Artful Deceptions Les Supercheries littéraires et visuelles

Verbal and Visual Trickery in French Culture La Tromperie dans la culture française

vonMaria Scott, Catherine Emerson

1. Auflage

Artful Deceptions Les Supercheries littéraires et visuelles – Scott / Emerson

schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei beck-shop.de DIE FACHBUCHHANDLUNG

Peter Lang Bern 2006

Verlag C.H. Beck im Internet:www.beck.de

ISBN 978 3 03910 701 8

Inhaltsverzeichnis: Artful Deceptions Les Supercheries littéraires et visuelles – Scott / Emerson

MARIA SCOTT

Artful Deceptions: Distortions, Seductions, and Substitutions

Tout homme, et un Français plus qu’un autre, abhorre d’être pris pour dupe.1

This volume of essays has its origins in a conference on the subject of verbal and visual trickery in French culture, held at National Uni-versity of Ireland, Galway in April 2004. Our aim, as conference organizers, was not to demonstrate that French culture is more or less tricky than any other; we just happened to have a particular research interest in evasive French texts, both visual and verbal. The range of responses to our call for papers, only a selection of which are rep-resented in this volume, reflected the deliberately broad definition we gave to our topic: we invited discussion of intrinsically deceptive works, of those that make of trickery a theme, and of those that, in their exploration or enactment of deception, are either verbal or visual, or both verbal and visual.

The book is divided into three sections, each corresponding broadly to a particular perspective on the notion of deception in art and literature. The first set of essays focuses largely on the relation-ship between distortion and truth, the second on links between du-plicity and seduction or entrapment, and the third on connections between deception and substitution.

1 Stendhal, De l’Amour (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), Chapitre XXXVIII, p. 129.

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Distortions

In his Salon de 1859, Charles Baudelaire distinguishes between false illusions and true illusions. According to the poet and art critic, much of the landscape painting of his time is phony in its depictions, while the cruder and more fantastical forms found in stage scenery succeed in conveying a certain imaginative truth:

Je préfère contempler quelques décors de théâtre, où je trouve artistement exprimés et tragiquement concentrés mes rêves les plus chers. Ces choses, parce qu’elles sont fausses, sont infiniment plus près du vrai; tandis que la plupart de nos paysagistes sont des menteurs, justement parce qu’ils ont négligé de mentir.2

For Baudelaire, paintings that are excessively honest, excessively faithful to perceived visible reality, are essentially dishonest. By con-trast, ‘true’ art reveals its own illusory status instead of dissimulating its artifice. It presents an obvious deformation of what we know as reality. According to Baudelaire, then, in not disguising the fact that it is a fake, in not attempting to substitute itself for reality, the artful distortion is closer than the replica to the truth.

Lucile Gaudin’s contribution to this collection, ‘Peinture et rhé-torique: Le Vrai chez Roger de Piles’, tackles the age-old problem of truth in painting and comes to a similar conclusion. Gaudin discusses the attempt of the art critic and theorist Roger de Piles to move the focus of aesthetic discussion, in the early eighteenth century, away from the idea of ‘le véritable’, towards the notion of ‘le vrai-semblable’. This meant that paintings, necessarily false according to traditional criteria, could be judged true or false in terms more properly their own. Gaudin shows that for Piles the degree of a painting’s truth or vraisemblance is dependent not on its ability to convince viewers of its fidelity to reality, but rather on the strength of

2 Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1975–76), II, 668.

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its address or call to the viewer, which is itself a function of its exaggeration or distortion of the visible.

Piles’s idea might be nicely illustrated by the Greek myth of Zeuxis and Parrhasios, discreetly invoked by Gaudin. Whereas Zeux-is’ painting of grapes succeeds in fooling birds by presenting an illusion of reality, Parrhasios’s painting of a veil fools humans. Jacques Lacan, whose useful theorization of trickery in a psycho-analytic context will be evoked at several points in this Introduction, explains the distinction as follows: ‘l’exemple opposé de Parrhasios rend clair qu’à vouloir tromper un homme, ce qu’on lui présente c’est la peinture d’un voile, c’est-à-dire de quelque chose au-delà de quoi il demande à voir’.3 Parrhasios’s trompe-l’œil is superior to that of Zeuxis because it possesses a rhetorical dimension: it solicits a question and then shows the viewer how s/he has been duped. According to Lacan, then, ‘C’est parce que le tableau est cette appa-rence qui dit qu’elle est ce qui donne l’apparence, que Platon s’insurge contre la peinture comme contre une activité rivale de la sienne.’4

Superior forms of painting, therefore, engage the mind rather than pure physical appetite. Instead of appealing to simple scopic demand, they invite desire, always a function of language for Lacan.

A similar appeal to the mind and frustration of the eye’s appetite would seem to be at work in the photography of Nicolas Bouvier. Tellingly, in this regard, Jean-François Guennoc’s ‘La Photographie chez Nicolas Bouvier: Un usage inquiet du regard et du monde’ prioritizes Bouvier’s writing about photography rather than the images themselves. According to Guennoc, Bouvier’s art takes the form of an ontological trick: while many photographs present a duplicitous image of an ordered and harmonious reality, Bouvier’s works aim to reveal the chaos and contingency underlying such images, the formlessness beneath form. The trickery of Bouvier’s photography lies not in presenting a trompe-l’œil replica that would bolster the viewer’s sense of a mastered world, but rather in revealing the photographer’s

3 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XI: Les Quatre Concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (1964) (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973), p. 127; my emphasis.

4 Ibid., p. 127.

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impotence and the camera’s failure to dominate a recalcitrant real. As such, the purpose of this photography is to disconcert the viewer, tending to provoke ironic laughter.

Humour is also central to the photographic art of Christian Bol-tanski, as demonstrated by Perin Emel Yavuz’s ‘Les Saynètes comi-ques de Christian Boltanski ou la mise en échec de C.B.’ Like both Guennoc’s and Gaudin’s contributions, this piece tackles the relation-ship between truth and visual art. Yavuz begins by reminding us that photography holds a privileged relationship with reality because of its indexical qualities; the photograph presents a trace of the real rather than representing it as such. However, Christian Boltanski’s pseudo-autobiographical photographic sequences suggest, like Bouvier’s writings on photography, that the mechanical ability to reproduce images of the real does not entail any special relationship with truth. Boltanski’s work reveals the way in which photographic images can be made to lie, despite their superficially faithful reproduction of the visible world: the captions assigned by the artist to the photographs he includes in his ‘reconstitutions’ lend false authentication to the images, inviting the viewer to interpret them as genuinely autobio-graphical documents. However, Yavuz contends that the falsification of apparent photographic truth is also, in Boltanski’s work, the affirmation of another kind of truth, defined as collective, symbolic, and affective. Boltanski’s Saynètes comiques reinforce this affirma-tion, but do so at least partially by making their own artifice comically explicit, in a way that his previous pseudo-autobiographical photo-graphic restitutions did not. The overtness of their lie aligns the saynètes with Baudelaire’s stage scenery, Piles’s ‘extraordinaire vrai-semblable’, and Bouvier’s photography.

The ironic rendering of pseudo-autobiographical truth is also Margaret Topping’s concern in ‘Exoticist Illusion in Pierre Loti’s Japan’. The western narrator of Pierre Loti’s novel Madame Chrysan-thème, often identified with Loti himself, perceives Japan in an ideologically distorted and unconsciously patronizing manner. Top-ping contends that the faulty nature of his perceptions is revealed by numerous points of strain in the text, such as the moment when the narrator glimpses his supposedly loving Japanese mistress counting the money he has given her. By invoking a more obviously astute

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contemporaneous work of travel writing by Loti, Topping attempts to demonstrate that the presentation of the narrator’s perceptions in Madame Chrysanthème is far from being purely autobiographical. In other words, Topping’s analysis suggests that Loti’s novelistic depic-tion of his own position as western traveller is self-consciously ironic rather than ideologically deluded. According to this reading, then, Loti’s text reveals the mechanisms of self-deception in a highly self-aware way.

Ideological distortion is at stake too in Peter Tame’s ‘History in the Abyss: André Chamson’s L’Auberge de l’abîme’. In the case of this novel, there is nothing self-consciously ironic about the nuanced representation of events, the author’s intention, according to Tame, being to persuade readers of the treacherousness of charismatic dictators rather than to alert them to the untrustworthiness of the text. Tame analyses Chamson’s depiction of the aftermath of the Napole-onic wars in André Chamson’s L’Auberge de l’abîme (1933), arguing that the author’s aim, at a time when Hitler was rising to power, was to convey a pacifist message. The human cost of military empire, as well as the pitfalls of historical representation, is dramatized by Chamson’s lone soldier, trapped in an abyss on his way home after the wars.

Tame’s analysis of Chamson’s historical novel shows how fic-tionalized versions of history can be made to serve an ideological purpose. Elisabeth Gerwin’s study of a novella by Balzac, ‘Represent-ing Delusion: Balzac’s Adieu and the Story of Transference’, exam-ines the manner in which fictionalized accounts of historical truth can be made to play a healing role, when handled sensitively. Gerwin’s analysis of Balzac’s novella demonstrates that excessively faithful approaches to the representation of history and trauma can prove sterile and even damaging in a therapeutic context. Indirectly recalling the argument of Gaudin’s essay, this piece suggests that narrative distortions can enable a dialogue, or reciprocal dynamic, that extreme mimetic fidelity would not permit. Gerwin’s reading of Balzac’s Adieu as an exploration of the ethics of historical realism argues that Balzacian realism blends fantasy and literal historical truth in a way that engages, instead of short-circuiting, the reader’s active participa-tion in the narrative.

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Alexandre Prstojevic’s ‘W ou le souvenir d’enfance de Georges Perec: Le Bruissement poétique d’une lettre rêvée’ also raises questions with regard to the relationship between historical fact and subjective fantasy. The link between the two is concretized, in the novel, by an apocryphal letter that evokes a Jewish heritage lost in the Holocaust. According to Prstojevic, the narrator’s mnemonic distor-tion of a childhood scene in which, surrounded by his family, he traces a pseudo-hebraic letter, serves as a mise en abyme or key to the ‘emergent’ structure of Perec’s novel. Apparent autobiography and adventure fantasy, supposed fact and evident fiction, remain in sepa-rate narrative compartments until the final page of the novel, which presents a dispassionate account of life in a concentration camp. This closing account brings together elements of both the autobiographical and fantastical components of W ou le souvenir d’enfance, in an un-expected union that was nevertheless anticipated by the scene involving the aprocryphal letter. Prstojevic’s analysis suggests, like Gerwin’s essay, that ruptures between past and present can be healed only by way of an enabling fiction, a blend of fact and fiction, symbolized here by a distorted letter.

In each of the essays about narrative distortions, as in the pieces about pictorial distortion, a literal truth is juxtaposed, either implicitly or explicitly, with a more imaginative (or deluded/ misleading) ver-sion of the truth. Both forms of ‘truth’ are shown to be deceptive in their own way, even if the latter is often accorded a privileged relationship with truth in discourse about art and literature.