greer cohn. from poetic realism to pop art.pdf

8/10/2019 Greer Cohn. From Poetic Realism to Pop Art.pdf

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From Poetic Realism to Pop ArtAuthor(s): Robert Greer CohnSource: MLN, Vol. 84, No. 4, French Issue (May, 1969), pp. 668-674Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2908180 .Accessed: 20/11/2014 10:21

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668

From Poetic Realism toPop

Art

Poetic realism n the various arts comes about typically when a familiarscene is revisited fter a period of remoteness nd is witnessed througha limpid glycerine f nostalgic emotion. The mood, we know, wells froma man's deepest longing: his desire to return all the way to the Source,Paradise, or its iving approximation, he native andscape of the long-lostchild, the neighborhood, he Home. This kind of feeling s as old as ourculture. Auerbach began his saga of Western realism with such a scenefrom he Odyssey: Ulysses' quelling return, fter twenty ears of wander-

ing, to his household, complete with faithful ld servant nd dog (later,Du Bellay adds subtle modern touches, a la Vermeer, of roof-tiles ndchimney-smoke). Had Auerbach rummaged further hrough he Hebrewtradition, he might ust as well have begun his story with Tobit and hisdog or some vignettes rom the Song of Songs, ike that wistful valentineof the fellow tanding behind the wall and peering through he lattice ofa house-window later, Chagall will suspend him at an angle in mid-air).But since, broadly speaking, the mood may be felt to underlie any repre-sentation drawn from veryday ife-even those factual depictions blended

with extreme fantasy s in the magic realism of Breughel, Bosch, Dali,Miracle in Milan-there is no point, for our present purpose, in multi-plying these examples from he distant past. Even recognizedly realisticpoetry such as Villon's, Mathurin Rdgnier's, oileau's or Thomas Hood'shardly belongs in our purview. Here, rather, we will be talking about aspecial brand of this sentiment which is peculiarly characteristic f themodern era beginning, pproximately, with the Romantics. It is simplya very keen version f lyric ealism, nd it comesabout with the particularisolation and self-concern r extreme ndividualism which historians sso-ciate with Romanticism. Because alienated souls like these were apt tolook with prolonged disdain on the ordinary bourgeois panorama, themoments f reconciliation have a special pointedness. With our twentieth-century ronic insights, we are not surprised t the vulnerability f theirpretended self-sufficiency-Goethe, ncidentally, ong ago reflected n thisbitter matter n his Harzreise-but occasionally t must have come as anunexpected and joyful olt to their ennui that they could still belong insome ways, f only to things. Indeed, the more a man is alienated, themore he is likely to appreciate, n such offsetting oments, ery ordinarythings. This can puzzle the sort who naturally hink of art as somethingrather more special, hi falutin, for example in the academic or beaux-artsmanner of noble figures lassically arrayed on pedestals above us meremortals. Here, contrariwise, e have a select nstance of the play of cross-purposes, the sort of morris-dance Joyce described, between artist and

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M L N 669

philistine. So we have this fascinating ew vein of the beautifully banalor even, by extreme extension, the exquisitely boring. In a few elite

cases, this blend of opposites can be compounded maddeningly. It nodoubt takes a special kind of man, preferably f the problematic recentvariety, o appreciate such a union, a Flaubert, Chekhov, Kafka, Nabokov,Giacometti or Beckett to derive huge or henormous delight from flatdreariness, ust as, in a better dentified irection of the wayward pirit,such men can laugh an absurdist augh at sheer disaster.

The intenser moments of poetic realism tend, naturally nough, to befragmentary, ike a naive documentary still inserted in a fictitiousfilm-story: he value obviously depends largely or even entirely on theoptique, in this case the special view of plain life seen through he aston-ished eyes of some superb poets.

Our vein seems to start with the Romantics-our first xample is goingto be from Nerval-but, with a little nudging, heseperspectives an alwaysbe prolonged. Should we go back as far as Vermeer? I would prefer nthis nstance to refer o Proust's way of looking at that insignificant etitpan de mur jaune, the hungry ook of a person who almost never wentout anymore and couldn't go home again. Perhaps we could allude tocertain passages n the Confessions, his s getting loser, or correspondingones in the coeval genre painters, Chardin and Greuze. A few lines in

Sainte-Beuve's oesies et pensees de Josephe Delorme are even warmer, orexample the opening of the Rayons aunes. But one has to start omewhereand, although t is not easy to demonstrate, sense the promised keen-ness much more distinctly n a little poem of Gerard de Nerval calledLa Cousine:

L'hiver a ses plaisirs; et souvent, e dimanche,Quand un peu de soleil jaunit la terre blanche,Avec une cousine on sort se promener . .-Et ne vous faites pas attendre pour diner,

Dit la mere. Et quand on a bien, aux Tuileries,Vu sous les arbres noirs es toilettes leuries,La jeune fille a froid . . . et vous fait observerQue le brouillard du soir commence se lever.

Et l'on revient, arlant du beau jour qu'on regrette,Qui s'est passe si vite . . et de flamme discrete:Et l'on sent en rentrant, vec grand app6tit,Du bas de l'escalier,-le dindon qui rotit.

This turkey ould be embarrassing f it weren't for Nerval's optique andthe faith we have in him as an absolute artist. Reading this modest earlypoem of Gerard's, we are home in another sense, far back in the mezzo-tinted nd heavily furnished ineteenth entury, ith some of the familiar



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strangeness f a visit in a dream or revery o our own childhood streetswhich led goodness knows where or the equivalent ones we strolled inan adolescent daze to adjacent neighborhoods with all sorts of slightlyfeverish and puzzling decor surrounding a reassuring warmth. Thisetat d'dme persists hrough good deal of Sylvie, particularly hose epi-sodes with the solid village girl, the Sylvie of the title, which have re-minded critics of Flemish painting, though, to quibble again, I feel thecrucial distinction:

Voici le village au bout de la sente qui c6toie la foret: vingt chaumieresdont la vigne et les roses grimpantes estonnent es murs. Des fileusesmatinales, oiffees e mouchoirs rouges, travaillent, eunies devant uneferme. Sylvien'est point avec elles. C'est presque une demoiselle depuisqu'elle execute de fines dentelles, tandis ques ses parents sont restesde bons villageois.-Je suis monte h sa chambre sans etonner personne;deja levee depuis longtemps, lle agitait es fuseaux de sa dentelle, quiclaquaient avec un doux bruit sur le carreau vert que soutenaient sesgenoux.

Et elle alla cherchant dans les armoires, ans la huche, trouvant dulait, du pain bis, du sucre, etalant sans trop de soin sur la table lesassiettes t les plats de faience emailles de larges fleurs t de coqs auvif plumage. Une jatte en porcelaine de Creil, pleine de lait oifnagaient des fraises, evint e centre du service, t, apres avoir depouillele jardin de quelques poignees de cerises et de groseilles, lle disposadeux vasesde fleurs ux deux bouts de la nappe. Mais la tante avait ditces belles paroles:-Tout cela ce n'est que du dessert. II faut me laisser faire a present.

Et elle avait decroche a poole et jete un fagot dans la haute cheminee.

Out of ustice to Greuze, we ought to note that Gerard himself ompareshis Sylvie, n a certain ight and setting, o a picture by the eighteenth-century ainter.

Later, toward heend of the SecondEmpire when a new subtler esthetic

is a-borning, imbaud's Ce qui retient Nina is clearly n the ineage of theNerval prose:Nous regagnerions e village

Au ciel mi-noirEt ca sentirait e laitage

Dans l'air du soir;Ca sentirait 'etable pleine

De fumiers haudsPleine d'un rythme ent d'haleine

Et de grands dos

Les lunettes de la grand'mereEt son nez long

Dans son missel; e pot de biere



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Cercle de plombMoussant entre les larges pipes

Quecranement

Fument des effroyables ippesQui, tout fumant,

Happent le jambon aux fourchettesTant, tant et plus,

Le feu, qui claire es couchettesEt les bahuts.

Between Nerval and Rimbaud there had been the Baudelaire of theTableaux parisiens, notably Le Cygne:

Le vieux Paris n'est plus (la forme d'une villeChange plus vite, h6las, que le coeur d'un mortel)

Je ne vois qu'en esprit tout ce camp de baraques,Ces tas de chapiteaux 6bauch6set de futs,Les herbes, es gros blocs verdis par l'eau des flaques,Et, brillant aux carreaux, e bric-a-brac onfus.

La s'etalait adis une menagerie;La je vis, un matin, a l'heure ouisous les cieuxFroids et claire le Travail s'6veille, ou la voiriePousse un sombre ouragan dans l'air silencieux,Un cygne qui s'etait evade de sa cage,Et, de ses pieds palmes frottant e pave sec,Sur le sol raboteux trainait on blanc plumage.Pres d'un ruisseau sans eau la bete ouvrant e bec

Baignait neurveusement es ailes dans la poudre,

From the first ine- Andromaque, je pense a vous -the touchingly

resignedtone a la Flaubert

beginsto build the

sadlylucid

atmosphere,the crystal world of feeling surrounding he city-poet ike a paperweightglobe about its isolated little snowman. He does not reject the setting(as he does in the poems of exotic voyaging) but rather t lodges in hisheart, dignified by its vibrancy between past and present n memory rregret, aguelyrecalling that ine in Du Cote de Chez Swann where Proustspeaks of turning street-corner n Paris et c'6tait dans mon coeur ;for there stood a spire like the one in Combray. The process wherebydream world merges with reality or, along a time dimension, past joinswith present, nd crystallizes nto the tertium quid of imagination-that

queen of faculties -is symbolized y the transfiguration f the memories,which are now in him pregnantly plus lourds que les rocs.

So the city participates n the poetry as la muse familiere, itadine,vivante as he called it in Les Bons chiens. Its casual and banal aspects



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occasion the milder moments f the sweet defeat, he variously entle andpoignant elegiac climate. And as in a Dutch urban scene, the mildness-for the horizontal panorama of the world has its own infinite f maternal

calm-turns insensibly nto song.A critic can easily pause here in numb wonderment t the feat Baude-laire has brought ff, t the sense of timing nd the precision of ear whichis required to fuse, at every turn, n a higher synthesis, he vertical andhorizontal dimensions of spirit: the transcendental nd the casual. Theresult s something ike that rien que le naturel excessif he found inhashish visions. Perhaps this s why Martin Turnell preferred audelaire'slive bird to Mallarme's more fully symbolist wan. But critics ike

Turnell are apt to make too much of a good thing. Realistic poetry sone valid

wayof

art, especiallyn the hands of a

Baudelaire;it is not

the only one and not necessarily he best. A capacity to savor Laforgueor Corbiere need not ruin one's appetite for Mallarm6 or Valery anymore than Le Cygne need make us scant the gorgeously ymbolist LaChevelure from another of Baudelaire's pens. Poetry ike La Chevelurerises through complex dialectic of its own in which the smaller dosageof the ordinary s made up for by a higher degree of crystallization fwarring forces from the heights and depths of the psyche. Baudelaireknew this and, no mean critic himself, made clear where his preferenceslay, for example, in the essayPuisque realisme l y a:

Le Poesie est ce qu'il y a de plus reel, c'est ce quin'est complktement rai que dans un autre monde.

Ce monde-ci, dictionnaire hieroglyphique.That it was a matter f preference orMallarm6 too is amply demonstratedby those early pieces like Reminiscence n which he indulges the realisticvein at will and masterfully.

Baudelaire, unlike the pedestrian Mr. Turnell, was a fervent dmirerof Madame Bovary. The best passages of that artistic novel, or of Un

Coeur simple or the Education sentimentale, re bathed in the sober glowof the touchingly uotidian as seen through the eyes of Emma-Gustave.Flaubert, s is well known, had been bullied by his friends nto renouncinghis built-in omanticism, o it came back with a multiplied vengeance, ikethe banished demon of the Gospels, in this restrained, omplex, ashamedand profoundly ccepted form. Keeping his distance from his anima orheroine by cruel lucid irony, he virile creator n him thus paid the pricethat allowed the timid tenderness o flood back, via a back route, intoour initially unsuspecting nd gradually grateful readers' souls; softnessabout the most routine

thingsof a French

provincialtown like the

etchings f tree-branches gainst the sky along the route of Charles' medi-cal visit, he hollow sounds casks made when beat on by a child's stubbornstick. Here is a choice moment of L'Education sentimentale, ne I suspectProust must have lingered over:



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M L N 673

II remontait, u hasard, le quartier latin, si tumultueux d'habitude,mais desert i cette epoque, car les etudiants etaient partis dans leurfamilies. Les grands murs des colleges, comme allonges par le silence,avaient un aspect plus morne encore; on entendait toute sorte de bruitpaisibles, des battements 'ailes dans les cages, e ronflement 'un tour,le marteau d'un savetier; et les marchands d'habits, au milieu des rues,interrogaient haque fenetre, nutilement. Au fond des cafes olitaires, adame du comptoir baillait entre ses carafons remplis; les journauxdemeuraient n ordre sur la table des cabinets de lecture; dans l'escalierdes repasseuses, es linges frissonnaient ousles bouffees u vent tiede ..

Joyce, who had a Vermeer reproduction hanging in his study and whosaid of Un Coeur simple That's really what I wanted to write, demon-

strated mastery f the same sneaky technique Flaubert had employed nhis descriptions f Emma's romantic reveries; n the Gerty McDowell epi-sode of Ulysseshe spares us no ear-warming entiment rom he adolescent

namby pamby pantsy marmelady past we were trying o live down withNabokov or Stravinsky. But who knows where that past is lurking?Stravinsky imself muggles n some outworn emotion amid the dryironies of The Rake's Progress n a furtive way he maybe learned fromKurt Weill. This is a jagged Brecht-like mixture of sweet bitterness, kinto Apollinaire's cigarette amore et delicieuse comme la vie. Joycedistills a homelier brew or Irish stew: not

onlyin the

GertyMcDowell

episode but throughout hat dear dirty Dublin day he regales us withPlumtree's Potted Meat advertisements r the tassled dance cards andsachets lmost anyone can rummage out of a creaking maternal drawer ofmemory. When Proust returned to grey provincial Combray through hecup of tea he rediscovered prosaisme qui sert de grand reservoir depoesie in his Tante Leonie's bedchamber where je revenais toujoursavec une convoitise navouee m'engluer dans l'odeur me'diane, poisseuse,fade, indigeste t fruitee du couvre-lit fleurs.

Proust must have been aware of an dime oeur vibrating nder the oddlyflat, or mat, Parisian park views of his friend Vuillard. Recently, PierreSchneider has alluded finely o the low-keyed uality of those drawingsand paintings n a phrase that refers o their tacit protagonist: e citoyenbonheur. Alain-Fournier nd sometimes Radiguet were masters of thismanner, Apollinaire, Leon-Paul Fargue, and Jules Romains belong some-where in this fleeting picture. Then there is the Sunday promenade inSartre's Bouville, through virtuoso tretch f urban lyricism; he portraitof Oran in Camus' La Halte du Minotaure s comparable, with a hauntingimage in those excruciating, bsessively oring stone lions in front f the

public building. Beckett fecit n his turn: his typical work s a particularlyashamed and ruseful detour to the adorable in bathos, the savory clichesof concierge French as only a foreigner, referably rish, could appreciatethem.

And so we come to Pop Art. On the museum walls now appear avatars



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of our appealing banality as a row of appallingly flat poster-style ananasplits or rows of Marilyn Monroes or peeled tomatoes on labels. Literaryequivalents proliferate n the little magazines signed by poets like GarySnyder and Michael McClure and a whole itinerant group of Zen-typeSan Franciscans. There is a compelling adnessmixed in with this nostalgiafor the god-awfully eal: this is the pathos of the shallow, the almostentirely failed-it doesn't even succeed at that, i. e. total failure-whichinvolves a special case of ambivalence, a timid brand of death-urge.Failure the longed for valley, as Richard Wilbur, a magnificent quare,

puts it, which is another way of saying Keats' I am half in love witheaseful death. This was the secret, we muse, of those fake windowspainted on dismal factory allswe once passed and also of those embryonic,

not-quite-making-it arly prints or chromolithographs images d'Epinal)that Rimbaud hymned n his Alchimie du verbe, that the surrealists ndDadaists took up and that our newspapers are now featuring n somesophisticated eo-primitive ds. Now, in Pop Art, the artist has come fullcircle, or about as far as you can get around, all the way back Home tothe long-denied setting and its familiar appurtenances. In fact he hascome so far so fast that he has abandoned in the process all the wayaround, the limited but humanly rewarding business of being an artistin any extensive ense. For example, Wayne Thi6baud's portraits epre-sent something ike highly electiveor synthetic hotography. The experi-ence of them s powerful s life sometimes s, not as art in any significantdegree. Like some saint who opts for nothing, he pop artist might tandto gain All spiritually, r almost All-he is not quite pure-but he obviouslygivesup therewith he usual functions f crafts r careers. The great artistsof the past were often tempted to do this and were often aware of theabsurd nature of their endeavor to catch wholes through all-too-humanparts. But, snuggling p again and again to a sort of sainthood of perfec-tionism nd innocence, hey topped short gain and again out of a subtleinstinct for human life and production, nd somehow they managed to

spiral dialectically toward pretty omplete approximations of Being. Inthe end, even at some cost to innocence, most of us will take the Viewof Delft over the tomato cans. True, the pop artist enjoys a personaladvantage in the mild ambivalence mentioned earlier: not only theimagery r even the whole work but really the artist himself glows in thelovely pathos of flop. It is mild ambivalence because the artist doesn'tdie or suffer n any tragic degree: he is merely ike Morgan or the rest ofthe beat generation not fulfilling he parental hopes. As a final sad note,if the Warhol goes out and sells the neat empty thing -and he does:one hears of fantastic

prices-eventhe sacrificial

spect disappears, andwe are left with very little. Perhaps we ought to look elsewhere forpromising evelopments n poetic realism.

Stanford niversity ROBERT GREER COHN

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