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    Barthes - Acrimboldo PDF

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    of 13
    OTHER BOOKS bY ROLAND BARTHES A Barthes Reader, Camera Lucida Critical Essays ‘The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies Elements of Semiology Empire of Signs ‘The Fashion System ‘The Grain of the Voice Image-Music-Text ‘A Lover's Discourse “Mythologies New Critical Essays On Racine ‘The Pleasure of the Text Roland Barthes Sade / Fourier / Loyola S/Z Writing Degree Zero Roland Barthes The Responsibility of Forms Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY Richard Howard w Hux ayn Wane New Yore A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux QNIVERSITY OF FLORIGA LIBRARIES " ‘Printed in the United States of America First edition, 1985 ss Cataloging in Publication Dats Barthes, Roland, ‘The responsibilty of forms. ‘Translation of: Lobvie ot Yobtus Includes bibliographical references. 1. Semioties Addresses, essays, lectures +. Communication —Philosophy—Addreses, eS, ketones, 5, Form (Aesthetics) Addresses, e875 ectures. 1. Tithe Pop.Bags13 1985 oo8.5 8422933 Library of Congr Editor's Note ‘A word of explanation about the American edition of this ook: five of the essays included here have already been pub- lished in the English-language volume Image-Music-Text (1977). To subtract them from this collection would be to dis- tort its structure. Particularly with regard to “Writing the Visible,” the absence of the first essays in that group would be troublesome, for their double movement—focusing and also transcending semiology—develops a method of “reading” which govems the subsequent essays and permits us to appreciate their brilliance. Indubitably, “The Third Meaning” is one of RB's most important writings—a nucleus of the Barthesian text—and it is no accident that the categories of obvious and obtuse de- fined there were chosen for the French title of this collection. ‘We are grateful to our friend Arthur Wang for having under stood this and for agreeing to respect the integral architecture of RB's work, Thus the reader can discem how inventively RB —pethaps better than anyone else—manages to articulate: infor- ‘mation, the communication of knowledge; deciphering of sig- nifications, the circulation among all lexicons of the symbol, in the web of all languages; and the revelation of signifying 228 / Rovanp Banturs same materiality (which never ceases being elegant) occurs in S: this is a sinuous woman coiled within the shape of the letter, itself consisting of a pink effervescence—as if the young body were swimming in some primordial, seething yet smooth sub- stance, and as if the letter as a whole were a kind of vernal hymn to the excellence of sinuosity, the line of life. Quite different is a nearby letter, S's twin yet foe: is not Z an inverted and angulated $, an S belied? For Erté, 7. is a melancholy, crepuscu lar, veiled letter in which Woman inseribes both her submis- sion and her supplication (for Balzac, too, Z was a “bad” letter, as he explains in his tale Z. Marcas) Finally, in this alphabetic cosmography of Exte’s, there is M a singular letter, the only one, I believe, which owes nothing to ‘Woman or to her favorite substitutes, angel and bird, This in- human letter (since it is no longer anthropomorphic) consists of fierce flames: it is a buming door, devoured by wicks: the letter of love and death (at least in our Latin languages), the folk letter of black despair, flames alone amid so many Letter Women (as we might say FlowerMaidens), like the mortal absence of that body Erté has made into the loveliest object imaginable: a script. 1973 Arcimboldo, or Magician and Rhétoriqueur* Officially, Arcimboldo was Maximilian’s portraitist. His activ- ity, however, far exceeded painting; he composed armorial bear- ings, ducal arms, designs for stained-glass windows and tapestry, he decorated organ panels and even proposed a colorimetric method of musical transcription by which “a melody could be represented by minuscule patches of color on a paper”; but, above all, he was an entertainer of princes, a showman: he organized and staged performances, invented tournaments (giostre). His composite heads, which he produced for twenty- five years at the court of the German emperors, functioned, generally speaking, as parlor games. In my childhood, we played a game called Families: each player, holding a hand of illus trated cards, took turns asking his partners for the members of the family he was collecting: the pork butcher, the pork butch- er’s wife, their son, their daughter, their dog, etc; looking at * Les Grands Rhétoriqueurs were a school of poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, though the word itself means rhetoricion —Trans 130 / Ronann Bates Antuma, oil on canvas ‘Louvre, Paris Summer, oil on canvas Private collection, Bergamo one of Arcimboldo’s composite heads, I must in the same way reconstitute the family of, say, Winter: I ask for a tree stump here, a strand of ivy therc, a mushroom, a lemon, a doormat, until I have the whole hibemal thematics before my eyes, the whole “family” of Villon's morte saison. Or again, with Arcim- boldo, we ate playing the game known as Chinese portraits aves the room, the others decide on someone to be identified, and when the questioner returns he must solve the riddle by the patient interplay of metaphors and metonymies If it were a check, what would it be? —A peach. If it were a ruff? —Ears of ripe wheat. If it were an eye? —A cherry. I know someone le it's Summer, re of Autumn, the (terrible) eye consists of a little In the fi ‘the botanic prunella prune, In other words—in French, at least— p ar prunelle, our word for eyeball. Tt is as if, becomes the ocul Arcimboldo, or Magician and Rhétoriqueur / 131 like a baroque poet, Arcimboldo exploits the “curiosities” of language, plays on synonymy and homonymy. His painting has a linguistic basis, his imagination is, stsictly speaking, poetic: it does not create signs, it combines them, permutes them, de- flects them—precisely what the practitioner of language does. One of the techniques of the poet Cyrano de Bergerac con sists in taking a perfectly banal metaphor in the language and endlessly exploiting its literal meaning. If the language says " of grief,” Cyrano conceives the story of a condemned man whose executioners sing him tunes so lugubrious that he finally dies of grief over his own death. Arcimboldo proceeds in the same way as Cyrano: if ordinary discourse compares (as it often does) a headdress to an overtumed dish of food, Arcimboldo takes the comparison literally, makes it into an identification the hat becomes a dish, the dish becomes a helmet (a “salad,” celata). The procedure functions in two time frames: at the moment of the comparison, it remains one of pure common sense, proposing the most ordinary thing in the world, an analogy; but in a second time frame the analogy goes wild be cause it is radically exploited, cartied to the point where it destroys itself as analogy: comparison becomes metaphor: the helmet is no longer like a dish, it is a dish. However, by a final subtlety, Arcimboldo keeps the two terms of the identification, helmet and dish, separate: on one side I read a head, on the other the contents of a dish; the identity of the two objects does not depend on simultaneity of perception but on rotation of the image, presented as reversible. My reading oscillates con- tinually: only the title manages to arrest it, makes the picture the portrait of a Cook, because from the dish we metonymically infer the man whose professional utensil it is. And then occurs a new repercussion of meaning: why does this cook have the fierce expression of a copper-complexioned old soldier? Because the metal of the dish necessitates armor, helmet, and the cook- 132 / Rouann BartHes ing of meats requires the swarthy red of open-air professions [A singular old soldier, moreover, whose helmet brim is embel lished with a delicate slice of lemon, And so on: the metaphor tums on itself, but according to a centrifugal movement: the backwash of meaning never stops. It is the dish which makes the hat, and it is the hat which makes the man, Curiously, this last proposition serves as the title of one of Max Emnst’s collages (2920), in which human silhouettes result from a jointed pile of headgear. Here, too, baroque representation tums on language and its formulas. Under the picture hums the vague music of such ready-made plirases as Le style, c'est 'homme, ot in Max Exnst’s case, The style is the tailor, The work shows the workman, The dish reveals the cook, etc. Language discreetly affords these appar ently whimsical, even surrealist paintings a rational point of reference, Arcimboldo’s art is not extravagant; it remains within the rim of common sense, on the verge of the proverb; what mattered was that the princes for whom these entertainments were devised be amazed by them and yet recognize them for what they were; hence a sense of the marvelous rooted in certain customary propositions: The cook prepares dishes. Everything js elaborated within the field of commonplace metonymies. There is a relation of these images to the language, but also to discourse: to the folk tale, for instance: they employ the same method of description. Mme d’Aulnay says of Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas (“tiny grotesque figures with movable heads”); “She undressed and stepped into the bath, whereupon pagodas and pagodines began to sing and to play their instru: ments: some had theorbos made of a walnut shell; others had viols fashioned from the hull of an almond; for their instruments had to match their size.” Arcimboldo’s composite heads thus participate in the fairy tale: of his allegorical personages we Cook, oit on wood. Civie Museums, Cremona 134 / Rovanp Barriers might say; this one had mushrooms for lips and wore a lemon as a pendant; another had a squash for a nose; the neck of a third consisted of a heifer lying prone, ete. What circles vaguely behind the image, like a memory, the insistence of a model, is a fantastic tale; I seem to hear Perrault describing the meta- morphosis of the words spoken by the good sister and the wicked one, after they have encountered the fairy: with each sentence, two roses, two pearls, and two big diamonds drop from the younger one’s lips, while from the elder's mouth fall two vipers and two toads. The parts of speech are transmuted into objects; in the same way, Arcimboldo paints not so much things but rather the description a teller of fantastic tales might give of them: he illustrates what is already the linguistic copy of an amazing story Let us recall, once again, the structure of our human Jan- guage: it is doubly articulated: the sequence of discourse can be divided into words, and the words divided in their tum into sounds (or into letters). Yet there is a great difference between these two articulations: the first produces units each of which already has a meaning (the words); the second produces non signifying units (the phonemes: a phoneme, in itself, signifies nothing). This structure, we know, is not valid for the visual arts; it is quite possible to decompose the “discourse” of a pic- ture into forms (lines and points) but these forms signify noth- ing before being assembled; painting knows only one articulation. Hence, we can readily understand the structural paradox of the Arcimboldesque compositions. ‘Arcimboldo makes painting into a veritable language, he gives it a double articulation: the head of Calvin first decomposes into forms which are already namable objects—in other words, words; a chicken carcass, a drumstick, a fishtail, scribbled pages: these objects in their tum decompose into forms which in themselves signify nothing: here we return to the double scale of words and sounds. Everything functions as if Arcimboldo had Arcimboldo, or Magician and Rhétoriqueur / 135 upset the pictural system, abusively doubled it, hypertrophying within it the signifying, analogical possibility, thereby producing a kind of structural monster, source of g subtle (because intel lectual) uneasiness, even more penetrating than if the horror derived from a simple exaggeration or a simple mixture of ele- ments: it is because everything signifies, on two levels, that Arcimboldo’s painting functions

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