John Zuern
In his 1947 tribute to Georges Braque, Francis Ponge writes that
the School of Paris in the present upheaval of civilizations, is rather like the Italian School at the time of the Renaissance: perhaps only a sign but immediately so visible (by definition), and with such success and such an unquestionable authority, that in this upheaval, rightly or wrongly, at least as active as anything else, it risks being considered (analyzed at a later date) as its origin and center. (PL143)Whether or not it can be designated as the "origin" or the "center" of the present-day upheaval in civilization, the Paris in which Braque, Duchamp, and Ponge himself were working in the first decades of this century was the scene of revolutionary explorations into artistic representation. As the painters of the Renaissance reacted against the limitations of the traditions that had preceded them, so did painters like Braque react against the strictures of the mimetic realism that had dominated Western art until the last decades of the nineteenth century, and which had, in the view of these artists, failed to provide an adequate representation of the world of perceptual experience. "When fragmented objects appeared in my painting around 1910," writes Braque, the founder, with Picasso, of Cubism, "this was my way of getting as close as possible to that object, as far as my painting allows me to" (qtd. in Zurcher, 54).
The desire for a more thoroughgoing rapprochement with the phenomenal world was felt among writers as well. The discussion that follows will concentrate on the short prose of two writers who began working in France during this period-- Gertrude Stein and Francis Ponge--and will draw examples primarily from Stein's 1914 collection Tender Buttons and from the "texts clos" of Ponge's Le Parti pris des choses, composed between 1924 and 1939. In focusing on texts that are essentially descriptive, this study hopes to show that these examples of short prose throw into relief a problem inherent in writing that is committed to "getting closer to the object": the problem of the inescapable subjectivity of the writer's experience, of his or her double alienation from the object in its essentiality and from the other human beings with whom he or she tries to communicate. It will be argued that these texts do not "solve" this problem as much as introduce into literary discourse new formulations of it, formulations which constitute new "moves" within the language games which make up the conventional, "generic" discourses of literature. Not yet formalized into a specific genre itself, the short prose exemplified here by the work of Stein and Ponge confronts the literary discourse of the twentieth century with a check, in the double sense of an inquiry, a "checking into," and of a threat, a challenge requiring a reconsideration of the possibilities for linguistic play within established genres.
In describing the twentieth century's crisis in knowledge and the attendant disruption of traditional forms of artistic representation, Jean-François Lyotard distinguishes, somewhat reductively, between two modes of response on the part of artists: the first he sees as a capitulation in the face of the impossibility of representation and communication and a retreat into personal anxiety and isolation. On the other hand,
[t]he emphasis can also be placed on the increase of being and the jubilation which result from the invention of new rules of the game, be it pictorial, artistic, or any other. What I have in mind will become clear if we dispose very schemati cally a few names on the chessboard of the history of avant- gardes: on the side of melancholia, the German Expressionists, and on the side of novatio, Braque and Picasso, on the former Malevitch and on the latter Lissitsky, on the one Chirico and on the other Duchamp. The nuance which distinguishes these two modes may be infinitesimal; they often coexist in the same piece, are almost indistinguishable, and yet they testify to a difference (un différend) on which the fate of thought depends and will depend for a long time, between regret and assay. (PC 80)Although his arrangement is indeed schematic, and even in its highly qualified form does not appear to accommodate writers such as Kafka (for whom regret is a kind of assay), Lyotard's second category provides an adequate description of the efforts of Stein and Ponge, who make, on the chessboard of literary avant-gardes, decidedly offensive moves. This essay will proceed, in a series of assays, from a brief discussion of literary gaming to an examination of how these two writers play out the difficulties of subjectivity in such a way as to invent new rules of the game.
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