Hi Marco,
You are pointing towards something at which I hinted but only started to sketch in. In my comment, I was actually arguing against the idea that the object, because we might experience it as absurd, is therefore altogether empty. If an object were truly empty, nothing would mean anything and anything could mean everything. Much bad Surrealist writing is bad for exactly this reason; the images are altogether arbitrary, and the chains of association lead nowhere in particular. De Chirico’s art and writing is not like this at all, quite the contrary. His images and scenes are so haunting because they seem to possess a superabundance of meanings; it just is difficult to figure out exactly what these meanings are. While de Chirico did attempt to frame his encounter with the strangeness of the world with philosophical concepts, it is immediately obvious to someone looking at or reading his work that this is little more than a self-protective reflex. What makes his best work seem dangerous and resonant, however, is that the chains of association are not entirely subjective. His images are “uncanny,” to an unusual degree. We are often possessed by a sense that we have walked on these streets, that we have stepped into these shadows, that we have smelled the salt air from this harbor, that we have seen these images before.
In a painting such as “The Dream Turns”—done in 1913—for example, we have two bunches of bananas–one intact and one disassembled–two pineapples, a head knocked from a classical sculpture, a row of arches, and some shadows, with a brick wall, a tower and a puffing locomotive in the distance. Let us take just the bananas and their context. On one level, of course, they are just bananas. If de Chirico might describe these bananas as “nonsensical,” he does not mean to suggest that they mean nothing; rather, he is attempting articulate a pregnant middle ground of tension, in which an object, image, or scene somehow activates our intuition but gives birth to a range of implications that our conscious minds can’t grasp. In looking at this object that we might call a “banana” and classify as a “fruit,” we are not looking at a only a situated object, we are looking at the net of interdependent origination that precedes, supports, and encompasses it. Within this net, all boundaries are more ambiguous than they seem, solidity is a kind of magic act, and meaning moves from the vaporous to the embodied by way of an ongoing dialogue. And if an object does exist in the Realm of the Ideal, as a fully perfected form, the realm from which it comes is nonetheless held in a state of tension with our own, and this art-producing tension is just as real as either pole in the opposition.
In de Chirico’s world, these bananas evoke North Africa, specifically Alexandria, where all of the cultural traditions of the ancient world met and mixed. Even in the modern world, this juxtaposition of cultures was going on. To some degree, the head of the ancient statue, now missing its body, and the puffing locomotive inhabit the same stage. De Chirico would also have been reminded of his father’s work as a railroad architect, of the childhood travels that brought them to North Africa and Greece and other places around the Mediterranean, of the 19th Century’s grand hopes for the future, of the march of progress and its cost. The bananas are somehow sad. There is no particular reason that they should be there, except that they fit, in a dreamlike fashion. We may be prompted to think of Darwin and the descent of humans from lesser primates, or of the lost innocence of the Age of Gold. The juxtaposition of these images, although poetic, is also quite disjunctive. As we stare at them, we pause to observe that we are not at peace. Nor is the nostalgia evoked by Alexandria reassuring. While it was there that traditions met, where the records of the ancient world were stored, where new and sophisticated syntheses were developed, it was there also that the great library was burnt, not once but a number of times, leaving only a few random threads to connect us to the mysterious depths of our origins.
If an artist’s interpretation of a scene or object is subjective, this is just the place that he starts; this does not mean that his action is not simultaneously collective, or that some field of collective genius does not regard him as its plaything.
When JF Martel posted “Consciousness in the Aesthetic Imagination,” we exchanged a number of emails about the nature of the sign and the symbol, including a few in which we debated about whether de Chirico’s images should be understood as symbols or as signs. They are, of course, symbols, as JF defines the term, but I posed the question of whether they could also be seen as signs that we had somehow lost the ability to read. My thinking was this: if the symbol suggests, the sign tells, and what it tells us may be as intricate in its web of meanings as a symbol. If we would usually take in a symbol’s implications at our leisure, there may be some greater degree of urgency to a sign, especially to someone in an unusual mental state. Many schizophrenics are quite literal in their thinking. If a symbol asks to be observed, a sign may demand some action on our part, even if we are not at first sure what this is. I am reminded of a man that I saw last year in a subway station. He was wearing a t-shirt with a rifle scope and crosshairs on the front. It read, “Nine out of ten voices are telling me not to shoot.” In one of these emails to JF, I wrote:
My thinking about the word “sign” has been influenced by my many years of staring at the paintings of de Chirico. The images in these paintings, of course, are generally understood to be symbols. In Freudian terms, a tower is a phallus and an arch is a vagina, a cannon is a phallus and a sail is a swelling breast, During the period that de Chirico first formulated his metaphysical vocabulary, however, he was in a very strange state of mind; he was prone to week-long migraines and intestinal disturbances, and was yanked between the extremes of self-doubt and grandiosity, between a near bottomless anxiety and a sense that he had been chosen by the Fates. The images in these paintings spoke to him in their own hermetically sealed language, and I can’t help but wonder if he saw them more as omens than as symbols. They were messages that were intended to be read, even if, on a human level, they had been emptied of almost all of their fixed meaning.
You wrote, “So while there is a real sensible world out there, the labels go on fast, and once on, they are very difficult to remove.” For de Chirico, at least in this early period, the removal of labels was both a goal and an impossible to escape form of torment. To achieve the great sensitivity that was required of him, the artist must expect “To live in the world as if in an immense museum of strangeness, full of curious many colored toys which change their appearance, which, like little children we sometimes break to see how they are made on the inside, and, disappointed, realize they are empty.” This idea of objects, signs, or symbols that lack meaning and yet speak to us and somehow “matter” is similar to a passage in your essay. You wrote, “Against those who would stop at the allegorical definition of the symbol, Deleuze, Bergson, and Lawrence argued, each in his own way, that symbols are signs devoid of meaning—or more precisely, signs referring to nothing beyond themselves. ‘You can’t give a great symbol a “meaning,” any more than you can give a cat a “meaning,”’ D. H. Lawrence wrote. But while symbols may not mean anything for these thinkers, they do matter.”
In a letter from the “Paul Eluard Manuscript,” de Chirico writes, “One of the strangest and deepest sensations that prehistory has left with us is the sensation of foretelling. It will always exist. It is like an eternal proof of the senselessness of the universe. The first man must have seen auguries everywhere, he must have trembled at each step he took.” It took me quite a while to come to terms with de Chirico’s use of words like “nonsensical” and “absurd.” That they were carried over from his reading of Nietzsche did not make the concepts behind them any easier to understand. In the cityscape dreamed and painted by de Chirico, we are instructed to regard each object, sign, and symbol as absurd, yet at the same time they are supercharged with significance. It is they and not the artist that appear to be in control, and the artist must carefully approach them from an angle.
Once, in a distant age, these apparently occult signs were perhaps meant to be clear. They were not readable by only a select group, nor were they more than moderately suggestive. There was a one to one correspondence between such signs and the primal mysteries at which they pointed. They were not necessarily just glyphs upon a page or objects placed in the street. Each had its own inner life. Such signs were not as passive as our contemporary ones; no, not at all; they could act, and they could manifest just as easily in the psyche as in the world, in other dimensions just as easily as in this one. They would speak to those without eyes and gesture to those who were deaf. We would look at a tower, and we would immediately grasp the full range of its associated meanings. We would register these with our spines. We would look at a ship, and we would immediately grasp its connection to the Deluge. We would see that the human body was also a kind of ship. Each sign came complete with a set of instructions for us. Even now, it is possible that they do their best to speak in a clear language. Yet something has gone wrong. The Earth appears to be far flatter than it should be. The sky stretches for an enormous distance overhead. The signs now appear to be indifferent to our welfare. A gulf has opened up, and the world from which they come has been removed.
