A Forest of Symbols: Art, Science, and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century

321 Pages·2019·13.937 MB·English

by  Andrei Pop

A Forest of Symbols
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A Forest of Symbols
Art, Science, and Truth in the
Long Nineteenth Century
Andrei Pop
Z O N E B O O K S • N E W YO R K
2019
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© 2019 Andrei Pop
zone books
633 Vanderbilt Street
Brooklyn, NY 11218
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise
(except for that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without
written permission from the Publisher.
Printed in the United States of America.
Distributed by The MIT Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pop, Andrei, author.
Title: A forest of symbols : art, science, and truth in the long nineteenth
century / Andrei Pop.
Description: Brooklyn, NY : Zone Books, 2019. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2019005766 (print) | lccn 2019006411 (ebook) |
isbn 9781942130314 | isbn 9781942130321 | isbn 9781942130338 |
isbn 9781935408369 (alk. paper)
Subjects: lcsh: Symbolism (Art movement) | Art — Mathematics. |
Science and the arts — History — 19th century.
Classification: lcc nx454.5.s9 (ebook) | lcc nx454.5.s9 p67 2019 (print)
| ddc 700/.415 — dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005766
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Contents
Preface: Why Symbolism? 7
i Symbolisms in the Plural 17
ii Crises of Sense: The French Take on Edgar Allan Poe 51
iii Where Do We Come From? Symbolism’s Psychologistic Roots 99
iv What Are We? A Symbolist Picture Theory 141
v Where Are We Going? Consequences of Symbolism 189
Conclusion: Beyond Symbolism 235

Acknowledgments 241
Notes 245
Index 301
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Figure P.1. Édouard Manet, Olympia, etching
and aquatint (1865–67), New York Public
Library. This plate was printed in Émile Zola’s
1867 book on Manet, subverting its insistence
that paint handling was everything to Manet,
subject matter nothing.
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preface
Why Symbolism?
What is art for? The question might be asked by a child. Children love
to paint or sing or sculpt with putty, but they are often puzzled by what
grown-up artists do: sell their work (“Why? I like my pictures and want
to keep them for myself”), or work hard to install it in an art space,
only to see it dismantled after a few weeks or months (“Why? I want to
keep my pictures forever”). Mostly, artists talk about their work inter-
—
minably to patrons, dealers, and art writers. But how do those people
know what art is about?
The most pervasive theory of the art object in art history . . . was its conception
as a medium of communication or expression. The object was construed within
its communicational or linguistic paradigm as a “vehicle” by means of which the
intentions, values, attitudes, ideas, political or other messages, or the emotional
—
state(s) of the maker or by extension the maker’s social and historical con-
texts — were conveyed, by design or chance.1
The author of these words does not think that art objects actually func-
tion as vehicles for what the artist has to say. But if they don’t, this
matters not only to the art writer. It also concerns the artist, and any-
one encountering art, whether in a museum, on the street, or on the
Internet. If artworks are not vehicles for meaning, what else could have
caused the scandal over Édouard Manet’s painting of the nude Olympia
(1863)? Merely its appearance? The appearance of the oil painting is
not that of the little etching Manet made for Zola’s book about his art
(Figure p.1). But how on earth are we to chart the correspondence, and
the divergence, between the two without taking meaning into effect?
7
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A FOREST OF SYMBOLS
I do not attempt an interpretation of Olympia and its variants here.
But it is plain that depriving art of meaning deprives it of its power.
Not all of its power, surely: artworks have many uses and effects. The
German critic Walter Benjamin once said, “Dada hit the spectator
like a bullet,” while Henri Matisse wanted his paintings to serve “like
an armchair for the tired businessman.” But notice the metaphori-
cal “like” in both quotations: it is in virtue of its meaning, its sense,
what we make of it, that a picture may hurt us like a bullet or comfort
us like squashy furniture. In this book, I call art that works mainly
by virtue of its meaning symbolist art. This is a conceptual and not a
historical definition. Yet there were artists and writers at the end of
the nineteenth century who called themselves symbolists, and whose
unifying trait, for all their political and aesthetic differences, was a
concern with how art gets its meaning. This book is about them.
The notion of art working in virtue of its meaning might seem
either strange or banal. Is there really such a thing, and is it a dis-
tinct historical phenomenon? Consider a passage from Mark Twain’s
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884. Huck is trying, with
little luck, to convince a skeptical Jim of the diversity of human
languages:
“Does a cat talk like a cow, or a cow talk like a cat?”
“No, dey don’t.”
“It’s natural and right for ’em to talk different from each other, ain’t it?”
“’Course.”
“And ain’t it natural and right for a cat and a cow to talk different from us?”
“Why, mos’ sholy it is.”
“Well, then, why ain’t it natural and right for a Frenchman to talk different
from us? You answer me that.”
“Is a cat a man, Huck?”
“No.”
—
“Well, den, dey ain’t no sense in a cat talkin’ like a man. Is a cow a man? er
is a cow a cat?”
“No, she ain’t either of them.”
“Well, den, she ain’t got no business to talk like either one er the yuther of
’em. Is a Frenchman a man?”
8
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PREFACE
“Yes.”
“Well, den! Dad blame it, why doan’ he talk like a man? You answer me dat!”
—
Huck editorializes notoriously: “I see it warn’t no use wasting words
you can’t learn a nigger to argue.”2 Twain liked the exchange so much
that he entitled public readings from the book after the second half
of Huck’s verdict. This ruffled feathers, more for the crudity of the
epithet than for its racism.3 But a close look at the text belies these
apparent last words. Huck, who had just argued with Jim about the
story of King Solomon’s choice, thought he was offering logical argu-
mentation: farmyard animals make different noises, so why shouldn’t
people? For his analogy to work, Americans and Frenchmen ought
to differ as do cats and cows; more precisely, they ought to differ
in the same respect, that of belonging to the same species. That is
exactly what Jim sees, and what he tries to show Huck: neither a cat
nor a cow is human, and just to be thorough, they are not of the same
species either (“Is a cat a cow?”). A Frenchman, being a man, hasn’t a
cat’s excuse for communicating differently. The Socratic conclusion
is that a Frenchman doesn’t speak differently from other people, in
the respect that a cat or a cow does.4
There is call for belaboring the obvious point that Jim outsmarts
Huck. For the moral and political insight that flows from the logical
one, surely, is that Jim is as much a man as Huck. This is a lesson the
book teaches, not tells. It does so by example, in the teeth of Huck’s
conventional resistance to it. This can only take place though with
the careful uptake of what the book offers: action and humor and
characterization, but also argument and allegory. The silly logical
bout is at the same time a moving symbol of intellectual equality.
And so Huckleberry Finn can be profitably thought of as a symbolist
artwork, though it doesn’t have the wan, moonlit ambiance of some
of that art, an ambiance that Twain made fun of (Figure p.2).
Besides being art history, then, this book is a history of ideas,
because the concerns of symbolist painters and poets were shared to
a remarkable degree by theoretical scientists of the period, especially
by mathematicians and logicians dissatisfied with the empiricism
9
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