Memory, p.5
Memory, page 5
The poesie for Philip II have no standard format, even though Titian seems to have planned certain of the paintings as pairs, and their Ovidian source materials are used in a variety of ways. One of the projects to which Titian turned in extreme old age takes its cue from the brief and oddly skewed retelling of the Marsyas story to be found in Books VI and XI of the Metamorphoses. The satyr Marsyas, having been defeated in a musical contest with Apollo, is flayed alive by the victor. Ovid dwells on this punishment with gruesome relish and comic bravado:
clamanti cutis est summos direpta per artus,
nec quicquam nisi vulnus erat; cruor undique manat,
detectique patent nervi, trepidaeque sine ulla
pelle micant venae; salientia viscera possis
et perlucentes numerare in pectore fibras. (VI. 387–91)
(and as he screamed/ Apollo stripped his skin; the whole of him/Was one huge wound, blood streaming everywhere,/Sinews laid bare, veins naked, quivering/And pulsing. You could count his twitching guts,/And the tissues as the light shone through his ribs.)
A new beauty, at once optical and arithmetical, is to be found inside the victim’s dissected frame. Ovid then adds an emollient coda: the shepherds who had witnessed the satyr’s ordeal wept so profusely that a new, limpid river sprang from their tears. Titian in 1570, on the other hand, will have none of this consolation, and reinforces the horror of the scene by ringing Marsyas round with sharply individualised vignettes of cruelty in action. In the top left corner of the canvas, a beautiful youth clasps his viol in self-absorbed rapture; just below him an artisan specialising in skin removal goes to work with professional application, and lower still Apollo, who kneels, busies himself with his flaying as if this were an act of benevolent homage to his prey; on the right, King Midas reflects disconsolately on the cruelty of gods and men, as a bucket of blood travels past his knee.
This terrifying work has visual as well as literary sources, but compacts and reinvents these in a way that is startlingly original. The viol-player alludes to the youthful musicians who appear often in the paintings of Titian’s great Venetian predecessor Giovanni Bellini; Midas re-enacts the pose and replicates the features of Michelangelo’s Jeremiah in the Sistine Chapel; and, above all, representations of the Crucifixion are an inescapable reference-point: the agony of Marsyas repeats those of Christ and of St Peter, whose upside-down slaughter, as depicted by Michelangelo in the Cappella Paolina, is likely to have been seen by Titian during his Roman stay in the mid-1540s. The main actors in this scene, including the bearer of the bucket, are all present in the Ovid room of the Palazzo Te in Mantua: Giulio Romano and his assistants had roughed out the immolation of Marsyas almost fifty years before Titian began work on his own version. Yet the mere enumeration of these earlier works does not take us far in understanding the rapaciousness of Titian’s memory, and the extremity of his recreative act. He takes artistic practice to a dangerous brink beyond which lie, in the words of A. D. Melville’s translation, a ‘quivering, pulsing and twitching’ of painted surfaces; a cult of gesture and rhythm seems about to supersede the intentional life of individuals; and perspective threatens to dissolve into a picture surface that is either all figure or all ground. The ‘argument’ of the painting is still more alarming, in that all those who attend upon Marsyas behave either cruelly towards him or with active indifference to his plight. The musician plays on, the philosopher-king cogitates, the workmen flex their muscles, and the young god, as he wields his scalpel, discovers a new politeness and decorum. No one escapes the painter’s critique, least of all himself, whose artistry is as much on display as the viol-player’s and involves an ecstatic musicalising of paint. This theatre of cruelty would be unthinkable without its backcloth of inherited Christian imagery, but this is the Crucifixion with all trace of catharsis and redemption removed.
One urgent question, however, still needs to be put: where exactly is the future in this interplay between later and earlier works of art? The in-between world of which I have spoken brings Beethoven into dialogue with Bach, Titian into dialogue with Ovid and Michelangelo, and, one might add, Racine with Euripides, Verdi with Shakespeare, Picasso with Velázquez. The list is endless. But surely such dialogue, and the energetic, many-levelled perception that it encourages in enthusiasts for art, is still mainly a backward-looking affair, and likely to be profitable to those who study the predecessors rather than the descendants of a great artist. What about the work of art in its progress through time, in its becoming and its forward flight? One rather limited and over-familiar account of the matter involves the propensity that strong artworks have to call their own progeny into being. Imitation, pastiche, and the sheer staying power of highly individualised artistic styles do indeed allow us to see futures being created before our eyes. One way of beginning to understand the singularity of, say, Leonardo or Caravaggio is to follow the fortunes of the leonardeschi in Lombardy or of the caravaggisti across Europe as a whole. Bohemian music in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is a tribute to the diffusive power of the classical style consolidated by Haydn and Mozart and centred on Habsburg Vienna.
When it comes to individual works, these migrations into the future can offer a powerful incitement to fresh awareness. Titian’s Marsyas, for example, reappears as an informative background in Tom Phillips’s portrait of Iris Murdoch (1984–86): Apollo’s dissecting arm and hand, appearing over Murdoch’s head, allude to the charismatic cruelty of many of her principal male characters. Those who travel back to Titian’s work with this modern portrait in mind will perhaps find themselves reflecting anew on the closeness of meditative Midas to the scene of torture. Midas like Murdoch is a philosopher who does his thinking inside the force-field of unspeakable deeds; perhaps their serenity as thinkers is obscurely connected to the smell of blood. On the broad canvas of cultural history, time has its own elasticity: works of art travel forward into the future, and later works alter the past by retroaction. Kafka can help us reread the Dickens of whom he only half approved. The book of Exodus is never quite the same again for those who expose their nervous systems to the speech-song and the orchestral tumult of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron. Even where there is no documented link between a later and an earlier work, this circling back from future to past can still take place: Rodin’s Le Penseur, for example, could be just as potent as Michelangelo’s Jeremiah to anyone seeking dialogue-partners for Titian’s dejected king.
Yet the dialectic of past and future to be found in cases like these, even if it points us in the direction of a general rule about artistic experience, is too bland to be useful as an exploratory tool when the inner grain of an individual work comes into view. At this level, the future is created word by word, note by note, dab by dab of colour, and the aggregation of these micro-elements in the facture of the work as a whole offers a serviceable bridge between the author and the receiver of that work, for both travel from poverty to plenty as time passes.
I spoke earlier about the variation principle, and the two grandest keyboard works embodying it that Europe has produced. But other formal conventions offer an equally arresting perspective on the becomingness and ‘futurality’ that inheres in the art of music. In a baroque ritornello movement, in a sonata argument on the classical Viennese model, or in the articulation of a tone-row by composers of the second Viennese school, musical time is governed by two conjoined imperatives. Continuity and change are both insisted upon, and development proceeds in such a way that material from the past is both recapitulated and superseded by an ever-incipient future. In each of these conventions the work is Janus-faced moment by moment. As the clock or the metronome ticks, implications are made explicit, potentialities are actualised and a fullness previously merely glimpsed is brought to birth in sound. A pressure towards completion runs as a magnetic force through the incomplete propositions that the work sets forth and interlaces. The future is the open arena into which artistic memory surges.
Describing in these terms the forward motion of the remembering mind might at first seem to confine us to the realms of music or literary narrative, those time-dwelling arts par excellence. But painting, too, is dynamic and propulsive even when it seeks to dissociate itself from the storyteller’s art. Wherever we begin our viewing of a Titian canvas, we enter a world of promises, prefigurations and echoes. As the eye travels across the painted surface, inventing depths and three-dimensional layerings as it goes, the beholder rediscovers the time-axis both of his formal preferences and of his underlying appetites. In the wake of the painter, he moves from incompleteness to plenitude; he realises possibilities, tries out internal relations – discarding some, accepting others – and segment by segment refashions his memories of the work in order to collude with its becoming. If Titian characterised in this way begins to sound like Cézanne, Mondrian or Jackson Pollock, so much the better – for we are talking about that indwelling in the stuff of time that great artists across the ages do indeed share.
My own temporal preferences will by now be clear. I want the Janus-time of art’s unfolding to flow back variously into the time of ordinary living and, in doing so, to protect me from the complacencies and sentimental trappings of the merely nostalgic backward gaze. Strict border controls will not serve these wishes well, especially as I am greedy and want my pantheon of art experiences to be as large and richly populated as possible. So far, and not altogether helpfully, I have admitted to my discussion long works and long-drawn-out processes of elaboration, as if time were more time-like when it arrived in an immense convoy of moments. But there is no need to reach for the Divine Comedy, the Sistine ceiling, or Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen in order to find clinching support for what is, after all, a modest enough claim.
Brief or small-scale works – miniatures, maxims, Cycladic statuettes, Beethoven’s bagatelles rather than his epic Diabelli sound-scape – have their own intentional life, their own sprung rhythms, and their own effects of copiousness and completion. Act IV of Measure for Measure, for example, begins with a brief song of singular beauty:
Take, oh take those lips away,
That so sweetly were forsworn,
And those eyes, the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn;
But my kisses bring again, bring again,
Seals of love, but sealed in vain, sealed in vain
and Giuseppe Ungaretti in 1917, also writing about the impact of morning light, went even further in the art of reduction:
m’illumino
d’immenso.
In both these cases a strong temporal pulse is created by the sparest of grammatical means. Shakespeare’s lines travel from the removal to the restoration of the beloved’s body, and from an earlier to a later imagined future. And both events, the taking away and the bringing back, are sensuously realised: the mouth is sweet, and the eyes bright, even as they are cast aside; and the lovers’ lips are sealed together even as a warning voice, enlisting a different meaning of the verb ‘to seal’, hints at subsequent loss and betrayal. An intimate rhythm of desire has been rediscovered in the space between two contrasted imperatives. Nothing happens in the poem, apart from a clash between two virtual events. Ungaretti finds his pulse in the indicative rather than the imperative mood. His four words, sealed together in a sumptuous display of assonance and alliteration, are the point at which two times, two meanings of the present tense, converge. The poet summons up an instant that is singular and unrepeatable on the one hand, and endlessly able to reproduce itself on the other: I do this once; I do this continually; I do this indefinitely often. A galvanic spasm passes between two temporalities as we read. In miniature, both poets give us the whole of desire-time.
The future is ubiquitous, then, in desire-driven works of art, and the future is assembled from whatever contingent materials happen to be at hand. The new work emerges from memories, from sense-impressions, from the whole rag-and-bone shop in which the acquisitive artist lodges. Its looking back is a looking forward. Writers quote and misquote each other. Painters and musicians readily turn to literature as a spur to their creativity. Choreographers turn melody and instrumental colour into silent dance-steps. This limitless criss-cross of influence is familiar enough, and can be alarming when certain monumental works are at issue. Virgil’s Aeneid, for example, begins to levitate in a dazzling prismatic display when we bring to mind its transformation at the hands of Dante, Ariosto, Purcell, Ingres, Berlioz, Hermann Broch and so many others from across the artistic genres and media.
One class of artistic practitioner seems, however, especially worth acknowledging at the end of this brief homage to art inflamed by the future. I am thinking of those writers who, far from simply nodding to their predecessors or signalling their approval of other art-forms, set out in headlong pursuit of works not their own, write for their lives about the achievement of others, and rediscover the time of creation in the fever of their own prose. Everyone will have his or her favourite examples of this style of verbal performance, and I shall confine myself here to a handful of passages relating directly to artists I have already mentioned. Walter Pater writing about Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Freud describing the intellectual passion that sustains Leonardo’s œuvre as a whole are both touched by the demon of poetic invention. Vasari in his life of Giulio Romano writes about the Palazzo Te with more than mere enthusiasm: his sparkling words seem to lift Giulio’s building blocks into position and cover the interior walls with the erotic panorama of his frescos. And no one has written more searchingly about Beethoven than Thomas Mann in the early chapters of Doktor Faustus, where the last piano sonata – Opus 111 in C major – is re-performed in prose. Mann’s language offers at once a critical reading of the work, a tribute to its strangeness, and an engaging comedy of intellectual manners.
In all these cases, the memory of an earlier artwork is the trigger that sets a new artwork going. The new work is not a gloss, an exposition or a commentary but the reinvention of an experience, with all its risks and hazards left in place. The writers I have mentioned, even as they celebrate a new birth and make possible worlds real, are unillusioned about the human future in the longer term. They do not idealise it. They know that it will contain very bad news as well as good, and this knowledge gives their writing about art its precarious beauty and its disconsolate joy.
Craig Raine, ‘Memory in Literature’
In A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust says many acute things about memory – about physical memory in the body, for instance, in Du côté de chez Swann. One assents and thinks of Robert Frost’s ‘After Apple-Picking’: ‘My instep arch not only keeps the ache, / It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round [my italics].’
Proust is good, too, on memory’s inaccuracy and its arbitrariness. Think of Albertine’s wandering beauty spot in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs or Marcel’s observation in Le temps retrouvé that one forgets the duel one nearly fought but remembers the yellow gaiters one’s opponent wore as a child in the Champs-Elysées. A strikingly dramatic but implausible illustration, this, almost worthy of Henry Carr’s slippage and distortion in Stoppard’s Travesties – where sartorial details, reveres and darts and flares, are given a Wodehousian precedence over world events. Less good, though, than Henry V’s prediction that soldiers at Agincourt will remember their part in the battle ‘with advantages’.
I prefer, too, T.S. Eliot’s more sober sense of arbitrariness in the ‘Conclusion’ to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: ‘Why, for all of us, out of all we have heard, seen, felt, in a lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? The song of one bird, the leap of one fish, at a particular place and time, the scent of one flower, an old woman on a German mountain path, six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway junction, where there was a water-mill: such memories may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer.’
They are, then, these memories, super-charged with sensation – sensation which is powerful, but indescribable. This sensation – of significance, of occluded feeling – is the subject of this essay. Can we describe it? Can we say what it means?
Proust is interested in the particular sensation that accompanies remembering. The tea-soaked madeleine loses its force when it is repeatedly tasted. Tom Stoppard recorded something similar in the first issue of Talk magazine when he wrote ‘On Turning Out to be Jewish’ (September 1999). He meets in Czechoslovakia a woman whose cut has been stitched decades before by Doctor Straussler, the father he never knew: ‘Zaria holds out her hand, which still shows the mark. I touch it. In that moment I am surprised by grief, a small catching-up of all the grief I owe. I have nothing that came from my father, nothing he owned or touched, but here is his trace, a small scar.’ A moving moment. But Stoppard has recorded unsentimentally that its power to move diminishes every time he tells the story.
Is the sensation simply nostalgia – like the nostalgic regret of Nicholas Bulstrode in Middlemarch for the time when he was an effective Methodist preacher in Islington’s Upper Row with an ambition to be a missionary? Or is it something more profound – like Proust’s meditation, in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, on his Aunt Léonie’s sofa in the brothel? On that same sofa, Marcel has first experienced love with a girl cousin. Proust gives us a stereoscopic irony as the seedy and the pre-sexual amalgamate. There seems to be a hidden message in the coincidence. Is the coincidence merely a coincidence? Or has the coincidence been arranged? Elements of this supernatural innuendo emerge repeatedly in Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. General Kuropatkin is showing the young Nabokov tricks with matches on a sofa, when he is summoned away: ‘the loose matches jumping up on the divan as his weight left it’. Fifteen years later, the disguised, fugitive general asks Nabokov’s father for a light … Nabokov says the true purpose of autobiography is ‘the following of such thematic designs through one’s life’.
