On its centennial perhaps even more apt in its statement of discomfort, and un-antiquated by the passage of a hundred years, its ephemeral first appearance in a newspaper notwithstanding, is this exclamation of dissent by Paul Valéry.
Upon his entering some unnamed museum real or imaginary, what did he encounter first, but tutelary gestures of constraint. That was Paris, in 1923. In 2023, throughout countries around the world, overseers and caretakers whose guidance has gone beyond the gesture now programme the museums with a hand that is far from invisible, while outside their confines, and this hardly by accident, bad usage applauds itself whenever verbs such as “curate” pop up where they least belong, the proper meanings of the words squandered by wilful careless mis- and over-use. – Alas, a trajectory of our “culture” can be plotted by these dates and bits of data.
Is the museum a malaise? he asked in effect, rhetorically, and today one has reason to repeat the question after him. For this complaint he prescribed nothing; but by way of diagnosis a few of his points may be mentioned: especially as the insights could carry over to those musical counterparts of museums, the concert-venues.
Once within the portals and venturing into the first sculpture gallery, he found himself amidst un tumulte de créatures congelées, dont chacune exige, sans l’obtenir, l’inexistence de toutes les autres. To spin out this observation just a little: all these figures were locked in a warfare that was frozen in much the way architecture could be called music by other – concrete – means, while their arrested strife propounded to the visitor, wary or unwary as he may have been, a not so covert affirmation of the Darwinist struggle for life, taken for a basic condition of all existence. And yet this message was conveyed no further than halfway, not being borne on a fuller inner fire but faltering as though it were dosed for effect, in the end a largely ineffective remedy for ennui; arousing despite itself mainly irritation or some mercurial fury in the recipients.
A dispirited state, a general insipidity was the result within this museum gallery, made over into a stage for a kind of contest of which Valéry, to be sure, was not the first observer. For example, à propos individual works of art, in the 1880s it had been seen by Whistler. Then all the formal elements in a painting no longer comprised a harmonious unity, but a jostling throng of would-be prima donnas. Scarcely a feature stays in its place, so fierce is its intention of “firmly” coming forth – opined the painter – and in the midst of this unseemly struggle for prominence, the gentle truth has but a sorry chance, falling flat and flavourless, and without force.* The truth of a painting, which had resided in the whole as a well-tempered harmony, shrank away when the latter disaggregated; and similarly nearly forty years on, now on the level of the art’s domicile, within the magnificent showrooms of the museums little place was left for anything other than the abundant chaos de toutes ces grandeurs sans mesure commune – as Valéry wrote – or, transposing his point into a more acoustic idiom, there the cacophonies of these conceited contenders overwhelmed all their separate sounds. (Would they have found, in settings constructed on different principles, some way of going together better?) Induced in l’œil qui écoute, in the face of all this visual noise, was an exhaustion which may readily be imagined.
* “A Further Proposition”
Especially in the sculpture galleries, by virtue of the longer spans of historical time between the earliest and the latest objects on display in them, along with the larger distances between the geographical points of origin of others, a visitor might be inclined to find in this seeming raccourci de l’évolution something more than a mere effect of his own intellectual perspective or vantage-point, thus overlooking or forgetting what Valéry elsewhere had suggested, with considerable bon sens, namely, tout point de vue est faux.* Yet in this instance the scrupulous observance of doubt may be put aside, because the abbreviation of the course of evolutionary history (whether human history narrowly or else natural history altogether) did indeed seem to be a main desideratum of the advancement of science, providing quanta of energy to the latter as the pace of discoveries accelerated further throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Evolution as a process unfolding perceptibly under one’s own eyes – more quickly than was previously held to be the case, in other words – that is a belief to which many, scientists and laymen alike, came to subscribe on account of the cumulative achievements of the sciences, a common belief, or even a faith, in the subliminal affirmation of which the museums were also contributing, though perhaps without realising the part they played. – But as for Valéry, the museums’ share in it was the idea he conveyed to his readers, sotto voce, through a single phrase.
* “La Crise de l’esprit,” Deuxième Lettre
Behind the thoughts which sprang up amidst the sculptures, there stood some recollection of the World War which had ended but five years before. (Even in 1923 some may have wondered how definitively it had “ended.”) Four years of warfare had ushered many millions to an early grave, and ushered in – from the armistice onwards – a multitude of doubts arising out of, and against, the society both as it was and as it would soon be, in all likelihood. From the sculpture gallery in Paris these doubts were not excluded, there too they arose to take issue with a society evincing, in prospect, a more and more patent inhumanity. Accompanied with a chill, they led an acute mind, mere minutes into its visit to the museum, to ponder the coming dystopia.
In Valéry’s case, witnessing the chaos and raccourci de l’évolution around himself in the gallery, he could have called back to mind his own sardonic observations of 1919, regarding a profound crise de l’esprit. Le monde qui baptise du nom de progrès sa tendance à une précision fatale, cherche à unir aux bienfaits de la vie les avantages de la mort. Quite a slap in the face of the societies that set the World War in motion! And yet this was at best a mere gesture; the march towards their next form would not halt. Une certaine confusion règne encore, mais encore un peu de temps et tout s’éclaircira – he then predicted, with obvious sarcasm – nous verrons enfin apparaître le miracle d’une société animale, une parfaite et définitive fourmilière.* Though an advent of some metamorphosis worked upon common life might be inevitable, still one could not reasonably expect the πόλεμος principle to vanish. Instead it would persist under a more organised and resolutely non-irenic management: such a future may be gleaned from his few words. – Quartered in brave new mounds to come, all the ants will seem to live on a footing of equality, though some in fact would be more equal than others, while woe to any that venture out of line!
* Première Lettre
Prognostications notwithstanding, time had come to leave the sculptures and move onwards to the paintings – housed in rooms where, upon entering, the problème was compounded. There, even despite himself, his gait slowed down piously, while whenever he spoke, it was with a whisper. Je suis saisi d’une horreur sacrée. By one and the same power, this horror distanced him from the habitudes of everyday life and aroused in him the urge to quit those precincts and return to it. – Prior to departing, however, he availed himself of the opportunity to present some further ideas about the experience of this sacred locale usually called a museum, whose collections comprise items which then perhaps deserve another term than works of art. For, as he insisted elsewhere, Qui dit : Œuvre, dit : Sacrifices.* Now, in keeping with Valéry’s designation, one may hold that the sacrifices which went into making them what they are, invest the space around them, and even the entire edifice wherein they abide, with a peculiar atmosphere, which simultaneously summons and repels too near an approach by the public. Another of his precursors, Mallarmé, may have caught an inkling of this strange distancing some decades before, during the fin de siècle, putting it into a gnomic proposition: Vestige de sacrifice, le risque suffit au désintéressement.** Possibly this was a suggestion of the work of art coming forth from some sacrifice, thereby conveying a sense of danger that proves hard to resist and may even exert a bit of charm upon a beholder: insofar as it poses this type of risk, a work of art might, in the end, even remove the distance otherwise separating the two of them, which was an interval in some manner shielding each from the other – a fateful direct contact the enigmatic sentence’s last word may have been chosen to evoke.
* Rhumbs, Littérature ** “Variations sur un Sujet,” ix: “Cas de Conscience”
Elimination from an artwork’s rapport with the beholder of the interest – in the most literal sense, that which is between them – yields a drastically compressed remnant. What then remains, foments not the least of the problems of the museums. Whether this reduced rapport should still merit the term, is an open question: after reflecting even briefly on it, in these minuscule substitutes for relations one begins to notice yet a further harbinger of the bonds which, Valéry had surmised, would constitute the societies whose new zoomorphic arrangement he already foresaw.
Speculations and conjectures, nothing more! one might retort to this line of thought; though there’s no cause to prolong it much further here. At present, noting a shift in demeanour when a visitor enters the museum’s many halls, as Valéry attested, will suffice. For by this change, if it displaces other habits successfully, an alteration in a person’s character, or even, it is conceivable, in his temperament could occur. – How beneficial this edification might prove to be, is another matter.
The relations typical of the society to come (a fourmilière or other like formation) materialising already in the present via the good offices of the museums – this is quite a perplexing idea. And, as seems to have happened already towards the end of the nineteenth century, some who anticipated most acutely the shape of the coming social arrangements, propelled into their future by a forceful effort of imagination, did return altered by the encounter, henceforth different than they had been by virtue of the bad tidings they brought back (become dysangels because it was a dystopia they had seen) – how surprising really is this outcome?
Towards the close of his active life, the change which overcame another of the minds by whom Valéry was inspired, provides an eminent instance of it. At the end of the 1880s, in Nietzsche’s case, one of his friends recorded how unfamiliar he found him, during what was to be their last meeting. Eine unbeschreibliche Atmosphäre der Fremdheit, etwas mir damals völlig Unheimliches, umgab ihn. Es war etwas in ihm was ich sonst nicht kannte, und vieles nicht mehr was sonst ihn auszeichnete. Als käme er aus einem Lande wo sonst Niemand wohnt.* An indescribable atmosphere of strangeness, something quite eerie and unknown to me at that time, enveloped him. There was in him something that I was otherwise unfamiliar with, and much was gone that otherwise did typify him. As though he came from a country where no one else lives.
* Erwin Rohde, letter to Franz Overbeck, January 24, 1889. – Some might be tempted to ascribe his new profile to the madness which would later overtake him, but in this variety of bad taste I shall not indulge.
The country from which he came – it was, I surmise, a likely future he had visited by the great force of his mind, that is, his intellect and imagination. Along the way he may not have met any people, but amongst his destinations the museums and other comparable institutions would have been prominent (also the anthills). Thus, if indeed he returned to his present moment from it a changed man, one would do well to take into account what he saw and heard there.
Once arrived back “home” – by dint of his travels itself rendered more unheimlich and fremd to him than it had been before – he turned his attention – although certainly not for the first time – to the topic of an antidote or inoculation in advance against the awful conditions which would one day – as he had anticipated – come to fruition. Espousal of solitude and the embrace of one kind of purity, were two possible options.
Valéry chose to differ. Rien de si pur ne peut coexister avec les conditions de la vie – he insisted in 1920 – et les demeures de la plus haut sérénité sont nécessairement désertes.* For him, evidently, a refuge upon some high mountain would have been contra-indicated. But what does his position signify, if not that the problems were even less tractable and treatable after the World War than his predecessor had still believed them to be some decades earlier (in some of his Stimmungen at least)?
* Avant-propos to L. Fabre, Connaissance de la déesse
If only because Valéry felt obliged to whisper during his visit to the museum, some of his remarks afterwards were strong indeed. Concerning his time in the painting gallery, he said this: Je me sens devenir affreusement sincère. Quelle fatigue, me dis-je, quelle barbarie ! Tout ceci est inhumain. Tout ceci n’est point pur. C’est un paradoxe que ce rapprochement de merveilles indépendantes, et non seulement indépendantes, mais adverses, – et même, qui sont le plus ennemies l’une de l’autre, quand elles se ressemblent le plus. Such a deliberate fostering of rivalry amongst the works of art, or else its creation nearly ex nihilo – he could just as well have called it not a paradox but a pernicious absurdity. And even an adaptation in another sphere of the old divide et impera stratagem.
Strife, everywhere, was intensified appreciably by the World War, and showed no sign of abating afterwards: that he presupposed silently.
Technology as a power aggrandises its strength over the humanity from whose service it had escaped: this he carefully proposed.
L’homme moderne, comme il est exténué par l’énormité de ses moyens techniques, est appauvri par l’excès même de ses richesses.
Museums were not untouched by such imbalances and extremes.
Le mécanisme des dons et des legs, he remarked analytically, along with the accroissement qui tient aux variations de la mode et du goût, did cause museums to grow inordinately, the result being, as he concluded the thought, l’accumulation d’un capital excessif et donc inutilisable.
The irrationality was patent. But could a rational answer to the problem be found?
Responses devised otherwise than “rationally,” do remain possible, after all.
Beauty is anything but a monopoly of the galleries and museums. There are times when it resides dans la rue, flickers in the flames, or remains amongst the ruins.*
* Théophile Gautier, “Une Visite aux ruines,” ii
Never far from Valéry’s mind, in all probability, were the events of 1871 along with their echoes in literature. One poem in particular dwelt on the impasses around which his essay veered a half-century later.
Tu viens d’incendier la Bibliothèque ?
– Oui.
J’ai mis le feu là.
– Mais c’est un crime inouï !
Crime commis par toi contre toi-même, infâme !
Yet what force could this reproach of infamy have had, under the circumstances? (Presumably the poet was rehearsing a complaint often made during that period.) It remained within the sphere of fame, that is, of literature and letters, while Paris –
Et tu détruis cela, toi !
– Je ne sais pas lire.*
– was more than a modern Parnassus, and hence the accuser’s words were spoken into a void. Given the existing distributions of literacy and of illiteracy throughout the city and the country, the library too, much like the museum, stood guard over un capital excessif et donc inutilisable.
* Victor Hugo, “À qui la faute ?”
Yet the unproductive depots expanded ever more rapidly, if only for lack of other ideas how such items could be bequeathed, while the transactions by which they grew had a whiff of pawnshop pungence about them. Je songe invinciblement à la banque des jeux qui gagne à tous les coups. And the devastations many dreamt of, frequently despite themselves, may have induced even a further increase in the size of the centralised hoards, thereby also adding to the unease these collections of stale things often provoked. La nécessité de les concentrer dans une demeure en exagère l’effet stupéfiant et triste. Accordingly, the visit to these repositories tended to be of shorter and shorter duration,* if one were sensible, in order to minimise that effect upon oneself. Evidently it was a common precaution, Valéry not having been the only museum-goer to be repulsed by the problem, nor should one think him alone in remarking, though softly for his had not finished, Nos trésors nous accablent et nous étourdissent. From these treasuries that, in the best of possible arrangements, ought to nourish the public, visitors emerge truncated instead, indeed the smaller the longer they tarried there.
* Today from on high we are informed of the coming of fifteen-minute cities. In 1923, fifteen-minute museums actually may have existed.
For these conditions, who was to blame? Everyone had some share in them. Right at this point Valéry did begin to remonstrate. Will one hear it? Nous devons fatalement succomber. Que faire ? Nous devenons superficiels. – It was neither an original nor a satisfying answer. – But he did not publish these three remonstrative sentences as though they together provided such an answer, or even merely the beginning of one. Rather, he meant them to hold open the place for some stronger answer yet to be formulated – hopefully before society really did evolve into the fourmilière he espied and feared.
A century later, is one in any better a position to devise an answer?* Probably not.
* Although our societies are not yet populated entirely by armies of ants, we may soon find ourselves forced to consume them and similar creatures, if the would-be rulers have their way. – Il faudra voir qui, qui sera mangé.
Nonetheless, I venture to suggest, if the aim is to restore again the productivity of museums and like institutions, some culling will be required – at least insofar as they too have nearly been buried under arid surpluses of decadence.
A similar problem and its resolution were addressed in just this way, ten years after Valéry’s essay, though from afar and in another tongue, in an encomium to the treatment of the language by a newcomer to the ranks of French writers. В этом, будто бы небрежном, неправильном, страстном в своей сжатости языке живет, бьется и трепещет действительное богатство французской культуры, весь опыт чувств и мыслей великой нации – said Trotsky in praise of this novelist’s debut. Художник перетряхнул заново словарь французской литературы. Как мякина отлетели заношенные обороты. In this irregularity of language untidy at first glance and of a passionate brevity, there lives, pulses, and trembles the real wealth of French culture, a great nation’s full experience of sentiment and thought. – The artist sifted anew the vocabulary of French literature. Like bits of chaff, exhausted expressions fell away. Instead one finds those ousted from daily usage, изгнанные из обихода – rescued by one who wrote as though he were the first to stumble upon a human word, как если бы он первый наткнулся на человеческое слово.*
* “Селин и Пуанкаре”