IN Naomi Schor’s great book on details [Reading in Detail], one of the monuments of the deconstructive moment of the 90s, there is an anecdote about Dali meeting Lacan, recounted in Dali’s The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, and thus as unreliable as Mickey Mouse’s broomstick assistants in Phantasmagoria.
“While awaiting Lacan’s arrivcal, Dali is at wok on an etching. In order to see the drawing on the copper plate more clearly, Dali found it helpful to stick a small white square of paper on the tip of his nose. After Lacan’s departure, Dali goes over their discussion, sorting out their agreements and disagreements:
‘But I grew increasingly puzzled over the rather alarming manner in which the young psychiatrist had scrutinized my face from time to time. It was almost as if the germ of a strange, curious smile would then pierce through his expression. Was he intently studying the convulsive effects upon my facial morphology of the ideas that stirred my soul? I found the answer to the enigma when I presently went to wash my hands… I had forgotten to remove the square of white paper from the tip of my nose!
… This very Freudian slip-up, this conspicuous “shine on the nose”, will serve as a parable for paranoia-criticism and its vissicitudes…”
Schor’s book is a combination of a certain feminist reading in aesthetics and an archaeology, or perhaps I should say underwater archaeology, a “diving into the wreck”, of the ways in which the detail has been sublimated and continually rediscovered in the eras of romanticism and modernism, those companions of consumer capitalism. The detail is the threat of a certain plenitude that, as man after man, quoted by Schor, assures us, is both threatening and female. In Baudelaire’s terms, the detail encodes the riot, the uprising: any detail conceals in its being noticed the moment in which order is potentially sprung. And yet it is of course the individual members of the street mass, the workers and plebes, upon which the work that sustains the order is done.
As it is with the vast unpaid mass of female labor.
2.
Heine’s memoirs begin by extensively undercutting the memoir genre as one of liars. He illustrates the inherent lie in self-portraiture by telling a shockingly racist anecdote about a South African King of the Ashantis, who has his portrait painted by a travelling European. After often jumping up from his pose several times, the king has a request:
The King, who admired the striking resemblences [of the painter’s portraits of Ashanti women], demanded to be counterfeited himself; he dedicated some sittings to the painter when the latter thought he observed, from the King‘s springing up to observe the progress of the painting, that there was a disquiet in the expression of his features, the grimacing of a man by which he betrayed that he had a wish on his tongue for which he could hardly find the words… Seeing this, the painter so pressed his majesty to tell him his greatest desire until the poor Negro King finally whispered whether it wouldn’t be better to paint him white.“
This anecdote, which mysteriously twins with Dali’s, very richly invests the detail with just the kind of social psychopathology that Schor is raising up from the wreck.
3.
Which gets me to another anecdote in Heine’s “Confessions”. Heine wrote a number of articles under the title De l’Allemagne, in mocking homage to Madam de Stael’s book of that title. A mockery backgrounded by Heine’s notion of the battle in Europe between Napoleon – the male principle – and Madam de Stael – the female principle, both exponentially raised to represent their sexes. Heine’s account of de Stael is unfair, of course, but it is also funny. And in the midst of his complaint against her account of Germany (which, he insists, she saw from a limited point of view, ignoring the “brothel and the barracks” in favour of the “thinkers and the poets”), he tells an anecdote that displaces Schor’s discourse about the detail and fetishism and moves us to a discourse about the detail and obsessive compulsion: although are these things so far apart, really?
“I will by no means imply that Madame de Stael was ugly; but beauty is something wholly different. She had pleasant particulars, which however formed a very unpleasant whole; particularly unbearable for a nervous person like Schiller, of blessed memory, was her mania for taking a tuft of grass or a small paper sack and rolling it over and over between her fingers. This manoeuvre made poor Schiller dizzy, and in despair he gripped her beautiful hand, in order to stop it. And Madame de Stael thought that the sentimental poet was pulled out of himself by the magic of her personality. She did in fact have beautiful hands, I’ve been told, and the most beautiful arms, which she contrived to show naked – certainly the Venus de Milo never displayed such beautiful arms.”
This is the kind of anecdote, the kind of detail, that gets passed around in the European salon of literature. The balling up the paper sack – the grabbing of her hand – the comparison of naked arms to the goddess with no arms, in her most famous statuary incarnation – these tap out a certain S.O.S., a certain coded distress of Heine, the poet of blessed memory. Against the background of the struggle between the male principle and the female principle, Napoleon and de Stael, de L’allemagne seems to be caught in a vertiginous moment, a complex of misunderstandings observed by Heine, in Paris, himself trying to understand the “female principle” in the person of his last lover, Elise Krinitz.
4.
Details and generals.
In Schor’s chapter on Displacement, she quotes from another “confession” – that which forms Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.
“What happens then in the borderline case of a self-analysis, for after
all no Hippocratic oath governs the relationship of Freud the writeranalyst
and Freud the analysand? The answer is forthcoming: in The
Interpretation of Dreams, Freud blithely breaks what I call the second
law of the detail-every detail must be interpreted-which he enunciates
in a note to his case history of the Wolf Man: "it is always a strict
law of dream interpretation that an explanation must be found for every
detail" (S. E., 17:42). Indeed, beginning with the analysis of the Irma
dream, Freud is careful to stress the limits of his interpretation: "I had
a feeling that the interpretation of this part of the dream was not carried
far enough to make it possible to follow the whole of its concealed
meaning. If I had pursued my comparison between the three women,
it would have taken me far afield.- There is at least one spot in every
dream at which it is unplumbable-a navel, as it were, that is its point of
contact with the unknown"
The navel is, as a point, strictly not the point of contact with the unknown, but the point left by a past contact. The navel was famously a question for the theologians, whose speculations are given a medical-cosmological sense by Thomas Browne in the Pseudodoxia Epidemica:
“For the use of the Navel is to continue the Infant unto the Mother, and by the vessels thereof to convey its aliment and sustentation. … Now upon the birth, when the Infant forsaketh the womb, although it dilacerate, and break the involving membranes, yet do these vessels hold, and by the mediation thereof the Infant is connected unto the womb, not only before, but a while also after the birth. These therefore the midwife cutteth off, contriving them into a knot close unto the body of the Infant; from whence ensueth that tortuosity or complicated nodosity we usually call the Navel; occasioned by the colligation of vessels before mentioned. Now the Navel being a part, not precedent, but subsequent unto generation, nativity or parturition, it cannot be well imagined at the creation or extraordinary formation of Adam, who immediately issued from the Artifice of God; nor also that of Eve, who was not solemnly begotten, but suddenly framed, and anomalously proceeded from Adam.”
Haven’t we seen this knot before, being balled up in the fingers of Madame de Stael? Whose particulars, beautiful in themselves, do not make up, for Heine, a beauty, but instead a constant irritation. And whose arms compete, in their nakedness, with Venus de Milo’s absence of arms? And can we plumb this point?
I’m not going to answer these questions.
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