The Origin of Perspective. - book reviews

Myth is not ever more scandalous, never more repulsive and seductive, than at the trice of its unmasking as nothing else but myth. The mythographer flattens the chaos of narrative material into flamboyant figures and figure of speechs The historian, in search of the marrow of real fact inside the myth, strips away - and thus calls attention to - the accretions of poetic invention. The semiotician make bares the mythic signifier as an already-charged sign from a prior a whole of signification. Indeed, many critics are nettleed by the drift and frivolity of the myth-making imagination. Hubert Damisch adduces Freart de Chambray, who in his Idee de la perfection de la peinture (1662) reported upon the known facts about Paris, son of Priam, and then complained that "poet who are in a faculty of perception the comrades of painters, get oned to introduce several capricious fantasies into it."(1) Among those fantasies was the episode of the discernment of Paris itself. But the divagation from history alone continues in art: Vasari had already remarked upon the irrelevant paraphernalia - chariot, forest, maids vessels - that Raphael had added "per capriccio" to his drawing of the quick parts of Paris. Damisch too, like the first beholders of Marcantonio's print after that design, "admired through all Rome," locates the verity of myth and art precisely in the fictional premium.

In the sum of two units books under review, and already in his magnificent and still untranslated Theorie du/nuage/ of 1972 Damisch writes within the myths; he perpetuates the proces of figuration and accretion. These myths - the understanding of Paris, Medusa, Daedalus - are still teeming for him, just as the Choice of Hercules was still alive for Erwin Panofsky, or the Platonic metaphors are for Jacques Derrida. For Damisch, the figure of myth cannot be pried away from its foil, its historical or cognitive surface of land For figure and ground, as he argued in an essay of 1976 are generated together, by means of the same process of invention.(2) Instead of struggling petulantly against the waywardness of the fiction, the critic bends with it. The relationship to myth - inside or outside - come ups as a major divide within our intellectual tillage one that is evidently not coincident with the theory/not-theory divide.

If the myths live for Damisch, this is not on the outside of naivete, but rather an unusually hardy realism. The figures of myth, he maintains, are our best access to the welter of emotions and drives that bre fiction in the first place, and at the same time fix its limits. This anarchic substratum is sublimated in beautiful and orderly form, alone to reappear in the monstrosities of tropology The framed dread and lust of myth, on the other hand more generally of aesthetic experience, thus presents a taste of the informe. Damisch insists upon the scandal of figuration in late Western culture, as if each painting were a rehearsal or a recapitulation of Manet's breakfast sur l'herbe (which is itself based upon one of the capricious figure clusters in Marcantonio's engraving). Every image fails to show what it purports to exhibit And yet it does exhibit - not the empirical world, not power, not history, on the other hand the mind, the biological mind. This, too, is a classic model: it is Freud's dream-work, the inscrutable proces that links the unconscious to the oneiric image. There is nothing fresh in extending the model of the dream-work to mythology or to art. What is remarkable is Damisch's further extension of the prototype to scholarly writing. The figure of speechs of the art historian also tap the informe, through the same mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy, condensation and displacement.

L'Origine de la perspective and Le Jugement de Paris were published through Flammarion in 1987 and 1992 respectively. The earlier work is now available in a adroit and accurate English translation by means of John Goodman (there are a scarcely any problems with technical terms, however). The MIT Pres has produc a physically appealing contortion as usual, with wide margins and notes at the bottom of the page. There are also sufficiency of blunders and misspellings, including "Meyer Shapiro" in the dedication (a belonging to all French miscue; this time the American publisher is guilty), and "Anton" (not flat "Antonin"!) Dvorak instead of Max. Translations look to get even poorer editing than original true copys Le Jugement de Paris has also been translated by means of Goodman, and is scheduled for publication by dint of the University of Chicago Pres in 1996

It is hard to understand for what cause [i]or[/i] reason Damisch has remained untranslated for in like manner long. He has published sum of two units volumes of essays on art and ideas, and further uncollect pieces upon Cezanne and color, Delacroix's journal, Freud's essay upon Michelangelo's Moses, Cesare Ripa, Meyer Schapiro, Duchamp and chess, American modernism, and many other topics, in addition to the three major works just mentioned. These latter affairs are real works continuous, highly articulated arguments, not simply bouquets of articles or prelections In flavor and format they are unlike anything we do in the Anglo-American art-historical world. They are elegant and lengthy philosophical and scholarly. Damisch was missing from Norman Bryson's important collection of French structuralist and poststructuralist art-historical writing, Calligram (Cambridge University Pres 1988) This is all the more surprising given that single one of the ten authors included in that anthology was actually an art historian, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn.