Cezanne’s Doubt 塞尚的疑惑
Maurice Merleau-Ponty 龐蒂
It took him one hundred working sessions 節課 for a still life靜畫, one hundred- fifty sittings 模特兒作姿 for a portrait 肖像. What we call his work was, for him, an attempt企圖 , an approach方法 to painting.
In September of 1906, at the age sixty-seven—one month before his death—he wrote: “I was in such a state 狀態 of mental 精神 agitation 激動, in such great confusion 混亂 that for a time I feared my weak reason 理性would not survive存活…. Now it seems I am better that I see more clearly the direction my studies are taking. Will I arrive at the goal, so intensely 強烈sought and so long pursued追求? I am working from nature, and it seems to me I am making slow progress”.
Painting was his world and his mode 模式of existence. He worked alone without students, without admiration 崇拜 from his family, without encouragement from the critics. He painted on the afternoon of the day his mother died.
In 1870 he was painting at l’Estaque while the police were after him for dodging逃避 the draft 徵召. And still he had moments of doubt about this vocation職業.
As he grew old, he wondered whether the novelty 新奇of his painting might not come from trouble with his eyes, whether his whole life had not been based upon an accident of his body.
The hesitation 猶豫or muddle-headedness糊塗 of his contemporaries 當代人equaled 相等 this strain 壓力and doubt. “The painting of a drunken privy 私人的cleaner清潔工,” said a critic in 1905.
Even today, C. Mauclair finds Cezanne’s admissions 承認 of powerlessness無力感 an argument 論點 against 不利於him.
Meanwhile, Cezanne’s paintings have spread throughout the world. Why so much uncertainty不確定, so much labor努力. so many failures, and, suddenly, the greatest success?
Zola, Cezanne’s friend from childhood, was the first to find genius天才 in him and the first to speak of him as a “genius 天才 gone wrong出毛病.”
An observer 觀察者of Cezanne’s life such as Zola, more concerned with his character than with the meaning of his painting, might well很有理由 consider it a manifestation證明 of ill-health.
For as far back as 1852, upon entering the College Bourbon at Aix, Cezanne worried his friends with his fits of temper脾氣 and depression沮喪. Seven years later, having decided to become an artist, he doubted his talent and did not dare to ask his father—a hatter and later a banker—to send him to Paris.
Zola’s letters reproach 譴責 him for his instability不穩定, his weakness, and
his indecision 猶豫. When finally he came to Paris, he wrote: “The only thing I have changed is my location 位置: my ennui has followed me.” He could not tolerate容忍 discussions, because they wore him out 精疲力盡and he could never give his reasoning.
His nature was basically anxious. Thinking that he would die young, he made his will at the age of forty-two; at forty-six he was for six months the victim受害者 of a violent, tormented折磨, overwhelming 壓倒passion 激情of which no one knows the outcome and to which he would never refer提到.
At fifty-one he withdrew 隱退 to Aix, where he found landscape 風景best suited to適合 his genius but where also he returned to the world of his childhood, his mother and his sister.
After the death of his mother, Cezanne turned to his son for support. “Life is terrifying,” he would often say. Religion, which he then set about 開始practicing for the first time, began for him in the fear of life and the fear of death.
“It is fear,” he explained to a friend; “I feel I will be on earth for another four days—what then? I believe in life after death, and I don’t want to risk 冒險roasting烤焦 in aeternum烤箱.”
Although his religion later deepened, its original motivation動機 was the need to put his life in order 有條理 and be relieved of it. He became more and more timid膽小, mistrustful不信任, and sensitive敏感.
Occasionally he would visit Paris, but when he ran into 遇到 friends he would motion 做動作to them from a distance not to approach接近 him. In 1903, after his pictures had begun to sell in Paris at twice the price of Monet’s and when young men like Joachim Gasquet and Emile Bernard came to see him and ask him questions, he unbent 不屈服a little.
But his fits of anger continued. (In Aix a child once hit him as he passed by; after that he could not bear any contact接觸.)
One day when Cezanne was quite old, Emile Bernard steadied 穩定 him as he stumbled絆倒. Cezanne flew into a rage勃然大怒. He could be heard striding 大步around his studio 畫室and shouting that he wouldn’t let anybody “get his hooks鉤 into me.”
Because of these “hooks” he pushed women who could have modeled for him out of his studio, priests, whom he called “pests,”害蟲 out of his life, and Emile Bernard’s theories out of his mind, when they became too insistent.堅持
This loss of flexible有彈性 human contact 接觸; this inability to master 控制new situations; this flight into established habits, in an atmosphere氣氛 which presented no problems; this rigid 嚴格 opposition 相對between theory and practice between the “hook” and the freedom of a recluse隱士—all these symptoms 病徵 permit one to speak of a morbid 病態constitution 身體 and more precisely as , for example, in the case of El Greco, of schizothymia 精神分裂.
The notion of painting “from nature” could be said to arise from the same weakness. His extremely close attention to nature and to color, the inhuman character in his paintings (he said that a face should be painted as an object) his devotion to the visible world: all of these would then only represent 代表 a flight 逃避 from the human world, the alienation 疏離of his humanity 人性.
These conjectures 推測nevertheless do not give any idea of the positive side of his work; one cannot thereby conclude that his painting is a phenomenon of decadence 頹廢 and what Nietzsche called “impoverished貧瘠 life or that it has nothing to say to the educated person.
Zola’s and Emile Bernard’s belief in Cezanne’s failure probably arises from their having put too much emphasis on psychology and their personal knowledge of Cezanne.
It is nonetheless 可是 possible that Cezanne conceived a form of art which, while occasioned 造成by his nervous condition, is valid有效 for everyone. Left to himself, he was able to look at nature as only a human being can. The meaning of his work cannot be determined from his life.
This meaning will not become any clearer in the light of art history—that is, by considering influences (the Italian school and Tintoretto, Delacroix, Courbet, and the impressionists),
Cezanne’s technique 技巧or even his own pronouncements 宣佈on his work.
His first pictures—up to about 1870—are painted fantasies幻想 : a rape強暴, a murder. They are therefore almost always executed 執刑 in broad strokes 筆觸and present the moral 道德physiognomy 生理of the actions rather than their visible aspect.
It is thanks to the impressionists 印象主義, and particularly to Pissarro, that Cezanne later conceived 構想 painting not as the incarnation 化身of imagined scenes, the projection投射 of dreams outward, but as the exact study of appearances: less a work of the studio 畫室 than a working from nature.
Thanks to the impressionists, he abandoned 放棄 the baroque 巴洛克 technique, whose primary 最初 aim is to capture 補捉movement, for small dabs 輕觸 placed close together and for patient hatchings 細線.
He quickly parted ways with the impressionists, however. Impressionism was trying to capture, in the painting, the very way in which objects strike our eyes and attack our senses.
Objects were depicted 描述as they appear to instantaneous 瞬間的 perception, without fixed contours輪廓, bound together by light and air.
To capture this envelope 涵蓋 of light, one had to exclude排除 siennas褐色, ochres黃土色, and black and use only the seven colors of the spectrum光譜.
The color of objects could not be represented simply by putting on the canvas畫布 their local tone, that is, the color they take on isolated 孤立 from their surroundings 環境; one also had to pay attention to the phenomena of contrast 對比 which modify local colors in nature.
Furthermore, by a sort of reversal倒轉, every color we perceive in nature elicits 召喚the appearance of its complement互補; and these complementaries 互補 heighten強化 one another.
To achieve sunlit 被太陽照射colors in a picture which will be seen in the dim light of apartments隔間, not only must there be a green—if you are painting grass— but also the complementary red which will make it vibrate 震動.
Finally, the impressionists break down the local tone itself. One can generally obtain any color by juxtaposing 對以rather than mixing the colors which make it up 組成, thereby achieving a more vibrant震動 hue 顏色.
The result of these procedures 程序 was that the canvas畫布—which no longer corresponded對應 point by point to nature—afforded a generally true impression through the action of the separate parts upon one another.
But at the same time, depicting 描述the atmosphere 氣氛 and breaking up the tones 色調submerged 淹沒 the object and caused it to lose its proper 適當的weight.
The composition 組成 of Cezanne’s palette畫板 leads one to suppose that he had another aim. Instead of the seven colors of the spectrum光譜, one finds eighteen colors—six reds, five yellows, three blues, three greens, and black. The use of warm colors and black shows that Cezanne wants to represent代表 the object, to find it again behind the atmosphere.
Likewise同樣的, he does not, break up the tone; rather, he replaces this technique with graduated漸層colors, a progression of chromatic 彩色的 nuances 纖細 across the object, a modulation 調和 of colors which stays close to the object’s form and to the light it receives.
Doing away with廢除 exact 確實 contours 輪廓 in certain cases, giving color priority優先over the outline— these obviously mean different things for Cezanne and for the impressionists.
The object is no longer covered by reflections 反映and lost in its relationships to the atmosphere 氣氛and other objects: it seems subtly 微妙地 illuminated 照亮 from within, light emanates發出 from it, and the result is an impression of solidity 固體 and material 物質 substance 物體.
Moreover, Cezanne does not give up making the warm colors vibrate震動 but achieves this chromatic 顏色 sensation感覺 through the use of blue.
One must therefore say that Cezanne wished to return to the object without abandoning the impressionist 印象主義 aesthetics 美學 which takes nature as its model.
Emile Bernard reminded him that, for the classical artists, painting demanded 要求outline輪廓,
Composition組成, and distribution 分怖of light. Cezanne replied: “They created pictures; we are attempting a piece of nature.” He said of the old masters that they “replaced reality with imagination and by the abstraction 抽象 which accompanies陪伴 it.”
Of nature, he said, “the artist must conform to 一致 this perfect work of art. Everything comes to us from nature; we exist through it; nothing else is worth remembering.”
He stated that he wanted to make of impressionism “something solid like the art in the museums.”
His painting was paradoxical矛盾: he was pursuing追求 reality without giving up the sensuous感官 surface, with no other guide than the immediate impression of nature, without following the contours輪廓 , with no outline to enclose 圍入 the color, with no perspectival 觀點or pictorial 圖畫
arrangement.
This is what Bernard called Cezanne’s suicide: aiming for reality while denying拒絕給予 himself the means to attain it.
This is the reason for his difficulties and for the distortions 扭曲 one finds in his pictures between 1870 and 1890. Cups and saucers碟子 on a table seen from the side should be elliptical橢圓形 , but Cezanne paints the two ends of the ellipse橢圓 swollen 腫脹 andExpanded擴大.
The work table in his portrait 肖像 of Gustave Geffroy stretches, contrary to相反於 the laws of perspective透視法, into the lower part of picture. In giving up the outline Cezanne was abandoning himself to chaos 混亂of sensation 感覺, which would upset擾亂 the objects and constantly不斷地 suggest illusions幻覺 , as, for example, the illusion we have when we move our heads that objects themselves are moving—if our judgment did not constantly 不斷地 set these appearances straight.
According to Bernard, Cezanne “submerged 淹沒 his painting in ignorance無知 and his mind in shadows 陰影 .” But one cannot really judge his painting in this way except by closing one’s mind to half of what he said and one’s eyes to what he painted.
It is clear from his conversations with Emile Bernard that Cezanne was always seeking 設法 to avoid the ready-made alternatives 替代 suggested to him: sensation versus對抗 judgment; the painter who sees against the painter who thinks; nature versus 對抗 composition 構景; primitivism 原始as opposed to 相對 tradition.
“We have to develop an optics光學,” Cezanne said, “by which I mean a logical vision視覺 —that is, one with no element 元素 of the absurd荒謬.” “Are you speaking of our nature?” asked Bernard. Cezanne: “It has to do with both.” “But aren’t nature and art different?” “I want to make them the same. Art is a personal apperception 統覺, which I embody 具體表現 in sensations and which I ask the understanding to organize into a painting.”‘
But even these formulas 公式 put too much emphasis on the ordinary notions of “sensitivity” or “sensations” and “understanding”—which is why Cezanne could not convince by his arguments and preferred to paint instead.
Rather than apply to his work dichotomies 二分法 more appropriate 適合 to those who sustain 維持 traditions than to those—philosophers or painters—who found them, we would do better to sensitize 敏感於 ourselves to his painting’s own, specific明確 meaning, which is to challenge挑戰 those dichotomies 二分法.
Cezanne did not think he had to choose between feeling and thought, as if he were deciding between chaos and order. He did not want to separate the stable 穩定的 things which we see and the shifting 轉移 way in which they appear.
He wanted to depict 描述 matter as it takes on form, the birth of order 秩序 through spontaneous 自動自發 organization 組織. He makes a basic distinction 區別 not between “the senses” and “the understanding” but rather between the spontaneous organization of the things we perceive 感覺 and the human organization of ideas and sciences.
We see things; we agree about them; we are anchored 固定 in them; and it is with “nature” as our base that we construct 建構 our sciences.Cezanne wanted to paint this primordial 原始 world, and his pictures therefore seem to show nature pure, while photographs of the same landscapes 風景 suggest man’s works, conveniences, and imminent 逼近的 presence.
Cezanne never wished to “paint like a savage 野人.” He wanted to put intelligence, ideas, sciences, perspective 透視, and tradition back in touch with the world of nature which they were intended to comprehend 理解. He wished, as he said, to confront面對 the sciences with the nature “from which they came.”By remaining faithful to the phenomena 現象 in his investigations of perspective 透視, Cezanne discovered what recent psychologists have come to formulate 說明: the lived perspective透視, that which we actually perceive, is not a geometric 幾何的or photographic攝影 one.
The objects we see close at hand appear smaller, those far away seem larger than they do in a photograph. (This is evident in films: an approaching train gets bigger much faster than a real train would under the same circumstances.)To say that a circle seen obliquely傾斜地 is seen as an ellipse橢圓形 is to substitute代替 for our actual perception what we would see if we were cameras: in reality we see a form which oscillates 搖擺 around the ellipse 橢圓 without being an ellipse.
In a portrait 肖像 of Mme 夫人 Cezanne, the border邊緣of the wallpaper on one side of her body does not form a straight line with that on the other: and indeed it is known that if a line passes beneath a wide strip 條紋of paper, the two visible segments 分割 appear dislocated分開. Gustave Geffroy’s table stretches into the bottom of the picture, and indeed, when our eye runs over a large surface, the images it successively連續receives are taken from different points of view, and the whole surface is warped 彎曲.
It is true that I freeze these distortions扭曲 in repainting them on the canvas畫布 ; I stop the spontaneous 自動自發 movement in which they pile up堆積 in perception and tend toward the geometric 幾何的 perspective. This is also what happens with colors. Pink upon gray paper colors the background green.
Academic painting shows the background as gray, assuming that the picture will produce the same effect of contrast 對比as the real object.Impressionist painting uses green in the background in order to achieve a contrast as brilliant as that of objects in nature.Doesn’t this falsify虛假 the color relationship? It would if it stopped there, but the painter’s task is to modify修改 all the other colors in the picture so that they take away from the green background its characteristics 特性 of a real color.
Similarly同樣 , it is Cezanne’s genius that when the overall 全面的composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions 扭曲are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute 促成, as they do in natural vision, to impression of an emerging 出現的 order秩序, an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes.
In the same way, the contour 輪廓 of an object conceived as a line encircling包圍 the object belongs not to the visible we but to geometry 幾何 .If one outlines輪廓 the shape of an apple with a continuous line, one makes an object of the shape, whereas the contour 輪廓is rather ideal limit toward which the sides of the apple recede消退 in depth.Not to indicate 指示 any shape would be to deprive the objects of their identity.
To trace just a single outline sacrifices 犧牲 depth—that is, the dimension 向度 in which the thing is presented not as spread out before us but as an inexhaustible 耗不盡 reality full of reserves 儲備力.
That is why Cezanne follows the swell膨脹 of the object in modulated調整 colors and indicates 指示 several outlines in blue.Rebounding反彈 among these, one’s glance captures 捕捉 a shape that emerges 出現 from among them all, just as it does in perception.
Nothing could be less arbitrary 任性多變 than these famous distortions扭曲 which, moreover, Cezanne abandoned in his last period, after 1890, when he no longer filled his canvas with colors and when he gave up the closely-woven 密集編織 texture 質料of his still lifes 靜畫
The outline should therefore be a result of the colors if the world is to be given in its true density 密度 .
For the world is a mass without gaps. a system of colors across which the receding 隱退perspective 觀點, the outlines 輪廓, angles 角度, and curves are inscribed鐫刻 like lines of force; the spatial空間 structure vibrates震動 as it is formed.
“The outline and the colors are no longer distinct 區別 from each other. As you paint, you outline輪廓; the more the colors harmonize 和諧, the more the outline becomes precise 準確…. When the color is at its richest, the form has reached plenitude豐富.” Cezanne does not try to use color to suggest the tactile 觸覺 sensations which would give shape and depth.
These distinctions區別 between touch and sight are unknown in primordial原始 perception. It is only as a result of a science of the human body that we finally learn to distinguish between our senses. The lived object is not rediscovered or constructed建造 on the basis of the contributions 貢獻 of the senses; rather, it presents呈現 itself to us from the start as the center from which these contributions radiate煥發.
We see the depth, the smoothness, softness, the hardness of objects; Cezanne even claimed that we see the odor. If the painter is to express the world, the arrangement of his colors must bear within this indivisible 不可分的whole, or else his painting will only hint at things and will not give them in the imperious 絕對必要的 unity, the presence, insurpassable 無法被超越的 plenitude豐富 which is for us the definition of the real.
This is why each brushstroke 筆觸 must satisfy an infinite number of conditions.
Cezanne sometimes pondered 沉思hours at a time before putting down a certain stroke, for, as Bernard said, each stroke must “contain the air, the light, the object, the composition, the character, the outline, and the style.”
Expressing what exists is an endless 永無止境的 task.
Nor did Cezanne neglect the physiognomy 面容 of objects and faces: he simply wanted to capture it emerging出現 from the color.
Painting a face “as an object” is not to strip剝除 it of its “thought.” “I agree that the painter must interpret 解釋it,” said Cezanne. “The painter is not an imbecile 白癡.”
But this interpretation 解釋 should not be a reflection 反映 distinct 不同於 from the act of seeing.
“If I paint all the little blues and all the little browns, I capture and convey表達 his glance眼光. Who gives a damn if they have any idea how one can sadden 悲傷a mouth or make a cheek smile by wedding 連接 a shaded green to a red.”
One’s personality is seen and grasped 捉住 in one’s glance, which is, however, no more than a combination 聯結 of colors. Other minds are given to us only as incarnate 具體表現, as belonging to faces and gestures 姿態.
Countering 反對 with the distinctions of soul and body, thought and vision is of no use here, for Cezanne returns to just that primordial 原始experience from which these notions are derived 得來 and in which they are inseparable.
The painter who conceptualizes 概念化 and seeks the expression first misses the mystery— renewed 更新 every time we look at someone—of a person’s appearing in nature.
In La peal de chagrin Balzac describes a “tablecloth white as a layer of fresh-fallen snow, upon which ,the place settings rose symmetrically 均稱, crowned 蓋住 with blond rolls.”
“All through my youth,” said Cezanne, “I wanted to paint that, that tablecloth of fresh-fallen snow…. Now I know that one must only want to paint ‘rose, symmetrically, the place settings’ and ‘blond rolls.’
If I paint ‘crowned’ I’m done for 完蛋 , you understand? But if I really balance and shade my place settings and rolls麵包 as they are in nature, you can be sure the crowns, the snow and the whole shebang 事情will be there.”
We live in the midst of man-made objects, among tools, in houses, streets, cities, and most of the time we see them only through the human actions which put them to use.
We become used to thinking that all of this exists necessarily and unshakably 無可動搖.
Cezanne’s painting suspends 懸掛 these habits of thought and reveals 顯示the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed 安置himself.
This is why Cezanne’s people are strange, as if viewed by a creature of another species品種 . Nature itself is stripped of剝除 the attributes屬性 which make it ready for animistic 精靈論communions 交流 : there is no wind in the landscape, no movement on the Lac d’Annecy; the frozen objects hesitate 猶豫as at the beginning of the world.
It is an unfamiliar world in which one is uncomfortable and which forbids all human effusiveness過份熱情.
If one looks at the work of other painters after seeing Cezanne’s paintings, one feels somehow relaxed, just as conversations resumed 重新開始 after a period of mourning 哀悼的 mask the absolute 絕對的 change and restore to the survivors their solidity 團結.
But indeed only a human being is capable of such a vision幻覺, which penetrates 貫穿 right to the root of things beneath the imposed 賦予 order of humanity.
All indications 暗示 are that animals cannot look at things, cannot penetrate them in expectation of 期望 nothing but the truth.
Emile Bernard’s statement 陳述 that a realistic寫實 painter is only an ape人猿 is therefore precisely 準確地 the opposite of the truth, and one sees how Cezanne was able to revive 復活 the classical definition of art: man added to nature.
Cezanne’s painting denies neither science nor tradition. He went to the Louvre every day when he was in Paris.
He believed that one must learn how to paint and that the geometric 幾何的study of planes 平面 and forms is a necessary part of this learning process過程 .
He inquired 詢問 about the geological 地質學 structure of his landscapes風景 , convinced that these abstract 抽象的 relationships, expressed, however, in terms of the visible world, should affect the act of painting.
The rules of anatomy 解剖 and design are present in each stroke 筆觸 of his brush筆刷 just as the rules of the game underlie 作為基礎 each stroke 揮動 of a tennis match’網球賽.
But what motivates 引起動機 the painter’s movement can never be simply perspective 透視 or geometry or the laws governing 支配 the breakdown 分解 of color, or, for that matter, any particular knowledge.
Motivating all the movements from which a picture gradually emerges 出現 there can be only one thing: the landscape in its totality 完全的 and in its absolute絕對的 fullness, precisely準確 what Cezanne called a “motif 主題 .”
He would start by discovering the geological 地質學的foundations 基礎of the landscape; then, according to Mme Cezanne, he would halt 停下來and look at everything with widened eyes, “germinating” 發芽 with the countryside.
The task before him was, first, to forget all he had ever learned from science and, second, through these sciences to recapture 補捉 the structure of the landscape as an emerging 剛出現的organism有機體.
To do this, all the partial views one catches sight of must be welded 鑲嵌together; all that the eye’s versatility 多樣 disperses 擴散的 must be reunited重新聯合 ; one must, as Gasquet put it, “join the wandering hands of nature.”
“A minute of the world is going by which must be painted in its full reality.” His meditation沉思 would suddenly be consummated 圓滿 : “I have a hold on my motif主題 ,” Cezanne would say, and he would explain that the landscape had to be tackled 處理 neither too high nor too low, caught alive in a net which would let nothing escape.
Then he began to paint all parts of the painting at the same time, using patches 塊of color to surround his original charcoal 焦碳 sketch 素描 of the geological 地質的 skeleton架構.
The picture took on 形成 fullness and density密度 ; it grew in structure 結構and balance; it came to maturity 成熟 all at once.
“The landscape thinks itself in me,” he would say, “and I am its consciousness.” Nothing could be farther from naturalism than this intuitive 直覺 science. 這種直覺的科學絕非是自然主義。
Art is not imitation模仿, nor is it something manufactured製造 according to the wishes of instinct 本能or good taste 品味.
It is a process 過程 of expression. Just as the function 功用 of words is to name—that is, to grasp 捉住 the nature of what appears to us in a confused困惑的 way and to place it before us as a recognizable 可認出的 object—so it is up to the painter, said Gasquet, to “objectify客體化,” “project計劃 ,” and “arrest捕捉住 .”
Words do not look like the things they designate指明 ; and a picture is not a trompe-l’oei 立體感而逼真的錯視法l. Cezanne, in his own words, “writes in painting what had never yet been painted, and turns it into painting once and for all一勞永逸地.”
We, forgetting the viscous黏著 , equivocal 曖昧的 appearances, go through them straight to the things they present呈現 .
The painter recaptures重新補捉 and converts轉移 into visible objects what would, without him, remain walled up 封閉in the separate 分開的 life of each consciousness: the vibration 震動 of appearances which is the cradle 搖籃of things.
Only one emotion 情感is possible for this painter—the feeling of strangeness陌生 — and only one lyricism抒情曲—that of the continual 不斷地 rebirth 重新誕生 of existence.
Leonardo da Vinci’s motto 格言 was persistent 持續 rigor精力 , and all the classical works on the art of poetry tell us that the creation of art is no easy matter. Cezanne’s difficulties—like those of Balzac or Mallarme—are of a different nature.
Balzac (probably based on Delacroix’s comments) imagined a painter who wants to express life through the use of color alone and who keeps his masterpiece 傑作 hidden.
When Frenhofer dies, his friends find nothing but a chaos 混亂 of colors and elusive 難理解的 lines, a wall of painting. Cezanne was moved to tears When he read Le chef-d ‘oeuvre inconnu and declared 宣怖 that he himself was Frenhofer.
The quest 追求 of Balzac, himself obsessed 著迷於 with “realization,” sheds light on 使真相大白 Cezanne’s. In La peau de chagrin Balzac speaks of “a thought to be expressed,” “a system to be built,” “a science to be explained.”
He makes Louis Lambert, one of the abortive夭折的 geniuses of the Comedie Humaine, say: “I am heading 出發 toward certain discoveries . . ., but how shall I describe the power which binds綁住 my hands, stops my mouth, and drags 拖住 me in the opposite direction from my vocation職業?”
To say that Balzac set himself to understand the society of his time is not sufficient. It is no superhuman 超人的task 工作 to describe the typical traveling salesman, to “dissect 解剖 the teaching profession,” or even to lay the foundations 基礎 of a sociology社會學.
Once he had named 命名 the visible forces such as money and passion激情, once he had described the manifest 明顯的 workings 結構of things, Balzac wondered where it all led, what the impetus推動力 behind it was, what the meaning was of, for example, a Europe “whose efforts tend 傾向 toward some unknown mystery神秘 of civilization.”
In short, he wanted to understand what inner force holds掌控 the world together and causes the proliferation 增多 of visible forms.
Frenhofer had the same idea about the meaning of painting: “A hand is not simply part of the body, but the expression and continuation 繼續of a thought which must be captured and conveyed…. That is the real struggle! 奮鬥
Many painters triumph 勝利 instinctively本能地, unaware of this theme 主題 of art. You draw a woman, but you do not see her.”
The artist is the one who arrests 捕捉 the spectacle 景象in which most men take part without really seeing it and who makes it visible to the most “human” among them.There is thus no art for pleasure’s sake alone. One can invent pleasurable objects by linking old ideas in a new way and by presenting forms that have been seen before. This way of painting or speaking “second hand” is what is generally meant by culture.
Cezanne’s or Balzac’s artist is not satisfied to be a cultured animal but takes up culture from its inception 開始 and founds it anew 重新: he speaks as the first man spoke and paints as if no one had ever painted before.
What he expresses cannot, therefore, be the translation of a clearly defined thought, since such clear thoughts are those that have already been said within ourselves or by others.
“Conception 觀念 ” cannot precede 預先存在 “execution 表現.” Before expression, there is nothing but a vague 模糊的 fever 狂熱, and only the work itself, completed and understood, will prove that there was something rather than nothing to be found there. Because he has returned to the source 來源of silent and solitary孤獨 experience on which culture and the exchange of ideas have been built in order to take cognizance 認出 of it, the artist launches開始 his work just as a man once launched the first word, not knowing whether it will be anything more than a shout, whether it can detach抽離 itself from the flow of individual life in which it was born and give the independent existence of an identifiable 可辨認meaning to the future of that same individual life, or to the monads 單子coexisting共存 with it, or the open community of future monads單子.
The meaning of what the artist is going to say does not exist anywhere— not in things, which as yet have no meaning, nor in the artist himself, in his unformulated 尚未形成的 life. It summons one away from the already constituted 組成的 reason in which “cultured men” are content to shut themselves, toward a reason which would embrace 擁抱 its own origins.
To Bernard’s attempt to bring him back to human intelligence, Cezanne replied: “I am oriented toward the intelligence of the Pater Omnipotens.” He was, in any case, oriented toward the idea or project 計畫 of an infinite 無限 Logos宇宙法則.
Cezanne’s uncertainty and solitude are not essentially 未必 explained by his nervous temperament性情 but by the purpose of his work.
Heredity 遺傳 may well have given him rich sensations感覺 , strong emotions, and a vague feeling of anguish痛苦 or mystery which upset擾亂 the life he might have wished for himself and which cut him off 隔離 from humanity; but these qualities特質 cannot create a work of art without the expressive act, and they have no bearing on關聯 the difficulties or the virtues 品德 of that act.
Cezanne’s difficulties are those of the first word. He thought himself powerless 無力 because he was not omnipotent 萬能, because he was not God and wanted nevertheless to portray 描述the world, to change it completely into a spectacle 景象, to make visible how the world touches us.
A new theory of physics can be proven because calculations 計算 connect the idea or meaning of it with standards of measurement 測量 already common to all human beings.
It is not enough for a painter like Cezanne, an artist, or a philosopher, to create and express an idea; they must also awaken the experiences which will make their idea take root 生根in the consciousness of others. If a work is successful, it has the strange power of being self-teaching. The reader or spectator觀眾, by following the clues線索 of the book or painting, by establishing the concurring同時 points of internal 內在 evidence 證據and being brought up short 中斷 when straying 漫遊 too far to the left or right, guided by the confused 困惑 clarity 澄清of style, will in the end find what was intended打算 to be communicated.
The painter can do no more than construct 建造an image; he must wait for this image to come to life for other people.
When it does, the work of art will have united 聯合 these separate 分開的 lives; it will no longer exist in only one of them like a stubborn 頑固的 dream or a
persistent 持續的 delirium 幻覺, nor will it exist only in space as a colored piece of canvas畫布. It will dwell居住 undivided 沒有分裂in several minds, with a claim 宣稱 on every possible mind like a perennial 永恆的 acquisition 獲得.
Thus, the “hereditary 遺傳的 traits 特性,” the “influences”—the accidents in Cezanne’s life—are the text 本文 which nature and history gave him to decipher詮釋. They give only the literal實質 meaning of his work. But an artist’s creations, like a person’s free decisions, impose on this given 已知事實 a figurative比喻的 sense which did not exist before them.
If Cezanne’s life seems to us to carry the seeds種子 of his work within it, it is because we get to know his work first and see the circumstances 環境 of his life through it, charging 賦予them with a meaning borrowed from that work.
If the givens 已知事實for Cezanne which we have been enumerating列舉, and which we spoke of as pressing 迫切的conditions, were to figure 包含in the web 網絡of projects 計畫which he was, they could have done so only by presenting呈現 themselves to him as what he had to live, leaving how to live it undetermined 未決定.
An imposed 賦予 theme 主題at the start, they become, when replaced 代替 in the existence of which they are part, the monogram 組合圖案 and the symbol 符號 of a life which freely interpreted 解釋itself.
But let us make no mistake about this freedom. Let us not imagine an abstract 抽象的 force which could superimpose 優先 賦予its effects on life’s “givens” 已知事實or cause breaches 破裂in life’s development. Although it is certain that a person’s life does not explain his work, it is equally certain that the two are connected.
The truth is that that work to be done called for要求 that life. From the very start, Cezanne’s life found its only equilibrium平衡 by leaning on依靠 the work that was still in the future. His life was the preliminary 最初 project of his future work. The work to come is hinted at 暗示, but it would be wrong to take these hints 暗示for causes, although they do make a single adventure of his life and work. Here we are beyond causes and effects; both come together in the simultaneity 同時性 of an eternal Cezanne who is at the same time the formula公式 of what he wanted to be and what he wanted to do.
There is a relationship between Cezanne’s schizoid 精神分裂 temperament 性情 and his work because the work reveals 顯示 a metaphysical形上學的
meaning of his illness (schizothymia as the reduction 化簡 of the world to the totality 全部of frozen appearances and the suspension懸掛 of expressive values); because the illness thus ceases being an absurd 荒謬 fact and destiny命運 to become a general possibility of human existence confronting面臨, in a consistent 一貫的, principled 原則的way, one of its paradoxes矛盾—the phenomenon 現象of expression—and because in this to be schizoid 精神分裂 and to be Cezanne are one and the same thing.
It is therefore impossible to separate分開creative freedom from that behavior, as far as possible from deliberate刻意, already evident明顯 in Cezanne’s first gestures 手勢as a child and in the way he reacted to反應 things.
The meaning Cezanne gave to objects and faces in his paintings presented itself to him in the world as it appeared to him. Cezanne simply released 釋放 that meaning: it was the objects and the faces themselves as he saw them that demanded要求 to be painted, and Cezanne simply expressed what they wanted to say.
How, then, can any freedom be involved? True, the conditions of existence can only affect consciousness indirectly間接, through raisons d’etre 存在的理性 and the justifications 理由consciousness offers to itself.
We can only see before us, and in the form of goals目標 , what it is that we are—so that our life always has the form of a project計畫 or choice, and thus seems to us self caused. But to say that we are from the start our way of aiming 目標at a particular future would be to say that our project has already been determined with our first ways of being, that the choice has already been made for us with our first breath.
If we experience no external constraints 約束, it is because we are our whole exterior 外在.
That eternal永恆的 Cezanne whom we see springing出來 forth from the start and who then brought upon the human Cezanne the events and influences deemed認為 exterior, and who planned all that happened to the latter—that attitude 態度 toward humanity and toward the world which was not chosen through deliberation刻意—may be free from 免除 external causes, but is it free in respect to 關於itself?
Is the choice not pushed back beyond life, and can a choice exist where there is as yet no clearly articulated表達 field of possibilities, only one probability and, as it were, only one temptation誘惑?
If I am a certain project from birth, the given and the created are indistinguishable 區別 in me, and it is therefore impossible to name a single gesture which is merely hereditary 遺傳 or innate 天生, a single gesture 姿態 which is not spontaneous自動自發—but also impossible to name a single gesture which is absolutely 絕對 new in regard to that way of being in the world which, from the very beginning, is myself.
There is no difference between saying that our life is completely constructed建造 and that it is completely given. If there is true freedom, it can only come about in the course of our life by our going beyond our original situation and yet not ceasing 停止 to be the same.
Such is the problem. Two things are certain about freedom: that we are never determined and yet that we never change, since, looking back on what we were, we can always find hints of what we have become.
It is up to us to understand both these things simultaneously同時, as well as the way freedom dawns啟明 in us without breaking our bonds 默契 with the world.Such bonds are always there, even and above all when we refuse to admit they exist.
Inspired by the paintings of da Vinci 達文西 , Valery梵樂希 described a monster 怪物of pure freedom, without mistresses女主人, creditors債主, anecdotes軼事, or adventures. No dream intervenes 介入 between himself and the things themselves; nothing taken for granted 視為當然 supports his certainties 確定性; and he does not read his fate命運 in any favorite image, such as Pascal’s abyss 懸崖. Instead of struggling against 奮鬥對抗the monsters怪物 he has understood what makes them tick 起作用, has disarmed解除武裝 them by his attention, and has reduced 化簡 them to the state of known things.
“Nothing could be more free, that is, less human, than his judgments 判斷on love and death. He hints at them in a few fragments 片斷 from his notebooks筆記: ‘In the full force of its passion激情 ,’ he says more or less explicitly明確 , ‘love is something so ugly that the human race 種族 would die out (la natura si perderebbe) if lovers could see what they were doing.’
This contempt藐視 is brought out 表現 in various sketches描述, since the leisurely悠閒examination of certain things is, after all, the height of scorn藐視. Thus, he now and again draws anatomical 解剖 unions 結合, frightful 可怕的crosssections 交會 of love’s very act.”2
He has complete mastery駕馭 of his means 工具, he does what he wants, going at will from knowledge to life with a superior 高級 elegance 優雅. Everything he did was done knowingly, and the artistic process過程 , like the act of breathing or living, is not beyond his ken 視野.
He has discovered the “central attitude態度 ,” on the basis of which it is equally possible to know, to act, and to create because action and life, when turned into 成為 exercises, are not contrary相反 to detached 隔離的knowledge.
He is an “intellectual 知識的 power”; he is a “man of the mind.” Let us look more closely. For Leonardo there was no revelation啟明 ; as Valery said, no abyss懸崖 yawned張開 at his right hand.Undoubtedly 無疑的 true. But in Saint Anne, the Virgin, and Child, the Virgin’s cloak 衣袍suggests a vulture 禿鷹 where it touches the face of the Child.
There is that fragment 片斷 on the flight 飛行 of birds where da Vinci suddenly interrupts 中斷himself to pursue追求 a childhood memory: “I seem to have been destined 註定 to be especially concerned with the vulture禿鷹, for one of the first things I remember about my childhood is how a vulture came to me when I was still in the cradle搖籃, forced open my mouth with its tail 尾巴, and struck me several times between the lips with it.”3
So even this transparent 透明的 consciousness has its enigma謎 , whether truly a child’s memory or a fantasy 幻想 of the grown man. It did not come out of nowhere憑空 , nor did it sustain 維持itself alone.
We are caught in a secret history, in a forest of symbols符號. One would surely protest 抗議if Freud were to decipher 解釋 the riddle 謎from what we know about the meaning of the flight of birds and about fellatio口交 fantasies幻想 and their relation to the period of nursing嬰兒.
But it is still a fact that to the ancient Egyptians the vulture was a symbol of maternity母親 because they believed all vultures were female and that they were impregnated 懷孕by the wind.
It is also a fact that the Church Fathers used this legend傳說 to refute反駁, on the grounds 理由 of natural history, those who were unwilling to believe in a virgin處女 birth, and it is probable that Leonardo came across偶遇 the legend傳說 in the course of 過程his endless 無窮盡reading. He found in it the symbol符號 of his own fate命運: he was the illegitimate son 私生子of a rich notary 公證人 who married the noble Donna Albiera the very year Leonardo was born.
Having no children by her, he took Leonardo into his home when the boy was five. Thus Leonardo spent the first four years of his life with his mother, the deserted被拋棄 peasant 農夫的girl; he was a child without a father, and he got to know the world in the sole 只有company陪伴 of that unhappy mother who seemed to have miraculously 奇蹟一般created him.
If we now recall 回憶 that he was never known to have a mistress 情婦or even to have felt anything like passion激情 ; that he was accused控訴—but acquitted宣告無罪 —of sodomy雞姦; that his diary, which tells us nothing about many other, larger expenses, notes with meticulous 細節 detail the costs of his mother’s burial埋葬, as well as the cost of linen and clothing for two of his students—it is no great leap 跳躍 to conclude that Leonardo loved only one woman, his mother, and that this love left no room for anything but platonic 柏拉圖tenderness 溫柔he felt for the young boys surrounding him.
In the four decisive years of his childhood he had formed a fundamental 基本的 attachment 感情, which he had to give up when he was recalled to his father’s home, and into which he had poured all his resources 資源of love and all his power of abandon 放縱.
As for his thirst 渴望 for life, he had no other choice but to use it in the investigation調查 and knowledge of the world, and, since he himself had been “detached隔離,” he had tobecome that intellectual 知識的 power, that man who was all mind, that stranger among men.
Indifferent, incapable of any strong indignation奮怒 , love or hate, he left his paintings unfinished to devote his time to bizarre古怪的 experiments; he became a person inwhom his contemporaries 當代人 sensed a mystery神秘.
It was as if Leonardo had never quite完全 grown up, as if all the places in his heart had already been spoken for, as if the spirit of investigation調查 was a way for him to escape from life, as if he had invested 投注all his power of assent 同意in the first years of his life and had remained true to his childhood right to the end.
His games were those of a child. Vasari tells how “he made up 發明 a wax 蠟油 paste黏土 and, during his walks, he would model 模擬 from it very delicate 微妙 animals, hollow 空洞and filled with air; when he breathed into them, they would fly; when the air had escaped, they would fall to the ground.
When the wine-grower種植葡萄酒主人 from Belvedere found a very unusual lizard蜥蝪, Leonardo made wings for it out of skin of other lizards and filled these wings with mercury水銀 so that they waved and quivered 振動whenever the lizard moved; he likewise 同樣made eyes, a beard, and horns角 for it in the same way, tamed馴服 it, put it in a box, and used the lizard to terrify嚇 his friends.”4
He left his work unfinished, just as his father had abandoned 放棄 him. He paid no heed 注意to authority 權威 and trusted only nature and his own judgment 判斷 in matters of knowledge, as is often the case with people who have not been raised in the shadow 陰影 of a father’s
intimidating 嚇人的and protective power.
Thus even that pure power of examination, that solitude孤獨, that curiosity—which are the essence 本質of mind—only developed in da Vinci in relation to his personal history. At the height of his freedom he was, in that very freedom, the child he had been; he was free on one side only because bound 跳躍 on the other. Becoming a pure consciousness is just another way of taking a stand立場 in relation to the world and other people.
Leonardo had learned this attitude in assuming 假定 the situation into which his birth and childhood had put him. There can be no consciousness that is not sustained維持 by its primordial原始 involvement參與 in life and by the manner of this involvement. Whatever is arbitrary 任意 in Freud’s explanations cannot in this context 本文 discredit 不足釁任psychoanalytic intuition直覺.
True, the reader is stopped more than once by the lack of evidence證據. Why this and not something else? The question seems all the more pressing迫切 since Freud often offers several interpretations解釋, each symptom病徵 being “over-determined” according to him.
Finally, it is obvious that a doctrine信條 which brings in sexuality性 everywhere cannot, by the rules of inductive 推論的logic邏輯, establish its effectiveness anywhere, since, excluding all differential cases beforehand事先 , it deprives 剝奪itself of any counterevidence反證.
This is how one triumphs勝利 over psychoanalysis, but only on paper. For if the suggestions of the analyst 分析師 can never be proven, neither can they be eliminated減少: how would it be possible to credit 推崇 chance with the complex複雜的 correspondences對應 which the psychoanalyst discovers between the child and the adult?
How can we deny否認 that psychoanalysis has taught us to notice echoes回聲, allusions 暗示, repetitions 重複from one moment of life to another—a concatenation 連續 we would not dream of doubting if Freud had stated 陳述the theory correctly 正確?
Unlike the natural sciences, psychoanalysis was not meant to give us necessary relations of cause and effect but to point to motivational 動機 relationships which are in principle simply possible.
We should not take Leonardo’s fantasy 幻想 of the vulture 禿鷹, or the infantile 嬰兒past which it masks掩蓋, for a force which determined his future. Rather, it is like the words of the oracle預言 , an ambiguous 曖昧symbol符號 which applies in advance 事先 to several possible chains鎖鏈 of events事件.
To be more precise準確: in every life, one’s birth and one’s past define categories分類 or basic dimensions 向度 which do not impose 賦予any particular act but which can be found in all.
Whether Leonardo yielded to屈服 his childhood or whether he wished to flee from it, he could never have been other than he was.
The very decisions which transform 轉變 us are always made in reference to提到 a factual situation; such a situation can of course be accepted or refused, but it cannot fail to give us our impetus 動機 nor to be for us, as a situation “to be accepted” or “to be refused,” the incarnation 具體化身 of the value we give to it. If it is the aim of psychoanalysis to describe this exchange between future and past and to show how each life muses over 沉思riddles 謎語 whose final meaning is nowhere written down, then we have no right to demand inductive 推論 rigor 精力from it.
The psychoanalyst’s hermeneutic 解釋musing沉思, which multiplies 加倍 the communications between us and ourselves, which takes sexuality性 as the symbol 符號of existence and existence as symbol of sexuality, and which looks in the past for the meaning of the future and in the future for the meaning of the past, is better suited than rigorous 精力充沛 induction推論 to the circular 循環 movement of our lives, where the future rests on依靠 the past, the past on the future, and where everything symbolizes 象徵everything else.
Psychoanalysis does not make freedom impossible; it teaches us to think of this freedom concretely具體的, as a creative revival 復活of ourselves, always, in retrospect回顧, faithful 忠實於to ourselves.
Thus it is true both that the life of an author can teach us nothing and that—if we know how to interpret 解釋it—we can find everything in it, since it opens onto his work. Just as we may observe觀察 the movements of an unknown animal without understanding the law that inhabits 居住 and controls them, so Cezanne’s observers 觀察者did not divine 推測the transmutations轉變 he imposed 賦予on events 事件and experiences; they were blind to his significance重要, to that glow 光輝 from out of nowhere which surrounded him from time to time有時候 .
But he himself was never at the center of himself: nine days out of ten all he saw around him was the wretchedness悲慘 of his empirical 試驗性的 life and of his unsuccessful attempts, the debris of an unknown celebrations
Yet it was in the world that he had to realize his freedom, with colors upon a canvas畫布. It was from the approval 同意 of others that he had to await the proof 證據of his worth. That is why he questioned the picture emerging 出現beneath his hand, why he hung on 逗留the glances other people directed toward his canvas畫布. That is why he never finished working. We never get away from our life. We never see ideas or freedom face to face.
