Any thought that Claire will provide the explanation is soon dispelled. She has, she says at once, told the magistrate everything. She hasn't got an answer to the question of why she did it. It's not the right question. ‘If they'd found the right question to ask me’, she says, ‘I'd have said. If I'd found the right question.’ One thing, though: she refuses to say where the head is. She found Marie-Thérèse's rich meat sauces nauseating, she says. The mint in the garden was the opposite to those meat sauces. ‘Sitting by that plant I was intelligent,’ she says. ‘Now I'm just me, but there … I was what remains after my death.’
So the criminal is found. Haussmann was right: the law at the centre can now reach out to any part of France, no matter how hidden. But the head of the victim has not been found and the question of why the murder was committed or who Claire Lannes is has not been answered. Yet this is not felt as a loss by the reader. On the contrary. The constant circling round the event and the refusal to come up with explanations convey a far more powerful sense of ‘what happened’ than Capote or Mailer ever manage. Above all the primacy of the event, the way it transcends all motive, all explanation, is borne in on us. In this it is like Greek tragedy; Claire, like Oedipus, we feel, is polluted but not guilty. To try and grasp what this means we go back to the beginning and start to read again: ‘Un livre sur le crime de Viorne commence à se faire.’
When Mallarmé said that he felt stupefied, nullified, by the effort of writing, and on top of that disgusted with himself; when Hofmannsthal's Lord Chandos said that he had lost the ability to speak in a coherent fashion; when Kafka lamented that he hadn't written a single line that he could accept, that his body put him on his guard against every word; and Beckett that he was weary of going a little further along a dreary road — they all testified to their revulsion at having, for the sake of something called art, to repeat the confused and half-thought-through actions of their predecessors, which, far from shedding light on the human condition, only muddied the waters. When Lord Chandos confessed to being moved only by the unnamed or the barely nameable, an abandoned harrow, a dog in the sun, a cripple, he touched unwittingly on the antidote to this, the effort, through art, to recognise that which will fit into no system, no story, that which resolutely refuses to be turned into art. That effort is at the heart of the Modernist enterprise.
9. Fernande Has Left With A Futurist
What Rosalind Krauss discerns as happening in the Picasso collages of 1912–13 is a key moment in Modernism's understanding of itself, not just a moment in Picasso's personal odyssey. For it is the moment when artists grasped that what they were producing were signs or emblems for the external world, not mirrors reflecting it. With that insight, however, as Rosalind Krauss realises, a new abyss yawned: is art then nothing but the circulation of signs?
Picasso's hatred of Futurism and of abstraction is well documented. As always with these things motives are mixed and strongly held views overdetermined. Krauss quotes a letter from Picasso to Braque in May 1912: ‘Fernande has left with a Futurist. What am I going to do with the dog?’ But, as she shows, personal pique connected with his loves, wounded pride at feeling that he, the torchbearer of the Modern, was being outflanked on two sides and starting to look distinctly vieux jeu, and a deeper, more purely artistic instinct, all played their part. ‘The avant-garde had moved on in the early teens and was now lying in wait for cubism’, she writes. ‘It had other tricks up its sleeve, not the least of which was pure abstraction on the one hand and the photomechanical conception of art — in which the readymade combines with the photograph — on the other.’ But Picasso clearly loathed the idea that Cubism should be thought of as ‘non-objective art’, just as he hated the notion that it had opened the way for the mechanical strategy of the readymade as Duchamp and Picabia were busy developing it.
Picasso turned his back on both abstraction and the mechanical, returned to his study of late Cézanne, and began, in the years that followed, to move towards what came to be called Neoclassicism. His disciples never forgave him. It was in those years, 1915–20, that the label of pasticheur, which has clung to him ever since, was first attached to him. Marinetti, Picabia, Rodchenko, Malevich, Mondrian — they were the purists, who saw how things were and drew their stern conclusions. Picasso seemed to be lost in a venture that was at once bourgeois and retrograde, suggesting in retrospect that even in Cubism, the one ‘movement’ he claimed all his life to have been his invention, he was only imitating others, in this case Braque.
However, in the light of Picasso's entire artistic career such a view, though maintained by critics with an axe to grind, like John Berger, has to be drastically revised. We can now see what Picasso was after, all along, in his insistence that it was the world he was interested in as much as art, and in his denunciation of Futurism, abstraction and the photomechanical production of art. As Leo Steinberg and others have shown, he went on till the very end exploring possible ways in which the multiple voices could be kept in play, and if he had dips in form or went down blind alleys then that is what engaging with the world through art is about. Rosalind Krauss is coy about the degree to which she believes that the charges of pastiche levelled at Picasso since that time are justified, and the degree to which she feels that he did indeed lose his way. But in her questioning of Berger and of his mentor Adorno, whose Philosophy of Modern Music she rightly sees as articulating most clearly the case against both Stravinsky (its immediate target) and Picasso, she is, as usual, both perceptive and profound. ‘It is the historical logic of modernism’, concludes her wonderful book on Picasso, that ‘the newly liberated circulation of the token-sign always carries as its potential reverse an utterly devalued and empty currency. Pastiche is not necessarily the destiny of modernism, but it is its guilty conscience.’
Duchamp was the only other artist apart from Picasso to grasp this, so that actually to align him with Picabia and the new mechanisation of art is to do him an injustice. More clearly even than Picasso (he was the more cerebral artist), Duchamp understood what was at stake in the crisis of authority and tradition that had engulfed the arts in the last years of the nineteenth century, what it meant that ‘the newly liberated circulation of the token-sign always carries as its potential reverse an utterly devalued and empty currency’. In an interview with Georges Charbonnier in 1961 he summed up his position with his customary wit:
The word ‘art’, etymologically speaking, means to make, simply to make. Now what is making? Making something is choosing a tube of blue, a tube of red, putting some of it on the palette, and always choosing the quality of the blue, the quality of the red, and always choosing the place to put it on the canvas, it's always choosing. So in order to choose, you can use tubes of paint, you can use brushes, but you can also use a ready-made thing, made either mechanically or by the hand of another man, even, if you want, and appropriate it, since it's you who chose it. Choice is the main thing, even in normal painting.
In the old days the painter had been a craftsman, almost an alchemist. He alone knew how to mix the paints that led to his special effects, it was something that had been passed down to him from the master to whom he had been apprenticed, often his father, and he would in turn pass it on to his sons or apprentices. Once artists were able to buy paint ready-made in tubes open-air painting became possible, but something had also been lost (as with the coming of print for writers). The nineteenth century had seen a growing awareness of what was implied by choice, both in life and in art, and desperate attempts both by sensitive individuals and by ever more self-conscious artists to escape its arbitrariness. But ‘Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard’, and Duchamp draws the inescapable conclusion: since all art is choice and all choice is in the end arbitrary, a mere throw of the dice, why not face up to this fact, make one big choice right at the start and leave it at that? (Had not Kierkegaard's wise Judge in Either/Or made that the prescription for happiness?)