In ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ …: ibid., pp.3–18.
Borges' most famous story …: ibid., pp.36–44.
page 86, Malcolm Bowie …: Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult, Cambridge, 1978, p.8.
Anthony Hartley provides this plain prose translation in his The Penguin Book of French Verse: The Nineteenth Century, Harmondsworth, 1957, p.197: ‘The virginal, living, and beautiful day, will it tear for us with a blow of its drunken wing this hard, forgotten lake haunted beneath the frost by the transparent glacier of flights that have not flown? A swan of long ago remembers that it is he, magnificent but freeing himself without hope, for not having sung the country to live in, when the tedium of sterile winter shone. His whole neck will shake off this white agony inflicted by space on the bird that denies it, but not the horror of the earth where his feathers are caught. A phantom condemned to this place by his pure brilliance, he stays motionless in the cold dream of scorn worn in his useless exile by the Swan.’
page 87, ‘with panic-stricken rapidity …’ Bowie, op.cit., p.9.
‘The double effort …’ ibid., p.8.
‘O the mind …’ Sonnet, ‘No worst, there is none’, in The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Robert Bridges, Oxford, 1956, pp.106–7.
page 88, ‘The space created by the poem …’ Bowie, op.cit., p.144.
page 89, ‘Tout se passe …’ Preface to Un Coup de dés, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry, Pléiade, Paris, 1945, p.455.
‘Quite often the anecdotal …’ ‘Le Tour d'écrou’, in Le Livre à venir, Gallimard, Paris, 1959, p.163.
page 92, ‘This poem …’ quoted in Bowie, op.cit., p.125.
page 93, ‘he chooses to depict …’ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, tr. Oliver Davis, London, 2008, p.40.
page 94, ‘When our gaze …’ ibid., pp.40–1.
‘a universe for the first time bereft …’ Claude Simon, La Corde raide, Sagittaire, Paris, 1947, p.117.
page 95, ‘to see the earth again’, Wallace Stevens, ‘Angel Surrounded by Paysans’, in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, Knopf, New York, 1954.
‘These almost asexual bodies …’ Simon, op.cit., pp.115–16.
‘It is Cézanne's genius …’ ‘Le Doute de Cézanne’, in Sens et non-sens, Nagel, Paris, 1963, p.25. I use the translation in Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, Evanston, IL, 1993.
page 96, ‘We live in the midst …’ ibid., p.28.
page 97, ‘The painter recaptures …’ ibid., p.30.
page 98, ‘Le calme. Le gris …’ Robert Pinget, Passacaille, Minuit, Paris, 1969. An English version might run:
Calm. Greyness. Nothing moves. Something must be broken in the mechanism but nothing shows. The clock is on the mantelpiece, the hands tell the time.
Someone in the cold room would have just come in, the house was closed, it was winter.
Greyness. Calm. Would have sat down at the table. Numb with cold, till the fading of the light.
It was winter, the garden dead, the yard bare. No-one there for months, everything is in order.
The road that leads to the house skirts empty fields. Crows fly up, or magpies, visibility is bad, night is about to fall.
The clock on the mantelpiece is encased in black marble, the face rimmed in gold, roman numerals.
The man sitting at the table a few hours earlier found dead on the dung-heap would not have been alone, a sentry was on guard, a trusty peasant who had noted only the deceased on a grey day, cold, would have approached the slit of the shutters and seen him clearly dismantling the clock then remaining prostrate in his chair, elbows on the table, head in hands.
How to trust this murmur, the ear is not up to it.
page 100, ‘The double effort required …’ See above, note to page 87.
page 101, ‘For centuries painters had faced …’ Gay, op.cit., p.155.
page 102, ‘At first they seem …’ Rosalind E. Krauss, The Picasso Papers, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 1998, p.25.
page 103, ‘The news items accumulate …’ ibid., p.39
‘One of the fragments …’ ibid., p.27.
page 105, ‘It is their unequal size …’ ibid., p.33
page 106, Every thought, he says … ibid., p.46.
One way of doing this … ibid., p.44.
page 107, A beautiful essay by John Mepham …: ‘Figures of Desire: Narration and Fiction in To the Lighthouse’, in G.D. Josipovici (ed.), The Modern English Novel, Open Books, London, 1976.
page 109, ‘Building a modern imperial capital …’ Robert Gildea, Children of the Revolution: The French 1799–1914, Allen Lane, London, 2008, p.83.
page 110, Marguerite Duras. …: L'Amante anglaise, Gallimard, Paris, 1967.
page 114, ‘Fernande has left …’ Krauss, op.cit., p.84.
‘The avant-garde had moved on …’ ibid., p.127.
[Picasso] clearly loathed …: ibid., p.126.
page 115, ‘It is the historical logic of modernism …’, ibid., p.241.
page 116, ‘The word “art” …’ quoted in Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp, MIT, Cambridge, MA, 1996, pp.161–2.
page 117, the story of Fountain …: I follow de Duve, op.cit., pp.89–143.
page 119, ‘if you analyze it, you will see …’ Sylvester, op.cit., pp.58–60.
page 121, let us remember Joseph Koerner's comments …: see above, note to page 62.
page 124, In a famous debate …: at one of the Cerisy colloques, see Nouveau roman: hier, aujourd'hui, Paris, 1972, vol. II, pp.51–2.
page 126, as Kafka once said …: Max Brod, Franz Kafka, A Life (1937), Schocken Books, New York, 1959, p.75.
page 128, as Elizabeth Sewell showed …: The Field of Nonsense, Chatto & Windus, London, 1952.
page 131, ‘We have a new advocate …’ ‘The New Advocate’, tr. Willa and Edwin Muir, in Franz Kafka, Collected Stories, ed. Gabriel Josipovici, Everyman's Library, London, 1993, p.163 (I have altered the translation here and there to make the meaning clearer).
page 132, ‘From Munich on …’ quoted in de Duve, op.cit., p.175.
page 133, Thierry de Duve suggests …: ibid., pp.184ff.
page 135, For years he had been trying …: I have written a novel about the whole episode: Gabriel Josipovici, The Big Glass, Carcanet, Manchester, 1991.