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  • Virtual Narcissus: On the Mirror Stage with Monet, Lacan, and Me
  • Steven Z. Levine

History

Claude Monet was born in Paris in 1840. His mother was thirty-five years old and already the childless widow of a first husband at the time of Monet’s birth. Her second husband, Monet’s father, was then forty, and her only other child, Monet’s only full sibling, a brother, was four. By the time Monet was five, he and his family had moved to the port town of Le Havre, where his father was in the business of provisioning France’s commercial shipping fleet. It was there, in this town where the Seine River spills into the English Channel, that Monet’s mother is said to have encouraged her son’s early interest in art; and it was there that she died in 1857 when he was not yet seventeen years old but already within a year of establishing himself as a draftsman of some notoriety on the strength of caricatures of local personalities exhibited in the window of a framer’s shop. 1

By 1860 Monet had taken up painting, and in that year he found himself at the age of twenty with a new half-sister born to his sixty-year-old widowed father and his father’s twenty-four-year-old mistress, a sibling who until 1974 was entirely unmentioned in the literature on the artist. Perhaps represented at her father’s side staring out to sea in a painting of 1867, Monet’s half-sister was legitimated in 1870 by way of his father’s second marriage, a marriage that took place a mere three months before Monet’s father’s death and only four months after Monet’s own first marriage had similarly legitimated his three-year-old son.

When Monet’s father died in 1871 his son was in London, in flight from military service in the Franco-Prussian war, the [End Page 91] war that claimed the life of one of Monet’s closest friends, the painter Frédéric Bazille. Upon his return to France, Monet established himself and his family in the outer suburbs of Paris at Argenteuil, where his colleague Edouard Manet painted the artist and his family in their garden in 1874, and where Manet painted Monet at work on the Seine in his studio boat, in the company of his wife but turning away from her gaze to grasp the environing riverscape by the tip of his brush. Penniless by 1878, and forced to leave Argenteuil with a sick and pregnant wife for an apartment in Paris, Monet was apparently unable to provide all the necessities to the postpartum mother, who would be represented in his art one last time lying on her deathbed in the tiny Seine-side village of Vétheuil, dead of uterine cancer in 1879 at the age of thirty-two. After Camille’s death . . . no, no, no, . . . this isn’t the story I want to tell. Let me begin again with a different death, the death of Narcissus, in which the mythological hunter turns away from the words of love offered him by the nymph, Echo, to contemplate instead the lethal image offered him by a reflecting pool (Levine 1994b). It is this illusory and delusive mirror-image that Lacan calls the ego, and it is the task of a life-time to shatter its allure (Lacan 1977a).

Autobiography

Claude Monet died in 1926 at Giverny, a prosperous village midway along the Seine between Paris and the sea where, throughout his last summer, the eighty-six-year-old painter, a nearly blind Narcissus, who by then had buried his parents, two wives, a stepdaughter, and his first-born son, Echos all, sat in his garden and watched the reflections on the surface of his pond come and go. I never knew him. I was born in Boston in 1947, twenty years after Monet’s death. I’ve never made a painting nor buried my closest kin, and though I do have a garden, unlike Monet I’m not dead yet. I’m not dead yet; yet in these pages I will be read, a promiscuous...

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