Writing Art: French Literary Responses to the Work of Alberto Giacometti (review)

More still than Alberto Giacometti and the French writers opening themselves out to his work, Writing Art explores the expressive power of poésie critique. Both disconcerting and engaging, the very expression shows the need recognized by many for poetic understanding in creative thought. Poésie critique both performs imaginative, subjective engagement and interrogates it; and Writing Art shows it is needed in reaching from one domain to another. It is an illuminating exploration of the unique place Giacometti occupies among a wide range of French writers, both in his own lifetime and since. In this exemplary work of textual criticism, Emma Wagstaff fashions groups of writers according to whether their response to Giacometti seems either to confirm or undermine their own horizons. André Breton is shown to gear his responses — material and aesthetic ones conjoined — to self-analysis and Surrealist self-liberation. With a different idea of freedom in mind, Jean-Paul Sartre too is shown to read individual works as dramatizing his own understanding of creative energy. René Char and Francis Ponge prove to be less appropriative. Ponge explores, rather than exploits, linguistic take-over, and the impossibility of arriving in language at the provisional quality of Giacometti’s effects. On the other hand, building on Derrida’s analysis of the performative to emphasize that texts can ‘do’ as well as ‘mean’, Wagstaff shows that Char’s engagements with Giacometti perform independent creative acts. Wagstaff is not equating writers with each other but exploring the disruptive effects of Giacometti on them individually. The haptic, the flattening on to each other of sight and touch, allows her to draw Jean Genet, Jacques Dupin, and Yves Bonnefoy together as well as distinguish between them. For Genet, discontinuity of the visual and verbal enterprises emerges, and of time and space generally. For Dupin, violence. For Bonnefoy, love, and the humanity of the here and now. The last chapter draws on Lyotard’s ‘figure’ and its power to shatter the two-dimensional in both visual and discursive representation. Michel Leiris’s Giacometti disrupts the two-dimensional by fusing the ancient and the present; André du Bouchet does so by fusing rupture and proximity. For both, the artifice of the distinction between designation and bodily understanding is exposed. Writing Art traces the optimism in these variously lived, formal resistances to the appropriation of image by word. A more melancholic approach might still find the tyranny of the point of view lurking everywhere, even in the desire to loosen its grip. This intriguing and engaging book is as approachable to scholars as to students not only of word–image relations, but also of twentieth-century French literature and thought.