The Production of the World: Translation, Compensation, and Anamorphism in van Gogh and Faulkner

1 I use this term in its generally understood sense, not in the precise Lacanian one of a lack only satisfiable by another’s desire (mainly because it is difficult to attribute this reciprocal capacity to the earth). If pressed to ‘Lacanify’ my use of “desire,” I might argue that it denotessomethinglike ‘demand’(thoughnotnecessarilyverbal),whichinvolvesan‘other’ to whom the demand is expressed and whose attentions the subject wants in the form of animaginaryunion. Continuingon thispath,I mightrelate thiswanttothepeasants’union or ‘marriage’ to the earth, the ‘(m)other’ from which they demand some acknowledgment of their labour in the form of a successful harvest. university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 3, summer 2003 T O N Y F A B I J A N C I C The Production of the World: Translation, Compensation, and Anamorphism in van Gogh and Faulkner In ‘The Production of the World,’ John Berger explains how viewing some Vincent van Gogh paintings in Amsterdam healed an aphasic-like inability he had been experiencing to hold meanings together or to ‘make connections ,’ and how his angst was eliminated and reality as he understood it was ‘confirmed’ by the apparent wholeness of the reply in the paintings (277). For him this wholeness derived partly from what I call their translational capacity to unite in one work two forms of labour – that of the object world of peasants van Gogh often painted and the act of painting itself – which allowed for a depiction of reality beyond the ‘screen of clichés’ erected by society (279). As the world becomes, according to Berger, the object of an aesthetic equation (is remade, turned into an art object), so too is desire1 objectified through a process here called compensation. Implicit in Berger’s article, compensation is a symbolic redressing of peasant drudgery and what Fredric Jameson calls the ‘transformation of a drab peasant object world into the most glorious materialization of pure color in oil paint’ (7). The primary source for the compensatory charge may be understood idealistically as the collective desire of the peasantry for some improvement or satisfactionin their lives, but may derive also from the sympathetic outsider – painter, viewer, or critic. For the outsider, a clear gap exists between the material world and life of peasants on the one hand, and on the other the depicted landscapes and objects with their psychic surplus energy evident in the form of ‘pure color.’ Exemplary of van Gogh’s so-called epileptic or schizophrenic vision, this surplus energy also reflects a wider yearning (on the part of viewers and even peasants themselves) for some lost or waning wholeness that the works satisfy symbolically through the homologies of translation. the production of the world: van gogh and faulkner 699 2 At first glance, anamorphism as defined here might appear synonymous with modernist distortion or stylization, an umbrella term under which might be found, for example, defamiliarization, shock as an aesthetic effect, and even the unique style or subjective vision. It could also be said to resemble postmodernist pastiche, though the latter really involves an amalgamation of styles rather than of optics. Anamorphism has a history outside of painting and literature. The perspective or ‘peep show’ box, for example, provides viewers with an anamorphic image if viewed through the correct opening. There are two holes, a peephole opening onto a painted interior, and another light opening either through the same side or on the box’s adjacent side. For example, in Samuel van Hoogstraeten’s Perspective Box with Views of a Dutch Interior (c 1655–1660), one of the chairs painted inside at the junction of three perpendicular planes is distorted if viewed through the light aperture, but the image seen through the peephole is realigned. For more on anamorphism see Baltrušaitis. university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 3, summer 2003 This yearning also manifests itself overtly by a ‘slanted’ quality in the pictorial style, what I will call anamorphism in order to alter somewhat the meaning of the memento mori that takes the form of a slanted skull in the foreground of Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533). Even though many of the objects in van Gogh’s world appear...