Chardin and the Domestic Sublime

Chardin and the Domestic Sublime JACK UNDANKzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA In spite of some critical haggling over the iconography of Chardin’s paintings, people seem to agree that “meaning,” in a discursive sense, is not finally or most importantly what he produced. But the question of meaning still haunts us and has led to a great deal of confusion largely because art historians, philosophers, and literary critics want to under­ stand the nature of the extraordinary innovation that took place in the eighteenth century when historical and pointedly moral painting was challenged by what Francastel too vaguely called “Pobservation directe du monde exterieur”1— the discovery of a world that was, presumably, without myth, story, and legend, a world anyone could spot through the window, in the parlor, or down in the kitchen. The ungrounded pre­ sumption of an eye so innocent that it ceased to “read” or “understand,” its gaze falling with perfect neutrality, indolence, and fascination upon the freshness, the “primal plentitude” (as Norman Bryson puts it2), of the images before it, has led to a series of exceedingly innocent and mislead­ ing questions: how could those who easily moved in the eloquent and programmed space of classicism have borne the shock of a mute, unin­ flected world? how did objects speak, what meanings did they compose, when they had lost their tongues? Only our obsession with language in general and linguistic models or analogies in particular can account for the rigid distinction these questions draw between meaning as pure dis3 Figure 1. Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, fedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA The Return from Market. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. 4 / U N D A N K zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA cursivity and a hypothetical void of meaninglessness, between what is cognitively construed and the puzzling static of things unenlisted in the drama of an institutionalized intelligibility. The far more awkward truth of the matter seems to be that the slow, historic movement from classical traditions of allegory, symbol, and transcendence to the new semiotics of immanence did not create a vac­ uum; it did not end by severing signifiers from signifieds so that, as Bryson views it, “the signified [was] effectively in exile” (114), unless the narrowest rational or linguistic construction is placed on meaning or signification. In this movement toward immanence, which, in fact, existed side by side and in contiguous relationship with history painting, painters or other practitioners of the “ordinary” did not imprison them­ selves in merely reflexive gestures, gestures without meaning, “painterly traces” that have, as Bryson says, “no implications other than beauty” (121). It goes without saying that philosophically unsettled terms like mean­ ing, signification, beauty, and intelligibility have their own history. They live within the changing circumstance of perception itself—not merely within those historically fluctuating assumptions concerning certain physical and physiological laws of vision that Michael Baxandall has carefully studied,3 but within the temporal codes, principles, and values that saturate all acts of attention. They did not arise, in the anthropic, Lockean world of Chardin’s century, from things in and of themselves but from our interanimating encounter with things as we aligned them with our already acculturated and idiosyncratic habits of mind, and as, in the process, these things immediately solicited from us their intelligi­ bility. We, or people then, contented ourselves with what was humanly, and in human terms, perceivable —a “beau per^u” (to use the terms of Diderot’s article “Beau” for the fedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Encyclopedic) if not a “beau reel.” And, above all, we perceived, knew, or understood something that was suffi­ ciently if not absolutely “real,” since Nature, according to Condillac and others, did in fact “offer” us this beauty and everything else; we were not simply fashioning them out of whole cloth. We, or they, apprehended especially the “rapports” or relationships objects entertained with one another, most interestingly in our context, the way some of them, to use Condillac’s example once again, unmistakably dominated others, while those others useem[ed] to arrange themselves about them” and created a space of “intervals.”4 Vision was a dance in which subjects and objects so happily accepted each other’s delicate embrace that there was no telling who led from who...