Painterly letters: On the possibilities of the textual reterritorialization of painting

ABSTRACT

Femmes (Editions Maeght, 1966) is a limited-edition livre d'artiste composed of a selection of paintings by Joan Miró and a text by Claude Simon. This article explores the rich yet somewhat elusive relationship between the writer and painter, as the former writes from, and also with, the works of the latter. An unconventional collaboration, the volume proposes numerous and varied connections between its figural and scriptural dimensions, which I read through a perspective that draws on the concept of territory (and its derivatives, deterritorialization and reterritorialization) developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I argue that the mutability inherent in this conceptual apparatus sheds light on the dynamic reflexivity that exists between the paintings and the text.

KEYWORDS:

• Gilles Deleuze
• deterritorialization
• Femmes
• image–text relations
• Joan Miró
• Claude Simon
• territory

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the Wayne State University Libraries, and in particular Cynthia Krolikowski, who facilitated my access to the libraries' special collections to consult a copy of Femmes. Many thanks also to Chera Kee, Victor Figueroa, and Michael Giordano for their discerning thoughts and suggestions.

Notes

1. I note, in chronological order, several articles by Raillard (1974); Rebollar (1995); Calle-Gruber (“Les corps ouvrables,” 1996); Duffy (“Claude Simon,” 1997); and Mourier-Casile (2004). See also Ferrato-Combe 201–07 for a concise analysis of Femmes.

2. This article, first published in French in the edited volume Texte(s) et intertexte(s), was subsequently included, in a slightly modified form, in Duffy's English-language book Reading between the Lines: Claude Simon and the Visual Arts (66–82).

3. On Miró's deep connection to Catalonia and the influence his native land exerted on his work, see Dupin 11–17; Daniel and Gale 20–58.

4. Simon describes in another interview (Simon and Paulhan 42) his approach to the writing of the text: “Miró est catalan, je le suis aussi par ma mère, nos deux pays sont voisins, de nombreux souvenirs me lient à la Catalogne espagnole et ils ont été alors ravivés. J'ai essayé d’écrire et d'organiser tout cela.”

5. Similar omissions can be observed in Simon's novel Histoire (1967), which he was writing while composing Femmes.

6. Because the original edition is extremely difficult to find and the subsequent reprints of the text display different paginations, for convenience, my references are based not on page numbers, but on the division of the text into sixty-nine fragments (e.g., each quotation I mention contains a reference to one of the sixty-nine fragments).

7. See Sarkonak 34. Regarding the change of title and how the new title correlates with specific features of the text, see Orr 131–39.

8. The text can, and has, in fact, been analyzed independently of the paintings; see the approaches of Neumann and Sarkonak.

9. Simon published two albums of photographs—Album d'un amateur (1988) and Photographies, 1937–1970 (1992)—and his book Orion aveugle (1970) is composed of a text and approximately twenty illustrations counting, among others, reproductions of photographs, paintings (as its title suggests, Poussin's canvas Paysage avec Orion aveugle cherchant le soleil occupies a central place), and anatomical charts. Simon also collaborated in the making of a 16-mm short film titled L'Impasse (1975), based on a screenplay he wrote and produced by Peter Brugger for Saarbrücken Rundfunk. The twelve-minute short film was to be included in a longer documentary dedicated to Simon's work. The screenplay was inspired by his novel Triptyque (1973), which was itself influenced by the works of three painters: Jean Dubuffet, Paul Delvaux, and Francis Bacon, who stimulate thematically the development of the text. The writer also acknowledged the impact of Robert Rauschenberg's multimedia combine painting Charlene (1954) on his novel Les Corps conducteurs (1971), where it acts as one of the main visual generators for the text.

10. For a comprehensive account of Miró's complex relationship with poetry, consult the chapter “Painting, Poetry” in Dupin 431–45.

11. See, for instance, the paintings Un oiseau poursuit une abeille et la baisse (1925), Le Corps de ma brune (1925), Ceci est la couleur de mes rêves (1925), Le Signe de la Mort (1927), Hirondelle Amour (1933–34), and Silence (1968).

12. It is interesting to note that Mourier-Casile, following a different line of reasoning, associates another painting (Femme et oiseau IX/X) to Simon's remark about the yellow patch on the sackcloth. The discrepancy between the interpretations provided by Duffy and Mourier-Casile points to the potential pitfalls of a model of interpretation based on one-to-one correlations. See Mourier-Casile 190.

13. See the photograph Scheidegger took of Miró in 1955 on the beach of Barcelonetta. The picture shows Miró collecting flotsam, holding and gazing at a piece of debris—the remnants of a large branch—found on the beach.

14. The artist's passion for recycled materials has been well documented, see Miró and Raillard 148–60.

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Notes on contributors

Alina Cherry

Alina Cherry is Assistant Professor of French at Wayne State University, where she specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century French and Francophone literature. She has published on Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint.