From Visual to Verbal in Jean Tardieu's "Les Portes de Toile"

Abstract

In his 1974 essay Obscurite' dujour Jean Tardieu avowed to transpose in writing some of the secrets he had learned through his understanding of painting and music. This need not perplex his reader. He had already explicitly revealed the nature of those secrets in another volume, Les Portes de Toile (1969), a series of prose poems, critical commentaries, and poetic texts which refer to music, sculpture, and, most significantly, painting. Tardieu's preoccupation with painting is nothing unusual in itself. A list of poet-art critics of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries would be almost identical to a list of great poets of the era: Baudelaire, Valery, Apollinaire, Reverdy, all the Surrealists, Ponge, and Bonnefoy. Les Portes de Toile is a worthy contribution to that tradition; it raises major theoretical questions about how the visual arts are treated in literature. The following discussion will present Les Portes de Toile and put forth a set of formulations recurrent traits derived from this text which seem to characterize poets' discourse on painting. There are five major points to which Tardieu returns repeatedly in his description of the relationship between writing and the visual arts, which I will enumerate. 1) The visual and verbal signifying systems are parallel in nature. The transposition of one into the other entails an approximation in different terms, an analogy rather than an equivalency. Attention to this process of transposition leads to a broader discussion of the nature of communication and the limits of literary representation which can almost be construed as a personal linguistic theory. 2) The nature of the art object discussed influences the type of discourse adopted by the commentator. Figurative painting forces the critic to speak in terms of content, of narrative; while abstract painting usually elicits