Introduction to the Selected Papers

Abstract

I N T R O D U C T I O N T O T H E S E L E C T E D PAPERS Andrea Loscllc is an Associate Professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. The principal challenge and merit o f this collection o f papers gathered under the title Camera on Stylo: A Problematic Dialogue? is reading across centuries, cultures, disciplines, and media in the seeming absence o f the camera and in some cases o f the modem pen. How can these serve as critical tools that wc may work into such quilled subjects as the problematic status o f the je in Renaissance poet Maurice Sceve's Delie, objet de plus haute vertu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's theatrical descriptions o f gardens and landscapes in Julie ou la Nouvelle Heloisc. Denis Diderot's dialogic and apostrophic representations o f paintings in his Salons, as well as into those topics sharing the same cultural, historical space o f the camera and pen: Stephane Mallarme's symbolist poetics, the abstract simultaneism o f Robert Dclaunay's paintings and Guillaume Apollinaire's free verse, the dialectical images o f Walter Benjamin and Osip Mandel'stam, and visual artist Sol LcWitt's predetermined serial systems? This collection o f papers is the distilled result o f a call for papers that opens out onto the question o f language's relation to visual, material phenomena and that eschews the already well known history o f mechanical reproduction and modern visual culture. Less well-known but no less productive are the juxtapositions that place, for example, Loli Tsan's reading o f Scevc at the end o f this collection and Anthony Abiragi's reading o f M a l l a r m e ' s sonnet, A la nue accablante tu, at the beginning. The Renaissance poet's voice is delie in a mirror structure involving the relation o f a suppressed je with a t u it dares not look upon: ' M o n regard par toy me tue. Do we not hear a paradoxical echo—this doubling o f an implied t u (you) in tue (kills)—in Mallarme's meditation on the trace o f sea foam ( o f an event: a shipwreck or a passing siren) materially obliterated in the past participle, t u o f the verb taire ? S c e v e ' s arrow with which he is pierced by desire becomes, Tsan writes, the visual image du basilic et de son regard poignard. But the arrow with its feathers is also related to the agile quill, an ecriture deliee and fulfilled by this instrument. We are reminded o f how much the symbolists admired the work o f this Renaissance poet when Abiragi writes on Mallarme's sonnet that [t]he silenced ' t u ' strains prolcptically towards other elements in the poem in order to achieve some fomi o f semantic fulfillment..., The source o f this fulfillment for Sccve is visual, but the lady is herself, like the mythical basilisk, lethal in her gaze; the image o f her looking at the poet, a gaze turned on him. threatens to silence him. Like the basilisk, Mallarme's poetic ideality, evidence o f whose dangerous voice is left in only the visual trace o f sea foam, contains the possibility o f its own semantic shipwreck in the colliding material trace o f a posited, real shipwreck and its mythical cause, the figure o f the siren. One might think in this connection o f Anastasia G r a f s reflection on Mandcl'stam's metamorphk images and Benjamin's constcllatory pregnant moments or dialectical images. This essay occupies a pivotal place in this collection as a rethinking o f mystical and mystified symbolist aesthetics that in Benjamin and MandePstam reengages with penned material images during a time when painters were first experimenting with abstraction and cameras were increasingly both recording daily life