Vol. 18 No. 23 · 28 November 1996
pages 30-31 | 3212 words
Post-Retinal
Harry Mathews
- The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation and the Self in Modern Culture by Jerrold Seigel
California, 291 pp, £28.00, September 1996, ISBN 0 520 20038 1
Twenty-eight years after his death, Marcel Duchamp continues to generate new readings of his life and work. Jerrold Seigel has absorbed eighty years’ worth of commentary and come forward with a reinterpretation in terms of Duchamp’s personal history. Noting that Duchamp ‘has become a kind of mythic presence in modern culture, a hero whose story we tell and retell for the sake of its exemplary lessons’, Seigel remarks that he ‘is said not only to have undermined the goal of seeking meaning through artistic activity, but also to have dissolved his own subjectivity as an artist ... [But] far from being the product of a dissolved subjectivity, the objects and activities that defined Duchamp as a person and as an artist ... fit together like pieces of a puzzle ... to reproduce the pattern of his own peculiar ... relationship to the world.’
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 1 · 2 January 1997
From Jerrold Seigel
Harry Mathews’s Olympian claim that potin (which I translate as ‘scandal’) must mean ‘gossip’ and ‘has never meant anything else’ (LRB, 28 November 1996) is simply wrong, as witnessed by the Dictionnaire du Français contemporain’s inclusion of two entries for the word. Under the second, the equivalent given for faire du potin is faire un scandale. It is equally false that I treat the sexual themes of Duchamp’s early pictures ‘as if the artist had no idea of what he was doing’. Quite the contrary, I argue that what makes the mood of regret and disillusionment in Paradise so powerful and affecting is the self-conscious contrast between the scene we witness and the title Duchamp gave to it, and my readings of The Chess Game and Young Man and Young Girl in Spring focus on elements too intricately worked out to have been unintended. The merits of my account of Raymond Roussel and his influence on Duchamp cannot be decided by reference to the ‘open and unassuming’ impression Duchamp made on Mathews when the two met. Matter-of-fact as the maker of Given may have wanted to appear at times, The Large Glass stands close by to remind us how much the appearance of transparency can conceal. Of course Duchamp wanted to live in the present. The question is: how, in what spirit? The euphoria he said he achieved cannot have been ‘readiness … to perceive and respond’, since he sought it precisely by leaving such ordinary manners of being an artist behind. His ways of passing time and the objects he either chose or made were all vehicles for his project of investing imagination in life, and living off the proceeds.
Jerrold Seigel
New York
