Mimesis: The Analytic Anthropology of Literature

Preface to the 2006 edition

1. Some of the results of my studies in the realms of literature and art that I began around the middle of the 1980s have been published as Metaphysics of the Landscape [Metafizika landshafta, 1993], Phenomenology of the Body [Fenomenologiia tela, 1995] and Expression and Sense [Vyrazhenie i smysl, 1995]. Initially, it was a rather limited project. I planned to publish a few essays on Russian and Western European literature (Kafka, Proust, Platonov and others). I wanted to check how successfully one could apply the technique of anthropological analysis to literature and art. The essays were published but I was not satisfied with the results. This was the state of the project around ten years ago. It was necessary to undertake a deeper study of the material, but the completion of the project continued to be delayed. Only toward the end of the 1990s was the research horizon formed and the main goal set: to use the material of one of the leading traditions of Russian literature of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries (Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Andrei Platonov, Andrei Bely, Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedenskii – a literature that I define as other or experimental, distinguishing it from the so-called ‘courtly-noble’ or ‘classicist’ literature, a literature of example) in order to trace the emergence of the idea of the (literary) work. The split between these ‘literatures’ is symptomatic; it points to a conflict between two dominant forms of mimesis (and, more widely, two visions of the world). Of course, I tried to take into account the fact that it was precisely toward the end of the nineteenth century that Russian literature began to present itself as a national-political and cultural myth, as a reflection of the imperial universalism of Russian culture as a whole, i.e. as a secular, non-confessional ideology. One may say that it ceased to be just ‘literature’ and became a kind of total fact of culture,¹ an almost singular source of the formation of examples of national behaviour that were necessary for a society to maintain an equilibrium between the experience it was acquiring and the means of its possible representation.

2. I made my choice of which ‘tradition’ to look at very quickly: the main object of my research efforts was going to be the other, experimental, literature. I could of course ask myself: isn’t there something artificial about this ‘split’ into two traditions, since the methods adopted by anthropological analytics do not require the notion of a ‘split’? In order to answer this question, we need to go into a more detailed explanation. Literature may be approached sufficiently generally, for example, from the point of view of its imitative veracity (a principle of plausibility). It is true, however, that this degree of ‘plausibility’ is determined anew each time. How does that happen? In a literary mimesis, I would distinguish between at least three active relationships:

(1) Mimesis-1, an external mimesis without which it would be impossible to narrate (what is narrated may be meaningless in terms of communicating something but at the same time contain relatively ‘meaningful’ signs of connection to a reality of which it is a complex transformation). This sort of mimetic relationship is often interpreted from the position of a classical theory of imitation that goes back to Aristotle’s Poetics. It is this form of mimesis that was so brilliantly researched by Erich Auerbach on the basis of the material of world literature, and that was later, and more systematically, elaborated by Paul Ricœur. Yuri Lotman held similar views on mimesis, having based them on the idea that the classical period in the development of Russian literature was complete (charting it temporally from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth). In his opinion, this epoch found its cultural example in the theatralisation of life. In other words, this ‘theatralisation of life’ was the main device of literary mimesis, that aesthetic form which reproduced and coloured the images of reality, and that was an ideal behavioural example.

(2) Mimesis-2, a mimesis that is internal to the literary work, points out that the work is self-sufficient and cannot be reduced to the veracity of the allegedly real world. In its constitution, the literary work is similar to a monad which, as we know, has ‘no windows’ and ‘no doors’, and whose internal connections are richer than the external ones since the entire world is recorded in the monad (Leibniz), and not only the world that presents itself as ‘reality’ due to the generally accepted convention. The diversity of (internal) mimeses corresponds to the diversity of literary worlds, and therefore the differences between literatures are so obvious. Yes, the literary work actively reflects in itself the actions of the external world, but only to the extent that it is able to recreate, appropriate and develop these actions to the level of communicative strategies. And, in the end, to turn these actions against the world. (3) And, finally, mimesis-3, a mimesis that exists between literary works; the relationships that exist between literary works, such as plagiarisms and borrowings, mutual citations, absorptions, epigraphs and dedications, attacks and fully conscious imitations. For example, we have the relationships between the works of Dostoevsky and Gogol, and these relationships change when seen through the prism of the works of Andrei Bely. This type of mimesis is as successful at countering the general convention of the real as the other types. It straightens rather than weakens the internal connections and the originality of the literary work.

Going back to the previously introduced distinction between two literary traditions, we must remember that the same triple structure of mimesis is at work in these traditions as well. However, the position and the meaning of a particular mimesis for each tradition varies. For the literature of example, the criterion of being realistic takes priority, i.e. it must create in the reader a ‘strong’ referential illusion. For the other, experimental literature, the determining role is played by mimesis internal to the literary work: there is no other reality but that which is accessed by the everyday mimesis of language. The utopia of the literary work expands until it consumes all competing reality. We will take a detailed look at these variations in the upcoming analyses.

3. By allowing for this split, I do not doubt the effectiveness of the previously employed methods of research. More than that, I am interested in the traditional studies, if by those one understands the work that is done by philology and contemporary literary studies that rely on their usual methods. Is it possible to label as traditional an excellent book series by Russian and foreign ‘slavists’ on the history of Russian literature published by the New Literary Review (NLO)? It’s odd to even ask this question. I wouldn’t be able to approach Gogol without the works by Vasily Rozanov, Innokentii Annenskii, Andrei Bely, Viktor Vinogradov, Boris Eikhenbaum, Yuri Tynyanov, Vasily Gippius, Vladimir Nabokov and Yuri Lotman; and while approaching Dostoevsky, I wouldn’t be able to manage without the works by Vyacheslav Ivanov, Sigmund Freud, André Gide, Mikhail Bakhtin, Petr Bitsilli, Alfred Bem, Yakov Golosovker and Mikhail Volotskii.

Every literature of this level is accompanied by a train of interpretations. There is no doubt that these interpretations inherit something, contradict one another and compete with one another, but it is impossible to develop one’s own position without them. Western literary studies started to look for more effective methods of analysis in the 1920s and 1930s, and in the 1950s and 1960s they significantly expanded their possibilities when they started to rely on new philosophical methods of analytic work. This way, a researcher of literature unwittingly became an expert in philosophy, ethnology, psychoanalysis, linguistics and history of culture. In the Russian tradition we had people like Mikhail Bakhtin and Yuri Lotman; both were researchers with the most foundational conceptual range. In the West we can name, first and foremost, Maurice Blanchot. But even those researchers who considered themselves to be specialists only in the history and theory of literature could not achieve any meaningful results without relying on the leading philosophical ideas of their time. Take, for example, the relationship between Jean Starobinski and Merleau-Ponty, or between Georges Poulet and Sartre, and, of course, the influence of the ideas of Henri Bergson on the development of the methods of literary analysis – ‘thematic’ analysis – put forth by Gaston Bachelard.

When it comes to the Russian philosophical tradition, it studied the forms of mimesis very little; it was largely preoccupied with edification, ideology, the ‘struggle for the idea’, and approached the history of literature only from this angle. It is not at all sufficient to simply call Gogol or Dostoevsky thinkers (or even to include them in historical dictionaries of Russian philosophy). It seems to me that only symbolists and formalists had elements of contemporary analysis of literature that still contained heuristic value. In any case, the literature of that epoch must be read correctly under the guidance of Boris Eikhenbaum and Petr Bitsilli, and not at all under the guidance of some philosophical masters. It is of course silly to deny that Gogol and Dostoevsky belong to their own time, to ignore their worldviews and ideological positions, predilections, hopes and errors; but their time has passed, it cannot be restored; it has been deposited in the global archive. I am interested, however, in the literary work’s ability to exist in a time that is other than its own time, a time where it does not have a contemporary reader and an author who exercises his will, but where it nonetheless continues to radiate, like flares from the sun, flashes of meaning that light up the paths of forgetting. We are still continuing to read …

4. One of the main features of the Russian national character, from Vasily Klyuchevskii and up to Dmitry Likhachev, was thought to be the lack of interest in form, the existence of some primordial formlessness, incompleteness, vagueness and so on. And even where such ‘interest’ did exist – here I mean classicist forms of architecture, painting and literature – it was explained as a partially successful imitation of Western examples, and not as an independent search for forms. Today we can no longer afford to be so hasty in our judgements regarding ‘Russian’ and ‘Russianness’. After all, today we know that nothing living can exist without form, without organisation and hidden order; in the same manner, literature cannot exist without its main ‘living’ form – the form of the literary work. The ‘living’ here expresses itself in some form, demands it; expression is life itself. And here comes my question: is it possible, instead of suggesting that Russian literature has no aspiration for form, has no form-shaping point of reference, like all other European literatures, to say that it has a different kind of form (the one generally designated as formlessness)? This complex (mimetic) form is the Work. The tradition of literature that I study (and that, by the way, always sharply opposed the rule of flat realistic examples) lacks neither internal order nor fully explicable principles of organisation. It is precisely the anthropological point of view that is capable of discerning the traces of order where one is told there is only chaos and disorder.²

The literary work is something done by an author, it brings the author’s voice to us, at first loudly and later as barely discernible. What did the author want to say, what did he say, and what is he continuing to say through his work, without knowing what he is actually saying, how he does it, for what purpose and for what reason he does it? We are other readers, other than the ones that came before us; today, we are the anthropologists of literature. That is why the author whom we are trying to meet can be compared to a guide-informant who explains the tribal rituals in a language that an anthropologist would understand. In reality, the informant provides one with a single (and therefore ‘correct’) interpretation of what can later become an object of a systematic analysis. Naturally, this interpretation then turns out to be a complete picture of society that is difficult to refute. But can an anthropologist reject the testimony of an informant and all other realities? No! In our case, however, we can ignore what the author’s voice is saying, since it pursues its own advantage, and turn our attention to the will-to-work about which the author can say nothing since he is himself attracted by it …

We must find a position to be able to see this will ‘in action’: to see how a text moves, how it is weaved together, how it spreads out beyond its own confines, to see a form emerge; a form is a rhythmic strange attractor that begins to take over and subjugate writing and all the connected blocks of meaning of the growing fabric of the text. To see this will ‘in action’ is to see how the features of an unfamiliar (to us) world are slowly emerging; this world has its own peculiarly distorted space-time, its own personages with their own bodies, gestures, poses and sensibilities – all the things that are necessary for this world only; we see how this world gets its first limitations and prohibitions, how something in it ends only to come back and to begin again, as if for the first time.

This alienating point of view emerged in Russian literary theory and criticism starting perhaps from the works of Vasily Rozanov. But it also exists in the literature itself since it is a transfigured form of a chosen strategy of mimesis. For example, in order to establish an anthropological point of view on the literature of Dostoevsky, we must rely on the singularly stable ‘authorial’ form of the work, despite all the dynamicity of Dostoevsky’s novels; and this form is not the idea of a double, but a construction of duality, repetition and doubling. In Gogol we find something like that in the theme of ‘wonderful/miraculous’ that is explained in the constructions and theories of puppeteering. We must also mention Andrei Platonov’s ‘eunuch of the soul’, a peculiar witness-narrator of the strange events described in his utopian, ‘machinist’ novels of the 1920s and the 1930s. Furthermore, we have the symbolic experiments and discoveries of Andrei Bely, Mikhail Chekhov (in the realm of ‘eurhythmic movement’), and partially those of Vyacheslav Ivanov and Innokentii Annenskii. We can also add here the search for the basics of an actor’s expressiveness, the principle of ‘reversal movement’ in the avant-garde theatre of Meyerhold and the cinematography of Eisenstein, and Dziga Vertov’s poetics of ‘pure observation’. Then we have the formalist school, and first and foremost the development of the theme of ‘making-strange’ [ostranenie] in Viktor Shklovsky, and the ‘(abrupt) shift’ [sdvig] in Yuri Tynyanov.³

5. The technique of anthropological analysis allows one to look at literature from radically objective positions. It is sufficient to recall an anthropologist’s report (notes of observations) on the customs and mores of a native community in the mysterious and alien world of the Polynesian islands. Not knowing the language, the rules of social interaction, the culture as a whole, he unwittingly becomes a pure observer who at first describes something that he does not understand. A significant amount of time will be required in order to study what was observed, but the interpretation can turn out to be false, limited by the observer’s own opinions, language and ideas. Or even worse (or better?), it could turn out to be a part of the story that was presented by a trusted informant. If we want to solve the paradox of the observer – he must trust neither himself nor his informant – then we have only one way to do so: to perfect the technique of observation/comprehension by refusing to interpret facts prematurely and to engage in general philosophical speculation.

We must forget for the time being that this novel was written by ‘Dostoevsky’ or ‘Tolstoy’ and consider ‘literatures’ primarily as documents, archives and collections, and not as symbols of the glorious past of ‘great Russian literature’. The anthropology of the gaze is not an artificial device but the only condition of direct cognition (before any interpretation) of the constructive forces of the literary work. What is primary is not interpretation but construction, the structure and placement of the main elements of the work. We can no longer count on an interactive illusion that we are able to communicate with another epoch and understand it either by means of blind imitation (pastiches of Proust or Bely), or by means of ‘feeling into’ (Einfühlung), or by means of a hermeneutical circle; all these methods are claiming to open already available reserves of comprehension in the everyday language so that suddenly Dostoevsky is miraculously transported into our time and appears to be more alive, or more dead, than we are … At the same time, the latest attempts to describe the semiotic universality of ‘intertext’ (Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco) repel us with their sharp rejection of the notion of the literary work. We must address the question as to why we do not recognise something, do not understand something, reject something, and why the work remains untranslatable into a language of another time and other works. Why is the author unable to help here, and how can we turn this authorial powerlessness into the only possibility of gaining access to the meaningful resources of the literary work?

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Elena Oznobkina and Igor Chubarov for their constant support during my work on the manuscript and for their faith that my efforts will not be in vain. I also want to thank Vladislav Karelin for his help with the publication of this manuscript in its later stages.

Moscow

May 2006

PART I

Nature Morte:

The Order of Work and

Nikolai Gogol’s Literature

Introduction

What Is Nature Morte?

The Union of Three

Landscape, still-life and portrait are linked together not only by their common aesthetic principle (experience of the world).¹ They are also extremely sensitive anthropomorphic subject matters of painting. One is easily transformed into another with an application of a few rules of transformation, with a consideration of each plastic form and the limitations of its genre. Still-life is a rolled-up or, more precisely, a radically transformed landscape. On the one hand, there is that which is far away (day and morning, full volume of light, a horizon line sliding into the distance), on the other – the closest (mainly ‘indoor’) darkened space full of things that are so close to the observer that it seems they form a part of his own person. The landscape operates with an empty space between things, but only up to the point when this space breaks out of their grip and fills the entire horizon. This is why the air (sfumato, or aura, haze) and colouration of the atmosphere play such an important role in the landscape – the far space must be open so that all things can be submerged in it since they have no weight, they are suspended, they float and dissolve close to the line of the horizon. The landscape is usually considered to be a projective device, almost like an ‘optical machine’, with the help of which one creates an illusion of the world’s depth, of its ‘vastness and incomprehensibility’. The observer moves forward and toward, and yet at the same time upward. One needs the gondola of an air balloon, a mountain peak – in short, a point of view from which to survey everything. The landscape is vertical, its lift force expands the horizon so that the landscape window accommodates more and more space. The landscape does not allow for the emergence of things, instead there are objects; the landscape is objectively abstract, and the objects are intersection points of projective nodes.

Still-life as a spatial construction is something different – at times this construction is crumpled up, collapsed and has neither a clear expressive line nor a unity of composition. No gaps are allowed between things. Everything is brought to the fore, and everything is presented as being at arm’s length. We can probably talk about the near-sightedness of the still-life and the far-sightedness of the landscape. The outstretched arm allows one to hold on to the optical realm at all possible points of contact; one is able to take a closer look, disassemble any whole into the smallest parts, gain a sense of the physical presence of a thing that is different from other things due to its individual qualities and not simply because it is spatially removed from other things. What separates the things and keeps one from mixing them up is the distinct and clearly expressed individuality of each thing. However, let us note that even though each fragment of nature is presented separately as if it ‘rests in itself ’, it is nonetheless directly accessible, one simply needs to stretch out one’s arm. The arm’s place in the still-life is not hidden, its presence is felt everywhere; after all, the ‘arm/hand’ supports things by needing them and, at the same time, it creates them (the artist’s hand). There are no nameless things, each has its master who uses it and whom it is ready to serve. The thing is something handy, always ‘at hand’ and as close as possible so as to effectively support connections that are established between the plan of action and its execution. In the still-life the optical realm opens up because the hand can touch anything, trace/grope its contour, feel its weight, touch its surface, evaluate its ease of use and so on. The moving and sensing hand is the hidden subject of the traditional still-life.

In the centre of the painting necessarily stands a table, its surface taking up practically the entire space between the ‘wall’ (background) and the foreground, which is closest to the viewer. The table in the dining room or the kitchen, or the table taken out to the seashore, is the foundation in the architectonic of the image, the place where the occurrence, or, if you will, the event of still-life may take place. We always have before us a pile of ‘dead’ things or objects as, according to the tradition, still-life (nature morte) cannot contain any living things. I will add that this is the case even if some of the things are depicted in a way that makes it difficult to determine whether they are living or dead. Furthermore, I think that ‘dead nature’ is dead precisely because it may become a nature morte. These tables full of foodstuffs, in the houses of rich Dutch bourgeoisie in the middle of the seventeenth century, do not get our juices flowing. The abundance of food is not yet food. We see an overturned jug or a cumbersome goblet on a table; next to it, on a tray, is a piece of fried fish, but no one has yet tried it; we also see a small sack with pepper (or some other spice), a salt shaker, a carelessly thrown knife that at times juts dangerously from the corner of the table and is about to fall off it. Cracked nuts, peaches, a huge slice of appetising ham or leg of lamb, a garland of leaves, a burnt-out candle in a massive candelabra – all these items tell us that the day is over (for example, that ‘dinner’ is finished). In other still-lifes we see the remnants of a lunch or a breakfast: broken-off chunks of bread, lobsters and crabs on large silver plates, big and brightly sparkling grapes and, of course, wine in tall transparent elegant vessels, or in low and bulky glasses, decorated with precious stones, some of them empty, others emptied and lying around, waiting for the table to be cleaned. Only a limited number of things preserve their stability.

At times something surprising happens and, as if jumping ahead through epochs, we suddenly find ourselves at the start of a surrealist revolution. The foreground is occupied by an enormous fish on the seashore (like in René Magritte) – here the still-life forms a symbiotic unity with the landscape perspective, it tells us something like a fisherman’s tale. But in reality, we see a change of optical possibilities and their complexification. We see another scale. There is no question that the still-lifes at the limit of the genre or in some genre combinations may be clearly distinguished from the rest. Today’s observer is attracted to images of prepared dishes (‘exquisite delicacies’), he develops a habit of anticipating the pleasure that these dishes will bring. That’s the reason, say, McDonald’s advertises items that are ready for consumption, not their original ingredients: there are no images of young calf, ears of ripe wheat, fresh eggs, bottles of rare vegetable oil and spices. We are interested in the artefact itself (the ‘processed food’), i.e. in the thing that exists only while we (either ‘slowly’ or ‘quickly’) consume it. We are not interested in the thing itself. We can even say that the epoch of things is over and today we no longer know what things are. In a traditional sense, things are used, they serve a purpose, they get ‘old’, but they are not destroyed by a single use.

It is impossible not to notice in these countless celebrations of ‘cuisine’, ‘lunch’, ‘breakfast’, ‘wild game’ and ‘hunting trophies’ the luxury, the riches and the well-being, the abundance of life, that so fascinated the well-to-do burgher. Still-life articulates this new hedonistic philosophy of the thing. Perhaps Philippe Ariès is correct when he points out the increased value of the thing, the expensive thing, that everyone wants to possess, use, gift, amass, demonstrate.

What a museum of daily life one could construct with the help of these paintings, which overlooked no opportunity to represent objects in loving detail! Sometimes they were precious objects: in the fifteenth century, gold or silver goblets filled with gold pieces that the Wise Men offer to an infant Jesus, who is delighted by all these riches, or that the devil offers, this time in vain, to Christ in the desert. (This scene became less common, as if the iconography of the time preferred the displays of the Epiphany or the opulence of Magdalene to the indifference or contempt of the tempted Christ.) … and simpler objects, but sometimes quite fine, tableware decorating the Last Supper of Dierik Bouts, porridge bowls in representations of the Virgin and Child, bowls and basins in which newborn infants are being bathed in holy nativities; books piled up in the niches of prophets … ordinary and rustic objects, flyswatters, and simple earthen dishes. The humblest objects enjoyed an attention that was henceforth focused on the richest ones. They emerged to become pleasing and beautiful shapes, regardless of the humbleness of their material or the simplicity of their design.²

Thing – Close-up – Face

Thus, the thing acquires in culture the meaning of a close-up. The thing does not only have a face, it is entirely a personified quality. The entire richness of the thing’s presentations in contemporary mass media, one way or another, is determined by the struggle for a close-up. But what does this mean? The thing in its visual accessibility must transmit information to the consumer in such a way as to turn the reflecting screen into its own complete personification. There is a desire for proximity, for consent found in the gaze that the thing exchanges with the consumer. The thing is endowed with a physiognomic expressiveness. If we take a closer look at the iconographically important image of Christ’s manger in Hugo van der Goes and let our gaze slip to the bottom corner of the painting, then right before us we will see a vase with an amazingly elaborately drawn flower, then some other small things, and all of this is found in its own spatial frame that is not dependent on the central subject matter of the painting. This surprising transition that creates one unified genre of portrait-landscape-still-life is determined by the line of individuation that goes in two directions: from a personified thing to a group of objects that have meaning and an overall order, and further, to the infinite dispersion of material that belongs to the thing into horizons of light and atmospheres, into barely noticeable movements of motionless air, whirlwinds and hurricanes, dust storms and raging sea walls, flashing lightning … and back to the thing, to what constitutes it, to accumulation and agglomeration.

It is natural for the landscape (paysage) to transmit the light-based nature of the world; this nature is neither living nor dead, while this light is simply the way we look at the world that spreads around us and that makes any chosen point of observation only a relative, not a main, point of reference. Conversely, what we see during the constitution of the phenomenon of dead nature weakens the work of light, and the gaze not so much sees as scrutinises this nature; therefore it can perceive well only what it subjects to analytic examination, what it takes apart but does not put back together. If we take a closer look at a festive picture of dead nature, we cannot say with absolute certainty that it is dead. But it is not alive either. So, is it neither dead nor alive? We may define this transitory state as the state of non-living (i.e. not as living or dead, but as something in between). We sense this intermediate nature of the image very well. There are traces of passing time everywhere, the living energy leaves – not quickly but sufficiently slowly and before our eyes – all these images that were alive only a few moments ago. We are thrown into the emerging moment of the future apotheosis of death. A thing does not have its own ‘biographical’ time or its own environment where it would have a place and a useful function.

An Arrangement in Imminent Danger of Disintegration …

And now the moment of transition arrives, from the full time of the thing to the time of decay. Properly speaking, there is no decay yet, but its time is already here; I repeat – there remains some life in it, although it is only smouldering, about to go out, and yet it is still there. ‘Dutch still life is an arrangement in imminent danger of disintegration; it is something at the mercy of time. And if this watch that Claesz is so fond of placing on the edge of platters, whose case is imitated by the round lemon cut in two, is not enough to warn us, how could we help seeing in the suspended peeling of the fruit, the weakened spring of time, that the mother-of-pearl snail-shell above shows us wound up and repaired, while the wine in the vidrecome alongside establishes a feeling of eternity? An arrangement in imminent danger of disintegration.’³ But why do we assign a symbolic meaning to a separate object whose place in the order of presentation must, it seems, prevent us from doing so? Due to the multiple repetitions of the very same ‘lemon’ in practically all paintings by Dutch artists who worked in this genre. Take, for example, Pieter Claesz (whom Paul Claudel mentions as well) and three other painters: Willem Claesz Heda, Jan Jans Track or Abraham van Beijeren’s ‘Still-life with Clock’; we can also add Willem Kalf’s ‘Dessert’. Indeed, there is a very strong impression that the ‘lemon’ plays a significant role in the symbolism of the ‘end of time’, in the experience of vanitas (found in the melancholic saying of Ecclesiastes: ‘all is vanity of vanities’). In reality, if we pay sufficiently close attention to the organisation of the foreground in Dutch still-life, we note that almost all things have approximately the same symbolic function, a function of unfinished completeness …⁴ Time fulfils itself while remaining incomplete. Here is the truth of the observer who is unable to see that which will devour him, but is able to see a small sliver of the great Nothing.

One thing is clear, something ended; but, I will clarify, something almost ended, but did not quite end (‘dinner’, ‘breakfast’, ‘hunt’, ‘fishing trip’ and so on). How do we think about this ‘almost’? And we must think about it if we want to understand the nature of time that constitutes the organisation of internal space in still-life. This ‘almost’ is a certain blink-of-an-eye that precedes a catastrophe – the whole world is on the verge of collapse. One more instant … and everything will be over, but this instant does not cease to endure. The fish is still moving, the hare can suddenly jump up and run away (in any case, when looking at still-life paintings, I see no decisive difference between, say, representations of a living dog and those of a dead hare; their eyes, surprisingly, express one and the same sorrow). The fruit appears fresh and ripe, and so are the berries; not to mention the flowers or the vegetables … All of this is still not separated from life; it exists as if in a slight state of fainting, anticipating its own death. At times we hear the opinion that we should not use the term ‘dead nature’, that this definition contains an evaluative element, and that it is better to talk about ‘still life’ (stilleven), a life that is barely noticeable, modest, departing, quiet … After all, the subject matter of representation is everything that lives: human beings, birds, insects, domestic animals. In reality, however, the distinction between the living and the dead in still-life is not made in accordance with the rule of Aristotelian mimesis. Is the crux of the matter really whether something looks like it is living or dead? Still-life’s metaphysical or temporal matrix does not rely on such limited and accidental criteria.

Thus, the designation ‘still-life’ also tells us very little. After all, the main criteria of the metaphysics of this genre are found in the principle of organisation of the objects themselves. What we have is not dead nature but artificial nature, or more precisely, a transition from the natural to the artificial. Things become artefacts, precisely because the thing has freed itself from previous conditions that were forced upon it by the traditional rules of reproduction. Still-life is artificial nature, ‘domesticated’, ‘collected and represented in one place’; and the access to this nature is defined by the renunciation of natural properties, of that aura of lifelikeness that preoccupied Walter Benjamin. For example, we see a cockatoo parrot sitting on a wonderfully delicate shell. In general, the two are incompatible, and yet in this place in the painting they are not only compatible but together tell us something … In other words, just because a parrot, or an insect, or any other being, appears to be alive, means nothing in comparison with the fact that natural life is no longer possible. Now one can only live an artificial or transitory life. All living beings are pretending to be dead, and all beings that are actually dead, appear as living. However, we cannot yet speak of death; death is what is yet to come, not what already came. And it is here that we find the duality of still-life, a duality that is continuously reproduced because one cannot be certain whether time has ended. Of course, there is a familiar and quite obvious point of view: time has ended and now we can consider the thing in its complete immobility, not simply as an immobile thing but as a dead one. Still-life appears to become possible because time is acknowledged as having ended. The time of still-life is a before-and-after-time; the count begins from the virtual line of the dead that divides two times (two eternities) and does not allow them to mix together; the gap between the two is occupied by almost-time. It is impossible to return back to life, but the time of decay has not yet come; still-life balances on this line. The internal time of the thing may be represented as a frozen blink-of-an-eye-time: something is about to fall down, but it does not fall; something is about to end, but it does not end. And this, neither one nor the other, is the place outside of life and death.

The landscape vision is different: it is pressed against the side of eternity that is passively contemplated, limited by nothing except the infinite line of the horizon. Therefore, each instant of contemplation plunges into immobile time and can no longer escape it.

As we see, dead nature, nature morte, is a purely conditional notion, it cannot be interpreted as a collection of ‘dead’ things without a human being. We must take into consideration the human being’s constant presence, for in still-life the human being is often the hidden reason behind the organisation or disorganisation of the space closest to us. A series of ‘scientific’ still-lifes is important precisely because it reveals the unchanging place of the observer. Still-life is autobiographical, it is the thing’s portrait, with its most plastically clear side turned toward the viewer. The main elements of the genre are nature, thing, face. And the painting technique