PARTISAN REVIEW
all
readable.
It is like an immense and vain effort, forever arrested
half-way between sky and earth, to express what their nature keeps
them from expressing.
Similarly, the signification of a melody-if one can still speak
of signification-is nothing outside of the melody itself, unlike ideas,
which can be adequately rendered in several ways. Call it joyous or
somber. It
will
always be over and above anything you can say about
it. Not because its passions, which are perhaps at the origin of the
invented theme, have, by being incorporated into notes, undergone
a transubstantiation and transmutation. A cry of grief is a sign of
the grief which provokes it, but a song of grief is both grief itself and
something other than grief. Or,
if
one wishes to adopt the existentialist
vocabulary, it is a grief which does not
exist
any more, which
is.
But,
you
will
say, suppose the painter does houses? That's just it. He
makes
them, that is, he creates an imaginary house on the canvas
and not a sign of a house. And the house which thus appears pre–
serves all the ambiguity of real houses.
The writer can guide you and,
if
he describes a hovel, make it
seem the symbol of social injustice and provoke your indignation.
The painter is mute. He presents you with
a
hovel, that's all. You
are free to see in it what you like. That attic window
will
never be
the symbol of misery; for that, it would have to be a sign, whereas
it is a thing. The bad painter looks for the type. He paints the Arab,
the Child, the Woman; the good one knows that neither the Arab
nor the proletarian exists either in reality or on
his
canvas. He offers
a workman, a certain workman. And what are we to think about a
workman? An infinity of contradictory things. All thoughts and all
feelings are there, adhering to the canvas in a state of profound undif–
ferentiation. It is up
to
you to choose. Sometimes, high-minded artists
try
to move us. They paint long lines of workmen waiting in the
snow to be hired, the emaciated faces of the unemployed, battlefields.
They affect us no more than does Greuze with
his
"Prodigal Son."
And that masterpiece, "The Massacre of Guernica," does anyone
think that it won over a single heart to the
Spanis~
cause? And yet
something is said that can never quite be heard and that would
take an infinity of words to express. Picasso's long harlequins, ambi–
guous and eternal, haunted with inexplicable meaning, inseparable
12
