BOOKS
615
it "incomparably the best screen adaptation ever made of a great work."
He tells why and shows that he knows Proust well. I stand by my
strictures, but I vote with Kauffmann that this film should be made.
It
documents a fascinating cultural milieu.
It
catches a strong glint of
Proust's haunting subjectivity. It enlarges the language of film in order
to
encompass one of the most sustained products of the human
imagination.
ROGER SHATTUCK
THE NAKED BRIDE
MARCEL DUCHAMP: APPEARANCE STRIPPED BARE: By
Octavio
Paz.
Viking Press. $10.95.
The real apple plucked from the bowl has, in our desacral–
ized age, no allegorical resonance. We pick it up; we eat it. Most of the
time it simply does not cross our minds that this object is symbolically
freighted. But if the apple we encounter is represented, in a painting, or
a poem, it is hard to see it any other way. Representation as one kind of
symbol system seems naturally to open onto other symbolical realms.
Around the depicted apple cluster associations that appear as much a
part of the object as its color, its texture, or the shadow it casts in fictive
space. The text-mythic, sacred, historic-that seems to stand behind
most depictions serves as the real model, the ultimate truth, rendered by
the work of art.
It
was the task of both realism and modernism
to
free
representation from its servitude to this kind of scripture. The work of
Marcel Duchamp is related to this task as it is to nearly everything
else-eccen trically.
For the layman, Duchamp is the artist of the outrageous gesture.
He is the painter whD put moustaches on the
Mana Lisa,
who signed a
urinal and declared it a piece of sculpture, who in a final act of
notoriety gave up art for chess. But for critics and historians another
piece of Duchampian defiance is far more intriguing. Ten years after
ending his career as artist and resigning his unofficial post as New
