La Méduse Elle est parfaite Pas de moule Rien que le corps She is perfect No mould Nothing but body
Marcel Broodthaers’ Pense-Bête adds its slender volume to the small shelf of poetic works that engage poetry as a plastic phenomenon, giving special attention to the reflexive relationship between the spatial and figural dimension of words on the page. The poets whose books have been shelved here include Stéphane Mallarmé (whom Broodthaers declared the inventor of Modern Art), and Guillaume Apollinaire, whose Calligrams trace a correspondence between shape and meaning, and Louis Aragon, whose poem “Suicide” in Le Mouvement Perpétuel congeals the flowing indeterminacy of poetic language into a square reproduction of the alphabet. In “La Méduse,” written in 1963, we also see the lines of the poem squared into a lifeless block. In this poem Broodthaers has brought about a displacement between meaning and mis-en- page such that the spatial plotting of the text renders the subject of the poem fluid.
First the fluid subject: Medusozoa. What we, in English, call the jellyfish is known more broadly in the romance languages as “the medusa”––la méduse in French, la medusa in Italian, medusas in Spanish, and meduses in Catalan. The notable exception is Portuguese, which calls the animal água-viva, (living-water), imaging a vital fluidity within the greater fluidity of the sea. The água-viva corresponds closely with the philosophical conception of the animal as such, expressed in a simile by Georges Bataille: “tout animal est dans le monde comme de l’eau à l’intérieur de l’eau (every animal is in the world as water is inside of water)”.1 It is this embodiment of fluid animality that Broodthaers’ poem praises as we first read it: “she is perfect/no mould/nothing but body.”
Jean-Phillippe Antoine has recently performed the first close reading of la méduse as a figure of perfection in Broodthaers’ Pense-Bête. In his remarkable book Marcel Broodthaers: Moule, Muse, Méduse, Antoine describes how la méduse, in contradistinction to la moule (the mussel), does not cast itself in its own mould, but is rather cast about the sea, becoming one with its environment. “Son corps varie au gré des mouvements fluides de l’entre-deux-eaux où elle flotte” (“Its body varies according to the fluid movements of the indistinct water in which it floats”).2 He adds, “la perfection informe de son corps sans os, ni forme rigide, défiant tout moulage autre qu’une étreinte éphémère (“the formless perfection of its body, without bones or rigid form, defies moulding by anything other than the strictly ephemeral”).3 Antoine defines his reading of “La Méduse” against “La Moule,” a poem which was laid out in Pense-Bête on the page facing “La Méduse,” as its symmetrical inversion.
La Moule
Cette roublarde a évité le moule de la société.
Elle s’est coulée dans le sien propre.
D’autres, ressemblantes, partagent avec elle l’anti-mer.
Elle est parfaite.
The Mussel
This slippery creature has evaded society’s mould
She’s cast herself in her very own
Others, likenesses, share with her the anti-sea.
She is perfect.
“La Moule,” coupled with “La Méduse” in the double-page spread of Pense-Bête, would have all the makings of a dialectical pair. The mollusk with its mineral shell resists the fluidity of the sea by creating a hermetically sealed boundary between its body and the environment. This act of “automodulation,” as Antoine calls it, opposes itself to the body of the jellyfish, which, without the least resistance, adapts to its environment to such a degree that its very life is defined by a constant process of what can be rightly called “heteromodulation.” According to the opposition thus laid out, the flux of the jellyfish would compare, in Broodthaers’ poem, quite readily to the description of the creature in Marianne Moore’s poem “The Jellyfish,” which, pulsating between visibility and invisibility, “quivers” as a “fluctuating charm.”4
Yet Broodthaers’ poem turns against this perfect fluidity, the charm of pure and supposedly ungraspable fluctuation. Even the title of the book from which it comes, Pense-Bête––taken literally as “think-animal,” rather than “reminder,” its customary meaning––conjures a creature that has had to abandon fluidity for fluency, animation for articulation. “La Méduse” articulates itself, line arranged under line, with artificial space added to the kerning of the characters so that the poem’s three lines conform to the shape of a box. The writing of the poem casts its “living water” in straight lines and right angles. As “La Méduse,” the poem, arrests the fluidity of the body of la méduse, the animal, the poet’s language moulds the animal figuring in it as the absence of mould.
In modern usage, both the masculine and feminine forms of the French noun moule, come from the Latin word modulus, by way of the Old French modle. Moule––sometimes made clear by the gender of its article, sometimes made obscure grammatically––stands as a potent signifier for Broodthaers. In the two poems under consideration, moule simultaneously names the containment that occurs in poetic form and the resistance of the figures in the poem to containment at the level of signification. Accordingly, the second line of the poem “La Méduse,” which uses this word, cannot be translated with any ease because it has multiple meanings in French. The negative construction “Pas de moule” creates an ambiguity by concealing the gender of the noun moule and in doing so the reader loses all certainty about whether this moule is a mussel (la moule), a mould (le moule) or any of the figurative associations proliferating from these two nouns, including the slang term for female genitalia. Fluidity suddenly reemerges in the center of this moulded poem, precisely at the point where the noun “moule” becomes unanchored from its gender.
While the moule may float free from its gendering article in the body of the poem, the feminine pronoun elle remains unambiguous. This marks the difference between my translation (above) and its original translation by Michael Compton. Compton’s translation has the merit of clarity, which is essential in the introduction of a poet to a new audience, as his translation did when it was published in the issue of the journal October dedicated to Broodthaers in 1987.5 However, as we return to a poem as complex as “La Méduse” or “La Moule” it is in my opinion of greater importance to increase our sensitivity to the complexities that arise from the poetic strategy of clarifying and obscuring the gender of the noun. Take, for example, la from la méduse. The construction of sexual difference in the figures of the mussel and the jellyfish is apparent in this poem well beyond the allusion to sexual organs. This is because the first line of the poem uses a feminine pronoun, elle or “she” which forges a connection to the female figure, the mythical woman––subject of poetry and moulding since Ovid––la Méduse.
Subject to unspeakable injustice, after having been raped by Poseidon, Medusa was punished by Athena, who gave her serpents for hair, and a gaze that brought instant death to those who fell under it. The jellyfish has been given the name “medusa” in the Romance languages because of its ability to paralyze and the resemblance it bears to the image of Medusa’s head with serpents sprouting out of it like tentacles. More specifically, the decapitated head of the medusa (such as we see it in Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings) provides the ground of similarity between medusa and Medusa. Keeping such resemblances in mind, the final line of Broodthaers’ poem–– “Rien que le corps/nothing but body”––might well refer to the headless Medusa alongside the fluidity of the sea-creature. It is this double reference to myth and to nature that helps us to understand the contradiction between the form of the poem and its subject. The medusa celebrated for being “nothing but body” found itself named after a mythical head that is nothing but head.
By drawing attention to the headless Medusa, Broodthaers brings up the question of the continuance, according to the poets and historians, of this head’s ability to captivate and petrify, long after the severance from its body. The reader may recall that in Ovid’s poem, it was Medusa’s head, her face, that had the power to strike the life out of those who fell under it, leaving them lifeless “like statues.” As Perseus narrates:
Along the way, in fields and by the roads, I saw on all sides men and animals—like statues—turned to flinty stone at sight of dread Medusa’s visage6
It was Perseus, who, in severing her head and leaving behind only the body of Medusa, appropriated Medusa’s powers of petrification by placing the head on a shield. But perhaps more like Broodthaers than Perseus––who stands as an emblem of phallocentric power7––are the ocean nymphs that Ovid describes just after the passage above, who are swept up in a strange tide of petrification, a process that turns mer to anti-mer. In the Metamorphoses Ovid tells us that, in the moments after Medusa’s decapitation, Perseus places the head on an arrangement of fresh plants “from below the waves”:
The fresh plants, still living inside, and absorbent, respond to the influence of the Gorgon’s head, and harden at its touch, acquiring a new rigidity in branches and fronds. And the ocean nymphs try out this wonder on more plants, and are delighted that the same thing happens at its touch, and repeat it by scattering the seeds from the plants through the waves. Even now corals have the same nature, hardening at a touch of air, and what was alive, under the water, above water is turned to stone.8
In Ovid’s description the ocean nymphs have seen that the power to freeze what is fluid, to render the organic inorganic, continues after the death of Medusa, as a diffuse power of petrification. As the nymphs “try out this wonder,” are they not like the poet who temporarily stills the ephemerality of life in images?
In circulation in the French language at the time Broodthaers wrote this poem is a verb, méduser. Être médusé––to be medusaed––is to be petrified. Roger Caillois uses this verb in his book tracing this phenomenon through history and, back, into natural history. In Méduse et cie (Medusa and Company), published three years before Pense-Bête, Caillois articulates the longstanding human fear of encountering a gaze or a representation that reduces life to a block of stone, but also the emergence of a desire to appropriate this power of petrification as own’s own:
Almost everywhere we see in man this tenacious, almost ineradicable, fear of the eye whose gaze paralyses, roots him to the spot, suddenly deprives him of thought, movement and will. He is afraid of finding himself in front of this circular device, which can bring unconsciousness or death, which can kill or turn to stone. He is terrified by it, but at the same time tries to use this instrument of terror so as to be master of it in his turn. He invents fabulous creatures with the sole object of wringing from them this paralyzing power, against which he feels defenseless, but which he hopes to take and use for his own ends.9
In Broodthaers’ two poems from Pense-Bête, we find an inheritance of petrification and freezing images from the history of poetry––which this essay has explored in contrast to the purely art-historical reception of Broodthaers. Yet it is the art-historical reception of Broodthaers, initiated by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh at the end of the 1970s, that has rendered legible the contemporaneous social and economic conditions in which Broodthaers’ work operated. The current essay should, at most, be considered an attempt to trace the “pre-history” of those conditions in the work of Broodthaers, the poet, in the period before his theatrical renunciation of poetry in favor of the plastic arts at Galerie St Laurent, in Brussels in 1966. It was at this often cited exhibition that Pense-Bête, the remainder of the edition of the book of poetry, became Pense-Bête the sculpture, which remains, unread, an object of contemplation in major museum exhibitions to this day. And yet, if we were to try to excavate the early poetry from its contemporary status as a celebrated modern ruin we would not find a naive insistence on animating forces that would displace the rigid constraints imposed on poetic fluidity by economic conditions. Rather, what shocks is the consistency of the figures deployed in Broodthaers’ work throughout its various phases and modes, where youth and even nature offer no respite from the separation and hardening that has already occurred all around them, on account of the ordering of a society that reduces social relationships to the exchange of things. Specifically, here: a zoological specimen, with a power to paralyze the nervous system, which evokes a poetic figure for petrification, mimicked by a typographical rigidification of the verses in which these first two elements are named, sealed within the cover of a book, embedded in plaster, for sale in the gallery.
From this standpoint it is quite clear that the deployment of economically explicit terms would become the logical extension of a poetics for Broodthaers, not its correction. In the last year of his life he would write the following words:
S’il s’agit du phénomène de la réification, l’Art serait la représentation singulière de ce phénomène, une sorte de tautologie.
If we are concerned with the phenomenon of reification then Art will be a particular representation of that phenomenon—a form of tautology.10