Collaborative Form

Studies in the Relations of the Arts

Thomas Jensen Hines

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781612770406
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Collezioni letterarie

Collaborative Form attempts to show the nature and limits of works of art that are made up of two or more artistic forms. The first task of this book is to analyze and interpret a set of such combinations. Each chapter treats one collaborative work and attempts to show that the principles of collaboration are the same, whether the components are poetry and graphic works as in Lettera Amorosa by Rene Char and George Braque, poetry and music as in Herzgewachse by Maurice Maeterlinck and Arnold Schoenberg, or more complex sets that include painting, music, dance, lighting, and drama as in Der gelbe Klang by Wassily Kandinsky, Morder, Hoffnung der frauen by Oskar Kokoschka, and Triad by Alwin Nikolais.

Hines breaks down disciplinary barriers and then emphasizes the effects of the interactions between the arts. The first step, in methodology, is that of refusing to make a priori commitments to the critical methodologies of the arts involved. Each art is treated from its own perspective, and each interpretation attends to interactions of the arts rather than to the contribution of any one art. Once the collaborative works are examined, the book shows that such works are similar to other art forms. They obey the laws of temporal necessity, non-addition, multiple interpretation, and unity that any poem, painting, or musical composition might be said to obey. Unlike other arts though, collaborative forms are unique examples of the combinative effects of the arts. In the process of interpreting individual works and attempting to summarize this form, we are forced to see beyond the conventions of the constituent arts.

ONE

THE WORK ADMIRED
IN EVERY AGE

Lettera amorosa

IN the twentieth century, the arts have been brought together in a wide variety of ways. The major movements in literature and painting (the plastic arts) have contributed new ideas and new approaches for crossing the traditional lines of the separate disciplines but all these movements have sought in common what Wassily Kandinsky called “a synthesis of art forms.” Whether we speak of Impressionism in painting, music, and poetry; cubism in painting and poetry; futurism in poetry, graphics, music, film, painting, and total performance; or Expressionism as it touched nearly every art form in Germany during the period 1905–22, we find a common fascination with bringing the arts together in a larger, unnamed form. Not that the idea was new in the twentieth century. Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk preceded both in theory and performance the attempts of the modern artists to fuse the different forms. But the modern experimental movements in the arts have been curiously unanimous in their separate espousals of such a total work which would, in theory, use the unique advantages of the respective forms together to achieve a totality which transcended the sum of its parts. Hence, from such simple experiments as Apollinaire’s “Les Fenêtres” to such complex works as Kandinsky’s Der gelbe Klang, the modern artist has felt an apparent urge to cross the formal boundaries of the disciplines in his creations.

The range of possible effects of such syntheses is only limited by the number of ways in which the different arts can be brought together. Thus, whether one simply adds the various possible combinations of art forms that could function together or contemplates the kinds of creativeness involved and their potentials in combination, he can soon imagine a maze of possibility. However, a surer way to begin a discussion of the phenomena is to talk specifically of certain models of collaboration between the arts before attempting to formulate a theory of collaboration.

The simplest model of collaboration is provided by those artists who have mastered more than one art and who then bring these arts together in their work. This model is provided in the works of Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Valéry, Hans Arp, and Oskar Kokoschka, to name a few. There are obvious advantages for the critic in beginning with a “one-artist collaboration.” First, since only one artist is involved, the critic can assume a certain unity and wholeness in the collaborative work. Such variables as the artist’s style, his development, and his idiosyncrasies tend to carry over from one art to the next, thus making discussion and understanding considerably easier. Second, for the art historian (as well as for the literary critic), such knowledge of the entire oeuvre as is necessary is a priori limited (even though this oeuvre may be in a variety of art forms and immensely complex, as is the case with Kandinsky, Schoenberg, and Valéry).

The classic model in poetry and painting of a “one-artist show” is the work of William Blake, an English engraver, poet, painter, and craftsman of the early Romantic period. It was not until the middle of the twentieth century, however, that the collaborative nature of Blake’s work began to attract the serious attention of his readers and critics. Once discovered, the illuminations and graphic works became indispensable parts of Blake’s work, parts that can no longer be ignored in favor of the poetry edited in “collective” editions. The interactions in Blake’s manuscripts and first editions between the texts and the illuminations create a constant flux, back and forth, between the two arts wherein each form both completes and complements the other. Such constant and profound interaction enriches the reading of the work in such a way that the resultant aesthetic experience transcends the isolated experience of either distinct art form in the total work. In The Four Zoas, for example, there are many sections of the manuscript wherein one cannot easily make reasonable distinctions between the effects of the two arts since they are so nearly inseparable from the whole. Critical attempts to come to grips with this problem have not been wholly successful but have nonetheless attested that Blake’s illuminated works cannot be broken into separate aesthetic forms without changing the nature of the work drastically. Hence, the peculiar nature of Blake’s collaborations demonstrates how effective such a fusion can be. Even though problems remain in finding adequate critical approaches to such a work, these problems are simplified somewhat by the fact that a single artist is the center of study. What one assumes about Blake the poet, his craft, his imagination, his poetic world, his images, and his symbols can frequently be carried over into the illuminations themselves. The major difference is that of the form used.

The second model, that of a collaboration between two artists, is more difficult to discuss in spite of the fact that it is the most common mode of interaction between the arts. For this reason, I have chosen to pursue the nature and qualities of a collaboration of this mode to some length to show how such works achieve their ends and what kinds of critical perceptions of the total experience of the collaboration are possible. The collaboration, in this case, is between two arts: poetry and lithography. Two artists bring their respective arts together to create a new work, composed of interaction and, at best, transcending the effects available in either art form separately.

Lettera amorosa is the kind of oeuvre that literally merits the description beau livre. Produced together by René Char and Georges Braque, the book was published in 1963 by Edwin Engelberts of Geneva, Switzerland, in a limited edition of 230 exemplaires. It was printed in Paris at the Imprimérie Union in folio size (In-4^°) and bound in folds which permit full-page sections to be removed for viewing. Nearly every one of its fifty-five pages contains a color lithograph by Braque and one or several fragments of a poem by Char.

Char recounts that he wrote the first version of the poem of the same title in 1952 and subsequently published it in a separate edition in Paris (NRF Gallimard, 1953). He later altered the poem several times; first for republication in a selection of his poems, translated and edited by Jackson Mathews in Hypnos Waking (New York: Random House, 1956); and later, in another variant published in La Parole en archipel, a collective edition published in Paris in 1962 (NRF Gallimard). Between these editions, he worked on a third, collaborative version with Georges Braque after the painter himself singled out Lettera amorosa as the one poem of Char’s that he particularly wanted to rework with the poet.¹ However, it was not until 1958 that Braque and Char agreed on a publisher and on the general concepts that were to guide the new work.² It should also be emphasized that, at this stage of the work, neither Char nor Braque intended their combined effort as a simple joining of a set of litho graphs to a set of preexistent lines of poetry. Rather, there was to have been a great deal of flexibility on the part of both artists as they gradually resolved and united their respective ideas into a single work which is neither an “Art Book” nor a “Poem” per se but rather L’Ouvrage, a curious combination that defies traditional definitions in the critical language of either art form. In this case, the beau livre is to be more than a container for the play of forces that each art form introduces and leaves for the other to fulfill. In this case, L’Ouvrage is itself a work of art as few books in their entirety are: “L’Ouvrage de tous les temps admiré.”³

Char and Braque commenced this work with a full appreciation of their shared experience and a rare communality of spirit. This undercurrent of understanding is nowhere more apparent than in the mutual respect for one another’s art, a respect that is reflected in the work. Char alters lines, changes typography, and adds fragments to complete the movements begun in Braque’s figures. Braque, at the same time, reinvents the imagery of the poem and unifies the major motifs within the images of the natural world of the Sorgue River and the Vaucluse. Most importantly, the painter honors the poet’s controlling image—the multivalent symbol for woman, love, deity, cosmos—the Iris d’Eros, iris de Lettera amorosa (“Sur le franc-bord,” Lettera amorosa, 55) by invoking floral images of similar shape and color in the movement of lithographs from the cluster cosmos of the first stone (10) to the flowing petals of the last stones (46, 48, 49, 51).

In appearance, the book is extraordinarily simple: a series of fragments of poetry intertwined (like the liseron with its roots and branches) with a series of color lithographs. However, the structure of Lettera amorosa is neither linear nor serial (though such structures might be inferred from a first glance at the work). Braque’s lithographs are not necessarily created to illustrate their respective pages of poetry. Nor is there a consistent one-to-one relationship between poem and lithography in the order of revelation of themes and motifs. Rather, like two complementary structures moving simultaneously toward each other, the fragments and the lithographs take formally different paths to arrive at the point of completion. In other words, to use a figure to describe the work’s structure, the poetry and the lithography form two sides of a circle that opens and closes within the work itself. The viewer’s experience of the work is never easily divisible since once he has seen the circle unfold and complete itself, he can rarely discern which part is made up of poetry and which of painting. This aspect is, in fact, one of the best descriptions of a successful collaboration between two art forms.

The central idea of the text is to present an exchange between two persons: one speaking, one listening (though absent). The form of Char’s poem, that of a letter, is not gratuitous. The original version of the poem, which was more specifically a personal letter between two people, has here been altered so that the exchange is not so simply between the lover and his absent loved one, but also explicitly between a more universal mind and its images and, at the same time, on another level, a conversation souveraine between poet and painter.⁴ The text was changed then to make more general the particular, more erotic the sexual, and more universal the moments of shared, private experience. In effect, Char opens the poem outward by each of his deletions and projects the poem toward universality by each addition.

The form of the letter gives two specific kinds of expectations to the reader, each of which is vital to the function of the ouvrage. First, the letter invites intimacy not only with the addressee (the tu to whom segments are addressed) but with the larger audience as well. Such an intimacy of tone breaks down the characteristic expectations of the reader concerning “Poetry.” In fact, the tone (as part of the form) reverses the formal expectations connected with poetry, thus freeing the reader to accept the interaction between the poem and the lithography. Second, the assumption of a shared experience, which is basic to the process of letter-writing, is extended to the work itself, wherein the larger context of the collaborative ouvrage is implied as a sequel to the particular unspoken whole relationship implied between lover and loved one. The fragments of poetry—which often seem distinct and not specifically related to the development of themes or ideas—operate nonetheless within an unseen horizon which is assumed to be the field of shared experience between the speaker and his loved one. As the poem opens, this private horizon of mutual experience and common assumption expands to include the broader world of relations accessible to all readers. Such an opening of the field of concern of the poem is advantageous since it creates the possibility of the ouvrage through the intertwining collaborative relationship between text and lithographs. Lettera amorosa is thus from the lover to his beloved, then from the mind to its forms, and finally from the poet to art itself as each of these relationships is explored de la base au sommet.

The entire process of opening begins with the first lines of the text which are in juxtaposition with the lithograph Profil:

Temps en sous-oeuvre, années d’affliction.… Droit Naturel! lis donneront malgré eux une nouvelle fois 1’existence à l’Ouvrage de tous les temps admiré. (9)⁵

With neither special emphasis (except that it occurs at the beginning) nor explication, the concept of the Ouvrage (“the Work”) is announced even before the specific lover’s vow (“Je te chéris”) that is traditional in a dedication.⁶ The lettera begins after a long period wherein time is measured (qualified) by personal suffering. The idea of beginning again implies a sense of a cyclic rhythm in which the season of suffering must be followed by rebirth and renewal. The closed past has been broken and the cycle of creativity is renewed (une nouvelle fois). Once more, L’Ouvrage will be given existence as if the idea had always been latent, needing only the opening of the nouvelle fois to take its shape. The announcement is juxtaposed between the first model, Monteverdi’s avowal from Lettera amorosa quoted as epigraph, and the poet’s repetition of this form.⁷ The changes in diction, tone, and elevation between Monteverdi and the speaker are introduced through the notion of the ouvrage: a form which takes a different shape with each succeeding age.

Char’s introductory epigram, remarks, and announcements are juxtaposed with the lithograph Profil (see figure 1) which makes dominant the silhouette of the absent loved one, the woman to whom the entire love letter is ostensibly addressed. In the first lithograph, Braque establishes not only the central figure toward whom the Lettera amorosa might be said to move on a literal level, but also other major forms, structures, and color motifs of the work. Moreover, he sets up these parts of the whole with miraculous simplicity. The largest image portrayed is the central figure of the woman’s head in black surrounded by the signs of the cosmos. More precisely, her profile is ringed by space and set off by star clusters, two irregular large star shapes, and two spirals. Each of these forms a direct relation to part of the text of the poem adjacent to the lithograph.

Furthermore, each of these forms is suggestive of larger meanings that are not at all explicit to the reader at this point in the work. The woman is dominant over all cosmic forces, for her gray shadow takes precedence over the other figures wherever there is an overlap. The central position of her head in the frame establishes her as both the central object of desire at this moment and as that being (“Absent partout où on fête un absent”), defined as absence itself, which overpowers even those extreme and constant figures of cosmic stability (the stars, the moon, the galactic form of the spirals, and the voids of space) which are invoked explicitly (as on page 16) and by juxtaposition (as on pages 28 and 29). Her absence becomes, like Heidegger’s Das Nicht, a negative ground that reveals itself als nicht, a force that is most fully realized by its not-being-there. The implied absence of the loved one in the poem is immediately juxtaposed to the power of absence in the lithography, a juxtaposition that leads the viewer to behold...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Work Admired in Every Age: Lettera amorosa
• 2 The Warmth of the Face of the Newborn: A La sante du serpent
• 3 On the Spiritual in Art: Der Blaue Reiter
• 4 The Relation of the Text: Herzgewächse
• 5 The Stage Composition: Der gelbe KLang
• 6 Der Sturm: Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen
• 7 The Sacred and the Profane: Triad
• Conclusion: The Theory of Collaborative Form
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index