Beautiful works are signs; no one doubts that; columns, vases, statues, portraits speak to the mind; if we return to them they have even more to say; but they only signify themselves; it’s a characteristic of the beautiful that it doesn’t refer us to something else, nor to any exterior idea. Machines speak to the mind; they have to be understood; but they refer us to an exterior idea, of which they are as if a copy; this is why a machine can be copied and just as well, in the same way that an idea can be copied anew, and just as well; but machines are not beautiful. Yet a simple column, on the contrary, the remains of a temple, throws its inexhaustible idea in our face, and its idea is itself; its idea is a captive of the stone. Like Shakespeare’s The Tempest which is full of ideas and will signify until the end of theatre; but all these ideas are within the whole, no one can express them otherwise; nothing replaces the work itself. What the work says, no summary, no imitation, no development, can say. And yet where is the whole? I find only words. But it’s the arrangement of the words that makes the work; and I can’t say what is important and what is not; everything counts. Each part of a statue is a grain of marble or stone; which of itself has no importance, and which in the statue has full importance. For a statue all will agree; but when a work is made of words, signs in common use, and which belong to us, criticism would remove them, saying that these parts are unimportant; and it’s true that as parts they have no importance. Once one judges through an exterior idea, they have none; just like this conjoined tissue concerning which anatomists don’t know what to think; padding in some way. Similarly, in any beautiful work we find what we might want to call padding; but these things, which in themselves don’t count for much, are made beautiful by the whole. Once you’ve noticed that, you no longer want to read extracts or selections.
I have fought for Balzac. From time to time I meet some hurried reader who proves to me that The Lily of the Valley is quite boring; and I can’t prove what I know, that this work is worth the Iliad or Hamlet. But I can always prove to this reader that he’s talking without having read it; for I remind him of sublime passages which he’s not even noticed, like the anguish of the woman, when she senses water through the walls. That’s how I alert the hurried reader, and I often bring him or her round; for nothing can replace the work; it has to be read and reread, until the whole work is present in the slightest word; such is the law of written works that can’t be embraced as a whole with one glance, as one does with a statue; no doubt it needs the example of one reader to bring another along with him. This is why the glory of an author can only grow little by little, and through an emulating admiration; and discussions hardly serve because they express only the exterior idea. But if they also express admiration, that’s how they spread the faith.
Libres Propos, Première série, Deuxième année, n°23, 17 février 1923
Propos sur l’esthétique (1923), 24, « Signes »
Translation copyright Michel Petheram