Urge of the Letter

Tumbling quotes, images, and thoughts related to the making of meaningful marks for a book in progress, The Urge of the Letter: A Sentimental & Natural History of Writing, by Matthew Battles (matthew dot battles at gmail dot com).
August 10
In the painting in my previous post (Deux Jeunes Filles—La Belle Rosine, Antoine Wiertz, 1847), a stupendously healthy young woman contemplates the remains of a departed peer—a memorable iteration of the classic memento mori trope. But a seemingly minor detail in the painting has something to say about the urge of the letter as well. On the skull there is a label, the text of which,”La Belle Rosine,” gives us the title of the work. Beneath the irony of applying the epithet “la belle” to the dead girl, there is a layer of significance which we might take as given: the label is attached to the dead girl. The corpse is not a person but a thing—and at some level writing not only marks this fact but makes it so. The memento mori was a major genre in medieval art which retained its fascination among early modern Europeans.  But by Wietz’s time the meaning not only of death, but of life, had changed fundamentally—or at least called into question, thrown to the hounds of interpretation. With understanding of the human organism came greater attention to the individual consciousness and the mechanistic reduction of the body to its disarticulated parts.  The skeleton of the medieval death image was anonymous and iconographic; by the mid nineteenth century, the dead could be named—but to a greater extent than ever before, we were always already things. But that story—the story of modernity—has been told. Less obvious is the enduring power of writing not only to reflect oral language but to do things in the world—to label. The mid nineteenth century was the golden age of natural history. Naturalists filled museums and curiosity cabinets with the remains of dead creatures, all tagged and labelled in india ink. In this respect the skeleton Rosine is marked as a specimen, even if the exam to which she is being submitted is more Romantic than coldly scientific. But this very aspect of the painting is a measure of writing’s atavistic power to act almost magically on people, objects, and states of affairs. J. L. Austin showed how certain spoken words are not only names of things but acts in themselves. The vow, the wager, the promise, and the lie all do more than denominate; they enact. As sign, warning, proclamation, and label, the written word also can do things in the world.

In the painting in my previous post (Deux Jeunes Filles—La Belle Rosine, Antoine Wiertz, 1847), a stupendously healthy young woman contemplates the remains of a departed peer—a memorable iteration of the classic memento mori trope. But a seemingly minor detail in the painting has something to say about the urge of the letter as well.

On the skull there is a label, the text of which,”La Belle Rosine,” gives us the title of the work. Beneath the irony of applying the epithet “la belle” to the dead girl, there is a layer of significance which we might take as given: the label is attached to the dead girl. The corpse is not a person but a thing—and at some level writing not only marks this fact but makes it so.

The memento mori was a major genre in medieval art which retained its fascination among early modern Europeans.  But by Wietz’s time the meaning not only of death, but of life, had changed fundamentally—or at least called into question, thrown to the hounds of interpretation. With understanding of the human organism came greater attention to the individual consciousness and the mechanistic reduction of the body to its disarticulated parts.  The skeleton of the medieval death image was anonymous and iconographic; by the mid nineteenth century, the dead could be named—but to a greater extent than ever before, we were always already things.

But that story—the story of modernity—has been told. Less obvious is the enduring power of writing not only to reflect oral language but to do things in the world—to label.

The mid nineteenth century was the golden age of natural history. Naturalists filled museums and curiosity cabinets with the remains of dead creatures, all tagged and labelled in india ink. In this respect the skeleton Rosine is marked as a specimen, even if the exam to which she is being submitted is more Romantic than coldly scientific. But this very aspect of the painting is a measure of writing’s atavistic power to act almost magically on people, objects, and states of affairs.

J. L. Austin showed how certain spoken words are not only names of things but acts in themselves. The vow, the wager, the promise, and the lie all do more than denominate; they enact. As sign, warning, proclamation, and label, the written word also can do things in the world.