Plastic Paris

1. Plastic autonomy

“[T]he flesh is lovely and we abhor the prudery of monuments”[1]

Despite its speaker’s early resolution to “go slowly,” Hope Mirrlees’s Paris (1919), an exuberantly frenetic work, rarely lets up.[2] There is one moment, however, just after Mirrlees evokes the Russian Revolution in the dreamt specter of “gigantic sinister mujik,” when this noisy poem draws to a temporary calm and reflects, or so it seems, on the limits of art (Mirrlees, Paris, 15):  

What are these lines if not an ingenious indictment of the way artworks can stall dialectical change and repress the real? To call Clio, muse of history, a “great French painter” is to condense with wry economy the sanitizing process by which art brings revolutionary crisis to aesthetic heel, resolving the Fronde (1648–1653), the storming of the Bastille (1789), and the June Days uprising (1848) into pictures all the more “beautiful” because “still” and “quiet.” A reading of this passage that fixates on anxieties about history’s representation may be unavoidable given the poem’s occasion: a city reeling in grieving celebration of its postwar spring. Scholars of Paris have taught us to appreciate Mirrlees’s extraordinary efforts to register the “Spirit of the Year / . . . stiff and stark”; the work is as haunted by the strained limits of representation as it is by the smashed unities and corpse-thick stages of a desolated Europe.[4] Or perhaps these two concerns coincide, for surviving the war means surviving precisely what is unrepresentable, that “curse of vastness” (Mirrlees, Paris, 13). Conventional aesthetic maps seem bound to fail the traumatized territory that this quintessentially modernist poem stakes out.[5]

And yet while these lines appear to strike a critical pose, we won’t be surprised to discover in a work as polyvocal as Paris complicating countercurrents of meaning. Consider that while Clio gets an ironic send-up as a worker of plein air miracles, “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego” come to embody another kind of autonomy, one the poem implicitly heroizes. In the Book of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar condemns these three to the fiery furnaces for refusing to venerate a golden idol. They survive by the miraculous grace of God, and Mirrlees tropes the Biblical story into a tale of two statues, as it were, by sculpting the men into effigies of another sort entirely—“motionless / and plastic mid the flames”—as if kilned and consecrated by their very refusal to worship the worldly statue. Here, “plastic” is not a synonym for “motionless” or “still,” but marks instead a Pygmalion transit between life and art, a dynamic state of being statuesque that pointedly contrasts with the inertness of Nebuchadnezzar’s false idol.

This passage affirms art’s autonomy not from social and economic life but from the reifying processes that set it off therefrom, a notion further developed by the “Waxen Pandoras” that the speaker discovers, in the next lines, decorating the Lenten “windows of les Galéries Lafayette, le Bon Marché, / la Samaritaine” (Mirrlees, Paris, 16, 15). Yet another allegorical image of the artwork, these “life-size wax dolls” dressed for First Communion are “holy bait” for the shopper enticed and undone like some latter-day “Prometheus” (23, 16). Behind this allusion we find one more story of statuary and flames, for Hesiod tells us that Zeus commissioned Hephaestus to sculpt Pandora from clay in order to punish Prometheus for his theft of fire. Whereas the furnaces sanctify Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, on the streets of Paris the molded Pandoras travesty the Eucharist’s gift of eternal life, and art becomes a wickedly cannibalistic sacrament. Both images frame a figure in dynamic passage between statuesque monument and living flesh. Add to these subtle images Mirrlees’s odd decision to invent paintings by Manet, David, and Poussin (why not reach for an actual example of art-historical witness, like Manet’s Guerre civile [1871] or David’s La mort de Marat [1793]?), and we’re left with the strong impression that representation, for Mirrlees, is a profoundly impoverished way of speaking about the relationship between the fictions of art and the facts of life, and about the power of art more broadly. The target of Mirrlees’s criticism is not the artwork per se but the “quiet gallery” in which it’s installed, roped off, and out of touch.

And so Paris is not exactly a work of “epic negation,” C. D. Blanton’s term for modernist long poems like Eliot’s The Waste Land that “include history” as social totalities which they fail positively to represent.[6] For all its openness and fragmentation, Paris operates in a more affirmative key, commending artworks for the autonomy they win back from a reified lifeworld by occupying space between states of consciousness, between spatial dimensions, and ultimately between forms of art and forms of life. Fluid passage between all these conflated states is the motive of Mirrlees’s aesthetic practice—it’s the way her speaker wends their way through Paris in spring 1919. With deference to Daniel’s heroes weathering the fires of history, I’ll call this practice a “plastic” one.[7] It also supplies a model for how readers might cut interpretive paths across Paris the poem. Inspired by Mirrlees’s psychogeographic wandering, this essay contrives an itinerary of moments when art declines to represent history and braves instead some riskier, more improvisatory encounters with life.

2. Plastic secrets

“Every culture is the terrible gush of its splendid outward forms”[8]

Paris was written at a turning point in the semantic career of “plastic,” a word just then beginning to designate semi-synthetic materials like vulcanized “indiarubber” (1839) and fully synthetic substances like Bakelite (1909).[9] In its then dominant acceptation, the adjective referred to what is sculptural or pliant, moldable or molded.[10] And so when Mirrlees uses the word to characterize “Scentless Lyons’ roses,” she qualifies not the flowers’ substance but their shape—these “Icy” roses seem works of sculptural handicraft (Mirrlees, Paris, 8). A reader of Guillaume Apollinaire, Mirrlees may have known the opening pages of The Cubist Painters (1913), wherein the former praises modern painting’s freedom from mimetic representation by extolling the “three plastic virtues, purity, unity, and truth, [which] hold nature subjugated at their feet.”[11] Nina Enemark has shrewdly noted the symmetry between Daniel’s three protagonists in the fiery furnace and the three plastic virtues which “blaze radiantly” in the flames of painting.[12] But whereas for Apollinaire the flame “symbolises painting” because it “brooks nothing foreign, and whatever it touches it cruelly transforms into itself,” Mirrlees’s sense of the transformative imagination differs significantly (Apollinaire, Cubist Painters, 6). She extends the concrete poetic strategies she had learned in part from Apollinaire not to “subjugate” nature, but to entrance the given world, to set it moving, pour it out, and otherwise plasticize it. Paris is plastic to the extent that it trains its ecstatic attention on the fluid traffic between life and art, and embraces headlong the freedom from representation and quarantined forms that such attention makes possible.

The word “plastic” first crops up in Paris when the speaker, strolling by the Louvre, observes the monument to Léon Gambetta, founder of the Third Republic, “red stud in the button-hole of his frock coat,” with the winged Genius of France “leaning over him, Whispering” confidentially (Hope Mirrlees, Paris, 4; fig 1):

Here Mirrlees arranges a combinatory grid—a sort of plastic syntax—to schematize the varieties of secrets kept by France and its famed servant. The lines that follow make a show of elaborating these secrets by invoking an eye-rhyme between Gambetta’s statue and Goya’s 1795 portrait of María Teresa de Silva, “Duchess of Alba” (fig. 2). What exquisite, significant, fade (in French, “insipid”) secrets lie in the visual conflation of these two plastic forms, one republican and one aristocratic (Mirrlees, Paris, 28)? To what end are French icons—the Eiffel Tower, the gray-green of “le Midi, the Louvre, [and] la Seine”—discoverable in a painting of a Spanish noblewoman (28)? Can we regard the Duchess’s sober pointing to terra firma as a riposte to the horizon-haunted men on the monument? What’s the finest point worth putting on the fact that Mirrlees superimposes two images of erotic desire gone conspicuously public: the implication of a sexual relationship between Gambetta and the winged France (“boutonnière is slang for anus,” Julia Briggs advises), and the aura of art-historical scandal telegraphed by the fact that the Duchess points not only to the Maltese at her feet, that conventional symbol of fidelity, but also to Goya’s signature just visible in the sand, fodder for rumors of the artist’s affair with his subject (27, 28)?

Ultimately these plastic forms keep their discursive secrets. But as Mirrlees writes, “c’est logique”; if they confessed outright, they’d be mere “plastic script[s]” for “communica[tion]” (Mirrlees, Paris, 4; Apollinaire, Cubist Painters, 10). In pursuit of the secrets that artworks at once keep and flauntingly advertise, the poem suspends its readers between national cultures, historical moments, class formations, modes of desire, and media forms. The upshot of all this plastic movement is the palpable sense that artworks, for Mirrlees, are those forms always busy exceeding themselves, stepping out beyond their bounded meanings as if to affirm, in endlessly oscillating succession, both definitions of the word “figure”: shape and trope. These are the two feet that one after the other carry us through Paris. The two senses of figure also rhyme with twin usages of the word “plastic”—a plastic substance receives and holds the form it has been given, and a plastic art shapes and reshapes it.[13] To write plastically, then, is to set things up and simultaneously admit they could be otherwise.

One further meaning of “plastic” belongs in Mirrlees’s mix, as well. For vitalist thinkers like Ralph Cudworth, the “Plastick life of nature” describes an all-pervading, “artificial, orderly, and methodical” force responsible for the organization of the universe.[14] Though fading from usage in the early twentieth century, this “quasi-philosophical” sense of the word makes a dramatic appearance in the preface to Mirrlees’s first novel Madeleine (1919), where it serves to identify “Fiction” at the intersection of art’s generative properties and life’s welter of contingencies: “Life is like a blind and limitless expanse of sky, for ever dividing into tiny drops of circumstances that rain down, thick and fast, on the just and unjust alike. Art is like the dauntless, plastic force that builds up stubborn, amorphous substance cell by cell, into the frail geometry of a shell.”[15] Sieving an onslaught of peacetime activity on the “Grand Boulevards,” Paris’s speaker echoes this passage directly (Mirrlees, Paris, 11):

Pace Apollinaire, art doesn’t triumph over the given world; if artworks rise above the conditions of their making they do so “[v]ery slowly” in the way “[s]ubaqueous” sediment may rise and eventually breast the water’s surface, “coming to” consciousness not as to any pure state of voluble alertness,  but to a “[t]hick halting speech” as yet surrounded and mired—it can’t be otherwise—in “time” and “[e]xperience.” The “curse of vastness,” in other words, is just as much the needful blessing, the hard contingent kernel of bewilderment around which art itself accretes to “something beautiful——awful——huge.” We might even construe this generative “curse” as a further guise for the “holophrase,” that striking concept of which Paris begins in desire and lack (Mirrlees, Paris, 3). According to Jane Harrison, the primeval holophrase utters “a relation in which subject and object have not got their heads above water but are submerged”—we might say “subaqueous”—in a “situation.”[16] Under the spell of the holophrase, an instance of “[t]hick halting speech” that reveals the speaker “entangled . . . in his own activities, he and his environment utterly involved,” subjects and objects are always “coming to,” “forming up,” or plastically between modes of being, media forms, and states of consciousness (Harrison, Themis, 474).

Briggs has suggested that we might grasp the entire poem as the residue of a reverie, since we do find the speaker at one point explicitly “[t]ranced,” “gaz[ing] down at the narrow rue de Beaune” from atop the Hôtel de l’Elysée (Mirrlees, Paris, 42, 17). Below, the hawkers, mourning women, workmen, and “[b]usy dogs” all testify to:

If the plastic secret or “lost romance” arrives only to those in “thrall” or perhaps “coming to” from an altered state of consciousness, the rest of us catch wind of it in the formal shapes that artists spend their lives on. Tellingly, Mirrlees manifests Ovid’s “romance” not as “[p]enned” language but as graphic illustration. What we do learn of this “lost romance” we receive in a blur of remediation—from Ovid’s pen to Italian painting and then to the fleshy happenings of the rue de Beaune. Such plastic movements are par for the course in Paris, where iconic shapes are wont to traverse the bounds of dimensionality, organicity, and facticity. Literary characters like Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain and Tolstoy’s Anna and Vronsky spring vividly to life, and artworks in the Louvre—David’s portrait of Juliette Récamier and a Spinario copy, for instance—show up in the streets, having shaken loose their lifelessness like the masterpieces that rise from their “subterranean sleep” in the museum’s bunkered basement during the war (Mirrlees, Paris, 12, 15, 6, 8). Meanwhile, these animating metamorphoses have their reciprocal complement in the way Paris’s figures in the round just as often go plastically flat, “black and two-dimensional” (20). “I see the Arc de Triomphe,” writes Mirrlees, “Square and shadowy like Julius Caesar’s dreams” (5). These lines may send readers first to Shakespeare, but Caesar doesn’t actually dream in that play; his wife Calpurnia does, however, and Act II Scene II turns on the interpretation of a plastic secret unconfessed by a statue come to life: does the dream of Caesar’s statue spouting blood portend his violent end, or that “great Rome shall suck / Reviving blood” from his virtuous reign, as Decius grovelingly suggests?[17]

It’s also possible these lines take their cue from the inscrutable, cataleptic gaze of Caesar’s marble statue in the Tuileries Garden (fig. 3).[18]

When Paris invites us to “see” the world in diminished dimensions, in flat “[s]quare and shadow,” we see it as it might be dreamt not by Caesar but by his statue, a figure “utterly involved,” or holophrastically submerged, in its own environment. The Eiffel Tower, too, goes “two dimensional / Etched on thick white paper,” and demobbing soldiers in the Tuileries become their own artisanal reproduction, “sketch[ed] . . . in chalk” for sale on the rue des Pyramides (Mirrlees, Paris, 15). But the poem never laments this pictorial reduction, even when fixing the ghosts of the war dead “in hideous frames inset with the brass motto / MORT AU CHAMP D’HONNEUR” (11). Mirrlees advises readers to “Scorn the laws of solid geometry, [and] [s]tep boldly into the wall of the Salle Caillebotte” in the Musée du Luxembourg, endorsing a plasticity notable for its lack of ideological prejudice: nothing calves off or depreciates in the passage from life to art (5). It’s the movement that matters, not the state that precedes or awaits it. Paris is a kaleidoscopic tableau vivant, its parade of outward forms shifting and flickering between dimensions as it performs its public secrets.

3. Plastic psychogeography

“A city is a flat massive thing already”[19]

As a work of extravagant flânerie, Paris has been characterized as a “psychogeographic” poem.[20] Psychogeography, in the words of its founder Guy Debord, is the study of the “precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment . . . on the emotions and behavior of the individuals.”[21] In the 1955 essay introducing this field of practice, Debord cryptically attributes the term “psychogeography” to “an illiterate Kabyle,” and this exoticizing combination of colonial Algeria, orality, and situationism neatly echoes the opening lines of Paris, where desire for the “holophrase” touches off an allusive musing on “themes of empire and négritude” (Debord, “Critique,” 8; Mirrlees, Paris, 25). Of course, on nearly every page the city of Paris is feverishly expressive in ways that seem indisputably psychogeographic; a ride on the subway conjures a gloomy underworld, the cityscape pines likes “a huge home-sick peasant,” and Freud himself dredges the Seine (Mirrlees, Paris, 3, 6, 21). But the psychogeographic city in the spirit of the Situationist International is not a “mere prompt for surrealist reveries,” as McKenzie Wark reminds us, but “a practice of the city as at once an objective and subjective space.”[22] 

We can frame the figural flights and shapely movements discussed above as psychogeographic raids on the boundary between “objective and subjective space,” between the urban environment as the speaker finds it in spring 1919, and the psyche that, in cutting its path across the city, transforms it. These plastic suspensions are nodes in a map of a new Paris. Here, in Paris: A Poem, Mirrlees’s holophrastic syntax implies, for a moment, that not the flâneur strolling its sidewalks but “the ancient rue Saint-Honoré” itself is “saunter[ing],” and that a slicing vertical stripe of single-file text (“There is no lily of the valley”) is at once a line of May Day general strikers, a bird’s eye view of the street they’re marching down, the flower no one can buy, and perhaps—in a furtive English pun—the match history is about to “strike” (Mirrlees, Paris, 6, 13–14). Towards the end of the poem, Mirrlees’s speaker overhears an enigmatic statement that decades later might have been mistaken, in the heady chaos of another revolutionary spring, for a slogan on the lips of a ’68 situationist like Debord: “Toutes les cartes marchent avec une allumette!” All the maps walk with/run on a match (21).[23] Like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, Paris itself grows plastic amid the flames, recreated as Mirrlees remaps it between life and art.

If the keyword “plastic” has been my own struck match, if you like, in this tendentious dérive through Paris, my guide in getting lost has been the contemporary Canadian poet Lisa Robertson. Inspired by the synthetic afterlife of the word “plastic,” I’ve cherry-picked my section titles from Robertson’s short 2001 manifesto “Spatial Synthetics: A Theory.”[24] This psychogeographic meditation on a “synthetics of space” that “improvises unthought shape” and places its speculative faith on poetic, architectural, intellectual, and political forms that “irreparably exceed their own structure” concludes with a call for “a theoretical device that amplifies the cognition of thresholds. . . . That is, a pavilion” (Robertson, Occasional Work, 77–79). Paris is one such engine of thresholds. The largest accretive structures of Mirrlees’s plastic art solidify, gradually, “[c]ell on cell,” in proportion to the way she dissolves and shoots-through with the light of a plastic imagination the massive monuments of her built environment: “The Louvre, the Ritz, the Palais-Royale, the Hôtel de Ville / Are light and frail / Plaster pavilions of pleasure” (Mirrlees, Paris, 16). Mirrlees responds to Paris in the spring of 1919 by turning all the structures she encounters—and her poetic and plastic figures most intently—into pavilions, which it’s our own revisionary pleasure to enter, to see through.