Professional Documents
Culture Documents
2009-Critical Quarterly
2009-Critical Quarterly
looking on the head (and his sculpture) which petrifies – her eyes need
not be open. Freud, identifying Medusa’s head with the mother’s
genitals, also lays stress on seeing the head rather than being seen.17
Presenting decapitation as cognate with castration, and thus the fear of
Medusa’s severed head as ‘a terror of castration that is linked to the
sight of something’,18 he thus elides a further connection that the mad
and violent eroticism of Cellini’s sculpture makes explicit – that the
decapitation of the female monster by the male hero is also a protection
against the threatened castration. (The closed eyes also make sense in
this context, since having them closed functions to deprive the Gorgon
of even residual power.)19
The psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, a long-time friend and corre-
spondent of Freud, gives a similar reading, speaking of the ‘frightful
impression’ made by the ‘terrible symbol of the female genital region’.
Unlike Freud he also mentions the ‘fearful and alarming starting [sic]
eyes of the Medusa head’, suggesting they have ‘the secondary meaning
of erection’.20 By this he presumably indicates that some sort of power
emanates from the Gorgon’s eyes themselves and since he, like Freud,
identifies the presence of symbolic penises (the snakes of her hair) as
further symbols of the castrative danger (‘the multiplication of penis
symbols signifies castration’, writes Freud),21 we can read this as a
similar case, i.e. if the eyes symbolize penile erection, the signs of danger
can be read in these ‘alarming starting’ eyes too.
Roger Caillois, in The Mask of Medusa,22 identifies various legendary
creatures, found in bestiaries and traveller’s tales from Pliny the Elder
onwards, as rationalized or corrupted versions of the Medusa. The
notorious Basilisk, as well as the less well known Catoblepas and
Gorgo (the name seems telling here), all destroy what they touch or see
by means of baleful emanations, often from the eyes. The sheep-like
Gorgo’s heavy mane screens off its deadly vision; should it shake its
locks from its eyes, the results are fatal for those it beholds; the
Catoblepas also has poisonous eyes, and a head so heavy it can barely
lift it from the ground. The corrupting influence of the Basilisk is well
known: scorching the earth before it, killing vegetation, and splitting
rocks with its malignity, Caillois reports that it is nevertheless ‘killed
by its own reflection’ – ‘the surface of calm water is quite fatal to it.’23
That all these creatures are said to be found in the deserts of Libya or
Ethiopia adds credence to his interpretation, since much of the final
sequence of the myth takes place in Ethiopia, and Ovid attributes the
fact that Libya is ‘infested with poisonous reptiles’ to a few drops of
the Gorgon’s blood dripping down on the country as Perseus flew
8 Black Light
homewards – ‘the earth received them and gave them life as a medley
of poisonous serpents’.24
Further evidence that the danger is not merely from seeing her, but
stems from an actual emanation, comes from the fable contained
within the story about the origin of coral – having dispatched the sea
monster sent to consume Andromeda, Perseus places the severed head
on a bed of seaweed while he ritually cleanses himself. Ovid tells us
that the seaweed ‘absorbed the force of the Gorgon’, and was turned
into coral.25
Other versions and transformations could no doubt be found.
Caillois is almost certainly correct to link the motif in its entirety to a
very generalized fear of being looked at which would cover not only
all similar myths, but also various masquerades and folk beliefs
concerning the evil eye. (Caillois being Caillois, he is even prepared to
argue that it seems to extend in a similar form into the non-human
world, where it is evidenced by the proliferation of eye-spots in insects
as a protective measure against predators.) ‘Almost everywhere,’ he
writes, ‘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.’26 We can be additionally sure
that it is this danger which Perseus must avoid, as well as the danger
of seeing Medusa, through the fact that the cap of Hades is a magical
source of invisibility – its presence as a significant accoutrement of the
hero is in fact unintelligible unless there is a real need not to be seen.
Hesiod mentions it in context of his flight from the Gorgons, saying
that it ‘had the awful gloom of night’ about it;27 Hyginus, in the most
explicit explanation of its purpose, describes it as ‘a helmet which kept
its wearer from being seen by an enemy’.28 It is the rhyme for the
shield which allows the bearer to see, and points decisively to the fact
that the sight of the Gorgon is deadly, not merely the act of setting eyes
on her. The texts do not suggest this meaning for the cap –
Apollodorus merely says it helps him escape after he has killed
Medusa, and Ovid does not mention it at all – but it seems obvious
that to see without being seen is the condition for success.
Here we must return again to the matter of reflection. Perseus’s
safety is ensured provided he does not look upon the deadly sight of
the real being but only upon the reflected image: the image on the
shield cannot see anything, nothing dangerous emanates from it. In the
shield’s mirror, transformed to an image, the Gorgon is disarmed: an
image does not see anything, and so it is safe to look at. With its help,
the real danger, the deadly aspect of the living monster, can be
The Shield of Perseus 9
Here is Alberti again, assuring us now that reflection gives the clue to
the improvement of our paintings, those beautiful fragments marvel-
lously grasped from Narcissus’s own impossible, untouchable mirror:
‘I do not know how it is that paintings that are without fault look
beautiful in a mirror; and it is remarkable how every defect in a picture
appears more unsightly in a mirror. So the things that are taken from
Nature should be emended with the advice of the mirror.’31
Reflect again the truth you have captured, and its own beauty and
defects alike will become apparent; it will itself become clear and truly
visible, and those errors it might have inherited from Nature herself
will be seen and may be ‘emended’. The mirror’s advice will be
objective; improving, even. The painting, coming into form as a
worldly object, may begin to suffer a transformation into as faulty an
object as its model: the mirror will remedy this – as paint is applied,
and effects are created, the mirror is ‘an excellent guide’ to let you
know when you have ‘arrived at what is required’.32 Backwards and
forwards: first the world as illusive reflection, then reflection as your
guide. Drawn off from the surface of the glistering pool into the fixities
of paint, the mirror – parody and fragment of the greater reflection –
will inform you just how to render these images truthfully and
without fault. There are, however, mirrors with their own faults.
Edouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1881-2; Figure 1) is a
painting about which rivers of ink have already been spilled. Manet
himself, the world in which he lived, and his specific place in it have
also, and to an extraordinary degree, become objects of scholarship.
The fierce academic intensity of the study devoted to this man and his
world is forbidding; long awarded a variety of historical stations, all of
the gravest significance (the founder of modern painting; the first truly
avant-garde painter; he in whom the first stirrings of painterly
modernism itself are clearly visible; the living avatar of 19th century
Paris, and so on), Manet is the object of a kind of cultic veneration.
With idolatry comes anxiety, in this case manifested in the obsessive
marshalling of sources. A world has been produced for the painter and
his paintings which is saturated with reference and implication, a
world so detailed that it does not in fact really correspond to any
world we can truly imagine being inhabited. It is a total world where
the historical significance of all things is somehow already present and
engaged with, their historical functions somehow on display. But it is
the condition of living societies that their internal structure is
The Shield of Perseus 11
it right from the start: his dismissal by his contemporaries and their
persistent failure to recognize his greatness marks the moment where
art criticism made probably its greatest and most notorious blunder.
Critics and art historians have returned again and again to this trauma,
determined every time to correct it anew; it is the ultimate failure, in
permanent need of remedy, and every fear that an assessment of an
artist might prove incorrect in the historical long-term is referable to it.
Bataille is right, in his book on Manet, when he writes that the
transfixed, hilarious public and the savage criticism which greeted
Olympia indicates a mystery in itself – they had all been ‘led by some
unerring instinct into the lair of danger’, and the violence of the
response is the most telling proof of the power in Manet’s painting.33 It
is a danger that art historians and writers have understandably and
belatedly tried to protect themselves against, building up around the
artist and his work an encasing edifice of historical matter. Manet is
the limit case for error, the blank and alien sign of unintelligibility and
mistaking, the permanent reminder that the current of history is swift,
cold and unpredictable.
What, then, of the Bar, Manet’s endlessly strange final major work,
completed a year or so before his death? In addition to the enormous
literature on Manet (in which it invariably features), there is an entire
book of theoretical essays by various authors devoted solely to its
impenetrable mysteries, a critical laying-siege to the work which is –
predictably – in great part concerned with prior art historical
approaches to the painting.34 Despite the thick patination of study, it
remains variable and multiple; faced with the painting, the various
interpretations and theories offered fall away, and when recalled
appear distant and extraneous, as if they were talking about something
else entirely. In any case, nearly all of them are different. Other major
works such as Olympia or Dejeuner sur l’Herbe have been more or less
stilled by the academy’s unremitting gaze, their meaning and
significance largely fixed in place. For these great paintings the litany
of sources is known by heart (Titian’s Urbino Venus, an engraving after
Raphael’s Judgement of Paris, Goya’s Naked Maja, Ingres, Velasquez,
and the rest); they are by no means any less troubling than the Bar, but
they have been comprehensively accommodated. Their reception by
the public is a famous legend, as noted above; the oft-parroted list of
important features in the paintings (unacceptable nudity, contempor-
ary dress, lack of justification for scene depicted, spectre of prostitu-
tion, gaze directed at viewer, flatness, etc.) is also well known. Their
place in the history, and how this history is thought to move with and
The Shield of Perseus 13
through them, is steady. The received truths about Manet guard them
like sentries, and keep the order of play correct: first Manet, then
Impressionism, and so it goes.
Not that there is not some truth in these asseverations; it is not for
nothing that Bataille so memorably describes the advent of Manet’s art
as the coming of ‘that moulting time’35 for painting, its cracked and rigid
casing dramatically sloughing off in his work. That was, in general, how
the matter was seen by sympathetic contemporaries, as well as now. But
the Bar doesn’t feature in this story in the same way – despite its
importance and majesty being generally acknowledged, it does not have
the recognizable place and narrative historical function assigned to it that
the earlier paintings do, or even an agreed meaning. It does not because
it will not; it holds out, obdurately, as the theories and source materials
proliferate. There are real and enduring difficulties in A Bar at the Folies-
Bergère; they arise because the genuinely perturbing forces harnessed in
the painting are directed outwards and seem specifically and intention-
ally to damage and limit any attempt to understand it. It refuses to have
a meaning, an explanation or a solution. These problematic forces, forces
that continue to reflect away all attempts at definitive interpretation, are
made manifest in the painted surface of a mirror.
Stubbornly and wilfully incomprehensible, the famously erroneous
mirror that takes up the entire background of the Bar simply will not be
made good. No wrangling with viewpoints or angles will resolve its
contradictions or relieve the frustration it generates. It refuses to be made
sense of; Bartleby-like, it would prefer not to, and its recalcitrance cannot
be argued against. We know it should reflect the reverse side of what we
are being told is immediately before us: a marble bar counter, a selection
of bottles, and the barmaid herself. Instead, it sends back a dizzying
profusion of jumbled elements, not one of which really corresponds to
anything we can see; but since all of them are sufficiently similar to what
we expect to see, we are sent round again in a maddeningly fruitless cycle
of identification and misidentification. Through the mirror’s work, the
picture exists in a condition of dynamic irresolution, permanently
oscillating back and forth between what we think happens at one
moment, but doesn’t quite, and what we think should not happen at the
next, but always does.
The details of the painting are familiar. Described and pored over
innumerable times, the multiplying accounts are themselves a parodic
echo of the way the picture forces the eye to shuttle again and again
over uncomfortable terrain, without permitting it any rest. The
counter, a cold and dark-veined grey marble, itself gently reflective
14 Black Light
(we seem to see a suggestion of the barmaid’s presence in it), runs the
length of the canvas along its base. At its left topmost extremity there
is the merest hint of a corner, cutting down at an obtuse angle and so
linking the bar with its reflection, which duly indicates that the
counter effectively finishes with the left edge of canvas, although the
perspective here is already rather muddling. At this left end, half a
dozen unopened bottles; aperitif, champagne, beer. On the right side, a
similar number. Between them, incongruously, a glass containing two
roses, and a cut glass compotier containing a bright rubble of ripe
tangerines, their gleaming skins a gentle rhyme with the golden foil of
the champagne bottles on the left.
The barmaid herself stands centrally, leaning on the bar, deceptively
flat until the lace jutting crisply forward from the picture-left side of
her jacket’s low, squared-off neckline suddenly gives her bosom an
unexpected volume. In fact, her body is not quite squarely on to the
viewer; her right shoulder (that is, picture-left) is slightly dropped, she
appears to lean slightly heavier on her right hand, and the irregular
outline of her hips and waist suggests her weight is on her right leg.
Her head gently leans picture-right, the briefest suggestion of
contrapposto; around her neck is a black ribbon necklace, with a cameo
or locket hanging down. Her jacket is a midnight blue-black, as infinite
as the cloak of the Virgin in Duccio’s Maesta, chased with a scumbled
white lace at the neck and cuffs, and studded with a dead-straight
constellation of perfunctory, flower-like white buttons down the front,
which is also the dead centre of the painting. Her skirts are silver grey;
at her breast a posy of flowers chimes with those on the bar-top below,
and Manet has emphasized them with thick daub of yellow-cream
paint, which shines in relief. She looks out, delicately but clearly made-
up, the powdered rose-pink of her cheeks in touching contrast to the
colder white flesh of her chest. The sheen on her neatly combed fringe
shines gold through hazelnut. The light, flat and source-less, seems to
be emanating from somewhere outside the painting, behind us and to
the upper left (this is, we can note in passing, effectively the traditional
source of the light of the annunciation).
The space behind the bar is indeterminate; the distance between her,
the bar-top, and the mirror appears by turns shallow and relatively
deep. The lower edge of the mirror runs parallel with the counter,
separated from it by a variably thick reddish band which reads as a
strip of wall visible beneath its gilded frame. It could be two feet away;
it could be five. This constitutes everything that at least pretends to be
‘real’; these few clues, condensed into the shallow space of the bar and
The Shield of Perseus 15
the limited space inhabited by the barmaid, are all we have to go on.
The mirror’s surface takes up everything else.
In this surface we are presented with an entirely invented world,
apparently an immaterial double to the one that we are told is
physically before us; a world which, we must suppose, is occurring
behind us. It is thinly but liberally scuffed with silver-grey patches,
which perhaps signify the cold, glassy material existence of the mirror
(this seems certain at the point between her right forearm and the
champagne bottles, for instance), and which might, if that were the
case, allow us to grasp at least the even flatness of its physical
presence; but since elsewhere these patches might equally represent
the blue haze of tobacco smoke inside the reflected establishment, the
possible comfort that proof of the mirror’s real existence might bring is
also called into doubt.
We do not have any choice about reading it as a mirror, though; there
is too much to say that it is. The bar is there, the bottles are there, the
barmaid is there, all in what appear to be approximately the right places.
In fact, they are in nothing like the right places, but the illusion is
incredibly forceful, and has to be in order to fight off the equally
confusing sense of deep space generated by the distant balcony and the
apparently infinite recession, perhaps into further large mirrors, of
crowding top-hatted figures. Manet’s unmistakable choppy and irregular
brushstrokes eventually dice this host into an abstract, blocky hatching
which is finally melded into areas of vertically dragged indeterminacy,
areas which again seem to indicate the mirror’s surface. The mirror is in
general painted with looser work, with occasional passages of thick paint
(for instance, on the reflected bottles’ tops), which pull the recessed space
abruptly forward to the picture plane. This effect not only contradicts the
depth and distance created by the mirror as it reflects the room, but also
denies the ‘real’ space, anterior to the mirror, behind the bar, within
which the mirror should hold its place on the wall behind the barmaid:
the viewer is brought up sharply to the surface of the canvas, and the
already confused spatial effects are made even more complex.
Along the surface of the reflected bar are several dramatic
discontinuities, in large part stemming from the entirely gratuitous
introduction of a recessive single-point perspectival view along the
counter’s reflected left-hand edge. This 45 degree angle – whose
ostensible vanishing point is exactly behind the centre of the barmaids
face – seems responsible for pushing everything up- and right-wards
in a most peculiar way which superficially appears to respond to an
imagined viewing position, but in fact cannot really do so. As well as
16 Black Light
being up to the right, the group of bottles at left are on the far side of
the reflected bar, when they should be at the near side; in the gap
between the barmaid’s arm and waist there appears to be the pinkish
suggestion of a seemingly nonexistent bottle and what one can only
presume is the reflection of one of the champagne bottles – its location
is completely baffling. Passing over the reflection of the barmaid
herself, the cut roses are reflected at the right hand edge of the
painting; the distance between them and the left-hand group of bottles
seems to have telescoped wildly and they are now an immense
distance away from these bottles, as is the barmaid’s reflected right
hand (her reflection-left). Excepting the roses, nothing on the right side
of the bar is reflected at all; the organizing illogic of the mirror decrees
that they must presumably be somewhere off to the right-hand side of
the picture, though more precisely they simply do not exist.
And then there is the matter of the barmaid. She herself seems
physically transformed by the mirror; her back seems rounder than it
ought, and she appears generally more massive. (Manet here, as ever, is
a master of economy; in the blackness of her jacket, he opens the space
between her left arm and body with a single dry smear of light yellow).
Her posture in the mirror does not properly correspond either; she
seems to slump slightly, and to lean further over the bar than her
original, who is upright and graceful by contrast. Most worrying of all
though, looming in from the right, is her interlocutor. Top-hatted, with a
trimmed beard and moustache, his indistinct features defined by the
sharp white line of his far shirt-collar, he stands at the bar before her. His
cane is held in a hand that is a purplish, brusquely smeared paw, and a
dabbed touch of Manet’s brush lights and models his nose; his hat
extends upwards off the canvas. He appears to be very close to the
barmaid, despite the width of the bar top.
How are we to understand his presence? His relation to the barmaid
as it is shown in the glass famously indicates that, if he was really
there, he would be standing in exactly the position held by the viewer
of the painting. Jack Flam, in an excellent essay on the painting, has
noted his physical similarity to the man at the left-hand end of the
reflected balcony, a man who also appears to look directly towards the
place occupied by the barmaid (which is to say, directly at the viewer).
A possible reading is thus that we are seeing one and the same man,
and a psychological narrative of fantasy and desire is being played out
from left to right: his look, the object of his desire (the barmaid), and
the ‘imaginary encounter’ between them; the desires could equally be
hers, and perhaps we are even seeing ‘a kind of shared reverie, based
The Shield of Perseus 17
Nature Mort
Something that cannot be ignored is that every single distinct item in the
Bar is readable at some level as a momento mori: the ripe fruit; the
unopened bottles; the attractive girl; the location itself, a place of
transient entertainments and pleasures; and of course the flowers. Flam
perceptively notes that in this context we may also see the reflected man
as a figuration of Death, to go with Maiden of the bar.37 The history of
iconology makes inevitable the conclusion that the painting must in part
be seen as a huge, complicated vanitas, painted by a dying man.
Manet, it seems certain, died from complications arising from
syphilis, probably contracted in his youth. The final, tertiary stage
appears to have set in during 1876; by 1878 he could no longer bend his
right leg. The nervous and muscular degeneration symptomatic of the
tabes dorsalis form of the disease had set in; he suffered the ‘lightning
pains’ associated with the illness, and walking became very difficult.38
At the time the Bar was painted, he was suffering gravely; effectively
unable to paint, his work was restricted to smaller pieces, and he had
even sought advice on the painting of miniatures. The Bar was the
exception, but it sapped his energy, and he worked in fits and starts.
In the final years between 1881 and his death in 1883, he produced a
series of small, extraordinary flower paintings; Gordon and Forge, in a
book devoted solely to them, reproduce 16, every one a jewel-like tour de
force.39 Of flowers, always a reminder of death, and always a touching
affirmation of life’s brief splendour and happiness, the dying painter
was said to remark, ‘I would like to paint them all’.40 Gordon and Forge
note that these flowers are given contrast by their vases: that the
exactitude and honesty of the bouquets have a counterpoint in the
splintered glitter of the glass containers.41 Working in concert with the
consummate depiction of the flowers themselves (which Manet paints
astonishingly, impeccably: he is the still-life painter non-pareil, perhaps
absolutely) there is an equal, possibly greater, and at least as breath-
taking effort to attend to the effects generated when light is bent and
baffled through glass, refracted and torqued through clear water where
the standing stalks are shivered into those familiar, angular brush marks.
Is this not, in some sort, the same opposition as that which we see in
the Bar between the mirror and its model? These crystalline crucibles
are as perfect and captivating as the flowers they contain. The
precision with which they are rendered is a moment of oscillation that
shows the other side of the visible blooms reaching up out of the glass:
their submerged selves, whose appearance is quite as visible yet
The Shield of Perseus 19
goddess was cast off, or the young gents in ordinary dress lunching on
the grass. It is not that Manet does not believe in the possibility of ‘good’
representations, pictures which really can show the world as it is; if he
did not, then finally to declare against, through the creation of a painting
which functions as a negation of this possibility, would have no power. If
anything, he has pushed too hard at the problem of representation:
because in the end the search for the true nature of the image reveals
nothing at all, a mask behind which there is no face, a merely arbitrary
language of expectations and conventions: ‘bottle’ for bottle, ‘barmaid’
for barmaid, and so on, without the secret heart of it being revealed. This
is what Manet runs up against: and so, at the last, he pushes beyond like-
for-like representation and on into the problem at its core: the final
arbitrariness of the signs that are used to denote things.
This arbitrariness indicates something further and more frighten-
ing: for if the representative sign is arbitrary, then what it denotes
cannot be grasped, and is finally unknowable. Real, alien, and active,
the world is not capable of being known or controlled by representa-
tions, however perfectly they reflect what we assume we see, or what
we seem to know. A mirror reflects the world perfectly; the invocation
of this perfection is what gives the painting its strange charge, for if we
are presented with the things we seem to be shown on the bar, then we
expect the mirror to do the work it should do ‘in real life’ and show
them in reverse. A touching expectation, Manet seems to say, but one
based on nothing except the mere faith that I will do what I am
supposed to do, now I have shown you a picture of a mirror. But he
has not done what he was supposed to do; instead he shows us exactly
how misplaced our faith in images is, exactly how little control we
have over what they do and how they are made (and also displayed
here, of course, is the extent of the control that the makers of images
possess over the viewers of images). By extension, we are shown how
arbitrary and limited our understanding of the world is, and how little
power we have to protect ourselves from the moment when it calls
time on us, and death returns us to mere matter.
The mirror of the Bar is the antithesis and negation of the shield of
Perseus; in the sliding away of the image we see a final retort to the
happy dream that the mortal gaze of the world itself can be happily
deflected by a clever ruse, set down on canvas and held fast. Instead,
Manet shows us something else: a glimpse of the gap between our
world of signs and representations and the vast cosmos, which they
feign to deliver. Paltry mutterings and meaningless daubs in the face
of a universe as indifferent as the barmaid. ‘Know yourself’ was the
24 Black Light
suggestion of the female sex in the grey triangle of the barmaid’s skirt.44
Recalling Manet’s syphilis, the link from the barmaid-as-Gorgon to the
old misogynist mythology of the vagina dentata would then be an easy
leap. Too easy, and also inaccurate – it would not accord with the picture,
which in truth suggests none of those things. If anything, it is the
barmaid that seems statue-like, petrified; she does not transfix us with a
terrible stare – indeed, she is more being looked at than looking.
While the mirror of the background delivers its various riddles to the
viewer standing before the famous canvas, another kind of mirror effect
is also created: one which identifies the barmaid with the observer. Their
positions are set in a mirror-like relation: facing each other frontally, with
the canvas’s lower edge approximately equal to the bar’s lower limit, the
viewer and the barmaid look at each other through the surface of the
picture as though one were the reflection of the other.
Once noticed, it is quite hard to shake this impression: looking at
the picture begins to feel like looking in a mirror, its invisible glass
along the front of the bar. This effect is accentuated by the fact that
most of the picture is a mirror, which is indeed showing the reflected
image of a scene apparently behind us. It receives a further
reinforcement via the reflection that is ostensibly ours – the top-hatted
man is in the ‘wrong place’, while the space in which we would expect
our reflection to be found is occupied by the barmaid alone. A further
element of the painting encourages us to identify with the barmaid,
rather than the man: the similarity, noted by Flam, between him and
the man on the balcony at far left. The possible encounter between
them has been remarked on above; but while the right-hand version of
this man is clearly looking at the barmaid’s reflection, the man at left
only appears to be looking at her through the fact that we project a line
of sight for him that would have him looking straight at her. But in
point of fact he is looking directly at us, thus setting up an uneasy
equivalence between ourselves and the barmaid. Perhaps the most
convincing argument for the notion of the viewer-as-barmaid is found
in the bottles of the reflection: for we have noted they are not
accurately reflected, but on inspection they are more or less accurately
reproduced. That is, the reflected barmaid’s relation to the reflected
bottles – which bears no resemblance to the ‘real’ barmaid’s relation to
the ‘real’ bottles – is in fact a reproduction of the viewer’s relationship
with the ‘real’ bottles that stand on the bar.
Mirrors, which appear to reverse left and right, in fact reverse front
and back. (This is what Magritte, the great logician of Surrealism,
recognizes in the famous Not To Be Reproduced of 1939.) Let us suppose
26 Black Light
for a moment that we are actually looking into a mirror, a possibility that
Manet does indeed seem to leave open, if only by implication; if the
barmaid is taken as a reflection of the viewer, then the painting redoubles
into an endless hall of mirrors, and the mirror of the background shows
this viewer identified not with man, but with the barmaid: it thus shows
an image of the viewer looking at the painting itself.
And what then is this painting? How is the act of looking at Manet’s
great work presented? What, in other words, does Manet tell us we are
looking at? He tells us that we look into the face of the mysterious, top-
hatted man, identified already as a figuration of death, a disembodied
presence, a reflection without a model. There in the mirror, invisibly
waiting for the viewer to look in and try to fathom its depths, is the
Gorgon’s face, a black-hatted Mephistopheles, the cold glare of Death
himself. It is symbolized by the man, not by the barmaid; and it is the
secret message of the painting, an image of the magic mechanism which
keeps the picture forever slipping away from understanding. Look at the
picture, and you yourself are looked at: it is you, the viewer, who is
transfixed by the painting, for death is looking back at you.
Finally, is this man not in some sense Manet himself? A Parisian
dandy, well-dressed and well-mannered, familiar with the girls and
bars and social life that the Folies-Bergère exemplified; a portrait, if we
are correctly informed, of another painter, Manet’s friend Gaston
Latouche? And is it not finally the artist who turns the living to stone,
whose gaze fixes them in their places with mixtures of pigment mined
out of the earth itself (the lapis blues and malachite greens) or, like
Medusa, renders them into cold marble? At his final salon, the dying
Manet holds up Medusa’s head to the crowds and critics that had
mocked him for twenty long years; it is a proof of his power, proof that
his story was true, as with Perseus in the house of Polydectes – Watch
out for your eyes!
I must, to begin with, insist on the following: in the scopic field, the gaze
is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture.46
Manet’s image does not show anything definite, he has made sure of
that. Instead, it can look.
Caillois, as we have seen, notes the prevalence in the insect world of
‘ocelli’, eye-like markings which function to frighten or distract a
predator, and links them to the transfixing gaze of Medusa, the various
mythical beasts whose eyes paralyse and kill, and the plethora of
folktales and beliefs which feature the evil eye. The ocelli of insects
work because they give predators the illusion of being looked at by a
different, more dangerous creature than the one which they actually
belong to; the ocelli of myth really are deadly.
Manet’s picture itself has something resembling Caillois’ ocelli: the
white orbs at the top, nominally two round electric lights but which
are in fact simply pure white unmodelled circles. Viewed in this way
they become disconcerting: the images of the painting dissolve, and
the object, suddenly indeterminate, is in possession of two piercing
eye-spots. Perhaps this the most radical moment of all in Manet’s
extraordinary painting: the moment it escapes being a painting and
becomes a mask, charged with a power that goes beyond its image.
This is not the same as the hoary ‘acknowledgment of materiality’, or
drawing attention to the picture plane, or any of art theory’s old saws.
No, here Manet uncovers a most secret mechanism, the moment of the
superstitious engagement and identification with inanimate matter –
the very creation of meaning from raw material, the moment real
significance is forged from configurations of mere paint.
The uncertainty of the mirror, the indeterminacy of the viewers
identity, the interruption of the flowers, and finally these strange eye-
spots – in all this unstable flickering we catch glimpses of a concealed
principle, which can never be looked on directly, but might perhaps be
intimated, or momentarily caught sight of in a mirror. Manet discloses
for us the moment when painted patterns – mere swirls – are
compulsively identified with the objects they seem to stand for, and
then displays this process as arbitrary, faulty and fragile. In the
transfixing eyes of the picture Manet shows to us in all its majesty and
drama the birth of the representative dyad – viewer and image, the one
demanding the other and holding them in place long enough for pattern
to become picture, and for the play of arbitrary forms to become imbued
with all the gravity of meaning and significance. And this secret moment
is made briefly visible only because Manet immediately takes away what
he has given: first the image of the bar, then the not-image of the mirror.
The wild and uncontrollable force that is at play in A Bar at the Folies-
Bergère – the force that makes it ever more confusing and that has
28 Black Light
Notes
1 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting [1435] trans. Cecil Grayson (London:
Penguin, 1991), 61.
2 Ovid, Metamorphoses trans. David Raeburn (London: Penguin, 2004): book
3, lines 341–3 (henceforth Ovid, 3: 341–3).
3 Ovid, 3: in order, 439, 417, 434–5.
4 Alberti, op. cit. note 1: 60; 61.
5 This famous discussion occurs in Republic, book 10.
6 There had been various Latin renderings of Plato made in Italy before
Marsilio Ficino’s major work of translation, at the behest of Cosimo de’
Medici, in the 1460s. The Republic had received a translation in Milan, by
Uberto Decembrio, as early as 1402, but there is nothing whatsoever in On
Painting to indicate Alberti had read it, or indeed had ever read anything
at all by Plato. For a detailed study on the Renaissance reception of Plato,
see James Hankins’s Plato in the Italian Renaissance (2 vols., New York: E. J.
Brill, 1990).
7 Alberti, op. cit. note 1: 61.
8 Ovid, 3: 407.
9 Ovid, 4: 604–803 and 5: 1–249.
10 From a literary point of view the Library is, as its translator Sir James
Frazer remarks, ‘the dull compilation of a commonplace man, who relates
without one touch of imagination or one spark of enthusiasm the long
series of fables and legends which inspired the immortal productions of
Greek poetry and the splendid creations of Greek art.’ J. G. Frazer,
Introduction to Apollodorus The Library, trans. J. G. Frazer, (London:
Heinemann, 2001 [1921]), xxxiii.
11 For full sources, including artistic sources, see the Timothy Gantz’s
invaluable Early Greek Myth, vol. 1, (New York: Johns Hopkins, 1993)
pp.303–7, and Jenny March’s equally useful Cassell Dictionary of Classical
Mythology (London: Cassell, 1998). Here are to be found detailed the
variations, discrepancies, visual sources etc.
12 Apollodorus ibid.: book II, ch. iv, paras. 1–2 (henceforth II.iv.1–2).
The Shield of Perseus 29
37 Ibid.: 172–3.
38 Beth Archer Brombert’s excellent and original biography Edouard Manet:
Rebel in a Frock Coat (Boston: Little, Brown & co, 1996) contains a detailed
section on Manet’s illness and death. See pp. 398–9 and pp. 452–3. The
book also contains an excellent account of the Bar, pp. 439–43.
39 The Last Flowers of Manet Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1986).
40 Ibid.: 5.
41 Ibid.: 14.
42 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis [1973] tr.
Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin,1994), 104.
43 Ovid, 5: 242–9.
44 Flam, op. cit. note 36: 167.
45 The phrase is taken from Lacan (Lacan op. cit. note 42: 101). In passages
which draw heavily on the work of Roger Caillois, the psychoanalyst is
speaking about the message that the painter sends through the painting to
the viewer: ‘The painter gives something to the viewer who must stand in
front of his painting which, in part, at least, of the painting, might be
summed up thus – You want to see? Well, take a look at this!’
46 Lacan, ibid.: 106.