READING THE VISUAL IN THE WORK OF MARGUERITE YOURCENAR Thesis Presented by Nigel Saint For PhD Examination University College London ProQuest Number: 10055381 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10055381 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ABSTRACT This thesis addresses the functions of the visual in the work of Marguerite Yourcenar. The visual here refers initially to her engagement with the visual arts in selected essays. Analysis shows her developing an independent critical voice and strategies in relation to existing artwriting and art history because of personal attitudes and choices within certain historical contexts. This in turn leads the reader to interpret the visual more broadly as the verbal articulation of all visualised encounters in Yourcenar’s fiction, for the study of which parameters have to be defined and a methodology elaborated. Topics, themes and motifs such as the corporeal impact of the visual, the contribution of images supplied by historiography (itself defined in visual terms and not only as a source of visual referents), the picturing of the Other, the working of memory, colour, appearance and dissolution are explored in Yourcenar’s chief works of fiction - mainly Mémoires d ’Hadrien, L ’Œuvre au Noir and Un Homme obscur - via the privileged point of entry supplied by her essays on various artists. The visual emerges as the site of a stmggle in which Yourcenar’s characters try to achieve certainty and power and to overcome their fear of dispossession. Its investigation also demonstrates the subversive and liberating potential of the verbal-visual relationship in the act of reading since it often results in challenging Yourcenar’s ostensible project. Reading the visual thus develops into a method of enquiry which not only suits the little studied corpus of Yourcenar’s essays but also empowers readers to extend their interpretation of her major texts and can even hope to contribute to the study of representation. Ill TABLE OF CONTENTS Illustrations iv Abbreviations v Introduction 1 1. The Triumph of Metamorphosis: Essays on the Visual Arts 14 I From Innsbruck to Ravenna 15 II The writer in exile: "Une exposition Poussin à New York" 21 III Dreams and waking thoughts: on Dürer and Ruisdael 47 IV Chenonceaux's mistresses and the portrait of Henri III 61 2. Looking with Hadrien: Memories of Antinoils 69 I Writing Roman history 70 II Looking for Antinous 81 III The melancholic cult of repetition 97 IV A palimpsest of shadows 104 3. Piranesi and the Trace of Zenon 116 I A dialogue with ruins: Yourcenar and Piranesi 117 II Zenon: notes from the underworld 133 III The prism of colour 153 4. Still lives: Un Homme obscur and "Deux Noirs de Rembrandt" 169 I Preliminary 170 II Representing Nathanael: textual pictures in Un Homme obscur 173 III The sacred and the profane: picturing love and Prince Aldobrandini's joke 177 IV Piranesi and the sinking of the printing press 191 V Rembrandt's vision: the secrets of painting 200 VI The anatomy lessons of existence 208 VII Seascape and the blues 214 Conclusion 228 Bibliography 232 IV ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Poussin, La Sainte Famille à la Baignoire (1650), oil on canvas, 100 x 132,5 cm (Cambridge, Mass., Fogg Art Museum ). 31 2. Poussin, La Crucifixion (1645-6), oil on canvas, 148,5 x 218,5 cm (Hartford, Conn., Wadsworth Atheneum). 35 3. Poussin, Le Déluge (1660-4), oil on canvas, 118 x 160 cm (Paris, Louvre). 36 4. Poussin, La naissance de Bacchus (1657), oil on canvas, 123 x 179 cm (Cambridge, Mass., Fogg Art Museum). 39 5. Poussin, Echo et Narcisse (1627-30), oil on canvas, 74 x 100 cm (Paris, Louvre). 40 6. Dürer, Dream Vision (1525), watercolour on paper, 30 x 43 cm (Vienna, Kunsthistorische Museum). 49 7. Ruisdael, The Jewish Cemetery (c. 1653), oil on canvas, 84 x 95 cm (Dresden, Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen). 56 8. Piranesi, Views of Rome (c. 1748-1778, 400/410 x 540/545 mm): Hadrian's Villa, Tivoli, Canopus (Exterior). 109 9. Piranesi, Views of Rome: Hadrian's Villa, Tivoli, Canopus (Interior). I ll 10. Piranesi, Views of Rome: Coliseum. 124 11. Piranesi, Views of Rome: Arch of Constantine (with Coliseum). 125 12. Piranesi, Views of Rome: Coliseum (Interior). 126 13. Piranesi, Views of Rome: Coliseum. 129 14. Piranesi, Prisons, 2nd state (1761, 410 x 550 mm), VII. 137 15. Piranesi, Prisons, 2nd state, VI. 142 16. Piranesi, Prisons, 2nd state, VIII. 143 17. Rembrandt, Two Blacks (1661), oil on canvas, 78 x 64.5cm (The Hague, Mauri tshuis). 202 18. Poussin, Vénus et Adonis (c. 1630), oil on canvas, 75 x 100 cm (Providence, Rhode Island School of Design). 220 ABBREVIATIONS The abbreviations given here are used in the footnotes and follow the form standardized by the Bulletin de la Société Internationale d'Etudes Yourcenariennes, Tours, Université de Tours (henceforth Bulletin de la SIEY) from June 1994 onwards: OR: Œuvres romanesques EM: Essais et Mémoires MCA: La Mort conduit l'attelage DR: Denier du rêve NO: Nouvelles orientales MH: Mémoires d'Hadrien, suivi des "Carnets de notes des Mémoires d'Hadrien" ON: L'Œuvre au Noir HO: Un Homme obscur SS: Les Songes et les Sorts SBI: Sous bénéfice d'inventaire SP: Souvenirs pieux AN: Archives du Nord QE: Quoi? L'Eternité TGS: Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur F: Feux FF: Fleuve profond, sombre rivière CL: La Couronne et la Lyre BG: Blues et Gospels VC: La Voix des choses PE: En pèlerin et en étranger TP: Le Tour de la prison INTRODUCTION In hospital in Maine in 1985, Marguerite Yourcenar was handed a small piece of malachite, black-grey, smooth and cold. She considered its age and provenance, marvelling at the route which had brought the stone from the mountains to her hands. Weak from fatigue, she lost hold of the object, which fell to the floor and broke into further, less even pieces. “La voix des choses” was the response of her companion, reiterated and reported to us by Yourcenar*. For a writer so passionately preoccupied by the visual in all its guises, this equanimity is distinctive and engaging. In her search for a voice as a writer, Yourcenar wrote regularly on the visual arts, eager to establish her vision and independence. In the study of her voice presented in this thesis, the hold of writing on the visual is assertive, poignant, liberating, and at times possessive and insecure. There are many essays by Yourcenar on the visual arts and these constitute a privileged corpus of her writing. The range of her interests is extensive. She wrote principally on the Hofkirche at Innsbruck, Michelangelo, the murals of Ravenna, Poussin, Piranesi, Dürer, Ruisdael and Rembrandt. These essays form the core of her writings on the visual arts and will therefore be discussed in detail during this thesis. While the presence of the visual arts in her work has been widely acknowledged in Yourcenar studies, the uses of art, architecture and sculpture in her fiction and non-fiction have in fact received little critical attention. The essays on the visual arts have been studied in terms of thematic development and a beginning has been made into looking at the connections between her essays and her fiction, including the employment of the visual arts in the latter. This thesis attempts to make up for this neglect and also to follow in the wake of the more adventurous examples of Yourcenar * VC, p. 7. 2 criticism. The aim here is to avoid two tendencies. One prevailing approach, while often providing much information about Yourcenar's detectable working practice, remains immanent to her own declarations about her work. This form of criticism has in turn been accompanied by a second problematic trend: there have been too many conferences recently on themes in her work. So many papers on death, art, universality, origins, margins, the Mediterranean world and civilizations, myth and history do no more than summarize the "arguments" of the texts, promoting a discourse which sets up its findings as a steady and increasingly monumental referent in Yourcenar studies. In such work, challenges to the posited Yourcenarian perspective have not been common. However, there have been some books and many articles offering alternatives to the simplistically signified discourse of such conference papers; this thesis will attempt to contribute to the fruitful work being done on questions of history, silence, solitude, narcissism, maxims and violence in the work of Yourcenar. Recognizing the modernism of Yourcenar's engagement with the visual arts led us to consider how the visual may be understood more broadly in the context of her fiction, primarily here the historical novelsM ém oires d'Hadrien, L'Œuvre au Noir and Un Homme obscur. This enquiry involves, among other topics, the study of the articulation of historiographical vision, encounter, memory and disappearance. It enables the reader to produce new and creative interpretations of Yourcenar’s major texts. The essays on the visual arts are, therefore, studied in the first chapter of this thesis. The diversity of Yourcenar's interests is reflected in the large number of books on art which she kept at her home in Maine^.