Theodore Gericault. — ‘Monomaniac of theft’ (circa 1820).
Walking through the streets of Paris this winter, I was haunted by a portrait. It was an unknown man painted around the start of the 1800s, and spread across posters announcing a big Géricault exhibition at the Grand Palais. It was also on the cover of the commemorative catalog — because it was the 200-year anniversary of Théodore Géricault’s birth.
The portrait, which I keep thinking about, was discovered 40 years after the painter’s death at 33, in an attic in Germany with four similar canvasses. Soon afterward, it was offered to the Louvre, which rejected it. In the dramatic setting of The Raft of the Medusa, which had already been hanging in the museum for 40 years, at the time the portrait would have looked relatively nondescript. Yet today it has been chosen to represent Géricault’s entire oeuvre. What changed? How has this slight portrait become so eloquent or, more precisely, so enthralling?
Behind everything Géricault imagined and painted — from his wild horses to the beggars he brought back from London — you detect the same wish: ‘Let me look misery in the face, let me discover some respect within it and, if possible, draw from it some kind of beauty’. Naturally, the beauty Gericault hoped to find required that he turn away from official pieties.
In this he was similar to Pasolini, the film director and poet:
“I force myself to understand everything,
ignorant that I am of any life that isn’t
mine, till, desperate in my nostalgia,
I realized the full experience
of another life; I’m all sympathy
but I wish the road of my love for
this reality would be different, that I
then would love individuals, one by one.”
The portrait on the poster was first named The Mad Assassin, then The Insane Kleptomaniac. Now we call it The Monomaniac of Robbery. No one recalls the real name of the man depicted.
He was interned at the Salpetriere asylum, in the center of Paris. There, Géricault painted ten portraits of people declared insane. Five of these canvases survived. Another is an unforgettable one of a woman. At the Lyon museum, where it is usually exhibited, it was originally called The Hyena of Salpetriere. Today it’s entitled The Monomaniac of Envy.
We can only guess at what pushed Géricault to paint these patients, but his manner of painting clearly shows that he was not interested in their clinical labels. His very brush marks indicate that he knew them and called them by their names. The names of their souls. Names that have since been forgotten.
A decade or two earlier, Goya had painted scenes of locked-up mental patients, who were naked and in chains. For Goya, however, it was their acts that counted, not their interiority. Before Géricault painted his Salpetriere sitters, no one — no painter, doctor, neighbor or parent — had looked as long or as deeply into the face of someone who had been categorized as ‘mad’.
In 1942, the philosopher Simone Weil wrote: ‘The love of the neighbour, made of creative attention, is analogous to genius.’ When she wrote this, she was certainly not thinking about art. ‘The love of our neighbor in all its fullness,’ she said, ‘simply means being able to ask, “What are you going through?” It is knowing that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen in the social category labeled “unfortunate”, but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way.’
Géricault’s portrait of the man with the dishevelled hair, undone collar and eyes unprotected by any guardian angel perfectly represents creative ‘attention’ and embodies the certain gaze to which Weil alludes.
Why does it feel like this painting is haunting the streets of Paris this winter? It’s as though the image of the man with the dishevelled hair were pinching us with two invisible fingers. So what are these fingers?
There are many forms of madness; they are like forms of theater (Shakespeare, Pirandello and Artaud knew this). Madnesss its strength through ‘rehearsals’. Anyone who has found themselves with a friend sinking into madness will be able to identify the feeling of being coerced into ‘playing’ the role of spectator. First you catch sight of a man or a woman alone on stage, and beside them, like a phantom, the inability to explain everyday pain. The man or the woman approaches the phantom, and measures the terrible gulf that separates its words from what they are meant to mean. In fact, this gulf, this abyss, is the pain. And because madness, like nature, abhors a vacuum, it rushes in to fill it. There is longer any distinction between the ‘stage’ and the world, between the ‘game’ and the suffering.
Today, there is a gaping gulf between the real experience of ordinary life on this planet and the public narratives on offer to give meaning to life. Desolation resides in that gulf, much more so than in events. Isn’t that why a third of the French population is prepared to listen to Le Pen? The story he tells — pernicious as it is — seems to correspond better with what is happening in the street. It’s also why so many people fantasize about ‘virtual reality’ in front of their screens. Any available means — from demagogy to onanistic manufactured dreams — will do, as long as the gulf is at last bridged! For in gulfs people lose themselves; in gulfs they lose their minds.
In each of the five portraits Gericault produced at La Salpetriere, the eyes of the model look elsewhere, askance. This is not because they are fixed on a faraway or imaginary object, but because they have learned to avoid seeing what is near them, even in front of them. What is very close causes vertigo, because none of the explanations on hand can ever explain it.
You often come across a similar gaze today, which refuses to land on what is nearest: on trains, in car parks, queues, shopping centres…
In some historical periods madness appears as it really is: a rare and abnormal misfortune. In others — like the period that we have just entered — madness appears to be typical.
This all describes the first of the two fingers with which the image of the man with the dishevelled hair pins us, so to speak. The second finger is compassion in the image. Postmodernists rarely evoke compassion. Still, to bring these two terms together might reassign to things their rightful value.
Throughout history, the majority of revolts have aimed to restore forms of justice long forgotten or disdained. The French Revolution went so far as to proclaim the universal principle of a better future. From that moment on, all political parties, left and right, had to promise that the amount of suffering in the world was being and would be reduced. From there, all misfortune became, to some extent, the echo of hope. Any pain could partly be transcended if experienced as a spur to make new efforts to construct a future where that pain would no longer exist. In this way, misfortune found a historical outlet. Over the course of these last two tragic centuries, even tragedy seemed to hold a promise.
Today, promises have lost all their power. To connect this powerlessness solely to the ‘defeat of communism’ is shortsighted. The phenomena on the market are more far-reaching, and commodities have replaced the future as a source of hope. This hope is doomed, obviously, for those who subscribe to it, which, thanks to inexorable economic logic, excludes the great majority of the global population.
You are starved of historic hope when you face this man on the poster. You consider him to be a consequence. This, in the natural order of things, means that you see him with indifference. You do not know him. He is a madman. He has been dead for more than fifty years. Every day, in Brazil, more than a thousand children die of malnutrition or entirely curable illnesses. They are thousands of kilometers away. There’s nothing you can do.
The image sticks with you. In it there is compassion that refutes indifference and is irreconcilable from any easy hope.
This painting belongs to an extraordinary moment in the history of representation and human consciousness. Before Géricault, no stranger would have dared look into the face of a mental patient with as much attention and pity. A little later, no painter would have executed such a portrait without making it reflect some romantic or modern hope. Like Antigone’s, this portrait’s lucid compassion coexists with its own powerlessness. And these two sentiments, far from being contradictory, reinforce each other in a way that victims can acknowledge, but only the heart can understand.
That, however, shouldn’t prevent us from being clear. Compassion has no place in a universe ruled over by necessity. The laws of necessity offer as few surprises as the laws of gravitation. The human faculty for compassion contradicts this order — and is therefore often assimilated into spirituality. To forget oneself, even for an instant, in order to identify with a stranger and fully recognize him, defies necessity. And this moment of defiance, however small and discreet (even if it only measures 60 x 50cm), liberates a power that cannot be measured by any scale in the natural world. This defiance is not a means, and it has no end. The Ancients knew this well. Antigone says:
“I did not think your edicts strong enough
To overrule the unwritten unalterable laws
Of God and heaven, you being only a man
They are not of yesterday or today, but everlasting.
Though where they came from, none of us can tell.”
The Géricault poster overhangs and haunts the streets of Paris like a ghost. Not the ghost of the man with the disheveled hair, not the specter of Géricault, but that of a particular form of attention that has been marginalized for two centuries. This attention now returns in force, less obsolete by the day, more pressing by the day. That is what the second finger is made of.
Pinched, what will we do? Will we finally wake up?