Picasso: Image Writing in Process Author(s): Louis Marin and Greg Sims Source: October, Vol.

65 (Summer, 1993), pp. 89-105 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778765

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Picasso: Image Writing in Process*

LOUIS MARIN
TRANSLATED BY GREG SIMS

Ut pictura Poesis erit; similisque Poesi Sit pictura; refert aemula quaequesororemAlternatquevices et nomina; muta Poesi Dicitur haec, Pictura loquenssolet illa vocari.' -Charles Du Fresnoy, De Arte Graphica, 1667 The oeuvre of Picasso-poet, now somewhat better known thanks to a recent exhibition and some magnificent accompanying work, constitutes an excellent opportunity to join in modern and contemporary discussions of the ancient Horatian formula ut pictura poesis. Over the last thirty years these discussions have assumed various forms, ranging from certain great studies in structuralist poetics-such as Roman Jakobson's article on Blake, Rousseau, and Klee2-to more recent work in the history of rhetoric, in some cases simply as a reaction to structural analysis, in others as a deliberate regression.3 We are told, for example, to expect a French translation of Rensselaer W. Lee's study "Ut pictura poesis," which appeared in the Art Bulletin in 1942(!).4 This is less a sign of the

* This text comes from a talk presented on January 16, 1991, at the Musee Picasso for the colloquium "Picasso poete," organized by the Ecole du Louvre and the Mus6e Picasso to coincide with the exhibition "Le crayon qui parle, Picasso poete." It was first published as "Dans le laboratoire de l'ecriture-figure" in Les Cahiersdu Musee national d'art moderne38 (Winter 1991). 1. "As with Painting, so it will be with Poetry; what holds for one holds for the other; each of the sisters refers to the other as its rival, alternating and exchanging names; thus Poetry is mute, and, as we customarily say, a Painting speaks." 2. Linguistic Inquiry 1 (January 1970), pp. 3-23. 3. See, for example, Marc Fumaroli's study "Muta eloquentia: la representation de l'6loquence dans l'oeuvre de Poussin," in Bulletin de l'histoirede l'artfrancais (1984). 4. Reprinted as Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theoryof Painting (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967). This text has indeed been translated into French by Maurice Block and published by Macula.

OCTOBER 65, Summer1993, pp. 89-105. Translation ? 1993 OctoberMagazine, Ltd., and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

he Gathering of' Nicola.sPoussin. TI the Manna. 1636-37.

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usual inexcusable delays in publication than of a very "fin de siecle" return to the past in theory and method. But apart from these issues of contemporary history and epistemology, the oeuvre of Picasso-poet also provides an opportunity to return to one of the avenues of research suggested by verse 361 of Horace's Ars poetica, devoted to the relations between "text and image," to employ the more than twenty-yearold phrase (still used here and there)-thus, an opportunity to go back over this entire area of research. Under the rubric of a visual semiotics full of youthful ambition and endowed with the self-assurance that came from working under the banner of Saussurian linguistics, it used to be wondered whether it was possible to study the image as a text; yet the reverse-to study the text as an image-seemed not to possess the same theoretical and methodological urgency. "Read the story and the painting," Poussin wrote to Chantelou from Rome in 1637, when sending him his picture La Manne (The Gathering of the Manna). But viewed as the watchword for pictorial research at the time, his injunction had a double meaning. To begin with, it meant studying the relations between a text and a painting-in this case, an ancient text, an episode from Exodus, which Poussin's painting was supposed to illustrate. But it also meant asking how, beyond simple questions of iconography, a narrative becomes an image, what requirements specific to the pictorial medium and to visual substance, to visual modes of perception and contemplation of the work, the painter had to fulfill in order "visually" to tell the story that constituted the subject of the work; it meant inquiring into the constraints imposed on the painter, constraints stemming from the most general categorizations of space and time and of their representation, operative at that precise time and place in history and culture, a series of laws and norms governing the painter's creative inventiveness, as well as the beholder's contemplation of the work. Nor could the study of the relations between text and image be confined to the notion of "illustration" of the text by the image, however complex the

Picasso: Image Writing in Process

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processes involved in illustration might otherwise be. One also had to ask, and just as imperiously, what text could emerge from an image, whether it was possible to read an image like a text, and what the conditions were that differentiated such readings? Was it possible to have the image produce a discourse of the image and no longer simply on the image? An attentive study of Poussin's letter to Chantelou suggests that the Master thought such a "reading" possible: "Read the story and the picture to see whether everything is appropriate to the subject." And he adds a remark that, in my view, points to something like a generative model of both composition and reading: "The first seven figures on the left-hand side will tell you exactly what I mean, and all the rest is of the same order." In short, a whole problematic of the description and interpretation of works of art was to be elaborated, making it possible to avoid running aground on the twin reefs of painting's "ineffability"-at worst a source of pure drivel, at best a discourse of impressions or a simple veneer based on linguistic models that had never been formulated with painting in mind; thus, a problematic of the text of the image, the discourse of the painting, which had to construct the concepts that made each of them possible, operative. the story and the The relations of the text and the image-"read painting"-this was the first way of understanding Poussin's injunction, and of putting it into practice. But there was another way, which involved studying the text in the image or painting, or the other way around, studying the image (or the painting) in the text, the intertwining of text and image where the text forms the texture of and in the image, where it textualizesthe image, and the image constitutes an icon with and in the text, thus iconicizingit. Hence inscriptions, captions, signatures, letters, marks, signs are mixed and articulated in specific ways with figures, forms, strokes, patches of color in the image, painting, engraving, or drawing. Or the other way around, where images, illustrations, maps, plans, diagrams, outlines, and other figures in the center, the margin, or on the verso of a page of writing effectively "work" the printed or written text, and put it to work in the memory and the imaginary, perhaps below the threshold of the artist's conscious control. And not to forget the middle or the vignettes, tailpieces, which are so many beginning of a book-frontispieces, figurative signs of these articulations, so many images that punctuate the written text with figures, beyond or below the level of the adventitious system of punctuation. Such images "figure" a certain form of the properly textual spacing of the text, while displacing its properly graphic configuration, opening up new avenues of meaning in the very form of the written expression and, through variations and transformations in this form, provoking unprecedented meaningeffects, or meaning as an effect. In short, as one of the privileged domains of the semiotics of the visual, the youthful semiology of the 1960s proposed these hybrid objects where a linguistic message and an iconic form are not simply juxtaposed, but cohabit "symbiotically" in remarkable, concrete entities in which the iconic invests the

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linguistic in the form and substance of its expression and its content, or the other way around, where the linguistic invests the iconic on all four of its levels. Thus, in Matteo di Pasti's medallion of Alberti, there is a complex, undecidable, signifying interaction between the legend, which was nothing more than a phatic Quid tur formula, and the very disturbing figure of a winged eye, spurting strange flames. Or a certain Vanitas or Still Life by Stosskopf, where on an envelope one can make out the name of the Antwerp merchant, a friend of the painter, to whom the picture was addressed, evokes, for a modern spectator, a small work by Klee depicting an envelope addressed to Kandinsky, pursuing him across Europe, as suggested by the crossed-out names of the various towns on the envelope, a work in which Klee plays back and forth between "text and image," a decisive ambivalence that Jasper Johns explores in Flag. As proof that these questions remain current, I need only cite the existence British of a journal whose very title institutionalizes this problematic as a veritable discipline in the history and theory of art,5 or a recent issue of an excellent review of contemporary art in Paris, entitled L'art et les mots,6whose theoretical underpinnings lie in work done in the 1960s, although it is never mentioned, perhaps because, in the headiness of the questions they pose and the ingenuity of their answers, the critics in question were simply unaware of it. This symbiosis of writing and figure actually has the immense advantage of allowing semiotic research in the domain of the visual arts to escape naivete, if not the overweening arrogance of a direct application of principles and rules of reading to images and paintings. By their very existence, such objects stand in the way of their being semiotically deducedfrom universal elements of signification. Better still, these strange and familiar objects of "text and image" constitute, in themselves, a critical experiment on just such an a priori application and deduction, as well as a critical experiment on the notions of plastic sign, pictorial vocabulary, figurative syntax, and a grammar of styles. What I'm suggesting is that such objects allow us to discern the metaphorical values of these critical notions, and to determine the conditions of their appropriate use more exactly-metaphorical values, values of displacement, conditions of use, with a critical awareness of this displacement. These symbiotic text-image/image objects manifest a reciprocal labor of the linguistic and writing [ecriture-figure] the iconic, a kind of work to be understood in the strict physical sense as the product of a force times its displacement. The critical experiment that the inherent creativity of these legible-visible text-images or image writings makes possible consists in measuring these displacements of the linguistic and the iconic as rigorously as possible in order to "evaluate the forces"-in the Nietz-

5. The first issue of the London journal Word and Image, A Journal of Verbal/VisualInquiry (January-March 1985) was devoted to Ut pictura poesis. 6. I am referring to an issue of the Parisian journal Artstudio(no. 15, 1989).

Stosskopf.Basket of (lasses and Pate. 1644.

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JasperJohns. Flag. 1954.

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schean and Deleuzian sense-that generate them, through letters, words, strokes, traces, lines, figures, splotches, hatchings, and configurations. phrases, Thus the critical experiment in which these symbiotic objects engage semiological research refers to the creative experience of which they are at once the testing ground, the guarantors, and the products. One of the goals of this research would perhaps be to produce a theoretical and conceptual formulation of this critique of the creative experience, with the proviso that "critique" be understood in its strict Kantian sense: to the keen observer, such works would reveal the conditions of the use of language and discourse applied to the work of art, as well as the limits of such use-thus, a critical experiment, a creative experience, a semiological and semantic labor. It is in order to evoke all these terms at once with respect to Picasso-poet (his recently published Writings)that d'ecritureI am venturing the expression "image writing in process" [laboratoire figure]. It is worth dwelling a moment longer on these premises of theory and method, with two examples-one of writing, the other of painting-where the reciprocal workings of writing and image, the forces of displacement at work in this creative-critical experiment, are unveiled. The first example is a 1935 "writing-gesture" by Picasso. The second, sixteen years earlier, is a painting by Paul Klee. On November 20, 1935, after having noted the date, Picasso writes:

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Picasso: Image Writing in Process

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I use this example simply in order to analyze the meaning-effect that results from the intrusion of a letter-figure or a figure-letter in a written text, in this case, "4": a "monogram," made up of the first two letters of a name. The letterfigure, the monogram, hides the name, sealing it in its combination, while still revealing the matrix of production, here "M" and "T" articulated in a very singular manner. "M. T.," or Marie-Therese Walter, was Picasso's companion at the time. The letter-figure appears exactly in the middle of the sentence: six words precede it, and six come after it; yet it does not occupy the visual and graphic center. The final word "joie" dominates the whole with the value of a signature, reinforced by the arabesque pen stroke that underscores it with a virulent flourish. First remark: an exact transcription reveals the strange arrangement of the lines, which must have been deliberate, since Picasso would have had space enough on the paper to write the sentence out on the basis of its "meaning" and its syntactic articulations, as in, for example: Flower sweeter than honey [Fleur plus douce que le miel] (M,) you are my fiery joy. [(M,) tu es monfeu dejoie.] We thus unearth a dual segmentation. Onto the "expected" one shown in this latter example is superimposed another, shown in the first, which plays with and works on the latter in the written space. This second reading places "Flower," "honey," and "fire" at the beginning of the three graphic lines, the third of which is very short, since the word 'joy" is moved over to the right, in the position of a signature ("I, Joy"). Flower-honey-fire, second remark: as we know, honey comes from flowers, the pollen gathered by bees; it is sweetness itself. Hence the surprise of the "hyperbolic" inversion, since here it is the flower, from which honey is made, that is sweeter than the honey that comes from it. At the same time, the semantic affinity of sweetness that links flowers and honey is opposed to the burning fire, a fire whose burns are treated with honey. Over and above "honey," we have a semantic opposition between flower and fire; but graphically, the words are "wedded" to each other, since all that separates "flower" [fleur] from "fire" [feu], and vice versa, is a single letter, "1." Third remark: W, M.-T., Marie-Therese Walter. The "M" is an inverted "W," the "W" coming from the name Walter, Marie-Therese's patronymic. By adding on to it and inverting it, the letter-figure develops into Marie-Therese Walter. The "T"(herese) is planted in the "M"(arie)and the "W"(alter)is inverted into an "M," and a "T" planted between the two legs of the "M"-just as the bee raids the flower to make honey. The letter is the explosion of Pablo's fiery love in the flower of Marie-Therese, sweeter than honey. Fourth remark: the "T" is also the torero's sword planted between the bull's horns, or the cross on Golgotha placed between the two thieves, a cruci-

Paul Klee. Villa R. 1919.

fixion that Picasso freely derides by placing Marie (Madeleine) and Christ side by side on the "T" (the cross), in a profane blasphemy. Fifth remark: the letter-figure "M"is also Toi and Moi, You and Me united in the same fiery joy, a brief love poem addressed to M.-T. W., Marie-Therese Walter, "you are .. ." [tu es]. Now, the "T" also graphically underlies the "F" of "flower" (a flower that is already You [Toi], Therese), before being planted in the "M" of Marie. But it is also found in the word "are" (ets): it is "T" [t'es] in what "you are" [tu es], thus cutting in two the being that "you are" [tu es]. In this sense, the monogram as a letter-figure or as letter of the figural is everything at once, as Kant wrote, the best approximation of the schema of pure imagination, and the very letter of the unconscious in the graphic system, realized in the short form of a word-poem that-literally-"makes," "performs" love. The second example is a small painting by Paul Klee entitled The Villa R (1919). Here the movement is reversed: we are dealing with a painting, not with the writing of a poem or a song. To begin with, we have an iconic ensemble that invests the letter "R," a consonant that can only be pronounced with a vowel. And yet there is no vowel: the letter is mute, unless the picture as a whole gives voice to it. The painting depicts a landscape with a river or road running through it, heading off into the background, alongside a villa. The letter "R," in red, is placed on the landscape so that it neutralizes the impression of depth, in particular that created by the road or river. Placed in the transparent plane of representation, it turns the picture into a play, a show, which is further suggested by the small section of curtain in the top right-hand corner. The whole painting becomes ideogrammatical: the letter makes it tend toward writing, toward the planar, as if it were painted in this first plane, thus imposing an opacity on its transparency. But at the same time, there is an inverse tension at work, where the picture actually strips the letter of its literality, converting it into a "walking" figure thanks to the "legs" of the "R" that seemingly deviates from the road or river to cut across the fields. The Klee example-and any number of others could be used-shows us

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how the intrusion of a letter into an iconographic ensemble constitutes a critical experiment on this ensemble to the extent that it brings to light the very conditions of representation: the letter is an operator, a catalyst (to speak the language of the laboratory) of opacity, blocking the mimetic qualities of the representation. The letter or printed character (in uppercase Roman type) is no longer the conventional transcription of a phoneme: the "R" has become diaphanous, a mimetic representation of a walking figure. On the basis of these historically different examples (but both of which are nonetheless modes of experimenting with or working on writing and figures), it is worthwhile elucidating the two key, complementary notions of opacity and transparency of the sign and representation, the philosophical lineaments of which can be found clearly traced out in the modern age. For the classical thinkers, thought as a whole is a sign. Thus, according to the logicians of PortRoyal: "To conceive a thing is simply to view that thing as it presents itself to the mind. For example, we are conceiving when we represent to ourselves a sun, an earth, a tree, thought, being, a circle, or a square, but form no explicit judgment about the thing. The form by which we represent a thing to ourselves is called an idea."7 The idea is a sign or, in other words, a thing that represents something else. We know the outside world through the intermediary of signs called "ideas." But the functioning of signs has a paradoxical aspect. For example: when I read, I am not aware of the characters on the page, I am aware only of the ideas represented by the character-words, yet I only have access to these ideas through the intermediary of signs. But, inversely, if I direct my attention to the characters themselves, I rapidly lose track of what they represent. The functioning sign is at once absent and present, transparent and opaque: when the Port-Royal logicians write that "a thing can be considered both as a thing and as a sign: as thing, warm ashes hide the fire; as sign, they reveal the fire,"8 they reveal, within representation itself, the double characteristic of the sign's transparency and opacity. Theoretical experimentation on texts and "images," signs and representations, writing and figures, which is what this second-generation semiotics consists of, would devote its rigorous attention to problems that stem from the opacity of the sign and representation, in particular the materiality of the various substances of expression, according to the specificity of their organization (the voice, writing, drawing, color, etc.), and the effects of this materiality on the imagination, the sensibilities, and the pleasures of sight and sound. "Tone of voice has an effect even on the wisest," notes Pascal, echoing Montaigne. Or, to employ the theoretical discourse of Renaissance painting, that of Brunelleschi

7. Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, Logic, or the Art of Thinking, trans. James Dickoff and Patricia James (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1964), p. 29. 8. Ibid., p. 47 (translation slightly modified).

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and Alberti, the picture is a window on the world, and, thanks to its transparency, it constitutes a true representation, but for this to be so, the picture also has to serve as a screen between the spectator and the world, a material medium and a surface on which the illusory impression of space and depth is constructed, a plane on which the figures are able to deploy their story. And artists at the time exploited the material medium, the surface and the plane, and more generally all such nonmimetic elements of representation, in order to invest them with political, social, and theological meanings that representation, in itself, could not convey. Every sign, every representation-and this is the very definition of its opacity-designates itself, signifies itself, reflects itself: the sign and representation present themselves while representing something, and, as a result of this reflexive dimension, all signs, all representations refer to a practical power of expression, or, to put it in Kantian terms, they refer to an "I think" [je pense] that accompanies all representations, which would need to be reformulated today as "it thinks" [fa pense], an "intention" that traverses every enunciation and all figuration, and to which signs and figures bear witness by their very existence. Corresponding to the strain put on the representational transparency of the image by its presentational or reflexive opacity is the strain put on the representative transparency of discourse, the text, the sentence, the word, and the sign, all the more transparent in that they are by their very nature conventional and institutional: thus, an "immediate" transparency put under pressure by the opaque limits of discourse. Haven't rhetoricians and poeticians from Gorgias to Fontanier studied these figures of discourse in the poets and orators: hypotyposis, harmonism, subjectioad aspectum,and alliteration, which, as one of them puts it, paint things in such a lively, energetic, animated fashion that we seem to "see" them as we listen to the words? But who does not also realize that, if periods and strophes, sentences and verses, words, consonants and vowels paint or depict things, if language makes things visible, it is through the force that traverses it, and which is articulated by these same hierarchical organizations-a force that displaces, so to speak, the instituted transparency. It is through the flesh of the voice that signs and letters, words and sentences convey information, what Poussin, along with sixteenth-century Italian musical theorists, called the sound of words, on the analogy of the properly pictorial modes of colors and the arrangement of figures. Below or above the level of words and sentences, the force of these figures of language traces in the body of the work-whether pictorial or linguistic-the opaque syntax of desire that animates the painter or the orator and his pathetic effects, of which the beholder's or listener's body becomes in turn the locus. Semiotic theoretical experimentation thus aims to account for the effects of these forces of opacity, for the presentation of representation, effects in which the imaginary identifications of the subject take shape.

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It goes without saying that these symbiotic "text-image" objects constitute concrete creative experiments with the various types and modes of relation between the substances and forms of content and expression in different genres: the studio of Picasso-poet thus becomes a laboratory, experimenting with the linking together of heterogeneous elements and with the production of their effects. No doubt we need to recognize-in order to problematize and theorize it-the considerable distance that separates the semiotic or theoretical laboratory from the artistic laboratory of writing and image, the gap between the two forms of experimentation. I shall come back to this point. In the artist's laboratory, "it thinks" [ca pense]. Art "thinks" in the will and expressive intention of the poet-painter, but this thought, in all its forms and accomplishments, will always constitute itself with and in meaning, in accordance with the three paradigms of properly semiotic significance, aesthetic sensation, and, lastly, pathetic sentiments-a meaning of which the work or product, from painting to poetry, is the incarnation in the fullest sense, verging on the theological. Let us examine one of these complex works by Picasso as an example of such "creative" experimentation. The example in question ostensibly involves only writing, but it "plays"on this writing, works on it-in other words, displaces it through a desiring force-in a repetition understood as a variation of the same and a transformation of difference: I have in mind the series of eleven pieces II neige au soleil [It is snowing in the sun], dated in the lower left corner "Paris, January 10, XXXIV," and numbered from I to XI. What is the protocol of analysis-by which I mean the theoretico-semiotic experimentation-of this work (or play) of writing? One of the exhibition organizers, Christine Piot, neatly evokes it in a single sentence: "The phrase 'January 10, 1934' shows that linear (temporal) writing can be developed graphically (spatially)." And she cites other examples taken from the group of Royan drawings from 1939-40, or from the portraits of Sabartes from February 1935. It is best to conduct the research as the study of a process of variation in an identical syntagm that, grammatically speaking, constitutes a complete meaning: "I1 neige au soleil." It is this process of variation in the writing (in the sense of its graphic inscription) that is progressively subtended by a mechanism of transformation, where writing becomes a form of drawing, and the sequence of written texts is transformed into a figure, or rather a visual, graphic configuration. The study of the process of variation here bears on a semiotic ensemble deriving from the same substance and form of expression and content, language. On the other hand, paradoxically, language will prove to be at once the producer and the product of a mechanism of transformation that itself involves two heterogeneous semiotic ensembles (text-image; writing-figure; the linguisticiconic) differing in the substance and form of their expression and content. Our theoretical experimentation in the Picasso laboratory should seek not just to describe the process and the mechanism, along with their successive opera-

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Pablo Picasso. II neige au soleil. 1934.

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Picasso: Image Writing in Process

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tions in the eleven experimental moments or "essays" [epreuves],9but it should also seek to elicit the rules governing the process of variation and the principles behind the mechanism of transformation, principles that govern both the process and the mechanism-in other words, the structure of the work II neige au soleil-the eleven sheets of Arches paper (26 cm x 32.5 cm) on which is (are) written in Indian ink, in French, the sentence(s) "il neige au soleil." But it is no here I would like to underscore the gap between the theoless obvious-and retical and the artistic laboratories-that semiotic, analytic, theoretical experimentation has as its sole aim to raise the "thought" of the work to the status of a concept, or to formulate as rules of variation and principles of transformation the dynamic of repetition (of identity and difference), the creative dynamic of writing and the graphic that produces the work. This raises immense theoretical and practical problems; I shall limit myself to providing a few hypothetical indications for research. First remark: throughout the group of "essays," the sentence is certainly written in a "linear" fashion, but in the first one, the writing is set out in three lines-"il neige / au / soleil"; in the second, it occupies two lines: "il neige / au soleil"; in the third, four lines-"il / neige / au / soleil"; in the fourth, three lines again, but differing from the first-"il / neige / au soleil." Like language, the sentence is a quantified entity, and iconicity is produced in the "poetic" sentence when the marks of quantity in language and drawing join to create a single effect-in other words, when linguistic quantities become lines, surfaces, cuts and breaks, frames and borders, which comes about through the mediation of writing. To return to our "sentence," the same sentence is certainly written in a linear form, but it is composed of four elements, four discrete entitieswords-which are in turn composed of letters: two, five, two, six. Their grouping into lines is organized on the paper by defining the surfaces, the different divisions and various framings. Second remark: the writing is unquestionably linear and linearly temporal, but through writing and repeating the same phrastic utterance, in its breaks and spacings, its positionings, correlations, parallelisms, enjambments,even its permutations or displacements of smaller units in the written body of the phrastic ensemble and the subensembles of words, the line is fragmented into incessant variations, spatial combinations, and positionings, and, as a result, the time of phrastic linearity is also fragmented, shattered; the successive, linear, homogeneous time comprised of a string of moments or "now's" arranged in a straight line, the metaphysical imaginary of Western time, is gone. This linearity

9. Marin is exploiting the polysemy of the French word "6preuve" to describe this series of writing-drawings: its meanings include "trial," "test," "proof" (as in "page-proof"), and "ordeal," all of which are relevant to his analysis. I have opted for the somewhat archaic "essay" as the most appropriate English equivalent [trans.].

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is doubly shattered, first within each of the "essays" through the written enunciation of the utterance, not just in terms of the lines, but also in terms of the "positionings" on the surface and in terms of the "breaks" and "spacings"; and it is shattered a second time over the entire oeuvre of the eleven sheets, through the repetition of the same utterance, "il neige au soleil," in-literally, spatially -different situations and circumstances of enunciation. This produces an epiphanic, shattered time, the time of a brusque and sudden coincidence of eleven kairoi, eleven opportunities, each of which concentrates all time in the present of each "essay." And, as an ensemble, they construct a time of writing transfigured by its variations and transformation. Third remark: "il neige au soleil" is a temporal utterance made in the present. This utterance is made in the present: (1) in the grammatical sense of tense, the present indicative; (2) in the semantic sense of time in English, the present of enunciation of an event; and lastly (3) in the cosmic sense of weather, which marks the meteorological presence of a physical oddity, the conjunction of snow and sun. It is this physical heterogeneity, this cosmic oxymoron, or, inversely, it is this poetic figurality, or baroque rhetoric become cosmic meteor, that the coupling of these heterogeneous entities, writing and drawing, seeks to capture or produce for reading and the gaze. How do the form of the expression in its written transcription and the form of the content in its semantic articulation, if they do not actually coincide, at least reciprocally produce each other? Better still, how do the incessant variations in the written expression, by producing the content of incessant meaning-effects, not only allow us to see and understand the variations in the cosmic meteor (the referent) signified by the sentence "il neige au soleil," but also give us access to the mechanism of the reciprocal transformation of writing and figure? Which brings me to a fourth remark: the poetic and meteorological oxymoron "snow-sun" repeats, graphically and vocally, the relation of contrast that defines the figure. The two terms, verb-noun in the first case, noun in the second, graphically include (in initial position after the first letter n, for "neige," and in final position before the last letter 1, for "soleil") the same composite of ei that, on some of the sheets, is written in an absolutely identical fashion. On the other hand, considered vocally rather than visually, appealing to the ear rather than the eye, the e of "neige" (nez) and the ej of "soleil" (solej)are opposed as vowel and diphthong with a sonorous element in common, the e: there is thus repetition of the same and of difference through the two categoremes of the phrase "neige-soleil," whose graphic quantities are almost identical, down to the letter-five for "neige" and six for "soleil"-but whose phonic quantities are very different, going from the simple to the dual: nez I solej. Fifth remark: pursuing this reflection on the three senses of temps(tense, time, and weather) and the functioning, on these three levels, of the cosmic oxymoron, we detect graphic variations in the "il" of the first word, which in the first essay is aligned with "neige," a verb in the third person singular, present

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tense, of which it is the impersonal subject, a scriptural semantic group (il neige), but in the subsequent essays it becomes isolated. Through its scriptural disconnectedness, "il" points to the sudden apparition of cosmic being, subsequently determined only by the physical meteor "neige au soleil" and by the qualifications that these terms in the position of verb and circumstantial adverb introduce on the semantic plane. I should point out that the theoretical rewriting I am performing on Picasso's own rewriting draws on Benveniste's analysis of the kernel of all phrastic utterances, an analysis that essentially reiterates that of the classical grammarians: "The bird is flying" [l'oiseau vole] is rewritten as "it (is), the flying bird" [il est, l'oiseau volant], where "flying bird" is, so to speak, placed in apposition to an impersonal "it is" [il est], an epiphany of being in language, that is then articulated by various empirical qualifiers and determiners. I should also point out that, in the final essays, the "il" is in a sense gradually absorbed, first by the "S," then by the "0" of "soleil." Sixth remark: in light of what has just been said, the analysis should be pursued by examining the graphic variations in the letters that make up the words in "il neige au soleil" in order to study the connections and relations that these variations create between the different words in each essay, and the meaning-effects that they produce on the level of the series as a whole, although an exhaustive analysis is clearly out of the question. Suffice it to say that the "S" and "0" of "soleil" are gradually given more prominence and expressive force: like an immense accolade, in the fifth essay the "S" ends up completely incorporating the syncategoreme "au," the semantic connector, syntactic (syntagmatic) and graphic link for the oxymoron "neige-soleil," then cuts into the verbnoun "neige" between the "n"and the "e," crosses the lower part of"il," traverses the "a" of "au," and finally frames the entire sentence, forming a grand, arabesque-like tangent to the "0" of "Soleil." As for the "O," the only one in the sentence, it very quickly abandons its position and its place as the second letter in "soleil" in the first essay, gradually acquiring a quasi-independence or autonomy, or at least a conspicuous "pregnancy" that, in the eleventh and last essay, ends up encompassing all of "neige au." To conclude, I shall try to describe the final rewriting of "il neige au soleil": in the center, we have the solar circle of the "0" that has absorbed "neige au" and cuts through the "1"of "il." This circle is framed on the left by the whip-like accolade of the "S" and on the right by the long, swan-like line of the "L," which ends, in turn, in the flourish of a single, upward pen stroke: "eil," outside the "0," parergon of the solar "0," which is like an external-ironic -graphic echo, bursting into song, so to speak, with the dot on the "i"so clearly marked, echoing the "ei" of "neige," stifled by the "n" and the "ge," and whose tractus fades into evanescence in the clarity, distinction, and pregnancy of the "O" (see my fourth remark). Added to this is a graphic variation confirming the injunctions of the voice and writing. The reader will have noticed that, on the level of the writing, the text literally begins and ends with "il": "il (neige au

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sole)il;" but whereas the first "il" is a word, the first in the sentence, the second "il" is integrated into the last word in the sentence (soleil). The spacing of "il / neige" as opposed to the liaison of "soleil"clearly underscores this, an opposition confirmed by the phone and the ear with the disappearance of the written rhymes: the phonetically initial "il" is undoubtedly "il," while the final "il" disappears in the diphthong "eil." One need only examine the first two essays of "il neige au soleil" to notice that, in the graphic process, the expressive force of the graphic line is powerfully insistent in the writing and the voice, with the poet writing, or rather the poet-draftsman drawing the initial and final "il" identically. It is this expressive force of the drawing tractus that displaces, in every sense of the term, the contour of the writing along with the text's vocal features. These eleven variations on the same sentence, or rewritings in the form of variations, are expressly designed to bring out this expressive force, present but latent from the first essay on, and to reveal the power of the visual, its virtiu, or the work of figurability in writing and speech, in the phone. We can therefore return to the question of repetition (eleven "proofs," as they say in the printing world, eleven "experiments," as they say in physics labs, eleven rewritings, as they say in linguistic circles) in order to focus on the articulation of the series and the cycle, and on the emergence of a properly poetic (or poesic) temporality from the scheme of variation and the mechanism of transformation, a temporality of the visual and the textual, a zoographic temporality (which is how the Greeks described painting), an intensive temporality that is neither successive (i.e., linear-the phrastic or discursive line), nor circular (reproductive of the same-the drawing or the mimetic image), but which, in the same locus and the same utterance, exhibits meaning: this is the epiphany of a force, the advent of a power whose poetic emblem would be the resolution of the initial meteorological oxymoron in the solar triumph of the final essay, which, in their overlapping, integrates snow and sun. The eleven essays can thus be considered as a series of eleven sequences that graphically recount the evolution of the weather, the evolution of this meteor, a snowfall in bright sunlight in Paris on January 10, 1934-an evolution that, in the final analysis, ends with the snow being obliterated in the heat and light of the sun. But, simultaneously, the obstinate repetition (in the musical sense of bassoostinato)of the same tense-the present of "il neige"-turns each occurrence of "il neige au soleil" into a single, unique, always new moment (here I'm quoting Benveniste) in which verbal enunciation, speech, and the referential event coincide: each enunciation of "il neige au soleil" enacts a self-sufficient, complete "now," a moment of pure presence. It is because this enunciation is written down, and because writing ensures the presence, the "nowness," of the utterance on the material medium of the paper that this inscription marks the definitive absence of the event, its disappearance, while simultaneously transforming it, "rebuilding" this absence in the graphic mon-

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ument. It is this monumentality that is signified by the inscription of the place and date ("Paris, January 10, 1934") on the sheet of paper where we find, as the catalog tells us, written in French in Indian ink, the word "undated" [non datee]: thus, not "il a neige au soleil a Paris ce-jour la" [it snowed in the sun in Paris that day], but "il neige au soleil" [it is snowing in the sun]. As a result, the eleven sheets of paper, the repetition of the same sentence eleven times, the scheme of variation that traverses this repetition, and the mechanism of transformation manifested by the eleven variations reveal, on the level of this present tense referring to a present weather, a present-time that I call intensive; it is the time of poesic creation, or, to put it more precisely, that of the pregnancy of the visual in the textual, the eruption of the gaze in the reading of letters, the germination of a cosmic, solar eye in the gray and white flux, the snow of signs.