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ISSUE 29 SLOTH SPRING 2008

The Writing of Stones

MARINA WARNER

Roger Caillois (19131978), polymath, aesthetic philosopher, historian of

science, and social analyst of ritual and belief, was friends with Andr
Breton and a fellow Surrealist; but in 1934 they parted over the Surrealist
commitment to mystery for its own sake: Caillois was an investigator of a
more empirical temper. Cailloiss disagreement with Breton arose when the
two men were shown some Mexican jumping beans: beans that will
suddenly twitch and take a leap into the air. Caillois conjectured that there
was a worm or larva inside them, and he wanted to dissect one to find out;
Breton objected roundly, denouncing Caillois as a low-grade positivist who
refused the marvelous and defaced the poetic by wanting explanationsin
other words, Caillois was of the party that wants to unweave the rainbow.
For Breton, hasard objectifobjective chance or unpredictabilityadmirably
disrupted the harmonious patterns of reason and delivered the mindexpanding stimulus of disorder: convulsive beauty. Caillois wrote a lettre de
rupture to Breton, which confirmed the depth of his quarrel with
Surrealism, declaring that he wanted research and poetry together. He
went on, I want the irrational to be continuously overdetermined, like the
structure of coral; it must combine into one single system everything that
until now has been systematically excluded by a mode of reason that is still
incomplete.1
Three years after he quarreled with Breton, Caillois became one of the
founders, alongside Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris, of the so-called
Collge de Sociologie in Paris, which was dedicated to exploring the nature
of the sacred in society. Though none was a follower of any particular faith,
all three believed in the sacred as a system that exceeded current
understanding of reason and psychologythey were experimental mystics,
mostly renegades from Catholicism. Two years later, Caillois published an
important study of the topic, called LHomme et le Sacr (1939). The three
men were fascinated by magical processes, by cosmology, and by stories
that anthropologists were bringing back from the four quarters of the
globe. The journals and other publications they createdsuch as
Minotaure, Documents, and Cailloiss own Diognereveal a restless and
sometimes prurient probing of other cultures, especially their members
intimacy with altered consciousness, magic rituals, and mysteries of
knowledge. A desire to discover stratagems to accede to worlds beyond the
senses fired their passion for the votive art, dances, and music which
constituted the presence of the sacred.2

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Episode from Ludovico Ariostos Orlando Furioso, painted on stone. Museo Opificio
delle Pietre Dure, Florence.

Tuscan ruin marble. From the collection of Roger Caillois.

Cailloiss difference from Breton expresses very richly a fissure that runs
through magical thinking and becomes more important in the last century
and perhaps this one. The Mexican jumping bean harbors a larva which, by
springing into the air and landing elsewhere, helps to propagate its host.
This marvel belongs to natural as opposed to supernatural magic, but it
possesses the kinetic unpredictability of oracular devices: like the twitching
of a dowsers hazel wand, the quivering intestines of a sacrificed bird, the
Ouija boards sliding glass, even the Chinese fortune-telling fish that curls
up in the palm of your hand to show how passionate you are, it moves to
forces in the universe imperceptible to human senses, and consequently
seems to illuminate a particular destinythe truth-seekers fate. Bretons
uses of enchantment tightened the bond between the self and chance:
Surrealist practices such as automatic writing, projective imagination, and
cadavres exquis doodles enhance subjectivity; these are magical

technologies of the individual self. But Caillois made a different rationalizing

move out of this impasse. In the preface to LeMythe et lHomme in 1938,
he identified two fundamental attitudes of the mind, shamanism,
displaying the power of the individual who struggles against the natural
order of reality, and manism, showing the pursuit through self-abandon of
an identification of self and non-self, consciousness and the external
world.3 This is a very neat linguistic rhyme from two altogether different
roots: shaman from Russian Siberian nomadic culture, and mana from the
Maori concepts of the holy, are both terms introduced into Europe by
nineteenth-century ethnography. For Caillois, the aggressivity and powerhunger of magiciansand religious leadersbelong to shamanism,
whereas mysticism and poetry belong with manism. He further
characterized these different modes of magical thinking as Satanistthe
shamansand, on the other hand, Luciferian, after the angel of light who
wanted knowledge.
Caillois, insisting on cutting open the jumping bean and striking out in his
Luciferian empirical quest for knowledge, was mounting a rescue
operation of magic from the realm of irrational, human imagination,
resisting the inward turn of the uncanny, and relocating magical thinking
out there. There were strong motives for turning magical thinking toward
contemporary scientific inquiry, as discoveries and inventions detected and
harnessed new, impalpable powers. For one thing, Caillois has his
precursors, such as conjurors who early on grasped the potential of new
scientific instrumentsnot least magic lanterns, camera obscuras, and
microscopes. In his letter to Breton, Caillois insisted on the marvellousness
in science: he remonstrated that the newly discovered theories of the atom
had collapsed all earlier thinking about nature; here was a form of the
Marvellous that absolutely required a new philosophy (writing in 1934, he
was being prescient). A little while after the incident with the beans, when
the conflict had acquired a certain moment and fame, Breton explained
that Caillois hadnt understood him. He would not have been opposed to
cutting one open, he said, but he was determined that all the possibilities
that the mystery offered for reverie, dream, and wonder should be
exhausted before doing so.4
It does not follow that the scientific spirit of empirical inquiry runs against
dreaming, and Breton was wrong to think Cailloiss investigative methods
opposed wonder. Material mysticism led Caillois back to magical thinking,
which he expanded further than the Surrealist interest in chance and
coincidence as he probed for insights into the order of things. Caillois was
equally, perhaps even more, fascinated with magic than the Surrealists, but
he wanted to probe what might exist as phenomenally marvelous, beyond
the subjective selfhe was a scholar of the sacred, and from the episode of
the jumping beans onwards, he looked for its character and its workings in
actual phenomena. In this sense he was more of a believerthough not in
a personal god or a religion. Where Breton exalted the perceiver, Caillois
wanted to go beyond these anthropocentric limits. But the distinction
cannot be held hard and fast as a standoff between subjectivity and
objectivity. As Peter Galison has commented on the Rorschach test, prime
trophy of Surrealisms long reach, no account of Rorschach subjectivity
(how we characteristically perceive our world) would be possible without a

concomitant characterization of objectivity (how the world is without that

distortion). We therefore need a joint epistemic project addressing the
historically changing and mutually conditioning relation of inside and
outside knowledge.5 Caillois spent his thinking life trying to work out this
position.
The quarrel with Breton throws light on the survival of ancient wisdom
within the newest scientific processes developed probing and analyzing
matter. Caillois is in fact not the sole participant in this twentieth-century
aesthetic turn of the oracular tradition. His writing grows gradually ever
closer to the precise observation, combined with lyrical delirium, that is
found in the prose and poetry of Paul Valry as well as the poetic
phenomenology of Francis Ponge. Valry, responding to the discovery of the
electromagnetic field, had also found in material phenomena the proof of a
secret, metaphysical order. These new frontiers of knowledge influenced
psychic research, in symbiosis with the invention of new communications
systems.

An eye agate from Uruguay. From the collection of Roger Caillois.

Approaches to the hieroglyphic universe found in the new science of the

seventeenth century offer a perspective on the modern science of the
twentieth, when divination changed direction but did not lose momentum.
Divining processes help define the character of magical thinking: first,
because their prime goal is knowledge, especially of events and outcomes
hidden in timemagical thinking yearns to overcome human limits,
especially the contingencies laid upon us by the physical constraints of the
here and now. Secondly, they posit some power that orders and patterns

phenomena and freights them with significance, if only they could be

rendered legible, scrutable; this order obeys a unifying energy in the
cosmos, which aligns the particular incident or being with a general and
universal order according to a correlation between microcosm and
macrocosm. This kind of system also finds expression in another magical
system, the network of natural correspondences, wrought in a variety of
ways (pictorial resemblance, synaesthetic relations, verbal punning), as in
Baudelaires famous sonnet, influenced by Swedenborg:
Nature is a temple where living pillars
Let sometimes emerge confused words
Belief in invisible lattices of significant meaning leads to a third pillar of
magical thinkingthat some individuals are uniquely gifted to interpret
encrypted messages. Such people are gifted to tune in to the imperceptible
transmissions emanating from phenomena, to sense the presence of hidden
aquifers, pick up the ominous aura in a room before a disaster, or scry the
floating of an egg yolk in water for news of ships at sea. But this third
principle, while warranting the importance of seers, clairvoyants, magi,
sibyls, mediums, and channelers, is not indispensable to the penetrating,
oracular optic: sometimes, like the guard on the battlements of Elsinore,
anyone and everyone can see the ghost and hear its dreadful warning.
Materialist mystics, among whom I count Caillois, do not search for selfknowledge, nor for foreknowledge of their destiny, the sirens secret; but
they emphatically investigate hidden meanings and scan the deepest
horizons of time into infinity: the world turns into an inexhaustible book
written in hieroglyphs. They apply the occult wisdom of Renaissance
Neoplatonists and their magical cosmology, linking microcosm and
macrocosm according to principles which inspired Romantic metaphysics,
above all in Germany: Goethes anti-Newtonian critique and his counterEnlightenment conviction that the superstitions and folklore of a culture
contained intimations of deep knowledge have gained rather than lost
ground. Superstition, wrote the German poet, actually only seizes false
means in order to satisfy a genuine need. It is therefore neither so
reprehensible as it is considered, nor so infrequent in so-called enlightened
ages and among enlightened people.6 He continued, We all walk in
mysteries. We are surrounded by an atmosphere about which we still know
nothing at all. We do not know what stirs in it and how it is connected with
our intelligence. This much is certain, under particular conditions the
antennae of our souls are able to reach out beyond their physical
limitations.7 The new horizons of geology, biology, and, above all, physics
and mathematics beckoned to literary imaginations, where ancient ideas of
magical correspondences, action at a distance, and fields of energy were
re-activated and refreshed.
Magical thinking in the nineteenth century consequently involved rational
attempts at decipherment; its underlying impulse towards intelligible,
cogent meaning paradoxically moved it into the traditional terrain of the
occult, of sorcery, and shamanism; all its wealth of ingenuity in coming up
with irrational measures remained directed at turning the world into a sign
system. To the triad of signs set forth by C. S. Peirceindex, image,

diagrama fourth form of picturing could be added: the cipher or enigma.

In order to decode such signs, various magical principles come into play: a
trust in chance as a revelatory organizational tool (a throw of the dice); a
belief in microcosmic-macrocosmic relations, which holds that underlying
unifying forces impart significance to the appearance of marks and patterns
in nature, in phenomena such as cloud formations, figured stones, and
spontaneous images; and thirdly, the view that these forces enjoy a
different relation to time itself, a magical relation which creates coincidence
across time and space, and meaningful correspondences. All three
principles return in the twentieth-century aesthetic of organic natural
symbolism.

A septarian stone from Germany. From the collection of Roger Caillois.

As Nature abhors a vacuum, so does the mind resist meaninglessness; it

invents stories to explain haphazard incidents, and to provide reasons and
origins; the amorphous, the inchoate, the formless, have beckoned
irresistibly to the shaping powers of thought and imagination. Humans are
polyglot creatures of language; signs attract meanings, and symbols stick
to forms, verbal and visual. Pattern, design, system, significations
meaning has accrued to every sort of natural phenomenon. The Rorschach
test represents the most common and familiarscientific!use of icasms,
applying for medical ends the idea that the human mind can make sense of
forms without inherent meanings, and that the signification the observer
discovers there conveys genuine insight into the observers own character
and fate. Here the seers role plays back and forth between the two people
involved: the patient reads the signs, and the doctor then interprets the

import of the reading and projects the interpretation back on the

interpreter.
The subjectivity of scrying raised a specter of fallibility, and a struggle
consequently began taking place to free the processes of decipherment
from this debateability; science, as ever, seemed to offer the hope that
there might exist a stable field of meaning, a language of things, beyond
human error and contingency.
Visiting London in 1894, the young poet Paul Valry was excited to a state
of frenzy by his readings in the new physicsespecially James Clerk
Maxwells Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. Scientific discoveries of
the nineteenth century were refashioning the perception and the very
concept of the physical world: the invisible hand behind the signatures was
identified with a difference, and the effect was indeed electric: in Maxwells
revelation of invisible lines of force, Valry recognized a key metaphor for
the role of imagination in poetic vision, which could also allow phenomena
that cannot be directly perceived to come into being and combine together
as objects of mental contemplation. For Valry, this work needed an
understanding of mathematics: he wanted to perform in poetry a kind of
linguistic algebra that would render intelligible the elusive and impalpable
geometry of reality. The study of my imagination he wrote in his
London notebook, has led me to considerations of mechanics and
geometrics, which is hardly astonishing or hypnotizing. It is sometimes
possible. Role of time, of space, of mass.8 This movement of Valrys
exultant thought, as it follows the lines of forces in the electromagnetic
field to the physical architecture of space-time and mass, led him to posit
a logic of the imagination which attunes human consciousness with
phenomena according to deep symmetries that remain invisible and
impalpable in the ordinary order of thingslike sound and radio waves, like
the interior of the nucleus.
The same thought returns in the ecstatic prose poetry of Roger Caillois two
generations later, as he contemplates rocks and stones, meteorites and
crystals. He called stones lore du songethe shore of dreamingand he
amassed a wonderful collection, which he left to the Museum of National
History in Paris where you can go and look at them; he also wrote two
luminous books about stones. These are not about precious stones such as
diamonds and rubies but about dendrites, agates, Chinese scholars stones
pebbles and rocks that look like nothing much at first but can open up
wonders under contemplation. Pierres (Stones) from 1966 is a Valry-like
prose poem, intense and rhapsodical. They lead him to understanding the
physical make-up of the world, its algebra, vertigo, and order.9 He exults
in their inscrutability and their lack of affect, their silence, their sheer
stoniness. When Caillois reads the writing of stones, when he pores over
the whorls and swirls in an agate, he ponders the revelation of cosmic time
they grant him. They provide moreover, taken on the spot and at a certain
instant of its development, an irreversible cut made into the fabric of the
universe. Like fossil imprints, this mark, this trace, is not only an effigy, but
the thing itself stabilized by a miracle, which attests to itself and to the
hidden laws of our shared formation where the whole of nature was borne

along.10
How did the circles in the stone grow therelike tree rings, like ripples in a
pond? Lines of force exert their power uniformly through space-time at any
scale, no matter how small, or how vast. As DArcy Wentworth Thompson
expressed it in On Growth and Form:
We are apt to think of mathematical definitions as too strict and rigid for
common use, but their rigour is combined with all but endless freedom. The
precise definition of an ellipse introduces us to all the ellipses in the world.
We discover homologies or identities which were not obvious before, and
which our descriptions obscured rather than revealed: as for instance, we
learn that, however we hold our chain, or however we fire our bullet, the
contour of the one or the path of the other is always mathematically
homologous.11
The writing in the rock is the signature of time itself, captured as Valryan
forms in movement, displaying their growth and articulation over eons in
the stilled swirls of their inner core, the camouflage stripes and fault-lines
of their structure, their veins and cells; it is possible to see clearly,
vertiginously, in these sections through a pebble or a rock the flow of
organic matter as it took shape and petrified.
Throughout Pierres, Caillois writes in a heightened poetic prose, and he
discovers an alter ego in the eccentric Taoist painter and governor, Mi Fu,
who in the twelfth century found ecstasy in caves filled with stalactites and
stalagmites and neglected his duties (a Chinese Prospero) for this secret
knowledge, this art which could render initiates immortal. Like Mi Fu,
Caillois develops a passion to collect stones that are then arrayed in three
different but proximate categoriesbizarre, insolite (unusual), and
fantastique. Like the Taoist, he discovers in stones not beauty but
lasting standards and the very idea of beauty, I mean the inexplicable and
useless addition to the complexity of the world.12 By the end, Caillois has
surrendered to the objects of his study: the ideal state is to let Nature
pass into you.13 By dint of his enraptured thinking on stones, he feels that
he is more alive than ever, chased by the wind of his passionate responses.
But he has himself also turned to stone, he feelsand he delights in his
metamorphosis.
He too recognized in his feeling for stones the operations of a logique de
limaginaire: this logic of the imagination is rooted in the laws of space and
time, light and color, evolution and decay, naturally evolving shapes and
naturally occurring rhythms, and it provides the underlying structure of
aesthetics. Caillois praises especially the kaleidoscopic metamorphosis of
phenomena such as flames and waterfalls.14
In his second work focusing on stones, LEcriture des pierres (The Writing
of Stones), written towards the end of his life, Caillois struggled to
formulate his credo about where his decipherment might lead: The tissue
of the universe is continuous, he proposed. I can scarcely refrain, from
suspecting some ancient, diffused magnetism; a call from the center of

things; a dim, almost lost memory, or perhaps a presentiment, pointless in

so puny a being, of a universal syntax.15 With this principle, Caillois
expands on how a cluster of certain natural circumstances, proclaim, or
illustrate, more spectacularly than is usually the case, but at the same time
in a manner almost obligatorily reticent and cryptic, the existence of
fundamental constants which ensure the latent continuity of the tissue of
the world. Then the object makes a sign, becomes sign. It attracts onto
itself that exact imagination, which reveals the object more than inventing
it.16
The marvelous in nature offers given or found works of art, such as stones,
which then shape and lead human aesthetics (we would now say
consciousness is hard-wired to respond) from delight to horror, desire to
repulsion. He concludes, Philosophers have not hesitated to identify the
real and the rational. I am persuaded that a different bold step would
lead to discover the grid of basic analogies and hidden connections which
constitute the logic of the imaginary.17
Oddly, this perception offered by stones returns us to ancient metaphorical
visions of the cosmos; in Ovids Metamorphoses, inorganic and organic life,
stone and flesh, do not stand as opposite poles but flow and fuse along the
continuum uniting all things. Valrys impulse to find a literary analogue
operating with language for the new physics vision of nature doesnt
disrupt poetrys endeavor or twist it from a long-established orbit. The
search for metaphor can march with the experimental method of science,
as Roger Caillois the manist believedand practiced in his writing and his
thought.
A different version of this text appeared in English and Italian under the
title The Language of Stones / Il Linguaggio delle pietre in the recent
book Joan Jonas, ed. Anna Daneri (Milan: Charta, 2007).

1 Roger Caillois, letter of 27 December 1934 to Andr Breton, in Claudine Frank,

ed. The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader (Durham, NC, and London:
Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 8486.
2 See the fine exhibition catalogue by Dawn Ades, Simon Baker, Caroline
Hancock, and Denis Hollier, eds., Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and
Documents (London: Hayward Gallery, 2006).
3 Denis Hollier, introduction to Anatole Lewitzky, Shamanism, in Denis Hollier,
ed., The College of Sociology, 19371939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1988), p. 250.
4 Roger Caillois, Intervention Surraliste, in Cases dun chiquier (Paris:
Gallimard, 1970), p. 211.
5 Peter Galison, Image of Self, in Lorraine Daston, ed., Things that Talk (New
York: Zone Books, 2004), p. 292.
6 Ernst Grumach, Goethe und der Antike (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1949), quoted
in Gloria Flaherty, Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, l992), p. 168.
7 Goethe, letter of 23 July 1820, quoted in Flaherty, Shamanism and the
Eighteenth Century, p. 173.
8 Paul Valry, in Florence de Lussy, ed., Carnet indit dit Carnet de Londres
(Paris: Gallimard, 2005), p. 114.
9 Roger Caillois, Pierres (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), p. 8. My translation.
10 Ibid, p. 117. Shared formation here translates Cailloiss phrase lance
commune, literally shared thrownness, which evokes the working of clay on a
potters wheel. My translation.

11 DArcy Wentworth Thompson, Growth and Form (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1942), p. 1027.
12 Caillois, Pierres, p. 88. Translation used here is drawn from Jean Burrell,
Extracts from Stones, Diogenes, vol. 52, no. 3 (2005), pp. 9192.
13 Ibid., p. 103. My translation.
14 Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones, trans. Barbara Bray (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 1985), p. 100.
15 Ibid., pp. 103104.
16 Roger Caillois, La Pieuvre: Essai sur la logique de limaginaire (Paris: La Table
Ronde, 1973), p. 229. My translation.
17 Caillois, Pierres, p. 230. My translation.

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2008 Cabinet Magazine