 |
| FUSELI 2 |
|
|
 |
|
 |
 |
"Translating The Nightmare, a nightmare of translation" from Negotiations Towards a Self, 1770-1830
In a sense, The Nightmare will not translate, and this is the nightmare; that translation will always fail. The Nightmare/nightmare is the image which defeats interpretation the most, which should not, cannot be interpreted, yet it is the image of Fuseli's which receives the most interpretation, and I do not think this lacks significance. For it is the nightmare that interpretation may not be grounded within the frame of the work, that the frame is permeable, and not permanent, that the frame does not work, but is always worked, manipulated by interpretation….The Nightmare/nightmare, a work that refuses interpretation, translation, must be satisfactorily interpreted, and yet no satisfactory interpretation can be given. The Nightmare/nightmare is a black hole of interpretation, yet it is this black hole, this void that drives the interpretive process…
*****
… this concerns what is behind the veil, for behind the veil and behind the trap of the gaze is the trap of interpretation, a trap that (ex)poses the void behind the veil, and it is this void which interpretation must cover up. Interpretation does this under the guise of un-covering or re-covering, a process of covering a bet, but it is always a process of covering, a necessary process, because without the covering, the veil, there is nothing, no thing, and when that no-thing insists upon itself most insistently, a tradition of art history demands a covering up. But this cover up cannot be done and is never done, never finished.
[T]he work-the work of art, the literary work- is neither finished nor unfinished: it is. What it says is exclusively this: that it is- and nothing more. Beyond that it is nothing. Whoever wants to make it express more finds nothing, finds that it expresses nothing. He whose life depends upon the work, either because he is a writer or because he is a reader, belongs to the solitude of that which expresses nothing except the word being: the word which language shelters by hiding it, or causes to appear when language itself disappears into the silent void of the work. (Maurice Blanchot)
The horse's piercing of the veil may be a displacement of a sexual transgression, but it is also a displacement of the interpretive transgression, of the piercing of the frame from outside by the translator/interpreter. The scandal, if it is one, is that the frame does not work, but is worked, manipulated and shifted, and "inside" and "outside" become ideological locales covering the "real" space of ideology, the body, the body of the subject that views and is viewed….the interpreter, the subject dreams, the one who possesses the gaze and does not want to be gazed at, or does not acknowledge wanting to be gazed at, dreams, dreaming the one who desires to know, and the nightmare/Nightmare is (not) the viewer's.
The image, capable of negating nothingness, is also the gaze of nothingness on us. The image is light, and nothingness is immensely heavy. The image shines and nothingness is the diffuse thickness where nothing reveals itself. The image is the crack, the mark of this black sun, the tear, which, under the appearance of the dazzling burst, gives us the negative of the inexhaustible negative depth. That is why the image seems so profound and so empty, so threatening and so attractive, always rich in more senses than we lend it and also poor, void and silent, because in it advances this dark impotence, deprived of mastery, which is that of death as recommencement. (Maurice Blanchot)
The Nightmare is not the viewer's, and yet the nightmare is, a nightmare of a gaze that has to reduce, that has to know, that has to comprehend, but cannot do so without going outside the frame, without turning that gaze back on the spot from where she gazes, where the gaze no longer "is" gaze, but becomes object of gaze. The frame does not frame enough, and interpretation must cover over this trap, the trap of the gaze, its own trap, the trap of interpretation. Thus, in an inter-dependent, yet independent fashion, the trap of the gaze and the trap of interpretation function at the same time, covering each other, neither trap having primacy, no pure origin, each trap lying behind the other, serving instead as defenses, rational and irrational, against something that is not nothing, but cannot be translated, an absence of absence.
Interpretation does not work. It works. It labors, and it works hardest on the viewer to force the viewer, to force the gaze to see that interpretation works, and in those instances of intense labor, interpretation gives birth to a vision of its work. That interpretation does not work, but is working. This is not to deny a factual, physical, biological, scientific knowledge of the work of art's existence as an object. On the contrary, what I am saying only affirms this. The work of art is object, but never works as an object, and instead only works on us, as we work on it…. The work of art never simply exists, and to believe that it does may lead to the most naive challenges to factual reality, a reality which interpretation is constantly working against, working upon, a form of reality which is not (im)possible, because of the gaze. There is gaze. The gaze is there, but so is interpretation. It is the attempt to separate gaze from interpretation, "inside" the frame from "outside" the frame, the attempt to look at The Nightmare and see Fuseli instead of our own nightmare, a nightmare which no amount of interpretation can erase. The Nightmare/nightmare provokes by not saying enough, forcing the interpreter to say too much, by saying what it says so clearly, yet making no sense and too much sense at the same time. We are caught looking. We are left in a state of translation. Babel.
|
|
 |
|
