Claude Monet was born in Paris in 1840. His mother was thirty-five years old and already the childless widow of a first husband at the time of Monet's birth. Her second husband, Monet's father, was then forty, and her only other child, Monet's only full sibling, a brother, was four. By the time Monet was five, he and his family had moved to the port town of Le Havre, where his father was in the business of provisioning France's commercial shipping fleet. It was there, in this town where the Seine River spills into the English Channel, that Monet's mother is said to have encouraged her son's early interest in art; and it was there that she died in 1857 when he was not yet seventeen years old but already within a year of establishing himself as a draftsman of some notoriety on the strength of caricatures of local personalities exhibited in the window of a framer's shop.1
By 1860 Monet had taken up painting, and in that year he found himself at the age of twenty with a new half-sister born to his sixty-year-old widowed father and his father's twenty-four-year-old mistress, a sibling who until 1974 was entirely unmentioned in the literature on the artist. Perhaps represented at her father's side staring out to sea in a painting of 1867, Monet's half-sister was legitimated in 1870 byway of his father's second marriage, a marriage that took place a mere three months before Monet's father's death and only four months after Monet's own first marriage had similarly legitimated his three-year-old son.
When Monet's father died in 1871 his son was in London, in flight from military service in the Franco-Prussian war, the war that claimed the life of one of Monet's closest friends, the painter Frédéric Bazille. Upon his return to France, Monet established himself and his family in the outer suburbs of Paris at Argenteuil, where his colleague Edouard Manet painted the artist and his family in their garden in 1874, and where Manet painted Monet at work on the Seine in his studio boat, in the company of his wife but turning away from her gaze to grasp the environing riverscape by the tip of his brush. Penniless by 1878, and forced to leave Argenteuil with a sick and pregnant wife for an apartment in Paris, Monet was apparently unable to provide all the necessities to the postpartum mother, who would be represented in his art one last time lying on her deathbed in the tiny Seine-side village of Vétheuil, dead of uterine cancer in 1879 at the age of thirty-two.
What the author sees in Monet's painting is not the Real
trauma of the subject's desiring
look, nor yet the
Imaginary reflex of the
mother's mirrored gaze, but precisely what Cézanne so notoriously described in Monet's art, that is,
the Symbolic effect of the paternal positioning of the desiring and mirroring individual as nothing but the
picture's
tache or objectal stain. “Monet is only an eye; but good God what an eye!” (Shiff
1984, 280). Just what kind of an eye/I is this?
Seen with God's eye from the unseen angle of “pèrespective,” Monet's painting is “a self-portrait in which the subject will see himself as he cannot see himself, a vision of horror in which his own nullity appears to him” (Borch-Jacobsen 1991, 237). “This rapid painting, this portrait without gaze,… indifferent to all spirituality, even in a face” (Régamey 1927, 89; Levine 1994b, 283) bodies forth the opaque pigmented screen “by means of which we confront the utter nullity of our narcissistic pretentions” (Žižek 1991b, 64). In the congealed gestural traces of his Self-Portrait, Monet “makes visible for us here something that is simply the subject as annihilated” (Lacan 1978, 88-89).16 “This man was in reality … a daily tormented person, at the same time a solitary person with an idée fixe, racking his brains into exhaustion, forcing his will to the fixed and desired task, pursuing his dream of form and color almost unto the annihilation of his individuality in the eternal Nirvana of things at once changing and immutable” (Geffroy 1922, 335; Levine 1994b, 260). Here Monet's biographer unknowingly repeats Freud's contemporaneous postulation of a Nirvana principle as the self-voiding impetus of narcissism, a Real principle of repetition and discharge whereby the self is obscurely driven “beyond the pleasure principle” to abdicate its Imaginary erotic teleology in favor of a concentration and, ultimately, a Symbolic annihilation of all erotic investment within itself. “We have unwittingly steered our course into the harbour of Schopenhauer's philosophy. For him death is the ‘true result and to that extent the purpose of life’” (Freud 1920, 49-50). This from the Freud least amenable to the affirmations of ego psychology and most resigned to the negations of Lacan and, I believe, Monet as well. “The function of the work of art is to render the void sufferable” (Schneiderman 1990, 211).
Tratto da:
Levine, S.Z. (1996). Virtual Narcissus: On the Mirror Stage with Monet, Lacan, and Me. Am. Imago, 53:91-106.
