Walking with Angels in Giacometti and Beckett

Timothy Mathews

L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 47, Number 3, Fall 2007 , pp. 29-42 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2007.0058

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/222865

Access provided at 10 Jan 2020 21:47 GMT from University of Technology, Sydney
 Walking with Angels in Giacometti and Beckett

Timothy Mathews

H
OW ARE THE SENSES, the experience of life, turned into a style?
How is touch turned into a style of touching, and a style of remem-
bering touch? Moreover, how do we become aware of style, in others
or in ourselves? And what is the relation between those two awarenesses—for
how are we to imagine the intimacy of another?
Baudelaire evokes the senses all in correspondence with one another,
interweaving the perceptions and memories locked away there. Yet the narra-
tor of “Correspondances” is observing the effects of nature, looking outward,
while appealing to a reader looking inward, sensing again the workings of the
senses themselves. For the reader, that will be the subject of the sonnet, for the
nature observed by Baudelaire’s narrator is not there for us now. To think how
it might be here, now, is to engage with the labyrinths of sense impression that
Baudelaire evokes, and that work for us now, in a style of thinking and
remembering that has been transported into our own. A kind of translation will
have taken place of Baudelaire’s style into the style of the present, the style of
knowing in each reader’s mind and body. What we know in this reading has
less to do with recovery of the past, personal or historical, and more with how
we know now. Baudelaire’s poem is less a discovery of the integration of the
senses than an attempt to discover something of that spontaneous knowing,
and of how it has come about.1
Towards the beginning of his own musing on the nature of meaning in Le
Degré zéro de l’écriture, Roland Barthes situates style somewhere between
langue and parole, somewhere between the existential parameters of our
immersion in linguistic possibility and the controlled, supervised freedom of
linguistic usage. In a lineage involving Vauvenargues and Flaubert, for
Barthes writing in the early 1950s the notion of style suggests something of
the paradoxical ease with which we absorb the rules of linguistic and social
engagement and the rhetoric of that spontaneity.2
Yves Bonnefoy’s Alberto Giacometti: biographie d’une œuvre is reveal-
ingly titled the biography not of an artist, Giacometti, but of his work. Bon-
nefoy is making his own attempt to tell the story of how a person is expressed.
This is a story of experience and time: how Giacometti develops, somehow,
from his eclectic art of the pre-war years to the distinctive style of sculpting
figures that emerges post-1945. How does his art emerge from the Surrealist

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 L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR

ethos of the inter-war period and its hotly contested, conflicting ambitions?
On the one hand, Breton offers the resolution of conflict; on the other, Bataille
sees in resolution itself the subterfuges of an ideology disguising its own vio-
lence and muck. Where will Giacometti stand in relation to that debate, or
how will he walk away?
One element involved in such questions is Giacometti’s involvement in
the post-war moment of existential doubt, which Bonnefoy describes in this
way:

C’est bien plutôt son ami Beckett qu’il retrouve, Beckett dont la constante pensée de l’absence et
des instants de présence—réels? rêvés?—sait se porter et se maintenir au bord le plus extérieur
et aventurier du langage, dans cette brume qui enveloppe aussi les passants de ces […] sculptures.
Giacometti […] ne cherche plus le sens qu’à ce niveau profond où, plus il est élémentaire, évasif,
plus il touche au mystère de l’être ou du n’être pas.3

The evocativeness of this account and the power of its resort to metaphor tes-
tify to the style of the thinking it describes, and to the way Beckett’s own writ-
ing has found its way into the intimate and cultural memory of his readers. In
the same way, this essay is concerned with what might have moved Gia-
cometti in Beckett: his sense not so much of being or not-being, but of being
or not being there. I approach being there and not being there in terms of the
relations by which we understand these positions, or fail to; in terms of how
we find a place for our understanding, or fail to. These relations are the formal
elements in the development of a style; and in reading these formal imprints,
I hope to show the human, aesthetic, and social issues with which Giacometti
engages. These issues emerge in attempts to approach beginnings, the idea of
beginning, of beginning to step forward, to reach out, and to imagine such
gestures of relation and community.

Part II of Beckett’s Watt concerns itself with seemingly endless permuta-

tions in the understanding of the relation of Master to Servant, employer to
employee. A common enough experience, the commonness of which, if not
any particular content, is expressed in the sounds of the names involved.
Watt’s employer is Mr Knott, and the two seem irredeemably bound together
in some relation I can’t think of the name of, a what-not. Or you might hear
“what knot?”: what on earth is binding them together? Signifier (“what-
not”—situations almost, though not quite, reduced to word-play) relates to the
signified (“what knot?”—a question about situations) to produce a comment.
What could more normal? What indeed. But how did we make it normal?
What possibilities, moments, and instances have passed by to make it so?

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 TIMOTHY MATHEWS

In Part I, readers had already been treated to the rigmarole of Watt getting
into the house of his new employer: how Watt had found the house, or found
himself there; how the door had opened and when; how Watt had noticed it or
failed to; how he had passed through it and with what volition behind him, if
any. Now we see how he comes to terms with his duties. What are the terms
into which Beckett translates them?
What are Watt’s duties with regard to the piano tuners who come to the
house in Part II of the novel? Why should they be so crucial to his under-
standing of his position as a servant?

Thus the scene in the music-room, with the two Galls, ceased very soon to signify for Watt a
piano tuned, an obscure family and professional relation, an exchange of judgements more or less
intelligible and so on, if indeed it had ever signified such things, and became a mere example of
light commenting bodies, and stillness motion, and silence sound, and comment comment.4

“Very soon”? Perhaps; certainly a good number of pages have been devoted to
this scene. This temporality is obscure, neither long nor short, and the incident
might resemble all the others: “In a sense it resembled all the incidents of note
proposed to Watt during his stay in Mr Knott’s house, and of which a certain
number will be recorded in this place, without addition, or subtraction, and in
a sense not.” How many rings of Purgatory can there be? Always one more, or
always one fewer? Endless permutations, endless frustration. How are we to
understand? Or rather, at what stage does understanding take place and how?
With Watt, is Beckett not making the problem for himself by removing
such concerns from any kind of material context? Are there not more imme-
diate ways of understanding the relations of power that move us? But then the
question might be, what is such a context and how might we arrive there with
any certainty? Who is to say Beckett with Watt is walking away from such
certainty and not in fact towards it? Or facing it, rather than turning away?
Does not the grace of Giacometti’s standing or walking figures lie in the
same uncertainty? Especially, perhaps, those he made in the years just after
World War II? I am thinking here specifically of Petit buste de femme sur
socle (1945-46), L’Homme qui marche (1947), and L’Homme qui marche II
(1960).5 But there is also a materiality in those pieces, one that seems palpa-
ble, and which roots them in some kind of here and now which we might be
able to recognize and respond to. Yet this materiality is also untouchable. It is
a tangibility confirmed in the loss of it, even if we were allowed the luxury of
running our hands over it: for still we would be imagining the hands of
Alberto, or anyone, touching me, touching you. The time of that touching will
not be the same. But equally, how might we reach that other, Alberto or

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Alberto Giacometti (1901-1996). © ARS, NY. Walking Male. Bronze Sculpture. Fon-
dation Maeght, Saint Paul-de-Vence, France. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing / Art
Resource, NY.

anyone who is not there, without the idea of such a reaching? How do we
reach such an idea? It is both intimate, yet other; mine alone, yet recogniza-
ble; yours alone, yet public; unique, and yet anonymous.
Intimacy is already an idea, then, just like the materiality of a context.
Watt’s uncertainties show this, or show him suffering from it. His anxieties to
do with the Galls and all the other incidents which “in a sense it resembles”
are consistently presented as conundrums of various kinds, whose elements
are uniqueness and anonymity. They develop into patterns. As patterns
advance or repeat themselves, the idea of the time passed with them emerges
in the narrative, and in the time we have spent reading. The sense of time
develops into an idea of it; it always was an idea. When did we start to know
that, reading this text?
Patterns, and ideas arising from patterns: forms then. Forms that we know
as such because we can interpret them, or simply see they are being inter-
preted—“comment,” as Watt puts it, “and became a mere example of light

32 FALL 2007
 TIMOTHY MATHEWS

commenting bodies, and stillness motion, and silence sound, and comment
comment.” The word “comment” comes and goes in a balletic rhythm all its
own in this extraordinary little clause. Drawing the sentence to a close, the
word comes and goes in the grammar, asserts itself by being there and by its
elision equally. However formal a remark this is, however more formal the
style becomes, it prompts and feeds on interpretation all the more. Formally,
the possibility of comment, of judgement, of point of view generally, comes
and goes; but just as much, formally the point of view is always present, in its
elisions and obscurities, drawing everything into its remit, and ending up with
itself: “comment comment.”
Watt has told us the incident resembles all others of note. How many dif-
ferent things are being translated, transported into comment—light, stillness
and motion, sound—in addition to comment itself. All the senses combine to
make a concept of what has gone on before into a concept that masks its gen-
eration, leaving an image of how that generation has passed, and a sensation of
wonder and loss. “This fragility of the outer meaning had a bad effect on Watt,
for it caused him to seek for another, for some meaning that had passed, in the
image of how it had passed.” We know things have passed, but we know that
in an image which makes us wonder how they have passed. And what ‘we’ am
I using? Interpreters of Watt. An indeterminate community made, if at all, or
lost, in the time of reading, which itself is without secure boundary. But an
image that tells nonetheless; a form that tells the story of its own genealogy and
its masking, and in that way the story of an idea, a context, how an idea lives
and is lost in its mediation: between Watt and the Galls, the narrator and Watt,
Beckett and Watt, Beckett and his readers—relations all making mediation in
interrupting it. In that interruption, the “outer meaning” collapses, the apparent
meaning, only to be replaced with an image of its passing, now the only form
or concept of what happened. But equally, the opposite of this spurious secu-
rity of signifying place, in other words meaning deferred, could hardly be more
self-evident or natural, even if difficult to accept. And Watt does find it hard to
accept. In a blink, as much as in pages of fruitless analysis, his meaning has
become an image of its passing; making meaning is at once there and still not
there, the stuff of its own generation or degeneration, incompatibly.
But neither deferral nor presence takes the lead, neither optimism nor pes-
simism with regard to freedom from pain, and neither the capacity nor inca-
pacity to think. But what then? Practicality, at one level, does seem to suffer.
“The fragility of the outer meaning” is the “face value” in which Watt, accord-
ing to his narrator, seems to pride, for he has clung to during all those years
now gone:

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The most meagre, the least plausible, would have satisfied Watt, who had not seen a symbol, nor
executed an interpretation, since the age of fourteen, or fifteen, and who had lived, miserably it
is true, among face values all his adult life, face values at least for him […]. And he had experi-
enced literally nothing, since the age of fourteen, or fifteen, of which in retrospect he was not con-
tent to say, That is what happened then.

Practicality, face values, knowing what happened when, the content, the sig-
nificance, the consequences: all the fibres of the way that idea is expressed
here undermine it. Neither the narrator nor Watt can say with certainty when
confidence in these things began in Watt—at fourteen or fifteen. Why that age
should be significant and not another is also not discussed. We have gone
from the circumstance (fourteen, fifteen) to the concept (adolescent age), and
absolutely no further; or no distance is measured at all by that passage from
chronology to symbolism. And it is in retrospect that the security of the face
value is provided, that it will have emerged.
What a relief, you might say. And how obvious, as well. The idea works
(of uncertainty, frustration, anxiety, power, of style itself). And Beckett has
shown how. It works in working towards working, and also in simply sub-
mitting to that. “Face values, at least to him […] of which in retrospect he was
not content to say, That is what happened then.” Here we see two very
common indicators of the point of view, one with the appearance of a spatial
context, “to him,” the other with the appearance of a temporal one, “in retro-
spect.” Each one, separately and together, leads to the definitive-looking “that
is what happened then”: the directive, the positioning, the organizing, and the
affirmative. “That” is in a clear and stable relation to “then,” in the here and
now of speaking and thinking; thinking and speaking happen as one. To speak
at all, to think about speaking or having spoken, involves making everything
that was time into everything that looks like space. A translation of time into
the space of speaking and its loss there.
That space will always dissolve; but Watt’s desire for one, for the appar-
ent, for the face value and the un-fragile outer meaning remains dominant,
even in that dissolution. In retrospect Watt was content; but not at the time,
and not at this time in the narrative either, where the retrospective is being
invoked. Contentedness has already passed. And yet the idea of it has been
conveyed and lives here at this moment, translated into this space. “That is
what happened then” is understood in so far as “then” is translated, trans-
ported into “that,” taken over by that, giving that its life.
In just such a way, the points of intersection between Beckett and Gia-
cometti fascinate and elude location. These elusive points of intersection are
made in uncertainties about place, about emerging and being submerged, about

34 FALL 2007
 TIMOTHY MATHEWS

standing or walking, beginning to walk or ceasing to, about arriving at a point

of view or departing from one, about the absence of a frame or its ever-present
invisibility and potency. Does the transparent cube of the kind in Le Nez of
1947 assert its power to enclose or show how to come and go?6 Conversely,
does the invisibility of a frame strengthen or loosen its power to constrict—or
liberate? And does a plinth suggest a platform for departure, or fixity?
From there further questions arise about the relation of art to thought,
about the kind of thought in art. They arise by responding to the invitations of
Beckett and Giacometti to think about, and with, the basic working principles
of art itself, as these two artists seem to know them. This thinking in and of
art takes the form of a continual return to the point of view in space, with Gia-
cometti, and the point of view in time, with Beckett. Where they might meet
is in the translation, mobile and inevitable, of space and time into each other,
in the loss of one in the other. Without the arrest of time in space, how can an
idea be developed? Without the loss of space in time, how can an idea be
mediated? Both are required for thought to take place, to be seen to have taken
place, to be directed, but also simply to have been submitted to.
Like Knott’s house, perhaps Giacometti’s Palais à quatre heures du matin
represents any house and not a dynasty, but perhaps not. In what relation does
the piece stand with regard to the house as an everyday part of life, a com-
monplace, and the various symbolic dimensions of that idea which give it its
continued life? Does Giacometti’s piece face towards or away from the abil-
ity to symbolize and make sense?
Giacometti made this piece before World War II, in 1932, while he seems
still to project some self-enquiry in relation to Surrealist thought and practice.7
The human form shares the space with other elements, and each suggests its
own history. Objects, each with its own history, incarnate and therefore hide
the associations that have made them, give them form and shape; each reaches
out for but suspends the associative highways and by-ways that might link it to
others, resolve all the elements in a new understanding of understanding itself,
and of beginning. Reaching out is both invited and suspended. Each element
stands or hangs in its own room in the palace, its own frame, which is also a
cube without walls, inviting visitors and viewers in but unable to get out. View-
ers’ glances might dart in and out, in and out of all of the cubes in an erratic
sequence; but that time of viewing will not bring the cubes or frames together.
Association between the various frames works because it does not, and
because of the continual interruptions which articulate this association and of
which it consists. The bird-form is there for all to see, in flight, but evidently
its flight is suspended; and whether it flies towards us or away is in as much

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Alberto Giacometti (1901-1996). © ARS, NY. The Palace at 4 a.m. 1932-33. Con-
struction in wood, glass, wire and string. 25
281/4
153/4 . The Museum of Modern
Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern
Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

doubt as its own morphology: skeletal? zoological? anthropological? A further

transparent box below shows an object reminiscent of others in Giacometti’s
visual vocabulary of the time (just as the bird might be reminiscent of Ernst’s),
but its emergent phallic content is destabilized because of that reminiscence,
the relation of this object to the others is not shown. So its relation to the female
figure in the corner is also obscure, formally suspended in the piece: that rela-
tion itself appears forgotten, though evident. . . .
Each box we see into is also one we see through, see past, lose in the
seeing, the relations of its content are multiplied to involve anything behind
and beyond it. The woman stands in front of what appears as a series of
screens, the set of a theatre perhaps. Her part on this stage and in this house
is absorbed in her form to the point of its oblivion: the collapse of enclosure
is also the collapse of memory. What is the gift offered to the viewer from the
other open corner? And from whom? What sense can be made of it?
All the transparent frames, cubes, and towers of the piece are permutations
of the ways it might be possible to place the figure in her space, in her scene,
in the loss of her space in spaces. Meaning has once again been degraded into

36 FALL 2007
 TIMOTHY MATHEWS

its forms, the possible ways of making meaning, its structures, if you like: pos-
sibilities of meaning that might apply to anybody in the same signifying house.
But in their uses, these forms do not remain static; we can see they are not open
to arrest or secure redirecting, as they might have become. All the permutations
of a frame in the piece are articulations of time and memory; each framing
shows something, but inaugurates a new framing in the displacement and
oblivion of the previous ones, a new suspension of memory each time, in each
reconfiguration or recalibration of meaning in the house. Time is translated
into space and instantaneously translated again into time, the time and the
space of thought, history, liberation or alienation from everything the house is
made of. How are we to get the measure of the symbolic content of the palace?
That measure derives from parental authority, inheritance, property, and prove-
nance. Its forms are those of the generations, the permutations of genealogy
which provide it with its present ownership, the forms by which we know it in
the present. Giacometti’s house shows that present of the house and its history,
its signifiers and signifieds all translate into each other with the ease of a style.
Are we any closer to understanding its provenance? Or further away? Or
simply suspended there, like and unlike the figure there?8
The space Le Palais makes for itself is lost in the looking; still, it signals
to us from a time before 1939. It offers an ease of movement to the eye as it
fixes on associative content and point, but in that ease, punctual meaning is
abandoned all the more. That same ease of movement between content and
form, the styling of one pervasive symbol—the house—in contemporary life
and semiotics, is experienced with greater anxiety by Watt in his post-war
domains and deserts. He has been reminiscing about the Galls and about the
effect of that reminiscence on himself over time; or the narrator has recounted
his reminiscences on his behalf: “the scene in the music-room became a mere
example of light commenting bodies, and stillness motion, and silence sound,
and comment comment.” This bit of the narrative began with Watt becoming
rather horrifyingly, if not trivially, engulfed in his uncertainty about the Galls,
how as a servant in the house he should approach them, and what the relation
is between the Galls themselves, in either a genealogical or a professional
sense. That range or diversity is what settles in his mind as the image of some-
thing passed, light commenting bodies, stillness commenting motion—com-
ment comment comment. But this comment is not the purely self-reflexive
kind; on the contrary it involves the settling of thought in a form, a style, a
working agility just as much as a constriction. With Watt we walk in a domain
that combines knowing and forgetting, and undermines our capacity to distin-
guish between them.

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Perhaps this is Watt’s style—not Watt’s, obviously: Beckett’s. But that hall
of mirrors, or voices and echoes, does not only show its own endlessness, any
more than the figure’s place in the space of Giacometti’s house locates or
identifies her. In both, in the open-ended, witty displacement of Giacometti’s
figure, and in Watt’s mental self-torture, as viewers and readers we are shown
a style. In being shown that style, we might see the absorption of a past now
other in the artificial ease of a moment now present. Watt’s account of an
image now there of something passed as stillness commenting motion is espe-
cially telling. Incompatible ideas prompt the need to account for them, which
then testifies only to the loss of one in the other. Even so, stillness creates
motion, even in the return it produces of that stillness once again. And even
just at a glance, this prompting of motion in stillness reaches out to Gia-
cometti’s pieces after the war, as they stand, or walk or imitate standing or
walking; each still. . . . Any one, and each one uniquely, shows something of
that moment, both there and passed, with a kind of literal simplicity or a mate-
rial simplicity: a simplicity that transports the forms of these pieces with
renewed mediation into the content of our living.

This kind of relation to others suggests trying to write history without the
pretension to understand it. This approach to relation is also an attempt to
write the history of suffering by failing to understand it, by inventing ways of
writing and showing which formally exemplify that not-knowing, so that it
can be imagined without analogy, ideology or translations of all kinds into the
ego-driven perceptions of the present.
In Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin draws on a
painting by Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, which he bought in 1921. The Angel
emerges in its outline against a uniform, anonymous background, its features
dominated by eyes which seem to seek a viewer.9 Benjamin turns to a repre-
sentation of an Angel to find a way of writing history. Faced with Fascism and
his commitment to establishing philosophically our ability to overturn it, Ben-
jamin the historian turns to painting, some lines of poetry by Gerhard
Scholem, and myth. Ideas of progress derived from the Enlightenment will
only leave us in a state of shock. What is the view of history that would help?
“Klee shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from some-
thing he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his
wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history.” In describing
how he pictures history, Benjamin concentrates on a paradox of looking and
fixing. From the lines of Klee’s picture, he discovers an angel moving away
while contemplating fixedly, even though moving and fixity cannot occupy

38 FALL 2007
 TIMOTHY MATHEWS

the same place. A storm of positional frenzy emerges, in which we discover a

content. This is not a content we can touch or take away from here, perhaps,
from this angel in this picture, in these lines of verse, in this poetic fragment.
But because of that uniqueness, we arrive at a content nonetheless, one which
can show us the nature of our responsibility to others—not only for their suf-
fering, but for the idea itself of another, and the nurturing of it.
For it appears that we both can and cannot nurture such an idea. Who can
say, watching Beckett’s Happy Days, whether Willie strives to embrace
Winnie or shoot her? Our responsibility lies in our failure to nurture it, which
itself comes from and is confirmed in an inability to recognise that failure
itself. Benjamin’s angel is of the most human kind—he cannot stay, he will
die, he cannot redeem himself or others, he saves only the idea of saving with
which he comes to us. The gift of the angel is to understand while not under-
standing, and to understand that we do not. The angel Benjamin has given us
is the angel of its own mourning.
What if we were to imagine him small, already drawn into his blind rush
towards his place in that unplaced paradise of his own making, and ours? Small
now, simply because far away, out of our reach, his effect on us unmeasured?
What might he look like if that rush could show itself? Like Zeno’s arrow, the
angel could only seem to stop endlessly, in a succession of moments, never
reaching its objective, endpoint, or paradise; and we would see movement
frozen, started in the freezing and frozen in the started; we would see our own
thinking of the angel and its movement. Like for Watt thinking about the Galls,
for each one of us thinking, the angel will never be an angel, anymore.
1945 to 1946: in Petit Buste de femme sur un socle (Marie-Laure de
Noailles), Giacometti fashions a fragile figure over a mound. It is one of many
from this period, some still more frail, barely there, barely beginning to live
or die, barely beginning to be seen or to disappear.10 What is in the passage
from plaster to bronze? What is emerging from where? From wherever we
stand, does the figure recede or grow? Greet us or bid farewell? What story is
“ill-told,” as Watt says, in that indeterminacy?11
This is still the dramatic period of transition and change in Giacometti’s
art. Beginning in the late 1930s, he tells us he can only find it within him to
try and depict the human face and the human form—and to experience his
constant failure to do so. Perhaps that sense of human frailty digs still deeper
into him as the result of being knocked over by a car in the Place des Pyra-
mides in Paris before the war, in 1938.12 But whatever their provenances,
what could be a more fundamental set of concerns than scale, human scale,
and the human form itself?

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If Giacometti’s figure is small, that is because we do not know where it is,

or our relation to it, the relation that makes it small, to any one of us; to
another it might be alive and in reach. That sightless possibility is given to us
to see, to see that we cannot see, anymore. The figure is caught up in its own
disappearance; like the angel, it stands where its rush, its movement, cannot
be seen, where it has been translated into immobility, into space, its other
dimensions lost. The figure is caught in the spatial relations that show it and
which, in that showing, are lost to us the viewers; and we are left attempting
to show that angel within us, and to find it, even in its tangible form as a figure
in front of us.
The destiny of what is lost is to become a symbol of itself. At its indeter-
minate distance suggested by the plinth, and because of those indeterminate
spaces, places, positions, and relations, Giacometti’s figure might look like a
monument. Such a monument would gain its expressive power from the place
it marks, from marking its own indeterminacy in space. This is its presence
over time, its there-ness in relation to innumerable vantage points that will not
be made whole or one, as much there as not there. Let us imagine once again
all the debris of Watt’s attempts to work out his relation to the powers that
affect him, the debris of everything that can be known about the Master and
the whims of his authority, or about the mountains of food and all the possi-
ble ingredients that have passed through the Master’s pot on their way to
being consumed, or again about the shocking translations of suffering into the
permutations of suffering at the hands of economic as well as sexual power
that Watt witnesses and to which he is subject. How better to see that than in
an anonymous, engulfing mound reducing the figures who experience it to
one, barely standing, barely there at all, barely in communication with the
crowd of solitary viewers and witnesses that might walk by, see or remember?
That translation of suffering into the permutations of suffering, that trans-
lation of unique into anonymous experience, not only invites but also sus-
pends pathos: like the angel’s eyes, like the grace of the Petit Buste. It invites
understanding on the basis of our own experience, and suspends it; it invites
using repetition as a way to understand, but suspends understanding, as each
thing is matched by the next and loses itself there. So now we suffer the anx-
iety of another, but in reaching out, in starting to identify with it once again,
we know it is not ours; and the world, as Watt and the angel of history encour-
age us to accept, will not be made in the imitation of the pain and joys we
expect from it. But that not-knowing, that prize of knowing without appropri-
ation, of knowing oblivion itself, of knowing through oblivion and within it,
cannot itself be reached. We are made in the knowledge that makes us, we

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 TIMOTHY MATHEWS

stand in the places where that knowledge has been made and which make it
ours. We cannot leave those places, for we cannot see them. But in not seeing
them, we must also leave them, for we do not know where we stand. We have
already left them. Giacometti’s figures begin to walk, for their space of walk-
ing also hides the place of its beginning. They are already walking, for in a
still sculpture can we tell the difference between walking and being about to
walk, standing and being about to walk, walking and standing? Staying and
leaving? Changing and repeating? Is the figure in the Petit buste being sub-
merged or emerging? That indeterminacy, her own incompletion, is the mate-
rial of her grace made static, untouchable, barely there. And as the man begins
to walk in 1947, L’Homme qui marche, in moving he shows the plinth that
gives it firm ground to step on; and he shows also the treading down, the bury-
ing, that gives spring to stepping forward.
That stepping forward is a step forward in time, now we see moving for-
ward without the where to or the where from. That space is also time, but a
space that has lost its place in time. The man walks in time, but the place
where we stand in relation to his walking is in the here and now. Those rela-
tions are made by the viewer in the viewing, not an ego-centric viewing but
an ego-evacuating one. This is a viewing driven to an attention to form,
almost desperate, as though that were all that remained to see. For the ability
of the man to walk is not shown, although its forms make it plain to see. Just
as we ourselves walk, in that secluded air Kundera describes us all living in
as we grow older, without being aware.13 The 1947 man takes the most tenta-
tive step, his textures suggesting roughness, the molten, a figure barely able
to step from the flames. But a survivor, nonetheless, visibly, the flames left
behind; so it is a viewer now who remembers the flames, either as a survivor
himself, or simply as any viewer from another time and another place. Nei-
ther one is in the flames from which the figure might be stepping, has stepped,
consigning those flames to the past, which now really is not there. The narra-
tive layers of memory have been translated into Giacometti’s plinths;
metaphoric content, all the convention of making sense, has collapsed into
formal, visible content, merely the remnants of itself alone, giving us all we
have to go on in seeing what we have remembered, in seeing that we have
remembered, and how we have remembered.
In that vertical play of plinths rising and plinths being stepped down, each
one is as likely to invite movement towards the other as away. We may see or
we may not. We may see what we cannot see in ourselves: the secrets of how
we move and change, how we act, in a style making temporal individuals of
us—a style whose very self-evidence makes us anonymous, like anyone with

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 L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR

a style. We move and change not because we can, not because we can prove
it, with all the fanfares of a new future better than an old past, but simply
because we do. This is not only a passive changing, but one with the capacity
to think passivity, the weight of anteriority that cannot be reached, embraced,
abandoned, articulated in the sequences of talking and moving to which we
are consigned. The man walking in 1960, L’Homme qui marche II, strides for-
ward with confidence, offers viewers confidence in a future that is as little
known as the past. But this is a future that can be made, nonetheless, with
others there or yet to appear, working with that shared reality of the oblivion
through which we move and which moves us. In that endless play of pointing
at places already lost, standing there and walking there, something may begin,
may have begun, may have overtaken us in its beginning, may evacuate us in
our ideas of beginning, allow us to begin and reach to others in their own
fragility of beginning, the endlessly collapsing places of their starting and
reaching. Giacometti shows us that grief and joy can be thought together,
incompatibly, that we can only, that we can.

University College London

Notes

1. Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, Claude Pichois, ed.
(Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 11.
2. Roland Barthes, “Qu’est-ce que l’écriture,” Le Degré zéro de l’écriture [1953] (Paris: Seuil,
1972), 12-13.
3. Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: biographie d’une œuvre (Paris: Flammarion, 1991),
332.
4. All quotations taken from Samuel Beckett, Watt [1953] (London: Calder & Boyars, 1970),
69-72. I am engaging with Beckett’s English version in this essay.
5. See Bonnefoy 318-19, 411.
6. See Bonnefoy, 293.
7. See Bonnefoy, chapter 6, “Époque surréaliste.”
8. Giacometti’s narrates the genealogy of this piece in ways which confirm this alternation
between the emergence and submergence of meaning. See “Je ne puis parler qu’indirecte-
ment de mes sculptures,” Minautore, 3-4 (December 1933), 46, included in Alberto Gia-
cometti, Écrits, présentés par Michel Leiris et Jacques Dupin, préparés par Mary Lisa
Palmer et François Chaussende (Paris: Hermann, 1990), 17-19.
9. Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 8-9, in Illuminations, Hannah
Arendt, ed., Harry Zohn, trans. (London: Fontana/Collins, 1982), 259-60.
10. See Bonnefoy, 269-72.
11. “ill-told, ill-heard, and more than half forgotten.”
12. Giacometti describes his anxieties in representing the human form throughout his writings.
See particularly Écrits, 44, 280-86. For an account of the accident, see James Lord, Gia-
cometti: A Biography (1983) (London: Orion Books, 1996), 194-99.
13. “There is a certain part of us all that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our
age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.” Milan Kundera,
Immortality, Peter Kussi, trans. (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), 4.

42 FALL 2007