Simone de Beauvoir

Microstory of Art VII –
Simone de Beauvoir


(Picture: aladar.es)

In Simone de Beauvoir’s 1966 novel Les Belles Images (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Belles_Images_%28Simone_de_Beauvoir%29), p. 114, we read (translation from the German edition’s mine):

(Picture: uni-leipzig.de)

»A huge fatigue assaulted me, a physical and mental fatigue; I do admire Papa, his capacity of being focussed and his curiosity. In two days I am going to leave him and I do not know him any better than I did know him before: this thought that I am suppressing since… when? has pierced me all of a sudden. We have entered a hall full of vases (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pottery_of_ancient_Greece), and I have seen that there were whole suites of rooms, all being full of vases. Papa has positioned himself in front of a vitrine, has begun to sum up to me the epochs, the directions of style, their particularities: Homeric period, archaic period, black-figured vases (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-figure_vase_painting), red-figured vases (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-figure_pottery), vases with white ground; he explained to me the scenes that these figures represented. He walked besides me, and yet he slipped from me, disappeared in this suites of rooms with the shiny parquet floor: or it was me who, all of a sudden, sank into an abyss of indifference; in any case there was an unbridgeable gap between us now, because a color difference, the drawing of a palmette (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmette) or a bird provided an amazement, a pleasure to him, that had arise delights of long ago and yet his whole past in him. These vases did crush me, and when we were walking from vitrine to vitrine my aversion gained into a fearful anxiety, and at the same time I thought of having done everything wrong. I stopped and said: ›I can’t go on any longer!‹.«

We add this here to our above section Views From the Nightside of Connoisseurship, as an image of memory that speaks of seclusion and not-connecting to other people, including in particular to those people that are meant to be particularly close to you (and in fact they are, as Simone de Beauvoir (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_de_Beauvoir) does show here as well, despite this father’s seclusion).

Legendary King of Thebes who refused to recognize the divinity of Dionysos (picture: beazley.ox.ac.uk)

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