The Illusion of Madame Récamier

In “Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts Into Tears,” Hungarian philosopher of art László Földényi shows how the Enlightenment brought about a radical shift in the understanding of the human body, and the consequences that arose from the attempt to divorce the physical body from its metaphysical context.

Dostoyevskey Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears, by László Földényi, trans. Ottilie Mulzet (304 pages, Yale University Press, 2020)

In the preface to his history of Venice, John Ruskin observed that “Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts— the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but of the three, the only trustworthy one is the last.”^[1]

We can expand Ruskin’s criteria not only to nations, but to epochs as well. The autobiography of Christendom, too, can be captured in its deeds, words, and art, just as much as that of Venice can.

Of course, the central event in Christendom is the Incarnation. But the peculiar claim of Christianity is that the Incarnation is the central event of human history—its ramifications not contained by any place or epoch, though it happened in a particular place in time, and in a particular body. Indeed, the great heresies that emerged during the first centuries after the Incarnation speak almost exclusively of Christ’s body and the bodies of His people: The Circumcisers, the Gnostics, the Arians, the Pelagians, and the Nestorians are but a few examples of how debates about the nature of Christ, His body, and, by extension, our bodies ought to be viewed in light of revelation. In fine, the Christian claim entails that our understanding of the body is central to our understanding of reality.

Every age has a view of the body. Though it may not be as neatly summarized as the course of battles fought and wars won, it remains true that the governing principle of any society is rooted in how it views the relationship between man and himself, man and nature, and man and God—all of which are joined in the view of the body.

Around the turn of the eighteenth century, a distinct shift occurred in Western society’s view of the body. This shift had its roots in the early Enlightenment—specifically, in the works of Francis Bacon—and came to fruition around the time of the French Revolution. Much has been written on the political and philosophical developments that took place during this period, which is conventionally viewed as the end of Christendom and the beginning of Modernity. Most works focus on the “words” and “deeds” of Western Europe, to employ Ruskin’s categories. I maintain that there is much to be said about this great shift on the basis of the “third manuscript”—namely, the art of Europe during the Enlightenment.

In his irresistibly titled set of essays, Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts Into Tears, Hungarian philosopher of art László Földényi is preoccupied with the Enlightenment and its consequences. One essay, which carries the weighty subtitle “Variations on the Human Body, Subjugated by Fantasies of Power,” is a reflection on how the Enlightenment brought about a radical shift in the understanding of the human body, and the consequences that arose from the attempt to divorce the physical body from its metaphysical context.

An indication of this shift is the eighteenth century’s preoccupation with bodily conduct in polite society. The once famous letters of Lord Chesterfield to his illegitimate son, Phillip Stanhope, are a paradigmatic example of this preoccupation. In over one thousand pages of letters, we find a host of practical guides to proper conduct. In Földényi’s summation, “When in society, observe everyone well, follow closely the manner and behavior of others, study well how they sit down, and how they stand up, how they engage in chitchat,” and so on.^[2] The ultimate goal—in Chesterfield’s own words—“when you go into a good company … [and]observe carefully their turn, their manners, their address” is to “conform your own to them.”^[3] It is this goal that Chesterfield stresses most of all throughout his letters, and what Földényi finds most disconcerting: “What is most conspicuous in these letters is how Chesterfield tries, through the dense forest of prohibitions, to drive his son toward the correct mode of life. He bombards him with a multitude of seemingly innocent counsels” that all lead to the overarching goal of avoidance of individuality, for “this is an attention due from every individual to the majority.”^[4]

The homogenization of behavior in the name of social propriety is a peculiar artifact of the Enlightenment. Whereas before Chesterfield behavioral guides tended to emphasize the uniqueness and distinction of the individual in society, Chesterfield’s guide emphasizes the individual’s capacity to imitate his “good company.”^[5] Not surprisingly, Földényi introduces an artistic metaphor to drive the point home: “The ideal readers of the earlier ‘behavioral guides’ could have been something like the subject of Renaissance portraits, who have no essential connection to the background of the painting but stand out from their environments like statues. In contrast, the ideal readers of Chesterfield are like students in high school class graduation pictures who, seen from a certain distance, hauntingly resemble one another.”^[6] What Földényi sees in Enlightenment behavioral culture is an attempt to regulate the body like a machine. The “well-bred” body and the well-oiled “l’homme machine”^[7] are one and the same, contributing to the overall functioning of the secular civil body.

In reality, Phillip Stanhope seldom lived up to Lord Chesterfield’s expectations—the latter often bemoaning his son’s various faux pas in his letters. What if, Földényi asks, the constant pleas for bodily control actually produce the opposite effect? What are the unintended consequences of treating the body as a machine? “From the horse of instruction the enraged tiger will burst out.”^[8]

For just at the time when bourgeois manners became commonplace expectations of general behavior, the human body “becomes deformed and unrecognizable” in the works of the Marquis de Sade, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Heinrich von Kleist, and, most famously, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.^[9] What made it possible for there to be such a dissonance between the expectations of polite society and the desecration of the body in works of literature during the same era? According to Földényi, this is only possible during a time when the “physical being” of the body “becomes its exclusive quality … withdrawn from its earlier metaphysical context…. [W] hereas earlier the king, with respect to Jesus Christ, had been the emblem of the extemporal body, by the end of the eighteenth century the individual body, just then stepping into the political arena, became anchored in time and became the standard.”^[10]

In other words, during the course of the Enlightenment, man truly became the measure of all things. By being reduced to his mere physicality, he became both an object of social control through seemingly innocuous behavioral standards—such as we find in Chesterfield—and an object open to radical distortion and experimentation—such as we find in Sade and Shelley. In the quest to rationalize the body, and therefore separate it from its metaphysical dimension, eighteenth-century society did not eliminate the darker impulses, the passions, and the brokenness inherent in man’s fallen state. Instead, it pushed them to the fringes, consigned to the sick imaginings of Sade’s Juliette and of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster.

Here we arrive at the chief issue with the Enlightenment: the idea that the persistent application of reason can cure all of the ills of mankind. In Földényi’s words,

The belief in the omnipotence of reason that illuminates all phenomena—similar to the sun—is the great inheritance of the Enlightenment. Thinking, of course, ever since humans have existed, has always tried to disperse the darkness. Earlier individuals did not cherish the illusion that here on earth they would be able to liquidate every shadow and every darkness. During the Enlightenment, however, the conviction that only time and intellectual preparation were required in order to eventually cast light upon all things—with no dark corners remaining anywhere unilluminated by the light of reason—became resolute.^[11]

As a critic and philosopher of art, Földényi is preoccupied with the “duality” between light and darkness, much like a composer is fundamentally concerned with the relationship between tension and release. What Földényi sees in the Enlightenment is man’s attempt to assert his autonomy over light and darkness, with the express purpose of eliminating the latter through the use of rational control. But light and darkness presuppose one another—as in painting, so in life.

Földényi highlights this dynamic through an analysis of two paintings that at first glance appear radically opposed: Jaques-Louis David’s Portrait of Madame Récamier (1800) and Henry Fuseli’s Nightmare (1781). In David, we find the well-bred body par excellence: Juliette Récamier, darling of Parisian society, is depicted with beauty, grace, and poise in a spare yet elegant setting. Récamier represents the high watermark of bourgeois composure, which is combined with explicit gestures to the Enlightenment’s inheritance of Greek philosophy—her muslin white garment is in a fashion known as à la grecque.

In Fuseli’s Nightmare we find quite a different scene, containing all that the Enlightenment wishes to overcome with the light of reason. The incubus perched on top of a woman clearly in distressed sleep, the black mare lurking in the background— all figments of a tormented imagination. The Enlightened response to such a work is a decidedly naturalistic one: What earlier ages would attribute to supernatural or metaphysical realities, the new age would cure by means of advanced medicine and treatment. Is it any wonder, Földényi prompts, that “a reproduction of Fuseli’s painting hangs even today in Freud’s study in Vienna at Bergstrasse 19?”^[12]

To bring things to a finer point: Is it possible that behind the “well-bred” body of Récamier “there can be glimpsed the uncontrollable world of passions, desires, [and] fantasies” that we find in Fuseli’s Nightmare?^[13] “Many parallels can be drawn between the paintings of David and Fuseli: the wide bed, occupying nearly the entire painting, the recumbent female figure, the white garments, in both cases disheveled, the relative lack of furnishings, the dark background…. For it would not take too much for the dark background behind Madame Récamier to become populated by Fuseli’s specters.”^[14]

Between David and Fuseli we find a perfect illustration of the dialectic of Enlightenment:

the extremes of bodily subjugation and bodily discipline, perfect self-control and hysteria … the clear and the sunlit, the nocturnal and the dark … do not exclude each other but presume each other. Just as, in another work of the same era, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the desire for knowledge and sober deliberation becomes the prerequisite for ghastly, anxiety-producing dread, the Umheimliche.^[15]

I have stressed in this short essay the importance of the body as a revelation, and art as a window to evaluate a given society’s view of the body. In particular, I have tried to demonstrate, using Földényi as my guide, that the paradoxes of the Enlightenment can be readily seen in the conflicting reports between its “book of words” and its “book of art.” With the benefit of hindsight, we can also examine the “book of deeds” of the society that the Enlightenment wrought. It, too, is one rife with contradictions: stunning material progress through the manipulation of the physical world mixed with war and atrocity at an industrial scale. The body is “liberated” from the chains of oppressive religion and material squalor, and almost immediately is decimated in the trenches of the Somme and the camps at Dachau. “If the world is divested of its metaphysical dimensions, nothing is easier than for the body to become the prey of fantasies of power,” writes Földényi in his concluding paragraph.

Today, we are still reeling from centuries of confusion over the body and its significance. Is it not a coincidence that many of the political-cultural battles of our own day—abortion, transgender-ism, etc.—are grounded in debates about the body, what it is, and what we ought to do with it? Art, of course, will not save us. Yet, in the repository of what was once called Western Civilization, we have at our disposal a cultural inheritance that, in many respects, lifts our gaze upward. At the heart is the Holy Liturgy—and at the center of that is a Body. A sign of contradiction proudly proclaimed.

__________

Republished with gracious permission from New Polity.

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Notes:

[1]   John Ruskin, St. Mark’s Rest: The History of Venice (Rahway, NJ: The Mershon Company, 1885), 1.

[2]  László Földényi, Dostoyevskey Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears trans. Ottilie Mulzet, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), 152.

[3] Letters Written by the Late Right Honorable Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, to his son, Philip Stanhope, Esq…Together with Several Other Pieces of Various Subjects, 4 vols. (London: J. Nichols and Son, 1804), 1:379. Emphasis added.

[4]  Földényi, Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel, 153.

[5]  Regarding the earlier tradition of “behavioral guides,” Földényi mentions the works of Machiavelli, Baldassare, Castiglione, and Baltasar Gracián as examples of works that urge a more aristocratic behavioral culture, as opposed to a bourgeois one.

[6]  Földényi, 153.

[7]  A phrase from Julien de La Mettrie (1709–51), who is often cited as one of the founders of modern materialism.

[8] At multiple points in his essay, Földényi uses William Blake’s proverb “The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction” to illustrate the dynamic between the controlled body and the resentment that emerges from being controlled. The phrase appears in Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Boston, MA: John W. Luce and Company, 1906), 17.

[9] Földényi, Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel, 160.

[10]  Ibid., 161.

[11] IIbid., vii–viii.

[12] Ibid., 167.

[13] Ibid., 165.

[14] Ibid., 166.

[15] Ibid., 167.

The featured image is “Dostoyevsky on his death bed, drawn by Ivan Kramskoy, 29 January 1881,” and is in the pubic domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.