“Un Coeur Simple” was originally commissioned by Triple Canopy as part of the public-program series Miscellaneous Uncatalogued Material at the Museum of Modern Art, the third session of which was facilitated by Ariana Reines on March 7, 2012. (All three sessions have been transcribed and compiled for the second edition of Triple Canopy’s Volume Number series.) “Un Coeur Simple” was also published by Triple Canopy as part of its Thinking Through Images project area, supported in part by the Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Ariana Reines: When I was invited to participate in this program back in January, I told Triple Canopy that I’d like to present an essay in verse on Flaubert’s Un cœur simple (A Simple Heart) and that, as part of it, I wanted to try to learn how to do something with my right arm: make the veve emblem you have on your handout by sprinkling cornmeal, which is the way that it’s done in Haiti. I wasn’t asked to respond to Sherrie Levine’s Flaubert project.1 I proposed to write an essay in verse on Un cœur simple, but I hadn’t even read the story. I just thought for some reason, at the time, that it would be an important thing to do. Then it turned out there’s this Sherrie Levine piece. It was more of a psychic or cosmic communication between me and Triple Canopy’s editors than an ordinary editorial or curatorial process, and I want to say that now so that you understand what’s really going on here.
William Smith: And I’ll just try to obfuscate. (Laughter)
AR: Yeah! I’m excited to do something that I’ve never done before with all of you tender-hearted people. This specific veve goes with the voodoo Loa Ezili Freda; she’s the Goddess of love—she is a bit of a cognate of Venus—but it’s very complicated, and her heart is not a simple one at all. I didn’t learn how to make the emblem with my hand, so instead we’ve printed the image, which I’ve been meditating on in an unintentionally insistent way. What I’m going to do now is read this weird essay, which is repetitive, so you can just relax, you don’t have to worry about paying attention unless you want to. Elements of the plot of the story Un cœur simple will come up. Then I’m going to read that entire story aloud in the courtyard, since it’s a nice day.
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AR: It seems like you’re all stunned, in misery.
Lucy Ives: I can ask you a question. Will you take questions?
AR: I will take anything. (Laughter)
LI: This is a general question about the way you read Flaubert. Flaubert is an author I have a lot of trouble with because of his obsession with style and creating a work that has a kind of objective integrity. And so, when he famously says things like, “I am Bovary,” for example, I’m left wondering what that means, or how I’m meant to perceive the author within his texts. And I was thinking this morning, as I was rereading this story, there’s a moment where, after Félicité’s nephew has died, the news comes to her, and her head falls back and her eyelids turn pink. It’s a very strange moment. Then, also, when Virginie dies, there’s the description of the corpse: The face sinks and something happens to the eyes. I had an uncanny impression that at these moments of death the body of the author is somehow appearing in the text. So I wanted to ask you about your impression of Flaubert’s presence in his own text, or his relation to his own text as a body.2
AR: That’s a beautiful question, and it calls us to be attentive to color in this story. And I don’t mean only the color of the parrot or the pinkness of the eyes; there’s also a blue, almost Krishna blue—and I’m not some kind of weird Hindu-obsessed freak—but at the end, when Félicité is dying and she sees the green parrot before her, there’s also this bizarre blue light, and she inhales it.3 Also, the color of the Negro—and that’s how he’s referred to in the translations of the French. (At one point this family moves into the town and they possess a Negro and a parrot.)
To segue into the second part of your question, about those moments of death that also seem to exude or exhale the decrepitude of Flaubert’s own body: I connect those to that part of the story in which Félicité is meditating on the mystery of the Holy Ghost, which is sometimes depicted as a bird, sometimes as a flame, sometimes as a breath. I also think it’s interesting that sometimes the French term is translated as “the Holy Spirit” and sometimes as “the Holy Ghost”; Flaubert was living with the ghost of the Holy Spirit, which was locked up and destroyed. I see the slave, the Negro, who bears the parrot, as the emblem of the Holy Spirit in chains. And through the simple heart of Félicité, I see an effort to seek out the heart of the world, or the Holy Spirit of the world. And I see, well, a Negro carrying a parrot in this little French town.4 What it means is that the heart of the world is in chains. It’s a pretty simple device.
As the old outcast whom Félicité takes care of, and who camps by the river like a hermit, falls into decrepitude, he gazes at Félicité with amazement—almost the way she would later look at her parrot, Loulou—with this kind of delirious gratitude at the grace and kindness that is being shown to him in spite of everything.
LI: I think it’s interesting to end with delirious gratitude; it’s one of the strangest features of the story.
AR: I led a vision-quest thing in New Mexico a couple of weeks ago called the Opening of the Mouth. One of the people there, a brilliant thinker named Nomy Lamm, was writing something and said, “This is my hardest and my softest work.” We all know from history and psychoanalysis that it’s out of our own frailties that everything comes. So Flaubert’s decrepitude, while extreme, is no different from the decrepitude of all writers; we are all rotting and our hearts are necropolises,5 and everything that we do, everything that we make in this world, comes out of some kind of loss or mourning or desire. And yet something about what Nomy said made me want to learn how to read with my heart, to subjugate my intelligence or my critical faculty in a way that, perhaps, one is afraid to do when seeking the perfection of style.
In 2004, Levine created a series of small bronze sculptures of parrots, which she named Loulou, after the parrot in Flaubert’s story. I wonder if Levine felt she had to cast these parrots in bronze because she was in an art world and market, and a gender moment, where in order to enter this zone of the heart, attempt a soft work, and be taken seriously required the parrots to be cast in bronze. I see Loulou as an eloquent failure. I see Levine’s response to Flaubert as utterly of her time.
Christine Smallwood: I’m having trouble with this dichotomy you’re setting up between irony and pathos. My reading of Flaubert has always been that he masters cliché. Cliché is the thing that, I think, bridges irony and pathos. We really genuinely inhabit all of our clichéd thoughts and experiences. And so this dichotomy seems like a straw man to me. The second thing I want to ask: I don’t remember the exact terms of the discussion between Flaubert and Louise Colet about her own work, but I do recall that her one creative work was autobiographical and that Flaubert was quite nasty about it. And so I’m wondering if part of what your essay is doing is recuperating some kind of conversation with Flaubert from a woman’s perspective. Because Flaubert was not—I mean, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi” has never really been understood as a personal identification.
AR: First, to the irony: I’m actually opposing the perfection of style and pathos. Irony and certain kinds of juxtaposition as elements of style are fine. I don’t have a problem with irony. I’m more concerned with the idea that the perfection of style is everything, as opposed to the pathos of Flaubert’s life or the pathos that this perfect style is meant to express. Flaubert has earned the reputation of being inhuman. He’s seen as this ironist, which is not the way I read him at all. I see the perfection of style in Flaubert as an expression of misery. I see any obsession with fashion as an expression of Occidental misery. The French represent the perfection of this misery. They always have, and they still do. Now this is not to say this misery isn’t elsewhere in the world, but in French culture it’s a jewel, it’s gemlike. The way I read the pathos of Flaubert, as Sherrie Levine very aptly called it—I see the perfection of his style as the utterly perfect expression of total failure, the misery of this culture.6 It’s a jewel, but it’s miserable—a miserable miracle, to borrow a phrase from Henri Michaux. And for me, reading Flaubert is a delight. When I read him, everything that I suffer just bathes over me like water.
With my essay, I was trying to write effortlessly and unconsciously, in the way that Un cœur simple opened itself up to me. What I wrote about my depressed return to New York was meant in some way to parallel the Occidental misery that I feel is exuded by the story. There’s a hardness and softness—the desire to express rage and the possibility to speak softly about my life in a way that Sherrie Levine perhaps could not have done at my age. This is like making lace, but it’s messy lace. Félicité tries to make lace at one point in Un cœur simple, but she can’t; her fingers are clumsy and she’s no good at it. She gives up.
Lara Weibgen: You describe Flaubert’s style as this miserable miracle, this jewel, and then you immediately talk about the pleasure of the text. They’re bound together.
AR: They are. They are absolutely one. But Un cœur simple exceeds the limits of Flaubert’s psychology, his situation, his personal decrepitude. That’s why I’m trying to open it up—beyond the way in which Levine did so by invoking his personal pathos: “Oh, this poor thing, look how he suffered.” When I read Flaubert I feel like the work is calling through time to my heart. And I think that he, with his one tooth, and his saliva blackened by mercury, his syphilis that he got fucking whores in Egypt, and the fact that he lived with his mother—all of that is there. And yet he’s made something that is a jewel, that is delightful, that hasn’t aged a day, that feels utterly true to my experience. And I feel, as a woman, that Flaubert has a great understanding of what is wrong with our world.7
To me, Levine is trying to enshrine something that is of the Holy Spirit. She’s accomplished a different kind of miserable miracle, a different kind of stylistic perfection. I think the form of the work says more about gender relations at that time than about the deeper, more universal message of this story. But I’m just going with my vibes on Levine.
Eileen Myles: Well, it’s kind of a feminist camp, male drag. “Madame Bovary c’est moi” is a kind of drag. When Rimbaud says, “I am an other” (“Je suis un autre”), that’s a kind of drag. When Sherrie Levine makes the hard harder, as Douglas put it, it’s butch drag—which was possible in the 80s.
AR: Power suit!
EM: Shoulders. A rack.
Douglas E. Martin: I want to ask you to do one alchemical thing. So: gold, bronze, and green.
AR: In alchemy, actually, the green lion is vitriol. The green lion is an epithet for sulfuric acid, for which vitriol is the acronym; it’s Latin, something like, “Visit the interior of yourself and you will find the philosopher’s stone.” There’s the chemical meaning of vitriol and the spiritual meaning. Everything in alchemy is allegory. Vitriol is allegorized in painting by a green lion biting the sun, which is bleeding. By burning through mere appearances—the Hindus would call it the veil of Maya, the world of illusions in which we all live—you can penetrate into the real truth of things. That’s the alchemical green. Why do I know that green is the heart chakra? Because the poet CAConrad was wearing a green shirt one day, and I’d been wanting to learn what those color correspondences are.
Sam Frank: If Flaubert is going in drag, and Sherrie Levine is going in butch drag, what persona are you adapting in your writing?
AR: I’m certainly in a kind of soft drag today. I wanted to attempt a way of thinking about reading that would be embodied. If I’m only willing to speak about the heart of someone else then I’m just a scholar or a steward of something. I wish to read as a poet. The decrepitude of Flaubert’s body did not seem to inflict itself upon his titanic, spotless reputation in literary history, and yet his prose is filled with these little stains—everything has rot on it, or it stinks a little bit. Flaubert isn’t hiding the shit of this world. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t wear clothes, that we should be naked and smear our poop on the walls together, and that that would be truer than sitting here and talking. And yet, I could have given only my feminist, postcolonial reading of Flaubert’s story and not brought up the fact that I miscarried or that love made me want to kill. And maybe that personal part of my essay was boring, and maybe if I had been listening to it I’d have been like, “Shut up!” But that’s also true. There will be things that are useful and things that are not.
EM: My interpretation of what you’re saying is that in doing this soft reading you get burned by the present. You enter the text thoroughly. Flaubert got burned by history, in a way, but now all the shit is gone—he’s Flaubert. How does one accomplish that in the present? I think this is a sort of feminist reading that allows you to enter the text and become invisible through your own magic, if that makes sense to you.
AR: That makes sense to me.8