Ecce Homo
The Tragic Passion of Auguste Rodin
Page III
When attempting to perfect The Age of Bronze, one of the last decisions Rodin made was to remove the spear from the figure’s hand in order to create a smoother line, for, as the sculptor noted, the object prevented the spectator from seeing the contours of the entire sculpture. In removing that object, Rodin did not detract from the sculpture, but intensified it; with the spear, it might almost seem conventional, too deliberately classic—without it, in removing it, the sculpture was transformed into something patently modern, something future oriented. In this manner it contains something which the Greek and Roman sculptures do not.
While one may momentarily mistake a Rodin for an ancient sculpture, it isn’t possible to mistake the latter for Rodin. When studying the Greek and Roman sculptures of his own collection, Rodin often draped cloths over certain areas of the sculptures to accentuate the parts he was studying, stating that he chose to conceal that which was “ugly” in order to “better admire that which is beautiful—that is what I call sense of decency.” Through these chance situations, Rodin discovered something vital out of which he developed a conscious practice. Thereafter he embodied history, revealing time in his work as part of its original form, creating works which appeared as if they were always already historical, that they were born with the ravages of age, already triumphant totems signaling to the future, but because of their form and their expression, are utterly modern. There is something solid and seemingly permanent about sculpture as there is with our own bodies, but Rodin evokes the state of becoming that the world is through his use of the fragmentary. That sense of flux, of discontinuity, and of incompleteness is evident not only in the obvious fragmentary works, but in the other seemingly complete works, too. Rodin marked his sculpture, deliberately imparting the influence of ‘chance and time’ to them, revealing their fate instantaneously and in revealing their fate, our fate, too, is revealed. We are face to face with our fragility and our disintegrating bodies, with what is fragmentary in us—wholeness is no longer possible. We, and earlier ages, had to wait centuries for time and the barbarous gestures of vandals to reveal history upon the Greek and Roman statues in order to learn the lesson of the fragmentary. But Rodin imparts history to us in a single concentrated gesture. Later ages, and we are one of these later ages, stand before these sculptures as if thousands of years have already tested and worn them down, ravaging and whittling them to pieces even further. They are removed from chance and time through already being ravaged by the sculptor as if by chance and time. It is like Rodin eluded chance and time through becoming them; whatever further ravages his sculptures suffer, it will be difficult to discern between what is Rodin’s and what the workings of history.
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What is the revelation of the work? The utter and irrevocable incompleteness of being, our piecemeal nature, our ravaged, impartial selves that struggle to firmly situate themselves like solid blocks of granite before the wind but resemble more crumbling shards of limestone. If one enters into the stone, one enters into the piecemeal fragments of one’s own existence—the work demands that we do, that we permit our selves to disintegrate before it. In defending himself against those who criticized his work for being incomplete, Rodin stated,
I take from life the movements I observe, but it is not I who impose them. . . I obey nature in everything, and I never pretend to command her. My only ambition is to be servile and faithful to her. There is no recipe for improving nature. The only thing is to see. I do not correct nature.
Like Hugo listening to the Muse, Rodin’s ear is keyed to the cosmos, he is obedient not to some theoretical concept, but to nature bursting forth from herself—it is an act of struggling to see; he knows that he is not the true author of the artwork, but only one who transfigures nature. He could not create whole, finished works. To do so would be to commit a gross lie, an amelioration of nature which would result in true ugliness. To Rodin, it is when the “artist [attempts] to improve upon nature” that he “creates ugliness because he lies.” The tragic artist reflects the world as it is and the world is not ugly, but horrifying, yet, if the artist “softens the grimace of pain, the shapelessness of age, the hideousness of perversion . . . he is creating ugliness because he fears the truth.” One cannot fear the truth of the world but must enter into it, enter into what is horrifying in order to discover the tragic truth of existence, for regardless of our dispositions, and it is our fixed dispositions that we are struggling to escape, nature reveals itself in our decaying bodies, which patiently break into fragments over time, while some of us disintegrate with alacrity. Thus, as a tragic artist, Rodin is too honest to veil, disguise, and temper nature to please an ignorant public. Out of his fidelity to the tragic, he refuses to promulgate idealized or Romantic expressions of existence; instead, he forces humanity to confront the implacable laws of the cosmos. In obeying nature, he obeys the laws of the cosmos, which reveal that man is not whole, nor complete, and he is aware that man never will be. “The mutilated gods have the air of martyrs” said Yourcenar, and we are the mutilated gods of Rodin’s sculptures; he perceived the divinity in man, as when he saw Jupiter in Hugo’s countenance, and he expresses that fractured divinity without reservation. It is not that we are ruined by sin, or that we are defective, but that we are incomplete. The caesura though is an opening, not a lack, a possibility, a gate through which we can walk and a bridge over which we can cross towards the future. In the incompleteness of becoming, in the fragmentariness of the cosmos, nothing is static and fixed, but replete with innumerable possibilities. We have not yet come to be but we struggle to become who we are, knowing all the while that we never can; we reach myriad stages, varying heights, and series of plateaus, but there is no end, no ultimate goal, it is an endless and processual road. The world is incomplete and we must continue to strive, to suffer with the passion of striving; as Rilke learned from Rodin, we must go our own way of suffering in search of our “ray of eternity,” and the suffering of all of our passions finds its ultimate and most incandescent expression in Rodin’s Gates of Hell.
In Rodin’s inferno, we truly go our own way, for we have no guide but our selves; it is alone that we go into the fiery abyss of ‘hell,’ which is the darkness of our very own hearts. Our passions are our flames, and if they do not burn us, that is, if they are not full of suffering, they are not passions; it is a fire that we must cultivate and tend. In creating the Gates of Hell, Rodin not only abandoned Virgil, he abandoned Dante, too. In fact, the Gates of Hell has nothing whatsoever to do with Dante or Christian theology. It is not that Rodin did not read the Inferno; he did and he was profoundly affected by it.
Surprisingly, Rodin held poets in higher regard than sculptors, but, he “had no idea of interpreting Dante.” What he was in pursuit of was something else entirely, and the Gates Of Hell are more informed by Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, which Rodin was overcome by and read religiously, than they are by the Florentine poet’s vision of the world. The Gates of Hell is not a medieval work; it is an absolutely modern one. Yet, even then, it was the immediate, palpable experience of life that guided the creation and form of the Gates. If sculpture is dependent upon literature for its meaning, then it fails and, in the end, Rodin would abandon literature entirely and go directly to bodies, to living forms for his inspiration. “My sole idea,” Rodin emphasized, “is simply one of color and effect. There is no intention of classification or method of subject, no scheme of illustration or intended moral purpose. I followed my imagination, my own sense of arrangement, movement and composition. It has been from the beginning, and will be to the end, simply and solely a matter of personal pleasure.” It is neither Dante nor Baudelaire but Rodin’s own pleasure in the tragic that guides his formation of the work. In moving beyond the circumscribing domain of Christian morality, in surpassing Baudelaire’s infernal vision of modernity, Rodin’s Gates become portals for all of humanity. It is Rodin’s Inferno, and his Inferno is not a reflection of some suffering that is the result of an ineradicable flaw or the punishment we receive from an implacable deity, it is the suffering of our own lives, a reflection of our passions and of the conflicting forces at play within us. They are a vision of our rendering of our selves, and in The Thinker is our reconfiguration; as the liver of Prometheus is regenerated anew, so are we, but always to be torn to pieces again and again, to live with the suffering that is the passion of man.
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The anonymous figure which presides over the Gates was originally intended to be Dante, but in abandoning literature Rodin transformed the figure into something entirely singular. Instead of the Florentine poet, The Thinker is more like a modern day Prometheus. It is the creator, naked and crouched on a rock, his feet contracted, his fist pressed against his teeth, fertile thoughts slowly unfolding in his imagination as he sits in focused contemplation. The tumultuous events below him reflect the play of his passions, and it is a tragedy. It is not Dante, nor is it a philosopher. It is Rodin the sculptor, and on the bottom right foot of the inner panel Rodin emblazoned an exact image of himself as thinker. The Thinker is the creator in focused contemplation, his imagination aflame; animated beneath his feet proliferates the world of the sculptor manifested with stirring vividness. And it is us, too; we are the multitudinous figures swimming on the violent surface of the Gates, entangled together, struggling with our passions, a swarm of Prometheans in the sea of the world. The thorns that stretch along the periphery above the gates is the unraveled crown of thorns which now stretch over humanity—Christ has been displaced from his cross. There is no need for redemption. The skulls have been removed from Golgotha; the hill has been leveled. The requiem aeternam deo has begun. In reclaiming our suffering, we release our selves from Christ and each of us, like The Thinker, presides over our own passions. It is our duty to become the masters of them. Rodin “once put sculpture in place of God throughout the Imitation of Christ . . . and it was right in every sense.” What this implies is that it is necessary that we become the sculptors of our own lives; we have no savior, nor do we need one. The Thinker is not an infernal juror, but one who is capable of self-mastery, of removing himself from his passions, of overseeing and transfiguring them into something intelligible; we must measure our selves against our senses and move out of and away from excessive subjectivity. Only then will we gain the equipoise of The Thinker, but that is not to declare that that state is without tension, for the body of The Thinker is torqued to reveal the incredible strain inherent in such a discipline; this is not tension as tenseness, as in clenched or overly tensed nerves or muscles, but tension as a degree of perfectly applied force. If the strings of a violin lack that perfectly applied force, they will be detuned. If the applied force is too intense, the strings will snap. It is a question of balance and grace, of sustaining enough tension in order to create music, and in the body of The Thinker is the music of his suffering. The sculpture articulates the tragic fact that our knowledge is born of cruelty and suffering; it is an ascetic practice that demands patience and sacrifice. Our sufferings are not moral though; there are no circles of hell in Rodin’s Inferno, nor is there a hierarchy of sinners. In fact, sin does not exist. As Hugo was not poised to listen to the confession of a sinner, none of the figures in this ‘hell’ are confessors. The suffering here is not like that of the figures in Dore’s etchings. In eliminating Christ, Rodin compels us to embrace and affirm our suffering, which is not the result of sin, but an affect born of each individual’s struggles in the sea of the shadows and the darkness of the world, prey to passions that afflict and overwhelm them but that also give meaning to their lives—they suffer because of their passion and their suffering is a passion. There is no other world. There is no inferno, there is no purgatorio, and there is no paradisio. If they exist, they are not places; they are states of being. The source of everything as Rumi noted is within us, and the entire world springs up from that source. The doors to Rodin’s Hell do not open; they are not portals to another realm, but an array of surfaces upon which man lives out his tragedy; that surface is a deep appearance and it is the surface of the earth upon which we remain. These closed doors proclaim that, without question, there is no other world; they declare: there is no escape. Nor should there be need for escape. It is this world where all collide. It is this world where ‘hell’ and ‘heaven’ coexist, eternally, in all of us, in all who are truly wrestling with their passions. The figures in Rodin’s Inferno reveal this. They are not the emaciated figures of Dore’s expression of Dante’s reality, they are fleshy, plump, vigorous figures driven by passions. It is the domain of the pagans where Dionysus dances in the field. The figures of Rodin’s Inferno are the energetic, gymnastic characters present in all of his works, characters who could also erupt directly out of Baudelaire’s Le Fleurs du Mal. Or his Parisienne Journal. The tenebrous, murky darkness of the Gates of Hell is the same world found in the works of Hugo and Baudelaire, a cosmos where suffering and sorrow reign and are generated by passion. In his Tenebres, a book which Rodin most probably read, Gautier wondered, “And when will our passion be finished?” Later in the book he states that “God will never come.” Our passion will not be finished; actually, it has just begun, for we have only recently recovered it. The Three Shades above the gate stand over The Thinker like Hugo over the cosmos, redirecting our suffering back into the world. It is an eternally returning configuration of passion that teems and billows like unruly tongues of fire that flicker and crack, shooting to and fro but always remaining within the confines of the blaze. The Gates for Rodin are an expression of all phases of love and passion, and in viewing them that seems indubitably clear. They are a veritable evocation of the forces of Eros, of seduction, attraction, surrender, and agony, the full scope and panorama of the terrors of love and passion. But The Thinker is the figure who organizes those passions, he is the wellspring out of which all of them are born; if he sat up and opened his eyes, if his inner tension dissipated, the entire multitude of oceanic figures would vanish. He knows that to be incomplete is to suffer, to be passionately alive, to know that we must continue to burn, to enter into contest with our selves and the world. Our bodies tremble with foreknowledge for they know where we are taking them, or rather, our selves tremble for, unconsciously, they know where our bodies are taking them, but it is the road we must traverse. Infinity, if it exists, is something we carry within us as Baudelaire said, and often our life is an attempt to flee that infinity. It is our duty however to go directly into it. It is inescapable. The tragic laws are decreed; our only hope is to rejoice in this knowledge, to be seized by the passion for this truth and in that, to find joy. “At times,” Rodin said, the artist’s “heart is on the rack, yet stronger than his pain is the bitter joy which he experiences in understanding and giving expression to that pain. In all existence he clearly divines the purposes of Destiny. Upon his own anguish, upon his own gaping wounds, he fixes the enthusiastic gaze of the man who has read the decrees of Fate. His ecstasy is terrifying at times, but it is still happiness, because it is the continual adoration of truth.” Our joy is found in the very expression of our passion, which is the exquisite suffering of each of our lives. The adoration of ‘truth’ is the adoration of the tragic, an unflinching engagement with the cruelty of the cosmos, a cruelty that we must struggle to transform into ecstasy. It is the way of Dionysus.
© Rainer J. Hanshe_Nietzsche Circle, 2007
(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, December 2006)
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“Ecce Homo: The Tragic Passion of Auguste Rodin”
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