We can overcome the absoluteness of death by attuning ourselves to and walking as caring companions with others.
View the study sheet here. Watch the recording here.
From the 16th through the 19thcenturies the dominant political doctrine in Europe was “absolutism.” A system in which monarchs held power unrestrained by all other social institutions. One of the great 19th century opponents of absolutism was Victor Hugo. As a politician, Hugo worked to undermine the grip of absolutist monarchical power and to promote the secular, democratic views of French republicanism. As a writer, he advanced the values of romanticism, with its emphasis on freedom of expression, subjectivity and attention to everyday life.
In 1872, Hugo published L’Année Terrible, a collection of poems describing the catastrophic events of August 1870 through July 1871: France’s defeat by Prussia; Bismarck’s siege of Paris; the violence of the Paris Commune. Almost 200,000 French lost their lives during that twelve-month period.
For Hugo, the losses of that year also included the profoundly personal. On March 13, 1871 Hugo was attending a dinner with friends at a restaurant. A carriage pulled up. When Hugo opened the door, he found his son Charles dead of a stroke and covered in blood.
In L’Année Terrible, Hugo writes: I take up pen to tell of the terrible year/And suddenly I stop, elbows on my desk/Must I proceed? Must I go on?/France! What horror! to see a star fade in the heavens!/I feel the lugubrious ascent of disgrace/Dismal anguish! One curse falls, a new one rises/No matter. Let’s continue. History needs this/The century is in the dock and I am his witness.
The year that Hugo published L’Année Terrible, Edouard Manet began work on the painting pictured here: The Railway. In its own way, it too is an assault on the culture of absolutism, both political and artistic, which had held Europe in its grip for centuries.
Manet had already outraged France’s art establishment with paintings such as The Luncheon on the Grass (1862) and Olympia (1865). His rejection of classical art’s insistence on idealized subjects and moralizing narratives was a direct assault on those who sought to maintain absolute control over what should be painted, how…and who could exhibit.
The location of The Railway is readily identifiable. It is Gare Saint-Lazre, Paris’ busiest train station, in a quarter of the city built by Baron Haussmann during his renovation of Paris in the 1850’s and 60’s in accordance with his utilitarian principles of logic, order and control. Manet had a personal connection to the setting. One of the residences behind the woman is 4 rue de St. Petersbourg, Manet’s studio from 1871 to 1877. Visitors there commented on how the floor trembled as trains passed beneath.
Most else of the painting is ambiguous, uncertain. It shows two figures, a seated woman and a standing child, in front of a set of iron railings. The woman looks directly at us, but appears guarded as one might look at a stranger who has just entered her space. Her fingers save a place in an opened book. Have we interrupted her reading?
The child is turned away from us…and from the woman. They are each engaged in their own separate activities. The relationship between the two of them is ambiguous. Mother and daughter? Governess and ward? They appear simultaneously connected to and detached from one another.
What exactly is this a painting of? The title tells us the subject is a railway. Yet, the railway seems quite peripheral. And indistinct, suggested by just a few brush strokes of paint. No train is visible. Its presence is only suggested by the steam.
The steam. During this period, Manet developed an intense friendship with the poet Stephane Mallarme. They lived on the same street and met daily. Mallarme was one of the greatest Symbolist poets, who emphasized emotions and sensations rather than the reproduction of observed reality.
As a Symbolist work, the steam serves to both conceal and reveal. Instead of being provided concrete representation, we must use our imagination to see what lies beyond. The artist has concealed so that we might reveal.
Manet has provided us with a message about a world in which nothing is absolutely fixed and certain. A world in which that which is insubstantial and intangible, our imagination, may give us the greatest means to overcome the absolutist’s insistence on what is real.
This week’s Torah portion, Chayei Sara, presents us with something we know to be absolutely real: death. Yet, it toys with our certainty by titling the portion “the life of Sarah.” The narrative’s arc drives us away from the contemplation of death and points us toward the wonder of life: Abraham seeks a wife for Isaac; Rebecca demonstrates her character as a wife for Isaac by how she conducts herself at a well; Isaac brings her into his deceased mother’s tent; Abraham remarries and fathers more children; Isaac and Ishmael reunite to bury their father. And the portion ends with a recitation of the line of Ishmael, the child who had been displaced from the family camp.
Hugo found a way to sing through what appeared to be disastrous finalities. Manet painted a victory over the static and absolute and colorfully proclaimed that nothing is fixed and certain. And Torah reminds us that we have the power to transcend death itself if we but attend to those around us.
Join us here at 7:00 p.m. (PT) on Thursday November 21 as we explore to blunt the absolute.
