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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822379416 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/23/1993 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| Lexile: | 1390L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Richard Klein is Professor of French at Cornell University and editor of Diacritics. He quit smoking while writing Cigarettes Are Sublime and has been nicotine-free ever since.
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Cigarettes are Sublime
By Richard Klein
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1993 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7941-6
CHAPTER 1
What Is a Cigarette?
Only smoking distinguishes humans from the rest of the animals. —Anonymous
A photographic self-portrait from the 1930s, reproduced in Le Monde (December 17, 1987), pictures the popular French photographer Brassaï, standing on the rue Saint-Jacques, shooting the streets of Paris at night. Posed against the intermittent shadows of the cobblestones, he is seen in profile, peering through the glass of his bellowed Rolleiflex. The camera is supported at his eye level by a tripod, one foot of which is barely visible in the gutter; the camera could be peering back at him. He wears a long, shadowy overcoat, distinctly well-worn, whose loose folds, like the dark cloth of a portrait camera, completely obscure his body; from beneath a broad fedora emerge, barely, his face and neck, straining to see through the glass. He is hunched against the rawness of one of those cold Paris nights, when the wet wind, sweeping in from the Atlantic uninterrupted by the plains to the west, blows down into the city streets, banishing cobwebs. Half his face is illuminated by the oblique ray of a street lamp that is the apparent but invisible source of the pool of light at his feet. The light, coming from above at an angle, lends a theatrical air to the prominence of his face in the photograph, a face that features a large aquiline nose and, jutting out and down, a cigarette—long, inordinately thick, and very white against the darkness. His craning neck bespeaks his avid wish to see through the lens something that lies improbably beyond the frame in the gloom—something his camera, haloed by light for its role in another photograph, probably could not record. Photographed photographing, he may in fact see nothing in the lens, standing, as he is, beneath the harsh glare whose function is to illuminate him and his camera for us, for the camera we do not see that gives us to see (in) this self-portrait. Seeming, with the angle of his neck, to form the leg of another tripod, the cigarette may be another index of avidity, sticking out from his lip like a sign of incipient arousal. Not merely a prop, although also that, like everything else in this self-portrait, the cigarette is an index—not a symbol but an entity that is what it is, while at the same time being a sign for the general category of things it is. The index of the cigarette points to itself to indicate that it is an instrument of the photographer's trade. In fact, the cigarette in the photo is a timer for determining, roughly, the long duration of the film's nighttime exposure. Brassaï explains: "Une gauloise pour une certaine lumière, une boyard s'il faisait plus sombre" [A Gauloise for a certain light, a Boyard if it was darker]. The Boyard is a cigarette first introduced into commerce in 1896 on the occasion of the visit to Paris of Czar Nicolas II; the word translates as seigneur, or lord, and designates the landed aristocracy of czarist Russia. What matters for Brassaï's purposes is that the diameter of the cigarette (10.5 mm for a Boyard versus the normal 8.7 mm for a Gauloise) determines the time it takes to smoke.
This cigarette is not a cigarette but a clock, as every smoker knows intuitively, and as many literary and cinematographic representations attest. It is an intimate counter that the photographer uses to divine the moment when enough light has done its magic on the emulsion. The photographic image takes time to form, but the image we see all at once, in the time of a look, is of a photographer smoking a clock, measuring the time needed to produce this image. Brassaï has in fact taken a photograph of the timer that may be timing the exposure, not of the picture he appears in the photo to be taking, but of the one we are observing, the self-portrait taken through the lens of the other camera we do not see. The peculiar and rather amusing centrality that is lent to the photographer's cigarette—a wink at the phallic intrusiveness of the camera's "eye"—is intended therefore to put light on the time of the photograph's exposure to the light and, more particularly, on the difference between the time of the image's production and the instantaneity of its consumption by a look. Every photo seems to represent the snapping off of a single frozen moment, the stereotypical time of a camera's click (or cliché, in French), even if, in fact, the exposure took the time it took to smoke a Boyard. No event is ever instantaneous, of course; the punctual unity that seems to define it is always an idealized fiction or a technically persuasive illusion. Frequently the illusion of instantaneity is ideologically motivated by the desire to erase from the appearance of what appears the multiple, heterogeneous labor times that went into its presentation as a single coherent occurrence. But how can one represent that difference in a photograph—the difference that is constitutive of its production and consumption—except by a little allegory of that difference in the person of the cigarette? It becomes the focus of this photographer's self-portrait. For all its apparent insignificance (the result of the ubiquity and the mechanical stereotyping of cigarettes), it speaks of what the photograph before us occults; it is a kind of hermeneutic hole in the surface of the image that opens onto a dimension of time—the time of its production—which the photograph itself cannot represent but must obscure in the stillness of its image.
One of the ironies of this photographic self-portrait is that its star is not the photographer but the production of the photograph, represented by its timer, a cigarette. The rare importance Brassaï lends to the cigarette contrasts with the way cigarettes are usually photographed or painted, depicted or indicated, in prose as well as images, always marginally—propping a gesture, sketching a pose, but rarely the direct focus of attention. The cigarette is usually considered to be merely an accessory to the face of the portrait, to the scene of whatever activity may be being observed. Its role is inessential or nugatory, its utility—if it has any—belongs to the realm of leisure or distraction, its function is decorative and incidental.
The caption in Le Monde accompanying the photograph of Brassaï is not misled by the modesty of cigarettes. After identifying the brand, it suggests, half seriously, that the subject of the Boyard, like the one Brassaï is smoking, "deserves a whole Sorbonne thesis in itself"; after all, Le Monde impeccably informs us, the boyard is also the "fat number" [gros module] Sartre used to "pop" [brûler] when he was writing Being and Nothingness. It is not true, as the myth has it, that Sartre wrote his masterpiece sitting in the Café Flore, on the Boulevard St. Germain, drinking small cups of coffee and filling ashtrays with innumerable ends of cigarettes, which had hung so long untouched on his Frenchman's lip that nothing remained but the barest butt. But it is true that, while writing, he smoked like a Turk. It will, therefore, be easy to show that any Sorbonne thesis on the Boyard would be bound to contrast the capital role played by cigarettes in the physical writing of Sartre's book with the depreciated value and insignificant functions they are assigned in the moral hierarchies of Being and Nothingness. But before getting too deep in anticipation of the putative thesis, the reader must remember that Le Monde's suggestion is only half-serious; such a thesis is impossible. Calling Sartre's cigarette a gros module in French has burlesque, bordering on obscene, connotations analogous to those in English surrounding a "fat number," referring to a large, thickly rolled joint. The mechanical impersonality of module, like the slangy word number, makes it antiphrastic, intimating the opposite of what it designates—the least indifferent, the most highly personal component of pleasure and taste the cigarette affords ("Who is that cute number?"). The joke of proposing that the fat number Sartre used to pop become the object of a Sorbonne thesis points up the inherent futility, the irredeemable triviality of cigarettes, all-too-ironically "worthy," like so many academic subjects, of being treated, out of all proportion to their actual value or significance, with the misplaced gravity of a weighty academic tome. Only a fool or an academic would undertake to write a thesis on the Boyard—to write a book on cigarettes!
But imagine for a moment that you were both an academic and a fool, like the author, and you took seriously Le Monde's suggestion. For a moment, try to imagine the shape of such a thesis. It would doubtless present some very peculiar anomalies. In the first place, the cigarette does not lend itself to the sort of Aristotelian definitions with which every Sorbonne thesis inaugurates its investigation. One has difficulty asking the question, the Aristotelian philosophical question, "Ti estin [What is] a cigarette?" The cigarette seems, by nature, to be so ancillary, so insignificant and inessential, so trifling and disparaged, that it hardly has any proper identity or nature, any function or role of its own—it is at most a vanishing being, one least likely to acquire the status of a cultural artifact, of a poised, positioned thing in the world, deserving of being interrogated, philosophically, as to its being. The cigarette not only has little being of its own, it is hardly ever singular, rather always myriad, multiple, proliferating. Every single cigarette numerically implies all the other cigarettes, exactly alike, that the smoker consumes in series; each cigarette immediately calls forth its inevitable successor and rejoins the preceding one in a chain of smoking more fervently forged than that of any other form of tobacco.
Cigarettes, in fact, may never be what they appear to be, may always have their identity and their function elsewhere than where they appear— always requiring interpretation. In that respect they are like all signs, whose intelligible meanings are elsewhere than their sensible, material embodiment: the path through the forest is signaled by the cross on the tree. Cigarettes are frequently signs, but especially ambiguous ones, difficult to read. The difficulty is linked to the multiplicity of meanings and intentions that cigarettes bespeak and betray; they speak in volumes, rather than in brief emblematic legends. The cigarette is itself a volume, a book or scroll that unfolds its multiple, heterogeneous, disparate associations around the central, governing line of a generally murderous intrigue. The cigarette is a thyrsus, the wand of Dionysus, which Baudelaire took to be the emblem of all poetic language, whose vine leaves are the poet's fantasy and invention swirling around a rigid, central hop-pole that stands for poetic intention and creative purpose. Smoking there at the end of two delicately poised fingers or emerging from its pack at the end of an offer to smoke, the cigarette may convey worlds of meaning that no thesis could begin to unpack, that require armies of novelists, moviemakers, songwriters, and poets to evoke.
There are other, more contingent reasons why Aristotle could not ask, "What is a cigarette?" Tobacco was unknown to antiquity, and not even Aristotle, who knew every damn plant, knew anything about it, botanically or experientially. But a more subtle ignorance may be involved here: Aristotle did not know the experience of tobacco, which, to some, may be equivalent to saying that he, an ancient, was uninformed about modernity. The introduction of tobacco into Europe in the sixteenth century corresponded with the arrival of the Age of Anxiety, the beginning of modern consciousness that accompanied the invention and universalization of printed books, the discovery of the New World, the development of rational, scientific methods, and the concurrent loss of medieval theological assurances. The Age of Anxiety gave itself an incomparable and probably indispensable remedy in the form of tobacco; it was an antidote brought by Columbus from the New World against the anxiety that his discoveries occasioned in the Eurocentered consciousness of Western culture, confronted by the unsuspected countenance of a great unknown world contiguous with its own. The paradoxical experience of smoking tobacco, with its contradictory physical effects, its poisonous taste and unpleasant pleasure, was enthusiastically taken up by modernity as a drug for easing the anxiety arising from the shock of successive assaults on old certainties and the prospect of greater unknowns. It is tempting to think that Aristotle could not have known tobacco even if he knew it. Tobacco, the avid enjoyment of which quickly spread to every corner of the Continent and promptly beyond to Asia, defines modernity; its use is an index of whatever revolution in consciousness may have occurred to transform the culture and the mores, the ethics and principles, of antiquity. Aristotle could not define the cigarette because, resisting the Aristotelian definition, the cigarette defines him and his age: the cigarette asks Aristotle, "What's this, the question: 'What is'?" Such an argument was advanced by Pierre Louÿs, the French classicist and pornographer, in a short story written in 1896, "Une volupté nouvelle." Cigarettes, he suggests through his heroine Callistô, are the only new pleasure that modern man has invented in eighteen hundred years, and perhaps his sole originality with respect not only to the pleasures but to the wisdom of antiquity For Louÿs they thus define the difference between modern man and antiquity and therefore become the most important thing to study, the one most worthy to occupy the attention of the historian of culture. History, in fact, should be nothing else, in a way, than the history of cigarettes.
However impossible it may be to ask the Aristotelian question of the cigarette, we cannot pretend to ignore that the question "Qu'est-ce que la Cigarette?" has already literally been asked, in French, in an essay written at the end of the nineteenth century by Théodore de Banville. For the moment we will put off consideration of the answer he proposes and assume that the question cannot be asked at all.
We can be certain, however, that no thesis could fail to include a chapter titled "Le Boyard in L'être et le néant." It would not only narrate what could be learned of Sartre's smoking habits, which were compulsive (Simone de Beauvoir, for example, attests that "he smoked two packs of Boyards a day" [8]), but it would contrast the importance of the role cigarettes played in the material production of the work with the insignificance they are implicitly assigned within it, whenever they serve as an exemplary, thematically explicit topic of philosophical reflection. For Sartre makes frequent reference in those pages to smoking. It is one of the charms of L'être et le néant [Being and nothingness] that its abstract formulations are illustrated with an abundance of concrete examples drawn from the writer's immediate surroundings—examples whose deictic formulations, such as "this inkwell," "this table," "these cigarettes," recall the style of Descartes's Meditations much more than, say, Heidegger's austere and rarely illustrated Sein und Zeit, to which Sartre constantly refers. It is instructive to contrast Sartre's constant cigarette smoking while writing L'être et le néant with his systematic devaluation of them in the work itself, particularly compared to his beloved pipe. Among the many references to cigarettes (but no cigars: wrong class) and pipes (to which we may assimilate the examples of matches and tobacco pouches), the latter are assigned to the side of Being while cigarettes belong to Nothingness.
What is a cigarette, philosophically speaking? A Sorbonne thesis such as the one Le Monde proposes might have less difficulty addressing the narrower question: "What exactly is a Boyard?" It would perforce begin by noting the circumstances surrounding the Boyard's introduction to France in 1896 on the occasion of an official visit to Paris of the ill-fated Czar Nicolas II, a heavy smoker whose habit was not what killed him. The name Boyard was chosen no doubt to honor the imperial guest, but it resembles many other names of cigarettes intended to lend an air of aristocratic luxury to the most democratic, popular form of tobacco; the putative thesis would not likely miss the irony that the cigarette named for the czar was adopted by the proletarian class that in Russia overthrew him.
Cigarettes first appear in L'être et le néant when Sartre wants to exemplify the existence of attributes that are objective properties of things but not inherent in them. He writes: "If I count the cigarettes in this cigarette case, I have the impression that I am uncovering an objective property of this group of cigarettes: they are twelve. This property appears to my consciousness as a property existing in the world.... an excellent refutation of Alain's formula: 'To know is to know one knows.' And yet, at the moment in which these cigarettes are revealed to me as being twelve, I have a non-thetic consciousness of my act of addition" (19). Sartre at this moment is distinguishing between reflexive consciousness and immediate consciousness of things. The former consists in judgments that consciousness passes on itself and therefore implies the "thetic" positioning of consciousness by itself—explicitly, nominally, self-reflexively posing itself as its own object, knowing that it knows. Immediate consciousness, perception or counting, attributes objective properties to things (the number twelve to cigarettes, for example) without posing its operation as an object of consciousness: one may count without knowing that one counts, or how. One can know, contrary to Alain, without knowing that one knows. What is of interest here is the way cigarettes lend themselves to the illustration of this philosophical distinction. It is not that "these cigarettes" actually themselves possess the "objective property" of being twelve; they only appear to do so at the moment they are counted. Nevertheless, they lend themselves better to this appearance than other things might (pipes or tobacco pouches, for example) by virtue of their eminent countability.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Cigarettes are Sublime by Richard Klein. Copyright © 1993 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface ixAcknowledgments xv
Introduction 1
1. What Is a Cigarette? 23
2. Cigarettes Are Sublime 51
3. Zeno's Paradox 77
4. The Devil in Carmen 105
5. The Soldier's Friend 135
6. "L'air du temps" 157
A Polemical Conclusion 181
Notes 195
Works Cited 203
Index 207