Exact Change, 1992
After slogging my way through these collective writings of de Chirico, I have decided that out of all the surrealists and proto-surrealists, this man comes as close to my own artistic aesthetic.
Not that I would have known from the title work, a novella called “Hebdomeros,” the only novel he wrote, a completely mad and dreamlike work that did not seem to come from the same artist, the man who painted empty plazas full of long shadows, statues, and mannequins.
For “Hebdomeros” is full of people. No real characters, save the title man, who is a wilder version of de Chirico, and who is somewhat of a painter, an artist, but who travels through the novel in and out of linear time, dreamstate, and textual reality.
It’s a work comprised of long, unweildy sentences that shift subject matter while you read them. “Dreamlike” has never been a truer description, as scenery shifts (though confining itself to hotel rooms, seaside towns, countrysides, and piazzas) along with characters. Yet nothing in “Hebdomeros” is reminiscent of de Chirico’s paintings, which is quite notable–he didn’t see the work as an extension of his painterly concerns.
This is made obvious with the other works that make up the second half of this book from Exact Change. Here we have a two rough sketches, warm-ups for the novel, written in similar (and equally confusing) style; Three stories containing a character called “Monsieur Dudron,” in which the narrative is more traditional and where we are alerted of shifts in dreamstate; and then a series of attempts at a manifesto, where the more familiar elements of deChirico’s paintings finally turn up–the statues, the lonely square, the banners and flags seen over the tops of buildings, the allusions to Homer and Ulysses; and two critical appraisals, one of New York City, and one of the painterCourbet. DeChirico admired the realists, but was in search of realistic solutions to Nietzchian revelations (“Ecce Homo” being a favorite philosophic text). When deChirico describes his paintings, he adds sound, so next time you see those banners over his walls, there’s a flapping, cracking sound to be heard.
I share some of his feelings, particularly the “nostalgia of the infinite,” by which he means, I believe, that sense of sadness and mystery when looking at things far away or hidden behind a wall, such as his flags or passing trains.
Sometimes the skyline is blocked by a wall behind which rises the whistle of a locamotive, or the clank of a departing train: all the nostalgia of infinity is revealed to us behind the geometrical precision of the square.
My childhood was often spent in the backyard of my house wondering what lay beyond the high fence at the top of the hill that bordered our property. Of course, I could have taken the road up and around to discover that, but it would have been different. De Chirico understands the same thing: the train seen at a distance is different from the same train seen up close. He wants to recontextualize things, much like the later Surrealist and Pop Artists did: he thought it a splendid enigma to put furniture in the middle of roads, or forests. He toys with the idea of placing statues of men in bedrooms, or sitting in chairs looking out windows.
Soon after his classic period, de Chirico tried to become a classicist (figures!) and got denounced by the artists around him. He wound up signing his work “The Greatest Painter” and making counterfeits of his old work. Oh dear.
The book taxed my vocabulary, which I consider pretty broad. For your fun and pleasure, I include a short list of words I had to go look up.
Parthenonize, pedagogize, ephebogogize, megaron, ithyphallic, hypostases, telluric, peristyle, amphorae, cholagogic, “acquae calidae”, ogival, littoral, hygrometrically, clepsydra, catafalque, vernissage, Alpheus, Thermopylae, ephebes, lacustrine, “lares and penates”, “Rialto bridge”, Quiberon, boreal, Zouave, deliomaque, Dioscuri
He also mentions artists and poets I didn’t know:
Etienne Spartali, Pandolfo Colenuccio, Corot, Poussin, Louis Le Nain, Zrzavy
If I was paid to write this, I would use Merriam-Webster and link to all these, but in this world you’re on your own.
Puffin, 1983