ABSTRACT

I am reduced-a sad confession!—to something I have also used before, and even in this book-the well-known method of degrading one species of art by appealing to another.^

W h e n remembering his daughter B e l ' s features, age twelve, after twenty years have elapsed, V a d i m Vadimovich , the writer-narrator of Look at the Harlequins! cannot tackle the art he has always l ived for and which has made him famous: he feels unable to truly portray his daughter with words, this is why he is "reduced" to appeal to another "species of art"—painting. His method consists in alluding to a specific work by a Russian artist, in order to revive the memories of his youth, and his reader is invited to participate in the process as he is supposed to be able to "see" it through V a d i m ' s eyes. A t this point of his life, when he has reached old age and finally met "you ," the young woman he loves, his mind has become the v ic t im of his heart since he is emotional ly impl ied in the depiction he attempts to present to his reader; therefore, he suddenly realizes that most of Be l ' s features as a ch i ld can no longer be described in literary terms, as always been the case in his works of fiction. One gets the impression that V a d i m is l i teral ly dissociat ing noncommittal creative wri t ing and personal involvement in one's art, because as soon as direct emotions are concerned-like what he calls his daughter's "radiance"—he cannot find the words to express it and make his reader visualize exactly what he senses. This is all the more enhanced by his addressing "you" at this point of his narration, "you" being his last and anonymous partner, the

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184 Christine Raguet-Bouvart

one he compares B e l to: " I f B e l is alive today, she is thirty-twoexactly your age at the moment of writing (February 15, 1974)" (N 6974 687). A l l these very specific details referring to the narrator's private l ife and sentiments account for his w i l l to avoid endowing his descriprions with tenderness. His former method of composiUon seems to have escaped him for good and he has no ready made frame to set his daughter's portrait in; consequently, he feels he has no solurion but to resort to some other artisdc form to represent a figure truer to his heart's image, as i f words would not suffice to solicit the reader's imaginary eye. Moreover, the picture he chooses is directly linked to his youth and his former country's sad history. Thus, when he decides to offer Serov's picture as an equivalent for his own mental image of his daughter's, he experiences both emorional and artistic failure, since he only manages to transpose his feelings by merging his figuration of his daughter into another artist's evocarion, as i f he were shedding both his love and his ardsdc gift in doing so. Henceforth, a foreign framing device encloses what should always have remained a personal piece of property; oddly enough, this idea is emphasized by V a d i m ' s mentioning the picture's fate: "that picture . . . belonged to (his cousin)'s grandmother before being handed over to the People by a dedicated purloiner" (N 69-74 689). A l l this undoubtedly accounts for his having to present this process as a reductive and "sad confession."