​Braque’s Violins, From Metonym to Metaphor, by Daniel Barbiero

Pitcher and Violin, by Georges Braque (France) 1909

​Braque’s Violins, From Metonym to Metaphor
 
In “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles” linguist and literary critic Roman Jakobson divides figures of speech into two major types. There are metaphors, in which one word is substituted for another on the basis of a similarity between their referents, and metonymy, in which an entity is referred to with a word naming a thing or feature associated with it. A common form of metonymy is synecdoche, which Jakobson defines economically as the substitution of “part for whole or whole for part.” Examples of the former type of substitution are most commonly encountered, as for example when the name of a capital city is used to stand for the entire country, or “sail” is used to mean “ship,” “boots on the ground” to refer to an army, and so on. The language of synecdoche is laconic; as Jakobson notes, it’s similar to Freud’s condensation in that it signifies a complex entity with a single image rich in associated information.
 
Although Jakobson is concerned with figures of speech and thus with language as such, in an aside he suggests a likeness between the visual and verbal arts when he claims that Cubist painting exhibits “a metonymical orientation...where the object is transformed into a set of synecdoches.” Jakobson’s claim is intriguing and I believe provides insight into how Cubism conjures its objects. We can see this with Braque’s violins, which are paradigmatic of Cubist – at least analytical Cubist – objects.
 
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Between 1909 and 1912, Georges Braque painted several pictures that included images of violins. In each of these paintings, Braque portrayed the instruments through their constituent parts – in effect, he analogized them to part-for-whole synecdochal figures of speech. Consider his Violin and Pitcher of 1910. Braque performs a neat act of reduction, dismantling the violin and presenting it as a collection of its various parts. Although each individual part is more or less where it should be in relation to the others, and although the parts display a high degree of contiguity, Braque’s carving up of the instrument at its imaginary joints, and arranging its disjointed parts on planes that abut at skewed angles, has the effect of isolating each one as a focus of visual attention. The pegs wrench themselves free of the peg box and scroll; the nut seems to float free of the fingerboard; the upper bouts slide away from the ribs and from each other; the strings are divided into two discrete and disconnected sections; the bridge is collapsed nearly flat against the top; the f-holes, which Braque, a classically trained violinist who knew the instrument well, has turned backwards, belong as much to the surrounding space as to the instrument itself. 
 
Braque’s disassembly of the violin in Homage to J. S. Bach (1911-12) is even more radical. Here, the continguity that held the different parts of the violin together in Violin and Pitcher is dissolved, as are entire regions of the instrument. The upper bouts have disappeared, while three curved lines represent the two lower bouts; the strings are four short lines projecting from a fully-depicted tailpiece; the fingerboard appears intact along its length, though seen from two perspectives; the f-holes occupy separate planes. The visual information Braque provides to signify the violin is partial and localized; here he is laconic indeed. Because of this, the synecdochal orientation of Homage to J. S. Bach feels stronger than it does in Violin and Pitcher, even if it isn’t certain that Braque portrays all of the parts of the instrument in the latter picture.
 
Regardless of the differences between them, in both of these paintings Braque’s disintegration of the violin effectively strips it of its status as a whole. One glance may be enough to take in the elements that Braque has set out, but it isn’t enough to put them together and to fill in what Braque has left out. We need to extrapolate and infer, as we do with a synecdoche – we have to derive the whole on the basis of the parts provided. Braque provides them, but in the form of a detotalized totality.
 
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A detotalized totality – I adapt the concept from Sartre’s later writings – is an entity made up of constituent parts that retain their independent identities as parts. It’s easy to see how this is pertinent to synecdoche. The part-for-whole synecdoche detotalizes the totality of the object it alludes to by detaching and presenting one part or quality through which we infer the rest. The part signifies through separation; its effectiveness as a representation is precisely its standing alone and implying what hasn’t been given. It summons the whole by displacing and replacing it, leaving us with the paradox that the whole comes to mind precisely by virtue of its absence in favor of the constituent part that stands apart from it. 
 
The object in analytical Cubism, broken up and dispersed across multiple planes, as Braque’s violins are broken up and dispersed, is the epitome of the detotalized totality. It presents things as sets of features, and not always as ordered sets at that. The detotalized totality that is the Cubist object can be totalized in a number of ways; given the disconnection and distribution of its parts, the relationships of the latter to each other appear to be unstable and changeable. In its disassembly, the Cubist object suggests alternative ways that the mind might assemble it.
 
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That the mind’s assembly of parts wasn’t intended as a reassembly was stated by Braque in 1917. He asserted that the intention of the Cubist portrayal of the object “is not to reconstitute the anecdotal fact but to constitute a pictorial fact...The subject is not the object, it is the new unity.” The new unity is this detotalized totality, this series of parts. In other words, the Cubist object isn’t a mimetic portrayal of a purely perceptual object but instead is something else, something that didn’t exist before and that is to the extent that it represents the negation of the given, even as it adds itself to the given, “thus to live its own life,” as Picasso said.
 
Braque’s statement suggests an irony in Cubism’s synecdochal orientation. For if for Jakobson, synecdoche in literature is the hallmark of the realist author who is “fond of” presenting life in all its details, then synecdoche in Cubist painting, even given its corresponding fondness for presenting details, serves to dismantle the sense of realism, at least if the latter is understood as consisting of the faithful reproduction of the eye’s plain version of the scene before it.
 
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The part-for-whole synecdochal orientation of analytical Cubism points to a quality it shares with something beyond its similarity to metonymic figures of speech. What it seems to hint at is how the dynamic structure of synecdochal comprehension, which consists in the active inference of the whole from the part, mimics the structure of perceptual comprehension itself.
 
Consider that when the analytical Cubist painting creates a new unity for the object thanks to its part-for-whole synecdochal orientation it detotalizes the totality of the object it portrays by distributing the parts in space and (often) intersperses them with lacunae. Each part occupies a different point or plane, which in turn represents a possible perspective from which to view the object. 
 
Hence the Cubist object reveals the synecdochal orientation of vision itself. We perceive an object by way of whatever part of it is given to vision, and from that part the mind fills in the rest. The structure of synecdoche turns out to mimic the structure of vision. In detotalizing itself into the parts through which it signifies itself as the totality we constitute in grasping it, the Cubist object offers itself as the point at which synecdoche and vision, the figure of speech and the grasp of the object, meet. If Braque’s violins are analogous to part-for-whole synecdoches, it’s because part-for-whole synecdoche is analogous to vision.
 
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The analogy to vision brings us to another analogy brought out by the Cubist object, one that leads us from the metonymy of the part-for-whole synedoche to a metaphor in which space is made to stand for time. 
 
Consider that we’re given the violins from a number of viewpoints through which selected parts of their fronts and sides are made visible at different angles. In order to see the instrument from the many perspectives Braque portrays, we’d have to move around it or rotate it, processes that take place in time. On the canvas, these processes are spatialized in that Braque, in good Cubist fashion, distributes our different views of the violins across different planes, scattering in space sights that unfold in time. What appears on the canvas as a simultaneity is experienced in fact as a sequence of events; the substitution of spatial distribution for temporal sequence in effect makes space a metaphor for time. The metaphor works because of a quality the object in space shares with the object in time: both are extended, one through the three dimensions of height, length, and width and the other through duration. In order to grasp the object extended in space we apprehend it in time, hence its spatial extension is correlated with the temporal extension of the perceptual-cognitive act through which we grasp it. Cubist part-for-whole synecdoche may start as an instance of metonymy, but it ends as its opposite number -- as metaphor. 

Daniel Barbiero

References:
Roman Jakobson, “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles,” in Modern Criticism and Theory, 2nd edition, edited by David Lodge with Nigel Wood (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2000).
 
Max Kozloff, Cubism/Futurism (New York: Harper & Row/Icon Editions, 1974). Quote from Braque is on p. 11; quote from Picasso is on p. 12.

Daniel Barbiero is a writer, double bassist, and composer in the Washington DC area. He writes about the art, music, and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work; his essays and reviews have appeared in After the Art, Arteidolia, The Amsterdam Review, Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Rain Taxi, Word for/Word, Otoliths, Offcourse, Utriculi, and elsewhere. He is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press; his score Boundary Conditions III appears in A Year of Deep Listening (Terra Nova Press).

Homage to J. S. Bach, by Georges Braque (France) 1912