What Colour Are Shadows?
L’“inter-dit” et l’ëntre-dit ne sont jamais—ou
plutût ne doivent jamais être—un discours périphérique, mais un parole qui
prend naissance dans le texte et qui continue à habiter le texte: va-et-vient
incessant entre le texte et cet “autre-texte” auquel il donne naissance. L’ ”autre-texte” n’est pas un orphelin: il
est une généalogie de dire.[1]
“The ‘word-between’ and the ‘word-across’ are never—or rather
should never be—a peripheral form of speech, but a statement that takes its
birth in the text and that continues to inhabit the text: coming-and-going
incessantly between the test and the other-text’ to which it gives birth. The ‘other text’ is not an orphan: there is a
genealogy of speaking.”
But what was this existential reality? Does it include the shadows that flitted
through it as well as the more usual topics that historians and literary
historians deal with? The point of this
book, as we have remarked from the first words set down, has been that nothing
is as it seems to be, and therefore any account of the Dreyfus Affair and the
people and events associated with it has to be constructed and constituted
through other methods than those normally manipulated by historians and
critics. Speaking of the Crypto-Jews and
Marranos of the Iberian Peninsula and in their long exile throughout the world,
José Faur describes them as living in the shadow of history. By this, of course, he means that they have
deliberately chosen to hide their Jewishness in a variety of ways and
consequently to maintain that inner faith in the Law of Moses from the prying
eyes of the Inquisition, nosey neighbours jealous and fearful of their
otherness still somehow visible in their successful way of life, and often,
too, from their own sense of guilt or shame when they feel deeply in their
intelligence and spiritual hearts the power of the Christian religion they or
their ancestors chose—or had imposed on them. This situation is complicated
enough. When it comes to talking about
Alfred Dreyfus, however, our notion of his life in the shadows requires even
more complex patterns of thought. Let us begin with five ways of conceiving
shadows.
The
rain shadow is a metaphoric use that addresses the problem of regions of the
world shielded by mountains, strong oceanic currents or wind-patterns that keep
sufficient amounts of precipitation from falling and thus allowing rich
agricultural farming to occur. In this
sense, a shadow does not mean, as we normally use the word, a deprivation of
light but of something else, here rainfall.
Ghosts,
phantoms and other imaginary beings who normally dwell on the other side—the
side beyond normal life, which is death in some form or another—whether it be
below or beyond our commonsense reckoning are supposed to bring in their
appearance or unseen presence the dark shadow of this otherness. Shades are the washed out, faded, desiccated,
not quite transparent residue of what they once were as living creatures in our
world, or what can be faintly and eerily of their other-world reality when
visiting this place of our existence.
They are like shadows insofar as they do not seem to have substance and
only glide over and through the realities of what living beings must confront
as tangible objects.
Such
negative presences—returning revenants of past life or foreshadowings of what
lies in our own inevitable future lives—are not the same as the shadow-drawings
or cut-outs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries known as silhouettes,
a term given after Etienne de Silhouette, a mid-eighteenth-century Minister of
Finance in France. Such silhouettes or Schwarzkoppfen,
to use the German term, not only give a more or less reductive outline of a
person’s head and bust, but in removing all the subtle textures, tones and
shadows that individualize the face and posture of the model come to depend on
careful attention to contours of the side-long image. The surprize in the making and viewing of
such drawings—or occasionally woven or metal-crafted pictures—lies in the
emergence of specificity from what at first seems only a non-descript blob of
solid black or other dark tint. Unlike
the shadow puppets in Southeastern Asia and the Ottoman Empire where
articulated shadow-forms are elaborated into lengthy and intricate dramatic
performances, thus circumventing Islamic objections to depictions of human or
divine figures, or, in earlier manifestations, seeming to represent shamanic
illusions of the other side of life or history, the fashionable portraits
produced in the years prior to—and perhaps evoking the invention
of—photographs.
Ironically,
then, it may not at all have been the increasing emphasis on realistic
portraiture which developed the taste for photographic realism, with its sense
of documentary permanence—formal pictures of the bourgeois family and its
possessions, momento mori of deceased children, legal records of significant
historical events—but the silhouette as the foreshadowing of the photographic
plate and the film negative, the inverted image of black and white that waits
to be developed into an illusion of still life (nature morte) and.
somewhat later, the trick of motion pictures, flickering images projected on a
screen, as the magic lantern once cast its shadows on smoke-filled rooms¸ often
with their mediation of mirrors or other distorting lenses.
Meanwhile,
as the techniques of photography advanced, impressionist painters discovered
that shadows were not black areas where light did not fall, their presence in
an outdoor scene of country or city life indicating an interference, a complete
lack of colour and light, as was always assumed—in the same discrepancy from
what was truly to be seen in the most familiar of appearances, say, of horses
legs while galloping, flowers unfolding to the sunlight, or droplets of water
crowning upward on a pond. Instead, what
these artists found themselves able to see was that shadows were part of the
colourful scene, a modality of light, a continuation of the total picture.
In
modern popular thought, the idea of a shadow, then, can stand in for a negative
light, hidden beneath the surface of ordinary reality, able to reveal things
that normally pass unnoticed, as the comic-book and radio hero detective,
Lamont Cranston, himself the hidden one who sees into the dark shadows others
believe to be the truthful and real substance of life. Thus the ominous voice at the start of each
evening broad cast would intone these words:
“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Only
the shadow knows.”
—Lamont Cranston, The Shadow
It is only one kind of shadowy being that can
recognize the presence of the other, one on the side of justice and moral
order, the other a manifestation of evil and disorder.
Another truism found in song and film versions of
reality presents the shadow as the virtual twin of an ordinary person, the
friend who is so close that he or she shares the same space, thoughts and
motivations of the other, as in this version of a song from the late 1920s
updated in the next generation by Sammy Davis Jr and Frank Sinatra, playing on
the racial contrast in the appearance of them both:
Like the wallpaper sticks to the wall
Like the seashore clings to the sea
Like you’ll never get rid of your shadow
Frank, you’ll never get rid of me.
Me and my shadow.
—Dave Dreyer, Billy Rose and Al
Jolson [2]
The cartoon cliché of a person trying to walk away
from his or her own shadow but which clings to them like flypaper suggests how
the image does not depict a phenomenon of blocking out the rays of light or
shielding an area from the burning sun, but rather as an extruded portion of
the object itself, a mysterious dark and featureless doubling of a person’s
outline. This song also hints at another
concept of the shadow, that of a complementary or alternative version of the
self, an embodied syntagmatic form shaped by its relationship to the
original.
[1] Marc-Alain Ouakin, Le livre brûlé: philosophie du Talmud (Paris:
Lieu Commun (1993) p. 69. Ouaknin explains that
he uses “inter-dit” in the sense of a negative mitzvah, a proscription
in the Law, an interdiction. Our usage
is somewhat different; see discussions on text and anti-texts, non-texts and un-texts. What is important here, however, is the sense
of a dynamic, inter-textual relationship that generates new words, meanings and
implications, on the one hand, and on the other, a continuously cybernetic,
reflexive and self-correcting process that, while expanding and contracting,
also refines, renews and enhances thoughts and feelings. As one discourse casts its shadow over and
through the other, there is a mutually refractive, reflective and prismatic
merging of light and darkness, color and its absence. The shadow here is akin to the Shekhinah,
both the presence and the absence, the point of intersection and the impasse
which cancels out signification.
[2] Wikipedia: "Me
and My Shadow" is a 1927 popular
song. Officially the
credits show it as written by Al Jolson,
Billy Rose, and Dave Dreyer; in fact,
Billy Rose was exclusively a lyricist, Dreyer a composer,[1]
and Al Jolson a performer who was often given credits so he could earn some
more money, so the actual apportionment of the credits would be likely to be
music by Dreyer, lyrics by Rose, and possibly some small contribution by
Jolson.
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