Principle of Convergence and the Theme of Disempowerment

The Principle of Convergence and the Theme of Disempowerment

In this paper, I propose to present interpretations of six works by French artists,

three painters (Watteau, Delacroix, and Manet) and three novelists (Zola, Proust, and

Camus), and to report on the unexpected discovery (if it deserves to be called such) that

these disparate works have certain principles of structuring in common.

Let us eliminate from the outset a possible source of distraction : these studies are

interdisciplinary in character, but that seems to have nothing to do with the discoveries

made.

One way to throw light on the meaning of a novel or a painting is to view it in

the light of a concept drawn from another discipline. Thus the various modes of

structuralism borrowed from structural linguistics, either directly (e.g. via certain

seminal works of Roman Jakobson, such as his famous essay on metaphor and

metonymy) or indirectly (e.g. as mediated by the structural anthropology of Claude

Lévi-Strauss). Such is the nature of interdisciplinary research. It is especially appropriate

and valuable when a key element or a central aspect of a text has manifestly not given up

its secrets to any of the traditional or conventional modes of analysis.

In analyzing these works, I have had recourse to psychology, psychoanalysis,

transactional analysis, group behaviour theory, feminism and control theory. However,

the discovery I am presenting does not appear to depend in any way on the

interdisciplinary character of the perspectives used. Rather, it depends on the plausibility

of the interpretation and the central character of the aspects of the work being interpreted.

Complexity in L’Embarquement pour Cythere. — The rococo is generally

though...

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...often without

any obvious link between these two features having been noticed previously, is

unexpected, both for the art critic and the literary critic. Equally intriguing is the

discovery that each of the works we have examined here leads the viewer/reader

through a two-part drama of disempowerment and re-empowerment that takes very

different forms but in its essence recurs over and over again. As far as I know, this has

never even been suspected by any critic or historian.

It would be very interesting to know just how many great works of art and

literature can be better understood in the light of such concepts or clusters of concepts as

those used here.

When we have noted that all these works appear to represent variations on one

and the same drama, we are left with an intriguing question that remains to be

answered : do they all have the same function?