“ One Into Another (Sugar Into Stone)”, an essay by Daniel Barbiero

It’s a rather ugly thing that no one seemed to like: a small wire birdcage painted white, half-filled with a jumble of 152 sugar cubes, a cuttlefish bone, a handful of wooden perches, and a thermometer for measuring fevers. On its underside, its title and date appear in black block letters: “Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy? 1921.” The piece, by Marcel Duchamp, was a trap of sorts. When you picked it up, the unexpected heaviness of the thing gave the game away: the “sugar cubes” were really small marble blocks cut to resemble the kind of sugar cubes you’d get in a French café. (Of course you can’t pick it up now that it’s on display in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.)

On a television program that aired on NBC in January 1956, Duchamp gamely demonstrated how the piece worked to art historian and museum director James Johnson Sweeney:

Let me show you: this is a Ready-made bird cage with, if you see me, I am having a hard time [picking it up] because this is not sugar, that is marble, and it weighs a ton, and that was one of the elements that interested me when I made it, you see. It is a Ready-made in which the sugar is changed to marble. It is sort of a mythological effect. (Writings, pp. 135-136).

The piece had been commissioned by Dorothea Dreier, the sister of Katherine Dreier. Katherine had been collecting Duchamp’s work since the ‘teens and had even followed him to Argentina in 1918, where he lived briefly during the First World War. Dorothea promised Duchamp $300 and allowed him to do anything he wanted, and this was the result. It was something Duchamp called an “assisted readymade” – “assisted,” because Duchamp had contracted out the job of cutting the marble blocks. Dorothea disliked it enough to sell it to Katherine, who didn’t much like it either. She passed it back to Duchamp and asked him to find a buyer for it. It eventually found its way into the collection of Duchamp’s other major patron, Walter Arensberg.

One person who did like it, though, was André Breton, founder and chief theorist of Surrealism, and an admirer of Duchamp. He was amused by the object’s ability to surprise his friends with its unexpectedly heavy weight and declared it a trick of art “as good as any other—and even as good as nearly all the tricks of art put together.” A trick indeed, but instead of a trompe l’oeil, a trompe l’esprit – a trick played on the mind rather than the eye. The expectation that the cage would be light because it was filled with sugar cubes was an inference rather than a perception, and it was an inference that the piece’s actual weight disabused. This I believe is what Breton liked about it – its confounding substitution of one idea (that these are sugar cubes) by another (that they are not), facilitated on the basis of a superficial likeness that conceals a deeper unlikeness. What Duchamp had created was exemplary of a particular kind of analogy that was central to Breton’s way of thinking.

Breton’s fullest exposition of his idea of analogy can be found in the theoretical statement “Ascending Sign.” Although the statement was composed in 1947, the concept it articulates had been part of Breton’s thinking since at least as far back as 1924’s first manifesto of Surrealism. In “Ascending Sign,” Breton described the Surrealist analogy as the site of a kind of truth brought out by the

spontaneous, clairvoyant, insolent connection established under certain conditions between two things whose conjunction would not be permitted by common sense...it transgresses the rules of deduction to let the mind apprehend the interdependence of two objects of thought located on different planes...it brings under the strongest light what are merely partial similarities…(Breton, pp. 104-105)

In sum, the Surrealist or poetic analogy is created by the juxtaposition of two more-or-less distant realities based on an incomplete or imperfect mutual identification, and identification whose logic transcends logic and demands instead that it be apprehended on an intuitive or affective, rather than rational, level. (We can see here Breton’s continuing debt, which he fully acknowledges, to Pierre Reverdy’s concept of the image as having the stronger emotional and poetic force the more distant the realities it brings together.)

Why Not Sneeze embodies the poetic analogy by establishing a likeness between two ontologically distant objects: sugar, and marble. In doing so, it resembles a move in the late-period Surrealist game of One Into Another. In the game, you as a player are asked to think of a concept or object and to keep its identity hidden. After you leave the room the other players decide on an object or concept of their own, the name of which they announce to you when you reenter. You must now make recognizable to the other players the identity of your own object or concept, using only the properties of the object or concept the others have chosen. To be sure, the game of One Into Another was an invention of the 1950s, three decades after Duchamp created his deceptive birdcage. But Duchamp’s object anticipates the game to the extent that, in its own way, it realizes a move in what is in effect a solitaire version of the game, and raises the stakes by casting its poetic analogy in the form of a material thing.

Consistent with Breton’s concept of the poetic analogy the likeness of sugar to marble is, as Breton would have it, a partial one based on an essential non-identity. As we’ve seen, the two elements are drawn from widely separate ontological domains – sugar cubes and marble blocks are two very different substances whose likenesses, which consist in their outward features of color and shape, are counterbalanced by their unlikenesses: of mass and density, as felt in the shock of the object’s unanticipated weight; of tactile qualities, felt as differences of hardness and smoothness, should one tap their surfaces; of function – one wouldn’t want to drop one of Duchamp’s “sugar cubes” in a cup of coffee!; and so forth. This is a work whose material not only is the medium for conveying its meaning, but whose material is its meaning and whose meaning is its material. We could drill down deeper and say that for Why Not Sneeze the sugar cubes belong to the ontological realm of the posited, or the expected, while the marble blocks belong to the ontological domain of the real, or the actually existing. And the non-identity of the analogy is made obvious thanks to the trick the piece plays on anyone who tries to pick it up: it demonstrates that the differences between sugar and marble literally outweigh their similarity of appearance. The difference separating the (imagined, anticipated) sugar cubes from the (actual) marble blocks maintains each at a distance from the other; identity between the two is deferred indefinitely, and difference preserved. That difference-in-partial-identity is the source of the object’s poetic charge, as manifested in the surprise it springs on anyone who lifts it. It is a case of warping reality, folding it up on top of itself to bring together distant phenomena and to wrap the one thing into the other. But not completely. Was this a fault? For at least one influential commentator, it was.

In “The Situation of the Writer in 1947,” Jean-Paul Sartre offered Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy as Exhibit A in a broader polemic against Surrealism. Sartre’s objection to Surrealism was that it represented a purely idealistic attitude of negation aimed at undermining objectivity, which is what he thought Duchamp’s object essentially intended to do. Duchamp’s trompe l’esprit birdcage, in his reading, was supposed to realize, in the mind of the person who picked it up, “the self-destruction of the essence of sugar” and by extension, to reveal the “deception of all being” and to destroy in fact what skepticism could only destroy in words, exposing the whole world as a “radical contradiction” without synthesis (Sartre, pp. 170-171).

But we might well ask whether the lack of synthesis is due to a conceptual failure at the heart of Surrealism’s relationship to the world, or whether on the contrary it is the deliberately cultivated mode of finding meaning in the world, a mode which produces its poetic power. Consider that because it is based on a partial likeness rather than on the possibility of a complete identity, the poetic analogy is an analogy that contains a certain inherent tension. Any identity drawn between the two likened objects will be incomplete,  as their non-likenesses constitute a force that pulls them away from each other at the same time that their (partial) likeness draws them together. Their relationship is much like that of two bodies orbiting each other as they are held together by the tension between gravity and inertia. One force pulls them in, another force pushes them apart. And yet they stay in relation to each other, making up a compound whole in which each part asserts itself as itself and nothing else, even as it defines the nature of the whole in necessary relation to its counterpart. In Why Not Sneeze sugar and marble are drawn to each other at the same time that they push away from each other, the one by virtue of what it is in the eye, and the other by virtue of what it is in the hand, of the beholder.

The poetic analogy, to – ironically -- borrow a concept from Sartre, is in effect a detotalized totality – a whole in which the constituent parts refuse to be subsumed completely into the All and in the process lose their identity as individuals. It is an imperfect dialectic whose synthesis is deferred precisely to the extent that the likeness on which the analogy is based is only a partial likeness. When we recall that Breton often referred to the Surrealist image as a catalyst, we can see that in the case of the poetic analogy, which is one of the forms the image can take, the catalytic force just is the product of this tension. Any consummative move of unification or synthesis we may want to find is blocked by the non-identity of the analogy’s constituent parts. They are exchangeable for each other only to the extent that they are separated by an intervening gap.

What the analogy catalyzes is not a revelation of the world’s inherent contradictions, but rather a poetic intuition of the world’s possible meanings, albeit meanings that run against, or better, open up out of, the ordinary meaning the world carries for us. The poetic analogy afforded by the sugar cubes that turn out to be cut out of stone doesn’t destroy the objectivity of the world with a corrosive skepticism so much as it alters the structures of meaning through which the world discloses itself to us. And it is in these structures of meaning that the objectivity of the world consists. In disrupting the ordinary form these structures take, the poetic analogy reveals something essential about human existence – that, in the words of Medard Boss, human existence “consists in nothing more or less than the sum total of a person’s innate potential for perceiving and responding to the significances of entities that impinge on him from the open realm of his world” (Boss, p. 129). Sometimes these significances appear in a clearing lit by an oblique light – the kind of light that illuminates the marble hidden in the sugar, and the sugar condensed in the marble.

References

Medard Boss, “I Dreamt Last Night…” tr. Stephen Conway (New York: Gardner Press, 1977). Internal cite to Boss.

André Breton, “Ascendant Sign,” in Free Rein, tr. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline D’Amboise (Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska Press, 1995). Internal cite to Breton.

Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, eds., The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973). Internal cite to Writings.

Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Situation of the Writer in 1947,” from What Is Literature? tr. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Harper Colophon, 1965). Internal cite to Sartre.