“A philosopher painter,” Poussin’s contemporaries called him. The monumental exhibition taking place in Paris until January 2 [1995] to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of his birth convinces us that even today his paintings offer food for thought.
Consider the example of Echo and Narcissus, also called The Death of Narcissus, an illustration of an ancient myth whose poetic and symbolic charge is still alive for us. Have not the terms “narcissistic” and “narcissism” become part of ordinary language?
It is in the first place the painting’s composition that holds our attention. All the lines diverge. Narcissus’s legs are spread on the right, and his arms are askew. The bodies of the other two figures, the nymph Echo and the putto bearing a funeral torch, are leaning in opposite directions. That deviation from the vertical is replicated by the branches of the tree that occupies the upper half of the painting. By visual means, these divergent orientations evoke the acoustical phenomenon of the echo, which gradually removes itself from the call or cry that produced it, until it is lost in the distance. As in one of Baudelaire’s best-known sonnets, that suggestive correspondence between different sense impressions marks the painting with a melancholy, a nostalgic sadness accentuated by the uniformity of the colors.
Under the entry “Écho,” the Littré dictionary assembles quotations from good authors. Numbering about a dozen, they are all imbued with yearning and sweetness. The principal virtue they acknowledge in the echo, it seems, is that, by means of repetition, it revives the precious memory of words or songs that are no longer. In his own dictionary, Furetière—who, like Poussin, lived in the seventeenth century—confines himself to a single example, which is no less instructive: “Unhappy lovers will make their complaints to the echo.” The technical uses of the word preserve that tone. In music, “echo” is defined as a softer repetition: “Echoes on the organ are very agreeable,” says Furetière. In poetry, the echo is used to produce a recherché effect.
The positive value that Western thought grants to the echo—countless examples could be found outside France as well—is not universal, however. I offer as proof the negative value that the Indians of North and South America assign to the echo in their myths. Echo appears in the form of an evil demon who pushes those who question him to the limit by obstinately repeating their questions. When the speaker becomes angry, Echo brutally beats him, leaving him an invalid; or he binds the speaker with human intestines, which he possesses by the basketful. Other traditions attribute to Old Lady Echo the power to cause cramps, which is also a way of paralyzing her victims.
It is true that Echo sometimes proves helpful. An ogre questions him about the direction taken by an escaped fugitive. Echo delays him by repeating his questions instead of providing him with information. Whatever the adversary, then, Echo immobilizes him or slows him down. Far from being, as in Europe, in complicity with the person speaking, far from agreeing with the feelings that drive him, the American Echo always has the function of erecting an obstacle or of obstructing.
It is clear where the opposition lies. For us, the echo awakens yearnings. For Amerindians, it is the cause of misunderstanding: a response is expected, and the echo is not one. And the two terms are at odds with each other. Yearning is an excess of communication with oneself: one suffers from remembering things that would be better forgotten. Conversely, misunderstanding can be defined as a failure of communication, this time with others.
That argument appears abstract and theoretical, the kind for which Baudelaire feared he would be reproached one day “because it may make the mistake of bringing mathematical methods to mind.” Nevertheless, it faithfully reflects what the myths on the origin of the echo say in the Old and New Worlds.
The Greeks and the Inuit both personify the echo as a young girl who has been turned into stones. According to one version of the Greek myth, she rejected the god Pan because she was still yearning for Narcissus, with whom she was in love and who, hostile to love, pushed her away. In the Inuit myth, it is she who was hostile to love and marriage; her people therefore abandoned her. Repentant, and having sought refuge atop a cliff, she issued marriage proposals to the men she saw from a distance fishing in their kayaks, but they did not believe her or did not understand her. Yearning, the driving force of the Greek myth, is here reversed into misunderstanding. And the reversal continues to the end: whereas the Greek nymph is dismembered by shepherds whom Pan has driven mad in an act of revenge, the Inuit heroine dismembers herself and turns the pieces of her body into rocks. That is the same as the Greek heroine’s fate—intentionally produced in one case; passively suffered in the other.
Things are not so simple, however (they rarely are when one is comparing myths). Although the myth of Narcissus places the emphasis on the theme of yearning, the theme of misunderstanding is not absent. Consider how Ovid recounts the story of Echo and Narcissus in book 3 of
The Metamorphoses. Desperately in love, Echo follows him deep into the woods. But she is unable to take the initiative because Juno, to punish her for having sought to distract her with her chatter while Jupiter was pursuing his amorous adventures, had condemned Echo to being unable to speak first or to being silent when someone talked to her, and to repeating only the last words of the voice she heard.
When Narcissus, separated from his companions, becomes worried and calls out: “Is there anyone near me?” Echo repeats: “…me.” “Come!” says Narcissus, and she calls to him in turn. When no one appears, Narcissus is astonished: “Why do you flee me?” he says, and Echo returns his words. “Misled by that voice, which reproduces his own, he replies ‘Let us join together.’ Echo, in transports of joy, replies, ‘…Let us join together,’ and hurls herself at Narcissus. Upon seeing her, he draws back and exclaims: ‘Let me die if I abandon myself to your desires,’ and Echo repeats: ‘…I abandon myself to your desires.’” And so on.
This is a complete misunderstanding, but the opposite of the one for which the American myths make Echo responsible. Here the protagonists, far from accusing each other of incomprehension, imagine they are conversing: Echo believes that Narcissus’s words are addressed to her, and he believes that someone is replying to him. For both of them, the misunderstanding does not seem to be one. They attribute to it a positive content. By contrast, that content is always negative in the American myths.
That is not all: the theme of misunderstanding, this time with the same negative content as in the Americas, also exists in the Greek myth, but it has been transferred from the acoustical register to the visual. Narcissus mistakes his reflection in the water for another whose beauty dazzles him and with whom he falls in love (previously, he had rejected both girls and boys). Only after the fact does he discover that the reflection is himself. Desperate upon learning that his love is impossible, he too dies from the consequences of a misunderstanding.
The best proof that we are arriving at a foundation common to the Greek and American myths is that, according to the former, a flower sprouts from the body of Narcissus (it grows near his head in Poussin’s painting). Named after him, this flower is the narcissus,
narkissos in Greek
, from
narke, which means numbness. That was in fact the power attributed to this flower, cherished by the gods of the underworld. The Furies were offered narcissus wreaths and garlands because it was believed they made their victims numb. In that way, the visual misunderstanding to which Narcissus succumbed coincides with the auditory misunderstanding imputable, in the American myths, to the demon Echo, who paralyzes victims by afflicting them with cramps or tying them up with intestines.
It is therefore not surprising that incest, which is a paralysis of matrimonial exchanges, appears in these myths. As with the echo, at issue in incest is always the strange presence of the same where one expected to find the different. One version of the myth of Narcissus recounts that he was in love with his twin sister. She died, and the grief-stricken Narcissus sought to see her image again by contemplating his own reflection in the water. And American myths attribute incestuous desires to a figure who bore a resemblance to the echo in that, instead of replying, he repeated the question. These behaviors were disapproved of, and, the myth concludes, it is since that time that incest has been prohibited.
If the Greek myth expresses through the visual code what the American myths express through the acoustic code, is the reverse also true? Do we find in the Americas visual images of the echo corresponding to the representation the Greeks produced at the auditory level? Only the Indians who live on the Pacific Coast of Canada seem to have produced a plastic representation of the echo. For them, it was a supernatural spirit, whom they depicted on human-looking masks equipped with interchangeable mouths: of the bear, the wolf, the crow, the frog, the fish, the sea anemone, the rock, and so on. The dancer carried these accessories in a basket hanging from his belt and discreetly substituted one for another as the myth unfolded.
Here the echo is no longer characterized by sterile and monotonous repetition, the cause of numbness and paralysis. On the contrary, what these masks of a hundred mouths evoke is the inexhaustible plasticity of the echo, its ever-renewed power to reproduce the most unexpected sounds. The different versions of the Greek myth also contrast these two aspects. Sometimes Echo is guilty and will be able to reproduce only the last part of the words she has heard; sometimes she is innocent and will receive the power to imitate all sounds, a faculty for which the American masks offer a visual illustration.
It is significant that, in one case, the myth places the emphasis on articulated language and, in the other, on music. Indeed, for the Greeks, music, much superior to the spoken word, was a means of communicating with the gods. Echo was too talkative, she misused language, and she would find herself condemned to make minimal use of it. By contrast, it is because Pan not only desired the nymph but was jealous of her musical gifts that he had her torn to pieces and turned her members into rocks, where, thanks to the echo, her song will continue to resonate.
A detour through the Americas has allowed us to identify the common foundation of the myths. The divergences that apparently predominate in Poussin’s composition are thereby revealed in all their aspects. Such divergences are inherent in the physical phenomenon of the echo, which seems, paradoxically, both idiotic and capable of the most surprising achievements. Hence the curiosity to which it gives rise, the fascination it has for hikers and tourists. Poussin’s painting also makes these divergences manifest in the way the nymph Echo and the little emissary from a supernatural world lean in different directions: one inclined toward the rocky earth, from which she is already nearly indistinguishable, thanks to a uniform grisaille; the other inclined toward the sky, where the only gleam of light in the entire painting breaks through. These contrasts, through the complementary resources of composition and color, assemble in a single image the nymph’s sterile yearning, Narcissus’s fatal misunderstanding, and the echo’s impotence and omnipotence.