What is the ichnography? "It is the ensemble of possible profiles, the sum of horizons. Ichnography is what is possible, or knowable, or producible, it is the phenomenological well spring, the pit" (Serres 19).
Where, then, can we observe the ichnography ?
"Leibniz never saw the ichnography, but he knew where it was. This flat projection is in God, it is God"(19). Using rational methods Leibniz sought to unveil the ichnography through a process of infinitesimal categorisation. He followed this path because as Serres suggests "It would no doubt have been absurd to the old master for rationality in its totality not to be rational" (19-20) But Leibniz's project, in a Protean movement, became one of disorder, indeterminability and chaos. Rather than allowing itself to be unveiled by rational methods the ichnography reveals itself, Serres believes, when we turn our attention away from methods like Leibniz's and, instead, concentrate our attention on the belle noiseuse, the beautiful noise. "That way lies before us," Serres says "it is infinite, the perfect flat projection remains inaccessible. It is divine, it is invisible" (21). The way is noise, multifarious and eternal.
If a tree falls in the forest does anybody hear ? Does it matter ?
Noise is the background, "a cornucopia from which myriad forms emerge", the noise of the ocean, the noise of cities, the noise of people, the noise of silence (18). "She is not harmony, she is racket. She is not peace, she is war. She is not smooth, transparent and blank, she is not one, she is the multiple, and a thundering mix, yes, chaos" (22). If we are to follow this then we must pay close attention to the ichnography as it unveils itself in the chaos of the work of Pollock, Frenhofer and Cezanne.
It is not only visual art where the belle noiseuse is at work. In literary texts we can see the belle noiseuse emerge in the background, in the description that positions the foreground of the texts. "There is the background noise" Serres says "then a noise in the midst of that background noise, and suddenly there's the whole song"(24). It is at the description and the detritus of a texts temporal and spatial positioning that we should look. Alain Robbe-Grillet in his book For a New Novel (1963) describes the development in the structure of the novel from nineteenth century realism epitomized by Balzac and Stendhal to the more experimental stylings of the French New Novelists. Discussing developments in literary description Robbe-Grillet says it "once served to situate the chief contours of a setting, then to cast light on some of its particularly revealing elements… now it seems to destroy them, as if its intention to discuss them aimed only at blurring their contours, at making them incomprehensible, at causing them to disappear altogether" (147). Description in this more experimental fiction begins at "what most resembles a point" from which it moves to "invent lines, planes an architecture" (italics added, 148). As it begins to pile details one on top of each other the description begins to contradict itself and problematise itself, the detritus begins to question its own existence. "Yet we begin to glimpse something," Robbe-Grillet says, "and we suppose that this something will now become clearer. But the lines of the drawing accumulate, grow heavier, cancel one another out, shift, so that the image is jeopardized as it is created" (148).
Is this what is at work in Musil ? It seems to be the case for James Joyce's Ulysses which, on the surface, does nothing more than describe the life, in a most enigmatic style, of an Irish Jew ? Certainly Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho, around which my thesis is structured, constantly runs the gauntlet between creation and destruction, description and absence. "The entire interest of the descriptive pages is therefore no longer in the thing described, but in the very movement of description" Robbe-Grillet says (148). Of course there are texts for which this method of analysis would seem wholly inappropriate but it nevertheless remains that for some texts a close examination of their descriptive qualities, of their temporal and spatial groundings and of their detritus and waste could provide the reader with a vantage from which to gaze on the belle noiseuse as it is at work within a text. Of course the belle noiseuse will always remain in motion, never fixed, and the glimpses of the ichnography that it grants us will always be flickering, self-effacing, ripples on the surface of a river. Ultimately the description is a Proteus, it "conceals information under the vast abundance of information, a straw in a haystack full of straw. He has an answer for everything; he says nothing. And it is this nothinginess that matters" (15).
Liam Ferney
