Timothy Mathews

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Literature, Art and the Pursuit of Decay in Twentieth-Century France
Cambridge University Press 2000, and 2006

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Literature-Pursuit-Twentieth-Century-Cambridge-Studies/dp/0521419700



…a plea for reading as translation and transport; for the silent subjectivity discovered every time the eye absorbs word or image; for the imagining of another ‘I’ with the ‘I’; and for imagining, if nothing more, a community and a music of collapsing defence.

What we have of ourselves is given to us and taken away in reading, that inadequate measure of events, and the subjectivities that are swamped by them. But still, in our minds, something many now begin.

Timothy Mathews, from this book



In Literature, Art and the Pursuit of Decay, Timothy Mathews examines work by a range of writers and painters working in France in the twentieth century. The well-illustrated book engages with canonical figures - Guillaume Apollinaire, Marguerite Duras and Jean Genet, Roland Barthes, Pablo Picasso and René Magritte - as well as more neglected individuals including Robert Desnos and Jean Fautrier. Mathews draws on psychoanalysis, existentialism and poststructuralism to show how both literature and fine art promote the value of generosity in a culture of anxiety and intolerance. Decay emerges as a surprising ally in this quest because of its ability to undermine intellectual complacency and egoism. Integrating theoretical and material approaches to reading and viewing, Mathews engages with the distinctive features of different literary genres and different types of painting to develop an original account of artistic ambition in twentieth-century France.

Reading now this description of the book written at the time, I’m surprised to find nothing that needs urgent changing, even from so long afterwards, and even though so much is left out. The twentieth century has long gone, but here I am, still in pursuit of elusive generosity, of communicating without appropriating, reaching across boundaries along the way, as each one of us does, each in their own way. Various disciplinary boundaries were the ones I was reaching across at the time, hoping it would take me further, which I still do. I also liked breaking up the book into different perspectives, and still do. But as time goes by, decay screams its reality, and rather than something to reach for, it’s already happened. But however slowly, will transience help loosen, re-think, and re-tie the attachments that bind people together, and brighten the dull incomprehension threatening to rise from within?


The seven essays that make up this this complex volume on modern French literature, painting and thought can be read as studies in dissidence, in which notions of cultural authority, confidence, and coercion are vigorously explored and often mercilessly dismantled. Timothy Mathews proposes decay as a central theme in twentieth-century intellectual endeavour, decay of the image, decay of the body, decay and collapse in philosophical orthodoxies. […] He shows the painter Jean Fautrier, for example,  working with decomposition, and he wonders, probingly, suggestively, how we are to capture and respect ‘the otherness suffering’. In his poignant Beckettian formulation, Fautrier’s broken corpses introduce us to the ‘whisperings of the body beyond the telling’. […] At the heart of Mathews argument is the co-dependence of the orthodox and the subversive. […] Anxious to see literature socially engaged, however problematically, Mathews urgently calls on us to convert our engagement with texts into a ‘site where narcissism might be transformed into generosity’.[…] Mathews threads his highly suggestive and often perplexing readings through densely and passionately argued essays. For their identification of the highly destabilizing forces of decay and generosity, they will be hugely influential, and cultural historians will regularly need and want to revisit them.

Edward Hughes,
Modern Language Review

Generosity and exclusion. […] The personal retains a welcome part in this writing. […] The inclusion, of the author, of the reader, and of the subject/object, is vibrant in its suggestion. […] Generosity meets decay. The problems tackled or at least signaled in this writing are not only well written about, they are those that concern many of us from day to day in our work.

Mary Ann Caws,
French Studies


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