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248 Appendix: Detail and PanFor someone, by contrast, who looks at the painting, for examplesomeone who, like Bergotte, might ‘‘fix’’ his gaze upon it to the pointof becoming mesmerized—until dying from it, as Proust imagined—for such a person it is the pan that is yellow: a particolare of the painting,quite simply, but efficacious, electively and enigmaticallyefficacious; not ‘‘cleansed of all matter’’ but, conversely, envisioned as‘‘precious matter,’’ as a ‘‘layer’’; not incited by a ‘‘photographic still’’of time past, but inciting a tremor in time present, something thatacts all of a sudden, and that ‘‘breaks down’’ the body of the viewer,Bergotte. For such a person, the yellow in the painting by Vermeer,as color, is a whack,* a distressing zone of paint, of paint consideredas ‘‘precious’’ and traumatic material cause.Literary as it may be, the distinction suggested by this passage fromÀ la Recherche du temps perdu is imbued with a profound intellectualrigor. A fiction as regards the efficacy of painting, certainly: it is rarefor a painting to watch its watcher die† . . . But the position of therelation in this fiction, in this coincidence, is itself informed by anincontestable truth effect, for such an efficacy—this dramatic outcome,this kind of negative miracle—indicates the existence of somethingvery real at work in painting: a work of bedazzlement, in somesense, at once self-evident, luminous, perceptible, and obscure, enigmatic,difficult to analyze, notably in semantic or iconic terms; for itis a work or an effect of painting as colored material, not as descriptivesign. Thus I will borrow from the Recherche the sublime and simpleword pan and try to polish its meaning (as mirrors must be polishedbefore they reflect clearly), to render its conceptual rigor more precise,notably as regards its differentiation from the category of thedetail. 38 For now, we’ll continue with Vermeer, specifically with apainting that is quite well-known, excessively simple, even ‘‘ordinary’’in his production: in the banality of its ‘‘subject,’’ an intimate ‘‘genre’’scene; in the obviousness of its lighting, which as so often comes fromthe right; in the sameness, or quasi-sameness, of this woman, whoelsewhere reads a letter but here quite simply does her lacework.*pan: an alternative, colloquial meaning of the word.†qu’un tableau regard mourir qui le regarde.