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24 COULse at the same time she was declared to be almost unmentionable- at the furthest margin of the categorisable - but thatonly seemed to reaffirm her importance as a founding significationof Woman.So it was clearly not the mere fact - lhe palpable signs _ ofOlympia being a prostitute that produced the critics' verbalviolence. It was Some transgression of Ie discours prostitutionnelthat was at stake; or rather. since the characterisation of thecourtisane could nO[ be disentangled from tbe specification ofWoman in general in the 18605. it was some disturbance in thenormal relations between prostiwtion and fem ininity.When J introduced the notion of a discourse on Woman in the1860s, I included the nude as one of its terms. Certainly it deservesto take its place there, but the ,'ery word indicates tbe artificialityof the limits we have to inscribe - for description's sake _aro und our various 'discourses', The nude is indelibly a term of3rt and art criticism: the fact is that an criticism and sexual dis.COurse intersect at this point, and the one provides the other withcrucial representations, forms of knowledge, and standards ofdecorum. One could almost say that the nude is the mid·term ofthe series which goes from femme honnClc [0 fille publique: it isthe important form (the complex of established forms) in whicbsexuality is revea led and not·revealed, displayed and masked , madeout to be unproblematic. It is the frankness of tbe bourgeoisie:here, after aU, is wha't Woman looks like: and she can be known,in her nakedness, without too much danger of pollution. This tooOlympia called into question, or at least failed to confirm.One could put the matter schematically in this way. The criticsasked certain questions of Olympia in 1865. and did nOt get ananswer. One of them was: what sex is she, or has she? Has she asex at all? In other words, can we discover in the image of pre.ordained constellation of signifiers whkh keeps her sexuality inplace ? Further question: can Olympia be included within the dis.course on Woman/the nude/the prostitute? Can this particularbody, acknowledged as one for sale, be articulated as a term in anartistic tradition? Can it be made a modern example of the nude?Is there nOl a way in which the terms nude and fille pub/ique couldbe mapped on to each otber, and shown to belong together?There is no a priori reason wby nOt. (Though I think there may behistorical reasons why the mapping could not be done effectivelyin 1865: reasons to do with the special instabiHty of the term'prostitute' in the ] 860s, which was already producing. in thediscourse on \ 14 May1865, P ll; A JLorentz. DemitrJour de l'Exposi·tion de 1865,p B.25
26 _____6 See B Farwell,Manet and theNude, A Study inIconography in theSecond Empire.unpublished PhD,Unive rsiry ofCalifornia at LosAngeles 1973,pp 199-204.7 21 May 1865.I shall give two examples: one concerning Olympia's relation toTitian's so-called Venus of Urbina (Figure 5). and the otherRavenel's treatment of the picture's relation to the poetry ofBaudelaire. That Olympia is arranged in such a way as to invitecomparison with the Titian has become a commonplace of criticismin the twentieth century. and a simple charting of the stages ofManet's invention, in preparatory sketches for tbe work. is su{fivcient to show how deliberate was the reference back to the prototype.t;The reference was not obscure in tbe nineteenth century:the Titian painting was a hallowed and hackneyed example of thenude: when Maner had done an oil copy of it as a student, hewould have known he was learning the very alphabet of Art. Yetin the mass of commentary on Olympia in 1865, only twO criticstalked at all of this relation to Titian's Venus; only twice, in otherwords. was it allowed that Olympia existed 'with reference to'the great tradition of European painting. And the terms in whichit was allowed are enough to indicate why the other critics weresilent.'This Olympia: wrote Amedee Cantaloube in Le Grand Journal.the same paper that holds the bouquet in BertalJ's caricature,sort of female gorilla, grotesque in indiarubber surrounded byblack, apes on a bed, in a complete nudity, the horizontal attitude0/ the Venus 0/ Tit ian, the right arm rests on the body in the sameway, except fo r the hand which is flexed in a sort of shamelesscontraction. ~The other, a writer who called himself Pierror, in a fly -by-nightorgan called Les Tablettes de Pierrot, had this entry:a woman Ot1 a bed, or rather some form or other blown up like agrotesque in indiarubber; a sort oj monkey making fun of the posea1ld the movement of the arm of Titian' s Venus, with a handshamelessly fl exed.The duplication of phrases is too closely, surely, to be a matter ofchance, or even of dogged plagiarism. The two texts seem to meto be the wotk of the same hand - the same hack bashing out aswift paragraph in various places under various names. Whichmakes it one voice out of sixty, rather than two.In any case the point is this. For the most part, for almosteveryone, the reference back to tradition in Olympia was invisible.Or if jt could be seen, it could certainly not be said. And if, once,it could be spoken of, it was in these terms: Titian's arrangementof the nude was there, vestigially, but in the form of absolutetravesty, a kind of vicious aping wbich robbed the body of itsfem ininity, its humani ty, it very fleshiness, and put in its placeune forme quelconque, a rubber·covered gorilla flexing her dirtyhand above her crotch.I take Pierrot's entry, and the great silence of the other texts,as Hcense to say. quite crudely in the end, that the meaning contri..·ed in terms of Titian - on and against that privileged schemaof sex _ was no meaning . had no meaning , in 1865. (This is amatter which becomes fa miliar in the later history of the avantgarde: the moment at which negation and refutation becomessimply too complete; they erase what they are meant to negate,and therefore no negation takes place; they refute their prototypestoo effectively and the old dispositions are - sometimes literally painted our; they 'no longer apply'.)The example of Ravenel is more complex. J have already said thatRavenel's text is the only one in 1865 tbat cou ld possibly bedescribed as articulate. and somehow appropriate to the matter inhand. But it is an odd kind of articulacy. Ravenel's entry onOlym pia comes at rhe end of the eleventh long article in animmense series he published in L' Epoque, a paper of the far leftopposition.' It comes in the middle of an alphabetical listing ofpictures which he has so far let out of account, and not aUottedtheir proper place in the extended critical narrative of the fustten instalments of the Salon. The entry itself is a peculiar, bril·Iiant, inadvertent performance : a text which blurts out the obvious,blurts it out and passes on; ironic, staccato, as if aware of itsown uncertainty.~ 1. Manet - Olympia. The scapegoat 0/ the Sa lon, the vlcttmof Panslan lynch law. Each passer-by takes a srone and throws itin her fa ce. Olympia is a very cra zy piece of Spanis h madness.T ITIA."'l Venus of Urbino, Florence, Uf!izi8 7 June 1865.27
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