The Surrealist Cabbage and Roger Caillois's Stones

In which the wonder-inducing properties of cabbages, the Surealist kitchen, and Roger Caillois's study of the forms of stones are discussed.

The vision the eye records is always impoverished and uncertain. Imagination fills it out with the treasures of memory and knowledge, with all that is put at its disposal by experience, culture, and history.
Roger Caillois

red cabbage (left) and its natural form.

Considering a red cabbage in the kitchen recently, it occurred to me how odd it is that the Surrealists made so little use of the wonder-inducing properties of such vegetables, and why they hadn’t speculated further and more widely on the implications of their existence.

At the root of the problem – in the matter of vegetables, we are obliged to follow roots right back to the earliest radish¹ – is probably that, whatever else you say about them, the first generation of surrealists were the types to have left the cooking to the women comrades. Maybe they thereby let slip an opportunity to go scrying around the kitchen.

I found a number of Surrealist, and quasi-Surrealist images which used vegetables somehow, but always as props to the image, not focusing on the alteriority and suggestiveness of the vegetable as a point of departure.

Radishes

In our original cabbage, when I shared it with friends, some saw echoes of Munch’s shop-worn Scream – their cabbage boiled down into soggy expressionist yelping, hands clapped to his ears. Others saw Chthulu, inverted.

Surprisingly, no one mentioned proto-Surrealist Giuseppe Alchimboldo (1527-1593), who complemented his traditional 16th-century Mannerist portraits of the Holy Roman Emperors with a sideline in rendering his sitters as assemblages of fruits and vegetables, fish or other handy objects. These portraits, however much they rattle the cages of conventional vision and hint at fantastic vistas beneath the skin and the personality, do not explore the mantic properties of the materials themselves, but only make use of their general form.

Giuseppe Alchimboldo, Portrait of Rudolph II, Portrait With Vegetables / The Greengrocer, Reversible Head With Fruitbasket.

Dali achieved an uncannily similar lightweight effect in his book of recipes, Les dineurs de Gala (1973), very much a product of his late style and not much more notable than most other celebrity cookbooks, other than that someone is bound to think of it in connection with vegetables and surrealism.

Salvador Dali / Avida Dollars, Les Dineurs de Gala, Joan of Arc as Cake-topper atop a Tower of Crayfish, Bush of Crayfish in Viking Herbs

More honourable is the work of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, both of whom projected images of the kitchen as a site of female alchemical transformation, thus taking up the slack left by the gender-bias of Breton et al. It doesn’t do to dwell for too long on the shortcomings of the earliest Surrealists in this regard, since all the evidence shows that the sometimes unravelling thread of their geneder politics was not abandoned but taken up and knit into something stronger by the same Surrealism. Part of the problem lies less with the Surrealists themselves than with the gendered way in which they attracted, or failed to attract, public attention.

Leonora Carrington, Grandmother Moorhead’s Aromatic Kitchen (1975), Remedios Varo, Still Life Reviving (1963)

Outside of references to food and cooking, where is the surrealistic fascination with the very form of some of these root materials? Here we leave the fleshy world of biology to focus on longer-term, subterranean natural processes, because the obvious answer to the question lies with the work of Roger Caillois, one of a group of dissident, unaligned Surrealists centred around Georges Bataille in the 1930s and beyond. In his 1970 work Les lecteurs de pierres² / The Writing of Stones³, Caillois uses the stones he studies (including many agates, jaspers, onyxs, chalcedony and limestones) as ready-made ‘stains’ through which the imagination is refracted into sights and visions.⁴ Instead of automatism, we go straight to nature itself, and catch it dreaming.

Who knows whether this tumult of triangles inscribed in stone, first brought about by nature and then by art, does not contain one of the secret cyphers of the universe?
Roger Caillois

I see the origin of the irresistible attraction of metaphor and analogy, the explanation of our strange and permanent need to find similarities in things. I can scarcely refrain from suspecting some ancient, diffused magnatism; a call from the center of things; a dim, almost lost memory, or perhaps a presentiment, pointless in so puny a being, of a universal syntax.
Roger Caillois

Max Ernst, Europe After the Rain (1940-1942).

Just as, eg, Max Ernst used frottage as the basis for hallucinated landscapes such as his Europe After the Rain, others had painted over chosen stones as they suggested images to the artists. Caillois discusses examples such as works illustrating Aristo’s Orlando Furioso in the Museum of Florence., which bear comparison with Ernst for the unsettling effect of the landscape created.

Episode from Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, painted on paesina. Museo Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Firenze.

Tuscan ruin marble. From the collection of Roger Caillois.

Caillois goes further than recognising the prophetic, ‘mind-revealing’, esemplastic potential of the forms he studies when they act on us. He sees in them not only a goad to the exercise of our human powers, but a natural power which runs parallel to the human imagination itself, mirroring it and underlying it, such that the human mind and the natural processes that created the stones alike participate in a universal mode of expression and communication not reliant on structuralism or semiotics, but woven into the fabric of matter itself.

Septaria are siliceous nodules crisscrossed with cracks filled with calcite.

“I gradually gave up regarding man has external to nature, its end,” said Caillois. Far from disparaging what is human, as has been alleged, he found it all along a scale ranging from molecules to the stars. Because he claimed to observe the presence throughout the universe of a sensibility and a consciousness both the analogies to our own, he has been accused of anthropomorphism. But Caillois himself has argued passionately that on the contrary he advocated an inverted anthropomorphism in which man, instead of contributing his own emotions, sometimes condescendingly, to all living beings, shares humbly, yet perhaps also with pride, in everything contained or innate in all three realms, animal, vegetable, and mineral. In short, there had taken place in that great intellect the equivalent of the Copernican Revolution: man was no longer the centre of the universe, except in the sense that the centre is everywhere.
Marguerite Yourcenar⁵

Left: The Surrealist / Freudian model of the mind. Centre: Automatism dampens the conscious mind. To orthodox Surrealism, this implies that the unconscious is then speaking, emerging from the mind once its lid is unscrewed. Right: Occult Surrealist automatism, in which the mind is dampened as before, but it’s understood that, while indeed the unconscious now speaks, it can also be that other, more or less autonomous and independent animated voices speak through that unconscious.

The strange markings in an agate lead me suddenly into wild extrapolations, seeking, in the obscure workings taking place with a stone at the dawn of time, traces of similar abortions. By their very strangeness the failures they perpetuate become for me so many speaking portents, or at least emblems. They somehow announce the coming, in the distant future, of a species that makes mistakes, being in whom freedom and imagination, together with their necessary disappointments, will be more important than successes due to infallible and inevitable mechanics. They presage new powers, imperfect but creative.
Roger Caillois⁶

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1. ‘Radical,’ ‘radix,’ and ‘radish’ all derive from the Latin word radix meaning ‘root’. A radish is the edible root vegetable. Radical means ‘to do with the root’, which can refer to fundamental or root-and-branch change in politics or society, or a mathematical root. Radix is the Latin term itself and refers to a root in general.

2. Roger Caillois (1970), L’écriture des pierres, Genève: Editions d’Art Skira, 1970.

3. Roger Caillois, Marguerite Yourcenar (introduction), Barbara Bray (trans), The Writing of Stones, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985.

4. Along with L’écriture des pierres and its translation, Caillois also wrote several essays on his interpretation of the stones, including Pierres (Stones) (1966), and Agates paradoxales (1977). On his death, his collection of stones was donated to the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle de Paris. Photographs of most of the stones discussed in his major work, as well as many others from his collection, can be found in Roger Caillois, Massimiliano Gioni (preface), François Farges (photography), Henri-Jean Schubnel (texts), Gian Carlo Parodi (texts), La lecture des pierres, Éditions Xavier Barral, 2014. This edition incorporates versions of the two essays mentioned alongside commentary and analysis, and it is superbly illustrated with full-page, high-resolution images of hundreds of Caillois’s stones..

5. Marguerite Yourcenar, ‘Introduction’, in Roger Caillois (1985), ppxi-xii.

6. Roger Caillois (1985), pp81-82.