A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME

Why had I never really noticed roses before that fateful day? And why, suddenly, did they blossom (apologies for the tired pun) into my life? The attempt to answer these questions is one reason for writing this book.

There’s a famous experiment by a group of psychologists in which participants were asked to watch a video of a basketball game and told to focus all their attention on counting the number of times one team took possession of the ball. Participants were so intent on fulfilling their designated task that they completely failed to see a man in a gorilla suit wander into the middle of the frame, perform a jig, and then wander out again![1] The psychologists wanted to test just how selective human vision is.

I thought of this experiment when I was trying to understand my own selective bias regarding roses and other flowers. But who was it told me to ‘keep my eyes on the ball’ – i.e. not get distracted by roses? My upbringing, of course. My culture. I was educated to consider flowers to be frivolous and ‘sissy’, the domain of females. My only contact with them should be as gifts, whereupon they could help me get what I wanted from the aforementioned females. In addition, I had been taught to believe that showing interest in flowers was a moral failing, a sign that I didn’t have my priorities right in the eyes of God and my peers. The virtue of frugality and the glory of the rose did not sit well together. If you compare a Presbyterian church interior, with which I was familiar, with a Roman Catholic one, you can see that, amongst much else, the Reformation was an assault on flowers – real, sculpted, and painted - and on the rose, the most sacred of all flowers to Catholics, in particular. But puritanism need not have a religious motivation. Any ideology will do. Most modern-day intellectuals are secular puritans because we focus on the ‘life of the mind’ and inevitably condescend towards the ‘life of the body’. In fact, anything deemed ‘beautiful’, that is, pleasurable and joyful, is likely to be suspect. And, as we consider ourselves custodians of ‘high culture’, we also tend to look down on something that is so pervasively embraced by ‘low culture’, deeming it kitsch, sentimental, commodified, and politically suspect.[2]

So, if I had to say in a very few words what it is that so fascinates me about the rose, it is the fact that it is both something I engage with as a plant, an intrinsic part of the vegetal world – of ‘nature’ - and also as an idea, or part of the human ‘culture’. But what is especially interesting is that with the rose both these roles are intertwined so completely that it makes the old familiar binary opposition ‘nature’ /’culture’ seem beside the point.

As my professional background is in the making and studying of visual signs, and most particularly, painting., I’m used to working with representations, and am attuned to viewing cultural artifacts as signs within a social code, a system whose purpose is to facilitate communication between people, but also often manipulates and controls them. A sign is never definitive proof of anything. It can be ambiguous, and it can be false. I am attuned to approaching images with a critical, demystifying mind, and am on the lookout for the ideology hiding behind the mediation, the trickery behind the fetish. But then I look at the specimen of ‘Cecille Brunner’ growing over the pergola in my garden, and all the suspicion gets blown to the wind by its delicately pink and fragrant spectacle.

The philosopher Paul Ricœur wrote that we can interpret culture according to two broad attitudes: ‘suspicion’ and ‘faith’.’[3] Equipped with the ideas of Marx, Nietzsche Freud, and the work of their disciples, most contemporary intellectuals primarily think within an atmosphere of ‘suspicion’. This means that where the rose is concerned, we can’t simply celebrate its fascinating history, its celebrated loveliness, its ubiquitous popularity. We must also ask what human hands are manipulating it and why. What has the rose has been made to say, and to what end? Any sign functions on two levels: denoted and connoted. A denoted meaning is manifest, explicit, obvious. With connoted meaning, which is parasitic on the first, it less easy to recognize when some kind of manipulation is taking place. Connotation occurs subliminally, and often unconsciously influences our beliefs and actions. In fact, it is on the level of connotation that the power of the image resides. So any truly valuable discussion of the rose as a cultural symbol will need to think about how it is involved in both denoting and connoting, and how the latter is working to control us. For example, while the rose clearly denotes feminine beauty, it can be said to connote a misogynistic idea of woman as merely frivolous, ornamental, and sexually available. While in a patriarchal society, men are routinely compared to animals like the lion, bear, or wolf, women are likened to a pretty plant. We send bunches of red roses on Valentine’s Day to denote our love for someone special, but they connote our participation in the values of the patriarchy, and also as consumers of a commercial business. Roses lain at war memorials denote our remembrance of the dead in battle, but they can be said to connote the sanctification and sublimation of state sanctioned violence.

But the demystifying acid of ‘suspicion’ is obviously insufficient. In fact, it is dangerous, because it can lead to an excessive reliance on the powers of critical reason, and the value of concept formation, at the expense of feeling, emotion, and imagination. The connotative dimension of an image is not necessarily only tied to patterns of abuse. Th imagination can use connotation to generate associations that fly free of the interests of the powerful. For example, in By Any Other Names we will be encountering many examples of imaginative synthesis, of the original use of metaphor and other figures of speech which, through analogy - or the forming of an unlikely correspondence – between seemingly unlike things. For example, D.H. Lawrence writes in a poem: ‘ She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts / Sway like full-blown yellow / Gloire de Dijon roses.’ The simile woman’s breast=rose blossom was a very familiar one when, in the early twentieth century, Lawrence wrote his poem. But Lawrence succeeds in imbuing it with powerful new value that rescues it from cliché because, unlike other poets, he actually specifies which rose. He thereby makes tangible and concrete an analogy that was in danger of becoming febrile and idealized.

We can also approach the rose motivated by a commitment to the other interpretative model: ‘faith.’ While it isn’t possible to return to the naïve or simple faith of someone who has never heard of, or choses to ignore, the unsettling messages delivered by Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, we nevertheless hope to restore meanings in spite of the critique justifiably unleashed by these masters of ‘suspicion’. This dimension of continuing ‘faith’ in the symbolic - faith even in a symbol that has undergone such banalization and commodification as the rose - seems especially important now because of the undertow of nihilism that pervades our culture. So this is the faith is of someone who believes that thinking about the rose will tell us something meaningful and truthful, and will only do this if, as Ricœur emphasizes, we remain ‘obedient’ to the symbol, if we proceeds by recollecting, recovering, and restoring the many meanings of the rose in history which undergird its complex reception today.

A portrait by Joshua Reynolds featuring the Damask Rose flower and bud.

A fresco from Pompeii featuring Gallica Roses and a nightingale.

NOTES

[1] The experiment was conducted in 1999, and is recounted, for example, in Edward Slingerland, What Science Offers the Humanities, Cambridge, 2008, p.49

[2] In the course of my research, I came across a painting by the little know Austrian Symbolist painter Maximilian Lenz (1860-1948) which sums up my, and many other intellectuals (male but also female), position regarding nature’s bounty. It is called ‘A Daydream’ or alternatively, ‘A World’, and was painted in 1899. It show an intellectual deep in thought taking a stroll across a flower-strewn meadow. Lenz was in earnest, but nowadays we can but smile at the blatant misogyny and biophobia. Here is Bram Dijkistra’s amusing description ‘ his mind quite obviously occupied with the exalted future of man, only to be beset by fiercely frolicking maidens and, worst of all, a bevy of transparently smocked young ladies carrying – indeed, becoming - huge stalks of blossoms. These decidedly daffy damsels personified tempting floral finitude as they urged the serious thinker to lose himself among their panting petals.’ ( Idols of Perversity, p.241, where the painting is illustrated).

[3] Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 27.

THE SYMBOLISM OF THE FACE MASK

KOREAN DANSAEKHWA MONOCHROME PAINTING