Michel Pastoureau - The Colours of Our Memories

MICHEL PASTOUREAU

TRANSLATED BY JANET LLOYD

polity

First published in French as Les couleurs de nos souvenirs Editions du Seuil, 2010. Collection La Librairie du XXIe sicle, General Editor Maurice Olender.

This English edition Polity Press, 2012

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ISBN-13: 9781509533954

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Cet ouvrage publi dans le cadre du programme daide la publication bnficie du soutien du Ministre des Affaires Etrangres et du Service Culturel de lAmbassade de France reprsent aux Etats-Unis.

This work received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States through their publishing assistance program.

For Laure and for Anne

before the very colours of our memories fade into the eternity of silence

Grard de Nerval (Letter to Paul Chenavaud, April 1848)

This is a book of memories based on my personal history, experiences and first-hand information and reflection. But it is also the fruit of conversations, exchanges and thoughts shared with numerous relatives, friends, students and colleagues over the past decades. I would like to thank all those who have taken part in this game of colours and who have lent their support to my ramblings, obsessions and chromatic whims, in many cases throughout almost half a century.

My particular thanks go to Emmanuelle Adam, Irne Aghion, Odile Blanc, Pierre Bureau, Perrine Canavaggio, Yvonne Cazal, Claude Coupry, Philippe Fagot, Henri Dubief (), Michel Indergand, Franois Jacquesson, Philippe Junod, Laurence Klejman, Christine Lapostolle, Maurice Olender, Anne Pastoureau, Laure Pastoureau, Caroline Pichon, Franois Poplin, Claudia Rabel.

It is not easy to define colour. Not only have definitions, over the centuries, varied from one period to another and one society to another, but even within our contemporary period colour is not apprehended in the same way across all the five continents. Every culture conceives of it and defines it in accordance with its own natural environment, its own climate, its own history, its own knowledge and its own traditions. In this domain, western bodies of knowledge do not constitute absolute truths but only particular bodies of knowledge among many others. Furthermore, they are not even unambiguous.

I regularly take part in colloquia devoted to the subject of colour that bring together researchers from a variety of fields: sociologists, physicists, linguists, painters, chemists, historians and anthropologists. Sometimes these are joined by neurologists, architects, town-planners, designers and musicians. We are delighted to meet to talk about a subject close to our hearts, but it takes only a few minutes to realize that we are not all speaking of the same thing: where colour is concerned, each specialist has his own definitions, concepts and certainties. It is not easy sometimes almost impossible to share these with other specialists. All the same, it seems to me that some progress has been made and that misunderstandings are fewer today than they were thirty or forty years ago. I have been taking part in such meetings for over three decades; and I really do have the impression that chemists and physicists are increasingly taking into account the questions and enquiries of researchers in the humanities and that, in return, historians, sociologists and linguists are improving their mediocre range of understanding in the domain of the physical sciences. If we all continue to do so, the sharing of views will be increasingly fruitful.

The present work, which is partly autobiographical, concerns only the humanities. The idea for it has germinated gradually over the years and in the course of my research into the history and symbolism of colours. The day came when it seemed to me that it was time to share a number of colour memories that are linked with my own history but also with that of a number of French and European societies and with their customs and codes over half a century. My project was not entirely narcissistic but it was somewhat utopian. For my desire was to record what I had seen, lived through and felt where colours were concerned in the course of close on six decades (from the early fifties to the present day). Furthermore, I wished at the same time to retrace that periods history and vicissitudes, focusing on what remained permanent and what had changed and underlining how all this affected social, ethical, artistic and poetic matters and even the domain of dreams. I hoped to be simultaneously a witness and a historian, supplying not only documentation, facts, observations and anecdotes but also a critique and a commentary. It would be a difficult, almost unrealizable undertaking but I nevertheless devoted myself to it, even though I was well aware that one should be wary of any historian who sees himself as a witness to his own time. For not only is he merely one witness among many others, but he is necessarily partial, preachy, capricious, egocentric and sometimes grumpy (things are not what they used to be) or dishonest, and furthermore his memory, however sharp, is not infallible.

I found proof of this a few months ago, when I reread a work which, in a way of which I was more or less conscious, contributed to the genesis of the journal devoted to colour that I am now publishing. That work was Je me souviens (I remember) by Georges Perec (193682). I had read it as soon as it was published, in 1978, having already seen parts of it in earlier, relatively private publications. In the completed book, Perec had collected together 479 sentences or paragraphs, each of which began with the words I remember and evoked a memory that was quite ordinary, inessential and common if not to everyone, at least to many. I had long been an admirer of Perec and for years I used to call to mind some of his expressions, the platitudinous nature of which delighted me. One was the following sublime statement: I remember that a friend of my cousin Henri would remain in his dressing-gown all day when revising for his examinations. Another was this confession, so accurate in its very ambiguity: I remember how difficult it was for me to understand the meaning of the expression sans solution de continuit (without any discontinuity). Yet another was the understated and derisory declaration: I remember May 1968. But there was one sentence that particularly delighted me, positioned around the middle of the book, like buried treasure, a sentence so fine and gleeful that I fancied that, for Perec, it was perhaps the most important one in the whole collection: I remember that General de Gaulle had a brother called Andr, who was red-haired and was the assistant manager of the Paris Fair.