Penelope

86cm x 72cm x 30cm

 

Description

Large wooden embroidery frame with unfinished needlework

Themes, comments & storylines

"We know that in his work Proust did not describe a life as it actually was, but a life as it was remembered by the one who had lived it. […] For the important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, a Penelope work of forgetting? Is  not the involuntary recollection, Proust's mémoire involontaire, much closer to forgetting than what is usually called memory? And is not his work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warf, a counterpart to Penelope's work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night was woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each dayunravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting. This is why Proust finally turned his days into nights, devoting all his hours to undisturbed work in his darkened room with artificial illumination, so that none of those intricate arabesques might escape him.

 

The Latin word textum means 'web'. No one's text is more tightly woven than Marcel Proust's; to him nothing was tight or durable enough. [...] For an experienced event is finite, because it is only the key to everything that hapened before it and after it. There is yet another sense in which memory issues strict weaving regulations. Only the actus purus of recollection itself, not the author or the plot, constitutes the unity of the text. One may even say that the intermittence of author and plot is only the reverse of the continuum of memory, the pattern on the back side of the tapestry."

 

Benjamin, Walter, 1929/1999. The image of Proust. In: Arendt, Hannah ed., 1999. Illuminations. Translated from  German by Harry Zorn. London: Pimlico, p.198

 

 

The movement of making and unmaking is captured in cultural memory in the image of Penelope weaving and unravelling to gain time and control over it, simultaneously working on a piece of cloth and a stretch of time that belong together like day and night. Waiting for Ulysses and working against the dangers of forgetting that threaten his return, “Penelope holds the past in memory, keeping it alive” (Cook 2000:16), her memory weave, in Italo Calvino’s words (ibid), holds “together the imprint of the past and the plan for the future” – thus allowing us “to become without ceasing to be, to be without ceasing to become.”

 

Reichek, Elaine & Cook, Lynn (2000), At Home and in the World, Société des Expositions, Brussels