Jean Follain and the Inner Lives of Objects – an essay by Daniel Barbiero

 Is it possible to speak of the inner lives of objects? Jean Follain would answer in the affirmative. Here is the beginning of an untitled prose poem, in Andrew Seguin’s translation, from Follain’s late collection of prose poems, 1957’s Tout instant:

A song comes out of each object. The artisan has sealed up inside it a bit of his body, which had known love intimately, then had lived with disease for a long time, unless it was simply done in by old age. Song of wood, of steel, of copper. Across the centuries one can hear the executioners guffaw, the girls laugh in a wild voice, the madwomen bleat, the child warble. The object does not disappear.

“A song comes out of each object” (“Un chant s’élève de chaque objet”): this is an important image that I believe encapsulates the poem in its entire scope. A song comes out of each object because a song is in each object. The object has an inner life, of which it sings. Follain’s image here reminds me of Kandinsky’s notion that every object contains within it a spirit, which the painter described as its “inner sound.” He went further to say that

The World sounds. It is a cosmos of spiritually affective beings. Thus, dead matter is living spirit.

Objects’ songs are their spirits, it’s what allows them to sing: to sing of the material they’re made of and of the person who created them. They are, in effect, animate entities. Kandinsky is emphatic on this last point; the italics above are his.

What Kandinsky theorized, Follain seems to have intuited. But in contrast to Kandinsky’s panpsychism, which followed from what Kandinsky believed to be the ultimately spiritual essence resident in all things, in Follain’s poem, objects’ animacy is a metaphor. Granted, metaphor is an important – perhaps the most important – medium through which we animate the inanimate world. Follain’s poem brings this out in the way that it qualifies the animacy objects are supposed to have. It isn’t an inherent feature of the object but instead is the work of the artisan, which gives to the object he makes its inner sound—he “seal[s] up inside” of it something of himself as he makes it. Objects’ song and hence their spirit is the result of a power invested in them from outside; their animacy is a borrowed animacy. Why this comes about Follain, being a poet and not a theorist, doesn’t have to say. But it seems clear that he is writing from the standpoint of an implicit notion of empathy which assumes a human propensity or willingness to project psychological states onto inanimate objects. It’s through just such an empathic projection that, when we look at an art object, we feel we can sense the creative intention within it, an intention we feel was transferred to the object through the artist’s working of matter. In effect, through a form of projection of his or her own, the artist ensouls the object in the act of creation.

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VIII, 1923, New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Even if Follain is concerned with mundane objects rather than with art objects per se, the basic process of empathic projection is the same. For Follain’s artisan as for the artist, the projection of empathy is associated with the action taken in creating the object. Through his work, he projects something of himself onto the artifact and seals it up inside. This is his meaning, which a subsequent possessor of the artifact may or may not recognize. He or she – the artifact’s subsequent owner – has meanings of his or her own to project onto the object as it takes its place within the structure of his or her life. Empathy can come from either side, from maker or from possessor. And when we consider it from either side, apprehending the thing as the object of empathic projection opens up an existential perspective on the meaning or meanings it carries.

***

To “seal up inside” of something some part of oneself is a metaphorical way of viewing the object’s ability to embody meaning. But beneath this specific metaphor for how the object acquires its meaning there’s the more general recognition that its mean transcends its material makeup– that the visible object has an invisible dimension, that there’s more to it than what we can see or touch. To be sure, at a purely practical level this invisible dimension equates to the object’s meaning as a useful thing—its meaning as an instrument. It’s something we made and use to meet our needs and accomplish our projects, it provides the furniture of the world we move through. It’s an element within what Sartre would label the practico-inert: the domain of worked material that both results from, and affords, human praxis or intentional action. Seen this way, the object that results from the artisan’s working of the raw material of wood, steel, or copper embodies in material form the concerns and needs that led to its creation, as well as his skill in fashioning a useful piece of equipment and his sense of form’s ability to fit with function. These are all practical considerations, and they make up part of the “song” the object contains.

A part, but not all of it. In Follain’s imagining, there’s more to the object’s “song” than its instrumental meaning. It encompasses something larger about its creator’s way of being in the world, as a body experienced through a history of emotions and sensations and defined by its finitude as it’s “done in” by disease or age. The object contains and discloses a world, it has an existential bearing. We can glean this from the rest of the poem:

So many random things can be found in the pockets of travellers: pen knives, small notebooks, a minuscule screw forgotten during some disassembly, a twist of string, a few carrot or parsnip seeds, the same seeds that the man, when he was home and leaning over the earth, scattered into the furrow he’d dug in the planting bed of his enclosure. The horizon dissolves before the eyes of the walker. He’s carrying so many secrets in his head, the afterlives of love, desires that are concrete for an instant but then evaporate, while the object, even if he has forgotten it, remains in his pocket like a talisman. Sorting one day through old clothes that our body, weighed-down and watched from afar by death, no longer fits, we find the cogwheel of a delicate machine and struggle to recall its use. We turn it over and over in our fingers while in the distance a storied sun goes down.

What Follain seems to be saying here is that these things—the pen knives, notebooks, screws, and other miscellaneous things that we use and keep—are the indicia and witnesses of our lives. They testify to their users’ actions and reactions in the moments in which they’re used. His implements “hear” and record the executioner’s coarse “guffaw” (“ricaner”), whether from embarrassment or sadistic pleasure in doing his job; surrounding things hear and somehow remember the girls’ laughter and the child’s singing as she plays with a toy. We can convince ourselves that these moments are memorialized in material form, given the object’s ability to evoke a memory or prompt us to recall an emotion or reexperience a sensation. The clothes that no longer fit remind us of a time when they did, and of what we were when we could still wear them. Touching the thing that we’ve forgotten about and have rediscovered, turning it over and over in our hands, helps crystallize the memory or bring the vague emotion into sharper focus. Their physicality reminds us that our primary encounter with the world is through the body: the body that created them with its hands, the body that picked them up and put them to use, the body that deftly handled or clumsily collided with them, the body whose needs and desires made them existentially necessary in the first place.

Of course, Follain in his poem doesn’t describe the meaning of objects in these existential terms. But I find it impossible not to hear in an existential key the songs Follain found in objects.

***

In Follain’s apt simile, the object is “like a talisman” (“comme un talisman”). “Talisman” is a powerful word signifying a powerful object, or rather in this case, an object potentially invested with a power. Both of these qualifiers— “potentially” and “invested”—are crucial in understanding the object’s borrowed animacy. The object’s talismanic power is something that isn’t automatically a part of it; in order to acquire this power, it has to have been associated with events that significantly affected us or has to appear fortuitously as a kind of sign suggesting something of importance to us. Things—our things, the things we spend our lives around—remind us of circumstances or people, either directly or indirectly, and have the ability to reawaken the emotions, sensations, imaginings, or thoughts we had during or in connection with those circumstances. Other things, the things new to us, may stimulate our imaginations in unexpected and creative ways. Both kinds of things can catalyze the kind of conscious and unconscious reactions that can momentarily recreate lost worlds from our past or can carry unexpected insights.

***

When reading Follain on objects’s talismanic power I’m reminded of André Breton’s remarks on the revelatory potential that objects have when encountered in a certain light. In Communicating Vessels he writes of “the astonishingly suggestive power that certain almost everyday objects are able to acquire by chance.” A few years later, in “The Surrealist Situation of the Object,” a talk given in Prague at the end of March 1935, Breton framed the question of the object in terms of the “dialectical resolution” of the contradiction between the “accidents of the external world” and the “caprices of personality.” For lack of a better metaphor, the contradiction between the outer and inner worlds. Breton also drew on Salvador Dalí’s notion of the paranoiac-critical method, which cathects the objective world by projecting psychological states onto it. (Dalí was at that moment still in the movement’s good graces; he hadn’t yet been anathematized as “Avida Dollars.”) Quoting Dalí, Breton described the object as potentially having a “symbolic function corresponding to already defined erotic fantasies and desires.” Through Dalí’s method, in other words, the object is grasped through an interpretive screen in relation to which it shows up with a personal significance by virtue of its association with the affective forces the psyche has projected onto it. This projection or transference of psychic energy onto the object, which Breton in “Crisis of the Object” termed the “will to objectification” (“volonté d’objectivisation”), produces the dialectical resolution Breton sought by casting the object in the role of mediator between the subjective and the objective realms, giving the former material embodiment and charging the latter with affective significance. (It isn’t hard to see in Breton’s will to objectification a quasi-Freudian variation on the idea of aesthetic empathy.)

Earlier, in the Second Surrealist Manifesto, Breton rhetorically asked whether there could be a new, as-yet unwritten kind of novel

in which the verisimilitude of the setting will, for the first time, stop concealing from us the strange symbolic life which objects, the most commonplace as well as the most clearly defined, have only in dreams…

What Breton hoped for was a kind of novel that would show that in waking life, objects have a symbolic value analogous to the symbolic value they are purported to have in dreams.

Follain’s poem isn’t a novel, but it does seem to answer to Breton’s call for prose that could reveal objects’ ordinarily unsuspected deeper meaning. By the same token Follain’s objects aren’t Surrealist objects, nor are they dream-like symbols, but they share a certain structure of meaning-by-projection with them. It is the structure that makes both of them talismanic bearers of meaning that, each in its own way, resolves the opposition between the psychological and the material.

***

In imagining that ordinary objects contain hidden songs, Follain’s poem brings out the essential paradox of things. They are inert and opaque, and completely lacking in interiority. And yet at the same time they do seem to have an inner dimension in that, given the meaningful roles they play in our lives, we can imagine that they contain something of us within themselves. They are entities that cannot speak and can only be spoken of and yet, largely because of our tacit willingness to project onto them our emotions and to allow them to take their place among the associations that make up much of our unconscious lives, in their muteness they manage to witness eloquently to those lives in whose webs of meaning they are inextricably woven.

When he writes of the artisan enclosing himself in the artifact what Follain seems to want to show is how the object as a concrete, physical presence realizes its role as a conduit between the individuality that created it and the individuality that encounters and interprets it as a really existing thing in a world of things—things that are empathically understood not in the abstract, but by really existing individuals who bring to them conscious and unconscious memories, actual and imaginative experiences, existential concerns and desires, affective and cognitive habits, and so forth. In the end it’s we who give these things their talismanic powers—powers that nevertheless are real, for all of that.

References and Sources

Moshe Barasch, Modern Theories of Art, 2: From Impressionism to Kandinsky (New York: New York U Press, 1998). My discussion of aesthetic empathy is based on Barasch’s chapter on the theories of Robert Vischer. The quotes from Kandinsky are found on p. 331.

André Breton, Communicating Vessels, tr. Mary Ann Caws and Geoffrey T. Harris (Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska Press, 1990). The quote is on p. 55.

___________, “Crisis of the Object,” in Surrealism and Painting, tr. Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Harper & Row/Icon Editions, 1972).

___________, Second Surrealist Manifesto, in Manifestoes of Surrealism, tr. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan Press/Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1972).

___________, “Surrealist Situation of the Object,” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, tr. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan Press/Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1972).

Jean Follain, Earthly, by Jean Follain, tr. Andrew Seguin (Brooklyn, NY: The Song Cave, 2025).

Daniel Barbiero is a Washington, D.C., area writer, double bassist (largely retired), and composer of graphic and verbal scores. He writes on the art, music, and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work, with a focus on the continuing influence and relevance of Existentialism and Surrealism. His essays and reviews have appeared in Arteidolia, Rain Taxi, Heavy Feather Review, The Amsterdam Review, periodicities, Word for/Word, Otoliths, OffCourse, Open Doors Review, London Grip, Perfect Sound Forever, Point of Departure, Utsanga, The Compulsive Reader, and elsewhere. As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press, appeared in 2021. 

https://danielbarbiero.wordpress.com/