Blue is the color of memory, nostalgia, mourning. I’m writing this beneath a blue sky with my late father’s blue fountain pen: a postwar Sheaffer Craftsman, bottom of the range at $3 on its launch in 1948, though this one must have seemed expensive in down-at-heel Dublin when he was given it (I’m guessing) as a 21st-birthday present the following year. The thing has seen a deal of use: Somebody’s absentmindedly bitten the soft celluloid barrel, and it wouldn’t surprise me, judging by a warped portion of the cap, if my dad had used it to tamp or clean out his pipe. The pen means all kinds of things to me. Its owner died more than 20 years ago; later, I used it to draft an M.A. dissertation and a few pages of my first book. It was recently serviced, so it writes like a dream— though I reach for it these days partly for the color, which pen-geek websites tell me was meant to be Prussian blue. The one in my hand has grayed a little, but it’s still the loveliest blue I know.
What is it about blue that prompts a precious kind of reverie, just a sigh away (or maybe not) from whimsy? It’s surely the hue of bright modernity: blue jeans, blue-liveried liners on blue seas under blue skies, a blurry blue world seen from space. Of course, all those new blues are now old ones: 20th-century blues. There are blues and blues, chromo-culturally speaking, and Carol Mavor’s Blue Mythologies: Reflections on aColour is all about infinite or involuted meanings, the plunge into a blue that Rebecca Solnit, in her Field Guide to Getting Lost, calls “the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in.” Blue, in Mavor’s vertiginous essay, is not so much an object of art-historical analysis as an energy or atmosphere, the very mood in which this giddiest of scholars thinks and writes.
The book is first of all, however, an illustrated guide to the valences of blue in art, literature, film, and daily life. Mavor has a knack for persuading academic publishers to lavish unaccustomed attention on design and image: Her 2008 book, Reading Boyishly, was a hefty, also blue-stained, study of the figure of the boy in Proust, Barthes, Jacques Henri Lartigue, and J.M. Barrie. In Blue Mythologies she treats of some familiar surfaces and details in Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Gainsborough, and (of course) Yves Klein. There are rhapsodies on such blues as the depthless shade of Anna Atkins’s cyanotypes—published in her British Algae of 1843—and reflections on lapis lazuli, which until the 19th century was solely derived from certain Afghan mines. We learn various pleasing facts: The term bluestocking originally referred to studious persons of both sexes; in Australia, the satin bowerbird collects blue objects to attract a mate and has even been observed painting its literal love nest with blueberry juice.
Blue Mythologies takes flight early on from the strictures of cultural as well as natural history: Mavor’s 22 short chapters, arranged according to no strict chronology or thematic array, are fragments or fugues rather than stages in an argument or narrative. In terms of tonal ambition, she follows writers who have ghosted much of her work to date: Barthes and Proust, twin (also radically unalike) patrons of her vocation in reverie, desire, and nostalgia. The debts are not only formal or temperamental: Both were in love with various blues. In Barthes, there is the mysterious Polaroid by Daniel Boudinet that serves as frontispiece to Camera Lucida: a diaphanous bedroom blue that Barthes never mentions and that has been ruinously rendered in black-and-white in most editions of the English translation. In Proust, the blue that haloes Marcel’s faithless lover, Albertine: “All round her hissed the blue and polished sea.”
Mavor announces her allegiances at the outset: “Like Barthes, I am a travel writer who resists the ‘bourgeois norm.’ ” She thinks of her blue interludes or anecdotes as escape acts from literary, artistic, and societal convention into a clandestine, or at least private, realm. It’s a world that belongs to children—four young girls loitering among blue pots and blue carpets in John Singer Sargent’s 1882 painting The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit—or to doomed lovers who are almost children: Goethe’s Werther and the would-be Werthers who copied his blue coat and yellow vest. Blue is the color of sequestered desires, whether in the cyanotypes of Fred Holland Day, with their blue boys who might easily play Thomas Mann’s Tadzio, or in the rural Irish interiors that almost drown the figures in paintings by Patricia Patterson. And there are remembered blues, too: colors that seem to mean too much, such as the eyes of a fawn that Mavor happened upon as a child and that on reflection she realizes she did not see, because they were closed.
I’m sure it sounds an odd thing to remark of a book about a single color, but there is an awful lot of blue in Mavor’s world, or in her imagination. That’s to say, once she has touched on actual blues—the blue cloak in a Zurbarán Virgin, Derek Jarman’s monochrome film Blue (1993)—she tends to discover, or perhaps to project, the color everywhere she looks. (In the midst of her thoughts about Proust and Vermeer, I half expected Mavor to prove that the “patch of yellow wall” loved by Proust and his fictional novelist Bergotte in Vermeer’s View of Delft was somehow actually blue.) Her method, here as in Reading Boyishly, is essentially one of exaggeration. She is not quite seeing things that are not there, but she pushes her intuitions and interpretations further than they want to go, so that they come back breathless and bruised, with new tales to tell. And the main exaggeration, of course, is the very premise of the book: the idea that all this disparate stuff may be held together in the mind simply because it is blue. In her introduction, Mavor claims the book “uncloaks blue as a particularly paradoxical color”: virginal and obscene, deathly yet eternal. But that is not paradox, it’s mere accident. It’s truer to say, I think, that Blue Mythologies is an act of enchantment—of author and reader alike—rather than a “cyanoclasm” in the face of blue’s acquired meanings.
You could object to this sort of behavior in a critic or an art historian as altogether too arch and self-involved. But you would have missed the tenor and texture of Mavor’s long-term project as a writer, which seems to have something to do with the uses of preciousness, a kind of critical exquisiteness that tips easily and deliberately into interpretative delirium. As a stylist and thinker, Mavor is not very similar to the novelist William H. Gass. But in 1976 he wrote a book on the same subject, On Being Blue, that includes an elegant justification for this seemingly arbitrary and excessive procedure: “So a random set of meanings has softly gathered around the word the way lint collects. The mind does that.”
This article is published in the December 2013 issue of Modern Painters.
