Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

Archive

 

 

Volume 14 Number 3, December 2013

__________________________________________________________________

Pastoureau, Michel. The Colours of Our Memories. Transl. by Janet Lloyd. Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA, Polity. 2012. 186 pages; ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5571-0. US$ 25.00, hbk.

 

Editorial note

The publishers sent two copies of this book at different times, the first in response to an editorial request, the second without. I gave both copies out for review, and have decided to publish both reviews.

 

Reviewed by

 

Hans Rindisbacher

Pomona College

 

This is a lovely book, even if it takes no images, in contrast to the author’s earlier publications on colors. It is short and elegant, yet rich in ideas. It is also very well translated. The Colours of Our Memories is memoir and history at the same time, deeply learned, yet free from academic jargon. Clearly the work of a poeta doctus, it neither preaches nor drones on but lives up with ease to the classical desideratum for great writing: prodesse et delectare.

 

Michel Pastoureau, medieval historian, expert in heraldry and the cultural history of colors, is professor and directeur d'études at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. In a scholarly approach that combines the Annales school with concepts of structural semiotics, his most recent book adds to an already impressive body of work on the phenomenon of color/s in European cultural history. The present book was preceded by a beautifully illustrated volume on Blue: the History of a Color (2001), another on Black: the History of a Color (2009), and the massive photo tome, without text, Couleurs (Editions du Chêne, 2010), of whose close to 500 pages 350 are large images dominated by one of Pastoureau’s six primary colors, white, black, red, blue, green, and yellow. The Devil’s Cloth (2001), another short book, is about stripes, mostly observed on clothing and in heraldry. Aimed at readers beyond the confines of academe, the present text, together with the other works just mentioned, made clear just how broadly interdisciplinary and all-encompassing the study of colors as a cultural phenomenon can be when its aim is to do justice to the all encompassing nature of the phenomenon.

 

The many- and short-chaptered book under review here (over seventy narrowly focused sections, most of them starting from a personal memory) is introduced by what amounts to a warning about the two main axes that Pastoureau pursues: the difficulty to define colors and the frailty of memory. The last chapter returns to this difficulty and illustrates it with references to the many fields and people for whom colors have played a role throughout history, the pigment makers, the painters, the clothiers, the linguists, the neuroscientists, and not least the historians who only recently have begun to pay more attention to the physicality of their worlds, the embodiment of their actors, the sensory surroundings in which human development always and necessarily occurs.[1] The bibliography, organized broadly thematically, is short and highly selective; it is followed by a brief chronology of life events and the scholarly output of the author. The book concludes with an index.

 

The Colours of Our Memories is thus history, memoir, semiotics, a study of material culture and perceptual change – all wrapped into an engagingly readable, accessible narrative full of intriguing topics that few people ever think about unprodded but will find invariably interesting, even fascinating, once they have been pointed out to them. And prodding and pointing out is what Pastoureau does supremely well. Born in 1947, he is just beginning to be justified in historicizing his biography. Each chapter starts off from a personal recollection and segues into a historical excursion on color and things associated with it – infallibly interesting, often surprising, and generally unfamiliar to the reader. This writing strategy melds elegantly and revealingly the three time levels of the author’s France of his childhood and early years, the critical-analytical perspective of the seasoned scholar of our present, and the depth of western history, at times as far back as classical Greece. Pastoureau’s mid-twentieth century France itself often appears as a place already deeply buried in history, where, for instance, as recently as fifty or sixty years ago, as he shows in the case of a young class mate of his, color photography, certainly for a passport picture, “was still regarded as something suspect and inaccurate” (32). In this distant France, but even beyond it, Pastoureau claims, red cars were fast; or rather, fast cars were red – or even more accurately, revealing the socio-cultural assumptions around colors, if a car was red, it was inevitably fast (37). Later, among many other color phenomena, a “Mitterrand beige” emerged, “a nasty beige at once out of date yet too new” (22). And at the same time, in another country, he observes a color so supremely ugly that he cannot even give it a name, “[d]isagreeable to the eye and wounding to the soul, it was as ugly as could be and, on top of everything, there was something brutal and uncivilized about it that appeared to stem from the most uncouth codes of social life, a kind of Urfarbe” (39) – the color dominating the public spaces of the old communist Eastern Europe.

 

Relying on this device of personal recollections arching back into history, Pastoureau finds answers to simple questions about colors he himself seemingly has just stumbled upon. His topic and his book are of the kind that address issues everybody lives with but rarely thinks about outside a few specific situations, such a – for women, surely – putting together a wardrobe, choosing the color of a new car, distinguishing the metro lines on a chart, making sure a traffic light is green and not red. Pastoureau does not mind his readers’ general colorless absentmindedness. After all, we take many things for granted as we go through our busy everyday lives, not paying attention. Yet, just why is it that the leader of the Tour de France wears a yellow shirt? that traffic lights are red and green? that we drink white wine (although it is not white) and red, which really comes in many shades stretching the very concept of red? Pastoureau does not assume that people know how colors change their meaning throughout history, for instance, black from the color of the devil, death, and sin to one of “humility and temperance” by the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (119) and authority and elegance later on. Or that green rather than black is the color most associated with superstitions, despite the common fear of the black cat (108) or that vexillology (116) is the science of flags, and “flying one’s colors” says exactly what it means. Or that research has shown that children do not like purple (139ff). Or that in the West the preference ranking of blue, green, red, white and black, with yellow last, has been stable for 140 years of poll taking. Neither geography nor culture or climate seem to have had an influence.

 

Yet this does not mean that there exist color universals because the European ranking does not apply to Black Africa or Central Asia: color may not even be perceived as a single unified phenomenon in non-Western cultures but as part of a more complex sensory experience, a synesthesia including wetness/dryness or roughness/smoothness as factors (145/146).

 

Who would have thought that designers and art historians for ages “paid no attention at all to problems of colour” (46)? Or how customers made their color choices from early mail-order catalogs full of black and white line drawings? Or that the phenomenon of sun-tanning can be read to yield interesting social and class implications via shades of skin color, with preferences by the upper classes shifting from the desirable sporty bronze in the fifties back to whiteness after the sixties – a development that started long before it was supported by medical rather than class and social status arguments (127).

 

Despite its brevity, The Colours of Our Memories is a book rich in information that it offers to the reader lightly and entertainingly for broad consideration via diverse roads of approach – experiential, of course, emotional, personal as well as social, historical, or scientific. In the end, Pastoureau emphasizes the humanities’ role above all for the understanding of color and their decoding on the basis of experience, memory, “knowledge[,] and one’s imagination” (170). Colors are pigment, it is true, mineral, vegetal, synthetic; they do have “tactile” qualities of surfaces, shine, hue, saturation and come in myriads of shades, industrially produced. But, as he maintains in a final linguistic observation, behind the proliferation of fancy color terms, “borrowed from animals, vegetables and minerals” (166) that are designed to be “more vague but more enticing” (166), the basic set of colors has “remained simple and accessible” (166) – essentially the six primary colors, white, black, red, blue, green yellow. A recent legal case serves to confirm both trends, the simple and the fanciful: in 2008 Apple Inc. settled a lawsuit filed by two “California professional photographers […], saying they were duped into buying MacBook Pro notebooks by Apple's claim that the[y] could display millions of colors. ‘The displays are only capable of displaying the illusion of millions of colors through the use of a software technique referred to as dithering,' the lawsuit said.” The plaintiffs’ lawyer noted that his clients didn't pursue class-action status. “[I]t was difficult to find other people who were wronged because they had bought Macs solely based on the ‘millions of colors’ claim.” Many commentators had seen “the case as frivolous or point[ed] out that they could not perceive much, if any, difference between millions of colors and hundreds of thousands of colors.”[2]

 

The very last chapter title, “What is Colour?”, is both a bit of a joke and a challenge. Pastoureau just told us all about colors but also revealed just how mysterious the phenomenon of color remains, despite – or because – it comes in hundreds of thousands – or even millions – of instantiations.