Envoy: Roberte's Glove
by Michael Sanchez

Roberte enjoys wearing costumes. She is outfitted as Diana the Huntress, grasped from behind by the stag Acteon, naked except for an incongruously dainty hat. She poses for a 19th Century style genre painting of Tarquin and Lucretia, covered in diaphanous silks and lounging on a divan. But most often, she simply acts as she is – a middle-aged woman, conservatively dressed in the style of the 1950s, her hair pulled back tight and her hands gloved.

Loosely modeled on his wife Denise, Roberte is the creation of Pierre Klossowski, a Polish-born French novelist, philosopher and artist who died four years ago at the age of 96. Roberte was Klossowski’s companion throughout his long career – she appeared in many of his novels (most notably the three-part series entitled The Laws of Hospitality, written from 1953 to 1965) as well as in his inimitable large-scale pencil drawings, often depicting scenarios taken from his books. Regardless of her costume, Roberte’s face always displays the same hard, yet inexplicably coquettish expression, the same sidelong glance, the same enigmatic curl of the lips.

Sketched in pencil or described in text, Roberte never finds herself alone. She is invariably observed, seduced, constrained, repelled, shocked, or otherwise transported. Even when, in the drawings, Klossowski renders her as a nude, she is never entirely nude – there is always something or someone else which shapes her and gives her substance. Klossowski constructed the most fantastic situations for Roberte, with an obsessive drive which he perhaps jokingly called his “monomania,” in an effort to reveal her essence, to unlock the secret of what made her character so fascinating to him.

This secret, as Klossowski well knew, could not be represented or even described: it could only be hinted at, implicit in the glint of an eye, the angle of a hand, the movement of a leg. Roberte surrenders herself only through what is around her – other characters invented by Klossowski (miniature Gulliverian men, a colossus wearing spurs and his dwarf accomplice, vagabond routiers who tie her to parallel bars, a group of rowdy students who accost her in a staircase, and so on) and accessories which form an integral part of her attractiveness, inseparable from her even when she is nude.

With his usual sophistication, Klossowski resists saying that Roberte has an essence. For Klossowski, what takes its place is something which he calls Roberte’s unique sign: the one unique, true, elusive sign which nevertheless almost begs to be unveiled, the sign which gives consistency to all of Roberte’s accessories, communicable only indirectly, unspoken. Roberte carries this sign with her everywhere. Like the sphinx – in one of his drawings, Portrait of the Artist’s Wife Typing on the Machine, Klossowski gives her a quite sphinx-like pose – Roberte poses a riddle to whomever she meets. But even though the answer to the riddle is always the unique sign, no one, including Klossowski himself, can seem to put his finger on it.

Of all the accessories which take part in the riddle of the unique sign, there is one which stands out – and that is her glove. Klossowski does not apparently give it a special status in either his drawings or written work. Nor does he call attention to it in any way. Roberte’s glove is simply another ornament on her semi-nude body, powerful in its ordinary obviousness.

Why, then, attribute so much importance to the glove? Despite, or perhaps because of its mystery, the glove is the closest thing Klossowski gives us to a description of Roberte’s unique sign. While the glove is not at all equivalent to the unique sign, it does schematize it in a very interesting way. Klossowski’s treatment of the glove exemplifies the way he conceives the link between the unique sign and the ornament. In one of the first drawings Klossowski ever made, an illustration to his novel Roberte ce soir (1953) entitled The Chimney, Roberte appears gloved, with a man lunging at her and grabbing her wrist. Her gloves in The Chimney are similar to what we see in many of Klossowski’s later drawings: skin-tight, to the point where only their dark coloring distinguishes them from Roberte’s hands, apparently fused to her body. But the glove stops just after her knuckles, leaving the fingers exposed and free to move.

This exposure is typical. Descent to the Basement, a 1978 drawing of a scene from The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (the second book of The Laws of Hospitality) in which Roberte is ambushed by two men and carried into a basement beneath the arcades of the Palais-Royal, also renders the glove as something half-concealing and half-revealing. In this drawing, Roberte sports a pair of apparently useless gloves. They are cut in such a way that almost her entire palm is exposed, leaving only the fingers covered. This technique of rendering the glove, also found in a much earlier drawing, La Belle Versaillaise (1955), is a complement to The Chimney. In one, we see her naked fingers, in the other, her naked palm. But in both cases, the glove seems meant only for decoration.

Like her glove, Roberte’s unique sign both obstructs her nakedness and allows it to shine through. This is why it has such erotic power: it both submits and resists, entices and rejects. It is a kind of tantalizing Gordian knot which no sword is never sharp enough to cut and which, of course, we can never untangle. One particular drawing, when considered in terms of the relationship between the glove and the unique sign, takes on an especially allegorical character. This drawing is called The Breach of the Tabernacle (1957), also taken from The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and shows Roberte sneaking into a church at night to unlock its tabernacle. She is dressed in tight frilly shorts which almost recede into her calves, her torso bare and her breasts wrapped in a flirtatiously loose sheath. Roberte’s partially masked face casts a seductive glance back at a shadowy man, who has discovered her ruse and peeps at her furtively from behind a curtain. Of all the plays of revealing and concealing in this picture – the legs, the face, the breasts – none is more highly charged than the gloved hand which holds the key to the tabernacle.

Roberte’s glove of The Breach of the Tabernacle is no longer even a glove – it is a collection of shadows, strategically placed to achieve the maximum possible ambiguity. The end of the glove seems like any ordinary glove, but once it reaches her hand, it becomes indistinct. Neither the fingers nor the palm are entirely revealed; they are kept in the nether-space between gloved and ungloved. Roberte adorns herself only in accessories which cannot be detached from her. A challenge to what we traditionally think of as the accessory, Roberte’s glove is never “outside the work,” as ornaments are. In order to be expressive, indeed, even to exist at all, Roberte needs her accessories. Her body is not enough, and it is this basic fact which prevents us from thinking of Klossowski’s drawings as nudes.

In The Breach of the Tabernacle, the key to understanding Roberte’s unique sign rests in the glove which holds the key. The unique sign is not a sign which we (or Klossowski, for that matter) can recover, but a gesture as defiant in its untouchability as Roberte herself as she tosses her hands into the air. The shadow of Lucas Cranach looms large over Klossowski, and not merely in the cunning smiles of his women. Holding a transparent veil over her thighs, Cranach’s Lucretia is all too aware of an enigma to which Roberte, in her own way, bears witness. Like the women painted by the German Renaissance master, Roberte flaunts her own ineluctable mystery, a mystery which cannot be completely naked since it is complicit with the glove, complicit with the accessory which it should overcome. But Roberte is tailor-made to convey what even she can barely understand. Deftly and subtly, Klossowski ensures that this mystery, for Roberte, fits like a glove.

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