The peculiar type of primate locomotion known as obligate bipedalism, it can be concluded, probably first started to evolve between five and eight million years ago (although precise dating is difficult, largely because fossils of the foot are extremely rare: predators and scavengers having a predilection for the red marrow in the tarsal bones, they tended to eat the feet of their prey). We can however be fairly confident that early hominid species such as Australopithecus had predominantly grasping feet and relatively prehensile big toes until roughly 3.2 million years ago.39
The recent discovery of a fossilized foot in the Afar region of north-eastern Ethiopia, which has been dated to 3.4 million years ago, seems to confirm that pre-human ancestors were adapted at least partially to an arboreal existence, because the big toe juts out to the side like that of a gorilla or chimpanzee. This hominid species was probably a contemporary of Australopithecus, which had lost similar bone features in favour of other adaptations that committed it to walking on two feet – as the remains of ‘Lucy’, several hundred pieces of whose bones were found in the same region of eastern Africa in 1974, indicate.
Obligate bipedalism and the convergent big toe on which it depends developed rather belatedly, in evolutionary terms; and the human foot, with its everted rather than inverted posture, and its characteristic distribution of the metatarsals in a transverse arch configuration, is thus a comparatively recent anatomical structure. This might help to explain why our feet are so susceptible to signs of maladaptation and malfunction.
‘Humanity has tortuously walked across the ages on two feet with a skeleton designed originally for four-legged travel,’ as Joseph Amato has pointed out; ‘flat feet, swollen feet, distorted toes, blisters, bunions, hammer toes, trick knees, herniated discs, and bad backs, not to mention hernias, hemorrhoids and other maladies associated with our bipedal locomotion, remain the price of standing proudly erect.’40 Or, as Bataille puts it, in diction that characteristically combines the sacred and profane, the human foot, though it gives ‘a firm foundation to the erection of which man is so proud’, ‘is stupidly consecrated to corns, calluses, and bunions, and … to the most loathsome filthiness’ (87).
The malfunctioning of the foot – in evolutionary terms, its belatedness – may be one reason for the ignominious status of the big toe in the history of representations of the human body; for its iconographical insignificance. The big toe developed too hurriedly. It is a botched job, a strangely Frankensteinian touch. But, if it is belated, and far from perfect, it is also an advanced piece of technology, highly effective both at providing propulsive force and withstanding weight. It is a prosthesis that makes it possible to walk and to go on walking.
This contradiction is central to Bataille’s interest in the big toe. The grossest, the ugliest, arguably the most alien-looking and least human-seeming part of the anatomy, is actually what makes us human. Conversely, the big toe is the part of our body that, despite its crucial role in enabling us to stand upright, and so transcend our brute past, most closely resembles a vestigial trace of that brute past, of some primitive, primeval, muddy origin. The big toe, to take a formulation from the philosopher Nick Land, ‘protracts the trajectory of animality’; but it also projects beyond it.41
In order to defend this digit against its denigration, in iconographical terms, it is imperative to imagine reorganizing the entire history of art in relation not to the head (for long its privileged physical feature, especially in the form of the face), but to the big toe.
This is, in effect, what the Italian novelist Carlo Emilio Gadda proposed in his late modernist masterpiece, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana (1957). At one point in this bizarre and brilliant novel, Gadda portrays Cocullo, the carabiniere, standing before a fresco of two saints attired in short cloaks that reveal ‘four unsuspected feet’.42 The two right feet, he specifies, are ‘generously tentacled in toes’; toes that are ‘stretched forward in their stride’, and ‘puncture the foreground’ of the composition. Gadda goes on to rhapsodize as follows:
With particular expressive vigor, in a remarkable adaptation to the mastery of the centuries, the big toes were depicted. In each of the two extended digits, the cross strap of otherwise unperceived footwear segregated and singled out the knuckled-toe in that august pre-eminence which is his, which belongs to the big toe, and to that toe alone, separating it out from the flock of the toes of the lower rank, less suitable for the day of glory, but still, in the osteologues’ atlases and in the masterpieces of Italian paintings, toes. The two haughty digits, enhanced by genius, were projected, hurled forward: they traveled on their own: they almost, paired off as they were, stuck in your eye; indeed, into both your eyes: they were sublimated to the central pathetic motif of the fresco, or alfresco, seeing as how it was plenty fresh. A bolt from heaven, a light of excruciated hours blanched them; however, when you came right down to it, the light seemed to rise from underground, since it struck them from below. (271–2)
The big toes project; are hurled forward. They stick in your eye. They belong, that is, to a different order of perspective to that of the rest of the composition. In their obtrusion from the picture plane, they acquire an almost anamorphic quality, like the smeared skull that is the peculiarly dynamic emblem of death in Hans Holbein’s celebrated portrait of The Ambassadors (1533). They travel on their own, in Gadda’s phrase, like entities from a different order of being. Gadda has excavated the distinct ontological space of the big toe.
The big toe in the painting described by Gadda, brilliantly refulgent, synthesizes Apollonian and Dionysian energies, the high and the low, the magnificent and the horrible. The theatrical extravagance of his ekphrastic digression seems unsurpassable. But Gadda’s hymn to the big toe does not end at this point. He has only just begun. For he proceeds to make an even more ostentatiously counter-intuitive claim:
The glorious history of our painting, in a part of its glory pays tribute to the big toe. Light and toes are prime ingredients, ineffable, in every painting that aspires to live, that wants to have its say, to narrate, persuade, educate: to subjugate our senses, win hearts from the Malign One: insist for eight hundred years on the favorite images. (272)
Light and toes are prime ingredients. This is an elaborate pun on la luce (meaning ‘light’) and l’alluce (meaning ‘big toe’). Both light and big toes, according to Gadda, are originary entities. They both lie at the very origins of being.
A couple of pages later, poring over ‘the two big toes, the Pietrine and the Pauline’, portrayed in a shrine to the due santi, Gadda brings the pun to its cosmic climax: ‘The “creator”’, he declares, apparently alluding both to the painter and to God …: ‘The “creator” couldn’t bear another moment’s delay, before creating. ‘“Fiat lux!” And there were toes. Plip, plop’ (274–5). This is the divine command underlying Gadda’s cosmology: Let there be toes! I mean – light! Too late … In his absurdist theology, the universe has come into being not because light has split apart the darkness but because a gigantic big toe has irrupted into it. It is as if creation itself is a ridiculous, Beckettian accident caused by a slip of the tongue.
Gadda goes on to explore his thesis in relation to additional, more canonical paintings.43 The first is Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo (1504–06), a painting that, implicitly playing with its circular tondo form, he rotates, symbolically speaking, so as to pivot it on its representation of the big toe. There, in the exquisitely delicate tension between ‘the inimitable big toe’ of St Joseph and ‘the little toe of the Bride’, or Madonna, he perceives ‘the Toe-Idea’: ‘a livid and almost surreal, or perhaps eschatological light, proposes the Toe-Idea, loftily incarnating – or inossifying [sic] – it, in the foreground of the contingent’ (273).
The casual almost-contact between Joseph’s big toe and Mary’s little toe is nearly as significant as the far-from-casual, indeed the causal, almost-contact between God’s index finger and Adam’s in Michelangelo’s painting of ‘The Creation of Adam’ (c.1
512) on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Raymond Tallis, who has argued for the quintessentially human quality of the index finger, admits in a reference to this fresco that he ‘like[s] to think that the slightly awkward encounter between God and man through their index fingers depicted by Michelangelo … was influenced by an intuition of the central role of the index finger in making us so different’.44 I like to think that the slightly awkward, but infinitely tender, encounter between Joseph’s big toe and Mary’s little toe in the Doni Tondo was influenced by an intuition of the central role of the big toe in making human beings so different. Certainly, it is the index of these saints’ humanity.
The other painting that Gadda reinterprets in relation to the big toe is Raphael’s Lo Sposalizio della Vergine (1504), in the Brera, which depicts Mary and Joseph being married by a priest, in front of a temple, among assorted onlookers. Gadda’s interest lies in Joseph’s left foot, since it is there that, in order to symbolize his chastity, ‘the same metatarsus protuberates, the foot’s thumb’:
The divarication of the solitary, bony toe from the remaining herd of other toes is rendered prominent by the perspectively charming joints of the cleansed pavement, where there is no husk or skin, neither orange’s nor chestnut’s, nor has any leaf or paper settled there, nor has man urinated there, nor dog. And the master toe, though disjoined from the others, at its root is spurred and gnarled: and then it converges inwards, as if forced by gout or by the habitual constriction of a shoe momentarily removed, or I’d say domum relapsa as if too fetid for the hour of the wedding. (273–4)
On the beautifully clean surface of the pavement, the big toe so tenderly painted by Raphael displays both the holiness and the ordinariness, the spirituality and the physicality, of this saintly artisan. It is ‘more than a toe of more than a barefoot carpenter’, as Gadda puts it (274). It has been liberated from the stinking sandal that encased it and consecrated to a divinity who, one day shortly before his death, will advertise his humility and his ordinary humanity by washing the feet of his disciples. Gnarled, spurred and gouty – in short, horrible – Joseph’s big toe is also magnificent.
In Gadda’s baroque elaborations, it is thus possible to identify a profound grasp of the unity I have pointed to in this chapter between the sublime and bathetic aspects of the big toe. Elevating the big toe, in the form of the Toe-Idea, he glorifies the contingent, the basely material. Fiat lux. Plip, plop.
This Toe-Idea, with its violent collision of the spiritual and the basely material, is invoked again in a religious context, also to scurrilously satirical effect, in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1965). There, Oedipa Maas attends a performance of The Courier’s Tragedy, a revenge tragedy by one Richard Wharfinger. In the second act of this parodic Jacobean drama, which centres on the ‘protracted torture and eventual murder of a prince of the church’ by the evil Duke Angelo, the cardinal in question is apparently ‘forced to bleed into a chalice and consecrate his own blood, not to God, but to Satan’:
They also cut off his big toe, and he is made to hold it up like a Host and say, ‘This is my body’, the keen-witted Angelo observing that it’s the first time he’s told anything like the truth in fifty years of systematic lying.45
The amputated big toe is the central symbol of the satanic theology imagined by Pynchon. Its bleeding stump, consecrated to what Gadda calls the Malign One, is the sacred emblem of a materialist anti-religion.
The big toe once again asserts the animality and the humanity of humanity. Here is a metaphysics of the foot in all its messy materiality.
Bataille’s article ‘Le gros orteil’ was first published in the sixth issue of Documents, the strange, crypto-anthropological journal that he edited, which he had set up as a materialist riposte to the idealist tendencies, as he regarded them, of Breton’s brand of Surrealism.
As Surya notes in his biography, the article was an ‘unrestrained parody of poetic idealism’, and it was in this sense typical of Documents, which used its ‘rancid’ ideas to leave ‘a doubtful taste in surrealism’s mouth’.46 The article on the big toe seems to have proved especially distasteful to Bataille’s more conservative colleagues and acquaintances, and it was widely rumoured that its publication was the immediate cause of his demotion from a post in the Medal Department at the Bibliothèque Nationale, where he had worked for some six years, to one in the Printed Books Department.
Documents, according to Surya, ‘created a great fuss right at the heart of the [library’s] quiet establishment, especially over Bataille’s article “The Big Toe”’; such a fuss, in fact, that the surrealist Michel Leiris, who himself sub-edited and contributed to Documents, ‘speaks of a veritable “scandal”.’47 ‘The Big Toe’, in short, like the big toe celebrated by Bataille, thus gave ‘shrill expression to the disorder of the human body’ (92).
To illustrate ‘The Big Toe’, Bataille commissioned three photographs of that subject from Jacques-André Boiffard. Boiffard, who had taken the photographs that adorn Breton’s Nadja (1928), was a relatively obscure and insignificant actor in the surrealist movement, but Breton nonetheless cited him in the first Manifesto of Surrealism as one of only two visual artists in a list of those who had ‘performed acts of ABSOLUTE SURREALISM’.48
The remarkable photographs Boiffard took for Bataille, two of them of male and one of female big toes, were published in full page, so the digits themselves, shockingly, are several times larger than life-size. Disembodied, and dramatically lit against an ominous black background, these big toes are pungent in their detail: every stray hair, every striation of the skin, every bit of cracked nail varnish, is visible. As Michael Sheringham points out, ‘the close-up, aided by spotlighting, blots out everything else, framing the big toe so that it emerges from a primal darkness.’49
Bataille’s essay begins from the paradox that, though it is generally ignored and demeaned, associated with mud and darkness, ‘the big toe is the most human part of the human body, in the sense that no other element of this body is so differentiated from the corresponding element of the anthropoid ape’ (87). The big toe mocks or melodramatizes the constant, raging oscillation between ordure and the ideal, the ideal and ordure, which is characteristic of the confusion and frustration of human life.
The upright gait of which humanity is so proud, according to Bataille, is founded on the foot, ‘but whatever the role the foot plays in his erection, man, who has a light head, a head raised to the heavens and heavenly things, regards it as spit, on the pretext that he has this foot in the mud’ (87). More than contempt, though, the foot inspires a ‘secret terror’ in humans, according to Bataille, and it is this that explains their ‘tendency to conceal, as far as possible, its length and form’ (87). The big toe, ‘hideously cadaverous and at the same time loud and defiant,’ as Boiffard’s photographs also insist, is the index both of our animality and our humanity (92).
Building on Bataille, we must press for nothing less than a philosophical reorientation of the human body. In order to understand the human being as a species that walks, a creature that is shaped in its species-being by walking, it is necessary to radically alter our perspective – as Gadda does before Michelangelo’s and Raphael’s paintings. We need to prostrate ourselves in the mud so as to gaze unflinchingly at this strange being’s big toe, its crucial point of connection with matter itself.
We need to approach the big toe as we approach that anamorphic skull in The Ambassadors, a figure that forces us radically to reorient our relationship to its perspectival picture plane in the interest of comprehending an alternative ontology. An ontoelogy. Everything begins with the big toe, including being itself. It is by taking the big toe as its starting point, and as the point of contact with the world as brute matter, that we can best reorganize the semiotics of the body according to a materialist as opposed to an idealist paradigm. Marx famously announced that, inverting Hegel, he had set the dialectic back on its feet; I propose pivoting it on its big toe.50 Or, again, adapting
a Hegelian formulation, it might be claimed that the being of Spirit is a toe bone.51
The big toes in Boiffard’s photographs stare at us – at once like ‘an alien organism’, as Adam Lowenstein has suggested, and like something all too human.52 We must stare back at them unflinchingly, affirming our fear, horror and hilarity, to celebrate their humanity and inhumanity alike. And to celebrate our humanity and inhumanity alike.
In a fragment of his unpublished preface to Le Mort (published posthumously in 1964), Bataille described his experience as a tubercular patient in the autumn of 1942, when he happened upon the dead bodies of some German pilots shot down by an English fighter plane.
‘The foot of one of the Germans was bared [dénudé],’ he records, ‘the sole of his shoe having been torn away.’ In contrast to the heads of the dead, which had been torched into indistinctness, ‘this foot alone was intact’. He stared at this ‘diabolical’, ‘indecent’, ‘unreal’ entity. He ‘remained motionless for a long time’, he recalls, ‘for this naked foot was looking at me.’ And this foot, he concludes, ‘had the violence – the negative violence – of truth’.53
In this regard, one might also think of Andrea Mantegna’s famous painting, from about 1480, of the Virgin’s lamentation for the dead Christ.54 In this violently foreshortened composition, Christ’s feet, protruding over the edge of the marble slab on which he has been laid, are inertly thrust towards the spectator, their wrinkled, slightly leathery soles marked with the stigmata – which are like tiny, blackened mouths crying out in pain.
It is perhaps one of those rare Christian images in which the low, to take a formulation from Barthes, is not ‘purely and scrupulously censured’.55 Marcel Duchamp was surely thinking in part of the feet in Mantegna’s painting when he constructed his Torture-Morte (1959), a sculpture of a dead foot pocked with flies. In art-historical terms, the latter is a deliberate faux pas or false step. Perhaps it’s also both a testament and a rebuke to André Breton’s celebrated claim, in Nadja, that ‘il n’y a pas de pas perdus’, there are no lost steps: here, Duchamp aggressively announces, is a lost step – a lost sole. In Mantegna’s and Duchamp’s torture-mortes alike the foot is the most pathetic part of the human anatomy – at once heroic and touchingly bathetic. Human dignity and vulnerability are both embodied in the foot.
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