The Gray Book

This is not a history of a colour. It is something harder to categorise — a philosophical essay, a work of literary criticism, and a kind of ghost story all at once, written in the mode of the thing it describes.

Fioretos begins from a simple observation: gray is the colour of vagueness, uncertainty, suspension. Smoke, fog, ashes, dust. The threshold region where life seems held in abeyance without having ended. From there he builds an argument that gray is the medium of literature itself — "that grainy gas of language" — the space where things blend and blur, where distance and proximity become indistinguishable, where time past and lost leaves its tint.

The book is written with a lead pencil, he tells us — in the tradition of Nabokov, Rilke, Svevo, Poe, Dickinson — and it chronicles what graphite leaves behind while also recording its own diminishment. Rather than the four classical elements, Fioretos organises the book around four revisions: not water but tears, not fire but vapor, not earth but grain, not air but clouds. The texts he reads range from Homer to Beckett.

What makes the book strange and memorable is what happens to it. The themes from the quoted texts begin to leak into the narrative itself. The border between fiction and fact dissolves. An increasingly unreliable narrator takes hold. The book becomes affected by its subject — a poetics of gray that gradually turns gray itself.

It sits in a different register from Pastoureau's social histories — less illustrated, less chronological, more literary and philosophical. A companion rather than a continuation. For anyone interested in what a colour can mean when it resists the fixed meanings that other colours accumulate, this is the book to read alongside the series.

Published by Stanford University Press (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics), 1999.