Chromatistes

Use in the book

The first Chromatistes enters under several signs of historical uncertainty. His name is variously reported; his discovery is casual; the narrator invokes the authorities who concur in calling him Chromatistes. The vocabulary mimics an antiquarian reconstruction of cultural origins. What is certain within the story is the pattern of his experiment: house, slaves, father, descendants, self. Painting moves from property and dependants towards the inventor's own body. Its success is at once beautiful and practical. He becomes easier to recognize and safer to encounter.

The later Chromatistes is not introduced through private invention. An unnamed Irregular Circle has devised the Universal Colour Bill, and §1023 names Chromatistes as the leader of the Sedition who is summoned forward by Pantocyclus. The conjunction identifies the political leader with the Bill's author without erasing the earlier inventor's separate description. The narrated age of colour has already lasted centuries. Neither an explanation of the repeated name nor a genealogy connecting its bearers is supplied.

Naming changes register with the second bearer. Colourist becomes a political position. Pantocyclus calls him into the centre of the assembly under the promise of receiving the hierarchy's submission. The invitation briefly seems to acknowledge representative authority: he will receive it in his followers' name. It actually isolates him. When he tries to answer the ruler's rhetoric, guards prevent speech; the apparent recognition of a rival ends in his transfixion.

The two appearances consequently frame an entire cultural passage. A name first associated with making bodies legible is attached at the end to a man whose public voice is forcibly extinguished. The first bearer produces an accessible visual language; the second is destroyed as that language is withdrawn from general use. This structural parallel is firmer than any claim that Abbott meant the two men to be identical, or that one occurrence is a printer's error. A lexicon should make the unresolved naming visible instead of repairing it silently.

Places to read

1. §82“a Pentagon whose name is variously reported”
2. §82“Wherever Chromatistes”
3. §923“an Irregular Circle”
4. §1023“Chromatistes, the leader of the Sedition”
5. §1023“transfixed the wretched Chromatistes”

In this edition

Note 86 treats the inventor's name and the uncertainty surrounding origins; note 94 concerns the Irregular author of the Bill. The main text supplies no resolution of the two bearers. Their distinction is a reading safeguard, not a claim of a documented textual variant.

Chromatistes, inventor

The Pentagon credited by tradition with inventing painting. He must be distinguished from the later Irregular Circle who leads the colour movement under the same name. Printed form: Chromatistes (§ 82). See Chromatistes.

Chromatistes, revolutionary

The leader of the colour movement, identified through the preceding account with its Irregular Circle strategist. He is distinct from the Pentagon inventor of painting described in §82. Printed form: Chromatistes (§ 1023). See Chromatistes.