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For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: wrap@warwick.ac.uk http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/32098/ mailto:wrap@warwick.ac.uk LITERATURE AND ART PAUL SMITH In an essay of this title published in 1910 the American critic, James Q1 H u n e k e r , g a v e a s h o r t a c c o u n t o f ‘ a r t i n f i c t i o n ’ t h a t c o u l d s u m u p r e c e i v ed wi s d o m o n th e s u b j e ct t o d a y. ‘ Fi c t i o n ab o u t a r t an d a r ti s ts i s r a r e ’ , H u n e k e r b e g a n , a d d in g : ‘ t h i s is go o d f i ct io n , n o t th e s tu f f g r o u n d out daily b y the publishing mills for the gallery -gods’. 1 He continued: ‘It is to France that we must look for the classic novel dealing with painters a n d t h e i r p a i n t i n g , M a n e t t e S a l o m o n , b y G o n c o u r t ’ . 2 H u n e k e r d i d ackn o wled ge, th ou gh on l y gru d gin gl y, th at o th er writers — Th ackera y, O u i d a , D i s r a e l i , B e r n a r d S h a w a n d M a u p a s s a n t a m o n g o t h e r s — h a d p ro d u ced s ign if ic an t f ictio n o n th e s u b j ect o f ar t. He als o men tio n ed several works by Henry James, but argued dismissively that ‘it is the par ticular psychological problem involved rather than theories of art or person alities th at s tee r M r J a m es ’ s cu n n in g p en ’ . Hu n e ke r n o les s s u mm ar il y dispatched the ‘facile, febrile skill’ Daudet had demonstrated in a description of a Salon opening, in Le Nabab of 1877, 3 with the quip: ‘ you feel t h a t i t c o m e s f r o m G o n c o u r t a n d Z o l a ’ . H o w e v e r , a s t h i s c o m m e n t indicates, Hun eker did ap pro ve of L ’Œuvre, 4 which he regard ed as ‘one of the b etter written boo ks of Zola’. H e also ackno wled ged Balzac’s L e Chef -d ’ Œu vre in connu (first published in 1831 ) as ‘the matrix of mod ern fiction’ concerned with art. 6 By singling out these two works, along with Manette Salomon (1867), H u n e k e r e f f e c t i v e l y e n u n c i a t e d h i s o w n c a n o n o f F r e n c h a r t f i c t i o n , Earlier versions of the papers in this issue were presented at the conference, French Art in Narrative and Drama, which was held in February 2005 under the aegis of the University of Bristol Centre for the Study of Visual and Literary Cultures in France, and was organized by Richard Hobbs and the present author. 1 Promenades of an Impressionist (New York, Scribner, 1910), pp. 27790 (this quotation pp. 285 -86). 2 Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, Manette Salomon, 2 vols (Paris, Lacroix — Verboeckhoven, 1867). 3 See Alphonse Daudet, Le Nabab: mœurs parisiennes (Paris, Charpentier, 18 77), ch. 14. 4 Émile Zola, L’Œuvre (Paris, Charpentier, 1886). 5 Honoré de Balzac, ‘Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu: conte fantastique’, L’Artiste, 1(1) (31 July 1831), 319-23 (‘Maitre Frenhofer’) and 1(2) (7 August 1831), 7 –11 (‘Catherine Lescault’). The story was first published in book form in Romans et contes philosophiques, 2nd edn, volume III (Paris, Gosselin, 1832). 6 The number of distinguished scholars who have written about this novella suggests this view is still widely shared today. See, for instance, Hubert Damisch, Fenitre jaune cadmium; ou, les dessous de la peinture (Paris, Seuil, 1984); Georges Didi-Huberman, La Peinture incarnée suivi de ‘Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu’ de Balzac (Paris, Minuit, 1985); P. Marot, ‘Le Chef d’œuvre inconnu ou l’irrepré sentabilité de la représentation’, in De la palette a` l’écritoire, ed. by Monique Chefdor (Nantes, Éditions Joca Seria,1997), I, 140-50; Arthur Danto, Introduction to The Unknown Masterpiece , trans. by Richard Howard (New York Review of Books, 2001), pp. vii–xxvii; and Hans Belting, The Invisible Masterpiece , trans. by Helen Atkins (London, Reaktion Books, 2001). Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu was not without its precedents, however. See, for instance, Max Milner, ‘L’artiste comm e personnage fantastique’, in L’Artiste en représentation, ed. By Rene´ De´ moris (Paris, Desjonquères, 1993), pp. 93–105, for Balzac’s debt to Hoffmann. 2 P. SMITH which he then reiterated by describing L’Œuvre as ‘an enormously clever b oo k’ th at d erives ‘ in th e ma in, f ro m Man ette S alomo n and B alzac’s Frenhofer’. 7 It may seem inconsistent that Huneker lavished praise on the ‘ h a l f f o r g o t t e n t r i l o g y’ o f a r t n o v e l s G e o r g e M o o r e p u b l i s h e d i n th e 1880s , 8 b u t M o o r e h i m s e l f a c k n o w l e d g e d t h a t t h e f i r s t o f t h e s e — A M o d er n L o v er o f 1883 — w as an ‘ u n co u th t e x t [ d e v i s ed ] o u t o f h is me mo ries o f B al za c, Zo l a , an d Go n co u rt’ . 9 B y th e b egin n in g o f th e twentieth century, therefore, it would seem that the now familiar trio of texts produced by these writers was alread y firmly establis hed as the pick of the crop. Huneker’s other opinions suggest that his judgment was highly question - able, as does his assertion: ‘you cannot find a Mildred Lawson [a woman painter from Moore’s Celibates of 1895 whose friends meet ‘the Impressio - nists’] in Gon court o r Flaubert’. 1 0 He thu s reminds us that no canon is u n c o n t e n t i o u s , w h i l e a t t h e s a m e t i m e a l e r t i n g u s t o t h e f a c t t h a t t h e status enjoyed by the ‘big three’ has resulted in innumerable novels and stories (and pla ys ) about Fren ch art f ro m the peri od 1820–1900 (written in English as well as French) being consigned to oblivion. This special issue of French Studies will therefore seek to look afresh at the canon, and o u t s i d e i t , wi t h t h e a i m o f f in d i n g n e w c o n t e x t s f o r f a m i l i a r w o r k s , a n d with a view to identifying texts whose intrinsic interest or historical significance is yet to be exhausted, or even examined at all. 1 1 7 On the relationship between L’Œuvre, and Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu and Manette Salomon, see Theodore Bowie, The Painter in French Fiction (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, 1950), pp. 5 –30; Patrick Brady, ‘Les sources litté raires de L’Œuvre de Zola’, Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles, 16 (1964), 413–25; and Robert J. Niess, Zola, Cézanne, and Manet: A Study of ‘L’Œuvre’ (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, 1968), pp. 6–14. On L’Œuvre’s relation to Balzac’s ‘La fille aux yeux d’or’, see Jeannine Guichardet, ‘Un artiste à l’œuvre: Claude Lantier’, in L’Artiste en représentation, pp. 107–23 (p. 110). 8 A Modern Lover, 3 vols (London, Tinsley, 1883). The others were Spring Days (London, Vizetelly, 1888) and Mike Fletcher (London, Ward & Downey, 1889). 9 Lewis Seymour and Some Women (London, Heineman, 1917), p. v. This reference is cited in Milton 70 Chaikin, ‘The Compos ition of George Moore’s A Modern Lover’, Comparative Literature , 7 (1955), 259–64 (p. 259). 10 See George Moore, Celibates: Three Tales (London, Walter Scott, 1895)) pp. 1-312, and especially pp. 99—100, 175, and 184. Huneker had in mind Gustave Flaubert, L’Education sentimentale: histoire d’un jeune homme, 2 vols (Paris, Lévy, 1870). See Promenades, p. 288. On this novel, see Maurice Z. Shroeder, Icarus: The Image of the Artist in French Romanticism (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 160-62, and Maurice Beebe, Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts: The Artist as Hero in Fiction from Goethe to Joyce (New York University Press, 1964), p. 60. 11 In addition to the sources already cited, several other works have also undertaken this kind of inves tigation, including: Artistic Relations: Literature and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth -century France, ed. by Peter Collier and Robert Lethbridge (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1994); Text into Image: Image into Text, ed. by Jeff Morrison and Florian Krobb (Amste rdam, Rodopi, 1997); L’Image de l’artiste, ed. by Pascal Griener and Peter J. Schneemann (Bern, Peter Lang, 1998); and Le Dialogue des arts, ed. by Jean-Pierre Landry and Pierre Servet (Lyon, CEDIC, 2001). See also Joy Newton, ‘The Atelier Novel: Painters as Fictions’, in Impressions of French Modernity, ed. by Richard Hobbs (Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 173- 89; Philippe Ha mon, ‘ Le topos de l’ atelier’, in L’Ar tis te en repr ésentation, p p . 1 2 5 –4 4 ; a nd J ea n - D id ie r W a gne ur , ‘ Q ua nd le r o ma n p o r t e c le f s ’ , in J . -J . L. [J e a n - J a c q ues Lefrèrere], M.P. [Michel Pierssens] et al., Les Romans à clefs: troisième colloque des Invalides (Paris, Du Lérot, 1999), pp. 47-50 (which mentions novels touching on art, and literature, by Murger, Harry Alis, Joseph Caraguel, Émile Goudeau, Georges Duval, Léo Trézénik and Raymond Maygrier). 3 P. SMITH One way of explaining how some art fictions (rather than others) have r i s e n t o p r o m i n e n c e i s t h a t , a t t h e t i m e o f t h e i r a p p e a r a n c e , t h e y ad d ress ed co n cern s th at h ad p articular s ign if ican ce . B y th is accou n t, Balzac’s novella did not serve as the prototype for much subsequent art-fiction s impl y b ecaus e it gave shap e to a new con cep tion of the artist as s o meo n e po is ed b etween th e co nd itio ns of gen iu s an d ra t é. R ath er, as Marc Gotlieb argues in his essay, ‘Pedagogical Disaster in Romantic Art Fiction’, the po ignan c y of the Frenhofer t yp e was als o a function of how it dramatized (albeit in historical guise) the relativel y novel predicament o f a lon e, in d ivid u al p ain ter wo rkin g at th e margin s o f t rad ition al ins ti - tutional structures, who enjoyed freedom only at the risk of meeting with incomprehension. If the Romantic conception of the artist as misunderstood genius was in fact a sublimation of the very real alienation experienced by his real counter-p a r t — e s p ec i a lly a s l a is s e z -f a i r e e co n o m i cs in c re a s i n g l y d e c id ed th e s t r u c tu r e o f ar t i s ti c p ra c t ic e a n d th e m ar k e t as t h e ce n t u r y w o r e o n — this would make sense of the lasting success the type enjoyed, and of Frenhofer’s touchstone status among avant -garde painters and theorists in particu lar. Th e vers ion o f C as tagn ary’ s ‘ S alon’ o f 186 0 p ub lis h ed in th e Almanach parisien, for example, ends with the revelation that the critic’s in terlocu to r, wh o is as d isen ch an ted with th e f o rmulaic art of th e S alon as he is himself, is none other than ‘Maître Frenhofer’. 1 2 ‘Frenhoffer’ (as he called him) also served C ézanne as a model, along with other literary seers whose steadfast individualism brought them only incomprehension, ostracism, and ultimately, death. 1 3 By analogy, the success of Manette Salomon rested to a considerable extent on its ability to revitalize the topos of the isolated genius by characterizing its protagonist, Coriolis, as a hypersensitive ‘temperament’ whose idiosyncratic colour ‘sensations’ made his work unique, and hence potentially market - able, but at the same time placed it on the borderline of comprehensibility. 1 4 Huneker described Manette Salomon as ‘that breviary for painters which so far back as 1867 anticipated . . . the discoveries , the experiments, the p r a c t i c e o f t h e n a t u r a l i s t i c - i m p r e s s i o n i s t i c g r o u p s f r o m C o u r b e t t o Cézanne’. 1 5 Althou gh this teleolo gical conception of its signif icance is 12 See JulesAntoine Castagnary, ‘Salon en raccourci’, L’Almanach parisien pour l’anne´e 1860 (Paris, Pick, 1860), pp. 111-23. I am grateful to Leah Kharibian for alerting me to this version of Castagnary’s text, which does not appear in his collected Salons. 13 See Adrien Chappuis, The Drawings of Paul Cézanne: a Catalogue Raisonné (Greenwich, CT, New York Graphic Society, 1973), I, pp. 5051; Joachim Gasquet, C ézanne (1921; repr. Paris, BernheimJeune, 1926), pp. 39, 67 and 152; and Émile Bernard, ‘Souvenirs sur Paul Cézanne’, Mercure de France, 69(247) (1 October 1907), 385-404 (p. 403). 14 See Manette Salomon, II, pp. 175–78 and pp. 265–66. 15 Promenades, p. 289. Cf. p. 290: ‘No such psychologic manual of the painter’s art has ever appeared before or since Manette Salomon. It was the Goncourts who . . . foresaw the future of painting as well as of fiction.’ LITERATURE AND ART 4 misleading, Manette Salomon was a mandatory read for any 1860s art student with avan t -garde aspiratio ns — at least acco rdin g to Frantz Jourd ain’s semi-autobiographical novel, L’Atelier Chantorel of 1893, where the student, Dorsner, describes it as: ‘Un beau livre Une vraie revelation.’ 1 6 (Cézanne also seems to have emulated Coriolis, since the phrase — ‘optique personnelle’ — that Goncourt used to describe his character’s way of seeing tu rn s u p in Em ile B e rn a rd ’ s acco u n t o f th e rea l p ai n ter’ s s en s e o f h is own vision. 1 7 ) L’Œuvre, of course, rehearses man y of the same themes as its two illustrious predecessors, but it was perhaps this rather derivative ch aracter th at mad e it on e of Zola’s leas t p opu lar n ovels . 1 8 B y 1886, in other words, the topos of the marginalized artist poised on the knife -edge between genius and insanity had become a little stale — as had its stereoty- pically misogynistic characterization of the artist’s female partner. A more old-fashioned view of the canon is that it e nshrines those works that info rmed opin ion h as held in high es teem fo r good reason, and which have stood the test of time because of qualities they actually possess. 19 Even a cursory reading of many a piece of art -literary detritus lends credence to this view (as does more sustained attention), but there are ‘half-forgotten’ art novels that display genuine literar y qualities (as opposed to curiosity v a l u e ) w h o s e o b s c u r i t y s e e m s u n w a r r a n t e d . T h i s i s t r u e o f t h e b o o k discussed in Joy Newton’s essay, ‘C ézanne’s Literary Incarnations’, that was also a likely source for L’Œuvre: Marius Roux’s witty, acerbic, and compassionate La Proie et l’ombre, of 1878 20 — if the judgement of Huysmans and Mallarmé, b oth of who m co mplimen ted Roux on his no vel, is to b e t ru s ted . 2 1 A cco r d in g to An n a G ru et zn e r R o b in s as wel l as Hu n ek er, th e s am e ap p lies to th e n o vel f eatu r ed in h er es s a y, ‘ Geo r ge Mo o re’ s A Modern Lover: Introducing the French Impressionists to London’. Moore was, as Huneker rightly claims, ‘the critical pioneer of the impressionistic movemen t [ who] firs t to ld London ab out Manet, Monet, Degas’, and he has enjoyed some status on this account. However, as Gruetzner Robins demonstrates, Moore also developed a highly personal style in A Modern 16 L’Atelier Chantorel: mœurs d’artistes (Paris, Charpentier, 1893), pp. 216 –17. Jourdain’s novel is dedicated ‘Au precurseur genial de l’art moderne, à Edmond de Goncourt’. 17 See Manette Salomon, II, p. 265, and Emile Bernard, ‘Paul C ézanne’, L’Occident, July 1904, p. 22. Cézanne’s several express ions of enthus ias m for Manette Salomon are recorded in Robert Ratcliffe, ‘Cézanne’s Working Methods’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, 1950, p. 372. 18 See Niess, Zola, Cézanne, and Manet, pp. 1 and 251, n. 1. 19 The argument is from David Hume, ‘On the Standard of Taste’ (1757), in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. by Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, Liberty Classics, 1985), pp. 226 -44. 20 Marius Roux, La Proie et l’ombre (Paris, Dentu, 1878). See Paul Smith, ‘Pa ul Cézanne’s Primitive Self and Related Fictions’, in The Life and the Work: Art and Biography, ed. by Charles G. Salas (Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2007), pp. 56-86. The present author will also publish a critical edition of this novel, in a translation by Richard Collins and Fiona Cox, with Penn State University Press in 2007. Roux was Zola’s oldest friend, and a companion of Cézanne’s in the 1860s. 21 See Joris Karl Huysmans, ‘La Proie et l’ombre de Marius Roux’, L’Artiste (Brussels), 20 April 1878, and Mallarmé’s letter to Roux of 30 April 1878, cited in Stephane Mallarmé, Correspondence, ed. by Henri Mondor and Lloyd James Austin, vol. 2 (Paris, Gallimard, 1965), pp. 174 -75. 5 P. SMITH Lover, which could capture in language the kinds of effects the Impr essio- nists had rendered in paint. It stands by itself, in other words, irrespective of any virtue it accrues vicariously. Peter Read pursues a similar line of thought in his essay, ‘Pierre Lou ÿs, Rodin and Aphrodite: Sculpture in Fiction and on the Stage, 1895 to 1914’, suggesting that Louÿs’s best-seller, although largely overlooked as literature nowadays, nevertheless remains significant for its morality, and its musical, transparent and ‘pure’ (Mallar mé an) language. Of course, attempts have been made periodically to revise the canon of ‘the literature of art’, but one major obstacle to these efforts is the persistent belief, dating from Huneker’s time at least, that Balzac’s Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu is the origin and paradigm of all subsequent art fict ion of an y value. It is probably the case that Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu did serve as a m o d el f o r M a n e t t e S a lo m o n , an d f o r L ’ Œ u vr e , as w el l as in f lu en c in g M o o r e ’ s C e l i b a t e s ( a ‘ v e r y B a l z a c i a n t i t l e ’ f o r H u n e k e r ) , a n d H e n r y James’s ‘The Madonna of the Future’ (in which one character even refers to ‘that terrible little tale of Balzac’s’). 22 However, as Gotlieb demonstrates, it was far from unique among fictions of the period addressing the lone artis t’s chan gin g status . In 1833, onl y two years after it first a pp eared, O. C harlet pub lish ed an an tho lo g y o f s to ries ab ou t b eleagu ered artis ts, Coups de pinceaux, and in the same year, Charpentier published the novel that forms the subject of Stephen Bann’s essay, ‘The Studio as a Scene of Emulation: Marceline Desbord es-Valmore’s L’Atelier d’un peintre’, which is set largely in the studio of the author’s uncle, Constant Desbordes, an important figure for a generation of artists aiming to steer a path between emulation and (imaginar y) parricide in the attempt to emanc ipate itself from the legacy of David. Many texts belonging to ‘the literature of art’ do undoubtedly issue from the ‘matrix’ provided by Balzac’s novella, but many do not — for the simple reason that the family resemblances constituting the genre are nei ther finite nor fixed forever, but are instead manifold and historically contingent. L’Œuvre, for example, does indeed share something of the ‘philosophical’ dimension of its predecessor, 23 but it has something in common too with mo re recen t ro man s à clef, wh ich s ign a l th eir top icalit y b y emp lo yin g subtitles like roman parisien, or roman contemporain, and thereby solicit a par- ticular mode of attention. Traditional conceptions of genre are hierarchical , and so help bolster the canon b y implicitly rank ing the different li terary forms. By corollary, the v a s t m a j o r i t y o f t h e i n n u m e r a b l e ( a n d a d m i t t e d l y o f t e n t r i v i a l ) p l a ys relatin g to art p erfo rmed in n in eteen th -cen tu r y Fran ce h ave b een ign o red 22 Cited in Niess, Zola, Cézanne, and Manet, pp. 9, and 253, n. 31. See also Beebe, Ivory Towers, pp. 197 and 201. 2 3 See Wagneur, ‘Quand le roman porte clefs’. LITERATURE AND ART 6 — even though some of these works sometimes rehearse similar themes, or employ comparable narrative strategies, to their novelistic counterparts. La Cigale (1877) by Meilhac and Halévy, 24 for example, along with Les Impres- sionnistes, comédie-vaudeville en un acte (1879) by Eugène Grangé and Victor B e r n a r d , s t r i v e to n o r m a l i z e t h e m a r g in a l Im p r e s s io n i s t b y r e p r es en t in g h im as a d evo ted lo ver, f ree of ven al m o tivation s . To th is exten t th ey have something in common with Philippe Burty’s Grave imprudence of 1880, 2 5 which tells of the Impressionist artist, Brissot’s, attempts to achieve success and social legitimacy by capitalizing on the affection of a Countess with who m he is also inf atu ated. All three texts, in other word s, s e e m c o n ce r n ed wi th t h e mo r a l l y c o m p l e x ef f e c ts th at l a i s s e z -f ai r e economics had on the independent painter. So too, according to Anna Gruetzner Robins, does A Modern Lover, although here the protagonist, Lewis Se ymou r, explo its the affection of his ad mirer, Mrs Bethan , with c yn ical venalit y, thus echoin g on a grand er s cale ho w Germain Ramb ert in La Proie et l’ombre takes merciless advantage of his less affluent mistress, the hapless Caroline Duhamel. At any event, it evidently impoverishes the n o vel an d sh o rt sto ry to read th em in iso lation f ro m p op ular d ramatic works such as those mentioned, just as much as it does to see any of these texts as unconnected to a common social and economic context. It could also appear natural that the more serious examples of narrative fiction have enjoyed the most acute scholarly attention. However, as Joy Newton amply demonstrates in her essay on C ézanne’s literary incarnations, it is necessary in order to u nderstand L’Œuvre fully to consider it in the c o n t e x t o f a w h o l e s e r i e s o f r e l a t e d w o r k s w h o s e t o n e v a r i e s f r o m outright caricature to high seriousness, and which characterize their own ‘Cézannes’ accordingly as a buffoon, a maniac and an exponent of an esoteric and metaphysical Provencal nationalism. Much the same applies to literary representations of Courbet. Before Bongrand in L’Œuvre, for example, there was a character named ‘B écourt’ who is abandoned by two prospective students — after one of them has a bizarre dream of reigning a m o n g s t ‘ s a v a g e s ’ o n a d e s e r t i s l a n d i n G e r m a i n P i c a r d ’ s z a n y a n d wholly inappropriate (given Courbet’s opposition to forming a school) fantas y of pedagogic disaster, ‘Un peintre sur le throne, ou le r éalisme t r i o m p h a n t ’ o f 1876. 2 6 A c h a r a c t e r n a m e d ‘ C o u r b e t ’ a l s o a p p e a r e d i n Étienne Baudry’s series of imaginary discussions, Le Camp des bourgeois of 1868 (which was illustrated by the real Courbet). Here he is a proponent of th e s cand alou s (bu t remarkab ly p res cien t) id ea th at mo d ern railway 2 4 The play was first performed on 6 October. See John Rewald, The History of Impressionism (1946 Revised edition London, Secker & Warburg, 1973), pp. 408, and 435, n. 18, which mentions an account by Sacha Guitry suggesting that Monet and Ren oir painted sets for the third act. 25 On this novel, see Niess, Zola, Cézanne, and Manet, pp. 15-16. 26 See Germain Picard, Artistes et bourgeois (Paris, Derenne, 1876), pp. 1-107. 7 P. SMITH stations, being ‘vastes, hauts, aérés et pleins de lumière’, should be use d for exhibiting modern paintings, especially ambitious, social -relevant, examples of ‘la vraie peinture’. 27 Before that, a Courbet of sorts had turned up in the s h a p e o f L a v e r t u j e o n i n C h a m p f l e u r y ’ s e c c e n t r i c a c c o u n t o f F. C. Denecourt’s activities in the forest of Fontainebleau, Les Amis de la nature of 1859, as the author of a still life of a ‘séditieux’ and ‘démagogique’ cheese rejected by the Salon Jury. 28 Fragmen ts like these su ggests that th e ‘archaeolo g y’ of nineteen th - cen tur y Fren ch art f iction is far fro m co mplete, bu t over and abo ve an y i m p e r a t i v e i m p o s e d b y t h e w i s h f o r c o m p l e t e n e s s , t h e r e a r e s e v e r a l specific and compelling reasons for attempting such a project. For one thing, many texts aside from Huneker’s three favourites had an impact on artistic practice, not least because, in dramatizing the predicament of the maítre, genius, or raté, they allowed artists an imaginative space in which the y could experimen t with assu min g different creative and p rof ession al roles. Cézanne, for one, not only identified with the artists pictured in Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu and Manette Salomon, but both emulated and repudiated the different representations of his own artistic and personal ‘impotence’ o f f e r e d b y D u r a n t y , R o u x , Z o l a a n d o t h e r s . 2 9 I n d e e d , t h e f a c t t h a t Cézanne appeared in so many stories as the enfant terrible of the avant-garde, rather as Courbet had, may even indicate that he aspired to assume person - alities or personae he had encountered in fiction. No vels, of cou rse, did no t just empo we r th eir male readers. The y also contributed to restricting the roles deemed acceptable for women by conti - n u a l l y d e f i n i n g t h e m in o p p o s i ti o n t o m as cu li n e c r e a t i v it y. 3 0 Th i s c o n c e p t i o n t a k e s a n e x t r e m e f o r m i n E d m o n d d e G o n c o u r t ’ s L e s F r è r e s Z e m g a n n o o f 1 8 7 9 , w h e r e t h e c r e a t i v e m a l e s y m b o l i z e d b y G i a n n i Z e m g a n n o i s i n c a p a c i t a t e d b y h i s j e a l o u s ( a n d u n n a t u r a l ) r i v a l , l a Tompkins. 31 As Gotlieb points out, other works including Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu , Manette Salomon and L’Œuvre, treat the legitimate claims of the 27 Le Camp des bourgeois (Paris, Dentu, 1868), pp. 273-91 (these citations from pp. 280-82). 28 Cited in Rewald, The History of Impressionism, p. 42. See Champfleury, Œuvres nouvelles: Les Amis de la nature, avec un frontispice d’après un dessin de Gustave Courbet, et précédés d’une caractéristique des œuvres de l’auteur par Edmond Duranty (Paris, Poulet Malassis et de Broise, 1859). This citation, for which I am grateful to Ed Lilley, is from Le Violon de faïence, L’Avocat qui trompe son client, Les Amis de la nature, Les Enfants du professeur Turck (Paris, Hetzel, 1862), p. 136. 29 Duranty represented Cézanne as a paranoid and hapless lover in the unpublished story unearthed in Mario Pétrone, ‘“La double vie de Louis Séguin” par Duranty’, Gazette des beaux-arts, sixth series, 88 (1976), 235-39. The word ‘impuissance’ or its cognates are used in Roux, La Proie et l’ombre , pp. 35 and 326, and numerous times in L’Œuvre, notably on the last page, where Sandoz states of Claude: ‘Il a avouéson impuissance et il s’es t tué (p. 491). 30 See, for instance, Lynda Nead, ‘Seductive Canvases: Visual Mytholo gies of the Artist and Artistic Creativity’, Oxford Art Journal, 18 (1995), 59-69. See also Alphonse Daudet, Les Femmes d’artistes (Paris, Lemerre, 1874). 31 See Shroeder, Icarus, pp. 222-23. LITERATURE AND ART 8 artist’s partner on his affection as deeply incompatible with his devotion to art, and so she becomes a rival to art itself. Fictional representations of art can also be valuable documents for under - standing artistic practices and deba tes. Stephen Bann argues, for example, t h at Ma r c e li n e D e s b o r d e s -V a l m o r e’ s L ’ A t el i er d ’u n p e in tr e p r o v id es a unique insight into the artistic values of the period. Bann, however, is careful to emphasize the irreducibility of the narrative to a ‘punctual’ re p- resentation of the goings -on in Constant Desbordes’s studio, not least because the author’s experience of this space was restricted, and her book written with considerable hindsight. Bann’s approach is to be contrasted therefore with that of art historia ns such as John Rewald, who despite his robust advocacy of historical ‘truth’ saw no problem in directly transposing content from Zola’s novels and stories into his biograph y of Cézanne (although this is only apparent in the two earliest editions of 1936 a nd 1939, which have footnotes). 32 Zola’s work is, of course, a special case: th e vo lu min o u s p rep a rato r y n o tes to L ’Œ u vr e tes t if y to t h e ext en t to which it incorporated real characters and events. It nevertheless remains dis ingenuous to assume that this text is straightforwardly veridical, since even wh en it ch aracterizes Lan tier o r d es crib es an even t in th e s ame wa y as anoth er text, this does no t n eces saril y impl y an ythin g mo re th an a d ep en d en ce on its p ro to typ e, o r th eir commo n dep en d en ce on yet an o th er. (Alth o u gh co rr es p o n d en ces d o s o m eti mes i mp l y tri an gu lat i o n . 3 3 ) It w o u l d t h e r e f o r e b e u n w i s e t o c o n c u r w i t h R e w a l d ’ s m e t h o d o lo g y o r with Huneker either, who described the ‘fifth chapter’ of L’Œuvre as ‘a faithful transcription’ of the 1863 Salon des refusés and Claude Lantier’s ‘fight for artistic veracity’ as a ‘replica of what occurred in Manet’s lifetime’. There are cases, however, where fact and fiction — and their different voices are more closely confounded. This is true in a small but indicative way of Auguste Lepage’s La Vie d’un artiste of 1882, which describes an artists’ café in the rue de Buci that also appears in the author’s exactly con - temporary journalistic survey of such establishments in Paris. 34 The demar- cation between fiction and rep ortage in the novels and stories about art written by Félicien Champsaur is even hazier. Champsaur, for example, based a whole chapter of his 1882 blockbuster, Dinah Samuel, on two of 32 See John Rewald, Cézanne et Zola (Paris, Sedrowski, 1936) and Cézanne: sa vie, son œuvre, son amitié pour Zola (Paris, Albin Michel, 1939). Rewald also quotes from p. 50 of George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man (London, Swann Sonnenschein Lowrey, 1888) in his Seurat (Paris, Albin Michel, 1939), p. 71. 33 In La Proie et l’ombre, pp. 134–35, Roux describes a sculpture by Père Godet, Démoc-Soc, which is evidently related to the Baigneuse couchée by Mahoudeau described in L’Œuvre, pp. 296-98. Both are modelled, it would seem, on Philippe Solari’s La Guerre de s écession, identified in Franck Baille, Les Petits Maîtres d’Aix à la Belle Époque: 1870-1914 (Aix-en-Provence, Roubaud, 1981), pp. 90 and 92, and described in Gasquet, Cézanne, pp. 47–48 under another title. See also Niess, Zola, Cézanne, and Manet, p. 43. 34 See Auguste Lepage, La Vie d’un artiste, pp. 102-05, and Les Cafés artistiques et littéraires de Paris (Paris, Boursin, 1882), pp. 43 -60. 9 P. SMITH his own ‘chroniques’ about the café, Le Rat Mort, and even recycled whole passages in all three. 35 Dinah Samuel also employs tell-tale descriptions to identify several of its characters with their real prototypes, along with cryp - tonyms of varying degrees of transparency, 36 including Paul Corydon (Paul Alexis), Edmond de Génicourt (Goncourt) and Jean Pauvrepin (Richepin). Comparison between the novel and the chroniques also shows that the enthu- siasm shown by the Impressionist painter, Paul Albreux, for the poetry of Arthur Cimber represents Renoir’s for Rimbaud, 3 7 and that the identities o f No r b e r t Go en eu t t e, H en r i D et o u ch e a n d J e an B ér a u d a r e d is g u is ed u n d e r t h e s o b r i q u e t s o f R o b e r t G a l t o i n e , H e n r i T y m e l a n d N i n o M a y. Other evidence suggests that the character, Blaise Verdet, an ‘impression - niste’ antiphysique who dresses as a woman and prostitutes himself when hit b y hard times , mi ght have been mod elled on Giuseppe de Nittis . 3 8 With Miss America (1885), and L’Amant des danseuses (1888), Dinah Samuel f o r m s a t r il o g y, i n wh ic h G a l to in e an d Ve r d e t d rif t in an d o u t o f t h e action, 39 as does the character Georges Decroix, who bears some s imilarity to Albert Besnard. 40 Yet, for all the light they may cast on the ‘forgotten’ Impressionists, and despite the fascinating possibility of a queer Impressio - nist, nothing sanctions the wholesale assimilation of Champsaur’s novels to r e p o r t a g e . Dinah Samuel in fact provides a forceful caveat against doing so, because in s o m e p l a ce s ch a r a ct e r s ’ n a m e s we r e c h a n g ed b e t w ee n o n e ed it io n an d another (especially those of 1882, 1889 and 1905). While these changes could indicate a growing frankness on the aut hor’s part as the likelihood o f s c an d a l f ad ed wi th t i m e, th e y c o u l d eq u a l l y w e l l re p r es en t a u t h o r ia l 35 Félicien Champsaur, Dinah Samuel (Paris, Ollendorff, 1882). For the section on the Rat Mort, see the edition by Jean de Palacio (Paris, Séguier, 1999), pp. 288–307, and the ‘clef’, pp. 544–45. The two chroniques are Félicien Champsaur, ‘Le rat mort’, L’Étoile française, 21 December 1880, and ‘Le rat mort’, Revue moderne et naturaliste, 1880, 435–41, for which references I am indebted to Michael Pakenham. On Dinah Samuel, see Fernand Drujon, Les Livres à clef: étude de bibliographie critique et analytique pour servir à l’histoire littéraire (Paris, Rouveyre, 1885–1888), II, pp. 278–79; and on Champsaur, see Salvator Delaville, Félicien Champsaur: étude littéraire (Paris, Bibliotheque artistique et littéraire, 1897). 36 Cf. Wagneur, ‘Quand le roman porte clefs’, p. 48. 37 See Jean-Jacques Lefrère, ‘Du rat mort aux poux: Champsaur et Rimbaud’, Parade sauvage, 17–18 (August 2001), pp. 103 -105. In the Étoile française article, ‘Renoir’ declares that ‘le plus grand poete de la terre est son ami Arthur Rimbaud’. ‘Alb’ implies the Latin ‘albis’, the opposite of noir; while ‘reux’ is the ‘Re’ from Renoir. 38 See Dinah Samuel (1882/1999), pp. 304–305, and Miss America (Paris, Ollendorff), p. 82. In the 1905 edition of Dinah Samuel (Paris, Douville, 1905), Verdet paints a scene set on the Champs Elysées that closely recalls Nittis’s Sous les marronniers, exhibited at the galleries of the magazine L’Art in 1880 (private collection). 39 Galtoine is absent from the later novel, but does turn up in Champsaur’s collection of short stories, Entrée des clowns (Paris, Lévy, 1886). 40 Decroix is the eponymous ‘amant des danseuses’. His identification with Bernard is sugge sted by how ‘Degas’ says of him in the 1905 edition of Dinah Samuel : ‘ Il vole maintenant de “ mes” propres ailes’ (p. 255), which recalls how Degas said of Bes nard, ‘ il vole avec nos propres ailes’, according to George Moore, ‘Memories of Degas’, The Burlington for Connoisseurs, 32(178-79) (1918), pp. 22-23, 26- 29 and 63-65 (p. 63). Octave Mirbeau also cited a similar phrase used by a fellow artist about Besnard in an article of 1892: see Combats esthétiques (Paris, Séguier, 1993), I, p. 481. LITERATURE AND ART 10 co n cern s ab ou t th e coh eren ce of th e p lo t. Th e s itu ation is mad e even murkier b y the use of similar devices and forms — innuendo and zany h u mou r in p articular — acro s s bo th lo w -b ro w f iction like C h amps au r’s and contemporary documentary writing. This is especially the cas e with stories about artists’ models. Champsaur’s story, ‘Le toux’, 41 for example, revels in exp os in g the myth ical d is in teres tedn es s of th e male p ain ter’s gaze in the same salaciously suggestive manner as several factual counter - parts. 4 2 Of course many fictions, and not just those belonging to the litera - t u r e o f a r t , c o m p a r e d s o c l o s e l y t o t h e i r d o c u m e n t a r y r e l a t i v e s t h a t p u b l i s h e r s o c c a s i o n a l l y f e l t i t n e c e s s a r y t o a d d t h e w o r d ‘ r o m a n ’ b e l o w th eir titles. Yet in th e cas e of Ch arles Mo reau -Vau th ier’ s L es Ra p in s : roman (1896), th e addition almost certainl y betra ys an an xiet y that the cross -o ver b etween genres to ward s th e end of the centu r y had created a grey area that the reader needed help navigating. A fru itful wa y of appreciating the d ifficu lties in volve d b y no vels and stories incorporating factual material is provided by a remark of Wittgen - stein’s where he argues that reality sometimes appears in fiction as it does in ‘dreams’. 4 3 This suggests that, as in dreams, facts turn up in fictions under disguises, in displaced locations a nd time-frames, dispersed among different characters and situations, or condensed, and always in aesthetically r e v i s e d f o r m . Id e n t i f yi n g t h e m w o u l d t h e r e f o r e r e q u i r e a l a b o r i o u s technique which, like dream-analysis, demanded close and extensive famili- arit y with the material co ncerned . Su ch a techniqu e migh t neverth eless m a k e i t p o s s i b l e t o c a j o l e w o r k i n g h yp o t h e s e s f r o m t h e a r c h i v e t h a t could su ggest new avenues of research. C ertainl y, wh en o ther sou rces are meagre, sparse or sca ttered allusions in fictions can assume exponential interest. Zacharie Astruc’s Les Dieux en voyage (Figure 1), for example, althou gh published so me twen t y years afterwards , n everth eless casts a u n i q u e l i g h t o n o n e s e c t i o n o f t h e B a t i g n o l l e s g r o u p o f t h e 1860s b y s t a g in g a d i s cu s s i o n a b o u t a r t t h e o r y b e t w e en Fa n t in - La t o u r , W h is tl e r, Alphonse Legros and Félix Regamy in an episode set in the forest of Fon - tainebleau. 44 Victor Joze’s L’Homme à femmes: roman parisien (1890) 45 and 41 Entrée des clowns, pp. 1 0 5 - 2 5 (the story features Galtoine). See also Joseph Gayda, ‘A l’atelier’, in Ce Brigand d’amour (Paris, Monnier, 1 8 8 5 ), pp. 5 1 - 5 4 . 42 See, for instance, Émile Blavet, ‘Les modè les femmes’, in La Vie parisienne: la ville et le théâtre (1884) (Paris, Boulanger, 1 8 8 5 ), pp. 1 1 9 - 2 3 2 ; and Adrien Marx, ‘Le modè le à Paris’, in Les Petites mémoires de Paris (Paris, Levy, 1 8 8 8 ), pp. 1 4 3 - 5 3 . See also Paul Dollfus, Modèles d’artistes (Paris, Marpon et Flammarion, 1888). 43 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Oxford, Blackwell, 1977 ), p. 89e: ‘if Shakespeare is great . . . then we must be able to say of him: Everything is wrong, things aren’t like that & is all the same completely right according to a law of its own. . . . If Shakespeare is great, then he can be so only in the whole corpus of his plays, which create their own language & world. So he is completely unrealistic. (Like the dream.)’ 44 Les Dieux en voyage (Paris, Bachelin Lecat, 1 8 8 9 ), pp. 1 5 3 - 5 5 . On this episode, see Sharon Flescher, Zacharie Astruc: Critic, Artist and Japoniste (New York, Garland, 1 9 7 8 ), p. 8 1 . 45 See Richard Thomson, Seurat (Oxford, Phaidon, 1 9 8 5 ), pp. 2 1 2 - 1 4 . 11 P. SMITH Hu gues Reb ell’s La Câlineuse (1900) 4 6 are equ all y su ggestive about the a c t i v i t i e s a n d v i e w s o f S e u r a t a n d To u l o u s e - La u t r e c , w h o p r o v i d e t h e mo d els f o r th e ir s u b s id ia r y ch ar act ers , G eo r ges Le g ran d an d J acq u es d e Tavannes. Paul Adam‘s story of 1887, ‘Au jour’, is noteworth y because it 46See Hubert Juin, ‘Redécouvrons Hugues Rebell’, Magazine littéraire, no. 31 (juilet-août 1969). Figure 1: Zacharie Astruc, drawing for the cover of Les Dieux en voyage (Bachelin Lecat, 1889). Pen-and-ink and body-colour. Image can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/fs/knl214 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/fs/knl214 LITERATURE AND ART 12 features the obscure scientific aesthetician, Charles Henry, under the guise of Marc S apelin e. 4 7 P erh ap s the main interes t of Armand Charpen tier’s Le Roman d’un singe of 1895 is that it personifies the elusive critic, F élix Fénéon, as Félix Yvonnel. In a different vein, two novels of the second half of the 1880s, Robert Caze’s La Semaine d’Ursule and Eugène Murer’s Pauline Lavinia, provide extensive and fascinating descriptions of their au th o r s ’ c o ll e c ti o n s o f Im p r e s s i o n i s t p a in ti n gs , wh i ch n o t o n l y h e l p identify individual works, but shed light on the authors’ display policies and tastes as well. 48 While each of these narratives is to some extent a representation of the rea l wo r ld , each a ls o cr ea tes wh at Wi tt gen s t ein ca ll ed a ‘ wo rld ’ o f its own, inside which art makes particular and unusually cogent sense, and comes alive with especial vividness. 49 Others are openly polemical. Jean Richepin’s Braves gens of 1886, for example, whose narrative draws on the b o h e m i a n e x i s t e n c e t h e a u t h o r s h a r e d w i t h R i m b a u d a n d t h e o b s c u r e co mp o s e r C ab an er, f o ld s Imp r es s io n is m in to its wo r ld u n d er th e ru b ric o f ‘ u n e p e i n t u r e p s yc h o l o g i q u e ’ d e v e l o p e d b y p a i n t e r s ‘ n e v o u l a n t traduire que l’impression des choses’ by means of ‘la lumi ère infiniment décomposée au plein air’ or (more interestingly) ‘la synth èse d’un dessin initial et primitif’. 5 0 Moreover, it draws on Impressionism as an ally in its defence of bohemianism, which it offers as a direct, dialogical riposte to the crass and venal cynicism of Dinah Samuel, and of (the author’s enemy) Champsaur’s ‘moderniste’ writings in general. 5 1 Paul Adam’s novel, Soi, of 1886 depicts a different world in which the nascent Neo -Impressionism o f t h e a u t h o r ’ s f r i e n d s ( D u b o i s - P i l l e t , P i s s a r r o , S i g n a c a n d S e u r a t ) gradually finds favour wi th its protagonist, Marthe Grellou, as she lapses o ver th e co u rs e of th e n ovel in to a so lips is m con s is ten t with Ad am’s S ymbolist aesthetic. 5 2 So too, in ‘Au jour’, Adam assimilates the painting o f h is Neo - Imp res s io n is t c o llea gu es to h is o wn p o s iti o n in a d en s e b u t n on e th e less illu min atin g p as s age d es crib in g S ap eline’ s su bj ectivit y in a third-person voice that slips imperceptibly now and again into a first -person description of the world in his mind: Sapeline voudrait dormir, n’était cette faim. Dans le sommeil il ensevelirait sa mémoire raisonnable et morose. Se lever, c’est entreprendre encore; puis l’aveugle chevauchée de 47 ‘Au jour’, La Revue indépendante, 10 (1887), 194-215. 4 8 See ‘Samedi’, in Robert Caze, La Semaine d’Ursule (Paris, Tresse, 1885), p p. 262-90, and Eugène Murer, Pauline Lavinia (Paris, Le´vy, 1887), pp. 231-36. Murer exhibited his collection in 1884 at his home in Rouen. 49 See note 43 above. 50 Braves gens: roman parisien (Paris, Charpentier, 1886), p. 53. 51 The second edition of Dinah Samuel (Paris, Ollendorff, 1889) contains the preface, ‘Le modernisme’, which term denotes especially the sexually titillating aspects of modern Parisian life that Champsaur featured in his novels, and plays. The word, ‘moderniste(s)’, is also used in the preface to Entrée des clowns. 5 2 Soi (Paris, Tresse Stock, 1886). On this see Paul Smith, ‘Paul Adam, Soi et les “Peintres impres - sionnistes”’, Revue de l’art, 82 (décembre 1988), 39-50. LITERATURE AND ART 13 ses tentatives illusoires le heurta aux indifférences, aux haines. Les membres s’affaissent heureusement dans la tiédeur des draps! . . . Le lit: un trône culminant la pi èce tapissée de moqu et t es où s’ent rebatt ent d e grosses fleu rs inn ommab les, éch evelées et j oufflu es, par la nuit des fonds. Là s’ouvrent des paysa ges que re cula l’art des peintres nouveaux. Le fleuve reflèt e les mai sons morn es ju squ’au fond d es ond es c lapota nt es. Il les b erc e vers l’omb re d e s p o n t s, v e r s l a f o r t e c a t h éd r a l e a c c r ou p i e e n t r e s e s b é q u i l l e s d e p i e r r e e t s e s t ou r s d’oraison, qui darde l’œil unique de sa rosace sur la grouillante salute de la rue. La ville. ... Sapeline trône sous l’ivoire du crucifix, dans la soyeuse richesse des courtines, en face ces i ma ges qui ga rd ent la réa li t é du mond e. 5 3 B y s ettin g art co h eren tl y with in a f ictio n al wo rld, Ad am’s texts vivid l y d r a m a t i z e h i s v a l u e s a n d b e l i e f s a n d t h o s e h e s h a r e d w i t h h i s a r t i s t friends. L’Atelier d’un peintre and A Modern Lover do something closely c o m p a r a b l e i n s e v e r a l p l a c e s . A p h r o d i t e w a s a l s o w r i t t e n i n a s i m i l a r s p i r i t , e x p r e s s i n g w h a t P e t e r R e a d c a l l s t h e ‘ s ym b i o s i s ’ t h a t e x i s t e d b etween R od in an d Lo u ÿ s . S uch examp les are imp o rtant, b ecaus e like many of the texts represented in this issue, they demonstrate how ‘the literature of art’ is especially worthy of the name when it is genetically insepara b l e f r o m t h e a r t t h a t i t i s t h e l i t e r a t u r e o f — a n d h e n c e e x e g e t i c a l l y inseparable too . Per hap s then, man y neglected works of this kind h ave a claim to being counted among its central cases — Huneker notwithstanding. UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK 5 3 ‘ Au j o ur’ , pp. 20 7 - 08.