Robert Lethbridge AGAINST RECUPERATION: the FICTIONS

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The Fictions of Art in L’Œuvre Robert Lethbridge

AGAINST RECUPERATION: THE FICTIONS OF ART IN L’ŒUVRE

he exact status of Zola’s L’Œuvre has always been problematic. For Pis- Tsarro, it was “un livre romantique,” for Edmond de Goncourt, in a no less double-edged judgment, “une bonne construction du roman vieux jeu.” 1 Other early readers moved uncertainly between professed admiration for its emotional power and reservations about the ideas expressed by “l’écrivain- philosophe” in the footsteps of Diderot and Balzac’s Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu. Its critical reception, when it was frst published, intuitively highlights the generic admixture that a modern scholar like David Baguley has analyzed to such revealing effect. Yet Patrick Brady’s compendiously titled study of 1968 accommodates its plurality in an exclusively recuperative direction that has seldom been properly challenged: “L’Œuvre” d’Émile Zola: roman sur les arts; manifeste, autobiographie, roman à clef.” 2 And, over four decades later, even the most authoritative of summations reverts to such terms of reference: “S’agit-il d’un roman à clefs? C’est la lecture qui s’impose d’emblée,” confrmed by the fact that “aujourd’hui, le débat critique continue, pour l’essentiel, de tourner autour des clés du roman.”3 Part of the reason for this ubiquity of emphasis has been, of course, L’Œuvre’s privileged position within attempts by art historians to cross disciplinary boundaries while, paradoxi- cally (or unsurprisingly), losing from sight its fctional specifcity. Exemplary in this respect is Kermit Champa’s question-begging conclusion that Zola’s novel of 1886 is, as he puts it, “the most unreliable art-historical text of the period” (71). Wayne Anderson’s apparently more judicious aside that the character of Claude Lantier has been “recklessly interpreted by many art historians as a portrait of Cézanne”4 (82) is equally indebted to the extraliterary, the hors

1. Cited by Henri Mitterand in his edition of the novel, in Les Rougon-Macquart 4: 1384–88, from which all intercalated page references in this article are taken. 2. See also, with its explicitly titled “decoding,” Niess; and, more recently, Williams. 3. Pagès and Morgan 280–82. In The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French, L’Œuvre remains “an important roman-à-clefs” (584). 4. See, for example, McPherson’s reference to L’Œuvre as “Zola’s roman à clef about the aborted career of a realist/impressionist painter modelled on Cézanne” (123).

The Romanic Review Volume 102 Numbers 3–4 © The Trustees of Columbia University 450 Robert Lethbridge texte of the real-life painter’s friendship with Zola himself, brought to an end after forty years in the famously ambiguous response Cézanne sent to him on receipt of a copy of L’Œuvre;5 the ensuing personal silence has provided not merely biographers with the justifcation for treating the novel as a roman à clef. The aim of this article, by contrast, is to alert its readers to the properly imaginative processes of its composition. For by exploring from a very different perspective precisely those dimensions of L’Œuvre foregrounded by Brady, we can both view this particular novel with renewed clarity and suggest the wider implications of our rereading of Zola at some distance from habitual approaches to his aesthetic. Emblematic in this regard are the novel’s interpolated descriptions of Claude’s “grand tableau,” some fve meters by three and titled Plein air, the vicissitudes of which play such an important narrative and symbolic role in the text. Doubtless further encouraged, beyond approximate analogies of subject-matter and internal geometry, by the hypothetical objection (voiced by the character of Dubuche) to a depiction of “ce monsieur, tout habillé, là, au milieu de ces femmes nues” (48), which had also scandalized Manet’s contemporary critics, modern commentators have too often unhesitatingly identifed the fctional painting as a transposition of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.6 It is, indeed, “instantly recognizable” as such, according to a respected Manet specialist.7 But to look at the description of Plein air much more closely is to be struck instead by the signifcant differences between Claude’s inventions and Manet’s considerably smaller (208 × 264 cm) picture of 1863:

Dans un trou de forêt, aux murs épais de verdure, tombait une ondée de soleil; seule, à gauche, une allée sombre s’enfonçait, avec une tache de lumière, très loin. Là, sur l’herbe, au milieu des végé- tations de juin, une femme nue était couchée, un bras sous la tête, enfant la gorge; et elle souriait, sans regard, les paupières closes, dans la pluie d’or qui la baignait. Au fond, deux autres petites femmes, une brune, une blonde, également nues, luttaient en riant, détachaient, parmi les verts des feuilles, deux adorables notes de chair. Et, comme au premier plan, le peintre avait eu besoin d’une opposition noire, il s’était bonnement satisfait, en y asseyant un

5. For the most forceful rejection of this orthodoxy, see Mitterand, “Mise au point.” 6. Literary scholars have generally been more circumspect, but only to substitute other possible models. Niess raises, and discounts, the “possibility that it was simply a creation of Zola’s own mind” (104). 7. Brombert 132. For an interesting study of the referential slippage involved in the “recognition” of the fctional painting, see Baldwin. The Fictions of Art in L’ŒUVRE 451

monsieur, vêtu d’un simple veston de velours. Ce monsieur tour- nait le dos, on ne voyait de lui que sa main gauche, sur laquelle il s’appuyait, dans l’herbe. (33)

To juxtapose this initial, and as subsequently developed (47, 92), description with that of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe included in the writer’s 1866 study of Manet is to fnd in common only the latter’s characteristic suppression of semi- tones that informs all Zola’s formalist defections of the painter’s supposedly obscene representations.8 Otherwise, the comparison calculatedly generates an inventory of differentiation. Most obviously, absent from Claude’s picture are the background rowing boat, the discarded clothes, and any indication of a picnic. Even more fundamentally, it has only one male fgure in it and, in contradistinction to the assumed prototype, he is turned away from the viewer rather than staring directly at us. Zola also replaces the fgure of the seated and inscrutable woman gazing directly out of Manet’s painting with that of a naked female, “enfant la gorge” and unequivocally smiling, who lies back with her eyes closed, “sans regard.” Were it not for that last detail, which blanks out the brazen stare so distinctive of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, the arm behind her smiling head makes her more akin to the full-frontal availability of a Cabanel or an Ingres rather than one of Manet’s more troubling nudes. In her almost disembodied and quasi-mythical imprecision (“fottait toujours, ainsi qu’une chair de songe, une Ève désirée naissant de la terre,” 47), she seems to have less in common with the fgure nearest the viewer in Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe than with the latter’s ungrounded bather in the distance. And Zola puts in his own background two women, “une brune, une blonde,” both completely naked and (no less interestingly) wrestling, an invention patently at odds with both the tone and the stillness of the Manet. To try to fnd a way through this enigma, Michael Fried, the distinguished art historian, has speculated that this may be an indirect transposition of Bazille’s wrestling men in his Summer Scene of 1869; he goes on to suggest that the fctional painting is made more “Courbet- like,” or at least an amalgam of Manet and Courbet, by virtue of the elimina- tion of that “facingness” that he detects as the necessary marker of Manet’s achievement in the 1860s (249). Such source-hunting, however, seems to me to ignore the further willful confusion effected by the recomposition of Plein air, later in L’Œuvre, in Fagerolles’s signifcantly titled Un Déjeuner—much admired by the viewing public by virtue of a less obvious, but more insidious,

8. “La foule [. . .] a cru que l’artiste avait mis une intention obscène et tapageuse dans la disposition du sujet, lorsque l’artiste avait simplement cherché à obtenir des oppositions vives et des masses franches” (Écrits sur l’art 158–59). 452 Robert Lethbridge nudity9—of two men and three women under some trees (269–70), which derives from, and inverts, Claude’s earlier and apparent failure. These kinds of transpositional amalgams and recompositions are integral, it can be argued, to the more general strategies of L’Œuvre, which consciously frustrate recuperative moves to specifc artists and their works. Zola himself declared that “j’ai l’horreur du ‘roman-à-clef’, où l’on prend des personnages sur le vif; cela me semble une mauvaise action.”10 But his own responsibility for the fact that L’Œuvre provided such immediate temptations is evident from the publicity-seeking tactics of its launch. As early as 1882, Paul Alexis had been his mouthpiece in asserting that “naturellement, Zola [. . .] se verra forcé de mettre à contribution ses amis, de recueillir leurs traits les plus typiques” (121–22). Contemporary journalists had only to rehearse the prière d’insérer for L’Œuvre composed by the novelist himself:

L’auteur a mis ce drame dans le milieu de sa jeunesse, il s’y est confessé lui-même, il y a raconté quinze ans de sa vie et de la vie de ses contemporains. Ce sont des sortes de Mémoires qui vont du Salon des Refusés de 1863 jusqu’aux expositions de ces dernières années, un tableau de l’art moderne, pris en plein Paris, avec tous les épisodes qu’il comporte. Œuvre d’artiste, mais œuvre de romancier, et qui passionnera.11

But only when working on the text does Zola fulminate against what he calls “l’imbécillité des reporters.”12 Responding to their curiosity and guesswork in June 1885, when he had barely started writing, Zola makes a point of remaining “passablement obscur.”13 By April 1886, with the serial publication

9. “Il retrouvait son Plein air, dans ce Déjeuner [. . .], mais combien adoucie, truquée, gâtée, d’une élégance d’épiderme, arrangée avec une adresse infnie pour les satisfactions basses du public. Fagerolles n’avait pas commis la faute de mettre ses trois femmes nues; seulement, dans leurs toilettes osées de mondaines, il les avait déshabillées, l’une montrant sa gorge sous la dentelle transparente du corsage, l’autre découvrant sa jambe droite jusqu’au genou, en se renversant pour prendre une assiette, la troisième qui ne livrait pas un coin de sa peau, vêtue d’une robe si étroitement ajustée, qu’elle en était troublante d’indécence, avec sa croupe tendue de cavale” (286). 10. In Le Voltaire of 3 May 1886 (cited by Brady 237). 11. Cited by Mitterand (see note 1), L’Œuvre, 1384. 12. In his letter to Alphonse Daudet, dated 26 July 1885; Zola, Correspondance 5: 288. 13. In his letter to the journalist Charles Chincholle, dated 6 June 1885; Zola, Correspondance 5: 270. The Fictions of Art in L’ŒUVRE 453

of L’Œuvre now complete, he refuses to answer any more questions about the possible models for his characters. In addition to being all too aware that, as well as Cézanne, other artists and friends might either recognize themselves or be publicly identifed within his roman à clef, Zola would have remem- bered the legal issues provoked by Pot-Bouille in 188214 and, more recently, Maupassant’s analogous diffculties with the real individuals presumed to lie behind the fctional characters in his Bel-Ami.15 But simply avoiding the risks inherent in the roman à clef remains an ex post facto positioning rather than a determinant of the creative process. At one level, this can be tracked within Zola’s work notes, where character types are defned through his use of the impersonal: “un Gervex,” “l’Alexis,” “le Baille” or “un Baille,” “un très chic Manet,” “un Flaubert,” “un Cézanne dramatisé,” and so on.16 Although such proper names found in the preparatory dossier of L’Œuvre attenuate abstraction, that is not to conclude that Zola’s fctional fgures are mere transpositions. For, more often than not, a sequence of substitutions leaves behind the original: “le Gervex” becomes “le Maupassant”; “une sorte de Valabrègue” becomes “le C[éard].” Thus, even in the case of a single fgure like Bongrand, scholars, aided (or misled) by authorial referencing, have identifed traces of Courbet, Delacroix, Millet, Manet, Daubigny, Hugo, and Zola himself. What is clear is that central to the creative process is an imaginative playing with “documentary” raw material, not ultimately different from Zola’s handling, in his novel-series as a whole, of the historical realities underlying his mimetic project. But what is also revealing, in the case of L’Œuvre, is the way in which the associative process sections and amputates character traits, reconfguring them au second degré. The same is true of the so-called autobiographical dimension of the novel. To be sure, nowhere else in Zola’s work do we fnd as explicit an intention to make of one of his novels “des sortes de Mémoires.” Here again, however, identifcation is scrambled, starting with the virtual (but indeed only partial) anagram of his own name in that of Sandoz, and extending from modifed parental origins to anecdotes from, and memories of, a personal past refracted by the text’s own imperatives. We need to keep in check, within the limits of Zola’s own period, the superimposition of the twentieth-century subtleties

14. See Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart 3: 1625–29, and its ironic echo, that same year, in Alexis’s “si je m’y trouve, pour ma part, et même si je n’y suis point fatté, je m’engage à ne pas lui faire un procès” (122). 15. See Maupassant’s “Réponse aux critiques de Bel-Ami,” in Le Gil Blas of 7 June 1885: “Quelqu’un peut se reconnaître dans un seul de mes personnages ? Non.”; in Romans 1343–46. 16. All these examples, with my italics, are drawn from the novel’s Ébauche, reproduced as an appendix in Brady 429–43. 454 Robert Lethbridge whereby autobiography slides into autofction. This dynamic of self-revelation and intermittent occlusion is not as ludic, it hardly needs saying, as Serge Doubrovsky’s “C’est moi et ce n’est pas moi.”17 But it is not beside the point that Sandoz, more or less the writer’s surrogate in L’Œuvre, poses for the male fgure in Claude’s Plein air with his face turned away from recognition: “On ne voyait de lui que sa main gauche” (33). This hitherto unnoticed detail may have its origin in an earlier conception of the painting, in which there was to be (as Zola put it in his notes) “un batelier [. . .] vu de dos.”18 As a consistent feature of the defnitive version, it is potentially highly instructive. What is certain is that, during the writing of L’Œuvre, Zola progressively reduced its autobiographical dimensions. “Non,” he wrote to a correspondent in July 1885, “le Midi ne trouvera pas place dans mon roman prochain. J’ai dû supprimer cette partie, ou du moins la réduire à quelques pages, pour des raisons de composition” (Correspondance 5: 289). This evocation of “ma jeunesse” had originally been conceived on the basis of a “liste de mes souvenirs” appended to the novel’s Ébauche. The actual writing of the novel, affording both ironic distance from nostalgia and subject to the internal rhythms of composition (revisions, recopying, synthesizing displacements, etc.), effects the dis- persal of a unifed identity: “une éducation de l’œil” (109) is now Christine’s; his militant journalism is delegated to Jory;19 the critical reception of Germinal is transferred to Bongrand (aged forty-fve, exactly like Zola in 1885) in precisely the epic terms consecrated by Jules Lemaître. The best-known example, of course, is the doubling of Claude and Sandoz, even betrayed in the manu- script’s occasionally almost arbitrary interchangeability of their names. But this complementarity cannot be reduced to the kind of simple binary struc- ture underlying Jean Kaempfer’s view of Sandoz as the “bon fls, excellent mari, fdèle et généreux en amitié, grand travailleur, modeste ce nonobstant et n’en tirant aucune gloire, d’humeur équanime,” designed to provide “le caractère compensatoire” of Zola’s self-portrait (77). Instead, the dialectical movement between the two fgures deforms both (“mon portrait modifé”), liberating Sandoz from his initial function as mere authorial spokesman20 and subjecting him to a retrospective irony: “L’écho pratique et résigné de Claude”

17. See Darrieussecq; and Lecarme and Lecarme-Tabone 266–83. 18. Cited by Mitterand, L’Œuvre 1409. 19. On the one hand, “pas moi avec Manet”; on the other, “Je pourrais même en faire une [étude sur Claude] par Sandoz, la mienne.” See Brady 189, 203. 20. The novel’s Ebauche, cited by Brady (432), perfectly refects the vicissitudes of the defnitive text: “Si je me mets en scène, je voudrais ou compléter Claude ou lui être oppose”; “Mais je n’ai pas le couple, Claude et moi. Le mieux ce sera de me prendre comme théoricien, de me laisser à l’arrière-plan, sans donner aucun détail net sur ma production.” The Fictions of Art in L’ŒUVRE 455

(underlined by Zola himself in his work notes); the “reproducteur débile”; uncomfortably close to a pragmatically successful Fagerolles—all too aware of the demands of his audience, as opposed to Claude working “uniquement pour des yeux d’artiste” (127). And one consequence of this is that Sandoz gradually evolves into a protagonist in his own right, increasingly integrated into the thematics of temporality and disintegration (signaled by the three scenes of the unraveling of the “bande”)21 that lead remorselessly to the cem- etery of the novel’s close. Sitting for Claude in his studio, he had remarked: “Elle n’est pas commode, ta pose” (35), and to no avail: “Au premier plan, le monsieur, recommencé trois fois, restait en détresse” (92). For if Zola had positioned himself in relation to his novel as “Moi, fatalement, je suis immobile. Je n’apporte que des idées, mes idées littéraires,” there is a sense in which L’Œuvre’s genetic momentum makes that awkward immobility, for the real writer too, equally impossible to sustain. The implications for the novel’s status as autobiography are self-evident. Instead of providing a stable version of the authorial self, the text is marked by instabilities, imbricated refections, discontinuities, and incomplete analogies. In its superimposed permutations, it offers us the equivalent of Florent’s seminal experience in Le Ventre de Paris, faced with a multiplicity of per- spectives through which partial images emerge only to be effaced. Instead of fxity, the relationship between subject and mirror dissolves in what have been so suggestively called the “eaux mortelles” of the text,22 “cette eau de source immobile” (131) at the Salon and “l’eau dormante d’une mare” (131) of Claude’s studio. L’Œuvre’s self-declared confessional ambitions lose their contours in the fractured surface of its refections. And if it is thereby absolved from narcissistic indulgence,23 it necessarily generates major questions, themselves inscribed in the novel’s textual fabric. These are inseparable from the notion of a manifeste (to pick up Brady’s frst headlined term) or (in Baguley’s defnition) a roman à thèse. For it is far from clear, in spite of the novel’s increasingly tedious theoretical discussions, what that thesis might be. On the one hand, the distortions of impressionism,24 for example, appear to be opposed to the naturalist exactitude predicated by Sandoz. On the other, however, the reader is persuaded that Claude (who ignores that advice) is a troubled genius, himself contrasted with outmoded or commercially driven artists, whose ultimate “failure” is accounted for by his own pathological singularity as well as in his hopeless confrontation with a hostile viewing public. To discern where Zola stands is obscured not only by

21. On the stages of this, see Kaempfer 77–79; and Gantrel. 22. Buuren 252–53. 23. In the sense classically elaborated by Rousset. 24. Critically articulated by Christine (155); see Lethbridge. 456 Robert Lethbridge the composite portrait at several removes from the roman à clef, but also by the heterogeneous range of styles that has Claude move through, even to the extent of superimposing one style on another, every artistic realization from Cézanne to Monet, and from Manet to the symbolists. What is more, Zola’s own creative practice in this novel, as we have seen, has much in common with a déformation valorized by postrealist aesthetics.25 As in the case of authorial self-portrait and intermittently identifable real-life artists, the novel moves, in this respect, too, between revelation and concealment, illumination and opacity. Its opening pages describing a darkened city punctuated by fashes of lightning seem to self-consciously prefgure subsequent dramas of optical uncertainty. It could be argued that these are not limited to the characters sheltering from the storm before making their way up, through the labyrin- thine complexities of courtyard, staircase, and corridors (“un tel dédale, parmi une telle complication d’étages et de détours,” 14–15) to the pictorial space of Claude’s studio. So too, the novel itself seems uneasily lodged between, in Zola’s words, an “œuvre d’artiste” and an “œuvre de romancier,” with its own defnitive title26 referring us indeterminately to the fctional painter’s masterpiece, his work in its entirety, the act of creation itself (exemplifed by every form of artistic expression from music to sculpture), or the book we hold in our hands. Nor should we be too sure that, consistent with the competitive tensions of the period, this rehearses a traditional antithesis between successful writer and failed painter. For when we are referred to Claude’s “série des grandes pages qu’il rêvait” (203, my italics), we are perhaps being directed to return to the painter’s fctions to better assess not (auto)biographical prov- enance27 but Zola’s artistic achievement. At one level, the novel provides a mise-en-scène of the very making of L’Œuvre. For if Zola’s handling of his raw material (whether individual artists or their works) can be described as a recomposition of sectioned traits, Claude’s own ébauches proceed by dismemberment. Even his studio is located “à l’angle de la Femme-sans-Tête” (11). Within it, his sketches are of detached limbs, “d’admirables morceaux, des pieds de fllette, exquis de vérité delicate, un ventre de femme surtout” (44). When Sandoz poses for him, “on ne voyait de lui que sa main gauche” (33). His attempts to draw the sleeping Christine are focused on bodily parts, momentarily captured only to defy integration within Plein air

25. See Shiff: “The expressive device of distortion, déformation [. . .] in its unorthodox deviation [. . .] might actually reveal truths, either of external nature or of the artist’s own nature” (37). 26. On the no less than sixty-fve variants, see Walker. 27. Niess’s chapter titled “Lantier-Zola” (151–69) is primarily concerned with the “evidence in L’Œuvre itself that Lantier is in some ways an autobiographical fgure” (152). The Fictions of Art in L’ŒUVRE 457 as a whole: “Et c’était surtout à la fgure centrale, à la femme couchée que le peintre travaillait: il n’avait plus repris la tête, il s’acharnait sur le corps” (92). Beyond the vicissitudes of its genesis, an indication of L’Œuvre’s contradic- tions is signaled in Claude’s initial resistance to fctionality itself. The novel’s exposition, for instance, is organized as a dialogue between alternative versions of contingency, with Christine’s “story” opposed by the refusal to suspend disbelief on the part of the painter. While the curious fact of her own intended employment in Paris as a “lectrice” (27) may be no more than a fortuitous detail, the metaphorical elaboration of Claude’s response to her narrative is more telling. Her version of the succession of accidents resulting in their meet- ing “lui paraissait une invention ridicule” (12), “une histoire si peu croyable” (20), and is dismissed as “son aventure de vaudeville” (13). Each time he begins to succumb to its credibility, skepticism is restored: “Il avait eu la bêtise de croire des contes à dormir debout” (31); “Il se jugeait très fort, il imaginait un roman contre sa tranquillité” (17). His own imaginative apprenticeship, however, in a “fringale de lecture” (40), gradually erodes his attempts “de raisonner l’histoire qu’elle lui avait contée” (17), ultimately subordinate to his own novelistic fights of fancy: “Et il imagina d’autres histoires: une débutante tombée à Paris avec un amant, qui l’avait lâchée ; ou bien une petite bour- geoise débauchée par une amie [. . .] ; ou encore un drame plus compliqué, des perversions ingénues et extraordinaires, des choses effroyables qu’il ne saurait jamais” (20). If this hypothetical plotting doubtless refects Zola’s own wildly revealing hesitations on ways in which to set his novel in motion, it is not by chance that Claude fnally comes to the realization of truths stranger than fction: “Il s’émerveillait de l’invraisemblance de la vérité, souvent” (26). The feeling that such metadiscursive parentheses deserve our attention is subsequently confrmed. Claude’s inversion of aesthetic categories makes of “des mensonges sans proft, inexplicables, l’art pour l’art!” (32); the creative impo- tence frustrating the development of his Plein air is unblocked at precisely the point at which inventio is liberating, “changeant de modèle chaque semaine, si désespéré de ne pas se satisfaire, que, depuis deux jours, lui qui se fattait de ne pouvoir inventer, il cherchait sans document, en dehors de la nature” (92). That newfound freedom from the anchoring constraints of reality makes his picture more akin to Zola’s original, and somewhat different, fctional painting (provisionally titled Les Baigneuses in his notes), in which there would be “quatre femmes, l’une nageant encore, une autre sortant de l’eau, deux couchées sur l’herbe, l’une toute nue (jeune flle, celle pour qui servira la gorge et la tête de Christine), l’autre plus âgée, en chemise. Les taches des corps sur l’herbe dure. Plein soleil. La jeune brune, la vieille blonde. Il n’avait pas trouvé de corps jeune.”28 This strangely voyeuristic conception, structured in the

28. Cited by Mitterand in his notes for L’Œuvre, 1409. 458 Robert Lethbridge

opposing tonalities that are the most distinctive feature of Plein air but over- laid by contrasting prepubescent nakedness and an older clothed body, can be related, of course, to the erotic drives so prominent in Claude’s imagined life and work. And it is within such psychosexual scenarios that commentators of L’Œuvre have located the most fertile conjunction between its author and the fctional painter. They have also devoted a lot of intelligent critical space to Zola’s reworking of the conventional rivalry between Art and Woman, nowhere more explicitly formulated than in Christine’s appraisal of Claude’s paintings: “Cette peinture, elle ne la comprenait pas, elle la jugeait exécrable, elle se sentait contre elle une haine, la haine instinctive d’une ennemie” (93). What can also be suggested, however, is that in the feminine (consistent with the contemporary teaching principles of the École des Beaux-Arts distinguish- ing imaginative color from “masculine” line) is to be found not merely the classic muse but also the seductions of fction itself. Claude’s liberation from mimesis generates from the prosaic body, as mentioned earlier, “une chair de songe, une Ève désirée naissant de la terre” (47), as plausible in terms of Claude’s obsessions and desires but also marking an incursion into mythico- poetic territory that will receive its fullest expression in his fnal great work. Before returning to the latter, however, it is worth reminding ourselves that Claude’s psychological particularities, too often invoked as the reason for his “failure,” dramatize in its most intense form Zola’s oft-cited defnition of a work of art as “un coin de la nature vu à travers un tempérament.” The inter- text here is the portrayal of Laurent, the fctional painter of Thérèse Raquin, the power of whose achievement is not in doubt:

Sa pensée délirait et montait jusqu’à l’extase du génie; la mala- die en quelque sorte morale, la névrose dont tout son être était secoué, développait en lui un sens artistique d’une lucidité étrange; depuis qu’il avait tué, sa chair s’était comme allégée, son cerveau éperdu lui semblait immense, et, dans ce brusque aggrandissement de sa pensée, il voyait passer des créations exquises, des rêveries de poète. Et c’est ainsi que ses gestes avaient pris une distinction subite, c’est ainsi que ses œuvres étaient belles, rendues tout d’un coup personnelles et vivantes. (Œuvres complètes 1, 629)

The analysis continually strains to break out of its narrative context in order to underline its wider implications. For those “rêveries de poète,” suggesting an imaginative dimension unamenable to naturalist or formalist criteria, are also those of Claude Lantier. Claude’s second “grand tableau” (230), the preparation of which is threaded through the last part of L’Œuvre, after his years in Bennecourt and up until his death, is indirectly derived from Chaîne’s “idée pour le Salon, une fgure The Fictions of Art in L’ŒUVRE 459 debout, une Baigneuse, tâtant l’eau de son pied, dans cette fraîcheur dont le frisson rend si adorable la chair de la femme,” but also in corrective opposition to its “épanouissement du joli sous l’exagération persistante des formes, [. . .] un peu romance, malgré ses cuisses de bouchère” (170). His picture emerges obliquely from the cityscapes that occupy him on his return to the capital, and is of such gigantic proportions, eight meters by fve, that it necessitates his renting a much bigger studio in which to work on it. Its background is constructed from earlier “morceaux” (227) of Seine and sky. “De ce travail héroïque,” we are told, “il sortait une ébauche magistrale, une de ces ébauches où le génie fambe, dans le chaos encore mal débrouillé des tons” (233). It is only a couple of years later, however, that the painting undergoes the radical modifcation that so astonishes the viewer:

[. . .] à la place de la barque conduite par un marinier, une autre barque, très grande, tenant tout le milieu de la composition, et que trois femmes occupaient: une, en costume de bain, ramant; une autre, assise au bord, les jambes dans l’eau, son corsage à demi arraché montrant l’épaule; la troisième, toute droite, toute nue à la proue, d’une nudité si éclatante, qu’elle rayonnait comme un soleil. (235)

Claude’s banal response to Sandoz’s question about what exactly these female fgures are doing (“elles se baignent”) reinforces the link back to the Baigneu- ses for which Zola had substituted Plein air. But the latter’s transgressions also inform Sandoz’s objection that “ce n’est guère vraisemblable, cette femme, nue, au beau milieu de Paris” (236). And that the two great paintings need to be considered in the same critical frame is underlined not only by Chris- tine’s posing for both, but also in the transfer of “la femme couchée de Plein air” (252) “cut-and-pasted” (to use an anachronistic idiom!) onto the second canvas. This, too, has generated modern speculation about a possible pictorial source, but none of it is convincing. For its inventiveness is far more defying, in this respect, than Plein air, as two further descriptions of it track a movement away from realist representation. The version Claude sends to the Salon retains a vestige of his urban panorama:

Les fonds, les quais, la Seine, d’où montait la pointe triomphale de la Cité, demeuraient à l’état d’ébauche, mais d’ébauche magistrale, comme si le peintre avait eu peur de gâter le Paris de son rêve, en le fnissant davantage. A gauche se trouvait aussi un groupe excellent, les débardeurs qui déchargeaient les sacs de plâtre, des morceaux très travaillés ceux-là, d’une belle puissance de facture. Seulement, 460 Robert Lethbridge

la barque des femmes, au milieu, trouait le tableau d’un famboie- ment de chairs qui n’étaient pas à leur place; et la grande fgure nue surtout, peinte dans la fèvre, avec un éclat, un grandissement d’hallucination d’une fausseté étrange et déconcertante, au milieu des réalités voisines. (259)

Once this has been rejected, however, the fantasmatic is given free rein:

[. . .] et la Femme, vue ainsi d’en bas, avec quelques pas de recul, l’emplissait de stupeur. Qui donc venait de peindre cette idole d’une religion inconnue? qui l’avait faite de métaux, de marbres et de gemmes, épanouissant la rose mystique de son sexe, entre les colonnes précieuses des cuisses, sous la voûte sacrée du ventre? Etait-ce lui qui, sans le savoir, était l’ouvrier de ce symbole du désir insatiable, de cette image extra-humaine de la chair, devenue de l’or et du diamant entre ses doigts, dans son vain effort d’en faire de la vie? Et, béant, il avait peur de son œuvre, tremblant de ce brusque saut dans l’au-delà, comprenant bien que la réalité elle-même ne lui était plus possible, au bout de sa longue lutte pour la vaincre et la repétrir plus réelle, de ses mains d’homme. (347)

That Claude then immediately commits suicide, hanging himself in front of this extraordinary painting, described as “son œuvre manquée” (352), is only one of the reasons why readers of the novel tend to extrapolate an authorial condemnation of such a departure from realism. Another is the explanation offered for it, not merely as the symptom of a diseased mind, but also as a refection of an aesthetic at odds with naturalism: “Le tourment d’un symbolisme secret, ce vieux regain de romantisme qui lui faisait incarner dans cette nudité la chair même de Paris, la ville nue et passionnée” (236). Zola’s art criti- cism of the time, starting with the triumphalist semantics of Le Naturalisme au Salon in 1880, seems unequivocal in its rejection of Romantic legacies and contemporary symbolist developments, not least in his confrontation with the work of Gustave Moreau, whose “théories artistiques [. . .] sont diamétrale- ment opposes aux miennes” (Écrits sur l’art 390). But, as Henri Mitterand has written, “Il faut défendre Émile Zola contre lui-même aussi bien que contre ses critiques” (Le Regard et le signe 55). And that, as we now know, means restoring the polemical context of a militant critical discourse that only par- tially corresponds to the writer’s own creative practice. In Zola’s preparatory notes for L’Œuvre, his thinking about Claude’s fnal painting is more nuanced, reconciling (as he had done in the case of Laurent in Thérèse Raquin) distorting subjectivity and artistic integrity, making it clear, in relation to Christine, that “son image peinte, de la femme faite avec elle The Fictions of Art in L’ŒUVRE 461

par Claude, interprétée par lui selon son idéal de peintre, son tempérament, qui n’est plus elle, qui est elle arrangée, et qu’il aime davantage”; Zola goes on: “Cette fgure prend une importance extrême au milieu du tableau, on ne voit qu’elle, le soleil de chair, un symbolisme moderne [. . .]. Les blagues des amis, de Fragerolles [sic].”29 That last notation seems to me crucial, for as Sandoz’s objections about its infractions of the vraisemblable are prefaced by his assertion, “Seulement, j’ai peur que le public ne comprenne pas, cette fois encore” (236), so the provocation of uncomprehending hilarity, in this novel, is always testimony to a philistinism and shortsightedness on the part of the spectator that anticipates the subsequent recognition of a painting’s true originality and power. By the end of L’Œuvre, that is the critical destiny of Plein air: “C’est toi le véritable triomphateur du Salon [. . .], tous maintenant t’imitent, tu les as révolutionnés, depuis ton Plein air, dont ils ont tant ri. . . . Regarde, regarde! en voilà encore un de Plein air, en voilà un autre, et ici, et là-bas, tous, tous !” (296). And its complement, in the shape of what is called Claude’s “symbolisme moderne,” suggests that Zola’s understanding of shift- ing cultural movements is less rigidifed than Sandoz’s. There are numerous ways in which L’Œuvre unintentionally resembles the painter’s fctional œuvre as a whole: in its intimate drama set against a more generalized social and urban context; in its nudes offset by the clothed fgures who stroll across Parisian parks and boulevards; in its indirections and disjunc- tions; in its fragmentary and episodic structuring, with descriptive tableaux interspersed with introspection; in its proliferating sketches dispersed through “chapters” of a fctional biography. Whatever the validity of the analogies, nobody has yet claimed that either Zola’s text or Claude’s career offer an inner coherence. More consciously, Claude’s painting of his own dead child (“un chef-d’œuvre de clarté et de puissance,” 267) folds into a single moment of ekphrasis the text and the image of the tragic life invented by the novelist. And in the development of his two “grands tableaux,” and in the thematic continu- ities between them, we fnd encoded what is distinct about the novel itself. The “Ève désiréé” of Plein air is also the Vénus of the fnal painting (“l’étonnement de tous, à voir cette Vénus naître de l’écume de la Seine, triomphale, parmi les omnibus des quais,” 236). The struggle between the “real” Christine and her painted image (possibly prefgured in the two wrestling women of Plein air) coincides with the terminal phase of a personal relationship but is afforded its more far-reaching implications by its patently symbolic force. The fairy tale of the novel’s opening (the “conte bleu,” 25) leading to a marriage ends with the “bride stripped bare,” dehumanized by Claude’s tormented focus on “le ventre,” “la rose mystique de son sexe” (347), and the anatomy of desire

29. Cited by Mitterand, L’Œuvre, 1461; my italics. 462 Robert Lethbridge itself. The allegorical dimensions of the picture of a modern Venus cannot but remind us of a novel like Nana, an earlier “poème des désirs du mâle,” and Flaubert’s brilliant response to its prosaic and symbolic modalities. “Nana tourne au mythe, sans cesser d’être réelle.”30 So too, Claude’s sum- ming up of his work as “ce brusque saut dans l’au-delà” (347) inevitably refers us back to Germinal, published as Zola started on L’Œuvre in 1885, and Zola’s revised defnition of his own creative practice as “le saut dans les étoiles sur le tremplin de l’observation exacte. La vérité monte d’un coup d’aile jusqu’au symbole.”31 Only a month later, in the preparation and writing of a “roman sur les arts” and “tableau de l’art moderne” ultimately subordinate to his “œuvre de romancier,” Zola, like the fctional Claude, is all too aware that “la réalité elle-même ne lui était plus possible” (347).

University of Cambridge

Works Cited Alexis, Paul. Emile Zola, notes d’un ami. Paris: Maisonneuve and Larose, 2001. Anderson, Wayne. Cézanne and the Eternal Feminine. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Baguley, David. “L’Œuvre de Zola: Künstlerroman à these.” Emile Zola and the Arts. Ed. Jean-Max Guieu and Alison Hilton. Washington: George- town UP, 1988. 185–98. Baldwin, Thomas. “Proust and Zola: Name That Picture.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 46 (2010): 29–42. Brady, Patrick. “L’Œuvre” d’Émile Zola: roman sur les arts; manifeste, autobiographie, roman à clef. Geneva: Droz, 1968. Brombert, Beth. Edouard Manet: Rebel in a Frock Coat. New York: Little, Brown & Co, 1996. Buuren, Martin van. Les Rougon-Macquart d’Emile Zola. De la métaphore au mythe. Paris: Corti, 1986. Champa, Kermit. Masterpiece Studies: Manet, Zola, Van Gogh and Monet. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1994. Darrieussecq, Marie. “L’Autofiction, un genre pas sérieux.” Poétique 107 (1996): 369–80.

30. From Flaubert’s well-known letter to Zola of 15 February 1880, in which (equally signifcantly) he invokes the greatest of painters: “La mort de Nana est Michelangelesque.” Cited by Colette Becker in her edition of Nana, xxiv. 31. In his letter to Henri Céard of 22 March 1885; Correspondance 5: 248–50. The metaphor becomes increasingly common in responses to Zola’s work from Nana onward, Huysmans describing the latter as “un sacré coup d’aile” (cited by Minogue). The Fictions of Art in L’ŒUVRE 463

France, Peter. The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Fried, Michael. Manet’s Modernism; or, the Face of Painting in the 1860s. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1996. Gantrel, Martine. “Zola et ses doubles: les instances d’auto-représentation dans Pot-Bouille et L’Œuvre.” Les Cahiers naturalistes 75 (2001): 87–98. Kaempfer, Jean. Emile Zola. D’un naturalisme pervers. Paris: Corti, 1989. Lecarme, Jacques, and Eliane Lecarme-Tabone. L’Autobiographie. Paris: Ar- mand Colin, 1997. Lethbridge, Robert. “ ‘Le Delacroix de la musique’: Zola’s Critical Confla- tions.” Le Champ littéraire, 1860–1900. Ed. Keith Cameron and James Kearns. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. 81–90. Maupassant, Guy de. Romans. Ed. Louis Forestier. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard- Pléiade, 1987. McPherson, Heather. The Modern Portrait in Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Minogue, Valerie. “Nana: The World, the Flesh and the Devil.” The Cambridge Companion to Emile Zola. Ed. Brian Nelson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 121–36. Mitterand, Henri. “Mise au point: Zola et Cézanne.” Zola, tel qu’en lui-même. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2009. 171–204. ———. Le Regard et le signe. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1987. Niess, Robert J. Zola, Cézanne, and Manet. A Study of L’Œuvre. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1968. Pagès, Alain, and Owen Morgan. Guide Emile Zola. Paris: Ellipses, 2002. Rousset, Jean. Narcisse romancier. Paris: Corti, 1973. Shiff, Richard. Cézanne and the End of Impressionism. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1984. Walker, Philip. “An Attempt by Zola to Define Artistic Creation: The List of Possible Titles for L’Œuvre.” Emile Zola and the Arts. Ed. Jean-Max Guieu and Alison Hilton. Washington: Georgetown UP, 1988. 123–34. Williams, Adelia. “Cézanne, Manet and the Genesis of Zola’s L’Œuvre.” Nine- teenth Century Studies 6 (1992): 37–50. Zola, Emile. Correspondance. Ed. Bard Bakker. 10 vols. Montréal: Presses universitaires de Montréal, 1978–95. ———. Écrits sur l’art. Ed. Jean-Pierre Leduc-Adine. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. ———. Œuvres complètes. Ed. Henri Mitterand. 15 vols. Paris: Le Cercle du livre précieux, 1966–70. ———. Les Rougon-Macquart. Ed. Henri Mitterand. 5 vols. Paris: Gallimard- Pléiade, 1960–67. ———. Nana. Ed. Colette Becker. Paris: Garnier, 1994.