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 refer- ence: “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 differ- ent 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 con- temporary critics, modern commentators have too often unhesitatingly identi- fed 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.