KATHERINE ASHLEY

Literary Acrobatics: Edmond de Goncourt’s Les Frères Zemganno

Edmond de Goncourt’s Les Frères Zemganno (1879) deals with the search for aesthetic innova- tion in acrobatic exercises and and takes place in the popular environment of the circus. Due to the semi-autobiographical nature of the text, the Zemgannos’ concerns mirror the author’s own, and expose the tensions between high and low art, and between Naturalism and Decadence, at the fin-de-siècle. Ultimately, the discourse on the circus can be read as a commentary on the evolution of literature.

Although the circus is virtually absent from the present-day mass cultural scene, save perhaps for the Cirque du soleil and strictly seasonal perform- ances, in nineteenth-century there were over twenty venues where one could delight in the popular comic arts. There were the well-known Cirque d’été and Cirque d’hiver (still in existence), but there were also music halls like the Folies-Bergères and the Folies-dramatiques, the Cirque du Prince Impérial and the Cirque Napoléon, the Nouveau-Cirque, the Hippodrome de l’Etoile, the Foire du Trône, and the Théâtre du cirque olympique. At each of these locations, spectators from all walks of life – from washer-women to aristocrats – gathered for displays of acrobatics, clowning, pantomime and equestrian showmanship. Given its prominence on the boulevards of Paris, it is unsurprising that the circus became a recurring theme in nineteenth-century . One of the earliest and most explicit examples of the connection between the two arts came in 1854 when Théodore de Banville, author of the famous poem ‘Saut de tremplin’, as well as Odes funambulesques and the preface to the lesser-known work Mémoires et pantomimes des frères Hanlon Lees (1871), wrote a ‘prologue’ to mark the opening of Les Folies-Nouvelles. Other authors were equally captivated. Baudelaire portrayed the circus and pantomime in both his poetry and his critical writings, most notably in ‘De l’essence du rire’ (1855). Champfleury, often thought to be the somewhat humourless theoretician of Realism, wrote Souvenirs des Funambules in 1859, and also wrote and performed pantomimes. The forefather of Deca- dence, Théophile Gautier, shared the same interests, as did George Sand and 154 Katherine Ashley

Alfred de Musset.1 Fast-forward to the latter part of the century and there are other prominent examples: Catulle Mendès published the two volume La Vie et la mort d’un clown in 1879; Emile Zola wrote of the Hanlon-Lee brothers in Le Naturalisme au théâtre (1881); Félicien Champsaur’s novel Lulu, ro- man clownesque was released in 1901, but had been performed as a panto- mime in 1888; and Joris-Karl Huysmans published sceptique in 1881.2 By all accounts, the lower echelons of the performing arts enthralled nine- teenth-century authors of all persuasions, were they Romantics, Realists, Naturalists or Decadents. But Edmond de Goncourt’s fascination with the circus – fuelled, perhaps, by his passion for the eighteenth-century French painter of , Watteau3 –led to a particularly interesting encounter be- tween the two art forms. His 1879 novel, Les Frères Zemganno (The Zemganno Brothers), transposes the life of the onto the life of two circus performers, Gianni and Nello Zemganno.4 Although the close fraternal relationship that is depicted is of interest, the text is equally intriguing for the way in which the circus functions as an allegory of literary pursuits at the end of the nineteenth century. The story revolves around Gianni and Nello’s quest for aesthetic innova- tion in acrobatic exercises. Their search for a perfect jump dramatises the Goncourts’ search for an aesthetically perfect novel. Once the reader recovers from the shock of imagining the debonair, worldly and proudly hypochon- driac Goncourts as acrobats – a shock exacerbated by J. Wély’s illustrations for one edition of the novel5 – it becomes clear that the choice of artistic transposition is highly significant. The depiction of the circus functions on two levels: firstly, it engages with a Naturalist fixation with documentation of the popular working classes; secondly, it engages with the notion of refined aestheticism being inherent to the mask of true artists. Underneath the docu- menting of external reality lies a notion that, no matter the subject matter, external reality, the visible, hides a hidden artistic dimension, an artistic abso- lute. In this sense, the novel is closely linked to the Goncourts’ opinion of

1 See Champfleury, Gautier, Nodier & Anonymes, Pantomimes, ed. by Isabelle Baugé (Paris: Cicéro, 1995). 2 For more on all of these authors, see Louisa Jones’ incomparable Sad Clowns and Pale Pierrots: Literature and the Popular Comic Arts in Nineteenth-Century France (Lexington: French Forum, 1984), which is a mine of information on the subject. 3 Jean-Antoine Watteau’s paintings frequently portrayed theatre and circus performers, as in Pierrot (Gilles) (c. 1718). 4 Many of the details in the novel are drawn from the Goncourts’ life. On this subject, see Pierre-Jean Dufief’s introduction to the novel in Edmond de Goncourt, Les Frères Zemganno, ed. by Pierre-Jean Dufief (Geneva: Slatkine, 1996), pp. 9-28. All subsequent ref- erences to the novel will refer to this edition and will appear in the text as FZ. Les Frères Zemganno first appeared in English in 1886 (London: J. & R. Maxwell). 5 Edmond de Goncourt, La Faustin. Les Frères Zemganno, Collection illustrée (Paris: Pierre Lafitte & Cie, n.d.).