Writing the Limits of Representation: Balzac, Zola, and Tournier on Art and Photography

Abstract

In Wallace Stevens' An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, a certain Professor Eucalyptus philosophizes that search for reality is as momentous as the search for god.' If this search drives the scientist, the philosopher, or the poet, it is no less the quest of artists for whom the search is bound up with the need to confront the real with forms of their own making, forms that embody hypotheses about the nature of reality and of art. Crucial to the artist's search are both the limits of realistic representation-for as one of Balzac's artists notes: pour notre malheur, il est des effets vrais dans la nature qui ne sont plus probables sur la toile2-and the status of the representation: its referential relationship to an object considered outside the page or frame, what Stevens' poem terms eye's plain version... a thing apart, / The vulgate of experience (I.1-2). This paper will explore the limits of representation as they emerge in three short stories, in order of consideration: Zola's L'Inondation3, Michel Tournier's Les Suaires de Veronique in Le Coq de Bruy~re4, and Balzac's Le Chef d'oeuvre inconnu5. All three stories adopt, at least superficially, the realistic aesthetics for which Balzac and Zola are the traditional models. Zola's story is based on an actual flood of the Garonne River; Balzac describes the events that befall the young Nicolas Poussin in a studio on the Quai des Grands Augustins three centuries before Picasso would take up residence there. Tournier's story takes place in Arles during the yearly Rencontres internationales de la Photographie, which the author most certainly attended, and its first person narrator could, by essentialist reduction, be taken as Tournier himself. This evocation of an actual historical setting serves to authenticate the events of the narrative, and in turn they are a foil for the realism of the painterly or photographic representations that figure in each story. The imbrication of first degree realism (the referential qualities of the narrative) and second degree realism (the discourse in the narrative concerning photographic and pictorial realism) complicate the reader's notions of representation and of referentiality. Each story dramatizes the limits of realist representation, that is,