MA Network Research Articles

Models of Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Several Authors, One Pen (review)

Reviewed by: Models of Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Several Authors, One Pen Hope Christiansen Whidden, Seth , ed. Models of Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Several Authors, One Pen. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. 187. ISBN: 978-0-7546-6643-1 In his useful introduction to this collection of twelve essays, Seth Whidden proposes "a new model for considering literary collaboration" (3), one that examines the nature of the collaborative texts themselves rather than attempting to get into the minds of writers. At issue in these studies are two general categories of collaboration: in præsentia (where co-authors are physically present when the work is created) and in absentia (where one of the co-authors is not). Taken together, the essays elucidate "what, precisely, was at stake in collaboration, that it was so prevalent, with such a variety of approaches, throughout the nineteenth century" (11). Joan DeJean's and Jack Iverson's opening contributions may seem out of place in a book devoted to the nineteenth century (the other 'bookend' for this volume, Daphné de Marneffe's study of 1920s Belgian literary journals, stretches this point further). However, the aim of DeJean's short piece is to show that while the early nineteenth was in many ways "a brave new literary world," it actually continued, rather than broke with, pre-Revolutionary practice in which collaboration was the rule, not [End Page 164] the exception (19). La Rochefoucauld was more editor than single author of Les Maximes, for example, as was Madame de Lafayette in the case of Zayde and La Princesse de Clèves. As for the eighteenth century, Iverson underlines the importance of collaborative endeavors such as the Encyclopédie, whose articles were meant to "interact with one another to yield a powerful cumulative impact" (27). Contacts and exchanges resulting from gatherings of philosophes were invaluable in stimulating intellectual activity; "conviviality and creativity," Iverson argues, "went hand in hand" (32). Of the remaining nine essays—each a worthwhile investment of reading time—those by Pascal Durand, Whidden, Jennifer K. Wolter, Frédéric Canovas, and Pamela A. Genova stand out. Durand affirms that Le Tombeau de Théophile Gautier not only epitomizes collaboration in the nineteenth century, with its eighty poems by almost eighty poets and its wide range of poetic forms, but stands as a fitting tribute to a poet who, as "painter, engraver, serial writer and artist writer, licentious poet and poet cherishing the 'contour pur,'" was "a whole artistic field, all by himself" (71). Whidden casts a wide net, looking first at L'Album zutique, a collection of poems, jokes, rants, and illustrations; then at Charles Cros's poem "Le Fleuve," for which Manet provided etchings; and finally, at Manet's work with Mallarmé on the latter's translation of Poe's "The Raven"—a partnership in which additional layers of collaboration were entangled: Poe's with Mallarmé and Manet, and Baudelaire's hypotexte (his own translation of "The Raven" published twenty years earlier) with Mallarmé's hypertexte. Canovas also explores the connections between visual and literary arts in his study of painter Maurice Denis's illustrations for Verlaine's Sagesse and Gide's Le Voyage d'Urien. He suspects that there is a correlation between the closeness of the Denis-Gide collaboration (in contrast to the extremely limited Denis-Verlaine one) and the superiority of the illustrations for Le Voyage. . . . Denis, who preferred the term "decoration" to "illustration"—which he felt subjugated the image to its textual equivalent (127)—"simply illustrated" Verlaine's text, whereas he "decorated" Gide's (128), taking such liberties as including a great number of female figures, "in full contradiction" to Gide's male-dominated text (134). For Canovas, the Denis-Gide collaboration represents "a milestone in the history of illustrated books: the moment when a visual artist finally decided to question the subordination of his art to literature in order to follow his own aesthetic and artistic goals" (135). Under scrutiny in Genova's contribution is La Revue Wagnérienne, the brainchild of Edouard Dujardin and "a singularly interesting example of literary journalism" thanks to its blend of methodologies and formats and its balance between theoretical and...

Divisions of Manet

Throughout Foucault's work references to Manet surface and resurface, sometimes more or less obscure, but always the context of the dawn of modernity, that point history which the objects and discourses that we are today so familiar with first came into existence. Unfortunately, the book that Foucault had planned, Le noir et la couleur, dealing strictly with Manet never came to fruition, and we are left with Foucault's lecture transcripts from presentations given between 1967 and 1971 Milan, Tokyo, Florence, and finally Tunisia. These lectures, published by Seuil and edited by Maryvonne Saison, were effectively given by Foucault under the heading La Peinture de Manet on May 20, 1971 at the Tahar Haddad Club Tunisia.1 Foucault begins the lecture with a series of apologies for his fatigued state, for his inexpertise on both painting and Manet, and his general lack of preparation saying that he will be speaking in profane on the subject. However, this colloquial tone, at times bordering on insouciance (he mistakes the names of several paintings), that Foucault maintains throughout the conference is stark contrast to the content of that which he attributes to Manet's painting. For Manet's work we witness the first stages of a mutation, a fracturing that would entail a reorganization of the spectacle, the spectator, visibility, and invisibility. By associating Manet with the emergence of a new, semi-modern object, which he calls the tableau-objet, Foucault will use Manet's work to illustrate the advent of a new force painting: the force of objecthood that would alter the order of vision. As we shall see, this transformation the functioning of vision is fact a malfunctioning, a temporary moment of blindness, as the canvas transitions from the site of the represented spectacle to its modern role which the picture plane exists as nonrepresentational object, revealing something that cannot be represented. Traditional Representation versus Modern Objecthood To begin, Foucault charts the history of the relationship between paint and canvas as well as the techniques of traditional representational painting since the Renaissance. Through the use of certain lines, lighting, and color, tactics were developed that work to hide the material components of the canvas, that is, its rectangularity, its flatness, and its underlying support structure. These are well-documented artistic techniques including the use of strong oblique lines a painting to create the illusion of depth, drawing the spectator's gaze away from the edges of the picture plane towards the middle where a spectacle is presented. Additionally, the spectacle is lit so as to complement this fictional space, which is to say a lighting that comes from inside the painting, either from above as most Renaissance art or from the side as is popular later Baroque and Rococo works. This has the effect of illuminating a space that is ulterior to our world as it is lit by an ideal source, and although this ideal lighting may flow out into our space, our light of day never penetrates the picture plane. We can see for example Velazquez's Las Meninas all of these techniques at work. In that painting the strongest, boldest line is without doubt the top of the right-hand wall of the salon-a robust line that moves diagonally, cutting across the vertical and horizontal axes of the two-dimensional canvas. It is primarily on the strength of this line that all the depth of the room is opened up to us, and consequently, by creating this deep space which the spectacle of the Infanta will be situated, the flat surface of the picture plane is necessarily masked. In fact, even placing the back stretcher of a canvas the scene and thus representing the supporting architecture of the canvas the picture plane, Velazquez only does so a way that furthers the creation of an ideal space existing independently of the rectangular two-dimensional support structure. …

Cezanne and the Eternal Feminine (review)

Reviewed by: Cézanne and the Eternal Feminine Charles Harrison Cézanne and the Eternal Feminine. Wayne Andersen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xiv + 249. $80.00 (cloth). As he is concerned constantly to remind his readers, Wayne Andersen has made a number of studies of what might be called the sexual psychopathology of early modernist art, from Manet's work of the 1860s (The Picnic and the Prostitute) to the Demoiselles d'Avignon (Picasso's Brothel). In his address to one of Cézanne's more diverting pictures, now in the collection of the John Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the author's guiding principle is that "imagery as complex as The Eternal Feminine . . . needs considerable background" (xiii). The tendencies of scholars are nowhere more clearly revealed than in their management of the figure-ground relations by means of which their subjects are qualified. A foretaste of Andersen's understanding of background may be gained by a sample of his chapter headings: "Leda and the Swan" (chapter 5), "The Clothed and the Naked" (6), "The Whore of Babylon" (8), "Venus, Venal, Venality" (9), "The Sacrifice of the Rose" (i.e. of virginity) (10), "Hero and Leander" (11), "The Vicissitudes of Love" (13), "Wives in Crisis" (14), and "Why not Put the Eyes at the Crotch?" (15). Having promised an approach to the painting that will be "tentative, roundabout and responsive to every clue" (xiv), the author is as good as his word, at least in so far as the clues that count are iconographical. On the mythological themes evoked by Cézanne's numerous flirtations with baroque and romantic subjects, Andersen's expositions are exhaustive and generally well informed. The problem is that the further we are led through the various sources and variants and representations of the myths in question, the harder it becomes to hold Cézanne's work in view in all its intractable facticity. This is neither an unusual nor an uncommon problem in modern art-historical work. Unless we demand what the now unfashionable Clement Greenberg called "relevance to the quality of the effect," it is hard to know just where limits are to be set to the causal inquiries that sustain interpretation. In the words of the author himself, "Try as one might to speak of Cézanne's art as art, one's mind is overtaken by psychology" (213). In this case, however, the psychology by which one's mind is overtaken is as often the author's as the [End Page 927] artist's. His text is peppered with personalized anecdote, with dolled-up Freudian cliché, and with avuncular generalizations on matters of sexual politics. We are advised at one point that "a fantasy of sexually assaulting a woman or being assaulted by a lusty gaggle of them can be a toss-up in most men's minds, but is best sustained as a fantasy" (160). That there is a tendency alternately to categorize women as virgins and as whores is a point reiterated ad nauseam. The problem of proliferating "background" is aggravated in Andersen's text by a tendency to take similarity for a causal relation. To cite one example among many, an apparent resemblance between a figure to the right of The Eternal Feminine and—suitably canted—the body of the drowned Leander in Vorsterman's copy after Rubens's Hero and Leander sets off a lengthy excursus into the story of Hero and Leander, and into its possible psychoanalytical reinterpretation. This is in turn conscripted into the aggregated "meaning" of Cézanne's picture. Paintings are of course polysemic and complex things and their interpretation is always a matter for open inquiry. In this case, though, as the layers of sexual obsession and repression accumulate, it becomes harder and harder to hold on to the saving sense that The Eternal Feminine is, among other things, a haplessly and perhaps intentionally comic painting. In fact the reader is dissuaded from such irreverence at an early stage in Andersen's book. The central feature of Cézanne's painting is the enthroned nude woman that gives it its title. In the state in which the picture was left...

Parrot’s Eye: A Portrait by Manet and Two by T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot's little-known sonnet On a (1909) describes a painting by Edouard Manet from 1866, Woman with a Parrot. The significance of this connection has not been examined, nor has the further association of Manet's painting with Eliot's Portrait of a Lady, another portrait of a woman with a parrot. These poems examine the peculiar inscrutability that observers of Manet's portrait have long remarked. Eliot's poems consider two possible meanings for the blank look on her face: either she is concealing her thoughts from us, or she is mentally absent. While On a considers both possibilities, Portrait of a Lady pursues the implications of the second interpretation, suggesting that selfhood or subjectivity is not predicated on a private interiority but on parroting the formulae of social interaction. Following Manet, Eliot links flatness--painterly and psychological--with meaningless imitation. All three portraits entertain a conception of subjectivity based on reflection and imitation rather than inwardness and originality. Although Eliot's connection with Manet has been neglected, (1) recent criticism in general has emphasized the nineteenth-century figures that influenced Eliot early in his career rather than the more historically remote ones (such as Donne and Dante) that he publicly avowed. In a recent article Ronald Bush identifies Eliot's ties to decadence as one of the primary areas of interest in Eliot studies, particularly with respect to the poet's sexuality (Ann Ardis, Colleen Lamos, Cassandra Laity). This renewal of attention to Eliot's nineteenth-century context owes much to Carol Christ's work on his use of Victorian genres; of special relevance to this essay, she has linked Eliot's representation of women to the nineteenth-century poetic mode of female portraiture as practiced by Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti, and Swinburne. (Gender 23). Swinburne is the primary presence in Eliot's Advocate poems from 1908 to January 1909, and this is especially true of On a Portrait, one of the last poems Eliot wrote before his momentous encounter with Laforgue, which began when he received a copy of Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Poetry for Christmas in 1908. Eliot's imitation of Swinburne and Tennyson is a stylistic feature of this poem and also very likely the source of some of its thematic anxiety about parrots. Eliot's primary inspiration for his sonnet, however, was Edouard Manet's Woman with a Parrot rather than a work of literature. According to a letter from Eliot's college friend William Tinckom-Fernandez to Harford Powel Jr. (Powel Sr., presumably his father, had been on the Advocate editorial board at the same time as Eliot), he wrote the poem after seeing a reproduction of Manet's painting in a book on French impressionism (Powel 90). (2) It is not at all surprising that Eliot would have been struck by Manet's work, in view of the apprenticeship to Laforgue, and then to Laforgue's master Baudelaire, that he took up almost immediately after he composed this poem. Baudelaire was also Manet's master, in the sense that the poet's treatment of modern urban life gave the painter much of his subject matter (Reff, Manet and Modern Paris 13)--as also happened with Eliot. What is surprising is that Eliot's appreciation of Manet predated the influence of the French poets on his sensibility. In fact, it may have prepared the way for it. Many critics now credit Manet as the first modernist painter, although he composed his major canvases in the 1860s and 70s and did not even regard himself as a member of the impressionists; they called him rather their father. Clement Greenberg influentially claimed that Manet's modernism lay in his rejection of the illusion of depth: Manet's paintings became the first Modernist ones by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the surfaces on which they were painted.... Flatness, two-dimensionality, was the only condition painting shared with no other art, and so Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else. …

Manet: the still-life paintings

The first major book to focus on a crucial aspect of Manet's work. Nearly one fifth of Manet's paintings are still lifes, a genre the artist himself considered 'the touchstone of painting'. He devoted considerable energy to still lifes, producing oils, watercolours, and prints that unite exuberant personal expression with a flawless mastery of light and detail.

Constructing a Sociology for an Icon of Aesthetic Modernity: Olympia Revisited

I address the problem of constructing a sociology of the artwork through analyzing one particular painting—Manet's Olympia. The painting is an acknowledged icon of modernist art and has been variously located in discourses concerning modernity, gender, and sexuality in the modern world. My purpose is to locate this painting and modernist painting generally in the social formation. While the interpretation of a particular work of art plays a central part, here the ground of that interpretation lies in social theory. Modernist art, and Manet's work in particular, is seen as a response to the growing disjunction between “instrumental” and “solidary” social relations—a disjunction fully acknowledged in the development of classical social theory. This changing relationship is reflected in the construction of discourses centered on value and motive. It is argued that Manet's modernism instantiates a spiritual resistance to the corruption of value by motive inherent in modernity and marked by a whole range of sociological discourses— commodification, alienation, rationality, disenchantment, and so forth. I identify a specific cultural configuration at the heart of bourgeois ideology involving gender and social class, and seek to show how Manet's painting subverts and deconstructs this configuration as a discourse of social formation. The semiotic possibilities made available by a modernist “presentationalcode”—the cultivation of flatness, the suppression of modelling and interaction, the use of dense allusive cultural reference, and the adaption of foreign and exotic pictorial techniques, etc.—are all seen as key to the deconstructive work that the painting accomplishes.