Identifying a general critical move from a literal to a more metaphoric understanding and presentation of Japonisme, Pamela A. Genova applies a theory of "aesthetic translation" to a broad response to Japanese aesthetics within French culture. She crosses the borders of genre, field, and form to explore the relationship of Japanese visual art to French prose writing of the mid- to late 1800s. Writing Japonisme focuses on the work of Edmond de Goncourt, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Émile Zola, and Stéphane Mallarmé as they witnessed, incorporated, and participated in an unprecedented cultural exchange between France and Japan, as both creators and critics. Genova’s original research opens new perspectives on a fertile and influential period of intercultural dynamics.
Identifying a general critical move from a literal to a more metaphoric understanding and presentation of Japonisme, Pamela A. Genova applies a theory of "aesthetic translation" to a broad response to Japanese aesthetics within French culture. She crosses the borders of genre, field, and form to explore the relationship of Japanese visual art to French prose writing of the mid- to late 1800s. Writing Japonisme focuses on the work of Edmond de Goncourt, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Émile Zola, and Stéphane Mallarmé as they witnessed, incorporated, and participated in an unprecedented cultural exchange between France and Japan, as both creators and critics. Genova’s original research opens new perspectives on a fertile and influential period of intercultural dynamics.
Writing Japonisme: Aesthetic Translation in Nineteenth-Century French Prose
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Writing Japonisme: Aesthetic Translation in Nineteenth-Century French Prose
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Identifying a general critical move from a literal to a more metaphoric understanding and presentation of Japonisme, Pamela A. Genova applies a theory of "aesthetic translation" to a broad response to Japanese aesthetics within French culture. She crosses the borders of genre, field, and form to explore the relationship of Japanese visual art to French prose writing of the mid- to late 1800s. Writing Japonisme focuses on the work of Edmond de Goncourt, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Émile Zola, and Stéphane Mallarmé as they witnessed, incorporated, and participated in an unprecedented cultural exchange between France and Japan, as both creators and critics. Genova’s original research opens new perspectives on a fertile and influential period of intercultural dynamics.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810132191 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/30/2016 |
| Pages: | 344 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Writing Japonisme
Aesthetic Translation in Nineteenth-Century French Prose
By Pamela A. Genova
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2016 Northwestern University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3221-4
CHAPTER 1
Edmond de Goncourt
Portraits of Artists
J'ai acheté l'autre jour à la Porte Chinoise des dessins japonais. ... Je n'ai jamais rien vu de si prodigieux, de si fantaisiste, de si admirable et poétique comme art. Ce sont des tons fins comme des tons de plumage, éclatants comme des émaux; des poses, des toilettes, des visages, des femmes qui ont l'air de venir d'un rêve ... ; un art prodigieux, naturel, multiple comme une flore, fascinant comme un miroir magique.
— Edmond de Goncourt, Journal (8 June 1861)
The esthetes of Europe needed twenty years before they learned that Goncourt's "Japonisme" did not take into account the severe soberness and restraint of Japanese taste in the matter of house-furnishing. Years were needed to undermine Goncourt's influence on the Continent especially and to destroy the pseudo-Japanese fashions which he imposed on his contemporaries.
— William Leonard Schwartz, The Imaginative Interpretation of the Far East in Modern French Literature, 1800–1925 (1927)
"Japonaiserie Forever"
In this chapter, I focus on the aesthetics of Japonisme in the writing of Edmond de Goncourt, first in his 1881 La Maison d'un artiste and then in more detail in his biographies of two celebrated Japanese artists of the ukiyo-e school, the 1891 Outamaro: Le peintre des maisons vertes and the 1896 Hokousaï: L'Art japonais au XVIIIe siècle. These studies, notable in part for Goncourt's original blend of the style of the Naturalist novelist and the subtlety of his imagistic perceptivity, are also valuable in that they represent the first biographies of non-Western artists to appear in France. Further, they not only help to illuminate the integration of Japoniste elements into the novels written by Goncourt and his brother, Jules, but serve as well to ground much future scholarship in art critical studies addressing Japanese prints, for which they remained the primary template for years. Although Goncourt originally hoped to include illustrations in his studies, a series of practical complications made it impossible; but, given his dexterity with inventive stylistic techniques, especially écriture artiste, he succeeded at crafting a sensual imagistic language to portray the artists' work in words. Thus Goncourt adapts such strategic Japanese aesthetic principles as fidelity to nature as a source of beauty, the dynamics of spontaneous, natural gesture, and stimulation of the viewer's emotions through bold yet understated brush strokes. In his writerly translation of Japanese visual aesthetics, he employs an impressionistic vocabulary, nuanced by hues of color and light, to communicate the transitory and vibrant nature of these artists' talent. In fact, many parallels, methodological and thematic, do exist between the literary art of Goncourt and the visual art of the Japanese figures in whose work he is interested; Pierre Sabatier suggests, for example, that one primary element they hold in common is the desire to create a "photographie esthétique," an artwork capable of expressing the fleeting details of a moment of lived experience, including the myriad of colors, forms, and sensations that characterize that moment. Indeed, while Goncourt's studies convey the complex perceptivity of the Naturalist author, as well as his talent as a literary Impressionist, they also significantly expand our understanding of the potential of late nineteenth-century Japoniste writing more generally.
The attitude of Goncourt toward the phenomenon of Japonisme reflects the writer's habitually complicated psychological stance toward practically everything he encountered, especially when he addressed the literary and artistic world in which he found himself immersed. Goncourt was considered one of the most visible art critics of his day, and his stance toward the world embodies is made up of formidable doses of jealousy, pique, and haughtiness. Despite the significant fact that neither of the Goncourt brothers ever made a journey to Japan, it is clear that the passion that Goncourt and Jules felt for the art of that country was strong and selfish, closely tied to the desire to be recognized for what Goncourt viewed as his own unequaled contribution to the development of the movement. Described by Madame Desoye, proprietor of La Porte Chinoise, as "le premier et le plus illustre inventeur de l'art japonais en France," Goncourt strived his entire life to live up to that depiction, and he worked hard to propagate his public image as the unrivaled founder of French Japonisme.
To introduce the 1986 edition of Goncourt's two biographies, collected together as Outamaro et Hokousaï, Hubert Juin writes in his preface about the diffusion of Japonisme in the nineteenth-century West. This dissemination, while it encouraged an interest in Japanese culture among people who had been wholly ignorant of life in the East, also provoked misinterpretation, stereotyping, and contradiction among those who lacked the education and experience to assimilate the seemingly exotic styles and aims of this Far Eastern art. "Pour le Japon," writes Juin, "il fallait des médiateurs;" thus figures such as Goncourt stepped in to offer explanations, finding a niche in the need for the interpretation of the new art. Juin suggests that Goncourt both did and did not "invent" Japan for his compatriots, a provocative claim that underscores the ambivalence of Goncourt's position in the development of French Japonisme. He made a name for himself as spokesman for a culture that obviously had its own independent and long-standing social and artistic history, a culture that, in a very important way, really had no need for the clarifications of outsiders. Yet it is also true that in the foreign context of French culture, the entity known as Japonisme might have remained a closed system for much longer, impenetrable by the general public, had it not been for those like Goncourt who took it upon themselves to popularize this art. Of course, the curiosity of collectors, critics, and gallery owners was also an ambivalent force, for, along with the benefits of the dissemination of information and the innovations of critical analysis came the disadvantages of deformation and the awkward results of the single interpretive perspective, at times motivated by aesthetic, moral, or political ideologies. It is within this framework, created from the experience of a sole man and the parti pris of an exclusive critical view that Goncourt's readings of the art of Utamaro and Hokusai lend themselves as much to a reading of the aesthetics of Goncourt himself as they do to that of the artists whose work is in question in these books.
In addition to the Goncourt brothers' impact on the subsequent development of European Japonisme on a larger scale, the question of the role that they played in the introduction of Japanese art into France has been much discussed by critics and biographers of the Goncourts, in part because of the equivocal nature of Goncourt's own claims of his discovery. The controversy surrounding the question of the actual participation of Goncourt in the introduction of Japanese art in the West is relevant, but not particularly for the sake of setting the historical record straight, since it is clear that a cultural manifestation as multifaceted as Japonisme cannot be traced back to any single individual. What is appealing in the question is rather what it reveals, not only about Goncourt's undeniably quirky character but also about his sophisticated critical methodology, his unique writerly style, and the artistic and ethical modalities of his understanding of both Japanese and French art. Japonisme meant a great deal to Goncourt, both personally and professionally, and his passion for collecting Japanese art and for contributing to the critical discourse of Japonisme played an enormous role in defining his own cultural legacy and in establishing what has been known now for many decades as the epitome of distilled Japoniste sensibility.
In Goncourt's celebrated preface to his 1884 novel Chérie, he stakes his claim to cultural worth very broadly, promoting what he sees as his and Jules' substantial impact on the whole of nineteenth-century French aesthetic theory. He relates that Jules apparently said to him, "Or la recherche du vrai en littérature, la résurrection de l'art du dix-huitième siècle, la victoire du japonisme: ce sont ... les trois grands mouvements littéraires et artistiques de la seconde moitié du dix-neuvième siècle ... et nous les aurons menés, ces trois mouvements ... nous pauvres obscurs." The preface to Chérie, described by Goncourt as "une sorte de testament littéraire," brings a curious light to the question, given that Goncourt introduces through the voice of his brother this infamous claim regarding Japanese art and thus oddly distances himself from the matter, eclipsing his own role behind that of a figure who in 1884 had been dead for almost fifteen years. In the same preface, Goncourt writes that Jules also declared, in a defiant moment, that it is they and no others who should be credited with revolutionizing Western art through their discovery of Japanese art; according to Goncourt, Jules pointed to
cette description d'un salon parisien meublé de japonaiseries, publiée ... dans notre roman d'En 18.., paru en 1851 ... — qu'on me montre les japonisants de ce temps-là. ... — Et nos acquisitions de bronzes et de laques de ces années chez Mallinet et un peu plus tard chez Mme Desoye ... et la découverte en 1860, à la Porte Chinoise, ... et les pages consacrées aux choses du Japon dans Manette Salomon, dans Idées et Sensations ... ne font-ils pas de nous les premiers propagateurs ... de cet art en train, sans qu'on sans [sic] doute, de révolutionner l'optique des peuples occidentaux?
It is not without interest to note the date of discovery reportedly mentioned by Jules in this passage — 1860 — that is, one year earlier than Goncourt had originally given; additionally, it is apparently Jules' opinion that already in 1851, with the publication of En 18.. offered as proof, the Goncourt brothers had made the monumental discovery of Japanese art and then proceeded to enlighten the rest of their colleagues. Within the larger project of exploring the dynamics of Goncourt's Japoniste aesthetics, the cloudy nature of this historical data is worth retaining, as it accentuates the idiosyncratic presence of the author's hand as he worked hard to control his public image, to elude what was often harsh criticism from his contemporaries, and to shape the very nature of French Japonisme.
Writing One's Image: The Extraordinary Goncourt Sensibility
Critics have addressed the complex and hypersensitive nature of Goncourt, often in the context of the critique of his fictional work as a discursive illustration of the prejudices and neuroses of its author. It is true that his personal history and private sense of identity were not without complications, involving a host of inhibitions from which he apparently suffered throughout his life. Goncourt's grandfather was titled at the end of the Ancien Régime, but until then the family had been bourgeois. Thus Goncourt was a man quite aware of his heritage and quite dependent on his inheritance. Unlike many of even the most prominent writers in the French literary circles of the time, Goncourt was never obliged to work to make a living, never forced to sell his writing to stay alive. He traced to his earliest years his great love of collecting art (and his undeniably remarkable talent at it), and he fondly remembered accompanying his mother and his aunt on their Sunday outings to dealers and galleries. Perhaps because of a childhood graced by leisure and refinement, he and his brother developed a deeply held sense of entitlement and were convinced that they were infinitely more discerning than their contemporaries. Quite simply, they felt that they had been born too late; their nostalgia for what they considered the elegant eighteenth century fueled much of the bitterness of their adult lives and formed many of Goncourt's later artistic tastes, as evidenced by his extensive collection of French art of the 1700s.
Early on, in 1853, the brothers were formally accused of offending public morality because in one of their feuilletons in Le Paris they included a somewhat racy poem by the sixteenth-century writer Jacques Tabureau. Although they were acquitted of the charges, this unpleasant experience seems to have planted the seeds of an overriding aversion for their era, specifically, in this case, for what they considered to be the dangerous consequences of frank journalistic writing and the ubiquitous hypocrisy of politics. Known for their distrust of what they rejected as the false ideals of the French Republic, and angered by the transformations in culture that allowed for la canaille to participate in matters of art, the Goncourts scornfully turned away from the iconic image of the Revolution of 1789, seeing in it the unhappy result of the decadence of French ideology. As Sabatier puts it succinctly, "La Déclaration des Droits de l'Homme, le culte de la Raison, la religion de l'Être suprême ne les ont pas seulement fait sourire; ils les ont profondément dégoûtés." In effect, Goncourt's distaste for the working classes was profound. As early as 1857, he writes in his Journal of his experience of meeting some working-class women on the Faubourg du Temple; his repugnance at their living conditions is acute, while his intense elitism truly gives pause:
[C]ela est le peuple et je le hais. Dans sa misère, dans ses mains sales, dans son grabat à punaises, dans sa langue d'argot, dans son orgueil et sa bassesse, dans son travail et sa prostitution; je le hais dans ses vices tout crus, dans sa prostitution toute nue, dans son bouge plein d'amulettes! Tout mon moi se soulève contre ces choses qui ne sont pas de mon ordre et contre ces créatures qui ne sont pas de mon sang.
In light of the condescending attitude Goncourt fostered toward his generation, it is understandable that his two most favorite styles of artistic expression — eighteenth-century French art and a variety of works from Japan — represented forms that he felt strongly needed a capable spokesman in the middle-to-late 1800s, and he obviously considered himself the most qualified ambassador for this art. Indeed, in La Maison d'un artiste, the inventive catalogue raisonné in which Goncourt details his extensive art collection, he reiterates often that the art he loves from the 1700s is underappreciated by the French public (he mentions smugly that it is for this very reason that he has been able able to develop such a large collection, since he has few competitors at auctions and gallery sales). Similarly, the Japanese artworks that made their way into European circles from the 1860s on were considered at first to be so foreign as to be distasteful, and thus they sparked little early interest in the general public. Here, too, Goncourt took advantage of his family wealth to buy up pieces before others realized how popular they were destined to become. In a word, we can assert that with the art of the French eighteenth century, Goncourt stands as a herald of the culture of another time, and with the art of Japan, of another place. In both cases, he positioned himself between the art in question and his contemporaries, with the aim of fashioning an interpretation of this foreign or forgotten artistry, steering spectators toward an appreciation strongly colored by Goncourtian hues. He embodied the exemplary figure of the aesthete as translator, and his firm discursive presence calls to mind questions about issues central to translation theory, such as fidelity to the original and struggles of authority and authorship, as we will see.
Goncourt was a man who suffered criticism poorly, whose assessments of the intelligence and the work of others often bordered on the hyperbolic and petty. To apprehend the vengeful power of Goncourt's spiteful pen, one need only review some of the more lively passages of the Journal in which salient traits, carefully chosen, of Goncourt's renowned contemporaries are showcased, frequently in a mocking and deliberately deformed perspective, as in the case of Victor Hugo's reported sexual prowess or Ernest Renan's supposed ugliness. Given his bitterness toward his fellow man, it is all the more interesting that in 1884 he began what became a remarkably successful literary salon (representing as well the origins of L'Académie Goncourt), which he named the Grenier, held in his house at 53, boulevard de Montmorency in Auteuil, the house in which he and his brother had taken up residence in 1868. Many of the most celebrated writers of the time attended the evenings hosted by the Goncourts, such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Guy de Maupassant, and Émile Zola (whom the Goncourt brothers met in 1868, and who played a strong and often stormy role in their lives). Yet perhaps here, too, Goncourt had initiated a project with the personal goal of instructing his peers in erudite matters in which he viewed himself as an expert surrounded by dilettantes.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Preface xi
Introduction: Japonisme and the Ambivalence of Theory 3
Prelude: Aesthetic Translation: Modalities of Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Correspondence 35
Chapter 1 Edmond de Goncourt: Portraits of Artists 69
Chapter 2 Joris-Karl Huysmans: Prose Painting and the Decadent Novel 107
Chapter 3 Émile Zola: Writing of and Writing with Art 141
Chapter 4 Stéphane Mallarmé: Staging Japonisme 175
Coda: Japonisme: "A Never-Ending Story"? 217
Notes 235
Index 313