Art in French Fiction since 1900 Edited by Katherine Shingler (review)

The nine articles in this collection, from scholars working in France and the UK, offer a range of critical perspectives in response to ‘a broad remit, examining not just art “in” fiction, but art around, alongside, beyond, in dialogue with fiction, as well as fiction “in” art’ (p. 228). Katherine Shingler’s edited volume necessarily includes analysis of the notion of the rivalry between the respective narrative techniques and representational powers of literature versus painting, as in David Gascoigne’s authoritative contribution on Georges Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi(1978). But, like the infectious playfulness that comes through in the borrowings from painting in Perec’s novel, the approach taken in Art in French Fiction since 1900is open to the creative possibilities of the interplay between visual and textual media, whether the subject is the general influence of portrait photographs by Paul Nadar on the creation and reception of À la recherche du temps perdu(1913–27), as in Kathrin Yacavone’s article; or Dado’s drawings of birds and monsters on the manuscript of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française(2004) in a fascinating archival collaboration with Claude Louis-Combet of 2007, Les Oiseaux d’Irène(studied by David Houston Jones); or three illustrated editions of Apollinaire’s Le Poète assassinéwith artwork by Raoul Dufy, Pierre Alechinsky, and Jim Dine (discussed by art historian Caroline Levitt). Two further issues are explored in the volume: the pros and cons of pursuing the links between art and fiction through critical detective work spotting reallife sources and models; and a reading of political and gender-related issues that fiction about the visual allows texts to open up. Both Levitt, revelling in Apollinaire’s manysided aesthetics, and Gavin Parkinson, writing on the nouveaux romanciersand Paul Delvaux, demonstrate how, instead of roman-à-clefinterpretations, visual illustrations or influences can consist of open-ended, imaginative, subjective ‘overwriting’ (p. 247), linked to a modernist rejection of completion and perfection. Two other excellent essays — by Élodie Lacroix di Méo on Victor Margueritte’s trilogy La Femme en chemin(1922–24), and Nella Arambasin on novels and a film about the seventeenth-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi — propose political and feminist readings of the circumstances facing the artists and decorators in Margueritte’s fiction and the situation of Artemisia as rendered by Catherine Weinzaepflen in her novel Orpiment(2006), which is contrasted with other versions of the ‘scandalous’ artist’s life. The pictorial forms and subjects adopted by Margueritte’s artists draw our attention to the historical importance of this novelist, while the remarkable combination of revisionist biography, bringing Artemisia’s servant fully into the frame, and rebellious anti-hierarchical aesthetics in Orpimenthighlights the subversive force of Artemisia’s case (also studied in The Artemisia Files, ed. by Mieke Bal (Chicago University Press, 2005)). Read alongside her recent incisive investigation into creative traditions and futures in Blaise Cendrars (see French Studies, 67.1 (2013), 47–60), Shingler’s Introduction contextualizes and delineates her edited volume’s position in the expanding field of visual studies.