Balzac and the Model of Painting: Artist Stories in 'La Comédie humaine' (review)

The seemingly awkward title of Diana Knight's original if not entirely successful monograph alludes to Barthes's use of the phrase 'modèle de la peinture' in a digression contained in S/Z. Insofar as Knight invokes its double meaning (not only 'painting as model', but also the artist's sitter), it in fact serves as an accurate pointer to her persuasive thesis that the narratives in which Balzac's fictional artists are embroiled, and in particular the surprisingly complex relationships they enjoy with their models, form part of a dramatization of contemporary sexual politics that is at the very heart of Balzacian realism. This is in welcome contrast to the widespread tendency to see Balzac's depiction of painters and the painterly as a self-contained reflection on contemporary aesthetics and artistic practice. More immediately indicative of her subject is the cover photograph of Daumier's 'Pygmalion', which has the statue bend down to ask the sculptor for a pinch of snuff. Studiously distancing herself from Naomi Schor's gendered reading of realism and from Alexandra Wettlaufer's Pen vs. Paintbrush: Girodet, Balzac and the Myth of Pygmalion in Post-Revolutionary France in particular, Knight nonetheless sees Balzac's artist stories as versions, both straight and parodic, of the Pygmalion myth and, as such, articulating a critical representation of marriage and prostitution. In a series of subtle, densely woven and, it must be said, rather austere close readings she squeezes significance from the tiniest of textual details, but always in the service of her fundamental argument. The illuminating discussions of the stories featuring Joseph Bridau owe much to the decision to discuss them as a cycle. Still more striking, perhaps, are the powerful readings of La Bourse, La Vendetta and La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, which blow to smithereens earlier insistence on them as artistically naïve or defective, or as of interest mainly for certain set descriptions they contain. Some might prefer to Knight's attachment to the integrity of individual characters a perspective that sees their trajectories as subordinate to their function of instigating a more generalized awareness of competing modes of understanding or judgement, but this is not to question the validity of the approach adopted. Where Knight's study is less satisfactory, however, is in its ostensibly important first chapter, where communication of her argument relating to 'pandemic castration' in Sarrasine and Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu seems inhibited by her acute awareness of prior readings of equal sophistication. That said, the chapter incorporates, as part of a parallel reading of S/Z, a valuable demonstration of Barthes's ambivalence towards realism, as well as an inspired use of the voyeuristic memoirs of the policeman Canler. There are, however, throughout this study numerous errors of transcription, some of which suggest a shaky grasp of French grammar or usage. The (valid) reference to the 'quasi-supernatural atmosphere' at the beginning of La Bourse is hardly supported by the phrase 'les étoffes chatouillent', but, then, what Balzac actually wrote was 'les étoffes chatoient'. On the other hand, few readers risk being seriously misled by the references to Diderot's '1861 Salon' and the 'rue Vanneau'.