Transposing Art into Texts in French Romantic Literature (review)

Henry F. Majewski's brief but informative collection of essays, Transposing Art into Texts in French Romantic Literature, examines the relationship between literature and the visual arts in a carefully chosen assortment of romantic novels and poems. Rather than posit historical, cultural, or aesthetic generalizations, Majewski instead focuses on the specifics of ekphrastic transposition in the works of Théophile Gautier, Victor Hugo, Gérard Nerval, George Sand, and Honoré de Balzac, resulting in a book that is careful and exacting. In his close readings of poems and passages, Majewski analyzes the stylistic and aesthetic influences on romanticism by artists ranging from Albrect Dürer to Eugéne Delacroix, charting the "rediscovery of the possible enrichment of all art forms through mutual borrowings and correspondences" (14). Concentrating "on the function of art in romantic poems and prose texts that deal only with clearly identifiable works," Majewski clearly defines his goal: "I attempt here primarily to illustrate some of the variety and explain the significance of the widespread practice of verbal representation of visual images from the world of art" (19). While this narrow range may leave some readers asking for more—more theory, more history, more aesthetics, and more problematization—Transposing Art into Texts succeeds in its tasks and gives a solid, often illuminating analysis of the important question of intimate relations between the sister arts in nineteenth-century France.

The study begins with an introduction: "Art, Ekphrasis and the Museum," in which Majewski sets up his terms and touches on some recent interdisciplinary studies as they relate to ekphrasis, or "the verbal representation of a visual representation" (14). Chapter 1, "Painting into Text: Théophile Gautier's Artistic Screen," looks at the techniques of painting in Gautier's poetry, identifying the multifold role of art as both a metaphor and a screen, at once embodying form and producing significance in a world "defined by lack and meaninglessness" (23). The chapter provides elegant readings of selections from Emaux et camées (1852), perhaps Gautier's most self-consciously artistic work, as well as an interesting analysis of the series of poems entitled España from the Poésies nouvelles of 1845 and a number of early verses devoted to landscape.

Chapter 2, "Reading Melancholy: French Romantic Interpretations of Dürer's Engravings," examines the function of Dürer's images as intertexts in works by Hugo, Gautier, Nerval, and Jules Michelet. From direct transpositions of Dürer's engravings into poetic images to more abstract evocations of iconography, Majewski highlights the ways in which each author interprets the Renaissance through a romantic filter. In this rich chapter, we find Hugo's grotesques, Nerval's melancholy, and Michelet's historical analyses linked through their readings of Dürer's images that enjoyed great popularity in France during this period. The following chapter, "George Sand's Aesthetic Dream: Artists and Artisans in Les maîtres mosaïstes," is the most narrowly focused of the collection, concentrating on Sand's too often overlooked novel of Venetian mosaicists in the Renaissance. Majewski contends, "An important analogy can be made between the mosaic makers of this novel and Sand's conception of the artist as craftsman" (69) and his interpretation of Sand's own aesthetic through her enunciation of the artisans' production is compelling enough to stake a claim for Les maîtres mosaïstes in the forefront of the Sand canon.

Chapters 4 and 5 are dedicated to Balzac's La fille aux yeux d'or and Le cousin Pons. While the former story is read in relation to Delacroix (to whom Balzac dedicated the text) and "Painting as Intertext," the latter is analyzed in terms of the material realities of art collecting and art as object. Majewski's interpretation of La fille aux yeux d'or takes a pair of Delacroix's most famous orientalist paintings—Les femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement and La mort de Sardanapale...