Manet, James, and Postmodern Narrative

Thanks to cultural studies, interartistic criticism is booming, especially when it comes to modernist fiction and painting, and perhaps most especially when it comes to Henry James studies. More often than not, though, the ever burgeoning interest in the relationship between modernist fiction and painting has been preoccupied with comparative analysis. This is not what Raymond Williams had in mind when he talked about relationships. Insofar as modernism is about pure form, the trouble lies partly in the object of study; which is to say that modernist interartistics has really been a case of appropriation without formal hybridization. The analogical approach to this problem has proven what we already know: that a style of fiction can be like a style of painting, and vice versa. In making this gross oversimplification I do not mean to suggest that all interartistic criticism begs the question, so what? The serious discussion of modernist interartistics goes at least as far back as Joseph Frank’s 1945 essay on “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” True, in this proto-cultural critique Frank did not go so far as to problematize the ideology of modernist appropriation. Philip Rahv and Frank Kermode did, however, and they denounced spatial fiction as a fascist aesthetic (Mitchell 97).

Be that as it may, modernist painters have made any number of raids across the literary borders, and again, this is usually a matter of hostile if subtle appropriation. As Greenberg put it, “Modernist painting asks that a literary theme be translated into strictly optical, two-dimensional terms before becoming the subject of pictorial art—which means its being translated in such a way that it loses its literary character” (17). What Greenberg is describing here and what Frank is talking about in his essay on spatial form in modernist literature is the monological structure of formalism. The description of formalism as a monological or one-voiced aesthetic is perfectly correct. In interartistic terms this means that when literature is put to use in modernist painting it is stripped of its autonomy and serves painterly aspirations. Often as not these aspirations have to do with painting’s struggle against literature for hegemony within what Bourdieu calls the cultural field. The same holds true when the spatial form of visual art is subjected to appropriation by modern literature.

This kind of appropriation obeys the categorical imperative of Kant’s modernist aesthetic and abides as well by Lessing’s proscriptions against mixing temporal and spatial form, and as I suggested, these matters do give rise to serious critical debate. But while such polemics tend to be more sophisticated than the analogical analysis I was complaining about to begin with, all too often the effect is more deleterious. Rarely in these discussions do we hear anything but the possibility of monological formalism in the so-called modernist epoch, and this powerful underwriting of a presumptive aesthetic monolith has pulled the wool for a long time. But if feminists have begun to see that dominant patriarchal modernism was not the only game in town, it is also true that modernist interartistics was not the only kind of interartistics going on in the period in question. In fact there can be discerned in the nineteenth century a dialogical relationship between painting and fiction. This postmodern development includes authors and painters long held critical hostage to modernist history—Manet and James perhaps foremost among them.

In what follows I want to discuss the way Manet contradicts the critical and discursive history by which his painting is still defined. I then want to look at the way Manet’s postmodern aesthetic turns up in James. Is this to say that Manet and James were absolute postmodernists? No. But I will suggest that their interartistic aesthetic comes very close to what Susan Suleiman has in mind when she says that the “appropriation, misappropriation, montage, collage, hybridization, and general mixing-up of visual and verbal texts and discourses, from all periods of the past as well as from the multiple social and linguistic fields of the present is the most characteristic feature of what can be called the ‘postmodern style’” (191). As...