The Uncreated Artwork in Mirbeau's Dans le ciel

Serially published in L'Echo de Paris between September 1892 and May 1893, Octave Mirbeau's unfinished novel Dans le ciel offers the author's clearest reflection on artistic expression as an impossible ideal. The novel shows that beauty untranslated into imagery is located in the creative process itself: in the moment of inspiration or in the suffering of the artist incapable of giving form to his vision.

Referred to in the title, the sky is a topological representation of the artist's brain, blue space seething with inchoate ideas, vaporous cloud-things shredding into evanescent shapes that break apart in the air. The journey traced in Mirbeau's novel maps the broken passage from conception to expression – from an artist's idea to the object embodying it. Between head and hand – between heaven and earth – the transmission of beauty involves disconnection and loss. A panoramic display of fantastic potential unconcretized in images and unbounded by frames, the sky is a painting of the dynamics of change. (rz)