Aesthetic Rivalries: Word and Image in France, 1880–1926 by Linda Goddard (review)

This carefully written and beautifully illustrated book interweaves two stories. The first is of a rivalry between two arts, poetry and painting, each of which would like to see itself as superior to the other, with poetry starting in pole position. In the period under consideration, which runs roughly from Mallarmé and Gauguin to Picasso and Gide, Linda Goddard brings out two peculiar features of the terms in which each art attempted to claim that superiority. One is that Mallarmé and his aesthetics are a constant reference point: both arts use his writings to defend their claims. The other is that practitioners of both arts accept that, to put it crudely, the ambition to represent the phenomenal world constitutes a mark of artistic inferiority, as does rationalizing theory. Artistic superiority, on the other hand, is figured as pure, ideal, symbolist, or abstract. The polemics charted by Goddard never fundamentally question that principle; rather, they seem, initially at least, to consist of repeated efforts by each art to demonstrate that it, and not the other, is the genuinely non-mimetic, pure one. Doubtless, many writers and painters of the time would not have accepted this aesthetic; for them, as for the general public, the representative function remained straightforwardly central to art. Goddard, however, like most modern critics, is interested not in such sociological perspectives, but in attempting to understand the high art tradition in which Mallarmé and Picasso have always been recognized as central figures. The other tale that Goddard has to tell (not heralded by her book’s title) concerns the relationship between this high art tradition and the newspaper. In chapters on Mallarmé, Picasso, and Gide, she takes issue with critics who draw up simple lines of opposition between high art discourse and the newspaper, or who content themselves with describing how the former borrows from the latter. All three figures certainly incorporate into their works elements borrowed from the newspaper (the typographical variations of Un coup de dés; Picasso’s ‘papiers collés’; the ‘faits divers’ of Les Faux-monnayeurs, Les Caves du Vatican, and indeed Mallarmé’s Divagations). But they always frame these borrowings in a way that foregrounds the folly of assuming that the newspaper itself simply describes reality. They turn the page of newsprint into another locus of the problematic relationship between reality on the one hand, and word or image on the other. This reflects back on the artists’ own poetic or painterly practice, which becomes one not simply of claiming a non-mimetic superiority, but of creating the value of the non-mimetic out of the internal contradictions of the mimetic function itself. (The peculiar fictional nature of this value-creating process is often figured by reference to money, and particularly gold.) The writers and painters whom Goddard admires thus go beyond the Neoplatonic idealism of many symbolists, and create an art in which the mimetic is as essential as it is inadequate. A new twist is thereby introduced into the history of aesthetic rivalries, and a new similarity, often unnoticed, between the arts.