La Pensée sur l’art dans le roman des xxe et xixe siècles by Simona Carretta, Bernard Franco et Judith Sarfati Lanter (review)

This collection of twenty-three essays emerged from a conference held at Paris-Sorbonne in November 2014. The collection is avowedly vast in scope, including in its purview not just the representation of the visual arts within the novel over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but the novel’s reflection on other art forms too (including architecture, music, and writing itself). As such, it broaches some important questions. How has the novel integrated within it a theoretical reflection on different art forms? What is the relationship between the novel that engages with the arts, and other genres such as the essay or critical treatise? How is the relationship between different media conceptualized in these texts (in terms of the notion of ‘sister arts’, or of rivalry)? Individual essays engage with these questions via the analysis of novels spanning the whole of the period in question, from a diverse range of geographical locations. While the focus is squarely on Western European writers, the collection does look beyond this, including an article by Sonia Dosoruth on the Mauritian writer and painter Malcolm de Chazal, and a piece by Romuald Fonkoua, on francophone literature’s engagement with twentieth-century painting, which looks quite broadly at Léopold Sédar Senghor’s art criticism and Aimé Césaire’s poetic ekphrases, as well as Dany Laferrière’s novel Pays sans chapeau. One might also have liked, in a collection of this scope, to see further attention paid to female authors and to gender as a critical factor in the representation of artistic creation. The individual contributions in this collection will be very valuable to readers looking for specialized analysis of particular authors and texts, ranging from Octave Mirbeau to W. G. Sebald, and it is likely that most readers will dip in and out rather than seeking to use the collection to gain a global view of ‘la pensée sur l’art’ in the novel. The broad scope of the volume and the sheer diversity of subjects and critical approaches on offer here mean that such a global view is difficult to obtain, and the volume as a whole perhaps does not manage to provide coherent responses to the questions it sets itself at the outset. Some of the essays will nevertheless be of more general interest: Isabelle Daunais and Simona Carretta both contribute wide-ranging essays which extend the reflections of the editors’ Introduction, while Bernard Franco’s contribution anchors Somerset Maugham’s representation of the artist’s studio in his 1919 novel The Moon and Sixpence in the nineteenth-century art novel tradition, considering the question of the specificity of twentieth- and twentieth-first-century responses to art in fiction. This is an eclectic collection of essays which will surely be of interest to scholars of visual and literary cultures in the French and francophone spheres, and beyond.