Opening the Door: Reinterpreting Interior Space and Transpositions of Art in La Fille aux yeux d'or via Assia Djebar

Abstract

The relationship between Honoré de Balzac's short novel La Fille aux yeux d'or and painter Eugène Delacroix, to whom the tale is dedicated, has always been enigmatic. In this article, I argue for the importance of reading the connection between Balzac and Delacroix through another text inspired by one of the same visual sources for La Fille aux yeux d'or: Assia Djebar's Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement. Through a discussion of Balzac, Delacroix, Djebar, and Picasso, I demonstrate how Balzac's story questions the concept of transposition d'art and foreshadows debates surrounding the relationship between text and image in nineteenth-century France.

Acknowledgments

Sara Pappas is assistant professor of French at the University of Richmond. She has published on the relationship between literature and the plastic arts in Zola and Baudelaire.

Notes

¹Henry Majewski's 1991 article is one of the few article-length studies I have found (later reproduced in Majewski's larger study, Transposing Art into Texts in French Romantic Literature). Georges Hirschell wrote an extensive study, Balzac und Delacroix, Streiflechter auf den Roman, La Fille aux yeux d'or (Basel, 1946); this study was, to the best of my knowledge, never translated into French or English. Olivier Bonard dedicates a chapter to La Fille aux yeux d'or in La Peinture dans la création balzacienne. Jean-Loup Bourget takes up Bonard's argument on painting and Balzac more generally in “Balzac et le pictural.” Albert Béguin briefly addresses La Fille aux yeux d'or and Delacroix in Balzac visionnaire. This sort of brief discussion seems to have been the trend in full-length Balzac studies or a discussion of the concept of “art” more philosophically and broadly in all of Balzac. See also Mary Scott Wingfield's Art and Artists in Balzac's Comédie humaine (1937) and Pierre Laubriet's L'intelligence de l'art chez Balzac (1961).

²Henry Majewski argues for La Fille aux yeux d'or as a transposition d'art of Delacroix's Sardanapale; however, even as Majewski makes the argument for one particular painting, he also is led by the text to other Delacroix images, namely his depictions of animals. It is difficult to stay with one painting when considering the connection between Balzac and Delacroix even, as I will discuss, when starting off by confining oneself to one visual source. In La Comédie inhumaine, André Wurmser dismisses any concrete connection to Delacroix and sees all three stories in the Histoire des Treize as dedicated to “artists” more generally. For Wurmser, the Histoire des Treize represents Balzac's self-liberation from stories about relationships formed by money alone; the dedication to artists are thus symbolic of Balzac's own artistic license (Wurmser 416–17). Though this is an interesting way to think about the trilogy together, I do not agree with Wurmser. Given the climate of artist/writer connections in this period and the timing of the publication with respect to Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartment, I would argue that Balzac's story relates to Delacroix in a way that is much more concrete than simply the idea of the liberated artist.

³For an excellent recent discussion of Gautier's concept of transposition d'art, see Cenerelli. See also David Kelley's article in Artistic Relations and Madeleine Cottin's edition of Émaux et camées.

⁴Here is a somewhat comprehensive, though not exhaustive, list: David Scott, Pictorialist Poetics: Poetry and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France; Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign; James Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbury; John Hollander, The Gazer's Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art; W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory; Mieke Bal, Reading ‘Rembrandt’: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition; Peter Collier and Robert Lethbridge, eds., Artistic Relations: Literature and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France.

⁵Djebar recounts the famous and well-known story: A French engineer in Algeria, a fan of Delacroix, had in his service a “chaouch” (head of state) who consents to have Delacroix enter his home during Delacroix's trip to Morocco and Algeria.

⁶Djebar takes time to note that Delacroix had in fact meticulously included each woman's name on the original sketches for the painting; she makes a point of unearthing and reproducing those names: “corps crayonnés sortant de l'anonymat de l'exotisme: Bayah, Mouni et Zora ben Soltane, Zora et Kadoudja Tarboridji” (240).

⁷Many scholars find the first chapter, or “prologue” as it is sometimes called, to La Fille aux yeux d'or difficult to reconcile with the two chapters that follow. They seem to belong to different literary genres (the philosophical or physiological preface, followed by a theatrical drame), and many have argued that Balzac does not explicitly connect his description of Paris to the story that follows. See, among others, Marie Josephine Diamond and Eric Bordas. Kadish argues, on the other hand, that the different hybrids in the text actually produce narrative coherence. The hybrid contains “incongruous elements,” but they are allowed to remain incongruous (270–72). I will be arguing that this kind of hybridity, and even lack of consistency from Chapter 1 to Chapters 2 and 3, also plays out in the connection of the story to painting.

⁸William Berg, in the final chapter of his recent Imagery and Ideology: Fiction and Painting in Nineteenth-Century France argues that Djebar is primarily referring to one specific version of Picasso's many Femmes d'Alger, version O, because Djebar cites a work by Pierre Daix on Picasso published two years before her collection (226). Still, Berg affirms that the entire series of Picasso paintings clearly inspired Djebar. I would agree; however, I would add, in stronger language than Berg, that her reading clearly refers to many if not all of the Picasso images despite the possible influence of the Pierre Daix connection. Djebar is particularly interested in how the female figures dance, and this dance-like movement is not nearly as present in version O. Berg's reading is especially useful because he compares the Delacroix paintings not just to Dejbar's Postface but also to the fictional short stories in Djebar's collection, an analysis that an article does not give me the space to explore.

⁹Balzac's use of color in many of his novels has been linked to Dutch painting. Jean-Loup Bourget discusses the connection between the Victorian and realist novel and Dutch seventeenth-century painting (286–87), and Henry Majewski mentions the link in the introduction to his article on La Fille aux yeux d'or (370).

¹⁰Djebar seems to prefer the 1849 Delacroix because it represents a more accurate vision of the “enfermement” of these women, and yet she also admires the Picasso images because she feels the servant is more of an ally.

¹¹Djebar does not condemn the Delacroix canvas in her reading; in fact, she refers to the 1834 painting as a “chef d'oeuvre” and seems to admire what she sees as accuracy or honesty in his paintings. For Djebar, Delacroix represents the restriction and loss of voice/history of Algerian women and exemplifies the difficulty in finding “une voix féminine.”

¹²Many scholars have remarked on how Henri and the marquise are each half male, half female, or argued that each represents one half of the other, or that they are interchangeable, etc. See especially Shoshana Felman (19–44) and Chapter 5 of Nathaniel Wing's Between Genders: Narrating Difference in Early French Modernism. Despite his occasional lack of virility, one could argue that Henri's domination is the only one that lasts: The marquise will eventually end up in a convent, while Henri will remain free to continue roaming the streets of Paris. Nevertheless, what I want to underscore here is that the oscillation between male/female, power/deference relates to the many different versions of Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement and, later in this section, reflects how La Fille aux yeux d'or questions the concept of transposition.

¹³See Wing and Felman.

¹⁴“Although Les Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement is arguably the intertext for the boudoir scenes in the novel, one cannot claim that Balzac is ‘imitating’ the painting. The composition of Balzac's ‘scène-tableau’ clearly differs from that of the picture (architectural details are not as prominent in the painting, and a group of women is present) […]. The color scheme that Balzac proposes—variations of white, red, gold, and black—corresponds more specifically to La Mort de Sardanapale” (375–76). I do not wish in any way to imply that Majewski's reading is simplistic; on the contrary, his study is rich, layered, and persuasive. I only seek to underscore how his analysis supports an understanding of transposition that is based on the finding of stable and recognizable equivalencies: Delacroix red signifies the ambiguity in the story; specific textual details correspond to the scene of violence in the foreground of Sardanapale; a connection between eroticism and death appears in both image and text, etc. I am arguing that what Djebar's reinterpretations of Femmes d'Alger allow us to consider is that Balzac's text and enigmatic dedication are located in between a straightforward transposition and the kind of transposition that would come later in the century, one that creates more distance between image and text.

¹⁵Tracey Sharpley-Whiting has argued for less focus on an “orientalist” reading of La Fille aux yeux d'or and links Paquita's creoleness to biracialism which, in the nineteenth century, would have been “inescapably black” (43–50). Though Sharpley-Whiting's argument is persuasive, and more work could certainly be done on race in La Fille aux yeux d'or, I would argue that race and orientalism are inexorably linked in both Balzac and Delacroix.

¹⁶Though Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement is the most likely source, given the history of the publication of the novel and the exhibition of the painting, I do agree with Majewski and others who argue that Sardanapale contains more obviously transposed elements if one accepts a more literal conception of the transposition d'art.

¹⁷See my “Managing Imitation: Translation and Baudelaire's Art Criticism,” and “All that Glitters: Connecting Baudelaire's Art Criticism to his Poetry.” This also relates to another aesthetic debate in nineteenth-century France: the influence of “les grands maîtres” on modern art. One of the academic traditions in painting was to visually cite past masters; art critics like Baudelaire, Zola, and Huysmans would argue for the importance of an artist's originality at the expense of the visual citation of past art.