The Substance and the Shadow - Softcover

Smith, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0271032057 ISBN 13: 9780271032054

Publisher: Penn State University Press, 2007

Synopsis

In 1878, the author Marius Roux, a noted friend of Emile Zola and Paul Cézanne, published La proie et l’ombre, a little-known roman à clef featuring a thinly disguised Cézanne as the main character, Germain Rambert. The text prominently features several conversations drawn from famous Impressionist discussions on the nature of art. La proie et l’ombre offers a unique insight into the thoughts and lives of the Impressionists. Cézanne scholar Paul Smith has resurrected this all-but-forgotten novel, recognizing its value in expanding our understanding of the Impressionists’ world in general and Cézanne’s in particular.

This translation, titled The Substance and the Shadow, also brings to the foreground the effects of a burgeoning capitalist economy on the artistic practices of the period. With changes in the Salon and the dealer system, art in France was no longer reserved for the privileged few, and artists increasingly found themselves attempting to appeal to the merchant classes. Art had become a commercial endeavor in ways never before imagined, and the story details Rambert’s―and, by extension, Cézanne’s―attempts to cope with the shift.

In a substantial introductory essay, Paul Smith discusses the nature of the roman à clef and its use as a historical document, and provides an examination of the relationship between Roux’s characters and their real-life counterparts.

About this title

About the Author

Paul Smith is Professor of Art History at the University of Warwick England. He is the author of Seurat and the Avant- Garde (1997), Interpreting Cézanne (1996), and Impressionism: Beneath the Surface (1995). He is also the editor of the anthology Seurat: Re-Viewed (forthcoming, Penn State Press).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

This world is full of shadow-chasers, / Most easily deceived. / Should I enumerate these racers, / I should not be believed. / I send them all to Aesop's dog, / Which, crossing water on a log, / Espied the meat he bore, below; / To seize its image, let it go; / Plunged in; to reach the shore was glad, / With neither what he hoped, nor what he'd had. -La Fontaine, The Substance and the Shadow

the commodity reflects . . . the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labor as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. Through this substitution, the products of labor become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time supersensible or social. . . . the commodity-form . . . is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves that assumes here, for them, the phantasmagorical form of a relation between things. This I call the fetishism which attaches itself to . . . commodities. -Marx, Capital

According to its title page, La proie et l'ombre was published in 1878. The novel quickly fell into obscurity, however, sharing the same fate as Roux's other works, and along with them, the author himself. Most of what else is known about the novel survives, paradoxically enough, from its association with more famous names. It appears to have been published in early April, since it was reviewed by Joris-Karl Huysmans in the Brussels-based periodical L'artiste on the 20th of the month (and slightly earlier by an anonymous reviewer in Le rappel). Stéphane Mallarmé also responded to Roux's gift of a copy in a letter of 30 April. The copy Roux sent to the book's dedicatee, Flaubert, also survives, and contains a profuse inscription supplementing the elaborate printed dedication, which indicates that the novel was completed in August 1876. It is also possible that Frédéric Mistral read the book, as one of the few extant sources on Roux are letters he wrote to the poet, which indicate he sent the older man his publications. La proie et l'ombre was also mentioned in a review of the fourth Impressionist exhibition published in the Petit journal in April 1879; but because Roux worked for this journal, it is likely that the author himself, or one of his colleagues, wrote the puff. The only further trace left by the novel are two cryptic remarks Cézanne addressed to Roux in a draft letter composed some time in 1878 or 1879, in which he implores: "I hope you will be able to separate my humble persona of an Impressionist painter from the man, and that you will only want to remember your old friend," adding, "I call on you, not as the author of The Shadow and the Substance, but as the child of Aix-en-Provence, under whose sun I too first saw the light of day." These remarks nevertheless testify to the main interest of the novel, which is that La proie et l'ombre presents an image of Cézanne-in its central character, Germain Rambert-that the painter recognized, but that he was also keen to repudiate. Roux was able to do this because, in addition to being Zola's oldest and intimate friend, his earliest collaborator, and a stalwart of Zola's "jeudis" and "mardis" gatherings, and other reunions involving the novelist, Roux acted as a go-between between Zola and Cézanne in the 1860s, becoming the painter's "companion," until their acrimonious break up around 1871. During their friendship, however, Roux was Cézanne's first (rather grudging) critic, and the sponsor of the artist's first "exhibition," which comprised one painting placed, briefly, in the window of a Marseilles art dealer. Roux's novel is vital, therefore, not just to an understanding of what Cézanne did in the 1860s and early 1870s (the period it treats), but, in virtue of its characterization of these events, to any appreciation of what Cézanne's subsequent practice was intended to repudiate. La proie et l'ombre may also illuminate the factual basis, and sources, of Zola's own novel "about" Cézanne: L'oeuvre, which was first published in feuilleton in 1885-some seven years after Roux's text. And although there is no mention whatsoever of La proie et l'ombre in any of Zola's literary remains, it is inconceivable that he did not know it. An indication of a debt to Roux may perhaps have slipped out nevertheless in Ernest Vizetelly's preface to his translation of L'oeuvre, in which he describes his friend's "Cézanne"-Claude Lantier-as "like the dog in the fable that forsakes the substance for the shadow."

Edition details

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0271032057
• ISBN 13: 9780271032054
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264