Chemin des brumes (Le): Daniel Duval -4 (French Edition)

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Best Juvenile Sharon E. It is in these nightmarish times that the fates of 5 boys and a girl are entwined. Captured from their school by the LRA, the boys wait for rescue only to discover that if they are to survive they must rely on themselves. But friendship, courage, and resilience might not be enough to save them. The view from this bridge, mercifully concealed from mortals of small stature by a parapet as high as a man, is char- Dickens and Nonrepresentation acteristic for the whole district.

Above the bridge are tanneries, bonemills, and gasworks, from which all drains and refuse find their way into the Irk, which receives further the contents of all the neighbouring privies. It may be easily imagined, therefore, what sort of residue the stream deposits. The background is furnished by old barrack-like factory buildings.

There is no attempt to tell us what is manufactured in Coketown, and how. There is no attempt to show us the workers at work, the gestures of their labor at the looms—which we guess to be contained in those redbrick factories, though the narrator never lets on. If, in my argument, realism tends to be intensely visual, concerned with seeing and registering, and therefore has frequent recourse to the descriptive, here one could tax Dickens with a certain refusal to see, an avoidance of the inventories of the real that we normally associate with realism.

This to be sure is to set up a criterion for judgment that Dickens is free to refuse—and does in fact refuse. But it may give us some insight into his repeated procedure in Hard Times, in both its successes and its limitations: Consider here the case of the noble Stephen Blackpool. Again, we have the metamorphic play of the narratorial style, metamorphosing the hands into strange clams or oysters that would better suit the preferences of the factory owners.

Stephen himself is largely his verbal style, which is written out as a kind of Lancashire accent Dickens apparently had on his desk a book on Lancashire dialect while composing the novel. Certainly the written presentation of his manner of speaking makes his voice, in a nearly operatic way, distinctive in its timbre and resonance, and inflects his highly biblical speech with a kind of prophetic portent. Here is the linguistic dramatization of the protest of conscience, of Carlyle and Ruskin and so many others, against the Industrial Revolution and what it has done to the conditions of life of the sometime English yeoman.

It is a moving cry from the dispossessed nation to those that have power. But note also that for Stephen it is a muddle for others to sort out. And though Stephen avers that some workingmen of Coketown could better express the problem than he, when we come to the only other attempt in the novel to articulate the problem of the industrial working class we encounter the voice of the union organizer Slackbridge.

Oh my friends and fellow-countrymen, the slaves of an iron-handed and a grinding despotism! Oh my friends and fellow-sufferers, and fellow-workmen, and fellowmen! The description of Slackbridge on the following page underscores what we have heard in his verbal style. Everything in the conditions of Coketown—as in the Preston strike, which Dickens had visited before writing the novel— cry out for organization of the workers, for unionization as the sole tool to use on Bounderby.

And his working-class hero is instead a pariah and a martyr persecuted and crucified not only by the mill owners but by his fellow hands as well. One senses that this is a brilliantly Dickensian solution to an intractable problem. Dickens is no Flaubert; his solution is less subtle, but very much of his own devising.

The play of narratorial linguistic invention is among other things a way of giving greater tonal unity to the disparate worlds and material of the novel. Consider, for instance, the place of Mrs Sparsit in the Bounderby world: He could not make up his mind how to do that, or what the consequences of the step might be. Whether she would instantly depart, bag and baggage, to Lady Scadgers, or would positively refuse to budge from the premises; whether she would be plaintive or abusive, tearful or tearing; whether she would break her heart, or break the looking-glass; Mr Bounderby could not at all foresee.

She sat down stiffly in a chair, as if she were frozen; and, with a fixed stare at Mr Bounderby, slowly grated her mittens against one another, as if they were frozen, too. Compare not only Bounderby, compare Slackbridge. If there is hope for an England divided into two nations, it lies in the simplicity, honesty, and decency of Stephen Blackpool. If Stephen and Rachel are what the novel offers in opposition to the forces generated by Coketown, there is little ground for an optimistic reading.

Stephen will leave Coketown, never to return alive, and the novel turns to its other plotlines: The novel takes a turn—not unfamiliar in Dickens— into moral melodrama or even allegory. The social issues of Coketown seem to be largely forgotten in the personal drama. Louisa in her near-seduction is I think quite a remarkable creation, a portrait of someone faced with something new welling up in her that she cannot fully understand, nor control, but knows she must recognize.

If Louisa were a character in a French novel, she would of course yield to Harthouse, and discover her broken and reformed heart only at the end of the affair. As it is, she looks less toward Emma Bovary than toward one of D. The return of Stephen, and all he represents, will be by way not of the mill but of the mine—those black pits that scar the green countryside where Sissy and Rachel go walking of a bright Sunday morning. Stephen has fallen victim to the dangerous byproduct of industrialism, to its waste. And in the rescue of what is left of Stephen, Dickens I think brings to bear, in this sinister pockmarked landscape, what he sees as the best in the English working class.

The rescue of Stephen requires ingenuity, strength, courage, character. Then the men build a stretcher, and back the sobered man goes with it. It is evident that the narrator takes pleasure in the recounting of the action here, perhaps because it is handwork, tough and ingenious, not industrial work. The machines it uses are simple and handmade, the qualities it tests and brings to the surface are not rote movements but skilled uses of hand and body.

When all was ready, this man, still taking his last hurried charges from his comrades and the surgeon after the windlass had begun to lower him, disappeared into the pit. The rope went out as before, the signal was made as before, and the windlass stopped. No man removed his hand from it now. Every one waited with his grasp set, and his body bent down to the work, ready to reverse and wind in. At length the signal was given, and all the ring leaned forward. For, now, the rope came in, tightened and strained to its utmost as it appeared, and the men turned heavily, and the windlass complained.

I sense in this passage a contribution to that long history of resistance to industrialism, on the part of middle-class observers, that takes the form of exalting handwork. Stephen raised from the pit—but critically injured—speaks in indictment of the pit as a central site of the crime of industrialism: See how we die and no need, one way an another—in a muddle—every day! Death scenes are usually pretty insufferable in Dickens. The reintroduction of the circus people of course allows Sleary to have the last word on the affair: The brilliant linguistic performance of the narrator in the novel is amusement with a purpose, making a statement about a better approach to education and life in general than those provided by the dominant characters of Coketown.

The narrator on the last page of the novel makes it explicit that the life of imaginative literature is the necessary antidote to the grim statistics of Coketown. In the end, it is not so much that this novel represents Coketown as that it stands as a counteraction against Coketown, and an alternative to it. The novel versus the life of machinery. That is no doubt a worthy mission, and it would be unfair to tax Dickens for not finding the means adequately to represent Coketown and the issues it raises when his prose so often is aimed in the other direction: No one who spends his life professing literature could disagree with that.

But at the same time that we find it just, we may find it inadequate. Hard Times was written to make you uncomfortable; and it will make you uncomfortable and serve you right though it will perhaps interest you more, and certainly leave a deeper scar on you, than any two of its forerunners. I wish Hard Times made us more uncomfortable, or perhaps I mean, more uncomfortable in the ways that would seem to suit better with an effective political response, that would Dickens and Nonrepresentation answer better to the issues the novel raises.

But Shaw is certainly right in detecting an element of discomfort in reactions to Hard Times ever since its publication. The discomfort arises from the sense of its being too un-Dickensian, its lacking the comic amplitude of the other novels. It still seems to me to stand apart in his work, a different kind of project from most of the other novels, a project not wholly mastered or even wholly understood by its author but nonetheless full of interest. I will end without trying to resolve the puzzlements that the novel provokes, in me at least.

The easiest thing, in the context I have set for this study, would simply be to rule it out of the canon of the realist novel—whatever that canon may be—which would be simple enough to do, since it cannot be counted a persuasively full effort to represent industrial England. Gaskell could be said to try harder. Hard Times for These Times: We may feel that is a pity—that the reader at the end should be summoned instead to build Jerusalem among the dark satanic mills.

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Yet the novel does in a more general sense summon the reader. Its very incoherences and failures of representation in its attempts to take on a very big subject make it a pest of a novel, a kind of disruption in smoother understandings of Dickens, and that surely is a good thing. Over and over again he complains to his correspondents about the meanness and tedium of the task he has set for himself. And it may be precisely in this disciplining of his imagination to something he loathes that the arduous perfection of Madame Bovary is forged. There is nothing natural about this novel.

It is absolutely the most literary of novels, Henry James said—which he did not mean entirely as praise. There is indeed something labored about the novel, its characters, plot, milieux are all constructed with effort. Everything, as Flaubert understands it, depends on the detail. She pricks her fingers while sewing and puts them in her mouth to suck them.

We learn of the whiteness of her finger- Flaubert and the Scandal of Realism nails, her pink cheeks, how the tip of her ear emerges from her hair, the sound of her clogs on the scrubbed floor, the little drops of sweat on her bare shoulders. One day when Charles says good-bye to her at the door, she goes to fetch her parasol because of the melting snow. In retrospect, you can say that these glimpses of Emma all suggest her sensuous nature—the extent to which she will live, and die, by her senses.

But as we read them they are details that we have yet to recover for meaning—to recuperate, as the French would say. They are simply there, as precise notations of what has been seen. For instance, Charles in the early days of their marriage: And Emma with Rodolphe: For the narrator as well, looking at Emma tends to fix on such details, rather than giving an image of the whole.

One could multiply the examples. There seems to be a problem of vision or perspective in this intensely visual novel, in that the central object of vision, Emma as a physical presence, never quite seems to cohere into a whole. Windows are always important in realist fiction, as in realist painting. Here, the window is doubled: The moment suggests both the ambitions and the limitations of sight, the kind of knowledge it would like to gain but the blockages it encounters—blockages that then can provoke the compensatory, and error-prone, play of the imagination.

The limitations of vision may point as well to a problem in the desire subtending the gaze. This is classic fetishism, the investment of accessory and ancillary objects—objects metonymically associated with the body—with desire. A key instance occurs when Rodolphe is leading Emma into the clearing in the woods where he will become her lover: The moment of seduction itself calls attention to the materials Flaubert and the Scandal of Realism of the clothes they wear: The drama of the novel seems so often to come to us in bits and pieces of this sort, as if the world could only be known in detail, in what the eye and the touch single out to be known.

Here a moment of high arousal is entirely focused in that corset lace. Fetishization seems to be at work throughout the novel, as one of the principal ways in which things are invested with meaning. This is a fetish of a fetish. It suggests the extent to which details carry the plot and meaning of the novel. In this sense, one could say that the way details are picked out by the characters and by the narrator in Madame Bovary instances its status as realist narrative: Meaning is not to be thought of— it is not created—independently of the objects amid which we live.

Things in Balzac are usually indexical: Things are known primarily through their market value, and by other kinds of sentimental or psychic value. They promote an intelligent decipherment of their meaning, they are clues to the legibility of persons, and of the world. While Emma is frequently described, we never quite see her whole. She and her world never quite cohere. Perhaps we should read this as one sign, among several, that she does not cohere as a person: This is undoubtedly true, and a legitimate, even necessary way to understand the atomization of her person as described.

Yet there seems to be a more general, and more radical, failure of the world to cohere in the novel. It is as if the parts of the world really are what is most significant about it— the rest may simply be metaphysics. What is curious about these reactions is that Flaubert and the Scandal of Realism one sees precisely nothing of what is going on inside the cab as it meanders through Rouen and the surrounding countryside: It is in a naked hand that you find the meaning of the scene. And in this sense, Prosecutor Pinard got it right. Another passage that enraged the prosecutor describes Emma embellished by adultery, and it is worth dwelling on for a moment: Never had Madame Bovary been so beautiful as at this time.

She had that indefinable beauty that comes from joy, enthusiasm, success, and which is only the harmony of temperament with circumstances. Her desirings, her troubles, the experience of pleasure and her illusions, still fresh, had worked upon her as manure, rain, the wind and the sun work to germinate flowers, and she bloomed at last in the fullness of her nature. Her eyelashes seemed formed expressly for long amorous gazes where the pupil sank into depths, while a deep breath opened her delicate nostrils and lifted the corners of her ripe lips, shadowed by a bit of dark down.

It was as if an artist skilled in corruption had disposed on the nape of her neck the coils of her hair: Her voice now took on softer modulations, her figure as well. Something subtle that took hold of you wafted from the very folds of her dress and the curve of her foot. Charles, as in the first days of their marriage, found her delicious and completely irresistible. And as that beauty is described, it is all in details of her face, voice, and body. Emma is not so much a character here, as the Victorian novel understood character, as a kind of biological product, a particularly successful collection of human traits.

As the prosecutor exclaims: When Rodolphe turns to the task of writing a letter of rupture to Emma, he opens the biscuit tin in which he keeps the souvenirs of his mistresses, old letters, miniatures, dried bouquets, a garter, pins, and locks of hair. The box opened gives off an odor of mildew and faded roses. The whole paragraph needs to be read. Emma resembled all mistresses; and the charm of novelty, slipping from her bit by bit like a piece of clothing, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion, which always has the same forms and the same language. Because libertine or venal lips had whispered similar words to him, he had no great belief in the candor of these.

And this situation is then made a kind of law of the ratio of passion to language: On a radical reading of this passage, language fails as an expressive instrument. It is a medium that cannot adequately give an account of human passion and aspiration, one that deforms the music that the soul would sing.

On a more radical reading, however, the problem is not one of expression, and Flaubert, unlike Balzac, cannot be said to subscribe to an expressionist understanding of language. Language may well be a cracked cauldron, but it is all we have. In this sense, Rodolphe is not so much an obtuse reader as simply a ploddingly literal reader, one who cannot imaginatively fill in the gaps of language.

Emma seeks the meaning of words. She used to reflect at times that these ought nonetheless to be the best days of her life, the honeymoon as it was called. In order to taste its sweetness, no doubt one would have had to travel to those countries with melodious names, where the newly-married state has more exquisite languors! It seemed to her that certain places on earth must produce happiness, like a plant native to a particular soil that would wither elsewhere. If only she could rest her elbows on the balcony rail of a Swiss chalet or take refuge with her melancholy in a Highland cottage, with a husband wearing a long-skirted black velvet coat, and soft leather boots, a cocked hat and ruffles at his cuffs!

It is in the imaginings afforded by language that reflection and self-reflection begin. To be aware, to aspire: These imaginative acts of course lead straight to unhappiness as well. The imaginative ones, like Emma, may live more fully than the Charleses, whose cells in the prison house of language are at least as narrow. I am becoming a bit too metaphorical. I want to suggest that if this novel proposes that language is a cracked instrument for the expression of human passion, it also relentlessly intimates that the limitations language places on passion are absolute boundaries since there is no passion outside language: In that sense, Emma, like Flaubert, can only struggle with the language she is born into.

Language is trans-individual, and each person who comes to consciousness in the world must find his or her place in it, discover how to speak it and, in a stage of further self-reflection that Emma at least initiates, how it speaks us. Thinker as he supposes himself to be, and ultimately a reporter and writer, he never gives any sign of linguistic self-doubt.

One of the most celebrated episodes of Madame Bovary is constructed entirely from a game of linguistic banalities—the scene of the agricultural fair, the comices agricoles. As we move into the evocation of the comices, we have a long description of the animals before we come to the people.

Rodolphe has been evoking magnetism and elective affinities: And so on, until we reach: Rodolphe gripped her hand, and he felt it warm and trembling like a captive turtle dove that strives to take wing again. Catherine Leroux is practically wordless. Flaubert in that final novel seems to take pleasure in ruining language, and already in Madame Bovary there are moments where we sense that language is deployed in ways that are self-defeating, that render the world, the actions, the people it names and describes nonsignifying: What is meant by telling us of this overelaborated confection, with its lakes of jam and nutshell boats?

Let me dwell on still another example, Binet at his lathe, at the moment when Emma comes begging for money: He was alone in his attic, in the process of imitating in wood one of those indescribable ivories which are composed of crescents, of spheres carved one within another, the whole thing standing up like an obelisk and not serving any purpose whatever.

He was beginning the last piece, the end was in sight! In the chiaroscuro of his workshop, blond dust flew from his lathe like a shower of sparks from the hooves of a galloping horse; the twin wheels spun, hummed; Binet was smiling, his chin lowered, his nostrils wide open, indeed he seemed lost in one of those complete happinesses that doubtless only come with mediocre occupations, which amuse the mind with facile difficulties, and satisfy it in an achievement beyond which there is no place for dreaming. And here we may irresistibly be reminded of the practice of writing the world, as if to say that representation of the world in language is by its nature useless, an achievement that forecloses dreaming, and perhaps most of all shows up language itself as mediocre.

The prosecutor clearly sensed this: Or sometimes he can merely repeat the quoted phrase, adding exclamation points. Such is the case with what may indeed be the most shocking phrase of the novel: Emma rediscovers in the adventure of adultery recall: Language is ruined, and it has ruined passion with it. Yet we repeatedly are given to understand that as a living, breathing character-construction, Emma is a product of language—of her reading, and her reveries on her reading, and of the sociolects that define her world.

If she is deluded by language it is because language is delusive. If she falls back into platitude, it is because language is in essence platitude. Madame Bovary may allow us to hover in a zone of ambiguity on this question, and to feel a certain ironic superiority to all the characters of the novel. He no longer allows us to feel superior.

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His copyists ruin everything they undertake, from gardening to child rearing. But it is not just their operations that are stupid, it is also the books from which they have copied them. The bailiff and his crew come to inventory the things that have so much defined her: Inventorying her clothes and things is like an autopsy: Death is on the horizon, and without any of the poetry Balzac could find in the deaths of some of his sublime women, such as Coralie and Esther.

Then he recited the Misereatur and the Indulgentiam, dipped his right thumb in the oil and began his unctions: Each body part is the occasion for a lyrical evocation of its sensuous, sensual, and erotic uses. The paragraph is of course also a kind of travesty of the extreme unction, suggesting not absolution for the sins of the flesh but regret for their cessation. When, immediately following, Emma dies, it is to the accompaniment of the obscene ditty of the blind beggar, outside her window.

The blind beggar, a kind of dark version of a Shakespearean fool, a figure of de-signification and nothingness, appears to be her last perception of life. And when he and Rodolphe meet, Charles speaks his last words in the novel, ascribing all blame to fate: The lieu-commun, as Sartre noted, is a place where we can all come together, protected from perception and the risk of insight by the platitude of common ground.

Flaubert keeps leading us back to the lieu-commun, possibly to suggest that language as our common ground—where we meet and exchange our perceptions—is inherently commonplace. Writing was such a slow and painful process for Flaubert because he had to make something new, strange, and beautiful out of a language in essence commonplace. He may be right: Eliot famously said, and the doctrine derives directly from Flaubert. Flaubert and the Scandal of Realism Part of his impersonality—the choice to be a hidden god in his universe, everywhere present but nowhere visible—lies in this respect for the everyday and its habitual things.

Flaubert in his correspondence most often rails against the difficulty and servitude of writing. But there are rare moments where he speaks of its pleasure, which is precisely the pleasure of negative capability, of ceasing to be oneself because one enters into other people, animals, things. Today, for instance, as both man and woman, at the same time lover and mistress, I rode horseback in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, and the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.

That claim is ratified by his investment in the things of the world, in its detailed surface, in that materiality which displaces authorial personality, to give us a world objectified. But that investment in things also means, to Flaubert, an obsession with the names of things: The preoccupation with things and their naming, their linguistic presentation, effectively takes the place of any postulation of interiority—any Romantic soul for Emma. Emma is like the horses and the leaves and the wind: In an ethical language, we may want to say that Emma is superficial, hollow at the core.

And that has been a source of objections to the novel throughout its existence: James wonders if Flaubert might be incapable of addressing the complicated human soul. Probably Flaubert stands guilty as charged: The misunderstanding between James whom I take of course as representative of a class of readers and Flaubert is irreconcilable.

Even James was willing to concede that for what it is, Madame Bovary is perfectly done; and that the beauty of its doing makes it a classic. As in a Bruegel painting, nothing is missing. The more you look at it, the more you find that all the details are in place. I might end by circling back to the title: Adultery is the novelistic master plot for women in the nineteenth century: It becomes important, then, to turn to the visual arts, all the more important in that the term realism—as critical and polemical label—seems to have been applied, in a consistent way, first of all to painting, most tellingly that of Gustave Courbet.

The paintings created an outcry and an uproar, especially the Burial. Its immense size was to contemporaries part of its scandalous quality. It is on a heroic scale usually reserved for the grandeur of history painting—the highest form of painting, that traditionally prized in the academies and the competitions—yet its subject matter is humble, or worse: Most of all, reactions to the Burial stressed its ugliness. The manner of the painting was seen as ugly: The space of the painting seems both crowded and disorganized.

To the extent that there is any focal point to which the eye is led, it appears to be the grave itself, the gaping hole foreground center. The referents of the painting seem clear enough: Yet why this one? Whose burial is it, and why does it warrant commemoration, in the manner of earlier representations of the interment of saints and aristocrats? That question is never answered by the painting. And indeed, as Fried points out, the apparent preoccupation with the specificity of the individuals portrayed, noted by many commentators, seems largely subverted by the painting as a whole, which draws attention rather to the massing of figures, their generic quality as mourners, and their nature as crowd—since they seem to be too many for the space they occupy.

The meanings of the painting, then, are enigmatic. Like its composition, what it intends to say to us appears heterodox and unspecifiable. A contemporary critic, Prosper Haussard, asked what one was to make of this long file of ludicrous masks and deformities copied from life, this village cleric and his priceless acolytes; those two churchwardens with noses as crimson as their robes; this joker with the funny hat and turned-up moustaches who carries the coffin, this brawny grave-digger who poses solemnly on one knee at the graveside; this seriousness and this buffoonery, these tears, these grimaces, this Sunday-best mourning, in black coat, in smock, in beguine cap, all adding up to a funeral from some carnival, ten yards long, an immense ballad in painting, where there is more to laugh at than to make you cry?

One might ask, finally, what might be the place of such a painting? In what literal place could it hang, since it is too large for the private house and clearly unsuitable for a church? It seems to claim a place only in the museum, the space of other burial artifacts. Figuratively, its place in art history is equally problematic: Once again, Flaubert appears the relevant literary counterpart. The Burial has elicited extensive commentary in our own time, as critics try to come to terms with its revolutionary place in nineteenth-century painting: It achieves the same arrest of our attention, in subject and manner—indeed because subject and manner have been made consubstantial in a very new way.

And that surely is part of what Courbet is up to. Reading, and viewing, have now become more uncomfortable. Again, it presents the humble of the earth on a scale considered inappropriate for such subject matter.

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These rustic workers engaged in unskilled and exhausting manual labor are notably unsentimentalized. What we feel most of all are the gestures of their work, the downward swing of the hammer, the strain of lifting the stone-filled basket. And we see these movements through the folds and creases and strains of their ragged clothing, not in the naked musculature of Greek statuary.

The man is old, we almost feel too old for such labor, and the boy with his torn shirt and single suspender no doubt as Courbet himself commented will end up resembling his older partner. As Michael Fried has effectively shown, Courbet holds a major place in the antitheatrical tradition of painting: Not only are the two figures looking away, their faces are completely unknowable to the spectator—another way of refusing sentiment, and directing our attention to the bodily gestures of the painting.

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Again, as with Flaubert one senses a de-dramatization of representation, a refusal to allow the world recorded to take on a more than literal meaning. This literalness of The Stonebreakers is perhaps most striking and significant because of its subject, that is: Earlier, one can in too sweeping a generalization say that most images of work are romanticized and, especially, seen as part of a pastoral convention of happy and picturesque peasants.

This is still true in the work of Millet, who clearly attempts to present a more particularized image of the peasant at work, and to capture the bodily movement and gravity of work, but who nonetheless seems to us to romanticize, sentimentalize, and in the process depersonalize his peasant characters.

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His Sower Le Semeur, fig. Its claim on our attention is quite dif- [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. Yale Visual Resources [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Even so, its view of work may be excessively Ruskinian and comparable to what Dickens appears to value in Hard Times rather than an attempt to come to terms with the reality of work in Manchester.

The conception of work in the mural is suggested by the sonnet written to accompany it, which begins: The painting remains enigmatic today: His woman is fleshy, the folds of her body emphasized, because the Arcadian nude is airbrushed, smoothed, her body elegantly unrelated to muscle and fat. In a distinction applied by some critics contemporaneous with Courbet, his nude is naked more than she is nude in the traditional sense.

Manchester City Art Galleries. Ingres may make good on a claim to revive and modernize for contemporary taste a classicizing tradition of the nude, though one in which the support of the classical reference has become purely conventional, almost camp. The nude, as a number of critics have noted, was increasingly a problem to nineteenth-century painters who wanted to break with the academic tradition and to do something closer to real life.

The human body was surely a central phenomenon of the real, needing representation. Courbet in his Bathers—like Manet ten years later in his Olympia— takes on the nude precisely as a way to denounce that tradition. As a result, it is easier to say what The Bathers is not doing than what it is: At this point, we need an excursus on photography. Thus the coming of photography largely coincides with the coming of realism in the visual and literary arts. Is this to say that photography creates realism, by offering the first true reproduction of the real?

One could I think with equal plausibility say the opposite: At least, the invention of photography almost seems inevitable in the context of realism; and when it is invented, it appears at once as the ally and tool of realism. The camera obscura had been around for centuries: Artists used the camera obscura as an aid to drawing: The nineteenth century saw an accelerating search for a substance that would fix the image projected in the box—so that it would be light itself doing the drawing the meaning of photography or the other early name, heliography.

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