The chronotope and the generation of meaning in novels and paintings

Criticism, Spring, 1994 by Janice Best

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A similar ambiguity of function and background suggests the duality of the nature of the transaction that we see in the mirror in "Un Bar aux Folies-Bergere"; it is at once possible that the man is only buying drinks and, as the critics of 1882 would have had it, that he is bargaining to buy the woman herself.(29) What is certain is that this painting calls into question, as do many of Manet's paintings, the distinction as well as the distance between what is public and what is private.

The public shown in the mirror of "Un Bar aux Folies-Bergere" is essentially the same as the one Flaubert describes in the scene where Frederic sees Mme Arnoux for the first time, on the boat, at the beginning of his novel. In each case, the artist juxtaposes the face of a woman against a background of the spectacle of modern life in motion. This face, by its immobility, by the inscrutable nature of its gaze, resists classification, refuses to belong to the world that surrounds it (Frederic supposes, for example, that Mme Arnoux is of Andalouse or Creole origin). If the gaze that the young woman in the painting turns towards the viewers and towards the world is a public and anonymous one, as Clark has said (Modern Life, 253), the conversation which we see in the mirror is of an intimate and private nature. In the same fashion, in L'Education sentimentale, Mme Arnoux's face has no identity for Frederic; he must ask himself "Quels etaient son nom, sa demeure, sa vie, son passe?" (What were her name, her house, her life, her past?), but, at the same time, he hopes to "connaitre les meubles de sa chambre, toutes les robes qu'elle avait portees, les gens qu'elle frequentait" (E.S., 37) (to know the furniture of her bedroom, all the dresses she has worn, the people she frequented). The spatial ambiguity, which allows the dissolution of social distinctions, facilitates a confusion between public and private and constantly questions the very nature of the encounters described.

The chronotope of the bordello: a specific sub-genre?

I have focused on key elements of one novel and a few celebrated paintings by Manet, but would like to conclude by suggesting that similar ambiguities can be found in the works of many of the artists and writers whose subject was the description of modern life. The "cabinet de toilette" where the half-dressed Nana receives the visit of the Prince of Wales and the unhappy Comte Muffat retains all its ambiguity in Zola's novels; the cafes concerts, restaurants and theaters so dear to artists such as Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, where one goes as much to seduce or be seduced as for the food or the show, come up time and again in novels by the Goncourts, Zola, Maupassant, and Alexis. Consider two specific scenes: first, that of the consummation of Renee's "incest" in Zola's La Curee, which takes place in a private room--furnished with an extra wide divan and a mirror for readjusting ruffled chignons--of the popular restaurant, the Cafe Riche; second, the scene where the title character of Maupassant's Belami first displays his seductive powers, which are the means of his success, while strolling about the crowded alleyways of les Folies-Bergere. In both of these novels, it is clearly the confusion between public and private created by the transitory nature of the places in which they find themselves that allows the principal characters to commit their acts of seduction. It is in precisely these places, as the Goncourt brothers noted as early as 1860, that the "interieur s'en va" (the interior is going away) and that "la vie retourne a devenir publique" (life returns to becoming public).(30) The confusion between public and private, facilitated by the gas lights and wide boulevards of Haussmann's new Paris, can ultimately render all places of encounter ambiguous. The race tracks, cafe concerts and theaters painted by Degas (or any number of other artists of this same period) are in this sense no different than the bordellos depicted by Toulouse-Lautrec. In all these cases, the return of the private to public life is associated with a moment of transition: a young woman dressing or undressing, a dancer rehearsing an "entrechat" or adjusting her shoe before going on stage, the crowd passing on the boulevard, women who sit in a salon or a cafe waiting for clients, horses thundering past an indifferent crowd. It is through the tension created by the intersection of a certain temporality of transition with a space in which distinctions and functions are ambiguous, that generates both action and meaning. It may thus be possible to define this intersection of time and space as one of the particular chronotopes of the nineteenth century, a determining factor of a specific artistic subgenre.