Visions de Paris: Béraud et Zola - confrontations

2007 Winter; 35(2): 424-38. Abstract Writing and painting offer incompatible perspectives. This fact is still widely ignored. Literally or otherwise, they have no acceptable common vocabulary. The present article explores this by comparing a scene by Jean Béraud (1849–1935) with an "identical" situation at the beginning of Nana. The same topography produces very different messages, diegesis being virtually excluded from painting (except when a specific anecdote or myth is referred to). The latter is in fact a space to be completely filled in with detail whilst literary narrative, naming things and defining their dynamic status in time, is inevitably full of holes. Painting is passive and immobile, spatially confined, and, beyond the precision of visual detail, inevitably opaque. The spectator must try to fill in the gaps. This is far from literature's approach: never a direct visual equivalent of the original scene. Different forms of theatrality result: Béraud's socially representative group invites us to all sorts of guessing games, whereas Zola's text is full of precise explanation: values and behaviour are meticulously explored, extending beyond the novel's text to the Rougon-Macquart cycle as a whole. (In French) (PMW)