AN ORE MALRAUX
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cannot be for us what it was for Rembrandt , as he had no knowledge of the
works of art that were
to
follow his own . This picture carries the so-called
"corporation" label, yet if the characters are substituted and it is replaced
by a "corporation painting" of the mediocre Dutch brand it will age like
the costumes of its characters : it will belong to the past and it will not enter
into metamorphosis. So metamorphosis introduces its own pictures into the
world of painting and abandons the mediocre ones in the ordinary world
which they depict. Far from pushing masterpieces into the past it brings
them out of it, it takes Rembrandt from the limbo where he was ageing and
grants him access
to
the timeless world of art .
The process is less obvious in novels, because they are more hemmed in
by time . The illusion is common to both arts. In painting and sculpture it
served spirituality and idealism while in the novel its reference was
to
realism. First of all in its choice of subjects. What in Balzac do we call sub–
ject? Everything that would necessarily be included in a film-just as the
models are what a mediocre painter would preserve in
The Night- Watch,
so
Balzac's models are precisely what move away from us and fall into the com–
mon past from which the " visionary" escapes. This "visionary" that no
adaptation can express , for in metamorphosis it meets the timeless world of
literature , which does not imitate the everyday world in which the logical–
illusionists of the nineteenth century believed .
For them, a work of art was the execution of a plan which was expected
to
pass its examination (grades : success, glory, promise of survival) before a
jury vaguely called the public and theoretically the critics. Novel or paint–
ing, it was then supposed to have been introduced into the world of its par–
ticular art with the rank that the critics or the academics conferred upon it,
which eradicated illusion , even a logical one . The cultured public, formerly
a caste, became a crowd . Throughout the West the media withdrew from
the necessarily undogmatic critics the authority they exercised. In 1857 they
ranked Feydeau ' s
Fanny
with
Madame Bovary,
and virtually ignored
Les
Fleurs du Mal.
When was
Madame Bovary
no longer compared
to
Fanny
but
with
La
Cousine Belle,
and Baudelaire no longer to Petrus Borel but to
Racine? When was a literary work freed from the everyday world and al–
lowed to enter the specific world where it need not pass any examination,
and join the works' 'which have survived?" Sometimes suddenly: it was Sur–
realism that allowed Lautreamont, neglected in spite of the efforts of Leon
Blou and Remy de Gourmont, to be published in paperback. Sometimes
slowly : Baudelaire 's crowning seems to have had a penetrating effect. A
great novel and a human being appear to have parallel lives , if the novel is
set in time. Man's life goes from conception
to
birth and then to biography;
the book's from a faint outline
to
its publication and then to its
