Translating art into words: the work of Claude Monet in the writings of Gustave Geffroy and Octave Mirbeau

This study identifies and assesses evocative modes of description along with visually or pictorially inspired adaptations of language in the critical and literary writings of Claude Monet’s staunchest allies – Gustave Geffroy (1855-1926) and Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917). Not only did these two authors publish more on Monet than any other critics of their generation, they also maintained an intimate perspective on the artist’s development from the middle of the 1880s to the very end of their lives. As much as Monet’s artistic fortune benefited from their favorable and informed publicity, Mirbeau and Geffroy’s aesthetic, literary, and critical practices mature and diversify based upon their experience of his paintings. An integration of literary tropes will show how the creative and critical projects of these two authors were informed by and intersected with some of Monet’s pictorial methods and aesthetic. At its core, this study considers how these two authors grapple with the issue of relating the discursiveness of verbal language to the presumed near-instantaneity in the appreciation of visual images. It operates as a comparative phenomenological study with Monet’s art serving as its focal point. Mirbeau and Geffroy’s interpretation of Monet’s paintings provides the primary avenue for exploring similarities and differences in the two author’s approaches to translating works of art and other sensory phenomena into words. What descriptive and rhetorical strategies do they develop to close a divide between seeing and saying, between thought and language? How does writing about Monet’s paintings intensify their struggles with the limitations of their expressive means? How do their ways of overcoming perceived inadequacies of prose compare with Monet’s solutions to pictorial challenges? Through close readings of a limited selection of their texts, I aim to demonstrate how both critical and creative writing can give ‘meaning’ to ‘pictures.’ In the process of converting their experience of Monet’s art into prose, both critics effectively remake the painter and his canvases in their own image. We will uncover how Geffroy and Mirbeau’s artwriting stimulates and appeals to a reader’s imagination, along with how their distinctive visualizations and versions of ‘Monet’ and his art shape our own.