Manette Salomon

Abstract Chapter 2 outlines new resonances between the Goncourts’ 1867 novel Manette Salomon and the brothers’ etching practice through the multilayered metaphor of the singe-peintre, or monkey-artist. A close analysis of the novel alongside Jules’s 1862 print Le Singe au miroir [The Monkey in the Mirror] underscores the Goncourts’ unusual take on the imagery of monkey and mirror. In both etching and novel, the brothers reimagine the singe-peintre as an ironic means of reckoning with their ambivalent stance on imitation in the arts. The figure of the singe-peintre further intersects with wider concerns about mechanical artmaking in nineteenth-century France. During the etching revival, the trope of the monkey-artist was used to criticize art made by mechanical means; or even more insidiously, artists who mechanically went through the motions of artmaking. Yet an examination of the Goncourts’ Journal entries about etching reveals an alternative perspective, where the brothers embrace the repetitive, mechanical aspects of etching as a means of accessing a creative flow state. Their focus on process over product offers an opportunity to re-evaluate the purpose of artistic and literary labor not only the Goncourts’ work, but also in the larger literary movement of l’art pour l’art [art for art’s sake].