ABSTRACT
In what have become the best known of Balzac's artist stories, Sarrasine and Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu, the secrets of art embrace both sculpture and painting, as well as the relationship between them. Both narratives are structured around the delayed revelation of a sexual secret; in Sarrasine the discovery of Zambinella's sexual identity (a castrated young man kept by a jealous Roman cardinal); in Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu, the uncovering of the ultimate male sexual fetish, a perfectly formed female foot, poking through the abstract chaos (an apparent jumble of lines and layers of paint) of Frenhofer's secret canvas. Yet both stories, so buried in critical discourse that it is hard to write about them at all, have become virtual emblems — within and beyond Balzac studies — of the notion that the secrets of art are ultimately empty, contentless secrets. It is especially difficult to dissociate Sarrasine from S/Z, Barthes's notorious commentary whereby a broadly psychoanalytic reading of the castration theme is extended to an influential argument about the undermining in this text of the stable values of representational art: Sarrasine thought he had found in Zambinella the founding masterpiece of female beauty; his statue of a castrato figures, therefore, not only the death of desire, but also the empty centre of his art. Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu, for its part, has long fascinated real painters, most famously Cézanne and Picasso, and generations of commentators have been intrigued by the possibility of transforming Frenhofer's Catherine L escault into a precursor of abstract, post-representational art. However, if Balzac's story and its reception have together forged 'a fable of modern art', the relation of Frenhofer's painting and its subject matter — the uncanny status of the buried, partial or absent woman — still fuels critical interpretation of the text as a whole. 1
