ABSTRACT
The everyday equivalences of lucidity' ready clarity and untroubled intelligibility are antithetical to the exploratory values informing aesthetic modernity in the age of Manet. It was precisely the lack of lucidity in modernist aesthetic practice that mobilized conservative establishment reaction in the mid to late nineteenth century. Manet's art drew charges of unfathomability and illegibility: the reception of Le Djeuner sur l'herbe at the Salon des Refuss in 1863, following its rejection by the jury of the official Salon, was outraged and baffled in equal measure. In the discourse of institutional reception, lucidity' is rallied against the precepts and practices of aesthetic modernity, as the State's case against Flaubert over Madame Bovary (1857) demonstrates. Yet, lucidity', explored in a counter-discursive context, is a key concept-term in the critical reception of literary and visual innovation since the later nineteenth century, though its intermedial scope is largely untested.
