Dans le ciel

Dans le ciel is a novel written by the French journalist, novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau. First published in serialized installments in L’Écho de Paris between September 1892 and May 1893, Dans le ciel, assembled and edited by Pierre Michel and Jean-François Nivet, first appeared its present form in 1989.

Plot summary

Inspired by the art of the Impressionists – using Claude Monet and, mainly, Vincent Van Gogh as models for its central characters –, Dans le ciel conveys the author’s growing conviction that the only worthwhile art communicated its striving for the incommunicable and that the finished work could express no more than the frustration of its goals.

Vincent Van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889 (Museum of Modern Art, New York)

A series of interlocking narratives, the novel begins by relating the creative failures of the self-styled novelist Georges, who produces nothing but an unfinished autobiography, then chronicles the poignant struggles of the painter Lucien, whose inability to complete his masterpiece culminates with his suicide when he severs his own hand. It is with the discovery of the terrible fate of the self-mutilating artist that Mirbeau’s truncated narrative is itself left in suspension.

Commentary

In the novel’s disjointed, fragmentary structure, Mirbeau expresses his rejection of the artificial unity of conventional novelistic form. As referred to in the title, it is in the sky that the artist locates the uncapturable ideal and on the terrestrial plane that the story of his creative tragedy plays out. Octave Mirbeau’s text focuses on the unbridgeable distance between the inspiration orienting the artist upward and the heavy, gravity-bound smallness of his limited ability.

Since the artist can never express with the “clumsy, faithless tools of his head and hands” (Michel and Nivet), the perfect beauty he intuits, his art becomes an experience of suffering. The existential struggle of the artist, whose labor is foreordained to come to nothing, suggests that the creator maintains his dignity through a refusal to surrender and that he attains nobility in the rejection of compromise and the determination to persevere.

External links

• Octave Mirbeau, Dans le ciel.
• Pierre Michel, Foreword.
• Robert Ziegler, « Vers une esthétique du silence dans Dans le ciel », 1998.
• Robert Ziegler, « The art of verbalizing the barking of a dog : Mirbeau's Dans le ciel », 2005.