Читать книгу Aisthesis - Jacques Ranciere - Страница 8
ОглавлениеOn that day, when Mathilde and Fouqué tried to tell him of certain public rumours very suitable, in their opinion, to raise his hopes, Julien stopped them at the first word.
—Leave me my ideal life. Your little tricks and details from real life, all more or less irritating to me, would drag me out of heaven. One dies as one can; I want to think about death only in my own personal way. What do other people matter? My relations with other people are going to be severed abruptly. For heaven’s sake, don’t talk to me of those people any more: it’s quite enough if I have to play the swine before the judge and the lawyer.
As a matter of fact, he told me himself, it seems that my fate is to die in a dream. An obscure creature like myself, who is sure to be forgotten in two weeks’ time, would be a complete fool to play out the comedy …
Still, it is strange that I have learned the art of enjoying life only since I have seen the end of it so close to me.
He passed these last days walking about the narrow terrace atop his tower, smoking some excellent cigars Mathilde had had brought from Holland by a courier; he never suspected that his appearance was awaited each day by every telescope in town. His thoughts were at Vergy. He never talked about Mme de Rênal with Fouqué, but two or three times his friend told him that she was recovering rapidly, and the phrase reverberated in his heart.1
When Red and Black was published in 1830, critics did not fail to denounce the novel’s implausible characters and situations. How could this rather uncouth little peasant become an expert in high-society intrigues so suddenly? How could this child show so much maturity, and how could this cold calculator prove to be the most passionate of lovers?2 However, no critic noticed the strangest of these inconsistencies: at the end of his long endeavours to escape his condition and rise up in society, Julien Sorel has lost everything. He is waiting to be judged and condemned to death for the shot fired at the woman who denounced him. And it is at this moment, inside the prison walls, that he finally begins to enjoy life. He can only ask the man and woman conspiring to free him not to bother him with the details of real life. A little later, after his condemnation, he will say it to Madame de Rênal: he will never have been as happy as during the days spent beside her in prison.
The little plebeian’s paradoxical pleasure in his prison gives Stendhal’s novel a conclusion that seems to contradict both its structure and its tone. Indeed the book, in effect, is the work of a man who clearly displays his contempt for stories of sentimental dreamers and lovers of a heavenly ideal. He prefers the tales of Italian chroniclers of the past or picaresque stories like Tom Jones, whose situations and characters he imitates occasionally: ladders to boldly climb up to windows, closets to hide in, sudden departures, meeting pretty maids, young dim-witted noblemen, professional intriguers, romantic or pious young women sensitive to the charms of well-built young men. He thus conforms to an old model of novelistic fiction: the story of a character who is placed outside his normal position by some unforeseeable event, and forced to traverse the various circles of society, from princely palaces to port city dens, from farms or country parishes to aristocratic or bourgeois salons. This class disorder – symbolized in the eighteenth century by the bastard Tom Jones or by Marivaux’s ‘upstart peasant’ – took on a new meaning after the French Revolution. It was then identified with the plebeian’s hazardous climbing in a society that had not yet found its new shape, and where the nobility’s nostalgia and ecclesiastical intrigues were mixed with the reign of bourgeois interests. Stendhal experienced the fever of the Revolution as a child, the wars of Empire as a young man, and later the plots of the Restoration. The story of the ambitious young plebeian gave him the opportunity to exploit the experience he had thus acquired. To show his knowledge of the world and to describe the social intrigues that followed the revolutionary and imperial epic, he surrounded his heroes with a multitude of experts: Russian aristocrats, who act as professors of political diplomacy and romantic strategy; Jansenist priests aware of all the Jesuit intrigues; Italian conspirators with expert intelligence of state secrets; Parisian academics up to speed on the secrets of noble families. And he spares us no details about manoeuvres to obtain a diocese or a position as a tax collector, the conspiracies led by the Ultras to re-establish the old regime, and the fifty-three model letters to send in sequence to overpower even the most unassailable virtues. Later, in Lucien Leuwen, he explains at length how to ‘run’ an election and how to overthrow a cabinet. It is not difficult to see why an illustrious reader, Erich Auerbach, considered Red and Black to mark a decisive moment in the history of the realist novel. ‘Insofar as the serious realism of modern times cannot represent man otherwise than as embedded in a total reality, political, social, and economic, which is concrete and constantly evolving – as is the case today in any novel or film – Stendhal is its founder.’3 The circumstances surrounding the book seem to confirm his analysis: 1830, the year the novel appeared, was also the year the people of Paris expelled the last of the Bourbons in three days. Two years later Balzac became famous as a writer for La Peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass’s Skin), in which the banker Taillefer’s banquet for journalists provides a tableau of the bourgeois royalty of opinion, which seems to respond precisely to the aristocratic and ecclesiastical intrigues described in Red and Black. How could one fail to notice the concordance between the fall of the last monarch of divine right and the growth of the great novelistic genre, which describes the inner workings of post-revolutionary society and thus takes the place of traditional poetic genres in the new literature? And how could one ignore that this growth begins with the story of the young plebeian setting out to conquer high society?
Yet the promised concordance between the growth of a genre and the rise of a class is immediately muddled. The Revolution of July 1830 had already displaced the narrative of an ambitious plebeian facing a society marked by nostalgia for nobility and Jesuit intrigues. Various critics remarked as much when the book was released: the diplomat–writer’s knowledge of the world referred to the world that had just been overthrown.4 But the rupture created by the July days between the world that had given rise to the book and the one in which it was published is not the most important one. It is in the very heart of the story that the expected concordance between fictional structure, the logic of a character, and the narrative of the workings of the social machine, falls apart. Throughout the novel we see the hero constantly calculating his gestures, words and attitudes. We see representatives from different social circles – the illiterate carpenter hoping to get a little more cash, the grand vicar seeking a diocese, the provincial bourgeois aiming for prebends and distinctions, a young noblewoman dreaming of romantic adventures – multiply calculations of means and ends around him. Finally, we witness the novelist incessantly mixing in his own reflections with the characters’ thoughts, and lecturing them in the name of this science of worldly success that he had generously attributed to them. But the instant the shot is fired, all calculation and reflection come to a halt. The letter of denunciation written by an obscure provincial Jesuit has ruined the dreams of Julien, Mathilde and the Marquis de la Mole. A pure succession of acts follows, which has not been announced or motivated by anything, and which takes place in less narrative time than needed until now for one of the lovers to make the slightest gesture toward the other. Julien leaves Mathilde, heads to Verrières, buys a gun, shoots at Madame de Rênal, then remains still and, with no reaction, lets himself be led to the prison, where he will finally enjoy perfect happiness with her, without attempting the slightest explanation of his act. The gunshot undoubtedly has an obvious cause for the reader: the denunciatory letter signed by Madame de Rênal. But at no point is this reflection included in Julien’s thoughts and feelings. It is not included simply because it cannot be. In fact, the slightest calculation in which the novelist may have revelled with him until now would have been enough to dissuade the hero from an act that is the most absurd response possible in his situation.
Thus the act, which is the culmination of an entire network of intrigues, also annuls it by ruining every strategy of means and ends, any fictive logic of cause and effect. This act definitively separates the ambitious plebeian from the causal rationality and the very temporality in which his conquering goals were inscribed. Action and the ‘real world’, Stendhal now tells us, are a matter for ‘aristocratic hearts’, representatives of the old world. Mathilde, the young aristocrat fascinated by the rebellious lords from the time of the League, takes care of it on her own, even if her noble passion for action only ends up creating a funeral ceremony in bad taste (but the men of action of the new society will not do any better: in Balzac, the pompous burial of Ferragus’s daughter will be the greatest success of the Thirteen). Ideal life alone can provide perfect happiness to the obscure beings society only recalls for two weeks if there has been a spectacular crime. Pre-revolutionary society, which considered itself eternal, occasionally liked to enjoy good times – whether erotic or narrative – with parvenu peasants with rosy complexions and rude manners, whom they could always send back to the fields after using them. But the new society could no longer surrender to such innocent games with the slender, effeminate sons of workers who had become Latinists thanks to the priests, and ambitious from hearing tales of Napoleonic feats. The only room it was willing to give them was as short news reports. The plot of Red and Black was actually inspired by two brief news items, two singular crimes, taken from the newly founded Gazette des Tribunaux, the archive of criminal acts signalling the dangerous energy and intelligence of the children of the people. This two-week glory is the true end promised to the ambitious plebeian, the glory to which Julien prefers the pure enjoyment of reverie that subtracts him from time. And the book that tells the story of this exemplary fate can only conclude, as Julien does, by dissociating the faits divers that capture the attention of society for fifteen days from the pure present of this enjoyment.
But this ending returns to the beginning. In fact, Julien’s heart is divided from the very beginning, and the novel along with it. There are the great schemes the young man devises while reading the Memorial of Saint Helena and the ‘small events’ that punctuate life at Monsieur de Rênal’s house. Yet, there are two kinds of ‘small events’: some obey the classic logic of small causes that produce large effects, like refilling a mattress or a dropped pair of scissors, that make Madame de Rênal Julien’s accomplice, despite her best intentions. Others are not linked in any chain of causes or effects, means or ends. On the contrary, they suspend these links in favour of the sole happiness of feeling, the sentiment of existence alone: a day in the country, a butterfly hunt, or the pleasure of a summer evening spent in the shade of a linden tree with the soft noise of the wind blowing. In the heterogeneous weaving of small events, the grand schemes find themselves torn between two kinds of logic: there is Julien’s duty that orders him to take revenge on those who humiliate him, by mastering his master’s wife; and there is the pure happiness of a shared sensible moment: a hand that surrenders to another in the mildness of the evening under a tall linden tree. The entire story of Julien’s relation with Madame de Rênal is constituted by this tension between such duty and such pleasure. But this fictional tension is not simply a matter of individual sentiment. In fact, it opposes two manners of exiting plebeian subjection: through role reversal or through the suspension of the very play of these roles. Julien triumphs the moment he stops fighting, when he simply shares the pure equality of an emotion, crying at Madame de Rênal’s knees. This happiness presumes that the conqueror should shed any ‘deftness’, and the loved ‘object’ no longer be object to anything – it too must shed all social determination, and be subtracted from the logic of means and ends. Julien experiences such happiness with Madame de Rênal in the countryside retreat at Vergy. He renounces it by heading for Paris and his great expectations. He finds it again in prison, where he has nothing to anticipate except death. Such happiness can be summarized in a simple formula: to enjoy the quality of sensible experience that one reaches when one stops calculating, wanting and waiting, as soon as one resolves to do nothing.
It is not difficult to recognize the origin of the plebeian heaven that Julien enjoys in his cell and on the prison terrace. It is the same heaven that, seventy years earlier, another artisan’s son, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, enjoyed on the other side of Jura, lying all afternoon in his barque on the Lac de Bienne. The plebeian rejected by society had taken refuge there, as if in a welcoming prison:
Because of the forebodings that troubled me, I wanted to make this refuge a perpetual prison for me, to confine me to it for life, and removing every possibility and hope of getting off it – to forbid me any kind of communication with the mainland so that being unaware of all that went on in the world I might forget its existence and that it might also forget mine.5
The ‘real’ prison in which the fictive assassin is locked up is very similar to the metaphorical prison where the man who considered himself condemned by his fellow beings would have liked to end his life. It is also inside a prison that the young Fabrice del Dongo – whom the reader of The Charterhouse of Parma is led to believe is the illegitimate son of one of these children of the people whom the French Revolution turned into generals – tastes happiness, by looking at Clélia’s window, that worldly intrigues, success as a preacher, and the possession of women would never equal. The carpenter’s son smokes cigars on the terrace, the son of the marquise is busy doing woodwork that will yield his square patch of sky and a view onto the window with the birdcages. This role reversal amounts to the same (in)occupation: thinking of nothing except the present moment, enjoying nothing other than the pure feeling of existence, and maybe the pleasure of sharing it with an equally sensible soul. The son of the Geneva watchmaker very precisely designated the content of this enjoyment: ‘The precious far niente was the first and the principal enjoyment I wanted to savor in all its sweetness, and all I did during my sojourn was in effect only the delicious and necessary occupation of a man who has devoted himself to idleness.’6
It is important to grasp the power of subversion of this innocent far niente. Far niente is not laziness. It is the enjoyment of otium. Otium is specifically the time when one is expecting nothing, precisely the kind of time that is forbidden to the plebeian, whom the anxiety of emerging from his condition always condemns to waiting for the effect of chance or intrigue. This is not the lack of occupation but the abolition of the hierarchy of occupations. The ancient opposition of patricians and plebeians is in effect firstly a matter of different ‘occupations’. An occupation is a way of being for bodies and minds. The patrician occupation is to act, to pursue grand designs in which their own success is identified with the destiny of vast communities. Plebeians are bound to do – to make useful objects and provide material services to meet the needs of their individual survival. The time that shaped Julien Sorel and Fabrice del Dongo witnessed the upheaval of this ancient hierarchy. Usually we only recall its most visible aspect: the sons of the people who want to act and get involved in the great matters of communities at the cost of creating a reign of revolutionary terror. And the responsibility for this terror is readily attributed to the author of the Social Contract. The other aspect of the egalitarian revolution is less easily accounted for: the promotion of this quality of sensible experience where one does nothing, a quality equally offered to those whom the old order separated into men of pleasure and men of work and that the new order still divides into active and passive citizens. This state of suspension, the sensible state freed from the interests and hierarchies of knowledge and enjoyment, was characterized by Kant as the object of the subjective universality of aesthetic judgment. Schiller made it into the object of a play drive that blurs the old opposition between form and content. The former saw the principle of a new kind of common sense, likely to unite still distant classes, within this universality without concept. The latter opposed the violent revolution of political institutions with an aesthetic education of humanity drawing a new principle of freedom from this sensible equality. But neither of the two concealed the debt owed to the first theoretician of this disinterested sensible state. It was Rousseau who had theorized it before them under the name ‘reverie’.
Stendhal hardly knew Kant and Schiller. On the other hand, he felt a youthful passion for the author of the New Heloise, followed by a mature man’s aversion for his argumentative lovers and his exaltation of rustic simplicity. And in the author of the Social Contract, he did not despise the supposed inspiration for the sans-culottes, but the father of a democracy that he identified with the power of Manhattan shopkeepers and artisans with whom he was obsessed all the more as he had never had the chance to meet a single one. But, by rejecting the author of the Social Contract, we are not yet rid of the one who wrote the Confessions and the Reveries of a Solitary Walker. Stendhal dismissed the equality of citizens, but only in order better to identify the sovereign good with another equality, the equality of that pure enjoyment of existence and of the shared sensible moment that makes all the intrigues of good society, and class differences, seem derisive. Julien and Fabrice equally enjoy the supreme happiness of the plebeian in prison, of Rousseau’s joy lying in his barque – the happiness of expecting nothing from the future, enjoying a present without gaps, without the bite of a mourned or a regretted past, or a feared or hoped for future. And it is not difficult to recognize each one of the steps in the ‘conquest’ of Madame de Rênal as so many souvenirs of exceptional sensible moments evoked by the author of the Confessions: a maternal woman, like Madame de Warens, who welcomes the son of the artisan and the dead woman at her door; butterfly chases that recall a famous cherry-picking episode; a hand grasped and kissed, like Mademoiselle Galley’s on the evening of a day spent in the country; tearfully embraced knees that recall the silent moment of happiness spent in Turin at Madame Basile’s knees … In the same way, one can easily find young Jean-Jacques’s treasured walnut tree in Fabrice’s beloved chestnut tree, and the evenings on the shores of the Lac de Bienne in a certain evening on the shores of lake Como, where universal silence is only disturbed at equal intervals by the small waves dying on the shore.
What matters here is clearly not Stendhal’s ambivalence as a novelist towards the writer who inspired him in his youth. It is the textual transfer of the philosopher’s childhood memories and reveries into the heart of action novels that tell us about the enterprises of an admirer of Napoleon and the son of one of his generals. It is how these narratives bear witness to the twisted relation between the growth of the novelistic form and the rise of plebeians in the new society. One and the other only coincide, in effect, through a singular play of profit and loss. The sensitive plebeian who sets out to conquer society does so at the cost of sacrificing the only happiness that could satisfy him: the abolition of the hierarchy of occupations in the equality found in the pure sharing of a sensation or an emotion. He is condemned, he condemns himself, to the bitterness and the deceptions of the other equality: equality as a form of revenge against humiliation, sought in the network of intertwined intrigues of all those who occupy or strive to occupy some position in society, to exert or strive to exert some influence. The most dim-witted of young gentlemen will always have the means to push the overly gifted plebeian back into the mediocrity of his condition, the slightest Jesuit from some sub-prefecture will always have the power to ruin his audacious enterprises. For they have already sacrificed sensible happiness to social performance. The Russian aristocrats, ridiculous champions of vain success, sum up the entire affair in some praise and a maxim: while congratulating Julien on possessing a naturally cold appearance ‘a thousand miles from the sensation of the moment’, they invite him to ‘always do exactly the contrary of what people expect’.7 One could hardly give a better definition of the means of never attaining happiness, disguised as an unfailing recipe for success. For happiness only exists in present sensation where there is nothing to wait for and nothing to fake.
It is true that the sorrow of characters normally makes for the happiness of books. This was the case for those great misfortunes that constituted the subject of tragedy for Aristotle. It also applied to the adventures punctuating Don Quixote’s quest for feats from another time, as it did to Tom Jones or Jacob profiting from the modern confusion of conditions and sentiments, and even to the non-adventures of Tristram Shandy. The novelist could choose whether to give happiness to his characters at the end of their tribulations. The essence of the matter lay in the agreement between these tribulations and the sinuous line of the novel. In La Peau de chagrin, Balzac still laid claim to this sinuous line that placed the adventures of the modern sons of the countryside in continuity with those of ancient masters. But only in order to doubt, a few pages later, whether any novel could ever rival the sober genius of a few lines of news in brief: ‘Yesterday, at four o’clock, a young woman threw herself into the Seine at the Pont-des-Arts.’8 But the logic of sorrow does not pose a challenge to the novel alone; happiness does so as well. Concerning the three years of unclouded happiness that Fabrice spends close to the person he does not have the right to see, the author asks for the reader’s ‘permission to pass, without saying a single word about them, over a gap of three years’.9 Saying nothing about what constitutes the hero’s happiness, on the contrary, means composing the subject-matter of the novel from the chronicle of worldly intrigues alone, which determine his success and failure. The silence about the nights spent with Clélia forces him to say a lot about the calculations of her father, the ‘liberal’ Conti, just as he must about Mosca’s tricks, Ranuce-Ernest’s threats, and the conspiracies of the tax officer Rassi. But these divisions of time already disarm the jumble of conspiracies and counter-conspiracies that compose the author’s science of society. The plebeian’s new happiness, the happiness of doing nothing, splits the novel in two. No need to invoke, like Lukács, a soul in mourning for lost totality. What is lost is the old division, the old hierarchy between two kinds of narrative logic: the noble logic of a chain of actions belonging to the tragic poem, and the vulgar logic of mixed conditions and the cascade of events that made the novel entertaining. In the society of ‘material interests’ that follows the revolutionary upheaval and the imperial epic, the distinction between forms of causal logic is no longer tenable. This explains why writers from these times, like Victor Hugo, dreamt of a great new genre that would substitute temporal sequences with spatial simultaneity, by holding together on the same stage aristocratic grandeur, the manoeuvres of intriguers, bohemian pleasures and plebeian impulses towards new skies. For them, this new genre was drama, made from a mixture of genres and representing mixed conditions, such as spectacular actions and intimate feelings – in short, ‘the mixture on stage of what is mixed in life … a riot there and a romantic conversation here’.10
Yet this genre of the future, which was meant to contain everything and instruct the gathered communities, would remain a proclamation. The genre suitable for new society would not take place on the public stage of the theatre. It would later be identified as the novel, the kind of writing that individuals read alone, without one knowing what kind of teaching they draw from it. The novel too was expected to say and represent everything: social stratifications, the characters they shape, the habitats that reflect them, the passions they circulate, and the intrigues that cut across them. But this desire for mastery seems immediately struck by a strange powerlessness. In order to make us cross all the circles of the modern metropolis, Balzac imported an extravagant society of conspirators from the Gothic novel who had ‘a foothold in all the salons, their hands in all the strongboxes, elbowroom in all the streets, their head on any pillow’.11 But the three episodes of the history of the invincible society of the Thirteen are so many failures whose narrative ends in epigrams: the girl with golden eyes ‘dies from her chest’; the duchess of Langeais, who was a woman, is no more than a corpse ready to be tossed into the water or a book read long ago; and Ferragus, the chief of the Devorants, becomes a stone statue whose greatest feat is to watch over an ongoing game of boules. Behind the repeated failures of an all-powerful society of conspirators, the novelist allows us to see a far more radical logic of inaction: these unknown kings ‘having made for themselves wings with which to traverse society from the top to the bottom, disdained to be something in it because they could be all’.12
To have the power to do everything, and consequently to do nothing, to head towards nothing: this is the troubling logic laid bare by this literature, which can now take an interest in everything and give equal treatment to the sons of kings and the daughters of peasants, the great undertakings of powerful men and the minute events that punctuate the slow-paced domestic lives of small provincial towns. Philosophers and critics have privileged an exemplary figure of this abdication, Bartleby the scrivener’s ‘prefer not to’. But Bartleby’s ‘choice not to’ is nothing but the other side of the irrational action of the other man with a pen and copy, the Marquis de la Mole’s secretary. At the decisive moment, Julien acts without choosing: he subtracts himself from the universe where one must always choose, always calculate the consequences of these choices, always copy the right models of political, military or romantic strategy. At the expense of one unreasonable act alone, he goes to the other side, the side of ‘ideal life’ where it is possible ‘to do nothing’. It is not necessary to render Bartleby singular to the degree that he becomes a new Christ, as Deleuze does. The ‘prefer not to’ is not the singularity of an eccentric attitude bearing a general lesson for the human condition. It is the law of this literature that overthrew the preferences of belles-lettres and the hierarchies on which it depended. No situation, no subject is ‘preferable’. Everything can be interesting, it can all happen to anyone, and it can all be copied by the penman. To be sure, this law of new literature depends upon the other novelty: anyone can grab a pen, taste any kind of pleasure, or nourish any ambition whatsoever. The omnipotence of literature – which it lends to these societies of high-flying manipulators it imagines only to foil their intrigues – is the other aspect of manifestos that used to say yesterday that the Third Estate, which was nothing in the social order, must finally become something within it, and tomorrow, would say along with the proletarian song: ‘We are nothing, let us be everything.’
This aspiration to everything marks the age of grand narratives, it is readily said. Surely this is the age that offers grand explanations for the order – or the disorder – of society, the teleologies of history, and world-transforming strategies based on the science of evolution. It is also the age of great novelistic cycles that pretend to encompass a society, cross all its strata, and expose the laws of its transformations through an exemplary family or a network of individuals. Yet this solidarity between the socialist political narrative and the ‘realist’ literary narrative seems to undo itself immediately. Literature that explores this new social world where everything is possible in the name of the omnipotence of writing seems to lead the grand narrative of an entirely controllable society towards its own nullification. Julien Sorel only finds happiness in the prison that precedes his death, in the definitive ruin of all strategies for social climbing. But his fate, in turn, voids all the conspiracies the novelist revels in describing, in which a society exhausts its energies. This waste of energies will be the common moral of Balzac’s Human Comedy and Zola’s ‘natural history of a family during the Second Empire’. At most, the latter would give a derisively positive value to such vanity: in Doctor Pascal’s old office, his incestuous son’s baby clothes come to replace the notes that scientifically explained the evolution of the family and the fate of all its members. The notes disappear in smoke, and the raised fist of the infant – a new kind of messiah different from Bartleby/Deleuze – celebrates, for all science, the hymn of life obstinately pursuing its own nonsense. Literary fiction has embraced the movement of history described by revolutionary science: the great upheaval of property; the rise of financial moguls, shopkeepers, and sons of upstart peasants; the artificial paradises of the city of trade and pleasure, misery and revolt, rumbling in industrial infernos. But it does so only to replace the future promised by social science and collective action with the pure nonsense of life, the obstinate will that wants nothing. This is not because it enjoys contradicting the socialist science. Rather, it might unveil its flip side: the science of society, bearing a future freedom in its womb and the philosophy of the will-to-live that wants nothing were born on the same ground: the site where old hierarchies of social and narrative order break down.
The year the people of Paris expelled the last king of divine right, Julien Sorel’s adventure brought forth this troubling revelation: the plebeian’s happiness does not lie in the conquest of society. It lies in doing nothing, in annulling hic et nunc the barriers of social hierarchy and the torment of confronting them, in the equality of pure sensation, in the uncalculated sharing of the sensible moment. Twelve years before the storming of the Bastille, this was already the lesson of the author of The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. The conflict between the two equalities – the revolutionary dream and plebeian reverie – would merit another study; what matters here is the way in which the great novelistic genre came to the fore gnawed by its opposite, the happiness of doing nothing, the suspension of the moment in which one experiences the feeling of existence alone ‘without gaps’, without the suffering of past trials or the worry of future calculations. For Julien, this moment comes very close to the end. But the new novel itself is born very close to its end, absorbed by the multiplicity of minute events likely to create a void in the most modest lives, swallowing up any intelligible chain of cause and effect, and any organized narrative of individuals and societies. It is born coupled with two daydreaming genres that will eventually devour its forces. First the prose poem nullified action to spread out the suspended sensation, the little scene that suffices to sum up a world: in Baudelaire, for example, a little old woman in a public garden or the gaze of poor children on the lights of a café terrace. Then came the short story, which conserved action to pierce into the immutable aspect of ordinary life, creating a hole that swallows characters, or that heals only to repeat the cycle. Take the spring walk, in Maupassant, at the end of which a lowly employee, who has changed his routine for once, commits suicide, or the pain of a life, deprived of the love to which it was entitled, that opens up for a brief instant before closing up again.13 In Chekhov, we have the tears at the memory of a summer evening when love and happiness were within reach, or the moment of revolt when the little slave-girl–maid smothers the child who keeps her from sleeping.14 The time of the modern novel is cut in half: on the one hand, there is revolutionary upheaval that makes the entire movement of society legible and controllable by thought; on the other, there is the suspension that brings this movement back to the instant and the spot where the equality and inequality of fates hang in the balance. The new novel is born in the gap between these two; it is born as the history of the breach that the great upheaval of social conditions and the minute disorder of plebeian reverie placed at the heart of the logics of action.
1 Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, in Œuvres romanesques complètes, vol. I (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), p. 775; Red and Black, transl. and ed. Robert M. Adams (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1969), pp. 381–2.
2 ‘This eighteen-year-old philosopher, with a fixed plan of action, who establishes himself as a master in the middle of a society he does not know, begins by seducing a woman for personal glory, and finds no happiness other than satisfying his own self-love, becomes sensitive, falls madly in love, and becomes animated by the passions of everyone. Another book now begins, in another style.’ Gazette littéraire, 2 December 1830, in V. del Litto, ed., Stendhal sous l’oeil de la presse contemporaine, 1817–1843 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001) p. 583.
3 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, transl. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991 [1953]), p. 463.
4 ‘Like the Indian cactus, a new civilization has burst open overnight. Now if your artistic imagination lies in a society made of aristocratic pride, financial scheming, injured self-love, either under the feet of the Jesuits, or at the jittery hands of a congregational bureaucracy, what empathy can you expect from an era that no longer knows your models, which has destroyed your painting with a cobblestone, and soiled your colours with July’s mud?’ Le Figaro, 20 December 1830, quoted in del Litto, Stendhal sous l’oeil de la presse contemporaine, p. 585.
5 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Cinquième promenade in Œuvres complètes, vol. I (Paris: Gallimard, 1959) p. 1041; The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, transl. Charles E. Butterworth (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), p. 63.
6 Rousseau, Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, p. 1042 (Butterworth transl., p. 64).
7 Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, p. 599 (Adams transl., p. 222).
8 Honoré de Balzac, La Peau de chagrin, in La Comédie humaine, vol. X (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), p. 65; The Wild Ass’s Skin, transl. H. J. Hunt (New York: Penguin Classics, 1977), p. 29.
9 Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme, in Œuvres romanesques complètes, vol. II, (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), p. 488; The Charterhouse of Parma, transl. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2007), p. 503.
10 Victor Hugo, preface to Marie Tudor, in Théâtre complet, vol. II (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 414.
11 Balzac, Preface to Ferragus, chef des Dévorants, in La Comédie humaine, vol. V (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), p. 792; Preface to Ferragus, Chief of the Devorants. La Duchesse de Langeais, transl. William Walton (Philadelphia: G.B. & Son, 1896), p. 11.
12 Ibid.
13 Cf. Guy de Maupassant, ‘Promenade,’ in Contes et nouvelles, vol. II (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), pp. 127–32; and ‘Mademoiselle Perle,’ in ibid., pp. 669–84; ‘A Little Walk’, in Artine Artinian, ed., The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant (Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1955), pp. 198–202; and ‘Mademoiselle Pearl’ in ibid., pp. 745–55.
14 Anton Chekhov, ‘Sleepy’, in Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, transl. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Bantam Books, 2000), pp. 4–8; ‘A Lady’s Story’, in The Tales of Chekhov, vol. IX: The Schoolmistress and Other Stories, transl. Constance Garnett (New York: Macmillan, 1921), pp. 87–96.
