Ideas and the Novel (5 page)

The spirit of the age, then, is one of rapacious opportunism. Many examples are held up for almost loving inspection. Monstrous specimens from the big pond of Parisian literary life compete in gross rascality with the entrepreneurs and small lawyers of the provincial backwater, and the only distinction, doubtless not foreseen by Balzac, is that the shamelessness of Parisian literary circles is probably more believable than before—that depraved milieu has not changed with time but only become more itself, like an essence or concentrate. Balzac lets us see that a few rare innocents are to be found both in dull, dead Angoulême and the capital; in the provinces one might expect that they would be slightly more numerous, but it is not so. Lucien himself is a false innocent; he fails because he is a
weak
opportunist. His utter lack of self-knowledge may have at the beginning a naive, ingenuous charm but it is soon revealed as simple cowardice: he does not want to have a clear picture of the base actions he is about to commit that will then “add up to” a self he does not wish to know. It would be wrong to say that he is satirized; he is far too weak for that. It takes a more robust figure, like Meredith’s Sir Willoughby Patterne (also utterly lacking in self-knowledge), to stand up to satire. Lucien hovers on the verge of being a comic figure, as he hovers on the verge of the literary world. Toward the end, he has decided or, rather,
thinks
he has decided to commit suicide—the only manly act left for him after the wrong he has done his family. Then, on reflection:
“J’ai toujours le temps de me tuer”
(“I’ve always got time to kill myself”). So instead he accepts a cigar.

It would be hard for Balzac to sympathize greatly with Lucien. He is too much an embodiment of the century, seeming to start out well, endowed with that lauded “genius” and with a
“beauté surhumaine”
and then turning shallow and self-seeking, like France after 1815, which, for Balzac (and for Stendhal and Flaubert, too), had been converted into a nation of calculating machines.
Les illusions
is a critique of the age, of most of its ideas and motives, though, as if to compensate, the author gives us a swift, approving sketch of a group of poor young provincials in Paris that he calls the Cénacle—all selfless men of principle, including a European federalist. And with the figure of David Séchard, the printer who becomes Lucien’s brother-in-law, he is directing the reader’s attention to where the true genius of the century may lie: David is an inventor. His fatal, innocent error is to suppose that Lucien’s lofty gift is superior to his own modest one: as his inferior, he feels himself bound to “stake” Lucien to a career in the capital, at the cost of doing without in his own domestic life, and, ultimately, of signing away
his
future (the patent), losing his once-thriving printing business, and being imprisoned for debt. Lucien, in fact, is his evil genius; surely the play on words was in Balzac’s mind and was meant to come into the reader’s.

Les illusions perdues,
without question, is a novel ruled by ideas, just as its chief characters are. Even David Séchard, it is said, “will be the Jacquard of the paper industry”—Jacquard, the inventor of the improved loom, revolutionized the textile industry, and in this self-inflating Balzacian world, an invention, like a literary work, cannot simply make a contribution; it must be revolutionary and upset the prevailing order of things. Balzac is the great spokesman for the idea-driven slaves of concepts, yet (unlike Victor Hugo) he rarely expresses himself in conceptual terms. That is left to his men of letters, who in dialogue—or, more often, monologue—have the habit of writing critical essays aloud, like Sorbonne lecturers addressing an amphitheatre, though their auditory here consists only of Lucien. Along with the astonished Lucien, we learn, for example, the distinction between
la littérature idéée
and
la littérature imagée,
which in practical language is the difference between Voltaire and Walter Scott. Balzac himself (as we know from other sources) had toyed with such a distinction, and this must mean that he regarded it at least half-seriously. But when in
Les illusions
we hear it expounded by a literary journalist and master charlatan, the effect is one of parody. In other words, Balzac, in assigning a fond idea of his own to a fictional character who is decidedly
not
himself, has marked a distance separating him from his character. His detachment is, if anything, underlined: that nice distinction, his brain child, was now an orphan, joining all the other ideas à la mode that were floating about the literary world, the flotsam of raw data that will be blended into the story.
“Littérature idée, littérature imagée,
that’s how they talked, the reviewers. Remember?”

When he does speak in his own voice, Balzac usually limits himself to a kind of factual instructiveness that widens the picture but certainly does not ennoble it. Indeed, the aim appears to be precisely the contrary: to make what is already prose more prosaic by letting the reader see the processes at work behind the façade. A social mechanism or group of mechanisms—say the distribution of first-night theatre tickets to influential persons—is explained, just as in a guided visit to an industrial plant. In this volume the production and reception of literary works, including stage plays, is the theme, and everything is seen in terms of a giant economic process, in which reviewers, publishers, booksellers, actresses, authors are as much a part of the machinery as the paper mill or printing press. We learn how advertising revolutionized the book trade, how the
affiches
in shop windows and boulevard displays, which were the earliest examples of book advertising, were replaced by ads in newspapers and how this did away with the immense power of critics’ notices and the dependence of publishers on journalists. And we learn a great deal, naturally, about the manufacture of paper and the history of printing processes, as well as many other interesting things, such as the difference between country attorneys and Parisian attorneys and how that affects the jailing of a man for debt.

All this, of course, has a bearing on the story, and I do not know whether a present-day novelist, deprived of the right of auctorial intervention, could succeed in telling such a complicated story at all.

With Stendhal, the spokesman’s role is divided. In
The Red and the Black,
Stendhal speaks sometimes
through
Julien, sometimes on
behalf
of him, and sometimes
about
him. Julien, who has acute self-knowledge, is a far more intense and demanding center of interest for his creator than Victor Hugo’s and Balzac’s heroes were for them. Yet this stops short of complete identification. Stendhal and Julien are two separate people, which would not be the case today. Occasionally he leaves Julien and the other characters entirely behind, as in the long parenthesis containing the famous statement “A novel is a mirror on the highway.” This abrupt interruption of his own narrative is addressed to an imaginary reader:
“Eh, monsieur, un roman est un miroir qui se promène sur une grande route.”
But there are other interjections, less programmatic and that do not have parentheses around them, though in reality they are “asides,” as in a theatre. While noting the chronic dissatisfaction of Mathilde de la Mole, who “has everything,” he remarks that in the convent she had been given the idea that because of her advantages of birth and wealth she should be happier than the others; then he suddenly reflects: “Here is the source of the boredom and follies of princes—an idea that has been planted in them.” The aside could belong to La Rochefoucauld or even Montaigne. Sometimes the aside may be almost imperceptible as author’s commentary and yet have a whole ethos compressed in it. Of the old curé of the town of Verrières: “despite his age...his eyes sparkled with the sacred fire that betrays the pleasure anticipated in doing a beautiful and slightly dangerous action.” The play between asides and narrative, the contrast in texture among Julien’s own thoughts—often identical, one would guess, with Stendhal’s own
(“En vérité, l’homme a deux êtres en lui, pensa-t-il”)
and often naively divergent from what a grown man would think—give the novel a shot-silk or quicksilver quality, an elusiveness of final commitment that is typical of Julien himself despite his iron resolves. The poles of heart and head—the first being Mme de Rênal, the second Mathilde—exercise an alternating attraction-repulsion on Julien, and of course they are
in
Julien, who switches from heart to head in the course of a single hour. He prefers Mme de Rênal, just as he prefers the impulses of his heart when he is lucky enough to feel them to the calculations of his head, but it is the black—the head, if the heart is the red—that governs. One cannot help reading it as an irony that this youth wholly directed by his will should die on the scaffold for a temporary aberration that led him, when beside himself, to commit a
crime passionnel.

Julien’s course, from the moment we meet him, is determined by ideas. In this he is different from Fabrizio in
The Charterhouse of Parma
and less attractive. He is programmed, like a just-invented computer, by an idea of duty
to himself.
That idea—not inclination—compels him to touch Mme de Rênal’s hand for the first time and retain it in his grasp when she seeks to draw it away; soon he owes it to himself as the logical next stage to enter her bedroom and possess her. The same strict duty prevails in his relations with Mlle de la Mole, and always he is surprised by his failure to feel the appropriate emotions— the emotions he has learned from books that he
ought
to feel. As his tenseness gradually relaxes with Mme de Rênal, he does, to his joy, experience something recognizable to him as passion, even a devotion of the body in which his mind is not involved. This cannot happen with Mathilde de la Mole, who is too much like him. She too has been led, or misled, by books:
Manon Lescaut, La Nouvelle Héloïse, Letters of a Portuguese Nun.
Having imbibed Voltaire as well as amorous literature, she has hopes for Julien as a “new Danton.” Each is imitating an accepted model—an idea—of passionate love, with disappointing results. Noting his lack of happiness during their first tryst, Julien has recourse to reason, which tells him he
should
be happy,
listing
the reasons. As if to prime the pump, he has just recited some sentences from
La Nouvelle Héloïse
to her.

The discrepancy between actual feeling and expected feeling is a leading motif here as in most of Stendhal. One of Julien’s social assets is a prodigious memory; he first makes his mark at the seminary in Besançon by being able to recite any passage from the Bible on demand. But to know it by heart when he has not taken it
to
heart is a monstrosity. He has not a trace of religion in him. Careful observation has pointed to the church as the sole career open to his talents, and the disparity of pious outside and impious inside gives him, in his eternal black, the aspect of a hypocrite. That, in the end, is the charge he levels against himself in the solitude of his prison cell, and he is ready to go to the scaffold to refute it. His duty to some kind of consistency in himself forbids him to make use of Mathilde’s ultraist connections and petition the detested crown for mercy.

Like Lucien de Rubempré, born Chardon, Julien is a parvenu. Or—the English word sits on him better—an upstart. And Stendhal is able to feel a half-tender admiration for him as an entirely self-made product. There is pardon, moreover, for Julien given, as it were, in advance of sin, in the picture Stendhal draws of the milieu—a duly objective picture that demonstrates that ambition and calculation are not so unnatural here as they might appear. Taken around the town of Verrières, we see the brutal necessity compelling him to which Julien has conformed his own will. He is self-made, but the tools his will had to work with were of Verrières manufacture.

Born under-privileged, the son of a sawmill operator (“the carpenter’s son” is a gibe he hears too often on his upward-mobile course), delicate, pale, slender, hated by father and brothers, he likes to fancy himself as a foundling. His bookishness and mental gifts make him an object of general suspicion and enforce him in his sense of isolation. He is an idea in his own mind seeking recognition and repelling it with ferocity when he meets it. His poverty and low birth have made him proud, exacting, and distrustful. An insane pride is his undoing, and this insanity, which goes along with his ambition and at the same time constantly thwarts it, is what Stendhal respects in him. Julien is too proud to serve and too proud, finally, even to be self-serving like the common trucklers of his time. His duty to himself contains a higher duty, to the self as pure principled idea.

I have often thought that in plotting the steps of Julien’s career Stendhal intended a wicked analogy with the career of Jesus. The “son of a carpenter,” sure that his nominal “father” cannot be his real father, who, socially speaking, is on high (the notion of being the by-blow of a nobleman gradually gains hold of Julien’s mind), our hero has his John the Baptist in his only friend, Fouqué, with whom early in his career he sojourns in the wilderness, at Fouqué’s little sawmill up the River Doubs—Jordan. Like Jesus, Julien is surrounded by faithful women—Mathilde and Mme de Rênal, two sorrowing Marys; he is crucified (the guillotine) and buried. Mathilde and the loyal Fouqué accompany his body to the tomb, a grotto of Julien’s own choosing high in the Jura mountains which Mathilde in due course will have embellished, like an early-Christian basilica, with Italian marble sculptures. Meanwhile, in the grotto “magnificently illuminated by an infinite number of tapers,” the last rites are sung by twenty priests, and all the inhabitants of the little mountain villages, attracted by the strange ceremony, have followed the cortège. Christ’s burial and apotheosis seem to have telescoped.