Mimesis (82 page)

Les époques déteignent sur les hommes qui les traversent. Ces deux personnages prouvaient la vérité de cet axiome par l’opposition des teintes historiques empreintes dans leurs physionomies, dans leurs discours, dans leurs idées et leurs coutumes.

(Periods rub off on the men who pass through them. These two personages proved the truth of this axiom by the contrast in the historical coloring imprinted upon their physiognomies, their talk, their ideas, and their clothes.)

And in another passage from the same novel, in reference to a house in Alençon, he speaks of the
archétype
which it represents; here we have not the archetype of a nonhistorical abstraction but that of the
maisons bourgeoises
of a large part of France; the house, whose piquant local character he has previously described, deserves its place in the novel all the more, he says,
qu’il explique des mœurs et représente des idées
. Despite many obscurities and exaggerations, biological and historical elements are successfully combined in Balzac’s work because they are both consonant with its romantic-dynamic character, which occasionally passes over into the romantic-magical and the demonic; in both cases one feels the operation of irrational “forces.” In contrast, the classically moralistic element very often gives the impression of being a foreign body. It finds expression more especially in Balzac’s tendency to formulate generalized apophthegms of a moral cast. They are sometimes witty as individual observations, but for the most part they are far too generalized; sometimes too they are not even witty; and when they develop into long disquisitions, they are often—to use the language of the vulgar—plain “tripe.” I will quote some brief moralizing dicta which occur in
Père Goriot
:

Le bonheur est la poésie des femmes comme la toilette en est le fard.—(La science et l’amour…) sont des asymptotes qui ne peuvent jamais se rejoindre.—S’il est un sentiment inné dans le cœur de l’homme, n’est-ce pas l’orgueil de la protection exercé à tout moment en faveur d’un être faible?—Quand on connaît Paris, on ne croit à rien de ce qui s’y dit, et l’on ne dit rien de ce qui s’y fait.—Un sentiment, n’est-ce pas le monde dans une pensée?

(Happiness is the poetry of women as get-up is their rouge.—[Science and love …] are asymptotes which can never meet.—If there is a sentiment innate in the heart of man, is it not pride in protection perpetually exercised in behalf of a weak creature?—When one knows Paris, one believes nothing that is told there and tells nothing that is done there.—Is not a sentiment a world in a thought?)

At best one can say of such apophthegms that they do not deserve the honor bestowed upon them—that of being erected into generalizations. They are
aperçus
produced by the momentary situation, sometimes extremely cogent, sometimes absurd, not always in good taste. Balzac aspires to be a classical moralist, at times he even echoes La Bruyère (e.g., in a passage from
Père Goriot
where the physical and psychological effects of the possession of money are described in connection with the remittance Rastignac receives from his family). But this suits neither his style nor his temperament. His best formulations come to him in the midst of narrative, when he is not thinking about moralizing—for example when in
La vieille Fille
he says of Mademoiselle Cormon, directly out of the momentary situation:
Honteuse elle-même, elle ne devinait pas la honte d’autrui
.

On the subject of his plan for the entire work, which gradually took shape in him, he has other interesting statements, particularly from the period when he finally saw it whole—in his letters of ca. 1834. In this self-interpretation three motifs are especially to be remarked; all three occur together in a letter to the Countess Hanska (
Lettres à l’Etrangère
, Paris 1899, letter of Oct. 26, 1834, pp. 200-206), where (p. 205) we find:

Les Etudes de Moeurs représenteront tous les effets sociaux sans que ni une situation de la vie, ni une physionomie, ni un caractère d’homme ou de femme, ni une manière de vivre, ni une profession, ni une zone sociale, ni un pays français, ni quoi que ce soit de l’enfance, de la vieillesse, de l’âge mûr, de la politique, de la justice, de la guerre ait été oublié.

Cela posé, l’histoire du cœur humain tracée fil à fil, l’histoire sociale faite dans toutes ses parties, voilà la base. Ce ne seront pas des faits imaginaires; ce sera ce qui se passe partout.

(The Studies of Manners will represent all social effects, without forgetting a single situation in life, a physiognomy, a man’s
or woman’s character, a way of life, a profession, a social zone, a part of France, or anything of childhood, old age, maturity, politics, law, war.

This established, the history of the human heart traced thread by thread, social history set down in all its parts—there is the foundation. It will not be imaginary facts; it will be what happens everywhere.)

Of the three motifs to which I have referred, two are immediately apparent; first, the universality of his plan, his concept of his work as an encyclopedia of life; no part of life is to be omitted. Second, the element of random reality—
ce qui se passe partout
. The third motif lies in the word
histoire
. This
histoire du cœur humain
or
histoire sociale
is not a matter of “history” in the usual sense—not of scientific investigation of transactions which have already occurred, but of comparatively free invention; not, in short, of
history
but of
fiction
; is not, above all, a matter of the past but of the contemporary present, reaching back at most only a few years or a few decades. If Balzac describes his
Études de Mœurs au dix-neuvième siècle
as history (just as Stendhal had already given his novel
Le Rouge et le Noir
the subtitle
Chronique du dix-neuvième siècle
), this means, first, that he regards his creative and artistic activity as equivalent to an activity of a historical-interpretative and even historical-philosophical nature, as his
Avant-propos
in itself makes it possible to deduce; secondly, that he conceives the present as history—the present is something in the process of resulting from history. And in practice his people and his atmospheres, contemporary as they may be, are always represented as phenomena sprung from historical events and forces; one has but to read over, say, the account of the origin of Grandet’s wealth (
Eugénie Grandet
), or that of Du Bousquier’s life (
La vieille Fille
) or old Goriot’s, to be certain of this. Nothing of the sort so conscious and so detailed is to be found before the appearance of Stendhal and Balzac, and the latter far outdoes the former in organically connecting man and history. Such a conception and execution are thoroughly historistic.

We will now return to the second motif—
ce ne seront pas des faits imaginaires; ce sera ce qui se passe partout
. What is expressed here is that the source of his invention is not free imagination but real life, as it presents itself everywhere. Now, in respect to this manifold life, steeped in history, mercilessly represented with all its everyday triviality,
practical preoccupations, ugliness, and vulgarity, Balzac has an attitude such as Stendhal had had before him: in the form determined by its actuality, its triviality, its inner historical laws, he takes it seriously and even tragically. This, since the rise of classical taste, had occurred nowhere—and even before then not in Balzac’s practical and historical manner, oriented as it is upon a social self-accounting of man. Since French classicism and absolutism, not only had the treatment of everyday reality become much more limited and decorous, but in addition the attitude taken toward it renounced the tragic and problematic as it were in principle. We have attempted to analyze this in the preceding chapters: a subject from practical reality could be treated comically, satirically, or didactically and moralistically; certain subjects from definite and limited realms of contemporary everyday life attained to an intermediate style, the pathetic; but beyond that they might not go. The real everyday life of even the middle ranks of society belong to the low style; the profound and significant Henry Fielding, who touches upon so many moral, aesthetic, and social problems, keeps his presentation always within the satiric moralistic key and says in
Tom Jones
(book 14, chapter 1): “… that kind of novels which, like this I am writing, is of the comic class.”

The entrance of existential and tragic seriousness into realism, as we observe it in Stendhal and Balzac, is indubitably closely connected with the great romantic agitation for the mixture of styles—the movement whose slogan was Shakespeare vs. Racine—and I consider Stendhal’s and Balzac’s form of it, the mixture of seriousness and everyday reality, far more important and genuine than the form it took in the Hugo group, which set out to unite the sublime and the grotesque.

The newness of this attitude, and the new type of subjects which were seriously, problematically, tragically treated, caused the gradual development of an entirely new kind of serious or, if one prefers, elevated style; neither the antique nor the Christian nor the Shakespearean nor the Racinian level of conception and expression could easily be transferred to the new subjects; at first there was some uncertainty in regard to the kind of serious attitude to be assumed.

Stendhal, whose realism had sprung from resistance to a present which he despised, preserved many eighteenth-century instincts in his attitude. In his heroes there are still haunting memories of figures like Romeo, Don Juan, Valmont (from the
Liaisons dangereuses
), and Saint-Preux; above all, the figure of Napoleon remains alive in him; the heroes of his novels think and feel in opposition to their time,
only with contempt do they descend to the intrigues and machinations of the post-Napoleonic present. Although there is always an admixture of motifs which, according to the older view, would have the character of comedy, it remains true of Stendhal that a figure for whom he feels tragic sympathy, and for whom he demands it of the reader, must be a real hero, great and daring in his thoughts and passions. In Stendhal the freedom of the great heart, the freedom of passion, still has much of the aristocratic loftiness and of the playing with life which are more characteristic of the
ancien régime
than of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie.

Balzac plunges his heroes far more deeply into time-conditioned dependency; he thereby loses the standards and limits of what had earlier been felt as tragic, and he does not yet possess the objective seriousness toward modern reality which later developed. He bombastically takes every entanglement as tragic, every urge as a great passion; he is always ready to declare every person in misfortune a hero or a saint; if it is a woman, he compares her to an angel or the Madonna; every energetic scoundrel, and above all every figure who is at all sinister, he converts into a demon; and he calls poor old Goriot
ce Christ de la paternité
. It was in conformity with his emotional, fiery, and uncritical temperament, as well as with the romantic way of life, to sense hidden demonic forces everywhere and to exaggerate expression to the point of melodrama.

In the next generation, which comes on the stage in the fifties, there is a strong reaction in this respect. In Flaubert realism becomes impartial, impersonal, and objective. In an earlier study, “Serious Imitation of Everyday Life,” I analyzed a paragraph from
Madame Bovary
from this point of view, and will here, with slight changes and abridgements, reproduce the pages concerned, since they are in line with the present train of thought and since it is unlikely, in view of the time and place of their publication (Istanbul, 1937), that they have reached many readers. The paragraph concerned occurs in part 1, chapter 9, of
Madame Bovary
:

Mais c’était surtout aux heures des repas qu’elle n’en pouvait plus, dans cette petite salle au rez-de-chaussée, avec le poêle qui fumait, la porte qui criait, les murs qui suintaient, les pavés humides; toute l’amertume de l’existence lui semblait servie sur son assiette, et, à la fumée du bouilli, il montait du fond de son âme comme d’autres bouffées d’affadissement. Charles était long à
manger; elle grignotait quelques noisettes, ou bien, appuyée du coude, s’amusait, avec la pointe de son couteau, de faire des raies sur la toile cirée.

(But it was above all at mealtimes that she could bear it no longer, in that little room on the ground floor, with the smoking stove, the creaking door, the oozing walls, the damp floor-tiles; all the bitterness of life seemed to be served to her on her plate, and, with the steam from the boiled beef, there rose from the depths of her soul other exhalations as it were of disgust. Charles was a slow eater; she would nibble a few hazel-nuts, or else, leaning on her elbow, would amuse herself making marks on the oilcloth with the point of her table-knife.)

The paragraph forms the climax of a presentation whose subject is Emma Bovary’s dissatisfaction with her life in Tostes. She has long hoped for a sudden event which would give a new turn to it—to her life without elegance, adventure, and love, in the depths of the provinces, beside a mediocre and boring husband; she has even made preparations for such an event, has lavished care on herself and her house, as if to earn that turn of fate, to be worthy of it; when it does not come, she is seized with unrest and despair. All this Flaubert describes in several pictures which portray Emma’s world as it now appears to her; its cheerlessness, unvaryingness, grayness, staleness, airlessness, and inescapability now first become clearly apparent to her when she has no more hope of fleeing from it. Our paragraph is the climax of the portrayal of her despair. After it we are told how she lets everything in the house go, neglects herself, and begins to fall ill, so that her husband decides to leave Tostes, thinking that the climate does not agree with her.

The paragraph itself presents a picture—man and wife together at mealtime. But the picture is not presented in and for itself; it is subordinated to the dominant subject, Emma’s despair. Hence it is not put before the reader directly: here the two sit at table—there the reader stands watching them. Instead, the reader first sees Emma, who has been much in evidence in the preceding pages, and he sees the picture first through her; directly, he sees only Emma’s inner state; he sees what goes on at the meal indirectly, from within her state, in the light of her perception. The first words of the paragraph,
Mais c’était surtout aux heures des repas qu’elle n’en pouvait plus
… state the theme, and all that follows is but a development of it. Not only are
the phrases dependent upon
dans
and
avec
, which define the physical scene, a commentary on
elle n’en pouvait plus
in their piling up of the individual elements of discomfort, but the following clause too, which tells of the distaste aroused in her by the food, accords with the principal purpose both in sense and rhythm. When we read further,
Charles était long à manger
, this, though grammatically a new sentence and rhythmically a new movement, is still only a resumption, a variation, of the principal theme; not until we come to the contrast between his leisurely eating and her disgust and to the nervous gestures of her despair, which are described immediately afterward, does the sentence acquire its true significance. The husband, unconcernedly eating, becomes ludicrous and almost ghastly; when Emma looks at him and sees him sitting there eating, he becomes the actual cause of the
elle n’en pouvait plus
; because everything else that arouses her desperation—the gloomy room, the commonplace food, the lack of a tablecloth, the hopelessness of it all—appears to her, and through her to the reader also, as something that is connected with him, that emanates from him, and that would be entirely different if he were different from what he is.