Ideas and the Novel (6 page)

Well, there is no way of proving it or disproving it. Stendhal was given to mystifications, and this little blasphemy may have been one of them. If so, it would have been a shaft of mockery aimed at the century with the following message attached: if Christ were reborn in our debased and hypocritical time, He would come, as befits the age, in the shape of the upstart Sorel, and you would send Him to the guillotine, monsieur....

The Red and the Black
is not the only novel that illustrates the evil effects of reading. There is quite a string of them, going back to
Don Quixote,
whose hero’s initial error sprang from reading chivalrous romances. These tales of chivalry unhinged him, so that he mistook the age he was living in, took prosaic windmills for castles, a peasant wench for a lady, and a broken-down jade for a charger. An idea had been implanted in him that rough reality, however often encountered, was powerless to correct. That Don Quixote, though mad, is a hero he owes to the fact that, like Julien Sorel, he remains true to his fixed idea. Catherine Morland in
Northanger Abbey
is in a similar case except that the Gothic romances she has stuffed herself with have made her fearful rather than brave; in an everyday world with its own perils, she is a prey to Gothic terror. She is the weakest, in both senses, of Jane Austen’s heroines, perhaps because her mistakes do not originate in her distinct self, as Emma’s do or even Anne’s (Anne is persuadable by nature), but are traceable to outside influences—bad literature—like a common cold she has caught.

In
Nightmare Abbey
Peacock’s characters have been completely vitiated by reading—
Werther,
Kant, Dante’s
Purgatorio,
Burke on the Sublime (“A conspiracy against cheerfulness”), stronger stuff than Catherine Morland was exposed to, and the effect is more lasting. In Meredith’s
The Egoist
—Meredith for a time was Peacock’s son-in-law—Sir Willoughby Patterne’s dreadful habit of discoursing with himself inside his head is said to be the result of reading “imaginative compositions of his time,” i.e., popular romances. And on the other hand there is the wise youth Adrian of
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel,
who “had no intimates except Gibbon and Horace,” but the consequences for
his
moral fiber, which is prematurely wizened and shrunken, seem to be even more deplorable. This “epicurean,” who is always quoting a cynical poet called “Sandoe”—an author of Meredith’s own invention—is a curious yet fitting associate for poor Sir Austin Feverel in his System for educating young Richard.

Emma Bovary’s ruin can be seen to have its origin in the books she read in the convent and on her father’s farm—books that “put ideas” in her head. The incriminated texts were not just cheap romances; she read Chateaubriand and George Sand, as well as Eugène Sue. Monsieur Homais, too, was a reader. We are not given his book list, but an article he has read in some journal is the source of his addled, sinister project to have Charles Bovary operate on Hippolyte’s clubfoot. The only benign and harmless people in that novel are Charles, who cannot stay awake over a book, and non-readers like the illiterate servant-girl Félicité.

D. H. Lawrence comes to mind again, though I do not remember any citations of specifically harmful reading matter mentioned by him. But I can supply, finally, a quite recent example from a living author. Solzhenitsyn in
August 1914
lays the disastrous defeat on the Eastern Front that culminated in the battle of Tannenberg in part if not wholly at the door of the Russian generals who had read
War and Peace.
These high-placed fools, he tells us, were seeking to imitate the strategy of Kutuzov as described in the novel—a strategy, or tactic, of delay and evasion that was totally out of place in the circumstances of the Masurian Lakes campaign of the First World War and in any case, according to Solzhenitsyn, had been “romanced” by Tolstoy with no support from historical fact. The quite unnecessary (as he sees it) collapse at Tannenberg, ending in the suicide of General Samsonov, demoralized the Czarist Army and thus paved the way for the general debacle of 1917, which led to the Bolshevik seizure of power. Hence the popularity of
War and Peace
was a large contributing factor in the creation of the Soviet state.

It is natural for the common man in an irritable mood to pronounce on the dangers of reading novels. What is strange is to hear this from novelists, among them some of the greatest: Cervantes, Jane Austen, Stendhal, Flaubert. Of course the tone varies. With Jane Austen there is a teasing playfulness in the indictment, while for Flaubert the circulating library and its patrons are a source of pure disgust. For him, the spread of the plague of literacy to which the
cabinet de lecture
can be traced belongs among contemporary evils that are probably incurable. The multiplication of readers, like the mass production of cacti and oleographs, is a tedious illustration of the typically bourgeois phenomenon of repetition, adding to the universal sameness and satiety.

If the circulating library in Rouen had only nourishing books to lend culture-hungry Emma Bovary, the social effect would be even more depressing. A bad book is not harmed by circulating among the populace, but a superior one is brought down to the general level. This will be the fate of
Madame Bovary;
Flaubert has no illusions about raising subscribers to his own level—the iron law will not be suspended in his case. The fault is not even with future Emma Bovarys who will be tempted by Emma’s example and devour the novel for “the wrong reasons,” thus reducing it by a natural and inevitable process to
merde.
The fault is in “the art of the novel” itself, which copies life, which copies art, so that there is no end to the vulgarity of it. The labor of composition, the search for the
mot juste,
betray the novelist as grubby imitator toiling for a pointless exactitude. All forms of art, obviously, are open to that suspicion, but in the others—music, theatre, painting, sculpture—there is an element of play, of making
(poiēsis),
or just making believe. Even the sister art of poetry is allied to performance, i.e., to the alive; it may be declaimed or recited and in Flaubert’s time often was. But, for both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races, and, in the case of the writer, disgust is quick to supervene. How cold and dead the words are, lying unresponsive on the page.

That there is something repellent to the practitioner himself in the practice of novel-writing may have to do with the servility of the form and with the fact that so little bodily action enters into it. The poet walks about and, as we know from Nadezhda Mandelstam, his lips move. Flaubert, if I remember right, did occasionally bawl out his sentences as he composed them, and other novelists of his day (e.g., George Eliot) wept while writing their “big” climactic scenes. Their tears were matched by their readers’; grown men cried over novels then. In fact the writer’s shedding of tears—no longer admissible today—revealed the novelist as split into two, susceptible reader and methodically calculating author, conscious of his “craft.” The tears were perhaps his penance for being the unmoved mover of masses. If the novel almost from its inception seems to be divided against itself, can this be because of its capacity for moving large numbers of people to extreme states of horror, suspense, longing, apprehension, while engineering no catharsis?

Stated in the simplest terms, the novelist’s complaint against the novel is that it over-stimulates the reader, puts ideas in his head. It seems to me, looking back over what I have said, that in the past atonement for this was twofold. First, that the novelist be emotionally affected to the highest degree himself (those shouts and tears; Dickens’ dramatic readings from his works, particularly Little Nell’s death, the strain of which was thought to have brought on his own), and, second, that the novel, aware of its dangerous propensity, should compensate by factual exposition and moral instruction. Just as the biographies of so many of the great novelists bear awful witness to the agonies their writings caused them (how often, like George Eliot, like Flaubert, like Lawrence, Proust, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, the novelist was a human sacrifice to his “heroic” creativity), so the intellectual and expository component in the novels of the great period was immense. The ratio was far larger than that in the drama and matched only, at moments, by that in the long narrative poem, say, “The Excursion” or
The Scholar-Gipsy.

When, with James, the novel renounced its actuality, renounced its power to move masses—in short, its vulgarity in both senses of the word—it no longer had any need for ideas to undo the damage that verisimilitude and a high emotional involvement might do the reader tensely following its episodes. That sort of damage, genuine or imagined, could never have been caused by the theatre even at its most weepy and melodramatic, because the theatre is a public, forum-like art and its audience is not a collection of solitudes sitting in rows side by side. It was not until the invention of the moving-picture that the novel lost its supremacy as purveyor of irreality to a multitude composed of solitary units. In certain scenes (I think) of
Middlemarch
and
Nostromo,
the approach of the silent film can already be felt.

But, unlike the novel, the moving-picture, at least in my belief, cannot be an idea-spreader; its images are too enigmatic, e.g., Eisenstein’s baby carriage bouncing down those stairs in
Potemkin.
A film cannot have a spokesman or chorus character to point the moral as in a stage play; that function is assumed by the camera, which is inarticulate. And the absence of spokesmen in the films we remember shows rather eerily that with the cinema, for the first time, humanity has found a narrative medium that is incapable of thought.

3

W
HEN SPEAKING OF
THE
Red and the Black,
I said that Julien Sorel patterned his conduct on ideas he had got out of books. In his love-making, for instance, his model was
La Nouvelle Héloïse,
and he was disappointed by not feeling the transports Rousseau had led him to expect. But—on purpose—I failed to mention one book,
the
book that inspired him in all his actions, the book he took for his Bible, that he is immersed in when we first catch sight of him seated astride a roof beam in his father’s carpentry shed, oblivious of the mechanical water-saw on a platform a few feet beneath him whose movement he is supposed to be watching and of the shouts of his approaching father. Surprised by his parent in the truant act of reading, he receives a heavy blow that causes the book to fall into the millstream below. A cuff on the head follows, half stunning him. Bleeding and tearful, Julien returns to his place by the saw, but the tears in his eyes are less for the physical pain than for the loss of the book he adores. Jerked to ground level by an iron hook (used for knocking walnuts off a tree), and chased toward the house, sadly he watches the stream—which in fact is the common gutter—that is carrying the book away. It is the
Mémorial de Ste. Hélène
—a semi-spurious collection of thought gems claimed to have been taken down verbatim from Napoleon’s conversation during the years of confinement on St. Helena.

In this first telling glimpse, Julien’s whole nature and the forces operating it, in a regular action like the sawmill’s, are compressed into two and a quarter pages. We have been shown the play of vectors that determines his direction; what follows will be development and amplification. Before the brief chapter is over, we learn that the cruelly lost volume was part of Julien’s legacy from an old Surgeon-Major of Napoleon’s armies who had taught the peasant boy Latin and what he himself knew of history, i.e., the history of the Italian campaign of 1796. The Latin and the bit of history are all Julien needs to know to set him in motion. From the veteran he has inherited, besides, the cross of the Legion of Honor, a collection of the bulletins of the Grand Army, and Rousseau’s
Confessions.
Those three books and the cross comprise Julien’s hope chest.

Multiply Julien and you have the tragi-comedy of France under the Restoration. For lowborn youths fired by ambition, Napoleon was an upstart figure raised to the point of sublimity. His career offered hope and food for thought to every gifted outsider; the fact that the career had been meteoric could not take away its glory or discourage imitation. On the contrary, the precipitous fall of Napoleon from the zenith—did he fall or was he pushed?—added to the bitterness and sense of injustice among the disadvantaged that were in themselves incentives for a new try. Had Napoleon died Emperor rather than prisoner and outlaw, his heirs would have been heirs of his well-cared-for body rather than his soul. There is a vengeful element in Julien’s determination to rise. He will
show
the
bien pensants
who wrong his hero that despite them Napoleon lives on, like the hydra; Julien will be a fierce new head poking up among them that mistakenly they will try to stroke.

The Little Corporal who made himself Emperor, rudely gesturing aside the Pope and putting the crown on his own head, is Julien’s consuming passion—his only true and lasting one. As tutor in the household of M. de Rênal, he keeps a portrait of Napoleon hidden in his mattress; Mme de Rênal, made aware of the secret, thinks it is a portrait of his mistress, and her instinct is not so wrong. To get ready for the evening when he will need all his courage to seize her hand and hold it, he has devoted an entire day to rereading the
Mémorial
—apparently he has procured a second copy or else Stendhal forgot. Shortly after this episode, he climbs all alone by a goat path to a rocky peak; standing on a huge crag, he spies a bird of prey, a sparrow-hawk, far above him silently wheeling in immense circles and ponders as he watches its still, powerful movements against the sky: “He envied that force, that loneliness. Such had been the destiny of Napoleon; would it one day be his own?” The idea of Napoleon links itself naturally with images of height and isolation, and it is a reprise, surely, of the Napoleonic idea that at the very end of the novel Julien should choose a mountain grotto for his tomb. Death and transfiguration.