Mimesis (69 page)

Elle connaît la vertu, elle la goûte même, et cependant elle commet les actions les plus indignes. Elle aime le Chevalier des Grieux avec une passion extrême; cependant le désir de vivre dans l’abondance et de briller lui fait trahir ses sentiments pour le Chevalier, auquel elle préfère un riche financier. Quel art n’a-t-il pas fallu pour intéresser le lecteur et lui inspirer de la compassion par rapport aux funestes disgrâces qui arrivent à cette fille corrompue!

(She knows virtue, she even relishes it, and yet she commits the most shameful acts. She loves the Chevalier des Grieux with an extreme passion; yet her desire to enjoy a life of wealth and to shine makes her betray her feelings for the Chevalier, to whom she prefers a rich financier. What art did it not require to interest the reader and inspire him with compassion in regard to the fatal disgraces which come to this corrupted girl!)

This is an undistinguished sort of corruption; it lacks all greatness and dignity; but the author does not seem to feel this. There is something exemplary about the Chevalier’s frenzied sexual thraldom and Manon’s almost ingenuous amorality, precisely by virtue of their lack of distinction; and because of its representative character the little novel is justly famous. But the Abbé Prévost wants at all costs to make heroes of the two characters, insisting that they are “really” good and as different from ordinary ne’er-do-wells as night from day. The lively feeling of shame which overcomes the Chevalier when he suddenly finds himself and all his falsehoods exposed gives him an opportunity to declare himself a very special and distinguished character with emotions deeper and richer than those of
le commun des hommes
, and it is evident that Prévost takes the Chevalier’s childish and overemotional interpretation of his moral “morning after” quite seriously. His conception of his heroes is consistently sentimental and high-flown.
Adieu, fils ingrat et rebelle!
exclaims the Chevalier’s father.
Adieu, père barbare et dénaturé!
the son replies. This is the tone of the
comédie larmoyante
, which came into vogue at the time. With the lack of distinction in vice goes an equally undistinguished conception of virtue. It is concerned entirely with sex, with order or disorder in conducting one’s sex life, and hence is itself steeped in eroticism. What is meant
by virtue in this instance cannot be imagined detached from the whole apparatus of erotic sensations. The pleasure which the author endeavors to evoke in his readers by his representation of his lovers’ childishly playful and unprincipled corruption, is in the last analysis a sexual titillation, which is constantly interpreted in sentimental and ethical terms while the warmth it evokes is abused to produce a sentimental ethics. This mixture is often found in the eighteenth century. Diderot’s ethical attitudes are still rooted in an enthusiastic sentimentality in which the erotic plays a part; and even Rousseau still shows traces of it. The increasingly bourgeois cast of society, the stability (maintained throughout the greater part of the century) of political and economic conditions, the settled security of life in the intermediate and well-to-do strata of society, the consequent absence of professional and political worry for the younger generation in those strata—all this contributed to the development of the moral and aesthetic forms which can be gathered from our text and from many similar ones. And even when the prevailing order of society revealed its problematic nature to all eyes, when it began to rock and finally collapsed, the newly formed revolutionary concepts absorbed much bourgeois sentimentality, which survived into the nineteenth century.

Thus we may say that our text exemplifies a sort of intermediate style in which the realistic mixes with the serious—the story even ends tragically. This mixture is most appealing, but both its ingredients—realism as well as serious tragedy—are nonchalantly superficial. The realistic representation is colorful, varied, lively, and graphic; there is no lack of portrayals of the basest vice; yet the language always remains charming and elegant. There is not a trace of the problematic. The social milieu is an established frame of reference, which is accepted as it happens to be.

Quite different is the stylistic level of the realistic texts which serve the propaganda purposes of the Enlightenment. Examples are to be found from the Regency on, and in the course of the century they become more frequent and increasingly aggressive polemically. The master of the game is Voltaire. As a first example we choose a fairly early piece, from the sixth of the Philosophical Letters, which deal with his impressions of England.

Entrez dans la bourse de Londres, cette place plus respectable que bien des cours; vous y voyez rassemblés les députés de toutes les nations pour l’utilité des hommes. Là, le juif, le mahométan et le
chrétien traitent l’un avec l’autre comme s’ils étaient de la même religion, et ne donnent le nom d’infidèles qu’à ceux qui font banqueroute; là, le presbytérien se fie à l’anabaptiste, et l’anglican reçoit la promesse du quaker. Au sortir de ces pacifiques et libres assemblées, les uns vont à la synagogue, les autres vont boire; celui-ci va se faire baptiser dans une grande cuve au nom du Père, par le Fils, au Saint-Esprit; celui-là fait couper le prépuce de son fils et fait marmotter sur l’enfant des paroles hébraiques qu’il n’entend point; ces autres vont dans leurs églises attendre l’inspiration de Dieu leur chapeau sur la tête, et tous sont contents.

(Enter the London stock exchange, that more respectable place than many a court; you will see the deputies of all nations gathered there for the service of mankind. There the Jew, the Mohammedan, and the Christian deal together as if they were of the same religion, and apply the name of infidel only to those who go bankrupt; there the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist, and the Anglican accepts the Quaker’s promise. On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies, some go to the synagogue, others go to drink; one goes to have himself baptized in the name of the Father, through the Son, to the Holy Ghost; another has his son’s foreskin cut off and Hebrew words mumbled over him which he does not understand; others go to their church to await the inspiration of God with their hats on their heads; and all are content.)

This description of the London exchange was not really written for a realistic purpose. What goes on there, we are told only in a general way. The purpose is much rather to insinuate certain ideas, which in their crudest and driest form would run as follows: “Free international business as dictated by the egotism of individuals is beneficial to human society; it unites men in common pacific activities. Religions, on the other hand, are absurd. Their absurdity needs no proof beyond the observation that they are very numerous while each claims to be the only true one, and that their dogmas and ceremonies are nonsensical. However, in a country where they are very many and very different, so that they are forced to put up with one another, they do not do much harm and can be regarded as an innocuous form of madness. It is only when they fight and persecute one another that things get really bad.” But even in this dry formulation of the idea there is a rhetorical trick which, however, I find it impossible to eliminate because it is contained in Voltaire’s conception itself. It is the unexpected contrast of religion
and business, in which business is placed higher, practically and morally, than religion. The very device of coupling the two, as though they were forms of human endeavor on the same plane and to be judged from the same viewpoint, is not only an impertinence; it is a specific approach or, if one prefers, an experimental set-up, in which religion is ipso facto deprived of what constitutes its essence and its value. It is presented in a position in which it appears ridiculous from the start. This is a technique which sophists and propagandists of all times have employed with success, and Voltaire is a master of it. It is for precisely this reason that here, where he wants to demonstrate the blessings of productive work, he chooses neither a farm nor a business office nor a factory but the stock exchange, where people of all faiths and backgrounds congregate.

The way he invites us to enter the stock exchange is almost solemn. He calls it a place deserving of greater respect than many a court, and its frequenters deputies of all nations foregathered in the interests of humanity. Then he turns to a more detailed description of its frequenters and observes them first in their activity at the exchange, then in their private life; in both cases he emphasizes their differing in religion. As long as they are at the exchange, the difference has no importance. It does not interfere with business. This gives him the opportunity to introduce his play on the word
infidèle
. But as soon as they leave the exchange—that peaceful and free assembly, in contrast to the assemblies of battling clerics—the disparateness of their religious views comes to the fore. What was just now a harmonious whole—a symbol as it were of the ideal cooperation of all human society—now falls asunder into numerous unrelated and indeed incompatible parts. The remainder of the passage is given over to a lively description of a number of these. Leaving the exchange, the merchants disperse. Some go to a synagogue, others go to have a drink. The syntactic parallel presents the two as equally worthy ways of passing the time. Then we get a characterization of three groups of pious frequenters of the exchange: Anabaptists, Jews, and Quakers. In each case Voltaire emphasizes a purely external detail which differs from and is in no way related to the next but which in every instance is intrinsically absurd and comic. What comes out is not really the true nature of Jews or Quakers, not the grounds and the specific form of their convictions, but the external aspect of their religious ceremonial, which, especially to the uninitiated, looks strangely comic. This again is an example of a favorite propaganda device which is often used far
more crudely and maliciously than in this case. It might be called the searchlight device. It consists in overilluminating one small part of an extensive complex, while everything else which might explain, derive, and possibly counterbalance the thing emphasized is left in the dark; so that apparently the truth is stated, for what is said cannot be denied; and yet everything is falsified, for truth requires the whole truth and the proper interrelation of its elements. Especially in times of excited passions, the public is again and again taken in by such tricks, and everybody knows more than enough examples from the very recent past. And yet in most cases the trick is not at all hard to see through; in tense periods, however, the people or the public lack the serious desire to do so. Whenever a specific form of life or a social group has run its course, or has only lost favor and support, every injustice which the propagandists perpetrate against it is half consciously felt to be what it actually is, yet people welcome it with sadistic delight. Gottfried Keller describes this psychological situation very finely in one of the novellas in his Seldwyla cycle, the story of lost laughter, in which a campaign of defamation in Switzerland is discussed. It is true, the things he describes compare with what we have seen in our time as a slight turbidity in the clear water of a brook would compare with an ocean of filth and blood. Gottfried Keller discusses the matter with his calm clarity and lack of prejudice, without softening the least detail, without the slightest attempt to whitewash the injustice or to speak of it as a “higher” form of justice; and yet he seems to sense in such things an element that is natural and at times beneficial, because after all “more than once a change of government and the expansion of freedom have resulted from an unjust cause or untrue pretense.” Keller was fortunate in that he could not imagine an important change of government which would not entail an expansion of freedom. We have been shown otherwise.

Voltaire concludes with an unexpected turn:
et tous sont contents
. With the swiftness of a prestidigitator he has, in three sharp phrases, parodied three creeds or sects, and the four concluding words are sprung at us just as swiftly, surprisingly, and merrily. They are extremely rich in content. Why is everybody satisfied? Because everybody is allowed to do business and grow wealthy in peace; and because everybody is no less peacefully allowed to cling to his religious madness, with the result that no one persecutes or is persecuted. Long live tolerance! It lets everybody have his business and his fun, whether
the latter is taking a drink or persisting in some absurd form of worship.

The method of posing the problem so that the desired solution is contained in the very way in which the problem is posed, and the searchlight technique, which overilluminates the ridiculous, the absurd, or the repulsive in one’s opponent, were both in use long before Voltaire. But he has a particular way of handling them which is all his own. Especially his own is his tempo. His rapid, keen summary of the development, his quick shifting of scenes, his surprisingly sudden confronting of things which are not usually seen together—in all this he comes close to being unique and incomparable; and it is in this tempo that a good part of his wit lies. As one reads his marvelous rococo sketches, the point becomes strikingly clear. For example: