Mimesis (86 page)

These conditions, which in recent times have been clearly recognized and often described, we have here attempted to present as briefly as possible, in order to reach a basis for an evaluation of the function which literature created for itself within the pattern of bourgeois, and first of all of French, culture in the nineteenth century. Did it display any interest, any understanding, any sense of responsibility, in the face of the problems which we recognize in retrospect as having been the decisive ones? In regard to the most important men of the romantic generation, to Victor Hugo and Balzac, that is, these questions must be answered in the affirmative. They had overcome the romantic tendency to flee reality (cf. page 467 above), for it was not in harmony with their powerful temperaments, and Balzac’s instinct for diagnosing the times is truly admirable. But with the very next generation, whose works began to appear during the fifties, the situation changes completely. There now arose the conception and the ideal of a literary art which in no way intrudes into the practical events of the present, which avoids every tendency to affect the lives of men morally, politically, or otherwise practically, and whose sole duty it is to fulfill the requirements of style. These demand that the subjects treated (be they external phenomena, be they products of the author’s apperception or imagination) be made manifest with sensory vigor and, further, in a new, not yet outworn form which will reveal the writer’s distinctive character. In this attitude (which, by the way, admitted no hierarchy of subjects) the value of art, that is, of perfect and original expression, was assumed to be absolute, and every kind of participation in the clash of contending philosophies and doctrines was discredited, for it seemed that any such participation must necessarily lead to slogans and clichés. When the traditional antique concepts of
prodesse
and
delectare
were cited, the reaction was an absolute denial of every kind of useful function for literature because usefulness immediately suggested practical usefulness or dreary didacticism. Under date of February 8, 1866, an entry in the Goncourt diary ridicules the idea
de demander à une œuvre d’art qu’elle serve à quelque chose
. But this is not at all the modesty of a Malherbe, who is supposed to have said that a
good poet is no more useful than a good bowler. It is to ascribe to literature and art in general the most absolute value, to make them the object of a cult, almost a religion. And thus so high a rank was assigned to pleasure—which was primarily a sensory enjoyment of expression—that the word “pleasure,”
delectatio
, seemed no longer to suffice. The term seemed discredited because it stood for something altogether too trivial and easily achieved.

The attitude here described, first observable in some of the later romanticists, became prevalent in the generation born about 1820: Leconte de Lisle, Baudelaire, Flaubert, the Goncourts. It continued to prevail during the second half of the century, although of course from the beginning it appears very differently in different individuals, running the gamut of modifications from collecting impressions for the sake of aesthetic enjoyment to destructive self-torture in complete devotion to impressions and to their artistic reformulation. The sources of this attitude are to be sought in the aversion which precisely the most outstanding writers felt toward contemporary civilization and contemporary society. This aversion acted all the more strongly to make them turn away from all contemporary problems because there was a mixture of helplessness in it. After all they were themselves indissolubly connected with the bourgeois society. They were part of it by descent and training. They profited by the security and freedom of expression which it had evolved. After all it was only within it that they found their public, perhaps only a small group but still their readers and admirers. Within it too they found the almost unlimited spirit of enterprise and experimentation which supplied every literary trend, even the strangest and most out-of-the-way, with patrons and publishers. The frequent emphasis on the contrast between “artist” and “bourgeois” must not lead to the conclusion that nineteenth-century literature and art had any other soil to grow in than that of the bourgeoisie. There simply was no other. For it was only very gradually, as the century progressed, that the fourth estate attained to political and economic self-comprehension; as yet there was no indication of aesthetic autonomy on its part; its aesthetic needs were those of the petty bourgeoisie. In this dilemma of instinctive aversion and necessary implication, yet at the same time amid an almost anarchic freedom in the realms of opinion, choice of possible subject matter, and development of personal idiosyncrasies in respect to forms of life and expression, those writers who were too proud and whose talents were too personally distinctive to produce the mass merchandise for which there
was a general demand and a profitable sale were driven into an almost stubborn isolation in the domain of pure aesthetics and into renouncing any practical intervention in the problems of the age through their works.

Mixed-style realism was caught and carried along in the same current, as may be seen most clearly when, as in the case of
Germinie Lacerteux
, it claims to be concerned with contemporary social problems. As soon as we examine the content carefully, we recognize the driving force to be an aesthetic and not a social impulse. The subject treated is not one which concerns the center of the social structure; it is a strange and individual marginal phenomenon. For the Goncourts it is a matter of the aesthetic attraction of the ugly and pathological. By this I do not mean to deny the value of the courageous experiment the Goncourts undertook when they wrote and published
Germinie Lacerteux
. Their example helped to inspire and encourage others who did not stop with the purely aesthetic. It is surprising but undeniable that the inclusion of the fourth estate in serious realism was decisively advanced by those who, in their quest for new aesthetic impressions, discovered the attraction of the ugly and pathological. With Zola and the German naturalists of the end of the century the connection is still unmistakable.

Flaubert too, who was almost of the same age as Edmond de Goncourt, belonged among those who isolated themselves entirely in the realm of the aesthetic. Indeed, he may well be the one among them all who carried furthest ascetic renunciation of a personal life insofar as it did not serve his style directly or indirectly. In the preceding chapter we attempted to describe his artistic attitude as something comparable to a mystic’s theory of absorption, and we also tried to show how, through the unfaltering consistency and depth of his effort, it was he above all who penetrated to the existence of things, so that the problems of the age are made manifest although the author takes no stand in regard to them. He succeeded in this during his best years, but not thereafter. His aesthetic isolation and the treatment of reality exclusively as an object of literary representation proved in the long run no more of a boon to him than it did to most of his like-minded contemporaries. When we compare Stendhal’s or even Balzac’s world with the world of Flaubert or the two Goncourts, the latter seems strangely narrow and petty despite its wealth of impressions. Documents of the kind represented by Flaubert’s correspondence and the Goncourt diary are indeed admirable in the purity and incorruptibility of their artistic ethics, the wealth of impressions elaborated
in them, and their refinement of sensory culture. At the same time, however, we sense—because today we read with different eyes than we did only twenty or thirty years ago—something narrow, something oppressively close in these books. They are full of reality and intellect but poor in humor and inner poise. The purely literary, even on the highest level of artistic acumen and amid the greatest wealth of impressions, limits the power of judgment, reduces the wealth of life, and at times distorts the outlook upon the world of phenomena. And while the writers contemptuously avert their attention from the political and economic bustle, consistently value life only as literary subject matter, and remain arrogantly and bitterly aloof from its great practical problems, in order to achieve aesthetic isolation for their work, often at great and daily expense of effort, the practical world nevertheless besets them in a thousand petty ways. There is vexation with publishers and critics; hatred of the public, which is to be conquered despite the fact that there is no common basis of emotion and thought. Sometimes there are also financial worries, and almost always there are nervous hypertension and a morbid concern with health. But since on the whole they lead the lives of well-to-do bourgeois, since they are comfortably housed, eat exquisitely, and indulge every craving of refined sensuality, since their existence is never threatened by great upheavals and dangers, what finally emerges, despite all their intellectual culture and artistic incorruptibility, is a strangely petty total impression: that of an “upper bourgeois” egocentrically concerned over his aesthetic comfort, plagued by a thousand small vexations, nervous, obsessed by a mania—only in this case the mania is called “literature.”

Emile Zola is twenty years younger than the generation of Flaubert and the Goncourts. There are connections between him and them; he is influenced by them; he stands on their shoulders; he has a great deal in common with them. He too would seem not to have been free from neurasthenia, but through his family background he is poorer in money, tradition, fastidiousness of sentiment. He stands out boldly from among the group of the aesthetic realists. We will again cite a text, to bring out this point as clearly as possible. We have chosen a passage from
Germinal
(1888), the novel which describes life in a coal-mining region of Northern France. It is the end of the second chapter of part 3. It is kermess time, a Sunday night in July. The workmen of the place have spent the afternoon going from one bar to another, drinking, bowling, looking at all sorts of shows. The day ends climactically with a ball, the
bal du Bon-Joyeux
, at the
estaminet
of
the fat, fiftyish, but still lusty widow Désir. The ball has been going on for several hours; even the older women are coming to it now, bringing their small children.

Jusqu’à dix heures, on resta. Des femmes arrivaient toujours, pour rejoindre et emmener leurs hommes; des bandes d’enfants suivaient à la queue; et les mères ne se gênaient plus, sortaient des mamelles longues et blondes comme des sacs d’avoine, barbouillaient de lait les poupons joufflus; tandis que les petits qui marchaient déjà, gorgés de bière et à quatre pattes sous les tables, se soulageaient sans honte. C’était une mer montante de bière, les tonnes de la veuve Désir éventrées, la bière arrondissant les panses, coulant de partout, du nez, des yeux et d’ailleurs. On gonflait si fort, dans le tas, que chacun avait une épaule ou un genou qui entrait chez le voisin, tous égayés, épanouis de se sentir ainsi les coudes. Un rire continu tenait les bouches ouvertes, fendues jusqu’aux oreilles. Il faisait une chaleur de four, on cuisait, on se mettait à l’aise, la chair dehors, dorée dans l’épaisse fumée des pipes; et le seul inconvénient était de se déranger, une fille se levait de temps à autre, allait au fond, près de la pompe, se troussait, puis revenait. Sous les guirlandes de papier peint, les danseurs ne se voyaient plus, tellement ils suaient; ce qui encourageait les galibots à culbuter les herscheuses, au hasard des coups de reins. Mais lorsqu’une gaillarde tombait avec un homme par dessus elle, le piston couvrait leur chute de sa sonnerie enragée, le branle des pieds les roulait, comme si le bal se fût éboulé sur eux.

Quelqu’un, en passant, avertit Pierron que sa fille Lydie dormait à la porte, en travers du trottoir. Elle avait bu sa part de la bouteille volée, elle était soûle, et il dut l’emporter à son cou, pendant que Jeanlin et Bébert, plus solides, le suivaient de loin, trouvant ça très farce. Ce fut le signal du départ, des familles sortirent du Bon-Joyeux, les Maheu et les Levaque se décidèrent à retourner au coron. A ce moment, le père Bonnemort et le vieux Mouque quittaient aussi Montsou, du même pas de somnambules, entêtés dans le silence de leurs souvenirs. Et l’on rentra tous ensemble, on traversa une dernière fois la ducasse, les poêles de friture qui se figeaient, les estaminats d’où les dernières chopes coulaient en ruisseaux, jusqu’au milieu de la route. L’orage menaçait toujours, des rires montèrent, dès qu’on eut quitté les maisons éclairées, pour se perdre dans la campagne noire. Un souffle ardent sortait
des blés mûrs, il dut se faire beaucoup d’enfants, cette nuit-là. On arriva débandé au coron. Ni les Levaque ni les Maheu ne soupèrent avec appétit, et ceux-ci dormaient en achevant leur bouilli du matin.

Etienne avait emmené Chaval boire encore chez Rasseneur.

—“J’en suis!” dit Chaval, quand le camarade lui eut expliqué l’affaire de la caisse de prévoyance. Tape là-dedans, tu es un bon!

Un commencement d’ivresse faisait flamber les yeux d’Etienne. Il cria:—Oui, soyons d’accord… Vois-tu, moi, pour la justice je donnerais tout, la boisson et les filles. Il n’y a qu’une chose qui me chauffe le cœur, c’est l’idée que nous allons balayer les bourgeois.

(It was ten o’clock before anyone left. Women kept arriving, to find and take away their men; bands of children followed at their heels; and the mothers no longer troubled about appearances, took out long blond breasts like bags of oats, smeared their fat-cheeked babies with milk; while the children who could already walk, gorged with beer and on all fours under the tables, relieved themselves without shame. It was a rising sea of beer, Widow Désir’s casks broached, beer swelling out bellies, flowing from all sides, from noses, from eyes, and from elsewhere. People swelled up so, in the press, that everyone had a shoulder or a knee digging into his neighbor, all were made cheerful, at ease, by feeling one another’s elbows in this way. A continuous laugh kept mouths open, gaping to the ears. It was as hot as an oven, everyone was roasting, all made themselves comfortable, their flesh exposed, gilded in the thick smoke of the pipes; and the only difficulty was to move, a girl got up from time to time, went to the back, near the pump, tucked up her skirts, then returned. Under the garlands of colored paper the dancers no longer saw each other, they were sweating so—which encouraged the pit-boys to knock over the haulage-girls by promiscuous thrusts of their haunches. But when a strapping girl fell with a man on top of her, the cornet covered their fall with its furious sounds, the swing of feet rolled them, as if the dance had collapsed on them.