No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Extract
Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.
The eighteenth century, having inherited a pessimism from classical anthropology that its own ideology of progress had to absorb, seemed to have invented le mal de vivre. Clues to this condition are suggested by the etymology of the term vacuus: vacuousness of existence (“Everywhere I find a terrifying emptiness,” asserted the hero of a novel around 1769), and “a vague disquiet which permeates everything and finds nothing to calm it,” according to the definition of Jacques the Fatalist. Le mal de vivre was indeed an invention because, despite a terminology that was inspired by the theory of humors (“hysterical vapors” among women; “hypochondriac melancholy” for men), the philosophers and doctors of the Enlightenment already had envisaged the fatality of an anatomical “limit” for the etiology of “afflictions of the soul.” In this way, according to the Eléments de Physiologie (Elements of Physiology) of Diderot, the agitation of the imagination actually represented the degree of irritability, or of erethism, of the nervous system: “the dreams of young people in a state of innocence come from the extremities of the fibres (meaning the nervous fibres) which are the original carriers of obscure desires, vague disquiet, a melancholy whose cause they do not understand.” If we believe the article on “delight” (jouissance) in the Encyclopaedia, a “vague and melancholy disquiet,” which is linked in particular with the physiological changes occurring at puberty, constitutes a general and “normal” state of sensation, all “delight” implying by this definition the absence of disquiet in comparison with its external object. Reduced to its vibratile intensities, the “perceiving body” that is deprived of its totalizing metaphor becomes pulverized and fragmented into so many “desiring monads.” Like Condillac's statue, it destabilizes itself through the fields of force of the phenomenal world, completely obedient to the energy economy of other bodies that define its external frontier, left to the contradictory universal laws of attraction and repulsion that govern them: “Here below, each part, through a higher impulse, combines toward the central harmony of a whole. We collide with one another and are thrown backward and forward by the force maintaining a general equilibrium and order, in which we participate mechanically.”
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © 1991 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
Notes
1. Thus, Voltaire wavers between trust in the "Enlightenment philoso phers" (the end of the Lettres anglaises refuting the tragic vision of Pascal's Pensées) and the perplexity of Candide. It is of some sig nificance that the complementary couple, optimism (1737) and pes simism (1757), appeared in the middle of the eighteenth century.
2. Maupertuis, quoted by Mauzi, "Les maladies de l'âme au XVIIIe siècle," Revue des sciences historiques, 1960, p. 461.
3. See M. Delon, "Du vague des passions à la passion du vague," Le Préromantisme, a symposium held at Clermont-Ferrand, ed. P. Vil laneix, Klincksieck, 1975, p. 490.
4. On the theoretical difficulty of reconciling the old temperament sys tem of vapors and the new conception of "nervous illnesses," see Mauzi, "Les maladies de l'âme au XVIIIe siècle" (see note 2), section "La mélancolie des vapeurs," p. 467.
5. Diderot, Oeuvres complètes. Club français du Livre, 1972, vol. 13, pp. 795-796.
6. See also Diderot in the article "Mélancolie" in the Encyclopédie: "It is the usual sentiment of our imperfection … most often the effect of the weakness of the soul and of the organs."
7. See O. Pot, "La figuration de la totalité in Candide," Littératures, 23, 1990, pp. 69-88.
8. La Morlière, Le Fatalisme pour prouver l'influence du sort sur l'histoire du coeur humain, 1769; see Mauzi, "Les maladies de l'âme au XVIIIe siècle," p. 476, which analyses the cosmic idea of a "vocation of misfortune" which has, without doubt, a Leibnizian origin ("Disquiet is essential to the felicity of living beings, a felicity which is never achieved through perfect possession," Leibniz, in A. Cuvillier, Vocabulaire philosophique, Armand Colin, 1956, sub verbo "Inquiétude"). On this "clash," an anticipation of the "Luna Park" world whose savagery was later revealed through urban sociology according to the analysis of Benjamin on Baudelaire, see O. Pot, "La figuration de la totalité dans Candide" (see footnote 7).
9. "Everything changes, everything passes. Only the Whole remains (….) What do you really mean with your individuals? … There aren't any. No, there is only one, single, great individual, which is the whole. In this whole, as in a machine or in any kind of animal, you will give such and such a name; but when you give the name of individual to this part of the whole, it is through a conception which is as wrong as if, in a bird, you were to give an individual name to the wing …." (Diderot, quoted by F. Schalk, "Der Artikel ‘Melancholie' in der diderotschen Enzyclopädie," Studien zur Französischen Aufklärung, Frankfurt, 2, Klostermann, 1977).
10. Rousseau, Discours sur L'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes, quoted from the 1984 Flammarion edition. The follow ing numbers indicate pages from this edition.
11. It is true that the "savage" has no "imagination"; "his soul, which is stirred by nothing, abandons itself to the single sentiment of his current existence, without any idea of the future" (183). However, "pity" or "compassion" constitutes a threshold of "generic" rupture in so far as the individual - as such - "identifies himself" morally - but not yet culturally - with the "other" (197).
12. For Rousseau, passion indeed "draws forth" language, a sort of "abstract" of nature (the cry), but this language degenerates as soon as it loses its primary relationship with the movement of passion and becomes pure "abstraction."
13. In Rousseau, passion still remains linked to the expression of the "sensitive" and unique individual, whereas in Hegel it has a dia lectical relationship with the spirit, which it serves as an instrument in a phenomenology of transformation of the nature of man history through the use of technical and cultural tools. See Zygmunt Jedryka, "Rousseau entre Hegel et Saint-Simon," Le Préromantisme (see foot note 3), pp. 259-277.
14. Rousseau, Etudes de la nature, "Le sentiment moral" (in connection with Rousseau), ed. Firmin Didot, 1843, p. 432 and, in particular, the chapter "Du sentiment de la Mélancolie" (On the Usefulness of Melancholy), p. 407.
15. This quotation is taken from the 1979 Ramsay edition. According to G. Poulet, Adolphe by B. Constant opposes the (French-style) lib ertine love to the (German-style) "metaphysical" or "serious" love. In Les Malheurs de l'insconstance, Dorat, 1772, a young man lectures an "old libertine," a symbol of an out-of-date world: "Pleasures only leave a faint trace in the soul, whereas heart-rending sensations go deeper" (p. 57). According to E. Leiter, La Passion du bonheur. Con science puritaine et sexualité moderne, (Paris, Gallimard, 1988) puri tanism, whose aim was, traditionally, to integrate sexuality with a form of vitalism, works, on the contrary, from the beginning of the eighteenth century, in the direction of the opposition morality versus sexuality.
16. See R. de Luppé, Les idées littéraires de Mme de Staël et l'héritage des Lumières (1795-1800), Vrin, 1969, p. 49.
17. R. de Luppé, ibid., p. 52.
18. A novel of the end of the eighteenth century entitled Les Réflexions d'un jeune homme by Feucher was already talking of a "voluntary melancholy" where the sick consciousness "multiplies itself, grows … and seems so well made for suffering that it even seeks reasons for eternalizing it, for anticipating it." Grief would then be an ex clusive mode of being of the soul: "Could it be true that the soul only has one way of feeling and is grief its sole attribute? Everything seems to prove it": Mauzi, "Les maladies de L'âme au XVIIIe siècle" (see footnote 2), pp. 479-480.
19. Indeed, the individual in love intuitively understands that "all that which follows love is nothingness, that nothing can replace what one feels … a conviction which leads one to think of death in the happiest moments of love" (130).
20. See also in the article "Vertu" in the Encyclopédie "the moral instinct so sure and so faithful." Leibniz was also talking of the "instinct of theory," Nouveaux essais, 1, 2, 3.
21. See Klibansky, Panofsky, Saxl, Saturne et la Mélancolie, French trans lation, Gallimard, 1989, p. 197; W. Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Frankfurt, Suhrkampf, 1928, p. 141. On this "passage to the limit," see Agamben, Stanze, French translation, C. Bourgeois, 1981, chapter I, 1. This amounted to a throwing over into a real positivity of the pathological diagnosis traditionally associated with melancholic idealization such as can still be found, for example, in the article "Mélancolie" in the Encyclopédie: "(Melancholy) is also the effect of ideas of a certain perfection which cannot be found either in oneself or in others, or in the objects of one's pleasures, or in nature…." On "sublime melancholy" before Kant, see Shaftesbury, A Letter concerning Enthusiasm, 1707.
22. Madame de Staël, De l'Allemagne, Flammarion, 1968, vol. 2, p. 136. "Is not infinity the secret of the great melancholies?" asked Balzac in Le Médecin de campagne. According to La Cousine Bette, "libertines" are "treasure hunters": see P. Barberis, Balzac et le mal du siècle …, 1970, passim.
23. Michelet, L'amour, Oeuvres complètes, Flammarion, 1985, vol. 18, p. 217. In the demoniac hysteria that releases phantasms and idle dreams, Michelet sees a "violent moral chemistry where individual passions turn into generalizations, and where generalizations become passions," La Sorcière, Flammarion, 1966, p. 21.
24. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Contes cruels, Folio, Gallimard, 1983, p. 66. Unlike "sentimentality," true passion "identifies us with the very essence of Joy! with the intense idea of Grief!" It lifts "instinct" to the "eternal" (186-90). This phenomenology of the spirit had al ready been formulated, before Mallarmé, by Vigny: Journal d'un poète, Gallimard, Pléiade, 1850, pp. 1053 and 1144: "As history lays its evidence at the feet of the idea, the idea reigns." For Rémy de Gourmont (La Culture des idées, 10/18, Union générale d'éditions, 1983, p. 8), "abstract passion" is, in short, "unconsciousness" which "plays such an important part in the intellectual process - I even think that it plays the highest part, that of queen-empress!"
25. The word appeared in les Eléments d'idéologie by Destutt de Tracy (in 1801) which Madame de Staël refuted.
26. Quoted by R. de Luppé, Les idées littéraires de Mae de Stael et l'héritage des Lumières (1795-1800) (see 16), p. 152.
27. R. de Luppé, ibid.
28. Madame de Staël, De l'Allemagne (see note 22), vol. 1, p. 212, "De la poésie classique et de la poésie romantique."
29. Here again, it is the argument of the Lettre sur les spectacles that finds itself "turned upside down": romanticism is prepared to do without classical theater, which Rousseau retained as a nostalgic ideal.
30. "At that time, men were identified with nature…. As they were doing little thinking (and) as they were always carrying the action of (their) soul to the outside, (they) had, so to speak, a corporeal soul" (Madame de Staël, De l'Allemagne [see note 2], 1, 212).
31. On the relation established by Hegel between action based on the pure interiority of consciousness and revolutionary "terror" as a trauma of history, see H. M. Enzensberger, Politik und Verbrechen. Neun Beitrage, Frankfurt, Suhrkampf, 1964, pp. 325-360.
32. This "primitive" scene is very different from that which Rousseau placed at the origin of "passions" in the Essai sur l'origine des langues. It no longer introduces a regression of history since the beginning but rather, as if in the center of this history, a break, a "void" which is like its eschatologic projection, its teleological (pro)pulsion.
33. At the origin of revolutions, there is "A certain something, hidden I don't know where, disquiet, specific to our heart which makes us take a dislike to happiness as well as to unhappiness and will hurl us from revolution to revolution until the final century" (Chateaubriand, Essai sur les révolutions, quoted by Delon [see footnote 3], pp. 489-490).
34. Chateaubriand, Le Génie du christianisme, II, 3, chapter 9, "Du vague des passions."
35. According to a different version dated 1801. René is quoted from the 1984 Folio Edition.
36. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie, Flammarion, 1966, p. 27.
37. In this way, the magnum opus becomes the "mental theater of the Idea," see Evelyn Gould, Virtual Theater, from Diderot to Mallarmé, Baltimore/London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
38. For Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and Delacroix, Journal, see W. A. Guentner, "Rhéthorique et énergie: l'esquisse," Romantisme, 46, 1984 (issue devoted to "energy"), pp. 27-36.
39. In L'Amour fou, Breton quotes Hegel: "objects appeal to us only in so far as they still contain something mysterious which has not yet been revealed." On the analogy between the "secret" of the first romantic novels (Adolphe, René, etc.) and the Kantian philosophy of the Oeffentlichkeit, or the Hegelian dramaturgy of the "sich bilden," see G. Benrekassa, "L'énigme, le secret, l'oubli," Romantisme, 56, 1987, pp. 21-28.
40. It would be appropriate to examine the coincidence: theory of the "vagueness of the passions" / birth of the "detective novel" (as in Poe, etc.). According to J. C. Vareille, "Préhistoire du roman policier," Romantisme, 53, 1986, pp. 23-36, the "gothic novel" (which is what René is) "implies the raising of a question, its solution and, in par ticular, the delay taken over this solution…. The enigma becomes one of the motors of the action." Moreover, the predecessor of the "police officer" is the "bloodhound" or the "tracker" of the "far-west" (Les Natchez anticipates F. Cooper's novels, p. 27).
41. Amélie's death, as a denial of nature by Christianity, re-writes Mademoiselle de Saint-Yves' death who, in Voltaire's L'Ingénu, also died without revealing her guilty secret.
42. See Bertrand d'Astorg, Variations sur l'interdit majeur. Littérature et inceste en Occident, Gallimard, 1990 (from Chateaubriand to Musil).
43. On the "Electra complex" as consciousness of the opposition between law and nature in romantic philosophy, particularly in Hegel, see G. Steiner, Les Antigones, Gallimard, 1984, pp. 13, 34, et seq.
44. For instance, J. P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet, CEdipe et ses mythes, Brussels, Complexe, 1988.
45. Rousseau, Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles, Flammarion, 1967, pp. 91-92.
46. Quoted by C. A. Porter, Chateaubriand, Composition, Imagination and Poetry, Anima Libri, 1978, p. 82.
47. See M. Butor, "Chateaubriand et l'Ancienne Amérique," Répertoire II, Editions de Minuit, 1964, pp. 152-192.
48. The references are to the Folio Edition, Gallimard, 1984.
49. Examples: "You drink the broth of the flesh of the dead out of the skull of the warrior"; "Mila took in her hand the skull which René had put back with the others. She saw some ants coming out of it…."
50. A. Goldschläger, "Sade et Chateaubriand," Nineteenth-Century French Studies, II, 1/2, 1973-1974, pp. 1-12.
51. Gallimard, Folio, 1976, p. 106. According to Catherine Cusset ("La passion selon Juliette," L'Infini, No. 31, 1990, pp. 17-26), the aporia of libertinage can, as at the end of Juliette, go beyond itself by means of female homosexuality (as in the stoic amicitia, the only "gener ous" and disinterested love is formed from the Same).
52. Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1787, quoted by U. Franke, "Das richtige Leben und die Kunst: Die schöne Seele im Horizont von Leibniz's Phi losophie," MLN, 103, 3, 1988, pp. 504-518. See also the article "Gran deur" in the Encyclopédie : "Good feelings are, … at one and the same time, good and great." "To the loftiness of feelings," The "great man" "adds a vast, luminous and profound spirit."
53. Phänomenologie des Geistes, quoted by U. Franke, ibid., p. 515.
54. According to Hegel, Hamlet is a "beautiful soul" but his failure stems from the fact that he is unable to turn "the melancholy and sadness which weigh him down" into carefully thought out action on the world, into phenomenology of the spirit: "Where he should only act after careful thought, he acts on impulse; where circum stances require active intervention, he remains turned in upon him self and lets events and chance decide without him and outside him," Esthétique, translated by S. Jankélévitch, Aubier, 1944, vol. 2, p. 314.
55. Essai sur les révolutions was written immediately after Chateaubraind's return from America and was still imbued with the conviction, born of the revolutionary cataclysm, that ideological Christianity had failed in its task. For this reason, it posed the question of a "post-Chris tianity" that would constitute a natural religion without worship and purified of all ceremonial. Les Natchez was added to the second part of the Essai in an attempt to achieve this. But the "spirit of Christianity" unexpectedly came to transform the ideological status of Christianity in the direction of true religion, the Christian cult manifesting the spiritual dimension of all natural religious experi ence in a poetic and ideal way. For this "beheading" of America, see M. Butor, "Chateaubriand et l'Ancienne Amérique" (see note 47).
56. In the preface to Cromwell, Hugo also attributed the origin of the "aesthetic" sentiment to the intrusion of the "vagueness of the pas sions" into modernity: "Under the influence of this spirit of Chris tian melancholy and philosophical criticism, poetry took a great step forward which changed the whole face of the intellectual world. It began to distinguish the grotesque from the sublime, the animal from the spirit" following on from Christianity, which "put an abyss between the soul and the body."
57. According to Claude Bernard's Introduction à l'étude de la médecine expérimentale," Champs, Flammarion, 1984, p. 125, the "dead body" is better known than the "living body" (sixteenth-century anato mies, such as Vesalius's, were still presenting the skeleton as an allegory of the "living").
58. The ancestor cult of the Natchez never arrived at the point of form ing an idea of death as the structural mourning of the "existing." Their collective behavior did not individualize death nor proble matize it in the slightest (151).
59. See R. Switzer, "Chateaubriand and the Welsh Indians," Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 3, 1-2, 1974-1975, pp. 6-17.
60. In brief, the "spirit" of Christianity came to give an explicit and conscious content, "noumenal" as Hegel puts it to a reality which "the spirits of the forest" or "the Great Spirit Manitou" of the Natchez could only make known in a phenomenological and implicit manner. The same applies to descriptions of nature that, transferred from Les Natchez to The Spirit of Christianity, comply with their interior and personalized truth. The solitude of the New World ("the world is a vast desert") anticipates the solitude of Christian hermits who radicalize its virtualities. The windings of the serpent observed in the American forest reveal their diabolic nature in Le Génie in the same way as the spectable of the migrating birds on the banks of the Meschacebe unveils to the Christian René the existence of "a secret instinct" of the absolute (1,159). Let us remind ourselves of the involuntary gesture of Mila who, in Les Natchez, seized the de composing head of a corpse. It was Rancé - this René who had repented and converted - who gave the finishing touch to this accidental gesture and gave it a religious sense by carrying the macabre relic of his lover to La Trappe. In brief, in the same way that Gothic architectural efflorescences extended the forms of the primitive forest in an ideal fashion, so the decorative ceremonial of Christianity stylizes the natural practices of cultures just as it restrospectively "sanctifies" the incestuous nature of all passion, al ready present in the naive relationships of the Natchez.
61. Hegel, La Raison dans l'histoire, 10/18, Union générale d'éditions, 1965, pp. 77 and 110.
62. In an article in the Revue française. To the approach of Niebuhr, the leader of the "historic party" whom he reproached for not having constructed his "History of Rome" "around an Idea," Chateaubri and opposes the great historical syntheses (Vico, Herder) already known to him through Michelet or Quinet, and, above all, the He gelian encyclopaedia, which made explicit the diverse modes or principles "by which the universal soul manifests itself in Human ity" and "the human spirit creates the fact." See M. Schumann, "Chateaubriand et Hegel," Revue des travaux de l'Académie des sci ences morales et politiques, 130, 1977, pp. 647-663.
63. M. Schumann, ibid., pp. 658 and 654. Chateaubriand's Hegelianism thus retrospectively permitted the march of the spirit to be seen in the "vagueness of the passions" and the death of civilizations: "'savage words,' ‘atrocious acts' thus become the envelope of a truth, in any case of a political or moral fact, which survives the gallows and the charnel-house…. On societies which constantly die, one society constantly lives."
64. "Treated everywhere as a novelistic mind … disgusted more and more by things and more and more by people, I took the option of withdrawing" (155).
65. See the note expressly inserted between the two parts of Les Natchez: "It is at this point that the first part of Les Natchez stops, the part which can be called their epic. What follows is only a mere story for which the author abandons the epic form and adopts the narrative form," Editions Hachette, 1863, p. 321.
66. In his article " Tragédie," Marmontel opposed the "system of fate," an exclusively extrinsic instance in the classical world, to the "system of passions," a radically interiorized causality, in modern tragedy. Schiller associated a calm and olympian view of the world with the epic and a dramatic and destabilized vision of the universe with modem "tragedy." (Auerbach, Mimesis, French translation, Galli mard, 1968, pp. 13 and 19).
67. Quoted by P. Barberis, René de Chateaubriand. Un nouveau roman, Larousse, 1973, p. 209.
68. For a sociology of the "evil of the age," see Michael J. Call, Back to the Garden, Chateaubriand, Senancour and Constant, Anima Libri, 1988; and R. Chambers, Mélancolie et opposition. Les débuts du modernisme en France, José Corti, 1987.
69. This quotation is taken from the Edition Garnier, 1960. See also Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, Gallimard, Pléiade, 1961, p. 950: "Isn't black clothing the necessary clothing of our age, suffering and wear ing on its black skinny shoulders the symbol of perpetual mourning ?."
70. Shoshanna Felman, La Folie dans l'oeuvre romanesque de Stendhal, José Corti, 1971, pp. 163, et seq.
71. On the "bric-a-brac mania" of the fin de siècle, see Rémy G. Saisselin, Le Bourgeois et le bibelot, Albin Michel, 1990, who analyzed the tran sition from the "collection" to the "consumption" of objects. Death, as the exhaustion of desire in things, was announced, at the be ginning of Balzac's La Peau de Chagrin, by the lumber-room of the antiquarian where Rodolphe found the fatal talisman.
72. "Im ganzen und allgemeinen jedoch beruht die dem Genie beigegebene Melancholie darauf, dass der Wille zum Leben, von je hellerem Intellekt er sich beleuchtet findet, desto deutlicher das Elend seines zustandes wahrnimmt," Sämtliche Werke, Darmstadt, 1968, vol. 2, p. 494.
73. Schopenhauer, Métaphysique de l'amour, 10/18, Union générale d'éditions, 1980, pp. 16-17.
74. In a certainly more dynamic sense, Balzac already saw in passion a "chagrin" ("peau de chagrin"), the indestructible power of which fed on the suicidal will of desiring individuals.
75. See Daniel Grojnowski, "Laforgue, lecteur de Schopenhauer et de Hartmann," De l'ordre et de l'aventure, Mélanges offerts à P.O. Walzer, La Baconnière, 1985, pp. 61-73, and, from a broader point of view, the special issue of Romantisme, 61,1988; "Pessimisme(s) (with many references to Schopenhauer).
76. This Schopenhauerian terminology is taken from Métaphysique de la mort, 10/18, Union générale d'éditions, 1980, p. 114: "Our intellect is only intended to provide our will with motives."
77. Laforgue, L'Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune, Poésie/Gallimard, 1979, pp. 61 and 32.
78. The discovery of "Buddhist" philosophies of oblivion which per mitted an escape from the "eternal return" had a great influence at the end of the century, in particular on Schopenhauer.
79. See J. E. Jackson, La Mort Baudelaire, La Baconnière, 1982. The nine teenth-century emblem of the "wandering Jew" picked up the tra dition of the "melancholic" who, since Dante, was "the one who had no hope of dying" (Inferno, chapter III) or who, in the words of Saint Teresa of Avila, "is dying from not being able to die."
80. One finds an anticipation of this in La Nouvelle Héloïse, when the peasants believe that Julie has been resurrected and refuse to allow her to be buried. On the late eighteenth-century fear of being buried alive, see M. Vovelle, Piété baroque et déchristianisation, Plon, 1973; chapter IV (pp. 78-85 in particular), and above all Claudio Milanesi, Mort apparente, mort imparfaite. Médecine et mentalités au XVIIIe siècle, French translation, Payot, 1991. In addition, the article "Mort" in the Encyclopédie linked this fantasy with Dom Calmet's theories on the existence of vampires (see below, note 81).
81. See Bela Köpeczi, "Un scandale des Lumières: les Vampires," Thèmes et Figures du Siècle des Lumières, Droz, 1980, pp. 123-136.
82. For this "archeology of death," see Chantal Grelle, "Les Voyageurs à Herculanum," et Boussif Onasti, "La description de l'Egypte," Dix-huitième siècle, 22, 1990, pp. 73-94.
83. In "the mummy's foot," it is the foot, another sexual symbol, which marks out this obsessional reminder of life.
84. Another incarnation of the hermit who, in Atala, prevents incest be tween the two lovers.
85. Gautier, La morte amoureuse, Avatars et autres récits fantastiques, Edi tion Folio, Gallimard, 1981, p. 200. Warned by this experience, Oc tave falls into "a gloomy melancholy" (204) which prevents him, from then on, from believing in love.
86. Ibid., p. 202.
87. Page numbers in parentheses refer to the text of the Complete Edi tion, Le Seuil, 1985, vol. 2.
88. "With the fierce vitality of grass…, the Arthauds married amongst themselves with shameless promiscuity" (24).
89. This poisonous "datura" which reveals the lethal design of the spe cies at the heart of desire can be found in another Paradise, that of the park of the Orotava in Breton's L'Amour fou.
90. Thus, "pansies" (pensées) appear as human beings, as "puppets" (85), the anthropomorphization of nature indicating the individual's dependence upon it.
91. In this way, the reason for the unconscious sense of unease, aroused in Serge and Albine by the scenes of "minor love affairs" painted in the bedroom where the future lovers meet reveals itself a pos teriori (a reminder of the parental scene which the two heroes re-enact by putting on the wedding clothes of their elders as in Nerval's Sylvie). Let us note that, as in Atala, the sound of a bell comes to reveal "death in this garden": "I hear bells and that is what wearies me," murmurs Serge "with an air of boredom" (69). (This bell is transformed into a funereal "whistle" in La Bête humaine: see R. M. Viti, "The cave, the clock and the railway: primitive and modem time in La Bête humaine," Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 19, 1, 1990).
92. The interest in the cult of the Virgin at the end of the nineteenth century, when the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was pro claimed (Zola then wrote Lourdes), can be explained by this Schopen hauerian desire to escape from nature.
93. Th.W. Adorno, La Dialectique négative, French translation, Gallimard, 1978.
94. See for example the eulogy of Schopenhauer in Maupassant's Auprès d'un mort.
95. The death of civilizations obsessed the "decadents" and filled them with joy: the end of Carthage in Salammbô, of the Roman Empire in Hérodiade (Flaubert, Mallarmé), of "rotting" antiquity (Huysmans). See, in general, G. Sagnes, L'Ennui dans la littérature française de Flaubert à Laforgue (1848-84), Armand Colin, 1968.
96. It is already the "lunar" and evanescent atmosphere of Verlaine's Les Fêtes galantes.
97. In Barbey d'Aurevilly, the insensitivity of the "dandy" arises from a situation where, as in the stories of vampires, love simultaneously reveals death. Thus in "Le Rideau cramoisi," the primitive scene of the dandy is made from the "diabolic" shock caused by the death of the woman at the very moment of the amorous embrace.
98. The references are to the text of the Complete Edition, Le Seuil, 1980, vol. 1.
99. Whereas the Paradou of Father Mouret is still "a natural conser vatory" (91), the husband of Renée Aristide Saccard "had proposed without laughing to put Paris under an immense cloche, in order to change it into a hot house and grow pineapples and sugar cane" (285). According to the Grand Larousse du XIXe siècle, 1875, a conservatory is a "collection of artificial means producing a fictitious result which is against nature": "in the conservatory" there reigns "a very hot and very humid atmosphere which is unhealthy for people but necessary for orchids." (Was Larousse aware that the orchid which "suffocated" Des Esseintes "to death" in A Rebours etymologically means "small testicle"?). Among the famous con servatories that symbolized the artificiality of seductive nature, we can cite in addition: The chamber of Fanfarlo in which the "air, filled with strange vapors made one want to die slowly as in a hot house" (Baudelaire, Gallimard, Pléiade, 1975, p. 576); "the over heated atmosphere of a church" where an incestuous Salomé, "brought up in ‘imples' conservatories," danced (A Rebours, chap ter 5); and the … Hot houses of Maeterlinck. On this theme, see Suzanne Braun, Quand la fleur se fait chair. Etude du motif floral dans A rebours de J.-K. Huysmans, Geneva, M.A. Dissertation, 1990.
100. I pass over in silence the heavily suggestive names of flowers in Huysmans's A Rebours (chapter 8) such as the "amorphophallus" or the "nidularium" with "scratched and gaping fundaments" which "under the thighs, in the open, was yawning at the sabre blades while bleeding."
101. It was already the exotic forest which served as "the nuptial bed chamber" for Chactas and Atala, but whereas in Chateaubriand the priest's bell interrupted this scene of natural seduction, the con servatory of the decadents pushed the artifice of nature to the point of artificiality, which brought about the triumph of consciousness in "Représentation." In the park of the Orotava in L'Amour fou, the "bread tree," the "soap tree," etc. play the same role except that, this time, - despite a brief allusion to "poison" - the seductiveness of nature is accepted as a gift for man, a delight which he can conquer "from under Blue Beard's nose" (the surrealist uncon scious pretends in effect to exploit "automatically" the sexual un conscious - that is to say without danger, under the form of a "white" sexuality. Hence Freud's mistrust of Breton).
102. "Ah! Flowers do not sentimentalize, my lady, … they make love … nothing but love…. And they make it all the time through every opening…. They think only of that…. Perverse? … Be cause they obey a single law of Life, because they satisfy the single need of Life, which is love? … Well, take a look then! … A flower is nothing but a sexual organ, my lady …," Octave Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices, reédition Gallimard, 1988, p. 214.
103. "The unconsciousness of the plant world is a decidedly too saddening nothingness," Rémy de Gourmont, Sixtine, roman de la vie cérébrale, 10/18, Union générale d'éditions, 1982, p. 59.
104. See A. Roger, "Huysmans et Schopenhauer," Huysmans. Une es thétique de la décadence, Geneva, Slatkine, 1987. The preface to A Rebours reproaches Zola for his "characters stripped of soul, simply governed by impulses and instincts."
105. References to A Rebours all refer to the Flammarion edition, 1978.
106. See A. Buisine, "Le taxidermiste," Revue des Sciences humaines, 170-171. April-Sept. 1978, p. 67: "There is no longer anything internal in the simulacrum … all the interior is going to tire itself out in surface representation."
107. Des Esseintes has "the walls (of his study)" bound "like books, with morocco …, lustred by strong plates of steel under a powerful press" (74). Since the room looks like a book turned inside out of which the interior forms the "cover," the Duke finds himself "in" the book which he is writing.
108. "Nature has had its day … There is not a single one of its in ventions which is acknowledged to be so subtle or so grandiose that it cannot be created by human ingenuity: no moonlight which cannot be produced by scenery flooded with electric spotlights; there is no waterfall that hydraulics cannot imitate to the point of being taken for the real thing; no rock which cannot be simulated by papier mâché" (80).
109. Just as at the end of Flaubert's Un coeur simple, the (Holy) Spirit is nothing but a "stuffed parrot."
110. The references are to the pagination of vol. 4 of Les Rougon-Macquart, Complete Edition, Le Seuil, 1970.
111. Besides Fécondité, La Joie de vivre also announces Quatre Evangiles: "All things considered, if one is not a pessimist, there is nothing for it but to be Christian or anarchist," Huysmans wrote to Zola on the subject of Pauline (237). A Van Gogh still life of (1885) places La Joie de vivre beside a bible open at a verse of Isaiah.
112. As Edmond de Goncourt maliciously recalled, this theme is pla giarized from one of his own novels (236).
113. To the initial title Le Mal de vivre borrowed from Schopenhauer and his translator, Bourdeu, that of La Joie de vivre was substituted in extremis (232-233).
114. Even before Fécondité, Au bonheur realized a "liturgy" of (re)production. Exceptionally, Zola indicated these landmarks in the festive calendar: "Begun on Whit Sunday, 28 May 1882 …" (11).
115. Should one see in "Denise" the feminine Dionysos, the occult force of life?
116. "He believed in the all powerfulness of his will … [t]hat is where action finds its recompense" (173).
117. The term qualifies the "cruelty" and the "fury" of Denise when she reveals to Colomban a desire which he was not aware of.
118. "I would rather die of passion than die of boredom" (173).
119. Lazare dreamed in vain of writing "dramas peopled with colos sal figures" and of departing for Oceania, toward the life of a savage (the "colossal" and the "savage" also form the ideal aes thetic of Claude in L'Oeuvre) (372).
120. This capitalism was nuanced in Germinal and in L'Argent but it remained - as in Marx - the "universal value," the leading "idea" replacing the unproductive spirit of Hegel.
121. As Schuré, Pelladan, etc. See M. Bury, "Les écrivains décadents de la fin du XIXe siècle et le sacré," Bulletin de l'association Guillaume Budé, 1990, 3, pp. 308-317.
122. Maeterlinck's work on "the intelligence of flowers" and of "bees" anticipated the work of Caillois (inspired by crystallography) on the phenomenological structure of the world.
123. See A. Raybaud, La Fabrique des Illuminations, Le Seuil, 1989.
124. Like Claudel in Connaissance de l'Est. Before Claudel, Schopen hauerian pessimism had already led the author of A Rebours to be converted ("After such a book, there is nothing for the author to do but choose between the mouth of a pistol or the foot of the Cross," wrote Barbey d'Aurevilly to Huysmans). In "the preface written twenty years after the novel," Huysmans noted that "the observations of Schopenhauer lead to nothing" while "the Church explains the origins and the causes, indicates the goals, offers the remedies" (49). Having recognized "that nervous illnesses and neuroses open fissures in the soul by which the Spirit of Evil can enter" and that the "word hysteria resolves nothing" because "this concupiscent illness" reveals a metaphysical failing ("Preface, 20 years after") (51), he shows that his own itinerary leads to the "Grace" which has become the unconscious cause of all the actions of the converted, Providence, of course, here replacing the uncon scious (57).
125. From Walt Whitman to Maurice Blondel, L'Action, 1893.
126. On the condemnation of "sorrow" in Barrès, see Le Culte du moi, 1887, "Un homme libre," chapter 7: "Acedia. Séparation dans le monastère."
127. Not without having hesitated between phylogenesis and ontogene sis, see J. Laplanche et J.B. Pontalis, Fantasme originaire. Fantasmes des origines. Origine du fantasme, Hachette, 1985, pp. 9 and 18-19 (on the way to phenomenology).
128. Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 1889.
129. On the coexistence between "modernity" and "archaism," already asserted by E. Bloch against Hegelian Marxism, see W. Moser, "Le travail du non-contemporain. Historiophagie ou historiographie," Etudes littéraires, 22, 2, 1989.
You have
Access