Aisthesis. Jacques Ranciere

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СКАЧАТЬ of experts: Russian aristocrats, who act as professors of political diplomacy and romantic strategy; Jansenist priests aware of all the Jesuit intrigues; Italian conspirators with expert intelligence of state secrets; Parisian academics up to speed on the secrets of noble families. And he spares us no details about manoeuvres to obtain a diocese or a position as a tax collector, the conspiracies led by the Ultras to re-establish the old regime, and the fifty-three model letters to send in sequence to overpower even the most unassailable virtues. Later, in Lucien Leuwen, he explains at length how to ‘run’ an election and how to overthrow a cabinet. It is not difficult to see why an illustrious reader, Erich Auerbach, considered Red and Black to mark a decisive moment in the history of the realist novel. ‘Insofar as the serious realism of modern times cannot represent man otherwise than as embedded in a total reality, political, social, and economic, which is concrete and constantly evolving – as is the case today in any novel or film – Stendhal is its founder.’³ The circumstances surrounding the book seem to confirm his analysis: 1830, the year the novel appeared, was also the year the people of Paris expelled the last of the Bourbons in three days. Two years later Balzac became famous as a writer for La Peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass’s Skin), in which the banker Taillefer’s banquet for journalists provides a tableau of the bourgeois royalty of opinion, which seems to respond precisely to the aristocratic and ecclesiastical intrigues described in Red and Black. How could one fail to notice the concordance between the fall of the last monarch of divine right and the growth of the great novelistic genre, which describes the inner workings of post-revolutionary society and thus takes the place of traditional poetic genres in the new literature? And how could one ignore that this growth begins with the story of the young plebeian setting out to conquer high society?

      Yet the promised concordance between the growth of a genre and the rise of a class is immediately muddled. The Revolution of July 1830 had already displaced the narrative of an ambitious plebeian facing a society marked by nostalgia for nobility and Jesuit intrigues. Various critics remarked as much when the book was released: the diplomat–writer’s knowledge of the world referred to the world that had just been overthrown.⁴ But the rupture created by the July days between the world that had given rise to the book and the one in which it was published is not the most important one. It is in the very heart of the story that the expected concordance between fictional structure, the logic of a character, and the narrative of the workings of the social machine, falls apart. Throughout the novel we see the hero constantly calculating his gestures, words and attitudes. We see representatives from different social circles – the illiterate carpenter hoping to get a little more cash, the grand vicar seeking a diocese, the provincial bourgeois aiming for prebends and distinctions, a young noblewoman dreaming of romantic adventures – multiply calculations of means and ends around him. Finally, we witness the novelist incessantly mixing in his own reflections with the characters’ thoughts, and lecturing them in the name of this science of worldly success that he had generously attributed to them. But the instant the shot is fired, all calculation and reflection come to a halt. The letter of denunciation written by an obscure provincial Jesuit has ruined the dreams of Julien, Mathilde and the Marquis de la Mole. A pure succession of acts follows, which has not been announced or motivated by anything, and which takes place in less narrative time than needed until now for one of the lovers to make the slightest gesture toward the other. Julien leaves Mathilde, heads to Verrières, buys a gun, shoots at Madame de Rênal, then remains still and, with no reaction, lets himself be led to the prison, where he will finally enjoy perfect happiness with her, without attempting the slightest explanation of his act. The gunshot undoubtedly has an obvious cause for the reader: the denunciatory letter signed by Madame de Rênal. But at no point is this reflection included in Julien’s thoughts and feelings. It is not included simply because it cannot be. In fact, the slightest calculation in which the novelist may have revelled with him until now would have been enough to dissuade the hero from an act that is the most absurd response possible in his situation.

      Thus the act, which is the culmination of an entire network of intrigues, also annuls it by ruining every strategy of means and ends, any fictive logic of cause and effect. This act definitively separates the ambitious plebeian from the causal rationality and the very temporality in which his conquering goals were inscribed. Action and the ‘real world’, Stendhal now tells us, are a matter for ‘aristocratic hearts’, representatives of the old world. Mathilde, the young aristocrat fascinated by the rebellious lords from the time of the League, takes care of it on her own, even if her noble passion for action only ends up creating a funeral ceremony in bad taste (but the men of action of the new society will not do any better: in Balzac, the pompous burial of Ferragus’s daughter will be the greatest success of the Thirteen). Ideal life alone can provide perfect happiness to the obscure beings society only recalls for two weeks if there has been a spectacular crime. Pre-revolutionary society, which considered itself eternal, occasionally liked to enjoy good times – whether erotic or narrative – with parvenu peasants with rosy complexions and rude manners, whom they could always send back to the fields after using them. But the new society could no longer surrender to such innocent games with the slender, effeminate sons of workers who had become Latinists thanks to the priests, and ambitious from hearing tales of Napoleonic feats. The only room it was willing to give them was as short news reports. The plot of Red and Black was actually inspired by two brief news items, two singular crimes, taken from the newly founded Gazette des Tribunaux, the archive of criminal acts signalling the dangerous energy and intelligence of the children of the people. This two-week glory is the true end promised to the ambitious plebeian, the glory to which Julien prefers the pure enjoyment of reverie that subtracts him from time. And the book that tells the story of this exemplary fate can only conclude, as Julien does, by dissociating the faits divers that capture the attention of society for fifteen days from the pure present of this enjoyment.

      But this ending returns to the beginning. In fact, Julien’s heart is divided from the very beginning, and the novel along with it. There are the great schemes the young man devises while reading the Memorial of Saint Helena and the ‘small events’ that punctuate life at Monsieur de Rênal’s house. Yet, there are two kinds of ‘small events’: some obey the classic logic of small causes that produce large effects, like refilling a mattress or a dropped pair of scissors, that make Madame de Rênal Julien’s accomplice, despite her best intentions. Others are not linked in any chain of causes or effects, means or ends. On the contrary, they suspend these links in favour of the sole happiness of feeling, the sentiment of existence alone: a day in the country, a butterfly hunt, or the pleasure of a summer evening spent in the shade of a linden tree with the soft noise of the wind blowing. In the heterogeneous weaving of small events, the grand schemes find themselves torn between two kinds of logic: there is Julien’s duty that orders him to take revenge on those who humiliate him, by mastering his master’s wife; and there is the pure happiness of a shared sensible moment: a hand that surrenders to another in the mildness of the evening under a tall linden tree. The entire story of Julien’s relation with Madame de Rênal is constituted by this tension between such duty and such pleasure. But this fictional tension is not simply a matter of individual sentiment. In fact, it opposes two manners of exiting plebeian subjection: through role reversal or through the suspension of the very play of these roles. Julien triumphs the moment he stops fighting, when he simply shares the pure equality of an emotion, crying at Madame de Rênal’s knees. This happiness presumes that the conqueror should shed any ‘deftness’, and the loved ‘object’ no longer be object to anything – it too must shed all social determination, and be subtracted from the logic of means and ends. Julien experiences such happiness with Madame de Rênal in the countryside retreat at Vergy. He renounces it by heading for Paris and his great expectations. He finds it again in prison, where he has nothing to anticipate except death. Such happiness can be summarized in a simple formula: to enjoy the quality of sensible experience that one reaches when one stops calculating, wanting and waiting, as soon as one resolves to do nothing.

      It is not difficult to recognize the origin of the plebeian heaven that Julien enjoys in his cell and on the prison terrace. It is the same heaven that, seventy years earlier, another artisan’s son, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, enjoyed on the other side of Jura, lying all afternoon in his barque on СКАЧАТЬ