Living Well with Pessimism in Nineteenth-Century France (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture) 3030610136, 9783030610135

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Living Well with Pessimism in Nineteenth-Century France Joseph Acquisto

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture Series Editor Joseph Bristow Department of English University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA, USA

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a monograph series that aims to represent innovative and interdisciplinary research on literary and cultural works that were produced from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fin de siècle. Attentive to the historical continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series features studies that assist in reassessing the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The aim of the series is to look at the increasing influence of different types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reflects a broad shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the 1800–1900 period but also every field within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14607

Joseph Acquisto

Living Well with Pessimism in Nineteenth-Century France

Joseph Acquisto University of Vermont Burlington, VT, USA

ISSN 2634-6494     ISSN 2634-6508 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ISBN 978-3-030-61013-5    ISBN 978-3-030-61014-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61014-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image © Alamy Stock Photo, Image ID: P52HE0 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

All translations from French are my own unless otherwise indicated. Part of Chap. 4 appeared in an earlier version in the article “Pessimism, Narrative, and Meaning in Henry Céard’s Une belle journée,” in Dix-Neuf 24: 1 (2020), 1–15.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Schopenhauer: Resignation, Compassion, and Narrative 37 3 Debates on Pessimism in Late Nineteenth-­Century France 77 4 Pessimism and the Novel: Fiction and the “As-If”151 5 Pessimism and the Poetic Imagination225 6 Conclusion: Living Well with Pessimism, Then and Now293 Index301

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Many books on pessimism begin with a disclaimer or clarification, and I suppose this one should be no exception. When it came up in conversation with colleagues that I was writing a book on pessimism, the general impression was that I should be condemning it or examining it as a social or psychological problem. It also became clear that, for many, pessimism is closely allied, if not synonymous, with ideas such as cynicism, nihilism, or despair, and sometimes with melancholy. The frequency with which I heard these reactions reminded me how differently the defenders of pessimism understand the concept, as opposed to those with only a passing acquaintance with the term as the undesirable opposite of optimism. Contemporary popular culture no doubt contributes to this bias in favor of optimism, and all that it suggests about related notions of hope and progress. But at least one manifestation of popular engagement with optimism and pessimism, a variation on the “glass half empty” scenario, actually does get us some way toward a better understanding of pessimism as its defenders would characterize it. These days, one can easily purchase a T-shirt, mug, framed print, and other items featuring the following statement: “If you see your glass as half empty, pour it into a smaller glass and stop bitching.” While at first this might appear to be a rebuke to the pessimist who sees the glass as half empty, I would argue that a true pessimist would absolutely endorse the statement. What it advocates, after all, is an adjustment of expectations based on the observed reality with which © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Acquisto, Living Well with Pessimism in Nineteenth-Century France, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61014-2_1

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one is confronted, a mindset that allows one to cope with a situation rather than aspiring to something else, and crafting a livable reality from the situation by recasting the way in which one conceives it. This already gets us quite far into the kind of pessimism I will address in this book. This sort of reconceptualizing reality is based on a new interpretation of it, one that refuses the temptation to take a side, presumably based on disposition, in the “glass half full” debate. Rather, it reframes the question and finds new conceptual meaning in a given lived situation and makes a proactive move to adjust conceptual reality to actual reality in a way that retains lucidity about the situation at hand, while all the while predisposing one to live better with that reality by that act of interpretive reframing. Here in this introduction, then, I would like to adjust expectations about what pessimism is and what it is not, both with reference to the nineteenth century and also, in our own time, to two periods marked by a significant degree of intrahistorical continuity for reasons I explore more fully later. Joshua Foa Dienstag’s pathbreaking book Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit begins by distinguishing pessimism from nihilism, and later demonstrates the difference between them in this aphorism: “Pessimism expects nothing. But this is not nihilism. Nihilism would be not wanting anything. Extreme nihilism? Wanting nothing” (256). While pessimism is distinct from nihilism in the former’s investment in living well in the world and affirming an ethics based on shared human concerns, pessimism does have a more complex relationship, which we could characterize as a family resemblance, with other distinct but more potentially related concepts. Georges Minois, for instance, includes pessimism in a long list of terms by which people have designated what Minois calls le mal de vivre. These include “taedium vitae ou fatigue de vivre, mélancolie, tristesse, acédie, dépression, désespoir, pessimisme, nihilisme, ennui, nausée, dégoût” [“taedium vitae or weariness of life, melancholy, sadness, acedia, depression, despair, pessimism, nihilism, boredom, nausea, disgust”] (7). What links all of these, according to Minois, is “le malaise d’être un homme” [“the malaise of being a human being”] (7). Such affective categories such as melancholy or sadness have a more complex relationship to pessimism than an idea such as nihilism because, while these affective states are distinct from pessimism, and while it is possible to be a pessimist without being melancholy, the two are often associated. In fact, the status of pessimism as either aligned with or distinct from moods or emotions is one aspect of the emergent conversation about it in the nineteenth century, as I shall examine in more detail in due course.

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Defenders of pessimism generally resist seeing it as identifiable with a certain affective state, concentrating instead on its function as an interpretive lens or worldview. Dienstag indicates that, as a first step in a revaluation of pessimism as a worldview: we must learn to avoid thinking of pessimism as a psychological disposition somehow linked to depression or contrariness. […] We must divorce the concept of pessimism from that of unhappiness as thoroughly as we separate theories of progress from happiness. Happiness and unhappiness, it ought to go without saying, have existed forever. But pessimism, like progress, is a modern idea. (17)

It is indeed a modern idea; the word pessimisme entered the French language in 1759  in the sense of “disposition d’esprit” [“mental disposition”] and in 1819 as a “doctrine,” that of Arthur Schopenhauer specifically. One of the important aspects of the family resemblance that it shares with the categories that Minois identifies in his history of le mal de vivre is the link to intellectual activity. The insistence in modern pessimism on lucidity about the human condition can be traced back to antiquity; the link between thought and melancholy has a long history, as does the identification of pessimism or one of its ancestors as a sickness. As Minois indicates: Les causes sont aussi variées que les symptômes. Aux causes physiques s’ajoutent des causes intellectuelles : ceux qui cherchent à trop approfondir les choses, à trouver les raisons de tout, à trop étudier les sciences et la philosophie, ceux-là deviennent mélancoliques. On retrouve ici l’association entre mal de vivre et préoccupations intellectuelles. « La pensée ardue, la remémoration, l’étude, l’examen approfondi, l’imagination, la recherche de la signification des choses, et aussi les visions et les jugements […] peuvent en très peu de temps porter l’âme à la mélancolie, si celle-ci s’immerge trop profondément en elles » [Constantinus Africanus, De melancolia]. Ces activités « incorporent la mélancolie […] dans la conscience de leur faiblesse intellectuelle et, dans la détresse que cette faiblesse leur cause, deviennent mélancoliques. La raison pour laquelle leur âme tombe malade […] réside dans la fatigue et l’abus de leurs forces ». Y a-t-il de remèdes ? Une visite au bordel de temps en temps sera très bénéfique, affirme Constantin en s’appuyant sur l’autorité de Rufus d’Ephèse. (57)

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[The causes are as varied as the symptoms. In addition to the physical causes there are intellectual causes: those who seek too much depth, to find reasons for everything, to study the sciences and philosophy excessively, become melancholic. We find here the association between world weariness and intellectual preoccupations. “Hard thinking, recall, study, deep examination, imagination, the search for the meaning of things, and also visions and judgments, can in very little time bring the soul to melancholy if it immerses itself too deeply in them” [Constantinus Africanus, De melancolia]. These activities “incorporate melancholy […] in the awareness of their intellectual weakness and, in the distress that this weakness causes them, become melancholic. The reason why their soul falls sick […] resides in fatigue and abuse of their forces.” Are there remedies? A visit to a brothel from time to time would be very beneficial, affirms Constantine, relying on the authority of Rufus of Ephesus.]

At stake, as we shall have occasion to see, is the question of what constitutes the kind of excess that would justify classifying a pessimistic worldview as a sickness. If thought leads us to conclude that we should cultivate detachment from life based on a justified perception that things often go badly, then it can hardly be called a sickness, and may in fact be better classified as a manifestation of a healthy worldview. To recall a phrase often attributed to Gérard de Nerval, La mélancolie est une maladie qui consiste à voir les choses tells qu’elles sont [Melancholy is an illness that consists in seeing things as they are.]1

The tension between somber worldviews as a manifestation of sickness and lucidity is apparent in this comment from an 1879 letter written to Emile Zola by novelist and poet Henry Céard, whose work I consider in Chaps. 3 and 4: “L’humanité est une grande maladie dont chaque individu est une manifestation pathologique” [“Humanity is a great sickness of which each individual is a pathological manifestation”] (quoted  in Salem 185). Such questions about sickness and health were an important part of the debate on pessimism in the nineteenth century, as I shall explore in more depth in Chap. 3, and which remain part of the debate on pessimism in our own time, as Minois signals in his analysis of pessimism as the troubling voice of conscience in the contemporary world, a sort of cog in the smooth works of the society of obligatory optimism, consumption, and progress:

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La société contemporaine ne veut pas entendre parler de pessimisme. Pour tenter d’échapper à la conscience de son vide spirituel, elle se précipite dans l’activisme, les distractions, le consumérisme, en valorisant le dynamisme, le narcissisme, l’affirmation de soi. Mais, en culpabilisant les perdants, la société hédoniste est une machine à produire des dépressifs, qu’elle recycle à coups d’antidépresseurs. Ceux qui ne jouent pas le jeu, ceux qui ne peuvent pas détacher leurs pensées de l’abîme, ceux qui n’arrivent pas à « y croire » sont marginalisés ; ils passent pour des « anormaux », des malades qu’il faut soigner. Qui, cependant, est le véritable malade ? Celui qui, regardant le monde comme il est et comme il a toujours été, persiste à dire : « Tout va bien ! », ou celui qui, prenant acte de la tragédie de l’histoire humaine, sombre dans la mélancolie ? (6) [Contemporary society does not want to hear about pessimism. In order to try to escape awareness of its spiritual void, it rushes into activism, distractions, and consumerism, and values dynamism, narcissism, the affirmation of self. But, by blaming the losers, hedonist society is a machine that produces depressives, which it recycles by means of antidepressants. Those who don’t play the game, those who cannot separate their thoughts from the abyss, those who don’t manage to “believe” are marginalized; they pass for “abnormal,” sick people that we must take care of. Who, though, is the true sick one? The one who, looking at the world as it is and as it always has been, persists in saying: “Everything is going well!,” or the one who, taking note of the tragedy of human history, sinks down into melancholy?]

Pessimism’s status as a product of modernity also helps us to identify another important clarification, namely, that pessimism is not merely synonymous with things ending badly. If that were so, then a lion’s share of French literature, at least according to some popular stereotypical views of it, would be pessimistic. But ending badly is by no means synonymous with pessimism. To take a nineteenth-century example, Emile Zola is a writer whose texts portray human suffering and “bad” endings but who, as Ronald Frazee indicates, can hardly be termed a pessimist: Si Zola présenta son œuvre comme essentiellement optimiste—le pessimisme lui apparaissant comme un danger social—il ne put jamais, au moment même où il déclarait ses plus ardents espoirs, cacher la mélancolie profonde de sa vision de la vie, où la peine quotidienne et la nécessité du perpétuel qui-vive occupent le premier plan. (76)

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[If Zola presented his work as essentially optimistic—pessimism seemed to him to be a social danger—he was never able, at the very moment when he declared his most ardent hopes, to hide the profound melancholy of his vision of life, where daily pain and the necessity of a perpetual being on the alert are at the foreground.]

While Zola knew a period of personal despair that manifests in his work in darker novels such as Pot-Bouille, his engagement with Schopenhauer in the 1880s had the perhaps paradoxical effect of moving him away from pessimism. His friend and fellow writer Henry Céard, whose novel Une belle journée I will analyze in Chap. 3, identifies Zola’s belief in progress as a key source of the distance he took from Céard’s pessimism: “Il me reprochait toujours mon scepticisme scientifique, il croyait au progress […]. Ma doctrine de résignation […] le mettait hors de lui” [“He always reproached me for my scientific skepticism; he believed in progress […]. My doctrine of resignation […] put him beside himself”] (quoted in Zola 1752). And indeed in the preparatory sketch for Au Bonheur des Dames, Zola describes his project this way: “Je veux dans Au Bonheur des Dames faire le poème de l’activité moderne. Donc, changement complet de philosophie : plus de pessimisme d’abord, ne pas conclure à la bêtise et à la mélancolie de la vie, conclure au contraire à son continuel labeur” [“In Au bonheur des Dames I want to write the poem of modern activity. Therefore, complete change of philosophy: no more pessimism first, no concluding with the stupidity and melancholy of life, conclude instead with its continual labor”] (Zola 1679). And indeed Zola’s later novels, beginning in the period of Au Bonheur des Dames and La Joie de vivre, embrace a hopeful vision centered on belief in ultimate progress, as evidenced in the hope placed in the unnamed child who figures at the end of the Rougon-Macquart series, the son of Docteur Pascal. So while melancholy may well accompany pessimism as an affective response, and while a vision of things ending badly does in fact play a role in pessimism, neither is sufficient to delineate it. What is important here is not the presence or absence of melancholy, or the portrayal of tragic aspects of life, but the perception of it as something in which it is important to dwell or as a kind of sickness over which one should aim to triumph. For Zola, both personally and in terms of the shape of his oeuvre, it was clearly the latter. Michel Guérin expands the definition of pessimism as an expectation that things will go badly by underscoring that, for the pessimist, things

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ne peuvent pas avoir d’issue heureuse. Pourquoi ? Parce que le mal est radical. Prenons un de ses aspects : la douleur. Le pessimiste admet qu’il nous arrive de goûter un plaisir, mais il le veut aussitôt gâté à la fois par sa fugacité et par le goût de déception qu’il nous laisse. Nous regrettons d’avance ce que nous n’arrivons pas à vivre heureusement dans l’instant parce que nous anticipons sur l’universelle corruption de tout ce qui se présente comme un bien. Celui-ci n’est qu’un mal déguisé et différé, ou un leurre. (77) [cannot have a happy ending. Why? Because evil is radical. Let’s take one of its aspects: pain. The pessimist admits that it happens that we taste pleasure, but he sees it ruined by both its fleetingness and by the taste for deception that it leaves with us. We regret in advance that we don’t manage to live happily in the instant because we anticipate the universal corruption of everything that presents itself as a good. This is only a disguised and deferred evil, or a trap.]

This sort of emplotment of a present event in the context of a future scenario that will give the present event its negative valence is an important part of pessimism’s relation to a narrative construction of human experience in the world whereby meaning is generated by our expectations based in past experiences. Like Guérin, Joshua Foa Dienstag identifies pessimism with “an expectation that things will go badly” (1), but also offers this expanded characterization that emphasizes the way in which pessimism helps us live better in the world rather than merely passing negative judgment upon it: It is a proposed stance from which to grapple with a world that we now recognize as disordered and disenchanted. It includes judgments about history and the possible course of our civilization, but it is not really a detailed set of predictions about future politics or economics. As such, pessimism stands opposed to a modern optimism that has taken many forms. Most, if not all, political writers today are ready to recognize and reject the historical utopianism found in the philosophical descendants of Hegel. (xi)

While definitions of pessimism vary and indeed play a role in the debates surrounding it in the nineteenth century and in our own time, I would like to advance a characterization of it as a worldview that seeks lucidity about the reality of human suffering and injustice, is wary both of overly simplistic and unjustifiably optimistic views of human progress, and seeks a basis for human solidarity in the face of the shared human experience of

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suffering and the imperative to respond to it in ways that attempt to articulate meaning to such a bleak human existence. Such a pessimism is one that helps us live rather than impeding life; it is interested in ways to cope with suffering, move toward alleviating it when possible, and identifying points of commonality rather than division among human persons. It attaches great importance to meaning and seeks to serve as a tool to help us cultivate it, while conscious all the while of the potential meaninglessness of suffering or human existence more broadly. In that sense, pessimism as I shall understand it here is better identified as an attempt at a solution to the problem of human existence rather than as itself a problem, something to be criticized, medicalized, or discouraged. Like Dienstag in his study, I am both looking at pessimism in writers and thinkers historically, with a focus on later nineteenth-century France, and also advocating for pessimism, understood as I have just outlined it, as a still pertinent and recommendable worldview that is part of our inheritance from the birth of the modern in the nineteenth century. One important role of pessimists is to reframe questions in ways that call commonplaces into question and to provide a critique of what might be a default optimistic view of experience. I have already hinted at this role in my opening example of new ways of thinking about the glass half empty or half full. Pessimists’ emphasis on lucidity often allows them to reformulate questions in ways that encourage new understanding. Contemporary examples abound. A recent CNN article bearing the title “Being Happier Will Help You Live Longer, So Learn How to Be Happier” illustrates the way in which popular discourse conflates pessimism and unhappiness. The article establishes a simplistic and straightforward binary relationship: Optimism and pessimism are the yin and yang of happiness. Optimists are people who expect good things to happen to them, while pessimists expect bad things to happen. It turns out that looking on the bright side of life is really good for your health. Research has found a direct link between optimism and a stronger immune system, better lung function and cardiac health. […] A recent meta-analysis of studies found that compared to pessimists, an optimist had about a 35% lower risk of major heart complications, such as a cardiac death, stroke or a heart attack. “In fact, the more positive the person, the greater the protection from heart attacks, stroke and any cause of death,” said Mt. Sinai’s Rozanski, who was the lead author on the study. (LaMotte)

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The article takes it for granted that it is desirable to seek “protection from […] any cause of death,” glossing over not only the question of whether life should in fact be prolonged and under what circumstances but also of what makes a life worth living, if indeed anything does. Implied here is the unreasonable assumption that life is to be prolonged as much as possible by, presumably, adopting a cheerier disposition. This is not to say that a pessimist would always affirm that life is not worth living, but a view that is at least open to that possibility allows a fuller consideration of the questions at stake in such simplistic claims, and may guard against unreasonable attempts to prolong life at all costs despite whatever suffering that may entail on the part of the living.2 Such an imperative to cheerfulness can in fact have unintended but very real negative consequences.3 Mariana Alessandri has pointed to the way in which United States culture features a potentially toxic culture of cheerfulness that risks confusing it with happiness and recasting it in ways that resonate with an obsession with capitalism and individual self-fashioning: The aorta of the US economy pumps out optimism, positivity and cheerfulness while various veins carry back US dollars naively invested in schemes designed to get rich quick, emotionally speaking. Socrates was right in the Symposium when he said that we are attracted to what we are not, and the psychologists behind production and marketing know better than we do the ubiquity of US anxiety, depression and restlessness. Many of us who might not be cheerful by nature get pressured to smile by the reigning notion that we alone are responsible for our happiness. Window-shop in any middle-class city and you will discover a consumer culture desperate to live up to the adage ‘Think like a proton: always positive!’ (Alessandri)

Barbara Ehrenreich likewise draws historical connections between Calvinist work on the self and the contemporary culture of positive thinking: The most striking continuity between the old religion and the new positive thinking lies in their common insistence on work—the constant internal work of self-monitoring. The Calvinist monitored his or her thoughts and feelings for signs of laxness, sin, and self-indulgence, while the positive thinker is ever on the lookout for “negative thoughts” charged with anxiety or doubt. […] A curious self-alienation is required for this kind of effort: there is the self that must be worked on, and another self that does the work. Hence the

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ubiquitous “rules,” work sheets, self-evaluation forms, and exercises offered in the positive-thinking literature. These are the practical instructions for the work of conditioning or reprogramming that the self must accomplish on itself. (90–91)

Such considerations of the insidious political consequences of a cultural bias in favor of an unjustified optimism open the way to rethink a common critique of pessimism as quietist or even reactionary in terms of its political orientation.4 I hope to show that, rather, pessimism’s effort to generate a lucid but livable worldview can enable a progressive politics based on a recognition of the reality of human suffering and injustice that optimism, especially in its manifestation as obligatory cheerfulness, simply ignores or dismisses. Pessimism occupies a unique place because while few would claim that it is a philosophical position, it is less clear whether it is a mood or temperament. While, as I have suggested, it is important to distinguish pessimism from melancholy, it is difficult to specify the precise relation between ideas associated with pessimism and the question of temperament. It becomes something of a chicken and egg game to determine whether pessimism springs from a melancholy disposition or pessimism’s lucidity gives rise to melancholy as an affective reaction. Early twentieth-century thinkers such as Miguel de Unamuno claimed that a pessimistic mood precedes its conceptual content. He writes in The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations in 1912: Our philosophy, that is, our mode of understanding or not understanding in the world and life, springs from our impulse toward life itself. And life, like everything affective, has roots in our subconscious, perhaps in our unconscious. It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but our optimism or pessimism—of perhaps physiological or pathological origin, the one as well as the other—that makes our ideas. (5)

Likewise, Bertrand Russell aligned pessimism with temperament and strictly delineated it from philosophical reason: “From a scientific point of view optimism and pessimism alike are objectionable: optimism assumes and attempts to prove that the universe exists to please us, and pessimism that it exists to displease us…. The belief in either optimism or pessimism is a matter of temperament, not reason” (727). The fact that pessimism

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sits uneasily either within the category of temperament or of philosophy points to what will be one of my central claims, namely, that pessimism, operating outside the realm of empirical viability or, at least sometimes, rational argument, leans instead on verisimilitude, which affords it a privileged relationship to literature. Contemporary philosopher David Benatar has indeed made a case for the objective validity of pessimism, responding to those who judge their lives to be good by attempting to “demonstrate that people are very unreliable judges of the quality of their own lives” and that “when we correct for the biases that explain the unreliability of these assessments and we look at human lives more accurately, we find that the quality (of even the best lives) is actually very poor” (Human 67). He goes on to blame an invalid standard of comparison for such inaccurately optimistic judgments: Most humans have accommodated to the human condition and thus fail to notice just how bad it is. Their expectations and evaluations are rooted in this unfortunate baseline. Longevity, for example, is judged relative to the longest actual human lifespans and not relative to an ideal standard. The same is true of knowledge, understanding, moral goodness, and aesthetic appreciation. Similarly, we expect recovery to take longer than injury, and thus we judge the quality of human life off that baseline, even though it is an appalling fact of life that the odds are stacked against us in this and other ways. (Human 82)

And optimism bias is indeed a proven unconscious phenomenon, which, like other such biases, can be corrected by careful philosophical reflection.5 Whether we are convinced by Benatar’s objective argument for pessimism, though, is beside the point for my purposes in this study, where I claim that pessimism’s worth should not be considered in terms of falseness or truth. While some of its claims can indeed be substantiated by empirical verification of documented human suffering,6 pessimism as I understand it here is more concerned with the narratively inflected arc of the relation of the future to the past and present, specifically in terms of how to draw the right conclusions from what we have established about human suffering in terms of ways to assign it meaning and to carry on living. I would claim that pessimism’s main concern, in the nineteenth century as in our own time, is directly related to, but not strictly limited to or circumscribed by, the main premises of Schopenhauer’s thought. For now, I will identify these premises as the emphasis on human suffering and the

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importance for any system of thought to account for it rather than attempting to ignore or even to justify it, and crafting an ethics of living in the world in the face of lucid recognition of suffering and our inability to alter the fact of suffering as playing an important role in defining human experience. The writers I examine seek to account for suffering and to affirm the value of pessimism from within rather than, like Friedrich Nietzsche, seeking to transcend it in a joyful or Dionysian form or, like Eduard von Hartmann, advocating for a collective rather than an individual renunciation of the will to live.7 Nineteenth-century writer Elme-Marie Caro, whom we shall explore in more detail in Chap. 3, founds a critique of optimism on the grounds that it is simply, and perhaps willfully, blind to suffering and would thus be untenable if the optimist were to take full measure of that suffering. He gives the following characterization of pessimism in “La Poésie philosophique dans les nouvelles écoles, un poète positiviste” [“Philosophical Poetry in the New Schools, A Positivist Poet”], an 1874 article in the Revue des Deux Mondes: Promenons l’optimiste le plus endurci dans les hôpitaux, les lazarets, les cabinets d’opérations chirurgicales, dans les cachots, sur les places d’exécution, sur les champs de bataille ; il verra si la vie est autre chose qu’une chasse incessante, où, tantôt chasseurs et tantôt chassés, les êtres se disputent les lambeaux d’une horrible curée, une guerre de tous contre tous, une sorte d’histoire naturelle de la douleur qui se résume ainsi : vouloir sans motif toujours souffrir, toujours lutter, puis mourir, et ainsi de suite dans les siècles des siècles jusqu’à ce que la croûte de notre planète éclate. Qu’il vaudrait bien mieux que le monde, étant si mauvais, n’eût pas été ou qu’il cessât d’être ! (253) [Take the most hardened optimist on a walk through hospitals, lazarettos, operating rooms, prisons, sites of execution, battlefields; he will see whether life is something other than an incessant hunt where, sometimes hunters and sometimes hunted, beings fight over horrible scrap pickings, a war of all against all, a sort of natural history of pain that can be summed up this way: wanting with no reason always to suffer, fight, then die, and on and on forever until the crust of our planet bursts. It would have been much better that the world, being so bad, had never been or that it cease to be!]

One could argue that such a view is situational, and that Caro risks overstating the case when he states that life is a war of all against all, in the name of calling attention to the suffering that an optimist fails to see. But

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that situationality is part of the point here: pessimism serves as a guard against a dangerous tendency to assert progress and happiness at the expense of erasing those who do not benefit from it or experience it. While this is not Caro’s own point in this passage, I would argue that it is from this insistence on construing a worldview that takes suffering into account that provides a progressive political valence to pessimism. Lacking an Archimedean point by which to judge objectively the truth value of pessimism, we are forced to engage with it from our specific and situational vantage point. When the historical moment is given to narratives of progress and improvement, which is arguably the case in nineteenth-century France as in our own time and place, accounts such as the one Caro gives here serve to restore lucidity about suffering not in order to make absolute claims about it but to moderate ideas about ways of living in the world that take it appropriately into account. What it would mean to do so appropriately is part of the conversation to which pessimism impels us. Another feature of pessimism is its rejection of hope but in a way that does not mean advocating despair. Rather, we can imagine this approach as reorienting the question of hope away from the hope/despair binary, in which an affirmation of despair would be much more akin to nihilism than to pessimism, and toward a view where the opposite of hope is simply non-­ hope, the rejection of the category itself. The trade-off for abandoning hope, beyond the potential for greater lucidity, is what pessimism has the potential to provide in terms of living well in the world based on more moderate expectations of it, as Joshua Foa Dienstag underscores: “While [pessimism] does indeed ask us to limit and eliminate some of our hopes and expectations, it can also provide us with the means to better navigate the bounded universe it describes” (ix).8 In that sense there is a family resemblance between pessimism and the notion of the absurd, as Albert Camus described it: Et poussant jusqu’à son terme cette logique absurde, je dois reconnaître que cette lute suppose l’absence totale d’espoir (qui n’a rien à voir avec le désespoir), le refus continuel (qu’on ne doit pas confondre avec le renoncement) et l’insatisfaction consciente (qu’on ne saurait assimiler à l’inquiétude juvénile). (Mythe 49–50) [Carrying this absurd logic to its conclusion, I must admit that that struggle implies a total absence of hope (which has nothing to do with despair), a continual rejection (which must not be confused with renunciation), and a

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conscious dissatisfaction (which must not be compared to immature unrest). (Myth 23)]

Nineteenth-century pessimism’s ethical concern with, and in many of its variants its commitment to, living a good life in the face of the impossibility of ultimate improvement in some ways prefigure the absurdism of the twentieth century that affirms political resistance not despite, but because of, its absurdity. Cultivating narratives of non-hope allows for the carving out of an imaginative space that asks what it would mean to live well without a notion of hope, in a way that balances lucidity with a livable way of moving in the world and interacting with others in a way that refuses to give in to nihilism or despair, and maintains that refusal via its focus on the question of meaning-making. Pessimism is thus situated at the intersection of literature and philosophy insofar as both these domains concern themselves with questions of meaning, and also at the intersection of forms of thought and forms of living. This focus on meaning is what separates pessimism as I understand it here from a simple affirmation of the awfulness and cruelty of life. Such would be a pre-reflective or simply non-reflective approach, whereas pessimism as I shall understand it, and as the authors I examine understand it, is not concerned with pointing out horrors for the mere sake of denouncing human existence, but rather is invested with imaginative construction (in the wide sense) that seeks to put experience in a context in which we can generate new kinds of meaning. If, as I have claimed, modern pessimism is distinct from other more ancient worldviews, such as those to be found in Ecclesiastes’ condemnation of the vanity of all things (Ecclesiastes 1:2), it is because it arises as an identifiable (and named) worldview in the mid- to late nineteenth century that reshaped Western culture in ways that are still part of our current historical moment, namely, the important shift toward the crisis inherent in the death of God and concomitant notions of structure and order in the universe. This move to secularism is contemporaneous with an epistemological crisis about the foundations for both beliefs and knowledge claims, provoking a cultural anxiety that resonates in pessimism’s claims about human suffering. (Like pessimism, the term “épistémologie” is a modern word with a long set of historical antecedents; it is attested in French in 1906, based on the English term “epistemology” dating from 1856.) To the empirical fact of physical and economic suffering is now joined, in many writers on pessimism, what we might call an intellectual anguish that threatens human existence with meaninglessness. Secularization,

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skepticism, and a rejection of popular discourses of progress play an important role culturally and intellectually in the emergence of modern pessimism in the later nineteenth century. Scientific advances, neutral in themselves, call out for a meaning to be assigned to them. Sandrine Schiano-Bennis, in her study of the return of idealism in late nineteenthcentury France, underscores that one potential solution to this epistemological crisis is a return to a mystical idealism “afin de rétablir le lien rompu entre l’homme et l’univers” [“in order to reestablish the broken link between man and the universe”] (62). Short of such a mystical vision, however, we are left with no tenable way to repair the breach between the noumenal and phenomenal world as Kant had described it, complicating the search for meaning by rendering metaphysical systems eternally open to question on account of our inability to know things in themselves: “Le criticisme kantien aboutissait au scepticisme” [“Kantian criticism led to skepticism”] (62). It is this breach that leads to a shift toward emphasis on representation that paves the way for Schopenhauer’s influence in later nineteenth-­century France. Schiano-Bennis points, for instance, to the late nineteenth-century historian of science Jules Soury, who writes: Ce qu’on appelle la nature est une création de notre esprit. Certes notre conception du monde répond à quelque chose de réel. On peut avoir pleine confiance dans l’observation et dans l’expérience. Toute notion n’est pourtant qu’une représentation subjective, une fille de l’imagination, et, en croyant connaître les choses, nous ne connaissons que la manière dont elles nous affectent. Il faut laisser à certains philosophes la conviction naïve qu’ils voient le monde tel qu’il est, non tel qu’il leur semble être. (Soury quoted in Schiano-Bennis 65) [What we call nature is a creation of our mind. Of course our conception of the world responds to something real. We can be fully confident in observation and experience. Every notion is, however, only a subjective representation, a daughter of the imagination and, in believing we know things, we know only the way in which they affect us. We need to leave to certain philosophers the naïve conviction that they see the world as it is and not as it seems to them to be.]

Such a shift from things to their subjective representations leads SchianoBennis to conclude that the renaissance of idealism in this period reflects “un pessimisme de la connaissance” [“a pessimism of knowledge”] (67). For her:

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Scepticisme, pessimisme et idéalisme possédaient une étroite parenté et une solide filiation d’idées. Ce pessimisme recouvrait bien souvent les excès d’une sensibilité aiguisée et d’une pensée lucide dont l’alternative entre ce qu’elle sait et ce qu’elle aimerait savoir permettait de déceler le siège d’un morcellement par trop évident. Leur scepticisme n’était point seulement porteur de germes de désespoir ; il était le symptôme d’un renouvellement de la pensée et l’indice d’une métamorphose profonde des mentalités. (128) [Skepticism, pessimism, and idealism possessed a close lineage and a solid filiation of ideas. This pessimism often covered over the excesses of a sharp sensibility and a lucid thought of which the alternative between what it knows and what it would like to know allowed it to detect the seat of an obvious partition. Their skepticism was not only the bringer of seeds of despair; it was the symptom of a renewal of thought and the index of a profound metamorphosis of mentalities.]

It is my contention that such a “pessimism of knowledge” is in fact a gain, and an example of why pessimism can engage in what I will call “creative destruction” precisely because it opens up new ways of seeing the world that attempt to remain lucid while at the same time creating a subjective reality that yields a livable response to the world in all its epistemological chaos and division. The shift from understanding the world “as it is,” as if from an Archimedean point outside human reality, to an emphasis on subjective representation, is consonant with the view I have advanced of pessimism not as a source of objectively verifiable knowledge about the world nor as merely a mood, but rather a set of expectations based on subjective lived experience reflected on in an attempt to impose some coherence that is consonant with lucidity about suffering. Once we approach lived experience as entirely bound to subjective human mental processes, the expectations that we derive yield a narrative structure to our understanding of the world, where we develop interpretations of events and create meaning from those events as we situate them in a plot that implies a past and future within which the present situates itself. I shall have much more to say about this narrative structure and how pessimism situates itself between philosophy and literature precisely on account of the importance of narrative to pessimism’s worldview. To understand pessimism well is to be responsive to a kind of thinking that refuses to take sides between a philosophical and a literary approach to understanding human experience. Born of the epistemological crises of the later nineteenth century, pessimism allows for an emphasis on subjective representation that also, and

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urgently, implies an ethics that implicates human solidarity rather than excluding others from the subjective vision. If it is a destructive form of thought, it seeks to destroy unjustified and even unethical forms of optimism, or simply of willful ignorance, in favor of a sober appraisal of what we can know and how, as well as what consequences we might draw both from these limitations and by the fact that these limitations are shared. This particular way of articulating these questions and this particular relationship of epistemology and ethics, imbued with a new emphasis on the narrative dimensions of human understanding, is what distinguishes modern pessimism from earlier forms of related notions. This study will ultimately be about the nineteenth century, but my argument is not purely historical; or, rather, it is historical in that I would argue that we are still living the consequences of the shifts in thought that occasioned pessimism. It is thus a viable option insofar as there are important points of continuity between the late nineteenth century and our own time to the extent that we still operate within the need to draw the consequences of a crisis of meaning inspired by the epistemological shifts I have sketched. I would argue that the discourse on pessimism that developed in the nineteenth century is in fact urgently relevant to our own historical moment and can usefully inform it at a time when optimism and an empty discourse of endless progress risk having more disastrous consequences than ever before while, at the same time, nihilism and despair lurk as equally destructive options. While I examine pessimism historically, it is within the context of its intrahistorical relevance to our own time, and I offer not only an analysis but also an endorsement of pessimism precisely on account of the way it can lead us away from the opposite dangers of optimism and nihilism. Reading back and forth between the nineteenth century and our own time is productive precisely because I claim that pessimists have something vital to add to our contemporary conversations, at personal, political, social, and ethical levels. Pessimism as I understand it here, then, is both a form of thought and a form of living, one that necessarily embeds experience and rejections onto the future into a kind of plot structure that looks, as all plots do, to conventional frames that allow us to envision ensuing development and that provide a ground for interpretation that allows us to endow experience with meaning. One key difference between optimism and pessimism is the way in which they draw on and intervene in those conventions. Lauren Berlant, in her recent study entitled Cruel Optimism, underscores the kind of conventionality inherent in an optimistic view: “one of

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optimism’s ordinary pleasures is to induce conventionality, that place where appetites find a shape in the predictable comforts of the good-life genres that a person or a world has seen fit to formulate” (2). Optimism is cruel for Berlant when adopting that sort of outlook works instead to produce the opposite of the desired effect in terms of happiness or satisfaction: Whatever the experience of optimism is in particular, then, the affective structure of an optimistic attachment involves a sustaining inclination to return to the scene of fantasy that enables you to expect that this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way. But, again, optimism is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving; and, doubly, it is cruel insofar as the very pleasures of being inside a relation have become sustaining regardless of the content of the relation, such that a person or a world finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming. (2)

Berlant identifies as part of optimism’s cruelty the fact that it gives its subjects a sense of orientation in and belonging to the world. Optimism is thus a relation of attachment, and, “whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of its form provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world” (24). It is my contention that pessimism shares with optimism this orienting toward a future living in the world, but cancels the cruelty of the kind of unattainable expectations that form an important part of the “cruelty” that Berlant identifies. Unlike the self-defeating nature of cruel optimism, pessimism allows a sense of possibility for living in the world based on the attempt to reduce expectations about it, mitigating loss of hope by adjusting desire in the face of what we know about, for instance, the potentially cruel structure of optimism. By changing the generic conventions by which we operate and into which we place ourselves as living actors, pessimism has the potential to empower effective living in ways that cruel optimism does not. On this view, it would be optimism and not pessimism that shuts down the possibility of living well in the world by virtue of the repeated demonstration, in the case of the optimist, of the impossibility of the fulfillment of the desires that come with attachment to the world. By cultivating

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detachment, pessimism has the potential to enable more effective living in the world. The question of how to do so, given that complete renunciation is indeed impossible, forms an important core of pessimist inquiry. This is an important part of the legacy of Schopenhauer in the history of nineteenth-­century pessimism. While, as I will show in Chap. 2, he concludes his inquiry with the recommendation of renunciation and resignation, we are left with the question of how best to carry on, given that total renunciation is impossible.9 What unites the philosophers, critics, poets, and novelists I examine in this study is the quest to work out, in their writing, the ways in which we might begin to answer that question of how best to draw conclusions from the simultaneous desirability and impossibility of resignation and to maintain a livable tension between lucidity and a sense of emplotment that allows for life to go on rather than yielding ever greater degrees of disappointment. At this point, I would like to explore further the ways in which pessimism necessarily brings together, or blurs the boundaries between, philosophy and literature through its dependence on the notion of verisimilitude as opposed to verifiability. Jerome Bruner, about whom I shall have more to say later, describes the difference between them this way: There are two modes of cognitive functioning, two modes of thought, each providing distinctive ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality. The two (though complementary) are irreducible to one another, Efforts to reduce one mode to the other or to ignore one at the expense of the other inevitably fail to capture the rich diversity of thought. […] A good story and a well-formed argument are different natural kinds. Both can be used as a means for convincing another. Yet what they convince of is fundamentally different: arguments convince one of their truth, stories of their lifelikeness. (Actual 11)

I have indicated that pessimism, like optimism, is not verifiable as the way things “really” are, in no small part because to make judgments of that kind would require an Archimedean perspective that would transcend human experience. Rather, from the limits of human experience, pessimism seeks to draw plausible conclusions and orient action in a way that accounts for the frustration of hopes and the reality of suffering. It is then by necessity linked to a certain pragmatic concern with living in the world, but it is at the same time infused with the philosophical concern of identifying what those ways are, based on a commitment to sustained reflection

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on the world and an impetus to interpret that world of human experience. The realm of interpretation and meaning immediately draws us simultaneously to the realm of the literary, where questions of meaning are posed urgently as the main task of reading and understanding the world as it manifests itself in literature. The act of interpretation, far from being a passive reception of the “intended” meaning of a given text, is an active process that aligns the reader with the creator of the text in the shared task of the creation of meaning. In that sense, such creation of meaning leads, not only to the creation of art, but to that of a life and of a community sparked by the imagination. Literature, as an imaginary space, has a privileged role to play in the imagination of what it might mean to live out the consequences of philosophical ideas. It is what allows us to think beyond what we might call canonical scripts of progress which undergird a lot of what contemporary thinkers such as Berlant and Ehrenreich have criticized about the mandate for optimism. As Dienstag puts it: there is a freedom to be gained when one’s existence is detached from the narrative of progress. If human history is pregiven as a story of progress, then one’s fate (however worthy) is already scripted, in a sense, by what has come before […]. Pessimism, by freeing us from this script, simultaneously frees us from enslavement to the past. This is not to say we are immune from the effects of history, merely that they do not bind us. (198–199)

To ask such questions about how best to live with the conclusions toward which pessimism draws us is to remain active both in the life of the mind and in the world itself, and thus pessimism is anything but a quietist withdrawal. It is, rather, a fecund intervention into the realities of lived experience as it provides an urgent imperative to assign them meaning and to align our actions with those meanings in a creative act. This alignment corresponds to a notion of living in the “as if” which, as I shall argue, plays an important role in the pessimist conception of lived experience. Dwelling in the “as if” addresses the epistemological crisis of modernity by acknowledging the fundamental lack of meaning or significance in human reality, all the while providing a framework in which to keep on living in the world by maintaining a view that recognizes the ultimately fictional nature of any kinds of meaning we may assign to existence or experience, but also not devaluing them by calling them fiction. To pay attention to the “as if” is

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to embrace a justification of action in the world based on the imaginative possibilities of a fiction that can then become our reality. This is one way of resisting resignation and justifying a commitment to a progressive politics from within pessimism. Poet and aphorist Henri Cazalis puts it this way in 1872: “Il faut par la pensée se résigner à tout, et dans l’action ne se résigner jamais, lutter comme si l’on devait vaincre, vivre comme si l’on ne pouvait mourir” [“We must resign ourselves to everything in thought, and never resign ourselves in action. We must fight as if we should win, live as if we couldn’t die”] (80). This emphasis on the “as if” has persisted into our own day, with aphorist Frédéric Schiffter writing in 2009: “Avec des « si » nous ne changeons rien, c’est entendu. En revanche, c’est avec des « comme si » que nous nous arrangeons de la réalité. Nous faisons comme si notre vie avait un sens et comme si ceux que nous aimons nous aimaient” [“With ‘ifs’ we don’t change anything, that’s understood. However, it is with ‘as ifs’ that we accommodate ourselves to reality. We act as if our lives had a meaning and as if those whom we love loved us”] (32). The “as if” of pessimism allows us to imagine ways to fill the void that the crisis of skepticism and the bankruptcy of optimism opens. It does so by providing an approach that keeps that void open while still allowing for action in the world within newly circumscribed limits and with lucid awareness not only of the fictional nature of our assumptions about action in the world but also of the power latent in those very fictions in terms of allowing us to continue to act.10 It is, I would claim, this incitement to continue acting that speaks in favor of adopting pessimism rather than optimism as the outcome of the “as if.” To understand this, we need to see that the “as if” is not simply a concession to untrue pictures of the world. To live in an optimistic “as if” would be simply to ignore the reality of suffering and injustice, whereas for the pessimist, living “as if” provides for a means to carry on even in full recognition of that suffering. The danger of choosing an optimistic “as if” is visible in the following remark by Anatole France in 1895, where he argues for deriving contentment and joy from resignation; but the kind of resignation he describes is something akin to simple willful ignorance: Nous n’avons rien à faire en ce monde qu’à nous résigner. Mais les nobles créatures savent donner à la résignation le beau nom de contentement. Les grandes âmes se résignent avec une sainte joie. Dans l’amertume du doute, au milieu du mal universel, sous le ciel vide, elles savent garder intactes les antiques vertus des fidèles. Elles croient, elles veulent croire. […] Elles con-

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servent pieusement cette vertu que la théologie chrétienne mettait dans sa sagesse au-dessus de toutes les autres, parce qu’elle les suppose ou les remplace : l’espérance. Espérons, non point en l’humanité qui, malgré d’augustes efforts, n’a pas détruit le mal en ce monde, espérons dans ces êtres inconcevables qui sortiront un jour de l’homme, comme l’homme est sorti de la brute. Saluons ces génies futurs. (149–150) [There’s nothing else for us to do in this world except to resign ourselves to it. But noble creatures know how to give resignation the beautiful name of satisfaction. Great souls resign themselves with a holy joy. In the bitterness of doubt, in the middle of universal evil, under the empty sky, they know how to keep intact the ancient virtues of the faithful. They believe, they want to believe. […] They piously conserve that virtue that Christian theology in its wisdom put above all others, because it supposes them or replaces them: hope. Let us hope, not in humanity who, despite noble efforts, has not destroyed evil in this world; let us hope in these inconceivable beings who will one day emerge from man, as man emerged from the beast. Let us salute these future geniuses.]

By contrast to such an affirmation of contentment, through a pessimistic approach to the “as if,” we keep the void open and resist the temptation to fill the void somehow, as we shall see some of the writers we will consider have done, with something that provides the appearance of a truth or a facile solution to the kinds of problems pessimism raises. These solutions can come in the form of religion, for instance, or right-wing politics, or we can succumb to cynicism or nihilism. Rather than closing the void by shifting to any of these putative solutions, pessimism maintains the void and allows us better to negotiate it, through an approach to thought that we can label creative destruction, an act that allows for the potential creation of new and previously unthought-of meaning. This is how pessimism can help create a livable lucidity, with the literary art often at the forefront of helping to conceive these new imaginative spaces. This is not to say that all, or even most, of the writers I consider are political progressives. Rather, what I claim is that pessimism can transcend particular authors’ own immediate political orientation, revealing the potential in their work to go beyond their own individual views. This is, after all, akin to the way we can read Honoré de Balzac, a political reactionary, as revealing something about the emergent opportunistic capitalism of his time that lends itself to a progressive critique, or Charles Baudelaire’s work as containing a revolutionary potential that would be

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quite at odds with his professed political views, or the way that Gustave Flaubert’s avowedly apolitical work can be shown, as for example in the work of Jacques Rancière, to bring forth a radically democratic approach to the work of art. I shall have occasion to demonstrate how Max Horkheimer provides such a critical reading of the potentially progressive political valence of Schopenhauer’s work, and I shall claim that, in the case of those authors who do not go on to yield to the temptation of mystical solutions or political nihilism, they can be read against the grain of their views as individuals in order to see how an acknowledgment of the universality of human suffering has the potential to lead to an ethics and politics of compassion. As I hope to show, literature has a key role to play in establishing the kind of pessimism that can lead to compassion, on account of the way it shifts the conversation about pessimism from its (impossible) verifiability to the realm of verisimilitude, based on the mise-en-situation of characters presented in literature or, sometimes, in the speaking voices of aphorists. In turn, the focus on verisimilitude can also allow us to read philosophical approaches such as Schopenhauer’s in narrative terms, in which we evaluate his claims in terms of plausibility as a viable worldview and imagine what consequences to draw from the “plot” that he sketches and that ends in the suggestion of what he knows to be an impossible resignation and renunciation of desire. To do so is to activate a kind of imagination more readily associated with reading fictional literature than with reading philosophy, as Jacques Bouveresse suggests when he claims that to read philosophy as literature is to “réussir à considérer une froide méditation en même temps comme une histoire dont on est anxieux de connaître la fin” [“succeed in considering a cold meditation as a story whose end we are eager to know”] (93). Bouveresse evokes the distinction between philosophy and literature in order better to understand how we can activate the imagination when considering philosophical claims by giving them a vividness more typically, but by no means necessarily, associated with the active role, less systematic and even potentially chaotic, of the reader of literature: ce qui les distingue est peut-être le fait que le genre d’imagination morale qui est à l’œuvre dans les travaux des philosophes est toujours plus ou moins l’imagination au repos, alors que le roman s’appuie au contraire sur une forme d’imagination active et même parfois hyperactive, […] une imagination qui, tout en affrontant parfois ouvertement le risque du chaos, reste néanmoins une imagination morale. (93)11

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[what distinguishes them is perhaps the fact that the sort of moral imagination which is at work in the work of philosophers is always more or less the imagination at rest, whereas the novel, by contrast, leans on a form of active and sometimes even hyperactive imagination, […] an imagination that, even while sometimes directly running the risk of chaos, remains nevertheless a moral imagination.]

For a philosopher such as Clément Rosset, what Bouveresse describes as chaotic is more related to literature’s concern with the particular as opposed to philosophy’s focus on the general truth: Il me semble, quant à moi, que la ligne de démarcation principale qui sépare les textes philosophiques des autres textes littéraires passe moins par la nature de la méthode (qui viserait respectivement, pour le dire en deux mots, la vérité dans le cas du texte philosophique, le vraisemblable et le suggestif dans le cas du texte littéraire) que par l’ampleur de l’enjeu. Il s’agit toujours de tenter de « dire vrai » ou de « faire vrai » ; mais ce vrai concerne, pour la littérature, une série de faits ponctuels et apparemment isolés, alors qu’il concerne plutôt, pour la philosophie, une tentative de relier l’une à l’autre la perception de ces faits vrais pour les assimiler, ou essayer de les assimiler, dans l’intelligence d’une vérité d’ordre plus général. (64–65)12 [It seems to me that the principal line of demarcation that separates philosophical texts from other literary texts is less in the nature of the method (which would aim, to say it briefly, for the truth in the case of the philosophical text and the verisimilar and the suggestive in the case of the literary text) than in the scope of the stakes. It is always a question of trying to “tell the truth” or “do the truth”; but this truth concerns, for literature, a series of punctual and apparently isolated facts, whereas for philosophy, rather, it concerns an attempt to link the perception of these true facts in order to assimilate them, or try to assimilate them, into the intelligence of a truth of a more general order.]

Rosset conjoins philosophy and literature here, by including philosophical texts under the category of literature, and also distinguishes them not by distinguishing between truth and fiction but by pointing toward two different kinds of truth, thereby calling into question the strict identification of truth with either universal logical validity or empirical verifiability. This more expansive field of truth is the space where pessimism operates in its attempt to understand the universality of human suffering in terms of dynamic, ever-changing creative and imaginative responses to it, in the

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context of the attempt to make meaning from it. To focus, as pessimistic writers do, on suffering is to invite not only an attempt to articulate its meaning, through engagement with both fictional and non-fictional works, but also to cultivate a community based on that shared human attribute of suffering and to seek a worldview that would do justice to the presence of that suffering and injustice, attempt to alleviate it to the extent possible, but also acknowledge the limits of our abilities to do so, and thus to formulate potential ways of living well within those limits, in ways that are constantly open to renegotiation as historical and cultural circumstances change. * * * At this point, it is necessary to articulate a bit more precisely how I understand the role of narrative in both fictional and non-fictional writing about pessimism. As I have suggested, I will claim in Chap. 2 that Schopenhauer’s work may be read in narrative terms, where the conventions of genre guide our reading and appeal to the use of imagination in a particular way so as to cultivate a sense of verisimilitude in the worldview he describes it as we evaluate it not so much in strictly rational terms as in its aptness as a description of human experience as we may have come to know it. This imaginative act encourages us to situate our own experience socially in the larger experience of a culture and temporally in the context of a past made meaningful by inscribing weighted importance to certain events in it and a future in which we assign meaning to our actions in the present while we project the “plot” forward. Jerome Bruner’s work is an important example of the ways in which the way the mind constructs meaning can be likened in important ways to narrative construction via a kind of emplotment that allows us to make meaning from experience. Bruner positions himself against rationalist or empiricist epistemologies whose objective “has been to discover how we achieve ‘reality,’ that is to say, how we get a reliable fix on the world, a world that is, as it were, assumed to be immutable and, as it were, ‘there to be observed’” (“Narrative” 1). For Joshua Foa Dienstag, pessimism’s commitment to reducing expectations about the world implies a similar commitment to Bruner’s constructivism in that the task of thought is not to represent but to construct the world, in a gesture that Dienstag explicitly compares to the making of art:

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Pessimism accepts the lesson of philosophical impressionism (whether its source is Heraclitus or Nietzsche): that the world contains no natural order to be depicted by philosophy. Like Seurat or Cézanne, we expect nothing of the world, not even that it will sit long enough to be painted or grasped as a whole. Nonetheless, we may still desire to take this obstacle and work on it until we achieve something to our satisfaction. (268)

The kinds of complexities that modern pessimism introduces go far beyond simple questions of a melancholic disposition or a blanket condemnation of human experience to pose questions, as we have seen, about the inherent sickness or health of such a view; the way, that is, in which pessimism forces us to reevaluate not just our answers but the very questions themselves. This is consonant with Bruner’s view of the way in which our psychological and philosophical landscape has kept pace with the literary landscape as it has increased in complexity in the modern era: It is worth more than a passing thought that from, say Flaubert and Conrad to the present, the Trouble that drives literary narrative has become, as it were, more epistemic, more caught up in the clash of alternative meanings, less involved in the settled realities of a landscape of action. And perhaps this is true of mundane narrative as well. In this respect life must surely have imitated art by now. (Acts 51–52)

Bruner is adamant that to say our construction of reality is akin to fictional world-making is in no way to degrade that construction or to consider it any less significant than views that purport to make claims about the world externally and as it “really” is: It is not the case that a constructivist philosophy of mind (or of literary meaning) disarms one either ontologically or ethically. Interpretations, whether of text or of world experience, can be judged for their rightness. Their rightness, however, is not to be recognized by correspondence to an aboriginal “real” world “out there.” For such a “real world” is not only indeterminate epistemologically, but even empty as an act of faith. Rather, meaning (or “reality,” for in the end the two are indistinguishable) is an enterprise that reflects human intentionality and cannot be judged for its rightness independently of it. […] In the end, it is the transaction of meaning by human beings, human beings armed with reason and buttressed by the faith that sense can be made and remade, that makes human culture— and by culture, I do not mean surface consensus. (Actual 158–159)

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The “rightness” of interpretations is what I have been calling verisimilitude, the extent to which a view or interpretation corresponds to the world as it is experienced with an attempt to refrain from willful blindness about suffering and to orient one’s future actions according to this view. It is one way to awaken from a cultural bias in favor of a potentially unjustified optimism or belief in progress, and thus it requires the kind of imaginative act that literature has the potential to render vivid and that can help us to appreciate a fuller complexity in the experiences to which we attempt to assign meaning: The function of literature as art is to open us to dilemmas, to the hypothetical, to the range of possible worlds that a text can refer to. I have used the term “to subjunctivize,” to render the world less fixed, less banal, more susceptible to recreation. Literature subjunctivizes, makes strange, renders the obvious less so, the unknowable less so as well, matters of value more open to reason and intuition. Literature, in this spirit, is an instrument of freedom, lightness, imagination, and yes, reason. It is our only hope against the long gray night. (Actual 159)

In the midst of pessimism’s gloom, it is the imaginative space opened by literature, and by thought more broadly defined, that can lead us to see that what recommends pessimism as a form of thought and a worldview is that it can account for suffering in a lucid way without shutting down our ability to function in the world. This imaginative function finds similar structures in fiction and in what, following Hannah Arendt in The Life of the Mind, I shall call thinking, a creative destruction that liberates the imaginative faculty by tearing down received opinion and spurring us to question what we thought we knew. Socrates is Arendt’s model inasmuch as he functions as a gadfly who arouses others “to thinking and examination, an activity without which life, in his view, was not only not worth much but was not fully alive” (172), and also as an electric ray which “at first glance seems to be the opposite of the gadfly [...] yet what cannot fail to look like paralysis from the outside […] is felt as the highest state of being active and alive” (173). For Arendt there is a close link between forms of thought and artistic production that is linked to meaning. As she writes in The Life of the Mind: “The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret

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meaning on the model of truth” (15). Thinking, for Arendt, is aligned not with truth but indeed with meaning, in that thinking sparks ultimately unanswerable questions in a process whose end would be the shutting down of a mind. Thinking about meaning is what allows for the continuation of questioning: By posing the unanswerable questions of meaning, men establish themselves as question-asking beings. Behind all the cognitive questions for which men find answers, there lurk the unanswerable ones that seem entirely idle and have always been denounced as such. It is more than likely that men, if they were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions, would lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded. (62)

The quest for meaning thus serves as a catalyst that saves the mind not only from the unhealthy repose of quietism and dogmatism but also from the kinds of illusions, such as optimism bias, that lead us to warped perceptions of the world that can have potentially catastrophic consequences. If there is a cognitive and/or social bias toward optimism, it comes with a block to lucidity against which we should arguably remain on guard if our attempts to give meaning to human experience are to be faithful to the reality of suffering. In that sense, pessimism has a liberating potential insofar as it frees us from a culturally mandated optimism and its attendant harmful results, as Dienstag has suggested: “Pessimism cuts us free of an optimism that is demanded of us. Pessimism cuts us out of a social activity we were enrolled in without our assent. Not the least of its freedoms is the freedom to report on the modern project” (259). The reading I advance of pessimism will highlight the way in which it holds open an imaginative intellectual space in both fiction and nonfiction, turning back on itself to reflect in non-dogmatic ways about what it might mean to draw the full consequences of suffering and affirm the value of resignation while simultaneously recognizing its impossibility. Narrative approaches to meaning allow for contingency, progression, and situational truths that lead us away from dogmatism and point toward the liberating potential of pessimism. To think and write about pessimism is to continue to engage in questions about suffering and to maintain the dynamism of thought that is fundamental to the attempt to articulate meaning in the context of lived experience as well as experience as it is reflected on, and shaped by, the nonfiction

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writers I consider as well as the novelists who present a mise-en-situation of suffering and of characters seeking to assign meaning to their experience, an act in which we necessarily participate as readers. As such, I see all of the writings I consider here as on a continuum, united by the kind of active engagement with a form of pessimism born in the late nineteenth century but in continuity with our own time. The literary characters who figure in the works I examine help us imagine what it would actually mean to live by pessimism’s tenets and demonstrate what some of the consequences of that kind of life might be, translated into the complex world of situated actors rather than the abstract and generalized concerns of metaphysics. * * * In Chap. 2, I argue that Schopenhauer’s writings invite interpretation in terms of verisimilitude rather than verifiability. As he seeks to provide a coherent interpretation and meaning for lived experience that accounts for suffering and injustice, he appeals both to metaphors and, especially, to plot structures such as comedy and tragedy as a way to structure that interpretation in ways that provide structural coherence to experience. We can see The World as Will and Representation in its turn as featuring the speaking voice of a main character working through a dramatic plot featuring the will, which ends with the desirable but impossible resolution of resignation. Such a plot structure implicates readers by inviting us to consider how best to conceive of our continued existence in the face of such an impossible complete resignation of the will to live. Having followed Schopenhauer through this plot, we find ourselves to be both actors in, and interpreters of, the tragedy, a kind of split self that incites critical examination and also underscores the basis for compassion, which I in turn see as a potential basis for an ethics and even a progressive politics stemming from attempts to draw appropriate conclusions from the world of perception and interpretation that Schopenhauer constructs. Schopenhauer’s philosophical works are perhaps best read in narrative terms rather than in a way that merely tests the validity of the arguments. Seen in this light, Schopenhauer is foundational for writers and thinkers that come after him not only on account of the world view he offers but also in terms of the way his style of thinking invites us to consider pessimism via a narrative lens that blurs the boundaries between philosophy and fiction in imaginative ways.

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Chapter 3 traces the debates on pessimism as they were worked out among nonfiction writers in the second half of the nineteenth century in France. What gradually emerges from beyond more simplistic arguments for or against a pessimistic perspective is a shift of epistemological frameworks that highlights the construction of meaning from experience, one of the consequences of viewing the world as representation. Writers such as Paul Challemel-Lacour complicate the discourse on pessimism as illness by blurring the distinction between sickness and health and asking whether the lucidity that pessimism offers might not be the healthy antidote to the social sickness of optimism. Such discussions pave the way for engagement with pessimism that is neither dogmatic nor dismissive, steering the conversation toward how best to achieve a balance between lucidity and conceptions of the world that allow us to denounce its suffering but still find a way to live well in it. As such, pessimism comes to inhabit a conceptual space between action in the world and reflection on it, and offers the potential for a renewal of compassion based on dissatisfaction with the world as it is currently experienced. The renewed quest for generating meaning from experience in the wake of pessimism’s emphasis on verisimilitude requires an imaginative act that frees pessimism from the accusation of quietism or despair and paves the way for an approach to living in what some early twentieth-century thinkers characterized as an “as if,” a reflective consciousness that makes room for a dialectical interplay between fiction and reality. Pessimism encourages us to accept the limits on our understanding and to see those limits not as imposing meaninglessness but rather as enabling new approaches to meaning in ways that bring philosophy and literature together productively. In Chap. 4, I turn to late nineteenth-century fiction by Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Teodor de Wyzewa, and Edouard Rod. These writers deepen the interrelation between philosophical reflection and literature in terms of engaging pessimism, not through romans à thèse that attempt merely to demonstrate a preconceived idea, but rather by inciting thought through a mise-en-situation of characters providing a portrayal of the kind of lived experience that serves as a testing ground for how to live well in the face of a desirable but impossible resignation. Some of these writers engage Schopenhauer explicitly in their texts, while others move toward a more general engagement with those aspects of his thought that had become highly influential in late nineteenth-­ century artistic and cultural circles. Each of these authors confronts the potential risk of meaningless inherent in the pessimist enterprise, and the

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pessimist thought experiment is inscribed structurally in these novels by the way they negotiate the impossibility of tidy closure or conclusion. By stripping characters and plot down to a bare minimum, these narratives draw readers into the drama of interpreting pessimist thought and action, and how best to follow the consequences of a desirable resignation while still living in the world and also avoiding the stasis of a mystical resolution or a stagnant, dogmatic nihilism. The tools of pessimism, in other words, provide the basis for questions rather than a predetermined set of answers, a productive restlessness that drives both our interpretations of these fictional works and, potentially, the way in which we negotiate the boundaries between fiction and lived experience. Chapter 5 analyses lyric poetry to demonstrate the way it entwines epistemological concerns related to uncertainty with affective reactions to the possibilities and impossibilities inherent in the search for meaning in a pessimistic context. Poets such as Louise Ackermann carve a role for poetry in the wake of the refusal of transcendence and the disappointment of both knowledge and ignorance. The poetic imagination turns to imaginative portrayals of the end of the world, as poets such as Leconte de Lisle and Jules Laforgue allow us an imaginative leap into an otherwise unobservable Archimedean perspective on a peaceful extinction of suffering that perhaps allows a degree of comfort stemming from the ultimate impermanence of existence. What emerges in these poems is a sort of “creative destruction” akin to Hannah Arendt’s characterization of thought as a manifestation of the “two in one” of consciousness. As Laforgue and Emile Verhaeren portray in their poetry, this split or ironic self allows for simultaneous tragedy and comedy, forging an imaginative space where laughter and tears could be made to coexist. Such a development of the split self of consciousness, what I call work on the self, has the potential to be torturous but could also be considered as a way to strive for the fullness of being alive in a way that keeps conceptual possibility open while retaining pessimism’s emphasis on the reality of suffering.

Notes 1. The attribution is apocryphal; the sentence comes from Nicolas-Hubert Mongault (1674–1746), as reported by Jean le Rond d’Alembert. I am grateful to Laurène Strzempa for this clarification. 2. See Cave for a critique of religious and scientific aspirations toward immortality.

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3. For a critique of cognitive behavioral therapy on the grounds that it blocks the lucidity that comes from a depressive state, see Reshe, who engages the same sorts of questions about sickness and health that I will trace in the nineteenth century. 4. For a recent articulation of such a critique, see Mikkel Krause Frantzen: “Pessimism will lead us exactly nowhere, which is precisely the dream of capitalism: Maintaining the status quo (while continuing to accumulate profits). […] The feeling that nothing can ever change, that nothing really is to be done” (102). As I hope to show, there is a world of difference between this position and one that sees in pessimism a justification for action but tempered by not necessarily expecting results, an acting “as if” perhaps some change were possible. 5. On optimism bias, see for instance O’Sullivan. 6. Already in the 1980s, sociologist Joe Bailey could claim that “the present period is unlike any other in three particular respects. There has never been, objectively, such potential danger for the human species; there has never been, subjectively, such a well distributed understanding of that danger; there is, now, a fully realised record of the failure of our societies to deal with that danger. The modern world gives substance and form to pessimistic expectations as never before” (7). 7. On Nietzsche’s critique of Schopenhauer on the basis of moral skepticism, see Dienstag 177–178. On Hartmann, see Beiser 122–161. 8. See also Beverley Clack’s study of living well with failure and loss: “We might be able to live well, perhaps, because we experience failure and loss. […] In my experience it becomes more a case of finding a way of holding at the heart of your life those experiences that make you acutely aware of how precious and precarious life is” (9). 9. As Dienstag notes: “Pessimists themselves have often been anything but resigned. Indeed, they have taken it as their task to find a way to live with the conclusions they have arrived at, and to live well, sometimes even joyfully” (x). 10. This tension between skepticism and action in the world, and the relation of that action to tranquility, has a long history going back to the ancient Skeptics and Epicureans, as Richard Bett indicates: “It is the skeptic’s orientation toward tranquility, not the lack of beliefs about things being in reality good and bad, that is the fundamental thing standing in the way of […] ethical engagement. One can come at the issue from the opposite direction. It is possible to make tranquility one’s goal while thinking that the truth is perfectly attainable, and that certain things—tranquility preeminent among them—really are good; this is the position of the Epicureans. And it is notable that the Epicureans, too, face criticisms having to do with their lack of ethical involvement. This is not just because of

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their literal, physical withdrawal in the Garden […]; the concern is with how a commitment to ataraxia is compatible with full-blooded engagement in any kind of community, even an isolated one” (164–165). 11. Michael Boylan has recently made similar claims for narrative-based philosophy: “The empirically suggestive narrative philosophy presentation is more gripping than the more simple architecture of deductive philosophy because it connects to the personal worldview in more ways than a simple abstract rational presentation. The more touchpoints to the personal worldview, the more real the presentation seems to the agent. The real in this context is that which is easier to project into one’s personal worldview and thus to imagine in all of its potential global significance. The act of worldview projection allows the reader to be able more completely to imagine the claims presented in a situated context” (72). 12. On the distinction or non-distinction between philosophy and literature as it relates to giving form to experience, see also Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe: “One cannot ask philosophy about literature as though it were a question raised ‘from the outside,’ any more than one can pursue this question to the very end, unfold it in its entirety” (2). As Gary Aylesworth indicates: “For Lacoue-Labarthe […] the closure of the metaphysical tradition is not only the exhaustion of metaphysics in the technological will to power […] but it’s also an inevitable limit that governs textual presentation. This is where Lacoue-Labarthe departs from Heidegger in order to radicalize the question of the relationship between philosophy and literature, and to insist upon the necessity of their intrication” (91).

Works Cited Alessandri, Mariana. “Against Cheerfulness.” Aeon, May 2, 2019. https://aeon. co/essays/cheerfulness-­c annot-­b e-­c ompulsory-­w hatever-­t he-­t -­s hirts-­s ay. Accessed February 15, 2020. Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. Aylesworth, Gary. “The Power of the Text: Lacoue-Labarthe, Rorty, and the Literariness of Philosophy.” In Anne O’Brien and Hugh Silverman, eds. Subjects and Simulations: Between Baudrillard and Lacoue-Labarthe (Lexington Books, 2015), 89–101. Bailey, Joe. Pessimism. Routledge, 1988. Beiser, Frederick C. Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860–1900. Oxford UP, 2016. Benatar, David. The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions. Oxford UP, 2017. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke UP, 2011. Bett, Richard. How to Be a Pyrrhonist. Cambridge UP, 2019.

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Bouveresse, Jacques. La Connaissance de l’écrivain: Sur la littérature, la vérité et la vie. Agone, 2008. Boylan, Michael. Fictive Narrative Philosophy: How Fiction Can Act as Philosophy. Routledge, 2019. Bruner, Jerome. Acts of Meaning. Harvard UP, 1990. ———. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Harvard UP, 1986. ———. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18 (Autumn 1991): 1–21. Camus, Albert. Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Gallimard, 1942. ———. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Tr. Justin O’Brien. Vintage Books, 1955. Caro, Elme-Marie. “La Poésie philosophique dans les nouvelles écoles, un poète positiviste.” Revue des Deux Mondes, 3e période, tome 3 (1874), 241–262. Cave, Stephen. Immortality. Crown Publishers, 2012. Cazalis, Henri. Le Livre du néant. Alphonse Lemerre, 1872. Clack, Beverley. How to Be a Failure and Sill Live Well. Bloomsbury, 2020. Dienstag, Joshua Foa. Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit. Princeton UP, 2006. Ehrenreich, Barbara. Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Metropolitan Books, 2009. France, Anatole. Le jardin d’Epicure, 6e edition. Calmann Lévy, 1895. Frantzen, Mikkel Krause. “Against Pessimism, or, the Education of Hope.” Substance 49:1 (2020), 97–109. Frazee, Ronald. Henry Céard: Idéaliste détrompé. U of Toronto P, 1963. Guérin, Michel. Le fardeau du monde: De la consolation. Editions Belles Lettres, 2011. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. The Subject of Philosophy. U of Minnesota P, 1993. LaMotte, Sandee. “Being Happier will Help You Live Longer, So Learn How to be Happier.” cnn.com. https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/30/health/ happiness-­live-­longer-­wellness/index.html. Accessed July 1, 2020. Minois, Georges. Histoire du mal de vivre: De la mélancolie à la dépression. Editions de La Martinière, 2003. O’Sullivan, Owen P. “The Neural Basis of Always Looking on the Bright Side.” Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental, and Neuro Sciences 8:1 (2015), 11–15. Reshe, Julie. “Depressive Realism.” Aeon, January 9, 2020. https://aeon.co/ essays/the-­voice-­of-­sadness-­is-­censored-­as-­sick-­what-­if-­its-­sane. Accessed July 1, 2020. Rosset, Clément. Le choix des mots. Minuit, 1995. Russell, Bertrand. The History of Western Philosophy. George Allen & Unwin, 1979. Salem, Jean. “Maupassant et Schopenhauer.” In Christian Bonnet et Jean Salem, eds. La raison dévoilée: Etudes schopenhaueriennes (Vrin, 2005), 175–191.

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Schiano-Bennis, Sandrine. La Renaissance de l’idéalisme à la fin du XIXe siècle. Honoré Champion, 1999. Schiffter, Frédéric. Délectations moroses. Le dilettante, 2009. Unamuno, Miguel de. The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations. Tr. Anthony Kerrigan. Princeton UP, 1972. Zola, Emile. Les Rougon-Macquart. Volume III. Gallimard, 1964.

CHAPTER 2

Schopenhauer: Resignation, Compassion, and Narrative

Pessimism, broadly understood, has a long history, but arguably the term has come to be associated most centrally, in modern intellectual, cultural, and esthetic history, with Arthur Schopenhauer.1 He has played a key role in defining pessimism, especially via insights about how we are condemned to alternate between suffering and boredom in a world not built for human satisfaction and the importance of consolation or temporary escape from that predicament, along with an ethics based on compassion, all of which I will address further in due course. But for our purposes, what is significant about Schopenhauer is the importance that his way of philosophizing could be said to place on the literary, in what we could call an imaginative or even fictional construct of an “as if.” While Schopenhauer sometimes has explicit recourse to literary devices such as metaphor and makes reference to a number of literary works, the literary dimension of his work that will interest us most here is one he would likely be unwilling to acknowledge.2 I will argue that the worldview that Schopenhauer presents in The World as Will and Representation and other writings invites interpretation in terms of verisimilitude rather than verifiability. It invites us to accept a worldview that ultimately depends less on irrefutable rational argument than on a plot structure that appeals to imagined shared experiences, which the narrative invites us to interpret in ways that make pessimism a highly plausible lens by which to establish meaning and coherence in lived experience. In that sense, Schopenhauer’s philosophical works are perhaps © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Acquisto, Living Well with Pessimism in Nineteenth-Century France, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61014-2_2

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best read in narrative terms rather than in a way that merely tests the validity of the arguments. Seen in this light, Schopenhauer is foundational for writers and thinkers who come after him not only on account of the worldview he offers but also in terms of the way his style of thinking invites us to consider pessimism via a narrative lens that blurs the boundaries between philosophy and fiction in imaginative and productive ways. Schopenhauer is in fact most compelling as a writer and thinker, I would argue, when we see him not as doing metaphysics but engaging in a process that bears a certain family resemblance to fiction and also orients the reader toward bridging the gap between fictional constructs and lived experience.3 To advance such an argument is, in important ways, to be faithful to the spirit of Schopenhauer’s arguments about the potency of esthetic experience and even its primacy over philosophical argument. It is to be faithful to Schopenhauer as a thinker to suggest that a blurred line between philosophy and fiction can yield important insights rather than compromising them. Ulrich Pothast notes that it is Schopenhauer’s philosophy of art that “had the greatest following, not among philosophers but among artists up to today” (150): It seems to be this primacy [of art over metaphysics or ethics] that turned many artists into Schopenhauer partisans, at least for part of their lifetime, like, to name but a few, Richard Wagner, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, August Strindberg, Maurice Maeterlinck, Guy de Maupassant, Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, André Gide, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Louis-­ Ferdinand Céline, Jorge Luis Borges and […] Samuel Beckett. (150)

Scholars such as Sophia Vasalou have underscored that what the many commentators on Schopenhauer from the nineteenth century until our own time seem to share is “an attunement to Schopenhauer’s philosophy in which the quality of its argument is not the most important concern” (4). Given, as we saw in Chap. 1, that the objective verifiability of pessimism is nearly impossible to accomplish, it should not be surprising that the main interest in Schopenhauer lies elsewhere. When we consider his work in narrative terms, verifiability shifts to verisimilitude, as the plausibility of the character suggested by Schopenhauer’s narrative voice is what becomes our main concern. The extent to which we judge Schopenhauer’s voice to be verisimilar will depend on how much it “speaks” to us, as any literary character’s words may; this hinges on questions of whether we identify, or can be persuaded to identify, with the narrative voice, seeing

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the ways in which it resonates with our experiences and being willing to follow the narrative voice’s lead when it comes to evaluating the relative advantages and disadvantages of existence in the world. A temporary suspension of disbelief becomes necessary in order for us to test the ideas that Schopenhauer presents. This is all the more the case when those views go against canonical views to the point of overturning them, as Eugene Thacker points out: If a thinker like Schopenhauer has any redeeming qualities, it is that he identified the great lie of Western culture—the preference for existence over non-existence. […] Wouldn’t it make more sense to mourn birth and celebrate death? Strange though, because the mourning of birth would, presumably, last the entirety of that person’s life, so that mourning and living would be the same thing. (32–33)

Such work on thought is also a creative work on language, whereby the very meaning of basic words such as mourning and living cease to be distinct. In that sense, what Schopenhauer, and those who reflect on his work in this way, provide is not a reflection of the world but a refashioning of it, an inherent creative, that is, esthetic act. Such creation stands in productive tension with Schopenhauer’s implicit claims that what he presents in his writing is a kind of realism, a rational development of things “as they really are,” so to speak.4 Embedded in his writings, then, is an undecidable contrast between seeing the objective truth about the metaphysical world (and our place in it) and an active construction of that world that is a work on language and on perception, a search for a conceptual framework that would make sense of the way Schopenhauer’s narrative voice encourages us to view reality. Schopenhauer holds out a special role for art as providing a way of making life tolerable. An intermediary space between fiction and reality becomes established whereby art does not simply make the ugly beautiful, nor does it seek to reveal the ugly in all its ugliness. Rather, Michel Guérin speaks of the “cognitive satisfaction” (120) that both reaffirms that life is suffering and that offers us a mental mode in which to make our peace with that, to continue imagining and inventing in a way that only what we might call a lucid delusion can allow. Throughout Schopenhauer’s writings there is a fundamental tension: on one hand, he claims objective truth about the world as manifested as Will, which would presumably need to be established from a kind of Archimedean point from beyond the realm of the Will (which is precisely

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what Schopenhauer claims as impossible to establish, based on the universal preponderance of the Will). On the other hand, he makes room for multifaceted, relative kinds of truth: No view of the world that has arisen from an objective, intuitive apprehension of things and has been consistently executed can be completely false, but instead is at worst only one-sided, so e.g. total materialism, absolute idealism and many others. All of them are true, but they are so simultaneously, thus their truth is only relative. For each such apprehension is true only from a certain standpoint, just as a picture portrays the landscape from only one point of view. If one were to elevate oneself beyond the standpoint of such a system, however, one would then recognize the relativity of its truth. –Accordingly therefore it is true, for instance, that I can regard myself as a mere temporal product of nature that has come into being and is destined for total destruction—as perhaps in the manner of Ecclesiastes. But it is true at the same time that I am everything that ever was and will be, and outside me there is nothing. Likewise it is true when I […] place the highest happiness in the enjoyment of the present, but it is true at the same time when I recognize the wholesomeness of suffering and the nullifying, indeed pernicious nature of all pleasure and conceive of death as the goal of my existence. (Parerga 2 15–16)

Schopenhauer goes on to indicate that “wherever there are contradiction and lies, there too are thoughts that have not arisen from objective apprehension—e.g. in optimism” (16), seeming to claim the objective truth of pessimism, but again, it is not clear how we might have access to such objective apprehension. And even if we were to have it, this is not a guarantee that an objective apprehension would be complete and universal. Schopenhauer immediately adds: “On the other hand an objective apprehension can be incomplete and one-sided, in which case it requires a supplement, not a refutation” (16). It is not clear what sort of supplement would serve as a corrective to an incomplete and one-sided objective apprehension. Schopenhauer seems to acknowledge this difficulty at some moments, such as when he claims that “that which precedes knowledge as its condition […] cannot be immediately grasped by knowledge, just as the eye cannot see itself” (WWR2 287). Sophia Vasalou asks about this passage: “if ‘the eye cannot see itself,’ what were we doing when we said: ‘the world is my representation’ […]? […] For a philosopher who prided himself on solving the riddle of the world, Schopenhauer would seem to

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be singularly short-sighted when it came to locating himself within it” (88–89). This is not, I would argue, to say that pessimism becomes open to the same charge that Schopenhauer lays against optimism, but rather that we need to consider the validity of pessimism by some other criterion than objective verifiability. Schopenhauer claims that there is much to be gleaned from temporary moments of full lucidity, which he equates to genius. At that genius level of perception, however, objective reason “lives only one story above madness” (49), suggesting that full lucidity, far from being a desirable condition, would in fact block our ability to live and function in the world. And on this view, Schopenhauer still needs to account for the criteria by which we would be able to identify full genius-­ like lucidity as the fully objective truth, and not one of those “at worst only one-sided” views that can be “true […] simultaneously” with other points of view. Terry Eagleton has pointed out the problem of the impossibility of philosophizing from nowhere in Schopenhauer’s thought: It cannot be that philosophy looks at the world from the vantage point of the will, for then it would be unable to pass any true comment on it; so it would appear to be inspecting the will and all its works from some other transcendental viewpoint. But since there is no such viewpoint acknowledged in Schopenhauer’s writing, philosophy must be standing in a non-­ place, speaking from some location not included within itself. There is indeed such a non-place identified in the theory itself—the esthetic—but this is not conceptual; and it is hard to see how it can be conceptually translated without falling instantly afoul of the delusions of the intellect. (167)5

This opening up onto the esthetic necessarily creates space for, and the necessity of, interpretation in order to generate meaning. Since music, which Schopenhauer takes as the most important of the arts, is non-­ conceptual, it needs to be translated back into the conceptual in order for it to be generative of anything we might call knowledge or meaning. But to interpret music this way is, as Eagleton indicates, to return promptly to all the conceptual difficulties of immediate access to objective reality that the appeal to music was supposed to resolve. What seems to be an irresolvable difficulty for verifiability turns out to open other avenues of verisimilitude, and allows us to posit Schopenhauer’s considerations as operating within a different kind of approach to truth, one that would embrace

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rather than reject the need for interpretation in order to generate meaning. This is precisely the advantage that reading philosophy such as Schopenhauer’s in literary terms can generate. In the preface to the second edition of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer recognizes that fiction plays a role in some philosophy: “my philosophy does not allow of the fiction which has been so cleverly devised by the professors of philosophy and has become indispensable to them, namely the fiction of a reason that knows, perceives, or apprehends immediately and absolutely” (WWR1 xxvi). Schopenhauer immediately takes his distance from this approach, but does so, quite tellingly, by use of a metaphor: “My meditative philosophy […] lacking in consideration and the means of subsistence, has for its pole star truth alone, naked, unrewarded, unbefriended, often persecuted truth, and toward this it steers straight, looking neither to the right nor to the left” (xxvi).6 From the start, then, Schopenhauer has inscribed his project in metaphor and imposed a plot structure that pits his approach, in a protagonist/antagonist relationship, against others, while also inscribing it in the genre of a cosmic adventure tale via the metaphor of steering toward the pole star.7 By inviting us to see the text in these terms, Schopenhauer, unwittingly perhaps, provides an alternative view of his project that would free it from the inevitable contradiction in terms of verifiability that we have underscored when it comes to claims to have found an Archimedean point outside philosophy from which to philosophize. Sophia Vasalou has noted that “if we were looking for a paradigm within Schopenhauer’s analysis of artistic forms in which his own writing could best be situated, it is indeed poetry that would seem to present the most hospitable terms, allowing us to locate both Schopenhauer’s reliance on imagery and the explicit appeal to the imagination to which this is tied” (66). The “esthetic character of philosophy,” on Vasalou’s reading, “turns out to be realised on two closely related levels: with regard to its origin, in taking its beginning (at least in part) from an objective apprehension, and with regard to its expressive form, in using imagery to place the reader in contact with its genetic fount” (66). And, in fact, the first metaphor that we find in The World as Will and Representation is that of reading, in a passage that blurs the boundaries between philosophy and literature right away: After these numerous passages from the poets, I may now be permitted to express myself by a metaphor. Life and dreams are leaves of one and the

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same book. The systematic reading is real life, but when the actual reading hour (the day) has come to an end, and we have the period of recreation, we often continue idly to thumb over the leaves, and turn to a page here and there without method or connexion. We sometimes turn up a page we have already read, at others one still unknown to us, but always from the same book. Such an isolated page is, of course, not connected with a consistent reading and study of the book, yet it is not so very inferior thereto, if we note that the whole of the consistent perusal begins and ends also on the spur of the moment, and can therefore be regarded merely as a larger single page. (WWR1 18)

Schopenhauer encourages readers to blur the distinction between life and dreams, living and reading, and whole book and single page. Like a poet, he invites readers to perform an imaginative act that would reshape our conception of lived experience, leaving behind what might be the most familiar or commonsensical ways of reading the world and our experiences in it. Such blurred lines also come into play in the tension between a rational and a livable system. From the start, Schopenhauer is aware that the consequences that one should draw from his worldview are in many ways incompatible with living in the world and that it is difficult to draw all the consequences that follow from that worldview. It becomes increasingly clear throughout The World as Will and Representation that, given the potential impossibility of knowing the world in an objectively verifiable way, his philosophical system needs to address the ethical, rather than metaphysical or epistemological, issue of how best to live in light of the potential consequences of viewing the world as will and representation. What ultimately may matter is not choosing truth over illusion, but rather of what kind of illusion best guides lived experience. This is where fiction and imagination have an important role to play, especially when it comes to assigning meaning and value to experience, and especially to suffering as a primary experience, an enterprise that Schopenhauer never refuses. Georg Simmel underscores how the fact that, for Schopenhauer, life has no intrinsic or inherent meaning allows him to create meaning for suffering: The aimlessness of life in itself accentuates happiness and suffering in a special way, giving them a specific value in themselves that neither is drawn from a higher goal nor transcends the moment of awareness. […] Once there is a place for happiness and suffering in the supreme sphere of life, as there is for Schopenhauer, they can gain such importance that they color the

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meaning of life in a new way. They are the cornerstone of Schopenhauer’s world-view, because no transcending goals could diminish them. (54)

In a passage from Thomas Nagel that Vasalou links to Schopenhauer, he argues: The pursuit of objectivity with respect to value runs the risk of leaving value behind altogether. We may reach a standpoint so removed from the perspective of human life that all we can do is to observe: nothing seems to have value of the kind it appears to have from inside, and all we see is human desires, human striving—human valuing, as an activity or condition … The problem is to know where and how to stop. (Nagel, The View from Nowhere 209, quoted in Vasalou 153).

Schopenhauer discusses this problem of the incompatibility of philosophical system and lived experience not in relation to his own thought at first but rather in the case of Stoicism: The Stoic sage as represented by this ethical system, could never obtain life or inner poetical truth, but remains a wooden, stiff lay-figure with whom one can do nothing. He himself does not know where to go with his wisdom, and his perfect peace, contentment, ad blessedness directly contradict the nature of mankind, and do not enable us to arrive at any perceptive representation thereof. Compared with him, how entirely different appear the overcomers of the world and voluntary penitents, who are revealed to us, and are actually produced, by the wisdom of India; how different even the Savior of Christianity, that excellent form full of the depth of life, of the greatest poetical truth and highest significance, who stands before us with perfect virtue, holiness, and sublimity, yet in a state of supreme suffering. (WWR1 91)

With this discussion of Stoicism, Schopenhauer inscribes within his text the problem of an unlivable philosophical system, one that cannot bridge the gap between reasoned reflection and the world of action. Such a thing is simply beyond human capability: “If such a reflection were to become a living conviction, it might produce a considerable degree of stoical equanimity, and greatly reduce our anxious concern about our own welfare. But such a powerful control of the faculty of reason over directly felt suffering is seldom or never found in fact” (WWR1 315). Clearly Schopenhauer’s system in its turn stands open to the same problem as he

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moves from metaphysics to ethics. This impasse opens wider the possibilities latent in seeing Schopenhauer’s philosophical system in fictional terms: it implicitly invites readers to live in the “as if,” to imagine what it would mean to see the world from the point of view of the Schopenhauerian subject and to try to fashion a guide for acting in the world that is consonant with the verisimilar conclusions about existence that Schopenhauer reaches. If we let go of a firm need for verifiability, in other words, we open up the possibility of imaginative reframings of the world (the proper domain of fiction) that allow us to live better in it, without the strong need for logical consistency in our action. We give complexity its due, in other words, in a way that strict logical consistency cannot. Schopenhauer explicitly inquires about how human life may be most appropriately emplotted, whether as tragedy or comedy: The life of every individual, viewed as a while and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy. For the doings and worries of the day, the restless mockeries of the moment, the desires and fears of the week, the mishaps of every hour, are all brought about by chance that is always bent on some mischievous trick; they are nothing but scenes from a comedy. The never fulfilled wishes, the frustrated efforts, the hopes mercilessly blighted by fate, the unfortunate mistakes of the whole life, with increasing suffering and death at the end, always give us a tragedy. Thus, as if fate wished to add mockery to the misery of our existence, our life must contain all the woes of tragedy, and yet we cannot even assert the dignity of tragic characters, but, in the broad detail of life, are inevitably the foolish characters of a comedy. (WWR1 322)

We note here that Schopenhauer makes room for differing perceptions of emplotment based on whether we are considering life in its totality or as it is lived moment to moment. We are invited to see it as all the more tragic perhaps that we cannot ultimately assign the genre of tragedy to it, but must rather be satisfied with the generic label of comedy.8 What is never in dispute here, however, is that human life maps onto fictional genres, which we use as interpretive categories in order to assign meaning to experiences, and which we evaluate in terms of verisimilitude. Terry Eagleton has addressed the question of genre in Schopenhauer, noting that “men and women are less tragic protagonists than pitiably obtuse” (155). He goes further by addressing the question not only of

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how Schopenhauer emplots human life but also how we readers may emplot Schopenhauer’s own work: There is something amusing about the very relentless consistency of this Schopenhauerian gloom, a perpetual grousing with all the monotonous, mechanical repetition of the condition it denounces. If comedy for Schopenhauer involves subsuming objects to inappropriate concepts, then this is ironically true of his own pessimism, which stamps everything with its own inexorable color and so has the funniness of all melodrama. Any such obsessive conversion of difference to identity is bound to be comic, however tragic the actual outlook. […] His perverse ignoring of what we feel to be the more positive aspects of life is outrageous enough to be amusing, as we would smile at someone whose only interest in great painters was in how many of them had halitosis. (157)

By blurring the lines between tragedy and comedy, both in human experience and in his writings, Schopenhauer shifts the discussion to the literarily inflected question of genre and allows us to ask questions about the extent to which the categories by which we assign meaning to our experiences allow or do not allow for imaginative transformation. Is it desirable, or even possible, to maintain a distinction between tragedy and comedy as interpretive models for experience, or does Schopenhauer’s philosophical engagement call on us to rethink our understanding of genre, not to reject it as an interpretive lens but to affirm its importance by imaginative reconfiguration of generic categories? To rethink genre this way is to open up new imaginative possibilities that have the potential to ring true to the narrative that Schopenhauer constructs in his work. In this way, what seems at first to be a fairly rigidly pessimistic view in Schopenhauer can, ironically, and in ways that Eagleton begins to sketch, allow us to explore the consequences of what it might mean to live out an experience that bears strong resemblance both to the comic and the tragic. Fiction cannot propose answers to this question, but it can allow us to frame the question in a way that breeds new understanding, and in that sense it aligns quite strongly with the philosophical project broadly understood and released from narrower metaphysical or logical conceptions. One of the paradoxes of attempting to draw consequences from Schopenhauer’s work or even to assign meaning to it through genre is that his is a drama that transforms or obliterates typical notions of character. Eagleton underscores how, in what I might now call Schopenhauer’s plot

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structure, “desire has become the protagonist of the human theater, and human subjects themselves its mere obedient bearers or underlings” (159). Schopenhauer’s drama, in other words, forces us to reevaluate our understanding of plot structure by calling radically into question the notion of character. If desire is the main character of the plot as Schopenhauer establishes it, how does that affect our notion of human “actors” in the drama? The dénouement of Schopenhauer’s drama is, on Eagleton’s account, an obliteration of all the characters: “Schopenhauer ends up with a kind of transcendentalism without as subject: the place of absolute knowledge is preserved, but it lacks all determinate identity. There can be no subject to fill it, for to be a subject is to desire, and to desire is to be deluded” (168). What would it mean to analyze life as a characterless drama while at the same time maintaining our identity as subjects ourselves? Are we able to imagine, as subjects, a fictive world devoid of such subjects? Such an act would at least require that we complicate our simpler models of genre, since both weeping and laughing are appropriate simultaneous responses to the plot structure that Schopenhauer establishes, as Eagleton indicates: “These antithetical responses are deeply interrelated, in the tragicomedy of the Schopenhauerian vision: I suffer with you because I know that your inner stuff, the cruel will, is also my own; but since everything is built from this lethal substance, I scorn its futility in a burst of blasphemous laughter” (171). If we continue to perceive ourselves as subjects, we necessarily enter a fictive realm and live in a sort of “as if” for as long as we entertain Schopenhauer’s possibility of the insignificance of human individuals in the face of the will or desire. And Schopenhauer’s account compels an emotional response, one that then mandates an act of the understanding in order to understand what kind of generic structure we would need in order to reconcile laughter and weeping. Imagining ourselves as subjective agents and conceiving ourselves as passive vehicles of the will both become plausible fictional constructs by which we may organize and understand our experience. We are now well on the way to an approach that allows for a kind of lucid illusion, a way of conceiving experience that makes room for, and even invites, fictional constructs as organizing principles. For Schopenhauer, an important aspect of perception involves seeing reality as either static or dynamic, an opposition that he links to the divide between optimism and pessimism. He presents this argument in esthetic terms as the difference between seeing the world as, essentially, landscape as opposed to drama:

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An optimist tells me to open my eyes and look at the world and see how beautiful it is in the sunshine, with its mountains, valleys, rivers, plants, animals, and so on. But is the world, then, a peep-show? These things are certainly beautiful to behold, but to be them is something quite different. […] But if we proceed to the results of the applauded work, if we consider the players who act on the stage so durably constructed, and then see how with sensibility pain makes its appearance, and increases in proportion as that sensibility develops into intelligence, and then how, keeping pace with this, desire and suffering come out ever more strongly, and increase, till at last human life affords no other material than that for tragedies and comedies, then whoever is not a hypocrite will hardly be disposed to break out into hallelujahs. (WWR1 581)

Optimism is tenable, in other words, only if we refuse to consider the dynamism of events unfolding in time, with the appearance of dramatic characters such as pain, desire, and suffering. There is a kind of perception available to us only when we conceive the world in narrative terms, with characters and actions and effects. By removing the elements of character and plot from our contemplation of reality, we lose something essential, and so partial as to be implausible and thus untenable on Schopenhauer’s account. This is a forceful critique even if we remain in the realm of plausibility rather than verifiability, since for Schopenhauer, perceiving badly can lead to falling victim to the pernicious effect of optimism. By seeing the world as landscape rather than drama, we fail to see that the will is the motor of the plot developments of lived experience and therefore end up with the pragmatically undesirable result of increased suffering: At bottom, optimism is the unwarranted self-praise of the real author of the world, namely of the will-to-live which complacently mirrors itself in its work. Accordingly optimism is not only a false but also a pernicious doctrine, for it presents life as a desirable state and man’s happiness as its aim and object. Starting from this, everyone then believes he has the most legitimate claim to happiness and enjoyment. If, as usually happens, these do not fall to his lot, he believes that he suffers an injustice, in fact that he misses the whole point of his existence; whereas it is far more correct to regard work, privation, misery, and suffering, crowned by death, as the aim and object of our life […], since it is these that lead to the denial of the will-to-­ live. (WWR1 584)

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What emerges in this account is that it matters less whether Schopenhauer’s account is objectively true in the standard philosophical sense. The effect of the perception is what drives his argument here, and his remarks on optimism are also an argument in favor of seeing and judging the world in narrative terms. His reference to optimism’s presentation of life as a “desirable state” once again suggests the static nature of the optimistic view, which is arguably a perception that is unfaithful to the way we experience life as a series of events and characters acting in situations according to motivations. It is by adjusting expectations that we can avoid disappointment, a key advantage of the pessimistic outlook, and on the mere grounds of plausibility it is more apt to consider lived experience from the point of view of an enfolding narrative than from that of a changeless state in order to minimize the chances of “miss[ing] the whole point.” The risk of pointlessness returns us to the vital question of meaning, which is arguably of greater importance than objective truth on Schopenhauer’s account as it plays out in the plot of The World as Will and Representation. Schopenhauer himself emphasizes the importance of meaning-making, as opposed to simple knowledge of the fact that we have representations. It becomes clear that pure epistemology is not his ultimate concern: But what now prompts us to make enquiries is that we are not satisfied with knowing that we have representations, that they are such and such […]. We want to know the significance of those representations; we ask whether this world is nothing more than representation. In that case, it would inevitably pass by us like an empty dream, or a ghostly vision not worth our consideration. Or we ask whether it is something else, something in addition, and if so what that something is. […] Here we already see that we can never get at the inner nature of things from without. However much we may investigate, we obtain nothing but images and names. We are like a man who goes round a castle, looking in vain for an entrance, and sometimes sketching the facades. Yet this is the path that all philosophers before me have followed. (WWR1 98–99)

The basic move that Schopenhauer recommends is thus perception of our representations followed by an inquiry into their significance; this requires emplotment in that it creates a temporal relation that links past, present, and future events in light of the meaning we assign to individual developments in light of the whole.

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Emplotment within a narrative is a highly effective way to generate meaning, in ways that Schopenhauer explicitly acknowledges in his remarks on literature: “All poets are obliged to bring their heroes into anxious and painful situations, in order to be able to liberate them therefrom again” (WWR2 575). It is easy to recognize such a dynamic plot structure in Schopenhauer’s work itself. The drama of the will plays itself out in a series of tensions that move toward, or at least call for, the kind of resolution that makes for a satisfactory plot. Consider, for instance, this description of the will as motor: From this there results the constant tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces which keeps the globe in motion, and is itself an expression of that universal conflict which is essential to the phenomenon of the will, and which we are now considering. For, as every body must be regarded as the phenomenon of a will, which will necessarily manifests itself as striving, the original condition or state of every heavenly body formed into a globe cannot be rest, but motion, a striving forward into endless space, without rest or aim. […] Thus matter has its existence only in a struggle of conflicting forces. (WWR1 148–149)

Such conflict in the universe is of course manifest in individual subjects as well, and the ultimate goal of understanding the world in this way is, according to Schopenhauer, to attempt to calm the will by ceasing as much as possible to struggle against it. Resolution of the tension crafted by his plot structure comes in the form of consolation: Knowledge of our own mind and of our capabilities of every kind, and of their unalterable limits, is in this respect the surest way to the attainment of the greatest possible contentment with ourselves. For it holds good of inner as of outer circumstances that there is no more effective consolation for us than the complete certainty of unalterable necessity. No evil that has befallen us torments us as much as those thoughts of the circumstances by which it could have been warded off. Therefore nothing is more effective for our consolation than a consideration of what has happened from the point of view of necessity, from which all accidents appears as tools of a governing fate. (WWR1 306)9

Intellectual assent to necessity as a form of consolation marks a tidy resolution to the conflict as Schopenhauer stages it in his work, but this solution

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seems close to the approach of Stoicism that Schopenhauer had already marked as impossible to achieve. Such a resolution is operative, then, in two opposing realms: that of pure logic, which does not adequately account for our ability or inability to live with that solution in practice, and that of fiction, which accomplishes resolution of the plot but in a world that we know not to be our own. For as long as we remain a conscious subject, Schopenhauer’s ideal resolution is inaccessible to us. He is clear on the point that the pleasure that we derive from aesthetic beauty is entirely linked to the fact that we can momentarily rise above willing, that is, that we temporarily cease to exist: Aesthetic pleasure in the beautiful consists, to a large extent, in the fact that, when we enter the state of pure contemplation, we are raised for the moment above all willing, above all desires and cares; we are, so to speak, rid of ourselves. […] And we know that these moments, when, delivered from the fierce pressure of the will, we emerge, as it were, from the heavy atmosphere of the earth, are the most blissful that we experience. From this we can infer how blessed must be the life of a man whose will is silenced not for a few moments, as in the enjoyment of the beautiful, but forever, indeed completely extinguished, except for the last glimmering spark that maintains the body and is extinguished with it. Such a man who, after many bitter struggles with his own nature, has at last completely conquered, is then left only as pure knowing being, as the undimmed mirror of the world. Nothing can distress or alarm him any more; nothing can any longer move him; for he has cut all the thousand threads of willing which hold us bound to the world. (WWR1 390)

Schopenhauer’s writing here requires an act of the imagination no less than that required by any literary text; in order to convince ourselves of the plausibility of his narrative, he asks the reader to imagine being dead, and to compare that necessarily impossible state of conscious unconsciousness to the state of restless and perpetually dissatisfied living consciousness. What would be redemptive, then, is experienced as necessarily impossible except in a temporary way that will ultimately only reinforce the pain of not being able to experience the unwilling of death in a permanent way. This impossibility is what requires Schopenhauer to shift focus onto what would constitute a meaningful and livable life in the wake of the conclusions to which his narrative draws him; otherwise, all his philosophy is, in a quite literal sense, a dead end.

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Schopenhauer’s resolution, that is to say, opens up a tension at the same time as it claims to resolve it. The very way in which he has constructed the narrative arc of his work precludes its tidy resolution, leaving us with the all-important question of meaning and the search for the right conclusions to draw from seeing the world in the way in which Schopenhauer presents it. We are back, in other words, to deciding whether his vision is comic, tragic, or some hybrid form. The fact that we can experience such dissolution of the will and thus of the self only temporarily goes hand in hand with the fact that we do not have language that could be used to describe such a state except in purely negative terms. This is of course why music plays such an important role in Schopenhauer’s philosophy; it provides a kind of knowledge inaccessible in other ways. Schopenhauer claims that art’s “only source is knowledge of the Ideas; its sole aim is communication of this knowledge. […] We can therefore define [art] accurately as the way of considering things independently of the principle of sufficient reason, in contrast to the way of considering them which proceeds in exact accordance with this principle, and is the way of science and experience” (WWR1 184–185). But as soon as we have recourse to music, an inherent set of problems emerges related to the impossibility to offer anything except a translation, a verbal approximation of the experience. Articulating what it would mean to have a form of knowledge that cannot be communicated except non-verbally opens a series of interpretive questions. To the extent that music becomes available to us as a point of comparison for experience, it requires an act of interpretation, which brings us directly back to the verbal realm that we had sought to bypass by appeal to the non-semantic experience of music. The kernel of Schopenhauer’s position, and the difficulty with it, are nicely summed up when he writes that music “is instantly understood by everyone, and presents a certain infallibility by the fact that its form can be reduced to quite definite rules expressible in numbers, from which it cannot possibly depart without entirely ceasing to be music” (WWR1 256). Few would follow Schopenhauer in affirming that music is immediately and universally understood in the same way by all. Beyond that, Schopenhauer here admits that once we seek to talk about music, or share that supposedly universal understanding of it, we no longer have music, nor do we, presumably, have that universal understanding, making music a desirable but impossible phenomenon that disappears the moment we try to seize it.10 That is to say that music, too, leads us ultimately back to the questions we have been posing about fictive structures and the

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impetus for interpretation in order not only to understand experience but to make it meaningful to us. With art comes Schopenhauer’s notion of genius, since the genius is said to have more access to the kind of ineffable knowledge that Schopenhauer privileges. At the start of his consideration of genius, he acknowledges madness and notes the lack of clear distinction between sanity and insanity (WWR1 192). Intriguingly, what he identifies as a characteristic of the mad is their tendency to fill in gaps in memory with fiction: It is not, indeed, a case of memory failing [the mad] entirely, for many of them know a great deal by heart, and sometimes recognize persons whom they have not seen for a long time. Rather is it a case of the thread of memory being broken, its continuous connexion being abolished, and of the impossibility of a uniformly coherent recollection of the past. Individual scenes of the past stand out correctly, just like the individual present; but there are gaps in their recollection that they fill up with fictions. […] In [the madman’s] memory the true is for ever mixed up with the false. […] If the madness reaches a high degree, the result is a complete absence of memory; the mad person is then wholly incapable of any reference to what is absent or past, but is determined solely by the whim of the moment in combination with fictions that in his head fill up the past. (WWR1 192–193)

While Schopenhauer holds up this fiction-making as a distinction between the sane and the insane, we could see it as further evidence of the blurred distinctions between them, since it is a natural tendency to fill in gaps in knowledge with a narrative that imposes coherence on what would otherwise be unlinked characters or events. For events to be meaningful, they need to be connected to each other by links akin to those of a plot structure and its implied motivations, relations of cause and effect, actions and reactions, and so on. It is at the moment when Schopenhauer’s own ideas seem to imply paradox or impossibility that we are made alert to the interpretive possibilities they may hold despite or even because of the impossibilities they seem to present. Understanding madness in terms of fiction-making also brings it closer to the general outline of Schopenhauer’s ideas by virtue of the fact that he ultimately sees this mad fiction-making as a redemptive coping mechanism: Now if such a sorrow, such painful knowledge of reflection, is so harrowing that it becomes positively unbearable, […] then nature alarmed in this way, seizes on madness as the last means of saving life. The mind, tormented so

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greatly, destroys, as it were, the thread of memory, fills up the gaps with fictions, and thus seeks refuge in madness from the mental suffering that exceeds its strength. (WWR1 193)

If we consider fiction-making as a coping mechanism, we can perhaps reconsider the valence it has in Schopenhauer. For while it seems to have negative associations here, as a substitute for a deficit in memory, what he claims about the mad could be generalized to all people inasmuch as he indicates that coping with the world is the best to which we could aspire. This claim, too, depends on what we have identified as “fictional” structure to Schopenhauer’s philosophy, a plot that introduces conflict and ultimately creative (narrative) resolution. Fiction provides a kind of refuge both for the mad as Schopenhauer describes them here and to everyone who would read Schopenhauer’s account of the world and, through an act of fictive identification, align their view of lived experience with it. The lack of ability to make connection between things is what, for Schopenhauer, links the madman and the genius: The madman correctly knows the individual present as well as many particulars of the past, but […] he fails to recognize the connexion, the relations, and therefore goes astray and talks nonsense. Just this is his point of contact with the genius; for he too leaves out of sight knowledge of the connexion of things, as he neglects that knowledge of relations which is knowledge according to the principle of sufficient reason, in order to see in things only their Ideas, and to try to grasp their real inner nature which expresses itself to perception. (WWR1 193–194)

Pure knowing, on this account, would not need to rely on fictional structures because it somehow grasps “their real inner nature,” which by definition would be uncommunicable in language and thus result in what would be understood as nonsense. Here again, what is at stake is the status of a knowledge claim that is not expressible or translatable into language. It is thus unsurprising that madness and genius are linked here via the fact that they are removed from the fiction-making, or, as we might say, the narrative structure, by which we understand the world by imposing precisely those relations between past and present, cause and effect, and so on, that the madman and genius bypass, according to Schopenhauer. It is claims such as these that produce a sort of maddening effect on anyone who tries to follow Schopenhauer’s philosophy, since it is at this point that it

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implicitly theorizes its own impossibility, or at least the impossibility of discussing it in language, which is the only means available to us.11 We thus need to understand Schopenhauer in fictional terms, but this is, as I have been suggesting, not to devalue his philosophy but rather to take seriously and make room for reading philosophy as fiction, as precisely that which attempts to fill in the gaps, to propose and test interpretations, to construct meaning from the potentially meaningless ways in which we first experience the world prior to the act of constructing meaning about it. Without that act of creative meaning-making, we are trapped in the communication-­less world of the genius, who is either powerless to express his knowledge or does so through art,12 which brings us right back to the issue of the artwork taking on meaning only through the act of interpretation in language that we necessarily undertake each time we begin to speak about perceiving the artwork. The deeper we get into Schopenhauer’s ideas, the more we see that conventional dichotomies blur, between truth and fiction, for instance, or sanity and madness. This is not to say that the texts deconstruct themselves so much as to affirm that these paradoxes, or the collapse of neat conceptual categories, send us back to the world of lived experience and underscore the need to bring an interpretive apparatus both to that experience and to the kinds of philosophical systems such as Schopenhauer’s that claim to account for it by dismissing fictive elements. This move only draws us further into the need for interpretation in order to account for the kind of knowledge he claims we can have, which, as we have seen, proves to be an ineffable one. What set us on this path in Schopenhauer’s text to begin with was precisely the discrepancy between truth and lived experience, in his attempt to draw the consequences of the fact that Stoicism is a simply unlivable philosophy. What we seek through the interpretive act, whether that means making sense of musical experience or assigning categories of genre to human experience, is a fiction by which we can live, one that is plausible in light of experience but does not shut down the possibility of continuing to live. Providing this, I would argue, is pessimism’s strong point. In the process, we have removed ourselves from concern with ultimate metaphysical reality, and have even begun to demonstrate that Schopenhauer’s metaphysics is more of a fiction than a philosophy, but to say that is to allow it the potential for meaning and for interpreting and even guiding lived experience. Without that potential for meaning, as we have seen Schopenhauer himself demonstrate, we end up only with an unlivable philosophy.

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An urgent, if often implicit, concern in Schopenhauer is the limits of philosophy, as we have already seen in his consideration of Stoicism as an unlivable philosophical system. In fact, he affirms that moral systems and ethics cannot “create virtuous, noble, and holy men” any more than esthetics could “produce poets, painters, and musicians” (WWR1 271). Philosophy’s role, rather, is that of interpretation: “Philosophy can never do more than interpret and explain what is present and at hand; it can never do more than bring to the distinct, abstract knowledge of the faculty of reason the inner nature of the world which expresses itself intelligibly to everyone in the concrete, that is, as feeling” (271). Once again, philosophy and literature find common ground on this view through interpretation. While philosophy is said to provide the interpretation that literature is said to require, it is not the case that philosophy stops there, since it continues to leave open questions and to invite us to draw consequences from the impasses to which it leads. While philosophy cannot indeed provide a guide to living, the very question of what to make of the implications of that impossibility itself requires a move to interpretation and an invitation to evaluate Schopenhauer’s philosophical system in terms of verisimilitude, for its usefulness in doing precisely what Schopenhauer claims philosophy should do, namely to “interpret and explain.” Schopenhauer’s conclusions prompt further acts of interpretation that beg questions about the implications of his conclusions, and a central question for pessimism is how we should live with, or live according to, its conclusions if we do in fact find them plausible in terms of lived experience. It is from this set of interpretive questions that issues of ethics and politics stem, and thus the question of lived consequences is necessarily part and parcel of the larger metaphysical vision, rather than a secondary concern. By claiming that philosophy can “never do more than interpret and explain what is present at hand,” Schopenhauer both imposes a limit on philosophy and suggests that there needs to be a step beyond philosophy, that it cannot be the last word about the interpretation of lived experience. This is because, on its own, the explanation continues to raise questions. In this sense philosophy is not unlike music in that what seems to be definitive truth is all at once open to a necessary continuation of the conversation. Despite the importance that his thought accords to interpretation, Schopenhauer does claim to present as objective truth the fact that “the lives of most people prove troubled and short. The comparatively happy are often only apparently so, or else, like those of long life, they are rare exceptions” (WWR2 573). He goes on to state that “life presents itself as

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a continual deception, in small matters as well as in great. If it has promised, it does not keep its word, unless to show how little desirable the desired object was; hence we are deluded now by hope, now by what was hoped for. If it has given, it did so in order to take” (573). But stepping back from this assertion, we see that it retains an ambiguity regarding lucidity and delusion, for while he claims that those who are happy are simply inattentive to the ways in which life is a constant deception, he offers no justification here for the claim that most lives are troubled beyond the (indeed probable) assertion that this is the case.13 His argument here is still dependent on a plot structure, where we are implicated in a drama whereby “life” acts on us by deluding us. To adopt a pessimistic outlook in this scenario would be appropriate given the narrative necessity that Schopenhauer builds here, but the very elucidation of lucidity and delusion would depend on adopting the fiction of the perspective as Schopenhauer presents it. His argument depends on assertions, which may be plausible, but which cannot be judged on the level of verifiability, such as when he sketches the past, present and future this way: The present is always inadequate, but the future is uncertain, and the past irrecoverable. With its misfortunes, small, greater, and great, occurring hourly, daily, weekly, and yearly; with its deluded hopes and accidents bringing all calculations to naught, life bears so clearly the stamp of something which ought to disgust us, that it is difficult to conceive how anyone could fail to recognize this, and be persuaded that life is here to be thankfully enjoyed, and that man exists in order to be happy. (WWR2 573–574)

To identify disgust as the appropriate reaction to life makes perfect sense within the world that Schopenhauer constructs here, but again, this is a world of narrative necessity rather than logical necessity. In fact, Schopenhauer himself, in other moments in his writings, presents what could be considered evidence for an opposing point of view, such as when he claims that we focus only on the bad, as when pain in part of the body consumes us even though the absence of pain has no effect on us: “When all our affairs go well except for one that runs counter to our intentions, this one will come to mind again and again, even if it is of little importance; we frequently think about it and think little about all the other more important things that go according to our plans” (Parerga 1 356). Objective assessments of the desirability of existence, he seems to claim,

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pale in importance compared to the situational perception of our lived experience. The importance of perception comes to light in the distinction that Schopenhauer identifies between the way children and adults view the world: Children covetously stretch their hands far out, after everything colorful and diverse that they see before them; they are attracted by it, because their senses are still so fresh and young. The same happens, with greater energy, to the youths. They too are attracted by the colorful world and its diverse shapes, and their fantasy immediately makes more of it than the world will ever be able to offer. Hence they are full of desire and longing for the undetermined, taking away their peace, without which there is no happiness. Accordingly, where as the young believe that God knows what wonderful things can be had in the world, if only they could find out where, old people are infused with the Qohelethian “All is vanity” and know that all nuts are hollow, as much as they may be gilded. For in old age, all this has ceased, in part because the blood has turned cooler and the excitability of the senses has decreased, in part because experience has clarified the value of things and the content of pleasures, by means of which we have gradually cast off the illusion, chimeras, and prejudices that previously concealed and distorted the free and pure view of things, so that now we recognize everything more accurately and clearly and take it for what it is and have also, more or less, come to the insight of the worthlessness of all earthly things. (Parerga 1 432)

Schopenhauer casts the difference in the stages of life here as one between naiveté and experience, which on this view progresses linearly from one to the other, as from error into truth. The problem remains, however, of the impossibility of objective verification of the way things “really are” according to Schopenhauer here. For if experience is to be what indicates the objective error of our ways, he cannot account for those who are not convinced of the undesirable quality of life as he portrays it here, and he finds it “difficult to conceive how anyone could fail to recognize this,” clearly recognizing that there are indeed those who fail in this regard. Either these people would need to be considered as having ceased development at the stage of childhood as Schopenhauer describes it, or they have had experiences that do not lead them to his conclusions and the role of experience is thus diminished even though he had claimed that it is our experiences in life that confirm his conclusions. His account stands on firmest

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ground when considered via the criterion of narrative plausibility and the act of interpretation by which we make meaning from experience. In that sense, both the child’s and the older person’s perspectives are true inasmuch as they present coherent interpretations of experience as the child and older person have had them, respectively. They are thus true situationally and provisionally, and open to revision as experiences change and as the plot of life develops. On this view, reading Schopenhauer is itself an experience that we are implicitly invited to consider in terms of plausibility; we are drawn to consider what the world would be like when viewed from this perspective, and what kind of consequences we might draw from it if it can in fact plausibly contribute to making meaning of our experiences by being itself part of that experience rather than standing above and beyond experience. We build interpretations, that is, as a way to account for our experiences, and not in the abstract way that Schopenhauer seems to suggest when he expresses surprise that anyone could be anything other than disgusted with life. Lucidity, delusion, and fiction are far more slippery categories when we introduce the idea of perception as the motor of our interpretations of experience, and perception is necessarily part of Schopenhauer’s narrative given the impossibility of an Archimedean point by which we may judge things “as they really are.” Thus any claim of his to see things as they really are needs to be judged according to narrative necessity rather than truth, as arising from perception and thus operating on the same plane as any other perception-based judgment. The best we can do, that is to say, is to make meaning of experience, which is an inherently fiction-making activity. To be lucid about fiction, and to value rather than devalue it on the grounds that it provides the potential to create meaning from necessary suffering, is a crucial insight to which Schopenhauer’s text powerfully but indirectly leads us. This interpretive road thus leads to the question of what meaning should be drawn not only from lived experience but also from Schopenhauer’s views on that experience. As we shall see in Chap. 3, at stake after Schopenhauer is the question of just what drawing all the conclusions from his writings would mean, whether it leads to an ethical system or to quietism, a healthy or a perverse way of viewing the world and acting in it, and indeed whether one should continue to choose to prolong existence.14 Schopenhauer himself presents a complex variety of potential consequences. Judged by the rigors of objective philosophical system-­ building, these could only be judged inconsistent, but given the

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situatedness of the perception-based paradigm in which he often operates, we can read this variety of options as a set of competing possibilities to evaluate within situated contexts. When Schopenhauer indicates, for instance, our tendency to focus on pain to the exclusion of a realization of states of comfort, his recommendation is to train the mind to notice and appreciate moments when pain is absence and existence is tolerable: With sullen faces we let a thousand cheerful, pleasant hours slip by without enjoying them, only afterwards, during gloomy times, to mourn their passing, vainly longing for their return. Instead we should cherish every present moment that is tolerable, even the everyday present, which now we let go by with such indifference, even impatiently pushing it to pass—mindful of the fact that at this moment it is crossing over into that apotheosis of the past, where from now on, illuminated by the light of immortality, it is preserved by memory, in order to present itself as an object of our deepest longing when memory one day will lift the curtain, especially during dire times. (Parerga 1 366)

Effective living is, on this account, a triumph over the “will have been,” an attempt to subvert the narrative process of assigning meaning and value to events and mental states only retroactively. This approach goes directly contrary to Schopenhauer’s stated aim at other moments, which, as we have seen, is to render us lucid about how awful our existence is. In the passage just quoted, the lucidity is, rather, in service of those moments of calm, a carpe diem approach that at first seems quite out of character for Schopenhauer. Stated another way, lucidity itself is situational rather than objective and universal, and is bound to the condition of the person who seeks (or seeks to flee) it. Sometimes, cultivating lucidity means being attentive to the world’s suffering to which we can often be blind, but at other times, lucidity would mean knowing how to pay attention to tolerable moments in ways other than retrospective appreciation (and, by extension, regret). Pessimism, therefore, can lead to something like happiness, if we pay adequate attention to what we make of our perceptions once they become molded into an interpretation. All the authors I explore in this book take on this question of how to draw the right conclusions from pessimism in ways that give it the potential to be, in a highly qualified way, affirming of the few moments of good that can emerge from a world of suffering. And it would be incorrect to suggest that in the trajectory that Schopenhauer

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traces from childhood to old age is to be found only the discovery of misery and suffering. While he claims that “if the character of the first half of life is an unsatisfied longing for happiness, that of the second is dread of misfortune” (Parerga 1 422), he indicates that the result is that: the second half of life contains […] less striving, but more peace than the first. This depends on the fact that in our youth we believe that lots of happiness and pleasure can be found in the world and are just hard to come by, whereas in old age we know that there is nothing to be gained, and so are perfectly reassured, enjoy a tolerable present, and take delight even in little things. (422–423)

Far from an indication of unmitigated misery awaiting us the longer we live, Schopenhauer indicates the tangible benefit to be had from seeing the world in the way he has been tracing it; such a view mitigates the force of calling life a farce or seeing it as something not even worth the name of tragedy, by suggesting that this realization can be a moment on the way to an interpretation of the world that brings peace even in full knowledge of the relentless disappointment and suffering that awaits us in lived experience. This is where we realize that we do not have to trade lucidity for fiction, but rather we can plot our lives in ways that retain lucidity about the reality of suffering instead of attempting to minimize its importance or ignore its existence. This perspective comes to us from our willingness to follow the narrative voice in Schopenhauer’s writings, evaluating the claims against our own experience but also being willing to allow the reading of Schopenhauer to become part of those experiences rather than standing outside and beyond them. Schopenhauer himself makes use of a metaphor of text and commentary when discussing the relation of earlier and later parts of life: The first forty years of our life provide the text, the following thirty the commentary to it, which first teaches us to understand the true meaning and connection of the text correctly, together with its moral and all the details. But the end of life is like the end of a masked ball, when the masks are removed. Now we see who those with whom we came in contact during the course of our life have truly been. For the characters have come to light, the deeds have yielded fruits, the achievements have received their just evaluation, and all delusions have crumbled. […] But it is most curious that even we ourselves really recognize and understand ourselves, our own goals and

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purposes, only towards the end of our life, especially in our relation to the world and to others. (Parerga 1 430–431)

Here too, we need to ask on what grounds we may affirm that the view at which we arrive in old age is, in any objective sense, the true or correct one. To propose such a model is to reduce the richness of Schopenhauer’s own metaphor of text and commentary as a fruitful way of conceiving experience and meaning. And indeed his own texts suggest that there is far from a single unified view that comes in old age. We have seen him affirm that the understanding that old age brings allows us to “enjoy a tolerable present, and take delight even in little things.” Such a view stands in sharp contrast to this characterization from another essay in the Parerga: “Blissfully dreaming childhood, cheerful youth, toilsome manhood, frail, often pitiful old age, the torments of final illness and finally the struggle with death—does it not look exactly as if existence were a blunder whose consequences inevitably and increasingly become apparent?” (Parerga 2: 260). And yet awareness of life as a blunder does not, apparently, preclude taking some pleasure in a tolerable present. Schopenhauer remains, however, aware in these reflections that our impressions of lived experience are bound to perception and that the same experience can yield vastly different but equally appropriate conclusions. In what is a key concession that perspective wins the day over the objective truth that he sometimes seems to be defending, Schopenhauer indicates: It is the greatest wisdom to enjoy the present and make this the purpose of one’s life, because after all the present alone is real and everything else is just thought-play. But one could just as well call it the greatest folly, for what no longer is a moment later, what vanishes as completely as a dream is never worthy of serious effort. (Parerga 2 256)

We are left with two equally viable options and, more importantly, an indication of the vital role that the active construction of meaning through interpretive activity plays in Schopenhauer’s texts. Far from presenting a predigested metaphysics and ethics, the “plot” of his writings holds interpretive tension in suspension while foregrounding its necessity and importance. The question of how we might take some kind of pleasure from inevitable suffering brings us back to questions of emplotment, since such

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paradoxical pleasure is characteristic of tragedy as well, and indeed Schopenhauer compares old age to the end of a tragedy: Life during the years of old age resembles the fifth act of a tragedy; we know that a tragic end is near, but we do not yet know which one it will be. Indeed, when old we only have death before us, and when young, life; and the question is which one is more precarious, and whether on the whole life is not an affair that it is better to have behind us than before us; for already Qoheleth says (7:2): “The day of death is better than the day of one’s birth.” Desiring a very long life is in any event an audacious wish. For quien larga vida vive mucho mal vive, says the Spanish proverb. (Parerga 1 435)

We have seen Schopenhauer make use of the comparison of life to a tragedy before, but here the comparison evokes an intriguing split of the living subject, who on the view that Schopenhauer enumerates would have to be considered both the actor and the spectator of the tragedy. It is not simply that one is watching a life play out; one is also the person playing it out. Such an implied but unacknowledged duality underscores once more the impossibility of a pure and objective contemplation of life separate from the experience of living it. Both, rather, occur simultaneously, and reflection on lived experience itself is an integral part of that lived experience in ways that cannot be separated and which complicate the metaphor of life as tragedy. From this splitting of the self as simultaneously actor and contemplator, it is not a big step toward the kind of compassion that Schopenhauer endorses for others based on a shared sense of human suffering.15 As is well known, suffering is the best basis for any sense of fellow-feeling among human beings, according to Schopenhauer: I wish to propose the following rule: for every human being with whom one comes into contact, do not undertake an objective evaluation of him according to value and dignity, hence do not take into consideration the baseness of his will, nor the limitation of his understanding and the wrongness of his notions, because the former could easily arouse hatred, the latter contempt for him. Instead, focus alone on his suffering, his distress, his fear, his pain— then you will always feel kinship with him, sympathize with him and instead of hatred or contempt sense that compassion for him which alone is agape, and to which we are exhorted by the gospels. In order to prevent hatred and contempt from rising up against him, truly it is not the seeking of man’s

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“dignity” but, quite to the contrary, only compassion that is the suitable position. (Parerga 2 184)

Schopenhauer offers no rational argument about why we should prefer to focus on suffering as the point of commonality of humanity; rather, he posits this as, presumably, a plausible view that can lead to a desirable outcome, an interpretive move that can lead to beneficial action in the world. Schopenhauer even suggests that, rather than using titles such as “Sir,” we address each other as “my fellow-sufferer”: “As odd as this this may sound, still it is consistent with the matter, sheds the proper light on others and reminds us of the most essential things, of tolerance, patience, forbearance and love of one’s neighbor, which everyone needs and therefore everyone owes as well” (Parerga 2 273). Once we interpret the world via philosophy, it is also philosophy that leads us to reason about what sorts of philosophical conclusions allow us to continue living in the world or, to put it another way, what sorts of lucid delusions allow for living. Such a move is a voluntary leap into the fictional as a guide. As in Schopenhauer’s text itself, making this move is akin to getting the metaphors right. Note here his use of metaphor to make the very pragmatic claim that we should not choose lucid delusion on account of the fact that the fall from it back into reality produces more pain than the joy we had taken from the delusion: Every immoderate joy […] always rests on the delusion that we have found something in life that is not to be met with at all, namely permanent satisfaction of the tormenting desires or cares that constantly breed new ones. From each particular delusion of this kind we must inevitably later be brought back; and then, when it vanishes, we must pay for it with pains just as bitter as the joy caused by its entry was seen. To this extent it is exactly like a height from which we can descend again only by a fall; we should therefore avoid them; and every sudden, excessive grief is just a fall from such a height, the vanishing of such a delusion, and is thus conditioned by it. (WWR1 318)

Schopenhauer recognizes that, from a logical point of view, what would be preferable would be “if we could avoid both” the pain and the joy (318). The conditional reveals that Schopenhauer recognizes the impossibility of the task, acknowledging that instead of rejecting joy and pain “we frequently shut our eyes to the truth, comparable to a bitter medicine, that suffering is essential to life, and therefore does not flow in upon us from

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outside, but that everyone carries around within himself its perennial source” (318). This truth is Schopenhauer’s famous contention that happiness is impossible, and that for us to be happy would require being something other than human: for a blissful condition of man, it would not be by any means sufficient for him to be transferred to a “better world”; on the contrary, it would also be necessary for a fundamental change to occur in man himself, and hence form him to be no longer what he is, but rather to become what he is not. For this, however, he must first of all cease to be what he is; as a preliminary, this requirement is fulfilled by death. (WWR2 492)

To conceive of bliss is to imagine a fictional construct, one that would lead us to the very limits of imagination because we would need to transcend the human by imagining ourselves to be other than what we are within the limits of our human conception of ourselves. Here, too, philosophy and fiction come together, and both of them lead to a necessary limit point that forces us to ask the pragmatic interpretive question of what the appropriate conclusions to draw would be. Are we to attempt resignation even though Schopenhauer himself seems to acknowledge the impossibility of avoiding joy and pain? That would be a fictional kind of resignation.16 Or are we to continue to pursue joy and become willfully and temporarily ignorant of the pain? That would be a fictional conception of joy. Are we to reject all efforts to mitigate human suffering because we know they will be unsuccessful, or are we to find a sense of human solidarity from the fact that we all share in suffering as constitutive of existence? That last question is key to understanding the potential in pessimism and is what distinguishes it from nihilism. Affirming the good to be found in a sense of solidarity based on human suffering is an interpretive move, one unrelated to verifiable truth and firmly ensconced in the realm of a useful fiction, a plausible way of interpreting conclusions in order to live well in the world. In other words, the explanation that philosophy provides, like the direct will-less knowledge that music affords us, is insufficient and, in narrative terms, deeply unsatisfying. For the conclusions it provides about needing to be something other than human in order to enjoy satisfaction invites reaction, and serves as a plot element of tension and conflict rather than providing the resolution associated with a conclusion. Schopenhauer himself presents lived experience this way:

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Life presents itself as a problem, a task to be worked out, and in general therefore as a constant struggle against want and affliction. Accordingly everyone tries to get through with it and come off as well as he can; he disposes of life as he does of a compulsory service that he is duty bound to carry out. But who has contracted this debt? His begetter, in the enjoyment of sensual pleasure. Therefore, because the one has enjoyed this pleasure, the other must live, suffer, and die. (WWR2 568)

One does not necessarily need to share the perspective of a lived life as the suffering that is required to pay back the debt of the pleasure of conception in order to see life as a “problem” and a “task.” A problem is worked through in a dynamic process for which our narrative understanding of the “plot structure” of life serves as a guide to action. This focus on life as a problem puts us on the path to the pragmatic consideration of how to respond to life as a problem. If suffering is recognized as generalized and inevitable, a certain solidarity establishes itself among human beings. It is here that an ethics begins to emerge from a narrative approach to Schopenhauer’s thought. When choosing between optimism and pessimism as outlooks on human experience, it cannot be a question of verifiable truth, but nor can it be a simple preference, since there is a negative ethical valence to optimism according to Schopenhauer: I cannot here withhold the statement that optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbor nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a wicked, way of thinking a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of mankind. Let no one imagine that the Christian teaching is favorable to optimism; on the contrary, in the Gospels world and evil are used almost as synonymous expressions. (WWR1 326)

An optimistic narrative account is unethical because it renders human suffering invisible at best and insignificant at worst. Schopenhauer’s thought, far from encouraging ethical quietism, produces a moral stance of compassion. Seeing another’s sufferings and taking pleasure in them if our own well-being has been obtained from them “lies very near the source of real, positive wickedness” (WWR1 320). And yet exactly what the normative terms of this ethics would be are left for the most part unspecified in Schopenhauer. Sophia Vasalou has linked the impossibility for Schopenhauer to articulate a normative ethics to a broader historical breakdown of “traditional social hierarchies and religious forms of

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belonging, and therewith the collapse of evaluative structures and their supportive context” (Vasalou 196). Such a move can be empowering rather than troubling, in ways that depend precisely on the epistemic shift from verifiable truth to narrative plausibility: To disavow the pretense of epistemic mastery […] will be to rediscover oneself standing at an “outside” that is an open sea instead of a stable point […]. Yet having retrieved, through such an act of intellectual humility, the vertigo that Schopenhauer’s standpoint had after all never fully expunged, this outside space will have opened up more fully to present itself as a field of uncertainty in which different ways of responding might be possible. (Vasalou 210)

Blurring the border between fiction and non-fiction writing, with an eye toward living well in that imaginative space that absorbs and seeks to make sense of lived experience, is an important part of the modern pessimist project that the writers I will go on to consider take up. The productive tension in Schopenhauer between resignation and compassion allows for establishing grounds for progressive politics rather than a reactionary quietism or a dismissal of political concerns based on the conviction that suffering and injustice will never be overcome. Sandra Shapshay has indicated the ways in which Schopenhauer’s ethics open onto progressive political potential: “Schopenhauer (unlike, say, Nietzsche) puts all human beings on a par with respect to moral considerability insofar as all human beings share these basic features of psychological complexity, individuality, having an intelligible character, and transcendental freedom” (Reconstructing 191).17 Before concluding this chapter, I would like to briefly explore the ways in which the potential for a progressive politics in Schopenhauer has been articulated in the twentieth century. As in all aspects of grappling with Schopenhauer’s thought, there is no definitive and foregone conclusion in his works in terms of how to draw their consequences. There can be no question, however, about the importance of compassion for Schopenhauer. As he writes in “On the Doctrine of the Suffering of the World”: The conviction that the world and therefore also mankind is something that actually should not be, is designed to fill us with forbearance towards one another, for what can be expected of beings in such a predicament? Indeed, from this point of view one could arrive at the notion that the really proper mode of address between human beings, instead of Monsieur, Sir, etc.

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would be Leidensgefährte, Soci malorum, compagnon de misères, my fellow-­sufferer. (Parerga 2 273)

At issue in the relationship of ethics to politics in Schopenhauer is the extent to which he provides for a true sense of the collective. Sophia Vasalou has claimed that Schopenhauer’s concern with vulnerability leads him to be “pre-occupied with self-protection” in a way that “does not, or should not, satisfy us. Preoccupied with the self, inward-looking, lacking the courage of desire, aspiring to nothing but a self escape—it is an image I doubt many of us would like to recognise, let alone aspire to, as our own” (Vasalou 169).18 Such was the source of Georg Lukács’ harsh critique of Schopenhauer, who on Lukács’ view provided “the social basis for an irrationalism founded in the social Being of the bourgeoisie” (196). For Lukács, “pessimism means primarily a philosophical rationale of the absurdity of all political activity” (203) and an isolation of the bourgeois ego even from within Schopenhauer’s dismissal of the individual under the more general aspect of the will. Lukács describes Schopenhauer’s philosophy as being “pervaded by a wholly conscious struggle against dialectics” (232). One might argue in turn, however, that such a reading is itself inattentive to the dialectical potential in Schopenhauer. Lukács constructs an interpretation whereby: with Schopenhauer, theory and praxis are so inimical to each other that its relation to praxis is presented as a downright dishonoring of theory, an important symptom of the inferior and superficial character of praxis; real theory and real philosophy must be pure contemplation strictly isolated from all praxis. (233)

While Lukács often cites Schopenhauer in order to provide textual evidence for his claims, this one about the absolute opposition of theory and praxis remains devoid of cited support, and indeed it is far from self-­ evident that Schopenhauer’s condemnation of suffering implies an endorsement of detached contemplation inattentive to the possibility of relieving suffering to whatever extent possible. If political activity may be labeled “absurd,” as Lukács claims it would be for Schopenhauer, this is not to say prima facie that it is therefore unworthy of pursuit. Lukács shows himself curiously unwilling to go beyond the surface of some of Schopenhauer’s claims and to provide a dialectical reading that might seize the potential for a progressive politics in Schopenhauer.

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For Terry Eagleton, by contrast, Schopenhauer is “led beyond the apparatus of bourgeois legality, of rights and responsibilities and obligations, since he rejects its prime datum of the individual subject. Unlike the fetishists of difference of our own day, he believes that what human beings share is ultimately of more substance than what distinguishes them. Moral action, like aesthetic knowledge, would thus appear an unthinkable paradox” (Eagleton 165). I would claim that the paradox is a productive one, allowing space for a dialectical reading of Schopenhauer that maintains the tension between the ultimate recommendation of renunciation and a compassion-based appeal toward progressive political action. Eagleton sees revolutionary potential in the tension between abstract idealizations of the individual subject and actual living human beings: Once the actual bourgeois subject, rather than its high-minded idealist representation is placed à la Schopenhauer at the nub of theory, there seems no way of avoiding the conclusion that it must be liquidated. There can be no question any longer of judicious reform: nothing short of that revolution of the subject which is its mystical obliteration will serve to liberate it from itself. The philosophy of subjectivity accordingly self-destructs, leaving in its wake a numinous aura of absolute value which is, precisely, nothing. (169)

Like Eagleton, Max Horkheimer’s engagements with Schopenhauer, surprisingly at first glance perhaps, illustrate the potential for critique even from within the bounds of pessimism. Horkheimer returned to Schopenhauer in several of his writings.19 In Critique of Instrumental Reason, he indicates that the doctrine of blind will: enunciates the negative and preserved it in thought, thus exposing the motive for solidarity shared by men and all beings: their abandonment. No need is ever compensated in any Beyond. The urge to mitigate it in this world springs from the inability to look at it in full awareness of this curse and to tolerate it when there is a chance to stop it. (Horkheimer Critique 82).

Such awareness of shared suffering and the prevalence of injustice yields “solidarity that stems from hopelessness” (82), along with a refusal to concentrate efforts on a now-meaningless paradise above and beyond us. “To stand up for the temporal against merciless eternity is morality in Schopenhauer’s sense” (82). For Horkheimer, there is political potential in Schopenhauer’s resistance to the primacy of the individual, which makes space for collective identity and a liberatory politics:

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What Schopenhauer declared about individuals—that they are an expression of the blind will to existence and well-being—is at present becoming apparent with regard to social, political and racial groups in the whole world. That is one of the reasons why his doctrine appears to me as the philosophic thought that is a match for reality. Its freedom from illusions is something it shares with enlightened politics. (83)

The move from idealism to materialism takes place as more of a continuum than a rupture, since idealism, like materialism, sprang from an awareness of suffering and injustice, as Horkheimer indicated in “Materialism and Metaphysics”: The life of most men is so wretched, the deprivations and humiliations are so many, and their efforts and success are for the most part so disproportionate, that we can easily understand the hope that the earthly order of things may not be the only real one. Idealism does not explain this hope for what it is but tries to rationalize it. […] When the desire for happiness, which life from beginning to end proves illusory, was put aside and hope alone was left, the alteration of those conditions which cause unhappiness could become the goal of materialist thought. This goal took on a different shape in varying historical situations. (“Materialism” 23–24)

Horkheimer provides a nuanced reading of Schopenhauer as a corrective to views that would see in him someone who rejects any and all improvement. Rather, he claims that Schopenhauer’s approach is dialectical: He saw things too clearly to exclude the possibility of historical improvement. […] He took technical economics and social improvements into account, but from the very beginning he also perceived their consequences: blind devotion to success and a setback for a peaceful course of events. […] He deified nothing, neither state nor technology. […] The idealistic fable of the ruse of reason, which extenuates the horrors of the past by pointing to the good ends they served, actually babbles out the truth: that blood and misery stick to the triumphs of society. The rest is ideology. In the century since Schopenhauer’s death, history has had to admit that he saw straight into its heart. (Critique 65–66)

Horkheimer illustrates how we can arrive at a view of pessimism from within an acknowledgment of some types of improvement while also taking a broader and, according to him, more dialectical view that allows us to affirm pessimism from within, rather than despite, that

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acknowledgment. Such a model provides an imaginative space for critique without a vision of hope as it is typically conceived by the optimist, an ultimately undialectical affirmation of the continuation of improvement and progress. This approach to Schopenhauer allows us to transcend his own personal political commitments and see the potential for a progressive political critique that would rely on the imperative to interpretation that I claim is essential in Schopenhauer when we seek to draw appropriate conclusions from the impossibility of resignation. This impossibility serves to incite a dialectical thought process about how best to reconcile living in the world with our awareness of what seems to be the perpetual existence of injustice and suffering. These are the questions that writers on pessimism engage with in the wake of Schopenhauer’s interest, and it is to essayists and critics that I turn in Chap. 3.

Notes 1. It was only after the 1870s, however, that Schopenhauer was associated first and foremost, and often exclusively, with pessimism. Before that, as René Pierre Colin notes, Schopenhauer was more likely to be discussed (and dismissed) on account of his atheism or the way in which he engages with Kant (71). See also Janaway xiv. 2. Sandra Shapshay has argued for the deep relevance of metaphor and metonymy to Schopenhauer’s conception of the will as the thing-in-itself: “What Schopenhauer is doing in calling the thing-in-itself ‘Will,’ is not metaphorical identification, but rather, metonymical identification” (216). 3. Patrick Vignoles underscores that we can see metaphysics in Schopenhauer as in relation to lived experience “en deux sens : au sens où elle se veut une explication ou une interprétation de cette expérience ; et au sens où c’est l’expérience qui permet de valider ou d’invalider cette explication et cette interprétation” [“in two senses: in the sense that it understands itself to be an explanation or interpretation of that experience, and in the sense where it is experience that permits us to validate or invalidate this explanation and interpretation”] (225). 4. As Thacker puts it, “Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation is one of the great failures of systematic philosophy. What begins with the shimmering architectonics of Kant ends up crumbling into dubious arguments, irascible indictments against humanity, nocturnal evocations of the vanity of all being, cryptic quotes from the Upanishads, and stark, aphoristic phrases entombed within dense prose, prose that trails off in meditations on nothingness. Schopenhauer, the depressive Kantian” (53–54).

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5. See also Sophia Vasalou, who reserves the term “miraculous” for the kind of transcendence that the esthetic is able to produce in Schopenhauer: “it is this precise resistance [to transcendence] that our natural condition presents to the act of understanding that renders the latter, not only miraculous, but wondrous in the more specific register belonging to the sublime. For it emerges against the background, not of a ‘because,’ but a ‘despite’ (89–90). 6. On affinities between literature in philosophy springing from metaphor, see H.P. Rickman: “Once it is accepted that metaphors can have revealing power and are not just illustrations for the less acute, it makes sense for philosophers […] to look to great poets for illumination of reality. What links poets and philosophers and makes it possible for them to learn from each other is their shared, self-conscious preoccupation with language as pervasive and uniquely characteristic of human life. The concern with language, self-evident in the poet, has always been present in philosophy as well. […] It then becomes eminently plausible that the poet, or the philosopher with his philosophic metaphors, achieves through an innovative exploration of language new insights into reality” (31). 7. As Dale Jacquette has pointed out, Schopenhauer relies on metaphor as an important mode of expression of the Will as well: “Schopenhauer admits that we cannot strictly know even this about the thing-in-itself. But we can characterize Will metaphorically in terms borrowed from our experience of the world as idea” (4). 8. Once we bring philosophical reflection to experience, however, we may recover tragedy as a possible generic model, according to Ulrich Pothast’s reading of Schopenhauer: “It is not fear and sympathy with the individual heroes of the tragic action which are to be induced, but rather […] a new kind of knowledge: the knowledge that individual existence in the world of appearances is thoroughly deceptive and that, therefore, individual death is unimportant, being nothing more than an illusion fading away. This knowledge allows the characters to free themselves from the drive of their individual will, and it allows the spectators to temporarily acquire the same attitude of freedom, a kind of happiness” (70–71). 9. Paul Guyer sees a source of positive pleasure in these moments of lucid knowledge in Schopenhauer, arguing that “Schopenhauer’s theory contains a positive element as well as a negative one, that is, a recognition that certain forms of cognitively significant experience are intrinsically pleasurable as well as affording relief from the pains associated with other forms of experience” (110). 10. Schopenhauer is fully aware of the difficulty but offers no solution: “I recognize, however, that it is essentially impossible to demonstrate this explanation, for it assumes and establishes a relation of music as a representation

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to that which in its essence can never be representation, and claims to regard music as the copy of an original that can itself never be directly represented” (WWR1 257). 11. For a detailed discussion of music’s “silence” in Schopenhauer, see Lydia Goehr. 12. “The man of genius excels [others] in the far higher degree and more continuous duration of this kind of [pure] knowledge. These enable him to retain that thoughtful contemplation necessary for him to repeat what is thus known in a voluntary and intentional work, such repetition being the work of art. Through this he communicates to others the Idea he has grasped” (WWR1 195). 13. For a contemporary case for anti-natalism based on the fact that it creates more suffering, see David Benatar. 14. Sandra Shapshay has identified a paradox in terms of the tension between ethics and resignation in Schopenhauer: “On the one hand, in order fully to honor the ‘harm no one’ part of the principle, resignation is in order. On the other hand, if one resigns, one is thereby not ‘helping everyone to the extent that one can.’ It looks as though we cannot simultaneously, fully honor both parts of the principle—and this despite the fact that its wording would appear to imply that we can. Schopenhauer never acknowledges this dilemma. As it stands, then, Schopenhauer’s ethics […] entails that we choose between two mutually exclusive parts of an ethical principle. And what is more, choosing either entails violating the other!” (Reconstructing 29). 15. As David Cartwright notes, “Schopenhauer’s understanding of compassion is literal, that is, he means that agents literally experience another’s suffering through compassion” (278–279). 16. Sandra Shapshay argues that “while the resignationist Schopenhauer—the one I shall call the ‘Knight of Despair’—represents one side of this thinker, there is another side, the ‘Knight with Hope,’ and this aspect of his ethical thought is in direct tension with the resignationist one. […] Instead of reading Schopenhauer as having a hierarchy of (1) resignationism, and (2) the ethics of compassion one should rather see these as competing ethical ideals in his thought” (Reconstructing 2). 17. See also David Woods, who acknowledges Schopenhauer’s conservative political views and also the ways in which his philosophy allows us to move beyond them: “Insofar as his political philosophy itself is concerned, […] Schopenhauer does indeed advocate an unsightly from of conservatism. On the other hand, however, […] Schopenhauer’s moral philosophy, which is not developed along contractarian lines, but is grounded in compassion with sufferers, concerns itself (not exclusively) with the same relatively powerless and vulnerable groups that his political philosophy

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overlooks, as evidenced by some of the examples that Schopenhauer himself adduces as confirmation of his moral philosophy, such as the abolition of slavery and the animal welfare movement. Insofar as his broader ethics are concerned, then, Schopenhauer’s philosophy has progressive applications to political and social life” (301). 18. Vasalou goes on to argue that the corrective to such a view is to be found in Schopenhauer’s stance on the aesthetics of the sublime. 19. For a thorough exposition of this engagement, see Gunderson.

Works Cited Benatar, David. Better Never to Have Been. Clarendon Press, 2006. Cartwright, David. “Schopenhauer’s Narrower Sense of Morality.” In Christopher Janaway, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge UP, 1999), 252–292. Colin, René-Pierre. Schopenhauer en France: Un mythe naturaliste. Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1979. Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Basil Blackwell, 1990. Goehr, Lydia. “Schopenhauer and the Musicians: An Inquiry into the Sounds of Silence and Limits of Philosophizing about Music.” In Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts (Cambridge UP, 1996), 200–228. Guérin, Michel. Le fardeau du monde: De la consolation. Editions Belles Lettres, 2011. Gunderson, Ryan. “Horkheimer’s Pessimism and Compassion.” Telos 160 (2012), 165–172. Guyer, Paul. “Pleasure and Knowledge in Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics.” In Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts (Cambridge UP, 1996), 109–132. Horkheimer, Max. Critique of Instrumental Reason. The Seabury Press, 1974. ———. “Materialism and Metaphysics.” Critical Theory: Selected Essays (Herder and Herder, 1972), 10–46. Jacquette, Dale. “Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics of Appearance and Will in the Philosophy of Art.” In Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts (Cambridge UP, 1996), 1–36. Janaway, Christopher. “Introduction.” In Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 1, Tr. Sabine Roehr and Christopher Janaway (Cambridge UP, 2014), xii–xxxiii. Lukács, Georg. The Destruction of Reason. Tr. Peter Palmer. Humanities Press, 1980. Pothast, Ulrich. “Elements of Schopenhauer’s Thought in Beckett.” In Nicholas Boyle, et al., eds., The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German

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Thought, Volume III: Aesthetics and Literature (Cambridge UP, 2013), 145–167. Rickman, H.P. Philosophy in Literature. Farleigh Dickinson UP, 1996. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. Tr E.F.J. Payne, vol. 1. Dover, 1969. ———. The World as Will and Representation. Tr E.F.J. Payne, vol. 2. Dover, 1966. ———. Parerga and Paralipomena. Tr. Sabine Roehr and Christopher Janaway, vol. 1. Cambridge UP, 2014. ———. Parerga and Paralipomena. Tr. Adrian Del Caro, vol. 2. Cambridge UP, 2015. Shapshay, Sandra. “Poetic Intuition and the Bounds of Sense: Metaphor and Metonymy in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy.” European Journal of Philosophy 16: 2 (August 2008), 211–219. ———. Reconstructing Schopenhauer’s Ethics. Oxford UP, 2019. Simmel, Georg. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Tr. Helmut Loiskandl et al. The U of Massachusetts P, 1986. Thacker, Eugene. Cosmic Pessimism. U of Minnesota P, 2015. Vasalou, Sophia. Schopenhauer and The Aesthetic Standpoint: Philosophy as a Practice of the Sublime. Cambridge UP, 2013. Vignoles, Patrick. “Nietzsche contra Schopenhauer?” In Christian Bonnet et Jean Salem, eds. La raison dévoilée : Etudes schopenhaueriennes (Vrin, 2005), 195–212. Woods, David. “Schopenhauer on the State and Morality.” In Sandra Shapshay, ed. The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 299–322.

CHAPTER 3

Debates on Pessimism in Late Nineteenth-­Century France

While I have argued that, in its broad outlines, pessimism in later nineteenth-­century France owes several of its key ideas to Schopenhauer, this is not to say that writers on pessimism engaged frequently, directly, and specifically with his texts in their discussions. As Georges Pellissier indicated in 1893: très peu avaient lu le philosophe allemand dans ses livres, mais beaucoup le lisaient dans leur propre cerveau. Le pessimisme, en France, n’eut point de maître et ne tint point d’école; il fut un état d’esprit général et spontané. Il ne s’enseigna pas comme une doctrine, il se respira comme un mauvais air. (9) [Very few had read the German philosopher’s books, but many read him in their own brain. Pessimism in France had no master-leader and didn’t form a school of thought; it was a general and spontaneous state of mind. It was not taught as a doctrine, it was breathed like bad air.]

Moreover, the rise of pessimism in later nineteenth-century France is part of a larger current of a renewal of idealism, with which it shares some important features. Like pessimism, idealism was subject to a variety of interpretations. Rémy de Gourmont, writing in 1905, distinguishes between two different concepts that were both typically labeled idealism at the time: “L’un vient de idéal, et l’autre de idée. L’un est l’expression © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Acquisto, Living Well with Pessimism in Nineteenth-Century France, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61014-2_3

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d’un état d’esprit moral ou religieux; il est à peu près synonyme de spiritualisme […]. L’autre idéalisme, qu’on aurait mieux fait s’appeler idéisme, […] est une conception philosophique du monde” [“One comes from ideal, the other from idea. One is the expression of a moral or religious state of mind; it is more or less synonymous with spiritualism […]. The other idealism, which one would do better to call ideism, […] is a philosophical conception of the world”] (quoted in Schiano-Bennis 22). While the first conception yields interest in mysticism and the various sorts of occult and spiritual revivals of the time in reaction to materialism, the second concept is the one that most directly relates to pessimism. It has important affinities with Schopenhauer’s notion of the world as representation, which entails a certain skepticism, in the wake of Immanuel Kant, about the extent to which we can know the external world independently of our perceptions of it. Sandrine Schiano-Bennis, in her study of the revival of idealism in this period, identifies what we might call a compensatory explanation, whereby the various strands of idealism arise as an effort to “rétablir le lien rompu entre l’homme et l’univers” [“reestablish the broken link between man and the universe”] (62). As writers on pessimism in this period indicate, it is precisely this sense of uprootedness, the dissolution of a harmonious and knowable universe, which Max Weber famously labeled disenchantment, that gives rise to modern pessimism, which on this account goes hand in hand with skepticism. Pessimism can be distinguished from idealism more generally, I would argue, by the way in which it seeks not so much to restore the link between humanity and the universe so much as to provide ways of adjusting the way we make meaning from the world in light of that broken link. The cultural moment was right for engagement with pessimism in post-1870 France, given its disappointing, unexpected, and humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. Culturally, the ground for withering views of human existence and human relations had been laid by the significant influence of writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose portrait of generalized and irredeemable depravity extended to all aspects of individual and communal human existence. As Joshua Foa Dienstag has shown, many generalizable features of modern pessimism are present in Rousseau and woven together in a new way by him, including “an increasing concern with inwardness and psychological depth,” “interest in historical time,” and “a growing suspicion that the increase of knowledge and civilization since the Renaissance have created a society of excessive pride, hypocrisy, and decadence” (49). It is, for Dienstag, a “departure

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from animal obliviousness of time and our insertion into the world of history” (62) that forms the basis of human unhappiness for Rousseau.1 While the writers I address in this chapter seldom appeal explicitly to Rousseau as a foundational figure for pessimism, his cultural narrative of impossible human happiness paves the way for the specific engagement with Schopenhauer and, to a lesser extent, Hartmann, that marks most of the writing on pessimism in late nineteenth-century France. Pessimism as it is worked out through this period involves not so much a despair as a shifting of epistemological frameworks in a way that highlights the construction of meaning from experience in light of the view of the world as representation. The writers I consider in this chapter allow us to trace the working out of the consequence of such shifts in worldview and to attempt to draw the appropriate consequences from pessimism. They allow us to watch new questions, taking shape as writers come to terms with pessimism and attempt to identify what new conceptual ground it may help us uncover. The question of Schopenhauer’s influence in France, as that of any other thinker or writer, is bound up with questions of how his readers interpret him.2 Foremost among those questions in the case of Schopenhauer is what consequences to draw from his work and how far his pessimism should lead in terms of its influence on thinking and living. Frederick Beiser’s comments on his reception in Germany apply equally to France: although we cannot ascribe political causes to the rise and popularity of pessimism in the late nineteenth century, we can still talk about its (real or apparent) political consequences. Because of its alleged quietistic implications, there was an important political dimension to the debate about pessimism. […] Some pessimists […] protested that pessimism had no such quietistic implications; they maintained that it denies only the possibility of achieving happiness in this life; and they insisted that it gave people every reason to strive to make the world a better place because that alone would diminish evil and suffering. (44)

In the face of arguments on both sides of the question of political quietism versus political activism and the lack of definitive answers to be found in Schopenhauer, this reception history becomes of primary importance, and the fact that his text not only invites but mandates interpretation in terms of the practical consequences that might emerge from it aligns it, as I have

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suggested, with the openness of a literary text. Commentators on Schopenhauer interpret him in light of other cultural narratives that either foreclose or open further possibilities inherent in taking his ideas as a starting place for an ethical or political worldview. Schopenhauer’s reception in France was colored by the fact that for a long time his texts were only available in bits and pieces. It is in 1855 that Schopenhauer is first seriously considered in France, in Christian Bartholmess’ Histoire critique des doctrines religieuses de la philosophie moderne [Critical History of Religious Doctrines of Modern Philosophy]. Schopenhauer was known in France for fragments of his thought, such as the Pensées, maximes et fragments [Thoughts, Maxims, and Fragments], which appeared in 1880, translated by Jean Bourdeau, before a first complete translation of The World as Will and Representation appeared, translated by Jean-Alexandre Cantacuzène, between 1888 and 1890, nearly thirty years after Schopenhauer’s death. The fragments of Schopenhauer’s thought lent themselves to open interpretations that may not always align with the larger picture of Schopenhauer’s thought; these interpretations go on, however, to form an important source of debates around pessimism in the later nineteenth century, when the very meaning of the term, along with its implications, was being gradually worked out among those who wrote on the subject from supportive or critical perspectives.3 In addition to arguments for or against pessimism, authors in this period also give a sense of attempting to articulate exactly what we might mean by pessimism, a question that is entirely bound up with that of the right consequences to draw from it and the way in which we might take these ideas as far as the ideas themselves may imply that we should go. At stake, after all, was a relationship to living that risked advocating the cancelation of life itself. What will emerge from the intellectual landscape in which the consequences of Schopenhauer’s ideas were being negotiated is that pessimism does not carry in itself any predetermined political or ethical valence, even while it suggests the urgency of considering the question of those valences. It is that combination of openness and urgency that drives discourse around Schopenhauer and pessimism more broadly in the final decades of the nineteenth century in France. The discourse was fueled in part by those Frenchmen who began to take an interest in Schopenhauer in the middle of the century, several of whom went to see him in person, as Arnaud François indicates:

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Many republican politicians and thinkers traveled to Frankfurt to visit with Schopenhauer: Frédéric Morin (visit in 1857), Louis-Alexandre Foucher de Careil, the editor of Leibniz’s works (1859), Paul-Armand Challemel-­ Lacour (1859). It is surprising that it was largely republican politicians and politician-thinkers who first took a great interest in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. This might be explained, however, by Schopenhauer’s Kantianism, by his anti-Hegelianism (since Hegel had been introduced in France by Victor Cousin and thus associated with “la Monarchie de Juillet”), by his systematic criticisms of religion (which led Challemel-Lacour to compare him with Voltaire), by his doctrine of compassion that was rooted in an acute sense of the problem of evil, and by the favor with which he viewed the empirical sciences. Foucher de Careil also notes Schopenhauer’s francophilia, and Challemel-Lacour is intrigued by his praise of Buddhism. (475)

This is not to say that these visits indicated a wholesale endorsement of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, however: Morin, Foucher de Careil et Challemel-Lacour […] declared themselves horrified by the mephistophelian atmosphere that surrounded this German thinker, and thus began the spread of the view of Schopenhauer as a “pessimist” in France. They were also scandalized by the paradoxes with which Schopenhauer adorned his conversation and by his hostility toward universal suffrage, progress, revolution, the education of women, and his suspicion of sexual love. One might say that they visited him mostly out of curiosity, rather than out of sympathy with his doctrines. (475)

I turn now to Paul Challemel-Lacour (1827–1896), moderate republican statesman and member of the Académie française who served as minister of foreign affairs, president of the Senate, and professor of literature at Limoges and Louvain.4 Challemel-Lacour’s biographer Edouard Krakowski has this to say about the seeming contradiction between Challemel-Lacour’s work as statesman and his writings on pessimism: Cette contradiction plus apparente que réelle, constitue la véritable originalité philosophique de Challemel-Lacour et isole entre tous les autres, ce disciple de Schopenhauer […]. La contradiction d’ailleurs est-elle aussi flagrante que d’aucuns le penseraient ? Le pessimisme est un jugement global sur l’ensemble de la vie, et l’action humaine ne porte jamais sur cet ensemble. (8) [That contradiction was more apparent than real and constitutes the true philosophical originality of Challemel-Lacour and sets him apart from all

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others, this disciple of Schopenhauer […]. Is the contradiction as flagrant as some would think it to be? Pessimism is a global judgment on the whole of life, and human action is never related to this whole.]

In 1870 he published the lengthy article “Un bouddhiste contemporain en Allemagne: Arthur Schopenhauer” [“A Contemporary Buddhist in Germany: Arthur Schopenhauer”], based on a meeting he had had with the philosopher, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, which I will consider before turning to his posthumously published Etudes et réflexions d’un pessimiste [Studies and Reflections of a Pessimist] (1901). Challemel-Lacour’s account of pessimism complicates the stance of those who would claim that it encourages a political quietism that is more compatible with the political right than with the left. His texts provide a complex and nuanced consideration of the ideas they consider and get us beyond simplistic or knee-jerk approaches. One of Challemel-Lacour’s important opening moves establishes that Schopenhauer should be considered not only as a philosopher but also as a writer: A côté du philosophe il y a chez A. Schopenhauer un écrivain et un penseur, et de ceux-là rien ne se perd: ils sèment des germes que des souffles imprévus, que d’invisibles courans emportent, et qu’on s’étonne souvent de voir fructifier au loin sans pouvoir dire d’où ils viennent. (“Bouddhiste” 297) [Next to the philosopher there is in A. Schopenhauer a writer and a thinker, and nothing is lost of those two: they sow seeds that unforeseen winds and invisible currents carry away, and that we are often amazed to see bearing fruit far away without being able to say where they come from.]

Challemel-Lacour seems more aware than his contemporaries of the way in which a writer’s reception may be quite far removed from a concern with a supposedly objective consideration of the ideas contained in his works. His emphasis on Schopenhauer as a writer in addition to philosopher hints at what I have been claiming about Schopenhauer, namely, that he lends himself, or indeed demands, interpretation that goes far beyond a logical evaluation of the arguments. The very nature of his ideas as well as the way he presents them invite broader reflections not just on whether we should accept them, but also on what it would mean to accept them, and how that could or should affect the relation between thinking and living. Challemel-Lacour gives a sense of Schopenhauer’s writing as a

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living thing, unpredictable in terms of the ways the ideas will be used but all the more vital on account of that aspect of unpredictability. There is in Challemel-Lacour’s account a new consciousness that philosophy at its best is personal and in dialogue with lived experience even when it claims to be removed from it. To deny a dialectical relationship between reflection and action is to risk sterile intellectual endeavor or unthinking passionate action, and as I hope to demonstrate, it is when pessimism is considered as a dynamic system of thought that invites dialogue rather than shutting it down and that both shapes and is shaped by lived experience that it is most pertinent. This pertinence depends on a dynamism that best comes to light in the ongoing attempt to draw the right consequences from pessimism and to make effective meaning from it, however that meaning may come to be defined. By acknowledging Schopenhauer as a writer and thinker as well as a philosopher, Challemel-Lacour introduces new methodological questions about how best to read him, and thus a new, more open way of understanding philosophy that would be precisely the opposite of aligning it with science. Challemel-Lacour’s approach could be said to be that of a proto-pragmatist, but still tinged with the biographical flavor of later nineteenth-­century literary criticism. He has this to say about method: La philosophie n’est pas une science impersonnelle, où le plus humble apporte sa pierre et dont on puisse retrancher le nom des ouvriers; elle se compose de grandes créations qui se répondent l’une à l’autre, qui s’enchaînent entre elles, et dont chacune est l’expression d’un génie et d’une âme coordonnant ses idées sous l’influence complexe du tempérament et de l’éducation. Au lieu de soumettre les systèmes à une critique abstraite dont les règles varient avec les convictions du juge, il serait temps qu’on leur appliquât la critique positive et psychologique si heureusement employée de nos jours dans l’examen des œuvres littéraires. (“Bouddhiste” 298) [Philosophy is not an impersonal science, where the most humble brings his stone and from which we can remove the name of the workers; it is composed of grand creations which respond to each other, which are linked together and follow from one another, and of which each one is the expression of a genius and a soul coordinating its ideas under the complex influence of temperament and education. Rather than submitting systems to an abstract critique of which the rules vary with the convictions of the judge, it is time that we applied to them the positive and psychological critique so happily employed these days in the examination of literary works.]

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At stake here is the realignment of philosophy with something more like literature than like science. Challemel-Lacour seeks to account for the aspect of lived experience that must be taken into account when considering Schopenhauer’s thought, given its implied but nevertheless direct implications for how we might reflect on and live in the world. Rather than viewing the system as self-enclosed, he invites us to read Schopenhauer within a series of intertextual echoes, playing his writings off those of others in the act of making meaning from them. While Challemel-Lacour, consistent with critical standards of his time, purports to understand Schopenhauer’s ideas as stemming in part from his biography, we can perhaps take “psychological” in a broader sense that is nonetheless consistent with what Challemel-Lacour implies here; that to consider Schopenhauer as a writer is to widen the range of interpretive possibilities for his text by considering them as an open-ended form that lends itself to kinds of analysis more typically associated with literary texts. This approach also invites critical judgment by reading the texts according to their ability to shed critical light on, and also shape, lived experience in the world, a kind of pragmatism perhaps not entirely inconsistent with “la critique positive” as Challemel-Lacour understands it here. Challemel-Lacour acknowledges that “tout est fait pour surprendre dans la destinée de cette doctrine [de Schopenhauer]” [“everything is made to surprise in the destiny of [Schopenhauer’s] doctrine”] and his own intervention here lays some new ground for the next developments in that reception history. If in some senses Schopenhauer resonates with a certain modern sensibility, Challemel-Lacour quickly resists that label: “Est-ce un moderne qu’on entend ? Non, c’est un bouddhiste, pour qui le repos réside dans l’absolu détachement, qui nous indique comme la bénédiction à laquelle nous devons aspirer et comme la récompense réservée aux saints l’anéantissement de la volonté” [“Is it a modern that we hear? No, it’s a Buddhist, for whom rest resides in absolute detachment, which indicates to us something like the blessing to which we should aspire and the reward reserved to the saints of the annihilation of the will”] (299). The very impossibility of that rest and detachment, the fact that it comes to be seen more as a fictional aspiration than as a lived potentiality, calls out for us to nuance the dichotomy that Challemel-­ Lacour establishes here between “modern” and “Buddhist.”5 He goes on to trace a rather surprising parallel between pessimism and the quite modern notion of positivism, even if he goes on to clarify that the parallel is at

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the structural level, considered in terms of the reception of the two approaches: Je pose la question sans essayer d’y répondre; mais je ne puis m’empêcher d’être frappé d’une parfaite analogie entre les vicissitudes de cette destinée et celles que le positivisme a traversées chez nous […]. Les deux doctrines ne se ressemblent guère; pour mieux dire, elles sont absolument contraires l’une à l’autre dans leur esprit, dans leur marche, surtout dans leurs conclusions. […] Cependant ces deux doctrines si opposées ont eu même peine à sortir de l’obscurité; leurs auteurs se sont pendant longtemps abandonnés aux mêmes protestations véhémentes contre l’oubli qui les couvrait. (300) [I pose the question without trying to answer it, but I cannot help being struck by a perfect analogy between the vicissitudes of this destiny and those that positivism has seen here […]. The two doctrines hardly resemble each other; to say it better, they are absolutely opposite in their spirit, their execution, and especially their conclusions. […] Yet these two such opposite doctrines had the same difficulty emerging out of darkness; their authors abandoned themselves for a long time to the same vehement objections to the oblivion that covered them.]

He goes on to identify another structural similarity between positivism and pessimism in terms of a repose for the intelligence, but a closer look at this parallel reveals more difference than similarity in the way that repose is established: Le positivisme a profité du discrédit des études philosophiques pour subjuguer des esprits fatigués, en déclarant ne poursuivre et n’admettre que des vérités démontrables; il a promis aux intelligences un repos définitif, pourvu qu’elles s’abstinssent résolument de toucher à la métaphysique, condition dure à la vérité, qui ressemble un peu trop au procédé sommaire employé par Origène pour se soustraire au trouble des passions. (300) [Positivism took advantage of the discredit of philosophical studies in order to subjugate weary minds, by declaring that it would pursue and admit only demonstrable truths; it promised a definitive repose to their intellects, as long they resolutely abstained from dealing with metaphysics, truly a hard condition, which resembles a bit too much the summary procedure employed by Origen in order to remove himself from the troubles of the passions.]

The repose that positivism offers is a negative one, and we might even say an anti-intellectual one. It offers repose by simply abstaining entirely from

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metaphysical speculation and the active intellectual questioning that it requires, in order to impose for itself the limits of the testable empirical world. While he introduces the parallel with pessimism by the phrase “de même,” what he goes on to outline is in fact rather sharp contrast to what he has just described: De même la doctrine du philosophe allemand se donne pour également positive, mais en un sens différent; elle prétend, au lieu d’abstractions, élever un édifice de vérités pratiques recueillies dans le champ de l’expérience, embrasser la vie dans ses détails, l’expliquer par des observations que chacun est à même de vérifier; elle en appelle à l’autorité irréfragable de l’expérience journalière, comme le positivisme à celle de la science. Il y avait là de part et d’autre, pour des esprits lassés d’utopies philosophiques, une séduction qu’ils ont subie d’abord, et à laquelle il leur a fallu quelque temps pour se dérober. (300) [Similarly, the German philosopher’s doctrine presents itself as equally positive, but in a different sense; it claims, instead of abstractions, to build an edifice of practical truths gathered in the field of experience, to embrace life in its details, explain it by observations that anyone can verify; it appeals to the irrefutable authority of daily experience, as positivism appeals to that of science. There was in both of those, for minds tired of philosophical utopias, a seduction that they experienced first, and which it took some time for them to overcome.]

It is true that pessimism is far from offering a philosophical utopia, and this is in fact what also distances it from anything we could qualify as intellectual repose. If it is true, as Challemel-Lacour claims, that Schopenhauer ultimately appeals, perhaps despite himself, more to lived experience than to metaphysical abstractions, this is not to say that daily experience simply allows us to ignore philosophical questions. Rather, it shifts the kind of interpretation of experience that we are invited to craft. Such a conception involves a dialectical relation between lived experience and the concepts by which we interpret and attempt to understand it; this kind of approach to interpretation can never be static, dependent as it is on the constantly shifting interplay between conceptual understanding and lived experience, both of which serve constantly to modify the other. And therefore it is far from representing any kind of intellectual repose. Rather, it challenges us to reconfigure the relationship among philosophical speculation, interpretation, and lived experience. While Schopenhauer may posit resignation as an ultimate goal, such resignation remains as pragmatically impossible as

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the total lack of existence that he also recommends. As long as we remain alive, we are confronted with the imperative of meaning-making. Challemel-Lacour’s attitude toward Schopenhauer is ambivalent, which we shall see both in the article that we have been considering as well as his book-length reflections on pessimism. He often stages scenes of judgment on Schopenhauer or pessimism and implicitly invites readers to do the same. A discourse that will play an important role in his book on pessimism is present in the article as well, namely, the consideration of pessimism as a sickness, a label that, as we shall see, others employ as well. As he characterizes it in the article, the sickness, a hypochondria, is to be found more in the method, or the way of seeing, that Schopenhauer cultivates than in the conclusions he draws: Il voit tout au point de vue métaphysique, tout lui devient commentaire ou confirmation de sa philosophie; il ne donne pas ses observations et ses expériences telles qu’elles lui viennent, il les traduit en langue philosophique et en fait une pierre de touche de son système. […] Ce n’est pas simplement de l’orgueil, c’est une maladie particulière qui peut avoir des effets désastreux, et que j’appellerais volontiers l’hypocondrie philosophique. L’homme atteint de cette maladie est captif d’une seule idée qui le domine, et qui, grossissant à l’infini, le ferme au sentiment naïf des choses, l’isole des autres, le remplit de dédains pour ceux qui se laissent tout bonnement sentir et vivre. Cloué sur son rocher, il ne descend jamais dans la plaine, et dans cette solitude, replié sur lui-même, il écoute sourdre ses pensées comme d’autres suivent le progrès de leur mal. La vie, le monde, se réduisent pour lui à un seul point, l’idée qui l’occupe, dont la fixité immobilise son esprit, et dont le poids finit par l’écraser. (305) [He sees everything from the metaphysical point of view, everything becomes commentary on or confirmation of his philosophy; he does not give his observations and experiences as they come to him. Rather, he translates them into philosophical language and makes them a touchstone of his system. […] It is not simply hubris, it is a particular illness which can have disastrous effects, and that I would happily call philosophical hypochondria. The man afflicted with this illness is the captive of one single idea which dominates him and which, becoming infinitely larger, closes him off to the naïve feeling of things, isolates him from others, fills him with disdain for those who let themselves quite simply feel and live. Nailed to his rock, he never goes down to the plain, and in this solitude, turned in on himself, he listens to his thoughts spring up as others follow the progress of their illness. Life and the world are reduced for him to a single point, the idea that

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­ ccupies him, of which the static nature immobilizes his mind, and whose o weight ends up crushing him.]

Challemel-Lacour’s diagnosis invites the question of whether pessimism is necessarily the sort of monomaniacal position that he claims it is here. As I have suggested, the openness that his other characterizations of pessimism imply would suggest that pessimism has the potential to be anything but single-minded. While he suggests that pessimism results in distorted vision, he does not provide the objective criterion by which we could label the vision distorted, and thus we return to the problem we identified in Schopenhauer, the lack of an Archimedean point from which we could verify his claims. And the very labeling of Schopenhauer’s writing as a sickness calls for a response, a continuation of the dialogue that will go on to become part of that “surprising” ongoing reception history, the work of interpretation according to which no reading, including Challemel-­ Lacour’s positing of illness, can be called definitive. Challemel-Lacour has recourse to metaphor to characterize the work of the philosopher: Le philosophe est comme le voyageur qui traverse une ville étrangère et qui, sans se soucier des intérêts qui agitent les habitans, se charge d’en décrire le plan et d’en saisir le caractère; il est comme l’artiste qui dans la campagne voit, non pas des domaines de rapport, des terres à blé, des prairies, des vignobles, mais un paysage sombre ou gai, grandiose ou gracieux. On peut dire encore que le monde se présente au philosophe comme une langue inconnue qui lui est donnée à déchiffrer; s’il tombe sur la véritable clé de la langue, si du moins il parvient à lui appliquer un système alphabétique qui forme des syllabes, des mots, des phrases, et que ces mots aient une acception constante, et que ces phrases présentent un sens suivi et satisfaisant, il peut se flatter d’avoir rencontré la vérité. (329) [The philosopher is like the traveler who crosses a foreign city and who, without worrying about the interests that trouble the inhabitants, takes upon himself to make a map and to seize the character of the city; he is like the artist who sees in the country, not workable lands, wheat fields, prairies, and vineyards, but a somber or happy landscape, grandiose or gracious. We can add that the world presents itself to the philosopher like an unknown language that he is given to decipher; if he happens upon the true key to the language, if at least he manages to apply an alphabetic system that forms syllables, words, sentences, and these words have a constant meaning, and

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these sentences yield a continuous and satisfying meaning, he can pride himself on having found the truth.]

The shifting metaphors here suggest Challemel-Lacour’s restlessness when it comes to describing the philosopher’s task precisely; each one is different in focus. The metaphor of the traveler underscores the philosopher’s propensity for abstraction and generalization at the expense of considering the inhabitants’ own perception of their space. The artist metaphor considers a landscape that is bereft of human presence, so that the philosopher-­ artist’s judgment is presumably not subject to comparison with that of other people with a different relationship to the landscape; all that is at stake in the second comparison is the nature of the description that the artist gives to the landscape, the meaning he imposes by transferring objective characteristics into subjective states (“un paysage sombre ou gai”). The most interesting of the three characterizations is the last one, where the world is given agency at first, after which it becomes the philosopher’s task to read the world as an unknown language. The philosopher is thus to decode the world by learning to read it, a characterization that leaves us with the open question of whether a successful decoding of the unknown language would result in a transparent understanding of its meaning or rather a translation of sorts into a different language, that which the philosopher applies to it. On this view, the philosopher will arrive not just at an interpretation of the world but at truth; but here we should be wary of the comparison of the world to a language, since Challemel-Lacour seems to be assuming that deciphering the world’s language yields transparent and unambiguous meaning, a view that begs the question of what the words mean beyond the simple decoding of what the words are. For that act of deciphering still leaves us with more work to do to arrive at meaning, an idea of which Challemel-Lacour seems conscious when at the outset of the essay he makes the distinction between Schopenhauer as writer and philosopher, but which he seems to elide here. Still, there is ambiguity in Challemel-Lacour’s final phrasing, as he claims that the philosopher “can pride himself on having found the truth.” Is the philosopher’s belief that he has found truth justified or an example of self-­ flattery? Challemel-Lacour’s commentary does not entirely resolve the question. For Challemel-Lacour, Schopenhauer’s originality lies not in his metaphysics but in its “applications morales” [“moral applications”]; he

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recognizes in Schopenhauer’s philosophy “de grandes ambitions pratiques” [“grand practical ambitions”], although they are mostly in the service of the impossible total renunciation of life: “Comme les religions, bien des philosophes ont opposé le monde des apparences sensibles à celui des idées, le monde des phénomènes à la réalité en soi. Le pessimisme de Schopenhauer est la traduction morale de ces conceptions métaphysiques” [“Like religions, many philosophers have opposed the world of sensual appearance to that of the ideas, the world of phenomena to that of reality in itself. Schopenhauer’s pessimism is the moral translation of these metaphysical conceptions”] (332). Still, as an aspirational ideal, such a practical orientation does guide Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and the task of working out the consequences and implications of desire being the root of suffering at the same time as it is impossible to extinguish it entirely will guide those writing in Schopenhauer’s wake in Challemel-Lacour’s generation and beyond. It is not enough merely to denounce the world; the point seems to be to articulate ways to live in it even so, and that is where there is room for a variety of interpretations and ways to conceive of action, even while staying within the realm of Schopenhauer’s worldview. Challemel-­ Lacour remains ambivalent about Schopenhauer’s position, seeing it, on one hand, as a useful corrective to his era’s tendency to overestimate humanity’s powers: “Dans un temps où l’on divinise l’humanité, […] une doctrine qui s’exprime d’un ton à la rendre modeste serait assez à sa place, si elle était moins outrée” [“In a time when we deify humanity, a doctrine that is expressed in a tone that renders it modest would be well placed, if it were less outrageous”] (332). But on the other hand, he wonders whether it might not be better to err on the side of making humanity out to be greater than it actually is than to affirm Schopenhauer’s negations: On se demande si l’illusion n’a pas son prix comme la vérité, si trop présumer de soi ne vaut pas mieux que de ne point se placer assez haut, et l’instinct répond, un instinct qui porte l’homme à l’action, à la croyance, au bonheur, et sur lequel il est probable que ne prévaudront pas de sitôt les subtiles doctrines qui l’accusent de mensonge et d’aveuglement. (332) [One wonders whether illusion doesn’t come with a price just like truth, if assuming too much about oneself is not better than not placing oneself high enough, and instinct responds, an instinct which brings man to action, to belief, to happiness, and over which it is probable that the subtle doctrines that accuse him of lies and blindness will prevail.]

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If the question of Schopenhauer’s philosophy is that of a useful fiction, Challemel-Lacour raises the issue of whether it would be in fact more useful to abandon Schopenhauer’s ideas altogether. Such a stance begs the question, in its turn, of whether true happiness as Challemel-Lacour refers to it here is possible by simply ignoring the worldview that Schopenhauer presents and its plausible account of human suffering that Challemel-­ Lacour has just exposed at length. By leaving the question open of whether he is simply unwilling to draw all the consequences from Schopenhauer, Challemel-Lacour ultimately stages the debate that will continue to play itself out around pessimism in the later nineteenth century. Challemel-Lacour’s book-length study of pessimism more broadly, Etudes et réflexions d’un pessimiste, was written nearly ten years before “Un bouddhiste contemporain,” between 1861 and 1869, but published much later, posthumously, serially in 1900 and in a single volume in 1901. In the book even more so than had been the case in the article, the author stages and invites judgment on the ideas about pessimism expressed therein. The book, by its very structure, mandates the involvement of the reader as judge. It begins with a section by its editor, Joseph Reinach, entitled “Oraison funèbre” [“Funeral Prayer”], which introduces from the outset that the ideas contained in the book are dangerous: Je n’aurai garde de combattre tous ces sophismes; je veux laisser au lecteur le soin d’en faire justice. Ils n’étaient pas un jeu d’esprit pour notre ami, c’est pour cela qu’ils l’ont conduit à sa perte. Ils devaient être publiés pour attester sa sincérité, pour montrer aux adeptes du pessimisme, s’il en est, le danger qu’ils courent, et leur faire sentir que la vraie sagesse est, en philosophie comme en politique, d’être content sans raisonner. (Etudes 23–24) [I will not combat these sophisms; I want to leave to the reader the care of doing justice to them. They were not a mind game for our friend; that’s why they led him to his demise. They needed to be published to attest to his sincerity, to show to pessimism’s partisans, if there are any, the danger that they are running, and to make them feel that true wisdom is, in philosophy as in politics, to be happy without thinking.]

The material that is to follow in the book is thus already represented as under negative judgment, presented as a kind of warning. The question of truth does not play a central role in this dismissal, except for the label “sophismes.” Rather, what matters most is the effect that such ideas have on those who hold them, and the speaker here advances a completely anti-­ intellectual stance by discounting reason rather than engaging the logic of

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pessimism’s arguments. This kind of unthinking commitment to happiness could also be said to represent a kind of danger. The stakes are high in what is staged in some ways as a drama here: we are invited to trace the ideas of a character who is “lost” on account of his intellectual adventure, and whose ways are meant to serve as a kind of cautionary tale about the importance of pursuing happiness to the exclusion of reasoning, resulting in a rather curious kind of “philosophy.” Already at stake, then, are borders between fiction and reality, true and false, illusion and reality, sickness and health, and the ways in which they might cross in our dialogic engagement with pessimism. No matter what the speaker goes on to say, the reader is invited at least to consider, based on this introductory section dismissing the ideas that follow, that the position the speaker advances is delusional and/or dangerous. Questions of truth and illness dominate Etudes et réflexions d’un pessimiste from the start of the book proper, written by the “pessimist” to which the title refers. Challemel-Lacour sets up a complex play between sickness and health, claiming that the majority view pessimists as sick when in fact they are healthy, or rather that their particular kind of sickness leads them to greater lucidity, and is thus a healthy kind of sickness. Questions of perceived versus actual sickness are thus complicated by reinterpretations of the terms themselves, making the terms, in a sense, reversible. He first attacks those optimists, who represent the common mainstream view, who dismiss the pessimists who have a long history of important thinkers on their side and refuse to engage with their arguments, justifying that refusal on the basis of perceived sickness: Ces gens bien portants ont tous une manie singulière, c’est de s’arroger, on ne sait pourquoi, un droit privilégié sur la vérité. Avez-vous le malheur de vous écarter en quoi que ce soit des idées vulgaires, ils vous déclarent malade de leur autorité, quand bien même vous ne feriez que penser ce que tous les sages ont répété à l’envi depuis Homère, Job et Salomon. Ce jugement porté, on s’abstient de discuter vos idées, on ne vous répond plus que d’un ton de piété bienveillante, qui jetterait hors des gonds le plus patient des hommes. (25) [These healthy people all have a singular obsession, that is to arrogate, who knows why, a privileged right to truth. If you have the misfortune to distance yourself in any way from vulgar ideas, they declare you sick on their authority, when all you have done is to think what all the sages have repeated since Homer, Job, and Solomon. Once this judgment is carried out, they refrain from discussing your ideas, they only respond with a tone of

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­ ell-­meaning pity, which would throw even the most patient of men off w the hinges.]

Challemel-Lacour goes on to call into question the very distinction between health and sickness: Les plus savants médecins affirment qu’il est très difficile de distinguer théoriquement la santé de la maladie, et je ne crois pas qu’il ait jamais été donné de l’une ou de l’autre une définition incontestée. Pour moi, je crois pouvoir dire que la maladie consiste principalement à voir les choses telles qu’elles sont, et c’est pourquoi j’admets, avec l’immense majorité de mes semblables, que l’essence de la maladie est de ne pas penser comme tout le monde. (25) [The most learned doctors affirm that it is very difficult to distinguish theoretically sickness and health, and I do not believe that an uncontested definition has ever been given of either one. For me, I think I am able to say that sickness consists principally in seeing things as they are, and that is why I admit, with the immense majority of my peers, that the essence of sickness is not to think like everyone else.]

Given these blurred distinctions, it becomes hard to know exactly how to read the definition of sickness that Challemel-Lacour provides in the passage I have just quoted. If it is indeed preferable to see things as they really are, and if such a perspective is aligned with sickness for Challemel-Lacour, then we should prefer sickness to health. If he is merely implying, when he says “for me,” that here he is giving voice to common opinion, saying essentially that the sickness in question is, for those who label it as such, what we should otherwise call lucidity. In either case, what is dismissed as sickness stems from a view that is at once lucid and a minority view. His view intertwines physical and intellectual sickness and health, as he goes on to note the correlation between “tous ceux dont la face épanouie, le teint clair, le pouls régulier, l’œil paisible attestent une digestion parfaite” [“all those whose contented faces, clear complexion, regular pulse, and  peaceful gaze attests to a perfect digestion”] (26) and a wholesale adoption of commonly accepted opinion, which results from “l’équilibre des humeurs et l’exercice modéré des fonctions cérébrales” [“the equilibrium of the humors and the moderate exercise of cerebral functions”] (26). Truth, however, is not on the side of those whose physical health leads them to accept received opinion:

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Ce rôle est beau, j’en conviens; mais il n’a rien de commun avec le don d’apercevoir la vérité, qui est réservé aux malades. Tout le monde n’a-t-il pas reconnu qu’aux approches de la dernière heure la pensée s’illumine d’une lumière presque divine et que le mystère de la vie s’éclaircit aux yeux des mourants ? De là vient qu’on leur a si souvent attribué l’inspiration prophétique. Pourquoi la maladie, qui est un acheminement à la mort, ne serait-elle pas un commencement d’illumination ? (26) [This role is beautiful, I admit; but it has nothing in common with the gift of perceiving truth, which is reserved to sick people. Has not everyone recognized that, as the final hour approaches, thought is illuminated with an almost divine light and that the mystery of life is illuminated in the eyes of the dying? It is from there that we have often attributed prophetic inspiration to them. Why would sickness, which is a pathway to death, not be a beginning of illumination?]

Such a view makes us reevaluate the commonly perceived alignment between health and truth, for if truth lies on the side of the sick, then we should revalue sickness, or perhaps label it true health. Such evaluation is complicated, however, by the fact that all the ideas that the pessimist is presenting here have already been dismissed out of hand by the author of the prefatory “Oraison funèbre,” who invites us to see all of what will follow in the book as evidence of mental sickness. The reader is constantly placed in the position of judge, and is forced to sense his or her alignment either with the healthy or the sick, or with those who hold a common view or those who hold the truth. Even the status of that distinction is not clear with an evaluative judgment on the part of the reader, who may well affirm that the common view is, pace the pessimist, true. If one accepts the pessimist’s view, then there is something heroic about the sick point of view in that it reveals truth in full lucidity. Should we then begin to put scare quotes around the word “sick” to imply that what is labelled sick is in fact healthy, or is the right conclusion to draw that we should affirm sickness, not labeling it health but rather affirming sickness itself as having a revelatory function? Once we are forced to make these interpretive judgments, we are no longer in the realm of philosophical deliberation and have passed over into something far more akin to literary reading as we consider the frames, the characters, and the effect of the words in this work as it unfolds. Here, as in Schopenhauer, the absence of external verification leaves us with opposing views, with shared sets of words but carrying totally different meanings depending on who is using the words. What is sick or ignorant from

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one point of view is the very opposite from another, even when one claims to see what “really” is, because it is precisely the question of what “really” is, what lucidity would actually mean, that is in question here. The dialogical aspect of the working out of these questions is thrown into relief by the inscription in the text of that voice from the prefatory text, which challenges the reader never to accept comfortably what is being asserted by any of the voices presenting claims here. Readers thus enter into their own internal dialogue as they try to make sense of the terms as the text presents them in multifaceted ways. Challemel-Lacour uses the term “vrai sens” [“true meaning”] when he claims to disentangle what people mean by sickness and health, but he still to some extent begs the question: Il ne faut donc pas se méprendre sur le vrai sens de ces mots: « Il est malade », quand on les applique à un homme en raison des opinions qu’il émet. Je suis convaincu (et je me flatte de l’avoir démontré) que cela revient la plupart du temps à cet utile avertissement: « prenez garde, il est empesté de vérité ». (27) [We must not have misunderstandings on the true meaning of these words: “he is sick,” when we apply them to a man by reason of the opinions that he expresses. I am convinced (and I believe I have shown) that most of the time that goes back to that useful warning “watch out, he is infected with truth.”]

While “he is sick” may well mean “he is infected with truth,” this does not resolve the question of whether we should take what most call “sick” to mean “healthy” or whether we should affirm the value of sickness as sickness. Is Challemel-Lacour seeking to move past the unhelpful discourse of sickness versus health when it comes to pessimists’ relation to the truth, to reverse the meaning of the terms, or to validate the term that is usually denigrated? These questions are left to the reader to resolve. The plurality of voices in the text is further enriched by the introduction of a German philosophical sage who becomes an interlocutor with the writer. The sage’s words are presented in direct quotation, as he expounds distinctly Schopenhauerean views, indicating that “le seul bonheur est de ne pas naître” (62) and that compassion in the face of suffering is both the glory of humanity and a source of further suffering: La pitié, qui est sa grandeur, sera son supplice; elle est le retentissement de toutes les douleurs humaines, non de toutes les douleurs possibles dans une âme d’homme, l’identification passagère mais réelle de mon être et de tout

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ce qui souffre. Sympathie, compassion, commisération, pitié, ces mots, qui sont l’effrayant symbole de la parenté universelle. (64–65) [Pity, which is his greatness, will be his torture; it is the resounding of all human pains, not of all the possible pains in the soul of a man, the passing but real identification of my being with everything that suffers. Sympathy, compassion, commiseration, pity, these words, which are the horrifying symbol of universal parentage.]

Challemel-Lacour ultimately rejects these ideas by establishing a rupture between theory and lived experience. After searching within himself for the reason why he cannot accept Schopenhauer’s ideas, he arrives at the conclusion that it is because “l’auteur, malgré sa sincérité, ne croyait pas un mot de ce qu’il disait” [“the author, despite his sincerity, believed not a word of what he was saying”] (72). Challemel-Lacour situates Schopenhauer’s pessimistic discourse within a historical frame whereby it takes on a performative aspect, a corrective to an overambitious optimism and belief in progress: Or, le siècle venait de commencer en 1818, et il avait déjà fait de si belles choses, si grandes, si merveilleuses, qu’il était plus nécessaire de le retenir que de l’exalter. En prudent pédagogue, mon philosophe voulait modérer une ardeur périlleuse, en affectant de rabattre les espérances et de diminuer les mérites d’un jeune siècle, justement satisfait de lui-même, mais un peu enclin à la suffisance. […] Certes, si le philosophe allemand écrivait son livre à cette heure, en voyant le chemin que nous avons parcouru il ne nierait pas le progrès comme il le niait en 1818. (72) [Now, the century had just started in 1818, and it had already done such beautiful, grand, marvelous things, that it was more necessary to hold it back than to exalt it. As a prudent pedagogue, my philosopher wanted to tone down a dangerous ardor by claiming to lower hopes and diminish the merits of a young century, self-satisfied, but a bit inclined toward sufficiency. […] Certainly, if the German philosopher were writing his book now, seeing the path we have traveled he would not deny progress as he did in 1818.]

The author seems to abandon notions of truth as lucidity for a kind of situational truth, emphasizing the rhetorical import of Schopenhauer’s ideas and implying that we can suggest the opposite of what Schopenhauer had to say now that our times are not his times. This is far from the discourse of lucidity and illness with which he began.

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Later in the book, this same sort of effect-centered approach leads Challemel-Lacour to more favorable evaluations of pessimism. Implicitly replying to the critique of pessimism that aligns it with quietism, he claims that a mark of pessimism is to go on living as if pessimistic conclusions weren’t really the case. Pessimists don’t seem, that is, to let themselves be paralyzed by living in the world because of their conviction that all action is ultimately fruitless in terms of producing human happiness. This will be a key aspect of the pessimism debate in terms of both a way of living in the world and enabling progressive politics. It is what will ultimately distinguish pessimists from cynics or nihilists. On ne peut refuser une grandeur particulière au pessimiste, que la prévision du dénoûement ne paralyse pas. […] Ils n’occupent jamais les premiers postes, parce qu’ils détestent l’emphase qui y est toujours nécessaire et parce qu’ils ne partagent pas l’ivresse générale. Mais, dans le demi-jour, où ils font leur œuvre et d’où ils ne sortent guère que pour tomber en victimes, ces figures trop souvent négligées de l’histoire […] sont de celles que je m’arrête le plus volontiers à contempler. J’aime les incrédules, tels que Chamfort, qui agissent comme s’ils croyaient. (121–122) [We cannot refuse a particular grandeur to the pessimist, whom the foresight of the ending does not paralyze. […] They never occupy the most important places, because they hate the emphasis that is always necessary there and because they do not share the general intoxication. But, in the half-light, where they do their work and which they hardly ever leave except to become victims, these figures, too often neglected by history […] are those that I most willingly stop to contemplate. I like skeptics such as Chamfort, who act as if they believed.]

We return here to the sort of heroism that was implied by Challemel-­ Lacour’s discourse of sickness. It is not so much the courage of one’s convictions as the courage not always to act on those convictions, to find some sort of balance between lucidity and the continuation of a life that might be said to be worth living. It is a kind of living in the “as if.” Such an approach allows the pessimist to retain the insights of lucidity but not for all that to lose motivation to live in the world, a conclusion that is consistent with Schopenhauer’s own insistence that suicide in no way cancels the ill effects of the will and is therefore ineffective and unadvisable. Once we have reached what seems like both a reasonable and livable conclusion about pessimism, at a point so far along in the book that the reader may have started to forget the blanket condemnation of the ideas it

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contains at the outset, the call to judgment returns in a postlude to the five main chapters of the book. If the reader has been taken in by the position advanced in the book, he or she is called back to a more critical analysis in the postlude, with a renewal of the attack on those ideas as contradictory and evidence of a sick mind: Il suffisait d’ailleurs d’avoir averti une fois pour toutes le lecteur de la maladie morale dont notre ami était atteint, sans noter dans ce qu’il a écrit les choses vraies et acceptables, à mon avis, et celles qui sont absurdes. […] J’ai laissé, comme je le devais, à la sagacité du lecteur le soin de discerner la vérité de l’extravagance. (164) [It was sufficient to have warned the reader once and for all about the moral sickness that afflicted our friend, without noting in what he has written the things that are true and acceptable, in my opinion, and the ones that are absurd. [….] I left, as I should have, to the sagacity of the reader the task of discerning truth and extravagance.]

In a clever textual game, the author of the preface leaves it to the reader to determine what is worth retaining and what should be jettisoned, as if such a thing were self-evident. But of course the question of the extent to which the position of the pessimist is tenable is what is at issue, and precisely the reader’s task as he or she remains in the position of judge of the health of the ideas that have been set out in the book. More than any one particular argument for or against pessimism, what this book stages is the nature of the debate about it, the necessity of affirming the sickness or health of its ideas, and the criteria by which one may do so credibly. It is, then, not so much a matter of pursuing objectively verifiable truth as of adopting a healthy point of view, however the reader may define such a thing. As we have seen, the categories of sickness and health have the potential to be reversible, so that true health might in fact correspond to the popular definition of sickness. What results is a concern with living well in the world, that is, the ethical rather than metaphysical stakes of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. This point is brought home in the essay on Schopenhauer that closes the volume: L’originalité de la doctrine [de Schopenhauer] […] consiste dans ses applications morales. Toute philosophie est avant tout spéculative, elle n’enseigne pas plus la vertu que l’esthétique n’enseigne le génie, –et celle de Schopenhauer se propose d’abord, elle aussi, la recherche du vrai; mais au fond elle a de grandes ambitions pratiques […]. Le pessimisme de

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Schopenhauer est la traduction morale de ces conceptions métaphysiques. (238–239) [The originality of [Schopenhauer’s] doctrine […] consists in its moral applications. All philosophy is above all speculative, it no more teaches virtue than esthetics teaches genius, –and Schopenhauer’s too proposes, first of all, the search for the true; but at base it has grand practical ambitions […]. Schopenhauer’s pessimism is the moral translation of metaphysical conceptions.]

In light of the considerations of the health or sickness of viewing the world from the point of view of pessimism, this observation about Schopenhauer, while departing significantly from Schopenhauer’s own understanding of the relationship of his philosophical reflections to truth, sets the stage for a pragmatic evaluation of pessimism. As I have suggested, what begins to emerge in Challemel-Lacour’s writing, and will continue to matter in other contemporaneous discussions of pessimism, is the question of the right balance between lucidity and livable conceptions of the world, a point of view that rejects a retreat into pure illusion but resists at the same time an approach to reflection that would simply shut down the possibility of lived experience. Pessimism comes to inhabit that space between reflection and action as authors begin to wonder explicitly about the pragmatic effects of the pessimist position. Challemel-Lacour sees Schopenhauer’s ideas in terms of their value as a corrective to other dominant views at the time. He is tempted by an illusion that he recognizes may very well be false but redeemable by its positive effects. If we retain this emphasis on the pragmatic value of fictional conceptions of humanity, it remains to pessimists in later generations to demonstrate that pessimism itself can lead to action rather than passivity, and perhaps even to something like a happiness that would be more compatible, to some extent, with lucidity than a full-on illusion of optimism would be. Challemel-Lacour thus sets the stage for important debates about how best to understand pessimism, the frameworks in which it impels us to judgment, and the criteria by which we might perform that judgment. The necessary ambivalence of the text ensures that it steers away from merely dogmatic or dismissive accounts of pessimism in order to attempt to engage the questions that pessimism brings in its wake about ethics, politics, and the relationship of fiction to truth.

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Challemel-Lacour’s contemporary, Elme Marie Caro (1826–1887), was a member of the Académie française whose works are often concerned with a defense of Christianity against positivism; he could be considered, as Sandrine Schiano-Bennis has recently indicated, “un apôtre de l’idéal, soucieux de normes éthiques” [“an apostle of the ideal, concerned with ethical norms”] who pursued “une philosophie de coeur et d’esprit” [“a philosophy of the heart and the mind”] (85). Caro took a far less ambiguous stance on pessimism than Challemel-Lacour in a series of articles in La Revue des Deux Mondes from 1877–1878, which were then reworked into the book-length study Le Pessimisme au XIXe siècle [Pessimism in the Nineteenth Century] in 1878. The collective title of the series of articles, “La Maladie du pessimisme au XIXe siècle” [“The Sickness of Pessimism in the Nineteenth Century”] presents in capsule form Caro’s argument, which he states early on in these terms: pessimism is “une sorte de maladie intellectuelle, mais une maladie privilégiée, concentrée jusqu’à ce jour dans les sphères de la haute culture, dont elle paraît être une sorte de raffinement malsain et d’élégante corruption” [“a sort of intellectual sickness, but a privileged sickness, concentrated up to now in the spheres of high culture, of which it seems to be a sort of unhealthy refinement and elegant corruption”] (ii–iii). Continuing and expanding the characterization of pessimism as an illness, he presents his argument without the ambiguity and call to the reader’s own judgment about the meaning of health and sickness that dominated Challemel-Lacour’s text.6 He gives a broad historical overview of pessimism in biblical and Greco-Roman contexts before concentrating centrally on Leopardi, Schopenhauer, and Hartmann. Like Challemel-Lacour, he links philosophy and literature by identifying pessimism as a concern for both: “Il y a là quelque chose comme une crise cérébrale et littéraire à la fois, qui dépasse l’enceinte d’un système” [“There is something there like a cerebral and literary crisis, which goes beyond the confines of a system”] (iii). He is confident, however, that the illness is not highly contagious and considers his study more as an examination of an intellectual or cultural curiosity than an exploration of a real danger: “Il n’est guère à craindre que cette philosophie soit jamais autre chose en Europe qu’une philosophie d’exception, et que l’humanité civilisée s’abandonne un jour à la mortelle séduction de ces conseillers du désespoir et du néant” [“It is hardly to be feared that this philosophy would ever be anything other than a philosophy of exception in Europe, and that civilized humanity would abandon itself to the mortal seduction of those counsellors of despair and nothingness”] (iii). While Caro recognizes that

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pessimism has long roots, which he traces back to biblical antiquity, the modernity of pessimism consists, for him, in “la forme systématique et savant qu’il a prise de nos jours” [“the systematic and learned form that it has taken in our times”] (2). Pre-modern pessimists, by contrast, express “la mélancolie d’un tempérament, la gravité attristée d’un penseur, le bouleversement d’une âme sous le coup du désespoir” [“the melancholy of a temperament, the sad seriousness of a thinker, the upset of a soul under the blow of despair”], whereas in the modern era we have “une conception systématique de la vie, la doctrine raisonnée du renoncement à l’être” [“a systematic conception of life, the reasoned doctrine of the renunciation of being”] (3). It would be hasty, however, to maintain that nineteenth-century pessimism is above all systematic. Its entwinement with literature should put us on guard against thinking of modern pessimism primarily in terms of system; in fact, part of what pessimism seeks to accomplish is a distance from overly systematic philosophical reflection. Where Schopenhauer’s ideas fail in terms of a complete philosophical system, they prove incredibly fecund as a set of questions that bear a distinct relation to lived experience and the attempt to assign meaning to it, thus creating more of a link to older forms of pessimism than Caro acknowledges. To argue against pessimism as a philosophical system is, in some ways, to miss the point, and in that sense, Challemel-Lacour’s dialogical approach that appeals to judgment is more consonant with pessimism’s developments in the later nineteenth century. Caro complicates his notion of “system” by going on to ask, in the context of a discussion of Leopardi, whether “l’absence de tout système n’est pas elle-même un système et qui a fait quelque figure dans le monde, puisqu’il est celui des sceptiques ?” [“the absence of all system is not itself a system and which figures in the world, since it is that of the skeptics?”] (30). Such a view can operate in a way analogous to what we saw in terms of the reversibility of sickness and health in Challemel-Lacour: if the absence of system can itself be said to be a system, we are forced to reevaluate our conception of how philosophical systems operate in a way that makes room for both the purportedly pre-modern pessimism of temperament and localized moment of despair and the modern attempt to systematize reflection on such moments or to raise them to the level of a general condition. The more Caro writes about the distinction that he wishes to draw, the less tenable it becomes, and all the more so since he associates individual expressions of temperament with literature and systematic explorations of generalized conditions with philosophy:

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Le pessimisme […] ne fait pas de la douleur un privilège, mais une loi; il ne crée pas une aristocratie de désolés. La seule supériorité qu’il revendique pour le génie, c’est de voir distinctement ce que la foule humaine sent confusément. […] Le mal subjectif pourrait n’être qu’un accident insignifiant dans le monde: c’est le mal objectif qu’il faut voir, le mal impersonnel, absolu, qui règne à tous les degrés et dans toutes les régions de l’être. Cela seul est une philosophie: le reste est de la littérature, de la biographie ou du roman. (35–36) [Pessimism […] does not make of pain a privilege, but rather a law; it does not create an aristocracy of the downtrodden. The only superiority that it claims as genius is distinctly to see what the human crowd senses confusedly. […] Subjective evil could be only an insignificant accident in the world: it is objective evil that we must see, impersonal, absolute evil, which reigns in all degrees and in all regions of being. Only that is a philosophy: the rest is literature, biography, or novel.]

In light of the ways we have seen the distinction between philosophy and literature begin to unwind in the case of pessimism, the distinction that Caro holds up as evident here looks less and less tenable. Rather, the modernity of pessimism would consist not in its systematization but in the blurred lines between philosophical and literary approaches to epistemological questions and the consequences of those blurred lines for the way in which we assign meaning to experience. Pessimism is for Caro the most radical extension of a series of philosophical and cultural tendencies that proceed by subtraction of most or all of the elements that have given meaning and purpose to human life: Le pessimisme nous paraît comme le dernier terme d’un mouvement philosophique qui a tout détruit: la réalité de Dieu, la réalité du devoir, la réalité du moi, la moralité de la science, le progrès, et par là l’effort, le travail, dont cette philosophie proclame l’absolue inutilité. (292) [Pessimism seems to us to be the last term of a philosophical movement which has destroyed everything: the reality of God, the reality of duty, the reality of the self, the morality of science, progress, and, through that, the effort and the work whose absolute uselessness this philosophy proclaims.]

Pessimism is, on this view, a cultural threat, an impasse which requires a change of direction, even though Caro had already indicated that it will affect only a few.

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What is at stake is the value to be found in the negative, in the destructive force that pessimism shows itself to be. Can it be a creative destructive force? As Caro understands it, pessimism can only lend itself to an absolute negative happiness: Quelle sera donc la solution de cette antinomie qui pose le bonheur à la fois comme nécessaire et comme impossible ? […] Il ne peut y avoir de bonheur positif, et pourtant le bonheur est nécessaire; donc il peut et il doit y avoir un bonheur négatif absolu, qui est précisément la négation même de l’être, l’anéantissement total; le meilleur état qui se puisse atteindre, c’est l’absence de toute souffrance, la plus haute félicité est de ne pas être. Le bonheur tout négatif de cesser d’être, voilà le but suprême, la seule fin logique des choses, l’explication du processus universel, la formule souveraine de la délivrance. (206–207) [What, then, will be the solution to this antinomy that happiness poses simultaneously as necessary and impossible? […] There can be no positive happiness, and yet happiness is necessary; thus there can and must be an absolute negative happiness, which is precisely the very negation of being, total annihilation; the best state that can be attained is the absence of all suffering, the highest happiness is not to be. The totally negative happiness of ceasing to be is the supreme goal, the only logical end of things, the explanation of the universal process, the sovereign formula of deliverance.]

He recognizes, however, that such a remedy is impossible because it is impossible to suppress existence: Existe-t-il un remède, universel et absolu comme le mal de l’existence qu’il doit combattre ? Est-il d’une efficacité sûre ? Est-il d’une application facile ? On verra qu’il n’est pas si aisé qu’on pourrait le croire de convertir l’être en néant: l’être résiste à toutes les tentatives de ce genre par une force indomptable dont les deux types sont dans l’ordre physique l’indestructibilité de l’atome, dans l’ordre moral la persistance du vouloir-vivre. (217–218) [Does a remedy exist, universal and absolute like the evil of existence that it must combat? Is it truly effective? Is it easily applied? We will see that it is not as easy as we might think to convert being into nothingness: being resists all efforts of this sort by an untamable force of which the two types are, in the physical order, the indestructibility of the atom, and in the moral order the persistence of the will to live.]

He correctly indicates that, for Schopenhauer, what would need to be suppressed is not the physical body through suicide but rather the will through

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acts of ascetic renunciation: “c’est le suicide moral qui importe, le reste n’est rien” [“it is moral suicide that matters, the rest is nothing”] (224). It is at this point that interesting questions emerge about the ways in which Schopenhauer’s ideas might be put into practice. And here Caro touches on a problem that defenders of pessimism need to address. He evokes with concern a “secte schopenhauériste” [Schopenhauerian sect] in Berlin “quelque chose comme une franc-maçonnerie vouée par des sermens et des pratiques secrètes à la destruction de l’amour, de ses illusions et de ses œuvres” [“something like a freemasonry dedicated by oaths and secret practices to the destruction of love, its illusions, and its works”] (245). What concerns him is not that the sect attempts to turn philosophy into a set of religious practices but rather that they are attempting to act against nature: Quand la théorie d’une chasteté de ce genre, toute négative, se produit dans des esprits et des cœurs qui ne sont pas chastes, en vue de fins chimériques comme la destruction du monde, elle aboutit dans la pratique à un système de compensations qui ne sont pas autre chose que des déréglemens sans nom. On ne gagne rien à vouloir arrêter la nature qui veut vivre, qui doit vivre, et qui se révolte contre des freins imaginaires. Elle pervertit les imaginations, elle déprave les sens, et c’est là sa vengeance. (245–246) [When the theory of chastity of this kind, entirely negative, is produced in minds and hearts that are not chaste, with chimerical ends in mind such as the destruction of the world, it leads in practice to a system of compensations that are nothing other than nameless derangements. We gain nothing by wanting to stop nature that wants to live, that should live, and that revolts against imaginary efforts to stop it. It perverts imaginations, depraves the senses, and that is its vengeance.]

Pessimism is thus both a sickness and a perversion. While there are grounds to reject both characterizations, the question remains of what a pragmatics of pessimism would look like, whether collective annihilation is in fact the active goal of Schopenhauer’s philosophical system, or, rather, whether he implies an ethics of both individual and collective living in the face of the impossibility of the discontinuation of life. Passing from thought to action is potentially problematic for pessimism because its ideas risk precluding action by showing that it is ultimately ineffective. It is here that pessimism becomes open to the charge of quietism. The sects that Caro describes are perhaps more ridiculous than perverted or dangerous because they seek to implement a set of ideas in ways

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that will ultimately prove ineffective to anyone who takes Schopenhauer’s ideas seriously. For the same reasons that Schopenhauer condemns suicide (that is, on the grounds that it does nothing to cancel the will), one can condemn other efforts to diminish the effects of the will. This is not to say that such efforts cannot remain, at the level of the imagination, as a kind of regulatory ideal that allows us to evaluate other actions while avoiding the “what’s the use?” that hovers temptingly over pessimism’s worldview without, for all that, canceling action altogether. The latter would be more akin, after all, to nihilism. Caro goes on to argue against pessimism on the grounds that lives have been lost on account of it: Eh quoi ! l’expérience nous prouve tous les jours qu’une volonté individuelle, qui arrive à se nier elle-même, suffit pour triompher de l’amour instinctif de la vie; elle a conduit à la mort volontaire bien des quiétistes et des ascètes, et cependant cette négation tout individuelle de la volonté est en désaccord avec les fins de l’Inconscient, et de plus elle est complètement stérile pour l’espèce humaine et pour la nature, elle ne peut produire aucun résultat métaphysique. (254–255) [Well then! Experience proves to us every day that an individual will, which succeeds in negating itself, suffices in order to triumph over the instinctive love of life; it leads many quietists and ascetics to voluntary death, and yet this totally individual negation of the will is in disaccord with the ends of the Unconscious, and moreover it is completely sterile for the human race and for nature; it cannot produce any metaphysical result.]

Such can hardly be an argument against Schopenhauerean pessimism, however, since Schopenhauer makes exactly the same claim about the uselessness of suicide, as Caro himself has acknowledged. Still, Caro touches here on a key question when it comes to the implications of pessimism, especially in terms of the relationship it posits or implies between thought and action. Moreover, what is at stake here is the role of interpretation in drawing the right conclusions from the pessimist worldview. Caro is, perhaps despite himself, correct that forming cult-like groups dedicated to the gradual annihilation of the will does not reflect deep understanding of Schopenhauer. While his own critique of such attempts is the dubious one that they are destined to fail because they act against nature, the critique does open the question of what an effective lived pessimism would be and how it would interpret its own actions in the world and link them to

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pessimism as an intellectual conception. Once we begin to consider the question along these lines, we need to rethink the grounds by which Caro identifies pessimism as a sickness. For while his argument seems to be that pessimism advocates a necessarily futile turn against nature, what he criticizes is also an erroneous understanding of Schopenhauer. He dismisses pessimistic ideas as “ces bizarres conceptions” [“these bizarre conceptions”] (260), but their strangeness against a backdrop of differing received ideas does not necessarily invalidate them; and as we saw in the case of Challemel-Lacour’s text, pessimism catalyzes a rethinking of the very categories of sickness and health. Indeed, if one labels pessimism a sickness as Caro does, it makes little sense to engage in refutation, and he explicitly puts an end to dialogue by claiming that those who are affected by the sickness would not be able to consider his logical arguments: Ceux qui seraient capables de se laisser séduire par de pareilles chimères, qui ressemblent aux jeux lugubres d’un cauchemar, seraient entièrement insensibles aux procédés de la logique vulgaire et du raisonnement. D’ailleurs il règne une telle indépendance de sens propre, une telle fantaisie de spéculation dans ce drame métaphysique que toute base manque pour une argumentation sérieuse. Comment prouver à M. de Hartmann que son Inconscient est une invention pure ainsi que le dualisme de l’Idée et de la Volonté qu’il introduit au sein de cet Un-Tout […] ? (260–261) [Those who would be capable of letting themselves be seduced by such illusions, which resemble the dismal games of a nightmare, would be entirely unreceptive to the procedures of vulgar logic and reasoning. Besides, there reigns in this metaphysical drama such an independence of proper sense, such a fantasy of speculation, that any basis is missing for serious argument. How can we prove to M. de Hartmann that his Unconscious is a pure invention along with the dualism of the Idea and the Will that he introduces at the heart of this One-Whole […]?]

Once again, despite himself, Caro does reveal something fundamental about pessimism here: if Hartmann’s conceptions cannot be logically refuted, it is because pessimism and optimism do not and cannot rest on a basis of logical, demonstrable truth. Productive dialogue around these questions becomes available when one shifts the context of the discussion from verifiability to verisimilitude, to the plausibility of the way in which the ideas account for lived experience, including, most especially, a sense of shared human suffering. To ask whether optimism or pessimism is logically demonstrable is to misunderstand the nature of its mode of thought,

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as Caro seems at least implicitly to understand when his main concern appears to be the practical implications of the two approaches for lived human life. This shift to verisimilitude allows us to reactivate the category of drama as a genre label for the kind of thinking that pessimists embrace, and here, too, what Caro sees as a limitation could be identified instead as a strength. In the passage just quoted, he refers to pessimism as a “drame métaphysique” [“metaphysical drama”], and he goes on to extend the metaphor: Dans des régions si vagues, si inconsistantes, si nébuleuses, […] une discussion sérieuse aurait ici quelque chose d’insupportable et de pédantesque. Nous devions à la curiosité du public cet échantillon de l’étonnante imagination d’un de nos contemporains. La pièce une fois analysée, ce serait perdre son temps et sa peine que de la critiquer. Elle a intéressé ou non, tout est là: qu’on aille l’applaudir ou la siffler au théâtre où elle se joue, je veux dire dans le livre même. (261–262) [In such vague, inconsistent, nebulous regions, [….] a serious discussion would have something unbearable and pedantic about it. We owed to the public’s curiosity this sample of the stunning imagination of one of our contemporaries. Once the work was analyzed, criticizing it would be a waste of time and effort. It interested people or not, that’s the whole question: whether people were going to applaud it or boo it where it plays out, I mean in the book itself.]

Schopenhauer himself, as we have seen, relies on metaphors of drama, which underscores the extent to which pessimism occupies a space that does not exclude lived experience but seeks both to inform and be informed by it. If pessimism lies in some sense on the border between philosophy and literature, it is because the way we understand our existence in terms of a plot structure matters in terms of the interpretation we create for the events in it. Such an emphasis on the construction of meaning in relation to a series of events does indeed correspond to the way we understand drama and the extent that it functions as a source of meaning for us, in ways that go beyond mere questions of pleasing an audience, as Caro would have it. Caro then takes on the question of resignation, delineating two types. The first, one typically associated with pessimists by those who would critique them, aligns with Leopardi:

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C’est Leopardi […] sentant que la lutte est vaine et y renonçant, n’attendant rien de la vie, ni de Dieu, ni des hommes, vivant dans une sorte de stoïcisme hautain et répétant avec une amertume passionnée cette plainte qui résume sa poésie:—« A quoi bon la vie, si ce n’est à la mépriser ? » (267) [It is Leopardi […] feeling that the struggle is in vain and renouncing it, expecting nothing from life, or from God, or from men, living in a sort of haughty stoicism and repeating with a passionate bitterness this lament which sums up his poetry: “what’s the use of life, if not to despise it?”]

The second type receives a more extended treatment, and might not typically be labeled resignation by others besides Caro. This is the attitude of those who: sans trop attendre de la vie, essaient de l’améliorer sinon pour eux-mêmes, du moins pour les autres et pour ceux qui viendront après eux; qui agissent comme si leurs œuvres devaient avoir des suites, s’efforçant d’agir le mieux possible, persuadés que les résultats de l’action bonne ne seront pas anéantis et deviendront une semence d’actions meilleures encore et des germes de progrès; qui espèrent que […] chacun de nous peut être considéré, pour sa part, comme l’humble architecte de ce monde moral qui grandit toujours; ceux enfin qui croient que l’idéal qui règle le mouvement de leur pensée n’est pas seulement une belle chimère, et que cette force mystérieuse n’agit si profondément sur la conscience et le cœur de l’humanité que parce qu’elle émane d’un principe vivant d’ordre et d’harmonie […] qu’ils recherchent dans les profondeurs voilées de l’univers comme dans la marche mystérieuse de l’histoire.—Il y a ainsi deux sortes de résignations bien différentes: celle qui nie le progrès et la réalité de l’idéal, proclamant la souveraineté de la force et du hasard dans toutes les régions de l’être, et il y a la résignation virile à la vie parce qu’elle peut être améliorée, à l’action parce qu’elle peut être féconde, à la moralité et au progrès parce que l’humanité comme l’univers doit avoir une fin divine. (267–269) [without expecting much from life, try to make it better if not for themselves, at least for others and for those who will come after them; who act as if their works were to be consequential, making an effort to act as well as possible, persuaded that the results of good action will not be annihilated and will become a seed of even better actions and seeds of progress; who hope […] that each of us can be considered, for his or her part, as the humble architect of this moral world who is always growing; those finally who believe that the ideal that rules the movement of their thought is not only a beautiful illusion, and that this mysterious force acts so profoundly on the consciousness and the heart of humanity only because it emanates from a living principle of order and harmony […] that they seek in the veiled

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depths of the universe as in the mysterious march of history.—There are thus two very different sorts of resignations: the one that denies progress and the reality of the ideal, proclaiming the sovereignty of force and chance in all regions of being, and there is the virile resignation from life because it can be improved, from action because it can be fecund, from morality and progress because humanity and the universe must have a divine end.]

This second kind of resignation is what would more typically be associated with optimism, although Caro does not use that word here. What is crucial about this kind of resignation, I would argue, is that it is by and large compatible with pessimism; what Caro establishes here is a false dichotomy between the two types of resignation. Rather, one could see the two approaches to resignation as a productive tension within pessimism itself, that is, that one does not need to reject pessimism in order to work to better the world, and that one does not need to believe in progress in order to attempt to affect positive change. A key aspect of this approach, and one that underscores the importance of fiction in the pessimist enterprise, is the “comme si” near the start of the passage I have quoted: acting as if one’s actions will have consequences that lessen suffering is not synonymous with faith in progress, nor is it necessarily incompatible with the first type of resignation that Caro outlines. One can simultaneously feel that the struggle is in vain and expect nothing out of life (two elements of the first kind of resignation), while still working to improve the world and acting as if such actions made a difference. One could apply the “as if” to what Caro goes on to say about “un principe vivant d’ordre et d’harmonie” as well, seeing such a conception as a motivating ideal that one recognizes to be entirely fictional while upholding the darker view of the first kind of resignation without allowing it to shut down action in the world entirely. One might in fact be all the more motivated to work toward alleviating suffering if one rejected rather than embraced the principle of a mysterious march of history guided by a living principle of order. The fact that one could draw equal and opposing consequences from either set of assumptions about order in the universe suggests that the consequences of that belief are in no way strictly implied by the belief itself. This is why pessimism, as I have been arguing, is above all a question of interpretation in its relation to drawing the right consequences from the worldview generated by one’s lived experiences. And this is why the particular kind of pragmatics that is implied with a literary approach to identifying and acting on meaning and interpretation is

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necessary in the case of pessimism. Caro paves the way to this kind of understanding, even in the midst of his critique of pessimism as an illness, by opening up the way of the “comme si,” which is what will ultimately allow us to reconcile lucidity with some sort of compassion-based action stemming from shared human suffering. Caro claims that the burden of proof is on the pessimists to demonstrate the validity of their theories. In an attack on Edouard von Hartmann, he writes: “Des ruses de l’Inconscient, dites-vous ? mais qu’est-ce donc que cet Inconscient qui travaille contre lui-même, qui s’applique si ingénieusement à se tromper, dupe éternelle de sa propre fraude ?” [“Ruses of the Unconscious, you say? But what is this Unconscious that works against itself, that applies itself so ingenuously to fooling itself, eternal dupe of its own fraud?”] (273). Here again, Caro perhaps unwittingly opens up crucial questions about pessimism in terms of the demonstrability either of its own ideas or of those to which Caro wants to oppose them. For it is not clear why the burden of proof should be on the pessimists and not on the ideas that Caro himself is defending, all the more so since he bases his argument on a notion of “reality” that he leaves undefined and without the kind of argument that he demands of the pessimists: “Cela ne fait rien aux choses que l’on se fâche contre elles, et s’il y a un désaccord entre la réalité humaine et les théories, à coup sûr ce n’est pas la réalité qui doit avoir tort” [“It has no effect on things that we get angry at them, and if there is a discord between human reality and theories, it is certainly not reality that should be wrong”] (274). Such a statement begs the question of what reality is and what it shows. Caro’s view presumably leaves room for experience in shaping our perception of “human reality,” but since that experience calls out for interpretation, we are back to the question of a verisimilitude that must triumph over verifiability when it comes to deciding the very kinds of issues that Caro is claiming pessimism addresses unsatisfactorily. Caro attempts to have it both ways by asserting the primacy of human reality over theory, but fails to account for how we might know human reality if not through an interpretation of that reality that depends on unverifiable meaning-making of the kind that the pessimists attempt to structure. In his concluding chapter, Caro has no kind words for pessimism and “l’exagération violente des thèses qu’il soutient” [“the violent exaggeration of the theses that it supports”] and for him, pessimism remains “une doctrine qui veut persuader à l’humanité d’en finir le plus tôt possible avec la vie” [“a doctrine that wants to persuade humanity to have done with life

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as soon as possible”] (275). Such is, as I have intimated, a limited understanding of what pessimism has to offer once we enter the more interesting territory of how to make meaning from pessimism. The conclusion explores more interesting terrain when Caro takes up the question of the explanation of the rise of pessimism. In a critique of James Sully’s book Pessimism: A History and Criticism (1877), he claims that Sully’s account of its rise explains it adequately at the subjective and individual level, but Caro insists that a more plausible explanation would consider “le côté ethnologique et social du problème” [“the ethnological and social aspect of the problem”], which he describes, in a vocabulary typical of his time, as “les affinités et les tempéraments des races, les milieux dans lesquels elles se développent, les grands courants qui modifient la vie intellectuelle et morale des peuples” [“the affinities and the temperaments of the races, the milieux in which they develop, the large trends that modify the intellectual and moral life of peoples”] (280–281). He goes on to provide a plausible account of the intellectual and cultural rise of pessimism by identifying it as a product of what we might today call disenchantment or perhaps lucidity about illusions formerly held to true. It is a product, more specifically, of a series of subtractions of key concepts of value in Western society that had been in place for centuries but uprooted by scientific and intellectual developments in the nineteenth century. Pessimism comes on the heels of, and perhaps as a natural extension of, the destruction of a series of idols, but it is important to acknowledge, as Caro seems not to, that there is an important distinction to be made between pessimism and nihilism. The fact that pessimism is an attempt to work out the implications and draw the right conclusions from this cultural destruction suggests that its destruction is at least potentially creative, and that it is not concerned, as nihilism would be, with exacerbating the end of humanity but rather of living well within the ruins of those idols by balancing lucidity with a livable approach to existence. This is arguably a debate that, while initiated in the modern period by the emergence of pessimism, is very much still with us, and is an important point of continuity within historical difference between the later nineteenth century and our time. What marks pessimism according to Caro, however, is not its staying power but rather that it is, according to him, a temporary phenomenon, “une philosophie de transition” [“a philosophy of transition”] (294) between two very different intellectual frameworks:

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Dans l’ordre philosophique elle représente l’état de l’esprit comme suspendu au dessus du vide infini entre les anciennes croyances que l’on a détruites une à une et le positivisme qui se résigne à la vie et au monde tels qu’ils sont. Ici encore, c’est une crise, et voilà tout. (294) [In the philosophical order it represents a sort of state of mind suspended above the infinite void between former beliefs that we have destroyed one by one and positivism that resigns itself to life and to the world as they are. Here again, it is a crisis, and that is all.]

While his sometimes inflationary rhetoric may suggest an important sense of cultural anxiety on his part, his reassuring conclusion is that cette “maladie de la décadence” [“sickness of decadence”] will not last: “c’est l’activité utile et nécessaire, c’est le devoir de chaque jour, c’est le travail qui sauve et sauvera toujours l’humanité de ces tentations passagères et dissipera ces mauvais rêves” [“it is useful and necessary activity, daily duty, and work that saves and will always save humanity from its passing temptations and will dissipate these bad dreams”] (293). Caro foresees two possible options for getting beyond the crisis. Perhaps the human spirit “abaissera son front vers la terre et retournera tout simplement à la sagesse de Candide désabusé, qui lui conseille de « cultiver son jardin »” [“will lower its head towards the earth and return simply to the wisdom of the disillusioned Candide, who advises it to ‘cultivate its garden’”] (294). Or perhaps humanity will return to “l’ancien idéal trahi et délaissé pour d’illusoires promesses, à celui que le positivisme a détruit sans pouvoir le remplacer et qui renaîtra de ses ruines un jour, plus fort, plus vivant, plus libre que jamais” [“the former betrayed and abandoned ideal for illusory promises, to that which positivism destroyed without being able to replace it and which will be reborn one day from its ruins, stronger, more alive, freer than ever”] (294–295). The only way forward for Caro, then, is a reactionary step back, and this final sentence of his study leaves open the question of what to do in the face of the lucidity that has destroyed those illusions that Caro continues to cherish. While Caro proposes a livable solution, he fails to account for lucidity in the way that pessimism seeks to do. Still, his discussion of pessimism breaks ground for more substantial engagement than most writers before him had managed to achieve. With Caro we move beyond a summary of basic tenets of Schopenhauer’s philosophy to a more explicit questioning of the conclusions that we are to draw from it, its implications for modes of living, and the way in which it challenges us to remake both the

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meaning of pessimism and the meaning of our own experience in light of pessimism’s approach to epistemology and ethics. In the years following Caro, the question of the potential political valence of pessimism also became part of the considerations of those who both defend and challenge it. As René-Pierre Colin has indicated: En associant Schopenhauer à une pensée révolutionnaire, [Caro] manifestait plus ses craintes sociales que son pouvoir d’analyse. Il révèle clairement que la droite française n’a point encore assimilé une philosophie qui lui sera bientôt constamment associée. […] Schopenhauer va redevenir très vite ce qu’il est fondamentalement, un philosophe réactionnaire. (125) [By associating Schopenhauer with a revolutionary thought, [Caro] demonstrated his social fears more than his ability for analysis. He reveals clearly that the French right has not yet assimilated a philosophy that would soon be constantly associated with it. […] Schopenhauer would very quickly become once more what he fundamentally is, a reactionary philosopher.]

A consideration of the potential political valence of pessimism needs to go beyond the political views of figures such as Schopenhauer himself in order to realize its full potential, which is by no means restricted to a reactionary political agenda. No less than in the case of metaphysics and ethics, the question of what consequences to draw from some of the fundamental premises of pessimism is subject to the complexities of interpretation and meaning-making that I have been foregrounding. Caro’s rebuilding is hardly a creative one, calling as he does for a simple restoration of the values that pessimism had been led by intellectual, moral, and scientific culture to call into question. It will remain for others to explore more convincingly the way pessimism may allow us to keep creation and destruction in productive tension. In several publications in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, writers take stock of pessimism as a rapidly expanding subject of discourse in philosophical, esthetic, and cultural contexts. The growth of such discourse, in which pessimism is almost always synonymous with the ideas of Schopenhauer (however they may be construed by the various writers), and to a lesser extent Hartmann and Leopardi, testifies to the rapid proliferation of Schopenhauer’s influence, given the general lack of interest in his ideas in the earlier decades of the century. Writing a year after Caro, in a brief study entitled La question du pessimisme [The Question of Pessimism] (1879), Louis Dépret (1838–1905) claims that the question of pessimism

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“est à la mode” [“is in vogue”] (1). It is, for Dépret, “une curiosité philosophique” [“a philosophical curiosity”] (43) that will not outlast its status as a fad, since the pessimists will simply disappear, “en laissant à peine le souvenir de leurs prétentions stériles” [“barely leaving behind the memory of their sterile pretensions”] (43). Still, Dépret takes the question of pessimism seriously enough to write a refutation of it, echoing Caro in the ambiguity of his take on pessimism as both troublesome and not likely to take root as a lasting philosophical or cultural stance. Dépret also echoes Caro in his distinction between an individualized phenomenon that has existed throughout human history, akin to melancholy, and the systematic, philosophical approach that emerges in the nineteenth century (6). Dépret recognizes that “la question du pessimisme touche aux questions de religion et de politique” [“the question of pessimism is related to questions of religion and politics”] (2), but immediately indicates that these questions will not form part of his inquiry. He also exposes another distinction, beyond the personality versus philosophical system divide, between the popular and philosophical senses of the term, thus giving an idea of some of the ambiguities in play in the use of the term at the time: Le pessimiste, dans l’acception banale et populaire, ne me parait point exprimer le goût du néant mais bien plutôt le culte peureux de la vie, par ces appréhensions et ces inquiétudes dont nous le voyons possédé, par ce noir et habituel soupçon que rien n’arrivera de ce qui est bien, de ce qu’il aimerait … et que tout arrivera de ce qu’il redoute. Le pessimisme philosophique, lui, conclut froidement, et par raison démonstrative, au négatif du plaisir, au positif de la douleur, au mal de l’existence, à la folie du vouloir-­ vivre et au bienfait de l’anéantissement. (4) [The pessimist, in the banal and popular sense, does not seem to me to express the taste for nothingness but rather the fearful cult of life, by these apprehensions and worries by which we see him possessed, by this dark and habitual suspicion that nothing good or nothing that he would like will happen … and that everything that he fears will happen. Philosophical pessimism concludes coldly, and by demonstrative reason, by the negative of pleasure, the positive of pain, the sickness of existence, the insanity of the will to live and the benefit of annihilation.]

We could pose the question of the extent to which the divide applies, and whether the categories are indeed as distinct as Dépret makes them out to be. The reception of pessimism in this period, I would argue, echoes its development in Schopenhauer in that, while approaches to analyzing

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pessimism attempt to be systematic by establishing clearly opposed categories, pessimism as a phenomenon always disrupts those categories and resists attempts at systematization. Dépret proves unwilling to apply that kind of dynamism to pessimism, committed as he is to neat categorical delineations. He uses pessimism’s supposed one-sidedness as the main vehicle of the argument he offers against it. There is a diversity of approaches to life, he claims, that span both optimism and pessimism: “Cette diversité n’est-elle pas le sel de la vie ? Donc nos optimismes et nos pessimismes individuels ne voient rien de même, et un pessimisme général et philosophique est une gageure ou un cauchemar, au même titre qu’un optimisme analogue serait pure niaiserie” [“Is this diversity not the spice of life? Thus, our individual optimisms and pessimisms see nothing the same way, and a general and philosophical pessimism is a challenge or a nightmare, just as an analogous optimism would be pure silliness”] (34–35). Dépret’s view of pessimism denies it the same sort of range that he values in human perception more broadly, implying that pessimism is a “tentative de supprimer nos bonheurs” [“attempt to cancel our happiness”] (41), the “variété infinie et innombrable de petits bonheurs” [“infinite and innumerable variety of small happinesses”] (34) that are always in the grasp of those who know how to see them. To claim that pessimism makes no room for small happiness, though, is to present a caricatured view of it; one could argue that by adjusting expectations about happiness downward, pessimism actually enables it, an idea that finds its echo in the moments of consolation that Schopenhauer affirms are available even to the gloomiest of pessimists.7 A fascinating case study in the reception of pessimism is that of Ferdinand Brunetière, literary critic affiliated with the Revue des Deux Mondes from 1877 to 1893. In his articles, one can trace the evolution of his thinking toward a growing appreciation of pessimism; he was one of the first to move beyond the somewhat caricatured representations that writers such as Dépret and Caro provided and to see some of the wider possibilities inherent in pessimism. He is, in his first pronouncements on Schopenhauer, critical, but even in some of those earlier articles, he successfully identifies important features of the way Schopenhauer writes and thinks, which allows him to take a step beyond those writers on pessimism who went before him.8 In his 1886 article “La philosophie de Schopenhauer,” published on the occasion of the appearance of the first full translation of The World as Will and Representation into French by Jean-Alexandre Cantacuzène, he claims that while Schopenhauer is known

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first and foremost as a pessimist in France, the interest of Schopenhauer lies elsewhere than in his pessimism. Brunetière indicates that he will not discuss Schopenhauer primarily as a pessimist because “il n’est ni le premier, ni le plus original, […] ni même le plus éloquent” [“He was neither the first, nor the most original, […] nor even the most eloquent”] (695). Brunetière then claims, arguing implicitly here against his predecessors who claimed that the key distinction of modern pessimism is that it had been systematized by Schopenhauer, that Schopenhauer was not in fact the first to provide such a systematization, and even less did he give it a metaphysical basis (695). Brunetière establishes a divide between Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and his pessimism, arguing against Schopenhauer’s own conception of his work and those who saw The World as Will and Representation as a unified system. Brunetière’s arguments foreshadow the kind of perspectivism that I have claimed is the most fruitful way to consider Schopenhauer’s work, that is, as an approach to philosophy that puts lived human experience at the forefront and does not suppose an a priori metaphysics. Such a take sits uncomfortably with Brunetière’s other views. According to Sandrine Schiano-Bennis, his later view on pessimism “n’est pas incompatible avec sa foi dans la perfection individuelle et collective” whereby he believes in “le pouvoir des idées sur les événements et à l’efficacité de la morale sur la conduite” [“is not incompatible with his faith in individual and collective perfection”] (89, n.79), but she rightly asks: “est-ce là la doctrine de Schopenhauer?” [“is that Schopenhauer’s doctrine?”] (89, n.79). There is thus in Brunetière a productive tension, more implicit than explicit, between moralism and the kind of perspectivism that he increasingly highlights in his accounts of Schopenhauer. Inasmuch as pessimism involves a judgment on life, it cannot exist prior to or beyond humanity, but is rather entirely imbricated in human experience. Brunetière puts it this way: avant qu’il y eût des hommes, il ne pouvait y avoir de jugement sur la vie; elle n’était ni mauvaise ni bonne, elle n’était pas; et ceci revient à dire que le pessimisme ne saurait avoir de base métaphysique, n’étant et ne pouvant être qu’un jugement sur la vie. (695) [before there were men, there could not have been judgment on life; it was neither bad nor good; it was not; and this means that pessimism would not be able to have a metaphysical basis, since it is and can only be a judgment about life.]

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Here we have one of the first indications, in the reception of Schopenhauer in France, that his primary interest is not necessarily as a philosopher, if we understand by that term a thinker whose concern lies in an attempt to transcend human experience in the account he provides of it. Brunetière understands his task to be to illustrate the true interest of Schopenhauer that can be hidden by his pessimism: “En même temps qu’un pessimiste, Schopenhauer est autre chose; son pessimisme, en servant sa fortune, a masqué sa valeur” [“While he is a pessimist, Schopenhauer is something else; his pessimism, while serving his reputation, masked his value”] (695). Far from having been the one to systematize pessimism philosophically, Schopenhauer is, for Brunetière, one who puts experience or experimentation at the core of his thinking: Ce que j’aime d’abord de sa philosophie, c’en est ce qu’il appelait lui-même le caractère expérimental. […] Le système de Schopenhauer, en un certain sens, et par comparaison à ces « magnifiques palais d’idées » qu’aimait à construire l’ancienne métaphysique, est à peine un système; il est fait des morceaux, des débris de vingt autres; […] il est avant tout et surtout d’un observateur des mœurs et de la vie. (695) [What I like first of all in his philosophy is what he himself called its experimental character. […] Schopenhauer’s system, in a certain sense, and by comparison with those “magnificent palaces of ideas” that the older metaphysics liked to construct, is barely a system. It is made of the pieces and the debris of twenty others; […] he is above all an observer of customs and of life.]

What the systematizers might see as a weakness, Brunetière considers a major strength. By separating out Schopenhauer’s thinking about human experience from his metaphysics, we are able to consider the (above all) human significance of his ideas independently of any potential value his metaphysics may have. This move brings Schopenhauer a step away from systematic philosophers and closer, as I have been arguing, to the boundary between philosophy and literature, where human experience is portrayed, theorized, understood by criteria other than verifiability, and, most crucially, interpreted. This philosophy made of “pieces” suggests a situated thought that is subject to revision or reinterpretation without causing an entire system to crumble; it frees Schopenhauer’s thoughts from the restrictive all-or-nothing approach that I have identified as caricatured in some of his other commentators in this period. In that sense, Brunetière

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opens up new terrain of inquiry in terms of interpretive possibilities for pessimism. Brunetière criticizes Schopenhauer for what he claims is a devaluation of the intellect in favor of the will: Schopenhauer […] dépossède l’intelligence de la royauté qu’elle avait exercée jusqu’alors; et, du principal faisant désormais l’accessoire, il met la substance et l’essence de l’homme dans la volonté. Vouloir, c’est vivre, et vivre, c’est vouloir, non point par métaphore, mais proprement et absolument; l’équation est parfaite, ou plutôt l’identité, et les deux termes entre eux sont toujours et partout convertibles. (697) [Schopenhauer […] removes from the intelligence the royalty that it had exercised until then; and, making what was fundamental now an accessory, he puts the substance and essence of man in the will. To will is to live, and to live is will, not at all metaphorically, but in a literal and absolute sense. The equation, or rather the identity, is perfect, and the two terms are always and everywhere interchangeable.]

I would claim, however, that here Brunetière establishes a false dichotomy between the will and the intelligence, for if this theory of the will is presented as a product of reflection, and if it calls out for interpretation in the form of the right conclusions to draw from such an affirmation of the power of the will, then the intelligence inevitably plays a role in attempting to answer those questions. While it is in speculations such as these about the power of the will that the risk of anti-intellectualism finds potential justification, the act of intelligence, which can never be shut down in the act of reflection on philosophical premises, can never be far behind in any approach except a simplistic and dogmatic one to Schopenhauer’s ideas. For Brunetière, a strength of Schopenhauer’s ideas is their explicatory value, the way they plausibly account for lived experience. Here he moves solidly in the direction of the kind of verisimilitude that I have claimed operates in important ways in Schopenhauer, and which is evaluated by an act of the intelligence reflecting on experience: En nous conformant nous-mêmes à la méthode que recommande Schopenhauer, il suffirait, pour nous convaincre de la valeur de sa « découverte », de regarder aux faits jusqu’alors mystérieux qu’elle nous a expliqués pour la première fois; on n’en demande pas davantage aux hypothèses scientifiques elles-mêmes, ou plutôt c’est justement là, dans l’explication qu’elles donnent de l’inexpliqué, c’est là leur raison d’être et leur légitimation. (699)

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[Following the method which Schopenhauer recommends, it would suffice, to convince us of the value of his “discovery,” to look at the facts that had hitherto been mysterious and that his discovery explained to us for the first time; one asks no more of scientific hypotheses, or rather, it is in the explanation they give of the unexplained that they have their raison d’être and their legitimation.]

In addition to the explanatory value of Schopenhauer’s ideas, Brunetière values Schopenhauer’s moral theory, “combinaison singulière et puissante de son pessimisme avec sa théorie de la volonté” [“unique and powerful combination of his pessimism with his theory of the will”] (701). Brunetière is among the only writers on pessimism in these years to identify moral implications as an important aspect of Schopenhauer’s thought, rather than simply dismissing his ideas by claiming that they involve a nihilistic death wish and little else. Brunetière writes that it is pessimism “en tout temps et presque en tous lieux, qui a fait en réalité l’éducation du caractère et du vouloir humains […]. Ce que le pessimisme enseigne, avec le détachement de la vie, c’est l’abnégation de soi-même, et il n’y a pas de vertu plus haute” [“in every time and in almost every place which in fact established the education of human character and will […]. What pessimism teaches, along with detachment from life, is abnegation of self, and there is no higher virtue”] (703). It is not difficult to see how such a reading of Schopenhauer can be made to fit a conservative ethics of personal regulation, and there is nothing particularly surprising about Brunetière’s endorsement of this aspect of his thought; as René-Pierre Colin has put it, “le pessimisme permet aux yeux [de Brunetière] de protéger l’homme contre lui-même, il lui inspire l’obéissance” [“pessimism allows  us, in [Brunetière’s] eyes, to protect man against himself, it inspires obedience”] (129). For Colin, this way of thinking about Schopenhauer was the basis for his popularity on the right: Ce n’est donc point dans Schopenhauer que l’on peut découvrir une invitation à modifier hic et nunc l’ordre de la société: le mal vient de plus loin. En imputant la source de la misère de l’homme à sa condition d’homme et à une force transcendante, et non à des rapports de classe, à un statut économique, Schopenhauer fournissait à la droite un renfort idéologique fondamental. (129) [It is thus not at all in Schopenhauer that we can discover an invitation to  modify here and now the social order: evil comes from farther on. By attributing the source of human misery to the human condition and to a

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transcendental force, and not to class relations or an economic status, Schopenhauer furnished the right with a fundamental ideological reinforcement.]

But by arguing this way, Brunetière opens the possibility for other interpretations of what the abnegation of self might look like, namely a devaluing of individual interest in favor of the collective good, a move that aligns ethics more closely with a progressive politics. To claim a simple one-to-­ one correspondence between Schopenhauer’s ideas and the ideology of the right is to foreclose precisely the kinds of interpretive possibilities that Brunetière himself goes on to claim that Schopenhauer’s thought invites. The seeds of such a reading are present in this article, where Brunetière indicates that Schopenhauer’s popularity instigated a “renaissance de l’idéalisme” [“renaissance of idealism”] (704), an idealism that he situates explicitly in opposition to Comte’s positivism and John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism (704). While he establishes that opposition in the name of preserving metaphysics, he does concede that Schopenhauer’s system is “peut-être une morale plutôt qu’une métaphysique” [“perhaps a moral philosophy rather than a metaphysics”] (704). He also signals, surprisingly perhaps, the way in which pessimism can open up a plurality of interpretive possibilities rather than shutting them down: Une seule affirmation fonde le pessimisme: il suffit de trouver que la vie est mauvaise, mais il y a vingt manières de le démontrer; et une seule affirmation le résout, à savoir que la vie ne saurait être son but ou sa fin à elle-même, mais il y a vingt manières de concevoir ce but ou d’imaginer cette fin. Et c’est pour cette raison, […]—parce qu’il n’est pas plus difficile et qu’il est tout aussi logique, plus logique même de tirer du pessimisme la Béatitude chrétienne que le Nirvana bouddhique, la continuation de la vie que son anéantissement. (706) [One single affirmation founds pessimism: it suffices to find that life is bad, but there are twenty ways to show it. And one single affirmation resolves it, that life cannot be its own goal or end in itself, but there are twenty ways to conceive this goal or imagine this end. And for that reason, […] –because it is not harder and it is just as logical, more logical even to draw from pessimism Christian Beatitude than the Buddhist Nirvana, the continuation of life more than its annihilation.]

Pessimism’s affirmation, then, is that interpretive and imaginative possibilities abound in its wake. While the immediate use to which Brunetière

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puts this conclusion is to make room for Christianity, his claims about pessimism’s imaginative possibilities in no way preclude other options, including one that would dispense with religious inclinations altogether, no matter what affinities pessimism may share with some aspects of Christianity. Four years later, Brunetière published his article “La Philosophie de Schopenhauer et les conséquences du pessimisme” [“Schopenhauer’s Philosophy and the Consequences of Pessimism”] (1890), on the occasion of the second translation of The World as Will and Representation, by M.A. Burdeau. If there had been a more cautious endorsement of pessimism in the earlier article, Brunetière provides a strong defense of it against its detractors in this essay. The mood around pessimism had shifted perceptibly since the time of the other works we have been considering; if it had been considered a fad just a few years earlier, Brunetière now indicates that “il semble que la mode se soit détournée de Schopenhauer et du pessimisme” [“it seems that fashion has turned away from Schopenhauer and pessimism”] (211), and so it is the essayist’s task to demonstrate its continued relevance. Also of note is Brunetière’s characterization of pessimism as “une conception ou […] une théorie de la vie” [“a conception or […] a theory of life”] (210), in contrast to earlier characterizations of pessimism as a philosophical system. By 1890, we have moved beyond the distinction between a historically ever-present individual melancholy and a specifically modern philosophical, systematic phenomenon toward an approach that potentially combines the two by emphasizing lived experience within the context of reflection on meaning without the confines of a strict systematic approach. Moving beyond such a distinction allows for a reevaluation of Schopenhauer’s ideas, and Brunetière speculates that the reason that Burdeau undertook a new translation was that “on avait assez mal jugé Schopenhauer, en France, et que le procès du pessimisme n’était pas encore terminé” [“they had judged Schopenhauer poorly in France, and that pessimism’s trial was not yet ended”] (211). This marks a moment when the conversation can be opened up again, when the multiple interpretive possibilities to which Brunetière had alluded four years earlier can be brought into play. Brunetière renews his emphasis on pessimism as moral philosophy and even uses that distinction to oppose it to optimism, represented, as he indicates, not by Béranger or Paul de Kock but by Leibniz or Spinoza: “Le pessimisme est une morale; l’optimisme […] n’est et ne peut être qu’une métaphysique” [“pessimism is a morality; optimism […] is only and can

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only be a metaphysics”] (211), and this is because the philosophy of optimism incorporates a notion of God and a divine plan, neither of which is necessarily present in pessimism. Human experience is, once again, primary in pessimism, which is generated from within human experience rather than positing itself as a way of transcending it: Mais ce qui fait la force du pessimisme, c’est que, s’il se couronne, en quelque sorte, aussi lui, d’une métaphysique, elle est induite, non déduite; ultérieure à la connaissance de l’homme et de la vie, non pas antérieure; tirée du spectacle et de l’expérience des choses, au lieu de leur être comme imposée et superposée du dehors. Schopenhauer ne nous demande que de jeter avec lui les yeux sur ce qui nous entoure, de considérer le train ou les accidents de la vie quotidienne. (211) [But what makes for pessimism’s strength is that if it is also crowned with a metaphysics, it is inductive rather than deductive; ulterior to the consciousness of man and of life and not anterior to it; drawn from the spectacle and the experience of things, rather than being as if imposed and superimposed of them from outside. Schopenhauer asks us only to cast a glance at what is around us, to consider the flow or the chances of daily life.]

With Brunetière, then, we get the first explicit articulation of pessimism as a modern style of thought (rather than a system), born not in a set of metaphysical assumptions but in lived human experience that is attentive to others’ lives as well as our own (note the “nous” that Brunetière employs when talking about the world around), and that guides our interpretation of that experience in a way that has the potential to affect decisions not in order to enable progress necessarily but instead to avoid stasis that could only be the prolongation of suffering. While an ethics of self-abnegation could certainly be co-opted by the right, such is not the only or inevitable conclusion to draw from it, and one may well be surprised to find Brunetière among the first to argue that pessimism enables progress because only discontent with a situation as we have experienced it can motivate change rather than stasis. Brunetière provides this ringing endorsement of pessimism on these grounds: Bien loin d’être capable d’aucune conséquence que l’on doive redouter, le pessimisme ne saurait être, et n’a été, en fait, qu’utile et bienfaisant dans l’histoire, pour l’individu, pour la société, et pour l’humanité. Admettons, en effet, que la vie soit mauvaise, et la condition de l’homme radicalement misérable. C’est ici […] le principe même de tout changement,

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et de tout progrès, par conséquent. Qui se trouve bien ne change pas de place. (212–213) [Far from being capable of any consequence that we should fear, pessimism can only be, and in fact has only been, useful and beneficent in history, for the individual, for society, and for humanity. Let us admit, in fact, that life is bad, and the human condition radically miserable. That is […] the very beginning of all change, and all progress, as a result. Whoever is happy with his situation does not move.]

Given this emphasis on change, it is possible to see in Brunetière’s endorsement of pessimism something other than political reactionism or a defense of Christian virtue. While he does claim that pessimism shares much with major world religious traditions including both Buddhism and Christianity (216), that idea is developed in the context of an argument against those who would see pessimism as dangerous. Likewise, he traces this virtuous path on which he claims pessimism, like religious traditions, leads: “La charité est devenue dévoûment, le dévoûment abnégation, et l’abnégation sacrifice. […] J’aimerais que l’on me dît ce que l’on trouve de « dangereux » dans une telle doctrine” [“Charity has become devotion, devotion abnegation, and abnegation sacrifice. […] I would like someone to tell me what people find “dangerous” in such a doctrine”] (215). All will, of course, depend on what exactly is abnegated and sacrificed, and whether this is accomplished at the individual or social level, but Brunetière had already indicated that pessimism has beneficial effects at the social level. The question remains of how best to adapt pessimism toward progressive social ends, and while Brunetière’s own definition of social progress may not match what we would call a progressive agenda, the larger point here is that Brunetière, despite himself perhaps, opens the way to a progressive understanding of pessimism by illustrating the ways in which it opens on to questions of creation and interpretation that have real consequences in terms of lessening human suffering. He thereby frees pessimism from the significant charge of quietism that was launched against it in his day and still is in our own. In doing so, he deepens the conversation and allows for a more nuanced understanding of and debate about the right consequences to draw from pessimism, moving beyond the situation he describes in the critiques of pessimism in his time, whereby, when it comes to the attack on grounds of inertia, “on s’est fait un fantôme de pessimisme pour le pouvoir plus aisément terrasser” [“they made a ghost of pessimism in order all the better to knock it down”] (218).

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Brunetière thus sees pessimism as resulting in a call to action to attempt to change a situation that we have identified as inducing suffering, and he criticizes optimism for denying the difficulty that comes with efforts to be just: Agir, c’est lutter, et lutter c’est avant tout se combattre soi-même. L’optimisme raisonne comme s’il nous était facile d’être justes et charitables; et il ne s’aperçoit pas que ce qui rend la justice et la charité si rares parmi les hommes, ce sont au contraire les sacrifices qu’elles coûtent. […] La « négation du vouloir vivre » n’est, en réalité, que le terme idéal vers lequel tend sans jamais y atteindre, la morale du pessimisme; mais en le proposant à l’homme, elle développe en lui tout ce qu’il a de ressorts et d’énergies pour l’action. (219) [To act is to struggle, and to struggle is above all to fight against oneself. Optimism reasons as if it were easy for us to be just and charitable; and it doesn’t notice that what makes justice and charity so rare among men is the sacrifices that they cost.[…] The “negation of the will to live” is, in reality, only the ideal end towards which tends, without ever attaining it, the morality of pessimism; but in proposing it to man, it develops in him all that he has in terms of sources and energy for action.]

Here again, such attempts at individual denial in favor of a larger cause resonate with progressive social agendas, which, via pessimism, are relieved of the commitment to belief that real change is possible while at the same time affirming the value in the fight for that change. Self-abnegation becomes a kind of refusal of the kind of selfish individualism that fuels liberal capitalism, in the name of a greater good that is no longer in service of a divine order. Brunetière is clear on the point that the “glory” of Schopenhauer is to have a pessimism that is “proprement et véritablement laïcisé” [“properly and truly secularized”]: “Dépouillant la doctrine de son enveloppe théologique, il a prétendu la fonder sur la considération toute philosophique du monde et de l’humanité” [“Stripping the doctrine from its theological envelope, it claimed to have founded it on the entirely philosophical consideration of the world and humanity”] (219–220). Brunetière thus illustrates how pessimism opens on to far greater sets of options than had thus far been recognized, requiring or encouraging neither political quietism nor religious faith. At least in this essay, Brunetière provides a colorful call to action and an argument for pessimism as a corrective to the worst effects of individualistic materialism in the name of

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something like improvement, not despite but on account of the secular pessimistic basis from which action springs: Les temps ne sont plus du matérialisme et du positivisme, ni même du rationalisme. […] Croyons fermement avec [Schopenhauer] que la vie est mauvaise; et ainsi nous l’améliorerons, puisque, en mettant son sens et son but hors d’elle-même, nous n’y aurons plus cet attachement qui fait une moitié de nos souffrances et de nos misères. Croyons que l’homme est mauvais; et, en conséquence, proposons-nous, pour principal objet de notre activité, de travailler à détruire en nous, si nous le pouvons, ou en tout cas d’y mortifier cette « volonté de vivre » dont les manifestations égoïstes font une autre moitié des maux qui rendent la vie si laborieuse à vivre. (221) [These are no longer the times of materialism and positivism, nor even of rationalism. […] Let us believe firmly with [Schopenhauer] that life is bad, and thereby we will make it better, since, by placing its meaning and its goal beyond itself, we will no longer have an attachment to it that makes for half of our sufferings and our miseries. Let us believe that man is bad, and, as a result, let us propose as the principal object of our activity, to work to destroy in us, if we can, or in any case to mortify that “will to live” whose selfish manifestations are the other half of the troubles that make life so laborious to live.]

Much interpretive work remains to be done on the heels of such a description, but Brunetière has arguably opened the terrain of discourse about pessimism far wider than most of his contemporaries, sketching at least the outline of a progressive ethics and politics that still remains acutely aware of the potential difficulty of social compassion and the risk of committing oneself to action that, in moments of full lucidity, one might see as fruitless but nonetheless worth the effort. Other essayists in the period continued to uphold a more conventional view of pessimism as dangerous. Pierre-Daniel Bourchenin, a Protestant pastor and docteur-ès-lettres, published La trace du pessimisme dans la société et les lettres françaises contemporaines [The Trace of Pessimism in Contemporary French Society and Letters] in 1893 and dedicated the work to “la jeunesse protestante française et patriote” [“France’s patriotic Protestant youth”] (5). He examines the general causes of pessimism, including misanthropy and melancholy, before outlining literary pessimism in the romantics and Stendhal. He reproduces Caro’s distinction between “le pessimisme spontané” [“spontaneous pessimism”] (which he later also refers to as “instinctif”), “fait psychique ou instinctif qui a

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toujours existé, parce qu’il est une catégorie de l’esprit humain, un penchant de la nature” [“psychological or instinctive fact that has always existed, because it is a category of the human spirit, a penchant of nature”] and “le pessimisme raisonné, conscient, […] système philosophique porteur d’une cosmologie spéciale dont l’objet est de fournir une certaine solution du grave problème de la vie et de la destinée” [“reasoned pessimism, conscious, […] philosophical system bringing a special cosmology whose object is to furnish a certain solution to the serious problem of life and destiny”] (12–13). Far from seeing, as Brunetière had, the potential in pessimism for enabling both creative thought and action, Bourchenin entertains the possibility that pessimism is a joke: “nous aurons à nous demander si tout cela est bien sérieux; car enfin nous ne voudrions pas être les dupes bénévoles d’une mystification littéraire ou sociale” [“we will have to wonder whether all of that is serious; because we do not want to be the voluntary dupes of literary or social mystification”] (14). He attacks Brunetière explicitly, maintaining that he spoke only of instinctive rather than systematic pessimism, “et la preuve c’est qu’il plaçait résolument Jésus parmi les pessimistes, ce que d’ailleurs nous ne saurions accorder à aucun point de vue” [“and the proof is that he placed Jesus resolutely among the pessimists, which we would not be able to grant by any point of view”] (27). He refuses precisely the kind of advances that Brunetière had championed, considering them impossible in Schopenhauer’s secularized context: On nous dit que [Schopenhauer] n’est pas dangereux ? Si, car sans la perspective de l’au-delà, c’est le malheur infini qu’il propose et désordre universel qu’il prépare pour hâter la fin du monde […]. Agir, c’est lutter, dites-vous ? Oui, mais avec la chance de vaincre; ou bien la lutte est absurde. (32–3) [They tell us that [Schopenhauer] is not dangerous? He is indeed, because without the perspective of the beyond, he proposes infinite unhappiness and prepares universal disorder to hasten the end of the world […]. To act is to struggle, you say? Yes, but with the chance to win, or else the struggle is absurd.]

In a somewhat uncanny way, and certainly despite himself, in the midst of this critique of Brunetière, Bourchenin anticipates a solution to the question of potentially futile action that will only find its full expression in twentieth-century writers such as Albert Camus. To fight without a chance of winning would indeed be absurd, but whereas Bourchenin uses this as

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grounds for dismissing the argument about action, those who would later pursue the consequences of the perceived impossibility of significant change resulting from action would of course valorize that very absurdity in the name of revolt. Combining lucidity with defiant action thus later becomes a hallmark of a kind of pessimism that can enable action rather than foreclosing it. Thus, later pessimists are able to answer the important charge that writers such as Bourchenin advance by defending action even in the case of those who cannot affirm, as Bourchenin does at the start of his text, “j’ai foi au progrès” [“I have faith in progress”] (9). While Bourchenin maintains the distinction between instinctive and systematic pessimism, he also acknowledges that the distinction, which goes back only to the supposed systematizing of pessimism in Schopenhauer, has broken down. Bourchenin characterizes instinctive pessimism, or what one might call a melancholy disposition, this way: Les causes morales sont les pensées de l’homme désabusé ou irrité qui, obsédé par la lutte sourde que se livrent perpétuellement dans le monde les deux principes du Bien et du Mal, attristé par les séries de défaites que le Bien subit en lui et hors de lui, […] se révolte contre le réel dans tous les domaines au nom d’un idéal qui recule dans le rêve. On le voit, il n’y a pas de système dans cette tristesse. (76–77) [The moral causes are the thoughts of man disillusioned or irritated who, obsessed by the perpetual deaf struggle in the world of the two principles of Good and Evil, saddened by the series of defeats that Good suffers in him and outside him, […] rebels against the real in all its domains in the name of an ideal that withdraws into the dream. We see that there is no system in this sadness.]

Much depends on what we make of the distinction between the real and the ideal here. Idealism itself is a multifaceted concept that does not necessarily imply a division from the real so much as a dialectical relationship with it. In ways that will become clearer as we explore the philosophy of the “as if” that emerges in the early twentieth century, a flight from the real into the ideal is not necessarily the characteristic of a resigned mind seeking escape from the world of experience into the world of fantasy. Rather, by reimagining the world in the mode of the “as if,” the world of lived experience can be altered so that the result is a more livable reality, constructed within a system of meaning that allows us to assign some sort of value to it. This is one important source of value in pessimism, and it depends on refraining from defining the “real” and the “ideal” as mutually

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exclusive categories. It makes room for the crucial role of fiction in assigning meaning to lived experience, and thus makes of the “ideal,” if we understand that as the world of imagination in the sense of meaning-­ making rather than that of fantasy, something that  allows us to move beyond the “tristesse” that Bourchenin identifies as the outcome of his melancholic subject here. Understood this way, the “revolt against the real” that he imagines can take on a positive valence. No doubt he means to suggest that the pessimist becomes ill equipped for living by rejecting reality in favor of some imaginary world. But understood as I have been suggesting, the revolt against the real can involve imagining the world in the sense of conceiving it otherwise, an act of imagination that, as Brunetière saw, enables action rather than shutting it down. The revolt then takes on the existentialist sense of action in the face of lucidity about the absurdity of that very action, and thus provides a plausible sense of meaning to existence and a “reality” thoroughly infused with the kind of imagination that can make it livable. Understanding pessimism this way, that is, via a recharacterization of the very terms that Bourchenin is using to criticize it, opens up new possibilities for it, again in a context that depends on the blurring of distinctions between literature and philosophy. This is so because this recharacterization begins in an interpretive act, a redefinition of familiar terms that requires an act of imagination. Such an act is of course also a thought process, through which we draw on methods more typically associated with philosophy. Pessimism thus becomes the motor of a dynamic process, the very opposite of the stagnation that Bourchenin accuses it of provoking. Nothing could be farther from this new scenario than the characteristic that for Bourchenin distinguishes modern pessimism from its ancient antecedents, namely a paralyzing lethargy. He takes the case of suicide as exemplary: Le pessimisme contemporain […] subit la mort, mais avec la même lâcheté qu’il subit la vie. Comment l’aimerait-il, puisque rien ne le tente, pas même le vide ? Bien plus, quand le vide l’attire […], son incurable aboulie paralyse son effort et jusqu’à son désir même de suicide ! Tel n’est point le cas du pessimiste ancien, qui aime la mort d’une passion plus ou moins sincère ou qui lui témoigne une parfaite indifférence. (78) [Contemporary pessimism endures death, but with the same cowardice that it endures life. How could it love it, since nothing tempts it, not even the void? Moreover, when the void attracts it […], its incurable absence of

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willpower paralyses its effort and even its desire for suicide! That is not the case for the older type of pessimist, who loves death with a more or less sincere passion or who manifests a perfect indifference to it.]

What Bourchenin describes here does indeed sound pathological and dangerous, but it does not correspond to pessimism as it was beginning to be understood in this time as an approach to lived experience that enables rather than foreclosing action, an approach to integrating fiction and reality in a dynamic relationship that attempts to give lucidity its due while creating a life worth living, for oneself as well as others within the bounds of that lucidity. Bourchenin ends his text with a tribute to Victor Hugo, marshalling him in the fight against pessimism: “Non, l’homme en qui a le plus rayonné et resplendi l’âme de la France au XIXe siècle, Victor Hugo n’était pas pessimiste !” [“No, the man in whom the soul of France in the nineteenth century had most shone in splendor, Victor Hugo was not a pessimist!”] (108). The age of Victor Hugo had begun to pass by the time of Bourchenin’s writing in 1893, though, and a rethinking of the imaginative and active possibilities that pessimism may hold in store was the order of the day just as much as a rethinking of the esthetic possibilities of literature, in a “crise de vers” and beyond, in the wake of Hugo’s death in 1885. To conclude this survey of French writers on pessimism at the fin-de-­ siècle, I turn to one whose thought reflects the ground that his immediate predecessors had travelled and provides a fairly balanced evaluation of the question of pessimism. Georges Pellissier, in his long essay “Le pessimisme dans la littérature contemporaine” [“Pessimism in Contemporary Literature”], which appeared in his 1893 book Essais de littérature contemporaine [Essays on Contemporary Literature], traces the intellectual trajectory of pessimism in the nineteenth century and evaluates its role in several writers of his time. He offers a multifaceted and fairly objective analysis of the causes of pessimism in the nineteenth century, but ultimately argues against it. Like Brunetière, Pellissier suggests, despite himself at some points, the intellectual and creative possibilities inherent in the ongoing conversation on pessimism. He begins with a nationalist reading whereby he conceives of pessimism as a contagious foreign import from Germany and makes the rather odd claim that pessimism is “une philosophie si peu en accord avec nos traditions nationales” [“a philosophy that is so little in accord with our national traditions”] (2). He recognizes the polyvalence of the term by claiming that, if so many in France claim to be pessimists, they do so “sans savoir au juste ce qu’ils veulent dire. […] Là

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même où le pessimisme a bien l’air d’une mode, cette mode n’est pas sans signification” [“without knowing exactly what they mean, […] Where pessimism seems to be a fashion, this fashion is not without meaning”] (2). If modern pessimism has its intellectual roots in Schopenhauer, Pellissier indicates, while underscoring the fact that Schopenhauer’s works were available in French translation largely in fragmented form, that pessimism was more “in the air” of the times than studied carefully in the philosophers. While he echoes other writers on pessimism as a fad and as an illness, he soon goes beyond these critical commonplaces, identifying the causes of pessimism’s taking root on both the historical plane, with reference to the Franco-Prussian war followed by the events of the Paris Commune, a time when “aux haines de peuple à peuple se sont ajoutées les haines sociales, à la guerre avec l’étranger la guerre entre citoyens” [“to the hatred of one people for another were added social hatreds, to war with the foreign was added war among citizens”] (10). To these social causes, Pellissier adds scientific and epistemological considerations, claiming that science has given credence to a determinism that discourages what had been standard notions of morality by undermining them. Science opens up an epistemological chasm because of the distressing nature of many of its discoveries about the universe and also on account of the way it reveals what must remain unknown: “La science, impassible en elle-même, laisse à ceux qui s’en nourrissent un arrière-goût de tristesse incurable. Tristes déjà de savoir ce qu’elle nous a appris, nous le sommes encore d’ignorer ce qu’elle ne peut nous apprendre” [“Science, impassible in itself, leaves in those who are nourished on it an aftertaste of incurable sadness. Already sad to know what it has taught us, we are also sad not to know what it can teach us”] (18). While he gives these viable reasons for the rise of pessimism, he ultimately argues against it by providing an argument against Schopenhauer specifically. Before doing so, he acknowledges, as Brunetière had as well, that it is pessimism rather than optimism that enables progress. In his evaluation, he makes a distinction between two understandings of pessimism, claiming to have no argument against pessimism if it were understood simply as recognizing the existence of evil: Etre pessimiste, ce serait dès lors concevoir dans l’idéal un monde supérieur au monde réel, une humanité meilleure et plus heureuse, et, de cette conception même, tirer la force et la vertu qu’il nous faut pour travailler, chacun suivant ses moyens, à la réaliser ici-bas. Ainsi compris, le pessimisme […] vaut beaucoup mieux qu’un certain optimisme. C’est une superstition

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­ angereuse entre toutes de croire que le progrès se fait de lui-même, sans d nous, […] quand notre ignorance ou notre lâcheté lui fait obstacle. Mais il n’y a même aucun progrès à faire dans « le meilleur des mondes possibles ». […] Non seulement [l’optimisme absolu] abolit en nous le besoin d’agir, inné à notre nature, mais il est encore foncièrement immoral, puisque, se croyant tenu de trouver bon tout ce qui arrive, il finit par confondre le bien avec le mal. (49–50) [To be a pessimist would then be to conceive in the ideal a superior world to the real world, a better and happier humanity, and, from this very conception, to draw the strength and virtue that we need in order to work, each according to his or her means, to bring it about here on earth. Thus understood, pessimism […] is worth much more than a certain optimism. It is a most dangerous superstition to believe that progress happens on its own, without us, […] when our ignorance or cowardice presents an obstacle to it. But there is not even any progress to make in the “best of all possible worlds.” Not only does [absolute optimism] abolish in us the need to act, innate in our nature, but it is beyond that immoral, since, believing itself obliged to find to be good everything that happens, it ends up confusing good and evil.]

Rather than arguing that a pessimism along the lines he imagines could in fact be developed, he claims that pessimism is essentially synonymous with Schopenhauer’s ideas, and he then advances a critique of renunciation as at root nothing more than egotism. If Schopenhauer is so keen to advocate renunciation, it is that he implicitly endorses the notion that “le seul bien pour l’homme, c’est le plaisir” [“the only good for man is pleasure”] (51). Even the suffering-based solidarity among human beings is nothing more than “l’égoïsme le plus vulgaire” [“the most vulgar egotism”] (53) for Pellissier: Quand […] le pessimisme reste fidèle à lui-même, il n’en dérive qu’une morale foncièrement égoïste qui prêche l’abolition du Moi dans l’intérêt même de ce Moi, et dont l’apparente philanthropie recouvre soit le mépris de l’homme, qu’engendre forcément le mépris de la vie, soit tout au plus une injurieuse pitié. (55) [When […] pessimism remains faithful to itself, what results from it is only a fundamentally egotistical morality that preaches the abolition of the Self in the very interest of that Self, and whose apparent philanthropy covers over either hatred for man that the hatred of life necessarily engenders, or at least an injurious pity.]

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What is intriguing about this line of argument is that it shuts down the possibility of further engagement with pessimism by making an absolute claim about Schopenhauer’s ideas and thereby attempting to prevent further dialogue about other possibilities inherent in pessimism, including the ones Pellissier himself had just advanced. Curiously, he thereby reduces pessimism to the condition for which he criticized optimism, namely, that it produces stagnation rather than further striving. If Pellissier is concerned to have a dynamic system of thought that enables action rather than shutting it down, which he criticizes in both optimism, as we have seen, and in the variety of pessimism whose “seul asile est la paix suprême du néant, auquel il aspire et dont il anticipe sur cette terre même la stagnante inertie” [“only shelter is the supreme peace of nothingness, to which it aspires and whose stagnant inertia it anticipates here on this earth”] (5), it is curious that he would dismiss pessimism as a form of egotism, precisely because it is not at all a given that pessimism necessarily leads either to egotism or to stagnation. Rather, and paradoxically perhaps, it enables creative expression, as the impulse toward nothingness proves fecund rather than silent, useful for thinking and acting rather than destructive of them. It is all the more curious that Pellissier’s conclusions attempt to shut down further dialogue about pessimism given that elsewhere in the essay he affirms thoughtful reflection, at least in appropriate doses. The ambiguity of his relation both to thought and to pessimism is evident in in the way he relates unthinking to optimism: “Quiconque ne réfléchit pas est un optimiste inconscient, car il n’y a point d’instinct plus naturel à notre être que l’amour de l’existence, et tous ceux qui vivent sans philosopher, même les plus misérables, trouvent l’existence bonne” [“Whoever does not think is an unconscious optimist, for there is no instinct more natural to our being than the love of existence, and all those who live without philosophizing, even the most miserable, find existence good”] (21–22). It is hard to align either optimism or pessimism with what Pellissier would call the natural, since here he claims that it is natural to love life, whereas his critique of optimism elsewhere in the essay is that it shuts down our need to act, which he claims is also innate in our nature. He ultimately argues for moderation and claims that a key cause of the pessimism he opposes is, in addition to the social factors he identified, the psychological one of excessive thinking. Contemporary writers, he claims, fall prey to “un exercice abusif de leur activité cérébrale” [“an abusive exercise of their cerebral activity”] (22) and “les dispositions mêmes et les aptitudes qui en ont fait des « artistes »” [“the very dispositions and aptitudes that made them

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‘artists’”] (22). The sociocultural explanation and the psychological one come together in the case of the writer: “En notre époque d’universelle décomposition, l’homme qui vit par la pensée est fatalement condamné au surmenage intellectuel” [“In our era of universal decomposition, the man who lives by thought is fatally condemned to intellectual overwork”] (22). Such excess acts to the detriment of “cette harmonie intérieure qui est la santé même” [“that interior harmony which is health itself”] (23), producing a hypertrophy of the brain and then of other organs. Such advocacy of moderation, given the way he frames it here, represents a refusal to follow pessimism’s ideas not because they are false but on account of potentially harmful effects. It effectively cancels the lucidity that pessimism recommends even while upholding, as Schopenhauer had, artists and writers as particularly lucid figures. We return then to the open question of what sickness and health would mean under these circumstances, and whether we might have reason to value what others might label sickness, or even to relabel such sickness health. Pellissier does not allow that there may be other routes for a lucid pessimism to take, precisely along the lines of the transformation of reality that he had advocated when indicating pessimism’s laudable function of pointing out evil and thus inspiring us, unlike optimism, to want to change that situation even in full awareness of the unlikelihood of success. Such would be the very opposite of resignation, which is one of the main sources of Pellissier’s critique of pessimism. It is true that Schopenhauer recommends renunciation, but such is the nature of discourse on pessimism, as I have been demonstrating throughout this chapter, that such advocacy of resignation can hardly be the last word on Schopenhauer or on pessimism. The very fecundity of discourse about pessimism shows that posing the question of resignation does not lead to silence. Schopenhauer’s recommendation of resignation calls for a response and initiates a long dialogue about what it would mean to draw the right consequences from pessimism and what potential it holds. It calls out, in other words, for interpretation rather than dogmatic acceptance, for a lucidity that would enable creative thought and writing rather than foreclosing it. In that sense it shares an important space with literature, which, as we shall see, acts as a kind of testing ground for pessimism in this period, where ideas are brought into imagined lived scenarios and placed before the reader for interpretation and judgment in a way akin to what happens in Challemel-Lacour’s book on pessimism, where more questions than answers await.

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*** One can understand public discourse about pessimism in the late nineteenth century as a realignment and redefinition of important related terms. Typologies of pessimism are both posited and rejected, and the question of whether pessimism leads to quietism or action also implies a distinction that we might want to make between pessimism and nihilism. In fact, the kind of paralysis that Bourchenin describes above may be better described as nihilism, to be distinguished from pessimism, where it is not the case that nothing matters. Another related term that enters the discourse is that of skepticism. If the growth of skepticism in the wake of epistemological crises of the nineteenth century was a contributing factor to the emergence of modern pessimism, it is not certain that skepticism can be assimilated to pessimism. Essayist Camille Bos, in his 1907 collection of essays Pessimisme, féminisme, moralisme [Pessimism, Feminism, Moralism], strictly delineates the two via the historical examples of Pascal and Montaigne: Un pessimiste n’est rien moins qu’un pyrhonnien. Proclamer la nature mauvaise, la raison imbécile et la vie un calvaire, c’est poser du moins une certitude, et n’est-ce pas prendre les choses au sérieux, faire acte de foi dogmatique que de souffrir et d’être malheureux ? On opposera malaisément Pascal à Montaigne, tant qu’on ne parlera que de scepticisme; on peut se méprendre quant au premier et il faut, chez lui, étudier la chose d’un peu près; mais tout s’éclaire si l’on reconnaît en Pascal un pessimiste et en Montaigne un joyeux vivant, un enfant sans-souci. (25–26) [A pessimist is nothing less so than a Pyrrhonian. To proclaim nature bad, reason idiotic, and life a Calvary is to posit at least one certainty, and is it not taking things seriously and making a dogmatic act of faith to suffer and to be unhappy? We will uneasily oppose Pascal and Montaigne, as long as we will speak only of skepticism; it is easy to be mistaken with the first one, and in his case, it is necessary to study the thing closely; but everything becomes clear if we recognize in Pascal a pessimist and in Montaigne a joyous liver of life, a carefree child.]

Bos underscores the element of belief in pessimism that, once again, complicates its relationship to philosophy. For it is not that philosophy can be said to be free of beliefs; as I have been arguing, the plausibility of the premises is what matters more than logical verifiability when it comes to questions such as those to which pessimism draws us and which it attempts

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to address. It remains to be seen whether a joyful pessimism can emerge in a way akin to Montaigne’s joyful skepticism, and there may in fact be more common ground between skepticism and pessimism than Bos is willing to admit. If pessimism finds its grounding in reflection on lived experience, it is not as much a matter of belief as Bos would claim. And, in fact, the category of useful fictions might be operative and productive to both the pessimist and the skeptic. Both could, as I hope to show, lean on an idea of the “as if” that would avoid a fall into paralysis for both the pessimist and the skeptic, and in that at least they are on common ground. Thus, in the later nineteenth century, the horizon of possibilities expanded for pessimism, as writers such as Brunetière and Challemel-­ Lacour began to articulate a set of complexities that could not be reduced to simplistic statements. In the next generation, studies at the boundaries of several kinds of intellectual inquiry were beginning to articulate ideas about truth versus verisimilitude, and about the constitutive role of fiction in giving structure to human experience at the individual and collective level. These works are both informed by debates about pessimism and, in their turn, allow us to extend our understanding of pessimism as a mode of thought, one that blurs the boundaries of fields such as metaphysics, ethics, psychology, literature, and politics. The works that will interest us in the remainder of this chapter are Hans Vaihinger’s The Philosophy of ‘As If’ (1911) and Jules de Gaultier’s Le Bovarysme (1902). My emphasis thus far on the ways in which pessimism may enable the production of meaning may seem to align it with pragmatism. William James, at the end of the nineteenth century, was among those who advanced the notion that optimism and pessimism are not conclusions reached by reasoning but, rather, dispositions that affect our reasoning. In “The Will to Believe,” first given as a lecture in 1896, James argues that “our non-intellectual nature does influence our convictions” (19) and that: our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, “Do not decide, but leave the question open,” is itself a passional decision—just like deciding yes or no—and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth. (19–20)9

Miguel de Unamuno was to develop similar ideas in his 1912 work The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations: “It is not usually our ideas that

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make us optimists or pessimists, but our optimism or pessimism—of perhaps physiological or pathological origin […]—that makes our ideas” (5). James’ pragmatism does not get us far when addressing the complexity of pessimism as it began to emerge in this period, however. While he reserves, in “Is Life Worth Living?” (originally delivered in 1895), a role for reflective thought itself as a potential corrective to the “pessimism and the nightmare or suicidal view of life” (39–40) to which “too much questioning and too little active responsibility lead” (39), he ultimately appeals to religious faith as an antidote to pessimism, claiming that “pessimism is essentially a religious disease. In the form of it to which you are most liable, it consists in nothing but a religious demand to which there comes no normal religious reply” (40). Here he echoes other thinkers we have considered who see pessimism as stemming from the crisis of modernity and the persistence of metaphysical questions in a post-metaphysical age. His essay is a defense of religious belief, an insistence that “we have a right to believe the physical order to be only a partial order” (49). He exhorts his listeners to “believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact” (56). I would argue that such a take is unhelpful as an approach either to pessimism or to the question that forms the title of James’ essay. Abandoning truth for mere belief leaves open a host of questions about the lucidity that comes with reflection on suffering and to which a traditional religious view hardly seems to do justice, bringing us back to the thought systems that began to seem implausible in the wake of the rise of pessimism to begin with. I have been arguing that reflecting explicitly on the role of fiction in posing and working through these problems is a more fruitful approach, on the grounds that it creates imaginative spaces that do not depend on mere belief, nor are they subject to the criterion of verifiability. This approach has affiliations with pragmatism but at the same time establishes important differences. Such a distinction is in fact the starting point of Hans Vaihinger in the preface to the English edition of The Philosophy of ‘As If,’ where he develops a distinction between what he calls fictionalism and pragmatism: Fictionalism does not admit the principle of Pragmatism which runs: “An idea which is found to be useful in practice proves thereby that it is also true in theory, and the fruitful is thus always true.” The principle of Fictionalism, on the other hand, or rather the outcome of Fictionalism, is as follows: “An idea whose theoretical untruth or incorrectness, and therewith its falsity, is

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admitted is not for that reason practically valueless and useless; for such an idea, in spite of its theoretical nullity may have great practical importance.” But though Fictionalism and Pragmatism are diametrically opposed in principle, in practice they may find much in common. Thus both acknowledge the value of metaphysical ideas, though for very different reasons and with very different consequences. (vii)

The distinction is an important one, since in pragmatism as Vaihinger characterizes it, the category of truth is retained but simply redefined, whereas fictionalism steps outside the distinction of true versus false in order to reframe the criteria by which we are to take ideas seriously, in a way that does not so much affirm the false as to evaluate ideas by different criteria. The distinction may be subtle, but it allows us to generate criteria for evaluating ideas that do not lead us either to reject all that cannot be established as definitively true or to make way for simple belief, as James does. Establishing the importance of fiction allows for imaginative possibilities and the effect they can have for assigning meaning to experience, in a way that maintains their fictional nature while simultaneously affirming their power. This approach has important and direct relations to the development of modern pessimism. An autobiographical footnote to this preface reveals the key role that Schopenhauer played in Vaihinger’s development. He provides an argument whereby pessimism enables effective living rather than shutting it down, one of the earliest articulations of the kind of argument I am making in this book about pessimism’s enabling function: Schopenhauer’s pessimism became in me a fundamental and lasting state of consciousness, and all the more so because of my own sad and difficult experiences. Even in earlier days I had been deeply affected by Schiller’s lines “Who can enjoy life, if he sees into its depths!” I have not found that this outlook tends to weaken biological and moral energy. On the contrary, I am one of those whom only pessimism enables to endure life, and to whom pessimism gives the ethical strength to work and fight for themselves as well as to help others. (xxvii)

Vaihinger suggests the way that pessimism allows for a more holistic integration of lived experience and philosophical reflection on that experience, which his notion of fictionalism goes on to theorize by analyzing the role that the “consciously false,” which for him is synonymous with the “as if,” plays “in science, in world-philosophies, and in life” (xli). He highlights

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benefits on the individual and social levels, and goes on in this part of the preface to discuss how pessimism has the potential to help us avoid political cataclysm: I foresaw and prophesied for many years the World-War, its result and its consequences for us. I have also found that the people of other nations, who have been accustomed to a more realistic philosophy than the usual German idealism and optimism, had a far clearer view of reality. If Germany’s leaders since 1871 had taken a lesson from Schopenhauer, Germany would not have fallen into this desperate condition. (xxvii)10

The main substance of the book, however, focuses on the level of individual experience, with more affinities to psychology than to politics. Vaihinger shifts the task of philosophy from providing accounts of reality to providing a guide for living: “It must be remembered that the object of the world of ideas as a whole is not the portrayal of reality—this would be an utterly impossible task—but rather to provide us with an instrument for finding our way about more easily in this world” (15). Still, such a model has important political implications, not least of which is the notion of freedom, a concept we “can no longer do without” even though we realize it is “a logical monstrosity, a contradiction; in a word, only a fiction, and not a hypothesis” (43). What gives a concept such as freedom its power is the fact that it has become an “indispensable fiction,” one by which we regulate individual and collective living, at least as a regulatory ideal. “A bitter struggle was necessary before we attained our present attitude, which for a long while was far from general. On this modern view there is nothing in the real world corresponding to the idea of liberty, though in practice it is an exceedingly necessary fiction” (43). Once we have acknowledged the power of fiction, the question becomes not one of truth versus falsehood as guiding principles for living, but rather the question of which productive fictions allow us to live well in the world. Such perspectives, again, have important relevance for the question of optimism and pessimism and important political implications, as Vaihinger goes on to outline. “Dogmatism is a form of logical optimism which approaches the logical function and their products with unbounded confidence, regards thought with an admiration and satisfaction so exaggerated that doubts are not raised at any point” (162). He builds an argument on the notion that such optimism was an evolutionary advantage at first “unless [man] was to die of starvation while pondering the problem

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whether the space through which he shot his arrow was real” (162), but “becomes definitely dangerous and disastrous” in the modern world: The logical edifice, even if it be but a house of cards, is so carefully protected against contact with the fresh breezes of doubt, that no one thinks of mistrusting the logical function. Optimism here becomes conservative, reactionary and injurious like everything that outlives its usefulness. (162)

This is an important moment, where Vaihinger turns the tables on those critics of pessimism who had argued that it was dangerous at both the individual and the collective level. Here, by contrast, pessimism allies with skepticism in order to avoid the trap of a dangerous optimism. Vaihinger is not able simply to endorse skepticism either, however. As we have already seen, skepticism and pessimism make for temporary but uneasy allies. Vaihinger offers a critique of skepticism in the following terms, identifying the good of skepticism as a negative one that allows us to free ourselves from the dangerous of optimistic dogmatism: “if dogmatism, in spite of its naïve products, is not fruitful, skepticism is definitely barren. Yet this mistrust, in addition to being strongly motivated, is of considerable service in preparing the way for the critical attitude which we ought to adopt towards our world, i.e. to the logical functions and products” (163). Pessimism, paradoxically perhaps given some of Vaihinger’s premises, allows us the lucidity of a critique of the illusions of thought, and most importantly of the illusion of “the identity of thought and reality” (163): “The valuable outcome of pessimism is the habit of seeing in these conceptual constructs primarily nothing more than subjective products” (163). Pessimism, when it aligns with skepticism, allows us to activate thought in Arendt’s destructive sense of attacking ideas that had seemed to stand on solid ground. Vaihinger shifts the ground of those discussions so that what matters most are the subjective products of the mind as subjective products, their reality not in relation to truth but in relation to each other and to the way in which we rely on them to construct, live in, and make meaning from our world. To think in this way is to let go, in a liberating way, of the desire to “understand” the world as if it were an external phenomenon there to be understood in some rationally verifiable way: “Understanding is the well-known feeling of pleasure due to the empirical transformation of sensations into categories. It is quite meaningless to try to extend this feeling of pleasure beyond its possible limits. […] The wish to understand the world is not only unrealizable, but

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also it is a very stupid wish” (171). Coming to understand and appreciate limits, while it may provoke disappointment at first, is an enabling move that allows us to function well within those limits rather than making futile attempts at transcending them. Such is a basic tenet of most approaches to pessimism, as it also provides mechanisms for coming to terms with those limits, seeing in them the tragedy or comedy they are likely to inspire. This is not, of course, to say that Vaihinger discounts the scientific enterprise. As I have mentioned, he sees productive fiction operating as a driver of scientific knowledge and discusses that role at length. But he makes the distinction between knowledge and understanding, claiming that science can provide the former but not the latter. It is not that we should seek alternate forms of understanding in the wake of the dissolution of religious thought in modernity; rather, we should abandon the enterprise of understanding altogether, since both science and philosophy yield only knowledge: The desire to understand the world is therefore ridiculous, for all understanding consists in an actual or imaginary reduction to the known. But to what is this “known” itself to be reduced, especially if in the end it turns out to be something “unknown.” Our world itself is not capable of being understood but merely of being known. Philosophy can arrive only at a knowledge of the world, not an understanding of it; it will be a knowledge of the world in its naked simplicity, after the destruction of all subjective forms of interpretational additions, where fictions are consciously recognized as fictions, i.e. as necessary, useful and helpful conceptual aids. (171)

In Vaihinger we thus find an articulation of the argument I have been making about pessimism: that it is useful as a destructive device that allows us lucidity about the limits of understanding, while at the same time providing conceptual tools for living well within those limits. At the same time, we shift from a focus on understanding to an affirmation of the importance of meaning in its stead, for to abandon understanding is not to resign oneself to meaninglessness; and in fact a realization of the impossibility of understanding can, I have claimed, facilitate meaning in ways that bring philosophy and literature together productively.11 Jules de Gaultier’s 1902 work Le Bovarysme [Bovarism] also engages questions of the newly reconfigured relationship of fiction and lived experience in the context of the debate on pessimism at the turn of the

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century.12 What he claims to provide is “un appareil d’optique mentale” [“a mental optical apparatus”] (8) by which we come to see that what is sometimes identified as a peculiarity of character on the part of Flaubert’s heroine Emma Bovary is in fact a generalizable aspect of the way we all imagine our own relationship to the world in which we live.13 This mental faculty is “le pouvoir départi à l’homme de se concevoir autre qu’il n’est” [“man’s ability to conceive of himself otherwise than he is”] (13). He grants that Flaubert explored this “pouvoir de métamorphose” [“power of metamorphosis”] with “une nuance de pessimisme” [“a nuance of pessimism”] (13), which de Gaultier shares to some extent as he also wishes to “montrer son universalité, […] son utilité, sa nécessité, […] son rôle comme cause et moyen essentiel de l’évolution dans l’Humanité” [“show his universality, [….] his utility, his necessity, […] his role as cause and essential means of evolution in Humanity”] (13). Thus, de Gaultier allows us to continue the evolving conversation among writers and thinkers about whether pessimism’s effects can ultimately be creative rather than destructive. Like others before him, de Gaultier raises questions about what such a worldview can lead to in terms of lived consequences and whether it is at heart pathological, as the tragic end of Madame Bovary may lead one to posit. As with the case of pessimism more broadly, what is at stake is the use one makes of Bovarism, how one adopts the faculty and the consequences one draws from this imaginative capacity. With de Gaultier we return to the debate about whether pessimism is a sickness and, if so, whether it affects everyone or only a few. We recall that those who claimed pessimism posed no major threat sometimes did so on the grounds that it affects only a few. If it were to be generalized, it seems we would need to redefine notions of sickness and health, as we saw in the writing of Challemel-Lacour and the ambivalence of that text in terms of these kinds of questions. According to de Gaultier, while Bovary and similar characters may seem exceptional in the fictional worlds of which they are the creation, they are actually figures of something more universal in that all of us operate in the world via these kinds of fictionalizations, which Vaihinger went on to theorize as the “as if.” As de Gaultier writes: Tandis que la faculté de se concevoir autre, exagérée en quelques individus, faisait de ceux-ci des personnages de drame ou de comédie et nous montrait des êtres que l’on pouvait croire exceptionnels, elle apparaît maintenant comme le mécanisme même en vertu duquel l’Humanité se meut, comme le principe funeste et indestructible qui la fonde et constitue son essence.

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Ce Bovarysme métaphysique donne à cette partie de l’œuvre de Flaubert une apparence pessimiste. On montrera bientôt qu’elle laisse place à une autre interprétation; mais on va respecter […] cette première impression qui s’en dégage. Elle est en effet la conséquence du relief exagéré qu’implique nécessairement une vision d’artiste, et cette exagération même sera de nature à faire mieux comprendre et mieux voir par la suite le principe d’où surgit la réalité phénoménale, avec les formes que nous lui connaissons. (39)14 [Whereas the ability to conceive oneself otherwise, exaggerated in some individuals, made of these people dramatic or comic characters and showed us being that we could believe to be exceptional, this ability now appears as the very mechanism by virtue of which Humanity moves, as the disastrous and indestructible principle that founds and constitutes its essence. This metaphysical Bovarism gives to this part of Flaubert’s work a pessimistic appearance. We will soon show that it leaves space for another interpretation; but we will respect that first impression. It is in fact the consequence of the exaggerated relief that an artist’s vision necessarily implies, and this very exaggeration will be such that it will make better understood and better seen the principle from which phenomenal reality emerges, with the forms that we know.]

De Gaultier seems to agree in this sense with Schopenhauer, for whom the genius (or, as de Gaultier says here, the artist) recognizes what others are unable to see, but this is not because artists or geniuses themselves are exceptional but because their insights allow us to see a more generalizable characteristic of lived experience and open it to reflective thought. The status of pessimism in this passage is ambiguous, as de Gaultier neither rejects nor embraces it. We can see in this ambiguity, I would argue, a sign that debates about pessimism are moving beyond the question of endorsement or rejection and toward the more fertile question of what we might do with conclusions that initially derive from pessimism. It is in this that pessimism promises to be a vehicle of creative destruction in terms of former ways of thinking; one sign of that would be the way in which it begins to dissolve the optimism/pessimism distinction by enabling change within the realm of imposed limits. Dissatisfaction with one’s current situation, what de Gaultier calls “une faculté de mécontentement” [“a faculty of discontent”] (189), is, for him, a defining human characteristic that distinguishes humans from other animals. It is, for de Gaultier, an enabling dissatisfaction in that it is what motivates us to change “les conditions du milieu auxquelles les autres

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animaux s’adaptent” [“the conditions of the milieu to which animals adapt”] (189). De Gaultier thus provides an illustration, as Brunetière did before him, of the way that pessimism, far from shutting down action, enables it better than optimism. Conceptual and situational restlessness are at the heart of any sort of changes, and pessimism, as we have seen, provides the motivation for those changes but also the lucidity to know that any change is ultimately incapable of producing satisfaction, as well as a way to cope with that impossibility while not abandoning the effort or dismissing its absurdity. Pessimism affirms the importance of limits, including the limits of the possibilities of taking steps to mitigate dissatisfaction, as de Gaultier recognizes: Mais [l’homme] ne peut modifier cette faculté même de mécontentement qui constitue son être et tous les changements qu’il apporte à l’univers sont le terreau où grandit et se fortifie cette plante vivace qui porte aux extrémités de ses branches tous les fruits de la connaissance. L’homme se conçoit doué du pouvoir d’augmenter ses joies, il ne réussit qu’à augmenter son savoir. (189–190) [But [man] cannot modify this very faculty of discontent that constitutes his being and all the changes that he brings to his universe are the mold where this plant grows and fortifies itself, that plant which has on its branches all the fruits of knowledge. Man conceives himself as having a talent for augmenting his joys; he only succeeds in augmenting his knowledge.]

De Gaultier explores similar epistemological distinctions between knowledge and understanding when taking up the question of knowledge of the self. For if we can, according to de Gaultier in the passage just quoted, make advances in knowledge (with the requisite sacrifice of the joy that we may have thought we were pursuing), such knowledge cannot expand to knowledge of the self, because such knowledge, in order to proceed from an eternal vantage point, requires the division of the self and thus a knowing self that will always be external to the object to be known: Il existe un antagonisme irréductible entre ces deux faits: existence et connaissance. […] Le moi humain ne peut prendre de lui-même une connaissance intégrale. Pour se connaître, il se divise, et c’est une partie de lui-même qui prend connaissance de l’autre partie. L’acte même par lequel il s’efforce de prendre connaissance de lui-même brise son unité. (195–196)

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[There exists an irreducible antagonism between these two facts: existence and knowledge. […] The human self cannot have an integral knowledge of itself. To know itself, it divides itself, and one part of itself gains knowledge of the other part. The very act by which it tries to gain knowledge of itself breaks its unity.]

Such division of the self from itself and the concomitant shattered unity can be taken either as a sign of mental instability, or of the way a genuine understanding of self as always split is to be achieved, or both. Such considerations about the self allow for a link between Bovarism and modern pessimism. Our new knowledge about the impossibility of knowledge of the self, or of its inevitably split nature, calls for a reevaluation of our notion of pathology that either redefines sickness and health or recognizes that such illness is generalizable across humanity more broadly and not the domain of a perverse few. Le phénomène bovaryque [s’]est en effet montré d’une application universelle. Il est apparu comme la loi même et comme la condition de la vie phénoménale. On ne saurait donc le considérer comme une maladie sans considérer, du même coup, comme une maladie de la vie phénoménale tout entière, c’est-à-dire la vie telle qu’elle nous est donnée. Le bouddhisme n’a pas reculé devant cette déduction à laquelle s’est également attaché, avec Schopenhauer, tout le pessimisme contemporain. […] Mais le fait que la vie phénoménale persiste, à l’ardeur dont témoigne l’humanité à la conserver et à la perfectionner interdisent de reconnaître la valeur d’une loi générale au vœu de cette sensibilité épuisée qui, pensant abolir la vie, n’abolit avec elle-même, dans l’effort de renoncement où elle se rétracte, qu’une maladie de la vie. (202–203) [The Bovary phenomenon showed itself to be universally applicable. It appeared as the very law and condition of phenomenal life. We thus should not consider it as a sickness without considering, at the same time, the entirety of phenomenal life as a sickness, that is, life as it is given to us. Buddhism did not recoil in the face of this deduction with which all of contemporary pessimism, with Schopenhauer, linked itself. […] But the fact that phenomenal life persists, with the ardor that humanity manifests for keeping and perfecting it forbids us from recognizing the value of a general law according to the wishes of that exhausted sensibility, which, thinking that it is abolishing life, abolishes with itself, in the effort of renunciation where it retracts, only a sickness of life.]

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On this view, pessimism gives itself over to the view of life as a fictional construct, which is a view that accompanied pessimism from the start, as I have tried to show by illustrating that pessimism is not a logically or empirically verifiable system but rather an interpretive tool that is effective in generating meaning while retaining a certain lucidity in the face of suffering. While de Gaultier claims to have avoided formulating “une évaluation pessimiste de la vie et de ses conditions” [“a pessimistic evaluation of life and its conditions”] (206), it remains open to question how he understands the term pessimism here. He singles out for praise those who “ne perdent pas courage lorsque quelque mensonge particulier leur devient apparent” [“do not lose courage when some particular lie becomes apparent to them”] (206), but indicates that, given that “aucun état de connaissance n’est possible que d’un objet pour un sujet, en sorte que toute entité vivante ne prend conscience d’elle-même qu’au moyen d’une falsification de soi, il apparaît que la vérité n’a pas de place dans la vie phénoménale” [“no state of consciousness is possible except of an object for a subject, so that every living entity only becomes conscious of itself by means of a falsification of self, it appears that truth has no place in phenomenal life”] (206). By applying the notion of truth to the life of phenomena, we arrive at “une nouvelle croyance bovarique […qui] consiste à appliquer aux modes de la vie phénoménale une conception qui exclut la vie phénoménale” [“a new Bovaristic belief […that] consists in applying to the modes of phenomenal life a conception that excludes phenomenal life”] (206–207). This is a kind of second-order bovarism whereby we find ourselves “concevant la vie phénoménale autre qu’elle n’est” [“conceiving phenomenal life as other than it is”] (207). Truth becomes wrapped up in the question of fictional construction here when we make the category mistake of taking what is necessarily a fictional construction as truth, thus embedding ourselves deeper in the fiction that now includes truth as part of its imaginative construction, without that truth corresponding to any exterior reality where it could indeed count as truth. Because this approach to truth is a “fausse conception” [“false conception”] (207), we are destined, if we maintain this conceptual structure, always to be heading for the impossible and thus “condamné à un recommencement perpétuel” [“condemned to a perpetual starting over”] (207). It is at this point that interpretation plays a key role in determining what our reaction to this situation should be: “Condamné, c’est le terme dont useraient les philosophes pessimistes, mais on dira ici que, par la vertu de cette illusion

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métaphysique, l’élan humain est assuré d’une ardeur toujours renaissante”[“‘Condemned’ is the term that pessimist philosophers would use, but we will say here that, by virtue of this metaphysical illusion, human momentum is assured by an always renewed ardor”] (207). It is not certain, based on the argument that I have been developing, that “pessimism” is the right label for those who would feel condemned by this situation. Rather, an acceptance of limits and the courage to go on in the face of the impossibility of arrival at truth is a hallmark of what I have been exploring as the outcome of the debates on pessimism in this period. De Gaultier thus identifies a key shift in our perception of our own mental activity when we engage in reflective thought about experience. This formula summarizes the change well: “Se croyant destiné à atteindre la vérité, l’homme à tout moment crée le réel. La vérité prise pour but est le moyen d’une chose toute différente” [“Believing himself destined to attain truth, at every instant man creates the real. Truth taken for a goal is the means of something totally different”] (208). Via de Gaultier’s Bovarism, he moves from a model of discovery of the truth to one of active creation of the real, a process whereby fiction has a key role to play and in which pessimism can be seen as destructive of illusions but also as creative in terms of articulating a way forward from the ruins of the former paradigm. Like Vaihinger, de Gaultier opens up new realms of possibilities for the “as if,” whereby fiction is no longer a dangerous illusion, but rather a space where new possibilities are evaluated in terms of their existence in imagination, and then, potentially, in lived experience as the conceptual constructs by which we make meaning of our actions: D’un point de vue de connaissance on ne demande donc pas si une réalité est conforme à une vérité objective, ni si une vérité est vraie. On recherche quelles vérités, c’est-à-dire quels procédés présidèrent à la formation de cette réalité, durant combien de temps ces vérités eurent le pouvoir de sculpter ses contours, dans quel sens précis elles agirent. Ces diverses connaissances sont propres à déterminer quelles transformations peut subir encore cette réalité donnée, quelles transformations la briseraient. (304–305) [From the point of view of knowledge we do not ask whether a reality corresponds to an objective truth, nor whether a truth is true. We are seeking which truths, that is, which procedures presided over the formation of this reality, for how much time these truths had the power to sculpt its contours, in which exact sense they acted. This various knowledge is appropriate for determining which transformations this given reality can still undergo and which transformations would break it.]

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The imaginative world of fiction is thus an important workshop where reality is imagined, weighed, judged, and altered, where perceptions that forge our way of seeing the world are developed or altered, and where new interpretive possibilities come to the fore as we enter the world of fictional characters through an act of imagination that also links those fictional experiences to our own. A sense of limits and possibilities is thus always up for negotiation within the world of fiction and its interpretation, and it is to that world that I now turn.

Notes 1. Dienstag reads Rousseau together with Leopardi as a representative of what he terms “cultural pessimism.” See Dienstag 49–83. 2. For a concise history of Schopenhauer’s reception in France, see François. For more detail, see Colin’s book-length study. 3. Boudeau’s goal was not necessarily to make the fragments representative of Schopenhauer’s thought. Alain Roger describes it this way: “Pas, ou peu de métaphysique, mais une prédilection sélective pour le pessimisme et la misogynie, tels qu’ils s’expriment en particulier dans l’Essai sur les Femmes et la Métaphysique de l’amour […]. Bref, un manuel à l’usage des blasés et des célibataires” [“No, or little, metaphysics, but a selective predilection for pessimism and misogyny, as they are expressed in particular in the Essay on Women and Metaphysics of Love […]. Briefly stated, a manual for the blasés and the bachelors”] (in Salem 83). 4. Challemel-Lacour participated in the revolts of 1848, “un des premiers à se mêler aux insurgés” [“one of the first to join the insurgents”] (Krakowski 58), but later espoused a more moderate republicanism: “il est républicain, malgré ses désillusions, mais il tend de plus en plus, comme avait fait Gambetta, comme le fait Jules Ferry, […] vers une république autoritaire, capable de préserver la démocratie de la démagogie, capable d’assurer une ascension des élites” [“He is a republican, despite his disillusionment, but he tends more and more, as Gambetta did and as Jules Ferry does, toward an authoritarian republic, capable of preserving democracy from demagoguery, capable of assuring an ascension of the elites”] (306). 5. For a study of points of convergence of divergence between Schopenhauer and the Buddha, see Christopher Ryan: “In sum, whereas both Schopenhauer and Gotama proclaimed pessimistic philosophies that aimed to alert us to the sheer extent of suffering […], their contrary metaphysical stances gave rise to distinct accounts of what it is about ourselves and reality that makes us suffer. For Schopenhauer, it is the bottomless pit of willing, […] always pushing us to seek more; for Gotama, it is clinging to

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objects and the fear of losing what we have. […] It is difficult to see how a Schopenhauerian might resolve the problem while embodied, even with propositional knowledge of the human dilemma, whereas understanding and meditative insight into life’s impermanence enables Buddhists to attain detachment daily” (391). 6. See Bootle 29–36 for a discussion of pessimism as disease in a nationalistic context that opposes France and Germany. Bootle demonstrates that “after 1870 German philosophical influence, especially that of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, is portrayed not only as alien, but also dangerous, invasive, corrupting” (13). 7. This sort of subtler approach to questions of joy and sadness becomes accessible only in the twentieth century; see for instance Marcel Conche’s call to “voir dans la tristesse la tonalité fondamentale de la vie, sur laquelle s’inscrit la joie sans aucunement l’effacer” [“see in sadness the fundamental tonality of life, on which joy is inscribed without erasing it in any way”] (31). 8. On Brunetière’s initial approval of Caro’s stance and subsequent change of position, see Schiano-Bennis 87–88, where she indicates Brunetière’s condemnation of Schopenhauer’s thought as a “philosophie de l’égoïsme et de la jouissance” [“philosophy of egotism and pleasure”] (quoted in Schiano-­ Bennis 87, n.71). 9. For more on the engagement of William James and his Harvard colleague Josiah Royce with Schopenhauer, see Buschendorf 487–491. 10. This is not to suggest that the political valence of a pessimism attuned to alleviating suffering necessarily offers a politics compatible with it. Vaihinger goes on to add: “The development of the social question might just as well have evolved toward the right as towards the left if Schopenhauer had been the guiding influence, instead of Rousseau and Hegel” and claims that “Kant’s theory of ‘radical evil’ in human nature is a direct contradiction of certain tendencies in extreme socialism” (xxvii). 11. For a contemporary approach to Vaihinger that retains a role for truth in philosophy, see Kwame Anthony Appiah: “So the kind of truth that matters most for agents whose psychological lives are stocked with the sorts of idealizing models I have been discussing is not just truth in the actual world, as it is, but truth in possible worlds, ways the universe might have been; or if you are a skeptic about those, then let us just say that what matters is the truth about what is possible. Which is why I think it is a good thing […] that we philosophers have a soft spot for truths, even if we have discovered that many of the most exciting and important things we think and say are not strictly speaking, true at all” (171–172). 12. Laurent Jenny highlights the way de Gaultier adopted and transformed key ideas from Schopenhauer, namely, the Will, which becomes “la Vie” in de Gaultier, and the importance of music, which yields its primacy to fiction:

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“À bien lire Jules de Gaultier, on comprend mieux pourquoi il omet toute référence explicite au Monde comme volonté et comme représentation: c’est que tout en en gardant […] l’opposition entre force d’être aveugle et représentation, il le soumet à des adaptations ravageuses. La « Volonté » est rebaptisée « la Vie » et perd ainsi son caractère métaphysique. Et la classification schopenhauerienne des arts se trouve aussi implicitement bouleversée: alors que la musique était dans le système schopenhauerien l’expression directe de la « Volonté », […] Jules de Gaultier entend lui substituer en son lieu et place la poésie, conçue comme une manifestation inconsciente de la Vie” [“When we read Jules de Gaultier well, we understand better why he omits all explicit reference to The World as Will and Representation: it is that while maintaining […] the opposition between the blind force of will and representation, he submits it to ravaging adaptations. “Will” is rebaptized “Life” and thus loses its metaphysical character. And Schopenhauer’s classification of the arts thus also finds itself implicitly torn apart: whereas music was, in Schopenhauer’s system, the direct expression of the “Will,” […] Jules de Gaultier means to substitute in its place poetry, conceived as an unconscious manifestation of Life” (Jenny 28–29). 13. Giorgio Agamben remarks on de Gaultier’s book in terms of the way in which “the problem of fiction is restored to the rank to which it is due, that is, to the level of ontological” (37). 14. On Flaubert’s pessimism, see Michel Brix, who affirms that Flaubert, independently of Schopenhauer, whose work he knew only late in life, develops many of the same themes. Brix underscores that Flaubert “a défendu des vues qui présentent d’étroites ressemblances avec la doctrine du philosophe allemande” (2), including their shared misanthropy and their avowed disdain for popular democracy.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. The Time that Remains. Tr. Patricia Dailey. Stanford UP, 2005. Appiah, Kwame Anthony As If: Idealization and Ideas. Harvard UP, 2017. Beiser, Frederick C. Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860–1900. Oxford UP, 2016. Bootle, Sam. Laforgue, Philosophy, and Ideas of Otherness. Legenda, 2018. Bos, Camille. Pessimisme, féminisme, moralisme. Félix Alcan, 1907. Bourchenin, Pierre-Daniel. La trace du pessimisme dans la société et les lettres françaises contemporaines. Grassart, 1893. Brix, Michel. “Flaubert, Schopenhauer et le pessimisme.” Revue Flaubert 7 (2007), 1–13. Brunetière, Ferdinand. “La Philosophie de Schopenhauer et les conséquences du pessimisme.” Revue des Deux Mondes. 1 novembre 1890, 210–221.

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———. “La philosophie de Schopenhauer” Revue des Deux Mondes, 3e période, tome 77 (1886), 694–706. Buschendorf, Christa. “Grappling with German Atheism and Pessimism: The Reception of Schopenhauer in the USA” in Sandra Shapshay, ed. The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 485–507. Caro, Elme Marie. Le Pessimisme au XIXe siècle. Hachette, 1878. Challemel-Lacour, Paul-Armand. “Un bouddhiste contemporain en Allemagne: Arthur Schopenhauer.” Revue des Deux Mondes 86 (1870), 296–332. ———. Etudes et réflexions d’un pessimiste. Fayard, 1993. Colin, René-Pierre. Schopenhauer en France: Un mythe naturaliste. Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1979. Conche, Marcel. Le sens de la philosophie. Encre marine, 2003. De Gaultier, Jules. Le Bovarysme. Mercure de France 1922. Dépret, Louis. La question du pessimisme. Danel, 1879. Dienstag, Joshua Foa. Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit. Princeton UP, 2006. François, Arnaud. “Schopenhauer’s French Reception” in Sandra Shapshay, ed. The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 473–483. James, William. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. Harvard UP, 1979. Jenny, Laurent. La fin de l’intériorité. Presses Universitaires de France, 2002. Krakowski, Edouard. La Naissance de la IIIe république: Challemel-Lacour, le philosophe et l’homme d’état. Victor Attinger, 1932. Pellissier, Georges. Essais de littérature contemporaine. Société Française d’imprimerie et de librairie, 1893. Ryan, Christopher. “Schopenhauer and Gotama on Life’s Suffering” in Sandra Shapshay, ed. The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 373–394. Salem, Jean. « Maupassant et Schopenhauer » in Christian Bonnet et Jean Salem, eds. La raison dévoilée: Etudes schopenhaueriennes (Vrin, 2005), 175–191. Schiano-Bennis, Sandrine. La Renaissance de l’idéalisme à la fin du XIXe siècle. Honoré Champion, 1999. Unamuno, Miguel de. The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations. Tr. Anthony Kerrigan. Princeton UP, 1972. Vaihinger, Hans. The Philosophy of ‘As If.’ Tr. C.K. Ogden. Harcourt Brace, 1924.

CHAPTER 4

Pessimism and the Novel: Fiction and the “As-If”

As writers of fiction in the later nineteenth century engage the question of pessimism, they do so in a way that furthers the conversation about drawing meaning from it by providing characters in lived situations that are informed by, and in turn inform, basic principles of modern pessimism. Works by the novelists I will consider in this chapter are driven not so much by plots in the usual sense of a series of actions so much as what we might call thought structures. They seldom result in tidy resolution of the intellectual adventures they portray in neat conclusions, and in some ways these novels continue to blur the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, as I have claimed some of the nonfiction writers I have been considering also do. This is because both fiction and nonfiction about pessimism in this period encourages the reader to enter actively into the conversation implied by the text in order to draw the consequences of the world of the “as if” that the text proposes. The reader thus participates in the creative destruction of received ideas about the world and risks meaninglessness, while attempting to forge meaning from experience that would be attuned to suffering but not reduced to despair in the face of a lack of epistemological certainty about one’s place in the world. The thought structures of these novels thus become the plot in that they both trace a character’s intellectual adventure and invite the reader critically to assess it, to ask what it would be like to live in the particular “as if” that the novel sketches, and what it would mean to draw conclusions about it. The imaginary © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Acquisto, Living Well with Pessimism in Nineteenth-Century France, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61014-2_4

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experience of the character thus becomes part of the lived mental experience of the reader in a way that encourages the reader to redraw the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction and between observer and observed. The characters in these novels attempt to negotiate the relationship between reflection and lived experience; their authors pose the implicit question of what would constitute the “plot” of a character tempted either by resignation or by facile solutions to the problem of meaninglessness, such as mysticism. In other words, these authors continue the conversation I traced in Chap. 3 about how best to draw the consequences of pessimism as a way of being in the world by portraying these thoughts in the context of a lived (fictional) life. In so doing, they invite readers to reflect on that fictional experience and to negotiate, in their turn, the way in which reflection maps dialectically onto experience. These fictional lives thus become, no less than the arguments and claims in the nonfiction works on pessimism that we have considered, a sort of hypothesis presented for consideration, which calls for a response. This is the sort of experience that philosopher of literature Peter Kivy has identified as common to both reflective and artistic experience: Philosophical and moral contemplation in the gaps and afterlife are the hallmarks of literary appreciation, where the work demands that. […] Where […] banality is alleged to result from the lack of argument and analysis in the literary work, as it would in many novels and plays, the reply is that argument and analysis occur, in the gaps and afterlife, in the reader’s mind, as part and parcel of a legitimate artistic experience. (23–24)

The novels I explore here are not romans à thèse, attempts merely to transpose philosophical systems such as those of Schopenhauer into fictional form. Rather, they are original interventions in those ideas, serving not to illustrate but to complicate and pose questions about how best to enact a worldview inspired by, and perhaps attempting to be faithful to, certain core notions of pessimism. This sometimes takes the form of direct engagement with the ideas, and even the character, of Schopenhauer, but then writers’ engagement with pessimism absorbs Schopenhauer’s ideas into more general territory. When they do this, they retain the basic structure but not the details of his ideas, and thereby incorporate a more broadly conceived pessimism into literary plot structures as a kind of laboratory for those ideas and the ways we can make meaning from them.

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I begin with an analysis of a short story by Guy de Maupassant that stages the death of Schopenhauer, which I analyze as a portrayal of the ambiguity of the response to the philosopher whose influence was growing in France at the time of his death. I argue that the five other authors I consider in this chapter write in the wake of the questions left open by pessimism and present fictional engagements with the consequences of the non-resolution to problems and questions raised by  it. Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel A rebours explores the issue of pessimism precisely in terms of these questions of the desirability of resolutions and conclusions; as I will argue, Huysmans’ later comments on his own novel reveal the tension between the open-endedness of pessimism and the potential for tidy resolution and conclusion that he associates with the Christianity he later adopts. Philosophy and fiction meet, I will claim, in this shared territory of the structural shape of their “plots” and the question of whether they can or should come to resolution. The open-endedness of pessimism, I will show, has an important role to play in reconfiguring how we understand plot structures, moving them away from the resolution of conflict. I illustrate this via an analysis of Henry Céard’s novel Une belle journée, a novel largely devoid of “action” that implicitly calls on the reader to interpret mundane details of life that otherwise risk falling into meaninglessness. As we attempt to make meaning from the non-events we read, we are drawn into the realm of judgment that I have claimed was operative in nonfictional writing on pessimism at this time as well. As we consider whether to label the action of novels such as Céard’s tragic, comic, or perhaps devoid of meaning entirely, we shape and are shaped by the pessimist worldview from which Céard draws. The three novelists I engage with in the second half of the chapter invite us, as Céard does, to consider the implications of pessimism via a re-evaluation of what we understand plot structure to be in the absence of tidy resolution. Teodor de Wyzewa shifts away from Céard’s realism in order to present a character struggling with the idealist response to pessimism; his main character seeks a way out of pessimism via refuge in music, a more Schopenhauerian solution than Huysmans’ Christianity, but an equally ineffective attempt to impose neat concluding gestures on the problems of the impossibility of resignation that pessimism opens. This intertwining of philosophy and literature becomes even more apparent, I argue, in Edouard Rod’s novels, where we see an extension of the role of the reader as judge of the ideas and experiences lived out by the main character, as we saw in Céard, but now within the context of an even less

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ordered “plot” structure. The influence of Schopenhauer on these novelists lies, I argue, not in the way they illustrate his ideas, for such is not really the case, but rather in the way they, as he does in his own writings, emplot the conceptual adventure of seeking meaning from potentially meaningless experience and attempting to avoid nihilism and despair while at the same time staying clear of tidy and consoling solutions. These novelists illustrate the imaginative potential inherent in pessimism and also the way that fictional and nonfictional accounts of it operate according to a similar structural logic. In the last section of the chapter, I argue that a late novella of Jules Verne pushes the imaginative possibilities of pessimism even further by representing the literal destruction of our current human civilization in a way that invites us to consider geographical and civilizational catastrophe rather than the personal experiential or metaphysical catastrophe that is staged by the other writers I consider. Taken together, I hope to show a progression in these six authors from a narrow and immediate concern with Schopenhauer’s legacy to the increasingly broader ripple effects of pessimism on the way we use fiction to give shape to lived experience in conjunction with crises of knowledge and even of human culture broadly conceived. Guy de Maupassant’s short story “Auprès d’un mort” [“Near a Dead Man”] (1883) stages Schopenhauer as a character on his deathbed, an event that took place twenty-three years before this fictional retelling.1 Far from narrating the death and burial of the philosopher’s ideas along with his body, the text raises questions of how his legacy will persist, what meaning to make from his ideas, and the perhaps uncanny way in which they live on. Maupassant invites the reader to the scene of the death of the philosopher the better to contemplate the meaning of that death and in what sense we can in fact say that Schopenhauer is dead. The portrayal itself invites questions about genre: are we witnessing a tragedy or a horror story? Will Schopenhauer have a peaceful or painful death? Would a painful death be a recompense for poisonous ideas, or will he be a model for the transition into nothingness that he advocated? By staging the death, Maupassant underscores the extent to which the philosopher’s ideas have direct implications for lived experience as well as the imperative to interpretation that those ideas provide. Indeed, by the 1880s, Schopenhauer’s ideas had become definitively influential to the point of losing their specific association with the philosopher and changing into a more generalized pessimism. Maupassant inscribes that influence in the narrative:

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Qu’on proteste et qu’on se fâche, qu’on s’indigne ou qu’on s’exalte, Schopenhauer a marqué l’humanité du sceau de son dédain et de son désenchantement. […] Et aujourd’hui même, ceux qui l’exècrent semblent porter, malgré eux, en leurs esprits, des parcelles de sa pensée. (728) [Whether one protests and gets angry, grows indignant or exults, Schopenhauer has marked humanity with the seal of his disdain and disenchantment. […] And even today, those who despise him seem to carry in their minds, despite themselves, aspects of his thought.]

Schopenhauer figures as a ghost even before the scene of his death is described; his ideas haunt us and force the kind of debate that Maupassant highlights as well. As he goes on to describe the death scene, then, we read it with the reminder that, in some sense, Schopenhauer has not really “died.” What, then, should be our reaction to this death or non-death? Schopenhauer becomes an overdetermined symbol in this narrative, with his body either standing in for his ideas or remaining distinct from them, and his presence remaining in such a distilled way as to be all the more powerful for having been generalized. Vocabulary related to pessimism as illness is absent from the description just quoted, but is nonetheless suggested by the idea of his enemies carrying elements of Schopenhauer’s thought unbeknownst to them in their mind. The death scene itself is gruesome. In fact, it is less of a death scene than a scene of wondering whether the body is in fact dead: Schopenhauer ne riait plus! Il grimaçait d’une horrible façon, la bouche serrée, les joues creusées profondément. Je balbutiai : « Il n’est pas mort ! » Mais l’odeur épouvantable me montait au nez, me suffoquait. Et je ne remuais plus, le regardant fixement, effaré comme devant une apparition. Alors mon compagnon, ayant pris l’autre bougie, se pencha. Puis il me toucha le bras sans dire un mot. Je suivis son regard, et j’aperçus à terre, sous le fauteuil à côté du lit, tout blanc sur le sombre tapis, ouvert comme pour mordre, le râtelier de Schopenhauer. Le travail de la décomposition, desserrant les mâchoires, l’avait fait jaillir de la bouche. J’ai eu vraiment peur ce jour-là, monsieur. (730–731) [Schopenhauer was no longer laughing! He was grimacing in a horrible way, mouth closed, cheeks profoundly hollowed out. I murmured: “He is not dead!” But the frightful odor was getting to me, suffocating me. And I was no longer moving, looking fixedly at him, frightened as if before a ghost.

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Then my companion, having taken the other candle, bent over. Then he touched my arms without saying a word. I followed his gaze, and I noticed on the ground, under the armchair next to the bed, all white against the dark rug, opened as if to bite, Schopenhauer’s dentures. The work of decomposition, opening his jaws, had made them fall out from his mouth. I was truly afraid that day, Sir.]

To what extent is Schopenhauer the man merged with, or distinct from, his ideas here? Are we to read the scene metaphorically, and if so, how exactly? The text provides few cues along these lines. It seems to encourage allegory by portraying the shift from Schopenhauer’s laughter (a reference, surely, to the humor in his texts) to the suffering unveiled by the grimace. Is Schopenhauer, in his painful death, receiving his just recompense for his perverted ideas, or are we to see the suffering as confirmation of his ideas about death as liberation from the inevitable suffering in human existence? This dead body, in other words, reinvigorates the very questions that the philosopher’s death might otherwise have “buried.” Does portraying Schopenhauer’s end as a kind of horror story serve as an attack or an implicit endorsement of his ideas? The part of him that is ready to bite is not in fact part of him but an artificial extension, once closely fitted to him but now seeming to take on a life of its own. If this is an allegory, its meaning is far from transparent. Is it that a once merely useful object becomes uncanny and terrifying when removed from its context? Are the dentures a stand-in for Schopenhauer’s words, detached from him but still causing (perhaps unjustified) fright? Is the character who is afraid justified in that fear, or is it that he has not properly assimilated Schopenhauer’s lesson on death as liberation from suffering? The narrative breaks off here as the speaker simply gets up and heads back to his lodgings, leaving the narrator and, by extension, the reader to ask questions about what meaning there could be in this account. And in this sense the story mirrors the status of Schopenhauer’s ideas in the later nineteenth century: what is of ultimate importance lies not in the particulars of Schopenhauer’s ideas but in the way he has raised or rephrased important questions about pessimism more broadly that are then worked out in the kinds of debates and discourse I traced in Chap. 3. What Schopenhauer provides is not a dogma or a set of ideas that are simply to be illustrated with fiction but rather a hermeneutic grid, an opening of interpretive

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possibilities via a kind of creative destruction of assumptions of pregiven meaning. The hero of Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel A Rebours, Jean Des Esseintes, explicitly evokes Schopenhauer in laudatory terms that are then reversed by the author in the preface he added to the work approximately twenty years after its first publication, by which point Huysmans had undergone a conversion to Catholicism. At stake in both the novel and the preface are the similarities and differences between the world view of Schopenhauer and of Christianity.2 While both views describe a world of difficult but necessary suffering, Des Esseintes admires the fact that Schopenhauer’s view is unmitigated by the hope of a resolution to the suffering in an afterlife: Il se révoltait contre le vague remède d’une espérance en une autre vie. Schopenhauer était plus exact ; sa doctrine et celle de l’Eglise partaient d’un point de vue commun ; lui aussi se basait sur l’iniquité et sur la turpitude du monde […]. Lui aussi prêchait le néant de l’existence, les avantages de la solitude, avisait l’humanité que quoi qu’elle fît, de quelque côté qu’elle se tournât, elle demeurerait malheureuse […] ; mais il ne vous prônait aucune panacée, ne vous berçait, pour remédier à d’inévitables maux, par aucun leurre. (129) [He rebelled against the vague remedy of a hope in another life. Schopenhauer was more exact; his doctrine and that of the Church had a common point of departure; he too was based in the iniquity and turpitude of the world […]. He too preached the nothingness of existence, the advantages of solitude, advised humanity that whatever it did, no matter where it turned, it would remain unhappy […]; but he recommended no panacea, did not lull you into any trap to remedy your inevitable sufferings.]

The anti-redemptive nature of Schopenhauer’s vision is put forward as the source of its superiority to Christianity: “Ah ! lui seul était dans le vrai ! qu’étaient toutes les pharmacopées évangéliques à côté de ses traités d’hygiène spirituelle ? Il ne prétendait rien guérir, n’offrait aux malades aucune compensation, aucun espoir” [“Ah! He alone had the truth! What were all the evangelical pharmacopeias compared with his treatises of spiritual hygiene? He did not claim to heal anything, offered the sick no compensation, no hope”] (129). Des Esseintes identifies Schopenhauerian resignation as the purview of an elite, “accessible aux riches de l’esprit” [“accessible to the rich in spirit”] but “difficilement saisissable aux pauvres dont la bienfaisante religion calmait plus aisément alors les revendications

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et les colères” [“difficult to understand for the poor whose beneficent religion more easily calmed their claims and their anger”] (130), and he is led back to the temptation of belief at the same time that his body is threatened with illness. If the Christian and Schopenhauerian world views share much in terms of basic presumptions about the misery of existence and the prevalence of suffering, what distinguishes them, as Huysmans writes in his 1903 preface, is the way they do or do not conclude. If Schopenhauer shares many premises with canonical scripture such as Ecclesiastes and the Book of Job, lorsqu’il s’agit de conclure, le philosophe se dérobe. […] Mais les observations de Schopenhauer n’aboutissent à rien […]. L’Eglise, elle, explique les origines et les causes, signale les fins, présente les remèdes ; elle ne se contente pas de vous donner une consultation d’âme, elle vous traite et elle vous guérit, alors que le médicastre allemand, après vous avoir bien démontré que l’affection dont vous souffrez est incurable, vous tourne, en ricanant, le dos. (49) [In terms of concluding, the philosopher shies away. […] But Schopenhauer’s observations do not lead to anything […]. The Church, by contrast, explains origins and causes, indicates ends, presents remedies; it is not satisfied with giving you a spiritual consultation; it treats and heals you, whereas the German quack, after having demonstrated to you that what you suffer from is incurable, turns his back on you and sneers.]

Huysmans now sees Schopenhauer’s refusal to heal his readers from the pain he describes as a weakness rather than a strength, a disadvantage rather than an advantage of his ideas. Huysmans frames this as a question of conclusion or concluding: A distance, ces similitudes et ces dissemblances s’avèrent nettement, mais à cette époque, si je les percevais, je ne m’y attardais point ; le besoin de conclure ne me tentait pas ; la route tracée par Schopenhauer était carrossable et d’aspect varié, je m’y promenais tranquillement, sans désir d’en connaître le bout ; en ce temps-là, je n’avais […] aucune appréhension des dénouements […]. Je m’imaginais que le Pessimisme pouvait être le consolateur des âmes élevées. Quelle bêtise ! (49) [From a distance, these similarities and differences seem apparent, but at that time, if I perceived them, I did not linger over them at all; the need to conclude did not tempt me; the route traced by Schopenhauer was passable and varied; I walked it in tranquility, without wanting to find the end; at that

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time, I had no apprehensions about the way things would go […]. I imagined that Pessimism could be the consoler of superior souls. What stupidity!]

Des Esseintes comes to realize, by the end of the novel, that Schopenhauer’s ideas cannot themselves bring the consolation that they valorize: Ah ! fit-il, dire que tout cela n’est pas un rêve ! dire que je vais rentrer dans la turpide et servile cohue du siècle ! Il appelait à l’aide pour se cicatriser, les consolantes maximes de Schopenhauer […], mais les mots résonnaient, dans son esprit comme des sons privés de sens ; son ennui les désagrégeait, leur ôtait toute signification, toute vertu sédative, toute vigueur effective et douce. Il s’apercevait enfin que les raisonnements du pessimisme étaient impuissants à le soulager, que l’impossible croyance en une vie future serait seule apaisante. Un accès de rage balayait, ainsi qu’un ouragan, ses essais de résignation, ses tentatives d’indifférence. (240) [Ah! he said, to think that all that is not a dream! That I’m going to go back into the turbid and servile throng of the century! He called for help in healing to the consoling maxims of Schopenhauer […], but the words resonated in his mind like sounds deprived of sense; his ennui broke them up and took from them all meaning, all sedative powers, all effective and sweet vigor. He noticed that the reasonings of pessimism were powerless to relieve him, that the impossible belief in a future life is the only thing that would be calming. A fit of rage swept away like a hurricane his attempts at resignation and indifference.]

The novel presents pessimism as in crisis when it comes to meaning, a set of ideas that becomes meaningless at the same time that it loses its pragmatic consolatory value. As we will see, notably in the case of the novels of Edouard Rod, who was influenced by A Rebours,3 it is ultimately the impossibility of the kind of resignation that Schopenhauer advocates that drives the plot of novels written under his influence. Those novels illustrate not the potential peace that comes with renunciation as Schopenhauer describes it at the end of his magnum opus, but rather the perpetual conceptual restlessness that pessimism provokes as a creatively destructive intellectual force. The very resistance to conclusion that made the later Huysmans renounce Schopenhauer in favor of the peace and stability of

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Christianity is what drives the new kinds of plot that writers in this generation embrace. So what would it mean to have a literary work engage with the kinds of questions suggested by the legacy of Schopenhauer’s ideas? How are they put into textual situations in ways that are not simple illustrations of a doctrine but an engagement with those ideas via the thought procedures unique to fiction? To explore this terrain, and to show how engagement with pessimism’s questions can both transform and be transformed by our reading of fiction, I begin with a fascinating novel by Henry Céard, Une belle journée [A Beautiful Day] (1881). The novel sold modestly in its day,4 and has received little critical attention; this could perhaps be on account of critics’ desire to understand it via the lens of its relationship to naturalism. Céard indeed was a member of the Groupe de Médan and a close friend of Emile Zola until a falling out over the Dreyfus Affair.5 His output includes, in addition to Une belle journée, the roman-fleuve Terrains à vendre au bord de la mer [Lands For Sale at the Seashore] (1906), published and unpublished works for theater and lyric poems, and more than a thousand newspaper articles. Those who have written on Une belle journée have attempted to demonstrate how it exemplifies, or takes distance from, key ideas and procedures of naturalism.6 They underscore that the novel’s lack of success, in its own day and perhaps later as well, is likely because of its nearly complete lack of plot, which defied novelistic conventions of the time. I will argue that the interest of Une belle journée lies not in its relationship to naturalism but rather in the ways it enacts the hermeneutic procedures awakened by the pessimism that influenced its author. In this novel, we see the imperative to interpretation enacted not despite but precisely because of the way it strips down plot and characters to their bare minimum. The novel negotiates the consequences of pessimism and draws the reader in to assigning meaning to what is presented. I hope to demonstrate that our reaction to this novel both determines and is determined by our reaction to pessimism. Deciding what to make of the story as it is presented in Une belle journée is inseparable from what one makes of key ideas from Schopenhauer about suffering and boredom, for instance, and in turn the experiences of the characters invite readers to continue to work out the ways in which lived experience confirms or alters the tenets of pessimism.7 The philosophical issues become entirely intertwined with questions of literary style, as a key question raised by the novel is whether one finds it banal, tragic, critical, or humorous. In this it shares something with

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Schopenhauer’s own texts, which are not devoid of humor even in the bleak picture they often paint. Can a text be all these things simultaneously, and how is this achieved via the lack of a definitive authorial voice? William Thomas has called the novel “an innovative psychological study of the banality of life, markedly different from other naturalist novels,” and indicates that it “has had since its publication the unfortunate reputation of being a plotless and therefore dull novel” (328).8 The scenario it presents chimes with what poet and aphorist Henri Cazalis characterized this way in Le Livre du néant (1872): “Le drame de la vie perd chaque jour de sa gravité, de son sérieux, de son importance, de sa beauté scénique, et risque de se transformer en vulgaire et plate comédie bourgeoise d’une irritante et intolérable médiocrité” [“The drama of life loses its gravitas, its seriousness, its importance, its scenic beauty every day, and risks transforming itself into a flat and vulgar bourgeois comedy of an irritating and intolerable mediocrity”] (44). The plot involves the bourgeois Ernestine Duhamain, who agrees to meet the bachelor Trudon for an adulterous escapade. They become trapped by rain at the restaurant where they dined before heading out to the country, only to lose interest in pursuing the affair and return to Paris. Thomas claims that reader reaction is fairly easily delineated; he describes it this way: “Céard’s insistence on [the characters’] banality prevents any feeling of sympathy at the end of the novel; clearly, we are expected to react intellectually, not emotionally to the situation presented” (334). Nothing in the banality of the characters precludes identification or sympathy with them, however. One could equally justifiably claim that the kind of banality on display here is an indictment not of these characters in particular, or of the bourgeoisie in particular, but rather of the potential meaningless of all aspects of lived experience. If that is the case, a reaction of sympathy would be intensified rather than excluded as a possibility. It is here that we begin to see the way in which assumptions generated from pessimism inflect any reading of a text that in its turn stems from some of those same assumptions. We may well react with sympathy, or find the characters funny in the way they navigate the day’s non-activities, or see irony in the text, but the extent to which any or all of these reactions are possibilities depends on the way in which we do or do not see ourselves in situations akin to those of the characters. We may cultivate a sense of ironic distance from them that allows us to laugh or judge them for their banality, but that same sense of irony could easily turn against ourselves in an act of recognition with the characters if we accept the hermeneutic grid

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of pessimism and its insistence that life is, for all, a pendulum swing between boredom and suffering. Céard’s novel enacts this essential situation but purposefully fails to dictate what our reaction to it should be. The forging of a reaction and judgment is left, then, to the reader, who is made to play, as Thomas has indicated, “a role to which he is totally unaccustomed: co-creator of the novel” (337). From the banality of the plot and the destruction of so much of standard novelistic practice, then, comes the potential for new types of meaning and a new role for the reader. Critics have identified several important intertexts in play in Une belle journée, and they are striking by their heterogeneity, ranging from Racinean tragedy to the libertine novel Les liaisons dangereuses.9 And while Céard played an important role in the articulation of naturalist principles via his participation in the Groupe de Médan, it is arguably Gustave Flaubert who provides the most important intertext for the novel.10 Céard admired him (Burns 21), and while he claims to have found most inspiration in L’Education sentimentale, there are many intertextual elements that link Une belle journée to Madame Bovary. William Thomas goes so far as to call it “a deliberate imitation” of that novel (331), outlining close structural parallels in the plot.11 These structural similarities serve to highlight the contrast between the two heroines, as I explore in more detail later. As in Challemel-Lacour’s book, then, the reader is called to judge the characters and the non-action of the book, not in the sense of making moral pronouncements but rather to decide what meaning can be made from the situation as it is presented. In fact, right at the outset of the novel, there is a sentence that sums up all that is to follow: “Madame Duhamain avait eu, elle aussi son aventure: un petit roman très court au souvenir duquel elle souriait ironiquement avec une sorte de pitié aiguë” [“Madame Duhamain too had had her adventure: a short little novel whose memory made her smile ironically with a sort of acute pity”] (6). As readers will come to find out, there is irony lurking even in this description of the “petit roman très court,” which calls attention to the disconnect between the twenty-four-hour span of the action of the novel and the 350 pages of the text that describes it. Readers will also come to find out that the “adventure” is, of course, by most understandings a non-adventure, given that it is planned but never executed because the actors lose interest. Irony, pity, or both? The narrator puts readers on alert from the start in terms of forming a judgment and deciding whether that judgment will align with Madame Duhamain’s self-assessment of her situation.

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From the start, as in the texts of Flaubert, we read observations about the characters that, in the absence of narratorial comment or evaluation, force interpretation that will color our view of the rest of the story: “Mme Duhamain avait des goûts simples, ne se plaignait jamais de la monotonie de son existence, la trouvait naturelle” [“Mme Duhamain had simple tastes, never complained about the monotony of her existence, found it natural”] (8–9). As in the case of Félicité in Flaubert’s “Un Coeur simple,” which appeared four years before Céard’s novel (and where the heroine, like Céard’s, “avait eu, comme une autre, son histoire d’amour” [“had had, like any other woman, her love story”] (Flaubert 21),12 what we think of Madame Duhamain will depend on what we think of those with simple tastes and a monotonous existence with which they are satisfied. While Madame Duhamain lacks the typical qualities of an adventurous heroine, in light of the tragic demise of Emma Bovary one may wonder whether such a refusal of adventure and satisfaction in the small life that one has may be the wiser path. Indeed, a reading of the novel inflected by Schopenhauerian pessimism could even result in the realization that, whether the adultery had been carried through or not by the end, the resulting boredom would in fact be the same.13 The novel thus sets itself up from the very beginning as undecidable in terms of meaning, but positing, on account of the very ordinariness of the characters, questions about how and where one is to find meaning in the ordinary at the fragile boundary between fiction and lived experience. Une belle journée is an enactment of boredom which is itself not boring; it maintains interest precisely because of how it poses implicit questions about the meaning of boredom. In fact, it could be read as an indictment of the monotony of the adultery plot so commonly played out in novels of the time. The narrator spares the reader the details of those all too familiar scenes via a summary that highlights the boredom of reading such details in other novels and of enacting them in life: “D’un ton respectueux et passionné, il lui débita toutes les fadaises de l’amour, toutes les niaiseries des déclarations, épuisa les formules sous lesquelles la phraséologie galante dissimule la brutalité du désir, fit des serments” [“With a respectful and passionate tone, he laid out for her all of love’s platitudes, all the silliness of declarations, exhausted the formulas under which gallant phrasing hides the brutality of desire, swore oaths”] (51–52). The narrative provides similar summaries of the pitiful subjects of their conversation, which are by turns painful to read and comic: “Et avec un peu de niaiseries elle continua, citant les unes après les autres toutes le pièces du mobilier, détaillant

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les patères, les candélabres de la cheminée, et jusqu’aux embrasses des rideaux” [“And she continued with some silly comments, citing one after another all the furniture, detailing the hooks, the candelabras on the fireplace, and even the curtain cords” [139]. Madame Duhamain comes to a brusque realization about the banality of her life: “Une rage violente la saisit. En un instant les écoeurements de sa vie d’honnêteté lui apparurent. Elle eut la vision furieuse et démesurée de la nullité crasse de son mari, de la continuelle platitude de son existence” [“A violent rage seized her. In an instant all of the disgust of her virtuous life appeared to her. She had furious and exaggerated visions of the crass nullity of her husband, of the continual platitude of her existence”] (58–59). Here she strongly resembles Emma Bovary, but of course she will ultimately escape Emma’s fate. Is this because she has realized that pursuing an idealistic dream of a perfect love will take her no farther in canceling the effects of the platitude of existence? Or has she simply denied herself, by the end when she refuses to pursue the affair, the chance of a more exciting life? These questions are crucial to readers’ understanding of the novel and are unanswerable apart from readers’ stance on pessimism. It is clear that she refuses the affair not on account of virtue but because of a mutual loss of interest. One could read this as a coming to lucidity, a step beyond the realization I just quoted about the banality of her life. Indeed, she later comes to realize that pursuing and not pursuing the affair are equivalent options: Assurément [son mari] n’était pas aussi mal élevé que Trudon, mais il ne lui apparut pas comme beaucoup plus spirituel. Ainsi de quelque côté qu’elle se tournât, le mariage ou l’adultère ouvraient devant elle un égal horizon de sottise, et l’adultère avait, de plus, l’inconvénient de compromettre et de déconsidérer. […] Comme ces malades accablés qui renoncent à se retourner dans leur lit parce que le changement de position ne leur procure qu’un changement de douleur, elle se résigna. Banalité pour banalité, elle préférait la platitude légale. (153) [Assuredly [her husband] was not as uncouth as Trudon, he did not appear to her as being more sociable. Thus no matter which way she turned, marriage or adultery opened before her an equal horizon of stupidity, and adultery had, beyond that, the disadvantage of compromising and discrediting her. […] Like those sick people who refuse to go back to their beds because the change in position does not bring about any chance in pain, she resigned herself. Banality for banality, she preferred legal platitude.]

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Passages such as this one allow us to see that, far from being a mere illustration of pessimist ideas, the novel puts them in play and calls on the reader to observe the ways in which they play out. In that sense, this novel allows us to read Schopenhauer just as much as Schopenhauer allows us to read the novel.14 The reader’s view on whether it is helpful, tragic, or both to see calm resignation as the appropriate reaction to the equivalent banality of all options will entirely determine the way he or she reads this novel and whether Madame Duhamain is wise or tragically unwilling to pursue the possibility of improvement. Madame Duhamain’s voluntary return to that banality, at a higher plane of realization of the equality of all other options and their inability to cancel a sense of futility, is, for the pessimist, an affirmation of the tragic nature of existence that at the same time allows one to avoid a catastrophic end such as the one that awaited Emma Bovary. This is not to say that Madame Duhamain consciously works through these questions; as she is presented, she has little reflective consciousness and, unlike Emma, is neither a reader of books nor an author of her life. But in the act of “co-creation” in which readers of this novel participate, she provides the possibility of emplotting her fate differently than a simple critique of the banality of married bourgeois existence. The ironic distance that readers take from Madame Duhamain paradoxically brings us closer to her as we are compelled to reflect on boredom and the potential inability of new experiences to serve as a corrective to it. The question becomes one of how a reflective consciousness should react to this realization. The uneasy but also perhaps pleasant mix of tragedy and humor that emerges from this novel, which is similar to the effect of Schopenhauer’s texts themselves, allows us at least the respite of the ironic self-distancing of laughter in the face of lucidity.15 What seems like the end of the plot comes in fact in the middle of the novel: “Maintenant rien de ce qu’elle avait désiré ne lui paraissait plus désirable. Le désenchantement venait avec chacune des paroles de Trudon. Les récits qu’il faisait souillaient l’espérance, anéantissaient l’idéal” [“Now nothing that she had desired seemed desirable to her anymore. Disenchantment came with each word from Trudon. The stories he told sullied hope and annihilated the ideal”] (160). As readers traveling with these characters, we risk the same reaction in terms of our expectations of the novel’s plot. And here it becomes visible the extent to which lived plots and fictional plots are structured similarly: are we as readers prepared to risk disappointment in a plot that continues for another two hundred pages with potentially no further action? Our reaction in the face of this

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plotless narrative is inextricably bound to our expectations about it. By adjusting those expectations so that we continue reading while abandoning the idea that some beautifully conceived and highly satisfying action will ensue, we are able better to see the plot that is in fact offered to us in those pages and take a different, more lucid, kind of pleasure from watching that action unfurl. Resignation, in other words, only need be tragic if it is emplotted over and against an expectation of adventure. This novel becomes a sort of test case for pessimism by implicitly posing the question of whether there is any pleasure to be had from it. Adjusting expectations by reading it through the interpretive grid of Schopenhauer’s own “plot” can potentially produce narrative pleasure rather than canceling it, which is precisely the kind of creative destruction that I have been arguing pessimism accomplishes. And indeed the novel plays with expectations, providing absurdly comic moments such as a description of a pair of slippers depicting Alsace-­ Lorraine (198–199) in close proximity to other passages that evoke tragedy more than comedy, as we witness a forlorn Madame Duhamain still trapped at the restaurant table with Trudon as they continue to await the end of the rainstorm: Mme Duhamain éprouva dans son cœur une tristesse illimitée : le jour, en s’en allant, ajoutait à son abandon, lui amenait un surcroît d’ennui si grand que sa volonté même en demeurait anéantie. Sans force pour rester et pour s’échapper, sans courage, elle demeura là ; abîmée, sur une chaise, dans l’obscurité grandissante. (204) [Madame Duhamain felt an unlimited sadness in her heart. When the day went away, it added to her abandonment and brought her an excess of ennui so large that her very will remained annihilated from it. Without the strength to remain and to escape, without courage, she stayed there; in an abyss, on a chair, in the growing darkness.]

As readers, we are privileged observers of the true reality of the scene, and it is through Madame Duhamain’s eyes that we become aware of the singularity, and thus of the interest, of this particular plot. For the boredom and the relinquishing of desire constitutes the uniqueness of the plot we are reading. The story would be banal if it had played out as the consummation of an adulterous affair. The proprietor of the restaurant is unfazed by the couple, since “ce n’était pas la première fois que la pluie enfermait deux amoureux, toute la journée, dans son établissement” [“this was not

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the first time that the rain was closing in lovers for the whole day in his establishment”] (211). Ten pages later, Madame Duhamain realizes that everyone around them has the false impression that they are lovers, and the readers are thus initiated into the intimacy of the non-action of the novel, which then becomes the source of interest in terms of how the non-­ action will play out. As the enforced enclosure of the couple continues, the comedy heightens, so that what was initially a scene of boredom becomes a comic microcosm where the couple’s plight is raised by their dialogue to a sort of absurd metaphysical pronouncement: –Décidément ce fiacre n’arriverait donc pas. –Rien n’arrive, laissa tomber Trudon désespéré. (260) [–Decidedly, this carriage will never arrive. –Nothing arrives, a despairing Trudon let slip.]

What the narrator had labeled a few pages earlier “le ridicule de leur situation” [“the ridiculousness of their situation”] (254) becomes evident in their words and in the misreading of the situation by those around them. We as readers can take pleasure in the absurd comedy even in the face of the increasing exasperation of the characters, and, by imaginative substitution, we may even find ourselves able to sympathize with them. This too is mirrored in Madame Duhamain’s own reaction to her situation and her companion as she realizes that nothing about this situation will last forever: Par cela même qu’elle allait finir, cette désillusionnante journée prenait soudainement pour elle un intérêt imprévu. […] Elle se sentait maintenant pour Trudon elle ne savait quelle inerte sympathie. Elle ne souhaitait plus qu’il s’en allât. Certes, elle ne l’aimait pas, elle persistait à le trouver sot, stupide, insupportable, l’idée qu’elle aurait pu devenir sa maitresse lui semblait exorbitante ; pourtant, la présence de cet être indifférent ne laissait pas de la satisfaire, et elle en jouissait, malgré elle. (300–301) [By the very fact that it was going to end, this disillusioning day suddenly took on an unforeseen interest for her. […] She now felt for Trudon she knew not what inert sympathy. She no longer wanted him to go. Certainly, she did not love him, she continued to find him foolish, stupid, intolerable, and the idea that she could have become his mistress seemed exorbitant to her; and yet, the presence of this indifferent being still satisfied her, and she took pleasure in it, despite herself.]

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This is more than a mere tragic resignation to fate. By a creative reimagining of the situation from within the bounds of lucidity, Madame Duhamain seems to escape the tragic fate of Emma Bovary. C.S. Burns reads Ernestine Duhamain as having more in common with Frédéric Moreau of L’Education sentimentale than with Emma Bovary: Son sort [Mme Duhamain] est moins tragique peut-être que celui d’Emma Bovary, mais, comme Frédéric Moreau, elle se trouve condamnée à vivre avec le fantôme de son idéal mort. Rêveuse, romantique même, insatisfaite autant qu’Emma, Ernestine […] garde un sens commun très pratique, naturel à sa classe, si l’on veut, mais qui prend la valeur d’une philosophie de la vie et qui lui permet de survivre. […] L’apparente lâcheté de Frédéric, comme celle d’Ernestine, comprend un élément d’héroïsme inconscient et stoïque qui ne manque pas de grandeur. (112) [Her [Madame Duhamain’s] fate is perhaps less tragic than Emma Bovary’s, but, like Frédéric Moreau, she finds herself condemned to live with the ghost of dead ideal. A dreamer, a romantic even, as unsatisfied as Emma, Ernestine […] retains a very practical common sense, natural to her class, if you wish, but which takes on the worth of a philosophy of life and which allows her to survive. […] Frédéric’s apparent cowardice, like Ernestine’s, includes an element of unconscious and stoic heroism that is not lacking in grandeur.]

Returning to Jules de Gaultier’s terms, we could say that she participates in that universal capacity to imagine her life otherwise, but, unlike Emma, this reconception is a reinterpretation of the given facts of her situation rather than a fanciful scenario that serves only to reinforce the divide between imagined fantasy and reality.16 On Madame Duhamain’s reinterpretation, there is pleasure to be had, unexpectedly, even from within the boredom: L’ennui dont elle croyait souffrir n’était sans doute point si considérable et rien ne le différençiait du bonheur qu’une plus longue accoutumance. L’imagination, toujours, aggravait les tristesses naturelles et puisque les réalités s’imposaient, sans cesse moindres que le rêve, le mieux consistait à s’étendre dans une platitude définitive. […] C’était le calme assuré, d’abord, et peut-être que de la continuité même naîtrait à la fin une jouissance. La tranquillité même de sa chambre à coucher la déterminait, et l’atmosphère recueillie qui flottait autour d’elle semblait l’inviter au renoncement. […] Les laideurs mêmes de son mobilier lui paraissaient réconfortantes. (339–340)

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[The ennui from which she thought she suffered was no doubt not at all so considerable and nothing differentiated it from happiness except a longer habit. Imagination always aggravated natural sadness and since realities imposed themselves, which were incessantly less than dreams, the best consisted in stretching oneself out in a definitive platitude. […] It was assured calm, first, and then perhaps a pleasure would be born from that very continuity. The very tranquility of her bedroom determined her, and the contemplative atmosphere that floated around her seemed to invite her to renunciation. […] The very ugliness of her furniture seemed comforting to her.]

What we have in this passage can only be described as a plot twist in this supposedly plotless novel. Resignation, at this moment, brings not abandonment of pleasure but rather a new kind of pleasure, stemming from continuity rather than occurring despite it. Once again, we are brought back to the question of the extent to which fiction represents real possibilities in lived experience. The novel at least posits the possibility that such pleasure from resignation is possible. As co-creators of the novel, it is up to readers to fill in the gaps about whether we are to take such a possibility as part of the fiction, as wildly implausible as any of Emma Bovary’s dreams had been. Our stance on that will determine our reading of the novel, as it determines whether Madame Duhamain is victim of a life without possibilities and deluded in thinking that there is pleasure to be had from accepting the fact,17 or whether the novel is the story of the discovery of the key to pleasure by an active reimagination of the circumstances we are given through a lucid realization of the ultimate fruitlessness of seeking pleasure as it is more typically understood. Such a reading would be in line with Céard’s reading of Schopenhauer. As Ronald Frazee indicates: Par une profonde observation le philosophe arrive à la théorie que bien qu’il soit au-dessus de la puissance de nos facultés de contrôler ces lois inconnues qui dominent nos actes et notre volonté, il nous est possible, par la reconnaissance de notre néant, […] d’extraire la plus grande somme de bonheur de cette misérable vie. […] Schopenhauer ne se désespère ni ne se moque, il organise. En repoussant le principe d’une aide extérieure, en étant perpétuellement en garde contre lui-même, l’homme trouve en sa propre intelligence la possibilité d’un refuge et d’une consolation. Cette doctrine […] « lui apprend que lui seul, tous les jours, est l’artisan responsable devant lui du bonheur ou des malheurs de sa vie, et que son manque de savoir, l’obscurité

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de sa connaissance de lui-même constitue pour sa personne un danger immédiat, permanent. » (78) [By a profound observation the philosopher arrives at the theory that even though it is above the power of our faculties to control these unknown laws that dominate our acts and our will, it is possible for us, by the recognition of our nothingness […] to extract the greatest sum of happiness from this miserable life. Schopenhauer neither despairs nor mocks; he organizes. By rejecting the principle of exterior aid, by being perpetually on guard against himself, man finds in his own intelligence the possibility of refuge and consolation. This doctrine […] “teaches him that only he, every day, is the artisan responsible for the happiness or the miseries of his life, and that his lack of knowledge, the obscurity of his knowledge of himself constitutes for his person an immediate and permanent danger.”]

Such a reading casts serious doubt on an interpretation of Une belle journée that would see it as cynical or despairing, even if it is clear that it paints a bleak portrait of disappointment. If readers are capable of reading Une belle journée only as boring or tragic, perhaps this represents a lack of imagination on their part, precisely the fault that they would presumably find with Madame Duhamain. The novel’s interpretive horizons are wider than they seem at first glance, and certainly wider than that of a mere psychological portrait, which William Thomas suggests is the novel’s sole contribution to its reader: “At the end of the process the reader’s sole reward is the understanding of two characters. There is no reassuring vision of a world which is good, nor any suggestion that, if it is not good, it can be made better. Céard presents, on the contrary, a totally pessimistic view” (338). All depends here, as I hope to have made clear, on what we mean by a “totally pessimistic view.” The novel, I would argue, does present such a view, but in a way quite different from what Thomas seems to understand by the term. It is pessimism that raises questions about what to make of the bleak view that the novel presents, that does not leave us concluding only that the novel paints an unreassuring portrait of an unimprovable world. To claim as much is to foreclose the imaginative possibilities that pessimism offers. This is not to say that Une belle journée is an optimistic novel or that an optimistic reading is called for. On the contrary, the novel illustrates the imaginative potential that lies not beyond but rather within pessimism. It opens interpretive possibilities in a way that does not preclude cynicism or despair but, at the same time, does not hesitate to bring those possibilities into the interpretive conversation. We need tools from the basic tenets of

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Schopenhauer’s pessimism to make sense of this novel beyond seeing it as a mere critique of bourgeois banality, but those tools help us pose questions rather than providing answers. If both The World as Will and Une belle journée end in resignation, it becomes incumbent upon the reader to make meaning from that resignation, to emplot it beyond the confines of the particular narrative by the act of co-creation. If, as William Thomas claims, “Emma [Bovary] possesses the ability to create dramas which are carefully constructed and which have some staying power [while] Mme Duhamain and Trudon almost totally lack this ability” (334), the result is that the role of drama creation, or what I have called emplotment, is left to the reader, with perhaps less disastrous results than Emma had in Madame Bovary. In that sense, the experience of the fictional characters and of the readers becomes more blurred than is usually permitted in literary studies, but this dynamic relationship between plotted lived experience and plotted elements of a fictional narrative is precisely the way pessimism as I have been understanding it operates. Pessimism at its best provides for a grid for interpretation and an imperative to it, reflecting a need to make sense out of a potentially meaningless existence and therefore leaving open interpretive possibilities while maintaining as few illusions as possible about their tenuousness. Novelists at the close of the nineteenth century engage the heritage of both idealism and pessimism in their works; the novel of interiority features psychological action that bears an often uncomfortable relationship to the rest of lived experience. Coming to terms with some of the broader lines of Schopenhauer’s thought involves dealing with the consequences of the fact that, even if non-existence is established as the preferable option, it necessarily remains an unattainable goal for the conscious subject. Refuge in idealism broadly conceived or in the withdrawal into estheticism are commonly proposed solutions, but just as often, novelists portray the impossibility of sustaining such withdrawals. If my view of pessimism is correct, however, it provides an alternative to idealism and estheticism by continuing the dialogue about what it would mean to live the consequences of its own premises. Failure to continue the dialogue results in something like anti-intellectualism or dogmatism, an arrival point at which there can be no continuation of the “plot.”18 Collectively, novelists at the fin-de-siècle who stage characters coming to grips with pessimism provide a portrait of how wrestling with these questions plays itself out; they reveal a sometimes fragile pessimism that is never beyond

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the risk of degenerating into arguably less desirable options, such as nihilism, despair, or an abandonment of the search for meaning. Author, critic, and cofounder of the Revue wagnérienne, Teodor de Wyzewa provides, in his novel Valbert (1893), an example of a hero seeking to integrate ideas inspired by idealism, estheticism, and pessimism into a viable way of life that would not require a divorce between action in the world and reflection on that action. As Valérie Michelet Jacquod has noted, Valbert plays out “l’effort désespéré de qui cherche à sortir de lui-­même pour aimer et agir” [“the desperate effort of the one who seeks to go outside oneself to love and act”] (10). His character is formed by a loose conglomeration of ideas that could be said to be “in the air” at the time: “la perspective chrétienne de Wyzewa ne serait alors qu’une variante du nationalisme barrésien, du sensualisme gidien, de la tentation anarchiste de Gourmont, ou de toute autre forme de dépassement possible de l’impasse intellectuelle” [“Wyzewa’s Christian perspective would thus be only a variant of Barrès’ nationalism, of Gide’s sensualism, of Gourmont’s anarchist temptation, or any other form of possible overtaking of intellectual impasse.” (10). The novel is semi-autobiographical in that Valbert shares some of his intellectual development with Wyzewa, who trades, as Jacquot puts it, “la vacillante métaphysique de Schopenhauer contre un mysticisme d’obédience chrétienne, puis spirituelle ensuite” [“Schopenhauer’s vacillating metaphysics against a mysticism of Christian, then spiritual, obedience”] (23). To end up in mysticism is, however, to put an end to precisely the kind of dialogue via which pessimism can enable action in the world. Wyzewa’s novel demonstrates the instability and perhaps even the non-viability of a mystical stance as a solution to the problems first posed by pessimism. In that sense, the literature that puts these intellectual impasses into question remains more open-ended and less willing to bring the threads of the action together by the end of the work than many of the nonfiction works we examined in Chap. 3. Those seeking a strong drive toward a definitive closing action are sure to be disappointed by the way in which these novels conclude, as we have already seen in the case of Une belle journée.  Wyzewa knew Schopenhauer’s works in the abridged excerpts in which they appeared at first in France (Jacquod 48), and the philosopher is among those not explicitly named but traces of whose ideas are present throughout Valbert.19 At the outset of the novel, the hero attempts to reckon with idealism very broadly conceived; it manifests itself in a kind of idealized boyhood love for his friend René: “René m’apparaissait comme

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l’incarnation de la sagesse, de la richesse, de l’élégance : de la beauté aussi, mais d’une beauté si pure ; si dégagée de toute matière, que j’eusse craint de la profaner en y attachant un désir” [“René appeared to me as the incarnation of wisdom, richness, elegance: of beauty too, but such a pure beauty, so detached from all matter that I would have feared profaning it by attaching a desire to it”] (97). The fall from such youthful idealism is inevitable, and the dilemma for the hero becomes one of how to avoid absolute paralysis of action and the temptation of solipsism and withdrawal, engendered in his creation of an imaginary Amie, multiple and changeable according to Valbert’s imagination. This idealized fictional person stands in sharp relief to the ridiculous relations he maintains with actual women, with one of whom he develops a daily life whose character is summed up by the pet names she creates for him, names such as “Papsack” at first and then ones that involve substituting the names of common objects around them for terms of endearment: “ma chère table” [“my dear table”] or “mon cher cahier de musique” [“my dear music book”] (193). “Et je me désespérais, furieux contre moi-même, contre elle, contre le monde entier. Voilà ce que j’avais gagné à vouloir pratiquer la pitié, cette haute vertu dont j’avais fait le but de ma vie, à défaut de l’amour” [“And I despaired, furious with myself, with her, with the entire world. There’s what I gained by wanting to practice pity, that high virtue that I had made my life’s goal, since love was missing”] (194). It is through his encounter with the music of Richard Wagner that Valbert comes to see a way out of the impasse of the disappointment that his rejection of idealism brings, but the Wagnerian solution at which he arrives cancels not only solipsism but also thought. It attempts to resolve intellectual impasse by rejecting the intellectual altogether: “Oui, je savais maintenant par quelle grâce s’acquiert le seul vrai bonheur dans l’amour. Il n’est donné qu’à ceux qui dédaignent de penser et qui renoncent à eux-­ mêmes, pour trouver toute science dans la compassion” [“Yes, I knew now by which grace the only true happiness in love is acquired. It is given only to those who disdain thinking and who renounce themselves, in order to find all knowledge in compassion”] (205). As we have seen, however, mere abdication of the faculty of thinking is not a viable solution to the problems posed by pessimism specifically and idealism more broadly. If pessimism does give us grounds for nurturing compassion, it is on account of, and not despite, the intellectual difficulties it raises. Mysticism and estheticism share the same pitfalls in that, first of all, neither one is an infinitely prolongable state. Even Schopenhauer granted, when advocating

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music as providing a moment of detachment from the Will, that such detachment is only temporary. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, neither mysticism nor estheticism is directly communicable in words. Describing or conceptualizing such a state after the fact necessarily involves translations, approximations, and only partially successful attempts to communicate the experience. And when we attempt to do so, we are inevitably brought back into precisely the questions of interpretation that pessimism elicited to begin with. Far from advocating such a theory of mystical anti-intellectualism and a Tolstoy-like movement of compassion, the novel calls into question the viability of its hero’s ideas, notably by the end via an illness that prevents Valbert from developing his ideas on account of coughing fits: Quel univers de tendre bonheur j’aperçois devant moi ! Ah ! combien j’ai été stupide, injuste, cruel envers la vie ! L’amour, le bonheur, la vie… » Valbert ne put achever, car de nouveau son exaltation amena un terrible accès de toux. Comment il a pu survivre à ce dernier accès, je ne puis me l’expliquer. (222) [What a universe of tender happiness I notice before me! Ah! how stupid, unjust, and cruel I was toward life! Love, happiness, life…” Valbert was not able to finish, for once again his exaltation brought on a terrible coughing fit. How he was able to survive this last fit, I cannot explain.]

Even if he had been physically able to finish, it is not clear what else he could have added. Already his discourse is reduced to a series of nouns, a mere renunciation of his former position in favor of one that, from what he says here, seems ill suited for further elaboration. To reject pessimism is to put an end to the dialogue about the questions that it poses, subsuming them in a supposedly self-evident affirmation of life and love that leaves the questions that pessimism had raised unresolved. For Wyzewa, Wagner had surpassed Schopenhauerian pessimism by precisely such a commitment to optimism. In an 1885 article, “Le Pessimisme de Richard Wagner,” in La Revue Wagnérienne, Wyzewa concludes that: Le Maître [Wagner], partant de Schopenhauer, s’élève, par la réflexion bénie, à un optimisme philosophique radieux. […] Il nous a donné le moyen de réaliser le plus grand bonheur, par la Compassion, si nous conservons l’Apparence actuelle ; et, si nous lui renonçons, par l’Apparence supérieure de la Production artistique. (170)

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[The Master [Wagner], with Schopenhauer as point of departure, elevates himself, by blessed reflection, to a radiant philosophical optimism. […] He has given us the ability to produce the greatest happiness, by Compassion, if we conserve the current Appearance, and if we renounce it, by the superior Appearance of Artistic Production.]

This nonfictional account seems more like fiction in its desire to provide tidy conclusions to the situation it has sketched. The novel, by contrast, throws doubt on the possibility of such simple affirmations. In the final scene of the novel, even musical release is shown to be impossible, as the novel ends tragicomically with Valbert coughing loudly through a performance of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Et, une grosse dame assise près de moi déclara presque haut que, lorsqu’on était malade à ce point, c’était de religion qu’il fallait s’occuper, et non point de musique ni des Maîtres Chanteurs. J’avoue que cette représentation, troublée ainsi d’épisodes divers, ne m’apporta pas tout le contentement que j’en avais espéré. (223) [And, a fat lady sitting next to me declared nearly aloud that, when one is that sick, one should deal with religion and not at all with music or Die Meistersinger. I admit that this performance, thus interrupted by various episodes, did not bring me all the contentment that I had hoped.]

Contrary to the hero’s own coming to rest in what seem to be fairly vacuous ideas, the novel itself refuses to provide an unproblematic resolution to the conflict of ideas it has staged. Fiction, intriguingly, is here the place where illusions are shown to be illusions, as opposed to being the space where illusions are presented as real. Perhaps Wagner is not what Valbert needs after all; perhaps the Wagnerian solution to the problems posed by pessimism is simply not viable, or perhaps the dialogue about those solutions simply needs to continue rather than evaporating into a quasi-­ mystical (verbal or musical) evocation of love and happiness. The suffering body wakes the mind from a potentially dogmatic slumber here, and invites us to view illness, once again, as health. Critical reception of the novel plays out the puzzlement that a character such as Valbert provoked in readers. Georges Pellissier, in an 1893 review, indicates that the first several chapters show Valbert to be “un maniaque dangereux” [“a dangerous maniac”] who becomes less dangerous by the end but “ne cesse pas tout à fait d’être maniaque” [“does not entirely cease being a maniac”] (qtd in Wyzewa 246). Another critic, Bernard

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Lazare, wrote in 1895 that the novel’s point of view is that of “un tolstoïsant, mais un tolstoïsant à la fois inquiet et sceptique paraissant ne croire qu’à demi aux conseils qu’il donne et que, tout le premier, il aimerait à suivre” [“a Tolstoy-inflected writer, but one who is at once worried and skeptical, seeming to believe only halfway in the advice he gives and which he would like to be the first to follow”] (quoted in Wyzewa 247). Lazare takes Wyzewa to task for the point of the view that the novel seems to advance about knowledge as the source of unhappiness: “il est excessif d’en rendre responsables la science et le savoir, de dénoncer la malignité de l’esprit et le danger de l’intelligence” [“it is excessive to make science and knowledge responsible, to denounce the malignancy of mind and the danger of intelligence”] (247–248). Such a perspective on the novel may make it out to be more of a roman à thèse than it actually is, given the doubts that the final scene throws on the conclusions the hero has reached by the end. In that sense, identifying Valbert’s perspective as a dangerous dead end is itself a continuation of the conversation about pessimism and reinforces the mutual interdependence of fictional and nonfictional discourses about it in this period. Like Wyzewa, the Swiss-born novelist Edouard Rod features characters, especially in his early novels La Course à la mort [The Race to Death] (1885) and Le Sens de la vie [The Sense of Life] (1889), whose attempts to come to terms with, and draw appropriate conclusions for living from, pessimism form the main action of the novels.20 As in the case of Céard, these novels eschew systematization of ideas in favor of exploring what Sandrine Schiano-Bennis has called “coins de pensée” [“corners of thought”] or “fragments d’idéologie” [“fragments of ideology”] (184). Here we see the cross-fertilization of philosophy and literature, where ideas put into action become the drivers of new approaches to narrative plots, while the characters’ experimentation with ideas in lived situation provides a testing ground for notions first developed in philosophical reflections. It is not to the detriment but to the advantage of these kinds of novels that they do not adopt a philosophical system wholesale; they encourage new avenues of interpretation for the ideas of philosophers such as Schopenhauer and question the extent to which his epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics must be conceived as a whole and the extent to which one or more aspects of his system can be said fruitfully to take on a life of its own.21 Rod himself protests, in the preface to the fourth edition of La Course à la mort, against seeing the novel as “une sorte de catéchisme pessimiste, tiré de la philosophie de Schopenhauer” [“a sort of

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pessimist catechism, drawn from the philosophy of Schopenhauer”], and dismisses that idea as both too simplistic and as resulting from an unfounded confusion of the author and his created character (Course i– ii).22 This leaves the reader to puzzle out exactly what is the function of the character’s abstract reflections in the second part of the book especially. Rod asks that the reader not take those reflections “pour l’expression de ma conception de la vie” [“for the expression of my conception of life”] (iv), and indicates that they appear “parce que je les ai crues nécessaires à déterminer la physionomie complète de mon personnage, dont j’ai voulu montrer le mécanisme intellectuel comme le mécanisme sentimental” [“because I thought them necessary for determining the complete physiognomy of my character, whose intellectual and emotional mechanisms I wanted to show”] (iv).23 At the same time, he recognizes that his narrative pushes the boundaries of what might passably be called a novel: “je ne sais jusqu’à quel point La Course à la mort peut rentrer dans les genre « roman », et, si j’avais trouvé un autre terme pour la désigner, je n’aurais point hésité à l’employer” [“I don’t know to what extent La Course à la mort can be considered a “novel,” and, if I had found another term to use for it, I would not have hesitated to use it”] (iv). What we have, then, is a novel for lack of a better term, and this generic ambiguity highlights the way the text straddles boundaries between literature and philosophy in a way that his era did not yet know how to name but was conscious of creating. Curiously, Rod responds to critics of pessimism (whom he accuses of resembling a doctor who, rather than finding a remedy, simply tells the patient repeatedly “« Pourquoi donc ne vous portez-vous pas bien ?… Voyez-moi : je vais, je viens, je mange de tout : vous n’avez qu’à en faire autant ! »” [“Why aren’t you doing well? Look at me: I come, I go, I eat everything: all you have to do is imitate me”] [v]) by indicating a sharp separation between intellectual and practical life: Ainsi, tout pessimisme serait un ferment de corruption, et nos décevantes études, parce qu’elles ne montrent pas l’homme victorieux et satisfait, parce qu’elles découvrent ses plaies morales, parce qu’elles analysent ses faiblesses et ses impuissances, énerveraient la jeunesse et l’empêcheraient de se former pour la lutte de l’existence. –Mais, répondrai-je à ces moralistes, la vie ­intellectuelle est tout à fait séparée de la vie pratique. Chacun n’a qu’à s’examiner un peu pour voir la différence qu’il y a entre ce qu’il pense et ce qu’il fait. Schopenhauer, on le sait, vivait exactement comme tout le monde. (vi)

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[Thus, all pessimism would be a ferment of corruption, and our disappointing studies, because they do not show man victorious and satisfied, because they uncover his moral wounds, because they analyze his weaknesses and incapacities, would annoy the youth and prevent them from shaping themselves for the struggle of existence. –But, I answered these moralists, intellectual life is completely separate from practical life. Everyone has only to examine himself a bit to see the difference there is between what he thinks and what he does. We know that Schopenhauer lived exactly like everyone else.]

Such a claim seems odd as a commentary on a text that stages the lived life of a character and by its very nature invites speculation on the relationship between ideas and practical life. If ideas have no impact on the way one lives one’s life, it would seem a sterile exercise to engage in thought. This preface, like that of Challemel-Lacour’s work on pessimism, invites judgment not only on pessimism but on the very claims it makes about what kind of text we are about to read. We join the hero in his reflections eager to know whether those thoughts will turn out to have made no difference at all in his lived reality, and, if so or if not, what difference that knowledge might make in our own. Rod’s novel begins, in a sense, where Schopenhauer’s text ends, in resignation. In that sense, as it explores what it would mean for lived experience to draw the consequences implied by Schopenhauer’s philosophy, it asks us to consider what it would look like to live in the face of resignation, and in fact pessimism is put on trial right from the start by this opening move, since a frequent criticism of pessimism has been that it is a dead end, that it discourages its adherents from any sort of action and produces resigned lethargy. This does seem to be the hero’s situation at the start: “J’ai commencé de grands ouvrages qui sont restés inachevés sans que je le regrette ; un temps, j’ai rêvé les luttes de la politique, et j’y ai renoncé par une sorte de fatigue anticipée, […] avant d’avoir rien essayé” [“I began great works that remained unfinished without my regretting it ; once, I dreamed of political struggles, and I renounced them by a sort of advance fatigue, […] before having tried anything”] (2–3). The plot as it announces itself here, then, is less about a series of actions than about the continuation of the Schopenhauerian “plot” of resignation and whether it can function as a springboard for effective living, and, at the same time, as a plot for the novel we are beginning to read. It is the continuation of the narration, the need on the part of the hero to give expression to his very

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resignation and lethargy, that both moves the novel forward and serves as a corrective to that resignation itself, saving it from becoming despair: Je demeure épuisé, impuissant, incertain, dégoûté de tout ce que j’ai, de tout ce que je n’ai pas, de tout ce que je voudrais avoir. J’ai le sentiment de cette faiblesse, je m’en afflige, et, à la minute précise où la peine que me cause mon étrange état touche presque au désespoir, elle s’affaiblit d’elle-­ même devant le besoin tyrannique qui me vient de l’expliquer. (5–6) [I remain exhausted, impotent, uncertain, disgusted with everything I have, everything I don’t have, everything I would like to have. I have the feeling of this weakness, I am afflicted by it, and at the very minute when the pain that my strange state causes me almost touches on despair, it weakens on its own before the tyrannical need to explain myself that comes to me.]

The need to assign a meaning, an explanation, to this feeling is what prevents it from becoming despair. This is, as I have been arguing, a key feature of modern pessimism: the extent to which, paradoxically, resignation cannot simply become quietism but rather impels further comment, further dialogue, posing questions rather than providing answers, and in this way it staves off despair. Even so, the subject given to Schopenhauerian resignation must at the same time contend with the fact that non-existence is preferable to existence, a situation that also leads paradoxically to the proliferation of discourse about how what would be preferable would be for that discourse to cease. The narrator provides what often seems like a running commentary of what it would be like to attempt to live, or be forced despite oneself to live, in resignation: “Le temps, le monde, l’espace n’existaient plus : et de ce chaos montait pourtant comme un murmure, et c’étaient les voix des choses disparues qui célébraient l’ineffable béatitude de ne plus exister…” [“Time, the world, space no longer exist: and from this chaos something like a murmur rose up, however, and this was the voices of vanished things that celebrated the ineffable beatitude of no longer existing”] (94). The danger is that both the desire for nothingness and the desire to bring intellectual or creative projects to fruition both become impossible: La vanité de mes ambitions m’est démontrée ; je perçois enfin mes impuissances. D’abord, c’est ma pensée qui se meut dans le vide : elle ne repose sur rien et n’a pas d’ailes ; elle manque également de courage […] pour se perdre dans le rêve. […] D’ailleurs, à quoi bon parler, et que dire ? […] L’art seul,

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puisqu’il a sur les autres manifestations de l’esprit humain l’avantage d’être franchement inutile, l’art seul est digne de quelque intérêt ; mais il torture ceux qui le cultivent par les doutes les plus douloureux […] ! (101–103) [The vanity of my ambitions is demonstrated to me; I perceive my impotence at last. First, it’s my thought that moves in the void: it rests on nothing and has no wings; it also lacks the courage […] to lose itself in dreams. […] Besides, what good is it to speak, and what is there to say? […] Only art, since it has the advantage over other manifestations of the human spirit of being frankly useless, only art is worthy of some interest; but it tortures those who cultivate it by the most painful doubts […] !]

The character’s monologue presents Schopenhauer’s ideas as a kind of psychological drama, an approach that, as I have attempted to demonstrate, is present in Schopenhauer’s own writings. What Rod’s novel dramatizes is an attempt to draw all the consequences of resignation in full knowledge of the way those consequences resist those who would attempt them. The result is the creative destruction that thought brings, evident in the attempt in the passage just quoted to find a resolution to the dilemma in art, only to recognize that art inspires not calm or quietude but doubt, which in turn brings us back to the dialogue of thought and the continued attempt at something like resignation. This occurs in full recognition of the possibility that the pursuit of resignation could thus very well lead to its opposite, a fact that forces us to consider the consequences of the impossibility of resignation even as logic would still affirm it as the appropriate aim. The narrator’s thought about resignation thus begins to resemble a drama that reaches its ultimate resolution in the triumph of reason and the end of the human race: Oui, quand la sensibilité sera morte tuée par son excès même ; quand les exigences de la vie, à force d’être multipliées, nous opprimeront comme autant de tyranniques habitudes ; quand il n’y aura plus pour rapprocher les sexes que le banal aiguillon de la chair, –pourquoi les hommes et les femmes ne renonceraient-ils pas, d’un accord commun, à cet éclair de plaisir qui, sans même satisfaire leur désir trop complexe et trop difficile, précipite dans le gouffre de l’être un malheureux de plus ? Alors, la Raison triompherait enfin de la loi de nature, de l’instinct ; sa supériorité éclaterait dans le renoncement final ; et le dernier homme et la dernière femme s’éteindraient dans

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leur vieillesse vierge, en laissant déborder autour d’eux la bestialité de la terre enfin délivrée. (109–110) [Yes, when sensibility will be dead, killed by its own excess; when the demands of life, by being multiplied, will oppress us like so many tyrannical habits ; when there will be nothing to bring the sexes together except the banal sting of the flesh, –why would men and women not renounce, by a common agreement, this flash of pleasure which, without even satisfying their too complex and too difficult desire, rushes one more unhappy person into the abyss of being? Then, Reason would finally triumph over the law of nature and instinct; its superiority would explode in the final renunciation; and the last man and the last woman would die in their virgin old age, leaving to overflow around them the bestiality of the finally redeemed earth.]

But he takes back this fantasy as soon as it he presents it: “O folles rêveries ! mirages trompeurs d’un monde libre ! désir stupide de l’irréalisable négation !… A quoi bon errer à travers ces pensées ? Pourquoi appeler l’anéantissement de l’espèce, –moi dont la raison se cabre devant la Mort, moi qui frissonne de la fièvre d’exister ?…” [“Oh crazy reveries! Deceiving mirages of a free world! Stupid desire of unrealizable negation!… What’s the use of wandering through these thoughts? Why call for the annihilation of the species, –I whose reason rears up in the face of Death, I who shiver with the fever of existence?…”] (110). Fiction becomes the locus of enunciation of these ideas and the place where they are negated as fiction. Accounts such as this blur the boundaries between philosophy and literature by presenting the ideas under the guise of the fictive “as if,” rejecting rather than advocating for the possibility of a world governed by reason in the very same space where that possibility is presented. The fiction, by staging philosophy as fiction within this fiction, leads us back to where we started, to the problem that a reasoned philosophical approach was supposed to have helped us solve. By showing resignation to be a “crazy reverie,” the fiction provides a critique of the philosophy at the same time that it takes up the question of how to continue from what philosophy had identified as an endpoint. Neither philosophy nor fiction can thus come to rest in the tidy conclusion of resignation; it becomes the task of this fiction to explore ways beyond the impossible reduction to resignation or nothingness, or at least to account for that impossibility and ask what it would mean to live with it. The narrator does bounce back from these reflections. Even though he claims not to like theater anymore, he goes to the Folies-Bergères and to

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the circus, and finds what he wants to call happiness there, but not without a lingering doubt about the status of that feeling: “Pourquoi m’obstiné-je à me prouver que ce bonheur est un mensonge—et qu’elle n’est pas à moi, et que je ne suis pas à elle, et que nous nous trompons tous les deux?…” [“Why did I stubbornly persist in proving to myself that this happiness is a lie—and that [the evening out] does not belong to me, and that I do not belong to it, and that we are duping each other?…”] (122–123). In the absence of verifiability of an idea such as happiness, we are left with the question of the epistemological status of how one might know what counts as happiness as opposed to an illusion. What seems at first like a rejection of philosophical inquiry, in the simple happiness of a trip to the circus, poses the problem of how to define that happiness all the more urgently. The rejection of philosophy, in other words, leads to just as much conceptual restlessness as its embrace. He does find happiness, but in the form of forgetting rather than of resolution: Dans le silence de mes désirs où je vis depuis quelque temps, dans l’oubli définitif ou momentané qui m’a repris sans cause, dans l’indifférence apathique où ma passagère excitation s’est apaisée, je me trouve presque heureux. Je n’ai pas cessé de voir Cécile, quoique j’aille moins souvent chez elle ; mais elle ne me trouble plus, […] j’ai renoncé à savoir si je l’aime, je ne demande rien de plus que le charme de ses entretiens, et je sens à la voir une joie paisible. (151) [In the silence of my desires where I have lived for a while, in the definitive or momentary forgetting which took me back without a reason, in the apathetic indifference where my fleeting excitation has been calmed, I find myself almost happy. I have not stopped seeing Cécile, even though I go less often to her place; but she doesn’t trouble me; I have renounced knowing whether I love her, I no longer ask anything except the charm of her conversations, and I feel a peaceful joy upon seeing her.]

We seem to have reached a doubly satisfying conclusion, with the best of both worlds of calmed desires and a persisting but tranquil love for Cécile, with whom he had had a more complex relationship earlier in the narrative, when he had indicated that “elle est bonne, quoiqu’il y ait beaucoup d’indifférence et de mépris dans sa bonté” [“she is good, even though there is a lot of indifference and hatred in her goodness”] (8–-9). As in Une belle journée, however, this resolution comes not at the end but in the middle of the narrative; what is supposed to be a desirable permanent state can only be temporary, since there would then presumably be nothing left

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to say, which is precisely the kind of stasis that his reflections have shown to be impossible. Once again, the narrative stages the impossibility of the ends it claims to find desirable and is impelled forward precisely by that impossibility. The problem of the satisfying conclusion that arrives in the middle rather than at the end of the narrative illustrates the convergence of fictional and nonfictional plots related to pessimism and the way their structural logic can be mutually illuminating. By most accounts, movement and development are required for a compelling narrative; stasis would be the end of narrative impulse because it would fail to provide a compelling plot. A similar point of difficulty arises in philosophy as tidy theoretical conclusions give way to lived experience, as presumably they should in any philosophical considerations involving ethics. As the plot of La Course à la mort is beginning to reveal, the stasis of resignation is not only a problem for narrative; its impossibility poses a problem when one considers that resignation or a reduction to nothingness is ultimately impossible for the subject living in the world. Rod’s plot structure can best be read, I would argue, as an illustration of this inherent problem common to both lived and fictional plots. The “plot” of the second half of La Course à la mort could be said to lie less in the actions or thoughts of the character than in the way a text is able or unable to work out the consequences of a resignation or annihilation of the subject that is as desirable as it is impossible. The interest of the plot, then, is whether it is able to work out, in its narrative framework, a desirable or verisimilar approach to elaborating some ideas central to pessimism in the realm of lived experience. Rod’s own hesitation about whether his text is a “novel” points to the fact that the text reorients our expectations of plot in precisely these ways, heightening suspense about whether fiction will be able to provide the necessary complement to philosophy as it emerges from the unsustainable stasis at its center. The narrator’s reflections in the second half of the book end up revealing not an extension of imagination but its reduction. He succumbs to the danger of considering resignation as an endpoint rather than as a springboard for posing questions about living well in the world, and this translates into uninspired political reflections: “Rien de plus insuffisant, de plus nuisible, que les efforts des socialistes, des humanitaires, des réformateurs de toutes sortes dont le nombre en ce siècle est si grand” [“Nothing more insufficient and more harmful than the efforts of socialists, humanitarians, reformers of all sorts whose number is so large in this century”] (197).

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Like any other ideas that the narrator presents, these hypotheses are merely considered rather than argued for. The resignation he pursues, based as it has been in simple pleasures such as attending the circus, leaves seemingly little room for another of the pillars of modern pessimism, compassion. Instead, the narrator retains a focus on happiness in his critique of social reform: Supposons plutôt que les « réformes » des utopistes sont toutes accomplies : quel spectacle nous offre alors cette société « idéale », où la classe la plus nombreuse jouit de tous les bienfaits d’une civilisation savante, où l’industrie a fait de la terre un vaste promenoir dont les richesses sont à portée de toutes les mains, où l’administration merveilleusement sage qui a succédé à nos gouvernements intéressés et querelleurs n’a plus qu’à surveiller la répartition équitable entre les individus des trésors acquis sans peine par l’ensemble. Est-on plus heureux dans cette Icarie ?… (200) [Let us suppose rather than the utopians’ “reforms” are all accomplished: what spectacle does this “ideal” society offer us then, where the largest class enjoys all the benefits of a knowledgeable civilization, where industry has made of the earth a vast walkway whose riches are within the reach of all, where the marvelously wise administration that succeeded our self-­interested and quarrelsome governments has only to supervise the equitable sharing of easily acquired treasures among people. Are we happier in this Icaria?]

The narrator’s focus on happiness comes at the cost of turning a blind eye to compassion. While happiness is ultimately illusory according to most variants of pessimism,24 this does not mean that attempts to reduce suffering are meaningless: quite the contrary in fact, as we have seen in Schopenhauer and even in a thinker such as Brunetière, for whom pessimism was a motivator for change. The narrator’s attempts to draw the right conclusions from pessimist resignation begin to lead him instead into something that resembles cynicism or nihilism, arguably a less livable stance than that which pessimism has potential to yield. Without the outward turn motivated by compassion, pessimism risks a turn to solipsism, and the hero begins to float from temporary satisfaction to temporary satisfaction. He finds in music the sort of momentary escape from the will that Schopenhauer had described: Seul, le langage mystérieux des sons peut exprimer la multiplicité des impressions extérieures qui mettent nos cordes sensibles en perpétuel mouvement ; seul aussi il peut traduire ce qui se passe dans les profondeurs les plus

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intimes de notre être ; seul encore il peut nous arracher à nous-mêmes et aux obsessions des choses, imposer silence aux mille voix discordantes qui viennent de partout nous troubler ; seul il peut nous bercer dans un oubli pareil au sommeil magnétique, dans un apaisement de l’âme et des sens que traversent pourtant […] de splendides idées inexprimées. (210–211) [The mysterious language of sounds alone can express the multiplicity of exterior impressions that put our sensitive strings in motion; it alone can also translate what happens in the most intimate depths of our being; alone can it tear us away from ourselves and from obsessions with things, impose silence on the thousand discordant voices that come from everywhere to trouble us; alone it can rock us in a forgetting similar to magnetic slumber, in a pacification of the soul and the senses that splendid unexpressed ideas still cross through.]

He also finds pleasure in his studies and decides to renounce seeing Cécile (“comme on renonce à une habitude pernicieuse, à une liqueur qui fait mal” [“as one renounces a pernicious habit or a harmful liqueur”] [213]), only to see that what began as calm “se change en une lassitude qui pèse sur mon esprit d’un poids matériel” [“changes into a lethargy that weighs on my mind with a material heft”] (214). As it is staged in the novel, resignation proves unlivable even within the world of fiction, which opens rather than resolves the question of what a lived pessimism would look like in the face of the impossibility of full resignation. If calm becomes lethargy and the quest for happiness becomes a cynical refusal of political change, does pessimism become a merely impossible ideal? Even as the narrator longs for something resembling a living annihilation (“Et j’aspire au silence, j’aspire à ne plus penser, à ne rien savoir !” [“And I aspire to silence, I aspire to think no more, to know nothing!”] [217]), he finds in the next moment something like an affirmation of living: “…Mais non, je cherche, je songe, je crois, je doute, je vis, comme si hier ne m’avait pas trompé sans cesse, comme si demain devait m’apporter quelque chose !… ” [“…But no, I seek, I dream, I believe, I doubt, I live, as if yesterday had not constantly deceived me, as if tomorrow would bring me something!”] (218). Between these ellipses lies what we have already seen to be a crucial aspect of pessimism, the “as if.” Rod’s fictional hero arrives here at what I have traced through thinkers such as Vaihinger and Gaultier. Living in the “as if” is, I have been arguing, what allows us to reconcile the lucidity that pessimism yields with the impossibility (and perhaps undesirability) of ultimate renunciation. Carving out a fictional space of the “as if” allows the subject to continue living in a way that assigns

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meaning to what otherwise risks ultimate meaninglessness. At the same time, it deepens the relationship between philosophy and literature by putting the fictional construct of the “as if” at the forefront of the subject’s relationship to his living in the world. The “as if” is the space of fictional potentiality that, when adopted in lived experience, has the potential to shape both the production of meaning and the reduction of suffering in the world. It may allow the narrator to avoid the pitfalls of solipsism, cynicism, and nihilism to which he has come close in this part of the narrative. Once he has experienced this crucial moment of realization of the “as if,” the narrator does indeed come to see compassion as essential: Nos cœurs sont remplis de sentiments qui ne sont pas à nous : nous avons lu trop de secrets dans des yeux tristes. Et nous en voudrions lire davantage encore, nous voudrions pénétrer dans toutes les âmes pour en partager un instant les angoisses, nous voudrions nous identifier à ces frères inconnus dont la misère n’est pas nôtre et nous appartient pourtant. Voilà pourquoi nous comprenons si bien la voix lointaine qui nous crie : « Prosternez-vous devant toute la souffrance de l’humanité ! » (220) [Our hearts are full of sentiments which are not ours: we have read too many secrets in sad eyes. And we would like to read even more of them, we would like to penetrate all souls in order for a moment to share their anguish, we would like to identify with these unknown brothers whose misery is not ours and who still belong to us. That is why we understand so well the faraway voice that cries to us: “Prostrate yourself before all the suffering of humanity!”]

It is notable that the narrator expresses this move toward compassion in terms of reading, given the importance I have been assigning to interpretation and creating meaning. He presents this reading of suffering in the eyes of others as a sort of contrast to what he said a few pages earlier about books, as he wishes to be able to forget them: Mon cerveau est plein de livres […], vieux bouquins arrachés à la poussière des bibliothèques, volumes parcourus par hasard ou lus par nécessité, […] --des centaines, des milliers, je ne sais pas, je ne me figure pas leur nombre— qui hurlent leurs idées contradictoires, leurs inconciliables théories, leurs sentiments disparates. (214–215) [My brain is full of books […], old books torn away from the dust of libraries, volumes thumbed through casually or read by necessity, […] ­

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–hundreds, thousands, I don’t know, I can’t fathom their number—that scream their contradictory ideas, their irreconcilable theories, their disparate sentiments.]

While the narrator sets up this opposition between two kinds of reading, there is more of a dynamic relationship between the two than he lets on here, given that it is arguably his reading in books and his reflection on that reading, given the influence of Schopenhauer that permeates so much of his discourse, that prepares him to react with compassion to what he sees in the eyes of those he encounters.25 What the novel stages, beyond the narrator’s own words, is the possibility of successful integration of pessimism as an abstract conception of life and as lived experience. The narrator’s refusal of conceptual thought, then, suggests the necessity of mediating experience through an approach to thinking that refuses to settle into dogma and that cultivates the dialectical relationship between thought and experience. At its best, pessimism holds out such potential even when it appears to lead to a series of dangerous dead ends. It is in works such as La Course à la mort that we see these potentials being worked through in the fictional world of the “as if.” It is important to note that the refusal of cynicism or nihilism is not an embrace of optimism or of an affirmation of life. The narrator explicitly rejects such a view: “Ce « quelque chose » de torturant, cet aiguillon enfoui dans la vieille plaie, c’est la Vie. Oh ! comme je la hais dans toutes ses manifestations ! Tout ce qu’anime son souffle est à la fois pitoyable et odieux, parce qu’elle n’est que la double faculté de souffrir et de faire souffrir” [“This torturous ‘something,’ this sting stuck in the old wound, is Life. Oh! how I hate it, in all its manifestations! Everything that animates its breath is at once pitiable and odious, because it is only the double faculty of suffering and making suffer”] (228). It is not despite but rather because of the rejection of life that compassion is possible; it is that rejection that projects the subject into the “as if” and allows him or her to create imaginative space for the possible from within that rejection of life. If the “plot” of La Course à la mort could be said to lie in the negotiation of the tension between thought and lived experience, or between the desire for nothingness and a search for ways forward in living, it refuses closure and conclusion by the end. In fact, one might say that a plot that puts these tensions into play can only, if it is to be faithful to the tension itself, maintain them rather than resolving them. If Une belle journée forces readers to consider what defines the novel by rethinking conventions of

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actions that constitute a plot, La Course à la mort forces questions of genre by staging a plot that relies primarily on the communication of the narrator’s thoughts in a way that resists the closure of both philosophical and literary works. Near the end, the narrator encounters a hermit with whom he discusses Schopenhauer, inscribing the source of many of the narrative’s ideas directly into the text: –Vous êtes un bon schopenhauerien, lui dis-je après que nous eûmes longtemps causé. –Je n’ai jamais lu Schopenhauer, me répondit-il. […] On m’a souvent conseillé de le lire … mais il y a longtemps que je ne lis plus. […] La curiosité, cette passion d’où découlent toutes les autres, est tellement raffinée chez cet homme, elle se dirige si naturellement vers les régions où il n’y a rien pour elle, elle s’exaspère tellement dans son effort toujours vain, dans son interminable défaite, qu’elle le torture à la fin avec des cruautés d’idée fixe ou de remords. Aussi ne s’ennuie-t-il jamais, du moins dans le sens habituel du mot. (254–255) [–You are a good Schopenhauerian, I told him after we had talked for a long time. –I’ve never read Schopenhauer, he replied. […] People have often recommended that I read him … but for a long time now, I haven’t read anymore. […] Curiosity, that passion from which all others flow, is so refined in this man, it is so naturally directed toward regions where there is nothing for it, it is so exasperating in its eternally vain effort, in its interminable defeat, that it tortures him in the end with cruelties of an obsessive idea or of remorse. Thus he is never bored, at least in the usual sense of the word.]

The hermit is a Schopenhauerian without having read him, who participates in the logic of suffering and boredom but only if we redefine boredom in a way the narrator does not specify except to indicate that it is not the usual way. Suffering is identified exclusively with the desire to know, pursued beyond books. To the very end, that desire remains in tension with the impulse toward nothingness: “Ne rien voir et ne rien sentir : aspiration suprême de ceux qui ont tout vu et tout senti !” [“To see nothing and to feel nothing: the supreme aspiration of those who have seen everything and felt everything!”] (270). By working through, within fiction, potential resolutions to the question of how to achieve resignation when total resignation is de facto impossible for a living subject, La Course à la mort probes the phenomenological experience of attempting to come to

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terms with the impossibility of that resolution, thus complicating our sense of an ending or conclusion in both fiction and philosophy. Through the fiction, the reader comes to see how those who would criticize pessimism on the grounds that it is a closed system leading to lethargy or an unlivable stasis would need to contend with the fact that the fundamental tension it establishes between the desirability and the impossibility of resignation means that pessimism enables the proliferation of discourse rather than its reduction to silence. Far from removing the subject from lived experience, it invites a constant dialectical relationship between lived experience and reflection on that experience, which informs a subject’s way forward. If the lack of tidy conclusion is grounds for the critique of a philosophical exposition, it forms the strength of the literary narratives that stage the ways in which pessimism’s verisimilitude is tested in experience. In this way we can return to philosophy with reshaped expectations, evaluating it in terms of verisimilitude and becoming wary of tidy conclusions. In other words, the detour through narrative reforms our expectations based on an examination of lived reality, which is just what Schopenhauerian pessimism seeks when it claims that a focus on optimism and happiness is simply untenable in the face of observable experience. This interplay between reflection and experience is precisely the drama in play for the narrator in La Course à la mort, where conventional plot elements wither away.26 One could argue that the search for pathways out of pessimism serve to anchor the narrator all the more firmly in some of its basic structures in terms of the inevitable refusal of a resolution; the frustration of the desire for that kind of resolution serves only to reinforce the notion that striving is a source of suffering whereas boredom may well be unattainable, at least “dans le sens habituel du mot.” But if a solution would result in stasis, it is arguably undesirable, in Brunetière’s sense that it is our feeling of dissatisfaction with the world that impels us to want to change it. The question could fruitfully be viewed not as whether to embrace or reject pessimism but rather to continue the conversation about what exactly it means, and what consequences to draw from it. For Michael Lerner, La Course à la mort “montre que la pensée morale de Rod cherchait une solution spirituelle au pessimisme décadent de la France et à son propre scepticisme dans ses analyses de l’âme, ce qui le sépare de plus en plus du naturalisme et du roman zoliste” [“shows that Rod’s moral thought was seeking a spiritual solution to the decadent pessimism of France and its own skepticism in its analyses of the soul,

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which separates it more and more from naturalism and the Zolian novel”] (“Introduction” xiv). But as I have been attempting to demonstrate, pessimism need not be aligned with a decadent lethargy that removes itself from the world. In fact, Rod’s hero’s conceptual restlessness shows not that he is unable to find a solution to decadent withdrawal but rather that such withdrawal is untenable from within the logic of pessimism itself. For those who seek immanent rather than transcendent ways of assigning meaning to lived experience, pessimism’s restlessness allows the subject to resist the intellectual and political dangers of cynicism and nihilism. This pursuit of ways forward that would align neither with Huysmans’ mysticism nor Zola’s materialism continues in Rod’s next novel, Le Sens de la vie (1889). What is at stake is yet again the potential of a way out, specifically via a spiritual regeneration that would put an end, as Michael Lerner puts it: “au scepticisme pessimiste et au dilettantisme raffiné des romanciers et les convertira de leur culte du moi à l’altruisme néo-chrétien des Russes, que Rod exprime dans Le Sens de la vie” [“to the pessimist skepticism and neo-Christian altruism of the Russians, which Rod expresses in Le Sens de la vie”] (xix). Firmin Roz, writing in 1906, sees in this novel the representation of a more generalized sense of the intellectual and experiential dilemmas of the period: “L’auteur excellait à noter les mouvements de l’âme contemporaine. Il indiquait avec une finesse aiguë nos aspirations et nos défaillances, nos lassitudes et nos ardeurs” [“The author excelled in noting the movements of the contemporary soul. He indicated with a sharp finesse our aspirations and our failures, our lassitude and our ardors”] (19). Roz indicates that Rod had announced a third book, a sort of conclusion to a trilogy, that would have been called Vouloir et Pouvoir. “Bientôt il abandonnait ce projet, pour passer de l’analyse intime à l’interprétation de la vie. Il devenait franchement romancier” [“He soon abandoned this project, in order to pass on to the intimate analysis and interpretation of life. He was frankly becoming a novelist”] (19). The project of writers such as Céard, Wyzewa, and Rod is at odds with novelistic conventions of their time, to the point where one would have to abandon the kind of writing that narratives such as Le Sens de la vie represent in order to become “franchement romancier.” The Russian novelists become the source of Rod’s desire for a way out of what seems like the dead ends of the French literary scene. He writes in an 1887 article that Russian writers of the generation of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky:

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nous révèlent un monde nouveau et combien meilleur que le nôtre ! Les âmes fortes de leurs personnages sont un terrain où les mauvaises racines de la méchanceté humaine ne poussent guère, où se développe au contraire ce qu’il y a de meilleur, de plus noble, de plus généreux dans l’homme. Ils font le tour des problèmes de la conscience sans désespérer de la solution, comme les sceptiques occidentaux. (quoted in Lerner xvii)27 [reveal to us a new and such a better world than our own! The strong souls of their characters are a terrain where the bad roots of human wickedness hardly grow, where, on the contrary, what is best, most noble, and most generous in man develops. They go round the problems of conscience without despairing of the solution, as Western skeptics do.]

Once again, however, fiction shows the extent to which such tidy and idealized characterizations of solutions are untenable; an appeal to a different literary tradition does nothing to resolve the tensions in which one must dwell, as the restlessness of the hero of Le Sens de la vie shows when considering a variety of resolutions to those tensions, indicated in the four sections of the novel: Mariage, Paternité, Altruisme et Religion. As in La Course à la mort, the novel stages the disintegration of a sense of groundedness. The unnamed narrator, who according to Firmin Roz (24) could be considered the same hero as the one featured in La Course à la mort (although nothing in the novel explicitly confirms or negates this), feels most at ease in the opening pages of the novel as he settles into a new residence: “A chaque pas que je fais dans ce home, je me sens sous la protection d’une bienveillante fée dont la baguette me suit pour prévenir mes souhaits” [“With each step that I take in this home, I feel myself under the protection of a benevolent fairy whose wand follows me to see to my wishes”] (16). The stability of the dwelling yields to the restlessness of the questions: “Comment et pourquoi la vie se fait-elle accepter ?” [“How and why does life come to be accepted?”] (25). The narrator sets up the problem of the proper attitude toward life as a dichotomy: Lesquels ont raison : ceux qui, comme moi hier, méprisaient et haïssaient la vie, la traitant, en pensée, comme un compagnon de hasard qu’on est libre de quitter quand on est las de son bavardage ; ou ceux qui, comme moi demain, l’ont acceptée, la subissent—qui sait ?—l’aiment peut-être ? […] Y a-t-il un sens mystérieux que je n’avais pas compris ? (26) [Which ones are right: those who, like me yesterday, hate life, treating it, in their thoughts, like a random companion that one is free to leave when one

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is tired of his chatter, or those who, like me tomorrow, have accepted it, endure it—who knows?—love it perhaps? […] Is there a mysterious meaning that I had not understood?]

To accept life is not necessarily incompatible with hating it; all will depend, of course, on the meaning one assigns to the terms that the narrator puts in play here. The “mysterious meaning” might lie, in other words, in nothing more than working out the (perhaps shifting) meaning of the terms by which we attempt to understand and generate meaning from experience. The narrator considers a number of solutions to the problem of living, beginning with faith, “puisqu’elle nous prouve que nous sommes le centre du monde” [“since it proves to us that we are the center of the world”] (26). The solution is immediately and categorically rejected as unavailable to the narrator: “Mais la Foi, il faut l’avoir, et je ne l’ai pas” [“But with Faith, you need to have it, and I don’t”] (27). He likewise rejects the potential solution of progress, since two civilizations whose complete history we know have demonstrated that the ascent is followed by a gradual diminishing of that progress (27). Love for humanity, likewise, presents itself as a potential resolution and even “donne un sens à la vie” [“gives a meaning to life”] (28), but as in the case of faith, the narrator finds he simply does not feel that love: Ce n’est pas de la misanthropie, c’est de l’indifférence. Jeté au hasard dans la conversation, ce mot n’éveille en moi qu’une vague notion de foules insupportables, grossières, bêtes, bruyantes, laides et viles […]. J’entends réserver contre elle [l’humanité] les droits de mon individualité ; et, parmi ces droits, figure en première ligne celui de m’isoler. (28–29) [It is not misanthropy, it is indifference. Thrown randomly into conversation, that word evokes in me only a vague notion of intolerable crowds, rude, stupid, noisy, ugly, and vile […]. I reserve the rights of my individuality against [humanity]; and, among these rights figures first of all the right to isolate myself.]

He also rejects pity (“J’ai bien peur que ce ne soit encore une phrase vide” [“I am quite afraid that it is only another empty phrase”] [30]) and claims that in practice it resembles something like the mere ritual of a religion of human suffering: “Mais est-ce assez pour accepter la vie ? ” [“But is it enough to accept life?”] (31). The struggle for life is also rejected as a solution, as is agnosticism: “cela ne m’apaise nullement, de savoir que je

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ne puis savoir : ma curiosité subsiste, mon inquiétude aussi, et toutes les questions relatives à l’existence me touchent de trop près pour que je puisse paisiblement consentir à les laisser sans résolution” [“that doesn’t soothe me to know that I cannot know: my curiosity remains, my worry as well, and all the questions relative to existence touch me too closely for me to peacefully consent to leaving them unresolved”] (32–33). Renunciation of a search for meaning is thus shown to be impossible and is presented as the motor of the fiction here. The narrator poses the problem as one of meaning rather than truth, and identifies the central problem to be resolved as one of how to manage to go in living in the face of potential meaningless guiding principles: J’admets avec résignation que le Bien et le Mal, le Vrai et le Faux, le Beau et le Laid sont des mots dépourvus de sens réel, des modes transitoires de notre intelligence. […] Mais, entouré de ce néant que j’ai fait, j’accepte la vie, j’aime, j’ai des heures de joie, j’existe enfin. Pourquoi ? Comment ? Voilà la question d’enfant que je ne puis me résoudre à laisser sans réponse, car je ne puis agir sans pénétrer la raison d’un acte et je ne veux pas être un mannequin dont les forces inconnues tireraient les ficelles… (33–34) [I admit with resignation that Good and Evil, the True and the False, the Beautiful and the Ugly are words deprived of real meaning, transitory modes of our intelligence. […] But, surrounded by this nothingness that I created, I accept life, I love, I have hours of joy, I exist in the end. Why? How? There’s the child’s question that I cannot resolve to leave without an answer, for I cannot act without penetrating the reason for an act and I do not want to be a mannequin whose unknown forces would pull the strings…]

The narrator thus asks how it is possible to be a content pessimist, to dwell in meaninglessness and yet arrive at acceptance, and continue to live a life that may at least appear to have value. He explores, in other words, the border between pessimism and nihilism, and works out an approach to lived experience that is honest in its rejection of meaningless categories but livable nonetheless. This is made possible, as I have been suggesting, by seeing such an approach to life as an affirmation of livable fiction as opposed to considering it a mere error. The same move that gets us away from unanswerable questions of verifiability of the pessimist stance also allows a lucid yet livable approach to life to emerge in ways that the narrator begins to identify here. Part of moving toward such a stance involves replacing active negation with more passive acceptance. His reaction to both fatherhood and

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religion mellows simultaneously into this sort of resignation. While he at first actively resists the arrival of what he calls the fetus that his wife is carrying and indicates that “il me semble que j’ai commis un crime” [“it seems to me that I have committed a crime”] by conceiving the child (51), he resigns himself to fatherhood and seeks to make his daughter’s path as smooth as it can be: Pauvre petite Marie, fille légitime de… et de…, etc., qui sait ce que te coûtera la petite feuille sur laquelle on vient de certifier ta naissance !… Ne t’inquiète pourtant pas outre mesure, nous sommes encore au dix-neuvième siècle, et n’est-ce pas une consolation d’y être né, que de penser qu’on aurait pu naître au vingtième ?… (98) [Poor little Marie, legitimate daughter of… and…, etc., who knows what the little page where we just certified your birth will cost you!… Don’t worry too much even so, we are still in the nineteenth century, and is it not a consolation to be born in it, to think that one could have been born in the twentieth?…]

While he was at first disappointed to become a father, resignation eventually allows him to accept the course of events peacefully: “Et peu à peu cette troisième existence, qui d’abord m’avait paru tellement étrangère, se fond dans les deux nôtres” [“And little by little this third existence, which at first had seemed to me so foreign, is melting itself into the two others”] (117). This is not to say that the progression is simply linear. Peaceful resignation exists alongside, and in tension with, occasional moments of anguish: Quelquefois, sous l’action d’un hasard, je sens se réveiller soudain le malaise que me cause cette vie issue de la mienne, dont je suis coupable et qui me tient en laisse. C’est une angoisse oppressée que je crois faite de remords et d’appréhension, une double souffrance que j’éprouve pour l’enfant et pour moi : pour l’enfant, parce qu’il lui faudra vivre ; pour moi, parce que je sens bien que je n’ai plus ma liberté… (119) [Sometimes, under a random action, I feel the sudden awakening of the malaise that this life that came forth from mine causes, this life of which I am guilty and which keeps me on a leash. It is an oppressed anguish that I believe to be made of remorse and apprehension, a double suffering that I feel for the child and for me: for the child, because she will have to live; for me, because I feel that I no longer have my freedom.]

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The narrative maintains this tension between resignation and anguish rather than resolving it. The narrator actively resists the mere substitution of one code of beliefs for another, and thus also opposes a secularized humanism that risks taking the place of the religion that he has also rejected: je trouve que je n’ai plus aucune colère contre la religion, –bien au contraire. […] [C]ette haine s’est changée en une indifférence profonde : le sens du mot vérité a chancelé dans mon esprit ; je n’ai plus trouvé ni critère ni preuve ; je me suis dit que ma négation était une religion aussi, comme l’affirmation, aussi grossière, pas plus sûre, ni meilleure…, pire peut-être … Alors, pourquoi troubler les âmes simples ? […] J’en étais là, quand j’ai dû reconnaître que les libres penseurs me dégoûtaient de la libre pensée. […] C’était au moment de la désaffectation du Panthéon. On en chassait Dieu pour faire place à Victor Hugo : l’adoré de la veille cédait la place à l’idole du jour. (113–114) [I find that I am no longer angry at all with religion, –much the opposite. […] [T]hat hatred has changed into a profound indifference: the meaning of the word “truth” has staggered in my brain; I no longer found either criterion or proof; I told myself that my negation was a religion too, like affirmation, just as crude, neither better nor more certain…,worse, maybe. So, why trouble simple souls? […] That’s where I was in my thinking, when I had to recognize that free thinkers disgusted me with their free thought. […] That was the moment of the decommissioning of the Pantheon. They were chasing out God to make room for Victor Hugo: the adored one of the day before ceded his place to the idol of the day.]

What the narrator resists most of all is the attempt to fill voids rather than keeping them open and to resolve tensions rather than maintaining them. Substituting a secular religious logic for a sacred logic of the same structural type is merely to reproduce the empty solution that one was trying to get beyond. On this view, an optimism along the lines of Victor Hugo’s earthly and cosmic vision remains deeply unsatisfying in ways that bring with them all the problems of optimism, and most especially its impossibility to account for suffering. And yet, while aligning himself with a particular position represents an undesirable and static conclusion, the temptation to resignation also risks shutting down the possibility of further action:

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Sans savoir ce que je veux, je me laisse porter par les événements qui vont, qui vont, et me poussent de-ci de-là selon leurs caprices. Puis je me révolte contre eux, […] mais ma révolte est inactive et je finis par me résigner. C’est bien là le processus habituel de toutes les phases de mon existence : je suis un révolté pacifique, un conspirateur en chambre, sans poignard ni dynamite, qui ourdit des plans effroyables et ne fait rien sauter… (120) [Without knowing what I want, I let myself be carried by events that go along and push me here and there by their caprices. Then I revolt against them, […] but my revolt is inactive and I end up resigning myself. There you have the habitual process of all the phases of my existence: I am a peaceful rebel, a conspiratorialist in my bedroom, without dagger or dynamite, who hatches horrifying plans and blows nothing up…]

Such an approach makes him question the authenticity of both the revolt and the resignation, as the reader who is implicitly invited to judge the reflections of the narrator in ways that may suggest that his peaceful revolt may not result so much from considered reflection as from a character trait that predisposes him to inaction. If one is not to settle into comfortable religious (or secular) assurance, one is left with only the questions.28 The narrator makes space, briefly, for a political critique, but veers back toward a religious outlook, in the wake of his reading of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. That religious outlook risks shutting down questioning and making the contemplative life, for which he voices admiration, open to the same charge of quietism that haunts every effort at removal from the active life, especially one that sees such removal as a separation from politics rather than inherently political in itself. His critique of democracy is, initially, that it has taken a wrong turn by its improper emphasis on the individual: Tandis que d’une part le mouvement démocratique avance chaque jour dans la voie désolante du sacrifice de l’individu, –l’individualisme se développe d’autre part non dans ce qu’il y a de généreux, de noble et de fécond, mais dans ce qu’il a de plus vil, l’égoïsme indifférent. […] Cependant, au milieu de ce branle-bas, quelques-uns, supérieurs par leur intelligence et riches par leurs facultés, se sont retirés sur des collines, dans des déserts ou dans des jardins, et, tranquilles, regardent ou rêvent. Ce sont les poètes, les penseurs, les artistes, ceux qui jadis exprimaient l’idéal commun, touchaient le cœur des masses et guidaient les peuples. Maintenant, ils jonglent avec les phrases, les sons, les rythmes ou les couleurs, dédaigneux de la foule et fiers de leur retraite. (126–127)

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[Whereas on one hand the democratic movement advances each day in the sorry way of the sacrifice of the individual, –individualism develops on the other hand not in what is generous, noble, and fecund, but rather what is most vile, indifferent egotism. […] However, in the middle of this commotion, some people, superior by their intelligence and rich in their faculties, have withdrawn themselves in hills, deserts or gardens and, tranquil, they watch or dream. These are the poets, the thinkers, the artists, all those who in older times expressed the common ideal, touched the heart of the masses, and guided the peoples. Now, they juggle with sentences, sounds, rhythms, or colors, disdainful of the crowd and proud of their retreat.]

The possibility of detached contemplation is not afforded to the narrator, however, as a sudden crisis brings his young daughter in danger of death. Once she recovers, the narrator is led to affirm life, even in all its suffering, as superior to nothingness: Quand on a senti la mort passer tout près, […] on comprend alors que peut-­ être la vie, affreuse, inique et féroce, vaut encore mieux que le néant. Vis donc, petite Marie, puisque tu n’as pas voulu mourir ! Vis, c’est-à-­ dire souffre, pleure, désespère, vis jusqu’au bout, aussi longtemps que le Destin voudra te traîner sur ses claies ! […] Sais-tu ce que te souhaite ton père ? C’est de tout voir, de tout sentir, de tout connaître et de tout comprendre. (153–154) [When we have felt death pass near, […] we understand then that maybe life, awful, iniquitous, and ferocious, is still worth more than nothingness. Live then, little Marie, since you didn’t want to die! Live, that is to say, suffer, cry, despair, live to the end, as long as Destin wants to drag you on its rack! […] Do you know what your father wishes for you? To see everything, to feel everything, to know everything and to understand everything.]

With each change in the narrator’s perspective, the reader is placed once again in the position of judging the aptness of his reflections, as his thoughts are always shown to be provisional and dependent on his new experiences. In this case, readers must rely on their own judgment to determine whether the narrator’s crisis has brought him to the realization of the true value of life or whether the emotion generated by the crisis blinds him to the state of his situation by affecting his ability to advance to renunciation. The novel is marked, as Céard’s was, by the absence of criteria by which a reader could make that decision.29 To provide any guidance by which we could decide would be to close the void that pessimism

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attempts to keep open by its implicit refusal of definitive answers. With a system of thought that is dependent on one’s series of lived experiences for confirmation or rejection of the provisional conclusions one had established, we are left with equally viable possibilities in terms of the narrator’s potential delusion about life’s value or the validity of his affirmation of it, coexistent as that affirmation is with lucidity about the real possibility of suffering and despair. It is in fact the necessity of interpretation of experience to generate meaning that pushed Rod to value experience over the observation that marked the realist tradition from which he departs, a fact that he highlights in the preface to his work Les trois coeurs, in which he reflects on his previous novels, including La Course à la mort and Le Sens de la vie: L’expérience me plaisait ; je la trouvais préférable à l’observation, qui fait de l’artiste un photographe et néglige ce que les faits ont de plus intéressant, c’est-à-dire leur signification. L’expérience laisse à l’écrivain ce droit aux conjectures et aux déductions, que l’observation lui enlève : elle l’autorise, elle l’oblige même à tirer de son propre fonds les raccords qui existent entre les faits et échappent à l’observation. (13) [Experience pleased me; I found it preferable to observation, which makes a photographer of the artists and neglects what is most interesting about facts, that is, their meaning. Experience leaves to the writer that right to conjectures and deductions that observations takes away from him: it authorizes him, obliges him even, to draw from his own depths the links that exist between facts and escape observation.]

This impetus to interpretation in order to assign meaning to experience can usefully be applied to Le Sens de la vie, as the novel takes a turn toward the affirmation of life. As it does so, it forces the reader to consider whether we can so easily forget all that comes before and see the narrator’s movement toward affirmation as a linear progression from doubt and despair to acceptance, or whether we should be skeptical of such a turn of events. What is at stake is not only the philosophical assumptions that will guide or be guided by the experience of reading this fiction but also the status of linearity in plot structure. Linear development toward something resembling optimism strains plausibility insofar as it forces us simply to cancel or to forget all that has come before in the narrator’s experience, and indeed the narrator is himself skeptical of the simple pleasures that his daughter affords him:

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Combien de temps peuvent donc vivre et se perpétuer après nous les sentiments doux et simples que nous avons fait rayonner de nos cœurs ?.. …Voilà ce que je me répète quelquefois quand mon enfant s’égaie. D’où son plaisir ? (156) [How long can the sweet and simple sentiments that we have made shine from our hearts live and perpetuate themselves after us? …That is what I repeat to myself sometimes when my child is cheery. Where does her pleasure come from? What’s the reason for these little shouts that lets out?]

The possibility of a reconsideration of the validity or staying power of these moments of joy forces us to resist the temptation to establish a sense of an ending that would redeem despair in favor of simple joys, since to do so would be to assign a sense of permanence to moments that are experienced only as fleeting and to attempt to consign the experience of despair and meaninglessness to perpetual forgetting. The narrator in fact compares the effect of forgetting to that of a drug, implicitly underscoring the impossibility of such permanence: “C’est ainsi que l’oubli envahit le Coeur comme un bienfaisant narcotique amène le sommeil, et qu’on arrive à jouir presque de ce qu’on n’a plus…” [“Thus it is that forgetting invades the Heart like a beneficent narcotic brings sleep and we manage to take pleasure almost in what we no longer have…”] (171). If there is a symbiotic relationship between lived experience and literary experience, one needs to take into account the fact that a lived life can never be seen, and hence judged, in its totality by the one who lives it, leaving every interpretation of one’s own experience partial and tentative, as the narrator himself indicates in the context of both individual and collective human existence: Après, on s’anéantit dans l’œuvre inachevée que les générations n’achèveront jamais peut-être. On meurt sans voir le résultat de sa vie, ne laissant derrière soi que les mêmes injustices, les mêmes misères, les mêmes haines, – quelques-unes de plus peut-être … On a donné son nom, ses forces, son âme à l’avenir de cette humanité dont le progrès est un leurre : il faudrait y croire, au moins, il faudrait un peu de foi… (205) [Afterwards, we annihilate ourselves in the unfinished work that future generations will perhaps never finish. We die without seeing the result of our lives, leaving behind us only the same injustices, the same miseries, the same hatreds, –maybe a few more … We have given our names, our forces, our

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soul to the future of this humanity whose progress is a trap: we have to believe in it at least; we have to have a bit of faith…]

It becomes increasingly apparent to the narrator that he is incapable of such a faith, as he had already announced much earlier. He takes his distance, at the beginning of the section entitled “Religion,” from both religion and the stance of Russian novelists such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky who had influenced him for a time. He rejects the religion of suffering as a kind of impossible ideal: Il faut le reconnaître, les romans russes m’ont trompé, et m’ont fait faire quelques pas dans une voie qui n’est pas la mienne. […] En constatant la puissance du sentiment qui inspire les Tolstoï et les Dostoiewsky, […] je l’ai cherché, et je me suis soumis aux spéciales excitations d’esprit qui auraient pu le faire naître : il n’est pas venu […]. Hélas ! la « Religion de la souffrance humaine » n’est pas plus à notre portée qu’une autre religion, et les mêmes motifs nous l’interdisent. (254–255) [We have to recognize it, Russian novels fooled me and made me take a few steps in a path that is not mine. […] When I noticed the power of the sentiment that inspires the Tolstoys and Dostoevskys, […] I looked for it, and I submitted myself to the special excitements of the mind that might have given birth to it: it didn’t come […]. Alas! The “Religion of human suffering” is no more within our reach than another religion, and the same motifs forbid it to us.]

Where some may find love, the narrator finds only “une théorie de la pitié” [“a theory of pity”], abstracted and disconnected from actual suffering: “C’est la pitié du curieux et du dilettante, qui veut la connaître pour la connaître ou parce qu’il la trouve belle, et qui en jongle comme d’un autre hochet,—art, amour, vice ou vertu…” [“It is the pity of the curious and the dilettante, who wants to know it for the sake of knowing it or because he finds it beautiful, and who juggles with it as with another rattle—art, love, vice, or virtue”] (255–256). The narrator aims at tranquility, but it is crucial to note that, when he classifies people “d’après leur qualité intellectuelle combinée à leur valeur morale” [“according to their intellectual quality, combined with their moral value” (262), the pessimists are grouped with cynics and rebels rather than with those who have found tranquility.

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Il y a d’abord la grande masse des esprits vulgaires et satisfaits. […] Viennent ensuite— […] les esprits distingués et mécontents. […] Ce sont les pessimistes, les sceptiques, les cyniques, les révoltés : pour trop connaître, ils sont moins avancés que s’ils ne connaissaient rien. Parmi les faces opposées des problèmes, ils ne peuvent trouver celle sur laquelle ils établiraient leur équilibre. La ligne si nette que les autres voient si bien n’existe pas pour eux ; les oppositions les mieux tranchées se confondent dans leur esprit qui neutralise et rapproche les extrêmes ; la lime de leur intelligence détruit lentement tout ce qu’elle touche ; et, pour le royaume de l’Incertitude, qui est leur, ils conquièrent l’une après l’autre toutes les provinces où ils pénètrent. […] Enfin, viennent les esprits supérieurs et tranquilles. (262–265) [There is first the great mass of vulgar and satisfied minds. […] Then come— […] distinguished and unhappy minds. […] These are the pessimists, skeptics, cynics, rebels: because they know too much, they are less advanced than if they didn’t know anything. Among the opposing sides of problems, they cannot find the one on which they would establish their equilibrium. The exact line that others see so well does not exist for them; the most solid oppositions are mixed up in their minds which neutralize extremes and bring them close to each other; the file of their intelligence slowly destroys everything it touches; and, for the kingdom of Incertitude which is theirs, they conquer one after another all the provinces where they penetrate. […] Then we have superior and tranquil minds.]

This grouping represents a significant shift from the relationship that Schopenhauer had traced between pessimism and tranquility, whereby the aim of the pessimist, and presumably the result of a successful adoption of a pessimist perspective, would lead to tranquility via renunciation. Rod’s narrator highlights the shift that had been accomplished by the late nineteenth century in terms of the perpetual dissatisfaction in the face of the recognized impossibility of the realization of renunciation. The pessimist is thus aligned instead with the sort of restlessness that Rod’s narrator exhibits throughout the novel, a fact that highlights the association of pessimism with epistemological openness and the imperative to adjust the way one assigns meaning to lived experience in the face of the dialectic of thought and action. In a conversation that the narrator has with a friend, the subject turns to books, which the friend sees as an obstacle to tranquility: –Savez-vous ? me dit-il, après un jugement dont la sévérité m’étonnait déjà, je voudrais pouvoir anéantir tous les livres qu’on a imprimés en France depuis le commencement du siècle, et qu’il n’en restât pas un volume ! […]

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Oui, la littérature est devenue un ferment de dissolution ; elle nous énerve et nous ruine. (268) [–Do you know, he said to me, after a judgment whose severity surprised me already, I would like to annihilate all the books that they have printed in France since the beginning of the century, so that not one volume would be left! […] Yes, literature has become a ferment of dissolution; it annoys and ruins us.]

What the friend claims about books, that they foster the opposite of tranquility, is what Rod’s novels have also demonstrated in the conceptual restlessness of the narrator’s pessimism. Rod’s text performs the kind of distinction that his narrator establishes between pessimism and tranquility. The friend’s wish to destroy books points to the false and dangerous ideal that tranquility can become. If the narrator has shown it is unattainable for himself, the friend’s comments indicate the danger of shutting down thought while not being able to attain the nothingness that a Schopenhauerian would establish as an ideal. Rod’s novel dramatizes that impossibility, but, as I hope to have shown, inherent in Schopenhauer’s text was an imperative to interpretation, even, and especially, because his conclusions seem so tidy and straightforward at first, to draw the full conclusions not only from his advocacy of renunciation but also from the consequences of the impossibility of such renunciation. A dramatization such as Rod’s novel allows us to see more clearly the way that the imperative to interpretation, the constantly shifting attempt at making meaning, is already inherent even in those writers who wish to put an end to the restlessness that such meaning-making entails. As the novel draws to its conclusion, the narrator seems to have exhausted the possibilities that could afford a tidy conclusion to his conceptual restlessness (and thus to the novel itself). He rejects, once again, the religious faith that his friend encourages: “C’est très bien, c’est très beau … Mais il y a dans cette chaîne un anneau qui manque: il fallait la foi et vous l’avez trouvée. C’est de là à là qu’est l’abîme : vous ne m’expliquez pas comment vous l’avez franchi…” [“It’s very good, it’s beautiful … But there is a missing link in this chain: faith is necessary and you have found it. That’s where the abyss is: you’re not explaining to me how you crossed it”] (271).30 In the debate, his friend recommends rejecting all desire to know:

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Mais plutôt, chassez loin de vous la curiosité : elle devient toujours impie…Ne sachez pas et ne désirez pas savoir : savoir est la suprême duperie. Une heure de rêveries, sous le ciel ivre, dans le silence de la nuit, vous en dira plus que des ans d’étude, et vous ne serez jamais plus près de la Vérité que lorsque vos Idées s’évaporeront en poudroiement inutile… (283) [But rather, chase curiosity far away from you: it always becomes impious … Do not know and do not desire to know: knowing is the supreme deception. An hour of reveries, under the drunken sky, in the silence of the night, will tell you more than years of study, and you will never be closer to the Truth than when your Ideas evaporate in useless powder.]

Here as well, the novel points to the way that broad understanding of pessimism had evolved in the course of the nineteenth century. The resignation of the desire to know that the friend recommends offers a structural parallel to Schopenhauer’s advocacy of renunciation. By comparison to the impossible solution of religious faith, the novel suggests that Schopenhauerian resignation is ultimately not a viable solution, given what we have seen about the need to continue the intertextual discussion about what conclusions to draw from the impossibility of renunciation. Rod’s narrator highlights the parallel by indicating the simple impossibility of finding religious faith for one who does not have it. The double refusal both of resignation and of religious faith does not eliminate the temptation of resolution, however, which leads the narrator to the paradoxical situation, which we might also identify as another potential danger, of raising doubt itself to the level of a system: Si j’avais le loisir d’être philosophe, je ne me contenterais pas d’un banal éclectisme, et voudrais avoir mon petit système à moi […]. Titre : La Philosophie de l’Illusion, ou L’Illusionnisme. Je crois que je me déciderais pour l’Illusionnisme : c’est plus système ; cela augmenterait mes chances de devenir chef d’école. (292–293) [If I had the leisure of being a philosopher, I would not be happy with a banal eclecticism, and would like to have my own system […] Title: The Philosophy of Illusion, or Illusionism. I think I would go for Illusionism: it’s more like a system; it would increase my chances of becoming the leader of a school of thought.]

The blurring of philosophy and fiction that we have been tracing intensifies, with a philosophical system inscribed, as fiction, within a fiction. And once again, its fictional status invites judgment on the readers’ part as to

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whether we should or can take the attempt seriously, and, if not, whether such doubt about the viability of systems extends to nonfictional systems as well, which may fall prey to the same skepticism even though they are not presented in the form and context of a fiction. Illusionism, which by its very name makes room for fiction as its basis, elevates fiction to the status of a philosophical stance while also illuminating the fictional structures at work in philosophical systems, all the while calling into question the validity of the entirety of the enterprise via the cavalier way in which the narrator amuses himself with the creation of the system and his momentary desire for fame. Given that Illusionism is described but not developed in the novel, it is left to the readers’ imagination to flesh out, at the philosophical level, what it would look like and the extent to which we are to take the narrator’s proposal seriously and consider the viability of doubt raised to the status of a dogma. In light of the narrator’s many fluctuations in thought over the course of the novel, the extent to which we take his philosophical system seriously is affected by our stance on whether the narrative should aim at closure in its final pages: L’Incertitude ainsi rétablie en dogme triomphant, je parcourrais l’un après l’autre les grands départements de la vie. […] Tout cela serait serré, logique, définitif, irréfutable… Cependant –et voici d’où partirait la seconde partie,–la critique a beau détruire, ces idées que nous avons acceptées comme bases de notre existence sans qu’aucune philosophie ait jamais pu même les définir, existent. […] Nulle existence individuelle ne serait possible, si l’on admettait que, les fondements de la Morale étant introuvables, il n’y a pas de Morale. (294–295) [With Uncertainty thus reestablished as a triumphant dogma, I would go through one after another the great divisions of life. […] All of that would be tight, logical, definitive, irrefutable… Although—and here would be the starting point of the second part,– even though critique tried to destroy them, these ideas, which we have accepted as bases of our existence without any philosophy ever having been able to define them, exist. […] No individual existence would be possible, if we admitted that, since the foundations of Morality are impossible to find, there is no Morality.]

We arrive here, inscribed in a fiction, at an articulation of the comme si that I have been claiming as an important factor in the development of modern pessimism, a way of reconciling lucidity with a livable approach to experience that is based on the self-conscious fiction that drives us to go on in

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the face of the impossible resignation that would otherwise be the logical consequence of pessimism. It is fitting that the novel begins to come to an ending but via a form of non-closure, given that the role of fiction in generating a pessimism that retains lucidity while steering clear of nihilism is to keep the questions open, to mandate new forms of thought and interpretation precisely by avoiding closure. In addition to suspending closure, the novel also maintains the tension that it has sketched between theory and practice and affirms contradiction: La pratique est donc irréconciliable avec la Théorie. […] La contradiction […] se retrouve dans l’ensemble de la vie, comme un défi suprême jeté à notre Raison. Impossible de l’éviter : ou bien écoutez la critique, et devenez des sceptiques désemparés qui, à moins de passer pour des criminels ou des fous, seront forcés d’être inconséquents avec eux-mêmes ; ou bien acceptez comme vérité le mensonge éternel que vous avez reconnu… (297) [Practice is thus irreconcilable with Theory. Contradiction […] is found in the whole of life, like a supreme challenge thrown down to our Reason. Impossible to avoid it: either listen to the critique, and become helpless skeptics who, unless they pass for criminals or crazy people, will be forced to be inconsequential with themselves; or accept as truth the eternal lie that you have recognized…]

For Rod’s narrator, the question of affirming or criticizing life is moot, given that life needs to be lived no matter what our stance is on whether we are privileged or condemned to live it. Writing in 1906 on Le Sens de la vie, Firmin Roz has this to say on the novel’s perspective: Bonne ou mauvaise, la vie est un fait, le fait suprême. Ceux qui la condamnent ont à la vivre, comme les autres. […] Les plus intransigeants pessimistes […] ne devraient-ils pas respecter l’illusion suprême, laisser les hommes dupes de son prestige et s’efforcer de vivre eux-mêmes comme s’ils y croyaient encore ?… L’œuvre […] avait de quoi nous séduire, si elle ne pouvait nous satisfaire. (17) [Good or bad, life is a fact, the supreme fact. Those who condemn it have to live it, like the others. […] Do not the most intransigent pessimists […] need to respect the supreme illusion, leave men the dupes of its prestige and try to live themselves as if they still believed in it?… The work […] had the power to seduce us, if it couldn’t satisfy us.]

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Roz underscores the importance of the “as if” and associates it explicitly with pessimism, reinforcing the link I have been establishing between lucidity and fiction in modern pessimism, where a full lucidity would need to be balanced with lucid delusion in order to make life livable. By the end of the novel, Rod has further blurred the lines between fiction and philosophy by inscribing a hypothetical novel into the narrator’s reflections in addition to the fictional philosophical system he dreams of devising. As he considers his philosophical system, he begins to realize that a novel would perhaps convey it better: Un traité de philosophie conviendrait-il réellement à développer cette thèse féconde ? … Un gros volume in-octavo, écrit en style du métier, ne serait-il pas condamné à l’impopularité et fatalement inefficace ? … Non : quand on possède des précieuses vérités, il faut les mettre à portée de tous […]. L’idéal serait donc de fait un drame ; mais, comme un drame qui n’est pas joué est plus inefficace encore qu’un traité qui n’est pas lu, j’écrirai plutôt un roman. […] Au début, ce personnage part pour la vie avec toutes ses illusions. Elles tombent de page en page. (300–301) [Would a philosophy treatise really be appropriate for developing this fertile thesis? … A big in-octavo volume, written in the philosopher’s style, would it not be condemned to unpopularity and fatally ineffective? … No: when we possess precious truths, we need to put them within everyone’s reach […]. The ideal would thus be to write a drama; but, since a drama that is not staged is yet more ineffective than a treatise that is not read, I will write a novel instead. […] At the beginning, this character goes for life with all of its illusions. They fall page by page.]

Le Sens de la vie begins to take on characteristics of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, with a narrator telling the reader, within a novel, that he plans to write a novel, which exists only as a hypothetical fiction within the fiction, with the role of communicating an implied philosophical approach.31 In other words, the novel, again like Proust’s, is doing something more complex than it claims on the surface.32 While the narrator claims to want simply to use the form of fiction to disseminate ideas in a more popular form than a philosophical treatise, the very inscription of both the hypothetical treatise and the hypothetical novel in this fiction invites the reader to reflect on the ways in which the two genres can come to resemble each other structurally. This inscription underscores the blurred lines that help us make sense of the way pessimism depends on useful fiction, not only, or

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not even especially, in the sense that fiction can communicate ideas, but also that verisimilitude is more helpful than verifiability when it comes to adopting pessimism as a viable outlook. This is so because pessimism retains the possibility of living in the “as if” while maintaining lucidity about suffering, and while holding out the possibility that lucidity is perhaps itself part of the fiction that pessimism constructs. Rod’s novel plays out the inability to conclude (or the artificial imposition that a conclusion would imply) by offering several abortive attempts at concluding the narrative, with his notes on an unwritten treatise, the idea of an unwritten novel, and the refusal of both those ideas. The narrator has his invented protagonist float rapidly in the last section from a career in journalism to engagement in socialism and then in business and philanthropy. The plot ultimately becomes about the narrator’s own search for a way to impose a plot, and thus a meaningful hermeneutic structure, on his own life and his fictional character’s life, and the impossibility of turning intellectual tensions into the resolutions that would provide a satisfactory plot or a satisfactory answer. The wandering itself becomes its own plot structure as the narrator imagines his novel: N’ayant plus de but positif à poursuivre, il cherche l’oubli : il se jette dans d’énormes débauches qui ne peuvent le distraire, il devient alcoolique et morphinomane. […] Il se retrouve toujours obstinément lui-même, l’esprit tendu en curiosités inquiètes, l’âme ouverte à des désirs nouveaux. A la fin, il reprendrait sa robe de prêtre, et s’en irait prêcher un dieu auquel il ne croirait plus dans quelque village ignoré. […] Ou plutôt je n’écrirai ni roman, ni traité, et je crois que cela vaudra mieux… (304) [Having no positive goal to pursue, he seeks forgetting: he throws himself into enormous debauchery that cannot distract him, he becomes a drug and alcohol addict. […] He stubbornly always remains himself, his mind leaning toward worrisome curiosities, his soul open to new desires. In the end, he would take up again his priest’s robe, and would go around p ­ reaching a god he no longer believed in, in some unknown village. […] Or rather I will write neither a novel nor a treaty, and I think that will be better…]

Potential solutions, like potential conclusions, become increasingly untenable, as the narrator imagines his character retaining the form but not the content of religious faith, perpetuating that faith as itself a kind of fiction. And the temptation to silence reveals itself here, establishing a tension between the narrator’s refusal to give form of any kind to his ideas and Rod’s novel struggling to come to an end.

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The final scene of Le Sens de la vie takes place in the Church of Saint-­ Sulpice, where the narrator has gone for high mass. Rather than having a conversion experience, he reacts ambiguously, offering a vague and unconvincing prayer, which he then calls a “cantique d’athée” [“canticle of an atheist”] (312): “Soyez loué pour avoir fait la neige blanche, les prés verts et le ciel bleu! […] Soyez loués pour les saintes illusions qui se transmettent de race en race et de siècle en siècle!” [“Be praised for having made the white snow, the green prairies and the blue sky! […] Be praised for the holy illusions that are transmitted from race to race and century to century!”] (310–311). In the context of the novel as a whole, spiritual dearth is not so much the parting impression so much as the failed temptation of a potential move away from the conceptual restlessness of pessimism toward the certitude of something like religious faith. None of the potential stabilizing elements that the narrator has pursued, including marriage, fatherhood, and religion, counteracts the restlessness of his thought and the possibility of doubt.33 Nothing, one might say, cancels pessimism, but one might also say here that nothing cancels the doubt that is the motor of thought, which relies on doubt to spark constant renewal. Pessimism contains within it the impossibility of its own coming to rest in ways akin to a complacent religious faith. Dissatisfaction with the world pairs with the impossibility (and undesirability) of surpassing that dissatisfaction so that pessimism necessarily entails continuing the dialogue of thought. While most know him for his endearingly implausible tales of exploration and adventure, Jules Verne’s later work often took a darker turn. In what follows, I’d like to consider his novella L’Eternel Adam [The Eternal Adam] (1910), a work that extends his science fiction by imagining a future human race that discovers the existence of our current one. Verne continues the imaginative work of the later nineteenth-century novelists and poets I have considered by extending their engagement with imagination not in order to conjure the world differently or to imagine its end, but in order to invite readers to reflect on our own historical and metaphysical situation by placing those readers in the role of a human being living far in the future and who comes to discover a wholly different and distantly past human world. We discover what turns out to be our own human moment through the fresh eyes of this future reader deciphering a found manuscript about what we would label modern humanity. The main character, a scholar named Sofr, lives in a time when “sur toute la surface du globe, il n’existait pas d’autre terre que celle du

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Hars-­ Iten-­ Schu” [“on the whole surface of the globe, no other land existed except that of Hars-Iten-Schu”] (7), when humanity had traced what it thought might be its complete history, eight thousand years of wars and combat with some periods of peace. Sofr is moved by an impression of human progress; he surveys humanity’s many inventions, including that of writing, and the text indicates in free indirect discourse: “Oui, l’homme était grand, plus grand que l’univers immense, auquel il commanderait en maître, un jour prochain…” [“Yes, man was great, greater than the immense universe he would command as its master, one day to come”] (14). These musings spark more abstract philosophical reflections: “Alors, pour que l’on possédât la vérité intégrale, ce dernier problème resterait à résoudre : « Cet homme, maître du monde, qui est-il ? D’où venait-il ? Vers quelles fins inconnues tendait son inlassable effort ? »” [“Now, in order to have the whole truth, this last problem remained to be resolved: ‘This man, master of the world, who is he? Where did he come from? Toward what ends was his tireless effort leading?”] (14–15). In Sofr’s time, there is a widely held view that there was human civilization long before the one whose history is known, a view that Sofr is among the few to contest: “Admettre que d’autres hommes, séparés de leurs successeurs par un abîme de vingt mille ans, eussent une première fois peuplé la terre, c’était, à son estime, pure folie” [“To admit that other men, separated from their successors by an abyss of twenty thousand years, had once before peopled the earth was, as far as he was concerned, pure folly”] (20). Rather than accepting speculation on earlier developed civilizations, Sofr finds it preferable to assume that there was not, a conclusion that according to him would be fully satisfactory from the standpoint of “la raison pure” [“pure reason”] (20). It turns out that what most troubles Sofr about the potential that there had existed human civilizations just as advanced as his own is, tellingly, that it would indicate that progress is precarious and anything but assured. In other words, it would trouble optimistic narratives of linear human development and is thus dismissed as implausible: “Eh quoi ! se disait-il, admettre que l’homme—il y aurait quarante mille ans ! –soit parvenu à une civilisation comparable, sinon supérieure à celle dont nous jouissons présentement, et que ses connaissances, ses acquisitions aient disparu sans laisser la moindre trace, au point de contraindre les descendants à recommencer l’œuvre par la base […] ? …Mais ce serait nier l’avenir,

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proclamer que notre effort est vain et que tout progrès est aussi précaire et peu assuré qu’une bulle d’écume à la surface des flots ! » Sofr fit halte devant sa maison. « Upsa ni ! …hartchok!… (Non, non!…en vérité!…), Andart mir’hoë spha!… » (L’homme est le maître des choses !…)—murmura-t-il en poussant la porte. (21) “Hey then, he said to himself, to admit that man—forty thousand years ago!—had arrived at a civilization that was comparable, if not superior, to the one we enjoy presently, and that his knowledge and acquisitions disappeared without leaving the least trace, to the point of forcing his descendants to start the work over again from scratch, […]? … But that would be to deny the future, to proclaim that our effort is vain and that all progress is as precarious and as little assured as a bubble of foam at the surface of the waves!” Sofr stopped in front of his house. “Upsa ni! …hartchok!… (No, no, truly!…), Andart mir’hoë spha!…” (Man is the master of things!…)—he murmured as he pushed the door open.

Sofr’s defense of progress is shown to be a mere defense mechanism against a harder and indeed more “absurd,” but empirically true conclusion about a past that mandates a new interpretation of human reality. What had seemed implausible is now brought into the realm of possibility, a fact that then spurs a new interpretation of the narrative of human progress or supposed greatness. Our own position as readers, who know that our own civilization has in fact existed no matter how improbable Sofr finds it, gives credence to views that Sofr dismisses as absurd and even against the suggestions of pure reason. In this way, Verne’s narrative strategies allow us both to imagine more plausibly our own elimination as a civilization and to reject the narrative of linear progress in favor of a pessimism that may have seemed less tenable before reading this novella. As readers, we put ourselves in Sofr’s place as he attempts to read and interpret what to him, and increasingly to us, is an unknown civilization that we seek to understand by piecing together the fragments of a narrative. That piecing together of a narrative is literal in Sofr’s case: he finds an illegible document at an archeological site, which he spends years reading and translating from French. The narrator provides no details about how he learned to decipher it. It is dated le 24 mai 2…; as readers over Sofr’s shoulder, in a sense, we are now reading a document from ourselves while also interpreting the document from Sofr’s perspective, such that we become simultaneously inside and outside readers of the text. Once Sofr

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disappears from the narrative, we are left to “decipher” a record of our own civilization, with periodic reminders via Sofr’s reappearance that that civilization is now gone. Fiction provides the kind of Archimedean point that I have been arguing is missing from attempt to evaluate pessimistic worldviews from a standpoint of verifiability. The narrator of the document recounts a stay in Mexico where a conversation with his friends turns to the subject of the “progrès merveilleux accompli par l’homme” [“marvelous progress accomplished by man”] (28). That idea is up for debate in the recounted conversation itself but, within the context of the layer of the fiction whereby we are reading this (i.e. from the point of view of a destroyed human civilization), there can be no question but that such notions of progress are untenable. The certainty of that idea within the context of the fictional premise has the effect of lending credence and plausibility to the critique of human progress in our own time by allowing us to think in fictional terms from that otherwise inaccessible Archimedean point of the end of our own history. As the discussion continues, the friends review the many technological discoveries and innovations in recent human history, including chemistry, physics, medicine, railroads, printing, color photography, electricity, and so on. One of them, Mendoza, compares the moderns to the Babylonians or Egyptians, which provokes general laughter. His friend Bathurst insists that those civilizations are not comparable to the moderns because: nos inventions […] se répandent instantanément par toute la terre : la disparition d’un seul peuple, ou même d’un grand nombre de peuples, laisserait donc intacte la somme de progrès accomplis. Pour que l’effort humain fût perdu, il faudrait que l’humanité disparût à la fois. Est-ce là, je vous le demande, une hypothèse admissible ?… (32) [our inventions […] instantly spread out over all the earth: the disappearance of one people, or even a great number of peoples, would thus leave intact the sum of accomplished progress. For human effort to be lost, it would be necessary for humanity to disappear at the same time. Is that, I ask you, an admissible hypothesis?]

Readers confront Bathurst’s question about whether such a hypothesis is admissible with the demonstrated knowledge, within the context of the fiction, that it has in fact come to pass that the human race knew a first moment when virtually all traces of it were erased. From the perspective of Sofr, which we as readers share as we read the found manuscript, the

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answer to the question must be yes; the hypothesis is admissible because we know it came to be. While we as readers belong to the same civilization as the characters in this manuscript, the text creates a distance from them that makes it impossible to join in their speculation. Within the fiction, we are, rather, the contemporary of Sofr, far removed in the future, and drawing new conclusions based on what we now know to be the folly of these characters for having supposed that human civilization could indeed be wiped out nearly without a trace. The fiction creates a complex “as if” by allowing us to enter it as something other than ourselves, by forcing distance from those who are otherwise most like us in the text, the ones who are our closer contemporaries. Within the fiction, the possibility of human disappearance, and the concomitant negation of the model of progress, is more than plausible; it is a demonstrated fact by the time Sofr reads the manuscript. The text thereby strengthens the imaginative possibility that all perceived human progress could be negated by the continuation of a history that could well annihilate us, and presents a vivid picture, in Sofr, of a person who admits previously unconsidered possibilities and seeks now to draw the appropriate consequences from that revelation of the imaginative possibility. Just at the moment when one of the friends admits that the whole globe could suffer a cataclysm, a cataclysm indeed arrives in the form of an earthquake. The narrator remains level-headed in the face of the terror of those who surround him: Je ne tardai pas à recouvrer mon sang froid. La véritable supériorité de l’homme, ce n’est pas de dominer, de vaincre la nature ; c’est pour le penseur, de la comprendre, de faire tenir l’univers immense dans le microcosme de son cerveau ; c’est pour l’homme d’action, de garder une âme sereine devant la révolte de la matière, c’est de lui dire : « Me détruire, soit ! m’émouvoir, jamais !… » (34) [I quickly recovered my levelheadedness. The true superiority of man is not to dominate and to vanquish nature; it is the thinker’s job to understand it, to hold the immense universe in the microcosm of his brain; it is the man of action’s job to keep his soul serene in the face of the revolt of matter, it is up to him to say: “Destroy me, fine! Move me, never!…”]

While the narrator keeps his calm, the earth has literally moved around him; cliffs have crumbled and they spend ten days on an island with a desert climate before being rescued by a ship, a time during which two of the

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friends succumb to hunger and thirst. There is an eight-month hiatus in the writing; the results of the earthquake are that all of Mexico is under water, along with the rest of the continent and Asia as well. All living things around them have died: Acquérir peu à peu la certitude qu’autour de soi il n’existe rien de vivant, et prendre graduellement conscience de sa solitude au milieu d’un impitoyable univers !… Ai-je trouvé les mots convenables pour exprimer notre angoisse ? Je ne sais. Dans aucune langue il n’en doit exister d’adéquats à une situation sans précédent. […] En vérité nous commencions à nous habituer à notre épouvante. (46) [To acquire bit by bit the certainty that around oneself nothing living exists, and gradually to become conscious of one’s solitude in the midst of a ruthless universe!… Have I found the right words to express our anguish? I don’t know. There must not be in any language adequate words for an unprecedented situation. […] Truly we were beginning to become accustomed to our fear.]

What has been figured in some of the novels we have considered as a metaphysical crisis here becomes literalized in the landscape as the novella forces the reader, in an uncanny prophecy of our contemporary situation, to confront literal, geographic catastrophe and to attempt to find the language to express a new and unprecedented sense of anguish in the face of a previously unconceived and unconceivable situation. It is not so much that the literal, geographical landscape catastrophe replaces the interiorized mental crisis, but rather that the inner and outer landscapes conjoin, with the environmental catastrophe provoking questions about how best to respond intellectually to the destroyed environment in which humans lived and operated. The narrator asks how to find language to describe the previously unimaginable. But by asking the question in a fiction, such a possibility of having to react to a situation that is worse than imaginable is thereby brought into the realm of the “as if,” the imaginable within the world of fiction. At this point, we as readers, while we had been principally in the place of Sofr, are drawn into the world of the narrator as well, faced with the challenge not only of imagining catastrophe but also of what to do when we are unable to find the words adequate to describe an appropriate affective reaction to an unprecedented situation. It is pessimism, in its openness to the possibility of the worst, that better prepares us to seek a language adequate to the task of the unimaginable catastrophe, that

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allows us to move ahead rather than being blindsided by the unimaginable. While the optimist would find his or her narrative of progress destroyed with nothing to build up in its place, the pessimist potentially has the means to seek a language in which to describe the situation and the affective reactions it prompts, to advance with the modest goal of continuing in the face of the unimaginable. The friends spend seven months at sea, then land on an island that has freshly emerged from the water. At this point, the continuous narrative is interrupted because of several lacunae in the manuscript. The rest of what Sofr, and we, are able to read is in fragments because the pages were destroyed by humidity. If, before, we were figuratively piecing together what should be our reaction to this story, we now quite literally have to put the pieces of the puzzle together in order to attempt to establish a coherent continuation of the narrative. The stranded friends plant a sack of wheat they found but wonder whether it will germinate. Two years go by. At the end of the manuscript, which is intact, the narrator indicates that they tried building houses, but they remained unfinished and so he and his companions sleep on the ground year round. He writes: “Il est, hélas ! trop certain que l’humanité, dont nous sommes les seuls représentants, est en voie de régression rapide et tend à se rapprocher de la brute” [“It is, alas, too certain that humanity, of which we are the only representatives, is in the process of rapid regression and is tending to become like the brutes”] (60). He imagines not just human disappearance but the future rebirth of a worse human race: Il me semble les voir, ces hommes futurs, oublieux du langage articulé, l’intelligence éteinte, le corps couvert de poils rudes, errer dans ce morne désert… Eh bien ! nous voulons essayer qu’il ne soit pas ainsi. Nous voulons faire tout ce qu’il est en notre pouvoir de faire pour que les conquêtes de l’humanité dont nous fûmes ne soient pas à jamais perdues. (61) [It seems to me that I see them, those future men, forgetful of articulated language, their intelligence extinguished, their bodies covered with rough hair, wandering in this dreary desert… Well! We want to try for it not to be that way. We want to do everything in our power so that the conquests of the humanity are not forever lost.]

This is one of the document narrator’s last pronouncements; there is then a fifteen-year gap in the manuscript, after which the narrator is the only

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survivor left. He then indicates that he has buried manuscripts that “renferment le résumé de la science humaine” [“include the summary of human knowledge”] (62) in an iron box for potential rediscovery. His reaction to his situation encapsulates the kind of pessimism I have been identifying as featuring a balance between lucidity and realistic approaches toward the future. While his vision of the future, based on what he has seen since the cataclysm, is one of regression and suffering in “this dreary desert,” he nonetheless will do what is possible to prevent that from happening, all the while holding out no hope whatsoever that the action will be effective. The future will remain for him, at best, unknown, and, at worst, an intensification of the suffering he has already seen, with no room, in the face of his lived experience, for notions of hope or progress. Sofr reacts to his reading with shocked surprise both at his discovery of these ancestral humans and of how little it took to wipe away their civilization: Ces créatures misérables avaient fait partie d’une humanité glorieuse, au regard de laquelle l’humanité actuelle balbutiait à peine ! Et cependant, pour que fussent abolis à jamais la science et jusqu’au souvenir de ces peuples très puissants, qu’avait-il fallu ? Moins que rien : qu’un imperceptible frisson parcourût l’écorce du globe. (63) [These miserable creatures had been part of a glorious humanity, in comparison to which our present humanity barely stammered! And yet what had been necessary for science and even the memory of these very powerful people be abolished forever? Less than nothing: only for an imperceptible quiver to move across the surface of the globe.]

Along with rethinking what he knew about the origins of the human race, Sofr is also dissuaded, at least at first, from his optimism: Il n’en fallait pas plus pour que l’optimisme de Sofr fût irrémédiablement bouleversé. Si le manuscrit ne représentait aucun détail technique, il abondait en indications générales et prouvait d’une manière péremptoire que l’humanité s’était jadis avancé plus avant sur la route de la vérité qu’elle ne l’avait fait depuis. […] Peut-être n’avaient-ils fait que refaire, eux aussi, le chemin parcouru par d’autres humanités venues avant eux sur la terre. (64) [No more was needed for Sofr’s optimism to be irremediably shaken. If the manuscript didn’t include any technical detail, it abounded in general indications and proved in a peremptory way that humanity had long ago advanced farther on the route of truth that it ever had since. […] Maybe

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they too had only retraced the path taken by other humanities that had come before them on earth.]

These reflections dramatize the act of interpretation when it comes to reading the human record, quite literally in this case since the history is contained in a manuscript. While his optimism is shaken, within a few lines he considers the hypothesis that humanity could once again make great strides, reaffirming the optimism that had already at least seemingly been discredited by the narrative where the characters who had been discussing the marvels of human progress had been wiped away by cataclysm. At this point, Sofr’s interpretive act is also our own, as we need to decide whether to entertain this optimistic hypothesis in the face of the text’s evidence of the non-viability of linear models of progress. His optimism seems stubborn and untenable as he retains the possibility of exceptionalism for his own people, just as in the contemporary world we ignore past civilizational collapses in the affirmation that ours will be the real era of unmitigated progress: “Peut-être en serait-il de même pour les Andart’Iten-Schu. Peut-être en serait-il encore ainsi après eux, jusqu’au jour…” [“Maybe it would be the same for the Andart’Iten-Schu. Maybe it would still be the same after them, until the day…”] (65). That thought is interrupted immediately, in these last lines of the novella, by a refocusing of the question not according to progress and technology but, rather, human desire: Mais le jour viendrait-il jamais où serait satisfait l’insatiable désir de l’homme ? Le jour viendrait-il jamais où celui-ci, ayant achevé de gravir la pente, pourrait se reposer sur le sommet enfin conquis ? Ainsi songeait le zartog Sofr, penché sur le manuscrit vénérable. Par ce récit d’outre-tombe, il imaginait le drame terrible qui se déroule perpétuellement dans l’univers, et son cœur était plein de pitié. Tout ­saignant des maux innombrables dont ce qui vécut avait souffert avant lui, pliant sous les poids de ces vains efforts accumulés dans l’infini des temps, le zartog Sofr-Aï-Sr acquérait, lentement, douloureusement, l’intime conviction de l’éternel recommencement des choses. (65) [But would the day ever come when the insatiable desire of man would be satisfied? Would the day ever come when, having finished climbing the height, he would be able to rest on the summit that he had conquered at last? Thus dreamed the zartog Sofr, hunched over the venerable manuscript.

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By this tale from beyond the grave, he was imagining the terrible drama that would play out eternally in the universe, and his heart was full of pity. Everything bled innumerable evils which those that lived before him had suffered, bending under the weight of these vain efforts piled up in the infinity of time, the zartog Sofr-Aï-Sr was acquiring, slowly, painfully, the intimate conviction of the eternal new beginnings of things.]

In these final lines, the question of technological progress is made irrelevant in the face of the more pressing question of unsatisfied desire, which trumps the question of technology by raising the issue, not of whether human civilization can be recreated if it disappears, but rather of whether it is desirable to continue it at all in the face of the realization of perpetual dissatisfaction. To see desire satisfied would be the elimination of human life in another, and very different, sense from that of natural disaster: since human experience is marked by the dissatisfaction of desire, if it were possible to eliminate it, what would remain is something other than human experience. As Sofr comes to his thoroughly Schopenhauerian conclusion in these final lines, his optimism is reframed so that even admitting that human civilization can be reborn only brings a sense of pity for suffering rather than an affirmation of the possibility of progress. Fittingly, perhaps, as readers we are left with a return to Schopenhauer’s negation of optimism and progress and his sense of vanity and pity for human experience, without any neat narrative closure. As in the case of the other novels we have considered, pessimism serves as the vehicle for a reconsideration of humans’ place in a disharmonious and inhospitable world while warning against the tidy conclusions that we sometimes desire in our fictions. This sort of creative destruction and reshaping of expectations, both for narratives and for ways of seeing collective human experience, is also evident in the lyric poetry of the time, and it is to that genre that I now turn.

Notes 1. For details on Maupassant’s engagement with Schopenhauer, see Maupassant 1510 and Salem. 2. For an overview of such similarities and differences, see Janaway. 3. See Lerner “Introduction” vii–xiii.

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4. “Sales of the original Charpentier edition failed to reach three thousand, and it has never been reprinted. […] The book deserves a better fate” (Sachs 76). 5. For details on the rupture, see Burns 244–251. 6. For an exhaustive treatment of Céard’s relationship to naturalism, see Burns, especially 43–96. He characterizes the difference between Zola and Céard’s approach this way: “Tandis que le dynamisme de Zola lui permet de forger sa propre réalité supérieure, la passivité littéraire de Céard oblige ses personnages à subir la réalité banale. Zola emporte le lecteur dans l’univers halluciné qu’il évoque par le sortilège de son style ; l’auteur d’Une belle journée accompagne doucement son lecteur dans la lente promenade qu’il lui fait faire travers le paysage parisien, en lui faisant voir, à la loupe, les impressions suscitées chez ses personnages par ce spectacle banal” [“Whereas Zola’s dynamism permits him to forge his own superior reality, Céard’s literary passivity obliges his characters to suffer banal reality. Zola carries the reader away in the hallucinated universe that he evokes by the spell of his style; the author of Une belle journée gently accompanies his reader in the slow walk that he makes him take through the Parisian landscape, making him see, with a magnifying glass, the impression evoked in his characters by this banal spectacle”] (85–86). 7. Ronald Frazee claims that the direct influence of Schopenhauer on Céard has been exaggerated: “Nul doute que Céard mérite le nom de pessimiste ; mais encore ne fait-il pas entendre par là qu’il ait pu être disciple de Schopenhauer—pas plus d’ailleurs que les autres visiteurs de Médan” [“No doubt that Céard deserves the name of pessimist; but we must not understand that to mean that he could have been a disciple of Schopenhauer— not any more than the other Médan visitors”] (80), and enumerates some key points of divergence, especially on whether the source of suffering is the Will (Schopenhauer), or whether suffering is a force in its own right (Céard). 8. Murray Sachs offers a useful corrective to the description of Une belle journée as plotless, claiming that it “ought to be described as a novel in which human dreams and aspirations are discovered to be forever impossible. That is not only a more intriguing account of what is in store for the prospective reader but is considerably more accurate than one which describes it as ‘a novel in which nothing happens’” (79). 9. On Céard and Racinean tragedy, see Sachs 80–82, where he points out the structural similarities in terms of the minimum number of characters and action in the space of a single day as well as the division into five parts, and argues that Céard’s tale “becomes a prosaic parody of Racine, which is the only form tragedy can now take” (82). On Céard and Les liaisons dangereuses, see Baguley 484.

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10. See Burns: “Toute la vie littéraire de Céard sera dominée par Flaubert, par l’ombre de Frédéric Moreau et de Marie Arnoux” [“All of Céard’s literary life will be dominated by Flaubert, by the shadow of Frédéric Moreau and Marie Arnoux”] (21). 11. “Céard chose for the three major events in his novel—the dance, the afternoon in the cabinet particulier, and the cab ride—three occurrences which closely resemble the situation at the climactic moment in each of the three parts of Madame Bovary: the ball at La Vaubyessard, the comices agricoles (where Emma and Rodolphe are alone in a room of the mairie), and the cab ride with Léon” (Thomas 331) 12. On the influence of Flaubert’s Trois contes on Céard, see his letter to René Dumesnil of July 13, 1916 where he evokes 1878 as the “époque où, définitivement enseigné par Flaubert et les Trois Contes, je me suis détaché des procédés de Goncourt et de Zola. Une belle journée fut le symptôme de ma transformation” [“era when, definitively taught by Flaubert and the Trois contes, I separated myself from Goncourt and Zola’s procedures. Une belle journée was the symptom of my transformation”] (quoted in Burns 58). 13. For a study of Schopenhauerean resignation in Une belle journée and A rebours, see Cooke. 14. In an 1888 article on Schopenhauer, Céard identifies both his lucidity about suffering and his refusal of cynicism in favor of compassion: “Oui, Schopenhauer croit au mal dominateur du monde, mais […] il n’a point la joie du mal, le plaisir de la calamité … C’est un pessimiste doux, et s’il ne recule pas devant les épouvantes de l’esprit et de la chair, c’est à la façon de ce grand chirurgien contemporain qui se relevait, les yeux en larmes, de la plaie opérée où son bistouri n’avait point tremblé” [“Yes, Schopenhauer believes in evil dominating the world, but […] he never takes joy in evil or pleasure in calamity … He is a gentle pessimist, and if he does not draw back before the frights of the mind and the flesh, it is in the manner of that great contemporary surgeon who stepped back with tears in his eyes from the wound where his scalpel had not at all trembled during the operation”] (quoted in Frazee 78). 15. As C.A.  Burns puts it, in Céard’s novels “l’amertume est nuancée de comédie […] ce qui adoucit la leçon navrante du récit, sans en diminuer la portée philosophique” [“the bitterness is nuanced with comedy […] which softens the heartbreaking lesson of the story without diminishing its philosophical scope”] (114). 16. I would claim that these characters’ use of imagination is a variant of, rather than simply being opposed to, what de Gaultier called bovarysme. For an opposing view, see Thomas, who claims that “Mme Duhamain and Trudon are not capable of true bovarysme. […] Rather, they are ordinary people, quite restricted in their outlook, who can be curious about new

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experience but who do not want it badly enough to create a dream world which embodies it” (335). 17. See, for instance, Joseph Kestner: “Ernestine Duhamain’s plight is more dire than she recognizes […]. She is in effect condemned not to death but […] to a life of resignation, compromise, and disillusionment” (355). William Thomas concurs: “Once the climactic moment has been reached at the end of the first part, the rest of the novel is a slow descent, not toward death, but toward a sort of living death, the boring daily reality represented at the very beginning of the novel” (333). 18. For a consideration of anti-intellectualism in this period as what we might also call anti-rationalism, an idealism with a tendency toward mysticism, see Citti. 19. On Wyzewa’s relationship to Schopenhauer’s ideas, see Opiela-Morozik 78–83. “Wyzewa transforme le pessimisme inspiré de Schopenhauer et revendiqué par les symbolistes en une joie intérieure que peut procurer l’acte de créer. […] Wyzewa interprète les concepts de Schopenhauer de façon à détourner l’essentiel de sa pensée” [“Wyzewa transforms pessimism inspired by Schopenhauer and claimed by the symbolists into an interior joy which the act of creating can procure” […] Wyzewa interprets Schopenhauer’s concepts in a way that alters the essential aspect of his thought”] (78–79). 20. For the most complete book-length study on Rod, see Michael Lerner, Edouard Rod. 21. Michael Lerner claims that critics were too eager to note Schopenhauer’s influence to the detriment of other important influences on Rod: “Schopenhauer and Wagner have been considered as the main influences incorporated in La Course à la Mort. This is, however, to neglect two other artistic interest of Rod at his time, which in fact complement the German sources: these are Baudelaire and Pre-Raphaelite art. Rod read the former’s Paradis Artificiels while in England and even later in Alsace wrote to Nadar: ‘je vis en compagnie de Baudelaire, où je découvre toujours de nouvelles merveilles’ [‘I live in the company of Baudelaire, where I always discover new marvels’]. […] If Baudelaire supplemented Rod’s interest in Schopenhauer and Wagner, the Pre-Raphaelites encouraged his love of the Ideal in pure Art” (Portrait 78) 22. Writing in 1890, in the preface to Les Trois coeurs, Rod indicates that he had originally envisioned La Course à la mort as a third-person narrative but decided on the first person because so many technical details were lacking in the narrative as he conceived it, including the hero’s name. “Je le regrettai plus tard, surtout après la publication du Sens de la vie, parce qu’une partie de la critique vit une confession personnelle là où, sans se priver de recourir moi-même comme « document », j’avais tenté de faire

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un livre d’une portée plus générale que ne le serait un journal intime” [“I regretted it later, especially after the publication of Le Sens de la vie, because some critics saw a personal confession where, without depriving myself of having recourse to myself as a “document,” I had attempted to make a book with a more general scope than a personal diary”] (15). 23. Like Céard, Rod was seeking alternative paths from the roman d’observation that found its most familiar expression in the naturalism of Emile Zola. As Michael Lerner indicates: “La Course à la Mort is according to the 1889 preface to Les Trois Cœurs Rod’s first attempt at a ‘roman exclusivement intérieur’ in accordance with his confessed preference for expérience rather than the observation of the Roman Expérimental and his criticism of the moral analysis of La Joie de Vivre” (Portrait 79–80). 24. Curiously, at one point the narrator claims that professors’ lifestyle is most conducive to happiness: “Les professeurs surtout me semblent heureux, leur vie étant une sorte de végétation intellectuelle, comme un arbre qui se développe sans changer et croît régulièrement, ils ajoutent chaque année quelque chose à leur acquit. Ils jouissent de ce qu’ils savent et de ce qu’ils enseignent, chacun dans son étroit domaine, trop absorbés dans leurs sciences respectives pour être secoués par d’irréalisables aspirations, ni pour sentir entrer dans leur chair l’aiguillon de l’impossible” [“The professors above all seem happy to me, their life being a sort of intellectual vegetation, like a tree that develops without changing and grows regularly, they add something every year to what they have. They enjoy what they know and what they teach, each in his own narrow domain, too absorbed in their respective disciplines to be shaken by unrealizable aspirations or to feel the sting of the impossible enter their flesh”] (237–238) 25. On some distinctions between Schopenhauer and Rod, see Michael Lerner: “They differ not in spirit but in detail: for Schopenhauer, […] Life resembles the consequence of a false step, such as the Fall in is suffering and its insatiability, and this is in itself a positive impetus towards Life’s aim, which is freedom from pain. But here any comparison ends. For Schopenhauer, it is, unlike for Rod, the blind will and not le Mal, which governs Life; hence the Good is conformity to the Will and not a mere conceptual illusion […]. In sum, the main distinction to be made between Rod and Schopenhauer is that Schopenhauer sets out an all-embracing ­metaphysics of Life based on the Will, whereas Rod’s narrator merely attempts to explain his skepticism from a contemporary point of view” (Portrait 85). 26. See Lerner on the death of Cécile at the end of the narrative: “Leur amour toujours gâté par le scepticisme iconoclaste du narrateur (et par la maladie de la jeune fille) est symbolique de l’état d’âme spirituel et moral de la France trop raffinée et décadente de la fin de siècle” [“Their love, always spoiled by the iconoclastic skepticism of the narrator (and by the sickness

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of the young girl) is symbolic of the spiritual and moral state of a fin-desiècle France that was too refined and decadent”] (“Introduction” xii). 27. For more on Rod and the Russian novelists, see Lerner “Introduction” xiv–xii. 28. In the twentieth century, Maurice Blanchot, commenting on Georges Bataille, put it this way: “L’expérience intérieure est la réponse qui attend l’homme, lorsqu’il a décidé de n’être que question. Cette décision exprime l’impossibilité d’être satisfait. […] S’il sait quelque chose, il sait que l’apaisement n’apaise pas et qu’il y a en lui une exigence à la mesure de laquelle rien ne s’offre en cette vie. Aller au-delà, au-delà de ce qu’il désire, de ce qu’il connaît, de ce qu’il est, c’est ce qu’il trouve au fond de tout désir, de toute connaissance et de son être. S’il s’arrête, c’est dans le malaise du mensonge et pour avoir fait de sa fatigue une vérité” (Faux pas 47–48) [“Inner experience is the answer that awaits a man, when he has decided to be nothing but question. This decision expresses the impossibility of being satisfied. […] If he knows something, he knows that appeasement does not appease and that there is a demand in him that nothing in this life answers. To go beyond, beyond what he desires, what he knows, what he is—that is what he finds at the bottom of every desire, of every knowing, and of his own being. If he stops, it is in the disquiet of the lie, and because he has made his exhaustion into truth” (Faux pas tr. 37–38)]. 29. A critic, André Bellesort, noted in the Journal des débats of May 5, 1900 the way in which he arranges his characters in situations that force readers to evaluate what they themselves would do in a particular situation: “Il a une façon de présenter son héros qui équivaut à nous dire : « Si j’étais lui, que ferais-je? » Et nous cherchons avec lui” [“He has a way of presenting his hero that is equivalent to saying: if I were he, what would I do?”] (qtd in Roz 55) 30. Firmin Roz notes the general impossibility of faith and love for Rod’s characters and situates that as a defining characteristic of his pessimism: they are “déchirés par la lutte de leur noblesse intime et de leur intime misère. L’amour les sauverait peut-être. Mais l’amour, le véritable amour, celui qui triomphe de tout, celui qui s’oublie, celui qui se donne, cet amour leur est impossible. L’impuissance d’aimer n’est qu’une forme de l’impuissance d’agir. […] M. Rod est ainsi le romancier du pessimisme, comme Léopardi en est le poète et Schopenhauer le philosophe” [“torn by the struggle of their intimate nobility and their intimate misery. Love would save them perhaps. But love, true love, the one that conquers all, that forgets itself, that gives itself, that love is impossible for them. The incapacity to love is only a form of the incapacity to act. […] M. Rod is thus the novelist of pessimism, as Leopardi is its poet and Schopenhauer its philosopher”] (23) 31. Edouard Rod was a friend to, and supporter of, the young Proust, as Michael Lerner notes: “Proust greatly appreciated Rod’s work and told the

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author so. Rod for his part must have been one of the first admirers of Proust’s talent, for when a paragraph by Rod appeared on Les Plaisirs et les Jours in Le Gaulois—in which Rod praised the originality and maturity of this work of a new La Bruyère who ‘entre dans la carrière des lettres par un chemin fleuri de roses’ [‘is entering in the career of letters by a way paved with roses’]. The young novelist was delighted and showed it to his mother. It had in fact been Rod whom Proust had asked to revise one of the volume’s stories, “La Mort de Baldassare Silvande.” In return for Rod’s kindness, his young ‘admirateur respectueux’ had invited him to take tea with him and dine at the Ritz. (Portrait 40) 32. I have explored the relationship between what Proust’s novel says and what it does in Proust, Music, and Meaning 117–166. 33. Rod himself found himself tempted but not ultimately seduced by the solution of Christianity. See, for instance, his comments in a letter to friend Nancy Vuille in November 1898: “Plus j’avance plus il me semble que la sagesse est de renoncer entièrement au bonheur personnel. Vous voyez, c’est l’idée de sacrifice qui me ramène au Christianisme : après en avoir été longtemps offusqué, voici qu’elle m’apparaît de nouveau comme étant la norme la plus sûre et la meilleure” [“The more I go on, the more it seems to me that wisdom is entirely renouncing personal happiness. You see, it is the idea of sacrifice that brings me back to Christianity: after having long been obfuscated, it now appears to me anew as being the most sure and best norm”] (Qtd in Portrait 160).

Works Cited Acquisto, Joseph. Proust, Music, and Meaning. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Baguley, David. “A Harmless Liaison: On Céard’s Une belle journée.” Nineteenth-­ Century French Studies 18: 3–4 (Spring-Summer 1990), 482–91. Blanchot, Maurice. Faux pas. Gallimard, 1943. ———. Faux pas. Tr. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford UP, 2001. Burns, C.A. Henry Céard et le naturalisme. John Goodman & Sons, 1982. Cazalis, Henri. Le Livre du néant. Alphonse Lemerre, 1872. Céard, Henry, Une belle journée. Charpentier, 1881. Citti, Pierre. La Mésintelligence : Essais d’histoire de l’intelligence française du symbolisme à 1914. Editions des Cahiers intempestifs, 2000. Cooke, Roderick. “Le Schopenhauer de Huysmans et Céard : Deux avatars littéraires de la résignation.” Studi Francesi 63.1 (2019), 56–68. Frazee, Ronald. Henry Céard: Idéaliste détrompé. U of Toronto P, 1963. Huysmans, Joris-Karl. A rebours. Flammarion, 1978. Jacquod, Valérie Michelet. Introduction in Teodor de Wyzewa, Valbert ou les Récits d’un jeune homme (Classiques Garnier, 2009), 7–72.

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Janaway, Christopher. “Schopenhauer’s Christian Perspectives” in Sandra Shapshay, ed., The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 351–372. Kestner, Joseph. “Hugo, Céard, and the Title of Une belle journée.” Nineteenth-­ Century French Studies 11: 3–4 (Spring-Summer 1983), 354–356. Kivy, Peter. “On the Banality of Literary Truths.” Philosophic Exchange 28 (1998), 17–27. Lerner, Michael. Edouard Rod: A Portrait of the Novelist and His Times. Mouton, 1975. ———. “Introduction” in Edouard Rod, Le Sens de la vie (Slatkine Reprints, 1973), vii–xxxii. Maupassant, Guy de. Contes et nouvelles. Gallimard, 1974. Opiela-Mrozik, Anna. “Teodor Wyzewa face à ses maîtres.” Quêtes littéraires 9 (2019), 77–89. Rod, Edouard. La Course à la mort. 4e édition. Perrin et Cie, 1891. ———. Le Sens de la vie. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1973. Reprint of Paris 1889 edition. ———. Les trois cœurs. Perrin et Compagnie, 1890. Roz, Firmin. Edouard Rod. E. Sansot et Compagnie, 1906. Sachs, Murray. “The Esthetics of Naturalism: Henry Céard’s Une Belle Journée. Esprit Créateur 4: 2 (Summer 1964), 76-83. Salem, Jean. « Maupassant et Schopenhauer » in Christian Bonnet et Jean Salem, eds. La raison dévoilée : Etudes schopenhaueriennes (Vrin, 2005), 175–191. Schiano-Bennis, Sandrine. La Renaissance de l’idéalisme à la fin du XIXe siècle. Honoré Champion, 1999. Thomas, William W. “Henry Céard’s Une belle journée: Reduction and the Novel.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 5:3–4 (Spring-Summer 1977), 328–340. Verne, Jules. L’Eternel Adam. Editions Mille et une nuits, 2001. Wyzewa, Teodor de. “Le Pessimisme de Richard Wagner” in La Revue Wagnérienne (8 juillet 1885), 167–170. ———. Valbert ou les Récits d’un jeune homme. Ed. Valérie Michelet Jacquod. Classiques Garnier, 2009.

CHAPTER 5

Pessimism and the Poetic Imagination

When first considering pessimism and poetry together, one may well be tempted to think in terms of melancholy, with stereotyped images of a poet bemoaning his or her fate or dwelling in sadness. I hope to complicate that picture by showing that, far from a mere emotive vehicle for an especially sentimental poetic subject, poetry inspired by pessimism in the later nineteenth century moves far from subjective impressions and uses poetry to explore a problem of knowledge in affective terms. Like the essayists and novelists we have considered, poets also wrestle with issues of skepticism and how best to live in a world lacking harmony and order. They do so in many cases by going beyond individual subjectivity to what we might call a pessimistic cosmology, representing the end of the world in many of their poems. By doing so, they open up an imaginative space that functions like that Archimedean point I have claimed it is impossible to establish otherwise in considerations of pessimism. And indeed, such an approach is consonant with the way Schopenhauer himself saw poetry, as “the art of bringing into play the power of imagination through words” (WWR2 424). By bringing into poetic reality the end of the world not as an apocalyptic scene but as a peaceful disappearance that brings with it the end of suffering, these poets create a powerful “as if” that reveals the ultimate impermanence of the otherwise never-ending cycle of suffering and injustice.1 Rather than remaining trapped in the self, these poems allow for

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Acquisto, Living Well with Pessimism in Nineteenth-Century France, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61014-2_5

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a conscious self-reflexivity based on the two-in-one of the split self that allows for a dynamic relationship to the world that the self inhabits. In this chapter I demonstrate, through a reading of seven poets, the range of ways in which lyric poetry engages with and advances the conversation about pessimism’s potential at the border between literature and thought. Through an analysis of Louise Ackermann, I argue that poetry has the potential to give form to a dual disorientation within pessimism, epistemological and affective. Ackermann illustrates the suffering that accompanies the pursuit of knowledge, both on account of the painful lack that results from an awareness of ignorance and the realization of human insignificance in the world in light of developed scientific understanding of the universe and humans’ diminished place in it. Ackermann’s wish for human annihilation contrasts with Georges Rodenbach’s appeal for a way out of the suffering that Ackermann underscores via an embrace of Christianity. Such an approach, however, cancels the dialogue inherent in pessimism and favors, as I showed in Chap. 4, a tidy but unsatisfactory resolution to the issues that pessimism raises. By contrast, the poems of Henry Céard engage neither hope nor despair but instead a non-hope, reframing that question by concentrating on the affective response of sadness and regret that is the result of both knowledge and ignorance. Such suffering could only find its end with the end of the world, and several of the poets I consider, beginning with Henri Cazalis, use poetry to create an imaginative space that allows us to perceive the otherwise unperceivable experience of the annihilation of the human species. The poetry of Leconte de Lisle balances lucidity about the human predicament with the consolation of an imagined end, and allows temporary access to the elusive Archimedean point by which we may come to see that suffering is ultimately temporary. His poetry opens up imaginative possibilities while also demonstrating the limits of the imagination in terms of allowing us to perceive a humanity beyond humanity, which clearly remains impossible beyond the domain of imaginative fiction. His poetry, like that of Jules Laforgue, sometimes allows for laughter in the face of the human drama, not in a callous way but as a form of relief at the temporary nature of suffering. The ability to laugh at misery in Laforgue stems, I argue, from his construction of the split self, which allows for an ironic perspective that allows for the simultaneity of tears and laughter rather than a linear progression from one to the other. His lyric vision underscores the ambiguity of the worlds he portrays, implicitly responding to Ackermann in terms of the insignificance of humanity and the centrality of our

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affective response to an existence that can be perceived, not alternatively but simultaneously, as tragedy and farce. The split self is taken to violent extremes in Emile Verhaeren, where self-torture is figured as a dialogue with the self in ways that I argue are consonant with the dialogical definition of thought in Hannah Arendt that I have identified as central to the approach of pessimism as a creatively destructive mindset, which refuses the stasis of optimism but guards against overly zealous and potentially reactionary action in the world. The kind of lyric subjectivity developed by Laforgue and Verhaeren does not foreclose action in the world, but it puts in place appropriate limits on that action and our expectations of it. One of the most significant poetic corpuses to engage with the consequences of pessimism is that of Louise Ackermann, born Victorine Choquet (1813–1890).2 Her Poésies philosophiques [Philosophical Poems] (1874) address the dual epistemological and affective question of disorientation in the face of the discredited notion of God and the rise of empirical science. As Marc Citoleux notes, “l’irréligion de Mme Ackermann fut plus consistante que son pessimisme” [“the irreligion of Madame Ackermann was more consistent than her pessimism”] (180). Elme-Marie Caro affirms in an 1874 article that played a role in enlarging her readership (Citoleux 148) that “assurément c’est de la poésie troublante et troublée; mais c’est de la poésie. Rien de semblable n’avait été entendu dans ce siècle en France; je veux dire rien de plus désespéré” (“La Poésie philosophique”) [“assuredly this is troubling and troubled poetry; but it is poetry. Nothing similar had been heard in this century in France; I mean nothing more despairing”]. Edouard Schuré echoes this assessment in the early twentieth century: “Mme Ackermann a exprimé dans sa poésie avec une force unique un moment capital de la pensée au XIXe siècle, je veux dire son désespoir absolu entre la perte de la foi traditionnelle et l’étouffante doctrine du positivisme” [“Madame Ackermann has expressed in her poetry, with a unique strength, a capital moment of thought in the nineteenth century, I mean her absolute despair between the loss of traditional faith and the suffocating doctrine of positivism”] (312).3 Stemming in part from her reading of Charles Darwin, her view of humanity considered it “le héros d’un drame lamentable qui se joue dans un coin perdu de l’univers […] avec le néant pour dénouement” [“the hero of a lamentable drama that played out in a lost corner of the universe”] (Ackermann Œuvres  xxi–xxii). Her poems encourage readers to confront the role of women specifically, as she negotiates between speaking specifically as a woman and speaking in a more universalizing sense as a human subject.

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Her pessimism, while informed by lived experience, is above all intellectual, formed by her wide reading in thinkers such as Darwin, Hegel, and Schopenhauer; Marc Citoleux calls it “un pessimisme de bibliothèque” [“a pessimism of the library”] (21) that eschews the more personal pessimism of someone such as Leopardi in favor of more abstract formulations of a pessimism of the mind more so than of the heart. Ackermann herself identifies her work as providing a synthesis of those she has read: “Ce qu’il y a de certain c’est que ce que j’ai écrit n’est ni très personnel, ni très neuf. Bien d’autres ont déjà pensé tout cela, sinon exprimé. Mon seul mérite, c’est d’avoir extrêmement soigné la forme que j’ai donnée à des idées qui courent vaguement dans les esprits cultivés” [“What is certain is that what I have written is neither very personal, nor very new. Many others have already thought all of that, even if they haven’t expressed it. My only merit is to have taken extreme care with the form that I gave ideas that run vaguely in cultivated minds”].4 In the first poem of the collection, “Mon Livre” [“My Book”], she claims her right to full participation in the new paths opened by Truth: Comment ? la Liberté déchaîne ses colères ; Partout, contre l’effort des erreurs séculaires, La Vérité combat pour s’ouvrir un chemin ; Et je ne prendrais pas parti dans ce grand drame ? Quoi ! ce cœur qui bat là, pour être un cœur de femme,     En est-il un cœur humain ? Est-ce ma faute à moi si dans ces jours de fièvre D’ardentes questions se pressent sur ma lèvre ? Si votre Dieu surtout m’inspire des soupçons ? Si la Nature aussi prend des teintes funèbres, Et si j’ai de mon temps, le long de mes vertèbres,      Senti courir tous les frissons ? (Œuvres 70) [What? Liberty unleashes its anger; Everywhere, against the effort of secular errors, Truth fights to open itself a way; And I would not take part in this great drama? What? This heart which beats here, even though it is a woman’s heart, Is it a human heart?

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Is it my fault if in these days of fever Ardent questions come hurrying to my lips? If your God especially makes me suspicious? If Nature also is taking on funereal shades, And if I have in my time, all along my back, Felt shivers running through?]

Knowledge brings not hope and satisfaction but rather suffering, and Ackermann’s liminal poem ends on a desire for non-existence that we have seen, beginning with Schopenhauer himself, as a common theme resulting from reflection on the suffering of lucid knowledge: […] la Souffrance a vaincu. Dans un sommeil sans fin, ô puissance éternelle ! Laisse-nous oublier que nous avons vécu. (79)5 [[…] Suffering has vanquished. In an endless slumber, oh eternal power! Let us forget that we have lived.]

This wish is not her ending point but her point of departure. Positioning this wish for non-being at the head of her collection reinforces the idea that literary production in the wake of pessimism is an attempt to answer the demands of this desire for annihilation by addressing the consequences of its impossibility. If it is impossible for an existing subject to know the pleasure of annihilation precisely because at that point there would be no subjectivity present to perceive it, the question becomes how to respond and carry on in the face of that impossibility. Ackermann often explores participation in science as part of a structure of desiring to know in a broad sense. If God as ultimate source of knowledge is a kind of horizon that always withdraws from grasp, science has the potential to bring that horizon closer and provide answers. Those empirical answers, however, bring us to a different set of questions entirely, rather than closing down questioning. The new questions raised by empirical scientific discovery have the potential to become more troubling than the previously unanswered questions that are the object of scientific inquiry, precisely because they extend past the bounds of questions to which empirical research can provide satisfactory answers, or indeed any answer at all. Ackermann’s poetry illustrates the extent to which the affective and epistemological are intertwined when it comes to questions raised

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by pessimism, as the new questions of meaning that pessimism forces us to consider cannot be separated from the variety of potential reactions to those questions and answers. Given that emotional quietism might be desirable but impossible, it becomes the task of writing on pessimism to evaluate the way affective reactions to its conclusions feed one’s approach to the epistemological considerations. As a domain that in the earlier nineteenth century had privileged affective response, lyric poetry brings that potential anguish or distress to the forefront in a way that still foregrounds the epistemological. Poems are also freer than prose narratives in terms of the way they do not depend to the same extent on linear progression. As I have demonstrated, poems can invite circularity in ways that prose narratives often resist, and poems’ placement in volumes encourages a kind of simultaneous double reading of a poem on its own terms and in relation either to the forward-driving momentum of the volume or to other poems in the volume with which it resonates. Ackermann’s emphasis on the void opened by science allows for a challenge to the standard positivist narrative in the period whereby scientific discovery is linked to progress and thus to optimism. Rather than opposing science to metaphysics, Ackermann stages a drama whereby science participates fully in structures of desire that generate unfulfillment, raising what might otherwise be a personal struggle with desire to a cultural level that reinfuses a metaphysical perspective into the development of science in terms of its effect on the way human beings assign meaning to their thought and action in the world. She writes in the poem “Le Positivisme”: Il s’ouvre par delà toute science humaine Un vide dont la Foi fut prompte à s’emparer. De cet abîme obscur elle a fait son domaine ; En s’y précipitant elle a cru l’éclairer. Eh bien ! nous t’expulsons de tes divins royaumes, […] Nous fermons l’Inconnu. […] L’homme déjà se trouble et vainqueur, éperdu, Il se sent ruiné par sa propre conquête : En te dépossédant nous avons tout perdu. Nous restons sans espoir, sans recours, sans asile, Tandis qu’obstinément le Désir qu’on exile Revient errer autour du gouffre défendu. (91–92) [Beyond all human science there is opening up A void which Faith was prompt to grab.

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It made this obscure abyss its domain; By hurrying into it, it thought it would illuminate it. Well! We are throwing you out of your divine kingdoms, […]     We are closing the Unknown. […] Man is already troubled and, conquering, lost, He feels ruined by his own conquest: In dispossessing you we have lost everything. We remain without hope, without recourse, without asylum, While the Desire that we exile Stubbornly wanders around the forbidden abyss.]

The poem refuses a linear view of progress by framing scientific inquiry as having no effect on an ever-persistent desire that neither faith nor science is able to tame and that the poem identifies as a potentially endless source of suffering that would be canceled only by death. That death, however, can only be perceived as a kind of “as if,” since death brings with it the end of the subject who had longed for it. The unfillable “gouffre” in the poem stands in for the nothingness that would cancel desire.6 The void in the poem, as an empty space, by definition becomes filled as soon as we “gaze” on it in the poem, that is, as soon as we represent it in literature, at which point it becomes a “something,” a figure of the impossible negation of perception. What we perceive when encountering the void in the poem is precisely that impossible object of desire, transformed into some sort of conceptual or imaginative reality by our act of encountering it in the poem and attempting to assign meaning to it. There is, then, no such thing as unrepresented and unrepresentable nothingness, except as something already infused with meaning. The void as object of desire is already something more than the void in its very status as object, for at least as long as we contemplate the void and assign meaning to it in a poem. Poetry thus assigns itself an impossible task in the very fact of inscribing figures of nothingness into literary texts, and it compels readers to come to terms with the impossibility of nothingness and to forge meaning from that impossibility, which is, as I hope to have demonstrated, one of pessimism’s main tasks in both its philosophical and literary manifestations. The long poem “Pascal” presents a strong indictment of that philosopher’s religious faith and evokes once again the potentially horrific world of nature that science is poised to reveal:7

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A notre appel ardent, s’empressant d’accourir, La Science nous ouvre une route nouvelle, Et du voile jeté sur la face éternelle Sa main lève les plis. Qu’allons-nous découvrir ? Peut-être, au lieu d’un père aimant sa créature, Une marâtre aveugle et sourde, la Nature, Et dans son vaste sein, perdu mais enchaîné, L’Homme qui souffre et meurt, esclave abandonné, Si tel est notre sort, eh bien ! qu’il s’accomplisse ! Sachons d’abord … après ce n’est rien d’obéir. Délivrés d’ignorer, cet horrible supplice, Nous trouverons en nous la force de subir. (152) [At our ardent call, hurrying to come, Science opens for us a new route, And from the veil thrown over the eternal face Its hand lifts up the folds. What are we going to discover? Maybe, rather than a father loving his creature, A blind and deaf evil stepmother, Nature, And in her large breast, lost but chained, Man who suffers and dies, abandoned slave, If such is our destiny, well! Let it be accomplished! Let us know first … after, it is nothing to obey. Delivered from not knowing, that horrible torture, We will find in us the strength to submit ourselves.]

Intriguingly, Ackermann goes on to align resignation with religion and to address part of the poem directly to it in an apostrophe: O Résignation ! religion dernière, Seul culte que doit l’homme à l’ordre universel, […] Désapprends-lui les vœux et la plainte inutile ; Se taire et renoncer, c’est se sanctifier. Hélas ! tant que la Foi l’aveugle et le mutile, Il ne peut que trembler, gémir et supplier ; L’être faible devient alors un être lâche. Redonne-lui du cœur, et qu’il fasse sa tâche Bravement, jusqu’au bout, sous les yeux du destin. A la place où trônait le caprice divin Quand il ne verra plus que des lois souveraines, Qu’il cesse d’adorer et de se prosterner, Et sache que devant ces inflexibles reines, Pour tout geste en passant, il n’a qu’à s’incliner. (152–153)

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[O Resignation! Last religion, Only devotion that man owes to the universal order, […] Make him unlearn useless complaints and wishes; To keep quiet and to renounce is to sanctify oneself. Alas! As long as Faith blinds and mutilates him, He can only tremble, groan, and beg; The weak being then becomes a cowardly being. Give him back some heart, and let him accomplish his task Bravely, to the end, under the watchful eyes of destiny. Where divine caprice reigned on its throne When he sees only sovereign laws, Let him cease adoring and prostrating himself, And let him know that before these inflexible queens, As his only gesture in passing, he has only to bow.]

Ackermann is unique among the pessimists we have been considering in identifying resignation specifically as a religion, as opposed to a replacement for Christian hope.8 By doing so, she positions resignation explicitly as an impossible regulatory ideal, a fiction that can guide our thoughts, actions, and interpretations of the world but is destined to be impossible to achieve fully. Such “sanctification” that would be found through “keeping quiet and renouncing” is just as unattainable, according to her, as the more traditional Christian redemption. The poet further complicates the conceptual terrain here by calling resignation a religion but then, by addressing a prayer (or perhaps a simple request) to it, making it akin not to a religion but to a god. Such a move is not to be understood literally as an appeal to an abstract concept as if it were a personified divinity, but rather the structure of the poetic fiction here invites us to see resignation, as we would a god, as on one hand approachable via a call but also totally other and inaccessible. What might be seen as an entirely human response to suffering becomes equated with a supernatural ideal that is impossible to attain, but whose very inaccessibility provides the material from which this poem is born to give voice, shape, and meaning to that longing and concomitant impossibility. Resignation cannot, then, be the “end of the story,” so to speak, on account of its impossibility. Whereas Schopenhauer ends his work with a call to adopt it, Ackermann’s poem implicitly identifies the impossibility of coming to rest on a note of resignation despite one’s affirmation of its benefits. That very impossibility, however, becomes the motor of poetry, in a way akin to the fact that the impossible ideal that poetry presents for

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itself in the later nineteenth century, in terms of finding or crafting a perfectly harmonious and “pure” poetic language, itself becomes the motor of poetry’s fertile but futile attempts to bridge an impossible gap.9 Ackermann’s poetics of resignation encourages us to ask what role poetry can have in the wake of the refusal of transcendence. By bringing the object of our prayer and supplication “down to earth,” so to speak, to the level of an abstract human conception of resignation rather than a transcendent divinity, the poem challenges the reader to find meaning in the impossible but recommendable pursuit of resignation and nothingness, and to lean on poetry as a vehicle for making meaning from the impossible void. The passage I’ve been discussing is the end of the penultimate section of “Pascal.”10 The affirmation of resignation thus does not close the poem; the last section turns to a denunciation of God, almost as if enacting the impossibility of the resignation that the poet had called for in the preceding section. If Faith had been portrayed there as the cause of humanity’s persistent “trembling, groaning, and begging,” and thus a block to resignation, in the final section it is the impetus to negate the Christian God that takes the place of what would presumably be the silence of resignation: Et Non par dessus-tout au Sacrificateur ! Qu’importe qu’il soit Dieu si son œuvre est impie ? Quoi ! c’est son propre fils qu’il a crucifié ? Il pouvait pardonner, mais il veut qu’on expie ; Il immole, et cela s’appelle avoir pitié ! Pascal, à ce bourreau, tu disais : “Mon Père”. […] Aurais-tu tant gémi si tu n’avais douté ? Pour avoir reculé devant ce mot : J’ignore, Dans quel gouffre d’erreurs tu t’es précipité ! Nous, nous restons au bord. Aucune perspective, Soit Enfer, soit Néant, ne fait pâlir nos fronts, Et s’il faut accepter ta sombre alternative, Croire ou désespérer, nous désespérerons. (156–157) [And No above all to the Sacrificer! What does it matter if he be God if his work is impious? What! It is his own son whom he crucified? He could pardon, but he wants us to atone; He immolates, and it is called having pity!

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Pascal, to this torturer, you said, “My Father”. […] Would you have groaned so much if you had not doubted? For having stepped back before this word: I do not know, Into what abyss of errors you rushed! As for us, we remained at the edge. No perspective, Neither Hell, nor Nothingness, made our faces grow pale. And if we must accept your somber alternative, To believe or to despair, We will despair.]

The poet here embraces ignorance (in the neutral sense of not knowing) as a courageous act when the alternative is a harmful religious faith. But if resignation cannot be an ending point, either conceptually or literarily, neither can the despair that is represented as a viable possibility. The end of the poem extends its imaginative possibilities by portraying a fictional scene, set in the future, whereby an exasperated God decides to put an end to the earth and the human race, a move that the poet finds comforting precisely because it will bring about the desired annihilation. Nous entrecouperons nos râles de blasphèmes, Non sans désir secret d’exciter sa fureur. Qui sait ? nous trouverons peut-être quelque injure Qui l’irrite à ce point que, d’un bras forcené, Il arrache des cieux notre planète obscure, Et brise en mille éclats ce globe infortuné. Notre audace du moins vous sauverait de naître, Vous qui dormez encore au fond de l’avenir, Et nous triompherions d’avoir, en cessant d’être, Avec l’Humanité forcé Dieu d’en finir. Ah ! quelle immense joie après tant de souffrance ! A travers les débris, par-dessus les charniers, Pouvoir enfin jeter ce cri de délivrance : “Plus d’hommes sous le ciel, nous sommes les derniers !” (158) [We will punctuate our groans with blasphemies, Not without a secret desire to excite his fury. Who knows? Maybe we will find some insult That irritates him to the point where, with a frenzied arm, He will tear out from the skies our obscure planet, And break into a thousand pieces this unfortunate globe. Our daring would at least save you from being born, You who are still sleeping in the depth of the future, And we would triumph, by ceasing to be,

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In having forced God to be done with Humanity. Ah! What immense joy after so much suffering! Through the debris, above the mass graves, To be able at last to launch this cry of deliverance: “No more men under the sky, we are the last!”]

The scene is remarkable for its representation of human annihilation by an angry God as a triumph of, and advantage for, humanity. In the face of impossible resignation, the poem ends here with the pleasure of a fictional, imagined annihilation. The comforting illusion of a benevolent God and an afterlife is replaced by an equally comforting illusion of an angry God, in whom the poet has already indicated she refuses to believe, finally willing to cancel existence. The illusion is comforting on one hand, but on the other, by virtue of casting this entire scene as a fiction projected into the future, the poet also exposes comfort as illusion, as stemming from fiction, but perhaps none the less effective in terms of the affect generated by reading the poem. The destruction of the planet and all its inhabitants is, at least in Ackermann’s time if not our own, an unlikely scenario, but the moment of a beloved’s death is, in Ackermann, a time to reaffirm the rejection of hope. In “Paroles d’un amant” [“Words of a Lover”], the poetic subject characterizes that moment in the last three stanzas of the poem: C’est une volupté, mais terrible et sublime, De jeter dans le vide un regard éperdu, Et l’on s’étreint plus fort lorsque sur un abîme     On se voit suspendu. Quand la Mort serait là, quand l’attache invisible Soudain se délierait qui nous retient encor, Et quand je sentirais dans une angoisse horrible    M’échapper mon trésor, Je ne faiblirais pas. Fort de ma douleur même, Tout entier à l’adieu qui va nous séparer, J’aurais assez d’amour en cet instant suprême     Pour ne rien espérer. (108) [It is a voluptuous pleasure, but a terrible and sublime one, To cast a lost glance into the void And we embrace each other more tightly when over an abyss     We see ourselves suspended.

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When Death would be there, when the invisible cord That still attaches us would suddenly come loose, And when I would feel in a horrible anguish     My treasure escaping me, I would not grow weak. Strong from my very pain, Given over entirely to the final goodbye that is going to separate us, I would have enough love in that supreme instant     To hope for nothing.]

The opposite of hope here is not despair but rather non-hope, an acceptance of death that shields one from despair by leading to the courage to abandon the disappointment that hope risks engendering.11 In the poem “De la lumière !” [“Light!”] the poet gives voice to suffering stemming from not being able to see the invisible: Rien ne le [l’homme] guérira du mal qui le possède ; Dans son âme et son sang il est enraciné, Et le rêve divin de la lumière obsède     A jamais cet aveugle-né. Qu’on ne lui parle pas de quitter sa torture. S’il en souffre, il en vit ; c’est là son élément ; Et vous n’obtiendrez pas de cette créature     Qu’elle renonce à son tourment. De la lumière donc ! bien que ce mot n’exprime Qu’un désir sans espoir qui va s’exaspérant. A force d’être en vain poussé, ce cri sublime     Devient de plus en plus navrant. Et, quand il s’éteindra, le vieux Soleil lui-même Frissonnera d’horreur dans son obscurité, En l’entendant sortir, comme un adieu suprême,     Des lèvres de l’Humanité. (137–138) [Nothing will heal [man] from the sickness that owns him; In his soul and his blood he is rooted, And the divine dream of light forever obsesses     This man born blind. Do not talk to him of leaving behind his torture. If he suffers from it, he also lives off it; it is his element; And you will not obtain from this creature     That it would renounce its torment.

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Light, then! Even though this word expresses Only a desire without hope that goes on exasperating itself. From being uttered in vain, this sublime cry     Becomes more and more heartbreaking. And, when it is extinguished, the old Sun itself Will shudder with horror in its darkness, Hearing [the cry] coming out, like a supreme final goodbye,     From the lips of Humanity.]

The poem both calls for light and inscribes the impossibility of seeing the call fulfilled. It is, we might say, productive of a different kind of lucidity than the illumination it calls for insofar as it marks the suffering that comes not from darkness but from the double impossibility of letting go of the need for enlightenment and of any reduction in suffering that would come from that enlightenment. Paradoxically, the poem sheds light on the nature of the desire for light, in a way that reaffirms the necessity of suffering even while it changes our perspective on its source so that we are able to see it as stemming from the inability of enlightenment to satisfy us as opposed to, or in addition to, the suffering provoked by the darkness of unenlightenment. The final poem of Poésies philosophiques is a single quatrain entitled “J’ignore !” [“I do not know!”]: J’ignore ! Un mot, le seul par lequel je réponde Aux questions sans fin de mon esprit déçu ; Aussi quand je me plains en partant de ce monde, C’est moins d’avoir souffert que de n’avoir rien su. (183)12 [I do not know! One word, the only one I use to answer The endless questions of my disappointed mind; Thus when I complain upon leaving this world, It is less from having suffered than from having known nothing.]

The close syntactical proximity of “souffert” and “n’avoir rien su” in the final line might lead us to see ignorance as the source of suffering, but the poem posits no relation between the two, offering instead a comparison whereby the suffering is less of a source of complaint than the ignorance, presumably because of the poet’s conviction that suffering is a necessary and incorrigible aspect of human existence that is best met with the kind of acceptance that we saw displayed in “Paroles d’un amant,” where the

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poetic subject affirms that in the face of the death of a lover “I would not grow weak.” In Ackermann’s work, both knowledge and ignorance are sources of negative affect: the knowledge that positivistic science unveils has the potential to lead toward despair, but ignorance is represented as also being a source of lament. As Caro noted in his review of Poésies philosophiques, “Pour la première fois on sent le contre-coup direct des nouveaux systèmes dans l’imagination d’un poète. Il scrute les problèmes, non dans l’espérance de les résoudre, mais pour montrer aux yeux de la raison éclairée qu’ils ne peuvent pas être résolus” [“For the first time we feel the direct counterstrike of the new systems in the imagination of the poet. It scrutinizes problems, not in the hope of resolving them, but to show to the eyes of illumined reason that they cannot be resolved”]. “J’ignore!” serves as more of an overture than a conclusion, since it contrasts with the focus throughout much of the collection on knowing rather than unknowing. It unsettles even the stable conclusion one might have drawn about the way in which scientific knowledge coupled with the untenability of religious faith threatens meaninglessness. The answers give rise to infinitely more questions, as “J’ignore!” suggests, because the disappointed subject seeks to understand that very disappointment, a condition that leads not so much to suffering as to the unsettledness of perpetual questioning, the impossibility of conclusion that I have been associating with pessimism. This single-stanza poem, the shortest of the collection, which has almost the character of a fragment, reinforces the non-definitive aspect of the conclusion and the extent to which it is impossible to come to rest even in stoic resignation to suffering or revolt against that suffering. In her Journal, Ackermann notes: “J’aime l’unité dans la vie, la ligne droite” [“I like unity in life, the straight line”] (537). The editor of this posthumously published journal, Marc Citoleux, indicates in a note that this idea is a “conception capitale, pour laquelle Mme Ackermann mutila sa pensée” [“capital conception, for which Madame Ackermann mutilated her thought”] (537, n.24). He notes in the introductory comments to the Journal that Ackermann had “deux pessimismes, l’un du coeur, l’autre de l’esprit” [“two pessimisms, one of the heart, the other of the mind”] and that “afin de donner à sa vie et à son œuvre une unité factice, elle affectait d’être uniquement une cérébrale” [“in order to give to her life and to her work a false unity, she affected to be only a cerebral person”] (524). According to Citoleux, the journal that Ackermann declined to publish in her lifetime reveals a fuller personality, which gives voice to both the intellectual and emotional valence of her pessimism. Her poetry, however,

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reveals a tension between the desire for “unity in life, the straight line” and the impossibility of such linear conceptions of thought. It is, paradoxically perhaps, that circular nature of Ackermann’s poetic vision, whereby ignorance yields to knowledge that yields to greater consciousness of ignorance, which allows for the forward movement within the poetry itself as it gives voice to those cycles and maps them on to the poetic subject’s affective response to these epistemological questions. “J’ignore!” is, like the collection more broadly, complete and incomplete when it comes to coming to terms with the suffering involved in the quest to understand experience. Belgian poet Georges Rodenbach’s book of verse Les Tristesses [Sorrows] (1879) consists of some narrative poems and some of a more personal nature, notably about the death of his mother and sister. It also includes a poem, “L’Infini” [“The Infinite”], dedicated to Ackermann that is a response to her work.13 In it he sums up his era’s dismissal of Christian faith and criticizes the extremes to which Ackermann’s pessimism lead her: Dans ce siècle sceptique où s’éteint la croyance, L’homme, désabusé des rêves immortels, Est allé disséquer, au nom de la science Le Christ qui nous ouvrait ses bras sur les autels. On a maudit le don fatal de l’existence, Si fatal que l’enfant pleure en voyant le jour, Comme s’il pressentait à travers la distance Les désenchantements qui viendront tour à tour. […] On a nié l’Amour comme on niait la Vie, Et dans le pessimisme endurcissant les cœurs, On a fermé la voie où la vertu convie Les natures d’élite aux dévoûments vainqueurs !… Mais on démolit tout sans savoir reconstruire, Et ta désespérance à tel point s’agrandit Que s’il fallait t’en croire, il faudrait le détruire Ce triste genre haï qui souffre et qui maudit. (113–114) [In this skeptical century where belief is going out, Man, disillusioned about immoral dreams, Has gone to dissect, in the name of science Christ who opened his arms on the altars.

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We cursed the fatal gift of existence, So fatal that the child cries on seeing the day, As if he had a presentiment through the distance About the disenchantments that would come one by one. […] We denied Love as we denied Life, And in the pessimism that hardened hearts, We closed the way where virtue invites Elite natures with conquering devotions!… But we demolished everything without knowing how to rebuild, And your despairing grows to such a point That it was necessary to believe you, it would be necessary to destroy That sad hatred type that suffers and curses.]

Rodenbach’s critique is that Ackermann’s destruction is not creative, that there is nothing to take the place of all that is lost when we deny all that had justified life as worth living. He announces a refusal of that negation and a simple reaffirmation of Christian faith: Eh bien, non ! je veux croire et prier et me taire ; Dieu m’a mis son image au cœur en me créant, Et quel que soit le deuil, quel que soit le mystère, Avec elle je veux me sauver du néant !… […] Oui, je crois que Dieu vit ; oui, je crois que Dieu règne !…. […] C’est par le cœur qu’on apprend Dieu ! (114–115) [Well, no! I want to believe and pray and keep silent; God put his image on my heart when he created me, And whatever the mourning, whatever the mystery, With that image I want to save myself from nothingness!… […] Yes, I believe that God lives; yes, I believe that God reigns!… […] It is by the heart that we learn God!]

The affirmation of wanting to believe is transformed into an affirmation of that faith itself; as such, the poem offers not a refutation of the perspective of Poésies philosophiques so much as a simple negation of it. The religious alternative, posited rather than argued for, is available only to those inclined to accept it, and here we can think back to Edouard Rod’s narrator who rejects the option of religious faith on the grounds that he is

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simply not capable of it. While Rodenbach reproaches Ackermann for her non-creative destruction, one could argue that the scenarios he singles out for critique, that is, the view that one should perhaps embrace the destruction of humankind, are those that are most creative in her work, in that they invite the reader not only to imagine the end of the human race but also to reflect on how one might live and think if one were to be guided by a view whereby human non-existence would be preferable. As with all the pessimists we have been considering, Ackermann’s poetry implicitly invites us to consider what it would mean to draw the consequences of the necessarily impossible wish for non-existence and how one might best continue to live accordingly. If Ackermann destroys “without knowing how to rebuild,” this is not to say that there is no rebuilding implicit in her poetic vision. It is, rather, to claim something that Ackermann would likely endorse, namely, that one does not know how to rebuild; in that sense, the intellectually and artistically creative act would be to attempt to work out that understanding, to confront that non-knowledge and its consequences, as we have seen her do throughout several of her poems. Despite his critique of Ackermann, Rodenbach’s poetry often suggests an endorsement of key ideas of pessimism. Les Tristesses begins with “La Naissance du poète” [“The Birth of the Poet”], an affirmation of the poet’s vocation even in full knowledge of the suffering it will entail. The poem is addressed to a child destined to be a poet who ultimately chooses to embrace that fate: Tu poursuivras partout ton idéal désir Et tu resteras triste en comparant sans trêve Au bonheur qu’on atteint le bonheur que l’on rêve !… […] Tu verras tout à coup des envieux infâmes Te suivre, te railler, et comme des corbeaux Dépecer ta pensée et la mettre en lambeaux. […] Voilà ton sort !… Mais Dieu, pour le rendre plus beau, T’a mis au fond du cœur le don de poésie : […] Est-ce assez ? réponds-moi maintenant, car tu dois A ton gré décider de ta vie inquiète… » Et l’enfant répondit : “Je veux être poète !…” (6–8) [You will pursue your ideal desire everywhere And you will remain sad when endlessly comparing The happiness we dream of to the happiness we attain!… […]

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You will see abominable envious people all of a sudden Follow you, taunt you, and like crows Pick at your thought and put it in tatters. […] There is your destiny!… But God, to make it more beautiful, Put in the depth of your heart the gift of poetry: […] Is it enough? Answer me now, for you must At your will decide on your worried life…” And the child answered: “I want to be a poet!”]

This affirmation in the face of known and inevitable suffering is entirely in line with the basic tenets of pessimism, including Ackermann’s. While the point of view expressed here perhaps aligns best with the Romantic poet as destined for misunderstanding by those not perceptive enough to appreciate his work, the lucid acceptance of life in all its suffering is generalizable rather than specific to poets. Coming as it does as the first poem in the collection, “La Naissance du poète” frames the other poems of the collection, including narrative poems such as “Infamie éternelle” [“Eternal Infamy”], about a virtuous girl who ends up in a life of prostitution, and “Petit-Pierre” [“Little-Stone”], about the misery of a boy whose father forces him into factory work rather than schooling. The volume encourages the kind of compassion for others’ suffering that is totally compatible with pessimism. There is a fundamental contradiction in Rodenbach’s poetry between the many kinds of suffering he laments and a resistance to the idea of the definitive end to suffering that would come with the end of humanity generally. Ackermann’s poetry, taken as a whole, recognizes the desirability but also the impossibility of the destruction of humanity; she acknowledges human destruction as an impossible ideal just as resignation is impossible. Her poetry raises, as the other pessimist works we have been considering, the question of what to do in the face of those impossible ideals, how best to live with them as impossible. By leaving the question of resolving these difficulties open, her poetry continues the conversation and maintains the tension between impossible ideals and lived reality in a way that admits and accounts for that impossibility rather than looking for an external release from it. And that creative possibility from within the assumptions of pessimism is what distinguishes it from Rodenbach’s affirmation of Christian faith in “L’Infini.” The exclamatory declarations of faith put an end to all searching and questioning in indications such as this

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one affirming the wish for a reduction to silence: “I want to believe and pray and keep quiet” (114). Paradoxically, then, Rodenbach’s poetry laments the fact that Ackermann’s ideas are destructive without in turn constructing something in place of what has been destroyed, while his own poetry affirms the desire to keep quiet. Rodenbach’s conclusions could be said to be those that destroy without rebuilding insofar as they put an end to doubts about suffering by simply affirming Christian faith. Ackermann, by contrast, accounts for the impossibility of potential solutions such as resignation and human elimination while also seeing in them the kind of potential that maintains poetic production rather than shutting it down. By positing a definitive conclusion that hinges on faith in God, Rodenbach shuts down the openness that we have seen pessimism not only allowing for but rendering necessary, precisely because pessimism poses questions of how best to come to terms and live with the impossibilities of its own regulatory ideals. By adjusting expectations about the possibility of happiness, pessimism provides a space for imaginative possibilities for coping with suffering in a way that acknowledges its reality and potentially allows for compassion. Rodenbach and Ackermann thus raise the issue of concluding in both poetry and thought. Rodenbach’s conclusion that it is enough to believe and remain quiet is both too definitive and not enough, in that it simply refuses to take on the problems for thought explored by his other poems in terms of the meaning of suffering and coming to terms with it. While he offers a critique of Ackermann’s pessimism, he falls into the kind of quietism that has often been the grounds of attack on pessimism. Coming to terms with pessimism’s own conclusions, as I have been attempting to show, means never ultimately dwelling in a definitive conclusion, precisely because to do so would be to fall victim to the illusion of an ultimately impossible resolution to the epistemological and ethical issues that pessimism compels us to consider. Like Ackermann’s, Henry Céard’s work poses the relation of pessimism to knowledge. Céard, whose novel Une belle journée we considered in Chap. 4, also authored a number of poems, some of which were published in reviews in his lifetime but many of which remain unpublished. This unpublished sonnet stages a perpetual and necessary out-of-placeness whereby space is mapped onto time in a meditation on knowledge: Depuis le jour qu’il naît, jusqu’au jour qu’il trépasse L’homme éternellement doit demeurer lointain Entre l’obscur passé d’où lui vient son instinct Et l’avenir d’espoir qui toujours le dépasse.

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Que d’espoirs en arrière, en avant que d’espace ! Il recule, il avance et jamais il n’atteint L’horizon de son rêve, et demeure incertain Entre le jour qui vient et l’autre jour qui passe. C’est pourquoi ses regrets ressemblent aux espoirs, Que l’aube des matins a la grâce des soirs Et que la mort autant que la vie a des charmes. Devant, comme derrière, entouré de sommets, Entre deux horizons qu’il n’atteindra jamais, L’immobile marcheur pleure de grandes larmes. (quoted in Burns 208–209) [From the day he is born until the day he passes away Man must eternally remain far Between the obscure past from which his instinct comes And the future of hope which always eludes him. So many hopes behind, so much space ahead! He backs up, he goes forward, and he never attains The horizon of his dream, and he remains uncertain Between the coming day and the other day that passes. That is why his regrets resemble hopes, And the dawn of day has the grace of evenings And death has charms as well as life. Before him, as behind, surrounded by heights, Between two horizons he will never attain, The immobile walker cries big tears.]

The present is, ironically, not a space of proximity but of distance, inaccessible other than by its distance from the parameters of the past and future. The present thus becomes a space not of infinite possibility but of impossibility, a vantage point marked by affective reaction to uncertainty. The poetic subjectivity remains in a liminal space and the third-person perspective blocks much of the precise affective reaction that the poem evokes more than describes. The universalizing tone of the description of “l’homme” in general invites the reader’s judgment on the validity of the poem’s characterization of experience, given that it does not claim the experience for a particular subjectivity. The sonnet offers its form as providing explanatory value in the quatrains for the situation sketched in the tercets, via the transitional “c’est pourquoi.” The reason, we learn as we

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go along, is given before the thing to be explained is indicated, allowing the poem to accomplish a reversal between a condition to be explained and the explanation provided. The poem encourages the reader to join the meandering between cause and effect as between the wandering between present and past that it thematizes, arriving ultimately at a flattening of experience whereby regrets and hopes are reduced to sameness. The future resembles the past by virtue of the inaccessibility of both, a fact that potentially cancels justification for regretting hope’s unavailability. Both hope and regret take on a certain irreality under the sameness that encompasses past and present as they are figured here in the equal, and even indistinguishable, beauty of morning and evening. The flatness of the oppositions between past and present, movement and stasis (“il recule, il avance”), morning and evening find echo in the image of the horizon. If the horizon as spatial and temporal destination is figured as unattainable here, the poem as itself horizon makes space for a transformed understanding of the flattening of time, space, and experience that it enacts. Michel Collot has identified the horizon as a key structure that organizes the poem’s relationship to the world beyond it: L’écriture poétique, loin de se replier sur elle-même, vise constamment un dehors. Mais cet horizon renvoie aussi, très souvent, par le jeu de la métaphore, à l’espace intérieur de la conscience poétique, et à l’espace du texte lui-même. De par cette aptitude à métaphoriser les trois pôles de l’expérience poétique, il nous a semblé que l’horizon devait être considéré […] comme une véritable structure, régissant à la fois le rapport au monde, la constitution du sujet, et la pratique du langage. (6–7) [Poetic writing, far from folding in on itself, aims constantly at an outside. But this horizon also refers, very often, by the play of metaphor, to the interior space of poetic consciousness, and to the space of the text itself. By this aptitude for metaphorizing the three poles of poetic experience, it seemed to us that the horizon should be considered […] as a veritable structure, ordering at the same time the relationship to the world, the constitution of the subject, and the practice of language.]

The poetic subject in Céard’s sonnet is thus constituted by its inability to attain its goal, an impossibility that becomes the possibility of poetic expression itself. By an equivalence whereby life and death would have equal merit, the poem makes space for a reading whereby what it presents is not tragic but consolatory: if life is not necessarily preferable to death, there is no need to mourn its passing. The same inaccessibility that blocks

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access to hope also frees us from regret for a past that is just as unavailable. The lucidity of pessimism arguably yields a desirable end, or at least enlarges the interpretive possibility for the reality that we are perpetually out of place and unavailable to hopeful experience. The same pessimism that can cause despair can also, in ways suggested by this poem, enable dwelling in non-hope instead. The paradoxical immobile walker of the end sheds tears that, in light of the way the poem has led us to its final line, take on a more ambiguous cast than they might otherwise have. Tears are an ambiguous physiological response; while they can mark sadness or despair, they are also an affective response to beauty or relief or consolation that comes after moments of emotional trouble. In light of the poem’s demonstrated equivalence between the beauty of morning and evening, and by extension between life and death, nothing in the poem prohibits a reading of the final line that would suggest that the human figure is crying from such a feeling of beauty or consolation. The poem encourages us to look beyond a facile surface-level reading that would see the figure despairing in the last line. To open the possibility to the tears as an affective reaction to new possibilities of dwelling in life and death as equivalent, we need only read backwards, returning to the earlier portions of the poem in our mind as we consider the final line’s implicit invitation to interpret the tears. We need only, that is, question linear reading just as the poem establishes a nonlinear motion (or even non-motion) between past and future. By wandering in the poem, we discover new horizons of meaning that, in full lucidity of the impossibility of hope, present the possibility of dwelling in that non-hope and seizing the potential beauty in a conception of life that does not merely oppose it to death with the latter as a less desirable option. In the way the poem speculates on the equivalence of life and death, affective reaction, and an imperative to interpretation, it encompasses much of what we have identified about the way pessimism functions in and through literature, in a non-systematic space that posits a situation and calls on readers to judge the plausibility of the account it offers and the affective reaction it provokes. Other poems by Céard also combine a pessimistic view with affective considerations of epistemological questions, such as “Euréka,” published in La Revue blanche in January 1892: J’ai voulu tout scruter ; j’ai voulu tout savoir, Et comme le vieux Faust qui peine et s’exténue A guetter jour et nuit au fond d’une cornue La vérité qu’il craint toujours d’apercevoir,

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J’ai cherché. Maintenant je suis lassé de voir Quelle douleur en toute chose est contenue. Dans mon cerveau grandi le respect diminue, Et je tente d’aimer sans croire et sans pouvoir. L’inconnu m’effrayait, le certain m’épouvante ! Voilà donc tes succès, ô science qu’on vante, Tu nous montres les cœurs et tu fais douter d’eux. Et la tristesse encore, aujourd’hui, me pénètre, Car je ne sais lequel est le pire des deux, Le regret d’ignorer ou celui de connaître. (qtd in Frazee 123) [I wanted to scrutinize everything; I wanted to know everything, And like the old Faust who works hard and wears himself out Looking day and night into the bottom of a beaker For the truth that he always fears to see, I searched. Now I am weary to see What pain is contained in all things In my expanded brain respect diminishes, And I am trying to love without believing and without being able. The unknown made me afraid, what is certain scares me! There are your successes, oh science of which we boast, You show us hearts and make us doubt them. And sadness still today penetrates me, For I do not know which is the worse of the two, The regret of not knowing or that of knowing.]

The “Eureka” moment is a sad one rather than a triumph, as both ignorance and knowledge are reduced to the same equivalent affective reaction of fear and then sadness in the face of the realization of the equivalent fear produced by opposite conditions of knowledge. While there is arguably nothing new in the claim that knowledge has the potential to bring pain rather than joyful enlightenment—we have seen this theme in Ackermann as well—the poem invites readers to ask, as I have claimed pessimist works in general do, what it might mean to draw out the consequences of such an equivalence between knowledge and ignorance. The poem performs an intellectual cyclic motion whereby ignorance becomes knowledge, which then becomes metaknowledge in that the poetic subject then discovers the equivalent impact of knowledge and ignorance. The poem ends on the

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very opposite of a “Eureka” moment, in that its parting move is an announcement of not knowing; this time the non-knowledge pertains to the impossibility of evaluating the two kinds of regret of which the subject now has awareness.14 The poem leaves the subject and the reader in the sadness and regret of what seems to be a cyclic movement without the possibility of further resolution, at once a conclusion and the impossibility of a conclusion, and yet compels a response insofar as it implicitly poses a situation for the reader to judge. The situation that the poetic subject describes is not particular to him but rather posited as a potentially shared experience of the desire to know, overlaid with mythological overtones via the inscription of Faust. Given that potentially shared experience, the reader is invited into the affective world of the poetic subject, to dwell in the sadness or to react to it. In a significant move away from an earlier nineteenth-century conception whereby poetry has the capacity to reveal some kind of transcendent truth, Céard’s sonnet reveals, we might say, the truth about the truth, that revelation does not cancel ignorance but rather inscribes it in a new kind of knowledge. This epistemological concern is entwined in the poem with the affective reaction to the possibilities and impossibilities inherent in knowledge, including a kind of subjective truth that acknowledges that claims to knowledge are never bereft of affective content, a consideration that then becomes inscribed in the continued search for meaning implied by the situation the poem describes. What should we make, in other words, of the equivalent sadness and regret that potentially lie in both ignorance and knowledge? And how should a subject cognizant of this fact make meaning from it? What response is possible in the face of that knowledge, and to what extent does such knowledge enable us to continue the conversation about lucidity, fiction, illusion, and perseverance? Poems such as this one make the affective reaction, inscribed as it is into the epistemological conclusions, relevant to the conversation about the viability of pessimism as attempting to navigate between lucidity and living in the world, in a way parallel to that in which Schopenhauer makes ethics relevant to his metaphysical project. These blurred lines among several types of intellectual inquiry shape and are shaped by the intellectual and affective reactions they generate. One of the most fertile possibilities for reaction to the regret and sadness of both knowledge and ignorance, on the part of poets oriented toward pessimism in this period, is the imagination of the end of the world, seen by a poetic subject who adopts a “view from nowhere” in

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order to describe the scene. The poet Henri Cazalis writes of death as release from suffering in Le Livre du néant [The Book of Nothingness] (1872), a book of aphoristic fragments that looks back to works such as Alphonse Rabbe’s Album d’un pessimiste [Album of a Pessimist] and forward to the work of twentieth-century pessimists such as Emil Cioran: “La vie est un poison, rapide ou lent, mais qui, grâce à Dieu, tue toujours” [“Life is a poison, slow or quick, but which, thank God, always kills”] (12). Sometimes life is seen not as a poison but as the bearer of pleasant illusion: “La vie, comme le haschich ou l’opium, nous donne quelque hallucination rapide, puis nous tue” [“Life, like hashish or opium, gives us some quick hallucination, then kills us”] (53). Given the guarantee of death as release from suffering, there is comfort to be had for the pessimist from the thought of its eventual reality, and from art as a vehicle for imagining that end which cannot ultimately be lived and experienced precisely because it involves the obliteration of the perceiving subject. The deliverance that comes with death is future-oriented but allows the reader to live imaginatively in that space of deliverance, providing a way for the imagination to remain active while providing the comfort of an end. In this sense, poetry achieves something even greater than what Schopenhauer had claimed for music, which, for him, momentarily obliterates the individual subject. Since poetry remains at the level of the verbal and thus of the conceptual, it allows the imagination not simply to lose itself but to engage in an act that confirms the potentially liberating aspect of non-existence while at the same time remaining an actively perceptive subject. Cazalis sometimes poses this lucid desire for annihilation as a source of puzzlement: Pourquoi le dernier désir de ceux qui aiment avec passion ou, jusqu’au vertige, s’enivrent du chant, de la danse ou du vin, est-il un désir d’anéantissement ?—Quel étrange besoin de se sentir morts, et de ne se plus réveiller, et, fous de vertige, de rouler d’abîme en abîme et de rentrer dans l’infini ! Quel besoin glorieux de délivrance ! (43) [Why is the last desire of those who love passionately or, to the point of vertigo, get drunk on song, dance, or wine, a desire of annihilation?—What a strange need to feel themselves dead, and no longer to wake up and, crazy with vertigo, to roll from abyss to abyss and to go back into the infinite! What a glorious need for deliverance!]

The contrast of this aphorism with the one that expresses gratitude that life is always fatal highlights the situatedness of the aphorist’s approach,

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the resistance to definitive pronouncements in favor of a context-bound and changeable affective reaction to our collective lived situation. Like these aphorisms, poems by Cazalis and others also offer time-bound and sometimes contradictory affective explorations of the notion of the end of humanity, to advance the imagination of the scenario for which Rodenbach had criticized Ackermann but which proves rich in poetic potential. Cazalis’ verse poems, such as those published in the volume L’Illusion (1888) under his pseudonym of Jean Lahor, are attuned to human suffering and often focus on the question of seeing the world well enough to be aware of that suffering. In “Rébellion,” he couches this question of vision in an attack on God as the author of the universe: Si tu ne voulais pas que l’homme mécontent Te demandât raison de ton œuvre imparfaite, Il le fallait laisser dormir dans son néant, Ou comme aux animaux lui mieux courber la tête. De peur d’une révolte, il te fallait garder De mettre en notre esprit des rêves trop sublimes, Et ne nous pas donner des yeux pour regarder Trop avant quelquefois au fond de tes abîmes. Mais tu nous fis ainsi : ne t’étonne donc pas Qu’aimant et que pensant nous soyons des rebelles, Et trouvions des laideurs aux choses d’ici-bas, Que tes mains aisément pouvaient créer plus belles ! […] Tout affamé d’amour, de justice et de bien, Je m’étonne parfois qu’un idéal se lève Plus grand dans ma pensée et plus pur que le tien ! —Oh ! pourquoi m’as-tu fait le juge de ton rêve ? (205–206) [If you did not want that unhappy man To ask you to account for your imperfect work, You should have let him sleep in his nothingness, Or like animals make him hang his head lower. Out of fear of revolt, you should have avoided Putting in our minds dreams that are too sublime, And not give us eyes to look Too far sometimes into the depth of your abysses. But you made us this way: do not be surprised, then, That in loving and thinking we are rebels,

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And that we find ugliness in things here below, That your hands could easily have made more beautiful! […] Entirely starved for love, justice, and good, I am sometimes surprised that an ideal arises Bigger and more pure than yours in my thought! —Oh! Why did you make me the judge of your dream?]

The poet advances the possibility that things could have been otherwise, implicitly challenging Leibniz’s arguments about this as the best of all possible worlds and at the same time affirming revolt against the world as the logical choice for humanity given the reality of our situation as it is perceived in full lucidity. “Rébellion” evokes the “ugliness” of the world at a general level and chiefly in order to establish a contrast with the ideals that humans cannot help but perceive and, in perceiving them, lament the distance between the ideal and the real. The poem “Hôpital” renders that abstract discussion more concrete by presenting an example of witnessed human suffering that, rightfully, becomes the main focus of attention for the poet once he is able to see it lucidly. We as readers become complicit in witnessing the suffering as it is revealed in the poem, which unfurls as a sort of guided tour of the hospital and the varied kinds of suffering people it contains: Des enfants qui souffraient parce qu’ils étaient nés ; Des femmes qui mouraient pour les avoir fait naître ; Des hommes qui hurlaient ainsi que des damnés, Et demandaient la mort, et ne voulaient plus être ; Un enfant qui râlait et se tordait hagard, De l’écume à la bouche, avec des cris de bête, Des vieillards dont les yeux n’avaient plus de regard, Et dont tremblaient les mains, les jambes et la tête ; —Quand je sortis de là, j’allai je ne sais où ; Je marchai le cerveau malade à l’aventure ; Je regardai sans voir, comme ferait un fou, Le ciel, les arbres verts, bercés dans le murmure D’un matin de printemps, et restai tout le jour Le front baissé, cherchant à comprendre où nous sommes, Haïssant le soleil, et maudissant l’amour, Oubliant tout, hormis la misère des hommes. (202)15

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[Children who suffered because they were born; Women who died from having given birth to them; Men who screamed like the damned, And asked for death, and no longer wanted to be; A child who groans and contorts himself haggardly, Foam at the mouth, with animal cries, Old men whose eyes had no more gaze, And whose hands, legs, and head trembled; —When I left there, I went I don’t know where; I walked haphazardly with my brain sick; I looked without seeing, like a crazy person, At the sky, the green trees, rocked in the murmur Of a spring morning, and I stayed the whole day, My head down, seeking to understand where we are, Hating the sun, and cursing love, Forgetting everything, besides human misery.]

The poet’s affective reaction in the second half of the poem to the misery portrayed in the first blends many of the approaches we have seen pessimist authors take to the reality of human suffering. The poet seeks comprehension without, apparently, finding it. The poem portrays the kind of lucidity that pessimists endorse as the exposure to human suffering prevents the poet from seeing other things in the world; the frequent forgetting of suffering is counteracted here by the forgetting of all else. The lucidity thus yields not to understanding but to the affective reaction of hatred for the physical and emotional realms. Lahor does not shy away from the poetic portrayal of suicide as a response to the simple lack of enthusiasm for the pleasures that life may have to offer and the monotony that it presents: Suicide Cet homme s’est tué, triste et fatigué d’être : On l’aurait consulté, qu’il n’eût pas voulu naître : Pourquoi lui reprocher d’avoir voulu mourir ? Patricien très pur, il ne pouvait souffrir D’être heurté toujours par cette tourbe humaine. Du reste, il n’eut jamais ni colère ni haine. L’éternel féminin le satisfaisait peu, Il admirait parfois les décors, le ciel bleu,

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L’Océan, les forêts, et les soleils d’automne ; Mais la pièce à ses yeux était trop monotone, Et les acteurs aussi lui paraissant mauvais, Pris d’un ennui suprême, il se dit : Je m’en vais. Or, tous les satisfaits et les badauds des rues Sont étonnés quand on s’enfuit de leurs cohues ; Le spectacle l’écœure, il n’en veut plus, et sort Pour aller respirer le silence : a-t-il tort ? (241) [Suicide This man killed himself, sad and tired of existing: They could had consulted him, if he didn’t want to be born. Why reproach him for having wanted to die? A very pure aristocrat, he could not bear To be jostled all the time by this human throng. Besides, he never knew anger or hatred. The eternal feminine satisfied him little, He sometimes admired decors, the blue sky, The Ocean, forests, and the suns of autumn; But in his eyes, the play was too monotonous, And the actors seemed bad to him, Taken with a supreme ennui, he said to himself: I’m leaving. Now, all the satisfied people and the onlookers in the streets Are stunned when people flee from their mobs; The spectacle disgusts him, he doesn’t want any part anymore, and he leaves To go breathe the silence: is he wrong?]

While the final line’s question mark leaves semantic space for the possibility that one could condemn the suicide for making the wrong decision, the matter of fact presentation of the rest of the poem leads the reader to answer that suicide in such a case is a logical and understandable response. What the poem does leave unresolved, however, is the way that those who remain alive might come to terms with a world that proves less than worth living in, whether that be on account of its mediocrity or its active suffering. How to remain conscious of that misery yet continue to go on in the face of it? Other poets in this period found a source of inspiration in hatred of the world, but not in the sense that they wrote poems of invective against it or laments that dwell in poetic melancholy. Rather, poets such as Leconte de Lisle and Jules Laforgue wrote several poems in which they imagine the

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end of the world of suffering that Lahor evokes in “L’Hôpital.” If the perceiving subject cannot achieve annihilation and reduction of suffering that way, the poet can appeal to the imagination to represent the impossible by transforming that impossibility into the creative possibility of a projected end. Such poetry, I claim, provides the benefits of the imaginative potential of art, through which we can conceive and give poetic form to an end that is otherwise inaccessible to us while retaining the lucid subjectivity that Schopenhauer had claimed we temporarily abandon while giving ourselves over to esthetic experience in music. Thus, these poems that invoke the peaceful end of the universe retain a place for lucidity, while allowing the reader to imagine the consolation of a peaceful end and a sense of poetic and lived closure. Georges Pellissier writes in a volume of essays published in 1893 that if Leconte de Lisle “bénit l’existence, c’est en aspirant à ne plus être” [“blesses existence, it is while aspiring no longer to be”] (31). This aspiration takes the form, in many of his poems, of an imaginative construction of the end of the world, not in a dazzling or troubling post-apocalyptic scene but as a source of peaceful end, a calm resolution of the noise and suffering of human existence. His Poèmes barbares [Barbarian Poems] (1862) includes several such poems, including “Solvet seclum,” where the end of a noisy world is projected onto a future that the poet brings to life in anticipation on the page: Tu te tairas, ô voix sinistre des vivants ! Blasphèmes furieux qui roulez par les vents, Cris d’éprouvante, cris de haine, cris de rage, Effroyables clameurs de l’éternel naufrage, Tourments, crimes, remords, sanglots désespérés, Esprit et chair de l’homme, un jour vous vous tairez ! Tout se taira, dieux, rois, forçats et foules viles, Le rauque grondement des bagnes et des villes, Les bêtes des forêts, des monts et de la mer, Ce qui vole et bondit et rampe en cet enfer, Tout ce qui tremble et fuit, tout ce qui tue et mange, Depuis le ver de terre écrasé dans la fange Jusqu’à la foudre errant dans l’épaisseur des nuits ! D’un seul coup la nature interrompra ses bruits. […] Ce sera quand le Globe et tout ce qui l’habite, […] Ira fertiliser de ses restes immondes Les sillons de l’espace où fermentent les mondes. (2: 357–358)

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[You will keep silent, oh sinister voice of the living! Furious blasphemes that roll in the winds, Cries of fear, cries of hatred, cries of rage, Horrible clamors of the eternal shipwreck, Torments, crimes, remorse, desperate sobs, Mind and flesh of man, one day you will be silent! All will be silent, gods, kings, inmates, and vile crowds, The hoarse rumble of prisons and cities, The beasts of the forests and the mountains and the sea, What flies and jumps and flees, everything that kills and eats, From the earthworm crushed in the mud To the lightning wandering in the thickness of the nights! All at once, nature will interrupt its noises. […] It will be when the Globe and everything that inhabits it, […] Will go to fertilize with its disgusting remains The furrows of space where worlds ferment.]

The poem brings the reader to appreciate what might otherwise be envisioned as a terrifying prospect by performing the transition from noisy chaos to peace, inviting esthetic contemplation of the end by removing a specific human subject from the poem. Rather than featuring the suffering of a poetic subject speaking in the first person in a way that would place the poem in the vein of a post-romantic iteration of personal anguish, Leconte de Lisle’s poems that imagine the end of the world do so from a depersonalized perspective that uses the lyric genre to foster an imagination that transcends the individual subject. This poetry leads the reader to imagine at a more abstract level, in a way akin to philosophical reflection but with the added affective dimension of poetry, the calm of the end to existence in a way that divorces it from any potential anguish over individual death and fosters a sense of identification with the human race more generally, as the end that is imagined here is a collective and reassuring one that is available to us, unlike so many experiences represented or suggested in poetry, only in the fictive realm, given that the end that it paints precludes the possibility of a human subject’s actually experiencing it. The end-of-the-world poems thus avoid the violence that is often associated with post-apocalyptic scenarios as well as the sadness often associated with death. While “Solvet seclum” places the action in the future, poems such as “La Chute des étoiles” [“The Fall of the Stars”] present

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greater urgency in a series of imperatives addressed to the heavenly bodies in an attempt to hasten their end: Tombez, ô perles dénouées, Pâles étoiles, dans la mer. Un brouillard de roses nuées Émerge de l’horizon clair ; […] Plongez sous les écumes fraîches De l’Océan mystérieux. […] Mille et mille cris, par fusées, Sortent des bois lourds de rosées ; Une musique vole aux cieux. Plongez, de larmes arrosées, Dans l’Océan mystérieux. Fuyez, astres mélancoliques, O Paradis lointains encor ! L’aurore aux lèvres métalliques Rit dans le ciel et prend l’essor ; […] Heureux qui vous suit, clartés mornes, O lampes qui versez l’oubli ! Comme vous, dans l’ombre sans bornes, Heureux qui roule enseveli ! Celui-là vers la paix s’élance : Haine, amour, larmes, violence, Ce qui fut l’homme est aboli. Donnez-nous l’éternel silence, O lampes qui versez l’oubli ! (2: 222–224) [Fall, oh unstringed pearls, Pale stars, in the sea. A fog of pink clouds Emerges from the clear horizon; […] Dive under the cool foam Of the mysterious Ocean. […] Thousands upon thousands of cries, like rockets, Leave the woods, heavy with dew; Music flies to the heavens. Dive, watered with tears, Into the mysterious Ocean.

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Flee, melancholy stars, Oh still faraway Paradises! Dawn with its metallic lips Laughs in the sky and takes flight; […] Happy are those who follow you, dreary clarities, O lamps that pour out forgetting! Like you, in the boundless shadows, Happy is the one who rolls along buried! That one rushes toward peace: Hatred, love, tears, violence, What man was is abolished. Give us eternal silence, O lamps that pour out forgetting!]

Humanity is inserted only in the final moments of the poem. In “Solvet seclum,” the perspective shifts from the noise on the street to the gradually enlarged perspective that ends at the level of the globe as a whole. In “La Chute des étoiles,” by contrast, that perspective is reversed and we begin at the cosmic level, with humanity gradually enfolded into a much larger vision that had begun with the elimination of the celestial bodies. That gradual shift in scale establishes an equivalence between humanity and the larger cosmos of which it is a mere part and seems to make humanity’s end flow naturally from the end of the physical bodies beyond it. The trajectory of motion in the poem also shifts from the downward motion at the start (“Tombez,” “Plongez”) to a movement toward the skies at the end, with humanity now swept up in the peaceful destruction. There is a tension between that implied destruction (“Ce qui fut l’homme est aboli”) and the portrayal of the stars as providing forgetting, since after humanity there would be no beings left to do the forgetting. In that last stanza, the verb forms shift from the imperative to a simple present to express humanity’s completed transition to non-existence (“Ce qui fut l’l’homme est aboli”). Yet the return to the imperative in the final two lines highlights the poem’s intriguing status in terms of what it represents. The implied reader exists simultaneously in the time that follows humanity’s destruction and in the time before that when it is still a desired event (“Donnez-nous l’éternel silence”). The incongruence of this bitemporal existence highlights the powerful role that poetry plays in the creative imagination of the desired end of nothingness for the pessimists: it allows us to imagine the end by the hypotyposis that places the image of

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that end before our eyes, yet underscores at the same time that the pleasure to be derived from that end is available to us only insofar as we have not yet been obliterated. The yearning for eternal silence at the end of the poem is placed in a context that has suggested the potential satisfaction that such a silence would provide, while also reinforcing the idea that we are available to profit from the silence only insofar as we exist. This suggests that the esthetic enactment of that destruction is the closest we can get to actually experiencing it; poetry’s retention of conceptual content, unlike music, which has on a Schopenhauerian view the potential to obliterate it, makes accessible to human consciousness the imaginative realization of that end. While it, like music’s temporary obliteration of the subject, lasts only as long as the poem itself does, it is a potentially renewable experience, a fact that accounts perhaps for the number of variants on the peaceful end of the world theme that pessimist poets in this period produced. Paradoxically then, the forgetfulness that is called for in the final word of the poem marks precisely the impossibility of that forgetting and the proliferation of the imaginative experience that figures forgetting as a poetically imaginative experience, a calling actively to mind that is the opposite of forgetting. The status of forgetting, in terms of its possibility or impossibility, is at stake in these poems that invite readers to imagine the end of the world. In order to see such an end, the speaking subject in these poems necessarily takes on a unique status, a kind of witness of the world from an Archimedean point where the poet is able to see the world after the destruction of the human race. From this privileged non-subjective subjectivity, a voice from nowhere on earth, the poet paints a descriptive portrait in the present tense in poems such as “La Dernière vision” [“The Last Vision”]: Un long silence pend de l’immobile nue. La neige, bossuant ses plis amoncelés, Linceul rigide, étreint les océans gelés. La face de la terre est absolument nue. Point de villes, dont l’âge a rompu les étais, Qui s’effondrent par blocs confus que mord le lierre. Des lieux où tournoyait l’active fourmilière Pas un débris qui parle et qui dise : J’étais !

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Ni sonnantes forêts, ni mers des vents battues. Vraiment, la race humaine et tous les animaux Du sinistre anathème ont épuisé les maux. Les temps sont accomplis : les choses se sont tues. (2: 246) [A long silence hangs from the immobile cloud. The snow, bending its piled up folds, Stiff shroud, embraces the frozen oceans. The face of the earth is absolutely nude. No cities, whose supports have been broken by age, And who melt in confused blocks bitten by ivy. From the places where the active anthill twirled Not one piece of debris to speak and say: “I was!” Neither ringing forests, nor seas beaten by the winds. Truly, the human race and all the animals Have exhausted the evils of the sinister curse. Time is accomplished: things have fallen silent.]

While at first the poem seems to bear some resemblance to those in a long history that lament the losses of the past with the passing of time, in the vein of Villon’s “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?” [“But where are the snows of yesteryear?”] (32), there is a key difference here because of the permanence of the annihilation and the poet’s unusual position. It becomes clear that the poet speaks from nowhere, a disembodied voice able to describe a world where nothing remains, adding voice to describe a landscape where all is silent. Tout ! tout a disparu, sans échos et sans traces, Avec le souvenir du monde jeune et beau. Les siècles ont scellé dans le même tombeau L’illusion divine et la rumeur des races. (2: 247) [Everything! Everything has disappeared, without echo or trace, With the memory of the young and beautiful world. The centuries have sealed in the same tomb Divine illusion and the sound of the human races.]

The poem literally invites and allows readers to perceive the imperceptible, by contemplating the impossible landscape of a world devoid of human presence but described to us by some sort of poetic subject speaking in the

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poem. The poem puts forward both the power and the limitations of the imagination insofar as it is able both to call such an imaginary landscape to mind and also point a discerning reader to the impossibility of what it purports to do, of its own status as imaginary portrayal. All that remains is for the sun to go out, and the poem ends with an apostrophe to the sun and an appeal for it to stop shining: O soleil ! vieil ami des antiques chanteurs, Père des bois, des blés, des fleurs et les rosées, Éteins donc brusquement tes flammes épuisées, Comme un feu de berger perdu sur les hauteurs. Que tardes-tu ? La terre est desséchée et morte : Fais comme elle, va, meurs ! Pourquoi survivre encor ? Les globes détachés de ta ceinture d’or Volent, poussière éparse, au vent qui les emporte. […] Et ce sera la Nuit aveugle, la grande Ombre Informe, dans son vide et sa stérilité, L’abîme pacifique où gît la vanité De ce qui fut le temps et l’espace et le nombre. (2: 247–248) [Oh sun! Old friend of the old singers Father of the woods, the wheat, the flowers and the dews, Quickly put out your dying flames, Like the fire of a shepherd lost on the heights. Why are you waiting? The earth is dry and dead: Do as it has done, die! Why continue to survive? The globes detached from your golden belt Fly, scattered dust, into the wind that carries them away. […] And it will be the blind Night, the great Shadow Formless, in its void and its sterility, The peaceful abyss where lies the vanity Of what was time and space and number.]

Poetry remains to “testify” to the end of the world, but what is ultimately witnessed in the poem is, one could argue, the act of imagination that allows us to conceive of these things, suspending disbelief so that we allow a poetic subject to describe what cannot ultimately be observed based on the conditions the subject himself describes.

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Another notable absence from “La Dernière vision” is any affective reaction to the scene that is serenely and objectively described. The speaking subject seems to see the lifeless landscape neither as a welcome source of relief nor as a source of regret. The role of that poem, rather, seems to be the creation of the imaginative space whereby we could begin to conceive an apocalyptic scenario that would not be dramatic or conflict-­ ridden, but rather the attainment of the kind of nothingness that philosophers such as Schopenhauer had sketched in abstract terms in their discussion of renunciation. While nothing is renounced in “La Dernière vision,” the reader roams the literal and intellectual landscape of such a reduction of lived experience to a calm nothingness. In a poem that evokes a similar view of the world “after everything,” as we might call it, “Le Dernier dieu” [“The Last God”] in Poèmes tragiques [Tragic Poems] (1884), the speaking subject describes what he saw in “l’immuable rêve / Qui me hante” [“the unchangeable dream / That haunts me”] (3: 153). He is the sole survivor in a desolate but peaceful landscape: J’errais, seul, sur la Terre. Et la Terre était nue. L’ancien gémissement de ce qui fut vivant, Le sanglot de la Mer et le râle du Vent S’étaient tus à jamais sous l’immobile nue. (3: 153) [I was wandering, alone, on the Earth. And the Earth was naked. The former groan of what was alive, The sob of the Sea and the death rattle of the Wind Fell eternally silent under the immobile cloud.]

The calm of the landscape is in harmony with that of the subject; while the land is desolate, it is not foreboding: Les Iles d’autrefois hérissaient de leurs cimes Le gouffre monstrueux des Océans taris, Où s’étaient desséchés la fange et les débris. (3: 154) [The islands of yesteryear bristled with their crowns The monstrous abyss of the dried-up Oceans, Where mud and debris had dried up.]

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The physical meandering of the subject mirrors his mental wanderings, as he figures himself as a shade, and as the desolate geography inspires rumination from a psychological space beyond willing and desiring: Et j’errais en esprit, Ombre qui rôde et passe, Sans regrets, sans désirs, au hasard emporté, Reste de l’éphémère et vaine Humanité Dont un souffle a vanné la cendre dans l’espace. (3: 153) [And I wandered in my mind, Shadow that prowls and passes, Without regrets, without desires, carried by chance, Remains of the ephemeral and vain Humanity Whose ashes a wind has thrown into space.]

The poet’s vision comes to rest on the specter of a divinity: Et je vis, au plus haut d’un mont, silencieux, Impassible, plus froid que la neige éternelle, Un Spectre qui couvait d’une inerte prunelle L’Univers mort couché sous le désert des Cieux. Majestueux et beau, ce Spectre, auguste image Des Rois Olympiens, enfants des siècles d’or, Se dressait, tel qu’au temps où l’Homme heureux encor Saluait leurs autels d’un libre et fier hommage. (3: 154) [And I saw, at the top of a mountain, silent, Impassible, colder than the eternal snow, A Ghost which was brooding with an inert pupil The dead Universe reclining under the desert of the Skies. Majestic and beautiful, this Ghost, august image Of the Olympian Gods, children of the golden ages, Stood, as in the time when Man, still happy, Adored their altars with a free and proud homage.]

It is only the sight of his specter, and the contrast between what it had been and the emptiness of its current form, that inspires distress in the subject: Mais le front n’avait plus ses roses de lumière, Mais rien ne battait plus dans le sein adoré Qui versait sur le Monde à son matin sacré Tes flots brûlants et doux, ô Volupté première !

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Et le charme et l’horreur, le souvenir amer Des pleurs sanglants après les heures de délice, Tous les enivrements du céleste Supplice Me reprirent au cœur d’une étreinte de fer ; Et je connus, glacé sur la Terre inféconde, Que c’était là, rigide, endormi sans retour, Le dernier, le plus cher des Dieux, l’antique Amour, Par qui tout vit, sans qui tout meurt, l’Homme et le Monde. (3: 155) [But the forehead no longer had its roses of light, But nothing beats any longer in this adored breast That poured out on the World in its sacred morning Your burning and sweet waves, oh first Voluptuousness! And the charm and the horror, the bitter memory Of the bloody crying after hours of pleasure, All the drunkenness of the heavenly Torture Took me back to the heart of an iron embrace; And I knew, frozen on the infertile Earth, That it was there, rigid, asleep for good, The last, the dearest of the Gods, the Love of old, By whom everything lives, without whom everything dies, Man and the World.]

The ambiguity of this ending is intriguing: in the midst of this otherwise peaceful landscape, the blended emotion (“le charme et l’horreur”) comes to trouble the speaking subject. The act of forgetting is incomplete in this poem, and the new experience of peaceful physical and intellectual wandering around the ruins of the physical and psychological world is interrupted by the specter, a liminal being who in himself retains nothing of his former self but conjures up in the speaking subject the same emotions that he had experienced before the annihilation of the god and the landscape. The mixed emotional experience returns to the subject not as a memory but as a renewed and immediately present emotion, with the corresponding disruption in the peace of the poem and the dream it represents. The dream is thus troubled not by waking but by an element of the dream itself, suggesting the persistence of a kind of phantom memory, in a sense akin to a phantom limb, whereby a no longer present stimulus continues to cause distress. This poem itself serves as a disruption in the series of poetic imaginings of the calm of resignation that we have been

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considering; its vision haunts the otherwise smooth imaginings of successful renunciation and serves as a reminder of the ultimate impossibility of total renunciation not only in lived experience but perhaps also in the world of the poetic imagination. The impossibility of total forgetting operates in the textual as well as the psychological world, as texts remind us of the lingering of the affective content that remains in our memories of other kinds of poems, creating other kinds of affective experiences and reactions. Once again, the world of the fictional and the world of the real lived experience prove inextricably linked. The peaceful state suggested by the poem finds its end not in a waking from the dream that it had evoked, nor in the poem’s coming to an end and forcing the reader to make the transition back to reality beyond the page, but rather as an interruption of the peaceful state within the dream itself, within the poem itself, so that the peace of resignation even within the imagination proves to be temporary. Leconte de Lisle’s poetry thus reveals a tension between an emotionally distant poetic subject wandering a figurative and conceptual landscape, inviting the reader to roam the territory with him, and an emotionally invested subject navigating another sort of terrain where the calm of resignation vies with potential nostalgia or regret, or even the persistence of emotional states such as love and attachment that prevent our full capacity to be present in even a metaphorical landscape of nothingness and resignation. The opening of conceptual horizons that lyric poetry makes possible is still incapable of resolving the basic problem of a conscious subject never being able to experience nothingness precisely because that would involve the annihilation of the consciousness. As we have seen, there are potential conclusions to be drawn from this shared impossibility, including a sense of solidarity for suffering that can serve as an important basis for compassion. Lyric poetry in this period also opens up another potential affective reaction that allows the subject to find alternatives to despair in the recognition of the impossible end of suffering when the blurred line between fiction and reality becomes all too real in the case of the impossible realization of annihilation in the present as opposed to the future. This other alternative is humor, the comic distance from the tragedy that actually re-emplots the tragedy as something else, as a source of laughter that perhaps can be made to coexist with the tragedy, if not supplant it. Leconte de Lisle’s poem “Requies” retraces and extends much of the conceptual and affective ground we have been exploring in lyric poetry, and

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represents a complex trajectory in its exploration of what might at first be thought to be the calm and fixed notion of rest that is revealed in the title: Requies Comme un morne exilé, loin de ceux que j’aimais, Je m’éloigne à pas lents des beaux jours de ma vie Du pays enchanté qu’on ne revoit jamais. Sur la haute colline où la route dévie Je m’arrête, et vois fuir à l’horizon dormant Ma dernière espérance, et pleure amèrement. O malheureux ! crois-en ta muette détresse : Rien ne refleurira, ton cœur ni ta jeunesse, Au souvenir cruel de tes félicités. […] Le temps n’a pas tenu ses promesses divines. Tes yeux ne verront point reverdir tes ruines ; Livre leur cendre morte au souffle de l’oubli. Endors-toi sans tarder en ton repos suprême, Et souviens-toi, vivant dans l’ombre enseveli, Qu’il n’est plus dans ce monde un seul être qui t’aime. La vie est ainsi faite, il nous la faut subir. Le faible souffre et pleure, et l’insensé s’irrite ; Mais le plus sage en rit, sachant qu’il doit mourir. Rentre au tombeau muet où l’homme enfin s’abrite, Et là, sans nul souci de la terre et du ciel, Repose, ô malheureux, pour le temps éternel ! (2: 258–259) [Requies Like a dreary exile, far from those whom I loved, With slow steps I take my distance from the good days of my life From the enchanted country that you never see again. On the high hill where the road wanders I stop and see fleeing toward the sleeping horizon My last hope, and I cry bitterly. Oh unhappy one! Believe your mute distress: Nothing will flower again, neither your heart nor your youth, With the cruel memory of your happiness. […]

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Time has not kept its divine promises. Your eyes will no longer see your ruins turn green again; Hand over their dead ash to the breath of forgetting. Fall asleep without delay in your supreme rest, And remember, living buried in the shadow, That in this world there is only one being who loves you. Thus is life made, we need to endure it. The weak one suffers and cries, and the unreasonable one grows irritated. But the wiser one laughs at it, knowing that he must die. Go back to the mute tomb where man takes refuge at last, And there, with no worry for the earth and the sky, Rest, oh unhappy one, for eternity!]

The poem begins within a fairly standard romantic frame, as the first-­ person subject is lost in melancholy, alienated in time as if in exile. The discourse of bitter tears replaces words as we pass in the second stanza to the subject’s “mute distress,” and with this comes a shift to the second person whereby the subject is split and begins an interior dialogue that removes him from the unified but sterile discourse of melancholy and on to other metaphorical terrain. With the change in subjectivity comes the temporal shift to the present and to a focus not on regret but rather acceptance and the desire for forgetting, which, as figured here, necessitates a certain act of will on the part of the subject in order for the past to be consigned to that kind of psychological oblivion. The subject thus has the will to command itself to seek that repose but not necessarily the capacity to carry it out; the poem invites the reader to identify with the first-person subject lost in melancholy by heeding the call of the split second-person manifestation of the subject and thus bringing forgetting into the realm of creative possibility. The final stanza begins with the more generalized tones of the moralist speaking in a generalized third person. With this change comes a new perspective of laughter that presents a strong contrast with the tears of the first stanza and serves as an alternative affective reaction to the anguish and suffering that have not gone away so much as they have been transformed in terms of the possibilities of response. Laughter has the last word as the reaction of the wise person, but it is crucial to note that the way the poem constructs its subjectivity maintains the presence of three kinds of voices within the same subject. There is not a simple passage, on the part of a unified subject, from tears to laughter. Rather, laughter is introduced

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as a viable and recommendable option, which is not to say that it is ultimately able to, or even necessarily that it should, cancel the tears or in any way reduce the focus on human suffering. This is not a callous laughter but one that emerges from the realization that suffering is temporary because the eventual oblivion of death is assured. The split subjectivity emphasizes the dialogical nature of the pessimist’s approach to the lived experience of suffering: the nostalgia and melancholy coexist with the confident expectation of death, allowing for both tears and laughter once one’s perspective is adjusted in order to see beyond tears to the advantages of, and even the justification of, laughter as an appropriate response to lucid awareness of suffering. For if total forgetting is impossible, and death cannot be experienced by the conscious subject except in the imagination, laughter is a viable option even if it does not, and probably even should not, go all the way toward canceling sadness. The simultaneity of impulses toward differing affective reactions echoes the simultaneity of the temporal frames in the poem. The subject at the start of the poem stops at the crossroads between the present and the past, then looks forward to the future and allows that imaginative experience to affect his reaction in the present, permitting a renewed sense of life that is enabled by the imagined eventuality of death. The divided self thus enables more effective living rather than serving as a cause of further anguish. It is that splitting which establishes the poem’s internal dialogue that allows opposites to coexist in productive and creative tension. It is perhaps in Jules Laforgue’s poetry that the pessimistic split self is most clearly on display via an irony that allows for simultaneous participation in, and distance from, the world of suffering that the poet often describes.16 The sometimes lighthearted verse often contrasts with a subject matter that might otherwise lend itself to despair or pity. Laforgue’s poetry serves to some extent as a compendium of nineteenth-century poetic affects, blending romantic melancholy with Baudelairean irony along with a sometimes Archimedean perspective on the world or universe that echoes Leconte de Lisle. When we consider the poems together, and sometimes within the bounds of a single poem, Laforgue’s work illustrates a kind of simultaneity rather than linearity, which allows an affective pessimistic state that blends tears and laughter, proximity to the world and ironic distance from it. It does not simply substitute laughter for despair but forges an imaginative space where both could be made to coexist.

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Laforgue’s poem “Éclair de gouffre” [“Flash of an Abyss”] features the poetic subject perched on a height in a moment that gives rise to an epistemological crisis: J’étais sur une tour au milieu des étoiles. Soudain, coup de vertige ! un éclair où, sans voiles, Je sondais, grelottant d’effarement, de peur, L’énigme du Cosmos dans toute sa stupeur ! Tout est-il seul ? Où suis-je ? Où va ce bloc qui roule Et m’emporte ?—Et je puis mourir ! mourir ! partir, Sans rien savoir ! Parlez ! O rage ! et le temps coule Sans retour ! Arrêtez, arrêtez ! Et jouir ? Car j’ignore tout, moi ! mon heure est là peut-être ? Je ne sais pas ! J’étais dans la nuit, puis je nais, Pourquoi ? D’où l’univers ? Où va-t-il ? Car le prêtre N’est qu’un homme. On ne sait rien ! Montre-toi, parais, Dieu, témoin éternel ! Parle, pourquoi la vie ? Tout se tait ! Oh ! l’espace est sans cœur ! Un moment ! Astres ! je ne veux pas mourir ! J’ai du génie ! Ah ! redevenir rien irrévocablement ! (53) [I was on a tower in the middle of the stars. Suddenly, vertigo! A flash where, without veils, I was probing, shivering with alarm, with fear, The enigma of the Cosmos in all its stupor! Is everything alone? Where am I? Where is the rolling block Which is rolling and carrying me going?—And I can die! Die! Leave, Without knowing anything! Speak! Oh rage! And time flows Without return! Stop, stop! And pleasure? For I am ignorant of everything! My time has come perhaps? I don’t know! I was in the night, then I am born, Why? Where did the universe come from? Where is it going? For the priest Is only a man. We know nothing! Show yourself, appear, God, eternal witness! Speak, what’s the reason for life? Everything is silent! Oh! Space is heartless! One moment! Stars! I do not want to die! I have talent! Ah! To become nothing, irrevocably!]

The heights on which the subject finds himself yield revelation of nothing but the poet’s own ignorance. The poet’s isolation reinforces his removal from the world and forces him to confront the possibility of affirming

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nothing about his own existence or that of the world to which he was seemingly senselessly thrown but in which he wishes to remain. The final line, on first glance, is presumably a cry of anguish at the thought of reverting to nothingness. The removal of temporality via the infinitive construction points the way, however, to the subject’s removal from the temporal logic that gives rise to the anguished questions and the stated reluctance to die. Paradoxically, what is at first presented as the height of anguish in the last line becomes the condition of possibility of release from that anguish in that the subject will cease to exist. The unknowing of the poem’s central lines will be traded for the certainty of death and the cancelation of dread by the shift to nonexistence, since it is the imaginative projection into his future death that is the present source of distress. If we consider the temporality of the poem as a sort of simultaneity rather than linear progression, the distress of the final line can be seen as coexistent with a new imaginative possibility that allows us to consider the future nothingness as a desirable outcome. Such a reading depends on returning to the middle of the poem, to the ignorance at its heart, which would cancel any definitive affirmation of not wanting to die. The lack of temporality in the final line’s infinitive encourages that sort of reading, whereby it is not the end of the poem that illuminates and extends the middle but rather that the middle allows for an alternate reading of the end. In that new reading, the anguish of not knowing is canceled by the assured reduction to nothingness in such a way as to allow us to see it as comforting or reassuring even while retaining the tragic reading that is suggested more explicitly by the poem. Paradoxically perhaps, the lack of illumination that the reader notices at first glance, whereby the poetic subject’s removal to the heights brings only questions and anguish rather than revelation and reassurance, becomes a kind of illumination by means of a potential rethinking of the affective reaction to not knowing and to mortality. A pessimistically informed reading of the poem, then, allows for comfort rather than a deepening of the suffering produced by anguish and allows at least the potential for a brief temporal respite from suffering. Other poems take up the simultaneity of several intellectual and affective responses to the poetic subject’s situatedness in the world as well, from perspectives that are sometimes within the scene represented and sometimes, as in “Éclair du gouffre,” contemplated from afar. “Soir de carnival” [Carnival Evening”] places the poet on the ground amid an urban festival:

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Paris chahute au gaz. L’horloge comme un glas Sonne une heure. Chantez ! dansez ! la vie est brève, Tout est vain,—et, là-haut, voyez, la lune rêve Aussi froide qu’au temps où l’homme n’était pas. Ah ! quel destin banal ! Tout miroite et puis passe, Nous leurrant d’infini par le Vrai, par l’Amour ; Et nous irons ainsi, jusqu’à ce qu’à son tour La terre crève aux cieux, sans laisser nulle trace. Où réveiller l’écho de tous ces cris, ces pleurs, Ces fanfares d’orgueil que l’histoire nous nomme, Babylone, Memphis, Bénarès, Thèbes, Rome, Ruines où le vent sème aujourd’hui des fleurs ? Et moi, combien de jours me reste-t-il à vivre ? Et je me jette à terre, et je crie et frémis, Devant les siècles d’or pour jamais endormis Dans le néant sans cœur dont nul Dieu ne délivre ! Et voici que j’entends, dans la paix de la nuit, Un pas sonore, un chant mélancolique et bête D’ouvrier, ivre-mort qui revient de la fête Et regagne au hasard quelque ignoble réduit. Oh ! la vie est trop triste, incurablement triste ! Aux fêtes d’ici-bas j’ai toujours sangloté : “Vanité, vanité, tout n’est que vanité !” —Puis je songeais : où sont les cendres du Psalmiste ? (13–14) [Paris is in a gaslit uproar. The clock, like a death knell, Rings one o’clock. Sing! Dance! Life is short, Everything is vain,—and, up there, see, the moon dreams As cold as in the time when man didn’t exist. Ah! What a banal destiny! Everything shimmers and then passes, Trapping us with the infinite by the True and Love; And we will go thus, until in its turn The earth dies in the heavens, without leaving a trace. Where to wake the echo of all these shouts, these cries, These fanfares of hubris that history names for us, Babylon, Memphis, Benares, Thebes, Rome, Ruins where the wind sows flowers today?

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And how many days do I still have to live? And I throw myself on the ground, and I shout and quiver, Before the golden ages forever asleep In the heartless Nothingness from which no God saves! And now I hear, in the peace of the night, A resounding step, a melancholy and stupid song Of a worker, dead drunk, coming back from the party And finding by chance some despicable tiny room. Oh! Life is too sad, incurably sad! At parties here below I have always sobbed: “Vanity, vanity, all is only vanity!” —Then I thought: where are the ashes of the Psalmist?]

It would be difficult to identify a singular perspective that the poem puts forward on the situation that it portrays. The injunction to sing and dance sits uneasily with the bell that tolls like a death knell; are we to sing and dance on account of the fact that life is short, or is the singing and dancing in celebration of the brevity of life? The poet does not let the reader dwell in any one position, presenting in the second stanza an indication not of the joy or pain of life but of its banality as an endless repetition of events until the earth itself disappears. The poem also presents its simultaneous modernity and its participation in tradition, with the modern gas-light imagery of the first line giving way by the third stanza to the classic ubi sunt poetic trope and a series of now-mythical places. The second half of the poem situates the subject in the ambiguous conceptual landscape that the first half has sketched. Rather than singing and dancing, the poetic subject shouts and shudders, the two verbs serving as a kind of nightmarish direct counterpart to the joyful actions of singing and dancing. This affective reaction is not, however, the last word, as it was in “Éclair de gouffre.” The poetic subject’s screaming is interrupted by the shadowy figure of the drunk worker, a sort of aural synthesis of what precedes him in the poem by virtue of his melancholy song, halfway between the presumably joyous song of the first stanza and the shouts of the fourth. The melancholy song echoes the poetic subject’s own sobbing outcry in the final stanza about the vanity of all things; what had been perhaps legible as a more joyful affirmation of vanity in the first stanza, in its “seize the day” approach to singing and dancing, is now received in full tragic mode, at least until the very last line. The final rhetorical question

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about the disappearance of the psalmist’s own remains serves, like the final line of “Éclair de gouffre,” to destabilize any singular or coherent idea the reader may have thought to gain from the poem. The line could provide even further cause for mourning, given that not only are the ancient cities gone but also the one who taught us to see that all is vanity. But it could at the same time point to the fact that the focus on the vanity of all things itself can pass away, bringing us perhaps beyond the sadness of the final stanzas and back to the celebratory nature of the start. On that reading, it would be vain to repeat that all is vanity. Once again, these perspectives exist not in succession but in something as much like simultaneity as it is possible to have in a form like a poem that must be read, at some level, line by line. The measured and counted time as indicated by the bell at the start of the poem gives way to a flattened or circular sense of time that superimposes modern Paris on ancient and now-gone cities, and contemporary times onto mythic past ones. Once again, as in “Éclair du gouffre,” the poetic subject gains perspective not despite but on account of a pessimistically oriented play of thought, one that opens imaginative landscapes and invites the reader to dwell in the ambiguity of the world that the poem creates. A similar multiplicity of perspectives governs “Farce Ephémère” [“Ephemeral Farce”], a poem that shifts point of view from the ground-­ level of “Soir de carnaval” to a large-scale perspective by which we are able to see the relative smallness and insignificance of humanity: Non ! avec ses Babels, ses sanglots, ses fiertés, L’Homme, ce pou rêveur d’un piètre mondicule, Quand on y pense bien est par trop ridicule, Et je reviens aux mots tant de fois médités. Songez ! depuis des flots sans fin d’éternités, Cet azur qui toujours en tous les sens recule, De troupeaux de soleils à tout jamais pullule, Chacun d’eux conduisant des mondes habités… Mais non ! n’en parlons plus ! c’est vraiment trop risible ! Et j’ai montré le poing à l’azur insensible ! Qui m’avait donc grisé de tant d’espoirs menteurs ? Éternité ! pardon. Je le vois, notre terre N’est, dans l’universel hosannah des splendeurs, Qu’un atome où se joue une farce éphémère. (19)

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[No! With his Babels, his sobs, his pride, Man, that dreaming flea of a little world, When you think about it, is too ridiculous, And I come back to words so often contemplated. Think! Since the endless flows of eternity, This azure which always and in all senses draws back, Proliferates forever with herds of suns, Each one of them leading to inhabited worlds… But no! Let’s no longer speak of that! It’s truly too laughable! And I shook my fist at the unfeeling azure! Who then got me drunk on so many fallacious hopes? Eternity! Forgive me. I see that our earth Is only, in the universal hosanna of splendor, An atom where an ephemeral farce is playing out.]

In this sonnet, Laforgue underscores a simultaneous plurality of perspectives, by which the poetic subject is conscious of his status, shared with all of humanity, as a “pou rêveur,” while also maintaining a gesture of revolt against the “azur insensible.” The poetic subject draws the reader in both to reasoned contemplation of humanity’s insignificance and, implicitly, to the revolt implied in shaking a fist at the sky. Reasoned contemplation does not entirely cancel the impetus to revolt against humanity’s insignificant status. The double articulated “Non ! […] Mais non !” highlights the desire to suspend discourse about humanity and the impossibility of doing so. The poem dramatizes the possibilities open to the poetic subject when resignation and reduction to silence are not viable. No reconciliation transpires between the intellectually resigned realizations about human insignificance and the temptation to revolt. Rather, they are made to live together in the poem under the designation of “farce éphémère” that governs the entire poem via the title and serves as its last word. Realization of the farce of human history does not, however, preclude the gesture of revolt against it, as long as one retains awareness, presumably, that such a revolt is that of a flea, an act that is laughable but nonetheless inscribed in the poem as having perhaps some sort of affective power on the poetic subject. We are left with the poem’s double vision, which neither affirms the revolt it contains nor rejects it totally. Even the act of reflecting on these things means that one is inscribing oneself as playing a part in the farce,

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necessarily playing a role even as one adopts the posture of the spectator and judge. The double negation highlights, paradoxically, the impossibility of a total negation. The poem ends not in the silence that would need to follow the negation but rather in the affirmation of existence as an ephemeral farce, a conclusion that lends a circular structure to the poem by sending readers back to the start, where they will once again confront the juxtaposition of “Farce éphémère” and the “Non !” of the incipit. The double consciousness of a poetic subject who is unable to be either entirely out of, or entirely within, the realm of human action highlights the necessary participation as an actor in the farce, a summary judgment that inscribes both the revolt against the farce and the very labeling of human existence as farce within the farce itself. To label existence a farce is thus itself farcical, given that there is no way to move beyond or outside it, just as there is no way to negate either the farce or discourse about it, despite the poetic subject’s repeated cry of “Non !” Another Laforgue sonnet, “Médiocrité” [“Mediocrity”], echoes the smallness and insignificance of humanity as presented in “Farce éphémère” while underscoring humanity’s unconsciousness as it moves through life, unaware of the universe or its place in it: Dans l’infini criblé d’éternelles splendeurs, Perdu comme un atome, inconnu, solitaire, Pour quelques jours comptés, un bloc appelé Terre Vole avec sa vermine aux vastes profondeurs. Ses fils, blêmes, fiévreux, sous le fouet des labeurs Marchent, insoucieux de l’immense mystère, Et quand ils voient passer un des leurs qu’on enterre, Saluent, et ne sont pas hérissés de stupeurs. La plupart vit et meurt sans soupçonner l’histoire Du globe, sa misère en l’éternelle gloire, Sa future agonie au soleil moribond. Vertiges d’univers, cieux à jamais en fête ! Rien, ils n’auront rien su. Combien même s’en vont Sans avoir seulement visité leur planète. (23) [In the infinity riddled with eternal splendors, Lost like an atom, unknown, solitary, For a few numbered days, a block called Earth Flies with its vermin in the vast depths.

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Its sons, pale, feverish, under the whip of labor, Walk, with no worry about the immense mystery, And when they see pass one of their own who is being buried, They salute them and are not bristling with fear. Most live and die without noticing the history Of the globe, its misery in the eternal glory, Its future agony in the dying sun. Vertigo of the universe, heavens eternally celebrating! Nothing, they will have known nothing. How many even go away Without even visiting their planet.]

While such lack of consciousness means an unawareness of human misery and insignificance, it comes at the price of being something less than fully alive in a way that realizes the full reflective potential of humanity. By contrast with “Éclair du gouffre,” where not knowing is a source of torment, the human beings depicted collectively in “Médiocrité” are unaware even of their own unawareness, presumably unable to make the act of renunciation of life because they are unaware of what they would be renouncing. The gesture of renunciation is only meaningful in the context of knowledge of human suffering and insignificance. Paradoxically, then, resignation could only be sought by someone fully conscious of the suffering and insignificance of human existence; what might look like resignation, in the form of unconsciousness, would in fact be an ignorance of human conditions that would be something less than human. Resignation can only be conscious and a result of a willful effort that one knows is bound to fail based on the impossibility of actually living it. This complex play between consciousness and unconsciousness, will and resignation, is brought to the fore in the poems of Emile Verhaeren.17 I turn now to poems in his trilogy of short collections, Les Soirs [Evenings] (1887), Les Débâcles [Debacles] (1888), and Les Flambeaux noirs [Black Torches] (1890). Rather than seeing resignation as a final resting place, Verhaeren distinguishes himself from the other poets we have been considering by affirming through his work, as he claimed in Confession de poète [Confession of a Poet], that “le pessimisme n’est qu’une étape vers un état d’âme plus aigu” [“pessimism is only a step towards a more acute state of the soul”] (14). Christian Berg writes about the trilogy that it portrays the “coïncidence de la douleur et de l’être; volonté de pouvoir fondée sur une prise en charge de la douleur non plus en perspective sacrificielle ou

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expiatoire, mais en fonction d’une recherche personnelle à caractère métaphysique” [“coincidence of pain and being; will to power founded on a taking up of pain no longer in a sacrificial or expiatory perspective, but as a personal search with a metaphysical character”] (“Emile” 123). In these works, “le monde et l’existence humaine constituent une “pathographie” ou […] un texte où l’écriture de l’être s’est manifestée grâce à la douleur et à la mort.” [“the world and human existence constitute a “pathography” or […] a text where the writing of being showed itself thanks to pain and death”] (123–124). Michel Otten claims that in Verhaeren’s poems, “à travers les expressions de souffrance et de désespoir, on peut y déceler l’ébauche d’une positivité, c’est-à-dire les éléments neufs qui tirent de la crise elle-même les moyens de sortir de la crise” [“through expressions of suffering and despair, we can detect here the sketch of a positivity, that is the new elements that draw from crisis itself the means to get out of the crisis”] (in Verhaeren 14). I would claim that it is more productive to avoid the temptation of a redemptive reading here, which risks falling into stasis just as much as a resignation-oriented approach would. Rather, I’d claim that the reaction that Verhaeren performs in his poetry in the form of a violence against the self sets in motion a dialectical relationship between resignation and action. This is what permits pessimism to continue as a dynamic mode of thought, via the inner dialogue of the poetic subject inciting itself to violence against itself. Verhaeren’s poems of action follow others, such as “Le Gel” [“Bitter Cold”], where absolute stillness reigns: Ce soir, un grand ciel clair, surnaturel, abstrait, Froid d’étoiles, infiniment inaccessible À la prière humaine, un grand ciel apparaît. Il fige en son miroir l’éternité visible. Le gel étreint tout l’horizon d’argent et d’or, Le gel étreint les vents, la grève et le silence Et les plaines et les plaines ; et le gel mord Les lointains bleus, où les beffrois pointent leur lance. Silencieux, les bois, la mer et ce grand ciel. Oh sa lueur immobile et dardante ! Et rien qui remuera cet ordre essentiel Et ce règne de neige acerbe et corrodante.

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Immutabilité totale. On sent du fer Et de l’acier serrer son cœur morne et candide ; Et la crainte saisit d’un immortel hiver Et d’un grand Dieu soudain, glacial et splendide. (63) [This evening, a large clear sky, supernatural, abstract, Cold with stars, infinitely inaccessible To human prayer, a large sky appears. It freezes visible eternity in its mirror. The bitter cold embraces the whole horizon of silver and gold, The bitter cold embraces the winds, the strand, and the silence And the plains and the plains; and the cold bites The faraway blue, where the belfries point their lance. Silent, the woods, the sea, and this grand sky. Oh its immobile and darting glow! And nothing that will stir this essential order And this reign of acerbic and corroding snow. Total changelessness. We feel iron And steel squeezing our dreary and candid heart; And fear seizes us with an immortal winter And a grand God, sudden, glacial, and splendid.]

The frigid, still landscape, with the timeless, verbless phrase “immutabilité totale” inscribed within it, stands in for the state of resignation, an outwardly perceptible representation of an impossible state of consciousness of total immutability, frozen silence. This landscape prepares the way for the following poem, “Insatiablement” [“Insatiably”], also set in the evening, but this time dominated not by an impersonal landscape but by a dynamic and split poetic subject: Le soir, plein des dégoûts du journalier mirage, Avec des dents, brutal, de folie et de feu, Je mords en moi mon propre cœur et je l’outrage Et ricane, s’il tord son martyre vers Dieu. Là-bas, un ciel brûlé d’apothéoses vertes, Domine un coin de mer—et les glaives des flots Entrent, comme parmi des blessures ouvertes, Dans les fentes des caps et les trous des îlots.

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Et mon cœur se reflète en ce soir de torture, Quand la vague se jette et se déchire aux rocs Et s’acharne contre eux et que son armature D’or et d’argent éclate et s’émiette, par chocs. La joie enfin me vient de souffrir par moi-même, Parce que je le veux—et je m’enivre aux pleurs Que je répands, et mon orgueil tait son blasphème Et s’exalte, sous les abois de mes douleurs. Je harcèle mes maux et mes vices. J’oublie L’inextinguible ennui de mon détraquement ; Et quand lève le soir son calice de lie, Je me le verse à boire, insatiablement. (65) In the evening, full of disgust for the mirage of day, With my teeth, brutal, with madness and fire, I bite in me my own heart and I insult it, And sneer, if it bends its martyrdom toward God. There, a sky burned with green apotheoses, Dominates a corner of sea—and the swords of the waves Enter, as among open wounds, In the openings of the capes and the holes of the islands. And my heart is reflected in this evening of torture, When the wave throws and tears itself on the rocks And fights against them and its armature Or gold and silver explode into pieces, by shock. The joy of suffering at my own hand comes to me at last, Because I want it—and I get drunk on tears That I spill, and my hubris hushes its blasphemy And exalts under the barks of my pains.

Drawing perhaps on intertexts such as Baudelaire’s “Sed non satiata” and “L’Héautontimorouménos,” the poetic subject reacts to his disgust by an act of auto-vampirism. The landscape and the poetic subject merge, as had already been suggested perhaps by the ambiguous first line, where “plein des dégoûts” could at first be perceived to be describing the evening but is revealed by the third line to be referring to the poet. In the second verse, the poetic subject’s act of biting is mirrored by the landscape’s movement, transfigured by the description into a—metaphorical? literal?—act of natural violence between two nonsentient natural entities. It is by this

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imaginative projection of violence onto nature that the poetic subject is able to assimilate the act of self-torture; by projecting himself outward and reading himself in terms of the landscape, he is better able to turn inward to become both subject and object of suffering. Joy comes from willing here, and in that sense we move far away from a view that advocates renunciation of the will. But the centrality of suffering keeps us firmly within the realm of pessimism, and in that sense, the poem invites readers to reconsider the varieties of experience with which pessimism is compatible. The closing of the circle that a fusion of the subject and object implies does not, however, yield closure. The joy of self-­ imposed suffering becomes an image of lack, as the thirst for suffering is not slaked by the will to suffer but rather rendered impossible to fulfill or satisfy, as the final word “insatiablement” underscores. While the self-­ torment gets the poetic subject beyond the frozen and immutable stillness represented in “Le Gel,” it is at the cost of a return to the forever insatiable world of desire, and in that sense there is no getting beyond the framework of the tension between impossible (or undesirable) resignation and the perhaps equally undesirable insatiableness of desire. The poem, in other words, puts into play the situated solution to the dissatisfaction with resignation by representing the act of self-inflicted, willed torture, while inscribing within the poem the impossibility of such self-torture as a permanent solution. The poem “Dialogue,” the first of the collection Les Débâcles (1888), further develops the theme of the self-torturer in dialogue with himself. It begins as if in medias res:     … Sois ton bourreau toi-même; N’abandonne le soin de te martyriser À personne, jamais. Donne ton seul baiser Au désespoir ; déchaîne en toi l’âpre blasphème ; Force ton âme, éreinte-la contre l’écueil : Les maux du cœur qu’on exaspère, on les commande ; La vie, hélas ! ne se corrige ou ne s’amende Que si la volonté la terrasse d’orgueil. Sa norme est la douleur. Hélas ! qui s’y résigne ? —Certes, je veux exacerber les maux en moi. Comme jadis les grands chrétiens, mordus de foi, Se tournaient avec une ferveur maligne, Je veux boire les souffrances, comme un poison Vivant et fou ; je cinglerai de mon angoisse

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Mes pauvres jours, ainsi qu’un tocsin de paroisse S’exalte à disperser le deuil sur l’horizon. Cet héroïsme intime et bizarre m’attire : Se préparer sa peine et provoquer son mal, Avec acharnement, et dompter l’animal De misère et de peur, qui dans le cœur se mire Toujours ; se redresser cruel, mais contre soi, Vainqueur de quelque chose enfin, et moins languide Et moins banalement en extase du vide. —Sois ton pouvoir, sois ton tourment, sois ton effroi. Et puis, il est des champs d’hostilités tentantes Que des hommes de marbre, avec de fortes mains, Ont cultivés ; il est de terribles chemins, Où leurs cris violents et leurs marches battantes Sont entendus : c’est là, que sur tel roc vermeil, Le soir allume, au loin, le sang et les tueries Et que luisent, parmi des lianes flétries, De scintillants couteaux de crime et de soleil ! (105–107) [         …Be your own torturer; Don’t abandon the care of making a martyr of yourself To anyone, ever. Give your only kiss To despair; unleash in yourself the bitter blasphemy; Force your soul, tear yourself against the reef: The heartaches exasperate are the ones we command; Life, alas, only corrects or amends itself If the will lays it low with pride. Its norm is pain. Alas! Who resigns himself to it? —Certainly, I want to exacerbate pains in me. Like the grand Christians of old, bitten by faith, Turned on themselves with a malignant fervor. I want to drink sufferings like a Living and crazy poison. I will lash my poor days with my anguish, Like a parish bell Exalts in dispersing mourning over the horizon. This intimate and bizarre heroism attracts me: To prepare one’s own pain and provoke one’s own suffering, Relentlessly, and tame the animal With misery and fear, who looks constantly into his heart; To bolt up cruel, but against oneself, Conqueror of something after all, and less languid And less banally in ecstasy of the void.

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—Be your own power, be your own torment, be your own fear. And then, there are fields of tempting hostilities That men of marble, with strong hands, Have cultivated; there are terrible paths, Where their violent shouts and their beating steps Are heard: it is there, on such a red rock, The evening lights up, in the distance, blood and massacres And that sparkling knives of crime and sun Shine among the withered lianas.]

Here again, as in “Insatiablement,” the will is affirmed rather than denied, but as a will to suffering. The form of the dialogue indicated by the title, governing the whole of the poem, invites the reader to entertain that idea as a hypothesis rather than a definitive declaration, to see it as the situated affirmation of a character. The suffering is contextualized here, by contrast with “Insatiablement,” as a heroic act, albeit “intime et bizarre,” in continuity with the Christian tradition of mortification. Here again the question arises of whether this sort of mortification or self-torture is a release from pessimism or a different way of dwelling within it, given the centrality of the role of suffering that is common to both a desire for resignation and a desire to break out of stasis by self-torture. The desire to be “moins banalement en extase du vide” underscores the paradoxical relation between the void and literary creation. As Michel Otten remarks: “Quand au vide, il peut être le lieu par excellence de la création la plus radicale, […] celle qui ne doit rien au passé. Verhaeren est tout entier tendu vers un avenir qui n’a pas encore de nom” [“As for the void, it can be the place of the most radical creation par excellence, […] the one which owes nothing to the past. Verhaeren is entirely inclined toward a future that does not yet have a name”] (in Verhaeren 17). Verhaeren explicitly links the act of poetic creation to self-torture in a January 1887 letter to René Ghil when he describes a writing project: “Ce serait intitulé “Se torturer savamment”, et cela deviendrait un problème à résoudre, car c’est chose atrocement difficile que de se martyriser soi-même” [“It would be called ‘To torture oneself knowingly,’ and it would become a problem to resolve, because it is an atrociously difficult thing to make a martyr of oneself”] (qtd in Ghil 89). What is created in the space of the textual void is a poem rather than any act of literal violence; the poem brings forth a space where literal and metaphorical violence are in productive tension, with the act of self-torture serving as a function of the psychological drama that the poem

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inscribes. The poem is a product of the process of self-­torture, as is the productively divided self that allows for dialogue, within rather than beyond the framework of pessimism. What could seem at first like the closed-off world that a poem of self-­ torture seems to create is, I would argue, precisely the site at which the poem could be said to play a role in mitigating the dangers of both quietism and misguided ethical and political action. The poet stages the self-­ torture as an act of will, as we saw in “Dialogue”: “Life, alas, only corrects or amends itself / If the will lays it low with pride. / Its norm is pain. Alas! Who resigns himself to it?” But the fact that the act of will is self-directed in this case allows the subject to engage in intellectual activity that steers clear of passive resignation but also avoids the temptation to use the will to exercise unjustified power against another. The irony of the doubled subject who is both subject and object of the torture is accompanied by a violence that is not actualized as physical violence in the world. Rather, it is a metaphorical violence to the self that nonetheless has real force in terms of the act of thought it provokes. The poem, in other words, opens up a space for thought in a way that allows the mind to continue to pose questions related to resignation and action in the world rather than allowing resignation to shut down that thought. I appeal here to Hannah Arendt’s conception of thinking as she develops it in her essay “Thinking and Moral Considerations” (later collected in Responsibility and Judgment), where she takes Socrates as model. She opposes thinking, qualified as “so resultless an enterprise” (167), to knowing, which she identifies as a “world-building activity” (163). She explores the comparison of Socrates to an electric ray, which, “at first glance, seems to be the opposite of the gadfly; it paralyzes where the gadfly arouses. Yet, what cannot but look like paralysis from the outside and the ordinary course of human affairs is felt as the highest state of being alive” (175). Viewed this way, thought is not opposed to action but rather reconceived as a kind of action, one that Arendt explicitly links to the kind of split self that Verhaeren implies in “Dialogue”: “articulating this being-conscious-of-myself, I am inevitably two-in-one” (184). Arendt appeals to the common etymology between consciousness and conscience, which are indeed still indistinguishable in French, in order to link thinking to judging, the faculty that “realizes thinking, makes it manifest in the world of appearances” (189). While thinking remains a destructive and resultless enterprise, its relationship to judgment is what “may prevent catastrophes […] in the rare moments when the chips are down” (189).

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The intellectual activity that Verhaeren figures as “torture” in “Dialogue” could be said to be the kind of thinking that represents, for Arendt, “the highest state of being alive,” far from the passive resignation or isolation from the world of lived experience that reflection might otherwise be taken to be. Cecilia Sjöholm claims, in the context of a discussion of Arendt and poetry, that: when philosophy listens to poetry, it might get a sense of the inner voice. […] Poetry speaks to a sense of listening that is irreducible to hearing as a mere sense faculty. The experience of mood as a kind of tonality is not a question of translating emotions. It is not about something; it merely is, the presence of presence. Poetic language, as is stressed by Arendt, is speaking with. It engages with an interlocutor that is interiorized. (70)

While such an awakening to consciousness may be far from pleasant, as suggested by the stinging of the gadfly or the shock of the electric ray, the resulting two-in-one of thought brings us to this heightened state of living awareness while also making room and accounting for the suffering that attends not only lived experience but also the birth of reflection on it. There can indeed be said to be something heroic to undertaking such an intellectual enterprise, albeit “intime et bizarre,” as Verhaeren suggests. The will is, then, the will to be two-in-one, to act in a way that is different from action in the world but more than mere metaphor. On this view, the self-inflicted suffering that the poem suggests is not torture for torture’s sake but rather a way of working on the self via the irony of the split self, creating a space for a possibility beyond mere resignation. That work on the self would also, via conscience/consciousness, guard against a surging of the will in a way that would enable potentially dangerous political action akin to right-wing movements that might seek to triumph over pessimism and resignation via the worst kinds of reactionary politics. The metaphorical violence to the self that is thinking as Arendt describes it, and as Verhaeren paints it, allows for a space between resignation and overly zealous and potentially destructive action. Dialogue with the self enables not only the zapping into consciousness of thought but also the possibility of reply to that experience, the stage at which one seeks to draw the consequences of that awakening. If thinking is resultless, it is also forever committed to questions rather than answers, to the dynamics of intellectual activity that is never content to rest in the satisfaction of permanent answers.

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So while a dialogue-based approach to thinking may seem to advocate for an inward turn toward work on the self, as Arendt characterizes it, this inward turn also enables a turn back outward via the act of self-torture that constitutes and promotes the divided consciousness of the two-in-one. Such a split self also enables another layer of ironic dialogue in that it inspires readers to enter the dialogue that Verhaeren’s poem initiates and ask questions about what the nature of the self-torture that the poetic subject advocates might be. Being faithful to the spirit of the poem means not remaining satisfied with a single definition of self-torture or ironic self-­ consciousness. It remains to the reader to evaluate whether self-torture is recommendable or reprehensible, destructive in a creative or potentially nihilist way. The collection Les Débâcles, which features “Dialogue” at the start, closes with “La Couronne” [“The Crown”], which begins: Et je voudrais aussi ma couronne d’épines ! Une épine pour chaque pensée, à travers Mon front, jusqu’au cerveau, jusqu’aux frêles racines, Où se tordent les maux et les rêves forgés Et moi, par moi. (157) [And I too want my crown of thorns! A thorn for each thought, through My forehead, right to the brain, to the frail roots Where forged pains and dreams are contorted And me, by my own means.]

The collection, fittingly, has a circular structure whereby we return to the idea of self-inflicted suffering via thought. The poem ends with an apostrophe to the crown of thorns: Ô couronne de ma douleur Et de ma joie, ô couronne de dictature Debout sur mes deux yeux, ma bouche et mon cerveau ; Ô la couronne en rêve à mon front somnambule, Hallucine-moi donc de ton absurdité ; Et sacre-moi ton roi souffrant et ridicule. (157) [Oh crown of my pain And of my joy, oh crown of the dictatorship Standing over my two eyes, my mouth, and my brain; Oh the crown in a dream over my sleepwalking forehead, Hallucinate me then with your absurdity; And crown me your suffering and ridiculous king.]

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If the crown consists of a thorn for each thought, then these new thoughts and the direct address to the crown will themselves add new thorns, in a vision that the poetic subject himself qualifies as potentially hallucinatory and absurd. The fact that these are the last words of the collection might suggest that self-torture is as fruitless and impossible as resignation, but the very fact that the poet preserves the self-consciousness of the two-inone prevents us from assimilating this dialogue to an attempt at resignation. It is precisely the freshly inflicted pain of the new thought that moves the subject further from what would have been an impossible state of intellectual anesthesia, the resignation whereby one would have to cease being a human subject in order to experience it fully. Can thought imagined as desired and desirable self-torture be an effective antidote to the impossibility of resignation? The fact that the questions are posed in dialogue means that the answer can never be firmly established, since to do so would be to put an end to the dialogue that the poetic subject advocates. The place of “Dialogue” at the head of the collection prevents us from accepting any sort of definitive conclusion, which would simply shut down dialogue rather than feeding the creative destruction of a unified self for which the opening and closing poems of the collection advocate. Verhaeren arrives at a vision whereby suffering remains inevitable but can be the source of creative potential if channeled via an irony that refuses to allow the subject to rest in definitive conclusions. It is that kind of potential for creation not from destruction but in tandem with it that can allow us to conclude, as Jacques Marx has indicated, that it is writing that allows for this creation and cancels the potentially sterile effects of simple introspection: Les débâcles se concluent sur un constat de carence absolue dévoilant les perspectives d’un vide infini. Désormais, ce sera donc à partir de l’écriture, et non de l’introspection stérile, que le poète tentera d’assumer l’absurde du monde. De là, la langue de Verhaeren, ce laboratoire qui poursuit le travail de soi sur soi par une véritable vivisection lyrique. (21) [Les débâcles concludes by noting an absolute deficiency unveiling the perspectives of an infinite void. From here on, it will thus be from writing, and not from sterile introspection, that the poet will attempt to assume the absurdity of the world. From there, Verhaeren’s language, this laboratory that pursues the work of the self on the self by a veritable lyric vivisection.]

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And yet writing poetry generally is not necessarily a guarantee of this kind of active work on the self in an embrace of absurdity that nonetheless maintains the interior dialogue of thought. To renounce openness is to move away from pessimism more broadly but also to risk coming to rest in reassuring visions of the future, which is precisely what Verhaeren does in his later work. In works such as Les Villes tentaculaires [Tentacular Cities] and Les Aubes [Dawns], the poetry does open up onto the external world, but not in a way that maintains the ironic and creative self-doubling of the poems we have been exploring. While emerging from a view that, like pessimism as I have characterized it, endorses a sense of human solidarity, Verhaeren’s later works paint a picture of what is lost in the move from rural to industrial life and present a redemptive vision for the future. As Verhaeren himself summarizes in autobiographical notes from the period in which he was composing these works: “Dans Les Villes tentaculaires, je noterai l’absorption des campagnes par l’industrie, la misère, l’argent, la veulerie, la corruption, le blasphème contre l’ordre naïf et primordial des villes. Dans Les Aubes je veux dire l’avenir tel que je le rêve, purifié, lavé, exorcisé du présent” [“In Les Villes tentaculaires, I will note the absorption of the countryside by industry, misery, money, cowardice, corruption, blasphemy against the naive and primordial order of the cities. In Les Aubes I want to say the future as I dream it, purified, washed, exorcised from the present”] (qtd in Marx 30). To make this move, however, is to abandon the dynamic between destruction and creation in a way that reintroduces all the problems one could associate with optimism and that pessimism attempts to address, most notably in this case of utopian predictions that yield disappointment in the face of their impossibility or failure to materialize. Pessimism as we have been characterizing it is an approach that seeks to manage a sense of disappointment in a way that responds creatively to it not by denying or seeking to negate it but by adjusting expectations in such a way as to engage the questions of what it might mean to live with the consequences of human suffering. The process of engaging with those questions itself risks bringing suffering, as Verhaeren’s poems such as “La Couronne” make explicit. But to abandon dwelling in, and even affirming, that suffering in the name of a utopian future is to abandon the dialogue, the two-in-one that keeps thought alive. It is to assign a vital role to poetry in cultivating the ironic self and to create a space where the dialogue of thought can be made manifest, rather than resorting to a description of a potential future where the suffering may be eliminated

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altogether. To remain faithful to the call to dialogue that Verhaeren situates in the middle of his poetic oeuvre means to be suspicious of the directions in which he took his poetry later. And in that sense, we have an illustration of the paradoxical nature of ironic self-consciousness: on one hand, it seems inward-directed, turned back on its own consciousness in a way that resists an opening onto the external world. But precisely through the process of poetic creation, a space is opened for a re-entry into that world, produced in such a way that still retains the two-in-one that enables thought and that in turn allows the faculty of judgment to operate in such a way as to make us suspicious of a turning toward the world that is accomplished via redemptive or utopian visions of the future. Such a turn invites us to return toward the middle, so to speak, the ironic violence to self that enables the imagination to respond anew to the challenge of pessimism via the tools produced by pessimism itself, rather than abandoning the project. It is in that sense that the dynamic interplay between creation and destruction is most forceful. The very question of whether it is desirable to seek to get beyond pessimism is what is at stake in the poems of ironic self-splitting. The redemptive view at which Verhaeren eventually arrives could be said to be not an overcoming but a betrayal of the work on consciousness that the self-torture poems perform, a foreclosure of the thought process they seek to unleash. While the surpassing of such a moment may be in the name of a “combat héroïque” [“heroic combat”] (Otten in Verhaeren 10), one could also call into question whether it is indeed more heroic to attempt to overcome pessimism or to dwell within its creative destruction. Working out an answer to that question requires the kind of thinking that is accomplished in those middle poems rather than the later work. It requires an act of interpretation to affirm without question that a satisfactory resolution of self-torment would be the passage to a vision of a utopian future. Self-torturing thought is precisely the mental activity that allows us to question the received wisdom of a forward-looking, progress-oriented resolution as the “proper” plot structure that we should be seeking. To affirm such a thing, in other words, is to abandon the very thought processes set in motion by those poems and to foreclose the space of other possibilities that their poetic creation opens.

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Notes 1. Sam Bootle underscores that the “ultimate annihilation of human life,” while it played a key role in Hartmann, “occupies only a minor role in Schopenhauer […] but gained (perhaps undue) prominence in late nineteenth-­century France” on account of the role it plays in Challemel-­ Lacour’s 1870 interview with Schopenhauer, which I discuss in Chap. 2 (Bootle 5). 2. For biographical details, see her text “Ma Vie” in Œuvres i–xxiii. 3. Schuré offers a brief account of Ackermann’s publication and reception history; see 299–301. 4. Letter to Mademoiselle Read, January 10, 1881, cited in Citoleux 150. 5. On Ackermann’s relationship to Schopenhauer’s work, see Citoleux 93–6; he indicates that both of them “aspirent au Néant” [“aspire to Nothingness”] but “ne suivent pas la même route” [“do not follow the same road”] (96), resulting in “une série d’incompatibilités” [“a series of incompatibilities”] (93) between them. Citoleux identifies several differences in their approaches around questions of the will and their approach to progress. “Mme Ackermann quitte Schopenhauer et passe dans le camp ennemi, celui de Hegel. Quand elle quitte Hegel à son tour, elle ne revient pas à Schopenhauer” [“Madame Ackermann leaves Schopenhauer and passes into the enemy camp, that of Hegel. When she leaves Hegel in turn, she does not go back to Schopenhauer”] (94). 6. As Adrianna Paliyenko notes about this passage: “the attempt to apprehend reality via sense perceptions and the data of experience, though based on rejecting an abstract ideal, does not suppress the lack […] that informs all systems of knowledge” (212). 7. Elme-Marie Caro describes Ackermann’s Pascal in these terms: “Pascal n’est plus seul, il est sauvé ; mais imaginez un Pascal sans Dieu, un Pascal sans la croix, en face de cette solitude sans bornes, muette et ténébreuse, […]. Il se sent gagné par le désespoir, par la folie devant ces abîmes, il ne peut en soutenir l’horreur, il va s’y engloutir ; mais quel cri sublime il aurait poussé avant de disparaître dans le gouffre !” [“Pascal is no longer alone, he is saved; but imagine a Pascal without God, a Pascal without the cross, faced with this limitless, mute, and dark solitude, […]. He feels himself lost to despair and madness before these abysses, he cannot support the horror, he is going to sink into them; but what a sublime cry he would have uttered before disappearing into the abyss!”] (“La Poésie philosophique”). 8. Citoleux argues that Pascal “apprenait [à Ackermann] le Christianisme” [“taught [Ackermann] Christianity” and at the same time “il lui remettait des armes pour le combattre” [“he gave her arms to combat it”] (37).

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9. I explore the way the impossibility of a “pure” poetry generates poetic production rather than inhibiting it in the later nineteenth century in “Between Stéphane Mallarmé and René Ghil.” 10. The fourth section was in fact added to the poem in the 1885 edition (Jenson 182 and Paliyenko 295, n.47). 11. Contemporary philosopher André Comte-Sponville has developed a notion of “gai désespoir” [“gay despair”] that he associates with a lack of want that we could label wisdom or even happiness: “le désespoir, au sens où je le prends, ce n’est pas la tristesse, encore moins le nihilisme, le renoncement ou la résignation: c’est plutôt ce que j’appellerais volontiers un gai désespoir, un peu au sens où Nietzsche parlait d’un gai savoir. Ce serait le désespoir du sage : ce serait la sagesse du désespoir. […] Le sage […] n’a plus rien à attendre ni à espérer. Parce qu’il est pleinement heureux, rien ne lui manque. Et parce que rien ne lui manque, il est pleinement heureux” [“despair, as I understand it, is not sadness, still les sis it nihilism, renunciation, or resignation: it is rather what I would willingly call a ‘gay despair,’ a bit along the lines where Nietzsche spoke of a gay science. It would be the despair of the wise: it would be the wisdom of despair. […] The wise one […] has nothing more to wait for or hope for. Because he is fully happy, he lacks nothing. And because he lacks nothing he is fully happy”] (55). 12. Cf. this comment in Ackermann’s journal, dated January 25, 1863: “J’ai cessé de chercher la vérité, car je sais que je ne la trouverais pas” [“I have stopped looking for truth, for I know that I would never find it”] (514). 13. On Rodenbach’s admiration for Ackermann despite the critique he launches in “L’Infini,” see Berg: “Les Tristesses […] trahit l’influence de Sully Prudhomme, mais surtout celle de Louise Ackermann, dont il fréquentait assidûment le salon. Dans un article publié dans le quotidien bruxellois La Paix le 17 mai 1879, le jeune Rodenbach ne cache pas son admiration pour l’auteur des Poésies philosophiques et ne manque pas de relever la profonde influence de Schopenhauer et de Hartmann sur cette œuvre: “C’est une chose étrange, cette philosophie pessimiste éclatant ainsi à un moment aux quatre coins de l’Europe et répétée d’un pays à l’autre comme un cri de sentinelles” [“Les Tristesses […] betrays the influence of Sully Prudhomme, but above all that of Louise Ackermann, whose salon he faithfully attended. In an article published in the Brussels daily La Paix on May 17, 1879, the young Rodenbach does not conceal his admiration for the author of Poésies philosophiques and does not fail to identify the profound influence of Schopenhauer and Hartmann on this work: ‘It is a strange thing, this pessimist philosophy exploding on the scene at one time in all parts of Europe and repeated from one country to another like a sentinel’s cry’”] (“Un intercesseur” 120).

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14. I have discussed the relationship among poetry, knowledge, and nonknowledge in Poetry’s Knowing Ignorance. 15. Lahor presents a similar scenario in “Dans L’Esterel,” where there is a move from the idyllic first stanza: “C’était un clair matin d’avril: toutes les branches / Chantaient dans le soleil, après le long hiver ; / Les Alpes dans l’azur dressaient leurs cimes blanches ; / J’écoutais la sirène éternelle, la mer…” [“It was a clear April morning: all the branches / Were singing in the sun, after the long winter; / The Alps in the azure drew up their white summits; / I was listening to the eternal siren, the sea…”] to the sight of a dirty elderly man whose appearance makes serene contemplation of nature impossible by the last stanza : “…Cet homme s’éloigna, m’ayant jeté sa haine ; / Et du regard longtemps je suivis soucieux / Cette apparition de la misère humaine : / Ce vieillard en haillons me cachait tous les cieux” [“…That man moved away, having thrown his hatred at me; / And with my gaze I followed, worried, / That apparition of human misery: / That old man in rags hid all the heavens from me”] (201). 16. For a study of Laforgue’s relationship to Schopenhauer and Hartmann, see Bootle. He argues that Les Complaintes is “premised on the demise of the self as a fixed, enduring essence” and that “each poem might, perhaps, constitute a provisional self. Poetic schizogony—the emergence of a proliferation of selves—requires the death of the old, lyrical ‘Moi’” (110). 17. For a study of his life and work, see Zweig.

Works Cited Ackermann, Louise. “Journal de Mme Ackerman.” Ed. by Marc Ciotleux. Mercure de France (1 May 1927), 525–575. ———. Œuvres de L. Ackermann. L’Harmattan, 2005. Acquisto, Joseph. “Between Stéphane Mallarmé and René Ghil: The Impossible Desire for Poetry” in French Forum 29: 3 (Fall 2004), 27–41. ———. Poetry’s Knowing Ignorance. Bloomsbury, 2020. Arendt, Hannah. Responsibility and Judgment. Schocken Books, 2003. Berg, Christian. “Émile Verhaeren et la voie de la douleur.” In Anne Henry, ed., Schopenhauer et la Création Littéraire en Europe. Méridiens Klincksieck, 1989. ———. “Un intercesseur: Georges Rodenbach.” in Anne Henry, ed., Schopenhauer et la création littéraire en Europe. Méridiens Klincksieck, 1989. Bootle, Sam. Laforgue, Philosophy, and Ideas of Otherness. Legenda, 2018. Burns, C.A. Henry Céard et le naturalisme. John Goodman & Sons, 1982. Caro, Elme Marie. “La Poésie philosophique dans les nouvelles écoles, un poète positiviste. Revue des Deux Mondes, 3e période, tome 3 (1874), 241–262. Cazalis, Henri. Le Livre du néant. Alphonse Lemerre, 1872.

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Citoleux, Marc. La Poésie philosophique au XIXe siècle: Mme Ackermann d’après de nombreux documents inédits. Slatkine Reprints, 1973. Collot, Michel. La Poésie moderne et la structure d’horizon. Presses Universitaires de France, 1989. Comte-Sponville, André. Le Bonheur, désespérément. Editions Pleins Feux, 2000. Frazee, Ronald. Henry Céard: Idéaliste détrompé. U of Toronto P, 1963. Ghil, René. Les dates et les œuvres. Crès, 1923. Jenson, Deborah. “Gender and the Aesthetic of ‘le Mal’: Louise Ackermann’s Poésies philosophiques, 1871.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 23: 1–2 (Fall-Winter 1994–5), 175–193. Laforgue, Jules. Œuvres complètes de Jules Laforgue. Volume I.  Mercure de France, 1962. Lahor, Jean. L’Illusion. Alphonse Lemerre, 1888. Leconte de Lisle. Poésies complètes. 4 volumes. Slatkine Reprints, 1974. Marx, Jacques. “Introduction: La poésie sociale” in Emile Verhaeren, Poésie complète, Vol. 2. Brussels: Editions Labor, 1997, 7–57. Paliyenko, Adrianna M. Genius Envy: Women Shaping French Poetic History, 1801–1900. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016. Pellissier, Georges. Essais de littérature contemporaine. Société Française d’imprimerie et de librairie, 1893. Rodenbach, Georges. Les Tristesses. Alphonse Lemerre, 1879. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. Tr E.F.J. Payne Vol. 2. Dover, 1966. Schuré, Edouard. Femmes inspiratrices: Poètes annonciateurs. Librairie Académique Perrin, 1937. Sjöholm, Cecilia. “Voicing Thought: Arendt, Poetry, and Philosophy” in Ranjan Ghosh, ed. Philosophy and Poetry: Continental Perspectives (Columbia University Press, 2019), 69–83. Verhaeren, Émile. Poésie complète 1. Labor, 1994. Villon, François. Oeuvres. Garnier, 1970. Zweig, Stefan. Emile Verhaeren: Sa vie, son œuvre. Tr. Paul Morisse and Henri Chevret. Mercure de France, 1946.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion: Living Well with Pessimism, Then and Now

We have reached the end of our tour through a broad range of non-­fiction, fiction, and poetry that all attempt to wrestle with the problems of pessimism, teasing out whether it is a sickness (and if so, whether the sickness is collective or individual) or the highest manifestation of health, whether it represents delusion or lucidity, whether it inspires quietism or action, whether it is something more like a mood or a character disposition or more like a conceptual worldview, whether it is compatible with living in the world and carrying on. The very fact that the issues have been worked out both in literary and non-literary genres points to the way the questions inherent in pessimism blur those lines between fiction and non-­ fiction on account of the way pessimism relies, first of all, on a dynamic interplay between lived experience and reflection, and then a way of thinking about that experience not in terms of empirical verifiability of claims about optimism and pessimism but rather of their verisimilitude, the way in which interpretive categories account for, and do justice to, the reality of suffering. We saw that pessimist writers implicitly or explicitly negotiate the terrain between lucidity and delusion in ways that refuse to turn a blind eye to the horrors of existence but maintain enough of a desire to keep on living, given the impossibility of total resignation for any living human being. This was accomplished, I argued, via an act of the imagination characterized as an “as if,” a conceptual space that creates livable

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Acquisto, Living Well with Pessimism in Nineteenth-Century France, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61014-2_6

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possibilities that attempt to be faithful both to one’s own lived experience of suffering and, crucially, those of others. Imaginative acts were thus described as a sort of creative destruction, a demolishing of illusions of progress and improvement that recognizes the real potential for harm in creating those sorts of teleological narratives and attempting to live them out. Part of fidelity to a pessimistic view is the need to avoid filling the hole left by those demolished illusions in any sort of dogmatic way, leaving a space open instead for the creation of new kinds of meanings and new kinds of narratives that might help us live better in the world through pessimism, rather than despite it. It is here that the idea of “living well with pessimism,” the source of my title, comes to the fore; at long last I would like to say more about it. To be sure, at first glance such a phrase seems to align with the view that pessimism is a disease, something to be managed if it cannot be cured. What I hope to have shown, however, is that there is another way to understand the phrase, which is in the sense of a genuine living well via pessimism, taking on an approach to living that allows a certain buffer against disappointment, a way out of implicit faith in progress and the social mandate to cheerfulness. Pessimism in this sense provides freedom from potentially toxic social constraints and misleading biases toward optimism, in order to ask what it would mean to live well within the bounds of a fairly narrow set of possibilities for satisfaction based on the little that one might reasonably come to expect from the world. This living well has potential for enriching individual experience, but never at the expense of the collective; if pessimism can bring individual consolation, it also nourishes the kind of compassion that makes it impossible for us not to create human solidarity around the shared reality of suffering, and this is another crucial aspect of the “as if,” namely, to act as though others’ sufferings were in some important sense our own, as indeed they were for Schopenhauer. This is not to say that the more enabling sense of the phrase “living well with pessimism” simply cancels the idea of managing as best one can with a condition akin to illness; rather, both coexist in productive dialectical tension. By maintaining the context of illness, we keep alive the question of where true illness and true health lie. As soon as we begin to ask what it would mean to see things as they are, though, we are back in the realm of the epistemological problem of how we would know what that would be, and to our subsequent reliance on verisimilitude to guide the way we make meanings about our experience and our reflections on them. And when we do this, we engage with the writers and thinkers I have been exploring from the later

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nineteenth century in a way that suggests a significant sense of continuity with them. The pessimist writers I have discussed incite the kinds of thought that would be articulated later, as I have shown, by figures such as Hannah Arendt, and their potential for transcending whatever may have been their own political views was revealed, for instance, by the discussion of Schopenhauer by Max Horkheimer. In the time between those two periods, the very possibility of human happiness as it had been traditionally defined was called into question by thinkers such as Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, who in their own way could also be said to be addressing the question of what might be the best way to deal with issues of illusion about what makes for human happiness and the possibility, or even desirability, of achieving it. The question of how to live well in a world that could plausibly be said to frustrate our desires and induce suffering and injustice of all kinds, inaugurated powerfully by pessimist writers in the nineteenth century in part as a response to the crises of epistemology that I have traced, is still very much present. In fact, I would argue that it is urgently present to us in ways that an interhistorical engagement with the nineteenth century can illuminate helpfully. Pessimism as I have been characterizing it here remains necessarily open to constant revision in terms of the answers it attempts to provide about how best to live both for ourselves and in relation to other people (and living things more broadly, even) with whom we are linked. And it is precisely because of this openness, the refusal to fall into dogmatic answers or the seeming comfort of an unjustifiable optimism, that the questions that pessimism incites continue to be meaningful for us, cannot be dismissed, and may guide us to important insights in terms of assigning meaning to experience. Without the reassurance that could come from certainty or from dogmatic assertion or an appeal to transcendence, pessimism does still have the potential to provide, again momentarily, in a way that is necessarily fragile and in frequent need of renewal, a sense of consolation to the individual in terms of the ultimate impermanence of suffering, as we saw played out in the peaceful, and sometimes even comic, imaginative renderings of the end of the world in the poetry we examined in Chap. 4. The destruction of former ideals or former hopes often leads to artistic creation, a giving of form precisely to those doubts, those tentative negotiations of a space that risks leading to despair, and in that sense, the destruction that pessimist writers engage with is creative and, by virtue of being communicable as a text, a source of connection with others. Far

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from remaining focused on the isolation that can sometimes accompany suffering, pessimism from the start carried the potential to form a sense of human solidarity that can lead to a progressive politics that operates within an “as if” that attempts to alleviate injustice and suffering, even though on a deeper level one may be painfully aware of the impossibility of the task. It is here that pessimism distinguishes itself best from nihilism or cynicism, precisely because it recognizes not only the impossibility but also the danger of a full resignation from the world even when that might seem to be an enticing option. The tension between compassion and resignation is a productive one that serves to unleash imaginative potential in pessimism as it still manages to steer clear of false hopes and dangerous optimism. Here again, given that a sense for the imaginative possibilities is inherent, but not always explicit, in pessimism, literature has a key role to play in helping us see the world differently and in ways that can provide enough lucid delusion both to carry on and to make space for others. It is for this reason, I would claim, that any account of pessimism needs to engage both with fictional and nonfictional attempts to come to terms with it and articulate its potential. This is what Horkheimer saw as the political progressive potential of pessimism, which “leads through” literature as a key component: If young people recognize the contradiction between the possibilities of human powers and the situation on this earth, and if they do not allow their view to be obscured either by nationalistic fanaticism or by theories of transcendental justice, identification and solidarity may be expected to become decisive in their lives. The road leads through knowledge, not only of science and politics, but also of the great works of literature. (82)

I hope to have shown that, to some extent, fiction and non-fiction writers on pessimism in nineteenth-century France were aware of the potential it held, but were also able, we might say, to say more than they thought they were saying about its potential, since it is precisely by engaging imaginatively with the meaning their work could be said to have that we can arrive at new understandings and new ways forward from within, rather than beyond, pessimism. This openness to a progressive politics is not to be confused with a sense of a unlimited possibility, which is more the purview of optimism than pessimism, and it is no coincidence that it is a writer of the Frankfurt School, anchored in relentless critique rather than pragmatic solution,

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who argues for the progressive political valence of pessimism. As I argued in Chap. 2, pessimism encourages the recognition of limits as opposed to an unbounded sense of possibility or progress or growth. Such limits serve as an important check on the kinds of cancerous growth mentalities that have produced not only unrealistic expectations about satisfaction and happiness on the individual level but also the kinds of ecological crisis that result from the misguided belief in endless resources. By establishing an appropriate set of constraints within which they are likely to be less apt to be disappointed when unrealistic hopes are dashed, pessimists have the potential to achieve something like greater satisfaction with circumstances as they play out and as they cope with the fact that hopes and desires are frequently unfulfilled. This is where the critical edge of thought needs to remain active, however, in order to avoid the fall into quietism that writers on pessimism in the nineteenth century and our own time indicate as an argument against it. While, as I have argued, pessimism can help us cope with disappointment by allowing us to adjust our expectations, this is not to say necessarily that it encourages us to accept the world as it is or to scoff at efforts to relieve suffering in ways that progressive political action aims to do. This is why, as I have also argued, it is crucial to maintain the openness of thinking along the lines by which Arendt defines it. Thought can destroy an unreflective and potentially harmful optimism while leading us to recognize the common shared basis of human suffering and to work to attempt to relieve it, all the while recognizing that the effort might well be unsuccessful. Such is a reason to continue the effort, operating under the guise of the “as if,” while steadying ourselves for potential disappointment and being open to temporary, small victories if and when they occur. Only a sense of limits makes such a project viable and buffers it at least to some extent from disappointment, by creating an interpretive framework that accounts in advance for that potential disappointment. I hope I have not made it seem as though I seek to redeem pessimism, to make it out to be some variant of, or corrective to, optimism by claiming that the gloom it often describes is not really as bad as it seems. On the contrary, pessimism seeks to be as faithful as possible to the reality of suffering and to dwell within an existence that seems far less than desirable to continue to pursue, to say the least. For as long as individual and collective existence is made to continue, however, pessimism does provide the vehicle for at least potential, tentative meaning to be not so much found as created through the process of attempting to see the world in the way that I have labeled as lucid delusion, to be well aware of the extent to which we

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need to construct a fictional “as if” in order to carry on in the world. As I indicated in Chap. 4, pessimism in both fiction and philosophy actively resists the tidy conclusion. In fact, as I have sought to show, discourse on pessimism is born in the impossibility of its reaching a definitive conclusion and coming to rest in resignation and renunciation, given the impossibility of that goal for a living human subject. Another source of pessimism’s affinity with thought is thus this dialogical quality, the productive restlessness that stems from attempts to conceive or emplot what it would mean to go on living in a state of lucid delusion, in a way that balances coping with an attempt to eliminate suffering as if such a thing were possible. Through my analysis of Edouard Rod’s novels in Chap. 4, I demonstrated the way in which the portrayal of lived experience allows readers to test key ideas of pessimism through verisimilitude as a way of addressing the lack of tidy logical conclusions in arguments about pessimism. Pessimism does become a vehicle for better living to the extent to which we can indeed articulate those reflective experiences and create something like a virtual interhistorical community of those whose lived and reflective experiences have led them to similar ways of characterizing the world and emplotting it. In the company of those authors, we can be led to ironize or even sometimes to laugh at the absurdity of our existence, without, for all that, actually affirming life as Nietzsche would have it in his joyful pessimism. Schopenhauer’s dour description of existence did not preclude his seeing humor in it, without giving up the ultimate conviction that beneath the surface of the humor was still the dark reality to which we are, in his view, condemned. Just as irony and humor become, for the pessimist, vehicles for better living in the face of despair, the refusal of hope that I illustrated in Henry Céard’s poetry also has the potential to move us beyond despair, to a place of non-hope that shifts perspective away from a hope/despair dichotomy and toward questions of how best to carry on and perhaps attempt to alleviate collective suffering even in full recognition of the potential failure of all such efforts. These sorts of options are first made available, I would argue, in the late nineteenth-century debates on, and literary engagements with, pessimism, and remain part of our intellectual and cultural heritage now as we continue to grapple with these questions in the light of an intervening history that arguably brought, in the twentieth century and thus far in the twenty-first, horror beyond anything a nineteenth-century figure could have known. The potential for interhistorical meaning based on certain shared historical, cultural, and

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intellectual conditions means that my study of the later nineteenth century was never conducted in a way that would suggest a distinct separation between the way these ideas were in play then and the way they resonate now. To think in this way is not to challenge a historical approach but to affirm a sense of historical continuity, to say something about the way in which the nineteenth century could still in some sense still be said to be our own time. Official discourses of progress, especially via scientific accomplishments, have strengthened since the nineteenth century, and at the same time, the potential for human-created horror and destruction has also increased beyond the wildest imagination of the nineteenth century. Now more than ever, then, the time is right to appeal to the nineteenth century for the source of a pessimism that can somehow sustain us and inform, or maybe even bring about, the opportunity to live well, whatever that might mean in our own nightmarish time. Pessimism’s potential lies in the chance it provides to cope with the lived situation in which we find ourselves, without at the same time shutting down the possibility for change if ever it were to become possible, not in the name of progress, but that of some temporary change that may, for a while at least, relieve suffering or some kinds of injustice without our having to commit ourselves to a teleology of progress. In other words, pessimism accepts whatever gains we may make but without seeing them as necessary or, especially, irreversible. Within the potentiality, that is, lies also impotentiality, but such a realization need not prevent us from carrying on. To do so means to commit to an “as if” of an imaginative reality that still attempts to remain within reasonable boundaries of the possible and reasonable expectations about what may never change, all the while welcoming any evidence to the contrary. As illustrated by poets such as Emile Verhaeren in Chap. 5, this kind of commitment to an imaginative “as if” can be far from pleasant and often involves a violent and torturous relation to the self, pitting the desiring self against itself in an act of transformation that is not devoid of cruelty in its attempt to split the self in order to facilitate the kind of dialogue that is inherent in the model of thought that guides the inconcludable conversation about pessimism. While there may be moments of laughter, there is no way beyond the suffering of the self, even in the name of coming to terms with that very suffering and creating a mental space of the “as if” in which to dwell long enough to articulate an existence that balances lucidity and delusion in a way that honors an ethical commitment to attempting to reduce suffering.

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Pessimism considered this way allows imaginative worlds but without the danger of escapism; its imagination allows for us instead better and more fully to inhabit our own world here, to live well with it to the extent that such a thing may prove possible, by being well equipped to live in the world until the chance for political improvement may become a live possibility. Pessimists cultivate a sort of comfort with the world in all its misery while allowing to coexist along with it a dissatisfaction that can unlock the potential to attempt to make change, but without any illusion about some definitive improvement. Such an imagination is a sort of managed forgetting of suffering, which is another way to say lucid delusion, a dwelling in just enough illusion in order to continue to pose questions that have the potential to give experience meaning, with the return to lucidity always there to serve as an important corrective to any imaginative constructs that go too far to be considered plausible. Pessimists thus float somewhere between a healthy sickness and a sickly health that settles and dwells neither in sadness, nor hopelessness, nor any illusion about progress. And it is that very non-dwelling that facilitates potential movement, that keeps the mind responsive to this pitiful world and to the potentials for meaning that it may hold.

Work Cited Horkheimer, Max. Critique of Instrumental Reason. The Seabury Press, 1974.

Index1

A Ackermann, Louise, 31, 226–240, 243, 244 Annihilation, 236, 250, 264, 265 See also End of the world Arendt, Hannah, 27, 28, 31, 139, 283, 284, 295 Art, 250 As if, living in the, 20–22, 30, 37, 47, 97, 109, 127, 137, 141, 146, 151, 181, 185–186, 205–207, 212, 213, 225, 297, 299 See also Fiction B Balzac, Honoré de, 22 Banality, 161–162

Baudelaire, Charles, 22, 220n21, 268, 279 Benatar, David, 11 Blanchot, Maurice, 222n28 Boredom, 160, 163, 168 Bos, Camille, 134, 135 Bourchenin, Pierre-Daniel, 125–129, 134 Bruner, Jerome, 25, 26 Brunetière, Ferdinand, 115–127, 135, 189 Buddhism, 144 C Camus, Albert, 13, 126 Caro, Elme-Marie, 12, 13, 100–115, 227, 239

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Acquisto, Living Well with Pessimism in Nineteenth-Century France, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61014-2

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INDEX

Cazalis, Henri, 21, 161, 226, 249–255 Céard, Henry, 4, 6, 30, 153, 160–172, 226, 244–249, 298 Challemel-Lacour, Paul, 30, 80–101, 135, 162 Character, 46–48 Cheerfulness, 9, 10 Christianity, 121, 157, 223n33, 241 Cioran, Emil, 250 Closure, see Conclusion Comedy, 45, 46 Compassion, 66, 67, 125, 173, 174, 183–184, 186–189 Conclusion, 159, 183, 203, 207, 244 Consolation, 50, 158–160, 295 D Darwin, Charles, 227, 228 De Gaultier, Jules, 135, 140–147, 168 De Gourmont, Rémy, 77 Death, 8, 9, 14, 231, 250 Dentures, 155–156 Dépret, Louis, 113–115 Detachment, 4, 19 Disappointment, 165 Dissatisfaction, 142, 143, 208, 217, 280, 300 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 196, 199–200 E Egotism, 131, 132, 148n8 Emplotment, 45, 49, 50, 62, 171 End of the world, 254–265 Epistemology, crisis in, 14–16, 20, 79, 130, 247–249, 269 Ethics, 17, 23, 119, 120 Evil, 130, 131 Expectations, 165, 166

F Farce, 274–275 Fiction, 38, 42, 43, 51, 54, 55, 92, 137, 138, 181, 206, 207 See also Literature, relationship to philosophy Flaubert, Gustave, 23, 26, 141, 162, 163 Forgetting, 259, 265 France, Anatole, 21 G Genius, 53–55, 142 Genre, 177 God, denunciation of, 234–235 H Happiness, 60, 61, 99, 103, 181–184 Hartmann, Edouard von, 12, 79, 100, 106, 110, 113 Hope, 13, 14, 236, 244–247 Horkheimer, Max, 23, 295, 296 Hugo, Victor, 129, 195 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 30, 153, 157–160 I Idealism, 15, 16, 70, 127, 171, 173 Ignorance, 238–239, 248, 249, 269 Illness, pessimism as, 4, 30, 87, 88, 92–98, 100, 294–295 Imagination, 43, 128, 212–214, 259–261, 294, 300 Interpretation, 20, 52, 53, 56, 59, 145, 198 Irony, 161, 268, 284, 298

 INDEX 

J James, William, 135–137 Judgment, 87, 91, 94, 99, 162, 178 K Kant, Immanuel, 78 Knowledge, 143, 144, 229, 244–245 See also Epistemology, crisis in L Laforgue, Jules, 31, 226, 227, 268–276 Lahor, Jean, see Cazalis, Henri Laughter, 267–268 Leconte de Lisle, 31, 226–227, 255–268 Leopardi, Giacomo, 100, 101, 107, 108, 113 Limits, 30, 56, 140, 142, 143, 146, 296–297 Literature, relationship to philosophy, 14, 16, 23–25, 42, 65, 84, 176, 203 Lucidity, 2–4, 7, 8, 10, 13, 14, 16, 19, 22, 28, 30, 57, 96, 112, 129, 300 M Madness, 53–55 Maupassant, Guy de, 30, 153–158 Meaning, 8, 14, 15, 25–31, 49, 50, 88, 89, 179, 193 Melancholy, 2, 3, 6, 10, 121, 127 Metaphor, 42, 61, 62, 88, 89, 107, 284

303

Montaigne, Michel de, 134, 135 Music, 41, 52, 56, 250, 259 N Narrative, 16, 17, 49, 50 Naturalism, 160 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 12 Nihilism, 2, 17, 105, 111, 134, 296 Non-existence, 171, 242, 258 O Optimism, 1, 9, 17, 18, 40, 47–49, 66, 92, 96, 115, 132, 139, 215, 216 Optimism bias, 11, 28 P Pascal, Blaise, 134, 231 Pellissier, Georges, 77, 129–133, 255 Philosophy, see Literature, relation to philosophy Plausibility, see Verisimilitude Poetry, lyric, 31, 42, 225–288 Positive thinking, see Optimism Positivism, 84–86, 100, 120 Pragmatism, 135–137 Progress, 1, 7, 13, 17, 96, 127, 130, 210, 294, 299 Progressive politics, 10, 67–69, 71, 97, 120, 123–125, 296–297 Proust, Marcel, 205–206 Q Quietism, 104, 123, 134, 230, 244, 283, 297

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INDEX

R Rabbe, Alphonse, 250 Renunciation, 19, 69, 90, 104, 144, 275–276 Resignation, 171, 178–181, 183, 184, 193–195, 203, 232–234, 265 See also Renunciation Rod, Edouard, 30, 153, 176–208, 298 Rodenbach, Georges, 226, 240–244 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 78, 79 Russell, Bertrand, 10 S Schopenhauer, Arthur, 3, 6, 11, 19, 29, 30, 37–71, 79, 80, 98, 99, 113–125, 137, 138, 152–157, 165, 172, 176, 177, 188, 225 Science, 83, 84, 86, 130, 140, 229–231 Self-torture, 280–283, 285–286, 288 Sickness, see Illness, pessimism as Simmel, Georg, 43 Skepticism, 78, 134, 135, 139 Socrates, 27, 283 Solidarity, 7, 287 Split self, 226, 227, 268, 278, 283 Stoicism, 44, 51, 55, 56 Suffering, 7, 8, 11, 12, 63, 64, 123, 124, 157, 158, 187–189, 229, 243, 251, 287, 297, 298 Suicide, 253–254

T Tears, 247, 267, 268 Temporality, 269–270 Thinking, 27, 28, 283, 284, 297 Tolstoy, Leo, 190–191, 196, 199–200 Tragedy, 45, 46, 63, 165 Tranquility, 200–202 U Unamuno, Miguel de, 10, 135 V Vaihinger, Hans, 135–141, 146 Vanity, 272, 273 Verhaeren, Emile, 31, 227, 276, 299 Verisimilitude, 19, 25, 27, 30, 38, 41, 45, 106, 107, 110, 118, 135 Verne, Jules, 153–154, 208–217 Villon, François, 260 Violence to self, see Self-torture W Wagner, Richard, 173–175 Weber, Max, 78 Wyzewa, Teodor de, 30, 153, 172–177 Z Zola, Emile, 4–6, 160, 190, 221n23