The Phantom of Chance: From Fortune to Randomness in Seventeenth-Century French Literature 9780748645169

Citation preview

The Phantom of Chance

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd i

07/10/2011 08:08

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture Series Editor: Lorna Hutson Titles available in the series: Open Subjects: English Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods and the Virtue of Vulnerability James Kuzner 978 0 7486 4253 3 Hbk The Phantom of Chance: From Fortune to Randomness in SeventeenthCentury French Literature John D. Lyons 978 0 7486 4515 2 Hbk Don Quixote in the Archives: Madness and Literature in Early Modern Spain Dale Shuger 978 0 7486 4463 6 Hbk Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion William P. Weaver 978 0 7486 4465 0 Hbk Visit the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture website at www.euppublishing.com/series/ecsrc

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd ii

07/10/2011 08:08

The Phantom of Chance From Fortune to Randomness in Seventeenth-Century French Literature

John D. Lyons

Edinburgh University Press

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd iii

07/10/2011 08:08

© John D. Lyons, 2012 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4515 2 (hardback) The right of John D. Lyons to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd iv

07/10/2011 08:08

Contents

Preface: The Phantom of Chance

vi

Acknowledgements

xvii

Series Editor’s Preface

xviii

Introduction

1

1 Fortune, Mistress of Events: Corneille and the Poetics of Tragedy

30

2 God in a World of Chance: Pascal’s Pensées and Provincial Letters

67

3 From Chance Events to Implausible Actions: Lafayette and the Novel

104

4 The God of Suspense: Bossuet’s Providential History and Racine’s Athalie

135

5 An Accidental World: La Bruyère’s Characters

174

Conclusion

196

Bibliography

199

Index

209

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd v

07/10/2011 08:08

Preface: The Phantom of Chance

It is difficult to write a book about something that does not exist. For a brilliant novelist like Flaubert, the dream of writing a book about nothing – un livre sur rien – is tempting, but for the more pedestrian scholarly writer who depends on an object to describe there is something hopeless about such a project. So a book about chance in seventeenthcentury France, the high point of rationalist thought, seems to be condemned even before it begins. Lorraine Daston writes eloquently: In the clamorous debates of seventeenth-century philosophy [. . .] there was one unisonal chord struck: the unanimous and resounding rejection of the reality of fortune. Antipathy to fortune united Protestant and Catholic, mechanical philosopher and Cambridge Platonist, Hobbesian with Christian virtuoso.1

And yet . . . The very rationalists who rejected chance – la fortune or le hasard – as being simply a name for human ignorance continued to write as if there were many things that happened by chance. Arnauld and Nicole open their important Logic, or the Art of Thinking (La Logique, ou l’Art de penser, 1683) by saying, ‘This little work was born entirely by chance . . .’ (‘La naissance de ce petit ouvrage est due entièrement au hasard . . .’).2 Descartes writes of ‘games of chance, where fortune alone reigns’ (‘les jeux de hasard, où il n’y a que la fortune seule qui règne’),3 and in a celebrated passage of the Discourse on Method speaks of the need for resoluteness in actions, which makes men ‘walk always as straight as they can in the same direction, and not to change course for slight reasons, even if, perhaps, only chance at first cause them to choose it’.4 Pascal’s Pensées abound in examples of oddly random, almost imperceptible things that have enormous consequences. The passages on this theme that have left the most lasting impression are no doubt the ones on Cleopatra’s nose and its impact on history, but there are many others.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd vi

07/10/2011 08:08

Preface

vii

If then, as Daston says, the ‘vulgar error seventeenth-century philosophers worked hardest to reject was fortune or chance’, perhaps we can say that it is impossible to destroy something that does not exist, something that the influential neo-Stoic philosopher and statesman Guillaume du Vair called ‘this phantom’ (‘ce fantosme’).5 And even if chance does not exist, the effort to combat it or the belief in it does exist and leaves significant traces, a bit like the hollows left in lava or sandstone where some creature’s remains were once enclosed but where the passage of time has left only a void, but a void that bears the shape of something now missing. In a certain sense, most intellectual endeavour consists of the struggle against chance and because chance is the absent and even non-existent adversary, our speech and our writing are formed by this phantom. One of the most frequent expressions in intellectual discourse is ‘It is not by chance that . . .’ or ‘Ce n’est pas un hasard si . . .’ In this way, almost everything that we argue is framed by reference to this invisible, non-existent force whose effect we deny to assert our own views.

Starting in the Middle of Things Aristotle teaches that stories should start in the middle of things, in medias res. This study started with such a middle, with the riddle of chance that Pierre Corneille, one of the major playwrights and dramatic theorists of the seventeenth century, found in Aristotle’s Poetics. In the first paragraph of his major study of the theory of drama, Three Discourses on the Dramatic Poem (Trois discours sur le poème dramatique, 1660), Pierre Corneille quotes Aristotle to say that the good subjects for tragedy come from chance: Our Doctor says that the Subjects come from Fortune, which makes things happen, and not from Art which imagines them. She is the mistress of Events, and in giving us a choice from among those she presents to us, she implicitly forbids the usurpation by which we would put on the Stage incidents not of her making.6

In the midst of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle in turn quotes Agathon to say, ‘Art loves chance and chance loves art’ (VI. 4. 1140 a 17ss).7 And yet again, in describing the development and conclusion of the tragic plot, Aristotle mentions chance, but this time to exclude it from tragedy: Since tragic mimesis portrays not just a whole action, but events which are fearful and pitiful, this can best be achieved when things occur contrary to

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd vii

07/10/2011 08:08

viii

The Phantom of Chance

expectation yet still on account of one another. A sense of wonder will be more likely to be aroused in this way than as a result of the arbitrary or fortuitous, since even chance events make the greatest impact of wonder when they appear to have a purpose (as in the case where Mitys’s statue at Argos fell on Mitys’s murderer and killed him, while he was looking at it: such things do not seem to happen without reason). So, then, plot-structures which embody this principle must be superior. (1452a1–10, chap. 9)8

In all three cases the term used by Aristotle was tyche. Thus the relation of chance to art, and especially to literary art and drama, has a respectably ancient and tantalisingly obscure basis. And, like any concept conveyed in a series of words over several millennia and in multiple languages, the study of ‘chance’ requires, at the least, incessant attention to at least three moments: that of the authors of antiquity whose ideas became the basis, or the pretext, for much writing in the early-modern period, that of the writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries themselves, and our own moment with its concerns through which we attempt to understand the past. Was Corneille’s discovery of this puzzle an isolated case, or did the problem of chance draw the interest of other writers in this period? The more one looks, the more chance seems to be ubiquitous as an object of study and as an object of scorn in the early-modern period. This makes sense in the intellectual history of this time. Here are a few preliminary speculations about why chance might come to the fore in this period throughout the spectrum of writing, both in the ‘poetic’ genres of fictional narrative, lyric poetry and in the philosophical, political and religious writing in which chance is either advanced as an important factor in human life or on the contrary discounted. First, and most obvious, is the fact that popular literature has always included a large dose of chance – we need only to think of fabliaux or romances to find many examples of chance, some of them at or beyond the limits of the plausible. The association of the romance with chance was so utterly taken for granted that when the recognised author of one of the major novels of the period, Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette, wrote about her Princess of Cleves she claimed that it could not be considered a roman (a romance) because it was not at all ‘romanesque’, apparently meaning that it was more believable and coherent, lacking in the extraordinary coincidences that had come to be associated with the roman.9 This popular tradition of literature, lacking in the doctrinaire spirit of much of the neo-Aristotelian poetics that flourished in France in the mid-1600s, had not needed to make an inventory and provide a theoretical justification of events that just seemed to happen, often with little reason, but the early moderns developed such a hair-trigger

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd viii

07/10/2011 08:08

Preface

ix

sensitivity to questions about cause, effect and motivation that anything that seemed to be chance stood out. This was particularly the case after the debates surrounding Corneille’s Le Cid in 1637. Second, the significant revival of Stoic thought in the late sixteenth century thrust chance into the forefront, though in a quite paradoxical way. Much Stoic writing can have the effect of accentuating the apparent ubiquity of accidents, shipwrecks, conflagrations and sudden death. This may appear strange, since the Stoics are widely known to have believed in providence rather than in chance. Pierre Aubenque, in comparing Aristotle with the Stoics, notes that while Aristotle believed that the world is rational only in the higher spheres but not in the lower ones, within which there are all kinds of misfires and monsters engendered by matter that is not controlled by the forms, the Stoics on the other hand believed that the world is already rational throughout.10 However, as a practical matter, followers of the Stoics needed to accept that everyday life seemed, at least, to be full of inexplicable, unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. Not being able to change the world, the Stoic needed to get used to what appears to be chance: ‘The wise man does not act upon the world but rather follows it, attunes his private life to the universal harmony, makes himself consent to the decrees of a Providence that, even under the inevitable appearance of evil, remains the highest expression of the Logos.’11 But to teach this lesson, and to urge their followers to practise the mastery of imagination and passions, neo-Stoics, like their ancient forebears, needed to contrast and to model the serene acceptance of the wise man with the pathetic exaggeration of external ills typical of ordinary people. As a consequence, Stoic and neo-Stoic writing is full of calamity and contingent events, full of apparent chance. A third development, sometimes difficult to separate from neoStoicism, is that rise of sceptical thought generally called libertinage or ‘free-thought’ which was endowed with a great deal of energy by Montaigne’s Essays.12 The Essays were written during the wars of religion, which themselves created for some a backlash of doubt, and at a moment of renewed attention to ancient philosophers other than Aristotle, including the Sceptics and Epicureans (through Lucretius). These two circumstances shaped Montaigne’s book, which became a manual for Sceptics and free-thinkers for many decades after its publication in 1580. With Montaigne we can see the formation of a major problematics of chance both large-scale and small-scale. On the small scale there is an emphasis on the unpredictability of any individual’s life. The falling roof tile in ‘That to philosophise is to learn to die’ (‘Que philosopher c’est apprendre à mourir’) represents the unpredictable, sudden and trivial cause that can end life at any moment in any place.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd ix

07/10/2011 08:08

x

The Phantom of Chance

But less dramatic aspects of a person’s life are also apparently random: one’s tastes and opinions vary unaccountably from one day to the next. On the larger scale, Montaigne shows that political, military and judicial doctrines are all the result of chance and subject to it. Consider the complementarity of such essays as (the very first one) ‘By diverse means we arrive at the same end’ (I. 1) and ‘Various outcomes of the same plan’ (I. 24). Even more significantly, Montaigne makes striking use of a method that for centuries afterward was the central basis for sceptical arguments against religion and the established order, the method of cumulative cultural comparison. In his long chapter on the ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’, Montaigne teaches something quite striking about chance. It is tempting, when first thinking about chance, to suppose that chance displays itself in utter disorder, in the absence of system. Montaigne’s insight here, as he juxtaposes complex cultural arrangements, is that chance often appears with special clarity as a manifestation of an excess of order or system. This happens at the boundaries of systems, when they encounter each other, and when the smooth and apparently logical working of an ethical or legal code appears laughably arbitrary next to its mirror image in another culture, where comparable units of value appear transposed. In one, incest is held to be the most hateful, unnatural crime while in another incest is held to be virtuous. The consequence for the sceptic is to advance the claim that the contradictory manifestations of order cancel out the claim to an overall order and leave the conclusion that the world is ruled only by chance, and this view conformed nicely with Lucretian philosophy, which was gaining ground for many reasons and which gave chance the fundamental role in the creation of the universe. Libertines did not shrink from emphasising the discrepancy between a Christian view of the world as created for man and centred upon mankind (the image of God) and evidence of disorder, imperfection and non-anthropocentricism in the cosmos (in this view we can see why heliocentric astronomy appeared so threatening to the Church) – all themes found in Montaigne’s ‘Apology’.13 Libertine writers sometimes associated themselves with the neo-Stoic movement, one may think of La Mothe Le Vayer’s On the Virtue of the Pagans (De la vertu des païens, 1641), making it difficult to distinguish neo-Stoics in general from the more subversive thinkers so feared by Garasse and many others in the Church. As Christian writers (or even simply writers sponsored by the state and wishing to remain within official orthodoxy) pushed back against that movement of thought many approaches are deployed to explain, and sometimes to explain away, the apparent contingency of the world as people experienced it.14 Seventeenth-century France reacted against the wars of the sixteenth

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd x

07/10/2011 08:08

Preface

xi

century and against Montaigne’s triumphant scepticism. Centralised monarchical administration and renewed religious orthodoxy created institutional stability on a level not seen before. In literature and philosophy as well, France reacted against scepticism. Both Descartes and Pascal, with different approaches, attempted to provide a rational basis for religious faith and at the same time make major use of a concept that in certain respects eliminates chance: the idea of the machine. If chance is mysterious, unpredictable and unique (infrequent, not subject to repetition) the machine is the opposite: its functioning is clear, entirely predictable and repetitious. For Descartes the machine was the basis for all animal life and for Pascal it had even more extensive applications, ranging from the first arithmetic machine (or calculator) to an account of human life as a whole to the extent that we are controlled by thoughtless and repetitive routines. We recognise the mathesis universalis of Foucault but in a more dynamic form. In one of the most noted achievements of seventeenth-century science, the creation of the calculus of probabilities, Pascal and other thinkers tried to tame chance and increase predictability even in the domain where it seemed supreme and ineradicable, the games of chance, jeux de hasard. It would seem that, at least until the return of chance in the form of the je ne sais quoi, the seventeenth century aimed at eliminating chance in social institutions and in thought. Yet in reacting against chance, seventeenth-century French culture actually incorporated chance on a deeper level. There has been much attention to rationality and mechanism in the seventeenth century but less to the role that chance continued to play. However, from what we know about mimesis, in part from René Girard’s work, any struggle against something risks producing a mirror image of the foe. At the very least, chance appears as a trace within the procedures and representations designed to contain it. Thus the literary doctrines that urge plausibility (or verisimilitude) in plots give evidence of – and provide further stimulus for – a lively sensitivity to the appearance of chance. Fourth, the attention to chance in the seventeenth century derives from the renewed vigour of the ‘lower’ forms of investigation of natural phenomena, including medicine, which was not yet a science, and the gradual acceptance of empirical approaches, as Ian Hacking has shown in The Emergence of Probability. The everyday observation of life led to a certain practical know-how, but this know-how, even in highly developed crafts, could simply not be considered knowledge, that is scientia, for knowledge had to be arrived at by demonstration, that is deductively, as opposed to opinion, derived from sensation – including observation – which was aestimatio: ‘In scholastic doctrine opinion is

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd xi

07/10/2011 08:08

xii

The Phantom of Chance

the bearer of probability. The limit of increasing probability of opinion might be certain belief, but it is not knowledge: not because it lacks some missing ingredient, but because in general the objects of opinion are not the kinds of proposition that can be objects of knowledge.’15 The emergence of probability, that is a way of dealing with the imperfect and contingent material world, occurred when ‘internal evidence’, that is the evidence from things themselves, was admitted as a form of proof. This evidence from material things themselves came primarily from the ‘low sciences’: alchemy, geology, astrology and medicine. The high sciences such as optics, astronomy and mechanics still clung to demonstration and scorned opinion.16 Francis Bacon, as Michael Witmore and others have shown, saw the artificial cultivation of accident through experimentation as a way of thwarting the powerful inherited tendency toward deductive reasoning.17 On the other hand, Descartes attempted to create a foundation for science by eliminating circumstance and the contingent in general. In direct contrast to Montaigne, whom Ann Hartle has called an ‘accidental philosopher’, Descartes wished to be a philosopher of the necessary.18 In these four streams of converging influences that pushed chance to the forefront, we can see a common thread, the distinction between the ‘high’ and the ‘low’, the ‘certain’ and timeless sphere of spirit or intellect and the ‘contingent’ or irrational sphere of everyday and quite imperfect life. In literary debates, chance events, though common in much drama and narrative, were decried as being implausible and as showing what did happen rather than what should happen. Much effort was expended to eliminate or at least to contain and ‘explain’ chance events in a literature that was taken seriously and held to a higher theoretical standard. In philosophical and theological debates, much needed to be done to describe, if not to explain, how an omnipotent and eternal divinity could have created a world of such apparent injustice and randomness. And in the branch of philosophy that emerged into what we call science, there was turbulence on the boundary between the ‘higher’ world of theory and the ‘lower’ world of observable events.

The End of Fortune and the Rise of Chance The primary purpose of the present study is to explore what happened when ‘fortune’ yielded to other types of chance. Our hypothesis is that a view of chance that existed for millennia and that was expressed in early-modern French primarily with the term hasard (though other words convey the same or closely related ideas such as rencontre and

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd xii

07/10/2011 08:08

Preface

xiii

aventure) took on renewed life while ‘fortune’ waned. It is not simply that the word fortune appears less frequently (though that is in fact the case) but that new circumstances and new arguments made it desirable to use terms that conveyed a newly fragmentary, demystified and somewhat trivialised conception of unexpected events. The texts studied here are all broadly within the literary field. The concept ‘literary’ itself is relatively new and is forged out of what the seventeenth century would have considered poetry on the one hand – tragedy, comedy, prose narrative – and eloquence on the other. Thus we are not specifically concerned with philosophical and theological debates except to the extent that they influenced or were expressed in the literary domain. The idea that fortune fell at the end of the Renaissance is not in itself new.19 But there are many ways of understanding the results, ways that derive in part from different disciplinary approaches (history of science, philosophy, and literary study) and in part from the specific objects that one studies. One way of understanding fortune’s fall is to understand fortune as representing chance as a whole and to see the lowered status of fortune as corresponding to the proportionate and contemporaneous rise in world-views based on mechanism and determinism. We will encounter this view in the course of the present study but it is not the path that we will pursue. Instead, we will see how chance persisted but in a new form and within literature. In studying ‘chance’ or any other concept that has been shared by many cultures throughout millennia – ‘God’, ‘freedom’, ‘truth’, ‘beauty’ and other such concepts come to mind – we realise that we are confronted with a scale of juxtaposed ideas and terms, terms that are neither clearly distinct nor entirely identical. In approaching early-modern ideas of chance we first need to look back at the tradition on which writers like Bossuet, Corneille, Lafayette, Pascal, Racine and others drew and which they reshaped. This tradition assigns a great range of meanings to terms like tyche, casus and fortuna, and they must repeatedly be parsed with respect for the context. Thus when Boethius writes of Fortuna in the early sixth century and when Corneille writes of ‘la Fortune’ in the seventeenth century, each means to convey the sense of Aristotle’s tyche but all three writers have distinctly different ways of using the term and apply it to different cases. However, to anticipate somewhat the general line of the chapters that follow, we can say that after Montaigne, writers in French sought a term to designate events that erupted unpredictably, that could not be foreseen, that defied planning and institutional regularity, that disrupted lives and narratives, and that made a mockery of hierarchies, overturning the respected and apparently logical order of importance among things and people. Increasingly the term used

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd xiii

07/10/2011 08:08

xiv

The Phantom of Chance

for such events was hasard. ‘Fortune’ could sometimes be used with this new emphasis but was more often used either to designate material wealth and social standing or to convey a rather grandiose sense of dramatic effect and individual importance. In short, it seems that henceforth fortune gathers and organises, subordinates and prioritises, and creates extensive sequences, while hasard (which we will generally simply call ‘chance’ or ‘randomness’) erupts and scatters, levels, deflates and trivialises. There has been surprisingly little attention to the role of chance in early-modern French literature, with the exceptions of Thomas Kavanagh’s studies, which emphasise games of chance, and Ross Hamilton’s recent Accident. With the exception of a few passages in Pascal, Hamilton does not examine any of the authors who are included in the present study.20 With regard to games of chance, which are considered briefly in the chapter on Pascal, they appear as a flight from chance. That is, if a chance event is one which happens suddenly, unexpectedly and yet appears to be significant, games of chance constitute a way of constraining and limiting the appearance of the fortuitous, almost as if to conjure the danger of chance by limiting its appearance within a ritual. The work most closely related to the present volume in terms of its scope is a recent collection of essays on early-modern chance and literature Chance, Literature, and Culture in Early-Modern France. The Phantom of Chance does not constitute a systematic history of chance in the early-modern French literary field. It proposes instead, more modestly, a series of exploratory investigations of relatively wellknown works, with the aim of showing how attention to their representation of chance (hasard) sheds new light on the individual texts and the moment that produced them. The works studied in the five chapters are presented in roughly chronological order. This order allows us to glimpse certain key points on a trajectory that leads from a dramatic, imposing and coherent idea of chance as fortune toward an ever more fragmented, decentred, trivial and shallow view of chance as randomness. Fortune – and a number of other variants of what has been called the ‘constellation of chance’ – varies according to the subjective self-image of characters, and the fall of fortune and the rise of randomness largely parallel a disenchanted view of humanity and its place in the world.21 As evidence of this long process, we consider first tragi-comedy and the pivotal work Le Cid, which occasioned a justification of a poetics that simulates chance. Then we look at Pascal’s Provincial Letters (Lettres provinciales) and Pensées to examine the role of chance in his arguments for a rigorous Christianity. In the year that saw the publication of the Pensées,

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd xiv

07/10/2011 08:08

Preface

xv

Lafayette’s Zayde uses the form of a romance (a genre characterised by its spectacular inclusion of chance incidents) to show how chance appears at the intersection of events and of the characters’ individual fears and desires. Eight years later the same author, in a novel usually considered to break away from implausible romance plots, showed that in the new, apparently more realistic narratives, chance had not disappeared but instead took on a new look. While Lafayette was writing her The Princess of Cleves, the influential bishop Bossuet was completing his Discourse on Universal History (Discours sur l’histoire universelle), an authoritative expression of the view that all is governed by God’s providence. Surprisingly, Bossuet’s argument requires a heightened perception that the historical world operates randomly. His contemporary and acquaintance at the court of Louis XIV, Racine, may have drawn the idea for his final tragedy, Athalie, from Bossuet’s history. This drama, often considered the playwright’s expression of a predestined, ineluctable fate, shares with Bossuet a double vision of human life, one that appears on a certain level random and on another level driven by eternal purpose. Finally, La Bruyère, a ‘moralist’ who declares that he portrays the conduct and values of late-century Paris, shows a world spasmodically organised around mere accident (in the sense of coincidence) but also a world that gives an excess role to accident (in the philosophical sense of inessential quality).

Notes 1. Daston, ‘Fortuna and the Passions’, p. 26. 2. Arnauld and Nicole, La Logique, p. 29. In this and in the immediately following quotations, italics indicate emphasis added by me. 3. Descartes, Œuvres philosophiques, ed. Alquié, III, 679, cited by Emma Gilby, ‘The Language of Fortune in Descartes’, p. 155 4. Descartes, ‘Discours de la méthode’, p. 24. 5. Du Vair, De la constance, p. 79. Du Vair’s book is in dialogue form, and the expression ‘ce fantosme’ is attributed to the character named Orphée, who champions the view that all is controlled by God through the forms of nature and of destiny. 6. Corneille, Trois discours sur le poème dramatique, ed. Bénédicte Louvat and Marc Escola, pp. 64–5. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Corneille’s Discours will be to this edition. The translation is my own. 7. ‘Ainsi sommes-nous autorisés à appliquer à la prudence ce qu’Aristote dit, pour conclure, de l’art: “D’une certaine manière, le domaine de l’art est le même que celui du hasard, comme le dit aussi Agathon: L’art aime le hasard et le hasard aime l’art”’ (Aubenque, La Prudence chez Aristote, p. 68).

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd xv

07/10/2011 08:08

xvi

The Phantom of Chance

8. All quotations from Aristotle will give the conventional location in the Bekker edition of 1831, as here: 1452a1–10. Unless otherwise indicated, the translated passages are from The Poetics of Aristotle, trans. and ed. Stephen Halliwell. This passage is on p. 42. 9. Lafayette, letter to the chevalier de Lescheraine (13 April 1678), quoted in Laugaa, Lectures de Madame de Lafayette, p. 16 note 1. 10. Aubenque, La Prudence chez Aristote, p. 80. 11. Aubenque, La Prudence chez Aristote, p. 87. 12. Montaigne, Essais, ed. Pierre Villey and V.-L. Saulnier and The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame. All references to the Essais will be to these editions, with parenthetical references to the pages of the respective French or English text, giving the page number of the French text, followed by the page number of the English translation, as 72/49. These texts will be mentioned as Essais, referring to the French text, and Complete Essays, referring to the English translation. 13. In his La Doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits de ce temps (1623), François Garasse, SJ, attacked the wave of atheism that he saw sweeping over France. One of the ‘maxims’ of the atheists he describes and condemns is an assertion of the dominance of ‘destiny’ or ‘fortune’ – concepts he conflates (p. 187). 14. Neo-Stoicism, with its insistence on Providence, can in turn be considered an attempt to counter the multitude of Renaissance writings on ‘fortune’ and on ‘fate’. Jacob Burckhardt claimed that the prominence of Fortune in this period was the result of the spread of scepticism (Gesammelte Werke, III, 347–8). See Howard, ‘Jacob Burckhardt, Religion, and the Historiography of “Crisis” and “Transition”’. 15. Hacking, The Emergence of Probability, p. 22. 16. Hacking, The Emergence of Probability, p. 35. 17. Witmore, Culture of Accidents, p. 113. 18. Ann Hartle, Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher. 19. Daston writes in her article ‘Fortuna and the Passions’: ‘It is not my goal here to explain how and why Fortuna fell from philosophical grace. Rather, I propose to examine the impact of Fortuna’s fall in an area of philosophy traditionally closely intertwined with her vicissitudes, viz. the theory of the passions’ (p. 27). 20. Kavanagh, Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance; Kavanagh, Dice, Cards, Wheels; Kavanagh, Chance, Culture and the Literary Text; Hamilton, Accident. 21. This is the term that Erich Köhler uses to group together the many words used to denote ‘chance’, ‘fortune’ and their kindred concepts (Köhler, Le Hasard en littérature).

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd xvi

07/10/2011 08:08

Acknowledgements

This study began as a seminar at the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Université de Paris III), and I am grateful to Hélène Merlin-Kajman, who was director of the department of French and Latin Language and Literature, for the opportunity to give that seminar. Columbia University welcomed me as a fellow of the Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall in Paris during that time, and I thank the director of Reid Hall, Danielle Haas-Dubosc, for offering me the chance to enjoy the stimulating environment of the Institute. Portions of this work were subsequently given at Cambridge University, Glasgow University, Queen Mary, University of London, Dartmouth College, the University of Colorado and Wellesley College. I owe a particular debt to numerous colleagues at these institutions, particularly to Neil Kenny, Emma Gilby, John Campbell, Michael Moriarty, Christopher Braider and Hélène Bilis. As the work neared completion, the Society for French Studies generously allowed me to present an overview of the project at its annual meeting at the University of Swansea in 2010. I am deeply grateful to the members of the Society, and particularly to its president, Edward J. Hughes, for their encouragement. A version of the lecture at Swansea, which consisted of portions of Chapter 3, subsequently appeared in the journal, French Studies. I thank Oxford University Press and Jean Duffy, editor of French Studies, for permission to include passages of that text in the present book.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd xvii

07/10/2011 08:08

Series Editor’s Preface

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture may, as a series title, provoke some surprise. On the one hand, the choice of the word ‘culture’ (rather than, say, ‘literature’) suggests that writers in this series subscribe to the now widespread assumption that the ‘literary’ is not isolable, as a mode of signifying, from other signifying practices that make up what we call ‘culture’. On the other hand, most of the critical work in English literary studies of the period 1500–1700 which endorses this idea has rejected the older identification of the period as ‘the Renaissance’, with its implicit homage to the myth of essential and universal Man coming to stand (in all his sovereign individuality) at the centre of a new world picture. In other words, the term ‘culture’ in the place of ‘literature’ leads us to expect the words ‘early modern’ in the place of ‘Renaissance’. Why, then, ‘Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture’? The answer to that question lies at the heart of what distinguishes this critical series and defines its parameters. As Terence Cave has argued, the term ‘early modern’, though admirably egalitarian in conception, has had the unfortunate effect of essentialising the modern, that is, of positing ‘the advent of a once-and-for-all modernity’ which is the deictic ‘here and now’ from which we look back. The phrase ‘early modern’, that is to say, forecloses the possibility of other modernities, other futures that might have arisen, narrowing the scope of what we may learn from the past by construing it as a narrative leading inevitably to Western modernity, to ‘us’. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture aims rather to shift the emphasis from a story of progress – early modern to modern – to series of critical encounters and conversations with the past, which may reveal to us some surprising alternatives buried within texts familiarly construed as episodes on the way to certain identifying features of our endlessly fascinating modernity. In keeping with one aspect of the etymology of ‘Renaissance’ or ‘Rinascimento’ as ‘rebirth’, moreover, this series features books that explore and interpret

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd xviii

07/10/2011 08:08

Series Editor’s Preface

xix

anew elements of the critical encounter between writers of the period 1500–1700 and texts of Greco-Roman literature, rhetoric, politics, law, oeconomics, eros and friendship. The term ‘culture’, then, indicates a licence to study and scrutinise objects other than literary ones, and to be more inclusive about both the forms and the material and political stakes of making meaning both in the past and in the present. ‘Culture’ permits a realisation of the benefits to be reaped after two decades of interdisciplinary enrichment in the arts. No longer are historians naive about textual criticism, about rhetoric, about literary theory or about readerships; likewise, literary critics trained in close reading now also turn easily to court archives, to legal texts and to the historians’ debates about the languages of political and religious thought. Social historians look at printed pamphlets with an eye for narrative structure; literary critics look at court records with awareness of the problems of authority, mediation and institutional procedure. Within these developments, modes of research that became unfashionable and discredited in the 1980s – for example, studies in classical or vernacular ‘source texts’, or studies of literary ‘influence’ across linguistic, confessional and geographical boundaries – have acquired a new critical edge and relevance as the convergence of the disciplines enables the unfolding of new cultural histories (that is to say, what was once studied merely as ‘literary influence’ may now be studied as a fraught cultural encounter). The term ‘Renaissance’ thus retains the relevance of the idea of consciousness and critique within these textual engagements of past and present, and, while it foregrounds the Western European experience, is intended to provoke comparativist study of wider global perspectives rather than to promote the ‘universality’ of a local, if far-reaching, historical phenomenon. Finally, as traditional pedagogic boundaries between ‘Medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’ are being called into question by cross disciplinary work emphasising the ‘reformation’ of social and cultural forms, so this series, while foregrounding the encounter with the classical past, is self-conscious about the ways in which that past is assimilated to the projects of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, spiritual, political and domestic, that finally transformed Christendom into Europe. Individual books in this series vary in methodology and approach, sometimes blending the sensitivity of close literary analysis with incisive, informed and urgent theoretical argument, at other times offering critiques of grand narratives of the period by their work in manuscript transmission, or in the archives of legal, social and architectural history, or by social histories of gender and childhood. What all these books have in common, however, is the capacity to offer compelling,

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd xix

07/10/2011 08:08

xx

The Phantom of Chance

well-documented and lucidly written critical accounts of how writers and thinkers in the period 1500–1700 reshaped, transformed and critiqued the texts and practices of their world, prompting new perspectives on what we think we have learned from them. Lorna Hutson

Note 1. Terence Cave, ‘Locating the Early Modern’, Paragraph 29.1 (2006), pp. 12–26, 14.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd xx

07/10/2011 08:08

Introduction

The Tradition of Chance Whether or not chance exists, there are certainly many words in European languages that belong to a conceptual cluster denoting contingency, to things without necessity. Aristotle writes of tyche and automaton in the Poetics, in the Physics and in the Nicomachean Ethics. Latin developed its own vocabulary for chance, unrelated to Aristotle’s terms: casus appears alongside fortuna and is sometimes distinguished from it. A set of concentric circles widen away from chance or tyche, and there we can find words that are occasionally quasi-synonyms for ‘by chance’, like ‘arbitrary’ or ‘random’ or ‘coincidence’ and so forth. Tyche appears in most modern English translations as ‘chance’ and in recent French translations as hasard, in German as Zufall, in Italian and Spanish as caso. Each of these terms requires attention in context because they often convey shades of meaning and even direct opposition. And then there is a host of terms that seem to be antonyms and to be completely irreconcilable with ‘chance’, such as ‘Providence’ or even ‘fate’, but things in ordinary life are more complicated. We need only recall that Aristotle, in banishing chance from the denouement of the successful tragedy, also banished the intervention of the gods, the deus ex machina, thus suggesting that claims of divine intervention could be, on some occasions, placed into the same category as chance.1

Aristotle and the Third Type of Event Chance entered the Western tradition of literary theory in a well-known passage in Aristotle’s Poetics. After asserting the centrality of story (the representation of an event) in literary art, the philosopher considers the type of event that is appropriate in such stories and argues that the

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 1

07/10/2011 08:08

2

The Phantom of Chance

poet should represent events that could occur, not simply events that have already occurred. We saw above (pp. vii–viii) the striking passage in which Aristotle insisted on the importance of plots that produce not only pity and fear in the audience but also ‘wonder’ (thaumaston, rendered into French in the early-modern period as la merveille). In regard to the treatment of chance in the Poetics, the incident of Mitys’s statue leads Aristotle to formulate his thought in an exceptionally paradoxical manner, but one that is typical of his treatment of chance in his other works.2 He states quite clearly that tragic plots should exclude incidents that happen simply by chance. But rather than give an example of the proper way to construct a plot that would produce the three desired effects – or affects: pity, fear, wonder – he gives an example of an event that does not fit his requirements for a tragic plot. Yet rather oddly he does not specifically designate the statue incident as something to avoid or as something that would make a tragedy bad. Instead, Mitys’s statue appears in an indeterminate category, as a kind of third type of event. This expression itself appears in describing chance in the Physics, as we will see below, but it seems appropriate as a way to describe what the philosopher does in the Poetics with this matter of the statue. The fall of the statue is fortuitous and thus not appropriate for tragedy, but just the same it is a rather good kind of accident, because it is an accident that seems not to be an accident. So this event is not the result of a traceable chain of physical causes nor does it seem to be entirely without purpose. It is an uncaused yet appropriate event. This example in the Poetics is truly fundamental for all cases of chance in Aristotle because the way we recognised chance events is that they seem not to be chance events!3 Chance also appears in the Poetics when Aristotle discusses the means by which playwrights have found the right kind of plot, the kind that produces pity and fear in the audience. Aristotle points to the limited repertory of existing plots: [. . .] as said before, tragedies concentrate on a few families. Luck not art led poets to find how to achieve such an effect in their plots; so they have to turn to the families in which such sufferings have occurred. (1453b10–14)4

This comment on the role of luck (tyche) in the discovery of the events suitable for tragic plots refers back to the previous chapter, where Aristotle writes: For in the beginning the poets’ choice of stories was arbitrary [tychontas], whereas now the finest tragedies are constructed around a few families – Alcmaeon, for example, Œdipus,Orestes, Meleager, Thyestes, Telephus, and others who have suffered or committed terrible deeds [. . .]. (1453a18–20)5

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 2

07/10/2011 08:08

Introduction

3

Aristotle is understood by all recent commentators to mean that early poets simply stumbled upon good plots. In other words, chance is not located in the event represented but in the compositional practice of the playwrights. The third major passage of the poetics which is related to this matter of chance (though tyche does not appear in it) comes just a little further, in the discussion of proper denouements: It is evident that the dénouements of plot-structures should arise from the plot itself, and not, as in Medea, from a deus ex machina, or in the episode of the departure in the Iliad. But the deus ex machina should be used for events outside the play, whether earlier events of which a human cannot have knowledge, or future events which call for a prospective narrative; for we attribute to the gods a vision of all things. (1453a35–1453b5)6

The reproach that sloppy poets send a god into the plot to solve the problem is only the culmination of a chapter that insists, as does chapter 9, on the self-sufficient, closed causality of the proper tragic plot, based on ‘the necessary and the probable’. So that when the two passages are read together – the one about the falling statue and the one about the god fetched over the stage on a crane – the condemnation of chance and the condemnation of the deus ex machina are complementary. In both cases Aristotle contrasts the order of the empirical, observable world that functions according to certain recurrent patterns with the eruption into that world of another force. The case of the statue, which is attributed to ‘chance or spontaneity’, could have been attributed to a god, but to a hidden one. And if we juxtapose chapters 9 and 15, there seems to be the implication that Aristotle finds this mysterious event, apparently purposeful and yet surely not performed by an agent, more moving and productive of ‘wonder’ than the visible intervention of a god. There is much more about the controversial issue of chance in the second book of the Physics, chapters 4–6 (195a31–198a13), and here too Aristotle implies that there is something mysterious about ‘chance or spontaneity’.7 In the discussion of ‘causes’, Aristotle writes that ‘many things are said both to be and to come to be as a result of chance [tyche] and spontaneity [ton automaton]’, though he admits that some deny that these are causes.8 Such people point out that things we ascribe to chance happen for reasons that can be specified: e.g. coming by chance into the market and finding there a man whom one wanted but did not expect to meet is due to one’s wish to go and buy in the market. Similarly, in other so-called cases of chance it is always possible, they maintain, to find something which is the cause; but not chance [. . .]. (196a1–5)

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 3

07/10/2011 08:08

4

The Phantom of Chance

Aristotle expands on this example subsequently: A man is engaged in collecting subscriptions for a feast. He would have gone to such and such a place for the purpose of getting the money, if he had known. He actually went there for another purpose, and it was only accidentally that he got his money by going there; and this was not due to the fact that he went there as a rule or necessarily, nor is the end effected (getting the money) a cause present in himself – it belongs to the class of things that are objects of choice and the result of thought. It is when these conditions are satisfied that the man is said to have gone by chance. If he had chosen and gone for the sake of this – he always or normally went there when he was collecting payments – he would not be said to have gone by chance. (196b32–197a5)

What is central to this example is that getting the money owed to him is a purpose but that it was not the purpose for which he went to the market where he met the man from whom he wanted to collect the money. Chance cannot be formulated at all except in relation to human intention and desire: It is clear then that chance is an accidental cause in the sphere of those actions for the sake of something which involve choice. Thought, then, and chance are in the same sphere, for choice implies thought. (197a6–8)

But while chance is framed and represented in terms of what we want or do not want, it has a strange relationship to those desires. A goal can only be reached ‘by chance’ if we do not actually plan to reach that goal. The man going to the market to collect his money needs not to intend to meet his debtor in the market in order for this meeting to take place by chance. And a further condition of chance is that neither of the men must go habitually to the market at the time they meet. So there is something either supplemental or defective about chance; there is either not enough or too much cause. Both men must have gone to the market for some reason. The opponents of the idea of chance as a cause point out triumphantly that the encounter of the two men is easily explained: they both wanted to buy something there. On this explanation, the debtcollector’s wish to meet his debtor is something extra that must hover over the scene as something essentially unreal. On the other hand, in terms of the position that Aristotle seems to be advancing, chance is not at all an extra but rather a lack. It was the lack of any plan or expectation to meet the debtor that allows us to speak of a chance encounter. If this meeting had been planned, it would not have happened by chance. So Aristotle, in accounting for chance, emphasises what is missing. Yet this is only part of the story. Aristotle takes something away (reasonable expectation of a specific encounter), but he also adds something to his account: desire. This is something that the opponents of the

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 4

07/10/2011 08:08

Introduction

5

concept of chance do not take into account. And, in a way, they are right not to do so, because if you leave out desire or ‘choice’ then you have no grounds for distinguishing this encounter of the debt-collector and the debtor from any of the other encounters that take place in the marketplace at the same time. Surely, however, this is precisely what Aristotle points out in this example as he did in the example in the Poetics about the fall of Mitys’s statue. This particular type of encounter is oddly, hauntingly different from all other types of encounters. We must assume that there were scores, perhaps hundreds, of people in the market who met and spoke with one another in the process of going to purchase things. Their meetings were not planned, not specifically expected and were not the purpose for which they went to the market. Most of these people probably knew one another to some extent, but some may have been strangers. There was nothing remarkable about their encounters – it is, after all, impossible to enter a functioning marketplace without meeting people. Aristotle says nothing about these many other encounters, and for an obvious reason. They are entirely unremarkable and unmemorable. They lack this odd, almost contradictory thing that he designates as chance: something that someone wished would happen, happened, when he had no plan nor expectation that it would happen. We could almost formulate this as Chance = Desire – Expectation of fulfilment. In order to identify what is really important in the chance event, Aristotle must also discount the things that his opponents count as causes. That is, he does not deny that they are causes, but he simply sets them aside as pertinent to this special thing that is chance: The causes of the man’s coming and getting the money (when he did not come for the sake of that) are innumerable. He may have wished to see somebody or been following somebody or avoiding somebody, or may have gone to see a spectacle. Thus to say that chance is unaccountable is correct. For an account is what holds always or for the most part, whereas chance belongs to a third type of event. Hence, since causes of this kind are indefinite, chance too is indefinite. (197a16–20)

So the man may have been following somebody, and in this case the desire (or choice) to do something (to follow) probably coincides with what he was actually doing, that is following that person. So desire and expectation of fulfilment coincide entirely. There is nothing ‘indefinite’ –and one might add, nothing surprising. The accounts of chance given in the Poetics and in the Physics complement one another, because this element of amazement or wonder (thaumaston) is certainly part of the experience of the debt-collector in the marketplace and of anyone to whom he tells the story. It is clear that the fall of Mitys’s statue follows

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 5

07/10/2011 08:08

6

The Phantom of Chance

a similar pattern and is a more impressive example of chance – more impressive for the reason that the gap between desire and expectation is even greater. The ‘debt’ (or desire for vengeance) owed by the murderer to Mitys is of a much greater magnitude than the debt owed as a share of the cost of a feast, and the expectation that the statue of Mitys would fall precisely in such a way as to ‘collect’ the debt is much lower. In the case of the falling statue, the expectation that a statue will fall on someone is generally low, but there is also little purpose that such a fall would serve. The monument could have fallen on any passer-by, but it is precisely because the statue fell on the man who killed Mitys that the incident has passed into legend. In addition to chance (tyche) Aristotle also discusses spontaneity (automaton) and attempts to distinguish them: ‘They differ in that spontaneity is the wider. Every result of chance is from what is spontaneous, but not everything that is from what is spontaneous is from chance’ (197a35).9 And later: ‘It is clear, then, that when any causal agency incidentally produces a significant result outside its aim, we attribute it to automaton.’10 He goes on to say that the specialised term chance is used for things done by intelligent agents: ‘Thus an inanimate thing or a beast or a child cannot do anything by chance, because it is incapable of choice; nor can good fortune nor ill fortune be ascribed to them, except metaphorically’ (197b2–10). But spontaneity in the wider sense can describe what happens with animals and inanimate objects. Yet the strange complex of something either supplemental or defective about chance characterises spontaneity in regard to inanimate things as it does chance in the case of humans (or intelligent agents): A stone falls and hits someone, but it does not fall for the purpose of hitting him; the fall accordingly was ‘in-itself-to-no-purpose’ – a chance result – because the fall might have been caused by someone who had the purpose of hitting the man. (197b29–33)

So even things that are recognised as acting by chance (automaton) seem to have some purpose even though they do not. It seems as if someone threw the stone because the stone hit someone. So there is an excess of seeming purpose that is coupled with a known absence of purpose. But we would only say that the stone fell by chance if, in telling about this event, we framed it within the story of a person – that is the person who was or who narrowly escaped being the victim of the falling stone. We would then project back onto the inanimate object a human-like purpose of causing harm while we would at the same time say that we know the stone was not thrown. This back-and-forth between what we know (an incident without a purpose) and what we imagine (that the

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 6

07/10/2011 08:08

Introduction

7

incident seems to have had a purpose all the same) resembles the mental negotiations of ‘denial’ in the Freudian sense (Verleugnung) in which the speaker both asserts and denies something at the same time. As Octave Mannoni so well formulates this process, it corresponds to the French expression ‘Je sais bien, mais quand même . . .’ (‘I know, but just the same . . .’).11 In many cases of ‘spontaneity’, there is a doubly human element in the structure. Stones fall frequently on steep mountains. There is no purpose in their fall and no one comments on such occasional falling rock. But if a rock slide narrowly misses a person, then chance is often invoked. Either one remarks on the successful but unintended actions of the would-be victim (e.g. ‘If I hadn’t stopped to tie my shoelace, I would have been right under it!’) or on the apparently (though falsely) purposeful way in which the rock had waited until just that moment to let loose. Aristotle formulates this a bit differently because he treats Nature as a purposeful agent in itself, but concludes the treatment of chance in the Physics by restating the juxtaposition of apparent purpose and known absence of purpose: And since the results of automaton and tyche are always such as might have been aimed at by mind or Nature, though in fact they emerged incidentally [. . .] Chance [automaton] and fortune [tyche], therefore, imply the antecedent activity of mind and Nature as causes [. . .] (198a6–10)

This recognition of the way that both forms of chance depend on an imagined but denied purpose tends to blunt the otherwise sharp distinction between human and non-human that is presented, yet seems – particularly in the later literary implementations of chance – to be a distinction without a difference. Aristotle gives the example of the stool that falls as if to offer someone a seat: ‘the tripod fell spontaneously, because, though it stood on its feet so as to serve as a seat, it did not fall so as to serve for a seat’ (197b17–18). Once again we have the ‘third’ type of event, one that is not due to mind or Nature (Nature signifying what happens necessarily or probably), but one that seems as if it were assignable to one or the other of these two causes even though it cannot be. And the human, that is the apparent cause by a mind, seems to take precedence because how would we recognise this particular fall of a tripod as chance (automaton) and distinguish it from a natural fall unless we had at our disposal a human purpose or desire that we can project onto the simple fall of an object? If the tripod – and in view of the ‘thirdness’ of this type of event the choice of this three-legged example seems especially apposite – had fallen on its side or had fallen on its top (with legs upward) it would not seem to offer itself as a seat and would

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 7

07/10/2011 08:08

8

The Phantom of Chance

consequently (one presumes) be of little interest as an example of chance or spontaneity. Therefore, again, a sharp distinction between tyche and automaton has little relevance to poetics, the domain with which the present study is concerned. Finally, in this brief survey of Aristotle’s thought with regard to chance, there is a passage of the Physics that deals with the matter of proximity and point of view in the perception of chance. Aristotle takes a position opposing those who say that the universe arose by chance (by automaton): There are some who actually ascribe this heavenly sphere and all the worlds to spontaneity. They say that the vortex arose spontaneously, i.e. the motion that separated and arranged the universe in its present order. This statement might well cause surprise. For they are asserting that chance is not responsible for the existence or generation of animals and plants [. . .] and yet at the same time they assert that the heavenly sphere and the divinest of visible things arose spontaneously, having no such cause as is assigned to animals and plants. [. . .] [B]esides the other absurdities of the statement, it is the more absurd that people should make it when they see nothing coming to be spontaneously in the heavens, but much happening by chance among the things which as they say are not due to chance; whereas we should have expected exactly the opposite. (196a25–196b4)12

What seems to Aristotle absurd is that some people say that the things that they can observe closely everyday, such as the generation of an olive tree from another olive tree, are not chance events but are predictable and governed by necessity, but that the same people claim that the greatest systems, which are farther away, are governed by chance. Aristotle asserts as obvious an entirely reversed perspective and claims that we cannot find chance (automaton) in the heavens but that we do see things happening spontaneously (i.e. accidentally) in the terrestrial world around us.13

Fortuna and casus Entering the Roman world, the concept of chance took on new names – notably fortuna and casus – and was framed in different debates. Was there order to the universe, or did things happen for no reason? The tendency in Roman philosophy was to generalise beyond the isolated incidents that interested Aristotle. Whether as the delegate of a superior divinity or as herself, acting independently without further authorisation or control, fortune is often opposed to the notion of providence, which seems consistently to imply vision (awareness, consciousness)

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 8

07/10/2011 08:08

Introduction

9

and intention. This distinction was the object of renewed interest at the end of the sixteenth century thanks to the revival of certain Stoic texts and to the Epicurean De rerum natura of Lucretius. For example, in Seneca’s ‘On providence’ (De prouidentia), the author, while avoiding the word ‘fortune’, uses the derivative fortuiti, to contrast the blind and unintelligent workings of a nature without divine control, on one hand, to a world organised by an intelligence that directed things toward some goal: For the present purpose it is unnecessary to show that this mighty structure of the world does not endure without someone to guard it, and that the assembling and the separate flight of the stars above are not due to the workings of chance [fortuiti]; that while bodies which owe their motion to accident [casus] often fall into disorder and quickly collide, this swift revolution of the heavens, being ruled by eternal law, goes on unhindered, producing so many things on land and sea, so many brilliant lights in the sky all shining in fixed array; that this regularity does not belong to matter moving at random [materiae errantis].14

In this passage, we can see how the many terms for chance in Latin tend to function as synonyms rather than be parsed into special aspects of the fortuitous. What concerns Seneca is the sharp distinction between an intentionally directed world and one that is not animated by an intelligence but instead is simply material. For Seneca a world ruled by fortune is ruled by nothing – fortune is the absence of law, absence of intention, a sheer lack of cause. Yet we can also wonder whether one needs to believe in fortune in order to believe in ‘fortuitous things’, since it seems that we more often find the expression res fortuitae than Fortuna in Seneca and Cicero. Casus (source of the French cas and English case) designates ‘what is’, what has befallen, accident, the way things have fallen out, from the verb cadere, to fall. Casus thus means ‘chance’ in the most straightforward way, that is without attempting to attribute it to any occult force. In Latin, besides being the past participle of the verb, casus meant accident, event, occurrence and occasion (‘accident’ and ‘occasion’ are of course, simply further derivatives of some form of cadere and caedere), often with a negative connotation as disaster, downfall and ruin. Cicero uses the terms fortuna and casus [chance] interchangeably except perhaps to emphasise that chance is ‘blind’ and that fortune is ‘changeable’.15 There are also ‘fatality’ and ‘fate’. Fatum appears at the origin opposed to fortune and comes etymologically from the verb fari, ‘to say’, and is thus linked to fabula and to fateor (‘I confess’). If fatum means ‘said’ and is thus the decree by which a thing is decided once and

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 9

07/10/2011 08:08

10

The Phantom of Chance

for all, it is the opposite of fortune and chance in ordinary usage. But on the other hand, fate belongs to the constellation of chance because of its mysterious and unpredictable character. Fate implies that a certain thing happens despite all manner of human actions and intentions that seem to lead to a quite different outcome. Hence, it is tempting to say that Œdipus’s killing of his father was the outcome of ‘fate’ for the very reason that the hero’s actions were intended to – and seemed reasonably conceived with a view to – avoid precisely that outcome. Therefore fate has in common with fortune that it is invoked to explain a surprising event that is not only contrary to human intention but also to normally observed sequences of causes and effects. Yet while fortune signifies the absolute absence of necessity, fate or fatality seems to be the assertion that the less the cause is obvious the more there must be some cause – the less there is evidence of a cause, the more vigorous must be the belief in a cause. Cicero assigns the belief in fate primarily to the Stoics.16 He notes that our outlook on events, the manner in which we conclude that certain things happen by ‘fate’, is determined by discourse. In the extent fragment of his dialogue ‘On Fate’ (De fato) Cicero raised an excellent question about the effect of the word itself: What I want to know therefore is [. . .] if there were no such word at all as fate, no such thing, no such force, and if either most things or all things took place by mere casual accident [casu], would the course of events be different from what it is now? What is the point then of harping on fate, when everything can be explained by reference to nature and fortune [ad naturam fortunamve referatur] without bringing fate in?17

Cicero becomes the defender of chance (both casus and fortuna) against fatality, two families of concepts that are, for him, radically different, one permitting a margin of liberty to things, if not to human beings. Cicero recognises also that the term ‘fate’ acquires its significance for us not only from its etymology but also from its use in everyday speech, specifically from the way we tell stories about events. The allure of fate is that it makes good stories and it protects us against the idea that things happen fortuitously. Here is an example that Cicero gives in ‘On Fate’ to criticise a story that had been proposed to illustrate the working of fate. About the death of the robber Icadius, Cicero says: I swear I can’t see any trace of destiny; for the story does not say that he had any warning, so that if a rock from the roof of a cave did fall on his legs, what is there surprising about it? for I suppose that even if Icadius had not been in the cave at the time, that rock would have fallen all the same, since either nothing at all is fortuitous or it was possible for this particular event to have happened by fortune.18

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 10

07/10/2011 08:08

Introduction

11

Cicero finds no destiny or fatality in the case of Icadius because the robber had not received a ‘warning’ – the outcome had not been said beforehand. The author of ‘De fato’ applies a criterion that is bizarrely familiar to readers of seventeenth-century French dramatic criticism. The fatalising story is defective because the denouement was not properly prepared in the narrative. The story would have been much better if there had been a prediction. Otherwise, the outcome seems to be random and thus excessively open-ended. In another of his dialogues, ‘On Divination’ (De divinatione), Cicero argues against divination while his brother Quintus defends this traditional practice at length and not very intelligently, adopting Stoic arguments. There is, right from the beginning, a contradiction in Quintus’s position, for he defines divination as ‘the foreseeing and foretelling of events considered as happening by chance’.19 Here is Quintus’s summary of the argument: If there are gods and they do not make clear to man in advance what the future will be, then they do not love man; or, they themselves do not know what the future will be; or, they think that it is of no advantage to man to know what it will be; or, they think it inconsistent with their dignity to give man forewarnings of the future; or, finally, they, though gods, cannot give intelligible signs of coming events. (pp. 314–15)

Quintus, speaking as a Stoic, denies each of these propositions, starting with the hypothetical indifference of the gods toward mankind – something that Cicero later reproaches him for, saying that he puts forth a dangerous argument that makes belief in the existence of gods dependent on the belief in divination. All the long first part of ‘On divination’, with the presentation of Quintus’s weak arguments, consists of anecdotes, since Quintus proceeds by heaping up examples and then begging the question. There are two anecdotes that seem especially significant. The first concerns king Deiotarus, who always had the auspices consulted before travelling: On one occasion after he had set out on a journey for which he had made careful plans beforehand, he returned home because of the warning given him by the flight of an eagle. The room in which he would have been staying, had he continued on his road, collapsed the very next night. (Loeb, pp. 252–3)

Cicero seizes on this example to point out an incoherence in the doctrine of divination. For divination must either reveal to us what will necessarily happen or, instead, reveal to us, as do simple observation and prudence, what may or may not happen. If all is caused by fate, warnings serve no purpose:

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 11

07/10/2011 08:08

12

The Phantom of Chance

Of what advantage to me is divination if everything is ruled by Fate? On that hypothesis what the diviner predicts is bound to happen. Hence I do not know what to make of the fact that an eagle recalled our intimate friend Deiotarus from his journey; for if he had not turned back he must have been sleeping in the room when it was destroyed the following night, and therefore, have been crushed in the ruins. And yet, if Fate had willed it, he would not have escaped that calamity; and vice versa. (pp. 390–1)

Cicero portrays himself as an ardent partisan of fortuitous happenings (res fortuitae) and of chance (casus). He contends that even God does not know everything that will happen.20 Another revealing anecdote, or rather hypothesis, in ‘On divination’ concerns dice. Quintus asks: Can anything be an ‘accident’ [casus] which bears upon itself every mark of truth? Four dice are cast and a Venus throw results – that is chance; but do you think it would be chance, too, if in one hundred casts you made one hundred Venus throws? (pp. 248–51)21

As happens frequently in discussions concerning chance and hidden supernatural causes, the advocates of hidden causes appeal to what seems (to them) to be entirely obvious. Confronted by a bizarre event, they immediately claim that there is a hidden cause. But there is also a link in many of these cases between frequency of occurrence and expectation. Because it happens rarely to have one hundred ‘Venus throws’ when one has thrown the dice four hundred times that this appears to be prodigious – we would say unlikely or implausible. This hypothetical case, when read in conjunction with the controversies surrounding chance in the seventeenth century, has about it an air of complete modernity and appropriateness in view both of the rise of a science of ‘probability’ that takes frequency into account and the controversies about implausible events that raged in seventeenth-century literary and dramatic theory.

Boethius and the Wheel of Fortune Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (Philosophiae Consolationis), written in prison before the author’s execution in AD 524, was the central source of ideas about fortune for the following millennium.22 Boethius was a Catholic Christian, immensely learned, who followed Aristotle in the description of chance as a philosophical problem – the problem of causes – but whose practical aim was closer to the Stoic one of forming the character of the wise man to live with moral purpose

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 12

07/10/2011 08:08

Introduction

13

beyond the reach of circumstances. Because of this practical, ethical aim – ‘ethical’ in the etymological sense of pertaining to character – Boethius gives fortune a much, much larger extension than it has in Aristotle’s writing, where the fortuitous is rare.23 The Consolation, which is largely a dialogue of the author-character with lady Philosophy, is interspersed with verse passages. The first of these includes the lament, ‘Ill is it to trust to Fortune’s fickle bounty, and while yet she smiled upon me, the hour of gloom had well-nigh overwhelmed my head’.24 So ‘fortune’ is not simply something that is rare and astounding, some odd coincidence of the kind that appears in the Poetics as well as in the Physics, but rather is also the quite ordinary way of describing the way things are in the world in which we find ourselves. That world, as Philosophy presents it, takes on the aspect of one of the most common metaphors for chance or randomness, the sea of life: So it is no matter for your wonder if, in this sea of life, we are tossed about by storms from all sides; for to oppose evil men is the chief aim we set before ourselves. Though the band of such men is great in numbers, yet it is to be contemned: for it is guided by no leader, but is hurried along at random only by error running riot everywhere.25

In a world that has run wild in this way, the wise man, says Philosophy, will withdraw into the inner citadel of wisdom, having stared down fortune both when it seems to be good to him and when it is bad. At the outset of the Consolation, then, the problem is not that fortune appears as odd and remarkable incidents, but rather that it is everywhere – or, at least, that it is everywhere outside the wise man, if he has the sense to withdraw himself inward away from fortune. This wide extension of fortune’s reign, one of Boethius’s important legacies to the following centuries, appears as a result of the perception (which already concerned the Stoics) that human life is irregular and escapes from the order of the cosmos. Boethius says to Philosophy ‘. . . that the conceptions of any wicked mind should prevail against innocence while God watches over us, seems to me unnatural. Wherefore not without cause has one of your own followers asked, “If God is, whence come evil things? If He is not, whence come good?”’26 We are tossed, he says, on ‘Fortune’s wave’.27 Philosophy, in trying to cure Boethius, does not deny the existence or action of fortune but rather deals with the real problem, which is Boethius’s failure to withdraw from the world of appearances, where fortune acts, into the realm of rational thought. There is no ‘good’ and no ‘bad’ fortune, since even what we think of as good fortune corrupts us by making us rely on the outside world: ‘Your former good fortune has so affected you that you are being consumed by longing for it. The

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 13

07/10/2011 08:08

14

The Phantom of Chance

change of this alone has overturned your peace of mind through your own imagination’ (p. 20). Fortune has not changed toward Boethius, or rather, Fortune is constantly changing – that is the nature of Fortune. ‘If you think that Fortune has changed towards you, you are wrong. These are ever her ways: this is her very nature. She has with you preserved her own constancy by her very change’ (p. 21). These are the ‘different faces of the blind goddess. To the eyes of others’, Philosophy tells Boethius, ‘she is veiled in part: to you she has made herself wholly known [. . .], when you have once put your neck beneath the yoke of Fortune, you must with steadfast heart bear whatever comes to pass within her realm’ – so fortune controls the world of appearances; this implies that one is not obliged to yoke oneself to fortune – one can disconnect from it by disconnecting from the material world of change (p. 21). We can see how different Boethius’s concerns are here from those we saw in Aristotle. The external world, or at least mankind’s perception of it, has been surrendered to fortune, where the only thing one can count on is constant, inexplicable change.28 This is different from Aristotle’s rather technical distinction between intentionally meeting a man in a marketplace and meeting that man accidentally, though the two discourses have in common that the instrument of measure is human thought and purpose. For Philosophy, what is called ‘good’ and ‘bad’ fortune is merely a human imposition of an immature, unphilosophical set of expectations upon the world of matter. For Aristotle, what makes the encounter with the man who owes money a ‘chance’ event is simply that the debt collector wished to meet that man. All the other encounters in the marketplace on that same day were not ‘chance’ events because there was not purpose (or desire) with which to construct a narrative of the ‘third kind’, that is to frame the meeting neither as something that resulted from a deliberate human plan nor from the necessary or probable presence of the two men in the marketplace in the ordinary course of events but rather as something wished for, but not expected.29 For Boethius’s Philosophy, the constantly changeable course of events in the outside world are neither good nor bad but can be construed as such –wrongly, for the most part – only by a human participant or observer projecting what he wishes or does not wish onto that world. However, the criterion of rarity which is implicitly such a part of Aristotle’s examples in the Physics and explicitly part of his argument in Poetics 9 is missing in Boethius. Boethius’s character Philosophy in turn has Fortune herself also speak, justifying herself in a way that, of course, bears out Philosophy’s argument that mankind deludes itself in qualifying events as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or having purpose: ‘this is my unchanging sport. I turn my wheel

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 14

07/10/2011 08:08

Introduction

15

that spins its circle fairly; I delight to make the lowest turn to the top, the highest to the bottom’ (pp. 22–3). The wheel image had great success throughout the Middle Ages, and here it conveys an indiscriminate, or random, alteration in human circumstances.30 Tragedy itself is described not in terms of fault or flaw but in terms of this unpredictable variation: ‘For what else is the crying and the weeping in tragedies but for the happiness of kings overturned by the random blow [indiscreto ictu] of fortune?’31 Rather than mastering the randomness of the outside world (as Machiavelli proposed later), Boethius teaches the abandonment of an essentially corrupt world – we can assume that here Boethius, though writing as a philosopher and not as a theologian, is supposing Christian notions of the Fall and original sin.32 From observation of the imperfect world we can construct the idea of a perfect one, a perfect one that probably preceded what we see. In this imperfect world things do indeed happen by chance, and Boethius’s Philosophy gives another example taken from Aristotle, this time from the Metaphysics: Whenever anything is done with one intention, but something else, other than was intended, results from certain causes, that is called chance [casus]: as, for instance, if a man digs the ground for the sake of cultivating it, and finds a heap of buried gold. Such a thing is believed to have happened by chance [fortuiti causa], but it does not come from nothing, for it has its own causes, whose unforeseen and unexpected coincidence seem to have brought about a chance. For if the cultivator did not dig the ground, if the owner had not buried his money, the gold would not have been found. [. . .] We may therefore define chance [casum] as an unexpected result from the coincidence of certain causes in matters where there was another purpose. The order of the universe, advancing with its inevitable sequences, brings about this coincidence of causes. This order itself emanates from its source, which is Providence, and disposes all things in their proper time and place.33

Boethius, then, remains within the Aristotelian tradition in giving a technical definition of chance as something that happens contrary to expectation and to intention. But Boethius does not attempt to maintain the Aristotelian distinction between tyche and automaton, though he may indeed make an implied distinction of his own between fortuna and casus, the former connoting the human perception of a personal situation and the latter connoting the random processes that result in personal fortune or misfortune.34 Boethius’s most important contribution to the history of chance is to attach this concept to the images of a world outside of human control (the shifty wheel, the wind, the raging seas) and the consequent ethical necessity of attaching importance only to inward qualities and to self-control.35

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 15

07/10/2011 08:08

16

The Phantom of Chance

Machiavelli and the Dissolution of Fortune There is almost universal agreement that Machiavelli’s political thought is centred on the opposed concepts of fortune and virtù. As the editor of one edition of The Prince (Il Principe) writes, ‘The foundation of political action proposed by The Prince is furnished by the two concepts of virtù and fortuna.’36 But this consensus can obscure the specific features of Machiavelli’s ‘fortune’ and lead us to overlook the radical shift that he introduces into the history of chance. Moreover, the general scholarly habit of focusing on the virtù–fortune opposition can make us overlook a concept that appears in fact more frequently in The Prince, on almost every page and often multiple times: necessity. There is thus a triad, rather than a dyad, at the heart of Machiavelli’s thought, and the fulcrum of that triad is the necessity to act in accordance with the aims to be achieved in specific circumstances. The contrast between Boethius’s view of fortune and Machiavelli’s view almost exactly a thousand years later could hardly be greater. The former taught virtuous and contemplative withdrawal into the mind and disdain for the transitory things of the material world governed by fortune. Machiavelli, on the other hand, is exclusively concerned, in The Prince, with achieving goals within the contingent world of material goods and society. This contrast has been elegantly stated by Thomas Flanagan as a difference between a transcendent and an immanent conception of fortune, one that can be traced back to antiquity.37 Boethius’s Consolation is the exemplar of the transcendent ideal, one that prevailed for most of the intervening centuries and had a late flowering in Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae (c.1374). Machiavelli, in keeping with most subsequent writers, was interested in confronting contingency and attempting to succeed in the external, social world. As Flanagan says of the Machiavellian man, ‘His plans and desires are confined within the rules prescribed by Fortuna. He will achieve success if he can stay in harmony with her plans . . .’38 One of the consequences of this acceptance of the contingent world is the dispersion or dissolution of fortune as any kind of transcendent or unifying force. Machiavelli borrows the traditional term and follows the millennium-old practice of personifying fortune as Fortuna, but his conception of fortune no longer really coincides with anything that resembles an agent or even a power. Leonardo Olschki lucidly describes this radically altered fortune which has become what we mean today by chance: Fortune is neither a goddess nor a personification, neither an allegory nor a metaphor, as it has been in poetry, in Machiavelli’s own Capitolo on Fortune,

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 16

07/10/2011 08:08

Introduction

17

or in moral philosophy. In The Prince it is again an abstract and secular concept which eludes and substitutes for the superstitious belief in occult forces and also the Christian faith in the unfathomable decrees of God. In the chapter devoted to the power of fortune in human affairs he compared it to a force of nature which man can check through timely preparations and appropriate measures of protection.39

A major difference between Boethius’s thought and Machiavelli’s is that Boethius is a ‘lumper’ and Machiavelli a ‘splitter’. For Boethius, the life that is worthwhile is all contained within the inner citadel of the wise man’s mind and soul, in keeping with the teachings of a Christian neo-Stoicism or neo-Platonism. All the rest, considered globally as the outside world, is indifferent – or at least should be indifferent. In this respect, the ‘lumping’ process in Boethius’s thought is not simply a personal predilection but rather a deliberate aim. By lumping together both the goods and the evils (or what is seen as such by the immature mind) of the everyday world, the wise man can overcome the most dangerous tendency, which is to make a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ fortune. The most dangerous times for the victim of fortune (that is all mankind except the sage) are when things seem to be going well because we then become dependent on external things. The moments of suffering are much more useful because they help motivate the sufferer to turn inward. Consequently, the wisest position of all is to lump the outside world all together as unworthy of attention and to lump all ‘fortune’ together as something that only changes its appearance in our eyes but is substantially identical in all that matters. Machiavelli, in sharp contrast to Boethius, turns his attention entirely to the external world of contingency. In a telling passage, aimed not at Boethius himself but rather at writers on politics who, like Boethius, are guided by the vision of a purely ideal world of justice and right, Machiavelli stresses the difference between such transcendent visions and the politics of reality: Many writers have conceived of republics and princedoms which have never in fact been seen or known to exist. Since there is so great a discrepancy between how one lives and how one ought to live, whoever forsakes what is done for what ought to be done is learning self-destruction, not selfpreservation.40

This shift in attitude implies and requires a wholly new attention to the world of circumstance, the world of unpredictable encounters. To deal with this world, it is no longer possible to amalgamate things, not even to group together all the instances of reprehensible action. From an ideal point of view, for instance, a prince should not be cruel; hence,

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 17

07/10/2011 08:08

18

The Phantom of Chance

all instances of princely cruelty might well be categorised together as simply evil, or, at the most, distinguished by degrees of inhumanity. From Machiavelli’s point of view, two similar instances of cruelty might require, instead, rigorous distinction in terms of their effectiveness in achieving princely aims. And this distinction will necessarily drive the political philosopher’s gaze toward the factor that makes similar acts of cruelty significantly different: circumstance. So Machiavelli distinguishes and describes in great detail much that Boethius and idealistic political theorists would brusquely dismiss as unworthy of attention. But there is a second, crucial distinction between the Boethian transcendent view of the workings of fortune and the doctrine set forth in The Prince. Boethius advocates what one could call a passive approach to the external world. No doubt ‘passive’ is the complete opposite of Boethius’s own representation of the stance that he advocates, for he aimed to make mankind less dependent on the external world in which people find themselves happy or unhappy not because of any action of their own but because of a sudden unpredictable shift in such things as political regime, harvests and illness. But Boethius restricts the wise man’s realm of action to his mind, teaching him that he cannot alter the world dominated by fortune and should thus simply accept fortune’s control of the external world. With regard to the world of circumstance, the Boethian sage allows things to follow their course, and in this sense Boethius teaches passivity. Machiavelli, quite to the contrary, teaches full engagement with the shifting givens of the real world (the world of what he calls cose vere) according to a doctrine of necessity.41 This is the background of the notorious penultimate chapter of The Prince, ‘The Power of Fortune in Human Affairs and How She Can be Countered’, with its much criticised advice: ‘Fortune is a woman and you must, if you want to subjugate her, beat and strike her. It is obvious that she is more willing to be subjugated that way than by men with cold tactics’ (‘La fortuna è donna, ed è necessario, volendola tenere sotto, batterla e urtarla. E si vede che la si lascia più vincere da questi, che da quelli che freddamente procedono’).42 It is inevitable that modern readers find this metaphor quite odious. But it is just as inevitable that modern readers have difficulty accepting the connotations that Machiavelli, in countering all idealistic political theorists and all Boethian philosophers of fortune, is trying to impart to Lorenzo the Magnificent. For us, the sexual, or at least the gender, relationship is paramount here.43 But within the Boethian tradition, it is more useful to foreground the class relationship. For a millennium, at least, fortune was considered a dominant, oppressive force against

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 18

07/10/2011 08:08

Introduction

19

which mankind had no hope – except by praying to God – of imposing itself. As Machiavelli writes, conveying an entirely Boethian sentiment, men ‘would think it useless to sweat about these matters very much, and instead to leave control to chance’. So the project of The Prince is to undo the resignation and worldly passivity that constitute the wisdom of the previous centuries. The aggression against Fortuna is not, in such a tradition, an assault on a weaker, defenceless person, but rather an insurrection against a force that appears much stronger, indeed dominant.44 To understand how Machiavelli dissolves or disperses the ancient Boethian fortuna, we need to consider how the two principal elements of their disagreement fuse into something new. Machiavelli believes that the prince needs to take an active stance toward fortune, i.e. the world of true things, and that he needs to examine this world in its large number of subtle variations. In other words, rather than thinking of fortune as a unified, overwhelming and indistinct force, one needs to disenchant fortune, and to realise that it is simply a word for the incessantly shifting combinations of material and human situations. Here it is important to stress that Machiavelli sees the world as having a large number of variations but not an infinite number. If one thinks that the world of contingency varies infinitely, one is likely to withdraw into a stance of Boethian resignation and to abandon action. And it may well be that the world is characterised by such an infinite variation. However, Machiavelli’s project is to turn the reader’s attention away from this paralysing perspective of endless proliferation and instead to direct observation toward a finite number of patterns that can be located within the flux. By considering the world as a number of specific types of situations, Machiavelli can break apart the frightening domination of Fortuna and turn it into a set of contingencies, still called fortuna but no longer treated as the result of an antagonistic agency but rather as a repertory of possibilities.45 To this end he works tirelessly to break the manifold circumstances into a more manageable set of limited alternatives (here, of course, he is transmitting the Scholastic, Aristotelian heritage), in each of which Machiavelli’s crucial guiding concept – necessity – appears.46 This categorising strategy appears right from the first chapter of The Prince, when Machiavelli starts setting up pairs of circumstances with binaries such as new versus old.47 From Boethius, Machiavelli has taken the notion that the social and physical world can be described globally as the domain of fortune. This is a crucial difference in vision and emphasis from Aristotle, at least in the Physics and the Poetics, where tyche and automaton are a ‘third

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 19

07/10/2011 08:08

20

The Phantom of Chance

category’ of event that does not fall into the categories of the necessary and the usual. Because Machiavelli begins by accepting the dichotomy between human agency (virtù, at least as the highest form of such agency) and a fortune-driven world, the ‘necessary’ is a quality that is in some sense projected by human desire upon the appearances of endlessly changing fortune, but it is a kind of shadow that men have difficulty seeing. This version of necessity does not correspond to Boethius’s ideal of the immutable order of causation that seamlessly connects what happens in the world to divine providence through ‘fate’ (which is the manifestation of providence in time) but hidden to the eyes of the unwise. Instead, for Machiavelli the ‘necessary’ is determined by the relationship between human aims and the circumstances (fortune) that offer both obstacles and avenues toward the realisation of those aims. For example, in subjugating Greece, the Romans needed to recognise the things necessary to do given the circumstances and, moreover, they needed to recognise these things in a timely manner: The Romans did, in fact, what all wise princes ought to do: not only must they be on their guard for actual political disorders, but also for potential ones; they must prevent the latter with all their diligence. When provided for in advance these disorders can be cured; but if you wait until they are upon you, medicine is too late – the disease has become incurable.48

Rather than blaming fortune, Machiavelli repeatedly blames leaders for not doing what was necessary. The French king Louis XII made six mistakes in attempting to master Italy.49 These ‘mistakes’ can only be recognised in terms of the relation between Louis’ aims and the circumstances. Louis is not contending against a monolithic foe that groups everything in the world either for or against him (moving him up or down on a Boethian wheel of fortune), but rather faces a configuration of social and physical events that dynamically and progressively modifies what is necessary to do, given his aim of domination. What interests Machiavelli is not why unjust things happen despite the providence of a good God, but how to recognise what is necessary given the constantly morphing world of combinations. Louis might have kept power despite five of his errors, ‘had he not made a sixth: the seizure of Venetian territory’.50 Machiavelli’s emphasis on understanding the necessity generated by the dialectic of human aims or desires and the minutely but significantly shifting relationships among things can be seen in his use of the word caso, from the Latin casus (the term that Boethius used for random events). Almost invariably, Machiavelli uses caso with the sense of ‘case’, thus indicating that the emphasis is on the human mind’s activity

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 20

07/10/2011 08:08

Introduction

21

of taking the endless stream of events and categorising them by similarity and difference. For instance, in a chapter on judging the military self-sufficiency of a princedom, Machiavelli distinguishes between the self-sufficient and those who need help and continues, ‘I have already discussed the first case [caso] . . .’51 In other words, in The Prince, caso does keep its etymological and conceptual link to ‘what befalls’ (cadere), but the weight has shifted from the mere fact of happening or being in a particular state to the human activity of reducing the multiplicity of events to a smaller number of standard configurations.

Montaigne and the Sceptical Challenge Just as Machiavelli took certain aspects of Boethius’s thought – notably, that we may as well define the world around us as the realm of fortune – and reached the quite different conclusion that mankind should dominate fortune, or chance, rather than accept it with virtuous resignation, so too Montaigne shows a striking similarity to Machiavelli in his dissolution of fortune into a multitude of random events and states while abandoning Machiavelli’s emphasis on human responsibility and agency. Montaigne, probably the single author who was most influential for the thought of the following century, created a wide audience for sceptical thought. There is much throughout his Essays (1580–8) to counteract Machiavelli’s emphasis on empowering mankind through the concept of a finite number of configurations of circumstance and on making the virtù-possessing prince take responsibility for blunders rather than blaming failure on fortune. For Montaigne the human world – human actions and their results – appears to be disordered, governed by chance or fortune. This is a great theme in Montaigne’s work that appears strikingly in the first chapter of the Essays, ‘By diverse means we arrive at the same end’, and by the echo – at least in terms of the title – in the later chapter ‘Various outcomes of the same plan’ – these chapter titles, taken together, coincide strikingly with Machiavelli’s statement: ‘it turns out [. . .] that two people functioning differently can produce the same result; and that given two people functioning similarly, one can fulfil his goal and the other cannot’.52 But while Machiavelli’s comment is merely an aside, deep in a chapter, that recognises the limits to even the best plans, Montaigne, by putting this sentiment into the titles of two chapters, and especially by placing one of these chapters first in the book, sets the tone for his downbeat assessment of human capacity against the random proliferation of events in the world. As Richard Regosin has written, ‘Montaigne’s

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 21

07/10/2011 08:08

22

The Phantom of Chance

narrative of the origin of the Essays focuses on the gap between human intention and its outcome, as if, from the beginning, and as an inaugural experience, Montaigne recognised that things do not turn out as we plan, that human will or desire does not, cannot, determine or control the course of events [. . .]’.53 In ‘By diverse means we arrive at the same end’, Montaigne tells of contrary approaches which, surprisingly, result in the same outcome (I. 1) while in the chapter ‘Various outcomes of the same plan’, Montaigne praises those who understand the importance of chance and who do not pay excessive attention to planning what they are going to do, knowing that much depends on chance (I. 24). Alexander the Great is called ‘souverain patron des actes hazardeux’ (I. 24. 129) – the term patron here means ‘model’ – and in Montaigne’s soaring commentary and rush of examples on the theme of taking chances we at first suppose that such risky conduct is the key to succeeding in dangerous situations, but we encounter this anecdote: I saw, when I was a boy, a gentleman, the military governor of a great city, hard pressed by the commotion of a frenzied populace. To quell the incipient riot, he decided to leave a very safe place that he was in and commit himself to this seditious mob; whereby it went ill with him, and he was killed miserably. (I. 24. 130/95)

This is certainly an example that justifies the title ‘Of various outcomes’. Montaigne insists that ‘fortune still maintains her grasp on the results’ (I. 24. 127/92). The theme of the unpredictability of the results of human action, pushed so far that it seems that the greatest successes are the result of chance, appears here and there throughout the Essays. We know that Montaigne had a potentially serious run-in with the Roman Inquisition because of the importance he assigned to fortune in his writing.54 And, as Alexandre Tarrête says, ‘fortune’ was one of Montaigne’s favourite words, along with hasard, heur and accident, while, on the other hand, he avoided words like destin and Providence.55 It has been said quite rightly that the role of chance in the Essays goes beyond the question of terminology. As Philippe Desan observes, ‘For Montaigne the fortuitous and the contingent form the cornerstones of a philosophical project that specifically rejects the principle of necessity [. . .]’.56 In fact, Machiavelli’s whole project of creating a set of models that can be used to master the proliferation of circumstances falls under Montaigne’s sceptical observation about the proliferation and uncertainty of human thought: Machiavelli’s arguments, for example, were solid enough for the subject, yet it was very easy to combat them. [. . .] For the reasons have little other foun-

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 22

07/10/2011 08:08

Introduction

23

dation than experience, and the diversity of human events offers us infinite examples in all sorts of forms. (II. 17. 655/497)

Montaigne partly agrees with Machiavelli in not lumping all external events into a single, hostile and dangerous ‘fortune’ from which we should withdraw and instead takes great delight in cataloguing the variations and permutations of things, however exasperating they may be. But the thread of resignation to what happens runs through many chapters of the Essays and has a Boethian and Stoic resonance. For instance, in ‘Que le goust des biens et des maux depend en bonne partie de l’opinion que nous en avons’ (‘That the taste of good and evil depends in large part on the opinion we have of them’) Montaigne counsels that we simply try to modify our perception of circumstances rather than trying to find a clever way to use them to further alter the state of the world: Each man is as well or as badly off as he thinks he is. Not the man of whom it is thought, but the one who thinks it of himself, is happy. And by just this fact belief gains reality and truth. Fortune does us neither good nor harm; she only offers us the material and the seed of them, which our soul, more powerful than she, turns and applies as it pleases, sole cause and mistress of its happy or unhappy condition. (I. 14. 67/46)

The Essays do not propose or adopt a method of stabilising the proliferation of contingency but instead make contemplation of that contingency an end it itself. Montaigne’s position seems to be a radically immanent one, and to this extent he is like Machiavelli. Ann Hartle sees Montaigne as an ‘accidental philosopher’ and considers that this position assumes a radical contingency of a kind not thinkable to ancient philosophy. As she says, ‘Ancient philosophy cannot ask the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” because the absolute contingency of the whole cannot be thought if the whole is assumed to be all that is.’ She goes on to say that Montaigne embraces nothingness. For him, ‘nothingness is not a condition in the distant past, replaced through creation by a new condition of being. Rather, nothingness is our present condition, the condition for the appearance of the radically contingent.’57 With such an outlook, it is not surprising that Montaigne, like Machiavelli, takes an immanent view of life by denouncing the human presumption to know about the purposes or intentions of any transcendent agency. If there is a transcendent order to this world in which the predictability of events is limited, that order is hidden from us. In the chapter ‘Qu’il faut sobrement se mesler de juger les observations divines’ (‘We should meddle soberly with judging divine ordinances’) Montaigne protests against the imposture that consists of wanting to

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 23

07/10/2011 08:08

24

The Phantom of Chance

explain a striking or surprising event by supposing some supernatural intention (I. 32. 215/160). But he sees a tendency (one that widely persists into today’s world) to impose on events a narrative order that supports whatever we already believe and to neglect any more limited, commonsensical explanation (I. 32. 216/160). Concluding in favour of an unquestioning piety – where Stoicism and Christianity meet – Montaigne resigns himself to a hidden plan on God’s part: God, wishing to teach us that the good have something else to hope for, and the wicked something else to fear, than the fortunes and misfortunes of this world, handles and allots these according to his occult disposition, and deprives us of the means of foolishly making our profit of them. And those people delude themselves who try to take advantage of them by human reason. (I. 32. 216/161)

In other words, the world is governed, as far as appearances go, by chance. If we insist on finding a deeper explanation, we can simply say that puzzling things that happen result from the intentions of a deity whose designs are the equivalent of chance – that is unknown, incomprehensible, unpredictable and entirely beyond human power to influence. This is the idea that has passed into common speech with the expression that Pascal invented several decades later: ‘Cleopatra’s nose’ (see below p. 67). At the end of the sixteenth century, fortune was no longer thought of as the career of an individual nor even as the up-and-down movement of kingdoms as their prosperity waxed and waned. Instead, it was a generalised uncertainty about outcomes and thus about the means to ends. Even before the frequency of use of the word fortune declined as it did in the decades following Montaigne, the meaning of the term had shifted to represent a new sense of the disconnection between stable principles and the unstable world of appearances. Moreover, Montaigne’s radical description of the human condition in the ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’ (II. 12) made human life seem entirely divorced from any stable reality, any access to knowledge of what might be beyond the level of our senses. The world itself, disordered and unpredictable, is our lot. So as the seventeenth century began, there were both anti-chance traditions, typified by Boethius’s campaign against fortune, and pro-chance traditions, exemplified by Aristotle. The first tradition can be summed up by saying that humanity, and particularly individual people, must fortify themselves for a heroic, life-defining struggle against the unpredictable events of this world; and the second tradition can be described as one that shows mankind as swimming in a sea of events that often have no discernable cause or purpose and that remain largely unnoticed until – by what we call ‘chance’ – one of these events coincides with something

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 24

07/10/2011 08:08

Introduction

25

that we particularly wish for or with something that we particularly dread. Both traditions lead people to start with the perception that life is full of chance events. What writers do next, how they make use of this perception, is the source of much of their distinction as writers. It is tempting to think that all serious reflection on such weighty issues as the order or disorder of the world takes place in the sober precincts of those writing treatises and discourses. However, some of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking work on chance appears in fiction, in drama and novels. Our first example is the work of a dramatist and theorist of poetics, Pierre Corneille.

Notes 1. Aristotle, Poetics, 1454a33–1454b9. ‘In characterisation just as in plotconstruction, one should always seek the principle of necessity or probability, so that a necessary or probable reason exists for a particular character’s speech or action, and similarly for the sequence of events. It is evident that the dénouments of plot-structures should arise from the plot itself, and not, as in Medea, from a deus ex machina, or in the episode of the departure in the Iliad. But the deus ex machina should be used for events outside the play, whether earlier events of which a human cannot have knowledge, or future events which call for a prospective narrative’ (Halliwell trans., p. 48). 2. The crucial terms that appear there, tyche (chance, fortune or luck) and automaton (chance or spontaneity) are explained at greater length in his Physics, book II, chapters 4–7. 3. Much attention is given in some commentaries on Aristotle to make a sharp distinction between tyche and automaton (e.g. Heller-Roazen, Fortune’s Faces, p. 79), as, indeed, Aristotle attempts to do so in the Physics, chapter 6. However, overriding the philosopher’s attempt to distinguish between the two notions is his persistent practice of invoking them together, as he does here in the case of the statue. If it were a simple matter to separate ‘chance’ (or ‘fortune’) from ‘spontaneity’, it would seem that Aristotle would have chosen one term or the other in describing this case. 4. Aristotle, The Poetics of Aristotle, trans. and ed. by Stephen Halliwell, p. 47. Cf. Bywater’s translation: ‘It was accident rather than art that led the poets in quest of subjects to embody this kind of incident in their plots. They are still obliged, accordingly, to have recourse to the families in which such honours [sic] have occurred’ (The Complete Works, II, p. 2327). 5. The Poetics, ed. Halliwell, p. 45. 6. The Poetics, ed. Halliwell, p. 48. 7. Aristotle, ‘Physics’, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, in The Complete Works, I, 315–446. Chapters 4–6 are on pp. 334–8. 8. Chapter 4, p. 334. Further parenthetical references will simply give the page number of this edition. 9. Or, in another translation: ‘In Greek tyche and automaton differ in this,

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 25

07/10/2011 08:08

26

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

The Phantom of Chance that automaton is the more general term and includes tyche as a special class’ (Aristotle, Physics, trans. P. H. Wicksteed and F. M. Cornford, books I–IV, Loeb Classical Library, p. 157. Aristotle, Physics, Loeb, p. 159. Mannoni, ‘Je sais bien, mais quand même’. Physics, trans. by Hardie and Gaye, in Complete Works, I, 335. Cf. Wicksteed and Cornford in the Loeb translation of this conclusion: ‘whereas in all that these people tell us is exempt from chance such things are common. Of course it ought to be just the other way’ (Physics, books I–IV, p. 147). Seneca, ‘De Providentia’, pp. 2–5. Cicero, ‘De Divinatione’, pp. 386–7: ‘How, then, is it possible to foresee and to predict an event that happens at random, as the result of blind accident, or of unstable chance?’ ‘[I]t is consistent for the Stoics, who say that all things happen by fate, to accept oracles ...’ (Cicero, ‘De Fato’, section xiv, p. 229). Cicero, ‘De Fato’, pp. 198–9. Cicero, ‘De Fato’, pp. 198–9. ‘[I]d est de divinatione, quae est earum rerum, quae fortuitae putantur, praedictio atque praesensio’ (Cicero, ‘De Divinatione’, pp. 232–3). ‘Hence it seems to me that it is not in the power even of God himself to know what event is going to happen accidentally and by chance. For if He knows, then the event is certain to happen; but if it is certain to happen, chance does not exist’ (De divinatione, II, 7, p. 389). Cicero, De Divinatione, I, xiii. Falconer’s note to his edition explains that ‘The Venus throw occurred when each of the four dice fell with a different number on its upper face’ (p. 248 n.2). Boethius, ‘The Consolation of Philosophy’, trans. S. J. Tester, pp. 130–435. References to the Latin text of Boethius’s work will be to Tester’s edition. English translations of the Consolation will, unless otherwise noted, be drawn from Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, in The Consolation of Philosophy, ed. Irwin Edman, trans. W. V. Cooper. When page references to Boethius are given parenthetically, the first page number refers to the Latin text and the second to Cooper’s translation. Vincenzo Cioffari neglects an important dimension of chance Boethius’s thought, writing that Boethius follows Aristotle in assigning rare events to ‘Fortune or Chance’ (Cioffari, ‘Fortune, Fate, and Chance’, p. 231). However, Boethius at the very beginning of the Consolation makes fortune a catch-all category for the situations in which humans find themselves, not only rare and unusual events. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Cooper, p. 3. Boethius, Consolation, p. 8. Despite the seemingly irresistible implication of the ‘random’ (which appears also in Tester’s translation in the Loeb library), Boethius here does not use such a term in Latin: ‘sed errore tantum temere ac passim lymphante raptatur’ [lymphante, madly] (Boethius, ‘The Consolation of Philosophy’, ed. Tester, p. 142). Boethius, Consolation, p. 12. Tester’s note admits that this reference is obscure, but says that editors often attribute this dilemma to Epicurus (p. 152 note b).

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 26

07/10/2011 08:08

Introduction

27

27. Boethius, Consolation, p. 15. The Latin text: ‘Homines quatimur fortunae salo’ (ed. Tester, p. 160). 28. In books IV and V of the Consolation, Boethius attempts to penetrate the veil of fortune toward an understanding of causality and providence. However, he does defend the belief in contingent events, those which are without necessity (Consolation, book V, Latin text pp. 408–9ff.; English text p. 117ff.). 29. The way chance occupies this ‘third’ or intermediate position in Aristotle’s thought marks the weirdness of this category in his thought, for it violates the law of the excluded middle, as we can see especially in the case of the falling statue. To say that this is ‘weird’ is a reminder of the way human thought often seems to produce magical realisations of that thought, as in the old proverb ‘After word comes weird’ (‘the mention of a thing is followed by its occurrence or appearance’ – OED). For an extensive and subtle application of Aristotle’s notion of the excluded middle to ethics and tragedy see Goodkin, The Tragic Middle. 30. Studies of the wheel of fortune are so numerous that one drowns in them, as in that other image of fortune, the sea. See the studies by Tkacz, Wygant, Feldman, Ziolkowski, Poenicke, Radding, Murray and Wirth. 31. Boethius, Consolation, p. 21. See Herold, ‘Boethius’s Consolatio Philosophiae as a Bridge Between Classical and Christian Conceptions of Tragedy’. 32. As Tester writes, ‘In the Consolation [Boethius] is writing philosophy; in the Tractates he is writing theology. [. . .] The object of philosophy is to understand and explain the nature of the world around us; the object of theology is to understand and explain doctrines delivered by divine revelation’ (‘Life of Boethius’, in Boethius, ‘The Consolation of Philosophy’, pp. xii–xiv). 33. Aristotle, ‘Metaphysics’, pp. 1619; section 1025a15, p. 102. See HellerRoazen’s commentary on this passage in Fortune’s Faces, pp. 82–3. 34. The passage about the buried treasure is part of Philosophy’s reply to Boethius’s question whether there is anything that we can truly call chance (casum, Loeb, p. 384). There is a clear trend in the Consolation from fortuna, which dominates in books I–III, to casus, which appears primarily in books IV and V. 35. The influence of Boethius’s moral vision is clearly set forth by Cropp in ‘Boethius and the Consolatio Philosophiae in XIVth and XVth-Century French Writing’. J. Allan Mitchell is among the few writers to emphasise the issue of the ‘genuinely fortuitous or aleatory’ in Boethius (Mitchell, ‘Romancing Ethics’). Of course, for an author whose works appear in so many manuscripts and printed editions, it is difficult to isolate one aspect of it. Patch, in his fundamental study, describes this multiplicity but several times notes the ‘moral and spiritual influence of Boethius’ (The Tradition of Boethius, p. 121). In skipping from Boethius to Machiavelli in this survey, we pass over some of the most fascinating developments of the figure of Fortune, especially in canto 7 of Dante’s Inferno. See Hunt, ‘The Christianization of Fortune’ (1999). 36. Machiavelli, Il Principe, p. 52. 37. Flanagan, ‘The Concept of Fortuna’, p. 143. 38. Flanagan, ‘The Concept of Fortuna’, p. 143.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 27

07/10/2011 08:08

28

The Phantom of Chance

39. Olschki, Machiavelli the Scientist, pp. 37–8. Flanagan disagrees with Olschki on the grounds that Machiavelli’s work lacks scientific rigour: ‘For under fortuna he includes not only the truly fortuitous and contingent single event, but also the entire context in which such events occur; and while the individual event must remain mysterious, the large-scale constellations of social forces are in principle explicable’ (Flanagan, ‘The Concept of Fortuna in Machiavelli’, p. 153). This objection seems unfounded. Flanagan’s use of the expression ‘in principle’ is telling; whether such an explication of social forces can ever be other than the ideal, ultimate goal of social science is doubtful, and the ‘context’ includes the concatenation of physical circumstances as well. 40. Machiavelli, Il Principe, ed. Fiorentino, chapter 15, pp. 81–2 and The Prince, trans. and ed. Atkinson, pp. 255–7. Further quotations and references will be to these editions. In the case of parenthetical references, the page number of the Italian text will precede the page number of the English translation. 41. Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter 15, 81/257. I give here this awkward translation of my own to emphasise Machiavelli’s fixation on the concept of necessity. 42. Machiavelli, 115/369. 43. ‘Bluntly stated, Machiavelli’s advice is that women like to be raped’, writes Schiesari, in ‘Libidinal Economies’, p. 180. 44. In this respect, Atkinson’s choice of ‘woman’ to translate donna is unfortunate. ‘Donna’ is literally ‘lady’, and its etymology, domina, reveals the dominant nature of this force. 45. For Machiavelli, writes Vincenzo Cioffari, ‘Fortune represents all the external forces with which man must learn to work or must overcome. Recognizing that the circumstances which beset man’s path are not under his control, the struggle which arises is between man’s personal power and the power of Fortune. From man’s point of view, Fortune is the power which acts contrary to his control and therefore capriciously’ (Vincenzo Cioffari, ‘Fortune, Fate, and Chance’, p. 235). 46. Olschki’s comment on Machiavelli’s use of exempla is important in this context, because it shows one of the analytical and rhetorical tools that can help limit the seemingly vertiginous proliferation of incidents. Exempla ‘illustrate typical situations in the recurrent course of history, from Moses to Savonarola and from King David to Ferdinand the Catholic. Political leaders may discover in the events of the past the similarities of the circumstances and conditions which may determine their initiatives and reveal their chances of success or failure’ (Machiavelli the Scientist, p. 44). 47. The Prince, chapter 1, p. 25/97. 48. The Prince, chapter 3, p. 32/115. 49. The Prince, chapter 3, p. 121. 50. The Prince, chapter 3, p. 36/123. 51. The Prince, chapter 10, p. 64/203 (I have slightly altered Atkinson’s translation, which gives ‘possibility’ for caso). 52. The Prince, chapter 25, 114/365. 53. Regosin, ‘Prudence and the Ethics of Contingency’, p. 125. 54. Martin, Montaigne et la fortune; Samaras, ‘Le rôle de la fortune’; Legros,

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 28

07/10/2011 08:08

Introduction

29

‘Montaigne Between Fortune and Providence’; Tarrête, ‘Fortune’; and Philippe Desan, ‘Fortuit’. 55. Tarrête, ‘Fortune’, p. 415. 56. Desan, ‘Fortuit’, p. 414. 57. Hartle, Michel de Montaigne, pp. 157–8.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 29

07/10/2011 08:08

Chapter 1

Fortune, Mistress of Events: Corneille and the Poetics of Tragedy

Chance as Cornerstone of Poetics It seems unlikely that Le Cid, which has been described as ‘our first true classic tragedy’ in a tradition emphatically marked by ‘a confidence in human power and authority’ and written by an author known for ‘confining the action of the play to a conflict between passion and duty’, would give chance a significant role.1 Yet when Corneille reflected on several decades of writing for the theatre in the sparkling commentary known as the Three Discourses on the Dramatic Poem he did not choose to start with passion, duty, power or authority, but rather with an assertion of the importance of chance. In the first paragraph, which begins with the aggressively polemical assertion that pleasure alone is the goal of tragedy, Corneille also makes this ringing declaration about the primacy of chance: Our Doctor says that the Subjects come from Fortune, which makes things happen, and not from Art which imagines them. She is the mistress of Events, and in giving us a choice from among those she presents to us, she implicitly forbids the usurpation by which we would put on the Stage incidents not of her making.2

Corneille’s purpose in paraphrasing Aristotle here is clearly to launch a sustained assault on the orthodoxy of his day that tragic stories should be essentially plausible. He seeks a foundation in the Poetics by locating one of the three passages in which Aristotle writes of chance. Corneille in fact gives much more emphasis to the concept than the philosopher had, since the playwright moves this statement from the middle of the Poetics to a position of unusual prominence at the outset of the Discourse on the Usefulness and on the Parts of the Dramatic Poem (Discours de l’utilité et des parties du poème dramatique, the first of the Three Discourses). On this reading of the Poetics, Aristotle seems to favour a chance-based tragic plot, or rather a type of plot that somehow resembles chance.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 30

07/10/2011 08:08

Fortune, Mistress of Events

31

Corneille almost certainly misread Aristotle, and the assertion made at the outset of his Discourse is the most flagrant and revealing case of this misreading. Why did he do this? As we will see below, he had good reason to wish that Aristotle meant that events are governed by chance and that tragic subjects should resemble such events. But the passage that Corneille seems to be paraphrasing here, that Corneille takes as saying that ‘subjects [for tragedy] come from chance, which makes things happen’, seems instead to say only that poets stumbled upon the good stories and had no method for locating or inventing them.3 To say that the subjects come from chance (viennent de la Fortune) is certainly compatible with the idea that poets found them by chance, but this expression can also be taken as implying that the tragic stories should concern chance. Corneille’s further statement, implicitly attributed to the Greek, that chance is ‘mistress of events’, swerves away from the idea of chance as the means by which playwrights find subjects toward the conception of a world governed by chance – an idea close to Machiavelli’s but not clearly Aristotle’s view, and certainly not in the passage paraphrased here. Even though Aristotle does not say in this passage that the tragic plot should contain or resemble chance events, Corneille has a firmer basis for his claim that chance dominates events (in real life or history). In the passage of the Greek text in which the philosopher teaches that plot is the most important part of the play, he also says the poet’s task is to speak not of events which have occurred, but of the kind of events which could occur, and are possible by the standards of probability or necessity. For it is not the use or absence of metre which distinguishes poet and historian (one could put Herodotus’ work into verse, but it would be no less a sort of history with it than without it): the difference lies in the fact that the one speaks of events which have occurred, the other of the sort of events which could occur. It is for this reason that poetry is both more philosophical and more serious than history, since poetry speaks more of universals, history of particulars. (1451a36–1451b6)4

In describing the poet’s work and comparing it to that of the philosopher, Aristotle mentions the distinction between universals and particulars. This distinction is closer to chance than might first appear, since what is particular is, for early-modern thinkers as for their scholastic forebears, accidental, that is contingent, non-essential. All the particularising qualities of things – having red hair, being thin, being French, etc. – these are all accidents. These two uses of the term accident are attested side by side by the dictionaries of the time.5 The contrast between philosophy and poetry on the one hand and history on the other is basically a contrast between the universal and the accidental. History is full of the accidental not only because among the events that it records there are

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 31

07/10/2011 08:08

32

The Phantom of Chance

things that happen by chance (tyche) but also because history is full of unnecessary, apparently meaningless detail that does not fit into the significant patterns and clear lines that interest philosophers and poets. Among Corneille’s contemporary theorists of tragedy, most emphasise that the world as it is found in history is imperfect and not adequate for tragic subjects. La Mesnardière writes, for example, the Poet, following the example of the Philosopher, sets his contemplation on universal things, that he likes to write as they should be [selon qu’elles doivent estre]; while the Historian fixs upon the detail of matters and tells of particular events just as they happened, sometimes good, sometimes bad.6

La Mesnardière links, as does neo-Aristotelian poetics in general, a moral criterion (‘bonnes’ versus ‘mauvaises’) and the criterion of level of generality. It seems as if the general corresponds to the good and as if the particular corresponds to imperfection (which was Boethius’s view as well).7 On one hand the poet evaluates actions, selects only the good ones and prefers the general, and on the other hand the historian must furnish a complete and detailed view where human failures are included. Though no complete argument is given, historical particularities are associated with imperfection. D’Aubignac also emphasises this same passage from the Poetics. The tragic poet, writes d’Aubignac, does not concern himself with time, because he is not a chronologist; he will not cling to truth, any more than does the epic poet, because neither of them is an historian. They take from history what is theirs, and change the rest to make their poems, and it is a ridiculous idea to go to the theatre to learn history. The stage does not present things as they were but as they should be, and the poet should correct in the subject all that does not conform to the rules of his art, as does a painter when he works from a defective model.8

One thing that Corneille and the other theorists of tragedy have in common is that they take this passage in the Poetics to mean that the world of history is less regular, less governed by ‘probability or necessity’ than the worlds of poetry and philosophy.9 It is not too big a step to make to say that the world of history is somehow imperfect, as if defects had crept into the picture. This is an interpretation that is reminiscent of the Italian commentaries of the previous century. Corneille was strongly influenced by Lodovico Castelvetro’s 1570 commentary in which all events are enumerated as belonging to the categories of the natural (subdivided into those that happen either according to the laws of nature or contrary to the laws of nature – the monstrous or miraculous) and of the accidental (subdivided into those that result from chance or fortune and those that result from the will of man).10 The universal does not include

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 32

07/10/2011 08:08

Fortune, Mistress of Events

33

the monstrous, the miraculous or the accidental. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Corneille follows Castelvetro in believing that Aristotle’s reason for preferring the universal (what always or usually happens) over the particular (what sometimes happens, including the monstrous, the miraculous and the accidental) is that the playwright needs to make the audience believe that what is happening is possible. Other seventeenthcentury French commentators and critics like the Abbé d’Aubignac, Georges de Scudéry and Jean Chapelain are much less inclined to emphasise this practical issue of believability and, to the extent that they deal with believability, they reject the reaction of the common theatre-goer in favour of the more demanding views of the highly educated and technically versed literary critic. Such critics are interested in the key issue of the verisimilar (le vraisemblable) but approach it from a different point of view from the one adopted by Corneille. For the critical elite of Corneille’s day, verisimilitude is not so much what the audience will believe as it is an ideal or corrected view of the world. Not the way the world is but the way the world should be. It is precisely against this vision of a corrected world that Corneille constructs his poetic principles in the Discourses. In working out his dramatic theory, Corneille pondered for decades the theoretical implications of the French Academy’s censure of his great popular success, Le Cid. In the Sentiments of the Académie Française Concerning the TragiComedy Le Cid (Sentiments de l’Académie Française sur la tragi-comédie du Cid, 1637), written by Jean Chapelain on behalf of the Academy, the academicians launch a vigorous attack against the core of Corneille’s play: the events of the plot are historically true but they run counter to the ideal of ethical perfection that the Academy demands of a proper poetic subject.11 This criticism focuses particularly on the conduct of the heroine, Chimène, who behaved badly, according to the Academy, by encouraging Rodrigue to save his life within the code of honour of the society in which they both lived and especially by marrying him (or by not protesting against the King’s order that she marry him). Chapelain also finds that the number of major events happening within a twentyfour hour period is implausible. The Academy did not contest that the French audience of 1637 was wildly enthusiastic about the play and deeply moved by it, but the Academy asserted that popular approval had no authority – only the views of experts in poetics should be taken into account in determining the merits of the tragi-comedy.12 While much of the Quarrel of the Cid may not immediately and explicitly raise the issue of chance, the Academy structured its argument in a way as to straddle the boundaries between ethics and the study of chance, that is the study of unusual, unforeseeable things that simply happen.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 33

07/10/2011 08:08

34

The Phantom of Chance

In the very premise of its authority to speak, the Academy posits a problem with the way things are – the way they are by chance. Chapelain, in conceding that the play was a great success with its audience, writes the following about the basis of dramatic criticism: Just as the remarks of the critics of this tragi-comedy have not concerned it [the Academy], the great number of its supporters have not shaken it. The Academy has been of the opinion that it [the tragi-comedy] may be good but has not come to the conclusion that it is good simply on the grounds that it pleased the audience. The Academy is of the view that since what is required is a judgment of the soundness and not the might of the petitioner, it should rather weigh the reasons than count the number of the play’s supporters and not consider so much whether the play was pleasing but rather whether it should have pleased. Nature and truth have attached a certain value to things which cannot be changed according to the value that chance or opinion attributes to them; and one is guilty if one judges according to the way things appear rather than the way they are.13

What happens is not important, what should happen is alone important. This is the crucial and, for readers of later centuries, almost incredible position that the Academy presents as axiomatic for poetics. And an implication of this position is that what happens is often tainted by chance. Within the learned world-view of 1637, Chapelain’s position is perfectly orthodox – it is rather Corneille’s position (that the enjoyment of the great majority of the audience is a demonstrative mark of merit) that is unusual. The Academy’s position is based on Aristotle’s preference for the universal over the particular in poetic creation, and this position is fortified by the doctrine, taught in the schools, that deductive reasoning produces knowledge while experience and sensory observation only produce opinion.14 This is why the great popular success of Le Cid just seemed to confirm that this tragi-comedy was flawed. The Academy’s document is clear and consistent on this point, linking ‘le hasard ou l’opinion’. The defectiveness of the world as we see it around us is due to its contingent, chance-dominated nature so that logically prior to any conclusion about the quality of Le Cid is the Academy’s condemnation of the world as we know it, a condemnation of existence (as opposed to essence) itself. What we see around us is not nature but its failure to be, for nature – that is the ideal of nature – exists outside of experience. The approving audience of Corneille’s play showed its ‘depraved taste’ (goût dépravé) and the authoritative judgement must come from the few persons who are above the unnatural multitude. In these opening remarks the Academy is already assembling its complex framework of ideas that will place Le Cid outside nature and in the inferior

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 34

07/10/2011 08:08

Fortune, Mistress of Events

35

world of chance. Opinion and chance are assembled, and then opinion is associated with immorality or depravity. The next step is to associate the real with depravation. The people must be kept from knowledge of the real crimes that happen lest it become accustomed to such crimes (p. 466). It seems that for the Academy, nature is an ideal system that always works but does not appear in the world of the people. If nature did dominate the world as we know it, there would not be crimes – at least there would not be ‘crimes’ like those of Chimène – and there would not be such gross errors of taste as those that made the audience like Le Cid. The defect within the play comes from the same source as the defect outside the play: both the audience and the heroine are unnatural. Since neither Chimène nor the audience can give the proper value to things (un certain prix aux choses), what they think and do will depend on chance. This whole line of argument requires that the Academy avoid certain passages of the Poetics where, in a complicated back and forth from history to poetry, Aristotle praises history as a source of tragic material precisely because the unusual and touching events suitable for tragedy are found among a small number of families. History, for Aristotle, is not what should happen but what has happened (and thus can happen), and it opens the way for creativity (what poetics is about, to make, poiein). While the Academy is, from the outset, bent on concealing the breakdowns of the order of what should be – breakdowns due to the absence of true nature from the world and its dominance by the unruly, the disorderly, the unreasonable – in short, by chance – Aristotle seems to be interested precisely in those acts that challenge our credulity. This is where history comes to the aid of the poet, who needs to show what can happen: In tragedy [. . .] the poets hold to the actual names. (The reason for this is that people are ready to believe in what is possible; and while we may not yet believe in the possibility of things that have not already happened, actual events are evidently possible, otherwise they would not have occurred.)15

Aristotle seems here to anticipate the Cid: what happened seems incredible, but the proof of its possibility is that it happened. The Academy cannot altogether deny that the tradition of the Poetics links the tragic subject to the unexpected, in fact to what happens by chance. Describing the structure of a dramatic work, Chapelain writes: the crux [nœud] of plays being an unexpected incident [accident] that interrupts the course of the represented action, and the denouement another unexpected incident [accident] that brings about the end. (p. 467)

‘Accident’ is here used in the sense, given by the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française, of ‘Fortuitous incident that happens by chance.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 35

07/10/2011 08:08

36

The Phantom of Chance

It is almost always understood to be something bad. Unforeseen accident, unexpected, strange, baleful accident’.16 Having denounced the hasard that misdirected the public reception of Le Cid, Chapelain oddly now places the same entity decisively into the required dramatic structure.17 We can thus understand why Corneille misread Aristotle – though in all probability he gave this reading in good faith – and placed this claim about the role of chance or fortune at the start of his first Discourse. Corneille’s experience of writing for the theatre (the Academy frowned on assertions based on experience) had proven to him that it is not the universal, not the general pattern, that is interesting, but rather the bizarre exceptions. In this, he was not far from the apparent view that appears in certain other key passages of the Poetics, for instance Aristotle’s comment on the fall of Mitys’s statue at Argos and the wonder that it created (see above, p. viii). And, like Aristotle, Corneille comes to the conclusion that tragedy should emphasise events that were chance-like rather than actual chance. So the playwright’s task is one of taking a situation that seems to be so strange as to defy credulity and then to make it believable by revealing – in fact inventing – the details that make the incredible not only possible but even likely. As he writes in the passage that immediately follows his assertion that the poet should invent plots that are like those generated in the world by chance (Fortune forbids creating incidents that are not of her making, qui ne soient pas de sa façon): ‘The great subjects that whip up the passions and set their impetuousness against duty or family affection, must always go beyond what is plausible.’18 Implausible subjects, treated in a manner that can make them believable – these are Corneille’s ideal for tragedy. Or, to put this idea back into the context of Aristotle’s claim that poetry is more philosophical than history, the playwright needs to take the particular, the accidental, and show how it makes sense within the framework of the universal. In this perspective, tragedy can be seen as an intellectual device for protecting mankind from the absurd, from the view that life is simply a series of chance events that offer no pattern on which we can base an understanding of life. Corneille’s purpose was to attract and hold the attention of his spectators. A world of random incidents is much less effective as a way to achieve this end than are structures that create suspense and tension. This is a lesson that Corneille learned and taught when he reached maturity, but his first tragi-comedy took chance events to an extreme.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 36

07/10/2011 08:08

Fortune, Mistress of Events

37

Clitandre, and the poetics of gratuity The period 1630–40 marked the apogee of the tragi-comedy in France. During those years almost half of all plays produced in Paris were tragi-comedies.19 In the preface to Clitandre, or Innocence Delivered (Clitandre, ou l’Innocence délivrée, 1631), the first of his tragicomedies, Corneille contrasts human knowledge and intention to chance: It would never occur to me that a lengthy play, where one must concentrate the mind so many times and feel so many contrary impulses, could be made by chance. Comedy is not like a dream that comes upon our imagination confusedly and without our consent, or like a sonnet or an ode that gushes out in a moment of exceptional inspiration and even when we have not taken pen in hand. So antiquity may tell us of the horse’s foam perfectly produced by a sponge thrown in frustration when the painter’s effort had not achieved it: but nowhere does one read that a whole picture was ever made in that way.20

Although Corneille is writing about chance in the composition of a play rather than chance in the events of the fictional universe, the contrast between design and chance (le hasard) is already very much on his mind as he considers the play that he had written the year before and that was now to appear in print. He must have been thinking a good deal about this contrast because his play is both intricately designed and, in its story, entirely dependent on chance. In real life you cannot simply throw a sponge and make art, and yet things very similar to this happen in the fictive universe of Clitandre.21 One might almost say that Corneille’s dramaturgic motto at this point in his career was, implicitly, ‘Accident doesn’t happen by chance.’ In real life, things may happen by chance, but to make such things occur on the stage in such a way as to provide satisfaction to the audience – this takes considerable effort. Corneille’s preface makes it clear that he worked hard to complicate his play and to fill it with plots and subplots to the point that he felt (without much apology) that the theatre audience might easily miss something and not understand the great consequences of brief incidents. He liked the idea that a lot of things would happen and that the play on stage would consist of people doing things and not simply telling about things that happened offstage. He admits that the Greeks and Romans would have done things differently, and that while he adopted, without putting much stock in it, the practice of putting all the action into one day, he differs from the ancients in preferring direct theatrical representation to narrative:

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 37

07/10/2011 08:08

38

The Phantom of Chance

I reversed the order, so that in place of the messengers that they constantly introduce to tell about the wondrous things that happen to their characters, I put the incidents (accidents) themselves on stage. (p. 95)

Corneille combines here the celebrated Aristotelian poetic notion of wonder (in French, le merveilleux) with the ‘accidents’ that produce wonder. And while ‘accident’ could mean simply ‘incident’, most of what happens in Clitandre is in fact accidental in the sense of being fortuitous. To favour these accidents, Corneille set the action of Clitandre in the forest. The stage forest is a malleable space, conducive to chance occurrences. It is an open, loosely defined space, one through which many varied fictive characters pass. It is permeable, yet opaque. Many people can be in this space at the same time and yet not see one another, or they may see one another only intermittently and unpredictably. It is easy to get into the forest, but not necessarily quite as easy to leave. People in such a space are disoriented, and even if they exit from the woods, they may have, during their passage, lost the sense of where they are. The spatial filters (gates, gardens, courtyards, salons) that give a certain order to the mixing of classes (or, in the terms of the Ancien Régime, conditions) do not exist in the forest, so that a prince can find himself face to face with the lowest woodcutter or goatherd. The forest and the sea, which also mixes people and deprives them of control of their destination, are the two great spatial settings for chance. Tragi-comedy inherited the fictions of forest and sea from the romance tradition, stretching from the Greek novels of late antiquity (such as Heliodorus’s Aithiopika and Achilles Tatios’s Leucippe and Clitophon) to the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, Ariosto and Honoré d’Urfé. The word ‘chance’ (hasard) is the leitmotif of writings about tragicomedy. This genre as a whole can be called a ‘a dramaturgy of gratuitousness’, according to Hélène Baby, author of the most recent substantial work on the topic.22 The chance-based nature of the genre frustrates attempts at more precise formulations – these plays give an overwhelming sense of fortuitousness.23 However, Clitandre, like other tragi-comedies, fits the model of the single basic subject or story-type of the genre: ‘Linked exclusively to the plot of love crossed by obstacles, the tragi-comic story tells of the adventures of a couple that struggles to create or to preserve a love relationship.’24 Clitandre allows us to see the big differences between Corneille’s first, rather typical tragi-comedy and the transformative, genre-bending work that appeared on stage only six years later, Le Cid. For readers accustomed to the later productions of Corneille and his followers something

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 38

07/10/2011 08:08

Fortune, Mistress of Events

39

of the strangeness of Clitandre can be seen in the title itself, since one might think that the play principally represents the actions of a character named Clitandre. But Clitandre appears for the first time in the fourth scene of the second act, where he has only 30 verses to recite, and the essential part of his role consists of two monologues in his prison cell. He returns in the last act to appear in three scenes in which he has exactly thirteen, thirteen and two verses to speak. Clitandre’s only interaction, except in the last act, is with the prince and the jailer. The curiously decentred titular hero of Clitandre serves as an example of an aesthetic of complexity and indirection. At the beginning of the play, Dorise has lured Caliste into the forest on the pretext that they will find Rosidor with another woman, but Dorise’s intention is to kill Caliste. At the same time Pymante, who is in love with Dorise and thus wants to eliminate Rosidor, whom Dorise loves, has lured Rosidor into the forest by forging a note from Clitandre challenging him to a duel to decide which of the two will be Caliste’s lover. Pymante has disguised himself and his followers to make it appear that they are in Clitandre’s service, so that the blame will fall on Clitandre after they have ambushed and killed Rosidor. The two murder plots fail; Rosidor and Caliste are reunited. Clitandre is arrested for the attempted murder of Rosidor but is finally shown to be innocent. After the two failed attempted murders, Dorise and Pymante, fleeing the scenes of their respective crimes, encounter one another, disguised. Pymante recognises Dorise, however, and tries to rape her, but she puts out his eye with a pin. In all plots that make significant use of chance, there is an apparent discrepancy between the whole and the parts. Usually it seems as if the whole is unaccountably greater than the parts. If we consider Aristotle’s example of Mitys’s statue, we see that two minor things have been combined. A man is walking along a street. A statue, because of some defect in the stone, falls. But the result is that a murderer has been punished, and punished in the most appropriate way: by the very image of the man he killed. At one level, Clitandre also can be said to combine minor things into something almost too big. A woman finds a sword in the forest, a jilted suitor seeks revenge, etc. But as the play unfolds, it is easy to have the opposite impression and to feel as if the whole were less than the sum of the parts. Corneille created a series of brilliant, intense scenes and seems to have conceptualised his play as a set of highly wrought, emotional monologues. These monologues comment on events and, more importantly, amplify their emotional impact. This is extremely important as an overall way of structuring events, because the less things flow directly from one incident to another, the more there

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 39

07/10/2011 08:08

40

The Phantom of Chance

will be a sense of surprise and wonder at each new thing that happens. The cost, of course, can be disbelief and even laughter at the strange disconnection from cause to effect, but Corneille and his contemporary fellow authors of tragi-comedy had intuited an underlying principle of great importance: that it is not so much what happens that counts but rather how people feel about what happens to them. And what happens is basically a set of unpredictable and unintended events due to chance. The first act of Clitandre is a masterpiece in the dramaturgy of chance. The two attempted murders are, by coincidence, planned for contiguous sites in the forest. Thus there are two simultaneous murder plots located in the same part of the forest: Dorise against Caliste and Pymante against Rosidor. The two plots are perfectly but unwittingly coordinated in time and space by the two separate conspirators and their convergence illustrates the paradoxical permeability with opacity of tragi-comic space. The two groups (the two women on the one hand and a group of three attackers and Rosidor on the other) are next to each other in the woods but do not see each other until the very moment when Dorise raises her sword to strike Caliste. At that very moment Rosidor raises his sword to defend himself against Pymante’s follower Géronte but it breaks against the branch of a tree. Without showing any surprise that there is another sword in the air at a convenient angle for him to seize it instantly, Rosidor grabs Dorise’s sword and uses it to kill his attacker. He thus, without knowing it and apparently without seeing her, defends Caliste against Dorise (I. 7). Dorise and Caliste see Rosidor, but he does not see them. This crossing of the two murder attempts in the first act is the major incident from which the rest of the tragi-comic plot derives: Dorise’s escape and subsequent disguise, Pymante’s escape and subsequent encounter with Dorise, the accusation against Clitandre that he organised the attempt on Rosidor’s life, and finally the king’s permission for Rosidor and Caliste to marry. But this incident is the pure result of chance. If Rosidor’s sword had not broken at that precise moment he would not have needed another sword and would not have seized the one that Dorise held suspended over Caliste. Caliste would have been killed. Yet if Dorise had not attempted to kill Caliste in precisely this way at this time and in this place, then Rosidor would have lacked a weapon and he would have died, thus ending the possibility that he and Caliste could form a couple to live happily ever after. There are thus at least two chance events that appear in this convergence and it is the accumulation that makes chance impossible to miss. If Rosidor had simply hit his sword on a branch then this might have been perceived as simply a minor, random event – due

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 40

07/10/2011 08:08

Fortune, Mistress of Events

41

to chance, certainly, but only one of the many minute contingencies that make up any combat. But once one starts to notice the accumulation of chance events in Clitandre, it becomes difficult not to perceive still more and even to count them. There are at least twelve chance events in the plot – no doubt more could be identified: 1. Rosidor’s sword breaks (I. 7. 242) and 2. Immediately he seizes Dorise’s sword (I. 7. 243) 3. Rosidor later faints and, though unconscious, unawares (insensiblement) drags himself over to lie next to Caliste who has previously fainted (I. 7. 330ss) 4. Caliste wakes up, a ‘miracle’ according to Rosidor (I. 7. 347) 5. Lyasarque, Rosidor’s squire, meets Pymante in disguise (II. 2. 470) 6. Dorise finds Géronte’s clothes and puts them on (II. 5. 603) 7. Pymante in disguise meets Dorise in disguise (II. 6. 659) 8. Pymante finds a hairpin that Dorise forgot to remove and he thus knows that she is a woman in disguise (III. 3. 949) 9. Lightning strikes the Prince’s horse and kills the horse from under its rider – this incident separates the Prince from his followers (IV. 3. 1275) 10. Pymante and Dorise encounter the Prince (I. 4. 1306) 11. A group of the Prince’s followers comes upon him in the woods (IV. 4. 1325) 12. And the ‘inaugural’ chance event that had set the series in action but was not mentioned until the very end of the play: Dorise found a sword in the woods (mentioned in V. 4. 1789 but happened before I. 1). These different chance events are quite varied in nature, in magnitude and in sheer improbability. The exchange of the swords is the most remarkable and has the largest number of consequences, but it depends on the earlier discovery of the sword by Dorise, which is itself entirely unremarkable and rather random. The bolt of lightning that kills the Prince’s horse is the most conventional and the most spectacular kind of chance, that is an incident that is so widely identified as being unpredictable, unavoidable and yet hugely important that it is a ‘classic’ case of chance, often studied as such (e.g. in the Logique de Port-Royal).25 But the lightning bolt can also belong to another related category, also ruled out of tragedy by Aristotle: the deus ex machina. Corneille did not at all need to have the Prince’s horse killed in this or any other way. His immediate dramaturgic goal seems to have been to have the Prince get lost in the forest and separated from his retainers, but this could have been

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 41

07/10/2011 08:08

42

The Phantom of Chance

done in a multitude of other ways. The Prince could simply have lost his way during the storm, the horse could have twisted its fetlock, the retainers could have been sent ahead to catch some prey, etc. Corneille must have felt that a bolt of lightning was an excellent ornament for the plot of a tragi-comedy, one that added to the excitement of the whole mixture of events and one that declared unambiguously that the play was about chance. And there is also the question of rank. It may be that the Prince seemed more entitled than other characters to experience a ‘noble’ form of contingency, one that came from above. The crossing of the plots between the two attempted murders is rather different from the bolt from the blue, for which there is no actual immanent intention. But in the case of the two crossed murder plots, we can see actual human intentions that are strangely, uncannily parallel yet opposite, so that while the bolt of lightning is impressive because of something entirely unintended that happens, the crossed plots are impressive because of an excess of intention that is, moreover, exquisitely symmetrical. The two forms of chance meet at this point, in this extra or excess intention. We cannot apparently help thinking that ‘this is too good to be true’ precisely because there seems to be an intention that we, at the same time, deny. The term used by the characters in Corneille’s play is dessein – the alternative to chance stressed by Corneille in his preface – which expresses the intention of the human plotters. And this intention meets the unintended in the form of material reality: the tree branch on which the sword breaks, the bolt of lightning and the body of the horse. To draw still more attention to the role of chance in the form of the material world, there is the first incident of the story that is mentioned last, in the forth scene of the fifth act (v. 1789), so that the play ends by returning to its beginning but also so that it reminds the audience of the mysteries of causality: Dorise finds a sword in the forest. Human intention, the dessein, turns out to depend on material reality.26 At the end of the play Dorise is suddenly and weirdly rehabilitated and married to the Prince’s favourite Clitandre, and one effect of the flashback to the discovery of the sword is an attempt to transfer the guilt to the material world itself. When we consider how thoroughly seventeenth-century literature is lacking in material detail (by the standards of modern, that is post-nineteenth-century, readers), the few objects that are named (though not described) take on a proportionately much more intense being. In Clitandre this is true of the sword and also the hairpin that Dorise inadvertently left in place and that allowed Pymante to recognise her. The sword and the hairpin – easily seen as ‘phallic’ objects – converge insofar as they are both used by Dorise as weapons. She tries to kill

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 42

07/10/2011 08:08

Fortune, Mistress of Events

43

Caliste with the sword and she succeeds in putting out one of Pymante’s eyes with the hairpin. Corneille took great pains to create two complex symmetrical plots, both of which included entirely fictive plots within them. On both sides Corneille accentuates the complicated planning of the murder plots, so that human artifice is exhibited in all its fragility in the face of chance. The brief and momentary quality of the sudden and aleatory is contrasted with the lengthy elaboration of artifice. Dorise advises Caliste to restrain the ‘seething swells of an angry soul’ which are ‘too violent to persist’ (I. 3. 137–8), words that come from a character who already knows well the art of waiting and planning. The contrast between the surprising sudden event and the foreseeable or habitual one is also present in Pymante’s conspiracy, when Lycaste tells Pymante that Rosidor, who is drawn to the place of ambush by the false message, ‘Has no idea that his coffin is waiting for him’ (I. 4. 184) – the culminating moment of Pymante’s machinations is proposed as the source of aesthetic pleasure for the conspirators because of the delicious effects of surprise (for Rosidor) and of suspense (for the murderers and for the public). Pymante imagines the plotters’ swords dipped in his victim’s blood (I. 4. 186–8). For the audience the really delicious thing about this plotting and its gradual build-up toward a climax is that while both of the nefarious plotters – Dorise and Pymante – are impatiently waiting to surprise their victim, the surprise is going to be on them, by mere chance. The characters, however, do not perceive things as happening by chance. Instead, when their own artifice fails they imagine, in place of random incident, forms of supernatural plotting. This happens early in the play when Rosidor, thinking that his beloved Caliste is dead, accuses the gods (I. 7. 275–7). His apostrophe indicates a thread of chance-related thinking that appears in almost every invocation of the concept: it magnifies the importance of individual human experience in an almost megalomaniacal way. Rosidor can imagine himself important enough to be persecuted by the gods. But such an accusation also solves the problem of creating order and causality in the midst of what could otherwise be simple trivial randomness. Rosidor, having found the responsible agency does not have to look any further: ‘I will seek no other cause than your envy’ (v. 278). However, in its immediate context the reference to the gods has another effect; it creates a high contrast with a more immediate and purely human explanation of the sort that Rosidor had just given of his own situation as victim of an ambush. In this immediately preceding case Rosidor had blamed his supposed rival Clitandre, since the attackers wore Clitandre’s colours (v. 260). In the second case, Caliste’s apparent death, Rosidor speaks in a different

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 43

07/10/2011 08:08

44

The Phantom of Chance

register of emotional discourse – grief – that pushes him into hyperbole. In regard to his own attack, Rosidor had contented himself with a strictly analytic approach and ended his reflections with the conclusion that he would make a complaint to the king (v. 271). The difference in emotional tone corresponds to a break in the purely human sequence of actions. With regard to the attack on his own life, Rosidor can piece together both a set of events from the past (Clitandre seems to be courting Caliste and thus to want to eliminate Rosidor) and a set of actions to take in the future (he can pursue Clitandre in various practical ways). But with regard to Caliste’s death, Rosidor can find no apparent explanation in anything that precedes nor can he do anything at all to make the situation better; he cannot bring Caliste back to life. When there is nothing to be done, one calls on the gods. Rosidor is not the only character to invoke the gods to explain the situation. Dorise, who has no apparent reason to suppose that the gods would want to help her, threatens Pymante with violence that she hopes to inflict with the help of the gods (III. 3. 1043): ‘Ces mains, ces faibles mains que vont armer les Dieux . . .’ [‘These hands, these weak hands that the Gods will arm . . .’]. But Pymante himself, the villain of the play, is the character who insists most heavily on the intervention of a supernatural power. Unwilling to accept that his plan could go awry by simple chance, he constructs for himself a position of importance, albeit in a negative mode, within the divine scheme, as he apostrophises destiny (II. 1. 385–96). Such an appeal to destiny was the norm in tragi-comedy, and his incredulity that the failure of his plan could have been due to chance would have been shared by the audience, if this had been anything other than a tragi-comedy. Corneille himself must have perceived Clitandre as implausible, for only five years later his second tragi-comedy sharply reduced both the subjective appeals to destiny and the astounding coincidences of Clitandre.

Le Cid and the Management of Chance Le Cid was initially written and produced during the 1636–7 season as a tragi-comédie, and only later, beginning with the edition of 1648, revised and redenominated as a tragédie.27 In Le Cid, there are no assignations in the forest, no forged letters, no swords broken and immediately replaced by other swords that lie mysteriously at hand, no long scenes in prison and no horses struck by bolts of lightning. At the most, to connect Le Cid on the surface level to tragi-comedy there are the denouement reuniting the separated lovers, a lady who faints and an

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 44

07/10/2011 08:08

Fortune, Mistress of Events

45

extreme amount of action, since the hero fights in three separate combats in one day. These do not seem decisive grounds to classify Le Cid as a tragi-comedy, and in fact the Academy applied to Corneille’s play a set of requirements based on the neo-Aristotelian poetics of tragedy, making no allowances for a difference between tragedy and tragi-comedy. As for outward instances of chance, there is only the Moors’ opportune attack. But chance, the hallmark of tragi-comedy, plays a more original and subtle role in le Cid than what we can see at first glance. Corneille has clearly worked hard to displace chance from the plot functions that it had in Clitandre. Consider the story. Rodrigue and Chimène love each other and hope soon to be engaged to be married. What can disturb something so solid, so probable? It is only the king’s choice of a gouverneur or tutor for his son. Is this just a question of luck, bad luck? It could, of course, have happened by chance. We have available no developed theory of psychological randomness that could allow us to describe the king’s decision as based on whimsy. Chance has traditionally been described as originating outside the human, though it can enter the human mind from the outside. That is – and the Stoics as well as Boethius would attest to this – a person is taught to be resolute and unswerving in moral purpose when faced with unpredictably changing external circumstances.28 The wise man succeeds in this while the foolish man allows himself to be swayed and to pivot in the wind of contingency. But this influence of chance is generally attributed to what starts outside the human and then penetrates into the poorly prepared mind. Yet in the case of the king Corneille has taken further measures to forestall speculation that whimsy (internal, or psychological chance) is involved in the king’s choice, as we shall see in a moment. There is, however, a way in which the king’s decision does belong to the constellation of chance in a way that is entirely fitting for the world of absolutist France. King Fernand’s decision is an arbitrary one in the sense that it is not explained.29 This is important to the extent that the king insists on the notion that the decision is his alone to make and that it is not subject to ratification, advice or inspection by the aristocracy. We do not learn the reasons for his choice, but the king, offended by the Count’s gesture of defiance in insulting the officially designated tutor of the prince, makes it abundantly clear that what is most important is not the detail or the occasion of his decision but the unconditional right of the king alone to make this appointment (II. 6. 565–8). It is thus an arbitrary decision, even if Fernand had, as we well know, excellent reasons for preferring Don Diègue to the Count. Don Diègue seems to represent quite accurately the doctrine of Fernand’s kingship in formulating for

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 45

07/10/2011 08:08

46

The Phantom of Chance

the Count this statement of the arbitrary, unaccountable decision of the king: La faveur l’a pu faire autant que le mérite, Mais on doit ce respect au pouvoir absolu, De n’examiner rien quand un roi l’a voulu [. . .] (I. 3. 162–4) [Favour may have caused it as much as merit, But we owe this respect to absolute power, To question nothing when a king has wished it so.]

Was the king’s decision really unpredictable? After all, chance is not merely something that happens without an explanation but also something that happens unpredictably and surprisingly. The answer to this question is not entirely obvious, because the result of the expected royal decision must be seen differently by members of the two competing noble clans. In the originally performed version of 1637 we have only the Count’s own assessment of the situation, in which he saw no other conceivable candidate but himself (I. 1. 29–32).30 With the 1648 edition Corneille had Chimène’s confidante Elvire state that the Count is the obvious choice: ‘Ce choix n’est pas douteux, et sa rare vaillance / Ne peut souffrir qu’on craigne aucune concurrence’ [‘This choice is not in doubt, and his rare valour / Cannot allow the thought of any rivalry’] (I. 1. 45–6). So it appears that for the Count, the king’s decision was an abrupt and inexplicable affront. In the Count’s presentation of the forthcoming decision, the nomination of a tutor is conceived in terms of a compelling relationship of cause and effect. The Count is precise; he does not say that he has a presentiment or intuition about this choice. He simply notes that this is the way the world works. From the Count’s point of view, the subsequent announcement is an aberration, but it is not an inexplicable one. He immediately fastens upon an inference: it is the ‘favour of the king’ (v. 151) that determined the choice and Don Diègue obtained the position ‘by intrigue’ (v. 219). The text of the play (that is the sum of the dialogue as a whole) allows us to construct an alternative account for the royal reasons for the king’s choice. We learn that the Count lacks good judgement, empathy and imagination. Sure of his own ability, he does not envision other possibilities and he is incapable of putting himself mentally in someone else’s place (neither Don Diègue’s nor the king’s) to complement his own view of the world and to prepare himself for all eventualities. All such thoughts must seem to him to be ridiculously theoretical, and in fact the words exchanged between himself and Don Diègue reveals the Count’s character quite well. The problem is not simply that he is irascible – a fault that he confesses a little later in speaking with Don Arias (II. 1.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 46

07/10/2011 08:08

Fortune, Mistress of Events

47

351–2). His further handicap is that he exclusively favours demonstration (in the modern sense of a present, visible experience that can be brought about right now to confirm an assertion) over narrative, commentary and reflection (vv. 191–2).31 But most of all, he has no sense of proportion and has difficulty situating himself both with regard to the contemporary social structure and with regard to history (vv. 193–4). We can easily see that the king’s choice of Don Diègue is based on reasons of character, political philosophy and pedagogic approach that make Rodrigue’s father the most capable for the position. But one aspect of the Count’s character and outlook on the world seems particularly relevant here, in the study of chance, for the Count does not see things coming. Of course, no human being can gaze unerringly into the future, but the Count does not hedge or qualify his view of the future and does not have the flexibility of intellect nor of emotion to be suited for a reversal of fortune. He is neither prudent nor patient and thus lacks virtue in a Stoic or Boethian sense: he does not know how to withstand the blows inflicted by fortune. In his competition with Don Diègue, the Count has a curiously and characteristically simple view of time. Things happen in a predictably sequential order. He tells Don Diègue, ‘Si vous fûtes vaillant, je le suis aujourd’hui’ [‘Perhaps you were valiant, but I am valiant today’] (I. 4. 189), and although Don Diègue is in perfect agreement about the effects of ageing, they differ in regard to the concept of an entirely predictable process of waiting in line to assume each post, one after the other. We can say that the Count is waiting his turn. In both French and English the term (originally a metaphor) tour or turn offers itself rather equivocally. Etymologically, a turn is the process or result of a circular motion, and this recalls the image of fortune’s wheel. But the wheel can be understood to act in two basically different ways, either as a smoothly rotating machine or as an unstable and unpredictable one. Clearly the Count sees the position of individuals as rotating smoothly through a sequence. His outlook on life does not easily accommodate any other view.32 We can see then that Corneille has taken care to convey a representation of the Count that assures us that the king’s choice is not a random one, not made au hasard, even though it is a choice that is entirely and resolutely arbitrary. Thus, in logical terms, the decision is not random, but in political terms it is arbitrary or absolute. This quarrel in the first act is not the dramatic centre of Le Cid. But it does introduce the terms of what will be at stake politically throughout the play: to show that the king’s decisions are both arbitrary and necessary (i.e. not dependent on chance). In other terms, we can describe this early scene as showing that the king is able to recognise merit without

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 47

07/10/2011 08:08

48

The Phantom of Chance

being constrained by a law that makes his power depend on the sequence of causes and effects of what happens in the society that is subject to his royal authority. He knows how to make his judgement coincide with the judgement of history. Rodrigue’s ascension from the status of a promising young man to that of principal pillar of the state is an important aspect of the play, even an essential one, without being the crux or nœud of the action, which has been recognised since the seventeenth century as consisting of the paradoxical relationship between Chimène and Rodrigue. This ascension is no accident, as we know from what follows in the play, but perhaps we do not reflect enough on what makes us really sure that Rodrigue’s ascension to the status of ‘le Cid’ is not due to chance. Because it is almost impossible to come to the play without knowing in at least a minimal way the outlines of the ending, we have trouble imagining that the play could finish any other way. But for the play to work to its fullest effectiveness – with fear, pity, suspense – we need to try to imagine that all is not settled in advance. We need to play the role of a truly naive spectator who does not know how things will turn out. In other words, we have to avoid being like the Count, who does not see the alternatives. We need to recognise the effect of Rodrigue’s three combats and their implications for the question of chance. Corneille makes an effort to make it clear that Rodrigue could really be defeated and even killed by the Count. Don Diègue’s own words are fraught with menace (‘The man I send you to fight is fearsome’ [‘Je te donne à combattre un homme à redouter’], I. 5. 275–9). Of course, it is easy to pay less attention to these words about the Count than to the punch line that unleashes their emotional shock, the four concluding words : ‘. . . le père de Chimène’ [‘the father of Chimène’]. But objectively, it is not at all evident that Rodrigue is going to win. Once again, we know that he will win, but if we do not play the game of supposing that he could lose, we deprive Rodrigue of a good part of what makes him so great, this hugely unequal duel. In the celebrated stances of the monologue in which he weighs the reasons for fighting and for not fighting, Rodrigue pictures vividly a death that is not only possible but indeed probable and almost unavoidable. This thought returns several times at different stages in his reasoning about the duel. In fact, when he considers refusing to fight the Count, even then he sees death as inevitable – either he will die, crushed by the Count’s greater strength and skill, or he will commit suicide: ‘et puisqu’il faut mourir, / Mourons du moins sans offenser Chimène’ [‘and since I must die, / Let me die at least without offense to Chimène’] (vv. 329–30). At another moment he says that he is ‘Réduit au triste choix ou de trahir ma flamme, / Ou de vivre

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 48

07/10/2011 08:08

Fortune, Mistress of Events

49

en infâme’ [‘Reduced to the sad choice of betraying my love, / Or living in infamy’] (vv. 305–6), which makes us suppose that life is on the side of non-fighting (the side of ‘living ignominiously’) and death is on the side of taking part in the duel. Rodrigue finishes by deciding in favour of dying in the fight. All this is simply to say that Rodrigue’s victory is actually something unforeseen. This is hammered home in the scene in which the Count and Rodrigue talk just before the duel. The Count is more reluctant than Rodrigue to go out to duel because Chimène’s father can see that this duel is going to lead directly to Rodrigue’s death. The Count is sure that Rodrigue is going to lose, and that is why he praises the young man so much, because he pities him and does not want to kill such a valiant young man in such a stupidly unequal fight, saying to his daughter’s lover, ‘Ne cherche point à faire un coup d’essai fatal’ [‘Do not attempt to make your first try fatal’] (v. 431). We do not see the duel, which happens offstage. We do not even have any account of how the duel went, the way we do in Horace or later in Le Cid itself, when Don Sanche gives a partial account of his own duel with Rodrigue. In the absence of any such account of this all-important event and of its wildly improbable outcome, we can legitimately and reasonably ask: Did Rodrigue win accidentally? Was the Count momentarily distracted? Did the sun get in his eyes? Did he die because he was overconfident and thus did not pay full attention to what he was doing? Did his sword break, as in Clitandre? Or did the Count deliberately allow himself to be killed (a rather far-fetched hypothesis given what we know about his self-centred character)? Le Cid has been admired for more than three and a half centuries. Yet if we believe the Académie Française, the play should not have been admired. Even Corneille, in his own critique of the work (the Examen) and his comments in the Three Discourses on the Dramatic Poem, claimed that the play should not have been written as it was. Among the recognised defects (though oddly also necessary, since if one removed them, one would annihilate the play) is the multiplicity of Rodrigue’s combats, three in one day. Can we conceive of some way to remove two of them? There are good reasons to respond in the negative. Rodrigue’s transformation into the ‘Cid’ is part of the overwhelming pressure that is brought to bear on Chimène to overcome her principled resistance to marrying the hero, the slayer of her father. The battle against the Moors effects this transformation and makes it difficult for any private person to lodge a complaint against him and to prevail against the great need of the state to replace the deceased Count. The third combat, the judicial

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 49

07/10/2011 08:08

50

The Phantom of Chance

duel for which Chimène (on the basis of her own offer) is the ‘prize’, allows the king to co-opt the heroine into his decision against executing Rodrigue. Each of the combats has an important use in the plot, even if the hero’s repeated risks do not correspond to the rigorous hyperregulation that Corneille proposed for his own work in the Discourse on the Three Unities (Discours des trois unités, the third of the Discourses) on the basis of a certain interpretation of Aristotle’s doctrine of causality and necessity: There is a big difference (says Aristotle) between events that come one after the other and those that come because of one another. The Moors come in Le Cid after the death of the Count and not because of the death of the Count.33

The necessity of these combats is all on the side of the playwright and the public, not in the story-universe of the tragedy itself. Of course the Moors attack the city after the Count’s death and not because of the Count’s death – though here one could quibble with Corneille – but Corneille himself recognises in the Poetics that Aristotle stipulates structural preferences on the basis of audience expectation and capacity and not simply on the basis of internal causal logic. For instance, Corneille argues for the exclusion of lightning-speed incidents that do not have a beginning, a middle and an end.34 One might even argue that the repetitious quality of Rodrigue’s successful combats is actually based on this exclusion of instantaneous actions. More precisely, it may be that in order for Rodrigue to transform himself into the equivalent of the Count – as the Infante tells Chimène, ‘your father has returned in him alone’ [‘ton père en lui seul se voit ressuscité’] (v. 1180) – he needs to do something more than simply kill the Count, because the outcome of a single combat could be a fluke, the result of some simple accident. It is through repetition that things are transformed from being exceptions into being the norm, from being odd and improbable into being familiar and expected.35 Among the many criticisms made by adversaries of Corneille there were also some concerning the actions and character of the king. The Academy, in its Sentiments, found two important defects in this character: one concerns his military command and the other his administration of justice. The Academy says about Fernand: The king had not given an order to fight the Moors, for fear of creating too much alarm in the city. It is true that the excuse is worse than the fault, since it would be better that the king be disobeyed having given good orders than for him to perish for lacking of having given any. (p. 479)

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 50

07/10/2011 08:08

Fortune, Mistress of Events

51

This comment is provoked by the dialogue between Don Arias and the king (II. 6), where Don Arias speaks as if, for members of the court, there were no pressing military danger. After a discussion with Don Sanche about the Count’s importance for the kingdom, the king himself introduces the idea that there is a real danger (vv. 610–11). Don Arias persists in being unconcerned, and despite the specific intelligence that Fernand gives, Don Arias continues to minimise the danger (vv. 617–18). This exchange lasts over several lines of dialogue in which it is always the king who seems to be more alarmed than his advisors. The king concludes that in view of the uncertain information, it would be unwise to throw the city into panic. In the 1660 edition, the king not only maintains the guard but reinforces it: ‘Double the guard at the walls and at the port’ – a change made in response to the criticism of the Academy. Scudéry, who found fault with every aspect of Le Cid, made the accusation that the king is weak and negligent. The Academy later ratified that idea. But would an impartial spectator or reader, not having been lead by these critics, come to a similar conclusion? There are good reasons for thinking that the supposed threat from the Moors is not very credible. The king seems to have considered the possibility at length, and he returns several times to this issue, in the face of Don Arias’s doubts. He concludes that the existing guard will be sufficient. Subsequently Don Diègue receives information that the threat of an imminent attack has become more concrete and tangible, and, as we know, the kingdom is saved by Rodrigue. This is what happened and is henceforth the ‘official history’ so to speak, as we consider it after the fact. But do we know what would have happened if Rodrigue had not intervened? No, we do not, though nothing prevents us from speculating within the web of plausibilities the playwright has set up.36 It is quite possible that the guard would have detected the danger and would have done whatever necessary for the defence of the city, though the result might not have been a definitive triumph of the scope of the one obtained by Rodrigue, who was able to deploy his troops before the Moors arrived and to capture them in an ambush. Was there communication between him and the royal guard? Did the guard see five hundred Spanish soldiers conceal themselves along the port or not? In any event, all’s well that ends well. But what is really at stake in all this? Corneille takes care to emphasise Fernand’s vision of his task as monarch, which is to manage risk. He could alarm the city and create ‘panic fear’ (v. 634) each time that he receives a warning of this sort. He decides not to do this with only uncertain indications. Such an approach to what we call today in French gouvernementalité makes the king a manager – it was said somewhat

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 51

07/10/2011 08:08

52

The Phantom of Chance

differently in the seventeenth century.37 This idea is made quite explicit in Corneille’s text in the very scene that Chapelain censures (II. 6). Don Sanche had proposed that instead of submitting himself to the king’s authority, Don Sanche could make amends for his insult in a duel (v. 592). The king replies to his intermediary with the count, Don Arias: Un Roy dont la prudence a de meilleurs objets Est meilleur ménager du sang de ses sujets. Je veille pour les miens, mes soucis les conservent, Comme le chef a soin des membres qui le servent. Ainsi vostre raison n’est pas raison pour moy; Vous parlez en soldat, je dois agir en Roy (II. 6: 597–602) [A king, his prudence directed toward better ends, Takes better care of his subjects’ blood. I watch out for my people, my attention guards them, Just as the head does for the members that serve it. So what is right for you is not right for me. You speak as a soldier, and I must act as king.]

The ménager or ‘manager’ sees his task as overseeing and properly utilising the various resources of the kingdom, and even if in this context the emphasis is on one aspect of that activity (avoiding needless expenditure of resources), Fernand sets this aspect within a vision of the whole, using the traditional metaphor of the relation between the ‘head’ and the ‘members’, implying that his care (souci) goes beyond conservation alone. Since this remark is located between the request of a duel to satisfy royal justice and the decision regarding a response to the latest alarm of an enemy attack, Corneille creates a continuum illustrating the king’s role as manager. What he manages is, on the one hand, resources – the ‘membres qui [le] servent’ (thus, the life of the Count and of Rodrigue) – and on the other hand the risks (périls, and in this case the threat of an attack by the Moors). This vision is set forth in emphatic contrast to that of warriors like Sanche, the Count and even Rodrigue who do not see the whole picture. After writing Le Cid, Corneille seems to have thought a good deal about this question of risk. He may be the first theorist of tragedy to have defined the neo-Aristotelian notion of singleness of action (often called ‘unity of action’) in terms of limiting the hero’s exposure to death to a single occasion. In the first of his Three Discourses, he writes about the end-point of the dramatic plot: ‘It is the hero’s danger that constitutes the conclusion, and when he is out of danger, the action is over.’38 This is a principle that he repeats in the third Discourse, saying that unity of action ‘in tragedy consists of the unity of danger, whether the hero succumbs to it or overcomes it’.39

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 52

07/10/2011 08:08

Fortune, Mistress of Events

53

Students of Corneille’s theatre do not seem to have fully explored this innovative prioritising of péril or risk. In Le Cid, for instance, it is clear that the risks for the hero as an individual are tightly plaited together with the risks for the state as a whole. It is probable that the main focus for the spectators is the danger for Rodrigue and for Chimène, but the king is aware of the risk for the kingdom as a whole and stresses this point repeatedly. Perhaps this very insistence is what alerted Scudéry and set in motion the Academy’s eventual criticism. Corneille created this conversation between Don Arias and the king to avoid the appearance that the Moors arrived in a completely unforeseen and accidental way, par hasard. Yet reflecting on this issue twenty-three years later, Corneille finds that there is still too much chance: This arrival of the Moors still has the flaw that I have mentioned elsewhere [in the Discourses] in that they show up all by themselves [d’eux-mêmes], without being called into the play directly nor indirectly by any character in the first act. They are more suited to the irregularity of the Spanish author.40

In this comment on poetics, we perceive three interrelated themes. First, the aim to make plays that are like self-contained mechanisms, playing themselves out on the sole basis of the elements that are installed from the very first act. With a facile play on words that reveals the nonaccidental nature of this poetic ideal, we can see that Aristotle’s deus ex machina is abhorrent to early-modern theorists precisely because such a device is a deus extra machinam, a god that comes from outside the machine that is itself the play. Writers, or at least theorists, have nothing against machines themselves, but they want to build a certain kind of closed, textual machines. Second, the idea that chance (hasard) becomes increasingly intolerable as the plot progresses – in other words, chance is relatively acceptable (and relatively unexamined) as the starting point of a plot, but should then disappear. Most of all, the solution of the problem, the dénouement, should not happen by chance. To take Le Cid as an example of chance that is integrated into the starting point of a plot, we can note the coincidence that the king is to make a decision about the choice of the prince’s tutor on the same day that Rodrigue and Chimène’s marriage is to be decided. Chance functions in plot construction like a roll of the dice or the dealing of a hand of cards: once the givens are established, all must unfold according to the logic of a closed system. This, at least, seems to be the ideal. Third, Corneille’s way of describing the arrival of the Moorish troops (‘ils se présentent d’eux-mêmes’) resembles closely Aristotle’s twoheaded formulation of chance: what Aristotle considers bad in tragedy

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 53

07/10/2011 08:08

54

The Phantom of Chance

are incidents that happen by tyche or ton automaton. It seems probable that Corneille, at the approach of 1660, when the Three Discourses on the Dramatic Poem were published, had long assimilated into his own thought many expressions from Aristotle’s Poetics, and thus found it quite natural to condemn the episode of the Moors in terms of ton automaton, which is usually translated into French as spontanément or par lui-même. The king’s speech about the measures to take in view of a possible attack does more than head off the anticipated criticism of this episode, because it demonstrates the more general importance of the king’s function as a calculated risk taker. Even if the king is clearly distinguished from military heroes, Corneille at the same time shows what the king has in common with such heroes: they reckon on the risks, on the outcomes of a plan of action. The ‘stances’ show, in one of the most famous passages of seventeenth-century dramatic literature, the evaluation of various outcomes of the only possible actions. Rodrigue weighs what he has to gain and what to lose in this dilemma: to fight the Count or not to fight the Count, just as the king weighs the costs and the gains of action in terms of benefits: the tranquillity of his subjects, their safety or their danger, and all of this within a graduated scale based on the probability or improbability (in modern terms) of this danger.41 In a sense, these exercises of reasoning on Rodrigue’s and Fernand’s part are ways to limit chance while recognising the impossibility of eliminating it altogether. Rodrigue does not say ‘Let me kill the Count, and then afterwards we’ll see what Chimène does’. The king, whose problem is even more complex, does not resign himself passively to the possible arrival of the enemy nor does he take simply an active position at the risk of wasting the energy and morale of his kingdom. Fernand takes a middle course. What is interesting here is the absence of automatism, of a strictly mechanical reaction, especially in the king.42 What the king faces is not chance in the sense of events that have no cause. What is threatening the kingdom is simply opaque, unknown, a series of possible causes all tangled up together: the Moors are hostile to the Spanish; they wish to regain territory; they are perhaps at the mouth of the river or perhaps not; if they are there they might or might not benefit from a high tide. Chimène, like the older feudal generation represented by Don Diègue and the Count, behaves according to a system of mechanical reaction. If one is hit, one hits back. There is no need to think about it. The consequences can be dealt with later. Of course – and this is what makes Chimène’s situation touching – she thinks a lot about the consequences, but she tries to act as if she did not take them into account. So for

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 54

07/10/2011 08:08

Fortune, Mistress of Events

55

her – in her public declarations – the system is simple and consists merely of projecting onto the state the logic that traditionally dominates among private individuals or families. We can see how such a logic might work well in a completely closed system.43 But the universe represented by the play (as opposed to the play itself as ideal mechanism) is not a closed system. There may be interventions from the outside that are not regulated but are polymorphous and uncertain. This way the king, who watches over (veille sur) the interior and the exterior of the kingdom, cannot respond to Chimène’s request by an automatic reply of the type, if one is struck, one strikes. Le Cid concludes with a strangely friendly view of chance. Real dangers, it seems to show, do not come from the outside, from what is beyond rational foresight, but rather from within, from the excess of a system that is capable of destroying itself in the enforcement of its own requirements. Corneille’s tragi-comedy presents society as a form of ‘self-consuming artefact’ in that the better it works, the more effectively its members strive to fulfil all the duties that are incumbent upon them, the more swiftly and completely such a society will destroy itself.44 The logic of honour and the imbrication of love with honour are such that human intention is apparently not capable of finding a solution. Thus the king’s appeal to time in the last verse seems to be an appeal to chance, which is so thoroughly linked to historical contingency, to whatever may simply come along. The king tells Rodrigue, ‘To overcome a point of honour that combats you, / Trust to time, to your valour, and to your king’ (‘Pour vaincre un point d’honneur qui combat contre toi, / Laisse faire le temps, ta vaillance, et ton Roi’ (vv. 1865–6).

Miracles in Everyday Life The identification of chance with time in the conclusion of Le Cid is emphatically hopeful, but six years later Corneille gave another view of time and chance in Polyeucte (1643), a ‘Christian tragedy’ (‘tragédie chrétienne’). In general the play attracts the praise of those who consider the ‘holy’ heroism of Polyeucte as a great step forward from the simply human heroism of Corneille’s earlier tragedies. In terms of the poetics of chance, Polyeucte merits attention because it may stage a miracle and thus run against Aristotle’s stated distaste for the deus ex machina, a distaste that Corneille emphatically shared. If the series of conversions that happen in Polyeucte is a miracle rather than the ordinary functioning of the order of the world under God’s providence, then Corneille would be acting contrary to his strongly stated adherence to an Aristotelian

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 55

07/10/2011 08:08

56

The Phantom of Chance

poetics. To understand how a Catholic author of the seventeenth century would understand the difference between a ‘miracle’ and ‘providence’, let us recall the definition of providence given by Corneille’s contemporary, Pierre Nicole: Whether He has us live in this common manner, or whether He does it in an extraordinary and miraculous way, it is always He who acts and who maintains us. And thus we must recognize both His hand and His all-powerful operation, whether He conceals it or whether He reveals it. But there is nonetheless this difference between these two ways in which He acts on bodies and souls that the first is the common way by which He guides his creatures and the other is an extraordinary way that He rarely uses and that has no sure rules. The order of providence, that He allows men to know, consists of the first kind; and the second only includes certain effects that we can never foresee by ourselves, because the plans according to which God produces them at one time and does not produce them at another are too lofty for the mind of men.45

Nicole presents here a perfectly orthodox understanding of providence as the ordinary course of nature understood as the work of God. The events of Corneille’s play do not necessarily depart from this ordinary course of nature. Perhaps there is no miracle in Polyeucte, and perhaps not even in Rotrou’s slightly later tragedy The True Saint Genest (Le Véritable Saint Genest, 1645–6). Perhaps these plays simply stage striking examples of what man can do within the limits of ‘grace’ as it is distributed in the normal, mysterious way that Catholic authors would take as a basic foundation for verisimilar representation.46 The story of Polyeucte is simple. The Armenian aristocrat Polyeucte has married the daughter of the Roman governor of Armenia, a province of the empire. She, Pauline, would rather have married the Roman officer Sévère, but her father Félix chose for her the marriage with Polyeucte as offering political advantages. However, the lowly officer, having left Armenia and subsequently become a great military hero and favourite of the emperor, is now returning for his first visit. Will he be resentful and seek revenge? Meanwhile, Polyeucte has been attracted by Christianity and seeks baptism, disregarding the persecution that this will entail and disregarding his marriage to a woman who professes the official Roman cult of the gods. Polyeucte, enthused by his baptism, destroys idols during the official ceremony welcoming Sévère and is arrested for blasphemy. The Christian hero rebuffs his wife’s pleas to conceal his faith. Félix could have intervened to save him but is too cowardly to do so, and once again driven by political expediency condemns his son-in-law to death. After her husband’s execution, Pauline and then her father convert to Christianity.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 56

07/10/2011 08:08

Fortune, Mistress of Events

57

Even if we suppose that everything that Polyeucte says about God’s grace is true, the characters in the play act freely. God does not make things happen. There is no indication that the principal events of the play – Polyeucte’s marriage to Pauline rather than to Sévère, the latter’s apparent death and then his spectacular and unexpected return, Polyeucte’s zealous behaviour in the temple, etc. – take place because God dictates this sequence of actions rather than others. Polyeucte himself gives a human explanation, a psychological one, for the conduct of his fellow Christians when he describes the value of example (e.g. II. 6. 672: ‘The example of my death will strengthen them best’). If what happens does not come about because of an irresistible order determined from on high, it seems that chance must have some role, even if chance is only essential and indispensable for two connected components of the plot: Sévère’s modest social origins and his false death. The first is a fundamental given of the play, perhaps even the point of departure for the rest of the action. That chance should play a role in the beginning of a plot seems to be something that is implicitly accepted within treatises of neo-Aristotelian poetics, for condemnations of the role of chance repeatedly mention the denouement as being the point at which chance becomes utterly unacceptable. Sévère’s humble origins constitute the reason for Félix’s refusal to allow his daughter to marry the Roman, and this happens long before Polyeucte becomes Félix’s son-in-law. When Félix reviews how he came to be in the difficult political situation of having denied his daughter’s hand to a Roman hero and favourite of the emperor the issue of chance first becomes explicit in the text in terms of timing and coincidence. His military and political success simply came a little too late (II. 2. 448–51). Sévère returns to this idea of the importance of time much later in the play, wishing that his life had taken a better turn a bit earlier (IV. 5. 1327–8). Time is not presented as being able to affect the nature of people, their character and their values. Sévère does not gain glory because of chance but because of his own fearless efforts; Félix does not deny Pauline’s hand to Sévère by chance; but the sequential order in which these things happened constitutes chance. If chance is the unintentional outcome of an action, then we can see chance as resulting from the unforeseeable outcome of Félix’s decision, for perhaps it was Félix’s very refusal of Pauline to Sévère that caused the latter’s success. Disappointed in love, he became fearless in battle (II. 1. 398–402), but he did not die. His pursuit of death, the valiance that he showed, his success due precisely to his total absence of fear (a phenomenon that Montaigne mentioned in his chapter ‘Various outcomes of the same plan’ and recently given considerable prominence by Giorgio Agamben in his work on

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 57

07/10/2011 08:08

58

The Phantom of Chance

homo sacer)47 – all this can be explained by a chain of causes and effects that appears almost entirely necessary, that is it seems as if this is what must happen in the ordinary course of events provided that chance not interfere (after all, as Aristotle pointed out in the Poetics, the stronger and braver man can possibly be killed by someone without these qualities).48 On the other hand, certain incidents in the story seem to point to chance as an important factor: Sévère was left for dead on the battlefield even though he was not dead; he returned to life as if by miracle; he arrived at Mélitène exactly two weeks after Pauline’s marriage to Polyeucte (an amazingly even number). Here again, chance appears in the form of time. We can suppose that Corneille needed to play with time in order to put Pauline into a pathetic situation in which her duty would be pitted against her love. Such a plot device is quite common in the seventeenth century. Lafayette’s The Princess of Cleves (1678, thirty-five years later) is often compared to Polyeucte, in part because of a similar mismatch of time and desire that occurs when the Duc de Nemours is absent precisely at the moment when the heroine arrives at the court and then returns shortly after her marriage. In Corneille’s play time is brought forward as a theme in the most characteristic parts of the plot: Polyeucte’s conversion, his great display of Christian zeal and his death. One of the most striking characteristics of Polyeucte is that he is in a great hurry. Of all of Corneille’s heroes, he is probably the most pressé, the most urgently aware of the pressure of time. It is interesting that this issue of the hero’s hurry should be so prominent in Polyeucte, because six years earlier, the matter of time had arisen in the quarrel of the Cid, when Corneille’s critics and opponents were acutely aware of the passage of time and found that the playwright had rushed things, packing too many events into too little time. The characters of Le Cid seem to be relatively unaware of time, except when it is brought to their attention by the king, who presents time as an organic curative force. Though the characters rush from one thing to another they seem fixated on what they desire and look on this through the transparency of the moment. They seem to have no fear that time is short. Time in Polyeucte is practically the opposite of time in Le Cid. When it is not a kind of perverse dis-coordinating force that makes things happen always too early or too late, it is a corrosive force that wears and weakens the energy that is specific to the Christian.49 To explain the difference between Polyeucte and himself, his friend Néarque says: Vous sortez du baptême, et ce qui vous anime, C’est sa grâce qu’en vous n’affaiblit aucun crime;

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 58

07/10/2011 08:08

Fortune, Mistress of Events

59

Comme encor tout entière, elle agit pleinement, Et tout semble possible à son feu véhément; Mais cette même grâce, en moi diminuée Et par mille péchés sans cesse exténuée, Agit aux grands effets avec tant de langueur, Que tout semble impossible à son peu de vigueur . . . (II. 6. 693–700) [You have just been baptized, and what moves you Is His grace that is not weakened by any sin in you; Still entirely whole, it acts fully, And all seems possible to its ardent fire; But that same grace, diminished in me And continually weakened by a thousand sins, Provides its full power so slowly, That all seems impossible in its weaked state.]

It is important to note the implied inevitability of this deterioration that time inflicts on grace. Néarque does not say that Polyeucte is more zealous because Polyeucte received more grace, nor even a more efficacious grace, but simply that he has just come from being baptised. So it is this recent and fresh quality of the grace that Polyeucte has that makes the two friends different. Katherine Ibbett has cast a great deal of light on the function of time in Polyeucte by reading the play within theories of the conservation of life and the government of colonies. She thus shows the continuity of thematic political issues between Le Cid and this martyr play.50 When it comes to describing Néarque, Ibbett presents him as being conservative, or rather as being a conservator, taking somewhat the role of the king in Le Cid by wanting to preserve resources. Néarque tells Polyeucte that grace must be earned through life not death, exhorting him: ‘Ménagez votre vie, à Dieu même elle importe; / Vivez pour protéger les chrétiens en ces lieux’ [‘Spare your life, it is important to God himself; / Live to protect the Christians of this place’] (II. 6. 670–1).51 Yet Néarque’s comments to Polyeucte can also plant a different idea in his friend’s mind, since there is a downside to the ordinary course of life. As a previously baptised Christian, Néarque perceives his own sins as accumulating incessantly (sans cesse, v. 698). Although time does not cause sin, sin lives and grows in time as weeds grow in rich soil. Time is the element of sin.52 Néarque had earlier proposed a similar doctrine about time when Polyeucte was hesitating to be baptised. Néarque asked him: Avez-vous cependant une pleine assurance D’avoir assez de vie ou de persévérance? Et Dieu, qui tient votre âme et vos jours dans sa main, Promet-il à vos vœux de le pouvoir demain?

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 59

07/10/2011 08:08

60

The Phantom of Chance

Il est toujours tout juste et tout bon; mais sa grâce Ne descend pas toujours avec même efficace. (I. 1. 25–30, emphasis added) [Are you completely sure That you have enough life or enough perseverance? And God, who holds your soul and your days in his hand, Does he promise your will that it will triumph tomorrow? He is always just and always all-good; but his grace Does not always reach us with the same effect.]

One needs to seize the occasion, to seize the moment. This formulation makes of grace something unpredictable, fragile and fleeting, like chance, which has a similar relationship to time. Instead of being part of things that are arranged in a foreseeable manner within this earthly life, grace is fluctuating.53 Grace seems to depend on occasions or it creates them – this distinction remains unclear and debatable on the basis of Corneille’s text – but from the point of view of human beings, as it appears in Polyeucte, one needs to act as if the gifts of grace were a kind of windfall. Hence there is a certain ambiguity in the thorny question of the relation of grace to merit (or to human will) in this play. Corneille is generally thought to be the playwright who most vehemently or even stridently exalts the power of the will, la volonté. It is clear that the characters talk a good deal about the will. Polyeucte hopes for a death that is ‘volontaire’ (v. 658). But can he actually get what he wants? Can he be sure of the strength of his own resolve? It seems that it does not really depend on him in a world in which grace is not always readily available. One cannot make it come when one wishes and one cannot foresee its coming and going. Polyeucte says to Pauline: Mais que sert de parler de ces trésors cachés A des esprits que Dieu n’a pas encor touchés (IV. 3. 1253–4) [But what is the use talking of these hidden treasures To souls that God has not yet touched.]

Polyeucte’s words seem, to him, to be useless, to have no effect on Pauline. What is required is that independently of his words, God touch Pauline with his grace, grace being defined by this touching or impact of God on a person. If grace does not work by the ordinary, everyday order of nature – providence, the general disposition of earthly life – then it combines, in terms of Aristotelian poetics, the worst characteristics of chance and of the deus ex machina. In other words, like chance, grace presents itself when it is the least expected and without any apparent necessity, especially in regard to the moment of its arrival. Like the deus ex machina, grace appears as the intervention of an entity from the outside.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 60

07/10/2011 08:08

Fortune, Mistress of Events

61

So Polyeucte, propelled by the energy of his recent baptism, does not want to lose any time (that is, does not want to lose any grace), and he says, among many other similar things, ‘Ne perdons plus de temps; le sacrifice est prêt’ ([‘Let’s not lose time; the sacrifice is ready’] II. 6. 711) – and, of course, the audience can savour the many meanings of this expression, for the sacrifice is both the one that the pagan Romans have prepared and the sacrifice of Polyeucte himself. What he wants to do is to leave behind as soon as possible the harmful world of time.54 As soon as he saw Néarque tortured and executed, they say, he wanted to die himself (III. 4. 958–60). Polyeucte himself explained his doctrine of martyrdom to Néarque in act II, scene 6. He wishes to die (v. 656); he does not want to wait for death but to hurry it: ‘Plus elle est volontaire, et plus elle mérite’ [‘The more it is done willingly, the more it is meritorious’] (v. 658). Most of all he sees death as a way of avoiding chance (le hasard). When Néarque promises him that with patience he will have the ‘palme’ of glory, Polyeucte replies at once, recalling the nature of time as we have seen it evoked: Mes crimes, en vivant, me la pourraient ôter. Pourquoi mettre au hasard ce que la mort assure? (vv. 664–5) [My crimes, if I live, could take it from me. Why should I risk what death guarantees?]

Time is the dwelling-place of hasard. It is true that this word has two interrelated meanings and there seems to be no reason to suppose that Corneille intended only one to resonate. Hasard contains the notion of risk as danger as well as the notion of risk as uncertainty. Polyeucte accepts the danger of death and desires death as a way out of uncertainty; put another way, he cannot accept the danger of his own possible weakness. Death, by eliminating uncertainty, appeals to him. Death would leave nothing more to chance. After Néarque’s death, Polyeucte explains these ideas at greater length to Pauline, always linking life to chance or fortune – in the sense of chance and uncertainty – and death to the absence of chance. The pagan Romans, according to him: . . . n’aspirent enfin qu’à des biens passagers, Que troublent les soucis, que suivent les dangers; La mort nous les ravit, la fortune s’en joue; Aujourd’hui dans le trône, et demain dans la boue. (IV. 3. 1185–8) [. . . hope only for fleeting goods Troubled by care, pursued by dangers; Death robs us of them, fortune’s playthings; Today on the throne, and tomorrow in the mud.]

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 61

07/10/2011 08:08

62

The Phantom of Chance

The tradition of the wheel of fortune (rota fortunae) is easily detectable here, in this description of the movement from high to low, and especially – this is important for Polyeucte – because it places life in the context of time. Polyeucte values above all the ‘Éternelles clartés’ (v. 1286) thus preferring death to life. For Polyeucte then, independently of his proclamations of his religious adhesion, death is logically preferable if one fears chance (the unstable, the fleeting, the obscure). In death there is nothing more to lose. In these three plays – two tragi-comedies and a Christian tragedy – Corneille offers three views of the role of chance in drama. In Clitandre, everything happens by chance and yet the characters seem unaware of it. They live in a world that lacks coherence but they do not seem to expect coherence in the world. Instead, when something surprises them or grieves or pleases them, they refer to the particular intervention of a supernatural force. In Le Cid, on the other hand, there is a drive for coherence and system on the part of the characters – and also, quite perceptibly, on the part of the playwright. There seem to be two forms of chance, one that is generated by the system – or rather systems – of values itself and one that comes from ‘outside’ that system in the form of physical aggression. The most serious, and in this case harmful, form of chance is the first of these, the chance generated from within systems. One of the few universal traits of chance is that it is an encounter, sometimes of two people, often of a person and an object: a roof-tile falls just as someone walks below. In Le Cid the significant encounter is not between the two fathers or even between the two lovers but rather the encounter of two systems within the court depicted in the play. Each of these systems could work without too many problems, but the encounter of the feudal system based exclusively on honour with the monarchical system based on utilitarian subordination to the whole leads to an insoluble dilemma, an Aristotelian ‘third kind of event’, which generates wonder. For the play not to stop at that wonder, the wonder of a love relationship hanging between combat and attachment with no resolution, only some further chance from outside the system itself can provide the hoped-for occasion. Finally, in Polyeucte, Corneille has shown a hero fleeing from the potentially corrosive effect of chance in a martyr tragedy drawing on a Catholic view of the relationship between time and grace. Only for a Catholic hero – and not for a Huguenot, Calvinist one – would time contain the possibility of significant accident, an encounter that could alter the hero’s relationship to God. Since Polyeucte perceives his relationship to God’s grace as varying in time and in relationship to acts that occur in time, his words and actions stand in opposition to the conception of a predestined, unvarying relationship to God that

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 62

07/10/2011 08:08

Fortune, Mistress of Events

63

is in no way susceptible to deterioration (or amelioration) on the basis of acts. Although Polyeucte could never lose grace by chance, but only through an act of will, all his moments offer potential and unforeseeable occasions of sin, and thus he experiences the Christian life as one that is exposed to chance. These are only three examples of the ways Corneille played on the relationship between human action and chance in constructing his dramas. There are many more variations – one need only think of the depiction of birth order as chance and of the nefarious attempt by Queen Cléopâtre in Rodogune (1644) to counter chance by imposing an arbitrary and artificial order, or of the way Cinna (1642) ends with Auguste’s decision to trust his future to chance after all else has failed.55 It is clear, however, that Corneille’s commitment to a poetics that is always on the very edge of the plausible made him fascinated with chance. If fortune is the mistress of events – the type of events that are the best for tragic drama – and yet if fortune must be excluded from tragedy in favour of visible, rationally traceable causality, then great tragedy will always have an occult relationship with chance.

Notes 1. ‘Cette tragi-comédie est en fait notre première tragédie classique et reste l’une des plus grandes’ (André Lagarde and Laurent Michard, XVIIe Siècle. Les grands auteurs français du programme (1967), p. 103); Reiss, ‘1553, March: The Origin and Development of French Tragedy’, p. 209; Drabble (ed.), The Oxford Companion to English Literature, p. 235. 2. Corneille, Trois discours, pp. 64–5. 3. Aristotle, Poetics, chapter 14: ‘[T]ragedies concentrate on a few families. Luck not art led poets to find how to achieve such an effect in their plots; so they have to turn to the families in which such sufferings have occurred’ (The Poetics of Aristotle, ed. Halliwell, p. 47). 4. Poetics, ed. Halliwell, p. 40. 5. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie (1694): ‘ACCIDENT. s. m. Cas fortuit, ce qui arrive par hazard. [. . .] Accident, En termes de Philosophie, sign. Ce qui se trouve dans un sujet & qui n’en fait point l’essence, ce qui peut estre ou n’estre pas, sans que le sujet perisse, comme, la blancheur, la couleur, l’odeur, la chaleur, la froideur &c. La substance soustient les accidents’. 6. La Mesnardière, La Poëtique, p. 35. 7. Boethius’s allegorical figure of Philosophy says, ‘For nature does not start from degenerate or imperfecct speciments, but starting from the perfect and ideal, it degenerates to these lower and weaker forms’ (The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Cooper, p. 60). 8. D’Aubignac, La Pratique du Théâtre, p. 68. D’Aubignac continues that the verisimilar is the foundation of all dramatic works (p. 76).

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 63

07/10/2011 08:08

64

The Phantom of Chance

9. For more detail see Lyons, ‘La triple imperfection de l’histoire’. 10. Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, p. 507; Castelvetro, Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta, I, pp. 248–9. 11. Chapelain, ‘Sentiments de l’Académie’. 12. The play was originally performed and printed in 1637 as a tragi-comedy. In 1648 it was revised and republished as a tragedy. 13. Chapelain, ‘Sentiments de l’Académie’, p. 465. 14. On this important matter of the status of experience as non-productive of knowledge, see chapters 4 and 5 of Hacking, The Emergence of Probability. 15. Aristotle, Poetics, chapter 9, Halliwell trans., p. 41. 16. The first edition of this dictionary was in 1694 and the ‘Sentiments de l’Académie’ were published in 1637, so we cannot take this definition as being absolutely applicable. However, in 1606, Jean Nicot defined ‘accidental’ as ‘fortuitus’ (Thrésor de la langue françoyse). 17. The Academy proposed alternative endings for Le Cid that would have made the play decisively tragi-comic in the most trite and unimaginative sense of the term, by having Chimène turn out not to be the Comte’s daughter or having the Comte return from the dead (Chapelain, ‘Sentiments de l’Académie’, p. 469). 18. Corneille, Trois discours, p. 64. 19. Lancaster’s French Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Century lists the 233 extant plays from the years 1630–40. Of those, 107 were either tragicomédies or tragi-comédies-pastorales. 20. Clitandre, ou l’Innocence délivrée in Pierre Corneille, Œuvres complètes, I, p. 96. Subsequent references to Clitandre and will give the page number (for the preface) or act, scene or verse. The anecdote of the thrown sponge, which appears frequently (see pp. 37 and 64) comes from Pliny the Elder, Natural History, book 35, chapter 40, or from a number of other possible sources. . 21. On issue of the ‘thrown sponge’ allusion, see Chapter 4, p. 106. 22. ‘Une dramaturgie de la gratuité’ is the title of a chapter (part II, chapter 3) in Baby, La tragi-comédie, p. 153. 23. Baby writes, ‘La résistance manifeste du genre tragi-comique à la totalisation fait échouer toute tentative de définition générale’ (La tragi-comédie, p. 21). 24. Baby, La tragi-comédie, p. 103. 25. This example appears in chapter 16 of Arnauld and Nicole, La Logique, p. 429. 26. Rosset, L’Anti-nature. 27. Baby, La tragi-comédie, p. 136. 28. For the Stoic tradition see Hadot, Exercises spirituels et philosophie antique, Aubenque, La Prudence chez Aristote and Du Vair, De la constance. 29. Another word that figures in the ‘constellation of chance’ is arbitraire or ‘arbitrary’. In recent usage the word often means ‘existing or coming about seemingly at random or by chance or as a capricious and unreasonable act of will’ (Merriam-Webster) or ‘Derived from mere opinion or preference; not based on the nature of things; hence, capricious, uncertain, varying’ (OED). At least since the thirteenth century arbitre signifies the person

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 64

07/10/2011 08:08

Fortune, Mistress of Events

30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

65

who judges and decides, and thus the arbitrary involves ‘judgement’ and ‘will’. The first edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française maintains this sense of freedom in defining the adjective arbitraire first of all as ‘Qui dépend de la volonté du choix de chaque personne. L’église n’a point décidé là-dessus, cela est arbitraire’. The second definition concerns the ‘volonté des Juges’, and the third definition is particularly telling for a study of chance: ‘On dit aussi, Un pouvoir arbitraire, pour dire, Un pouvoir souverain qui n’a pour regle que la volonté de celuy qui le possede’. Corneille, Le Cid, 1637–1660. References to the first edition of Le Cid will be to this edition. On the meaning of ‘demonstration’ up until the seventeenth century see Hacking, The Emergence of Probability, pp. 31–8. It is worth noting that Corneille does not use the word fortune in Le Cid, while hasard appears in noun form or verb form about half a dozen times, always with the sense of placing something in danger. Heur and bonheur appear a number of times to indicate good fortune, success. Corneille, Trois Discours, p. 135. Italicised in the French text. Corneille, Trois Discours, p. 77 and p. 134. Repetition alone is not enough, in seventeenth-century terms, to classify an event as verisimilar rather than true, since dramatic and literary verisimilitude was determined by other ethical and aesthetic criteria. But according to Ian Hacking, frequency of occurrence was first used as part of the determination of probability in the middle years of the seventeenth century (Hacking, The Emergence of Probability, p. 77). The Academy’s criticism of Le Cid provokes speculation about how else things might be. This is frequently the case in texts that concern chance: the accident leads to thoughts about how things might be if the accident had not taken place. Thus we enter the speculative exercise known as the fiction of possible worlds. On these matters see La Théorie littéraire des mondes possibles, edited by Françoise Lavocat. Michel Foucault gave this term its current importance in his lectures of the late 1970s, e.g. ‘La gouvernementalité’, course given 2 January 1978 and published in his Dits et écrits, vol. III, pp. 635–57. Corneille, Trois Discours, p. 74. Corneille, Trois Discours, p. 133. ‘Examen’ of Le Cid , Œuvres complètes, vol. III, p. 704. This decision process departs from certain representations of Cornelian ‘heroism’ as simple ‘exaltation of the moi’ or pure ‘quest for glory’ because the text shows an awareness of costs and benefits. Poirier, Corneille et la vertu de prudence. What she asks would be entirely logical in a closed system, and this is an important step in the mechanism of violence as René Girard studies it in such works as La Violence et le sacré. Chimène’s ‘justice’ is still a form of vengeance, but the execution of the vengeance is delegated to the state and thus offers the advantage of breaking the spiral of reprisals. The term is borrowed from Fish’s study of this title, Self-Consuming Artifacts, though it is here applied in a different sense. Nicole, ‘Des diverses manières dont on tente Dieu’, pp. 419–20.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 65

07/10/2011 08:08

66

The Phantom of Chance

46. One might be able to give a purely human, non-religious and nontranscendent reading of Polyeucte, as in Doubrovsky, Corneille et la dialectique du héros, pp. 222–61. 47. Agamben, Homo sacer. 48. Corneille paraphrases this passage from Aristotle (Trois Discours, pp. 127–8). 49. Ibbett writes perceptively of Polyeucte that ‘Christianity seems to be uncomplicatedly a religion of the present tense, untainted by political gameplaying. Thus Pauline’s conversion speech emphasises the absolute presence of faith by insisting on the present tense’, yet Corneille shows that this is more complex than it seems, for Corneille ‘shows how Polyeucte’s desire for death involves a kind of temporal negotiation’ comparable to that of the cynical politician Félix (Ibbett, The Style of the State, pp. 79–80). 50. Ibbett, ‘Conservation, Corneille, and the Question of the Colonial Governor’, in The Style of the State, pp. 59–92. 51. Ibbett, The Style of the State, p. 81. 52. Polyeucte does not understand time in this sense before his baptism, since he first wishes to delay the sacrament (v. 42). 53. The difference between Néarque and Polyeucte can also be expressed in terms of a debate about merit. Ibbett writes that Néarque takes the position that ‘grace is not given once and for all but must be managed over time. Néarque tells Polyeucte that grace must be earned through life not death’ (The Style of the State, p. 81). 54. Ibbett makes this point with utter clarity: ‘Polyeucte tells Pauline he wants to die before his grace is eroded by the contingent swings of fortune’ (The Style of the State, p. 80). 55. Le Cid, III. 4. 997.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 66

07/10/2011 08:08

Chapter 2

God in a World of Chance: Pascal’s Pensées and Provincial Letters

The Random Human Condition Whoever wants to know man’s vanity fully has only to consider the causes and effects of love. The cause is a something I know not what. Corneille. And the effects are frightening. This something I know not what, so insignificant that we cannot recognize it, disturbs the whole earth, princes, armies, the entire world.1

Pascal’s cryptic comment on Cleopatra’s nose is one of the best-known fragments of the Pensées. It conveys crisply the idea that a small, random factor can have enormous consequences. This factor may even be invisible to the people initially most concerned. Was Antony aware that it was the nose, or rather the particular length of the nose, that drew him irresistibly to this Egyptian queen? Presumably not, for the cause of love is a Je ne sais quoi.2 Love, in other words, happens by chance and is simply a moment within an infinite and imperceptible series of causes that could also be ascribed to chance and about which we can ask, in vain, ‘Why this nose?’ and ‘Why this moment?’ A similar fragment concerning a contemporary event appears elsewhere in Pascal’s text: Cromwell was about to ravage all Christendom, the royal family was lost, and his own established forever, save for a little grain of sand getting into his bladder. Even Rome was about to tremble under him. But this small piece of gravel having gotten there, he died, his family was debased, all is peaceful, and the king restored. (S. 622, p. 1161/185)

In both cases a small thing has enormous, apparently disproportionate consequences. The thing is a parcel of matter, not something that has thought or will of its own and not something that is even within the control of the human agents who are affected. These are both debunking or deflationary examples of chance at work, since they concern important

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 67

07/10/2011 08:08

68

The Phantom of Chance

historical personages who are at the top of the power structure. The emphasis is slightly different from the traditional wheel of fortune allegory, but by choosing people at the top of the social hierarchy, Pascal conveys the dramatic, striking, public character of these instances of chance at work. The importance given to the very small cause is consistent with his tendency throughout the Pensées to represent chance as being at work everywhere, in the most minute of circumstances, and not simply in a limited number of unusual and striking occasions. We are all in the same situation: ‘The great and the small suffer the same reverses and the same distress’ (S. 583). Significantly, with regard to Cromwell’s death and the relief it offered Roman Catholics, Pascal does not add any remark about God’s intervention on the Church’s behalf but simply leaves the effect of a kidney stone as the intentionless, material cause of a great historic shift. Pascal, following Montaigne’s comments in his ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’, creates the picture of a world dominated by chance. Battles are won and lost not by the skill of generals or the bravery of soldiers or by a remarkable and visible divine intervention but by the power of insects (‘The power of flies: they win battles’, S. 56, p. 10). More grave still is that the laws and values of humanity are determined by chance. Pascal speaks of ‘the recklessness of chance, which planted human laws’ (‘la témérité du hasard, qui a semé les lois humaines’): Three degrees of latitude reverse all jurisprudence; a meridian decides what is true. Fundamental laws change after being kept for a few years; rights have their terms. The entry of Saturn into Leo marks the origin of a given crime. Odd kind of justice that is bounded by a river! Truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on the other. They admit that justice does not reside in these customs, but in natural laws common to every country. They would certainly maintain this stubbornly if reckless chance, which has distributed human laws, had found at least one that was universal; but the joke is that human whim has so many varieties that there is no such general law. (S. 94, p. 868/19)

Pascal adopts Montaigne’s viewpoint here, basing himself largely on the ‘Apology’ and thus building scepticism into his own apology for the Christian religion. Pascal is reported to have claimed that Epictetus and Montaigne were his two favourite authors, the latter because he exposed the ignorant presumption of mankind: ‘there he gradually destroys everything that passes for most certain among men’.3 Pascal, in this reported conversation with Lemaître de Sacy, is said to have attributed to Montaigne, prior to Descartes, a ‘universal doubt’. Pascal, however, makes a use of such a doubt that is quite different from both of these other writers. For Pascal, widespread or universal human error is useful

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 68

07/10/2011 08:08

God in a World of Chance

69

insofar as it represents human intelligence working without the light of faith, the condition of most of mankind and also the state of those contemporaries most in need of his own efforts to show that faith is not incompatible with reason.4 However, Pascal finds something else useful in Montaigne’s representation of human life. Even those who have faith live in a disordered world, the world after the fall of Adam and Eve, and so confront a bewilderingly irrational world.5 Pascal’s apologetics, in keeping with the Augustinian tradition, reverses the pro-theistic or pro-providential apologetics of such ancients as Seneca.6 The latter had argued that the beautiful order of the cosmos showed that it was not ruled by chance.7 Pascal’s interlocutor in the Pensées, the unbeliever, expects such a classic apologetic argument based on the supposed regularity of the cosmos. Pascal clearly intends to catch the unbeliever off guard by repudiating this argument: ‘Why, do you not yourself say that the sky and the birds prove God?’ No. ‘And does not your religion say so?’ No. For while this is true in a sense for some souls to whom God gave this illumination, nevertheless it is false for most of them. (S. 38, p. 843–4/7)

Pascal disconcerts the unbeliever by an abundant evocation of the inexplicably accidental quality of life, the sort of view that a sceptic, rather than a Christian, would be expected to give. The Pensées offer glimpses of a world in which things happen for no apparent logical reason or, in short, in which things seem to happen by chance, and not only by great, striking, dramatic accidents but by simple everyday randomness. This is sometimes great in its consequences but it is small in its origins. It is undramatic or de-dramatised; it is petty and so ordinary and obvious that it is almost invisible. One example in the Pensées is the talon de soulier, a metonym for the everyday functioning of chance in ways that are almost imperceptible: Occupations/Thoughts/All is one, all is diverse. How many natures exist in man! How many vocations, and through what chance [hasard]! Each person normally takes up what he has heard praised. A well-turned heel. (S. 162, p. 897/34, emphasis added)

This is one of the many fragments in which Pascal locates the choice of a calling, a métier, in chance. The heel of a shoe is not the cause of the choice the way the nose was the cause of love, but it is the object which comes into awareness at the precise moment when the profession is chosen. The object becomes the bearer of the admiration that the young man desires for himself thinking that he can have such admiration if he too makes beautiful heels for shoes. For Pascal this materialisation of praise is an

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 69

07/10/2011 08:08

70

The Phantom of Chance

ordinary intervention of chance in human life. In another fragment he writes, ‘The most important thing in all of life is the choice of vocation: chance decides it. Custom makes men masons, soldiers, roofers’ (S. 527). While it is true that the talon de soulier is associated with a vain desire to replicate the initial praise by producing more perfect shoes, we can see why Pascal associates the choice of a calling so persistently with chance. The heel is, like Cleopatra’s nose, a ridiculous object, at least when considered in terms both of its unpredictability and its disproportionate effects. One day a young man happened to be present when one admired a shoe. And it transformed his life. In this example Pascal associates chance with custom, almost as if the terms were synonymous: ‘Custom makes men masons, soldiers, roofers …’. This is how we recognise randomness. It does not make a contrast with ordinary life – it is ordinary life. Without it, things would not happen. But it is at the same time chance. Custom, for Pascal, can be considered chance that is simply congealed – a set of unjustifiable practices that have become familiar but that reveal their irrationality as soon as we stand back to inspect them.8 Another example is the passage from the long fragment on imagination (S.78) in which Pascal gives the example of the grave magistrate listening to a sermon. The intent of the passage is not to describe chance, yet it is chance that may well break through the serious man’s appearance of gravity ‘if by chance [the preacher] is dirtier than usual’.9 In this way, chance intervenes constantly in the world described in the Pensées and it generally passes unnoticed. The magistrate may not even know why he laughs. Eventually the Pensées make the disorder of the world the basis of an Augustinian argument for Catholic doctrine. The hypothesis of a fall from a prior, better state offers an explanation both for the disorder of the world and for our ability to perceive it. Here, Pascal’s first move is to accept the sceptical claim that the world is a horrid mess. The apologist’s second and crucially important move is to question how we can tell that the world is in such a bad state. The greater mystery becomes, in Pascal’s terms, the source of our criterion for judging how the world should ideally be. Little by little the Pensées present the case that on one hand the post-lapsarian world is disordered, and that on the other hand the trace within us of a pre-lapsarian standard of order and justice (in our heart) allows us to perceive that disorder and to hold it against a different, better standard. In the evocation of a world dominated by chance, Pascal conceives of chance (le hasard) in a way that differs noticeably from Aristotle’s tyche. The Pensées have a strong tendency to de-dramatise everyday, individual life. There is no wonder here, the kind of wonder (thaumaston) that is so important as the defining characteristic of chance

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 70

07/10/2011 08:08

God in a World of Chance

71

in both the Physics and the Poetics. We can speculate on why the neoAugustinians would tend to frame chance events in terms of randomness rather than in the form of the more dramatic, classic chance that abounds in Corneille’s work or in Aristotle. Pascal wished to recuperate the non-anthropocentric vision of sceptics like Montaigne. With this sceptical view Pascal opposes the medieval representation of a Fortune that supports human claims to be at the centre of the world. We should remember that, as the seventeenth century began, it was not the sceptics, agnostics or freethinkers who asserted the centrality of man within the material cosmos but instead the Christians, eager to show a divine plan, centred on planet earth, in which the story of man’s creation, fall and redemption occupied the foreground. Galileo’s trial before the Roman Inquisition in 1633 attests the importance that the Church attached to an earth-centred and thus human-centred model of the physical world. In the ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’ Montaigne had forcefully shoved mankind out of its privileged position: The most vulnerable and frail of all creatures is man, and at the same time the most arrogant. He feels and sees himself lodged here, amid the mire and dung of the world, nailed and riveted to the worst, the deadliest, and the most stagnant part of the universe, on the lowest story of the house and the farthest from the vault of heaven, with the animals of the worst condition of the three; and in his imagination he goes planting himself above the circle of the moon, and bringing the sky down beneath his feet. It is by the vanity of this same imagination that he equals himself to God, attributes to himself divine characteristics, picks himself out and separates himself from the horde of other creatures, carves out their shares to his fellows and companions the animals, and distributes among them such portions of faculties and powers as he sees fit.10

Pascal meets his unbelieving interlocutor on this common ground, but where the unbeliever may advance a purely materialistic, non-theistic account of a world in which humanity invented the myth of its own importance and crowned that myth with the concept of a god-creator, Pascal makes this vision of the world converge with the Hebrew and Christian account of a fall.11 In addition to a purely immanent account of the ambient confusion of the world, Pascal offers a second, related explanation of this condition. In this second account the apparently accidental state of the world is not due simply to a loss of order but to God’s active creation of disorder. God conceals himself to make it difficult for those without grace to detect his trace. Pascal’s thinking on this matter seems to be directly linked to the same text by Montaigne that energised free-thinking sceptics in the same period:

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 71

07/10/2011 08:08

72

The Phantom of Chance

Blind, enlighten. Saint Augustine, Montaigne, Sebond. There is enough light to enlighten the chosen and enough darkness to humble them. There is enough darkness to blind the reprobate and enough clarity to condemn them and leave them without excuse. Jesus Christ’s genealogy in the Old Testament is intermingled with so many other useless ones that it cannot be discerned. If Moses had recorded only Jesus Christ’s ancestors, it would have been too perceptible. (S. 268, p. 962/70)

So the Bible contains deliberately useless information in an attempt to confuse the unchosen and to throw them off the track of the truth. God has chosen to be a hidden God, Deus absconditus (S. 275), and the term used for this divine concealment within the Bible and human history and the term used for the human condition as we see it through ordinary observation are the same: blindness (aveuglement). Pascal sounds like Montaigne when he writes: ‘When I see man’s blindness and wretchedness, when I consider the whole silent universe and man left to himself without light’ (S. 229), but this blindness is not simply a passively experienced condition. In the passages on the Scriptures, we find statements such as ‘He is to blind the learned and the wise’ (S. 734). Pascal, then, has a double vision of the randomness of the world. The first grows out of Montaigne’s sceptical vision and makes its case for religious inquiry entirely on the basis of worldly observation. This thematic thread in the Pensées has been aptly described by Hall Bjørnstad as an anthropology.12 Pascal’s second account of the appearance of chance in life comes from the Bible. By using Scripture, Pascal aims to show that the coming of the Messiah was not due to chance (‘afin qu’on ne prenne point l’avènement pour un effet du hasard’, S. 4). In the following pages we will consider examples of these two strands of Pascal’s thought. His anthropological approach is visible already in his earlier work, the Lettres Provinciales (co-authored with Pierre Nicole and published anonymously in serial form during 1656). Then we will consider how Pascal’s thinking about chance shaped his approach to Biblical prophecy.

From Probability to Frequency in Pascal’s Provinciales Pascal’s Provinciales (1656–7) are often studied as a key work in the development of modern French prose – light, humorous, colloquial, ironic. They are studied also as an example of deft and effective polemical satire, of clandestine writing and publication, of vivid statements

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 72

07/10/2011 08:08

God in a World of Chance

73

of the particular theological concepts that divided the Jansenists from the Jesuits and, finally, as a depiction of the doctrine of ‘probabilism’, developed by the Spanish Dominicans but widely associated in the seventeenth century with the Jesuits. Seen from the twenty-first-century perspective, ‘probabilism’ contrasts vividly with the term ‘probable’ in its modern sense, both in common speech – for instance, when we say that something is probable, we mean that it is likely to happen – and within the history of probability theory. Probability theory has flourished in the past three decades and attracted attention far beyond its status as a ‘tiny subspecialty of the history of mathematics’, to use Lorraine Daston’s words,13 and this has happened largely because of the success of Ian Hacking’s The Emergence of Probability, of which Daston has written rightly that it is one of those ‘books that can change your life’.14 In Hacking’s revealing synthesis of the range of meanings grouped under the term ‘probability’ and its cognates, the Provinciales serve primarily as the best-known example of a soon-to-be-extinct use of the term ‘probable’ in stark contrast to the newer meaning – the current meaning of ‘probable’ for us today – that is subsequently associated with Pascal – the Pascal of the Wager – but not with the Pascal of the Provinciales. To be clear: Pascal had an important role in creating the modern sense of ‘probability’, but Pascal himself never used the term in the modern sense of ‘what is likely to happen’. There are, as we will see, reasons to give equal weight to the Provinciales and to the Pensées for the study of the culture of chance in the seventeenth century, despite the tradition that gives much more emphasis to the latter text. The issues surrounding probability and probabilism call into question Pascal’s relationship to his adversaries the Jesuits and, more important still, to the discovery of a much deeper stratum of chance-related questions in Pascal’s work. A note seems in order here to acknowledge that the shift of perspective from the ethical realm to the study of chance may create a certain dissonance with the majority of readings of the Lettres Provinciales. There is no doubt that Pascal’s argument with the Jesuits and, more broadly, with the casuists concerned above all theology and morality. To emphasise the passages in the text that deal with predictability, frequency and contingency is to read the text ‘against the grain’, that is to stress a topic that was surely secondary for Pascal and Nicole at the time but one that, in hindsight and in the context of Pascal’s work, reveals the multitude of ways that chance was a concern for these writers. And, after all, how could chance not be a matter of interest to writers convinced that the world is in the control of an all-powerful and omniscient God and some

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 73

07/10/2011 08:08

74

The Phantom of Chance

of whose adversaries believed, on the contrary, that there was no such transcendent intelligence at work in the world?15 In attacking the Jesuits as proponents of casuistry, Pascal, deliberately or not, highlighted a major early-modern practice that incorporates ‘chance’ into its very name. Casuistry comes from Latin casus, which (as we have seen) is one of the Roman terms for chance. We would in English say ‘case’, which is defined by the OED as ‘A thing that befalls or happens to any one; an event, occurrence, hap, or chance’. But another sense of the English word ‘case’ is also appropriate here, ‘A thing fitted to contain or enclose something else; a receptacle or holder; a box, chest, bag, sheath, covering, etc.’. The study of the casuists was a form of sorting-out and filling little places, what we would call in French a case or casier. The various statements of moral law served as algorithms that generated a huge number of possible combinations of simultaneous obligations and interdictions, many of them contradictory. For instance, one must obey one’s masters, but if the master orders you to eat meat on a day of fasting, should you fast or should you do as your master commands? This ‘case’ can generate other cases, since the master may have drunk too much before giving the order. Or, on the other hand, one may need strength, available only after a good meal, to do one’s duty, and so forth. We can see that these cases involve chance, since the contradictory obligations occur when two or more things collide, when they co-occur. This co-occurrence is largely unforeseeable since the earthly life is imperfect. The exuberant work of the casuists, which Pascal takes so much pleasure in showing as a kind of playful and inventive speculation – he wants to make it seem too playful, not sufficiently solemn, the activity of overfed and underworked Jesuits with nothing better to do than to shoot these moral practical jokes back and forth as they each outdo one another in cleverness – is part of one of the largest and most often described trends of modernity itself: the desire to organise things into taxonomies, into the mathesis universalis of Foucault. The aspiration to a more satisfactory organisation of knowledge had existed for a long time, and the sixteenth century with its long lists (as in Rabelais) and its encyclopaedic compendia showed that if this information was not satisfactorily classified, it would outrun the texts that tried to contain it.16 The novella tradition, as exemplified by Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron, demonstrated that for every example of one variant in the combinatory of human relationships there was always another related variant.17 Montaigne famously complained, as Foucault reminds us, that ‘It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 74

07/10/2011 08:08

God in a World of Chance

75

other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other.’18 What particularly bothered Montaigne was the proliferation that happened at the intersection of language and experience, as lawmakers and jurists tried to fit pre-existing legislation to new, unforeseen actions and circumstances, and then to make new laws in an endless race between words and things, law and action. (Montaigne wrote ‘Multiplication of our imaginary cases will never equal the variety of the real examples.19) The Cartesian revolution of the seventeenth century is at least in part an attempt to throw off the yoke of experience and to substitute deduction for induction. The casuists were still trying to do what Montaigne had cautioned against, to foresee every potential act and to fit it into the hierarchy of laws. But they, in their way, also participated in the great classifying effort of the early-modern period. Since Pascal was primarily interested in making the Jesuits look morally lax, his excerpts and commentary do not foreground one crucial and central thing that he and they had in common: the goal of giving a rational guide to conduct in a world of complex and often unpredictable circumstance – or, as we could say it another way, both Pascal and the casuists were trying to defeat the effects of chance. If everything can be foreseen then nothing is left to chance. Yet, in the case of the casuists, one of the consequences of this effort of rationalisation and foresight was, of course, that the more one classified the more one discovered exceptions. The more one tried to foresee everything, the more one became aware of the possibility of not foreseeing everything. Another thing about casuistry that has struck modern scholars of it is that the attempt to defeat chance, to head it off, actually becomes an almost addictive fascination with those cases that seem most chance-like insofar as they are beyond expectations. In one recent comment on casuistry, a contemporary scholar writes of ‘the casuists’ affinity for cases that are unrealistically complex, if not downright bizarre’.20 Looking at the Provinciales primarily as a document in the shift from Renaissance probabilism to modern probability, we are guided by Ian Hacking’s pioneering work. Although Hacking’s book and the many books and articles to which it gave rise have made the history of probability quite well known, it is no doubt worthwhile to review the main argument. Hacking stated that prior to the mid-seventeenth century, discourse about what will occur had nothing to do with probability. In fact, many problems that we routinely treat today within a framework of predicting what will happen by observing what has happened in comparable situations in the past were not dealt with at all in this way. The case of actuarial contracts in Holland is particularly telling. Life annuities were being issued without reference to the age of the annuitant and

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 75

07/10/2011 08:08

76

The Phantom of Chance

therefore did not take into account the likely number of years of payout, which posed a painful problem to issuers.21 Science, or rather the high sciences taught in the universities, were not connected with empirical studies, and experience was treated as a low-level and undependable guide, much as Montaigne describes it in ‘Of experience’. For various reasons that Hacking relates, this situation changed rather quickly: The decade around 1660 is the birthtime of probability. In 1657 Huygens wrote the first probability textbook to be published (Cardano had earlier written a book on the subject, but it was published later). At about that time Pascal made the first application of probabilistic reasoning to problems other than games of chance, and thereby invented decision theory. His famous wager about the existence of God was not printed until 1670 but it was summarized in 1662 at the end of the Port Royal Logic. The same book was the first to mention numerical measurements of something actually called ‘probability’.22

Hacking points out that it is hard for twenty-first-century readers to grasp what ‘probability’ meant up to, and including, Pascal’s time. To be ‘probable’, in the Scholastic tradition, did not mean likely to occur according to observed prior instances but rather meant to be demonstrable with reference to authoritative writings: ‘Probability pertains to opinion, where there was no clear concept of evidence. Hence “probability” had to mean something other than evidential support. It indicated approval or acceptability by intelligent people.’23 This is the sense in which the term is used in the Provinciales, and with Hacking’s book in mind we can see that the Jesuit position so ridiculed by the nameless narrator of those letters was far from bizarre, though Pascal managed to make it seem so. Instead, ‘probable’ simply meant ‘authoritative’, approved by someone and permissible with reference to existing expertise. Pascal so thoroughly and effectively discredited the Jesuits, and the rest of the casuists, in the popular imagination that it has seemed farfetched to suppose that he learned anything from them. Yet it is tempting to think that Pascal’s immersion in a discipline that has ‘chance’ as its very name might have something to do with his manner of dealing with chance elsewhere in his work. So, we can ask on the one hand how, other than in his terms of hostility and ridicule, Pascal is situated with respect to the casuists and, on the other hand, how the position that the ‘I’ of the Provinciales espouses relates to positions on chance that appear in the Pensées and other texts by Pascal. One of the few scholars to have been interested in the literary implications of chance and to have commented on Pascal as well is David Bell, who sets forth the appealing claim ‘that a critique of the type of probability that the Jesuits espouse

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 76

07/10/2011 08:08

God in a World of Chance

77

in their casuistry [. . .] must necessarily accompany the conceptual change implied by the quantification of probability that Pascal began to accomplish’ in the rule of points.24 Bell has many interesting insights into the contextualisation of the Provinciales – for instance, that this work does constitute an early skirmish in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns – but he does not connect Pascal’s position and that of the casuists. Bell represents Pascal’s adversaries, as Pascal depicts them, as belonging quite completely to the past, so that casuistry belongs thoroughly to ‘antimodernity’ and offers a kind of ‘probabilism [that] offers no way to conceive of or to account for uncertainty’.25 Ernest Coumet, on the other hand, has made a strong argument for a kinship between Pascal and the casuists in a closely argued and informative article, ‘La théorie du hasard est-elle née par hasard?’ [‘Was the theory of chance born by chance?’]. Coumet points out the risks of projecting backward onto Pascal, as their founder, the concerns of probability theory and decision theory as these disciplines subsequently developed.26 Then he shows how this backward projection, which makes Pascal seem different indeed from the casuists, causes us to neglect the similarity in concerns between Pascal and the authors he opposes in the Provinciales. Both sides, Coumet points out, are rooted in scholastic philosophy and in jurisprudential practice, which had accepted that chance – seen neither as a pagan goddess nor as an expression of a particular divine intervention on the part of the Christian God – plays a part in human affairs, including those that might eventually come to the attention of tribunals. Pascal was thus working in an intellectual environment quite different from that experienced by Montaigne little more than a half-century earlier, for Montaigne had been detained and questioned by Roman Church authorities for his use of the term fortune.27 In regard to the outcome of matters that were decided by ‘chance’, the newly secularised, purely logical chance, though still sometimes called fortune, offered an advantage for describing and regulating games, as Coumet writes: If the conventions that were based on its results are correct, this is precisely because [fortune] is impartial. It is characterised by uncertainty. It is in no way different from what logicians specifically call ‘fortune’: there is no qualitative difference between the events that occur during a game of chance and what are more generally called contingent events.28

The range of contingent events, as Coumet says, included insurance contracts and annuities, about which the main question for jurists was to determine equality of opportunity, not to eliminate chance.29 In this respect, determining the fair cost of an insurance contract on a boatload of merchandise was considered to be the same thing as making sure

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 77

07/10/2011 08:08

78

The Phantom of Chance

that all players in a card game were treated fairly, even though no one knew whether the boatload would safely reach its destination anymore than one could tell which card player would have the best cards. To strengthen his argument for a juridical contextualisation of the emergence of chance theory – and it is worth noting that he uses the term ‘théorie du hasard’ rather than ‘theory of probability’ – Coumet points out that Pascal and Fermat, whose correspondence led to the creation of what Pascal called la géométrie du hasard (the ‘geometry of chance’, which has subsequently been called ‘the rule of points’), were both from families of jurists. But if Coumet permits us to see that both the Provinciales and the ‘geometry of chance’ are grounded in judicial concerns about fairness (card games and commercial contracts being in this regard interchangeable), he does not explore the way that Pascal engages his adversaries on the ground of the plausibility of – we would say probability of – a reallife event occurring. The Provinciales are not addressed to mathematicians, and most people would consider the moral dilemmas of everyday life to be quite different from the situations covered by the highly technical ‘geometry of chance’ that Pascal developed for determining how to distribute the stakes of an interrupted game – that is when a game of dice or cards is interrupted rather than being played through to its intended conclusion and one needs to determine the fair distribution of the money that had been wagered. Such a situation is ideally suited for logical treatment precisely because opinion is not pertinent, but this suitability for highly objective and ‘geometrical’ treatment comes at a cost: the ‘geometry of chance’ (or problem of points) is entirely artificial.30 It requires a closed system (the game) with a limited number of combinations. This ‘classical probability’ – again not called such by Pascal – has nothing to do with the open-ended reality of everyday life. Indeed, one of the most startling things about the géométrie du hasard in Pascal’s writing is that the very element of chance that sets the calculations in motion has been excluded. After all, the reason to calculate the equitable distribution of the stakes of the game is that the game has been interrupted – for instance, the players are playing outdoors when a sudden storm makes them run for cover or an important guest arrives before the game is finished. We can point out, though for Pascal this is not at all a pertinent issue, that this interrupting factor is entirely contingent. This is chance at work in everyday life, chance outside games of chance. We can even go further and ask, ‘What is the probability that a game of cards will be interrupted before completion?’ These questions are simply not pertinent to the Pascalian ‘geometry of chance’ because the ‘chance’ in question comes

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 78

07/10/2011 08:08

God in a World of Chance

79

from outside the system. The question of the interruption itself, which always precedes Pascal’s calculations, thus resembles events of ordinary life and brings us back to situations like those chosen by Aristotle to represent tyche and automaton. Aristotle did not propose situations in which there is a closed situation (a hundred people in a marketplace) within which various combinations of arrivals and departures can be compared until we determine the likelihood of person A encountering person B. It seems likely, however, that if a game is interrupted, it will be interrupted precisely by some unexpected event that would ordinarily be described as chance. On the other hand, in the Provinciales, Pascal and his adversarial interlocutors are dealing with everyday life, filled with questions of conscience or ‘cases’. Both Pascal and the Jesuits are interested in a set of determinations that fall within the field of uncertainty. Several passages of the Provinciales concern predictability, uncertainty and human ability to control outcomes. It is hard to say how it happens that Pascal draws attention to matters that are so closely related to ‘probability’ in the modern sense while denouncing ‘probability’ in the older sense that is associated with the casuists. For them, as Pascal explains in regard to the ‘doctrine of probable opinions’ (p. 332), an opinion is ‘probable’ (a term rooted etymologically in probare, both to prove and to approve) if it is stated with approval by an established authority. The casuists’ use of this idea is satirised by Pascal beginning with the fifth letter. There were a great number of theologians who studied cases of conscience, the sort of question that would be raised in confession, for instance, by a Catholic seeking absolution, that is sacramental pardon of sins. As Pascal’s Jesuit points out, in the outpouring of writings by these experts one finds many different opinions on all sorts of specific hypothetical examples of acts that might be sinful or might not be sinful, depending on a number of factors. For the Jesuits, on this account, the divergence of opinions, far from being a weakness in moral teaching, is actually an advantage because it increases the options available to each confessor and each penitent: Hence [the casuists] are very often of different opinions; but that doesn’t matter: each one makes his own probable and certain. In truth we know that they are not all in agreement: and that is all the better. On the contrary, they almost never agree. There are few questions where you do not find that one says ‘yes’ and the other says ‘no’. (p. 340)

Although the term ‘probability’ (probabilité, p. 346) designates this rather technical, though flourishing, field of moral theology rather than what we have since come to regard as ‘probability’, the two senses of the

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 79

07/10/2011 08:08

80

The Phantom of Chance

term do overlap to some extent, since ‘probable’ is sometimes (as above) interchangeable with ‘sure’ but can at other times be opposed to ‘certain’ or ‘sure’, just as this opposition can be made today. For instance, Pascal quotes the casuist Suarez to this effect: ‘Even though [. . .] it is a probable opinion that attrition suffices with the sacrament, still, it is not certain’ (p. 431). The first-person speaker of the letters exclaims elsewhere, ‘I am not satisfied with the probable . . . I am seeking the certain’ (‘Je ne me contente pas du probable . . . je cherche le sûr’, p. 338). We know from other texts of about the same date that ‘probable’ was becoming rather loosely associated with the meaning ‘likely’ or ‘plausible’. Probability concerns the uncertain in human conduct, though not in terms of what will happen but rather how actions will be judged. Probability, in this older sense, also plays a role in decision-making in the face of moral uncertainly since, as Pascal insists with great indignation, people will choose to do various things on the basis of a probable opinion of the sinful or non-sinful nature of the act. Alongside this thematic thread of probability, there are other themes that draw the Provinciales close to modern discussions of predictability. Patterns of occurrence and in particular frequency of occurrence are discussed at several points. To put the matter in simple terms, in Pascal’s presentation of the casuistic form of probability, probability increases frequency whereas in the modern version of probability to which we are accustomed frequency increases probability. So there is a chiastic relationship between the two ‘probabilities’: probability increasing frequency (by encouraging people to do questionable things) versus frequency increasing probability (by creating a pattern of expectation). Pascal, though he does not use ‘probability’ in the sense we do, makes this very point. Although it is sometimes said that the Jesuit probability is backward-looking in that it aims primarily to justify actions after the fact – that is, after the act – Pascal stresses and fears primarily the futureoriented nature of casuistic probability, its capacity to cause a massive change in patterns of conduct.31 Pascal repeatedly decries the ‘pernicious consequences’ (p. 397) of the doctrines of the casuists because ‘the license that they introduce into morals is scandalous and excessive’ (p. 450). He sees their teaching about revenge and the defence of honour in duels as ‘all Christians with their daggers in their hands to kill those who offend them’ (p. 495). Jesuit lessons about how to avoid lying (by direction of attention and cleverly altering the volume of one’s speech) do not concern actions performed in the past and confessed to a priest but instead look forward toward the future conduct of the faithful by teaching them alternatives to simple lying (p. 413). So for Pascal what is at issue is the effect of casuistic probability on the future conduct of the faithful.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 80

07/10/2011 08:08

God in a World of Chance

81

He also questions the casuists’ unwillingness to pay serious attention to past conduct and particularly to the frequency of past sins when it would be useful or even crucial to predict what a sinner will do in the future. This is a matter discussed in considerable detail in the tenth letter, where the purportedly lax Jesuit standards for granting absolution are called into question with regard to what are known as the ‘proximate occasions of sin’ (occasions prochaines), which are circumstances in which the penitent has previously sinned and which seem to offer particularly high risks for a repetition of the sin. The Jesuit character argues for a narrow definition of proximate occasions based – and this is extremely significant in view of what we know from Ian Hacking’s work on the emergence of modern probability – on a standard of frequency. He quotes the celebrated and prolific Jesuit authority Antonio Escobar y Mendoza: ‘One does not call a situation in which one sins rarely a “proximate occasion”, as for instance to sin three or four times a year by sudden impulse with the woman with whom one lives’ (p. 428). Then Pascal hammers home the matter of frequency by putting forth definitions of proximate occasions permitting shorter intervals between the offending occasions, such as Father Bauny’s opinion that sinning ‘one or two times a month’ would still be insufficient to constitute a proximate occasion and that the term would only apply in cases where the recidivism reached the level when ‘relapses are frequent and almost daily’ (p. 428). So here we have prediction of conduct based on experience and quantified (though they are also qualified in important ways, such as Escobar’s remark that the relatively rare sin, once a season, may come on suddenly and thus in some sense escape predictability). This is probability in the modern sense located within the probabilists of the older school. Both Pascal’s own character, the ‘I’ of the letters, and his opponents agree that past frequency of occurrence can be used to determine expectations of conduct, but the two sides differ on the threshold of frequency to be used to distinguish acceptable and unacceptable risk. In effect, this means that while the Jesuits agree to the general principle that frequency should be taken into account, they require such a high frequency of previous sinning that unless the sin seems almost entirely unavoidable they will disregard most demonstrations of frequency. The implication is clear that according to Pascal a household in which a man and a woman ‘sin’ together four times a year is already a circumstance with an intolerably high propensity for immoral behaviour, and the Jesuits appear ridiculously lax by demanding almost daily activity before they will recognise a proximate occasion. The casuists are also quick to set frequency aside when some other factor can be used to justify maintaining a recidivistic status quo, as in this quotation from Father Bauny:

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 81

07/10/2011 08:08

82

The Phantom of Chance

That one may and one should absolve a woman who has in her home a man with whom she sins frequently, if she cannot decently make him leave or if she has some reason to keep him. (p. 429)

Pascal, in short, accuses the casuists of a complete disconnect between experience and an ideal (however distorted that ideal itself might be). We see here, of course, an echo of the contemporaneous controversies surrounding dramatic verisimilitude, in which poetic theorists such as the Abbé d’Aubignac insisted that just because something happened often in real life that thing would not necessarily be plausible in a tragedy.32 Pascal is making the case that quantifiable experience should be taken into account in establishing guidance for future conduct, since it appears to be common sense that in cases of habitual actions the future will resemble the past. He displays as ridiculous casuistic pronouncements like the following: All kinds of people are allowed to enter places of debauchery to convert sinful women, even though it is plausible that the former will commit sins there: in view of the fact that they have often surrendered to sin as a result of seeing and being tempted by those women. (p. 429)

Even the casuists are willing to admit that frequent past experience leads to a plausible predictability, but – in Pascal’s representation of their position – they discount this form of reasoning both for high reasons (the primordial importance of working to save one’s fellow from eternal damnation, even at the risk of one’s own) and for low (the reticence of most Catholics to make the effort to avoid sin because ‘there are few souls who wish to leave the proximate occasions’ (p. 428)). Thus we can see that, for Pascal, in the casuistic system probability increases frequency of sin in the future (that is the lax advice given by priests deteriorates the moral standards of society and increases the frequency of sins), whereas in the empirical system that Pascal prefers, frequency of sin in the past increases what we would call the ‘probability’ of further sin. Pascal also insists (the example of the proximate occasions of sin shows this) on the importance of circumstance in determining the cause and predicting the occurrence of acts. This is important in the formation of the world-view within which the modern concept of probability takes its place and within which also chance becomes both a possibility and a problem. In the background of the debates between Pascal’s Augustinian champion and his casuist opponents it is obvious, and yet implicit, that Pascal is suggesting that while the ‘accident’ of human acts may in individual cases be subject to randomness, in the aggregate the patterns can be perceived and described and thus used. The casuists seem simply to ignore this idea. This does not mean that actual

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 82

07/10/2011 08:08

God in a World of Chance

83

casuists did not pay attention to causality in human action but simply that Pascal has chosen, as he did for the concept of frequency, to make them evade the problem in a ridiculous fashion. As a consequence, we get the impression that despite his acceptance of the randomness that permeates the human condition, Pascal is making the case for a more coherent world, one in which people act the way they do because of where they are, when they are there, who is there with them, what habits they have formed and what they have been told is permissible. In fact, it may be that the recognition of randomness opens activity to a new, demystified examination through the levelling, deflationary effect of this form of perception. It matters little, for instance, toward what end a man may enter a place of ill repute; all that matters is a pattern of frequency, not heroic intention. Human beings can be viewed as things, machines or ‘black boxes’, according to the approach Descartes describes in the Discourse on Method when he forms the provisional morality not by heeding what people say they do or why, but rather by simply watching them behave.33 Here Pascal’s interest in chance intersects with his critique of imagination. Human beings almost invariably live within an imaginary story created by themselves or simply taken from the collective imaginary story rather than pay attention to what they actually do. To apply that insight here, we can see that the Jesuits seem to provide those who consult them with a narratively coherent plot that they can imagine (e.g. I was heroically trying to save a woman from her life of sin) even though this plot conflicts with the apparent situation. The Jesuit position allows for many cases of doing one thing while thinking another. The case of those who enter a brothel to promote the spiritual welfare of those therein is only one example of the direction of attention. For instance, rather than killing a man in a duel if he has insulted us (and thus caused us to lose honour) one can kill that man in an ambush, thus – if one is careful to have the right intention at the time – avoiding participation in the sin that the dead man would have committed by fighting in a duel (p. 372). That is, you may kill him so that he will not have an occasion to commit a sin. This is, of course, the sort of example that made the Lettres provinciales famous and the Jesuits infamous, but the thread that runs through here is the idea of human action that is fundamentally atomised (by the casuists, in Pascal’s view) in ways that prevent the kind of analysis that later comes to be known as psychological. What we can take away from this is not so much a realistic or coherent idea of what casuistry actually was as an idea of what Pascal thought was a correct doctrine to put in the place of casuistry. That seems to be one in which individuals act in a verisimilar manner,

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 83

07/10/2011 08:08

84

The Phantom of Chance

that is to say in which intention and action are generally linked (one usually does what one intends to do, though not always what one would prefer to do) and patterns of behaviour through time are consistent or do not change in sudden and unaccountable ways. One is expected, as an individual, to be responsible for knowing those patterns and acting accordingly. So that if one has a tendency to become physically violent while drinking in a tavern, one should not drink in taverns. The ridiculous casuistic position that Pascal creates as a foil makes it seem that people wander through life doing things that they cannot account for. For instance, they leave a trail of corpses behind them even though they never meant to do anyone any harm. By foregrounding a coherent and plausible representation of human behaviour, Pascal creates the conditions for discovering significant inconsistencies. He lays the ground here for his description of the human condition in the Pensées, where the often incongruous juxtaposition of situations, intentions and enduring patterns of behaviour, both individual and collective, permits him to exploit the celebrated contradictions that he writes of notably in Divertissement: why does a wealthy nobleman exhaust himself chasing a hare that his cook could purchase for his dinner? But in the Provinciales Pascal’s appeal to verisimilar patterns of behaviour (where verisimilar has its modern sense of being based on observation of actual experience) casts a stark light on certain bizarre events that one would not predict and thus opens the way for the claim that something supernatural has occurred. In the first letter, Pascal quotes a passage from Antoine Arnauld’s Second Letter . . . to a Duke and Peer of France (1655): ‘That grace, without which one can do nothing, was lacking to Saint Peter in his fall’ (p. 269). This quotation appears in a discussion of various forms of grace, notably the various ways of speaking of ‘efficacious grace’ and ‘sufficient grace’, and it is tempting to think that beyond the amusement of making the pro-Jesuit position look laughable this could only be of interest to a historian of the Church. But there is something of more general import in his passage, as we see when Pascal returns to it in the third letter of the Provinciales. Returning to Saint Peter’s denial of Christ, Pascal draws on passages from the Fathers of the Church that Arnauld quoted. Saint John Chrysostome is quoted thus: That the fall of Saint Peter did not happen because he lacked love for JesusChrist, but because he did not have grace; and that the fall did not happen as much by his neglect as by God’s abandonment of him, to teach the whole Church that without God one can do nothing. (p. 299)

This is an important passage for Arnauld and for Pascal precisely because it points to something that seems completely implausible. Saint

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 84

07/10/2011 08:08

God in a World of Chance

85

Peter was fervent and not negligent. We must assume that Peter had a demonstrated record of fidelity (a pattern of good behaviour) as well as good intentions that heretofore had dovetailed nicely with his acts. Then, all of a sudden, inexplicably, he failed. This is exactly the opposite of the case that Pascal makes later in the Provinciales in regard to predictability based on a quantified analysis of past behaviour. There is something implausible about Saint Peter’s act; it seems almost like an accident. This implausibility is entirely necessary for the argument that Arnauld, in his Seconde Lettre, and Pascal are making with respect to efficacious grace. This form of grace is the grace that, according to Port-Royal, was not given to everyone and was entirely necessary for action that is pleasing to God. Pascal does not give any explanatory background; he does not ‘motivate’ this passage, as Genette would say.34 It would be easy to do so in psychological or circumstantial terms, but for the Port-Royal argument is it much better not to explain away this inconsistency in Peter’s conduct? Since Pascal generally tightens the purely human and social explanation for things, we are left with the hypothesis of a random act or, and this is explicitly the point, divine intervention. It is true that this ‘divine intervention’ here comes in the paradoxical form of divine refusal to intervene since God could have given Peter the efficacious grace that would have kept his behaviour consistent. But God decided not to do this. This seems like a case where chance has been removed from the everyday world and transferred to the transcendent, celestial world.35

The Coming of the Messiah Was Not an Effect of Chance Up to this point we have been considering the first of two strata in Pascal’s work, the anthropological or immanent study of the human condition. It is quite possible to appreciate Pascal’s descriptions of randomness in human society and his demolition of casuist probabilism without reference to any claims to revealed or supernatural knowledge. However, turning back to the Pensées, we can see that in addition to meeting his unbelieving interlocutor on the common ground of human experience, Pascal also looks to the Bible for arguments in favour of Christian belief. There is a link between the immanent and the transcendent (or revealed) arguments to the extent that Pascal saw the Bible as a key to the interpretation of human history. As such a key, the Bible explains why the history of mankind appears so full of confusion. Pascal attempts to respond to the unbeliever’s implicit assumption that Jesus was simply a man like others (for instance, Mohammed) who asserted

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 85

07/10/2011 08:08

86

The Phantom of Chance

supernatural claims. Pascal formulates his argument as a refutation of the idea that Jesus appeared within the history of mankind by chance. To construct this account of prophecy, Pascal first accepts Montaigne’s view that the world as experienced by human beings is dominated by randomness (above, pp. ix–x). This experience of history constitutes the background to the argument on the basis of Old Testament prophecy that Jesus of Nazareth was indeed the Messiah. General randomness became, for Pascal, the environment within which significant and apparently non-random events could be concealed in such a way that only those who had the key could discern God’s plan. Pascal felt that this argument was the decisive, ‘demonstrative’ one, the argument for which the rest of his apology was only preparatory, but the sections on the prophecies (sections LIV to LXI in the Sellier edition) are much less often read and studied than what has been called the Wager-centred ‘existential’ argument.36 These sections are much more lacunary and unfinished than the better-known preceding sequences, and in many cases the ‘fragments’ are only passages from the Vulgate translated into French apparently by Pascal himself, leaving us to ponder what he selected and, at the same time, excluded. One of these passages allows us to see how thoroughly Pascal passes through spectacular examples of chance – highly representative of what exemplifies tyche for Aristotle – to locate the inscribed elements that, by the interpretative scheme he was using, were hidden within the random details of history.37 Nebuchadnezzar’s dream opens a fairly lengthy fragment of Pascal’s notes on prophecies (S. 720, p. 1263/244). Pascal does not comment on the dream except to say that the dream was very important to the king and that the feet of the statue, described by the scriptural text he transcribes as being of iron and earth, were of iron and clay. So in commenting on this text within the context of the Pensées, we can only consider it as incorporated into Pascal’s apologetic project and specifically into the line of argument anchored in the Biblical prophecies, and set forth at the outset of the Pensées: ‘And so that the coming would not be perceived as the result of chance [hasard], it was necessary that it be predicted’ (S. 4). The purpose of prediction is to prevent a misinterpretation of a single major event, the coming of the Messiah in the form of Jesus of Nazareth, as the ‘effects of chance’. The account given in chapter II of the Book of Daniel goes to the heart of the rhetorical power of prophecy to persuade unbelievers of the truth of the god of Abraham. Although for Pascal and for many of his contemporaries, this episode seemed to show the accuracy of biblical prophecy, on a simple reading the relation between prediction and outcome is not the point. Daniel gives Nebuchadnezzar an interpretation of his dream that makes claims about the future, but

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 86

07/10/2011 08:08

God in a World of Chance

87

Nebuchadnezzar has no way of verifying those claims nor does he seem to have any interest in doing so. Let us recall briefly the episode from the Book of Daniel and then concentrate on the portion of the chapter (verses 27–46) that Pascal copied. It is interesting to see what Pascal omitted and, therefore, what he selected for emphasis in this story. Nebuchadnezzar had a dream that troubled him (one of Pascal’s two commentaries is ‘this dream must have caused him much anguish’),38 but on awaking, he forgot the dream. He called ‘the magicians and the astrologers, and the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans’39 and ordered them to tell him his dream and to tell him its meaning. The narrative insists on this dual command by repetition, since the Chaldeans do not initially grasp the enormity of what Nebuchadnezzar asks. They say that they will gladly interpret the dream if he tells it to them, and when they finally understand that they have first to reproduce the dream and only then to interpret it, they exclaim that no one could do such a thing and that no king had ever demanded such an impossible thing. Nebuchadnezzar thereupon tells them that they will all be put to death and that their goods will be confiscated if they do not obey. At this point Daniel, also known as Balthazar, who was not among the summoned interpreters, offers to do this impossible task. It is at this point that Pascal begins his transcription. Daniel emphasises that none of the augurs and wise men can uncover the mystery in question but that there is a God who can do so. He then tells the following ‘dream’: You saw a great statue, high and terrible, which stood before you. His head was of gold, his breast and arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, his legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of earth (clay). You saw it thus until the stone cut out without hands struck the statue upon the feet of mixed iron and earth and crushed them.40

After telling the king what the king himself had dreamt, Daniel moves on to an interpretation of the dream that he himself told. It is important to stress that the narrator of the dream and the interpreter are the same person and that Nebuchadnezzar makes no comment between the recital of the dream and the following commentary. Nebuchadnezzar, says Daniel, is the great king of all and is the golden head of the statue. His kingdom will be followed by a less powerful one – the silver – followed by a widespread kingdom – the bronze – and a kingdom that will crush everything – the iron – but it will be fragile, since it will be divided (this is the significance of the mixture of iron and clay). Out of this divided kingdom God will raise an everlasting kingdom, like the stone, ‘which without been cut out by a hand fell from the mountain’. Nebuchadnezzar then throws himself on the ground before Daniel.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 87

07/10/2011 08:08

88

The Phantom of Chance

Pascal ends his excerpt of the second chapter of Daniel at this point. This passage is followed in the same fragment of the Pensées by notes on chapters 8, 9 and 11 of Daniel. There is much of interest in Pascal’s selection from Daniel, and one of the most obvious things that Pascal has done is to discard precisely what the author of Daniel presents as the prophet’s most amazing achievement: his discovery of the dream itself. The Chaldeans, after all, had been confident of their ability to make an interpretation, but they claimed that no one could possibly say what Nebuchadnezzar had dreamt.41 Daniel intervenes to take up this unique challenge of the unknown dream rather than the relatively common task of making an interpretation. Moreover, Nebuchadnezzar’s hyperbolic praise of Daniel and his God is not based on the accuracy of the interpretation, a determination that could only be made centuries later, after the event of the many dynastic changes. But Pascal’s choice to leave aside these issues reminds us that for Pascal what is interesting and useful in this passage is precisely the set of predictions which Pascal believed he could correlate with historical events to show an unbroken chain leading to the Messiah from Nazareth. In short, Pascal is interested only in the accuracy of the prediction, while Nebuchadnezzar is interested in the accuracy of the dream and the satisfactory nature of the interpretation (which was non-threatening to his own reign). For Pascal prediction is the chief tool to prevent the coming of the Messiah seeming to be the result of chance. In his drive to deflect chance, Pascal may not have noticed – or may have noticed and chosen to leave unmentioned – that the dream-story Daniel told has itself many symptoms of a chance event. As Pascal’s opposition between prediction and chance (les effets du hasard) illustrates, the latter is outside of the logos, outside logic and human discourse. The prediction of an event, setting it into language before the event itself, asserts mastery over what happens. Even if the prediction itself does not cause what subsequently happens (though this notion is something worth considering), to foreknow and state what will happen seems to assert the pre-eminence of discourse over what would be, as we might say, raw being – the undistinguished, unorganised world, much of which we never see. This is a classic division that recurs in almost all discussions of chance: an opposition between culture and nature, logic and randomness, language and silence, and intention and matter. The dichotomy that Daniel establishes in his dream-story of, on the one hand, a statue, artfully composed of a variety of highly refined materials, and, on the other hand, a stone falling from the mountain, corresponds perfectly to

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 88

07/10/2011 08:08

God in a World of Chance

89

the topos of accident. In this regard it is important to note the detail of the pierre taillée sans mains, which at first reading is difficult to understand (a cut stone without hands? what kind of stone has hands?). The New Oxford Annotated Bible translates this as ‘a stone was cut out by no human hand’ (the Vulgate has ‘abscissus est lapis de monte sine manibus’). The sense seems to be that no human agency was require for the stone to fall. It just fell. This happened, we might say, by accident. Pascal’s associate at Port-Royal, Lemaître de Sacy, gives the most developed or least literal translation, one that is highly revealing: ‘une pierre se détacha d’elle-même et sans la main d’aucun homme de la montaigne’ [‘a stone separated itself and without the hand of any man from the mountain’].42 In Lemaître’s reading all agency is excluded, and the stone spontaneously came detached from the mountain and fell. As we know, the expression d’elle-même, which does not have an equivalent in this passage from Daniel but is interpolated by Lemaître to clarify what he understood to be the sense, is an echo of Aristotle’s term autonomou, one of the two forms of chance he describes in the Physics (the other form being tyche), that is a spontaneous, apparently uncaused event.43 In the passage as quoted by Pascal, there is a powerful contrast between the works of mankind – the statue – and the working of the mysterious, unpredictable and unaccountable forces of the material world, what we commonly call today ‘nature’. These forces, as is often the case in literature, are represented as stronger than anything humans can devise. This kind of event differs quite obviously from the routine of life as it appears elsewhere in the Pensées. Nebuchadnezzar’s dream is like examples of aesthetic wonder as produced by the classic chance of tyche. Of course, it is a dream, and dream causality is, we might say, routinely non-routine, lacking in predictable sequences and evident causes. This particular dream represents an event that, if it had occurred outside a dream, would certainly have been seen as extraordinary chance or a divine intervention. In interpreting the dream, Daniel’s attention does not fix itself on the stone’s sudden fall. Instead his commentary enumerates each of the elements: the pieces of the statue from head to foot, the collision of the stone with the feet, the destruction of the statue and the continued existence of the stone, once again characterised as not cut by hand. Thus flattened by interpretation, the dream no longer has the structure of a chance event but is simply a code, with suddenness and unpredictability removed. Pascal thus cites what at first seems to be an instance of classic chance but has no interest in its relation to (or appearance of) chance, because it is for him simply a prophetic prediction that counters chance hypothesis of Jesus’s coming through les effets du

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 89

07/10/2011 08:08

90

The Phantom of Chance

hasard.44 It could, of course, be said that Pascal is drawn to the story of Daniel for reasons of which he himself is unaware, and that one of these is the spectacularly improbable circumstances of the prophecy that are so carefully arranged through a dramatic build-up of improbability and suspense until the enunciation of the prophecy that Pascal quotes. But one element of the context of the prophecy does fit a well-established pattern that is of use to Pascal: the split between those able to discover a secret message and to decipher it and those who not only cannot decipher it but do not know what there is to decipher. Among arguments given in an effort to persuade someone of the truth of a religious doctrine, the reference to alleged ‘miracles’ is most exposed to the counter-argument that it is all a matter of chance. The juxtaposition of miracles and chance events is revealing, since both, as we have been describing them here, concern striking, unexpected events. This is how, at least as early as Aristotle, people have spoken of chance and – most often implicitly – made a distinction between chance and contingency in general. That is, it could be sunny or rainy tomorrow; this is entirely contingent. But one would not, in ordinary usage, say that its being sunny tomorrow was ‘by chance’ unless that particular state of the weather coincided in a meaningful way with some other event in such a way as to mime a human purpose. No doubt it is the great likelihood that miracles would encounter the objection that they were simply chance events that led Pascal to set them aside as the principal basis for a demonstration of Christian belief: I am not speaking here of the miracles of Moses, Jesus Christ, and the Apostles, because they do not at first appear convincing, and here I only want to put into evidence all those foundations of the Christian religion that are beyond doubt and cannot be called into doubt by any person whatsoever. (S. 694, p. 1245/233)45

Despite Saint Augustine’s statement that he would not have become Christian without the miracles (S.200), Pascal relegates them to a secondary position behind the prophecies, even though Jesus himself performed miracles. Still, even in this case, the miracles were merely a stop-gap solution to the need for demonstration: Jesus Christ performed miracles, then the apostles, and the early saints in great number, because it was miracles that alone bore witness, and the prophecies had not yet been fulfilled, but were being fulfilled. It was foretold that the Messiah would convert the nations. How could this prophecy be fulfilled without the conversion of the nations? And how could the nations be converted to the Messiah, if they did not see this final effect of the prophecies that prove him? (S. 211, p. 932–3/54)

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 90

07/10/2011 08:08

God in a World of Chance

91

The miracles of Jesus have a spectacular effect. They are noticed as something entirely out of the ordinary course of events – they are, as we would say, improbable, and they have on the multitude the impact of chance events as described by Aristotle, they create the effect of the marvellous. But for Pascal this proximity of miracle to chance is apparently too close and too exposed to sceptical examination, and so he folds the miracles back into prophecy.46 In Pascal’s use of prophecy we can detect certain characteristics of his general approach to relating parts to a whole, something that could be called the Pascalian dialectic and that he describes in part in his fragments on the esprit de finesse (a form of holistic and intuitive thinking) and the esprit de géométrie (or mathematical, sequential and methodical thinking), two types of thought which imply a third type, the esprit pascalien, for neither finesse nor geometry alone seem adequate, and Pascal’s description of both implies that he is in a position to see the advantages and disadvantages of each and thus to practise a synthesis of the two (for example, formulations like this one about Scripture: ‘Jesus Christ, to whom the two Testaments turn their gaze, the Old as its expectation, the New as its model, both as their centre’, S. 7). In regard to the predictions made in the fragments on Old Testament prophecies, we should consider what Ernest Coumet has said about Pascal’s geometry of chance. In determining what course of action we should take, the geometry of chance (or calculus of probabilities) casts a new light on what we know to be certain in view of what we know is uncertain. Thinking about the uncertain refines our perception of the certain, and generally this takes place in a framework in which the uncertain is the future and the certain is the present. In most instances when we invoke a prediction, we are giving a description of some future state that is more or less uncertain, though the person making the prediction often presents it as having a great deal of likelihood or even certainty – the nature of predictions is to include uncertainty stretched into one temporal format. There can be various emphases in regard to what element of the prediction (the event – or what is predicted – the predictor and his or her authority, the relationship of time between the prediction and the occurrence of the event) is paramount. Sometimes what counts most of all is the event predicted, regardless of who is making the prediction. But sometimes what counts most is the authority of the predictor; the event itself could be relatively trivial but the accuracy of the prediction of even something very unimportant might be used to justify a claim of authority on behalf of the predictor. In the case of Pascal’s use of the prophecies of Daniel, Isaiah and Jeremiah, the only event that is significant in itself is the birth of Jesus

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 91

07/10/2011 08:08

92

The Phantom of Chance

Christ specifically as the Messiah – it must be shown that this is not ‘the result of chance’ (one of ‘les effets du hasard’, S. 4). The other events are in the basic sense contingent, that is they have no necessity. However, for Pascal’s scheme it is important that a whole series of other events be removed from the realm of chance as well, even though these events are of no intrinsic importance. These are the events that prove the authority of the prophets, that is their ability to predict. These are, in a certain sense, test cases in which the quality of the prediction is more important than that of the thing predicted. The prophets foretold, and were not foretold. Then the saints were foretold, but did not foretell. Jesus Christ both foretold and was foretold. (S. 701, p. 1249/236)

We know that Pascal liked this triadic structure that placed Jesus at the pinnacle, both predicted and predicting, but did this structure have for him any more than an aesthetic value in regard to the prophecies? If the prophets were not predicted, then their arrival and activity would seem to have been spontaneous rather than planned. In other words, they seem less likely to be part of a conspiracy (cf. ‘Hypothesis of deceptive apostles’ [‘Hypothèse des apôtres fourbes’ ], S. 696) and have, rather, the authenticity of an empirical given, somewhat as advertisers today make use of what is called ‘unsolicited testimonials’. There were a multiplicity of prophets, and here Pascal almost seems to incline toward an argument based on frequency, the sort of argument that he made in the Lettres Provinciales but that was not part of his own contribution to what we call probability calculus.47 Pascal perceives a cumulative effect based on the frequency of predictive success: ‘The prophets have foretold him ever since, while always foretelling other things, which, being fulfilled from time to time in the sight of men, showed the truth of their mission and consequently that of promises they made concerning the Messiah’ (S. 314).48 The prophets seem to have been disinterested (not to receive a gain from any specific occurrence that they predicted), and at times to have been unaware of the actual significance of their message. Pascal paraphrased a portion of Daniel, chapter 8, and then copied a portion, beginning, ‘Gabriel, make this man understand the vision that he had’.49 Being thus separated from the message, the prophet may have acquired, in Pascal’s eyes, the indifference of a judge. This is related to the general inability of the Jews, as Pascal describes it, to understand the message that they were transmitting to the world. Most of all, various prophets seem – to Pascal – to have predicted things that had already come to pass both long after the prediction and long before the culminating event in the series, the arrival of the Messiah.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 92

07/10/2011 08:08

God in a World of Chance

93

In Pascal’s use of prophetic prediction – and we should note that prophets did lots of things besides predict, since much of what they said was an immediate teaching concerning the present or the past – there is no longer any predictive force. The prophecies of the Old Testament that interest him concern the future in the past, and the principal event in question, the coming of Jesus, has already happened, along with the various other predicted events that preceded the birth of the Messiah. This obvious specific fact allows us to note another obvious but more general fact (one that is nonetheless infrequently noted) that Pascal has framed Jesus’s birth as a potential matter of chance. How can we tell that something is not due to chance? Things that are the result of human intention are not due to chance – this is the basic guide set forth by Aristotle and stated or implied in almost all subsequent discussions of chance. This is why it is so important that Jesus’s birth be predicted, since chance events are not predictable, they are only described and recognised after the fact. The event of Jesus’s birth creates a boundary in human history, and this boundary can be described in terms of contingency. Before this birth there were prophecies and after this birth there are miracles. Believing in both prophecies and miracles, Pascal had a choice of arguments. He could have chosen – and it would perhaps have been the more common approach – to emphasise the miracles performed by Jesus; their accumulation over time would permit the inference that Jesus was endowed with supernatural powers and this could bolster whatever claims he made about his identity, authority and purpose. Pascal explained his reason for including miracles while at the same time subordinating them to prophecies. The miracles of Jesus were both a means to accomplish the prophecies and a short-term measure that was necessary prior to the full accomplishment of the predictions made by the Old Testament prophets. It is quite possible, however, that there were two other factors that made miracles seem less convincing than prophecy: first, the frequency with which claims of performed miracles have appeared throughout history (including the claims of Simon the magician in the Acts of the Apostles), with the consequence of diluting the claim of uniqueness necessary for the Messiah; and, second, the uncomfortable relationship that such after-the-fact inferences have with the recognition of chance events themselves. Both tyche and automaton have precisely this characteristic of appearing after the fact to have come about by human intention, and it is only this denied understanding that makes chance recognisable – we simultaneously perceive something as being intentional and as being unintentional, we draw a line through the intention. Miracles and chance events share at least two other characteristics as well. They

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 93

07/10/2011 08:08

94

The Phantom of Chance

are, first, important and change people’s lives in significant ways, and, second, they occur suddenly. There is no gradual miracle anymore than there is gradual chance. There are, indeed, contingent processes that occur over long periods of time, imperceptibly, but we do not call them ‘chance’ or ‘miracle’. Take, for instance, the roof tile that falls and kills a person walking below. The actual loosening of the tile that caused it to fall took place over months, years or decades. If it had gradually slid down to earth, this descent would not appear as ‘chance’ any more than the wilting of a flower. Pascal therefore fortifies his argument by moving to a point of view prior to the primary event that he wishes to demonstrate, on the basis that a properly predicted event cannot be chance.50 The coming of the Messiah becomes, then, the singular non-contingent event, whereas – and this assertion appears crucial to Pascal – Mohammad was not predicted, anymore than the prophets.51 Thus any of them could be, individually, either accidental or impostors, as free-thinkers may have believed.52 In all this effort to demonstrate the necessary and non-accidental coming of Jesus, it is clear that Pascal is working with a conception of hasard that is distinct from Aristotelian tyche and from Cornelian Fortune. First of all, judging from the main Aristotelian examples of chance-tyche, when a chance event occurs, it is noticed. In fact, if it were not noticed, it would simply not exist as an event. In Aristotle’s Physics, the tripod that falls as if to offer someone a place to sit is noticed because of the ‘as if’ that it offers to our imagination.53 Things fall all the time for no apparent reason, but we do not place this falling into the inventory of chance. This Aristotelian conception of chance, echoed in the dramatic poetics of Pascal’s time, stretches forward in time as well and appears in the eighteenth century among apologists such as Hutcheson and Sterne when they use improbability as the basis for religious belief.54 Pascal quite straightforwardly announces that the Messiah came and was not noticed: The time of the first coming foretold, not the time of the second, because the first needed to be hidden and the second brilliant and so manifest that even his enemies had to recognize him. But, as he had to come in obscurity and be known only by those who probed the Scriptures . . . (S. 292, p. 973/76–7)

This is, indeed, one of the signs of the Messiah – that he not be noticed. Here we return to one of the issues raised in Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, the invisibility of the message to one portion of the audience. If the coming of the Messiah could pass unnoticed, it lacked much of what characterises chance, tyche, but this is, in Pascal’s argument,

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 94

07/10/2011 08:08

God in a World of Chance

95

because God intended it to be so and also intended to conceal the very signs that would have allowed witnesses to recognise this coming as a predicted event. These signs include the events that realise the prophecies that, for the believer, establish the pattern of reliable prediction leading up to the Messiah. Pascal combines two traditions here – the tradition of typological readings or figuration in the Old Testament, on one hand, and another, more recent teaching that grows out of the first and had a considerable vogue in the seventeenth century, steganography, on the other. Steganograpic messages did not seem to be coded but rather appeared to be ordinary texts. For instance, a message might take the form of a poem or a business letter and thus would not provoke an interceptor into trying to decode it. Johannes Trithemius’s book, which had circulated in manuscript throughout the sixteenth century, was printed in 1606 and then reappeared in multiple editions throughout the seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries. This method of concealed communication had practical applications during an epoch of constant warfare, when military intelligence and plans needed to be communicated. It had the advantage over ordinary cryptography that it did not appear to be a code, did not invite efforts at decoding by the adversary and could be transmitted unwittingly by a bearer for whom the text had a completely unrelated significance. Pascal does not use the expression, but the idea of a covered or sheltered writing corresponds quite exactly to what Johann Trithemius describes: Men of great learning hold the opinion that the ancient wise men whom we call Philosophers (from the Greek), concealed such secrets as they discovered, whether of nature or art, in various forms and methods, so that they should not come to the notice of wicked men. They say also, (and the more learned of the Jews agree), that Moses, that most renowned leader of the Israelite race, using simple words, disguised in the description of the creation of Heaven and Earth the ineffable secrets of the mysteries.55

When the Game is Over The single passage of Pascal’s Pensées that allows us to see the difference between a chance-based view of the world and a probability-based view (in the modern sense) is the one that presents the argument known as the Wager, the Pari (S. 680).56 It constitutes a relatively minor theme overall in the collection of fragments that became the Pensées insofar as it is not one of those topics that is repeated in many fragments, like divertissement or miracles. But it gives the succinct statement of an argument that has fascinated decision theorists, logicians, apologists and scholars in

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 95

07/10/2011 08:08

96

The Phantom of Chance

a number of other disciplines. It interests many who have little interest in the rest of the text. One scholar writes, ‘contemporary discussion of Pascal’s wager has, for the most part, divorced itself from the text of Pascal’s Pensées’.57 It has become an autonomous focal point of debate in decision theory and in the theory of probability. This assimilation of the wager into subsequent disciplines has shaped our understanding of the wager and broken its connections with the earlier world-view to which it belonged. In this passage, the apologist confronts the unbeliever with the claim that it is necessary to make a decision as to God’s existence or inexistence: ‘But you must wager. It is not optional. You are committed’. Pascal combats the unbeliever’s preference to maintain a position of non-commitment (‘The right thing is not to wager at all’). Significantly, the term wager is first uttered by the unbeliever, so that the apologist seems simply to seize on his interlocutor’s way of framing the discussion, meeting the unbeliever on his own ground. This is the point that leads to a confusion between chance, as the name for a loose tradition of ideas that range from Aristotle’s tyche to Boethius’s fortuna and Machiavelli’s different fortuna, and chance as a term used in a specific, highly structured, institutionalised, regulated and (from about the time of Pascal) theorised social activity, games of chance (jeux de hasard). The relationship between these two concepts – chance and games of chance – is complex. For millennia the two have been related, and the overlapping use of the terms chance and hasard can hardly be a pure coincidence. Cicero’s dialogue on divination and chance uses a throw of the dice – specifically the ‘Venus throw’ – as an example of the boundary between chance and non-chance.58 If the same throw occurred a hundred times in a row, would it still be chance? The throw of dice and bones are ancient practices that are not always simply games in the sense of entertainment or diversion but also ways of interrogating supernatural forces in the hope that a decision can be made that is attributable to no human agency and hence, perhaps, that such a decision is of extrahuman agency. Even if this occult aspect of gaming yielded in the seventeenth century to mathematical science in the modern, rational sense, modern games of chance and their forebears (the casting of lots, etc.) distinguish themselves from the broader conceptual field of chance by the particular constraints that such games impose.59 These constraints are double. First, and most obviously, they concern the elaborate rituals surrounding both augury and games of dice and cards. There is little about games of chance that happens by chance. And second, chance itself is constrained; the players are only interested in a very narrow set of variations. In augural ritual and games of chance, the participants hope that

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 96

07/10/2011 08:08

God in a World of Chance

97

‘chance’ will manifest itself in a limited set of possibilities. The bird will have a large or a small liver; the first bird spotted after the ritual begins will fly from the east or the west; the dice will fall so that the number of dots will be clearly visible, etc. An unforeseen variation that is simply an accident would manifest the role of chance in the world but would either be disregarded or would spoil the game of chance. For instance, if the ivory of one of the dice had a slightly different colour, this chance variation would probably be disregarded. As we saw, Pascal’s own géométrie du hasard was a study of the distribution of the stakes in cases where a game is interrupted. This is a limited, calculable set of variables and, strikingly, does not include any consideration of what may have interrupted the game: a heart attack, a storm, the unexpected arrival of an important visitor, an eclipse of the sun, etc. When the unbeliever brings up the idea of wagering, he does not suggest that something is going to happen by chance, nor does the apologist. The issue at hand is the question of whether it is necessary to make a decision within the limited framework of two options: to believe in the existence of God or not so to believe. As Nicholas Rescher points out, the wager argument does not aim to prove the existence of God: When all is said and done, we cannot, on the basis of this argument, say that we know that God exists. [. . .] The argument only maintains that it is prudent (rationally advantageous) to accept (believe, have faith) that God exists. It is prudential and not, strictly speaking, evidential. Geared to interest rather than knowledge, it proceeds ad hominem and not ad rem.60

The wager argument uses the term hasard several times to mean what there is to lose – and it is worth stressing that the terms ‘chance’ or ‘randomness’ almost never appear in subsequent scholarly studies of the wager argument. Hasard concerns the uncertainty of the outcome of this hypothetical wager: ‘Yes, I must wager. But perhaps I am wagering too much.’ Let us see: since there is an equal chance of winning and losing, if there were two lives to win for one, you could still wager. But if there were three lives to win, you would have to play (since you must necessarily play), and it would be foolish, when you are forced to play, not to risk your life to win three at at a game in which there is an equal chance of losing and winning. (S. 680, p. 1212/213)

This use of the term hasard signifies a calculated choice of what one is willing to give up (to pay) in the hope of an uncertain gain. It has little to do with chance in the sense of tyche, which concerns neither calculated choice nor a finite and specified payment. For the unbeliever, God may exist or God may not exist. But neither the apologist nor the believer suggest that God may exist by accident.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 97

07/10/2011 08:08

98

The Phantom of Chance

It is difficult for us today to consider the wager argument as being outside of the realm of chance. Our terms for dealing with uncertainty have so completely absorbed words that in an earlier time meant something so entirely different from what we mean when we use such terms. We say that ‘there is little chance that . . .’ and ‘there is little probability that . . .’ without thinking that anything can happen for completely unknowable reasons – that is, for no reason. We see today the relationship between chance and probability, and we can say of Aristotle’s or Boethius’s examples of chance events that they are events with low probability. However, before the mid-seventeenth century, as Ian Hacking has shown, people did not think in terms of probability (in the modern sense). It is much easier to project our own patterns of thought backwards than to grasp the thoughts of an earlier, very different period. Pascal writes on the boundary between the world of chance and the calculable world of gain and loss. He uses both concepts, chance in the older sense of an apparently unaccountable but nonetheless significant event, and risk (what one risks, ce qu’on hasarde) in the modern, calculable sense. A characteristic of Pascal’s writing that appears in both domains (chance and probability) is the emphasis on disproportion. An imperceptibly small variation on the length of a nose changed all of human history. This is an example of the irrationality of human behaviour and human history. The passage that contains the wager argument begins with the words, written like a title, ‘Infinity, nothingness’ (Infini, rien). The wager involves a disproportion between what is to be gained and what is to be lost, and it too may simply have been intended to show the irrationality of mankind. The unbeliever may have been set up by Pascal to refuse to make the proposed wager and thus to exemplify mankind’s fallen nature, man’s incomprehensible indifference to salvation.61

Notes 1. Pascal, Pensées, ed. Ferreyrolles and Sellier, S. 32, p. 841. English translation from Ariew, Pensées, S. 32, p. 6. The numbering system of the fragments is the one established by Sellier and conventionally indicated as ‘S.’ followed by the fragment number. When pages are given the page number of the French edition will precede the page number of the translation, as here: S. 32, p. 841/6. 2. Was Cleopatra’s nose beautiful or not? Richard Scholar takes for granted that it was not: ‘It is the tiny flaw in her beauty, rather than its perfection, that makes Cleopatra so cataclysmically bewitching’ (Scholar, The Je-NeSais-Quoi, p. 169). On the other hand Paul Barolsky and Charles Lock emphatically state the opposite assumption: ‘Cleopatra’s nose is exemplary

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 98

07/10/2011 08:08

God in a World of Chance

3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

99

of the normative, the superbly normal nose’ (Lock, ‘Ignoring the Nose’, p. 170). Pascal, ‘Entretien avec Monsieur de Sacy sur Epictète et Montaigne’, as written by Nicolas Fontaine, in Les Provinciales, Pensées et opuscules divers, p. 722. Pascal tells M. de Sacy that Montaigne ‘a voulu chercher quelle morale la raison devrait dicter sans la lumière de la foi’ and that ‘il a pris ses principes dans cette supposition’ (Entretien, p. 721). On the importance of the doctrine of the Fall for philosophy and theology in this period see Moriarty, Early-Modern French Thought. The Age of Suspicion and Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves. Early-Modern French Thought II, as well as Melzer, Discourses of the Fall. Pascal may have discovered much of his approach independently of Augustine, whose work he came upon rather late (‘Entretien avec Monsieur de Sacy’, pp. 717–18). Seneca argues that in all we see of nature ‘this regularity does not belong to matter moving at random, and that whatever combinations result from chance do not adjust themselves with that artistry whereby the earth, the heaviest in weight, abides immovable and beholds the flight of the sky as it whirls around it’ (Seneca, ‘De Providentia’, p. 5). See Ferreyrolles, Les Reines du monde. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, S. 78, p. 856/13. Montaigne, ‘Apologie de Raymond Sebond’, in Essais, p. 452; Complete Essays, pp. 330–1. Montaigne’s statement here is not heliocentric, as Galileo’s and Copernicus’s astronomy would be, but Ptolomaic. The earth is represented as the lowest of the spheres in keeping with this tradition. However, Montaigne’s attack on mankind’s centrality provides the basis for subsequent sceptical descriptions of a world in which the Christian view of a God deeply concerned about man’s salvation is called into doubt. Misère, Grandeur, and Raison des effets contain the fullest development of the role of chance in a fallen world, and there are also traces in Divertissement of a theory that deepens the idea of chance in life. Divertissement allows us to see that chance is part of our pastimes in general and that we have what appears to be an addiction to chance. The man who recently lost his only son finds solace in an activity with a random outcome, hunting a boar (S. 168, p. 909): ‘il est tout occupé à voir par où passera ce sanglier’. The boar could show up anywhere, at any time. This unpredictability is entirely necessary for the desired effect, complete fascination or preoccupation. However, uncertainty does not suffice to enable chance to function in our quest for diversion. Uncertainty is made visible by desire which both brings the world into focus (that is, it selects from among all the potential variables in any situation the one that will hold our attention) and projects us forward in time (the attention of the person in diversion is directed forward toward what will be gained or will be lost or will be learned in the future). Consider Pascal’s thought experiment on the gambler to whom one might give every day a sum equivalent to what he could win by gambling (S. 168, pp. 908–9). The man would obtain the ostensible object of his desire, but he would be required, in exchange, not to play. As a result, says Pascal, ‘vous le rendez malheureux’. But the thought

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 99

07/10/2011 08:08

100

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

The Phantom of Chance experiment has another phase. If the man really enjoys the process of the game itself and not the money he could win, you might instead ask him to play for nothing. In this case he would have nothing to gain, and he would be bored. There would still be all of the random happenings of a ‘game of chance’ but this uncertainty would have no focus or, as we might say, no libidinal investment in some privileged combination or encounter of the dice that would be meaningful for the gambler. Uncertainty by itself is not interesting, not diverting (and, according to Aristotle, not even chance). Uncertain gain is thus better than both certain gain or uncertainty without gain. Bjørnstad, Créature sans créateur. Daston, ‘The History of Emergences’, p. 801. Daston, ‘The History of Emergences’, p. 801. In the Provinciales, Pascal and his adversaries have in common that they are interested in opinion. Hacking points out that demonstration had been the goal of the high sciences and that the low disciplines did not concern demonstration (which produced certainty, that is knowledge) but simply opinion. The casuists acknowledge that their system of probabilism is based on opinion, albeit of expert opinion. Pascal also, but more tacitly, seems to acknowledge that he is working solely on the basis of opinion insofar as he is appealing to common sense to recognise the scandalous and far-fetched nature of some of the results of casuistry. Pascal thus would be moving in the direction of common sense and away from science, including his own mathematics, by invoking frequency – frequency has nothing to do with classical probability of the sort set up by the geometry of chance. Pascal is thus anticipating the kind of shift that also occurs between verisimilitude in the older sense (still that of the dramatic theorists Jean Chapelain and d’Aubignac) and the newer, as yet uncodified, modern sense of what happens commonly. In one of Pascal’s principal examples of casuistry, a recent critic has noted ‘cette recherche d’exhaustivité qui se prête au traitement des péchés très mineurs’ (Parish, ‘Le Père Étienne Bauny, SJ’, p. 388). Lyons, ‘The Heptameron and Unlearning from Example’. Montaigne, Essais, p. 1069 ; Complete Essays, p. 818. Quoted by Foucault, Les mots et les choses, p. 55. Montaigne, ‘De l’expérience’, Essais, p. 1066; Complete Essays, p. 816. Jung and Turner, review of The Abuse of Casuistry, p. 300. Hacking, ‘Annuities’, in The Emergence of Probability, pp. 111–21. Hacking, Emergence, p. 11. Hacking, Emergence of Probability, p. 22. Bell, ‘Pascal: Casuistry, Probability, Uncertainty’, p. 44. Bell, ‘Pascal: Casuistry, Probability, Uncertainty’, p. 46. Bell also claims that casuistry is turned toward the past because it seems to justify mostly acts that have already been committed (p. 46), though we should note that, in the larger sense, casuistry turns toward a hypothetical future of acts that may be committed and then confessed. So if there is a past involved it is a future perfect, a past in the future of the hypothetical penitent who will have committed an act for which he seeks absolution. Bell contrasts this supposed backward-looking quality of casuistry with the more forward-

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 100

07/10/2011 08:08

God in a World of Chance

26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

101

looking and ‘modern’ quality he finds in Pascal, the Pascal of the Wager, where the question is the future in the form of eternity. But ‘eternity’ in the Pensées is no less hypothetical than the ‘cases’ considered by the casuists. Coumet, ‘La théorie du hasard est-elle née par hasard?’ The Roman authorities, as Alain Legros writes, reproached Montaigne ‘for the use of the word “fortune”, judged to be “too licentious”, or, in other words, lacking rigor and theologically improper. They expected Montaigne to substitute a different word in the next edition of his work’ (Legros, ‘Montaigne Between Fortune and Providence’, p. 18). See Montaigne, Journal de voyage, pp. 92, 119 and 131. Coumet, ‘La théorie du hasard’, p. 580. Coumet, ‘La théorie du hasard’, p. 580. Blaise Pascal, correspondence with Pierre Fermat, in Œuvres complètes, II, pp. 1136–58. David Bell writes that ‘the casuistic method as it is described polemically by Pascal is in some sense backward-looking. It is more interested in justifying acts on the basis of precedents or in justifying them after the fact than in focusing on the complexity of the situation that prompts the accomplishment of any given act and makes its outcome always at least partially unpredictable’ (‘Pascal: Casuistry, Probability, Uncertainty’, pp. 46–7). The Abbé d’Aubignac makes an emphatic distinction between thing that happen frequently in real life and things that can be considered plausible (or verisimilar) in drama (La Pratique du Théâtre, p. 77). Descartes, ‘Discours de la méthode’, pp. 22–3. Genette, ‘Vraisemblance et motivation’. Saint John Chrysostom decided, apparently, that God’s actions should not appear too random and so he created an explanation to attribute to God: Peter was simply made an example. God caused Peter to sin to give an empirical representation of human weakness. Wetsel, L’Ecriture et le reste, p. xxi. The question of Pascal’s relation to Sacy is much debated. A long tradition holds that Sacy, a great scholar and translator of the Bible, guided Pascal’s reading. But, as David Wetsel points out, ‘only [. . .] two historical references permit us to document with complete certainty even the fact that Pascal and Sacy ever met one another. Nowhere in the works of Pascal is there a verifiable reference to Sacy’ (Wetsel L’Ecriture et le reste, p. 4). Pascal, Pensées fragment S. 720 (p. 1263). English trans. Roger Ariew, Pensées, p. 243. Daniel, II, 2, in La Bible, trans. Louis-Isaac Lemaître de Sacy, p. 1110. Pascal, Pensées fragment S. 720 (p. 1263). Nebuchadnezzar actually does not say that Daniel told his dream correctly. Nebuchadnezzar waits until he gets the whole ‘package’ (dream and meaning) to approve Daniel. If he had not liked the interpretation would he have been so much impressed? Daniel, II, 34, in La Bible, trans. Louis-Isaac Lemaître de Sacy, p. 1111. The King James version is ‘a stone was cut out without hands’. We note that Le Maistre’s expression, d’elle-même, is signficantly cognate with one of Aristotle’s terms for chance, autonomou. As an example of the translation of autonomou into French as

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 101

07/10/2011 08:08

102

44.

45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

The Phantom of Chance d’elle-même, see Pierre Pellegrin’s translation of Physics, II, 4, 197b30 (Aristotle, Physique, p. 144). We can see why Nebuchadnezzar would be delighted with Daniel’s account of the dream and the prophecy, for any threat to Nebuchadnezzar is removed and the action of the wayward stone is directed, not at Nebuchadnezzar’s monarchy, but at some monarchy in the distant future. We can also see another layer in the phantomatic appearance of chance in Daniel, II and note Pascal’s editing-out of chance in his notes on Biblical prophecy. If chance manifests itself in unexpected events, particularly unexpected events that work to the advantage or disadvantage of a person, one especially prominent type of chance event is the narrative kernel: finding something you did not expect to find. This type appears in Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Metaphysics, book V, discussion of accidentality. Cf. Latin trans. by William of Moerbeke around 1260 or 1270. See Metaphysics, 1025a15–1025a30) and reappears in Boethius and Aquinas (as Daniel Heller-Roazen pointed out in Fortune’s Faces, p. 82). In this case Nebuchadnezzar ‘found’ a dream that he could not have expected to find because the only person who had any knowledge of the dream, he himself, had forgotten it. He sought it in the usual places – among the Chaldeans and the other dream interpreters – but then happened upon it where there was no reason to expect it, in a young captive with no apparent gift for dream interpretation. Here too what is expected, by Nebuchadnezzar, does not happen, but the unexpected does. Pensées fragment S. 694, p. 1245. Both Protestants and free-thinkers expressed scepticism about miracles in the contemporary age, as distinguished from Catholics who believed that miracles could occur in the modern – post-Biblical – world. See Mullin, Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination; Popkin, The History of Skepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza; Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding; Wygant, Medea, Magic, and Modernity in France; Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique; Shiokawa, Pascal et les miracles; La Mesnardière, Traitté de la mélancholie; Wygant, ‘D’Aubignac, Demonologist’. Coumet, ‘La théorie du hasard est-elle née par hasard?’ According to Ferreyrolles and Sellier in their ‘Notice’ to the Pensées, the Jewish prophets ‘ont annoncé tel événement de détail qui s’est réalisé; ainsi accréditent-ils leur essentielle révélation (l’annonce des temps messianiques)’. Pascal, Les Provinciales, Pensées et opuscules divers, p. 793. Pensées, fragment S. 720, p. 1265. Cf. the ‘miracle’ of the Sainte Épine, p. 151. ‘Différence entre Jésus-Christ et Mahomet. / Mahomet non prédit. JésusChrist prédit. [. . .]’ (S. 241). See L’Art de ne croire en rien, suivi de Livre des trois imposteurs. Freethinkers presented a serious challenge to religious orthodoxy, as the execution of Lucilio Vanini in Toulouse in 1619 showed. See Charles-Daubert, Les Libertins érudits and Cavaillé, Libertinage, irréligion, incroyance. Aristotle, Physics, book II, chapter 6, 197b15 in The Complete Works of Aristotle, I, p. 337. Patey, Probability and Literary Form, pp. 68–70.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 102

07/10/2011 08:08

God in a World of Chance

103

55. Trithemius, The Steganographia, p. 17. 56. This is the fragment of the Pensées that begins ‘Infini rien’ and is number 418 in the Louis Lafuma numbering scheme. 57. McClennen, ‘Pascal’s Wager and Finite Decision Theory’, p. 115. 58. Cicero, De Divinatione, I, xiii. Falconer’s note to his edition explains that ‘The Venus throw occurred when each of the four dice fell with a different number on its upper face’ (p. 248 n. 2). 59. Amy Wygant’s work, among others, points out that the sharp division between occultism and modern science with regard to games of chance and many other practices is not historically attested. See her ‘Fortune, Long Life, Montaigne’ and her review of Kavanagh’s Dice, Cards, Wheels. 60. Rescher, Pascal’s Wager, pp. 20–1. 61. See Howells, ‘The Interpretation of Pascal’s “Pari”’. Howells proposes that Pascal never intended the unbeliever to take the wager seriously. As the author toyed with this line of reasoning, writes Howells, ‘He finally saw that the argument could be put to more devastating use as part of a strategy aiming to show up the irrationality of the libertin’s reluctance to countenance religion’ (p. 62).

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 103

07/10/2011 08:08

Chapter 3

From Chance Events to Implausible Actions: Lafayette and the Novel

If Corneille’s career marked the transition from the tragi-comedy to tragedy, Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette’s work has been enshrined in literary history as the quintessential example of the shift from ‘romance’ to ‘novel’. These generic transformations in dramatic literature and prose narrative are not unrelated. As we saw, the tragi-comedy often took its stories from popular fiction, and the adjective romanesque clung to many such dramatic works as a way of emphasising the presence of implausible and, especially, fortuitous incidents in the plots.1 So it is significant that when Lafayette was asked about the book that later established her in the literary canon, The Princess of Cleves, she felt that it was important to say that this text is not ‘romance-like’ (romanesque): And especially, what I find there is a perfect representation of the world of the court and of the way in which one lives there. There is nothing romance-like and overdone; in fact, it is not a romance; to be precise, these are memoirs. And that was, from what I was told, the title of the book, but it was changed.2

The Shipwreck of Romance Several years before writing The Princess of Cleves, Lafayette had, however, written a romance, Zayde (1670),3 a story full of the adventures and surprises that mark the genre. In fact, it may be so romanesque precisely because it was either a kind of farewell to the genre, already in decline, or even, as Nicholas Paige suggests, a parody of romance.4 By 1670 the characteristics of romance had long been rejected in theory by many of the same authors who wrote them. One of these, Madeleine de Scudéry, argued in the preface to the romance Ibrahim, ou l’Illustre Bassa (1643) that the external incidents that dominate the genre are highly implausible and reveal the heavy hand of clumsy writers:

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 104

07/10/2011 08:08

From Chance Events to Implausible Actions

105

As for me, I believe that the more the incidents are natural, the more satisfying they are; and the ordinary passage of the sun seems more wonderous to me than the strange and baleful rays of the comets. Furthermore, this is why I have not made so many shipwrecks, like those in some romances from antiquity. [. . .] it seems that the god [Eolus] had given them the winds locked up in a cave, as he gave them to Ulysses, because they burst out just at the right moment. Such writers make storms and shipwrecks whenever they want; they would blow one up on a peaceful sea, and would find reefs and rocks in places where the most experienced pilots never found any. But those who deploy the winds in this way do not know that the prophet assures us that God keeps them among his treasures and that philosophy, for all her wisdom, has not been able to find where they dwell.5

What Scudéry finds objectionable is, simply, extremely noticeable and numerous chance events. In criticising them, she reveals several important things about chance in the novel. First of all, she opposes ‘natural’ adventures to those that are ‘strange and fatal’. By invoking here one of the gold standards of literary praise, the wondrous or merveilleux, Scudéry proposes a realignment of expectations. For her, the ordinary course of events is more wondrous than things that are strange. She is walking a fine line between adopting a neo-Aristotelian framework (she invokes many standard concepts from the Poetics such as starting the story in the middle, limiting the time span, not granting priority to simple chronological order) and opposing Aristotle. After all, that memorable example of wonder (thaumaston) in the Poetics, the fall of Mitys’s statue, freakishly well aimed and well timed, was ‘strange and fatal’. A corollary of this preference for the ordinary is that we should understand the ‘natural’ as corresponding to a certain set of expectations on the part of the reader; the ‘natural’ is not simply what characterises the non-human or non-artificial (such as the sun, the sea, the earth, the forest) but rather the ordinary and the predictable. The ‘ordinary course of the sun’ is therefore ‘natural’, but Scudéry seems to imply that the course of the sun could also become ‘unnatural’ in the work of a clumsy writer. A second important point that Scudéry makes here is that readers are able to recognise departures from these ordinary (and for Scudéry preferable) events by using two measures, the first derived from observation of the everyday world and the second from an understanding of the writerly craft. Storms and shipwrecks do not happen in the middle of a calm sea, or, if they do, they are ‘strange’ and depart from the poetics of ordinariness that Scudéry claims to favour. To this measure based on an understanding of real life, the author of Ibrahim adds one based on what writers do. There are times when writers wish to make things happen; writers are often not content with the ordinary and they need to assume powers that are above nature, that are actually

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 105

07/10/2011 08:08

106

The Phantom of Chance

super-natural, that belong to the gods. So when a storm abruptly arises in a calm sea in real life, we would consider this an unnatural event attributable to a divinity. And when such a thing happens in a novel, we would attribute it to an author – to a clumsy author who could not do what all good authors do, which is to conceal themselves behind the surface. There remains something mysterious about these events, these things that happen, just at the right moment (à point nommé). Scudéry seems to be pointing to things that are on one hand entirely inappropriate (because they are not natural, not ordinary and not predictable) and, on the other hand, excessively appropriate because we can clearly see the opportuneness of the event for the author’s intention. Scudéry begins her preface to Ibrahim by praising technical mastery and by denouncing chance in the composition of novels: I do not know what kind of praise the Ancients thought they were giving to that Painter, who, unable to finish his work, completed it by chance, throwing his sponge at the Picture. But I know that such praise would not have pleased me, and I would have taken it rather as a satire than as praise. The workings of the Mind are too important to leave some to be guided by chance: and I would almost rather be accused of failing intentionally than of succeeding without thinking. There is nothing that temerity shrinks from undertaking and that Fortune cannot achieve; but when one trusts these two for guidance, one may not get lost but one risks doing so.6

Scudéry here alludes to the story of Protagenes, the Rhodian painter of the fourth-century BCE. It was said that Demetrius spared Rhodes from destruction in 304 BCE in order to save the artist’s painting of Ialysus, which Protagenes had completed by throwing a sponge in his frustration at attempting to reproduce the effect of a dog’s foaming mouth.7 As the preface continues, it becomes clear that excessive dependence on chance as a technique of composition will appear within the represented world of the novel – the fictive world in which the characters of the novel live – as an excessive series of chance events. This is why such poorly written novels will have many shipwrecks and ‘reefs and rocks where the most expert pilots never noticed them’. The unskilled author’s work becomes apparent as misplaced artifice; in other words, the more chance there is in the events of a novel, the more the writer has thrown the sponge, so to speak, and thus disturbed the ‘natural’ or ‘ordinary’ course of events. The less skilled the writer, the more the writer’s activity will disrupt the surface of the narrative.8 Yet for all her theoretical misgivings about chance, as exemplified by the most traditional of chance events, shipwrecks, Scudéry could not entirely do without them:

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 106

07/10/2011 08:08

From Chance Events to Implausible Actions

107

I do not aim to banish shipwrecks from romances; I approve them in the works of others, and I use them in my own. I know that the sea is the setting most suited to making big changes and that some have called it the theatre of inconstancy. But because whatever is excessive is bad, I have only used them in moderation in order to maintain plausibility. For the same reason my hero is not overwhelmed with that stupendous number of accidents that have afflected some others, inasmuch as, in my view, that departs from plausibility. The life of no man having ever been so crossed by misfortune, it is better, in my opinion, to separate the adventures, to make from them several stories, and to show different people in action.

The idea that Lafayette’s Zayde, published almost three decades after Scudéry’s preface, may have been conceived as a pastiche of romance is certainly fortified, as we will see, by the central role played by a shipwreck. Indeed, Lafayette’s romance gives such a prominent, systematic and in some ways blatant place to various types of chance that it is hard to resist the idea that the writer was deliberately and self-consciously parsing the various terms used to signify fortuitous events (such as fortune, hasard, destinée and accident) and distinguishing among them. Let us consider the term fortune, which appears within a few pages of the opening of Lafayette’s text, is the dominant term for chance throughout roughly the first third of the story and then essentially vanishes. With hindsight, it seems almost as if fortune, like the romance genre to which it traditionally belonged, were taking a last bow. When the term appears, it is almost always uttered by a character whose statements are clearly implied to be unreliable or subjectively biased to a significant degree. The denial that the concept of fortune could be taken seriously was nothing new at this date. Du Vair’s De la constance (1594; English translation, Treatise of Constancie, 1622) seventy-six years earlier, had attacked it vigorously and substituted for fortune a rather complex neoStoic providential vision. Zayde does not directly address the question of ultimate causes and does not argue for an immutable and unerring divine providence. Instead, Lafayette’s work exposes the relation between fortune and subjectivity in an almost parodic way. The subjective nature of fortune – the way fortune appears real to the self of narrators and only to them – discredits the term in her narrative. Prior to Lafayette, fortune was tightly linked to the thinking self in the Stoic and Boethian tradition. The individual was challenged to withdraw himself from the world of material possessions, time and accidents – fortune’s domain. At issue, however, was usually the strength or weakness of the individual, with fortune serving primarily as a term for the circumstances in which this strength was tested in the churning and undependable material world. One was to learn that whatever things could be determined by fortune were not worthwhile

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 107

07/10/2011 08:08

108

The Phantom of Chance

or, in any event, that it was useless to worry about them. In Zayde, the assemblage of events into a coherent narrative of rise and fall, fortitude and weakness no longer appears tenable. Instead, fortune seems to be a way in which the individual’s self-love, in the particular guise of self-pity, manifests itself in ways that are unconvincing to other observers. Fortune appears in such a parodic form in the first of the numerous internal narratives (stories told by the characters, rather than by the nameless general narrator), the ‘Story of Consalve’. While the word fortune is rare in the text of Zayde as a whole, it appears densely within the hero Consalve’s own account of his life. The first appearance of the term, however, comes not from Consalve but from the friend to whom he tells this story, Alphonse. At their first encounter, Alphone tries to persuade Consalve to take refuge in his modest house on the coast of Catalonia, by saying that he had offered shelter to a number of people whose ships had been wrecked in storms on the shore nearby: ‘but the only ones whom Fortune has guided here have been foreigners, incapable of conversation even if I had wanted it’ (p. 38). Here chance is presented in an allegorised, rather ceremonial way and in a context that is highly traditional, associating the sea, storm and shipwreck as major motifs, foreshadowing the encounter of Zayde and Consalve, the dominant chance event of the whole book. Fortune, in this early passage, is not accident or hasard so much as the agency or narrative instance that unifies a set of random cases into a pattern. That pattern has now been broken with the arrival of Consalve who is doubly different from those who have previously arrived at Alphonse’s dwelling: they came from the sea, while he came on horseback looking for a ship, and they did not speak Spanish, while Consalve does. Looking forward in the story, we can see that fortune serves as a rhetorical marker of order and symmetry, since these characteristics (coming from land and speaking Spanish) present the necessary contraries to match with Zayde’s characteristics (coming from sea and not speaking Spanish) along with the male/female opposition that drives the narrative plot of encounter, loss and rediscovery. This portentous but isolated occurrence of ‘Fortune’ in Alphonse’s conversation with Consalve alerts us to the particular intensity of fortune and to its function as source of narrative unity, qualities that are amply displayed in the story that Consalve tells Alphonse shortly afterward. Fortune has not simply dropped these unhappy people on the shore, it has brought them there (conduits), and there is a subtle indication of Alphonse’s point of view and personal interest in this verb, giving a central importance to Alphonse and his house, where the hero and heroine will fall in love.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 108

07/10/2011 08:08

From Chance Events to Implausible Actions

109

In Consalve’s subsequent narrative of the series of betrayals by his lover, his sister and his two best friends – the events that led him to flee the court – we find the densest cluster of occurrences of the word fortune in the whole book. Here, fortune often means merely accumulated wealth or a combination of wealth and other material and social advantages – thus the term distances itself from chance and becomes settled, stable, unsurprising. But in other passages fortune maintains the medieval sense of an inconstant, unpredictable, uncontrollable power, as when Consalve says, ‘Up until this point, Fortune hadn’t shown me her fickleness, but soon she made it clear that she stands still for no man’ (p.76/57). The two uses of the term – simple wealth and force for radical change – nonetheless overlap in several ways. Most strikingly, fortune is attached to an individual or to a group; one possesses a fortune, both in the sense of wealth and in the sense of a narrative sequence that either leads toward or away from a position of wealth and advantage. This individualising quality of fortune, the attachment of fortune to a person or group, is accompanied by a transfer of agency from that person or group to fortune itself. In other words, praise or blame, merit or fault, shifts from the person, now seen as mere plaything or victim of fortune, to circumstances. Within the first few pages of Zayde (precisely in the ninth paragraph), the narrator, apparently conveying the thoughts of the hero Consalve in indirect discourse, says ‘he gave himself over to reflecting upon his misfortunes, with for sole consolation the idea that he had known the last of them. But Fortune showed him that she searches even the remotest wilderness for those whom she is bent on persecuting’ (p. 56/41). Although these words are the narrator’s, and although they rather pompously announce (as with a trumpet fanfare) the arrival of the heroine who is shipwrecked, one can sense Lafayette’s own amusement as she trots out precisely the most obvious of the dire accidents that fortune was reputed to inflict just after this appearance of the term ‘Fortune’ – this presentation of the hero as passive and without responsibility conveys Consalve’s own view of his situation. In fact, in the solitary retreat on the coast, the chief contention between Consalve and his friend Alphonse is whether it is worse to be the passive victim of events like Consalve or to be the cause of events that lead to unhappiness as Alphonse was. Consalve claims that no one could be more miserable than he, since he was entirely blameless – loyal, loving, conscientious, honest and honourable – yet he was betrayed by his best friends, his lover, his sister and even his father. In short, Consalve transfers outward into the traditional realm of fortune all responsibility for his life. It is precisely to prove this point that he begins to tell the story of his

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 109

07/10/2011 08:08

110

The Phantom of Chance

life up to this moment, a story that is prefaced by another reference to fortune: Fortune herself keeps me from conceiving of misfortunes beyond those she really causes by exceeding anything I could possibly imagine. She invents special ones for me, ones otherwise unknown to man, and if I told you the details of my life, you’d be obliged to admit that I was right when I claimed that I was more unfortunate than you. (p. 65/49)

Consalve invokes fortune because he feels sorry for himself, but his self-pity is also a way of magnifying his own importance. This is one of the traditional effects of the concept of fortune: it makes every man the hero of his own story while relieving him of responsibility for that story. Consalve’s hyperbolic description of his unhappiness brings the idea of fortune into contact with what we would today be tempted to call paranoia.9 The hero imagines that things are happening with a purpose and that he is at the centre of that purpose. Things do not simply just happen: they do not happen, as we would say, ‘by chance’ but rather they are part of a pattern that is woven together by and under the name of fortune. Paradoxically the word that seems to be the central term for chance – for things that just happen without any apparent cause or predictability – here becomes the name of the opposite of such causelessness when seen from the point of view of the hero. Aristotle had, as we saw, described tyche – translated by Cicero, Boethius and Corneille as fortuna and fortune – as the concept of what happens without intention but as if with intention. Consalve removes the qualification ‘as if’ that hovers over the Aristotelian concept so that fortune is precisely what gives the world coherence through reference to his desire, that is by thwarting his desire. Lafayette makes Consalve see his life as an anti-model of romance plotting in terms of the principles of the preface to Ibrahim. Too many things have gone wrong in his life; there must be a centralising intention (whereas Scudéry claimed that Ibrahim ‘is not overwhelmed by that prodigious number of incidents [accidents] that happen to some others. Because, in my opinion, that departs from plausibility. No man’s life has ever been so crossed.’ As Consalve’s friend Alphonse listens to Consalve’s first-person account of his life and as we readers discover it as well, we can see that little is, objectively speaking, the work of a systematising fortune nor even, in fact, the result of ordinary randomness. Through perfectly ordinary processes of human nature Consalve’s beautiful young sister Hemenesilde has fallen in love with the crown prince and she with him, while at the same time Consalve’s lover Nugna Bella, whose ambitious and manipulative character is clear, has become the secret lover of his

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 110

07/10/2011 08:08

From Chance Events to Implausible Actions

111

friend Ramire. This all happens within the narrow confines of the royal court, and the only event that one might attribute to chance – that in fact Consalve himself attributes to le hasard (p. 99) – is the one that allows Consalve to discover what is actually going on: Nugna Bella had written two letters at the same time and sent the wrong one to Consalve. This ‘chance’ is a recognisable lapsus due to Nugna Bella’s distraught state of mind as she tried to feign love for Consalve while carrying on a passionate but secret love affair with Ramire. The concept of fortune provides Consalve with a narrative and psychological means of centring the world on himself, while, in fact, the story that he tells shows that his own rigidity was making him increasingly marginal in the life of his family and friends. The reconfiguration of love and friendship becomes, in Consalve’s telling, fortune’s way of teaching him a lesson: ‘Up until now Fortune had not shown me her fickleness, but she soon made me see that she stands still for no one’ (p. 76/57). If the term fortune appears with overwhelming frequency within Consalve’s own narrative of his early life – and almost exclusively there – this is because the hero’s idea of fortune shows his delusional, immature and self-centred character during the time he lived at the royal court of Leon. The court is intensely hierarchical, a place where every small symbolic advantage is pursued fiercely. This is an important characteristic of the court in terms of the Boethian tradition of fortune. The wheel of fortune has a circular motion, to be sure, but what matters to those who see their lives in terms of this figure is that the wheel moves some up and others down. This image is a way of graphing the essentially binary opposition of upward movement and downward movement (good fortune versus bad fortune) across the chronology of a lifetime. The young Consalve who tells this story of what happened when he was an even younger man thinks within the naive framework of such an upand-down movement. Note the striking combination of circularity and verticality in Consalve’s description of his early life: Fortune had placed me by birth into a rank worthy of the envy of the most ambitious: I was the favorite of a prince whom I loved by natural inclination; I was loved by the most beautiful woman in Spain, whom I adored; and I had a friend, whom I thought faithful, and whose fortune I was able to improve. (p. 74/56)

This sentence, beginning and ending with ‘la fortune’, largely concerns rank and the ability of people higher up on the scale to give a boost to those lower down – the prince helps Consalve who helps Ramire. This sentence contains the core of Consalve’s view of life prior to the moment

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 111

07/10/2011 08:08

112

The Phantom of Chance

of the shipwreck. He is concerned with the rise of his family at the court of Leon and he calculates everything accordingly. He is convinced that everything works according to invariable rules based on rank and prestige. There is no room for doubt or mystery in his picture of life. Consalve counts entirely on knowledge and discounts the importance of surprise and . . . chance. In a discussion with his friends Ramire and the prince Garcie, Consalve insists that he could not possibly fall in love with a woman whom he did not know thoroughly (p. 68/51), whereas both Ramire and the prince consider surprise a necessary condition for falling in love. Consalve’s subsequent refusal to entertain any thought of a marriage between the prince and his sister is based on the idea that the class structure is unyielding and that there are no exceptions to the principle that a crown prince or king cannot marry a woman of a lower rank. Thus Consalve’s use of fortune to knit together the various events of his life is entirely consonant with the seamless verticality of his worldview, one that is repeatedly underscored by his references to the ‘reputation and fortune’ (p. 85/64) of his family, his ‘good fortune’ (p. 86/64), ‘my fortune and my person’ (p. 87/65), the ‘inconstancy of fortune’ (p. 100/75) and so forth. But this whole way of thinking is about to be overturned. And it does not appear entirely insignificant that the cohesive, centripetal narrative of fortune is replaced precisely by the destabilising occurrence of simple chance (le hasard), which Lafayette presents in precisely what we recognise as a traditional literary manifestation of what would have been called fortune: the shipwreck that brings the beautiful and enigmatic Zayde to the place to which Consalve has fled in order to be beyond the grasp of Fortune. This event overturns all that the hero had believed up until then, as he exclaims to Alphonse: Consider this: I never thought beauty alone could make me fall in love, nor that a woman with feelings for another could affect me. And yet I adore Zayde, about whom I know nothing, except for the fact that she is beautiful and predisposed to someone else. Since I was wrong about Nugna Bella, whom I knew, what might I expect from Zayde, whom I don’t know at all? Indeed, what can I expect, and what claim can I possibly have on Zayde? She is completely unknown to me; chance tossed her up on this shore . . . (p. 106/78–9, emphasis added)

This sentence reveals a massive shift in Consalve’s world-view and a turning point in the romance as a whole. From this point onward in Lafayette’s text the term hasard appears with great frequency (e.g. pp. 108/80, 110/81, 112/82, 116/85, 120/88) while ‘fortune’ almost entirely disappears. To be sure, throughout French culture hasard was gaining ground while fortune was receding. As an example, we note that in

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 112

07/10/2011 08:08

From Chance Events to Implausible Actions

113

Pascal’s Pensées the noun hasard (in the singular and plural) appears twenty-nine times while fortune (in the singular and plural) only occurs eight times.10 However, Lafayette has made the contrast quite remarkable by setting up a sharp distinction in usage, one that underscores the subjective and systematising use of fortune in Consalve’s first-person account and then eliminating it thereafter. Coinciding with this shift in vocabulary is a radical change in Consalve’s world-view. No longer is he concerned with rank, wealth, reputation and the court. Instead, he is focused entirely on Zayde, whom he loves passionately although he cannot place her within any system despite his attempts to conjecture who she might be. Consalve’s account of fortune was centred on the court, which is where the verticality of that concept belongs. Henceforth, the hero’s life has no geographic or political centre since he has no idea where Zayde is, nor with whom, nor with what intentions. He is exposed to an exploded world, a world in which the simple scheme of upward and downward movement is no longer adequate. Lafayette’s hero has moved from fortune to chance (or randomness), from a subjectively coherent though delusional narrative to a world that no longer has such coherence. Since the author calls attention so clearly to the shift from ‘fortune’ to hasard at the point of Zayde’s arrival in the story, we perceive within the conceptual inventory of the text a doubling: where we expect fortune, according to iconological conventions regarding the sea and shipwreck, we find hasard. Since the text, like many of those in the Scudéry and Lafayette corpus, delegates the narrative function to the fictive characters themselves, we see different attitudes toward chance on the part of different characters. While Consalve, to this point, fancied himself persecuted by a force outside himself, his friend Alphonse shapes the story of his life around another concept in the constellation of chance, caprice.11 The distinguishing characteristic of caprice is that it imports chance into the mind, where it most emphatically, according to the stoic and Boethian tradition, does not belong. We recognise that by the time he is telling his story, Alphonse, unlike Consalve, has accepted his own responsibility for what happened and so the term caprice constitutes an admission of his own loss of self-awareness and self-control. On the other hand, during the events that make up this sad story, others had repeatedly told Alphonse that he was behaving according to caprice and he disregarded what they said. His caprice consisted of believing that the woman he loved was unfaithful to him. He had believed that she was not being candid about her feelings toward a previous suitor and even imagined a love affair between Bélasire and his best friend. At the time Alphonse believed these things and eventually killed his friend Manrique in the

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 113

07/10/2011 08:08

114

The Phantom of Chance

dark under the illusion that the latter was arriving for a tryst with Bélasire. In designating after the fact his various illusions and unreasonable demands as ‘caprice’, Alphonse admits his inability to recognise chance. If a chance event is one that happens without a clear reason and without intention but as if it happened intentionally, we can see the case of Alphonse as a particularly dangerous manifestation of the effort to resist the idea that things can happen by chance. The drive to find a hidden intention in everything appears early in Alphonse’s unhappy relationship with Bélasire. One of the things that initially attracted him to Bélasire was that she had never loved any of her previous suitors. He enjoyed hearing accounts of their unsuccessful courtships, but he is particularly struck by her account of one of the suitors, the Comte de Lare: The suspicion entered my mind that she might not be telling me all her feelings for him [. . .] It was impossible for her to have told me every single detail of a passion that had lasted several years; she told me some things that she hadn’t yet told me; I thought she had hid them on purpose . . . (pp. 131–2/96)

Here, as in many other passages, Alphonse’s critical refrain could be paraphrased as ‘it couldn’t have been an accident that . . .’ The Comte de Lare persisted more than the other suitors? Why was that? It could not have been an accident, he seems to think; Bélasire must have encouraged him in some way. So Alphonse tries to extract more information, and when something seems to be missing, once again, it could not be an accident: Bélasire must be concealing things deliberately. When his friend Manrique tells him that he is being unreasonable, Alphonse finds that there must be some hidden reason for Manrique’s view and especially for the way Manrique expresses it: ‘It seemed to me that given the way Don Manrique had condemned me, he must have some feelings for Belasire’ (p. 137/100). When he sees Manrique and Bélasire together, it happened, he says, that ‘It was my misfortune to notice two or three times that she had stoppped talking to Don Manrique the moment I entred the room’ (p. 139/101) – again, this could not be an accident. And so it goes up to the moment when Alphonse believes he hears Bélasire’s window open over the street during the night and believes he sees Manrique. He attacks this figure in the shadows, they fight and Alphonse mortally wounds the unknown man, who turns out to be, in fact, Manrique. When Manrique, before dying, explains that he was on his way to see another lady in the neighbourhood, Alphonse is finally convinced. He accepts that this dreadful outcome resulted from his own imaginary narrative about Bélasire’s unfaithfulness. Alphonse’s caprice leads to, and comes to its end in, what is finally called, twice, an ‘accident’:

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 114

07/10/2011 08:08

From Chance Events to Implausible Actions

115

The grief caused Belasire by the accident, which happened on account of her, as well as the rumors it engendered at court, made my despair complete when I thought of how all the pain she was feeling, as well as the pain I myself was overcome with, had happened through my own fault alone . . . (p. 149/108, emphasis added)

Bélasire likewise refers to ‘this recent accident’ (p. 149/105). Alphonse’s narrative ends not long after this event, the climax of his story. It is interesting that this event is called an accident, because in some senses it is not accidental, in the loose, modern sense of the term. It results from Alphonse’s unrelenting, systematic jealousy and distrust of all those who are closest to him. Could he, crazed with jealousy, have killed Manrique in broad daylight? Clearly the author of Zayde keeps this secondary hero from committing a deliberate murder and thus maintains the reader’s sympathy for him.12 ‘Accident’ is variously defined as ‘Cas fortuit, ce qui arrive par hazard’ [‘Fortuitous event, what happens by chance’] (Dictionaire de l’Académie, 1694) and as ‘cas desastreux, malencontres et infortunes’ [‘disastrous events, bad coincidences and misfortunes’] (Nicot, Thrésor de la langue françoyse, 1606). What cures Alphonse of the idea that nothing happens by chance is precisely a cas fortuit in which what seems to happen corresponds to Alphonse’s systematic imaginings. What frees him from an obsession with Bélasire’s dead suitor, the Comte de Lare, is the death of another man whose dying words – presumably worthy of trust – indicate that he is not Bélasire’s suitor. Lafayette’s romance, which is shot through with doppelgängers and doublings of all sorts, includes this culminating double of caprice and accident. The phantom of the real suitor of Bélasire is exorcised by the death of the man who was only imagined to be her suitor. Although caprice and accident resemble each other they differ – and this is a distinction valid beyond Alphonse’s individual case – in that caprice is in the mind while accident is in the external world. In the case of Alphonse, caprice consists of believing for no reason that things are happening for a reason. Or we can put it another way: the system and the intention are in Alphonse’s mind and not in the outside world. All of his friends try to disabuse him of this illusion, and it is from them that he first learns the diagnosis of his capriciousness, an idea that he resisted throughout the events narrated in his first-person story but that he fully accepts in retrospect now that he has become the narrator. Bélasire, for instance, tells him that his mind is really not working properly: Belasire didn’t think much of my reasoning. She told me that some passing chagrin might well be caused by what I had adduced, but that an obsession

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 115

07/10/2011 08:08

116

The Phantom of Chance

as enduring as mine could come only from some defect and disturbance in my constitution . . . (p. 136/99)

With the end of Alphonse’s story of Alphonse, caprice, like fortune, is as it were purged from the lexicon of the narrative and we rejoin the stream of hasard that flows forward from Consalve’s encounter with Zayde. Hasard is the term from the constellation of chance that dominates the rest of the text, independently of shifts of narrator. That is, whether the story is being told by the unnamed general narrator of Zayde or by one of the characters who tells his or her story or the story of another, the term hasard is henceforth, with few exceptions, the term used. It is as if chance had moved out of the mind of the characters and into the world itself, a world no longer controlled by a coherent narrative centred on the affected individual but simply determined by unaccountable randomness. After these two stories end – and rather clumsily Lafayette drops Alphonse from the rest of the book – chance in its weirdest forms appears relentlessly. Zayde arrives in Consalve’s life by hasard (p. 106/79); she disappears from the residence on the Spanish coast on the single occasion when Consalve is not there attentively watching her (p. 121/89); he overhears her speaking in a garden in Tortosa but does not know that it is she (p. 152/110); the next day, when she is too far away to hear him, he sees her leaving Tortosa in a ship, apparently departing for Africa, where he will never find her (p. 153/111); and then, when he least expects it, he discovers Zayde among the population of a city in Spain that he has just captured from the Moors (p. 167/120). In short, there seems to be nothing but a series of quite amazing fortuitous events that separate and then reunite the principal characters. Yet the general, unnamed narrator of Zayde does not usually designate these incidents as being the result of chance. They simply happen. As in the case of fortune and caprice, the discourse of chance is almost exclusively left to the characters. This seems to indicate a great degree of integration of ‘chance’ into everyday reality. There is no longer a great narrative called ‘fortune’ nor is there any such force. Instead, things simply happen, and if some of these things stand out as ‘chance’ it is because people, that is the fictive characters, think of them that way. Lafayette has thus arranged a two-layered system to deal with chance. On one hand, it becomes implicit (folded in) in the general narrative, where it is displayed but not named. On the other hand, it becomes explicit in the internal narratives and in the other discourse of the characters. For much of the narrative chance is hidden in full sight, displayed for the reader to notice – or not to notice – without any mention of

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 116

07/10/2011 08:08

From Chance Events to Implausible Actions

117

the contingency, the logical non-necessity, of such events as Consalve’s near-encounter with Zayde in Tolosa. There are a few exceptions, of course. When Consalve meets Zayde again for the first time since their weeks together on the coast, the narrator does not designate the encounter itself, which is the key event, as chance (hasard), but does describe the moment when the hero and the heroine can speak without being overheard: ‘By coincidence [par hasard], all the ladies around her had drifted off; he wanted to take advantage of the few moments he could speak with her’ (p. 169/122). Again, shortly afterwards, when Consalve encounters his rival for Zayde’s hand, the Moorish prince Alamir, the highly unusual and long-sought meeting of these two men who have been resentful and curious about one another for quite a while is not described as the result of chance, but a somewhat secondary action is so described by the narrator: This being a major road, he came upon an Arab horseman of quite noble bearing who was following, rather sadly, the same path. The men with Consalve uttered his name by accident [par hasard]. At the mention of Consalve’s name, this horseman, previously immersed in a deep reverie, started . . . (p. 178/128)

While the general narrator is quite sparing in references to chance, within the internal narratives characters copiously invoke chance. Félime’s tale of Alamir includes hasard on almost every page, beginning with one of Alamir’s many amorous adventures: During one of these feasts, Alamir saw a young widow named Naria, whose beauty, wealth, and virtue were extraordinary. Chance [le hasard] had it that he saw her unveiled while she was addressing one of her slaves; the charm in her face took him by surprise; for her part she was troubled by the sight of the Prince and stood looking at him for a few moments. (p. 202/147)

Félime, telling this story, is herself intensely, hopelessly, in love with Alamir. One can imagine her pain as she enumerates a sampling of his many encounters and one can appreciate her heightened understanding of the particular circumstances that favour Alamir’s initial attachments. Chance is almost always associated in her telling with Alamir’s erotic fixations. Surprise, rarity, suddenness and a convergence between latent desire and unexpected reality – these are the traits of chance events that we have seen before in the Aristotelian tradition of tyche. Before meeting Naria for the first time, Alamir was already looking for an object to attach himself to. This is why Félime mentions the customs of the Arabic feasts (the specific holiday is not named) during which women have more freedom to be in public places and during which rakes like Alamir expect to discover ‘some beauties they had never seen’ (p. 202/147). So

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 117

07/10/2011 08:08

118

The Phantom of Chance

there is something half-expected about this encounter; Alamir might well not meet Naria and might even not meet any attractive woman, but, like Aristotle’s man in the marketplace, there is something that he wants even though he does not expect to obtain it at the very moment and place in which he does. Félime, as internal narrator, could have said simply that Alamir saw Naria briefly unveiled, but instead she says ‘chance allowed him to see’ [‘le hasard la lui fit voir . . .’]. This is entirely typical of Félime’s tale of Alamir. In a subsequent incident, Alamir has hidden in the women’s quarters of a bathhouse where he has arranged a tryst with a young woman named Zoromade, who is guarded with great vigilance by her mother. In this unusual place he meets instead another, still younger person, named Elsibery: The young woman was as surprised at seeing Alamir as Alamir was to see her; by his attractiveness and the beauty of his clothes [. . .] She approached Alamir, who was charmed by the whole adventure, and asked him how he happened to be in this place. (p. 210/152)

Elsiberry herself says that ‘I came in here by chance’ [‘le hasard m’a fait entrer dans ce cabinet’] (p. 211/153). Later, Alamir sees still another desirable person – though, by an additional twist, he does not at first know that the person he sees is a woman: ‘Just as he was about to withdraw, by chance he turned his head and was surprised indeed to see, in a corner of the terrace, the handsome slave who had already given him such cause for worry’ (p. 218/158). Given the distribution of these allusions to chance, we can well ask whether chance creates desire or whether desire creates chance. The two are tightly associated, and even though the author of Zayde has delegated to the internal narrators rather than to the general narrator most mentions of chance, we can see even in what the general narrator tells that chance is associated with something that people particularly wish (or particularly fear). Alamir and Consalve pass on a road in Spain, apparently like so many Spanish and Moorish combatants during a truce, but on this occasion Consalve’s name snaps him into focus for Alamir and makes the two men, who think that each is the obstacle to the other’s love for Zayde, see their encounter as the unexpected but longed-for opportunity to examine and perhaps even to eliminate the other. So it seems too with Alamir’s adventures with women that desire makes some moments stand out so that they become noticeable, enjoyable, memorable – or so it seems to Félime, for whom those very same moments, which she is imagining as she narrates them, are conversely moments that bring her the pain of knowing that the man she loves has met still another woman who is more fortunate (she thinks).

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 118

07/10/2011 08:08

From Chance Events to Implausible Actions

119

Accidental Destiny There is still another term in the constellation of chance that has a significant role in Zayde: destiny (la destinée). As for the other chancerelated words in Lafayette’s romance, destiny is shown to be essentially a human construct rather than a force in the world. It is the fourth chance-related word – after fortune, caprice and hasard – in this text, a text that seems systematically and sequentially arranged to deal with and debunk these adventitious agencies or frameworks for forming life into story. Destiny is always an ambiguous word. It can simply refer to an intended outcome, a goal, entirely within the rational, human sphere, as ‘Destiner. v. n. Projetter, se proposer de faire quelque chose. J’ay destiné de faire cela’ [‘To destine. v. To project, to intend to do something. I have destined to do that’].13 In Zayde, we find an example of this use when the prince, Don Garcie, speaks of ‘an evening that I had destined to spend beneath those windows’ [‘un soir que j’avais destiné à passer sous ces fenêtres’, p. 71/54]. It can mean an outcome, as that is experienced, even if the outcome was unintended. It is where you end up, your final destination: ‘Destin, se prend aussi pour le sort particulier de chaque personne ou de chaque chose, & pour ce qui arrive ordinairement de bien ou de mal à chacun. [‘Destiny is understood also as the particular lot of each person or of each thing, and as what ordinarily happens, good or ill, to each’].14 And, from the first appearance of the term in a dictionary in French, it is also associated with an occult power, destiny: ‘Destin, id est, Destination, ou predestination, Fatum’ [Destiny, i.e. Destination, or predestination. Fate].15 Lafayette plays with these various meanings in the course of her text and has the characters mistake the first of these meanings (destination) for the third (destiny); Zayde believes that destiny – a supernatural force – rather than her father’s intention has decided that she will marry a man who looks like Consalve. Destiny is thus debunked. Zayde’s own understanding or misunderstanding of her ‘destiny’ is presented tantalisingly in bits and pieces throughout the narrative and is the foremost factor in creating confusion and suspense. Consalve discovers early in his acquaintance with Zayde that he reminds her of another man, and he comes to believe that he looks much like a man Zayde loves. This interpretation of gestures and glances – at a time when the two main characters cannot speak to one another because they have no language in common – leads to various other confusions, such as Consalve’s mistaken idea that Alamir is the fortunate suitor in question (although, as he finds, Alamir and he do not look at all alike). The reader first glimpses the source of this issue of resemblance when Consalve

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 119

07/10/2011 08:08

120

The Phantom of Chance

learns, indirectly, Félime’s account of Zayde’s visit to Alexandria with her father. There she met a famous astrologer, Albumazar, to whom Zayde’s father showed various possessions that he had gathered in the course of his travels.16 Among these was a small portrait of a handsome young man dressed in the fashion of the Arabs: Zayde seemed taken by surprise at the attractiveness of the painting. Albumazar noticed the attention she paid to it; he teased her, saying that he could easily see that any man with a resemblance to this portrait might well have hopes of winning her affections. Because the Greeks hold astrology in high esteem, and since young ladies are always very curious about the future, Zayde asked the famous astrologer at a number of different times to say something about her destiny. He would always turn her down, however; the little time he did not spend studying was reserved for Zulema, and he seemed to want to avoid making a show of his extraordinary knowledge. (p. 235/171)

In this context, Zayde clearly intended to learn from Albumazar about the supernatural patterning of causes that would lead to a specific outcome – so ‘destiny’ is understood here as fate or divine providence, not a mere human intention nor a random end point. However, after resisting Zayde’s pressing requests to learn about what fate has in store for her, Albumazar seemed finally to relent: One day, finding him at last in her father’s room, she asked him more insistently than she ever had to consult the stars about her fortune. ‘I have no need of consulting them’, he said, smiling, ‘in order to assure you, madam, that you are destined for the man whose portrait Zulema showed you. Few princes in Africa are his equal; you will be happy if you marry him; take care not to commit your heart to someone else’. Zayde took Albumazar’s words as a rebuke for the attentiveness with which she had looked upon the portrait; with all the authority of a father, however, Zulema told her that she should have no doubt as to the truth of the prediction; he himself had none, he said, and the only man she would marry with his permission was the one for whom this painting had been made. (p. 236/171)

Zayde’s friend Félime took these words very seriously, and thereafter considers that the young man pictured is destined in some supernatural sense to be Zayde’s husband. Zayde herself, however, does not become convinced of this destiny until after she meets Consalve and notes his resemblance to the young man in the portrait. Zayde’s relationship to Consalve is thus from the start doubly fraught with attraction and with inhibition, since he is the living image of the man she must marry and yet he could not possibly be the young Arabic prince whose portrait indicated her destiny. The heroine understands this situation in terms of a powerful force external to her, similar to the fortune that Consalve

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 120

07/10/2011 08:08

From Chance Events to Implausible Actions

121

accused of plotting the series of betrayals that he experienced as a young man at the court of Leon. In the garden in Tortosa, Consalve (going by the pseudonym Théodoric) hears Zayde, without seeing her or knowing that it is she, say: True, the power of the first inclinations a person ever feels may well excuse the one I allowed to grow in my heart – but what an odd effect of chance, if it happens that this inclination, seemingly in accordance with my destiny, should one day make that destiny so painful to follow. (p. 153/110)

Here there is a layering of chance (hasard) and destiny. Chance brings her the surprise of the encounter with a man with whom she falls in love, while, on the other hand, ‘destiny’ – the way things are supposed to be in the long run – casts over this encounter the veil of the forbidden, which may, of course, simply intensify the desire. Zayde herself, as we learn late in the story, goes through several phases of interpretation with regard to Albumazar’s words, and she explains the somewhat enigmatic comment above with regard to the interaction between chance and destiny by saying that it was only when she met Consalve and noticed his resemblance to the portrait that she projected backwards upon the astrologer’s words a truly predictive force (pp. 239–40/174). By an odd back and forth between the earlier prediction, the encounter with Consalve (who was going by the name Théodoric at the time) and the ‘destined’ outcome of a marriage, it is only the chance encounter with the hero that makes the earlier prediction seem to have some authority. However, it turns out that there is no supernatural force at work, or at least none whose existence is affirmed by any voice within Zayde. Instead the supposed ‘prediction’ itself results only from a series of bizarre chance events and misinterpretations. Albumazar did not make an astrological forecast but simply used ordinary common sense when he told Zayde that she would marry the young man in the portrait. But this is something that the principal characters and the readers learn only close to the end of the romance, and within the last pages of the text the ambiguity of the terms concerning ‘destiny’ and ‘destination’ resolves itself quickly. Zayde is destinée as spouse of the young man in the portrait not by the stars but by her father who intends to arrange this marriage. And the father, in the penultimate paragraph of Zayde, explains that he has destined his daughter to marry the young prince in the portrait because of chance (hasard)! He explains to Consalve and to the king of Leon that as Zayde’s father he planned to order her to marry the Prince of Fez. When Zayde asked the astrologer to tell her something about her future, says the father:

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 121

07/10/2011 08:08

122

The Phantom of Chance

Since he knew all about my plans, and because he thought the portrait she had seen was that of the Prince of Fez, he told her, without any intention of having his words taken as a prediction, that she was destined to be with the man whose portrait she had seen. I pretended to believe that Albumazar’s words were based on some special knowledge of things to come . . . (p. 266/192)

The portrait, as it turns out, is of Consalve himself, whose father liked to carry around the likenesses of his two children and who had had their portraits painted by a famous artist who happened to like Moorish costume and who painted all his models in that fashion. Consalve’s father lost the painting of his son in a battle against the Moors and, as Zayde’s father admits, ‘it came into by hands only by chance’ [‘je ne le tiens que du hasard’] (p. 265/192, emphasis added). Thus Lafayette’s work culminates in a hyperbolic send-up of destiny. The apparent force of destiny turns out to be merely a concatenation of random incidents, jokes, fatherly authority gone awry, surprises, physical attraction and retrospective attempts to make the facts fit a preconceived storyline that would reconcile the random with the providential.

Everyday Encounters Lafayette’s ingenious attack on the related concepts of fortune, hasard and destiny continues in her better known The Princess of Cleves (1678). This celebrated novel enjoys a rather paradoxical status in literary history. On one hand, it is generally held to be a more plausible representation of human life than many earlier fictions. The emphasis on plausibility or vraisemblance had been growing in importance for decades. As we saw above, Scudéry had insisted thirty-six years before on the primacy of plausibility in the preface to Ibrahim. Of all qualities plausibility is surely the most necessary. It is like the corner stone of a building, and only upon it does the construction stand. Without it, nothing can be touching; without it, nothing can give pleasure. And if that charming deceiver does not beguile the mind in romances, such reading appears insipid, rather than entertaining.17

Charles Sorel, in his Bibliothèque française (1664), made plausibility a major criterion for judging fiction, even devoting one chapter specifically to ‘Plausible romances and novellas’ [‘Des romans vraysemblables et des nouvelles’], in which he describes the demand for increasingly accurate representation of the world as it ordinarily appears: ‘People sought invented stories that would portray the characters of people as

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 122

07/10/2011 08:08

From Chance Events to Implausible Actions

123

they are and that would be a simple picture of their situation and their temperament.’18 Significantly, he moves the criterion for plausibility from what happens to how people are. In this chapter Sorel mentions with approval Lafayette’s Princesse de Montpensier ‘which comes from a person of high condition and of excellent wit’ (p. 180). Scudéry had identified shipwrecks as the generic marker of the implausible romance and, as we have seen, in Zayde the shipwreck that permits the encounter of the hero Alphonse and the heroine Zayde is the most spectacular of the many coincidences by which the plot signals the fidelity of Zayde to the earlier genre of the traditional roman.19 In contrast, the Princess of Cleves seems to have been written with the aim of excluding this type of generic chance. There are no shipwrecks, no events that happen on the sea or seashore, no lost children, no earthquakes, no lightning storms. But this does not mean that chance loses its importance and that all seems predictable and explainable. On the contrary, chance has been released into the world of the everyday. It is everywhere and therefore, in a sense, nowhere in particular. Its most powerful instances in The Princess of Cleves occur in shops, gardens, dressing rooms of jeux de paume. Lafayette herself, in denying that she was the author of this text, also denied that it had any romanesque qualities.20 Lafayette’s novel nonetheless contains some amazingly far-fetched incidents. In fact, it can easily be argued that at least one of the events of The Princess of Cleves, the scene in which the Princess’s lover Nemours overhears – by chance – her confession to her husband that she is in love with someone other than her husband, breaks all records of implausibility among fiction literature in the century, going far beyond earthquakes and shipwrecks. What then is the role of chance in this important novel? And how does chance relate here to plausibility? We can start by noting the remarkable parsimony with which terms relating to chance are used in this novel as compared to Zayde. Fortune is mentioned half as often, hasard a quarter less often and destinée or destiner two-thirds less often, taking into account the length of the texts.21 There is no mention in The Princess of Cleves of ‘caprice’. Yet there is a striking similarity in the distribution of the terms, particularly in the case of hasard: these terms belong to the discourse of the characters, not to that of the narrator. In fact, the narrator of Lafayette’s novel only uses the word hasard twice in the entire work!22 By this we mean that, except on two occasions, hasard appears only in the reported direct discourse or indirect discourse of the characters. The author, therefore, has chosen to assign the concept of chance to the fictive characters rather than to the unnamed narrator (whoever the narrator may be).23 The characters speak of hasard in ways that are

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 123

07/10/2011 08:08

124

The Phantom of Chance

reported by the narrator, who does not assume responsibility for the term. For instance, from a conversation with the king and queen about the reliability of astrological predictions, the narrator writes that the queen was inclined to believe in them but ‘Others again held that the small number of lucky hits out of the numerous predictions that were made, proved that they were merely the result of chance [ce n’était qu’un effet du hasard]’ (p. 311/41).24 Here the concept of chance is attributed to a nameless group of courtiers. Later, the princess’s small portrait disappears after a painter has retouched it, and the narrator reports the discussion that ensues: ‘No one supposed that it had been stolen, but that it had been dropped by chance’ (p. 318/45–6, emphasis added). When the princess discovers with horror that her confidence to her husband has become known (though without the names of the people involved), she is at a loss to discover how this act could have been reported. She says to her husband: ‘Oh, sir,’ she said, ‘in the whole world there is not another case like mine; there is not another woman capable of doing what I have done! Chance could not make anyone invent it; no one had ever imagined it’ (p. 367/77). The narrator also reports the unspoken thoughts of the main characters, who sometimes think about chance. Thus about Nemours, distressed at not being able to see the woman he loves, the narrator writes: ‘He was to leave the next day, and there was no chance of his meeting her [il n’avait plus rien à espérer du hasard] (p. 379/85). It is the duke, not the narrator, who thinks that he has nothing more to expect from chance.

Silent Chance Chance can affect a text without ever being mentioned. There are things that simply happen, suddenly, without any preparation, and of which the particular timing has no apparent necessity in the fictive world. Some incidents such as these are among the most important in Lafayette’s novel. For instance, the heroine’s arrival at the royal court is recounted without any narrative explanation about the timing or circumstances of its happening and, indeed, the odd impersonal turn of phrase seems more appropriate for a catastrophic storm, enemy attack or other such event rather than the unannounced arrival of a sixteen-year-old girl: The death of Mary of England raised great obstacles to any treaty of peace; the commission broke up at the end of November, and the king returned to Paris. At that moment there appeared at the court a beauty to whom all eyes were turned, and we may well believe that she was a faultless beauty, since she

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 124

07/10/2011 08:08

From Chance Events to Implausible Actions

125

aroused admiration where all were well accustomed to the sight of handsome women. (pp. 259–60/7–8)

Subsequently, the heroine goes to a jeweller’s shop and the Prince de Clèves arrives while she is there (p. 261/8). This meeting is crucial for all that happens subsequently, since the prince’s immediate love for the mysterious young woman seems to owe much to the surprise and novelty of this first encounter.25 The prince is only able to marry the heroine after the death of his father (p. 269/14). The heroine’s marriage to M. de Clèves might not have taken place if the Duc de Nemours had returned to the court a few weeks sooner. The timing of his return seems entirely fortuitous (p. 274/17), as does the death of Madame de Tournon (p. 293/29), an event that leads to a conversation crucial to the heroine’s ultimate confession. After her husband’s death the heroine sees Nemours from a distance in a garden in a faubourg, and this fortuitous encounter has a significant impact on the heroine’s feelings: ‘This incident made a deep impression on Madame de Clèves’ heart; all her love was suddenly rekindled, and so violently!’ (p. 400/99). But the most amazingly fortuitous of all the events of the novel is Nemours’ presence in the garden of the Clèves’ country estate at Coulommiers at precisely the moment when she tells her husband that she is in love with another man (pp. 349–54/66–8). The narrator tells us about these events without describing them as the result of chance. Thus, as in Zayde, the evocation of chance is left almost exclusively to the characters and this concept is implicitly marked as subjective. However, these events and their chance character did not go unnoticed at the time of the novel’s publication. Valincour, in his Lettres à Madame la Marquise *** sur le sujet de la Princesse de Clèves (Letters to the Marquise *** about the Princesse de Clèves, 1678), comments rather bitingly on the role that chance plays in Lafayette’s novel. The first of his letters concerns the ‘conduct of the story in general and the manner in which all the incidents are brought about’,26 and there Valincour points to the astounding convergence of characters at the garden pavilion in Coulommiers. The princess is there seeking solitude, far both from her husband and her lover, and yet, notes Valincour, ‘fortune brings both of them there when they were the least expected; one to be involved in and one to witness one of the most extraordinary events that has ever been told’ (p. 46). Valincour’s description goes on to emphasise the timing of events: Precisely at the moment when he is ready to ask her this question, the Duke of Nemours, who had gotten lost while deer hunting, or, rather, was carefully guided by his destiny to arrive just in time, is standing in the lane [. . .] It

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 125

07/10/2011 08:08

126

The Phantom of Chance

seems, indeed, that Monsieur and Madame de Clèves were timing their entry in keeping with his arrival. As soon as he has entered, we see them come . . . (p. 46)

Time in the form of timing – a particular aspect or quality of time sometimes discussed under the name kairos – is heavily emphasised by Valincour, who, despite his humorous deprecation of The Princess of Cleves, is characteristically acute in seizing upon the temporal thickening that occurs in this passage. It seems as if time itself is the only cause for what happens, and yet normally we do not think of time as a cause but only as a neutral dimension within which causes function. Valincour notes another thing: the as if quality that timing projects onto the characters’ actions. Here the as if – the comme si – takes the longer form ‘Il semble, en effet, que Monsieur et Madame de Clèves n’attendaient que lui pour paraître’. It is as if they are waiting for Nemours to appear and yet this waiting is exactly what is not happening. Valincour has already said that fortune has brought the characters together precisely at the moment when ‘they were the least expected’ [‘on les y attendait le moins’]. Valincour’s remarks let us glimpse a characteristic of chance events in the tradition of tyche, that they give us the most of what we expected the least. Yet, in order to say that there is something that we expected the least and that we expected it the least at a certain moment, we have to think in a circle. We have to revise our view of what we expected prior to the surprising event, for it is unlikely that we had established an inventory of least-expected events prior to the surprise that motivates such a calculation. While Valincour is ironising in a humorous way, he exposes the after-the-fact impression that a thoughtful reader can easily have that the husband and wife seem to be waiting for Nemours when they are not, and that Nemours seems to dismount from his horse and hurry toward the pavilion in order to arrive in time for a confession that is about to happen even though none of the characters knows that it is about to happen. This paradoxical logic is already set forth by Valincour in his opening comments on this passage: It is a great pity to be destined for adventures; they seek us out precisely when we are fleeing from them and doing all we can to avoid them. (p. 46)

This vision of chance events marks a difference between classic chance (Aristotle’s tyche) and the kind of chance that appears with growing frequency from Machiavelli onward – randomness – insofar as classic chance, appearing here as aventures, manifests itself by its eerie appropriateness. Such an event appears either to the participants or to the

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 126

07/10/2011 08:08

From Chance Events to Implausible Actions

127

onlookers (or to both) as precisely what they wished for or precisely what they fled from. Let us turn now to the Princess’s confession. She had left Paris for Coulommiers in order to get away from M. de Nemours. Nemours, for his part, had gone to the estate of his sister, Madame de Mercoeur, near Coulommiers, ‘in the hope of seeing Madame de Clèves and to go to her home with the Vidame’.27 Yet the plan to go to call on the Princess in the company of her uncle does not lead directly to the Duke’s presence in the garden pavilion. Instead: While they were deer-hunting, Monsieur de Nemours lost his way in the forest; and when he asked what road he should take, he was told that he was near Coulommiers. When he heard the word ‘Coulommiers’, he at once, without thinking, without knowing what his plan was, dashed off in that direction. He got once more into the forest, and let himself follow at random [se laissa conduire au hasard ] carefully-made roads as seemed to him to lead to the chateau. (pp. 348–9/65)

Long before mentioning the term hasard, chance, the novelist emphasises the difference between design and intention on the one hand and spontaneous action on the other. Even though Nemours does see the Princess, as had been his hope, this wish is fulfilled in a way that escaped from his foresight and control. He gets lost in the forest – this is a classic topos of romance, that is of the romanesque novel – and the forest, along with the sea, is one of the places where chance rules supreme.28 Even Descartes uses the image of the forest in conjunction with human action when it is subjected to chance.29 One of the effects of the forest, like the sea, is to remove all organisation and all traces of human design. It creates a tabula rasa from which human convention is removed, thereby freeing impulse from constraint but also removing the orientation necessary to carry out many intentions. Once Nemours does learn that Coulommiers is nearby, he acts without thinking and without knowing what his plan was. Still nearer to the Princess’s house, he allows himself passively to be directed at random, an action that is in an odd way contrasted with the roads he follows that were made carefully. In this important passage, then, all of Nemours’ actions are attributed to one side of the dichotomy between intention and spontaneity or chance. This is one of the two occasions in the novel as a whole when the narrator seems to assume responsibility for the choice of the term hasard, yet even here it is debatable whether the concept of chance is attributable to the narrator or to the character. The narrator seems, in fact, simply to describe how Nemours’ mind is working, while situating this chance-driven conduct against the more orderly arrangement of the external world. When his

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 127

07/10/2011 08:08

128

The Phantom of Chance

beloved Princess and her husband arrive, the narrator allows us to see the contrast between intention and chance, though without mentioning chance. The fortuitous is here simply displayed, without being named. Finding the pavilion at the edge of the forest, Nemours entered apparently with the intention of enjoying the sight of this construction but, at that very moment, he is interrupted: ‘He entered the summer-house, and was about to admire it, when he saw Monsieur and Madame de Clèves coming along the path . . .’ (p. 349/65). For Valincour, of course, the fact that so many things happen by chance is a defect of construction. He agreed with Scudéry’s earlier preface to Ibrahim that too much chance in the world of the fiction (the diegesis) reveals too little writerly technique in the historical world of the author. Or, in other words, the chance event in a narrative reveals the hand of the author, who should be concealed by a flawless chain of causality within the fiction. Valincour and the author of the Princess of Cleves point toward the same insight about chance: the logic of chance is the logic of desire.30 Chance reveals itself by its eerie mimicry of human purpose. In this sense it is akin to the uncanny and Guillaume du Vair’s expression the ‘phantom of chance’ is strikingly appropriate. Certain ordinary events can suddenly surge out of the background to stand out as meaningful within the way the principal characters of the novel imagine their life and the way we imagine their lives. Monsieur de Nemours is in the garden at Coulommiers because Madame de Lafayette wants him to be there, and if we play the role of the intended reader, we want to be there as much as Nemours does. This concept of identification of spectators and readers with the characters of fiction is an important emphasis in seventeenthcentury poetics, as we can see in Corneille’s comments in his Discourse on Tragedy.31 Throughout the century, identification (though not called by this recent name) was described in increasing detail, as Michael Moriarty has shown for the writings of Pascal and Malebranche.32 Such an operation of identification is at work at those points in Lafayette’s novel which Valincour identified as the silent yet retrospectively obvious intervention of the narrator. Malebranche notes, in Moriarty’s terms, a process of identification that seems to fit what happens at the more far-fetched moments in The Princess of Cleves, including the scenes at Coulommiers: ‘Not only passion is contagious, but the rationalization by which it justifies itself, and the peculiar self-gratification to which it gives rise. Our imagination espouses, so to speak, that of the passionate person.’33 The reason that we are not shocked at this otherwise completely unbelievable convergence of lover, beloved and husband at the very moment of this conversation is that we are simply swept away by the drive to hear what the Princess is going to say.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 128

07/10/2011 08:08

From Chance Events to Implausible Actions

129

The New Implausibility The perfection of this scene, in which a woman gives simultaneously to two men the highest proof of love conceivable within two different forms of relationship – husband and lover – can only come about, within the universe of the story (the diegesis), by chance, for there is no way the characters could have brought such an arrangement about through any design.34 Its spectacular bizarreness, the exceptionally unusual convergence of people and acts within this moment, makes it highly, implausible [invraisemblable].35 ‘Seventeenth-century debate about the novel’s verisimilitude focused on this famous scene in which the princess confesses to her husband that she loves another man. Is it plausible that such a wife would make such a confession?’ writes Steven Rendall.36 Actually the scene of the confession combines two highly implausible plot elements, for as Rendall notes subsequently, Nemours’ presence as unseen witness ‘is almost wholly aleatory’.37 Now that we have seen the strange distribution of the discourse of chance, which is almost entirely absent from the utterances of the narrator while abounding in the reported conversation and thoughts of the characters, we can consider in more detail what is at stake here. Most critical attention has been devoted to the heroine’s speech act itself. This is the first, and most developed, negative comment that Bussy Rabutin made of the novel in writing to his cousin Marie-Chantal de Sévigné, Madame de Clèves’s confession is preposterous, and could only be told in a true history; but when one is making a story up it is absurd to depict the heroine as having a sentiment that is so out of the ordinary. The author, by doing so, was thinking of ways to be different from the old romances and was not paying attention to common sense. A wife rarely tells her husband that a man is in love with her and never tells her husband that she is in love with another man.38

As he enumerates the flaws of the book, he later comes to Nemours’ hidden presence: The first incident in the gardens at Coulommiers is not plausible and smacks of romance [sent le roman]. It is a very calculated arrangement that when the Princess confesses to her husband that she loves another man, M. de Nemours, at just the right moment, is behind the fence listening to them.39

In terms of the relationship between The Princess of Cleves and the tradition of the roman (romance or novel) as genre, Bussy’s two remarks offer a useful insight. The confession is wildly implausible (extravagant), he writes, for a rather odd reason: it is something that does not happen in other romans. Such a confession might happen in real life but does

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 129

07/10/2011 08:08

130

The Phantom of Chance

not happen in works of fiction. Whereas Nemours’ hidden presence during the confession is simply implausible in the fashion of novels (sent le roman), it does not happen in real life. So there are two different and even incompatible forms of implausibility here, one that reflects a possibility from real life and the other that reflects the practice of writers of fiction. We know, and Scudéry in her preface to Ibrahim reminds us, that the decisive generic characteristic of romans was the excess of chance.40 So Bussy here seems to be distinguishing between a truly innovative, but objectionable, implausibility that is not related to chance and an entirely derivative one that does concern chance. What happened in the mid-seventeenth century was a break with the narrative conventions of what was representable. Increasingly, authors included incidents that departed from preconceived paradigms of conduct – or at least such a departure was perceived by those writing literary criticism at the time. Increasingly an opposition appeared between ‘what happens in real life’ and ‘what happens in fiction’. To the consternation of many critics, certain major works chose the former over the latter. In doing so, they decreased the number of poetically conventional marks of chance (e.g. the shipwreck) and increased the number of ordinary, random occurrences (e.g. two people enter a shop at the same time). And in the same period, critical resistance shifted from what happened unintentionally to what happened as a result of thoughtful decision by a character. This change in emphasis first became apparent in the Quarrel of Le Cid and was confirmed by the debates surrounding The Princess of Cleves.41 The Princess of Cleves was implausible for many seventeenthcentury readers, primarily because the heroine ‘should not have taken her husband as her confidant’ and thus in this instance, as in others in the novel, she violated norms of behaviour.42 In short, the category of morality shifted attention away from the category of predictability in events and things. The scene of the confession in the garden so starkly confronts two implausibilities that it is almost tempting to think that Lafayette was constructing an exemplary case for literary theorists. If you are going to put something implausible into a plot, she seems to be saying, put two far-fetched things together – the reader will be so fixated on one that she will not notice the other. But it may also be the case that Lafayette, in keeping with the views of her contemporaries, felt that chance, when it simply happens, silently, without anyone mentioning it, and when it serves our desire, when it happens to coincide with what interests us, is perfectly acceptable. We believe what we wish to believe because, after all, chance is usually what is too good to be true. We can say with

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 130

07/10/2011 08:08

From Chance Events to Implausible Actions

131

Tertullian, ‘certum est, quia impossibile’ – it is certain, because it is impossible.43 On the other hand, this willingness to suspend judgement of implausibility with regard to chance coincides with much stricter standards concerning what the characters decide to do. This new attention to human agency is also entirely consonant with more intense identification with the fictive characters.44

Notes 1. An overview of this chapter, along with comments on chance in Molière’s L’École des femmes, appeared as ‘From Fortune to Randomness in Seventeenth-Century French Literature’ in French Studies. 2. Passage from Lafayette’s letter to Lescheraine, 13 April 1678, quoted in Laugaa, Lectures de Madame de Lafayette, p. 16. 3. We here follow the traditional attribution of a number of texts to Lafayette, even though Zayde appeared in 1670 as the work of Jean Regnault de Segrais, a friend of Lafayette’s, and even though The Princess of Cleves was published without an author’s name. References to the French text of Zayde in this chapter are to the edition prefaced by Camille EsmeinSarrazin, Zayde. Quotations from Zayde in English follow the recent translation of Nicholas D. Paige, Zayde. A Spanish Romance. However, Paige’s text has occasionally, and without indication, been modified in order to make clear certain relations been fortune and hasard in the French. Two page numbers are given for references to Zayde; the first indicates the page in the Esmein-Sarrazin edition and the second the page in the Paige edition. 4. ‘Lafayette set out to subvert the genre from the inside: her work is both a romance and a pastiche of romance, if we understand by that word a selfconscious revisiting of a form perceived as dead’ (editor’s introduction to Zayde. A Spanish Romance, p. 13). 5. Scudéry, Ibrahim, preface. The preface is not paginated. 6. Preface of Ibrahim (not paginated). Emphasis added. 7. Smith et al., A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, vol. II, p. 415 and Friedrich et al., History of Painting, vol. I, pp. 62–3. 8. We can see that Scudéry’s location of narrative chance between the natural and the artificial coincides with Clément Rosset’s similar positioning of this concept in his L’Anti-nature, especially in chapters 2 and 3. 9. We will return to this topic in Chapter 5 (pp. 165, 167). See on this point Peters, ‘Kingship and Paranoid Subjectivity’, and Farrell, Paranoia and Modernity. 10. Davidson and Dubé, A Concordance to Pascal’s Pensées. The first, but much truncated, edition of the Pensées appeared the same year as Zayde. The Concordance is based on the much longer text established by Louis Lafuma (Pascal, Pensées sur la religion, 1952). This longer text was, in 1670, known in manuscript only to a small number of Pascal’s intimates. Note that of the eight occurrences of the term fortune, seven refer to fortuitousness and the eighth refers to wealth.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 131

07/10/2011 08:08

132

The Phantom of Chance

11. Caprice is a form of fortune or chance. In his Apologie du théâtre, Georges de Scudéry writes of ‘la fortune qui se plaist aux choses capricieuses’ (p. 80). 12. Corneille wrote of the importance of protecting audience sympathy for the protagonist (Trois discours, p. 117). 13. Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1694). Cf. OED: ‘To fix or set apart in intention for a particular purpose, use, end, course of action, etc.; to design, intend, devote, allot’. 14. Dictionnaire de l’Académie française 1694. In Lafayette’s text, there are various passages in which this sense of destinée may be intended, that is passages where one could either suppose a reference to some totalising external, invisible force, or simply something like ‘the situation that I am in’ or ‘the way things turned out’ (e.g. Zayde, p. 148/108). 15. Nicot, Thrésor de la langue françoyse (1606). 16. Ja’far ibn Muhammad Abu Ma’shar al-Balkhi, known in the west as Albumazar, was a celebrated ninth-century mathematician and astrologer. Albumazar’s fame as astrologer had already made itself known in literature through Giambattista della Porta’s play L’Astrologo (1606) and Thomas Tomkis’s tragedy, Albumazar, performed at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1615. John Dryden wrote a prologue for a 1668 revival of Tomkis’s play, two years before the publication of Lafayette’s Zayde. In Tomkis’s play Albumazar is represented as a fraud. See Tomkis, Albumazar: a Comedy). 17. Scudéry, Ibrahim. 18. Sorel, La Bibliothèque françoise, p. 177. 19. The astounding and memorable opening pages of Scudéry’s Clélie may well be the most hyperbolic example of an over-the-top chance event since within a few minutes and within very few sentences a storm, an earthquake and a volcano occur in such a way as to separate a couple about to be married on a sunny day (Scudéry, Clélie, histoire romaine, I, p. 52). Scudéry’s novel also illustrates the topos of the shipwreck with an exceptionally elaborate and, again, almost incredible series of incidents (vol. I, p. 95). 20. Laugaa, Lectures de Madame de Lafayette, p. 16. 21. In the 1990 Classiques Garnier edition, Zayde [Zaïde] is 211 pages long, while in the same edition La Princesse de Clèves in the same typography is 164 pages long. In the former work, ‘fortune’ in the singular appears fortynine times, hasard (all forms, including the verb) appears fifty-one times and destin, destinée and the verb destiner appear forty-one times altogether. In La Princesse de Clèves ‘fortune’ appears fifteen times, hasard or hasarder appears twenty-nine times and destin, destinée and destiner appear ten times (ARTFL database). 22. The only two passages in which the term hasard is attributed to the narrator alone (as distinguished from the cases in which the narrator is reporting a character’s words or thoughts) are pp. 328 and 349. A borderline case, but which seems to refer to Nemours’s thoughts, is on p. 403. 23. Kuizenga, Narrative Strategies. 24. Lafayette, La Princesse de Clèves in Romans et Nouvelles, ed. Alain Niderst, p. 311. Further references to the French text of the Princesse de Clèves will be to this edition. English translations of The Princesse of Clèves

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 132

07/10/2011 08:08

From Chance Events to Implausible Actions

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42.

43.

133

will be taken from The Princess of Clèves, trans. Perry. The translation will be modified to give more literal versions of passages referring to chance. Within parenthetical references, the page number of the French text will be given before that of the English translation. See Lyons, ‘Mlle de Chartres at the Jeweler’s Shop’. Valincour, Lettres à Madame la Marquise, p. 34. Lafayette, La Princesse de Clèves, p. 348. On the romance conventions in Nemours’ night-time visits to Coulommiers, see Weinberg, ‘The Lady and the Unicorn’. The second maxim of the provisional morality in part 3 of the Discours de la méthode is explained with the comparison to a man lost in a forest (Descartes, Discours de la méthode, VI, p. 24). In Lafayette’s case chance seems also to be aligned not just with desire in general but with irrational desire, with that form of desire that is illicit, that takes place outside of marriage and is therefore subjected to obstacles and frustration. Corneille, Trois discours, p. 109. Moriarty, The Age of Suspicion, pp. 199–200, 206–7 and 251 Moriarty, The Age of Suspicion, p. 199. Any licit design. The seen of the aveu can be read as the seventeenth-century form of a ménage à trois in which a woman makes love to two men at the same time, though in different ways. But this scene is available only to the reader, not to the participants. Cf. the earthquake scene in Scudéry’s Clélie, I, p. 52. Rendall, ‘Trapped Between Romance and Novel’, p. 130. See also Shoemaker, ‘Lafayette’s Confidence Game’. Rendall, ‘Trapped Between Romance and Novel’, p. 132. Correspondance de Bussy, vol. 3, p. 430, quoted in Laugaa, Lectures de Madame de Lafayette, p. 18. The English translation by J. D. Lyons is from The Princess of Clèves: A Norton Critical Edition, p. 122. Bussy, in Laugaa, pp. 18–19. English translation, p. 122. Bussy’s description from memory is inexact. The garden is surrounded by palisades, but Nemours is in one of the two rooms of the little garden pavilion when he hears the conversation between the spouses. ‘The prince and the princess are trying to tell a story governed by the norms of vraisemblance, but the material with which they have to deal more properly belongs to the genre of romance, in which the action frequently turns on arbitrary coincidences, and improabable events occur without any explanation other than sheer chance’ (Rendall, ‘Trapped Between Romance and Novel’, p. 132). Genette showed that the Academy conflated two strands of poetics, character consistency and chance, what Genette calls the twin defects of the immoral and the unpredictable (Genette, ‘Vraisemblance et motivation’). Mme de Clèves ‘ne devait pas prendre son mari pour confident, – ce qui signifie évidemment tout à la fois que ces actions sont contraires aux bonnes mœurs, et qu’elles sont contraires à toute prévision raisonnable: infraction et accident’ (Genette, ‘Vraisemblance et motivation’, p. 72). Tertullian, De Carne Christi Liber. Treatise on the Incarnation, p. 18, lines 25–6.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 133

07/10/2011 08:08

134

The Phantom of Chance

44. The identification with the desire of the characters is also bound up with the drive for a happy ending. As Mark Parker has written about a very different text within the romance tradition, ‘the desire for a certain kind of ending takes precedence over all other considerations’ (‘History in Atom Egoyan’s Ararat’, p. 1053).

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 134

07/10/2011 08:08

Chapter 4

The God of Suspense: Bossuet’s Providential History and Racine’s Athalie

At the end of the seventeenth century, French literary, historical and political thought seemed to reach a triumphant unity. The nation’s greatest tragic poet had become historiographer of the king and was charged with writing the story of the reign of Louis XIV. The most splendid royal residence in Europe, the château de Versailles, became the permanent home of the court in 1682. Three years later, Louis revoked the Édit de Nantes, thus forcing official religious uniformity in the country he ruled as absolute monarch. It was time for the century itself to be named for this moment of perfection in the poem ‘Le Siècle de Louis le Grand’.1 Two works from this period of grandeur are among the most official of its literary production: Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet’s Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1681) and Jean Racine’s last tragedy, Athalie (1691). Both of them seem to present the vision of a culture satisfied with its place in the world and possessed of an apparently unified aesthetic, theological and political vision. What room could there be in such works for the fortuitous? It seems, at the outset, that this is not the place to look for chance, but whenever there are great displays of system, chance cannot be far away.

God’s Anamorphic History Though famous, Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History is not among the perennial best-sellers of French literature.2 Written for Bossuet’s pupil, Louis de France, the crown prince or dauphin, it was an introduction to history, and its effect on its intended reader, who was not known to have been inclined to studious pursuits, remains a mystery. Bossuet’s general view of history and its relation to religion is mentioned here and there by historians, often with insightful comments about his views of divine providence and their relationship to the writings of

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 135

07/10/2011 08:08

136

The Phantom of Chance

Saint Augustine.3 Bossuet’s purpose in writing, besides the education of the Dauphin (and indirectly, the French reading public as a whole)4 was to refute Spinoza and Richard Simon. The latter, in particular, had, with brilliant erudition, dehistoricised the Old Testament, making it an instructive fable.5 Bossuet, the Bishop of Meaux, reasserted the Old Testament as a historical text, and thus broke somewhat with the mainstream tendency of the Roman Catholic tradition, which had stressed the figural rather than the literal historical value of the Bible. Even Augustine, in general an important influence on Bossuet’s thought, had taught that the Bible should be read as allegory.6 Repositioning the Biblical account into the historical realm, Bossuet concentrates on connecting the events of Biblical history into a comprehensible sequence of causes and effects. He thus addresses some of the most controversial issues of his day: accident, intention, providence and miraculous intervention. In Bossuet’s providential view of history, everything that happens is the result of God’s eternal intention. In the ‘Sermon on Providence’ (‘Sermon sur la Providence’, 1662) Bossuet pointedly contrasts this understanding of history with that of the unbelievers, the libertins, who ‘declare war on divine Providence’ and use as their best argument against it ‘the distribution of goods and evils, which appears unjust, irregular, without any distinction between good people and evil people’.7 Against this chaotic, entropic or random vision of the world he sets the view of the Church, an account derived from Aquinas:8 We must understand that this universe, and particularly the human race, is the kingdom of God, that he rules and governs according to immutable laws . . . this celestial policy which regulates all nature and which, encompassing in its order the entirety of human things, does not treat with less consideration the large and small accidents that toss the life of individuals than those great and memorable events that decide the fortune of empires.9

Bossuet does not deny that life often seems full of accidents, that it is full of hasard. On the contrary, the very fact that we experience the disorder and seeming pointlessness of life fortifies Bossuet in the confidence that there is a higher order: Christians, whatever strange confusion, whatever disorder or whatever injustice appears in human affairs, although they seem driven by the blind haste of fortune, we must impress upon our mind that everything is there carried out in order . . . and that an eternal and immutable plan is hidden among all these events that time seems to unfold with strange uncertainty. (pp. 113–14)

Bossuet is, in fact, one of the seventeenth-century writers who most eloquently advocated the position that human life is lived as an experi-

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 136

07/10/2011 08:08

The God of Suspense

137

ence of chance incidents (hasard), and he found a vivid simile to convey the relation – we might say the interface – between this experience and the invisible truth that he discerns in the Bible and the teachings of the Church: ‘When I reflect on the way human life is arranged, confusedly, unequally, irregularly, I often compare it to certain pictures that are commonly displayed in the libraries of collectors of curiosities as a trick of perspective’ (p. 114). The pictures of which he speaks are what we know as anamorphic paintings, perhaps best known today in the example of Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors (1533). ‘What confusion in this picture!’ says Bossuet, speaking of the image of human life, ‘and does it not appear that the colours were spattered at random solely to jumble the canvas or the paper?’ (p. 115). The authentic experience of human life, that is the honest expression of our experience as imperfect creatures, must include, according to the Bishop of Meaux, our perception that chance dominates in the world. If we follow his analogy, the perception of chance seems to have been created deliberately. This is, as he points out, the Biblical view, found in Ecclesiastes: ‘The race is not to the swift, nor war to the strong: but that chance and circumstance rule everywhere. But time and chance in all’ (p. 115).10 Bossuet’s preferred terms for chance are ‘confusion’ and ‘disorder’; or, to be more precise, ‘confusion’ is the immediate perception and ‘chance’ (hasard) is the interpretation that we most often give when faced with confusion. Commenting on this passage of Ecclesiastes, Bossuet implies that this reasoning results in the mistaken inferences of the libertins, while the Biblical sage starts with the same perception and reasons quite differently: He finds in humankind an extreme confusion; he sees in the rest of the world a marvelous order; he sees clearly that it is not possible that our nature, which is the only one that God made in his own likness, should be the only one that he leaves to chance; thus, convinced by reason that there must be an order among men, and seeing by experience that it has not yet been established, he necessarily concludes that man has something to wait for. And here, Christians, is the whole mystery of God’s plan. (p. 116)

This is not an apologetic argument. Although it has its roots in Augustine, as does Pascal’s thought, and although it focuses on the perception of disorder in human life, as does Pascal in refuting the sceptical tradition that was reinvigorated by Montaigne’s Apology for Raymond Sebond, Bossuet does not move in the direction of a phenomenology of the trace that leads backward toward the discovery of original sin. Unlike Pascal, Bossuet does not designate as his interlocutor the libertin himself but instead addresses already convinced Christians. So Bossuet sets worldly confusion against two competing hypotheses: chance and

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 137

07/10/2011 08:08

138

The Phantom of Chance

providence. He thus makes an important point. We do not perceive chance itself, only a set of things that happen and that puzzle us to which we assign the cause ‘chance’. Providence is also invisible to the unaided human eye, a fact that Bossuet repeatedly acknowledges, even though he does not make the invisibility of God as central a point as do Pascal and Nicole. However, terms like ‘blind’, ‘secret’ and ‘hidden’ (aveugle, secret and caché) appear frequently in his work to describe humanity’s relation to the higher order. Some of Bossuet’s modern scholarly readers have found him too quick to exposit authoritatively the secret order of providence as it acts in history.11 Others have defended him on the grounds that he only claims to know the divine reasons for those events that are prophesied in the Bible, and that in these and in other cases he makes, as Ferreyrolles says, a ‘remarkable attempt . . . to explain events on the basis of human causality’.12 What has not been described in detail is Bossuet’s apparent endeavour to exacerbate the perception of confusion that reigns in human life. If, as has sometimes been said, the dominant figure of the literary baroque is antithesis, Bossuet’s antithetical structuring of his material into intense confusion on one side and absolute order on the other – along with the frequent invocation of the corollary divisions such as time and eternity – marks him as an emphatically baroque writer.13 In creating the sense of confusion of the type that characterises an anamorphic painting, the remarkable first part of the Discourse on Universal History should be acknowledged as one of the strangest ways of opening a text destined for a young student of history. Indeed, the formal features of this text have, in general, almost never attracted critical attention. The Discourse is divided into three parts: The Epochs, or the sequence of time, The sequence of religion and The Empires (Les époques, ou la suite des temps, La suite de la religion and Les empires). The second part, on religion, constitutes almost exactly half of the book as a whole. Of the remaining half, the first part, The Epochs, is slightly longer than the concluding section on empires. On first consideration, if we take the point of view of a writer going about his task, there seems nothing strange about this arrangement. The first part provides the raw material of dates and events that will later be considered in greater depth according to the enlightening doctrine of providence. But if we imagine ourselves on the receiving end, as an audience of non-specialists, reading the first part is extremely difficult for the simple reason that its structure runs against the grain of any readerly habit. It is simply a very long list of largely unrelated incidents, a variety of dates from various chronological systems and many confusing, similar or repetitive names. This first part looks like something that should be presented in an appendix

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 138

07/10/2011 08:08

The God of Suspense

139

where the reader of the two other, more coherent sections, could look to check a date or a location. For instance, when did the Samaritans build their temple in Gerizim? When did the Romans overthrow Queen Teuta of Illyria? How did Leotychides encourage his forces in the battle of Mycale? And who was the winner in the combat that resulted when Constantine divided the empire ‘among his three sons, Constantine, Constans and Constantius’? For Bossuet to suppose that his pupil would wade through what looks like a large file of research notes before getting to the doctrinal core of the text challenges plausibility. And his approach is all the more surprising in that Bossuet was a redoubtable rhetorician who owed his entire career to his ability to make difficult teachings come to life and hold the attention of dissipated courtiers during his sermons. Orest Ranum alone seems to have paid attention to the formal aspects of the first part of the Discours. He notes that Bossuet delivered it orally to the Dauphin and suggests that ‘Part I ought still to be read as if it were the score of a baroque cantata’.14 This analogy makes sense if we consider the importance of contrast, for the first part only manages to create an impression of God’s power (and clarity) by accentuating the polar opposite, the confusion of events as they were experienced by their contemporaries and especially by the participants. One can imagine that the unrelenting overload of information would leave the audience begging for something more digestible, some light and analysis. The Epochs is organised into twelve chapters, one for each of the twelve epochs that begin with ‘Adam or, the creation’ and end with ‘Charlemagne, or the establishment of the new empire’. The two basic organisational principles of The Epochs are an overall chronological sequence from earlier to later (with some glances backward and some passages of a general, metatemporal nature) and alternation of passages on Biblical events and passages on ‘profane’ events (after the middle of the tenth epoch, the post-Biblical history of the Church takes the place of incidents from the Bible). As a result of these two principles, apparently unrelated events are placed side by side on the grounds that they happened at the same time. Within each of the juxtaposed passages, Bossuet shows a sequence that either explicitly or implicitly conveys the sense of causality. These causal mini-narratives are interrupted by others that have a separate causal sequence usually unrelated to neighbouring passages. It is not unusual to find in quick succession a paragraph on Jewish history, a paragraph on Athens, a paragraph on Assyria and Media, a paragraph on Rome, and a paragraph on Egypt, as is the case in the seventh epoch or ‘Rome founded’ (pp. 64–5). The passages on profane history usually assert no transcendent purpose or intention:

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 139

07/10/2011 08:08

140

The Phantom of Chance

Rome grew, but weakly (83–671). Under Tullus Hostilius, its third king, and by the famous combat of the Horatii and the Curiatii, Alba was conquored and ruined: its citzens, incorporated into the victorious city, made it larger and fortified it. Romulus had been the first to use this means of enlarging the city, where he welcomed the Sabines and the other conquored peoples. They forgot their defeat and became loyal subjects. Rome, in extending its conquests, gave order to its militia; and under Tullus Hostilius it began to learn that beautiful discipline that made it subsequently the mistress of the universe. (p. 65)

Here Bossuet identifies Roman practices that led to long-term success: repeated incorporation of conquered populations into the city, historical forgetfulness on the part of the defeated, the discipline of military forces – in short, immanent rather than transcendent causality implied by cumulative success rather than made explicit through analysis of the psychological or sociological principles that would make such strategies work. There is no obvious relationship between what is happening in Rome and what is happening at the same time in the kingdom of Judah, where ‘the ungrateful people forgot God, and disorders increased’ (p. 65). On the other hand, among events taken from the Bible, there are occasional relations of an explicitly causal and transcendent type between what is happening among the chosen people and their profane neighbours: While impiety grew in the Kingdom of Judah, the power of the kings of Assyria, who were to be the avengers, increased under Esarhaddon, son of Sennacherib. He joined the Kingdom of Babylon to the Kingdom of Nineveh (73–681), and equaled in greater Asia the power of the first Assyrians. The Medes also began to become powerful. (p. 65)

In a mass of otherwise unrelated developments (the union of Babylon and Nineveh and the growing power of the Medes), Bossuet indicates a transcendent intention at work in the future relations between Judah and Assyria. The population of Judah is increasingly impious and therefore the Assyrians will somehow punish or exact ‘vengeance’ from the Jews, even though this vengeance was unintentional on the part of the Assyrians – that is, they had no plan to discipline the Jews for violations of Jewish law. This vengeance, which is purely unintentional or accidental from the Assyrian (or Babylonian) point of view, shows providence at work through natural causes. It is never said that God favoured one or the other leader among the many nations at war in the eastern Mediterranean but the juxtaposition of growing impiety on one side – that is within one strand of history – and growing power on the other, combined with the concept of ‘vengeance’ within one of those strands (that is Jewish history) leaves the impression that the growing power

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 140

07/10/2011 08:08

The God of Suspense

141

of the Assyrians is useful for God’s purposes. In fact, readers searching for some narrative thread to guide them through this mass of names are almost forced to rely on Jewish history to keep from plunging into complete chaos. It is difficult to know, in fact, who the ‘Assyrians’ are. Meanwhile the kings of Assyria were becoming more and more intimidating for the entire Orient. Shamash-shum-ukin, son of Esarhaddon, believed to be the Nebuchadnezzar of the book of Judith, defeated in a set battle (97–657) Arpachshad, king of the Medes, whoever that is. If it is not Deiokes himself, the first founder of Ecbatana, it may be Phraortes or Aphraarte, his son, who raised the walls. Puffed up with his victory, the proud king of Assyria undertook to conquor the whole earth (98–656). To this end, he crossed the Euphrates, and ravaged everything all the way into Judah. (pp. 65–6)

Because of Bossuet’s attempt to cover as many kingdoms as possible by placing different national narratives next to one another without extensive transition, should we assume that the kings of Assyria who were becoming powerful in the first of the above sentences are meant to include the Shamash-shum-ukin, son of Esarhaddon, mentioned in the following sentence? But Nebuchadnezzar was the name of a number of Babylonian kings who waged war against Assyria. The effect, in short, is a chaotic but self-regulating effervescence of ambitious, violent kings on the one side, and a rather simple narrative of crime and punishment on the other. Bossuet follows the above developments on Babylon, Assyria and Media with the following paragraph: The Jews had irritated God, and had given themselves over to idolatry, like Manasseh; but they did penance along with this prince: God took them as well under his protection. The conquests of Nebuchadnezzar and his general Holophernes, were suddenly stopped by the hand of a woman. (p. 66)

The difference between sacred or Biblical history on the one hand, and profane history on the other, may well be meant to intensify the feeling that profane history is confused as well as confusing. Bossuet notes at one point that the discrepancies between sacred and profane history come from the asymmetry in their sources. The multiple sources of profane history are themselves deeply contradictory: Those who are suprised to find profane history in some places so little in conformity with sacred history, should note at the same times that it [profane history] is even less in conformity with itself. The Greeks told the deeds of Cyrus in several different ways. Herodotus notes three, besides the account that he follows, and he does not say that this one was written by more ancient or more acceptable authors than the others. (p. 69)

Although Bossuet does not make God’s concealment of his intention a central theme, as had Pascal in his treatment of Old Testament figures,

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 141

07/10/2011 08:08

142

The Phantom of Chance

Bossuet’s many examples and his analysis of them show that the purpose of the divine author of sacred history – God – cannot be plain without the proper, post facto revelation. Unlike ordinary, profane causality, which allows us to predict the outcome of specific types of acts (for instance, if you hold your bare hand in the fire, your hand will be burned and this happens with entire certainty), the narrative causality in the Old Testament as Bossuet reads it can only be constructed later on a case-by-case basis and not used for purposes of prediction. Within a few pages of one another, Bossuet describes the cases of David and of Manasseh. The former received from God both a promise of protection, if he and his descendants observed the laws of Moses, and the assurance of punishments if they did not. David, however, violated the law. These punishments come quickly: David, who forgets himself for a while, felt them the first; but, having made reparation for his fault by penitence, he is blessed with wealth, and held forth as the model of an accomplished king. The thrown is assured to his house. (p. 194)

It seems as if the contract is clear and stable, leading to predictable outcomes of crime and punishment. Moreover, it seems as if ‘crime’ and ‘punishment’ can be distinguished by human beings, at least by those who are participants in the covenant. Conversely, it seems that penance is efficacious and brings rewards. Thus a simple reading of this passage could lead us to believe that David’s penance did not simply precede the many good things that came his way but that his penance caused the outpouring of wealth (biens) on the part of his contractual partner, God. On the other hand, one could (but Bossuet does not lead the reader in this direction) suppose that David’s penance and reparation of his fault were independent of the good things that happened to him subsequently. On this reading, he could, in short, have experienced great prosperity whether or not he had repented. The impious king Manasseh was touched by the words of the prophets, at a time when many of his people were faithfully keeping the law, yet Manasseh was punished ‘even though he had done penance in order to leave an eternal monument to the horror that his conduct inspired’ (p. 197). While in David’s case penance was followed by great goods, for Manasseh this did not happen. One cannot therefore count on rewards for one’s repentance. Can one count on punishment for one’s crimes? Not necessarily. David’s son Solomon was well-behaved and appropriately prosperous, but, late in life, he left the path. If there were any predictability to the sequence of events, Solomon should have received a prompt punishment – after all, his prosperity and his good behaviour

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 142

07/10/2011 08:08

The God of Suspense

143

were simultaneous. Yet Solomon’s punishment did not strike him during his life; rather, ‘God, who spares him out of love for his servant David, tells him that He will punish him in the person of his son. Thus he makes fathers see that, according to the secret order of his judgments, he makes their rewards or their punishments persist after their death’ (p. 194). It was not therefore an accident that his bad conduct did not lead to his downfall. But the son will be punished for the father. Note that Bossuet, while pointing to the ‘secret’ nature of the cause–effect link here, does not say that God strikes Solomon’s son in order to intensify his punishment but instead that Solomon was ‘spared’. Both punishments and rewards can apparently be displaced across all chronology, backwards and forwards. God could have punished Solomon for David’s bad, prepenitential behaviour, and then rewarded Solomon’s son Roboam for David and Solomon’s periods of good kingship. The disconnection between good behaviour, faithful participation in the covenant and reward is even more marked in the case of nonJewish personages. Bossuet gives the example of Nebuchadnezzar, ‘this impious, and also victorious king’ (p. 198). Was this Babylonian king rewarded for his impiety? No, it is actually more complicated than that, as Bossuet makes clear. Nebuchadnezzar benefited from – one might even argue that he was rewarded for – the increasing impiety of the Jews: ‘Impiety increased and God calls forth in the East a more arrogant king than any of those who had appeared up until then: this is Nebuchadnezzar’ (p. 198). The main passage in the Discourse about Nebuchadnezzar shows on one side a tight coordination between cause and effect. This king conquered Jerusalem not once but three times in a great coordinated crescendo of sin and punishment. The first time he took part of the inhabitants of the Judaic capital to Babylon. But neither the captives nor those who remained in Jerusalem repented. The avenging Nebuchadnezzar returns, and ‘Jerusalem’s yoke is made heavier’, but the Jews do not mend their ways, so finally ‘inquity reaches its limit; pride grows alongside weakness, and Nebuchadnezzar reduces all to dust’ (p. 198, cf. p. 67). Bossuet stresses the proportionate relation between iniquity and its result while also emphasising that the Jews, despite the prophecy of Jeremiah, were unable to see the relationship between the Babylonian victories and their religious condition. God’s secret order was thus invisible even to his chosen people and despite the prophets – we can only assume that those who are not among the chosen would fail to see the link, even though, Bossuet says, God displayed Nebuchadnezzar as his instrument: ‘he shows him from afar to the nations and to the kings as the avenger destined to punish them’ (p. 198). It was, then, the

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 143

07/10/2011 08:08

144

The Phantom of Chance

Babylonian’s good fortune to live in proximity to the kingdom of Judah so that he could benefit from their transgressions, since God provides exceptional temporal rewards not only to those who knowingly observe his law and participate in the covenant of salvation but also to those who are, unwittingly, his instrument. We assume that this ‘impious and victorious king’ did not know why he kept winning, not only over the Jews but over the Idumeans, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Syrians and the Egyptians. He was ‘cloaked in the divine power’ (p. 199) – the divine power can therefore be found within bad people as well as good. To the unenlightened this account of God’s purposes may give the impression of complete randomness. Throughout Bossuet’s work the insistence on chance as the central experience of human life is constant and emphatic, though always balanced by the corrective insistence that there is something beyond this experience. Thus, in the funeral sermon for Henriette-Marie d’Angleterre, he says: ‘Man must not be permitted to despise himself completely, lest, believing like the impious that our life is only a game ruled by chance [où règne le hasard], he conduct himself without rule and without restraint, following his blind desires.’15 But what Bossuet finds in the Old Testament story is not randomness at all but rather the supreme manifestation of arbitrariness. Like random events, arbitrary events have no explanation, though they have a cause – everything has a cause. But unlike random events, arbitrary events result from an intention, from the intention of a person who does not need to provide any explanation of his decision. For Bossuet, all of mankind’s ills derive from its initial refusal to accept the arbitrary power of God, and it is important to stress, as the Discourse itself does, that it is very specifically the arbitrary nature of God’s power, rather than his power alone, in its absolute might, that is the central point. We can see this in the account of the fall of Adam and Eve. Here is the passage about the serpent’s approach to Eve: Let us hear now how the demon spoke to her and let us see into the workings of his machinations. He speaks to Eve, because she is the weaker: but in the person of Eve he speaks to her husband as well as to herself: ‘Why did God impose this prohibition on you? If he gave you reason, you should know the reason of everything: this fruit is not a poison; “you will not die from it”.’ See how the spirit of revolt begins. One reasons about the rule, and obedience is cast into doubt. (p. 157)

The demon makes clear to Eve – and Bossuet makes clear to his reader – that the commandment not to eat of the fruit was arbitrary. God did not supply a reason and, of course, did not need to supply a reason. Specifically, by telling Eve ‘you will not die from it’, the tempter attacks the fundamental impulse of reason, which is to identify the effects of

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 144

07/10/2011 08:08

The God of Suspense

145

causes and the causes of effects. Clearly, it is Eve’s need to know, rather than any inherent quality of the fruit, that is the cause of the sin. It seems almost as if there had been an original sin before original sin in order for this ‘weakness’ to exist in Eve, and the serpent does not hesitate to point out what that weakness is: ‘he gave you reason’. Bossuet describes this all-too-human penchant that the serpent so astutely recognised: A flattering and proud thought, the secret pleasure of acting on one’s own and according to one’s own thoughts, attracts and blinds him: he wishes to make a dangerous test of his freedom, and he tastes with the forbidden fruit the pernicious sweetness of satisfying his mind. (p. 157)

In the course of sacred history that Bossuet traces subsequent to the fall, we can see the emphasis that is given to the non-accountable quality of God’s decrees, their immunity to the reasoning efforts of mankind. It is tempting, surely, for the non-believer to describe the world as random and to perceive in Bossuet’s account – and in the Biblical account itself – simple after-the-fact ‘rationalisation’ for everything that happens. When things go badly for a Jewish king, for instance, it is because he has sinned (usually in regard to sexuality, like Louis XIV), but if the king sins and is not punished, there is also a reason that Bossuet can give.16 Bossuet does not, as we have said, give much emphasis to the powerful Augustinian argument that it is precisely the hidden and even scandalous quality of the esoteric doctrine that finally proves the truth of Christianity, once the distinction is made between the ‘spiritual’ and ‘carnal’ Jews.17 It would also be wrong to think of Bossuet as being anti-rationalist. Ranum says that ‘Bossuet firmly believed that man’s knowledge, though limited, was of the same nature as God’s, permitting him to perceive providential and human causation at work together in history’, though this is true, Ranum notes, to the extent that readers ‘shared his Christian presuppositions about history’.18 Besides the need to share Bossuet’s view of history – and Bossuet confidently expected most of his audience to share those views (the police had, at his instigation, destroyed almost the entire printing of Richard Simon’s book) – there is another major imperative for understanding events in Bossuet’s presentation. Perhaps this is too trite to mention, but things can only be understood when they are over. In a system that is ruled by a ‘secret order’, prophecy, rather than human prediction, is the only forward-looking approach to cause and effect, and prophecies themselves can only truly be appreciated after the fact. It is for this reason that Bossuet, opposing Simon, held so strongly to the historical basis of the Old Testament, for by coordinating profane and Biblical history, Bossuet felt that he was putting the events of history at

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 145

07/10/2011 08:08

146

The Phantom of Chance

the service of Biblical prophecy as a non-miraculous way of validating Biblical claims. The importance of retrospection to transform the view of the world is also illustrated, in a rather odd way, by Bossuet’s account of the fall. The supreme evil spirit adopted the form of a serpent to tempt the first humans: God allowed him to speak to them in the form of a serpent, in the most suitable form to represent malignity along with the torment of that evil-doing spirit, as we will see subsequently. All animals had been placed at Adam’s feet to receive from him a suitable name and to recognize the sovreign whom God had given them. Thus none of the animals caused revulsion in man because, in the state in which he lived, none could harm him. (p. 156)

So there was nothing bad about the serpent – its form was perfectly innocuous and gave no advance warning of its intelligent malevolence. But afterwards, even though the serpent is not, apparently, physically transformed in any way, its form becomes absolutely appropriate for the evil that it has done: In the form of the serpent, whose tortuous crawling was a vivid image of the dangerous insinuations and the deceptive detours of the evil spirit, God made clear to Eve, our mother, the odious character and at the same time the proper torment of our enemy . . . Just as the serpent crawls on his chest, the demon, justly thrown down from heaven where he had been created, cannot rise up again. The earth, from which, as it is said, the serprent eats, signifies the low thoughts that the demon inspires in us. (p. 159)

None of this was visible to Eve before the fall. In order to understand the fall, you have to have fallen. In order to see the formal significance of the serpent, you must first not see that significance because if you saw it too soon, you would not have participated in the event that must take place for the significance to appear at all. Here as elsewhere Bossuet provides his readers with a human, or immanent, account of events that is interwoven with the account derived from a retrospective reading of the prophecies. He gives, in other words, a set of circumstances and human characteristics that make what happens entirely credible, even to a non-believer. The exact relationship between these circumstances and characteristics (in which we can hear an echo of the Machiavellian duo of individual talent and appropriate moment) on the one hand, and divine intervention on the other, is not always made explicit, and so the Discourse does leave open the possibility of an entirely natural understanding of events, even though this is not at all Bossuet’s understanding. Another way to put this is to say that God’s intention and the ordinary course of human and natural events complement one another.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 146

07/10/2011 08:08

The God of Suspense

147

In the case of Nebuchadnezzar, the image of the wheel of fortune gives a traditional sequence of cause and effect to Bossuet’s Christian narrative: Isaiah, who saw Nebuchadnezzar’s glory and his senseless pride long before his birth, predicted his sudden fall and that of his empire. Babylon was almost nothing when that prophet saw its power, and a little later its ruin. Thus the revolutions of cities and empires which tormented the people of God or which profited from their loss were written in his prophecies. These oracles were followed by a prompt execution; and the Jews, so roughly punished, saw fall before them, or with them, or slightly after them, according to the predictions of their prophets, not only Samaria, Idumea, Gaza. (p. 199)

The ‘revolution’ refers to a turn of the wheel, and the sudden downward lurch that Nebuchadnezzar experiences is preceded not only by prophecies but by the conventional set of attributes that indicate an imminent fall, most of all pride: Nebuchadnezzar is the most ‘arrogant’ king who had yet appeared (p. 198) and he was possessed of a ‘senseless pride’ (p. 199). He wanted to ‘make himself adored’ (p. 200). He made Babylon ‘the greatest city, the strongest, and the most beautiful that the son had ever seen’ (p. 200), and ‘admiring his greatness and the beauty of Babylon, he raised himself above humanity’ (p. 200). This, the moment of greatest elevation, is precisely, notes Bossuet, the moment when God strikes him, drives him mad and makes him like an animal. These are all traits of a conventional wheel of fortune scheme, with its insistence on upward movement and arrival at a peak, followed by a sudden precipitous fall. This is not only true of the impious king of Babylon but also of Christian princes. In the funeral oration for Henriette-Marie de France we read of ‘The heart of a great queen, formerly raised by such a long period of prosperity and then plunged suddenly into the abyss of bitterness.’19 The antithesis of apogee and nadir is emphasised by hyperbole in both directions. From being ‘above humanity’, the king ends up among the lowest of the creatures. And when this happens, it always happens suddenly. What goes up, comes down – a truism that is apparently universal and brings together Greek tragedy and the Hebrew Bible. This simple formula is both reassuring and disquieting. It makes it seem that all is not random and that there is an order in the world. But it also creates suspense: yes, things will come down, but when? This is precisely the most human aspect of history, in Bossuet’s text, its dimensioning in time. God is above time. Nothing that he does takes time, unless he decides for some reason to let it take time. The creation of the world offers Bossuet the occasion to make this point: And to follow the history of creation . . . Moses taught us that this powerful architect, to whom things cost so little, wished to do them in several stages,

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 147

07/10/2011 08:08

148

The Phantom of Chance

and to create the universe in six days, to show that he does not act from blind necessity or impetuosity, as some philosophers have imagined. The sun casts out all at once, without holding back, all its rays; but God . . . in making the world with his word, shows that nothing is difficult to him; in doing it in several stages, he shows that he is the master of his material, of his action, of his whole undertaking, and that he has, in acting, no other rule than his will, always direct in itself. (pp. 151–2)

Taking time, while also, of course, making time, God shows his mastery, his superiority over the creatures like the sun, that have no control over their power and simply spurt. Throughout the Discourse there are remarks that show God taking his time in ways that puzzle and frustrate humanity. God does ‘tout en son temps’ (p. 204). He sometimes punishes a crime right away but he often waits until much later, when the punishment is not expected. Sometimes he rewards good conduct but other times he seems to reward bad conduct, but this, throughout the Discourse, is shown to be a mistake in interpretation. The limited human understanding, which is not accustomed to the divine virtuosity in the play of time, is prone to fall into mistakes about causality by overemphasising temporal coordination. Corneille noted that Aristotle dealt with one aspect of these faulty causal inferences based on proximity in time: ‘There is a big difference . . . between events that come one after the other, and those that come because of one another.’20 The mistake in question concerns things that happen in rapid succession and create the impression of the cause and effect that belongs to creatures, like the sun itself, which behave with a ‘blind impetuosity’ whereas God can establish causal linkages in any direction and at any rhythm. This is why divine history can be written before it happens – that is, before it appears in human consciousness. Of the prophets, Bossuet says, ‘They all wrote in advance the history of the son of God’ (p. 193). In the Sermon on Providence, Bossuet had already tightly associated the appearance of disorder and chance with the human experience of time when he spoke of ‘all these events that time seems to unfold with such a strange uncertainty’ (p. 115). Time, for God, is merely a way to signify, though nothing assures us that this is its only purpose. It can also be the medium of concealment, since with perfect foresight, people would not do the things that collectively serve the divine purpose. To return to the case of Nebuchadnezzar, the king did not see his fall coming. Kings rarely do. The Jews also did not often see things coming and sometimes did not see things that had already come, despite the prophets. On returning from Babylon: The people weep over . . . the misdeeds that had drawn upon them these great punishements and recognize that Moses had predicted them. All together read

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 148

07/10/2011 08:08

The God of Suspense

149

in the holy books the threats of the man of God; they see these things coming to pass: Jeremy’s oracle, and the long promised return after the seventy years of captivity astonishes and consoles them. (p. 204)

They can recognise the accomplishment of the prophecies now that they have been fulfilled. Although the verb étonner did not simply mean surprise or astonish in Bossuet’s day – since it still had a closer connection to its etymology in ‘thunder’ than it does for us – it does convey the unexpected quality of what had happened. Does this mean that the Jews did not actually think that the prophecies would come to pass at all, and thus were cowed into docility by the amazement that the event had happened? Or does it mean that they did not think that the prophecy would be fulfilled after seventy years? It seems that the effect of the accomplishment of a prophecy is to crystallise time, to give sharpness to what had been formless, close to mush. The return to Jerusalem was an event, and for Bossuet the quality of an event is to be precise: the Bible brings us to God by ‘so many precise events, and by the very sequence of things’ (p. 150). For the chosen people of the Old Testament, the prophecies were an attempt to give to the blurry contours of the world an occasional sharp frame. Bossuet returns constantly to a dual and parallel contrast. The first contrast concerns history as lived and history as told and studied. Within a strictly human perspective, that is one available even to the impious people against whom he preaches in the Sermon on Providence, it is clear that hindsight, an accumulation of information not available to most participants in historical events, and the playing-out of subsequent events so as to reveal consequences will give a different vision, an apparently clearer vision, than the one that was available to the personages of history. As a recent article on history and causality in Bossuet has put it, ‘History is the site of an unstable composition of forces with results at the same time perfectly rational – to such an extent that they appear after the fact as inevitable – and perfectly amazing, because what happens always turns itself against what produced it.’21 The second of the parallel contrasts concerns the human vision of history – at whatever moment, close-up or from further away – and the transcendent vision of the author of history. That final vision is hidden from all humans, short of a particular, prophetic, revelation. In concluding the Discours, Bossuet says of history as a whole: It is thus that God rules over all the nations. Let us no longer speak of chance or fortune; or let us speak of them only as of a name with which we cover our ignorance. What is chance in relation to our uncertain plans is a design put together in a higher plan, that is, in the eternal plan that contains all the

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 149

07/10/2011 08:08

150

The Phantom of Chance

causes and all the effects in a single order. In this way all converges on the same end; and it is for lack of understanding of the whole that we find chance or irregularity in individual encounters. (p. 428)

Human beings, however, live life in ‘individual encounters’ [rencontres particulières], not perched above history in sight of the vast picture and with knowledge of the providential order. If hasard is the term with which human beings cover their ignorance, then even the people of God live their lives in a world that appears to be nothing but the work of chance, unpredictable things that surprise us. In the ‘Funeral Oration for Henriette d’Angleterre’ (1670), Bossuet links surprise to vanity: ‘Oh vanity, oh nothingness ! Oh mortals ignorant of their fates! Would she have believed, ten months ago, that she would so soon bring you all together to weep over her?’22 Knowing this, we are not surprised to find that surprise itself is one of the main concepts within the narrative of the Discourse on Universal History. Forms of the verb étonner and of the noun étonnement occur more than twice as often as the word ‘Providence’ itself – in fact, ‘Providence’ and ‘confusion’ are, in lexical terms, in equilibrium.23 Sometimes, astonishment (étonnement) serves to impress upon mankind God’s sovereign power, as in Moses’s depiction of the miracles that saved the Jews from the Egyptians: The God whom he showed us has a far greater power: he can make and unmake whatever he wishes; he gives laws to nature and overthrows them when he wishes. If to make himself known in the time when most of mankind had forgotten him, he performed astonishing miracles and forced nature to exceed its most constant laws, he continued in this way to show that he was the absolute master and that his will is the only link that maintains the order of the world. (p. 163)

God creates both stability and confusion, and these two states or modes of mankind’s experience of the world are interdependent and used by God at will. If there were no laws, that is no observable regularities in the way the non-human world functioned (the sun, the stars, the wind, the seas, the seasons, the plants), then mankind would actually not experience confusion. There would be no disorder, since there would be no order from which to derive the concept of disorder and to experience it. There would also be no chance (hasard) because the dialectic of predictability and surprise within which people experience chance would not exist. Bossuet analyses this relation of order and disorder with care, noting how the early people of the Bible misinterpreted an excessive stability in the natural order. It caused them to forget the power that lay behind the order:

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 150

07/10/2011 08:08

The God of Suspense

151

This is precisely what men had forgotten: the stability of such a beautiful order only served to persuade them that this order had always existed and that it existed by itself; thus they were inclined to adore the world in general, or the stars, the elements, and finally all these great bodies that comprise the world. God thus gave proof to humankind of a goodness worthy of Him, by overthrowing on remarkable occasions that order, which not only no longer impressed them, because they had grown accustomed to it, but which, such was their blindness, even made them imagine eternity and independence outside of God. (p. 163)

Blindness and forgetfulness are so frequent in the Biblical narrative as to constitute the normal condition of humanity. God is not only the demiurge but also a dramaturge insofar as he creates spectacle with many of the same tools as the ordinary human playwright. To make mankind see, Bossuet’s God needs to create that effect so prized among seventeenth-century dramatic theorists, wonder – la merveille or le merveilleux.24 The account of divine spectacle given here parallels profane poetics insofar as both depend on a careful and unforeseeable equilibrium between the ordinary functioning of things – the plausible, the explicable, the normal – and some stunning departure from the norm, something that the onlookers will be tempted to consider a matter of chance, something that seems to happen without a reason, as the Greeks ‘attributed to chance [hasard], according to human habit, effects for which the causes were not known’ (p. 409). Or, to put it in a different way, the sudden departure from ordinary causality fits into the story, it happens appropriately. Because the ordinary modes of human perception are blindness and confusion, surprise can be, in the divine plan, a way of conveying truth. The crystallising effect of events is often related to their power to surprise and to break through the veil of the banal and the random. The Crucifixion has this effect, even independently of the Resurrection: At the cross, He considers in the prophecies what remains for Him to do; he accomplishes it and says finally: All is consumated. At this word, all changes in the world; the law ends, its figures pass away, its sacrifices are abolished by a more perfect offering. That done, Jesus Christ expires with a great cry; all nature is moved; the centurion who guarded Him, astonished at such a death, cries out that He was truly the son of God; and the onlookers turn away beating their chests. (p. 231)

The centurion can only know the appearances – Bossuet in no way attributes to him a knowledge of the prophecies and their accomplishment – but he recognises that there is something out of the ordinary, something spectacular, something inexplicable to him except through the son-of-God hypothesis. This description of the crucifixion as

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 151

07/10/2011 08:08

152

The Phantom of Chance

surprising had already appeared in the ‘Sermon on the Passion of Our Lord’ as ‘this spectacle that astonishes all of human nature’.25 Throughout the Discourse, surprise and its opposite, ‘unsurprise’, are intertwined. Unsurprise, the lack of surprise, is a somewhat unusual concept for which we have no adequate term. Complacency, indifference, apathy or disinterest do not describe the attitude that Bossuet seeks to impart to his readers, because the occasions about which they should not be surprised are, he implies, surprising, and it is precisely this ability to resist surprise that demonstrates the reader’s passage from the domain of appearances to the vast panoptic vision of God’s design. Therefore we read of David’s prophetic visions, full of the upheavals to come in his line: David, who saw these things, recognized, when he saw them, that his son’s kingdom was not of this world. He is not surprised, for he knows that the world passes; and a prince always so humble on the throne saw clearly that a throne was not a goal at which his hopes should end. (p. 190)

The action of not being surprised is a form of surprise at the second degree. It is surprising that David was not surprised at the things that would surprise everyone else. But just as the function of surprise is to allow truth to penetrate, exceptionally, through the veil of confusion, so David’s lack of surprise is surprising only to the reader who has not yet grasped, as David has, that everything is perfectly organised. There are many things that did not surprise David, just as there are many things that do not surprise the ordinary person. But unsurprise is only worth noting when it occurs in the face of the extraordinary. This is the case in Bossuet’s writing, where a firm grasp of the providential order evacuates surprise: ‘After the establishment of this new kingdom, one should not be surprised if all perished in Judah. The second temple had no usefulness since the Messiah had accomplished what was marked in the prophecies’ (p. 249). It is certain that the inhabitants of Judah must have been surprised by what Bossuet calls ‘this last frightening desolation of the Jews’ (p. 249), but in hindsight and with Bossuet’s clear understanding of God’s plan one must not be surprised. To understand the causes of a surprising thing should eliminate the surprise, just as to understand the causes of a chance incident should eliminate the perception of chance. Bossuet’s rhetorical and didactic activity is therefore a campaign that invokes chance but as a phantom that must be dispelled so that we do not believe that ‘our life is only a game ruled by chance’.26 The mark of the impious is not simply an absence of belief in God’s redemptive plan but rather the contrary and active belief in the existence of chance.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 152

07/10/2011 08:08

The God of Suspense

153

Racine’s Tragedy of Errors: Athalie The impious queen of Racine’s Athalie (1691), a Biblical tragedy that may have been inspired by passages of Bossuet’s Discourse, loses her faith – that is, she loses her faith in chance. Her abandonment of the idea of chance may well have led to her defeat and death at the hands of the partisans of the divine plan that Bossuet adduced from Scripture. The idea of chance appears as a hypothesis concerning the central motivating event of the plot, Athalie’s dream. In the second act she tells her dream to Abner, the Jewish general who is both religiously observant and loyal to Athalie as the reigning queen and to Mathan, the conniving courtier and Jewish apostate who serves as the chief priest of Baal, Athalie’s god. The account of the dream appears in a long monologue that is divided in two by Abner’s exclamation ‘Grand Dieu!’ upon hearing the first details of her nightmare. The first part of this monologue summarises Athalie’s great success as monarch of Judah. She has brought peace to Jerusalem. Neither the Philistines nor the Arabs bother the residents of Judah. The Syrian ruler treats her with respect, and she has even found a way to keep the hostile king of Israel, Jehu, occupied with battles elsewhere so that he no longer threatens Judah. Despite these real, demonstrable achievements, she has been troubled for several days by a dream. In the first part of this dream she sees her mother, Jezebel, who expresses her pity for Athalie, who has, according to her mother, fallen prey to the God of the Jews: ‘Le cruel Dieu des Juifs l’emporte aussi sur toi. / Je te plains de tomber dans ses mains redoutables’ (II. 5. 498–9) [The cruel Jewish God over you too / Prevails. You’ll fall into his dreaded arms . . .]. When Athalie tries to embrace her mother she grasps only bones, sullied flesh and torn body parts – it is this description that provokes Abner’s exclamation, a cry that can be seen both as simple expression of shock and horror and as a way for the dramatist to signal to his audience that this vision is a manifestation of the power of God. But the part of the dream that precedes this interruption is only the prelude to the presentation of the bait that leads Athalie into the trap that is the basis of the plot of Athalie. In the midst of this ‘disorder’ – the fragments of her mother – Athalie sees a beautiful boy dressed in the white linen of the Jewish priests. While she admires his sweet, noble, and modest appearance she feels him stab her in the chest. Embarrassed to be bothered by a mere dream, she tells Abner and Mathan: De tant d’objets divers le bizarre assemblage Peut-être du hasard vous paraît un ouvrage. Moi-même quelque temps honteuse de ma peur Je l’ai pris pour l’effet d’une sombre vapeur. (vv. 315–18)

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 153

07/10/2011 08:08

154

The Phantom of Chance

[This mixtue of such strange and diverse things May seem the work of mere coincidence. I myself for a time, shamed of my fear, Rejected it as sombre fantasy.]27

Athalie herself sees that an observer – someone who had not actually dreamed this dream – would consider it a chance occurrence. She even designates the elements that make it appear the work of chance: it is an ‘assembly’ or concatenation of things that do not seem to belong together, things that do not belong to the same categories and seem not to be linkable into a narrative with a sequence of causes and effects. The encounter of the dream objects is ‘bizarre’, a necessary though not sufficient condition for an incident to be perceived as the result of chance. As a rational person, Athalie looks for a natural explanation of the dream, and she finds a good hypothesis in the ‘vapour’ that would tie the dream to simple, random, bodily processes. Having stated herself the chance hypothesis, Athalie proceeds to argue against it by using one of the most traditional of anti-chance arguments: repetition. If something happens once, it can be considered a coincidence, a misfire, an exception, and thus unpredictable and non-systematic. But if something happens several times in a row, then that incident takes on the status of a process in its own right. The magic number for this confirmation seems to be three, and that is exactly what happens in Athalie’s dream: Mais de ce souvenir mon âme possédée A deux fois en dormant revu la même idée. Deux fois mes tristes yeux se sont vu retracer Ce même Enfant toujours prêt à me percer. (vv. 519–22) [But yet by this same vision haunted still, Twice as I slept it came to me in dreams, And twice my harrowed eyes were visited By the same child ready to piece my heart.]

Her own obsession with the child has produced for her an argument against his appearance by chance. Racine has carefully constructed Athalie’s monologue so that, objectively speaking, there is no reason to suppose that Athalie has received a message of any supernatural kind. The force of the first vision has simply set her thoughts into a cycle of repetition (mon âme possédée) guaranteeing the reappearance of the frightening vision. And in the logic of a world entirely dominated by the concept of vengeance – even God is presented as ‘le Dieu des vengeances’ (v. 1471) [the God of Vengeance] – Athalie’s previous murder of her own children and grandchildren can easily explain her apprehension of a revenge directed back at herself. However, it is Athalie’s all-too-human inability to accept that the dream may have occurred by chance that

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 154

07/10/2011 08:08

The God of Suspense

155

leads to her undoing. In her agitation she rushes to the Jewish temple and sees the same child who appeared in her dream. Athalie represents a world in which there are real plots and false plots, natural causality, and the hypotheses of chance and divine providence. The real plot – plot in the sense of conspiracy or secretly organised enterprise – is Joad’s plan to reveal to the oppressed and fearful Jews that there is a surviving royal heir of David’s line. This heir is the child Joas, secretly rescued from Athalie’s massacre of her own children and all the other descendants of the royal line of Judah. Joad has apparently chosen the feast of Shavuot or Pentecost to make this fact known, and he has amassed a large store of arms, increased the number of temple personnel and given them military training in view of this moment. This conspiracy within the play is based, as Georges Forestier has shown, on one of the most popular dramatic works of Racine’s day, Corneille’s Héraclius, empereur d’Orient (1647).28 In both plays, a usurper has apparently killed all of the legitimate heirs to the throne, and when the surviving heir is revealed, he triumphs by the immediate assent of the people (in Héraclius) or by the assent of the influential loyal remnant (in Racine’s play). Racine’s adaptation of this model adds, in terms of plot and perception of plot, so many additional layers that Athalie is arguably both the most complex and ambitious, yet one of the easiest seventeenth-century plays to follow. This is because Joad’s conspiracy is reduced to the minimum (he has David’s heir, a strong building and a secret garrison of Levites) while the complex questions that unfold before the spectator’s eyes all concern human perception of God’s action in the world or the lack thereof. Racine’s play is a masterpiece of Providentialist tragedy that corresponds faithfully to Bossuet’s presentation of this doctrine in his Discourse on Universal History of ten years earlier. And the central thread of Providentialism that binds the two works together is the insistence that the way Providence works is not through miraculous suspension of the laws of nature or of human choice but by allowing human beings to carry out unwittingly the intentions of God. This is why, as Forestier says, Athalie is actually the primary agent of her own undoing. If she had not reacted as she did to her dream, Joad’s plotting would have had no effect, at least not on this feast day with its dramatic and, in fact, spectacular result: ‘Racine completely reversed the perspective of Biblical history by assigning the entire initiative for the action to Athalie and her accomplice Mathan.’29 In Bossuet’s Discourse, God’s invisible action in the Old Testament inevitably involves human error, whether on the part of the Jews or of their enemies or both. Erreur is one of the key words in Athalie. It

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 155

07/10/2011 08:08

156

The Phantom of Chance

appears with great emphasis as the last verse of the chorus concluding act II: ‘Ô dangereuse erreur!’ (v. 846) [Dangerous misreckoning!]. Here the error is that of the ‘guilty race’ of those who do not believe in the law of the Jewish God. They will, in eternity, looking backward, recognise the vanity of their pleasures during life, and these will appear to them as ‘Ce qui reste d’un songe / Dont on a reconnu l’erreur’ (vv. 835–6). [This remnant of a dream, / That one has recognized as error].30 Error is thus associated with the passage of time and the point of view of human beings whose perception is, in the moment, limited but who may, retrospectively, discover the truth. The work of error appears, in fact, in the first scene of the play, when the faithful but discouraged Jewish general Abner describes God’s absence from the world, his apparent abandonment of the Jewish people: Dieu même, disent-ils, s’est retiré de nous. De l’honneur des Hébreux autrefois si jaloux, Il voit sans intérêt leur grandeur terrassée, Et sa miséricorde à la fin s’est lassée. On ne voit plus pour nous ses redoutables mains De merveilles sans nombre effrayer les humains. L’Arche sainte est muette et ne rend plus d’oracles. (vv. 97–103) [‘God has withdrawn himself from us,’ they say. ‘God, once so jealous of the Jews’ fair name, Beholds unmoved their power now laid low. His patience has at last been wearied, and No longer do his dreaded hands for us Terrify man with marvels numberless. The Ark is mute, and gives no oracles.’]

The chief priest, Joad, immediately delivers a spirited rebuttal, arguing that God has never more actively intervened in the world through miracles and merveilles. The problem, as Joad presents it, is that the ungrateful Jewish people, Abner apparently included among them, simply do not see what is, or should be, manifest: ‘Auras-tu donc toujours des yeux pour ne point voir / Peuple ingrat?’ (vv. 106–7) [Always will you have eyes that never see? / Ungrateful race!]. On Abner’s departure, Joad announces that the time has come to put an end to the situation in which God’s ‘profond silence’ (v. 168) serves as the basis for claims that the divine promises to the people are false, that is that these promises are erreur: Des ennemis de Dieu la coupable insolence Abusant contre lui de ce profond silence, Accuse trop longtemps ses promesses d’erreur. (vv. 167–9) [The guilty insolence of God’s enemies,

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 156

07/10/2011 08:08

The God of Suspense

157

Profiting from this silence, has accused Too long His promise of deceitfulness.]

The first two scenes indicate clearly what is at stake in the tragedy as a whole. Joad, as representative of Jewish orthodox faith, needs to satisfy the need of the people for some proof that God is still leading them, through the course of the ages, toward the future glory of the House of David. In this context, erreur denotes a false belief or assertion but connotes wandering and recalls the forty years of the Jewish people seeking their way in the wilderness. As a tragedy that constitutes in large part a meditation on history, this emphasis on error reminds us that the shape of history, the sequence of events, causes and effects, and, indeed, in the simplest sense what is going on – these things are not clear to the people who are in the midst of those events that we call history or that we recount as history. God is, in Racine’s tragedy, profoundly and duplicitously linked with error. It is tempting to suppose that a simple dichotomy would do: God versus error. But this tragedy shows something more complex. First of all, God creates error, or permits it. Assuming the existence of an omnipotent God, He could eliminate the error to which Abner and most of the rest of the Jewish people are prey. Joad, immediately after asserting that God has never produced more miracles, admits to Josabet that there is, indeed, a ‘deep silence’ on His part that provides an argument for the enemy to claim that God’s promises are themselves a kind of error. God therefore creates the conditions that, as He knows, will lead to the error that either the Jewish God does not exist, is powerless or has turned away from the Jews. However, in Joad’s view God does not simply allow error to exist, He actually can and should create it. This appears in Joad’s prayer : Daigne, daigne, mon Dieu, sur Mathan et sur elle, Répandre cet esprit d’imprudence et d’erreur, De la chute des Rois funeste avant-coureur. (I. 2. 292–4) [Deign, Lord, on Mattan and on her to set The seal of blindness and of recklessness – Those fateful heralds of the fall of kings.]

Prudence is widely regarded as the proper choice of actions in view of past experience, a sense of usual results: ‘With the ancient is wisdom; and in length of days understanding’.31 People who are imprudent do not, then, pay enough attention to the probable outcome of actions; they take excessive risks. Imprudent people do not do things that always or necessarily lead to a bad outcome – that would be stupidity, selfdestructiveness, masochism – but they foreground the outcome that they

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 157

07/10/2011 08:08

158

The Phantom of Chance

wish for rather than the outcome that they fear. They put themselves in situations in which accidents happen. Second, the nature of the dispute about God is determined by the type of truth asserted. Joad and Abner, among others, repeatedly insist that what God has told the Jews concerns what is coming; He has made a series of promises and predictions, and these seem to recede tantalisingly into the future. Abner asks Joad: Mais où sont ces honneurs à David tant promis, Et prédits même encore à Salomon son fils? (vv. 129–30) [But where are all these honours held in store For David, and for Solomon, his son?]

This forward-looking characteristic of Jewish perception of history is mocked by their enemies. Athalie asks Josabet: Ce Dieu depuis longtemps votre unique refuge, Que deviendra l’effet de ses prédictions? Qu’il vous donne ce Roi promis aux Nations, Cet Enfant de David, votre espoir, votre attente . . . (vv. 732–5) [This God, your only refuge, for so long, What will His prophecies avail you now? Let him but give you this much-promised king, This son of David’s line in whom you hope.]

Conversations about God, and thus about the nature of reality, split here into two tenses: the past, when promises were made, and the future, when they may be realised or may prove to be a source of error. The problem, for Joad, is that the present does not fit the past and future. Or rather, the problem for Joad is that the other Jews are testing the past promise against the present and beginning to defect from the temple over which Joad presides. This problem seems to be inherent in the nature of the Jewish God and the Jewish identity, as represented by Racine. This is the hidden God of a doubting people. Error is not only important in Athalie, it is, as we know, a crucial concept in the theory of tragedy as outlined by Aristotle in his Poetics, where it appears as hamartia, commonly defined as ‘a failure, fault, sin’.32 This term is both central and highly controversial in the commentaries on the Poetics. D. W. Lucas, in the notes to his important edition, argues vigorously against readings of hamartia in the Poetics as ‘flaw’, writing that ‘there are few, if any, passages where “flaw” is a justifiable rendering’ but that the term signifies instead ‘error’: ‘A[ristotle] is fairly consistent in using it in the sense of “mistake”, either unavoidable and so entirely innocent, or involving at most a moderately culpable negligence.’33 Hamartia, as Lucas points out, is ‘closely connected with the

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 158

07/10/2011 08:08

The God of Suspense

159

kind of ignorance of identity’ discussed by Aristotle in Poetics 14. We know that as a young man, Racine read the Poetics with care and in Greek, but his few notes do not include a comment on hamartia. On the other hand, Racine’s chief dramatic model, a writer whose influence was decisive for the construction of Athalie, as Georges Forestier has shown, was Pierre Corneille, and the latter made it clear that he understood hamartia as meaning simple mistake, such as misrecognition of a person: ‘The meaning of the Greek word hamartema may include a simple failure of recognition, such as [that of Œdipus].’34 It is remarkable to see the growing importance of error (erreur) in Racine’s tragedy in the course of his brief career. The word appears once in Alexandre le Grand (1665) and in Andromaque (1667), but seven times in Phèdre (1677) and five in Athalie. Error, in Racine’s tragedies, appears as simple ignorance or miscalculation or even as accident. In Britannicus, Aggripine recalls with chilling frankness her manipulation of the senescent emperor Claudius, whom she tricked into naming Néron as his heir. Only too late did Claudius recognise his ‘error’ (IV. 2. 1174–7). Error has increasing importance in Racine’s tragedies as his career moves forward, and error is a concept on which Aristotelian poetics and Bossuet’s scriptural exegetics converge. Athalie is a tragedy ‘drawn from Sacred Scripture’. As a ‘tragedy’ in the seventeenth- century sense it must concern the downfall of a hero. As Racine paraphrases the Poetics with approval in the preface to Andromaque, ‘Aristotle, far from requiring perfect heros, demands on the contrary that the tragic characters, that is, those whose misfortune constitutes the conclusion of the tragedy, be neither entirely good nor entirely wicked.’35 To whom could such a description apply in Athalie if not Athalie herself? Neither Joas nor Joad are portrayed as having this ‘middling goodness’ [bonté médiocre];36 they are on the contrary both of unalloyed virtue, even if Joad is rather rude and unbending. The only characters who suffer a downfall at the end of the play, the catastrophe, are Athalie and Mathan. The latter is entirely evil and selfserving (though skilled and charming) and is also relatively minor. By this process of subtraction, we have only Athalie. It may be difficult to think of Athalie as the ‘heroine’ of the tragedy because her defeat is such a cause of rejoicing on the part of the characters who represent the religious tradition from which the highly official, established French Catholic Church of Racine’s day was descended. The monarch who sponsored this play, the religious school for girls in which it was performed, the orthodoxy of Racine’s presentation of Biblical material – all these things argue for the audience’s predisposition in favour of the triumph of Joad and Joas and against Athalie. It

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 159

07/10/2011 08:08

160

The Phantom of Chance

is not unheard of to centre a tragedy on a character who is frightening and, perhaps, unsympathetic. Corneille’s Médée is one such work and, depending on one’s judgement with regard to the assignment of the central role, this may also be the case for the same author’s Rodogune, in which Queen Cléopâtre has a certain resemblance to Athalie. Yet Racine seems to have taken steps to endow Athalie with some of the characteristics of an Aristotelian hero in the most strict and demanding sense: someone who is neither all good nor all bad but somewhere in between and who suffers a downfall not because of a crime but because of a simple mistake. Althalie’s self-presentation in the monologue that includes her account of her dream offers the first major element of this rehabilitation of a potentially monstrous character. She has had military and diplomatic triumphs that assure peace and prosperity to the people of Judah, (v. 476) and the people are not in a state of revolt, so that while she may be hateful from Joad’s point of view, she benefits from the Jews’ oubli fatal – ‘fatal forgetfulness’ – of their religious tradition (v. 17). Finally, and most importantly, she shows an apparently sincere benevolence toward the orphan Éliacin and an ordinary, human empathy for human childhood when she talks with him in act II and suggests that he would have more fun if he lived in her palace rather than in the temple. Finally, and most problematically in terms of the creation of a ‘middling’ character, there is Athalie’s religious tolerance. She tells Éliacin that if he comes to live with her he can continue to worship the Jewish God while she worships her God, Baal. To a modern European audience this acceptance of religious pluralism will appear as a positive trait in Athalie as character and as monarch.37 However, it is much more difficult to calculate its impact (or Racine’s intent) within the historical moment of Athalie. The play was performed before Louis XIV just six years after the Edict of Fontainebleau, commonly called the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which ended precisely the kind of religious tolerance that Athalie embodies. The return of a strictly enforced state religion is often said to have resulted from the influence of Mme de Maintenon, founder and director of the school of Saint-Cyr itself. Moreover, the young women of the school of Saint-Cyr, who were performing the play, were themselves orphans, brought to the school for an intensely Catholic education. It is unlikely that Athalie’s tolerance would have seemed positive to this audience. However, would Athalie’s pluralism have been considered a defect by a broader sampling of French people at this time? Would it have seemed a flaw to Racine, reconciled with Port-Royal, despite the king’s continued campaign against the Jansenists?38 We could venture the idea that Athalie’s willingness to permit the continued worship of

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 160

07/10/2011 08:08

The God of Suspense

161

the Hebrew God alongside Baal was meant to place her firmly in a middling position, insofar as she did not announce the intention to kill all Jewish worshippers, unlike such other seventeenth-century French tragic tyrants as Diocletian in Rotrou’s Saint-Genest, for whom the mere fact of being a Christian entailed torture and death. Athalie is the most intense and pure example of the closed nature of Racine’s scenic space. Nero’s dark, labyrinthine palace in Britannicus and the seraglio of Bajazet seem almost diffuse next to the insistence on the completely enclosed, sacred space of Joad’s temple. This effect derives in part from the fact that in Athalie the scenic space, within the temple, is a space that outsiders try to penetrate. This sought-after but reserved centre thus differs from the space of the imperial palace and the seraglio, which are primarily prisons from which people would like to escape. The temple is the place where, according to Joad, life is at its fullest and this plenitude differs from the space of the two other tragedies where the scenic space seems to be the place from which life has been sucked out, a place where people come to die. The powerful and highly satisfying dramatic effect of the space in Athalie is the reversal that occurs at the very end, when the place Athalie seeks to enter turns into a trap from which she cannot escape. The delicious dramatic irony of this anticipated reversal corresponds to the perfect match of scenic arrangement and Athalie’s psychic entrapment by the desire for the beautiful but homicidal child who is encased within the temple. This characteristically closed space of Athalie is important within the poetics of chance in the seventeenth century precisely because of the contrast with the openness of romance and of tragi-comedy that invites chance (Chapter 1, p. 38). This scenic space gives physical embodiment to the air-tight plotting of the high priest. Joad knows and controls its every passageway, chamber and door. The temple thus seems to bring to a conclusive apogee a tragic poetics from which chance is excluded in favour of exhaustive control. Athalie, thus, at the end of Racine’s career as playwright, seems resoundingly to confirm his reputation as the dramaturge who most consistently and completely excludes chance from the structure of his works. As John Campbell has written, ‘Of all the great tragedies in world literature that are still performed and read, those of Racine are commonly presented as deliberately logical structures, pieces of intricate dramatic clockwork in which chance has no place.’39 However, what happens in Athalie is that Racine has cleverly played the rejection of the chance hypothesis against chance itself. The fundamental incident that is the single crucial element of the plot seems entirely explicable by chance: Joas’s survival during the massacre of

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 161

07/10/2011 08:08

162

The Phantom of Chance

the house of David several years before the play begins. He survives because of two entirely contingent happenings. First, Athalie, in her fury, had failed to verify that all of Ochosias’s offspring were dead and, second, Josabet just happened to notice that there was one infant still moving. This evacuation of the chance event outside the play and into the precursor events is entirely consistent with the handling of chance in Racine’s practice, as Campbell notes. But the purely fortuitous nature of this earlier event is thrust into the shadows by the foregrounding of chance within Athalie’s own thinking. By rejecting the idea that her dream was the result of chance, Athalie doomed herself to the pursuit of Joas and increased the probability of error in her conduct. If she had accepted that the dream was simply a random assemblage of images, she might have continued to behave as a prudent, albeit ruthless, sovereign. God is represented in Racine’s play, as in Bossuet’s Discourse, as duplicitous. This is not an adjective these authors apply, but the quality of a confusing doubleness appears in Athalie and in the Discourse on Universal History as characteristic of God’s action in the world. This duplicity is, to be sure, a way to describe the imperfect human apprehension of what God has done, is doing and intends to do. Put another way, God’s providence always prevails no matter what happens. Therefore the set of alternatives that humans construct to explain what providence does always contains a false option that can be known to be false, by believers, only after the event. For instance, Athalie’s downfall and death at the end of the play is an effect of God’s providence, from the point of view of Joad and probably from the point of view of the original audience of the tragedy. However, had Athalie triumphed, destroyed the temple and killed Joas this would also have been a result of God’s providence and could be integrated without difficulty into the worldview represented by Joad and the chorus. As Bossuet showed, it was due to God’s providence that the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in order to punish the Jews for their faithlessness. Racine carefully prepared the basis for such a possible outcome in Athalie, where only a small group of Jews remain faithful to the sacred traditions. Joad combats both Athalie and the majority of Jews who support her, as Abner notes at the start of the play: D’Adorateurs zélés à peine un petit nombre Ose des premiers temps nous retracer quelque ombre. Le reste pour son Dieu montre un oubli fatal (I. 1. 15–17) [The merest handful of the faithful dares Bring back for us, how faintly, former times. The others are forgetful of their God.]

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 162

07/10/2011 08:08

The God of Suspense

163

God’s justice is constantly ready to strike down the Jews, who, one way or another, seem to deserve punishment (a view that both Bossuet and the partisans of Port-Royal extended to include Christians).40 Josabet fears for the safety of Joas himself (v. 236). The belief in God’s intention to punish the Jews and the corresponding belief in his intention to protect them are threaded through the refrains of the chorus, as in this perfectly balanced set of replies: [Une voix seule] Sion ne sera plus. Une flamme cruelle Détruira tous ses ornements. [Une autre voix] Dieu protège Sion. Elle a pour fondements Sa parole éternelle. (III. 8. 1216–19) [A Voice Zion will be no more. A cruel flame Will raze its temples to the ground. A second voice God watches over Zion. And it rests Upon His everlasting word.]

There is an equilibrium in the chorus’s presentation of God’s action or inaction, intention to punish or intention to protect, that has certain similarities to the individual positions of Josabet and Abner. Mathan seems, on the other hand, to work on the premise that a great number of things are determined by chance and that human cleverness can do the rest. Joad’s declarations all weigh energetically on the side of God’s plan to restore the Davidian line, strike down Athalie and all who support her, and place the majority of Jews, who are not loyal to the chief priest, under the latter’s coercive control (Ismaël announces in the last act that ‘the Jews submit’, V. 6. 1746). It is tempting to suppose that Athalie is on every point opposed to Joad but, as is often the case, the fiercest enmity occurs between people with similar beliefs. Though Athalie worships Baal and Joad worships simply ‘God’, both Joad and Athalie believe in the ability of the Jewish God to effect outcomes, and both see Him as working against Athalie. On the surface of things, there is no rationally defensible indication of the Jewish God’s intervention. One need be neither a sceptic nor a committed atheist to perceive the absence of signs of God’s actions in Athalie. By having Abner, Josabet and members of the chorus, all faithful Jews, express the view that God is silent and has apparently ceased to act on behalf of the Jews and ceased to communicate with them through oracles and events, Racine has produced a balanced view of the relation between immanent and transcendent

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 163

07/10/2011 08:08

164

The Phantom of Chance

causality. However much Joad’s party may be foregrounded in the play, Joad’s insistence on God’s plan to overthrow Athalie is not made an objective given the reality of the stage universe. On the other hand, there are two characters in Athalie who believe that God is actively working against Athalie: Joad and Athalie. The queen begins with a presentiment based on her dream and finishes with the deep conviction, as she exclaims in an apostrophe to the Jewish God, that everything that has happened was inexorably caused by his transcendent force: Impitoyable Dieu, toi seul as tout conduit. C’est toi, qui me flattant d’une vengeance aisée, M’as vingt fois en un jour à moi-même opposée. (I. 5. 1775–7) [Pitiless God ! yours was the guiding hand, You, who, with easy vengeance luring me, Set me against myself perpetually.]

At the denouement of the tragedy, the utter agreement between Joad and Athalie thus becomes explicit, particularly in the insistence on the total control of God over what happens. This is exactly Joad’s view of the ‘grands desseins de Dieu’ [‘God’s designs’] (v. 1268) on whose accomplishment he has been insisting since the first scene, when he rebukes Abner for thinking that God’s action on behalf of Israel was all in the past. In hearing Joad’s demonstration of God’s all-encompassing and unfailingly effective action on behalf of his people, one can understand Abner’s position as well as Joad’s. The difficulty for anyone who wishes to identify the events that God has brought about is that he has brought about everything, he has tout conduit, as Athalie finally recognises: . . . quel temps fut jamais si fertile en miracles? Quand Dieu par plus d’effets montra-t-il son pouvoir? Auras-tu donc toujours des yeux pour ne point voir, Peuple ingrat? Quoi toujours les plus grandes merveilles Sans ébranler ton cœur frapperont tes oreilles? Faut-il, Abner, faut-il vous rappeler le cours Des prodiges fameux accomplis en nos jours? Des Tyrans d’Israël les célèbres disgrâces, Et Dieu trouvé fidèle en toutes ses menaces; L’impie Achab détruit, et de son sang trempé Le champ que par le meurtre il avait usurpé [. . .] (I. 1. 104–14) [When did such miracles abound as now? When did God show his power by greater deeds? Always will you have eyes that never see? Ungrateful race! The greatest miracles Will strike your ears but never more your heart! Must I recall the wondrous prodigies, Abner, that in our days have come to pass –

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 164

07/10/2011 08:08

The God of Suspense

165

The well-known fate of Israel’s tyrants, and The Lord found true in all His menaces? Ahab destroyed and drenching with his blood The field that he by murder had usurped.]

For someone with the eyes of faith, everything that happens is not only the result of God’s action – this is a position that even many sceptical rationalists could easily adopt through a formulation such as ‘God is the name we give to the totality of causes’. Instead, for the faithful all that happens is a sign of God’s power, meant to communicate a message to the faithful, as well as a result of his intent. This totalising systematic world-view, which Athalie adopts in the antepenultimate scene of Athalie, could be described as a form of paranoia. ‘For the paranoid, nothing is accidental’, writes John Farrell in Paranoia and Modernity.41 Although the term ‘paranoia’ has existed only since the eighteenth century and has only taken on its current meaning in the last hundred years, it has recently been proposed as a term for describing large sectors of European culture and one that has particular pertinence for early modernity. Both in the broad sense as ‘an intellectually coherent and meaningful delusion’ and in the narrower ones of an ‘assault on agency’ and the ‘compulsive habit of seeking others whom we can hold responsible for our failures’, paranoia appears as an appropriate term to describe Athalie’s account of what has happened in the course of the tragedy.42 Paranoia, as Farrell and others have shown, need not be considered only as a personal pathology. Indeed, in certain respects it need not be judged as pathological at all, provided that it offers real advantages to an individual or to a group. Broadened to include Joad, paranoia becomes the crucial mode of action for both of the two central characters. Athalie exemplifies the more familiar paranoia of persecution, exculpating herself by attributing her downfall to God, while Joad manifests the empowering form of the same world-view. In constructing Athalie and Joad as the two visionary – or paranoid – characters, Racine took care to have both of them recount narratives of events that are available only to, and through, their own minds. For Athalie this is her dream; for Joad, it is the vision that comes upon him when he is with the chorus in act III, scene 7, when he exclaims ‘d’où vient que mon cœur frémit d’un saint effroi? / Est-ce l’Esprit divin qui s’empare de moi?’ [‘But why this sacred fear that grips my heart? / Is it the Spirit that comes over me?’ (vv. 1129–30). While fully engaged in bold and resourceful preparations for the eventual entrapment of Athalie, Joad shares with his adversary’s concluding declaration the conviction that all has been done by God, not by any human agency. This belief has the immediate and demonstrable advantage that it animates the high priest himself as

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 165

07/10/2011 08:08

166

The Phantom of Chance

well as his followers to take extreme risks that are rewarded. Abner’s more prudent approach, entirely based on observable phenomena and naturalistic cause and effect patterns, could never have produced the same revolutionary outcome. Accident and providence are the two poles of possible world-views in Racine’s Athalie, and both main characters choose the providential hypothesis over the accidental one. In view of the context in which Athalie appeared, only a decade after Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History under the attentive patronage of the same king, it is appropriate to see them both as manifestations of a movement of thought in favour of system and against chance. Significantly, Farrell’s study of paranoia and culture in modernity argues that the inclination to rationalise the imperfection of the world (that is to reject chance) is characteristic of Augustinian thought. In the attempt to reconcile the existence of evil, manifest not only in human actions but also in the imperfection of the world, with the doctrine of an omnipotent God, Augustine located evil in human will, not only in the will of the first parents of mankind but in the will of all subsequent humans. Original sin and the fall are, undeniably, the central tenets of Christianity in the seventeenth century and they were, arguably, emphasised more during that period than in any time before or since.43 Within the manifold implications of this doctrine, the thread that is most important for the understanding of history is the emphasis on God’s hidden action in the world. As we saw in Bossuet’s ‘Sermon on Providence’, the appearance of chance in the world is not due to chance nor is it a sign of God’s weakness or absence. Instead, God creates the appearance of chance just as a painter creates the perceptible distortions of an anamorphic painting. For those outside the family of believers – and this external group contains Jews and Christians as well as sceptics, pagans and atheists – the unshakeable confidence that the apparent disorder of the world is the coded sign of divine intent can appear as a form of delusion. Abner’s polite exasperation is one reaction in the face of the systematic belief in the totalising divine responsibility for all that is happening. Mathan’s chance-oriented view of history no doubt reflects the sceptical tradition that appeared so strongly in Montaigne, Charron, Naudé and others earlier in the century. Racine uses Mathan as the representative of the chance hypothesis. When Athalie tells her dream to Abner and Mathan, she apparently foresaw his sceptical reaction in the face of the importance that she assigned to her vision, when she says that the assemblage of these confused objects ‘Peut-être du hasard vous paraît un ouvrage’ [‘May seem the work of mere coincidence’] (v. 516). This is not the only point in

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 166

07/10/2011 08:08

The God of Suspense

167

the text where Mathan is associated with the idea of chance. In weighing options to deal with the unknown child in the temple, Mathan sees two possibilities. On the one hand, if the child is the offspring of noble parents, he is a threat and should be killed quickly. On the other hand, if the child is of humble birth, ‘Qu’importe qu’au hasard un sang vil soit versé?’ [‘What matter if base blood at random flows?’] (II. 6. 566). Thus Mathan opposes significance – the deserved death of an important child who presumably figures within some machination of human origin – to insignificance: the random death of a child who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mathan’s confident Nabal likewise supposes that Joas’s presence in the temple is simply the result of chance and draws the conclusion that the high priest will quickly surrender the infant, ‘un Enfant qu’ils ne connaissent pas, / Que le hasard peut-être a jeté dans leurs bras’ [‘a child that they do not know, / That chance, perhaps, has put into their hands’] (III. 3. 901). Mathan and his party appear throughout as entirely opportunistic sceptics, using their wits to survive and prosper in a world of deeply opposed believers. The over-used term Machiavellian is not entirely inappropriate to describe Mathan, with the reservation that Machiavelli concentrates on large configurations of chance – conjunctures – that can be identified with the spirit of the moment, whereas Mathan seems attentive to the minute random elements of everyday life. In the place of a doctrine, he has a practice, which consists of benefitting from the passions of the more systematic and engaged leaders of the centres of power in the world around him.44 Hence, however irrational he finds Athalie’s obsession with Joas, he sees that it is in his interest to encourage it in the hope that in the ensuing confrontation with Joad, the latter will be destroyed. In Mathan’s view, this approach takes advantage that the belief (or paranoia) of others offers to non-believers. Those who are behaving according to a plan that is immune to contradiction by experience will tend to be rigid and predictable and thus will expose themselves to the agility of the opportunist. Mathan rejoices, for example, in Joad’s obstinacy in defence of the child (III. 3. 904–7). From Mathan’s point of view, Joad’s resistance to Athalie’s royal command to turn the child over to her is not at all an obstacle to Mathan’s self-interest. He views both Athalie and Joad as being irrational insofar as they are wasting their time struggling over a mere child, perhaps even a random child. But this is all to the good for Mathan, since it allows him to advance his project of eliminating Joad and his religious opposition and of acquiring hegemony in the religious life of Judah. Mathan is fundamentally duplicitous. He cloaks his plotting against Joad in the consummate language of a court flatterer, a discourse of the

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 167

07/10/2011 08:08

168

The Phantom of Chance

type that La Rochefoucauld, La Fontaine and La Bruyère so repeatedly mock. He presents himself to Josabet as Joad’s benefactor and comes to the temple, he says, ‘chargé de paroles de paix’ [‘laden with words of peace’] (III. 4. 974). Meanwhile, he does what he can to profit from Athalie’s paranoid imaginings about the child in her dream. As soon as Abner is away, Mathan depicts for the queen a scenario suited to her worst fears, telling her ‘Quelque Monstre naissant dans ce Temple s’élève’ [‘Some budding monster in this temple lurks] (III. 6. 601–6). Throughout the play, Racine has skilfully allowed considerable ambiguity about Mathan’s real information about Joad’s activities, but it seems most likely that he has invented a conspiracy from whole cloth. In speaking with his confidant Nabal, Mathan recounts that he has told Athalie of inquiries he has supposedly made and of a plot that he claims to have discovered (III. 3. 889–91). This speech had, it appears, the intended effect of inflaming Athalie’s anger against Joad and Josabet. But was Mathan telling Athalie the truth? Had he really obtained the information that he claims to possess? In all probability, Mathan has simply tailored a story to suit the circumstance. One clue here is the expression ‘Ai-je dit’ [‘I told her’]. One of the conventions of seventeenth-century French theatre is that principal characters usually tell their confidants the truth – the confidant exists simply to avoid monologues, which were judged unrealistic in most circumstances. So Mathan is boasting to Nabal about his adroit fabrication of a plot that, as far as he knows, does not exist. This view is supported by the discrepancy between what we have seen for ourselves about Joad’s and Abner’s activities. Joad has been exceptionally discreet about Joas’s ancestry, not even telling Abner. And thought Abner did visit the temple earlier in the day, we know that he is completely unaware of Joad’s schemes and is, on the contrary, unconvinced by the high priest’s assurances that God continues to produce prodiges. Mathan, then, on this view, has seized upon Athalie’s fundamentally paranoid tendency: for her, nothing (concerning the child seen in the dream) is accidental. Her imagination has the capacity and the drive to integrate all observable data into a seamless sequence of cause and effect. Mathan supplies the necessary materials for this psychic activity instead of noting that Abner, as observant Jew, may have gone to the temple on this feast day out of piety, or may have been there by chance. Most crucially, within the logic of the tragedy as a whole, Mathan’s duplicity is a powerful example of divine duplicity at work. What Mathan does not know and, in a situation of dramatic irony, the audience does know is that there really is a plot taking place in the temple and Joas really is the key to that plot because of his ancestry. Mathan,

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 168

07/10/2011 08:08

The God of Suspense

169

then, thinks that he has duped Athalie by inventing a plot that fits perfectly with her delusional system. But what the audience realises is that Mathan’s efforts to incite Athalie require the representation of an actual plot of which he is ignorant. Finally, if we adopt Joad’s providentialist view of God’s action in the world, then Mathan’s opportunistic incitement of Athalie’s paranoid quest is precisely part of God’s plan to destroy Athalie by depriving her of her usual caution and leading her into the temple with only a small escort. In this way, the two paranoid or systematic visionaries are linked through their dependency on the chance-driven deceitful opportunist. Joad wins, but in a sense his win also validates Athalie’s vision. Both end by agreeing that the Jewish God has won. They were both fighting a fight that was framed from the outset as a fight for or against this God’s power. The real difference in world-view is between Mathan on the one hand and Joad and Athalie on the other. Although Mathan never falls himself into the trap of believing in a transcendent purpose and plan, his chance-based view of events dooms him as much as does the paranoid or systematic views of the two other main characters. Precisely because he does not think that there is really a plot in which Abner and Joad are collaborating, Mathan does not prepare to fight against it. He weaves a story that fits Athalie’s imagination, not knowing that he has unwittingly – by chance as it were – produced a slightly garbled version of Joad’s actual plot. Though believing in chance may be the rational thing to do in the absence of empirical evidence to the contrary, Mathan’s downfall is caused by his faithlessness – not his apostasy from the Jewish God but his infidelity to his central insight about chance. He plays with Athalie’s paranoia instead of dispelling it. Racine’s great achievement in Athalie is to reconcile the French Catholic providentialist outlook with neo-Aristotelian poetics by discerning the principal point of convergence: suspense. The importance of suspense in tragedy was an innovative contribution of seventeenthcentury poetics. A simple comparison of most sixteenth-century tragedies to tragedies from the middle of the seventeenth century shows that suspense was virtually non-existent in the works of the earlier century. This is not meant to imply that writers such as Jean de La Taille and Robert Garnier were unskilled in achieving suspense – it was simply not their aim. Corneille’s Three Discourses, in emphasising the importance of the ‘agréable suspension’, makes explicit what had already become routine in practice early in Corneille’s career.45 In the Abbé d’Aubignac’s Theatrical Practice (La Pratique du théâtre, 1657) the creation of suspense takes on even greater importance, particularly as evidenced by the chapter on the preparation of incidents.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 169

07/10/2011 08:08

170

The Phantom of Chance

The spectators see that the characters are caught up in actions that are leading them to some outcome but, if suspense works, the audience will, like the characters, be unsure of what is coming next. However, at the denouement, retrospectively all will seem to lead logically from one incident to the next. Thus a key part of the playwright’s art is to achieve the difficult balance between the preparation of an unavoidable, or at least plausible, outcome and the concealment of each step closer to that outcome: So one might say, if the incidents need to be prepared long before they occur, that they will be anticipated; and therefore they will no longer have the surprise that gives them all their grace, and thus the spectator will not have his pleasure nor the playwright his glory. To which I reply that there is a big difference between anticipating an incident and preparing it . . . [. . .]46

D’Aubignac’s solution to this problem leads to a strange encounter with Bossuet’s description of the working of providence. Bossuet, we recall, said that the appearance of disorder and chance in the world was like colours thrown randomly onto the canvas to create confusion (‘does it not seem that these colours have been splashed at random, just to mess up the canvas or the paper?’).47 D’Aubignac also chooses the metaphor of ‘colour’ to signify the playwright’s clever concealment of the causal pattern: There are certain things that should serve as the basis for producing others, according to the order of plausibility, and which would, however, give any indication of those others, not only because the subsequent things will not necessarily happen as a consequence of the earlier ones but also because the earlier ones are presented under pretexts and with such plausible colours, in keeping with the affairs of the moment, that the spectators’ minds are kept focused so that they don’t think that any other incident should follow from the one they witness.48

The well-made tragedy makes complete sense when it reaches its completion, yet along the way, it is not at all obvious what is coming next.49 This is how Bossuet describes the action of God in the world, particularly with reference to the experience of the Jews of the Old Testament. And this is how Racine’s Athalie works as well. Something is going to happen, either Athalie or Joad will win, and along the way even the most faithful of Joad’s followers are not sure how things will turn out. The God of Athalie, like the God of Bossuet’s history, is a God of suspense, and this view of God depends on a figure that Racine makes explicit in Athalie. Joad explains to Josabet that God is always about to strike: ‘Dieu, dont le bras vengeur, pour un temps suspendu, / Sur cette race impie est toujours étendu’ [‘God, whose avenging arm, though

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 170

07/10/2011 08:08

The God of Suspense

171

now withheld, / Is ever poised to strike this impious race’] (I. 2. 233–4). Through Joad, Racine sets forth a metaphor that has equal validity for the providentialist-historical and for the dramaturgic-tragic instances. God’s ‘withheld’ – or, rather, literally suspended – arm is going to strike sometime, and thus fear is linked with surprise and time. We know that some astonishing event is coming, and as time passes the apprehension – the suspense – increases.50 In Racine’s tragedy, as in Bossuet’s history, God’s plan is suspended over the people of Israel. This, at least, is the view of the believers. For the others, the unbelievers, accidents happen. The poetics of French tragedy, as theorised by d’Aubignac, Corneille and others, accentuated the need for suspense in the ordinary, modern sense of the term: ‘A state of mental uncertainty, with expectation of or desire for decision, and usually some apprehension or anxiety; the condition of waiting, esp. of being kept waiting, for an expected decision, assurance, or issue; less commonly, a state of uncertainty what to do, indecision: esp. in to keep (or hold) in (great or a great) suspense’ (OED). Racine’s Athalie earns its place in the canon of major French tragedies by the way it interweaves the plotting in the tragedy (by Joad) and the plotting of the tragedy (by Racine), and by the way it unites the waiting of the Jewish faithful with the expectation in the audience for a satisfying denouement. On both levels, the belief that there is a plan and therefore a true sequence of events opposes the thought or fantasy that there is no plan and that things may simply happen by chance.

Notes 1. Perrault, ‘Le Siècle de Louis le Grand’. 2. A glance at the MLA International Bibliography in 2009 shows a halfdozen articles. 3. Ferreyrolles, ‘L’Influence de la conception augustinienne’. 4. Orest Ranum, ‘Editor’s introduction’, Discourse on Universal History, p. xxx. 5. Ranum, ‘Introduction’, p. xxxv. 6. Ranum, ‘Introduction’. 7. Bossuet, Sermons: Le Carême du Louvre, ed. Cagnat-Deboeuf, p. 111. 8. Ferreyrolles, ‘Histoire et causalité chez Bossuet’, p. 190. See Thomas Aquinas, De providentia Dei, Summa Theologica, 1a, q. 22, a. 2, ad 1. 9. Bossuet, ‘Sermons: Le Carême du Louvre, ed. Cagnat-Debœuf, p. 113. 10. Bossuet here paraphrases Ecclesiastes 9. 11 and quotes portions thereof from the Vulgate. 11. G. Ferreyrolles notes with disapproval the criticism of Henri-Irénée Marrou ‘à l’adresse de Bossuet, accusé de prononcer de façon souveraine et arbitraire sur le sens ultime des événements et de trahir ainsi le mystère de

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 171

07/10/2011 08:08

172

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

The Phantom of Chance l’histoire, qui s’origine dans l’impénétrabilité divine comme dans la liberté des hommes’ (‘Histoire et causalité chez Bossuet’, p. 186). Ferreyrolles, ‘Histoire et causalité chez Bossuet’, p. 186. See Genette, ‘L’or tombe sous le fer’. Ranum, ‘Introduction’, p. xxx. Bossuet, ‘Oraison funèbre de Henriette-Anne d’Angleterre’, in Sermons et Oraisons funèbres, pref. Crépu, p. 262. ‘Louis’s sexual vices could cause God to award victory to the Dutch!’ (Ranum, ‘Introduction’, p. xxviii). Cf. the case of Manasseh, who married a Samaritan woman and adopted her religion (Bossuet, Discours, p. 86). Cf. Pascal, S.318. Ranum ‘Introduction’, pp. xxvii and xxv. Bossuet, ‘Oraison funèbre de Henriette-Marie de France’, in Sermons et oraisons funèbres, p. 234. Corneille, Discours des trois unités, p. 135. Ferreyrolles, ‘Histoire et causalité chez Bossuet’, p. 188. Bossuet, ‘Oraison funèbre de Henriette-Anne d’Angleterre’, in Sermons et Oraisons funèbres, p. 261. ‘Providence’ occurs twenty times and ‘confusion’ nineteen times, according to the ARTFL database, while the root ‘étonn-’ appears forty-nine times (http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/databases/TLF07/frantext. search.html). As Rapin describes it, the merveilleux is ‘tout ce qui est contre le cours ordinaire de la nature’, and the writer’s task is to make such things believable (Réflexions sur la poétique d’Aristote, p. 51). Bossuet, ‘Sermon sur la Passion de Notre Seigneur’, in Sermons: Le Carême du Louvre, ed. Cagnat-Debœuf, p. 252. ‘Oraison funèbre de Henriette-Anne d’Angleterre’, p. 262. The English translation here and in subsequent quotations is by John Cairncross and appeared in his Jean Racine: Iphigenia, Phaedra, Athaliah, pp. 217–317. Forestier, ‘Notice’ to Athalie, in Racine, Œuvres complètes: Théâtre-Poésie, p. 1710. Forestier, ‘Notice’, p. 1722. Cairncross, Athaliah, ‘Only a dream, / Which they will recognize / With terrified surprise’ (p. 274). Book of Job, XII, 12. English from the authorised version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1983), p. 413. H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, Greek–English Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Aristotle, Poetics, ed. D. W. Lucas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 143–4. Corneille, ‘Trois discours’, p. 98. Racine, introductory letter to Andromaque, in Œuvres complètes, pp. 197–8. Racine, introductory letter to Andromaque, p. 198. More generally, as Roland Barthes has noted, the character of Athalie is paradoxically more appealing (to Barthes, and by implication for modern

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 172

07/10/2011 08:08

The God of Suspense

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

173

readers generally) than the ‘good’ characters in the play, such as Joad (Barthes, Sur Racine, p. 131). Toward the end of his life Racine wrote a history of Port-Royal that was published posthumously, the ‘Abrégé de l’Histoire de Port-Royal’. Campbell, ‘Chance in the Tragedies of Racine’, p. 111. Kolakowski, God Owes Us Nothing. Farrell, Paranoia and Modernity, p. 2. Farrell, Paranoia and Modernity, pp. 6 and 16. The relationship between paranoia and early-modern French drama has been suggested by Henry Garrity in ‘Paranoia and Schizophrenia in Corneille’, and by Jeffrey Peters in ‘Kingship and Paranoid Subjectivity’. Farrell, Paranoia and Modernity, pp. 19–20. Joad does not have a doctrine but he still feels ‘un reste de terreur’ from his upbringing as a Jew (III. 3. 957), and his wish to destroy the Jewish temple could be described as a kind of behavioural therapy for himself. If he manages to destroy the temple and does not suffer harm, he will reassure himself that God does not exist or has no power: ‘Je puis convaincre enfin sa haine d’impuissance’ (v. 960). Corneille, Trois Discours sur le poème dramatique, p. 115. Abbé d’Aubignac, La Pratique du Théâtre, p. 126. Bossuet, ‘Sermon sur la providence’ in Sermons: Le Carême du Louvre, ed. Cagnat-Debœuf, pp. 116–17. D’Aubignac, La Pratique du théâtre, p. 129. On suspense in seventeenth-century poetics see Terence Cave, ‘Towards a Pre-history of Suspense’, in Retrospectives, pp. 158–67, and various comments through Cave’s Recognitions. See also Murray, Theatrical Legitimation, pp. 166–91; Lyons, Kingdom of Disorder, pp. 112–22; Forestier, Passions tragiques et règles classiques, pp. 200–10. Joad’s approach to historical action – to creating a historical event – resonates rather surprisingly with Simone de Beauvoir’s description of the shift from a female to a male domination of society at the time of the shift from an agrarian society to an artisanal one (de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième sexe, vol. I, p. 120).

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 173

07/10/2011 08:08

Chapter 5

An Accidental World: La Bruyère’s Characters

In the last years of the seventeenth century, a contemporary of Bossuet’s and Racine’s published a little book that became a great success. Its object seemed quite modest: to portray exactly the customs of its time. Jean de La Bruyère’s Les Caractères ou mœurs de ce siècle (The Characters, or Manners of the Present Age, 1688) offers more than vivid vignettes of French society; it places these anecdotes and descriptions within the framework of an opposition between the brittle, superficial and artificial world of the royal court and Paris – la cour et la ville – and another world, evoked primarily by implication – the natural world that exists, or that should exist, or that may once have existed, elsewhere.1 This duality of the artificial and the natural, though it derives in part from the long-standing preference accorded to ‘natural style’ (le naturel) in most critical writings of the seventeenth century, makes La Bruyère a precursor of the early Romantics such as Rousseau, because, like the latter, he sees Parisian society as the enemy of nature. For them the naturel is not simply a matter of style but of ethics, and it is associated with distinct places and groups as well as with an understanding of the causes of things. For La Bruyère the artificial courtly and urban world is a world of accident, a world of the non-necessary, the contingent and the fleeting. In this description we can see the persistence of ideas that go back to Boethius and his wheel of fortune, but La Bruyère has clearly absorbed also much of the thought of Montaigne and Pascal. He locates chance as much in the trivial, the undramatic, the quotidian, as in the great lifechanges that characterised fortune. What makes La Bruyère’s writing on chance distinctive is that chance in The Characters takes the particular form of accident, in both the current sense of ‘chance event’ and the sense that it long had in scholastic philosophy as a non-essential quality of an entity, accidens as opposite of substantia or essentia.2 In this latter sense, accident, according to the Academy dictionary first

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 174

07/10/2011 08:08

An Accidental World

175

published six years after The Characters, means ‘That which is in a subject and which does not constitute the essence, that which may be or not be, without causing the subject to perish, such as whiteness, colour, smell, cold, etc.’. We may also think of Descartes’s use of the term, when, for instance, following the Scholastics, he distinguishes between the soul, which is pure substance, and the accidents that appear in the body.

The Heart La Bruyère is intensely attached to a vision of the world in which substance, rather than accident, would be valued, and he is dismayed that the condition of the world as we know it gives pride of place to nonessential, contingent qualities and relegates the essences of things to the background, to the depths where they lie hidden.3 The world as he describes it, a fallen world in the Christian, Augustinian tradition, is a world in which competence and performance are dissociated, in which deep potential is rarely actualised, and in which the ephemeral triumphs over the enduring qualities that are rarely allowed to come forth into visibility. La Bruyère emphasises that his own work differs from Théophrastus’s Greek book, The Characters (c.300 BCE), which appeared in translation in the first pages of La Bruyère’s volume. His own new work, says La Bruyère, makes the heart more central: We have addressed ourselves more to the defects of the mind, to the folds of the heart and of all that is within man than did Theophrastus; and we can say that, as his Characters, by a thousand external things that they point out in man – his actions, his words, and his undertakings – teach us what is deep within him and elicit the source of his disorder, quite in the opposite way the new Characters, setting forth first the thoughts, the opinions and the impulses of men, disclose the basis of their evil and their weaknesses, and make it easy to foresee all that they are capable of saying and doing, so that we are no longer surprised by a thousand vicious or frivolous actions that fill their lives. (‘A Prefatory Discourse concerning Theophrastus’, 16)4

La Bruyère’s use of the term ‘heart’ resembles modern usage. The heart is primarily the centre of emotions, as opposed to intellect or wit.5 La Bruyère writes of cases in which a person’s ‘heart is at war with reason’ (‘Of women’, 23: 112/57), and remarks that in dealing with people one can win or lose access ‘to their heart and their mind’ (‘Of the heart’, 71: 144/92). He locates in the heart love (‘Of women’, 81: 131/79) and pain (‘Of the heart’, 35: 137/86). The heart is not always opposed to reason

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 175

07/10/2011 08:08

176

The Phantom of Chance

but it is opposed to the superficial, as we can see in the comparison of the femme prude and the femme sage: The formal lady (une femme prude) is all show and words; the conduct of the wise woman is better than her words. The former follows her humour and her fancy; the latter her reason and her heart. The former is precise and austere; the latter is on all occasions exactly what she ought to be. The first hides her failings under a plausible outside: The second covers a rich treasure of virtues, under a free and natural air. Formality puts a constraint on the wit, neither does it hide age or wrinkles; it gives cause to suspect them often; wisdom on the contrary palliates the defects of the body, and ennobles the mind. It renders youth more charming, and beauty more dangerous. (48: 121/67)

La Bruyère’s preference for the wise woman over the prude is consistent with his appreciation for depth or essence over surface or appearance. The prude’s maintien, her bearing or carriage, is contrasted with the wise woman’s conduct. The latter is clearly more substantial, while the former hints at a kind of staging. The parallel continues with similar implications but sometimes in unanticipated ways. Especially unusual is the statement that the prude, who has already been said to hide her moral or spiritual defects under a plausible exterior, does not hide her physical defects. The wise woman, on the other hand, ‘palliates’ these defects. Does this make the prude more sincere or candid, in La Bruyère’s view – and thus appropriately unconcerned with the ‘lower’ physical order of things? Clearly, within the relentless process of this comparison, the prude’s display of her physical flaws, driven here all the way to ‘ugliness’, constitutes a further indictment of her lack of authenticity. By active display of her ugliness, the prude is using her body to distract from her moral failings, so that this case of not hiding is actually a more serious form of hiding. She is drawing attention to the accident to conceal the (moral) substance. Most of all, what matters in our current discussion is what this passage tells us about the heart in La Bruyère’s picture of the world. The heart is distinguished from reason but not antagonistic to it in the case of the wise woman, who follows ‘her reason and her heart’. The prude follows her ‘humour and her complexion’. The Academy (1694) gives several definitions of ‘complexion’, including ‘Temperament, constitution du corps’, ‘Humeur & inclination’ and ‘Caprice, fantaisie, humeur bizarre’. What La Bruyère seems to be pointing out in the comparison of these two types of women is that one acts in accordance with stable, deepseated and trustworthy guides, and the other is influenced by superficial and changeable aspects of her person. The heart is not associated here with whimsy nor with unaccountability – we can see the way in which

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 176

07/10/2011 08:08

An Accidental World

177

La Bruyère, in privileging deep substance over superficial qualities, is also conveying a world-view that locates changeability and unpredictability in that world of surface. As Marine Ricord says about the wise person in La Bruyère: ‘In this world swept along by the movement of interest, the wise person is the one who knows how to resist the current and prefers immobility.’6 Given this recurrent preference for immobility throughout The Characters, we can assume then that the wise woman is not as changeable as the prude in terms of her conduct. How, then, can we explain that the prude is always serious and austere, while the wise woman changes from one situation to another? If the prude is consistently ‘serious and austere’, then it would seem that she is the stable one, since the wise woman varies according to circumstance. Given La Bruyère’s clear preference for the wise woman, and given the force of ‘what she ought to be’ (ce qu’il faut qu’elle soit), what seems to be the point is that the wise woman behaves sincerely and naturally while the prude is simply always playing a quasi-theatrical role. Or, to put the matter in the overall scheme of La Bruyère’s thought, the wise woman acts appropriately – that is with à propos. The heart is where the real nature of a person is, whether that be a good nature or a bad one. To know someone, we need to penetrate manners to see where the passions are located: ‘All our Passions are deceitful and conceal themselves from other people as much as possible; they even conceal themselves to themselves’ (‘Of the heart’, 72: 145/94), and people hide their weaknesses even more than their crimes: ‘Men don’t so much blush for their crimes, as for their weaknesses and vanity. Such a one makes no scruple openly, and with a bold face to be unjust, cruel, perfidious, a slanderer; yet he conceals his love or his ambition upon no other account, but purely to conceal it’ (‘Of the heart’, 74: 145–6/94). The man of the court is always false, full of false smiles (‘a forced laugh, false embraces’, ‘Of the court’, 62: 235).7 The surface, for La Bruyère, is a screen that conceals the real, and since the court is the ultimate place of artificiality and concealment, this is where the surface most completely prevents penetration to the place where the natural is located. This conception emerges in one of the most striking passages of The Characters: ‘The Court is like a Marble Structure, I mean ’tis compos’d of Men very hard, but very polished’ (‘Of the court’, 10: 216/165). The polished, shiny surface of courtiers endows the surface with opacity but also with a mirror-like quality that simply reflects the ambient artificiality, blocking insight into whatever might be unique to the person or whatever might be the common core of humanity under the artifice. In the court, the small imitate the great and in the city, the burghers imitate the court. Both la cour et la ville are therefore places

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 177

07/10/2011 08:08

178

The Phantom of Chance

where it is difficult to find an original but easy to find copies.8 Thus the already unnatural manners of the petits-maîtres simply reflect themselves in a multitude of copies (‘Of the city’, 7: 205/151–2). The contrasting inward nature is complexly tied in The Characters to the idea of a basic, common human nature that would prevail in the properly functioning human being if she or he could be removed from the pernicious external influence of modern society, the society of this century. For La Bruyère the depth and naturalness of the heart make it the opposite of accident, in the philosophical sense (that is inessential). People who follow their heart are also less vulnerable to the influence of accident in the sense of the fortuitous. Louise Horowitz has noted how different La Bruyère’s position on this topic is from that of his predecessors in what we call moralist literature.9 In the relationship between depth and surface with regard to love, most of the earlier moralists emphasised the need to constrain feelings and to keep them from erupting into social interaction: The moralists [. . .] seeking to perfect an ‘outer self’ capable of controlling erotic energy, established a distance between the emotive and the rational parts of the personality. To give in to the disorganizing life of passion meant renouncing psychological and social equilibrium. The age’s hero, not surprisingly, was l’honnête homme, the incarnation of the controlled, aesthetic ideal [. . .]. Love per se is not a problem for La Bruyère, who did not fear the violent eruption of spontaneous emotion. Rather, the society he saw about him had become so depersonalized, its members so superficial, that the passions could pose relatively little threat.10

For La Bruyère the spontaneity of feeling that comes from the depths of the person reflects the stable nature under the fluctuating surface of social mores. We can understand La Bruyère’s view if we recall the etymology of ‘spontaneous’, which comes from sponda in Latin, meaning ‘bed’. So that which is ‘spontaneous’ is deeply rooted in the foundation of our being and allows us to do what is spontaneus (Latin: voluntary). It might be tempting to suppose that spontaneity belongs to the extroverted personality and concerns the surface, but La Bruyère is closer to the etymological link of the spontaneous to what is inside a person and is thus genuine. La Bruyère strongly accentuates the deep preference and deprecates superficial adaptation not only with regard to love, but also for taste. Surface attachments, based on interest and politics, are subject to unpredictable change. The spontaneous is the intersection between depth and surface within the dimension of time, specifically, within the moment. Spontaneity is thus one possible configuration of the relationship among these dimensions: the vertical (depth/surface) and the horizontal (past/present/

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 178

07/10/2011 08:08

An Accidental World

179

future). But spontaneous events are rare in La Bruyère. More frequent are accidental events, that is events in which the surface has broken from the depth and in which the present has broken from the past. La Bruyère’s systematic preference for the spontaneous (deeply rooted in human nature) is sometimes set within a contrasting framework that accommodates the surface, as when he writes of the maxim ‘To live with our Enemies in such manner, as if they shou’d one day be our Friends, and to live with our Friends as if they shou’d some time or other become our Enemies’ (‘Of the heart’, 55: 141/89). To follow such advice would require constant deception, a constant polishing of the hard, marble surface so that it would prevent any penetration of the real feelings. On the one hand, the great advantage of this approach would be to prepare the socially adept person for any future contingency but, on the other hand, such a preparation would permanently subject that individual to the reign of chance insofar as chance (as what might happen) would rule not only the social world but also the inner life of the political individual. The heart would never dominate; all would be inauthentic; chance would rule. It would be the triumph of the inauthentic and the defeat of human nature.11

Occasion In La Bruyère’s writing hasard and occasion recur often to designate the threshold between competence and performance and also, at that threshold, to create a rupture between the logical outcome of potency and virtue which should result in action, achievement and recognition. The world thus described is like an ocean with a turbulent, stormwracked surface that attracts all attention with its instantaneously shifting swells and hollows in which nothing is constant and where the depths are invisible and ignored. The strange perspective that the author brings to bear on his time, his siècle, may explain the quality of malaise that Barthes describes on reading the Caractères, for the most important, most valued things in this world are those things that never happen, the non-events.12 This inclination runs against the grain of most ‘literary’ production, that is most writing for a large public seeking entertainment along with eventual, or possible, enlightenment, which privileges what happens over what does not happen, event and plot over potential and quality. Much of La Bruyère’s writing has a deflationary thrust that returns the reader to the undone, the unseen, the squandered potential. It is as if La Bruyère were attempting a sort of detoxification, a cure for those who are addicted to the buzz of gossip, the news of

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 179

07/10/2011 08:08

180

The Phantom of Chance

appointments and preferences, the latest in fashion and the contagion of taste. We saw earlier that chance and desire have long been closely related, even as early as Aristotle.13 La Bruyère more often construes the relation between chance and desire as a mismatch, as when he writes: ‘Those things which are most desired never happen at all, or do not happen at the time or in the circumstances when they would have given the greatest pleasure’ (‘Of the heart’, 62: 142/90). Typically bleak in its affirmation that extreme pleasure is not available to us, this passage almost makes desire an inexorable force to prevent things from happening. This is not to say that La Bruyère actually claims for desire such a prophylactic function. Rather, he posits radical subjectivity as part of the human condition and desire as always connected to lack. There is a certain authenticity to desire itself that is alienated in the things desired, which are separated from us by time and ‘circumstance’. In the case of the death of a bad man, ‘His Death happens at last, but then ’tis at such a conjuncture perhaps, that our Interests will not permit us to rejoyce; for which he dies either too soon or too late’ (‘Of the heart’, 66: 143/91). The ‘too late’ or ‘too early’ of this death recalls the classic examples of tyche from Aristotle, where an event is identified as manifesting tyche when it corresponds to some possible human intention, or as we would say, desire. We need to recall the importance of death in Ancien Régime society to appreciate such an example as well as many other apparently unrelated examples of social advancement. The society that La Bruyère knew was not an entrepreneurial one, and to the extent that creative commercial ventures existed he ignores them (and would probably have disapproved, given his fundamentally traditionalist and conservative nature). Within families, the younger generation waited more or less gracefully for the older one to pass away, leaving the estate; the younger brothers might also have a chance if their older siblings died; and there was sometimes a cousin whose land, title or revenue might become available (‘Only those who have had elderly relatives or who still have them, and from whom they will inherit, can say how much this costs’, ‘Of society’, 42: 163).14 Beyond the set of potential openings within the family, there were also offices and employments of various kinds that could become available on the death of the incumbent (‘’Tis a common way of talking; after such an one, Who shall be Chancelour? Archbishop? or Pope?’, ‘Of judgments’, 92: 371–2/331). In such a political and economic structure, death itself is one of the few things that permit a limited form of social mobility (marriage being another). Yet the awaited and desired deaths can happen only for reasons beyond the control of those waiting in line for a position so that in these cir-

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 180

07/10/2011 08:08

An Accidental World

181

cumstances chance is what determines the outcome. Waiting for such a promotion, then, is like a game in which you get to play a single card and in which merit and any form of cleverness has no role. In Of personal merit the double accidentality of the world appears poignantly in missed opportunities and wasted potential. ‘Merit’ as recognised by the world is simply the result of chance, since in the primacy given to the inessential – the secondary qualities, unrelated to the logically primary matter – it is only randomly that a person with real talents is able to put those talents to good use: And this I’m inclin’d to think from the strange Success of some People whom chance [hasard] only has thrown into Posts, and from whom, till then, no great Matters were expected. How many great Men and extraordinary Genius’s are dead without ever being talkt of? And how many are there living that neither are now, nor ever will be talkt of? (Of personal merit’, 3: 91/34)

Hasard places some competent people in situations in which their talent can lead to achievement, but this is simply the result of a blind process not based on any previous performance. Their subsequent laudable performance comes out of nowhere, and they perform with unpredictable success that manifests itself as occasion. La Bruyère’s own enterprise here becomes one of speculatively taking the place of chance to shine a light on the reservoir of potential that would never even be suspected if he did not take the chance (je me hasarde) to point it out. La Bruyère’s formulation here creates two categories of people: those who are ‘placed’ and thus can display their capability and those who are not placed and whose talents remain unappreciated. It would seem that the two groups have in common an initial or ideal similarity in that each at one time had a set of talents that had not yet been displayed. Thus the only thing that distinguishes them, in hindsight, should be that for various unexplained reasons the first group had the occasion to perform and the second did not. On this reading, all have a comparable degree of talent (La Bruyère having taken the precaution to say that he is not speaking of all unplaced people but only of several – he has preselected a group of talented unplaced people on whose behalf he writes). Yet in a subtle way La Bruyère seems inclined toward the undiscovered ones, whose très beaux génies have not been put to use, and to associate the group of those who are employed with le hasard seul and with that frequent effect of chance, wonder (le merveilleux). These lucky ones, who had never shown any particular capability for the endeavour that is entrusted to them, seem to remain, for La Bruyère, forever under the suspicion that they owe everything to le hasard. On the other hand, La Bruyère’s book itself seems to rival chance by drawing attention to the talents that are hidden.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 181

07/10/2011 08:08

182

The Phantom of Chance

There are some examples of fortunate timing, like the poets JeanFrançois Sarasin (or Sarrazin) and Vincent Voiture. La Bruyère attributes all of their success to a matter of timing that was entirely beyond their control (‘Of fashion’, 10: 394/352). Generally, however, he emphasises the missed encounters of talent with opportunity, as he does in a biting passage in which he suggests that the powerful prefer to maintain their arbitrary power of appointment rather than allow merit to prevail (‘Of personal merit’, 11: 93/37–8). Yet La Bruyère implies that this arbitrariness is not randomness, for the powers of the world are inclined against merit, whereas in a truly random world merit or demerit would have strictly nothing to do with outcomes. In the world of this siècle, according to La Bruyère, in the rare cases where merit can be discerned, it disconcerts or worries the powers that be and it thus gives the powerful people pleasure in destroying merit while appointing fools to office. The visible world is tainted by its frequent display of the incompetent and the unseen is presented as the place of autonomous, substantial being. If we could know this non-existent world, our knowledge would shift the ontological weight of things, putting things into what La Bruyère conceives as their proper place so that the tempest-tossed court would become a fiction that the intelligent person would view without mistaking it for a reality. Such a fictive realignment could restore the cause-and-effect relationship which is broken in the contingent world of arbitrary appointment. The wise person, standing back from the specious courtly world, would see it as ‘a comic or even tragic play’. The court that has all the symptoms of chance (figured in the cour orageuse, pleine de mouvements, inviting us to imagine a storm, that emblem of chance) is nothing but an illusion. For the courtier who gambles to win at court, timing in discourse is a crucial skill in such milieu where things change quickly. It is important to say the right thing at the right time, to speak à propos and to avoid the opposite of à propos, impertinence. Going back to Nicot’s dictionary we find ‘Dire ou faire choses impertinentes, Aliena, nec ad rem pertinentia dicere, vel facere’ [‘To say or do impertinent things . . .’] – so that impertinence consists of saying or doing something that has nothing to do with what is being said or what is going on. The impertinent is annoying because he speaks in a conversation without any sense of relation to what has already been said and without grasping (or caring about) the overall plan or shape of a discourse. Thus the impertinent’s words interrupt and surprise because they erupt out of the internal depth of the impertinent’s ignorance, where they fall like a tile from a roof, producing surprise and consternation. Occasions are a combination of time and place, and can be described

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 182

07/10/2011 08:08

An Accidental World

183

with emphasis on one or another of these dimensions. As we have seen repeatedly, for La Bruyère the unchanging is generally good and what changes is bad, inferior or superficial. So when something changes within a short distance that thing is just as suspect as something that changes in a short time. La Bruyère writes of the urban middle class that apes the nearby court: One, that is the Refuse of the Court, in the City is receiv’d into the Withdrawing Room. There he triumphs; the Magistrate he routs, tho he’s drest like a Beau; and the Citizen, tho he’s got his long Perruque and his Sword on: He beats ’em all out of the Field, and possesses himself of the place. He alone is regarded and belov’d. There’s no holding out against a Gold Scarf and a White Plume, no resisting a Man that talks to the King, and visits the Ministers. The Men and Women are jealous of him. He is admir’d and envy’d: four Leagues off, he is despis’d and pityd. (‘Of women’, 29: 113/58–9)

The estimation of value based on supply and demand is not at all a sound practice in La Bruyère’s view, nor, indeed in the view of other writers of his time.15 In this case, the value of this low-level courtier is prized in large part because of the rigid and superficial social structure which the courtier can exploit by slumming. But another reason for this success is that the city people know this person less well or not at all. They are fixated on the most superficial of his characteristics, his golden scarf and his white feather, which are magnified by unfamiliarity. He notes elsewhere that ‘The Court appears afar off to the Country, as an admirable thing; but if we approach it, its Beauties diminish, like a fair Prospect which we view at too little a distance’ (‘Of the court’, 6: 216/165). Variations of this sort in the perceptual effects of time and place are La Bruyère’s way of emphasising the worldly failure to grasp the largely hidden essence of things.

Love Chance is often associated with love. The chance encounter seems to intensify erotic attraction as it is evoked by poets from Petrarch to Baudelaire and beyond. La Bruyère, turning his attention to love and courtship, mocks the social distortion of natural sexual desire as a form of placing the accidents before the essence. In a rather long unit of ‘Of society’, La Bruyère evokes the widower Nicandre’s courtship of Élise (‘Of society’, 82: 174–5/121–2). Nicandre gives a lengthy inventory of his possessions, including land, land revenues from tenant farming, city houses and furniture, surveys his family history and his alliances, and even holds forth the prospect that he will die soon and without

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 183

07/10/2011 08:08

184

The Phantom of Chance

children. All is calculated to win Élise’s consent to marriage through incidentals. There is nothing about Nicandre himself, nothing about his inherent qualities, nothing about what is sometimes called today his ‘human capital’ – all concerns his financial capital. Nicandre’s values are precisely the opposite of the attachment to one’s essential being that is central to La Bruyère. It is no wonder that Élise finds him much less interesting than an arriving horseman: But Elisa had not Courage enough to grow rich at the price of being his Wife. She declares herself the minute he talks to her, in favour of a Gentleman; who with his Presence alone dismounts the Batteries raised by this Citizen; he gets up melancholly and disappointed, and is now saying the same things somewhere else, which he said to Elisa. (‘Of society’, 82: 175/122)16

In this example – it happens from time to time in Les Caractères – one kind of accident (the chance arrival of a handsome young man) undermines the imposition of another kind of accident (the external quality of wealth of the older suitor). The quality of the young man comes as close to anything in La Bruyère to being purely inherent: he impresses by ‘his presence alone’ and not by his clothing, his manners or his reputation. He has all the potential required, but above all he arrives at an opportune moment. In regard to love, things do not always go so well in Les Caractères. La Bruyère’s low opinion of women appears in his assignment to them of a strongly accident-centred world-view, as in the case of a lady who has chosen ‘A little Monster, that has not one Grain of Sense’ (‘Of women’, 27: 113/58). From the point of view of today’s readers, to the extent that they are still influenced by Romanticism, this choice would probably be seen as a vindication of the entirely private and mysterious nature of love, its non-rational nature, considered in a positive light, perhaps recalling the Platonic myth of the uniquely appropriate lost ‘other half’. It might even – and here there is evidence within La Bruyère’s period – seem that this woman showed laudable discernment of the hidden qualities of the man she chose. This view corresponds to what is presented in Perrault’s fairy tale ‘Riquet à la houppe’, in which a princess sees the valuable qualities of her suitor despite his deformed body.17 Within the context of La Bruyère’s Les Caractères, however, this anecdote is just one of many cases of women’s lack of discernment of the essential qualities of men, for in La Bruyère’s discourse a hero is a man of great essential qualities and the lack of wit is an irremediable character flaw. Whatever attracts the woman to this little monster must be some entirely circumstantial, superficial phenomenon precisely like his clothes, his money or his habit of laughing at her jokes.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 184

07/10/2011 08:08

An Accidental World

185

La Bruyère’s essentialist view is the basis of this other, easily misunderstood, passage: ‘Attractiveness [l’agrément] is arbitrary: beauty is something more real and more independent of taste and opinion’ (‘Of women’, 11: 110).18 Here the author contrasts beauty with attractiveness or agreeableness, finding the latter dependent on chance in the form of the arbitrary, the beholder’s or chooser’s unaccountable taste – clearly a bad thing for La Bruyère since it moves away from the substantial, unvarying reality of beauty toward fleeting and changeable phenomena of taste and opinion.19

Machines In Les Caractères the old figure of Fortune’s wheel is still perceptible, though in an allusive form. The world has a strong vertical dimension, and people move upward and downward, sometimes through the classic form of the fall: ‘It may be said with reason of an eminent and delicate Post, that ’tis got with more ease than ’tis maintain’d’ (‘Of the court’, 33: 225/176) and ‘We see a great many Men fall from a high Fortune, by the same Defects which rais’d them’ (‘Of the court’, 34: 225/176). This is the standard upward movement, the difficult act of balance on the top of an unstable structure and then the often swift descent. A more original aspect of La Bruyère’s work is the way he transfers the mechanistic features of the older image of Fortune to mankind itself. What could suggest mechanism better than a wheel? There are many ways of invoking Fortune’s wheel and of portioning out mankind’s degree of agency in its own success and failure. One extreme is to see the wheel as the irresistible, unconscious and all-powerful system that determines outcomes without regard to wishes, actions, virtues, vices and wisdom. The outcome of a battle and the downpour of rain at harvest time could all happen one way or another without any human influence whatsoever. An alternate view of the wheel of fortune would make it largely or wholly a figure of the immanent pattern of human conduct. On this latter account, the circular pattern of rise and fall and possible reascension would occur because of the typical sequence of such behaviour as diligent striving, persistent cultivation of the powerful, austerity and sacrifice, followed by success and then, after a period of reasonable enjoyment of prosperity, over-reaching, complacency, negligence, ingratitude and so forth, leading to a fall. Thus humans would retain a considerable amount of agency and responsibility for either avoiding or committing the frequent mistakes that the wheel describes. Within this figure we can notice that mankind’s problems occur at the apogee; up to that point

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 185

07/10/2011 08:08

186

The Phantom of Chance

the Wheel offers only a positive view of human activity. What happens at the top? It is at the top that the metaphor of the wheel – that is the fact that a wheel is a mechanical-inert thing – becomes most significant. At the top, people forget what got them there; they become themselves somewhat mechanical and alienated from their own forces; they cease to be able to perceive themselves and to regulate themselves accordingly. It is not surprising that forms of mechanisation are often described by scholars of La Bruyère.20 For La Bruyère this alienation is simply another – perhaps the most extreme and comical – form of the reigning dichotomy of essence and accident that he finds throughout the conduct of the world, les mœurs de ce siècle. Sometimes the thoughtless puppet-like activity of courtiers appears as a form of trance in which the characters repeatedly engage in sets of actions that show no presence of a thoughtful human nature: There are some people who are besotted to the favour of great men, they think on’t all day, and dream of it all night; they are always running up and down stairs in a Ministers apartment, going in or coming out of an Antechamber: they have nothing to say to him; they speak to him; they speak to him a second time: then they are happy. They have spoken to him. (‘Of the court’, 61: 234/184)

In other passages, La Bruyère explicitly mentions the ‘machines’ at work, like those that placed a man in a position of success and favour while also making that man foreign to himself and distracted away from his basic merit. In this instance the mechanism is not in the central character of the successful man but in the social system which repeatedly and thoughtlessly runs through the same process. Indeed, the basic activity of social scheming for preferment is simply called a ‘machine’: ‘A Man sets up for an eminent Station, prepares his Machines, takes the right measures, and to be well serv’d, some pull a little back whilst others push apace forward: The Snare at last laid, and the Mine ready to play, the Candidate withdraws from Court . . .’ (‘Of the court’, 43: 227/177). The machine metaphor here supposes that innate ability alone and even demonstrated achievement are less important than the management of the intricate coordinated group activity that ostensibly draws attention to potential merit but that actually displaces and even replaces it. The disconnection from the substance of the successful personage appears in the paintings that represent him in such a way that he seems to be deformed, the representation becomes primary and his reality becomes secondary: He is so much flatter’d in the Pictures that are made for him, that were he to be set by either of them, he would appear deform’d [. . .]. The Machines

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 186

07/10/2011 08:08

An Accidental World

187

which lifted him so high by Applause and Encomiums, were built so as to throw him down into extreamest contempt: And there are none then who disdain him more, are sharper in their Censures, and say worse things of him than those who were most furious in their Praises when his Fortune smil’d on him. (‘Of the court’, 32: 224–5/175–6)

There are other cases, however, where the mechanical quality and alienation from human nature have become part of the central personage of whom La Bruyère writes. This is the case for Cimon and Clitandre: Would you not believe of Cimon and Clitandre that they alone are charged with the details of the whole State and that they alone bear the whole responsibility? One must have at least the affairs of land and the other maritime matters. If anyone could describe them, he would express urgency, worry, curiosity, action, and would paint an image of movement. No one has ever seen them sitting; they are never immobile and at rest. Who has ever even seen them walk? We see them run, speak while running, and question you without waiting for an answer. They come out of nowhere, they go to no destination. They pass and pass again. Do not slow them in their precipitate haste, you would dislocate their machine. [. . .] Everything in their way is at risk. Their vocation is to be seen again and again, and they never go to bed without having acquitted themselves of a role that is so serious and so useful to the republic. [. . .] Should I say it? They are blown in the wind, both harnessed to Fortune’s coach and both quite far from ever riding in it. (‘Of the court’, 19: 219–20/169)21

By a particularly striking effect of external focus, La Bruyère seems to be watching Cimon and Clitandre perform. He gleans his insights simply by looking at them in their objective (but misleading) phenomenal state. From their appearance, it seems that they must be very important, and yet their importance, translated into kinetic energy, is unrepresentable. They assume a series of intensely focused attitudes of deep care, but their central characteristic is to be in constant motion. Their speech seems to have no communicative function; they do not wait for the answers to questions they ask. They come from nowhere and go nowhere in what seems like a description of circular motion. They wheel around, passing and passing again. Most significantly, they must not be slowed, for this ‘would knock their machine out of kilter’. In the spectacle of the court, Cimon and Clitandre are the two characters who most fully realise the deviation into pure accident that La Bruyère diagnoses. There is no substance whatsoever, since ‘their profession is to be seen and re-seen’ – we note the circularity implied by these verbs. If their circling slows or stops, they fall apart, and this insistence on movement has strongly negative connotations within Les Caractères. It probably seems strange to a modern reader, but for La Bruyère immobility, stasis and the lack of change are prized more than movement, which implies superficiality,

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 187

07/10/2011 08:08

188

The Phantom of Chance

fickleness and thus the influence of uncontrollable and often temporary external pressures. As this passage culminates, La Bruyère makes the connections to the traditional representation of chance as Fortune increasingly explicit. Cimon and Clitandre are précipités, which means, on the one hand, simply that they rush around without thinking, but also sets forth quite plainly that central feature of chance: the act of falling or the state of being fallen. Here this falling comes in a form that stresses the entirely passive stance of the characters; précipiter is ‘to throw down’ and that is the trajectory of Cimon and Clitandre. Finally, the allegorical figure of Fortune presents itself in the last sentence. Cimon and Clitandre will never be ‘seated’ in her chariot, which they pull like beasts of burden. La Bruyère thus not only places his text within the long tradition of representations of fortune but also marks the contrast between the happy situation of those who are seated and thus immobile and the unhappy one of those who are in movement and particularly those who are hurled down. There are many characters in La Bruyère’s work dominated by the mechanistic dehumanisation that removes them from their own nature and traps them in superficial movements. The portrait of Narcisse in ‘Of the town’ does not represent the haste of Cimon and Clitandre but rather the staid ticking of a clock: ‘Narcissus rises in the Morning to lye down at Night, he spends hours in his Dressingroom like a woman, and goes regularly to the beautiful mass at the Feuillants’ or the Minims’’ (‘Of the town’, 12: 208/156). The emptiness of the activity appears in the act of getting up to go to bed – one of those circles that La Bruyère delights in pointing out – and Narcisse’s machine-like punctuality and predictability make every day alike: ‘He is religiously punctual in his Visits: He will do the same tomorrow, which he has done to day, and did yesterday. Thus he lives, and in this manner he will die’ (Of the town’, 12: 208/156). The simile of clockwork and the fruitless circular activity of the courtier are even more explicit in this passage: ‘The Wheels, the Springs, the Movements of a Watch are hidden, nothing appears but its Hand, which insensibly goes forward and finishes its Circuit. The true image of a Courtier, who, after having gone a great way about, comes at last frequently to the same point from whence he set out’ (‘Of the court’, 65: 237/186).

Fashion The particular social practice that most illustrates the working of chance in society and that most emphasises the accidental (as the inessential as

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 188

07/10/2011 08:08

An Accidental World

189

well as the fortuitous) is fashion, la mode. Fashion, by which La Bruyère means rapidly changing preferences for food, music, books, dress, forms of speech – in short, anything – is entirely a matter of the surface, unnecessary and unpredictable. One could argue that what makes fashion interesting or even liberating is precisely its non-necessary character, but such is not La Bruyère’s view. He consistently favours what is natural, required for existence, unchanging or grounded in individual ‘genius’. Fashion is contrary to all of these values, as La Bruyère shows in this example: Curiosity is not an inclination to what is good and beautiful; but to what is rare and singular, for those things which another can’t match. ’Tis not an affection for those things which are best, but for those which are most in the fashion. ’Tis not an amusement, but a passion (often so violent) that it yields to Love and Ambition, only in the meanness of its object: ’Tis not a passion for every thing that is scarce and in vogue, but only for some particular, that is rare and yet in fashion. (‘Of fashion’, 2: 386/341)

In this passage things that are à la mode appear to have no compelling, essential value but become desirable in a fortuitous way. Neither the intrinsic worth of a thing (and La Bruyère does believe in such worth: perfection, beauty and goodness) nor even its rareness generates this particular effect of fashion, curiosity. La Bruyère shows none of the modern confidence in the ability of the markets to determine value. In his description of supply and demand, there is neither a rational motive for desiring to possess these things nor are these things directly connected to any fundamental passion within the individual, for such a passion, if innate, would not change with dramatic rapidity as do the objects of la mode. They seem to come about by accident. La Bruyère in fact illustrates an object of curious attachment that is rare simply because it is accidentally defective – it results from a mistake or failure of a mechanical kind. It concerns Démocède’s collection of prints, among which there is one that the collector Démocède particularly cherishes: He draws them out, and shews them you; there you find one that is neither finely Printed, neatly Graved, or well Designed, and therefore not worth the preserving; he found it hanging up in the Holidays against the wall in the most publick places of the City; he allows it to be ill Graved, and worse Design’d; but he assures you, ’twas done by an Italian, of whom there’s little extant; that ’tis the only one in France of his hand, he bought it very dear, and would not part with it for a much better. (‘Of fashion’, 2: 388/344)

Here the idea of value has been entirely divorced from quality of drawing, skill of engraving, effectiveness of representation or even of popularity (since no one bothered to print many copies). The curiously cherished

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 189

07/10/2011 08:08

190

The Phantom of Chance

print results from a series of unintentional acts, including some production error that prevented the plate from being properly inked. We have noted in earlier chapters that chance has been, since the time of Aristotle, predominantly the domain of the material. Chance happens at the point of contact between people and material objects when the latter seem weirdly to anticipate a human desire or to realise a human fear. And to surrender to the events of the material world has seemed, since the Stoics, to be a form of dehumanisation or at least to be a failure to live one’s humanity to the fullest. With this in mind, it is not surprising that in ‘Of fashion’ things take on such conspicuous, even, in the world observed by the moralist, delirious forms. In La Bruyère we have already seen how humans tend to turn into machines when they surrender to external forces and neglect their inner nature. Under the influence of fashion, there are many similar distortions. Some of these actually cause physical deformation of the human body: We blame a fashion that divides the stature of a man into two equal parts, which takes one entire to the waste, and leaves the other for the rest of the body: we condemn those dresses which make the Ladies heads look like the base of an edifice, with numerous stories above ’em; the order and structure whereof alter with their whimsies . . . (‘Of fashion’, 12: 394–5/352)

In other cases the alienation takes the form of an unnatural and disproportionate attachment to an object. There is, for example, the man who loves butterflies and their larvae (‘Of fashion’, 2: 391/348). The pathological relationship to material objects finds its most powerful expression in Les Caractères in a passage in which the shifting values of fashion are inscribed in the decaying form of matter. For La Bruyère the ultimate proof that these societies are cut off from fundamental nature is their extravagance and their attachment to the evanescent. These two features are linked, because with the passage of time artificial things should degenerate since they have no necessity and no foundation. They are merely accidents: In the first year there are always sown those Seeds of Division which break it the next, by Quarrels about some Beauty, Disputes at Play, extravagant Feasts, which though modest in the beginning, soon degenerate into Pyramids of Victuals, and costly Banquets, to the utter overthrow of the Commonwealth. And thus in a little while there is no more talk of this People, than of the last year’s Flies. (‘Of the town’, 4: 203–4/150)

Social superficiality manifests itself in time as degeneration. Such superficiality appears in the moment as a set of social practices unhitched from basic needs and unchecked by natural appetite. Without the control of an inner nature, the performance of appetite (as opposed to real, felt

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 190

07/10/2011 08:08

An Accidental World

191

appetite) appears in explosive attachment to quantity. But this quantity is only a form of inflation that reveals itself over time as decomposition. La Bruyère cleverly forms a metaphor behind the literal description. When he writes that the meals degenerate into mounds of food, he is ostensibly merely expressing a negative judgement about the preference for quantity over quality. However, he implicitly invites us to form the image of rotting meat. This understanding is only fully released by the word mouches (flies), which denotes cosmetic points applied to the face, part of the fashion that changes from year to year.22 But the cumulative result of stringing together the terms ‘meat’, ‘degenerate’, ‘flies’ and ‘last year’ is to evoke putrescent garbage. The concluding image of last year’s flies (a perhaps unwitting, debunking parallel with Villon’s ‘les neiges d’antan’) completes the picture of an insubstantial and ephemeral deviation from the authentic core of enduring human nature. The heart, in sum, is the deep, authentic force that permits people to do the right thing, and it is in constant opposition to the social world as the latter is institutionalised both in the court and in the city. Two chapters of Les Caractères appearing back to back give a further insight into the different ways accident (primarily as ‘chance’ but also as the insubstantial) can manifest itself. ‘Of fashion’ and ‘Of certain customs’ are the fourteenth and fifteenth of the sixteen chapters that make up the book. At a first glance they seem to be radically different, not only with regard to the level of seriousness of the practices described (and decried) but also with reference to the way they are framed in time. ‘Of fashion’ concerns mostly frivolous things that change frequently and quickly while ‘Of certain customs’ is about a certain number of grave matters and institutions that last for a long time. Chance appears in most literary texts in the form of things that happen suddenly, unexpectedly and for reasons that remain in some way unclear. This certainly seems to be true of what happens in ‘Of fashion’ and in many instances of events in the court (in ‘Of the court’) since the court is so dominated by fashion and sudden change: The Man who leaves the Court for a minute, renounces it for ever: The Courtier who saw it in the Morning, must see it in the Evening in order to recognize it the next day or in order to be recognized there himself. (‘Of the court’, 4: 215/164–5)23

In regard to fashion, La Bruyère does not spare expressions of quickly passing time: ‘There’s nothing brings a Man sooner in fashion than . . .’ (7: 393/350); ‘Such a man was in fashion . . .’ (4: 392); ‘A man of mode is not so long: Fashions are very transitory’ (5: 392/349) etc. Yet after detailing these quirky and inexplicable shifts in preferences

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 191

07/10/2011 08:08

192

The Phantom of Chance

and activities, La Bruyère takes aim at much more stable targets. For someone who favours stability over change, especially rapid change, how can it be that he finds fault with much more established habits? To be sure, the usages he criticises are primarily novelties characteristic of his own epoch and thus irritate his very traditionalist sensibility (e.g. the ‘rehabilitations’ or inspections of titles of nobility).24 Yet in other cases this novelty is less apparent. The dowries required of women asking for admission to religious orders are such a case: ‘There have been virtuous, healthy, zealous Maids, and who had a good and lawful Call; but who had not enough money to devote themselves to Poverty in a rich Abbey’ (‘Of certain customs’, 31: 415/376). Another such instance concerns the practice of members of married couples being seen separately: ‘What impertinent whimsey can make him blush at his own Wife? What makes him be asham’d of being seen in publick, with one whom he has chosen for an inseparable Companion?’ (‘Of certain customs’, 35: 416/377). These examples have in common that they are a form of frozen chance. The practices in question make no logical sense and are, for La Bruyère, scandalous. What keeps them going, then, is not logic but the force of collective habit, known either as ‘usage’ or ‘custom’. La Bruyère taps into the vein of criticism of custom that was such a powerfully subversive legacy of Montaigne’s Essays for seventeenthcentury readers. Pascal’s frequent use of such illogical social practices was a way of showing the apparently random organisation of human society. But where Pascal springs from the discord between the arbitrary and random on the one hand and mankind’s aspiration to justice, order and reason on the other toward a proof of original sin (and thus of Christian doctrine), La Bruyère seems to entertain the nostalgic notion that mankind could improve the world by restoring an earlier, purer order of social organisation. He thus prefigures the early Romantic attachment to simple village life. In terms of the working of chance, Les Caractères represents the world as a sedimentation of fashions that have simply not gone away but instead acquired authority through time. We can see in La Bruyère’s hostility to these customs the same opposition between surface and depth, society and the individual conscience: ‘But it is this odd, illgrounded and unreasonable custom which I blame, and which is even less to my taste . . .’ (‘Of certain customs’, 24: 413/373). The nostalgia for an earlier time appears throughout La Bruyère in such a way as to create the structure ‘surface is to depth as present is to past’, where depth and past are both marked as being substantial (or essential) and thus causally justified just as surface and the present are marked as

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 192

07/10/2011 08:08

An Accidental World

193

unsubstantial and not causally justified.25 Within the heart (working with reason) things are as they should be, just as in the past things were as they logically should be. Here, as throughout the tradition of chance, from tyche to hasard, one of the important things that remains constant is the role of imagination. Whether the writer be Aristotle, Boethius, Corneille, Lafayette or La Bruyère, when chance intervenes it disturbs an image of the present and the soon-to-be world that people form. One meets someone one did not expect to meet, for instance, and the reality of the meeting replaces the previous image of a time without such a meeting. The duel that Rodrigue in Le Cid is obliged to fight replaces the image of the soonto-be marriage that seemed on the verge of being settled. Throughout La Bruyère’s writing one feels the contrast between the superficial, accidental world of his time and the writer’s imagination of a much better, more authentic world that haunts it. In concluding our study with La Bruyère’s Characters, we see how chance works by projecting human imagination onto the actual world of event. At that intersection between images of fear and desire on the one hand and material reality on the other, chance appears as a phantom. La Bruyère’s vision of the accidents of courtly and urban life, in a world of haste, without a sense of the whole, stands between Bossuet and Rousseau. Like Bossuet, La Bruyère starts with the world of disorder and then envisions another world that is the orderly world of grace. Like Rousseau, he locates this other world not in religious transcendence but in an imagined uncorrupted nature. This world without accident, for which the author of The Characters longs, almost never appears. Would La Bruyère, a man of the court and the city have recognised it if he saw it? We can approach it only in our heart, and in that insight the seventeenth century concludes by echoing the Boethian call for withdrawal from the outside world. It is as if The Characters had adopted the strictly negative view of ‘Fortune’ from Boethius (hence not adopting the Aristotelian tyche) and hybridised it with the random and de-dramatised chance (hasard) that dominates in Pascal, Lafayette and Bossuet. With the attention to the surface of the world, conceived as artifice and devoid of intrinsic significance, La Bruyère exemplifies a style – the rococo – that displays a world opposed to the aesthetic and ethical standards he advocates. The very substance of his book consists of the minute observation of everyday contingencies swirling, circling, without roots, but ever determined by unexpected encounters. With The Characters we reach the threshold from which we can glimpse a world of nature and necessity, the world of the early Romantics.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 193

07/10/2011 08:08

194

The Phantom of Chance

Notes 1. La Bruyère, Les Caractères de Théophraste traduits du Grec avec les Caractères ou les Mœurs de ce siècle, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Benda, pp. 1–478. All references to the French text of Les Caractères will be to this edition and will generally take the form of a reference to the section of the chapter followed by the page number; thus in a discussion of the chapter ‘Des grands’, a reference to the first section would be given as 1: 248. Quotations of La Bruyère’s work given in English will be based on the 1699 London translation, The characters, or, The manners of the age by Monsieur de La Bruyere and will, for the reader’s convenience, refer to the pagination of that edition. However, I have modified those translations for three reasons: to provide a passage that is absent in that translation, to correct errors in translation and to give more literal translations of terms regarding chance. In parenthetical references the reference to the French text will precede that of the English. 2. Hamilton, Accident, pp. 11–16, 75. 3. La Bruyère uses the word ‘accident’ only twice in the Caractères, both times in the modern sense of fortuitous event. However, as will become clear in what follows, his decision to avoid the obsolescent and technical term (a preference for non-pedantic style that he shows throughout his work) does not mean that he was not keenly aware of the dichotomy between substance and adventitious or superficial features. 4. Not paginated in the 1699 London edition. 5. ‘The seat of the emotions generally; the emotional nature, as distinguished from the intellectual nature placed in the head’ (OED). 6. Ricord, Les Caractères de La Bruyère, p. 59. 7. This section is not included in the 1669 London edition. 8. ‘De quelques usages’, 8: 408. 9. ‘Écrivain qui observe, décrit et analyse les mœurs, les passions d’une époque’ (Trésor de la langue française). Littré writes, ‘Écrivain qui traite des mœurs. La Rochefoucauld, la Bruyère, Vauvenargues sont nos plus grands moralistes’ (Dictionnaire de la langue française [1872–7]). See Van Den Abbeele, ‘Moralists and the Legacy of Cartesianism’. 10. Horowitz, Love and Language, pp. 147–8. 11. Cf. ‘Du cœur’ 57: 141: ‘Il est doux de voir ses amis par goût et par estime; il est pénible de les cultiver par intérêt; c’est solliciter.’ 12. Barthes, ‘La Bruyère’, p. 222. 13. Aristotle, Physics 196a1–5. See above, Introduction, pp. 3–8. 14. Not included in the 1699 London edition. 15. For Pascal it is imagination that sets the price of things: ‘L’Imagination a le grand droit de persuader les hommes. La raison a beau crier, elle ne peut mettre le prix aux choses’ (Pascal, Pensées, fragment S. 78, p. 855). 16. In this example La Bruyère’s emphasis on essential nature, as opposed to accidents, parallels Pascal’s analysis of tyranny, which consists of a separation of orders. In the case of Élise, it is either unnatural (in La Bruyère’s terms) or tyrannical (in Pascal’s terms) for someone to expect love in return for money. 17. Perrault, Contes, pp. 173–81. Is it a mere coincidence that Perrault

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 194

07/10/2011 08:08

An Accidental World

18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

195

belonged to the generally more woman-oriented ‘Modernes’ faction and that La Bruyère was an ‘Ancien’? The 1699 London edition, p. 55, seems to mistranslate this by limiting the point of view: ‘That a Woman is agreeable depends on Fancy, but Beauty is something more real and independent of inclination and opinion.’ La Bruyère used the term ‘arbitrary’ in its basic, positive sense (which was losing currency in his day) in his discourse of thanks at his reception into the Académie. Addressing his fellow academicians, he said, ‘Vos voix seules, toujours libres et arbitraires, donnent une place dans l’Académie française’ (La Bruyère, ‘Discours Prononcé dans l’Académie Française’, in Œuvres complètes, p. 503). See, for instance, Kirsch, ‘Automatisme et prévisibilité’, in La Bruyère ou le style cruel, pp. 69–77, and Ricord, ‘L’esprit de l’œuvre ou la mélancholie d’un monde déspiritualisé’, in Les Caractères de La Bruyère, pp. 75–91. La Bruyère illustrates (and perhaps anticipates) Henri Bergson’s views on mechanisation and the comic as the latter expressed them in his Le Rire, notably in his celebrated description of the comic as ‘Du mécanique plaqué sur du vivant’ (p. 29). The translation of this passage is our own, but the parenthetic reference gives the corresponding page of the 1699 London edition. ‘On appelle aussi, Mouche, Certain petit morceau de taffetas noir que les Dames se mettent sur le visage, ou pour cacher quelques eleveures, ou pour faire paroistre leur teint plus blanc. Elle a le visage tout couvert de mouches. les mouches ne luy viennent pas bien. une boëte à mouches. des mouches de la bonne faiseuse’ (Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française, first edition, 1694). The translation given here corrects the serious error in the 1699 London edition in which the feminine past participle (vue) is overlooked. ‘Of certain customs’, 3: 406–7. ‘Of certain customs’, ‘16: 410 and ‘Of fashion’, 21: 398.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 195

07/10/2011 08:08

Conclusion

The seventeenth century marked the decline of a totalising, centralising, personalising, spectacular and didactic view of chance – Boethian Fortune – in favour of a punctual, decentred, impersonal, imperceptible and amoral form of contingency, often designated by the term hasard. There are many consequences, or symptoms, of this shift. A set of conventional, highly noticeable or spectacular markers of chance, typical of romance and tragi-comedy early in the seventeenth century, was increasing derided by critics and theorists of drama and narrative. The shipwrecks, bolts of lightning and earthquakes that might disrupt lives in romance and romance-like drama in the first third of the century appeared less frequently later in the century. Chance still played an important role, but increasingly in the form of inconspicuous yet convenient coincidences of timing, of lost objects and of overheard conversations. Although chance moved into the background, it wove itself more thoroughly into everyday life and became an essential component of existence as it was portrayed in novels, tragedies and apologetic discourse. As part of the everyday world, chance became more egalitarian. The humble chance events of novellas and fabliaux mingled with the heroic incidents of epic and tragedy so that contingency did not plot itself primarily in the arc of rise and fall nor did it appear solely in the major events of clear historical importance. Henceforth, chance appeared in accounts of the poorly washed preacher, the cuckolded husband, the falling roof tile, the shoemaker’s choice of vocation, the interrupted card game. The immediate significance of any individual chance event was not easy to detect or to assert, but now chance events could be bundled into groups, categories and patterns and studied with reference to frequency, in the emerging natural philosophy, or with reference to a hidden, transcendent divine plan. At the end of the sixteenth century, chance had been a problem. It

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 196

07/10/2011 08:08

Conclusion

197

seemed, under Montaigne’s pen, to threaten humanity’s place in the universe and to serve the often anonymous free-thinkers as the lever that would tear apart religion, church and state, making dogmas and social order the patently incoherent result of coincidences and acts of violence. In the course of the seventeenth century, however, chance was largely recuperated by Christian thinkers, who reversed the valence of the concept so that random events – or apparently random events – could be described as part of God’s plan. Such events, precisely because they seemed to make no sense, conformed to the conception of a hidden God who had deliberately strewn the world with obstacles to man’s understanding. Randomness and injustice, like the seemingly infinite and unfathomable space of the universe, now came to the fore in descriptions that emphasised the fallenness of mankind and its helplessness without grace. Moreover, grace itself appeared to a large number of Christians, both to Jansenists among the Catholics and to Huguenots, as arbitrary, that is as given or withheld by God without any order or causality perceptible to man. A law-abiding man could be damned, a sinner might be saved. Throughout the century chance served writers, both secular and religious, to combat anthropocentric illusions, the idea that the world, in the form of fortune, God or the gods, arranged things either to reward or to persecute an individual. Chance did not disappear, but instead it became increasingly evident that both in the conventional and now mocked form of fortune or in the form of randomness (hasard), chance simply marked the turbulence that arose from the collision of human desires and fears with a world that was indifferent. Literature was faced with a paradox with regard to chance. If the world behaved magically, as it often did when fortune was invoked, it would be unbelievable. Such a magic of human fear and desire had dominated romance in a hyperbolic form. What the characters feared or what they desired often coincided with the appearance of traditional markers of fortune. Do a bride and groom long for a life of happiness together? A volcano will erupt on their wedding day to separate them. Does a man desperately want to find a woman whose whereabouts in the world are completely unknown to him? He will meet her at the turning of the next street. Making chance appear as chance while maintaining the bond of interest between reader and fictive character became the major challenge to writers of novels for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Representing chance in its trivial, random form rather than in its emphatic, dramatic aspect was actually more difficult than using traditional tropes of fortune. Such a form of writing required the display of things in novels as if they happened in real life. This kind of illusion, which we now take largely for

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 197

07/10/2011 08:08

198

The Phantom of Chance

granted, was shocking in the seventeenth century. Early critics objected that such events might happen in the world but were not acceptable in a novel. The overheard conversation, the accidentally misaddressed letter and an encounter in a shop now shifted literary representations of chance from the concentrated form of shipwrecks and bolts of lightning to the diffuse form of daily incidents. The increased emphasis on omnipresent yet minor chance occurences appeared to many writers as a grotesque disproportion. Major turns in a person’s life might occur on account of the most absurdly minor circumstance. This discrepancy could be conceived in transcendent terms as the result of mankind’s initial fall from grace. What happened in this life was thus unhitched from the only thing that mattered, which was life in another, more essential world that could be known only after death. But the disproportion between minor cause and huge result could be conceived as a fall of another sort, parallel to (and perhaps symbolic of) the fall from grace: the fall from nature into artifice. This conception of chance constituted a systemic negative form of tyche. Instead of the rare instances in which the world might unexpectedly coincide with a person’s desires, in the world of artifice chance appears as the almost constant disruption of a posited natural course of events by the socially determined actions of people. The dream of a world without chance now appeared as the early Romantic dream of a return to nature.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 198

07/10/2011 08:08

Bibliography

Primary Texts Anonymous, L’Art de ne croire en rien, suivi du Livre des trois imposteurs, ed. Raoul Vaneigem (Paris: Rivages, 2002). Aquinas, Thomas, The Providence of God, in Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 1920 (http://www.op.org/summa/ summa-Iq22.html). Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, gen. ed. Jonathan Barnes, Bollingen Series (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Aristotle, Physics, trans. P. H. Wicksteed and F. M. Cornford, books I–IV Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1929; reprinted 1996). Aristotle, Physique, trans. and ed. Pierre Pellegrin (Paris: GF Flammarion, 2002). Aristotle, Poetics, Greek text with commentary, ed. D. W. Lucas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). Aristotle, The Poetics of Aristotle, trans. and ed. Stephen Halliwell (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). Arnauld, Antoine, and Pierre Nicole, La Logique ou l’art de penser, ‘Champs’ Collection (Paris: Flammarion, 1970). Aubignac, François Hédelin abbé de, La Pratique du théâtre, ed. Pierre Martino (Algiers: Jules Carbonel, 1927). Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, in The Consolation of Philosophy, ed. Irwin Edman, trans. W. V. Cooper (New York: Modern Library, 1943), pp. 1–120. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. S. J. Tester, in Tractates, The Consolation of Philosophy, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 130–435. Boileau, Nicolas Despréaux, ‘Traité du sublime, ou du merveilleux dans le discours’, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Françoise Escal (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), pp. 333–440. Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, Discours sur l’histoire universelle, pref. Jacques Truchet (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966). Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, Discourse on Universal History, trans. Elborg Forster, intro. Orest Ranum (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1976).

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 199

07/10/2011 08:08

200

The Phantom of Chance

Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, Sermons et Oraisons funèbres, pref. Michel Crépu (Paris: Le Seuil, 1997). Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, Sermons: Le Carême du Louvre, ed. Constance Cagnat-Deboeuf (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). Castelvetro, Lodovico, Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta, ed. Werther Romani (Rome: Giuseppe Laterza & Figli, 1978). Chapelain, Jean, ‘Les Sentimens de l’Académie françoise sur la Tragi-comédie du Cid’, in Œuvres de Pierre Corneille, ed. Charles Marty-Laveau (Paris: Hachette, 1861–2), vol. 12, pp. 463–501. Cicero, ‘De Divinatione’, in De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione, trans. and ed. William A. Falconer (London and New York: William Heinemann and G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1923), pp. 213–539. Cicero, ‘De Fato’, in De Oratore Book III, De Fato, Paradoxa Stoicorum, Partitiones Oratoriae, trans. and ed. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, 1972), pp. 187–249. Corneille, Pierre, Le Cid, 1637–1660, ed. Georges Forestier (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1992). Corneille, Pierre, Œuvres complètes, ed. Georges Couton (Paris: Gallimard, 1980–8). Corneille, Pierre, Trois discours sur le poème dramatique, ed. Bénédicte Louvat and Marc Escola (Paris: GF Flammarion, 1999). Descartes, René, ‘Discours de la méthode’, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1996), vol. VI, pp. 1–78. Descartes, René, Méditations, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1996), vol. 12, pp. 13–72. Descartes, René, Œuvres philosophiques, ed. Ferdinand Alquié, Classiques Garnier (Paris: Garnier, 1963–73). Du Vair, Guillaume, De la constance et consolation és calamitez publiques (Paris: Mamert Parisson, 1594). Garasse, François, La Doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits de ce temps, ou prétendus tels. contenant plusieurs maximes pernicieuses à l’estat, à la religion, & aux bonnes moeurs, combattue et renversée (Paris: Sebastien Chappelet, 1623). Hume, David, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Millican (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2007). La Bruyère, Jean de, ‘Les Caractères, ou les mœurs de ce siècle’, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Julien Benda (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), pp. 59–478. La Bruyère, Jean de, The Characters, or, The Manners of the Age by Monsieur de La Bruyere Made English by Several Hands with the Characters of Theophrastus, Translated from the Greek and a Prefactory Discourse to Them by Monsieur de La Bruyere to Which is Added a Key to His Characters (London: John Bullard, 1699). La Mesnardière, Hippolyte-Jules, La Poétique (Geneva: Slatkine, 1972). La Mesnardière, Hippolyte-Jules, Traitté de la mélancholie, sçavoir si elle est la cause des effets que l’on remarque dans les possédées de Loudun (La Flèche: M. Guyot and G. Laboe, 1635). La Rochefoucauld, François, Œuvres complètes, ed. L. Martin-Chauffier and Jean Marchand (Paris: Gallimard, 1964).

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 200

07/10/2011 08:08

Bibliography

201

Lafayette, Marie-Madeleine, The Princess of Clèves, ed. John D. Lyons, trans. Thomas S. Perry, Norton Critical Editions (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994). Lafayette, Marie-Madeleine, Romans et Nouvelles, ed. Alain Niderst, Classiques Garnier (Paris: Garnier, 1990). Lafayette, Marie-Madeleine, Zayde, pref. Camille Esmein-Sarrazin (Paris: GF Flammarion, 2006). Lafayette, Marie-Madeleine, Zayde. A Spanish Romance, trans. and ed. Nicholas D. Paige (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Lemaître de Sacy, Louis-Isaac, trans., La Bible, ed. Philippe Sellier (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1990). Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. R. E. Latham (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1951). Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Prince, trans. and ed. James B. Atkinson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976). Machiavelli, Niccolò, Il Principe; Scritti Politici, ed. Luigi Fiorentino (Milan: Mursia, 1969). Montaigne, Michel de, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1958). Montaigne, Michel de, Les Essais, ed. Pierre Villey, pref. V.-L. Saulnier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965). Montaigne, Michel de, Journal de voyage de Michel de Montaigne, ed. François Rigolot (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992). Nicole, Pierre, ‘Des diverses manières dont on tente Dieu’, in Essais de morale, ed. Laurent Thirouin (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), pp. 417–40. Pascal, Blaise, Œuvres complètes, ed. Jean Mesnard (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1964). Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, trans. and ed. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005). Pascal, Blaise, Pensées sur la religion: et sur quelques autres sujets, ed. Louis Lafuma (Paris: Éditions du Luxembourg, 1952). Pascal, Blaise, Les Provinciales, Pensées et opuscules divers, ed. Gérard Ferreyrolles and Philippe Sellier (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2004). Perrault, Charles, Contes, ed. Gilbert Rouger (Paris: Garnier, 1967). Perrault, Charles, ‘Le Siècle de Louis le Grand. Poème’, in Parallèle des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences (Geneva: Slatkine, 1979), pp. 79–85. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. and ed. Horace Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938–63). Racine, Jean, Jean Racine: Iphigenia, Phaedra, Athaliah, trans. and ed. John Cairncross (London: Penguin, 1970). Racine, Jean, Œuvres complètes: Théâtre-Poésie, ed. Georges Forestier (Paris: Gallimard, 1999). Rapin, René, Réflexions sur la Poétique d’Aristote (Paris: Muguet, 1674). Scudéry, Madeleine, Clélie, histoire romaine, ed. Chantal Morlet-Chantalat (Paris: Champion, 2001). Scudéry, Madeleine and Georges, Ibrahim, ou l’Illustre Bassa (Paris: Compagnie des Libraires du Palais, 1665).

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 201

07/10/2011 08:08

202

The Phantom of Chance

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, ‘De Clementia’, in Moral Essays, trans. and ed. John W. Basore, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928–35), pp. 356–447. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, ‘De Providentia’, in Moral Essays, trans. and ed. John W. Basore, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928–35), pp. 2–47. Sorel, Charles, La Bibliothèque françoise (Paris: Compagnie des Libraires du Palais, 1667). Tertullian, De Carne Christi Liber. Treatise on the Incarnation, trans. Ernest Evans (London: SPCK, 1956). Tomkis, Thomas, Albumazar: A Comedy, ed. Hugh G. Dick, University of California Publications in English (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1944). Trithemius, Johannes, The Steganographia of Johannes Trithemius, ed. Adam McLean, trans. Fiona Tait and Christopher Upton (Edinburgh: Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks, 1982). Valincour, Jean-Baptiste de Trousset de, Lettres à Madame la Marquise *** sur la Princesse de Clèves, foreword Christine Montalbetti (Paris: Flammarion, 2001).

Secondary Texts Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Aubenque, Pierre, La Prudence chez Aristote (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963). Baby, Hélène, La tragi-comédie de Corneille à Quinault (Paris: Klincksieck, 2001). Barolsky, Paul, ‘Preface’, in Nose Book. Representations of the Nose in Literature and the Arts, ed.Victoria De Rijke, Lene Ostermark and Helen Thomas (London: Middlesex University Press, 2000), pp. vii–x. Barthes, Roland, ‘La Bruyère’, in Essais Critiques, ‘Points’ (Paris: Le Seuil, 1964), pp. 221–37. Barthes, Roland, Sur Racine (Paris: Le Seuil, 1963). Bayle, Pierre, Dictionnaire historique et critique (Amsterdam: Reinier Leers, 1967). Bell, David F., ‘Pascal: Casuistry, Probability, Uncertainty’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28.1 (Winter 1998), pp. 37–50. Bergson, Henri, Le Rire. Essai sur la signification du comique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1940). Bjørnstad, Hall, ‘ “La Continuité dégoûte en tout”: Some Notes on Pascal’s Apologetics of Discontinuity’, Seventeenth-Century French Studies 24 (2002), pp. 229–38. Bjørnstad, Hall, Créature sans créateur. Pour une anthropologie baroque dans les Pensées de Pascal (Laval, Québec: Presses de l’Université de Laval, 2010). Boorstin, Daniel J., Cleopatra’s Nose: Essays on the Unexpected, ed. Ruth Boorstin (New York: Random House, 1994).

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 202

07/10/2011 08:08

Bibliography

203

Brumfitt, J. H., ‘Cleopatra’s Nose and Enlightenment Historiography’, in Woman and Society in Eighteenth-Century France: Essays in Honour of John Stephenson Spink, ed. Eva Jacobs et al. (London: Athlone, 1979), pp. 183–94. Burkckhardt, Jakob, Gesammelte Werke (Bern: Scherz, 1971). Campbell, John, ‘Chance in the Tragedies of Racine’, in Chance, Literature and Culture in Early-Modern France, ed.John D. Lyons and J. Kathleen Wine (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 111–22. Campbell, John, ‘The God of Athalie’, French Studies 43 (1989), pp. 385–404. Cavaillé, Jean-Pierre, Libertinage, irréligion, incroyance (Paris: Ecole de Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2003) http://www.ehess.fr/centres/grihl/ DebatCritique/LibrePensee/Libertinage. Cave, Terence, Recognitions. A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Cave, Terence, Retrospectives: Essays in Literature, Poetics, and Cultural History, ed. Neil Kenny and Wes Williams (London: Legenda, 2009). Charles-Daubert, Françoise, Les Libertins érudits en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998). Cioffari, Vincenzo, The Conception of Fortune and Fate in the Works of Dante (Cambridge, MA: Dante Society of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1940). Cioffari, Vincenzo, ‘Fortune, Fate, and Chance’, in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip Wiener (New York: Scribner, 1973), pp. 225–36. Coumet, Ernest, ‘La théorie du hasard est-elle née par hasard?’, Annales (Économie Sociétés Civilisations) 3 (May–June 1970), pp. 574–97. Cropp, Glynnis, ‘Boethius and the Consolatio Philosophiae in XIVth and XVthCentury French Writing’, Essays in French Literature 42 (2005), pp. 27–43. Daston, Lorraine, ‘Fortuna and the Passions’, in Chance, Culture and the Literary Text, ed. Thomas M. Kavanagh, Michigan Romance Studies (Ann Arbor: Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, 1994), pp. 25–47. Daston, Lorraine, ‘The History of Emergences’, Isis 98 (2007), pp. 801–8. Davidson, Hugh M. and Dubé, Pierre H., A Concordance to Pascal’s Pensées (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975). de Beauvoir, Simone, Le Deuxième sexe (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1976). Desan, Philippe, ‘Fortuit’, in Dictionnaire de Michel de Montaigne, ed. Philippe Desan (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), pp. 414–15. Doubrovsky, Serge, Corneille et la dialectique du héros (Paris: Gallimard, 1963). Drabble, Margaret, ed., The Oxford Companion to English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Farrell, John, Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). Feldman, Walter, ‘The Celestial Sphere, the Wheel of Fortune, and Fate’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 28.2 (May 1996), pp. 193–215. Ferreyrolles, Gérard, ‘Histoire et causalité chez Bossuet’, in Bossuet, le Verbe et l’histoire (1704–2004). Actes du colloque international de Paris et Meaux pour le troisième centenaire de la mort de Bossuet, ed. Gérard Ferreyrolles (Paris: Champion, 2006), pp. 185–95. Ferreyrolles, Gérard, ‘L’Influence de la conception augustinienne de l’histoire au XVIIe Siècle’, Dix-Septième Siècle 34.135 (April 1982), pp. 216–41.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 203

07/10/2011 08:08

204

The Phantom of Chance

Ferreyrolles, Gérard, ‘Pascal et la rédemption de la nature’, in Méthodes chez Pascal, ed. Thérèse Goyet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979), pp. 285–90. Ferreyrolles, Gérard, Les Reines du monde. L’imagination et la coutume chez Pascal, pref. Jean Mesnard, Lumière Classique (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1995). Fish, Stanley E., Self-Consuming Artifacts. The Experience of SeventeenthCentury Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). Flanagan, Thomas, ‘The Concept of Fortuna in Machiavelli’, in The Political Calculus. Essays on Machiavelli’s Philosophy, ed. Anthony Parel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), pp. 127–56. Ford, Ed, ‘La Bruyère as Quietist: A Straussian Reading of La Bruyère’s Caractères and Dialogues sur le Quiétisme’, Harvard Theological Review 98.1 (January 2005), pp. 95–112. Foucault, Michel, ‘La Gouvernementalité’, in Dits et Écrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 635–57. Foucault, Michel, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). François, Anne-Lise, Open Secrets. The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). Friedrich, Alfred et al., History of Painting, trans. Clara Bell (London: Kegan Paul, 1887). Gaines, James, ‘L’Eveil des sentiments et le paradoxe de la conscience dans L’Ecole des femmes’, French Review 70.3 (1997), pp. 407–15. Garrity, Henry A., ‘Paranoia and Schizophrenia in Corneille: From L’Illusion comique to Horace’, in Selected Proceedings of the Thirty-Ninth Annual Mountain Interstate Foreign Language Conference, ed.Sixto E. Torres and S. Carl King (Clemson, SC: Clemson University, 1991). Genette, Gérard, ‘L’or tombe sous le fer’, in Figures (Paris: Le Seuil, 1966), pp. 29–38. Genette, Gérard, ‘Vraisemblance et motivation’, in Figures II (Paris: Le Seuil, 1969), pp. 71–99. Gilby, Emma, ‘The Language of Fortune in Descartes’, in Chance, Literature and Culture in Early-modern France, ed.John D. Lyons and J. Kathleen Wine (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 155–67. Gilby, Emma, Sublime Worlds: Early-modern French Literature, Legenda (London: Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2006). Girard, René, La Violence et le sacré (Paris: Gasset/Le Livre de Poche, 1972). Goodkin, Richard, The Tragic Middle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). Hacking, Ian, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas About Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). Hacking, Ian, ‘The Logic of Pascal’s Wager’, in Gambling on God, ed. Jeff Jordan (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), pp. 21–9. Hadot, Pierre, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, 2nd edn (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1987). Hamilton, Ross, Accident. A Philosophical and Literary History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 204

07/10/2011 08:08

Bibliography

205

Hartle, Ann, Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Presss, 2003). Heller-Roazen, Daniel, Fortune’s Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). Herold, Christine, ‘Boethius’s Consolatio Philosophiae as a Bridge Between Classical and Christian Conceptions of Tragedy’, Carmina Philosophiae: Journal of the International Boethius Society 3 (1994), pp. 37–52. Horowitz, Louise K., Love and Language (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1977). Howard, Thomas Albert, ‘Jacob Burckhardt, Religion, and the Historiography of “Crisis” and “Transition”’, Journal of the History of Ideas 60.1 (1999), pp. 149–64. Howells, Bernard, ‘The Interpretation of Pascal’s “Pari”’, Modern Language Review 97.1 (January 1984), pp. 45–63. Hunt, Tony, ‘The Christianization of Fortune’, Nottingham French Studies 38.2 (Autumn 1999), pp. 95–113. Ibbett, Katherine, The Style of the State in French Theater, 1630–1660. Neoclassicism and Government (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009). Jung, Patricia Beattie and Turner, Philip, ‘Review of Stephen Toulmin and Albert R. Jonsen, The Abuse of Casuistry. A History of Moral Reasoning’, in Religious Studies Review 17.4 (October 1991), pp. 298–305. Kavanagh, Thomas M., ed., Chance, Culture and the Literary Text, Michigan Romance Studies (Ann Arbor: Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, 1994). Kavanagh, Thomas M., Dice, Cards, Wheels: A Different History of French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). Kavanagh, Thomas M., Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance. The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Kaylor, Harold, Jr, ‘Fortune’s Wheel, The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius, and Recent American and British Fiction’, Carmina Philosophiae: Journal of the International Boethius Society 10 (2001), pp. 73–81. Kirsch, Doris, La Bruyère ou le style cruel (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1977). Köhler, Erich, Le Hasard en littérature: le possible et la nécessité (Paris: Klincksieck, 1986). Kolakowski, Leszek, God Owes Us Nothing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Kuizenga, Donna, Narrative Strategies (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1976). Lafuma, Louis, ‘Les trois fragments de Pascal sur Cléopâtre’, Dix-Septième Siècle 54–55 (1962), pp. 54–7. Lagarde, André and Michard, Laurent, XVIIe siècle. Les Grands auteurs français du programme (Paris: Bordas, 1967). Lancaster, Henry Carrington, The French Tragi-Comedy: Its Origin and Development from 1552 to 1628 (New York: Gordian Press, 1966). Lancaster, Henry Carrington, A History of Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Century. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1929).

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 205

07/10/2011 08:08

206

The Phantom of Chance

Laugaa, Maurice, Lectures de Madame de Lafayette (Paris: Armand Colin, 1971). Lavocat, Françoise, ed., La Théorie littéraire des mondes possibles (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2010). Legros, Alain, ‘Montaigne Between Fortune and Providence’, in Chance, Literature and Culture in Early-modern France, ed. John D. Lyons and J. Kathleen Wine (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 17–30. Lestringant, Frank, ‘Providence and Imago Mundi’, trans. Michael Meere, in Chance, Literature and Culture in Early-modern France, ed. John D. Lyons and J. Kathleen Wine (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 31–48. Lock, Charles, ‘Ignoring the Nose. Making Faces’, in Nose Book. Representations of the Nose in Literature and the Arts, ed. Victoria De Rijke, Lene Ostermark and Helen Thomas (London: Middlesex University Press, 2000), pp. 169–83. Lyons, John D., ‘From Fortune to Randomness in Seventeenth-Century Literature’, French Studies 65 (2011), pp. 156–73. Lyons, John D., ‘The Heptameron and Unlearning from Example’, in Exemplum. The Rhetoric of Example in France and Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 72–117. Lyons, John D., Kingdom of Disorder. The Theory of Tragedy in Classical France (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1999). Lyons, John D., ‘Mlle de Chartres at the Jeweler’s Shop: Knowledge and Commerce in La Princesse de Clèves’, Seventeenth-Century French Studies 27 (2005), pp. 117–26. Lyons, John D., ‘La triple imperfection de l’histoire’, Dix-Septième Siècle 246 (2010), pp. 27–42. Lyons, John D. and Wine, J. Kathleen, eds, Chance, Literature and Culture in Early-Modern France (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009). McClennen, Edward F., ‘Pascal’s Wage and Finite Decision Theory’, in Jeff Jordan, ed., Gambling on God. Essays on Pascal’s Wager (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), pp. 115–37. Mannoni, Octave, ‘Je sais bien, mais quand même’, in Clefs pour l’Imaginaire, ‘Le Champ freudien’ (Paris: Le Seuil, 1969), pp. 9–33. Martin, Daniel, Montaigne et la fortune (Paris: Champion, 1977). Melzer, Sara E., Discourses of the Fall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Mesnard, Jean, ‘Sur le nez de Cléopâtre’, in Du baroque aux lumières: pages à la mémoire de Jeanne Carriat (Limoges: Rougerie, 1986), pp. 66–72. Mitchell, J. Allan, ‘Romancing Ethics in Boethius, Chaucer, and Levinas: Fortune, Moral Luck, and Erotic Adventure’, Comparative Literature 57.2 (2005), pp. 101–16. Moriarty, Michael, Early-Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Moriarty, Michael, Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves. Early-modern French Thought II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Mullin, Robert Bruce, Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). Murray, Alexander, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 206

07/10/2011 08:08

Bibliography

207

Murray, Timothy, Theatrical Legitimation. Allegories of Genius in SeventeenthCentury England and France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Nussbaum, Martha, The Fragility of Goodness. Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Olschki, Leonardo, Machiavelli the Scientist (Berkeley: Gillick Press, 1945). Parish, Richard, ‘Le Père Étienne Bauny, SJ: La Somme des péchés qui se commettent en tous états face aux Lettres Provinciales’, French Studies 63.4 (October 2009), pp. 385–98. Parker, Mark, ‘Something to Declare: History in Atom Egoyan’s Ararat’, University of Toronto Quarterly 76.4 (2007), pp. 1040–54. Patch, Howard R., The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature (New York: Octogon Books, 1967). Patch, Howard, The Tradition of Boethius. A Study of His Importance in Medieval Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935). Patey, Douglas, Probability and Literary Form: Philosophical Theory and Literary Practice in the Augustan Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Peters, Jeffrey, ‘Kingship and Paranoid Subjectivity in Marie-Catherine Desjardain’s Le Favori’, French Forum 25.3 (2000), pp. 261–76. Poenicke, Klaus, ‘Fortune’s Wheel and Revolution: On the Picaresque View of History’, in Forms and Functions of History in American Literature, ed.Winfried Fluck, Jurgen Peper and Willi Paul Adams (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1981), pp. 120–33. Popkin, Richard H., The History of Skepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). Radding, Charles M., ‘Fortune and Her Wheel: The Meaning of a Medieval Symbol’, Mediaevistik 5 (1992), pp. 127–38. Regosin, Richard, ‘Prudence and the Ethics of Contingency in Montaigne’s Essais’, in Chance, Literature and Culture in Early-modern France, ed.John D. Lyons and J. Kathleen Wine (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 125–40. Reiss, Timothy J., ‘1553, March. Étienne Jodelle’s Tragedy Cléopâtre captive is Performed in the Presence of Henri II’, in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 205–9. Rendall, Steven,‘Trapped Between Romance and Novel’, in An Inimitable Example: The Case for the Princesse de Clèves, ed. Patrick Henry (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1992), pp. 127–38. Rescher, Nicholas, Luck: The Brilliant Randomness of Everyday Life (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995). Rescher, Nicholas, Pascal’s Wager: A Study of Practical Reasoning in Philosophical Theology (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985). Ricord, Marine, Les Caractères de La Bruyère ou les exercices de l’esprit (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000). Rosset, Clément, L’Anti-nature. Éléments pour une philosophie tragique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1973). Samaras, Zoe, ‘Le Rôle de la Fortune dans la pensée de Montaigne’, Bulletin de la Société Des Amis de Montaigne 10–11 (1974), pp. 71–7.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 207

07/10/2011 08:08

208

The Phantom of Chance

Schiesari, Juliana, ‘Libidinal Economies: Machiavelli and Fortune’s Rape’, in Desire in the Renaissance. Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. Regina Schwartz and Valeria Finucci (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Scholar, Richard, The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early-modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Sellier, Philippe, Pascal et Saint Augustin (Paris: Armand Colin, 1970). Shiokawa, Tetsuya, Pascal et les miracles (Paris: Nizet, 1977). Shoemaker, Peter, ‘Lafayette’s Confidence Game: Plausibility and Private Confession in La Princesse de Clèves and Zaïde’, French Forum 27.1 (2002), pp. 45–58. Smith, William et al., A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (London: John Murray, 1891). Tarrête, Alexandre, ‘Fortune’, in Dictionnaire de Michel de Montaigne, ed. Philippe Desan (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), pp. 415–16. Tkacz, Catherine Brown,‘The Wheel of Fortune, the Wheel of State, and Moral Choice in “Hamlet”’, South Atlantic Review 57.4 (November 1992), pp. 21–38. Van Den Abbeele, Georges, ‘Moralists and the Legacy of Cartesianism’, in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 327–34. Weinberg, Bernard, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). Weinberg, Kurt, ‘The Lady and the Unicorn, or M. de Nemours à Coulommiers: Enigma, Blazon and Emblem in La Princesse de Clèves’, in The Princess of Clèves, ed. John D. Lyons (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), pp. 191–205. Wetsel, David, L’Ecriture et le reste. The ‘Pensées’ of Pascal in the Exegetical Tradition of Port-Royal (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1981). Wirth, Jean, ‘L’iconographie médiévale de la roue de fortune’, in La Fortune: thèmes, représentations, discours, ed. Yasmina Foehr-Janssens and Emmanuelle Metry (Geneva: Droz, 2003), pp. 105–27. Witmore, Michael, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledge in Earlymodern England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). Wygant, Amy, ‘D’Aubignac, Demonologist, I: Monkeys and Monsters’, Seventeenth-Century French Studies 23 (2001), pp. 151–71. Wygant, Amy, ‘Fortune, Long Life, Montaigne’, in Chance, Literature, and Culture in Early-modern France, ed. John D. Lyons and J. Kathleen Wine (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 169–95. Wygant, Amy, Medea, Magic, and Modernity in France. Stages and Histories, 1663–1797 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Wygant, Amy, ‘Poppea and the Goddess Fortune in Music’, New Directions in Emblem Studies 4 (1999), pp. 137–51. Ziolkowski, Eric J., ‘Don Quijote’s Windmill and Fortune’s Wheel’, Modern Language Review 86.4 (October 1991), pp. 885–97.

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 208

07/10/2011 08:08

Index

Académie française, 33, 35, 49, 64n accident, 2, 9–10, 12, 22, 25n, 26n, 31, 35–6, 38, 89, 102n, 174–6, 178, 181, 183–4, 186–9, 191, 193–4 aleatory, 27n, 43, 129 anamorphic painting, 135, 137–8, 166 arbitrary, concept of, 1–2, 45–7, 64–5n, 144, 182, 185, 192, 195n, 197 Aristotle Physics, 1–3, 5, 7–8, 19, 25n, 71, 89, 94 Poetics, 1–2, 5, 13–14, 19, 25n, 30, 32, 35–6, 50, 54, 58, 172 Arnauld, Antoine, 41, 64, 84–5 astrology, 120–1, 132n Aubignac, François Hédelin, abbé de, 32–3, 82 Augustine, Saint, and Augustinianism, 69–72, 82, 90, 99n, 136–7, 145, 166, 175 automaton, 1, 3, 6–8, 15, 19, 25–6n, 54, 79, 93 Beauvoir, Simone de, 173n Bell, David, 76–7, 100n, 101n Bergson, Henri, 195n Bjørnstad, Hall, 72 Boethius, Ancius Manlius, 12–21, 24, 26n, 27n, 32, 45, 96, 110–11, 174, 193 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 135–52, 155, 159, 162–3, 166 Campbell, John, 161–2 caprice, 113–16, 119, 123, 132n, 176; see also whim/whimsy caso, 1, 20–1 Castelvetro, Lodovico, 32–3

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 209

casuistry, 73–5, 77–83, 100n, 101n; see also probabilism casus, 1, 8–10, 12, 15, 20, 74 Chapelain, Jean, 33–6, 52; see also Académie française Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 9–12, 96, 110 Cioffari, Vincenzo, 26n, 28n Cleopatra’s nose, 24, 67, 70, 98n; see also Pascal, Blaise Corneille, Pierre, 30–4, 36–56, 58, 60–7, 71, 104, 110, 128, 132n, 148, 155, 159–60, 169, 171, 193 Le Cid, 30, 33–6, 38, 44–5, 47–53, 55, 58–9, 62, 64n, 65n, 130, 193 Clitandre, 37–45, 49, 62 Polyeucte, 55–61, 66n Three Discourses on the Dramatic Poem, 30–1, 33, 49–50, 52–4, 169 Coumet, Ernest, 77–8, 91 Daston, Lorraine, 73 Descartes, René, 68, 75, 83, 127, 133n, 175 destiny, 10–11, 44, 119–22, 125, 132n deus ex machina, 1, 3, 25n, 41, 53, 55, 60 divertissement, 84, 95, 99n; see also Pascal, Blaise Essays see Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de Farrell, John, 165–6 fashion, 180, 182, 188–92 fate, 1, 9–11, 20, 119–20 Ferreyrolles, Gérard, 102n, 138 Flanagan, Thomas, 16 Forestier, Georges, 155, 159, 172–3

07/10/2011 08:08

210

The Phantom of Chance

fortune, 6–10, 12–24, 28n, 36, 61–2, 65n, 68, 77, 101n, 107–13, 116, 119–20, 122, 125–6, 131n, 132n, 147, 149, 174, 185, 188, 197; see also wheel of fortune Foucault, Michel, 74 frequency/probability, 12, 24, 65, 73, 80–3, 92–3, 100n, 111–12, 126, 196; see also repetition games, 76–9, 96, 144, 181 Genette, Gérard, 85, 133n, 172 genius, 181, 189 genre see romance and romanesque; tragedy; tragi-comedy géométrie du hasard, 78, 91, 97; see also Pascal, Blaise Girard, René, 65n grace, 56–7, 59–61, 66n, 71, 84–5, 193, 197–8 Hacking, Ian, 64–5, 73, 75–6, 81, 100n hamartia, 158–9 hasard, 1, 22, 34, 36–8, 47, 53, 61, 68–70, 72, 77–8, 86, 88, 90, 92, 94, 96–7, 107–8, 111–13, 116–19, 121–4, 127, 136–7, 144, 150–1, 153, 166–7, 179, 181, 193, 196–7 Ibbett, Katherine, 59, 66n Jansenists, 73, 160, 197; see also Pascal, Blaise Jesuits, 73–6, 79, 81, 83–4; see also Pascal, Blaise La Bruyère, Jean de, 174–95 La Mesnardière, Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de, 32 Lafayette, Marie-Madeleine de The Princess of Cleves, 58, 123–31 Zayde, 104–22 Lemaître de Sacy, Louis-Isaac, 68, 89, 101n Machiavelli, Niccolò, 15–23, 28n, 31, 96, 126, 146, 167 machine, 47, 53 in La Bruyère, 185–8 see also Deus ex machina Malebranche, Nicolas, 128 merit, 34, 46–7, 60, 66n, 109, 181–2, 186 merveille see wonder

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 210

miracles, 41, 55–6, 58, 90–1, 93, 95, 102n, 150, 156–7, 164 Mitys, statue of, 2, 5–6, 27n, 36, 39, 105 monsters/monstrous, 32–3, 168, 184 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 21–4, 57, 74–7, 86, 166, 174, 192 Apology for Raymond Sebond, 24, 68–9, 71–2, 99n, 137, 197 Moriarty, Michael, 128 Nicole, Pierre, 56, 72–3, 138 occasions of sin, 81–3 in La Bruyère, 179–83 Olschki, Leonardo, 16, 28n paranoia, 110, 165–7, 169, 173n Pascal, Blaise, 24, 67–98, 128, 137–8 Pensées, 67–70, 72–3, 76, 84–6, 88–9, 95–6, 99n, 101n, 102n, 103n, 113, 131n, 194n Provincial Letters, 72–3, 75–80, 83–5, 92, 100n wager, 76, 86, 95–8, 103n plausibility, 78, 107, 110, 122–3, 139, 170; see also verisimilitude poetics, 1–3, 5, 8, 13–14, 25n, 30, 33–4, 37, 45, 50, 53–4, 56–8, 60, 63n, 71, 94, 151, 128, 133n, 158–9, 161, 169, 171n probabilism, 73, 75–7, 81, 85, 100n; see also casuistry; Pascal, Blaise probability, 12, 25n, 31–2, 36, 54, 73, 75–82, 92, 95–6, 98, 100n prophecy, 72, 86, 90–1, 93, 102n, 143, 145–6, 149 providence, 1, 8–9, 15, 20, 55–6, 60, 120, 135–6, 138, 141, 155, 162, 166, 170, 172n Provincial Letters see Pascal, Blaise Racine, Jean, 135, 153–5, 157–63, 165–6, 168–74 randomness, 13, 15, 43, 45, 67, 69–72, 82–3, 85–6, 88, 97, 110, 113, 116, 126, 144, 181–2, 197 Ranum, Orest, 139, 145 repetition, 50, 65n, 154; see also frequency and probability roman see romance romance and romanesque, 38, 104–5, 107, 112, 122–3, 129–30, 131n

07/10/2011 08:08

Index scepticism, 21–2, 68,70, 72, 91, 137, 165–7 Scudéry, Madeleine de, 33, 51, 53, 104–7, 110, 113, 122–3, 128, 130–3 Sebond, Raymond see Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 9, 69 shipwreck, plot element, 104, 105–9, 112–13, 123, 130, 132n, 196, 198 Sorel, Charles, 122–3 steganography, 95 Stoicism, 9, 10–13, 17, 23–4 suspense, 36, 43, 147, 169–71 thaumaston, 2, 5, 70, 105; see also wonder time, 55–61, 66n, 80, 100n, 101n Tomkis, Thomas, 132n tragedy, 1–2, 15, 30–2, 35–6, 41, 45, 50, 52–3, 55–6, 82, 147, 153, 155, 157–60, 162, 164–5, 168–71, 196

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 211

211

tragi-comedy, 33–4, 36–8, 40, 42, 44–5, 64n tyche, 1–3, 6–8, 15, 19, 32, 54, 70, 79, 86, 89, 93–4, 96–7, 110, 117, 126, 180, 193, 198 Vair, Guillaume du, 107, 128 Valincour, Jean-Baptiste Henri du Trousset, de, 125–6, 128, 133n verisimilitude, 33, 65n, 82–4, 100n, 122, 129, 133n vraisemblance see verisimilitude wheel of fortune, 14–15, 20, 47, 62, 68, 111, 147, 174, 185–8; see also fortune whim/whimsy, 45, 68, 176; see also caprice wonder, 2–3, 5, 9, 13, 36, 38, 40, 62, 70, 89, 105, 151, 172n, 181, 184 Wygant, Amy, 103n

07/10/2011 08:08

LYONS PHANTOM PRINT.indd 212

07/10/2011 08:08