The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination 9781907975707

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PARASCHAS

Paraschas focuses on two realists, Honoré de Balzac and George Eliot, and traces this authorial scenario from its origins in the late eighteenth century to its demise in the early twentieth century, examining its presence in the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Friedrich Schlegel, Charles Baudelaire and André Gide. Sotirios Paraschas is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in French at the University of Warwick.

legenda is a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge. The series studies in comparative literature ranges widely across comparative and theoretical topics in literary and translation studies, accommodating research at the interface between different artistic media and between the humanities and the sciences.

The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination

The nineteenth century realist author was a contradictory figure. He was the focus of literary criticism, but obscured his creative role by insisting on presenting his works as ‘copies’ of reality. He was a celebrity who found himself subservient to publishers and the public, in a newly-industrialised liter­ ary marketplace. He was the owner of his work who was divested of his property by imperfect copyright laws, play­ wrights who adapted his novels for the stage, and sequelwriters. This combination of a conspicuous yet precarious status with a self-effacing attitude was expressed by an image of the author as a plural, Protean subject, possessing the faculty of sympathetic imagination — which the realists incorporated in their works in the form of a series of fictional characters who functioned as ‘doubles’ of the author.

STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 28

The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination Sotirios Paraschas

ISBN 978-1-907975-70-7

cover illustration: William Marlow (1740–1813),

9 781907 975707

Paraschas-9781907975707-cover.indd 1

St. Paul’s and Blackfriars Bridge (c.1770), oil on canvas, 513 mm × 746 mm.

Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge

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The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination

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Studies in Comparative Literature Editorial Committee Professor Stephen Bann, University of Bristol (Chairman) Professor Duncan Large, University of Swansea Dr Elinor Shaffer, School of Advanced Study, London Studies in Comparative Literature are produced in close collaboration with the British Comparative Literature Association, and range widely across comparative and theo­ retical topics in literary and translation studies, accommodating research at the interface between different artistic media and between the humanities and the sciences. published in this series Breeches and Metaphysics: Thackeray’s German Discourse, by S. S. Prawer Hölderlin and the Dynamics of Translation, by Charlie Louth Aeneas Takes the Metro, by Fiona Cox Metaphor and Materiality: German Literature and the World-View of Science, by Peter D. Smith Marguerite Yourcenar: Reading the Visual, by Nigel Saint Treny: The Laments of Kochanowski, translated by Adam Czerniawski Neither a Borrower: Forging Traditions in French, Chinese and Arabic Poetry, by Richard Serrano The Anatomy of Laughter, edited by Toby Garfitt, Edith McMorran and Jane Taylor Dilettantism and its Values: From Weimar Classicism to the fin de siècle, by Richard Hibbitt The Fantastic in France and Russia in the Nineteenth Century, by Claire Whitehead Singing Poets: Literature and Popular Music in France and Greece, by Dimitris Papanikolaou Wanderers Across Language: Exile in Irish and Polish Literature, by Kinga Olszewska Moving Scenes: The Aesthetics of German Travel Writing on England, by Alison E. Martin Henry James and the Second Empire, by Angus Wrenn Platonic Coleridge, by James Vigus Imagining Jewish Art, by Aaron Rosen Alienation and Theatricality: Diderot after Brecht, by Phoebe von Held Turning into Sterne: Viktor Shklovskii and Literary Reception, by Emily Finer Yeats and Pessoa: Parallel Poetic Styles, by Patricia Silva McNeill Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death: Walter Pater and Post-Hegelianism, by Giles Whiteley Blake, Lavater and Physiognomy, by Sibylle Erle Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque: Crashaw, Baudelaire, Magritte, by Shun-Liang Chao The Art of Comparison: How Novels and Critics Compare, by Catherine Brown Borges and Joyce: An Infinite Conversation, by Patricia Novillo-Corvalán Prometheus in the Nineteenth Century: From Myth to Symbol, by Caroline Corbeau-Parsons Architecture, Travellers and Writers: Constructing Histories of Perception, by Anne Hultzsch Comparative Literature in Britain: National Identities, Transnational Dynamics 1800-2000, by Joep Leerssen with Elinor Shaffer 28. The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination, by Sotirios Paraschas 29. Iris Murdoch and Elias Canetti: Intellectual Allies, by Elaine Morley 30. Likenesses: Translation, Illustration, Interpretation, by Matthew Reynolds 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination ❖ Sotirios Paraschas

Studies in Comparative Literature 28 Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2013

First published 2013 Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

LEGENDA is an imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2013 ISBN 978-1-907975-70-7 (hbk) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recordings, fax or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgwwnts List of Ahhrn·iations List t~f Tnmslations Introduction: An Author fOr Realism

lX

X Xl

I

PART 1: SYMPATHETIC IMAGII\ATION Sympathy and Sympathetic Imagination in Realist Fiction

I8

2

Irony and Sympathetic Imagination

39

3

The Authorial F.conomy of Sympathy

6-r

I

P;\R T II: Al.'THORIAL DOl.'BLES II\ RE:\LIST FICT!Ol\ 4

Balzac and the Author as Capitalist

5

Baudebire. the Fl!meur. and the Author as Prostitute

6

Daniel Derond,1: The Commodity and its Soul

7

The Decline of the Authorial Double Concludin\r Reileclions 0

I6I

]Votes

Bibliography

I96

Inde,"\-·

220

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v

This monograph is based on my doctoral dissertation, ‘The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century Literary Marketplace’, submitted to the Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Oxford. I am deeply grateful to my supervisor, Professor Ann Jefferson, for her sympathetic and judicious guidance, her generous support and continued encouragement. I owe special thanks to my college advisor, Dr Tim Farrant, for reading drafts of several chapters of the thesis, the entirety of which benefited greatly from his erudition. I would like to thank my viva examiners, Professor Roger Pearson and Dr Michael Tilby, for their invaluable comments. Particular thanks are due to Professors Michalis Chryssanthopoulos, Miltos Pechlivanos, and Lizy Tsirimokou from whose guidance I have benefited in incalculable ways over the course of the past fourteen years. Many friends have discussed the subject of this thesis with me or read drafts of chapters, offering insightful suggestions and helpful objections; I am both personally and intellectually indebted to Georgios Kazantzidis, Kostas Peroulis, Kostas Spatharakis, and Kostis Karpozilos. My debt to my family is beyond acknowledgement; this book is dedicated to them. s.p., Warwick, January 2013

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS v

CH Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine, ed. by Pierre-Georges Castex, 12 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1976–81) CHH Honoré de Balzac, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Maurice Bardèche, 28 vols (Paris: Club de l’honnête homme, 1956–63) EGE George Eliot, Essays of George Eliot, ed. by Thomas Pinney (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963) GS Honoré de Balzac, Gobseck, in CH, II GEL George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, ed. by Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954–78) IP Honoré de Balzac, Illusions perdues, in CH, V KFSA Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe seiner Werke, ed. by Ernst Behler, Jean-Jacques Anstett, and Hans Eichner, 33 vols (Munich: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 1979–80) LV George Eliot, ‘The Lifted Veil’, in The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob, ed. by Sally Shuttleworth (London: Penguin, 2004) OC Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Claude Pichois, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1975–76) OD Honoré de Balzac, Œuvres diverses, ed. by Roland Chollet and René Guise, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1990–96) OE Diderot, Œuvres esthétiques, ed. by Paul Vernière (Paris: Garnier, 1988) PC Honoré de Balzac, La Peau de chagrin, in CH, X PG Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot, in CH, III SM Honoré de Balzac, Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, in CH, VI SP Charles Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris, in OC, I TMS Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. by Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

Journals AB ELH MLN NCF NCFS NLH PMLA RHLF

L’Année balzacienne English Literary History Modern Language Notes Nineteenth-Century Fiction Nineteenth-Century French Studies New Literary History Publications of the Modern Language Association of America Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France

LIST OF TRANSLATIONS v

All translations of texts not included in this list are mine. Where necessary, translations have been modified to bring them closer to the original. Balzac, Honoré de, A Harlot High and Low, trans. by Rayner Heppenstall (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970) —— Lost Illusions, trans. by Herbert J. Hunt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971) —— Old Goriot, trans. by Marion Ayton Crawford (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977) —— Selected Short Stories, trans. by Sylvia Raphael (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977) —— The Wild Ass’s Skin, trans. by Herbert J. Hunt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977) Barthes, Roland, The Rustle of Language, trans. by Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) Baudelaire, Charles, Baudelaire as a Literary Critic, trans. by Lois Boe Hyslop and Francis E. Hyslop (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1964) —— Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. by P. E. Charvet (London: Penguin, 1972) Diderot, Denis, Rameau’s Nephew and First Satire, trans. by Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) Flaubert, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, trans. by Francis Steegmuller, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980) Gide, André, Logbook of the Coiners, trans. by Justin O’Brien (London: Cassell & Co., 1952) —— The Counterfeiters, trans. by Dorothy Bussy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966) Goux, Jean-Joseph, The Coiners of Language, trans. by Jennifer Curtiss-Gage (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994) Hoffmann, E. T. A., The Golden Pot and Other Tales, trans. by Ritchie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) Schlegel, Augustus Wilhelm, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Arts and Literature, trans. by John Black (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1846) Schlegel, Friedrich, Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. by Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971) Wheeler, Kathleen (ed.), German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)

Introduction v

An Author for Realism

The history of the concept of the author in twentieth-century literary criticism can be seen as a process of gradual semantic attenuation; critical orthodoxies have divested it of a meaning acquired mainly over the course of the nineteenth century. The term ‘author’ possessed considerable gravity: the author was, among other things, a way in which literature was understood and interpreted. The meaning of a text was associated, in more or less sophisticated ways, with its author: texts were conceived as the products of his imagination, expressions of his ideas and feelings, transcriptions of his life, of real people (‘models’) and of events he had been a witness to; the author functioned as the centre and the source of the meaning of his works. All these involved a certain (not necessarily naïve or direct) relation with reality, and it is not a coincidence that the concept of realism becomes a problem and an object of contention when the author loses his primacy: ‘the death of the author’ and ‘the reality effect’, that is, the relegation of both ‘reality’ and the author to a rhetorical effect, go hand in hand. This attenuation does not seem to go against the accepted meaning of realism: since any possible definition of realism depends by necessity on the concept of a more or less faithful representation of reality, it implies an author who effectively effaces himself, or, at least, feigns to do so. The definition of realism as ‘the objective representation of contemporary social reality’1 designates a limited range for the author’s activity; he is assigned the status of a copyist.2 Realism is thus assumed to aspire to transparency or to an epistemological naïveté which Baudelaire’s formulation of the realist credo in the ‘Salon de 1859’ conveys quite bluntly: ‘Je veux représenter les choses telles qu’elles sont, ou bien qu’elles seraient, en supposant que je n’existe pas’ [I want to represent things as they are, or as they would be on the assumption that I did not exist].3 Although Baudelaire’s aphorism expresses an assumption widely accepted in twentieth-century discussions of realist fiction — to the extent that it became an invariable component of the textbook definition of realism — the term ‘réalisme’ in his time did not yet possess the meaning it later came to acquire. The context and the way in which Baudelaire employs the term, however, are highly indicative of the main problems that have accompanied the concept of realism for a long time. In the first place, the passage cited above does not refer to literature; it occurs in a discussion of the visual arts — which is only apposite since the process of the semantic crystallization of the term originated in the 1850s debate on the work of Gustave Courbet, which came to be called ‘la bataille réaliste’. The term had a

2

Introduction

long history in philosophical discourse and its first applications to literature and the arts (occurring in the nineteenth century)4 had already signalled a reversal of the sense in which it was used in a philosophical context.5 Originally, realism, even if principally referring to the detailed portrayal of everyday reality, was employed in connection with Romantic authors, and denoted a manner of writing that was not incompatible with Romanticism.6 It was the debate on Courbet’s work that gave rise to Champf leury’s and Edmond Duranty’s ‘programmatic realism’, regarded as a distinct school and associated with the principle of ‘sincérité’.7 Even though its proponents were soon relegated to the footnotes of histories of realism, the term itself gained currency; although its semantic stabilization did not render it less inclusive and its various branches (social, psychological, socialist or critical) managed to promote it to a ‘perennial mode’8 with no historical specificity, it still retained a privileged connection with its origins: nineteenth-century fiction never failed to maintain its authority as having set the standards for the representation of reality. Secondly, Baudelaire was always careful to handle the term ‘realism’ with a gloved hand, refusing to treat it as anything more than a hoax.9 This attitude is not unlike that of many realist authors who were more than merely disinclined to be associated with the term — Flaubert’s condemnation of ‘réalisme’ as ‘une ineptie’ [an absurdity] being a case in point.10 This unwillingness points to the restricted meaning of the word. The emphasis on sincerity identified a limited field of action that seemed to exclude equally important concepts such as the imagination; indeed Baudelaire cites the realist credo in the section of the ‘Salon de 1859’ which he entitles ‘Le Gouvernement de l’imagination’. This antithesis between representation and imagination lies at the heart of most modern discussions of realism or of most nineteenth-century discussions of nineteenth-century fiction (even when the term is not mentioned), and, above all, concerns the kind of author the various views on realism imply. Observation and representation suggest a ‘weak’ authorial figure, while imagination and invention a ‘strong’ one — an author who makes his presence felt in the literary text. It comes as an explainable paradox that realism was rejected in the twentieth century (when truthfulness of representation was no longer valued or considered downright impossible and suspect) as containing too little invention, while, in the nineteenth century (when truth was cherished), it was deplored for containing too much.11 This exclusion of the imagination referred less to the manner in which an abstract ‘realist’ author composes or should compose his work and more to the literary modes which were assumed to be incompatible with realism. The distinction between realism and Romanticism, ‘fantasmagorie’, ‘idéalisme’,12 ‘falsism’13 or ‘abstraction’14 — concepts which, originally, had wide applications and were not period-specific — was gradually transformed into a literary-historical polarity: realism became a period concept as much as a manner of writing and was juxtaposed to Romanticism. This distinction was often projected back into periods in which it did not exist, creating a series of problems when it came to be applied to specific authors: thus, while Balzac’s pronouncements in his ‘Avant-propos’ sound decidedly realist, he is found wanting when measured according to an overly technical concept of realism.15

Introduction

3

Purely representational realism and neutral observers as well as purely imaginative Romanticism and self-expressing subjects are both critical fictions: French Rom­ anticism and realism, in any understanding of the terms, have multiple points of contact, or, as Hans-Robert Jauß has argued,16 are both inaugurated by Victor Hugo’s ‘Préface de Cromwell’; George Levine has explored the suppression and the return of the imagination or romance as one of the main features of English realism.17 This monograph draws heavily on the assumption of certain essential continuities between Romanticism and realism, both in the way realist authors imagine their relation to reality and in the way they stage their own authorial images. The Realist Author Man kann sagen, daß es ein charakteristisches Kennzeichen des dichtenden Genies ist, viel mehr zu wissen, als es weiß, daß es weiß.18 [One can say that it is a distinguishing mark of poetical genius to know a great deal more than he knows he knows.] Balzac, indécrottable et embêtant. Dans la vie privée, ignare et ignoble, ne sachant rien. Ouvrant des grands yeux à toutes les explications, bouffi de lieux communs, une vanité de commis-marchand. Il semblait qu’il se fît un phénomène somnambulique lorsqu’il travaillait, et que concentré sur un point, par une intuition, il se rappelât toutes choses, même les ignorées.19 [Balzac, incorrigible and annoying. In his private life, ignorant and vile; he knew nothing. He was astonished by every explanation, he was full of com­ mon­places and had the vanity of a travelling salesman. It seems that, when he was working, a somnambular phenomenon took place and that, when he was concentrating on something, he remembered everything, even the things he did not know.]

This malicious comment paints a familiar picture of the realist author as insignificant, or, indeed, irrelevant to his work and as epistemologically naïve — propositions which, in one way or another, have been repeated frequently by twentieth-century theorists and critics. The idea that even the best of poets are largely ignorant when it comes to the workings of their own genius predates August Schlegel’s aphorism and reaches back to Plato’s Apology;20 the idea that the effective cause behind a literary work is an entity external to the author, be it the Muse or divine afflatus, has a venerable and equally long ancestry; neither is as harsh as the mesmerist metaphor in that the latter implies that the author, rather than seek its help, is altogether unaware of this other entity and that he is deluded in thinking of himself as an agent. The twentieth century treated the author for a long time as a medium, a spokesman for something else. If the Goncourt brothers were silent on the identity of the mesmerist agent who animates the author with his will, twentieth-century theorists have produced several hypotheses on the subject: the author is believed to be mimicking, distorting, or, at best, passively transmitting what is whispered to him by Literary Evolution, the Unconscious, Ideology, Form, Universal Grammar, Language or Discourse. Roland Barthes’s ‘death of the author’ was not a novelty,

4

Introduction

in this respect: Osip Brik’s pronouncement, in 1923, that Eugene Onegin would have been written even if Pushkin had never been born21 is in fact less generous in that at least Barthes grants the author the privilege of having lived. The realist author, in this context, was an easy target. Unless he could be, like Flaubert, conveniently rescued by virtue of being viewed as a (proto)modernist and, thus, conscious of or actively seeking his own effacement, the realist author was linked with all the scapegoats of modern theory: belief in a fixed and objective reality, epistemological naïveté, trust in the transparency of language and in its inability to interfere with his message, optimism regarding the power of communication.22 According to such a view, if the author in general had forfeited his agency, the realist author never had any to begin with. The realist author, however, was not considered a medium only in the context of negative evaluations of realism. In his Studies in European Realism, Georg Lukács takes up what Friedrich Engels had called, in 1888, ‘the triumph of realism’ in relation to Balzac: the fact that ‘he was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices’.23 This idea of a fundamental discrepancy between Balzac’s conscious views and the insights afforded by his work 24 is what constitutes, for Lukács, Balzac’s ‘historical greatness’. Lukács justifies the paradoxical choice of rejecting an ideologically ‘correct’ author such as Zola on aesthetic grounds while embracing an ideologically deluded ‘great artist’ by arguing that such authors’ ‘true conception of the world is only superficially formulated in the consciously held world-view and the real depth of their Weltanschauung [...] can find adequate expression in the being and fate of their characters’. Thus, in Les Paysans, ‘what Balzac really did [...] was the exact opposite of what he had set out to do: what he depicted was not the tragedy of the aristocratic estate but of the peasant smallholding’. In this sense, the process of selecting the fundamental aspects of any given historical period and the creation of typical characters, firmly rooted in their socio-historical situation (which for Lukács, constitute the two main criteria by means of which realism is distinguished from the naturalist accumulation of meaningless details and the creation of average characters) is, in the case of Balzac, an essentially unconscious process. Lukács’s rule of unconscious greatness does not differ considerably, in this respect, from the ways in which the twentieth century dealt with the author.25 Roland Barthes’s 1968 ‘L’Effet de réel’ attacked the main realist assumption that was a thorn in the f lesh of structuralism (namely, the belief that a realist text represents reality) and focused on what Henry James called Balzac’s ‘mighty passion for things’.26 The raison d’être of the accumulation of ‘détails superf lus’, ‘inutiles’, ‘insignifiants’ (since they could not be assigned a function in structuralist analysis), is to connote ‘the real’: their function is rhetorical, persuasive and, thus, deceptive. ‘Realism’ is a rhetorical trick in which the tripartite nature of the sign (signifier–signified–referent) collapses: the barometer of Mme Aubain is a signifier with no signified; moreover, its referent is not an object but ‘the real’ itself. Thus the accumulation of descriptive details, rather than refer to the external world, aims to persuade the reader that what he is reading is ‘real’: it is merely a ‘reality effect’. But, in Barthes’s opinion, this deception goes even further, since, other than that,

Introduction

5

realist narratives are not at all realist: la littérature réaliste est, certes, narrative, mais c’est parce que le réalisme est en elle seulement parcellaire, erratique, confiné aux ‘détails’ et que le récit le plus réaliste qu’on puisse imaginer se développe selon des voies irréalistes.27 [Realistic literature is narrative, of course, but that is because its realism is only fragmentary, erratic, confined to ‘details’, and because the most realistic narrative imaginable develops along unrealistic lines.]

This summary dismissal of realism was published a year after Barthes had issued the death certificate of the author in Aspen 5+6.28 Like reality which, in ‘L’Effet de réel’, becomes a rhetorical effect, the author in ‘La Mort de l’auteur’ is also transformed into the (after-)effect rather than the origin of his text: its origin, instead, is Language. Barthes announces that the death of the author is necessary for the birth of the reader. This ‘reader’ however proves to be a curious subject ‘sans histoire, sans biographie, sans psychologie’,29 a reader whose function is to become the space in which the multiplicity of meaning produced by the liberation of the text from the authorial shackles may be registered; Barthes’s reader, in other words, can be seen as the first incarnation of Barthes’s own authorial-readerly persona in S/Z. Barthes begins his essay by posing the infamous question ‘Qui parle ainsi?’ [Who speaks in this way?] in reference to a passage from Sarrasine: ‘C’était la femme avec ses peurs soudaines, ses caprices sans raison, ses troubles instinctifs, ses audaces sans cause, ses bravades et sa délicieuse finesse de sentiment’ [This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility].30 He then proceeds by suggesting answers in the form of rhetorical questions (Sarrasine, Balzac the individual, Balzac the author, universal wisdom, romantic psychology) and concludes by saying that it is impossible to know. Interestingly, Barthes does not mention the correct — from a literal point of view — answer, not even in order to reject it: it is the anonymous narrator-character of the frame narrative,31 the person who relates the story of Zambinella to Mme de Rochefide, who voices this opinion about a particular kind of woman ‘molle et sans énergie’ [soft and enervating].32 This character is doubly motivated in narrating the story: on the one hand, the admiration of Mme de Rochefide for the portrait of Zambinella as Adonis provokes his jealousy33 and he is bent on proving that the original of the painting is not exactly male. On the other, the narration takes place in the frame of an eventually frustrated exchange: the narrator employs it as a means of seduction. The passage, therefore, can be seen as a description of Zambinella that emphasizes her femininity and also as an indirect compliment to the marquise Béatrix de Rochefide, who is most unlike the kind of woman that Zambinella appears to be. In eliminating the frame narrative, in isolating the passage and in failing to treat it as an instance of communication between two characters, a narrator and a listener, Barthes does not merely ‘kill’ the origin or the ‘author’ of the passage (whose intentions are clearly very different from the transcendental authorial intention Barthes targets)34 but also its destination, the ‘reader’. On a larger scale, in his essay, Barthes also eliminates any kind of communication between author and reader, by substituting them for Writing and for his own phantasmal Reader-Critic, respectively.

6

Introduction

Lukács and Barthes may be seen as standing for two major approaches to realism, which, according to Lilian Furst, view the latter either as ‘a faithful portrayal of a social situation at a particular time in a particular place’ or ‘as a textual web of discourse’ — as either truth or illusion.35 The anti-realist bias did not hold for long: the late 1970s and the 1980s witnessed several defences of realism, arguing against its alleged naïveté and refusing to see it as a curious hiatus in the history of the novel, an otherwise ref lexive genre. The strong anti-authorialist climate in the wake of Barthes, Foucault and Derrida and the rise of reader-oriented literary theory resulted in the illumination of realism from hitherto neglected points of view. Rather than focusing on what realism is, most of the studies appearing in the 1980s, shifted their interest towards what realism does (to the reader) and how: Diana Knight argued for Flaubert’s characters as combining representational and ref lexive concerns; Christopher Prendergast stressed the social mediation and the contractual dimension of the concepts of mimesis and verisimilitude; Ann Jefferson located the ref lexive qualities of Stendhal’s realism in its attitude towards the reader.36 All these studies occupy a middle position, as it were, between Lukács and Barthes, stressing the self-consciousness of realism without disparaging its representational aspects. This meant that critical interest turned from the constative function of realism to the performative one, which became the explicit focus in the accounts of realism by Sandy Petrey and Lilian Furst. Sandy Petrey argued that the reality that realist fiction appeals to is not a pre-existent, fixed reality, but one which is performed and ‘produced when signs successfully collaborate with the conventional procedures that organize a collectivity’. In this sense, Zambinella is never described as a castrato (a word that does not occur in Balzac’s text) but successively as a man and as a woman: the Balzacian text does not refer to a pre-existing object, but, instead, shows how this object becomes what it is through the performative collaboration of conventions and social practices; thus, the referent of the realist text ‘is not the source but the product of verbal performance’.37 Rather than insist on realism as the debated product of conventions, Furst argues that the novel’s ‘partak[ing] of both fictionality and verisimilitude’ is based on an unspoken ‘let’s pretend’ in the beginning of a text which ‘translates [...] into the perception of the verbal artifact as a performance by readers’ — what she calls the ‘performative pretence’ of realism. One essential insight of Furst’s book is that ‘the alleged simplicity and naïveté of realist fiction can indeed be seen as yet another component of its pretence’ which presents not merely the reading of the realist text, but also the text itself and the process of mimesis, as a performative process: mimesis can be translated as ‘presentation’ or ‘making present’. That ‘making present’ of place is manifest in what I designate its enactment: its forcefulness in the text as a propelling factor in the action. In assigning this function to place, the realists prove to be faithful to the initial Greek meaning of mimesis as performance.38

Neither Petrey nor Furst show any marked interest in the debate on the author; however, in stressing the performative aspects of the realist text, they implicitly sketch an image of the author as neither a neutral writing machine nor as the executor of the inscrutable will of Language but as someone who is aware of the

Introduction

7

pitfalls of both representation and rhetoric and orchestrates, more or less cunningly, the va-et-vient between truth and illusion, reference and language. The rehabilitation of realism was parallel to attempts to reintroduce the author as a valid term in the critical vocabulary, attempts which took roughly two forms. A first approach was inspired by Michel Foucault’s argument, in ‘What Is an Author?’ (1969), that the author-function has a limited life span, that it comes into being, as far as literature is concerned, ‘in the seventeenth or eighteenth century’ and that books began to have authors when writers became proprietors of their works and subject to punishment.39 A group of studies engaged in the archaeology of authorship, especially in relation to copyright, and attempted to render Foucault’s vague pronouncement more precise — thus, revitalizing both authorial studies and the interdisciplinary study of law and literature.40 A second approach engaged with the death of the author by agreeing with Barthes’s own insight in Le Plaisir du texte (1973) that the reader, while reading, ‘desires the author’:41 Alexander Nehamas’s ‘postulated author’42 and Maurice Couturier’s ‘figure auctoriale’43 both resurrect the author as a construct of the reader, indispensable to the process of reading — a variation of Wayne C. Booth’s concept of the implied author.44 This view of the author as an effect of his text, generated a somewhat distinct, sociologically informed approach which consists in the study of the image of the author: Daniel Oster speaks of ‘l’écrivain comme représentation’, Jean-Claude Bonnet of ‘le fantasme de l’écrivain’, Jean-Benoît Puech of ‘le personnage auctorial’, and José-Luis Diaz of ‘l’écrivain imaginaire’ and ‘le scénario auctorial’.45 Diaz distinguishes provisionally between three levels of ‘l’espace-auteur’: the real, the textual and the imaginary, which are the domains of ‘l’homme de lettres’ (the actual historical individual), ‘l’auteur’ (that is, ‘une réalité nominale et pronominale’) and ‘l’écrivain (imaginaire)’, respectively. The last-mentioned, although conceptually distinct, is shaped also by the first two notions: ‘authorial scenarios’ depend on the textual manifestation of the author and the attitude of the man of letters, as well. This image of the author does not consist merely in the figure which emerges, in the perception of the reader, as a plausible cause for the text; it refers to the pose adopted by the author, to the fictional character he invents for himself, to the way in which he chooses to stage his authorial self in his works, prefaces, correspondence, or in his public appearances. This image is not related exclusively to his work;46 it is co-created by the ways in which the author is presented by others (his publishers, reviewers or biographers) and it may, subsequently, be sanctioned or rejected by the reader and abandoned or altered by the author. The authorial scenario is a f lexible concept, applicable to a specific work or the entire œuvre of an author, to a group or a generation of authors or to a literary period; its f lexibility enables it both to encompass the concepts of a literary movement, epoch, or school and to avoid their rigidity, since an author may participate, simultaneously or alternately, in various authorial scenarios.47 Since the 1990s, especially after the full-length scrutiny to which anti-authorialist arguments have been subjected by Seán Burke, who argues that, in one way or another, the author inevitably returns in any anti-authorial discourse,48 the study of the author has been revived.49

8

Introduction

This necessarily selective account of the twin fortunes of realism and the author in recent critical discourse aims to foreground alternatives to the relegation of the realist author to the role of a medium. What reader-oriented and performative accounts of realism share with Diaz’s approach is the reintroduction, in one way or another, of the aspect of realist fiction that, as mentioned, was eliminated by Barthes in ‘La Mort de l’auteur’. The realist text can be viewed as a site in which an image of the author is staged, as an aspect of a performance which is itself larger and may also include paratextual or extratextual practices. This performance, although taking place in the name of a biographical subject, does not aim to articulate any kind of truth about this subject which would in turn constitute a privileged interpretive principle for the explication of the literary text; instead, it creates a fictional character, a role for this subject. This character, unlike Nehamas’s ‘postulated author’, is not merely created by or necessary to the reader but is part of a calculated and intentional strategy on the part of the author. In this sense, instead of a possessed medium, the author can be seen as the mesmerist himself, as an agent; instead of a puppet as the puppeteer, or the director who sets on stage, among other things, versions of himself. This metaphor for the author is not absent from the nineteenth century: one of its most famous versions is Thackeray’s who presents the author of Vanity Fair (1848) as ‘the Manager of the Performance’ who ‘retires and the curtain rises’.50 Baudelaire, in his review of Madame Bovary (1857), also notices ‘la dureté systématique de l’auteur, qui a fait ses efforts pour être absent de son œuvre et pour jouer la fonction d’un montreur de marionnettes’ [the systematic severity of the author, who has made every effort to remain outside of his book and to assume the role of a manipulator of marionettes]. Both comments can be read not as referring to impersonality in the sense of total effacement but as hinting at the staging of the authorial self as absent; Baudelaire’s reading of Flaubert’s novel points to this second direction: Il ne restait plus à l’auteur, pour accomplir le tour de force dans son entier, que de se dépouiller (autant que possible) de son sexe et de se faire femme. Il en est résulté une merveille; c’est que, malgré tout son zèle de comédien, il n’a pas pu ne pas infuser un sang viril dans les veines de sa créature.51 [To accomplish the tour de force in its entirety the author had only to divest himself (as much as possible) of his sex and to become a woman. The result is a marvel; in spite of all his zeal as an actor, he could not keep from infusing a virile blood into the veins of his creation.]

Four years after Thackeray, Flaubert himself expressed a theological version of the same idea: ‘l’auteur dans son œuvre doit être comme Dieu dans l’univers, présent partout, et visible nulle part’ [an author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere].52 This idea is compatible neither with an author who behaves as if he did not exist, nor with a medium possessed by Language. Such a belief in objectivity, as Erich Auerbach has observed, is essentially mystical;53 indeed, it is as mystical as Auerbach’s own figural realism. Like the latter, based on Christ’s incarnation, in his simultaneous participation in and transcendence

Introduction

9

of the world he has created (which valorizes the low, everyday reality, and renders it sublime), Flaubert’s godlike objectivity and impersonality are based on a similar simultaneous presence in and absence from the fictional world. Flaubert sketches the author not merely as detaching himself from his work but also as the creator participating in it, who, according to the apocryphal dictum, is also Emma Bovary. The author is, thus, as Henry James put it, present ‘in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself ’.54 The Omnipresent and Invisible God This monograph is concerned with one among the multifarious forms of authorial presence as well as with the attempts at self-elimination. Both Flaubert’s and James’s pronouncements imply a vacillation between manifesting and concealing oneself. I argue that this vacillation is not a matter of naïveté, indecision or inconsistency in the realists’ theoretical principles; rather, the realist author operates according to a set of calculated strategies which stage what I shall call a ‘screened presence’. There are various ways in which an author can be ‘present’ or ‘absent’, ‘strong’ or ‘weak’; by ‘author’, I mean all the possible manifestations of the author, both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ to the work, which are related to the way in which he stages his authorial self and have an impact on the way his work and his figure are read, marketed and interpreted. This strategy of screened presence can be seen at work in the textual, paratextual and extratextual manifestations of the image of the author. A first instance of authorial presence is naturally the narrator — most often, an authoritative, privileged figure, long considered by ordinary as well as professional readers to be equivalent or very close to the author. The realist narrator is ‘intrusive’ on principle: he possesses a surplus of knowledge which he dispenses in lengthy descriptions and explanations, not hesitating to judge his characters directly or to provide the necessary maxims for their moral evaluation. Nonetheless, realist narrators are extremely reticent when it comes to commenting explicitly on their function, especially when compared to many of their eighteenth-century predecessors or twentieth-century successors. Instead, by apparently denying the status of fiction to their work and restricting their role to commenting on a pre-existing world, they seem to adhere to one of the traditional claims of the novelistic genre (‘this is not a novel’) — thus, creating the impression that they are insufficiently ref lexive. Another privileged textual manifestation of the author takes the form of fictional characters who are authors. However, the abundant population of realist fiction contains relatively few such figures, who, moreover, rarely assume the role of the protagonist. Even when they do, it is not in their quality as authors that they figure in realist plots; the stress falls on their life rather than on their art.55 The example of David Copperfield is telling: although he is not simply a fictional character who is an author but also the protagonist and the narrator of his own story, it is precisely this story he most wants to tell. The fictional authors of La Comédie humaine are similarly brought on stage for reasons other than the illustration of the intrinsic problems of their art: Lucien’s story in Illusions perdues exemplifies the

10

Introduction

snares of journalism; Canalis in Modeste Mignon is presented as a celebrity rather than as a craftsman; D’Arthez, the authorial genius par excellence, is assigned the role of the protagonist in Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan only in his affair with the heroine, which, characteristically, marks a recession of his creativity. Such figures are certainly not insignificant in their quality as authors; they highlight, nevertheless, the conspicuous absence from realist fiction of characters such as Proust’s Marcel, Gide’s Edouard, Joyce’s Stephen or Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger and Gustav von Aschenbach. This absence of ‘Dichterromane’ from the realist canon does not indicate indifference towards the theoretical problems of art; realism excelled in the Künstlerroman and it is precisely in this context that the apparent insignificance of authors can be read as a problem. The fictional authors of La Comédie humaine are not only outnumbered by the artists,56 but also art is analysed in a privileged way in the Etudes philosophiques. It is common practice to translate the attitudes of Balzac’s painters or George Eliot’s musicians into correspondent theories of realism or into positions that conf lict with it; fictional artists have regularly been considered a hiding-place for the realist author.57 Both in his guise as narrator and as fictional artist, the realist author is engaged in a simultaneous presence and absence, or in a screened presence. This can be seen not only within the limits of fictional works, but also in the realists’ paratextual or extratextual practices. The realists often aimed at a distance from their work, by inventing imaginary mediators and personae or by employing real ones. The use of pseudonyms was very common: Stendhal chose to be known through a pseudonym; Balzac began his career as a hack signing with unlikely names such as Lord R’Hoone. His final signature, Honoré de Balzac, was also a pseudonym as far as the ‘de’ was concerned. Marian Evans was content to let the readers muse about the identity of the author of Scenes of Clerical Life and decide that he must be a provincial man of the cloth; even when her identity had become (in)famous, she clung to the phantasm of George Eliot for the rest of her life. At the same time, realists also maintained a distance from their work by avoiding direct comments on it. Stendhal, Flaubert, Eliot, Thackeray or Gaskell almost never attached prefaces to their works; Dickens and Zola only brief notes. Balzac’s dislike for prefaces is emblematic: despite the fact that he produced many, he not only repeated incessantly that they were redundant, but stressed their circumstantial and provisional character, the fact that they consisted in ad hoc answers to specific ‘charges’, often unrelated to the novels themselves. The preface to La Peau de chagrin is justified as an attempt to dispel the misunderstandings that arose after the anonymous publication of Physiologie du mariage; the preface to Le Père Goriot appeared belatedly in the Revue de Paris, providing a defence against the charges of immorality levelled at the novel; the ‘Historique du procès auquel a donné lieu Le Lys dans la vallée’ was attached to the novel in order to exonerate Balzac from the malicious rumours circulating about him. Most of these prefaces are not concerned with the ‘art of fiction’; a collection of Balzac’s prefaces would be an odd item compared to the collection of Henry James’s prefaces58 — which, it should be noted, were composed only retrospectively, after the turn of the century, when

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James began revising his previous work for his monumental New York edition, from the standpoint of his new-found modernism. Balzac, by contrast, when publishing his own collected works, suppressed all such prefaces and introduced his work with the ‘Avant-propos’. The latter belongs to a different category of prefaces, those accompanying collected editions of his work which Balzac preferred to assign to others, although he arguably retained control over what was being said about his work: he employed Félix Davin (for the prefaces to the Etudes philosophiques (1834) and to the Etudes de mœurs au XIXe siècle (1835)) and Philarète Chasles (for the 1831 preface to the Romans et contes philosophiques) as his porte-parole and tried unsuccessfully to devolve the task of writing the ‘Avant-propos’ to Charles Nodier, Hippolyte Rolle and George Sand. At the same time, this attempt on the part of the realists to disconnect themselves from their work is paralleled by a choice of subjects that could not fail to attract attention to the author. An aspect of the realist project that was essential throughout the nineteenth century, however much the subsequent domestication of the term and the canonization of realist fiction may have obscured it, is its radical subject matter. Realism, far from consisting in the mere representation of everyday life, focused the reader’s attention on its ‘shocking’ aspects as well. Realism undertook the task to represent areas of experience that previously lay outside the scope of fiction or were treated comically. This included the depiction of blatant immorality in a not entirely unsympathetic way — for which the yellow covers of French novels were notorious in the pages of their Victorian counterparts across the Channel. Taine’s remark that ‘Balzac loves his Valérie’59 and the Madame Bovary trial, which was triggered less by the subject of the novel and more by Flaubert’s seemingly amoral treatment of it,60 are cases in point. The description of painful truths and shocking acts (such as Hetty’s infanticide in Adam Bede) was not absent, if more carefully handled, from Victorian fiction, whose moral awareness was much stronger. Realism could offend both public feeling and certain people; this offensive potential is ref lected in the various disclaimers occasionally attached to realist texts, which either state that they describe invented places and characters to avoid the suspicion that ‘something personal [is] intended’,61 or feign to disguise them in order to elude the identification of their real models (as Balzac does at the beginning of Le Cabinet des antiques).62 This attitude coexists happily with the detailed description of real places and people, or of characters which, for the informed contemporary reader, cannot but reveal their models. On the other hand, a plethora of real or fictional incidents demonstrate the reactions of such — sometimes self-appointed — models: the Reverend John Gwyther sent a letter to Eliot’s publisher, claiming — rightly — to recognize himself in Amos Barton;63 Flaubert was terrified when he recognized himself and his friend, Alfred Le Poittevin, in Louis Lambert (1832);64 Makar Devushkin, in Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk (1846), is enraged by what he conceives as his personal exposure in Gogol’s The Overcoat (1842).65 The charge of immorality raised against realist novels often expanded to include their authors: ‘realist scandals’ such as Dickens’s separation from his wife66 or George Eliot’s and George Henry Lewes’s concubinage did not fail to affect their public image and the reception of their fiction. These were only extreme versions of

12

Introduction

another way in which the realist author came to be conspicuous, namely, by virtue of his celebrity. Authorial celebrity is a phenomenon that accompanies the modern concept of the author; in 1840, Carlyle dates ‘the hero as a man of letters’ not more than a century back.67 The interest of the public in the private life of authors and in the anecdotes surrounding the birth of their works was amplified in the nineteenth century: at the time when fiction maximized its referential potential, authors came to be viewed as characters, often very similar to the ones they created. The author became the object of biographies, gossip columns, anecdotes which circulated in newspapers, memoirs and private conversations, while his image appeared in lithographic portraits.68 The author’s life was read like one of his characters (Balzac as Birotteau, Eliot as Romola) and became a kind of fiction or a necessary supplement to it. Realist authors did not seem to dismiss this kind of attention: on the contrary, they participated in or initiated the creation of authorial myths, or, authorial scenarios. Balzac in his correspondence, styles himself as the ambitieux or the genius who spends his vital force in writing; George Eliot cultivates the myth of the Victorian Sibyl. Myths or practices of isolation (such as Balzac, dressed as a monk, writing through the night or Eliot’s never returning calls, even to people who are more than happy to overlook her unconventional domestic situation) were combined with instances of conspicuousness, such as Balzac’s extravagances, his famous stick, or Eliot’s ceremonial Sundays. This contradiction between the apparent effacement of the author and his public image or the importance attributed to him in nineteenth-century author-centred criticism can also be seen in his economic and legal status and his own attitude towards it. The association of literature with money can be considered an index of authorial independence; however, it was experienced by many authors as degrading: as early as 1828, Balzac notes that publication is ‘la prostitution de la pensée’.69 The metaphor of prostitution for authorship, relatively common in the nineteenthcentury, ref lected the fear that the professionalization of authorship compromised the quality of the author’s work, deprived him of his individuality, and reduced him to a nondescript worker who catered to the needs of the public. The nineteenth century also witnessed the increasing legal recognition of the author’s rights: the concept of literary property since the eighteenth century had been coeval with the development of the concept of genius. The recognition of the author as a unique being, whose uniqueness is ref lected in his work, and whose main quality becomes originality, is the foundation of the modern concept of the author. However, while, on the one hand, the idea of the author as a proprietor confirms the concept of genius, on the other, it may also seem to undercut it: even Carlyle, anxious to prophesy a better state for the man of letters, asks: ‘Besides, were the money-furtherances, the proper season for them, the fit assigner of them, all settled, how is the Burns to be recognized that merits these?’.70 Copyright, in this sense, treats all authors as equals and prevents the recognition of real genius.

Introduction

13

The Realist Author, Sympathetic Imagination, and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Marketplace If the apparent effacement of the realist author is seen as merely one aspect of a strategy which consists in an oscillation between absence and presence or in the staging of a screened presence, the realist author emerges as an agent (rather than a medium) who carefully orchestrates his presence and absence both inside and outside his work. In this monograph, I argue that an authorial scenario which corresponds to this strategy of screened presence is embodied, in nineteenthcentury realist fiction, in a certain type of fictional character. This type, which I shall call ‘the authorial double’, is an authorial persona not by virtue of occupying one of the traditional textual positions with which the author is identified: he is neither the omniscient narrator, nor a fictional artist or author. The authorial double is a character who can enter the minds of his fellow-characters through a process of imaginative identification, who can manipulate their actions and shape the development of the plot; he resembles the author in that he possesses the faculty of the sympathetic imagination. The sympathetic imagination is a concept usually employed in the context of English Romantic poetry, but whose application and implications, as I suggest in this monograph, are larger. The idea that the author possesses the faculty of the sympathetic imagination originates in eighteenth-century philosophical and aesthetic discussions of sympathy. The author, according to this scenario, is a Protean, chameleonic being, devoid of personal qualities who can, temporarily and at will, assume any character he wishes. The Protean author is able, through an act of sympathy and the imagination, to identify with others, enter into their consciousness and, thus, gain a profound understanding of other human beings, treating them as subjects rather than as objects. Likewise, when in the process of inventing his characters, he both identifies with and detaches himself from each one of them, achieving thus objectivity without abdicating his subjective involvement in them. In this sense, the author is a second maker, comparable to God who is simul­taneously subjective and objective and participates in all his creations: an omni­present and invisible, absent yet present God, like the one invoked by Flaubert. In such a scenario, the author’s treatment of reality is both representational and highly ref lexive. Although his starting point is the world he observes, the author, in identifying with the object he wishes to portray, is assumed to penetrate into its hidden essence through an act of his sympathetic imagination; although this process is imaginative and creative, its outcome coincides with truth. The author, thus, recreates reality, or, as Balzac puts it, ‘[il] invent[e] le vrai’ [he invents the true];71 his aesthetic role is both ‘strong’ and ‘weak’, he is present in a covert manner and combines representation and imagination. This authorial scenario, which reaches nineteenth-century realism through the mediation of Romanticism, is not absent from the realists’ theoretical pronounce­ ments; however, it is primarily present in realist fiction in the form of the authorial double, whose relation with his fellow-characters is analogous to the relation between the author and his work. The distinctive feature of realism is that this

14

Introduction

relation is not described merely in aesthetic but also in economic and legal terms; thus, the authorial double is employed to express the strategy of realist screened presence on both the textual and the extratextual levels. I argue that there are three versions of this idea of the author as a ‘plural individual’ which are fundamental to the understanding of its uses in the nineteenth century: theories of Shakespeare as Proteus which stem from the eighteenth century and are taken up by the English Romantics; Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien, published in 1830; Friedrich Schlegel’s notion of irony which is put into practice by E. T. A. Hoffmann. The first two chapters of this monograph are devoted to these three versions of authorial plurality. Chapter 1 has a dual aim. On the one hand, it places the sympathetic imagination in the context of eighteenth-century theories of sympathy, arguing that sympathy as a moral concept, based on emotional identification with the other, develops towards theories of the sympathetic imagination as an aesthetic concept which stresses the cognitive and intellectual, rather than the emotional aspect of identification: the Protean author is viewed as entering into the feelings of others without becoming emotionally involved. On the other hand, by referring to two realist texts, Balzac’s Le Père Goriot and George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil’, I demonstrate the relevance of discourses of sympathy in realist fiction and argue that both texts juxtapose (emotional) sympathy with (detached) sympathetic imagination and privilege the latter: both texts prompt the reader to sympathize and identify with the main character but eventually sabotage his attempt to do so, by failing to portray acts of sympathy and by presenting their main characters as unworthy of it. By contrast, authorial doubles are depicted as being detached or altogether unfeeling. In Chapter 2, I turn to German Romanticism and I argue that Friedrich Schlegel’s notion of irony can be seen as a version of the sympathetic imagination. The ironic author, text and reader are all regarded as engaging in an oscillation between identification and detachment: the author is a plural individual who must be simultaneously involved in and detached from his work and his characters; the ironic reader is forbidden or prevented from engaging in an illusionist identification with the characters and must also take his distance from them; this is effected through the ironic work which eschews the reader’s identification by including a ‘portrait of the portrayer’, a manifestation of the author, which disrupts the fictional illusion and thus renders the work an allegory of the creative process of involvement and detachment whose outcome it is. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘Prinzessin Brambilla’ is suggested as the fictional counterpart of Schlegel’s ref lections on irony; in his tale, Hoffmann assigns Schlegel’s vague ‘portrait’ to a fictional character who possesses the faculty of the sympathetic imagination, thus offering the first instance of an authorial double. Both chapters reach the conclusion that in eighteenth-century theories of the sympathetic imagination, in Schlegel’s theorization and Hoffmann’s practice of irony, and in the two realist examples examined, sympathy and emotional identification with the characters are associated with the reader, viewed as a defect and are discredited or sabotaged, while the sympathetic imagination is

Introduction

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unsentimental, detached and expressed by characters who resemble the author. In Chapter 3, I argue that the source of this conf lict can be traced in a predominantly modern authorial anxiety. The eager sympathy on the part of the readers for the fictional characters is seen as a commodifying force: the reader, by identifying completely, experiences the work in an illusionist way, as if it were ‘real’, and thus his attitude leaves no margin for the creative role of the author, or eliminates the latter altogether. In this context, the authorial double functions as a subtle way through which the author reminds the reader of his presence in the work. Thus, the authorial double is, on the one hand, the mark of the author which reminds readers of his creative role by re-enacting it in an allegorical manner, while, on the other, the authorial double is a means by which an author claims the work as his own. In this sense, authorial doubles, apart from expressing a certain aesthetics of authorship, respond also to new challenges posed to the author in the nineteenth century by the increasing commodification of literature and by the inadequate protection offered by copyright legislation. The second part of the monograph examines the role of the sympathetic imagination and of authorial doubles in three authors: Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire and George Eliot. Balzac and Eliot have been chosen not merely by virtue of being two of the most heavily discussed realists but in view of their different relation to realism, the marketplace and authorial rights. Balzac belongs to the early period of realism, when neither the term nor the practice had crystallized, while Eliot belongs to an advanced phase, subsequent to ‘la bataille réaliste’. Despite their different positions in the history of realism, they are both taken to be typical realists: Balzac has been largely theorized as the founding father, while Eliot, in view of her overt moralizing attitude and her idealist streak, proves particularly resistant to assimilation into most versions of modernist aesthetics. At the same time, both are positioned, in their own way, in the margins of realism: Balzac emerges from a largely undifferentiated Romantic-realist continuum and begins his career under the star of the Gothic novel, or, later, of E. T. A. Hoffmann; Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda, is frequently seen as a departure from realism, a return to romance and a break with her previous work. Balzac and Eliot illustrate different attitudes towards the marketplace: the former confronts the literary marketplace and its industrialization as a nascent phenomenon, and the latter encounters it as a well-established reality in an age when the literary field is becoming gradually more autonomous. Both authors are, in their different ways, connected with climactic moments in the history of authorial rights: Balzac was devoted to the cause of literary property, and became the president of the Société des gens de lettres, while Eliot’s career coincided with a reconceptualization of intellectual property in the context of the debate for the abolition of patents for invention. Balzac’s and Eliot’s authorial doubles refer to the aesthetic, economic and legal status of the realist author: the realist author is presented as ‘inventing the true’; the sympathetic imagination and the relation between authorial doubles and their fellow-characters are described in terms of economic and legal metaphors which refer to and revise the relation between author and work in the nineteenth-century literary marketplace.

16

Introduction

Chapter 4 follows the development of the figure of the authorial double in Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin, Gobseck and the Vautrin trilogy. I argue that the sympathetic imagination is contextualized by Balzac in his theory of energy and described in terms of capital: the isomorphism between energy, capital and the imagination presents literary creation as a form of investment and the author as a kind of capitalist. On the other hand, I identify three basic metaphors which describe the relation between the authorial double and his fellow-characters: the Mephistophelean pact, paternity and demonic possession. These metaphors are used to refer to the ways in which the object of literary property is defined and enlarge this definition to include the work as an intangible rather than as a merely tangible object. In Chapter 5, I examine the use of the sympathetic imagination in Baudelaire’s prose poems as essential to the understanding of this realist authorial scenario. Le Spleen de Paris, published in the feuilleton of La Presse, is taken as a comment on the commodification of literature and, particularly, of realist fiction. The figure of the flâneur is, thus, read not merely as a revision of Baudelaire’s own authorial scenario in Les Fleurs du mal, but also as a ref lection on the realist authorial scenario. Baudelaire’s description of the sympathetic imagination in terms of prostitution and his pessimistic attitude towards the marketplace illuminates the stance of both Balzac and Eliot. In Chapter 6, I describe Eliot’s turn from a ‘programmatic realist’ agenda to the sympathetic imagination during the period when the identity of ‘Mr George Eliot’ is discussed and discovered; the doubts expressed as to Eliot’s imaginative power and the closeness of her first two books to actual life-stories have a long-lasting impact on her career — an impact I trace through to her last novel, Daniel Deronda. I argue that the use of the sympathetic imagination in Daniel Deronda corresponds to a fundamental fear about the alienability of her work; in this sense, the authorial double, Mordecai, is viewed as expressing a moderate withdrawal from the literary marketplace. At the same time, the terms in which the doubts regarding Eliot’s imagination were articulated are seen as parallel to the debate about the abolition of patents of invention (the long discussion of which encompasses her career); the description of the relation between Mordecai and Deronda is examined in the context of the changes in the perception of intellectual property that this debate effected. The main contention of this study is that this particular configuration of elements (the sympathetic imagination, the authorial double and his potential for expressing the aesthetic, economic and legal standing of the author) is specific to nineteenthcentury realism. The last chapter touches on the decline of this configuration at the end of the nineteenth century and concludes with André Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs, which I take as a retrospective evaluation of the realist authorial scenario which signals its demise: Gide’s novel demonstrates that the changing aesthetic, economic and legal landscape in the twentieth century renders the sympathetic imagination and the authorial double redundant.

Pa r t I v

Sympathetic Imagination

C h ap t e r 1

v

Sympathy and Sympathetic Imagination in Realist Fiction The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of art. To art’s subject-matter we should be more or less indifferent. [...] It is exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows are such an admirable motive for a tragedy.1

In making his case for the art of lying, Oscar Wilde’s Vivian dissociates art from the depiction of everyday reality, forbids its appeal to the reader’s sympathy and denies its beneficial effects; at the same time, by answering Hamlet’s question (‘What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba, | That he should weep for her?’) in the negative, he implies that the artist is equally indifferent to his subject-matter. Vivian’s contention questions an entire tradition in ethics, literary criticism and novelistic practice, which connects sympathy, the representation of reality and the moral inf luence of fiction. The systematic combination of these elements and their association with the novel occurred under the aegis of the eighteenth-century ‘cult of sensibility’: eighteenth-century moral philosophers, countering Hobbes’s and Mandeville’s stress on egoism and self-interest, developed theories of man’s innate ‘moral sense’ and sympathy;2 in the theatre, the bourgeois drama transcended the barrier between tragedy and comedy and offered serious treatment of familiar subjects; the rise of the novel from a marginal genre to the predominant pastime of the middle classes raised debates regarding its moral inf luence; the sentimental novel, in particular, focused on the depiction of suffering3 and on the question of man’s innate benevolence. Literary historians argue that the French revolution signalled the demise of the cult of sensibility;4 however, the connection of the novel with reality and its sympathetic effects was inherited by nineteenth-century realist fiction. In what follows, I shall examine two realist texts which are intensely preoccupied with sympathy, Honoré de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (1834–35) and George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil’ (1859), and I shall attempt to locate them between, on the one hand, the basic tenets of eighteenth-century discourses on sympathy and, on the other, the rejection of these tenets by Wilde, focusing on the roles ascribed to the reader, the fictional character and the author. Both works seem to subscribe to the close

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relation between sympathy, reality and fiction defined by eighteenth-century theories of sympathy; however, as I shall argue, their overt claims to the sympathy of the reader are undermined and counteracted by another concept of eighteenthcentury provenance, the ‘sympathetic imagination’ of the author, which disavows emotional involvement, in a way similar to Wilde’s, and lays stress on the detached and cognitive aspect of ‘sympathy’. Sympathy, Reality, and Fiction The narrators of both Le Père Goriot and ‘The Lifted Veil’ disagree with Vivian, not merely in desiring to obtain the reader’s sympathy but also in believing that the truth of their narratives will guarantee it. Latimer, the narrator and protagonist of ‘The Lifted Veil’, believes that the revelation of his true circumstances will elicit the reader’s fellow-feeling. His initial hesitation is counterbalanced by his confidence that, although he has never been the object of sympathy in the f lesh, mere strangers, his readers, will not fail to commiserate with him: ‘It is only the story of my life that will perhaps win a little more sympathy from strangers when I am dead, than I ever believed it would obtain from my friends while I was living’ (LV, 4). Latimer’s trust in the power of a narrative to excite sympathy as equal to — if not stronger than — that of the actual presence of the sufferer was by no means undisputed among eighteenth-century theorists of sympathy. Edmund Burke, in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), maintained that real distress is stronger than the best imitation: Chuse a day on which to represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy we have; [...] and when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square; in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts, and proclaim the triumph of the real sympathy.5

The dubious ‘sympathetic’ motive of the theatregoers who hasten to the square aside,6 Burke offers an alternative which is also a spectacle; real sympathy seems to retain an affinity with the theatre.7 The narrator of Le Père Goriot invokes this affinity explicitly: En quelque discrédit que soit tombé le mot drame par la manière abusive et tortionnaire dont il a été prodigué dans ces temps de douloureuse littérature, il est nécessaire de l’employer ici: non que cette histoire soit dramatique dans le sens vrai du mot; mais, l’œuvre accomplie, peut-être aura-t-on versé quelques larmes intra muros et extra. [...] Ah! sachez-le: ce drame n’est ni une fiction, ni un roman. All is true, il est si véritable, que chacun peut en reconnaître les éléments chez soi, dans son cœur peut-être. (PG, 49–50) [However discredited the word ‘drama’ may be because of the way it has been overworked and strained and twisted in these days of doleful literature, it must be used here; not that this story is dramatic in the real sense of the word, but perhaps some tears may be shed over it in the reading — intra muros et extra. [...] But you may be certain that this drama is neither fiction nor romance. All is

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Sympathy and Sympathetic Imagination in Realist Fiction true, so true that everyone can recognize the elements of the tragedy in his own household, in his own heart perhaps.]

The narrator calls his story a ‘drame’ on the grounds that it is real and, as such, will excite the reader’s sympathy; the dramatic is viewed as a quality inherent in reality. The most systematic exposition of the inherent dramatic qualities of real sympathy is that of Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).8 If, for Burke, fictional sympathy is, compared to real sympathy, a mere shadow, Adam Smith does not distinguish between the two since, for him, the ‘sympathetic images’ of the feelings of another being are already the ‘shadows’ of the ‘substance’ (TMS, 257) that these feelings are: since the senses fail to inform us directly on the feelings of another being it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us in any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. (TMS, 11–12)

Sympathy, for Smith, is an act of the imagination and, by its nature, a matter of representation: this renders almost irrelevant any distinction between a real and an imaginary person. Smith, however, does not merely engage in the common practice of indiscriminately drawing examples of sympathetic identification from reactions to real and to represented suffering; tragedy, Smith’s privileged genre, is more than mere evidence for the ‘natural’ tendencies of sympathy. The following passage points to a different way in which this relation may be construed: The loss of a leg may generally be regarded as a more real calamity than the loss of a mistress. It would be a ridiculous tragedy, however, of which the catastrophe was to turn upon a loss of that kind. A misfortune of the other kind, how frivolous soever it may appear to be, has given occasion to many a fine one. [...] What a tragedy would that be of which the distress consisted in a colic! Yet no pain is more exquisite. These attempts to excite compassion by the representation of bodily pain, may be regarded as among the greatest breaches of decorum of which Greek theatre has set the example.9 (TMS, 35–36, 37)

Pain, however keenly felt, is not rejected by Smith merely as an improper object for the stage; the reference to tragedy here aims to support his argument that bodily pain in itself, although a ‘real calamity’ for the sufferer, does not excite sympathy in the spectator. Decorum for Smith is not merely desired in tragedy but also in real sympathy. For Smith, sympathy depends on the approval of the passions of others: we approve of and sympathize with someone else’s feelings when these feelings are proportionate to their cause. The ‘proper’ manifestation of passion lies, according to Smith, in its ‘mediocrity’, restraint, and self-command (TMS, 32–33): excessive joy or grief fail to excite sympathy. ‘Mediocrity’ is a relative concept: some passions can be expressed strongly without inspiring aversion, while others should, by their very nature, be kept at a low pitch. Smith constructs a typology of passions, sympathy with which depends not on the intensity of the sufferer’s feelings but on the degree

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of ‘propriety’ that governs their expression and, thus, determines whether the spectator may or may not sympathize with them. Passions springing from the body, such as hunger, lust and bodily pain, attract little or no sympathy and their strong expression is indecent; in Greek tragedies, we do not sympathize with the bodily pain of Philoctetes and Hercules but with their solitude and imminent death, respectively (TMS, 33–38). While passions arising from the imagination are in general more propitious for producing identification (TMS, 32–33), Smith distinguishes the varying degrees in which one can sympathize with love, the ‘unsocial’, ‘social’ and the ‘selfish’ passions. Love, which originates in a ‘peculiar turn of the imagination’ proves to be difficult to sympathize with, unless there is a prospect of misfortune: it is the ensuing distress that makes us enter into the feelings of tragic lovers, or their ‘secondary passions’ such as Phaedra’s despair and shame (TMS, 38–41). Resentment or hate (‘the unsocial passions’) are equally an object of aversion, unless we are acquainted with their reasons and we judge them to be proportionate to the amount of anger excited: it is only thus that we can feel for Othello and detest Iago (TMS, 41–47). Generosity, humanity, friendship and family love (‘the social passions’) arouse our sympathy naturally. ‘Selfish passions’, by which Smith designates joys or sorrows that have no reference to others but the sufferer, lend themselves to sympathy as long as joys are small (and no envy is possible in the spectator) and aff lictions grave: the fact that ‘we weep even at the feigned representation of a tragedy’ proves ipso facto that our sympathy with ‘deep distress’ is both strong and sincere (TMS, 49–52). Although sympathy for tragic characters is ostensibly invoked as an illustration of sympathy for real individuals, Smith defines the ‘proper’ object of real sympathy not according to the amount of pain the sufferer feels but according to whether the latter’s feeling can be a proper object of representation: it is tragic decorum that creates the object of real sympathy and dictates its rules. Not surprisingly, the strongest kind of sympathy a man may feel is, for Smith, that for kings whose suffering arouses ‘ten times more compassion and resentment’ than that of ordinary individuals; ‘it is the misfortunes of Kings’ and of lovers ‘only which afford the proper objects for tragedy’ (TMS, 63). Smith’s discussion of the propriety of sympathy seems not only to conf late the object of sympathy and that of tragedy, but also to point to the fact that the proper object of sympathy is that which excites it when presented on the stage, or, rather, the one that is designated as the proper object of tragedy by neo-classicist poetics: regal lovers, characters with self-command, themes that are noble and not somatic, moderation and containment of excessive feeling. Smith’s narrow definition of the object of sympathy was not universally shared, especially since tragedy was already beginning to lose its sway over the stage; the harmonious relation between fictional and real sympathy, however, and their association with the theatre, remained a fundamental assumption. Diderot’s Le Fils naturel and the Entretiens sur le fils naturel, Le Père de famille and De la poésie dramatique, already published in 1757 and 1758 respectively, demonstrate and argue for a new kind of drama, which would bridge the gap between tragedy and comedy and represent ‘[l]es malheurs qui nous environnent, [...] [l]es dangers dont il est

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impossible que vous n’ayez tremblé pour vos parents, vos amis, pour vous-même’ (OE, 149) [the suffering that surrounds us, [...] the dangers which it is impossible not to fear for the sake of your family, your friends, even yourself ]. Unlike ‘la comédie gaie’, Diderot’s ‘comédie sérieuse’ ‘nous touche d’une manière plus intime et plus douce que ce qui excite notre mépris et nos ris’ (OE, 195) [moves us in a more familiar and gentle manner than that which makes us feel contempt or laugh]; unlike tragedy, which emphasizes lofty sentiments and noble characters, Diderot’s ‘tragédie domestique’ ‘est plus voisine de nous’ (OE, 148) [is closer to us] — Diderot’s followers would claim that tragedy fails to engage the sympathy of contemporary audiences on the grounds that it represents characters who have nothing in common with the spectator.10 The simplicity of this kind of drama induces ‘la commisération qui nous substitue toujours dans la place du malheureux’ (OE, 150) [compassion which always puts us in the place of the sufferer] and enables theatrical illusion; by contrast, complexity reminds the spectator ‘qu[’il est] dans un parterre; que tous ces personnages sont des comédiens’ (OE, 150) [that he is in the stalls; that all these characters are actors]. Diderot’s theatre aims at illusion and, according to his famous formula, the actors are to act as if they were facing a wall instead of an audience, as if the curtain had not been raised (OE, 231). In Diderot’s terms, familiar subjects ensure sympathy and identification which induce illusion.11 This illusion is, according to Diderot, the ‘but commun’ (OE, 215) [common aim] of both drama and the novel; indeed, the novel, a new genre which had no exclusive association with noble subjects and characters became, during the eighteenth century, the ideal vehicle for sensibility by combining familiar subjects with the discourse of sympathy. Eighteenth-century novels reinforced this impression of reality by claiming authenticity and by insisting on generic designations such as ‘life/vie’, ‘history/histoire’ or ‘memoirs/mémoires’, rather than on those of ‘novel/ romance/roman’.12 The sentimental novel, in particular, while depicting and aiming at sympathy, breaks with one of Smith’s basic tenets, ‘mediocrity’: sentimental characters renounce all claims to self-command and engage in manifestations of excessive feeling. The reader is presumed to imitate them: like Balzac’s reader who is prompted to find ‘les éléments [of the drama] chez soi, dans son cœur peut-être’, Diderot states in his Eloge de Richardson (1762) that ‘les passions qu’il peint sont telles que je les éprouve en moi’ (OE, 31) [the passions he depicts are of such kind that I feel them myself ] and invites humanity to weep together over ‘les personnages malheureux de ses fictions’ (OE, 33) [the unhappy characters of his fictions]. The reader’s sympathy for the fictional characters induces perfect illusion and reduces the reader to the state of a child in the theatre who mistakes performance for reality and cries out to warn the actors of imminent dangers (OE, 30). For certain less sophisticated readers, this illusion persists even after they have read the novel: they discuss the characters of Richardson’s novels as if they were real people or expect travellers to England to meet them (OE, 37–38, 41–42). In designating Le Père Goriot as a ‘drame’13 and in asserting the truth of his narrative, Balzac’s narrator seems to be calling for a similar sympathetic response: the effusive reader is prompted to sympathize with Goriot’s excessive, far from ‘mediocre’ passion of paternity, especially since the plot of the novel is, at least

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partly, a ‘bourgeois redaction’,14 or, in the terms of an unsympathetic reviewer, ‘une contrefaçon bourgeoise’ [a bourgeois forgery]15 of a tragedy, Shakespeare’s King Lear.16 The programmatic statements of both Balzac’s novel and Eliot’s tale seem to subscribe to the equation of real and fictional sympathy; in what follows, I shall explore the extent to which these texts carry out their promise to engage the reader’s sympathy. Sympathy in Le Père Goriot A passage from The Theory of Moral Sentiments summarizes, almost uncannily, through its resemblance to Rastignac’s mandarin parable, the moral problems posed by Balzac’s novel. Let us suppose that the great empire of China [...] was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected [...]. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow [...], he would make many melancholy ref lections [...]. And when all this fine philosophy was over [...], he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befal himself would occasion a more real disturbance. [...] To prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, would a man of humanity be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren, provided he had never seen them? Human nature startles with horror at the thought, and the world, in its greatest depravity and corruption, never produced such a villain as could be capable of entertaining it. (TMS, 157–58)

Smith uses this example to distinguish between our ‘passive feelings’ which may be ‘sordid’ (we would care more for a personal ‘paltry misfortune’ than for the destruction of China) and our ‘active principles’ which are ‘noble’ (we would never provoke such a catastrophe in order to avoid a minor disturbance). These two aspects of Smith’s moral problem can be read into the two plotlines of Le Père Goriot which focus on Rastignac’s relation to Goriot and to Vautrin respectively, and simultaneously involve the reader and his sympathetic response to fiction. The novel begins and concludes with illustrations of Smith’s ‘passive feelings’. In the narrator’s introductory comments, it is the unfeeling reader who can easily turn to his dinner, after having read about Goriot’s misfortunes: Ainsi ferez-vous, vous qui tenez ce livre d’une main blanche, vous qui vous enfoncez dans un moelleux fauteuil en vous disant: ‘Peut-être ceci va-t-il m’amuser’. Après avoir lu les secrètes infortunes du père Goriot, vous dînerez avec appétit en mettant votre insensibilité sur le compte de l’auteur, en le taxant d’exagération, en l’accusant de poésie. (PG, 50) [And you will show the same insensibility, as you hold this book in your white hand, lying back in a softly cushioned armchair, and saying to yourself, ‘Perhaps this one is amusing’. When you have read of the secret sorrows of old Goriot you will dine with unimpaired appetite, blaming the author for your callousness, taxing him with exaggeration, accusing him of having given wings to his imagination.]

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This passage makes the ending of the novel stand in relief; it is now Rastignac who, after attending Goriot’s funeral and addressing his ‘A nous deux maintenant’ [It’s war between us now] to Paris, goes to have dinner at Delphine’s: ‘Et pour premier acte du défi qu’il portait à la Société, Rastignac alla dîner chez madame de Nucingen’ (PG, 290) [And by way of throwing down the gauntlet to Society, Rastignac went to dine with Madame de Nucingen]. Rastignac, who has shed tears over Goriot’s misfortune, could be considered a character on whom the sensitive reader should model his sympathetic response; however, the unfeeling reader seems to cast his shadow over him: his ironic defiance of society in going to dine at Delphine’s resembles the unfeeling reader’s reaction. This similarity indicates a contradictory treatment of sympathy in the novel: indeed, neither Rastignac as the subject of sympathy, nor Goriot as the object of sympathy can be viewed in an unproblematic way, and this problematization extends its grasp to the reader’s sympathy for Goriot and fiction in general. Rastignac’s imperfect sympathy at the final scene merely confirms his moral ambiguity throughout the novel: in his relation to Goriot, he alternates between commiseration and an attitude that often resembles exploitation. His proximity to Goriot is the means through which Rastignac approaches his daughters; Goriot is made to act as a mediator between Rastignac and Delphine; Rastignac obtains a f lat paid for by the liquidation of Goriot’s annuity; he shares Delphine’s feeling that her father is a bore (PG, 232). In general, his ‘adoption’ of Goriot as a father legitimizes a filial attitude that often resembles that of Goriot’s daughters. While the Goriot plotline concerns Rastignac’s ‘passive feelings’, the Vautrin one tests his ‘active principles’. Vautrin suggests that Rastignac should f lirt with Victorine, so that, after her brother is murdered, he will end up marrying a very rich heiress. Rastignac is evidently hesitant and, while ruminating over what he should do, he poses the problem to Bianchon, in abstract terms, without confessing the particulars. The formulation of this ethical problem, attributed to Rousseau, probably stems from Chateaubriand17 and is strikingly similar to Smith’s: — As-tu lu Rousseau? — Oui. — Te souviens-tu de ce passage où il demande à son lecteur ce qu’il ferait au cas où il pourrait s’enrichir en tuant à la Chine par sa seule volonté un vieux mandarin, sans bouger de Paris. — Oui. — Eh bien? — Bah! J’en suis à mon trente-troisième mandarin. — Ne plaisante pas. Allons, s’il était prouvé que la chose est possible et qu’il te suffit d’un signe de tête, le ferais-tu? — Est-il bien vieux, le mandarin? Mais, bah! jeune ou vieux, paralytique ou bien portant, ma foi... Diantre! Eh bien, non. (PG, 164) [— Have you read Rousseau? — Yes. — Do you remember the passage where he asks the reader what he would do if he could make a fortune by killing an old mandarin in China by simply exerting his will, without stirring from Paris? — Yes.

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— Well? — Bah! I’m at my thirty-third mandarin. — Don’t play the fool. Look here, if it were proved to you that the thing was possible and you only needed to nod your head, would you do it? — Is your mandarin well-stricken in years? But, bless you, young or old, paralytic or healthy, upon my word — The devil take it! Well, no.]

Vautrin is not alone in fitting the definition of Smith’s ‘villain’. Rastignac not only gives serious consideration to Vautrin’s suggestion, but he acts on it, by courting Victorine, by failing to warn the Taillefers and by keeping the whole affair a secret: he thus becomes a sort of accomplice — something that Vautrin will be given the chance to take advantage of in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. Rastignac’s moral ambivalence18 is ref lected in his change of name, which was originally Eugène de Massiac. Balzac changed it at a point in the narrative (PG, 108) that precedes three climactic scenes: Rastignac’s initiation to the secrets of Parisian society by Mme de Beauséant, his letter to his family asking for their savings, and his first encounter with Vautrin. This change renders the novel an exploration of the Bildung of its character towards the cynical and arriviste Rastignac whom the reader has already encountered in La Peau de chagrin.19 Rastignac’s moral ambiguity did not go unnoticed and seems to have impeded the reader’s identification: his unscrupulousness was an aspect of what the reviewers considered a profoundly immoral novel;20 both the unauthorized stage adaptations of the novel which were performed almost immediately after its publication presented Rastignac as morally impeccable, by omitting Vautrin and his scheme, by turning Delphine into a virtuous woman, or by making Victorine Goriot’s daughter and uniting her with Rastignac;21 the publication of the novel in Canada, in a newspaper significantly entitled L’Ami du peuple, de l’ordre et des lois (in 1835–36), expunged Rastignac’s moral ambivalence throughout the novel along with its final page.22 If Rastignac cannot provide a model for the reader’s sympathetic response, Goriot can also be seen as a questionable object for it; the narrator seems uneasy about the emotional impact of his story: Sera-t-elle comprise au-delà de Paris? le doute est permis. Les particularités de cette scène pleine d’observations et de couleurs locales ne peuvent être appréciées qu’entre les buttes de Montmartre et les hauteurs de Montrouge, dans cette illustre vallée de plâtras incessamment près de tomber et de ruisseaux noirs de boue; vallée remplie de souffrances réelles, de joies souvent fausses, et si terriblement agitée qu’il faut je ne sais quoi d’exorbitant pour y produire une sensation de quelque durée. Cependant il s’y rencontre çà et là des douleurs que l’agglomération des vices et des vertus rend grandes et solennelles: à leur aspect, les égoïsmes, les intérêts, s’arrêtent et s’apitoient; mais l’impression qu’ils en reçoivent est comme un fruit savoureux promptement dévoré. Le char de la civilisation, semblable à celui de l’idole de Jaggernaut, à peine retardé par un cœur moins facile à broyer que les autres à qui enraie sa roue, l’a brisé bientôt et continue sa marche glorieuse. (PG, 49–50) [Will it be understood outside Paris? One may doubt it. Only between the heights of Montmartre and Montrouge are there people who can appreciate the details and the local colour of this scene which has been observed from life. They live in a valley of crumbling stucco and gutters black with mud, a valley

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Sympathy and Sympathetic Imagination in Realist Fiction full of real suffering and often deceptive joys, and they are so used to sensation that it takes something outrageous to produce a lasting impression. Yet now and then in some overwhelming tragedy evil and good are so strangely mixed that these selfish and self-centred people are forced to pause in their restless pursuit of their own affairs, and their hearts are momentarily touched; but the impression made on them is f leeting, it vanishes as quickly as a delicious fruit melts in the mouth. The chariot of civilization, like the chariot of Juggernaut, is scarcely halted by a heart less easily crushed than the others in its path. It soon breaks this hindrance to its wheel and continues its triumphant course.]

The narrator is afraid that his drama might not be comprehended outside Paris: distance is, as in the case of the mandarin, a factor that diminishes sympathy. Even within Paris, he descries a moral anaesthesia that might prevent its being understood: indeed, as the dénouement of the novel proves, Goriot is a kind of mandarin killed at close quarters, after his fortune has been inherited (among others, in a way, by Rastignac). Lasting sensations can only be caused by something ‘exorbitant’ and by ‘douleurs que l’agglomération des vices et des vertus rend grandes et solennelles’: the implied association of Goriot and his sufferings with excess and vice recalls the exaggeration of which the unfeeling reader accuses the author, and problematizes the status of Goriot as an object of sympathy. Insensitivity is frequently depicted in the novel; it is not only Goriot’s daughters but also Mme Vauquer’s boarders who are characterized by their lack of sympathy: Toutes avaient les unes pour les autres une indifférence mêlée de défiance qui résultait de leurs situations respectives. [...] Toutes devaient passer droit dans la rue devant un aveugle, écouter sans émotion le récit d’un infortune, et voir dans une mort la solution d’un problème de misère qui les rendait froides à la plus terrible agonie. (PG, 62) [They all felt for each other an indifference mingled with suspicion which was the result of their respective situations. [...] They would all walk straight past a blind man in the street without a glance, or listen unmoved to a tale of disaster, and would see in death only the solution of a problem of misery which in their own suffering made them callous to the most terrible sufferings of others.]

The boarders are no different from the reader whose fellow-feeling needs an extraordinary object in order to be excited. Goriot, who is frequently mocked by them, does not seem to be this object; the only instance of collective moral indignation and manifestation of solidarity (what Smith would call ‘sympathetic resentment’) they indulge in is their condemnation of Michonneau and their defence of the villain, Vautrin. The lack of sympathy towards Goriot is heightened when he is about to die: the boarders refer to his death casually; Mme Vauquer demands money; his daughters postpone their visits indefinitely and are absent from his funeral. This generalized lack of sympathy for Goriot is part of the novel’s strategy to obstruct the reader’s identification with him. Goriot’s inability to excite sympathy does not merely highlight the lack of fellow-feeling in others but also their difficulty in identifying themselves with his excessive paternal sentiments; one of the ways in which this difficulty is expressed in the novel is Goriot’s dubious association, both by the characters and by the narrator, with the sublime.

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The notion of the sublime, a key concept in theories of tragedy, combines aesthetic and moral connotations; it refers both to beauty, or more precisely to elevated style, images and sentiments, and to their ability to cause, in the reader, not merely an aesthetic sentiment of admiration but also a moral elevation, an admiration of virtue which makes him a better human being.23 The outcome is what Longinus called ‘ecstasy’, rendered in French as ‘transport’; this ecstasy, according to Jaucourt’s Encyclopédie entry, amounts to a spontaneous and uncritical identification with the sublime characters: je commence à devenir elle-même [Medea], je réf léchis avec elle, & je conclus avec elle; ‘et c’est assez’: voilà le sublime [...] Je ne doute point un instant que Médée seule ne doive être supérieure à tous ses ennemis; elle en triomphe actuellement dans ma pensée, & malgré moi, sans m’en apercevoir même, je partage avec elle le plaisir d’une vengeance assurée. [...] Lorsque des gens animés se parlent, nous nous mettons machinalement à leur place.24 [I am gradually becoming her, I am thinking with her and I am concluding with her: ‘and it is enough’: this is the sublime [...] I do not doubt for a moment that Medea alone is superior to her enemies; she triumphs against them at that moment in my mind and, against my will, almost unwittingly, I share with her the pleasure of certain vengeance. [...] When animated people speak, we automatically put ourselves in their place.]

In Le Père Goriot, indeed, the word sublime designates the effect produced at the sight of extreme sacrifice or self-negation for the sake of virtue:25 ‘Être fidèle à la vertu, martyre sublime’ (PG, 146) [To be faithful to virtue is to be a sublime martyr]. Rastignac’s exclamation, however, occurs after his first encounter with Vautrin which prompts his short-lived decision to make his fortune virtuously, slowly and depending only on his own labour — expressed in a monologue interrupted by Sylvie who announces his tailor, the first recipient of the family savings which Rastignac spends in order to transform himself into a fashionable dandy. While the word ‘sublime’ seems to be suitable to describe Goriot’s self lessness and virtue, and, thus, to promote the reader’s identification and sympathy with him, its use throughout the novel is consistently ambiguous and ironic. Rastignac applies it not only to Goriot (PG, 154) and to his sisters (PG, 121) but also to Mme de Beauséant’s silent suffering (PG, 154) and twice to Delphine: in the first instance, it refers to her joy over Rastignac’s first gambling gains, which are destined to repay her debt to her former lover, de Marsay (PG, 174); in the second, Rastignac declares that he is in love with her, whether she is ‘sublime’ or ‘infâme’ (PG, 263). In a third passage, it is stated that ‘les Parisiennes [...] quand elles aiment réellement, elles sacrifient plus de sentiments que les autres femmes dans leurs passions; elles se grandissent de toutes leurs petitesses et deviennent sublimes’ (PG, 255) [Parisian women [...] when they truly love they are more ready than other women are to sacrifice all personal feelings to their passion; they rise above all their pettiness, and by this victory become sublime]. The passage refers to Delphine’s love for Rastignac: the former believes that her love justifies her attitude towards

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her father, since it is he who is to blame for her unhappy marriage and her constant demands for money. The narrator’s use of the sublime in reference to Goriot is equally ambiguous. Sublimity is paired with the grotesque by Goriot’s fellow-merchants, who, unable to understand his sublime love for his daughters, devise a grotesque sobriquet (PG, 124);26 Goriot’s devotion to Rastignac is an instance of the ‘sublime de la nature canine’ (PG, 148) [the sublime sensitivity of the canine nature]; young Goriot, when not managing his affairs, ‘redevenait l’ouvrier stupide et grossier’ [he became once more the uncouth, slow-witted workman], but like all such natures, has ‘un sentiment sublime au cœur’ (PG, 124) [at the heart [...] a sublime sentiment], his love for his wife and his daughters; when Goriot, on his deathbed, describes his extreme self-effacement for the sake of his daughters, the narrator declares: ‘Le père Goriot était sublime’ (PG, 161). Even if Goriot is seen as ridiculous, grotesque or stupidly loyal by others, his sublimity is consistently linked by the narrator to his love for his daughters. However disinterested and virtuous it may seem, this love is, according to Goriot’s own confession, a ‘vice’ (PG, 275): it is described as a ‘passion’ (PG, 161) and, in this light, the initial confusion of Mme Vauquer’s boarders, who believe that Delphine and Anastasie are Goriot’s mistresses, acquires a less comical dimension. Goriot indeed behaves towards his daughters as if they were his mistresses, in a self-destructive manner that, in the context of La Comédie humaine, can only be compared to Hulot and his degenerative love for progressively younger women in La Cousine Bette. Goriot’s obsessive paternity links him to another group of characters whose relation to the sublime is also controversial: the monomaniac artists and thinkers of the Etudes philosophiques. While their endless pursuit of an unattainable ideal is the object of admiration and is implicitly or explicitly designated as sublime, they all meet their end in an ironic, grotesque or even comical manner: Frenhofer keeps painting over his perfect painting; Gambara perceives the cacophonies he composes as celestial music; Lambert, the theoretician of will, loses his mind; Claës takes a dubious discovery to his grave. Goriot never attains the intellectual or artistic merits of these characters; while they move between the spheres of ‘abstraction’ and ‘spécialité’, Goriot remains rooted in the realm of the instincts.27 The reviewers of the novel found it difficult to enter into Goriot’s feelings, especially since his love for his daughters, which seemed to them similar to that of Des Grieux for Manon Lescaut, led him to act as Delphine’s procurer; Balzac’s novel was seen as a blasphemous degradation of the idea of paternity.28 The depiction of sympathy as a problem in Le Père Goriot does not fail to implicate the reader’s reactions. The reader who is prompted to weep over Goriot’s misfortunes is unable to find characters on which he can model his sympathetic response: the majority of the characters lack fellow-feeling, while Rastignac’s attitude as a sympathizer is at least equivocal. On the other hand, the relativization of Goriot as an object of sympathy weakens the reader’s sympathetic impulse and forces him into an alternation between commiseration and indifference which fails to induce identification. The novel engages in a double gesture: while, on the one hand, it explicitly calls for the reader’s sympathy, on the other, it sabotages it.

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Sympathy in ‘The Lifted Veil’ ‘The Lifted Veil’ (1859) is the story of Latimer, the second son of an English landowner, who finds himself, when convalescing from an illness, prone to two new powers that he cannot control: the ability to visualize places he has not been to or scenes from the future, and the ability to hear the thoughts of others. He falls in love with the only person whose mind remains a mystery to him, Bertha, the fiancée of his elder brother, and marries her after the latter’s accidental death, even though he has anticipated that she will come to hate him. This is confirmed very soon, since, after the first months of their marriage, he is granted access to her mind for some time. His uneasiness about the curious relation of his wife to her maid, Mrs Archer, is translated into horror when he learns that Bertha was planning to poison him — a fact made known when, after the death of Mrs Archer, Charles Meunier, a doctor friend of Latimer’s, performs a blood transfusion which brings the maid temporarily back to life, only to reveal her mistress’s plot. He separates from his wife and a month before he dies he starts writing ‘The Lifted Veil’ which begins with the evocation of his future death, an event that occurs shortly after he completes it. Latimer, like Balzac’s narrator, believes (as did George Eliot) that the goal of fiction is to activate the reader’s sympathy: You will think, perhaps, that I must have been a poet, from this early sensibility to Nature. But my lot was not so happy as that. A poet pours forth his song and believes in the listening ear and answering soul, to which his song will be f loated sooner or later. But the poet’s sensibility without his voice — the poet’s sensibility that finds no vent but in silent tears on the sunny bank, when the noonday light sparkles on the water, or an inward shudder at the sound of harsh human tones, the sight of a cold human eye — this dumb passion brings with it a fatal solitude of soul in the society of one’s fellow-men. (LV, 7)

The author is the one who trusts in the reader’s response; Latimer’s mistrust of the sympathy of others seems, even in his opinion, to exclude him from the ranks of the artists. The absence of sympathy is the predominant theme of the tale: Latimer constantly complains that others do not sympathize with him; Bertha is described by him as the prototype of the ‘cruel woman’; Latimer’s father fails to understand him; Alfred is a self-complacent youth unable to put himself in the position of others; and the tale starts (and, presumably, finishes) with two lovers (Latimer’s servants) who quarrel and thus do not respond to the ultimate cry of their moribund master for help. Latimer tends to present the lack of sympathy on the part of others for himself as parallel to the lack of sympathy of readers in the context of literary communication. The passage quoted above is indicative; although Latimer admits to not being a poet, he describes the unsympathetic attitude of others towards himself as the reaction of the unappreciative audience of a genius and addresses himself, in writing his confession, to the ‘happy few’ who will be able to understand him.29 Latimer is anxious to present himself as a genius: his story abounds in the topoi of the biography of the misunderstood poet-martyr, even before he is granted the —

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admittedly authorial — gifts of insight and foresight. After the death of his mother, he has to cope with his father’s indifference, who, after consulting a phrenologist, delivers Latimer to countless tutors who take no heed of his personality. Like a true Romantic poet, he appreciates nature aesthetically, without caring for, or even rejecting, scientific explanations (LV, 7).30 While he still believes he may be a poet, he is happy with his frail and effeminate physique on the grounds of its being the ‘condition of poetic genius’ (LV, 14). His visions convince him for a while that he is a poet and that his ‘slumbering genius’ (LV, 11) has been awakened: he immediately compares himself to famous men, such as Novalis, who had been transformed by illness (LV, 10). Even when he discovers that he is unable to wield his powers at will, he ‘remember[s] that inspiration [is] fitful’ (LV, 11). Although he claims to feel better when his weird and tiring visions recede, and while he suspects that he might be mentally ill, the way he expresses himself betrays his secret pride and enjoyment: ‘Already I had begun to taste something of the horror that belongs to the lot of a human being whose nature is not adjusted to simple human conditions’ (LV, 12). Even when he wants to justify his attraction to Bertha, despite the fact that she is not his ‘ideal of womanly beauty’, he ascribes it to his artistic temperament (LV, 16): like an artist, he falls in love with a woman who is not ‘son genre’. Ascribing to dreams the importance accorded to them by the Romantics, he feels ‘humiliated’ by the commonness of his own (LV, 10). Finally, he enjoys Bertha calling him playfully — and quite appropriately — ‘Tasso’ (LV, 26). Latimer, therefore, directs his plea for sympathy to the reader; however, like Balzac’s narrator, he fails to provide him with a model for his sympathetic response. Although he repeatedly assures the reader that he craves sympathy, Latimer is more than reluctant to grant it to others himself: in fact, he is the most unsympathetic character in the tale. With the exception of Meunier and of a brief interlude of sympathy for his father, he despises his family and all the people who surround him; instead of leading him to understand and justify the foibles of the human race, the gift of insight into the minds of others reinforces these feelings and combines them with ‘disgust’ (LV, 18). This extreme antipathy raises questions about Latimer’s reliability as a narrator — a suspicion reinforced when the tale is seen in the context of Eliot’s work. Eliot’s repeatedly professed aim to perform ‘the extension of our sympathies’ (EGE, 270) is unmistakeably at odds with Latimer’s worldview; the latter is, with the exception of Theophrastus Such, the only first-person narrator in Eliot’s work. The tale was considered by Eliot a ‘jeu de mélancolie’ and was published anonymously in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1859. She insisted that the tale be viewed within the broader context of her work; when Blackwood, in 1873, offered to include it in a collective volume bringing together tales published in Maga, she refused and composed the motto that accompanied it when it found its way into the 1877 Cabinet edition: ‘Give me no light, great Heaven, but such as turns | To energy of human fellow­ ship; | No powers beyond the growing heritage | That makes completer manhood’ (LV, 2). The motto is a plea for sympathy, an attempt to create an ironic distance from Latimer and to suggest an ironic reading of the tale.31

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31

Latimer’s narrative, indeed, gives a lot of leeway for an alternative interpretation of his story:32 in the first place, Latimer has never been consciously wronged by anyone and his solitude seems to be more or less self-inf licted. This perspective applies especially to Bertha’s role: the extent to which she toys with Latimer’s affections must be left open to conjecture and cannot be based on Latimer’s assumptions, which are expressed very carefully: he admits that he founds his belief that she really disliked Alfred on ‘feminine nothings which could never be quoted against her’ (LV, 16). After Alfred’s death it is only ‘out of the subtlest web of scarcely perceptible signs’ (LV, 29) that Bertha seems to lead him to believe that she loves him. Bertha’s progress from toying to hatred is not documented: Latimer intentionally abridges that part of his story (LV, 30) and, quite conveniently, is able to read her mind only when her hate is full-grown (LV, 31–32). He ascribes her change to the fact that he makes a ‘poor figure’ as a bridegroom (LV, 30), that the world considers her pitiable (LV, 32–33) and that, believing that he would be weak, she assumed that he would be enslaved by her. But the main reason for this hatred, according to Latimer, is, unsurprisingly, his clairvoyance, which means not only his ability to control her but also the fact that he is an exceptional individual. Latimer, therefore, can be seen not merely as ‘unsympathizing’ but also as ‘un­trust­worthy’,33 as Blackwood, who disapproved of the tale, had stated. This unreli­ability, moreover, can be seen as extending to his claims that he is a ‘sensitive nature perpetually craving sympathy and support’ (LV, 15). Rather than inviting the under­standing of others, Latimer seems systematically to repel their sympathy; his dread of others becoming aware of his mental peculiarity is telling: ‘I shrank from the idea of disclosing to anyone what might be regarded as a pitiable peculiarity, most of all from betraying it to my father, who would have suspected my sanity ever after’ (LV, 13). His dread, I would argue, rests mainly on the fact that he would attract only their pity and seem to be, in their eyes, a freak, an ‘energumen’ (LV, 18), an ‘incubus’ (LV, 33), that is, the opposite of an exceptional individual, or a genius, which is what Latimer considers himself to be. I would suggest, therefore, that, since he cannot produce art and reveal himself to others as a poet, Latimer compensates for this, by postulating that no one can sympathize with him; posing as the misunderstood genius, in his eyes, legitimizes his right to despise everyone else. His actions seem calculated to provoke antipathy and to keep himself dissatisfied and discontented. For example, he chooses a wife whom he knows to be unimaginative and shallow (or, at least, contrary to his nature), who does not share his tastes (LV, 15), and, above all, a woman who, as he has predicted, will hate him: he can thus continue to feel misunderstood and special. It is his desire to view himself as a genius that leads him to consider others as insipid and hateful beings who do not understand him. Latimer’s text itself is a final attempt to repel sympathy, in appearing to want to attract it even while he knows he will not enjoy it, and to commemorate himself as the misunderstood genius. ‘The Lifted Veil’, therefore, repeats, in a different way, the double gesture of Balzac’s novel. Like Balzac’s narrator, Latimer invites the reader to identify with the main character; by failing to depict acts of sympathy and by implying that Latimer

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is less pitiable than he presents himself to be, the narrative problematizes both the subject and the object of sympathy and, thus, eschews the reader’s identification. Sympathy, the Author, and Sympathetic Imagination In disturbing the reader’s identification with the characters, this double gesture questions another fundamental assumption that Le Père Goriot and ‘The Lifted Veil’ seem, at first sight, to adhere to: their correspondence with reality. Both texts imply that sympathy, identification and fictional illusion are closely connected, if not synonymous: both texts claim that since the stories related are true, the reader should sympathize and identify with the characters and, conversely, that the reader, by identifying and sympathizing, will recognize the truth of the stories. Both texts, therefore, by inviting and repelling the reader’s sympathy, disrupt the fictional illusion. In this context, Latimer, as an unreliable narrator, misrepresents his story: even if he is not consciously lying, the truthfulness of his narrative is compromised.34 In Balzac, the reader who cannot sympathize with Goriot’s sufferings accuses the author of ‘exagération’ or ‘poésie’: a pertinent remark since the very claim of the narrator of Le Père Goriot to truth, ‘All is true’, is the (sub)title of another fiction, Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.35 In both cases, the reader whose eyes fail to moisten is granted a glimpse of the author. If fiction is not equated with lying (as Wilde’s Vivian wishes), the eschewal of the reader’s identification stresses its character as artifice, rather than as an orchestration of sincere feelings. Thus, it brings to the fore the role of the author, posing questions concerning his sincerity, his own feelings and sympathy and, ultimately, the question of whether the feelings a reader may feel have already been experienced by the author or are the outcome of a cool manipulation on the latter’s part. These questions pertain, firstly, to the way in which feelings and sympathy are presumed to be communicated between different persons. Eighteenth-century philosophical accounts of sympathy aimed to account for society as a harmonious whole founded on fellow-feeling rather than self-interest;36 in this context, feeling could be produced either spontaneously or by an act of ref lection. Adam Smith, as shown above, theorizes sympathy primarily as an act of judgement, imagination and ref lection. By contrast, Hume’s early privileging of passions over reason, in his Treatise of Human Nature (1740), suggests that sympathy spreads by means of contagion. Hume’s passions are freely communicated among individuals: ‘the passions are so contagious, that they pass with the greatest facility from one person to another, and produce correspondent movements in all human breasts’. This ‘propensity [...] to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own’ is the cause of ‘the great uniformity we may observe in the humours and turn of thinking of those of the same nation’.37 The members of society, in this sense, are all connected through sympathy, the means of transmission of feelings which sometimes are not theirs in the first place38 — the medical meaning of sympathy at the time was precisely the communication of a condition between bodily organs or individuals.39

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Likewise, for many theorists of fictional sympathy, in order for a feeling to be com­municated to the reader, it must have been felt by the author in the first place: the truth is, all verbal description, merely as naked description, though never so exact, conveys so poor and insufficient an idea of the thing described, that it could scarcely have the smallest effect, if the speaker did not call in to his aid those modes of speech that mark a strong and lively feeling in himself. Then, by the contagion of our passions, we catch a fire already kindled in another, which probably might never have been struck out by the object described.40

Coeval with the theories of sympathy as a moral sentiment is the belief in the enthusiastic absorption of the author by his subject. Since both sympathy and literary creation are activities of the imagination, the author should resemble the sympathetic individual who enters into the feelings of the sufferer. He should experience the feelings of his characters: ‘l’homme enthousiaste, qui prend la plume, l’archet, le pinceau, ou qui monte sur ses tréteaux’, ‘hors de lui, il est tout ce qu’il plaît à l’art qui le domine’ (OE, 252) [the enthusiastic man who grasps the pen, the bow, the brush or climbs on the stage, abandoning himself, becomes anything the art that governs him wishes him to be]. Sympathy in this sense is associated with the process of mimesis: in order to represent a specific character, the author tries to feel his passions.41 Burke, in citing the method of Tommaso Campanella, describes sympathy as the outcome of imitation: When he had a mind to penetrate into the inclinations of those he had to deal with, he composed his face, his gesture, and his whole body, as nearly as he could into the exact similitude of the person he intended to examine; and then carefully observed what turn of mind he seemed to acquire by this change. So that, says my author, he was able to enter into the dispositions and thoughts of people, as effectually as if he had been changed into the very men.42

Campanella’s experiment is presented as having a cognitive dimension, amounting almost to mind reading. As Walter Jackson Bate has shown, the ‘sympathetic imagination’ of the author was also assigned cognitive qualities. Unlike Smith’s sympathizer who represents to himself the feelings he would feel in the sufferer’s place, the author is presumed to transcend the limitations of his own self, become temporarily the character he conceives and experience or understand his feelings; the process of sympathetic identification leads the author to grasp, intuitively, the truth about another human being.43 The author in this case resembles the actor, who was also believed to transform himself into the character he was presumed to impersonate, by means of his sympathetic imagination.44 In this context, the author’s task is defined as the invention of fictional characters with whom he becomes totally identified. The assumption that the more successful the expression of a feeling, the more vividly it was felt by the author and, hence, the more perfect was his identification with his characters, found its ultimate expression in Shakespeare who had been an actor as well as an author. The belief in Shakespeare’s success in the equally true and convincing depiction of the most varied types of character contributed to his rise as the foremost example of genius in the eighteenth century45 and suggested the idea of Shakespeare as Proteus, as a being who can become everyone he projects his mind onto.46

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The idea of the successive metamorphoses of an author or an actor poses the question as to whether he is really feeling the sentiments he represents. Diderot’s first interlocutor in his Paradoxe sur le comédien (conceived in 1769, written and revised over several years and published in 1830) is convinced that he cannot: dans l’intervalle de quatre à cinq secondes, son visage [Garrick’s] passe successivement de la joie folle à la joie modérée, de cette joie à la tranquillité, de la tranquillité à la surprise, de la surprise à l’étonnement, de l’étonnement à la tristesse [...]. Est-ce que son âme a pu éprouver toutes ces sensations et exécuter, de concert avec son visage, cette espèce de gamme? Je n’en crois rien, ni vous non plus. (OE, 328) [in the course of four or five seconds, Garrick’s face moves successively from wild to moderate mirth, from mirth to tranquillity, from tranquillity to surprise, from surprise to astonishment, from astonishment to sadness [...] Can his soul have felt all these feelings and performed, in concert with his face, all this range of emotions? I do not believe so and neither do you.]

Even if Diderot’s Paradoxe cannot be taken as an unqualified endorsement of this theory,47 it is a text that addresses the ambivalence between the sensitive and the insensitive artist. The actor’s ability to ‘s’anéanti[r], pour ainsi dire, s’annule[r] avec son héros’ [to annihilate himself, as it were, to lose himself in the character he is impersonating],48 which, for Rousseau, in his Lettre à M. d’Alembert (1758), is tanta­mount to deception and duplicity, becomes, for Diderot, the distinctive mark of genius: ‘Les grands poètes, les grands acteurs, et peut-être en général tous les grands imitateurs de la nature [...] sont les êtres les moins sensibles’ (OE, 310) [The great poets, the great actors, and perhaps all the great imitators of nature in general are the least sensitive beings].49 An actor is a being able to mimic the emotions of another being and transmit feelings to the spectator without feeling them himself; theatrical illusion, rather than consisting in the passionate involvement of the actor in his role, is the effect of the correspondence between the external signs of passion produced by the actor and ‘le modèle idéal imaginé par le poète’ (OE, 317). The actor’s insensibility and his ability to transform himself into any character mean that he has no character of his own; Diderot implicitly employs the metaphor of Proteus: LE SECOND: A vous entendre, le grand comédien est tout et n’est rien. LE PREMIER: Et peut-être est-ce parce qu’il n’est rien qu’il est tout par excellence, sa forme particulière ne contrariant jamais les formes étrangères qu’il doit prendre. (OE, 341) [THE SECOND: In your opinion, the great actor is all and nothing. THE FIRST: And perhaps he is all par excellence precisely because he is nothing and his individual disposition is never at conf lict with the foreign dispositions he must assume.]

The sympathetic imagination and the conception of the author as a Protean being was systematically applied by the English Romantics to Shakespeare:50 Coleridge spoke of Shakespeare as the poet who ‘darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, the [...] Proteus of the fire and the f lood’;51 Hazlitt claimed that Shakespeare ‘seemed scarcely to have an individual existence of

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his own, but to borrow that of others at will’; he is ‘the Proteus of human intellect’ ‘with a perfect sympathy with all things, yet alike indifferent to all’;52 Keats does not merely speak of Shakespeare as the ‘camelion Poet’ who ‘has no self — [...] is every thing and nothing’ — a quality he calls ‘Negative Capability’ — but believes this to be a quality of the ‘poetical Character’ in general and feels that ‘when I am in a room with People [...] the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me that, I am in a very little time annihilated’.53 The English Romantics developed a conception of genius according to which the author is a being who has no self but is able, through the faculty of the sympathetic imagination, to become anyone and thus possesses an intuitive and wide-ranging knowledge of human nature; he is both objective and subjective since he experiences simultaneous participation in and detachment from his characters; as such he is comparable to God, or he is a ‘second Maker, a just Prometheus under Jove’.54 This concept of genius, which crystallizes into the example of Shakespeare, is characterized by a fundamental paradox: while the ideas of genius and originality, as they emerge during the eighteenth century, stress the author’s uniqueness and individuality, the concept of genius as a Protean being possessing the faculty of the sympathetic imagination defines his uniqueness as precisely the lack of a distinct individual character. Shakespeare was an ideal case since, on the one hand, his disregard for the neoclassical rules exemplified his individuality, while, on the other, the scarcity of biographical data could easily accommodate the idea that he could be anyone — whose too literal rendition would express itself in the controversies on Shakespeare’s identity, which had already begun to appear by the end of the eighteenth century.55 Both Diderot’s theory of acting and art and the English Romantics’ conception of the sympathetic imagination, in arguing for the author as a Protean being, concur with Vivian’s answer to Hamlet’s question: the artist can conceive, understand and impersonate Hecuba because she is nothing to him, because he is indifferent to her. Authorial Doubles in Le Père Goriot and ‘The Lifted Veil’ This dissociation of the ability to gain access into the thoughts and feelings of another being from emotional involvement with the latter is present in both Le Père Goriot and ‘The Lifted Veil’: the problematization of sympathy as a moral sentiment is combined in both texts with the presence of characters who can enter the minds of others without implicating themselves emotionally. Vautrin and Latimer have been seen as authorial personae on the grounds of their privileged insight into the other characters;56 what has not been noticed is that their insight is described in terms of the sympathetic imagination of the unfeeling variety. Latimer’s powers consist in an extension of his imagination; he mistakes them initially for ‘a diseased activity of the imagination’ (LV, 14) but he soon realizes that, like the authorial sympathetic imagination, they have cognitive value: when he sees Prague in a vision, he does not combine pictures or images he has actually seen in real life, but he is mentally transferred to the city. His vision is triggered by the mere mention of the word by his father; Latimer resembles, in this sense, Keats’s ‘camelion Poet’ who becomes one with his environment without being able

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to control his transformation. Latimer himself describes the opal as the ‘emblem of poetic nature’ since it ‘chang[es] with the changing light of heaven and of woman’s eyes’ (LV, 17): likewise, Latimer describes his ability to enter into the minds of others as ‘the obtrusion on my mind of the mental process going forward in first one person, and then another, with whom I happened to be in contact’ (LV, 13). At the same time, this surplus of knowledge is distinct from sympathy: his understanding of the motives and the innermost thoughts of others does not lead to any kind of emotional involvement. In fact, Latimer feels love only for the person whose mind is inaccessible to him. This incompatibility between sympathy as a moral sentiment and the sympathetic imagination is highlighted in Le Père Goriot through the juxtaposition of Goriot with Vautrin. Goriot is the only character in the novel capable of sympathy; in fact, he is characterized by a surplus of sympathy, even if it exclusively concerns his daughters: ‘Je vis de leurs plaisirs’ (PG, 149) [I live through their pleasures]. This sympathy overcomes the barriers of the senses and approximates a kind of vicarious fulfilment: Ma vie, à moi, est dans mes deux filles. [...] Je n’ai point froid si elles ont chaud, je ne m’ennuie jamais si elles rient. Je n’ai de chagrins que les leurs. Quand vous serez père, [...] vous vous croirez attaché à leur [of your children] peau, vous croirez être agité vous-même par leur marche. [...] Enfin, je vis trois fois. Voulez-vous que je vous dise une drôle de chose? Eh bien! quand j’ai été père, j’ai compris Dieu. Il est tout entier partout, puisque la création est sortie de lui. Monsieur, je suis ainsi avec mes filles. Seulement j’aime mieux mes filles que Dieu n’aime le monde, parce que le monde n’est pas si beau que Dieu, et que mes filles sont plus belles que moi. (PG, 160–61) [My life is lived through my two girls. [...] I don’t feel cold if they are warm, and I’m never dull if they are laughing. The only troubles I have are their troubles. [...] when you are a father [...] you will feel as if their skin covered your own body and as if you went with them in every step they took. [...] In short, I live three times over. Shall I tell you something strange? Well, when I became a father I understood God. He is there complete in everything because creation sprang from him. It is just like that with me and my daughters. Only I love my daughters more than God loves the world, for the world is not as beautiful as God is, and my daughters are more beautiful than I.]

Goriot describes a state that encompasses and supersedes mere vicarious fulfilment; he proceeds to an analogy between himself, or fathers in general, and God — the tertium comparationis being their shared attribute as creators. Goriot’s theological metaphor does more than merely reassert his designation as ‘le Christ de la paternité’ [the Christ of fatherhood]; it conf lates the states of father, God, creator and author, along with the ability to identify with their creations. In this respect, Vautrin emerges as Goriot’s counterpart, since it is exactly this kind of relation that the former convict attempts to establish with regard to Rastignac. Vautrin and Goriot have, in general, many similarities which, along with their relation to Rastignac, put them in a symmetrical position: they are both capitalists (Vautrin is the banker of the Dix-Mille), they wield a great fortune with illegal or immoral origins, which they are happy to dispense to their ‘children’.

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Both are likened to Christ: Goriot is the suffering Christ of paternity, and Vautrin assumes the burden of Franchessini’s crime and is betrayed, in a Judas-like manner, by Michonneau.57 Vautrin combines the states of father, God, creator and author/artist more emphatically than Goriot. In the first place, Vautrin presents himself as a kind of father (‘papa Vautrin’) in relation to Rastignac,58 he seems to refer to the Dix-Mille as a family whose son Rastignac will be (PG, 185) and fantasizes ‘une vie patriarcale’ (PG, 141) [a patriarch’s life] as a plantation-owner with two hundred slaves. Vautrin announces to Rastignac from the start that ‘je vous connais comme si je vous avais fait’ (PG, 135) [I know you as well as if I had made you myself ] and lays claim to divine omnipotence: ‘J’ai appris de cet homme-là [...] à imiter la Providence qui nous tue à tort et à travers’ (PG, 136) [He has taught me to imitate Providence who kills us right and left haphazard]; ‘Moi je me charge du rôle de la Providence, je ferai vouloir le bon Dieu’ (PG, 144) [For my part I will take the role of Providence upon myself. I’ll persuade the will of Heaven to act in the right way]. Finally, he pronounces himself an artist: ‘Je suis ce que vous appelez un artiste’ (PG, 136) [I am what you might call an artist]; ‘Je suis un grand poète. Mes poésies, je ne les écris pas: elles consistent en actions et en sentiments’ (PG, 141) [I am a great poet. My poems are not written: they are expressed in action and in feeling]. Vautrin’s most important attribute, however, is his insight into the minds of others: ‘son œil semblait aller au fond de toutes les questions, de toutes les consciences, de tous les sentiments’ (PG, 61) [his eyes seemed to pierce to the heart of all questions, to probe all consciences and examine every feeling]. His ‘regard profond’ (PG, 86) [searching look] gives the impression of penetrating into the mind of the person before him: ‘il lui [Rastignac] semblait que ce singulier personnage pénétrait ses passions et lisait dans son cœur, tandis que chez lui tout était si bien clos qu’il semblait avoir la profondeur immobile d’un sphinx qui sait, voit tout, et ne dit rien’ (PG, 133) [It seemed to him that this strange being examined his feelings every moment and read his inmost heart, while Vautrin himself was so closely sealed that he seemed to possess the still depths of a sphinx, who knows all, sees all, and keeps silent]. Rastignac admits that ‘il a deviné mes motifs aussitôt que je les ai conçus’ (PG, 146) [He guessed my motives before I knew them myself ]. Vautrin’s perspicacity is completely dispassionate; his only fault, in Le Père Goriot, is his concentration on Rastignac which diverts his attention from Michonneau: when he realizes the betrayal, ‘son regard magnétique tomba comme un rayon de soleil sur mademoiselle Michonneau, à laquelle ce jet de volonté cassa les jarrets’ (PG, 217) [his magnetic glance fell like a ray of bright light on Mademoiselle Michonneau, and the old maid’s legs seemed to crumple under her as she felt the impact of the man’s strong will]. Goriot and Vautrin illustrate the dissociation of the sympathetic imagination from emotional involvement: Goriot’s excessive love for his daughters offers him a dubious vicarious fulfilment which is accompanied by his blindness in respect to them; Vautrin, on the contrary, retains his uncanny intuition and its cognitive attributes and is able to read the minds of others, precisely because he is not implicated emotionally.

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*

*

*

*

Vautrin and Latimer are both instances of the type of character which I term ‘the authorial double’, characters possessing the faculty of the sympathetic imagination which enables them to enter the minds of their fellow-characters and inf luence the development of the plot — acting, thus, as if they were the authors of their own world. The Protean authorial scenario and the sympathetic imagination are present in nineteenth-century realism primarily in the guise of the authorial double. As my readings of Le Père Goriot and ‘The Lifted Veil’ have shown, authorial doubles embody the idea of the Protean, detached author which originates in the eighteenth century and they juxtapose the authorial sympathetic imagination with the emotional attitude of the reader. Neither this conf lict, nor its embodiment in a type of character are accounted for by the two versions of the Protean author that I have brief ly presented in this chapter: both the English Romantic version and Diderot’s theory of the actor are abstract theories on the nature of authorship (or art, in general); although they are intended to be comprehensive, their privileged examples, rather than prose fiction, are drama and poetry. In order to explain the presence of the authorial double and his function as a ref lexive device in nineteenth-century realism, I shall turn, in the next chapter, to a third version of the author as a plural individual: Friedrich Schlegel’s notion of irony.

C h ap t e r 2

v

Irony and Sympathetic Imagination August Wilhelm Schlegel, in his lectures on drama (delivered in Vienna, in 1809), bestows on Shakespeare the appellation Proteus and detects ‘in dem Dichter selbst eine gewisse Kälte, aber die eines überlegenen Geistes, der den Kreis des menschlichen Daseins durchlaufen und das Gefühl überlebt hat’ [in the poet himself, notwithstanding his power to excite the most fervent emotions, a certain cool indifference, but still the indifference of a superior mind, which has run through the whole sphere of human existence and survived feeling]. What was designated as detached sympathetic imagination in the previous chapter, is given another name by August: Die Ironie bezieht sich aber beim Shakespeare nicht bloß auf die einzelnen Charakter, sondern häufig auf das Ganze der Handlung. Die meisten Dichter, welche menschliche Begebenheiten erzählend oder dramatisch schildern, nehmen Partei und verlangen von den Lesern blinden Glauben für ihre Bemühungen zu erheben oder herabzusetzen. Je eifriger diese Rhetorik ist, desto leichter verfehlt sie ihren Zweck. Auf jeden Fall werden wir gewahr, daß wir die Sache nicht unmittelbar, sondern durch das Medium einer fremden Denkart erblicken. Wenn hingegen der Dichter zuweilen durch eine geschickte Wendung die weniger glänzende Kehrseite der Münze nach vorne dreht, so setzt er sich mit dem auserlesenen Kreis der Einsichtsvollen unter seinen Lesern oder Zuschauern in ein verstohlenes Einverständnis; er zeigt ihnen, daß er ihre Einwendungen vorhergesehen und im voraus zugegeben habe; daß er nicht selbst in dem dargestellten Gegenstande befangen sei, sondern frei über ihm schwebe, und daß er den schönen, unwiderstehlich anziehenden Schein, den er selbst hervorgezaubert, wenn er anders wollte, unerbittlich vernichten könnte.1 [The irony in Shakespeare has not merely a reference to the separate characters, but frequently to the whole of the action. Most poets who portray human events in a narrative or dramatic form take themselves a part, and exact from their readers a blind approbation or condemnation of whatever side they choose to support or oppose. The more zealous this rhetoric is, the more certainly it fails its effect. In every case we are conscious that the subject itself is not brought immediately before us, but that we view it through the medium of a different way of thinking. When, however, by a dexterous manœuvre, the poet allows us an occasional glance at the less brilliant reverse of the medal, then he makes, as it were, a sort of secret understanding with the select circle of the more intelligent of his readers or spectators; he shows them that he had previously seen and admitted the validity of their tacit objections; that he himself is not

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Irony and Sympathetic Imagination tied down to the represented subject, but soars freely above it; and that if he chose, he could unrelentingly annihilate the beautiful and irresistibly attractive scenes which his magic pen has produced.]

In this passage, irony is taken to mean various things: detached sympathetic imagination (the Protean author, like Diderot’s actor, can represent the feelings of a character without becoming involved);2 a Bakhtinian polyphonic objectivity (he represents all points of view as equally valid, without adopting or privileging one as ‘authorial’); the double gesture I described as underlying Le Père Goriot and ‘The Lifted Veil’ (he is able to make the reader oscillate between sympathy and detachment); a detached attitude of the author vis-à-vis his work. All these notions (which resume the phenomena discussed in the previous chapter) rest on an unresolved dialectical process between identification and detachment, involvement and distance, that is, the process of irony. The inclusiveness of irony that enables August to subsume under its aegis all the latter phenomena was made possible through the transformation that the concept of irony underwent in early German Romanticism, and especially in the work of August’s brother, Friedrich Schlegel, who was chief ly responsible for this transformation. In what follows, I argue that Schlegel’s notion of irony may be seen as a version of the sympathetic imagination which does not merely describe the ironic author as a Protean being but also paves the way for the inclusion in the text of his fictional counterpart, the authorial double — a type of character which appears for the first time in the work of E. T. A. Hoffmann. The ‘Concept’ of Irony and the Irreconcilability of Contradictions The fact that the sympathetic imagination is almost casually dubbed irony by August is an indication of the major re-conceptualization or, rather, to be more exact, de-conceptualization of irony: the concept of irony is unravelled into a process, or, in Paul de Man’s terms, it turns from a trope into the ‘trope of tropes’.3 The shift in the theory of irony effected (or, according to Hegel, ‘invented’)4 by Schlegel is usually described as the move from a rhetorical to a philosophical concept of irony. This entails two seminal breaks: on the one hand, irony ceases to be the property of a text or to be necessarily tied to a specific utterance and becomes a quality that may pervade the entirety of a text5 or of the ironist’s attitude; irony becomes a quality one ‘has’ or does not ‘have’ (K108). On the other hand, irony ceases to be ‘une figure par laquelle on veut faire entendre le contraire de ce qu’on dit’ [a figure of speech by which one means the opposite of what he says]6 and its meaning becomes, more often than not, the object of conjecture; as Raymond Immerwahr puts it an author ironic in Schlegel’s sense does not simply mean the opposite of what he seems to say; he means rather a little more or a little less, or something a shade different from the superficial intent of his words. He may even mean just what he says; yet he is not in unremitting, dead earnest as to the manner in which he says it.7

Indeed, the ironist may mean both what he says and the opposite, none of them or

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something altogether different: he is simultaneously attached to and detached from what he says. This duplicity (or, in Schlegel’s terms, ‘durchaus unwillkürliche, und doch durchaus besonnene Verstellung’ (K108) [involuntary and yet completely deliberate dissimulation]) is radically ambiguous and irony becomes ‘die Form des Paradoxen’ (K48) [the form of paradox]:8 it harbours contradictions without reconciling them into a final synthesis. This irreconcilability of contradictions9 is the imperative that governs irony and the ironic manner of thinking: irony, for Schlegel, is ‘klares Bewußtsein der ewigen Agilität’ (I69) [the clear consciousness of eternal agility] and ideas are ‘unendliche, selbständige, immer in sich bewegliche, göttliche Gedanken’ (I10) [infinite, independent, unceasingly moving, godlike thoughts]. The ironist’s mind embraces contradictions, can understand opposing claims and bear in mind the equal validity of contrasting ideas: irony is ‘klares Bewußtsein [...] des unendlich vollen Chaos’ (I69) [the clear consciousness [...] of an infinitely teeming chaos]. Schlegel’s conception of irony has been deemed a radical de(con)struction of meaning and since Hegel it has been condemned as ‘bad infinity’ which produces duplicitous, noncommittal individuals who oscillate from one opinion to the next, unable and unwilling, yet longing, to construct a system, a coherent worldview.10 At the same time — and this cannot but be seen as part of the workings of irony — it has also been reclaimed as an ‘attempt to reformulate objective truth’.11 Its employment by literary criticism has been ample and no less diverse: it has been applied to concepts of form or content, to concrete devices or ideological indeterminacy. In what follows, I shall outline certain aspects of irony which facilitate its connection with the sympathetic imagination by August, insisting on the ‘creative’ (even if this cannot be distinguished from the ‘destructive’) aspect of irony. ‘Chaos’ in the last-cited fragment is defined elsewhere in a productive way: ‘Nur diejenige Verworrenheit ist ein Chaos, aus der eine Welt entspringen kann’ (I71) [Confusion is chaotic only when it can give rise to a new world]. There are two privileged fields in which this productive potential of irony is realized: philosophy and literature, which Schlegel envisages as one (A116). ‘Die eigentliche Heimat der Ironie’ [the real homeland of irony] is philosophy and, more specifically, philosophy in the form of dialogue (K42): Schlegel’s model is the Platonic aporetic dialogue, in which Socrates poses questions concerning a concept without reaching a conclusion or formulating a definition. Dialogue is, for Schlegel, the form that incarnates the ironic process of thinking: it contains conf licting views without reaching a synthesis. A dialogue, moreover, is ‘eine Kette [...] von Fragmenten’ [a chain [...] of fragments], which is another of Schlegel’s fundamental concepts; a fragment is ‘zugleich ganz subjektiv und individuell, und ganz objektiv’ (A77) [simultaneously completely subjective and individual and completely objective]. A fragment ‘muß gleich einem kleinen Kunstwerke von dem umgebenden Welt ganz abgesondert und in sich selbst vollendet sein wie ein Igel’ (A206) [like a miniature work of art, has to be totally isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a porcupine]; and since ‘in der Poesie mag wohl alles Ganze halb, und alles Halbe doch eigentlich ganz sein’ (K14) [in poetry too every whole can be a part and every part really a whole], it constitutes a totality in itself.12

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Literature, on the other hand, and especially the novel, or Roman, shares with philosophy the quality of the ironic genre par excellence. The term Roman in Schlegel is used to designate not only novels, but the future all-encompassing genre that would abolish generic distinctions. His celebrated definition is that ‘ein Roman ist ein romantisches Buch’,13 that is, romantic literature in general, regardless of actual genres, applicable equally to non-prose authors such as Dante or Shakespeare.14 Novels, according to Schlegel, are ‘die sokratischen Dialoge unserer Zeit’ (K26) [the Socratic dialogues of our time]; they are, therefore fragmentary (simultaneously objective and subjective)15 and ironic: unlike poems, they embody the dialectics of irony. Novels are not merely expressions of subjective feelings but ‘mancher der vortreff lichsten Romane ist [...] eine Enzyclopädie des ganzen geistigen Lebens eines genialischen Individuums’: ‘auch enthält jeder Mensch, der gebildet ist, und sich bildet, in seinem Innern einen Roman’ (K78) [many of the very best novels are [...] encyclopedias of the whole spiritual life of a brilliant individual: and every human being who is cultivated and cultivates himself contains a novel within himself ]. Therefore, ‘sollte es nicht überf lüssig sein, mehr als Einen Roman zu schreiben, wenn der Künstler nicht etwa ein neuer Mensch geworden ist? Offenbar gehören nicht selten alle Romane eines Autors zusammen, und sind gewissermaßen nur ein Roman’ (K89) [is it not unnecessary to write more than one novel, unless the artist has become a new man? It is obvious that frequently all the novels of a particular author belong together and in a sense make up only one novel]. Both irony as a process of thought and its incarnations in philosophical dialogues, fragments and the novel are thus characterized by a continuous and unresolved oscillation between affirmation and negation, objectivity and subjectivity, involvement and detachment — an oscillation which also underlies the detached sympathetic imagination. The following sections, without attempting to narrow irony down to a concrete ‘device’, are devoted to the practical effects of this irreconcilability of contradictions and to the way in which they transform the concepts of the reader, the author and the work. The process of irony is a framework into which the sympathetic imagination and the double gesture described in the previous chapter, the oscillation between sympathy and the absence of it, identification and detachment, or realist illusion and its disruption, can be productively placed. Walter Benjamin comments: ‘For Schlegel, the concept of irony acquired its central importance not only through its relation to certain theoretical issues, but even more as a purely intentional attitude’.16 I shall follow him in stressing irony as ‘an intentional attitude’ on the part of the author rather than its radical philosophical implications. Incomprehensibility and the Reader August’s ‘auserlesener Kreis der Einsichtsvollen unter seinen Lesern’ points to an essential quality of irony: its exclusivity, which is an effect that Schlegel consciously aimed at. It is not accidental that the Critical Fragments (1797), which inaugurate the genre of the early Romantic fragment, begin with Schlegel regretting

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‘de[n] gänzliche[n] Mangel der unentbehrlichen Ironie’ (K7) [the total lack of an indispensable irony] from his earlier ‘Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie’ (published in 1797, completed in 1795) and stating his conviction that ‘eine klassische Schrift muß nie ganz verstanden werden können’ (K20) [a classical text must never be entirely comprehensible]. According to most of his contemporary readers and his subsequent critics, Schlegel compensated amply, in the Athenäum (1798–1800), for his former neglect of irony. Schlegel chose to theorize incomprehensibility as well as offering another instance of it17 by concluding the last issue of the shortlived journal with an essay entitled ‘Über die Unverständlichkeit’ — one of the best examples of Schlegelian irony in practice, which exemplifies his attitude towards the reader. This connection of irony with incomprehensibility and the theoretical grounding of the former on the latter are part of the shift in the meaning of irony that I am tracing. Ceasing to signify the opposite of what it seems it say, irony ceases also to be — in Wayne C. Booth’s terms — ‘stable’, while the ‘clues to irony’18 that help locate it are omitted. What the readers of the Athenäum were protesting at was the loss (or the intentional destruction by Schlegel) of their ability to detect and decipher irony, which, according to the traditional definition of the concept, amount to one and the same thing.19 Schlegel parodies the reader’s expectations of self-evident ironies, by perversely and ironically announcing them and pointing out their presence or absence: ‘bis hierher ist nun alles ohne alle Ironie’; ‘da fängt nun auch schon die Ironie an’;20 ‘wenn man ohne Ironie von der Ironie redet, wie es soeben der Fall war’ (Ü, 369) [up to this point I have not been ironical; this is where the irony begins; if one speaks of irony without using it, as I have just done]. Schlegel’s defence of his practice includes a gesture of civility that was probably lost on his audience: the further broadening of the definition of irony (for those who had not paid sufficient attention to the ‘involuntary dissimulation’ of K108) to include as its ‘victim’21 the ironist himself. Schlegel mockingly enumerates the various kinds of irony, concluding with the ‘irony of irony’: Was wir aber hier zunächst unter Ironie der Ironie verstanden wissen vollen, das entsteht auf mehr als einem Wege. [...] wenn man mit Ironie von einer Ironie redet, ohne zu merken, daß man sich zu eben der Zeit in einer andren viel auffallenderen Ironie befindet; wenn man nicht wieder aus der Ironie herauskommen kann, wie es in diesem Versuch über die Unverständlichkeit zu sein scheint; wenn die Ironie Manier wird, und so den Dichter gleichsam wieder ironiert; [...] wenn die Ironie wild wird, und sich gar nicht mehr regieren läßt. (Ü, 369) [But what we want this irony to mean in the first place is something that happens in more ways than one. For example [...] if one speaks of irony ironically without in the process being aware of having fallen into a far more noticeable irony; if one cannot disentangle oneself from irony anymore, as seems to be happening in this essay on incomprehensibility; if irony turns into a mannerism and becomes, as it were, ironical about the author; [...] and if irony runs wild and cannot be controlled any longer.]

In Schlegel’s terms, the Aristotelian distinction between the eiron, who deliberately depreciates himself, and the alazon, who exaggerates his merits,22 collapses: some­

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one who ‘has’ irony can, in his attitude towards those who do not ‘have’ it, easily become the dupe of his own irony: indeed, ‘mit der Ironie ist durchaus nicht zu scherzen’ (Ü, 370) [irony is something one simply cannot play games with]. While August, a much more systematic and less bold theorist than his brother, speaks of a ‘select circle’ of readers at whom the author can wink, Friedrich claims that ‘es unter den philosophischen Worten [...] geheime Ordensverbindungen geben muß’ (Ü, 364) [there must be a connection of some secret brotherhood among philosophical words] and that they spread irony and confusion, merely because ‘die Worte sich selbst besser verstehen, als diejenigen von denen sie gebraucht werden’ (Ü, 364) [words often understand themselves better that do those who use them]. Schlegel’s idea of the reader is less and also more elitist than August’s; one of his many programmatic aims in this essay is ‘mich mit dem Leser in ein Gespräch über diese Materie [incomprehensibility] zu versetzen, und vor seinen eignen Augen, gleichsam ihm ins Gesicht, einen andern neuen Leser nach meinem Sinne zu konstruieren, ja, wenn ich es nötig finden sollte, denselben sogar zu deduzieren’ (Ü, 363) [to have a talk about this matter [incomprehensibility] with my reader, and then create before his eyes — in spite of him as it were — another new reader to my own liking: yes, even to deduce him, if need be]. However, even this distinction is not between the first (supposedly ‘real’) reader who misunderstands and an imaginary, ideal reader who will understand Schlegel: what the latter mostly complains about is that the readers of the Athenäum misunderstand the wrong parts of his writings and not the ones he himself destines for misunderstanding (Ü, 263). Schlegel’s imaginary reader is someone who will misunderstand what is provided as a misunderstanding by the author. What Schlegel suggests is that incomprehension is an integral part or stage of understanding, or, even, that the two may be identical.23 Indeed, he pretends to pose a pedagogical aim in providing misunderstandings: Das Beste dürfte wohl auch hier sein, es [incomprehension] immer ärger zu machen; wenn das Ärgernis die größte Höhe erreicht hat, so reißt es und verschwindet, und kann das Verstehen dann sogleich seinen Anfang nehmen. (Ü, 367) [Here too probably the best thing would be to aggravate it [incomprehension] even more: when this vexation reaches its highest point, then it will burst and disappear, and then the process of understanding can set to work immediately.]

Schlegel’s attacks on the reader should not be interpreted merely as part of his hostile attitude towards an unappreciative public (which, to an extent, they also are),24 nor as a theory of irony that leads to a radical divorce of meaning and utterance; rather, the indispensable misunderstanding that Schlegel argues for may be seen, more productively, as a component of his theory of reading. Incomprehensibility is an instance of interruption, which Schlegel considered to be a necessary part of the process of reading — a practical demonstration of which is to be found in his review of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.

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Romantic Irony, the Reader, and Practical Criticism Schlegel’s review of Wilhelm Meister (1798) is a celebrated instance of Romantic literary criticism, and exemplifies the essentially Romantic tendency to judge a work of art as a consistent, organic whole.25 Its importance rests not merely on its typicality as an example of Romantic criticism, but also on its object: although the Romantics developed a controversial relationship with Goethe’s novel,26 Schlegel had pronounced it one of the three greatest ‘Tendenzen des Zeitalters’ [tendencies of the age] (along with the French revolution and Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (A216)). The review presents itself literally as a reading of the novel: it proceeds from first to last book, describing the reactions of the reader and the impressions the author intends to arouse in him. The reader referred to throughout the review is neither the ‘actual’ nor the ‘imaginary’ one of ‘Über die Unverständlichkeit’; he is rather the critic, an entity who partakes both of the nature of the reader and of the author, or an adequately ironic reader. Even if the relation of this reader to the author is not one of radical incomprehensibility, Schlegel describes a milder form of interruption of the normal f low of reading. The reader’s expectations revolve around the process of Bildung that Wilhelm undergoes and its final outcome. Already from the first book, these expectations are given a measure, through the character of the Stranger, ‘der Höhe, zu welcher das Werk noch steigen soll; eine Höhe, auf der vielleicht die Kunst eine Wissenschaft und das Leben eine Kunst sein wird’27 [of the heights to which the work has yet to rise, where art will become a science, and life an art]. This aim is never achieved: Wilhelm never becomes an artist and he commits his greatest blunders after being granted the Letter of Apprenticeship by the society of the Tower. The reader, therefore, oscillates continuously between his identification with Wilhelm and a critical distance from him: from the very beginning, the reader feels that he is familiar with the characters, as if he had met them (M, 127), and it is ‘anziehend und ergötzlich’ (M, 127) [absorbing and delightful] to read of Wilhelm’s naïve artistic aspirations, even if ‘die Teilnahme an diesen Gefühlen und Wüschen nicht frei von Besorgnis sein kann’ (M, 127) [our response to such feelings and desires cannot be wholly without misgivings]. By the end of the first book, ‘gewinnt er [Wilhelm] schon jetzt das ganze Wohlwollen des Lesers’ (M, 129) [Wilhelm has already won the reader’s good-will] although ‘wir voraussehn, daß erst spät oder nie als Mann handeln wird’ (M, 129) [we can foresee that he will come to act as a mature man only very late (perhaps never)]. This oscillation is carefully orchestrated by the author who, in crushing Wilhelm’s hopes or in showing him to commit errors, produces a ‘harte[n] Mißlaut’ (M, 128) [harsh dissonance], or a ‘Harmonie von Dissonanzen’ (M, 130) [harmony of dissonance]. Although the reader trusts that Wilhelm’s likeable character promises ‘daß Männer und Frauen sich seine Erziehung zum Geschäft und zum Vergnügen machen’ [that men and women will make his education their business and their pleasure], in the end, he comes to realize that ‘wenn gleich der Zögling trotz des redlichen Beistandes so vieler Erzieher in seiner persönlichen und sittlichen Ausbildung wenig mehre gewonnen zu haben scheint als die äußre Gewandtheit’

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(M, 138–39) [despite the honest concern of so many pedagogues in his personal and moral education, their pupil, it is true, seems to have acquired little more than the external graces] and that ‘diese Lehrjahre eher jeden andern zum tüchtigen Künstler oder zum tüchtigen Mann bilden wollen und bilden können, als Wilhelmen selbst. [...] selbst der kleine Felix hilft ihn erziehen und beschämen, indem er ihm seine vielfache Unwissenheit fühlbar macht’ (M, 143–44) [Wilhelm is the last person these years of apprenticeship would and could turn into a fit and able artist and man. [...] He is even educated by little Felix, who shames him into an awareness of how little he knows]. Ultimately, the reader’s appreciation is aesthetically grounded, since it is the charm and the artistic merit of the novel which counterbalance the disappointment of the expectations the novel itself has set up: Wie mögen sich die Leser dieses Romans beim Schluß desselben getäuscht fühlen, da aus allen diesen Erziehungsanstalten nichts herauskommt, als bescheidne Liebenswürdigkeit, da hinter allen diesen wunderbaren Zufällen, weissagenden Winken und geheimnisvollen Erscheinungen nichts steckt als die erhabenste Poesie, und da die letzten Fäden des Ganzen nur durch die Willkür eines bis zur Vollendung gebildeten Geistes gelenkt werden!28 (M, 144) [How disappointed the reader of this novel might be by the end, for nothing comes of all these educational arrangements but an unassuming charm; and behind all those amazing chance occurrences, prophetic hints and mysterious appearances, there is nothing but the most lucid poetry; the final threads of the entire action are guided merely by the whim of a mind cultivated to perfection.]

The reader, therefore, is shown to oscillate between the ‘delightful’ illusion offered by the author and his disillusionment with Wilhelm’s character, between identification or sympathy and detachment. On the other hand, alongside the irony of an author who carefully enables and destroys the reader’s identification with Wilhelm, lies the irony of the reader: the heart of the essay consists in a digression on reading: Es ist schön und notwendig, sich dem Eindruck eines Gedichtes ganz hin­ zugeben, den Künstler mit uns machen zu lassen, was er will [...]. Dies ist das Erste und das Wesentlichste. Aber nicht minder notwendig ist es, von allem Einzelnen abstrahieren zu können, das Allgemeine schwebend zu fassen, eine Masse zu überschauen, und das Ganze festzuhalten, selbst dem Verborgensten nachzuforschen und das Entlegenste zu verbinden. Wir müssen uns über unsre eigne Liebe erheben, und was wir anbeten, in Gedanken vernichten können: sonst fehlt uns, was wir auch für andre Fähigkeiten haben, der Sinn für das Weltall. [...] So mögen wir uns gern dem Zauber des Dichters entreißen, nachdem wir uns gutwillig haben von ihm fesseln lassen, mögen am liebsten dem nachspähn, was er unserm Blick entziehen oder doch nich zuerst zeigen wollte, und was ihn doch am meisten zum Künstler macht: die geheimen Absichten, die er im stillen verfolgt. (M, 130–31) [It is a beautiful and indeed necessary experience when reading a poetic work to give ourselves up entirely to its inf luence, to let the writer do with us what he will [...]. This is the prime, the most essential response. But it is no less necessary to be able to abstract from all the details, to have a loose general concept of the

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work, survey it en bloc, and grasp it as a whole, perceive even its most hidden parts, and make connections between the most remote corners. We must rise above our own affection for the work, and in our thoughts be able to destroy what we adore; otherwise, whatever our talents, we would lack a sense of the whole. [...] So we gladly tear ourselves away from the poet’s spell, after we have willingly let him cast his enchantment upon us; what we love most is to seek out what he has hidden from our gaze or was reluctant to reveal at first, what it is that most makes him an artist: the hidden intentions he pursues in secret.]

The reader, in order to enjoy and understand the work, has to destroy its charm. Irony consists in dodging the reader’s emotional reaction: the latter, thus, becomes aware of the author’s ‘hidden intentions’ and his ability both to create and to distance himself from his creation. The Ironic Author Before proceeding to what Schlegel explicitly says about the author and to his description of the creative process, it should be noted that his own practice, the production of fragments (particularly prolific, if one counts his unpublished notebooks), displays an apparent disregard for authorship. On the one hand, the Athenäum fragments were published anonymously and, while the bulk was written by Schlegel, the collection contained contributions from August, Novalis, and Schleiermacher — some of which Schlegel had drawn from their correspondence. On the other hand, the fragment was modelled on the genre of the aphorism:29 aphorisms are relatively autonomous and can be easily repeated by their readers as witty sayings. Schlegel’s fragments, however, unlike aphorisms, cannot be isolated from their context; they are highly resistant to such an attempt at appropriation by the reader. The only way to make sense of them (as most of their readings exemplify) is to read them one against the other, in a chain, as it were, which may still lead to contradictory conclusions. The fragments, therefore, through their interconnectedness, form a whole and constitute a work that presupposes an absent yet present authorial figure; they call for a reader who has ‘Sinn für das Universum’ (M, 134) [a sense of totality] and who will look, however inconclusively, for signs of the author’s ‘geheimen Absichten’ (M, 131) [hidden intentions] behind the fragments. The alternation between involvement and detachment, described in the previous section, is not limited to the effect produced by the ironic text: it is rather an integral part of the process of creation or, even, identical to it; for the author should also be able to ‘annihilate’ his work. Um über einen Gegenstand gut schreiben zu können, muß man sich nicht mehr für ihn interessieren; der Gedanke, den man mit Besonnenheit ausdrücken soll, muß schon gänzlich vorbei sein, einen nicht mehr eigentlich beschäftigen. So lange der Künstler erfindet und begeistert ist, befindet er sich für die Mitteilung wenigstens in einem illiberalen Zustande. Er wird dann alles sagen wollen; welches eine falsche Tendenz junger Genies, oder ein richtiges Vorurteil alter Stümper ist. Dadurch verkennt er den Wert und die Würde der Selbstbeschränkung, die doch für den Künstler wie für den Menschen das Erste und das Letzte, das Notwendigste und das Höchste ist. Das Notwendigste:

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Irony and Sympathetic Imagination denn überall, wo man sich nicht selbst beschränkt, beschränkt einen die Welt; wodurch man ein Knecht wird. Das Höchste: denn man kann sich nur in den Punkten und an den Seiten selbst beschränken, wo man unendliche Kraft hat, Selbstschöpfung und Selbstvernichtung. (K37) [In order to write well about something, one should not be interested in it any longer. To express an idea with due circumspection, one must have relegated it wholly to one’s past; one must no longer be preoccupied with it. As long as the artist is in the process of discovery and inspiration, he is in a state, which, as far as communication is concerned, is at the very least intolerant. He wants to blurt out everything, which is a fault of young geniuses or a legitimate prejudice of old bunglers. And so he fails to recognize the value and the dignity of selfrestriction, which is after all, for the artist as well as the man, the first and the last, the most necessary and the highest duty. Most necessary because whenever one does not restrict oneself, one is restricted by the world; and that makes one a slave. The highest because one can only restrict oneself at those points and places where one possesses infinite power, self-creation and self-destruction.]

This passage lucidly expresses the contradiction of the ironic author; irony, even if it inevitably engulfs the ironist himself, does not necessarily require an author to relinquish his sovereignty;30 detachment from the work is freedom, a sign of his ‘infinite power’. Self-restriction, or the oscillation between self-creation and self-destruction are the technical terms with which Schlegel designates, in a more radical sense, what August calls ‘annihilation’, the means for the author to achieve detachment from his own work. Irony is, for Schlegel, ‘die freieste aller Lizenzen’ [the freest of all licences] and, at the same time, ‘die gesetzlichste’ (K108) [the most lawful], and consists in the eternal ‘Wechsel von Selbstschöpfung und Selbstvernichtung’ (A51) [alternation between self-creation and self-destruction]. This alternation is derived from Fichte’s epistemology; Fichte argues for the split of the I, which becomes both the subject and the object of ref lection, thus simultaneously participating in and distancing itself from itself. Unlike Fichte, who, for the purpose of theoretical philosophy, regards the restriction of this process to the ‘thinking of thinking’ as indispensable, the Romantics embrace the process of infinite ref lection.31 Contemplating one’s ego and its thinking process becomes an infinite thinking about one’s self, a thinking about thinking about thinking and so forth. This continuous alternation is not only an epistemological principle for Schlegel, but it became the model for his poetic ref lection, ‘poetry of poetry’, or ironic poetry. In this way, an ironic author ref lects on the process of writing, and literature mirrors the creative process. For Schlegel, ref lection, whether in philosophy or in literature, means, first of all, duplication: ‘Eine Idee ist ein bis zur Ironie vollendeter Begriff, eine absolute Synthesis absoluter Antithesen, der stete sich selbst erzeugende Wechsel zwei streitender Gedanken’ (A121) [An idea is a concept perfected to the point of irony, an absolute synthesis of absolute antitheses, the continual self-creating interchange of two conf licting thoughts]. A thought is defined as its own combination with its antipodes (A39), and, for Schlegel, every philosophy must contain its own selfannihilation, in a process that is likened to the phoenix’s re-emergence from its ashes (A103). The ironic thinker or artist must, therefore, split in two in order to abandon

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himself to the alternation between self-destruction and self-creation: ‘Sinn (für eine besondere Kunst, Wissenschaft, einen Menschen, u.s.w.) ist dividierter Geist; Selbstbeschränkung, also ein Resultat von Selbstschöpfung und Selbstvernichtung’ (K28) [Feeling (for a particular art, science, person, etc.) is divided spirit, is selfrestriction: hence a result of self-creation and self-destruction]. This ‘divided spirit’ is the result of ref lection: the ironist thinks and thinks of himself thinking, and the ironic artist creates and thinks of himself creating, thus ‘destroying’ his creation.32 Writing is a process that presupposes this duplication, or, in less transcendental terms, what Schlegel calls dialogue. The actual literary practice of the group of Jena in the Athenäum was par excellence dialogic. Their main objective was Symphilosophie and Sympoesie, as is manifest in their collectively and anonymously published fragments. Literary communication, for Schlegel, consists not only in expressing something, but also in managing to share it with others (K98), in formulating a text while anticipating its reception. Thoughts that are not communicated are only ‘Seelen von Gedanken’ (A208) [souls of thoughts]. Writers are divided, therefore, into two categories: Der analytische Schriftsteller beobachtet den Leser, wie er ist, danach macht er seinen Kalkül, legt seine Maschinen an, um den gehörigen Effekt auf ihn zu machen. Der synthetische Schriftsteller konstruiert und schafft sich einen Leser, wie er sein soll; er denkt sich denselben nicht ruhend und tot, sondern lebendig und entgegenwirkend. Er läßt das, was er erfunden hat, vor seinen Augen stufenweise werden, oder er lockt ihn es selbst zu erfinden. Er will keine bestimmte Wirkung auf ihn machen, sondern er tritt mit ihm in das heilige Verhältnis der innigsten Symphilosophie oder Sympoesie. (K112) [The analytic writer observes the reader as he is; and accordingly he makes his calculations and sets up his machines in order to make the proper impression on him. The synthetic writer constructs and creates a reader as he should be; he does not imagine him calm and dead, but alive and critical. He allows whatever he has created to take shape gradually before the reader’s eyes, or else he tempts him to discover it himself. He does not try to make any particular impression on him, but enters with him into the sacred relationship of deepest symphilosophy or sympoetry.]

This imaginary reader, as we have seen in the Wilhelm Meister review, can, like the author, enact this alternating process and become ‘no longer interested’ in what he is reading. The author duplicates himself, he creates an image of his reader and stages a dialogue, an alternation between self-creation and self-destruction. This duplication relates not only to the reception of the work but also to its material; Schlegel poses writing as the result of a multiple individuality, which is a necessary result of the ‘individuality’ and ‘concreteness’ of modern art, in opposition to the abstraction of ancient art: Aber sich willkürlich bald in diese bald in jene Sphäre, wie in eine andre Welt, nicht bloß mit dem Verstande und der Einbildung, sondern mit ganzer Seele versetzen; bald auf diesen bald auf jenen Teil seines Wesens frei Verzicht tun, und sich auf einen andern ganz beschränken; jetzt in diesem, jetzt in jenem Individuum sein Eins und Alles suchen und finden, und alle übrigen absichtlich vergessen: das kann nur ein Geist, der gleichsam eine Mehrheit von

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Irony and Sympathetic Imagination Geistern, und ein ganzes System von Personen in sich enthält, und in dessen Innerm das Universum, welches, wie man sagt, in jeder Monade keimen soll, ausgewachsen, und reif geworden ist.33 (A121) [But to transport oneself arbitrarily now into this now into that sphere, as if into another world, not merely with one’s reason and imagination, but with one’s whole soul; to freely relinquish first one and then another part of one’s being, and confine oneself entirely to a third; to seek and find now in this, now in that individual the be-all and end-all of existence, and intentionally forget everyone else: of this only a mind is capable that contains within itself a plurality of minds and a whole system of persons, and in whose inner being the universe which, as they say, should germinate in every monad, has grown to fullness and maturity.]

According to Schlegel, the author becomes a plural individual by identifying and detaching himself successively from what he writes; what is expressed in his work is not merely ideas but what Bakhtin would later call individualized ideas,34 that is, ideas that cannot be separated from the characters and cannot be directly attributed to the author. Thus, the process of authorial irony approaches the sympathetic imagination, and it is this that enables August to move freely between Shakespeare the ironist and Shakespeare as Proteus.35 Schlegel’s irony, however, does not only describe the author as Proteus but also postulates the presence of this plural individual in the work. The Ironic Work This plurality of the ironic author can be seen, as in the above-cited passage by August, from the perspective of the author’s relation with his fictional characters. The novel is, for Schlegel, a dialogue and the latter consists in a chain of fragments, which are simultaneously subjective and objective. In this sense, the fictional character can be seen as a concrete manifestation of the novelistic fragment: the author, in conceiving a character, simultaneously identifies with and detaches himself from him, alternating therefore between subjectivity and objectivity. On the other hand, this simultaneous subjectivity and objectivity can be also seen from the perspective of the sum of the characters: the author is at the same time involved in all and in none of them. The novel thus becomes an objective–subjective chain of fragments, a dialogue which imposes no privileged, ‘authorial’ view, or a fragmentary totality. Indeed, according to A118: Es ist nicht einmal ein feiner, sondern eigentlich ein recht grober Kitzel des Egoismus, wenn alle Personen in einem Roman sich um Einen bewegen wie Planeten um die Sonne, der dann gewöhnlich des Verfassers unartiges Schoßkind ist, und der Spiegel und Schmeichler des entzückten Lesers wird. Wie ein gebildeter Mensch nicht bloß Zweck sondern auch Mittel ist für andre, so sollten auch im gebildeten Gedicht alle zugleich Zweck und Mittel sein. Die Verfassung sei republikanisch. [It is not even a subtle but actually a coarse titillation of the ego, when all the characters of a novel revolve around a single figure like the planets around the sun. And this central character usually turns out to be the author’s own naughty

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little darling who then becomes the mirror and f latterer of the delighted reader. Just as a cultivated human being is not merely an end but also a means both to himself and others, so too in the cultivated literary work all the characters should be both ends and means. The constitution should be republican.]

This novelistic republicanism, however, is only the result of the author’s multiplicity; according to Schlegel, the work is not simply the outcome of the process of ref lection, but it also embodies and mirrors this process, becoming the allegory of the process of its own creation. It is in this sense that each element of the work becomes both an end and a means. According to A116, romantic poetry becomes an allegory of ref lection: Sie [romantic poetry] kann sich so in das Dargestellte verlieren, daß man glauben möchte, poetische Individuen jeder Art zu charakterisieren, sei ihr Eins und Alles; und doch gibt es noch keine Form, die so dazu gemacht wäre, den Geist des Autors vollständig auszudrücken: so daß manche Künstler, die nur auch einen Roman schreiben wollten, von ungefähr sich selbst dargestellt haben. Nur sie kann gleich dem Epos ein Spiegel der ganzen umgebenden Welt, ein Bild des Zeitalters werden. Und doch kann auch sie am meisten zwischen dem Dargestellten und dem Darstellenden, frei von allem realen und idealen Interesse auf den Flügeln der poetischen Ref lexion in der Mitte schweben, diese Ref lexion immer wieder potenzieren und wie in einer endlosen Reihe von Spiegeln vervielfachen. [It [romantic poetry] can so lose itself in what it describes that one might believe it exists only to characterize poetical individuals of all sorts; and yet there still is no form so fit for expressing the entire spirit of an author: so that many artists who started out to write only a novel [Roman] ended up by providing us with a portrait of themselves. It alone can become, like the epic, a mirror of the whole circumambient world, an image of the age. And it can also — more than any other form — hover at the midpoint between the portrayed and the portrayer, free of all real and ideal self-interest, on the wings of poetic ref lection, and can raise that ref lection again and again to a higher power, can multiply it in an endless succession of mirrors.]

The means by which this embodiment of ref lection is achieved is therefore this hovering ‘at the midpoint between the portrayed and the portrayer’; the work contains a portrait of the artist himself: not, however, of the artist as an individual, nor as a privileged point of reference in the work, but of the artist as the person who performs this creative process, an individual who contains a plurality of individuals. Thus the Roman is a mirror in two senses: it mirrors the world (it is representational) and it also mirrors the creative process of which it is the result.36 This twofold mirroring is simultaneous: the work ‘hovers’ between representation and ref lexivity and this alternation is the essence of irony. The Uses of Romantic Irony In my discussion of irony I have suggested that it may be conceived as a fairly broad attitude which has to do with (both the author’s and the reader’s) simultaneous involvement in and detachment from the text. Schlegel’s note that ‘Ironie ist eine

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permanente Parekbase’37 [irony is a continuous parabasis] has prompted many scholars to identify irony with the disruption of the fictional illusion through characters who are conscious of their fictional status, or playful narrators who intervene to state the fictionality of the text; such a view restricts the presence of Romantic irony to texts in which some sort of metafictional device is at work. Parabasis is indeed the part of ancient comedy where the chorus ref lects on the play and on the progress of the plot, a device which is incontestably an instance of ref lection, of a distancing from the plot and of a disruption of the fictional illusion. Nevertheless, for various reasons, the concrete expression of Schlegel’s theory of irony cannot be reduced exclusively to such a device.38 First of all, as he clearly states, irony cannot be traced to isolated passages but pervades the entire text (K42). Second, the fragment in question contains an adjective which largely modifies the meaning of parabasis: ‘permanente’. Authorial intrusion can hardly qualify as continuous, even in literary texts such as Tristram Shandy or Jacques le fataliste where it is more than frequent and more central to the work than its ‘plot’.39 By contrast, works that Schlegel indicated as ironic (such as Dante’s or Shakespeare’s) do not, as a rule, contain overt disruptions of the fictional illusion. A clear indication that Schlegel did not have metafictional comments in mind and that he employed the term parabasis only as a metaphor for ironic ref lection may be derived from the same source: Schlegel’s notebooks. ‘Die Parekbase im Rom.[an] muß verhüllt sein, nicht offenbar wie in der alten Komödie’ [Parabasis in the novel must be concealed, not apparent as in Old Comedy].40 The unambiguousness of this note leaves no leeway for an exclusive identification of Romantic irony with metafictional commentary. I would argue that the alternation between identification with and detachment from the work, both as the stance of the author and the effect on the reader, qualifies as a kind of continuous parabasis: during this process the reader’s identification is interrupted, the normal f low of reading is disrupted, and the ironic reader, or the reader of an ironic work cannot fail to experience its reading as a continuous disruption of the illusion, without necessarily needing metafictional comments. Thus, the reader is reminded of the presence of the author and becomes aware of the work as a whole. Friedrich Schlegel’s notion of irony, consists, as I have shown, in an alternation between involvement and detachment which is applicable to the author, the reader and the work. The author, who embraces all points of view and simultaneously identifies with and distances himself from his work and his characters, can be seen as a version of the Protean author who possesses the faculty of the sympathetic imagination. The reader is caught in the double gesture I described in Chapter 1: he is forced to oscillate between illusion and its disruption, between sympathy or identification with the fictional characters and detachment. The ironic work is both representational and ref lexive, it mirrors both the world and the creative process whose outcome it is. Schlegel did not specify any privileged means for this mirroring or continuous parabasis; he only implied in A116 that this involved a portrait of the author. In the rest of this chapter, I shall turn to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ironic practice. For the purposes of this monograph, Hoffmann, a representative of the second generation

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of the Romantics, is an instrumental figure: although not Schlegel’s disciple, he conceives of irony and, particularly, of literary irony, within the theoretical framework set by Schlegel; unlike Schlegel’s novel, Lucinde, Hoffmann’s literary work was enthusiastically received in France and, as I shall demonstrate in Chapter 4, had a long-lasting impact on Balzac, functioning thus as an indispensable link for the transmission of German Romantic literary theory in the realist nineteenth century. Moreover, Hoffmann’s practice of irony retains Schlegel’s emphasis on the author as a Protean, plural individual and offers the first instance of the authorial double as a concrete device, both continuous and covert, which embodies Schlegel’s parabasis. I have chosen Hoffmann’s ‘Prinzessin Brambilla’ (1820), one of his late works, which has been considered one of the most typical examples of Romantic irony (among others, by Baudelaire, Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs and Paul de Man) and which is often read in conjunction with Schlegel’s theory of irony. ‘Prinzessin Brambilla’ and the Authorial Double The structure of ironic duplication is present in the work of Hoffmann in a very palpable form: doubling and the theme of the double can be easily read as a literalization of ironic infinite ref lection.41 Duplication in Hoffmann extends from a mere theme to a structural principle: real or imaginary doubles, split personalities,42 along with binary or mise-en-abyme structures that ref lect each other. Hoffmann’s two novels, Die Elixiere des Teufels (1816)43 and Lebensansichten des Katers Murr (1819–21),44 recapitulate all the possible thematic or structural versions, while the entirety of Hoffmann’s work seems to oscillate between a ‘realistic’ and a ‘fantastic’ element, often exemplified in his stories as two distinct worlds or realities that have to be merged.45 In the case of ‘Prinzessin Brambilla’, duplication can be found in every aspect of the text. The tale relates the story of Giglio, a Roman actor who stars in the pompous and maudlin tragedies of Abbate Chiari, and his fiancée, Giacinta, a seamstress who has been assigned to sew f lamboyant dresses for the forthcoming carnival. Celionati, a character presented in the guise of a ciarlatano, but who is really Prince di Pistoja seeking to reform the Roman theatre by replacing tragedy with commedia dell’arte, stages the entire plot of the text, in order to claim and train the two protagonists as comic actors. He leads the impressionable couple to believe that the fictional Princess Brambilla and her fiancé, Prince Chiapperi, who have arrived in Rome for the carnival, are secretly in love with them. The various occurrences that Celionati has staged help them to live out their fantasies, seeking their princely partners, or, later, believing that they have actually turned into them. Celionati reunites them in a ceremony during which they realize who they really are, and accept their own identities and their vocation as commedia dell’arte actors. The main narrative is interrupted by Celionati and Ruffiamonte, who relate the story of the Land of Urdar, a Märchen that mirrors the main plot and finally converges with it. Pairs of doubles abound in the text: Giglio and Chiapperi, Giacinta and Brambilla, Ruffiamonte and Hermod, Celionati and Prince di Pistoja. On the other hand, the tale consists of multiple narratives each of which repeats or contains

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elements of the others: Jacques Callot’s engravings which, printed alongside the text, are presented as the model for the story46 (a ‘source’ that must be seen alongside the tale’s relation to Carlo Gozzi’s L’amore delle tre melarance),47 the narrator’s story of Giglio and Giacinta, and Celionati’s embedded story of the Land of Urdar48 — to which one can add the confusion caused by the mirroring worlds of the carnival and the theatre.49 The tale centres on the ironic Bildung to which Celionati subjects the two main characters; this process is doubly ironic, since it consists in the ironization, or renegotiation of the Goethean concept of Bildung,50 and in a Bildung in irony as ref lection: in order to achieve self-knowledge, Giglio and Giacinta must learn to achieve detachment from their selves and perform ironic duplication. In his visit to the theatre where he used to work, Giglio overhears two masks criticizing his competence as an actor: they stress that he always tries to look graceful and elicit the admiration of the audience, becoming thus a soulless puppet instead of a being of f lesh and blood.51 This suggests that Giglio’s defect is that, even while he is performing, he is unable truly to impersonate another character. In such an interpretation Celionati’s role consists in convincing Giglio that he is Chiapperi, that is, in making him become somebody else and achieve total distance from his own self.52 However, Giglio’s situation, the process of Bildung, and Celionati’s role in it are more complicated and subtle than this reading allows: Giglio’s defect consists not so much in failing to identify with his roles in the theatre but, rather, in identifying with them in reality, and in behaving as an out-of-place tragic character in everyday life.53 Celionati aims to draw him out of this tragic illusion by staging a process of successive instances of identification and detachment, a kind of ‘shock therapy’, during which Giglio’s illusion is alternately reinforced and undermined. In this context, Princess Brambilla and Prince Chiapperi cannot be seen as ideal figures, belonging to a higher reality with which the main characters have to merge (as is often the case in Hoffmann’s Märchen).54 The princely couple is not part of the ‘other world’ of the tale, the Land of Urdar, neither does it belong to the stock characters of commedia dell’arte; they are figments of Celionati’s imagination and arguably they can be considered to be parodies of tragic characters, put in the context of the Roman carnival and rendered ridiculous, in the same way that Celionati aims to make Giglio understand that total identification with tragic roles is laughable. Giglio’s behaviour when he believes he is before the Princess, is telling: he addresses her with pompous monologues, drawn from the tragedies he has played on stage (810–11). Celionati prompts Giglio to believe he is Chiapperi only in the context of a process which alternates between identification and detachment, and aims to make him conscious of his illusion; Celionati stages both aspects of this process. The tale starts with Giglio dreaming of a princess who is in love with him; when he watches Brambilla’s procession, he is instantly convinced that she is the one: notably the windows of her coach are mirrors and the bystanders who see themselves ref lected in them, fall prey to the illusion that they are occupying it themselves (782). Celionati incites him to look for her, providing him with a pair

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of distorting spectacles, which, as Giglio is led to believe, will help him locate the princess; when a Pantaloon addresses him as Chiapperi, Giglio is ready to believe he really is the prince and thinks he sees Brambilla; the spell is broken by a voice booming in his ears, scolding him for pretending to be Chiapperi (789). Giglio spends some days searching in vain for Brambilla, having forgotten his previous life, and swears ‘des assyrischen Prinzen sich zu bemächtigen [...] so daß er selbst dann der Prinz sein werde’ (793) [to overpower the Assyrian Prince, so that he himself would become the Prince]: it is Celionati’s mocking glance which dissolves his delusion and reminds him of Giacinta (794). Overhearing the two masks talking about himself, he becomes convinced once again that Brambilla is real, by verifying that, as the masks say, she has mysteriously left a purse full of money in his pocket, on which the words ‘remember your dream’ are embroidered; at that moment, Beatrice, Giacinta’s chaperone, brings him back to reality, when she informs him that Giacinta is in prison and accuses him of being responsible (803). He then believes he meets Brambilla (who is really Giacinta, convinced herself she is Brambilla) and addresses her with a speech copied from the ‘high-f lown’ tragedies he plays in. However, he suddenly says, feeling ‘als sei er es gar nicht gewesen der mit der Prinzessin gesprochen, als habe er ganz willenlos das heraus gesagt, was er selbst nun nicht einmal verstand [...]. “Legt diesen prunkenden Schmuck ab, der mich betört, befängt, wie gefährliche Zauberei. Dieser gleißende Blutf leck” ’ (810) [as though it had not been he who spoke to the Princess, and as though he had automatically recited something he did not even understand [...]. ‘Discard the lavish finery, which bewilders my senses like perilous enchantment. This gleaming blood-stain...’]; Giglio, without realizing it, breaks the enchantment himself by urging Giacinta to discard her fake dress and by pointing out the blood-stain which, although on the dress, Giacinta, being in a similar state of self-delusion, cannot see. When he sees Brambilla dancing with Chiapperi (828), ‘es geschah dem Giglio Fava, als er jene Worte vernahm, nichts weiter, als daß er sich augenblicklich selbst für den assyrischen Cornelio Chiapperi hielt, der mit der Prinzessin Brambilla tanze’ (830–31) [all that happened to Giglio Fava, on hearing these words, was that he instantly believed himself to be the Assyrian Cornelio Chiapperi who was dancing with Princess Brambilla]: in duelling with his ‘other self ’ he regrets the ‘groteskes Schauspiel’ (832) [grotesque spectacle] a tragic actor like himself is offering to the crowd and it is then that he meets Chiari, the author of the tragedies he plays. When Chiari reads to him his latest tragedy, The White Moor, Giglio suddenly realizes, for the first time, that he is bored and cannot identify with the main character (836). After his discussion with Chiari, ‘es überfiel ihn, wie ein starker Fieberschauer, das tragische Pathos!’ (840) [tragic rhetoric overcame him like a fit of strong fever] and he again enters a state of identification. He subsequently meets Giacinta, who is expecting Chiapperi and he expresses his jealousy by starting to recite a monologue from one of Chiari’s plays, but he gets carried away and plays the whole scene out, forgetting that he is supposed to really mean what he says: ‘Wie ist mir? Gott! — ich habe ja nicht Komödie gespielt, ich bin ja wirklich in Verzweif lung geraten’ (848) [What is the matter with me? O God! I wasn’t acting, I really am in despair]. After drinking some wine, he once more becomes absorbed in the Brambilla plot (848–

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49): thus he states to Bescapi that he is Chiapperi, goes to the palazzo Pistoja and gets himself locked in a cage, from where Celionati frees him and mocks him for his ‘verf lucht[e] Narrheit’ and ‘tollen Einbildungen’ (867) [folly and wild fancies]. He subsequently meets Brambilla and dances with her, identifying completely with Chiapperi: Celionati humours him (872–73) and then Giglio-Chiapperi duels with Giglio and kills the latter (879), who proves to be a cardboard model stuffed with pages of Chiari’s tragedies (889). Even if this ritual duel means that Giglio ‘kills’ his total identification with Chiari’s tragedies, it is by no means Celionati’s ultimate objective, since the actor is now convinced that he is Chiapperi. This is merely another stage of the tragic illusion Giglio has fallen prey to, which is expressed by the mental illness Celionati calls ‘chronischen Dualismus’ (893) [chronic dualism]. This state seems to resemble irony but the three descriptions provided for it make clear that it is not. Reinhold describes it as schizophrenia (894); Celionati likens it to the state of a pair of Siamese twins whose mood is characterized by complete mental disparity, like the pair Ophioch and Liris who are melancholic and merry respectively (894); Giglio himself describes it as an ‘Augenübel’ (896) [eye complaint] that makes him see everything upside down and ‘erregt [ihm] oft entsetzliche Angst und solchen Schwindel, daß [er] [s]ich kaum aufrecht erhalten kann’ (896–97) [makes [him] so giddy that [he] can hardly stay on [his] feet]. Giglio’s dizziness is an indication that he is far from having achieved ref lection and irony: it resembles the befuddling of the senses that some citizens of Urdar feel when they see themselves upside down in the Lake of Urdar (859), or the dizziness that Schlegel describes as the effect of irony on ‘die harmonisch Platten’ [the harmonious bores] who cannot understand it (K108).55 Indeed, the emphasis in all three descriptions falls on the fact that this state, although seemingly ironic, is not conscious; Giglio is merely subjected to it, rather than controlling it. Celionati’s aim, as he states at the end of the story, is precisely to find ein Paar [...], das nicht allein von wahrer Fantasie, von wahrem Humor [v. irony]56 im Innern beseelt, sondern auch im Stande wäre, diese Stimmung des Gemüts objektiv, wie in einem Spiegel, zu erkennen und sie so ins äußere Leben treten zu lassen, daß sie auf die große Welt, in der jene kleine Welt [the theatre] eingeschlossen, wirke, wie ein mächtiger Zauber (910) [a couple of people who were not only animated by true imagination, true inward humour, but were also capable of recognizing this state of mind objectively, as though in a mirror, and of introducing it into external life in such a way that it should have the effect of a powerful spell upon the great world which surrounds the little world [the theatre].]

Celionati’s aim, therefore, is not to make Giglio forget himself and truly impersonate someone else (in this case, Chiapperi), but to make him able to shift roles at will. And, indeed, the last stage of the apprenticeship consists in Giglio’s and Giacinta’s objective recognition of their state when they glance at their mirror images in the Lake of Urdar. What is also at stake at the same time is the ironic education of the reader. At the beginning of the second chapter, the narrator intervenes and addresses the angry

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reader who, after the fantastic description of Brambilla’s procession, might have thrown the book away, impatient with the whimsical turn the tale has taken. The narrator offers various excuses for his ‘verzeihliche Streben [...], [s]ich [the reader] aus dem engen Kreise gewöhnlicher Alltäglichkeit zu verlocken und [s]ich in fremdem Gebiet [...] auf ganz eigne Weise zu vergnügen’ (791) [pardonable eagerness to lure [the reader] out of the narrow confines of everyday life and to let [him] enjoy [him] self as [he] please[s] in an unfamiliar region]. The narrator’s ostensible aim is to produce a perfect illusion:57 Fragen will ich dich daher lieber, ob dir niemals in deinem Leben ein seltsamer Traum aufstieg, dessen Geburt du weder dem verdorbenen Magen, noch dem Geist des Weins, oder des Fiebers zuschreiben konntest? aber es war, als habe das holde magische Zauberbild, das sonst nur in fernen Ahnungen zu dir sprach, in geheimnisvoller Vermählung mit deinem Geist sich deines ganzen Innern bemächtigt, und in scheuer Liebeslust trachtetest und wagtest du nicht, die süße Braut zu umfangen, die im glänzenden Schmuck eingezogen in die trübe, düstre Werkstatt der Gedanken — die aber ginge auf vor dem Glanz des Zauberbildes in hellem Schimmer, und alles Sehnen, alles Hoffen, die inbrünstige Begier, das Unaussprechliche zu fahen, würde wach und rege und zuckte auf in glühenden Blitzen, und du wolltest untergehen in unnennbarem Weh, und nur sie, nur das holde Zauberbild sein! [...] und du wähntest, nur jener Traum sei dein eigentliches Sein, was du aber sonst für dein Leben gehalten, nur der Mißverstand des betörten Sinns? [...] In diesen Zustand geriet nun der junge Schauspieler, Giglio Fava (792–93) [I should therefore prefer to ask you if you have never in your life had a strange dream whose birth you could attribute neither to indigestion, nor to the fumes of wine, nor to fever; instead, the lovely magical image, which had previously spoken to you only in remote premonitions, seemed to have entered upon a mystic marriage with your mind and taken possession of your inner world, and in your timid amorous delight you neither sought nor dared to embrace the sweet bride who in all her gleaming finery had entered the gloomy, dismal workshop of your thoughts. But the lustre of the magic image filled your mind with bright light, and the yearning, the hope, the ardent desire to lay hold of the ineffable stirred and woke with f lashes of lightning, and you wished to perish in unutterable pain, and become her, the lovely image itself! [...] Did you not fancy that the dream alone was your true existence, and that what you had previously taken for life was only the delusion of your befuddled senses? [...] It was in this state that the young actor Giglio Fava found himself.]

The reader is likened to Giglio, when the latter is still under his first fit of delusion; the narrator prompts the reader, as Celionati prompts Giglio, to ‘remember his dream’. In identifying with Giglio, the reader finds himself, while reading the tale, in an analogous position to that of the actor: he is forced to oscillate between illusion and its disruption, identification and detachment, without initially understanding fully what all this is about; he is supposed to feel, along with Giglio, ‘daß der verruchte Celionati ihn durch allerlei teuf lische Zauberkünste verlockt, ihn, seine törigte Eitelkeit in höhnischer Schadenfreude nützend, mit der Prinzessin Brambilla auf unwürdige Weise gefoppt habe’ (794) [that the villainous Celionati

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had led him astray by all manner of fiendish spells and exploited his foolish vanity in a spirit of mockery and malice in order to play a contemptible trick on him involving Princess Brambilla]. Reading the tale proves a painful task for the reader, as the narrator warned him: Doch vielleicht hofftest du, daß der Autor, nur scheu geworden durch irgend ein tolles Gebilde, das ihm wieder plötzlich in den Weg trat, einen Seitenweg machte ins wilde Dickicht und daß er, zur Besonnenheit gelangt, wieder einlenken würde in den breiten ebenen Weg, und das vermochte dich, weiter zu lesen! — Glück zu! (790) [But perhaps you were hoping that the author, alarmed by some weird shape that suddenly confronted him, was only making a detour through pathless thickets, and that on calming down he would return to the broad, smooth way, thus enabling you to go on reading! Good luck!]

The reader begins to understand that the narrator’s aim is not to make him relinquish everyday reality, as he professes: the tale does not result in a merging of the real with the imaginary world, where Giglio would be transformed to Prince Chiaperi; the reader, like Giglio and Giacinta, returns to reality, although with an added consciousness, that of ref lection. By the end of the story, the text itself has acquired the character of the Lake of Urdar. As a result of seeing his mirror image (in Giglio), the reader is finally in a position to acquire the ironic view of life and an ironic relationship with literature, which consists in his ability to identify and detach himself, and also in being conscious of this process, thus approaching Schlegel’s reader-critic of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. Celionati is the character who fulfils the role ascribed by Schlegel to the ironic author, that is, the orchestration of the alternation between identification and detachment. Reinhold, the German painter who is among the audience of Celionati’s story, defines irony as ‘die wunderbare, aus der tiefsten Anschauung der Natur geborne Kraft des Gedankens, seinen eignen ironischen Doppeltgänger zu machen, an dessen seltsamlichen Faxen er die seinigen und — ich will das freche Wort beibehalten — die Faxen des ganzen Seins hienieden erkennt und sich daran ergetzt’ (826) [the wondrous power, born from deep intuitive understanding of nature, by which thought creates its own ironic double, whose strange antics give delight by revealing the antics — let me keep to this impertinent word — of thought itself and of all sublunary being]. This definition describes precisely what Celionati does, thus becoming a persona of the ironic author. Celionati conforms fully to the image of the ironic author as described above and his example suggests how the ironist as a multiple individual, the ‘portrayer’, can be depicted as an actual fictional character. The ref lexive author is multiple in that he is able to identify with and detach himself from all his characters in a Shakespearean manner; indeed, Celionati shows the outward characteristics of this process: he treats Giglio and Giacinta as if they were characters of a work of his own invention, and, to the extent that he stages their story, he is truly their ‘author’. As such, Celionati is one of the last representatives of a type of character which can be found almost everywhere in Hoffmann’s work;58 these characters are ascribed wondrous powers, direct the development of the plot and manipulate the

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other characters as if they were puppets. Celionati claims to be omnipresent, seems to be omnipotent and is shown to be omniscient: he is able to guess what goes on in his fellow-characters’ minds, as Giglio himself admits (786, 807, 867). This kind of knowledge presupposes the ironist’s duplication and identification with his characters. In short, he possesses the faculty of the sympathetic imagination and proves to be the prima causa of the whole tale. Celionati’s duplication is only implicit in the main story. The embedded story of the Land of Urdar, however, makes it explicit. On the one hand, his narration is another allegory of ref lection and irony and mirrors the main plot: Ophioch and Liris are alternative versions of Giglio and Giacinta. On the other hand, this mirroring does not limit itself to the protagonists: Celionati’s mirror also ref lects himself in the image of Hermod. Hermod is a wizard (as Celionati is supposed to be according to Giglio or Chiari), omnipotent and immortal as well as omniscient (821–22, 857–58). Moreover, he is not just an analogous figure but he performs the same function as Celionati: he creates the Urdarquelle and helps Ophioch and Liris recognize their real selves. What Celionati does, therefore, is precisely to bring forth an ironic double of himself and insert him into the story, as he himself is a double of the author.59 The mise-en-abyme structure of the tale presents a series of authors who are doubles of each other: the narrator is Callot’s double, Celionati the narrator’s and Hermod Celionati’s. Each diegetic level of the tale contains a persona of the author: the creator in creating also creates an image of himself creating and so forth, in an endless Schlegelian succession of mirrors. Not least, ‘Celionati’ himself is a fictional character impersonated by Prince Bastianello di Pistoja and the staged plot of the carnival is another of Celionati’s inventions. Celionati is an author who can alternate between self-creation and self-destruction. His attitude at the end of the story is telling in this regard: he validates the domestic happiness of Giglio and Giacinta, of which he is the author, and he explains it allegorically (that is, he criticizes it, revealing his secret intentions) while at the same time, he denies the allegorical interpretation, making Giglio and Giacinta both means and ends, neither mere allegorical images, nor arbitrary figments of his imagination:60 the tale ends ‘mit einer unaufgelösten Dissonanz’ (877) [in an unresolved dissonance]. This alternation is also verified in his awareness of his own fictionality and of being a character in the capriccio ‘Prinzessin Brambilla’ — an awareness which, far from being the essence of Romantic irony, or of the destruction of illusion, is only its overt manifestation. *

*

*

*

*

Hoffmann’s practice of Romantic irony suggests a literal way in which one can take Schlegel’s portrayal of the portrayer: a fictional character who resembles the portrayer in being a multiple individual, who possesses the sympathetic imagination and acts as if he were the author of his fellow-characters, becoming thus a double of the author in the text. The device of the authorial double, as exemplified in Celionati, embodies all the main qualities of Schlegelian irony and constitutes a ‘continuous parabasis’ in the sense that it is not localized but pervades the entirety

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of the text: the presence and the function of the authorial double render the text an allegory of its own creation, that is, poetry of poetry, and the work hovers between the portrayer and the portrayed. It is in this context that characters in realist fiction such as Vautrin and Latimer can be seen.

C h ap t e r 3

v

The Authorial Economy of Sympathy Paul de Man, in ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, deconstructs the alleged supremacy of symbol over allegory in the Romantics: he shows that the explicit privileging of symbol, conceived as the organic synthesis, or identification of mind and nature, of self and non-self (which is conceptualized as ‘affinity’ or ‘sympathy’), is ‘derived from an illusionary priority of the subject that had, in fact, to borrow from the outside world a temporal stability which it lacked in itself ’. Allegory, by contrast, although explicitly denounced as mechanical, is shown eventually to be the last stage in a dialectic of demystification which includes as one of its stages the mystification of the symbolic mode (or, the illusion of sympathy and identification of the self with the non-self ) and to be structured according to a temporal difference. For de Man, this temporality also brings allegory close to irony, which, being ‘a temporal sequence of acts of consciousness which is endless’, similarly ‘divides the f low of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic’. Allegory and irony are thus linked in their common discovery of a truly temporal predicament. They are also linked in their common demystification of an organic world postulated in a symbolic mode of analogical correspondences or in a mimetic mode of representation in which fiction and reality could coincide. It is especially against the latter mystification that irony is directed: the regression in critical insight found in the transition from an allegorical to a symbolic theory of poetry would find its historical equivalent in the regression from the eighteenth-century ironic novel, based on what Friedrich Schlegel called ‘Parekbase’, to nineteenth-century realism.1

While the definition of irony implied in the passage coincides entirely with what I have argued for in the previous chapter, my aim in this monograph is precisely to reverse the claim de Man makes about realism. Rather than being an instance of ‘regression’, realism conforms to the paradigm of irony by employing the authorial double as a means of what Schlegel calls ‘permanente Parekbase’. Irony is indeed what de Man calls a ‘dialectic of demystification’ which involves both the author and the reader in a process of identification with and detachment from the fictional characters. The author, on the one hand, identifies with and, at the same time, distances himself from his characters, thus combining subjectivity and objectivity, in a process which corresponds to the detached sympathetic imagination in the cases of Vautrin and Latimer. On the other hand, this process

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is communicated to the reader, who is forced to approach the work not as a mere fragment of reality, but to ‘annihilate’ it and perceive it as a constructed totality. This process is analogous to the double gesture described in Chapter 1: the reader is explicitly invited to identify but this identification is eventually sabotaged. This detachment enables the reader to grasp the figure in the carpet that pervades the work and, ultimately, to see it as a work of art. Both aspects of this alternation are expressed in the figure of the authorial double: the eschewal of the reader’s identification with the fictional characters and the demonstration of a lack of correspondence between fiction and reality are accompanied by the emergence of an authorial figure; dispelling the reader’s illusion is tantamount to making him ‘see’ the author. This chapter deals with the reasons for which the realists adopted such a strategy: August describes the ironic author as having ‘survived feeling’; I argue that it is the ‘real’ interests of the realists, their survival in the literary marketplace that impels them to employ the sympathetic imagination and the authorial double. Hoffmann’s moribund author, in one of his last tales, the semi-autobiographical ‘Des Vetters Eckfenster’ (1822), and his encounter with his reader, provide a point of transition between the Romantic poetics of irony and the problems that become dominant in nineteenth-century realism. ‘Des Vetters Eckfenster’: The Author and the Reader in the Marketplace ‘Des Vetters Eckfenster’ was drawn out of relative obscurity when Walter Benjamin chose to use it as the backdrop against which the modernity of the Baudelairean flâneur could stand out.2 Since then, the tale has become the focal point of heated debate in Hoffmann scholarship: the prosaic subject has prompted scholars to view Hoffmann’s poetic testament as a break with his earlier work3 and a herald of realism.4 The anonymous cousin of the title is an invalid author suffering from writer’s block. The narrator spots his normally indisposed cousin cheerfully observing the market below his corner window. The cousin receives him and invites him to look at the spectacle of the market; the narrator can see nothing but a confused image. What follows is a lesson in irony and the sympathetic imagination: the cousin offers to teach the narrator ‘d[ie] Kunst zu schauen’ [the art of seeing],5 claiming that ‘das erste Erfordernis’ [the first prerequisite] for authorship is ‘ein Auge, welches wirklich schaut’ [an eye that can really see].6 Unlike the narrator, the cousin focuses on specific individuals, since ‘das Fixieren des Blicks erzeugt das deutliche Schauen’ (471) [you have to focus your attention if you are to see distinctly]. The bulk of the tale is devoted to the description of the external appearance of the people they observe and to the hypotheses the cousin puts forward regarding their social status, profession, character and life-stories.7 The cousin demonstrates the sympathetic imagination in action:8 in deducing their stories, he resembles the Protean author who identifies now with one now with another of the people he observes, alternating between involvement and detachment, subjectivity and objectivity; his performance culminates in two alternative versions of the same

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character, both of which, in the narrator’s opinion, are equally convincing. Thus the cousin demonstrates the creative role of the author when dealing with everyday reality. In each story, his starting point is an average individual and the outcome a plausible, if trivial narrative; nevertheless, the process which leads from one to the other is intuitive and imaginative: without resorting to any extravagant f light of the imagination, the cousin proves that the author’s role, even when dealing with the most humble subject, is active and highly individual. Hoffmann’s tale, however, does not consist only in the affirmation of the author’s creative treatment of reality. What stands out among the various stories the cousin invents is an episode he recalls: his past encounter with a f lower-seller. The then healthy cousin notices that the girl is reading a book and hopes that she is reading one of his; when he realizes that she is indeed, he asks her whether she likes it, and, after her affirmative answer, proudly introduces himself as the author. The girl’s vacant expression makes clear that she has never before given thought to the concept of the author; when it dawns on her that books have particular persons as authors, she assumes that the stranger standing before her has written all the books available in Kralowski’s bookshop. In this episode, Hoffmann stages an encounter between the Author and his Reader in the Marketplace. The cousin at first believes that the girl is astonished by the sudden appearance, in the f lesh, of the author of the book she is reading; he soon realizes that it is not the presence of an author that amazes her but the actual existence of authors: Es fand sich, daß das Mädchen niemals daran gedacht, daß die Bücher, welche sie lese, vorher gedichtet werden müßten. Der Begriff eines Schriftstellers, eines Dichters war ihr gänzlich fremd, und ich glaube wahrhaftig, bei näherer Nachfrage wäre der fromme kindliche Glaube ans Licht gekommen, daß der liebe Gott die Bücher wachsen ließe, wie die Pilze. (481) [Apparently it had never entered the girl’s head that the books she read must first have been composed. She had no idea that such things as writers or authors existed, and I verily think that closer enquiry would have elicited from her the pious, child-like belief that God makes books grow, like mushrooms.]

The cousin is bitterly surprised in his turn because he assumes that reading a book means, above all, forming a certain impression of its author; the girl proves that this is not necessarily the case. Consequently, it is not merely his authorial vanity that is punished, as the narrator observes in passing (482); the girl actually enjoys reading his book. What the cousin cares most about is the fact that she does not perceive ‘das sublime Genie, dessen schaffende Kraft solch ein Werk erzeugt’ (481) [the sublime genius whose creative power had produced such a work]. The cousin realizes that, for at least a fraction of his audience, his works bear no authorial stamp and his genius, his individuality as an author, passes unnoticed. The f lower-seller’s assumption that the cousin has written all the books she has ever borrowed from Kralowski’s, implies that to the girl all books are exactly the same; authors are interchangeable and the cousin, to her eyes, is a mere bookproducing machine. A book, for the girl, is not the expression of an individual genius but a mere commodity, or a ‘mushroom’ which does not require any care

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to cultivate. What is eliminated in the marketplace, in Hoffmann’s account, is the process of production and the labour of the author. The subject of Hoffmann’s allegorical vignette is the commodification of liter­ ature;9 however, he does not focus on commercial literature, on literature which is designed to be a commodity. What renders the cousin’s book a commodity is not the way in which it is written (the author assumes that the girl ‘streb[t] nach höherer Kultur des Geistes’ (479) [is striving to cultivate her mind]) but the way in which it is read. ‘I mein lieber Herr’, erwiderte das Mädchen, ‘das ist ein gar schnackisches Buch. Anfangs wird einem ein wenig wirrig im Kopfe; aber dann ist es so, als wenn man mitten darin säße’. Zu meinem nicht geringen Erstaunen erzählte mir das Mädchen den Inhalt des kleinen Märchens ganz klar und deutlich, so daß ich wohl einsah, wie sie es schon mehrmals gelesen haben mußte; sie wiederholte, es sei ein gar schnackisches Buch, sie habe bald herzlich lachen müssen, bald sei ihr ganz weinerlich zu Mute geworden. (480–81) [‘Well, sir,’ replied the girl, ‘it’s a very funny kind of book. At first it makes your head spin a bit; but then you feel as if you were right in the middle of it.’ To my considerable astonishment the girl recounted the plot of the little fairy-tale quite clearly and distinctly, so that I perceived that she must have read it several times; she repeated that it was a very funny kind of book, and said that at times it had made her laugh heartily, and at other times she had felt like crying.]

This brief passage describes both the text and her reading. The cousin himself mentions that the text in question is a Märchen and at first he hopes that the f lowerseller is transported ‘in die phantastische Welt [s]einer Träumereien’ (480) [into the fantastic world of [his] dreams]. The description of the cousin and of his writings in the tale imply that the text in question is not merely a Märchen but a Hoffmannesque Märchen, a self-conscious and ironic tale with a complicated plot: the cousin is surprised that the girl can so easily summarize the plot in all its details (something that he can explain only by the fact that she must have read it several times); the technique of the author is likened to that of Callot (471), Hoffmann’s frequently evoked model; Hoffmann has consciously endowed the cousin with certain resemblances to himself (the authorial capacity, the invalid state, the description of Hoffmann’s own f lat); finally, the narrator, in describing the cousin’s art, while admitting that he does not understand these things, praises the writer’s peculiar faculty of humour (468). Indeed, the initial reactions of the f lower-seller seem to confirm this assumption: her first sensation is a confusion similar to the one Schlegel describes as the result of the first encounter with the incomprehensibility of irony; subsequently, she feels unable to decide whether she should laugh or cry — which brings to mind Giglio’s similar predicament when still a novice in irony. So far, the reader is on the ‘right’ path, as the latter was described by Schlegel and Hoffmann; however, initial incomprehension or misunderstanding and the alternation between the serious and the comic aim, according to Schlegel and Hoffmann, to lead the reader to an alternation between involvement and detachment which, being similar to the process of creation, conveys to the reader an awareness of the author and of the

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work as such — which is exactly the opposite of the girl’s reaction. The f lowerseller, overcoming her sense of confusion, reaches a state in which she feels that she is in the book: in short, she experiences illusion. This matches her description by the cousin before he interrupts her reading: Sie [...] hatte das Buch aufgeschlagen auf dem Schoße, den Kopf in die Hand gestützt. Der Held mußte gerade in augenscheinlicher Gefahr, oder sonst ein wichtiger Moment der Handlung eingetreten sein, denn höher glühten des Mädchens Wangen, ihre Lippe bebten, sie schien ihrer Umgebung ganz entrückt. (480) [She [...] had her book open on her lap, with her chin propped on her hand. The hero must have been in deadly danger, or some other crisis in the plot must have been reached, for the girl’s cheeks were f lushed, her lips were quivering, and she seemed miles away from her surroundings.]

Oblivious of the world around her, the reader is immersed in the fictional world in a state of illusion. She sympathizes with the hero, she identifies with him to the extent that she forgets that she is in the marketplace and believes herself to be part of the book. Unlike the ironic reader postulated by Schlegel, and unlike the ironic Bildung designed by Celionati for Giglio and by the narrator of ‘Prinzessin Brambilla’ for the reader, the f lower-seller is enmeshed in illusion, in a total identification with the characters; this makes her forget the fact that she is reading and leads her to forget, or never to consider the fact that the book in her hands has been written by an author. It is therefore the way in which she reads, fictional sympathy itself, which eliminates the author and transforms the work into a mere commodity. Fictional sympathy and illusion, when uninterrupted, do not need the concept of an author. Hoffmann is here describing a process through which literature is commodified against itself. This interpretation seems also to explain the writer’s block as well as the entire tale, which consists in the cousin’s attempt to teach the authorial way of seeing to the narrator. The encounter with the f lower-seller seems to have had a traumatic impact on the cousin which is confirmed by the nature of his writer’s block. According to the narrator, the cousin does not experience difficulties in coming up with stories: ‘die schwerste Krankheit vermochte nicht den raschen Rädergang der Phantasie zu hemmen’ (468) [the gravest illness could not stop the wheels of his imagination]. ‘Der böse Dämon der Krankheit’ [the evil demon of illness], blocks, instead, ‘de[n] Weg, den der Gedanke verfolgen mußte, um auf dem Papiere gestaltet zu erscheinen’ (469) [the path that his thoughts had to follow in order to appear fully formed on paper]; the cousin’s encounter with the f lower-seller proves to him that he has failed to make readers such as the girl engage in the ironic reading that would provide recognition of his authorial genius. His eagerness, therefore, to explain the author’s task to the narrator and to display his sympathetic imagination could be construed as a symptom of the trauma caused by his encounter with the f lower-seller. ‘Des Vetters Eckfenster’ juxtaposes the sympathetic imagination of the author with the sympathy of the reader. While the former stresses the participation of the author in what he creates, the latter ignores his involvement in his work. In

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engaging in an illusionist reading, Hoffmann’s f lower-seller disregards the author’s creative power; but also, in failing to distinguish between the books she has read, she reduces their authors to workers providing the publisher with identical commodities; her attitude, in general, denies the author any relation with his work. Once it has entered the marketplace, the book is appropriated by the readers and the publisher. Hoffmann’s tale, in this sense, poses a number of problems concerning authorship which are central to nineteenth-century realism. It shows that the creative role of an author who represents reality may be ignored; that his place in an increasingly industrialized marketplace may become of secondary importance; that, after his work has been alienated, he retains no control over it. In this light, the authorial double and the sympathetic imagination are means by which nineteenth-century realist authors negotiate their aesthetic, economic and legal status; like Hoffmann’s cousin who is anxious to stress the role of the author, realist authorial doubles aim to reassert the realist author’s presence in his text, his importance as the producer, and his indissoluble bond with his work. While nineteenth-century realism inherits the sympathetic imagination and the concept of the Protean author from the eighteenth century and the type of the authorial double, along with its ref lexive function, from German Romanticism, what I consider particular to nineteenth-century authorial doubles is their use as a means of expressing an awareness of the author’s economic and legal, as well as aesthetic situation. In this chapter I trace the potential of the authorial double and the sympathetic imagination to refer to the author’s actual standing, to re-imagine it and to express the role the author assigns to himself in the context of the literary marketplace. After exploring the relation between the sympathy of the reader and the commodification of literature in more general terms, I shall turn to the authorial double and the sympathetic imagination as the means by which the realist author reacts against both, reasserts his presence in his work and re-appropriates it. Sympathy and Commodity Fetishism The commodifying potential of fictional sympathy, as described by Hoffmann, is a result of identification, of the fact that the reader feels that he is in the book; this substitution of the fictional character by the reader, of the individuality of the author by that of the reader, or, essentially, of the object by the subject of sympathy, is not specific to the sympathetic response to fiction but it is fundamental to the workings of sympathy in general. Sympathy, for Adam Smith, is an exchange of individualities; it constitutes a social bond which draws individuals into a nexus of identifications. Identification, however, is a broad concept which can accommodate various positions: one of the two ‘I’s involved recedes before the other and Smith makes clear that the I that dominates is that of the subject and not of the object of sympathy: As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. [...] Neither can that faculty [imagination]

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help us to this in any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own [sensations], if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. (TMS, 11–12, my italics)

Sympathy operates through the imagination; what the subject of sympathy imagines is not what the object feels, but what he himself would feel, if he were in the same situation. When a passer-by pities a beggar, he does not (and cannot) imagine the feelings of the specific beggar; rather, he pictures himself in the place of a beggar. The beggar who stands before his eyes is devoid of individuality and becomes a mere image of the sympathizer’s self in the same circumstances. Unlike what would be called empathy in the late nineteenth century, and unlike the sympathetic imagination (both of which imply a fusion of subject and object, a total, if momentary, abandonment of the self for the sake of another), sympathy is not a fusion of individualities: it is a substitution in which the subject of sympathy fantasizes himself in the place of various objects, obliterates their individuality and replaces them, as it were, with his own self. It is, therefore, essentially, an act of appropriation of the object by the subject of sympathy. This substitution is most clear in cases in which our sympathetic feelings cannot, by definition, coincide with the feelings of the object of our sympathy: We sometimes feel for another, a passion of which he himself seems to be altogether incapable; because, when we put ourselves in his case, that passion arises in our breast from the imagination, though it does not in his from the reality. (TMS, 15)

These are the cases of sympathy with the insane, infants or the dead. A mother worries about her child, even though the latter cannot feel the danger it is in (TMS, 15–16); a sane man pities a madman who might be completely happy or unaware of his misery: ‘the anguish which humanity feels, therefore, at the sight of such an object, cannot be the ref lection of any sentiment of the sufferer’ (TMS, 15). The ref lection is actually the other way round: it is the object of sympathy that mirrors the subject. The object, in this case, is not only devoid of individuality, but becomes, as in the case of sympathy with the dead, a dead body: The idea of that dreary and endless melancholy, which our fancy naturally ascribes to their condition, arises altogether from our joining to the change which has been produced upon them, our own consciousness of that change, from our putting ourselves in their situation, and from our lodging, if I may be allowed to say so, our own living souls in their inanimate bodies, and thence conceiving what would be our emotions in this case. It is from this very illusion of the imagination, that the foresight of our own dissolution is so terrible to us [...]. (TMS, 16, my italics)

In allowing himself to say so, Smith reveals the mechanism on which sympathy relies: even though a beggar is not a dead body, the passer-by treats him like one, by projecting his own emotions upon him.10 The object of sympathy is a mere image of the subject; it is nothing more than a mirror on which the subject finds another version of himself, in an ‘illusion of the imagination’. Sympathy is generated by such a substitution of the object by the subject: Smith values highly the explanatory force of the hypothetical situation of a man living

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outside society and suddenly finding himself in it, thus revealing the genesis of sympathy. Were it possible that a human creature could grow up to manhood in some solitary place, without any communication with his own species, he could no more think of his own character, of the propriety or demerit of his own sentiments and conduct, of the beauty or deformity of his own mind, than of the beauty or deformity of his own face. All these are objects which he cannot easily see, which naturally he does not look at, and with regard to which he is provided with no mirror which can present them to his view. Bring him into society, and he is immediately provided with the mirror which he wanted before. It is placed in the countenance and behaviour of those he lives with, which always mark when they enter into, and when they disapprove of his sentiments; and it is here that he first views the propriety and impropriety of his own passions, the beauty and deformity of his own mind. (TMS, 129)

Even when sympathy is first felt, it is still a ref lection of ourselves in others. This rendering of others into mere mirrors and self-images is considered by Smith to be thoroughly beneficial. While from a moral point of view it may well be so, when this substitution of the object by the subject of sympathy takes place during the process of reading, and the object of sympathy is an aesthetic object, it can be seen, as Hoffmann shows, in a more sinister light. From an aesthetic point of view, the f lower-seller does not merely turn the fictional character into an inanimate body onto which her feelings are projected; the f lower-seller’s illusionist reading also prevents her from perceiving the author’s uniqueness: for her, authors are producers who provide the market with indistinguishable and interchangeable commodities in which no trace of their personality may be discerned. Hoffmann finds fault with the reader’s sympathy simultaneously from an aesthetic and an economic point of view. The way he describes this interaction between consumer, commodity and producer, in terms of the substitution of the object by the subject of sympathy, is illuminated if it is placed within the context of political economy. Indeed, in turning from Smith’s moral philosophy to Marx, one sees the example used by Smith to account for the genesis of sympathy, the first encounter of man by man, presented as a moral equivalent of commodity exchange. By means of a value-relation, therefore, the natural form of commodity B becomes the value-form of commodity A, in other words the physical body of commodity B becomes a mirror for the value of commodity A.* * In

a certain sense a man is in the same situation as a commodity. As he neither enters the world in a possession of a mirror, nor as a Fichtean philosopher who can say ‘I am I’, a man first sees and recognizes himself in another man. Peter only relates to himself as a man through his relation to another man, Paul, in whom he recognizes his likeness. With this, however, Paul also becomes from head to toe, in his physical form as Paul, the form of appearance of the species man for Peter.11

In Marx, the relation between commodities A and B is the same as that between subject and object of sympathy: in exchange (or in identification) one comes to stand for the other, or, rather, one simply mirrors itself in the other and takes its place. B, outside the sphere of exchange is a product with a specific use-value, which consists

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in its physical body, its concrete physical properties. Like the object of sympathy which loses its individuality in the process of identification, commodity B, when it enters into exchange, sheds its use-value12 and ‘acquires a value form different from its natural form’: it becomes a mirror of the (abstract) exchange-value of commodity A. At the same time, ‘concrete labour becomes the form of manifestation of its opposite, abstract human labour’.13 When a commodity enters into exchange it is no longer a table, a house, a piece of yarn, or any other useful thing. All its sensuous characteristics are extinguished. Nor is it any longer the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason or the spinner, or of any other particular kind of productive labour. With the disappearance of the useful character of the products of labour, the useful character of the kind of labour embodied in them also disappears; this in turn entails the disappearance of the different concrete forms of labour. They can no longer be distinguished, but are all together reduced to the same kind of labour, human labour in the abstract.14

These ‘peculiarities’, as Marx calls them, of the ‘equivalent form of value’ (in this case, commodity B) constitute the phenomenon of commodity fetishism. As soon as the proportion in which commodities are exchanged with each other is relatively stabilized (which happens with the emergence of the universal equivalent of value, money), these proportions ‘appear to result from the nature of the products’ and conceal the social relations that really determine the production and exchange of commodities. Commodities — that is, concrete physical objects, having a usevalue grounded in their physical properties, constructed by an individual labourer and embodying his private labour, whose exchange is a social relation between individuals — cease to appear what they really are; commodities become expressions of exchange-value and embodiments of abstract labour, they are equated with each other and lose their concrete properties: ‘the money-form [...] conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly’. Marx argues that ‘ “value is a relation between persons” [...] concealed beneath a material shell’.15 This link between commodity fetishism and sympathy puts into context the commodifying effect of fictional sympathy in Hoffmann’s tale, as well as the fear of the reader’s sympathy described in Chapters 1 and 2. During the process of reading, the reader who sympathizes with the fictional characters is involved in an exchange of individualities. In identifying with the fictional characters, the reader substitutes them for himself; the character, like the object of sympathy, and like commodity B, becomes no more than a mirror of the reader. In sympathizing, the reader turns the novel into a mirror of himself: in an ‘illusion of the imagination’, he imagines himself, like Hoffmann’s f lower-seller, in the work. He thus forgets himself as a reader, he forgets that he is reading; in taking the novel to be real, he turns it into a mirror of reality. An illusionist reading produces the same result as commodity fetishism; the novel appears to be a quasi-natural object, a fragment of reality, and the reader forgets not only that he is reading, but also forgets that he is reading something that has been written: he forgets the author. The private labour of the author becomes merely abstract labour: books are interchangeable and are not

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perceived as containing any kind of individuality or genius (the f lower-seller asks the cousin whether he has written all the books she has read). The reader’s sympathy eliminates the author and his labour, and the reader appropriates the work. In light of this, the nineteenth-century realist authorial double does not simply remind the reader of the aesthetic role of the author; as I shall demonstrate in the second part of this monograph, the authorial doubles of realist fiction also outline an economic relation between author and work, a relation which re-imagines the actual conditions of the marketplace and presents the author in a position of control. In view of the role of money in realist fiction, the authorial double is not only a reaction against commodification and the reader’s sympathy, but also shares the structure of exchange which underlies them and uses it for his own purposes: namely, to reinforce the role of the author. If money is the universal equivalent that equates all commodities and obliterates their peculiarities (thus threatening to eliminate the author’s unique genius by denying any personal quality in his work), the Protean authorial double may be seen as a rival universal equivalent: by being able to assume any character, he produces works imbued with his individuality and retains his control over them, rather than relinquish them to the market. Realism and Money: The Authorial Double as a Universal Equivalent Commodity fetishism and the alienation that is its consequence are not simply dangers which realist fiction faces nor, indeed, the conditions of its production, but they are also its prime subject-matter: the social relations between individuals are described in terms of relations between things and they are measured and quantified by money. Realist fiction is proof that ‘metallic problems’, as Oscar Wilde put it, have their ‘melodramatic side’.16 Realist fiction dramatizes, firstly on a thematic level, the ubiquity of exchange and of its means, money. The concrete presence of the latter is a distinctly novelistic quality, an integral part of the genre’s heritage of the low style and one of the guarantees of its referentiality. Nineteenth-century realism systematizes this potential; apart from the depiction of financial activities,17 money is an integral part of its plots, which frequently take the form of a progression towards enrichment or bankruptcy, while money and attitudes towards it become one of the main elements of characterization.18 In realist fiction, everything has a price, even the self: Lucien’s agreement to sell himself to Vautrin in Illusions perdues and Gwendolen’s mercenary marriage in Daniel Deronda are just two examples of the thematization of the alienation of the self.19 At the same time, the novel can be seen as a discourse which is parallel to political economy, a discipline that emerged also during the eighteenth century as a result of a division between the domestic and the public sector.20 The affinities of money with realist fiction in particular transcend the thematic level, since both are forms of representation.21 Money is predominantly a sign, especially when it starts to lose its intrinsic value; the advent of paper money22 enhances its affinities with fiction by extending them to the material support of the two phenomena.23 Both realist fiction and money are systems of signs which point towards or try to approximate real referents: if realist literature refers to social reality, banknotes refer to a quantity

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of gold stored in a bank. Financial crises are, above all, crises of representation: financial panic ensues when people lose their faith in the referentiality of paper money.24 At the same time, turning points in the history of representation can be seen as analogous to changes in the history of the money-form: for Jean-Joseph Goux, the dematerialization of money in the twentieth century and its con­ ceptualization as a nexus of related signs rather than as signs of (intrinsic) value have parallels in Saussurian linguistics, Cubism and abstract art.25 One of the most concrete features of money is, paradoxically, the elusiveness of its substance: it can take all forms and transform all things into anything else. According to Georg Simmel, ‘money lacks that substance by which other specific objects, even if we legally own them, refuse to yield to our will. It adjusts with equal ease to every form and every purpose that the will wishes to imprint it with’.26 In its most literal version, this quality is evident in novelistic plots when an anagnorisis is required to identify characters who have gone up or down the social scale. Its most powerful realization is the self-transforming power of money; the source of old Harmon’s fortune, the dust heaps, in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, provided one of the most potent symbols of this power in the nineteenth century;27 George Eliot in Silas Marner describes the way in which Silas’s heap of gold transforms itself, in his imagination, after it has been stolen, into the ‘golden child’, Eppie. Gobseck’s exclamation ‘l’or contient tout en germe, et donne tout en réalité’ (CH, II, 969) [gold contains everything in germ and offers everything in reality] traces both this metaphysics of money and its affinities with the imagination.28 Investment and the imagination share the activity of speculation. In the case of a miser, such as Gobseck, money is valuable not only as the actual means of acquiring something else, but as the abstract possibility of possession. Such an experience approaches aesthetic experience, precisely through its imaginative nature and the freedom that it implies: Aesthetic contemplation [...] most thoroughly removes the barrier between the self and the objects. To aesthetic contemplation the notion of the objects unfolds so easily, effortlessly and harmoniously as if they were solely determined by the basic laws of the self. Hence the feeling of liberation [...]. Such must be the psychological f lavour of the enjoyment of merely owning money.29

Money shares with the imagination this essentially ‘metaphoric’ structure, in the sense that it can stand for and transform itself into anything. It is this selftransforming power of money that makes it what Marx calls the universal equivalent of value, able to express the value of all commodities. Marx sketches the origin of the value form in four stages: the ‘simple, isolated, or accidental form of value’, that is, barter exchange in which one commodity is exchanged for another; the ‘total or expanded form of value’, in which one commodity is habitually used as the means of exchange for a series of commodities; the general form of value, in which one commodity, becoming what Marx calls a ‘universal equivalent’, represents the value of all commodities; finally, the fixing of the universal equivalent of value in the commodity of gold. Marx views this progression as a gradual distinction between the use-value of commodities and their exchange value, or as a gradual detachment of the former from the latter: in this process of abstraction, the sensuous qualities

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of commodities are successfully effaced so that, in the end, they confront each other as values, independently of their material dimension. By virtue of being the universal equivalent, gold (which for Marx is the money-form of value), although a commodity itself, is excluded from the realm of commodities.30 Given the affinities of money and the imagination, the Protean author may be seen as a kind of universal equivalent of his characters. Gold, when functioning as the universal equivalent of value, loses all specific qualities and can transform itself into any commodity; the Protean author, likewise, can conceive and assume any character and quality, precisely because he has no qualities of his own. The authorial double, therefore, draws attention to the connection between the author and his work; the sympathetic imagination is a reaction against the sympathy of the reader. While the reader’s sympathy leads to commodity fetishism and constitutes a process of appropriation of the work by the reader who substitutes the fictional characters for his own individuality, the Protean author, by participating in all his characters, reclaims the work, reasserts his presence therein and re-enacts the creative process. However, the authorial double is not a clear-cut antithesis to commodity fetishism; on the one hand, both the sympathetic imagination and the sympathy of the reader share this structure of exchangeability; the authorial double internalizes the structure of commodification, even though he uses it for the opposite purpose, directing it against the elimination of the author. On the other hand, the sympathetic imagination, as will be shown in the second part of this monograph, is charged with economic metaphors.31 The relation of the authorial double with his fellow-characters is expressed in economic terms and, to the extent that this relation stands for the relation of the author to his work, the authorial double expresses the position of the author in the literary marketplace. As I shall show, the sympathetic imagination in Balzac is described in terms of investment and the author is presented as a capitalist; Baudelaire employs the metaphor of prostitution; Eliot, in Daniel Deronda, tells the story of the author who attempts to reclaim his commodified work. Genius and Copyright The authorial double may be seen as a strategy by which the author reasserts his presence in the text, regains control over its meaning and reacts against attempts to suppress his individuality: it is, in this sense, a device which serves to brand and mark a text as belonging to the author. This sense of ownership that an author may have regarding a work that has been ceded to the publisher and has entered the marketplace also has an objective measure. Copyright and literary property laws are frequently seen as not merely regulating the limits of the author’s property but also as acknowledging his uniqueness and individuality by assigning him the status of the owner of his work: in short, they are presumed to ref lect the recognition of genius and originality. However, copyright and literary property can also be seen as ambiguous concepts which undermine the author’s claims to uniqueness and originality and equate all authors, thus constituting a further instance of the suppression of authorial individuality to which the authorial double reacts.

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Scholarly consensus, especially since Michel Foucault’s ‘What Is an Author?’,32 dates the emergence of the modern concept of the author to the eighteenth-century and the rise of individualism; criticism has enquired into the way developments such as the expansion of the reading public, the gradual industrialization of the literary marketplace and the growing number of people attempting to make a living out of authorship,33 are related to the emergence of the concepts of genius, Kantian disinterested art and to the first copyright laws. Martha Woodmansee has convincingly argued for ‘the interests of disinterestedness’: she shows the notion of disinterested art and the establishment of the domain of aesthetics to be a ‘weapon in cultural politics’,34 directed against the earlier ‘instrumentalist’ view of literature as targeting the reader’s responses, as mere entertainment or pastime, which, in the face of the growth both of the reading public and the number of books written, threatens authors who sell poorly. She argues that the concepts of genius and of originality are designed to give control over the meaning of the literary work to the author, leaving the response of the reader aside, and she shows that copyright law comes to validate these claims.35 The value of Woodmansee’s argument lies in the connection between an aesthetic concept (genius), or a way of reading (author-centred instead of reader-oriented reading) and the legal definition of the author as proprietor. This connection is especially valid for Germany where copyright legislation was either absent or ineffectual. On the one hand, the protection offered by copyright statutes was restricted to the individual states that enacted them and could not really deal with piracy in other German states; it was only in 1845 that the Federation of German states enacted a shared law against piracy. On the other hand, the protection was offered, until 1810, to publishers rather than authors.36 This meant that the field was left open for philosophical and legal theorizing which was contemporaneous with theories of genius and which, from the very beginning, was oriented towards the recognition of the rights of the author that would result in Urheberpersönlichkeitsrecht, a legal concept stressing the rights of the author as a creator, including both patrimonial and moral rights.37 When it comes to England and France, the connection between genius and copyright is much less straightforward. A first, general objection might be that it is dangerous to establish direct relations between extra-legal (in this case aesthetic) notions and legal realities. Woodmansee does not commit the error of postulating a ‘natural’ idea of authorship which comes eventually and inevitably to be recognized by positive law,38 but, shows, rather, the way in which this idea of authorship is constructed. However, she describes the twin process of the development of genius and copyright as relatively isomorphic, or as entailing a causal connection between aesthetics and legal discourse.39 While the connection itself is essentially arguable as far as Germany is concerned, it is, nonetheless, quite unstable and troubled by many tensions in England and France. In this context, I shall explore three questions: whether copyright is necessarily perceived by authors as a confirmation of authorial genius — a question with limited explanatory force; whether the development of copyright in France and England in the eighteenth century was author-driven; and whether copyright and the definition

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of the author as proprietor constitute the legal analogue of the aesthetic concept of genius. Literary property and copyright might indeed be legal concepts that confirm aesthetic notions such as originality and genius; yet, this view was not the object of universal agreement, especially in the nineteenth century, when the commer­ cialization of literature was intensified to an unprecedented degree. The concept of literary property, while undoubtedly asserting the author’s claims to originality and genius, nevertheless also undermined them. The author’s newly earned right to reap the benefits of his work directly paved the way for commercial literature. To many nineteenth-century minds this right was incompatible with genius and it obscured the distinction between commercial art, designed to cater to the needs of the public, and the best-selling work of a genuine genius; the marketplace was seen as a melting-pot which dissolved such oppositions. Sainte-Beuve, in his landmark invective against ‘la littérature industrielle’ (1839), was among the supporters of this view. He focuses his attack on ‘le démon de la propriété littéraire’40 which, in one way or another, is held responsible for a series of phenomena such as the multiplication of authors and the democratization of literary life, the lack of ‘moral ideas’ in literature, and the tendency to consider authorship as a form of speculation — to name but a few. Sainte-Beuve’s attitude is not unique; the establishment, in 1838, of La Société des gens de lettres, in order to confront problems such as emendations of copyright laws, Belgian piracy, and issues arising from the new ‘genre’ of the roman-feuilleton,41 provoked conf licting reactions. Some hailed the Society as a positive development, while others repudiated it as a ridiculous project which degraded authors and stressed the commercial aspects of authorship.42 Sainte-Beuve decisively ranks himself among the detractors of the society; in his view, the author, after dispatching his work to the publisher or to the newspaper or journal editor, should forfeit his copyright and should be ignorant of ‘details’ such as piracy, since these matters should be the concern of none but the publisher.43 The author should evince no interest in commercial matters; in Sainte-Beuve’s view, it is disgraceful even to calculate the compensation for one’s authorial labours, especially if this means quantifying their labour or genius: ‘Chacun s’exagérant son importance, se met à évaluer son génie en sommes rondes’ [Everyone, exaggerating their importance, sets out to evaluate their genius in round figures]. In the ‘atmosphère cholérique’ of the commercial age, not only are many of the ‘talents nouveaux et les jeunes espoirs [...] plus ou moins gâtés’ [new talents and the promising young writers more or less spoiled], but also, everybody can now claim the title of author, for the Société des gens de lettres further obscures the limits of authorship by claiming to protect all writers, independently of their merit or genius.44 In short, Sainte-Beuve considers literary property not merely unworthy of genius but positively detrimental to it.45 Such a reaction, however typical it may be for a certain group of authors who attempt to distance themselves from commercial literature, can also be misleading, since it is precisely such gestures that created the distinction between ‘low’ and ‘high’ culture — it should be noted that Sainte-Beuve’s ‘industrial’ literature refers to the roman-feuilleton and is a fairly open attack against Balzac who inaugurated

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the genre in 1836. His argument, nevertheless, brings out the ambiguity of literary property: even if the latter does not demolish pre-existing distinctions between authors of genius and hacks, it certainly pays little attention to the individuality of any author. Secondly, the first assignations of copyright to authors in England and France were not instigated by authors and, furthermore, they predated the full development of aesthetic theories on genius and on the author as proprietor. Notwithstanding their differences, the French concept of literary property and the English practice of copyright46 share one feature: they were assigned to authors as a result of the attempts, on the part of the publishers, to retain their monopoly over the bookmarket. In pre-eighteenth-century England, the Stationer’s Copyright was a commonlaw right to publish copies of a manuscript, and it was conferred by the Stationers’ Company, the guild of printers and publishers, exclusively to its members. It was considered to be perpetual and, after the death of a publisher, it was obtained by another member of the company.47 Copyright had no reference to the author, whose role consisted in producing the manuscript, for which he was compensated, and in entering into a negative covenant not to object to the publication of the work.48 These arrangements were suspended with the final lapsing of the 1662 Licensing of the Press Act, in 1695; the act, which forbade unlicensed publications, was in line with the Company’s monopoly (granted, among other reasons, for easier control over the press).49 The 1710 Statute of Anne came to cancel their monopoly by establishing a statutory right, tenable for fourteen years, renewable once by the author,50 which was available for the first time to everyone. Although this was the first time that English authors had been assigned the right to publish copies of their works, the Statute of Anne cannot be construed as recognizing a special relation between the author and his work; the author could obtain copyright simply because anyone could: the specific aim of the Statute of Anne was to break the stationers’ monopoly.51 This was effected by the limited renewal of the Stationer’s Copyright for works whose authors were already dead (and which constituted the main source of the Stationers’ income): in order to remunerate them, it was renewed for twenty-one years.52 After the lapse of this period, there began what has been called the Battle of the Booksellers during which the Stationers had to confront the booksellers who were not members of the Company and who claimed their right, under the Statute of Anne, to print works whose copyright had lapsed. The company came up with the legal fiction of a perpetual common-law property right of the author in his work, which, if valid and assigned by the author to a publisher, would circumvent the limited statutory copyright established by the Statute of Anne. Their petitions failed in Parliament, but injunctions sought in court to prevent ‘unauthorized’ publications were successful until 1750.53 The landmark case that overturned the Stationers’ status quo was Donaldson v. Becket (1774). Donaldson demanded the right to print a work whose copyright, according to the Statute of Anne, had long lapsed; the House of Lords, to which the case was taken, ruled that the perpetual common-law right of the author and his assignees, which Becket was invoking, had been taken away by the Statute of Anne.54 In short, it was the

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publishers who invented the notion of the author as the owner of his work, in order to achieve the protection of their own interests; the Statute of Anne and its final confirmation in 1774 granted authors a property right of limited duration. Privileges were the centre of the book-trade in France and, unlike the Stationer’s Copyright, they were not perpetual but had to be renewed. Prior to the eighteenth century, authors were also — rarely — accorded privileges for their work, without having the right to publish their books themselves; even then, the privileges had to be ceded to a publisher.55 The 1723 règlement specifies that privileges could no longer be obtained by authors.56 The publishers’ privileges aimed to compensate them for their investment and to protect them from piracy; the requirements of censorship led the authorities to renew the privileges of Parisian publishers, who were easier to control,57 over successive generations — a policy that created a monopoly envied by provincial publishers, who were forced to restrict their activities to piracy or to the printing of forbidden books. In the context of this conf lict, the Parisian publishers argued that authors had perpetual property rights in their works, which retained their perpetual character when signed over to a publisher.58 The six 1777 decrees distinguished for the first time between the privileges of publishers and those of authors. Authors and their heirs were granted perpetual privileges to their works (unless they alienated them), while the publisher’s privilege was limited to the lifetime of the author without further possibility of renewal.59 Additionally, authors were permitted to print and publish their works themselves.60 Revolutionary legislation initially cancelled all kinds of privilege (4 August 1789), something which produced a state of total chaos in the book-market.61 The decree of 19–24 July 1793 conferred an exclusive property right on authors and accorded it for ten years to their heirs: after its lapse, the property of the works would fall into the public domain.62 Most copyright historians agree that the main drive of revolutionary legislation was the interest of the public rather than that of the author.63 Apart from the conclusion that authors were not the object of particular attention in England or France and that it was not through their struggles that property rights were granted to them, it is interesting to note that both the Statute of Anne and revolutionary legislation in France, at least on a discursive level, denied authors a perpetual property right and granted them a limited one on the grounds of public interest and of general access to books. In the case of England, the Statute of Anne was based on patent law and the fourteen-year term of protection was the one also accorded for patents.64 This meant that books were seen as having the same status as an invention, which, even though originating in an individual, had, at some point, to be made more easily available to the public: the argument of the opponents to perpetual copyright during the battle of the booksellers was that ideas could not be treated as the object of a monopoly.65 In addition, the Statute of Anne was ‘an act for the en­couragement of learning’ and an underlying concern was the continued produc­tion of books as a means for the moral improvement of readers.66 In this con­ text, Woodmansee’s opposition between an author-centred theory of reading and an instru­mentalist, reader-oriented one seems to correspond to two separate con­cerns within copyright laws: the interest of the author and the theory of the pub­lic domain;67 the latter can be construed as a literal appropriation of the work by the public.

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Thirdly, it is doubtful whether, in the nineteenth century, copyright can, in itself, be considered the legal analogue of the concept of genius. Copyright (or its French counterpart, ‘la propriété littéraire’) defines the relation between the author and his work in terms of property. The ground on which this property right is based is the labour of the author, expended in the creation of an original work. Originality, the distinctive mark of genius, is employed to support the argument in favour of property; however, originality in a legal context is not tantamount to originality as an aesthetic term. On the one hand, the legal definition of originality is much narrower: even though its legal use presupposes a conception of the work as not merely the vehicle of pre-existing ideas but as the creation of something new, its practical use designates merely a work that has not been plagiarized, and not an ‘original’ work as opposed to a work of ‘imitation’ — a work which would be characterized imitative by Edward Young would be original in legal terms. On the other, aesthetic originality does not simply presuppose a proprietary relation of the author to his work. An original work in Young’s account, according to the oftcited passage, ‘may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows, it is not made: Imitations are often a sort of manufacture wrought up by those mechanics, art, and labour, out of pre-existent materials not their own’.68 Originality, in this sense, does not merely designate the relation of the author to his work as a relation of property in the face of an object constructed by the proprietor; it implies an organic relation, in the context of which the work is an integral part of the author’s personality rather than his property. Such a relation of the author to his work is implied by modern legal concepts which were not available for the greater part of the nineteenth century. Although the author had become the proprietor of his work, this property was limited in time. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, literary property in France could be bequeathed to the author’s heirs for ten years (according to the law of 1793), while in England, copyright lapsed twenty-eight years after the date of publication or on the death of the author (according to the 1814 Copyright Act).69 The standard demand of authors on both sides of the Channel, consistently disappointed over the course of the century, despite their active lobbying,70 was perpetual copyright. Moreover, the concept of property itself was restrictive. Literary works were considered primarily to consist of ideas, that is, of incorporeal elements of divine provenance, which were beyond the scope of property: in order for the author to become a proprietor, there had to be a distinctly personal element that he contributed which could be conceptualized as relatively material and tangible. This element was the expression of an idea, the words employed by the author, his style. It is by means of this distinction between ideas and expression, or ‘content’ and ‘form’, that literary works became the object of property.71 Such a distinction, however, generated several problems: since all non-verbal elements of the work were considered to be ‘ideas’, copyright laws were unable to offer protection against the unauthorized appropriation of the plot or the characters, in the case, for instance, of stage adaptations of novels (on which I shall have the opportunity to elaborate further in Chapter 4). The recognition of such ‘éléments intellectuels’ as part of the object of literary property, despite the exclusion of ideas which has

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always been a principle of copyright law,72 was a gradual process, completed only in the twentieth century. Another problematic aspect of property was the fact that it was entirely alienable: if the work was considered merely the property of the author, surrendering it to a publisher meant that he abdicated any kind of control over it. As the former proprietor, the author was unable to exercise what is today called the moral right of integrity, that is, his prerogative to object and to prohibit unauthorized alterations of his work. When, for instance, French authors took publishers to court for altering their works, the basis on which courts ruled in their favour (which was not always the case) was article 1832 of the Code civil: the author was granted protection neither as a proprietor, nor as the creator of the work, but on grounds of defamation of character, that is, simply in his capacity as a citizen whose views had been prejudicially distorted.73 The nineteenth century was a period in which all these aspects of authorial rights were extensively debated and negotiated: by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century resolutions to most of these issues were under way: even though literary property never became perpetual, its term was significantly extended; some of the intangible aspects of the literary work were recognized and protected; in France, literary property was considered by many jurists to be an unsuitable term74 and was gradually abandoned for ‘le droit d’auteur’; from the late 1870s a new group of authorial rights began to emerge: the inalienable, non-transmissible and perpetual moral rights of the author were conceptualized as relatively distinct from his patrimonial rights, and were intended to regulate the author’s control over his work before or after it had been alienated.75 All these involved a complex process of author-instigated court cases, legal treatises attempting to clarify problems emerging from difficult cases, bills and legislation initiatives, as well as international treaties. These developments not only improved the situation of authors but also offered them protection in their capacity as authors.76 It is in this sense that I am arguing that copyright and literary property during the nineteenth century were far from being ‘la déclaration des droits du génie’,77 as Joseph Lakanal put it, referring to the 1793 French law. As shown above, copyright and literary property can be seen as suppressing the author’s uniqueness and limiting what he views as a distinctly personal and inalienable relation. Copyright can be, and has been, interpreted as an invasion of commercialism; historically, its assignation to authors was a result of the breakdown of the publishers’ monopoly and cannot be claimed as an intent­ ional privileging of the author; and the definition of authors as proprietors, given the limitations the concept of literary property implies, cannot be seen as the recognition of the rights of genius. Nineteenth-century authors were only too aware of the shortcomings of copyright laws; in the second part of this monograph, I shall argue that one of the ways in which this awareness was expressed by realist authors was the authorial double and the use of the sympathetic imagination. The relation of the authorial double with his fellow-characters, which, as I have suggested, stands for the relation between author and work, is described, in realist texts, by a number of metaphors which may also be seen as referring to the legal aspects of this relation. The metaphors of the

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Mephistophelean pact, paternity, demonic possession and prostitution all originate in the concept of property but, at the same time, they transcend it and emphasize the status of the work as an intangible object, and the bond between author and work as personal and inalienable. In this sense, realist texts may be seen as expressing doubts parallel to those discussed in nineteenth-century legal discourse regarding the status of the author and his relation to his work. *

*

*

*

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In the context of the nineteenth-century marketplace August Schlegel’s metaphor of the author as ‘surviving feeling’ becomes literal. The conf lict between the reader’s emotional sympathy and the author’s detached sympathetic imagination may be seen in the context of the precarious position in which the nineteenthcentury realist author finds himself: the focus on the representation of reality seems to assign secondary importance to the author’s imagination and his creative powers; what Sainte-Beuve called the ‘industrialization’ of literature relegates him to a worker providing the publisher and the reader with commodities lacking individual character; copyright laws, while compensating the author for his labour, fail to recognize the work as a part of his personality which retains, independently of its alienation, an indissoluble bond with its creator. In this context, the sympathy of the reader and the illusionist reading of realist texts have a commodifying effect: by treating the work as a fragment of reality, they eliminate the author and constitute an instance of commodity fetishism. Thus the authorial double may be seen as one of the means by which the author reasserts his presence and his unique and indissoluble bond with his work. The second part of this monograph will substantiate these claims by examining the role of the sympathetic imagination and the authorial double in the work of two realists, Balzac and George Eliot, and in Baudelaire’s prose poems, viewed as a comment on the commodification of realist fiction which illuminates the attitudes adopted by the two realists. After showing that the relation of the authorial doubles with their fellow-characters in Balzac and Eliot is regulated by the sympathetic imagination and asserts the relation between author and work, I shall demonstrate that the terms in which the sympathetic imagination and the authorial double are described refer to the aesthetic, economic and legal standing of the realist author.

Pa r t I I v

Authorial Doubles in Realist Fiction

C h ap t e r 4

v

Balzac and the Author as Capitalist Hoffmann, Balzac, and the Image of the Author Balzac’s preface to the first edition of La Peau de chagrin (1831) aims to dissolve the misunderstanding caused by the anonymous publication of Physiologie du mariage (1829) concerning the identity of its author. The diversity of the readers’ hypotheses rendered the author, as Balzac remarks, an ‘être multiple’ (PC, 48). He therefore sets out, on the one hand, to reveal his identity and, on the other, to claim, through his exposition of the laws of artistic creation, that any author’s identity is irrelevant to the work of art. Balzac refutes not only the readers’ assumption that an author upholds the views expressed in his work, but he also claims that a book’s content may be totally independent from its author’s personality. Observation and expression, the two indispensable prerequisites of creation (PC, 52), cannot justify his second claim and need to be complemented by an additional quality: il se passe, chez les poètes ou chez les écrivains réellement philosophes, un phénomène moral, inexplicable, inouï, dont la science peut difficilement rendre compte. C’est une sorte de seconde vue qui leur permet de deviner la vérité dans toutes les situations possibles; ou, mieux encore, je ne sais quelle puissance qui les transporte là où ils doivent, ou ils veulent être. Ils inventent le vrai, par analogie, ou voient l’objet à décrire, soit que l’objet vienne à eux, soit qu’ils aillent eux-mêmes vers l’objet. (PC, 52) [truly philosophical poets or writers experience an inexplicable, extraordinary moral phenomenon which science has difficulties accounting for. It is a sort of second sight which allows them to guess the truth in all possible situations; or, to put it better, it is I don’t know what sort of power which transports them where they need or wish to be. They invent the true, by analogy, or see the object they wish to describe: it either comes to them or they go towards it themselves.]

Balzac’s authorial scenario presents the author as a Protean being possessing the faculty of the sympathetic imagination (or, in his terms, ‘second sight’):1 the author can assume temporarily any character: l’écrivain doit avoir analysé les caractères, épousé toutes les mœurs, parcouru le globe entier, ressenti toutes les passions, avant d’écrire un livre; ou les passions, les pays, les mœurs, les caractères, accidents de nature, accidents de morale, tout arrive dans sa pensée. Il est avare, ou il conçoit momentanément l’avarice, en

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traçant le portrait du Laird de Dumbiedikes. Il est criminel, conçoit le crime, ou l’appelle et le contemple, en écrivant Lara. (PC, 52–53) [the writer must have analysed the characters, espoused all ways of life, traversed the entire world, felt all passions, before writing a book; or all passions, countries, ways of life, characters, natural and moral accidents, occur in his mind. He is a miser, or he momentarily conceives of avarice in tracing the portrait of the Laird de Dumbiedikes. He is a criminal, conceives of crime or he summons it and contemplates it in writing Lara.]

This description of the author seems to have nothing to do with the novel it precedes, serving merely to explain how a young bachelor was able to write a cynical account of marriage. However, this portrait of the author strongly resembles a character figuring in La Peau de chagrin, namely, the antiquary. The antiquary’s description recapitulates the features of the author as defined in the preface: he is a centenarian who possesses a broad knowledge of the world, the gift of penetrating intuitively into the thoughts of others, a godlike tranquillity which implies that he has renounced all worldly joys (PC, 78), and he claims that he is not subject to the laws of time and space (PC, 86–87), like the authors described in the preface whose ‘cerveau est [...] un talisman avec lequel ils abolissent les lois du temps et de l’espace’ (PC, 53) [mind is [...] a talisman with which they abolish the laws of time and space]. Such omnipotent and omniscient characters are not oddities in La Comédie humaine: figures similar to the antiquary can be found both in Balzac’s later works as well as in his œuvres de jeunesse. An early example is Béringheld in Le Centenaire (1822), who is an exaggerated Gothic predecessor of the antiquary: over four hundred years old, gigantic and superhumanly strong, speaking all languages and possessing immense knowledge, he can invade people’s minds, mesmerize them and subject them to his will. His longevity and power are dependent on the absorption of the life-force of his victims, in a vampire-like manner. The fundamental difference between Béringheld and the canonical incarnations of this type of character in the antiquary, Gobseck and Vautrin, is that the former is a destructive agent, while the latter, even though they retain certain of his sinister qualities, are closely associated with artistic creation and can be seen as personae of the author. The catalyst effecting the transformation of this type of character is E. T. A. Hoffmann and his device of the authorial double. Hoffmann, whose impact in France developed fast into a true vogue, provides Balzac with an alternative to the Gothic extravagances on which he drew in his youthful novels. The advent of Hoffmann on stage, initiated by two competing translations of his entire works in 1829, has been meticulously documented;2 the study of his impact has concentrated mainly on the repercussions of his work on the contes fantastiques3 and on the depiction of fictional artists. The most obvious echoes of Hoffmann in Balzac can indeed be found in his contes fantastiques (and La Peau de chagrin was both presented 4 and perceived as one),5 and artists such as Gambara and Frenhofer are of direct Hoffmannesque descent.6 What has not been studied is Hoffmann’s impact on realism, especially given the fact that his reception in France was oriented from the beginning towards what

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Jean-Jacques Ampère had called ‘le merveilleux naturel’. Hoffmann’s work, rather than being considered a German and quirkier version of the Gothic novel, was perceived as dealing predominantly with ‘un ordre de faits placés sur les limites de l’extraordinaire et de l’impossible’ [a class of events on the limits between the extraordinary and the impossible]:7 his subject is taken to be bizarre occurrences rather than supernatural ones, the description of states of mental disorder and uncanny events that could actually take place.8Even though this is a selective reading of Hoffmann’s work, its inf luence on French writers was considerable in general and palpable in particular on Balzac. Hoffmann’s impact on Balzac outlived his fascination with the fantastic. It can be argued that Hoffmann’s fantastic tales acted as the mediators of German Romantic literary theory in France; in particular, the notion of irony, described in Chapter 2 as a version of the sympathetic imagination, found its way into Balzac’s work through the device of the authorial double; the type of character who, in Le Centenaire, is a Gothic villain becomes a persona of the novelist; second sight aligns itself with the notion of irony and of the sympathetic imagination; alongside the actual artist figures of Hoffmann’s tales, it is also the latter’s authorial doubles which have a lasting impact on Balzac and shape one of his authorial scenarios. The image of the author as Proteus is taken up by Balzac, and, even though he seems gradually to abandon it, in his prefaces, in favour of a more ‘scientific’ image for the author,9 it is preserved in his authorial doubles, that is to say, in characters, who, without being artists themselves, constitute images of the author. The antiquary initiates a succession of characters who not only represent the author but whose relation to their fellow characters stands for the relation between author and work. More specifically, I argue that ‘Prinzessin Brambilla’ and Celionati directly inf luence La Peau de chagrin and the figure of the antiquary.10 In what follows, I shall examine, on the one hand, the antiquary as the first of Balzac’s authorial doubles and, on the other, the ways in which this image of the author is adapted to the universe of La Comédie humaine. Sympathetic Imagination, Irony, and Second Sight in La Peau de chagrin Like the novelist described in the preface, the antiquary possesses a superior knowledge of the human condition and an ability to enter the minds of others, which he calls ‘savoir’: Ma seule ambition a été de voir. Voir, n’est-ce pas savoir? Oh! savoir, jeune homme, n’est-ce pas jouir intuitivement? n’est-ce pas découvrir la substance même du fait et s’en emparer essentiellement? Que reste-t-il d’une possession matérielle? une idée. Jugez alors combien doit être belle la vie d’un homme qui, pouvant empreindre toutes les réalités dans sa pensée, transporte en son âme les sources du bonheur, en extrait mille voluptés idéales dépouillées des souillures terrestres. La pensée est la clef de tous les trésors, elle procure les joies de l’avare sans en donner les soucis. Aussi ai-je plané sur le monde, où mes plaisirs ont toujours été des jouissances intellectuelles. (PC, 86) [My sole ambition has been to see. To see, is that not to gain knowledge? And in the gaining of knowledge, young man, is there not intuitive enjoyment?

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Is it not to discover the very substance of fact and take possession of its very essence? What remains of a material possession? Only an idea. So then, judge how magnificent must the life of a man be who, being able to imprint his mind with every reality, transports into his soul the sources of happiness and extracts from them a thousand ideal ecstasies free of all earthy defilement. Thought is the key to all treasures and confers the joys of a miser without the anxieties a miser is prey to. And so my spirit has soared over the whole world and my pleasures have always consisted in intellectual enjoyments.]

‘Savoir’ is only one of the terms employed by Balzac to designate this superior kind of knowledge: in his preface, he had called it ‘second sight’ and its mystical version in Louis Lambert (1832) would be called ‘spécialité’:11 it consists in the ability to see beyond appearances into the true nature of things. This surplus of knowledge is a fixed, almost magical, ability in Béringheld, thanks to his exceptionally long life; in Schlegel’s ironic author and in Celionati, it is, as I have shown, the outcome of a process of identification and detachment, of an ironic oscillation between subjectivity and objectivity. The antiquary’s virtual omniscience is also the result of such an oscillation. Ce que les hommes appellent chagrins, amours, ambitions, revers, tristesse, sont pour moi des idées que je change en rêveries; au lieu de les sentir, je les exprime, je les traduis; au lieu de leur laisser dévorer ma vie, je les dramatise, je les développe, je m’en amuse comme de romans que je lirais par une vision intérieure. (PC, 86) [The things that men call disappointments — loves, ambitions, setbacks, sadness, are for me ideas that I convert into reveries; instead of feeling them I express and translate them; instead of letting them consume my life I dramatize and develop them; they divert me as though they were works of fiction which I can read thanks to an inner vision.]

Like the author of the preface who possesses second sight and must identify with a criminal in order to conceive one, the antiquary identifies with the people he observes; he experiences their joys and sorrows vicariously, by projecting himself into others through his faculty of the imagination. He duplicates himself, becomes someone else while retaining a distance, and experiences life through the medium of thought.12 Vicarious fulfilment, however, is not merely a kind of duplication but an ‘aesthetic dédoublement’;13 the vocabulary employed by the antiquary is explicitly aesthetic: ‘idée’, ‘exprimer’, ‘traduire’, ‘dramatiser’, ‘développer’. Vicarious experience, the ironic process of involvement and detachment, is tantamount, as in the case of Celionati, to artistic creation. Like the author in the preface, the antiquary draws his material from the observation of reality, enters into its innermost truth and reproduces it. Although his knowledge is obtained through the imagination, it coincides with truth; in the words of the preface, the antiquary ‘reprodui[t] la nature par la pensée’ (PC, 51) [reproduces nature by means of thought] and he ‘invent[e] le vrai’: even though he has not experienced what he imagines, ‘le peintre le plus chaud, le plus exact de Florence, n’a jamais été à Florence’ (PC, 53) [the most passionate, the most accurate painter of Florence, has never been to Florence].

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The antiquary therefore possesses the faculty of the sympathetic imagination, conceived in ironic terms as an oscillation between identification and detachment, and he re-enacts the creative process described in the preface. The authorial gift of second sight, however, when transferred from the preface to the antiquary, becomes something more than the main attribute of the author that enables him to ‘write well’.14 This relation to the characters and the ironic detachment become necessary conditions of the antiquary’s longevity, or, indeed, his survival. Balzac situates irony and the sympathetic imagination within the context of his theory of energy; and this very contextualization reveals the function of this inherited image for the realist author. The authorial double does not merely ref lect the process of writing but he also alludes to the actual conditions of its production and to the material survival of the realist author in the nineteenth-century literary marketplace. The antiquary’s ‘savoir’ is only one term of the equation which La Peau de chagrin is taken to illustrate: ‘Vouloir nous brûle et pouvoir nous détruit, mais savoir laisse notre faible organisation dans un perpétuel état de calme’ (PC, 85) [The exercise of the will consumes us; the exercise of power destroys us; but the pursuit of knowledge leaves our infirm constitution in a state of perpetual calm]. This fear of desire15 is explained through Balzac’s theory of energy, a theory that underlies his entire work and whose germ is to be found very early in his writings. According to Balzac, each human being possesses a certain amount of vital force, or energy, whose exhaustion results in death. Energy is spent through what Balzac calls ‘mouvement’, which may refer to physical exertion (most importantly, the fulfilment of desire) or to abnormal concentration of energy on an idea (grief or intellectual strain of any sort can be deadly).16 In this context, the antiquary’s attitude is a strategy of survival: the authorial gift of second sight depends on the correct distribution of energy. The plot of the novel (and La Comédie humaine in general) presents the reader with a variety of means for the distribution of energy. La Peau de chagrin is commonly believed to revolve around an essential dilemma: since the vital force of a person is limited, one must choose between two kinds of death: a pleasurable but brief life (which resembles suicide) and a slow, passive life with no pleasures designed to preserve one’s energy (which approximates death). In the first case energy is expended while in the second it is economized. The antiquary, in this context, is assumed to embrace the second position,17 preaching to Raphaël the avoidance of excess in order to slow the pace of life. However, a close look at the antiquary’s ‘savoir’ reveals it to be less compatible with the economy of forces than it seems at first sight. The antiquary has indeed renounced desire, which would, in the long run, exhaust his energy. However, he is not endorsing a passive, vegetative life; his solution, closely associated with artistic creation, is more active and, in a way, productive. In terms of energy, the antiquary seems to be referring to the conservation of energy: the first law of thermodynamics, according to which energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but can only change forms, was most probably familiar to Balzac.18 The antiquary describes vicarious fulfilment less as a process of saving energy and more as a process of imaginative transformation. Energy was conceived by Balzac as a mater­ ial substance, a sort of f luid frequently (con)fused with phenomena of animal

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magnetism; loss of energy consists in the projection of this f luid. If the antiquary projects his energy into others, his attitude implies that he is, in some way, able to recover it in a different form.19 On the other hand, saving one’s vital force is not depicted in the novel as salutary. It is practised by Raphaël in the third part of the novel, when he has realized the effect of the talisman and the law of exhaustion. The comparison of Raphaël’s attitude with what the antiquary professes reveals a fundamental difference: Raphaël, although he is commonly believed to apply the antiquary’s maxims, leads a kind of vegetative life that does not require any kind of ‘savoir’. He renounces desire altogether and when he ventures outside his house, he wears distorting glasses (PC, 225–26), blocking his sight, the main channel of ‘savoir’ (‘voir, n’est pas savoir?’). Raphaël misunderstands the antiquary’s attitude; in order to avoid the fatal entropy, ‘il s’était fait chaste à la manière d’Origène, en châtrant son imagination’ (PC, 217) [he had attained chastity in somewhat the same manner as Origen, by castrating his imagination]. Although the novel shows that only verbalized desires are those that are realized by the talisman and hence expend energy,20 Raphaël is afraid even to think that he desires something; this is why he becomes an automaton and orders his servant to predict his wishes and fulfil them before he feels them (PC, 213–15). This castration of the imagination is precisely the opposite of the antiquary’s solution. The fundamental difference between Raphaël’s economy of forces and the means of distributing energy favoured by the antiquary becomes even clearer, if one turns to the main metaphor employed to describe energy. It is commonly accepted that Balzac describes energy in economic terms,21 but the implications of this have not been fully grasped when it comes to the antiquary. This analogy between energy and money is most evident in the narrative of Raphaël’s life, which repeats the sequence saving–spending–death: his frugal life under the supervision of his father is followed by the loss of his inheritance and results in his retreat to his garret, described as a symbolic death; his life of study is interrupted when he falls in love with Foedora and practises ‘le système dissipationnel’ (PC, 192) [the Rake’s system], leading to his near-suicide with which the novel begins; his renunciation of desire after the acquisition of the skin is disrupted by his marriage to Pauline which eventually causes his death through a fit of desire. In all these phases, Raphaël’s material fortune and his energy go hand in hand: his vital force is described as a ‘capital’ of energy.22 And capital can be used in three ways: it can be accumulated, it can be spent, and it can be invested and circulated. The first and third sequences of Raphaël’s life are fairly brief and straightforward: both describe a move from accumulation to spending; the second sequence is more complicated and provides a third term. Raphaël spends the remainder of his inheritance sparingly, in order to support himself while writing a philosophical treatise and a comedy through which he believes that he will become famous and earn a fortune. Rastignac proposes an alternative way of achieving success: he introduces him to Foedora, and suggests that by courting her he will acquire both fame and a fortune. Raphaël falls in love with Foedora and it is only when

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she rejects him completely that he engages in what Rastignac calls ‘le système dissipationnel’ (PC, 192), or in an elegantly protracted suicide: he spends his fortune and exhausts his credit to the last penny (PC, 192–94), before finally attempting to commit suicide, which is averted by the antiquary. While this second phase consists in spending, Rastignac’s initial advice is altogether different; in prompting him to ingratiate himself with Foedora, Rastignac describes another way of distributing both energy and money. Foedora is presented as a rewarding speculation: Raphaël is to live on credit in order to become established in the beau monde and make Foedora fall in love with him, so that he can use her for his own purposes.23 Raphaël is therefore to invest both his energy and his money, circulating his capital in order to increase it (PC, 145, 172). Raphaël does indeed begin by studying Foedora (PC, 150) but, in the long run, he cannot apply Rastignac’s instrumentalism; he loses his distance (PC, 153), identifies himself completely with her (PC, 154–55), a mistake that he soon realizes (PC, 175) and perceives as a deviation from Rastignac’s advice (PC, 172). In falling in love with Foedora, he ends up spending his vital energy through desire as well as his money, since Foedora, rather than serving him, enslaves him and turns him into an in­stru­ment for her own purposes (for instance, she uses him to have her noble status recognized with the help of the duc de Navarreins, Raphaël’s uncle, PC, 173). The solution suggested by Rastignac, the circulation of energy and capital, corresponds closely to the antiquary’s practice. The latter seems indeed to conserve his energy; this, however, does not mean that he hoards it. The antiquary is not a miser: while it is Raphaël, in the third part of the novel, who is ‘avare’ and ‘impuissant’ (PC, 217) [a miser and impotent], the antiquary savours ‘les joies de l’avare sans en donner les soucis’ [the joys of a miser without the anxieties he is prey to]; the difference lies in the fact that, unlike Raphaël, he is not afraid of parting with his energy because he is sure that he will be compensated for it. Vicarious fulfilment, the solution he proposes, is described as an exchange between him and the people he observes; he identifies with them, fulfils his desires through them. In becoming someone else, his energy changes form but is not lost, since he retains his distance from others.24 Vicarious fulfilment, therefore, is understood in the novel as circulation of energy, analogous to the circulation of capital.25 The authorial double and, by extension, the author, are described as capitalists who speculate, instead of wasting or merely accumulating their fortune. The capitalist ‘releases the money, but only with the cunning intention of getting it back again. The money therefore is not spent, it is merely advanced’;26 capital ‘is constantly changing from one form into the other, without becoming lost in this movement. [...] By virtue of being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself ’.27 Like the capitalist who transforms his money into commodities only in order to recover it, the authorial double invests his energy in others, and transforms himself in his imagination, by identifying with others and by recreating them as versions of himself; he thus recoups the energy he has invested with a surplus. It is only by retaining his distance, and treating others as means to an end that he is able to preserve and increase his

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vital energy. Through the antiquary, the author is presented as possessing a capital of imagination which acquires the form of a commodity (the work); the work is for the author, as the rest of the characters are for the authorial double, an investment, a version of himself; he both identifies with and detaches himself from it — a process which ensures his survival by providing him with a surplus of value. The antiquary is the first authorial double in Balzac’s work. Béringheld depends equally on the vital energy of others but his relation to them is that of a vampire to his victims: he kills them and steals their energy, in order to amass a quantity sufficient for him to survive until he finds his next victim. The antiquary, instead of exhausting the energy of others, circulates his own through them; this becomes possible through an imaginative identification with them. Instead of spending his energy by fulfilling his desires, he transfers it to others and watches them enact them; he describes this act as an imaginative recreation of the world. This shift from the destructive Gothic villain to an authorial persona is effected through the impact of Hoffmann: Balzac does not merely endow the antiquary with certain authorial attributes but he presents him as re-enacting the task of the author: like Celionati, who uses irony and the sympathetic imagination as a dialectics of involvement and detachment and teaches Giglio the necessity of detachment, the antiquary stands for the realist novelist as a re-creator of the actual world; at the same time, Balzac’s coupling of energy with money stands for another dimension of realist authorship, apart from the aesthetic one: the antiquary engages in an activity of investment and circulation and the author is presented as circulating his energy and capital. This image of the author as a capitalist will become more explicit as Balzac’s authorial doubles evolve. ‘Voir, n’est-ce pas (s)avoir’:28 Gobseck and the Pitfalls of Accumulation The antiquary fails to live up to the principle of circulation; Raphaël maliciously wishes that he succumb to desire; his failure is caused by the omnipotence of the skin. Raphaël’s death, on the other hand, is caused not only by spending his vital force (which, by the time he acquires the talisman, is already half-spent) but also by his attempt to hoard it in the third part of the novel; he is conscious of the ‘impuissante énergie qui se dévorait elle-même’ (PC, 129) [a self-devouring, impotent energy]. It is implied that accumulation can prove to be equally fatal. Gobseck (1835) expands on the fatal effects of such accumulation. If the antiquary is a capitalist only on a metaphoric level, the metaphor becomes literal in the case of Gobseck the miser, and in his portrayal as, in Marx’s words, ‘a capitalist gone mad’.29 When writing, in the preface to La Peau de chagrin, that the author ‘est avare, ou il conçoit momentanément l’avarice, en traçant le portrait du Laird de Dumbiedikes. Il est criminel, conçoit le crime, ou l’appelle et le contemple, en écrivant Lara’ (PC, 52–53) [is a miser, or he momentarily conceives of avarice in tracing the portrait of the Laird de Dumbiedikes. He is a criminal, conceives of crime or he summons it and contemplates it in writing Lara], Balzac seems to be announcing the two major authorial doubles of La Comédie humaine: Gobseck the miser and Vautrin the criminal. In what follows, I shall explore the ways in which

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the antiquary’s theory evolves into Gobseck’s theory of ‘savoir’ and ‘pouvoir’, a theory that — this time explicitly — emphasizes the connection with money. Gobseck’s principal quality is his second sight (GS, 979), an immediate pene­ tration into the minds of others30 which, as is the case with the antiquary, generates a comparison with God: ‘Mon regard est comme celui de Dieu, je vois dans les cœurs. Rien ne m’est caché’ (GS, 976) [my glance is like that of God; it enters the heart. Nothing is hidden from me]. Second sight here is also the result of vicarious fulfilment of desire: Le bonheur consiste ou en émotions fortes qui usent la vie ou en occupations réglées qui en font une mécanique anglaise fonctionnant par temps réguliers. Au-dessus de ces bonheurs, il existe une curiosité, prétendue noble, de connaître les secrets de la nature ou d’obtenir une certaine imitation de ses effets. N’est-ce pas, en deux mots, l’Art ou la Science, la Passion ou le Calme? Hé bien, toutes les passions humaines, agrandies par le jeu de vos intérêts sociaux viennent parader devant moi qui vis dans le calme. Puis, votre curiosité scientifique, espèce de lutte où l’homme a toujours le dessous, je la remplace par la pénétration de tous les ressorts qui font mouvoir l’Humanité. En un mot, je possède le monde sans fatigue, et le monde n’a pas la moindre prise sur moi. (GS, 970) [Happiness consists either in strong emotions which wear out life or in regular occupations which turn it into an English mechanism which functions at stated times. Above these forms of happiness, there exists the curiosity (said to be noble) of knowing the secrets of nature or of producing a certain imitation of her effects. Isn’t that, in two words, Art or Knowledge, Passion or Tranquillity? Well! all human passions, heightened by the play of social interests, parade before me, who live in tranquillity. As for your scientific curiosity — a sort of combat in which man is always worsted — I substitute for that a penetration into the secret springs that move humanity. In a word I possess the world without fatigue, and the world has not the slightest hold upon me.]

Like the antiquary, Gobseck surveys the world dispassionately and from a distance. He is able to duplicate himself, to penetrate into the minds of others and identify with them (he ‘épous[e] la vie des autres’ (GS, 976) [espouses the life of others]), without implicating himself emotionally. This ironic attitude has aesthetic connotations; Gobseck claims that he is a poet: ‘Croyez-vous qu’il n’y ait de poètes que ceux qui impriment des vers?’ (GS, 968) [Do you think there are no poets but those who scribble verses?].31 Gobseck presents a more advanced version of the authorial double than the antiquary does. Second sight and vicarious fulfilment (‘voir’ and ‘savoir’) lead him to a relation with the world and others which is only implicit in the antiquary: ‘je possède le monde sans fatigue, et le monde n’a pas la moindre prise sur moi’. This possession does not remain merely contemplative; unlike the antiquary who is a catalyst rather than an agent in the plot of La Peau de chagrin, Gobseck is the main character. Possession leads to the exercise of power (‘pouvoir’): Je suis assez riche pour acheter les consciences de ceux qui font mouvoir les ministres, depuis leurs garçons de bureau jusqu’à leurs maîtresses: n’est-ce pas le Pouvoir? Je puis avoir les plus belles femmes et leurs plus tendres caresses,

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n’est-ce pas le Plaisir? Le Pouvoir et le Plaisir ne résument pas tout votre ordre social? (GS, 976) [I am rich enough to buy the consciences of those who manage the ministers — be they ushers or mistresses: isn’t that Power? I can have beautiful women and tender caresses: isn’t that Pleasure? Power and Pleasure: don’t those two things sum up the whole of your social order?]

This ‘pouvoir’ is not the ability to fulfil one’s desires (as it is in La Peau de chagrin) but the ability to control others; what in the antiquary was a contemplative recreation of the world, becomes, in Gobseck, an omnipotence similar to that of Celionati. Gobseck not only guesses the future of Anastasie on their first transaction but actively engages in safeguarding the fortune of her husband; he sets up Derville as a lawyer and marries him happily to Fanny Malvaut; he thus predetermines their future fate. The means of this power, for Gobseck, is money; since ‘l’or contient tout en germe, et donne tout en réalité’ (GS, 969) [gold contains everything in germ and offers everything in reality], Gobseck and his brotherhood of usurers ‘sont arrivés à n’aimer le pouvoir et l’argent que pour le pouvoir et l’argent même’ (GS, 977) [have come to love power and money solely for power and money themselves]. The isomorphism of energy and money, implicit in La Peau de chagrin, becomes literal in Gobseck; money contains the essential principle of vicarious fulfilment: instead of spending it, Gobseck lends it to others and watches them fulfil his desires. Money for Gobseck becomes energy itself: both are substances which are distributed in the same way. Gobseck is usually considered to be a miser in relation to both money and energy: Derville refers to him as an avare and describes him as economizing his energy: Cet homme parlait bas, d’un ton doux, et ne s’emportait jamais. [...] cet homme s’interrompait au milieu de son discours et se taisait au passage d’une voiture, afin de ne pas forcer sa voix. A l’imitation de Fontenelle, il économisait le mouvement vital, et concentrait tous les sentiments humains dans le moi. (GS, 964–65) [This man spoke low, in a gentle voice and was never angry. [...] this man would interrupt his speech if a carriage passed, in order not to force his voice. Imitating Fontenelle, he economized the vital movement and concentrated all human sentiments upon the I.]

Neither of these qualifications is accurate: Derville himself calls him a miser and a philosopher (GS, 995) and Gobseck is not a miser in the typical sense. For the miser, money is not a means, as it is for Gobseck, but an end. Unlike the typical miser (such as Grandet or George Eliot’s Silas Marner), who keeps his money to hand, where he can see it, count it and feel its presence, Gobseck does not need the physical proximity of his fortune. Derville has no idea where Gobseck’s fortune is stored: ‘Je ne voyais jamais d’argent chez lui. Sa fortune se trouvait sans doute dans les caves de la Banque’ (GS, 966) [I never saw any money in his possession. His wealth was no doubt in the cellars of the Bank]. Balzac describes Gobseck as a capitalist whose aim is not accumulation but the circulation of capital. Depositing his money in the bank (if Derville’s suspicion

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is correct) means that he prefers to use it and invest it; he engages in various speculations; money-lending is for him a way both to control the prof ligates of the Balzacian world and increase his capital. Gobseck himself describes money in terms of energy: La vie n’est-elle pas une machine à laquelle l’argent imprime le mouvement? Sachez-le, les moyens se confondent toujours avec les résultats: vous n’arriverez jamais à séparer l’âme des sens, l’esprit de la matière. L’or est le spiritualisme de vos sociétés actuelles. (GS, 976) [Isn’t life itself a machine to which money imparts motion? Know this: means are always confounded with results; you will never succeed in separating the soul from the senses, spirit from matter. Today, gold is the spirituality of your societies.]

Gobseck, therefore, does not economize energy. His contemplative possession of the world corresponds to circulation, which transcends the dilemma between accu­ mulation and expenditure. His narration of his first visits to Fanny Malvaut and to Anastasie show that what he is after is imaginative identification and power over others. Gobseck circulates his energy, like his money: in lending money to someone, Gobseck identifies with them and watches them enact his own desires. Both his energy and his money assume a different form, they are embodied in someone else; this metamorphosis is, however, only provisional. Usury describes with precision the way in which vicarious fulfilment and the circulation of energy work. If this is the philosophical side of Gobseck’s personality, by the dénouement it has given way to his avaricious side; Balzac shows a capitalist becoming a miser, or in other words, ‘going mad’. At the outset, Gobseck is calm and he rarely loses his composure. His serenity is, however, often merely a mask (‘ce masque blanc dont l’immobilité vous a si souvent étonné’ (GS, 977) [this livid mask whose immobility has so often amazed you]). After his successful transaction with Maxime, he is so happy that ‘la joie du vieillard avait quelque chose d’effrayant’ (GS, 987) [the old man’s joy was somehow frightening]; his joy nevertheless, is caused less by his gains as such, and more by the fact that he has triumphed over his colleagues. These outbursts of joy are signs of Gobseck’s latent avaricious nature and announce his eventual destruction. His proclivity for accumulation manifests itself in the text mostly through the metaphor of eating. When Anastasie presents her diamonds Ses joues pâles s’étaient colorées, ses yeux, où les scintillements des pierres semblaient se répéter, brillaient d’un feu surnaturel. Il se leva, alla au jour, tint les diamants près de sa bouche démeublée, comme s’il eût voulu les dévorer. (GS, 988) [His pale cheeks coloured; his eyes, in which the glitter of the stones seemed to be ref lected, sparkled with unnatural fire. He rose, went to the light, held the diamonds close to his toothless mouth as if he wanted to devour them.]

Gobseck, therefore, gradually evinces a tendency to ‘internalize’ wealth. When Derville inspects his chambers after his death, this is the metaphor employed by Gobseck’s porter who has been noticing goods entering the f lat but never leaving it:

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‘Foi d’honnête femme, [...] je crois qu’il avale tout sans que cela le rende plus gras, car il est sec et maigre comme l’oiseau de mon horloge’ (GS, 1010) [On the word of an honest woman, [...] I believe he swallows them. But that doesn’t make him fat, for he is as lank as the pendulum of my clock]. She clearly states the reason for his death according to Balzac’s theory of energy: the accumulation of goods (and of energy), and the avoidance of circulation bring about Gobseck’s death. Derville discovers later that all kinds of goods have been stored in his chambers where they have then disintegrated. Gobseck dies amidst his rotting fortune which is a metaphor for his own decomposition owing to the concentration of energy. While the concentration of all human feelings in the ego may be salutary as far as it is a means for circulation, as soon as Gobseck ceases to meddle in other people’s lives, it becomes a cause of death.32 Gobseck’s failure is much more fully explained than the antiquary’s; his death is metaphorically prefigured and its beginning can be dated at the moment when Derville moves out of the adjoining room and Gobseck immediately buys it (GS, 979), thus acquiring storage space. He eventually ceases to consider money as ‘une marchandise que l’on peut, en toute sûreté de conscience, vendre cher ou bon marché, suivant le cas’ (GS, 995) [merchandise which may, in all security of conscience, be sold cheap or dear, according to circumstances]. Ceasing to view money as a means for exercising his power over others, he cannot retain his distanced attitude and enters the world of human desires. His downfall makes clear that accumulation is fatal: ‘l’avarice est la mort du génie’ [miserliness is the death of genius];33 Balzac’s imperative is an imperative to circulate.34 Vautrin and the Protean Author The development of Balzac’s authorial doubles is more erratic than my account of the antiquary and Gobseck has implied; Gobseck appears for the first time in the tale Les Dangers de l’inconduite (1830) in which the stress falls on the Restaud family rather than on Gobseck himself; it is only after Balzac takes up the story of Anastasie in Le Père Goriot (1834–35) that he is forced to look back and considerably revise the early tale; Gobseck becomes the central character (something which is ref lected in the change of title) and his views on life and energy ref lect those of the antiquary and Vautrin; he is endowed with both a life-story and a death-narrative (which were entirely absent in the first version). It is in this revision that his niece, Esther, appears for the first time, thus connecting the tale with Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1838–47). Consequently, although Gobseck predates both the antiquary and Vautrin, he is transformed by them, and also provides a link between Vautrin in Le Père Goriot and Vautrin in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. Vautrin, the only authorial double who reappears in an active role in more than one novel, develops and changes not only between the different drafts of the same text but also from novel to novel; he appears in Le Père Goriot and then, as Carlos Herrera, in the first scene of La Torpille (the draft of the first part of Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes), published before the encounter of Lucien and Herrera at the end of the final part of Illusions perdues.35 Vautrin’s capacity to change and evolve is, however, not

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limited to the contingencies of Balzac’s writing and publishing schedule, nor to the requirements of individual novels, but proves to be one of his major attributes.36 Gobseck’s mask of calmness, when conducting his everyday affairs, makes him an actor who merely plays the role of the avaricious usurer in order to exercise his power over others more effectively; his downfall is caused by his eventual inability to disentangle himself from this role. Vautrin does not commit the same mistake; he makes his first appearance as a shady bourgeois businessman in Le Père Goriot; he is identified as the criminal Jacques Collin and sent to prison; he reappears in the last pages of Illusions perdues as a Spanish priest, a disguise that he sheds in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes in favour of a multitude of assumed identities. Having erased all the physical evidence that linked him to Collin37 and having rendered himself unrecognizable, he utters his real name only when he is in a position to negotiate a new identity; he becomes Collin the criminal only in order to become the chief of the secret police and avenge his enemies. The setting for Vautrin’s successive metamorphoses could not be more appropriate; Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes is a novel of concentration: 166 of Balzac’s characters reappear38 and seem, in Harry Levin’s opinion, to ‘crowd the novel into shapelessness’.39 The shapelessness in question, rather than being the result of faulty execution, as Levin seems to suggest, could rather be seen as a conscious device: Parisian society is depicted as a world in which nothing is stable, in which the upper classes and the underworld not only cross each other’s paths but mingle to the point of confusion; the opening scene of the masked ball at the Opera is, in this sense, the introduction for the depiction of society as an elaborate role-play.40 This world is the perfect backdrop for Vautrin’s ‘dernière incarnation’, which is not merely that of becoming the chief of police but his transformation into the Diderotian actor, the final development of Balzac’s figure of the authorial double. The antiquary projects himself onto others from a distance; Gobseck enters the minds of his clients and controls their fate; Vautrin not only identifies, in his imagination, with others, but he externalizes his chameleonic capacity in changing his name, appearance, manners and, to a degree, his body. Although this ability is part and parcel of certain novelistic and (melo)dramatic conventions, Vautrin is unique, since his character, like that of Diderot’s actor, consists in this ability to transform himself. Vautrin thus becomes the universal equivalent of all characters, transgressing the boundaries which structure the Balzacian world, whether social, religious or sexual and containing all contradictions: he is the criminal and the policeman, the father and the mother of Lucien, his parent and his lover41 — antitheses which have no meaning when applied to him, since he is as amorphous and polymorphous as the author presented in the preface of La Peau de chagrin. The process of irony and the sympathetic imagination, that is, the oscillation between identification and detachment, is detailed in the description of his relationship with Lucien: Jacques Collin [...] avait renoncé à lui-même depuis sept ans. Ses puissantes facultés ne jouissaient que pour Lucien; il jouissait de ses progrès, des ses amours, de son ambition. Pour lui, Lucien était son âme visible. Trompe-la-Mort dînait chez les Grandlieu, se glissait dans les boudoirs des

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grandes dames, aimait Esther par procuration. Enfin, il voyait en Lucien un Jacques Collin, beau, jeune, noble, arrivant au poste d’ambassadeur. Trompe-la-Mort avait réalisé la superstition allemande DU DOUBLE par un phénomène de paternité morale que concevront les femmes qui, dans leur vie, ont aimé véritablement, qui ont senti leur âme passée dans celle de l’homme aimé. (SM, 813) [ Jacques Collin [...] had for seven years renounced himself. His powerful faculties, absorbed in Lucien, had been brought into play only for Lucien; his advancement, his loves, his ambition had been the source of the convict’s only joy. Lucien had been his visible soul. Dodgedeath had dined at the Grandlieus’, slipped into great ladies’ boudoirs, loved Esther by proxy. Finally, in Lucien he had seen a Jacques Collin, handsome, youthful, ennobled, in the position of an ambassador. Dodgedeath had fulfilled the German superstition of the Doppelgänger by a phenomenon of intellectual paternity which will be easily comprehended by women, who, in their lives, have truly loved, who have felt their soul pass into that of the man they loved.]

Vicarious fulfilment and duplication are described in the most unambiguous of manners. Vautrin’s authorial sympathetic imagination renders others versions of himself: Lucien is ‘son âme visible’, a mere puppet, animated by Vautrin’s willpower. Like the Protean author, he can become whomever he wants — an ability which, in Balzac, as has been argued above, is contextualized in his theory of energy: he neither accumulates nor spends his vital force, but circulates it, investing it in others and making it change forms. Like money which becomes a commodity only in order to become capital again and increase its value, Vautrin becomes Lucien only to become (through him) an inf luential young politician, able to control more people and find more surrogates. Vautrin, like a true capitalist, treats his living speculations instrumentally: Franchessini, Rastignac, Lucien and Théodore Calvi are all means to an end: his ultimate purpose is to exert as much power as possible over others, through his ever-increasing knowledge; hence, he becomes the chief of the secret police. His attitude towards money is analogous to that towards his characters: it is not accidental that he is the banker of the Dix-Mille; he already holds in his hands the secrets and the money of the Parisian underworld and this is how he funds his projects and mans his operations.42 The most notable instance that illustrates the analogy between the sympathetic imagi­nation and money is the episode with Esther’s false bills of exchange. Vautrin makes Esther sign three bills of exchange, accepting an imaginary debt of three hundred thousand francs to her former lover, Georges d’Estourny, whom Vautrin knows to be a fugitive abroad; he backdates them, pretends to be George Barker, an English businessman and d’Estourny’s creditor, and forces d’Estourny’s former partner and accomplice, Cérizet, to endorse them and protest them in his own name; timing the appearance of the bailiff for the morning following Nucingen’s first night with Esther, he forces Nucingen to pay the debt in order to save Esther from debtors’ prison (SM, 562–84). He thus succeeds in becoming ‘maître des valeurs qu’il a créées’ (SM, 564) [master of the values he had created].

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In enacting this scam, Vautrin is described as inventing or creating a value that becomes real: this process applies equally to a fraud, a speculation, Vautrin’s relation to the other characters as well as to the activity of the novelist.43 Vautrin’s fraud is a speculation on human passion: he manipulates Esther’s love for Lucien, Nucingen’s lust for Esther and Cérizet’s fear of d’Estourny (whose funds he has appropriated in his absence). At the same time, the process described applies equally to his relation with Esther and Lucien. Vautrin takes up Esther as a prostitute whose association with Lucien may harm his (as well as Vautrin’s) prospects, he transforms her into a comme-il-faut, religious woman, while at the same time he has his mind on her as an asset that can be liquidated at any time; when Lucien finds himself needing to raise a fortune in order to marry Clotilde de Grandlieu, he transforms her back into a prostitute and uses her to drain Nucingen, providing thus for Lucien’s ambitions. Both Esther and Lucien, whom he recreates as a successful parvenu44 after saving him from drowning himself, are values which he has created and whose master he is, employing them for his own purposes. Through Vautrin, the realist novelist is described as a capitalist, a speculator, and also as something of a fraud; his starting point is reality, his prime subject-matter human passions which he can mimic and re-present without subjecting himself to them; based on these he invents plots and characters, which become real values of which he is the master and which he can use to earn money, to survive, like Vautrin who can survive only if he is to project his energy onto his creations. The novelist identifies with the characters he creates, he temporarily becomes them; in ‘inventing the true’, he channels his energy through the imagination, he circulates it through the versions of himself that he recreates. Vautrin represents the last stage in the development of the figure of the authorial double: the type of character which Béringheld initiates, is, on the one hand, grad­ ually disconnected from the fantastic through the inf luence (paradoxically enough) of Hoffmann; from a vampire-like villain he becomes a persona of the author in La Peau de chagrin; the antiquary’s Mephistophelean attributes, his transcendental knowledge and virtual absence from the plot, evolve into characters who occupy central roles and whose ‘savoir’ is also motivated by their situation: Gobseck and Vautrin owe their insight to their observing the world as a usurer and a criminal respectively, or, in Vautrin’s case, through a network of spies. On the other hand, Vautrin looks back to his Gothic predecessors: if Balzac’s early fantastic is gradually grounded in reality (as Balzac decides to compete with the civil register rather than with Ann Radcliffe and Charles Maturin), in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, he gives a fantastic allure to realism. Reality is often less verisimilar than fiction, as Balzac often asserts (SM, 873): thus, Vautrin acquires a kind of omniscience, omnipotence, as well as a power of will, mesmeric abilities and a Satanic and vampire-like profile which bring him closer to his Gothic ancestors. His final metamorphosis into the chief of police makes him as omniscient as the novelist who is the master of the world he (re)creates and manipulates. If indeed Balzac’s authorial doubles describe the relation between the author and his work, as argued above, Vautrin, the most developed of the authorial doubles, seems to sketch this relation as one of absolute control. This control, however, although triumphant

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in Balzac’s fictions, is far from being the case when it comes to the actual author: the author’s relation to his works is disputed in various ways in the real world; this fictional triumph has to be read alongside the call for a similar status for the author, frequently championed by Balzac. The Authorial Double and the Rights of the Author The presentation of the author as a would-be capitalist is not very distant from one of Balzac’s recurrent images; according to Henry James, Balzac had ‘an eye for the shop’45 and in Taine’s oft-repeated phrase, he was ‘un homme d’affaires endetté’ [a businessman in debt];46 his entrepreneurial initiatives (which included printing and journal editing, his plans for the Société d’abonnement général, his thwarted theatrical career, as well as several ill-fated speculations) are often seen as foils for his only relatively successful speculation: La Comédie humaine itself, in which his ‘eye’ seems to be more acute than it had been in regard to his other ventures.47 However, his (and the realist author’s, in general) control over the fate of his works in the real world was far from being as strong as that of Vautrin’s over his ‘creatures’; Balzac systematically voiced demands for such a control. Having been a ghost-writer, a printer and a professional journalist in the 1820s, Balzac was intimately acquainted with all facets of the book-market and, in the early 1830s made several suggestions for the reformation of the book-trade, insisting, above all, on the suppression of unnecessary intermediaries and accumulating credit which were responsible, in his view, for over-priced books, low-paid authors and publishers’ bankruptcies.48 From 1833, Balzac focused more exclusively on the situation of authors. In his relevant articles and his prefaces, he systematically cultivated the image of the artist as a solitary genius, a man apart in distress: ‘Un grand homme doit être malheureux’ [A great man must be unhappy]49 — not least because of the hostile conditions of production and copyright laws. In 1834, with his ‘Lettre adressée aux écrivains français du XIXe siècle’,50 he urged the creation of a society of authors, which came into being independently in 183851 — his brief presidency was particularly active and prompted him to concentrate on literary property. According to Balzac, the author, no longer being rich or patronized by the royal family and the aristocracy (as was the case in the eighteenth century), turned towards the patronage of the public, which, in Balzac’s view, apart from being ignorant, was generally unwilling to support him: even those with the means to buy books preferred to borrow them.52 Various forms of piracy hampered the author and minimized his income: Belgian piracy did not merely monopolize the market abroad, often by publishing novels before they had even appeared in volumeform in France,53 but its products were even imported;54 since 1828, ‘les journaux reproducteurs’ had engaged in the reproduction of fragments or even entire works of fiction without authorization;55 dramatic authors treated the plots, characters and titles of novels as public property and staged unauthorized adaptations, thereby earning often in a matter of days more than what the author was paid for his book.56 The cabinets de lecture multiplied the readers of a single volume, minimizing the number of copies sold. Last but not least, copyright laws specified that the term of

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copyright expired ten years after the death of the author, consequently depriving the author’s family of an income that became gradually more considerable (since it took time for a work to become a classic), and transferring this income to publishers wholly unconnected to the author and his family.57 Balzac engaged, on the one hand, in ad hoc confrontations of concrete acts of infringement by taking publishers to court;58 on the other, with regard to problems for which legal action was not possible, he made various recommendations or publicly denounced certain phenomena. Balzac’s aim, in his most official intervention, a petition addressed to the committee for the emendation of the current copyright law in 1841,59 was the assimilation of literary property (which, until then, had been defined as a sui generis right, lapsing ten years after the death of the author) to property tout court. This assimilation, while solving certain problems, fails, as will be shown below, to address several others that Balzac had been complaining about for nearly a decade. Balzac, when referring to literary property, argues that it is the only kind of property that man creates rather than appropriates;60 even if ideas are of divine provenance and can, therefore, be considered public property, the form in which they are presented by the author cannot but be his own exclusive property:61 works are ‘les produits les plus immédiats de l’âme’ [the most immediate products of the soul];62 literature is ‘propre à l’âme’ [belongs to the soul]63 and ‘n’a de racine que dans l’intelligence’ [springs exclusively from the mind].64 The author therefore has a right of ownership that cannot be denied. These arguments were not novel; they were employed in the mid-eighteenth century, in order to endorse the image of the author as proprietor, which was recognized in 1777; they had since been reactivated between 1789 and 1793, when the abolished privileges reappeared in the guise of ‘la propriété littéraire’. Balzac — among others — resurrected them once again in order to ask for a return to the pre-Revolutionary status. His political argument is quite clear: it is the ancien régime which established literary property as an absolute property right and the revolution which limited it; to insist, in 1841, on literary property as a sui generis right — he warns the committee — simply pro­ vides additional arguments in favour of the abolition of any property, expressed by several radical groups. Literary property is, therefore, for Balzac, in his ‘Notes’, one instance of property, differing in no way from personal property: the proprietor of a literary work should have the same rights as the proprietor of a house. However, even though Balzac is deploying all his rhetorical skill to convince the committee, a close look at the sum of his relevant writings reveals that his ‘Notes’ include a significant omission; nowhere does he refer, not even in passing, to the problem of unauthorized stage adaptations of novels, which are a constant complaint in all his other interventions.65 Even though the ‘Notes’ is a much more focused text, concentrating on substantiating a specific claim, Balzac does not fail to paint a black picture of the general predicament of the author, mentioning his usual complaints, even if they are not directly relevant to the term of copyright. Balzac realized that many of the authors’ problems would not be affected by deliberations concerning the duration of copyright: for instance, even if the authors’ descendants were provided for, piracy would still be rampant in the absence of international

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copyright laws. In this sense, piracy is mentioned66 in order to strengthen the impression of the precarious position of authors, thus presenting the posthumous dispossession as the culmination of successive acts of expropriation. In this context, the silence on stage adaptations, which Balzac does not fail to denounce vehemently on other occasions, seems unjustified. At the same time, it should be noted that neither Balzac, nor any other contemporary novelist seems to have pursued this particular problem in court.67 This rift between the public denunciation of stage adaptations and their suppression in Balzac’s petition suggests that there existed a certain difficulty in formulating the problem in legal terms. Stage adaptations were indeed a peculiar kind of ‘theft’ and Balzac was fully aware of that. They did not involve the appropriation of the actual text but of its plot, characters, or title — that is, elements that were closer to ideas (which could be public property) rather than form (which was the crux of Balzac’s argument). When Balzac discusses stage adaptations, he refers to ideas as being stolen or violated.68 Moreover, these ideas were ‘découpée[s], tirée[s], déshabillée[s], écartelée[s] [...] et servie[s] aux habitués d’un théâtre’ [chopped, pulled, undressed, quartered [...] and served to theatregoers]69 and no legal means existed to prove that there was a kind of property in question. les tribunaux de commerce condamnent à d’énormes amendes l’eau de Cologne sans néroli qui se dit Farina. Toutes les fois qu’il y a un ballot, le droit est précis, voyez-vous! mais, s’il s’agit d’une page écrite, d’une idée, la justice ne sait plus ce que veut dire le procès; elle n’a de loi que contre nous!70 [commercial courts impose enormous fines to the eau de Cologne without neroli oil which is called Farina. As you can see, whenever a product is concerned, law is precise; but when it comes to a written page, to an idea, justice no longer knows what a trial is: its laws are only against us.]

Given Balzac’s unsuccessful attempts at the theatre (Vautrin, his only promising attempt at drama after a decade of aborted projects, had been banned in 1840), the applause obtained by the adaptation of his plots must have rung bitterly in his ears. A plausible way to explain why he fails to mention them is that unauthorized stage adaptations highlight a difference between literary property and property which Balzac, for the purposes of his petition, wishes to suppress. Balzac wanted to extend the term of copyright and make it, if possible, perpetual. The way he chose to achieve this was to argue that literary property could be assimilated to the concept of property. However, the latter does not involve only perpetuity; personal property also refers exclusively to material objects and is alienable. While Balzac is certainly in favour of the first element, the other two are not necessarily desirable when it comes to literary property. Stage adaptations clash with this, because they highlight an essential difference; literary property, the work, is not a res: indeed when he described stage adaptations as piracy, in his ‘Lettre adressée aux écrivains français’, Balzac is fully aware that he is abusing the term and he is forced to resort to a neologism: ‘la contrefaçon spirituelle’ [spiritual piracy].71 The way Balzac confronts the problem of stage adaptations suggests that he was conscious of certain aspects of the relation between author and work which could not be protected by the contemporary legal conceptualization of literary property;

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such protection could be offered only if the object of property were to be defined also as intangible. Since this was not the case in Balzac’s time, his awareness of the need for a much broader control of the work by the author — a kind of control that transcended the limitation posed by the concept of property — is channelled in the descriptions of the relation between authorial doubles and their creatures: I shall explore the three metaphors which structure this relation, the Mephistophelean pact, (demonic) possession and paternity, and discuss them in the context of (literary) property. Authorial doubles are bound to their creatures by forcing or persuading them to enter into an agreement. These agreements are explicitly or implicitly described through the metaphor of the Mephistophelean pact. The least developed authorial double, the antiquary in La Peau de chagrin, is merely a witness to the pact formed by the talisman and Raphaël; he is nevertheless described as a Mephistophelean figure (PC, 78, 222). In Gobseck, the agreements are mainly financial and they often take the form of contracts. Vautrin is frequently referred to as a demon or as Satan;72 he enters into a pact with Lucien in Illusions perdues and although he fails to strike up the agreement he planned with Rastignac in Le Père Goriot, the latter’s hesitation does not fail to bind him to Vautrin: in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, Rastignac is ordered to stand up for Lucien, to deny the identity of Carlos Herrera and Jacques Collin, and he is promised the support of the Sûreté in his future political career. The word ‘pacte’ is used in La Comédie humaine to denote the devil’s pact or, else, agreements which do not take place within the context of a legal procedure: either illegal, clandestine or individual agreements that do not require or cannot be expressed in a contract. The term ‘contrat’, on the other hand, is employed predominantly for the prenuptial agreement and for commercial contracts but is still able to denote less formal agreements such as the social contract and, in La Peau de chagrin (PC, 57, 85), the Mephistophelean pact.73 The Mephistophelean pact, which is formed between two parties, standing for the author and his work, is an agreement that can be read both in the context of the actual contract of an author with his publisher (which specifies the limits of the author’s control over his work) and in the context of Balzac’s demands for greater control which does not accord with the contemporary legal understanding of the relation between author and work. As far as the actual contract is concerned, it should be noted that, by virtue of being an individual agreement, it could function as a safety net for certain of the author’s demands that were not otherwise offered protection; certain prerogatives of the author that would later be situated in the context of ‘le droit moral’ were either explicitly expressed in contracts or were considered to be implicit terms. For instance, the court might rule — if rarely — that the respect of the form of a work by a publisher (the author’s right of integrity) was an implicit term in a contract.74 Mephistophelean pacts are described as indissoluble: the talisman in La Peau de chagrin is a case in point. The skin is not only the object whose ownership is in question; it is also the contract itself,75 since on its surface there is a text that specifies the terms of the contract76 and it is one of the parties, since it owns Raphaël’s life as much as he owns the skin. The terms of these pacts specify the way in which the relation between author and work is conceptualized. In the first place, they establish

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a relation of possession between the authorial double and his creature: the latter becomes in some way the property of the former. The object of property, however, is not an object: it is Raphaël’s life that is owned by the talisman; Gobseck does not merely lend money to Derville or to the prof ligates of La Comédie humaine but he turns them into personifications of his capital and takes charge of their lives; Vautrin acquires possession of Lucien’s whole being, body and soul, in a sort of demonic possession: Lucien becomes a mere puppet, possessed by Vautrin’s will. This kind of property refers to an intangible object. The antiquary scoffs at the idea of tangible property (‘Que reste d’une possession matérielle? Une idée’), since he does not need material objects in order to exercise his rights of possession; Gobseck also defines his power over others in terms of possession, when he states: ‘je possède le monde sans fatigue, et le monde n’a pas la moindre prise sur moi’ (GS, 970). Vautrin specifies the vehicle of the metaphor, referring expressly to demonic possession: ‘Je vous ai pêché; je vous ai rendu la vie, et vous m’appartenez comme la créature est au créateur, comme dans les contes de fées, l’Afrite est au génie, comme l’icoglan est au Sultan, comme le corps est à l’âme’ (IP, 703) [I’ve fished you out of the water, brought you back to life, and you belong to me as a creature belongs to its creator, the afreet to the genie, the icoglan to the sultan, the body to the soul]. This possession of an intangible object is explicitly attributed, in this passage, to the relation between the creator and his creation, the author and his work: what is implied here is a kind of ‘possession spirituelle’, analogous to the distinction that Balzac makes between ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ piracy. This possession is founded on the fact that Vautrin, in taking Lucien up and directing his steps, acts as the author who creates something, or, rather, the realist author who recreates reality: ‘Je veux aimer ma créature, la façonner, la pétrir à mon usage, afin d’aimer comme un père aime son enfant’ (IP, 708) [I want to love a creation of my own, shape it, mould it to my purposes so that I may love it as a father loves his progeny]. This passage introduces the third metaphor employed to describe the relation between author and work, that of paternity. Paternity is one of Balzac’s favourite metaphors for creation77 and it is evoked unsparingly in the cases of Gobseck and Vautrin. Gobseck’s control over others makes him assume a paternal role. He tends to behave or present himself as a father, an attribute his clients seem to accept. The latter refer to him ‘par antiphrase’ [ironically] as ‘papa Gobseck’ (GS, 968) and when he appears to collect his dues, they receive him ‘avec plus de respect que si [il eût] été leur propre père’ (GS, 971) [more respectfully than if [he were] their own father]. Maxime de Trailles also seems to exhibit a kind of filial fear in the presence of the usurer (GS, 985). Gobseck’s relationship with Derville is presented in terms of a father–son relationship; the usurer occasionally addresses the young lawyer as ‘mon fils’ (GS, 995),78 he lends him the amount necessary to purchase the practice of his retiring employer, he marries him to Fanny Malvaut. Derville is not only financially indebted to the usurer but also intellectually beholden; Gobseck promises to teach him about men and women (GS, 982) and Derville frequently boasts, in the course of his narrative, of his perspicacity and his ability to read the hearts of others (GS, 999, 988). In the case of Ernest de Restaud, Gobseck, in accepting the ‘vente simulée’ of the Restaud

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fortune in order to preserve it for the count’s proper heir, also becomes a father figure for the latter. Gobseck’s exclamation ‘Ego sum papa. Je suis votre maître à tous’ (GS, 991) [I am the master of all of you] in a moment of triumph, sums up in an exemplary manner his paternal and godlike dimensions and, by alluding to the Pope’s infallibility, his second sight. Vautrin is also presented as a father figure: he often designates himself as ‘papa Vautrin’ in relation to Rastignac and Lucien (whom he occasionally addresses as ‘mon fils’); he assumes paternal functions not only towards his protégés but also towards Victorine and Esther; he refers to the Dix-Mille as a family whose son Rastignac will be; the narrator, accordingly, highlights his paternal glance, his tone of voice or behaviour; Lucien himself figuratively calls him father (IP, 709) or refers to him as his spiritual father (SM, 789, 790); in Le Père Goriot, Vautrin refers to his plan to become a plantation owner in America as ‘une vie patriarcale’ (PG, 141), describing his slaves as his children. The metaphor of paternity implies both that a part of the father’s being is passed on to the son (‘un phénomène de paternité morale que concevront les femmes qui, dans leur vie, ont aimé véritablement, qui ont senti leur âme passée dans celle de l’homme aimé’, SM, 813) and a relation that is inalienable and cannot be transferred to a third party. In fact, the Code civil was particularly ill-disposed towards attempts to disavow paternity, even in the case of illegitimate children: the legal father of children born within marriage was automatically the husband (‘Pater quem nuptiae demonstrant’)79 unless he could prove that he was away at the time of conception.80 In this sense, authorship is presented as an indissoluble link between the creator and the work, which cannot be transferred to someone else: Balzac thus envisions a relation between author and work that does not cease at the moment that he surrenders his text and his economic rights to the publisher. Like the father who ‘creates’ his children, the author creates what Balzac calls ‘valeurs anthropomorphes’:81 his works are presented as part of himself, no less than a child is part of his father. All these metaphors describe the relation between the author and his work in ways that transcend the concept of property: the Mephistophelean pact opens up a space in which something more than the proprietary rights of the author is negotiated; demonic possession implies a concept of property that does not restrict itself to a material object; paternity implies a relation that is inalienable and indissoluble. The fictional undermining of the application of the concept of property to literary property is contemporary with the first doubts expressed by legal scholars as to the suitability of property as the basis of the relation between an author and his work82 — doubts that would gradually lead to the conceptualization of ‘le droit moral’. *

*

*

*

*

The portrait of the realist author which emerges from Balzac’s authorial doubles is one that awards him an aesthetic, economic and legal sovereignty over his work which authors in the real world were far from possessing: the realist author, rather than copying reality, is shown to engage with it in a creative and imaginative way;

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despite the author’s subservient position in relation to the publisher and the public, he is presented as an enterprising speculator; transcending the limitations of the concept of literary property and its inability to protect authors from what they view as unauthorized appropriations of their work, Balzac’s authorial doubles assert his perpetual control over his work. In this sense, authorial doubles can be seen as a response to the various ways in which the primacy of the author is questioned in the nineteenth century or to the fear that what he conceives as an intimate and integral part of his being may be irretrievably taken away from him. This fear may be seen as corresponding to another theme, occurring frequently in realist texts in relation to the author: the theme of prostitution and of the alienation of the self. The fear of the alienation of the self is ubiquitous in realist fiction: most characters find themselves in the situation of Raphaël when he enters the gambling-house in the beginning of La Peau de chagrin: the narrator remarks that ‘Vous êtes au jeu [...] vous-même’ (X, 58) [you are yourself at stake]. Lucien in Illusions perdues becomes the emblem of the prostituted artist. While authorial doubles seem to be impervious to prostitution themselves, they are surrounded by characters who may be regarded, in one way or another, as prostitutes.83 This marginality of prostitution in relation to the authorial double is reversed by Baudelaire: the next chapter aims to illuminate the attitude of the realists by exploring the use of the sympathetic imagination in conjunction with prostitution in a non-realist text, Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris.

C h ap t e r 5

v

Baudelaire, the Flâneur, and the Author as Prostitute Le Spleen de Paris has been read as a systematic project which ref lects on the language of poetry and its figurative powers, as well as, more specifically, on Baudelaire’s own poetry, on Les Fleurs du mal.1 Critical readings of Baudelaire’s prose poems have insisted on unearthing ever deeper levels of irony: irony directed against Les Fleurs du mal, the narrator’s irony towards his narrative, irony aimed at the narrator, or a constant self-ironization of the author and his aesthetic or political views.2 In what follows, rather than adding a hitherto unexplored layer of irony, I shall locate one of the standpoints from which irony is unleashed in Baudelaire’s prose poems. I shall argue that their publication in La Presse and the description of the flâneur as a Protean authorial double allow them to be read as a comment on realist fiction and its commodification. In presenting the author in the guise of the flâneur, Baudelaire, on the one hand, detaches himself from the authorial subject of Les Fleurs du mal, whose inability to cope with the degrading conditions of the literary marketplace is demonstrated in the prose poem collection; on the other, the flâneur, the more pragmatic representative of the author, is explicitly associated with prostitution: Baudelaire thus undermines both his new authorial persona and the realist author. The Image of the Author in Le Spleen de Paris J. A. Hiddleston has remarked that the depiction of the artist in Le Spleen de Paris is noticeably different from that in Les Fleurs du mal; while, in the verse collection, the artist retains considerable prestige with many ‘positive’ pieces to counterbalance the ‘negative’ aspects in the portrayal of the artist, in Le Spleen de Paris, it is a bleak picture that predominates.3 This difference is not merely one of emphasis: the prose poems arguably stage the encounter of two relatively distinct images of the author, dramatized in the dialogic piece that opens the collection, ‘L’Etranger’.4 The second interlocutor, the stranger, is an ‘homme énigmatique’ (SP, 277) who is estranged from his family, isolated from society and the world, and who sketches himself as a radical idealist: he loathes earthly riches, is in search of eternal beauty and breaks off into a rêverie in the middle of a conversation. His answers tend to dodge the questions put to him and his attitude towards the questioner is rather haughty, addressing him with ‘vous’. The first interlocutor is more easy-going and familiar,

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if a little indiscreet; he is a professed materialist, hating God as much as the stranger hates gold. The two do not seem to be unacquainted as is implied by the familiarity of the questioner (who addresses his interlocutor with ‘tu’) and the certainty of the stranger as to the religious views of the other. The second interlocutor is not a stranger to the first but the stranger par excellence who seeks a home ‘Any where out of the world’. The first does not seem to pose questions out of ignorance or mere curiosity; the monotony of his questions seems to imply that he anticipates the answers and is trying to prove a point by staging a dubious dialogue in an ironic manner: il fait poser l’étranger. The stranger and his questioner can be seen as two authorial personae (whom I shall designate as the poet and the flâneur, respectively) which, in Le Spleen de Paris, are both objects of irony. The poet, described as an estranged dreamer and a solitary idealist, can be seen as an incarnation of the poet of Les Fleurs du mal; his features will be repeatedly taken up and elaborated upon in individual prose poems, which either place him in an ironic perspective or dramatize his failure to accomplish the ideal he aspires to: his poetic rêveries are always interrupted, either because he is unable to compete with nature (‘Le Confiteor de l’artiste’), or by the intrusion of prosaic reality (‘La Chambre double’, ‘À une heure du matin’, ‘Le Gâteau’, ‘Enivrezvous’, ‘La Soupe et les nuages’); his idealism proves to be an insufferable burden (‘Chacun sa chimère’) or is unveiled as mercenary (‘L’Horloge’); contact with reality reduces him to a fool or a buffoon (‘Le Fou et la Vénus’, ‘Le Vieux Saltimbanque’, ‘Une mort héroïque’); his exquisite works are not understood by the public (‘Le Chien et le f lacon’); his belief in beauty is shattered (‘Laquelle est la vraie?’); he revolts gratuitously against the prosaic (‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’).5 The down-to-earth questioner in ‘L’Etranger’ is the flâneur, an authorial persona that appears f leetingly in Baudelaire’s verse poems (namely, in the ‘Tableaux parisiens’)6 but achieves consistency only in the prose poems, as an alternative to the poet of Les Fleurs du mal: if the prose poems are the ironic counterpart of the verse poems, the flâneur is the prosaic authorial persona, the ironic counterpart of the poet. The flâneur, however, is not beyond the reach of irony: Le Spleen de Paris does not reject one persona in favour of another; rather, it stages their confrontation and reciprocal ironization. If the flâneur mocks the illusions of the poet and his inability to disentangle himself from his ideal, he is, nonetheless, like the narrator of ‘Chacun sa chimère’ even more burdened by his ‘Indifférence’, or his spleen. The shift from ‘Spleen et Idéal’ to Le Spleen de Paris is telling: in the absence or the death of the Ideal, the flâneur is more attuned to prosaic reality which, in the prose poems, includes the realities of literary life and the marketplace: the spleen of Paris is not the existential spleen of Baudelaire’s verse poems, caused by the disparity between the ideal and reality; the prose poems lose what Erich Auerbach calls the ‘aesthetic dignity’ of Les Fleurs du mal,7 since their spleen springs from the trivial conditions of modern urban life. The prose poems have frequently been seen as exhibiting some sort of realism: they are written in prose; they are narrative in their majority;8 their setting is the urban landscape; their themes apparently approximate the triviality of everyday life. Some of these features are shared with the ‘Tableaux parisiens’; a decisive difference,

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however, apart from their form, is the medium in which they are published. Rather than a literary journal, Baudelaire chose a daily newspaper, La Presse, for the first publication of Le Spleen de Paris as a whole. The first twenty prose poems were published in three instalments (26–27 August and 24 September 1862); the following six were also supposed to be published in La Presse but were eventually turned down. Moreover, the prose poems appeared in the feuilleton section of the newspaper. La Presse was not a random choice; it was not only the first daily newspaper, but the first to include a serial novel, namely, Balzac’s La Vieille Fille (1836). The newspaper feuilleton had since then become the space of the most extreme commodification of the realist novel. The serial novel, soon to develop into a genre in its own right, was an offspring of the encounter of the realist novel with the newly industrialized literary marketplace; Balzac himself steadily provided La Presse (among other newspapers which followed Girardin’s lead) with a series of novels, the last of which was La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin (1847). Baudelaire’s prose poems, thus, are not merely ‘realistic’ but they usurp the space of the serial novel and their publication in the feuilleton of La Presse can be seen as a symbolic gesture. If, indeed, as Richard Terdiman argues, Le Spleen de Paris can be seen as a form of counterdiscourse, which adopts the dominant bourgeois commercial discourse in order to subvert it,9 the guise chosen by Baudelaire is that of the commodified version of the realist novel, the roman-feuilleton. Thus, Le Spleen de Paris, strategically published in La Presse, could be read as a comment on the commodification of literature in general. But, given that Baudelaire’s prose poems occupy the place of the roman-feuilleton, it can be argued that they may also be read as a comment on the commodification of realist fiction and on the relation between the realist author and the marketplace. This spatial and formal proximity of the prose poems with realist fiction makes the flâneur a focal point of double irony. On the one hand, he represents the working man of letters who directs his irony at the poet; on the other, as I shall show in the next section, he shares with the realist authorial double the faculty of the sympathetic imagination, so that by undermining it and associating it with pro­ sti­t ution, the flâneur also becomes an ironic image of the Protean realist author.10 The Flâneur and Sympathetic Imagination The flâneur is an authorial persona well suited to the prose poems: like poetry which becomes prose, deals with urban realities and is published in a newspaper, the flâneur is the author who correspondingly descends into the marketplace, renounces the isolation of the romantic solitary genius and interacts with his subject-matter and his public. This connection between the urban observer and the author is not invented by Baudelaire. The flâneur is a type who acquired importance in the context of the proliferation of writings about the city.11 He is indicative of the move from the description of ‘characters’ (in the tradition of Theophrastus and La Bruyère) towards a more sociological approach to the urban population, represented by the genre of the physiologies. Wandering aimlessly in the city and observing its inhabitants are soon seen as the activities of an artist or an author; and the flâneur thus also becomes

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a literary type or an authorial persona which underpins Baudelaire’s conception of this figure. Even if the Baudelairean flâneur is considerably more aestheticized than his predecessors, there are certain elements of Baudelaire’s configuration of the flâneur which can already be traced in the physiologies.12 Firstly, flânerie is closely connected with authorship in the physiologies13 — a connection which, for Lacroix, is causal: ‘littérateurs parce que f lâneurs’ [they are men of letters because they are flâneurs].14 Secondly, the flâneur possesses a semio­ logical competence which implies some sort of superiority over the objects of his observation. Even if, as Martina Lauster argues, the flâneur of the physiologies is to be seen as a common man, not opposed to the urban crowd but a mere member of it,15 texts dealing with the flâneur tend to emphasize (albeit to a lesser degree than Baudelaire) his superior power of observation. A standard distinction is that between the flâneur and the badaud, the enthusiastic but unref lective loiterer; although the enumeration of kinds of people who cannot be flâneurs, or are wrongly termed thus, aims at a parody of scientific discourse, the gap between the strolling observer and the passers-by is constantly thematized.16 In the Physiologie du flâneur, the observer is presented as exerting incontestable authority over the rest of the urban crowd, ‘lorgnant impitoyablement tous les ridicules’ [mercilessly eyeing all the ridiculous characters], while his ref lections on what he sees are infinitely richer and more profound than those of his fellow-city-dwellers.17 The flâneur, thus, emerges less as a sociological type and more as the subject implied by the writings about the city, as the authorial subject of the urban sketches: indeed, the signature of the anonymous contributor in Paris is ‘un f lâneur’; Fournel speaks in the first person in the quality of a flâneur; Lacroix concludes his sketch as follows: ‘Qui êtes-vous enfin, vous qui lisez ces lignes? Et qui suis-je, moi qui les écris? Un f lâneur’ [Who are you, after all, you who read these lines? And who am I, who has written them? A flâneur].18 Thirdly, the flâneur is a somewhat ambiguous sociological type; other than being, in general, a man of leisure who can afford to wander aimlessly, his sociological status is vague. He is hardly a character: ‘le f lâneur n’a guère d’intérieur à lui’ [the flâneur has no inner self ];19 ‘C’est un daguerréotype mobile et passionné qui garde les moindres traces, et en qui se reproduisent [...] le mouvement de la cité, la physionomie multiple de l’esprit public, des croyances, des antipathies et des admirations de la foule’ [He is a mobile and passionate daguerreotype which captures the smallest traces, and which reproduces [...] the movement of the city, the multiple physiognomy of the public spirit, of the beliefs, antipathies and admirations of the crowd].20 This ability to ref lect (on) what he observes makes him a sort of Protean personality; indeed, Lacroix endows him with a quality that closely approximates the faculty of the sympathetic imagination: Le f lâneur est un être essentiellement complexe, il n’a pas de goûts particuliers, il a tous les goûts; il comprend tout, il est susceptible d’éprouver toutes les passions, explique tous les travers et a toujours une excuse prête pour toutes les faiblesses.21 [The flâneur is a fundamentally complex being, he has no particular taste, he has all tastes; he understands everything, he is susceptible to all passions, he explains all failings and always has a ready excuse for all weaknesses.]

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A first conclusion to be drawn from the above is that the association of the flâneur with the ability to identify with the crowd, with a Protean personality and with the faculty of the sympathetic imagination seems to be already present in more popular and less aesthetically oriented conceptions of the flâneur than that of Baudelaire. However, the connection of the sympathetic imagination with the figure of the urban observer has other, more literary, precedents: the cousin in Hoffmann’s ‘Des Vetters Eckfenster’ (a tale that Baudelaire must have known)22 is one such example. Although the cousin is not a flâneur (he observes the market from a privileged vantage point symbolic of his superiority), he has frequently been discussed in this context. While Walter Benjamin dismisses the story as an idyllic picture of urban mores, and accuses the cousin of a pre-modern attitude to the urban environment and of a panoramic rather than a fragmentary modern vision, he nevertheless admits that the cousin belongs to the same family as the flâneur and Poe’s ‘man of the crowd’. My analysis in Chapter 3 aimed to restore the modernity of the tale, in a broadly Benjaminian sense: notwithstanding the cousin’s lack of mobility, the f lower-seller episode was read as a revelation to the author of the commodifying effect of the marketplace and his readership. In this sense, the Hoffmannesque observer foreshadows one of the fundamental functions of the flâneur in Le Spleen de Paris: he already poses the problem of the author’s relation to the marketplace. This association is also very conscious in Balzac’s Facino Cane (1836). The figure of the flâneur is not absent from realist fiction. He leads a spectral but ubiquitous life in La Comédie humaine23 and he is frequently evoked as someone who knows the city only too well, as an alter ego of the omniscient narrator. Facino Cane presents a portrait of the flâneur as an author possessing second sight: [...] j’allais observer les mœurs du faubourg, ses habitants et leurs caractères. [...] Chez moi l’observation était déjà devenue intuitive, elle pénétrait l’âme sans négliger le corps; ou plutôt elle saisissait si bien les détails extérieurs, qu’elle allait sur-le-champ au-delà; elle me donnait la faculté de vivre de la vie de l’individu sur laquelle elle s’exerçait, en me permettant de me substituer à lui comme le derviche des Mille et une Nuits prenait le corps et l’âme des personnes sur lesquelles il prononçait certaines paroles. [...] je pouvais épouser leur vie, je me sentais leurs guenilles sur le dos, je marchais les pieds dans leurs souliers percés; leurs désirs, leurs besoins, tout passait dans mon âme, ou mon âme passait dans la leur. C’était le rêve d’un éveillé.24 [I used to go and observe the people of the suburb, their characters and behavior. [...] I had already acquired a power of intuitive observation which entered the soul without ignoring the body, or rather it grasped external details so well that it immediately went beyond them. This power of observation enabled me to live the life of the individual I was watching, allowing me to substitute myself for him, just like the dervish in the Arabian Nights who took on the body and soul of people over whom he pronounced certain words. [...] I was able to live their lives; I felt their rags on my back, and walked with their worn-out shoes on my feet. Their wants, their needs, all passed into my soul, or perhaps it was my soul which passed into theirs. It was like the dream of a man who is wide awake.]

The narrator is not the only character in the tale who possesses the faculty of the

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sympathetic imagination. He is juxtaposed with Canet, an aged blind musician who claims to be an Italian nobleman with the ability to sense gold:25 Canet’s ability to overcome the restrictions of the senses is a variety of second sight. The narrator is described as obeying the dictates of Balzac’s theory of energy: he circulates it through sympathetic identification, while keeping his distance from the objects of his observation. His encounter with Canet constitutes a temptation: the old man’s tale of a hidden treasure which he is still able to recover fascinates the narrator who momentarily envisages accompanying the old man in his dubious journey — a temptation he eventually overcomes.26 On the other hand, the blind and possibly senile Canet is a monomaniac who wastes his energy, by concentrating it on an unproductive target, which is, moreover, that of obtaining wealth: Canet’s attitude, in this sense, subjects the sympathetic imagination to his pecuniary interests and stands for the commodification of the authorial gift. The narrator’s encounter with him constitutes a warning not to subject his own talent to the literary marketplace and the tale may be read as a parable whose moral is expressed by Baudelaire’s aphorism: ‘La seule manière de gagner d’argent est de travailler d’une manière désintéressée’ [the only way to gain money is to work in a disinterested manner].27 Before Baudelaire, both Hoffmann and Balzac had employed the urban observer as an authorial persona endowed with the sympathetic imagination and they did so in order to explore the author’s interaction with the literary marketplace, issuing warnings about the threat that commercialization poses for the author and his gift. It is this association of the flâneur with the author and the sympathetic imagination that is to be found in Le Spleen de Paris: Baudelaire does not merely draw the figure of the perspicacious flâneur from the physiologies, but, taking up the Balzacian association of the flâneur with second sight, he employs the flâneur as a means of ref lecting on the author’s status in the marketplace. The Prose Poem as a Commodity Baudelaire’s dedication of Le Spleen de Paris to Arsène Houssaye, the editor of La Presse, presents the prose poems in a contradictory light: Mon cher ami, je vous envoie un petit ouvrage dont on ne pourrait pas dire, sans injustice, qu’il n’a ni queue ni tête, puisque tout, au contraire, y est à la fois tête et queue, alternativement et réciproquement. Considérez, je vous prie, quelles admirables commodités cette combinaison nous offre à tous, à vous, à moi et au lecteur. Nous pouvons couper où nous voulons, moi ma rêverie, vous le manuscrit, le lecteur sa lecture; car je ne suspends pas la volonté rétive de celui-ci au fil interminable d’une intrigue superf lue. Enlevez une vertèbre, et les deux morceaux de cette tortueuse fantaisie se rejoindront sans peine. Hachez-la en nombreux fragments, et vous verrez que chacun peut exister à part. Dans l’espérance que quelques-uns de ces tronçons seront assez vivants pour vous plaire et vous amuser, j’ose vous dédier le serpent tout entier. (SP, 275) [My dear friend, I am sending you a little work for which one could only unjustly say that it has neither head nor tail, since, on the contrary, everything in it is, at the same time, head and tail, alternately and reciprocally. Please

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Baudelaire and the Author as Prostitute think how wonderfully convenient this combination is for all of us, for you, for me and for the reader. We can cut, whenever we want, I my reverie, you, the manuscript and the reader, his reading; for I do not bind the latter’s restive will to the interminable thread of a superf luous plot. Take away one vertebra and the two pieces of this tortuous fantasy will easily rejoin each other. Chop it into many fragments and you will see that each of them can stand on its own. Hoping that some of these pieces will be lively enough to please and amuse you, I take the liberty of dedicating the entire serpent to you.]

The prose poems are fragments in many ways.28 The work is not merely serialized in three instalments but the individual prose poems are attuned to the fragmentary logic that governs the daily newspaper: each instalment consists of not one but many individual fragments. The daily paper itself consisted of brief ‘articles’, isolated from each other and included faits divers and advertisements (which at the time took up a large amount of space in the four-page daily paper).29 What Baudelaire suggests is that the order of the prose poems does not signify (even though he had not chosen it lightly)30 — a suggestion that can be read in conjunction with both Les Fleurs du mal and the serial novel. On the one hand, the prose poems f ly in the face of the concept of the work that he was expounding with Les Fleurs du mal, presented not merely as a consistent, unified work but as a collection of verse poems whose order was essential: Baudelaire himself pronounced that ‘il a un commencement et une fin’ [it has a beginning and an end],31 their development approximating a narrative.32 On the other, this extreme fragmentation seems to aim at a parody (or a reductio ad absurdum) of serialization. Baudelaire boasts that his work enacts the fragmentation of the roman-feuilleton more efficiently, and offers ‘admirables commodités’ more suited to the commodified logic of the daily paper, since the instalments are not only temporally detached from each other, but are also totally independent: they are not bound together by the ‘fil interminable d’une intrigue superf lue’. Baudelaire proceeds further by prompting Houssaye to omit pieces that he might not like or to discontinue the publication (as indeed happened, when the intended fourth instalment was rejected) — authorizing him to perform what he had called a ‘ridicule opération chirurgicale’ [ridiculous surgical operation]33 when PouletMalassis had had the condemned poems torn from copies of Les Fleurs du mal, as a way to appease the court with minimum delay. The reader is likewise granted permission to stop reading at whatever point he wishes, as if he were skipping from one newspaper ‘article’ to the next. This permission amounts to a total abdication of the author’s control over his work. With regard to the reader, it means that Baudelaire seems to be accepting the consequences of commodity fetishism: he allows readers to disregard the intentions of the author, since the dissociation of one piece from the rest implies a dissociation of the author from his work, or even, the destruction of the very concept of the work. The publisher, on the other hand, is authorized to intervene and alter the author’s work without consulting him — which, in modern terms, would amount to a waiver of the right of integrity. Even though the latter had not been formulated as such in Baudelaire’s time, unauthorized interventions of publishers were frequently condemned in court and the publisher’s respect for the form in which the work

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was entrusted to him was either safeguarded in contracts or was even considered sometimes to be an implicit term in any contract.34 Baudelaire is thus claiming that he has produced a work that was not only suited to the most commercial medium but also totally amenable to the hostile conditions of the literary marketplace. In short, he seems almost to celebrate the fact that he has subjected his talent to the market. Fragmentation, however, is not the last word of Baudelaire’s dedication, for the work seems to possess a curious unity of its own.35 It is likened to a snake, a metaphor frequently employed to denote the unity of a gripping narrative.36 Balzac, when advertising La Peau de chagrin described his novel as a ‘drame qui serpente, ondule, tournoie, et au courant duquel il faut s’abandonner, comme le dit la très spirituelle épigraphe du livre’ [a winding, undulating, swirling drama to whose current one must abandon himself, as suggested by the very witty epigraph of the book]37 — the epigraph in question being the pictorial representation of the f lourish of Trim’s cane, taken from Tristram Shandy, in which it represents the freedom of the bachelor. Balzac adds the connotation of the snake (which is the shape the epigraph takes, by a singular coincidence, in the posthumous editions of the novel) and interprets it as standing for the fascinating continuity of his narrative. Baudelaire uses the image both to denote the disruption of continuity effected by the practice of serialization (simultaneously introducing the motifs of interruption, cutting and mutilation that are central to the entire collection)38 and to reaffirm the unity of his work. This makeshift and spontaneous unity hints at the impossibility of eradicating the author from his work. Baudelaire’s nonchalance in authorizing the publisher and the reader to ignore him implies that such a gesture is nothing more than an act of bravado: he dares the reader to treat his work as a commodity, confident that the figure of the author, contained in each prose poem, will re-emerge as soon as the reader connects two individual pieces. By appearing to celebrate his subjection to the marketplace, Baudelaire obliquely introduces one of the pervading themes of Le Spleen de Paris, namely, prostitution. The metaphor of the author as prostitute summarizes the contradiction which is illustrated in the dedication. On the one hand, the relation of an author to his work is likened to that of the prostitute to her body, suggesting that the work is an intimate part of the author’s being from which he cannot be dissociated. On the other hand, prostitution implies that even this eminently private part of his being is completely alienable — a radical alienability expressed in Baudelaire’s ‘waiver’ of his authorial rights. The issue of prostitution is explored in the prose poems through both its authorial personae, the poet and the flâneur. By posing the question as to whether poetry can be such when ‘transcribed’ into prose and published in a newspaper, Le Spleen de Paris casts into doubt the ontology of poetry (and of literature in general) when it is reduced to a commodity, and of the author when he is reduced to being a worker. One of the ways in which this questioning is conducted is through the demonstration of the failings of both the poet and the flâneur when confronted with the literary marketplace and the prospect of prostitution: this confrontation takes a different form for each of the two personae. The poet is described in Le Spleen de Paris as associating literary creation and

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privacy: he isolates himself, either in a rural environment or in his garret, dreams of an ideal kind of beauty and shuns the public. The poet fails to safeguard his privacy and this failure is associated with prostitution: his solitary rêveries are interrupted by an invasion of the public into the private (this disruption of privacy being, as I shall show, a form of prostitution); his ideal beauty proves to be less pure than he imagines and he is forced to recognize his dependence on his public. The flâneur, on the other hand, seems to accept these interruptions as necessary conditions of his art, or, at least as unavoidable evils: he abandons his privacy, descends into the marketplace and merges with the urban crowd. This attitude is not seen by the flâneur as tantamount to subjecting himself to the marketplace: in fact, he describes it in ‘Les Foules’ as ‘la sainte prostitution de l’âme’ [the holy prostitution of the soul], taking it to be a special, positive kind of prostitution which consists in a form of the sympathetic imagination and guarantees his superiority; the flâneur is thus depicted as an authorial double. However, the flâneur fails to identify truly with others — a failure that also casts its shadow on the authorial doubles of realist fiction. Prostitution and the Disruption of Privacy J’abandonne mon esprit à tout son libertinage. Je le laisse maître de suivre la première idée sage ou folle qui se présente, comme on voit dans l’allée de Foy nos jeunes dissolus marcher sur les pas d’une courtisane à l’air éventé, au visage riant, à l’œil vif, au nez retroussé, quitter celle-ci pour une autre, les attaquant toutes et ne s’attachant à aucune. Mes pensées, ce sont mes catins.39 [I give my mind license to wander wherever it fancies. I leave it completely free to pursue the first wise or foolish idea that it encounters, just as, on the Allée de Foy, you see our young rakes pursuing a f lighty, smiling, sharp-eyed, snubnosed little tart, abandoning this one to follow that one, trying them all but not settling on any. My thoughts are my tarts.]

The ‘moi’ in Le Neveu de Rameau characterizes his thoughts as prostitutes: the tertium comparationis is both his and their ‘libertinage’; both represent the disorderly freedom of thought and the imagination. The simile sounds much more sinister when employed by Balzac in his ‘Avertissement du “Gars” ’ (1828): ‘cette prostitution de la pensée qu’on nomme: la publication’ [that prostitution of thought they call publi­ cation].40 The merry libertinism of Diderot’s ‘moi’, who presents himself as a client, is transformed into the imposed prostitution of thought by its author-father who occupies the position of the procurer. Publication is equated to the public display of the loss of the Muse’s — doubtful — virginity. Literary creation is con­cep­t ualized as something eminently private — a privacy that is disrupted by publication. The distinction between private and public, creation and the marketplace is the main polarity that structures Balzac’s ‘Avertissement’ — the preface intended for the first version of the novel that would become Les Chouans, provisionally entitled at the time, ‘Le Gars’. Balzac’s conception of publication as a disruption of privacy seems to account for his use of pseudonyms for every text he had previously published, but it also serves as a prelude to the introduction of a new — shortlived — one: Victor Morillon, the alleged author of ‘Le Gars’. Victor Morillon belongs to the type of the solitary genius and, like his subsequent incarnation, Louis

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Lambert, he requires privacy, in order to abandon himself to the gift of second sight that they share: he is described as being able to visualize lives very different from his own, as well as to convince others that he has truly experienced them.41 Balzac attempts to explore the interrelation of the authorial genius and the market through the metaphor of prostitution. The sympathetic imagination is a quality which f lourishes in privacy: Victor isolates himself in places where no sensory stimuli could disturb his inner vision. Publishing texts results in the disruption of this privacy, safeguarded hitherto by the small and familiar audience with which Victor shares his stories. Nevertheless, Victor seems to retain his dignity, since he is not forced to publish in order to survive; he merely indulges his friends. Although publication is designated as prostitution, Victor is presented as simply extending his familiar audience, and as sharing the fruits of his genius; his aim is not monetary gain. Prostitution in the ‘Avertissement’ is still just a vague threat. With Lucien, in Illusions perdues, the metaphor of prostitution takes one significant step forward. It is no longer ‘thought’ or ‘the Muse’ that is prostituted; the author loses the relatively advantageous position of the procurer, only to become himself a prostitute when his involvement in the market exposes both his lack of genius and his inability to manipulate his talent and market himself and his work effectively. The solitary genius, the polar opposite to Lucien, is incarnated in Daniel D’Arthez and the Cénacle: its members constitute an intimate circle, isolated from publicity, and create their work in privacy, scorning commercial success. Lucien, who disregards their advice, soon falls apart without his agent, Vautrin, in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. He proves to be no real poet but a mere literary celebrity, a commodity made to be consumed and disposed of. The increasing demonization of the public, publicity and publication in Balzac provides a useful background for the theme of prostitution in Le Spleen de Paris, where the poet experiences his contact with the marketplace primarily as a disruption of privacy. The Poet and his Failures The poet is repeatedly presented in Le Spleen de Paris as seeking inspiration in solitude and in solitary rêveries, in pursuit of ideal beauty and of the correspondances between nature and himself. However, a number of prose poems dramatize the failure of these activities, a failure which is associated, directly or implicitly, with prostitution. The common romantic myth of isolation and nature as conducive to literary creation is undermined in ‘Le Confiteor de l’artiste’. In the first part of the poem, the narrator, contemplating a seaside landscape, experiences a delightful fusion with nature reminiscent of ‘L’Homme et la mer’ in Les Fleurs du mal (‘toutes ces choses pensent par moi, ou je pense par elles (car dans la grandeur de la rêverie, le moi se perd vite!)’ (SP, 278) [all these things think through me, or I think through them (for in the greatness of reverie, the I is quickly lost)]). In the verse poem, the sea is man’s mirror, even if the ref lection becomes threatening in the last two stanzas; the prose poem is its ref lexive revision: the ‘man’ becomes an artist and the second part of the piece negates the first. While, in the first, nature is a ref lection of the artist’s feelings and an object of imitation, in the second, nature cancels the

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illusion of its correspondence with the narrator’s soul and becomes his rival; rather than portray her, the poet has to compete with her creative power. As the narrator admits, this attempt is doomed. ‘Le Confiteor de l’artiste’ is emblematic of a series of prose poems in which the poet’s identification with his surroundings fails: in ‘Le Fou et la Vénus’, the narrator’s sense of harmony is disrupted by the lamentations of the idealist fool; in ‘Le Gâteau’, ‘une guerre parfaitement fratricide’ (SP, 299) [a perfectly fratricidal war] interrupts the narrator’s sense of correspondances; in ‘L’Horloge’, the poet’s contemplation of eternity is disrupted both by the ‘importun’ who mocks him and by the poet himself who, by renouncing any compensation for his madrigal, recalls the conditions of its production; in ‘Enivrez-vous’, he admits that his escape from time is temporary and depends on inebriation; in ‘Déjà’, proximity to land cancels the narrator’s contemplation of infinity; and in ‘La Soupe et les nuages’, the narrator’s mistress shatters his rêverie by hitting him on the back and calling him a ‘marchand de nuages’ [cloud-monger]. Prose poems set in an urban environment enact more violent forms of interruption, frequently accompanied or expressed by physical blows (coups) reminiscent of the dedication: rêveries are interrupted by the intrusion of trivial reality and the poet’s privacy is brutally disrupted. ‘La Chambre double’ dramatizes the conf lict between the poet and the material conditions of the production of poetry: the ‘public’ invades the ‘private’, designated as the space of creation. The poet’s rêverie consists in an ‘interior’ version of correspondances, though which the room is transformed into a landscape: Les meubles ont l’air de rêver; on les dirait doués d’une vie somnambulique, comme le végétal et le minéral. Les étoffes parlent une langue muette, comme les f leurs, comme les ciels, comme les soleils couchants. (SP, 280) [The furniture appears to be dreaming; one would say that they possess a somnambular life, like vegetables and minerals. The fabrics speak a silent language, like f lowers, like skies, like setting suns]

In this state, ‘l’art défini, l’art positif est un blasphème’ (SP, 280) [definite, positive art is blasphemy], since a work of art, as soon as it is completed, becomes an object to be exchanged, a commodity. The narrator tries to become part of a utopian state dominated by the presence of the Idol but this rêverie is violently interrupted by a knock at his door which introduces a Spectre in the forms of a bailiff, a mistress who forces her trivial demands on him and a publisher’s errand-boy asking for the next instalment of his work. Literature as a product is part of the menacing reality, alongside the diary marking the days on which his debts are protested, or the poverty and disorder of his room. The knock at the door (coup) which discontinues (couper) his creative rêverie and is felt as a physical blow by the narrator (‘un coup de pioche dans l’estomac’ (SP, 281) [a blow to the stomach by a pickaxe]) refers also to the activity of ‘cutting’ or ‘chopping’ the manuscript of Le Spleen de Paris, mentioned in the dedication. The marketplace is shown to interrupt the privacy of creation, to ‘chop’ the poet’s manuscripts into pieces, to assign exchange value to them and also to injure the author physically. In ‘A une heure du matin’, the invasion of the ‘public’ dimension of literary life

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in the ‘private’ space of creation (again the narrator’s room) is not physical but a result of the narrator’s thoughts, and proves equally to hinder creation. The narrator returns late to his quarters and his relief in resuming his privacy (and possibly his work) is soon transformed into a reliving of his day: his recapitulation of his daily wanderings amounts to a summary description of literary life, oscillating from the ignorance of the men of letters and the narrow-mindedness of publishers, to his self-loathing sociability, and the little lies he finds himself forced to tell. His solitude is ‘peopled’ as the ignominy of his dealings poisons his privacy. Instead of trying to write, he merely prays to produce a couple of nice verses, in order to prove himself better than the people he has encountered during the day — a day that will probably repeat itself the following morning. The transformation of the Idol into a Spectre in ‘La Chambre double’ does not merely express the elusiveness of the poet’s Ideal of Beauty but its frequent translation, in Le Spleen de Paris, into a figure associated with prostitution: the narrator’s mistress or the poet himself who has to write for money in order to be able to pay his debts. Beauty is rarely ideal in Le Spleen de Paris: the ideal beauty of the woman described in ‘La Chevelure’ is, as Barbara Johnson has shown, systematically deconstructed in the prose version of the poem;42 the sensitive mistress in ‘La Femme sauvage et la petite maîtresse’ is mirrored in the savage woman; the only unambiguously beautiful woman, ‘La Belle Dorothée’, is gradually shown through the narrator’s less and less subtle hints to be a prostitute, a freed slave who consorts with French officers in order to free her little sister.43 The stranger and the fool (in ‘Le Fou et la Vénus’) are both in search of beauty as ‘déesse et immortelle’ (SP, 277, 284): ‘Laquelle est la vraie’ dramatizes the death of beauty and her substitution by her worldly counterpart. Even if the Muse can be sick (‘La Muse malade’) or prostituted (‘La Muse vénale’) in Les Fleurs du mal, she has not changed essentially: she is still capable of the ideal, but she cannot live off it. In the prose poem, the Muse herself changes. The piece starts by attributing immortal and ideal beauty to Bénédicta ‘qui remplissait l’atmosphère d’idéal et dont les yeux répandait le désir [...] de tout ce qui fait croire à l’immortalité’ (SP, 342) [who filled the air with the ideal and whose eyes spread the desire [...] for everything which makes one believe in immortality]. Bénédicta, however, dies and while the narrator believes her to be dead and buried, her double appears in the form of ‘une fameuse canaille’ [a well-known trollop] who claims to be the real Bénédicta; the poet, unable to renounce his illusion, ends up trapped ‘à la fosse de l’idéal’ (SP, 342) [at the grave of the ideal], which, if the ‘real Bénédicta’ is the living one, is nothing more than a cenotaph. In the world of Le Spleen de Paris, the poet’s ideal is not merely absent but is also undesirable; the public, according to the Journaux intimes is ‘scatophage’44 — a thought expanded on in ‘Le Chien et le f lacon’. In order to dramatize the poet’s interaction with his public, Baudelaire uses the theme of the actor and the theatre; in ‘Le Vieux Saltimbanque’ and ‘Une mort héroïque’, the poet is transformed into a fool or a clown who performs for an undeserving audience. In ‘Une mort héroïque’, Fancioulle is the unsuccessfully rebellious poet who has been condemned to death by the Prince and who is called on to perform

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his swansong and die as a martyr: his performance is ‘une parfaite idéalisation’ (SP, 321), accomplished through Fancioulle’s ability to detach himself from his personal circumstances and to identify so perfectly with his role that his effort to transcend his real self is invisible to his spectators. Fancioulle becomes the perfect Diderotian actor, because he knows how to duplicate himself, to split himself into the performer and the spectator of the performance, as Baudelaire’s theory of ‘le comique absolu’ dictates.45 Fancioulle’s duplication can be seen as a solution to the problem of the artist: since triviality cannot be effaced, the artist performs a split between his private (creative) and his trivial self. He thus attains a transcendental position outside triviality and becomes a disinterested spectator of his own self. Duplication enables Fancioulle to achieve an ideal performance, unhindered by his condemnation to death. The drama played out in ‘Une  mort héroïque’, however, is not Fancioulle’s performance but the Prince’s staging of a Diderotian experiment. The Prince wants to test the limits of Fancioulle’s art, not only by making him perform under the threat of an imminent execution, but also by confronting his ideal performance with the public. By sending his page to the stalls, and by ordering him to masquerade as a member of the audience and whistle disapprovingly, the Prince is responsible for the mightiest instance of the theme of interruption in Le Spleen de Paris; the public invades the private space of the poet and interrupts his ideal rêverie: this interruption, even if not physical, has the result of a physical blow, of the intended decapitation that Fancioulle would have been subjected to in any case. Like Baudelaire, who, in Le Spleen de Paris, makes poetry out of shattering the poet’s ideals, the Prince, ‘véritable artiste lui-même’ (SP, 320) [himself a true artist], stages a play whose subject is the very failure of Fancioulle to outlive his rejection by the audience.46 From the Poet to the Flâneur: ‘Perte d’auréole’ The concluding scene of the poet’s drama is enacted in ‘Perte d’auréole’; the poet finds himself in the midst of the modern city and is transformed into the flâneur:47 the final coup is a mutilation, the loss of his halo. The halo is a transparent symbol of the poet as vates, as inspired creator: Baudelaire had evoked it in its traditional sense in ‘Bénédiction’,48 where the poet’s portrayal as a martyr, who is tortured by his fellow-beings, is counterbalanced by his divine credentials. The halo is still discernible on Fancioulle’s head: ‘une indestructible auréole autour de la tête, auréole invisible pour tous, mais visible pour moi, et où se mêlaient dans un étrange amalgame, les rayons de l’Art et la gloire du Martyre’ (SP, 321) [an indestructible halo around his head, invisible for all but visible to me, which combined, in a strange amalgam, the beams of Art and the glory of Martyrdom]. In ‘Perte d’auréole’, the poet drops his halo when crossing a congested boulevard and exhibits a most un-martyr-like attitude: ‘J’ai jugé moins désagréable de perdre mes insignes que de me faire rompre les os’ (SP, 352) [I decided it is less unpleasant to lose my insignia than to have my bones smashed] — he is evidently not ready to suffer any tortures for his faith.

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The poet seems to greet this transformation with glee: ‘Et puis, me suis-je dit, à quelque chose malheur est bon’ (SP, 352) [And then, I said to myself, every misfortune is for the best]. He savours the permission to wander unrecognized ‘comme les simples mortels’ (SP, 352), like the author of the dedication who welcomes the mutilations inf licted on his work by the publisher and the readers. Unsurprisingly, the place where one finds him after that is a ‘mauvais lieu’ (SP, 352), a brothel. However, like the author of the dedication, who is confident that his work will generate a unity of its own, the narrator’s joy erupts precisely at the moment he is recognized by the anonymous interlocutor; even if he seems to be happily relinquishing his renown, he still believes in a superiority which, while allowing him to mingle with the urban crowd, will also enable him to stand out from it. This feature, which guarantees his superiority and makes him, like Constantin Guys, resemble ‘un prince qui jouit partout de son incognito’ [a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes],49 is the sympathetic imagination. In what follows, I shall explore the way that Baudelaire treats the second authorial persona of Le Spleen de Paris, the flâneur.50 Sympathetic Imagination, Prostitution, and the Flâneur ‘Les Foules’ presents the sympathetic imagination as the flâneur’s main attribute: Le poète jouit de cet incomparable privilège, qu’il peut à sa guise être lui-même et autrui. Comme ces âmes errantes qui cherchent un corps, il entre, quand il veut, dans le personnage de chacun. Pour lui seul, tout est vacant; et si de certaines places paraissent lui être fermées, c’est qu’à ses yeux elles ne valent pas la peine d’être visitées. [...] Celui-là qui épouse facilement la foule connaît des jouissances fiévreuses, dont seront éternellement privés l’égoïste, fermé comme un coffre, et le paresseux, interné comme un mollusque. Il adopte comme siennes toutes les professions, toutes les joies et toutes les misères que la circonstance lui présente. (SP, 290) [The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and somebody else, as he pleases. Like those wandering souls who search for a body, he enters, when he wishes, into anyone’s character. For him alone, everything is vacant; and if certain places appear to be barred to him, it is because in his eyes they are not worth visiting. [...] He who easily espouses the crowd knows feverish joys from which the egoist, closed like a chest, and the slothful man, confined like a mollusk, will be forever excluded from. He adopts all professions, all the joys and the suffering circumstances present him with, as if they were his own.]

As we have seen, duplication is also Fancioulle’s solution. However, unlike Fancioulle, who seeks to place his creative self in the domain of the ideal, the flâneur tries to establish his transcendence within the trivial and prosaic world. He mingles with the urban crowd and identifies himself with it, transforming the urban experience into the creative process. The sympathetic imagination is presented as an art (‘jouir de la foule est un art’ [enjoying the crowd is an art]) and termed ‘la sainte prostitution de l’âme’ (SP, 291). Holy prostitution is presented as a thoroughly positive attribute, which is glossed amply — to the point of contradiction — in

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Baudelaire’s Journaux intimes.51 For Baudelaire, prostitution means duplication of the self, substitution of oneself for somebody else. He thus establishes an equation between different acts of duplication: love and sex (‘Qu’est-ce que l’amour? Le besoin de sortir de soi. [...] Aussi tout amour est-il prostitution’ [What is love? The need to exit ourselves. Therefore, all love is prostitution]),52 artistic creation (‘Qu’est-ce que l’art? Prostitution’ [What is art? Prostitution])53 and the divine act of creation: God is ‘l’être le plus prostitué’ [the most prostituted being] both because he is ‘le réservoir commun, inépuisable de l’amour’ [the common and inexhaustible reservoir of love]54 and because the act of creation is ‘l’unité devenue dualité’ [unity become duality].55 If prostitution is presented as a fusion with the other, as a kind of sacrifice (‘Adorer, c’est se sacrifier et se prostituer’ [To adore is to sacrifice and prostitute oneself ])56 or as the Fall itself (‘la création ne serait-elle pas la chute de Dieu?’ [is not creation the fall of God?]),57 it is also imbued with a certain superiority: L’amour peut dériver d’un sentiment généreux: le goût de la prostitution; mais il est bientôt corrompu par le goût de la propriété. L’amour veut sortir de soi, se confondre avec sa victime, comme le vainqueur avec le vaincu, et cependant conserver des privilèges de conquérant.58 [Love can spring from a generous sentiment: the taste for prostitution; but it is soon corrupted by the taste for property. Love wants to exit itself, to merge with its victim, like the victor with the defeated, yet to preserve the conqueror’s privileges.]

In a similar way, for ‘l’homme de génie’ ‘la gloire, c’est rester un, et se prostituer d’une manière particulière’ [glory is to remain one and prostitute oneself in a special manner].59 This special way of prostituting oneself consists in an oscillation between ‘la vaporisation et [...] la centralisation du Moi’ [the vaporization and [...] the centralization of the I]60 — an oscillation which triggers a feeling of ‘ivresse’ (‘Ivresse religieuse des grandes villes. — Panthéisme. Moi, c’est tous; tous, c’est moi’ [Religious intoxication of big cities. — Pantheism. I am everyone; everyone is I]),61 the highest expression of which is the experience of the urban crowd: ‘Le plaisir d’être dans les foules est une expression mystérieuse de la jouissance de la multiplication du nombre’ [The pleasure of being amidst the crowds is a mysterious instance of the joy of the multiplication of the number].62 Baudelaire, therefore, describes the flâneur as an authorial double: like Balzac’s authorial double, he is a creator, who obtains ‘jouissances intellectuelles’ through his sympathetic identification with others — a process explicitly designated as tantamount to the creative process. Through his ironic oscillation between himself and others, or between involvement and detachment, he reaffirms his epistemological superiority over the urban crowd, which is the material he transforms into literature: like the Balzacian author, he ‘invent[e] le vrai’.63 This attitude parallels the oscillation between renunciation and self-assertion discerned in the dedication. The phrase ‘la sainte prostitution de l’âme’ owes its positive meaning to two implicit juxtapositions which distinguish the flâneur from a common prostitute. On the one hand, ‘la sainte prostitution’ refers arguably to the religious practice of

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sacred prostitution64 and is distinguished from the vulgar, ‘commercial’ kind: the author is presented as a kind of priest, or a vates. On the other, ‘la prostitution de l’âme’ is a metaphor to be understood in contradistinction to the prostitution of the body. However, the description of the flâneur and of ‘la sainte prostitution de l’âme’ in ‘Les Foules’, while suppressing commercial prostitution, cannot help evoking it at the same time: ‘la prostitution de l’âme’ recalls Balzac’s ‘prostitution de la pensée’. Indeed, Walter Benjamin remarks with reference to the passage from ‘Les Foules’ quoted above that ‘the commodity itself is the speaker here’: If the soul of the commodity which Marx occasionally mentions in jest existed, it would be the most empathetic ever encountered in the realm of souls, for it would have to see in everyone the buyer into whose hand and house it wants to nestle.65

Benjamin’s reading of the passage sketches a different relation with the crowd than the one ‘Les Foules’ explicitly describes: if the flâneur is taken to be the Protean artist, the crowd in which he freely circulates is his subject-matter: it is the material that he creatively transforms into art. If, in view of Benjamin’s comment, he is taken to be the commodified, prostituted author, the crowd can be seen as his public, his audience, or his ‘clients’. Such an interpretation of the crowd is explicit in ‘Le Vieux Saltimbanque’: the urban crowd is, literally, the dismissive audience of the clown and, in the allegory the narrator suggests, it is the unappreciative public of the aged man of letters. Moreover, ‘la foule’ enjoyed currency precisely in the sense of the uninitiated, undiscerning, unappreciative or even vulgar public — a usage to which Baudelaire’s own critical texts frequently bear witness.66 In this context, the difference between the flâneur as Protean author and as prostitute, or between the crowd as his subject-matter and as his public rests on the sympathetic imagination. If the flâneur can prostitute himself in a ‘special manner’, that is, if he can become a plural individual by identifying with the people he observes and by gaining an insight into them, the crowd is (as in Hoffmann’s and Balzac’s case) the starting point for his art. If, by contrast, he cannot adopt ‘comme siennes toutes les professions, toutes les joies et toutes les misères que la circonstance lui présente’, his attempt to ‘épous[er] [...] la foule’ is indistinguishable from common prostitution. It therefore remains to be seen whether the flâneur, as presented in the prose poems which depict acts of sympathetic imagination, is equal to the task set for the author in ‘Les Foules’ and the Journaux intimes. The occasional moral stupidity of the flâneur has often been noticed: a frequently invoked example is ‘Les Yeux des pauvres’. The narrator and his mistress are sitting in a luxurious café, watched by a poor family; after ‘reading’ the faces of the family and explaining their expression as aesthetic admiration directed towards the lavishly decorated café, he turns to his mistress’s eyes ‘pour y lire [s]a pensée’ (SP, 319) [to read [his] thoughts in them], certain of their agreement in everything (‘nous nous étions bien promis que toutes nos pensées nous seraient communes à l’un et à l’autre, et que nos deux âmes désormais n’en feraient plus qu’une’ (SP, 318) [we had promised each other that we would share all our thoughts and that henceforth our two souls would be but one]). However, he discovers that she is extremely annoyed by the needy gaze of the poor. His misunderstanding is double: on the one hand,

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he fails to decipher the minds of the family, who are possibly hungry and envy the couple’s refreshments. On the other, he is unable to penetrate into the mind of his mistress, whose reaction (potentially provoked by the guilt caused by the eyes of the poor)67 seems to have been generated by a much more acute ‘reading’ of the onlookers’ minds. A similar kind of blindness is exemplified in ‘La Corde’: the narrator begins by lamenting the shattering of his belief in the idea of maternal love: his illusion vanishes when he realizes that the mother of the boy whom he has hired as a model and who has committed suicide after having been rebuked by the painter, cherishes the rope used by the boy to hang himself for its commercial value. What, however, proves to be an illusion is the painter’s confidence in his sympathetic imagination: he boasts of his observational powers and of his ability to transform the boy into symbolic, allegorical or mythological figures. Nevertheless, what he essentially lacks is insight into the boy’s real nature: the boy is evidently of an ‘artistic’ temperament (endowed with an appetite for luxury, sensual pleasure, spleen, a tendency to drink) which, as an artist, the narrator might have easily recognized. He shudders at the mother’s insensibility and cannot see that he has been using the boy for the same purpose: a cheap model for his paintings, from which he earns his living. He is thus trapped in his own illusions: he is unable to see ‘le fait réel’ [the real thing] and transform it into art, while at the same time he is blind to the commercial aspect of his art and to the similarities between his own attitude and that of the mother.68 While in ‘La Corde’ the painter is unaware of his illusions, of his tendency to idealize and aestheticize reality, the narrator of ‘Les Fenêtres’ takes a ref lexive turn on the same subject: he poses the question of the correspondence between reality and the artist’s insight into it. The observer boasts of his sympathetic imagination: Avec son visage, avec son vêtement, avec son geste, avec presque rien, j’ai refait l’histoire de cette femme, ou plutôt sa légende, et quelquefois je me la raconte à moi-même en pleurant. Si c’eût été un pauvre vieux homme, j’aurais refait la sienne tout aussi aisément. (SP, 339) [With her face, her clothes, her gestures, with almost nothing, I have recreated the story of this woman, or, rather, her legend, and sometimes I tell it to myself and weep. If it had been a poor old man, I would as easily have recreated his story, too.]

The narrator employs the metonymic process observed in Hoffmann and Balzac which leads from the external traits of the person observed to the construction of a life-story.69 The poem is doubly ironic. Firstly, the exaggeration and the arrogance with which the narrator emphasizes the ‘avec presque rien’ and his indifference regarding the sex of the object of his observation evince a suspect self-confidence which prepares the ref lexive turn. Secondly, the narrator constructs not exactly the woman’s life-story, but, as he hastens to correct himself, ‘plutôt sa légende’. ‘Légende’ means also caption, the epigraph that accompanies a painting or — more suitably, in this case — a caricature.70 In this sense, the window is transformed into a frame, the old woman is seen as a framed picture, and accorded another

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meaning, in a manner that reverses the metonymic process: while Hoffmann and Balzac proceed from general to more individual traits and then to the essence of a character, Baudelaire here moves towards even greater generality. Instead of discerning the individuality of the old woman, the narrator renders her a symbol of suffering mankind or of old age. It would be unfair to ascribe no awareness of the irony in question to the narrator:71 ‘Et je me couche, fier d’avoir vécu et souffert dans d’autres que moi’ (SP, 339) [And I go to bed, proud of having lived and suffered through others beside myself ]. He is self-sarcastic and seems to be conscious of his illusion. Indeed: Peut-être me direz-vous: ‘Es-tu sûr que cette légende soit la vraie?’ Qu’importe ce que peut être la réalité placée hors de moi, si elle m’a aidé à vivre, à sentir que je suis et ce que je suis? (SP, 339) [You may ask me: ‘Are you sure that this legend is true?’ What does it matter what the reality outside myself might be, if it has helped me live, feel that I am and what I am?]

The cognitive quality of Balzacian sympathetic imagination is lost here; instead of being the sole mode of knowing another being as a subject rather than an object, it is reduced to a — dubious — means of introspection, ceases to be part of a process of duplication and identification, amounting eventually to solipsism, for which the old woman is a mere pretext.72 These three examples show that the flâneur in Le Spleen de Paris does not seem to prostitute himself in any special manner: his superiority over the crowd is groundless, since he can never really become two even for a brief time. If the flâneur does not really possess the faculty of the sympathetic imagination, his wanderings amidst the crowd make him resemble the Benjaminian commodity; if he cannot treat the crowd as his subject-matter, if he has no special insight into it, he confronts it as his audience. Rather than being a superior individual who can enter a brothel incognito, like the narrator of ‘Perte d’auréole’, he cannot be recognized, he does not stand out because he has become an indistinguishable member of the crowd. This change of attitude towards the crowd can be read into a text that, although not written by Baudelaire, was appropriated by him in multiple ways: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’. ‘L’Homme des foules’ ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840) is a tale that seems to have generated or at least helped to crystallize certain of the themes discussed above, having been translated by Baudelaire in 1855, before he wrote most of his prose poems. Baudelaire claimed that his resemblance to Poe extended to the point of having the same thoughts or even writing sentences that he afterwards found word for word in Poe.73 In this sense, I shall read ‘L’Homme des foules’ as if it were part of Baudelaire’s work, arguing that it can be viewed as summarizing the failure of the flâneur and of the sympathetic imagination, as well as the ambiguous relation to the crowd depicted in Le Spleen de Paris. Baudelaire seems to have read Poe not merely as a late version of the Gothic

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but also in a ref lexive way: in ‘Laquelle est la vraie?’, he takes up what is for Poe ‘le plus poétique sujet du monde’, ‘la mort d’une belle femme’,74 treated by Poe in a series of tales. ‘Berenice’ (1835), ‘Morella’ (1835), ‘Ligeia’ (1838) and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839) present the dead woman as returning from the grave or as changing character and becoming an altogether different person; these seemingly supernatural events are filtered through narrators (or, in the case of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, a character) whose mental state is distinctly unstable to the point of being unreliable. Baudelaire transforms this theme into the death of the Ideal and of Poetry; his title and the narrator’s self-questioning suggest his unreliability; Bénédicta’s death might have been his own fantasy and her ideal former self only a delusion, similar to that of the narrators of Poe’s tales. This seems also to be the case with ‘The Man of the Crowd’: in his first mention of the tale, in Edgar Allan Poe, sa vie et ses ouvrages (1852), Baudelaire comments on its fantastic character — a fantastic ‘à la manière d’Hoffmann’, ‘moulé sur nature’ [in the manner of Hoffmann, modeled on nature], not necessarily supernatural. In this first mention, ‘l’homme des foules’, who ‘se plonge sans cesse au sein de la foule’ [plunges incessantly into the crowd] and ‘nage avec délices dans l’océan humain’ [delights in swimming in the human ocean] is the old man whom the narrator (not mentioned at all by Baudelaire) follows; Baudelaire’s question as to whether the old man is a criminal or ‘un imbécile qui ne peut pas se supporter lui-même’ [an imbecile who cannot stand himself ]75 (an option not offered by Poe’s narrator who is convinced of the old man’s guilt) seems to imply lack of confidence in the narrator. The second mention of the tale occurs in Le Peintre de la vie moderne, written at the same period as Le Spleen de Paris (1859–61) and published in 1863: the section is entitled ‘L’Artiste, homme du monde, homme des foules et enfant’ and, in summarizing the tale, Baudelaire merely mentions the old man as the object of the narrator’s curiosity; it is now the narrator who ‘contemplant la foule avec jouissance, [...] aspire avec délices tous les germes et tous les eff luves de la vie’ [is enjoying the sight of the passing crowd, [...] breathes in with delight all the spores and odours of life]. As the title already suggests, it is the narrator who is ‘l’homme des foules’76 and who is taken by Baudelaire to be an artist; his ‘curiosité [...] fatale, irrésistible’77 is that of the flâneur; Constantin Guys is termed a flâneur and his attitude towards the crowd is identical to ‘la sainte prostitution de l’âme’ in ‘Les Foules’. Poe’s tale relates the story of the anonymous narrator, who, having just recovered from an illness, finds himself in a mood of heightened perception. In search of a diversion in a London coffee-house, he analyses the appearance of the passers-by: he sorts them into categories by class, profession or behaviour and ‘reads’ their life-stories at a single glance. He then notices an old man whom he is unable to classify. Convinced that he is the incarnation of evil, a criminal, he pursues him for twenty-four hours in London, following him as the latter apparently does not want to be alone and wanders in the crowded spots of the city. Finally, exasperated, the narrator turns to face him for the first time but the old man fails to acknowledge his presence. The crux of the tale’s interpretation is the question of the narrator’s reliability. His convalescent state which dictates ‘a calm but inquisitive interest in everything’78

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already suggests a similarity with the distorting attention to details attributed to Usher and the narrator of ‘Berenice’. The tale has been read as another treatment of the theme of the double by Poe, as another version of ‘William Wilson’ (1839): the old man has been interpreted as a mere alter ego of the narrator on whom the latter projects his baser self. Poe’s text does not exclude such a reading and provides clues which consolidate the doubts regarding the narrator’s reliability, although not necessarily to the extent of questioning the old man’s existence altogether: it is what the narrator observes that seems to clash with his deductions. Benjamin reads this tale as ‘the X-ray picture of a detective story. In it, the drapery represented by crime has disappeared. The mere armature has remained: the pursuer, the crowd and an unknown man’.79 The absence of palpable evidence for a crime and the paucity and inaccuracy of the details observed by the narrator (Baudelaire’s ‘avec presque rien’) that lead the latter to decide that the old man is a criminal undermine the narrator’s reliability. The old man may be merely a ‘besotted vagrant’80 or a harmless passerby, possibly drunk, frightened by the narrator who is stalking him.81 Such a reading does not adequately explain the final scene where the old man fails to notice the narrator. Although the old man has been seen as a sort of spectre, what has not been noticed is the spectral quality of the narrator himself. The old man’s failure to notice him suggests that the narrator has somehow vanished. This final ‘disappearance’ could provide the starting point for Baudelaire’s version of the tale, which can be read as dramatizing the status of the author in his relation to the crowd and the loss of the sympathetic imagination. The narrator is a flâneur who believes he possesses the faculty of the sympathetic imagination, an authorial double who engages in ‘la sainte prostitution’; in the first part of the tale, he enters the minds and lives of the people of the crowd, like the narrator of ‘Les Foules’. As in Le Spleen de Paris, he boasts of his observational powers and the clarity of his vision; he treats the crowd as his subject-matter and identifies with it through his sympathetic imagination. The appearance of an individual object of observation, the old man, seems to challenge his penetrative ability. In the first place, he admits that he cannot ‘read’ him; he continues to pursue him and comes up with a ‘reading’ which is not parti­ cularly well-founded. The narrator insists that he observes the old man from behind and — for most of the time — at a certain distance; nevertheless, his descriptions of him presuppose a close view from the front. This incongruity strengthens the suspicion that the narrator imagines more than he observes. He does not merely stalk the old man, but he imitates him, he impersonates the character that he projects onto him: he covers his mouth with a handkerchief and pursues him with inaudible rubber shoes, thus resembling (much more than the old man does) a criminal. By impersonating the old man, the narrator becomes himself a ‘man of the crowd’, an indistinguishable part of it. He admits the loss of the sympathetic imagination and when he turns to face the old man, the latter ignores him. The author ends up as just another member of the crowd, ‘tout semblable à [eux]’ and is not recognized. The dénouement of ‘L’Homme des foules’ can be seen as a dark version of ‘Perte d’auréole’, where the poet pretends to rejoice at the lack of recognition. *

*

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*

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Balzac (as I have shown in Chapter 4) and George Eliot (as I shall argue in the following chapter) employ authorial doubles and the sympathetic imagination to outline a f lattering image for the author as retaining control over his work and his circumstances; both compensate, as it were, for what they conceive as the shortcomings of copyright laws and the restrictions the literary marketplace imposes on them. Baudelaire refuses to project such a compensatory image of the author on the two authorial figures of Le Spleen de Paris: his treatment of the poet demonstrates that severance from the market is an untenable position; in the flâneur, he shows that the belief that the author can fully participate in the marketplace while retaining his sovereignty is also an illusion. By using prostitution as a metaphor for authorship, Baudelaire, on the one hand, describes the relation between author and work as resembling the relation between the prostitute and her body, confirming thus the intimate bond between author and work both Balzac and Eliot postulate. On the other hand, unlike the realists, he does not present this bond as inalienable. While Balzac and Eliot present their authorial doubles as succeeding where actual authors cannot but fail, Baudelaire, by contrast, makes his own success depend on the failure of his authorial figures. Like the Prince in ‘Une  mort héroïque’ who creates a work of art by staging the destruction of Fancioulle, like the author of the dedication who intentionally shatters the unity of his work, Baudelaire produces Le Spleen de Paris by thematizing the impossibility of making poetry in the literary marketplace.

C h ap t e r 6

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Daniel Deronda: The Commodity and its Soul In ‘Poetry and Prose, from the Notebook of an Eccentric’ (1846), George Eliot sketches the main character, Macarthy, as an eccentric, who is placed ‘not above, but simply out of, the sphere of his fellow-men’. He possesses ‘a morbid sensitiveness in his feeling of the beautiful’ which approximates ‘those alleged states of mesmeric lucidity, in which the patient obtains an unenviable cognizance of irregularities, happily imperceptible to us in the ordinary state of our consciousness’. This ‘preternaturally sharpened vision’ weakens his compassion for his fellows and makes him ‘shrink from all organized existences’.1 This combination of the sympathetic imagination and problematized moral sympathy is taken up, thirteen years later, in the character of Latimer, a decided misanthrope. ‘The Lifted Veil’ (1859) portrays an authorial double who neither feels nor is the object of sympathy; the tale is usually read in the context of Eliot’s anxieties over the ‘Liggins affair’: Eliot was forced to reveal her identity when a certain Joseph Liggins claimed to be the author of Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede. Latimer, who apparently seeks in vain the sympathy of others, is taken as an allegory for Eliot, who was afraid that the disclosure of her identity as the ‘fallen’ Marian Evans, the concubine of a married man, George Henry Lewes, would deprive her of the sympathy of her readers. In Chapter 1, I suggested that Latimer does not seek the sympathy of others, but repels it, and that this repulsion is calculated to establish him as a special individual, a poetic genius. In my reading, Latimer still stands for the author but he perceives the reader’s sympathy as a threat. Although the motto attached to the tale simultaneously with Eliot’s signature in 1878 implies that Latimer is intended as an ironic portrait, I shall argue that he represents a real fear, Eliot’s distrust of success and of some of its consequences. ‘The Lifted Veil’ was written in the midst of the enthusiastic reception of Adam Bede as well as of the Liggins affair: the insistence of Liggins’s partisans on the real-life ‘models’ for her fictional characters and on a narrowly defined realism raised in Eliot the fear that wide and spontaneous acceptance of her work failed to appreciate her imaginative power, eliminated the authorial presence in her works, equated them with gossip and made them common property that anyone could appropriate. Such fears about the alienability of her works persisted as late as The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879) and had an impact on the development of her theory

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of sympathy, which culminates in her penultimate book, Daniel Deronda (1876). The presentation of sympathy as a problem in this novel is the last stage of Eliot’s gradually increasing stress on sympathy as the outcome of a conscious effort of the imagination, as opposed to an evident, spontaneous sort of sympathy. The latter (what Eliot called ‘sympathy ready-made’) is seen as a one-sided appropriation of the work by its consumer, which results in the elimination of the author’s presence. In what follows, after sketching brief ly the development of Eliot’s theory of sympathy, I shall read Daniel Deronda as an allegory of the struggle between this commodifying sympathy of the reader and the authorial sympathetic imagination which reaffirms the indissoluble and inalienable bond between author and work. Sympathy as a Problem George Eliot’s belief in sympathy has been seen as becoming complicated, less confident or as dissolving in her late work.2 In her essays, sympathy is the main criterion for the evaluation of art, both as a quality of the author and as the intended effect on the reader: ‘if art does not enlarge our sympathies, it does nothing morally’.3 In her novels, an all-understanding, compassionate narrator locates the characters across a spectrum ranging from egoism to sympathy and relates their moral Bildung towards the latter.4 The eponymous character in Daniel Deronda, however, unlike Gwendolen, is not accused of lacking sympathy; his frequently emphasized defect is rather a surplus of sympathy: His imagination had so wrought itself to the habit of seeing things as they probably appeared to others, that a strong partisanship, unless it were against an immediate oppression, had become an insincerity for him. His plenteous, f lexible sympathy had ended by falling into one current with that ref lexive analysis which tends to neutralize sympathy [...]. A too ref lective and diffusive sympathy was in danger of paralysing in him that indignation against wrong and that selectness of fellowship which are the conditions of moral force.5

Finding fault with ‘too diffusive’ a sympathy seems, at first sight, to be at odds with Eliot’s well-known programmatic aim, expressed in ‘The Natural History of German Life’ (1856): The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.6

This spatial metaphor backfires in Deronda whose ‘f lexibility’ seems to question the limits of sympathy. However, the novel does not seem to challenge the principle of extension per se: the main character’s sympathy for the Jews is, after all, such an extension.7 Deronda’s sympathy is deemed to be a problem because he does not take sides; understanding all points of view makes him unable to act. The problem lies with the deeper reason for this passive impartiality and unwarranted extension: ‘his sensibility to the half-known facts of his parentage made him an excuse for

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lingering longer than others in a state of social neutrality’ (180). Sympathy is for Eliot an organic entity which grows but has to be rooted in a certain medium. It is as a metropolitan bourgeois that the reader of ‘The Natural History of German Life’ is called on to extend his sympathy towards the peasants; the narrator’s regret, in Daniel Deronda, for Gwendolen’s homelessness8 bears witness to the fact that Eliot’s views have not altered considerably in this respect: Pity that Offendene was not the home of Miss Harleth’s childhood, or endeared to her by family memories. A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship [...] for whatever will give that home a familiar, unmistakeable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection [...], may spread not by sentimental effort and ref lection, but as a sweet habit of the blood. At five years old, mortals are not prepared to be citizens of the world, to be stimulated by abstract nouns, to soar above preference into impartiality; and that prejudice in favour of milk with which we blindly begin, is a type of the way body and soul must get nourished at least for a time. (22)

For Eliot, sympathy must be fashioned by the impact of a certain place; it must begin with affectionate prejudice, in order to be able to spread by means of ‘sentimental effort and ref lection’. Deronda’s sympathy is spontaneously universal: since it demands no effort, it is unsuitable for ‘moral action’. This connection between sympathy and its roots, although implicit in her earlier work, becomes an issue only gradually; Eliot initially focuses on societies that she conceives as organic. Even if the concept of organicism and its application are fraught with tensions, as Sally Shuttleworth has shown,9 Eliot’s early characters are firmly located in their community and culture; their initial sympathies are fixed and the duties entailed, the proper ‘moral action’, are evident. There is no confusion for Arthur Donnithorne and Hetty Sorel, in Adam Bede (1859), as to which is the right course of action; their faults are caused by the lack of sympathy, egoism. While Dinah has to choose between marrying Adam and devoting herself to preaching, her choice is naturalized, since it coincides with the prohibition of female preachers by the Methodist community, in a way that makes it inevitable. Maggie, in The Mill on the Floss (1860), although at odds with her community, accepts the duties imposed on her and strives to fulfil them, when she can control herself. Silas Marner, the first uprooted character in Eliot’s fiction, acclimatizes himself, if belatedly, in a natural way, through the inf luence of Eppie, to his community. When Eliot moves, in Romola (1862–63) and Felix Holt (1866), to the depiction of societies which, even if not decentred, have lost the organic harmony of Adam Bede, the connection between sympathy and its roots becomes explicit and characters, lacking self-evident duties, have to choose consciously the kind of life they are to lead. Romola, unlike Maggie, is not rebellious by nature and performs her duties to her father admirably; when faced with Tito’s disloyalty, she submits to the broader duties dictated by Savonarola. Her choice, however, is highly personal: in an attitude projecting Eliot’s combination of her atheist religion of humanity with the observance of long-venerated forms of behaviour, she follows his lead without becoming a convert and clings to his teachings even when he proves to

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be disappointing. Felix Holt not only chooses to sympathize with the working class, disregarding his middle-class education and the associated prospects, but by impersonating the leader of the election riot and by inadvertently killing a policeman, he accepts responsibility for a far from evident choice. Esther, in Felix Holt, also has to choose between an aristocratic life that is hers by right of birth and the humble life and duties in which she finds that she really belongs; the narrative dwells on the difficulty of her decision, foreshadowing thus an additional complication in Eliot’s late theory of sympathy which acquires full proportions in Middlemarch (1871–72): sympathy may be bestowed in the wrong quarters, even if consciously and conscientiously given; while Esther’s choice to marry Harold Transome would have been dictated by egoism and would have aimed at self-gratification, Dorothea’s choice of Casaubon is apparently and sincerely self-sacrificial. What Eliot explores in Middlemarch is the coexistence of egoism and sympathy; caricatured in Bulstrode’s belief that his egoistic and criminal acts aim to keep him active as the tool of God’s sympathy, the (un)conscious use of sympathy as an excuse for egoism, is also present in Dorothea. Although the latter believes that she marries Casaubon in order to assist a great man in his life’s work, she realizes that her motive is self-glorification and that she is incapable of accounting for her husband’s ‘equivalent centre of self ’.10 Sympathy, throughout Eliot’s work, is firmly associated with belonging to a certain community and possessing a certain identity (themes which are ubiquitous, in more than one way, in Daniel Deronda); duties gradually become less and less selfevident and sympathy is associated with a prior moral commitment that the indi­ vidual is supposed to make consciously. This is precisely what Deronda longs for: the inf luence that would justify partiality and make him what he longed to be yet was unable to make himself — an organic part of social life, instead of roaming in it like a yearning disembodied spirit, stirred with a vague social passion, but without fixed local habitation to render fellowship real. (365)

In this context, the extension of Deronda’s sympathy is not a problem per se; the development of Eliot’s theory of sympathy consists in the move from ‘ready-made’ sympathy, self-evident duties springing from one’s commitment to a place and a culture, towards what she called ‘sentimental effort’, a conscious choice of duties in societies which are no longer organic.11 While, in Middlemarch, she illustrates wrong choices made by unconscious egoism, in Daniel Deronda she insists on the inability of a self less character to decide. Deronda’s sympathy expands to an unprecedented degree because he cannot decide; indecision is not a problem as such — it becomes one on the grounds of its belatedness and duration. The problem lies more in the cause and the effects of this postponement: the ‘all-presupposing fact’ (7) is Deronda’s imperfect sense of belonging, his homelessness, his orphan state; the outcome is his availability. Deronda and the Commodity Deronda’s availability, when it comes to the needs of others, is the object of a wellmeant caricature sketched by Hans Meyrick:

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‘But Mr Hans said yesterday that you thought so much of others you hardly wanted anything for yourself. He told us a wonderful story of Bouddha giving himself to the famished tigress to save her and her little ones from starving. And he said you were like Bouddha. That is what we all imagine of you.’ ‘Pray don’t imagine that,’ said Deronda, who had lately been finding such suppositions rather exasperating. ‘Even if it were true that I thought so much of others, it would not follow that I had no wants for myself. When Bouddha let the tigress eat him he might have been very hungry himself.’ (465–66)

Most of Deronda’s friends and acquaintances, even the most self less character next to Deronda himself, Mirah, seem, almost literally, to consume him: Deronda’s situation, prior to his meeting Mordecai, when ‘such suppositions’ begin to annoy him, can be read as an allegory of commodity fetishism. While in Balzac the fear of alienability, of the work detaching itself from its author and becoming appropriated by the public, was counteracted by the incorporation of authorial doubles who are presented as possessing full control over their ‘creatures’, Eliot, in thematizing the same fear, opts for a more dramatic form of presentation: instead of representing the indissoluble bond between author and work from the beginning, she postpones the appearance of the authorial double, Mordecai, revealing his significance only gradually, and she begins her novel by presenting the predicament of the commodified work. Deronda shares two main qualities with the commodity: his orphan state and his availability. Like the commodity, which, in entering the marketplace in order to be exchanged, is severed from its producer, Deronda is an orphan:12 he is taken away from his parents; his father is dead, while his mother exchanges him for her freedom; he and everyone else, with the exception of Sir Hugo, are completely unaware of his Jewish origins. This separation is not merely spatial: like the commodity, which bears no mark of its origins and cannot be traced back to its producer, Deronda possesses no distinctive feature of his parentage. Indeed, he is presented as a literally nondescript man: the details provided on the physical appearance of the main character of the novel are remarkably few; the narrator’s most frequent strategy is to feign to describe his external traits but eventually evade description by stressing the moral qualities his features imply13 — what Henry James’s Pulcheria perversely called the author’s ‘pusillanimity’ in the treatment of Deronda’s nose.14 This physical indeterminacy matches his psychological description, which is again too vague: his main characteristic is, as mentioned, ‘too diffusive’ a sympathy. Like the commodity, which, severed from its origins, is able to envisage a multiplicity of destinations in its various consumers, Deronda is available to cater to the needs of anyone who claims him. His extensive sympathy is analogous to the ‘empathy’ attributed by Walter Benjamin to the commodity in the passage I have already quoted in reference to Baudelaire’s ‘Les Foules’: If the soul of the commodity which Marx occasionally mentions in jest existed, it would be the most empathetic ever encountered in the realm of souls, for it would have to see in everyone the buyer into whose hand and house it wants to nestle.15

Deronda’s availability and dissolving sense of self is aptly expressed by Sir Hugo:

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Daniel Deronda And, my dear boy, it is good to be unselfish and generous; but don’t carry that too far. It will not do to give yourself to be melted down for the benefit of the tallow-trade. You must know where to find yourself. (183–84)

Although Deronda, as a child, winces at the idea of his obvious commodification when he declines Sir Hugo’s — quite innocent — suggestion that he might like to be a singer, on the grounds that people ‘would not care about him except as a wonderful toy’ (170), it takes him a long time to realize that the life he is actually leading is not that different. Prior to his meeting Mordecai, he exists almost exclusively in his relation to others, taken for granted as a listener, a helper, a saviour, or a mentor, without his protégés ever realizing that he might have a life apart from them or ‘an equivalent centre of self ’: if Deronda is presented as the commodified work, the rest of the characters are his consumers, the readers whose ‘ready-made sympathy’ is challenged when Deronda discovers his identity. Although dissatisfied with ‘such suppositions’ by the middle of the novel, Deronda has been more or less consciously cultivating such an attitude. He is unable, even as a boy, to form mutual friendships, since, being extremely unwilling to expose his private situation, he cannot reciprocate his friends’ confessions (173): he compensates for this lack of confidence in others by means of a reserve combined with an impersonal, general sympathy, by becoming useful to them. His relation with his best friend is telling: in Cambridge, he coaches Hans to get a scholarship and fails his own exam. This sets the pattern for their relationship: even though Hans frequently talks about himself to Deronda, he ‘had never cared for any detail in return, and, if he chanced to know any, had soon forgotten it’ (463–64). Thus, when Hans finds himself in love with Mirah, he assumes that ‘for any danger of rivalry or jealousy in relation to Mirah, Deronda was as much out of the question as the angel Gabriel’ (464). Sir Hugo’s remarks often emphasize that pattern of relation, conveying it through the language of economy: he ‘declared that he would pay money to have such a boy’ (634), when Alcharisi asks him to raise her son; he often thinks that Deronda ‘belongs to [him] in a sort of way’ (322) and that children are ‘a product intended to make life more agreeable to the full-grown’ (715). Even when Deronda is fullgrown himself, he remains a ‘convenience for the family’ (226), ‘ready at [Sir Hugo’s] elbow’ (226) — to the extent that he is almost never at his own quarters but practically lives at Sir Hugo’s house (321), putting himself on hold and running — often rather unwillingly — errands (414, 449, 516, 320–25). Mirah herself becomes aware of Deronda’s other life, only after Gwendolen’s impromptu visit awakens her jealousy, and ‘she could not avoid a new painfully vivid association of his general life with a world away from her own’ (653) to the point that it ‘hurt[s] [her] love for [him]’ (657). The most extensive illustration of this attitude is Gwendolen who ‘never recognized his having any affairs’ (797): Deronda, after his involvement in her fate in Leubronn, is appointed as her confessor and even though most characters in the novel, among whom Grandcourt, Sir Hugo, Hans and Mirah, detect his attraction to Gwendolen, ‘that he should misunderstand her had never entered into her mind’ (448). Gwendolen soon perceives Deronda as a personification of her conscience, an

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objectification of her super-ego: when her marriage to Grandcourt deals a severe blow to her narcissism, she stops looking at her ref lection in the mirror and looks at herself through Deronda’s eyes. His availability is read by Gwendolen in his countenance: His eyes had a peculiarity which had drawn many men into trouble; they were of a dark but mild intensity, which seemed to express a special interest in every one on whom he fixed them, and might easily help to bring on him those claims which ardently sympathetic people are often creating in the minds of those who need help. In mendicant fashion, we make the goodness of others a reason for exorbitant demands on them. That sort of effect was penetrating Gwendolen. (332)

Deronda is not an exception in submitting himself to the claims of others and becoming more often than not an instrument for their wishes; the English world in Daniel Deronda is, as has been frequently remarked, a thoroughly reified world.16 Human relations are depicted as irretrievably commodified, especially in the context of Gwendolen’s encounter with the marriage market. The characters view their mutual relations in terms of possession: they conceive of themselves as either possessing others or possessed by them, as consumers or commodities. Deronda’s availability is thus mirrored in the way other characters, and primarily Gwendolen, let themselves be treated as commodities; this association highlights his oblique and sometime direct relation with prostitution.17 The theme of commodification and prostitution is disseminated in every sector of English life, especially in marriage and art. Characters are or consider themselves to be prostituted when they are treated as instruments, especially in a way that fails to account for their inclinations or their vocation: thus neither marriage nor art are uniformly described as prostituted. For Mirah, the theatre is against her natural inclinations and she associates acting and prostitution even before her father attempts to prostitute her literally; Deronda resents the fact that Mirah is treated, when she performs in public, ‘as if she were an imported commodity disdainfully paid for by the fashionable public’ (558). For Alcharisi and Gwendolen, conversely, it is marriage which feels like prostitution; while Alcharisi is forced to marry, Gwendolen enters willingly, even if half-heartedly, into a mercenary marriage. In this context, the plot of the novel can be seen as consisting in successive instances of acquiring and losing power over others: ‘superiority’, ‘inferiority’, ‘mastery’, ‘coercion’, and ‘submission’ are among the most frequently recurring words in Daniel Deronda. Gwendolen’s story is the fullest illustration of such shifts in power: she begins her life by firmly believing in her superiority; she terrifies her mother, sisters and suitors, and she envisages marriage as a relation of power, in which she would occupy the position of the master (137). At the same time, Gwendolen evinces a penchant for display: she regards places as props for her performances and other people as spectators.18 While she enjoys displaying herself as a commodity and attracting the admiration and desire of others, whenever she becomes conscious that her attitude causes them to make claims on her, she withdraws: despite the fact that she consciously f lirts with Rex, she ‘objected, with a sort of physical repulsion, to being directly made love to’ (70) and, when she realizes that he is about to propose,

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she feels ‘passionately averse from this volunteered love’ (81). Gwendolen’s fear that she might lose her mastery over herself and others, evident in her dislike for marriage or in her dread of becoming a governess, is a kind of ‘agoraphobia’: she is afraid of the marketplace, of becoming a commodity or someone’s possession. At the same time, her sense of mastery is disrupted by ‘fits of spiritual dread’ (63), manifested precisely in a fear of open spaces. Solitude in any wide scene impressed her with an undefined feeling of immeasurable existence aloof from her, in the midst of which she was helplessly incapable of asserting herself. The little astronomy taught her at school used sometimes to set her imagination at work in a way that made her tremble: but always when some one joined her she recovered her indifference to the vastness in which she seemed an exile. (63–64)

The narrator often employs this image in order to convey the blows to her sense of mastery: when it is shaken for the first time by Klesmer criticizing her musical talents, she feels ‘the sudden width of horizon opened round her small musical performance’ (49). The last straw is Deronda announcing that he is getting married and leaving indefinitely for the East: ‘the world seemed getting larger round poor Gwendolen, and she more solitary and helpless in the midst’ (803).19 In this context, Grandcourt presents himself as the least of evils to Gwendolen, since he seems much less eager to possess her: her refusal has to do with his former attachment to Lydia; when the loss of the family fortune forces her to marry him, Grandcourt reveals himself as a tyrant.20 Grandcourt is the undeniable master with an invulnerable belief in his superiority; he treats Gwendolen, Lydia and Lush as commodities he has bought to satisfy his needs21 or rather his need for mastery and possession; he is the consumer par excellence. The quality the narrator associates with this attitude is an insight into his ‘possessions’: If Grandcourt cared to keep anyone under his power he saw them out of the corners of his long narrow eyes, and if they went behind him, he had a constructive process by which he knew what they were doing there. He knew perfectly well where his wife was, and how she was behaving. (412)

This insight into others detects a specific disposition: Not that Grandcourt was without calculation of the intangible effects which were the chief means of mastery; indeed he had a surprising acuteness in detecting that situation of feeling in Gwendolen which made her proud and rebellious spirit dumb and helpless before him. (423–24)

The narrator emphasizes increasingly, as the novel progresses, that Grandcourt’s intuition is partial;22 he is conscious only of Gwendolen’s attempts to defy him; other than that, he is quite blind to any other feelings she may entertain, such as her guilt and remorse on account of Lydia. Grandcourt’s insight is that of the consumer who is interested in others to the extent that they are his possessions; by ignoring the aspects of their personality that seem to be unrelated to his control over them, his partial insight makes him an extreme representative of the consumer: others are mere mirrors in which his image as a master is ref lected. In turning others into instruments serving his needs and in disregarding their feelings, Grandcourt

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highlights the attitude of most of the characters of the novel towards Deronda. Grandcourt in his relation to Gwendolen as well as Gwendolen in her relation to Deronda stand for the readers who approach a work with ‘ready-made sympathy’ and see in it only a f lattering ref lection of themselves. One of the questions with which the novel begins seems to sum up this attitude and present an alternative: ‘Why was the wish to look again felt as coercion and not as a longing in which the whole being consents?’ (7). Deronda responds to the claims of others by being coerced, just as Gwendolen is coerced into submitting to Grandcourt: Gwendolen and the rest of the characters claim Deronda by coercing him to cater to their needs and by disregarding his ‘whole being’. If this attitude is described as the commodifying, partial sympathy of the consumer, the relation of Mordecai with Deronda, since the former accounts for the latter’s ‘whole being’ and ensures his consent, stands for the relation of the author to his work.23 In Search of the Producer Mordecai seems at first sight to claim Deronda in the same way as the rest of the characters: he needs a disciple, a rich Jewish idealist to realize his vision. Mordecai is indeed presented as dominating Deronda, who is drawn to ‘difficult obedience’ (546), especially since he feels an initial repulsion towards Mordecai (387, 501). But it is Deronda’s reactions which obey the pattern of commodification set by his other relations. At first Deronda responds to Mordecai by putting his personal feelings on hold and by trying not to disappoint him: he feels that ‘not meeting his expectations’ (400) in not being a Jew, is ‘humiliating and embarrassing’ (387); he begins, after their two rather brief meetings, to study Hebrew ‘in deference to Mordecai’ (413), who emits ‘a radiation’ which makes him a sort of ‘preternatural’ ‘authority’ (494). In a typical turn of his commodified nature, Deronda, feeling ‘a profound sensibility to a cry from the depths of another soul’ (496) thinks: ‘But some strong relation there must be between me and this man, since he feels it so strongly’ (495). However, this similarity between the attitude of Mordecai and that of other characters towards Deronda is only superficial, since what is essentially different is the way Mordecai approaches him. Unlike Grandcourt or Gwendolen who claim others as commodities, Mordecai claims him as a ‘whole being’; instead of exhibiting a partial insight, he accounts for Deronda’s nature: he guesses that he is a Jew, a discovery that results in making Deronda what he wants to be, ‘an organic part of social life’. Mordecai’s insight is brought into relation, by the narrator, with the concept of second sight:24 unlike Balzac’s second sight which is used exclusively to denote the power of the author’s imagination, second sight in Eliot is a more comprehensive term: There are persons whose yearnings, conceptions — nay, travelled conclusions — continually take the form of images which have a foreshadowing power: the deed they would do starts up before them in complete shape, making a coercive type; the event they hunger for or dread rises into vision with a seed-like growth, feeding itself fast on unnumbered impressions. They are not always the

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Among these, the narrator continues, ‘no doubt there are abject specimens of the visionary’ and Mordecai, although he is in ‘inevitable kinship’ with all these, is a case apart. It is Mordecai’s method that distinguishes him: conscious of his frail health and of his mission, he is characterized by a ‘yearning for transmission’ (472); he conceives of his heir as a man ‘who would have all the elements necessary for sympathy with him, but in an embodiment unlike his own’ (472). He gradually forms an idea of his physical traits by selecting elements from people he observes and from paintings in the National Gallery: His imagination had constructed another man who would be something more ample than the second soul bestowed, according to the notion of the Cabbalists, to help out the insufficient first — who would be a blooming human life, ready to incorporate all that was worthiest in an existence whose visible, palpable part was burning itself fast away. (473)

Mordecai forms a mental image of this ‘expanded, prolonged’ or ‘executive self ’ (473) before he meets Deronda, who ‘seemed to him to realize the long-conceived type’ (479). Mordecai’s second sight is described in terms of the sympathetic imagination:25 his starting point is external reality, he proceeds carefully by selecting his material which his imagination combines into an image which coincides with reality; in Balzac’s terms, he invents the true. Mordecai ‘creates’ the image of a man who already exists: when he meets his ‘work’ in the f lesh, he knows him because he has projected himself onto him. This imaginative process, unlike Gwendolen’s ‘visions’,26 is described in positive, scientific terms. Eliot and Lewes were particularly receptive to the idea that the imagination was a faculty equally important for writers and scientists: Lewes had devoted a large part of his ‘Principles of Literary Success’ (1865) to the subject,27 and Eliot had already described in Middlemarch Lydgate’s views on the scientific imagination, while she referred to her works as ‘experiments in life’.28 This view was more widely shared: the imagination was considered important in many emerging disciplines29 and John Tyndall had devoted one of his popular lectures in 1871 to the role of the imagination in science.30 As George Levine, Sally Shuttleworth and Gillian Beer have shown, Eliot describes both Lydgate and Mordecai as experimental scientists who, rather than transcribing a fixed reality, create experiments: Mordecai, in postulating Deronda’s existence and his Jewish identity, forms a working hypothesis which he gradually verifies through experimentation.31 In this sense, the relation between Mordecai and Deronda is described as the relation between author and work. The Jewish visionary is presented as the author who recovers his commodified work, which has been appropriated by its consumers, and arrests the process of commodification. Mordecai reclaims his work by cancelling the two features Deronda shares with the commodity: his orphan state and his availability. Mordecai does not merely recognize Deronda as a Jew but he also makes him one by educating him in the Jewish tradition. Their meeting marks the point after which Deronda becomes unwilling to ‘lend himself to the

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tallow-trade’, because Mordecai remedies the deeper problem that made Deronda available in the first place. When meeting his mother and Gwendolen in Genoa, his penchant for sympathy is mixed with ‘anger’ (627) and ‘indignation’ (632) and he feels that he is ‘only fulfilling claims’, while ‘his more passionate sympathy was in abeyance’ (688). Through his relation to Mordecai, Deronda finds ‘an added soul’ (745) and both his physical indeterminacy and his self lessness evaporate: instead of being a mirror for others, Deronda is a ‘copy’ (630) of his grandfather, he is able to recognize himself as a Jew and becomes the ‘antitype’ of Mordecai’s ‘visionary image’ (510). In depicting the relation between Mordecai and Deronda as analogous to the relation between author and work, Eliot invokes the metaphors of the pact, paternity and demonic possession, seen at work in Balzac, but in a very different way. Instead of the authorial double binding his creature into a relation of total submission, the roles have been reversed: Deronda has to give his long-awaited consent32 and recognize whole-heartedly Mordecai as his author. The metaphor of paternity is present through the theme of inheritance: Mordecai does not merely assume the role of the father who transmits the Jewish heritage to his son, but he also transmits his mission and, eventually, when he dies, his own soul. His imaginative projection onto Deronda is completed with the assimilation of their souls forever. The metaphor of demonic possession loses the sinister qualities it had in Balzac, and is fused with the Cabbalistic notion of the transmigration of souls: In the doctrine of the Cabbala, souls are born again and again in new bodies till they are perfected and purified, and a soul liberated from a worn-out body may join the fellow-soul that needs it, that they may be perfected together, and their earthly work accomplished. [...] When my long-wandering soul is liberated from this weary body, it will join yours, and its work will be perfected.33 (540)

Although the spirit of Mordecai possesses Deronda forever, this possession is conceptualized in terms of unity and assimilation34 and is also referred to in the novel as a ‘marriage of souls’: the creator and the creation become one, indivisible being and they are described ‘as if they had been two undeclared lovers’ (495). Authorial Property The relation between Mordecai and Deronda and the metaphor of the transmigration of souls, as they have been described above, imply both an authorial model based on paternity and a strong preoccupation with authorial property. The critical literature on Eliot has dismissed both as typically male: Catherine Gallagher suggests prostitution as a female model of authorship in Daniel Deronda and Clare Pettitt has argued that Eliot’s stress on the moral impact and public usefulness of her fiction is a female preoccupation, opposed to the male affirmation of authorial property. Catherine Gallagher has argued that Eliot does not struggle under the debilitating male conception of the author as a father (as Gilbert and Gubar assume) but that, instead of linking authorship with generation, she adopts the female model of prostitution; while the association of authorship with exchange and money liberates her from patriarchal authority, it generates a fear of commercialism, which

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Eliot attempts to combat by stressing the quality of her work and by postulating what Gallagher calls a ‘moral economy’ distinct from the commercial one. This distinction is not clear-cut in Daniel Deronda, in which the association of art with exchange, usury, commodification and prostitution threatens to contaminate Eliot’s moral economy: Eliot’s solution, according to Gallagher, is to separate her moral economy from art altogether: the transmigration of souls that enables Deronda’s moral duty is seen, in this context, as an instance of exchange that is not confused with the exchanges of authorship.35 My reading also suggests that the relation between Mordecai and Deronda is indeed separated from the commercial economy of art. However, I argue that the transmigration of souls is a metaphor for authorship, that it is modelled on paternity, and that the novel dramatizes the tensions between prostitution and paternity. The relation between Mordecai and Deronda is not described in terms of exchange but of inheritance: paternity is opposed to prostitution as an act of merging and selfeffacement which accomplishes the widening of sympathies. Clare Pettitt, on the other hand, argues that, for Victorian women authors, public exposure and property claims were associated with prostitution; married women were, in this respect, in a relatively advantageous position, since they presented themselves to the public with the name of their husband and they could have no personal property: a married woman was legally, until 1883, a feme covert. Unmarried women, like Marian Evans who, as a feme sole, had property rights, felt much more threatened: in order to dissociate themselves from the idea of prostitution, unmarried authors adopted male pseudonyms and, according to Pettitt, they preferred to stress the moral impact of their fiction, rather than their intellectual property.36 Given the additional complications of her relation with Lewes, Eliot was indeed quite happy to pose as a feme covert both in public and in private:37 Marian Evans was not substituted merely by the nom de plume George Eliot but also by Mrs Lewes, as she insisted on being called by her friends.38 However, Eliot clung to her male pseudonym and cultivated a distinct authorial persona, or what Edward Dowden had called, in 1872, ‘George Eliot’s second self ’ which ‘stands at some distance from the primary self, and differs considerably from its fellow’.39 This character was gradually projected onto the real George Eliot creating the myth of the Victorian Sibyl, a moral authority — a myth enforced by publications such as Alexander Main’s Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings (1871).40 Even if Eliot’s public authorial persona was constructed in terms of a public benefactor, stressing the moral impact of her fiction, Eliot was, at the same time, quite protective of her property rights: unlike many of her contemporary authors, she never forfeited her copyrights, assigning them to her publishers only for a few years, and she was one of the first to adopt royalties as a method of payment, thus making the publication of her fiction a joint business venture with John Blackwood.41 In both Gallagher’s and Pettitt’s readings, Eliot’s stress on the public usefulness of her fiction is seen as a way of disengaging herself from the stigma of prostitution that is associated with authorship, either by separating her moral aims from art or by stressing them instead of her intellectual property. By contrast, I argue that Daniel Deronda is evidence that Eliot believed that the moral impact of her fiction

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depended precisely on the recognition of the author and his proprietary relation to his text. The characters’ sympathy for Deronda is tested exactly when he is known to be a Jew, when he is claimed by his father-author, Mordecai. And, as I will show in the last section, it is this connection that aimed also to test the sympathies of the actual readers. Both readings invoke Eliot’s social situation as the mistress of Lewes and the Liggins affair as threatening to compromise the moral impact of her work, by the disclosure of its ‘polluted source’.42 Eliot was particularly secretive on the subject of her authorship and afraid of curious enquirers. The reception of her fiction was indeed temporarily affected by the disclosure of her identity: Charles Mudie, notorious upholder of family values, whose circulating library was one of the main gateways through which novels in book-form reached the public, initially threatened to boycott The Mill on the Floss, on the grounds of the author’s identity.43 The new novel, however, was successful (Eliot received twice the amount she had received for Adam Bede) and the reviewers were favourable and occasionally enthusiastic. Eliot’s anomalous social position was not connected with her fiction: by the time Daniel Deronda was being written, the stability and the duration of her relation with Lewes, even if not approved, was, in some way, respected and, while Marian Evans was a social outcast, her novels were avidly read. Without underestimating the presence of these anxieties in Eliot’s fiction, I would like to suggest the long-lasting impact of another aspect of the Liggins affair, which generated more deep-seated fears whose inf luence can be seen at work in Daniel Deronda and which had to do with the perception of Eliot as an author and with her relation to and presence in her works. When rumours began circulating that George Eliot was a certain Mr Liggins, Eliot and Lewes felt both that it was ‘amusing’ and that she was ‘lucky’44 that this diverted the attention of people who might have suspected who she really was. Her change of attitude has been located at the moment when Liggins was reported to have accepted donations;45 this was certainly annoying both on her own account and because she felt that she was responsible for harming Blackwood’s reputation as a publisher.46 However, her letters reveal that it was not only Liggins’s reputed fraud but another set of claims expounded by Liggins’s partisans which struck home: the closeness of her early fiction to actual life stories. While the discussion of ‘models’ in nineteenth-century realist fiction was not unheard-of, the details with which Eliot was bombarded and her own reaction reveal the extent to which such attacks inf luenced her — especially since some were quite well-founded. The fears raised in George Eliot by the Liggins affair related to a threat other than that of disclosure: the assumptions of Liggins’s partisans questioned her imaginative powers, implied that her parentless work could easily be appropriated by others and explicitly posed a question central to (her) realism: the relation between the novelist’s material and its imaginative reconstruction — issues whose discussion did not stop when the secret of her identity was divulged. It is important to note that the Liggins affair did not start with Joseph Liggins claiming that he was the author of Scenes of Clerical Life; authorship was imputed to him by various people who recognized the factual background of the stories told

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by George Eliot and who were looking for someone who was acquainted with it; when he did not deny it, the ensuing literary gossip led many to support him. Thus, before even Blackwood knew who George Eliot really was, a reviewer of ‘Janet’s Repentance’ suggested that the author is a certain ‘Liggers’.47 Rumours spread fast, articles and letters were published in journals and newspapers (among which The Times), which prompted denials by Blackwood and George Eliot. However, what raised Eliot’s fears the most were two things. Firstly, the people who — quite justifiably — recognized themselves or their family in Eliot’s characters: in his letter to Blackwood, William Pitman Jones recognized Tryan as his brother and wondered ‘who could have [...] revived what should have been buried in oblivion’;48 Charles Newdigate, the nephew of Robert Evans’s employer, asserted that Oldinport was his grandfather;49 John Gwyther in letters to his friends and to Blackwood identified Amos Barton’s model as himself, revealing also the models for the Dempsters, Gilfil and Katerina, greatly regretting the liberties taken by the author of Scenes of Clerical Life in exposing stories of people who were still alive.50 Such claims began to circulate prompting Liggins’s supporters to bring forward other more or less well-founded claims on the supposed models of characters and places — a process rekindled by the publication of Adam Bede. Finally, it was Eliot’s brother himself who recognized their father in Adam.51 Secondly, the multiple suppositions as to the authorship of Scenes of Clerical Life: Newdigate was sure that Liggins was the author and had written to him urging him to reveal himself;52 Gwyther suggested two possible authors, Liggins and a Reverend W. H. King;53 Isaac Evans suggested his own sister. Some of these people, such as Newdigate, seemed to believe that it was the closeness of the stories to reality that dictated the use of a pseudonym — and this was the criterion for the attribution of authorship in the first place. All this suggested to Eliot that her work could have been written by anyone who knew the stories — or, simply, by anyone: Elizabeth Gaskell was delighted to hear that many people believed Adam Bede was hers and addressed (through Blackwood) a letter to ‘Mr Elliott’, expressing her joy.54 Eliot was not amused by all these suppositions: she resolved to defend herself against the assumption that her stories were too close to their originals and that they could have been written by anyone who was acquainted with them: even after the disclosure of her identity, she was afraid that her imaginative intervention was not recognized. When the suppositions still lacked precision, she insisted that the similarities ‘in outward circumstances’ are ‘vague’, that any correspondence originated in ‘childish recollections’ and in an ‘imperfect knowledge’ of the facts: she did not admit that there were any definite portraits in Scenes of Clerical Life, especially in ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story’.55 More specific disclosures forced her to admit, eventually, that there were two portraits in her stories, Amos and Dempster,56 but she refused any connection of Adam Bede with real-life models announcing: ‘nor will there be [portraits] in any future book of mine’.57 Her main line of defence was to invoke the nature of the author’s imagination: she repeatedly insisted on the fact that the author combines ‘widely sundered portions of experience’;58 Lewes’s response to Charles Holte Bracebridge talked of ‘creations out of combinations of varied experience’,59 while in her response to Gwyther,

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where she could not claim that she had not used his story, Eliot insisted on ‘the large amount of arbitrary, imaginative addition’.60 This theory of the imagination is parallel to the one propounded by Lewes in ‘The Principles of Literary Success’ and its echo can be seen in the way Mordecai composes Deronda’s portrait out of individual features observed in real life and art. ‘The Lifted Veil’, written during that period, is not unconnected to the pains Eliot takes to establish that her work is not a direct transcription of reality; the Leweses had suggested to Blackwood that it be published with George Eliot’s signature (despite the standard policy of anonymity in Blackwood’s Magazine) as a way of proving that Eliot was not Liggins, it ‘not being likely that L. would write on such a subject’.61 Indeed, the tale contains an improbable and shocking, Poe-like experiment in blood transfusion which seems to have been designed to frustrate the search for ‘portraits’. More importantly, the stress falls on Latimer’s imagination as a visionary faculty and his visions, although corresponding to reality, refer either exclusively to the future, or to places that he has never been to.62 The disclosure of Eliot’s identity and the acceptance by most of Liggins’s partisans of the fact that she had written Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede did not put a stop to the whole affair, which then concentrated exclusively on the issue of sources and material. It triggered another vexing supposition: that Eliot could not have written or, at any rate, had not written her works without help. For those who believed that Adam Bede seemed to have been written by a man, it was Lewes who had co-authored it;63 there were suggestions that Mrs Poyser’s sayings were indebted to people who collected material for Eliot.64 The last stronghold of the Liggins faction, Charles Holte Bracebridge, engaged in a relentless search for sources, which he believed were either collected by Liggins or connected with Eliot’s family history: he hunted down people by the name of Poyser and invoked non-existent journals of Eliot’s Methodist relations as sources for Dinah and Seth.65 At the same time, Eliot received a letter from a reader demanding a sequel about the subsequent fate of Hetty and suggesting the main lines on which the plot should develop: Eliot, amused, cited it in a letter to Blackwood.66 Only six days later, a sequel, Adam Bede Junior, by an anonymous author was announced by the publisher Newby, and Eliot’s and Lewes’s reaction — once more — turned from amusement to indignation and panic: their repeated letters to Blackwood urging him to take action against it annoyed him considerably, especially since he and his lawyers believed that there was little they could do concerning a matter which was not worth dealing with.67 Eliot focused on the fact that the advertisement was phrased in such a way as to imply that the book had been written by George Eliot, and she suggested that if its publication could not be avoided the publisher should at least be prevailed upon to attach a name to it;68 Lewes mentioned to Blackwood that many people seemed to believe that the work was either by Eliot or by Liggins (in both cases a sequel by the same author as Adam Bede).69 Eventually it was another ‘sequel’ that appeared: Seth Bede, ‘The Methody’: His Life and Labours; Chiefly Written by Himself (1859), a short, anonymously published ‘biography’ of Eliot’s Methodist uncle and aunt, purporting to make ‘known the real names and correct history of the family on which the talented authoress of “Adam Bede” founded her tale’70

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— whose versions in Eliot’s novel are pronounced ‘life-like-photographs’ of the originals.71 The Liggins affair, Bracebridge’s search for sources and the sequel issue spanned more than two years, during which Eliot was not only forced to reveal her identity but had to defend herself against assumptions that doubted her creative powers: a large portion of her readers seemed to recognize no personal stamp in her works; her narratives were reduced to mere gossip or, at best, were presumed to be based on a meticulous search for facts and on an exploitation of her family history; as such, they had become common property and could be appropriated by anyone; Liggins had not merely successfully impersonated her but had most possibly also received money from his partisans; the undiscriminating public easily confused her works with those of impostors. Despite the success of Adam Bede, Eliot had become fully aware that works whose origins, like Deronda’s, were obscure could fail to accomplish the moral aims of the author and could be appropriated by the public. Such fears resonate throughout Eliot’s work, as late as The Impressions of Theophrastus Such: her last creation attacks people who ‘[expatiate] on the diffusive nature of intellectual products’ or who uphold ‘those grand laws of the universe in the light of which Mine and Thine disappear and are resolved into Everybody’s or Nobody’s, and one man’s particular obligations to another melt untraceably into the obligations of the earth to the solar system in general’.72 It is in this context that Mordecai’s imagination, his relation to Deronda and the metaphor of the transmigration of souls can be read as allegories of the indelible mark of the author on his works. The admission that the work is an intimate part of the author’s being is not a novel view in the nineteenth century: it goes back at least to the eighteenth century when it was used, as a secondary argument, to support the idea of the author as proprietor.73 In this context, Mordecai’s posthumous survival in his ‘executive self ’ could also be read as an allusion to a standard demand of authors which had not been satisfied with the 1842 Copyright Act: the demand for perpetuity. However, the indissoluble bond between author and work in 1876 can be seen as echoing an issue much-debated during Eliot’s career; the premises on which property in ideas was based and the nature of the relation between a creator and his creation were objects of contention in a branch of intellectual property which was not merely genetically but also conceptually and circumstantially connected to copyright: patents for invention.74 Eliot could not have ignored the patent debate: it lasted for three decades, it was largely reported in the newspapers, and The Times played an important and controversial role in it;75 patent bills were frequently debated in Parliament in the same sessions as copyright bills and authors were either directly involved in or commented on the patent debate in their fiction (among which Dickens’s ‘A Poor Man’s Tale of a Patent’ and Little Dorrit (1857)). The controversy known as the patent debate was the outcome of a long series of demands for the reform of the patent system. The 1851 ‘Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations’ acted as a catalyst: the display of inventions to a large international audience raised the inventors’ and manufacturers’ fears of

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domestic and international piracy. In order to ensure the participation of British inventors, the slow, complicated and costly procedure for the obtaining of patents was temporarily simplified by the Protection of Inventions Act.76 By the time it lapsed and was replaced by the 1852 Patent Law Amendment Act, the debate on patents had shifted its focus from the ways in which the superannuated patent system should be reformed to whether property in ideas should be recognized at all. Between 1852 and 1883, the supporters of the abolition of patents grew stronger and at times seemed to be prevailing.77 The abolitionists advanced two sets of arguments. The practical aspect of the problem consisted in whether patents encouraged invention and contributed to industrial growth: questioning the widely shared assumption that patents, by justly compensating inventors for their labours, were an incentive for invention, the abolitionists argued that patents were merely monopolies which, even if they had proved to be useful in the past, were obstructing the free use of new inventions and slowed the pace of industrial growth. Patents were viewed as incompatible with free trade policies and the abolitionists often invoked countries which did not possess a patent system, arguing that England would soon be unable to compete with them. Their theoretical argument stated, firstly, that property in ideas was not a natural but an artificial right, since ideas are by nature public property. Secondly, questioning the application of the concept of original creation to inventive activity, they distinguished between creation and discovery. Inventors, according to the abolitionists, merely applied ideas that were common property: an invention was not, in their view, a creation of something that did not exist before, but a discovery; it could be invented by anyone who had access to the same body of knowledge; by citing examples of inventions that were made independently by more than one person, they concluded that society should not consider itself indebted to inventors and should not, therefore, assign them rights of property.78 The patent controversy was related to copyright in various ways. Copyright was not only conceptualized initially as a monopoly but the 1710 Statute of Anne had been modelled on patent laws and specified the same fourteen-year term.79 Since then, both authors and inventors were considered to be original creators and they shared the status of genius and popular stereotypes such as the persecuted benefactor of humanity; during the patent debate, authors campaigned in favour of patents and represented their own creativity in terms of invention.80 Most importantly, copyright was explicitly and repeatedly invoked both by the abolitionists and the supporters of patents. While supporters reiterated the old arguments about the inventor as creator and sought to legitimize patents on the grounds of their analogy with copyright, the abolitionists distinguished between the author as creator and the inventor as discoverer: they argued that, unlike inventions which consisted in the application of widely disseminated knowledge and the discovery of novel combinations, literary texts were works that proceeded exclusively from the mind of the author; and while an invention may be conceived and realized by many people, a literary work is a unique creation which can be written by no other than the original author. Although the arguments of the abolitionists failed to accomplish their aims, they

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were not entirely ineffectual: one of the outcomes of the patent debate, according to Sherman and Bently, was a shift of focus in the way property in ideas was conceptualized in the nineteenth century. Prior to the patent debate, the difference between various products of mental labour was determined in terms of the quantity of labour expended: while inventions were a mixture of mental labour and material components, a literary work was conceptualized as almost purely mental labour. It was on such grounds that authors were granted much longer protection than inventors and that a demand for perpetuity could be conceptualized. During the patent debate, the criterion that prevailed was the quality of mental labour: even if patents were not abolished, inventions were considered to be distinct from their maker’s personality, while the idea gained currency81 that ‘a creation of art or literature, a literary or artistic invention, is the man — it is the individual himself; it is the soul, the spirit, the personality of the man who invents it’.82 The terms on which the patent debate rested closely resemble Eliot’s fears at the time of the Liggins affair: like Eliot, whose work was dismembered and considered to consist of identifiable sources, gossip and the unimaginative transcription of widely diffused information, inventors were excluded from the domain of creation on the grounds that their works were merely applications of knowledge that was public property; like an invention that could be claimed by two or more people at the same time, Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede for the greatest part of the public could be attributed to Joseph Liggins; Eliot was not seen as having marked her work with the stamp of her unique genius, like the inventor whose personality was not impressed on his discovery. Eliot herself, in reviewing a novel by Charles Reade in 1856, a few months after her first piece of fiction, ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton’ had been accepted by Blackwood, distinguishes between talent and genius in similar terms: We feel throughout the presence of remarkable talent, which makes effective use of materials, but nowhere of the genius which absorbs material and reproduces it as a living whole, in which you do not admire the ingenuity of the workman, but the vital energy of the producer.83

It is this affirmation of the power of the imagination as a reproduction of a living whole that is described in the relation between Mordecai and Deronda; the metaphor of the transmigration of souls presents the author bequeathing his soul, his ‘vital energy’ to his work. Mordecai is shown to find the orphan Deronda, restore his identity and educate him in the tradition of his forefathers. C. W. Siemens, a proponent of patents, when called as a witness by the 1872 Select Committee entrusted with the task of enquiring into the issue of patents, argued that the inventor should be granted protection as A: [...] the foster-father or protector of an infant, in which light we may regard an idea from which a useful invention may be developed. Q: You look upon the idea as a foundling which has been abandoned, and which is taken up and nourished, and educated by the inventor who is the foster-father? A: Yes, quite so.84

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Daniel Deronda and its Readers Daniel Deronda can be read as an allegory of commodity fetishism: Eliot presents Deronda as the commodified work which has been appropriated by the reading public, since it responds to their ‘ready-made sympathy’, and Mordecai as the author who, by withdrawing his work from the marketplace and by arresting commodification, reclaims his work and reaffirms his indissoluble bond with it.85 Daniel Deronda, however, is not a mere allegory but a novel which is designed to enact this process vis-à-vis its actual readers: it forces them to abandon their readymade sympathy and widen it, and rejects the readers who are unable to do so.86 In one of her ‘Leaves from a Notebook’, ‘Authorship’, Eliot regrets the lack of a ‘regulating principle’ which would specify the difference of authorship ‘from the other bread-winning professions’ and ‘would override the rule of the market’;87 in order to determine the ‘rules of production’, she compares two kinds of manufacturer: the first supplies the public with calicoes as long as they are in demand while the second produces a temporarily fashionable commodity which makes him rich but is coloured with arsenic. While the first is blameless, an author who imitated him would not be: the difference between the calico-manufacturer and the author is that in calicoes, ‘the sameness is desirable’; by contrast, an author must not only be conscious of the fact that he is inf luencing moral taste and that his products should not contain any trace of arsenic, but ‘he must detest bad literature’ and should not ‘force or hurry his production, or even do over again what has already been done, either by himself or by others, so as to render his work no real contribution, for the sake of bringing up his income to the fancy pitch’.88 Unlike repetition in literature, the ‘sameness’ of calico does not ‘nullify [the consumer’s] senses of hearing and touch’ and does not excite a ‘morbid passion for Manchester shirtings’ which ‘makes him still cry “More” ’;89 readers, however, enjoy repetition, especially if it is the repetition of their own views: It is amazing, after the experience we have all had when we have lived a good number of years in the world, that our minds still rush to accept statements and repeat them. [...] On the same ground that an idle woman with f lirtations and f lounces likes to read a French novel because she can imagine herself the heroine, grave people, with opinions, like the most admirable character in a novel to be their mouth-piece.90

Readers are pleased when they find themselves and their opinions ref lected in fiction. This appeal of the commonplace was something against which Eliot was set from the beginning of her career: in the passage from ‘The Natural History of German Life’ cited above, it is stated that ‘appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity’; this is why Eliot’s own success raised in her the fear that she was providing for such a ready-made sympathy: Neither you [Blackwood] nor I calculated on half such a success, thinking that the book was too quiet and too unf lattering to dominant fashions ever to be very popular. I hope that opinion of ours is a guarantee that there is nothing hollow

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Eliot’s concern about her own imaginative powers and self-repetition was never laid at rest. Her reviewers, even when praising her moral conceptions and hailing her as one of the greatest authors of the age, often remarked that one of her faults was that she tended to return to the same types of characters and that she had difficulties in coming up with plots:92 her plots had ‘always been artificial — clumsily artificial’,93 as Henry James had remarked in his review of Felix Holt. Since Adam Bede, Eliot had resolved not to repeat herself: she was apparently tempted to provide a sequel about the extremely popular Poyser family but soon dismissed the idea.94 Her concern with self-repetition is expressed by Gwendolen, in a sarcastic comment aimed at the ‘authoress’, Mrs Arrowpoint (a caricature of the ‘lady novelist’): ‘I would like to differ from everybody; I think it is so stupid to agree. That is the worst of writing your opinions; you make people agree with you’ (46). Especially after Romola,95 Eliot seemed to want to produce novels that would not attract the ready-made sympathy of the readers of Adam Bede — an attitude which culminates in Daniel Deronda. One of the reviewers, R. E. Francillon, put his finger on the novel’s intentions when he remarked that the disappointment of the public in Daniel Deronda lay in the fact that it was not another Adam Bede and that the reader could not find in it an image of himself or his friends; it was ‘a first book by a new author and must be judged accordingly’.96 By refusing to repeat herself in Daniel Deronda, Eliot chooses to force her reader to make an imaginative effort and transcend his ready-made sympathies: If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally. [...] the only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.97

Eliot was conscious, while she was writing the novel, that her aim involved the disagreement of readers: ‘the Jewish element [is] likely to satisfy nobody’; she regrets the fact that the public will prefer Disraeli’s Sidonia to Mordecai; in a letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe, she confesses that she ‘expected more aversion than [she] ha[s] found’.98 In Daniel Deronda, Eliot departs from many of the norms of her fiction: she moves from the English provinces to the metropolis, from the middle class to the aristocracy, she transcends the national limits and, most importantly, she takes up the Jewish subject. Her novelty does not consist in tackling the Jewish issue, nor in presenting non-stereotypical Jewish characters (Dickens had already done that in Our Mutual Friend (1864–65) with Mr Riah), but in assigning to Jewish characters the status of protagonists in the novel of a non-Jewish author and in invoking, in the case of Deronda, a sensitive issue, the fear of the ‘hidden Jew’.99 Eliot’s strategy was to offer a vague, sympathizing character who would attract the ready-made sympathy not merely of the characters of the novel, but also of

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its readers: given the mode of publication (in eight monthly parts), readers were supposed to sympathize with the Jewish nation gradually, through Deronda’s own sympathy and through the eventual discovery that the character with whom they were identifying all along was himself a Jew. Eliot’s anxiety over whether she might be carrying her plan a little too far is evident in the novel: ‘Perhaps it was his [Deronda’s] weakness to be afraid of seeming straitlaced, and turning himself into a sort of diagram instead of a growth which can exercise the guiding attraction of fellowship’ (524). The character’s fears betray those of the author: the passage occurs in the chapter preceding the one in which Eliot presents Deronda’s first — not decisively unfavourable — reactions to Mordecai’s plans. The narrator feels obliged to ensure that Deronda still attracts the fellowship of the reader.100 Eliot had predicted that her dénouement would prove to be disappointing for many of her readers: ‘endings are inevitably the least satisfactory part of any work in which there is any merit of development’.101 In uniting Deronda with Mirah, Eliot refuses to ‘do over again what has already been done, either by [her]self or by others’: Grandcourt’s death raises the expectation that Daniel Deronda might conclude by repeating the ending of Middlemarch: Gwendolen is available, like Dorothea after the death of Casaubon, to marry the right husband. Eliot, however, destines her own Ivanhoe to choose Rebecca over Rowena. Gwendolen’s confusion and dubious ‘conversion’ at the end of the novel can be seen as a figure for the reader whose expectations have been frustrated and who hesitates between his narrow world, his ready-made sympathy and the broadening of his horizons through ‘sentimental effort and ref lection’. Some readers, indeed, viewed the Jewish element as a temporary distraction: Eliot noted that ‘one reader is sure that Mirah will die very soon and I suppose will be disgusted at her remaining alive’.102 Eliot was annoyed by the tendency of the readers and the reviewers103 to ‘cut the book into scraps and talk of nothing in it but Gwendolen’.104 Although the enthusiastic response of the Jewish public pleased her,105 the former had responded in a similar way: they cared little for the Gwendolen part and focused on Deronda’s mission. The sequels to Daniel Deronda opted for repetition: both the parody which appeared in Punch and the anonymous sequel published in America presented Deronda abandoning his mission, returning to England and marrying Gwendolen.106 This attitude was emblematically expressed in F. R. Leavis’s suggestion to excise the Jewish section and baptize the novel Gwendolen Harleth107 — a suggestion originating in what was perceived as the lack of unity between the two parts of the novel. More recent literature rehearses the question in different terms, opposing to the negative evaluation of the Jewish section, a positive one which argues that Daniel Deronda supersedes realism,108 that it is not a novel but a romance:109 in both cases, the question of how Mordecai and his sympathetic imagination fit into Eliot’s realism is ultimately evaded. However, Mordecai is not only integral to the novel, but he is an authorial double who, in his relation to Deronda, stands for the aesthetic, economic and legal relation between the realist author and his work. After drawing his material from real life and art, Mordecai recreates them, through his faculty of the sympathetic imagination, and combines them into the image of his ‘executive self ’; when

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he meets the ‘long-conceived type’ in the f lesh, he lends him his soul. Like her authorial double, Eliot does not reproduce reality as it is, actual life-stories or gossip (as she was accused of doing by Liggins’s partisans) but she combines ‘widelysundered portions of experience’ into a new whole. Mordecai helps Deronda find his moral purpose by restoring his heritage, by accounting for his ‘whole being’ and by arresting the process of commodification which, until then, caused Deronda to be appropriated or ‘consumed’ by the other characters of the novel. Likewise, through Mordecai, Eliot reasserts her presence in her work, and reacts against the commodifying ‘ready-made sympathy’ of the reader who enjoys repetition and, like Leavis, ‘cut[s] the book into scraps’ instead of treating it as a whole. The relation between Mordecai and Deronda and, especially, the transmigration of souls, echo the terms of the patent debate and describe the relation between author and work as an intimate, almost biological link in which the personality or the soul of the author is imparted to the work forever.

C h ap t e r 7

v

The Decline of the Authorial Double Sympathetic Imagination in Doubt The sympathetic imagination and the authorial double, whose transformations I have traced in this monograph, are both in decline by the end of the nineteenth century. It can be argued that the intuitive and omniscient character who is able to guess the truth at a glance is preserved in the detective story. Sherlock Holmes, who makes his first appearance in A Study in Scarlet (1887), retains vestiges of the sympathetic imagination; he inherits his ability to achieve ‘thorough’ ‘identification of the reasoner’s intellect with that of his opponent’1 from Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional detective, Auguste Dupin. If Holmes’s abilities are beyond doubt, Conan Doyle’s detective is not, however, a persona of the realist author; by contrast, late nineteenth-century novels set on stage authorial figures in which the sympathetic imagination and, along with it, the certainties of the realist author, are discredited or parodied. I shall illustrate this point by referring brief ly to four novels: Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Le Docteur Pascal (1893), and The Sacred Fount (1901). All four novels occupy a crucial place in each author’s œuvre and their main characters are engaged in projects similar to those of their authors. Flaubert’s last, unfinished and posthumously published novel depicts two copyists who compile, unwittingly, an encyclopaedia of universal platitudes — thus taking on Flaubert’s own project; Wilde’s single novel gives fictional form to his complaint against the ‘decay of lying’ and presents two ‘authors’ who lose control over their living masterpiece; Zola’s final instalment of Les Rougon-Macquart devolves the task of summarizing and concluding his cycle of ‘romans expérimentaux’ to a ‘real’ doctor; James’s novel, written and published at the turn of the century, is both an epilogue to his nineteenth-century production (soon to be heavily revised in view of the New York edition) and a prologue to his ‘late style’, ‘mark[ing] the point at which James, for the general public, had definitely become unassimilable’:2 The Sacred Fount introduces an anonymous narrator who is obsessed with assigning meaning to every chance occurrence. All these characters could claim ‘tout connaître’ as their motto: they all aspire to possess a superior kind of knowledge which, in turn, will make them able to create something new, to reshape their world and (re)create their fellow-characters.

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Nonetheless, unlike Balzac’s and Eliot’s authorial doubles, they fail in their attempts — failures which result not only from their imperfection but from the impossibility of attaining full omniscience and omnipotence. Bouvard and Pécuchet, in their unquenchable thirst for learning, can be seen as parodies of figures such as the antiquary and Gobseck; if their successive taking up and abandonment of all sciences and arts were successful, they would acquire a ‘savoir’ comparable to that of Balzac’s authorial doubles. However, unlike the latter, who are supposed to ‘épouser toutes les mœurs’ either in reality or in their imagination, and whose ‘savoir’ is the outcome of a process of identification, Bouvard and Pécuchet experience everything second-hand, by means of reading. Neither really retires from being a copyist: in all their ventures, they merely copy what they have read. Bouvard and Pécuchet are therefore the opposite of the creative genius: being copyists, they are unable to create; unaccustomed to question what they are reading, they are perplexed by the contradictions they come across and engage in a continuous and frustrating search for ‘rules’. Their artistic efforts consist in the mechanical combination of elements, instead of the creation of an organic whole. Their garden is a medley of different ‘genres’ they have read about; the only effect they produce — unintentionally — is, significantly, an echo.3 When attempting to write a novel, they are unable to come up with a plot and they merely try to combine their memories. Their inability to create stands out when they engage with different forms of the organic. When taking up agriculture, they fail to produce healthy organisms and they are incapable even of keeping them alive. Likewise, their Pygmalionic aspirations are doomed: none of the methods they adopt when they take over the education of Victor and Victorine bears any fruit; one of the planned chapters of the novel would have dealt with the fiasco of a public lecture about the ways of reforming adults. Eventually, the two characters turn to what they were essentially doing all along, copying. Wilde’s two ‘authors’, by contrast, succeed in (re)creating Dorian Gray: like Mordecai, they take hold of the material that reality offers them and transform it, imparting their ‘soul’ to their work. Basil does not simply succeed in portraying Dorian but he fixes his physical appearance forever: in doing so, he puts into his work ‘too much of [him]self ’.4 Lord Henry shapes Dorian’s soul, believing that ‘to inf luence a person is to give him one’s own soul’, to make him ‘an echo of some one else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him’ (183). In both cases, it is Dorian’s true self that is revealed: when looking at the finished painting, it is ‘as if he had recognized himself for the first time’ (188–89); Lord Henry’s ‘entirely fresh inf luences’, likewise, ‘seemed to him to have come really from himself ’ (184). The question as to who the ‘real Dorian Gray’ (190, 192) is, Dorian before or after meeting Lord Henry, Dorian in the f lesh or the portrait, cannot be answered. Wilde presents a realist paradox in his novel: art can imitate life (that is, the picture can register Dorian’s physical and moral changes) only as a long as life imitates art (that is, while Dorian remains identical to the image captured in the original picture); when Dorian becomes aware of and regrets his corruption, any correspondence between the two ceases. The turning point in this process is

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the death, or, more accurately, the murder, of the ‘author’. If Basil and Lord Henry are most successful in creating a living work of art (‘the lad was his own creation’, 218), their insight into him fails deplorably. Lord Henry, although presented as the more cunning of the two, is incapable of suspecting Dorian’s capacity for murder, much less the reality that he has murdered Basil (349) — who is also convinced that Dorian is the personification of goodness. Neither of the two is able to control their work and Wilde presents a work of art that runs wild and destroys its creator. Zola’s Pascal shares such Promethean aspirations to omniscience and omnipotence but on a larger scale: he believes that science will enable him to go beyond the limits of what can be known, to cure all diseases with his ‘panacée universelle’,5 and to bring about ‘le parfait bonheur de l’humanité’ (989) [the perfect happiness of humanity]. Pascal’s knowledge of the family tree of Les Rougon-Macquart equals that of his creator and his dossiers are a fictional equivalent of Zola’s cycle of novels. However, unlike Zola, Pascal is himself part of the heredity he is tracing, even if he prefers, initially, to view himself as a being apart. He is not alone in believing himself not to belong to his family: his mother is in complete agreement that ‘il n’en est pas, il n’a pas voulu être, de la famille’ (927) [he is not, he did not want to be, part of the family]. In scientific terms, Pascal considers himself to be a case of ‘innéité’ [innateness], which he defines as ‘le principe d’invention’ [the principle of invention] and which generates ‘l’être nouveau, ou qui paraît tel, et chez qui se confondent les caractères physiques et moraux des parents, sans que rien d’eux semble s’y retrouver’ (945) [a being which is new, or appears to be so, and in which the physical and moral characteristics of the parents merge without any of their traits seeming to reappear in the new being]. Pascal, however, eventually finds himself ‘aux griffes du monstre héréditaire’ (1033) [in the clutches of the monster of heredity] and realizes that, rather than being an original being, he is simply a copy, or another case of heredity (‘le principe d’imitation’ (945) [the principle of imitation]), according to which individuals merely represent or reproduce (représenter, reproduire) the traits of their ancestors. Along with his aspirations to absolute knowledge, it is also his aspiration to infinite power over heredity and death that is disappointed: although his injections seem to promise to make him able to resurrect the dead (956), all the patients he treats die: Valentin, Charles, Sarteur, Lafouasse and, eventually, Pascal himself. Pascal’s method is supposed to facilitate ‘la vie qui élimine les corps nuisibles, qui refait de la chaire pour boucher les blessures, qui marche quand même à la santé, au renouvellement continu, parmi les impuretés et la mort’ (999) [life which eliminates the harmful bodies, rebuilds the f lesh to fill the wounds, marches despite everything towards health and constant renewal, among impurities and death]. His credo, however, is rendered suspect, since it sounds very much like that of his mother: Félicité, in her struggle to cleanse the family of its disgrace, is also bent on eliminating ‘les corps nuisibles’ which include Pascal himself and his dossiers. Eventually, Pascal’s failure to ‘corriger la nature’ (1084) [rectify nature] makes him change his views on his deathbed: in a way that parallels his discovery that he is not a case of ‘innéité’ but one of heredity, his last word on medicine marks a shift from an organic to a mechanistic theory (1176–79). Even though Pascal is not impotent as

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he fears, his and Clotilde’s son has a precarious future, since he belongs to the same generation as Charles, Nana’s Louiset, Claude’s Jacques-Louis — in all of whom degeneration prevails and leads to their death. Although Zola presents ‘l’enfant inconnu’ as a ray of hope through Clotilde’s eyes, he also juxtaposes it with the crowning glory of Félicité’s efforts, the erection of the monument in honour of ‘la légende des Rougon’ (1074). The inf luence of one human being on another is also the main subject of The Sacred Fount. The anonymous narrator, invited to spend the weekend in a country house, seems to be stepping into a Gothic world, subject to Balzac’s theory of energy: on observing how altered two of his fellow-guests are since they last met, he becomes convinced that the changes are caused by the draining of their lovers’ ‘sacred fount’6 — the latter being reduced to mere ‘sponge[s] wrung dry’ (83). While Mrs Brissenden owes her newly acquired youth and beauty to her husband, who seems, to the narrator’s eyes, to become older by the minute, the transformation of Gilbert Long from a bore to a wit is less easy to explain. The narrator immediately produces a full-scale theory, according to which the effect wrought is visible only when both partners are present in the same place. He therefore sets out to discover who is Long’s ‘sacred fount’. In assuming, without proof, that his theory is correct to the letter, that the couples in question are aware of this process and wish to hide it by dissimulating relations with other people, and in believing himself to be in possession of a ‘transcendent intelligence’, a ‘preposterous acuteness’ (95) or an ‘effective omniscience’ (103), the narrator’s search verges on paranoia. In accounting for the unseen inf luences, he also believes that he is directing things, and that what happens is ‘[his] own wizardry’ or his ‘work’ (79): I was positively [...] proud of my work. I had thought it all out, and to have thought it was, wonderfully, to have brought it. Yet I recall how I even then knew on the spot that there was something supreme I should have failed to bring unless I had happened suddenly to become aware of the very presence of the haunting principle, as it were, of my thought. (79)

His stay in the house is really a ‘play that had so unexpectedly insisted on constituting itself for [him]’ (101). Indulging in ‘that joy of the intellectual mastery of things unamenable, that joy of determining, almost of creating results, which [is] attached to some of [his] plunges of insight’ (129), he enmeshes others in his theory: he makes everyone pay attention to everyone else, forcing them to spy on each other, hoping to catch them in the act. The Sacred Fount is a novel with no dénouement: it simply breaks off with the end of the weekend, and the narrator, despite his efforts, has had no luck in extracting a positive confession from either the victims or the agents. His only proof is that he has imagined and created a consistent theory: as Mrs Brissenden puts it, ‘Of course you could always imagine — which is precisely what is the matter with you! But I’m surprised at your coming to me with it once more as evidence of anything’ (190). James presents an ambiguous omniscient authorial figure who believes that he discerns an occult drama in a typical countryside weekend: James’s novel is ‘a fine f light [...] into the high fantastic’7 constructed according to the methods employed by the authorial doubles of the realist novel. James presents the allegedly intuitive individual who believes that everything is

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pregnant with meaning as a paranoid imaginist who disregards what James called ‘the fatal futility of Fact’,8 the necessity that reality be carefully distilled before it is transmuted into fiction. These four novels, in parodying and problematizing the main attributes of the authorial double, question the basic principle of the sympathetic imagination, on which, as I have argued, Balzac’s and Eliot’s realism rests: namely, that the reproduction of reality can be a creative act of the imagination. Flaubert and Zola, in their different ways, show the closeness of copying and creation, repetition and originality; Wilde parodies the concept of art imitating life by reversing its terms and presenting a being who is the outcome of such an imaginative recreation and turns against his authors; James shows that this imaginative f light might be nothing more than unfounded and possibly insane invention. Authorial doubles are an exclusively nineteenth-century realist phenomenon: the configuration of elements that I have examined in this monograph — that is, the connection between the sympathetic imagination, the scenario of the Protean author and a certain type of fictional character — has been described as a reaction to a series of aesthetic, economic and legal conditions which by the late nineteenth century have undergone several transformations. As I have shown, these four novels indicate a loss of faith in the sympathetic imagination and in the role the realists assign to it; in what follows, I shall examine a twentieth-century novel, André Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs, arguing that it offers a privileged vantage point from which these transformations and the disappearance of the authorial double can be observed. Realism, Modernism, and Les Faux-monnayeurs Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1925–26) has often been proclaimed an artistic failure, a ‘fundamentally f lawed experiment’9 which fails to satisfy the supporters of either realism or modernism: for E. M. Forster, its excessive artificiality makes ‘the emotional thermometer’ drop,10 while, when measured against the modernity of Joyce, Proust, Woolf or Thomas Mann, Gide’s novel is found to be limited, contradictory and even slightly anachronistic.11 In this sense, it is seen as a hesitant or, indeed, a schizophrenic novel: on the one hand, it is viewed as a modernist ‘pure’ novel which dispels such realist illusions as character, plot and representation, and denounces the realist project as counterfeit; on the other, it is frequently blamed for not carrying its modernism far enough and for exhibiting a contradictory attachment to the concepts it allegedly repudiates. This view of Gide’s novel as a compromise between two irreconcilable tendencies is represented, at its strongest, by Jean-Joseph Goux, who believes that while Gide wanted to write a ‘pure’, ‘abstract’ novel (like the one Edouard — misguidedly — contemplates for a while in Saas-Fée), ‘il ne réussit qu’à demi (avec une radicalité atténuée) à le mener à bien’ [he succeeds only halfway, diluting it in the execution].12 His argument is based on the alleged incompatibility between ref lexivity and representation and on a strong demarcation between the domains of realism and modernism which are presumed to consist in a wholesale espousal and rejection, respectively, of representational concerns.

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Such a reading of Les Faux-monnayeurs as a radical (even if inadequate) dismantling of the certainties of nineteenth-century realism is a little odd in that it ascribes to the mature Gide a violent, polemical repudiation of certain conventions from which he had been singularly free throughout his previous career. His early ‘symbolist’ works display a cavalier attitude towards both character and plot; his récits have minimal plot and tend to be variations on similar themes and characters; his soties and especially Les Caves du Vatican may be seen as parodying the plot of a nineteenth-century novel and as dispelling the psychological unity of character much more effectively than Les Faux-monnayeurs. On the other hand, Gide’s subsequent and effectively last major work, namely, the triptych comprising L’Ecole des femmes, Robert and Geneviève, is something of an anti-climax for anyone attempting to examine the development of Gide’s formal experimentation alongside that of Joyce from Ulysses to Finnegans Wake, Virginia Woolf ’s from Mrs Dalloway to The Waves or Proust’s from his early works to A la recherche du temps perdu. The ref lexive devices which are presumed to be employed by Gide in Les Fauxmonnayeurs in order to ‘deconstruct’ realism are hardly new in his work: he had already employed them in his earlier works without any apparent intention of disparaging the realist tradition. Books within books, novelists within novels and playful narrators can be found in the Cahiers d’André Walter, Paludes and Les Caves du Vatican;13 the extensive use of confessional narratives, diaries and letters which may mirror each other and provide complementary accounts of the same events from different perspectives is present everywhere in his work; even the publication of the Journal des ‘Faux-monnayeurs’ encapsulates, in a smaller scale, the relation which Gide was cultivating between his work and his Journal. Indeed, what is singular about Les Faux-monnayeurs is the fact that it reviews practically all the elements of Gide’s writing; it is an overdetermined text which concentrates all the contradictory formal or thematic impulses which, until then, Gide had chosen to distribute between single texts or to present in pairs (for instance La Porte étroite as an antidote to L’Immoraliste). What Gide called his ‘premier roman’14 does not merely resume all tendencies of Gide’s writing but constitutes, as Michael Tilby puts it, ‘a radiographic repre­ sentation of the universal conventions of novel writing’:15 a fictional book identical to the one the reader has in his hand, Gide’s mise en abyme, can be traced back to Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen (which Gide was thinking of translating); the playful narrator imitates the narrators of Sterne, Diderot or Fielding (Gide was writing a preface to Tom Jones while he was working on his novel); Bernard is a picaro or another Tom Jones; Vincent’s theories echo Balzac’s or Zola’s scientific theories of the novel; Lady Griffith may be seen as a Balzacian character; Armand or Strouvilhou draw their descent from Dostoevsky; the theme itself of Edouard’s (and Gide’s own) novel, ‘la rivalité du monde réel et de la représentation que nous nous en faisons’ [the rivalry between the real world and the representation of it which we make to ourselves]16 is nothing less than the central concern of the novelistic genre since its inception: as Harry Levin puts it, ‘it would be hard to hit on a better summary of Don Quixote in a single sentence’.17 This rivalry, however, when it becomes the main preoccupation of the genre

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of the novel, is accompanied by the denial of fictionality: novels since Don Quixote have insisted on the paradoxical assertion that ‘this is not a novel’. With characteristically ambiguous Gidean sincerity, Les Faux-monnayeurs reverses the traditional novelistic claim: rather than saying ‘this is not novel’ or presenting ‘une théorie de la littérature déguisée en roman’ [a theory of literature disguised as a novel],18 Gide proudly pronounces that ‘this is a novel’, his first and, practically, last and only novel, which deliberately f launts its fictionality. Gide had hinted as much: ‘Il me faut, pour écrire bien ce livre, me persuader que c’est le seul roman et dernier livre que j’écrirai. J’y veux tout verser sans réserve’ [To write this book properly I must persuade myself that it is the only novel and the last book I shall write. I want to pour everything into it without reservation].19 Included in this ‘tout’ is a multiplicity of ref lexive strategies from all periods of the history of the novel, which are not necessarily compatible with each other. For instance, Gide’s narrator is not merely ‘interventionist’, aware of the presence of the reader and of the fact that he is relating a story he has invented; he may treat his characters as real individuals whom he observes and whose innermost thoughts he describes; he may profess his insouciant ignorance as to what they are really thinking; he may admit their fictionality but treat them at the same time as objective entities which obey their own laws of development rather than as arbitrary and whimsical figments of his own imagination. On the other hand, the novel contains a fictional author who is writing a novel of the same title and constantly comments on the relation between fiction and reality; it also presents fictional characters who read parts of this novel and discuss or criticize its conception. Such a proliferation of ref lexive techniques borders on redundancy or on the reductio ad absurdum of self-consciousness.20 In this sense, his use of ref lexive techniques originating in the eighteenthcentury need not necessarily aim at attacking allegedly naïve nineteenth-century notions of character, plot and unimpeded referentiality; rather, Gide may be seen as reviewing the history of the novel, as summoning its various tendencies and as making overt what was previously only implicit. Alongside the use of overtly selfconscious devices, Gide shows the ref lexive potential of other strategies by laying them bare. It is in this context that the presence and the centrality of Edouard and of his projected novel may be seen: the novelist, although present as a sociological type in nineteenth-century realist fiction, rarely assumes a central place as a craftsman. The aesthetic credos of the realists are mostly expressed in a veiled form through a variety of authorial personae who are not actually authors: they may be musicians (Gambara or Klesmer), painters (Frenhofer, Joseph Bridau, Claude Lantier), doctors and scientists (Claës, Benassis or Pascal) — a list to which what I have called ‘the authorial double’ can also be added. In assigning to Edouard such a crucial place in his novel (a gesture not particularly original in 1926), Gide may not necessarily want to introduce a self-conscious device which would counter the naïveté of the nineteenth-century realist novel — as Goux would have it. Instead, Gide may be seen as rendering explicit what was merely implicit in nineteenth-century fiction: like his novel which refuses to deny its fictional status and proclaims ‘this is a novel’, Gide refuses to disguise his persona as anything other than an author. In this sense, rather than parodying and deconstructing realist conventions and the belief in the

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transparency of ‘le langage-or’ [gold-language], as Goux argues,21 Gide is engaged in showing how realism, among other novelistic forms, worked. This reviewing of the history of the novel is nostalgic: his alleged attachment to outdated aesthetic concepts coexists with an awareness that they belong to the past and are no longer viable. Les Faux-monnayeurs, rather than being an innovative suggestion about the future of the novel, consists in a recollection of what the novel had previously been: ‘Ce que je voudrais que soit ce roman? un carrefour — un rendez-vous de problèmes’ [What I wanted this novel to be? A crossroads — a meeting point for problems].22 As such, it is an instance of what Michel Raimond has described as ‘the crisis of the novel’.23 Les Faux-monnayeurs demonstrates what Gide diagnosed in ‘De l’importance du public’ (1903) as a crisis of taste: modern eclecticism which allows us to appreciate the merits of conf licting artistic schools of the past is proof that l’art n’est plus une production naturelle, [...] il ne répond plus à quelque besoin précis d’un public, et [...] la société décomposée, sans idéal distinct à formuler dans aucun style, accepte imprudemment, au hasard des rencontres, tous les idéals du passé et chacun de ceux que chacun des artistes nouveaux lui propose. Et la tradition artistique, que tant de générations successives avaient poussée si haut, semble un arbre dont meurt enfin la puissante tige centrale [...].24 [art is no longer a natural product, [...] it no longer corresponds to a specific need of the public and [...] society, which is decomposed and cannot express any distinct ideal in any style, incautiously accepts, as encountered by chance, all the ideals of the past and all those that new artists suggest to it. And the artistic tradition, led to such heights by so many successive generations, resembles a tree whose strong central stem is eventually dying.]

Gide’s novel is in this sense both a foregrounding and a demonstration of this crisis: it displays the ability of several aesthetic traditions of the past to coexist, it portrays aspects of this ‘société décomposée’, while at the same time problematizing both and subsuming them under the metaphor of counterfeiting. Counterfeiting refers first and foremost to the various insincerities and deceptions practised by the characters, to the hypocritical upholding of superannuated principles as well as to their total rejection, and to blind idealism. In its aesthetic sense, the counter­ feiting metaphor does not attack nineteenth-century realism in particular, but seems to have a much broader significance. It questions, in general, the present application and use of past aesthetic conceptions of the novel, which, in their lack of correspondence with a specific society, seem counterfeit. It is in this sense that the only explicitly pejorative reference to realism in the novel may be seen: according to both Gide and Edouard, the novel should digress from its ‘ornière réaliste’ [realistic rut],25 not because there was an inherent fault in the nineteenthcentury conception of the novel, but because changes such as the emergence of new media have altered the task of the novel and necessitate that it give over the representation of speech to sound recording and ‘les évènements extérieurs’ [outward events] to the cinema (990).26 At the same time, counterfeiting applies to the wholesale and polemical rejection of past practices, exemplified in Strouvilhou and Passavant.

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In this sense, Gide’s novel is less the glorious beginning of modernism and more the declaration of the impasse which the novel has reached — an impasse shared by both Edouard and Gide. Edouard is unable to write his novel, hesitating between ‘la réalité’ and ‘[l’]effort pour la styliser’ (1081) [th[e] attempt to stylize it]; Gide writes a novel which demonstrates this inability: while Edouard cannot choose, Gide simply does not choose and presents all possible solutions to the problem. This is why Gide’s novel, unlike Proust’s, Joyce’s, Woolf ’s, or Musil’s, cannot portray an epiphany which would reveal the way in which life acquires meaning and can be transmuted into art; instead, the culmination of Les Faux-monnayeurs is the confrontation of Edouard with Georges and the discovery of the maladroit relation the novelist has with reality: unlike Marcel, Edouard is still hesitating to put pen to paper at the end of Gide’s novel. In this context, Gide’s novel can be seen as questioning the present viability of older modes of representation without denying their past validity — an attitude towards the nineteenth-century heritage shared by many modernists. Virginia Woolf deplored what the eighteenth-century tradition and nineteenth-century realism had become in the hands of ‘Mr Bennett’ and declared that ‘our quarrel, then, is not with the classics’ but with the Edwardians who turned ‘the simple tools and primitive materials’ of older novelists into a sterile materialism which failed to take account of the way the perception of reality had changed.27 Similarly, the object of contention in the debate on expressionism (1936–39) was whether changes in the perception of reality necessitated a change in the modes of its representation; Ernst Bloch and Bertolt Brecht objected to the way in which Georg Lukács ossified the precepts of realism, drew them out of their socio-political context and turned them into a normative concept for art a century later.28 Such arguments are not, essentially, anti-realist in that they do not attack the validity of realist modes of representation in the nineteenth century, but question their pertinence to the twentieth. In this context, it is not surprising that Les Faux-monnayeurs failed to impress Gide’s successors as a revolutionary novel; the nouveaux romanciers were not anxious to claim Gide, by then a canonical writer and an incarnation of the literary status quo, as a progenitor.29 Rather, the novel can be seen as a retrospective evaluation of the relevance of older forms of writing: as Philippe Lejeune puts it, Les Faux-monnayeurs is ‘une sorte de festival du roman traditionnel, bien plus qu’une ouverture sur le roman moderne’ [a sort of celebration of the traditional novel rather than an opening towards the modern novel].30 It is in this context that the presence of the authorial double and the sympathetic imagination in Gide’s novel can be understood. Edouard is not only a novelist but he believes that he possesses the faculty of the sympathetic imagination; in this sense, he is an authorial double who, for the first time, is also an author. In what follows, I shall attempt to explore why the screened use of the sympathetic imagination seems to be no longer necessary in Gide’s time.

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The Authorial Double, Sympathetic Imagination, and Les Faux-monnayeurs Gide was familiar with the concept of the sympathetic imagination in Keats’s version of negative capability. Le triomphe de l’objectivité, c’est de permettre au romancier d’emprunter le ‘je’ d’autrui. J’ai donné le change pour avoir trop bien réussi; certains ont pris chacun de mes livres pour des confessions successives. Cette abnégation, cette dépersonnalisation poétique, qui me fait ressentir les joies et les douleurs d’autrui beaucoup plus vivement que les miennes propres, nul n’en parle aussi bien que Keats (Lettres).31 [The triumph of objectivity consists in the novelist being able to borrow someone else’s ‘I’. I have led certain people off the track by doing this most successfully: they have taken my books to be a series of confessions. No one speaks more eloquently than Keats (Letters) of this renunciation of the self, this poetic depersonalization which enables me to feel the joys and suffering of others much more acutely than my own.]

Passages conveying Gide’s sense of himself as a plural individual can be found in earlier entries of his Journal;32 Gide was consciously cultivating his image as a contradictory author and man, as ‘un être de dialogue’ [a dialogic being].33 His disponibilité has frequently attracted critical attention:34 Jacques Rivière described Gide’s ‘soul’ as composite, complex and constantly changing while critics often resort to the explicit description of Gide as Proteus;35 Protos, whose name refers to this changing ability is a parody of Balzac’s Protean authorial double, Vautrin;36 in Les Faux-monnayeurs, Edouard is called Proteus by Laura: ‘Son être se défait et se refait sans cesse. On croit le saisir... c’est Protée. Il prend la forme de ce qu’il aime’ (1094) [His being dissolves and reshapes itself perpetually. One thinks one has grasped him... but he is Proteus! He takes the shape of what he loves]; he also shares the abilities of his creator: Mon cœur ne bat que par la sympathie; je ne vis que par autrui; par pro­ curation, pourrais-je dire, par épousaille, et ne me sens jamais vivre plus intensément que quand je m’échappe à moi-même pour devenir n’importe qui. Cette force anti-égoïste de décentralisation est telle qu’elle volatilise en moi le sens de la propriété — et, partant, de la responsabilité. (987) [My heart beats only out of sympathy; I live only through others — vicariously, so to speak, and by espousals; and I never feel myself living so intensely as when I escape from myself to become no matter who. This anti-egoistical force of decentralization is so great in me that it disintegrates my sense of property — and, as a consequence, of responsibility.]

Typically for Gide, a passage proclaiming the author’s ability to get out of himself and become the fictional character is copied — with slight alterations — from Gide’s own journal: Je deviens l’autre. [...] Pousser l’abnégation jusqu’à l’oubli de soi total. [...] De même dans la vie, c’est la pensée, l’émotion d’autrui qui m’habite; mon cœur ne bat que par sympathie.37

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[I become the other person. [...] Push abnegation to the point of complete selfoblivion. [...] In life as well, the thoughts and emotions of others dwell in me; my heart beats only through sympathy.]

Edouard seems to adopt the model of the Protean author wholeheartedly and sincerely; he imagines himself as a chameleonic, intuitive being: ‘La singulière faculté de dépersonnalisation qui me permet d’éprouver comme mienne l’émotion d’autrui, me forçait presque d’épouser les sensations d’Olivier’ (1008–09) [The singular faculty of depersonalization which enables me to feel other people’s emotions as if they were my own, compelled me, as it were, to enter into Olivier’s feelings]. However, this ability proves to be nothing more than a mere fantasy, as the novel amply demonstrates: Edouard is guilty of one blunder and misunderstanding after another, misinterpreting people’s feelings and behaviour, often with grave consequences such as Olivier’s near-suicide or Boris’s tragic death. When he tries to turn Georges into a fictional character and gives him a fragment of his novel to criticize, the discrepancy between reality and Edouard’s conception of it is emphasized. In applying an outdated authorial model and in deceiving others and himself, Edouard is included among the numerous counterfeiters of the novel. Edouard’s claim that his sympathetic imagination causes a loss of his sense of ownership indicates a radical reversal in the way the authorial double is used. As I have argued, the Protean authorial scenario is paradoxically employed by the realists to stress the indissoluble bond that unites the author with his text. In this sense, the relation of the authorial double to his fellow-characters stands for the aesthetic, economic and legal relation of the author to his work. The authorial double ‘possesses’ his fellow-characters, in more than one sense, and, as we have seen in the cases of Balzac, Baudelaire, and Eliot, his survival depends on them: Vautrin depends on Lucien in order to circulate his energy, without which his survival is impossible; the prostituted author in Baudelaire depends on his public; Mordecai, after his physical death, claims posterity through Deronda, whose body he inhabits. As the anonymous narrator of James’s The Sacred Fount remarks, ‘one of the pair must always pay for the other’.38 In Gide’s case, however, this relation is radically reversed: instead of possessing his fellow-characters and depending on them for his survival, Edouard provides for them. As David A. Steel has observed, most of the characters in the novel live at the expense of the two fictional novelists, Edouard and Passavant; Edouard provides for Laura, Bernard and Olivier. Gide was thinking of making Edouard remark ‘Ils [my characters] vivent en moi d’une manière puissante, et je dirais même volontiers qu’ils vivent à mes dépens’ [They live powerfully within me and I will even admit that they live at my expense].39 Thus, his relation to the characters is analogous to the relation of the author to his works: both the narrator and Gide himself present their relation to their characters as one of debt in which the former rather than the latter are the debtors: ‘je me dois à eux’.40 Steel has identified the underlying economic metaphor as ‘le rentier prodigue’ and has discussed the figure of the prodigal rentier as central to the work of Gide in general:41 the author, the narrator and the authorial double in Les Fauxmonnayeurs are all presented as rentiers who possess the necessary economic means which they then dispense to the characters.42

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This reversal also cancels the metaphors of the Mephistophelean pact, paternity and demonic possession which, in the nineteenth century, referred to the legal status of the author in relation to his work.43 Edouard’s belief that he possesses the faculty of sympathetic imagination, as mentioned above, does not result in superior access to the minds of others. Instead of demonically possessing others, Edouard believes himself to be invaded by the person with whom he is in love: his loss of self is not the detached objectivity of Vautrin but a doubtful annihilation of his own self by that of his lovers. Thus, Edouard prefers the role of the lover to that of the father that nineteenth-century authorial doubles assume in relation to their fellowcharacters: indeed, as it has been frequently remarked, paternity itself is thoroughly discredited in the novel which starts with Bernard’s discovery of his illegitimate birth. Remnants of the Mephistophelean pact are retained only in Passavant’s and Edouard’s tendency to enrol their lovers as their secretaries and in their dubious moral inf luence on them. Such an economic relation was not far from Gide’s own relation with his works: he was himself a rentier; prior to La Porte étroite (1909) his books were published at his own expense44 and, rather than supporting their author, they were funded by him; from Isabelle (1911) onwards, he published his works in the publishing house of La Nouvelle Revue Française, which was, at least initially, and like the journal itself, partly funded by Gide.45 In more than one sense, Gide was not merely an ‘écrivainéditeur’46 but his own publisher. Indeed, rentier authors, although far from being the rule, were not rare among the modernists: unlike the realists among whom the model of the professional author predominated, the modernist tone is largely set by Gide, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann or Virginia Woolf. In the absence of significant wealth, what could be called a rentier attitude towards literature and the marketplace was common. Nous qui vivions dans l’entourage de Mallarmé, l’idée seule que la littérature pût nous ‘rapporter’ nous faisait honte. [...] Se faire payer, pour nous, c’était ‘se vendre’ dans la pire acception du mot. (Nous n’étions pas à acheter.)47 [The mere idea that literature could be ‘profitable’ made us, who lived in Mallarmé’s circle, feel ashamed. [...] To receive money meant, for us, to be ‘sold’ in the worst meaning of the word. (We were not to be bought).]

Such an attitude was not limited to Mallarmé’s followers but was a strategy pursued, more or less systematically, by authors on both sides of the Channel. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the literary field became more and more autonomous; autonomy, as Pierre Bourdieu has shown, meant primarily the emergence of a hierarchy of literary value which reversed the hierarchy based on commercial success.48 Authors took their distance from the marketplace: they wrote expressly for small audiences, limited the tirage of their books (published often at the author’s expense), and preferred small publishing houses and literary journals to the established ones which were denounced as commercial — the house selected by Gide for the publication of his first books was significantly called La Librairie de l’Art indépendant. This strategy gradually formed an alternative market, represented by the gradual growth of publishing houses such as that of La Nouvelle Revue Française and The Hogarth Press in the twentieth century.49 Twentieth-century

The Decline of the Authorial Double

159

modernist authors are a far cry from the nineteenth-century working man of letters: if not rentiers, they choose a profession other than authorship or survive on direct or indirect forms of patronage;50 in all cases, literature, on the ideological level, is kept separate from commerce and, rather than providing funds for its author, is funded by the author’s other occupations. In this context, the novel gradually acquired the respectability for which it was still fighting in the nineteenth century: since Flaubert and James, it had already begun to be discussed in terms of ‘art’; in the twentieth century, it became the site of radical formal experimentation; the rise of literary history, the gradual introduction of more recent literature in schools and the emergence of English and Modern Languages as academic subjects ascribed to fiction a new cultural status. It is in this context that the art of fiction acquired an intrinsic interest that made possible the appearance of the novelist on stage as an artist dealing with the aesthetic problems involved in writing a novel, rather than as a mere sociological type. Moreover, the ease with which Edouard admits his lack of any sense of ownership and his easy-going attitude towards his ‘creatures’ can also be seen in the context of the disappearance of the fear of authors regarding the alienability of their works which, as I have argued, is one of the raisons d’être of the authorial double. The 1886 Berne Convention, the first European copyright treaty, eliminated the longstanding practice of unauthorized reproduction of works outside their country of publication, thus putting an end, as far as France was concerned, to Belgian piracy; the long-awaited establishment of international copyright in America in 1891 achieved a similar effect for English authors who acquired access to an unprecedented number of readers.51 Since the late 1870s, a shift in the conceptualization of literary property had begun in France. The term ‘la propriété littéraire’ was gradually abandoned in favour of ‘le droit d’auteur’52 — a suggestion which was originally put forward by AugustinCharles Renouard in 1838,53 and which was meant to purge the rights of authors from overly commercial connotations. The change, however, was not merely nominal: jurists such as André Morillot (who is considered to have coined the term ‘le droit moral’ in 1872) were arguing that the grounds for the author’s protection should not be his property right in an object he has created, but the respect of the personality of the author whose manifestation the literary work is. The ensuing debates during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as to the foundation, the object and the number of authorial rights54 resulted in the conceptualization of a relatively distinct, non-patrimonial ‘droit moral’ which consisted in the right of disclosure (droit de divulgation), the right of attribution/paternity (droit à la paternité), the right of integrity (droit au respect) and the right of withdrawal (droit de repentir ou de retrait). The moral rights of the author, unlike the conception of literary property in the nineteenth century, were inalienable, non-transmissible and perpetual, and they allowed the author to control his work regardless of whether he had disposed of his economic rights.55 Although these rights were confirmed in positive law only in 1957,56 they were widely discussed not merely among jurists but also in the conferences of the Association littéraire et artistique internationale (founded in 1878 in Paris) which lobbied systematically for the recognition of the moral rights of the

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author.57 In England, copyright remained a property right, and the moral rights of the author were recognized only in 1988 in an attempt to unify EU copyright law: however, the inalienable bond between author and work was increasingly asserted in the aftermath of the patent debate, while the definition of the object of literary property was extended to intangible aspects of the work — thus providing, since the 1880s, protection against stage (or, later, film) adaptations.58 This necessarily selective outline of the changing conditions of authorship aims to argue that the landscape which determined the use of the authorial double, the sympathetic imagination and the Protean author in realist fiction had already begun to change by the late nineteenth century. This transformation was nearly complete when Gide wrote Les Faux-monnayeurs, and his novel demonstrates that the authorial scenario and the type of fictional character which has been traced in this monograph as one of the key ways in which the realists attempted to reassert their presence in their work and to respond to various forms of unauthorized appropriation, had by Gide’s time become redundant. Gide’s novel, in this sense, is an epilogue for what I called, in the Introduction, the realist author’s strategy of ‘screened presence’ of which the authorial double is an instance. As I have argued in this monograph, the appeal of the sympathetic imagination for the nineteenth-century realists rested on its being an authorial scenario which presented the author as simultaneously present in and absent from his work — thus making the authorial double an ideal vehicle for the expression of what they perceived as their precarious aesthetic, economic and legal status. While the focus on the representation of reality seemed to obscure the creative role of the author, authorial doubles present him as recreating reality, as inventing the true. While the literary marketplace was seen as reducing the author to a worker exploited by the publisher and catering for the needs of the public, authorial doubles paint a picture of the author in control: in Balzac, he is shown to triumph over the marketplace, and, in Eliot, to overcome the effects of commodification. While copyright laws defined literary property as a right in a tangible, alienable object, lapsing shortly after the author’s death, authorial doubles insisted on the personal and inalienable bond between author and work. All these elements are present in Gide’s novel, but they no longer perform the same function: the authorial double is explicitly an author; the sympathetic imagination is merely a fantasy; the metaphor of the rentier is the index of a break with the marketplace and the model of the working man of letters; Edouard’s lack of a sense of ownership bears witness to the absence of the fear, on the part of the realists, of the alienability of their work. Gide’s novel may be read as a demonstration of why the modernist author does not need to engage in a screened presence, nor, like Thackeray’s ‘Manager of the Performance’ to ‘retire’ for the curtain to rise.

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS v

In his 1975 essay ‘The Ideology of the Text’, Fredric Jameson issued a warning against the reification of realism by literary history: the division of literature into these two starkly antithetical tendencies [modernism vs. realism] (form-oriented versus content-oriented, artistic play versus imitation of the real, etc.) is dictated by the attempt to deal adequately with modernism, rather than the other way round [...]. The concept of realism that thereby emerges is always that with which modernism has had to break, that norm from which modernism is the deviation, and so forth. [...] the straw man of ‘realism’ was formally necessary. The proof of this assertion may be found in the peculiar fact that whenever you search for ‘realism’ somewhere it vanishes, for it was nothing but punctuation, a mere marker or a ‘before’ that permitted the phenomenon of modernism to come into focus properly. So as long as the latter holds the centre of the field of vision, and the so-called traditional novel or classical novel or realistic novel or whatever constitutes a ‘ground’ or blurred periphery, the illusion of adequate literary history may be maintained. But as soon as our critical interest itself shifts to these last, we become astonished to discover that, as though by magic, they also have every one of them been transformed if not all into modernists, at least into precursors of the modern — symbolists, stylists, psychopathologists, and formalists to a man!1

While the critical landscape has changed considerably since then, studies of realism often exhibit a tendency to make realism ‘vanish’ or express astonishment when it emerges as a sophisticated form of writing — two tendencies the present monograph hopes to have avoided. Rather than ‘restore’ the ref lexivity of realist fiction by having recourse to contemporary critical concepts which are often the product of the ‘division’ referred to by Jameson, I have suggested a ref lexive device (the authorial double) and a conception of the author (the Protean individual implied by the concept of the sympathetic imagination) which were both available in the nineteenth century. While the use of twentieth-century concepts may illuminate the ‘modernity’ of realist texts in unexpected ways, it often has two effects. On the one hand, ref lexivity is frequently considered to be a force antagonistic to realism which is supposed to undermine its ‘naïve’ assumptions about representation. On the other, the conclusion of such analyses is very often tautological, consisting in the confirmation of the status of realist fiction as fiction. In both cases, the realist text emerges either as a naïve object which can be read in sophisticated ways only despite itself, or as half-heartedly assuming the task to represent reality, undermining it in the process, as if it suffered from an inferiority complex and was bent on proving that

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it is, indeed, worthy to be called ‘fiction’. Studies of ref lexivity seem very reticent to ascribe what might be called a ‘ref lexive imperative’ to realist texts — which is unquestionably attributed to eighteenth-century fiction such as Tristram Shandy or Jacques le fataliste, or to modernist and postmodernist narratives in which ref lexivity is explicit and not ‘concealed’, as Friedrich Schlegel would have it. Moreover, this ref lexive potential is rarely granted to realist texts as such: the source of ref lexivity is language or the text in general — something which denies the ref lexivity of realism any historical specificity. Realist ref lexivity, as it has been sketched in this monograph, does not mean to subvert the representational concerns of nineteenth-century fiction; instead, it is presented as a built-in feature of realism. By showing that the realist novelist invents, neither Balzac nor Eliot undermine their own literary practice. And if the stress on the imagination can be seen as a sort of reaction, it would be a reaction against the restrictions imposed by the codification of this practice by literary critics and readers: they reacted to the logic behind Sainte-Beuve’s exclamation ‘C’est de l’imagination, de l’invention’2 or to Bracebridge’s indefatigable search for real models. Moreover, ref lexivity does not merely confirm the aesthetic status of realist texts but it actively ref lects on the conditions of their production. In this sense, realist ref lexivity is ‘realistic’: it does not isolate the text within the limits of the aesthetic domain but points back to the material conditions of its production — often aiming at revising them. The depiction of the authorial double as a capitalist by Balzac is not mere wish-fulfilment: it is indicative of the nineteenth-century author’s wish to take control of his profession. At the same time, in presenting the work as the intangible, inalienable property of the author, Balzac and Eliot convey through their fiction a demand they could not express in strictly legal terms: in this sense, realist fiction becomes a vehicle for a critique of other discourses, a critique that cannot be articulated within the context of these discourses. In this sense, it is by not ‘free[ing] [itself ] from all real and ideal self-interest’ (despite Schlegel’s recommendation) that realist fiction becomes ‘a mirror of the whole circumambient world, an image of the age’ which ‘hover[s] at the midpoint between the portrayed and the portrayer’.3

notes v

Introduction. An Author for Realism 1. René Wellek, Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 240–41. 2. On the ambivalence of the terms ‘copy’, ‘imitation’, and ‘reproduction’, denoting both representation and plagiarism, see Ann Jefferson, Reading Realism in Stendhal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 25–33. 3. OC, ii, 627. 4. Bernard Weinberg, French Realism: The Critical Reaction, 1830–1870 (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), pp. 117–19; E. B. O. Borgerhoff, ‘Réalisme and Kindred Words: Their Use as Terms of Literary Criticism in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’, PMLA, 53.3 (1938), 837–43; Wellek, pp. 225–30. 5. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963), pp. 11–30. 6. Wellek, pp. 225–30; Borgerhoff, pp. 837–43; Harry Levin, ‘What is Realism?’, Comparative Literature, 3.3 (1951), 193–99 (p. 196); for a full-scale treatment of ‘romantic realism’, see Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens and Gogol (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998). 7. See the first issue of Réalisme, 1 (1856), 1–16; Champf leury, Le Réalisme (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1857), pp. 1–21; on the critical reception of realism in literature and painting, see Weinberg, pp. 97–152; on realism and Champf leury, see Emile Bouvier, La Bataille réaliste (1844–1857) (Paris: Fontemoing, 1914). 8. See J. P. Stern, On Realism (London and Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). 9. OC, ii, 57–59. 10. See Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, ed. by Jean Bruneau and Yvan Leclerc, 5 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1973–2007), v, 154. 11. Cf. Sainte-Beuve’s, Duranty’s and Zola’s negative evaluations of Balzac’s penchant for invention and ‘fantasmagorie’: Sainte-Beuve, Les Grands Ecrivains français: Les Romanciers I. Xavier de Maistre, Benjamin Constant, Senancour, Stendhal, Balzac, ed. by Maurice Allem (Paris: Garnier, 1927), pp. 151–53, 170–71, 179–80; Edmond Duranty, ‘Le Remarquable Article de M. de Pontmartin sur Balzac’, Réalisme, 2 (1856), 28–29 (p. 28); Emile Zola, Ecrits sur le roman, ed. by Henri Mitterand (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2004), p. 189. 12. Zola, p. 170. On the contrast between Sand’s idealism and Balzac’s realism, see Naomi Schor, George Sand and Idealism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), esp. pp. 23–54; for an account of the neglected role of aesthetic idealism in the nineteenth century and its relation to Romanticism, realism and modernism, see Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 67–104. 13. George Henry Lewes, Literary Criticism of George Henry Lewes, ed. by Alice Kaminsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. 87. 14. EGE, 267–73, 366–71; Henri Thulié, ‘Du roman’, Réalisme, 1 (1856), 5–6 (p. 6). 15. Such as the one detailed, e.g. in Philippe Hamon, ‘Un discours contraint’, in Littérature et réalité, ed. by Gérard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Seuil, 1982), pp. 119–81. 16. Hans-Robert Jauß, Literaturgeschichte als Provokation (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), pp. 118–20. 17. George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from ‘Frankenstein’ to ‘Lady Chatterley’ (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

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18. KFSA, ii, 192. 19. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal: Mémoires de la vie littéraire, ed. by Robert Ricatte, 3 vols (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989), i, 46. 20. Plato, Apology, 22 a8–b8. 21. Cited in Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine (The Hague, Paris and New York: Mouton Publishers, 1980), p. 253. 22. For a summary of the leitmotifs of the postmodern critique of realism, see Adventures in Realism, ed. by Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 1–12. 23. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, 50 vols (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975–2004), xxxxviii, 167–68. 24. This idea can be dated as far back as Hugo’s funeral oration for Balzac: see David Bellos, Balzac Criticism in France 1850–1900: The Making of a Reputation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 31–32; see, also, Zola, Ecrits sur le roman, p. 127. 25. Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki and others, trans. by Edith Bone (London: Merlin Press, 1978), pp. 21, 10–12, 21. 26. Henry James, Literary Criticism: French Writers; Other European Writers; The Prefaces to the New York Edition (New York: The Library of America, 1984), p. 48. 27. Roland Barthes, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Eric Marty, 5 vols (Paris: Seuil, 2002), iii, 32. 28. For a description of this ‘issue’ of Aspen, see Molly Nesbit, ‘What Was an Author?’, Yale French Studies, 73 (1987), 229–57 (pp. 240–43). 29. Barthes, iii, 45. 30. CH, vi, 1070. 31. Barthes mentions him, however, in S/Z, when commenting on the same passage: see Barthes, iii, 263. 32. CH, vi, 1070. 33. CH, vi, 1054. 34. For a summary of the arguments of both sides of the debate on intention, see Antoine Compagnon, Le Démon de la théorie littéraire: Littérature et sens commun (Paris: Seuil, 1998), pp. 49–99. 35. Lilian Furst, All is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 2. 36. Diana Knight, Flaubert’s Characters: The Language of Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Christopher Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Jefferson, Reading Realism. 37. Sandy Petrey, Realism and Revolution: Balzac, Stendhal, Zola and the Performances of History (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 49, 55. In his more recent book, Petrey revisits his argument and speaks of ‘the realist duality’: see Sandy Petrey, In the Court of the Pear King: French Culture and the Rise of Realism (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2005). For a view of realism as a performance in which the object of mimesis is not a pre-existing one but an interpretation of the world, and which oscillates between the real and the imaginary, see also Rainer Warning, Die Phantasie der Realisten (Munich: Fink, 1999), pp. 9–34. 38. Furst, pp. 26, 44, 146, 190. 39. Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. by Josué V. Harari (London: Methuen, 1980), pp. 141–60 (pp. 149, 148). 40. See Martha Woodmansee, ‘The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the “Author” ’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 17.4 (1984), 425–48; Mark Rose, ‘The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship’, Representations, 23 (1988), 51–85; Carla Hesse, ‘Enlightenment Epistemology and the Laws of Authorship in Revolutionary France, 1777–1793’, Representations, 30 (1990), 109–37. For their synthetic studies, see Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Carla Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1810 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

Notes to the Introduction 165 41. Barthes, iv, 234–35. 42. Alexander Nehamas, ‘Writer, Text, Work, Author’, in Literature and the Question of Philosophy, ed. by Anthony J. Cascardi (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 265–91; ‘The Postulated Author: Critical Monism as a Regulative Ideal’, Critical Inquiry, 8.1 (1981), 133–49; ‘What an Author Is’, The Journal of Philosophy, 83.11 (1986), 685–91. 43. Maurice Couturier, La Figure de l’auteur (Paris: Seuil, 1995), p. 22. 44. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983 [1961]). 45. Daniel Oster, Passages de Zénon: Essai sur l’espace et les croyances littéraires (Paris: Seuil, 1983), pp. 117–31; Jean-Claude Bonnet, ‘Le Fantasme de l’écrivain’, Poétique, 63 (1985), 259–77; JeanBenoît Puech, ‘Du vivant de l’auteur’, Poétique, 63 (1985), 279–300; José-Luis Diaz, L’Ecrivain imaginaire: Scénographies auctoriales à l’époque romantique (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007); see also Textuel, 22 (1989), ‘Images de l’écrivain’, ed. by José-Luis Diaz; L’Auteur comme œuvre: L’Auteur, ses masques, son personnage, sa légende, ed. by Nathalie Lavialle and Jean-Benoît Puech (Orléans: Presses Universitaires d’Orléans, 2000); L’Auteur entre biographie et mythographie, ed. by Brigitte Louichon and Jérôme Roger (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2002). For an early version of this approach, see also Boris Tomasevskij, ‘Literature and Biography’ [1923], in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. by Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), pp. 47–55. 46. As is Booth’s ‘career author’: see Booth, p. 431. 47. Diaz, pp. 17–20, 44, 75–84. 48. Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004 [1992]). 49. Cf. the relevant anthologies, readers and introductory works: What Is an Author?, ed. by Maurice Biriotti and Nicola Miller (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993); Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern: A Reader, ed. by Seán Burke (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995); The Death and Resurrection of the Author?, ed. by William Irwin (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002); Andrew Bennett, The Author (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). 50. W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, ed. by John Carey (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 6. 51. OC, ii, 83, 81. 52. Flaubert, ii, 204. 53. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. by Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 487; on figura and figural interpretation, see Erich Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. by Ralph Manheim and Catherine Garvin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 11–76. 54. Cited in Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), p. xiv. 55. Cf. Michel Raimond’s distinction between the nineteenth-century ‘roman du romancier’ in which the novelist is primarily present as a social type and the twentieth-century ‘roman du roman’ which focuses on the relation of the novelist to his work and on aesthetic problems. See Michel Raimond, La Crise du roman: Des lendemains du Naturalisme aux années vingt (Paris: José Corti, 1966), p. 244. 56. See Arlette Michel, ‘Le Statut du romancier chez Balzac’, in Le Statut de la literature: Mélanges offerts à Paul Bénichou, ed. by Marc Fumaroli (Geneva: Droz, 1982), pp. 257–71. 57. On realism in painting as a model for literary realism, see Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); on the way different arts are employed as analogous to or contrasting with realism in England, see Alison Byerly, Realism, Representation and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 58. Henry James, The Art of the Novel, ed. by Richard P. Blackmur (London and New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934). 59. James, Literary Criticism, p. 63. 60. Hans-Robert Jauß, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. by Timothy Bahti (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 27–28. 61. Anthony Trollope, The Warden (London: Trollope Society, 1995), p. 1.

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62. CH, iv, 965–66. 63. GEL, iii, 21, 83–84. 64. Flaubert, ii, 218–19. 65. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories, trans. by David McDuff (London: Penguin, 1988), pp. 66–69. 66. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London: Minerva, 1991), pp. 854–72. 67. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, ed. by Michael K. Goldberg and Joel L. Brattin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 133. 68. Hélène Dufour, Portraits, en phrases: Les Recueils de portraits littéraires au XIXe siècle (Paris: PUF, 1997). 69. CH, viii, 1669. 70. Carlyle, p. 144. 71. CH, x, 52.

Chapter 1. Sympathy and Sympathetic Imagination in Realist Fiction 1. Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works, ed. by Russell Jackson and Ian Small, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000–07), iv, 82. 2. On the preoccupation with sympathy in the eighteenth century as an implicit admission of its impossibility, see Sean Gaston, ‘The Impossibility of Sympathy’, The Eighteenth Century, 51.1/2 (2010), 129–52. 3. See R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (London: Macmillan, 1974), esp. pp. 69–95. 4. See Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 129–46; on the resilience of sensibility, see Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 190–221. 5. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. by Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 43. 6. On sympathy and sensationalism in public executions, see also the discussion of Du Bos in David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 22–27. For an overview of eighteenth-century opinions on the paradox of the spectator’s pleasure in witnessing the suffering of others, either in real life or in tragedy, see Earl Wasserman, ‘The Pleasures of Tragedy’, ELH, 14.4 (1947), 283–307. 7. On the ‘theatricality’ of sympathy, see Marshall, The Surprising Effects. 8. On Smith’s sympathy and the theatre, see David Marshall, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 167–92. 9. Cf. also Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. by J. C. Bryce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 124. 10. Marian Hobson, The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 167–79; Joseph Harris, ‘Identification and the Drame’, Nottingham French Studies, 47.3 (2008), 56–67 (pp. 58–60). 11. On sympathy and illusion in the bourgeois drama, see Helmut J. Schneider, ‘Humanity’s Imaginary Body: The Concepts of Empathy and Sympathy and the New Theater Experience in the 18th Century’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 82.3 (2008), 382–99. 12. On the complexities of eighteenth-century claims to authenticity, see Hobson, pp. 85–137. 13. On Le Père Goriot and the theatre, see Stéphane Vachon, ‘Le (Mot) drame du Père Goriot’, Poétique, 111 (1997), 323–42. 14. Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 191. 15. Nicole Billot, ‘Le Père Goriot devant la critique (1835)’, AB 1987, 101–29 (p. 104). 16. Pierre Barbéris, ‘Le Père Goriot’ de Balzac: Ecriture, structures, significations (Paris: Larousse, 1972), pp. 45–50; Pierre Brunel, Le Chemin de mon âme: Roman et récit au XIXe siècle, de Chateaubriand à Proust (Paris: Klincksieck, 2004), pp. 110–12; Alexander Welsh, ‘King Lear, Père Goriot and Nell’s

Notes to Chapter 1 167 Grandfather’, in Literary Theory and Criticism: Festschrift in Honor of René Wellek, ed. by Joseph P. Strelka, 2 vols (New York: Peter Lang, 1984), ii, 1405–25; Gretchen R. Besser, ‘Lear and Goriot: A Reevaluation’, Orbis Litterarum, 27 (1972), 28–36. 17. See CH, iii, 1280, n.2. On the problems posed by the exclusive attribution of the parable to Chateaubriand, see Stéphane Vachon, ‘Balzac, Rousseau, Louis Protat’, AB 1996, 395–422; for the wider philosophical context, see Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Killing a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance’, Critical Inquiry, 21.1 (1994), 46–60. 18. On Rastignac’s moral indeterminacy, see William Stowe, Balzac, James, and the Realistic Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 22–37; David R. Ellison, ‘Moral Complexity in Le Père Goriot: Balzac between Kant and Nietzsche’, in Approaches to Teaching Balzac’s ‘Old Goriot’, ed. by Michal Peled Ginsburg (New York: The Modern Languages Association of America, 2000), pp. 54–61; Edward J. Ahearn, Marx and Modern Fiction (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 140–41. On Rastignac’s choice as ref lecting the complicated moral perception of the melodramatic imagination, see Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 138; on Balzac’s use of melodrama as tending towards a similar complexity, see Christopher Prendergast, Balzac: Fiction and Melodrama (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), pp. 8–13. 19. On Massiac, see Barbéris, pp. 122–30. 20. Billot, pp. 101–29. 21. See Barbéris, pp. 48–49; Sylvie Boulard-Bezat, ‘Les Adaptations du Père Goriot’, AB 1987, 167–78. 22. See Patrick Imbert, ‘Le Père Goriot au Canada: Feuilleton et censure’, AB 1986, 237–46. 23. See Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. by Diderot and d’Alembert, 17 vols (Geneva, Paris, and Neuchâtel: 1754–72), xv, 566. 24. Encyclopédie, xv, 567. 25. Arlette Michel, ‘Le Pathétique balzacien dans La Peau de chagrin, Histoire des Treize et Le Père Goriot’, AB 1985, 229–45. Balzac’s notion of the sublime does not seem to have been inf luenced by the Burkean distinction between the sublime and the beautiful; for the opposite view, see Mireille Labouret, ‘Le Sublime de la terreur dans Les Chouans et Une ténébreuse affaire’, AB 1990, 317–27; Danielle Dupuis, ‘Balzac et l’école modern: Du sublime burkien au sublime balzacien’, AB 2006, 295–320. 26. On the relation between the sublime and the grotesque in the novel, see Brunel, pp. 87–115; Renée de Smirnoff, ‘Le Sublime dans le roman balzacien’, in La Littérature et le sublime, ed. by Patrick Marot (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires de Mirail, 2007), pp. 263–68 (pp. 275, 281). 27. For this tripartite distinction of the kinds of intelligence, see Louis Lambert, CH, xi, 688. On the aesthetic theories of Gambara and Frenhofer in relation to parody and the sublime, see Max Andréoli, ‘Le Sublime et la parodie dans les “Contes artistes” de Balzac’, AB 1994, 7–38. On Goriot as the only Balzacian monomaniac of ‘limited intelligence’, see Moïse Le Yaouanc, Nosographie de l’humanité balzacienne (Paris: Librairie Maloine, 1959), p. 369. 28. See Billot, pp. 114–16, 118–20. 29. On Latimer as the alienated or manqué artist, see Gillian Beer, ‘Myth and Single Consciousness: Middlemarch and “The Lifted Veil” ’, in This Particular Web: Essays on ‘Middlemarch’, ed. by Ian Adam (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), pp. 91–115; Elliot L. Rubinstein, ‘A Forgotten Tale by George Eliot’, NCF, 17.2 (1962), 175–83. 30. On the confrontation of Romantic poetry with science, see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 298–335, (esp. pp. 303–12). 31. ‘The Lifted Veil’ also alludes to a number of texts which contain unreliable narrators and unsympathetic characters. Latimer in Geneva models himself on Rousseau and he echoes the latter’s fear of persecution: on Latimer and Rousseau, see Neil Hertz, George Eliot’s Pulse (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 42–62; Hugh Witemeyer, ‘George Eliot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, Comparative Literature Studies, 16.1 (1979), 121–30. The blood transfusion scene and Mrs Archer’s resurrection recall Edgar Allan Poe’s tales ‘Berenice’ (1835), ‘Ligeia’ (1838) and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839), in which the theme of a woman returning from the

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grave is related by unreliable narrators or characters, all of which have acquired, like Latimer, a kind of heightened perception while convalescing from an illness: on Poe’s unreliable narrators, see G. R. Thompson, Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973). Finally, both the setting in Geneva and the medical experiments recall Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which the lack of sympathy is a central theme: on ‘The Lifted Veil’ and Frankenstein, see Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 456. 32. On Latimer as unreliable, see also Susan Payne, The Strange Within the Real: The Function of Fantasy in Austen, Brontë and Eliot (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1992), pp. 151–62; Kevin Ashby, ‘The Centre and the Margins in “The Lifted Veil” and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine’, George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Studies, 24/25 (1993), 132–46. 33. GEL, iii, 112. 34. On ‘The Lifted Veil’ as an exploration of realism and its problems, cf. Terry Eagleton, ‘Power and Knowledge in “The Lifted Veil” ’, Literature and History, 9.1 (1983), 52–61; Caroline Levine, The Serious Pleasures of Victorian Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2003), pp. 127–37; Julian Wolfreys, ‘Phantom Optics: Contextualizing “The Lifted Veil” ’, George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Studies, 38/39 (2000), 61–75. 35. See Victor Brombert, The Hidden Reader: Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Baudelaire, Flaubert (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 21; Furst, All is True, pp. 1–27. 36. See John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 18–56. 37. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), i, 386, 206. 38. See Adela Pinch, Epistemologies of Passion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 17–50. 39. Ellis, pp. 18–19; Encyclopédie, xv, 736 [‘Sympathie’]; on eighteenth-century sensibility and physiology, see Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 40. Burke, p. 160. 41. See also the Encyclopédie entry for ‘Génie’ (formerly attributed to Diderot): ‘dans la chaleur de l’enthousiasme, il ne dispose ni de la nature, ni de la suite de ses idées; il est transporté dans la situation des personnages qu’il fait agir; il a pris leur caractère’ (OE, p. 10) [in the heat of enthusiasm, he has no control over the nature or the order of his ideas; he is transported into the situation of the fictional characters he moves to action; he has assumed their character]. 42. Burke, p. 120. 43. Walter Jackson Bate, ‘The Sympathetic Imagination in Eighteenth-Century English Criticism’, ELH, 12.2 (1945), 144–64; From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), pp. 129–59; James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 143–60. This aspect of sympathy and the sympathetic imagination has been designated, since the late nineteenth century, by the term ‘empathy’: the term appeared as a translation of Theodor Lipps’s Einfühlung by the psychologist E. B. Titchener in 1909 and was subsequently used as a synonym or antonym of sympathy: on empathy and its relation to and emergence from sympathy, see Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 37–64; Robert L. Katz, Empathy: Its Nature and its Uses (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1963), pp. 1–10; Jørgen B. Hunsdahl, ‘Concerning Einfühlung (Empathy): A Concept Analysis of its Origin and Early Development’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 3.2 (1967), 180–91; Thomas J. McCarthy, Relationships of Sympathy: The Writer and the Reader in British Romanticism (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), pp. 3–8; for an account of the problems posed by sympathy/empathy and fiction, see Sophie Ratcliffe, On Sympathy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), esp. pp. 7–70; for an exploration of different ways in which the proposition ‘I am You’ is present in Western thought, see Karl F. Morrison, ‘I am You’: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology and Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). Rae Greiner distinguishes between sympathy and empathy and stresses the fact that sympathy is not emotional; however,

Notes to Chapter 1 169 she employs Adam Smith’s notion of sympathy to examine nineteenth-century British fiction and argues that sympathy in realist fiction is incompatible with identification and fusion with the other: see ‘Thinking of Me Thinking of You: Sympathy Versus Empathy in the Realist Novel’, Victorian Studies, 53.3 (2011), 417–26 and ‘Sympathy Time: Adam Smith, George Eliot and the Realist Novel’, Narrative, 17.3 (2009), 291–311. 44. See Earl R. Wasserman, ‘The Sympathetic Imagination in Eighteenth-Century Theories of Acting’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 46.3 (1947), 264–72. 45. See Jonathan Bate, ‘Shakespeare and Original Genius’, in Genius: The History of an Idea, ed. by Penelope Murray (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 76–97. 46. See Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 14; Engell, pp. 153–55; on the metaphor of Proteus for the actor in eighteenth-century France, see Hobson, pp. 199–202. 47. On the shared interest of both interlocutors in the different ways in which the actor forgets himself, see Marshall, The Surprising Effects, pp. 105–34; see also Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, L’Imitation des modernes (Paris: Galilée, 1986), pp. 15–36. 48. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social (Paris: Garnier, 1963), p. 187. 49. On the contradiction between Diderot’s conceptions of genius as an enthusiast and a cool observer, see Herbert Dieckmann, ‘Diderot’s Conception of Genius’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 2.2 (1941), 164–72. 50. Abrams, pp. 244–49; Bate, Shakespeare, pp. 14–16. 51. S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), II, 27. 52. William Hazlitt, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. by P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930–34), vi, 23; viii, 42. 53. John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. by H. E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), i, 387, 193, 386, 387. On Keats and Shakespeare, through Hazlitt, see Walter Jackson Bate, Negative Capability: The Intuitive Approach in Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939); Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare, pp. 157–74. 54. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. by Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 93. For a wide-ranging account of the relations between artist and God in Western culture, see Peter Conrad, Creation, Artists, Gods and Origins (London: Thames and Hudson, 2007). 55. On the authorship controversy, see Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (London: Picador, 1997), pp. 65–100. 56. On Vautrin as an authorial persona, see Alfred Glauser, ‘Balzac/Vautrin’, Romanic Review, 79.4 (1988), 585–610; Max Milner, Le Diable dans la littérature française de Cazotte à Baudelaire, 1772–1861, 2 vols (Paris: José Corti, 1960), ii, 43; Michael Tilby, ‘From Argow to Vautrin: The Transformation of a Literary Stereotype’, Quinquereme, 12.1 (1989), 14–15. 57. On the similarities between Vautrin and Goriot, see Ellison, pp. 73–74; Nilli Diengott, ‘Goriot vs. Vautrin: A Problem in the Reconstruction of Le Père Goriot’s System of Values’, NCFS, 15.1/2 (1986–87), 70–76. Also, on pairing and doubling in Le Père Goriot, see Rose Fortassier, ‘Balzac et le démon du double dans Le Père Goriot’, AB 1986, 155–67. 58. PG, 137, 142, 145, 186, 202.

Chapter 2. Irony and Sympathetic Imagination 1. Augustus Wilhelm Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Briefe, ed. by Edgar Lohner, 7 vols (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1962), vi, 144, 136–37. 2. On Diderot and Romantic irony, see also Judith Spencer, ‘Pour une esthétique de la praxis de l’Histrio: Le Paradoxe de Diderot comme pré-texte à l’ironie romantique’, Studia Neophilologica, 62 (1990), 105–11. 3. Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. by Andrzej Warminsky (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 165. 4. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. by T. M. Knox, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), i, 66.

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5. KFSA, ii, Kritische Fragmente, fr. 42. Schlegel’s fragments are henceforth designated by K (for ‘Kritische Fragmente’ (1797)), A (for ‘Athenaüm Fragmente’ (1798)), I (for ‘Ideen’ (1800)) and their respective number. 6. Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 17 vols (Geneva, Paris, and Neuchâtel: 1754–72), viii, 905. 7. Raymond Immerwahr, ‘The Subjectivity or Objectivity of Friedrich Schlegel’s Poetic Irony’, The Germanic Review, 26.3 (1951), 173–91 (p. 184). 8. Cf. also KFSA, xvi, 174, fr. 1078. 9. On the significance of the irreconcilability of contradictions, see Georgia Albert, ‘Understanding Irony: Three Essais on Friedrich Schlegel’, MLN, 108.5 (1993), 825–48 (pp. 825–33); Immerwahr, ‘The Subjectivity’, pp. 177–82; on the incompatibility of Schlegelian dialectics and Hegelian synthesis, see also Steven Alford, Irony and the Logic of the Romantic Imagination (New York: Peter Lang, 1984), pp. 61–62. 10. Hegel, pp. 64–69. For a criticism of the Hegelian view of irony as absolute negativity and avoidance of commitment, see Charles Larmore, The Romantic Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 76–83. On the tension between unity and chaos, system and lack of system in the Romantic fragment, see Christopher Kubiak, ‘Sowing Chaos: Discontinuity and the Form of Autonomy in the Fragment Collections of the Early German Romantics’, Studies in Romanticism, 33.3 (1994), 411–49. Michel Chaouli (The Laboratory of Poetry: Chemistry and Poetics in the Work of Friedrich Schlegel (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)) explains the combination of system and lack of system very convincingly, drawing on Schlegel’s use of the discourse of chemistry, which constitutes, in his opinion, a middle path between mechanism and organicism; the totality of the fragment is usually explained through organicism: see e.g. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, L’Absolu littéraire: Théorie de la littérature allemande (Paris: Seuil, 1978), pp. 69–74. 11. See Gary Handwerk, Irony and Ethics in Narrative: From Schlegel to Lacan (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 19. On the creative aspect of irony, see Anne Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 3–30. Cf. also Jerome McGann who takes Mellor’s approach as an example of the partiality of accounts of Romanticism: see Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 21–31. 12. On the fragment, see Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, L’Absolu littéraire, pp. 57–80. 13. KFSA, ii, 335. 14. Cf. e.g. KFSA, xvi, 91, fr. 91; 267, fr. 165; on the ‘modal’ re-conceptualization of generic terms in Romanticism, see Tilottama Rajan, ‘Theories of Genre’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, 9 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), v: Romanticism, ed. by Marshall Brown, 226–49 (pp. 230–36). 15. Cf. also KFSA, xvi, 156, fr. 836. 16. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism’, in Selected Writings, ed. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999–2003), i, 116–200 (p. 161). 17. On the essay as a demonstration of incomprehensibility, see also Cathy Comstock, ‘ “Transcendental Buffoonery”: Irony as Process in Schlegel’s “Über die Unverständlichkeit” ’, Studies in Romanticism, 26 (1987), 445–64. 18. On stable irony and its clues, see Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 1–86. 19. Socratic irony, however, was neither easily detectible nor semantically stable. On Socratic irony, see Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living. Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 19–98, who criticizes Gregory Vlastos’s dismissal of Socratic irony as dissimulation, and implicitly describes it in Romantic terms. 20. KFSA, ii, 366. Passages from ‘Über die Unverständlichkeit’ are designated by Ü and page number. 21. On the concept of the victim of irony, see D. C. Muecke, The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen, 1969), pp. 34–39.

Notes to Chapter 2 171 22. Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1233b 40–1234a 2. 23. On understanding as interwoven with incomprehension, see also Ernst Behler, ‘Friedrich Schlegels Theorie des Verstehens: Hermeneutik oder Dekonstruktion’, in Die Aktualität der Frühromantik, ed. by Ernst Behler and Jochen Hörisch (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna and Zurich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1987), pp. 141–60; on Schlegel’s incomprehensibility as a critique of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, see Christopher A. Strathman, Romantic Poetry and the Fragmentary Imperative: Schlegel, Byron, Joyce, Blanchot (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), pp. 31–42. 24. On the fragments as intentionally frustrating the reader’s expectations, see also Kubiak, p. 422. 25. See Hans Eichner, Friedrich Schlegel (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970), p. 31. 26. On Schlegel’s — mostly private — gradual disappointment with Meister, see René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950, 8 vols (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955–92), ii, 32–34; Novalis believed that ‘W[ilhelm] M[eister] ist eigentlich ein Candide, gegen die Poesie gerichtet’ [Wilhelm Meister is really a Candide which targets poetry]: see Novalis, Schriften, ed. by Richard Samuel, 5 vols (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1960–88), iii, 646; see also Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 214. 27. KFSA, ii, 128. Passages from ‘Über Goethes Meister’ are designated by M and page number. 28. On the review as an ‘ironization of the concept of Bildung’, see Ginette Verstraete, ‘Friedrich Schlegel’s Practice of Literary Theory’, Germanic Review, 69.1 (1994), pp. 28–35. 29. See Kubiak, pp. 411–15. 30. For a similar view, see also Chaouli, pp. 188–95, who argues that Schlegel’s ‘combinatorial method’, inspired by contemporary chemistry, favours a less omnipotent authorial figure, who, however, reasserts himself through self-ref lection. 31. On Schlegel and Fichte and on the parting of ways in epistemology between Fichte and the early Romantics, see Benjamin, pp. 120–35; Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs, Die romantische Ironie in Theorie und Gestaltung (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2002), pp. 23–34; Kubiak, pp. 430–42; Ernst Behler, ‘The Theory of Irony in German Romanticism’, in Romantic Irony, ed. by Frederick Garber (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1988), pp. 43–81 (pp. 56–62); Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. by Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), pp. 177–89; Werner Hamacher, ‘Position Exposed: Friedrich Schlegel’s Poetological Transposition of Fichte’s Absolute Proposition’, in Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, trans. by Peter Fenves (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 222–60; Gary Handwerk, ‘Romantic Irony’, in Brown (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, v, 203–25 (pp. 210–11). 32. Cf. e.g. KFSA, xvi, 237, fr. 71: ‘Ironie ist [...] σθ [Synthese] von Ref lex[ion] und Fant[asie], von Harm[onie] und Enthus[iasmus]’ [irony is the synthesis of ref lection and imagination, of harmony and enthusiasm]. 33. On the ironist as a plural individual, cf. also August’s A242; KFSA, xvi, 140, fr. 654; KFSA, xvi, 295, fr. 494. 34. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. by Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 78–100. 35. De Man also connects, in passing, the ironist’s ‘super-, transcendental self ’ to Keats’s description of Shakespeare in terms of negative capability: see De Man, p. 175; on sympathy/empathy and irony, see also Frederick Garber, ‘Nature and the Romantic Mind: Egotism, Empathy, Irony’, Comparative Literature, 29.3 (1977), 193–212 (p. 211). 36. Cf. KFSA, xvi, 116, fr. 378: ‘φσ [Philosophie] des Romans im Roman selbst’. 37. KFSA, xviii, 85, fr. 668. 38. One would tend to agree with Lilian Furst’s wary formulation: ‘[the breaking of the artistic illusion] may be one of its visible effects in a work of art’. See Lilian Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony in European Narrative, 1760–1857 (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 28 (my italics). Muecke (pp. 164–77) calls this kind of irony ‘proto-romantic’ in contradistinction to Romantic irony proper. Among the scholars who have stressed this misreading are: Wellek, ii, 15; Handwerk, ‘Romantic Irony’, pp. 203–25; Wheeler, p. 20; Raymond Immerwahr, ‘The Practice of Irony in German Romanticism’, in Garber (ed.), Romantic Irony, pp. 82–96 (pp. 82–84); Immerwahr, ‘The Subjectivity’, pp. 182–91.

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39. As Raymond Immerwahr has observed, Schlegel did not normally apply to such texts the term irony but the term ‘arabesque’: see Raymond Immerwahr, ‘Romantic Irony and Romantic Arabesque Prior to Romanticism’, The German Quarterly, 42.4 (1969), 665–85 (pp. 673–83). 40. KFSA, xvi, 118, fr. 397. 41. On the connection of the theme of the double with ref lection, see the early book by Wilhelmine Kraus, Das Doppelgängermotiv in der Romantik: Studien zum romantischen Idealismus (Berlin: Verlag von Emil Ebering, 1930). 42. On Hoffmann and contemporary medical discourse, see Maximilian Bergengruen, ‘Die heitere Therapie. Persönlichkeitsspaltung und Groteske in E. T. A. Hoffmanns Prinzessin Brambilla’, Colloquium Helveticum, 35 (2004), 119–42. 43. On the double in Die Elixiere des Teufels, see Wladimir Trubetzkoy, L’Ombre et la difference: Le Double en Europe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), pp. 59–108. 44. On the double narrative in Murr, see Horst Daemmrich, ‘E. T. A. Hoffmann: Kater Murr (1820– 1822)’, in Romane und Erzählungen zwischen Romantik und Realismus: Neue Interpretationen, ed. by Paul Michael Lützeler (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1983), pp. 73–93. 45. See Hans Mayer, ‘Die Wirklichkeit E. T. A. Hoffmanns’, in Begriffsbestimmung des literarischen Realismus, ed. by Richard Brinkmann (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987), pp. 259–300; Stefan Ringel, Realität und Einbildungskraft im Werk E. T. A. Hoffmanns (Köln, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1997), esp. pp. 261–90 for ‘Prinzessin Brambilla’. 46. On the correspondence of the plot with Callot’s engravings, see Gerhard Neumann, ‘E. T. A. Hoffmanns Prinzessin Brambilla als Entwurf einer “Wissenspoetik”: Wissenschaft-TheaterLiteratur’, in Romantische Wissenspoetik: Die Künste und die Wissenschaften um 1800, ed. by Gabriele Brandstetter and Gerhard Neumann (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2004), pp. 15–47. 47. See Jean Starobinski, ‘Ironie et mélancolie (I): Le théâtre de Carlo Gozzi’, Critique, 12.227 (1966), 291–308 and ‘Ironie et mélancolie (II): La “Princesse Brambilla” de E. T. A. Hoffmann’, Critique, 12.228 (1966), 438–57. For a brief account of the tale’s sources and reception, see Detlef Kremer, E. T. A. Hoffmann: Erzählungen und Romane (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1999), pp. 123–30. 48. For a similar distinction between various ‘Erzählwelten’, cf. Strohschneider-Kohrs, pp. 369–82; Bärbel Frischmann, ‘Personale Identität und Ironie: E. T. A. Hoffmanns Prinzessin Brambilla, Fichtes Philosophie und Friedrich Schlegels Ironie’, Colloquia Germanica, 32.2 (2005), 93–122; Claudia Liebrand, Aporie des Kunstmythos: Die Texte E. T. A. Hoffmanns (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1996), p. 261. 49. See Ross Chambers, ‘Two Theatrical Microcosms: “Die Prinzessin Brambilla” and “Mademoiselle de Maupin” ’, Comparative Literature, 27.1 (1975), 34–46. 50. The first scene of the tale is a variation on the first scene of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre: see, e.g., David Wellbery, ‘Rites de passage: Zur Struktur des Erzählprozesses in E. T. A. Hoffmanns Prinzessin Brambilla’, in ‘Hoffmanneske Geschichte’: Zu einer Literaturwissenschaft als Kulturwissenschaft, ed. by Gerhard Neumann (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005), 317–35 (pp. 322–23). 51. E. T. A. Hoffmann, Sämtliche Werke, ed. by Hartmut Steinecke and Wulf Segebrecht, 6 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2003–04), iii, 797–99. Further references to Hoffmann’s tale are given after quotations in the text. 52. For a reading of Nathanael in ‘Der Sandmann’ as the poet who is unable to detach himself from his creations, see Maria Tatar, ‘E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann”: Ref lection and Romantic Irony’, MLN, 95.3 (1980), 585–608 (pp. 605–08). 53. On Giglio’s style of acting as a parody of Goethe’s conception of tragic acting, see Heide Eilert, Theater in der Erzählkunst: Eine Studie zum Werk E. T. A. Hoffmanns (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1977), esp. pp. 155–88. 54. This is the case with ‘Der goldene Topf ’ (1814), in which bourgeois reality is condemned and Anselmus, whose dreams are presented as glimpses of a higher reality, becomes, at the end of the tale, a part of the world of Atlantis. The relation of the two realities in ‘Der goldene Topf ’ is often projected in ‘Prinzessin Brambilla’: see e.g. Ringel, pp. 273–83. Against this projection, see Helga Slessarev, ‘E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Prinzessin Brambilla”: A Romanticist’s Contribution to the Aesthetic Education of Man’, Studies in Romanticism, 9.3 (1970), 147–60; Liebrand, pp.

Notes to Chapter 2 173 257–300; see also Thomas Cramer, Das Groteske bei E. T. A. Hoffmann (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1966), pp. 96–102, who argues for the gradual assimilation of the grotesque element in reality, exemplified in Hoffmann’s change of attitude towards the grotesque from ‘Der goldene Topf ’ to ‘Prinzessin Brambilla’. 55. On the medical context of dizziness in the tale, see Christine Weder, ‘Ein medizinischliterarisches Symptom: Zum Schwindel bei E. T. A. Hoffmann und im Kontext medizinisches Diskurses der Zeit’, E. T. A. Hoffmann Jahrbuch, 10 (2002), 76–95. 56. Hoffmann employs explicitly the terms humour and irony as interchangeable. Wolfgang Preisendanz, however, distinguishes between irony (taken to mean the negation of reality) and humour (the positive, creative and reality-affirming force), arguing for the primacy of humour in ‘Prinzessin Brambilla’. See Wolfgang Preisendanz, Humor als dichterische Einbildungskraft (Munich: Eidos Verlag, 1963), pp. 50–67, 72–84, for the analysis of the tale and the terminological distinction, respectively. 57. On the narrator and Celionati as working at cross purposes, on the former as strengthening the illusion of Giglio’s story and on the latter as disrupting it, see Strohschneider-Kohrs, pp. 386–400. 58. Christa-Maria Beardsley has identified this type of character as the ‘Master’: see Christa-Maria Beardsley, E. T. A. Hoffmann: Die Gestalt des Meisters in seinen Märchen (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1975). Although Beardsley restricts her corpus to Hoffmann’s Märchen, this type may include Master Abraham in Lebensansichten des Katers Murr, while Serapion, in Die Serapionsbrüder, can be viewed as the prototypical example. For an examination of ‘Prinzessin Brambilla’ in the context of the Serapiontic principle and the development of Hoffmann’s aesthetic theory, see Hilda Meldrum Brown, E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Serapiontic Principle: Critique and Creativity (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006), pp. 92–105. For a view of Celionati as a sinister figure, standing for the capitalist who exploits Giglio, see Claus Friedrich Köpp, ‘Realismus in E. T. A. Hoffmanns Erzählung “Prinzessin Brambilla” ’, Weimarer Beiträge, 12 (1966), 57–80. 59. Cf. Strohschneider-Kohrs, p. 386: ‘Die Gestalt des Ciarlatano Celionati erfüllt im Erzählgang des Capriccios eine besondere Aufgabe. Celionati gibt nicht nur in den erwähnten letzten Teil des 8. Kapitels Auf hellungen und Erklärungen für den ganzen Erzählzusammenhang, sondern er erscheint überall als der Überlegene, der Allwissende, als derjenige, der die Fäden der Handlung in der Hand hält, — wie ein [...] Marionettenlenker, wie ein Inszenator des erzählten Spiels. Es will scheinen, als habe der Dichter mit dieser Gestalt sich selbst wiederholt’ [The figure of Celionati the charlatan serves a particular function in the course of the narrative of the Capriccio. Celionati does not explain and clarify the overall coherence of the narrative merely in the abovementioned last part of the eighth chapter but he appears always as superior, as omniscient, as he who holds the threads of the plot in his hands — as a [...] puppeteer, a director of the narrated performance. It seems as if the author has repeated himself in this figure]. 60. On the ironic ending of the text, see also Paul de Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 187–228 (pp. 217–18).

Chapter 3. The Authorial Economy of Sympathy 1. Paul de Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 187–228 (pp. 200, 220, 222). 2. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, trans. by Harry Zohn (London and New York: Verso, 1997), pp. 48–49, 129–31; Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), v/1, 536, 565. 3. The relevant discussion focuses on whether ‘Des Vetters Eckfenster’ represents a break in Hoffmann’s poetics, especially in regard to its continuity with the Serapiontic principle. Most scholars argue in favour of this continuity: cf. Hilda Meldrum Brown, E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Serapiontic Principle: Critique and Creativity (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006), pp. 106–16; Heinz Brüggemann, ‘Aber schickt keinen Poeten nach London!’ Großstadt und literarische Wahrnehmung im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert: Texte und Intepretationen (Reinbeck bei Hamburg:

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Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985), pp. 173–87; Peter von Matt, Die Augen der Automaten: E. T. A. Hoffmanns Imaginationslehre als Prinzip seiner Erzählkunst (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1971), pp. 31–35; Jörn Steigerwald, Die fantastische Bildlichkeit der Stadt: Zur Begründung der literarischen Fantastik im Werk E. T. A. Hoffmanns (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001), pp. 265–69; Klaus Deterding, Die Poetik der inneren und äußeren Welt bei E. T. A. Hoffmann (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1991), pp. 189–206. Cf. also the objections of Roger F. Cook, ‘Reader Response and Authorial Strategies: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s View from Des Vetters Eckfenster’, German Studies Review, 12.3 (1989), 421–35 (pp. 431–32) and Lothar Köhn, Vieldeutige Welt: Studien zur Struktur der Erzählungen E. T. A. Hoffmanns und zur Entwicklung seines Werkes (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1966), pp. 208–19. 4. On ‘Des Vetters Eckfenster’ as realistic, see Karl Riha, Die Beschreibung der ‘Großen Stadt’ (Berlin: Verlag Gehlen, 1970), pp. 131–42; as an instance of the epistemological continuity between Enlightenment, Romanticism and realism, see Gerhard Neumann, ‘Ausblicke: E. T. A. Hoffmanns letzte Erzählung Des Vetters Eckfenster’, in Hoffmanneske Geschichte: Zu einer Literaturwissenschaft als Kulturwissenschaft, ed. by Gerhard Neumann (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005), pp. 223–42; Gerhard Neumann, ‘Romantische Auf klärung: Zu E. T. A. Hoffmanns Wissenschaftspoetik’, in Aufklärung als Form: Beiträge zu einem historischen und aktuellen Problem, ed. by Helmut Schmiedt and Helmut J. Schneider (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1997), pp. 106–48; as a return to Enlightenment aesthetics, see Günter Oesterle, ‘E. T. A. Hoffmann: Des Vetters Eckfenster: Zur Historisierung ästhetischer Wahrnehmung oder Der kalkulierte romantische Rückgriff auf Sehmuster der Auf klärung’, Der Deutschunterricht, 39.1 (1987), 84–110 (pp. 86–92); as a compromise with the principles of the nascent Biedermeier era, see Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, p. 130; Fritz Martini, ‘Die Märchendichtungen E. T. A. Hoffmanns’, Der Deutschunterricht, 7.2 (1955), 56–78 (p. 59). 5. The relation between the cousin and the narrator has also been the object of debate: some recent studies argue that the narrator, while humouring his invalid cousin, is essentially ironic towards the cousin’s allegedly obsolete, eighteenth-century ‘Kunst zu Schauen’, himself adhering to a more modern mode of seeing. Cf. Robert McFarland, ‘Ein Auge, welches (Un)wirklich(es) schaut: Des Vetters Eckfenster und E. T. A. Hoffmanns Ansichten von Berlin’, E. T. A. Hoffmann Jahrbuch, 13 (2005), 98–116 (pp. 105–16); David Darby, ‘The Unfettered Eye: Glimpsing Modernity from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Corner Window’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 77.2 (2003), 274–94. For convincing versions of the opposite view, see Rolf Selbmann, ‘Diät mit Horaz: Zur Poetik von E. T. A. Hoffmanns Erzählung Des Vetters Eckfenster’, E. T. A. Hoffmann Jahrbuch, 2 (1994), 69–77 (p. 77) and, especially, Steigerwald, pp. 265–69, 275–78. See also Wulf Segebrecht, Heterogenität und Integration: Studien zu Leben, Werk und Wirkung E. T. A. Hoffmanns (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996), p. 127, who chooses to take the master–apprentice relationship between the cousin and the narrator at face value. 6. E. T. A. Hoffmann, Sämtliche Werke, vi, 471. Further references to the tale are given after quotations in the text. 7. The cousin’s observations and hypotheses are largely based on physiognomy: see Oesterle, pp. 86–92; Linde Katrizky, ‘Punschgesellschaft und Gemüsemarkt in Lichtenbergs HogarthKommentaren und bei E. T. A. Hoffmann’, Jahrbuch der Jean Paul Gesellschaft, 1987, 155–71; Hans-Georg von Arburg, ‘Der Physiognomiker als Detektiv und Schauspieldirektor: Johann Ludwig Christian Hakens Blicke aus meines Onkels Dachfenster in’s Menschenherz (1802)’, E. T. A. Hoffmann Jahrbuch, 4 (1996), 54–68; McFarland, pp. 98–116; Detlef Kremer, E. T. A. Hoffmann, pp. 195–96. Also, on the cousin’s ‘art of seeing’ and panoramas, see Thomas Eicher, ‘ “Mit einem Blick das ganze Panorama des Grandiozen Platzes”: Panoramatische Strukturen in Des Vetters Eckfenster von E. T. A. Hoffmann’, Poetica, 25 (1993), 360–77. 8. Oesterle (pp. 109–10) also remarks that the cousin’s vision is similar to the attitude depicted by Schlegel in Athenäum Fragment 121, which, as I have argued in Chapter 2, describes irony in terms of the sympathetic imagination. 9. Cf. also Ulrich Stadler, ‘Die Ansicht als Einblick: Zu E. T. A. Hoffmanns später Erzählung Des Vetters Eckfenster’, Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie, 105.4 (1986), 498–515 (p. 511); Andreas Schirmer, ‘E. T. A. Hoffmann: Des Vetters Eckfenster’, in Deutsche Erzählprosa der frühen Restaurationszeit: Studien zu ausgewählten Texten, ed. by Bernd Leistner (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995), 66–86 (p.

Notes to Chapter 3 175 82); Hermann Korte, ‘Der ökonomische Automat: E. T. A. Hoffmanns späte Erzählung “Des Vetters Eckfenster” ’, Text und Kritik: Sonderband E. T. A. Hoffmann, ed. by Heinz Ludwig Arnold (1992), 125–37; Jens Dirksen, ‘Die Literaturgeschichte verbürgt den Widerstand: Hans Joachim Schädlichs Proza-Skizze “Satzsuchung” und ihr Anspielungshorizont von Paul Scarron über Karl Friedrich Kretschmann zu E. T. A. Hoffmann’, Text und Kritik, 25 (1995), 62–73; on the cousin’s vision as analogous to that of a shopper, see Richard T. Gray, ‘Imaginary Value and the Value of the Imaginary: J. G. Schlosser, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and the Convergence of Aesthetics and Economics in German Romanticism’, Modern Language Quarterly, 72.3 (2011), 389–97. 10. On Smith’s sympathy for the dead, see Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 34–40. 11. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. by Ben Fowkes, 3 vols (London: Penguin, 1990), i, 144. 12. Marx, i, 152–53. 13. Marx, i, 143, 148, 150. 14. Marx, i, 128. 15. Marx, i, 167, 168–69, 167. 16. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 274. 17. For England, see Norman Russell, The Novelist and Mammon: Literary Responses to the World of Commerce in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). 18. For a general approach of the relation between money and literature, see John Vernon, Money and Fiction: Literary Realism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1984). 19. For an account of the various approaches of the relation between literature and money, see Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen, ‘Taking Account of the New Economic Criticism: An Historical Introduction’, in The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, ed. by Woodmansee and Osteen (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 3–50. 20. On political economy and the English novel, see James Thompson, Models of Value: EighteenthCentury Political Economy and the Novel (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1996); Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006). 21. The classic contributions to this kind of argument are Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) and Jean-Joseph Goux, Freud et Marx: Economie et symbolique (Paris: Seuil, 1978). See also Thompson, pp. 40–86. 22. On paper money as introducing a representational crisis that extended itself to areas other than economics, see Marc Shell, ‘The Issue of Representation’, in Woodmansee and Osteen (eds), The New Economic Criticism, pp. 53–74. 23. See Kevin McLaughlin, Paperwork: Fiction and Mass Mediacy in the Paper Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 24. See Gail Turley Houston, From Dickens to ‘Dracula’: Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 25. Jean-Joseph Goux addresses the isomorphism between several cultural domains, in all of which emerge universal equivalents (the Father, the Phallus, the King, law and God) whose development is parallel to that of money as the universal equivalent of commodities: see Freud et Marx; ‘Cash, Check, or Charge’, in Woodmansee and Osteen (eds), The New Economic Criticism, pp. 114–27; ‘Banking on Signs’, Diacritics, 18.2 (1988), 15–25. 26. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 325. 27. See Christina Crosby, ‘Financial’, in A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. by Herbert Tucker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 236–39. 28. See also Kurt Heinzelman, The Economics of the Imagination (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980). 29. Simmel, p. 328. 30. Marx, i, 138–63.

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31. On both political economy and sympathy as discourses which react to eighteenth-century financial crises, and aim to conceptualize society as a system and restore trust in it, see Robert Mitchell, Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era: Systems, State Finance and the Shadows of Futurity (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2007). 32. Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, in Josué V. Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies, pp. 141–60. 33. See Maurice Crubellier, ‘L’Elargissement du public’, in Histoire de l’édition française, ed. by HenriJean Martin and Roger Chartier, 4 vols (Paris: Promodis, 1982–86), iii, 24–45; Christophe Charle, ‘Le Champ de la production littéraire’, in Martin and Chartier (eds), Histoire, iii, 127–57; Henri-Jean Martin, Histoire du livre, 2 vols (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1964), ii, 72–94; James Allen Smith, A History of Reading in Modern France, 1800–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Priscilla P. Clark, ‘Stratégies d’auteur au XIXe siècle’, Romantisme, 17/18 (1977), 92–102; Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998); Victor BonhamCarter, Authors by Profession, 2 vols (London: Society of Authors, 1978–84), i. 34. Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market, p. 30. 35. Woodmansee, pp. 35–55. 36. Woodmansee, pp. 52–53; David Saunders, Authorship and Copyright (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 106–07; Elizabeth Adeney, The Moral Rights of Authors and Performers: An International and Comparative Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 13. 37. On this development, see the relevant chapters in Stig Strömholm, Le Droit moral de l’auteur en droit allemand, français et scandinave avec un aperçu de l’évolution internationale: Etude de droit comparé, 2 vols (Stockholm: P.A. Norstedt & Sönersförlag, 1966), i, 182–259, 313–52; Saunders, pp. 106–21. 38. This approach is systematically criticized by Saunders. It has also been argued that the emphasis on originality is outdated and unable to protect practices of authorship such as collaborative works, films et al.: for a critique of the role of the myth of the romantic author in the evolution and interpretation of copyright laws, see The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, ed. by Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1994), esp. the introduction (pp. 1–13) and the contributions of the editors, pp. 15–28, 29–56, respectively; Thomas Paris, Le Droit d’auteur: L’Idéologie et le système (Paris: PUF, 2002). 39. For instance, Woodmansee presents Young’s ideas on originality as ‘answer[ing] the pressing need of writers in Germany to establish ownership of the products of their labour so as to justify legal recognition of that ownership in the form of a copyright law’ (p. 39). 40. Sainte-Beuve, ‘De la littérature industrielle’, Revue des deux mondes, 19 (1839), 675–91 (p. 678). 41. See Edouard Montagne, Histoire de la Société des gens de lettres (Paris: Librairie Mondaine, 1887). 42. See e.g. Jules Janin: ‘Cette fois tous les hommes de lettres sont égaux devant l’alphabet. Il ne s’agit plus d’esprit, de génie, de talent, de courage. Il s’agit de mille lettres, de vingt mille lettres, de deux cent mille lettres’ [This time all the men of letters are equal before the alphabet. It is no longer a matter of wit, genius, talent, courage. It is a matter of a thousand letters, twenty thousand letters, two hundred thousand letters]: cited by Pierre Antoine Perrod, ‘Balzac “avocat” de la propriété littéraire’, AB 1963, 269–96 (p. 272). 43. Sainte-Beuve, p. 687. 44. Sainte-Beuve, pp. 678, 680, 681, 688. 45. For a — belated — response to Sainte-Beuve, see Emile Zola, ‘L’Argent dans la littérature’ [1880], in Œuvres complètes, 21 vols (Paris: Nouveau Monde Editions, 2002–10), ix, 394–414. 46. For a comparison of the two, see Alain Strowel, Droit d’auteur et copyright: Divergences et convergences: Etude de droit comparé (Paris: Librairie générale de droit et de jurisprudence, 1993). 47. On the Stationer’s Copyright, its origins and its early function, see Lyman Ray Patterson, Copyright in Historical Perspective (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968), pp. 42–77; Saunders, pp. 47–50. 48. Saunders, p. 49; Patterson, pp. 73–76. 49. John Feather, Publishing, Piracy and Politics: An Historical Study of Copyright in Britain (London: Mansell, 1994), pp. 43–52; Mark Rose, Authors and Owners, pp. 31–33. 50. Ronan Deazley, Rethinking Copyright: History, Theory, Language (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2006), p. 13.

Notes to Chapter 3 177 51. On the Statute of Anne, see Patterson, pp. 143–50; Saunders, pp. 53–57. Patterson argues that the Statute of Anne was essentially a trade-regulation statute, aiming to prevent the stationers’ monopoly, rather than a copyright statute (p. 14). 52. Patterson, pp. 147–48. 53. Patterson, pp. 151–72; Saunders, pp. 57–64; Rose, Authors, pp. 67–91. 54. Patterson, pp. 172–79; Saunders, pp. 65–69; Deazley, pp. 15–20. 55. Pierre Recht, Le Droit d’auteur, une nouvelle forme de propriété: Histoire et théorie (Paris: Librairie générale de droit et de jurisprudence, 1969), pp. 26–27. 56. Jacques Boncompain, La Révolution des auteurs: Naissance de la propriété intellectuelle (1773–1815) (Paris: Fayard, 2001), p. 33. 57. On the origins and the function of early privileges, see Marie-Claude Dock, Etude sur le droit d’auteur (Paris: Librairie générale de droit et de jurisprudence, 1963), pp. 62–75; Saunders, pp. 80–85. 58. Dock, pp. 115–26; Saunders, pp. 85–88. 59. See Dock, pp. 128–33; Carla Hesse, ‘Enlightenment Epistemology’, p. 113. 60. Recht, p. 32. 61. See Carla Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, pp. 63–82; Saunders, pp. 93–94. 62. See Dock, pp. 150–57. 63. See Jane C. Ginsburg, ‘A Tale of Two Copyrights: Literary Property in Revolutionary France and America’, Tulane Law Review, 64.5 (1990), 991–1031; Hesse, ‘Enlightenment Epistemology’, pp. 109–37; Saunders, pp. 90–95. 64. Mark Rose, ‘The Author as Proprietor’, p. 61. 65. Rose, pp. 61, 65. 66. Deazley, p. 13. 67. In Germany, this was precisely the argument in favour of piracy, which was considered to give free access to learning. See Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market, pp. 47–56. 68. Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition in a Letter to the Author of ‘Sir Charles Grandison’ (London: Millar, 1759), p. 12. 69. Saunders, p. 127. 70. On the 1842 Copyright Amendment Act and the involvement of authors, see Catherine Seville, Literary Copyright Reform in Early Victorian England: The Framing of the 1842 Copyright Act (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 149–75; John Feather, A History of British Publishing (London: Croom Helm, 1988), p. 171; Paul M. Zall, ‘Wordsworth and the Copyright Act of 1842’, PMLA, 70.1 (1955), 132–44. 71. Rose, ‘The Author’, pp. 60–65; Recht, pp. 50–51; Adeney, pp. 23–25. 72. Pierre Sirinelli, Sylviane Durrande and Antoine Latreille, Code de la propriété intellectuelle (Paris: Dalloz, 2008), p. 13; Lionel Bently and Brad Sherman, Intellectual Property Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 181–85. 73. Strömholm, I, 134–35. 74. Recht, pp. 48–89; Saunders, pp. 95–97. 75. The moral rights of the author in France were confirmed in positive law in 1957: see Strömholm, I, 297–310; in England, where moral rights were viewed as a continental civil-law peculiarity, they were adopted in 1988, in an attempt to harmonize E.U. copyright laws: see Cyrill P. Rigamonti, ‘Deconstructing Moral Rights’, Harvard International Law Journal, 47.2 (2006), 353–412. 76. The recognition of the moral rights of the author is often confused with protection offered to authors prior to the conceptualization of moral rights, based on grounds other than their privileged relation with their work, or on certain undeniable moral principles, such as the opprobrium attached to plagiarism. Dock argues for the in abstracto recognition of the moral rights of the author in Roman law (pp. 9–51); Alain Viala views moral rights as confirmed by jus (customary ethical principles), although not by lex (positive law): see Alain Viala, Naissance de l’écrivain (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1985), pp. 86–94; for a criticism of Viala, see Saunders, pp. 76–77, 81–83. Similarly, the Stationers’ awareness that they could not alter the works they published has been construed as recognizing the right of integrity, while it was simply a

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safeguard against piracy, protecting primarily the Stationers themselves: see Patterson, pp. 9–11, 69–77; Adeney, pp. 15, 367. 77. Joseph Lakanal, Exposé sommaire des travaux de Joseph Lakanal (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1838), p. 10.

Chapter 4. Balzac and the Author as Capitalist 1. On second sight, see A. J. L. Busst, ‘Scottish Second Sight: The Rise and Fall of a European Myth’, European Romantic Review, 5.2 (1995), 149–77; Göran Blic, ‘The Occult Roots of Realism: Balzac, Mesmer, and Second Sight’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 36 (2007), 261–80; on observation, vision and intuition in Balzac, see Albert Béguin, Balzac visionnaire: Propositions (Geneva: Albert Skira, 1946), esp. pp. 39–59; Pierre Laubriet, L’Intelligence de l’art chez Balzac: D’une esthétique balzacienne (Paris: Didier, 1961), pp. 32–64, 160–68; André Allemand, Unité et structure de l’univers balzacien (Paris: Plon, 1965), pp. 60–91. 2. On Hoffmann in France, see Elizabeth Teichmann, La Fortune d’Hoffmann en France (Paris: Librairie Minard, 1961); Marcel Breuillac, ‘Hoffmann en France: Etude de littérature comparée’, RHLF, 13 (1906), 427–57 and 14 (1907), 74–105; Gerhard Pankalla, ‘E. T. A. Hoffmann und Frankreich: Beiträge zum Hoffmann-Bild in der französischen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 28 (1939), 308–18; Ute Klein, Die produktive Rezeption E. T. A. Hoffmanns in Frankreich (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2000); Andrea Hübener, Kreisler in Frankreich: E. T. A. Hoffmann und die französischen Romantiker (Gautier, Nerval, Balzac, Delacroix, Berlioz) (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2004). 3. On Hoffmann and French fantastic tales, see Pierre-Georges Castex, Le Conte fantastique en France de Nodier à Maupassant (Paris: José Corti, 1951), pp. 42–56, 60–68; Marcel Schneider, Histoire de la littérature fantastique en France (Paris: Fayard, 1985), pp. 151–203; Gary Cummiskey, The Changing Face of Horror: A Study of the Nineteenth-Century French Fantastic Short Story (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), pp. 55–100. 4. It was announced by Balzac as such on 9 December 1830: see OD, ii, 823. 5. Teichmann, pp. 75–77; Pierre Barbéris, Balzac et le mal du siècle: Contribution à une physiologie du monde moderne, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), ii, 1556. The inf luence of Hoffmann was also noticed by the German readers of Balzac’s novel: see Roland Albrecht, ‘Jalons pour l’étude de la fortune de Balzac en Allemagne (1829–1848)’, AB 1970, 79–85; Henry H. Remak, ‘The German Reception of French Realism’, PMLA, 69.3 (1954), 410–31 (p. 414). 6. On Hoffmann’s impact on Balzac, see Timothy William Lewis, ‘The Inf luence of E. T. A. Hoffmann on Balzac’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, Goldsmiths College, 1991); Breillac, pp. 78–83; Marie-Claude Amblard, L’Œuvre fantastique de Balzac: Sources et philosophie (Paris: Didier, 1972), pp. 119–26; Lucie Wannufel, ‘Présence d’Hoffmann dans les œuvres de Balzac (1829–1835)’, AB 1970, 45–56; Marie-France Jamin, ‘Quelques emprunts possibles de Balzac à Hoffmann’, AB 1970, 69–75; Hübener, pp. 180–92. 7. Jean-Jacques Ampère, ‘Allemagne. Hoffmann. Aus Hoffmann’s [sic] Leben und Nachlass, herausgegeben von Hitzig, Berlin, 1822’, Le Globe: Recueil philosophique et littéraire, 6.81 (2 August 1828), 588–89 (p. 589). 8. See, also, Lewis, pp. 135–37; on Hoffmann as an alternative to the Gothic novel see, also, Maurice Bardèche, Balzac romancier: La Formation de l’art du roman chez Balzac jusqu’à la publication du Père Goriot (1820–1835) (Geneva: Slatkine, 1967), p. 326. 9. See José-Luis Diaz, Devenir Balzac: L’Invention de l’écrivain par lui-même (Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire: Christian Pirot, 2007), pp. 175–90. 10. The first complete translation of ‘Prinzessin Brambilla’ was published in March 1830 (Teichmann, p. 40), some months before the first mention of the novel (roughly dated in the second half of 1830 (CH, x, 1221)). In L’Εlixir de longue vie (published on 24 October 1830), one of Juan’s lovers is named Brambilla (CH, xi, 482); there are two allusions to ‘Prinzessin Brambilla’ in La Peau de chagrin: see, PC, 179, variante a, pp. 1298–99; pp. 199, 1309, n.3). 11. CH, xi, 688. 12. The antiquary’s emphasis on thought as salutary has generated confusion, because it is often taken to contradict another axiom intended to summarize the main principle illustrated by the

Notes to Chapter 4 179 Etudes philosophiques: ‘la pensée tue’ (expounded by Balzac’s spokesman, Félix Davin, in his 1834 introduction to the Etudes philosophiques, see CH, x, 1210–17). This idea occurs for the first time in Balzac’s youthful novel Clotilde de Lusignan (1822) and, according to Moïse Le Yaouanc, the theme disappears from Balzac’s work by 1842: Le Yaouanc, Nosographie de l’humanité balzacienne, p. 46. Barbéris considers it to be the basic thesis of the novel, and views it in the context of the aftermath of the July revolution: see Barbéris, Balzac, ii, 1517–24; José-Luis Diaz (‘Penser la pensée’, in Penser avec Balzac, ed. by José-Luis Diaz and Isabelle Tournier (Paris: Christian Pirot, 2003), pp. 35–49) notes the contradiction, without pursuing its implications; Martin Kanes employs the distinction between ‘Pensée’ and ‘Idée’ (from Louis Lambert) in order to account for the salutary and creative powers of thought, with which he identifies the antiquary’s ‘savoir’ (p. 86); on this distinction and its implications for Balzac’s theory of creativity in La Peau de chagrin, see Martin Kanes, Balzac’s Comedy of Words (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 65–100; Per Nykrog, in La Pensée de Balzac: Esquisse de quelques concepts-clé (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1965), comments on its destructive powers only in order to illustrate Balzac’s belief in its materiality. Le Yaouanc remarks that La Peau de chagrin does not illustrate the corrosive qualities of thought but considers this a contradiction (p. 50), concluding, however, that Balzac’s over­arching thesis is that thought may have both salutary and harmful physical effects (pp. 60–61). 13. Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 72. On the antiquary as a kind of artist, see also Samuel Weber, Unwrapping Balzac: A Reading of ‘La Peau de chagrin’ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), pp. 38–43. 14. KFSA, ii, Kritische Fragmente 37. 15. For two opposed views on the role of desire in La Peau de chagrin, see Bersani, pp. 70–74; Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Invention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 48–61. 16. For the best exposition of Balzac’s theory of energy, see Ernst Robert Curtius, Balzac, trans. by Henri Jourdan (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1933), esp. pp. 69–94. On Balzac and energy, see also Jean-Pierre Richard, Etudes sur le romantisme (Paris: Seuil, 1970), pp. 7–139; Françoise Gaillard, ‘L’Effet peau de chagrin’, in Le Roman de Balzac: Recherches critiques, méthodes, lectures, ed. by Roland Le Huenen and Paul Perron (Montreal: Didier, 1980), pp. 213–30; Pierre Laszlo, ‘Production d’énergie romanesque: La Peau de chagrin’, MLN, 97.4 (1982), 862–71; Madeleine Ambrière, ‘Balzac et l’énergie’, Romantisme, 46 (1984), 43–48; Arlette Michel, ‘La Poétique balzacienne de l’énergie’, Romantisme, 46 (1984), 49–59; Christine Raffini, ‘Balzac’s Allegories of Energy in La Comédie humaine’, in Honoré de Balzac, ed. by Harold Bloom (Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003), pp. 211–22; Max Milner, ‘Extinction du mal et entropie dans les “Contes et romans philosophiques” ’, AB 2006, 7–16. On Balzac’s relevant medical and scientific sources, see Le Yaouanc, pp. 129–75; Madeleine Ambrière, Balzac et ‘La Recherche de l’absolu’ (Paris: PUF, 1968), pp. 120–266; François Bilodeau, Balzac et le jeu des mots (Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1971), pp. 187–205; Jean-Louis Cabanès, Le Corps et la maladie dans les récits réalistes (1856–1893), 2 vols (Paris: Klincksieck, 1991), i, 95–156. 17. Cf. e.g. Barbéris, Balzac, ii, 1517; Nykrog, pp. 264–76; Ambrière, ‘Balzac’, pp. 43–48; Linda Rudich, ‘Balzac et Marx: Théorie de la valeur’, in La Lecture sociocritique du texte romanesque, ed. by Graham Falconer and Henri Mitterand (Toronto: Samuel Stevens Hakkert, 1975), pp. 63–78 (pp. 64–65); Linda Rudich, ‘Une interprétation de La Peau de chagrin’, AB 1971, 206–33; JoséLuis Diaz, ‘Esthétique balzacienne: L’Economie, la dépense et l’oxymore’, in Balzac et ‘La Peau de chagrin’, ed. by Claude Duchet (Paris: S.E.D.E.S., 1979), pp. 161–77; Nicole Mozet, Balzac au pluriel (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), p. 23; Régine Borderie, ‘Le Corps de la philosophie: La Peau de chagrin’, AB 2001, 199–219. 18. Balzac was familiar with Lavoisier; Claës is presented as his disciple (CH, x, 674). 19. The antiquary’s solution is sometimes read as a simple alternation between rest, inaction and concentration of efforts on a specific aim: see, e.g. Barbéris, Balzac, ii, 1524–36; Maurice Bardèche, Une lecture de Balzac (Paris: Les Septs Couleurs, 1964), pp. 11–37. 20. The skin shrinks e.g. when Raphaël uses the verb ‘souhaiter’ without meaning it (PC, 219). 21. Lucienne Frappier-Mazur, L’Expression métaphorique dans ‘La Comédie humaine’: Domaine social

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et physiologique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1976), pp. 195–228; Curtius, pp. 85–88; Linda Rudich, ‘Balzac et Marx’, pp. 63–78; Gaillard, pp. 213–30; Marco Diani, ‘La Révolution dans la forme: L’Inscription immatérielle de l’argent chez Balzac’, Stanford French Review, 15.3 (1991), 373–92; Warren Johnson, ‘That Sudden Shrinking Feeling: Exchange in La Peau de chagrin’, The French Review, 70.4 (1997), 543–53. Samuel Weber makes extensive use of Marx in his analysis of La Peau de chagrin, arguing that Raphaël’s attempts to go beyond fetishism, beyond the phenomenality of money and desire, and to find what is really there, are thwarted, in the same way that the supposedly realist novel referring to an external reality, is nothing more than an articulation of this phenomenality, a skin of words that covers the absence of a referent. 22. The skin itself is described as a gold ingot; on the skin as gold, see Ruth Amossy, ‘La “Confession de Raphaël”: Contradictions et interférences’, in Duchet (ed.), Balzac, pp. 43–59 (pp. 57–58); Gaillard, pp. 223–24. Barbéris, anxious to dismiss the fantastic elements of the novel in order to prove that it is a political, realistic novel dealing with the disappointment in the wake of the July revolution, considers the skin to be a merely a sign, or a piece of bric-à-brac: Balzac, ii, 1470–74; originally, Raphaël was supposed to be the victim of a hoax, and to have been frightened to his death by a talisman that shrank from natural causes: see Madeleine Fargeaud, ‘Dans le sillage des grands romantiques: Samuel-Henry Berthoud’, AB 1962, 213–43 (p. 227). 23. See Weber, pp. 84–86. 24. Curtius seems to imply this when he argues that the antiquary spends his energy only for productive aims: see Curtius, p. 85. Johnson (pp. 543–53) emphasizes the importance of the notions of exchange and circulation but attributes them to Planchette and his theory of motion, rather than to the antiquary: while Johnson remarks that the source of the antiquary’s ‘savoir’ is movement (p. 545), he still attributes to the antiquary ‘an ultimately misguided attempt to repudiate pouvoir’ (p. 546) which he thinks Raphaël follows. 25. Blic, who addresses the correspondence between energy and money, argues that the antiquary’s attitude is a mysteriously productive kind of accumulation: see Blic, p. 272. 26. Marx, Capital, i, 249. 27. Marx, i, 255. 28. CH, ii, 425 [La Grenadière] / PC, 86. 29. Marx, i, 254. 30. GS, 972, 974, 975, 976. 31. On Gobseck as a persona of the author, see also Marina Zito, ‘La metafora estetica di “Gobseck” ’, Studi e ricerche di letteratura e linguistica francese, 1 (1980), 87–102; Leo Mazet, ‘Récit(s) dans le récit: L’Echange du récit chez Balzac’, AB 1976, 129–61 (pp. 157–58); Jean-Luc Seylaz, ‘Réf lexions sur Gobseck’, Etudes des lettres, 1 (1968), 295–310. 32. For a reading of Gobseck (and, partly, also Derville) as an illustration of the Freudian ‘analsadistic phase’, see Diana Knight, ‘From Gobseck’s Chamber to Derville’s Chambers: Retention in Balzac’s Gobseck’, NCFS, 33.3/4 (2005), 243–57. 33. OD, ii, 713. 34. On Balzac viewing accumulation as a ‘social crime’, see Pierre Barbéris, Mythes balzaciens (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1972), pp. 145–49, 164–66. On Gobseck and circulation see Achim Schröder, ‘Geld und Gesellschaft in Balzacs Erzählung “Gobseck” ’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 49.2 (1999), 161–90. 35. On the different versions of Gobseck, see Bernard Lalande, ‘Les Etats successifs d’une nouvelle de Balzac: Gobseck’, RHLF, 46 (1939), 180–200 and 47 (1947), 69–89; Barbéris, Balzac, ii, 1494–1513; Bardèche, Balzac romancier, p. 288; on the political implications of these revisions after the July revolution see Schröder, pp. 161–90. For an objection to Gobseck being the main character (or a character at all), see Allan H. Pasco, ‘Descriptive Narration in Balzac’s Gobseck’, The Virginia Quarterly Review, 56.1 (1980), 99–108. On La Torpille and its development, see Jean Pommier, L’Invention et l’écriture dans ‘La Torpille’ d’Honoré de Balzac (Geneva: Droz, 1958). 36. It should be noted that Vautrin also draws his descent from another type, that of the (reformed or benevolent) criminal, such as Argow and Ferragus: on a model for this type, see Giacomo Mannironi, ‘Criminal Ambitions: The Young Balzac and the Inf luence of British Romanticism’, La questione romantica, 2.2 (2010), 59–70. On Argow and Vautrin, see Michael Tilby, ‘From Argow to Vautrin’; Max Milner, ‘La Poésie du mal chez Balzac’, AB 1963, 321–35. On Vautrin’s

Notes to Chapter 4 181 development in the context of Balzac’s depiction of evil and crime, see Juri Jakob, Balzacs ‘Iliade de la corruption’: Säkularisierung des Bösen und ‘poésie du mal’ im ‘cycle Vautrin’ (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1999). On Vautrin’s real and literary models, see Paul Ginisty, ‘De quoi est fait Vautrin’, Les Annales politiques et littéraires, 78.2030 (21 May 1922), 562; Paul Vernière, ‘Balzac et la genèse de Vautrin’, RHLF, 48.1 (1948), 53–68; Marcel Bouteron, Etudes balzaciennes (Paris: Jouve, 1954), pp. 119–36; Marcel Reboussin, ‘Vautrin, Vidocq et Valjean’, The French Review, 42.4 (1969), 524–32; Pierre Citron, ‘La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin’, AB 1967, 375–77; P. G. Wagstaff, ‘Vautrin et Gaudet d’Arras: Nouvelle évaluation de l’inf luence de Restif sur Balzac’, AB 1976, 87–98; Raymond Mahieu, ‘Balzac, Vidocq, Gozlan’, in Balzac, ou la tentation de l’impossible, ed. by Raymond Mahieu and Franc Schuerewegen (Paris: S.E.D.E.S., 1998), pp. 193–97; Michael Tilby, ‘Balzac’s Vautrin: A Theatrical Source?’, French Studies Bulletin, 29.109 (2008), 92–95. On Vautrin’s names and their connotations, see J. Wayne Conner, ‘Vautrin et ses noms’, Revue des sciences humaines, 95 (1959), 265–73. 37. See Lawrence R. Schehr, Rendering French Realism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 91–104; Pierre Laforgue, ‘La Marque, la lettre, le sexe: Le Corps de Vautrin’, in Corps, littérature, société (1789–1900), ed. by Jean-Marie Roulin (Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2005), pp. 79–88. 38. According to Fernand Lotte’s count: see ‘Le “Retour des personnages” dans La Comédie humaine: Avantages et inconvénients du procédé’, AB 1961, 227–81 (p. 280). Only two other novels contain more than a hundred reappearing characters: César Birotteau (106) and Illusions perdues (116). For the changes to the number and identities of the reappearing characters from the first versions of the novel to the Furne corrigé, see Anthony R. Pugh, Balzac’s Recurring Characters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974). 39. Levin, The Gates of Horn, p. 201. 40. See Tim Farrant, Balzac’s Shorter Fictions: Genesis and Genre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 213–14. 41. On Vautrin’s (homo)sexuality cf. Michael Lucey, The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 171–237; Pierre Citron, ‘Sur deux zones obscures de la psychologie de Balzac’, AB 1967, 3–27; Philippe Berthier, ‘Balzac du côté de Sodome’, AB 1979, 147–77. 42. On Vautrin as the capitalist, see also Christopher Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis, pp. 96–101. 43. On Vautrin as a persona of the author, see also Alfred Glauser, ‘Balzac/Vautrin’; Maurice Beebe, Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts: The Artist as Hero in Fiction from Goethe to Joyce (New York: New York University Press, 1964), p. 189. 44. On Vautrin and Lucien as Daedalus and Icarus, see Mario Hamlet-Metz, Vautrin y Dedalo: Estudio de tres obras de Balzac (Madrid: Playor, 1974); Maurice Z. Shroder, The Image of the Artist in French Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 96; on the importance of the theme of failure in Balzac, see Bernard N. Schilling, The Hero as Failure: Balzac and the Rubempré Cycle (Chicago, IL, and London: Chicago University Press, 1968); Charles Affron, Patterns of Failure in ‘La Comédie humaine’ (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1966). 45. Henry James, Literary Criticism, p. 34. 46. Hippolyte Taine, Nouveaux essais de critique et d’histoire (Paris: Hachette, 1905), p. 2. 47. On Balzac, money and the world of affairs, see Barbéris, Mythes, pp. 132–93; Erik Sherman Roraback, ‘Money and Power in Henry James’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 1997), pp. 63–90; Emmanuel Failletaz, Balzac et le monde des affaires (Geneva: Payot, 1932); Nicole Felkay, Balzac et ses éditeurs, 1822–1837: Essai sur la librairie romantique (Paris: Promodis, 1987); René Bouvier and Edouard Maynial, Les Comptes dramatiques de Balzac (Paris: Fernand Sorlot, 1938); Jean-Hervé Donnard, Balzac: Les Réalités économiques et sociales dans ‘La Comédie humaine’ (Paris: Armand Colin, 1961); Ronnie Butler, ‘Dessous économiques dans La Comédie humaine: Les Crises politiques et la spéculation’, AB 1981, 267–83; André Vanoncini, ‘Le Statut philosophique de l’or dans La Comédie humaine’, AB 2006, 179–92. 48. For a brief account of Balzac’s projects related with the book-trade, see Roland Chollet, ‘Au nom du livre et de l’écrivain’, in Balzac imprimeur et défenseur du livre (Paris: Paris-Musées and Des Cendres, 1995), pp. 39–54.

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49. OD, ii, 716. See, e.g., James Allen Smith, Popular French Romanticism: Authors, Readers and Books in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1981), pp. 74–101. 50. OD, ii, 1235–53. 51. On Balzac and the Société des gens de lettres, see Edouard Montagne, Histoire de la Société des gens de lettres, pp. 5–45; Louis de Royaumont, Balzac et la Société des gens de lettres (1833–1913) (Paris: Dorbon-Ainé, 1913); Pierre Descaves, Le Président Balzac (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1951). 52. OD, ii, 1246. 53. See Paul van der Perre, Les Préfaçons belges: Bibliographie des véritables originales d’Honoré de Balzac publiées en Belgique (Brussels: [n.pub.], 1940). 54. OD, ii, 1240; CHH, xxvii, 308; Gustave Charlier, ‘Balzac et la contrefaçon belge’, in Balzac et la Touraine (Tours: [n.pub.], 1949), pp. 163–68. 55. See Stéphane Vachon, ‘Balzac dans quelques “journaux reproducteurs”: Répertoire des spoliations’, AB 1993, 361–403 and 1994, 309–37. 56. On the stage adaptations of Balzac’s works, see Edmond Biré, Honoré de Balzac (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1897), pp. 265–316; Patrick Berthier, ‘ “Adieu” au théâtre’, AB 1987, 41–57; Sylvie Boulard-Bezat, ‘Les Adaptations du Père Goriot’. 57. OD, ii, 1237–39; CHH, xxvii, 303; xxviii, 571–72. 58. For example, he took Buloz, the editor of the Revue de Paris, to court in 1836 on the grounds of having sold without authorization and without the author’s ‘bon à tirer’ Le Lys dans la vallée to the Revue étrangère of Saint Petersburg (see ‘Historique du procès auquel a donné lieu Le Lys dans la vallée. 1836’, ix, 917–66); in the Société des gens de lettres c. Le Mémorial de Rouen case (1839), he pleaded in court: see the report of his intervention in La Gazette des Tribunaux in CHH, xxvii, 725–27; see also Pierre-Antoine Perrod, ‘Balzac “avocat” de la propriété littéraire’. 59. ‘Notes remises à messieurs les députés composant la commission de la loi sur la propriété littéraire’, in CHH, xxviii, 559–79. On Balzac and literary property, see Perrod, ‘Balzac “avocat” ’, pp. 269–96; Jean-Yves Mollier, ‘L’Edition en Europe avant 1850: Balzac et la propriété littéraire internationale’, AB 1992, 157–73; Frédéric Pollaud-Dulian, ‘Balzac et la propriété littéraire’, AB 2003, 197–223. 60. CHH, xxvii, 304, 305. 61. CHH, xxviii, 569. 62. OD, ii, 662. 63. CHH, xxviii, 572. 64. OD, ii, 1236. 65. ‘De l’état actuel de la littérature’ [1833], in OD, ii, 1224; ‘Lettre adressée aux écrivains français du XIXe siècle’ [1834], in OD, ii, 1243–45, 1247–49; ‘Sur les questions de la propriété littéraire et de la contrefaçon’ [1836], in CHH, xxvii, 303, 307; ‘Code littéraire proposé par M. Balzac’ [1840], in CHH, xxviii, 734–35. 66. CHH, xxviii, 569, 573. 67. No such case is mentioned by Stig Strömholm, Le Droit moral de l’auteur. 68. OD, ii, 1224, 1243. 69. OD, ii, 1244. 70. OD, ii, 1244. 71. OD, ii, 1245. 72. On Vautrin as Satan, see Max Milner, Le Diable dans la littérature française, ii, 7–46; on Vautrin as a wizard, see Jeannine Guichardet, ‘Vautrin l’enchanteur’, in Images de la magie: Fées, enchanteurs et merveilleux dans l’imaginaire du XIXe siècle, ed. by Simone Bernard-Griffiths and Jeannine Guichardet (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1993), pp. 61–75. 73. See Kyoko Murata, Les Métamorphoses du pacte diabolique dans l’œuvre de Balzac (Paris: Klincksieck, 2003), pp. 11–21. 74. Strömholm, i, 136. 75. On the skin as a contract, see Weber, pp. 48–50; Johnson, p. 544; Gaillard, pp. 220–21. 76. ‘Si tu me possèdes, tu posséderas tout. Mais ta vie m’appartiendra. Dieu l’a voulu ainsi. Désire, et tes désirs seront accomplis. Mais règle tes souhaits sur ta vie. Elle est là. A chaque vouloir je décroîtrai comme tes jours. Me veux-tu? Prends. Dieu t’exaucera. Soit!’ (PC, p. 84) [Possess me and thou shalt possess all things. But thy life is forfeit to me. So hath God willed it. Express a

Notes to Chapter 4 183 desire and thy desire shall be fulfilled. But let thy wishes be measured against thy life. Here it lies. Every wish will diminish me and diminish thy days. Dost thou desire me? Take and God will grant thy wish. Let it be so!]. On the inscription, see Alois Richard Nykl, ‘The Talisman in Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin’, MLN, 34.8 (1919), 479–81; Bouteron, pp. 171–80. 77. On the relation between creation and paternity, see Robert T. Denommé, ‘Création et paternité: Le Personnage de Vautrin dans La Comédie humaine’, Stanford French Review, 5.3 (1981), 313–26. 78. See R. J. B. Clark, ‘Gobseck: Structure, images et signification d’une nouvelle de Balzac’, Symposium, 31 (1997), 290–301 (p. 292), who argues for Gobseck as an image of Balzac’s father and Derville as a persona of Balzac. 79. CH, xi, 1022 [Physiologie du mariage (1829)]. 80. See e.g. Lucey, pp. 21–22. 81. CHH, xxvii, 305. 82. See Pierre Recht, Le Droit d’auteur, pp. 48–53. 83. On artists and their relation with prostitution, see Diana Knight, Balzac and the Model of Painting: Artist Stories in ‘La Comédie humaine’ (London: Legenda, 2007), esp. pp. 80–109 on Joseph Bridau.

Chapter 5. Baudelaire, the Flâneur, and the Author as Prostitute 1. Barbara Johnson, Défigurations du langage poétique: La Seconde Révolution baudelairienne (Paris: Flammarion, 1979). 2. Cf. Thorsten Greiner, Ideal und Ironie: Baudelaires Ästhetik der ‘modernité’ im Wandel vom Verszum Prosagedicht (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993); Scott Carpenter, Acts of Fiction: Resistance and Resolution from Sade to Baudelaire (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), pp. 125–48; Sonya Stephens, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Maria C. Scott, Baudelaire, ‘Le Spleen de Paris’: Shifting Per­ spectives (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Debarati Sanyal, The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), pp. 53–94; Jennifer Bajorek, Counterfeit Capital: Poetic Labor and Revolutionary Irony (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 3. J. A. Hiddleston, Baudelaire and ‘Le Spleen de Paris’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 1–32. 4. On the stranger as an artist, see Hiddleston, pp. 5–8; on both interlocutors as personae of Baudelaire, see Jean-Luc Steinmetz, ‘Notes sur Le Spleen de Paris’, L’Année Baudelaire, 9/10 (2005–06), 289–307 (p. 289); on the questioner as a bourgeois, see Peter Schofer, ‘You Cannot Kill a Cloud: Code and Context in “L’Etranger” ’, in Modernity and Revolution in Late NineteenthCentury France, ed. by Barbara T. Cooper and Mary Donaldson-Evans (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), pp. 99–107; Anne-Marie Brinsmead, ‘A Trading of Souls: Commerce as Poetic Practice in the Petits poèmes en prose’, Romanic Review, 79.3 (1988), 452–65 (p. 453); Steve Murphy, Logiques du dernier Baudelaire: Lectures du ‘Spleen de Paris’ (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003), p. 165. 5. See Francis S. Heck, ‘ “Le Mauvais Vitrier”: A Literary Transfiguration’, NCFS, 14.3/4 (1986), 260–68. 6. See Ross Chambers, ‘Baudelaire’s Street Poetry’, NCFS, 13.4 (1985), 244–59; Karlheinz Stierle, ‘Baudelaire and the Tradition of the Tableau de Paris’, NLH, 11.2 (1980), 345–61; on Baudelaire and the city, see Christopher Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 126–63; Pierre Citron, La Poésie de Paris dans la littérature française de Rousseau à Baudelaire, 2 vols (Paris: Minuit, 1961), ii, 332–83. 7. Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, pp. 199–226. 8. Prendergast, p. 157. 9. See Richard Terdiman, Discourse–Counterdiscourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 261–305. 10. On the criminal, the policeman, the Jew, the flâneur and the capitalist as incarnations of Proteus, see Richard D. E. Burton, ‘The Unseen Seer, or Proteus in the City: Aspects of a NineteenthCentury Parisian Myth’, French Studies, 42.1 (1988), 50–68. 11. For a brief historical account of the flâneur, see Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, ‘The Flâneur in and

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off the Streets of Paris’, in The Flâneur, ed. by Keith Tester (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 22–42. 12. Martina Lauster, in her study of the physiologies, takes issue with Walter Benjamin over his theorization of the flâneur; she argues convincingly that Benjamin systematically underestimates both the importance of the physiologies as material for the flâneur, and their self-consciousness and parodic intent (on which see, also, Nathalie Basset, ‘Les Physiologies au XIXe siècle et la mode: De la poésie comique à la critique’, AB 1984, 157–72), and that he conf lates aesthetic and sociological accounts: see Martina Lauster, Sketches of the Nineteenth Century: European Journalism and its ‘Physiologies’, 1830–1850 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 1–22; ‘Walter Benjamin’s Myth of the Flâneur’, MLR, 102.1 (2007), 139–56. However, as I shall show below, in her attempt to refute Benjamin, she overstresses the flâneur’s interchangeability with all other observers and his lack of superiority over the urban crowd. Moreover, the association of the flâneur with the author and the stress on his superiority can also be traced in canonical literature; Benjamin’s account of the flâneur centres on Baudelaire, for whom 1830–1850 journalism was not the only inf luence. For Benjamin and the largest part of the relevant literature, the urban sketches and the flâneur aim to domesticate the unfamiliar and threatening urban environment: see Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, pp. 35–36, 37–40; Dana Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 20–40; Richard Sieburth, ‘Une idéologie du visible: Le Phénomène des physiologies’, Romantisme, 47 (1985), 39–60; Susan Buck-Morss, ‘The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Prostitute: The Politics of Loitering’, New German Critique, 39 (1986), 99–140; on the politically suspect function of the flâneur, see Ross Chambers, ‘The Flâneur as Hero (in Baudelaire)’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 28.2 (1991), 142–53. 13. In what follows, I draw my examples from four representative texts: a panoramic collection which predates the 1840–1842 vogue of the physiologies (Paris, ou le livre des cent-et-un, 15 vols (Paris: Ladvocat, 1831–34), vi, 95–110 [‘Le Flâneur à Paris’, by ‘un f lâneur’]); the physiologie devoted to the subject (Louis Huart, Physiologie du flâneur (Paris: Aubert, 1841)); a panoramic collection contemporary to the physiologies (Les Français peints par eux-mêmes: Types et portraits humoristiques à la plume et au crayon, 4 vols (Paris: J. Philippart, n.d. [11840–1842]), iii, 25–35 [‘Le Flâneur’ by Auguste de Lacroix]); a relatively late text, overtly inf luenced by ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (Victor Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris (Paris: E. Dentu, 1867 [11858]). 14. Les Français, iii, 31; Paris, vi, 97–98; Huart, p. 55. 15. Lauster, pp. 175–77. 16. Paris, vi, 101, 102, 103; Les Français, iii, 25; Fournel, pp. 277, 278, 280. 17. Huart, pp. 96, 106, 124–25. 18. Les Français, iii, 35. 19. Paris, vi, 100. 20. Fournel, p. 268. 21. Les Français, iii, 27. 22. This tale was contained in neither of the two early translations of Hoffmann’s works, but was translated by Champf leury in E. T. A. Hoffmann, Œuvres posthumes (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1856), pp. 276–313. Benjamin is sure of Baudelaire’s knowledge of the tale (p. 130, n.45); see also, Rosemary Lloyd, Baudelaire et Hoffmann: Affinités et influences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 12. 23. On the flâneur in Balzac, see Pierre Loubier, ‘Balzac et le f lâneur’, AB 2001, 141–66 (pp. 152–54); John Rignall suggests the flâneur figure as a device which problematizes the privileged vision of the realist novelist: John Rignall, Realist Fiction and the Strolling Spectator (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 24. CH, vi, 1019–20. 25. On the parallelism between the narrator and Canet, cf. Takao Kashiwagi, ‘La Poétique balzacienne dans  “Facino Cane” ’, AB 1999 (II), 567–74 (pp. 568–70); Janet L. Beizer, Family Plots: Balzac’s Narrative Generations (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 23–26. 26. The extent to which the narrator believes Canet’s story is a matter of contention: cf. William R.

Notes to Chapter 5 185 Paulson, Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Blind in France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 134–66; Alexander Fischer, ‘Distance and Narrative Perspective in Balzac’s Facino Cane’, L’Esprit créateur, 31.3 (1991), 15–25 (pp. 21–22); John Rignall, pp. 44–48. 27. OC, i, 671. 28. The conception of the prose poems as independent and yet interrelated totalities recalls, as Jonathan Monroe has noticed, Schlegel’s notion of the fragment and the novel as a dialogue, as ‘eine Kette von Fragmenten’: see Jonathan Monroe, A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre (Ithaca, NJ, and London: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 45–71. 29. On the structure of the daily newspaper, see Terdiman, pp. 117–34. 30. On the order of the prose poems, see A. W. Raitt, ‘On Le Spleen de Paris’, NCFS, 18.1/2 (1989– 90), 150–64. 31. Charles Baudelaire, Correspondance, ed. by Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), ii, 196. 32. On Les Fleurs du mal as the biography of the poet, see Ann Jefferson, Biography and the Question of Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 161–80. 33. Baudelaire, Correspondance, i, 429. 34. Strömholm, Le Droit moral de l’auteur, i, 123–42. 35. Fritz Nies argues that each poem is literally ‘tail’ to the previous one and ‘head’ of the next one, in such a way that reading them consists in a textual form of flânerie: see Fritz Nies, Poesie in prosaischer Welt: Untersuchungen zum Prosagedicht bei Aloysius Bertrand und Baudelaire (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1964), pp. 268–87. 36. As Claude Pichois suggests (OC, i, 1308), Baudelaire might have had in mind a passage from Henri de Latouche’s preface to Adieux; Latouche, after mentioning ‘l’amour du gain, prostitution générale des lettres’ [the love of profit, the general prostitution of literature], explains why he has stopped writing novels: ‘Mais j’ai changé de désœuvrement depuis que l’art du conteur est devenu un métier, où le producteur et le consommateur se méprisent. L’un, parce que l’écrivain, sans dignité ni estime de son œuvre, consent à couper son âme en tronçons de serpent, impossible à rallier, pour arriver plus vite au salaire’ [But I have turned to idleness since the art of the storyteller has become a profession in which the producer and the consumer have nothing but contempt for each other. The latter, because the writer shows no dignity nor respect for his work and consents to chop his soul up like a serpent which cannot rejoin itself, in order to get paid faster] (see Henri de Latouche, Adieux (Paris: [n.pub.], 1844), p. vii). 37. OD, ii, 849. 38. Richard D. E. Burton, ‘Bonding and Breaking in Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose’, The Modern Language Review, 88.1 (1993), 58–73. 39. Diderot, Œuvres, ed. by Laurent Versini, 5 vols (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1994–97), ii, 623. 40. CH, viii, 1669. 41. CH, viii, 1673. 42. Johnson, pp. 31–55. 43. On ‘La Belle Dorothée’ as a ‘parabl[e] of ethical blindness’, see Edward K. Kaplan, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Esthetic, the Ethical and the Religious in ‘The Parisian Prowler’ (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1990), p. 99–100; Scott, pp. 72–80. 44. OC, i, 698. 45. OC, ii, 532, 543. 46. On Fancioulle, the Prince and the narrator as Baudelaire’s personae, see Jean Starobinski, ‘Sur quelques répondants allégoriques du poète’, RHLF, 67 (1967), 402–12; Hiddleston, pp. 15–19. 47. Wohlfarth, in his excellent analysis of the poem, argues for the narrator’s transformation into the dandy, rather than the flâneur: see Irving Wohlfarth, ‘Perte d’auréole: The Emergence of the Dandy’, MLN, 85.4 (1970), 529–71. Prendergast argues that the stumbling poet parodies the figure of the flâneur (pp. 133–36). 48. For a comparison between the verse and the prose poem, see Richard Klein, ‘ “Bénédiction”/“Perte d’auréole”: Parables of Interpretation’, MLN, 85.4 (1970), 515–28; Wohlfarth, pp. 533–34. 49. OC, ii, 692. 50. ‘Perte d’auréole’ poses the problem of visibility which is also connected with prostitution. The

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narrator’s wish not to be identified corresponds to the prostitute’s strategy of not being easily identified as such. One of the main concerns of official policy on prostitutes is that they should be identifiable, so that no confusion between them and ‘honest women’ might be possible. See Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, La Prostitution à Paris au XIXe siècle, ed. by Alain Corbin (Paris: Seuil, 1981), pp. 202–04, who proposed the containment of prostitutes in certain houses and neighbourhoods; cf. the relevant comments of Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 8–33 and Richard D. E. Burton, The ‘Flâneur’ and his City: Patterns of Daily Life in Paris, 1815–1851 (Durham: University of Durham Press, 1994), pp. 58–60. On the containment of the theme of prostitution in nineteenth-century French fiction, see also Jann Matlock, Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria, and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 51. On prostitution in the Journaux intimes, see Hiddleston, pp. 21–30; Russell King, ‘Sexual (In?) difference: Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris’, in Reconceptions: Reading Modern French Poetry, ed. by Russell King and Bernard McGuirk (Nottingham: University of Nottingham, 1996), pp. 8–20; Leo Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 8–15; Bernard Howells, Baudelaire: Individualism, Dandyism and the Philosophy of History (Oxford: Legenda, 1996), pp. 64–82; Nathaniel Wing, The Limits of Narrative: Essays on Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud & Mallarmé (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 19–40; Reginald McGinnis, La Prostitution sacrée: Essai sur Baudelaire (Paris: Belin, 1994). 52. OC, i, 692. 53. OC, i, 649. 54. OC, i, 692. 55. OC, i, 688. 56. OC, i, 692. 57. OC, i, 689. 58. OC, i, 649–50. 59. OC, i, 700. 60. OC, i, 676. 61. OC, i, 651. 62. OC, i, 649. 63. CH, x, 52. 64. Cf. McGinnis, La Prostitution sacrée. 65. Benjamin, p. 55. 66. Cf. e.g. OC, ii, 78 (the public against truth in literature), 79 (taking pleasure in the commonplace), 106 (vs. ‘les amateurs de l’art’), 119 (vs. the initiated), 150 (susceptible to sentimentalism), 156 (genius as an insult to the vulgar public). 67. See Scott, pp. 93–98. On the theme of the poor in Le Spleen de Paris, see Maurice Delcroix, ‘Un poème en prose de Baudelaire: “Les Yeux des pauvres” ’, Cahiers d’analyse textuelle, 19 (1977), 47–65; Gretchen van Slyke, ‘Dans l’intertexte de Baudelaire et de Proudhon: Pourquoi faut-il assommer les pauvres?’, Romantisme, 45 (1984), 57–77; Patrick Labarthe, ‘Le Spleen de Paris ou le livre des pauvres’, L’Année Baudelaire, 5 (1999), 99–118. 68. Cf. also Hiddleston, p. 10. 69. This metonymical process of observation is prevalent in nineteenth-century texts dealing with the urban observer; on Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1836), see J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Fiction of Realism’, in Realism, ed. by Lilian Furst (London and New York: Longman, 1992), pp. 287–319; on this kind of deduction as central to nineteenth-century scientific discourse, see Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm’, in Myths, Emblems, Clues, trans. by John and Anne C. Tedeschi (London and Sydney: Hutchinson Radius, 1986), pp. 96–125. 70. On ‘légende’ as caption, cf. also Sima Godfrey, ‘Baudelaire’s Windows’, L’Esprit créateur, 22.4 (1982), 83–100 (pp. 92–93); Murphy, p. 207. On the window as a work of art, see Jean Pellegrin, ‘Question de sens’, Bulletin baudelairien, 22.2 (1987), 81–84. 71. See e.g. Scott, p. 168. 72. Johnson’s analysis of the poem (as well as of ‘Les Foules’) also touches, from an entirely different perspective, on the failure of the sympathetic imagination (pp. 67–70). For psychoanalytical

Notes to Chapter 5 187 readings of Baudelaire’s narcissism, see Bersani, pp. 125–36; Eugene W. Holland, Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: The Sociopoetics of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 177–257. On the ‘intransitiveness’ of the sympathetic imagination in ‘Les Fenêtres’, see Jean Starobinski, ‘Windows: From Rousseau to Baudelaire’, The Hudson Review, 40.4 (1988), 551–60; on the inability of the narrator of Le Spleen de Paris to communicate with others, cf. Kara M. Rabbitt, ‘Reading and Otherness: The Interpretative Triangle in Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose’, NCFS, 33.3/4 (2005), 358–70; Rosemary Lloyd, ‘Dwelling in Possibility: Encounters with the Other in Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 29.1 (1992), 68–77. 73. Baudelaire, Correspondance, ii, 386; I, p. 676. Cf. also, among his lists of projects: ‘L’homme qui croit que son chien ou son chat c’est le diable, ou un esprit quelconque enfermé’ [A man who believes his dog or his cat to be the devil, or to be possessed by some spirit] (which recalls Poe’s ‘Black Cat’) and ‘L’homme qui voit dans sa maîtresse un défaut, un vice (physique?) imaginaire. Obsession’ [A man who discerns an imaginary fault, (physical?) defect in his mistress. Obsession] (which recalls Poe’s ‘Berenice’) (OC, i, 596). 74. Allan Poe, Œuvres en prose, trans. by Charles Baudelaire, ed. by Y.-G. Le Dantec (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), p. 990. 75. OC, ii, 277. 76. On Benjamin’s confusion as to who the flâneur is in the tale, see Rignall, pp. 13–14. 77. OC, ii, 690. 78. Edgar Allan Poe, Collected Works, ed. by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), ii, 507. 79. Benjamin, p. 48. 80. Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980), p. 7. 81. J. Gerald Kennedy, ‘The Limits of Reason: Poe’s Deluded Detectives’, American Literature, 47 (1975), 184–96 (pp. 188–91); G. R. Thompson, Poe’s Fiction, p. 170. Jonathan Auerbach argues that the narrator projects his own depravity in the old man in order to avoid introspection: see Jonathan Auerbach, The Romance of Failure: First-Person Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne and James (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 27–34.

Chapter 6. Daniel Deronda: The Commodity and its Soul 1. EGE, 15–16. 2. See Elizabeth Deeds Ermath, ‘George Eliot’s Conception of Sympathy’, NCF, 40.1 (1985), 23–42. 3. GEL, iii, 111. 4. On sympathy and egoism in Eliot, see Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (London: Athlone Press, 1963), pp. 78–114; on Eliot’s concept of sympathy and middle-class ideology, see Daniel Cottom, Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History and Literary Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 183–200. Eliot has also been diagnosed with less sympathetic tendencies: on her acts of vengeance on some of her characters, see Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, pp. 478–535; on the narrator’s ‘compassionate terrorism’, see Michiel Heyns, Expulsion and the Nineteenth Century: The Scapegoat in English Realist Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 136–82; on the depiction of hatred, see Christopher Lane, Hatred and Civility: The Anti-Social Life in Victorian England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 106–35; on the limits of sympathy between her characters, see Ellen Argyros, ‘Without any Check of Proud Reserve’: Sympathy and its Limits in George Eliot’s Novels (New York: Peter Lang, 1999). 5. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, ed. by Terence Cave (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 344. Further references to the novel are given after quotations in the text. 6. EGE, 270. 7. See David Marshall, The Figure of Theater, p. 215. 8. On exile, homelessness and family estrangement in Daniel Deronda, see Jean Sudrann, ‘Daniel Deronda and the Landscape of Exile’, ELH, 37.3 (1970), 433–55; H. M. Daleski, Unities: Studies

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in the English Novel (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), pp. 27–28; Nancy Pell, ‘The Fathers’ Daughters in Daniel Deronda’, NCF, 36.4 (1982), 424–51. 9. Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 24–50. 10. Middlemarch, ed. by David Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 205. On the deconstruction of organicism and teleology in Middlemarch, see J. Hillis Miller, ‘Narrative and History’, ELH, 41.3 (1974), 455–73. 11. It is telling, in this respect, that ‘hardly ever, in the course of the novel [Daniel Deronda], is the emotion of any one character shown to enter into a synergetic unison with that of another’: see Leona Toker, Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), p. 122. 12. On the commodity as an orphan, see Kevin McLaughlin, Writing in Parts: Imitation and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 1–21. 13. Cf. pp. 166, 496, 173–74, 321, 168–69, 186. On Deronda’s description and Victorian composite photography, see Daniel A. Novak, Realism, Photography and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 90–117; on Deronda’s dubious circumcision, see Steven Marcus, Representations: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 212 (n.4); Cynthia Chase, ‘The Decomposition of the Elephants: Double-Reading Daniel Deronda’, PMLA, 93.2 (1978), 215–27 (pp. 223–24); K. M. Newton, ‘Daniel Deronda and Circumcision’, Essays in Criticism, 31.4 (1981), 313–27. 14. George Eliot: The Critical Heritage, ed. by David Carroll (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 420. 15. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, p. 55. 16. For an exploration of the novel in the context of reification, see Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 77–99; on sympathy in Middlemarch as described with the language of economy, see Anna Kornbluh, ‘The Economic Problem of Sympathy: Parabasis, Interest and Realist Form in Middlemarch’, ELH, 77.4 (2010), 941–67. 17. On prostitution in Daniel Deronda, see Catherine Gallagher, ‘George Eliot and Daniel Deronda: The Prostitute and the Jewish Question’, in Sex, Politics and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, ed. by Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 39–62. 18. On Gwendolen’s theatricality, see Marshall, pp. 196–202. 19. Eliot’s description of Gwendolen’s fear of open spaces in terms of a nervous disorder implies that she might indeed be describing some form of agoraphobia: the fear of open spaces was identified as a nervous condition and designated with the neologism Agoraphobie in 1871 by Carl Otto Friedrich Westphal, a German psychiatrist. When the Leweses travelled to Germany in 1870, Lewes was introduced to Westphal, visited his asylum three times, and observed his patients (GEL, v, 86); according to Gordon S. Haight, Lewes describes in his journal the cases they discussed (GEL, v, 86, n.5); Eliot and Lewes also met Westphal socially and were invited to his house (GEL, v, 87; Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 423–24). On these grounds, it is highly probable that Eliot had heard of the condition, if not of the term: interestingly, Westphal perceives agoraphobia as a fear of open spaces in general and not exclusively of urban spaces (cf. also Kathryn Milun, Pathologies of Modern Space: Empty Space, Urban Anxiety, and the Recovery of the Public Self (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 25–35), something which matches Gwendolen’s description by Eliot: see C. Westphal, ‘Die Agoraphobie: Eine neuropathische Erscheinung’, Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankenheiten, 3 (1871), 138–61. Gwendolen’s condition is usually described as hysteria; on Eliot and psychology, psychiatry and on Gwendolen’s nervous disorder, see Michael Davis, George Eliot and NineteenthCentury Psychology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Jane Wood, Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 141–62; Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 48–80; Jill L. Matus, ‘Historicizing Trauma: The Genealogy of Psychic Shock in Daniel Deronda’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 36.1 (2008), 59–78.

Notes to Chapter 6 189 20. For a reading of Gwendolen’s relationship with Grandcourt in the context of the gradual distancing of Victorian fiction from family plots and the depiction of marital alienation, see Charles Hatten, The End of Domesticity: Alienation from the Family in Dickens, Eliot, and James (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010), pp. 184–219. 21. Gallagher describes Grandcourt as one of the three cases of impaired motivation presented in the novel, the lack of will: he represents the consumer whose senses have been nullified by excessive consumption and who accumulates commodities he does not want to consume. See Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic, pp. 134–36. 22. pp. 443, 555, 584, 594, 596, 607, 671, 678. 23. On both Deronda and Grandcourt as coercing Gwendolen, see David Carroll, George Eliot and the Conflict of Interpretations: A Reading of the Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 296–312; Alexander Welsh, George Eliot and Blackmail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 264–65, 289–95; Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 143–50; Carole Robinson, ‘The Severe Angel: A Study of Daniel Deronda’, ELH, 31.3 (1964), 278–300 (p. 279); on Grandcourt and Deronda as different versions of imperialism, see Derek Miller, ‘Daniel Deronda and Allegories of Empire’, in George Eliot and Europe, ed. by John Rignall (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), pp. 113–22; on Deronda’s mission as blatantly imperialistic, see also Edward W. Said, ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims’ in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. by Ann McClintock, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 15–38. 24. Mordecai’s sympathetic imagination is described as a sort of telepathy; interestingly, ‘telepathy’ was coined by one of Eliot’s protégés, Frederic Myers, in 1882: see Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 107–12. 25. On Eliot and the sympathetic imagination, see Barbara Hardy, Particularities: Readings in George Eliot (London: Peter Owen, 1982), pp. 181–204; in relation to Shakespeare, see Marianne Novy, Engaging with Shakespeare: Responses of George Eliot and Other Women Novelists (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1994), pp. 44–68, 117–37; Robert Sawyer, Victorian Appropriations of Shakespeare: George Eliot, A. C. Swinburne, Robert Browning and Charles Dickens (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), pp. 20–24. 26. Gwendolen’s fits of dread at the sight of the painting at Offendene and her reactions after Grandcourt’s death are frequently interpreted as instances of visionary powers which are taken to resemble Mordecai’s (see David Carroll, ‘The Unity of Daniel Deronda’, Essays in Criticism, 9.4 (1959), 369–80) or undermine them (see Vrettos, pp. 74–75; Wood, pp. 153–62). However, Gwendolen is never shown to have visions, in the strict sense of the term: she is frightened twice by a painting ‘of an upturned dead face, from which an obscure figure seemed to be f leeing with outstretched arms’ (27, 60–61). When her hatred of Grandcourt crystallizes in a desire to kill him, she identifies with the figure of the painting (674); after Grandcourt’s death, for which she considers herself responsible, Gwendolen, in her delirium, says: ‘I saw his dead face [...] ever so long ago I saw it; and I wished him to be dead’ (691). Presentiments like these occur frequently in the novel and are associated with many characters: Lush ‘had a second sight for [the] evil consequences’ of Grandcourt’s marriage to Gwendolen (317), Mab is shown to predict Mirah’s fate (209) and Deronda, when he realizes that he loves Mirah, often has the feeling (before he has any evidence) that the discovery of his identity will enable their union (381, 468, 620): see also Maurice Beebe, ‘ “Visions are Creators”: The Unity of Daniel Deronda’, Boston University Studies in English, 1.3 (1955), 166–77. Grandcourt’s death, on the other hand, is elaborately prepared by Eliot: it is hinted at by the narrator (317); Mr Vandernoodt describes Grandcourt as Jason (432); Gwendolen is also associated frequently with murder: the ‘infelonious murder’ of her sister’s canary (25), her ‘murderous thought’ (42), her remark on female ‘poetic criminals’, before her meeting Grandcourt, as well as her remark that ‘he has fallen into the pool’ (153) and her wish that they would drown in Genoa (679) are all part of Eliot’s prefiguring of Grandcourt’s death — in the context of a novel whose revelations (such as Deronda’s identity) are also craftily prefigured. In this sense, I would disagree with Vrettos’s contention that Eliot implies that, through Gwendolen, all visionary powers, including Mordecai’s, are presented as a function of nervous disease; Gwendolen’s reactions are described as superstition and, rather than

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undermine Mordecai’s spiritual discourse, they highlight its scientific contexts: on Gwendolen and superstition, see E. S. Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Fall of Jerusalem’: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 261–64; Carroll, George Eliot, pp. 278–79; Lisabeth During, ‘The Concept of Dread: Sympathy and Ethics in Daniel Deronda’, in Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory, ed. by Jane Adamson, Richard Freadman and David Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 65–83; Margueritte Murphy, ‘The Ethic of the Gift in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 34.1 (2006), 189–207. Gwendolen’s perception of her hysterical reactions in terms of superstition, on the other hand, might be seen in the context of ‘possession’ which was considered to be the religious or superstitious interpretation of hysteria: see L.-F. Maury, La Magie et l’astrologie dans l’antiquité et au moyen âge (Paris: Didier, 1860), pp. 256–338 and Lewes’s review of Maury’s book in George Henry Lewes, Versatile Victorian: Selected Writings of George Henry Lewes, ed. by Rosemary Ashton (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1992), pp. 290–98. In this context, Gwendolen can be seen as reacting to her ‘possession’ by Grandcourt. 27. George Henry Lewes, The Principles of Literary Success (Westmead, Hants: Gregg International Publishers, 1969), pp. 12–41. 28. GEL, v, 216. 29. See Jason H. Lindquist, ‘ “The Mightiest Instrument of the Physical Discoverer”: The Visual “Imagination” and the Victorian Observer’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 13.2 (2008), 171–99. 30. John Tyndall, Fragments of Science for Unscientific People: A Series of Detached Essays, Lectures and Reviews (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1871), pp. 125–68. 31. See George Levine, ‘George Eliot’s Hypothesis of Reality’, NCF, 35.1 (1980), 1–28 (pp. 5–7, 17–26); George Levine, ‘Daniel Deronda: A New Epistemology’, in Knowing the Past: Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. by Suzy Anger (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 52–73; Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 38–40, 148–56; Shuttleworth, pp. 22–23, 142–46. 32. On Deronda’s consent, cf. also pp. 509, 545–46, 627, 750, 751. On the significance of Deronda’s consent, see Audrey Jaffe, Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca, NY, and London, Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 134–38. 33. On the Cabbalistic doctrine of the transmigration of souls, see George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda Notebooks, ed. by Jane Irwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 455–56; Shaffer, pp. 255–56; William Baker, George Eliot and Judaism (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1975), pp. 159–69; on the Biblical and messianic significance of Deronda’s and Mordecai’s names, see Mary Wilson Carpenter, ‘The Apocalypse of the Old Testament: Daniel Deronda and the Interpretation of Interpretation’, PMLA, 99.1 (1984), 56–71; on Deronda’s and Mordecai’s fusion as privileging spirituality over materiality and writing, see Garrett Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 301–28; for an opposite view, see Daniel Hack, The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2005), pp. 147–77. 34. On Deronda’s understanding of Judaism as broader than Mordecai’s, see Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 119–46; on their relation as a catalysing interaction rather than a union, see John Kucich, Repression in Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 177–81. 35. Gallagher, ‘George Eliot’, pp. 39–62. 36. Clare Pettitt, Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 204–16, 234–70. 37. On Eliot and coverture, esp. in relation to The Mill on the Floss, see Rachel Ablow, The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 70–94. 38. On Eliot’s names, see Rosemarie Bodenheimer, ‘A Woman of Many Names’, in The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, ed. by George Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 20–37.

Notes to Chapter 6 191 39. Carroll (ed.), The Critical Heritage, p. 321. 40. David Carroll, ‘George Eliot: The Sibyl of Mercia’, Studies in the Novel, 15.1 (1983), 10–25. 41. Donald Gray, ‘George Eliot and her Publishers’, in Levine (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, pp. 181–201. 42. GEL, iii, 209, n.2. 43. See Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: The Last Victorian (London: Fourth Estate, 1998), p. 291. 44. GEL, ii, 459, 461; iii, 63–64. 45. GEL, iii, 68, 73. 46. GEL, iii, 75. 47. GEL, ii, 337. 48. GEL, ii, 374–75. 49. GEL, ii, 457. 50. GEL, iii, 21, 83–84. 51. GEL, iii, 98. 52. GEL, ii, 457. 53. GEL, ii, 83–84. 54. GEL, iii, 74. 55. GEL, ii, 375, 459, 460; iii, 86; ii, 460. 56. GEL, iii, 99, 156. 57. GEL, iii, 99. 58. GEL, ii, 459; iii, 155. 59. GEL, iii, 159. 60. GEL, iii, 86. 61. GEL, iii, 83. 62. Bodenheimer accounts for the inf luence of this aspect of the Liggins affair on Eliot’s fiction, arguing that lack of sympathy towards Latimer stands for the lack of sympathy of Liggins’s partisans and that the whole affair had an impact on the depiction of gossip in The Mill on the Floss: see Rosemarie Bodenheimer, The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, her Letters and Fiction (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 132–36. 63. GEL, iii, 98. 64. GEL, iii, 157. 65. GEL, iii, 158–60, 162, 163. 66. GEL, iii, 184. 67. GEL, iii, 206, 209, 221, 223. 68. GEL, iii, 191–92. 69. GEL, iii, 213. 70. GEL, iii, 226. 71. Seth Bede, ‘The Methody:’ His Life and Labours, Chiefly Written by Himself (London: Tallant and Co.: 1859), p. 3. 72. George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1879), pp. 189, 194 (my italics). 73. Mark Rose, Authors and Owners, pp. 120–29. 74. On the history of patents before 1852, see H. I. Dutton, The Patent System and Inventive Activity during the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1852 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). 75. See Moureen Coulter, Property in Ideas: The Patent Question in Mid-Victorian Britain (Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1991), pp. 146–48. 76. See Pettitt, pp. 123–24. 77. On the patent debate, see Coulter, Property; Christopher May and Susan K. Sell, Intellectual Property Rights: A Critical History (London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006), pp. 115–22; Brad Sherman and Lionel Bently, The Making of Modern Intellectual Property Law: The British Experience, 1760–1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 140–57; Fritz Machlup and Edith Penrose, ‘The Patent Controversy in the Nineteenth Century’, The Journal of Economic History, 10.1 (1950), 1–29; Victor M. Batzel, ‘Legal Monopoly in Liberal England: The Patent Controversy in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Business History, 22.2 (1980), 189–202; Mark D. Janis, ‘Patent Abolitionism’, Berkeley Technology Law Journal,

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17 (2002), 899–952. On patents, the patent debate and the Victorian novel, see Pettitt, Patent Inventions. 78. On the arguments employed by abolitionists and supporters of patents, see Coulter, pp. 84–100. 79. Mark Rose, ‘The Author as Proprietor’, p. 61. 80. On the analogy between authors and inventors, see Pettitt, Patent Inventions. 81. Sherman and Bently, pp. 141–57. 82. ‘Letters Patent’, Journal of the Society of Arts (27 October 1871), p. 847, cited by Sherman and Bently, p. 150. 83. EGE, 329. 84. Cited by Coulter, p. 156. 85. It should be noted, however, that while Eliot ‘represents Jewish culture as a precious inalienable possession’, she frequently ‘uses the language of material property and finance to describe it’: see Deborah Wynne, Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 120. 86. Gallagher reads Daniel Deronda as dramatizing Eliot’s fear of what she called the ‘too much of literature’. She relates the novel to the marginal utility theory and to Alexander Bain’s ‘rule of novelty’, according to which a sensation loses the motivating force it has when experienced for the first time. Gallagher argues accordingly that Daniel Deronda is an attempt by Eliot to counteract the effect of satiety in her readers, as illustrated in the satiety of Grandcourt. Gwendolen in this context is an allegory of Eliot’s fears for her novel as a commodity which is consumed despite the fact that it is no longer desired. In her reading, which is mostly concerned with the novel as an allegory of its consumption, Deronda occupies the position of Eliot’s ideal reader. See Gallagher, The Body Economic, pp. 118–55. 87. For an interesting reading of Middlemarch as a commodity, see Simon R. Frost, The Business of the Novel: Economics, Aesthetics and the Case of Middlemarch (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012). 88. EGE, 438–40. 89. EGE, 439. 90. GEL, iii, 111. 91. GEL, iii, 191. 92. See e.g. Carroll (ed.), The Critical Heritage, pp. 199, 209–10, 213, 259, 263, 279. 93. Carroll (ed.), The Critical Heritage, p. 273. 94. GEL, iii, 89. 95. On Daniel Deronda as a failure of sympathy in the context of Eliot severing her ties with the public after Romola, see Janice Carlisle, The Sense of an Audience: Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot at Mid-Century (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 214–26. 96. Carroll (ed.), The Critical Heritage, pp. 383–84, 396. 97. GEL, iii, 111. 98. GEL, vi, 238, 223, 302. 99. On the fear of the ‘hidden Jew’, exemplified by Disraeli, see Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: ‘The Jewish Question’ and English National Identity (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 287. On the — at best — ‘imperfect’ sympathy with the Jews in the English nineteenth century, see Judith W. Page, Imperfect Sympathies: Jews and Judaism in British Romantic Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 100. This fear was realized, since several critics accused Deronda of being a ‘prig’: see, e.g. Henry James’s review in Carroll (ed.), The Critical Heritage, p. 424. On Deronda as an unconvincing, improbable character, see The Critical Heritage, pp. 253–54, 399–404, 420–22, 424, 429. 101. GEL, vi, 241–42. 102. GEL, vi, 241. 103. For negative reviews, occasionally bordering on racism, see Carroll (ed.), The Critical Heritage, pp. 365–70, 371–76, 376–81, 406–17; George Eliot: Critical Assessments, ed. by Stuart Hutchinson, 4 vols (Mountfield: Helm Information, 1996), i, 408–11, 424–25. 104. GEL, vi, 290. 105. On the reception of Daniel Deronda by Eliot’s contemporary Jewish community, see Ruth Levitt, George Eliot: The Jewish Connection ( Jerusalem: Massada Ltd, 1975), pp. 25–35. On

Notes to Chapter 6 193 Eliot’s reactions, see The Journals of George Eliot, ed. by Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 146–47, 176. 106. See Hack, pp. 172; John M. Picker, ‘George Eliot and the Sequel Question’, NLH, 37.2 (2006), 361–88. 107. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 97–146. 108. Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 99–112. 109. On Daniel Deronda as a romance, see R. E. Francillon, in Carroll (ed.), The Critical Heritage, pp. 382–98; George Levine, ‘Introduction: George Eliot and the Art of Realism’, in Levine (ed.), The Cambridge Companion, pp. 15–17.

Chapter 7. The Decline of the Authorial Double 1. Edgar Allan Poe, Collected Works, iii, 984. 2. Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 112. 3. Gustave Flaubert, Œuvres complètes, 16 vols (Paris: Club de l’Honnête homme, 1971–75), v, 70. 4. Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works, iii, 170, 172. Further references are given after quotations in the text. 5. Emile Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart, ed. by Armand Lanoux, 5 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1960–67), v, 949. Further references are given after quotations in the text. 6. Henry James, Novels, 1901–1902: The Sacred Fount; The Wings of the Dove (New York: The Library of America, 2006), p. 25. Further references are given after quotations in the text. 7. Henry James, Letters, ed. by Leon Edel, 4 vols (London: Macmillan, 1974–84), iv, 159. 8. Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. xli. 9. Robert Alter, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1975), p. 161. 10. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 83. 11. See Wladimir Krysinski, ‘Les Faux-monnayeurs et le paradigme du roman européen autour de 1925’, André Gide 6 (1979), 254–63. 12. Jean-Joseph Goux, Les Monnayeurs du langage (Paris: Galilée, 1984) p. 87. 13. On the mise en abyme, see Lucien Dällenbach, Le Récit spéculaire: Essai sur la mise en abyme (Paris: Seuil, 1977); on fictional artists and less overt ref lexive techniques, see Arthur E. Babcock, Portraits of Artists: Reflexivity in Gidean Fiction, 1902–1946 (York, SC: French Literature Publications Company, 1982). 14. On Gide’s previous ‘novels’, see Alain Goulet, André Gide, ‘Les Faux-monnayeurs’: Mode d’emploi (Paris: S.E.D.E.S., 1991), p. 47. 15. Michael Tilby, Gide, ‘Les Faux-monnayeurs’ (London: Grant and Cutler, 1981), p. 17. 16. André Gide, Romans, récits et soties, œuvres lyriques (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), p. 1096. Further references to the novel are given after quotations in the text. 17. Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn, p. 54. 18. Goux, p. 117. On Les Faux-monnayeurs as being, instead, ‘a copy of the conventional novel attempting to pass itself off as an ideal abstract one’, see Jonathan Romney, ‘Forgery and Economy in Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs’, Neophilologus, 71.2 (1987), 196–209. 19. André Gide, Journal des ‘Faux-monnayeurs’ (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), p. 35. 20. For an analysis of the characters as representing the various stages of artistic creation, see Loïs Linder, ‘Le Roman du roman’, André Gide 5 (1975), 81–91; on the profusion of (potential) novelists in the novel, see Gerald Prince, ‘Personnages-romanciers dans Les Faux-monnayeurs’, French Studies, 25.1 (1971), 47–52. 21. Goux, esp. pp. 129–38. 22. André Gide, Journal, ed. by Eric Marty and Martine Sagaert, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1996–97), i, 1218 [17 June 1923]. 23. Michel Raimond, La Crise du roman. 24. André Gide, Essais critiques, ed. by Pierre Masson (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), p. 428. 25. Journal des ‘Faux-monnayeurs’, p. 61. 26. Cf. also Journal des ‘Faux-monnayeurs’, pp. 64–67. 27. Virginia Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Andrew McNeillie and Stuart N. Clarke, 5 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1986–2009), iii, 31.

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Notes to Chapter 7

28. For the texts of the debate, see Die Expressionusmusdebatte: Materialien zu einer marxistischen Realismuskonzeption, ed. by Hans-Jürgen Schmitt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973); for a brief account of the debate, see Stephen Eric Bronner, ‘Expressionism and Marxism: Towards an Aesthetic of Emancipation’, in Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage, ed. by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Kernell (London: Croom Helm, 1983), pp. 411–53. 29. See Claude Martin, ‘Gide et le “nouveau roman” ’, in Entretiens sur André Gide, ed. by Marcel Arland and Jean Mouton (Paris: Mouton, 1967), pp. 217–27 and especially Jean Ricardou on Gide in the ensuing discussion (pp. 228–42). 30. Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1996), p. 184. 31. Journal, i, 1217 [29 May 1923]; on Gide and Keats, see Patrick Pollard, Répertoire des lectures d’André Gide, 2 vols (London: ATAG, 2000–04), ii/1, 183–91. On Keats and negative capability, see also Correspondance André Gide–Dorothy Bussy, Cahiers André Gide 9 (1979), p. 198 [1920], in which Gide quotes Keats’s letter on the ‘chameleon poet’; on depersonalization, see also N. David Keypour, André Gide: Ecriture et réversibilité dans ‘Les Faux-monnayeurs’ (Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1980), pp. 225–35; on Gide and Keats, see Michael Tilby, ‘Les Fauxmonnayeurs: A Novel about Embarrassment’, French Studies, 35.1 (1981), 45–59. 32. Journal, i, 154 [12 May 1892]; see also, André Gide and François-Paul Alibert, Correspondance, 1907–1950, ed. by Claude Martin (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1982), pp. 106–07 [1914]. 33. See, e.g. André Gide, Si le grain ne meurt (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), pp. 21, 86, 122–23, 210–11, 251, 280, 366. On this as a — not entirely insincere — pose, see Roger Martin du Gard, Notes sur André Gide (1913–1951) (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), pp. 127–29. Gide connected this with what he called his lack of the sense of reality, which he also related to Keats and the ‘chameleon Poet’: Journal, i, 1269–71 [20 December 1924]; also, FM, pp. 987–88; see also Catharine Savage Brosman, ‘ “Le Peu de réalité”. Gide et le moi’, André Gide 9 (1991), 29–46. 34. Henri Freyburger, L’Evolution de la disponibilité gidienne (Paris: A.-G. Nizet, 1970). 35. See e.g. Jacques Rivière, ‘André Gide’ [1911], in Etudes (Paris: Gallimard, 1936), pp. 201–09; Klaus Mann, ‘Proteus and Protestant’, in André Gide and the Crisis of Modern Thought (New York: Creative Age Press, 1943), pp. 139–69; Germaine Brée, André Gide: L’Insaisissable Protée: Etude critique de l’œuvre d’André Gide (Paris: Société d’édition ‘Les Belles Lettres’, 1970); Freyburger, p. 10; Simon Leys, Protée et autres essais (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), pp. 69–151. 36. On Protos and Vautrin, see Alain Goulet, ‘Les Caves du Vatican’ d’André Gide: Etude méthodologique (Paris: Larousse, 1972), pp. 58–59; Marie-Denise Boros Azzi, ‘Vautrin et Protos: Une étude intertextuelle’, Modern Language Studies, 23.4 (1993), 55–69. 37. Journal des ‘Faux-monnayeurs’, pp. 76–77. 38. James, Novels, p. 19. 39. Journal des ‘Faux-monnayeurs’, p. 58. 40. FM, 1111; Journal, ii, 202 [30 May 1930]. 41. David A. Steel, ‘Gide’s Prodigal: Economics, Fiction and the Acte Gratuit’, in André Gide, ed. by David Walker (London and New York: Longman, 1996), pp. 52–78; ‘Lettres et argent: L’Economie des Faux-monnayeurs’, André Gide 5 (1975), 60–79; see, also, Alain Goulet, Fiction et vie sociale dans l’œuvre d’André Gide (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1985), pp. 299–343. 42. On the wider significance of the metaphor of spending and exhaustion (épuisement, dénuement) in Gide, see Naomi Segal, André Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 41–117; on creativity in terms of f low and ‘sympathie’, see pp. 118–19. 43. On Gide and law, see Sandra Travers de Faultrier, ‘De la fausse monnaie à la fiction, Gide et le droit’, Bulletin des amis d’André Gide 19.131/32 (2001), 513–22. 44. Anna Boschetti, ‘Légitimité littéraire et stratégies éditoriales’, in Histoire de l’édition française, ed. by Henri-Jean Martin, Roger Chartier, and Jean-Pierre Vivet, 4 vols (Paris: Promodis, 1982–86), iv, 480–528 (p. 485). 45. See Alan Sheridan, André Gide: A Life in the Present (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1998), p. 254. On Gide and the NRF, see Auguste Anglès, André Gide et le premier groupe de ‘La Nouvelle Revue Française’, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1978–86). 46. Peter Schnyder, Permanence d’André Gide: Ecriture–Littérature–Culture (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007), pp. 115–26.

Notes to the Conclusion 195 47. ‘Il y a cent ans naissait Saint Mallarmé l’ésotérique’ [1942], in Essais, p. 369. See also Si le Grain, pp. 250–51. 48. Pierre Bourdieu, Les Règles de l’art: Genèse et structure du champ littéraire (Paris: Seuil, 1992), esp. pp. 165–200. 49. See Boschetti, pp. 480–528; Modernist Writers and the Marketplace, ed. by Ian Willison, Warwick Gould and Warren Chernaik (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1996). 50. Paul Delany, Literature, Money and the Market: From Trollope to Amis (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 125–61. 51. On the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century developments of domestic and international copyright, see Catherine Seville, ‘Copyright’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, ed. by David McKitterick, 6 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–2009), vi, 214–37. 52. For an account of this gradual change of terms, see Pierre Recht, Le Droit d’auteur, pp. 48–60; David Saunders, Authorship and Copyright, pp. 95–97. 53. Augustin-Charles Renouard, Traité des droits d’auteurs, dans la littérature, les sciences et les beaux-arts, 2 vols (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1838–39), i, 455–57. 54. Recht, pp. 61–139. 55. Henri Desbois, Le Droit d’auteur en France (Paris: Dalloz, 1978), pp. 473–561. 56. Recht, pp. 139–47. 57. Recht, pp. 58–60; Elizabeth Adeney, The Moral Rights of Authors and Performers, pp. 97–102. 58. Patrick Leary and Andrew Nash, ‘Authorship’, in McKitterick (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vi, 172–213 (pp. 201–03).

Concluding Ref lections 1. Fredric Jameson, ‘The Ideology of the Text’, in The Ideologies of Theory (London and New York: Verso, 2008), pp. 20–76 (p. 61). 2. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt , Journal, i, 964. 3. KFSA, ii, A116.

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INDEX ❖ Adam Bede Junior 139 L’Ami du peuple, de l’ordre et des lois 25 Ampère, Jean-Jacques 84 Aristoteles 43 Athenäum 43, 44, 49 Auerbach, Erich 8–9, 105 author 1–16 authorial celebrity 12 authorial scenario 7, 12, 13, 16, 38, 82, 84, 151, 157, 160 death of the author 1, 3–4, 5 implied author 7 as Proteus 13–16, 33–35, 38, 39–40, 50, 52–53, 62, 66, 70, 72, 82–83, 84, 93–97, 104, 106, 107–08, 119, 151, 156–57, 160, 161 authorial double 13–16, 35–38, 40, 53, 58–60, 61–62, 66, 70–72, 78–79, 83, 84, 86, 88–90, 93–97, 100–03, 104, 106, 112, 118–19, 123–24, 125, 129, 133–35, 145–51, 153, 155–60, 161 authorial rights 12, 15, 72–79, 97–103, 124, 135–42, 159–60 copyright 75–76 le droit d’auteur 78, 159 moral rights 73, 78, 100, 102, 110–11, 159–60, 177–78 n. 76 and patents for invention 15, 140–42 piracy 73, 76, 97, 99 privileges 76 la propriété littéraire 76, 159 sequels 139, 145 stage adaptations of novels 77, 97, 98–100 Bakhtin, Mikhail 40, 50 Balzac, Honoré de 3, 4, 10–11, 12, 15, 22, 53, 72, 74, 79, 82–103, 118, 119, 120, 121, 124, 129, 133, 134, 135, 148, 150, 151, 152, 157, 160, 162 ‘Avant-propos’ 2, 11 ‘Avertissement du “Gars” ’ 12, 112–13 Le Cabinet des antiques 11 Le Centenaire 83, 84, 85, 89, 96 César Birotteau 12 Les Chouans 112 La Cousine Bette 11, 28 Les Dangers de l’inconduite 93 La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin 106 Etudes de mœurs au XIXe siècle 11 Etudes philosophiques 10, 11, 28, 83, 153 Eugénie Grandet 91

Facino Cane 108–09 Gobseck 16, 71, 83, 89–93, 94, 96, 100–02, 148 Illusions perdues 9, 70, 93–94, 100–03, 113, 157 Louis Lambert 11, 85 Le Lys dans la vallée 10, 182 n. 58 Modeste Mignon 10 Les Paysans 4 La Peau de chagrin 10, 13, 16, 25, 82–83, 84–89, 90–91, 94, 96, 100–03, 111, 148 Le Père Goriot 10, 14, 18, 19–20, 22–28, 29, 31–32, 35–38, 40, 60, 61, 93, 94, 100–02 Physiologie du mariage 10, 82 Romans et contes philosophiques 11 Sarrasine 5, 6 Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan 10 Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes 25, 93–96, 100, 113, 157 La Torpille 93 Vautrin 99 La Vieille Fille 106 Barthes, Roland 3, 6 ‘L’Effet de réel’ 4–5 ‘La Mort de l’auteur’ 3, 5, 8 Le Plaisir du texte 7 S/Z 5, 164 n. 31 Bate, Walter Jackson 33 Baudelaire, Charles 1, 2, 8, 15, 16, 53, 62, 72, 79, 103, 104–24, 157 Edgar Allan Poe, sa vie et ses ouvrages 122 Les Fleurs du mal 16, 104, 105, 110 ‘Bénédiction’ 116 ‘La Chevelure’ 115 ‘L’Homme et la mer’ 113 ‘La Muse malade’ 115 ‘La Muse vénale’ 115 ‘Tableaux parisiens’ 105 Journaux intimes 115, 118, 119 ‘Madame Bovary par Gustave Flaubert’ 8 Le Peintre de la vie moderne 117, 122 Salon de 1859: 1, 2 Le Spleen de Paris 16, 103, 104–24 ‘La Belle Dorothée’ 115 ‘Chacun sa Chimère’ 105 ‘La Chambre double’ 105, 114, 115 ‘Le Chien et le flacon’ 105, 115 ‘Le Confiteor de l’artiste’ 105, 113–14 ‘La Corde’ 120 ‘Déjà’ 114

Index ‘Enivrez-vous’ 105, 114 ‘L’Etranger’ 104–05 ‘La Femme sauvage et la petite maîtresse’ 115 ‘Les Fenêtres’ 120–21 ‘Le Fou et la Vénus’ 105, 114, 115 ‘Les Foules’ 112, 117, 119, 122, 123, 129 ‘Le Gâteau’ 105, 114 ‘A une heure du matin’ 105, 114–15 ‘L’Horloge’ 105, 114 ‘Laquelle est la vraie?’ 105, 115, 122 ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’ 105 ‘Une mort héroïque’ 105, 115–16, 117, 124 ‘Perte d’auréole’ 116–17, 121, 123 ‘La Soupe et les nuages’ 105, 114 ‘Le Vieux Saltimbanque’ 105, 115, 119 ‘Les Yeux des pauvres’ 119–20 Beer, Gillian 134 Benjamin, Walter 42, 62, 108, 119, 121, 123, 129, 184 n. 12 Bently, Lionel 142 Blackwood, John 30, 31, 136, 137, 138, 139, 142, 143 Blackwood’s Magazine 30, 139 Bloch, Ernst 155 Bonnet, Jean-Claude 7 Booth, Wayne C. 7, 43 Bourdieu, Pierre 158 Bracebridge, Charles Holte 138, 139, 140, 162 Brecht, Bertolt 155 Brik, Osip 4 Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful 19, 20, 33 Burke, Seán 7 Burns, Robert 12 Byron, Lara 83, 89 Callot, Jacques 54, 59, 64 Carlyle, Thomas 12 Cervantes, Don Quixote 152, 153 Champfleury 2 Chasles, Philarète 11 Chateaubriand, François-René de 24 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 34 commodification 15, 16, 63–66, 71–72, 88–89, 95, 104, 106, 108–12, 114, 119, 121, 124, 126, 146, 160 commodity fetishism 66–70, 72, 79, 110, 128–37, 143 Conan Doyle, Arthur, A Study in Scarlet 147 contes fantastiques 83–84 Courbet, Gustave 1, 2 Couturier, Maurice 7 Dante 42, 52 Davin, Félix 11 de Man, Paul 40, 53, 61 Derrida, Jacques 6 Diaz, José-Luis 7, 8 Dickens, Charles 10, 11 David Copperfield 9

221

Little Dorrit 140 Our Mutual Friend 71, 144 A Poor Man’s Tale of a Patent 140 Diderot, Denis: Eloge de Richardson 22 Entretiens sur le fils naturel 21–22 Le Fils naturel 21 Jacques le fataliste 52, 152, 162 Le Neveu de Rameau 112 Paradoxe sur le comédien 14, 34, 35, 38, 40, 94, 116 Le Père de famille 21 De la poésie dramatique 21–22, 33 Disraeli, Benjamin 144 Donaldson, Alexander 75 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 152 Poor Folk 11 Dowden, Edward 136 Duranty, Edmond 2 Eliot, George 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 79, 124, 125–46, 148, 151, 157, 160, 162 Adam Bede 11, 125, 127, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 144 Daniel Deronda 15, 16, 70, 72, 125–46, 153, 157 Felix Holt 127, 128, 144 The Impressions of Theophrastus Such 30, 125, 140 ‘Leaves from a Notebook’ 143 ‘The Lifted Veil’ 14, 18, 19, 23, 29–32, 35–38, 40, 60, 61, 125, 139 Middlemarch 128, 134, 145 The Mill on the Floss 127, 137 ‘The Natural History of German Life’ 126, 127, 143 ‘Poetry and Prose, from the Notebook of an Eccentric’ 125 Romola 12, 127–28, 144 Scenes of Clerical Life 10, 125, 137, 138, 139, 142 Silas Marner 71, 91, 127 Engels, Friedrich 4 Evans, Isaac 138 Evans, Robert 138 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 45, 48, 68 Fielding, Henry, Tom Jones 152 flâneur 16, 62, 104, 105, 106–09, 111–12, 116–24 Flaubert, Gustave 2, 4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 13, 159 Bouvard et Pécuchet 147, 148, 151 Un cœur simple 4 Madame Bovary 8, 9, 11 Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de 91 Forster, E. M. 151 Foucault, Michel 6, 7, 73 Fournel, Victor 107 Francillon, R. E. 144 Furst, Lilian 6–7 Gallagher, Catherine 135–37 Gaskell, Elizabeth 10, 138 genius 72–79

222

Index

Gide, André 151–60 Cahiers d’André Walter 152 Les Caves du Vatican 152 L’Ecole des femmes 152 Les Faux-monnayeurs 10, 16, 151–60 Géneviève 152 ‘Il y a cent ans naissait Saint Mallarmé l’ésotérique’ 158 L’Immoraliste 152 ‘De l’importance du public’ 154 Isabelle 158 Journal 152, 154, 156, 157 Journal des ‘Faux-monnayeurs’ 152, 153, 156–57 Paludes 152 La Porte étroite 152, 158 Robert 152 Gilbert, Sandra M. 135 Girardin, Emile de 106 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 53, 54 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre 44–47, 58 Gogol, Nikolai, The Overcoat 11 Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de 3 Gothic 15, 83, 84, 89, 96, 121, 150 Goux, Jean-Joseph 71, 151, 153, 154 Gozzi, Carlo 53, 54 Gubar, Susan 135 Guys, Constantin 117, 122 Gwyther, Reverend John 11, 138 Hazlitt, William 34–35 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 40, 41 Hiddleston, J. A. 104 Hobbes, Thomas 18 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus 14, 15, 40, 52–60, 68, 69, 83, 84, 89, 96, 109, 119, 120, 121, 122 Die Elixiere des Teufels 53 Lebensansichten des Katers Murr 53, 173 n. 58 Prinzessin Brambilla 14, 52–60, 65, 84, 89 Die Serapionsbrüder 173 n. 58 ‘Des Vetters Eckfenster’ 62–66, 69–70, 108 The Hogarth Press 158 Houssaye, Arsène 109, 110 Huart, Louis 107 Hugo, Victor, ‘Préface de Cromwell’ 3 Hume, David, A Treatise on Human Nature 32 Immerwahr, Raymond 40 irony 14, 38, 39–62, 84, 104, 105, 106 and duplication 48–50, 53–54, 58–59, 85, 95, 116, 117 and illusion 14, 15, 46–47, 51–53, 54–58, 59, 64–66 and sympathetic imagination 14, 39–60, 86, 89, 94–95 James, Henry 4, 9, 10–11, 97, 129, 144, 159 The Sacred Fount 147, 150–51, 157 Jameson, Fredric 161 Janin, Jules 176 n. 42 Jaucourt, Louis de 27 Jauß, Hans-Robert 3

Jefferson, Ann 6 Jones, William Pitman 138 Joyce, James 151, 155 Finnegans Wake 152 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 10 Ulysses 152 Kant, Immanuel 73 Keats, John 35, 156 King, Reverend W. H. 138 Knight, Diana 6 La Bruyère, Jean de 106 Lacroix, Auguste de 107 Lakanal, Joseph 78 Latouche, Henri de, Adieux 185 n. 36 Lauster, Martina 107, 184 n. 12 Le Poittevin, Alfred 11 Leavis, F. R. 145, 146 Lejeune, Philippe 155 Levin, Harry 94, 152 Levine, George 3, 134 Lewes, George Henry 11, 125, 134, 136, 137, 138, 139 188 n. 19 La Librairie de l’Art indépendant 158 Liggins, Joseph 125, 137–40, 142, 146 Longinus 27 Lukács, Georg 4, 6, 155 Main, Alexander 136 Mallarmé, Stéphane 158 Mandeville, Bernard 18 Mann, Thomas 151, 158 Der Tod in Venedig 10 Tonio Kröger 10 Marx, Karl 119, 129 Capital 68–69, 71–72, 89 Maturin, Charles Robert 96 Morillot, André 159 Mudie, Charles 137 Musil, Robert 155 Nehamas, Alexander 7, 8 Newdigate, Charles 138 Nodier, Charles 11 La Nouvelle Revue Française 158 Novalis 30, 47 Heinrich von Ofterdingen 152 Origen 87 Oster, Daniel 7 Paris, ou le livre des cent-et-un 107 Petrey, Sandy 6–7 Pettitt, Clare 135–37 physiologies 106–08, 109, 184 n. 12 Plato 3, 41

Index Poe, Edgar Allan 147 ‘Berenice’ 122, 123, 167 n. 31 ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ 122, 123, 167–68 n. 31 ‘Ligeia’ 122, 167 n. 31 ‘The Man of the Crowd’ 108, 121–24 ‘Morella’ 122 ‘William Wilson’ 123 Poulet-Malassis, Auguste 110 Prendergast, Christopher 6 La Presse 16, 104, 106, 109 Prevost, Abbé Antoine François, Manon Lescaut 28 prostitution 12, 16, 72, 79, 96, 103, 104, 106, 111, 112– 13, 115, 117–21, 122, 123, 124, 131, 135–36, 157 Proust, Marcel 151, 155, 158 A la recherche du temps perdu 10, 152 Puech, Jean-Benoît 7 Punch 145 Pushkin, Alexander, Eugene Onegin 4 Radcliffe, Ann 96 Raimond, Michel 154 Reade, Charles 142 realism 1–16, 18–38 and imagination 2, 125, 137–40 and modernism 4, 15, 151–55, 161–62 and money 70–72 and reflexivity/epistemological naïveté 1, 3, 4, 13, 153–54, 161–62 and Romanticism 2, 15, 61–62, 66, 83–84 Renouard, Augustin-Charles 159 La Revue de Paris 10 Rivière, Jacques 156 Rolle, Hippolyte 11 Romanticism 2–3, 13, 14, 34–35, 38, 39–60, 61 see also realism and Romanticism Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 24, 167 n. 31 Lettre à M. d’Alembert 34 Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin 74, 79, 162 Sand, George 11 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 3, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 47, 48, 50, 62, 79 Schlegel, Friedrich 14, 38, 40–53, 59, 61, 64, 65, 85, 162 Athenäum Fragmente 41, 47, 48, 49, 50–51, 162, 185 n. 28 ‘Goethes Meister’ 44–47, 49, 58 Ideen 41 Kritische Fragmente 40, 41, 42, 43, 47–48, 49, 56 Lucinde 53 Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie 43 ‘Über die Unverständlichkeit’ 43–44, 45 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 47 Scott, Walter: The Heart of Midlothian 83, 89 Ivanhoe 145 Seth Bede, ‘The Methody’ 139 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of 35

223

Shakespeare, William 14, 33, 34–35, 39–40, 42, 50, 52, 58 Hamlet 18 Henry VIII 32 King Lear 23 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein 168 n. 31 Sherman, Brad 142 Shuttleworth, Sally 127, 134 Siemens, C. W. 142 Simmel, Georg 71 Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments 20–21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 32, 33, 66–68 Société des gens de lettres 15, 74 Socrates 41, 42 Steel, David A. 157 Stendhal 6, 10 Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy 52, 111, 152, 162 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 144 Strohschneider-Kohrs, Ingrid 53 sublime 26–28 sympathetic imagination 13–16, 18–38, 65–66, 106–09, 117–21, 125, 126, 133–35, 147–51, 156–60, 161 and irony see irony and sympathetic imagination negative capability 35, 156 second sight 82–83, 84–89, 90–91, 133–34, 189– 90 n. 26 sympathy 13–16, 18–38, 125, 126–28, 129, 130 and commodity fetishism 66–70 and empathy 168–69 n. 43 and fiction 19–22 and illusion 22–23, 64–66 Taine, Hippolyte 11, 97 Terdiman, Richard 106 Thackeray, William Makepeace 10 Vanity Fair 8, 160 Theophrastus 106 Tilby, Michael 152 The Times 138, 140 Trollope, Anthony, The Warden 11 Tyndall, John 134 Westphal, Carl Otto Friedrich 188 n. 19 Wilde, Oscar: ‘The Decay of Lying’ 18, 19, 32, 35 The Importance of Being Earnest 70 The Picture of Dorian Gray 147, 148–49, 151 Woodmansee, Martha 73–74, 76 Woolf, Virginia 151, 155, 158 Mrs Dalloway 152 The Waves 152 Young, Edward 77 Zola, Emile 4, 10, 152 Le Docteur Pascal 147, 149–50, 151 L’Œuvre 153