Aisthesis. Jacques Ranciere
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logic of a character, and the narrative of the workings of the social machine, falls apart. Throughout the novel we see the hero constantly calculating his gestures, words and attitudes. We see representatives from different social circles – the illiterate carpenter hoping to get a little more cash, the grand vicar seeking a diocese, the provincial bourgeois aiming for prebends and distinctions, a young noblewoman dreaming of romantic adventures – multiply calculations of means and ends around him. Finally, we witness the novelist incessantly mixing in his own reflections with the characters’ thoughts, and lecturing them in the name of this science of worldly success that he had generously attributed to them. But the instant the shot is fired, all calculation and reflection come to a halt. The letter of denunciation written by an obscure provincial Jesuit has ruined the dreams of Julien, Mathilde and the Marquis de la Mole. A pure succession of acts follows, which has not been announced or motivated by anything, and which takes place in less narrative time than needed until now for one of the lovers to make the slightest gesture toward the other. Julien leaves Mathilde, heads to Verrières, buys a gun, shoots at Madame de Rênal, then remains still and, with no reaction, lets himself be led to the prison, where he will finally enjoy perfect happiness with her, without attempting the slightest explanation of his act. The gunshot undoubtedly has an obvious cause for the reader: the denunciatory letter signed by Madame de Rênal. But at no point is this reflection included in Julien’s thoughts and feelings. It is not included simply because it cannot be. In fact, the slightest calculation in which the novelist may have revelled with him until now would have been enough to dissuade the hero from an act that is the most absurd response possible in his situation.
Thus the act, which is the culmination of an entire network of intrigues, also annuls it by ruining every strategy of means and ends, any fictive logic of cause and effect. This act definitively separates the ambitious plebeian from the causal rationality and the very temporality in which his conquering goals were inscribed. Action and the ‘real world’, Stendhal now tells us, are a matter for ‘aristocratic hearts’, representatives of the old world. Mathilde, the young aristocrat fascinated by the rebellious lords from the time of the League, takes care of it on her own, even if her noble passion for action only ends up creating a funeral ceremony in bad taste (but the men of action of the new society will not do any better: in Balzac, the pompous burial of Ferragus’s daughter will be the greatest success of the Thirteen). Ideal life alone can provide perfect happiness to the obscure beings society only recalls for two weeks if there has been a spectacular crime. Pre-revolutionary society, which considered itself eternal, occasionally liked to enjoy good times – whether erotic or narrative – with parvenu peasants with rosy complexions and rude manners, whom they could always send back to the fields after using them. But the new society could no longer surrender to such innocent games with the slender, effeminate sons of workers who had become Latinists thanks to the priests, and ambitious from hearing tales of Napoleonic feats. The only room it was willing to give them was as short news reports. The plot of Red and Black was actually inspired by two brief news items, two singular crimes, taken from the newly founded Gazette des Tribunaux, the archive of criminal acts signalling the dangerous energy and intelligence of the children of the people. This two-week glory is the true end promised to the ambitious plebeian, the glory to which Julien prefers the pure enjoyment of reverie that subtracts him from time. And the book that tells the story of this exemplary fate can only conclude, as Julien does, by dissociating the faits divers that capture the attention of society for fifteen days from the pure present of this enjoyment.
But this ending returns to the beginning. In fact, Julien’s heart is divided from the very beginning, and the novel along with it. There are the great schemes the young man devises while reading the Memorial of Saint Helena and the ‘small events’ that punctuate life at Monsieur de Rênal’s house. Yet, there are two kinds of ‘small events’: some obey the classic logic of small causes that produce large effects, like refilling a mattress or a dropped pair of scissors, that make Madame de Rênal Julien’s accomplice, despite her best intentions. Others are not linked in any chain of causes or effects, means or ends. On the contrary, they suspend these links in favour of the sole happiness of feeling, the sentiment of existence alone: a day in the country, a butterfly hunt, or the pleasure of a summer evening spent in the shade of a linden tree with the soft noise of the wind blowing. In the heterogeneous weaving of small events, the grand schemes find themselves torn between two kinds of logic: there is Julien’s duty that orders him to take revenge on those who humiliate him, by mastering his master’s wife; and there is the pure happiness of a shared sensible moment: a hand that surrenders to another in the mildness of the evening under a tall linden tree. The entire story of Julien’s relation with Madame de Rênal is constituted by this tension between such duty and such pleasure. But this fictional tension is not simply a matter of individual sentiment. In fact, it opposes two manners of exiting plebeian subjection: through role reversal or through the suspension of the very play of these roles. Julien triumphs the moment he stops fighting, when he simply shares the pure equality of an emotion, crying at Madame de Rênal’s knees. This happiness presumes that the conqueror should shed any ‘deftness’, and the loved ‘object’ no longer be object to anything – it too must shed all social determination, and be subtracted from the logic of means and ends. Julien experiences such happiness with Madame de Rênal in the countryside retreat at Vergy. He renounces it by heading for Paris and his great expectations. He finds it again in prison, where he has nothing to anticipate except death. Such happiness can be summarized in a simple formula: to enjoy the quality of sensible experience that one reaches when one stops calculating, wanting and waiting, as soon as one resolves to do nothing.
It is not difficult to recognize the origin of the plebeian heaven that Julien enjoys in his cell and on the prison terrace. It is the same heaven that, seventy years earlier, another artisan’s son, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, enjoyed on the other side of Jura, lying all afternoon in his barque on the Lac de Bienne. The plebeian rejected by society had taken refuge there, as if in a welcoming prison:
Because of the forebodings that troubled me, I wanted to make this refuge a perpetual prison for me, to confine me to it for life, and removing every possibility and hope of getting off it – to forbid me any kind of communication with the mainland so that being unaware of all that went on in the world I might forget its existence and that it might also forget mine.5
The ‘real’ prison in which the fictive assassin is locked up is very similar to the metaphorical prison where the man who considered himself condemned by his fellow beings would have liked to end his life. It is also inside a prison that the young Fabrice del Dongo – whom the reader of The Charterhouse of Parma is led to believe is the illegitimate son of one of these children of the people whom the French Revolution turned into generals – tastes happiness, by looking at Clélia’s window, that worldly intrigues, success as a preacher, and the possession of women would never equal. The carpenter’s son smokes cigars on the terrace, the son of the marquise is busy doing woodwork that will yield his square patch of sky and a view onto the window with the birdcages. This role reversal amounts to the same (in)occupation: thinking of nothing except the present moment, enjoying nothing other than the pure feeling of existence, and maybe the pleasure of sharing it with an equally sensible soul. The son of the Geneva watchmaker very precisely designated the content of this enjoyment: ‘The precious far niente was the first and the principal enjoyment I wanted to savor in all its sweetness, and all I did during my sojourn was in effect only the delicious and necessary occupation of a man who has devoted himself to idleness.’6
It is important to grasp the power of subversion of this innocent far niente. Far niente is not laziness. It is the enjoyment of otium. Otium is specifically the time when one is expecting nothing, precisely the kind of time that is forbidden to the plebeian, whom the anxiety of emerging from his condition always condemns to waiting for the effect of chance or intrigue. This is not the lack of occupation but the abolition of the hierarchy of occupations. The ancient opposition of patricians and plebeians is in effect firstly a matter of different ‘occupations’. An occupation is a way of being for bodies and minds. The patrician occupation is to act, to pursue grand designs in which their own success is identified with the destiny of vast communities. Plebeians are bound to do – to make useful objects and provide material services to