Aisthesis. Jacques Ranciere
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and Fabrice del Dongo witnessed the upheaval of this ancient hierarchy. Usually we only recall its most visible aspect: the sons of the people who want to act and get involved in the great matters of communities at the cost of creating a reign of revolutionary terror. And the responsibility for this terror is readily attributed to the author of the Social Contract. The other aspect of the egalitarian revolution is less easily accounted for: the promotion of this quality of sensible experience where one does nothing, a quality equally offered to those whom the old order separated into men of pleasure and men of work and that the new order still divides into active and passive citizens. This state of suspension, the sensible state freed from the interests and hierarchies of knowledge and enjoyment, was characterized by Kant as the object of the subjective universality of aesthetic judgment. Schiller made it into the object of a play drive that blurs the old opposition between form and content. The former saw the principle of a new kind of common sense, likely to unite still distant classes, within this universality without concept. The latter opposed the violent revolution of political institutions with an aesthetic education of humanity drawing a new principle of freedom from this sensible equality. But neither of the two concealed the debt owed to the first theoretician of this disinterested sensible state. It was Rousseau who had theorized it before them under the name ‘reverie’.
Stendhal hardly knew Kant and Schiller. On the other hand, he felt a youthful passion for the author of the New Heloise, followed by a mature man’s aversion for his argumentative lovers and his exaltation of rustic simplicity. And in the author of the Social Contract, he did not despise the supposed inspiration for the sans-culottes, but the father of a democracy that he identified with the power of Manhattan shopkeepers and artisans with whom he was obsessed all the more as he had never had the chance to meet a single one. But, by rejecting the author of the Social Contract, we are not yet rid of the one who wrote the Confessions and the Reveries of a Solitary Walker. Stendhal dismissed the equality of citizens, but only in order better to identify the sovereign good with another equality, the equality of that pure enjoyment of existence and of the shared sensible moment that makes all the intrigues of good society, and class differences, seem derisive. Julien and Fabrice equally enjoy the supreme happiness of the plebeian in prison, of Rousseau’s joy lying in his barque – the happiness of expecting nothing from the future, enjoying a present without gaps, without the bite of a mourned or a regretted past, or a feared or hoped for future. And it is not difficult to recognize each one of the steps in the ‘conquest’ of Madame de Rênal as so many souvenirs of exceptional sensible moments evoked by the author of the Confessions: a maternal woman, like Madame de Warens, who welcomes the son of the artisan and the dead woman at her door; butterfly chases that recall a famous cherry-picking episode; a hand grasped and kissed, like Mademoiselle Galley’s on the evening of a day spent in the country; tearfully embraced knees that recall the silent moment of happiness spent in Turin at Madame Basile’s knees … In the same way, one can easily find young Jean-Jacques’s treasured walnut tree in Fabrice’s beloved chestnut tree, and the evenings on the shores of the Lac de Bienne in a certain evening on the shores of lake Como, where universal silence is only disturbed at equal intervals by the small waves dying on the shore.
What matters here is clearly not Stendhal’s ambivalence as a novelist towards the writer who inspired him in his youth. It is the textual transfer of the philosopher’s childhood memories and reveries into the heart of action novels that tell us about the enterprises of an admirer of Napoleon and the son of one of his generals. It is how these narratives bear witness to the twisted relation between the growth of the novelistic form and the rise of plebeians in the new society. One and the other only coincide, in effect, through a singular play of profit and loss. The sensitive plebeian who sets out to conquer society does so at the cost of sacrificing the only happiness that could satisfy him: the abolition of the hierarchy of occupations in the equality found in the pure sharing of a sensation or an emotion. He is condemned, he condemns himself, to the bitterness and the deceptions of the other equality: equality as a form of revenge against humiliation, sought in the network of intertwined intrigues of all those who occupy or strive to occupy some position in society, to exert or strive to exert some influence. The most dim-witted of young gentlemen will always have the means to push the overly gifted plebeian back into the mediocrity of his condition, the slightest Jesuit from some sub-prefecture will always have the power to ruin his audacious enterprises. For they have already sacrificed sensible happiness to social performance. The Russian aristocrats, ridiculous champions of vain success, sum up the entire affair in some praise and a maxim: while congratulating Julien on possessing a naturally cold appearance ‘a thousand miles from the sensation of the moment’, they invite him to ‘always do exactly the contrary of what people expect’.7 One could hardly give a better definition of the means of never attaining happiness, disguised as an unfailing recipe for success. For happiness only exists in present sensation where there is nothing to wait for and nothing to fake.
It is true that the sorrow of characters normally makes for the happiness of books. This was the case for those great misfortunes that constituted the subject of tragedy for Aristotle. It also applied to the adventures punctuating Don Quixote’s quest for feats from another time, as it did to Tom Jones or Jacob profiting from the modern confusion of conditions and sentiments, and even to the non-adventures of Tristram Shandy. The novelist could choose whether to give happiness to his characters at the end of their tribulations. The essence of the matter lay in the agreement between these tribulations and the sinuous line of the novel. In La Peau de chagrin, Balzac still laid claim to this sinuous line that placed the adventures of the modern sons of the countryside in continuity with those of ancient masters. But only in order to doubt, a few pages later, whether any novel could ever rival the sober genius of a few lines of news in brief: ‘Yesterday, at four o’clock, a young woman threw herself into the Seine at the Pont-des-Arts.’8 But the logic of sorrow does not pose a challenge to the novel alone; happiness does so as well. Concerning the three years of unclouded happiness that Fabrice spends close to the person he does not have the right to see, the author asks for the reader’s ‘permission to pass, without saying a single word about them, over a gap of three years’.9 Saying nothing about what constitutes the hero’s happiness, on the contrary, means composing the subject-matter of the novel from the chronicle of worldly intrigues alone, which determine his success and failure. The silence about the nights spent with Clélia forces him to say a lot about the calculations of her father, the ‘liberal’ Conti, just as he must about Mosca’s tricks, Ranuce-Ernest’s threats, and the conspiracies of the tax officer Rassi. But these divisions of time already disarm the jumble of conspiracies and counter-conspiracies that compose the author’s science of society. The plebeian’s new happiness, the happiness of doing nothing, splits the novel in two. No need to invoke, like Lukács, a soul in mourning for lost totality. What is lost is the old division, the old hierarchy between two kinds of narrative logic: the noble logic of a chain of actions belonging to the tragic poem, and the vulgar logic of mixed conditions and the cascade of events that made the novel entertaining. In the society of ‘material interests’ that follows the revolutionary upheaval and the imperial epic, the distinction between forms of causal logic is no longer tenable. This explains why writers from these times, like Victor Hugo, dreamt of a great new genre that would substitute temporal sequences with spatial simultaneity, by holding together on the same stage aristocratic grandeur, the manoeuvres of intriguers, bohemian pleasures and plebeian impulses towards new skies. For them, this new genre was drama, made from a mixture of genres and representing mixed conditions, such as spectacular actions and intimate feelings – in short, ‘the mixture on stage of what is mixed in life … a riot there and a romantic conversation here’.10
Yet this genre of the future, which was meant to contain everything and instruct the gathered communities, would remain a proclamation. The genre suitable for new society would not take place on the public stage of the theatre. It would later be identified as the novel, the kind of writing that individuals read alone, without one knowing what kind of teaching they draw from it. The novel too was expected to say and represent everything: social stratifications, the characters they shape, the habitats that reflect them, the passions they circulate, and the intrigues that cut across them. But this desire for mastery seems immediately struck by a strange powerlessness. In order to make us cross all the circles of the modern metropolis,