Aisthesis. Jacques Ranciere
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in all the salons, their hands in all the strongboxes, elbowroom in all the streets, their head on any pillow’.11 But the three episodes of the history of the invincible society of the Thirteen are so many failures whose narrative ends in epigrams: the girl with golden eyes ‘dies from her chest’; the duchess of Langeais, who was a woman, is no more than a corpse ready to be tossed into the water or a book read long ago; and Ferragus, the chief of the Devorants, becomes a stone statue whose greatest feat is to watch over an ongoing game of boules. Behind the repeated failures of an all-powerful society of conspirators, the novelist allows us to see a far more radical logic of inaction: these unknown kings ‘having made for themselves wings with which to traverse society from the top to the bottom, disdained to be something in it because they could be all’.12
To have the power to do everything, and consequently to do nothing, to head towards nothing: this is the troubling logic laid bare by this literature, which can now take an interest in everything and give equal treatment to the sons of kings and the daughters of peasants, the great undertakings of powerful men and the minute events that punctuate the slow-paced domestic lives of small provincial towns. Philosophers and critics have privileged an exemplary figure of this abdication, Bartleby the scrivener’s ‘prefer not to’. But Bartleby’s ‘choice not to’ is nothing but the other side of the irrational action of the other man with a pen and copy, the Marquis de la Mole’s secretary. At the decisive moment, Julien acts without choosing: he subtracts himself from the universe where one must always choose, always calculate the consequences of these choices, always copy the right models of political, military or romantic strategy. At the expense of one unreasonable act alone, he goes to the other side, the side of ‘ideal life’ where it is possible ‘to do nothing’. It is not necessary to render Bartleby singular to the degree that he becomes a new Christ, as Deleuze does. The ‘prefer not to’ is not the singularity of an eccentric attitude bearing a general lesson for the human condition. It is the law of this literature that overthrew the preferences of belles-lettres and the hierarchies on which it depended. No situation, no subject is ‘preferable’. Everything can be interesting, it can all happen to anyone, and it can all be copied by the penman. To be sure, this law of new literature depends upon the other novelty: anyone can grab a pen, taste any kind of pleasure, or nourish any ambition whatsoever. The omnipotence of literature – which it lends to these societies of high-flying manipulators it imagines only to foil their intrigues – is the other aspect of manifestos that used to say yesterday that the Third Estate, which was nothing in the social order, must finally become something within it, and tomorrow, would say along with the proletarian song: ‘We are nothing, let us be everything.’
This aspiration to everything marks the age of grand narratives, it is readily said. Surely this is the age that offers grand explanations for the order – or the disorder – of society, the teleologies of history, and world-transforming strategies based on the science of evolution. It is also the age of great novelistic cycles that pretend to encompass a society, cross all its strata, and expose the laws of its transformations through an exemplary family or a network of individuals. Yet this solidarity between the socialist political narrative and the ‘realist’ literary narrative seems to undo itself immediately. Literature that explores this new social world where everything is possible in the name of the omnipotence of writing seems to lead the grand narrative of an entirely controllable society towards its own nullification. Julien Sorel only finds happiness in the prison that precedes his death, in the definitive ruin of all strategies for social climbing. But his fate, in turn, voids all the conspiracies the novelist revels in describing, in which a society exhausts its energies. This waste of energies will be the common moral of Balzac’s Human Comedy and Zola’s ‘natural history of a family during the Second Empire’. At most, the latter would give a derisively positive value to such vanity: in Doctor Pascal’s old office, his incestuous son’s baby clothes come to replace the notes that scientifically explained the evolution of the family and the fate of all its members. The notes disappear in smoke, and the raised fist of the infant – a new kind of messiah different from Bartleby/Deleuze – celebrates, for all science, the hymn of life obstinately pursuing its own nonsense. Literary fiction has embraced the movement of history described by revolutionary science: the great upheaval of property; the rise of financial moguls, shopkeepers, and sons of upstart peasants; the artificial paradises of the city of trade and pleasure, misery and revolt, rumbling in industrial infernos. But it does so only to replace the future promised by social science and collective action with the pure nonsense of life, the obstinate will that wants nothing. This is not because it enjoys contradicting the socialist science. Rather, it might unveil its flip side: the science of society, bearing a future freedom in its womb and the philosophy of the will-to-live that wants nothing were born on the same ground: the site where old hierarchies of social and narrative order break down.
The year the people of Paris expelled the last king of divine right, Julien Sorel’s adventure brought forth this troubling revelation: the plebeian’s happiness does not lie in the conquest of society. It lies in doing nothing, in annulling hic et nunc the barriers of social hierarchy and the torment of confronting them, in the equality of pure sensation, in the uncalculated sharing of the sensible moment. Twelve years before the storming of the Bastille, this was already the lesson of the author of The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. The conflict between the two equalities – the revolutionary dream and plebeian reverie – would merit another study; what matters here is the way in which the great novelistic genre came to the fore gnawed by its opposite, the happiness of doing nothing, the suspension of the moment in which one experiences the feeling of existence alone ‘without gaps’, without the suffering of past trials or the worry of future calculations. For Julien, this moment comes very close to the end. But the new novel itself is born very close to its end, absorbed by the multiplicity of minute events likely to create a void in the most modest lives, swallowing up any intelligible chain of cause and effect, and any organized narrative of individuals and societies. It is born coupled with two daydreaming genres that will eventually devour its forces. First the prose poem nullified action to spread out the suspended sensation, the little scene that suffices to sum up a world: in Baudelaire, for example, a little old woman in a public garden or the gaze of poor children on the lights of a café terrace. Then came the short story, which conserved action to pierce into the immutable aspect of ordinary life, creating a hole that swallows characters, or that heals only to repeat the cycle. Take the spring walk, in Maupassant, at the end of which a lowly employee, who has changed his routine for once, commits suicide, or the pain of a life, deprived of the love to which it was entitled, that opens up for a brief instant before closing up again.13 In Chekhov, we have the tears at the memory of a summer evening when love and happiness were within reach, or the moment of revolt when the little slave-girl–maid smothers the child who keeps her from sleeping.14 The time of the modern novel is cut in half: on the one hand, there is revolutionary upheaval that makes the entire movement of society legible and controllable by thought; on the other, there is the suspension that brings this movement back to the instant and the spot where the equality and inequality of fates hang in the balance. The new novel is born in the gap between these two; it is born as the history of the breach that the great upheaval of social conditions and the minute disorder of plebeian reverie placed at the heart of the logics of action.
1 Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, in Œuvres romanesques complètes, vol. I (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), p. 775; Red and Black, transl. and ed. Robert M. Adams (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1969), pp. 381–2.
2 ‘This eighteen-year-old philosopher, with a fixed plan of action, who establishes himself as a master in the middle of a society he does not know, begins by seducing a woman for personal glory, and finds no happiness other than satisfying his own self-love, becomes sensitive, falls madly in love, and becomes animated by the passions of everyone. Another book now begins, in another style.’ Gazette littéraire, 2 December 1830, in V. del Litto, ed., Stendhal sous l’oeil de la presse contemporaine, 1817–1843 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001) p. 583.
3 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, transl. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991 [1953]), p. 463.
4 ‘Like the Indian cactus, a new civilization has burst open overnight.