The Salt Smugglers (34 page)

Eighteen forty-eight, “the springtime of the people,” was also very much a springtime of the printed word. The early years of the Second Republic saw the creation of some 400 new periodicals in France — not to mention an explosion of almanacs, broadsheets, popular prints, caricatures, and
cabinets de lecture
for the people's perusal — and the combined daily press runs for all Paris newspapers rose from 50,000 to 400,000 as a result (by contrast, after the draconian press laws of February 1852, only fourteen Parisian daily newspapers were left standing). The stamp tax levied on the publication of serial novels by the Riancey amendment was thus part of a broader right-wing strategy to strangle the popularity and the profitability of the daily press. The fact that this law should have specifically targeted the
roman-feuilleton
may in part be due to the Assembly's apprehension about the rabble-rousing success of the recently elected socialist representative Eugène Sue, whose serial novels,
Les Mystères de Paris
and subsequent
Mystères du peuple
, were seen as encouraging populist uprisings against the regime not only because of their unflinching representation of the miseries of the urban masses but, perhaps more importantly, because they encouraged a kind of participatory democracy among their reading public, consisting of recitations of their latest installments in the workplace or letters to their author from readers offering commentaries and corrections — a feature that Nerval would imitate in
The Salt Smugglers
by including (fictitious?) correspondence addressed to him by subscribers to
Le National
. The Riancey amendment, in any event, proved a blessing in disguise for Nerval, for it provided him with the basic comic shtick of his feuilleton: ever anxious to follow the letter of the law and please the censor, its hapless
narrator will valiantly attempt to avoid “committing a novel” (as he puts it), only to fail again and again as he discovers that “history” itself is nothing more than a purely linguistic, purely narrative construct whose “facts” are often no more stable than the six different spellings of the abbé de Bucquoy's name.

As if this legislative enforcement of the ideology of referentiality were not enough — after all, Plato's
Republic
, recognizing the perils of unfounded mimesis, had similarly recommended the expulsion of poets — there was another rider attached to these press laws of July 16, namely, the so-called Tinguy amendment, which required that any newspaper article dealing with “matters political, philosophical, or religious” be signed by the name of its author. Gérard Labrunie, who had spent most of his literary career publishing under a variety of initials and pseudonyms before arriving at his definitive nom de plume Gérard de Nerval in the 1840s, could not fail to be amused and alarmed by this attempt to institutionalize the “author function” (as Foucault calls it) by fixing the legal liability of utterance within the locus of the proper name. He wryly observed that this new law obliging journalists to affix their signatures to their articles would no doubt lead writers to “develop their personalities beyond measure,” causing them to preen and posture in front of their readers. Whereas the “we” traditionally used by the
feuilletoniste
indicated that the opinions he offered were not simply his own, but rather those collectively held by the staff of his newspaper or by the guild of his literary confreres, the newly instituted regime of the “I” (so Nerval argued) broke down this spirit of community, leaving the author a “mere individual, a mere spectator, constrained at all points to protect his own personal dignity and modesty” from the glare of public — and legal — exposure.

To protect his privacy on the public page, Nerval devised an elaborate cat and mouse game with his censors — and his readers. Even as he puts in his daily conversational visits to his public, gently nudging it with his elbow like some affable eighteenth-century narrator, he remains forever elusive — much like his alter egos the abbé de Bucquoy or Angélique de Longueval, both “historical” figures to be sure, but in the end only knowable as evanescent textual traces. At moments these autofictional sleights of hand leave Sterne or Diderot behind altogether and seem to anticipate the New Journalism of the 1960s. It is difficult, at any rate, to think of any other French newspaper writer before Nerval who had adapted the essayistic feuilleton mode to this level of random
autobiographical disclosure: he shares with us his childhood memories of the Valois, his battles with censors and theater directors during the 1839 production of his play
Léo Burckart
, his recent travels in Germany, and even informs us of his imminent eviction from his current apartment in Paris because of the planned urban renewal of his neighborhood — the historical veracity of which he proves by reprinting the actual (?) expropriation notice sent to him by the prefecture of the Seine. Yet even as we think we have entered into the quotidian intimacy of our narrator, sharing in his frustrations with the French postal system as he tries to dispatch his copy back to the capital or sympathizing with his ill treatment at the hands of a grumpy bookseller (on whom he takes revenge by printing his business address at the bottom of the page to warn away future customers), the Nervalian “I” keeps slipping through our fingers, lost in the labyrinth of the Archive, its voice receding into the intertextual murmur of the Library of Babel.

Nearly two months after embarking upon his initiatory quest for the rare book containing the life and adventures of the abbé de Bucquoy, our narrator informs his newspaper readers that he has at last reached his grail. It is now their turn to speak.
Lector in fabula:

This exchange provides a textbook example of what the Russian critic Mikhael Bakhtin defined as the “dialogism” of the novel — agenre whose origins he located in exactly the same tradition as Nerval (the
Odyssey
, Hellenistic romance, Rabelais, etc.). Dialogism, for Bakhtin, represents the liberatory subversion of all forms of monologic authoritarianism — the literary equivalent, as it were, of violating salt monopolies and of bootlegging contraband across borders.
The Salt Smugglers
is a “polyphonic” text in very much this political sense, for its “eccentricity” (a favorite word of Nerval's) works to undermine any stable notion of a sovereign center, replacing it instead with the unlicensed play of multiple narratives, multiple temporalities, multiple voices. For a newspaper serial of this relatively brief compass, the generic diversity and hybridity of Nerval's text are startlingly (pre-post-)modern. Although framed as an epistolary novel (i.e., as a series of letters to the director of
Le National
), its pages serve up a carnival feast of proven recipes for fiction: the quest romance, the picaresque novel, the adventure story, the detective tale, the confessional memoir, the folk legend, the anecdote, the
conte fantastique,
and, of course, the historical novel — all punctuated by various found textual objects that are collaged into the narrative (police reports, book catalogue entries, snippets from manuals of heraldry, tombstone inscriptions, not to mention the periodic strains of verse, both rhymed and free, that sing forth from the contrapuntal motifs of his prose). Nerval at one point refers to his work as a
“symphonie pastorale,”
thus hinting at the musical structure of his performance — the syncopations of whose chapter breaks and the unpredictable modulations of whose tonalities (now idyll, now elegy, now satire) also look forward to the riffs and improvised solos of jazz. Behind this term “symphony” one also hears distant echoes of the
Sympoesie
theorized and practiced by the Jena Romantics — a collective work (or act) of art based, like Nerval's experimental fiction, on the Utopian imagination of a community engaged in a revolutionary process of continual remembering and remaking and retelling:

 

“And I found my way back to my abbé de Bucquoy.”

“Tell me about it.”

English translation copyright © 2009 by Richard Sieburth

First Archipelago Book edition, 2009

Originally appeared as
Les faux saulniers
in
Le National
newspaper in Paris, 1850.
This edition follows the text established and annotated by Jacques Bony in volume
two of Nerval's
Oeuvres complètes
(
Bibiothèque de la Pléaide
, 1984).
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nerval, Gérard de, 1808-1855.
[Faux saulniers. English]
The salt smugglers / by Gérard de Nerval ;
translated from the French by Richard Sieburth.
p. cm.
Translation of: Les faux saulniers.

eISBN : 978-0-981-98739-2

1. Lost books — France — Fiction. 2. Censorship — France — History —
19th century — Fiction. 3. Satire. I. Sieburth, Richard. II. Title.
PQ2260.G36F'.7 — dc22
2009014413

 

The publishers are grateful for the support of Lannan Foundation,
the Florence Gould Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts,
and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.