Read Why Read the Classics? Online
Authors: Italo Calvino
Why Read the Classics? (21 page)
This sentence provided both the subject and the title of Roland Bardies’ last paper, which he was to have read at the Stendhal conference in Milan in 1980 (but it was while he was writing it that he was involved in the road
accident that cost him his life). In the pages that he completed, Barthes observes that in his autobiographical works Stendhal emphasises on several occasions the happiness of his time in Italy as a young man, but he never manages to describe it.
And yet twenty years later, in a kind of
après-coup
which also forms part of the contorted logic of love, Stendhal writes magisterial pages on Italy: yes, those pages enkindle in the reader like me (but I am sure I am not the only one) that ecstasy, that radiance that his intimate diary mentioned but could not communicate. There is a sort of miraculous empathy between the mass of happiness and pleasure which broke out in Milan with the arrival of the French and our joy in reading: at last the effect narrated coincides with the effect produced
.
[1982]
The enterprise which Balzac feels impelled to undertake when he starts to write
Ferragus
is a vast one: to turn a city into a novel; to represent its districts and streets as characters, each endowed with a personality totally different from the others; to summon up human figures and situations like spontaneous vegetation burgeoning from the pavements of this or that street, or as elements that provoke such a dramatic contrast with those streets that they cause a series of cataclysms; to ensure that in every changing minute the real protagonist is the living city, its biological continuity, the monster that is Paris.
And yet he had set out with a totally different idea in his head, namely the power exercised by mysterious characters through an invisible network of secret societies. To put it another way, his favourite sources of inspiration, which he wanted to blend to write a single novel-cycle, were two: secret societies, and the hidden omnipotence of an individual on the fringes of society. The myths that will inform both popular and highbrow fiction for over a century all surface in Balzac. The Superman who takes his revenge on the society that has outlawed him by turning into an elusive demiurge will pervade the various volumes of the
Comédie humaine
in the ever-changing guise of Vautrin and will be reincarnated in all the Counts of Montecristo, Phantoms of the Opera and perhaps even the Godfathers that the most successful novelists would later put into circulation. The murky conspiracy that spreads its tentacles everywhere will become a half-serious, half-playful obsession for the most sophisticated English novelists of the turn of the nineteenth century and will reemerge in the serial production of violent spy thrillers in our own times.
With
Ferragus
we are still in the middle of a romantic, Byronic vogue. In an issue of the
Revue de Paris
for 1833 (a weekly for which Balzac had a contract to write forty pages a month, amidst the constant complaints of the publisher for his delay in delivering manuscripts and for the excessive number of corrections made at proof stage) we find the preface to the
Histoire des treize (History of the Thirteen)
in which the author promises to reveal the secrets of thirteen determined outlaws bound by a secret pact of mutual help which makes them invincible, and announces the first instalment as
Ferragus, chef des Dévorants
. (The term
Dévorants
or
Devoirants
traditionally signified the members of a guild, ‘The Companions of Duty’, but Balzac certainly played on its false etymology from the much more sinister ‘dévorer’ (to devour), and wants us to think of Devourers.)
The preface is dated 1831, but Balzac only started work on the project in February 1833, and did not manage to deliver the first chapter in time for the issue following the one that contained the preface, hence it was only two weeks later that the
Revue de Paris
published the first two chapters together; the third chapter caused the following week’s issue to be delayed, while the fourth and the conclusion came out in a special supplement in April.
But the novel as published was very different from what the preface had promised: the author was no longer interested in the original project, he was much more concerned with something else which made him agonise over his manuscripts instead of turning out pages to comply with the rhythm demanded by the journal, something which forced him to cover his proofs with corrections and additions, completely altering the typographers’ layout. The plot he followed was still enough to make readers hold their breath at its astonishing mysteries and reversals, and the dark character with the Ariostesque nickname of Ferragus plays a central role, but the adventures to which he owes both his secret power and his public notoriety are in the past and Balzac allows us only to witness his decline. And as for the Thirteen, or rather the other twelve members, the author apparently forgot about them, having them appear only in the distance, in an almost decorative role, at a ceremonial requiem mass.
What now obsessed Balzac was a topographical epic about Paris, following the intuition that he had been the first to have of the city as language, as ideology, as something that conditions every thought, word and deed, where the streets
‘impriment par leur physionomie certaines idées contre lesquelles nous sommes sans défense’
(by virtue of their appearance impress
upon us certain notions which we are powerless to resist), the city as monstrous as a giant crustacean whose inhabitants are merely the limbs which propel it. Already for some years now Balzac had been publishing in journals sketches of city life and portraits of typical characters: but now he had the idea of organising this material into a kind of encyclopedia of Paris in which there was space for a mini-treatise on following women in the streets, a genre sketch (worthy of Daumier) of passers-by caught in the rain, a survey of street vagabonds, an account of the
grisette
, and a register of the various kinds of language spoken (when Balzac’s dialogues lose their usual rhetorical emphasis they are able to imitate the most fashionable phrases and neologisms, even down to reproducing the intonation of people’s voices — for instance, when a streetseller claims that marabou feathers give to women’s coiffure
‘quelque chose de vague, d’ossianique et de très comme il faut’
(something airy, almost Ossianic and very much up to date)). To these exterior scenes he adds a similar range of interiors, from the squalid to the luxurious (with studied pictorial effects such as the vase of wallflowers in the widow Gruget’s hovel). The description of the Père-Lachaise cemetery and the labyrinthine bureaucracy connected with funerals rounds off the picture, so that the novel which had opened with the vision of Paris as a living organism closes on the horizon of the Parisian dead.
Balzac’s
History of the Thirteen
turned into an atlas of the continent that is Paris. After
Ferragus
, he went on to write (his obstinacy never permitted him to leave a project half-finished) for different publishers (he had already quarrelled with
La Revue de Paris)
two further stories in order to complete a trilogy. These are two novels which are very different from the first and from each other, but which have in common, apart from the fact that their protagonists turn out to be members of the mysterious club (a detail which is in reality quite marginal to the aim of the plot), the presence of long digressions adding other entries to his encyclopedia of Paris:
La Duchesse de Langeais
(a novel of passions written on an autobiographical impulse) offers in its second chapter a sociological study of the aristocracy of the Faubourg Saint-Germain;
La Fille aux yeux d’or
(which is much more important: one of the key texts in that line in French literature which starts with Sade and still continues today, down to, say, Bataille and Klossowski) opens with a kind of anthropological museum devoted to Parisians divided into their various social classes.
If the richness of such digressions is greater in
Ferragus
than in the other two novels of the trilogy, that is not to say that it is only in these digressions
that Balzac invests the full power of his writing, for even the intimate psychological drama of the relationship between M. and Mme. Desmarets absorbs him totally. Of course we find this drama of a couple who are too perfect much less interesting, given our reading habits which at a certain height of the sublime allow us only to see dazzling clouds and prevent us from discerning movement and contrast. Nevertheless, the way in which the shadow of suspicion that refuses to go away is unable to scratch the exterior of their amorous trust but rather corrodes it from within, is a process narrated in anything but banal terms. Nor must we forget that passages which might only seem to us exercises in conventional eloquence, like the last letter from Clémence to her husband, were the virtuoso passages of which Balzac was proudest, as he himself confessed to Madame Hanska.
The other psychological drama, concerning a father’s excessive love for his daughter, is less convincing, even though it can be seen as a first draft of
Père Goriot
(though here the egoism is all on the side of the father, and the sacrifice entirely the daughter’s). Dickens was able to develop a quite different plot from the return of an ex-convict father in his masterpiece
Great Expectations
.
But once we accept the fact that the importance given to these psychological dramas also helps to relegate the adventure plot to a secondary level, we must recognise how much the latter still contributes to our pleasure as readers: the suspense works, even though the emotional centre of the story shifts constantly from character to character; the rhythm of events is exhilarating even though many sequences in the plot limp somewhat through illogicality or inaccuracy; the mystery of the visits by Madame Jules to the street of ill repute is one of the first criminal mysteries to confront an amateur detective at the opening of a novel, even though the solution is discovered too quickly and is disappointingly simple.
The work’s whole strength as a novel is supported and enhanced by being founded on the myth of the metropolis, a metropolis in which every character still appears to have a distinctive face, as in portraits by Ingres. The age of the anonymous crowd has not yet begun: and it really is a short period, those twenty years that separate Balzac and the apotheosis of the city in the novel from Baudelaire and the apotheosis of the city in poetry. In order to offer a definition of that transition, two quotations will suffice, by readers from a century later, both arriving at an interest in such problems by different routes.
Balzac discovered the big city as something bristling with mystery, and the sense which he always keeps alert is that of curiosity. This is his Muse. He is never either comic or tragic, simply curious. He immerses himself in a tangle of things but is always capable of sniffing out and promising us a mystery, and he sets about dismantling the whole machine bit by bit with keen, lively and in the end triumphant enthusiasm. Look at how he approaches new characters: he examines them up and down as though they were rare specimens, describing, sculpting, defining and commenting on them until he conveys all their individuality and guarantees us marvels. His conclusions, observations, tirades, and bon mots, do not contain psychological truths, but the hunches and tricks of a presiding magistrate flailing away at the mystery which dammit must be cleared up. For this reason, when the quest to solve the mystery is at an end and — at the beginning or in the course of the book (never at the end because by then all is revealed, along with the mystery) — Balzac discourses on his own mystery complex with an enthusiasm that is at once sociological, psychological and lyrical, he is wonderful. See the opening of
Ferragus
or the beginning of the second part of
Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes:
here he is sublime. His work is the overture to Baudelaire
.
The author of this passage was the young Cesare Pavese, writing in his diary on 13 October 1936.
Almost at the same time Walter Benjamin, in his essay on Baudelaire, writes a passage in which all one has to do is to substitute for Victor Hugo’s name the even more appropriate one of Balzac, for Benjamin to develop and complete Pavese’s point:
One looks in vain, in
Les Fleurs du mal
or in
Spleen de Paris
for something analogous to those large frescoes of the city at which Victor Hugo excelled. Baudelaire describes neither the people nor the city. And this very refusal allowed him to conjure up the one in the image of the other. His crowds are always those of the metropolis; his Paris is always overpopulated … In
Tableaux parisiens
one can, almost always, sense the secret presence of the masses. When Baudelaire takes as his subject the morning dawning, there is in the deserted streets something of the ‘swarming silence’ which Hugo senses in Paris at night … The masses were really the fluttering veil through which Baudelaire saw Paris
.
[1973]
Our Mutual Friend
The Thames at nightfall, dark and muddy, with the tide rising up the piers of the bridges: against this backdrop, which this year’s news stories have brought to our attention in the most lugubrious light, a boat approaches, almost touching the floating logs, barges and rubbish. At its prow stands a man staring with vulture-like eyes at the current as though looking for something; at the oars, half-hidden by the hood of her cheap cloak, is a girl with an angelic face. What are they looking for? We soon learn that the man recovers the corpses of suicides or murder victims who have been flung into the river: the waters of the Thames seem to contain every day a rich catch for this particular fisherman. As soon as he sees a corpse floating on the water’s surface, the man removes the gold coins from his pockets, and then drags him with a rope to a riverside police station, where he will receive a reward. The angelic girl, the daughter of the boatman, tries not to look at this macabre booty: she is terrified, but continues to row.