Abstract
To define the novel as a long prose fiction that is unified, coherent, and literary is by no means to set the genre in concrete, for the novel, though not living, is a changing form and cannot be immobilized. There are many ways in which exemplars of the genre can vary their constituent parts within its encompassing form, without changing its generic essence. Playing on the Darwinian “natural selection,” one might say that it changes through “natural variation.” The novel is not transmuted into a new species when one or the other of its latent but essential inherent traits is changed or emphasized, though it may seem new. Just as Molière pushed several of his comedies to the edge of tragedy, without making a muddle, so novels frequently play on the conventions of essays, poetry, theater, and, indeed, the short story. Considerable variance is possible even when novelists limit their creativity to concentrated work on a sequence of plot and character—what Aristotle called narration. It is not unusual for novelists to invent a device or attribute or arrangement that, for a while, makes their work look very different from other novels. One might remember the epistolary novel that was so popular in the eighteenth century.
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Notes
See, especially, Mary Donaldson-Evans, Medical Examinations: Dissecting the Doctor in French Narrative Prose, 1857–1894 (Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 2000) 22–40.
Max Aprile, “L’aveugle et sa signification dans Madame Bovary,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 76 (1976): 385–92.
P. M. Wetherill, “Madame Bovary’s Blind Man: Symbolism in Flaubert,” Romanic Review 61 (1970): 35–42.
Pasco, “Myth, Metaphor and Meaning in Germinal,” French Review 46 (1973): 739–49.
Michael Issacharoff, J.-K. Huysmans devant la critique en France (1874–1960) (Paris: Klincksieck, 1970) 67–68.
Pierre Jourde’s more recent study comes to the same conclusion: Huysmans—À rebours: l’identité impossible (Geneva: Slatkine, 1991) 9.
Émile Zola’s “confusion” was expressed in his letter of May 20, 1884, to Huysmans: Pierre Lambert, ed., Lettres inédites à Émile Zola (Geneva: Droz, 1953) 103–04.
William York Tindall, The Literary Symbol (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1965) 69.
H. Brunner and J. L. de Coninck, En marge d’À rebours (Paris: Dorbon aîné, 1929) 75.
Marc Fumaroli, “Préface,” A rebours, by J.-K. Huysmans (Paris: Gallimard 1977) 21.
Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989) 263.
Lilian R. Furst stated that the actual order “could be shuffled without substantially altering the work, specially in the middle”—The Contours of European Romanticism(London: Macmillan, 1979) 130.
Ruth Plaut Weinreb, “Structural Techniques in A rebours,” French Review 49.2 (1975): 223–24.
David Mickelsen, “A rebours: Spatial Form,” French Forum 3.1 (1978): 48–55.
Huysmans, “Préface écrite vingt ans après le roman,” A rebours, ed. Rose Fortassier, Lettres françaises (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1981) 52, 61.
Paul Valéry, Tel Quel, Œuvres, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1960) 2.557.
C. A. Cevasco, “Delineating Decadence: The Influence of J.-K. Huysmans on Arthur Symons,” Nineteenth-Century Prose 23.1 (1996): 74–86.
Paul Valéry, November 19, 1890, Letter 13, Lettres à quelques-uns (Paris: Gallimard, 1952) 35.
Valéry, according to Frédéric Lefèvre, Entretiens sur J.-K. Huysmans (Paris: Horizons de France, 1931) 39.
Gisèle Séginger, “À rebours de Huysmans: la lévitation du sens,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 23.3–4 (1995): 485.
I previously used the concept and the illustration below in an analysis of En rade: Pasco, Novel Configurations: A Study of French Fiction, 2nd ed. (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 1994) 149.
William J. Berg, Imagery and Ideology: Fiction and Painting in Nineteenth-Century France (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2007) 165.
The quotation is from Séginger, “À rebours, le roman de l’écriture,” Littératures 25 (automne 1991): 72, though the entire argument is significant (74–80).
“Decadent Coherence in Huysmans’s À rebours,” Modernity and Revolution in Late Nineteenth-Century France, ed. Barbara T. Cooper and Mary Donaldson-Evans (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1992) 33.
Françoise Carmignani-Dupont, “Fonction romanesque du récit de rêve: L’exemple d’ À rebours,” Littérature 43 (October 1981): 57–74.
Jeffrey B. Loomis, “Of Pride and the Fall: The Allegorical A rebours,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 12.4–13.1 (Summer-Fall 1984): 147–61.
See the discussion of methodology in Pasco, The Color-Keys to À la recherche du temps perdu (Geneva: Droz, 1976) 1–23. I have not hesitated to use documented, organized scholarly compilations of recent vintage. The most convenient references are the following: Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des symbols: Mythes, rêves, coutumes, gestes, formes, figures, couleurs, nombres (Paris: Robert Lafont, 1969)
J.E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. Jack Sage (New York: Philosophical Library, 1962), though I have confirmed these texts with wide reading in other resources, some of which Huysmans might have known: Artémidore’s second century The Interpretation of Dreams: Oneirocritica, trans. Robert J. White (Torrance, CA: Original Books, 1990
Isaac Myer, Qabbalah: The Philosophical Writings of Solomon Ben Yebudab Ibn Gehirol or Avicebron (1888; rpt. New York: Ktav, 1970)
Éliphas Lévi, Dogma et rituel de la haute magie, 2 vols. (Paris: Baillière, 1856)
Lévi, La clef des grands mystères (Paris: Baillière, 1861)
Lévi, Histoire de la magie (Paris: Baillière, 1860)
Lévi, Fables et symboles avec leur explication (Paris: Baillière, 1862)
Lévi, La science des esprits (Paris: Baillière, 1865)
Frédéric Portai, Des couleurs symboliques dans l’antiquité, le moyen-âge et les temps modernes (Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1837)
Adolphe Franck, La kabbale ou la philosophie des Hébreux (Paris: Hachette, 1843)
Carl G. Jung et al., Man and His Symbols (New York: Doubleday, 1964)
Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, vol. XIV, The Collected Works, trans. R.F.C. Hull (London: Routledge, 1963)
Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, vol. XII, The Collected Works; Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (London, Harrvill, 1960).
See, Robert Ziegler, Mirror of Divinity: The World and Creation in J.-K. Huysman (Newark, NJ: U of Delaware P, 2004) 139–56.
Ania Teillard, Ce que disent les rêves: le symbolisme du rêve (Paris: Stock, 1970) 54–56.
A very complete analysis of the symbolic house, with many examples, is also to be found in Gaston Bachelard, La terre et les rêveries du repos (Paris: Corti, 1948) 95–129. Mallarmé’s “Les fenêtres,” offers as well a brilliant illustration.
Ziegler, “Taking the Words Right Out of His Mouth: From Ventriloquism to Symbol-Reading in J.-K. Huysmans,” Romanic Review 91.1–2 (Jan.–Mar. 2000): 77–88; and “The Pervert, the Aesthete, and the Novelist,” Romance Studies 25.3 (2007): 199–209.
Nuccitelli, “A rebours’s Symbol of the ‘Femme-Fleur’: A Key to Des Esseintes’s Obsession,” Symposium 28 (1974): 336–45.
See, Emanuel J. Mickel’s analysis of the three poems in, “À rebours’ Trinity of Baudelairean Poems,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 16 (1987–88): 154–61.
Gaston Bachelard, L’eau et les rêves: Essai sur l’imagination de la matière (Paris: J. Corti, 1947) 81.
I shall be referring to Étienne Bonnot Condillac, Traité des sensations (1755), ed. Georges Le Roy, Corpus générale des philosophes français: Auteurs modernes, vol. 33 (Paris: P.U.F., 1947). Condillac had considerable influence in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1851 or 1852, Hippolyte Taine, one of the major intellectuals of the period, studied Le traité des sensations for his aggregation examination—H. Taine: Sa vie et sa correspondance: correspondance de jeunesse 1847–1853, vol. 1 (1876; Paris: Hachette, 1902) 122. Indeed, according to C. Plon, Taine’s Les philosophes français au XIXe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1857) signals Condillac’s resurrection—“Condillac et sa philosophie,” Bulletin mensuel de L’académie delphinale 17 (1881–82): 18–19. Taine refers several times to the Traité in his Les origines de la France contemporaine, 3 vols. (1876–94; Paris: Hachette, 1937), e.g., 1.284–85, 317. Over a third of Victor Cousin’s Philosophie sensualiste au XVIIIe siècle, 5th ed. (Paris: Didier, 1866) is devoted to Condillac. He terms the Traité “l’ouvrage capital de Condillac” (68). In 1869, Cousins said flatly, he “est le métaphysicien français du XVIIIe siècle.” Perhaps because of the Ferry educational reforms of 1879–83, there was a flurry of increased interest in the early 1880s that resulted in five separate editions of Le traité des sensations by F. Picavet, E. Belin, T.-V. Charpentier, Abbé Drioux, and Georges Lyou in 1885 and 1886. In short, the work was very much a part of the intellectual life when Huysmans wrote A rebours. I am grateful to André Chervel, Denis D. Grélé, and Ralph Albanese for their help with Condillac’s work in the nineteenth-century.
Chevalier 761; Hans Biedermann, Dictionary of Symbolism, trans. James Hulbert (1992; New York: Facts on File, 1992) 358.
See, above, n31. Ann Heilmann believes that Gilman emphasizes the negative aspects of the color yellow—“Overwriting Decadence: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Oscar Wilde, and the Feminization of Art in ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper,’” The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Catherine J. Golden and Joanna Schneider Zangrando (Newark; U of Delaware P, 2000) 133n2. For the ferocity and desperation of orange, see, Oswald Wirth, Le tarot des imagiers du moyen âge (Paris: Tchou, 1966) 102.
Harold Bayley, The Lost Language of Symbolism: An Inquiry into the Origin of Certain Letters, Words, Names, Fairy-Tales, Folklore, and Mythologies (1912; New York: Citadel P, 1960) 157–58; Pasco, Color-Keys 160n2.
Roy Jay Nelson, “Malraux and Camus: The Myth of the Beleaguered City,” Kentucky Foreign Language Quarterly 13.2 (1966): 91.
See, Pasco, Balzacian Montage: Configuring La comédie humaine (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991) 108–13.
Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1987–89) 1.153.
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© 2010 Allan H. Pasco
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Pasco, A.H. (2010). Remaking the Novel. In: Inner Workings of the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117433_3
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