Abstract
This chapter analyzes late nineteenth-century fiction by Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Teodor de Wyzewa, and Edouard Rod. These writers deepen the interrelation between philosophical reflection and literature in terms of engaging pessimism, not through romans à these, but rather by inciting thought through a mise-en-situation of characters, providing a testing ground for how to live well given a desirable but impossible resignation. By stripping characters and plot down to a bare minimum, these narratives draw readers into the drama of interpreting pessimist thought and action and how best to follow the consequences of resignation while still living in the world and avoiding the stasis of a mystical resolution or a stagnant, dogmatic nihilism. The tools of pessimism provide the basis for questions rather than a predetermined set of answers, a productive restlessness that drives the way in which we negotiate the boundaries between fiction and lived experience.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
For details on Maupassant’s engagement with Schopenhauer, see Maupassant 1510 and Salem.
- 2.
For an overview of such similarities and differences, see Janaway.
- 3.
See Lerner “Introduction” vii–xiii.
- 4.
“Sales of the original Charpentier edition failed to reach three thousand, and it has never been reprinted. […] The book deserves a better fate” (Sachs 76).
- 5.
For details on the rupture, see Burns 244–251.
- 6.
For an exhaustive treatment of Céard’s relationship to naturalism, see Burns, especially 43–96. He characterizes the difference between Zola and Céard’s approach this way: “Tandis que le dynamisme de Zola lui permet de forger sa propre réalité supérieure, la passivité littéraire de Céard oblige ses personnages à subir la réalité banale. Zola emporte le lecteur dans l’univers halluciné qu’il évoque par le sortilège de son style ; l’auteur d’Une belle journée accompagne doucement son lecteur dans la lente promenade qu’il lui fait faire travers le paysage parisien, en lui faisant voir, à la loupe, les impressions suscitées chez ses personnages par ce spectacle banal” [“Whereas Zola’s dynamism permits him to forge his own superior reality, Céard’s literary passivity obliges his characters to suffer banal reality. Zola carries the reader away in the hallucinated universe that he evokes by the spell of his style; the author of Une belle journée gently accompanies his reader in the slow walk that he makes him take through the Parisian landscape, making him see, with a magnifying glass, the impression evoked in his characters by this banal spectacle”] (85–86).
- 7.
Ronald Frazee claims that the direct influence of Schopenhauer on Céard has been exaggerated: “Nul doute que Céard mérite le nom de pessimiste ; mais encore ne fait-il pas entendre par là qu’il ait pu être disciple de Schopenhauer—pas plus d’ailleurs que les autres visiteurs de Médan” [“No doubt that Céard deserves the name of pessimist; but we must not understand that to mean that he could have been a disciple of Schopenhauer—not any more than the other Médan visitors”] (80), and enumerates some key points of divergence, especially on whether the source of suffering is the Will (Schopenhauer), or whether suffering is a force in its own right (Céard).
- 8.
Murray Sachs offers a useful corrective to the description of Une belle journée as plotless, claiming that it “ought to be described as a novel in which human dreams and aspirations are discovered to be forever impossible. That is not only a more intriguing account of what is in store for the prospective reader but is considerably more accurate than one which describes it as ‘a novel in which nothing happens’” (79).
- 9.
On Céard and Racinean tragedy, see Sachs 80–82, where he points out the structural similarities in terms of the minimum number of characters and action in the space of a single day as well as the division into five parts, and argues that Céard’s tale “becomes a prosaic parody of Racine, which is the only form tragedy can now take” (82). On Céard and Les liaisons dangereuses, see Baguley 484.
- 10.
See Burns: “Toute la vie littéraire de Céard sera dominée par Flaubert, par l’ombre de Frédéric Moreau et de Marie Arnoux” [“All of Céard’s literary life will be dominated by Flaubert, by the shadow of Frédéric Moreau and Marie Arnoux”] (21).
- 11.
“Céard chose for the three major events in his novel—the dance, the afternoon in the cabinet particulier, and the cab ride—three occurrences which closely resemble the situation at the climactic moment in each of the three parts of Madame Bovary: the ball at La Vaubyessard, the comices agricoles (where Emma and Rodolphe are alone in a room of the mairie), and the cab ride with Léon” (Thomas 331)
- 12.
On the influence of Flaubert’s Trois contes on Céard, see his letter to René Dumesnil of July 13, 1916 where he evokes 1878 as the “époque où, définitivement enseigné par Flaubert et les Trois Contes, je me suis détaché des procédés de Goncourt et de Zola. Une belle journée fut le symptôme de ma transformation” [“era when, definitively taught by Flaubert and the Trois contes, I separated myself from Goncourt and Zola’s procedures. Une belle journée was the symptom of my transformation”] (quoted in Burns 58).
- 13.
For a study of Schopenhauerean resignation in Une belle journée and A rebours, see Cooke.
- 14.
In an 1888 article on Schopenhauer, Céard identifies both his lucidity about suffering and his refusal of cynicism in favor of compassion: “Oui, Schopenhauer croit au mal dominateur du monde, mais […] il n’a point la joie du mal, le plaisir de la calamité … C’est un pessimiste doux, et s’il ne recule pas devant les épouvantes de l’esprit et de la chair, c’est à la façon de ce grand chirurgien contemporain qui se relevait, les yeux en larmes, de la plaie opérée où son bistouri n’avait point tremblé” [“Yes, Schopenhauer believes in evil dominating the world, but […] he never takes joy in evil or pleasure in calamity … He is a gentle pessimist, and if he does not draw back before the frights of the mind and the flesh, it is in the manner of that great contemporary surgeon who stepped back with tears in his eyes from the wound where his scalpel had not at all trembled during the operation”] (quoted in Frazee 78).
- 15.
As C.A. Burns puts it, in Céard’s novels “l’amertume est nuancée de comédie […] ce qui adoucit la leçon navrante du récit, sans en diminuer la portée philosophique” [“the bitterness is nuanced with comedy […] which softens the heartbreaking lesson of the story without diminishing its philosophical scope”] (114).
- 16.
I would claim that these characters’ use of imagination is a variant of, rather than simply being opposed to, what de Gaultier called bovarysme. For an opposing view, see Thomas, who claims that “Mme Duhamain and Trudon are not capable of true bovarysme. […] Rather, they are ordinary people, quite restricted in their outlook, who can be curious about new experience but who do not want it badly enough to create a dream world which embodies it” (335).
- 17.
See, for instance, Joseph Kestner: “Ernestine Duhamain’s plight is more dire than she recognizes […]. She is in effect condemned not to death but […] to a life of resignation, compromise, and disillusionment” (355). William Thomas concurs: “Once the climactic moment has been reached at the end of the first part, the rest of the novel is a slow descent, not toward death, but toward a sort of living death, the boring daily reality represented at the very beginning of the novel” (333).
- 18.
For a consideration of anti-intellectualism in this period as what we might also call anti-rationalism, an idealism with a tendency toward mysticism, see Citti.
- 19.
On Wyzewa’s relationship to Schopenhauer’s ideas, see Opiela-Morozik 78–83. “Wyzewa transforme le pessimisme inspiré de Schopenhauer et revendiqué par les symbolistes en une joie intérieure que peut procurer l’acte de créer. […] Wyzewa interprète les concepts de Schopenhauer de façon à détourner l’essentiel de sa pensée” [“Wyzewa transforms pessimism inspired by Schopenhauer and claimed by the symbolists into an interior joy which the act of creating can procure” […] Wyzewa interprets Schopenhauer’s concepts in a way that alters the essential aspect of his thought”] (78–79).
- 20.
For the most complete book-length study on Rod, see Michael Lerner, Edouard Rod.
- 21.
Michael Lerner claims that critics were too eager to note Schopenhauer’s influence to the detriment of other important influences on Rod: “Schopenhauer and Wagner have been considered as the main influences incorporated in La Course à la Mort. This is, however, to neglect two other artistic interest of Rod at his time, which in fact complement the German sources: these are Baudelaire and Pre-Raphaelite art. Rod read the former’s Paradis Artificiels while in England and even later in Alsace wrote to Nadar: ‘je vis en compagnie de Baudelaire, où je découvre toujours de nouvelles merveilles’ [‘I live in the company of Baudelaire, where I always discover new marvels’]. […] If Baudelaire supplemented Rod’s interest in Schopenhauer and Wagner, the Pre-Raphaelites encouraged his love of the Ideal in pure Art” (Portrait 78)
- 22.
Writing in 1890, in the preface to Les Trois coeurs, Rod indicates that he had originally envisioned La Course à la mort as a third-person narrative but decided on the first person because so many technical details were lacking in the narrative as he conceived it, including the hero’s name. “Je le regrettai plus tard, surtout après la publication du Sens de la vie, parce qu’une partie de la critique vit une confession personnelle là où, sans se priver de recourir moi-même comme « document », j’avais tenté de faire un livre d’une portée plus générale que ne le serait un journal intime” [“I regretted it later, especially after the publication of Le Sens de la vie, because some critics saw a personal confession where, without depriving myself of having recourse to myself as a “document,” I had attempted to make a book with a more general scope than a personal diary”] (15).
- 23.
Like Céard, Rod was seeking alternative paths from the roman d’observation that found its most familiar expression in the naturalism of Emile Zola. As Michael Lerner indicates: “La Course à la Mort is according to the 1889 preface to Les Trois Cœurs Rod’s first attempt at a ‘roman exclusivement intérieur’ in accordance with his confessed preference for expérience rather than the observation of the Roman Expérimental and his criticism of the moral analysis of La Joie de Vivre” (Portrait 79–80).
- 24.
Curiously, at one point the narrator claims that professors’ lifestyle is most conducive to happiness: “Les professeurs surtout me semblent heureux, leur vie étant une sorte de végétation intellectuelle, comme un arbre qui se développe sans changer et croît régulièrement, ils ajoutent chaque année quelque chose à leur acquit. Ils jouissent de ce qu’ils savent et de ce qu’ils enseignent, chacun dans son étroit domaine, trop absorbés dans leurs sciences respectives pour être secoués par d’irréalisables aspirations, ni pour sentir entrer dans leur chair l’aiguillon de l’impossible” [“The professors above all seem happy to me, their life being a sort of intellectual vegetation, like a tree that develops without changing and grows regularly, they add something every year to what they have. They enjoy what they know and what they teach, each in his own narrow domain, too absorbed in their respective disciplines to be shaken by unrealizable aspirations or to feel the sting of the impossible enter their flesh”] (237–238)
- 25.
On some distinctions between Schopenhauer and Rod, see Michael Lerner: “They differ not in spirit but in detail: for Schopenhauer, […] Life resembles the consequence of a false step, such as the Fall in is suffering and its insatiability, and this is in itself a positive impetus towards Life’s aim, which is freedom from pain. But here any comparison ends. For Schopenhauer, it is, unlike for Rod, the blind will and not le Mal, which governs Life; hence the Good is conformity to the Will and not a mere conceptual illusion […]. In sum, the main distinction to be made between Rod and Schopenhauer is that Schopenhauer sets out an all-embracing metaphysics of Life based on the Will, whereas Rod’s narrator merely attempts to explain his skepticism from a contemporary point of view” (Portrait 85).
- 26.
See Lerner on the death of Cécile at the end of the narrative: “Leur amour toujours gâté par le scepticisme iconoclaste du narrateur (et par la maladie de la jeune fille) est symbolique de l’état d’âme spirituel et moral de la France trop raffinée et décadente de la fin de siècle” [“Their love, always spoiled by the iconoclastic skepticism of the narrator (and by the sickness of the young girl) is symbolic of the spiritual and moral state of a fin-de-siècle France that was too refined and decadent”] (“Introduction” xii).
- 27.
For more on Rod and the Russian novelists, see Lerner “Introduction” xiv–xii.
- 28.
In the twentieth century, Maurice Blanchot, commenting on Georges Bataille, put it this way: “L’expérience intérieure est la réponse qui attend l’homme, lorsqu’il a décidé de n’être que question. Cette décision exprime l’impossibilité d’être satisfait. […] S’il sait quelque chose, il sait que l’apaisement n’apaise pas et qu’il y a en lui une exigence à la mesure de laquelle rien ne s’offre en cette vie. Aller au-delà, au-delà de ce qu’il désire, de ce qu’il connaît, de ce qu’il est, c’est ce qu’il trouve au fond de tout désir, de toute connaissance et de son être. S’il s’arrête, c’est dans le malaise du mensonge et pour avoir fait de sa fatigue une vérité” (Faux pas 47–48) [“Inner experience is the answer that awaits a man, when he has decided to be nothing but question. This decision expresses the impossibility of being satisfied. […] If he knows something, he knows that appeasement does not appease and that there is a demand in him that nothing in this life answers. To go beyond, beyond what he desires, what he knows, what he is—that is what he finds at the bottom of every desire, of every knowing, and of his own being. If he stops, it is in the disquiet of the lie, and because he has made his exhaustion into truth” (Faux pas tr. 37–38)].
- 29.
A critic, André Bellesort, noted in the Journal des débats of May 5, 1900 the way in which he arranges his characters in situations that force readers to evaluate what they themselves would do in a particular situation: “Il a une façon de présenter son héros qui équivaut à nous dire : « Si j’étais lui, que ferais-je? » Et nous cherchons avec lui” [“He has a way of presenting his hero that is equivalent to saying: if I were he, what would I do?”] (qtd in Roz 55)
- 30.
Firmin Roz notes the general impossibility of faith and love for Rod’s characters and situates that as a defining characteristic of his pessimism: they are “déchirés par la lutte de leur noblesse intime et de leur intime misère. L’amour les sauverait peut-être. Mais l’amour, le véritable amour, celui qui triomphe de tout, celui qui s’oublie, celui qui se donne, cet amour leur est impossible. L’impuissance d’aimer n’est qu’une forme de l’impuissance d’agir. […] M. Rod est ainsi le romancier du pessimisme, comme Léopardi en est le poète et Schopenhauer le philosophe” [“torn by the struggle of their intimate nobility and their intimate misery. Love would save them perhaps. But love, true love, the one that conquers all, that forgets itself, that gives itself, that love is impossible for them. The incapacity to love is only a form of the incapacity to act. […] M. Rod is thus the novelist of pessimism, as Leopardi is its poet and Schopenhauer its philosopher”] (23)
- 31.
Edouard Rod was a friend to, and supporter of, the young Proust, as Michael Lerner notes: “Proust greatly appreciated Rod’s work and told the author so. Rod for his part must have been one of the first admirers of Proust’s talent, for when a paragraph by Rod appeared on Les Plaisirs et les Jours in Le Gaulois—in which Rod praised the originality and maturity of this work of a new La Bruyère who ‘entre dans la carrière des lettres par un chemin fleuri de roses’ [‘is entering in the career of letters by a way paved with roses’]. The young novelist was delighted and showed it to his mother. It had in fact been Rod whom Proust had asked to revise one of the volume’s stories, “La Mort de Baldassare Silvande.” In return for Rod’s kindness, his young ‘admirateur respectueux’ had invited him to take tea with him and dine at the Ritz. (Portrait 40)
- 32.
I have explored the relationship between what Proust’s novel says and what it does in Proust, Music, and Meaning 117–166.
- 33.
Rod himself found himself tempted but not ultimately seduced by the solution of Christianity. See, for instance, his comments in a letter to friend Nancy Vuille in November 1898: “Plus j’avance plus il me semble que la sagesse est de renoncer entièrement au bonheur personnel. Vous voyez, c’est l’idée de sacrifice qui me ramène au Christianisme : après en avoir été longtemps offusqué, voici qu’elle m’apparaît de nouveau comme étant la norme la plus sûre et la meilleure” [“The more I go on, the more it seems to me that wisdom is entirely renouncing personal happiness. You see, it is the idea of sacrifice that brings me back to Christianity: after having long been obfuscated, it now appears to me anew as being the most sure and best norm”] (Qtd in Portrait 160).
Works Cited
Acquisto, Joseph. Proust, Music, and Meaning. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Baguley, David. “A Harmless Liaison: On Céard’s Une belle journée.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 18: 3–4 (Spring-Summer 1990), 482–91.
Blanchot, Maurice. Faux pas. Gallimard, 1943.
———. Faux pas. Tr. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford UP, 2001.
Burns, C.A. Henry Céard et le naturalisme. John Goodman & Sons, 1982.
Cazalis, Henri. Le Livre du néant. Alphonse Lemerre, 1872.
Céard, Henry, Une belle journée. Charpentier, 1881.
Citti, Pierre. La Mésintelligence : Essais d’histoire de l’intelligence française du symbolisme à 1914. Editions des Cahiers intempestifs, 2000.
Cooke, Roderick. “Le Schopenhauer de Huysmans et Céard : Deux avatars littéraires de la résignation.” Studi Francesi 63.1 (2019), 56–68.
Frazee, Ronald. Henry Céard: Idéaliste détrompé. U of Toronto P, 1963.
Huysmans, Joris-Karl. A rebours. Flammarion, 1978.
Jacquod, Valérie Michelet. Introduction in Teodor de Wyzewa, Valbert ou les Récits d’un jeune homme (Classiques Garnier, 2009), 7–72.
Janaway, Christopher. “Schopenhauer’s Christian Perspectives” in Sandra Shapshay, ed., The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 351–372.
Kestner, Joseph. “Hugo, Céard, and the Title of Une belle journée.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 11: 3–4 (Spring-Summer 1983), 354–356.
Kivy, Peter. “On the Banality of Literary Truths.” Philosophic Exchange 28 (1998), 17–27.
Lerner, Michael. Edouard Rod: A Portrait of the Novelist and His Times. Mouton, 1975.
———. “Introduction” in Edouard Rod, Le Sens de la vie (Slatkine Reprints, 1973), vii–xxxii.
Maupassant, Guy de. Contes et nouvelles. Gallimard, 1974.
Opiela-Mrozik, Anna. “Teodor Wyzewa face à ses maîtres.” Quêtes littéraires 9 (2019), 77–89.
Rod, Edouard. La Course à la mort. 4e édition. Perrin et Cie, 1891.
———. Le Sens de la vie. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1973. Reprint of Paris 1889 edition.
———. Les trois cœurs. Perrin et Compagnie, 1890.
Roz, Firmin. Edouard Rod. E. Sansot et Compagnie, 1906.
Sachs, Murray. “The Esthetics of Naturalism: Henry Céard’s Une Belle Journée. Esprit Créateur 4: 2 (Summer 1964), 76-83.
Salem, Jean. « Maupassant et Schopenhauer » in Christian Bonnet et Jean Salem, eds. La raison dévoilée : Etudes schopenhaueriennes (Vrin, 2005), 175–191.
Schiano-Bennis, Sandrine. La Renaissance de l’idéalisme à la fin du XIXe siècle. Honoré Champion, 1999.
Thomas, William W. “Henry Céard’s Une belle journée: Reduction and the Novel.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 5:3–4 (Spring-Summer 1977), 328–340.
Verne, Jules. L’Eternel Adam. Editions Mille et une nuits, 2001.
Wyzewa, Teodor de. “Le Pessimisme de Richard Wagner” in La Revue Wagnérienne (8 juillet 1885), 167–170.
———. Valbert ou les Récits d’un jeune homme. Ed. Valérie Michelet Jacquod. Classiques Garnier, 2009.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Acquisto, J. (2021). Pessimism and the Novel: Fiction and the “As-If”. In: Living Well with Pessimism in Nineteenth-Century France. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61014-2_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61014-2_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-61013-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-61014-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)