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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
This is Bourdieu's long-awaited study of Flaubert and the formation of the modern literary field, it is an important contribution to the study of the social and historical conditions of literary works.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Translator’s Preface
Preface
Acknowledgements
PROLOGUE Flaubert, of Flaubert Analyst:
A Reading of
Sentimental Education
Places, investments, displacements
The question of inheritance
Necessary accidents
The power of writing
Flaubert’s formula
Appendix 1:
Summary of
Sentimental Education
Appendix 2:
Four Readings of
Sentimental Education
Appendix 3:
The Paris of
Sentimental Education
PART I: Three States of the Field
1 The Conquest of Autonomy:
The Critical Phase in the Emergence of the Field
A structural subordination
Bohemia and the invention of an art of living
The rupture with the ‘bourgeois’
Baudelaire the founder
The first calls to order
A position to be made
The double rupture
An economic world turned upside down
Positions and dispositions
Flaubert’s point of view
Flaubert and ‘realism’
‘Write the mediocre well’
Return to
Sentimental Education
The imposition of form
The invention of the ‘pure’ aesthetic
The ethical conditions of the aesthetic revolution
2 The Emergence of a Dualist Structure
The particularities of genres
Differentiation of genres and unification of the field
Art and money
The dialectic of distinction
Specific revolutions and external changes
The invention of the intellectual
The exchanges between painters and writers
For form
3 The Market for Symbolic Goods
Two economic logics
Two modes of ageing
Leave a mark
The logic of change
Homologies and the effect of pre-established harmony
The production of belief
PART II: Foundations of a Science of Works of Art
1 Questions of Method
A new scientific spirit
Literary
doxa
and resistance to objectification
The ‘original project’, founding myth
Thersites’ viewpoint and the false rupture
The space of points of view
Bypassing the alternatives
To objectify the subject of objectification
Appendix
The Total Intellectual and the Illusion of the Omnipotence of Thought
2 The Author’s Point of View:
Some General Properties of Fields of Cultural Production
The literary field in the field of power
The
nomos
and the question of boundaries
The
illusio
and the work of art as fetish
Position, disposition and position-taking
The space of possibles
Structure and change: internal struggles and permanent revolution
Reflexivity and ‘naiveté’
Supply and demand
Internal struggles and external sanctions
The meeting of two histories
The constructed trajectory
The habitus and the possibles
The dialectic of positions and dispositions
Formation and dissolution of groups
A transcendence of institution
‘The impious dismantling of the fiction’
Appendix
Field Effect and Forms of Conservatism
PART III: To Understand Understanding
1 The Historical Genesis of the Pure Aesthetic
Analysis of essence and illusion of the absolute
Historical anamnesis and the return of the repressed
Historical categories of artistic perception
The conditions of pure reading
Poverty of ahistoricism
Double historicization
2 The Social Genesis of the Eye
The Quattrocento eye
The foundation of the charismatic illusion
3 A Theory of Reading in Practice
A reflecting story
Time of reading and reading of time
DA CAPO Illusion and the
Illusio
POSTSCRIPT For a Corporatism of the Universal
Notes
Index of Names
Subject Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
PROLOGUE Flaubert, of Flaubert Analyst: A Reading of Sentimental Education
Figure 1 The field of power according to Sentimental Education
2 The Emergence of a Dualist Structure
Figure 2 The literary field at the end of the nineteenth century (detail)
Figure 3 The field of cultural production in the field of power and in social space
3 The Market for Symbolic Goods
Figure 4 Comparative sales over time of three books published by Éditions de Minuit (Source: Éditions de Minuit)
Figure 5 Galleries and their painters (in 1977)
Figure 6 The temporality of the field of artistic production
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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e1
The Rules of Art
Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field
PIERRE BOURDIEU
Translated by Susan Emanuel
This translation copyright © Polity Press 1996.
First published in France as Les Règles de l’art
copyright © Éditions du Seuil 1992.
This translation first published by Polity Press in 1996 in association with Blackwell Publishers.
Published with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture.
Reprinted 2005, 2008, 2009, 2010
Polity Press
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Cambridge, CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
350 Main Street
Maldon, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN 978 0 7456 1152 5
ISBN 978 0 7456 1778 7 (pbk)
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com
C’est en lisant qu’on devient liseron.
RAYMOND QUENEAU
Translator’s Preface
Tackling a major opus by Pierre Bourdieu is particularly daunting since he has been so well served by many previous English translators. I owe a debt to my predecessors, even if I have not always followed their precedents.
The Rules of Art is a complex book which spans too many academic fields for any one translator to claim particular expertise. In the Prologue, a reading of Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, and in the first part, about the conquest of autonomy in the field of cultural production, Bourdieu invites us on a ‘walk through the woods’ of the literary and artistic fields in the second half of the nineteenth century, including byways forgotten even by those well versed in French literary history. Portions of part II, which lays the foundation of what he calls a ‘science of works of art’ and of part III, an analysis of the pure aesthetic and alternatives to it, have appeared previously in a variety of contexts, but they have since been revised in the writing of this work.
I have respected Bourdieu’s ‘hierarchy of text’, in which he complements the main argument with illustrative text in smaller type, and both are supported by a network of footnotes, many of them pithy, now moved to the end of the text. Several chapters have appendices which furnish concrete examples or push an argument in a polemical direction. His footnotes are so rich that I have hesitated to add to their number, except for occasional glosses of his key theoretical terms for those new to his thought, and of literary or artistic movements where these seemed essential. For his citations, I have endeavoured to discover English editions, and if I could not find one, I have reproduced his reference and translated the quoted passages myself. In general, his style in French has a willed ‘literariness’ about it, which I have attempted to preserve, sometimes keeping his plays on words by putting his French in italics and parentheses after English renderings which cannot do them justice. Readers will be aware – and Bourdieu’s self-reflexiveness does not allow us to forget – that this book is written within a charged intellectual field both in France, where sociology often struggles within a hierarchy that puts philosophy at the pinnacle of thought, and in Europe, where a basis for collective action by scholars and artists, such as he tries to provide in his Postscript, is rendered more difficult by competitiveness within their fields and threats to their autonomy emanating from outside.
I wish to thank Armand Mattelart for daring me when I first read the book to contact Bourdieu, who patiently answered the queries I brought to him. This project would have been impossible without the selfless patience of Shoggy Waryn of MIT, a second reader who accompanied me through every page, Ann Bone, whose contribution extended beyond simple copy-editing, and Kerry Emanuel, whose soft heart and customized software took much of the pain out of a labour of love.
Preface
Angel. Eminently suitable for love and literature.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, Dictionary of Received Ideas
Not everything appears in the collection of foolish quotations, so there’s hope.
RAYMOND QUENEAU
‘Shall we allow the social sciences to reduce literary experience – the most exalted that man may have, along with love – to surveys about our leisure activities, when it concerns the very meaning of our life?’1 Such a question, lifted from one of the innumerable timeless and nameless defences of reading and of culture, would certainly have unleashed the furious mirth that the well-meaning commonplaces of his day inspired in Flaubert. And what to say of such shopworn tropes of the scholastic cult of the Book, or of such supposedly Heideggerian-Hölderlinian revelations, each worthy of enriching the ‘Bouvardo-Pécuchetian anthology’ (the phrase is Queneau’s) as these: ‘To read is first of all to be tom out of oneself, and of one’s world’;2 ‘It is no longer possible to be in the world without the help of books’;3 ‘In literature, essence is revealed at a stroke; it is given in all its truth, with all its truth, like the very truth of the being which reveals itself’?4
If it seems to be necessary to begin by evoking some of these vapid reflections on art and life, the unique and the common, literature and science, the (social) sciences which may well elaborate laws but only by losing the ‘singularity of experience’, and literature which elaborates no laws but which ‘deals always with the individual person, in his absolute singularity’,5 it is because, indefinitely reproduced by and for scholarly liturgy, they are also inscribed in all minds fashioned by the School. Functioning as filters or screens, they continually threaten to block or confound the understanding of scientific analysis of books and of reading.
Does the claim for the autonomy of literature, which found its exemplary expression in Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve, imply that the reading of literary texts should be exclusively literary? Is it true that scientific analysis is doomed to destroy that which makes for the specificity of the literary work and of reading, beginning with aesthetic pleasure? And that the sociologist is wedded to relativism, to the levelling of values, to the lowering of greatness, to the abolition of those differences which make for the singularity of the ‘creator’, always located in the realm of the Unique? And all because the sociologist is thought to stand on the side of the greatest number, the average, the mean, and thus of the mediocre, the minor, the minores, the mass of petty, obscure actors, justly unrecognized, and to be an ally of what is repugnant to the ‘creators’ of an era, the content and the context, the ‘referent’ and the hors-texte, beyond the pale of literature?
For a good number of accredited writers and readers of literature, not to mention philosophers, of greater or lesser standing, who, from Bergson to Heidegger and beyond, intend to assign science a priori limits, the case is already made. And countless are those who forbid sociology any profaning contact with the work of art. We might cite Gadamer, who places at the outset of his ‘art of understanding’ a postulate of incomprehensibility or, at the very least, of inexplicability: ‘The fact that the work of art represents a challenge to our understanding because it indefinitely escapes all explanation, and offers an ever insurmountable resistance to whoever would translate it into the identity of a concept, has been precisely for me the point of departure for my hermeneutic theory.’6 I will not debate this postulate (but does it even bear debating?). I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why they are so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence.
Why such insistence on conferring upon the work of art – and upon the understanding it calls for – this status of exception, if not in order to stamp with prejudicial discredit the (necessarily laborious and imperfect) attempts of those who would submit these products of human action to the ordinary treatment of ordinary science, and thereby assert the (spiritual) transcendence of those who know how to recognize that transcendence? Why such implacable hostility to those who try to advance the understanding of the work of art and of aesthetic experience, if not because the very ambition to produce a scientific analysis of that individuum ineffabile and of the individuum ineffabile who produced it, constitutes a mortal threat to the pretension, so common (at least among art lovers) and yet so ‘distinguished’, of thinking of oneself as an ineffable individual, capable of ineffable experiences of that ineffable? Why, in short, such resistance to analysis, if not because it inflicts upon ‘creators’, and upon those who seek to identify with them by a ‘creative’ reading, the last and perhaps the worst of those wounds inflicted, according to Freud, upon narcissism, after those going under the names of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud himself?
Is it legitimate to invoke the experience of the lover, to make of love, as an astonished abandon to the work grasped in its inexpressible singularity, the only form of understanding which accords with the work of art? And to see in the scientific analysis of art, and of the love of art, the form par excellence of scientistic arrogance, which, under cover of explaining, does not hesitate to threaten the ‘creator’ and the reader in their liberty and their singularity? Against all those defenders of the unknowable, bent on manning the impregnable ramparts of human liberty against the encroachments of science, I would oppose this very Kantian thought of Goethe’s, which all natural scientists and social scientists could claim as their own: ‘Our opinion is that it well becomes man to assume that there is something unknowable, but that he does not have to set any limit to his inquiry.’7 I think that Kant expresses well the image that scientists have of their enterprise when he suggests that the reconciliation of knowing and being is a sort of focus imaginarius, the imaginary from which science must measure itself without ever being able to reach it (despite the illusions of absolute knowledge and the end of history, more common among philosophers than among scientists … ). As for the threat that science might pose to the liberty and singularity of the literary experience, it suffices, to do justice to the matter, to observe that the ability, procured by science, to explain and understand that experience – and thus to give oneself the possibility of a genuine freedom from one’s determinations – is offered to all those who want to and can appropriate it.
A more legitimate fear might be that science, in putting the love of art under its scalpel, might succeed in killing pleasure, and that, capable of delivering understanding, it might be unable to convey feeling. So one can only approve of an effort like that of Michel Chaillou, when – basing himself on the primacy of feeling, or emotional experience, of aisthesis – he offers a literary evocation of the literary life, strangely missing from the ‘literary’ histories of literature.8 By contriving to reintroduce into an apparently self-contained literary space what one may call, with Schopenhauer, the parerga et paralipomena, the neglected ‘margins’ of the text, all that ordinary commentators leave aside, and by evoking, by the magic virtue of nomination, that which made (and was) the life of authors – the humble domestic details, picturesque if not grotesque or ‘crotesque’ [squalid], of their existence amid its most ordinary setting – he subverts the ordinary hierarchy of literary interests. Armed with all the resources of erudition, not in order to contribute to the sacralizing celebration of the classics, to the cult of ancestors and of the ‘gift of the dead’, but to summon and prepare the reader to ‘clink glasses with the dead’, as Saint-Amant said, Chaillou thus tears fetishized texts and authors from the sanctuary of History and academicism, and sets them free.
How could the sociologist, who must also break with idealism and literary hagiography, not feel an affinity with this ‘carefree knowledge’ [gai savoir], which relies on the free associations made possible by a liberated and liberating usage of historical references in order to repudiate the prophetic pomp of the grand critiques of authors and the sacerdotal droning of scholarly tradition? However, contrary to what the common image of sociology might lead one to believe, the sociologist cannot be completely content with the literary evocation of literary life. If attention to the perceptible is perfectly suitable when applied to the text, it does lead to neglect of the essential when it bears on the social world within which the text is produced. The task of bringing authors and their environments back to life could be that of a sociologist, and there is no shortage of analyses of art and literature whose purpose is the reconstruction of a social ‘reality’ that can be understood in the visible, the tangible, and the concrete solidity of daily experience. But, as I shall try to demonstrate throughout this book, the sociologist – close in this respect to the philosopher according to Plato – stands opposed to ‘the friend of beautiful spectacles and voices’ that the writer also is: the ‘reality’ that he tracks cannot be reduced to the immediate data of the sensory experience in which it is revealed; he aims not to offer (in)sight, or feeling, but to construct systems of intelligible relations capable of making sense of sentient data.
Is this to say that one is once more returned to the old antinomy of the intelligible and the sensible? In fact, it will be up to the reader to judge if, as I believe (having experienced it myself), scientific analysis of the social conditions of the production and reception of a work of art, far from reducing it or destroying it, in fact intensifies the literary experience. As we shall see with respect to Flaubert, such analysis seems to abolish the singularity of the ‘creator’ in favour of the relations which made the work intelligible, only better to rediscover it at the end of the task of reconstructing the space in which the author finds himself encompassed and included as a point. To recognize this point in the literary space, which is also the point from which is formed a singular point of view on that space, is to be in a position to understand and to feel, by mental identification with a constructed position, the singularity of that position and of the person who occupies it, and the extraordinary effort which, at least in the particular case of Flaubert, was necessary to make it exist.
The love of art, like love itself, even and especially of the amour fou kind, feels founded in its object. It is in order to convince oneself of being right in (or having reasons for) loving that such love so often has recourse to commentary, to that sort of apologetic discourse that the believer addresses to himself or herself and which, as well as its minimal effect of redoubling his or her belief, may also awaken and summon others to that belief. This is why scientific analysis, when it is able to uncover what makes the work of art necessary, that is to say, its informing formula, its generative principle, its raison d’être, also furnishes artistic experience, and the pleasure which accompanies it, with its best justification, its richest nourishment. Through it, sensible love of the work can fulfil itself in a sort of amor intellectualis rei, the assimilation of the object to the subject and the immersion of the subject in the object, the active surrender to the singular necessity of the literary object (which, more often than not, is itself the product of a similar submission).
But is this not paying too high a price for the intensification of experience, to have to confront the reduction to historical necessity of something that wants to be lived as an absolute experience, freed from the contingencies of a genesis? In reality, to understand the social genesis of the literary field – of the belief which sustains it, of the language game played in it, of the interests and the material or symbolic stakes engendered in it – is not to surrender to the pleasure of reduction or destruction (even if, as Wittgenstein suggests in his ‘Lecture on ethics’,9 the effort to understand no doubt owes something to the ‘pleasure of destroying prejudices’ and to the ‘irresistible seduction’ exercised by ‘explanations of the type “this is only that” ’, especially by way of antidote to the pharisaical complacencies of the cult of art).
To seek in the logic of the literary field or the artistic field – paradoxical worlds capable of inspiring or of imposing the most disinterested ‘interests’ – the principle of the work of art’s existence in what makes it historic, but also transhistoric, is to treat this work as an intentional sign haunted and regulated by something else, of which it is also a symptom. It is to suppose that in it is enunciated an expressive impulse which the imposition of form required by the social necessity of the field tends to render unrecognizable. Renouncing the angelic belief in a pure interest in pure form is the price we must pay for understanding the logic of those social universes which, through the social alchemy of their historical laws of functioning, succeed in extracting from the often merciless clash of passions and selfish interests the sublimated essence of the universal. It is to offer a vision more true and, ultimately, more reassuring, because less superhuman, of the highest achievements of the human enterprise.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Marie-Christine Rivière for her help in the preparation and organization of the original manuscript of this book.
Pierre Bourdieu
The author and publishers are grateful for permission to quote from Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education, trans. Robert Baldick (Penguin Classics, 1964), copyright© the Estate of Robert Baldick, 1964.
PROLOGUEFlaubert, of Flaubert Analyst: A Reading of Sentimental Education
One does not write what one wants.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Sentimental Education, that book on which a thousand commentaries have been written, but which has undoubtedly never been truly read, supplies all the tools necessary for its own sociological analysis:1 the structure of the book, which a strictly internal reading brings to light, that is, the structure of the social space in which the adventures of Frédéric unfold, proves to be at the same time the structure of the social space in which its author himself was situated.
One might think perhaps that it is the sociologist, in projecting questions of a particular sort, who turns Flaubert into a sociologist, and one capable, moreover, of offering a sociology of Flaubert. And there is a risk that the method of proof itself, which is to be based on constructing a model of the immanent structure of the book – in order to re-engender and so to understand the principle at work behind the whole story of Frédéric and his friends – may appear as the height of scientistic excess. Yet the strangest thing is that this structure – which strikes one as self-evident the moment it is spelled out – has eluded the most attentive interpreters.2 This obliges us to raise more particularly than usual the problem of ‘realism’ and of the ‘referent’ of literary discourse. What indeed is this discourse which speaks of the social or psychological world as if it did not speak of it; which cannot speak of this world except on condition that it only speak of it as if it did not speak of it, that is, in a form which performs, for the author and the reader, a denegation (in the Freudian sense of Verneinung) of what it expresses? And should we not ask ourselves if work on form is not what makes possible the partial anamnesis of deep and repressed structures, if, in a word, the writer most preoccupied with formal research – such as Flaubert and so many others after him – is not actually driven to act as a medium of those structures (social or psychological), which then achieve objectification, passing through him and his work on inductive words, ‘conductive bodies’ but also more or less opaque screens?
Above and beyond the fact that it compels us to pose these questions and examine them, in situ, as it were, the analysis of the book ought to allow us to take advantage of the properties of literary discourse, such as its capacity to reveal while veiling, or to produce a de-realizing ‘reality effect’, in order to introduce us gently, with Flaubert the socioanalyst of Flaubert, to a socioanalysis of Flaubert, and of literature.
Places, investments, displacements
This ‘long-haired youth of eighteen’, ‘who had recently matriculated’, whom his mother, ‘having provided him with just sufficient to cover his expenses, had packed … off to Le Havre to visit an uncle who, she hoped, would be putting her son in his will’, this bourgeois adolescent who thinks ‘of an idea for a play, of subjects for a painting, of future passionate affairs of the heart’,3 has come to the point in a career from which he can encompass with one gaze that totality of powers and possibilities open to him and the avenues to take him there. Frédéric Moreau is, in a double sense, an indeterminate being, or better yet, determined to indetermination, both objective and subjective. Set up in the freedom which his situation as heir to property [rentier] assures him, he is governed, right down to the feelings of which he is apparently the subject, by the fluctuations of his financial investments [placements], which define the successive orientations of his choices.4
The indifference which he sometimes betrays for the common objects of bourgeois ambition5 is a secondary effect of his dreamed love for Madame Arnoux, a kind of imaginary support for his indetermination. ‘What is there for me to do in the world? Others strain after wealth, fame, power. I have no profession; you are my exclusive occupation, my entire fortune, the aim and centre of my life and thoughts.’6 As for the artistic interests which he expresses from time to time, they do not have enough constancy and consistency to offer a base of support for a higher ambition capable of positively thwarting vulgar ambition: he who, from his first appearance, ‘thought of the plot of a play and of subjects for paintings’, and at other times ‘dreamt of symphonies’, ‘wanted to paint’ and composed verses, begins one day ‘to write a novel called Sylvia, a Fisherman’s Son’, in which he depicts himself, with Madame Arnoux; then he ‘rents a piano and composes German waltzes’; then converts to painting, which brings him closer to Madame Arnoux, only to return to the writing ambition, this time with a History of the Renaissance.7
Frédéric’s entire existence, like the whole universe of the novel, is organized around two poles, represented by the Arnoux and the Dambreuses: on the one side, ‘art and politics’, and on the other ‘politics and business’. At the intersection of the two universes, at least in the beginning, that is, before the revolution of 1848, there stands, besides Frédéric himself, only father Oudry, a guest at the Arnoux’, but as a neighbour. The key characters, notably Arnoux and Dambreuse, function as symbols charged with marking and representing the pertinent positions in the social space. They are not ‘caractères’ in the manner of La Bruyère, as Thibaudet believes, but rather symbols of a social position (the work of writing thus creates a universe saturated with significant details, and therefore more signifying than true to life, as testified by the abundance of pertinent indices it offers to analysis).8 Thus, for example, the different receptions and gatherings are entirely signified, and differentiated, by the drinks served there, from Deslauriers’s beer to Dambreuse’s ‘grand vins de Bordeaux’, passing through Arnoux’s ‘vins extraordinaires’, lipfraoli and tokay, to Rosanette’s champagne.
One may thus construct the social space of Sentimental Education by relying for landmarks on the clues that Flaubert supplies in abundance and on the various ‘networks’ that social practices of co-optation such as receptions, soirées and friendly gatherings reveal (see the diagram).
At the three dinners hosted by the Arnoux,9 we meet, besides the stalwarts of L’Art Industriel – Hussonnet, Pellerin, Regimbart and, at the first, Mile Vatnaz – regulars such as Dittmer and Burrieu, both painters; Rosenwald, a composer; Sombaz, a caricaturist; Lovarias, a ‘mystic’ (present twice); and, finally, occasional guests like Anténor Braive, a portrait painter; Théophile Lorris, a poet; Vourdat, a sculptor; Pierre-Paul Meinsius, a painter; to whom should be added, at such dinners, a lawyer, Maître Lefaucheux, and two art critic friends of Hussonnet’s, a paper maker and father Oudry.
At the opposite extreme, the receptions at the Dambreuses,10 the first two separated from the others by the revolution of 1848, gather together, besides generically defined characters, such as a former cabinet member, the curé of a large parish, two civil servants, ‘proprietors’ and famous personalities of the worlds of art, science and politics (‘the great Mr A., the famous B., the intelligent C., the eloquent Z., the wonderful Y., the old stagers of the centre left, the paladins of the right, the veterans of the middle way’), Paul de Grémonville, a diplomat; Fumichon, an industrialist; Mme de Larsillois, the wife of the prefect; the Duchesse de Montreuil; M. de Nonencourt; and finally (besides Frédéric) Martinon, Cisy, M. Roque and his daughter. After 1848, we shall also see at the Dambreuses’ M. and Mme Arnoux, Hussonnet and Pellerin, converted, and lastly Deslauriers, introduced by Frédéric into the service of M. Dambreuse.
Figure 1 The field of power according to Sentimental Education
At the two receptions given by Rosanette, one at the time of her liaison with Arnoux,11 the other at the end of the novel, when she plans to marry Frédéric,12 one encounters actresses, the actor Delmar, Mile Vatnaz, Frédéric and certain of his friends, Pellerin, Hussonnet, Arnoux, Cisy and, lastly, the Comte de Palazot and characters also encountered at the Dambreuses’, Paul de Grémonville, Fumichon, M. de Nonencourt, and M. de Larsillois, whose wife frequents the salon of Mme Dambreuse.
The guests of Cisy all belong to the nobility (M. de Comaing, present also at Rosanette’s, etc.) with the exception of his tutor and of Frédéric.13
At the soirées of Frédéric, one finds once more Deslauriers, accompanied by Sénécal, Dussardier, Pellerin, Hussonnet, Cisy, Regimbart and Martinon (these last two being absent from the last soirée).14
Finally, Dussardier assembles Frédéric and the petit-bourgeois fraction of his friends, Deslauriers, Sénécal, as well as an architect, a pharmacist, a wine merchant and an insurance employee.15
The pole of political and economic power is marked by the Dambreuses, who are from the start constituted as the supreme goals, of political and amorous ambition (‘A millionaire – just think of it. Make sure you can get into his good books! And his wife’s too! Become her lover!’16). Their salon receives ‘men and women knowledgeable about life’, that is, about business, totally excluding, before 1848, artists and journalists. Conversation there is serious, boring, conservative: the Republic is declared impossible in France; journalists ought to be gagged; decentralization is urged, with the redistribution of the surplus urban population to the countryside; the ‘lower classes’ are castigated for their vices and needs; people chat about politics, elections, amendments and further amendments; prejudices against artists are voiced. The rooms are overflowing with art objects. The rarest delicacies are served there: bream, venison, crayfish, accompanied by the best wines, in the most beautiful silver dishes. After dinner, the men talk among themselves, standing up; the women are seated in the background.
The opposite pole is marked, not by a great revolutionary or established artist, but by Arnoux, an art dealer, who, in this function, is the representative of money and business dealings at the heart of the universe of art. Flaubert is perfectly clear on this in his notebooks; M. Moreau (the original name of Arnoux) is an ‘industrialist of art’, then a ‘pure industrialist’.17 The oxymoron of words is there to emphasize, as much in the designation of his profession as in the title of his journal L’Art Industriel, the double negation inscribed in the formula of this double being, indeterminate, like Frédéric, and therefore fated to ruin. As ‘neutral territory where rival factions could rub shoulders’,18 the ‘hybrid establishment’ which is L’Art Industriel offers a meeting place for artists occupying opposite positions, advocates of ‘social art’, exponents of art for art’s sake, or writers consecrated by the bourgeois public. Talk there is ‘free’, which means wilfully obscene (‘Frédéric was astonished by the cynicism of these men’), always paradoxical; manners there are ‘simple’ but one does not detest affecting a ‘pose’. There one eats exotic dishes and one drinks ‘extraordinary wines’. There one becomes impassioned about aesthetic or political theories. There one is on the left, or rather for the Republic, like Arnoux himself, or even socialist. But L’Art Industriel is also an artistic industry capable of economically exploiting the work of artists because it is an authority for the consecration which governs the production of writers and artists.19
Arnoux was in a certain manner predisposed to fulfil the function of art dealer, only able to ensure the success of his enterprise by dissimulating to himself its truth, that is, its exploitation, by a permanent double game between art and money.20 This dual being, ‘with his innate combination of sincerity and commercial guile’,21 of calculated avarice and ‘madness’ (as Mme Arnoux would define it22 but also Rosanette23), that is, of extravagance and generosity as much as of impudence and impropriety, accumulates for his own sake, at least for a while, the advantages of two antithetical logics. There is the logic of disinterested art, which knows only symbolic profits, and there is the logic of commerce: his duality, more profound than all manner of duplicity, allows him to catch artists at their own game, that of disinterestedness, confidence, generosity, friendship (‘Arnoux loved him – Pellerin – even while exploiting him’24) and thereby to leave them the best part, the wholly symbolic profits of what they themselves call ‘glory’,25 reserving for himself the material profits made on their work. Businessman and merchant among people who owe to themselves the refusal to acknowledge [reconnaître], or to be aware of [connaître] their material interest, he is destined to appear to artists as a bourgeois and to the bourgeois as an artist.26
Situated between bohemia and ‘society’, the ‘demi-monde’ – represented by Rosanette’s salon – recruits simultaneously from the two opposed universes: ‘The courtesans’ drawing rooms – their importance dates from this period – served as neutral territory on which reactionaries of different parties could meet.’27 This intermediate and slightly shady world is dominated by ‘free women’, thus capable of carrying out the function of go-betweens between the ‘bourgeois’, simply dominant, and the artists, dominant–dominated (the wife of the ‘bourgeois’, dominated – as a woman – among the dominants, also fulfils this function, on another level, with her salon). Often of lower–class extraction, these ‘girls’ of luxury, and even of art, such as the dancers and actresses, or La Vatnaz, half kept woman, half woman of letters, who are paid to be ‘free’, engender freedom by their fantasies and their extravagance (the homology with bohemia is striking, or even with the more established writers, who, such as Baudelaire or Flaubert, are questioning at the same time the relation between their function and that of the ‘prostitute’). Everything there is permitted which would be unthinkable elsewhere, even at the Arnoux’,28 not to mention the salon of the Dambreuses: incongruities of language, puns, boasts, ‘lies taken for truth, improbable assertions’, misdemeanours (‘people threw oranges or corks; people left their seats to chat with someone else’). This ‘milieu made for pleasure’29 holds concurrently the advantages of the two opposed worlds, conserving the freedom of one and the luxury of the other, without the concomitant privations, since some abandon there their forced asceticism and others their mask of virtue. And it is to ‘this little family party’, as Hussonnet says ironically,30 that the ‘girls’ invite the artists among whom they sometimes recruit their paramours (here, Delmar) and the bourgeois who support them (here, Oudry); but this inverted family reunion, where the liaison of money and reason serves to maintain the heart’s relations, remains once more dominated, like a black mass, by what it denies: all the bourgeois rules and virtues are banished, except respect for money, which may, as virtue does in other cases, prevent love.31
The question of inheritance
In thus laying out the two poles of the field of power, a true milieu in the Newtonian sense,32 where social forces, attractions or repulsions, are exercised, and find their phenomenal manifestation in the form of psychological motivations such as love or ambition, Flaubert institutes the conditions of a kind of sociological experimentation: five adolescents – including the hero, Frédéric – provisionally assembled by their situation as students, will be launched into this space, like particles into a force-field, and their trajectories will be determined by the relation between the forces of the field and their own inertia. This inertia is inscribed on the one hand in the dispositions they owe to their origins and to their trajectories, and which imply a tendency to persevere in a manner of being, and thus a probable trajectory, and on the other in the capital33 they have inherited, and which contributes to defining the possibilities and the impossibilities which the field assigns them.34
A field of possible forces exercised on all bodies entering it, the field of power is also a field of struggle, and may thus be compared to a game: the dispositions, that is to say the ensemble of incorporated properties, including elegance, facility of expression or even beauty, and capital in its diverse forms – economic, cultural, social – constitute the trumps which will dictate both the manner of playing and success in the game – in short, the whole process of social ageing which Flaubert calls ‘sentimental education’.
As if he had wanted to expose to the forces of the field a collection of individuals possessing, in different combinations, the aptitudes representing in his eyes the conditions for social success, Flaubert thus ‘constructs’ a group of adolescents such that each of its members is united with each of the others and separated from all the others by an ensemble of similarities and differences distributed in a fairly systematic manner: Cisy is very rich, noble, endowed with relations and distinguished (handsome?), but not very intelligent or ambitious; Deslauriers is intelligent and animated by a fierce will to succeed, but he is poor, lacking in relations and without looks; Martinon is rich enough, handsome enough (at least he brags about it), intelligent enough, and bent on success; Frédéric has, as the saying goes, everything going for him – relative wealth, charm, and intelligence – except the will to succeed.
In this game which is the field of power, the stakes are evidently power which must be conquered or maintained, and those who enter it can differ in two relations: firstly, from the standpoint of inheritance, which means advantages; secondly, from the viewpoint of the disposition of the heir in relation to it, which means the ‘will to succeed’.
What makes an heir disposed to inherit or not? What drives him to simply maintain the inheritance or to augment it? Flaubert gives some elements of an answer to these questions, notably in the case of Frédéric. The relation to inheritance is always rooted in the relation to the father and the mother, overdetermined figures in whom the psychic components (of the sort psychoanalysis describes) are intertwined with the social components (of the sort sociology analyses). The ambivalence of Frédéric with respect to his inheritance, source of his tergiversations, may find its principle in his ambivalence towards his mother, a double personage, obviously feminine, but also masculine in that she substitutes for the disappeared father, bearer of the customary social ambition. Widow of a ‘plebeian’ husband who ‘was killed by a sword blow during her pregnancy, leaving her a compromised fortune’, this female head of the household, born to a family of the minor provincial nobility, had transferred to her son all her ambitions of social re-establishment and never ceased reminding him of the imperatives of the worlds of business affairs and money, which apply also to affairs of the heart. Even so, Flaubert suggests (notably in the evocation of the final meeting: he felt ‘an indefinable feeling, a repugnance akin to a dread of committing incest’) that Frédéric had transferred his love for his mother to Mme Arnoux, responsible for the victory of reasons of love over those of business.
Thus a first division is effected between the ‘petits-bourgeois’ who have no other resources than their (good) will, Deslauriers and Hussonnet,35 and the heirs. Among the latter, there are heirs who come to terms with it, either by contenting themselves with maintaining their position, like Cisy, the aristocrat, or by trying to augment it, like Martinon, the conquering bourgeois. Cisy has no other raison d’être, in the economy of the novel, than to represent one of the possible dispositions with respect to inheritance and, more generally, with respect to the system of inheritable positions: he is the unproblematic heir, who contents himself with inheriting because, given the nature of his inheritance, his wealth, his titles, but also his intelligence, there is nothing else for him to do than that, nothing else for him to do either for that. But there are also heirs with stories, those who, like Frédéric, refuse, if not to inherit, at least to be inherited by their inheritance.
The transmission of power between generations always represents a critical moment in the history of domestic units, among other reasons because the relation of reciprocal appropriation between the material, cultural, social and symbolic patrimony and the biological individuals fashioned by and for the appropriation finds itself provisionally in peril. The tendency of patrimony (and thus of the whole social structure) to continue in its state cannot be realized unless the inheritance inherits the heir, unless, by the mediation notably of those who are provisionally responsible for it and who must assure their succession, ‘the dead (that is, property) seizes the quick (that is, a proprietor disposed and able to inherit).’
Frédéric does not fulfil those conditions: a possessor who does not intend to let himself be possessed by his possessions, without however renouncing them, he refuses to get in line, to provide himself with the two properties which alone can confer on him, in these times and in this milieu, the instruments and insignia of social existence, to wit an ‘estate’ and a wife endowed with income.36 Frédéric wants to inherit without being inherited. He lacks what the bourgeois call a serious side, that aptitude to be what one is: the social form of the principle of identity which alone may establish an unequivocal social identity. In proving himself incapable of taking himself seriously, of identifying himself by anticipation with the social existence which is destined for him (for example, that of the ‘intended’ of Mile Louise37 ) and thereby giving guarantees of future seriousness, he de-realizes the ‘serious’ and all the ‘domestic and democratic virtues’38 – virtues of those who, identified with what they are, do what should be done and are devoted to what they do, whether ‘bourgeois’ or ‘socialists’.
So while everything else makes him similar, Martinon is, in this respect, the perfect antithesis of Frédéric. If, in the final analysis, he is the one who ends up by winning, it is because he takes the roles seriously whereas Frédéric merely plays at them: Flaubert, who, from his first appearance, notes that he wanted ‘already to appear serious’,39 indicates for example that, during the first reception of the Dambreuses, amid the laughter and ‘daring pleasantries’, ‘Martinon alone remained serious’,40 whereas Frédéric chatted with Mme Dambreuse. In a general way, in similar circumstances, Martinon always tries to convince ‘serious people’ of his ‘seriousness’; as opposed to Frédéric, who flees to women from the boredom of masculine conversation (‘As all this bored Frédéric, he went over to the women’41).
Frédéric’s disdain for serious people, who, like Martinon, are always disposed to adopt enthusiastically the states of being to which they are promised and the women who are promised to them, is compensated by the irresolution and insecurity that he feels in the face of a universe without marked goals or reliable landmarks. He incarnates one of the manners, and not the least common, of experiencing bourgeois adolescence, which may be lived and expressed, according to the moment or to the epoch, in the rhetoric of aristocratism or in the phraseology of populism, strongly tinged, in both cases, with aestheticism.
A potential bourgeois and a provisional intellectual, obliged to adopt or to mime for a while the poses of an intellectual, he is predisposed to indeterminacy by this double contradictory determination: placed at the centre of a field of forces owing its structure to the opposition between the pole of economic or political power and the pole of intellectual or artistic prestige (in which the force of attraction receives a reinforcement from the very logic of the student milieu), he is situated in a zone of social weightlessness in which the forces which will carry him in one direction or another are provisionally balanced and cancelled.
In addition, through Frédéric, Flaubert carries on the interrogation into what makes adolescence a critical moment, in a dual sense. ‘Entering into life’, as one says, means to accept entering into one or another of the social games which are socially recognized, and engaging in the inaugural investment, both economic and psychological, which is implied in the participation in the serious games of which the social world is composed. This belief in the game, in the value of a game, and of its stakes, is manifested above all, as with Martinon, in seriousness, indeed in the very spirit of seriousness, this propensity to take seriously all things and people – especially oneself – socially designated as serious, and them alone.
Frédéric does not manage to invest himself in one or another of the games of art or money that the social world proposes. Rejecting the illusio as an illusion unanimously approved and shared, hence as an illusion of reality, he takes refuge in true illusion, declared as such, whose form par excellence is the novelistic illusion in its most extreme forms (with Don Quixote or Emma Bovary, for example). The entry into life as entry into the illusion of the real guaranteed by the whole group is not self-evident. And novelistic adolescences, such as those of Frédéric or Emma, who, like Flaubert himself, take fiction seriously because they do not manage to take the real seriously, remind us that the ‘reality’ against which we measure all fictions is only the universally guaranteed referent of a collective illusion.42
Thus, with the polarized space of the field of power, the game and the stakes are set in place: between the two extremes there is total incompatibility, and one cannot gamble at both tables except by risking losing everything by wanting to win everything. With the description of the properties of the adolescents, the cards are dealt. The game can commence. Each of the protagonists is defined by a sort of generative formula, which does not need to be made completely explicit, and even less so formalized, in order to orient the choices of the novelist (the formula functions rather like the practical intuition of the habitus43 which, in daily experience, permits us to sense or to comprehend the conduct of people familiar to us). Actions, interactions, relations of rivalry or conflict, or even the happy or unhappy happenstances which make up the course of different life histories, are just so many occasions to manifest the essence of characters by deploying the formula across time in the form of a story [histoire].
Thus, each of the behaviours of every single character will come to refine the system of differences which oppose each to all the other members of the experimental group, without ever really adding to the initial formula. In fact, each of them is whole in each of his manifestations, a pars totalis predisposed to function as a sign immediately intelligible by all the others, past or future. Thus, Martinon’s neat ‘beard along the line of the jaw’ announces all his subsequent behaviour, from the pallor, sighs and lamentation by which he betrays, on the occasion of the riot, his fear of being compromised, or the prudent contradiction which he offers to his comrades when they attack Louis-Philippe – an attitude that Flaubert himself relates to the docility whi.ch served him in escaping detentions during his college years and in pleasing his law professors now - right down to the serious face he puts on, both in his behaviour and in his ostentatiously conservative speeches, at the Dambreuse soirées.
If Sentimental Education – necessarily a story of a group whose elements, united by an almost systematic set of combinations, are subjected to an ensemble of forces of attraction or repulsion exercised over them by the field of power – may be read as a history, it is because the structure which organizes the fiction, and which grounds the illusion of reality it produces, is hidden, as in reality, beneath the interactions of people, which are structured by it. And since the most intense of these interactions are sentimental relations, foregrounded in advance for attention by the author himself, one understands how they have completely obscured the basis of their own intelligibility from the eyes of commentators whose ‘literary sense’ hardly inclines them to look for the key to sentiments in social structures.
What precludes the characters from having the abstract appearance of combinations of parameters is also, paradoxically, the narrowness of the social space in which they are placed: in this finite and closed universe, very similar, despite appearances, to that of crime novels where all the characters are enclosed on an island or in an isolated manor, the twenty protagonists have strong chances of meeting each other, for better or worse, and hence of developing in a necessary adventure all the implications of their respective ‘formulas’, which enclose in advance the episodes of their interactions, for example the rivalry for a woman (between Frédéric and Cisy for Rosanette, or between Martinon and Cisy for Cécile) or for a position (between Frédéric and Martinon with respect to the protection of M. Dambreuse).
From a preliminary comparative overview of trajectories, one learns that ‘Cisy will not finish his law studies’. And why should he? Having fooled around over the time of a Parisian adolescence, as the tradition of the time expected, with people, customs and heretical ideas, he will not waste time finding the direct path which takes him to the future implicated in his past, that is, to the ‘château of his ancestors’ where he will end up, as he should, ‘sunk into religion and father of eight children’. A pure example of simple reproduction, he is equally well opposed to Frédéric, the heir who refuses the inheritance, as to Martinon who, wanting to do everything possible to augment it, puts a will to succeed into the service of his inherited capital (of wealth and relations, beauty and intelligence), a will whose equivalent is only found among the petits-bourgeois and which will assure him the highest of the objectively offered trajectories. The determination of Martinon, strict inverse of the indetermination of Frédéric, doubtless owes an important part of its efficacy to the symbolic effects accompanying any action marked by this sign: the particular modality of practices which make manifest the disposition with respect to the stakes, ‘seriousness’, ‘conviction’, ‘enthusiasm’ (or inversely ‘frivolity’, ‘insolence’, ‘casualness’), constitutes the surest testimony of the recognition of coveted positions, hence the submission to the order into which one wants to integrate, the very thing each socially constituted body requires above all from those who will have to reproduce it.
The relation between Frédéric and Deslauriers sketches the opposition between those who inherit and those who inherit only the aspiration to possess, that is, between the bourgeois and the petit-bourgeois. Hence the adventure at the house of the Turkish woman: Frédéric has the money, but lacks the audacity; Deslauriers, who does dare, doesn’t have the money, and can only follow him in his flight.
The social distance which separates them is recalled many times, in particular by means of the opposition between their tastes: Deslauriers has aesthetic aspirations of the first degree and ignores the refinements of snobbery (‘A poor man, he hankered after luxury in its most obvious form’44): ‘“If I were you,” said Deslauriers, “I’d prefer to buy myself some silver plate,” revealing, by this taste for sumptuous display, the man of humble origin.’45 In fact, he ‘longed for wealth, as a means of gaining power over men’, whereas Frédéric imagines the future as an aesthete.46 Moreover, Frédéric demonstrates several times that he is ashamed of his relation with Deslauriers47 and even gives him evidence openly of his disdain.48 And Flaubert, as if to recall the principle of Deslauriers’s whole conduct (and its difference from that of Frédéric), makes the question of inheritance the cause of the failure which puts an end to his university ambitions: presenting himself at the competitive examinations for teaching posts ‘with a thesis on the right of making a will, in which he maintained that this right should be restricted as far as possible’, ‘as luck would have it, he had drawn by lot, as the subject for this lecture, the Statute of Limitations,’ which gave him the opportunity to prolong his diatribe against inheritance and heirs; confirmed by this failure in the same ‘unfortunate theories’ which merited the setback, he advocates the abolition of collateral succession, making an exception only for Frédéric …49
