So for me, books have been a way of “seeing something” in painting, but they have done other things too. For instance, I was able to decode a Benetton advertising campaign for students in the Paris School of Political Science (Sciences-Po), using the analytical tools of art history, which applied very well. And it is not so difficult to understand why St Barbara is particularly honored in the Brazilian mining region of Minas Gerais—one of the biggest cities there is named Santa Barbara after her—if you know about Christian iconography: she has always been the patron saint of miners, protecting them from the dangers of their work. When Panofsky paid a visit to Henri Focillon in the 1930s—or perhaps it was to his daughter Hélène and her husband Jurgis Baltrusaitis (I can’t remember and nobody can tell me now)—they took him to Colombey-les-deux-Eglises, and he went off looking for the second church. I have just discovered from a recent book, Relire Panofsky (Re-reading Panofsky by Georges Didi-Huberman et al.) that his visit to Focillon in Maranville took place in August 1933. The story is told of Bernard Berenson, on learning that the Virgin Mary had appeared to Pope Pius XII, he immediately asked the first question that would occur to an art historian: “And in what style?”
7
REAL PEOPLE, FICTIONAL CHARACTERS
The best bacon omelettes I have eaten in my life have been with Alexandre Dumas.
JACQUES LAURENT
Hundreds of thousands of people live in my library. Some are real, others are fictional. The real ones are the so-called imaginary characters in works of literature, the fictional ones are their authors. We know everything about the former, or at least as much as we are meant to know, everything that is written about a given character in a novel, a story or a poem in which he or she figures. This character has not grown any older since the author brought him or her into existence, and will remain the same for all eternity. When we hold in our hand the text or texts in which such a person appears, it feels as if we are in possession of everything the author wanted us to know about the character’s acts, words and, sometimes, thoughts. The rest doesn’t matter. Nothing is hidden from us. For us, a novel’s characters are real. We may be free to imagine what we don’t know about them, though we know quite well that these are just guesses. And we are free to interpret their words or their silences, but again these will just be interpretations. We know quite a lot about Odysseus, Aeneas or Don Quixote, correspondingly little about Homer, Virgil or Cervantes. Sometimes characters are even deprived of an author as if their creator had discreetly slipped away. Who made up the first version of Don Juan? Who invented Faust? And while we feel sure that Harpagon, Tartuffe or Monsieur Jourdain undeniably exist, what do we know in the end about a certain Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, whose stage name was Molière? Not very much, not even whether he really wrote all the plays attributed to him. Pierre Louÿs devoted his final years to trying to establish that Molière’s plays were in fact written by Corneille—which is not as far-fetched as it might at first appear according to Goujon and Lefrère. Hamlet is a great deal more present to us than Shakespeare, about whom we have only a few scraps of information. Without even going into the question of whether he wrote the plays, no traces remain (apart from his recorded marriage to Anne Hathaway and the births of the children, Susanna and twins Judith and Hamnet) of his activity during his early manhood, 1579 to 1588, the period Shakespeare scholars call “the lost years.” So we shouldn’t assume too much.
It’s even worse, in fact, when we think we do know the author. And this despite our knowledge that we know little or nothing even about our contemporaries. Every day one learns with surprise from the newspapers that, for instance, a certain notoriously homophobic conservative member of parliament has been arrested for soliciting in the men’s lavatories of an airport, or that a prominent advertising man has been accused by his daughters of sexual abuse, that the helpful neighbor was really a dangerous psychopath, that the women’s downhill ski champion turned out to be a man, or that a respectable accountant was actually embezzling thousands to finance his addiction to the gaming tables. And yet we carry on believing what we read in biographies. (Curiosity is too strong: I have masses of biographies in my library!) They are simply im-aginary reconstructions based on the necessarily fragmentary elements left by someone now dead, whether long ago or in the recent past. And as for autobiography, it is no more than a pernicious variant of romantic fiction.
We may be lacking many elements in the life of Henri Beyle, but the features Stendhal gave his fictional alter ego, Henry Brulard, are undeniable. Whole chunks of the life of Benjamin Constant are lost to us forever, but his Adolphe is sufficiently realistic to have tempted at least four writers to set out to write the novel from Ellénore’s point of view: Gustave Planche, Essai sur Adolphe (Essay on Adolphe) of 1843; Sophie Gay, Ellénore, of 1844; Stanislas d’Otremont, La Polonaise (The Polish woman) of 1957; Eve Gonin, Le Point de vue d’Ellénore (Ellénore’s point of view) of 1981. This is because literary figures are so real that writers borrow them from each other as they navigate from one book to the next (there are countless Don Juans and Wandering Jews). They can even come unexpectedly to life. Apparently Balzac on his death-bed called for Horace Bianchon, his fictional doctor in La Comédie Humaine. (“Yes, that’s it! Bianchon’s the man I need! If only Bianchon were here, he’d save me!”) The story is probably quite untrue, but it does suggest that in the moment of dying Balzac was aware that his characters would survive his death.
We are so anxious to maintain the illusion that the author is a real person that we cannot be satisfied simply with an orphan work of literature. It took centuries to identify Gabriel-Joseph de Lavergne, vicomte de Guilleragues, the supposed author of The Portuguese Letters (1669): this book was published as “Lettres portugaises traduites en françois, A Paris Chez Claude Barbin, au Palais, sur le second perron de la Sainte Chapelle, MDCLXIX” (“Portuguese Letters, translated into French, available at Claude Barbin’s, Paris Palais de Justice, second staircase, Sainte Chapelle”). As for Madame Solario, an English novel published anonymously in 1956 (and translated into French by R. Villoteu in 1985), the theories about its authorship are legion, the most far-fetched being that it was written by no less a person than Winston Churchill.2
Authors are just fictional people, about whom we have a few biographical elements, never enough to make them truly real people. Whereas the biography of a literary character, even if it is incomplete—and explicitly so—is perfectly reliable: it is whatever its creator decided. So are his or her acts and words. All the same, we readily refer to biographies, after reading them (or even without), and quote them as if they were authentic. Anecdotes and bons mots from historical persons—including writers—often turn out, when you check them, to be apocryphal or mythical.
As for what happens to both fictional and real people, they all do the same things: both kinds fall in love, deceive each other, murder, feel guilt, steal, run away, betray, make things up, sacrifice themselves, are cowardly, go mad, take revenge and end up killing themselves; but once again, even in such specific actions, the invented characters are the most real. We are certain that Carlos and Maria Eduarda in The Maias by Eça de Queiros have been incestuous lovers—even if they do not realize it themselves. But we don’t know what happened between Byron and Augusta, George Trakl and his sister Margarethe, Egon and Gert Schiele, who as teenagers repeated their parents’ honeymoon voyage, or Erika and Klaus Mann. We know more about the motives that drove Paulina Pandolfini to murder Count Michele Cantarini on August 28, 1880, thanks to Pierre-Jean Jouve’s novel Paulina 1880, than we do about those of Louis Althusser when he killed his wife Hélène. We know that Zeno Cosini in Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno married Augusta, although he was in love with her sister Adelina, and why he did; but the real reason why Tolstoy proposed to Sofia Behrs, rather than to one of her sisters Tatiana or Liza, who both seem at different times to have attracted him, remains obscure; similarly Mozart, who was in love with Aloisa Weber, married her sister Consta
nza. What extravagant arrangement drove Pierre Louÿs to marry Louise de Heredia, the sister of his lover, Marie de Régnier, with the latter’s consent? We will never know why certain writers (Herman Melville, Robert Frost, Hugo von Hoffmansthal, Thomas Mann) had a child who committed suicide; but the suicide of Edgardo Limentani is completely understandable after the few hours that it takes to read Giorgio Bassani’s The Heron—and a great deal more so than the suicides of Count Potocki, or Ernest Hemingway, or Cesare Pavese, about whom many commonplaces have been aired to explain an act which is never commonplace. Whether Pirandello, Scott Fitzgerald or T.S. Eliot had any responsibility for the mental illness of their wives, Antonietta, Zelda and Vivien, will always be a mystery: but the madness of Catharine Holly in Suddenly Last Summer, by Tennessee Williams, is undeniably prompted by her aunt, Mrs Venable. Was Gorky poisoned by Stalin? Was Zola assassinated by the anti Dreyfusards, or was he the accidental victim of carbon monoxide poisoning from his stove? We shall never know. Will we ever find out why Pushkin imprudently challenged the Baron d’Anthès to a duel? On the other hand, we are quite certain that Thérèse Raquin and her lover Laurent drowned Thérèse’s husband, Camille; and we know that Count Serlon de Savigny, with his beautiful mistress, the fencing champion Hauteclaire Stassin, poisoned the count’s wife, Delphine de Cantor, and lived happily ever after—in Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s, “Le Bonheur dans le crime” (Happiness in crime), a story in The She-Devils. As for Sherlock Holmes, Pierre Bayard recently demonstrated convincingly, in Sherlock Holmes was Wrong: reopening the Hound of the Baskervilles Affair, that the detective was on completely the wrong track, and that Conan Doyle, in his inquiry into the mysterious deaths on Dartmoor, did not actually know what was going on. (“Literary characters are not, as is too often believed, paper creatures, but living beings who lead an autonomous existence within the texts and may even commit murders without their author realizing it!”) Finally, in the case of two historical persons, I am far more convinced of the authenticity of Alexandre Dumas’s Henri III in Chicot the Jester and The Forty-five Guardsmen than by the one described by many historians, including Michelet. And Tolstoy’s Napoleon, in War and Peace, has always seemed much more lifelike than the Napoleon of the countless so-called biographies. They both have that reality which their literary creator gave them, a much less shaky reality than an historical portrait trying to be accurate.
You can of course find some features which the two categories of person do not share. The author never tells us everything about his characters. Nowhere in Moby-Dick are we told which of Captain Ahab’s legs has been lost and replaced with a wooden one after his struggle with the white whale (an ambiguity, according to Umberto Eco, which John Huston was unable to respect when he had to take a decision about equipping Gregory Peck for the film). Since Melville didn’t tell us, we shall never know. We can ask the same question about Byron—which was his club-foot? Apparently there are no clear indications (not that I have checked this out). But in the latter case, it is always possible to hope that one day someone will find the unpublished diary of a Venetian contessa who met him in Florian’s, or crossing the Campo San Samuele, and noted this detail. And when I come to think of it, what about Talleyrand? When Sacha Guitry made his film Le Diable boiteux (The lame devil), did he know which leg to limp with when he played the famous bishop-minister? Did he take the time to check, or was it a deliberately arbitrary choice, because in fact nobody knows?3
One extravagance is allowed to authors—and it adds a further dimension to their fictional nature: they can choose a pen name. When a literary character chooses a pseudonym, the author has to tell us about it so that we can appreciate it: for instance, when Jean Valjean in Les Misérables passes himself off as the honorable Monsieur Madeleine, or when in Balzac’s Père Goriot, Jacques Collin registers at the Vauquer boarding house under the name of Vautrin. It would be pointless and completely irrelevant if Julien Sorel’s real name (in Stendhal’s Scarlet and Black) had secretly been Georges Bouton, or if Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau (in Sentimental Education) had been Auguste Lampin. The art of the novel is partly the art of omission, but some things can not be concealed from the reader.
It is hard to guess, unless you are a specialist, that Pierre Mac Orlan’s real name was Pierre Dumarchey, Jean-Louis Curtis was Louis Laffitte, and that Anatole France’s birth certificate says Anatole François Thibault. There may be good reason for publishing under a pseudonym—it may be out of discretion by people in certain senior posts (Saint-John Perse or Pierre-Jean Rémy), in order to reject their fathers (Stendhal), out of a wish to distinguish between different books (Cécil Saint-Laurent/Jacques Laurent), or to simplify a foreign name (Henri Troyat started out as Lev Tarassov, Elsa Triolet as Elsa Kagan, and Teodor Józef Konrad Korzeniowski fortunately shortened his name to Joseph Conrad); from a desire to avoid a certain connotation (Marguerite de Crayencour chose to drop her aristocratic family name and become Marguerite Yourcenar); to disguise oneself during wartime (Jean Bruller took the name Vercors); or because one’s original name had distracting connotations—so Georges Courteline dropped his name Georges Moinaux (which sounds like moineau = sparrow), and Philippe Sollers chose not to be the more precious Philippe Joyaux (which sounds like joyau = jewel); Gérard de Nerval went the other way, wanting to upgrade from his more ordinary name of Gérard Labrunie. Some cases might, however, require a more thorough psychological explanation: “Sébastien Japrisot,” as a writer of crime novels, sounds fine, but what was wrong with his original name of Jean-Baptiste Rossi? And as for William Falkner altering the spelling to Faulkner, despite various scholarly explanations, I am still no wiser.
Authors and their characters do have something in common: they almost always have love lives. It is very rare for a novel to contain no love story at all. This subject is so huge and obvious that I will not go into it. But they also have sex lives. The narrative approach of an author to this subject will vary with style and temperament but also with the period of writing or the literary effect desired. It would no doubt be interesting, but not to our purpose here, to compare the ways novelists tackle physical sex. From Madame de Lafayette’s The Princesse de Clèves to L’histoire de dom B., portier des Chartreux (The Story of Dom B., porter at the Charterhouse), ascribed to Jean-Charles Gervaise de Latouche, from complete silence to precise indeed anatomical detail, the variations are infinite. By the same token, one could look at the way people in novels eat—which might run from the briefest description (“They stopped at Mantes-la-Jolie where they consumed a light supper”) to the most detailed: “He dipped a piece of rye bread into the sauce from the veal casserole whose aroma had pervaded the whole room, then, wiping his lips, tried the white Sancerre—it was a La Croix de Roy 1998, from the vineyards of Lucien Crochet—which the sommelier had served.”
Authors do sometimes describe their own sex lives. This might be a literary exercise of complete sincerity (but is it really?); it might indicate a propensity to exhibitionism; and it might simply be a narrative procedure required by the text. I am quite certain, for example, that the famous book My Secret Life, which is supposed to be the exhaustive diary (in eleven volumes!) covering the sex life of a Victorian Englishman, is simply an erotic novel taking the form of a thoroughly explicit and total confession, in order to provoke the reader’s interest. Yet Michel Foucault, in his preface to the French translation of extracts from it (My Secret Life, Récit de la vie sexuelle d’un Anglais de l’époque victorienne) presented the text as an authentic journal. And Jean-Jacques Pauvert, in his long preface to the full translation by Mathias Pauvert (Ma vie secrète), does not seem to doubt for a moment that this really was the autobiographical account of one Henry Spencer Ashbee. Ashbee may indeed have been the author, but it is obvious to the reader that this is a novelistic narrative, a mixture of real-life experience and free-ranging fantasy.
Where sex life is concerned, the main difference between literary characters and authors is what I would call “sexual ac
counting”—not so much a matter of description but of numerical listing, usually in code, of a person’s private sexual activity. It is of course so dry as to be virtually unreadable, and offers virtually no interest to the reader, so I do not think any author has taken the risk of depicting a character with this habit. One can indeed wonder what the point is (and that is the real mystery) even for the individual concerned to note down in a kind of technical way, without any sensual detail, what happened with whom, on what day. Perhaps since writers may have a heightened sense of the passage of time, of which sexuality is a critical symptom, the (male) writer may yield to the peculiar temptation of repeating these fleeting acts by committing them to the apparent eternity of writing.
Phantoms on the Bookshelves Page 7