Politics and Narratives of Birth: Gynocolonization from Rousseau to Zola (Cambridge Studies in French)

This book is a feminist analysis which combines a psychoanalytic perspective on catastrophic birth with the politics of ...

Author: Carol A. Mossman

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This book is a feminist analysis which combines a psychoanalytic perspective on catastrophic birth with the politics of reproduction in the emergent democracy of nineteenth-century France. It focuses on three major thinkers whose personal relation to origins is problematic Rousseau, Constant, and Stendhal - and also includes a broad reading of the nineteenth-century novel within the frame of pathological generation, giving special attention to works by Michelet and Zola. Professor Mossman identifies important areas of interaction between production and reproduction at the level of aesthetic form, and between private, birth-related discourse and the ideology of the birth of democracy. Within the context of the collapse oiancien regime France, the nascent ideology of motherhood collides with modes of discourse that invade and colonize the maternal body, generating a considerable burden of anxiety expressed in the nineteenth-century French novel.

Cambridge Studies in French 38

POLITICS AND NARRATIVES OF BIRTH

CAMBRIDGE

S T U D I E S IN F R E N C H

General editor: Malcolm Bowie (All Souls College, Oxford) Editorial board: R. Howard Bloch (University of California, Berkeley), Ross Chambers (University of Michigan), Antoine Compagnon (Columbia University), Peter France (University of Edinburgh), Toril Moi (Duke University), Naomi Schor (Duke University)

Recent titles in this series include 28.

DAVID BAGULEY

Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision 29.

LESLIE HILL

Beckett's Fiction: In Different Words 30.

F. W. LEAKEY

Baudelaire: Collected Essays, 1953-1988 31. SARAH KAY

Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry 32.

GILLIAN JONDORF

33.

LAWRENCE D. KRITZMAN

French Renaissance Tragedy: The Dramatic Word The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance 34. JERRY G. NASH

The Love Aesthetics of Maurice Sceve: Poetry and Struggle 35.

PETER FRANCE

Politeness and its Discontents: Problems in French Classical Culture 36.

MITCHELL GREENBERG

Subjectivity and Subjugation in Seventeenth-Century Drama and Prose: The Family Romance of French Classicism 37.

TOM CONLEY

The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing 38.

MARGERY EVANS

Baudelaire and Intertextuality: Poetry at the Crossroads 39. JUDITH STILL

Justice and Difference in the Works of Rousseau: bienfaisance and pudeur

A complete list of books in the series is given at the end of the volume.

POLITICS AND NARRATIVES OF BIRTH Gynocolonization from Rousseau to

CAROL A. MOSSMAN Associate Professor of French, University of Maryland at College Park

1 1 CAMBRIDGE •W UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521415866 © Cambridge University Press 1993 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1993 This digitally printed first paperback version 2006 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Mossman, Carol A. Politics and narratives of birth: gynocolonization from Rousseau to Zola / Carol A. Mossman. p. cm - (Cambridge studies in French: 41) Includes index. ISBN 0 521 41586 1 1. French fiction — 19th century — History and criticism. 2. Childbirth in literature. 3. Feminism and literature - France History - 19th century. 4. Politics and literature - France History- 19th century. 5. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778 Political and social views. 6. Zola, Emile, 1840-1904 - Political and social views. 7. Stendhal, 1783—1842 — Political and social views. 8. Constant, Benjamin, 1787-1842. Adolphe. 9. Motherhood in literature. 10. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Title. II. Series. PQ653.M67 1993 843'.709352042 - dc20 92-22019 CIP ISBN-13 978-0-521-41586-6 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-41586-1 hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-03098-4 paperback ISBN-10 0-521-03098-6 paperback

To Jan, to Jack, to Dorothy, and to Karen for their love and support

Contents

Acknowledgements A note on translations

page xi xii

Introduction: conception of this book Cycle i Stendhal: delivering a plot Death and transfiguration in the Vie de Henry Brulard Palimpsest and pregnancy: reading across Stendhalian autobiography Stendhalian fictions: plotting the unspeakable

i 19 19 40 54

Cycle 2 Production, reproductions, and narrative form: Adolphe

72

Introduction The economy of production: the paternal and narrative form Reproduction: (de)composing mother Rebirth and the performance of matricide

72 82 96 120

Cycle 3 Gynocolonization: Rousseau, Michelet, Zola and the nineteenth-century French novel

139

Section I Introduction: toward a bodied politics For unto us a son is born: Emile Birthing the body politic: Du Contrat social The politic in the body Rousseau: Emile revisited and "La Reine Fantasque" Section II Introduction: birth, motherhood, and the dis-ease of democracy The flesh made word: Enfants du siecle and pathologies of reproduction in the nineteenth-century French novel Liberty, equality, maternity: Michelet as body snatcher Into Africa: Zola and gynocolonization

139 153 161 176 181 191 205 216

x

Contents

Conclusion

225

Notes Bibliography Index

228 241 249

Acknowledgements

The first section of cycle i appeared in Studies in Romanticism 26 (1987). I thank the Trustees of Boston University for granting me permission to reprint it here. The second section of cycle 1 was published in Nineteenth-Century French Studies 16 (1988), and

the first part of cycle 2 appeared, in slightly different form, in Annales Benjamin Constant 12 (1991). I am grateful to both these journals for permission to use this material here. I further wish to thank the General Research Board of the University of Maryland for a summer grant which enabled me to complete the middle section of cycle 1 and a Semester Research Award which afforded me the time to write much of cycle 2. I also gratefully acknowledge Beatrice Fink and Lynn Hunt for reading cycle 2, and, to Doris Kadish, I extend particular thanks for her time and valuable commentary on cycle 3.

A note on translations

The translations from the French in this book are of my own rendering, except for a few cases. The latter are clearly indicated in the Bibliography. Generally speaking, quotes in the original French have been omitted. However, for certain parts of the study, the French has been retained in order to explore the full resonance of the original.

Introduction: conception of this book

How to begin a study of birth? Merely to mention birth summons up branches of knowledge as diverse as medical science and bio-ethics, psychology, theology, anthropology, political science, and aesthetics, to name only a few. For birth cannot be contemplated in isolation: to speak of birth is to open up to the problematics of origins. And culture has a stake in addressing origins. This much is evident from the universal existence of myths and cosmogonies which recount genesis. To the extent that such accounts also seek to situate human existence within the larger scheme of things, narratives of collective origins must intertwine with what it means for the individual body to emerge into the world. If giving birth is never an isolated act, to be born is to emerge into a social environment. We are all born into culture. We are all born ... and yet only half of us are actually capable of giving birth. That one fundamental biological fact carries with it an ideological burden almost beyond conception. We are all born into discourses bearing on reproduction, kinship and family, species propagation for or against the State, creation and procreation. There is thus no neutral passageway leading to birth. In attempting once again, then, to begin, I cannot help but invoke Sterne's Tristram Shandy, which stages all the ironies of beginning with birth as the postpartum narrator gazes backward through time's speculum on his own mise-au-monde. And a heavily labored beginning it is, in which the arduous emergence of the hero coalesces with the act of literary creation, both subject to the vicissitudes of nativity: miscarriage, stillbirth,

2

Politics and narratives of birth

postnatal infant mortality. Tristram Shandy's is one of the most ingenious instances of male headbirth. In fact, to talk about the literal birth act is not simply to account for the emergence of one being, but rather to consider how one human entity becomes two. This means that the issue of parturition cannot be addressed independently from the Maternal. The mother, states Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born, ''is the birth trauma" (p. 187). Such language would seem to situate us firmly within the pale of psychoanalysis, pointing - as it does - directly to Otto Rank's work, The Trauma of Birth, written in 1923. Herein Rank advances the significance of that primordial severance which is birth in a model which in fact competes (however cautiously) with his mentor's castration construct, thereby out-Freuding Freud. 1 That the experience of parturition as it relates to the constitution of the self is an issue to be addressed by psychoanalysis is undeniable. Freud's reluctance to acknowledge its importance, particularly in elaborating his theory of the origins of civilization in Totem and Taboo, suggests that certain narratives of beginnings remain silent on the power to give life for reasons which may best be considered political. Because, needless to say, birth is also a political affair. In Two Treatises of Government, John Locke raises the question in all its gynecological starkness, taking the argument of who shall inherit the throne ab ovo... or very nearly. When a caesarian section must be performed on an expired queen, "which," wonders Locke, "shall be Heir of two Male-Twins, who by the dissection of the Mother, were laid open to the World?" (p. 249). Exposed alongside a queen's dead body is the arbitrary character of primogeniture in which legitimacy depends on which male happens to slide down the birth canal first. In his short story, "La Reine Fantasque," Jean-Jacques Rousseau envisions a different sibling dilemma. To a capricious queen, twins are born, a son and a daughter. But their gender traits have been " misdistributed": the female appears to be endowed with rational, decisive, and firm characteristics, whereas her brother seems flighty, vacillating, and of unpenetrating mind. Sorting out the consequences of nature's

Introduction

3

"error" on the exercise of power becomes the preoccupation of this narrative. These twin examples serve as reminders that reproduction is related to the question of political legitimacy and is as such always the business of the State. Furthermore, a politics of gender is indissociably bound to birth, both on the giving and on the receiving ends. And finally, also at issue here is how the political stands in relation to the maternal body. Judeo-Christian religious thought is no stranger to the subject of birth either. Indeed, any system of thought which is eschatologically oriented tends to privilege the moment of origin inasmuch as this is hermeneutically bound to ending, often figured as a rebirth. So religion has had much to say on the matter. Everyone knows that if Eve was painlessly extruded from Adam's rib, her destiny as a result of the fall into civilization is to give birth in suffering. Indeed, the mater dolorosa is one of patriarchal culture's most cherished icons. Much is also made in Christian lore of the events surrounding Christ's birth. The Annunciation is a topos heavily favored by the pictorial arts wherein the Virgin is often depicted hearkening to the Word of God as transmitted by the angel Gabriel, who offers her a white lily, that strangely vagiform symbol of purity which at the same time resembles the ear. Conception is thus a triply mediated and disembodied act: vagina is transfigured into ear, God operates through angelic intermediary as the maternal body readies itself to distill mind into matter. Christ's gestation also has its remarkable moments such as the Visitation, an intra- and interuterine recognition scene during which the future John the Baptist stirs in his mother's womb in acknowledgement of his in utero cousin. Of course, marvelous gestations and births function mainly to portend extraordinary men and, to that extent, they merely form the hermeneutic props of hagiography. This is no doubt the tradition which Sterne pastiches in Tristram Shandy, although it is far from being a culture-specific convention: the Buddha's gestation was a lengthy one during which his mother experienced all manner of premonitory dreams. Neither should one neglect Gargantua's prolonged sojourn in utero and his

4


joyous explosion into the world announced by a splatter of fecal realism. The conditions of this mise-au-monde bespeak the Renaissance's celebration of life in all its functions compared to, say, Freud's somber and despondent refrain - a lamentation echoing the Ancients - that man is born "inter faeces et urinas." And, entering now this book's field of focus, two of nineteenthcentury France's greatest mythologizers of the self, Chateaubriand and Michelet, recount their own tales of singular birth. The Chateaubrianesque event was nothing short of cosmic, for it was at the autumnal equinox with seas tempest-toss't that the nascent body of Francois-Rene was coaxed out of its maternal abode (Memoires doutre-tomb>e, p. 29). At least as self-conscious in his birthscript, the historian Jules Michelet tells the reader of Le Peuple how he came into the world in 1798 in a convent church which was "occupied" — but "not profaned" — by the family printing press (pp. 21-22). The birth of this Romantic self is an emergence into an arena of writing which is itself branded onto a holy uterine space associated with the feminine. In other words, Michelet's nativity scene - his ontogenography - actually recapitulates Western culture's own phylogenetic account of reproduction as male imprint on female matter. What is odd is that subsequently, in LAmour, Michelet will take it upon himself to popularize reproductive science's recent advances suggestive of a preponderant feminine role in procreation. Thus, when it is depicted, the act of birth serves the narratological function of aggrandizing an extraordinary individual, casting a mystique about his very origins. The origins of the female self, however, can hardly be said to belong to any such convention. This is so for two interdependent reasons. First, the female subject of narrative, if not precisely a rare bird, can at least be classified as something of an endangered species in premodern literature: aggrandizing her origins goes directly against the grain of a socio-literary culture engaged in the praise of great - and later, common - men. Then there is, for the daughter/subject, the booby trap of becoming the maternal which most disciplines - from psychoanalysis to anthropology have defined either as an absence, or an as unbudgeable object.

Introduction

5

In her book on nineteenth-century British women writers, Bearing the Word, Margaret Homans undertakes to explore the ambivalent and highly difficult position in which the woman writer is placed as she confronts the maternal. Her analysis of writers Austen, the Brontes, and Mary Shelley (the latter's mother Mary Wollenstonecraft died in the aftermath of childbirth) demonstrates a real anxiety over the issue of birth on the part of these women writers. In her article "The Birth of the Artist as Heroine," Susan Gubar suggests that safer conditions governing childbirth which evolved during the second half of the nineteenth century led women writers to assume birth as figure for their own (self) writing with far less ambivalence and fear.2 Certainly women's writing of recent years bears this out: in the French forum, Julia Kristeva and Chantal Chawaf are two writers who come to mind. Also noteworthy is Mexican artist Frida Kahlo's work, in particular her 1937 painting entitled "My Birth." 3 Under the portrait of a woman, another woman lies in childbed, face covered, laboring to give birth. The crowning has just occurred and the viewer is graphically presented with an infant's head emerging between two legs. One reading of this might suggest that under the sign of matriliny (the portrait), woman can birth herself. As the Annunciation example shows, the prevalent topos of male birthing requires mediation and a lot of structural fiddling, whereas woman as sole procreatrix demands less of an imaginative leap. Indeed, the 1915 gynotopian novel Herland, by Charlotte Gilman, conceives an entire feminine culture born without male intervention. Still, the above are all recent depictions which stand, small if growing, against an imposing wall of patriarchal tradition which, aside from extolling the hero as of his birth, has labored hard to suppress birth in its literality. For, in beginning an account of beginnings, one immediately encounters, in both art and literature, the silence which historically has enveloped this most universal of human experiences. And yet it cannot be denied that, whether the event of parturition is viewed in its profane ordinariness, whether it is theologically enshrined in a sacred majesty reflective of some higher order, or whether it is

6


considered politically as an affair of the State, birth shares with death alone a most considerable burden of universality. Never through the ages have art and literature shrunk from the depiction of death, often revelling, or so it seems, in the full palette of its violence. Of the violence required for one human being to emerge on the outside from within the body of another, aesthetics has had very little to say. And what it has said has been from the perspective of the emergent body, almost always male. Only in the last twenty years has the paucity of representations of birth begun to be acknowledged. Perhaps it was Rich who first pointed out this surprising stillness in literature {Of Woman Born, p. 166). In the discipline of political science, two theorists have considered, from different perspectives, the ideological stakes involved in the suppression of birth. In The Politics of Reproduction, Mary O'Brien affirms that the birth function has been appropriated by patriarchy as a result of the historical discovery of male participation in procreation, and further that patriarchal institutions have arisen as a proprietary response to the uncertainty of paternity. Revising the Marxist theory of labor to include reproduction, O'Brien maintains that men and women bear an essentially different relation to birth. Whereas the physical process of gestation and labor experienced by women in the procreation of a new being serves to mediate her alienation-in-birth with the product of her labors, what sets "male reproductive consciousness" apart is a degree of alienation from the product of generation which can never be mediated. This sense of alienation results, in her account, both pan-culturally and transhistorically, in masculine control of the means of reproduction and the consequent elaboration of a metaphysics which denigrates the body, elevates the mind, and champions notions of male spiritual rebirth. It also explains the silence which reigns over the literal act of parturition. Any discussion of birth must inevitably address one of feminism's central challenges: namely, whether and in what way to acknowledge the feminine body when patriarchal culture's dominance is based precisely on a gendered hierarchy which heavily promotes woman as corporeal (defining her in

Introduction

7

her capacity to give birth) opposite a disembodied male. If the valorization of woman's body in an effort to destigmatize it is one approach to the problem, it is nonetheless a response which remains stranded within Western culture's binary elaboration of female-matter/male-mind identity and is thus inaccessible to any shift of a dialectical nature. In her deft review of the implications of French feminism's strong positive investment of the maternal metaphor, writing, and childbirth, Domna Stanton examines precisely the risk of capture-within-language that a maternalizing discourse runs (see "Difference on Trial"). Recognizing the feminine in the body clearly is a risk and yet, as another prominent political theorist, Carole Pateman, argues, not to do so is to subscribe to one of the central tenets of modern democratic theory, namely that the democratic process is constituted by the collective participation of gender-neutral individuals freely and equally consenting to enter into a political contract. "Liberal feminism," she points out in The Disorder of Women, "assumes that the relevant political problem is to show that women possess the capacities men possess and can do what men can do. However, this also assumes that there is no significance to the fact that women have one natural ability which men lack: women, but not men, are able to give birth" (p. 44). Pateman's argument, made at greater length in The Sexual Contract, rests on the concept that modern democratic political theory is well served by maintaining the invisibility of the body and consequently of literal birth. Invisible it has also been in art, as Judy Chicago discovered to her amazement when she began work on The Birth Project in 1980. If, to an important degree, art constitutes itself as an allusive and self-referential system, if, in other words, the "Annunciation" has an archaeology all its own, the "Parturition" has a history of representation scant indeed. In fact, Chicago had to look to the art of preindustrial peoples in order to find models, models similar to the Aztec figurations Kahlo's painting is sometimes said to draw upon. Thus, bringing literal birth out of repression should be one of feminism's projects, even as we bear in mind Stanton's exhortation that it be viewed as a metonym of the feminine rather than as a metaphor: in short,

8


that woman must be represented in the full spectrum of her human capacities. On all fronts, therefore, it is necessary to push harder, and this includes patriarchy's construction of the feminine and birth which forms the subject of this book. In a sense, one might say that the conspiracy of silence enshrouding parturition is doubly-motivated. That Western political culture balks at speaking the bodily reality of birth, persisting even today in mythologizing reproduction, is beyond doubt, and surely relates also to taboos governing sexuality. However, it is equally true that the subjective experience of being born is traumatic, more so for some than for others, and that, like all violence - incest, war trauma, rape - it is eminently susceptible to repression. As regards reproduction, therefore, repression is a concept which operates both at the psychoanalytical and ideological levels (if it is possible to distinguish between these two). Moreover, it is not impossible that cultural accounts of collective origins, especially where these be bloody, engage in a kind of political forge tfulness. This is certainly true of the Terror and the French Revolution.4 I have just raised the thorny issues of reproduction, the social body, and the nature of collective representation of political origins and legitimacy. To this day, in fact, the forging of national identity is configured according to the reproductive grid of birth and development within a nuclear family. Le Monde of May 30, 1991, for instance, reports Washington as '' acting as 'accoucheur'" for an emergent Ethiopian regime (no. 14,413). What the reportage fails to fill in is the submerged portion of the metaphor, namely Africa configured as occupiable matrix. More than an innocent figural outcropping, the imagery of the Afro-uterus is firmly grounded in a colonial discourse wherein it entertains a specific relation to reproduction, a relation which I have termed "gynocolonization." Meanwhile, Nobel laureate Lech Walesa recently made the following observation after meeting Queen Elizabeth: "Nations need a mother. From what I've been able to tell, Queen Elizabeth is a good mother for the English. We Poles are lacking a mother, for better or for worse" {Le Nouvel Observateur, M a y 2-8, 1991).

Introduction

9

Whether at the level of collective political ideology or private discourse, nothing better sums up patriarchy's ambivalent stance with respect to the maternal than Walesa's "for better or for worse." Herein also is the uneasy confluence of psychoanalysis and political science. To what extent, it must be asked, does the universal but subjective relation to birth determine an individual's response - be s/he female or male - to the maternal? Then, in what manner does a private and bodied response to an Other become reencoded by a culture whose power hierarchy may demand a particular structural positioning of the maternal, a culture, furthermore, which holds the corporeal in disrepute? Once again to cite Rich, "Motherhood ... has a history, it has an ideology" {Of Woman Born, p. 34): in other words, it is necessary to historicize and denaturalize an institution so often presented as a phenomenon of Nature opposite to Culture. In The Reproduction of Mothering, Nancy Chodorow attempts just such a denaturalization through the elaboration of a concept of the unconscious as culturally-constituted construct. This implies that, from a very early age, human experience incorporates external relations of power of which the family provides the first and most accessible paradigm. Chodorow notes: Psychoanalysis shows how the unconscious inner world, or worlds, developed during childhood affect the external experience of adulthood. . . To the extent that females and males experience different interpersonal environments as they grow up, feminine and masculine personality will develop differently and be preoccupied with different issues. The structure of the family and family practices create certain differential relational needs and capacities in men and women that contribute to the reproduction of women as mothers. (The Reproduction of Mothering, p. 51)

While this formulation is useful in describing the internalization of power relations, it does stop short of origins and the caesura of being. And it may well be impossible to take the exact measure of this gap, although some — Stendhal, Constant, Rousseau - were destined to measure it all their lives. Recently, in The Spectral Mother, Madelon Sprengnether,

io


following in the footsteps of Irigaray and Homans, has examined how psychoanalysis (both Freudian and its Lacanian revision) and post-structuralist theory have all tended to elaborate models of signification in which the production of meaning depends on renunciation of the maternal. For better or for worse, but mainly for ulterior motives of symbolization, the maternal must be configured as absent. Lech Walesa is reading from an old script. Sprengnether argues in favor of a semiotics of parturition wherein the maternal body could be revalorized as present and absent: "Even if the child does not have the developmental capacity to experience birth as separation, subsequent losses will glance back at this first great dislocation and derive meaning therefrom" (The Spectral Mother, p. 229). She then proposes a model of the ego as "elegiac formulation": "If the mother's body in its otherness represents estrangement as well as origins, it also provides a paradigm for the construction of the ego, itself a form of memorial, or presence that enfolds absence" (pp. 233-34). Absence, presence; contraction, dilation; for better or for worse; 'til birth do us part. Because birth does us part. But who is "us"? Is there a uter-us and a uter-them? Is the universal experience of being born a gendered one and, if not, at what point do questions of gender come into play in reproductive consciousness? This is merely a more specific formulation of the Nature/Culture problem. I would submit that the subjective experience of being born truly constitutes a tabula rasa as far as gender is concerned: it may, in fact, be the only such experience in human existence. If the gendering hand of Culture can intervene immediately postpartum, as evidenced by the practice of female infanticide, it takes time to "reproduce mothering." In this book I shall be investigating what might best be termed a psychopolitics of birth. The question will be approached via logical extremes, the ultimate aim being to map out the junctural zone wherein subjective experience interlocks with a public discourse on origins. First, I focus on three individuals who stand in catastrophic relation to a birth event, by which I mean a birth where maternal loss is involved. A

Introduction

11

pattern of mastery emerges at the individual level which is then perfectly reproduced by a cultural stance with respect to reproduction. Hence, to the extent that a private discourse of birth/maternal loss is framed by an overarching patriarchal politics of reproduction, male authors whose relation to origins is traumatic bring unique focus to the problem of the mastery of reproduction. These individual thinkers - Stendhal, Constant and Rousseau — in turn contribute in different ways to one of history's unique enterprises: the collapse ofancien regime France, the French Revolution, and the emergence of a more or less representative form of political organization negotiated through fits and starts during the course of the nineteenth century. Now, the new political forms being explored through theory by Rousseau, and in practice as of 1789, do not exist in a social vacuum but depend rather on a reconfiguration of social space which historians have recently begun to chart. If power reposes on the creation and enforcing of difference, then the radical collapse of difference at the level of class made the erection of distinctions elsewhere an affair of urgency and moment. It is becoming increasingly apparent that that elsewhere was the arena of gender. The legal exclusion of women from the electoral arena in 1793 marks the moment of crystallization in the resituation of difference. Admittedly this is a highly schematic account of a complex and multifarious process, but the conclusion for my purposes here is that this reinvestment of difference leads to a polarization of gender roles which tends to spotlight the maternal. In order to " metonymize" motherhood, to re-cite Stanton's appeal, it will be useful to revisit the scenes of the metaphor. For historical, legal and political reasons, therefore, nineteenthcentury France offers ideal ground for the exploration of a new relation to the maternal. Even through the various nondemocratic political phases following the Revolution, a sociopolitical topography emerged which mapped out a new space of difference: namely, a public versus a private sphere. Women's scope of activity narrowed considerably. Eliminated as significant contributor in the marketplace, legally subjugated

12


through the Code Napoleon, her "natural" habitat became the domestic realm. As Claire Moses has stated in her study of French feminism, by the nineteenth century, "the very concept of womanhood had changed. Women were now idealized and, at the same time, sharply differentiated from men. This had not been so in earlier centuries" [French Feminism, p. 17). Moreover, this demarcation was not class-specific: it extended to the aristocracy, formerly that class wherein women had enjoyed social and political power. Margaret Darrow notes that in early nineteenth-century France, "the foyer... had become the noblewoman's proper sphere" ("French Noblewomen," 41). Challenging a widely received view that the ideology of domesticity was a slowly assimilated process whose motivation was economic rather than political, she argues as follows: In thefirstplace, the changes were abrupt. Although Rousseau's ideas about motherhood and breastfeeding achieved a certain vogue among noblewomen at the end of the ancien regime, in practice their experiments rarely went deeper than playacting... The adoption of domesticity by noblewomen was not the result of gradual drift throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but was accomplished during the French Revolution. ("French Noblewomen," 42)

If it is possible to single out an individual who contributed most to the historical investment of motherhood, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is surely that person. For the moment, suffice it to say that while class-based motivation for the promotion of motherhood differed and varied over time, it is nonetheless on the maternal that construction of the feminine converges.5 Thus it is that both history and the structural demands of a new political form converge to put the maternal on dazzling display. Yet to bedazzle is to render all too visible. In the final part of this book, I shall be examining an ideological double bind arising as the demands of a political organization which requires maternal visibility clash with coeval cultural signifying practice which depends on maternal absence to initiate a dynamic of replacement and symbolization. Indeed, we can look to the Romantic venture of Saint-Simonism under the

Introduction

13

charismatic leadership of Prosper Enfantin for a performance of this very contradiction. Woman, often configured by the movement as the Mother, is elevated to cooccupy the position of Godhead, and yet no woman in France could be found to represent this position. Inaugurated thereby was a quest for the missing mother and it was, inevitably, to the East - that is, to the matrix of civilization — that Enfantin set sail. This strange crusade (which actually retraces the well-trod cultural pilgrimage to the maternal relic) is not, however, without its personal baggage. As Moses notes, Prosper Enfantin had written to his mother that " I am in a state of giving birth ... Now it is I who give birth to woman" [French Feminism, pp. 58—59). This intrusion of private anxiety with its clear will to mastery of birth suggests a significant zone of overlap between a subjective male relation to the power to give life and a cultural anxiety over the issue of reproduction. Although this anxiety is always latent in patriarchy as O'Brien has shown, for specific historico-political reasons, I shall be arguing, it erupts with explosive force in nineteenth-century France. It would be difficult to overstate the extent to which postRevolutionary France was preoccupied with issues of reproduction. Although my study will limit itself to birth, let me here briefly give play to the breadth of its field of implication. To start with, in 1827, Karl Ernst von Baer demonstrated the existence of the mammalian egg. This in turn led to important revisions of prevailing theories of ovulation and conception, and a reassessment of female and male roles in procreation. Thomas Laqueur has elegantly made the case that the advances made in reproductive biology tended to further the socially implemented trend toward gender differentiation.6 But what does an egg contain if not the future? And to what extent is the future determined from within its origins? The business of scrutinizing the egg - that is, reinventing beginnings - forms part of a vision of history as hermeneutic of generation, and the theories of race which evolve in the course of the nineteenth century are indissociably tied to the problematics of reproduction. Zola's literary application in Les Rougon-Mac quart of reproductive

14


determinism perfectly captures a society locked in by its own historical consciousness, by its own self-conception as product of pathological generation: in short, a culture destined to play out its own organic metaphors of socio-political regeneration, making decadence into an inexorability. It is as if, by virtue of his own model, Zola were structurally compelled, in his post-Rougon novel-treatise Fecondite\ to look abroad - to Africa, in fact - for a dialectical escape from the dilemma of degeneration. But in order to make that colonial reach, as will be seen, he must first plant himself on the womb. Nor in this gesture is he alone, for medical science had also been bending over the uterus, prodding it to reveal its enigmas, manipulating it, along with the ovaries (as did Charcot in "controlling" phases of the hysterical attack), or very simply removing it altogether. With birthing already subsumed within the male medical establishment, the practice of hysterectomy represents one further step in the process of gynocolonization. At the same time, and paradoxically perhaps, it also opens up the possibility of woman's choice to mother, and, although contraception had been practiced in France since the mideighteenth century, population control became an urgent political concern late in the following century.7 The neoMalthusian class-oriented campaign to reduce poverty by limiting population collided with a pronatalist political agenda aimed at reversing the downward trend of the demographic revolution for reasons of national prestige. If reproduction is a political issue because, quite simply, that is how live bodies are furnished to the State, it also entertains a symbolic relation to politics as well. As nineteenth-century France lurched from authoritarianism to various degrees of representative government with intermittent backsliding, the problem became one of how political form could reproduce itself predictably in the wake of the 1790 legal collapse of primogeniture. The Civil Code's egalitarian revision of inheritance rights (which in fact extended to daughters) meant that a whole new system of transmission of property - and power - would have to be elaborated. How the family reproduced itself had everything

Introduction

15

to do with the distribution of wealth, and it is small wonder that science, literature, and social theory were so preoccupied with the implications and permutations of reproduction. The massive literary anthropologies of Balzac and Zola, medicine's interest in the womb and in theories of atavism, biological legacy, and inherited disease bespeak the anxiety of a culture as yet unable to regenerate a stable hierarchy. From one end of the century to the other, the French novel articulates this anxiety, delivering one example after another of "pathological" generation. Stillbirths, dead or languishing male infants, robust female babes, sterility, impotence, androgyny, homosexuality, incest: a long list which speaks - and more than metaphorically - of a dysfunctional political machine. Having begun by evoking the subject of birth in its timelessness, I have gradually contextualized the issue within a specific historical and cultural field. It now remains for me to situate my own discussion within this frame and, in order to do so, a few words on the structure of this book are in order. I have adopted an approach which is nonlinear in two distinct ways. First, each of the three essays which comprise this book takes, at least initially, a writer as departure point for a meditation. Moving against the grain of chronology from Stendhal slightly backward to Benjamin Constant, I arrive ultimately at the far more significant figure ofjean-jacques Rousseau who stands, in my reading, at the base of a reproductive ideology grounding much of nineteenth-century French discourse on origins, a discussion which forms the conclusion of this book. There is thus a sense in which I begin in medias res, perhaps an odd opening for a book on origins, but, as it should by now be evident, the question of origins is ripe for mythologizing. To stake a claim to origins itself constitutes a gesture of mastery, and it is precisely these forms of appropriation which I have set about to explore and expose in the pages that follow. More important, however, this study is nonlinear in the way it conceives the presentation and organization of knowledge. In other words, rather than a demonstration which emerges, like Athena, already integral from the head of some Cartesian deity of deduction, the epistemological mode which I here favor is

16


inductive, cumulative, and process-oriented. Each of the three divisions is a cycle. Cycle i begins as a close reading of Stendhal's autobiographical works, extending conclusions reached therein to his works of fiction. In its scope the most restricted of the three, this cycle nonetheless spans the entire oeuvre of Henri Beyle. Loosely informed by psychoanalysis, although generally detached from a theoretical base, this essay seeks to give full play and force to the idiosyncracies of an author and his text as they engage with the problematics of birth and perinatal grief. Although it is easy to intellectualize about " birth traumas," it is not so easy, I think, to form an idea of the impact that such events can exercise on an individual, even when that individual — as is the case for Stendhal — is only indirectly implicated in the event. This analysis is the only one I know of to sift through the debris of a failed birth act, take the measure of its legacy, and adumbrate the strategies of reparation and mastery which make up what I consider to be Stendhal's masterplot. The credibility of my more historically oriented conclusions on Rousseau's birthing of the body politic reposes directly on establishing the birth-related burden of anguish in all its subjectivity. Still, subjective experience never exists in a vacuum, and it is when French national history intersects with Henri Beyle's familial reign of terror that the sense of his truth-in-birth is generated. For Stendhal, the French Revolution, with its fraternalizing slogans, sparks a semantic collision: in fact, his private and specific relation to origins only becomes clear as it passes through the rhetorical grid of national regeneration and political rebirth. This section concludes by pointing to the existence of a zone of confluence of private and public discourse as these relate to birth. Cycle 2 develops the implications of mastery of origins by applying these to narrative form itself, using Constant's 1816 novel, Adolphe, as a paradigm. Moving beyond models of civilization like that of Freud's Totem and Taboo which define culture as the affair of fathers and sons (models wherein the birth function is conspicuously absent), I appeal to objectrelations psychoanalysis in order to bring the maternal out of

Introduction

17

invisibility. Making visible is the first step toward exposing a narratological mastery of reproduction based precisely on the absent maternal function. The dominant narrative movement will itself be viewed as functioning according to the lines of a credit-motivated, interest-generating economy, or, in other words, an economy of production associated with the paternal. There is, however, a coexisting — if subordinate — narrative economy of the maternal which occasionally emerges from repression and is more closely allied to the body. I stress here and now that a dual "parental" narrative apparatus is necessarily configured through the grid of patriarchy, and therefore that the construction of the maternal is just that: a construction. What I am interested in demonstrating is that mastery of reproduction, thematic and personal for Stendhal (and for Constant as well, for that matter), can operate at the abstract level of narrative form. The maternal vacancy with which Adolphe begins and toward which it tends is in fact linked to a politics of birth which requires maternal invisibility. Sprengnether is no doubt correct in asserting that the structural imperatives of patriarchal theory doom the maternal to make appearances which are marginal, subversive, and " spectral": I advance further that the power of reproduction subtends the whole issue of invisibility. As noted earlier, to the extent that this book deals with mastery of reproduction, I have by and large confined myself to the discussion of male authors. It would be well worth exploring how, within this framework, women writers engage the problematics of birth, power, and the objectification of the maternal. I have briefly touched upon some of these issues with respect to Germaine de Stael, Claire de Duras, George Sand, and Rachilde. Perhaps those observations can serve as points of departure for a systematic examination devoted exclusively to the feminine. What begins to emerge from the essay on Constant is the presence of the body in the text. How does a literary work figure the body? More to my point, how does the body configure and disfigure a text, are there degrees of figurality and literality, and finally, does a Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who notoriously lost his

18


mother in childbirth, birth a nation differently from other political thinkers? Cycle 3 thus contemplates the shared topography of private bodied experience and a particular political discourse relating to national origins. Rousseau's Contrat social, his Emile, and other works will be read as articulations of subjective pain, embedded within a preexistent politics of reproduction, recycling and reconfiguring this discourse, endowing it with a force and torque all its own. Rousseau's legacy is enormous, diffuse, and for that reason difficult to pin down, but the proposition that his body with its truth-in-birth might become embalmed - as of Chateaubriand's Rene in fact - and constellated throughout nineteenth-century socio-literary discursive structures, if impossible to maintain with quantifiable precision, is stupefying to consider. More concretely, however, I shall be examining the implications of Pateman's theory of democracy as gendered institution with reference to selected works of Michelet and Zola. It is my thesis that while the nineteenth century's tendency to spotlight the maternal serves certain ideological purposes, it simultaneously exposes contradictions latent in the democratic model, contradictions stemming from the problem of reproduction. If Michelet's pseudo-medical attempts to dissolve these antinomies verge on science fiction, Zola, for his part, is the advocate of a foreign policy of gynocolonization founded on a conception of woman's body as annexable territory. It is within the aegis of gynocolonization, and through the grid of dysfunctional reproduction, that I undertake a reading of a series of nineteenth-century French novels, ranging from works by Chateaubriand to Rachilde's Monsieur Venus. But Cycle 3 is also a recycling. Fleshing out and folding around Stendhal's matrix of personal pain, it incorporates Constant's narrative politics, reclaiming both within a broader ideological contextual frame. Thus it is over the will to mastery of birth that the private and the public converge, coalesce, ultimately to collude. Let me now open in the middle of things and dispense with any further annunciations.

CYCLE I

Stendhal: delivering a plot

DEATH AND TRANSFIGURATION IN THE VIE DE HENRY BRULARD

That Henri Beyle, alias Stendhal, was born in Grenoble on January 23, 1783, we know from his autobiography, the Vie de Henry Brulard. Pseudonymous title notwithstanding, this is a narrative which falls into the autobiographical tradition of Rousseau, as Beatrice Didier has demonstrated ("Roman," 220-23). Indeed, the chameleonesque Stendhal himself declared when writing to Levavasseur, the publisher of Le Rouge et le noir: " I am now writing a book which may be a great folly; it is My Confessions, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau's except for the style, with greater frankness" (Correspondance, III, p. 140). Despite this literary lineage, however, there are several aspects of Beyle's "Confessions" which make them rather singular. For example, contrary, again, to what its title suggests, the book closes on an adolescent Henry Brulard. Thus the entire emphasis is shifted onto childhood, giving the work a distinctly modern cast. And a woeful tale it is: Henry recounts in detail a sort of reign of terror administered by his father and his Aunt Seraphie which he was forced to endure following his mother's death when he was seven. More than a document of interest to those devotees known as Stendhalians, the Vie de Henry Brulard presents a precious record of France's greatest social upheaval as seen through the eyes of a mutinous child. It is a well-known fact that for Henri Beyle, personal history was inextricably tied to national history. Raging in the background of his account, the French Rev19

20


olution and the Terror serve to anchor and legitimize a youth's revolt against authority. From the very beginning, the political and the psychological are consciously posed as analogues, and the man who professed unceasing hatred for his father, Cherubin Beyle, will likewise possess a loathing of monarchy unmitigated by time. In this first section of cycle i, I shall examine a chapter from the Vie which brings the psycho-political juncture into peculiar prominence. Therein Henry Brulard recounts how he indulged in a certain proroyalist activity, one which he is hard put to interpret given his republican sympathies, and which he is eventually forced to dismiss as absurd. Taking the alleged absurdity to be instead a form of denial, my reading will follow psychoanalytical lines as it endeavors to extract the sense from what Beyle touts as nonsense. It will become apparent that the episode in question, a troubled one to say the least, was composed during a time of considerable anguish. Moreover, this anguish is actually inscribed on the manuscript page, where it takes the form of a hiatus - a passing-over of a date. The first section of this first cycle will conclude by passing through the excised date to an entry in Beyle's Journal where what was inadmissible in autobiography finds a most interesting articulation. Stendhal's autobiography is unusual for several reasons, as has been mentioned. A further element distinguishing this narrative from others of the genre is to be found in the 177 crudely-drawn sketches which interrupt the prose passages at frequent intervals. Straining perhaps toward a geometric "objectivity" - toward a topography of Truth - these sketches all pinpoint " H " (Henry) in given situations and generally in framed places. It is thus entirely consistent with these "snapshots" that the narrative itself should proceed by scenes, which in fact it does. If this mode of telling (which corresponds to a system of rememoration) tends to spotlight certain scenes, others automatically fall into the penumbra. The end result is often a lack of transition. For instance, when at last the youth's persecutrix, Seraphie, passes away, Henry can recall none of the cir-


21

cumstances surrounding the crucial event. Instead what his mind retains is his exact location on hearing the news of her death, a static scene which he then repeats in the form of a sketch. On the matter of such missing betwixts, the Brulardian memory is categoric: "But the reader... will see with no trouble that all my wherefores, all my explanations may be very faulty. All I have are very clear images" (Oeuvres intimes, II, p. 575). Yet, it must be asked, when all is said and done, what is this "pourquoi," this elusive interval, if not meaning itself? And how, one might be tempted to wonder, can a sequence of images come to signify in spite of a narrator's radical denial of syntax? This is an issue raised by the discontinuities characterizing the Vie, and the gaps are nowhere more flagrant than in chapter 32 which I propose to discuss here. If there is any consensus about this autobiography, it must concern its fragmentary nature. Reading Dennis Porter, one learns that "To read Henry Brulard is... to experience the discontinuity, ellipsis and fragmentariness that one associates with a rough draft" ("Stendhal," 165). But a rough draft this work is not, however much it bears the traces of its hasty creation - typically Stendhalian in any case. Didier assigns this writing a more significant role: " Stendhal, in his autobiography founds a writing of discontinuity" ("Roman," 226). This mode, she affirms, corresponds to the exigencies of a sincerity which Beyle imposed on himself in an effort to deafen his ears to the sirenic, and false, lyricism which, to his way of thinking, had claimed Rousseau as he wrote his Confessions. Doubtless a will to veracity does dictate, in some measure, the fragmented presentation of the Vie. Yet one must not forget that we are dealing with a man whose identity remained so ungraspable that even his close friend, Prosper Merimee, remarked, retrospectively, of him: "No one knew exactly whom he saw, which books he had written, what journeys he had made" (//.£., p. 39). Might not some of the gaps in this text, flaunted by Stendhal as transparent monuments to sincerity, be construed rather as refusals to impart a truth: that is, as anything but sincere? The

22


reader, all the more respectful of HB's restraint and modesty when s/he considers the pitfalls of the genre to which, alas, Rousseau had succumbed, is lulled into believing the half-truth which Beyle offers: that the pieces of the fresco of his life, to use his own metaphor, have fallen and, not only would any restoration be vain, but indeed would constitute a distortion of the truth. 1 But let me give an example of one such gap which, as it happens, subtends the very genesis of the Vie de Henry Brulard. Beyle tells us that he conceived his account on October 16 when he was nearing fifty, but only began it three years later; that is, when the half-century marker had been leapt over. " I am only continuing [this]," the narrator affirms, "on November 23, 1835" (Oeuvres intimes, II, p. 534). Louis Marin has shown this brilliantly-choreographed leap to be a step in the death dance whose ending Stendhal is at considerable pains to defer. The disingenuous " I am only continuing" registers, to reduce Marin's argument to the essential, as a triumph over Stendhal's mortal fate: "If fifty is death's number, by situating the initial gesture of writing three months before the mortal number, in flying over ["voler" is also to rob] three years, Henri is flying over [robbing] death, his death" (La Voix, p. 66).2 One might say, then, that the Vie is a tale whose foundations repose on a sort of geologic fault, a place where something has dropped out and two new edges have been brought together in uncertain conjuncture. Facing the reader is a writing whose origins are profoundly auto-chthonous, as if emergent from some crack in the earth/self. And in fact, it is a place which first inspires in HB the idea of writing his self: "That morning, on October 16, 1832, I was at San Pietro in Montorio, on Mount Janiculum, in Rome ... This place is unique in the world, I said to myself, day-dreaming" (Oeuvres intimes, II, pp. 529, 531). No indifferent site, this. Besides the all-encompassing view it affords of the Eternal City (what panorama could be more conducive to a reverie on the theme of origins?), this compact mound of earth forms a veritable historical archive whose contents address themselves directly to the Stendhalian imagination. Can it really be here, sighs the ageing French Consul,


23

that Raphael's Transfiguration hung for some 250 years? Let us recall, since the narrator declines to, that this celebrated painting represents Saint Peter and two other apostles witnessing the immortalization of their Lord. Furthermore, Peter is apocryphally bound to this spot by a legend (Stendhal knew it well) which gives this very mount as his place of martyrdom. Finally, Beatrice Cenci, the lovely parricide and beheaded heroine of one of Stendhal's Chroniques italiennes lies here entombed. All the threads which converge on this monsmausoleum seem to lead to death and, perhaps, to its supersession.3 It is, then, from this lofty vantage point on November 23, 1835, that Henry Brulard goes on to capture ancient and modern Rome in a glance which not only freezes time, but actually foils it in a premonition of one of the major concerns of this autobiography. Still, muses Henry, "in spite of myself ancient Rome won out over the modern one" (Oeuvres intimes, II, p. 531). With this statement of predilection we stand forewarned that the narrative will favor the archaic register, as indeed turns out to be the case, since Stendhal halts his narrative in Milan in the year 1800 with the youthful hero's triumphal crossing of the Alps and his passage into the promised motherland, Italy. 4 One manifestation of Brulardian archaism can, of course, be found in the way the Vie rebounds from scene to scene as if miming Henry's childish mode of perception. Thus it is almost despite the counterpoint of the sketches, mute images stripped of wherefores, that the account gradually assumes a certain fluidity. Increasingly as the story unfolds, transitions smooth over the gaps, although to the end the narrator will refuse explanation to some extent. And while it is impossible to pinpoint a moment in the text in which a shift toward a more synthetic perception takes over, one might say that with the vanquishing of the she-dragon Seraphie (chapter 21 of 46), the account takes on a coherence ascribable to the narrator's age and consequent ability to rationalize Event. That images should begin to align themselves according to a conscious syntax scarcely seems unnatural when one realizes that the new-found

24


cogency corresponds to HB's enrollment in the Ecole Centrale, that is, to his insertion into the social register after the years of enforced sequestration he suffered in the name of an aristocratic and religious education. It is in the context of this (always tentative) cogency, then, that the reading of chapter 32 of the Vie has a jarring effect because the chapter seems to shift backward to a more primitive form of rememoration: the reader is confronted anew with memories at once monolithic and disparate. Curiously enough, the chapter's singularity has gone unremarked. This is a lacuna which is all the more unaccountable when one considers that the third and final episode of the chapter treats none other than the violent punishment of a parricide. I propose to begin this analysis by focusing on the disjointedness which characterizes this chapter and to which the narrator persistently calls attention throughout the text in a litany of queries — " contre quoi," " pourquoi" — as well as a series of disclaimers: "je l'ignore," and "je ne sais pas." But first, a brief summary of the three episodes which I shall consider as constituting a triptych since together they form a sort of discontinuous unit whose meaning hinges, as will be seen, on the hinges. In the first panel of this triptych, then, HB relates his initiation to hunting, a practice in which he indulges in defiance of paternal interdict. The story is simple and seems insignificant: one day, as he is descending a hill, Henry shoots. A thrush is hit and falls, "making a sound on hitting the ground that I still hear" (Oeuvres intimes, II, p. 834). His subsequent encounter with a fox, however, meets with less success. " I missed him quite neatly," reports Brulard of the fox which had trotted directly toward him, an easy target (p. 835). Thereupon, the hunternarrator dwells for several paragraphs on this spectacular miss, the particulars of which he furnishes in various sketches. Soon after, he brings down another thrush: this one falls to the ground with "large drops of blood that I still see" (p. 841). Two acts whose violence haunts him to this very day surround a miss whose inexplicability HB strongly insists upon. Then abruptly ("encore un recit") one moves to the second


25

panel: HB and his comrades' "conspiracy" against the Tree of Fraternity which stood in the Place Grenette, the center of eighteenth-century Grenoble's social life. Much of this episode is obscured by Brulard's inability to remember. Why, for example, did he "conspire" against a tree which displayed a placard glorifying the annihilation of the ancien regime? (The placard evoked the political repression in pre-revolutionary France with a crown, scepter, and chains, and the "conspiracy" involved shooting down this placard.5) If the question is well put, the answer is never forthcoming. Stendhal's hatred of monarchy and despotism in general is well known. He explains in considerable detail early in the Vie that his precocious republicanism grew out of a revolt against his conservative, ultraroyalist father. In this context, shooting down a placard which championed his own political principles clearly constitutes nothing less than a nonsensical act, as he himself is quick to admit. Perhaps, interjects the narrator in an attempt to rationalize the absurd, perhaps this tree was a rival of his beloved Tree of Liberty which stood in the same enclosure. HB pushes the inquiry further. Why, he wonders, did he instigate the crime and then leave the trigger-pulling to someone else?

("Je l'ignore.") And who pulled the trigger anyway? HB cannot say, but one thing remains certain amidst all the disclaimers — a shot detonated in the silence and the young miscreants dispersed with guards in hot pursuit. Henry and his cousin Colomb (but was it his cousin?) took refuge in the apartment of two elderly ladies who affirm, out of sheer terror to the guards who knock at their door, that the boys have spent the entire evening in their company. Thus HB finds himself cleared of suspicion. Then abruptly (with no transition whatever) one moves to the third episode, which is really more of a coda to its two longer predecessors and has no more to do with the conspiracy than the conspiracy had to do with hunting. One Jomard, the parricide, was guillotined on August 23, 1797. With horror Henry observed the "drops of blood forming all along the blade before falling" (p. 850). However, the reader is not privy to the fatal severance. The narrator spares us that final violence in a sort of

26


textual black-out reminiscent, for that matter, of Julien Sorel's decapitation, also an ellipsis. It is as if the text, in its refusal to recount, were miming that definitive loss of consciousness which is, par excellence, a beheading. In fact, to return to this syncope which closes chapter 32, one realizes that it is neither the blade which falls nor the head: " I was so near that after the execution I saw the drops of blood forming all along the blade before falling." Whether it was the drops of blood or the horrified young spectator that fell remains open to question. Before I venture further, the tripartite structure of chapter 32 deserves comment. Undeniably, and on many levels, three is a privileged figure in the generation of meaning. Take, for instance, the grammatical trio, subject, verb, object, or the syllogism's threefold propositions; the triadic structure (beginning, middle, end) of conventional narrative, or Hegelian dialectics' celebrated triumvirate; the blessed trinity of Freud's family romance, or, again, the triple registers of human experience according to Lacanian scripture. The figure three in and of itself should suffice to alert the reader that a statement is perhaps being made in this chapter, a story being told. Let us suppose, then, for the time being, that the narrator of the Vie is in fact making a statement of some kind through these three apparently disparate episodes. Naturally this supposition requires that some of the important gaps be filled in, a task which can be accomplished at first by simple association. Thus the drops of blood forming on the blade that HB witnessed with horror in panel three transfuse into the blood issuing from the hapless thrush, drops that HB observed with joy at the time and, indeed, sees to this very day. Blood points to blood. Moreover, the thud, eternally replayed, of the thrush hitting the ground ("a sound I still hear") evokes the sound which the narrator has refused to disclose, that of the severed parricidal head dropping to the ground. If the violent sights and sounds of the hunt haunt Henry like the Erinyes pursuing the antique parricide Orestes, it is probably because they replace another more significant violence which must remain unnamed. What becomes clear through this blood tie is that a kinship exists between the hunt and the killing of one's parent. More


27

serious, however, is the narrator's implication by association in the crime. The issue which this chapter appears to be addressing is the determination of guilt and judgment in connection with parricide. Thus, if venery and executing the Venerable are one and the same thing, the former alone can be represented. The thud of a head fallen is too unbearable to describe because it testifies to the commission of a peculiar kind of crime. And even were the crime itself representable, the narrator seems to be protesting that no such crime took place. It was at the end of his gun that the two thrushes met their fate, but did he not miss the object of a real hunt, the fox? True, HB did pull the trigger, but he missed. But wait - he did not pull the trigger after all! This is what the conspiracy episode is at pains to demonstrate, even though a crime might have taken place. The gun, it turns out, is an associative device whose function is to link the hunt to the conspiracy, but it is perhaps the conspiracy episode which will reveal what has in fact transpired. At some level, an equation is being made between pulling the trigger and missing, and hitting the target without pulling the trigger. Combining the two, one is confronted with a simultaneous admission and denial, a yes-and-no, that is, a (de) negation. One must acknowledge that this chapter is remarkably economical: see how with a single stone it manages to kill several birds. Just as the sounds and the sights of the guillotining echo back to those of the hunt, the gunshots fired at the hunt ricochet into the political arena in which the tree - like the fox earlier - stands for something else. For it is the absurdity of the tree-shooting act, an absurdity heavily insisted upon, which signals that something else is at stake. But what? "Against what did we conspire?" BRULARD, Henry, former resident of Grenoble, now consul at Civitavecchia, pleads ignorance. Whereas the "harmless" objects of Henry's violence go openly proclaimed in the first panel of the triptych, the case is quite the reverse for the conspiracy which is linked by its violence, political overtones, and, perhaps most important, its contiguity, to the final episode, the parricide's punishment.

28


The sequence of association is thus determined by the general violence characterizing all three events, but more than that, in each case, there exists a target, the receiver of an aggression. In the first narrative, the subject, HB, and the object of the violence can both be named because the object is ostensibly harmless. With its associational counterpart, the parricide incident, it is the nature of the crime and the target of the violence which are given; the aggressor (the public? a judge?) is left unarticulated. Finally, in the conspiracy episode, the object of aggression is postulated in the text as being merely apparent ("against what?"), the nature of the crime remaining obscure, and the subject of the aggression, HB, is named somewhat equivocally, as we shall see. Decidedly the circle will remain vicious and senseless unless we can determine the syntax of this violence, the logic which binds the criminal elements together to form a statement, a narrative, or even, as I contend, a defense. Because it seems clear at this stage that the narrator, accused of a crime, is attempting to exonerate himself. Will HB meet the same fate as the parricide Jomard? (Unthinkable. Black-out.) Or will he, a latter-day Orestes, be exculpated ? A host of evidence is adduced by the accused, evidence whose sometimes self-contradictory nature belies a certain desperation. Yes, perhaps he did wish violence (but on a tree?); he is ready to assume complete responsibility for that: " I alone had the idea of the thing" (p. 845), "the thing" designating the unnameable. Nonetheless, this idea, which he admittedly entertained, this wish of death on a tree, was not executed by him: "The strange part is that I did not fire the shot myself" (p. 850). Now if the exact nature of HB's involvement in the crime remains obscure, at least there is clear evidence of criminal intent. A closer reading of the conspiracy episode reveals its function in the chapter to be essentially syntactic, that is, it specifies the nature of the relationship obtaining between the various elements already discussed. (Indeed, its median position in the chapter would seem to designate it as a structure of mediation.) The question which sticks in the craw is why HB, champion of


29

republicanism and despiser of tyrants, should have aimed his hostility at that placard and the tree? And it is precisely the glaring absurdity of the act, its quality of somehow being out of place, that leads one to suspect that if resituated, its meaning would become clear. For, seen in a different way, HB's targeting of the tree is an ungrammatical act. He is, in effect, indulging in a double negative, saying: " I do not like 'I do not like [down with, death to] the ancien regime'" Do the negatives cancel out, making Henry Brulard a covert royalist? Hardly likely, especially when one recalls how HB, ever an admirer of regicides, had applauded Louis XVFs death, to his family's horror. What the gunshot in the Place Grenette is trying to explode is Henry Brulard's former and violent rejection of an archaic state of affairs — a familial ancien regime. This rejection emerges in the form of a negation: " I deny that I wished death." And, invoking the Freudian omnipotence of wishes, this is tantamount to saying, " I deny that I committed murder." Here the old ladies are brought on as witnesses, testifying, like some Greek chorus, to the narrator's innocence before the Proper Authorities. Jomard was judged guilty of killing his father-inlaw, but HB is exonerated of his crime. (One cannot help but think of the trial looming so large in Le Rouge et le noir which had resulted from Julien Sorel pulling the trigger but not fatally attaining his target, certainly a variant of the episode under consideration. A black-out had ensued.) No sooner has one question been put to rest, however, than another springs up in its place. Whose death is at issue here? The political reference to the paternalist ancien regime, not to mention HB's heavily publicized hatred of his father, would seem to indicate that the parricide is more specifically a patricide, returning us to the well-trod crossroads of Stendhaliana and psychoanalysis: the oedipus nexus. Bearing this hypothesis out, moreover, is HB's protestation in the same chapter that "without a certain law of the 13th of Germinal" (p. 841), the inheritance of the elder branch of the Beyle family would have fallen entirely to him, a statement which evokes the notion of the patrimony due a son on his father's death. Indeed,

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Michel Crouzet has devoted an entire book to the patrifilial conflict in the Vie, after noting that, save for Beyle's "scandalous" admission of desire for his mother, "the mother... is in fact nonexistent in Brulard" [La " Vie," p. 29). (I prefer to say that she is not an explicit presence, which is not by any means the same as being nonexistent.) At this point it would be useful to stop and take stock. The fresco has been at least partially restored. Indeed, as the tripartite structure of the chapter seemed to promise, the outline of a story has been discerned beyond the "grands morceaux tombes" (Oeuvres intimes, II, p. 644). It is a tale of parricide whose chief distortions have been realized through ellipsis and refusals to recount. This does not strike one as surprising, particularly when one considers that for Stendhal, excessive passion sets the limits of the narratable. Neither sorrow, happiness, nor guilt is susceptible of being told. Hence, to some extent, the Vie de Henry Brulard is doomed to a premature ending. It is an ending which takes the form of a series of convulsive sentences revealing a narrator torn by the desire to recount what is fundamentally ineffable for him: the intense happiness of his life in Milan. The rhythmic utterances (sobs or laughter?) by which the narrator attempts to describe his entry into Italy fade into a sort of beatific silence. In just the same way, Beyle the man, in moments of extreme sensation, was prone to fall down: "When an idea takes hold of me too strongly in the middle of the street, I fall down" (p. 809). And so the black-outs of the body Beyle come to be inscribed in his literary corpus. Let us return to chapter 32, this time for purposes of habeas corpus, since some body has yet to be handed over. The question remains: who was the target of the parricidal impulse? Cherubin Beyle, the sly fox who "cheated" his only son out of his rightful inheritance, seems a choice all the more obvious because Jomard the parricide - so the text of Brulard informs the reader - murdered his father-in-law. Micheline Levowitz-Treu has followed the patricidal line of reasoning (although briefly evoking another possibility) in an excellent analysis of the conspiracy episode [UAmour et la mort, pp. 81—85).


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Still, all things considered, it seems implausible that HB should be haunted by the memory of a hostility that, in any case, had always been explicit. Referring to his father in an 1816 letter to his friend Louis Crozet, Beyle writes (partially in English): "Je suis dans les griffes d'un Jesuite [I am in the claws of a Jesuit] 70 years old\ if he reaches the years ofthe grant-father', viz. 82, how will I pass those twelve years?" {sic), followed by: " Y o u

yourself will shudder like Jocasta when I tell you the horrible secret" (Correspondance, I, p. 821). There can be nothing strange about a death wish which has constantly gone avowed. What is interesting is what is denied: "The strange part is that I did not fire the shot myself." Why strange? Because I did in fact take aim ("I alone had the idea of the thing"), and the death of my target did in fact ensue, but without my even firing the shot. It is a cruel and strange fate indeed that allows the hunter's prey, however fervently desired its death, to be stalked and brought low by someone else's shot. But who can have outfoxed Henry Hunter? "My friend," the priest had murmured to Cherubin Beyle to console him after his young spouse, Henriette, had died in childbirth, "this comes from God" (Oeuvres intimes, II, p. 564). Hearing this, reports Henry, stunned by the death, "Je me mis a dire du mal de God" ("I began to speak evil of God") (p. 564). And throughout Beyle's works, the divinity is most often alluded to in English, as if uttering its "real" name were forbidden by taboo, in accordance with some totemic law. It is in a letter written in Civitavecchia in 1834 to his celebrated contemporary Sainte-Beuve that Beyle combines a credo in a cruel God with a death wish on the mother. Needless to say, the wish is imputed to someone else, and the two elements stand separated by a long paragraph but, as has already been seen in the case of chapter 32, these are precisely the mechanisms of revelation favored by the Stendhalian text. "Mais un abime nous separe, car je crois qu'il y a un God: il est mechant et malfaisant. Je serai bien etonne, apres ma mort, si je le trouve, et, s'il m'accorde la parole je lui en dirai de belles" ("But an abyss separates us, because I believe there is a God: he is evil and malfeasant. I shall be quite astonished after my death

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if I find him, and, if he deigns to hear me, I shall tell him off") (Correspondance, II, p. 762). "De belles," de Beyle - beyles irae. A little further on in the letter, Beyle talks about a twenty-year sentence recently passed on a young Italian thief, "protected by me," for having uttered the malediction: "A pox on the Madonna!" (p. 763, my emphasis). The formula is the same as in chapter 32: I protect him (I am he) who wished death on the mother for ("car") there is a God who is really responsible for the crime and I, the undersigned of this letter, Henri Beyle, will personally reproach him.6 With respect to chapter 32, then, it might be supposed that the wishing of death upon the father functions as a sort of screen which both points to and away from the other scene — that of the matricide. In fact, this is precisely the mechanism of diversion used in the reportage of Jomard's patricide which, it turns out, serves as a cover-up for his other crimes: those committed against women.7 In cycle 2, I shall address the broader issue of oedipus as a cultural screen. For the present, I prefer to sift through Stendhal's opus remaining vigilant and receptive to its idiosyncracies. For Jomard's murder of his father-in-law is but the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, this crime had followed a sort of incest: Jomard had married the daughter of his former mistress, a marriage which culminated in his killing the mother. (In this respect, one thinks of Mathilde de la Mole and the older Mme de Renal of Le Rouge et le noir.) Which, if either, of these two parricides takes precedence? Here once again the silence of the text speaks its truth. Mentioned in parenthetical association with Jomard is another parricide, one Mingrat, whose crime - although again HB does not say so - had been the rape and murder of a woman: "Jomard was a rascal of a priest, like Mingrat later, who was guillotined for having poisoned his father-in-law" (Oeuvres intimes, II, p. 850). Murder of a woman is thus twice stilled in this text. Stendhal's hostility toward his mother, a hostility well concealed through elaborate idealization, has not passed unnoticed. Philippe Berthier, for example, has shown that Aunt Seraphie, allegedly Cherubin's mistress after Henriette's death,


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who poisoned Henry's youth, was a useful stand-in for the real mother: "this 'anti-mother,' who is also a 'second mother'... conveniently assumes all the aggressive impulses which Henri in reality intends for Henriette" (Stendhal, pp. 136-37). Henriette thereby remains as incorrupta as those Madonnas which figure in the plates accompanying the Vie de Henry Brulard.8 Let me cite from the celebrated passage in which Beyle describes his mother (and of which Gerard Genette sighed, " For the specialists such a text should be a sort of scandal: what does it leave to interpret?" ["'Stendhal,'" p. 158]): My mother, Mme Henriette Gagnon, was a charming woman and I was in love with my mother... I wanted to cover my mother with kisses and for her to have no clothes on. She loved me passionately and embraced me often, I returned her kisses with such ardor that it was as if she were obliged to leave. I abhorred my father when he came to interrupt our kisses. I always wanted to give them to her on her bosom. Let it be remembered that I lost her in childbed when I was scarcely seven years old ... One evening, when by some chance I had been put to bed on a mattress on the floor of her room, this woman, as lively and agile as a doe, leapt over my mattress to reach her bed more quickly. (Oeuvres intimes, II, pp. 555-57, my emphasis) It is not the fox, after all, but the doe which was the hunter's real target. And the strategy has been brilliant, it must be conceded: the hunter-narrator had flaunted his paternal hostility as a sort of decoy to divert the reader's attention away from the real object of interest, Henriette Beyle. Only the overloud protestations of ignorance (read as a denial) give him away: "Against what did we conspire? I don't know." Let us return, one last time, to the scene of the crime, the conspiracy, to determine, if possible, the motives behind Henry's death wish on his mother. I shall begin by calling attention to still another protestation of ignorance, this one regarding the wherefores of the incident. " I don't know why I conspired," reports Henry (p. 843) which, using the key elaborated above, one might translate as: " I cannot say why I wished death upon my mother." But where the narrator refuses to tell, it is the interstices of the text which

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betray him, divulging his secrets. Once again we take our cue from the lack of transition between Brulard's plea of ignorance and what follows immediately. Indeed, just as the larger units - the hunt, the conspiracy, the parricide - yield a narrative when combined, here, on a smaller scale, meaning is generated out of a black-out, out of the refusal to be conscious: I do not know why I conspired. This tree was an unhappy young oak, very graceful, at least thirty feet high, which had been transplanted to its great regret into the middle of the Place Grenette, well beyond the tree of Liberty, which had all my tenderness. The tree of Fraternity, perhaps the rival of the other one ... (Oeuvres intimes, II, p. 843, my emphasis) The " w h y " of the matter fairly radiates from certain terms, not the least of which are the terms of endearment applied to the trees. Who is this younger tree, this smaller upstart whose very name - Fraternity - bespeaks sibling rivalry? Who is this fraternal enemy not in his natural place (transplanted), who occupies his elder brother's rightful place, his sacred space? Now, at last, one understands why HB should have temporarily assumed his puzzling anti-revolutionary stance. Because between a tender Liberty and a usurpatory Fraternity, there can be no question of Equality. At this point, the narrator takes aim at the offensive tree with its irksome prorevolutionary slogan implicitly touting fraternal love ... but a strange thing comes to pass. The crime is accomplished without HB pulling the trigger! The " unhappy" young oak is brought down, but in the process, his mother-deer is slain as well. "Let it be remembered that I lost her in childbed." 9 No longer does chapter 32 appear an incongruous collage of three discrete stories. Rather, it must be seen as a tale too unbearable to recount but which nonetheless demands articulation in distorted form. In a quasi-theological melt-down, the three become one, and this according to distinct mechanisms : association, contiguity, and finally, identification. If each episode relates to the two others in an oblique way, no episode is exactly analogous to another. This means that combining two "panels" does not suffice to yield a narrative


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because each panel lacks a different, but equally essential, element. In order for the subject, object, and action of the tale to emerge unequivocally, all three strands must be interwoven. The reader of this study will already have gleaned the gist, especially if s/he is familiar with Freud on Dostoyevsky and Goethe. Once upon a time, a young boy tenderly loved his mother and he fiercely coveted her affections. Seeing her with child and himself threatened with a rival, he wished that they both might perish - and lo, so it came to pass. But if the narrator reports a matter of record - a death - he is also at pains to defend himself. Herein lies the importance of the muddled meditation on who might have pulled the trigger, because in a way HB did, but in a way, he did not. Similarly, on the one hand, Jomard was judged guilty, while on the other hand, two elderly ladies testified in favor of Henry Brulard, acquitting him of the crime. Not only does this crucial chapter of the Vie de Henry Brulard contain a sequence of actions with their underlying motivations nowhere else revealed in Beyle's autobiography, but it is also a reflection on the nature of guilt and innocence, crime and punishment. At this juncture I would like to turn to the manuscript itself to determine whether the anxiety characterizing chapter 32 might not be inscribed, in some way, on the hand-written page.10 What first strikes the reader's attention is not so much that it is chapter 32 which begins the third and final volume of the Fz>, but rather that the chapter continues the account while at the same time breaking it off. For at some point Henri Beyle had numbered the pages of all three volumes consecutively such that the second volume had carried over from the first and likewise the third from the second. So it is remarkable that later he should have systematically crossed out each page number in volume III and begun anew with another page 1, starting with chapter 32. (Unfortunately, the Del Litto edition bears no mention of the "reformed" pagination.) It is as if, in rejecting the continuity of a previous numbering effected, ostensibly, in a moment of greater tranquillity, Stendhal were miming (or preparing?) the discontinuities of chapter 32. Whatever the rationale for interrupting, it is clear that the

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finale of the Vie de Henry Brulard is born out of a movement of rupture redolent of the originary gap which, it will be recalled, the narrator had at once acknowledged and then hastened to suture up with his pen ("I am only continuing this"). It can be no indifferent matter that this chapter, which inaugurates the ending of the book of Beyle's self, should break with its predecessors only to adopt the form of a neo-beginning or even (to anticipate a little) a transfiguration. If being reborn (transfigured) is a matter of such import that it can be manifested materially on the manuscript page, it must be because for Stendhal a birthday is and always would be a deathday, not only that of two Others but his own as well. With each passing January 23, he becomes increasingly aware that the further he moves from the "moment of birth," to use the language of the Vie\ sketches, the nearer he draws to the opposite shore. The testaments and epitaphs inscribed everywhere in the margins of Stendhal's work bear witness to an obsession with what for him was the ultimate calamity, one not necessarily associated, contrary to what Marin proposes, with the year fifty in and of itself. In a letter to his sister Pauline, written in 1824 when Beyle was only forty-one, the day of birth is clearly united to a desire to prolong life indefinitely, to foil — humorously — the "God" who had already dealt him the most ironic of hands: "You, Pauline, make me a necktie on the 23rd of each month. It is on that day that I was born in 1783. May the number of my neckties reach 1783!" (Correspondance, II, p. 49). Undeniably the comic "long live myself" betrays Beyle's lifelong preoccupation with self-transfiguration in this passage which, while not properly autobiographical, perfectly figures one of the dilemmas of autobiography: namely that only origins are susceptible to narration. The obituary mode remains the prerogative of fiction. Yet one cannot help wondering whether the pseudonymic title, Vie de Henry Brulard, besides its wellknown parricidal function, might not also allow the author just a tiny, ever so unnoticeable latitude. This question I shall leave open, the way Henri in his letter to Pauline has refused closure of his personal narrative.


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If the precise month of Henri's birth is not mentioned in the epistolary text, it is perhaps in deference to something more sacred: the cipher 23. One November 23, Henriette and her unborn "son" died; one August 23, Jomard the parricide was executed. (And oh supreme stroke of irony! one March 23, Henri Beyle was to die of apoplexy in a Paris street.) Twentythree: a blasphemous figure at once sacred and taboo which binds together birth and death first, and then links these to writing, for, let us recall, the narrator first put pen to paper on precisely November 23. There is, however, one hitch in this grandiose project of auto (trans) figuration. The Henry Brulard who had flippantly begun the book of his self by leaping over the cinquantaine, outdoing "God," and landing beyond the tomb squarely on November 23 nonetheless has another 23 — this one his own — with which to contend. Is it any wonder that one so preoccupied with death should have fallen victim to the somber contemplations of chapter 32 on the very eve of his birthday? For, looking closely at the dates with which Stendhal obsessively peppered his account, one realizes that, except for the first two or three paragraphs, one half of this chapter was written on January 22 while the rest, in another of those leaps, was composed on January 24. Elided is the vital date. The syncopes which have been seen to denude the three episodes of their narrative syntax are inscribed on the very page as part of the network of black-outs which repeat themselves throughout the fresco of this text-being to the point that they, like Beethovenesque silences, form the signifying pattern of the work. Moreover, extraction of the painful date together with the suturing together of the 22 and the 24 is an operation effected on the manuscript page itself. The top of manuscript page 22 bears the date January 22; midway down the same page, with no spaces in the text, the reader encounters the indication "24 January." (The Del Litto edition does not mention this.) While it might seem natural for an author in the habit of dating his work to do so at any point in the text, such is not Beyle's modus operandi. Indeed, this mid-page dating is unique in the entire manuscript. Out of about 400 such dates, the vast majority are

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found in the top left corner of the written page, with an occasional date on the top of the back of the previous page. Thus it is that through this singular severing of the prose at mid-page, the reader of the manuscript is privy to a mise-en-scene of the act of rupture. But if Stendhal refused to write his life on that January 23, might one not inquire as to what his preoccupations were on the unhappy day? To this end, we turn to the Del Litto edition of the "reconstituted" Journal, to the sole entry of January 23, 1836, written in Stendhal's copy of Saint-Simon's Memoires: Deuxieme lecture sur cet exemplaire. M. de Saint-Simon n'a de profondeur que juste ce qu'il faut pour faire une belle phrase a la Tacite, comme " au terrible flambeau." Sa profondeur ne mord pas au fond des choses; bien inferieur a son contemporain Bayle, mort en 1706, et naturellement, sans comparaison avec un homme qui est mort la meme annee que lui, 1755, M. de Montesquieu. Vaut-il mieux que 1'historien ait un prejuge mort ou vivant? J'aime mieux le mort tel que la ducomanie ou la manie des rangs. (Second reading of this copy. M. de Saint-Simon has just barely the depth needed to turn a lovely phrase a la Tacitus, like "of the terrible torch." His depth does not reach [bite] to the heart of things; quite inferior to his contemporary Bayle, dead [who died] in 1706, and naturally, with no comparison to a man who died the same year as he, 1755, M. de Montesquieu. Is it better that the historian should have a dead or a living prejudice?

I prefer the dead one such as ducomania or the mania for [social] rank.) (Oeuvres intimes, II, p. 273, my emphasis) (Note that "mord" and "mort" are homonyms, as are "belle," "Bayle" and "Beyle.") Five occurrences of the telltale syllable "mor" in five sentences make it obvious that Stendhal could not write his life on that day precisely because he was busy writing a death, and the tintinnabulation of the "belle," "Bayle," Beyles clearly indicates that the death in question is his own. That January 23, Beyle, an admittedly superior being, pictured himself deep in the jaws of death, ready perhaps to succumb to the mortal bite ("sa profondeur ne mord pas"), but to the end reasoning with Death, a sort of Don Juan dealing with the Commander a la Don Giovanni, one of Beyle's favorite operas. "Ne mords pas!" the text seems to shrill, before I pose my rhetorical question in the


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manner of Hamlet, that other son who spared his mother death according to the Stendhalian version revised in 1802-03. " Is it better to be mort ou vivant? " To be or not to be, this is the question being put by Henri Beyle/Bayle on the anniversary of his birth. And the response, " I prefer the dead one," is no tragic submission since Beayle has nominally embraced death, made a conscious choice. But look again, and marvel at the ingenuity: in paying homage to death, Henry recounts his Other's (Bayle's) death... and lives to tell the tale! Cheating imperceptibly on the constraints of autobiography (but what is a little straying next to the gross violations of a Rousseau?), Stendhal writes his own obituary on his birthday, truly a moment of death and transfiguration.11 "Ne mord pas" translates into a refusal of death, a "pas mort." Nor does the associational power of a proper name stop here, for the dead Other's Christian name was none other than Pierre. It is thus an onomastic link which returns us to the rock upon which the Vie de Henry Brulard is built, Mount Janiculum, and to the privileged figure of Saint Peter - he chosen to witness a transfiguration and who holds Eternity's keys, just as the name of the dead Pierre Bayle holds the key to the immortalization of his namesake. When all is said and done, remarkable revelations about crime and punishment have been made in chapter 32. What is ultimately more significant, however, is the way a highly visible caesura (January 22/24) occurring midway down a manuscript page in this same chapter affords us a fleeting glimpse of certain autobiographical truths. By skipping over B-day, January 23, Henri Beyle has repeated the legerdemain he had already performed against " G o d " at the beginning of his Vie. The divinity may have dealt him a cruel hand by executing a death wish one November 23 - as the deciphered version of chapter 32 has revealed - but in this round, at least, Beyle has taken the trick. Henri Pierre Beayle-Brulard's dinner with the Commander has been deferred.

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Politics and narratives of birth PALIMPSEST AND PREGNANCY! READING ACROSS STENDHALIAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I have dwelt on chapter 32 of the Vie de Henry Brulard at considerable length for two reasons. First, it presents the most complete and complex formulation of the Stendhalian posture vis-a-vis the Maternal to be found in the author's autobiographical works. What is ultimately more important, however, is that when the structure which combines pregnancy, maternal and sibling death, and guilt is translated into fiction — as I shall maintain it does — all the ruses of equivocation remain intact. And herein lie the vicissitudes of Stendhalian narrative. For, whereas logical contradictions actually found the veracity of autobiography, figuring as they do the vacillations of the self and the coexistence of differing, but equally valid, levels of truth, this same "incoherence" is likely to be the bane of conventional narrative whose denouement must revolve around a choice made between alternatives. In the second section of this cycle, I shall read across Henri Beyle's autobiographical works - the Vie, his correspondence, and journals - in order to demonstrate the extent to which the plotting out of pregnancy infiltrates his writings, as well as the mechanisms governing this infiltration. For heuristic purposes, Freud's early essay entitled "Screen Memories" (1899) furnishes a useful departure point since it describes how memory can transpose and veil material, thereby permitting its articulation. Nonetheless, the Stendhalian text far exceeds a simple rearrangement of elements constituting some primal event. It is, I suggest, more truly palimpsestic in nature since the episode in question, rather than being reprojected in fixed, paradigmatic form, is constantly undergoing revision and is, on occasion, as we shall see, given a happy ending. The third and final section of this Stendhal essay will be devoted to the articulations of this palimpsest-plot in Stendhal's fiction. The analysis of chapter 32 indicates that there is some justification for approaching Stendhal grammatically, as it were. When, as in this chapter, heterogenous elements are serially presented but with no connecting "verb," what


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statement is being made? Or, to anticipate the problematics of fiction, when a shooting or birth or abortion are central to a plot and yet fail to "deliver" in narrative terms, what statement is being made? Or — and I would like to reconvene my analysis with this — when images referring to different events separated in time are nonetheless strikingly similar, one is tempted to suppose that behind the apparent diversity, a single plot is undergoing elaboration. At issue here (readers of Stendhal will have guessed) are the author's two celebrated early memories in which he committed acts of violence against women. The two incidents are reported serially in chapter 3 of the Vie, although at least two years separate them. Before analyzing the episodes, let me invoke Freud's "Screen Memories" which deals with the way childhood memories are amalgamated and reconstituted to fit circumstances other than those to which they appear to refer. Perhaps the most radical conclusion of Freud's paper is the suggestion that childhood memories may exist only insofar as they are mobilized by the memory at a later time in response to other events: " I t may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at allfrom our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all we possess." What is responsible for stirring this or that particular dormant memory is " a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy" (Works of Freud, III, p. 322). It is not, claims Freud, that these primeval events are inventions, but rather that they are awakened and modified by the content of ulterior event, and this to a purpose, " almost like works of fiction." In this sense, early memories, especially amalgamated ones, serve as screens: they are vested with meaning post facto.12 To anticipate my later discussion of the politics of psychoanalysis, the fact that Freud chose the screen as paradigm is significant in itself. A screen being a device which simultaneously exposes and occults, memories can serve as screen-constructions (my position here). Such, however, is also the function of entire narratives including some of Western patriarchal culture's most important metacultural constructs — those in which it reflects upon its own origins.

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To reveal or to conceal: this is the burden of writing origins. In a culture wherein reproduction is not simply another fact of life but, instead, an ideological concern, birth can only be a charged and overdetermined event. A universal yet private experience of anxiety, to be born is also to emerge into a culture which itself entertains a certain historical relation to the process of generation. This means that the subjective (and variable) language of beginnings shares an interface with a public discourse which holds a vested interest in the power to reproduce. This Stendhal cycle focuses mainly on the ontogenetic aspect of the ideology of reproduction. Since Otto Rank, much has been made of the "birth trauma" and related experience of pain, and yet, I think, the extent to which anxiety surrounding birth informs and configures subsequent life experience and, in Stendhal's case, literary production, is almost imponderable. Thus, before moving to the more "significant" figure of Rousseau for whom the collusion of private and public discourse over the subject of reproduction is a breathtaking and historical affair, it is necessary to get a sense of the impact of tragic birth at the level of subjective experience. I shall begin by building on Berthier's brief but excellent analysis {Stendhal, pp. 141—44) which likens the two famous scenes from Henry Brulard's childhood to each other, suggesting that they function as screens for another event, the decease of his mother, Henriette. However, I wish to show that this triune complex extends further still, embracing at least one other incident recounted in the Vie. The incident in question, perhaps less well known to readers than the first three, displays striking structural similarities with them, while at the same time bearing all the marks of being a fantasy of reparation and reconstruction. First, here are the sparse details which HB furnishes regarding the death of his mother, a woman who "was full-figured" and who "perished in the flower of her youth." The untimely death, it will be recalled, resulted in Henry's revolt against religion: " I began to speak evil of God" (Oeuvres intimes, II, p. 564). HB is outraged by Seraphie's accusation that he reacted to the event in an unfeeling way, and he responds in turn by accusing


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Henriette's brother, Uncle Romain Gagnon, of treating the matter lightly. It is worth noting that Uncle Gagnon is viewed by the narrator with some ambivalence. The same chapter which contains the two memories and the narrative of the maternal death also includes the claim that his grandfather "did not like his son," Romain, and that later, when Henry had sent his grandfather a portrait of himself, the latter was said to have declared: " He is the true one " (p. 554). At some level, this witty bon vivant, the Don Juanesque uncle, is the rival of Henry who claims to replace him in the affection of his old grandfather. This usurpation of avuncular status will be brought into play in another memory, and it is important that it is first mentioned in tangential connection with the mother's death. The narrator concludes his account noting that Henriette Beyle was buried in a cemetery in the rue des Muriers. Much has been written about the two scenes described by Henry Brulard as being founding memories. For all their primordiality, they are very succinctly reported and there is considerable wavering as to the dates of their occurrence. But the first attack on a woman - for that is what is at issue - dates from 1786. Henry, aged two or three, was gathering daisies in a field near the porte de Bonne. In his company was a Mme Pison du Galland, a "full-figured woman" (p. 551). This lady cousin demanded a kiss ("Embrasse-moi, Henry"), whereupon HB took aim and bit her "on the cheek or on the forehead." His Aunt Seraphie promptly proclaimed the young man to be a "monster" endowed with "an atrocious character." The next scene follows hard upon the first, with no transition. Young Henry, now four or five, was once again in the field near the porte de Bonne gathering plants. These he had taken back to his house where, on the balcony of the first floor, he was cutting them into small segments and lining them up. The kitchen knife he was using fell from his hands "near or on" Mme Chenevaz: "She was the meanest woman in the whole town (the mother of Candide Chenevaz)" (p. 551). Again Seraphie accuses him of having an "atrocious character," although, as Michel Crouzet has correctly pointed out, she is

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not supposed to make her calamitous entry into HB's life until after his mother dies {La " Vie," p. 24). The time of these two memories should really belong to the idyllic reign of the mother. Immediately on hearing himself thus accused, says Henry: " I revolted, I might have been four years old: my horror of religion dates from that period" (Oeuvres intimes, II, p. 552). Genevieve Mouillaud has pointed out that the attacks on Mesdames Pison du Galland and Chenevaz took place either just after or during pregnancies of Henriette Beyle ("Le Rouge et le noir" de Stendhal, pp. 191-98). The story being told through these memories, one of rivalry and aggression against a new family member and the mother who dared harbor him (for Beyle always seems to imagine the intruder as a male), corresponds to and corroborates my reading of chapter 32. However, although the two events in question may well have occurred, and while they may to some extent refer to early pregnancies, I suggest that they are both screen memories at once summarizing and masking the circumstances surrounding Henriette Beyle's death. If the two episodes may be situated near or during periods of pregnancy, when amalgamated and combined with Seraphie's recurrent and out-of-place accusations of guilt, they appear to refer to that pregnancy which turned out to be fatal. To continue using the model outlined by Freud in " Screen Memories," these twin events are vested with meaning in the light of a posterior event, to which they in fact refer. This view of things has the merit of explaining Seraphie's anachronistic entries on the scene as fictions whose syntactic function is to link them to the event being screened. If Seraphie's retrogressively imported presence belies what is at stake, it is the structural similarities between the two scenes and the cross-echoes of peculiar words which show them to be variants of a single story. And this narrative is not a fiction, but rather a revision of personal history. Let us examine the mechanisms by which the two "screen" memories are amalgamated. First, the text itself extends a fairly obvious invitation to construct simply through the sequential and unmediated presentation of material supposedly separated by two or three years. Both events have their origin in the same


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space, the field outside the porte de Bonne. (In fact, this detail registers as somewhat superfluous in the knife episode, an indication that its function is not narrative but associational.) Both events entail attacks on women followed by guilt-inspiring reprimands, each time emanating from Seraphie, and couched in the same language. Furthermore, in both scenes the same sort of hesitancies obstruct the telling of the deed. HB had bitten Mme Pison du Galland on the cheek or on the forehead. Likewise, the kitchen knife had fallen on or near the evil mother, here Mme Chenevaz. It is true that, to some extent, these hesitations lend an air of autobiographical verisimilitude to the story. After all, who can expect perfect recall of events which transpired fifty years earlier? On another level, however, these disjunctions belie a malaise. For when it is a question of divulging the actual target (on or near? a cheek or a forehead?), the narrator becomes confused. These grammatical hesitations, as I have already shown, are typically Stendhalian: in the fiction, they take the expanded form of alternative situations which coexist uncomfortably and which frequently revolve around pregnancies. That Mme Pison du Galland and Mme Chenevaz are both maternal stand-ins becomes more clear when one considers that the first was "full-figured" like Henriette, and the second is described as a wicked mother: the fusion of the two yields a sort of composite portrait of Henriette Beyle. The hypothesis that these two scenes, when aggregated, compose, mask, and repeat one more painful to recall is further borne out by another shared element, this one funerary in nature. I am referring to the heavy insistence in both reminiscences on bouquets and collections of flowers, evocative of the cemetery and its floral commemorations of death. If in the first case the youth contents himself with collecting bouquets as if in memoriam, in the second, he performs a symbolic gesture with his bouquet: having reaped and then mutilated the plants, he "sees himself" laying them out in an orderly fashion suggestive of the way a funeral bier is laid in its final resting place, neatly, next to others of its kind. There is, however, another scene conjured up in the Vie de

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Henry Brulard, one strongly resembling these crucial two episodes and which, for all that, has attracted scant critical attention, except regarding the dates of its occurrence. Here once again, HB can be seen throwing objects at women, although this time, for some reason, the entire episode takes place under the sign of extreme happiness: it is Henry Brulard's brief sojourn in Les Echelles in Savoy where his Uncle Romain lived. Indeed, so intense is the memory of happiness, that it threatens to derail the narrative: " I do not know whether or not I'll give up on this work. It seems to me that I could only paint that rapturous happiness, pure, fresh, and divine, through an enumeration of the boredom and the troubles which were completely absent from it" (Oeuvres intimes, II, p. 658). A strange sort of autobiographical truth, this, which cannot recount those extremes which, nonetheless, constitute the standard against which the rest of a life must take its measure. The account of the Les Echelles idyll is marked by the same hesitancies and incertitude, the same frantic date-searching which characterize other psychologically significant episodes of the Vie de Henry Brulard. Above all, Henry cannot determine exactly when the visit to his Uncle Romain and Aunt Camille had taken place. After much deliberation, based on historical circumstance (the date of the Terror in Lyons, for example), he concludes: " My divine sojourn in Les Echelles was thus in 1790 or 1791. I was seven or eight years old" (p. 658). We are thus faced anew with a disjunction, this one all the stranger since what is straddled and elided is Henriette Beyle's death. In 1790 she was still alive (critical consensus places the idyll in the summertime; she died on November 23). By summer 1791 she had been dead six months.13 Surely HB must recall whether he was mourning his mother at the time or not — unless, for some reason, the episode presents us with another of those yes-and-no situations whose function seems to be to equivocate on the subject of her death. In fact, the "seven or eight" formulation points to just such an equivocation. And yet how could Henriette Beyle be both dead and alive? Perhaps, once again, we must look to a maternal stand-in. Indeed, she had been implicitly designated in chapter 3 when

Stendhal: delivering a plot HB had substituted himself for his uncle in the eyes of his grandfather. If in some way HB saw himself as occupying Romain's place (just as he claimed to occupy his father's with respect to his mother), might not other privileges fall to him as well? What, for instance, of his aunt? My Aunt Camille Poncet, married to my Uncle Gagnon, a tall and lovely person, was the essence of kindness and cheerfulness. A year or two before this trip, near the Claix bridge... I had caught a momentary glimpse ["j'avais entrevu"] of her whiteflesha bit above her knee ... She was for me, when I thought of her, an object of the most ardent desire, (pp. 658-59) Indeed, this idyll might be subtitled "what Henry saw," since the visual mode prevails. And yet, it is less a matter of seeing, than of catching an occasional glimpse. A glimpse of an auntly leg, a glimpse of an acquaintance in the service of the King of Turin ("je ne fis que l'entrevoir" ["I just caught a glimpse of him," p. 660]), a glimpse of the sister of a well-known writer ("J'entrevis a ce voyage Mile Teresina Maistre" ["During this trip, I caught a glimpse of Mile Teresina Maistre," p. 663]). How to reconcile the vertiginous happiness of the episode, the desire for Aunt Camille, the hurling of objects at women (as we shall see presently), and finally, the catching of glimpses is a question to be addressed. But first I shall undertake a more detailed account of this pastoral, noting at the same time its similarities with earlier episodes. In this case, the connections often reside at the level of the single word or name. On his land at Berlandet, near Les Echelles, a M. Bonne (porte de la Bonne - knife, bite) gave two splendid outdoor parties: A une seconde partie a Berlandet, je me revoltai par jalousie [je me revoltai — knife]: une demoiselle que j'aimais avait bien traite un rival de vingt ou vingt-cinq ans [Mme Pison du Galland, une femme de vingt-cinq ans qui avait de Pembonpoint - bite]. Mais quel etait l'objet de mes amours? ... Apres ma revoke par jalousie ...je jetai des pierres a ces dames [female targets - bite, knife]. Le grand Corbeau (officier en semestre)

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me prit et me mit sur un pommier ou murier [a la joue ou au front, pres ou sur — bite, knife; the cemetery rue des Muriers] ... entre deux branches dont je n'osais pas descendre. Je sautai, je me fis mal, je m'enfuis vers Z. (At a second party at Berlandet, I revolted out of jealousy [I revolted - knife]: a young lady of my liking had favored a rival twenty or twenty-five years old [Mme Pison du Galland, a twenty-five year old woman who was full-figured - bite]. But what was the object of my love? After my revolt out of jealousy... I threw rocks at these ladies [female targets - bite, knife]. The tall Corbeau (an officer on furlough) took me and put me in an apple or a mulberry tree [on the cheek or on the forehead, near or on - bite, knife; the cemetery rue des Muriers] ... between two branches from which I dared not get down. I jumped, I hurt myself, I took flight toward Z.) (p. 663) It is difficult not to see in this Berlandet pastoral another articulation of the drama which had earlier combined pregnancy and death, this time, however, performed in a major key. All the elements are present, from HB's desire for a female relative and jealousy of a rival, to his making women a target of violence. Critics generally place the Les Echelles idyll in the summer of 1791: it is tempting to situate it before June 13. For it was on that date that Camille Poncet, she so "ardently" desired by Henry, gave birth to a daughter. In fact, how else can one account for the sheer, unbridled rapture of this version of the screen memory when the other three episodes in which HB targeted women were steeped in anguish and guilt? Let us look to the individual utterance: over and over again HB tells us that at Les Echelles he was afforded a fleeting glimpse of heaven: " I took a trip to Les Echelles; it was like a stay in heaven ... The sound of the Guiers [river] ... became a sacred sound for me, one which transported me instantly to heaven" (p. 658, my emphasis). What was it that HB gleaned in this divine crossing-over? He nearly refuses to say: "The difficulty, the deep regret over poorly rendering and thus spoiling a heavenly memory... causes me true pain" (p. 659, my emphasis). When did he catch that glimpse? " I was eight years old when I had that vision of heaven" (p. 660, my emphasis). If the disjunction has disappeared, bringing the date into


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brutal focus, it is perhaps because the ambiguity (seven or eight? mother dead or not?) has been cleared up, momentarily at least. It is as if HB had been permitted to see his angelic mother (in the pregnant figure of Camille Poncet) as she had been before her death six months earlier, a time when fate's coup de theatre was still reversible and when HB was still without moral blemish. Or, in another reading, this celestial re-vision yields a mother successfully delivered. Either solution is a divine one. In the Stendhalian code, throwing objects at a woman appears to designate a death wish upon a mother with child; at Les Echelles, since Seraphie is not present to utter her accusations, the entire configuration takes on a benevolent cast, becoming a fantasy of restoration. But more than this, it is a revision of the drama which had been played out six months before. Once again it will be useful to conceive the shift in grammatical terms. The bite and the knife episodes might be formulated as: " I wished death; my mother died; thus I am guilty." The revised Les Echelles version, based on Henry's glimpse of heaven, contains a new element which inflects the meaning of the psycho-syllogism, deflecting guilt. It would read: "Although I wished death [the rock throwing], no harm came to my mother [I caught a glimpse of her myself]; thus I am innocent." This alone, as a gesture of exoneration, would explain the intensity of HB's happiness. It is essential that Seraphie be absent from the event and, moreover, that this absence be explicit, for she is the ingredient which signifies guilt: "Seraphie, clericalism, everything that was so awful and so powerful in Grenoble is masked in Les Echelles" (p. 658). The switch to the present ("est masque") betrays the extent to which the entire adventure is a construction.14 It was during this same idyllic visit over the mountain to the then-independent Duchy of Savoy that Henry visited a grotto: "What to say about a trip to the Grotto? ... What to say about a hunt in the Berland woods ... The Berland forests and its cliffs ... became for me a dear and sacred ideal. That is where I pictured all Ismen's magical charms in Jerusalem de'livre" (pp. 664—67). What began as an intensely personal glimpse of

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heaven ends up sharing borders with fiction, recalling Freud's statement that memories can become amalgamated according to a process "almost like works of fiction." That the entire Les Echelles construction can be linked to a maternal recovery becomes increasingly clear when one reads another version of it, again both personal and literary, sketched out in an 1808 letter to Beyle's sister, Pauline, on the eve of her marriage: Here are my reveries, my dear friend: I am almost ashamed of them ... I was reading an author whom I neither knew nor appreciated much: the works of Count Gasparo Gozzi, it was La Punizione nel precipizio. Queen Elvire, forced into hiding in an immense forest, meets her son, a charming young man who does not know she is his mother ... Elvire had had no news of him since his birth ... She comes to him and says " Shepherd, see how well I like you. Come back tomorrow at dawn; this dark grotto leads to another grotto beyond the mountains where I have stronger and safer haven." Hearing his mistress, Angela, read those words to her son, reports Henri to Pauline, " I felt myself weeping like a child" (Correspondance, I, pp. 442—43).

Henri Beyle's lifelong mourning for his mother is perhaps one of the unavoidable issues of Stendhaliana, along with his muchprofessed hatred for his father. Levowitz-Treu has seen in the women Beyle loved a series of maternal substitutes. This is probably no more clear than in the case of his cousin Alexandrine Daru, the wife of his protector, Pierre Daru, described as the mother par excellence.15 That Alexandrine Daru should have died in childbirth capped a drama begun, in fact, before HB's birth. For Henri Beyle was actually Henri II. An original Henri Beyle had preceded him by one year, dying shortly after birth on January 16, 1782. And Henri II was fully aware of this brother, even to the point of passing himself off for the dead sibling when the interest of career demanded he appear older. Writing to the due de Massa to solicit a position as Commissioner of the Council of State in 1810, he states: " I shall immediately submit to Your Excellency's Ministry a deed signed by my father, in 1808 ... To this deed I shall attach my birth certificate proving that I was


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born in Grenoble on January 16, 1782" (I, p. 557). Thus HB has found a loophole in the Code civil authorizing him to be someone else in the sight of the law. Indeed, how could Beyle have conceived himself otherwise than as surrounded by dead brothers, one whose place and name as eldest son he had usurped, and the other, the potential usurper of maternal affections, whom he had executed? I shall return to the collision between a personal and a political discourse centering on fraternalism. In the meantime, it is perhaps in these other versions of the self, these tiny beings purely potential, that one can situate Beyle's penchant for pseudonymity, for disguise, indeed, for being bodily someone else and somewhere other than where his cruel fate had placed him. In this connection one recalls that odd text, certainly destined by Stendhal to remain private, Les Privileges. It is a document composed of a series of articles, drawn up in the most legalistic of forms, which derogate to the "undersigned" - HB - under specific circumstances and subject to precise conditions, various miraculous privileges. For example, Article 7 states: Miracle. Four times per year he will be able to change into the animal of his choice, and then change back into a man. Four times per year he will be able to change into the man of his choice and further to concentrate his life into that of an animal which, in case of the decease or other impediment of man number 1 into whom he was transformed, can restore him to the natural form of the privileged being. Thus the privileged person can occupy two bodies at once four times per year and for an unlimited duration each time. (Oeuvres intimes, II, p. 984) As commentators have pointed out, it is with some uneasiness that one reads this document. It is as though one had intruded into the recesses of that part of the self given over to primitive childhood beliefs in magic, in the efficacy of rituals performed in distinct sequence (Les Privileges display a meticulous ordering), and in the blurring of all distinctions between wish and reality. The capacity to imagine oneself other, elsewhere - even dead at an earlier time and still living - which bespeaks a radical fragmentation of self — may be ascribable to the circumstances surrounding HB's own birth and his perceived role in the death

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of a sibling. For Henri, to be unborn is soon to be dead, to be delivered into the world is to die or to be guilty, to have escaped that death is to have found some loophole in the cosmic scheme of things. If Stendhal makes no references to Buddhism or to doctrines of metempsychosis, he certainly evinces a fascination for tales of magic, such as the Thousand and One Nights. One magical spectacle which bewitched Henri Beyle in Milan in 1817 was Le tre Melarancie. In a letter to his friend Adolphe de Mareste he describes the plot which revolves around the changing of three princesses into oranges and how they eventually regain their true form. Night after night Beyle returned to La Scala (whose very name echoes " les echelles ") in order to see repeated one peculiar part of the play: " I begin my little visits to la Scala, staying until midnight which is when Le tre Melarancie begin to swell up on the table of their father, the king, and become pregnant with the princesses.16 The rest not being worth anything, I return home" (Correspondance, I, p. 880). What is obsessively repeated is the pregnancy: the outcome is only to be feared and thus, to be fled. It is difficult to imagine a psycho-construct more central to the Stendhalian imagination than that of pregnancy, and yet its importance has gone relatively unnoticed in Stendhaliana. Gilbert Chaitin, Levowitz-Treu, and Robert Andre have all treated the elaborate uterine reconstruction in La Chartreuse de Parme and, to a lesser extent, the animosity which HB must have felt toward his mother during her fatal pregnancy has been noted. But what has escaped notice is the fact that this figure traverses the autobiographical writings and the fiction, in the form of fleeting metonymic references as we shall see, or in the form of entire episodes elaborately transposed in other cases (the conspiracy, the bite, the knife, and the Les Echelles episodes). Sometimes, for instance, a single word suffices to trigger the association in Beyle's mind. When as a young man Henri Beyle had followed his actress-mistress Melanie to Marseilles, he made passing acquaintance with a M. Samadet and his two daughters. The name of one daughter, Henriette (who, incidentally, is never mentioned thereafter), seems to call forth two other terms which seem faintly absurd within the manifest context: " Sa fille


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ainee, Henriette, rit de tout... L'autre est une grosse stupide qui rtaccouche jamais que d'un sourire niais" ("His elder daughter, Henriette, laughs about everything... The other is a fat [in French, a synonym for "pregnant"] ninny who only gives birth to an idiotic smile") (Oeuvres intimes, I, p. 388; my emphasis). With the terms, "Henriette," "grosse," and "n'accoucher que," one witnesses an invasion of the manifest semantic content by the latent plot, an invasion, indeed, whose magnitude stretches the limits of language to such an extent that it threatens to derail meaning. The remark, formulated grammatically to yield a judgement regarding two uninteresting young women, becomes instead (or in addition) a statement about sterile pregnancies, about fullnesses which lead to emptiness. Now, such references one might be tempted to assign to certain periods of Henri Beyle's life, to particular times of trouble as, for example, following the death of the once ardently sought after Mme Daru. And yet one discovers that these same structures emerge in similar manner throughout Stendhal's autobiographical writings. Newly appointed French Consul thanks to the July Revolution, he is still favorably impressed by Louis-Philippe, to whom he refers as "my brother" in coded letters to friends. Beyle analyzes the king's success in the July Days to Adolphe de Mareste in the following terms: "II n'y avait de paix pour mon frere que dans la plus absolue bonne foi. Moi, j'aurais couche avec le grand cit[oyen]. II a fusille la canaille au Champ de Mars jadis. Cette ligne devait enfanter le salut de mon frere et peut-etre de la France" ("The peace awaiting my brother could only arise out of the most utter good faith. Myself, I would have slept with the big citizen. He shot the rabble on the Champs de Mars in the early days. That manoeuvre was to give birth to my brother's safety and perhaps that of France") (Correspondance, II, p. 218; my emphasis). A statement about politics masks another pertaining to pregnancy, and safe deliveries of brothers. One might even venture to say that the very choice of the code word ("frere" for "roi") is determined by the possibility which it offers of articulating the unspeakable.

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In fact, not only do such allusions pepper Stendhal's Journal, his various autobiographical writings, and his correspondence, but it would seem that, in his official capacity as diplomatic representative of France abroad, he would go out of his way to help those who found themselves in situations psychologically analogous to his own. I am here referring to the 1834 letter to Sainte-Beuve, written from Civitavecchia, in which Beyle reports having protected a thief condemned to twenty years labor for uttering a malediction on the Madonna. The plot with which the autobiography is so pregnant goes so far as to dictate biography. Indeed, it should be increasingly clear that in Stendhal's case, the boundaries separating the self-in-text of fiction, the self-as-text of autobiography, and the self-in-life are anything but clearly defined.

STENDHALIAN FICTIONS! PLOTTING THE UNSPEAKABLE

Thus far the present analysis has taken the autobiographical writings as its exclusive object, although we have briefly encountered Henri Beyle actively engaged as a reader extracting his own message from someone else's fiction. So numerous are the articulations of the pregnancy plot, and so varied its mode of performance, that inevitably one begins to view the Stendhalian text as a vast palimpsest whose surface is continually being erased to accommodate new inscription. I would now like to turn to Stendhal's fiction with the contention that the same revising occurs therein. It is well known that the prospect of ending was always problematic for Henri Beyle.17 Indeed, it might be argued that closure in recriture stendhalienne becomes an impossibility precisely owing to the frequent intrusions of the palimpsest-plot. For if the Stendhalian text is palimpsestic, and thus by its very nature open, the palimpsest also shows traces of evolution. While the narrative functions (pregnancy, maternal and fraternal death, guilt, etc.) remain stable throughout the oeuvre, there is a systematic and purposive shifting progressively being operated at the level of the equivocation, a shifting which is obedient to


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the logic of plot insofar as it proceeds toward a denouement. Equivocation is a way of settling accounts which must take place before the plot can begin to negotiate its next sequential function. Such, at least, is my thesis in this final section. Hence I am proposing that by reading through pregnancy, one uncovers a masterplot, one which resists containment in a single work, being instead elaborated across the expanses of prose which define Stendhal's writing career. Nonetheless, the devices of this masterplot, to the extent that they project narrative denouement beyond any particular literary piece, work against the grain of novelistic closure, threatening to cause individual plots to miscarry, as I hope to show. Single novels are thus susceptible to being read as chapters within this narrative superstructure, segments obedient to a grander chronological sequence. While each novel incontestably has an internal logic all its own, it still anticipates an ending lying outside its pages. Let me begin with one of Stendhal's earliest works, his Histoire de la peinture en Italie, published in 1817 but written some time earlier. I shall summarize the episode in question since it is relatively unknown.18 In his introduction to the Histoire, by way of elucidating the Italian character, Louis-Cesar Alexandre Bombet (alias Henri Beyle) transcribes a historical anecdote, a gesture which in fact frames his literary career which was to close with the Chroniques italiennes (1839) of similar inspiration. Beginning with the story of Come I, Stendhal chronicles the fate of this sixteenth-century ruler's children: his first daughter was poisoned, the second came to grief at the end of a dagger. Their mother, "went to hide her sorrow in her beautiful Pisa gardens," taking two of her sons with her. A slight dispute led one son to stab the other, and such was the wrath of Come that "the mother and her two sons together went to the grave" {Histoire, p. 18).

However, it is part 3 of the anecdote, the death of the remaining son, Francois, which concerns us here. A poor Florentine, Pietro Buonaventuri, goes to Venice, where he falls in love with a powerful noble's daughter, Bianca Capello, who is kept sequestered and can only be viewed at a high window of

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her father's palace. Just as with Fabrice and Clelia in the later work, La Chartreuse de Parme, "necessity prompted them to invent a language" (p. 19). To make a long story short, the guilty couple, having incurred the ire of Bianca's father, must leave Venice, which is swarming with bounty hunters, to seek refuge in Florence. It is there that Come's son Frangois falls in love with the now-married Bianca. After a time, her husband (who has coexisted comfortably in a " triangolo equilatero " arrangement) dies, conveniently leaving Bianca available to marry the prince, which she eventually does. The trick is now to produce an heir. No child forthcoming, and Masses and prayers notwithstanding, "the duchess had recourse to her confessor... who undertook to bring this great enterprise to successful conclusion. She had nausea, repugnances, and was even confined to bed; she received the compliments of the entire court" (p. 25). What this witty insinuation fails to disclose, however, is that the duchess' pregnancy is a fraud arranged by her confessor. But danger lurks in the robes of the cardinal, Francois' brother, who remains the heir apparent until Bianca has produced a male child. As Bianca nears the term of her "pregnancy," the resourceful confessor, who has more than one trick up his sleeve, enters the room with a male baby concealed in this very sleeve. The watchful cardinal sees through this counterfeit delivery, but withholds from denouncing the fakery, ostensibly awaiting a propitious moment. Bianca attempts to remove the threat by dining with him and poisoning his food, but the cardinal detects the plot and Bianca and her unwitting prince succumb instead to the poison. In the end, the cardinal ascends the throne and nothing more is heard of the baby. As I have suggested, Stendhalian equivocation often takes its toll on narrative logic. If the truth must out, it is at the expense of coherence. In this case, the babe turns into a bit of narrative excess, eventually missing in action and unaccounted for in the final tallying up of closure. On the other hand, this very issue will prove to be the narrative dilemma underlying much of Stendhalian fiction: how to dispose of the male infant? Such, it turns out, is the business of the masterplot.


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In the Bianca Capello episode, equivocation is hardly an elaborate affair: the yes-and-no revolves only around the fact of pregnancy and birth. Yes, there was a birth, but no, it only seemed like it. And yet, when all is said and done, the attempt here to fake birth was bungled: it is as if in this early work Stendhal were unable to pull off the clear-cut denial (the no!) necessary to offset the troublesome fact. The work of equivocation has been botched in this early piece and it will take Lucien Leuwen (1835) to remedy the failure. Meanwhile, it is not insignificant that the two episodes leading up to this more elaborate one feature women as targets of violence and maternal and fraternal death. In Le Rouge et le noir (1830), the strategies of equivocation are more complex because they embrace more elements. Julien Sorel does in fact take aim and he shoots Mme de Renal but she does not die. A jury subsequently finds him guilty. This variant of the tale, still far less complicated than chapter 32 of the Vie, yields results which are quite the opposite: here what is being called into question is not Julien's guilt (he clearly fired the shot and he was most definitely inculpated), but rather the fact of maternal death. Furthermore, there is undeniably a true pregnancy, but by the novel's end Mathilde de la Mole has not been delivered of Julien's "son." This narratological breach of closure has the psychological merit of leaving the uncomfortable issue of filial birth in suspense. The yes-and-no structure is thus double in Le Rouge: yes, there was a shot; no, it was not fatal; and yes, there was an infant; no, it never saw the light of day. As a novel, Lucien Leuwen was perhaps destined to remain unfinished. We know that Stendhal derived most of his plot skeletons from other authors' narratives. As for Lucien Leuwen, even if Stendhal borrowed to some extent from his friend Mme Gaulthier's Le Lieutenant, the manuscript of his own novel reveals an author continually modifying the basic structure of the narrative. In the manuscript of Lucien, perhaps admonishing himself to settle on one plan of action once and for all, Stendhal explained the processes governing plot formation in terms which, by now, should scarcely be surprising:

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In the embryo, the spinal column is formed first, the rest is established on this column. It is the same here: first the love plot, then the silly episodes which are obstacles to love, deferring its pleasures, the way in a symphony Haydn defers the conclusion of a phrase. {Romans et nouvelles, I, p. 743)

If plot development mimes intrauterine ontogenesis, the resultant literary production is itself analogous to an infant. It is certainly true that the literary process as gestation is a common enough conception of authorial labors. Often Stendhal speaks of his own travails in terms of birth (see for instance, Correspondance, I, pp. 853,854,895). More interesting perhaps is the way the metaphor of plot as a flesh-and-bones production recalls another more celebrated Stendhalian metaphor, that of love analogized as crystallization around a branch, set forth by Stendhal as theory in De /'amour. The figure of the branch thrown into the Salzburg mine about which crystals slowly cluster, thereby obscuring the referential (love) object, conjoins with plot viewed as a circumvertebral accretion in a master trope: for both embryology and crystallography repose on the concept of a matrix - the womb, in one case, the mathematical structuration of crystals in the other. Nor was this meeting of the twain fortuitous, as Stendhal makes apparent in a note pencilled into the Vie de Henry Brulard which seeks to explain the concept of crystallization as " [a] kind of madness which shows all the perfections and everything becoming perfect in the object which takes effect on the matrix" [Oeuvres intimes, II, p. 805). The matrix is the thing, then, from which love and plot issue forth in an elaboration which proceeds according to geologic and organic laws. The trope - plot as embryo - is, of course, a doubly-pregnant one to the extent that it operates a complete fusion of narrative form in the abstract, and the content of the Stendhalian plot in particular. The master narrative will move from plotting against the embryo (which is tantamount to a plot waged against the author's own plot defined as embryo) to a plotting out and delivery of the male child successfully accomplished by Henri Beyle in his last completed novel. In Lucien Leuwen, however, it is still a matter of plotting


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against the infant, a stance which points to this novel's incompletion as a refusal to deliver, to make use of an expression which, in this case, surpasses the purely rhetorical. And typically, the exclusion of the infans is brought about through the work of equivocation and the familiar yes-and-no gesture. The situation as it is presented in Lucien Leuwen is nothing other than a more complex version of the Bianca Capello episode. The dashing protagonist, Lucien, in a military post in Nancy, falls in love with Mme de Chasteller. Because Lucien is the son of a well-to-do Restoration banker and a Parisian to boot, he is despised by the old, ugly, and generally diabolical Dr. Du Poirier. The latter decides to cool Lucien's ardor for the virtuous Mme de Chasteller by simulating a birth scene under the very eyes of the horrified young spectator. Once again, the mechanisms of repetition are invoked at the expense of narrative credibility as the palimpsest plot begins to erupt and invade the surface. For Du Poirier's scheme to fake a delivery approaches some of the most ingenious quid pro quo scenes to be found in the theater, scenes authorized - as the novel as a genre is not - by a willing suspension of disbelief. Indeed, Du Poirier will manage (a) to make Mme de Chasteller and all her friends believe she has been seriously ill for a long time; (b) to have Lucien introduced by someone else into a small enclosure from which he can half-witness the proceedings; (c) to procure a male baby, at the same time sending away any witnesses who know Mme de Chasteller was never pregnant; (d) finally, to conduct the counterfeit birth, ''bringing forth" the stand-in baby without the bedridden M m e de Chasteller ever suspecting an event has taken place. Here,

then, is how the situation appeared to Lucien: From there [his perch], Lucien could see quite well what was happening in the next room and heard nearly everything that was said in the entire apartment. Suddenly, he heard the wailing of a newborn infant. He saw the doctor arrive breathless in the antechamber carrying the baby in some swaddling clothes which to him appeared to be blood-stained. [Romans et nouvelles, I, p. 1061)

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By straining the limits of narrative plausibility, equivocation here has its way: there was and there was not a baby. Whereas the attempt to equivocate was bungled in the Bianca Capello episode because the cardinal was able to see through the event as a counterfeit, with the wily older figure (in this case, Du Poirier) actually constructing the simulacrum, the yes-and-no can emerge as a clear structure. The baby is set aside on a bed and once again the narrative will refuse to assimilate him. To pursue this analysis along chronological lines, we have already seen in some detail that the Vie de Henry Brulard (1835-36) contains several articulations of the tale in question. In the knife and the bite episodes, what is undergoing negotiation is the degree of Henry's responsibility. If the youth took aim and bit a feminine cheek, the knife simply dropped on a woman " by accident." The Les Echelles incident may furnish one of the most interesting versions of this palimpsest-text, for it constitutes a structure of exoneration. With its grottos and movement of ascending steps ("les e'chelles") and passage from France into a motherland, Savoy, it evokes still another variant which is encoded in the Pauline letter. There, an apparently guilty young prince was reunited with his lost mother who beckoned to him to follow her through a grotto into a promised land. While I do maintain that the same narrative ingredients contribute to the confection of both Stendhal's fiction and Beyle-Brulard's autobiography, one fundamental difference remains to be pointed out. Due to its third-person narrative apparatus, the fiction can always afford to designate the maternal object as mother. However, when the " j e " assumes the discourse and the event moves closer to home, the mother can only assume symbolic representation, either through other women, or in the somewhat odd figure of a tree. What such a veiling does accomplish in this economy of compensation is the liberating of affect associated with event. The shot which detonates in the church at Verrieres continues to stun readers of Le Rouge, for the novel remains absolutely silent on Julien's thoughts leading up to the crime. But the full range of emotions, from extreme anguish to intense happiness, can be given


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articulation in the Vie precisely because the identity of the target-object is always being called into question in one way or another. Del Litto claims that if the autobiography breaks off precociously with Brulard's triumphal trans-Alpine crossing, its continuation is to be found, translated into the mode of fiction: "Nonetheless, the Vie de Henry Brulard will have an ideal sequel, so to speak: it will be La Chartreuse de Parme" (Oeuvres intimes, I I ,

p. 1313). I would like to conclude this cross-reading of Stendhal's narratives with two of his last works, both published in 1839 and which bear strong resemblance to each other as Martineau notes in his preface: " I t is singularly intriguing to think that V Abbesse de Castro is, in light of its date of composition, absolutely contemporary with La Chartreuse de Parme and that in both of these stories, very similar novelistic peripeteia can be seen" (Romans et nouvelles, I I , p. 535).

L Abbesse de Castro is one of the more appreciated short stories of the Chroniques italiennes, most of which are based on sixteenthand seventeenth-century Italian tales revolving around crimes of passion. I shall briefly summarize its plot, a plot far more byzantine than that of La Chartreuse, noting to begin with that the first seventy-five pages of the Pleiade edition are devoted to the courtship of the poor but brave Jules Branciforte and the rich and noble Helene de Campireali, their vows of eternal faithfulness, their chaste rendezvous, and attempts to free Helene from the convent where she has been interned by her family until a more appropriate conjugal match can be found — in short, the entire menu of peripeteia constituting the love intrigue. Theirs is a union, however, which is destined to go unconsummated. When in the remaining fifteen pages, with ten years having passed and believing Jules dead, the virginal Helene, now the abbess of the convent, breezily takes a lover for whom she has nothing but contempt, becomes pregnant, and secretly delivers a male child, one realizes that here again, plot and character cogency have been sacrificed to a reetching of the palimpsest-plot. That all the elements of this structure should be present in UAbbesse is not surprising, but the fact that certain

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hostile attitudes toward the Maternal are given explicit, syntactic (i.e., causal) articulation rather than taking symbolic form as in other examples seen, makes this text a particularly significant one. Jules and Helene had begun their courtship in defiance of paternal wishes. One night which they had spent together out of doors, Helene had been on the verge of yielding to Jules when the sound of bells chiming the Ave Maria wafted through the air. The couple withheld consummation, placing their eternal union - for so they pledged it to be - under the protection of the Madonna. Still, Jules, devout but no less desirous for that, agreed to forestall his pleasure only if Helene consented to surrender herself to him at a later moment of his choosing. To this she agreed. Alas, as circumstances would have it, Jules killed Helene's brother who had been intent on guarding his family's honor by protecting his sorella. This is the apparent knot of the drama, for henceforth Helene's mother will do anything in her power to keep her daughter from marrying the man who killed her son. The most expedient way to do this was to put Helene into the Castro Convent where Jules could only manage verbal contact and Helene would be unable to make good her promise. At this point, Jules gives cautious expression to a wish which the present analysis has been at pains to coax out of pregnant silences, equivocations, symbolic presentations, and outright denials in both the fiction and the autobiography. Thinks the frustrated Jules on seeing his prospects of a Helenic habeas corpus growing ever dimmer: It was in hearing the morning bells sounding the Ave Maria, a prayer dedicated to the Madonna, that he had been seduced then, and incited to a generous act which he now regarded as his life's greatest error. But, out of respect, he dared not go further and express the entirety of the idea which forced itself on his mind. [Romans et nouvelles, I I , p. 606, my

emphasis.)

Seduced by the Virgin Mary into not seducing Helene, it is clear that the thought which Jules is on the point of harboring, though he dare not, is the same criminal wish expressed by the thief


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whom Consul Henri Beyle reported having taken under his wing in 1834: a pox on the Madonna. What keeps Jules from taking his nascent wish to its extreme is the following thought: "If I fell into error through the inspiration of the Madonna, must she not, by virtue of her infinite justice, cause some circumstance to arise [" faire naitre "] which restores my happiness?" (p. 606). "Faire naitre" is precisely what this narrative aims to do, I maintain, although Jules will never number among the happy few. Thus far a brother has been killed and there has been an embryonically formulated and vehemently denied wish of death upon the Mother. Yet something crucial has happened in the four years separating Lucien Leuwen from UAbbesse de Castro. For whereas the birth scene of Leuwen was a trumped-up affair whose psychological aim seemed to be the denial of an event, UAbbesse presents us with a bona fide pregnancy and delivery: in short, with an affirmation of the event in question. A palimpsest in itself, the actual birth scene reproduces the others in its clandestine and urgent nature, while at the same time placing itself under the sign of authenticity rather than fraudulence. Furthermore, it is the issue of a successful outcome which seems to be under negotiation here: the midwife whom Helene engages insists that two of the abbess' confidants share in the secret. "Doubtless," intervenes the narrator, "she had in mind the accusation of infanticide" (p. 640). What is being denied in the text is the whole notion of murder, a notion which stridently comes to the fore with the utterance of the term "infanticide" and recedes when Helene is successfully delivered. Once the child is born, however, the same structures as seen with Bianca Capello and Lucien Leuwen are brought into play. The midwife secretes the babe out of the only-too-pregnable convent walls to ... where else but a grotto: "Having arrived in the open country and pursued by a dreadful terror, she took refuge in a grotto" (p. 641). This locus, so sacred in the Beylist imagination, has gone relatively unacknowledged in Stendhalian criticism. The grotto which cradles Julien Sorel's remains, the grotto of Jerusalem delivre which connects the land

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of the long-lost mother to the here-and-now, the grotto at Les Echelles where Henry caught certain celestial glimpses, are all clearly spaces of recovery linked to the Madonna and Child icon. Returning to UAbbesse, once the infant has touched this natural "home base," he is even baptized and given a name, Alexandre. But there the story does not end or it would not be part of the Chroniques italiennes. Word of the abbess' sin leaks out and Helene designates a false partner in crime, not in order to spare the guilty lover, but because "he will be able to care for my son" (p. 644). This is the last mention of the neonate who joins the fate of all the tiny siblings which people Stendhal's narrative limbo. The Mother, however, is tried and found guilty. Jules, of course, returns having covered himself in glory in the service of the king of Spain, and Helene, grief-struck, stabs herself. As I hope to have shown, this version of the palimpsest contains important revisions, and through it the masterplot advances one significant step further toward denouement. The pregnancy is no longer being refuted; moreover, a child is successfully born and the text can be seen making tentative efforts to incorporate him. What seems to be under equivocation in LAbbesse de Castro is the issue of guilt. For the point is heavily underscored that the death wish on the mother is only almost uttered, and that measures are taken to guarantee against the accusation of infanticide. This is a crucial strategy whereby the filial role in the psycho-drama is in the process of being diminished. For it is only by denying guilt in advance that the masterplot can actually articulate what thus far has remained unmentionable. Such refusal of responsibility can only be buttressed by shifting the guilt elsewhere, and this time it is the mother (and not the Julien Sorel figure) who will stand trial. She is incriminated of betraying Jules, of having become pregnant " against her vows," and finally of her own death. No longer the target of someone else's violence, she has become her own target. It was seen earlier that if" Pierre " is the onomastic rock upon which the Vie de Henry Brulard is constructed, it is because of the


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evocative richness with which this name is imbued. Not the least of its merits is to conjure up " Pierre Bayle," a name I have read to be a kind of effigy whose function is to attract death upon itself rather than on its namesake, Henri Beyle. The bonds of kinship linking UAbbesse to La Chartreuse, besides being thematic in nature as Martineau remarked, are of an onomastic order as well. It can scarcely be a coincidence that Alexandre was the name of the babe first baptized in UAbbesse only to be put aside, since the name crops up later within the recognized subtext of La Chartreuse. Indeed, Stendhal was quite explicit that the story of his protagonist, Fabrice del Dongo, was spun out of the threads of the life story of Alexandre Farnese who acceded to the papacy under the name of Paul III. It is as if the Stendhalian text were always picking up the strands of one of its previous unfinished versions with each renewed attempt to deal with the fate of the dead infant. For if Stendhal was able to compose his massive masterpiece, La Chartreuse de Parme, in an astonishing fifty-two days, it is probably because its destination — the death of a baby — had, at last, become self-evident to him. " I composed la Chart[reuse]," he points out in a letter to Balzac, "with a view to Sandrino's death, an event which strongly affected me in life" (cited by Berthier in Stendhal, p. 102).19 The clarity with which the aim is set forth, however, in no way implies a linear narrative trajectory. Fabrice's muddled and inadvertent venture onto the Waterloo battlefield, the cloak-and-dagger style episodes, the intrigues of the Parmese court, to mention only a few aspects of the novel, contribute to a creation of baroque profusion and diffuseness situated, from a compositional standpoint, at the antipodes from Le Rouge et le noir whose plot lines are unidirectional and in which there is a much clearer sense of convergence. In his introduction to La Chartreuse, Martineau attempts to parry any potential criticism of novelistic incoherence in the following manner: "The logic never resides in the events, but in the feelings of the characters whose passion carries them away" [Romans et nouvelles, II, p. 15). The logic, indeed, must be sought elsewhere.

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For beyond any doubt La Chartreuse de Parme contains the most fully elaborated representation to be found in Stendhal's fiction of the matri-filial drama, with a clear regressus ad uterum, delivery of the protagonist, birth and death of a son, and maternal decease. And, as Martineau sensed, the narrative apparatus reflects the strain imposed upon it by the obtrusion of the other text, the br/other's text. Critics often conceive of La Chartreuse in architectural terms. This is true partially because of the centrality of the Farnese Tower in which Fabrice is imprisoned and which is something like the matrix of the entire narrative edifice, and also because the labyrinthine meanderings of the plot do truly take on a subterranean aspect.20 Furthermore, Chaitin and Andre have both demonstrated that during Fabrice's internment in the Tower a womb-like environment is created. That Fabrice is delivered from prison after nine months attached to a cord leaves little question as to the symbolism of the episode. Yet the novel does not end on this literary act of palingenesis. It comes to rest, in fact, where no other fiction of Stendhal's had been able to: on an articulation of the unspeakable. Indeed, Berthier has underscored the almost imponderable character of this ending. "That the enormous Chartreuse," he writes, "should construct a mausoleum around the body of a child both stuns and stupefies... the novelistic edifice builds a gigantic tomb of words for the son of Fabrice and Clelia" (Stendhal, p. 101). The male infant whose birth was either denied in the earlier writings (Bianca Capello, Lucien Leuwen), or who existed but never managed to be born (Le Rouge et le noir), or who was born but not appropriated by the discourse (L Abbesse de Castro), is here no longer a bit of narrative residue, a bothersome appendix to the palimpsest-text, but instead, and at long last, the point on which all psycho-narrative energies converge. What has all along been deceptively relegated to the margins here assumes its central importance as a fact "which strongly affected me in life." Fabrice's son is at last born and entombed and the masterplot has finally staged its denouement. Nonetheless, this denouement is not accomplished - as indeed no significant action ever is -


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without equivocation. For not least among the many peripeteia is another fakery — not of a birth this time, but indeed of its sequel, the infant's death. Sandrino is the illegitimate son of Fabrice and Clelia, who by now is married. Fabrice would like to have his son under his own roof and to this end, the infant's illness, an illness which is supposed to lead to death, is counterfeited. It is to be a death which occurs in appearance only, affording Fabrice the opportunity of kidnapping a child whom everyone except Clelia believes to have succumbed to a mortal illness. This is an overly elaborate plot, indeed, and in this redolent of Lucien Leuwen's trumped-up delivery enactment. It is also an intrigue which fails because the child really does sicken and does, in point of fact, end up dying. Once again, the interference of the palimpsest-text asserts itself at the expense of narrative plausibility. Surely there must have been more efficient ways of putting the son to rest? And once again, narrative efficacy is to be sought elsewhere, namely in the strategies of equivocation. With the child's birth firmly established by this point (since " he " had also managed to be born in UAbbesse), the issue under negotiation here by the masterplot is the fact of the infant's subsequent death. The palimpsest-plot undergoing constant and varying articulation throughout Stendhal's oeuvre has never managed to deliver this denouement other than in symbolic form. This is so because the conclusion, the "infanticide," with all its baggage of death-wishing and guilt, has ever been the unspeakable. La Chartreuse succeeds in acknowledging, affirming, and even trumpeting the child's death, first by its simulation, which is then followed by the real thing in another of those yes-and-no narrative gestures. That this death can even be staged, however equivocally, must be attributed to the fact that the burden of the guilt has been transferred onto the mother, Clelia. Indeed, the mechanisms of this transfer had already been set in motion in U Abbesse de Castro.

Clelia, it turns out, had taken the by-now familiar vow to the equally familiar Madonna nevermore to see her lover, Fabrice. This vow the couple circumvented by casuistry: seeing, after all,

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does not preclude feeling. Their relations had hence always taken place under the veil of darkness. It is when Sandrino falls ill that Clelia, lighting candles to take care of him, spies Fabrice, thereby breaking her vow. This vision "prefigured Sandrino's d e a t h " [Romans et nouvelles, I I , p. 491).

Now predictions are very much to the point in La Chartreuse de Parme. Early on, the mentor of Fabrice's youth, the astrologer clairvoyant Blanes, had predicted the protagonist's imprisonment, absolving him — provisionally at least — of guilt. " I saw only that after prison," Blanes confides to his protege, "there will be what I call a crime, but fortunately I think I can be certain in saying that it will not be committed by you " (p. 172). Yea! the birth (delivery from prison) shall be followed by a crime (infanticide), but this crime shall not be of thy making. This is perhaps the message of reassurance which the novel is at pains to express. In fact, the prominence of prognostication, superstition, ritual silence, and vows in La Chartreuse de Parme is only matched elsewhere in the Stendhalian oeuvre in the somewhat troubling text of Les Privileges wherein, it will be recalled, Henri Beyle had so legalistically set forth certain magical privileges which might fall to him under specific conditions. All through Stendhal's last completed novel, what is being heavily insisted upon is that there are certain things of which it is forbidden to speak, certain names which must go unuttered, certain acts whose articulation can have dire consequences. There is a taboo, for example, on the Farnese Tower itself, that uterine space so gigantically presiding over the novel that its sheer presence guarantees it against deniability. Nonetheless, for the inhabitants of Parma, "it was forbidden to speak of this construction" (p. 308). The sage abbe Blanes cautions his pupil: "Any announcement of the future is an infraction of the rule, and carries with it the risk of changing the event" (p. 172). Behind the mumbo-jumbo and taboo imposed on certain utterances, one senses that certain thoughts or wishes must never be given voice, lest in so doing the fate of the world - Henri Beyle's world - be ineradicably altered. It was precisely this kind of thought, a death wish on the Madonna, which Jules


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Ferrante had managed (but only barely) to avoid articulating. The acts of targeting which actually figure a linguistic structure, that wish of death so prevalent in Stendhal's writings, have at last been denied in La Chartreuse de Parme.

Maternal death has, of course, been recognized by Stendhal scholars as a primordial experience, one which was bound to find transcription, in one way or another, in Henri Beyle's works. And yet the death is itself but one of the constitutive elements of a latent text which intrudes on the surface discourse with surprising frequency and persistence throughout the Stendhalian oeuvre. I have treated this text as a palimpsestic inscription since, although its functions remain stable (death, pregnancy, sibling rivalry), it is constantly being recast in different syntactic configurations depending on which function is undergoing equivocation. Nor is this process of continuous negotiation a simple affair, for several functions can be simultaneously affirmed and denied in the same variant. This complexity probably reaches its apogee in the formulations of chapter 32 of the Vie de Henry Brulard in which even its author is reduced to admitting that the narrative has become completely absurd. It has also been my contention in this reading that across the Stendhalian oeuvre, progress of sorts is made precisely by way of these fits and starts of denial, a progress toward the masterplot's denouement: an acknowledgement of the existence and subsequent disposal of a dead brother. Merely reaching this stage, however, implies an elaborate series of issues debated, admissions made, and accounts already settled. Such are the mechanisms of equivocation examined in the preceding pages: whether aim was taken or not; whether, given that aim had been taken, the shot was actually fired; who, in fact, fired the shot; whether or not there was a pregnancy; given such a pregnancy, whether the child survived or not; whether or not the death wish was withheld or actually given utterance. For the assumption of the child into the discourse, finally achieved in La Chartreuse de Parme, can only take place through another denial, namely that the death wish upon the mother had ever been articulated in the first place. What is significant

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in this drama undergoing reenactment throughout Stendhal's writings is not so much the paradigmatic functions of the masterplot, but rather the slow and excruciating labor of exoneration undertaken through the very processes of writing. When, on occasion, Stendhal addresses himself to "the happy few," one imagines, perhaps, a group of select members who share the author's ideals and aspirations, who indulge in the same ethic of discretion, who subscribe to the same aesthetic of transparency and understatement. Restoring his celebrated epithet to its Shakespearean context, however, we realize that it is, in reality, an apostrophe designating (as apostrophes do) absent ones. "We few, we happy few," it reads, "we band of brothers." The quote is not from King Lear, nor Othello, nor yet from Stendhal's beloved Hamlet, but rather from Henry V (IV, iii, 60). Ineluctably. Not even Henry IV: the more Henrys, the merrier. To all appearances, the power of the name is inexhaustible for Henri Beyle. And so, even as the band of brothers proliferates around him, he silences them: through the longing suppression which is apostrophe, through acts of anti-Jacobin violence directed at trees, through literary fratricide. Indeed, the discourse of fraternalism is bound to haunt the Stendhalian imagination. Good libertarian that he is, he endorses Liberty and Equality, but never will he make peace with Fraternity, never consent to the idea that a band of brothers might, in federation, enter into a civil society based on a pact. For private reasons, Henri Beyle will forever remain at odds with the third, and Jacobin, term of the infamous Revolutionary troika. Subjective language enters into spectacular collision - and refusal of collusion - with a specific political agenda. It is out of this collision between private and public that the truth-in-birth is generated in the case of Henri Beyle. Nonetheless, there is something inherently disturbing about this particular ideological cluster, and Stendhal is not alone in discerning it. The enthusiasm of an entire culture for the better part of a century was to wax and wane and wax again around the concept of fraternity, not because the newly created homo


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civicus was fickle, but because the conceptual group (which today approaches statuary solidarity) is historically traversed by tension and logically marked by contradiction. Mona Ozouf has devoted a chapter of LHomme regenere to the problematic nature of the fraternal principle from the Revolution to its final embrace by the Third Republic: "Fraternity: this is one of the most enigmatic words to have emerged from the French Revolution. Still more problematic is its connection to the two other terms of the republican motto. For fraternity, whose mission is to link, appears antinomical to that liberty and equality which bear the promise of man's independence" (p. 158). For the present, I would like to suggest that it may be fruitful to explore the topography of overlapping private and public discourse with respect to the question of birth. Taking the cue from Stendhal's malaise, it is not unthinkable that birth in the particular might bear a relation to the ideology attached to the emergence of a new democratic nation. My contention is that the privileged passages of access to the zone of overlap are located precisely in those individuals for whom the subjective experience of parturition was particularly intense or tragic. I shall, however, reserve this discussion for cycle 3. In the meantime, the foregoing Stendhal analysis has left some birth ground uncovered. What, for instance, to make of Henri Beyle's apparently serious observation that " according to the Journal de Paris, it is possible for a man to give birth to a child and for both of them to live afterwards. This occurred in Holland" (Oeuvres intimes, I, p. 96)? If the masterplot which spans Henri Beyle's entire writing career rewrites personal history with a view to mastery of birth, there exist other ways through which to master reproduction at a more collective level. It is to these strategies of gynocolonization that I begin to turn in cycle 2.

CYCLE 2

Production, reproduction, and narrative form Adolphe

INTRODUCTION

In Schizoid Phenomena, Object-Relations and the Self, Harry Guntrip

traces the evolution of psychoanalysis, noting that: " The Oedipus problem, as Freud saw it, was, in fact, the gateway opening back into the arena of the psychopathology of infancy" (p. 45). For those interested

in the study and appreciation of literature, Guntrip's observation hints at the possibility of enhanced critical readings once a certain threshold, presented in fact as a barrier, has been crossed. Indeed, the implication is that oedipus, the classic skeleton supporting so many kinds of narrative, may function as a screen, and this in several ways. First of all, it is a story whose sheer cultural weight is inescapable, a collective projection situated at the crossroads of history - Western history, at least - and which speaks to us of our own collective origins. Oedipus is a story which continues to impose itself on our attention. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, for example, contemporary Czech novelist Milan Kundera causes his protagonist, Tomas, to fall into political disrepute for writing an article allegorizing oedipus and the situation of his occupied country. It is precisely in response to this article that Tomas' long-estranged son arranges to meet his father who, repeating a legendary failure, does not recognize him. It has become increasingly clear that in reconstructing the oedipus myth along more modern lines, Freud failed, in considerable measure, to move beyond it, resisting Klein, Rank, Jung, and others whose work pointed to the existence of 72

Production, reproduction, and narrative form different stories. To this extent, oedipus is a screen which diverts the gaze, veiling occulted matter. And there may be, furthermore, some sense in which this tale of an ancient civilization serves as a collective screen memory by dissociating, regrouping, and then recasting elements of an order and a narrative more archaic than itself, to use Freud's own paradigm of the screen memory. If these considerations touch on the mechanism of narrative in the abstract, their illustration can be sought at the level of the particular. What would be needed for such a demonstration would be a work which devotes overwhelming attention to the oedipal problematic with all its resonances in language, in the Law, in syntax, order, and genealogy that psychoanalysis since Freud has brought to light. What is required, in short, is a text so infused with the Paternal that the "gateway" to the Maternal, if such exists, is not even suspected. As I have observed in the Introduction, for historical, legal, and political reasons, the nineteenth century offers ideal ground for the exploration of a new relation to the Maternal. Once again acknowledging biography in this study of birth, I have chosen an author, Benjamin Constant, whose very emergence into the world "cost his mother her life," to use Jean-Jacques Rousseau's description of his own catastrophic relation to origins. For purposes of this demonstration, I shall focus on Constant's novel Adolphe, published in 1816. From time to time, however, it will be useful to expand the discussion to his nonfiction writings as well as to other nineteenth-century novels. As with Stendhal, my contention in this analysis is that the experience of birth is central to Adolphe, although it remains largely invisible. The construct and its syntax are not readily discernible in Stendhal's writing because, like certain preindustrial people's inscriptions writ so large it requires an aerial perspective to grasp them in their totality, the signs of disastrous pregnancy are disseminated across the Stendhalian oeuvre and their articulation proceeds through elaborate processes of denial. In the case ofAdolpke, I shall be examining how a narrative performs the work of repression — in a psychopolitical acception of that term — precisely when the issue

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under negotiation is that of birth and the prominence of the maternal. Whereas my Stendhal cycle was attentive to the mastery of disastrous birth at a personal level, I shall here be considering the politics of narrative form, contending that the production of narrative movement is generated according to a model of a credit-motivated economy. There is, however, an alternate narrative which is contained by the first, and from time to time, that other economy erupts. If the more overt discourse remains a disembodied affair tied to the written word, the covert discourse enjoys a proximity to the body such that, on occasion, it stigmatizes and reconfigures the abstract text itself. It is what results from the collision of the flesh with the word that I shall be examining here. This analysis o£ Adolphe will proceed along the following lines. First, I shall offer a summary of object-relations theory. Then this discussion will be temporarily bracketed in favor of an examination of the economy of production associated with the paternal. At this point ("Reproduction"), I shall recuperate the theory presented in the Introduction with respect to the novel's "maternal" text. I shall end with a consideration of the performance of matricide in other nineteenth-century novels, including the implications of this ritual literary act for two women writers. As indicated above, the oedipus grid functions as a screen which distorts, diverts, reframes, blocks, and denies access to a different reality which the object-relations school of psychoanalysis has begun to explore. To the extent that an objectrelations model opens the "gateway" to the maternal and to the problematics of reproduction, it will be useful to invoke it in order to open up the text to birth. Let me say that I chose to examine object-relations theory in function of what I feel to be an unusual quality and texture of the world which Adolphe creates. Adolphe is, of course, a novel of introspection, and to that extent symptomatic of a certain brand of Romanticism. Beyond these contextual attachments, however, I feel that the novel's presentation of the relation between the subjective world and external reality is strangely fluid, the boundaries between the

Production, reproduction, and narrative form two being permeable in the extreme. A generally disembodied texture achieved through exploitation of conventional prose tending toward a high degree of abstraction and buttressed by almost ritually repetitious formulations is occasionally ruptured by appearances of the concrete which register as violent. I can think of no other nineteenth-century novel written in French wherein the distinction between interior and exterior is so problematic. Because object relations addresses precisely the processes whereby the external is constructed from out of subjective experience, new light can be shed on the novel as understood from the perspective of that theory. I shall first offer a schematic summary of the model, along with some contemporary critiques of its implications. Melanie Klein is commonly cited as the founder of this branch of psychoanalysis, although her theories have evolved considerably through the work of her colleague, W. R. D. Fairbairn, D. W. Winnicott, and, more recently, Otto Kernberg and Harry Guntrip. Building on the later Freudian elaboration of ego construction as a mimetic and dynamic process involving a matching up of interior and exterior realities, Klein displaced the process backwards in time to a preoedipal period. The infant's earliest needs being oral, denial by the founding object of gratification, the breast, provokes the infant to split objects into "good" and " b a d " in an effort to stave off ambivalence which is at this point incomprehensible and therefore intolerable. This response is semiotic to the extent that it represents an attempt to establish a grid of valorized signs through which the individual can apprehend the world in a first step toward ego construction. Meanwhile, and depending on the "position" (or phase) of development, objects are introjected and/or projected, creating situations which can be persecutionary and threatening to the emergent ego's existence, or depressive if the ego has ejected good objects and experiences loss. Object-relations theory, in turn, builds on the British school of psychoanalysis (including Klein and Fairbairn), while rejecting certain notions of instinct and death drives. The ramifications of psychoanalysis' more recent emphasis on

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infantile development for the present analysis of Adolphe are that, to a considerable degree, the onus of influence is shifted onto the child's first object, its mother, away from the paternal persona Freud so privileged. It is a way of bringing the mother out of a repression which founded the psychoanalytic movement, just as surely as it stands at the base of traditional narrative, the present novel included. This valorization of the maternal is far from being problemfree, however, since it perpetuates the tendency to lock the maternal into the posture of object of dread and fascination. Various theorists have attempted to destabilize the binarity of this model constructed around that icon of Western culture: the mother and her son. In The Reproduction of Mothering, for instance, Nancy Chodorow revises object relations along less essentialist lines, providing a cultural account of the model which takes stock of the asymmetrical positioning of the daughter with respect to the maternal, while at the same time exposing the politics of motherhood thus: "Woman's mothering in the isolated nuclear family of contemporary capitalist society creates specific personality characteristics in men that reproduce both an ideology and psycho-dynamic of male superiority and submission to the requirement of production" (p. 180). My reading of Adolphe remains within the binarity of the model while demonstrating, at the formal level, the narratological implications of the "requirement of production," which I call narrative capitalization, and the relation the latter bears to reproduction. Post-Kleinian object-relations theory holds that the founding experience of the human organism is that of separation and loss.1 Paraphrasing Fairbairn, Kernberg explains that: The earliest and original form of anxiety... is separation anxiety, activated when frustrations, including, basically, temporary separations from mother occur. These frustrations bring about the internalization of the object and also the development of ambivalence toward it. {Internal World, p. 67)

Birth would thus be a primal instance of separation, but there are others, including death or abandonment by the mother, and

Production, reproduction, and narrative form failure to gratify the individual's earliest oral needs. In a manner different from Chodorow, Sprengnether's recent study, The Spectral Mother, attempts to circumnavigate the Scylla and Chary bdis of object relations by at once privileging the figure of the mother and dislodging her from the permanent posture of object. Sprengnether proposes the following reformulation which deserves to be quoted in extenso: A beneficial conjunction between feminism and psychoanalysis must take account of the fact... that a woman's body is the carnal origin of every human subject without desubjectifying the mother herself (as object relations theory tends to do). If, however, the ego represents a reactive formation to loss, then separation would seem to be primary and the mother's body itself a focus of mourning. In this memorial or elegiac view of the ego, the loss that precipitates the organization of a self is always implicitly the loss of a mother, whose status as present/absent problematizes her signification... As both origin and Other, the preoedipal mother escapes the equally devastating effects of idealization and erasure, allowing for the possibility of maternal discourse as well as a nonphallocentrically organized view of culture.

(P-9)

If everything about Adolphe betokens precisely this tendency toward objectification and erasure, it is important to acknowledge that there may be ways for feminist theory to recuperate the preoedipal. (Renaming it might be a place to start.) In order to illustrate the quagmire that maternal objectification and loss represents for women writers, I shall conclude this analysis with a brief examination of how Germaine de Stael and Claire de Duras dispose of the dilemma of maternal vacancy as structural paradigm for narrative. The response of their heroines, if ingenious, remains circumscribed by the same discursive conditions governing the writing of their contemporaries, Stendhal and Constant. To resume Kernberg's account of personality construction, loss or deprivation experienced on the exterior gives rise to the mimetic construction of an internal "primal scene" of pain. It is out of this construction that a representation of the self will begin to emerge as separate and distinct from internal object representations. Both object and self-representation, however,

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tend to be fluid and are susceptible to merging and/or being thrust upon the exterior in gestures of repudiation. In Schizoid Phenomena, Guntrip describes the process in the following terms: An inner psychic world... has been set up duplicating an original situation, an unhappy world in which one is tied to bad objects and feelings therefore always frustrated, hungry, angry, and guilty, and profoundly anxious, with constant temptation to seek transient inner relief by projecting it back on the external world. (p. 22)

The possibility of such border-crossings and the ease with which they are carried out should come as no surprise. After all, borders between inside and outside are constructions which have a historical existence within the individual. To breach them merely constitutes a reversion toward a less defined organization which is archaeologically present within the mind, just as the borders of some nations (Poland, for instance) have such a history of violation that each invasion or occupation seems, if not precisely acceptable, somehow in the order of things. It is, for that matter, probably no accident that Constant ends his novel in Poland, with the protagonist's world collapsing down upon him in an annihilation (as I maintain) of identity for what is Poland but the very space of border violability?2 Following a tentative establishment within the individual of internal and external, development proceeds along two lines sketched out by Kernberg in Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism: For the internalization of object relationships, there are two essential tasks that the early ego has to accomplish in rapid succession: (i) the differentiation of self images from object images which form part of early introjections and identifications; (ii) the integration of self and object images built up under the influence of aggressive drive derivatives, (p. 26)

The process of integration, toward which maturation tends, involves bringing into balance a doubly Manichean world (good and bad self on the one hand, and similarly polarized object representations on the other), as well as matching these up with the external world. This account has several serious implications which need to be considered. First, perception of

Production, reproduction, and narrative form the external world per se closely parallels the emergence and independence of the individual's representation of self. Ideally, therefore, the relation between internal and external is, to some extent, a mimetic one, although the ordering and spacing of an internal world is prior to the structuring of an external reality. Thus configuration of the exterior world is both structurally and historically determined from within the individual. This means that even things perceived as purely external bear the imprint of archaic internal organizations: in terms of the present analysis, it will be seen that certain exterior objects and destructive acts wrought upon them undergo parallel and prior fates within the "sanctuary" of Adolphe's mind, to use the novel's own rather telling metaphor. Because exterior is genetically linked to interior, the two are indissociable, although development takes one toward the attainment of an unbreachable sense of exteriority which, in turn, corresponds to a firm internal representation of self. The harboring within of bad objects, as well as their projection on the outside, is a necessary part of the process since it forces the self to assume a position of distance with respect to objects. Loss of bad objects could prove catastrophic inasmuch as these function as foils for the self in the process of individuation. This principle will be key to my interpretation of the denouement of Adolphe.

Another developmental goal, besides the production of a distinct self-representation, is the integration of objects hitherto split into good and bad. This corresponds to a coming-to-terms with the fundamental ambivalence of human experience. When mother and, later, father and siblings, are no longer perceived as exclusively good or bad, a major step in the maturational process has been taken. In Internal World, Kernberg remarks that this phase consists in the gradual, more realistic integration of good and bad selfrepresentations into real self-representations, and the integration of good and bad object representations into real object representations ... The completion of the separation-individuation phase and the establishment of object constancy marks, precisely, the accomplishment of this developmental task. (p. 96)

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Yet it must be conceded that the appropriation of any such extra-literary model for purposes of a literary reading is never without its problems; the more rigid the paradigm, the more problematic its literary application. And the object-relations depiction of the earliest phases of human development is rigid to the extent that it is theoretically austere, ultimately coming to repose on the maternal imago. This central fact is repeated throughout the literature. For instance, in discussing the various phases of therapy, Guntrip notes: It becomes clear that the last and deepest element to be reached and uncovered by analytical therapy is the patient's infantile experience of failure, non-possession or absolute loss of an adequate mother. This is the final problem for psychotherapy to find an answer to: the fear of ego-breakdown over the re-experiencing of the original maternal deprivation. {Schizoid Phenomena, p. 106)

Notwithstanding the evident risk of reductiveness, viewing Adolphe through object-relations theory can provide a productive reading, I believe. I shall reserve until later the discussion of the fragility of such an application to aesthetics, but for the moment, these considerations will be held in abeyance. For the time being, I shall be arguing that beyond Adolpheh more visible paternal narrative, the lines of a maternal tale are to be found, dimly sketched, to be sure. Both are stories of development which in large measure run parallel to each other. Nor is it coincidence that the two unfold in diachronically parallel courses. For the oedipal and its particular concerns with the individual's entry into language and Culture, his/her creative acceptance and appropriation of loss and absence, his/her translation of the incest fantasy into more socially viable love scenarios — all these can be seen as a restructured repetition of the preoedipal and its concerns with differentiation of the self and independence from object representations. The oedipal narrative holds the sway it does precisely because it is rooted in a more archaic experience. Before entering a discussion of the oedipal politics of production, let me briefly situate Constant and his work in their historical frame. Aside from a play, Wallstein, Adolphe is the only

Production, reproduction, and narrative form literary work which Constant published. In his time, the author was known rather for his works on religion, his studies and pamphlets devoted to politics and the history of slavery and usurpation. He was also a political figure of some prominence. His writings exercised considerable influence over his contemporaries: the slightly younger author, Stendhal, for instance, avidly devoured each new work which appeared, recommending certain of these to his sister as essential to her education. Later, Constant would merit mention, however acerbic, by Karl Marx as one of the "interpreters and mouthpieces" of bourgeois society ("The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," p. 596). Although the novel Adolphe has traditionally been viewed by the roman-a-clef school as a reflection of the tempestuous and elastically long-lived love affair between Constant and Germaine de Stael, more modern critical approaches have focused on its specifically literary qualities, from the novel's paradigmatic articulation of the early Romantic mal du siecle phenomenon to its more purely formal aspects. Adolphe revolves around the dilemma of commitment to a loved one, loss of desire, attempted abandonment of the erstwhile beloved, and, ultimately, the protagonist's incapacity to commit himself to life, to Eros, and generally to any meaningful act whatsoever. The novel opens on a young man of brilliant prospects - Adolphe - still under paternal tutelage. For sport and for gratification of his self-image, Adolphe seduces Ellenore, the long-established mistress of a friend of his father. Ellenore's consequent attachment, and Adolphe's desperate efforts at detachment, thus structure the plot whose vacillating progress has occasioned more than a little readerly discomfort. Bold and decisive actions are scarcely to the point in this short work. Its beauty instead lies in the delicate rendering of every nuance composing the spectrum of indecision. The novel closes on Ellenore's death and the distinct feeling of a world receding from Adolphe in a movement of abandonment.

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THE ECONOMY OF PRODUCTION! THE PATERNAL AND NARRATIVE FORM

It was because the river Neto overflowed its banks that two strangers were forced to spend several weeks together in an Italian inn. The waters subsided, the acquaintances went their separate ways; however, one of the travellers chanced to lose a case which remained behind on the road, a residue of the adventure of the flood. The innkeeper, having recovered the object, but uncertain as to the identity of its owner, forwarded it to the wrong person. In such manner did Adolphe's fellowtraveller appropriate his companion's tale, which turned out to be that very residue left behind on the road. This part of my analysis argues that the flood out of which Constant's novel emerges, far from being an act of God, is, on the contrary, a paradigm of the narrative mechanism which regulates the action of Adolphe on one important level. This economy can best be characterized as a system of symbolic exchange in which, during each transaction, something is left over. Otherwise stated, each important narrative transaction results in the creation of a surplus value. Moreover, narrative succession is produced out of just these residuals, for the plot is continually moving to absorb and contain excess, be that in the form of cases fallen on the road, unclaimed "open" letters, or inheritances open to claim. That plot succession might align itself with paternal dynastic succession should scarcely come as a surprise. In so saying, I am concurring with conclusions reached by Edward Said: The unity, or integrity, of the text is maintained by a series of genealogical connections: author-text, beginning-middle-end, textmeaning, reader-interpretation, and so on. Underneath all these is the imagery of succession, of paternity, of hierarchy. [Beginnings, p. 112) Unmistakably one of the overt questions addressed in Adolphe is that of how the Son is to inherit from the Father. For Adolphe, it will be recalled, remains legally dependent on his father throughout most of the novel. By the time he does attain his majority, events have taken their fatal turn and he has become

Production, reproduction, and narrative form a permanently ineffectual being, a dependent of the past. The riddle of how the Son can inherit, with its clear oedipal dimensions, goes unsolved in this novel for Adolphe falls victim, I suggest, to a narrative double-bind. It is another economy one patriarchally configured as maternal - which claims Adolphe

before he can really claim his patrimony by entering the symbolic circuits of succession, politics, and mastery. To begin with, the Adolphe first encountered by the reader is himself a left-over. Ellenore deceased, and he in some measure responsible, he remains behind, dead-yet-alive, unassimilable by society and a stranger to the world at large. This happens, of course, to be an apt characterization of the Romantic hero, and critics have traditionally classified Adolphe's symptoms as belonging to the mal du siecle syndrome. Margaret Waller's fresh feminist recasting of this "grand mal" as a grand male euphemization and appropriation of feminine aspects at the expense of the female does certainly shed new light on the phenomenon of Romantic narcissism. Without wishing to deny that Constant's novel can be read as part of a broader cultural intertext, I propose here to situate his mal at the juncture of two economies internal to the novel. I reserve for the final cycle of this book the consideration of how the question of birth, as it is posed in Adolphe, might be reclaimed by a more politically oriented reading. Let us return to Adolphe who, as a survivor, is like the box left on the road: a residue. A reading of Adolphe is bound to call up a host of cautionary adages relating to time—"a stitch in time," "never put off till tomorrow," "procrastination is the thief" — all aphorisms urging against the sort of deferral which costs Ellenore her life. To be sure, Adolphe spends almost the entire novel postponing his break with Ellenore such that the offputting, maddening aspects of this narrative sequence do seem to be related to continuous puttings off. The dragging out of postponement has even been experienced by some critics as a malaise of a dramatic order. For instance, W. Wolfgang Holdheim remarks: "And in the last analysis, this pseudoprogression marks the structure of the entire work, which is that of a deficient dramatic development. Everything tries to concentrate but disperses" {The

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Hermeneutic Mode, pp. 67—68). Still, dilatory tactics must eventually fall through and, in spite of the protagonist's existential inability to commit himself to any decision, Ellenore does at last die. The fact is that Adolphe might better have heeded the injunction "neither a borrower nor a lender be." Because if Adolphe operates as if he were postponing time, what is really occurring, perhaps unbeknownst to him, is that he is borrowing it. And to borrow is to put oneself in debt. This implies that Ellenore dies because Adolphe cannot pay the piper. Thus Adolphe's seemingly innocuous techniques of procrastination might be transcribed into the terms of a credit-motivated, interest-generating narrative economy. But who, then, is this piper who, as the story goes, cashes in on innocent human life when the debtor fails to pay up? In Adolphe, time is systematically portrayed as being a paternal commodity. As his first leave-taking of Ellenore nears, Adolphe explains that "the six months my father granted me had expired" (p. 106).3 Lest capitalization as narrative prime mover of Adolphe seem improbable, or simply to be a figure of rhetoric, it is worth noting that the notion of time purchased on credit appears elsewhere in Constant's writings. Let me shift briefly to the political arena for an example. In De Vesprit de conquete et de Vusurpation, Constant compares the immorality engendered by imperialism, whose very existence depends on a never-ending series of conquests, to a peaceable nation the legitimacy of whose ethical values can only be acquired over time: "Or, la morale a besoin du temps. C'est la qu'elle place ses dedommagements et ses recompenses. Pour celui qui vit de minute en minute... le temps n'existe pas. Les dedommagements de l'avenir deviennent chimeriques " (However, moral values need time. It is in time which they invest their earnings and compensations. For the man who lives from one moment to the next, time does not exist. Recouping in the future becomes a chimerical enterprise) (pp. 999-1000).4 Whereas ethical, legitimate time functions like capital investment ("placer"), gaining in value, projecting and begetting itself in the future,

Production, reproduction, and narrative form irresponsible, usurpatory - in a word, filial - accounting amounts to an outright denial of time. It is essential to note that on one narrative register of Adolphe, paternal time is always pitted against the son's attempt to live minute by minute. But the son must remain subservient. Adolphe, aged twenty-two, has just finished his studies at the novel's beginning, and his love affair ends tragically just as he passes into his legal majority. That is, throughout the novel, Adolphe remains legally bound to and dependent on his father. His father, the minister of the "electeur de *** 5 " reminds him gently of this fact after his son has absconded from the paternal hearth with his unacceptable partner, Ellenore: "You are twenty-four years of age... I shall not exercise my authority, whose term is nearly up, over you" (p. 115). This is to say that throughout the novel, Adolphe is forced to operate entirely according to the paternal clock: the Son's time has not yet come. Indeed, the tragedy of the novel lies in the fact that, due to the sequence of events which are masterpieces of mistiming, the Son's time will never come. His life before he has reached majority constitutes time in suspension; following Ellenore's death, he becomes a permanent slave to the past. Because it is the Father's power to grant time, it is to him that Adolphe must apply for extensions. This he does throughout the novel as he attempts to wriggle free of Ellenore's dependent grasp. Adolphe first borrows a large chunk: six months, the pretext being that he must remain in the town of D*** to complete his education. If his distant father is generous, it nonetheless devolves to the stand-in paternal figure, the jealous and justifiably suspicious comte de T***, Ellenore's "protector," to remind the young man that "it seems to me... that at your age, one ought to waste no time in choosing a career." Time at last up, Adolphe returns to the house of his father, promising to see Ellenore in two months. However, as this new rendezvous draws near, "anxiously," reports our hero, " I counted the days and the hours which passed; with my wishes, I would slow down the passage of time; I trembled seeing the time approach when I would have to keep my promise" (p. 106). The day of reckoning near, " I limited myself to the

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advice that she delay a few months" (p. 109). But never will Ellenore consent to Adolphe's procrastinations. First, she knows what he is about (even if he does not), and she will have none of it, but, more important, it is not in Ellenore's power to grant time because she is precisely the material on which time's passage is registered. Adolphe next requests a time loan from the border whence he has sought refuge from his father's well-meaning attempts to resolve the Ellenore situation. " I announced to him," writes Adolphe with uncharacteristic resolve, " that I would only leave Ellenore... when she no longer needed me... I awaited his answer" (p. 115). There, at the border (which is by definition a nonfatherland), the son asks for an indefinite period of time such time, in fact, as it will take for his mistress not to require his presence anymore. The father once again accedes to what is now an alarmingly open-ended demand. It is shortly afterwards that the narrative indulges in a kind of cautionary inset on the dangers of stalling: Ellenore's father, long in exile in Russia, had been recalled to Poland, his property and titles restored, and beckons to his daughter to join him there. However, in the period of procrastination and negotiation over whether Adolphe will accompany Ellenore, her father dies. Family reunions, if they exist, must take place on another level, as we shall see. Once the couple has arrived in Poland, and Adolphe is linked to the last paternal substitute, the baron de P***, Adolphe will take out one final time loan. At this point, "time was going by with frightening rapidity" (p. 159), and Adolphe requests, once again by letter, a mere three days in which to settle his affairs and separate himself from Ellenore. The baron is even authorized to convey the news to Adolphe's father in advance. In the novel the clock never ticks louder than during this three-day period. Adolphe first takes to watching the sun, and later " a clock which sounded each hour," the final twenty-four hours of Ellenore's life. What occurs next in the novel bears reformulation in the terms of this analysis. Adolphe shows no sign of making good on his promissory note. But the baron has also been counting the time, and when this time is up, he sends the promissory note to

Production, reproduction, and narrative form Adolphe's mistress. The message of rupture contained in Adolphe's letter to the baron thus overreaches its destination and, in so doing, the value of the message is compounded to the point of becoming fatal. Even Adolphe realizes that Ellenore's death is somehow linked to his reckless temporal consumerism: "Thus all my efforts to procure time... had turned against the unfortunate woman" (p. 164). Now, to call Ellenore ill-fated is surely to heap on Providence the responsibility for Adolphe's own acts, a practice at which he is only too adept. In a different sense, however, it is Adolphe who is now the "infortune," to the extent that he has squandered his own fortune - calculated as time. He has failed to understand that time, like capital, is not lent gratis. Time, like capital to its holder, generates interest. Adolphe has taken out several loans, for which Ellenore functions very much as narrative collateral... in other words, that which he stands to lose and the issue under narrative negotiation. Little does the unschooled Adolphe suspect that interest has been accruing all along. As Adolphe reaches the time of the Son - of his majority - the father, more authoritarian and severe as the novel progresses, does eventually come to collect. But the son cannot make up for lost time, especially since that time has come to exceed its actual value. It is the residual interest (precisely the difference between time borrowed and time owed) which cannot be recovered. This is the surplus value which claims Ellenore. She is in the end repossessed by the Father and his narrative, to whom she had belonged all along save for a brief oedipal idyll. Adolphe, for his part, is foreclosed upon in the term's etymological sense of being literally shut out. Henceforth he banishes himself from the house of the father, and from society in general, a fact attested to by the nomadic existence which he is living when he encounters the "editor." There is scarcely anything eyebrow-raising about oedipal content in a nineteenth-century novel: that the oedipal transaction should take place in the terms of credit, however, is perhaps deserving of note. I am not here referring to the raw presence of money so palpable in the Balzacian universe and

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realist novels in general, but rather to an entire narrative system and sequencing of events which functions according to an abstract model of investment and foreclosure.5 Now in Adolphe, time and writing bear the same relation to that movement of production which characterizes the paternal economy motivating this narrative. Adolphe's father is linked to distance as of the second sentence of the novel: "The intention of my father, the Minister of the Elector of***, was that I visit the most remarkable countries of Europe. After that, he wished me to join him" (p. 51). For the ever-distant father, the vehicle of communication is the written word. Indeed, Adolphe reproaches his father an inability to communicate in the presence of his son: In my father I found, not a censor, but a cold and caustic observer, who would smile pityingly at first, and soon finish the conversation impatiently. In my first eighteen years, I do not recall ever having a discussion of one hour with him. His letters were affectionate ... but hardly were we in each other's presence than there would be something forced in his behavior, (p. 52) The father is, by his very essence, a distant being and, as such, he functions most often by proxy... that is to say, through agents. If the father is first presented as benign and generous (Adolphe even craves his judgement), he becomes through substitution, progressively demanding and ultimately vengeful. Ellenore's "protector," the comte de P*** 5 "whose family was related to mine by marriage," is a clear stand-in for Adolphe's father. Adolphe's conquest of Ellenore, ten years his elder, can be construed in an oedipal light, a fact evinced by the reaction of the younger generation when at last the news of the affair breaks: " the young men, on the contrary, were delighted at my adroitness in replacing the count" (p. 102). The comte de P*** is in turn structurally "supplanted" by the baron de T*** in Poland, and it is here that the Father will collect his dues and take his revenge for the oedipal transgression. Nonetheless, Constant is no Sophocles, and the "deficient dramatic development" of which Holdheim complains may have something to do with the family romance, as a narrative, having gone awry. Having bedded (if not wedded) mother, a

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different drama — Preoedipus — takes over. Nor does this other play turn on structures which patriarchy (including Said) traditionally construe as paternal - namely, beginning-middleend, recognition, acknowledgement, and acceptance of genealogy. Instead it privileges an inexorable circularity, denial, refusal, repudiation, and expulsion, as will be seen subsequently. Meanwhile, one aspect of the novel seems to have escaped attention, presumably overshadowed by biographical connections, and this is the ongoing litigation in which both the comte de P*** and Ellenore's father are implicated. The two trials share revealing common elements: both these men (to whom Ellenore stands in a relation of dependency) were formerly titled and wealthy. In each case, for political reasons, they were divested of their possessions and power. Both lived for a time on foreign soil while judgement was pending. Finally, both reemerged into their "former opulence." 6 It is as if the Father, temporarily displaced and the victim of acts of subversion which must properly be considered filial, were, in the course of the novel, reinvested with his former powers, thereupon returning with a vengeance. That the paternal should make an abstract return in the form of a legal institution recalls Freud's primal horde model first elaborated in Totem and Taboo and later in Moses and Monotheism. And filial guilt and expiation are directly related to this passage into Culture which is marked by the institutionalization of the superego (the Law). To return to Adolphe^ pending litigations, the whole notion of suspending judgement, of course, carries with it a strong psychological charge and, in fact, to a very large extent, Adolphe is about the withholding and subsequent passing of judgement. A pending litigation can be construed as a temporary hushing of the voice of conscience, which can be extended to the notion of putting moral opprobrium provisionally on hold. It will be recalled that Adolphe's father had insistently refused to pass judgement on his son. Reproached at the beginning for not being censorious enough, he had always spared Adolphe the consequences of the latter's potentially immoral acts: "He had never allowed me to suffer the consequences of my errors"

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(p. 51). In fact, Adolphe's father systematically abdicated his paternal authority. When the son has fled to the border, his father makes the following offer: " I shall provide for you amply" (p. 116), thereby supporting his son's mistress as well. Writing to his son in Poland, he once again refuses to pass judgement: "For that matter, I will not pass judgement on a situation of which my knowledge is imperfect" (pp. 127-28). Needless to say, the period during which judgement pends is none other than the son's time, a time in which Adolphe can act just as he pleases with no interference. It is a time of unfettered irresponsibility, but during which irreparable debts are incurred. The fact that judgement is ultimately handed down not only denotes a reinvestiture of the Father into his position of power, but also implies that the narrative apparatus, which after all can only sustain dilatory devices in finite number, is making ready to shut down. In fact, the son's story, so lacking in definitive action, has been a chronic narrative scandal from the start. It remains, therefore, for the paternal to recuperate narrativity, and the rendering of legal judgement which reinvests the paternal with its former authority serves ulterior motives of narrative closure. In this way, litigation must be read as the very figure of narrative and its governing structures of authority. Hence, the two trials are crucial to the novel's progression, for through them the personal level of the provident father is modulated into the Symbolic sphere, to use the Lacanian idiom, which is itself very much concerned with social institutions and judgement. It is distance from the father which sets up the conditions of circulation governing the oedipal register of the novel. With the father absent, he acts indirectly through proxy, triggering a movement of paternal delegation which enables the personal oedipus to connect with the patriarchal demands of Culture. Thus the system of circulation should be seen less as a closed circuit than a spiral, since each fatherly deputy takes Adolphe outward, one step closer to his merger with society which will make of him (it is hoped) a responsible adult. But the absence of the father also establishes a semiotic circuit

Production, reproduction, and narrative form in which communication must take place through the written word. In the remainder of this section, I shall discuss how letters circulate according to the same economy which governs time: as objects, they accrue value solely by virtue of changing hands. In other words, the written word, when released into the paternal economy of production and usurious exchange, begins to accumulate a surplus value which, to the extent that it is selfperpetuating, resists containment. This, it will be seen, has narrative consequences not only for Adolphe, but for all those who have come into contact with his story. If there is a sense in which the written word is the bearer of ultimate truth in Adolphe, it is nonetheless the case that speech and oral articulation carry a certain burden of fatality in their constant penchant toward falsification of truth. Adolphe demonstrates at one point oral language's quasi-autonomous tendency toward drift, stating that " everything I said would either die on my lips, or end in a completely different manner than I had expected" (p. 69). Indeed, Todorov considers this penchant to be precisely the rule of the language game as it is played in Adolphe. "This law," he notes, "according to which, if a spoken word seeks to express the truth, it becomes false, has its corollary... which is: if an utterance aspires to be false, it becomes true" (Poetique, p. 106). Important sentimental borders are often crossed merely by opening the mouth. However, although at times the articulation of a subjective truth suffices to advance Adolphe one step further on the road to separation, a simple speech act can also contravene a previously articulated message. Thus Ellenore, faint after Adolphe has, at long last, managed a declaration of nonlove, revives only to the strains of her lover's repeated recantations: "These simple words, contradicted by so many words uttered previously, restored Ellenore to life ... she made me repeat them several times" (Adolphe, p. 120). Nothing, however, can undo the effects of a letter. We have already examined various types of letters in Adolphe. There are those written to the Father requesting more time. On the other hand, both Adolphe and Ellenore's fathers write letters beseeching their son and daughter, respectively, to return home.

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Adolphe's missive to the baron de T*** stating his intention of abandoning Ellenore can only be compared, in its capacity to determine event, to Ellenore's final letter, written shortly before her death, accusing Adolphe of the entire tragedy. And since letters circulate according to the capitalizing economy of paternal time, they are dangerous and irrevocable precisely because they move beyond their intended addressee. Moreover, as with capital and its interest, one may situate the power of these supercharged messages, again, in the overflow zone which defines the distance between the first and "intended" receiver and the second, inadvertent receiver who, doubtless at some level of the text, is in reality the intended addressee. Of course, not all of the many letters in Adolphe overshoot their target. Adolphe's procrastinatory letters do reach his father and stop there. Likewise the comte de P***'s letter to Ellenore and her father's letter to her, each containing financial propositions, reach her at strategic narrative moments: their contents are only orally relayed to Adolphe. It is often the letters from Adolphe's father or his delegate which are, in some sense, open letters. Adolphe's initial reaction to his father's first appeal that he, the prodigal son, return, is to show the letter to Ellenore. Later in Poland, the baron de T*** deliberately allows Adolphe's father's letters written to him to be read by Adolphe: "The baron showed me several letters from my father. These betrayed an anguish/#r greater than what I had supposed" (p. 157; my emphasis). There is thus a sense in which the value of a message is compounded as it moves beyond its addressee. Just as Adolphe is falling under the sway of these superadded messages of paternal sorrow, however, he receives one from Ellenore demanding his presence. This one-good-letter-deserves-another movement both foreshadows the interplay of the final two letters and provokes Adolphe, humiliated that the baron perceives him as the slave of some woman, to authorize the baron to notify Adolphe's father by letter that the termination of the affair is difait accompli. Herewith begins the fatal sequence of events. Adolphe


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having, as usual, allowed the three days containing "le moment" to elude him, writes to the baron the already-familiar text asking for a reprieve, this time reiterating, in black on white, his intention to leave Ellenore. The letter reaches its addressee, the baron, who correctly construes its message to be one of perpetual procrastination. Thereupon this paternal agent releases the letter, with one of his own attached, back onto the semiotic circuit which cannot fail to convey the message the superadded distance to a new addressee, Ellenore. For, as we have seen, going the extra mile is the movement which characterizes the paternal narrative of Adolphe. It is, at last, the interest compounded out of time loans and a hyperextended epistolary trajectory which will make of Adolphe an eternal outcast, or, in other words, a son for life. Part of the perversity of this novel lies in the fact that the last word (written, needless to say) should rest with Ellenore. And once again, in this regard, Adolphe's narrative is obedient to the law of the residual. For although Ellenore would have liked to destroy her letter accusing Adolphe of murdering her (to put it bluntly), she cannot put her hands on it in the moments remaining before her death. How can one explain this misplacement of a final writ which will dictate Adolphe's entire future except by saying that the matter (her lover's fate, her own letter) is, by virtue of the patriarchal symbolic circuitry, already out of her hands? For the letter's destiny to be consumed by flames, as she would have wished it be, was only its first destination and, as such, inessential. In fact, the message had to convey beyond the flames, beyond the grave, to be consumed by its intended addressee, who will then not fail to be consumed by its message. The "moral" of Lacan's "Seminaire sur 'La Lettre volee'" applies in the present case as well: "This is why a letter which is purloined, nay, a letter which is dead ["en souffrance"], means a letter which always arrives at its destination" (P- 53)"Souffrance" is another aspect of Constant's text well worth considering, but a few words remain to be said about the written word. The symbolic chain regulating Adolphe's " anecdote " (as Constant was wont to call it in his Journal) might best be

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characterized as an economy of supervaluation in which it is precisely the excess which gives the system its mobility and its narrative value, and this by virtue of the same principle according to which interest generates itself out of capital. Nor is it coincidental that the circuit governing temporality is identical to the system of epistolary circulation: the rhythm of both is that of capitalization and the generation of surplus value. Quite simply stated, in narrative terms, these are lucrative. I would now like to suggest that Ellenore's letter, having withstood the ordeal by fire and taken its toll on Adolphe, does not — indeed cannot — stop with him. It is no literary "maladresse" that the letter, intended first for Adolphe and then for the fire, ends up "sans adresse." Breaking still another promise, Adolphe reads Ellenore's accusatory letter which "had no address, it was open" (Adolphe, p. 174). If the addressee remains unknown, it is precisely in order that the letter can continue to haunt the circuits in perpetual " souffrance," an object accruing value in this economy of production and capitalization. In connection with the possibilities of a narrative opening-up implied by such an economy which always generates a residual, one might invoke Marx, who uses a spatial model to depict the processes governing the accretion of value. "From the concrete point of view," he writes in Capital, "accumulation resolves itself into the reproduction of capital on a progressively increasing scale. The circle in which simple reproduction moves alters its form, and, to use Sismondi's [Constant's close friend] expression, changes into a spiral" (p. 546). Returning to Adolphe, what spaces can accommodate the overflow if not those texts which frame the narrative proper, thereby becoming marked by the very text which they purport to contain? The final "Reponse a l'editeur" in which a former friend of Ellenore's urges the editor to "read these letters," recalls the novel's apparent beginning, the "Avis de l'editeur," which seeks to localize the genesis of Adolphe's narrative in that pandora's box fallen on the road which harbored not only a manuscript, but also "many very old letters with no addresses or whose addresses and signatures had become effaced" (Adolphe, p. 48; my emphasis).

Production, reproduction, and narrative form Thus the case, a residue left behind by a creationary flood, contains a literary surplus to Adolphe's story in the form of still other open letters. The imperialism of the "floating" missive works its effect, moving from within to outside the text, taking its toll first on Ellenore, then on Adolphe, next on the editor, and ultimately spiralling out of control to reach Constant himself. For the raison-d? etre of the third edition of Adolphe, explains Constant, published at a time when the author professes to have become "most indifferent" to the novel, was to block a Belgian counterfeit edition which "would have been enlarged with additions and insertions not of my own making" (p. 43; my emphasis). Constant is prompted to pick up the pen again only in order to defend his paternal authorial rights. Yet the irony of Constant's gesture is that in order to make his defense against illicit, albeit inevitable, textual expansionism, a new document, the "Preface a la Troisieme Edition," must be attached to the text. And thus the author's attempts to maintain his authority in the face of what I suggest is this novel's inherent tendency toward the generation of surplus value, repeat, reinvest, and capitalize on the movement of the originary flood with its overflowing of banks. By way of concluding this discussion of narrative capitalization and in order to open it up to the problematics of birth, I would like to recall Marx's observation regarding the morphological transformation of capital to the effect that the circle of "simple reproduction" becomes a spiral. Simple reproduction is very much the issue in Adolphe, although not in the way Marx intends the term here. Nonetheless, the very use of the word suggests an equation of production and reproduction which Mary O'Brien makes explicit in The Politics ofReproduction. Hers is a feminist revision of the Marxist theory of labor and creation of value which seeks to take into account the labor of birth while at the same time examining patriarchy's reticence to acknowledge this labor. Distinguishing between a male and female "reproductive consciousness" (a line of argument which will not be adopted here), she elaborates a model of androcentric culture which arises as a response to the uncertainty of paternity.

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(This, of course, is not a novel concept: Freud in fact champions this very "uncertainty" as a triumph of paternal deduction in Totem and Taboo.)

Although I reserve the ideology of reproduction for future discussion, I bring up O'Brien's argument at this juncture because she views in capitalism a specific response to the "problem" of birth. Capitalism, she proposes, improves on Plato's mystic brotherhood, for it has the capacity to reproduce and multiply itself without recourse to sexuality and without any need for females. This may seem to be merely metaphorical ... except that historically it can be demonstrated that the uncertainty of paternity is no longer a problem with the advent of the capitalist mode of production. {The Politics of Reproduction, pp. 158-59) The movement of narrative capitalization, production, and abstraction which constitute the dominant economy in Adolphe is as overpowering as it is, I suggest, because there is something over which power must be exerted.

R E P R O D U C T I O N : ( D E ) G O M P O S I N G MOTHER

Woman will only ever be taken quoad matrem. (Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire XX: Encore, p. 36)

When, working on The Birth Project, Judy Chicago cast about for representations of parturition in Western art, she was stunned at the vacuum surrounding the act of giving life. As I shall be suggesting increasingly, this is not a silence born of reverence, but more a silencing. Nor can one make the case for aesthetic pudeur, for never has art spared us the spectacle of death. Woman's capacity to gestate and deliver another human being is a unique power, a fact attested to by the existence of artefacts celebrating the earth goddess in early matripotestal cultures. With the historical shattering of these icons by patriarchy, and their replacement by a metaphysics of abstraction, disembodiment, and rebirth into the spiritual, there comes over the power and the labor of literal birth a vast hush.

Production, reproduction, and narrative form It is within the heart of this extraordinary stillness that I listen for murmurs of birth, interrogating those — Stendhal, Constant, Rousseau — who cannot still their painful relation to origins and maternal death, even if their truth-in-birth must be outed in distorted form. Their personal anguish offers a privileged point of access to anxiety of a collective dimension. Insofar as patriarchal culture requires silence on the mother matter, and because Adolphe necessarily articulates the maternal through a discourse structured to eliminate her, birth and maternal representation inevitably take the form of covert operations. These, however, do occasionally disrupt the abstract discourse of capitalization and production. It is to this disruption that I now turn. In the "reproduction" half of this analysis ofAdolphe, I shall examine not only the process through which the maternal is articulated in the text, but also how the maternal, on occasion, actually comes to articulate the text itself, disfiguring and regrouping the hierarchical sentence into rhythmic clusters which bear the stigmata of the body. Once again, I wish to clarify that the representation of the maternal in Constant's text is conducted through the prism of patriarchal discourse. Adolphe offers an ideal vantage point from which to view maternal repression, for in spite of the novel's resolutely familial content, the mother is never mentioned. One might perhaps object that she is missing simply in order to highlight the patrifilial relationship of attraction and repulsion. But it is my contention that the inaugural absence provides the actual ground — a burial ground — on which the oedipal dance of mutual fascination (that is, the narrative of production) can be performed. It is because the novel is constructed over Her dead body that the dynamics of her replacement and reconstitution as object of desire take on a structural aspect. Filling in the gap thus becomes both a formal project as well as a psychological imperative. In order to demonstrate the extent to which the absent maternal function determines event-sequencing in general, I shall open up to the work of Flaubert and Stendhal and conclude with a consideration of the structural dilemma posed by maternal vacancy when the subject of narrative action is a woman capable of filling the position of the maternal.

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The first section of the present analysis described the patrilinear narrative as a usurious affair, with the father foreclosing on the son and claiming his pound of flesh from the maternal body. However, this same story also has its preoedipal version, and it is this m/other tale which will now be explored. There is something peculiar in the way Constant's novel emerges into the world, opening on a dyadic relation of father and son and not a triangular one. Although conventional enough as a beginning, one cannot help but note that even those novels in which one is immediately thrust into the oedipolitical (Le Rouge et le noir, for example) at least encode the feminine in a topographical evocation of Mother Nature. In other words, the maternal, even if absent, can at least put in a semiotic appearance. In Adolphe, however, since even the beauties of Mother Nature are forsworn, it is out of a double repression of the feminine that the novel emerges, as if indulging some fantasy of textual parthenogenesis. Nonetheless, the fantasy of paternal beginnings is interrupted as of the first chapter wherein one is afforded a glimpse of the son emerging from the feminine. Here, in an intrusion of gratuitous material into a narrative which rarely dallies over historical explanation, Adolphe sketches out what for him was an initiatory relationship: his adolescent conversations with "an elderly woman whose remarkable and bizarre mind had begun the development of my own" (p. 54). This anonymous older woman had rejected the all-powerful social order, and, "having failed to conform to the artificial, but necessary, rules of decorum" (p. 55), she was in her turn expelled from society. The passage concludes: She lived in a castle neighboring one of our properties, withdrawn and dissatisfied, with only her mind for a resource, analyzing everything with that mind. For nearly a year, in our inexhaustible conversations, we had considered life in all its aspects, with death always the final end of everything; and after having discussed death at such length with her, I saw death strike her with my very eyes. (p. 55) Cast in the role of nurturer and initiatrix into the ways of the spoken word, this older woman is defined as maternal in

Production, reproduction, and narrative form contradistinction to the father who, it will be recalled, refused the succor of speech to his son. If this woman bears no actual blood relation to Adolphe, she is nonetheless textually wed to his father in two distinct manners. First, her "place" is next to his ("a neighboring castle"), the conjugal fantasy thus projecting the couple as couple in a fantasmic space a la Chagall. Then, she is situated adjacent to the father in language, making up for what he cannot provide: the spoken word and the closeness and copresence it demands. It is key to this analysis that, from the outset, the maternal is associated with the spoken word and the voice. If speech does not enter into the abstract paternal economy of the written word, it does nonetheless enjoy a privileged status in Adolphe. Speech is violent, assuming an autonomous existence once released from the mouth, and its message can be either meaningful or utterly meaningless depending on who delivers it. Jeannine Jallat has traced the growing murmur of society in Adolphe, a murmur which eventually drowns out any utterance that might purport to have semantic value: On the periphery, this sound of language is that of the worldly word ... This indirect speech of society, so long contained in the margins of the text... is, of course, the speech of pure custom. That in chapter IX, it should attain the status of evenemential speech, indicates the deteriorization of Adolphe's universe. ("La parole et l'autre," 79) Thus the language of culture eventually drowns out a more archaic form of communication in a movement paralleling the paternal accession to power through litigation which takes place in the course of the novel. But Adolphe's " inexhaustible conversations" with the nameless and faceless elderly woman are extraworldly to the extent that they take place outside the paternal pale. Furthermore, there may also be something a trifle unworldly about them since the entire weight of their meaning derives from their connection with death, a connection which the text suggests, in a morbid play on words, is a causal one: "et apres avoir tant cause AQ la mort avec elle, j'avais vu la mort la frapper a mes yeux" (" and after having discussed death at such length with her, I saw death strike her with my very

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eyes") {Adolphe, p. 55; my emphasis). By closing the gap in "cause [de] la mort," the link between death and the spoken word becomes immediately apparent. It is as if Adolphe had talked her into dying, caused her death. In fact, the complex formed of Adolphe/older woman/speech/death will return with a vengeance, with Ellenore standing in as effigy. This returns us to the mother matter: maternal evocation in Adolphe is necessarily conducted on the level of pure substitution. Unlike the father, the mother never materializes. So immaterial is she, in fact, that hers might be considered a ghost story, for she haunts the text through surrogacy. A lost object right from the start, she is reinstated as Adolphe's extramural tutoress in the realm of pure spirit ("with only her mind for a resource, analyzing everything with that mind "). Lost anew to death, she returns to reclaim Adolphe during his lonely nocturnal vigil on the plain in Poland: "Ellenore's image rose up before me like a phantom, thrusting me into nothingness" (p. 133). The only way the mother can return is as a revenant just as, in narratological terms, the maternal function, as textually repressed matter, can only surface in the patrilinear discourse as a surrogate. Now the case for maternal substitution might, at first glance, seem an improbable one. To begin with, she was never there at all. Next, the exiled lady in the castle, while she does fill the role of nurturer and is structurally positioned in symmetry to Adolphe's father, does not strike one as "maternal" in the same self-sacrificing nineteenth-century Mother-Madonna sense of Mme de Renal, Baroness Hulot, or Anna Karenina. Nor is Ellenore (whose association with feminine exile rests on the voice's link to death) an especially motherly type, although evidently she has struck certain critics that way. "How could she be insensitive," muses Paul Delbouille, for example, "to that appeal [Adolphe's] which, addressing the consolatrix in her - she who protects and gives succor - strikes the maternal chord, so alive in every woman?" (Genese, p. 207). This maternal "fiber," in fact, seems to strike a chord in the heart of many an analyst: indeed, Lacan even gives it his psychoanalytical imprimatur in Seminaire XX. "If there is a


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discourse which demonstrates it, it is the analytic discourse, by bringing into play the following: woman will only ever be taken quoad matrem," states he, repressing the unspeakable through latinization. "Woman only comes into play in the sexual relation as mother" (p. 36). Lacan's conception would appear to preclude any possibility of the mother (or more pertinently, her daughter) ever acceding to the position of a desiring subject: after all, one issue never addressed is Jocasta's experience of her youthful bedfellow. However, to the extent that it repackages the patriarchal position, Lacan's dictum is entirely compatible with the situation which has been set up in Adolphe. Far from being the mere denatured as she is taxed by society for abandoning her children, Ellenore is the more maternal for having sacrificed them in order to adopt Adolphe, who is yet a child before the law.7 In any case, rather than renouncing her own offspring, Ellenore is merely bowing to the legal reality that the progeny of such unions are the property of the Father, should he choose to recognize them. "My children," she says in self-defence, "belong to M. de P*** " {Adolphe, p. 98). The troublesome fact is that, not being married herself, Ellenore is not the property of anyone. Furthermore, no one is in a position to make any real claim over her: as a Mother figure, Ellenore is she who resists appropriation, who always eludes paternal and textual capture. In Adolphe's peregrinations from the house of his father to Ellenore's house in Poland, he crosses an important border with his mistress. In fact, it is no coincidence that Adolphe's father writes precisely when his wayward son finds himself at the border - that is, poised on the verge of eluding the Paternal. For the paternal letter deplores Ellenore's conduct which is deemed "immoral" not because of her adulterous liaison with a younger man, as one might expect, but rather because she is not paternally subsumed: "Your birth, your talents, your fortune destined you for a position in society other than that of companion to a woman having no fatherland and placed under no higher tutelage" (p. 116). Nonetheless, in Adolphe's father's eyes, a more disquieting development occurs when Ellenore does return to the land of

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her forefathers since this entails a scandalous feminization of someone who had always been "daddy's boy." Continuing his attack, the father writes: Until the present, I saw in you Ellenore's protector, and as such, there was something noble in your acts which exalted your person, irrespective of the object of your attachment. Today, your relations are no longer the same; it is no longer you who protect her, it is she who protects you; you live in her house, you are a stranger whom she is introducing into her family, (p. 128) The tables have been turned, reversing Adolphe and Ellenore's roles. Hitherto, the women in the novel have always been displaced persons, frozen in the margins of society or relegated to the sidelines of the narrative. In fact, it was precisely Ellenore's character of being socially out of her place with the count which rendered her attractive to Adolphe in the first place: "The bizarreness of her position made up for a lack of new ideas" (p. 67). "Being out of place" may well be another major structural paradigm of this novel of fugitivity. However, if being out of place covers up a lack ("suppleait en elle"), setting things to right, as Adolphe believes himself to be doing by escorting Ellenore home ("I would have restored ["replacee"] her to the midst of her family") can only expose a void somewhere else. Thus reinstating Ellenore into her lost prestige and prerogatives means that Adolphe will find himself out of place. With the bizarre object of mimetic desire, Ellenore, in Poland and no longer displaced and transitory — and thus no longer desirable- the "bizarrerie" now gravitates to Adolphe whose turn it is to be a protege (e), out of place and passive: in short, feminized, because he has inherited this "lack" now that he has become displaced. The dangers of restoring the mother to her rightful place in the bosom of her family are apparent: the act of maternal restitution results in a disintegration of the filial subject as male, whether one terms this castration or, more generally, a deprivation of autonomy and a reduction to a state of dependency. Investing the Mother means divesting the Son, and this is a scandal often reenacted in the nineteenth-century novel.


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If there is a sense in which Ellenore's return to Poland can be considered an authentic homecoming, there is also a sense in which she is not "chez elle." We learn in chapter 7 that her father's will is being contested in this short novel's second litigation. Again, litigation functions as a metaphor for narrative : suspended judgement is analogous to narrative suspense. At issue is whether in fact Ellenore, surely a prodigal daughter but more pertinently la mere denatured, can come home: " On her arrival, Ellenore was granted temporary possession of the properties ["la jouissance des biens"] which were being legally disputed, after consenting not to alter their status in any way before a judgement was handed down. She took up residence in one of her father's properties" (p. 127). By occupying this paternal half-way house, what is being negotiated both by society and by the text itself is the positioning of the maternal. At this stage, Ellenore is legally a usufructuary, that is, a temporary beneficiary of the paternal legacy of production: interest generated out of capital. As far as maternal representation is concerned, this is a pivotal zone in the narrative for it signals her partial emergence out of repression. Nonetheless, the surfacing of the maternal is problematic since Ellenore is at once reinstated "dans la jouissance" and at the same time not empowered to touch the paternal signified, capital: her right to inherit is acknowledged on one level while being refused on another. If this is the definition of " usufructus," it is also that kind of negation which Freud discussed in a paper of that name. According to Freud, articulated negation is characterized by simultaneous recognition and denial: in fact, precisely those mechanisms which characterized the Stendhalian text as it engaged the problematics of birth. In the Freudian explanation, this articulation constitutes a first step toward the lifting of unconscious censorship: Thus the content of a repressed image or idea can make its way into consciousness, on condition that it is negated. Negation is the way of taking cognizance of what is repressed; indeed it is already a lifting of the repression, though not, of course, an acceptance of what is repressed ... With the help of negation only one consequence of the repression is undone - the fact, namely, of the ideational content of

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what is repressed not reaching consciousness. The outcome of this is a kind of intellectual acceptance of the repressed, while at the same time what is essential to the repression persists. {Works of Freud, XIX, pp. Nothing better describes Ellenore's status as usufructuary. During the process of litigation, the maternal awaits admission to the conscious of the text. For behind the query of how Adolphe can inherit from his father stands, in silhouette, a far more disturbing question: namely, can the maternal lay a claim to the patriarchal narrative legacy? Ultimately, of course, the paternal censor will deny admission, "negating" Ellenore through an epistolary message into the permanent repression of death in a reversion to the vacant position of her foremothers. It is no secret that Adolphe contains a subtle analysis of the vacillations of a self lucid and detached from event on the one hand, and hopelessly embroiled on the other. Delbouille speaks of "the clearly dual nature of thejV" (Genese, pp. 76-77), a split which Constant explicitly acknowledges to be characteristic of himself, as he writes in his Journaux intimes: " I am not an altogether real being. There are in me two people, one of whom observes the other, knowing full well that his convulsive phases will pass" (Oeuvres completes, pp. 290—91). Indeed, Adolphe^ modernity lies precisely in the unbreachable distance it takes from any Cartesian subject as it explores the fragmentation and disintegration of its own protagonist. This fragmentation, I maintain, is intimately bound up with the maternal presence and tends to articulate itself through alternate shifts between the exterior and interior worlds. In fact, Constant himself, the cosmopolitan who spent his life crossing borders, seems to have envisaged life, both in its personal and political manifestations, as a struggle between the inward and the outward. In De Vesprit de conquete, for instance, the author deplores the sort of government which, "operating in the spirit of conquest and invasion," divides its own populace into master and slave. The outcome of this political divisiveness can only be madness on a national scale:


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While it [the government] is depraving its chosen party, it must act on the rest of the country, demanding sacrifices and passive obedience in such a way as to derange its mind, pervert its faculty of judgement, overturn all its ideas. (Oeuvres completes, pp. 1003-04) What is true for the affairs of state also holds good for the state of affairs of the self. Adolphe had said as much in the early pages of his novel by defending himself against the accusation of " profound " egotism: " although my only interest was me, I was only mildly interested in myself" (Oeuvres completes, p. 54). We can read this " j e " in the light of the above political allegory to be the government prevailing - if a trifle madly - over the occupying armies of the self. If, however, "l'etat, c'estjV," who then are " m o i " and "moi-meme"? Much about Constant's writings, be they autobiographical, novelistic, religious, or political, bespeaks a preoccupation with a shattering of the whole into hostile and even persecutionary subunits. As a consequence, the discourse of power and humiliation is all-permeating: if Germaine de Stael, "after having captured me... tamed me with her violent demonstrations," Constant's concurrent love interest, Amelie, "is the opposite. From myself to her, there is such a difference of superiority, that she can only be a diversion " (Journaux intimes in Oeuvres completes, pp. 233-34). This consuming interest in mastery coupled with a volatile relation to passive or active behavior is further evidence that one might productively apply an approach based on object-relations theory to a study of Adolphe.

In the first section of this study, I demonstrated that the paternal/oedipal in Adolphe is characterized by an economy which capitalizes on time and letters, and is greatly preoccupied with the father's law and how the son is to be situated within that peculiar system of exchange and circulation. The preoccupations of the maternal are, however, other. They revolve around a founding loss, around the creation and ordering of a world of objects, and a consequent strong sense of space which is conceived in purely relational terms. This is why the crossing of borders takes on such importance in Adolphe, and why those few objects which do appear in Constant's highly stylized world

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seem to be experienced by the protagonist as either persecutionary or reassuring. Colette Coman has discussed this "animistic" aspect of Adolphe's universe in a Kleinian analysis of the novel.8 In the discussion which follows I shall propose that Adolphe can also be read as an individual's vain attempt to differentiate himself from his object world. It is an attempt doomed to failure in the face of premature loss of the maternal object, a loss which the novel stages, dramatically enough, both internally and externally. I further maintain that the oedipal narrative reiterates the preoedipal which uses the same diachronic sequencing: that is, the dilemma of maternal deprivation, subsequent object construction, and ultimate collapse of the self, receives a historical elaboration in the course of the novel. One of the more celebrated passages of Adolphe will be reread as a birth scene with all the attendant anguish occasioned by such a fall from grace. Another will be construed as an effort to re-fuse with the maternal body. This effort can only yield ambivalent results since, in the interests of survival, a regressus is always experienced as at once desirable and suicidal. Although the collapse of the male hero would seem to constitute the central drama of this work, by novel's end, one significant gain - triumph over corporeal birth - will have been achieved. Pyrrhic though it might seem, this victory is Adolphe's covert agenda. The fixing of a name on a protagonist or major character is inevitably a highly charged narrative act. For example, it has been established that the proper name can contain in condensed form an entire narrative sequence, thus giving it hermeneutic value. Or a name can, of course, articulate psychological truths on a whole range of levels, from the more or less explicit to the cryptic. Naomi Schor has considered " E m m a " to be a deprived "Femma" opposite "Hom(mais)" (Breaking the Chain, p. 12). Meanwhile, spotting the plodding cow in "Bovary" is history. With respect to Le Rouge et le noir, I have contended elsewhere that "Julien," when detached from its patronymic, Sorel, functions as a hermeneutic nexus binding several Julianic


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intertexts which otherwise have no links to each other [The Narrative Matrix, pp. 72-92). Names can also be viewed, as Barthes does in S/Z, a s devices whereby a subject ("le Nom propre") functions to unite and assemble a field of predicates. The illusion of character is thus a grammatical creation. It is in turn this very grammaticality which subverts all notions of character as person, for predicates obey laws of syntax, and can just as easily migrate and stick to other Proper Names. Yet if the name as a latent structure entertains a crucial and manifold relation to the narrative scheme, the conferring of the name — the how, why, when, and where — is no less important. For the act of naming itself spans the evenemential, the psychological and linguistic orders of a text, and through it the text's own ontogeny parallels that of its protagonist. An application of this principle of literary Darwinism may be found in Tony Tanner's fine analysis of Charles' introduction into the classroom with which Madame Bovary opens. Of Charles' famous cap, composed of motley, disparate elements, including a "sac," a "cordon," and "glands," Tanner notes that it seems a fragmented recapitulation of gestation and the birth process {Adultery in the Novel, p. 239). "Sac," he points out, can designate the amniotic sac, "cordon," the umbilical cord, and "gland," the testes. The description of this hat out of which Madame Bovary is pulled soon gives way to Charles' onomastication of his own name ("Charbovari") in front of the class, a humiliating process by which Charles, in Tanner's reading, is initiated into language: It is worth stressing how unerringly and with what economy and exactitude of detail Flaubert has redramatized in the opening pages of his book the various stages involved in the entry into language, finally focusing on the necessity to learn to insert gaps or holes into the continuum of sounds in order to participate in social discourse, (p. 244) Something similar, if less elaborate, occurs in Le Rouge et le noir to Julien Sorel after his uncanny experience in the Verrieres church where he read a preobituary notice about himself in anagrammatic form. To shake off his feelings of terror and

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foreboding, he plunges his head in the church baptismal font and goes to his first encounter with the maternal Mme de Renal, whereupon he identifies himself thus: " O n m'appelle Julien." Hence, both these novels begin with an allusion to a mise-aumonde and heady anointments. Moreover, in both, the protagonist (for such Charles appears to be at first) identifies himself in a flawed manner. Charles bungles his own attempt so utterly that he fails to distinguish his given name from his paternal name (Charbovari), signifying, perhaps, that the process of individuation has not yet been broached, that the gradual distancing of self from parents has not been attempted. Julien Sorel's self-nomination stages a double denial. In the silencing of the Name of the Father ("On m'appelle Julien"), one might see an encapsulated version of the novel's political content: the continual struggle waged by this filial figure against paternal institutions: in short, oedipus. Whereas Charles may never extricate himself from these institutions, Julien may never manage to insert himself into them. And the narrative seems to be setting us up for these possibilities through the initial act of naming. Then there is, after all, something equivocal about saying "On m'appelle," as if the son were implicating someone else even as he is naming himself. Recalling the "glands," "cordon," "sac," and the baptismal font, it is tempting to suggest that Charles and Julien are still uneasy in their onomastic yoke so soon postpartum. It has evidently escaped notice that in Constant's novel, so narcissistic and brimming over with "je," the protagonist, who is on stage ioo percent of the time, does not assume a name until the end of the second chapter out of ten. Perhaps because the title is eponymous, the reader unwittingly fills in the blank, assuming that s/he is dealing with the titular name. But that is an assumption, and what the readerly movement is doing is to play along with a remarkable example of textual repression. In view of this rather extraordinary silence, the act of naming takes on greater than usual prominence, and it is scarcely by chance that it falls to the Maternal in this novel to confer the name — that name we should have been waiting for but had already supplied. This passage, which occurs near the beginning

Production, reproduction, and narrative form of the novel after Ellenore has returned from the country in an effort to avoid Adolphe and first encounters him in society, is worth examining in detail: Dinner was announced; I gave Ellenore my arm, which she could scarcely refuse. "If you do not promise," I said, guiding her, "to receive me tomorrow at your house at eleven o'clock, I shall leave forthwith; I shall abandon my country, family, and my father; I shall break all my attachments, forswear all my duties, and go somewhere - anywhere - to end a life which you enjoy poisoning." - "Adolphe!" she answered; and she hesitated. I made a motion to distance myself. I do not know what my face expressed, but never had I experienced so violent a contraction. Ellenore looked at me. Terror mixed with affection was depicted on her face. "I will receive you tomorrow," she told me, "but I entreat you..." Many people were following us; she could not finish her sentence. I pressed her hand with my arm; we sat down to dine. (pp. 74-75) The intent of emotional blackmail aside, Adolphe's initial threat to abandon family, country, and father is essential since it amounts to a clearing away of all the cultural and paternal baggage with which the novel began. In terms of the narrative economy, it represents the possibility of regression to a point beyond the novel's actual beginning. Needless to say, an erasure of that magnitude would be narratological suicide, so the function of this speech (which begins with an "if") is to bracket the paternal and at the same time the entire patrilinear sequence, temporarily suspending it so that another scene — the m/other scene — may take place. The way has been paved for the "trauma of nomination," to use Tanner's phrase, which in this case is preoedipal and takes on the characteristics of traumatic birth. For Ellenore, the simple act of uttering the filionym is a laborious procedure ("and she hesitated"), and its eventual delivery results in the son's expulsion and a physical distancing from the Mother ("I made a movement to distance myself"). At the same time, Adolphe's entire being is rocked with the violent and originary spasms redolent of parturition: never had he experienced so violent a "contraction." Once separated and

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distanced, he can bask in a loving maternal contemplation which still bears the mark of her own sufferings ("a terror mixed with affection"). In the extrauterine setting, however, other people already block communication between the two. Contact is thus carried out at the level of part objects, hands and arms touching. And now, Adolphe, newborn and born into the maternal story, can turn to the earliest and most pressing, infantile concern, satisfaction of the oral need :"we sat down to dine." With this remarkable passage, the process of the construction of self is set into motion. Born into language by bearing a name, the damage of separation has been done. Both birth and nomination imply a loss of unity, a sense of rejection and fragmentation (evinced by the decoupage of body into arms and hands), and wrenching away from a state of pure indifferentiation, or perhaps a state of pure rhythm. For Adolphe's spasmic reaction to hearing himself named reminds us that language is itself grounded in the experience of separation of which parturition is the first instance. On the one hand, to speak is to signify difference since no language is necessary in perfect bodily communion, while on the other, it constitutes an attempt to master absence through symbolization. In Adolphe, the mother will bear the brunt both of the fall from grace, and of the son's painful insertion into culture. It is not an indifferent fact that the mother's voice is often heard by Adolphe as separated from its utterance, existing thus at the level of inchoate and unarticulated pneume. Throughout the novel, this sound, pure vocalization, is audible solely in the rapport between this couple. It is in order to evade the maternal voice that Adolphe wanders all night on the plain in Poland: " I was happy to put off the moment when I would hear her voice," explains he (p. 136). Likewise, on her deathbed, Ellenore recognizes Adolphe only through his voice: "What is that noise?" she wonders before realizing that "it is the sound of the voice which has hurt me" (p. 164). Society, and indeed themselves insofar as they are participants, cut up language according to patriarchal syntax: between Adolphe and Ellenore, at critical and painful moments in the text, it is the vocal


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surge of solicitation and aggression subtending the words which counts.9 The experience of initiation into the world has thus been marked by a triple separation: umbilical disseverance (loss of physical union), the entry into language (loss of the signified, forcing symbolization), loss of primacy in the maternal relation (others now intrude). Several questions still remain to be addressed. How will Adolphe order his world, how will the maternal be valorized, how will construction of the self proceed, and what will be its outcome? Although there is already good reason to believe that the maternal will be configured along sadistic and hostile lines, as evidenced through the sort of associations made with the voice, there is in fact one attempt at idyllic re-fusion with the maternal and it is an immediate postpartum one, following, that is, the first act of oral gratification discussed above: And when we rose from the table, our hearts were in communion as if we had never been separated. "You see," I said to her, giving her my hand to retire to the drawing room, "that you dispose of my entire existence; what have I done to you that you take pleasure in tormenting me?" (p. 76; my emphasis) It is the novel's only imagination of paradise regained, envisioned as a movement inward ("retire to the drawing room") to a place of complete oral gratification and dependence. But in the land of milk and honey, the mother's milk has already soured. Adolphe is already accusing Ellenore of persecution. Nonetheless, from an object-relations perspective, erecting the mother as a bad object serves the ulterior purposes of self-construction to the extent that it dampens any appeal that a regressus ad uterum might have, making re-fusion seem dangerous. Guntrip has discussed the inherent ambivalence of the structure birth/regression with respect to a patient who dreamed she first entered and then fell out of a gas oven: This "birth symbolism" shows that suicidal impulses may have opposite meanings. The gas oven means a return to the womb, a surrender to identification with mother. Falling out of... the gas oven means a struggle to separate and be born. The struggle to dissolve identification is long and severe. (Schizoid Phenomena, p. 41)

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The preoedipal narrative of Adolphe traces the phases of this struggle toward independence through a series of birth and regression scenes, as well as through the projection of affects and objects in the exterior world, a device which creates what Coman called the "animist illusion." This progression ends with Adolphe's rebirth on the Polish plain. It has become necessary at this juncture to examine the implications of applying object-relations theory to literature. Because, however much the theory may illuminate certain evolutionary aspects of a given work, application of it requires looking at the problem of the literary text as mimesis of "reality," even if this reality be a psychic one. But what of the text itself? How does it configure, for instance, the illusion of character? More pertinent to the present case, by what artful mechanism does the psycho-political repressed come to be inscribed in the text? For, as potentially fruitful as object-relations theory may be in literary applications, the following caveats do come to mind. For one thing, art risks being defined as a mere mise-en-scene of ego conflicts, with the outcome therapeutic or not, as the case may be. Barbara Schapiro's interesting analysis of the English Romantic depiction of the mother adopts this tack as evidenced in her remarks on Keats' poem Endymion: "Book 4 demonstrates an increasing maturity, and his ability to feel compassion and love for the maiden finally signifies a move out of narcissistic isolation and into real human relations" {The Romantic Mother,

P-5°)Such exegeses can be useful and have punctuated the various moments of Freudianism. A classical example is Bettelheim's reading of fairy tales. Although emphasis therein is on the reader, the basic function of any story (since art is considered functional) is viewed in terms of ego integration. Another reservation regarding object relations as applied to art is not so much methodological as quantitative, as it were: by pushing sources of anxiety back one archaeological layer, most conflicts risk becoming reduced to the same thing. While this doubtless has clinical utility, the effect on literary analysis can be one of impoverishment simply because the field has been more


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narrowly defined. The present analysis of Adolphe does not seek to "get to the bottom " of things by suggesting that the maternal is in some way the ultimate signified. Rather, I am here interested in examining the patterns of imbrication of two narrative economies. That the maternal and birth are the more repressed articulates a reality which is as much socio-political as it is psychological. Another problematic implication of viewing literature as pure therapy is that if the "cure" takes place somewhere in mid-creation, the artist might decide to put pen aside. This is, of course, a logical extreme but it is, in fact, exactly where Schapiro's analysis takes her, as she concludes of the Keatsian late poem, The Fall of Hyperion, that: "The poem was abandoned perhaps because the source of its creative energy, its motivating conflict, lies in the poet's confrontation with Moneta, and thus when Keats completed that passage, he felt no compelling need to continue" (p. 59). It goes without saying that the forging of art out of subjective experience is a highly problematic issue. Freud, in addressing himself to it in "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming," states that if art does serve as a vehicle for articulating the unconscious, there is nonetheless a "bonus" of a structural nature which is, in point of fact, the aesthetic {Works of Freud, IX, pp. 152-53). But the bonus remains a "je ne sais quoi," an excess of some kind. It is therefore perhaps more productive to define the articulation of psychological conflict, even when it appears painful, in terms of pleasure and "jouissance," following Barthes and Julia Kristeva's example. Although Kristeva is concerned with poetry in her Revolution in Poetic Language, some aspects of her analysis may be brought to bear on Adolphe. In an attempt to situate the disruptions exercised by the unconscious on linear, discursive language, Kristeva appeals to the concept of "oralization," defined by her as a tendency toward "reunion with the mother's body" which, in poetic language, translates into "melody, harmony, rhythm" {Revolution, p. 153). Her analysis would appear to concur with Guntrip's in his gas oven example to the degree that for both theorists, no return to the maternal can be conceived as

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exclusively idyllic: the reversion to the mother's body must entail an element of revolt, a refusal often expressed sadistically. Kristeva continues: This oralization restrains the aggressivity of rejection through an attempted fusion with the mother's body, a devouring fusion... A return to oral and glottal pleasure combats the superego and its linear language, which is characterized by the subject/predicate sequence of its syntagms. Suction or expulsion, fusion with or rejection of the mother's breast seems to be at the root of this erotization of the vocal apparatus and, through it, the introduction into the linguistic order of an excess of pleasure marked by a redistribution of the phonematic order, morphological structure, and even syntax, (pp. 153-54) For purposes of this analysis, then, Kristeva's model has the virtue of not reducing aesthetics to therapy. Instead, by tying creation to pleasure (even as a painful issue is undergoing articulation), art becomes an experience which is infinitely variable and repeatable: Keats' pen need not be suspended. Also, and no less fundamental, aesthetics is thereby viewed in terms of process. The text's art is encoded in the pathways of its permutations and is not necessarily teleological. Thus if one maintains that Adolphe chronicles the history of an arduous construction of self, it must also be acknowledged that this entire process, rather than being mirrored on a receptive literary surface, is transcribed and distorted as it passes into text. This is, after all, what makes Adolphe a novel and not simply a case history. In the light of these considerations, I would like to examine a passage of the novel which is extraordinary both for its reflection of Adolphe's internal object world, and for the disruptions and distortions which the exposure of the matritext operates on the stylistic register. It is a matter of another, less happy, regressive venture over the threshold of difference (defined by birth and language) occurring shortly after the oral gratification scene previously examined. The scene is contained, in fact, in a letter (that is, in a text set apart from the novel like an objet d'art) in which Adolphe entreats Ellenore (not yet" his") to see him, explaining the suffering and terror that the imagination of such an encounter occasions in him. This is one of the novel's most

Production, reproduction, and narrative form remarkable passages, often cited for the violence of its emotion and the beauty of its style. I propose that in this passage, what the reader in fact witnesses is a breakdown of prose with the consequent emergence of a body rocked by the rhythms of pleasure/pain. The disembodied and stylized quality of Constant's writing becomes reinvested and reorganized into a pulsating mass of words, whose repetition closely approximates poetic discourse, as writing enters into proximity with the body. I have reformatted the prose to highlight the repetitions, observing the text's own punctuation in order to divide it into "lines," underscoring its poetic aspects. There are, of course, many other examples of internal rhyme spread over greater distances. These do not result in an impression of throbbing, but do conspire to lend a unity and ritual quality to the passage, not unlike displaced refrains. Furthermore, lines 3, 10, 19, and 24 seem to function as "rejets" within a strophe. Each brings a thought to conclusion, beginning with a single syllable word characterized by a weak " e " ("je,"" que," " d e , " " le "). These clauses "en rejet" occur after strong rhymes and approximate an Alexandrine meter, two having twelve syllables, one thirteen, and the other fourteen. (This passage will go untranslated since what I am showing is a poeticization of language audible in the French. The analysis following the passage constitutes something of a summary of its contents.) Lorsque enfin ces heures de delire sont passees, lorsque le moment arrive oil je puis vous voir, je prends en tremblant la route de votre demeure. [rejet] Je crains que tous ceux qui me rencontrent ne devinent les sentiments que je porte en moi; Je m'arrete; Je marche a pas lents: Je retarde l'instant du bonheur, de ce bonheur que tout menace, que je me crois toujours sur le point de perdre; [rejet] bonheur imparfait et trouble, contre lequel conspirent peut-etre a chaque minute et

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Politics and narratives of birth les evenements funestes et les regards jaloux, et les caprices tyranniques, et votre propre volonte. Quandje touche au seuil de votre porte, quandje l'entrouvre, [mimes "lorsque" of beginning] une nouvelle terreur me saisit: je m'avance comme un coupable, [mimes "Je m'arrete"] demandant grace a tous les objets qui frappent ma vue, [rejet] comme si tous etaient ennemis, [mimes "quandje touche"] Comme si tous m'enviaient l'heure de felicite dont je vais encore jouir. Le moindre son m'effraie, le moindre mouvement autour de moi m'epouvante, le bruit meme de mes pas me fait reculer. [rejet] Tout pres de vous, je crains encore quelque obstacle qui se place soudain entre vous et moi. Enfinj> vous vois. je vous vois et je respire, et je vous contemple etje m'arrete, comme le fugitif qui touche au sol protecteur qui doit le garantir de la mort. (Adolphe, pp. 84-85)

Rarely has the body been so violently resurrected from a prose so placid! Indeed, as Kristeva indicates, pain, rejection, and orality "rebind" the syntactico-paternal discourse such that the "new phonematic and rhythmic network" speaks the body in all its anguish. In this case, syntax is not disturbed (this is, after all, Constant and not Mallarme), but patterns are radically altered: regression toward the intrauterine brings about a semiotic shift as well. That this writ of pain might be wrought out of pleasure is the more conceivable in light of its extratextual status, as if it were being signified as a different mode of fiction - the Freudian aesthetic bonus, as indeed it is. While in Adolpke, articulation of the maternal (vacancy, power of birth, etc.) is a feat of patriarchal ventriloquism, there may be a few (rare) instances in which relation to the mother body is presented as unprocessed through the oedipolitical screen. It is

Production, reproduction, and narrative form precisely these privileged moments of the text, associated with catastrophic birth and loss, which offer an insight into personal anxiety before this can be recast by a gendered collective cultural response to the power of reproduction. To return to the poetry of Adolphe, it is as if the repressed maternal material could find articulation only at the expense of a complete stylistic rupture. On the purely thematic level, the passage clearly chronicles the terrors of reabsorption, also construable as a walk through Adolphe's own internalized object world. There, good objects are seriously compromised and threatened by the bad ones ("happiness which everything threatens"). Adolphe's promenade is further marked by persecution fantasies ("conspire," "jealous glances," "the enemies"), guilt, and meek attempts at expiation ("asking forgiveness of all objects"). Fear reaches an unbearable pitch until, at last, he espies the good object of his desire. This monument of promised fusion must, he believes, shield him from all the other evil objects. The passage culminates in a paroxysm of repetition: "Enfin, je vous vois, je vous vois" ("At last, I see you, I see you"). Alas - no haven this, and after the grand poetico-orgasmic release, the text proceeds, like a nightmare, to transform the sigh of relief into a shriek of terror as the good object Adolphe was banking on refuses him the hoped-for welcome. The passage continues: "But at the very moment when my entire being thrusts itself toward you... Your eyes observe me. Nearly offended, you are uncertain how to react" (p. 85). The mother on the inside is nothing if not a persecutionary and devouring object demanding to be placated and certainly projected onto the outside out of revenge and self-protection. This aspect of the maternal demand doubtless surfaces in the form of the pure voice which, as has been seen, characterizes matrifilial communication. No words need be imprinted on this vocal raw material for the voice signifies, in and of itself, a state of utter indifferentiation; in other words, death itself. To escape the voice is to evade death, thereby articulating one's self as an entity separate and distinct from the engulfing maternal object. What perhaps astonishes most about Constant is the lucidity

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with which he recognizes and describes processes of introjection and identification. "Love," claims the narrator of Adolphe, "identifies itself with the love object to such a degree that even in its despair, there is some charm" (p. 169). Thus on a highly conscious level, Constant constructs the self as a theater of cruelty within which the positions of self and Other risk becoming interchangeable, something which can lead either to the cataclysmic dissolution of self... or mother. Yet if some objects undergo introjection, others are susceptible to being projected when this serves the purpose of defense of self, as just seen. In Adolphe, what is on the outside is never too clearly demarcated from the internal. Castles, portals, thresholds, borders, trees with problematic telluric attachments: if these comprise the novel's sparse allusions to external reality, what they express in common, as objects which mediate and go between two worlds, seems to cancel out their very exteriority. The sense of space which the novel projects is thus committed neither to the interior nor to the exterior. One ill imagines Adolphe anticipating the Proustian narrator's remark, by uttering something like: " I set down my cup and turn toward my interieur." It is precisely this propensity to straddle borders which lends the Constantian text its celebrated abstract quality. For Delbouille, this abstractness reposes, in large measure, upon a linguistic code as highly stylized as that of, say, La Princesse de Cleves. While this stylization is undeniable, I would attribute Adolphe^ austerity principally to a narrative which defines the world in purely positional terms. Physical depictions of persons or the natural environment occupy a rarefied place in this aesthetics of pure relation. When depicted, the exterior world is a desolate, disembodied space mapped out mainly in terms of marginality: this is clear from the beginning which situates Adolphe anonymously in "la petite ville de D***." We are here far removed from the realism and sense of place characterizing another nineteenth-century "petite ville," Stendhal's Verrieres, with its mutilated trees, streams whose courses have been deviated, hedges whose height connotes power, and assembly-line organization of labor.

Production, reproduction, and narrative form Adolphe moves from D*** to the very space of marginality itself, the border, thence on to legendary Bohemia, landing at last in Poland which represents for him, to use Jarry's term, "nulle part," a symbolic no man's land, for it is in Poland that the world becomes depersonalized for Adolphe, where he renounces all desire, purpose, and future. It is also here that Ellenore meets her fate. In fact, the external world is not constructed according to any code of realism at all, because it is a subjective space alternating between persecution and refuge. In other words, to return to object-relations theory, what is seen on the exterior duplicates, in some manner, an internal world. This is why those few palpable, real objects which do appear in Adolphe - such as castles and trees - constitute fantasmic entities translated and displaced onto the exterior. Indeed, the reader of these passages may have the impression that Adolphe is merely stumbling through the debris of objects which litter his own mental space. Critics have often commented, for instance, on Adolphe's reverie which occurs near the end of the novel in which the paternal castle of his youth is evoked in the following idyllic terms: Again I saw the ancient castle I had lived in with my father, the woods surrounding it, the river which ran at the foot of its walls, the mountains forming the borders of its horizon, (p. 136) No sooner are these objects invoked than the threatening maternal counterpart obtrudes rudely onto the protagonist's perception: "Suddenly I saw Ellenore's castle" (p. 136). No sooner is the "good" mental image of the paternal castle conjured up in Adolphe's imagination than it is violently echoed and annulled by its bad counterpart, projected onto the exterior. Godelieve Mercken-Spaas notes (without, however, pursuing the matter further) what is perhaps the most odd about this polarized castle construct: " I t is striking that inside the castle Adolphe sees his father, whereas the elements surrounding the castle seem to symbolize rather the maternal element (security, secrecy) " ("The Metaphor of Space," 191). Throughout Constant's work, the exterior - or Mother

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Nature - is depicted as cold, hibernal, and in a state of decay. It is not, for example, surprising that in Constant's autobiographical work, Ce'cile, the heroine's death agony (whose depiction echoes that of Constant's friend Mme Talma and prefigures the "contractions" of Ellenore's) is brought about because she ventured out in a winter storm. In De la religion, Constant describes the advance of old age as a wintry veil cast over external objects: " Old age moves toward us, a somber and solemn time when objects become obscure and seem to move off, and when an indescribable coldness and bleakness envelopes everything around us" [Oeuvres completes, p. 1403). Once again, it is a matter of a persecutionary exterior force moving inwards ("moves toward us") and, in so doing, evicting other objects which migrate coldly outward ("seem to move off"). The response to the sense of a cold, invasive, maternal force associated through the fact of birth with death is to repudiate it out of existence. And this is the juncture of the personal and the collective, for if ejecting the " b a d " maternal conforms to a standard development of the preoedipal narrative, it also corresponds to one of the demands of a cultural masterplot which has a stake in not acknowledging the maternal body and its relation to reproduction, as will be seen in cycle 3. REBIRTH AND THE PERFORMANCE OF MATRICIDE

The writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother... in order to glorify it, beautify it, or dismember it, taking it to the limits of recognition. (Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte, p. 60) In Adolphe, the mother, death, voice, and language accompany nature in its death throes. En route to Poland, " I took up the language of love ... with [Ellenore] once more," notes Adolphe, "but those emotions and that language resembled the pale and discolored leaves which grow listlessly on the branches of an uprooted tree, the remains of a dying plant" (p. 125). It is here in the tradition of Rousseau that language, certainly a cultural artefact, seems nonetheless to be an organic outgrowth of Nature. In other words, Culture would appear to differ from its origin, Nature, in degree only. And yet what is excreted from


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the Natural is nothing less than a false language, figured by an image which rather strikingly recalls that processed dead wood known as paper. These "pale and discolored leaves," assimilated to an inherent linguistic mendacity and, by implication, to paper and to writing itself, are ready to detach themselves from a nature being uprooted. The unspeakable of the text — the primal scene of maternal death and its relation through birth to the patrifilial — is here

articulated and frozen in a wintry metaphor. And a simple death it is not, but rather a matricide since the son is caught in Jlagrante delicto of emergence into culture from out of a dying maternal trunk, and this precisely through the paternal law of residuals ("the pale and discolored leaves which grow listlessly on the branches of an uprooted tree, the remains of a dying plant"). The fantasmic emergence of a live body at the expense of another body's life, besides describing Constant's own entry into the world (see Verhoeff, "Adolphe" et Constant, pp. 100, 103, 106), suggests a fear which is at the heart of every experience of separation. Guntrip maintains: One cause of anxiety is that separation may be felt to involve, not natural growth and development, but a violent, angry, destructive break-away, as if a baby, in being born, were bound to leave a dying mother behind. [Schizoid Phenomena, p. 41)

Through the metaphor of the tree and its unnatural, discolored leaves, Constant articulates his highly personal conception of origins. The son's emergence from an expiring womb subtends the very image of Culture and language evolving out of Nature. 10 (While Rousseau is the clear cultural intertext for the problematic Nature/Culture embrace, his negotiation of the issue, as we shall see, will be far more painstaking, his solutions different, and his influence incalculably wider.) Culture thus begins as an excrescence of nature; that is, a mere surplus, devoid, in and of itself, of pure essence or a quality all its own. Indeed, one can only conclude that the paternal economy of Constant's narrative stages a matricide: propelled through capitalization and surplus value, it seeks to uproot on

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multiple levels - thematic, figural, and structural - the maternal ur-text and its bodied relation to birth. In Le Plaisir du texte, Barthes develops his own — by now notorious - notion of an aesthetic relation of text to the maternal. The writer is seen as in some primordial battle, grappling with a Mother Tongue which he distorts according to the direction of individual fantasy: No object entertains a constant relation with pleasure. However, for the writer, this object does exist; it is not language ["le langage"], but Language ["la langue"], the mother tongue. The writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother... in order to glorify it, beautify it, or dismember it, taking it to the limits of recognition. I shall go so far as to say: to revel in ["jouir de"] the disfiguring of the mother tongue ["langue"], and public opinion will protest in indignation, because it will not have "nature disfigured." (p. 60) Such public protestations are, in fact, unlikely, for Barthes is merely adding a stylistic twist to the time-honored equation of woman as substance receptive to male imprint; narrative satisfaction (that is, the unfurling of Event and History) he early on proclaimed to be a mise-en-scene of the Father; woman stands resolutely outside of event. In his reading, love, hostility, and sadism, all take the maternal as their target and, just as in Adolphe, disfiguring nature is one way to figure the Mother. The baleful tree-mother makes one more appearance toward the end of Adolphe and again in a hibernal pose: "The sky was serene; but the trees were leafless" (p. 167). The image of the second tree is a narrative marker suggesting that the filio/foliotext has now detached itself from its original referent. Returning to object-relations theory, one might say that with Mother Nature wrenched from her progeny on the outside, Adolphe, with his new and mendacious word, is ready at last to proceed to the final meticulously wrought disfigurement of the novel's denouement.

Resuming the sequence of the preoedipal story which seems to progress through alternating projection and introjection, it would seem that as Adolphe, like the leaf, continues to detach himself, he perceives Ellenore's attempts to reach him as persecutionary assaults on his sacred self: "She would have


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liked to penetrate the intimate sanctuary of my mind," he protests (p. 122). Thus Ellenore, a ubiquitous and demanding bad object, is barred access from a certain holy place in the spatialized mind. One might well wonder what sort of rites take place in this tabernacle since, shortly after, in admitting to Ellenore's confidant that he no longer loves Ellenore, Adolphe readily opens up his "sanctuary" to a perfect stranger. The result of enlightening a third party is disastrous and takes a heavy toll on Adolphe's internal object world: " the light which penetrates this sanctuary uncovers and finishes off the destruction which night had kept enveloped in its shadows" (p. 143). Something was certainly decomposing right there on an inner stage to which Ellenore had been refused admittance. Then, in a metaphor whose realism shocks in this lexically bland novel, the sanctuary is revealed to be, in fact, a reliquary: "in the same way, bodies sealed in tombs retain their first form until the outside air comes and hits them and reduces them to powder" (p. 143). Indeed, Ellenore may not venture upon the internal stage where her dead body is already in repose, on view, it would seem, for the self. In narrative terms, the novel's denouement has been anticipated from within the inner universe of objects. And so with the internal representation of Adolphe's love object crumbling away, it only remains for her corresponding material manifestation to be dispatched. Perhaps it is because the murder has already taken place in the cathedral that the novel depicts Ellenore's physical death, to some extent, as a fait accompli. By the final chapter (but well before the death), the ghost has, as it were, been exorcized: " I had put aside indefinitely the need to act; she was no longer pursuing me like a specter" (p. 161). The final matricide is thus a double repetition: reenacting the ritual death which has already transpired in the internal temple, it is also a return to the maternal vacancy which founds Adolphe. However, the only possible outcome of the depopulation of both inner and outer worlds through this apocalyptic annihilation of objects is ego loss which will result in a perpetual sense of depersonalization. Even though Adolphe had spent the entire

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novel attempting to abandon Ellenore, he describes his final state in terms which imply that it is the external world which has abandoned him: "Nobody observed them [my actions] now; they interested no one; nobody tried to take the time or the hours from me; no voice bade me return" (p. 174). Adolphe is indeed placed in the position of mourning a bad object. At first glance this might appear odd, but whereas before, when Ellenore was still alive, he was negotiating the possibility of productive detachment from the maternal object, now this object, opposite to which his self was being defined, is missing both from the inner sanctuary and the exterior world. And, as Guntrip has stated, "any object relations are better than nothing" [Schizoid Phenomena, p. 253). If "bad objects involve the fear of ego-loss by disintegration under destructive persecution," the annihilation of objects "involve[s] the fear of ego-loss by depersonalization" (p. 83). Clearly, Adolphe's world has been emptied of its internal and external contents. In the Preface, the narrator describes Adolphe's loss of the world in terms anticipatory of modern psychoanalysis: " I am speaking of the kind of mistrust which follows upon an utter confidence [in things] and which, having fallen upon the person whom one had exalted above all others, extends, through the same gesture, to the rest of the world " {Adolphe, p. 39). This case of mal du siecle, at any rate, bears all the marks of the condition of mourning. 11 The present study has tended to read Adolphe as a coupling of "parental" narratives, one dominant and the other repressed, in a relation of subordination which reproduces that of the socio-political. True to its "genealogical imperative," the paternal hermeneutic regulates causal narrative progression through an abstract economy of surplus value and production, as has been seen. The maternal narrative, on the other hand, makes itself felt not temporally (for Event is construed by patriarchy as being of the Father), but spatially and bodily in the highly fluid rapport between interior and exterior. I would like to conclude this analysis of Adolphe first by examining the final violence which is the shutting of the motherly mouth, that organ which devours, which articulates voice into language,

Production, reproduction, and narrative form and transcodes nature into culture. Then we shall see how Claire de Duras and Germaine de Stael position themselves with regard to the issue of maternal vacancy. It has been seen that crossing over the bar separating External from Internal is a prospect fraught with terror. Such passingsover are not infrequent, however, in Adolphe, and I would like to suggest that the bar of the metaphor (External/Internal) is the organ of orality: the mouth. For it is indeed the mouth which imprints articulations onto pure voice; it is the mouth which thus is responsible for infusing voice with those meaningful rhythms and stops perceived as speech. The cavity of the mouth is a threshold which is the very locus of difference, and yet wherein interior and exterior touch. On the one hand, by regressing through it (as an infant at the breast, for example), one may attain fusion with the maternal, and the pulsations of the prose "poem" earlier examined might be viewed as an oralization of language in the service of a maternal union. Herein the climactic repetition "je vous vois, je vous vois" comes about as close as language can come to annihilating articulation or difference, while at the same time condensing the maternal novel's contents into its three ultimate signifying terms: I, you, the voice - "je/vous/voix." On the other hand, the mouth, turned outward, is that organ which, in producing utterances, imprints meaning onto difference according to the semantico-cultural codes of an external world. This is why the process of articulation, situated in that apparatus-mouth, is such a laborious one in Adolphe. For the utterance is a generative act which creates an exterior world: "everything I said," laments Adolphe, " would either die on my lips, or end in a completely different manner than I had expected" (p. 69). Either there is an attempt to keep language internalized, or there is a hesitant construction of the exterior which is also disagreeable because once past the limits of the mouth, words, released like bubbles of signification, drift outside the purview of the person articulating. That is, language may be likened to birth to the extent that it is an experience of loss, and the external world, which is uttered into existence, is hostile because it escapes mastery.

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Delivery through the mouth is another form of separation, and the world out there is bound to be suspect to the likes of Adolphe to whom projected words must inevitably exist side by side with projected bad objects which resist containment. Explaining his father's coldness, Adolphe refers to a timidity "which denatures in our mouth everything we try to say" (pp. 52-53; my emphasis). There is thus some sense in which the elusive boundary between nature and culture might also be situated in the mouth, since that is where internal experience is "denatured" before being thrust into culture. It is then and there that inside becomes outside, voice turns into language, rules are added to principles, trees are converted into paper, and Mother Nature undergoes the sex change of enculturation. However, for better or for worse, the beginning of the novel has clued us in to the fact that the son is allied with culture, and in order to extricate himself from the persecutionary maternal imago (the constantly demanding Ellenore on the outside), the break must come at the level of the mouth by silencing the maternal voice. The progressive muzzling of Ellenore has often been commented upon by critics (see, for instance, Jallat's article). What I shall discuss here, briefly, is how the obliteration of the maternal voice and, at last, death, serves the hermeneutic purpose of returning us to the situation of the novel's beginning, that is to say, the founding silence in matters maternal. Narrative beginnings, in other words, display a wish already fulfilled decomposing the mother - and the drama which unfolds is a reenactment tending toward an absence: in a way an account of how the situation arose in the first place. But this is to move ahead of ourselves. Following Ellenore's fateful nomination of Adolphe which precipitated his odd seizure with its "violent contraction," everything possible is done to deprive her of speech. Indeed, after that first "Adolphe" appeal, "many people were following us; she could not finish her sentence" (p. 75). The interruption functions, of course, to isolate the utterance as an act of pure nomination, but it is also an indication of things to come. It will be recalled that even before Ellenore is seen, Adolphe

Production, reproduction, and narrative form had entered into an initiatory relationship with an old woman whose principal trait, it seemed, was speech. The long conversations referred to, and from which the father was excluded, are situated in so distant a past that their content is no longer of any import: they merely signify speech, or perhaps, at an even less articulated level, an exchange of voice. Death was the interruptor of those conversations which, because they are not reported in any diachronic, historical fashion but are given rather as a monolithic image, may be akin to a screen memory, functioning in the narrative to associate vocalization with the maternal. Moreover, it is the son who is the agent of the maternal silencing. Shortly after the parturition-nomination, he, a sulky offspring, will brook no vocal contact between Ellenore and someone else: " I could scarcely contain myself when someone other than I was speaking privately to Ellenore; I would interrupt her conversations abruptly" (p. 80). Whereas the "prenatal" son had been impotent to speak to Ellenore ("Convinced by these repeated experiences that I would never have the courage to speak to Ellenore"), he proceeds through interruptions to a mastery of the spoken word. Indeed, an eager apprentice of Don Juanesque techniques, he will seduce through the word: "gradually she became familiar with this language" (p. 81). Even on the way to Poland, maintaining the lie of his own speech, Adolphe pursues: "once again I took up the language of love with her" (p. 125). In fact, it is in Poland, once he has been reduced to complete dependency, according to the father's account of it, that Adolphe at last seems to detach himself from this object which is threatening to destroy him. The night of meditation on the plain begins with an attempt to evade the maternal voice: " I was happy to put off the moment when I would hear her voice " (p. 136). Just as the paternal story was bracketed in the beginning to give way to the nomination-birth and subsequent highly physical scene of uterine regression, here the voice is being stifled to allow a resurfacing of the paternal story whose discourse includes adventure, career, acceptable marriage, in short, the masculine position in the external world. " I had,"

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states Adolphe, "an impatient desire to regain the position due me in my fatherland and in the company of my peers " (p. 134). Further, there are all the signs that the mother and her persecutionary demands are being let go. This process is evoked by the sudden and violent resurgence of the maternal imago perceived as ego-threatening: "Ellenore's image rose up before me like a phantom, pushing me into nothingness" (p. 133). Then, however, night falls, and the peasants "abandoned nature to herself" (p. 136; my emphasis). Following this, dreaming of "the ancient castle I had lived in with my father," Ellenore's real castle rudely thrusts itself upon his consciousness. Adolphe's reaction is to turn away from it, just as the peasants were abandoning Mother Nature. During this night, then, a primordial struggle is waged whose stakes for Adolphe are very high: to resist succumbing to complete ego engulfment by maternal objects, keeping these in perspective while at the same time differentiating himself from them. And it seems indeed to be a night of transfiguration in which Adolphe senses that he is emerging from out of the " cell" (p. 133) of his narcissism: " I had sunk down to a new level of egotism, so to speak, to an egotism lacking in boldness, malcontent and humiliated; I was glad to be reborn into thoughts of another order, and to discover within me the capacity to forget myself" (p. 137; my emphasis). And with this epiphany we have, for the first time in the text, an explicit image of birth. Yet, at this juncture, several questions need to be addressed regarding the literary representation of ontogeny, and in this respect, Adolphe can serve as a basis for a broader discussion. First, what does the structure of rebirth signify within the narrative economy? And how many times can a protagonist be reborn, anyhow? Finally, and more pertinently, to what extent are such births symbolic affairs — metaphors for spiritual rejuvenation — and to what extent are they grounded in the body? The implication of this last question would seem to be that literary rebirth may find articulation on a whole series of textual registers and that the expression of this most primordial of archetypes can assume different degrees of "figurality."


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Let me take an example. There is certainly some difference of level between the birth enactment contained in the description of Charles Bovary's weird headgear in Tanner's reading and, say, Etienne Lander's descent into the bowels of the earth, his epic struggle with the bestial Chaval, his painful reemergence onto the earth's rejuvenated surface in Germinal. Of course, Bovary's cap is a semiotic figuration of genesis, an unlikely conflation of metonymic shards pointing to, rather than tracing, a mise-au-monde. As a representation, it exists at a metalinguistic level, as if Flaubert had appropriated bits and pieces of birth texts with the result that delivery emerges as a hodge-podge of literary citation. Zola, on the other hand, works with vast slabs of epic sequence, a technique which lends his representation a more allegorical quality. To what extent either of these constructions articulates an "unconscious " of the text is difficult to say, but what is certain is that they are both highly selfconscious structures, already deriving their support, in part, from a well-established literary tradition. Some critics would argue that the literary tradition is inescapable in any case — in short, that all the world's a quote. While this may be true, it merely situates the argument at one further remove from the question, which is: do some texts reenact birth closer to a physiological level than others? Actually, regarding Adolphe, this analysis has already supplied half the answer. For the traumatic contraction of Adolphe's face on nomination and the stylistic contractions which translated the return to the maternal into a kind of poetry, radically altering the medium itself, bespeak an archaic formulation of delivery and reunion, one far more closely tied to the body, less abstract, less rhetorical: in short, more evocative of the literal power of reproduction. No term designating birth is offered in those passages, whence it may be wondered whether or not an ideological censor governs these powerful constructs attributed to the maternal. On the other hand, the character of Adolphe's night on the Polish plain, although a text which bears witness to an occasional obtrusion of the archaic, in general remains on a highly discursive level, with a syntax unarticulated by anguish.

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The anguish of death, choice, and commitment may well form the theme of Adolphe's meditation, but this is an angst of a different color, organized to fit into the syntactico-paternal which thus presides over and structures its content. The birth in question is positioned on a figurative plane, construable as rejuvenation, and, as the text explicitly states, as a would-be entry into "un autre ordre," the paternal. Another way to approach the difference between these two birth scenes is by defining their function in the narrative. Does the scene complete a previous action and/or lay the groundwork for some ulterior event? The peripatetic musings on the plain, after the protagonist's own story has been reviewed, result in a clear resolution to adopt a new bio-narrative tack: Adolphe will shake himself loose of the importunate Ellenore. This is to say, even if the decision to reenter the world as an active agent remains unimplemented, it is a decision nonetheless, one which could influence, for example, the outcome of the novel. This event is thus endowed with a narrative value. The act of nomination by Ellenore, however, and to a greater extent the tormented letter written by Adolphe, carry little or no impact in the narrative circuit of production. This does not mean they are somehow less essential - I would in fact argue to the contrary. But their efficacity must be sought elsewhere, and can only be discovered by being attentive to the maternal which, as I hope will become increasingly clear, patrifilial narrative tends to stage in order to suppress. Matricide is, in fact, a ritual act and a performance. Now, as we have seen, if summarily, Adolphe is not the only work in which a birth of narrative is also a narrative of birth. To take an example, the same sort of layers of "figurality" are operative in Le Rouge et le noir. The numerous scenes in which Julien Sorel, on spending solitary time in the mountains or at Vergy, undergoes spiritual renaissance form a counterpoint to the terror-inspiring, though at times euphoric, incidents which occur in the uterine recesses of Mother Church. Needless to say, these scenes are not construed as uterine in the text, which means that their full affective impact may be given free voice. As birth scenes, they remain closer to the body and far removed

Production, reproduction, and narrative form from the highly rhetorical expressions of rebirth into society, scenes in which (incidentally) Julien Sorel is explicitly described as " reborn." Here also literal birth remains a covert operation. What is emerging through this analysis is a view of Constant's novel as determined by a dual narrative apparatus: one of production, the other relating to reproduction, both gendered through the grid of androcentric discourse. If the two "parent" economies are situated at different narrative levels, there are at times points of encounter. These conjunctures make themselves readily apparent at times of narrative disjuncture, as in the two birth scenes under discussion. For in the first case, the sequence of events in the paternal narrative is halted and temporarily bracketed so that a fairly unfigurative drama of reproduction can be set into motion and a new narrative — the construction of the inner self— inaugurated. This maternal narrative is in its turn interrupted as the bracketed world of the father and production comes to reclaim hegemony in Adolphe's other birth — a rebirth — on the plain. Thus, there is nothing surprising that two delivery reenactments, and not just one, should occur in the novel, since the literal birth and its attendant anxiety of loss and separation must precede a symbolic regeneration and rite of passage. In fact, birth is the figure on which the parental narrative discourses must converge inasmuch as reproduction is precisely the function which must first be rehearsed in order to be appropriated. The meta-story in such a reading is a tale of gynocolonization: the mastery and containment of a narrative constructed as maternal by the cultural law of the father. This explains the peculiar economy of the paternal signifying chain earlier elaborated as one of surplus value since, even in quantitative terms, in order to survive, one story must outdo the other. Thus, in the final analysis, production supersedes reproduction. Once the project of rebirth has been achieved, it remains only to silence the maternal. Adolphe's mastery over speech goes hand in hand with an attempt to create and enter the external world and stifling Ellenore is key to this same attempt. Earlier, as Adolphe was emerging from his narcissism, the maternal

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imago had materialized in an effort to reclaim him: "Ellenore's image rose up before me like a phantom, thrusting me into nothingness." His response to the dread of being permanently immured within his internal collection of objects is an attempt to speak Ellenore's death. "Where," Adolphe wonders, " to find the words which will push her into isolation?" (p. 159), a predicament which one might read to be a desperate casting about for the magic utterance - the sesame which will seal the menacing maternal object once and for all in Adolphe's mental cemetery while he manages to remain intact and outside. Eventually Adolphe will find the magic word needed to mummify mummy, but meanwhile, as she is dying, she is slowly retracted from the external world of speech in a regressive movement into inchoate noise and finally, silence. She first receives the baron's fatal letters "without uttering a word" (p. 163). Then her speech is reduced to an asyntactic series of utterances as she herself blocks her mouth: "she had spent the night uttering a broken flow of words which could not be understood, putting her handkerchief on her mouth as if to prevent herself from speaking" (p. 163). Gradually language breaks down altogether: "At times she would cry out" (p. 163) and, reduced to the one word which really signifies in this novel of narcissism, "she repeated my name" (pp. 163-64). Nomination here continues to function as an act of separation as Ellenore draws further from Adolphe. Then, in an extraordinary structural repetition of the original trauma of nomination, " a horrible contraction disfigured her features" (p. 165), whereupon Adolphe, in one of the novel's rare instances of direct addressing of Ellenore, names her: "'in the name of heaven,' I cried, 'dear Ellenore ...' She shuddered and attempted to distance herself" (p. 165). Facial contractions, onomastic designation and distantiation reenact in the same words Adolphe's spasmic entry into the world. Here, however, the roles have been exchanged with Adolphe doing the expelling. For certainly it is no birth we are witnessing here, but rather that which birth signified for Adolphe: a catastrophic separation and loss of unity of which death is the ultimate expression. More radically, perhaps, it is now Adolphe who births Ellenore into


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death. In a form of mastery far more sadistic than that adopted by Stendhal, Constant symbolically performs the circumstances of his own mise-au-monde while at the same time appropriating the power of reproduction. Ellenore loses the ability to articulate, along with the capacity to distinguish articulation, as the reader assists at a collapse of language into the text's privileged form of matrifilial communication, pure vocality. In this case, however, unarticulated voice allied with nature is also tied to sadism and suffering. " May that voice which I have loved so dearly," pleads Ellenore, "may that voice which echoed in the depths of my heart not enter there to rend it asunder" (p. 165). Silence reigns, interrupted by speech only at " long intervals " (p. 172). At last, at the moment of death, "she wished to speak; there was no more voice left" (p. 173). In a lugubrious repetition, Adolphe has, indeed, rediscovered the mother. That is, he has created on the exterior the same maternal object which existed on the interior: a dead object. A psychological imperative thereby coalesces with the novel's formal project: the originary situation — a missing term in the narrative corresponding to a dead figure preserved within the self— is reproduced. However, this structural repetition achieves more than simple recovery of an initial maternal absence: it generates surplus value of its own. For if Adolphe remains stranded in the same state of infantile listlessness with which the novel began, he has first been reborn and then, more important, sadistically given birth to the maternal. In Adolphe, suffocating the Mother is elevated to the stature of crime litteraire: as her voice is stifled, her terror and her symptoms are inscribed on her face which, then, becomes a necrology for the benefit of the literate Adolphe: " I saw the signs announcing death imprint themselves on her noble and expressive face. I saw... that proud and energetic character receive countless jumbled and incoherent imprints of sorrow" (pp. 168-69; my emphasis). The face becomes a blank page upon which pain is chronicled and meaningful "signs" are traced as the mater dolorosa is transfigured into the matter of writing, to rejoin Barthes'

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explanation of why an author writes. It is thus no surprise that the mother revisits Adolphe not as the "voice of conscience" (for she has lost her voice), but rather through a letter from beyond the grave, for that is exactly how the maternal functions, not only in Adolphe, but in a significant number of nineteenthcentury novels: namely, as a ghost text which does, in the end, find articulation. Let me cite some other cases in point. With Madame Bovary, the maternal vacancy is on Emma's side. The heroine is first seen in the house of the Father, and the missing mother, when evoked, is inevitably conjured up in death: how Emma would have liked to mourn her! Naturally (and shoes being very much to the point in Flaubert) one day, Emma will find herself in her mother's shoes. One senses that the initial maternal hole in the novel will be reproduced in the hole in the ground waiting to engulf Emma's triple casket. Likewise Julien Sorel's mother is repressed from the text: of her one finds nary a mention in the novel. As with Adolphe, this lack is quickly compensated for, in both cases, by a woman ten years the protagonist's elder... that is, old enough to signify " maternal," young enough still to be an object of desire. (Thus, adultery, which Tanner views as the radical undermining of the social contract, is a euphemism for a more subversive act: incest. Or, perhaps more accurately, adultery is the societal homologue of the family romance.) Novels composed over the mother's dead body indeed tend to further the state of decomposition. From Mme de Renal's discreet death, to Ellenore's facial contractions and her bodily embalmment within Adolphe's mind, at last to Emma's putrefying corpse emitting literary improprieties, the narrative first symbolically resurrects the dead mother of the beginning, whence it proceeds to an act of ritual sacrifice. The extent to which nineteenth-century French art, from painting to opera, engages in ritual matricide has yet, I believe, to be realized. Anticipating my discussion of Rousseau, let me sketch out here how an idiosyncratic relation to birth might interlock with a collective apprehension of generation. At the level of private experience, the inaugural separation and vacancy sets up a


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psycho-structural configuration which impels the bereft subject to reconstruct, recapture, and redispose of the lost maternal object. Inevitably, such a project is particularly compelling for those for whom personal origins are inextricably allied to maternal death. Moreover, loss at this level is not yet inflected by gender because, even if more urgently addressed by the likes of Stendhal, Constant, Rousseau, as an experience of separation, this loss nonetheless remains universal, as Sprengnether has suggested. It is the nature of the response to birth and the maternal which is overdetermined by androcentric culture's stance with respect to reproduction. While remaining within a psychoanalytic model which takes as theoretical cornerstone a concept of loss not processed through the oedipus screen, I have also attempted to suggest, in this study ofAdolphe, that maternal vacancy is an ideologically charged affair, and that appropriation of maternal power - gynocolonization - can take place at the level of aesthetic form.

Banishing the maternal thus becomes a condition, sine qua non, for the construction of many plots and, in cycle 3, I shall be arguing that for specifically historical reasons, the need to repress — and I now intend that word in its full political sense — becomes acute. To conclude this part of the analysis, I would like to contemplate briefly what maternal absence as structural imperative might imply in the novels of two women authors, contemporaries of Stendhal and Constant, who cast daughter figures as subjects of narrative action. In a way, Claire de Duras' remarkable short work Ourika (1824) stages the dilemma of maternal objectification in its most radical form. Ourika, having lost her mother at a young age in Senegal, is sold into slavery. In this case, maternal vacancy determines the heroine's positioning as commodity in the market of the flesh. By racializing the issue, however, Duras makes literal and concrete woman's function as commodity in the marriage market. (One thinks, for example, of the more abstract bargaining for the future princesse de Cleves, and how her market value plummets at the beginning of Mme de Lafayette's novel.) On arrival in France, Ourika is rescued and taken into the maternal custody of Mme de B., an act of

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recovery which is, in fact, represented as a rebirth: " To save me from slavery... was twice to give me life" (Ourika, p. 31). Like Julien and like Adolphe, she has found a maternal replacement. Nonetheless, as we "know" from Freud's hyperextended itinerary of the process of female maturation ("Female Sexuality") which congeals into theory a gendered cultural narrative already in place, when woman is the subject of discourse, she is destined to travel further. Mme de Duras' choice of African woman as subject highlights and radicalizes the problem of woman's place. As an exotic subject come to rest on French soil, Ourika cannot stop there. Already ambiguously positioned by her race as other with respect to her adoptive mother, she goes on to fulfill her racial destiny of total otherness by remaining unabsorbable into society through that time-honored mechanism of (class) assimilation: matrimony. Not surprisingly, her grief and her sense of alterity define themselves with respect to the maternal, for if Ourika can aspire to "having" the mother (albeit in a more heavily mediated form than for Julien or Adolphe), her tragedy - as she herself recounts in that premature grave called the convent — is that she can never become one (p. 58). Ourika is an example of how maternal loss as structural paradigm might function from within a feminine writing bound by a discourse which simultaneously promotes the inevitability of motherhood and structures all meaningful symbolic action around her absence. In Corinne (1807), the indomitable Germaine de Stael (as Constant was wont to depict her) envisages other, more empowering solutions. Here again, mothers are conspicuously absent: Corinne lost hers, we are told, when she was ten, and Oswald, the future Lord Nelvil, was also a motherless child.12 But Corinne, a travelling subject like Ourika, chooses to dwell in Italy, consistently portrayed as the motherland opposite to paternal England. She never does marry, for to do so would be to assume the position of maternal object, a situation of narrative arrest. Indeed, even if Corinne's fate as desiring subject of action is ultimately sealed by that literary death warrant which is exile in a nunnery as prelude to death, she rocks the patri-ark in a more profound sense than Mme de

Production, reproduction, and narrative form Duras in bypassing the literally maternal to institute herself as symbolic matriarch of an inheritance system which tends toward the matrilineal. First, she is a wealthy heiress having claimed her patrimony at the age of twenty-one. Although this debt to the paternal underscores the inextricable grasp of patrilineal kinship, when Corinne dies, she has property and money to bequeath, but, more important, it is her character traits - her talent and her values - which amount to her true legacy. Corinne's half-sister Lucile, who has married Oswald, is taught by her sibling (ironically enough) how to become a good wife; their young daughter has inherited Corinne's eyes, hair, and finally, her artistic gifts {Corinne, p. 292). This is not a question of the kind of atavism that Emile Zola was to explore in his "study" of the perversions of genealogy, but rather an attempt to elude the inevitable financial circumscription within the paternal in an appeal to a matroclinous system of birthright. At the conclusion of the novel, all major characters have inherited something from Corinne, but the most subversive legacy by far is her effect on the ultimate paternal heir, Lord Nelvil. For, it is revealed, his language itself has become invaded, and thus determined, by her own: five years after her death, he is stunned to find that "il empruntait son langage" ("he was using her language") (p. 262). The power of symbolization which is language is thus Corinne's most significant legacy, and it is important that the male fall heir to this particular capability since it implies not simply a loose and gendered matroclinous system, but instead evokes the real possibility of a matripotestal lineage and consciousness. In order to achieve the latter, however, Corinne had to leap over that structural and cultural quicksand which, for the feminine subject, is literal motherhood (ingeniously occupied by her half-sister), positioning herself in a beyond wherein the field of inheritance and symbolization is defined as maternal. 13 A strange land, this, too exotic even for twentieth-century anthropologist-explorer Claude Levi-Strauss, who reproaches ethnographers indulging in the study of matrilineal societies

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their hope of unveiling "strange institutions, imbued with an atmosphere of the dramatic" (The Elementary Structures of Kinship, p. 118). Earlier, however, he had acknowledged the possible coexistence of matrilineal systems: "We are deeply aware that so-called primitive societies include heterogeneous types [of kinship], and that the theory of some of these types remains to be worked out" (p. 106). Still, militating against the working out of such a theory is patriarchal culture's structural imperative to construct woman as alien. Indeed, in LeviStrauss' estimation, this is precisely the virtue of exogamy: " Speaking objectively, a woman ... has no specific or individual characteristics ... she is the same whereas she must (and therefore can) become other" (p. 114). The use of force supported by alleged objectivity explicit in the anthropologist's remarks is not peculiar to him: indeed, it makes itself felt whenever issues of territoriality arise. I turn now to the crossroads of private and public discourse as these meet over the question of birth and the dark continent of the body maternal.

CYCLE 3

Gynocolonization: Rousseau, Michelet, and the nineteenth-century French novel

SECTION I

Introduction: toward a bodied politics

All of us are born into this world, but only half of us possess the power to give birth. The time has come for me to politicize this discussion of reproduction. In the Introduction, I pointed to the stupefying silence which, in art, has surrounded this most primordial of human experiences. True, there is a hagiographic tradition, pastiched by Rabelais and Sterne, which features extraordinary gestation and birth. Mythologizing origins is one way to launch a remarkable life, and it is a strategy that both Chateaubriand and Michelet favor in their own efforts at canonization of the Romantic self. We shall be in a position to realize that significant social transformation has taken place when women begin to represent their relation to birth, both their bestowal of life as well as their own emergence into the world as subjects of action. In the plastic arts and in literature, the twentieth century has witnessed the commencement of the depiction of origins as self-portrait. However, when in 1854 the papal bull Ineffabilis Deus elevated the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary to the status of dogma, it severed one of occidental culture's most sanctified icons of maternity from the material conditions of her own birth. To do this was merely to institutionalize an evolving relation to the maternal and to reproduction which had been occurring in France as of the Revolution and even before. In cycle 3 of this book, I shall examine how an ideology of birth emerges from Rousseau in a personalized form of 139

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discourse. Initially, I shall attempt to chart the problematic interface of private and public discourse with respect to Rousseau and reproduction. His highly subjective and idiosyncratic vision is, I contend, subsequently incorporated and articulated through a whole range of celebrated nineteenthcentury French narratives to be examined after the opening section on Rousseau. In these narratives, the imagination of generation systematically assumes the form of dysfunctional reproduction. The myriad examples of this (dead babies, stillbirths, abortions) betoken a political apparatus in crisis. Authors under discussion following the Rousseau section will include Chateaubriand, Constant, Stendhal, Balzac, Gautier, Musset, Hugo, Flaubert, Huysmans, Rachilde, and, with particular emphasis, Michelet, and Zola. My argument will not simply be that the act of giving birth is a political issue, which it indubitably is. Rather, I shall be maintaining that the climate of uncertainty reigning in postRevolutionary France while the terms of power are being renegotiated and different political forms are being explored, sets up conditions which are ideally suited to expose the ideological stakes involved in suppressing birth. I shall thus be working within an implied theoretical frame of a politics of anxiety. Toward the end of this essay, it will be my contention that the nineteenth-century French narrative articulates the tensions which exist within the discourse of republicanism when it confronts - as it inevitably must - the problematics of birth. Finally, resurrecting Rousseau's body politic as a roadmap, I shall examine in detail the strategies employed by Michelet and Zola to occupy the maternal body, demonstrating that it is in fact precisely these same strategies which they invoke to authorize the French colonial enterprise. Through a cartography of uterine annexation, a phenomenon which I here refer to as gynocolonization, mastery of birth at last accedes to the status of foreign policy. My Stendhal essay in the first part of this book may be considered a case study designed to gauge the sheer power associated with birth gone awry, the fear and ambivalence which surround the maternal accompanied by a will to mastery

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accomplished through acts of writing. In that cycle, I confined myself to capturing the impact which tragic birth can exercise on an individual who is, in fact, only partially implicated. If I proceeded slowly and (I hope) methodically, it is because the psychic weight of such catastrophes is difficult to conceive. The Rousseau section, composing the first part of cycle 3, takes this very imponderability and consequent will to mastery as a given. Nonetheless, if my initial gaze in "Stendhal" was on the particular, it was impossible to overlook a critical zone of interference, the rhetorical arena wherein the political engages the personal. For Henri Beyle, it was the incomprehensible collision of the two, generated (darkly for him) out of the democratic troika "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" which enabled his truth-in-birth to be articulated. Stendhal's intimate tale is unique. It has its own idiosyncratic twists and peripeteia along with its special denouement. As a story, however, it merely takes to the extreme an anxiety of loss which is universal and originary of being, as Sprengnether has suggested. My Constant essay was designed to further the move from personal into public by showing suppression and mastery of birth as this can be achieved at the level of aesthetic form within the pages of a single literary text. One of the aspects of that analysis upon which I shall be building here is the notion of a textual proximity to the maternal body. Triumph over that proximity which I there considered as an affair of the self I shall reconceptualize, in the conclusion of this study, to be an affair of the State. Having first exhumed the maternal corpse which subtends the Stendhalian literary corpus, it was then possible to make a move to an object-relations model in an effort to recover that which the oedipal grid has a vested interest in not disclosing. Adolphe proved an ideal test-site due to its perfect replication in a text of the processes governing maternal suppression. The general elegiac tone and listlessness which prevail in Constant's novel, often referred to as typifying the mal du siecle syndrome, may be viewed as the sign of mourning. Indeed, I would venture to advance the notion that personal history for both Stendhal and Constant intersects with national history, and that the mal

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du siecle constitutes a literary expression of a collective mourning and after(birth) shock of the violent labors leading up to the birth of France as a modern nation-state. Nonetheless, the movement to suppress the maternal body whether one conceive that as access to the Lacanian symbolic, "tyranny of the abstract" in Mary O'Brien's terms, or, in Margaret Homans' line of thinking the tendentious promotion of the figural over the literal, or, finally, Carole Pateman's implied conditions underwriting the democratic contract — is not accomplished as some act of transcendence. This is where the close readings that I am proposing in the following pages will diverge from the aforementioned theorists' readings of the gendered construction of culture, for I shall remain attentive to the body in the text. Then, too, it continues to be my concern here to shed some light on the politics of psychoanalysis. To that effect, I have already compared Totem and Taboo to a screen, or even a screen memory, for it functions as a semiotic grid, conditioning, reprogramming archaic data and keeping repressed the apprehension of amother content. The Conclusion of this book will revisit Totem, suggesting that Freud's 1912-13 work can be relocated within the particular cultural context of a gynocolonization which originates with Jean-Jacques Rousseau who, perhaps most famously of all, lost his mother in childbirth. Before engaging Rousseau's bodied politics, however, let me review the two divergent accounts offered by O'Brien and Pateman of the political stakes involved in generation. In The Politics of Reproduction, O'Brien has pointed out that major bodies of theoretical knowledge have developed around all of the central facts of material existence except birth (p. 20). Marxism, she states, addresses the question of sustenance and the power relations that devolve therefrom; Freud traces the meanderings and permutations of desire pressed into the service of a psycho-anthropological account of civilization, while theories of death and immortality (alias rebirth) form core preoccupations of Western theology. Yet there exist no attempts to theorize the labor entailed by the act of birth and the human value it creates (the child) within a framework of the socio-

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political. O'Brien's thesis is that the historical discovery of the male contribution to reproduction precipitated the foreclosure of a matripotestal consciousness. Henceforth, the act of procreation was to be assimilated as a properly male function, a concept institutionalized by Aristotle through his assertions that the female served as simple incubator (matter) for a virile lifegiving force (form). O'Brien's analysis is significant because she historicizes reproduction, thereby extracting it from the Nature/Culture binary opposition in which it has been entrenched by centuries of patriarchy. For O'Brien, the historical discovery by men of man's role in procreation, and the concomitant realization that paternity is nonetheless destined to remain uncertain, are twin events which trigger ancient patriarchy's move to sequester women and appropriate their reproductive capacities through the institutionalization of patrilineal kinship systems which guarantee ownership of offspring and transmission of property. In Totem and Taboo, Freud hails this mythic moment as a crucial collective turning away from the mother, and the fiction which is paternity a triumph of deduction: in short, mind over mater. Many a critical glance has since been directed at this " t r i u m p h " which is paradigmatically staged, according to a well-established tradition of feminist readings, in The Oresteia.1 Orestes, it will be recalled, is acquitted of a matricide which he did, in fact, commit. Athena, that goddess who as a "child sprung full-blown from Olympian Zeus/ never bred in the darkness of the womb" {The Eumenides, p. 274), had cast the final tie-breaking vote, thereby exculpating Orestes of his crime. In this process, it is the dead mother, Clytemnestra, who has been discredited. She had killed her husband Agamemnon in retaliation for having sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia. In the final play of the trilogy, in the court of Apollo, the Erinyes (originally chtonian fertility goddesses) are domesticated: no longer will they hound the son figure in a demand for retribution. Matricide is, in effect, condoned. In The Oresteia, all avenues of power open to woman are explored and then shut down. Mother is sundered from daughter with simultaneous paternal investment of authority

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over that daughter. The order of birth is inverted; woman is represented as springing from the head of man, a relation which is re-affirmed by Athena's final speech: "No mother gave me birth. I am/ all for the male, in all things but marriage./ Yes, with all my heart I am my Father's child" (p. 278). Furthermore, matricide is authorized and finally, the power of the Furies neutralized with their banishment to caves underlying Athens, the rising city state. Political culture thus comes to rest upon the repression of the body of woman with an architecture of power configured topographically. In fact, the tendency toward spatialization may well be inherent in the narrative of appropriation of origins for reasons that remain to be demonstrated. Meanwhile, the "overthrow of mother right [which] was the world defeat of the female sex" (Engels, The Origin of the Family, p. 120) is marked in this drama's final moments in the apollonian decree denying female fertility: "The woman you call the mother of the child/ is not the parent, just a nurse to a seed... / The man is the source of life — the one who mounts" (The Eumenides, p. 274). Assuming the power to create life is the real achievement of ancient patriarchy, and The Oresteia is but a complete and economical example of this story recounted by so many cultures, as Merlin Stone has demonstrated in When God was a Woman. The variant most familiar to occidental culture is, of course, the myth of Eve being created from the adamic rib. The stakes of reproduction are thus anything but negligible. With this perspective in mind, one is far less astonished than Dr. F.-A. Pouchet from Rouen who, setting forth his 1842 thesis that the human female egg is emitted independently of any male activity, is wonderstruck at medical science's historical blindness: "The results which I have achieved," he marvels, "were so easy to discover that, if one thing astonishes me, it is that no one arrived at them in the many centuries during which the human mind has been examining the subject. It truly seems that a long delirium has dominated scholars who have dealt with generation" [Theorie positive de la fe'condation, pp. vi-vii).

Madness, as Marie Delcourt has shown, has always been the

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companion of matricide, that act of violence which is itself, in my view, a response to the power to give life. By now it should be clear that the "birth of a nation" is neither an idle nor an innocuous metaphor. Indeed, as I suggested in the Introduction, birth and the political may have more in common than commonly supposed. The image, of course, is subsumed under the broader figural aegis of the state as organic entity. O'Brien views the analogy this way: The "body politic" has always carried reproductive connotations in terms of the establishment of continuity over time and the need for regeneration. This is true of such apparently diverse concepts as Burkean constitutionalism and Mao's continuing revolution... such theories are not merely analogues of generational continuity and procreation, but take social forms which meet in quite a practical way the problem of the integrity of male reproductive consciousness with itself, with nature and time, problems which are posed through the actual process of reproduction. (The Politics of Reproduction, pp. 16-17) While I shall not be appealing to such concepts as male or female reproductive consciousness here, O'Brien's analysis is useful for the link it establishes between the appropriation of birth, and the generation of continuity of political power. The model more helpful to me in opening up to the tension inherent in nineteenth-century politico-literary discourse as it confronts birth is the structural one proposed by Pateman in The Sexual Contract. Let me now rehearse that argument because it bears directly on my approach to Rousseau. Pateman is interested in how social contract theory which is "conventionally presented as a story about freedom" [The Sexual Contract, p. 2) never accords - indeed, cannot accordthat liberty to women in spite of its purportedly egalitarian base. In Pateman's reading, Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Freud of Totem and Taboo offer differing versions of the story, but the basic plot is the same: in the interest of political harmony, protection, liberty, or access to women (Freud), a group of brothers unites, forming together a political union which supersedes the reign of a patriarchal father. This supersession can be peaceable (Locke) or violent (Freud), but it marks the

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movement from kinship and/or monarchy into modern civil government peopled by "individuals" and characterized by the much-discussed division of the public and the private spheres. Pateman concurs with O'Brien that the older form of patriarchy had already appropriated the power and products of reproduction. It is important to note that the overthrow of the "matriarchy," to use a typically nineteenth-century formulation, is explicitly recounted only in the earlier story of power. What the modern fraternal account relates, then, is how this power is removed from the father to be redistributed among the brothers. The new story of "masculine political birth" is "perhaps the greatest tale of men's creation of new political life. But this time women are already defeated and declared procreatively irrelevant... In civil society all men, not just fathers, can generate political life and political right. Political creativity belongs not just to paternity but to masculinity" (The Sexual Contract, p. 36).

Pateman's central thesis is that while it is a sexual contract which supports the fraternal pact, the "signature" of this original pact is always repressed in the modern story because it is not a contract entered into by two freely consenting individuals, but is inherently a relationship of domination. The whole notion of consent, she claims, is at best problematic. Whereas overt appropriation of women and reproduction by individual father figures characterizes the older patriarchy, the burden of the fraternal union is to preserve "the father's capacity to create political right" (pp. 95-96) in a political form which must disseminate that power away from a single person. It is precisely the immateriality and "transparency" of the human body which guarantees the commutable nature of one individual for another, and thus which stands as the signifier par excellence of the defeat of the former order: In modern patriarchy the capacity that "individuals" lack is politically significant because it represents all that civil order is not, all that is encapsulated in women, and women's bodies. The body of the "individual" is very different from women's bodies. His body is tightly enclosed within boundaries, but women's bodies are permeable, their contours change shape and they are subject to cyclical

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processes. All these differences are summed up in the natural bodily process of birth. Physical birth symbolizes everything that makes women incapable of entering the original contract. (The Sexual Contract, PP- 95-96) I shall end my discussion of Pateman by citing her as follows: The [contract] story is an example of the appropriation by men of the awesome gift that nature has denied them and its transmutation into masculine political creativity. Men give birth to an "artificial body," the body politic of civil society; they create Hobbes' "Artificial Man, we call a Commonwealth," or Rousseau's "artificial and collective body," or the "one Body" of Locke's "Body Politick." However, the creation of the civil body politic is an act of reason rather than an analogue to a bodily act of creation, (p. 102) Thus, although the analyses of O'Brien and Pateman differ in fundamental ways, they converge on the notion that the patriarchal and/or fraternal political structure is organized as a repressive and compensatory response to woman's body and specifically to her reproductive capacities. This is no small claim, and

it goes straight to the heart of a conflict within feminist theory for which the specificity of the body has always been a real hot potato. Still, in spite of the evident risk that avowing the body entails, recognition of this specificity in reproduction goes a long way toward explaining the necropolis of women which underlies so much of nineteenth-century French art and literature. Not that the female corpse is necessarily a period specialty: it is not. I maintain, however, that because the new social contract - forged in theory by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and others, rehearsed and executed during the French Revolution and thereafter legally enforced by the 1803-04 Civil Code - and the ambient socio-political atmosphere so thoroughly encloses and restricts woman to her maternal role, thereby promoting an ideology of domesticity and motherhood to a degree not before witnessed, tensions about women's reproductive capacities, always latent in any case, rise to the surface and explode with considerable social force. Political crisis besetting nineteenthcentury France is more than mirrored by patriarchal anxiety over the issue of reproduction. It is, I contend, precisely because

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certain gendered political forms are being explored that the scandal of birth is exposed in the first place. Moreover, collective anxiety about the particular kind of power which is the capacity to reproduce becomes further exacerbated by medical discoveries attributing even more procreative "power" to women. In his medico-lyric treatise, U Amour, for example, Jules Michelet undertakes some attempts at damage control in this arena, as will be seen. I begin now to turn to an examination of selected works ofJeanJacques Rousseau. As just noted, both O'Brien's and Pateman's arguments expose the ideological stakes involved in a bodybased rhetorical organization of the state. My contention hereafter will be that for Rousseau, the birth of the body politic is anything but an act of reason, even though his construction is consonant with a certain political tradition. Moreover, it is probably because of this discursive synchrony that readers have systematically glossed over the body inside the Rousseauan political corpus.2 In fact, Rousseau's politics remain far closer to the body than one might imagine, and his solution to the problem of how to dispose of the maternal is both highly particular and nontranscendental. Thus, if the peculiar contradictions arising from the inextricable embrace of Nature and Culture in Rousseau have appealed to commentators across the disciplines, most have chosen to avert their gaze from the concerns of the corporeal. In Allegories of Reading, Paul de Man carries the tendency toward disembodiment to its extreme with a studied movement away from referentiality and assertions that the truths of a text inhere in a rhetoric which is by definition delusive. De Man blurs the boundaries between historical and literary discourse, actually inverts the conventionally ascribed "truth value" of the two, by demonstrating historical discourse's blindness to the ruse of language. The result is the toppling of the fact/fiction hierarchy: " It has often been said that Rousseau's novel Julie is also his best treatise on political science; it should be added that The Social Contract is also his best novel" (Allegories of Reading, p.

159). Although my reading of Emile and Du Contrat social is

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situated at the antipodes of de Man's figurally oriented model, his collapse of discursive distinctions is a useful departure point for my own reading. If" the political writings can ... themselves become a reliable way of access to the problematics of the self in Rousseau" (Allegories, p. 138), the study which follows is an attempt to gain just that access. In her recent work, The Body and the French Revolution, Dorinda Outram in fact sounds a challenge for a shift in historiographic emphasis toward the body: " A history ... should and must focus on the body because the body is the only space in which intentionality can be restored to the historical subject and, at the same time, come together with that subject's connection with, transformation of, and manifestation of, current cultural paradigms ... We can ... escape from the false dichotomies between forms of history from which individuals have been banished, and forms in which they are the only subject matter, and enter a history of intersubjectivity, in which the structural forms of interlocking private experience become the text" (p. 5). Such is my program here and one could scarcely ask for a body more symptomatically constructed than that of J.-J. Rousseau. The importance of Rousseau, man of letters, political thinker, philosophe, theoretician of language, pedagogue, composer, aesthetician, hailed by Levi-Strauss the "father of anthrop o l o g y " - a n d the list is no doubt partial - is almost beyond estimation: beyond estimation because so utterly profound on the one hand, but on the other because Western culture has so completely absorbed the corpus of his work that the many explicit references to Rousseau may be taken as exterior signs of an internalization very thoroughgoing indeed. There is no doubt that the principal players in the French Revolution, as pluridimensional and multi-phased as it was, hearkened to the wisdom of Jean-Jacques. Sebastien Mercier claimed that by 1791, the French citizenry knew Du Contrat social by heart, whereas previously it had numbered among the lesser known works after Julie ou la nouvelle Heloise and Entiled The year 1794 saw the translation of

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Rousseau's remains to the Pantheon accompanied by a cortege of mothers and infants under a banner which read: "He restored mothers to their duty and children to happiness" (Levy, LEnfant,

lafamille et la revolution frangaise, pp. 210—11).

Likewise it is Rousseau whom Mona Ozouf singles out from among the philosophes as the only one truly to subscribe to the "regeneration" of French society: "Reposing thus on the reading of Rousseau, the Revolution opens the path to a desire which becomes a labor: the reconstitution of a new innocence, the re-creation of a new Adam" (UHomme regenere\ p. 118). If he alone seemed possessed of the optimism of the phoenix, it is perhaps because experience had borne him out. It is also a well-known fact that Rousseau's own birth was an ill-starred event. He announces near the opening of his Confessions: " I cost my mother her life, and my birth was the first of my misfortunes " (p. 45). It is not coincidence that so many of his writings, regardless of their object, seek to address the issue of origins. Beyond the reiterated attempts to resolve this vexed question, it is difficult to screen out the specter of his own botched beginnings. And yet, as fate would have it, he was born into a society one of whose central preoccupations was with origins: the origins of animal life (Buffon, Maupertuis, Diderot), the descent of man, the foundations of legitimate government, the matrix of language, the cradle of civilization. Thus it is that in the case of J.-J. Rousseau, the turn of the screw of history can scarcely be more ironic. In the pages which follow, I shall examine two of Rousseau's most celebrated treatises with an eye to the body and birth. While I cannot claim to extricate his model of the state from a political discourse already in place - one which draws heavily, but differently, on the metaphor of the body politic - I do wish to problematize the figural distance of this metaphor in his writings while at the same time challenging some of the discursive boundaries between political science, psychology, and literature erected and maintained by a long tradition of critical commentary. To begin with, I shall be dealing primarily with two of Rousseau's later works, Emile ou de VEducation and Du Contrat social. T h e analysis will subsequently open onto the Discours sur

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rorigine et lesfondements de Vinegalite\ then revisit Emile, concluding

with a short story, "La Reine Fantasque." Published in 1762, Emile and Du Contrat social are sibling texts which to some extent derive meaning with respect to each other, a kinship which Rousseau himself acknowledges in a letter to his bookseller affirming that "the two together form a complete whole" (Robert Derathe, " Introduction," p. xcviii).4 Emile sets forth the principles governing the proper education of a young man from birth through his marriage to Sophie, coming to completion only as the student is himself on the threshold of fatherhood. This education begins in earliest infancy with a remarkable amount of attention devoted to the material concerns of swaddling, wetnursing, proper diet, weaning, and eventually the apprenticeship into language. Consonant with the prevailing eighteenth-century sensualist epistemology, the overriding pedagogical principle of Emile is that learning is experiential, that lessons should be grounded in the concrete and their utility be apparent to the student. Although he is of noble descent, this ideal pupil "chooses" to become a carpenter, for the day may come when he shall have to earn his living: "We are approaching a state of crisis and the century of revolutions. " 5 Small wonder that the architects of the Revolution should have been nourished on Rousseau who, far more than a prophet of the apocalypse, furnishes in Emile a plan of education for the citizen in addition to the Contrafs blueprint for socio-political reorganization. Book 4 of Emile addresses the student's rebirth into the moral world, the public sphere and province of the male. This passage, a period of initiation, is quite clearly presented as a rebirth. (There are no fewer than thirty-seven occurrences of various forms of the verb " to be born " in the first forty-six pages alone.) The emergence into the world of ideas and abstraction poses clear epistemological problems for Rousseau, and belongs to the same problematic Nature/Culture matrix which stands at the root of his entire thought system, whether the latter take literary or political form. Does one emerge into the realm of ideas ex nihilo in a movement of abrupt rupture with (sensualist) origin, or is that movement one of perpetual - albeit indiscernible -

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motion, one of infinitessimal degree? How can a pedagogy predicated on induction and a primary experience of the physical world be made coherent with a valorization of the loftier reaches of abstract thought? Nonetheless, the timehallowed alliance of the concrete with the feminine ("Consult women's taste in those physical matters relating to the judgement of the senses") makes the move to Reason imperative ("men's [taste] in moral matters which depend on the understanding," Emile, p. 446). Within the context of a gendered construction of culture, the epistemological problem becomes one of precisely how the male can detach himself from the body feminine. This, of course, is always the problem, but for Rousseau, the roots of this conflict are deep and idiosyncratic in the extreme. Book 5 treats Sophie's education, the couple's blushing courtship, while the finishing touches are added to Emile's instruction in the form of travel. Finally, an encapsulated version of Du Contrat social is presented. Voila: the perfect citizen of the ideal republic has been constructed. His education has all along been a political affair, often couched in military terms, and, in spite of an education which purports to champion free choice, Emile's principal character trait is docility. He is therefore ideally suited to enter into a social pact which will require the voluntary alienation of his immediate selfinterest in favor of a political organization capable of guaranteeing each individual's liberty and equality over the long term. This is why much of Emile's education has been geared toward teaching the virtues of deferral: the impact of lessons taught early is often not fully felt until much later. When the moral is brought home, it is satisfyingly capitalized upon. Similarly, in Entile^ suspension of erotic gratification is carried to exhausting lengths. In Emile, the real proof of the preceptor's mastery over his student becomes manifest when the latter (whose senses are at last aflame), acquiesces to a plan to travel abroad, temporarily renouncing a precocious — albeit feasible — marriage with Sophie. Deferring sexual gratification (not Rousseau's personal strong point, as the reader of the Confessions knows) is not

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everyone's prerogative, however. When, following the wedding night, Emile appears exasperated, we discover that Sophie has learned her lessons over-well and has taken chaste modesty too far. I shall begin by exploring the stigmata of catastrophic birth as these are branded onto the opening pages of Emile. As we saw in Stendhal's masterplot, the project of mastery of birth can command its own narrative syntax. The heavy insistence on rebirth in book 4 of Emile suggests mastery at the personal level and integration into the public realm, or, to borrow from Outram, "the subject's connection with... current cultural p a r a d i g m s " (The Body, p. 5). Like Le Rouge et le noir, book 5

closes on a Sophie still big with child: however, it also features one very telling nativity scene which perfectly captures the moment and mechanisms by which a purely subjective structure is mediated and "interlocks" with a broader politics of reproduction. That, however, is the destination of my Rousseau analysis, and before arriving at it, I propose to read for the body in Rousseau's body politic. A trickster figure whose appearance in Emile does not register as strange leads us into Du Contrat social where he does crop up strangely as a sort of magician dismembering an infantile political body. In this reading, I shall be attuned to traces of the personal, the private, and the subjective in Rousseau's particular elaboration of contract theory and in his critical doctrine of the inalienable and indivisible nature of the sovereign. I begin, at last, by giving body to Emile's many injunctions regarding birth and early infancy, with an imagination of fear. For unto us a son is born: Emile All is well leaving the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man. (Emile, p. 35) Sliding slick, darkly: when will this end? pulse and throb and squeeze and hurt. What's this? Feel open. Black/white. Flash/white. Feel open. Help. Falling, don't drop. Sick terror. Pain. Cold blast. Dry blast. Look ma, no hands. Look no

hands, no ma: "nothing can replace a mother's care" (Emile, p. 46).

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Whose are the hands that will hold me safe? " It is impossible for a child to

be well reared who has been successively passed around by so many pairs of h a n d s " (p. 63). Hold me impossibly safe, impossibly together. Warm me-here, cold air-there. Glistening wet throbbing me-here, dry not-me-there. Cover, hold, rock, enclose me-here. Stop passing me-soft around— all those hands pushing in, collapse, implode, falling drop. So vulnerably hurt. " [The air]

penetrates all the pores of a soft and delicate skin; powerfully it affects bodies being born; it leaves upon them imprints which are never erased" (p. 65). JVoool Too soft. Pain. Me-surface-tabula rasa. " I t is said

that various midwives claim to give a more appropriate shape to a newborn infant's head by moulding it, and this [practice] is tolerated! As if our heads were ill-formed by the Author of our being and needed to be fashioned on the outside by midwives" (p. 43). Oh no. Searing pain. Hot malleable me-skin tabula rasa: don't write me it hurts. STOP.

"Do

you want him to keep his original form; preserve it from the moment he comes into the world. As soon as he comes into the world, seize him and do not unhand him until he is a man" (p. 51). Feel-open. Where are the hands to hold me safe? Don't drop don't leave don't abandon me-soft. As soon as I'm out (but soooooner pleaseI) Just as soon (but earlier still I). " A b a n d o n e d as of birth" (p. 35), "as of our birth" (p. 38), "as of his birth" (p. 43), "as of their birth" (p. 44), "in being born" (p. 50), "as soon as he is born" (p. 51), "from the instant of his birth" (p. 54), "at the instant the infant breathes on emerging from his enveloping sack" (p. 67), "in being born" (p. 68), "from the instant he is born" (p. 70), "as of his birth" (p. 81), "as of their birth" (p. 81), "as of their birth" (p. 85). As soon as soon as soon as throbbing sobbing convulsing repulsing imploding exploding soon. At the very moment (but when is the moment?), on the threshold of the abyss (but where is that threshold?), at the edge, on the line, in the opening out, the closing in. It hurts to be, to be outside (but when did it happen and it keeps happening from hand to hand to hand). If hands could hold me up in there I wouldn't feel hot/cold, dark/light, here/there, sticky/dry, quiet/noise, soft/

hard: my Drop into Being. "You give a preceptor to your alreadyformed son: I want for him to have one before being born" (p. 55), " before he is b o r n " (p. 56). But what's this? A hand up here supporting mesoft? Porous skin. Not taut. Too soft, too soon, not yet, dropping exploding breaking open. Shattering into a billion me-soft bits. Won't come out, pliable pain, never hard enough, can't be hard enough. " B u t ours [children], softened

before being born by their fathers' and mothers' [moral] laxity [" mollesse " ] , come into the world with an already-spoiled disposition, one which must not be exposed immediately to all the trials necessary to rehabilitate it. It is only by degrees that they can be brought back to their original vigor" (p. 66).

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Eternally too-soft-me, yes fluid warm calm me-her me-her, always too-soft, dreaming in there the dream of an ancient Folk, the Hard Skins: " In order to

make her son invulnerable, Thetis plunged ... him into the waters of the Styx" (p. 49). But sticks and stones hurt my bones. 0 mothers: "Harden their bodies ... plunge them into the waters of the Styx" (p.

49). I dream a dream of hardness, of inviolability, of invulnerability. This is the

work of nature: " nature ... hardens through trials" (p. 49).

But don't expose me-soft, smooth me out, ease me out. I dream a soft, warm inout moist space luminous but not bright. Take my envelope (but don't write me), stretch it, pull it inside out, easy easy into an outwomb sleeve, not the waters of

the Styx but a womb bath: "as they get stronger, reduce the heat of the water by degrees, until you bathe them, summer and winter, in cold and even icy water. Since, in order not to expose them to death, it is important that this reduction be slow, successive and imperceptible, a thermometer may be used to measure it exactly" (pp. 66-67). M°w easy mamamamarsupial me-her me-her me-her me-he-me-h-mmmmmmeasure it\ Divide it! So infinitessimally (hail £eno [full of paradox) so as to render the drop into being imperceptible. No cut {pain), no snap (oh), no break (help). All is me, me is her, all is one, all men are born, all men are born equal, all men are born

men. "There is one point, namely the birth of man, from which we all depart equally" (p. 331). Equality, Fraternity, Liberty. "At the instant the infant breathes on emerging from its enveloping sack, do not allow it to be covered by other clothes which confine it more. No baby bonnets... no swaddling clothes; ample and loose-fitting garments, leaving all its members in liberty" (p. 67). Surprise\ It's a boy\ For Rousseau, human existence and social institutions arise out of an inutterable, a vertiginous drop-into-being. To speak in terms of a fall from grace or oedipal longings is to dislocate the problem and to speak metaphorically, whereas Rousseau authorizes us, in his pedagogy as in his epistemology, to ground all representational activity in the body: "Consider also," proposes Emile's "vicaire Savoyard," that, limited by our faculties to perceptible things, we offer almost no footing for the abstract notions of philosophy and purely intellectual ideas. In order to attain these, it is either necessary to disengage ourselves from the body to which we are so strongly attached, or to make slow and gradated progress from object to object, or finally, to cross over the gap swiftly and nearly in a single bound with a giant step of which childhood is incapable and for which even men require many intermediary steps designed expressly for them. Thefirstabstract idea

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is the first of these steps; but I am hard put to see how one might construct them. (Emile, p. 333) This tragic drop-into-being is experienced as a sense of surface so vulnerable, so acutely receptive to the mark of the world, so permeable and malleable, that all manner of devices must be conjured up merely to establish a surface tension capable of distinguishing interior and exterior and keeping floating members in a jellied stasis, a kind of primal corporeal hierarchy. Even this most basic of hierarchies, however, proves illusory, as evidenced by the desperate obstetric gestures to extrude the womb outward in the form of an incubating bath or the alternative prenatal insertion of a pedagogical hand into the birth canal in an attempt to ease the emergence into culture.6 Alas, it is all to no avail, and it is precisely these efforts to prevent and forestall the ineluctable drop which give rise to contradictory epistemologies amounting to, on the one hand, the human being as tabula rasa (whose surface, democratically receptive from birth, will become imprinted with the mark of individual experience), and, on the other hand, the human being as already genetically and racially determined (softened in utero by the corruption of our forebears). One cannot have it both ways, although Rousseau will try mightily. In general he will favor the more egalitarian solution, but it is important to note that the suggestion of a theory of race exists alongside the tabula rasa in Emile, and that this is the Rousseau that the nineteenth century, so intent on opening up a space of difference in the wake of the Revolution's own tabula rasa of class, will amplify.7 I do not wish to dwell on the movement of supplementarity, to use Derrida's term, interposed somewhere in the unlocatable breach which is origin for Rousseau. I merely wish to stress, as I already have for Constant, that the great divide of parturition as the primal experience of separation and loss is what opens up the field of symbolization and representation and that, to turn Freud upside down, oedipus and castration are only thinkable in function of a more archaic severance. The above passage from the "vicaire Savoyard" section of Emile alludes to three

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possible ways of channeling the experience of loss at the level of the body into the production of meaning: (a) abrupt detachment from the experience of the (maternal) body; (b) slow, furtive, graduated movement away (the thermometer solution as opposed to the icy waters of the Styx); (c) a nimble leap over the crevice in a movement of transcendence which remains, however, humanly inconceivable. It is the great dislocation of birth, to use Sprengnether's term, universal, true, but irreparable and even inutterable where maternal death is also involved, which founds subsequent signifying activity in Emile. The drop-into-being is also the fall into representation. Parturition forces the first substitution of the sign for the thing, one breast for another. The cleft of separation, the torn flesh which the production of meaning strives simultaneously to cover and recover determines Rousseau's understanding of the subsequent phases of early infantile development as adumbrated in Emile. Weaning, speech, various experiences of privation deemed necessary to the pedagogical project, are all configured according to this matrix of traumatic loss. Weaning, for instance, must be conducted ever so gently by substituting chewy bread for the breast such that babes "might find themselves weaned almost before noticing it" (Emile, p. 81). And let them teethe softly, " the nascent teeth " should encounter " soft matter which yields and upon which the tooth leaves an imprint" (p. 80). The malleable baby, erstwhile skin-text for an epitaph, is now slightly firmer, and can bite-write his own message which is one of separation in the abstract, as was seen with Constant. Speech and diction ("a clear pronunciation") follow the same model of demarcation and distantiation. The sloppy pronunciation of the city is to be deplored; look rather to the pristine countryside where low population density forces people to enunciate clearly if they are to be understood over distance. Speech is thus conceived as that which brings together two beings separated by an (ideal) distance. However, if it simultaneously mimes and remedies the drop-into-being, the mission of proper diction assumes a distinctly military aspect. For in the Republic of Virtue, a man must be able to make

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himself heard "at the head of a battalion" (p. 85). And one must ever be watchful, lest superfluous words infiltrate the vocabulary exceeding and dominating the ideas they represent (p. 86) or lest foreigners insinuate themselves into our midst and catch us unawares: "Every patriot is hard toward strangers" ( P . 38). Emile is a pedagogy destined not for the man, but for the citizen whose exemplary form is that citizen of Sparta who rejoices in his own electoral defeat if that means the State will be better served by candidates worthier than he. Voluntary immolation of the self for the greater good of the whole stands at the very base of the social contract. Those pages of the Contrat social where lesser political bodies seem to proliferate endlessly are also marked by reiterated concern for the well-being and preservation of the larger body politic. In fact, Rousseau's constant entertainment of the relation of part to whole takes on an obsessive quality nowhere found, for example, in his predecessor John Locke's Two Treatises of Government. What interests me at this point is how Rousseau's particular experience of the maternal death-in-birth is pressed into the service of an ideology of the State in which the theory of a public sphere of free action is predicated on confining woman to a single domestic function, defining her into a politically closed space, one, moreover, which is actually imponderable for Rousseau. In

Emile, the dilemma revolves around how the instructor can get a preemptive grip on his tiny - even prenatal - charge in spite of the necessary ministrations of the womenfolk. Even before the nativity, he has entered into a pedagogical contract with the father, the sole requirement thereof being a healthy delivery: "This treaty made in advance presupposes a successful delivery" (p. 57). With the hand of culture already engaged in a didactic, intrauterine probe, it is scarcely surprising that the newborn is a born student: "in being born the infant is already a disciple, not of the preceptor, but of nature. The preceptor merely studies under this first master" (p. 68). However, the hands of nature are vying to make that primordial imprint which culture has already made in utero: "our first preceptor is

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our wetnurse" (p. 42). And Rousseau must concede that: "The newborn needs a wetnurse" (p. 62). Yet who is this " nourrice " anyhow? " If the mother agrees to fulfill her duty, well and good" (p. 62). But in Emile, despite the lip service paid to the maternal breast, the mother never consents to filling her function, just as Rousseau, despite promises to explain "the meaning which I give to the term 'mother'" (p. 36), shrinks from defining that function. The surreptitious substitution of wetnurse for mother stands at the first remove from the matrix of the Rousseauan Nature/Culture double bind. "Nothing can replace a mother's care. She who nurses the infant of another instead of her own is a bad mother: how could she be a good wetnurse? " How indeed? For we were never in the presence of the maternal per se, but only of a mercenary stand-in, a mother to be sure since she must be able to suckle, but defined as maternal only to the extent that she abandons her authentic offspring. Worse, this "new mother" is considered an "etrangere." She can, allows Rousseau, become a good nurse, but only slowly: "habit will have to change nature" (pp. 46-47). The wrong of " lese-maternite" can be partially redressed, and we are plunged back into the thick of the Rousseauan paradox, for it becomes the work of Culture to rehabilitate Nature. Nor is there any turning back on the road to redressment. Once the babe has been handed over to the custody of a surrogate (and this change of hands is inevitable don't drop him!), the mother can never repossess her offspring: "The mother who thinks she can replace her [the nurse], thereby repairing her cruelty, is mistaken" (p. 47). Whether at the moment of birth where she constitutes an unthinkable presence, or after weaning, the mother is always denied access to her child. Ironically, the ideology of motherhood which owes so much to Rousseau reposes in fact on maternal absence. The nineteenth-century texts which I shall discuss later will play out this strain and magnify it to the breaking point. In fact, exclusion of the "natural" mother and admission of the stranger into the midst favors Emile's pedagogical project, for the presence of the biological mother constitutes an

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impediment to education. Childrearing instructions, Rousseau makes clear, can only be issued in writing: "her instructions shall be given to her in writing" (p. 62) in the hope that she will observe them. This "advantage" of the real mother actually suckling her child "has the disadvantage of keeping the preceptor a bit distanced from his pupil" (p. 62), whereas a wetnurse can be easily dominated: "Do not reason with wetnurses: order them" (p. 68). It is thus maternal absence which sets the authoritarian education machine into motion in the first place. Most projects of education form part of a larger vision which is political in nature, as the final chapter of Emile, which states the argument of Du Contrat social in brief, demonstrates. Emile reproduces on the pedagogical level the tension between the fundamentally libertarian nature of individual man, free and uncorrupted (and yet unperfected!) by civilization as presented in the Discours sur les origines de Vinegalite on the one hand, and a

totalitarian philosophy espousing the abnegation of self in favor of a collective will on the other. Thus it is that throughout his life experiments, Emile must have the impression of acting freely: for this is the very premise of learning. Yet, at all times, the preceptor has visited the scene of education in advance, fiddling with the decor, prefabricating results. Anything but a socratic give-and-take, the learning process is essentially a theatrical enterprise. With its staged lessons and conclusions, the student is constantly being set up to learn freely. More than once, Emile becomes "lost" in the forest, in a place contrived by his pedagogue, and is urged by the pangs of hunger and impending nightfall to give his knowledge of geometry concrete form: happy empirical lesson which stands him in good stead when, in the final book, Emile having suddenly fallen into a pastoral novel, again loses his way in the forest on a visit to his demure mate-to-be Sophie. Versed now in the semiotics of going astray (Homer and Fenelon's Telemaque [1699] a r e being cited at a furious rate), Emile unerringly treads the path of propagation of the species in a kind of retrouvailles with literary convention. Nonetheless, this theater of pedagogy has its double. To the

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extent that learning is a staged affair, it is fundamentally disingenuous even if tending to a noble end. This is why the problem of fakery crops up from time to time, and why, for that matter, Rousseau must lock horns with the dilemma of theatrical artifice, as he does, for instance, in the Lettre a cTAlembert sur les spectacles.

Let us look at the little episode of book 3 in which a delighted Emile, having discovered how a juggler ("un joueur de gobelets") manages to make wax ducks "obey" him through artfully concealed magnets, publicly outdoes the performance. The bright lad is invited to perform at the next day's spectacle where, a sitting duck, he is roundly humiliated by the juggler. The lesson of the magnetized wax duck, itself a metaphor for malleability and unquestioning obedience (besides prefiguring the end's staged magnetic attraction between Sophie and Emile), is that it will not do for young Emile to wander behind the scenes and inspect the stage machinery. Whereas Dorothy's exposing of the Wizard of Oz pulling the levers behind the curtains is precisely that act necessary to lead her to personal truth (however bittersweet), Emile is treated to further humiliation when the charlatan pays them a home visit to rebuke the student for stooping so low. With this, the juggler stalks off with all his dignity intact.

Birthing the body politic: Du Contrat social

I bring up this episode not for the problems of good or bad theatricality it poses, but because of the way it privileges the image of the "foire," with its ruse and artifice, as the arena of political and pedagogical instruction. For the juggler is a magical being who also walks onto — of all places — the sober pages of Du Contrat social! Further, it is not a matter of coincidence that the reference in question occurs in the chapter entitled "That sovereignty is indivisible" {Du Contrat, p. 64).8 Rousseau has already advanced his particular notion of the sovereign, which is one concept that sets Rousseau's social contract apart from those elaborated by Locke, Hobbes, and

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others. To this effect, Bernard Gagnebin notes: "The idea of a sovereign, one, indissoluble and indivisible, as well as the definition of the law, derive their authority from him" ("Introduction," p. xxii).9 The sovereign is the abstract entity which represents the assembly of each individual's voluntary and consensual alienation of personal power into a whole, the sum of which is greater than, and qualitatively different from, the sum of its constituent parts. The general will, as agency of the sovereign, expresses the collective desire of a given culture. It is axiomatic in Rousseau that the general will can never be misdirected by self-interest, either on the part of the contracting individual or interest groups vying for power within the whole. If it is true that "Rousseau's theory completed a tendency in the eighteenth century for thought about sovereignty to become more and more abstract" (Outram, The Body, pp. 74-75), this very abstractness and indivisibility also serve a distinct purpose within the Rousseauan private discourse. In fact, paradoxical as it may seem, what abstraction a la Rousseau conceals is precisely his problematic attachment to the body. Robert Derathe attempts to situate the emergence of the concept of sovereignty in Rousseau's thought thus: "in all probability, Rousseau elaborated his theory of sovereignty before formulating the terms of the social pact question" ("Introduction," p. ci). In other words, the concept of sovereignty - that which binds the body politic together - is a floating concept and actually antedates any specific political formulation. What is thus primordial for Rousseau is less a particular political form (which turns out to be democracy), but the postulation of an entity almost mystical in its abstractness whose principal function is to be capable of maintaining constituent parts intact. Unlike Locke's Two Treatises of Government and Hobbes' Leviathan, both of which do, of course, detail how different subentities must relate to a larger governing entity, Rousseau returns over and over again, and in a particular manner, to the question of how the political parts interact with the whole.10 Rousseau never presents these interrelationships as neutral and self-sustaining, but always in terms of threats to political

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integrality. Here the trickster revisits the scene as a metaphor for politicians who, unable to "divide sovereignty in its principle, divide it in its object" (Du Contrat, pp. 64-65): They divide it into might and will, into legislative and executive power, into rights of taxation, legal and defense rights, into domestic administration, and the conduct of foreign affairs. Sometimes they mix all these parts and sometimes they separate them. Out of the sovereign they make a fantastic and piecemeal being. It is as if they assembled man out of several bodies, one having eyes, the other arms, another the feet, and nothing more. It is said that the charlatans of Japan dismember an infant under the spectators' eyes and then, throwing all its members into the air one after another, they make the infant fall back down alive and completely reassembled. Such are... the juggling acts of our politicians. Having dismembered the social body by acts of prestidigitation worthy of the fair, they reassemble the parts who knows how. (pp. 64-65) The terms of catastrophic birth have done more than simply infiltrate Rousseau's political discourse. The dysfunctional state is a nightmarish image of a falling infant, exploding into bits, dismembered only to be reconstituted - but who can say how? And without the magical glue of sovereignty and the general will, who can say how the political body can be anything other than a grotesque prosthesis, a motley, disparate, and patchwork assemblage of organs and members always threatening to come unglued? Indeed, the birth of the State is subject to the same vicissitudes as the birth of the individual Rousseau. The organicist rhetoric of national genesis and regeneration (incorporated into the French Revolution and "performed" along dysfunctional lines in the nineteenth-century novel), does not coast along the parallel rails of a heuristic system of analogy as it does for Hobbes and Locke.11 Rather it arises directly out of a corporeal experience of pain, loss, and terror of falling and violently exploding apart. The principle of indivisibility of the sovereign, conjured up and defended somewhat desperately throughout the Contrat and in the final pages of Emile can thus be read as a fantasy construction of integrality, a beautiful dream of wholeness accompanied by simultaneous denial of

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dismemberment. It is to the tensions within the Rousseauan body politic that I now turn. Rousseau is such an important thinker that it is not without reluctance that I advance the notion that his construction of the State and his theory of a social contract are grounded in his personal corporeal experience of birth and maternal death. There exists in patriarchal metaphysics a deep-rooted tradition which holds truth to be inversely proportional to the individual and the material, both values which have been ascribed over time to the feminine. In order to conduct the business of theory, the contingent and the corporeal or, to quote Hobbes, the "grossness of bodies visible" (Leviathan, p. 71), must be transcended. It is as if the heaviness of being- the weight and consistency of individual pain and joy - inherently barred access to truth of a nobler alloy, as if the two were, in fact, mutually exclusive. My analysis here of Rousseau resurrects the corporeal, however, by giving body to an androcentric discourse which has a vested interest in feigning indifference to it. My discussion stands opposite to de Man's flight toward the figural, and even to Derrida's elegant study of Rousseau and the question of origins, which, to the extent that it stops short at the oedipus barrier, can only engage a text at a certain level, as my Adolphe study

demonstrated earlier.12 In Du Contrat social, the presiding analogy for the functioning political unit is incontestably that of the body politic with its diverse members. The physiologically based construction leads to such formulations as a "moral and collective body" having a "self," a "public person" (p. 52): the legislative branch is its heart, and the executive its soul (p. 128). So thoroughgoing and extensive is the metaphor that the political very simply becomes inconceivable outside this frame. Take away this discursive skeleton and one would be hard-pressed, I think, to arrive at the construction of the State by a different rhetorical path. Now it is also true that Rousseau draws on a discursive tradition in which political structure is constructed using the body as extended metaphor. If Rousseau "interlocks" with this tradition, and, indeed, engages the same philosophical problems

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as Hobbes and Locke, his "body politick" is very different from that of his two great predecessors. In both Leviathan and Two Treatises of Government, the body politic exists as a heuristic device to facilitate conceptualization. In both cases, the language associated with it is affect-free, neutral, and "transparent, " as it were, to the intended object of demonstration. In short, the body politic in Hobbes and Locke remains a selfconsciously metaphorical construction, there to serve a rhetorical purpose and nothing more. Not so for Rousseau for whom the body carries with it an anxiety which is staged in his representation of the State. For the body politic in Du Contrat social is a body under assault, a body prone to ill-health, fragmentation, destruction, and in constant competition with its constituent members. "Without becoming entangled in this multiplication of terms," explains Rousseau as he proceeds to do just that, "suffice it for us to consider the government as a new body within the State" (p. 101).

Vainly does he sound this cautionary note, however, because these smaller bodies proliferate relentlessly. In Locke's Two Treatises, there is only one body and it is the " body politic." In a textual space far more condensed, Rousseau manages to conjure up " a moral and collective body" {Du Contrat, p. 52), " a body of the people" (pp. 53, 64, 107), a "social body" (pp. 65, 68, 98), the "body of the nation" (p. 70), a "body of the State" (pp. 88, 101, 102), "an intermediary body" having its own members (p. 98), a "body entrusted with this administration" (p. 98), a "body of the government" (pp. 100, 101, 102, 138), "the body of the magistrature " (p. 102), " a body of laws" (p. 130), " a sovereign body" (p. 132), " a body of one hundred horsemen" (p. 153). These all exist alongside the "body politic" (itself invoked twenty-six times) and various other formulations such as the "will of the body" (pp. 103, 104, 105, 116, 125). I shall return to the problematic relation of small bodies to larger entities in concluding my discussion of Rousseau. For the time being, suffice it to say that Rousseau's exploitation of this well-established metaphor for the organization of the State far

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exceeds the rhetorical, and that his own famous political construction elaborated in Du Contrat social is an extension of his own body, even as it conforms to a preexistent tradition. Once this metaphor is securely in place, the rise and fall of polities can be conceived only in terms of birth, maturation, and death. In Du Contrat social, states ineluctably issue forth from the matrix of history in more or less dolorous conditions, even retaining, as will be seen, dim memories of their problematic collective origins. For Rousseau, however, it is phylogeny which recapitulates ontogeny and not the reverse. Things cannot be otherwise: "Therein lies the inevitable and inherent vice which relentlessly tends to destroy the body politic as of its birth, just as old age and death destroy the body of man" (p. 125), or again: "The body politic, like the body of man, begins to die as of birth, carrying within itself the causes of its destruction" (p. 128).

If Emile's throbbing refrain, "as of his birth, "joins birth to death, it nonetheless entails some sort of normal intervening life span. However, the power of this rhetorical matrix lies in the fact that it can just as well generate a pathological obstetrics and pediatrics of the State. Of Roman history, Rousseau writes that "Romulus' first institution was a composite government which promptly degenerated into despotism. For specific reasons, the State perished before its time, as one sees a newborn die before reaching maturity. The expulsion of the Tarquins was the true era of the birth of the Republic" (Du Contrat, p. 126). History might well have to rehearse reproduction because political miscarriages can occur. A state may be stillborn or, as in the above quotation, fall prey to the hard realities of infant mortality. Only a culture fully primed can deliver itself of a healthy baby-state. Similarly, before marriage, the love-struck Emile must travel abroad, less to polish his education than to allow Sophie's lovely young uterus to mature to perfection: "Do you know," rhetorically inquires Emile's preceptor, "how many young women's constitutions are weakened, their health ruined, their lives shortened by pregnancies endured before their maturity? Do you know how many babes remain feeble and languishing from not having been well enough nourished

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inside a sufficiently developed body? When mother and babe grow at the same time, and when the sustenance necessary to the growth of both is shared, neither will have that which nature intends" (Emile, p. 587). The danger is that two beings might have to compete with each otherfor life and that, indeed, one might cost the other its (her) very existence. In a striking premonition of Totem and Taboo, Rousseau evokes acts of collective violence accompanied by the concept of a collective cultural amnesia. In this disturbing vision, the body politic born at the expense of another body, carries with it, however dimly, the collective memory of its own origins, a memory so horrible (as seen earlier, it is also Stendhal's unspeakable burden) that it cries out for relief in the form of a historico-cultural gesture of repression: As some illnesses overturn men's reason, removing from them the memory of the past, there can be violent periods in the lives of States during which revolutions do to peoples what certain crises do to individuals, periods wherein the past's horror is replaced by forgetfulness, and wherein the State, aflame in civil war, is, so to speak, reborn out of its ashes, assuming all the vigor of youth as it emerges from out of the arms of death. Such was Sparta at the time of Lycurgus. (Du Contrat, p. 81) Such was Sparta, and so also am I. UEtat [de Sparte) c'est moi. Sparta the bold, Sparta the austere, Sparta whose taut, hardened, and military surfaces repel civilizations softened by luxury and vice. Out of the spasms of civil war - that is, strife which rips asunder the self-same body politic - emerges a glistening baby republic gloriously - nay, miraculously - intact. This is the fantasy state of the infant who comes into the world whole " as of birth," not dismantled and reconstructed by some charlatan who knows how. And yet this fantastical vision of the birth of a nation is a fiction, since its very existence as an entity intact depends on repressing the memory of its own violent origins. It is anticipatory of Totem and Taboo perhaps, but more to the point, eerily prophetic of the collective trauma of the Revolution which has a cultural amnesia of its own, for where in French

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literature of the first two decades of the new century, is the Terror recounted? 13 Meanwhile, Du Contrat social's reproductive grid of the body politic carries with it other rhetorical baggage as well. Adjacent to, and ostensibly competing with, the fantasy of the gloriously intact phoenix-infant as sole embodiment of the State is the figure of a maternal body politic which contains a smaller body: "Without becoming entangled in this multiplication of terms, suffice it for us to consider the government as a new body within the State, distinct from the people and from the sovereign" (p. 101). Here is a different account of the birth of the State, one so haunted by the fear of exploding into bits that it will require a doctrine of indivisibility (dubbed the sovereign) as axiomatic as a papal bull to keep it together. A delicate operation, this, of affirming an integral moi ("it requires an individual moi" [p. 101]) without however harming the mother-state: "The difficulty arises in how this subordinate whole is ordered within the whole such that the overall constitution is not harmed by strengthening it... It is out of these differences that are born the various relations which the government entertains with the body of the State, and it is from individual, accidental [contingent] relations that this same State becomes modified" (pp. 101-02). But accidents do happen, and the proliferation of baby bodies which seems to occur in spite of Rousseau's best efforts at containment directly threatens the existence of the maternal political body. The relation between parts and whole, to which Rousseau returns obsessively, is always antagonistic and mutually exclusive. The social contract would seem to be the answer to this antagonism, for once the multitude is united in a single body, "no member can be hurt without attacking the body; still less can the body be hurt without its members feeling it" (p. 54). A delicate balance, this, however, for it is inconceivable that the smaller body should perish, impossible, for instance, that the larger body "should wish to harm all its members." Adjacent to this, the specter of the "ruin of the political body" (p. 54) is invoked. Nonetheless, in the Contrat, Rousseau attempts to maintain two bodies in equipoise, both

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equally alive and intact: "However, even though the artificial body of the government is the work of another artificial body and although the life of its body is... borrowed and subordinated, these facts do not prevent it... from enjoying... a more or less robust health" (p. 102). However, the nascent entity is most often depicted as existing at the expense of the larger body: "any individual dependency is that much strength removed from the body of the State" (p. 88). Even with the help of the doctrine of indivisible sovereignty, the coexistence of part and whole is evidently inconceivable to Rousseau. A successfully executed social contract would represent his fantasy of two bodies surviving birth intact, but everywhere the impossibility of this project is signified, with violent death of the maternal corpus the ultimate fear, evoked in such formulations as "the ruin of the body politic" (p. 540), "the body politic is destroyed" (p. 64), the "social body" dismembered (p. 65), the "dissolution" of the body politic (p. 101), its "health" endangered (p. 147), what it can do to "preserve itself" (p. 73).14 All is for naught, because it is precisely at the moment of its inception that a State is most vulnerable: in that instant wherein "the body is the least capable of resistance and the easiest to destroy" (p. 87). So accidents do happen, and no amount of contract theory can keep the maternal body politic from being modified right out of existence. This being the case, one must see how, if at all, Rousseau attempts resolution. For it seems we are stuck in a rhetorical double-bind reflecting two contradictory visions of the body politic: either UEtat c'est moi and we have Sparta, mighty, intact, and forgetful of its violent origins, or UEtat c'est die, necessitating the elaboration of a theory capable of sustaining parts and whole in healthy relation to one another without recourse to a prosthetic, postpartum juggling act. Yet in the many fascinating contradictions which riddle Rousseau's writings, he somehow often manages to have things both ways. The solution here takes a syllogistic twist which might read something like: the State is myself; the State is mother; therefore I am mother. (And I can, in that capacity, give up my own five children for adoption, for one cannot have children and

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exist at the same time; I shall repeat the circumstances of my birth in the mode of mastery.) The ingenious solution, far from being a dialectical dissolution of contradictions conducted over the long term and in a loftier metaphysical register, is to reverse the terms, substituting effect for cause: in short, to embody the maternal in a gesture of gynocolonization: In order for a nascent people to enjoy healthy political order and to follow the basic rules of the State ["la Raison d'Etat"], the effect would have to become the cause, the social mind ["Pesprit social"] which must be the work of the institution would have to preside over the institution itself, and men would have to be, before the advent of laws, what they must become by virtue of them. (Du Contrat, p. 79).

It's a juggling act which strains credibility, to be sure, but the stakes - the welfare and survival of a nascent popular body are high. Adolphe's inner virtual theater had an incorporeal, disembodied quality (Mallarmean avant la lettre) when compared to the physicality characterizing Rousseau's assimilation of the body maternal. In Emileh final reprise of the Contrat, the social exchange goes as follows: "Each of us places his property, his person, his life, and all his power in the commonwealth under the supreme governance of the general will, and as a body ["en corps"] we receive back each member as an indivisible part of the whole" (Emile, p. 603). The Rousseauan architecture of mourning, wherein the volume of the self is augmented by virtue of a magical incorporation of its erstwhile container (in spatial terms), is buttressed temporally by an inversion of causality according to which the son precedes the mother and could, ostensibly, either generously give birth to her, or sadistically hold her captive, or both. If incorporation of the maternal plays havoc with notions of origins and legitimacy (but that is precisely the point), it also entails a wealth of other ideological consequences. Henceforth, the mother is as ubiquitous as she is invisible. Now you see her everywhere (Sophie as mother-to-be, Julie, Mme de Warens, and the mountains of maternal mammaries in Emile), now you

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don't. (For yes, that figure of the juggler is none other than Rousseau himself!) The archetype of the State, set forth at the beginning of Du Contrat social, is the family: Thus the family is... the first model of political societies; the head is the figure of the father, the people is the figure of the children, and all being born equal and free, they do not alienate their freedom except in their own interest. The only difference is that in the family the love of the father for his children is payment for his care of them. (Du Contrat, p. 42) 1 5

In the abundance of liberty, equality, fraternity, and paid paternity, it is easy to overlook the fact that this intimate and prelapsarian family cluster, prototype and matrix of all future polities, features no mother.16 Here in this primal scene of the private sphere, that natural habitat of the maternal creature according to the citizen of Spartaneva, we encounter instead a void. And it is a void which stupefies. When the juggler's game is exposed, and keeping so many disparities aloft proves too much of a strain, the curtains open up, brutally perhaps, on an architectonics of Culture erected around a structural flaw. As an edifice, it is a monument of mourning dedicated to nonexistent origins. Why, one might wonder, does this construction not implode like the musty collapse of Ellenore within Adolphe's mental space? Precisely because the maternal has been incorporated (as with Adolphe) and then vested within the economy of the Rousseauan self (unlike Adolphe).

The promotion of the moi which qualifies Rousseau as one of the founders of Romantic sensibility is more than the inauguration of a new aesthetics. For Jean-Jacques, it is big business: his life depends on it. We should not be fooled by the Confessions' fist-shaking claims proffered to a judging reader/ God of the fundamental uniqueness of his self ("moi, moi seul"). The claim is designed to deflect his reality as a body double. Indeed, Rousseau's very existence is an expensive affair, for he cost his mother her life. An idiosyncratic view of the self, it might seem at first, the economic autoconception is borne out by Emile's formulation of it in the same terms. On being asked where babies come from, a mother responds thus: "My son...

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women piss them out in pains which sometimes cost them their lives"

(Emile, p. 283). And, in La nouvelle He'loise, Julie, in her letter from beyond the grave, reassures her son Marcellin that "it cost her nothing to die for him" (p. 730). The economics of the self then become incorporated into the language of the body politic throughout Du Contrat social wherein the problem of the possible coexistence of two interdependent bodies and the obligation of the citizen is constantly entertained: "Whomsoever wishes to preserve his life at the expense of others must also give it up for them when necessary" (p. 72; my emphasis). It is when Rousseau, disputing the neonatal custom of swaddling the newborn into complete immobility, wonders what the child "has gained in being born" (Emile, p. 44) that an economics of the self and pedagogy of investment in the service of the State begin to emerge. The teachable child is a commodity which appreciates in value with assimilation of instruction: A child becomes more precious in advancing in age. Joined to the price of his person is the cost of rearing him ... thus it is above all to the future that one must look in securing his welfare because, if the price of life increases until such time as life becomes useful, what folly it is not to spare childhood ["epargner"] some of its difficulties! (p. 50) Moreover, the investor-preceptor must choose only from human specimens perfect at birth, lest his investment not yield returns. Ministering to a sickly child, his losses are described as financial: "in caring for a useless life, he loses the time which was intended to increase its value" (p. 58). "What else would I be doing in vainly lavishing my attentions upon him than doubling society's loss, thus removing two men instead of one? " (p. 58). The economics of pedagogy feed into a politics of reproduction. The father owes a "triple debt" to society: "He owes men to his species; he owes sociable men to society; he owes citizens to the State" (p. 52). What are the stakes for Emile's tutor? Can one expect disinterested attentions from the preceptor? Rousseau takes care to underscore the fact that our man is no mean wage earner: he is the father's friend (p. 65). What, then, does he stand to profit by the didactic enterprise which is distinctly not

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conceived in the terms of a simple exchange of labor, but rather in those of longterm investment? Very simply, the business of Emile's self constitutes, for the interested teacher, a retirement plan: "the preceptor takes [has] an interest in these attentions whose fruits he must harvest. The merits which he instills in his pupil are a fund in which he invests toward his old age" (p. 57). And cash in he does, for Emile ends in a vision of conjugal bliss borne out by Sophie's well-groomed and burgeoning womb ... accompanied by an invitation extended to the preceptor to remain on as tutor to the next generation. To bow out or not to bow out: the question is framed, in the final pages of Emile, in terms of authoritarianism and political control. Coyly demurring to stay on, the tutor announces: "Today I am abdicating the authority with which you entrusted m e " (p. 628). But Emile parries the proposed abdication with assurances of eternal subservience: "govern us; we shall be docile" (p. 629). Thus all is quiet in the Republic. Yet, like Le Rouge et le noir which shuts down on a pregnant Mathilde de la Mole, Emile closes on a Sophie big with child. We wish her the best, for we know that her body has been carefully cultivated. But accidents do happen. As with Stendhal midway through his masterplot, a mise-au-monde constitutes the unnarratable. For how is it possible to conceive that in order to live, someone else must die? (Will this be Sophie's choice?) Well, one might, for instance, simply give in to the devastating either/or of existence. But an easy logic of alternatives is not for the likes of Rousseau who, magician that he is, will have his mother and consume her too, saw her body in twain only to reproduce it intact, visibly and loudly placing her behind the veil of the domestic sphere. Ultimately, for Rousseau, the business of the self is to assimilate the maternal into what becomes a Moi, Incorporated. He emerges into life as a value-added being, doubly precious a priori, a costly item from the start. In this manner, the dead mother is "comprehended" and gynocolonized. She is never fully lost because she is embodied within the male whose self she augments. The economics of pedagogy, sketched out earlier, arises directly out of the experience of maternal loss and does not

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take the form, as it did for Constant, of a superseding semiotic system. Now one might consider this embodiment of the maternal as constituting a kind of repression. We have seen earlier, in a discussion of various nineteenth-century French novels, that maternal absence functions structurally to set into motion the grand filial quest. With the patriarchal narrative, the gap opened up by the maternal void founds all figural activity. In short, it is the sine qua non of signification. Rousseau's relation to the maternal, however, is more problematic than a simple banishment to the basement of culture. Unable to attain the metaphoric distance of his forefathers in political theory, Rousseau, in his body politic, creates a space prone to invasion. Nor is he alone in this undertaking, for the conception of an annexable maternal space provides a useful political model for Michelet, Zola, certain forms of nineteenth-century colonial discourse, and even (I shall be suggesting) for Freud. And indeed, in this enterprise as well, Rousseau blazes the imperialist trail when he speaks in Du Contrat social of the advantages enjoyed by coastal nations: "besides, through the colonies it is easier to relieve the country of inhabitants which are overburdening it" (p. 86). Unlike Stendhal, Rousseau does not rehearse the scene of birth through elaborate phases of denial toward acknowledgement and acceptance. Perhaps this is because Rousseau's own personal origins are tied to matricide whereas at least Henri Beyle's burden of guilt is not an ontological one. For Rousseau as for Constant, Nature and Culture are locked in an inextricable embrace. Nonetheless, Rousseau does propose "solutions" from time to time and these solutions, as will be seen, are closely tied to the political and have traditionally been read along those lines. Let me take, for instance, the hypothetical situation which the Discours sur Vorigine et les fondements de rinegalite offers as a

paradigm of man's inherently virtuous nature and his innate possession of compassion ("pitie"). It is a primal scene of violence which goes as follows: a man witnesses a ferocious beast tearing from a mother her infant, " crushing the feeble members beneath its murderous teeth" (Oeuvres completes, III, p. 155).

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Helpless to bring succor to the "fainting mother" and "expiring" child, the voyeur experiences a sense of commiseration which Rousseau in fact describes as an identification, being " a feeling which puts us in the place of the sufferer... In fact, commiseration will be the more forceful for the Spectator's tighter identification with the suffering being ["l'animal Spectateur; Panimal souffrant"] " (Oeuvres, III, p. 155). This is the proof which Rousseau advances in support of his theory of man's innate goodness as opposed to the Hobbesian pessimistic view. The paradigm is a telling one. A wounded mother with her dying babe, the fantasy of being wrenched from the maternal body and dismembered: the example is hardly innocent, although Rousseau attempts to pass off the spectator as someone having "no personal interest" in the scene (Oeuvres, III, p. 155). Such is the example served up as proof of man's universal and natural goodness. By reconfiguring the tragic birth event, once played out between two agents, into a theatrical scene a trois, a level of dissociation is achieved which actually allows an identification with the dying child to occur safely. It is also a scene which exculpates the viewer/(erstwhile)babe, who is axiomatically barred from offering help, and moreover reverses the charge of violence since the babe perishes and not the mother. In their complexity, the strategies of denial and reparation at work here rival those employed by Stendhal. What strikes one in Rousseau's example, however, is its theatricality. Indeed, in The Open Boundary of History and Fiction, Susan Gearhart pits the theatrical nature of this important scene against the hostile stance Rousseau takes toward theatrical representation in the Lettre a d'Alembert. Hers is yet another demonstration of the contradictions besetting the Rousseauan vision-du-monde. Eluding Gearhart's notice is the conclusion that what supports Rousseau's theatrical imagination in thefirstplace is the potential it offers for distanciation, dispersion, detachment, and dissociation.17 In other words, the construction of theatrical space corresponds to the architectonics and tensions of the self involved in a palatable mise-en-scene of birth.

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Always, it seems, either one body exists or else the other one does. In different ways, Emile, Du Contrat social and the example cited from the Discours put forth refusals of the tragic alternative which stands at the matrix of Rousseau's existence. Small wonder that contradiction abounds in Rousseau's thought, for contradiction results from an attempt to reconcile, at varying distances from the origin, the impossible coexistence of two beings. The tertiary empathic structure of viewer/mother/babe represents the potential of a dialectical resolution. Likewise, the abstract doctrine of the sovereign provides the prosthetic force necessary to maintain the many bodies in competition with each other for their very lives in a state of mutual viability. The politic in the body Rousseau: Emile revisited and "La Reine Fantasque"

Where, then, is the politic in Rousseau's body? The question which arises is how to assess the relation between private and public discourse if one of Rousseau's most important philosophical premises - that of man's natural goodness and perfectibility which leads him to enter into political pacts - reposes on so idiosyncratic and tendentious a paradigm? In what way, to paraphrase Outram, does his subjectivity interlock historically with the socio-political experience of late eighteenthcentury France, and in what manner, if at all, will nineteenthcentury cultural transformations engage the body Rousseau? For, as grounded as Rousseau's political vision may be in a peculiar experience of the body with a highly problematic relation to the maternal, I do not wish to suggest that unidirectional lines of influence are at play, as if somehow the remarkable range of his thought could or should be reduced to some psychological nugget. Indeed, to make this claim would be to ignore the fact that, misfit that he always claimed himself to be, J.-J. Rousseau nonetheless fits exceedingly well into his century with its preoccupation with origins, the sources of political legitimacy, its burgeoning interest in childhood along with a privatization of the family, its movement toward sentimentality away from

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the authoritarian austerities of classicism. Moreover, in addition to all this, Rousseau is both heir and contributor to a discursive tradition surrounding reproduction. I hope my analysis thus far has demonstrated that the issue of pregnancy and birth spoke to Rousseau with far more urgency and force than to most. Nonetheless, in his writings, this personal event and its attendant loss become recycled, fed back, and conflated with a political ideology of reproduction. What I am suggesting is that Rousseau's own private catastrophe led him to seize selectively on the subject of birth, grafting it onto a preexistent ideological framework dealing with the origins of civil society: his writings bring to the politics of reproduction an intense focus and a particular torque. If his works were so avidly assimilated by Revolutionary culture, it was in part because as the ancien regime eroded and then exploded, the nascent political organization performed the script of a new fiction explaining how one political order emerges from another. This new myth bears a peculiar relation to the problem of reproduction, as will be seen. Both at the symbolic and the practical levels, the issue of birth, population, and the procreation and enculturation of the new citizen had already been addressed by Rousseau. In the foregoing analysis of some of Rousseau's political writings, I have followed the spin of birth inward. I propose now, through two further examples from Rousseau, to trace the spiral of reproduction outward, probing the interface of the personal and the political in an effort to locate, if possible, the zone of transubstantiation of the body Rousseau into that of the "body politick." For if Emile has left Sophie's maternal fate dangling in the balance, it does nonetheless conduct a rehearsal of pregnancy successfully delivered in book 5. The incident occurs when Emile and his tutor, en route to one of the youth's chaperoned courtship visits, is detained by a cry in the wilderness. The appeals for help are those of a peasant who is immobilized with a broken leg while his wife lies in the throes of labor at home. Carefully they transport the man back to his rude abode, remaining there to deliver the baby. Sophie arrives later to minister to "the poor patients" with "their

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aching members" (p. 579). The episode deserves note for several reasons. First, at the psycho-narratological level, it offers the proleptic suggestion that Sophie will be successfully delivered when her time has come: in short, it constitutes a rehearsal. The narrative itself, however, shrinks from representing the actual event, and we can refer back to Stendhal for the wherefores of this suppression. Second, it is politically significant that the male teacher and his pupil have stepped in to take charge of the fact of reproduction itself. What is staged here, of course, is an appropriation of birth, but the more urgent issue is the transmission of this power from one generation to the next. Finally, while the woman's labor is completely passed over ("I shall not detail the rest for you" [p. 578]), her husband's suffering is heavily stressed as he, like her, lies confined in what is clearly a couvade. Postpartum, their bodies become amalgamated, and no distinctions are made between "the poor patients" with their "aching members." Nor should it go unmentioned that the fantasy of appropriation of procreation has clear class ramifications: if the male peasant invades and occupies his wife's body, the political power deriving from this annexation devolves to the upper crust, for that is who conducts the actual delivery. Later, we shall see how Michelet, ardent proponent of democracy, attempts to eliminate the classist aspect of gynocolonization. Thus, while the male of the lower classes dislodges woman and quite literally embodies her, he assumes by this very gesture the stigma of materiality which the privileged male can then transcend. Class hierarchy is thus erected through the reproductive process. What happens to the displaced maternal is something I shall address subsequently. Let me end this discussion of Rousseau by evoking one of his curious and lesser-known works, " La Reine Fantasque." This is a short story recounted by a narrator to a narratee about one King Phenix, his capricious queen, and her belated first pregnancy. It is a playful piece whose sense of narrative expectancy is entirely generated out of the suspense of pregnancy : will it be a boy or will it be a girl? The narrator digresses

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at critical moments, such that the exasperated narratee and reader are pushed into an overtly signified condition of expectancy experienced as painful labor by the narratee who urges the narrator to return to "this queen ... whom you are at such pains to deliver, and with whom you have been keeping me in labor for one hour" (Oeuvres completes, II, p. 1185). True to a convention governing certain works of short fiction (I am here referring to Barthes' reading of Balzac's Sarrasine), the dilemma posed by the narrative enigma (castration for Barthes, pregnancy in this case) is operative at all levels of the narrative apparatus. Narrative suspense and the act of storytelling are construed according to a paradigm of expectancy and delivery with the male narrator in conspicuous control of the outcome. He alone manipulates the gestation of the story in a mastery of reproduction operative at the level of form. For the issue under negotiation in "La Reine Fantasque" is not so much that of disastrous childbirth, although the queen does come dangerously close to losing her life. Beyond this, three other questions loom, namely: (a) who has property rights to the offspring; (b) who presides medically over the operation on the female body; and (c) the ideological implications of gender at birth: in short, what it means to be born a girl or a boy. The danger posed as the terms which the story is negotiating — that possibility, in other words, which threatens comic denouement and social order — is the specter of female dominance in reproduction, as might be exercised in any of the three above arenas. First, the rebellious queen is presented as having sufficient autonomy over her own body as to be able to determine the sex of her child and to claim proprietary rights thereto: "she claimed she was going to have a daughter, adding that it struck her as rather odd that someone might dispute her right to dispose of property which incontestably belonged to her alone" {Oeuvres, II, p. 1181). What if woman should be able to lay claim to the human product of her own labor? Now, unlike Emile's private and domestic birth scene set in a lowly abode, a royal birthing is a public affair of the highest visibility. The queen's body, never her own, is on display for all to see. During the gestation, the entire court is abuzz, learning

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how to "speak to an embryo" (p. 1183), whilst magistrates must be present to witness the royal infant's passage into Culture in order to avoid precisely such prestidigitations as those practiced by Stendhal's Du Poirier. If what is at stake between two regal legs is political legitimacy, no less an issue is that of who controls the actual lying-in. In this respect the king commits an error which is ridiculed by all the ladies of the court. So addled is he when his lady goes into labor that he mistakenly calls in a midwife rather than an accoucheur, a miscalculation which nearly costs his spouse her life. Thus, even before nineteenth-century medicine's progressive cooptation of the delivery process documented by Rich and others, Rousseau forces an entry into the nativity scene, previously a feminine space imbued with its own rich tradition of wisdom, lore, and ritual. The kingly error is presented in a cautionary context, while his name, Phenix, serves to suggest male mastery over reproduction in spite of his blunder. Imagine our surprise when the queen gives birth to twins, a son and a daughter. The ultimate threat of feminine dominance is so implausible that merely to raise its possibility requires the presence of a fairy ("la Fee") who, reminiscent of A Midsummer Nighf s Dream, has all along been playing the queen off against the king. To each spouse, the fairy proposes to bestow on his/her preferred child a cluster of character traits. There then occurs a mix-up of identities worthy of Plautus with the result that the young male heir appears to have acquired the "feminine" traits of capriciousness, indolence, and irrationality, whereas the infanta exhibits forceful, determined, and judicious behavior. Briefly entertained before the recognition scene (which takes the form of gender restored to its proper place) is the question of what might arise were woman possessed of male attributes and capable of wielding power. But the door opening onto this gynotopia slams shut, and one of the ways of keeping it closed is to maintain tight control over all facets of reproduction. From physical occupation of the maternal body in Emile (a class affair) to a male-based obstetrics and its perpetuation, from mastery of reproduction at the

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aesthetic, formal level to the political danger attending to the birth of a girl (a story only told by patriarchy for certain reasons), all these tendencies are incarnated in the glorious figure of the Phoenix rising up from the ash of History. A miraculous birth it is, too, severed of omphalic attachment. Above all, it is a matter of sound politics.

SECTION II

Introduction: birth, motherhood, and the dis-ease of democracy

In his popular 1858 work, LAmour, Jules Michelet declares that "this century will be called the century of the womb" (p. 42).18 He may well have been right. If Jean-Jacques, for personal reasons, put his particular spin onto the politics of reproduction, it is true that in some measure, the French Revolution "performed" Rousseau, following and amplifying the torque of his thought. Giving birth to a new body politic, producing a new citizen capable of reproducing the new order: these urgent enterprises were swaddled in a rhetoric of reproduction.19 Allegories of regeneration abounded even as the political doors, briefly open to women, slammed shut in a Jacobin draft evidently already hypersaturated with change. Instead, thrust into a new position which was that of the exclusively maternal, woman was incited to procreate for the Nation and, if big with child, invited to put her bigness on display in the "fetes de l'Etre supreme," embodying for the Revolutionary pageant the national agenda of political pregnancy and regeneration (Ozouf, La Fete re'volutionnaire, p. 135). In her recent study on the evolving representation of the family during the revolutionary decade, Lynn Hunt notes that "when represented publicly, women were increasingly relegated to distinctly motherly roles " (The Family Romance, chapter 6). 20 As a corollary, the figure of the child assumed enormous symbolic importance as the very embodiment of the future. In public ceremonies, for instance, illegitimate offspring were rebaptized "enfants de la Patrie" (Ozouf, UHomme regenere\ p. 168). Two youths, Bara and "le petit Jullien" (known as the

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''second Emile") became celebrities and were actively promoted as exemplars of revolutionary ideals of youth. "During the fetes," notes Yvonne Knibiehler, "the pedagogical motivation is blindingly clear: the scenography proclaims that the child, regardless of birth and family, now has value in and of itself because it represents the future of the Nation" ("L'Enfant au sein de l'espace public" in L Enfant, lafamille, p. 80). And the preoccupation with children translates into literature as well, as Hunt demonstrates in her analysis of the popular "child novels " of Ducray-Dumenil. Nineteenth-century France is thus heir to an overdetermined symbolic discourse in which political change is figured in terms of birth and offspring. One might be tempted to view this rhetorical grid as something which determines historical consciousness by programming history to be conceived in terms of reproductive process. For this is a metaphor endowed with its own syntax, one which remains in place through the end of the century: literary decadence, with its emphasis on the many forms sterility can take, might be seen as the inevitable resting place of this organic and teleological trope. Indeed, the nineteenth century opens with a real literary twist as Chateaubriand's Rene lifts Rousseau's personal trauma almost verbatim (only the tense is changed) to account for his own mise-au-monde: " I cost my mother her life in coming into the world," he both echoes and announces [Rene, p. 149). Thus does Rene come into being with the emergence of the new century, both still ashiver with the memory of their violent birth, a crime to be expiated under the sign of mourning and loss, a hope to be fulfilled in a new generation, and a generating of the new — of the novel. Rene (whose very title speaks truth-in-rebirth) assumes into itself the body Rousseau, commemorating and enshrining it as cradle of the Romantic movement. Turning Rousseau's fact into Rene's fiction is another ironic turn of the screw of history, one of those zones of "interlocking subjectivity." In the nineteenth-century novel, the pathology of birth is felt more keenly in the wake of the failures of 1848, it is true, but history's legacy is presented in terms of dysfunctional repro-

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duction - painful, costly birth and sterility - as of Chateaubriand. That emblematic figure of the Reproductrix, Mother Nature, is already hailed as a "nice grandmother" in Gautier's 1835 Mademoiselle de Maupin, a scant five years after Hugo's robustly Romantic Hernani had hit the literary scene. By 1884, Huysmans' hero, des Esseintes, is doing no more than mouth the opinion of his generation (Zola excepted) in pronouncing "that sempiternal drone" senile [A rebours, p. 80). Meanwhile, Huysmans' promotion of anality, redolent of his predecessor in the other decadent jin-de-siecle, the marquis de Sade, clearly translates a belief that reproduction has reached a dead end or cul-de-sac. Political crisis, for Sade and for Huysmans, finds its ultimate novelistic expression in the terms of a pathology of reproduction, whether that take the form of the exaltation of sodomy and explicit matricide (Sade) or des Esseintes' recreation in A rebours of an artificial womb and failed attempt to regress, and an ending touting coprophagia. In addition, the nineteenth-century novel explores other ways of representing political chaos in conjunction with reproduction which I can only mention here. These include the collapse of gender difference, homosexuality and its "sterilities," impotence (for example, des Esseintes' dinner party honoring his defunct organ), or the birth of female children which constitutes the very sign of the demise of the genealogical line expressive of the incapacity of political form to perpetuate itself. And yet the trope of politics-as-birth is far more than a simple metaphor. I maintain that at this privileged juncture of history - that is, in the century following the 1790 collapse of primogeniture during which a system guaranteeing transmission of power was being worked out - the problem of reproduction becomes exposed for the compelling issue that it really is. It is because France was moving toward the establishment of a particular political form - democracy - even if through fits and starts of turmoil followed by bouts of authoritarianism - that the whole question of reproduction becomes an urgent one. Clearly, when power, wealth, and property are no longer automatically vested in the first-born male, the question of what

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it means to be born second, third, or more alarming perhaps, to be born female, is thrust to the fore. With the obsolescence of the old system of birthright, a new blueprint for the transmission of power and property would have to be elaborated. At stake therefore, is the emergence of a different principle of political continuity, and the various theories of race, genealogy, mental pathology, and even Balzac's zoology of the human species, all constitute parallel ideologies of transmission and legacy. Ultimately, beneath these redefinitions of legacy which are being negotiated at all levels lies an attempt to found a predictable transmission of power. If it requires the better part of a century to put into place a republic of any longevity, "liberty, fraternity, and equality" remain those ideals toward which change, violent or not, tends. In the remaining pages of this book, I shall deal with the tension which strains the credibility of the discourse of republicanism when it confronts - as it must do - the problematics of birth. I shall now move beyond Pateman's argument which holds that the democratic contract reposes on the invisible appropriation of woman's power to reproduce. Instead, I shall be suggesting that the gendered division of public and private space advocated by Rousseau, enacted during the Revolution, elevated to legal reality in the 1803-04 Civil Code, along with the concomitant elaboration of an ideology tending to maximize gender difference, carries with it the paradoxical result of rendering the "grossness of bodies"-certain bodies - too visible for comfort. If power resides in erecting distinctions and enforcing difference, one might view in the post-revolutionary project of gender construction an attempt further to open up a space of difference as compensation for the collapse of difference at the level of class. The popularity of melodrama in the first two decades of the century dramatizes the need to position family roles as centrifugally as possible. As I see it, this polarization constitutes a direct response to the closing up of difference elsewhere: public man now fraternalizes. It results (and already had, if problematically, in Rousseau) in the creation of a new ethic of motherhood. That which ultimately distinguishes man

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from woman - namely the ability to reproduce - is glorified precisely because it represents the most extreme form of differentiation. And yet if Pateman is correct, the fraternal contract reposes, like its patriarchal predecessor, on the appropriation of reproduction ("elevated" to a more symbolic level); the difference, however, is that the new story's egalitarian premise means that it cannot afford to acknowledge its base of power without undermining itself. The body, in all this business, is repressed since it is alleged to be politically irrelevant. The notion of disembodiment goes hand in hand with the rise to power of the public individual, interchangeable with his brother, newly vested heir to power, and eligible to participate in the creation and transmission of political order. So, in any case, goes the theory. But at the inception of the nineteenth century, a political order has yet to be hammered out. If, as Joan Landes has claimed, " the new symbolic order of nineteenth-century bourgeois society was predicated on the silencing of public women" [Women and the Public Sphere, p. 38), woman is enshrined in the private sphere where, as mother (goes the new account of gender incommensurability), she reigns supreme. The enshrinement of motherhood, which hearkens back to Rousseau, becomes necessary in order to maintain the fiction of equality. Woman is equal, but enjoys a separate (domestic) sphere of influence. The ideology of motherhood thus emerges not simply adjacent to, and as if unconnected with, the rise of bourgeois capitalism, but as an attempt to cover over one of republicanism's fundamental inconsistencies. It thus exists as a response, a structure of compensation, and as such, threatens to strain the credibility of the fraternal narrative. In short, the maternal looms like a symptom of the democratic dis-ease. The irony here is that overinvestment of the maternal, which serves to paper over one contradiction (the viability of equality) in turn exposes a problem more profound, namely, that the whole contract reposes silently on divesting woman of her procreative function in the first place. Empowering the maternal keeps republican ideology afloat at one level, but lays

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bare the fact that the base of democratic power is directly linked to patriarchal appropriation of birth. The logical move (separate but equal) made in an effort to smooth over contradiction is instead responsible for unleashing all the anxiety, both individual and collective, which surrounds the issue of reproduction. It is, in fact, the very base of democratic power which is threatened by the valorization of the maternal, and this is why, I contend, so many nineteenth-century French novels concern themselves with the question of reproduction. In the first place, the earlier patriarchal story of appropriating origins does not remain implicit in these novels — for it cannot. Indeed, from Chateaubriand onward, the story is constantly retold as if in response to the resurgence of the maternal. With Rousseau's body politic as a roadmap, I shall examine in detail the strategies of Michelet and Zola to reoccupy the maternal body. First, however, I shall examine a series of novels in which, I maintain, the causal connection between reproduction and the emergent democratic ideology is exposed, and wherein the failure of the nascent political form to reproduce itself is articulated in terms of dysfunctional reproduction. Besides creating the optimum circumstance for ideological engineering, the in vitro isolation of motherhood can be viewed as an attempt to enforce biological paternity at a time when methods guaranteeing the reproduction of power were in considerable disarray. Keeping woman behind the veil of domesticity is almost tantamount to affirming certain paternity of offspring. We can turn to Balzac for an illustration of how one author figures the relation between uncertain paternity, birth, and politics. In question is the pregnant Valerie Marneffe of La Cousine Bette who exploits the " uncertainty principle " to the hilt by promising each of her several lovers that he is the authentic father of the babe-to-be. The veritable river of seminal fluid leading to the Marneffian ovaries represents the (con)fusion besetting the new fraternal system of power transmission according to which all brothers can be political fathers. Marneffe's spectacular stillbirth, crowning the novel's denouement, should be read as a political statement about democracy.

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(Again, democracy, even when construed as catastrophe a la Balzac, is built around annexation of woman's body, in this case, only too pregnable.) I would argue that if, as O'Brien avers, the uncertainty of paternity is a fear which is always latent, it is reawakened with the collapse of primogeniture. Suddenly, the political scene is dominated by the possibility of multiple political fathers of the State. It is no accident that Articles 312 and 340 of the Civil Code seek to allay fears about this uncertainty by expressly forbidding paternity searches, both for illegitimate offspring and for those born within wedlock. Through the Code, paternity, always a legal fiction, becomes one in a new way, and stands in counterpoise to the myth of the exclusively maternal, enforcing male control of reproduction. I have been arguing that the doctrine of gender incommensurability and consequent promotion of the maternal comes into existence to parry the falsehood of the premise of equality of individuals which is one of the pillars of republicanism of this period. Many members of the Romantic generation of French literati will champion the cause of liberty and equality of the individual as opposed to the fraternal concerns of the more collectively oriented social movements which returned to vogue in the 1840s. It is thus with respect to this emphasis on individual egalitarianism characteristic of the first- and secondgeneration sons of the Revolution that motherhood is created and sanctified as a "kind of ministry" (Chateaubriand, Atala, p . 112).

However, Romanticism's investment of the Maternal, whether taking the form of a return to the benevolent bosom of Nature, the glorification of sentiment and concomitant cult of "irrationality," or Saint-Simonism's attempts to incorporate her as the feeling half of a new godhead, contained the seeds of its own undoing. For such heavy idealization of motherhood is bound to unleash anxiety or, at the very least, ambivalence. Hence the vacant maternal position which activates so many male-authored nineteenth-century novels by forcing the protagonist into motion, translates, on another register, a cultural quest for the maternal, a quest which is destined to go unfulfilled

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given that the maternal is the object of a highly ambivalent desire. One solution will be to displace the search onto the global level. This not only guarantees that the quest will remain ongoing, but, indeed, frames colonial development in gynocological terms, as will be seen. Thus, when Prosper Enfantin's Romantic Saint-Simonian experiment founders in France, it is to the Orient that he sets sail in search of "la Femme," sometimes referred to as "la Mere. " 2 1 Troubles with the government had, of course, motivated this departure, but so had tensions within the feminist branch of his community. In short, it was more expedient to search for Woman abroad, and the discourse of orientalism was already carving out that exotic space as womb of the world. "The representation of relationship between East and West," notes Richard Terdiman, "constantly takes the form of... metonymies. And indeed this metonymic operation inscribes itself within the full meaning which the Orient bears for orientalizing Europe: the womb, the origin" (Discourse/Counter-Discourse, pp. 237-38). Actually, there is no need for elaborate theory here: Webster's Third International Dictionary gives the following as an example of the usage of "matrix": "viewing the East as the matrix of civilization." While I concur with Terdiman on the uterine configuration of the Orient, I am here attempting to collapse figural distance by showing proximity to the body. In fact, as already noted in the Introduction to this book, one gets a sense of the personal anxiety and the stakes involved in valorizing the maternal from this remark Prosper Enfantin addresses to his mother in a letter: " I am in a state of giving birth ... Now it is I who give birth to woman" (quoted in Moses, French Feminism, p. 59).

In the wake of the Saint-Simonian diaspora, Michelet would combine politics and birth with a return to the ur-womb of civilization, "republican" India: "India, nearer creation than us, has better preserved its tradition of universal fraternity," he declares, exhorting those in need of rejuvenation to "allow yourself the sweetness of returning to your mother... Grateful nature has bestowed upon India another gift: fertility" (Introduction a Vhistoire universelle, quoted in Introduction to

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LAmour, p. 19). It is precisely this figuration of the Orient as vacant and pregnable matrix that will furnish the rhetorical scaffolding for Zola's colonialist novel-treatise, Fecondite, which arrives, in 1899, on a literary scene dominated by the imagery of impotence and sterility. In fact, it may be that the womb-of-history metaphor and corollary valorization of the maternal retain their strength through displacement onto the exotic space of the (M)other, even as the metaphor is decaying at home. If Delacroix's barebreasted Marianne of 1830 remains consonant with Daumier's pre-1848 teats of the State all swollen with political promise ("La Republique"), " h e r " bosom has collapsed into sagging paps in many an allegorical representation of the nation in the wake of 1848. Because the novel is one of the vehicles which articulates the political relation between maternity and generation, sociocultural disillusionment in post-1830 France (but particularly after 1848), takes the form of reproduction perverted. This includes putting motherhood on trial. Certainly Flaubert is a case in point. Madame Bovary was scarcely good publicity for the institution (as the litigation initiated by the State proves), but deflation is complete in LEducation sentimentale, the novel that replays 1848. Here Mme Arnoux, erstwhile idealized figure of maternal chastity, finally offers herself to Frederic, who flees in fear and disdain, his idol knocked off her pedestal, to seek out the homosocial comforts of a brothel. In this hinge of the century, the mother has become the whore.22 Meanwhile, in Flaubert's earlier novel, Salammbo, the heroine-goddess (really more of a daughter than a mother figure) is quite literally toppled after being immobilized. After all this iconoclasm, what, indeed, remains, but two fussy old maids, Bouvard and Pecuchet, pottering about a home aclutter with ecletic paraphernalia? Total elimination of woman has been achieved in favor of a world of relics and fetishes. At a collective level, post-revolutionary France reproduces Rousseau's dilemma: the maternal is simultaneously everywhere, and yet nowhere to be seen. This ambivalence, I maintain, is a sign of the double bind which arises as the

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fraternal contract is played out. First, the maternal is valorized (if differentiated) in order to validate the cultural claim of equality. However, this very valorization in turn exposes the fact that the real base of power is predicated on the repression of the maternal body in the first place. Hence, the need to reaffirm, not only the story of democracy, but its relation to the maternal. This occurs, as of 1801, in Chateaubriand's Atala. Herein we are given to read the familiar civil contract story as told by Father Aubry for the edification of the pagan Chactas. For the latter, the story of the emergence of culture serves as a catechism on post-adamic kinship structure, but it should also be read as an allegory of the political re-organization which France had just undergone. Like the later Freudian variant, this contract is incest-motivated: for Chateaubriand (of course), this originary incest is practiced between brother and sister. At the dawn of time (but not quite!), the jealousy resultant from these "troubled unions" was such that "in those very beds wherein the patriarchs tasted of such joy ... they forgot the death of their mothers" (Atala, p. 124). But one would do well to note the slippage, for the "patriarchs" Chateaubriand is describing are in fact the sons of Adam, and the elision here is significant for it explicitly links a culture's emergence into civil society (the sons' triumph over the father, or the Revolution) with the repression of maternal death. Michelet also captures the sense of simultaneous maternal absence and presence in LAmour as he eulogizes the Wife thus: " O h ! how can you not feel that there is nothing in your cherished body that is not as sacred as my mother's grave? " (p. 163). Indeed, as discussed in the Adolphe section, maternal vacancy inaugurating a novel sets up the structural possibility of a maternal quest, the very same quest being embarked upon by an entire culture. It also figures a confusion about origins, which in turn implies uncertainty as to historical destination. "Life is less mysterious," writes Michelet in Le Peuple, "when one knows about its birth ... when one has seen ... how the living being existed ... well before being born" (p. 191). Pinning down the uterus (as Dr. Pouchet - Flaubert's and Michelet's friend - will do) is thus one way of forcing History.

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However, History may not willingly consent to yielding up her secrets. When such proves to be the case, Victor Hugo authorizes the use of force. Defending poetic justice against the rigors of historical truth in the 1827 Preface de Cromwell, Hugo admits that: "For a long time I have maintained, above all regarding the theater, that it seemed to me permissible to rape history as long as one created a child" (p. 57). History thus raped might give birth to some monstrosity, but this is permissible as long as the result is good Art. Although this overtly advocated rape of history would probably have appalled Michelet, he nonetheless shares with Hugo the womb-as-originof-history view. For Michelet, wifely infidelity consitutes no less a crime than " lese-histoire," and the womb must be sequestered in order to prevent counterfeit history: "One lie from the wife can falsify history for a thousand years" (U Amour, p. 167). The entire burden of authentic historiography falls squarely on the maternal uterus. The flesh made word: Enfants du siecle and pathologies of reproduction in the nineteenth-century French novel

From Chateaubriand's Rene and Atala through Musset, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Rachilde, Huysmans, and Zola, there is an obsessive concern with dead, feeble, or female offspring. Michelet was right: the womb's the thing, and the nineteenthcentury French novel stages every permutation and deviance of reproduction and inheritance imaginable, starting with the uterine space itself. I am not referring here to stories which feature the experience of childhood per se, such as Rousseau's Confessions or Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes, but rather to infants or children whose function is exclusively symbolic. It is according to this grid of pathological reproduction - which includes as well the "monstrosities" and sterility of incest, homosexuality, impotence, and thefin-de-siecle's new operation, hysterectomy - that the incapacity of social and political form to reproduce itself is figured. The use of birth and the baby as indicators of cultural anxiety is a relatively recent phenomenon, and is no doubt tied to the

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rise of the nuclear family and what might seem to be the belated recognition of the importance of childhood which Aries has discussed in his classic, Centuries of Childhood. If the nineteenthcentury French novel exploits this symbolism to the fullest, it is not simply because it is a convenient metaphor, but because the ills of the republican body politic repose on the question of birth. It is true that eighteenth-century prose was already using a specific kind of child — the orphan — to denote vacancy in political power. Eliminating the confining bonds of kinship (particularly paternal) opened up the marvelous possibilities of picaresque elan and social rise. To be an orphan was to allow a society to dream its future, just as Paul et Virginie can, for a limited time, play the game of Utopia together. Too, there are mock orphans of the Figaro ilk who can rehearse arrival in an unthreatening manner since comic family reunion eventually restores order. These orphans and bastards are vehicles through which a society senses and invents its own reorganization. But what happens when History speaks change through bloodshed and Terror, through totalitarianism and more bloodshed, through reiterated revolutions, through still another bout with authoritarian government ending on both the national humiliation of the Franco-Prussian war and the internecine trauma that was the Commune? Balzac's bastard, Henry de Marsay of La Fille auxyeux (Tor (1834-35) is separated from Figaro by an irreparable divide, and this is nowhere more clear that in the de Marsay family reunion scene. The murder of his lover, Paquita (the "screen-woman" in de Marsay's personal philosophy of the boudoir), leads to revelations about his own identity and that of his kinfolk. In fact, Paquita was quite literally the screen, the interposed body, preventing incest (while metaphorically permitting it) with de Marsay's lesbian sister, Paquita's lover. Earlier it is insinuated that the hero's English father, Lord Dudley, had narrowly averted homosexual and incestuous union with his son on learning the latter's identity. Unlike the stillbirth outcome of Valerie Marneffe's democratically receptive uterus, Balzac aborts in La Fille, stopping short of imagining first the product of a sexual union of brother

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and sister, then of a sister with proclivities toward her own sex. With monstrosity on the one hand, sterility on the other, everywhere social change is being configured in terms of dysfunctional reproduction. In his Confessions (Tun enfant du siecle, published also in 1835, Alfred de Musset speaks of the confusion of his generation, lost in the divide of History: Thus three elements divided the life proffered to the young men of that period: behind them was a past forever destroyed,flailingabout amid its own ruins ... before them was the dawning of an immense horizon and the first glimmers of the future. And between these two worlds ... the present century which, in a word, separates the past from the future. Being neither the one nor the other, it resembles both at the same time, and one never knows, with each advancing step, whether one is treading upon seeds sown or debris. (Confessions (Tun enfant, pp. 24-25). Have the seeds of the future been sown? If so, will history miscarry, abort, or perhaps produce some ghoulish thing? Some dead infant, or perchance a viable girl child, or maybe even nothing at all? Moreover, what is the nature of this womb capable of concocting these deviances? (It shall be studied!) In novel after novel, the sense of cultural discontinuity, drift, free-fall, futility will be embodied through pathological forms of reproduction. The crisis in reproduction - which becomes a full-blown demographic and political concern by the end of the nineteenth century (although Rousseau had already raised the problem of population decline as related to national prestige in Emile), is not a simple metaphor for the constant self-destructing of the social body. Instead, continuity of power has everything to do with control of the means of reproduction. Let me explore further the ideology of reproduction by looking at some of the enfants du siede in chronological order.23 If Rene fictionalizes Rousseau's fact with an image of the newborn century emerging from an expiring body politic, one of Atala's central themes is that of "cursed be the womb that bore thee." It is perhaps appropriate that these two short re'cits which recount the emergence of a new century retell the

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political birth story. Early in this short novel, there is a clear symbolic rebirth scene which transpires near a fountain. Chactas is attached to Atala by a cord, and his basic needs are experienced as those of an infant: " I had fallen back into a kind of infancy... I almost needed for someone to watch over my sleep and prepare my food!" (Atala, p. 84). However, whereas the hero is symbolically reborn, authentic birth is systematically associated with sterility. Atala cannot unite with Chactas because of a deathbed vow she made to her mother: "My mother had conceived me in misfortune; I fatigued her womb, and she brought me into the world amid great suffering: my life was despaired of" (p. 116). Everything bespeaks the sterility and sense of drift that time had delivered up, from the womb-weariness of Atala's mother to the dead infants which the Indian women hang on trees as offerings (p. 86). If the symbolism of the accursed womb and sterility relating to the maternal constitute clear allusions to the uncertain political destiny of France, symbolic rejuvenation is nonetheless open to our hero. Sadism directed at the uterus and matricide in Atala parallels the political "forgetting" of the mothers in the story told by Father Aubry, a repression reminiscent of Rousseau's distant and forgotten political violence that can found the State. It is now possible to integrate the earlier analysis of Adolphe (1816) within the broader framework of a politics of reproduction. What my psychoanalytic reading of that novel elicited was the existence of a birth narrative which so closely approached the maternal body that the prose rhythm became altered. It has also been seen how this proximity is captured, if in a different way, in Rousseau's writing. Thus I maintain that, while the experience of loss suffered at birth is universal (and its sub specie aeternitatis character is precisely why Freud disqualifies it as a useful model), when birth entails maternal death, the loss carries with it a greater charge and additional burden of existential guilt. This made Rousseau, Constant, and Stendhal (in a different way) ideal vehicles for exploring the problematics of birth, since for them mastery over reproduction is no doubt more compelling than for most.

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Nonetheless, their urgent efforts to master the event are synedoches of a gynocolonizing endeavor embarked upon by an entire culture whose base reposes on the appropriation of the means of reproduction. And while, again, anxiety over who does the reproducing is universal in patriarchy, my contention is that with the late eighteenth century and the French Revolution, the anxiety is brought to the surface and laid bare, the cogs of the ideology machine exposed with the suppression of primogeniture and, I might add, the Code's new instituting of daughters as heiresses.24 Male spiritual rebirth into a higher order thus takes place at the expense of the maternal body. This is certainly the process that Atala stages, and this is also how one can read Adolphe's rebirth following his tormented Gethsemanesque night on the plain. One striking example of symbolic feminine rebirth, however, does come to mind and, not coincidentally, it is a dysfunctional rebirth. It occurs in Balzac's first novel, Les Chouans (1829). The scene is remarkable both because the symbolic uterus is configured as a space of capitalism, and because the renascence in question is a pejorative affair.25 The scene goes as follows: Mile de Verneuil, the illegitimate daughter of a duke, has despoiled her brother of part of his rightful inheritance. Pursued by the enemy forces, she goes into hiding in the vault of the miserly M. d'Orgemont. It is an eerie, gothic locale over which d'Orgemont's dead elder brother, a priest, presides in mummified form. There between walls fairly sweating money, in the midst of a cache of gold, she is protected, and as she emerges in the countryside through a series of tunnels and passageways, "she thought herself reborn" (Les Chouans, p. 178). If Valerie Marneffe's uterine implosion alludes to the stillbirth resultant from a pluralistic political form, Mile de Verneuil's emergence offers the very figure of the birth of illegitimacy from out of the death of primogeniture and the expired clergy. As I have suggested, to the extent that women are rarely reborn in patriarchal narrative, such rebirths deserve special attention. Indeed, gender does signify here, for it compounds the illegitimacy of the situation. Likewise, the birth of a daughter is never a positive situation. Meanwhile, if the

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embalmed elder brother/priest of Les Chouans refers to the great power shift of the Revolution combined with the fate of the Church, the fact that he is preserved above ground recreates the ultraroyalist atmosphere of 1827-30 when the trappings of absolutism, relics of the past, remain above ground. 1830 will see to their burial, however, and, to return briefly to Stendhal, the composition and publication of Le Rouge et le noir straddles this divide. If Mathilde de la Mole's undelivered pregnancy at the end of that novel awaits resolution within the psycho-logic of Henri Beyle's personal masterplot, the elaboration of which spans his entire writing career, the series of pregnancies which appear in his work may nonetheless be reclaimed by a political reading. Indeed, Stendhal's obsession with pregnancies, births, and bungled deliveries signals a disturbance at the private level, and yet it requires the revolutionary troika "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" for the actual syntax of guilt to be articulated, as my analysis of the Vie de Henry Brulard (1835—36) has shown. That most potent of political slogans thus becomes the rhetorical branch around which the terms of the birth/maternal death complex cluster and crystallize, to use Stendhal's own metaphor. The resultant matrix of meaning is thus a grafting of public discourse onto a most subjective and intimate language of the self. As with Rousseau, personal birth is overdetermined by a public politics of reproduction. Can 1830 deliver on its promises? Le Rouge leaves us in suspense, and Stendhal never manages to finish Lucien Leuwen (1835—36), whose very plot structure, it has already been seen, is conceived in embryological terms. It was enough perhaps just to trump up that false pregnancy and mock delivery scene suggestive of false promises and vacuous rhetoric. Gautier's 1835 Mademoiselle de Maupin, on the other hand, exploits pregnancy to present us with the incongruities and unpredictability of reproduction. At one point, the narrator muses: "When I think that I was born of so gentle a mother... of habits and tastes so simple, I am completely surprised that I did not burst her belly when she carried me" (pp. 155-56). If this statement overlaps with the category of the spectacular gestation of the

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male hero, it also partakes of the discourse of monstrosity which includes perversion, inversion, and gender aporia so closely allied with the ideology of reproduction. Musset's 1836 Enfant, an Everychild representing the generation begat during the Napoleonic era, fares little better. Musset, much given to metaphor, is explicit in his allegorization of pregnancy and reproduction. He speaks thus of his generation's discovery of the historical present, "seated upon a sack of lime full of bones ... The anguish of death entered into their souls at the sight of this specter half mummy and half foetus" (p. 25). The imagery of embalmment and the dead preserved also present in Atala, Adolphe, and Les Chouans, and elevated to high art by Flaubert, bespeaks a sense of national mourning and loss. Thus, socio-political transformation and potentially catastrophic outcomes are rehearsed and imagined in the nineteenth-century novel through the grid of procreation. For the metaphor of national birth, heavily exploited during the revolutionary decade by way of promoting an agenda of social regeneration, drags along with it a rhetorical baggage of miscarriage, dead and stillborn infants, and degeneration. In short, the playing out of this metaphor, even though it is teleological and tends in and of itself toward senescence, can nonetheless take place along several different lines. One ill imagines the participant in revolutionary logomachy, to use Bonnet's phrase, to have projected the future of an image which had, in any case, been inherited.26 Yet a future it does hold, and the novels I have just reviewed stage the metaphor as History miscarried. In fact, in Le Peuple, Michelet, often intent on resurrection through return to the matrix of history, addresses his 1846 public thus: "Young and old, we are tired." The solution he envisages for the generation of bourgeois which is jaded even as it emerges into life sets up resonances with Rousseau's annexation of the maternal body by the lower classes. These young men have always embraced all talk in favor of the people with open heart. Let them do more; let them... form an alliance of common regeneration together... [this rich youth] is despondent on being born and, young though it be, greatly in need of rejuvenation through a

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return to popular thought. Its greatest strength lies in the fact that it is still very close to the people from which it has barely emerged. (Le Peuple, p. 160)

The promises of 1789 do not come true, nor, apparently do those of 1830. The feeble male Rene, brutally extracted with forceps from an expiring womb, the dead babies of Atala, Ourika who is herself a "disinherited child" (Ourika, p. 56), the in utero narrator of Mademoiselle de Maupin whose prenatal self is disharmonious with origins, Musset's foetal present perched adjacent to death, Mathilde's undelivered pregnancy, La Chartreuse's infant son at long last delivered only to die, Valerie Marneffe's stillbirth: the rhetorical grid of the French Revolution has yielded up a very different imagination of social metamorphosis. Nor do the novels of post-1848 France present us with many images of robust children, with the exception of Gavroche, the street urchin of Les Mise'rables, tenaciously clinging to life, and (earlier) some of Sand's novels featuring healthy children.27 (Hugo's vitality rises up in stark contrast to the general sensibility of fatigue experienced by the Romantics as existential, and later in the century as pathological. Only Hugo, perhaps, could have imagined raping history in the sure knowledge that the act would bear fruit.) Emma Bovary's turning away at the news that she has given birth to a girl child is celebrated, and whatever else it means — feminine alienation from self, or betrayal of the hope of a better future for one's offspring — the result is that the genealogical line has fallen to the distaff side. Female infants in nineteenthcentury literature are often born healthy and viable precisely because they represent, by very virtue of their gender, the extinction of a "race." What has gone less noted in Madame Bovary is Emma's brother who died in childhood and about whom Rouault thinks briefly, if longingly, near the novel's beginning. It is scarcely Flaubert's style to indulge in heavy-handed allegories of history miscarried, but with regard to dead infants, one can discern a consistency at the level of imagery. For instance, one of the props of Homais' pharmacy is the foetus in formaldehyde. This may lend a certain "effet de reel" to the

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decor, and it would be tempting to ascribe the foetus to the Flaubertian taste for miscellany and kitsch, were it not for the Education sentimentale's dead infant boy whose post-mortem fate is

as remarkable as Emma's. Of Flaubert's novels, U Education sentimentale is the one which most overtly deals with recent politics, in this case the charged atmosphere surrounding 1848, and the hopes of a generation raised only to be dashed. Just as Madame Bovary presents the catalogue of Romantic readings consumed by the likes of Emma, the LEducation sets forth the socialist reading agenda assimilated by Senecal. The latter, who represents earnest, disinterested political belief, had digested "Maby, Morelly, Saint-Simon, Comte, Cabet, Louis Blanc, the heavy cartload of socialist writers" (p. 166). However, the knowledge presented as active is that of Rousseau: "He had annotated le Contrat social" (UEducation, p. 166). The specter of Rousseau is ubiquitous, and his bodied theory of the body politic continues to inform generation upon generation. Meanwhile, Frederic, who haunts the fringes of various political gatherings of 1848, has fathered an illegitimate son, a sickly creature not long for this world, a sibling of the Second Republic itself. It would be too simple to bury the baby and get on with things and, besides, putrefaction is one of Flaubert's specialties. The mother, Rosanette, wishes to have a portrait painted of her dead infant, and to this effect the tiny body remains unburied for three full days, in the end becoming puffy and blue. Through the pathology of reproduction, Flaubert evokes the dysfunction of the French political apparatus with its notorious disparities between rhetoric and action. History and language do in fact miscarry, and this is confirmed by Frederic's final retreat into the whorehouse wherein resides solid, material truth not open to the ambiguous and delirious interpretations a la Virginie, Saint Julien, or Saint Antoine. Rachilde's Monsieur Venus (1888) presents us with a fascinating Jin-de-siecle ripost to Rene. Unlike the opening of Rene', with its creationary parting of the heavens and the waters, its naming of beast and fowl, Monsieur Venus opens on the odor of cooked apples, a stench which sickens the novel's heroine, Raoule de Venerande. Not only is paradise lost, but the

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gendered myth of its famous apple has been distinctly overdone. In Monsieur Venus, Adam becomes Eve and vice versa. This collapse of gender distinctions, a constant in the nineteenthcentury French novel as Dorothy Kelly has shown in Fictional Genders, is often conducted with high seriousness. Here it is achieved with a levity akin to the playfulness of Virginia Woolf s Orlando. In terms of heredity and reproduction of the genealogical line, Monsieur Venus and A rebours compose opposite panels of a diptych. Des Esseintes, A rebours' fainting, effeminate hero, is the sole remaining scion of his "race," and his impotence, commemorated in a last supper style dinner party, makes it seem unlikely that he will reproduce. He figures a civilizatiqn atrophying into extinction. Raoule is also sole heir (ess) to a line which has thus fallen to the distaff side. She is decisive, vigorous, bold in her decisions (the nightmare of Rousseau's "Reine Fantasque" come true), and given to donning male attire and identities. Even though Monsieur Venus treats gender and social disorder in a celebratory mode, the same signifiers of crisis and obsolescence - namely, problematic birth and dead infants - are retained. Like Rene, Raoule is herself the product of a childbed maternal death: her mother "died of a hemorrhage some time after delivery " (Venus, p. 9). No languishing infant she, however, and her upbringing by her aunt and her own sword-wielding prowess constitute allusions to feminine empowerment and matripotestal politics. In fact, Monsieur Venus goes so far as to suggest, if cryptically, the relation between the birth act and the suppression of the maternal by the paternal. Although Raoule's

mother had been a vigorous " provinciale," her husband, it is revealed, "blamed himself for his wife's premature demise" (p. 39). A shadowy allusion to the possibility that the husband physically violated his wife's confinement, Monsieur Venus is a novel which does not easily "forget" the maternal. Forced access to the maternal body is what founds the narrative of Raoule's life. Beyond the implication of the matricidal origins of this society in disarray, two references to dead children occur in the novel. In the first, Marie Silvert invents the pretext of feeling

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sick because she has just witnessed " a child fall under an omnibus" (p. 35). More significant is Baron de Raittolbe's impression as he slips his sword into the body of his lover, Jacques, in a duel: " I t seemed to him that, all by itself, his sword was entering the flesh of a newborn child" (pp. 222-23). Rachilde thus exploits the same semiotics of defunct infancy which reaches back to Chateaubriand and further back to Rousseau. Nonetheless, Rachilde does make a difference even as she situates herself (perhaps in the mode of parody) within the same discourse. For unlike the cortege of mothers, foetuses, stillbirths, dead male heirs, alive female heirs (the two amount to the same thing) which parade down through the French novel as of 1801, and all of whose deaths are presented as spontaneous and unmotivated, Monsieur Venus ascribes, if elliptically, both the founding matricide and a symbolic infanticide to the masculine. Huysmans seems to approach the pathology of reproduction more from the angle of impotence, venereal disease, celibate retreat, although "corrupting the youth" is a theme which appears both in A rebours and its sequel, En route, which touches on the pedophilic murderer of youths, Gilles de Rais. The third work of the trilogy, La-bas, however, does feature a hysterical, satanic orgy culminating in the sacrifice of a child. Within the context of dysfunctional generation, it seems appropriate, therefore, that Emile Zola's authoritarian hymn to fertility, Fecondite (1899) should crown the century, enumerating an endless list of perversions and contraceptive "frauds" which obstruct the path to national reproduction, overtly advocated as the gateway to global power. This work, the first of the uncompleted Quatre Evangiles, does not look backward to tainted origins the way the RougonMacquart cycle had done, exploring the permutations of heredity and the transmission of defective characteristics down through the generations. Instead, rising up amid a wasteland of abusive obstetric practices and corrupt midwifery which give on to a cemetery of babes and mothers, Feconditetrumpets out a militant apology of the propagation of the species, particularly within France. Exploiting the same discourse of regeneration often

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employed during the French Revolution and also milked by Michelet, the world itself is configured as a cosmic womb: "The entire globe is big with child, its insides heaving and throbbing like a pregnant woman. It is bursting with vigor in the continuous birthing of the future and of the universal and fraternal people" (Fecondite, p. 77). I shall return in a later section to the discourse of republicanism and its alliance with an obstetric vision of history. First, since this is a lesser-known work, let me summarize the plot line. The novel opens on Mathieu and Marianne, an honest, hard-working couple whose only debts are for milk and eggs. They already have four children, so by anyone's standards, they have fulfilled their national duty. Yet they will persevere in their reproductive labors until their brood numbers twelve children. In order to accommodate this growing family, the couple will revert from the city to an unpromising piece of land, Chantebled. By the sweat of his brow, the technologically versed Mathieu coaxes Mother Nature to be fruitful and multiply, which she does to the same rhythms as his spouse, a compliant uterus with a militant name. It is probably worth observing that while Mathieu Froment's genealogy is knowable and is, in fact, reconstructed at the opening of the novel, Marianne's origins are doubly obscure. Indeed, she issued forth from the dark continent itself (Algeria, to be exact) and, like the Virgin Mary, she is mystically lifted out of time and lineage by her parents' massacre at the hands of brigands whereupon she was "saved by a miracle" (p. 5). With more sons Mathieu acquires more land, and at a certain point Chantebled begins to function as a patriarchal political entity of the earlier type. This being yet another story of fathers and sons and the construction of culture, the specter of fratricidal war is presented as a territorial conflict, the danger of civil war is narrowly averted, and one of the younger sons, feeling cramped, moves to the fertile valley of the Niger where he continues the mission to be fruitful and multiply along fraternal lines. Fecondite is one of the few nineteenth-century novels to depict birth, apart from Lucien Leuwenh fake birth scene, describable probably because it is inauthentic. 28

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Juxtaposed to the Fromentian visionary society founded directly on the act of birth is a degenerate culture actually in the throes of population decline. France has become a political entity unable to reproduce itself: "The birth figures in England, Germany, and Russia are still on the rise whereas for us they are dropping frightfully" (p. 15). Just as healthy birth is depicted, there are graphic descriptions of bloody stillbirths, miscarriages, and infanticides. Whereas the other novels examined have generally condensed cultural dis-order and lack of political causality into a single languishing, dead or female "result" or effect, Zola's social body, at once prolific and wildly dysfunctional, churns out reproductive aberrations with the frenzy of a sorcerer's apprentice. Fecondite takes the semiotics of pathological birth and political miscarriage to its extreme... and then proposes solutions. Discussion of these solutions will be reserved for the final part of this essay. Let me here cite a few examples of reproduction gone awry. The wicked Serafine (whose acceptance of her legal patrimony has endangered her brother's fortune) indulges in " abominable infertile carnal pleasures" and gives birth to " a dead infant, an abortion" (p. 39). Much later, after a hysterectomy, she is confined to an asylum, stark raving mad. Mme Morange dies as a result of an illegal abortion (p. 197) and failure to call a doctor. Her only daughter, Reine, corrupted by Serafine, dies in a horrible hysterectomy (p. 381). The description of her death and her "criminal wound" repeats that of her mother nearly verbatim. 29 Then there is the post-mortem scene to which the reader is offered a speculum approach through the "jambes ouvertes" of a maidservant, dead as a result of a childbirth in which she was attempting to strangle the life even as it emerged from her body. Meanwhile, with Aristotelian economy, Mme Morange's calamitous parturition took place within the same twenty-four hours as two other deliveries. If Mme Morange is punished for her abortion and conjugal "frauds" which were attempts to confine her family to a single daughter who would thus be the sole beneficiary of the family's fortune, Mme Seguin, who also indulges in contraceptive fraud after producing two offspring, is

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punished with a gruelling labor aided (fortunately) by Dr. Boutan. When at last she does deliver, it is a girl, whereas Marianne, who has experienced an easy pregnancy, delivers herself- in suffering, it is true - of a bouncing baby boy. These are but a few instances of more or less monstrous short-circuiting of the lifegiving process. There are also references to infanticide as a result of incest (p. 182), and diatribes against the practices of "fraud," which can drive an unsatisfied husband out of the conjugal bed, beginning a whole cycle of infidelity and, thus, uncertain paternity. As with Rousseau, as with Michelet, the burden of the State falls on the mother. Not surprisingly, the theater of reproductive warfare in Fecondite is the doctor's office, and the real hero of the story is Dr. Boutan, a "male midwife, treating above all women and children's illnesses; he was the natural spiritual director" (p. 12). His nemesis, the evil Dr. Gaude, violates nature and impersonates the divinity as his name indicates by doing hysterectomies: "He serenely opens the womb as one opens a closet; he looks inside, removes everything; then he closes it up and the woman is cured" (p. 34). The sacerdotal mission of the doctor is debased by this practitioner who violates the sanctity of the tabernacle of life, now demoted to the prosaic status of armoire/closet. Dr. Gaude's practice, however, is licit and reflects advances made in obstetrics which include the use of anaesthesia, also anathema to Zola for reasons which will become apparent. Some of Dr. Gaude's minions, however, subvert reproduction less officially. Mme LaRouche operates an institution whose legal front is a sort of home for unwed mothers, but her real specialty is stillbirth (p. 192), which she considers to be an entirely legitimate activity, "because, having a free will, woman has the right, does she not, to give or not to give life" (p. 209). The right to give or not to give life is, of course, the central question of Fecondite, and the fraternal agenda of republicanism which is the ideology being endorsed with bludgeon-like force in the novel becomes strangely warped as it engages with questions of woman's liberty to reproduce. Zola, in fact, presents the gynocratic network developed to

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ease the burden of childbearing and nurturing as a seedy business concern, immoral and destructive of the interests of the State. If babies cannot be prevented or eliminated by contraception, abortion, or choreographed stillbirth, they can in last recourse be handed over to the "burial pit" (p. 205) of the terrible Mme Couteau, the novel's wetnurse-pimp who transports infants born in urban squalor to mercenary mammaries in the provinces where death is the inevitable fate awaiting the babes. Indeed, Zola exceeds Rousseau in the ardor with which he promotes maternal nursing for, in Fecondite, there is none of the ambiguity surrounding the identity of the maternal that stems from Rousseau's private drama. If Rousseau's breast is difficult to harness because it was elusive in the first place, Mathieu at last manages, through much coercion, to lariat the unwed mother, Norinne, into "willing" acceptance of motherhood. It is thus fitting that the nineteenth-century French novel's danse macabre of enfants du siecle ends with Fecondite in a

tarantella of infant mortality. To this extent, Fecondite sums up a literary tradition and then moves beyond that convention by proposing a vision of the future. These solutions, as we shall see, expose what is really at stake in the politics of reproduction.

Liberty, equality, maternity: Michelet as body snatcher

In the final two sections of this book, I shall examine the rhetoric of republicanism with respect to Zola's Fecondite and Michelet's UAmour in order to show how the question of reproduction brings out the tensions which are latent in that political model. I shall briefly review conclusions already reached on Rousseau in an effort to demonstrate the continuity of a discursive tradition of gynocolonization. Although Fe'condite'is a novel, its unabashedly propagandizing tone situates it on a discursive par with a neo-Malthusian program being actively advanced during the 1890s by, among others, an organization known as "la Ligue de la Regeneration humaine." This neo-Malthusian organ, which Francis Ronsin studies in La Greve des venires, attempted to expose the national

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militarism underlying the politics of birth, as well as linking unbridled reproduction to the propagation of misery in the urban lower classes. The human "regeneration" of the group's name referred to the improved quality of life stemming from the use of contraception and was also associated with woman's control over her own body. It is paradoxical in the extreme that Emile Zola who is, at that very moment, engaged in defending Dreyfus against institutional anti-Semitism and xenophobia, should espouse a politics of militant natalism. Among the other ironies of his position is the fact that he finds himself— erstwhile champion of the application of scientific models to literature and endowed with socialist tendencies to boot — combatting a collectively oriented movement which advocated the use of scientific technology to achieve its contraceptive goals. Paul Robin, one of the leaders of the movement, addressed women thus: " I t depends on you; you are absolutely the mistresses of your own destiny. Do not forget - you or your companions in suffering that science has emancipatedyou from the dreadful fate of being mothers

against your will" [La Greve, p. 54). Zola will be caught between an ideological rock and a hard place, and it is inevitably around the question of birth that his fraternalist republicanizing discourse will founder, as will be seen. It is because of Fecondite's missionary position vis-a-vis reproduction, its pedagogical tone and its philosphy that emphasizes fraternalism (over libertarianism, another mode of the contract story) that it can be situated within the discursive pale of two other generically hybrid works, Rousseau's Emile and Michelet's LAmour. It will be recalled that Emile, while a treatise on the education of the ideal male citizen as of birth (and even before) to his reproduction (but not quite) had veered off into the pastoral mode with the courtship of Sophie. The "lapse" into fiction permits the politics of marriage and problems ,of consent to be disguised. Moreover, it enables that stopover in the woods in order to deliver the pregnant woman and even more pregnant husband to be read as a peripeteia of the pastoral, akin to getting lost in the forest or falling into a river and floating downstream, or any number of devices which serve

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to obstruct the route to legitimate socio-sexual union. But the sylvan birth scene is far from being the simple detour it presents itself as being. First, since Emile shuts down on a pregnant Sophie, the scene constitutes a therapeutic prolepsis, functioning perhaps to induce narrative labor (and, as I have demonstrated for " La Reine Fantasque," Rousseau was perfectly conscious of the formal and structural possibilities inherent in this trope). Far more important, however, what the scene disguises as peripeteia is, in fact, the repressed of the politics of reproduction: namely, the physical occupation of the maternal body, and the edification of class hierarchy thereupon. In the middle of these pages dedicated to bringing up an Emile capable of signing a social contract as a free agent, the equal of each of his brothers, this scene, camouflaged as fiction, gives the lie to the more overt democratic story line, by freeze-framing the relationship between class and birth, and exposing what are for the privileged the political stakes of that connection. One of the reasons Jean-Jacques Rousseau is such a fascinating thinker is the quality of tension which governs his work. No wonder the juggler figures so strategically for he incarnates Rousseau's own innumerable balancing acts: fashioning (as he will in his rendition of Pygmalion) a woman out of a slab of inert marble, animating it, and then bringing the full weight of the State to bear upon this ambiguous space; attempting to birth culture out of nature so gently that the fall-into-being goes unperceived (a trick which requires calibrating apparatuses, marsupial baths, and a cultural probe into the birth canal); assembling a political body out of a multitude of small bodies, each of which must remain intact and function independently within an architectonic structure remaining in place in spite of a systemic tension so precarious that a mystical force, the sovereign, must be predicated to keep it all cohesive; promulgating an ideology of the free-willing individual and subjugating him to the authoritarian demands of collective interest; espousing a doctrine of equality and policing class distinctions in Julie and Wolmar's paradise. These are among the pressures which strain Rousseau's paradise. My reading has aimed to demonstrate that not only do some of these repose on the

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problematics of birth, but that this is the case to an astonishingly literal degree. As long as class structure and the system of transmission of power stay in place, the eloquent tensions of Rousseau remain virtual. However, when, out of the half-century of assaults led by the philosophes, a general shift in manners all capped by the travail of revolution, the class-based system of power collapses, what supported the hierarchy in the first place - namely, occupation of the maternal and assimilation of reproductive power - is exposed to view. Much was at stake in forgetting the mother, to use Atala's expression. Thus, to reprise my argument, with the curtains of class parted (for the time being at least), the maternal occupies center stage, even as political paternity is being renegotiated through a series of phases ranging from the authoritarian to the republican modes. But woman's power to reproduce has been repressed historically for good reasons, and although maternal visibility and the new ideology of motherhood emergent as of the eighteenth century serve as a cultural anchor allowing negotiations of paternal power to take place on the one hand, this same visibility which allows political change to go forward cannot help but unleash psycho-political anxiety centered on the figure

of the reproductrix. Because the hierarchy reposes on maternal repression, and continuity of power obtained by reproducing the system proceeds through a process of embodiment, as will be seen, each reiterated attempt and failure, in the nineteenth century, of the political body to reproduce itself by reconstructing some new system of privilege is doomed to refer back to that now-exposed base, the uterus, newly magnified into an object of scientific inquiry. Before examining the visionary solutions to the demographic "problem" proposed in Fecondite\ I wish to loop back forty years and consider in more depth Michelet's UAmour, which sets up a rhetorical scaffolding susceptible of supporting what will turn out to be Zola's colonialist politics. It is not enough to say that the ideology promoting motherhood and the creation of a private, familial space is a springboard allowing the new homo civicus to emerge. The real paradox being performed in

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nineteenth-century French cultural practice lies in the fact that the very gesture of subordination which to an increasing degree seals woman into motherhood uncovers the power which the first patriarchal story had disposed of: the power to give birth. Michelet perfectly understands the stakes and comes to the rescue in L'Amour, which is at once a romantic apotheosis of motherhood and a scientific peep (men only, please!) at the womb. Once again, the intertext is the body of Rousseau's writings. UAmour is written in explicit if mild opposition to Emile, and there is a clear identification between the elder Rousseau and Michelet, now a mature and respected historian and writer who lauds great men through their mature works: " It was then that Moliere gave us Tartufe, Rousseau the Emile and the Contrat social" (L Amour, p. 182). Nonetheless, the historian prefers a more universal approach because " characters with names (like Rousseau's Emile and Sophie) wrongly influence our ideas" (p. 55). However, the citizen of Geneva is the author most often referred to in Michelet's treatise (pp. 55, 182, 184, 218, 264, 266). U Amour expands on the Sophie section (educating the male is not discussed because the business at hand is the construction of the female), with the result that Rousseau's "peripeteia" shift to occupy the central position in a discourse in which the militarist lexicon of invasion and force are no longer covert. And it is because the subject itself is birth and woman's reproductive cycle that the issue of who reproduces whom and how is flushed out of the pastoral bushes where it had taken cover in Emile. Michelet's stroke of genius is the simultaneous exaltation of maternity and its classification as an illness ("the great malady"). He vulgarizes for the lay person the new science of the womb: Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire (Balzac's patron saint) and Serres' invention of embryogeny, Baer's 1827 beginnings in ovology followed up by Negrier and Coste, ending with Pouchet, that other master from Rouen, who "formulated the whole science" (p. 47). He consults illustrations by Bourgery, Coste, and Gerbe of the postpartum uterus: "oh! what terror! ...one recoils" so well has the artist rendered the "ineffable

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sanctuary of love and pain " (p. 131) .30 Labor pain, it turns out, is an essential ingredient, but not simply because of its inscription within the biblical tradition which makes it a condition of woman's existence (Laget, Naissances, pp. 155-72). By straddling two discourses which could scarcely be more dissonant - the Romantic and the positivist - Michelet meets the dual and conflicting demands of democratic ideology. For in U Amour, woman remains "sanctified" as mother, thereby maintaining her private-sphere opacity necessary for the projection of the image of the public man, and at the same time, the anxiety surrounding reproduction and maternal power, which, I contend, is ineluctably generated when motherhood is thrust to the fore, is neutralized through its subjection to the scientific gaze. When the womb is inadvertently exposed by politics, it can be domesticated by science. Now, earlier, in Le Peuple, Michelet had explained social inequality as being a matter of degree, defensible to the extent that the less privileged could emulate those in power with the reasonable hope of improving their lot. It is precisely the quantitative conception of class difference which permits the historian to suggest that cultural regeneration could be obtained if the new rich folded themselves back, as it were, into the popular classes, in a reversion to the matricial revolution. Woman cannot revert to the womb, however, because she is defined as the womb. In any case, access to the uterus is a proprietary affair: "To be a man, in the true sense," affirms Michelet, "is first and foremost to have a woman" {LePeuple, p. 99). Class mobility is achieved through a process of assimilation made possible because of the male commonwealth of the female body, itself set apart as qualitatively different. Indeed, as Thomas Laqueur has shown, a doctrine of biological incommensurability is what the nineteenth-century science of reproduction strives to adduce in spite of discoveries suggestive of homological embryological development: Nineteenth-century advances in developmental anatomy ... pointed to the common origins of both sexes in a morphologically androgynous embryo and thus not to their intrinsic difference. Indeed the Galenic homologies were by the 1850s reproduced at the embryological level

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... Finally, and most tellingly, no one was very interested in looking at the anatomical and concrete physiological differences between the sexes until differences became politically important. It was not, for example, until 1797 that anyone bothered to reproduce a detailed female skeleton in an anatomy book. ("Orgasm," 3-4) "The new biology," Laqueur continues, "with its search for fundamental differences between the sexes... emerged at precisely the time when the foundations of the old social order were irremediably shaken, when the basis for a new order of sex and gender became a critical issue of political theory and practice" (4)- _

It is true that Michelet takes gender difference to extravagant lengths. Woman breathes, eats, and digests differently (U Amour, p. 61). She also has her own language. In short: "She does nothing like us" (p. 61). But the whole question of the nature of difference does not sift out as neatly as all that, with quantitative class difference on the one hand and qualitative, gendered (and thus insurmountable, adialectical) difference on the other. For it is not enough, evidently, to tame the womb through scientific demystification. On looking more closely at U Amour, differentiation, it turns out, is a one-way road: woman is ontologically other and cannot aspire to leap the unbridgeable gap (although even this is problematic), but man seems to be only quantitatively different from woman. If Rousseau juggles babies in the air, wondering how they manage to land intact, Michelet fiddles with difference such that man can possess woman's body not simply in the proprietary fashion suggested in Le Peuple, but in the sense of a true magical possession (indeed, this is one of the aspects of medieval witchcraft that intrigued him): " Invaded by male force ... She will increasingly be him " [U Amour, p. 24).

Whereas Rousseau's gynocolonization proceeded, as has been seen, through incorporation, Michelet's man actually becomes woman through a process of invasion. It is precisely this rhetoric and politics of displacement and occupation of the maternal that Zola will draw upon in his Jin-de-siecle hymn to reproduction. For Michelet, annexation of the mother body allows

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man to become the mother, which means that he can mother woman, reversing the causal sequence of reproduction. Within the context of the pathologization of motherhood and its embodiment, the groom, "he who makes himself into a mother and sicknurse" (p. 90) is offered the following advice as to the cultivation of his "frail flower" (p. 98) on receiving her into his domus: "Before having a child, she must herself be strengthened, poor child. She must be completely brought to womanhood. One must be a mother" (p. 98). Concern for the Sophian uterus is what led Emile to travel abroad: the uterus was to be taken by brute force later in any case. For Michelet, far more heavily vested in the discourse of equality than Rousseau and feeling the strain of keeping it consistent, the approach will be one of slow infiltration supported by such oxymoronic formulations as the wife's appeal to her husband, "free me from myself" (VAmour, p. 108), or "she feels free then, provided that you are her master" (p. 77), or the encouraging chapter title, "You must create your wife; she asks nothing more." What really sets woman apart is her biology. If her menses, incapacitating her (according to him) from fifteen to twenty days per month, means that she is not only sick but "wounded," it is the pain of labor that defines her. The valorization of painful birth is essential because suffering is a universal experience. It is precisely through the shared language of pain that appropriation of the birth process goes forward. It will be recalled that this process of identification was how the peasant man in Emile came to give birth. The male in LAmour, in fact, moving toward complete mastery over reproduction, suffers all the symptoms of gestation because he is assimilated to the mother through transsexualized pain: "Resign yourself, my friend," Michelet consoles the husband, " all things come from you " (p. 80). " Modern man," he adds later, "that all-powerful male, must engender ceaselessly ... But," he continues, "if woman's birthing comes at the cost of pain — she must suffer for nine months, often shrieking for twenty or thirty hours — man's great deliveries often require nine or twenty years. And how many stifled sighs, how many

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suppressed moans!" (p. 149). Subsequently, he declares a male menses to occur every three or four days (p. 187). The depiction of male birth is no stranger to the novel, either, and Balzac, for one, furnishes some particularly interesting examples while at the same time denigrating the physical act of birth itself.31 Nor is it by chance that the Pygmalion/Galatea story, with its pitting of artistic creation versus female procreation, is so heavily exploited in the nineteenth century: it is a narrative which needs to be reiterated in nineteenth-century France because the power shift toward the fraternal has exposed the old wound of reproduction.32 As for the real reproductive deed, in LAmour, Michelet traces the stages in a couple's creation of a family. Notwithstanding the book's explicitly obstetric focus, when the pregnant wife does come to term, the actual birth scene is completely glossed over. No longer can one consider this traditional omission a matter of modesty, for L Amour has already indulged in uterine biopsies and all manner of gynecological speculation. What is in fact being enacted on these pages is the repression of the mother's contribution to the literal act of birth, a suppression which becomes flagrant given its inscription within the medical discourse which had to be invoked, in the first place, in order to acknowledge motherhood, even if as pathology. No details about the mise-au-monde, therefore, except to inform us that it's a boy; the husband, for his part, is "half dead" (VAmour, p. 130): "What a bond, to die together; I mean to have together seen and felt death so near!" (p. 130) That clarificatory " I mean" is eloquent indeed, for it exposes the process of identification preceding embodiment as the prelude to the expense of maternal death, to rejoin Rousseau's formulation. "Half-death" is actually more literal than it might seem, for life exchange in UAmour is endorsed by the "contract of pain" (p. 130) or the marriage covenant: "But how does she remake his life?," Michelet rhetorically enquires about the wife's function. His answer follows forthwith: "By risking her own" (p. 121). Let me recapitulate my argument before moving on: it grows into a bit of a hydra since each time a resolution of one

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ideological problem is offered, it appears to destabilize an earlier accommodation, with the result that contradictions are constantly being exposed. In UAmour, Jules Michelet simultaneously maintains the myth of the mother reigning supreme on her pedestal, and dominates his subject by classifying maternity as an incurable illness. This satisfies the covert demands of the fraternal contract by simultaneously making visible and disenfranchizing. However, I have been arguing that in vitro isolation of the maternal, even when it is stigmatized, awakens anxiety revolving around the power of procreation which had been put to rest by the more remote patriarchal narrative, and included but occulted in the fraternal story of the birth of a republic, as Pateman contends. Now, to make matters worse, Pouchet has advanced the theory that the human female produces an egg independently of any male participation. It will be recalled that the doctor had expressed wonder that so obvious a fact had for so long remained enshrouded in mystery, but within the framework of a politics of birth, science's reticence is easily explained.33 Indeed, the nineteenth century's new science of ovology threw salt in the fraternal wound by further affirming woman's reproductive power, thereby making an issue which had already become uncomfortably visible through the institution of exclusive motherhood, even more flagrant. Despite his self-promotion as proponent of the new science, Michelet's mission in U Amour is actually one of damage control. His book constitutes an attempt to neutralize, in all senses of that term, the maternal. Not only, therefore, does Michelet endorse the republican story with many references to fraternalism, but he must also reiterate the terms of the earlier contract, by annexing the maternal body, indulging in male couvade. The body and pain form the bridge allowing birth to cross over from one gender to the other. The male experiences menses, labor pains, and is able to give birth. What is more, he himself gives birth to the mother. The work of annexation and occupation is thereby complete and the maternal can be displaced into death. (Sometimes this phenomenon is called " transcendence.") It will be remembered

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that the spouse's words of tenderness to his wife were that her cherished body was just as "sacred" as his mother's tomb. Jules Michelet's historical vision of redemption and salvation through love shares borders with science fiction, which, in a way, is not surprising since that genre revolves around conquest and invasion. Nonetheless, one might feel a bit as if one had blundered into the screenplay of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers when the mother's link to her family is described thus: "she falls into a kind of narcotic stupor, a half-dream, in which her life and theirs are no longer distinct. Her fluid personality escapes her" (VAmour, p. 138). At length, the zombie-mother comes to walk like her husband and her voice drops in pitch. We know that the vampirism is achieved when she sprouts a mustache (" a light down" [pp. 228-29]). The mother is no longer there at all. She is simply an empty vessel occupied by alien forces. Notwithstanding Michelet's notorious anticlericalism, a tone of missionary holiness pervades U Amour. Or perhaps the relation might better be construed as causal: Michelet heralds the Third Republic's movement of secularization and definitive separation of Church and State, at the same time foiling loss of the sacred by displacing that sacred and reinvesting it into a doctrine of national difference which valorizes the French fraternal discourse and supports the ideology of global expansion in a proselytizing mode. Even woman, in all her m/otherness, may be susceptible to conversion: "Fraternity, the sacred word of the new age, she can spell, but she cannot yet read it" (p. 203). For the moment, however, the maternal vessel functions to distill ideology: "Of the abstract and general which you give to her... she makes an individual. You spoke to her of country and of the free and heroic city, she has dreamt a hero" (p. 122). Moreover, the maternal distillery is portable, and Michelet, anticipating Zola by some forty years, adumbrates a politics of colonial occupation of other hemispheres which reposes directly on the m/other hemisphere. The sun never sets on the English Empire, according to him, for the good reason that the English woman is willing to emigrate: "Why does the Englishman emigrate so readily and with such utility for England itself?

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Because his wife follows him. Except for all-consuming climates (like India), the English woman... has sown the entire earth with English colonies" (p. 57). The uterus is thus a potent tool of foreign policy, and property rights to the embryo, a national concern from time immemorial, become an affair of State all the more urgent given France's declining birth rate widely perceived as alarming within the context of an evolving European balance of power: "the fruit she has in her womb," Michelet concludes, "is the property of the human species" (p. 222). But the maternal corpus is more than a simple population machine, for the pregnant orb both figures the space of colonial conquest and configures the rhetorical grid of invasion. Reverently Michelet contemplates this "new hemisphere," "this divine globe which contains an unknown world" (p. 123): in short, the hemisphere of the mother, vacant, pregnable and receptive to occupation and annexation. In Fe'condite, that dream of republicanism, Emile Zola will stretch the discourse of foreign policy based on annexation of the maternal body to the breaking point, as we shall see. While direct lineage between L'Amour and Fe'condite is difficult to establish, the resemblances between the two are quite striking. In his source study, "' Fecondite" cTEmile Zjola^ David Baguley maintains that: Doubtless the Froments will achieve a happy and harmonious marriage such as Michelet conceived it. Although one might hesitate to assert that the work of the latter is a direct and immediate source of Zola's novel, the natural affinities in their ideas — a spontaneous religiosity, a basic naturism, an instinctive rather than reasoned traditionalism - added to the notion of salvation through love ... at least allow us to conclude that Fecondite echoes certain of Michelet's beliefs with which Zola had been imbued in his youth, (p. 54) Into Africa: £ola and gynocolonization

Indeed, Michelet is transfixed by "that divine globe which contains an unknown world" with the same awe as Mathieu Froment unveiling his wife Marianne's lovely orb: "He uncovered her belly with a religious gesture. He contemplated it, so white and silky, round and swollen like a sacred dome, and

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whence a world was to emerge" (Fe'condite, p. 109). Already projected onto the taut white screen of the belly, all silk and domes, is the profile of the Orient. As stated earlier, Zola is combatting the demographic revolution in France by condemning all forms of limitation of reproduction. For someone who bills himself as socially progressive, this stance is a difficult one to maintain in the face of a neo-Malthusian agenda whose central tenet is that social inequality results directly from the underprivileged reproducing themselves at a higher rate than those with wealth and power. Moreover, as it should by now be clear, that movement's emphasis on woman's control over her own reproductive functions threatens to close off the possibility of patriarchal annexation of the maternal body which we have seen to be operative at an extremely literal level both with Rousseau and with Michelet, a literal annexation which is absolutely essential to male appropriation of reproduction. For the political stakes of guaranteeing stability — whether that take the form of maintaining class hierarchy or, as in the wake of the Revolution, keeping the maternal reference point intact so that power can be renegotiated elsewhere - reposes, in the would-be hermeneutic of fraternalism, on mastery of birth. But neither in its collectively oriented republican mode nor in its individualist libertarian elaboration is the fraternal narrative a rigorously tight argument. In either case, in spite of its ungendered premises, it is precisely upon gender differentiation that it rests. Those foundations may remain obscure in Locke and Hobbes' contract theory, as Pateman argues. However, with Rousseau they become visible because, as I have contended, of the peculiar circumstances of his own birth. Rousseau's subscription to an ideology of motherhood at once responds to his personal need to reproduce and master the maternal, but it also has enormous structural utility as a counterpoise to the allegedly ungendered but clearly patriarchal redistribution of political power occurring throughout the nineteenth century in France. Anxiety over birth and the consequent configuration of the maternal as occupiable space constitute the zone of "inter-

218


locking subjectivity" wherein the Rousseauan personal/ political vision du monde engages with the structural demands of a new political culture, itself nurtured on a heavy diet of Rousseau. Thus, to the extent that Rousseau's highly "bodied" body politic informs political discourse of the Revolution and succeeding century, his embalmed ancestral body, along with its troubled relation to reproduction, is itself reproduced. If the idealization of the maternal is invoked as a compensatory device to maintain the fraternal myth in position, as soon as birth or the maternal become the explicit objects of discourse, I maintain, the strain inherent in the account of democratic power rises to the surface. The fact that so many nineteenth-century novels from 1801 to 1899 are simultaneously preoccupied with the pathologies of reproduction and the problematics of a dysfunctional cultural order unable to regenerate itself predictably, is evidence that the connections between birth and power are becoming exposed. Michelet's ingenious suturing together of the romantic language of maternal idealization and a medical demotion of the maternal to incurable disease constitutes an attempt to resolve these tensions. However, such compromise formations are bound to articulate in some way the dis-ease of democracy. For instance in L Amour, the holy trinity of French contract theory, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, becomes inflected into: Liberty: liberate her from herself; Equality: woman is qualitatively different from " u s , " if equal in her way; Fraternity: she can spell the word, but cannot yet read it. In Fecondite, wherein birth itself has, at long last, become the explicit object of study, the strain of maintaining the political fiction of fraternal equality and of extending it into Africa results, as I shall demonstrate, in a collapse of the discursive structure of fraternalism, culminating in the eruption of the language of power of the ancien regime, a language which Rousseau himself had helped to render obsolete. To return to Zola's argument, however, his ideological burden is to promote himself as socially progressive in the face of liberal neo-Malthusianism. This he achieves through such categoric and undefended assertions as: "No progress has ever

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been made that has not been caused by an excess in births" (Fe'condite, p. 17). Throughout Fe'condite, the details of how social equalization through copious birth might take place remain hazy, but the empty expanses of Asia and Africa beckon as relief valves for the internal pressures of French overpopulation, a topography wherein equalization can take place and, presumably, the terms of the fraternal contract renegotiated. Colonial expansion is thus proposed as the solution to a (nonexistent) problem, and the "empty" zones toward which "civilization" aspires are vacant in precisely the same manner that Michelet's maternal body was vacant: it had been evacuated for ideological reasons. It remains to be seen whether the same will prove true for Zola. Yet it is not enough to reproduce: Dr. Boutan adheres to the Rousseauan ideal of maternal breastfeeding which here becomes explicitly linked to fraternal politics: "And ... all this can be summed up in this one truth: the mother must nurse her infant... In our democracy, woman becomes august as soon as she is pregnant" (p. 276). If the familiar pedestal upon which the maternal breast is displayed is a pillar of the democratic state, as in the Rousseauan political architecture, its "august" stature instead recalls the bust imperial. The latent authoritarianism which supports the fraternal discourse, dispersed in Rousseau, conjoined but denied through strange oxymora in Michelet, baldly obtrudes in Fecondite, where it initially assumes the form of banter. Dr. Boutan is prodded by the enemy camp, which champions contraception, as to just how he would enforce such nursing practices: "would you have the Chambers declare breastfeeding obligatory? Boutan was laughing too, 'My Heavens! Why not?'" (p. 293). That the same "joke" is repeated shortly thereafter (p. 343) suggests that the humor is of the grim variety and the stakes serious indeed. Laid bare like a dazzlingly flawed pearl in the good doctor's position (and the jocularity serves as a screen) is the fictional nature of a republic peopled by genderless individuals. What is shown to underwrite this fiction, that base which must be policed and kept in place, is woman's power to give birth. By 1899, the Third Republic had enjoyed

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a near thirty-year existence, and under the pressures of feminism, the shaky foundations upholding the brotherly pact begin to make themselves felt in Zola's text. Setting sail for the Orient may constitute a last-ditch effort to displace the problem and reframe it. In The Sexual Contract, Pateman had argued that the fraternal narrative suppresses the earlier story of maternal domination, retaining it as implicit base. While this contention may be true of Locke and Hobbes, it is certainly not valid for Rousseau, as has been seen. It is precisely when the mother attains extreme visibility that it becomes necessary to disembody her (almost vampirically) and annex her reproductive function. Displacement of the maternal is a structural imperative. Rousseau's peasant husband's body assumes all the labor pain; Michelet's procreative spouse (now the democratic Everyman) is "demimort"; and Zola's Mathieu, the creator par excellence, follows in the same tradition of couvade. During the only parturition depicted in relative detail, Mathieu "suffered with her; he sensed even the slightest waves of pain running through her... Had he not desired this community of labor ... From that moment on, she became more his... as the pregnancy proceeded, the living torrent which mingled them together gradually made her full of him" (Fe'condite\ p. 216). Everything possible is done to guarantee " their common delivery," following which they are " pale from the same torment" (p. 217). Again we see the efficacy of labor pain and why Zola should preach against the use of anaesthesia (p. 363) because " this pain at last intermingled them " (p. 217). With the maternal body transformed into an occupied territory, the family militant, that "sacred battalion" (p. 544) marshalled by Mathieu, can then pursue its mission first in France, and later abroad. As the Froment clan increases in number, and Mathieu aspires to the surrounding land, acquisition is conceived not in the terms, for instance, of speculation, nor with the language of, say, self-sufficiency and containment, but assumes instead the bellicose aspect of conquest and invasion. The Froments are "at war" (p. 548) with their neighbors, whose land they eventually "invade" (p.

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549). Annexation proceeds also through exogamy, although son Ambroise's marriage to the Seguin's daughter is hardly a peaceful union of families, but rather "Chantebled victorious over the Seguins, their home soon invaded by Ambroise" (p. 537). It is when the discourse of fraternalism with its emphasis on consent is stretched to the limits of credibility that its authoritarian underpinnings are exposed. Thus decrees (parliamentary, of course) could police the maternal function, even if such a valorization is problematic at other levels. Likewise occupation of one's neighbor's lands is difficult to pass off as an act of brotherly love, or even as an imprudent action susceptible of inviting retaliation (Rousseau's version). Nor does it suffice to couch militant imperialism in moral terms, invoking evangelical visions of a higher good. With the Fromentian expansionist project in full swing, the strains of keeping the ''liberty, equality, fraternity" fiction cohesive prove too much and the entire discursive structure founders. That collapse is probably inevitable. What then emerges, however, from under the debris is really rather remarkable, for it is not simply a generic language of totalitarian aggression and enforcement, but in fact, a full-blown rhetoric of royalism which arises, resplendent, from amid the contradictions. Early on, Mathieu had mused: " the time has come ... for me to found a kingdom" (p. 244), an ambition secured through conquest: "Since the Froments had become conquerors, busy founding their small kingdom" (p. 428). The clan is Mathieu's "small people," (p. 625) inhabiting a "royal residence" (p. 489) with its very own royal oak (p. 480). For one of the clan feasts, a daughter, imagining herself a "faraway princess," goes to greet guests, welcoming them to "her father's States" (p. 550). Later, after the clan has survived fratricidal strife, it convenes its "great royal council" (p. 714). Given the politics of unbridled reproduction which stand at the base of the entire operation, there can be no logical halt to the movement of expansionism. The domain of which " Mathieu was king, through his prudent conquest" becomes "his empire"

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(p. 479). In Zola's simplistic vision of social equalization through territorial annexation, relentless reproduction and eventually demographic spill-over, there must periodically occur moments of discomfort arising from excessive population density. Fecondite depicts the first such instance, which turns out to be a variant of the fraternal pact narrative, since Zola is operating at the level of the primal family. Although no brotherly covenantor se is ever explicit, one is presented with a fraternal reconciliation scene and the beginnings of a diaspora which will found civilization. It is also at this point that the restless son, Nicolas, moves to Africa. Ineluctably, it is over a land dispute that strife between two embittered brothers erupts. The little monarchy stands tottering on its foundations. The father's political hegemony is not overtly called into question, but his potency is, for Mathieu must go to Paris to enlist the support of two other brothers. (Actually, Mathieu had "abdicated" power in favor of his sons earlier, but remained on as guide and "oracle.") What is really at stake in this impending internecine conflict is the body maternal, for Marianne is sickened near to death that the "sacred fraternal band" is tearing itself to shreds (p. 696). Only reconciliation will restore her waning life to her. The reader is not privy to the terms of the agreement, but when Mathieu returns from Paris, some form of accommodation has been reached, the brothers have renounced their territorial claims, and the mother has been revived. Keeping the land intact is tantamount to keeping the maternal body integral. It is essential that the equation of the two be made explicit here, since one model of occupation will be constructed by homology with the other before being displaced. The pregnable maternal corpus will furnish the mould for future territorial occupation. The byzantine dome of Marianne's belly supports, bodies forth, and lends the formal and structural imprimatur to a certain foreign policy. Hence, by transposing body and land, in its most sketchy formulation, what occurs at Chantebled, in the absence of the father, is war and negotiation over the mother body, with renunciation of claims over the terra mater, a renunciation which

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can be envisioned precisely because the Afro-uterus has been opened up

as a space of displacement. Viewed from this perspective, we are fast approaching Freud's version of the narrative and this is not surprising, as will be seen. However, to return to the dark continent, I noted earlier that orientalist thought had rhetorically charted the East as uterine topos in any case, and Zola is not inventing some personal psycho-cartography here. It is incumbent upon him, however, in order to prepare the cultural launch into the valley of the Niger, to reiterate the brother-pact narrative including its relation to the maternal.

What juncture more opportune than this one, when the authoritarian — nay, the specifically royalist — base of the republican fiction is becoming uncomfortably apparent, to export the story, thereby giving it a new lease on life? Indeed, this would seem to suggest that foreign policy can sometimes amount to the transfer of ideology no longer sustainable in the domestic arena. And in Fe'condite, the foreign policy which Zola is advocating is clearly one of gynocolonization. Those hysterectomies that Dr. Gaude performs in public are far more than breaches of sanctity. In the most literal way, they subvert the State, not only by offering woman the choice not to mother, but particularly by removing that occupiable territory which supports the cartography of power. Mathieu and Marianne, the founders of civilization (alias Chantebled), remain in France, attaining Old Testament longevity. Significantly, it is on the occasion of the couple's diamond wedding anniversary that an emissary of the kin, Dominique, grandson of Nicolas, returns to recount African tales. During this merry feast, which in fact commemorates the original annexation of the mother body, Dominique speaks of the collective African endeavor: " O h ! we live as in a republic; we are a community whose every member must strive toward the fraternal oeuvre," to which he adds, "Nonetheless, we are also laborers, kings of the plain" (p. 738). Not even displacement onto the dark, m/other continent, that terra incognita fertile and receptive to cultivation of occidental myth, can contain the latent authoritarianism of the republican story. Quite simply, it is a fiction impossible to

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sustain, as the novel's final utterance bears out. With the narrator's eye prophetically trained on the horizons of empire, the neonatal civilization is described as "another Chantebled [which] was carving out a kingdom ... And it was an exodus, a human expansion throughout the world: humanity in movement toward infinity" (p. 751).

Conclusion

Given the conditions governing its conception, the birth of the republican body politic is destined to be an operation fraught with complications which no amount of ideological obstetrics is capable of resolving. If the tensions and strains manifest themselves in slightly different ways in the major authors discussed here, the underlying eviction of the maternal is the common ground of their political constructions. What is curious, it seems to me, is that no account is ever given of the fate of the dislodged body, be that woman or her African effigy. To do so would no doubt be to expose the patriarchal ideological support and power base. And yet mater can neither be created (although nineteenthcentury French patriarchy will try mightily) nor, I think, destroyed. Rousseau's incorporation, Michelet's incubus-like possession, Zola's military occupation, all involve the displacement of a significant entity. Viewed from the perspective of a topology of displacement, it is not surprising that the mother should often be represented as other-worldly in nineteenthcentury French prose for, indeed, she is carnally annexed by alien forces. Sprengnether's demonstration of how the maternal haunts Freud's pages as a lingering and "spectral" presence which refuses to go away, might be recast in more historicopolitical terms with Freud's work itself reframed and reconsidered as a continuation of a tradition of gynocolonization. Indeed, in The Sexual Contract^ Pateman does treat Freud's Totem and Taboo as a variant of the contract story, which it most certainly is. Her classification is based on isotopies of the kind Levi-Strauss has used to demonstrate the structural universality 225

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of certain myths (oedipus, for instance). On one level, it is surely sufficient to demonstrate the analogy of content and argument as it moves through history and informs the discursive organizations which over time have emerged as distinct disciplines. Still, I am tempted to follow the turn of the screw spiralling outward from Rousseau through its French revolutions, spinning through many a nineteenth-century French novel, revolving in Michelet and turning into Zola. Fecondite is not one of the novels which has immortalized Emile Zola. And yet one cannot say that its influence has been negligeable. The scant thirteen years which separate its publication from that of Totem and Taboo, that "seminal" work of anthropological psychoanalysis, does give pause for thought. Politics and narratives of birth and its mastery are universal concerns, as the fact that the debate is alive and well late in the twentieth century indicates. And yet to the extent that the ideology of reproduction takes forms that are historically specific, it is possible to gauge degrees of cultural malaise by looking at how and in what tradition of tenacity motherhood and birth are policed. It thus seems not inconceivable to view Totem from within a French legacy of enforcement stemming from Rousseau. With this possibility in mind, therefore, one is less surprised to note that, in response to a 1907 questionnaire asking him to list "ten good books," Freud names Zola's Fecondite. This naming does not proceed without elucidation, of course. Freud does not understand "good" to mean "magnificent," in which case he would assuredly have cited the likes of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Faust. Nor does it imply his "favourite books," among which he numbers Milton's Paradise Lost and Heine's Lazarus {Works of Freud, IX, p. 245). He thus surmises that the term "good" is meant "to designate books to which one stands in rather the same relationship as to 'good' friends, to whom one owes a part of one's knowledge of life and view of the world" (IX, pp. 24546).

With the acknowledgement of this particular intellectual debt, Sigmund Freud situates himself within the patriHneage of French gynocolonization. In fact, further examination reveals

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that his interest in Zola's work was already of long standing. On April 27, 1900, he delivered a lecture on Fecondite to the Vienna chapter of the Society ofB'nai B'rith ("Sons of the Covenant") (XX, editor's note, p. 272). Whether covenant of sons, fraternal pact, or social contract, all function to screen and to screen off the maternal through appropriation of her labor pains. Annexation of the maternal space is an essential element of the story and as such must be signified. Thus, Freud writes to Jung in 1911 that he is creating Totem and Taboo amid "constant douleurs a" enfantement"

(cited by Sprengnether,

The Spectral

Mother, p. 92), for that is precisely how fraternal culture a la Zola, a la Michelet, and, beyond it all, a la Rousseau, is constructed. The politics of reproduction support an ideology of invasion because the first space to be penetrated, infiltrated, annexed, probed, and occupied is that of the maternal body. Her continent must remain steeped in darkness if the missionary light of civilization is to be cast upon it. The domes and silks of her pregnable body beckon for capture, and her tabernacle commands the same appeal to seizure and study as that other symbolic space of gynocolonization, that object of ardent quest, that nineteenth-century colonial grail: the recondite source of the Nile.

Motes

INTRODUCTION 1

2

3

4

See my book, The Narrative Matrix (pp. 119-30), for a discussion of Freud's struggle with Rank's claim. This battle against the primacy of birth as structuring principle was waged by Freud, for the most part, in the margins of Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism. For a more recent and more complete account of this tension as it is expressed throughout Freud's work, see Madelon Sprengnether's The Spectral Mother (pp. 135-53). Although my own work here on Stendhal and Constant antedates her book, Sprengnether's analysis has been extremely helpful to me in the way it situates the maternal with respect to object-relations theory. In "Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse," Susan Stanford Friedman attempts to delineate how women writers differ (and sometimes conform) in their use of birth tropes. She concludes that: " In general, women's birth metaphors cover a wide spectrum of personal statement, reproducing the central debates over the relationship between poetics and the body. At one end of the continuum, women's birth metaphors express a fundamental acceptance of a masculinist aesthetic that separates creativity and procreativity. At the other end of the continuum is a defiant celebration of (pro) creation, a gynocentric aesthetic based on the body. At points along the spectrum are expressions of fear, ambivalence, and a dialectical search for transcendence of the binary system of creativity " (66). I would like to thank art historian Josephine Withers for pointing out the birth-related work of Frida Kahlo and Judy Chicago to me. For example, Camille Desmoulins, advocating forgiveness and moderation at the apogee of the Terror, endorses a new calendar precisely because reoriginating time allows for repression of the collective violence associated with the birth of the nation: "the 228

Notes to pages 12-22

5

6

7

229

establishment of a clemency committee strikes me as a great idea, worthy of the French people, erasing from its memory many errors by erasing the very time in which these were committed and creating a new era from which it dates its birth and its memories" (quoted in Walter, La Revolution, p. 338). In Darrow's view, the aristocratic espousal of domesticity (and consequent embrace of maternity) arose as part of the nobility's attempt to assimilate itself within the bourgeois governing class active in the promotion of this ideology ("French Noblewomen," 43). See also Laura Strumingher's article, "L'Ange de la maison: Mothers and Daughters in Nineteenth Century France." Strumingher points out that although motherhood was widely advocated in the nineteenth century, there were important differences in how and why it was promoted, both at the level of gender and class. What is significant for the purposes of my analysis is the convergence of the various interests of class. Laqueur's " Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology" traces the evolution of theories of reproduction from Greek antiquity to the twentieth century with particular emphasis on the late eighteenth-century shift in models of generation. His is a fascinating and illuminating analysis of which I shall be making further use in cycle 3. In his Introduction to Levy's U enfant, la famille et la revolution frangaise, Michel Vovelle tells us that the "secrets " of contraception had reached the peasantry of the Parisian area by the mideighteenth century (p. 31). Mireille Laget is slightly more reserved in her conclusions about this period than is Vovelle: "The evolution toward a contraceptive behavior is only clear in the elites," noting further that "the expression 'contraceptive revolution' exceeds reality" (JVaissances, pp. 101-02). For a statistical demonstration of the "neo-Malthusian behavior" of the French population from the mid-nineteenth century to the eve of World War I, see chapter 2 ("L'Evidence de la fraude") in Francis Ronsin's La Greve des venires (pp. 16-22). CYCLE 1

1

2

Victor Brombert has been particularly insightful on the subject of discontinuities which correspond, he maintains, not only to "the blanking out of strong emotions within the author's memory but [to] the elaborate camouflage of his most passionate commitments in his relations with his imagined reader" (Stendhal, p. 13). Marin first developed this line of argument in an article entitled

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3

4 5

6

7

8 9

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"The Autobiographical Interruption." I need to state my debt to Marin's analyses which are, in my opinion, among the most inspired on this subject. See also his study, "Bodies and Signs in Autobiography." Marin has dealt in detail with the importance of Raphael's Transfiguration in the opening pages of the Vie {La Voix, pp. 60-63; 68-76), although, oddly, not discussing its obvious relation to immortality. For Didier (Stendhal, p. 227), transfiguration is "an obvious ... image of writing." Didier treats the significance of Italy for Stendhal in Stendhal (pp. 194-217). In connection with this placard, Henri Beyle's memory is at fault, as his cousin Colomb pointed out in corrections which he pencilled in the manuscript. In fact, only after the conspiracy episode was the placard affixed to the tree. This distortion and overlaying of memories points up the anxiety associated with the episode in Beyle's mind. See also Merimee's H.B. (pp. 15-16) for a similar account of Beyle's cosmogonical theories along with this remark: "He had no religious ideas whatever, or if he had any, he bore a feeling of anger and rancor against Providence." This information HB has withheld from the reader not counting, doubtless, on the likes of a Del Litto who, in a note Oeuvres intimes, II, p. 1494, has brought to light the apocryphal material. For an analysis of these illustrations and how they relate to the prose of the Vie, see my article, "Les Gravures." See LAmour et la mort for a discussion of the young Henri's animosity against his mother during her pregnancies. LevowitzTreu arrives at her conclusions extratextually by showing that Beyle's celebrated attacks on two women (perpetrated between the ages of three and five) corresponded to the pregnancies of Henriette Beyle. What is remarkable is that this entire story of aggression, pregnancy, death-wishing, and parricide is not only contained in chapter 32, but, moreover, that its sequence is preserved intact. The Vie de Henry Brulard is in the Municipal Library of Grenoble which houses a large collection of Stendhal manuscripts. I wish to thank Mr. Michel Merland for permitting me to consult the manuscript. In La Voix, Marin explores Stendhal's desire to record his own birth based on the "je vais naitre" annunciation which appears twice in the Vie. The (im) possibility of recording one's own death is also discussed: Marin considers Beyle's gesture of tracing in the dust the names of the women he loved to be something in the nature of an epitaph (La Voix, p. 113).

Notes to pages 46—76 12

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As Strachey points out in his introduction to " Screen Memories," Freud's ulterior formulations of the theory stress later memories as constituting screens for earlier events. For the date of the "divine" sojourn, see Martineau's Le Coeur de Stendhal (pp. 62-63). For a dissenting view placing the idyll in September 1791, see Emile Gaillard's "Stendhal aux Echelles." Berthier also muses over the undecidability surrounding the date in "Les Echelles du paradis" (18-19). I should note in passing, however, that even if young Henry saw his Aunt Camille after she had been successfully delivered of her child, the vision, equally divine, would have restored not only the mother, but also the babe. In this connection, one thinks of how often in museums Stendhal's gaze is arrested by the iconic rendition of the Virgin and Child. A "proof" of A. Daru's "tendresse maternelle" is given in the "Consultation en faveur de la duchesse de B*** pour Banti": Mme Daru, mourning the death of her son, "jumped out of her bed stark naked... and threw herself on the body of that poor child." (Oeuvres intimes, I, p. 1067) Berthier has suggested this onomastic kinship (La Scala/Les Echelles) in his article "Les Echelles du paradis." One of the few to have treated the Les Echelles episode, and with his characteristic insight and elegance, Berthier touches on many of the same issues which I have singled out: the incongruous intensity of HB's happiness, the persistent vocabulary of the celestial, and the literary tenor of nature's depictions. Although Berthier does not read the episode as a variant of the pregnancy scene, he does sense that Les Echelles offers the ideal geographic possibility for a psychological movement beyond: "Les Echelles functions to cross over death" (18). For studies which address the problems of closure with respect to Le Rouge et le noir, see Peter Brooks's "The Novel and the Guillotine," D. A. Miller's Narrative and Mossman, The Narrative Matrix. I would like to thank Michal Ginsburg for this reference. I sketched out elements of the following analysis in a paper ("Stendhal et les figures de la revoke") delivered at the Colloquium "Stendhal et la Revolution frangaise" held in Montreal. The Proceedings appeared in Stendhal Club 126 (1990), 188-97. For an illuminating analysis of the son and paternity in La Chartreuse, see Berthier's Stendhal (pp. 101-06). For a discussion of the theme and symbolism of the prison, see Brombert's Stendhal.

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Notes to pages 78—106 CYCLE 2

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For purposes of this study, I am minimizing the differences between the various proponents of object-relations theory. These differences do, however, exist, partially because the theory is less attached to a dogma than more orthodox psychoanalysis, and partially because it is a more recent development which continues to evolve. A point of clarification regarding terminology: in the present study, I am using the term "self" for simplicity's sake. Not only do some theorists make use of the term "ego," but that ego, according to some, can be split into as many as four parts. See Hemmings's article on Adolphe in which he brings to the fore Poland's history of border fragility, suggesting that in Adolphe, several political episodes might have become amalgamated. All references to Adolphe are from the Garnier-Flammarion edition. Constant, Benjamin. De P esprit de conquete et de Vusurpation dans leurs rapports avec la civilisation europeenne in Oeuvres completes de Benjamin Constant. All subsequent references to this work, as well as to the Journaux intimes and Cecile, will be to this edition. This is why I take exception to Holdheim's view that the dominant temporality of Adolphe is a universal one, although he does also acknowledge a "subjective" and a "clock" time: "What his [Constant's] text presents is more than a lucid insight into past events - it is something very much akin to divine transcendence, a totally objective view of time" {The Hermeneutic Mode, p. 59). For an enlightening analysis of the realism of Adolphe's time frame with respect to the destitution of the Polish elite, see F. W. J. Hemmings's article, "Constant's Adolphe." My discussion deals with the litigations and consequent restitution of property on a symbolic level. See, however, Han VerhoefFs "Adolphe" et ConstantTor a conflicting view: " it is clear," states Verhoeff, " that abandoning the children is not an accessory detail; on the contrary, it recalls the novel's central theme" (pp. 67-68). In the Mauronian tradition, VerhoefFs study begins with biography, discussing Constant's mother's death giving birth to him and relating this to Adolphe and other of Constant's works. My concern in the present study is to show how the missing maternal element functions within narrative discourse. Coman's analysis of Adolphe is successful on many levels. Noting the animism characteristic of the novel's universe of objects, Coman contends that objects have been split into good and bad, the latter being projections of Adolphe's own aggressive tendencies.


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(However, she never assigns a parental identification to any of the object splitting, which, it seems to me, is to lift the theory out of its frame of reference.) She concludes her study thus: It is no less true, however, that this narrative affords a glimpse, alongside the aggressive world represented by "bad objects," of the subject's unconscious desire to liberate itself from them. Thus certain landscape/ states of mind ... bear witness to the triumph of "good" objects over the "bad," of love over hatred, Eros over Thanatos. This is a triumph, it is true, which is ephemeral because it is limited to the time of writing. But it is nonetheless one which allows the "je," the author/scriptor, to exorcize his demons temporarily. ("Le Monde inanime," 41)

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Aside from the fact that it is difficult to see in Adolphe's final predicament a triumph (the self is, after all, portrayed as destined to go unloved and emptied of desire), the Kleinian configuration might be criticized for being a static model of the personality. If the triumph to which Coman alludes can only be ephemeral, as she admits, it is simply because, in this view of things, one object has temporarily asserted ascendency over the other. Kernberg has discussed the flaws of this theoretical Manicheanism. His conclusions are couched in terms which narrative analysis can easily appropriate: "These 'positions' [paranoidschizoid and depressive] are therefore not only developmental stages but also what might be called synchronic (in constrast to diachronic) characteristics of ego functioning" [Internal World, p. 26). This is to say that structurally, the Kleinian model offers little possibility of denouement (cure?), presenting instead a mise-en-scene of the self as arena of perpetual strife. Constant's preoccupation with the voice is well known. As Todorov has said, in Adolphe, "the voice becomes an almost material object; it passes from the auditory to the tactile register" (Poetique, 104). In Ce'cile, Mme de Malbee had " a soft sounding voice which broke in a singularly touching fashion when she was moved" (Oeuvres completes, p. 184). And, as with Ellenore, when Cecile is nearing death, the narrator reports that "my voice alone made any impression on her" (p. 219). In her book, Narcissus and Echo, Naomi Segal includes a perceptive analysis of AdoIphe (pp. 68-84). Her approach differs from mine, but her conclusions corroborate my own: "The unspoken of Adolphe - that the child is born of the mother - makes every encounter into mental murder. Repressed out of discourse, the childbed death is a phantasy whose logic marks every page" ( P . 83).

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One is even tempted to speculate as to whether the mal du siecle of early Romantic literature does not point to a mourning process being undertaken at the national socio-political level. If this were the case, it would seem that a "political unconscious" were determining (doubtless, in a highly complex and mediated way) individual authors' choice of plot and ending. George Sand's Indiana also begins with a maternal absence and consequent movement toward surrogation. Indiana "had never known her mother... thus she experienced a kind of fascination for Raymon's mother" (p. 116). In Lelia (which actually cites Corinne), Sand makes use of similar strategies. Lelia acknowledges the appeal of becoming a mother all the while resisting the temptation. Resisting the poet Stenio, she declares: " I have never been a mother, but it seems to me that I have for you the feeling I would have had for my son" (I, p. 122). The fact that she reiterates this renunciation later ("I would have liked to have been your mother and held you in my arms without awakening in you the senses of a man" [II, p. 132]) underscores the necessity of not literally occupying the maternal position if symbolic matripotestal investment is to occur, which it does in this novel, since Lelia becomes mother superior. CYCLE 3

1

Actually Bachofen's 1861 Mutterrecht stands at the head of this tradition of reading. Engels comments on Bachofen's reading of The Oresteia in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

2

wherein he asserts that the overthrow of the mother right took place "without disturbing a single one of the living members of the gens" (pp. 119-20). O'Brien, who does her own reading of Aeschylus {The Politics of Reproduction, pp. 151-55), takes strong exception to Engels' cavalier dismissal of violence. For a reading of the variants of the Oresteia myth and its relation to matricide, see Marie Delcourt's Oreste et Alcmeon. In addition, Froma Zeitlin's article, "The Dynamics of Misogyny," provides an excellent feminist perspective. This is not to say that concerns of the body have been neglected by readers of Rousseau who himself so frankly discussed his ailments in the Confessions. See Jean Starobinski's Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La Transparence et V obstacle for a discussion of illness and Rousseau (pp. 240-82). Starobinski's work on Rousseau remains among the most subtle and sensitive of those readings which aspire to mediate between a primordial event in Rousseau's life and his subsequent

Notes to pages 157—65

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writings in all genres and, indeed, his life actions. In La Transparence, Starobinski points to the determining nature of a false accusation of theft in Rousseau's childhood (pp. 18-19), relating this to a dialectic of guilt, innocence lost, and paranoia. Stated by Bernard Gagnebin (p. xxii). Derathe's introduction provides a good account of the genesis of Du Contrat social including a commentary of its first version, "The Geneva Manuscript." Emile ou de VEducation (p. 252). Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966. All subsequent references are to this edition and all translations (again, my own) are based on this edition. In another variant of this structure, the Discours sur Vorigine de rinegalite features a lengthy note devoted to the mother opossum who carries her suckling young on her belly (p. 140). For instance, Dr. Cerise, in his 1845 introduction to Pierre Roussel's Systeme physique et moral de la femme, uses Rousseau to

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advocate a class-specific approach to gynecology. The possibility of reconstructing class is offered in the first place by stretching gender difference as far as possible. Once again, Dr. Cerise uses Rousseau (specifically Emile) to authorize this stretch: "Woman owes her major virtues and charms to her exquisite sensibility; that is what Rousseau, in his Emile, demonstrated" (Systemephysique, p. xxii). Du Contrat social. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966. My reference and translation from the French are based on this edition. Although Hobbes does embrace a doctrine of an indivisible sovereign power in Leviathan, his concept of the latter is very different from that elaborated by Rousseau. First, the Hobbesian indivisibility is prescriptive: the best form of government is that in which sovereign power goes the least divided, and that form is absolute monarchy. Sovereign power is not an abstract concept: it represents, for Hobbes, the sum of its constituent parts and is, as such, only too susceptible to being dismantled. Juliet Flower MacCannelPs book, The Regime of the Brother, appeared as I was in the final stages of writing the present book. Her work includes a provocative reading of Rousseau and, while she is dismissive of the importance of birth for him (p. 56), her analysis is also a psycho-political one. "As far as I can determine," she notes, "Rousseau is the first to have understood the structure of the polity indeed as psyche, i.e. a relation among ego-id-superego, rather than a rational state" (p. 62). While I would not credit Rousseau with the kind of lucidity MacCannell does, her approach confirms my own thesis that collective political realities are

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susceptible to being envisioned psychoanalytically. Her theoretical frame is Lacanian and differs considerably from my own. Hobbes exploits the extended metaphor of the body/body politic in the opening pages of his Leviathan: "For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE, in Latin GIVITAS, which is but an artificial man ... and in which the sovereign is an artificial soul... the magistrates, and other officers of

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judicature and execution, artificial joints', reward and punishment... are the nerves" (p. 5). Nonetheless, given his particular position that metaphor is an "abuse" of language, Hobbes is hard put throughout his work to justify his own trope. It is impossible to approach Rousseau and the question of origins without invoking Derrida's Of Grammatology. He has, in many ways, captured the essence of Rousseau's vacillating and selfcontradictory stance with respect to the genesis of culture. "This birth of society," he notes, "is therefore not a passage, it is a point, a pure, fictive and unstable, ungraspable limit. One crosses it in attaining it. In it society is broached and is deferred from itself. Beginning, it begins to decay" (Of Grammatology, p. 267). Derrida then uses the concept of the vanishing point of origins and its corollary - the inevitable insertion of the supplement into the scandalously ungraspable gap - in support of his theory of writing. And, in truth, one can scarcely imagine an example more pertinent than that of Rousseau when addressing the unspeakable void which gives rise to all forms of representation. But, like Levi-Strauss whose phallogocentrism he critiques, Derrida remains inside oedipus, and his model, like his forefathersin-theory, turns on the incest prohibition which is "the hinge ["brisure"] between nature and culture" (p. 265). Once again this makes castration the fundamental and original signifying function. In Headless History, Linda Orr has mentioned this extraordinary hiatus. Mme de StaeTs Delphine does address the Revolution but stops short of the Terror. (I thank Doris Kadish for pointing this out to me.) By the 1820s, two works do treat the Revolution: Mme de Duras' Ourika mentions the Terror, and there is, of course, Balzac's Les Chouans. In Julie ou la nouvelle Heloise, the same tension is evoked and the prosthetic solution proposed is situated at the level of the family. In her posthumous letter to Saint Preux, Julie exhorts him to marry Claire: "remember that another Julie remains to you... Each of you is going to lose half of his [her] life; unite to preserve the other half; it is the only way for both of you to survive me" (p. 730).

Notes to pages 182-94 15 16 17

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The same formula occurs in Emile: "that small country which is the family" (473). For the same model, see Emile (p. 602). Gearhart is taken in by Rousseau's claim of disinterestedness: "Even in those situations in which we have no direct connection with the events we witness, we immediately identify with the victim, Rousseau argues" (The Open Boundary, 204). A note on the work's popularity: by December 8, 1858, the 10,000 copies circulated on November 18 had been sold. On December 18 and 20, new editions were announced, and these sold out. In all, there were eight editions published in his lifetime. The metaphors of childbirth and infancy, heavily exploited during the Revolution, could, of course, reflect the entire spectrum of political orientation. The pere Duchesne speaks thus of the 1791 dissolution of the Assemblee constituante: "Yes, before allowing this assembly to leave, we would have liked for the constitution to walk all by itself and, instead of leaving this infant of so many fathers still swaddled and in the cradle, we would have liked for [the assembly] to have fostered it in its early years" (Walter, La Revolution, p. 210). In 1792, the royalist Du Rosoi uses the image of the monstrous birth of la Nation: "it is not a single excrescence. Each member has its own. The most beautiful of births of human wisdom, the best organized, has become a monster" (La Revolution, p. 263). In a chapter on the influence of rhetoric, Philippe Roger quotes the abbe Gregoire as saying: "There is nothing more natural than to see a great nation which is striving to break its chains and regenerate itself... give birth to new ideas at every m o m e n t " (La Carmagnole des muses, p . 161).

I wish to thank Lynn Hunt for permitting me to consult her manuscript within the context of a seminar sponsored by the Folger Library. The bibliography which she supplied on the French Revolution has been of considerable help to me and it included Pateman's The Sexual Contract of which I make extensive use in the present study. For a synopsis of the Saint-Simonian movement, see chapters 3 and 4 of French Feminism. Moses cites some reactions of the movement's feminist constituency to the construction of the mother figure. For instance, an 1834 article of the Tribune des femmes features the following complaint against such ideological straitjacketing: "No! They will not find the Ideal... so long as their narrow vision does not widen to see it in all women ... The Mother is not one woman; she is all women" (French Feminism, pp. 86-87). See also the reference to Suzanne Voilquin's reaction to what " the

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Saint-Simonian men call the Mother" (p. 87). Dentelbaum and Huff note that the Saint-Simonians had an armchair reserved for "La Mere" (The M/Other Tongue, p. 263). It is important to recognize, I think, that the many "figures of illrepute" which populate fin-de-siecle cultural consciousness are connected to a playing out of the metaphor of the maternal in the mode of historical disillusionment. In his article "The Unrocked Cradle and the Birth of the Romantic Hero," Allan Pasco links the existence and popularity of the Romantic hero to a societal increase in the practice of wetnursing, a trend which began in France in the late eighteenth century and extended into the middle classes during the nineteenth century. Pasco's explanation, which is social rather than political, suggests a direct connection between the maternal deprivation involved in wetnursing, and the plethora of orphans and motherless children in French literature of the early and middle parts of the century. Insufficient attention has been devoted to the fact that the Civil Code also instituted the daughter as heir on an equal footing with her brothers. While it is true that the Code severely curtailed woman's latitude of action, the mere fact that she did now inherit, constituted a threat to male domination. Indeed, Michelet opens La Femme bemoaning French woman's power as heiress. Furthermore, many a Balzac plot revolves around despoiling woman. (La Rabouilleuse provides a thorough example of this.) As already noted, Les Chouans is one of the first French novels to break the silence surrounding the French Revolution: it is as if the subject itself could only be broached tentatively, entered into through its fringe manifestation, la chouannerie. Indeed, the literary pall cast over the French Revolution could scarcely be more deafening, and it is, I believe, the kind of silence which encloses collective trauma and mourning. In UHomme regenere, Ozouf speaks of the "dolorisme" characteristic of rituals of expiation practiced during the Restoration. However, it is not as if the full potential of the metaphor of regeneration went unperceived. Indeed, conservative factions had regular recourse to the imagery of monstrous birth. (See note 19, for an example.) Hunt furnishes another in Politics, Culture and Class: "Propaganda has risen up in the midst of all the Peoples of the Earth ... her flanks have opened up and thousands of serpents have been translated into men" (p. 41). In L'Assommoir, Gervaise Coupeau also delivers a healthy baby. Although the scene is not explicit, the fact that it is there at all is


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remarkable. Nonetheless this infant is the future Nana, vicious courtesan who indulges in lesbian affairs. The health of this child may be interpreted as robust vice. Crossing cultures, however, I would like to signal Kate Chopin's remarkable work, The Awakening, published in the same year as Fe'condite. Not only does Chopin signify that the taboo on speaking of childbirth is a cultural matter (the heroine Edna is shocked by the French Louisianans' tendency to speak overtly about labor), but Edna's suicide, presented as an awakening, is a response to having witnessed the "scene of torture" (p. 146) of a dear friend who dies giving birth. "Between agonizing moments," Edna thinks of her own labors, remembering "faintly an ectasy of pain, the heavy odor of chloroform, a stupor which had deadened sensation" (p. 145). This stylistic superimposability is more than structural and thematic symmetry and raises formal questions about the potentially reiterative quality of an aesthetics of reproduction, questions not unlike those touching on repetition in pornography. Jean Borie, in his chapter " Une gynecologie passionnee," discusses the personal and conjugal reasons which led Michelet to consult these works in the first place (p. 157). Borie's is an excellent study of the rise of the figure of the Doctor. In addition, he offers a cursory treatment of Zola's Fe'condite and notes the uterine character of Africa. His analysis addresses the ideology of nineteenth-century medical practice and its intersection with religious discourse. Some examples are old Goriot's uterine head with its "lump." Speaking of his daughters' visceral attachment to him, he says: "That came out of me ... you feel yourself attached to their skin" (Le Pere Goriot, p. 38). It is thus entirely fitting that he die of a titanic headache. Vautrin creates both women and men, and speaking as Carlos Herrera in Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes, he states, " I am also a mother" (p. 502). Like Goriot, Louis Lambert exhibits phrenological symptoms of maternity. The vicissitudes of cerebral birth are described as follows: " This brilliant idea ... dies completely, an ephemeral existence like that of [some] children ... a kind of stillborn flower in the fields of thought. Sometimes ideas linger in the unknown limbo of the organs whence they are born. They wear us out with a long confinement, evolve, become fertile ... Sometimes ideas are born in swarms ... Sometimes they well up, pale" (pp. 395-96). Concomitantly, there are occasional derogatory references to literal childbirth. Lucien de Rubempre (who has appropriated his

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Notes to page 215

mother's name) declares himself dishonored that his mother "had watched over women in confinement" (Splendeurs, p. 134). In La Rabouilleuse, subtitled La Mauvaise Mere, it is bad son Philippe who swears by his mother's "womb" (p. 514), just as it is illegitimate Max's surprise and illegal visit to a garden that kills a pregnant woman (p. 368). It is ironic in the extreme that two women authors, Claire de Duras and Rachilde, should have used the male procreation story to their own ends, showing the extent to which gender is a construction. Ourika, the Senegalese woman disenfranchized by both race and gender, compares herself as a drawing-room creation to Galatea. Raoule de Venerande, for her part, turns convention upside down by having a German inventor construct an erotic male doll, perhaps a wink at Offenbach's 1881 operatic rendition of The Tales of Hoffmann which features a Pygmalion variant. For a contextualization of Pouchet's theory within the framework of a medical discourse evolving in the direction of a reconstruction of woman, see Laqueur's remarkable article "Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology." It must be said regarding science's "reticence" that it was not until 1827 t n a t t n e existence of the mammalian egg was proved by Baer ("Orgasm," 25)-

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Index

A rebours (Huysmans) 183, 200, 201 Abbesse de Castro, V (Beyle) 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67 Adolphe (Constant) 16, 17, 72-138, 141, 171, 190, 194, 197, 232 "Adolphe''1 et Constant (Verhoeff) 121, 232 Aeschylus: Eumenides, The; Oresteia 143, 144 Alain-Fournier: Grand Meaulnes, Le 191 Allegories of Reading (de Man) 148, 149 Amour, L (Michelet) 4, 148, 181, 188, 190, 191, 205-16, 218, 219 Amour et la mort, L (Levowitz-Treu) 30, 230 Andre, Robert 52, 66 " Ange de la maison, L': Mothers and Daughters in Nineteenth Century France" (Strumingher) 229 Aries: Centuries oj Childhood 192 Aristotle 143 Assommoir, U (Zola) 238—39 Atala (Chateaubriand) 187, 190, 191, I 93~94> J95> *97, *98, 208 Austen, Jane 5 "Autobiographical Interruption, T h e " (Marin) 230 Awakening, The (Chopin) 239 Bachofen: Mutterrecht 234 Baer, Karl Ernst von 13, 209, 240 Baguley, David: "Fe'condite" d'Emile £ola 216 Balzac, Honore de 15, 140, 184, 186, 191,213 Chouans, Les 195, 197, 236, 238 Cousine Bette, La 186 Fille auxyeux a"or, La 192 Pere Goriot, Le 239 Rabouilleuse, La 238, 240

Sarrasine 179 Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes 240 Barthes, Roland 113, 122, 133, 179 Plaisir du texte, Le 120, 122

s/Z107 Berthier, Philippe "Echelles du paradis, Les," 231 Stendhal 32-33, 42, 65, 66, 231 Bettelheim, Bruno 112 Beyle, Henri 9, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19-71, 73, 74, 77,97, " 8 , 133, *35> 140, 141, 174, 180, 191, 194, 196 Abbesse de Castro, V 61, 63, 64, 65, 66,

67,68

Chartreuse de Parme, La 52, 56, 61, 65, 66, 67, 69, 198 Chroniques italiennes 23, 35, 61, 64 Correspondance 19, 31, 32, 36, 50, 52, 53 De Vamour 58 Histoire de la peinture en Italie, V 55 Journal 20, 38, 54 Lucien Leuwen 57, 58, 59, 63, 66, 67, 203 Oeuvres intimes 21, 22, 23, 24, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 38,42,44,46, 5!,53, 58, 61, 71, 231 Privileges, Les 51, 68 Rouge et le noir, Le 19, 29, 32, 57, 60, 65, 66, 98, 106, 107, 130, 153, 196 Vie de Henry Brulard, La 19-39, 4°, 4 1 , 42, 45-46, 58, 60, 61, 64, 69, 196, 230 "Birth of the Artist as Heroine, T h e " (Gubar) 5 Birth Project, The (Chicago) 7, 96 "Bodies and Signs in Autobiography" (Marin) 230 Body and the French Revolution, The (Outram) 149, 153, 162

249

25°

Index

Bonnet, Jacques: Carmagnole des muses, La " Constant's Adolphe " (Hemming) Borderline Conditions and Pathological 232 Narcissism (Kernberg) 78 Contrat social, Du (Rousseau) 18, 148, Borie, Jean: "Gynecologie passionnee, i49, i5°> l5^ : 52, i53> J 58, 160, Une," 239 161-76, 199-209, 235 Brombert, Victor Corinne (Stael) 136, 137, 234 Stendhal 229, 231 Cousine Bette, La (Balzac) 186 Bronte sisters 5 "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming" Brooks, Peter: "Novel and the (Freud) 113 Guillotine, The," 231 " Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Capital (Marx) 94, 95 Literary Discourse " (Friedman) Carmagnole des muses, La (Roger) 237 228 Ce'cile (Constant) 120, 232, 233 Crouzet, Michel 30, 43-44 Centuries of Childhood (Aries) 192 Cerise, Dr.: Introduction to Systeme Darrow, Margaret 12, 229 physique et moral de lafemme 235 Daumier 190 Chaitin, Gilbert 52, 66 De Vamour (Beyle) 58 Charcot 14 De la religion (Constant) 120 Chartreuse de Parme, La (Beyle) 52, 56, 61, De Vesprit de conquete et de Uusurpation 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 198 (Constant) 84, 104-05, 232 Chateaubriand 4, 18, 139, 140, 182, de Man, Paul: Allegories of Reading 148, 183, 191, 202 149, 164 Atala 187, 190, 191, 193-94, J95> X97> Del Litto, Victor 35, 37, 38, 61 198, 208 Delacroix, Eugene 189 Memoires a" outre-tombe 4 Delbouille, Paul 100, 104, 118 Rene 18, 182, 191, 193, 199, 200 Delcourt, Marie 144 Chawaf, Chantal 5 Oreste et Alcmeon 234 Chicago, Judy: Birth Project, The 7, 96, Delphine (Stael) 236 228 Dentelbaum and Huff: M/Other Tongue, Chodorow, Nancy: Reproduction of The 238 Mothering, The 9, 76 Derathe, Robert 151, 162, 235 Chopin, Kate: Awakening, The 239 Derrida, Jacques 157, 164 Chouans, Les (Balzac) 195, 197, 236, 238 Of Grammatology 236 Chroniques italiennes (Beyle) 23, 55, 61 Desmoulins, Camille 228 Coeur de Stendhal, Le (Martineau) 231 Didier, Beatrice Coman, Colette 106, 232-33 "Roman," 19, 21 Confessions (Rousseau) 150, 152, 171, Stendhal, 230 "Difference on Trial" (Stanton) 7 191. 234 Confessions a"un enfant du siecle (Musset) Discourse/Counter-Discourse (Terdiman) 188 193, 197 Discours sur I'origine et les fondements de Constant, Benjamin 9, 11, 15, 17, 18, rinegalite (Rousseau) 150, 160, 174, 72-138, 140, 156 175,235 Adolphe 16, 17, 72-138, 141, 171, 190, Disorder of Women, The (Pateman) 7 194, 197 Du Rosoi 237 Ce'cile 120, 232, 233 Duchesne, Pere 237 De la religion 120 Duras, Mme de 17, 77, 125, 136, 137, De resprit de conquete et de ^usurpation, 240 84, 104-05, 232 Ourika 135, 136, 198, 236 Journal 93 "Dynamics of Misogyny, The" (Zeitlin) Journaux intimes 104, 105, 232 Wallstein 80 234

Index "Echelles du paradis, Les" (Berthier) 231 "Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, T h e " (Marx) 81 Elementary Structures of Kinship, The (LeviStrauss) 138 Elizabeth, Queen 8 Emile ou de FEducation (Rousseau) 18, 148, 149, 150, 151-161, 163, 166, 170—81, 193, 206-207, 209, 212, 235, 237 En route (Huysmans) 201 Endymion (Keats) 112 Enfant, lafamille, U (Knibiehler) 182 Enfant, lafamille et la revolution frangaise, U (Vovelle) 229 Enfantin, Prosper 13, 188 Engels, Friedrich: Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, The 144, 234 Eumenides, The (Aeschylus) 143, 144 Fairbairn, W. R.D. 75, 76 Fall of Hyperion, The (Keats) 113 Family Romance, The (Hunt) 181 Fecondite (Zola) 14, 189, 201-208, 216-24, 226, 227, 238 "Fecondite" d1 Emile Z°t>a (Baguley) 216 Femme, La (Michelet) 238 Fenelon, Francois: Telemaque 160 Fete re'volutionnaire, La (Ozouf) 181 Fictional Genders (Kelly) 200 Figaro 192 Fille auxyeux a"or, La (Balzac) 192 Flaubert, Gustave 97, 140, 189, 190, i9J> 197 Education sentimentale, V 189, 199 Madame Bovary 107, 129, 134, 189, 198, 199 Salammbo 189 French Feminism (Moses) 12, 13, 188, 237 Freud, Sigmund 2, 4, 26, 35, 41, 50, 72, 73, 103-104, 136, 142, 156, 194, 223, 225, 226, 227 " Creative Writers and DayDreaming," 113 Moses and Monotheism 89, 228 "Screen Memories," 40, 41, 44, 231 Totem and Taboo 2, 16, 89, 96, 142, 143, 145, 167, 225, 226, 227, 228 Friedman, Susan Stanford: " Creativity

251 and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse," 228

Gagnebin, Bernard 162, 235 Gaillard, Emile: "Stendhal aux Echelles," 231 Gargantua et Pantagruel (Rabelais) 3 Gaulthier, Mme: Lieutenant, Le 57 Gautier, Theophile: Mademoiselle de Maupin 140, 183, 196, 198 Gearhart, Susan Open Boundary of History and Fiction, The 175, 237 Genette, Gerard 33 Gerbe 209 Germinal (Zola) 129 Gilman, Charlotte: Herland 5 Grand Meaulnes, Le (Alain-Fournier) 191 "Gravures, Les" (Mossman) 230 Greve des venires, La (Ronsin) 205, 206, 229 Gubar, Susan: "The Birth of the Artist as Heroine," 5 Guntrip, Harry 75, 113 Schizoid Phenomena, Object-Relations and the Self 72, 78, 80, 111, 121, 124 "Gynecologie passionnee, Une" (Borie) 239 Headless History (Orr) 236

Hemming, F. W J.

"Constant's Adolphe," 232 Herland (Gilman) 5 Histoire de la peinture en Italie, L (Beyle) 55 Hobbes, Thomas 145, 147, 161, 163, 164, 217, 220 Leviathan 162, 164, 235 Holdheim, W. Wolfgang 83-84, 88, 232 Homans, Margaret 5, 10, 142 Homme regenere, V (Ozouf) 71, 150, 181, 238 Hugo, Victor: Miserables, Les 198 Preface de Cromwell, La 140, 191 Hunt, Lynn 237 Family Romance, The 181 Politics, Culture and Class 238 Huysmans, Joris A rebours 140, 183, 192, 200, 201 En route 201 La-bas 201

Index

252 Indiana (Sand) 234 Ineffabilis Deus (papal bull, 1854) 139 Internal World (Kernberg) 79, 233 Introduction a Uhistoire universelle

(Michelet) 189 Irigaray, Luce 10 Jallat, Jeannine 99, 126 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La Transparence et

Vobstacle (Starobinski) 234 Jerusalem delivre 49, 63

Journal (Beyle) 20, 38, 54 Journal (Constant) 93 Journaux intimes (Constant) 104, 105, 232 Julie ou la nouvelle Heloise (Rousseau)

148, 149, 172, 236 Kahlo, Frida 7, 228 "My Birth," 5 Keats, John Endymion 112 Fall of Hyperion, The 113

Kelly, Dorothy, Fictional Genders 200 Kernberg, Otto 75, 76, 77 Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism 78 Internal World 76, 79, 233

Klein, Melanie 72, 75 Knibiehler, Yvonne: Enfant, lafamille, V 182 Kristeva, Julia 5, 116 Revolution of Poetic Language 113-114 K u n d e r a , M i l a n : Unbearable Lightness of Being, The 72

La-bas (Huysmans) 201 Lacan, Jacques 93, 101 Seminaire XX 96, 100-1 o 1, Laget, Mireille Naissances 210, 229

Landes, Joan 185 Laqueur, Thomas 13 "Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology," 210-11, 229, 240 Le'lia (Sand) 234 Lettre a d'Alembert sur les spectacles

(Rousseau) 161, 175 Levi-Strauss, Claude 137, 149, 225, 236 Elementary Structures of Kinship, The 118

Levowitz-Treu, Micheline 50, 52 Amour et la mort, V 30, 230

Lieutenant, Le (Gaulthier) 57 Locke, John 145, 147, 161, 163, 165, 217, 220 Two Treatises of Government 2, 159, 162, 165 Lucien Leuwen (Beyle) 57, 58, 59, 63, 66, 67, 203 MacCannell, Juliet Flower: Regime of the Brother, The 235

Madame Bovary (Flaubert) 107, 129, 134, 189, 198, 199 Mademoiselle de Maupin (Gautier) 183, 196, 198 Marin, Louis: "Autobiographical Interruption, The," 230 "Bodies and Signs in Autobiography," 230 Voix, La 22, 230

Martineau, Henri 65 Coeur de Stendhal, Le 231

Marx, Karl: Capital 94, 95 " Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The," 81 Memoires (Saint-Simon) 38 Memoires a"outre-tombe (Chateaubriand) 4 Mercier, Sebastien 149 Mercken-Spaas, Godelieve 119 Merimee, Prosper 21, 230 Michelet, Jules 4, 18, 139, 140, 174, 178, 186, 188, 190, 191, 202, 204, 211, 214-16, 218, 219, 220, 225, 226, 227 Amour, V 148, 181, 188, 190, 191, 205-16, 219 Femme, La 238 Introduction a Vhistoire universelle 189 Peuple, Le 4, 190, 197, 210, 211 Midsummer Night's Dream, A

(Shakespeare) 180 Miller, D. A.: Narrative 231 Miserables, Les (Hugo) 198 Moliere, Tartufe 209 Monde, Le (May 30, 1991) 8 Monsieur Venus (Rachilde) 18, 199, 200, 201 Moses, Claire 12, 13, 188, 237 Moses and Monotheism (Freud) 89, 228 Mossman, Carol: "Gravures, Les," 230 Narrative Matrix, The 107, 228, 231 M/Other Tongue, The (Dentelbaum and Huff) 238

Index

253

Sexual Contract, The 7, 145, 146-47, Mouillaud, Genevieve 44 220, 225 Musset, Alfred de: Confessions (Tun enfant Paul et Virginie (Saint-Pierre) 192 du siecle 140, 191, 193, 197 Pere Goriot, Le (Balzac) 239 Mutterrecht (Bachofen) 234 Peuple, Le (Michelet) 4, 190, 197, 211, "My Birth" (Kahlo) 5 211

Naissances (Laget) 210, 229 Narcissus and Echo (Segal) 233 Narrative (Miller) 231 Narrative Matrix, The (Mossman) 107, 228, 231 Negrier 209 Nouvel Observateur, Le (May 2-8, 1991) 8 Nouvelle He'loise, La (Rousseau) see Julie "Novel and the Guillotine, T h e " (Brooks) 231

Plaisir du texte, Le (Barthes) 120, 122 Politics, Culture and Class (Hunt) 238 Politics of Reproduction, The (O'Brien) 6, 95, 96, 142, 145, 234 Porter, Dennis 21 Pouchet, F.-A. 190, 209, 214, 240 Theorie positive de la fecondation 144 Preface de Cromwell (Hugo) 191 Privileges, Les (Beyle) 5 1 , 68 Quatres Evangiles, Les (Zola) 201

O'Brien, Mary 6, 13, 142, 143, 146, 147, 148, 187 Politics of Reproduction, The 6, 95, 96,

142, 145, 234 Oeuvres intimes (Beyle) 21, 22, 23, 24, 30, 31 > 32, 33, 34, 38,42,44, 5 i , 5 3 , 58, 61, 71, 231 Of Grammatology (Derrida) 236 Of Woman Born (Rich) 2, 6, 9 Offenbach, Jacques: Tales of Hoffman, The 240 Open Boundary of History and Fiction, The

(Gearhart) 175, 237 Oreste et Alcme'on (Delcourt) 234

Oresteia, The (Aeschylus) 143, 144, 234 "Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology" (Laqueur) 210-11, 229, 240 Origin of the Family, Private Property and

the State, The (Engels) 144, 234 Orlando (Woolf) 200 Orr, Linda: Headless History 236 Ourika (Duras) 135, 136, 198, 236 Outram, Dorinda 176 Body and the French Revolution, The 149,

153, l 6 2 Ozouf, Mona Fete re'volutionnaire, La 181 Homme re'genere, L 71, 150, 181, 238

Pasco, Allan, "Unrocked Cradle, T h e " 238 Pateman, Carol 7, 18, 142, 148, 185, 214, 217 Disorder of Women, The 7

Rabelais, Francois 139 Gargantua et Pantagruel 3

Rabouilleuse, La (Balzac) 238, 240 Rachilde 17, 18, 140, 191, 199, 201, 240 Monsieur Venus 18, 199, 200, 201 Rank, Otto 72 Trauma of Birth, The 2 Raphael: Transfiguration 23, 230 Regime of the Brother, The (MacCannell) 235 "Reine Fantasque, La" (Rousseau) 2, 151, 176-81, 200, 207 Rene (Chateaubriand) 18, 182, 191, 193, 199, 200 Reproduction of Mothering, The

(Chodorow) 9, 76 Revolution of Poetic Language (Kristeva) 113-14

Rich, Adrienne Of Woman Born 2, 6, 9 Robin, Paul 206 Roger, Philippe: Carmagnole des muses, La 237 "Roman" (Didier) 19, 21 Ronsin, Francis: Greve des venires, La 205, 206, 229 Rouge et le noir, Le (Beyle) 19, 29, 32, 57, 60, 65, 66, 98, 106, 107, 130, 153, 196 Rougon-Mac quart, Les (Zola) 13, 202 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 9, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 22, 42, 73, 97, 121, J 34, J 35, J 39, J 4°, H 1 , T42, 145, 147, 148-91, 193, 194, 196, 197,

254

Index

2OI, 2O4, 205, 2O7, 2O8, 209, 211, Sprengnether, Madelon 10, 17, 135, 213, 217, 22O, 221, 225, 226, 227 141, 157, 225 Spectral Mother, The 9, 10, 77, 227, 228 Confessions 21, 150, 152, 171, 191, Stael, Germaine de 17, 77, 105, 125, 136 234 Corinne 136, 137, 234 Discours sur Vorigine et Us fondements de Delphine 236 rinegalite 150, 160, 174, 175, 235 Stanton, Domna 7, 11 Du Contrat social 18, 148, 149, 150, "Difference on Trial," 7 151, 152, 153, 158, 160, 161-76, Starobinski, Jean: Jean-Jacques Rousseau: 199, 209, 235 La Transparence et I"obstacle 234 Emile ou de VEducation 18, 148, 149, Stendhal see Beyle, Henri 150, 151-161, 163, 166, 170-81, Stendhal (Berthier) 32-33, 42, 65, 66, 231 193, 206-207, 209, 212, 235, 237 Stendhal (Brombert) 229, 231 Julie ou la nouvelle Heloise 148, 149, Stendhal (Didier) 230 172, 236 Lettre a cTAlembert sur les spectacles 161, "Stendhal aux Echelles" (Gaillard) 231 Sterne: Tristam Shandy 1, 2, 3, 139 175 Stone, Merlin: When God Was a Woman Pygmalion 207 144 "Reine Fantasque, La," 2, 151, Strumingher, Laura: "L'Ange de la 176-181, 200, 207 maison: Mothers and Daughters in Roussel, Pierre: Systeme physique et moral Nineteenth Century France," 229 de lafemme 235 Systeme physique et moral de lafemme (Roussel) 235 Sade, Marquis de 183 S/Z (Barthes) 107 Said, Edward 82 Saint-Hilaire, Geoffroy de 209 Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de: Paul et Tales of Hoffman, The (Offenbach) 240 Tanner, Tony 107, 109, 129, 134 Virginie 192 Saint-Simon: Memoires 38 Tartufe (Moliere) 209 Sand, George 17 Telemaque (Fenelon) 160 Indiana 234 Terdiman, Richard: Discourse/CounterLelia 234 Discourse 188 Sarrasine 179 Theorie positive de la fe'condation (Pouchet) Schapiro, Barbara 112 144 Schizoid Phenomena, Object-Relations and theTodorov, Tzvetan 91, 233 Self (Guntrip) 72, 78, 80, i n , 121, Totem and Taboo (Freud) 2, 16, 89, 96, 124 142, 143, 145, 167, 225, 226, 227, Schor, Naomi 106 228 "Screen Memories" (Freud) 40, 41, 44, Transfiguration (Raphael) 23, 230 231 Trauma of Birth, The (Rank) 2, 42 Segal, Naomi: Narcissus and Echo 233 Tre Melarancie, Le 52 Seminaire XX (Lacan) 96, 100-101 Tristam Shandy (Sterne) 1, 2, 3 Serre 209 Two Treatises of Government (Locke) 2, Sexual Contract, The (Pateman) 145, 159, 162, 165 146-47, 220, 225 Shakespeare, William Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Midsummer Night's Dream, A 181 (Kundera) 72 Shelley, Mary 5 "Unrocked Cradle, The" (Pasco) 238 Sismondi, Leonard 94 Verhoeff, Han Spectral Mother, The (Sprengnether) 9, "Adolphe" et Constant 121, 233 Vie de Henry Brulard, La (Beyle) 19-39, 77, 228, 229 40, 41, 42, 45-46, 58, 60, 61, 64, Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes (Balzac) 69, 196, 230 240

Index Voix, La (Marin) 22, 230 von Baer see Baer Vovelle, Michel: UEnfant, lafamille et la revolution frangaise 229 Walesa, Lech 8, 9, 10 Waller, Margaret 83 Wallstein (Constant) 80 Walter, Gerard 229, 237 When God Was a Woman (Stone) 144 Wollenstonecraft, Mary 5 Woolf, Virginia, Orlando 200

255

Zeitlin, Froma: "Dynamics of Misogyny, The," 234 Zola, Emile 13, 14, 15, 18, 129, 137, 140, 174, 183, 186, 191, 204, 205, 206, 211, 215, 216-24, 225, 226, 227 Assommoir, U 238

Fecondite 14, 189, 201-208, 216-24, 226, 227, 239 Germinal 129 Quatre Evangiles, Les 201 Rougon-Macquart, Les 13, 201

CAMBRIDGE

STUDIES

IN

FRENCH

General editor: Malcolm Bowie (All Souls College, Oxford) Editorial board: R. Howard Bloch (University of California, Berkeley), Ross Chambers (University of Michigan), Antoine Compagnon (Columbia University), Peter France (University of Edinburgh), Toril Moi (Duke University), Naomi Schor (Duke University)

Also in the series (*denotes list now out of print) 1. J. M. COCKING

Proust: Collected Essays on the Writer and his Art 2. LEO BERSANI

The Death of Stephane Mallarme * 3 . MARIAN HOBSON

The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in EighteenthCentury France 4. LEO SPITZER TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY DAVID BELLOS

Essays on Seventeenth Century French Literature 5. NORMAN BRYSON

Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix 6. ANN MOSS

Poetry and Fable: Studies in Mythological Narrative in Sixteenth-Century France 7. RHIANNON GOLDTHORPE

Sartre: Literature and Theory 8. DIANA KNIGHT

Flaubert's characters: The Language of Illusion 9. ANDREW MARTIN

The Knowledge of Ignorance: From Genesis to Jules Verne 10. GEOFFREY BENNINGTON

Sententiousness and the Novel: Laying Down the Law in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction *II.

PENNY FLORENCE

Mallarme, Manet and Redon: Visual and Aural Signs and the Generation of Meaning 12. CHRISTOPHER PRENDERGAST

The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval and Flaubert 13. NAOMI SEGAL

The Unintended Reader: Feminism and 'Manon Lescaut'

257

258 14. GLIVE SCOTT

A Question of Syllables: Essays in Nineteenth-Century French Verse 15. STIRLING HAIG

Flaubert and the Gift of Speech: Dialogue and Discourse in Four 'Modern' Novels * l 6 . NATHANIEL WING

The Limits of Narrative: Essays on Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud and Mallarme 17. MITCHELL GREENBERG

Corneille, Classicism and the Ruses of Symmetry *l8.

HOWARD DAVIES

Sartre and ' Les Temps Modernes' 19. ROBERT GREER COHN

Mallarme's Prose Poems: A Critical Study 20. CELIA BRITTON

Claude Simon: Writing the Visible 21. DAVID SCOTT

Pictorialist Poetics: Poetry and the Visual Arts in NineteenthCentury France 22. ANN JEFFERSON

Reading Realism in Stendhal 23. DALIA JUDOVITZ

Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity 24. R I C H A R D D . E . BURTON

Baudelaire in 1859 25. MICHAEL MORIARTY

Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France 26. JOHN FORRESTER

The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida 27. JEROME SCHWARTZ

Irony and Ideology in Rabelais: Structures of Subversion 28. DAVID BAGULEY

Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision 29. LESLIE HILL

Beckett's Fiction: In Different Words 30. F. W. LEAKEY

Baudelaire: Collected Essays, 1953-1988 31. SARAH KAY

Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry 32. GILLIAN JONDORF

French Renaissance Tragedy: The Dramatic Word

259 33-

LAWRENCE D. KRITZMAN

The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance 34.

JERRY C. NASH

The Love Aesthetics of Maurice Sceve: Poetry and Struggle 35.

PETER FRANCE

Politeness and its Discontents: Problems in French Classical Culture 36.

MITCHELL GREENBERG

Subjectivity and Subjugation in Seventeenth-Century Drama and Prose: The Family Romance of French Classicism 37.

TOM CONLEY

38.

MARGERY EVANS

39.

JUDITH STILL

The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing Baudelaire and Intertextuality: Poetry at the Crossroads Justice and Difference in the Works of Rousseau: bienfaisance and pudeur 40.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida

Politics and Narratives of Birth: Gynocolonization from Rousseau to Zola (Cambridge Studies in French)

Justice and Difference in the Works of Rousseau: Bienfaisance and Pudeur (Cambridge Studies in French)

From Rousseau to Lenin: Studies in Ideology and Society

The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau

Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature: From Loti to Genet (Cambridge Studies in French)

Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature: From Loti to Genet (Cambridge Studies in French)

Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Memory in literature: from Rousseau to neuroscience

Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Sade and the Narrative of Transgression (Cambridge Studies in French)

Internationalization and Domestic Politics (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics)

Genealogies of the Text: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Politics in Modern France (Cambridge Studies in French)

The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics)

Zola Germinal

Legislative Politics in Latin America (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics)

A Novel Approach to Theatre: From Adams to Zola

Walking and the French Romantics: Rousseau to Sand and Hugo (French Studies of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, V. 13)

Travel As Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau

Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche: The Politics of Infinity

Immigration and Conflict in Europe (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics)

Politics, Theology and History (Cambridge Studies in Ideology and Religion)

Science, Politics, and Evolution (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Biology)

Politics, Theology and History (Cambridge Studies in Ideology and Religion)

Studies in French Cinema

Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought)

The Birth of European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in Staël's 'De l'Allemagne', 1810-1813 (Cambridge Studies in French)

Rousseau And the Ethics of Virtue (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

The Acquisition of Two Languages from Birth: A Case Study (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics)

Politics and Narratives of Birth: Gynocolonization from Rousseau to Zola (Cambridge Studies in French)

Justice and Difference in the Works of Rousseau: Bienfaisance and Pudeur (Cambridge Studies in French)

From Rousseau to Lenin: Studies in Ideology and Society

The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau

Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature: From Loti to Genet (Cambridge Studies in French)

Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature: From Loti to Genet (Cambridge Studies in French)

Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Memory in literature: from Rousseau to neuroscience

Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Sade and the Narrative of Transgression (Cambridge Studies in French)

Internationalization and Domestic Politics (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics)

Genealogies of the Text: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Politics in Modern France (Cambridge Studies in French)

The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics)

Zola Germinal

Legislative Politics in Latin America (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics)

A Novel Approach to Theatre: From Adams to Zola

Walking and the French Romantics: Rousseau to Sand and Hugo (French Studies of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, V. 13)

Travel As Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau

Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche: The Politics of Infinity

Immigration and Conflict in Europe (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics)

Politics, Theology and History (Cambridge Studies in Ideology and Religion)

Science, Politics, and Evolution (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Biology)

Politics, Theology and History (Cambridge Studies in Ideology and Religion)

Studies in French Cinema

Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought)

The Birth of European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in Staël's 'De l'Allemagne', 1810-1813 (Cambridge Studies in French)

Rousseau And the Ethics of Virtue (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

The Acquisition of Two Languages from Birth: A Case Study (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics)

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