What does the literary text bring that historiography does not already know? A historian undertakes to meticulously render a short story by Barbey d’Aurevilly to the world that provided its material and stamped it with its imprint.
The couple history and literature is one of those duos of notions which, like passionate couples, are held together by the interlocking of their respective neuroses. For a long time, literary studies were summed up in literary history, a canonical discipline, institutionalized in the school and university curriculum which aimed to historically classify texts by a genetic criticism based on different categories, essentially the author and the genre. The theory of literature had its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, in the battles between Roland Barthes and Raymond Picard, the thematic criticism of Jean-Pierre Richard up to the “Figures” of Gérard Genette which intended to find in the formal interlacing of texts the structures of meaning of literature. This formalist moment is temporarily closed. In decline in the 1980s and 1990s, literary theory has recently been reinvested by talented young writers who are re-examining literature from their own point of view: contemporaries of a world of XXIe century where the present is evanescent, the past vanished, the future blurred, reality unreadable. The corpus is considered not only as a resource of intelligibility but also, and more pragmatically, as a laboratory for action: the richness, the precision, the accuracy of the words would allow us to inhabit the world differently and to multiply with it the attachments untied by social brutalization. This alliance profiled with Latourian anthropology which aims to broaden the world of existences (to the animals and plants of nature, but also to the technical objects, to the things which surround us) is therefore very political: it aims to reconnect literature to our world, by making us want to seize it again.
“Professional” historians, led by Lucien Febvre, fairly early on criticized literary history, which, according to the latter, was not a history at all, closed to the text itself and deaf to the society that produced and received it. And so, for a long time, the division continued: to literary scholars, the masterpieces and the explanation of literary genius; to historians (or sociologists), the sidelines of literature. After having explored, with Roger Chartier, the historicity of reading experiences (collective or individual reading, aloud or quietly, mystical or monastic reading, etc.), the materiality of the object “book” in its different forms (manuscript/printed; images, typography, publishing), historians have undertaken a thorough historicization of the author’s genealogy, of the operation of unfolding the meanings of a text, while limiting themselves, however, to the surroundings of the text, and without really penetrating the heart of its fiction – or with modesty that is no longer appropriate today, as the issue of Annals which historians devoted in 2010 to “Knowledge of literature”.
It is in this dynamic context that Judith Lyon-Caen’s book appears – a bold essay that tackles these problems head on, conducting an analysis without rhetorical concessions to confront history and literature: what does the literary text bring that historiography does not already know? The demonstration is made from a short story by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, “La vengeance d’une femme”, the last text in the collection Devilish (1877), given to read in the preamble, as an invitation to the reader to reason in concert with the historian. At this date, Barbey (1808-1889) is a man of letters, a journalist, recognized and unclassifiable. Posing in front of Nadar’s lens, he cultivates his eccentric clothing and his ideological dandyism of an old Catholic reactionary, in a France now acquired to the Republic (at the end of the 1870s). As its name indicates, the short story tells a story of extraordinary revenge mixing the “contemporary tragedy” with the boulevard register. It is therefore a micro-object (a short story) that tells a story taking us on a journey in a sophisticated narration of interlocking times: from the castles of the immemorial Spain of the Great to the Parisian sidewalk of the 1840s, a moment of the romantic youth of Barbey and the narrator, from the present of the opening of the story to the today of the publication (1877). The historian stages an investigation that does not necessarily lead to a positive conclusion. Her method is a rhythm: a slowed-down examination that proceeds through reading scenes. Instead of tempting generalizations, Judith Lyon-Caen chooses meticulous contextualization. This reading as close as possible to the text serves a broader objective: not to repatriate the knowledge of literature for today, but on the contrary – initially at least – to return the book to the historical world that provided it with its material and to which it fully belongs.
The capture of the social world
Thus Barbey’s story is set in the world of Parisian prostitution – since it is about a “persilleuse” hooking up the dandy of Tressignies on the Boulevard des Italiens: free prostitutes or those registered with the Prefecture, operating in prostitution lodgings or brothels… Historians are already very knowledgeable about this omnipresent world, in facts and minds, in XIXe century. What the confrontation with literature shows is to what extent literary fiction has shaped the imaginations of contemporaries but also of historians. The dialogue with Alain Corbin, author of Wedding girlsis edifying in this respect: we can see to what extent the historian’s hypotheses and representations are woven from literature. There is a loop effect there that could be discouraging. But, in finethis study demonstrates the matrix importance of realist literature in grasping the social world of the July Monarchy. Barbey restores by his own means this experience of blurring of boundaries and identities that the big city allows and which constitutes its most powerful attraction – thus contributing, following Balzac, to “consecrating Paris as a city-text to be deciphered in its entirety as well as in its details” (p. 200).
The flood of senses experienced by de Tressignies, who was nevertheless jaded when it came to women, is an opportunity for the historian to seize her sensual reverie in order to explore precisely the erotic culture of the time: legal standards, images of modesty and immodesty, licentious prints, the role of lithography, the vogue for small bronzes (by James Pradier), transformation statuettes in the second half of the 19th century. XIXe century… The investigation depicts a densely eroticized society, with sensuality democratized by the objects displayed in windows, now available to the crowds.
The acme of this interpretative approach takes place in a combat of foils with the puppet of referential illusion. What is it about? Roland Barthes once brilliantly analyzed the detail which, in a description – the “barometer on the piano” in A simple heart Gustave Flaubert’s novel, to take his example – has the function of signifying reality rather than specifying its content. Judith Lyon-Caen assumes an opposing petition of principle: despite all its “effects of reality”, the realistic novel of XIXe century still offers us the world to share. It is the formidable transmitter of an entire material culture, the “panoply of things”, these objects that immerse us in their history, whether it is the weeping willow feathers hanging from ladies’ hats, the striped Turkish shawls or the steps of Tortoni, the famous café of the July Monarchy – objects, places that also represent the “claw” of the past and organize the pile-up of temporalities.
The experience of time
Because literature, by preserving the traces of the past that has disappeared – the “Paris of that time” – also operates as a knowledge of the times, a “resource for thinking about the historicity of human experience in its relationship to time” according to Antoine Lilti and Étienne Anheim, quoted by Judith Lyon-Caen. The “revenge of a woman” is a rereading of the Balzacian city, a precise recapture of the topography of Louis-Philippe’s Paris, destroyed by the work on the Place de l’Opéra in the 1860s, as the historian demonstrates. It is part of a prolific literature of lamentation for the “old Paris” that is flourishing and to which Baudelaire will give its letters of nobility with his poem “The Swan” (The evil flowers1857), dedicated to Victor Hugo: “Old Paris is no more (the shape of a city/ Changes more quickly, alas! than the heart of a mortal)”.
Like the ethnologist, the novelist, the last of these young romantics, records the world of his youth, constituted as such by the powerful Balzacian work, at the very moment when it is no more. The specter of the Paris of yesteryear inhabits the Aurevillian text. After Barbey, Parisian works continue, social rhythms accelerate, technological revolutions follow one another; each generation is now orphaned of its childhood and of the framework that sheltered it, sometimes immortalized by a few photographs – such as those of Charles Marville invited to photograph Paris before Hausmann’s major works in 1858. Literature (of Barbey) then becomes a contribution to the anthropology of modern man, prey to the rapid transformations of his world, inhabited by several pasts which, although vanished, exercise an almost hallucinatory hold on him. To understand the part of the immemorial – the Grandees of Spain in immobilized time –, the layered character of time, the hold of the past on beings, is to understand in depth the beginning of the modern experience of time, embedded in a capital city which undergoes all its tears, all its scratches.
The title of Judith Lyon-Caen’s book sums up the promises of a sensitive historian’s look at literature, at a specific historical moment: the Restoration, when literature was the great decipherer of social life, the incubator of representations, at the same time as its power of belief was at its zenith. The success of the book is largely due to its writing, nervous, as if contaminated by Aurévilian poetics – the “concentrated sanguine of memory”… The historicization of fiction opens the floodgates of time to bring us to the shores of this “disenchanted modernity” that historians of the XIXe century have discovered in recent years. This is how “what history can say about literature” – the subtitle of the work – in turn relaunches the question of what “literature does to history”: an ancient, conflicting alliance, here ambitiously renewed.