The Fantastic in France and Russia in the 19th Century

In Pursuit of Hesitation

Claire Whitehead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781904350569
• eBook ISBN: 9781351196253
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Hesitation between a natural or supernatural interpretation of fictional events is the life-blood of the fantastic; but just how is this hesitation provoked? In this detailed and insightful study, Claire Whitehead uses examples from nineteenth-century French and Russian literature to provide a range of narrative and syntactic answers to this question. A close reading of eight key works by Alexander Pushkin, Vladimir Odoevskii, Nikolai Gogol, Fedor Dostoevskii, Theophile Gautier, Prosper Merimee and Guy de Maupassant illustrates how ambiguity is provoked by such factors as point of view, multiple voice and narrative authority. The analysis of hesitation experienced in works depicting madness or ironic self-consciousness advocates the inclusion in the genre of previously marginalized texts. The close comparison of works from these two national traditions shows that the fundamental discursive features of the fantastic do not belong to any one language."

Chapter 1
Reliability and Shifting Perspectives: Hesitation in Heterodiegesis

Introduction

Before a reader can be prompted to hesitate, she must be encouraged to believe. If a reader is to respond with uncertainty to an apparently supernatural event, she needs to have been persuaded previously that the world she is observing is essentially natural. This opening chapter takes these two fundamental strands of the fantastic, believability and hesitation, as its basis. In the early stages of Introduction à la littérature fantastique, Todorov identifies the essential precursor to ambiguity in the fantastic as 'un monde familier' (F 29). In the progression of his study, the idea of familiarity is superseded by the twin concepts of 'la réalité' and 'le réel' and he explains:

Le lecteur et le héros [...] doivent décider si tel événement, tel phénomène appartient à la réalité ou à l'imaginaire, s'il est ou non réel. C'est done la catégorie du réel qui a fourni sa base à notre définition du fantastique. (F 175)

[The reader and the hero [...] must decide if a certain event, a certain phenomenon belongs to reality or to the imaginary, if it is real or not. It is therefore the category of the real that has provided the basis for our definition of the fantastic.]

However, having invoked these concepts as centrally important, Todorov defines them with disappointing vagueness: reality is simply 'telle qu'elle existe pour l'opinion commune' (F 47), for instance. Rather than relying on such unquantifiable factors as public opinion, it would be more helpful to consider the notion of reality within a fictional text in purely literary terms. The likelihood that a text will be considered to represent reality depends upon its creation of a fictional world which stands in a mimetic relationship with the real world; it needs to portray a fictional world which resembles the extrafictional actual world. The first two parts of this chapter investigate the dual methods used in fantastic narratives to convince the reader of this resemblance. In Part 1, methods employed to create a sense of 'vraisemblance' in the fictional world are analysed. In Part 2, the spotlight falls upon the specific elements of the reliability and authority of the narrative voice and how these factors contribute to the construction of a stable fictional world. Part 3 of this chapter then turns its attention more specifically to the provocation of hesitation once the natural status of the fictional world has been established. It specifically challenges Todorov's contention that third-person narrators are ill-suited to the fantastic by examining uncertainty in the heterodiegetic context. It reveals the ways in which elements of syntax and techniques of narrative can be combined to problematize the status of fictional events and the reader's interpretation of them.

My analysis of these questions of believability and hesitation takes as its twin testing grounds Alexander Pushkin's FluKoeaa dama (The Queen of Spades) and Théophile Gautier's Spirite. Pushkin (1799-1837) is widely known as Russia's greatest poet, but he also made a remarkable contribution to the country's literary development in almost every other available genre. With the popularity of poetry in decline during the late 1820s and early 1830s, Pushkin turned increasingly towards prose fiction. Following on from the success of his first prose effort, Tloeecmu BenKuna (The Tales of Belkin) in 1830, The Queen of Spades was first published in 1834 in the journal Bu6nuomeKa dm nmemin (Library for Reading). The story is generally considered to be Pushkin's prose masterpiece and has, accordingly, received an enormous amount of critical attention. The hero of the story is a Russified German, transparently named Germann, who becomes obsessed with the tale of a gambling formula which could secure his fortune. In order to gain access to the holder of this formula, countess ***, Germann decides to court her ward, Lizaveta. An invitation to a late-night tryst with Lizaveta provides the perfect opportunity for Germann to confront the old woman. Fatefully, in a scene replete with erotic overtones, when he threatens her with a pistol, the countess dies of fright without revealing her secret. An overwrought and inebriated Germann is subsequently visited by the dead countess who reveals the sequence of three cards he needs to win at faro: three, seven, ace. Germann's first two nights of gambling prove successful as he wins 47,000 and then 94,000 roubles. However, disaster strikes on the third night when, having laid what he believes to be the winning ace, he realizes he has actually staked on the queen of spades — and lost. Bearing more than a passing resemblance to the dead countess, the queen of spades then appears to wink at Germann from the losing card. The story concludes with a description of the hero confined to a mental asylum, maniacally repeating: 'three, seven, ace','three, seven, queen'.

The story's status as an exemplary text in the genre of the fantastic was signalled by Fedor Dostoevskii in a letter of 1880. During correspondence with a young writer, lu. F. Ahaza, the novelist offered advice on how a fantastic story ought to be written by praising the example of Pushkin in The Queen of Spades. He recommended:

[The fantastic must be so closely aligned with the real that you have almost to believe in it. Pushkin, who has provided us with all forms of art, wrote The Queen of Spades which is the very pinnacle of the art of the fantastic. And you believe that Germann really did have a vision which complies precisely with his world-view; but, meanwhile, at the close of the story, when you have read it through, you do not know how to resolve matters: was this vision a product of Germann's mind or is he, in actual fact, one of those persons who is linked to another world and who is one of those evil spirits, destructive to mankind... Now that is art!]

Despite an historical distance of almost one hundred years, there are clear echoes between the opinions expressed here and the definitions of the fantastic proposed by Todorov. Dostoevskii explains how the description of the dead countess's visit to Germann causes him to hesitate between a natural explanation (the vision is a product of the protagonist's imagination) and a supernatural one (the visit did, actually, occur and the protagonist enjoys links with the 'other' world). Transposing Todorov's definitions and categories onto Dostoevskii's comment that, at the end of the story, you still 'do not know how to resolve matters' would lead to a classification of Pushkin's story as an example of the 'fantastique-pur'. This can be confirmed by an analysis of the linguistic and narrative devices which are employed in The Queen of Spades to ensure that Germann's uncertainty is shared by the reader and is denied any definitive resolution.

Like Pushkin, Théophile Gautier (1811-72) was a remarkable contributor in both a range of literary genres and a variety of artistic spheres. While he is best known as the author of poetry and prose fiction, he also wrote plays, ballet librettos, travelogues, and was a noteworthy critic of art and literature for the Parisian press. His novella, Spirite, was first published in feuilleton form in Le Moniteur universel during 1865. It marked Gautier's return to the fantastic some thirty years after the appearance of his first efforts in this field. He had revealed his taste and talent for the genre with a series of stones published in the 1830s which included La Cafetière (1831), Omphale (1834), and La Morte amoureuse (1836). Spirite recounts the story of a young man's encounters with the spirit of a dead girl. This girl, referred to throughout simply as 'Spirite', reveals that, in life, she was in love with the hero, Guy de Malivert, but that he remained oblivious to her presence. Nevertheless, Spirite believes that fate has destined them to be together and so returns from the ideal world she inhabits in death to convince him of this. There is nothing frightening or foreboding in these supernatural interventions, which is not the case in The Queen of Spades. Instead, the supernatural offers the possibility of initiation into an ideal other world which will bring happiness and fulfilment and not tormented insanity. Structurally, the novella can be considered to fall into two sections. Broadly speaking, the opening six chapters describe Spirite's unexpected visits to the hero while the remaining ten chapters present the story of her life and the denouement of the plot, involving the hero's death and accession to the ideal realm. By the point at which Spirite begins to dictate her story in chapter 7, hesitation concerning the nature of events has been resolved. Like Guy de Malivert, the reader now accepts that he is being visited by a spirit from beyond the rational world, thereby placing the novella in Todorov's category of the 'merveilleux'. In view of the present chapter's interest in techniques establishing verisimilitude and provoking hesitation, my discussion will be restricted to the opening six chapters of Gautier's work.

Part 1: Realist Borrowings in the Fantastic

The key to any text's ability to persuade the reader to believe in the reality of its fictional world is 'vraisemblance'. This notion is a central element in the practice of mimesis which is, in turn, the defining feature of literary realism. I have shown in the Introduction to this book that it is not unusual for critics to relate a discussion of the fantastic to mimesis or realism. As Louisa Jones (1972,237) claims: 'the fantastique [...] complements rather than opposes realism in fiction, since vraisemblance, paradoxically, is a major organizing principle of both'. This sentiment is reiterated by Joyce Lowrie (1979-80, 14), who explains that 'because the hero in a fantastic tale confronts that which threatens the very basis of his perceptions of reality, the question of mimesis is a crucial one'. Despite the pertinence of these observations, there remains work to be done in order to understand more clearly the relationship between the fantastic and realism. The most obvious approach is to look at how fantastic narratives appropriate certain realist devices as a means of creating a 'vraisemblable' fictional world. This methodology is chosen by Christine Brooke-Rose (1981, 85—102) in her analysis of the similarities between science fiction and realism and she makes use of the typology of realist fictions fifteen 'structures obligées' which is proposed by Philippe Hamon (1973, 411-45). My decision to re-employ Hamon's realist inventory is informed not simply by its applicability but also by the symmetry between his approach and that found in Introduction à la littérature fantastique. Hamon himself likens his work to that of Todorov, saying:'il faudrait [...] faire pour le discours réaliste ce qu'a commencé de faire T. Todorov a propos du discours fantastique' ['it is necessary [...] to do for realist discourse what T. Todorov has begun to do with regards to fantastic discourse'] (1973, 417). By considering which of the procedures identified by Hamon can be seen at work in fantastic narratives, I hope to show how the genre establishes the necessary verisimilitude by borrowing realist techniques.

Both Spirite and The Queen of Spades succeed in creating a fictional world which stands in a mimetic relationship with the real world. Their methods of doing so, however, do not always coincide. Just as in many of Gautier's fantastic stories, the setting of Spirite is recognizably contemporary, perhaps even reminiscent of scenes from the author's own youth. The novella's opening pages provide an extended passage of orientation comprising detailed descriptions of Guy de Malivert and the layout and furnishing of his rooms. This description does not simply restrict itself to the physically observable facts. In a manner typical of realist discourse, the narrator also reveals that he has a certain knowledge of the protagonist's personality, financial position, and behaviour in society:

il avait 40 000 francs de rente en terres et un oncle cacochyme plusieurs fois millionnaire done il devait hériter. [...] Lorsqu'il se voyait trop bien accueilli dans une maison, il cessait d'y aller, ou il partait pour un grand voyage, et à son retour il avait la satisfaction de se voir parfaitement oublié. (S 204-05)²

[he had an income of 40,000 francs from land and an ancient, multi-millionaire uncle from whom he was due to inherit. [...] Whenever he found himself too well received in a house he would stop visiting or would leave on a long trip, and on his return he was pleased to see that he had been completely forgotten.]

The narrator's revelation of knowledge in the form of references to heredity and the psychological motivation of the character corresponds respectively to the first and second realist procedures identified by Hamon. A similar display of narrator knowledge is also manifest in The Queen of Spades, albeit at a later stage. For example, the reader is told towards the end of the second chapter:

[Germann was the son of a Russified German who had left him a small inheritance. Firmly convinced of the need to consolidate his independence, Germann did not even spend the interest, he lived on his income alone, allowing himself not the slightest extravagance.]

These summaries establish a sense of mimesis in each story by making the hero appear rooted in the real world. More tellingly, though, they also reveal the desire of fantastic narrators to persuade their reader that they possess the degree of knowledge and insight which is typical of their realist counterparts.

The resemblance between the fictional world of the text and the real world is further promoted in Spirite by the information that, 'Guy habitait une des rues les moins fréquentées du faubourg Saint-Germain' ['Guy lived on one of the quietest streets in the Saint-Germain district']. We are also told that he purchased his horse from 'le célèbre marchand de chevaux des Champs Elysées' ['the famous horse dealer on the Champs Elysées']. For Hamon (1973, 426), such references to actual geographical places constitute an important third feature of realist discourse because they:

renvoient à des entités sémantiques stables, qu'il ne s'agit d'ailleurs pas tant de coinprendre, que de reconnaître comme rioms propres (et la Majuscule en est la marque typographique differentielle), fonctionnent done un peu comme les citations du discourse pédagogique: ils assurent des points d'ancrage [...] en embrayant le texte sur un extra-texte valorisé, permettent l'économie d'un énoncé descriptif, et assurent un effet de réel global qui transcende même tout décodage de détail, (original italics)

[refer to stable semantic entities which do not so much need to be understood as recognized as proper names (and the capital letter is the differentiating typographical mark), function therefore a little like quotations in pedagogic discourse: they ensure points of anchorage [...] by switching the text to a valorized extra-text, they enable a description to be efficient and they ensure a global effect of reality which goes beyond any deciphering of detail.]

References to actual geographical places are less frequently encountered in The Queen of Spades. Nevertheless, mention is made of St Petersburg while, in his anecdote revealing the existence of the gambling formula, Tomskii states that his grandmother, the countess, was feted in Paris as 'the Muscovite Venus' (Q 320). The extent to which fantastic stories employ such geographical references is striking. For example, in the opening lines of Hoffmann's Der goldne Topf (The Golden Pot) (1814) a young man runs through 'the Black Gate in Dresden', in Charles Rabou's Le Ministère public (1832), reference is made to Beaugency, Orleans and its place du Martroi, as well as to Paris, while Dostoevskii's The Double repeatedly cites street names in St Petersburg. The lesser frequency of geographical reference in The Queen of Spades is counterbalanced by the depiction of various actual historical figures such as the due d'Orléans, Richelieu, and the Count Saint-Germain with the same aim. While the first two of these are mentioned only in passing, the third occupies a central and intriguingly ambiguous role. It is Saint-Germain who is said to have helped the countess by revealing to her the gambling formula some sixty years previously This creates the ironic situation in which an actual historical figure, who would conventionally be expected to act as a guarantor of the realness of the fictional world, is made complicit in action which undermines its very rationality.

The effect of mimesis created by these references to place and person is reinforced by the repeated inclusion of precise temporal references. Hamon (1973,442) contends in his seventh procedure that there exists '[une] prédilection du discours réaliste pour les te...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Reliability and Shifting Perspectives: Hesitation in Heterodiegesis
• 2 Personality and Multiple Voice: Hesitation in Homodiegesis
• 3 Madness and Narrative Disintegration: Hesitation and Coherence
• 4 Narrative Play and Generic Disruption: Hesitation and Self-Consciousness
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index