Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth-Century Novel?

John Attridge

Modernism/modernity, Volume 16, Number 1, January 2009, pp.

167-171 (Review)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mod/summary/v016/16.1.attridge.html

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 review essay
167

Review Essay

Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth-Century

Novel?

By John Attridge, Université de Paris VII

modernism / modernity
Henry James Goes to Paris. Peter Brooks. Princeton, NJ volume sixteen, number

and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. 255. one, pp 167–171.

$24.95 (cloth). © 2009 the johns hopkins

university press

Quand Paris était un roman: du mythe de Babylone au

culte de la vitesse. Brigitte Munier. Paris: Éditions de la
Différence, 2007. Pp. 478. €35.00 (paper).
Paris is not only a great cultural capital: it is great cultural capital.
To grasp this truism, you need only imagine the deadpan itineraries of
The Sun Also Rises, at once fussy and nonchalant, transposed to the
streets of your hometown (unless, of course, your hometown is Paris or
somewhere like it). The ascetic regime of proper nouns that Hemingway
recommended in A Farewell to Arms has no effect on a city that has
been described so many times before: Paris is always already read, and
hence always already converted into a symbolic commodity. Flaubert’s
Paris, for example, was mediated by Balzac (“But it occurs to me that
what I’m saying is classic,” says a character in L’Education sentimentale:
“Remember Rastignac in The Human Comedy!”), while for Balzac him-
self Paris was already the “city of a hundred thousand novels.”1 Paris’s
figural existence as a city of literature has been further boosted by the
exceptional centralization and cohesiveness of the French cultural elite.
As Henry James tartly observed in 1876, “everything in France proceeds
by ‘schools’”; it is no accident that the twentieth-century notion of an
intellectual class was largely defined in Paris, by Zola’s J’accuse (1898)
and the ensuing Manifeste des intellectuels. Overarching the city’s
geography is the endogamous family tree of côteries and cénacles, of
intellectual friendship, patronage, collaboration, and, above all, “move-
ments”: the avants gardes and nouvelles vagues that Lambert Strether
tentatively regrets not having kept up with in The Ambassadors. These
institutions are Paris too.
It is primarily this city of cultural institutions that Henry James
goes to in Peter Brooks’s critical narrative, in spite of indications to the
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168 contrary contained in the whimsical title and fetching jacket design. He goes to the physical
city too, of course, and a strength of the book is its fine account of Third Republic Paris and
the relationships James formed there, but the “Paris” of the title mostly stands for French pro-
tomodernism, and in particular the circle of novelists gathered around Flaubert and associated
with realism. This is not necessarily a synecdoche: as Brigitte Munier particularly insists, French
realism was synonymous with Paris in important ways.
James only lived in “the modern Babylon,” as his brother William called it, for just over a year,
from November 1875 to December 1876, although he would return there at regular intervals for
the rest of his life. He took a flat between the Tuileries and the Grands Boulevards, not far from
the newly completed Opéra and the ultra-fashionable boulevards des Capucines and Italiens,
and set to work on The American and a series of travel letters for Whitelaw Reid’s Tribune. This
last, mutually trying relationship was dissolved in July of the following year, James asserting a
constitutional inability to dumb his sketches down any further than he had already, but not be-
fore he had had a chance to register opinions about the second impressionist exhibition that are
important for Brooks’s argument. In a word, James didn’t get the impressionists, lamenting their
slavish mimesis and sloppy finishes, and this “misestimation” (31) reveals a deeper unwillingness
to overhaul his own bearings on representation. “How one understands representation,” Brooks
says, “will turn out to be a deep source of misunderstanding not only between James and the
impressionists, but as well between James and Flaubert” (32).
After a lonely couple of months, James made contact with the American colony in Paris and
also with a mondain circle of Orléanist monarchists, but his most important encounter from
a literary point of view was with Flaubert and his circle, to which he was introduced by Ivan
Turgenev. James liked Flaubert, “a great, stout, handsome, simple, kindly, elderly fellow,” and
exulted to have gained access to his Sunday afternoon salons, a “Mount Olympus” where he also
met Maupassant, Daudet, Edmond de Goncourt, and Zola (24). Despite this initial enthusiasm,
however, James was to have a reaction against the parochialism of the realist côterie, a recoil that
Brooks skillfully interweaves with James’s complex and equivocal attitude towards the modern
French novel. James was powerfully attracted to the example of Flaubert as a writer who took
the novel as seriously as he did himself, but he could not bring himself to endorse the oeuvre,
granting the status of masterpiece to Madame Bovary only grudgingly. As Brooks puts it, James’s
Flaubert “is somehow limited and limiting, a writer whose view of life is too exclusively behav-
ioristic, and who does not develop the full potential of the novel” (60). This is an incompatibility
of doctrine rather than a judgment of taste: “what is at stake for him is the commitment and
project of the novel itself, as representation, as cognitive instrument in the study of life” (65).
Brooks makes good use of the fact that James was reading Daniel Deronda in serial during his
Paris stay to argue that George Eliot was one “touchstone” to whom James looked for an alter-
native to Flaubert, but the most important such counterweight was, improbably, Balzac, whose
work authorized “the liberty of the subject” (James’s words) in terms of characterization, and
the liberty of the author from Flaubert’s behaviorism.
If L’Education sentimentale was “an antinovel that undermines the very bases of the Balzacian
and the Jamesian novel” (66), the height of Jamesian-Flaubertian dissonance comes with Bou-
vard et Pécuchet, “the most radical work of its time,” and in this sense the literary equivalent of
impressionism (28). Needless to say, James didn’t get Bouvard et Pécuchet either. Brooks argues
that Flaubert’s po-faced practice of citation forges past irony to produce “an aesthetics and ethics
of stupidity,” a zero degree of parody in which no smart discourse any longer exists from which
stupid discourse can be distinguished (122). In addition to an illuminating analysis of Flaubert’s
“nerds” (a tongue-in-cheek translation of the novel’s original working title), Brooks delves briefly
into “Un Coeur Simple” to coin the term “parrotry” for Flaubert’s “postmodernist” concern with
citation (117). James was unnerved by parrotry because it interfered with the realist wish to refer
to the real, but also because it implied a philosophy of the subject that is, indeed, behaviorist,
suggesting that “any notion of the soul is a romantic fiction that needs to be dismantled” (127).
Parrotry, that is, emerges as another form of Flaubert’s misconceived (from James’s point of view)
preoccupation with surfaces, whereas James was interested in the recesses of consciousness
where surfaces become significant: “not just what Maisie sees but what she knows” (148). James’s
belief that “a picture is not an impression but an expression” (as he put it in gentle remonstrance
 review essay
with Whistler) prevented his fully learning the lesson of Flaubert and the impressionists, from 169
accepting “‘modernism’ as a preoccupation with the medium itself” (149).
This is not, of course, the whole story. The master conceit of Henry James Goes to Paris is
borrowed from psychoanalysis: James did not miss the “crucible of the modern” that was Paris
in 1875–6, but rather repressed it, and the repressed lesson of Flaubert returns in the “radical
perspectivalism” of the late phase, even though James never completely shoved off from his
“expressionist” moorings (28, 98). I am simplifying what is a rich and subtly presented case,
but that is the gist. What I find most problematic about this argument is its reliance on a Whig
interpretation of art history. As Peter Brooks knows better than anybody, “narratives tend to be
determined by their endings, what they are headed toward,” and the narrative of modernism
here is unashamedly teleological (5–6). James was just wrong about the direction art was going
in the 1870s, to the extent that he later had to have postimpressionism personally explained to
him by Roger Fry (a scene that Brooks plays to great effect). The “problem . . . for us” is that
James responded inadequately to the germs of modernism and postmodernism in the art of his
day, even though he was himself one of those germs (30). It is true that few readers will back
the James of 1876 against Brooks on Flaubert or Whistler. But this kind of teleological argument
tends to obscure the opacity of the literary field to actors on the ground. One contemporary
reader who did not underestimate Bouvard et Pécuchet was H. G. Wells, who praised it in “The
Contemporary Novel” as a triumph heralding the formless baggy monsters that Wells himself
wanted to write. If this novel’s cultural significance was up for grabs to the extent that Wells
could claim to be one of its spiritual inheritors, James’s failure to predict the future path of
modernism stands less strikingly in need of explanation, and the repression hypothesis seems
that much less necessary.
I have described Brooks’s study as a narrative because that is explicitly its structure: it tells
“the story—the novel” of James’s Paris adventure and its aftermath (6). Much of Brooks’s best-
known work is situated on the border of narratology and psychoanalysis, and his recent research
has been on narrative and legal institutions. Henry James Goes to Paris explores the intersection
of narrative and criticism, using an explanatory hypothesis of James’s development to frame a
series of perceptive critical readings. To pick out only one particularly rewarding strand, Brooks
charts James’s deployment of Balzacian melodrama as a way of “going behind,” as James puts it,
Flaubert’s realism. Applying his own early work on Balzac and the “melodramatic imagination”
with a light touch, Brooks shows how the melodramatic turn perceptible in The American has
matured by the time of The Golden Bowl into an inward “moral melodrama,” a sort of melodrama
of consciousness (56). The other important thread in Brooks’s “novel” is the story of James’s
sexuality, and here, too, the novelistic approach has signal advantages. If, as Eric Haralson has
suggested, textual queerness always depends on an individual act of hermeneutic daring, rather
than any sort of objective hey presto outing, then one way in which such an act of reading might
proceed is by narrative. Brooks delicately avoids arbitrating the particulars of James’s sex life,
building instead a critico-biographical context in which same-sex desire can be plausibly assumed
and meaningfully discussed. James’s friendship with the Russian émigré artist Pavel Vasilievich
Zhukovsky is only one episode that benefits from this approach.
There are, then, rewards here for the scholar as well as for the common reader, a market to
whom the book is evidently designed to appeal. Other agreeable features are Brooks’s own use
of a “scenic method,” wherein historical set pieces such as Paul Bourget’s 1897 Taylorian lecture
on Flaubert or James’s conversation with Roger Fry at the Grafton Galleries in 1912 are used to
move the argument along, and simply the fact of his assembling James’s many encounters with
French culture in one place. I did find the genial, democratic idiom a little mannered after a
while, and the nonconventional endnote style, identified only by page number, makes references
harder to locate. On the other hand, the index is exemplary.
James described the institution of the French novel in 1876 in tones of unmistakable envy:
“emulation, competition, and the extraordinary favor which this branch of literature has come to
enjoy, has rendered [French novelists] incomparably skilful and audacious.”2 Yet, as this descrip-
tion faintly hints, such “extraordinary favor” went hand in hand with parochialism. Of Balzac,
the originator of the tradition, James observed that “never was a great genius more essentially
local,” while, for the Goncourts, “space comes to a stop at the limits of Paris. They are the most
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

170 Parisian thing I know.”3 These two factors—the position of cultural privilege accorded to the
novel in nineteenth-century France, and its “heroicization” of Paris—function as the essential
coordinates of Brigitte Munier’s essay in literary sociology, Quand Paris était un roman. From
this vantage point, the “fabulous consensus” of Paris novels in the nineteenth century reveals
a symbiosis between the cultural authority of the novelist and Paris’s status as capital of the
nineteenth century, the privileged “laboratory” of modernity (23, 29).
Drawing on Paul Bénichou’s classic analysis of the “consecration of the writer,” Munier
argues that the cultural authority enjoyed by poets in postrevolutionary France also extended
to the “clerisy of novelists” engaged in writing the city. Detailed discussion of the emergence of
this clerisy is relegated to an appendix, but even so it remains unclear how the realist novelist
came to share the authority of the mage romantique. Some of the argumentative load is carried
by a useful discussion of the “city as spectacle” and the early-nineteenth-century popularity of
panorama shows, imported from London in 1799, which Munier plausibly takes to demonstrate
a psychic need for totalizing representations of Paris. “Paris or London,” she infers, “had become
so large and complex that their panoramic representation afforded a comforting impression of
legibility and coherence” (53). Such devices as the panorama and the popular genre of social
“physiologies,” however, proved inadequate to the ephemeral open-endedness of the industrial
metropolis: only the novel could make sense of a city continually melting into air.
Unlike panoramas, novels constructed Paris as a “dynamic Whole” without falsifying its
character of constant self-renewal, the fact that, as Baudelaire put it in The Swan, “the shape
of a city / Changes more quickly than the heart of a mortal” (87). Munier’s theoretical cue here
comes from The Theory of the Novel by Georg Lukács, according to whom “the novel is the
epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given . . . yet which still
thinks in terms of totality.”4 Few readers will be satisfied with this appeal to a theory dating from
1916, and one wonders where Lukács’s later Marxist reflections on realism come into it, but in
any case the most compelling evidence in Quand Paris était un roman is its wealth of quota-
tions from the novels themselves. Relying particularly on Balzac and Zola, but demonstrating
an impressive textual knowledge of the nineteenth-century canon, Munier’s labor of research
and collation is itself persuasive evidence of the “fabulous consensus,” a collective and internally
consistent enterprise of urban decipherment.
Munier’s strategy of letting the sources speak for themselves also serves another of the book’s
aims, which is to access the sociological content of the realist novel. The novel, she claims, con-
stitutes “a powerful ally allowing access to the sensibility of history beyond historical knowledge”;
“only the novel really conserves and revives the living memory of the styles of behavior colored
by this or that privileged place of Paris” (291, 76). Claims about the unique historical value of
novels are, strictly speaking, question-begging, since ex hypothesi their historical testimony can-
not be checked against anything else. This slope of Munier’s argument seems undertheorized:
it compares unfavorably, for example, with the complex case mounted in Pierre Bourdieu’s The
Rules of Art to justify reading L’Education sentimentale as sociology. It does, however, allow for
a wide-ranging social history of Paris, refracted through the eyes of its novelists.
Thick description abounds, but sometimes textual minutiae burst the seams of the argument.
The proliferation of mirrors in the cafés of the boulevard des Italiens, for example, is illustrated
with sightings of one such café, the Maison Dorée, in Nana and A la recherche du temps perdu.
These incidental cross-references, however, apparently make no mention of mirrors, while the
interesting discussion of mirrors in Le Bel-Ami and Le Ventre de Paris that follows has nothing
to do with the boulevard des Italiens (102–103).
Munier attributes the decline of the novelistic “heroicization” of Paris in part to the Dreyfus
Affair and in part to the second industrial revolution, and devotes about a third of the book to
these phenomena (12). Having been politically galvanized along with the rest of the country by
the Dreyfus controversy, the Parisian literary class were disenchanted by its farcical denoue-
ment, a sentiment that somehow rebounded on the city itself. Meanwhile, Paris’s cultural
importance declined as a result of the rapid pace of technological innovation, embodied in the
Universal Expositions of 1889 and 1900. Although Paris still seemed the natural host for these
events, globalization and the “cult of speed” made it apparent that modernity would henceforth
be defined technologically rather than geographically. Munier’s discussion of Philippe Villiers
 review essay
de L’Isle-Adam’s Eve future (1886), surely a source for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and of Proust’s 171
dazzling riffs on telephones, automobiles, and aeroplanes, are particularly interesting. The as-
sumption that the city was “derealized” by modernist techniques of “interiorisation,” however,
will not convince everyone. Received wisdom has it that recording urban existence was modern-
ism’s long suit (404).
At times the thesis gets ahead of the evidence. It would, for example, have been helpful if
Munier had caught Zola or one of his younger contemporaries actually saying that their disgust
with the second Dreyfus trial was taken out on Paris itself. The argument also tends to homog-
enize various versions of urban “heroicization,” so that little significant difference is registered
between Balzac and L’Education sentimentale. Nonetheless, the wealth of source material
and the suggestive hypotheses contained in Quand Paris était un roman will be of interest to
researchers of urban modernity.
Munier’s attitude to the symbiosis between the capital of the nineteenth century and its
dominant literary genre ranges from neutral to admiring, and one would wish in reading her
study to have a work such as Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 on hand to
be reminded of the power imbalance involved in this representational monopoly. New research
on modernism, such as the Geographies of Modernism collection edited by Peter Brooker and
Andrew Thacker (2005), and a forthcoming special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on regional
modernisms, seeks to resist the perpetuation of this monopoly by exploring territory beyond the
transatlantic triad. In view of this work of revision, it is interesting to see Henry James revers-
ing the qualities of modernity and universality conventionally attributed to the city of light. If
nineteenth-century Paris forged the tropes that would loom over every subsequent figuration of
the city, it also provided the model for the literary movements and -isms whose instrumentality
characterized the moment of modernism. No later cultural collective, however, would match
the spectacular inward-lookingness and Paris-centrism of the realist circles visited by James.
Paris combined urbanity with localism. As Brooks shows, James was ultimately repelled by
the monoculturalism of the Paris scene, and his reaction perhaps looked forward to the more
international—but no less cliquey—institutions of twentieth-century modernism. At any rate,
literary Paris, he was convinced, was petrified, less the capital of modernity than an enclave of
atavism: “‘Chinese, Chinese, Chinese!’ They are finished, besotted mandarins, & their Paris is
their celestial Empire.”5

Notes
1. Gustave Flaubert, L’Education sentimentale: histoire d’un jeune homme (Paris: Garnier, 1984),
18.
2. Henry James, “Bernard and Flaubert,” in Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European
Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition (New York: Library of America, 1984), 167.
3. James, “Bernard and Flaubert,” 177.
4. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, transl. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1971),
56.
5. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, eds., The Correspondence of William James,
Volume 1: William and Henry 1861–1884 (Charolottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 127.