Abstract
Nineteenth-century novels are the form par excellence in which desire and social mobility intersect. Their expression of a craving for freedom and innovation, “the euphoria of an ‘open’ society, where everything is relative and changing,”1 may be read as one of the logical consequences of the French Revolution and of its collective parricide.2 After the execution of the king, the disappearance of his overbearing figure created a void, which, at the symbolic level, meant a sense of infinite possibility. The postrevolutionary society, like the new hero it produced, favored youth, but a restless one, avid, irreverent, belligerent, and eager above all to conquer everything, for Old Regime measures of one’s status and corresponding destiny legally disappeared altogether. Moretti’s point is that “the ideal that valorizes borders,” in which characters seek and find happiness in discovering who they are, as in the classic Bildungsroman, is no longer possible with the birth of the capitalist world: to the contrary, borders become “intolerable limitations.”3 The novel of ambition replaced the adventure novel that flourished before the revolution, and ambition is the new device that drives narratives.4
La société étant divisée par tranches comme un bambou, la grande affaire d’un homme est de monter dans la classe supérieure à la sienne, et l’effort de cette classe est de l’empécher de monter.
—Stendhal, Souvenirs d’égotisme
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Notes
Franco Moretti, The Way of the World (London: Verso, 1987), p. 131.
Marthe Robert, followed by Franco Moretti makes this point. Marthe Robert, Origins of the Novel, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Brighton: St. Edmundsbury Press, 1980), pp. 151 and 172 and Moretti, Way of the World, p. 131.
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot. Design and Intention in Narratives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 39: “By the nineteenth century, the pícaro’s scheming to stay alive has typically taken a more elaborate and socially defined form: it has become ambition. It may be in fact a defining characteristic of the modern novel (as of bourgeois society) that it takes aspiration, getting ahead, seriously, rather than simply as the object of satire … and thus it makes ambition the vehicle and emblem of Eros, that which totalizes the world as possession and progress. Ambition provides not only a typical nov-elistic theme, but also a dominant dynamic of plot: a force that drives the protagonist forward, assuring that no incident or action is final or closed in itself until such a moment as the ends of ambition have been clarified, through success or else renunciation.”
Ross Chambers, “No Montagues without Capulets. Some Thoughts on ‘Cultural Identity,’” in Explorations in Difference: Law, Culture and Politics, eds., Jonathan Hart and Richard W. Bauman (University of Alberta Centre for Constitutional Studies), 1996, p. 35.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Random House, 1934), vol. 1, pp. 558–60. A la Recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1988), vol. II, pp. 97–9.
Mchael Riffaterre, “Marcel Proust’s Magic Lantern: on Narrative Subtexts,” in Reading Proust Now (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), p. 59.
See Margaret Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern and Post-Modern (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 46ff and
Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes. La Littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil, 1982), p. 20.
Ibid., p. 120. See for example Israel Davidson, Parody in Jewish Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1907).
Michel Deguy, “Limitation ou illimitation. Remarques sur la parodie,” Le Singe à la porte. Vers une théorie de la parodie (New York: Peter Lang, 1984), p. 2. Translations of Deguy’s texts are my own.
Marc Shell, Children of the Earth. Literature, Politics and Nationhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
For a general history of Jewish emancipation see, for example, Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto. The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation. 1770–1870 (New York: Shocken, 1978). On the difference between the emancipation of Jews from Alsace and that of Jews of the South,
see Simon Schwarzfuchs, Du Juif à l’Israélite. Histoire d’une mutation, 1770–1870 (Paris: Fayard, 1989).
See for example Clermont-Tonnerre, Opinion relativement aux persécutions qui menacent les Juifs d’Alsace (1789) quoted in Jay Berkowitz, The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century France (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989), p. 71.
Edouard Drumont, La France juive devant l’opinion (Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, 1871), p. II. Drumont’s translations are my own. “Tout un peuple travaillant pour un autre, qui s’approprie par un vaste système d’exploitation financière, le bénéfice du travail d’autrui.” I discuss further these questions in chapter 6. About Jews and artistic creativity, see
Kaiman P. Bland, The Artless Jew. Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Michel Serres, Le Parasite (Paris: Grasset, 1980), p. 15 (English edition: Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr [Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982], p. 8.)
See George Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
See for example Ludwig Börne’s humoristic-nostalgic description of Jewish life in the Frankfurt Ghetto where he was born. Ludwig Börne, Sämtliche Schriften (Düsseldorf: Joseph Melzer Verlag, 1964), vol. I, p. 46ff Börne describes the Judengasse as a big family. The inhabitants walk around in their slippers and robes, smoking on the street, drinking coffee, and greeting each other: “Kurz, man tat wie zu Hause” (“In short, we made ourselves at home.” Translations of Börne’s texts are my own.) Alexandre Weil, an Alsatian Jewish writer, also describes the village life as an idyllic enclave of simplicity and innocence. See Alexandre Weil’s Couronne. Maurice Samuels devotes a chapter of his book on Weil’s nostalgia of the village.
Maurice Samuels, Inventing the Israelite. Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
“D’un misérable que sa misère engourdit parfois, [l’émancipation] fera un être subtil qui sentira doublement toutes les piqûres, et dont l’existence deviendra par conséquent mille fois plus insupportable.” Bernard Lazare, Le Fumier de Job (Strasbourg: Circé, 1987), p. 100. Translations of Lazare are my own.
Hannah Arendt to Heinrich Blücher (August 12, 1936), quoted in Dagmar Barnouw, Visible Spaces, Hannah Arendt and the German-Jewish Experience (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 42.
Arendt’s book Rahel Varnhagen. Lebensgeschichte einer Jüdin aus der Romantik was written in 1933, except for the last two chapters completed in 1938, after her departure from Germany. It was first published in 1957, in English. Initially intended as a study leading to Arendt’s Habilitation, the book was interrupted when she left Germany at the beginning of the Third Reich, and was not completed until 20 years later. While a refugee in the United States, Arendt expanded on the theme of Rahel Varnhagen in a collection of essays entitled The Jew as Pariah. Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (New York: Grove Press, 1978). The collection was also published in German: Die verborgene Tradition. Acht Essays (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976). Both texts, extensively commented upon because of their challenging content as well as because of the theoretical questions they raise, have been the object of numerous attempts at categorization. Arendt’s book on Rahel has initiated a renewed interest in the figure among German critics, which is exemplary of their extensive examination of Jewish life in the nineteenth century. [See for example Barbara Hahn’s “Im Schlaf bin ich wacher.” Die Träume der Rahel Levin Varnhagen (Frankfurt: Luchterland, 1990);
Barbara Hahn and Ursula Isselstein, eds., Rahel Levin Varnhagen. Die Wiederentdeckung einer Schrifstellerin (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987). See also
Barbara Breysach’s study, “Die Persönlichkeit ist uns nur geliehen.” Zu Briefwechseln Rahel Levin Varnhagens. (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1989)]. Yet, the reception of Rahel has been tinged with ideological interpretations that reassign various aspects of the works to a particular agenda, and has been complicated in the modern German perspective by the shadow of the Holocaust (For a typical ideological reading, see for instance
Judith Shklar, “Hannah Arendt as Pariah,” Partisan Review, vol. 50, no. 1, 1983, pp. 64–77). According to Konrad Feichenfeldt, having been appropriated by different movements as an identification object, Rahel came to embody both the emancipated Jew and the emancipated woman. [Konrad Feichenfeldt, “Rahel-Philologie im Zeichen der antisemitischen Gefahr, (Margarete Susman, Hannah Arendt, Käte Hamburger),” in Hahn and Isselstein, eds., Rahel Levin Varnhagen, p. 187]. Similarly, Arendt’s reading of Rahel’s life has been interpreted in light of her own experiences in Germany and her fate as both a Jew and a female witness of the failure of emancipation. While both texts raise several theoretical questions, it seems that the critics’ emphasis on Arendt’s intentions reduces them in an unfortunate way to yet another testimony of the modern Jewish-German condition. It would, of course, be naïve to deny a possible specific interest for contemporary events at the origin of Arendt’s interest for Rahel, or even a declared political interpretation a posteriori, formulated long after the actual historical events. However, even though Arendt is concerned with the theme of “Augenblick der Entscheidung,” the capacity to make choices in “dark times,” she goes beyond these questions, while at the same time addressing new concerns in much more complex images. See Ingeborg Nordmann, ‘“Fremdsein ist gut.’ Hannah Arendt über Rahel Varnhagen,” in Hahn and Isselstein, eds. Rahel Levin Varnhagen, p. 202.
For a detailed description of Weber’s analyses of the Pariah, see Werner Cahnmann, “Pariahs, Strangers and Court-Jews: a Conceptual Clarification,” Sociological Analysis, vol. 35, no. 3, Fall 1974, pp. 155–66.
Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare, trans. Melville B. Anderson. (Chicago, IL: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1906), p. 45. “Tombé, il devient gigantesque. Tout le poème de Job est le développement de cette idée: la grandeur qu’on trouve au fond de l’abîme. Sa lèpre est une pourpre.” (Paris: Flammarion, Nouvelle Bibliothèque romantique, 1973), p. 73. Italics are my own.
Sigmund Freud, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewuβten (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1992), p. 126.
Using this term in her study of Arendt’s book, Barbara Breisach suggests a novelistic rather than a purely biographical approach, even though there are no fictional elements in Arendt’s account: “Hannah Arendt shows how Rahel is confronted, inevitably and repeatedly, with the paradox of impossible assimilation. The sociocultural source of fiction that becomes visible in this manner allows Rahel, the letter writer, ultimately to appear as a “negative heroine.” But Arendt has a reason for this: she transforms Rahel into the protagonist of a Bildungsroman with critical intent.” Translation is my own. By Bildungsroman Breisach means the meeting point between the formation of Rahel’s character, her confrontation with the forces of history and society (Bildung), and the subsequent choices she made (Entscheidung). Barbara Breysach, Die Persönlichkeit ist uns nur geliehen. Zu Briefwechseln Rahel Levin Varnhagens (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1989), p. 66. Italics are mine.
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© 2012 Sarah Juliette Sasson
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Sasson, S.J. (2012). Theory of the Parvenu. In: Longing to Belong. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330819_2
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