Before Ayn Rand and Nietzsche was La Païva

Esther Pauline Thérèse Lachmann, Mme Villoing, Mme la Marquise de Païva, Countess Henckel von Donnersmarck

Grandes Horizontales, Virginia Rounding, Bloomsbury, 2003

Pages from the Goncourt Journals, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt (tr. Baldick), NYRB, 2007

At table she expounded a frightening theory of will-power, saying that everything was the result of an effort of the will, that there were no such things as fortuitous circumstances, that one created one’s own circumstances, and that unfortunate people were so only because they did not want to stop being unfortunate….She spoke of a woman who, in order to attain some unspecified aim, shut herself up for three years, completely cut off from the world, scarcely eating anything and often forgetting about food, walled up within herself and entirely given over to the plan she was developing. And then she concluded: “I was that woman”.

Goncourt Journals, January 3, 1868 (p. 134)

La Païva (Esther Pauline Thérèse Lachmann, Mme Villoing, Mme la Marquise de Païva, Countess Henckel von Donnersmarck) was one of the most famous courtesans of decadent Second Empire France — famous for bleeding her lovers dry. In those days marriages were expected to be loveless and there was no such thing as a relationship, and men who had the wherewithal satisfied their needs for sex, romance, fantasy, ego-gratification, etc. through a variety of more or less openly commercial arrangements. A few of the courtesans became the objects of bidding wars and were able do very well for themselves, and La Païva married several aristocrats and spent the last years of her life in her final husband’s castle.

When La Païva declared her metaphysic of the will in the passage above, Nietzsche was only 24 and had published nothing, so the direction of influence is presumably in the other direction. However, it seems unlikely that, impecunious and inept as he was, Nietzsche ever met La Païva in the flesh, so we can conclude that the influence was transmitted through some intermediary.*

As for Ayn Rand, La Païva seems like a much more likely teacher and role model  for her than for Nietzsche, given Nietzsche’s notable lack of worldly success. Like La Païva, Ayn Rand was an unobservant Russian Jew who reinvented herself very successfully in a hostile foreign environment, and Rand’s first book (in Russian) was a biography of another self-made woman who triumphed in a strange land: the Polish vamp and femme fatale Pola Negri. We may thus conclude that La Païva was the great unsung philosopher of the 19th century.

* UPDATE Between 1842 and 1846, when she was living with the pianist Herz,  La Païva became friends with the composers / musicians von Bülow and Wagner  (Rounding, p. 82).  These men, who successively married Franz Liszt’s daughter Cosima in 1857 and 1870, were both close to Nietzsche from 1868 to 1872, and during this period Nietzsche also became obsessed with Cosima. In 1868, when La Païva’s above statement of her philosophy was made, Cosima was involved with Wagner, still married to von Bülow, and flirting with Nietzsche.  Thus, Cosima was the most likely channel by which Païvism reached Nietzsche, though as far as we know there is no documentary evidence for Cosima’s  Païvism (or Lou Salomé’s either. )

You can’t tell the players without a program

France around 1830 was rich in factions and tendencies, and you can’t read about the French literature of the first half of the 19th century without running into a large number of competing groups — political, literary, or simply social. So I have compiled a list.

France changed its form of government four times between 1787 and 1830 (plus another couple of changes during the revolutionary period), and in 1830 partisans of most of the past regimes were still around. The main political factions were the ultra-royalists, the Girondin republicans, the Jacobin republicans, the American-style republicans, the Bonapartists, and the moderate semi-liberal royalists who took power with the July Revolution. Besides these there were utopian socialist followers of Fourier or Saint-Simon, but while they got their ideas out, they didn’t really have a political role, and whatever groups the bottom 70% of the population had were regarded with fear and disdain.

The only faction that was probably lacking was one supporting the overthrown Restoration government. The Bourbons had been imposed on France by England and Germany after Napoleon’s defeat, and while they weren’t royalist enough for the ultras, they were too royalist for everyone else. This set a pattern for France — the moderate royalist regime established in 1830 didn’t make anyone happy either, and examples could be multiplied.

In the literary world, the big split was between the romantics just coming onstage, and everyone else:  the classicists, philosophes, and republicans. To begin with, the romantics were led by Charles Nodier of l’Arsenal (a library), but around 1830 Victor Hugo seized power for his Cénacle, and a little after 1830 Théophile Gautier and Petrus Borel established the Petit Cénacle, which included younger writers. (Nodier, Hugo, and Gautier became famous for praising the writing of anyone who ever brought them a manuscript.) The first two groups were just salons, but many of the members of the Petit Cénacle were housemates, and they threw rowdy parties of a type which should be familiar to many readers.

Most of the factional activity took place among the romantics. The romantic factions were Les Meditateurs, Les Frénétiques, Les Larmoyants, Les Illuminés, Le Petit Cénacle, Les Jeunes-France, Les Buveurs d’Eau, the literary Bousingots, the political Bousingots, Les Badouillards, Les  Muscardins (dormice), Les Dandys and Les Bohème.*  Dividing lines between the groups were fluid, with a lot of overlap and switching.  The heaviest action took place between 1831 (by which time the new government had succeeded in disappointing everyone)   and 1834, when violent uprisings took place and most writers became apolitical. The polemical fervor of these groups belies the fact that most of them, if they had any politics at all, were vaguely republican or liberal and never much more than that. The battles were cultural.

Most of the countercultural forms and rituals now in effect anywhere in the world can be traced to this period, so the reader who has mastered the categories listed above will be well-equipped to pigeonhole writers and counterculturalists of almost any era.

Of the French political factions, only the moderate royalists really had a chance, since France or Germany would have intervened if an assertive Napoleonic or republican government had been established. Political moderation (le juste milieu) was invented during the July Monarchy at the same time as counterculturalism, and it really couldn’t have been any other way. Le juste milieu produces minimally tolerable government which doesn’t make anyone happy, and that seems to be the best that we can hope for.

*Les éclectiques and Les doctrinaires were not romantics and belonged to an earlier period.

I have no idea how I could possibly have missed Courbet up till now

Self-portrait

Gustave Courbet

Revisionism needs revision

Pamela Pilbeam, The 1830 Revolution in France, St. Martins Press , 1991

J.H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History, Chicago, 1979

Bourgeois doesn’t mean a citizen with the rights of the city. A duke may be bourgeois in the indirect sense in which the word has been used for the past thirty years or so. Bourgeois, in France, means roughly the same as philistine in Germany, and it means everyone, whatever his position, who is not initiated in the arts or doesn’t understand them.

Theophile Gautier, in Le Moniteur universel, Dec. 31, 1855

Bohemian and bousingot studies required me to learn about France’s July Revolution, and Pilbeam’s thoroughly-documented book told me what I needed to know. But I have a bone to pick.

Pilbeams book is revisionist. She argues against the idea that the 1830 revolution was a bourgeois revolution, even though that’s what people called it at the time.  (Karl Marx was 12 years old when the revolution took place; the “bourgeois revolution” label was already there when he started studying history. )  Her argument consists of flinging whatever she can fling, without arguing against any specific statement of the thesis she rejects, and without spending any time discussing the various things that the term “bourgeois revolution” might mean.

She extends her argument to the 1789 revolution and the Napoleonic Empire (not bourgeois either!) and makes the corresponding argument about the Ancien Regime and the Restoration (which were apparently pretty darn bourgeois). If you gather everything together she said (which she doesn’t do) you would conclude that France in 1837 was more or less as bourgeois as it had been fifty years earlier. Her argument is that  neither the bourgeoisie nor the aristocracy was ever united, that neither class was class-conscious, that the political leadership in every era (and the leadership of the Restoration and both revolutions) included both aristocrats and bourgeoisie, and that in 1830, after all the hooplah, the aristocracy was still in a strong position.

Her argument amounts to taking the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy simply as groups of individuals and asking at every point which individuals were influential and what class they belonged to, and she concludes that nothing much changed, since the influential groups in every era included members of both classes. But this amounts to begging the question, and assuming her conclusion that all of these changes were mere political revolutions (personnel changes at the top) rather than social revolutions. She does not focus on the social institutions of the various era and the changes made at the transitions. (Pilbeam does confirm half the meaning of the term  “bourgeois revolution” when she says that urban workers, the ones who fought in the streets in 1830, gained little or nothing from the July Revolution. Even though the workers made the revolution, whatever it was, it was not a workers’ revolution.)

A different interpretation of the term “bourgeois revolution” would just say that between 1787 and 1837 the society became more bourgeois and less aristocratic. The bourgeoisie of 1786 had to accommodate themselves to an aristocratic society, where aristocrats had various privileges and the bourgeoisie suffered various disabilities, whereas in 1838 most of the aristocratic privileges and bourgeois disabilities were gone, and aristocrats had to accommodate themselves to a bourgeois society. The superior interpretation would also note that the diminution in the power of the Church (which Pilbeam does grant) was a loss for the aristocracy, since the Church was an important ally of theirs against the bourgeoisie, and that freedom of the press was a powerful anti-aristocratic institution. (In the words of Marquis de la Mole in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, “It’s war to the death between freedom of the press and our existence as gentlemen”).

As far as that goes, maybe those who called the July revolution “the bourgwois revolution” only meant it in Gautier’s sense, which predated Marx’s. (Presumably many studies exist of the relationships between leftist and avant-garde opposition to the bourgeoisie, but I have not read them.) 

Revisionism, like Marxism, is a canned storyline. After you’ve done your research, you cram it into the “Rising Bourgeoisie” story line if you’re a Marxist, and if you’re a revisionist you cram it into the “Shit Happens” quagmire theory of history. I find it particularly annoying that revisionists are happy to be sniping parasites, and are satisfied once they have discredited the received theory and don’t feel the need to gather things together and propose a different theory, but that’s just another case of the dutiful postmodern suspicion of Grand Narratives.

I was first introduced to revisionism 45 years ago when I was assigned Hexter’s Reappraisals in History. I loved the book, but enough is enough. “Rewriting history” is what historians do, but “revisionism” is the brand name of a storyline we can do without.

More on Enid Starkie vs. Petrus Borel

(A further development of the previous post. At some point I will join the two posts into one.)

Starkie’s disapproval of Borel reveals itself in sharp passing comments scattered through the book.  Borel’s grandiose attitudes, irregular way of life, and lack of shrewdness and worldly wisdom are all blamed for his ultimate defeat, which she interprets as weakness. As far as I know Starkie gets the facts right, with one possible and rather large exception, but  she treats Borel’s misfortunes as, in effect,  judgments — things that wouldn’t have happened to a better man.

Starkie’s attitude toward her subject does not have to be teased out with the help of sophisticated hermeneutics:

Indeed nothing sound could be expected from the collaboration of two such madmen as Gerard de Nerval and Petrus Borel (p.148)

Neither he nor Nerval had been able to acclimatise themselves to ordinary everyday life (p. 191)

Champfleury describes him as a shabby middle-aged man…. talking solemnly and grandiloquently in archaic language. He still thought of himself as a leader, still tried to assert his ascendancy over others …. only Baudelaire, with his sympathy and understanding for failures, recognized something noble and fine in this tragic wreck….Life however broke Borel as it was never to break Baudelaire (p. 149)

[This is a repeated theme; Gautier was also "a survivor". Baudelaire, the greatest poet of the age unless it was Hugo, in fact admired Borel and learned from him, which suggests that Borel was, in fact, a leader.]

Petrus Borel was the kind of meteoric personality who is thrown up by violent revolution, whose light burns brightly for a short space, as long as the fashion for destruction prevails, and finally, because he cannot adapt himself to the conditions of a stable society, splutters out into obscurity.  (p. 193)

Borel was, as Starkie says, an impractical, tactless, and arrogant man whose works have been mostly forgotten, and  in the end he was defeated by life. There is one episode in Borel’s life, however, about which Starkie might very well have been flatly wrong. In 1846, after he had given up on literature, Borel accepted a government post in newly-conquered Algeria. During his time in Algeria there were two changes of regime in France, and his administrative superior also changed several times; furthermore, it was never quite certain whether he should be answering to the civilian administration or to the military. His tenure was rocky, and after a number of reprimands, in 1855 he brought an action against his superior de Gantès, accusing him of corruption. He lost, and in 1855 he was finally dismissed;  four years later he died in poverty.

Here’s what Starkie has to say about the episode:

Later, at the inquiry into Borel’s accusations, it transpired that he had tramped around the country collecting gossip and slander to build up his indictment, all of which he believed implicitly without verification, just as he had elicited it from idle wastrels who were ready to slander others provided that they were not obliged to substantiate their statements on oath in a court of law, ready to say anything for the sake of a free drink. (p. 181)

Whatever may be the truth concerning Borel’s allegations against de Gantès, there is little doubt that his action was, from his own point of view, extremely foolish….It is impossible to unravel the truth …whether true or false is not clear….[de Gantès'] supporters may well have been lying…. (p. 184)

De Gantès said that the trouble had started through Borel’s vanity. He said that under his predecessors the inspectors had been assuming more and more power, so that, when he was appointed, he had decide to keep them within their rightful functions. This, he said, seemed to have annoyed Borel, whose pride was wounded…. (p. 185)

A cleverer man than Borel would have left that particular hornet’s nest severely alone …. Audin says that a few months later the culprits were unmasked and that Quesnel, who was the scapegoat of the lot, was condemned to prison for two years. (p. 187)

Several things strike me about these passages. First, apparently Starkie finds Borel’s evident lack of worldly wisdom more important than whether he was right or wrong, or a good man hounded to his grave, or just unlucky loser in a bureaucratic struggle. Second, in several cases she clearly is repeating  Borel’s accuser’s allegations (or the conclusions of the packed court which supported his accuser) as fact.  And finally, here as elsewhere Starkie takes success in “ordinary everyday life” as a decisive standard.

There’s no “there but for the grace of God go I” in Starkie’s book, because Starkie would never have gone that way. For all her reported eccentricity, Starkie, unlike Borel and Nerval, was a worldly-wise survivor who knew which hornets’ nests to avoid and  how to flourish in the academic snakepit. Like any good bourgeois, she also knows that there’s no arguing with success, and the corollary of that is that there’s no excuse  for failure. And whatever Borel was, he was a failure.

Another author than Starkie (for example, me) might wonder whether Borel’s books might have been wrongly neglected , or whether Borel himself had been wronged in Algeria,  or whether Borel’s life might have gone differently if his books had sold better or if he had found a niche in journalism. Paris in the 1830s and 1840s was a creative place, but it was a harsh place too, virtually Third World, and Borel was not the only author of the time to have a difficult life. Starving artists of that era actually starved (or died of tuberculosis), and bourgeois parents quite reasonably tried to keep their sons and daughters from becoming writers. It makes more sense to think of Borel as a soldier who fell in battle than as a man born to fail or as someone brought down by his flaws. Literature in those days was a bloody business, and it also destroyed authors (Gerard de Nerval, Aloysius Bertrand) who are read and admired today.

The University (a prosperous, well-established institution which  provides its minions with a routinized path to success) has made itself the final judge of literary worth . But academic critics of literature and biographers of authors live in an entirely different world than do their pitiful subjects. The potential problems with this should be evident.***

NOTES

* L’Âne mort et la Femme Guillotinée, Janin’s parody of les frénétiques, was so well done that some suspected that he had become one of them.

**Starkie’s documentation is in her very-hard-to-find Petrus Borel en Algérie (Blackwell, 1950). (Here’s a  brief review.) It’s possible that some of  my questions would be answered there.

***This reminds me of the Ultimate Failure Series of my youth. Apparently one of the things about American writers is that they ultimately fail. Twain, Melville, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, O’Neill, Faulkner, and God knows who else — all failures. To me this seemed like a dangerous judgment for faceless academic bureaucrats to be making.

An iron law of literary history

Petrus Borel the Lycanthrope

Enid Starkie, Petrus Borel, New Directions, 1954

The pioneer French avant-gardeist Petrus Borel (fl. 1830-1840) was noted for his extravagant attitudes and behavior and his violently republican political beliefs. His bitter, cynical fiction sold poorly, and before he abandoned writing he lived for a considerable time in real poverty.  By and large his writings have been forgotten, and he is generally regarded as having been important as a personage, and perhaps as an influence, but not as a writer.  (On this more later;  I have some books on order and wonder whether Borel might not be due for a revival.)

Enid Starkie, by contrast, is an Anglo-Irishwoman* of good family who spent her life going from success to success and who played a major role in introducing such authors as Rimbaud to English-language readers. Her biography of Borel is good for what it is, and it also can serve as a literary history of the time. She does not have the carefulness of contemporary biographers and occasionally takes stories too much at face value, but that’s more than made up for by the good anecdotes she passes along as a consequence of that.

The problem with Starkie is this: like every other biographer of a starving artist I’ve ever read, from time to time Starkie feels compelled to kibitz , or to wonder why Borel did the things he did, or to suggest maybe he was partly at fault for his difficulties, or to suggest other ways he could have gone at things. Borel is not the best case to make my point, since the value of his work is uncertain, but I have also seen similar attitudes taken toward artists like Musorgsky, Satie, and Nerval whose merit is unquestioned.

Subject to correction, I would like to generalize this into a law. There are no starving or avant-garde biographers. The biographers of starving artists will always have more common sense and be much more comfortably situated than their biographees, and in every case some degree of condescension must slip into their work. Readers are invited to suggest counterexamples.

As a corrective principle I’d like to propose that if the person you’re writing the biography of has been dead for a century or more, they should (except for idiot kings, mass murderers, etc.) be assumed to deserve a considerable degree of respect; whereas the same is not necessarily true of biographers.

* Along with Joanna Richardson’s The Bohemians and Pamela Pilbeam’s The 1830 Revolution in France, Starkie’s book has also led me to suspect that well-born Englishwomen, however hyphenated, are not the best choices for writing about Frenchpersons of any description.

The hypocritical octopus

Recently when reading what Victor Hugo had to say about octopuses (none of it good) in Travailleurs de la Mer,  I came across this line: “The octopus is a hypocrite. You don’t even notice it, and suddenly it unfolds itself.” For Hugo the octopus is murderous — it lies disguised  in ambush, and then suddenly it opens up and gets you! (which indeed it often does,  if you’re a fish). Elsewhere, Hugo writes of the sea itself  “The wave is hypocritical: it kills, hides the evidence, plays dumb, and smiles“.

To me, the English word hypocrite does not simply mean “someone who feigns innocence”, which is how Hugo uses it here. To me hypocrisy is the ostentatious affectation of virtue by someone who is unvirtuous, especially when the hypocrite also loudly condemns someone who has committed the same sin that he himself is committing.

This sent me on a long but interesting wild goose chase through the dictionaries. The consensus seems to be that Hugo, who has never been accused of not being vivid or emphatic enough, was stretching the French language for effect (possibly via an etymological reading of the word), and that his use of the word hypocrite is a bit odd and excessive in French too. Hypocrisy is one of the central themes of his book,  and when the vertebrate hypocrite Clubin is eaten by the mollusc hypocrite at the end of Book One, that’s to be understood as a grotesque irony.

Hugo dominated 19th century literature in French literature, and I started reading him as necessary background for writers I like better. What I’ve read so far has not what I expected: more grotesque, more excessive, and weirder. For me Hugo is an acquired taste, but he’s growing on me.

Here’s a freely-translated prose poem I have extracted from Hugo’s long reflection on hypocrisy in “Un intérieur d’abime éclairé”, in the same way I extracted a prose poem on the octopus from his long chapter on that beast. The hypocrite in question, Clubin, to all appearances had been a good man all his life, but he had been filled with resentment and anger the whole time, and in the novel he had just taken his revenge.

Hypocrisy had weighed on this man for thirty years. He was evil and he had shackled himself  to goodness. He hated goodness with the hatred of a mismatched spouse. Underneath, he was a monster;  the skin of a good man concealed the heart of a bandit. Virtue was for him a stifling thing.

To be a hypocrite is to be a patient in both senses of the word: he waits for his triumph, and he suffers torture. The eternal premeditation of  the cruel stroke, the constant need to put people off the scent, the impossibility of ever being oneself — these are  exhausting.

There are strange moments when the hypocrite thinks well of himself; within the phony there hides an enormous ego. The worm slithers like the dragon and rears up the same way that it does. A traitor is nothing than a failed despot who cannot attain his ends except as a lackey, a petty thing capable of enormities. The hypocrite is a dwarfed titan.

The hypocrite, being wickedness complete, has within him both  poles of perversity. He is a priest on one side and a courtesan on the other. His demoniacal sex is double. The hypocrite is a frightful hermaphrodite of evil.

The peculiarity of hypocrisy is to be cruel in hope. The hypocrite is someone who waits. Hypocrisy is nothing other than a terrible hopefulness, and this lie founds itself on a virtue turned vicious. Strange to say, in the hypocrite there is trust;  the hypocrite trusts in that mysterious indifference of the unknown  which allows for evil.

In the hypocrite there is emptiness, or to speak more truly, the hypocrite himself is an emptiness.

I only came to Toilers of the Sea looking for octopuses. I had not really expected to take much  interest in Hugo’s writing as such; I have always found romantic authors of Hugo’s type antipathetic, and I expected nothing more than standard average melodrama.  But either I’ve changed, or I was wrong all along. I found Hugo’s rambling, over-the-top, virtually avant-garde excess almost hypnotic, and while I must reject his Manichaean view of the octopus, hypocrisy will never look the same to me again.

TEXTS BELOW

The etymology of hypocrisy

(Many thanks to my friends at Languagehat.com)

My puzzlement over the hypocritical octopus and the hypocritical ocean wave in Victor Hugo’s Les Travailleurs de la Mer led me to an etymological investigation of the words hypocrite and hypocrisy (hypocrisie) in English,  French, Latin, and Greek (but not Hebrew.) It was actually sort of a wild goose chase, but I put in a lot of time into it and one of the privileges of obscure bloggers is to publish anything they want. This is probably my least interesting post ever, since most people aren’t interested in etymology and the ones who are have better things to read.

The word “hypocrite” and its derivatives trace back to the Greek. Neither the word nor the concept is found in Hebrew. The  word does not appear in the Septuagint, the Jews’ own Greek translation of the Tanakh (the Old Testament), though it does appear in a different Jewish translation of the Tanakh into Greek. When the word is seen in the KJV translation of the Old Testament  it translates, and possibly mistranslates, a word that simply means “godless” or “lawless”. (Whether it’s a translation or a mistranslation depends on the degree to which the Biblical Greek word’s meaning had diverged from its classical Greek meaning).

In classical Greek the word “hypocrite” means someone who is pretending to be or acting as someone else. It can be  negative, as in the case of a fraud, or neutral, as in the case of stage actors and public spokesmen.

The word appears many times in the Greek New Testament, often in the words of Christ.  This is problematic, since Jesus did not speak Greek and there doesn’t seem to be an Aramaic or Hebrew equivalent of the word. In only one case does this word clearly have its classical Greek meaning of “pretending”; in the others (and in the exceptional Jewish translation mentioned above) the Greek word seems to have acquired an additional meaning beyond just feigning and dissimulation, something more like “evil”.

Presumably the Greek word had evolved (perhaps under the influence of Hebrew and Aramaic). Conjecturally, if “hypocrisy” in the sense of “feigning” had come to be used mostly in cases when evil people were feigning goodness, then “evil” might become part of the definition.  Thus, “pretending to be good, but really evil inside” and simply “evil inside”, rather than “feigning”,  might have become the primary meaning of the word. However the restricted “feigning” meaning probably never quite disappeared — Godefroy cites an instance from Old French.

It seems pretty clear that the common European meaning of the word is derived (via the Vulgate) from Biblical and not classical Greek, though some scholarly writers may have occasionally deliberately reverted to the classical meaning. One source claims that the word came to English via Molière’s play Tartuffe, ou le Hypocrite, and while this is not true and is off by many centuries, it’s possible that in English the limited Tartuffian sense became dominant while the broader meaning survived in France. Even so, Hugo’s application of the word “hypocrite” to an octopus pretending to be a rock and to the murderous ocean wave feigning innocence does seem like quite a stretch.  But Hugo, being Hugo, could lay it on as thick as he wanted.

SOURCES BELOW

Victor Hugo on Cephalopods

To believe in the octopus, one must have seen it. Compared with it, the hydras of old are laughable.

Orpheus, Homer, and Hesiod were only able to make the Chimaera; God made the octopus. When God wills it, he excels in the execrable. And all ideals being admitted, if terror be the object, the octopus is a masterpiece.

Its most terrible quality is its softness. A glutinous mass possessed of a will — what more frightful? Glue filled with hatred.

At night and in its breeding season, it is phosphorescent. This terror has its passions. It awaits the nuptial hour. It adorns itself, it lights up, it illuminates itself; and from the summit of a rock one can see it beneath, in the shadowy depths, spread out in a pallid irradiation, — a spectre sun.

It has no bones, it has no blood, it has no flesh. It is flabby. There is nothing in it. It is a skin. One can turn the eight tentacles wrong side out, like the fingers of a glove.

The creature superimposes itself upon you by a thousand mouths; the hydra incorporates itself with the man; the man amalgamates himself with the hydra. You form but one. This dream is upon you. The tiger can only devour you; the octopus, oh horror! breathes you in. It draws you to it, and into it, and bound, ensnared, powerless, you slowly feel yourself emptied into that frightful pond, which is the monster itself.

Beyond the terrible, being eaten alive, is the inexpressible, being drunk alive.

(Excerpted from five pages of Toilers of the Sea, II iv 2, “The Monster”: Toilers of the Sea, p. 157; Les Travailleurs de la mer, p. 199)

This passage, which has been cobbled together from the most vivid lines of a long chapter, adequately represents Hugo’s capacity for excess.

For me, Hugo is an enormous nuisance. One of the great writers and public intellectuals of the 19th century, dominant in French poetry for decades, prolific for sixty years or more (he kept on writing after Rimbaud quit), the source of a hundred or so movie scripts, Hugo remains internationally popular to this day. But I find him impossible to read. It’s very fortunate that this post is part of a series about cephalopods in literature and philosophy and not about Hugo. (Aristotle is linked below, and Erasmus is next, and then maybe Melville).

Since Les Travailleurs de la mer was published in 1866, the Guernsey dialect name for the octopus used by Hugo, pieuvre, has replaced the older name poulpe, which is now used only in cooking. Hugo’s book “spawned an unusual fad in Paris: Squids. From squid dishes and exhibitions, to squid hats and parties, Parisians became fascinated by these unusual sea creatures, which at the time were still considered by many to be mythical.“*  Three years later Verne’s 10,000 Leagues under the Sea kept the squid fad alive, and perhaps the origination of the squid dystopia should be added to Hugo’s many other accomplishments. (Hugo’s monster is clearly an octopus, but fads aren’t picky about details.)

* This citation has been doubted and is probably junk wiki. It’s been labelled “citation needed” for at least 18 months by now. Like every other wiki article it has spammed the internet.  

Hugo was a pioneer radical Catholic, along with his friend Lamennais, and his horrible novelistic octopus is often thought to be symbolic of  the insidious and irresistible power of capitalism:

The creature superimposes itself upon you by a thousand mouths; the hydra incorporates itself with the man; the man amalgamates himself with the hydra. You form but one. This dream is upon you. It draws you to it, and into it, and bound, ensnared, powerless, you slowly feel yourself emptied into that frightful pond, which is the monster itself.

Beyond the terrible, being eaten alive, is the inexpressible, being drunk alive.

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned….

ARISTOTLE ON THE SEX LIFE OF THE SQUID:

The Discovery of the Bourgeoisie

The Bohemians, Joanna Richardson,  A.S. Barnes, 1969

The 1830 Revolution in France, Pamela Pilbeam, St Martin’s Press, 1991

Bourgeois doesn’t mean a citizen with the rights of the city. A duke may be bourgeois in the indirect sense in which the word has been used for the past thirty years or so. Bourgeois, in France, means roughly the same as philistine in Germany, and it means everyone, whatever his position, who is not initiated in the arts or doesn’t understand them. Once upon a time…. it was enough to be pink-cheeked and clean-shaven, with a square shirt-collar, and a stove-pipe hat, to be apostrophized with this injurious epithet.

(Theophile Gautier, in Le Moniteur universel, Dec. 31, 1855;  Richardson,  p. 52.)

Before Marx were the bousingots.  According to Pilbeam, the political factions of the 1830 revolution were not class-conscious, and to the extent that class lines can be detected between them, they did not match the distinctions described by Marx.  She also concludes that the streetfighters who made this and later 19th century revolutions happen were never the beneficiaries of the revolutions. Gautier’s anti-bourgeois convictions were not political, and the political bousingots were not really progressive.

The bourgeois and the bousingot are enemy twins, and, and you can’t have one without the other. The bousingots usually lose, and the cagy ones  jump ship (as Gautier did). But the bourgeoisie always produces more of them.

Gautier’s bouzingos (his spelling) were mostly just literary dissidents. The slightly later street-fighting bousingots were urban artisans and undifferentiated political rebels.  Their enemy, the newly-discovered bourgeoisie, has pretty much dominated France ever since.

We miss that in the United States, because what we go to France for is avant-gardists, not  ordinary folk. Two generations of American college students have learned that France is populated primarily by existentialists, surrealists, symbolists, Marxists, decadent aristocrats, bohemians, and so on — but no!. The petty bourgeoisie dominating France is the pettiest of them all.

“Bousingot”:  not in your dictionaries.