Reappearing Characters in Nineteenth-Century French Literature

Authorship, Originality, and Intellectual Property

Sotirios Paraschas

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319692906
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines the phenomenon of the reappearance of characters in nineteenth-century French fiction. It approaches this froma hitherto unexplored perspective: that of the twin history of the aesthetic notion of originality and the legal notion of literary property. While the reappearance of characters in the works of canonical authors such as Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola is usually seen as a device which transforms the individual works of an author into a coherent whole, this book argues that the unprecedented systematisation of the reappearance of characters in the nineteenth century has to be seen within a wider cultural, economic, and legal context. While fictional characters are seen as original creations by their authors, from a legal point of view they are considered to be 'ideas' which are not protected and can be appropriated by anyone. By co-examining the reappearance of characters in the work of canonical authors and their reappearances in unauthorised appropriations, such as stage adaptations and sequels, this book discusses a series of issues that have shaped our understanding of authorship, originality, and property.

© The Author(s) 2018

Sotirios ParaschasReappearing Characters in Nineteenth-Century French LiteraturePalgrave Studies in Modern European Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69290-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: ‘La littérature ruminante’

Sotirios Paraschas¹

(1)

King’s College London, London, UK

End Abstract

Ce ne fut que vers 1833, lors de la publication de son Médecin de campagne, qu’il pensa à relier tous ses personnages pour en former une société complète. Le jour où il fut illuminé de cette idée fut un beau jour pour lui! […]

– Saluez-moi, nous dit-il joyeusement, car je suis tout bonnement en train de devenir un génie!¹ [1858]

[It was not until around 1833, when his Médecin de campagne was being published, that he thought of connecting all his characters in order to create an entire society out of them. The day on which this idea visited him was a great day for him! […]

– Hail me, he told us joyfully, for I am quite simply about to become a genius!]

Cette prétention l’a finalement conduit à une idée des plus fausses et, selon moi, des plus contraires à l’intérêt, je veux dire à faire reparaître sans cesse d’un roman à l’autre les mêmes personnages, comme des comparses déjà connus. Rien ne nuit plus à la curiosité qui naît du nouveau et à ce charme de l’imprévu qui fait l’attrait du roman. On se retrouve à tout bout de champ en face des mêmes visages.² [1846]

[This aspiration has eventually led him to a most false notion which, in my opinion, could not be more incompatible with the interest of the reader—I mean the notion to make the same characters reappear incessantly, from one novel to the next, as if they were well-known supporting actors. Nothing endangers more the curiosity which is born of novelty and the charm of the unpredictability that attracts us to the novel. At every turn, we find ourselves running into the same faces.]

These two diametrically opposed views on the reappearance of characters are expressed by Balzac’s sister and his greatest critic within twelve years of each other. While Laure Surville’s narrative can be seen as unreliable³ or biased, it can also be said to reflect a critical judgement that became a locus communis, at least after Balzac had been canonised in the second half of the nineteenth century.⁴ As such, it does not sound surprising to a twenty-first-century reader: the reappearance of characters is largely believed to have been Balzac’s invention—and a highly original one, for that matter. In this context, Sainte -Beuve’s denial of its originality and, along with it, of Balzac’s genius , could be attributed to his notoriously resentful attitude towards the author of La Comédie humaine; however , the idea that the reappearance of characters was an instance of highly unoriginal repetition was shared by Balzac’s reviewers during his lifetime (as I shall have the opportunity to show in Chap. 2), creating the impression that Balzac’s production was an example of what one of his critics termed ‘la littérature ruminante’ [ruminating literature].⁵

Balzac was not the first writer to force his characters to transcend the finis of the works that contained them. The device is as old as the modern novel itself: it occurs in Don Quixote and it can be traced up to Balzac’s immediate predecessors (for instance Rétif de la Bretonne) and to Balzac’s own œuvres de jeunesse. Even though the reappearance of characters was not Balzac’s invention, he certainly systematised it to an unprecedented degree; rather than producing a few novels which contained a recurring protagonist, from 1834 onwards, Balzac designed his work as a network of characters which can rise from a secondary to a protagonistic role or vice versa. This systematisation of the reappearance of characters did not limit itself to Balzac’s work. From Balzac’s La Comédie humaine and Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart to series or cycles of novels by Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne and Ponson du Terrail, nineteenth-century fiction in general favours characters which refuse to be contained in a single work. Such popular characters would often cross the boundaries of genre: Balzac’s first play to be staged , Vautrin, focuses on the eponymous criminal genius of La Comédie humaine, while Alexandre Dumas, Émile Zola , and Jules Verne adapted their novels for the stage. In fact, this ‘recycling’ of fictional characters was not a privilege reserved to their creators: the nineteenth century witnesses a proliferation of imitations , stage adaptations, sequels , and cycles of novels which were not written by the authors of the original works.

The term ‘retour de personnages’ is usually reserved only for some instances of reappearing characters: in the case of canonical novelists, such as Balzac and Zola , it is seen as an aesthetic device that ensures the unity of their œuvre. By contrast, more ephemeral contemporary adaptations for the stage and sequels which are based on their works are usually considered to be instances of commercial exploitation of their success, while similar commercial motives are attributed to the reappearance of characters in the work of more popular authors such as Dumas . Such a distinction is not only anachronistic (since it is based on the perceived value of the works after the nineteenth century) and arbitrary (since both artistic and commercial motives apply in all cases) but also obscures the unity of all forms of reappearing characters from a nineteenth-century perspective: whether in Balzac and Zola , or in appropriations of their work, the reappearance of characters was seen as a form of repetition, incompatible with claims to originality . In this context, the co-examination of, on the one hand, the status of such appropriations and the notions of imitation , plagiarism , and piracy (which were used to describe them) and, on the other, the lack of originality detected by critics in ‘le retour de personnages’ will allow me to illuminate not only the phenomenon of the reappearance of characters but also the very notions of authorship, the fictional character, and originality in the nineteenth century.

Originality is one of a series of aesthetic ideas whose gradual crystallisation in eighteenth-century Europe, in the wake of the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, undermined the (neo)classical poetics of mimesis and turned the attention of literary criticism from the rules according to which a text is supposed to be constructed and from the effect it has on the reader to the author. The increasing importance of the author as an exceptional individual who breaks his ties with tradition is part of the rise of individualism in domains beyond aesthetics: charismatic individuals are gradually being depicted in the eighteenth century as beings apart, possessing god-like qualities—a development often seen as filling the gap created by the diminishing power of religion in the age of Enlightenment.⁶ The idea of genius as a leader of men, a legislator, a prophet, and a revolutionary entailed a radical transformation of the notion of the author. By the end of the eighteenth century, the latter had been transformed from a craftsman who had a specific place in society (either because he was a man of means writing at his leisure or because he was supported by a patron) to an inspired individual,⁷ a genius , who was increasingly portrayed as being at odds with his class, his society, his time, and his readers. The term genius no longer meant simply a quality one possesses (‘un homme de génie’) but also the individual as such (‘un génie’)⁸ who is supposed to create and invent, rather than imitate, to follow no rules and have no models, whose main faculty is imagination and whose main quality is originality.⁹ This turn towards the author has been seen as a reaction to the development of the literary marketplace: the notions of genius , originality, disinterested art, as well as the very discipline of aesthetics were responses to the anxiety caused by the incipient professionalisation and increasing commercialisation of authorship.¹⁰

In the eighteenth century, the notion of originality seems to have been more enthusiastically received in England than in France,¹¹ where, in the context of neoclassical poetics, originality played a limited role, guaranteeing a certain variation and novelty within the limits of mimesis. When used in reference to individuals, the term ‘original’ had negative connotations of eccentricity.¹² The modern concept of originality, in the sense of absolute novelty incompatible with imitation , was shaped during the period 1740–1770.¹³ The more the concepts of genius and originality detached themselves from neoclassical poetics, the more abstract they became: Roland Mortier notes that, in the eighteenth century, ‘l’originalité est tenue pour une évidence ressentie comme telle, pour une expérience qui échappe à l’analyse et à la démonstration’¹⁴ [originality is seen as an obvious fact which is perceived as such, as an experience which cannot be analysed nor demonstrated]. In fact, both concepts were usually defined in terms of what they are not, rather than what they are: Edward Young, in his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), the most emblematic and influential essay on originality (translated for the first time in French in 1769–1770), refuses to define originality and structures his essay by means of an opposition between the ‘original’ author and the ‘imitator’.¹⁵ Ann Jefferson has recently traced the history of genius in France from the eighteenth century onwards, arguing that the transformations of the concept can be grasped by considering the notions to which it is opposed, its ‘others’.¹⁶ One of these concepts throughout the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries is women: genius and, by extension, originality are considered to be male qualities, with the male artist seen as a second creator, a rival to God, and women pronounced incapable of being geniuses or even the very opposite of genius.¹⁷

Despite the vagueness that characterises t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: ‘La littérature ruminante’
• Part I. Originality and the Reappearance of Characters
• Part II
• Back Matter