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the Realists to the search for, and cult of, style. They created the
"artistic" style. In describing the most ordinary, and often the meanest,
objects, they brought to bear a refinement, a concentration, a labor
and integrity which are in a way admirable; but without perceiving
that all they undertook, in this respect, was unrelated to their prin–
cipal aim and that they were inventing a singular type of "truthful–
ness," a wholly fantastic truth of their own fabrication. The fact is
that they situated their commonplace characters, incapable of respond–
ing to the colors, or of delighting in the forms of things, in milieus,
the description of which necessitated a painter's eye and a distinctive
sensibility alert to everything which escapes the ordinary man. These
peasants and
petits-bourgeois
of the Realists lived and moved in a
world which they could no more see than an illiterate can read. When
they spoke, their stupidities and platitudinous talk were made parts
of a calculated and unusual linguistic system, rhythmic, weighed word
by word, and which expressed respect for the self and the desire to
be remarked. Realism ended, curiously enough, by giving an impres–
sion of the most deliberate artifice.
One of Realism's most disconcerting applications
is
the one to
which I referred before and which consists in taking as realities the
data presented to us in the form of "historical documents," relating
to some more or less distant epoch, and of attempting to construct,
on this foundation of verbal matter, a work which is to give a sensa–
tion of the "truth" of the epoch in question. Nothing is more painful
to me than to contemplate the amount of work expended in building
a tale on the illusory foundation of an erudition even more vain than
any fantasy. For pure fantasy springs from what is as authentic as
anything in this world, the desire to be delighted, and finds its path
in the hidden dispositions of the various feelings which constitute us.
One invents only what invents itself and wants to be invented. But
the forced products of erudition are necessarily impure, since the
chance by which texts are or are not available, the conjecture which
interprets them, the translation which betrays them, mix with the
intention, interests and passions of the scholar, not to speak of those
of the chronicler, scribe, evangelist or copyist.
This
kind of production
is the paradise of middle-men.
This is what weighs on
Salammbo
and weighs on me in reading
it. I get much more pleasure out of reading tales of a fabulous anti–
quity, wholly free from fact, like
La Princesse de Babylone,
or
l'Ake–
dysseril
of Villiers, books which do not make one think of other books.
