502
VICTOR BROMBERT
(among other things) of his
((vie de fonctionnaire,"
French
fiction is peopled with these shabby-looking "professor-types;'
leading apparently colorless lives: Anatole France's hen-pecked
but smiling Bergeret, Bourget's monklike, pernicious Adrien Sixte
or his utopian Monneron, Barres's smug and opportunistic Bou–
teiller, Mal(:gue's worn out Meridier, Louis Guilloux's clumsy
but admirable Cripure, Louis de Villefosse's humble, idealistic
profoundly unhappy Adrien Bruneau-all types which seem to
lean heavily
in
the direction of conscious pathos or caricature.
This curious tendency toward caricature is hardly a co–
incidence: it is probably the most important single key to the
emergence of the intellectual as a literary type. For without
even insisting on the significance of an .anti-intellectuaJ revolt
such as the one led in various countries by intellectuals like
Unamuno, Peguy or Papini, it is clear that it is the intellectuals
themselves who, with a curious lack of solidarity, have in large
measure been responsible for this portait of the intellectual. Just
as it was the anti-bourgeois son of the bourgeois who invented
and exploited the hatred of the philistine in whom he so often
still recognized himself, the intellectual, with self-inflicted
cruelty, has created in literature the frequently unflattering
portrait of the intellectual. The literary climate of the nineteenth
century only encouraged such a paradox: with Romanticism
man learns to view himself as a "problem," the novelist casts
himself as his principal hero, art gradually becomes a medita–
tion on art, and thought the subject of thought. Even a distort–
ing mirror is still a mirror, and, like irony, can be a useful
device where there is fear, shame or duplicity. Thus caricature
can be ambiguous: the comic figure projected into fiction by
the intellectual-novelist may wear another mask, begin to play
a more serious role, cease to be awkward or monstrous, and
finaJly be granted the stature and dignity necessary to emerge
as the central character in the modern novel of ideas.
