54
LEO BERSANI
panded consciousness and the poverty of the occasion as well as of the
character's life makes him both ridiculous and irreducibly mysterious.
The comedy is crucial, and Diderot is suggesting the absorbing insig–
nificance of a mind idly exploring its own limits. Some of Musset's
heroes strike a similar note; although they tend to reflect on absurdity
in "serious" metaphysical terms, in their freest moments their speech
may be simply garbled. In
Les Caprices de Marianne,
for example,
vaguely philosophical talk about reality as a "shadow" is far less in–
teresting than the inarticulate, undignified and "empty" irritability
which Octave displays after his scenes with Marianne (when he
complains of the bells grating on his nerves, or when only a silly
"Drig! drig!" or "Tra, tra, poum! poum!" can express the disarray
of a totally disinterested, unattached mind which Marianne has tem–
porarily set afloat again, has dislodged from the comparative security
of debauchery).
There are of course immense differences among all these treat–
ments of unspecified or extreme mental states. The exuberant activity
of Diderot's
neveu,
for example, is a far cry from the poet's leaden
melancholy in those pieces of
Les Fleurs du mal
where Baudelaire
describes, if not similar feelings, at least a similar relationship between
a kind of existential intensity and the conditions - internal or ex–
ternal- which might make it intelligible. The resemblance lies in a
certain indifference to possible correlations between modes of being
and what can be
known
about the self and the world. And, as we
shall see more clearly in
Madame Bovary,
that indifference both
changes the psychological content of literature (by undoing the notion
of coherent character) and makes literature less dependent on psy–
chology (since the imagination can apparently invent in extravagant
excess of what environment or a personal past can provide) . An
overcast day in Paris sets off the fantastic depression of a famous
"Spleen" poem:
Quand le ciel bas et lourd pese comme un couvercle
Sur [,esprit gemissant en proie aux longs ennuis,
Et que de l'horizon embrassant tout le cercle
Il nous verse un jour noir plus triste que les nuits;
Quand la terre est changee en un cachot humide,
OU l'Esperance, comme une chauve-souris,
S'en va battant les murs de son aile timide
Et se cognant la tete
Ii
des plafonds pourris;
