Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust: The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities (Cambridge Studies in French)

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LITERATURE AND MATERIAL CULTURE FROM BALZAC TO PROUST

The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities

This book addresses the issues of collecting, consuming, classifying, and describing the curiosities, antiques, and objets d’art that proliferated in French literary texts during the last decades of the nineteenth century. After Balzac made such issues significant in canonical literature, the Goncourt brothers, Huysmans, Mallarme´ and Maupassant celebrated their golden age. Flaubert and Zola scorned them. Rachilde and Lorrain perverted them. Proust commemorated their last moments of glory. Focusing on the bibelot (the modern French term for knick-knack, curiosity, or other collectible), Janell Watson shows how the sudden prominence given to curiosities and collecting in nineteenth-century literature signals a massive change in attitudes to the world of goods, which in turn restructured the literary text according to the practical logic of daily life, calling into question established scholarly notions of order. Her study makes a new and important contribution to the literary history of material culture. Janell Watson is visiting Assistant Professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). She has published articles on nineteenth-century French literature and culture, and this is her first full-length book.

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                         LITERATURE AND MATERIAL CULTURE FROM BALZAC TO PROUST

                       GENERAL EDITOR: Michael Sheringham (Royal Holloway, London) EDITORIAL BOARD: R. Howard Bloch (Columbia University), Malcolm Bowie (All Souls College, Oxford), Terence Cave (St John’s College, Oxford), Ross Chambers (University of Michigan), Antoine Compagnon (Columbia University), Peter France (University of Edinburgh), Christie McDonald (Harvard University), Toril Moi (Duke University), Naomi Schor (Harvard University) Recent titles in the series include             Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse         The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction                          (eds.) Reading Paul Vale´ry: Universe in Mind        Proust, the Body and Literary Form                Reading the French Enlightenment: System and Subversion   Simone de Beauvoir, Gender and Testimony A complete list of books in the series is given at the end of the volume.

LITERATURE AND MATERIAL CULTURE FROM BALZAC TO PROUST The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities

JA NEL L WA TS ON

          The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom    The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Janell Watson 2004 First published in printed format 2000 ISBN 0-511-03351-6 eBook (Adobe Reader) ISBN 0-521-66156-0 hardback

To C.A.S.O.R.

Contents

Acknowledgments

x

Introduction



 The bibelot 

A nineteenth-century object

 The logic(s) of material culture Imitation, accumulation, and mobility

 The fashionable artistic interior Social (re)encoding in the domestic sphere

 

 Flaubert’s ‘‘muse´es rec¸us’’ Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s consumerist epistemology



 Narrate, describe, or catalogue? The novel and the inventory form in Balzac, the Goncourts, and Huysmans



 The parlour of critical theory Reading dwelling space across disciplines



 Rearranging the Oedipus

Fantastic and decadent floor-plans in Gautier, Maupassant, Lorrain, and Rachilde



Notes Bibliography Index

  

ix

Acknowledgments

Three scholars with whom I have had the pleasure and privilege of working personally have deeply influenced my thinking; these are Naomi Schor (director of the dissertation version of this project), Fredric Jameson, and Kenneth Surin. For first encouraging me to pursue the topic of the bibelot I thank Alain Buisine. Others who have read part or all of the manuscript in its various manifestations, offering valuable comments, include David Bell, Jean-Jacques Thomas, Alice Kaplan, William Reddy, Ge´rard Gengembre, Philippe Hamon, Julia Hell, V.Y. Mudimbe, and James F. Hamilton. Articles derived from parts of chapters two and three have been published in Mosaic and in French Cultural Studies. Financial support at various stages was provided by the Duke University Department of Romance Studies, the Ecole Normale Supe´rieure Fontenay – Saint-Cloud, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Charles Phelps Taft Memorial Fund.

x

Introduction

This book began as a study of the bibelot, the modern French term for knick-knack or curiosity, but quickly grew to encompass the larger questions of collecting, consuming, classifying, and describing. For the sake of working within a coherent historical context, the primary locus of the book remains nineteenth-century France, though analogous cultural phenomena can be found throughout Europe, North America, and many former European colonies. Because the topic does transcend national borders, I do include several critical texts from outside France. Bibelots – knick-knacks, curiosities, collectibles, antiques, objets d’art – proliferate in French literary texts during the last decades of the nineteenth century. The bibelot makes its first major canonical appearance in Balzac’s Le Cousin Pons (). Its golden age is marked by Huysmans’s A rebours, Edmond de Goncourt’s La Maison d’un artiste, and Mallarme´’s famous line ‘‘Aboli bibelot d’inanite´ sonore’’ (, , and  respectively). By this point in literary prose, one more intellectual than chronological, material objects have ceased to function as mere vehicles of information about their user and the world of people, as authors begin to provide more and more information about objects themselves, and the world of objects to which these belong. Plot begins to deteriorate, overrun by description. Signifiers multiply then begin to float free. By the end of the century, the presence of objects in texts no longer needs to be justified by their connections either to people or to the ‘‘real.’’ The literary object becomes gratuitous, yet authors continue to be drawn toward it. It multiplies and proliferates in the text, just as objects without use-value – bibelots – multiply and proliferate in the marketplace and in the nineteenth-century interior. We could call this phenomenon the bibelot-effect, the sudden invasion of culture by gratuitousness, which amounts to a way of describing modernization and decadence in terms of a literary history of material culture. The late 



Introduction

nineteenth-century writer and critic Paul Bourget declares an understanding of the bibelot indispensable to the literary and cultural analysis of his time. Several decades later, however, Proust celebrates the bibelot’s last moments of glory in A la recherche du temps perdu (–). Why does the bibelot flourish in and then fade from French literature at this particular time and place? The literary history of the bibelot coincides with the history of European material culture. As detailed in chapter one, by the s a new category of objects has come into being, the category designated by the word ‘‘bibelot,’’ whose meaning has evolved to encompass a disparate array of goods, ranging from mass-produced trinkets to priceless collectors’ items. Examples include exquisite porcelain vases, finely crafted snuff boxes, oriental figurines, master paintings, factory glassware, and cheap souvenirs. Superfluousness, or the absence of usevalue, is the sole unifying criterion for the seemingly heterogenous list of items belonging to this category. The confusing nature of the category expresses the inadequacy of existing organizational frameworks for dealing with the onslaught of material goods associated with industrial production and mass consumption. The prominence of the term in nineteenth-century French literature, in fiction as well as in criticism and commentary, signals a massive semantic and spatial reorganization of the world of goods. Defined within the context of the consumer and industrial revolutions, the bibelot can be seen as the quintessential object of modern material culture. Its widespread presence signals that luxury goods have become available, at least hypothetically, to the middle and even the working classes. However, the emergence of this category of gratuitous luxury goods cannot be explained solely by the economic history of modern industrial production and mass consumption. The history of older cultural practices such as collecting and interior decorating, as well as non-monetary forms of exchange (barter, the gift, the recuperation of debris, the archaeological dig), must also be taken into account. Telling the story of the bibelot involves telling stories of collecting, displaying, decorating, selling, shopping, classifying, and cataloguing. That the bibelot becomes a literary object is a significant part of its material history. Writing, in forms as diverse as novels, newspapers, and interior decorating manuals, plays an integral part in the modernizing reconfiguration of material culture which takes place throughout the nineteenth century. Throughout this study, literary and para-literary writing is juxtaposed against resolutely non-literary writing. Novels,

Introduction



short stories, and lines of poetry are considered alongside journalism, diaries by literary figures, literary criticism, art criticism, museum catalogues, how-to manuals on collecting and interior decorating, industry reports by arts administrators and decorative arts professionals, social commentary, and sociology. The purpose of including commercial and social scientific writing is to broaden the discursive field, thus allowing for a better understanding of the world of goods, which far exceeds the bounds of the literary realm. The relationship between the bibelot and this writing is more than a question of rhetorical style. The bibelot calls forth a concrete practice of objects, a logic of material things, an aesthetics, an epistemology. To be a bibeloteur, a collector of bibelots, is to contemplate, comprehend, and organize objects in certain ways, whether these be the objects in a living room or the objects in a novel. The presence of the bibelot transforms literature and living rooms alike. The bibelot-filled novel is not a ‘‘representation’’ of the bibelot-filled living room, nor is the literary bibelot some sort of self-reflexive signifier cut off from its material referent by means of the transcendental powers sometimes imputed to language. Rather, the heavily descriptive novel is as much a product of nineteenth-century material culture as is the bourgeois living room. The onslaught of material goods associated with industrialization and consumer society poses several sorts of problems. First and foremost, there is the matter of organization, classification, and order. From the perspective of the bibelot, an object born of domestic daily life, existing notions of order tend to be overly formalistic, based as they are on analyses of taxonomy, collecting, and the museum. I have therefore found it necessary to rethink the logic(s) of classification in terms of the logic of daily life. Second, there arise issues of evaluation, of determining the relative worth of things in terms of money, aesthetics, scholarly interest, and/or prestige. Third, accumulations of goods present problems of representation, whether one’s purpose is accounting, inventorying, or describing. Fourth, and this stems directly from the third problem, there arise issues of balance between persons and things, and between narration and description. Classic poetics presumes that persons and events should be privileged over things and descriptions, whereas many fin-de-sie`cle texts challenge this formulation. Finally, there is the matter of interpretation, of finding meaning in superfluous material things, of reading things for information about people, or for historical or anthropological knowledge. These concerns continuously surface and resurface throughout the



Introduction

chapters which follow, though each chapter brings one set of issues to the forefront. Following the historical overview provided in the opening chapter, chapter two makes use of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of ‘‘practical logic’’ to examine the less-than-coherent reasoning by which the objects of material culture are classified, described, evaluated, and judged. In chapter three, I move from organization to meaning, tracing a genealogy of the encoding of domestic furnishings with the vocabulary of art, showing how distinctions of class and gender are mapped onto a distinction between art and fashion. Chapter four shifts the focus from meaning to knowledge, through a reading of the collecting episode in Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pe´cuchet. Taking issue with previous criticism, I argue that what seems to be an epistemology of the museum coincides with and overlaps other epistemologies, those of domestic daily life, of social class, and of consumption. Chapter five asks why modernist literary critics have been harsh on inventory-like descriptions, while poststructuralist and postmodern literary critics have embraced the catalogue form. Chapter six examines descriptions of domestic interiors by novelists, social commentators, and sociologists, all of whom use similar strategies to elicit information from ordinary household objects, in effect rendering the bibelot ‘‘readable.’’ Chapter seven charts a trend that evolves in fantastic and decadent narrative: alterations in classic plot structure correlate closely to alterations in traditional configurations of household furnishings. Present in all chapters is the question of order (and disorder), of the intertwined organizational logic(s) (and illogic) of the material, the social, and the textual.

 

The bibelot A nineteenth-century object

By the s, the medieval French word bibelot (knick-knack), which in the fifteenth century designated miscellaneous household items of little value, is revived by the most elite among Parisian collectors to designate the objects most precious to them, even though the term is also used to refer to the cheapest industrial kitsch. The term is not only revived and reinvented during the nineteenth century, it is also associated with the century. In Proust this association manifests itself as a break with the twentieth century since, in implicit contrast to the narrator’s modernist sensibility, it is only among those characters who reach adulthood before the s that one finds bibeloteurs: Swann, Odette, Charlus, and Madame Verdurin. The term’s uses, connotations, and associations, as well as the goods that it designates, evolve along with ‘‘the nineteenth century,’’ as conceptualized by those writers who speak in its name. If this culture embraces the bibelot with enthusiasm, it is because it creates the bibelot in its own image. The objects designated by the term bibelot, along with the practices designated by its variants, bibeloter [to collect], bibeloteur, and bibeloteuse [masculine and feminine forms for both the noun ‘‘collector’’ and the adjective ‘‘bibelot-like’’], are invested with a variety of often contradictory significations – not only ‘‘meanings’’ but also ‘‘significance’’ in the sense of perceived importance or value (aesthetic, monetary, sentimental, psychic, or other). Even though many are very consciously aware of these significations, these are not assigned in a fully conscious way by any individual or group, but rather evolve out of shared practices of objects, practices which are historically and culturally specific. This chapter provides a synchronic and diachronic overview of the uses, connotations, and associations of the word bibelot in nineteenth-century literary and extra-literary texts. Synchronically, the bibelot must be understood as a category which cuts across several domains of the world of goods: the household, the 



Literature and material culture

marketplace, the collection, and the museum. Each of these four cultural spaces operates according to its own logic. Each is organized on three levels: physical, economic, and cognitive. The cognitive level, which includes meaning production, is inseparable from the other two levels, the physical arrangement of goods in space and the economic structures of exchange. Following the bibelot through these four spaces (the household, the marketplace, the collection, and the museum), while taking into account their individual logics and their shared multi-level organizational structures (physical, economic, and cognitive), allows for an examination of the configuration and reconfiguration of nineteenthcentury material culture. Diachronically, the evolution of the term’s use must be recounted in terms of history, or better, histories, including revolutionary history, intellectual history, and literary history.                    Why, at this particular time and place, nineteenth-century Paris, does it become necessary to create a category of goods which unites valuable art objects, industrial reproductions, and worthless junk, a group of disparate items gathered together under the auspices of superfluousness, gratuitousness, heterogeneity, and accumulation? The industrial and consumer revolutions provide the obvious context for this question. Rosalind Williams describes the radical transformation of the world of goods, as material things begin to multiply during the middle decades of the century: The quantity of goods available to most people had been drastically limited: a few kitchen utensils . . . , several well-worn pieces of furniture . . . , bedding, shoes or clogs, a shirt and trousers or a dress (and sometimes one outfit for special occasions), some essential tools. That was all. . . In the past century these ancient and universal patterns have been shattered by the advent of mass consumption. . . The merchandise itself was by no means available to all, but the vision of a seemingly unlimited profusion of commodities is available, is, indeed, nearly unavoidable.

This multiplication of objects, their ‘‘seemingly unlimited profusion’’ at once ‘‘real’’ and imagined, necessitates a radical reconfiguration of the world of material things, a physical, economic, and cognitive reorganization. However, the statement that ‘‘ancient and universal patterns’’ of people’s relations to objects were ‘‘shattered’’ by this onslaught of goods needs to be nuanced. It would be more accurate to say that these ancient patterns, which are historical rather than universal, are not destroyed, but rather modified, adapted, and supplemented in order to accommo-

The bibelot



date new types of goods, and their (at least hypothetical) availability to new groups of people. The reconfiguration of ancient patterns for dealing with goods is of primary concern here. The historically determined patterns by which people confront goods can be thought of in terms of the constantly evolving social structure of the world of objects. The very concept of ‘‘material culture’’ carries with it the assumption that, like language, the world of goods is fundamentally social in nature. Like words, things are created and given meaning collectively (Saussure’s dimension of langue), though used individually (the dimension of parole). Furthermore, as Marx insists in his theory of the commodity, relationships among things are inseparable from relationships among people, implying that the world of things is a social world, with a social structure which includes not only class relations and social positioning (the stuff of ‘‘distinction’’), but also gender relations, written and unwritten rules of exchange, usages of objects in daily life, and the significance accorded to objects, implicitly or explicitly, consciously or unconsciously. The world of objects is directly structured by institutions and spheres of practice which are formalized to varying degrees; for nineteenthcentury Paris these include the marketplace, the household economy, collecting, and the museum. The nineteenth century witnesses the expansion and further specialization of these institutions, especially with the creation of the magasin de nouveaute´s [novelty shop], the grand magasin [department store], and many new public museums. In the sphere of the household economy, it is worth noting that the term de´coration inte´rieure appears in print for the first time in France in . Also significant are the many new publications destined for female homemakers. Though the marketplace, the household, collecting, and the museum seem to be quite separate, governed by very different concerns and objectives, their mutual involvement in the world of goods makes for some striking similarities among them. One activity critical to all four domains is the creation and maintenance of spaces in which goods are accumulated, displayed, classified, and valorized. Practices of display and valuation depend on acts of classification. The category bibelot represents such a classification, one which is frequently used in the marketplace, in the household, and in private collecting, but which is not altogether unrelated to the public museum. The creation of the category bibelot signals the interconnectedness of these four domains, since it belongs to all of them but is contained by none of them, juxtaposing the museum-worthy heirloom against the mass-produced trinket.



Literature and material culture                             

The heterogeneity and disparity in value of the objects designated by the term bibelot can be traced to the evolution of its usage, as given in Ernest Bosc’s Dictionnaire de l’art, de la curiosite´ et du bibelot:     . Ce terme, qui a` son origine ne servait qu’a` de´signer des outils, des ustensiles et des objets tre`s divers et de peu de valeur, est aujourd’hui [] employe´ par les amateurs et les antiquaires pour de´signer principalement des objets d’art et de curiosite´. [  . – This term originally designated only tools, utensils and a wide variety of objects of little value. Today +,, collectors and antiquarians use it principally to designate objets d’art and curiosities.]

Bosc defines the category bibelot in terms of its changing relationship to other categories of things: outils, ustensiles, objets tre`s divers et de peu de valeur, objets d’art, and objets de curiosite´. He directly ties the contemporary usage of the term to collecting by assigning it to the vocabulary of ‘‘les amateurs et les antiquaires’’ [in this context, amateur, or enthusiast, is synonymous with ‘‘collector,’’ with overtones of ‘‘connoisseur’’]. The category bibelot thus shifts drastically in meaning between ‘‘son origine,’’ the Middle Ages, and Bosc’s ‘‘aujourd’hui,’’ the s, its designation drifting from simple articles of daily domestic life to objets d’art and rare collectors’ curiosities. The domains of collecting and of household goods become even more entangled as more and more articles of daily life become recognized as collectors’ objects, such as soup tureens of Se`vres porcelain, shaving bowls of Rouen pottery, silver snuff boxes, or even ornate antique bedwarmers, spittoons, and chamber pots. While in  Bosc assigns the term bibelot to the vocabulary of antique collecting, by the century’s end the term is more commonly assigned to the vocabulary of home furnishings, as is evident in a  treatise on interior decor co-authored by Edith Wharton: It is perhaps not uninstructive to note that we have no English word to describe the class of household ornaments which French speech has provided with at least three designations, each indicating a delicate and almost imperceptible gradation of quality. In place of bric-a`-brac, bibelots, objets d’art, we have only knick-knacks – defined by Stormonth as ‘‘articles of small value.’’

Like Bosc, Wharton too defines the bibelot in relation to other categories of things. Though French does have the advantage of numerous terms, their meanings shift over the course of the nineteenth century, making it difficult to discern the ‘‘delicate and almost imperceptible

The bibelot



gradation of quality’’ which they supposedly designate. Whereas for Wharton in  the term ‘‘bibelots’’ clearly belongs between ‘‘bric-a`brac’’ and ‘‘objets d’art,’’ texts dating from the preceding century reveal more ambiguity. From roughly the s to , the ‘‘gradation in quality’’ represented by these terms was not only ‘‘almost imperceptible,’’ but also ambiguous, particularly in the case of the central term, since a bibelot was sometimes an objet d’art, sometimes merely bric-a`-brac, while at other times all three terms were used to describe the same object. Furthermore, two key terms are missing from Wharton’s list: curiosite´ and antiquite´, which French shares with English. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in France curiosite´ was the word commonly used to designate collectors’ objects, while antiquite´ designated Greek and Roman art and artifacts. Bric-a`-brac refers to ‘‘objets tre`s divers et de peu de valeur’’ [‘‘a wide variety of objects of little value’’], to borrow Bosc’s phrasing. A neighboring term, bimbelot, generally refers to toys, but also to toiletry items and trinkets. When the word bibelot is revived in the middle of the nineteenth century, it is used as a synonym of curiosite´, but still carries the connotation of its original meaning, ‘‘objets tre`s divers et de peu de valeur,’’ a pejorative overtone which the word still carries. Antiquite´ came to include French and European collectibles from the Gallic period, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. During the second half of the nineteenth century, this entire lexical chain is used more or less interchangeably to designate virtually the same objects, though each term carries slightly different connotations. These terms, as used during this period, can be arranged in a rough order of least to most flattering: bric-a`-brac, curiosite´, antiquite´, bibelot, objet d’art. By this time the term bibelot refers strictly to decorative or collectors’ objects, no longer designating any tool or utensil other than antiques which no longer have use-value. There is always some degree of irony involved in using terms with pejorative connotations, namely bibelot and bric-a`-brac, to designate valuable collectors’ objects, raising questions about the collector’s attachment to what for many seem to be useless trifles.              How does the same word come to designate inexpensive household goods, decorative items, and rare collectibles? Changes in the meaning, use, and connotation of the term bibelot correspond closely to changes in



Literature and material culture

the post-revolutionary collectors’ market. Immediately following the  political revolution, a revolution in the world of objects fuels the association of collectors’ curiosities with the pejorative terms bric-a`-brac and bibelot. Thanks to the sudden dispossession of the nobility, royalty, and clergy, many precious decorative art objects, luxurious household goods, and religious cult objects find themselves on the market at very low prices. ‘‘Une moitie´ de Paris vend l’autre!’’ [‘‘One half of Paris sells the other’’], exclaim the Goncourt brothers in their history of daily life under the Directoire (–). Their image of this huge fire sale is gruesome: ‘‘C’est la liquidation de la guillotine’’ [‘‘It’s the guillotine’s liquidation sale’’]. Louis Cle´ment de Ris sums up the state of the post-revolutionary collectors’ market in a biographical sketch of Charles Sauvageot, a ‘‘real-life’’ model for Balzac’s cousin Pons: C’e´tait le bon temps []! La tempeˆte re´volutionnaire avait disperse´ aux quatre vents du hasard et jete´ au coin de la borne des myriades d’objets – de bibelots, pour me servir de cet ignoble ne´ologisme – amasse´s pendant des sie`cles dans les palais des princes, les communaute´s religieuses, les corporations laı¨ques, les hoˆtels et les maisons des riches particuliers. [Times were good! The storm of revolution had dispersed to the four winds and thrown out on the side of the road a myriad of objects – bibelots, to use that vulgar neologism – which, over the centuries, had been amassed in princely palaces, religious communities, secular corporations, and the mansions and homes of rich individuals.]

The revolution disperses an impressive quantity (‘‘des myriades’’) of objects into the marketplace, objects which have been confiscated from spaces designated according to ancien re´gime social categories (‘‘les palais des princes, les communaute´s religieuses, les corporations laı¨ques’’). The goods of the former cultural elite are sold not only at the state auction house where art is normally exchanged, but also in shops selling antiques alongside other second-hand goods – the magasin de bric-a`-brac. Precious relics find themselves displaced and put in circulation by the merchants of bric-a`-brac and by the auctioneer. Collectors delight in the possibility of buying these objects cheaply, even as many of them nostalgically bemoan the demise of a more aristocratic era. The old treasures of the dispossessed nobility and the Church go unnoticed by all but the most ardent collectors during the first decades of the century, when Greek and Roman antiques dominate French decor. Hence for a number of years the terms curiosite´ and bric-a`-brac

The bibelot



remain equivalent to the term bibelot. Such is the case in Balzac’s Le Cousin Pons (), in which the three terms are used interchangeably to describe the fictitious collection of master paintings, miniatures, porcelain, and snuff boxes which Pons has amassed in large part from among the junk in countless dusty Parisian magasins de bric-a`-brac between  and , the golden age of collecting when European antiques are undervalued. Pons seeks out objets d’art amidst collectors’ curiosite´s, bibelots, and bric-a`-brac. The linguistic conflation of these three terms follows the intermingling of junk with precious decorative objects in the marketplace. The meanings of the terms become muddled by the physical contiguity of their referents. Sifting through the post-revolutionary rubble becomes a game of recognition and misrecognition ruled by the elusive mechanisms of market value and fashion. The collector seeks to acquire exquisite objects at affordable prices by discovering them before they attain a high market value. By the s many ‘‘curiosite´s’’ have become very expensive, though collectors interested in the more minor decorative arts – namely, ‘‘tous les petits monuments de la vie usuelle’’ [‘‘all the little monuments of daily life’’] of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – are still discovering bargains. Such is the case of Edmond de Goncourt’s foresighted aunt, with whom he discovers collecting on Sunday afternoons: Ma tante se trouvait eˆtre, a` cette e´poque [around ], une des quatre ou cinq personnes de Paris, enamoure´es de vieilleries, du beau des sie`cles passe´s, des verres de Venise, des ivoires sculpte´s, des meubles de marqueterie, des velours de Geˆnes, des points d’Alenc¸on, des porcelaines de Saxe. [At this time, it so happened that my aunt was among the four or five Parisians who were enamored of the old-fashioned, of the Beauty of centuries past, of Venetian glass, of carved ivory, of marquetry furniture, of Genoa velvet, of Alenc¸on lace, of Saxe porcelain.]

These household ornaments do eventually become highly valued collector’s objects. Goncourt’s aunt recognizes their value ahead of the market. It is in the context of recognizing misrecognized value that Balzac presents Pons as a figure ridiculed by those around him, until the importance – and value – of his collection is generally understood. Likewise, Cle´ment de Ris describes the growing public recognition of the above-mentioned model for Balzac’s Pons: En , M. Sauvageot e´tait un fou; en , il n’e´tait plus qu’un maniaque. Original en , il devint une ce´le´brite´ en .



Literature and material culture

[In  Monsieur Sauvageot was a crazy fool; in  he was but a maniac. Eccentric in , he became a celebrity in .]

The public opinion of the collector changes along with an evolution in mainstream tastes, which begin to favor the medieval, Renaissance, and Oriental objects in which Sauvageot specializes. As demonstrated by the examples of Edmond’s aunt, Pons, and Sauvageot, negotiating the antique market involves a dialectic of recognition and misrecognition when it comes to apprehending a bibelot’s aesthetic, historical, or monetary value. The collector dreams of cheaply obtaining items he or she recognizes as priceless, taking advantage of a seller’s underpricing based on a misrecognition of their value. The collector’s dream is not fulfilled until the full value of the cheaply acquired items is finally recognized by the market, and thus by society at large. When used by serious nineteenth-century collectors to designate objects they recognize as precious, in its ambiguity the term bibelot points to the shifts in market value which underpin this dialectic. By mid-century, mainstream taste appropriates the beautiful objects of France’s ancien re´gime once sought after only by a few eccentrics. As one nineteenth-century commentator on collecting puts it, ‘‘La mode se met de la partie, on s’arrache les miettes du passe´; livres, me´dailles, estampes, meubles antiques, menue curiosite´, on veut tout avoir’’ [‘‘Fashion joins in, people fight over the crumbs of the past; books, medals, prints, antique furniture, minor curiosities, people want everything’’]. Fashion trends favoring the use of antique and exotic collectors’ items in home decor drive up their market value. The fashionability of Greek and Roman antiques gives way to a preference for French medieval and Renaissance antiques, later supplemented by a taste for the eighteenth-century decorative arts. Colonial trade adds to the body of objects which the Revolution placed on the collector’s market, as Turkish, Moorish, and other ‘‘Oriental’’ styles become common. The Goncourts, among others, display decorative objects from Japan in the company of French and European antiques. By the end of the century, some antique collectors begin to include objects from French Art Nouveau and the English Arts and Crafts Movement in their eclectic interiors. The growing fashionability of collecting gradually transforms its venues of distribution. While the Parisian department store has received much scholarly attention of late, the trajectory of the bibelot requires taking into consideration the more archaic market forms which coexist with the department store, forms which are not wiped out as quickly as

The bibelot



Zola implies in his novel of feminine consumption, Au bonheur des dames. Because the antique market deals in second-hand goods, even today it stands on the periphery of mass consumption. The market for secondhand goods was much more important during the nineteenth century, since the clothing and household goods of the lower classes often consisted of the cast-offs of the wealthier classes. These were sold by the lowest classes of merchants in the most marginal commercial spaces. The colporteurs were nomads; these merchants are to household goods (and books) what Benjamin’s chiffonnier [ragpicker] is to clothing. Fairs and bazaars furnished a setting for temporary stalls; the terms brocante, brocanter, and brocanteur [second-hand trade, to trade in, and trader in second-hand goods] often refer to exchange activities in such liminal retail spaces. Ferrailleurs and quincailliers [scrap-metal dealers and iron mongers] sometimes maintained small shops. The next step up on the retail hierarchy would be the magasin de bric-a`-brac [junk shop or secondhand shop]. The dusty shop of the antiquaire [antique dealer] is accorded mythical status in fictive representations such as Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin () and Gautier’s fantastic short story ‘‘Le Pied de momie’’ (). As the bibelot becomes more popular, it moves into more fashionable retail space. By the s, it is found not only in the magasin de bric-a`-brac, but also in the more modern and more affluent magasins de nouveaute´s [novelty shops selling cloth and what are called ‘‘articles de Paris,’’ mostly toiletry implements and trinkets]. Thus the bibelot comes to be associated not only with used goods, but also with the new goods of modernized production. In addition, the magasins de nouveaute´s are more modern in that they cater to consumer desire, as opposed to the junk shop whose inventory depends on the randomness of available cast-offs. The bibelot does make its way into that most modern of retail spaces, the grand magasin [department store]: though Zola’s fictitious retail palace Au Bonheur des Dames specializes in clothing and accessories, its visionary owner Mouret does eventually add a display of exotic decorative goods, including bibelots. At the same time, elegant boutiques featuring objets d’art begin to appear in fashionable shopping areas. As Cle´ment de Ris explains, at the turn of the nineteenth century, ‘‘le bon temps’’ [‘‘the golden age’’] of bargains for the pioneering collectors, ‘‘le marchand d’objets d’art tel que nous le voyons en  n’existait pas, et rien ne pouvait faire pre´voir les hautes destine´es auxquelles e´tait appele´ ce genre d’industrie’’ [‘‘the dealer in objets d’art as we see him in  did not yet exist, and the great destiny of this sort of industry could not then have been foreseen’’].



Literature and material culture

Arnoux of Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale () is the literary incarnation of the new type of ‘‘marchand d’art’’ which evolves with the growing fashionability of the bibelot. His shop l’Art Industriel looks more like a ‘‘salon’’ than a ‘‘boutique.’’ Edmond de Goncourt, in an  journal entry, describes a gentrification of antique dealers: L’e´tonnement est extreˆme chez moi, en voyant la re´volution qui s’est faite tout d’un coup dans les habitudes de la ge´ne´ration nouvelle des marchands de bric-a`-brac. Hier, c’e´taient des ferrailleurs, des Auvergnats . . . Aujourd’hui, ce sont des messieurs habille´s par nos tailleurs, achetant et lisant des livres et ayant des femmes aussi distingue´es que les femmes de notre socie´te´; des messieurs donnant des dıˆners servis par des domestiques en cravates blanches. [I am extremely surprised to see the sudden revolution in the habits of the new generation of dealers in second-hand goods. Before, it was scrap-metal dealers from Auvergne . . . Today, it is gentlemen outfitted by our own tailors, gentlemen who buy and read books and whose wives are as distinguished as those of high society; gentlemen whose dinner guests are served by waiters in white tie.]

This gentlemanly dealer is a far cry from Re´monencq in Le Cousin Pons, the Auvergnat ferrailleur turned marchand de curiosite´, who dreams of opening an elegant boutique for true amateurs. As a result of these changes, by the s valuable objects are rarely found in junk shops, though at times they are still playfully referred to as bric-a`-brac, even among elitist collectors. Meanwhile, at yet another venue of distribution, the public auctions, these goods begin to circulate more rapidly and in greater numbers, among a growing number of buyers: De  a` , les ventes se succe`dent rapidement. . . Tableaux, estampes, e´maux, livres, faı¨ences, me´dailles, l’antiquite´, le moyen aˆge et le temps moderne, la grande et la petite curiosite´ arrivent peˆle-meˆle et innondent la place. Le torrent est irre´sitible, il entraˆne la mode et la foule; les ventes engendrent l’amateur, l’amateur engendre les ventes, l’un pousse l’autre, et, le marchand aidant a` tous les deux, le commerce de la curiosite´ prend des proportions inouı¨es. [From  to , auction follows auction in rapid succession . . . Paintings, engravings, enamels, books, pottery, medals, antiquity, the Middle Ages and modern times, major and minor curiosities arrive pell-mell and inundate the place. The torrent is irresistible, it drives fashion and the crowd. Sales engender the collector, the collector engenders sales, the one pushes the other, and, the dealer helping both, trade in curiosities has reached unheard of proportions.]

The succession of terms in the second sentence is instructive. First, there is a list of categories of ‘‘curiosite´’’ which shows the variety of forms on

The bibelot



the market (tableaux, estampes, ´emaux, livres, faı¨ences, me´dailles). Second, a list of historical periods (l’antiquite´, le moyen aˆge et le temps moderne) underlines a different type of variety within the category ‘‘curiosite´,’’ that of temporal origin. Third, a disparity in genre is emphasized by adding to the list ‘‘la grande et la petite curiosite´.’’ The adverb ‘‘peˆle-meˆle’’ which follows underscores the list’s heterogeneity. The verb ‘‘inondent’’ along with the noun ‘‘torrent’’ in the following sentence hyperbolize the ever increasing proliferation and circulation of these objects. The motivating force behind this acceleration of circulation is the goods themselves, arriving in ever greater quantity. Market and buyer enter into a procreative relationship, the one (re)producing the other under the mediation of the dealer. By the s, it is not only collectors and investors who attend the auctions at the Hoˆtel Drouot (the state-controlled auction house located in Paris), but also high-society women who are beginning to find the bibelot chic. ‘‘Tiens, il faudra que nous allions aux CommissairesPriseurs . . . Nous irons rococoter . . . C’est tre`s amusant’’ [‘‘Well then, we must go to the auctioneer’s . . . We’ll go rococo hunting . . . It’s great fun’’], proclaims an elegant female character in the Goncourts’  novel of the bourgeoisie, Rene´e Mauperin. ‘‘Rococoter’’ is a neologism, no doubt a play on bibeloter, and meaning ‘‘to seek out and collect rococo objects.’’ Cle´ment de Ris’s description of a mid-century auction demonstrates a negative connotation of the word bibelot by its association with the market: that of art tainted by money. In deploying the vocabulary of collecting, the following passage first uses the non-pejorative terms ‘‘curieux’’ and ‘‘amateurs,’’ not using the term ‘‘bibelot’’ until the question of money arises: Cette vente restera pour les curieux la grande feˆte de l’anne´e [] . . . Tout le monde en a pris suivant ses moyens: les curieux pauvres, ceux qui sont force´s d’admettre comme une ve´rite´ l’aphorisme voir c’est avoir, en re´jouissant leurs regards de la vue de tant de belles choses amasse´es par un homme d’un gouˆt de´licat et fin; les amateurs riches, en se les disputant au milieu du feu croise´ des enche`res et sous les coups du marteau de Me Pouchet; les hommes d’argent, enfin, en plac¸ant en bibelots – qu’on me pardonne cet horrible vocable, il est consacre´ – leur argent d’une manie`re au moins aussi profitable qu’en reports ou en primes. [For curiosity collectors, this sale will remain the grand event of the year [] . . . Everyone took part according to his means: the poor curiosity lovers, those who are forced to accept as true the aphorism to see is to have, taking great pleasure in gazing on so many beautiful things brought together by a man of



Literature and material culture

refined and delicate taste; wealthy collectors, competing for them in the midst of the crossfire of bidding, under the blows of Monsieur Pouchet’s gavel; men of money, finally, placing their money in bibelots (pardon me for using this horrible word, but it is fitting), which prove to be at least as profitable as stocks or bonds.]

The linguistic progression of collecting terminology is arranged in order of wealth, ‘‘curieux’’ – ‘‘amateurs’’ – ‘‘bibelot,’’ an order which mirrors the chronological progression of terms for the collector: ‘‘curieux’’ (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) – ‘‘amateur’’ (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) – ‘‘bibeloteur’’ (s through the Belle Epoque). The term bibelot retains pejorative overtones even as the most elite aesthetes begin to refer to themselves as bibeloteurs. Whereas in the quotations above, from  and , Cle´ment de Ris excuses himself when he uses the word bibelot – ‘‘cet horrible vocable,’’ ‘‘cet ignoble ne´ologisme’’ – , throughout the s and up to his death in , Edmond de Goncourt freely uses bibelots and bibeloteur to describe his collection, himself, and his collecting activities. The flamboyant finde-sie`cle aesthete and poet, the count Robert de Montesquiou, likewise employs bibelots several times in describing his famous apartments in his memoirs. Similarly, the word is frequently used non-pejoratively in publications of decorating professionals such as the Revue des arts de´coratifs, founded in , or in the title of Bosc’s  dictionary (Dictionnaire de l’art, de la curiosite´ et du bibelot). However, at the same time the term is still used to designate the cheapest mass-produced trinkets and souvenirs. For example, in Zola’s L’Oeuvre (), ‘‘bibelot’’ denotes the antiques collected by the writer Sandoz and his wife, the extravagantly fashionable decor of the high-society artist Fagerolles, and the cheap glass and porcelain carnival prizes in a game booth at a popular fair. The apparent logical contradiction inherent in using one term to designate a heterogenous group of things highlights that it is the quality of superfluity that unifies those objects referred to as bibelots. The generally negative perceptions of the qualities of heterogeneity and superfluity would seem to marginalize those things designated as bibelots, whereas it is this very marginality which valorizes the bibelot in the eyes of aesthetes such as the Goncourts and Montesquiou. Indeed, the rise of aestheticism contributes directly to the revalorization of the bibelot during the latter part of the century.

The bibelot



    -        The qualities most closely associated with the phenomenon of the bibelot – heterogeneity, accumulation, and superfluousness – can be seen as values espoused by a series of nineteenth-century ‘‘-isms,’’ such as dilettantism, decadence, and aestheticism; as opposed to another series of ‘‘-isms’’ generally hostile to these qualities, such as rationalism, utilitarianism, scientific positivism, and progressivism. Embracing the first group of ‘‘-isms’’ and rejecting the latter, a certain nineteenthcentury French cultural elite comes to embrace the bibelot, appropriating it as a part of a modern artistic sensibility. The modernity of the bibelot lies precisely in its association with superfluous aesthetic qualities such as the ornamental, the merely pretty (as opposed to the Beautiful), the domestic, the feminine, and the minor arts. Hence the bibelot occupies a subordinate position within the hierarchies espoused by classical aesthetics and by the Academy of Beaux-Arts, making it an appropriate vehicle for anti-classical and anti-Academy sentiments. Intermingled with the more widely studied debates among painters and art critics, there is a neglected but equally influential alternative branch of aesthetics, an art of daily life in which the bibelot plays an essential role. This art of daily life grows out of the advancements in interior decor and comfort developed during the eighteenth century in France, and is further elaborated by the nineteenth century’s democratized cultural elite within the framework of those aesthetic movements which extend beyond literary and artistic genres to become ways of thinking, ways of seeing, and even lifestyles: Romanticism, Art for Art’s Sake, Dandyism, and Decadence. The more general attitude of aestheticism links the latter three of these movements. In spite of Romanticism’s revalorization of medieval art and its fascination for archaeological ruins, its literary texts do not depict collectors, as Walter Benjamin remarks with surprise. However, in realist and naturalist texts collecting is often associated with vestiges of Romanticism. In L’Oeuvre, Zola presents the collection of bibelots in the new home of writer Sandoz and his wife as such a remnant: Le salon, qu’ils achevaient d’installer, s’encombrait de vieux meubles, de vieilles tapisseries, de bibelots de tous les peuples et de tous les sie`cles, un flot montant, de´bordant a` cette heure, qui avait commence´ aux Batignolles par le vieux pot de Rouen, qu’elle lui avait donne´ un jour de feˆte. Ils couraient ensemble les brocanteurs, ils avaient une rage joyeuse d’acheter; et lui contentait la` d’anciens de´sirs de jeunesse, des ambitions romantiques, ne´es jadis de ses



Literature and material culture

premie`res lectures; si bien que cet e´crivain, si farouchement moderne, se logeait dans le Moyen Age vermoulu qu’il reˆvait d’habiter a` quinze ans. [Their newly furnished salon was filled with old furniture, old tapestries, and bibelots of all peoples and all centuries, a rising tide, at present overflowing, one which had begun at Batignolles with the old Rouen pot which she had given him on a special occasion. Together they made the rounds of the second-hand dealers and bought with joyful fury. He thus satisfied old desires of his youth, romantic ambitions born long ago of his early reading, so much so that this writer, so fiercely modern, lived in the worm-eaten Middle Ages which he dreamed of inhabiting at the age of fifteen.]

Sandoz’s romantic ‘‘premie`res lectures’’ include Hugo and Musset (pp. –). The writer of modern life living in a medieval-inspired interior represents an anachronism common to many authors of the period, including Zola himself, whose own interior was Gothic. A similar anachronism can be seen in the Sandoz’s ‘‘rage joyeuse d’acheter’’ characteristic of the modern consumer, brought to the archaic retail spaces of the brocanteurs – spaces which still exist today. The passage also underlines the objects’ heterogeneity (‘‘de tous les peuples et de tous les sie`cles’’) and proliferation (‘‘un flot montant, de´bordant’’), echoing many of the passages cited above. However, given the signification of the Sandoz household within the novel’s social structure, namely the contrast between the bourgeois lifestyle of the married writer as opposed to that of his Bohemian artist friends, on a narrative level the referent of these bibelots is not merely historicism, exoticism, or abundance, but also and especially a bourgeois domesticity which incorporates all three of these qualities. Romanticism inspires not only a nostalgia for the remains of the past, but also a veneration of the artist and of the arts. During the early decades of the nineteenth century the cachet ‘‘artiste’’ serves as a ‘‘signal romantique,’’ explains Alain Rey in his linguistic study of the term. Balzac builds links among art appreciation, collecting, and Romanticism in the portrait of the heroine of La Muse du de´partement: Une fois pose´e en femme supe´rieure, Dinah voulut donner des gages visibles de son amour pour les cre´ations les plus remarquables de l’Art; elle s’associa vivement aux ide´es de l’e´cole romantique en comprenant dans l’Art, la poe´sie et la peinture, la page et la statue, le meuble et l’ope´ra. Aussi devint-elle moyen aˆgiste. Elle s’enquit aussi des curiosite´s qui pouvaient dater de la Renaissance, et fit de ses fide`les autant de commissionnaires de´voue´s. [Once established as a superior woman, Dinah wished to put forth some visible tokens of her love for the most remarkable creations of Art. She enthusiastically

The bibelot



associated herself with the romantic school by understanding Art to include poetry and painting, the written word and the statue, furniture and opera. She also became a medievalist. She also took an interest in curiosities which might date from the Renaissance, and commissioned her followers to become devoted intermediaries in this quest.]

Dinah’s collection of medieval and Renaissance bibelots materializes (as ‘‘gages visibles’’) her romantic admiration not only for the decorative arts, but for all of the arts – including writing. As fragments of Art which stand for Art in general, these bibelots thus function as synecdoche. The synecdoche is doubled in that the appreciation of art in turn becomes a sign of Dinah’s status as a ‘‘femme supe´rieure.’’ The narrative thus assigns these bibelots a referential function of ‘‘distinction.’’ Contrast this use of bibelots against that Zola assigned the Sandoz, whose collectibles signified not social ambition, but a cozy domesticity. The notion of ‘‘Art for Art’s Sake’’ further valorizes the bibelot. Gautier illustrates his famous declaration in response to utilitarianism, ‘‘je suis de ceux pour qui le superflu est ne´cessaire’’ [‘‘I am someone for whom the superfluous is necessary’’] by means of a bibelot: ‘‘Je pre´fe`re a` certain vase qui me sert un vase chinois, seme´ de dragons et de mandarins, qui ne me sert pas du tout’’ [‘‘I prefer to a useful vase a Chinese vase covered with dragons and mandarins, which is not useful at all’’]. The bibelot embodies perfectly the values of superfluity and anti-utilitarianism, all the more so when it is a fantastically decorated chinoiserie. The fin-de-sie`cle aesthete inherits this anti-utilitarian appreciation of bizarre ornamental objects. The historical and exotic eclecticism which becomes incorporated into the aesthetics of collecting in many ways defies both conservative bourgeois values and the (neo)classical aesthetic. This would seem to help explain the reluctance of the French cultural elite to embrace the functionalism advocated by the English decorative arts reformers, since functionalism could be perceived as too closely related to Philistine utilitarianism. Yet the bibelot quickly becomes a stereotypical component of bourgeois decor. This necessitates a reappropriation of the bibelot from bourgeois domesticity, a process which relies on the plays of distinction embraced by Dandyism. The figure of the Dandy helps to reconcile the paradoxical position of the bibelot, at once caught up in the system of fashion yet with claims to membership in the sphere of art, since the Dandy is not just a leader in matters of fashion and an arbiter of taste, but also a connoisseur of the arts. Furthermore, the anti-bourgeois Dandy, who is almost by definition a bachelor in lifestyle if not in fact, also rescues the bibelot from its



Literature and material culture

ties to banal bourgeois domesticity. As the abundant analyses of the Dandy insist, Dandyism goes beyond clothing to embrace an art of daily life, which becomes ‘‘une manie`re d’eˆtre, entie`rement compose´e de nuances’’ [‘‘a way of being composed entirely of nuances’’]. The capacity to recognize the rare bibelot among the mass of ornamental objects on the market relies on an eye for nuances, becoming a mark not only of erudition, but especially of a certain inbred cultural mastery. Because he is known for the minimalism of his dress, in that his clothing is understated yet superior by means of almost imperceptible nuances, the Dandy is seen by art historian Linda Nochlin as ‘‘prophetic of avant-gardism’’ in his feeling that in art and taste ‘‘less is truly more.’’ There is, however, an accompanying tendency towards accumulation which is not entirely ‘‘modernist’’ in Nochlin’s sense of the term: first there is the closet filled with clothing and accessories. More importantly for us, ‘‘real’’ and fictitious dandies accumulate in the form of the collection: the ‘‘original’’ English dandy Beau Brummell, the count de Montesquiou, Huysmans’s des Esseintes, Jean Lorrain’s M. de Phocas, Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, and Proust’s le baron Charlus are all bibeloteurs. Decadence embraces the bibelot for its rarity, luxury, and artificiality. The interior of Huysmans’s des Esseintes (A rebours) comes immediately to mind. Bibelots with historical, mythical, or religious significations are first secularized then perverted in the exotic erotic decor of the decadent text. Collectors abound in the fin-de-sie`cle novels of Rachilde and Jean Lorrain, their carefully enumerated bibelots setting the stage for orgies, thinly disguised homosexual encounters, acts of sadism, drug abuse, and even murder. Several referents for the (literary) bibelot have been identified thus far: domesticity, distinction, dandyism, anti-utilitarianism, and perversion. Such a range of possible significations allows the bibelot to proliferate in the full gamut of nineteenth-century literary forms, including realism, naturalism, ‘‘l’e´criture artiste’’ of the Goncourts, symbolist poetry, and decadence. A common thread among these forms is a propensity for extra-literary erudition in various domains, such as documentation from the ‘‘real world’’ (the Goncourts, Flaubert, Zola), scholarship in art history (the Goncourts, Huysmans, Lorrain), and the seeking out of rare words (Huysmans, Mallarme´). Writing in , Auguste Chevrie suggests that though his century has produced no period style of its own, it certainly has its own character:

The bibelot



Ce caracte`re est l’e´rudition. Tant que l’influence du romantisme, et par conse´quent du re´alisme, se fera sentir, tant que nous serons dans cette pe´riode d’e´tudes, il n’y aura pas de style spe´cial possible. [This character is erudition. As long as the influence of romanticism, and consequently realism, makes itself felt, as long as we remain in this period of studies, no special style will be possible.]

The recycling of past styles in the decorative arts and in architecture requires the antiquarian’s love of erudition. According to Proust, the spirit of erudition common to nineteenth-century writers, collectors, architects, and decorative artists is also shared by fashion-conscious women of fin-de-sie`cle high-society. In his early novel Jean Santeuil, written in the s, the narrator explains that in creating her appartement artistique, ‘‘une femme qui n’a jamais appris l’histoire, travaille son hoˆtel pendant deux ans au Cabinet des Estampes’’ [‘‘a woman who never learned history spends two years in the +national library’s, Department of Engravings ‘working on’ her mansion’’]. Erudition thus becomes fashionable. ‘‘             ´ ’’ What Chevrie identifies as erudition could be compared to the spirit of dilettantism which characterizes the century for Paul Bourget. This characterization is brought to bear in the most substantial nineteenthcentury analysis of the bibelot I have found, Bourget’s  newspaper commentary, republished in his well-known collection, Essais de psychologie contemporaine: Etudes litte´raires. In it, Bourget draws an analogy between the bibelot, the dilettante’s general intellectual attitude, and the Goncourt brothers’ writing. In what appears to be a digression, this piece of literary criticism presents a para-literary representation of late nineteenth-century culture, from which can be deduced an intriguing configuration of persons, things, literary production, and material space. The intent here is not to read Bourget for an accurate portrayal of some kind of world view, but rather to examine how frivolous material goods fit into what he calls ‘‘psychologie contemporaine,’’ which he understands as both individual and collective. The bibelot’s capacity to carry such a heavy referential charge, as well as the nature of this referential charge, reveals a great deal about the social significance accorded material culture in the nineteenth century.



Literature and material culture

Writing in the medium of journalistic literary criticism targeted at the more culturally sophisticated newspaper reader, but nonetheless obliged to entertain, Bourget uses an almost obligatory tone of witty irony: Les fre`res Goncourt ont e´te´ des hommes de muse´e, et en cela des modernes, dans toute la force du mot, car cet esprit de dilettantisme et de critique s’est de´veloppe´ chez nous a` ce point qu’il a e´tendu le muse´e bien au dela` des collections publiques et prive´es, en l’introduisant dans le moindre de´tail de l’ameublement et en cre´ant le bibelot. Le bibelot, – ce miniscule fragment de l’oeuvre d’art, qui met sur un angle d’une table de salon quelque chose de l’extreˆme Orient et quelque chose de la Renaissance, un peu du moyen aˆge franc¸ais et un peu du e sie`cle! [The Goncourt brothers were men of the museum and were therefore moderns in the strongest sense of the word, for our spirit of dilettantism and of criticism has developed to the point that it has extended the museum beyond public and private collections by introducing it into the smallest detail of furnishing and creating the bibelot. The bibelot – that minuscule fragment of the work of art which brings to the corner of a table something of the Far East and something of the Renaissance, a bit of the French Middle Ages and a bit of the eighteenth century.]

In one sentence Bourget shifts his focus from the Goncourt brothers to the bibelot, making the transition by evoking first the museum, then the spirit of dilettantism and criticism with which he defines his age. To be men of the museum is to embrace this spirit, therefore to be moderns. This spirit of dilettantism and criticism is credited with the creation of the bibelot. The meandering connections made in this sentence will require some unraveling. For Bourget, in this and other essays in the collection (especially the article on Renan), dilettantism results from an ‘‘esprit d’analyse’’ which considers in turn a multiplicity of often contradictory cultural forms (art works, ideas, philosophies, religions, etc.) from various countries (pp. –). It is the resulting incertitude in the face of diversity that defines the dilettante. Unlike the situation of contemplating a single work of art in its original spatial and cultural context, such as a Christian church or Greek temple, the museum presents numerous art works which have been detached, uprooted, and isolated from the context for which they were designed, presenting the visitor with an overwhelming number of contradictory influences. The museum, then, is not ‘‘le domaine du ge´nie et de la cre´ation, c’est celui du dilettantisme et de la critique’’ [‘‘the domain of genius and creation, it is the domain of dilettantism and criticism’’] (p. ). Dilettantism and criticism are opposed to genius and

The bibelot



creation. The opposition criticism/creation is used to describe the Goncourts’ writing, which belongs to ‘‘le domaine de l’observation pure,’’ thus requiring ‘‘des faculte´s de critique beaucoup plus que de cre´ateur’’ [‘‘the domain of pure observation’’ / ‘‘the capabilities of the critic more than those of the creator’’] (p. ). In this spirit, the brothers assemble and document facts to produce a ‘‘peinture’’ of the ‘‘moeurs de notre aˆge,’’ reducing the novel, which should be ‘‘un art d’imagination,’’ to ‘‘une tentative de science exacte’’ (p. ). Such a project is well suited to its time: ‘‘le roman de constatation, d’analyse minutieuse, de nomenclature et de petits faits, est aussi celui qui convient le mieux a` notre aˆge d’universel recensement’’ [‘‘the novel of observation, of minute analysis, of nomenclature and of little facts, is also the novel which best suits our era of universal census’’] (p. ). And yet, paradoxically, the Goncourts are known for their self-described ´ecriture artiste. This quasi-scientific census or inventory (‘‘recensement’’) of minute facts is presented by means of ‘‘une rhe´torique de l’image’’ drawn from painting and sculpture (pp. –). Their writing, then, partakes at once in erudite documentation and the visual arts. Summing up Bourget’s scattered remarks, what dilettantism, criticism, the museum, and the Goncourts’ writing have in common is a tendency to assemble and to analyze, juxtaposing things or ideas without hierarchizing or concluding. In other words, philosophical eclecticism meets decorative eclecticism, as the multiplication of objects converges with the multiplication of knowledge. But what ultimately underpin the creation of the bibelot as Bourget describes it – the extension of the museum into the bourgeois salon – are the twin nineteenth-century grand intellectual obsessions: the cult of Science and the cult of Art. More than mere markers of distinction, material things are at once a source of knowledge, hence their documentary value, and a source of aesthetic pleasure. The museum as interior becomes a private shrine of the cult of Art, rationalized by the doctrines of the cult of Science. These issues converge in the bibelot, which is created by the extension of the museum beyond the space of the collection into the space of the living room (‘‘cet esprit de dilettantisme et de critique . . . a e´tendu le muse´e bien au dela` des collections publiques et prive´es, en l’introduisant dans . . . l’ameublement et en cre´ant le bibelot’’). The bibelot is born not only of the displacement of art (from museum to living room), but also by its fragmentation, as art is physically reformatted in miniature (‘‘minuscule fragment’’), suitable for display on a living room table. Moving



Literature and material culture

the artifact from the museum to the living room represents a secondary displacement, since the artifacts of the museum collection have already been displaced from cultures distant in time and/or space (the Orient, the Renaissance, the French Middle Ages, the eighteenth century, etc.). The growing body of criticism on collecting and the museum discusses the phenomenon of displacement at length. Bourget describes the movement of the bibelot through the material spaces of modernity, from the museum to the bourgeois interior, then follows its passage through the marketplace by noting its presence ‘‘aux devantures des grands magasins de nouveaute´s’’ and ‘‘dans la boutique du papetier,’’ then mentions the ‘‘magasin de bric-a`-brac’’ (p. ). In the sentences that I have cited, though, what is perhaps more significant than the displacement of the objects themselves, from museum to living room via the marketplace, is the displacement of agency from persons – in this case the Goncourt brothers – to a prevailing cultural attitude, as embodied in a cultural institution – the museum. To be ‘‘des hommes de muse´e’’ is to be subjects constructed in and by a world of objects. Bourget credits the bibelot with a transformation of the nineteenthcentury interior, and with the absence of a properly nineteenth-century decorative style, echoing the remarks of Chevrie (cited above): Le bibelot, – qui a transforme´ la de´coration de tous les inte´rieurs et leur a donne´ une physionomie d’archaı¨sme si continuˆment curieuse et si docilement soumise que notre e sie`cle, a` force de colliger et de ve´rifier tous les styles, aura oublie´ de s’en fabriquer un! (p. ) [The bibelot, which transformed the decor of all interiors and gave them an archaic physiognomy so utterly curious and so docilely submissive that, as a result of collating and affirming all styles, our nineteenth century has forgotten to make one for itself.]

In other words, the cultural phenomenon of the bibelot leads to a spirit of passive submission (‘‘si docilement soumise’’) in the face of a disparate array of past styles, a situation which in the end circumvents the creation of a new nineteenth-century style. Finally, in a sentence hidden in the middle of this tirade, it is revealed that the bibelot corresponds to the period’s psychology: Le bibelot, – manie raffine´e d’une e´poque inquie`te ou` les lassitudes de l’ennui et les maladies de la sensibilite´ nerveuse ont conduit l’homme a` s’inventer des passions factices de collectionneur, tandis que sa complication interne le rendait incapable de supporter la large et saine simplicite´ des choses autour de lui! (p. )

The bibelot



[The bibelot, refined mania of an anxious era in which the weariness of ennui and the illnesses of nervous sensitivity have led man to invent for himself the artificial passions of the collector, while his internal complexity renders him unable to tolerate the broad and healthy simplicity of the things around him.]

The connection between mental illness, artificiality, and psychological complication corresponds to the familiar themes of decadence, which Bourget theorizes in his famous essay on Baudelaire. Bourget concludes his discussion of the bibelot by proclaiming its fundamental importance to the comprehension of much of the literature of his time: Le bibelot . . . C’est une mode, et qui s’en ira comme une autre; mais l’analyste de notre socie´te´ contemporaine ne peut pas plus la ne´gliger que l’historien du grand sie`cle ne saurait laisser sous silence le paysage taille´ du parc de Versailles. La noble poe´sie de Racine est en rapport e´troit avec l’horizon qui se voit de la terrasse du vieux palais, et une grande portion de notre litte´rature actuelle demeure inintelligible sans l’aspect de magasin de bric-a`-brac habituel a` nos installations. (p. ) [The bibelot . . . It is a fashion which will disappear like any other, but the analyst of our contemporary society can no more ignore it than the historian of the great century can silently pass over the manicured landscape of the Versailles gardens. The noble poetry of Racine is closely tied to the horizon visible from the terrasse of the old palace, and a large part of our current literature remains unintelligible without the presence of the curiosity shop so common to our scenery.]

Had the ‘‘magasin de bric-a`-brac’’ actually usurped the cultural place of the Versailles gardens, Le Noˆtre’s royal monument of landscape architecture? What are the implications of claiming such a substitution? The Versailles park represents a grandiose rationalization of nature which submits an entire horizon to seventeenth-century monarchial power. In contrast, the magasins de bric-a`-brac which populate the nineteenthcentury urban cityscape represent displays of cultural debris which circulate in the marketplace, propelled by fashion (‘‘C’est une mode’’). Under the Third Republic, fashion has replaced the monarch as arbiter of style. Urban daily life has replaced court life as the locus of culture. Le Noˆtre’s rationalization of nature gives way to a pervasive commodification of culture – at least as conceptualized in Bourget’s spatialization of the literary imaginary. The intimate relationship which ties material space, such as the Versailles park and the antique/junk shop, to the literary works for which they provide a visual field, would seem to suggest that material



Literature and material culture

culture provides the backdrop for the staging of literary production. However, it is important to be wary of the shiftiness inherent in the foreground/background distinction, especially in nineteenth-century narrative forms, where the things in space traditionally relegated to the background suddenly move to the foreground, first in the realist description, then even more dramatically in the heavily descriptive narratives of naturalism and decadence. As material objects multiply during the nineteenth century, material culture is accorded more and more space in the literary text. Balzac establishes ample space for material culture in the novel, but positions it in the background. In certain of their novels, Flaubert, the Goncourts, and Huysmans move material culture into the foreground. A sense of instability is created by the foregrounding of elements ordinarily considered as background, such as bibelots, resulting in the sort of imbalance which characterizes what Naomi Schor has called the ‘‘ornamental text.’’ The destabilizing effects of foregrounding the background mirrors the cultural effects of the replacement of the monarch by the amorphous forces of the market. The bibelot affords a unique perspective on material culture precisely because it is a moving vantage point, shifting from background to foreground, through the spaces of art, commerce, and private life, through material space and literary space. The bibelot creates and is created by this movement, forms and is formed by the subjects which manipulate it, whether these subjects be writers or their characters, explicitly fictive or purportedly non-fiction.

 

The logic(s) of material culture Imitation, accumulation, and mobility

To call an object a ‘‘bibelot’’ is to place it in a category, therefore to classify it. Categorizing and classifying are key steps in the processes of organizing and establishing order. And yet, as demonstrated in the previous chapter, the category ‘‘bibelot’’ is fraught with ambiguity, put to often contradictory uses as a result of the disparities among the items that the category includes. Complicating matters is the consideration that the category ‘‘bibelot’’ calls forth several networks of terms used to classify, describe, and evaluate the various objects included within it, terms from the lexicons of the fine arts, the decorative arts, interior decor, collecting, the souvenir, commerce, home economics, and more. If, as I have suggested, the creation of the category ‘‘bibelot’’ is part of a modern and modernizing reconfiguration, reorganization, and recodification of material culture necessitated by a multiplication of objects in daily life, then what kind of reorganization is this? What kind of logic can accommodate or even account for such a disorderly order? Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘‘logic of practice’’ can be usefully applied to the contradictions and ambiguities of the category ‘‘bibelot.’’ The ‘‘logic of practice’’ is to be understood in opposition to the logic of analysis used by modernist scholars such as anthropologists (in the structuralist tradition), sociologists (in the positivist tradition), or philosophers of art (in the Kantian tradition). It should be noted that many social scientists have since abandoned the analytic logic that Bourdieu is critiquing here, the logic of a highly formalist, descriptive sort, based on mechanistic, rigid, positivist models. The idea of practical logic, clearly inspired by Le´vi-Strauss’s notions of totemic logic and bricolage, is applied by Bourdieu both to the Kabyle culture of Algeria and to French bourgeois culture. The point is that the formalist analytic logic of a (now-dated) sort of theory is inadequate for explaining the key features of either culture, for in their practical 



Literature and material culture

dimensions, although cultural phenomena like ritual, daily activities, social structures, and perceptual categories of taste evidently do follow perceivable patterns, these are only logical up to a point. The organizational coherence perceptible in the structures, patterns, and categories of daily life, as well as in the categories of art appreciation, are products of practical logic. Daily life involves many acts of classification, of food, of tools, of activities, of people, etc. These classifications are generated not from theoretical schemas developed through careful analysis, but from basic oppositions or ‘‘practical taxonomies’’ which consist in ‘‘oppositions between up and down, masculine (or virile) and feminine, etc.,’’ oppositions which shape our thinking in a not entirely conscious way, guiding ‘‘our perceptions of the social world.’’ Such ‘‘practical taxonomies’’ or classificatory oppositions are internalized by the members of a society and go largely unquestioned. They are not entirely ‘‘logical’’ in the Aristotelian sense. Indeed, ‘‘the classifications produced by these [practical] taxonomies owe their effectiveness to the fact that they are ‘practical,’ that they allow one to introduce just enough logic for the needs of practical behavior, neither too much – since a certain vagueness is often indispensable, especially in negotiations – nor too little, since life would then become impossible.’’ The bibelot belongs to a world of material objects structured by the practical logic of daily life, which is to say ‘‘just enough logic’’ to get by. Bourdieu suggests here that the ‘‘vagueness’’ of practical logic is necessary in situations such as negotiation. This same vagueness is also ‘‘indispensable’’ to literature; the extreme degree of vagueness exhibited by the classification ‘‘bibelot’’ lends itself beautifully to the literary ‘‘uses of uncertainty’’ of which Flaubert is the recognized master among nineteenth-century French authors. Though Bourdieu distinguishes practical logic from the logic of analysis, he shows that these are not entirely separate ways of thinking, for practical logic actually underpins the ‘‘theoretical’’ logic of formal analysis, and this because the above-mentioned ‘‘practical taxonomies’’ guide our constructions of scholarly analytical classifications as well. The thinking of ethnologists and other academics can be compared to that of ‘‘the ‘primitives’ who classify objects according to whether they are wet or dry, hot or cold, up or down, right or left, and so on.’’ For example, political scientists use the practical taxonomy right/left to classify politicians. Through practical taxonomies, the logic of practice permeates the logic of formalist analysis. The distinctions and overlaps

The logic(s) of material culture



between formal logic and practical logic are crucial to the workings of material culture. The case of the bibelot serves as an excellent illustration of this point, bringing together as it does the domains of the household, the marketplace, collecting, and the museum. The formal taxonomic logic of the encyclopedia and of the modern museum is not the only logic of material culture. Practical logic is at work as well, even within the walls of the museum. Itself a classificatory category generated through practical logic, the term ‘‘bibelot’’ is in turn defined and described with other oppositional pairs or ‘‘practical taxonomies.’’ The primary opposition brought into play by the category ‘‘bibelot’’ is useful/useless, since it designates those goods which are superfluous, as opposed to those with an immediate use-value. However, in cases where certain connotations or uses of the term bibelot are contradicted by others, the classification ‘‘bibelot’’ shifts to encompass first one pole of an oppositional pair and then the other, destabilizing the underlying practical taxonomies. For example, depending on the context, as shown in examples throughout this book, ‘‘bibelot’’ designates objects which are ‘‘valuable’’ or ‘‘worthless,’’ ‘‘old’’ or ‘‘new,’’ ‘‘beautiful’’ or ‘‘merely pretty,’’ ‘‘artistic’’ or ‘‘kitsch,’’ etc. The classification ‘‘bibelot,’’ as it is used in literary and para-literary discourse, is based on systematic contradiction, in that oppositions are evoked only to be undermined. For this reason, the classification ‘‘bibelot’’ pushes ‘‘practical logic’’ to its limits. Another difficulty with the category ‘‘bibelot’’ is that it draws on the categories of art appreciation, categories whose ‘‘logic’’ remains largely practical, despite the best efforts of philosophers like Kant. In discussing the categories of art appreciation in The Rules of Art, Bourdieu again relies on the idea of ‘‘practical logic.’’ Artistic judgments ‘‘are organized according to a structure, but one which does not have the formal rigor of a properly logical construction’’ (p. ). To illustrate, Bourdieu cites a contemporary art historian (Michael Baxandall) commenting on the critical categories of a fifteenth-century critic (Cristoforo Landino): Pure, easy, gracious, ornate, varied, prompt, blithe, devout, relief, perspective, colouring and composition, design and foreshortening, imitator of Nature, lover of the difficulties – Landino offers a basic conceptual equipment for addressing Quattrocento pictorial quality. His terms have a structure: one is opposed to, or is allied with, or is subsumed by, or overlaps another. It would not be difficult to draw a diagram in which these relationships were registered, but the diagram would imply a systematic rigidity which the terms in practice do not and should not have.



Literature and material culture

Baxandall here suggests an opposition between systematic analysis and practical analysis. Bourdieu makes the further point that the terms of art criticism originate not in philosophy, but in commerce, in the commissioning and trading of paintings. ‘‘Systematic rigidity’’ corresponds to philosophical logic, whereas the looser logic of ‘‘practice’’ corresponds to the domain of the art market. The same is true of bibelots. Like the lexicon of terms which Baxandall provides in this citation, an extensive vocabulary for evaluating and categorizing bibelots develops out of the practices of collecting and trading bibelots in antique shops and at auctions. Erudite works on collecting and the decorative arts published in the nineteenth century develop this lexicon into a set of terms which serves as the ‘‘conceptual equipment’’ for describing bibelots, terms like those of the fifteenth-century critic cited here (which are not altogether unlike those still used today). This vocabulary of bibelot-appreciation is then vulgarized in decorating and collecting ‘‘how-to’’ manuals aimed at the middle classes. Journalists, essayists, and novelists also borrow from this lexicon. Like the terms cited by Baxandall, the terms used to evaluate bibelots ‘‘have a structure’’ which, in practice, does not conform to systematic rigidity. A ‘‘plurality of logics,’’ then, guides perceptions of material culture. Different practical and formal logics organize different fields (champs) of cultural production. The growing autonomy of cultural fields like art, literature, science, private space, commerce, etc., is widely recognized as a distinctive feature of modernity. However, many of the perceptual categories of practical and formal logic cut across several of these fields, the bibelot and related terms being among these. The remainder of this chapter is organized around three terms which are not immediately recognizable as applicable to domestic goods, collectibles, or art objects, but which occur repeatedly in discussions of the bibelot: imitation, accumulation, and mobility. These terms function in conjunction with and in opposition to many others. Each opens up sets of issues related to the topic at hand, the place of the bibelot in the modernizing reconfiguration, reorganization, and reencoding of material culture.         From one perspective, ‘‘imitation’’ presupposes the equally pervasive antonym, ‘‘authentic.’’ From another perspective, ‘‘imitation’’ presupposes a different antonym, ‘‘original.’’ Both sets of antonyms are

The logic(s) of material culture



brought to the forefront during the industrial revolution, since the issue of imitation is often linked to the copying or reproduction of older stylistic forms. As a result, in this context the notion of imitation calls forth further oppositions such as old/new and artistic/industrial. That the theme of ‘‘imitation’’ is endemic to modern (and postmodern) culture is amply demonstrated in Hillel Schwartz’s recent weighty book, The Culture of the Copy. The theme of imitation in modern culture is of course not limited to industrial production, nor to the forms of ‘‘mechanical reproduction’’ discussed in Benjamin’s famous essay. Imitation, or ‘‘emulation,’’ to use Veblen’s term, is also a key concept in discussions of social stratification. Bourgeois culture is often seen as imitative of noble or artistic models, which implicitly represent ‘‘authentic’’ culture. However, the binary imitation/authenticity breaks down upon closer examination of the chain of who serves as a model for whom. In the case of the nineteenthcentury bibelot-filled interior (what I will call ‘‘the artistic interior’’), members of the cultural elite imitate collectors and artists; artists imitate a romanticized image of themselves; the newly wealthy imitate the cultural elite; the middle classes imitate representations of the decor of their cultural superiors that they see in shop windows, in the newspaper, in novels, and at the theater. In this sense, fashion itself is a form of imitation. The chain of social imitations commonly known as fashion motivated a series of manufactured imitations: copies and reproductions of the objects necessary to furnish fashionable fin-de-sie`cle interiors. It should be noted that the techniques of mass production only gradually transform the world of objects in nineteenth-century France, in contrast to the rapid mechanization of industry in England and Germany. For many years partial mechanization characterized French industry, whose particular strength is luxury goods. Reproductions of antiques produced by partially mechanized artisanal methods predominated among the decorative goods on the collectors’ market, as well as in retail stores. Historians now attribute the slowness of French industrialization not to some sort of ‘‘backwardness,’’ but rather to consumer demand for high-quality, aesthetically pleasing goods. The widespread taste for the bibelot can be seen as part of this trend, since bibelots are produced by the entire range of technological innovation, from hand-production to partial mechanization to fully industrialized mass production. Industrial improvements developed during the mid-nineteenth century enabled the manufacture of the imitations of art objects and



Literature and material culture

luxury goods, thereby making luxury objects available and affordable to hundreds of new consumers. These new technologies include ‘‘zinc d’art,’’ ‘‘bronze d’art,’’ and ‘‘galvanoplastie,’’ as well as techniques which speed the production and decoration of glass, crystal, porcelain, and pottery. ‘‘Dans les diverses branches de l’art de la reproduction tout a e´te´ transforme´ depuis un demi-sie`cle’’ [‘‘The various branches of reproductive art have been completely transformed over the last halfcentury’’], remarks the Revue des arts de´coratifs in . Most of these production methods remained partially artisanal, and should not be conflated with the mass production of full industrialization. These various production methods increased the output, availability, and affordability of home furnishings, especially decorative items like bibelots. This increased production of furnishings and decorative objects was accompanied by an increased production of professional and specialized writing about them, the publication of which peaked in the s. The topic of imitation arises frequently in these texts, which almost without exception make liberal use of the term ‘‘bibelot’’ in referring to decorative objects. Chief among these publications is the Revue des arts de´coratifs, which from its first appearance in  combines the voices of arts administrators, scholars deploying an erudite art-historical discourse, elite collectors, museum curators, art critics, and even some producers from the luxury-arts industries. Several important interior decorating manuals were published during this decade, some targeting decorating professionals, others aimed at a middle-class public. This body of writing is marked by inconsistencies, often within the same article or book, resulting from conflicts among its several goals: the elevation of the taste of the public, the preservation and historical study of French decorative arts treasures from the past, the commercial promotion of the French decorative arts industries, and the perpetuation of aesthetic standards of elitist collectors. The two latter goals, industry promotion and ‘‘high-brow’’ aesthetics, often simultaneously embraced by the same writer, necessarily create an uneasy ambivalence in regard to imitations and reproductions. Writers of the literary sphere tend to express negative attitudes toward imitations and reproductions, since for the most part they do not share the goal of promoting the decorative arts industries. Even Edmond de Goncourt, himself involved with many of the above-mentioned arts administrators, curators, art critics, and art collectors, shows little or no tolerance for industrial imitation of any kind.

The logic(s) of material culture



Because the techniques of reproduction are many, encompassing the full range from artisanal to mass production, it is necessary to think about degrees of imitation in sorting out these published critiques of it. This complicates and therefore destabilizes the anchoring pole of the oppositions we set out to examine in this section, imitation/authentic and imitation/model or original. The various types – or degrees – of imitation can be divided into four groups: fakes, high-quality reproductions, simulated luxury materials, and the machine-made imitations of industrial mass-production. First, there are imitations best defined as fakes – modern copies which are marketed as antiques by ‘‘fabricants de fausses antiquite´s’’ and ‘‘marchands de vieux-neuf.’’ It is here that the opposition old/new comes into play. The market for fakes prospers from the s to the end of the century, thanks to the popularity of the bibelot: Malgre´ les commotions les plus violentes, le Bibelot re`gne toujours en souverain maiˆtre. Il faut bien que le nombre des antiquite´s augmente en raison directe de celui des amateurs; et c’est se bercer d’illusions que de vouloir empeˆcher les naı¨fs d’acheter des vieilleries vendues par des truqueurs de profession. [Despite the most violent commotion, the Bibelot still reigns as sovereign master. The number of antiques must of course increase in direct proportion to the number of collectors. We are deluding ourselves in wanting to prevent the naive from buying the old-fashioned things sold by professional cheats.]

This citation is taken from Paul Eudel’s Le Truquage (), which describes in detail the fabrication of different types of counterfeit antiques. The ‘‘truqueurs de profession’’ take full advantage of the many new collectors seduced by the charm of the bibelot. In the context of the growing problem of fakes passed off for authentic antiques, Bosc redefines the term ‘‘bric-a`-brac’’ in :   -` -   . – Dans son sens ge´ne´rique, ce terme sert a` de´signer toute sorte d’objets vieux, tels que bahuts, armures, bronzes, tableaux, etc. Le gouˆt prononce´ du public pour ces sortes d’objets a donne´ lieu a` une industrie nouvelle, la fabrication du vieux neuf, exe´cute´e plus ou moins habilement. Il faut souvent un oeil tre`s exerce´ pour distinguer un vieil objet de curiosite´ authentique d’avec un objet faux. En ge´ne´ral, le mot bric-a`-brac est employe´ comme terme de me´pris; on l’applique dans la langue usuelle a` des objets de peu de valeur. [  -  -   . – In its generic sense, this term designates all sorts of old objects, such as chests, armor, bronzes, paintings, etc. The public’s marked taste for these sorts of objects has given rise to a new industry, the manufacture of the new old-fashioned, more or less well-made. Distinguishing an authentic curiosity from a

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false one often requires a very practiced eye. The word bric-a`-brac is generally used pejoratively. In common parlance it refers to objects of little value.]

Once associated with old objects, for Bosc the word ‘‘bric-a`-brac’’ now encompasses both new imitations of old valuables and old objects of no value. In previous times ‘‘old’’ was a negative attribute; in the age of the bibelot ‘‘old’’ is often synonymous with ‘‘authentic.’’ The opposition ‘‘vieux’’/‘‘neuf’’ folds into the opposition ‘‘authentique’’/‘‘faux,’’ now that many old objects have acquired value as antiques. However, the first opposition cannot be reduced to the second. The second type of imitation comprises those which do not pretend to be authentic; these are reproductions rather than fakes. In responding to these products which made up an important part of the French decorative arts industries in the latter part of the century, tastemaking writers sympathetic to the concerns of trade found themselves torn between aesthetics and commerce. Most of them discuss well-made reproductions sympathetically, though with many cautions. For example, in his decorating manual Spire Blondel praises the mid-nineteenth-century invention of a technique for making exact bronze reduced copies of statues, writing that ‘‘aujourd’hui, il est peu d’inte´rieurs, meˆmes modestes, ou` l’on ne trouve quelques bonnes re´ductions de l’antique’’ [‘‘there are today few interiors, even modest ones, without some good reproductions of antiques’’]. In a similar spirit, Eudel (cited above) carefully distinguishes the reproduction, or avowed imitation, from the fake, writing that ‘‘Du moment ou` vous ne donnez pas une copie comme authentique, l’imitation est parfaitement le´gitime’’ [‘‘As long as you do not proclaim a copy authentic, imitation is perfectly legitimate’’]. Honesty helps legitimate the reproduction of art works. Even though Eudel himself numbers among collecting’s elite, he does accept avowed reproductions. He even notes that such imitations can be ‘‘useful’’ for the arts, pointing out that the imitation ‘‘est souvent tre`s utile aux peintres et aux statuaires, dont elle vulgarise les oeuvres’’ [‘‘is often very useful to painters and sculptors, whose works it popularizes’’] (ibid.). In other words, reproductions publicize the work of artists, making them known to a wide audience. The higher purpose of art thus valorizes these miniaturized reproductions of statues, which might otherwise be considered to be superfluous decorative objects. ‘‘Art’’ is often used to justify, legitimate, and sell the new decorative products of nineteenth-century industry. Consider the following statements by two decorative arts professionals:

The logic(s) of material culture

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le plus admirable de tous les progre`s, c’est la vulgarisation, par le bon marche´, des oeuvres de gouˆt, de luxe et de fantaisie, et nous sommes heureux de constater que l’immense majorite´ du public, a` qui les arts d’imitation ont permis une foule de jouissances dont elle fut si longtemps sevre´e, partage entie`rement notre avis. [popularizing tasteful, luxurious, fanciful works by making them affordable is the most admirable of all advances. We are happy to report that our opinion is shared by the vast majority of the public, for whom the imitative arts have provided a host of great pleasures, from which they were so long cut off.] Le ge´nie de la science moderne semble avoir eu pour objet de diminuer (en attendant peut-eˆtre de la de´truire un jour) le privile`ge exclusif de la richesse en rendant accessibles a` des fortunes modestes les produits les plus merveilleux de l’industrie et de l’art. Ce qui est certain, c’est que les belles de´couvertes de la science ont aujourd’hui pour re´sultat de distribuer a` un tre`s grand nombre les jouissances de la vie, dont les plus nobles et les plus vives sont le sentiment et la possession du beau. [In making accessible the most marvelous products of industry and the arts, the genius of modern science seems to have held as its goal the diminution (perhaps awaiting its destruction some day) of the exclusive privilege of wealth. Certainly, the great discoveries of science have today resulted in the distribution of life’s pleasures to the many. Among these pleasures, the most noble and vivid are the feeling for and the possession of the beautiful.]

In their promotion of the democratization of comfort and luxury, both of these defenses of ‘‘les arts d’imitation’’ are informed by what Philip Nord calls ‘‘republican politics.’’ The first writer cited celebrates the imitative arts for making tasteful, luxurious, fanciful goods more affordable; this ‘‘vulgarisation’’ is considered to be ‘‘[du] progre`s.’’ The second writer credits ‘‘le ge´nie de la science moderne’’ with making the marvelous products of industry and art available to those of modest means. Luxury is no longer restricted to the rich. The middle classes can now afford the ‘‘noble’’ pleasures in life, ‘‘le sentiment et la possession du beau.’’ By linking ‘‘sentiment’’ and ‘‘possession’’ with a simple ‘‘et,’’ then with ‘‘[le] beau,’’ the writer implies that the noble, even sublime sentiments aroused by the ‘‘beau’’ can be accessed by purchasing beautiful things. The writers place reproductions on high moral ground by evoking the popular causes of progress, modern science, and the democratization of tasteful luxury goods. Each of these themes calls upon a powerful ideology. The writers group all of these together for the purposes of legitimating the reproduction of aristo-

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cratic decor for the middle classes. Nord reads such moralistic, politicized writings on domestic furnishings as a part of an elaboration of bourgeois values. Manuals and journal articles such as those cited here tend to equate tasteful home decor with values such as the love of virtue and the appreciation of artistic beauty. While moral values are clearly at issue, another motivating force behind this barrage of legitimating discourses and ideologies must not be forgotten, and that is the force of consumer capitalism. These two brief statements ardently defend the increased production and consumption of goods for a much broader market than before, for a range of consumers unprecedented in number. The third type of imitation is the simulation of expensive substances – ‘‘imitations d’or, de bijoux, de parures de tout genre, d’objets d’art de toute nature et de toute matie`re, simili-bronze, simili-marbre, etc’’ [‘‘imitations of gold, jewels, all manner of ornament, all sorts of objects in all substances, simulated bronze, simulated marble, etc.’’]. The opposition between art and luxury underpins the criticism of this type of imitation. This helps explain a rather rigorous critique of such simulations, in a decorating manual sympathetic to reproductions of sculpture in the form of casts: un bon moulage est partout bien place´ . . . Ce qu’il importe, . . . c’est la bonne foi. Simili bois, simili pierre, simili marbre, simili bronze, c’est-a`-dire ce qui domine trop malheureusement un peu partout dans les milieux qui nous occupent [the modern middle-class apartment], devrait eˆtre banni impitoyablement. [a good cast is well-placed anywhere . . . Honesty . . . is what counts. Unfortunately, simulated wood, stone, marble, or bronze predominates everywhere in the settings with which we are concerned +the modern middle-class apartment,. These simulated substances should be banned without pity.]

This manual shows a marked ambivalence toward imitation. Wellmade casts of statues are acceptable and even desirable, while imitations of expensive substances are denounced. Even industry professionals find it difficult to assimilate the cheap reproduction of traditional decorative materials. Though the discourse of decorating professionals informs and echoes that of literary writers, a decidedly negative attitude toward imitation prevails among the latter, in their journalism as well as in their fiction. For example, in Zola’s scathing portrayal of the bourgeoisie in his novel Pot-Bouille, the adjective ‘‘faux’’ appears repeatedly in descriptions of the

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simulated luxury of the modern Haussmannian apartment building in which this novel is set. Unlike the above-cited industry representatives who speak favorably of reproduction (the second type of imitation), most literary writers would consider the phrases ‘‘arts d’imitation’’ and ‘‘art de la reproduction’’ to be oxymorons. These denunciations must be taken with a proverbial grain of salt, however, since, with the possible exception of the Goncourts, these literary writers make use of reproductions and even fakes in their own decor; such is certainly the case of Balzac, Zola, Huysmans, and Maupassant. The fourth and final category of imitation, that of industrialized mass-production, inspires harsh words in both professional and literary discourse. Here the categories of bibelot and kitsch overlap. In a decorating manual explicitly dedicated to middle-class housewives, Henri de Noussane speaks out against the cheapest bibelots, those made by machine: La machine triomphe. Elle produit par milliers des imitations grossie`res de meubles de´licats. La pacotille a` effet est mise a` la porte´e de toutes les bourses. He´las! cette pacotille ne de´veloppe pas les instincts artistiques; elle encourage les appe´tits de luxe, dangereux appe´tits. [The machine is triumphant, producing by the thousands crude imitations of delicate furnishings. Cheap trinkets are now within the grasp of all pocketbooks. Alas! these trinkets do not develop artistic instincts, but rather encourage the appetite for luxury, a dangerous appetite.]

Noussane relies on the dichotomy art/luxury to support his critique of mass reproduction. Cheap copies perpetuate the love of luxury, not the love of art. Echoing this anti-mass production sentiment with particular violence, Huysmans eloquently denounces industrial imitations of the lowest quality – or ‘‘l’ignominieuse camelote des pastiches lance´s dans le commerce’’ [‘‘the ignominious junk of pastiches thrown into the marketplace’’], as he puts it. His colorfully vehement response is particularly telling: Ce n’est donc pas assez que le premier venu puisse copier a` la grosse les meubles du Muse´e de Cluny! Je sais bien que l’on n’est pas oblige´ de les acheter, mais il faut bien les voir puisqu’ils emplissent des boulevards entiers et des rues! – Et que sont ces boutiques a` coˆte´ de ces magasins de faux Se`vres et de faux Saxe dont le boulevard Saint-Germain regorge? [It isn’t enough that any firstcomer can copy the Cluny museum’s furnishings by by the gross! I realize one is not obligated to buy, but one cannot avoid

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Literature and material culture

seeing them since they fill entire boulevards and streets! – And what are these boutiques next to the shops of fake Se`vres and fake Saxe, which abound on the Boulevard Saint-Germain.]

Though it is not clear whether the neo-Gothic furnishings in question represent the well-made reproductions of skilled craftsmen, or mass production (hinted at by the phrase ‘‘a` la grosse’’), the target is clearly the entire industrialization process. Quantity is emphasized with strongly worded phrasing evoking an image of overflow (‘‘emplissent,’’ ‘‘regorge’’), which raises the issue of accumulation, the subject of the next section of this chapter. But it is not only the poor quality and mass quantity of these wares that Huysmans finds offensive, it is also and especially their inescapable display. After a description of the vulgar colors and neo-rococo decorations of industrial porcelain, the passage continues: L’horreur de cette vaisselle est incomparable et, quoi qu’on fasse, meˆme en changeant de trottoir, il faut qu’on la subisse, car l’oeil attire´ par cette couleur crue s’e´gare quand meˆme vers elle et s’y attarde; il y a la` une impulsion force´e, morbide, l’attraction de l’horrible, la malacie du monstrueux, le pica du laid! – Et je ne parle pas des redoutables e´talages des pendules artistiques Louis XIII, fabrique´es par des ne´gociants dont l’extermination lente et complique´e me serait douce! [The horror of this dishware is incomparable. No matter what one does, even changing sidewalks, one must suffer it. Drawn by the crude colors, the eye wanders toward it and pauses anyway. This impulse is forced, morbid, the attraction of the horrible, the inedibility of the monstrous, and the acidity of the ugly! – Not to mention the formidable displays of artistic Louis XIII clocks, made by dealers whose long, complicated extermination would seem sweet to me.]

These products of industrial mass production horrify Huysmans’s narrator. The obscure terms ‘‘pica’’ and ‘‘malacie’’ refer to deprivations of the appetite, morbid likings for the inedible and for the acidic (respectively). Furthermore, the streets of Paris inspire in the narrator a Benjaminian ‘‘shock’’ strong enough to produce murderous intentions, provoked not by the crowd of people but rather by the intrusive invasion of consumer goods. This is not the case with the traditional, stupidly innocent nonindustrial popular art of equally poor taste, ‘‘car, en somme, ces pauvrete´s ne gaˆtaient rien et surtout ne contaminaient point, sous pre´texte d’art applique´ a` l’industrie, les oeuvres originales de Muse´es’’ [‘‘since, after all, these poor things spoiled nothing, and above all did not

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contaminate original Museum works, under the auspices of art applied to industry’’]. It is here that Huysmans seems to strike at the heart of the problem of the modern implications of the term ‘‘industrial art’’: the ‘‘contamination’’ of high culture, as if industrialized imitation were a disease. Though the cheap industrial decorative object in no way presents the danger of confusion with its model, as is the case with the fake, and though it is not especially in worse taste than the naive hand-made object of popular art, it mimics too closely ‘‘les oeuvres originales’’ of museums, producing an acute discomfort. It is with an obvious bitter irony that Huysmans uses the adjective ‘‘artistiques’’ in reference to the Louis XIII clocks, although it is a common marketing term at this time. The various pronouncements about imitation in the body of writing I have been citing do more that record and document an ambivalence toward industrial reproduction. These publications help teach the middle classes that their interior reflects their character and that of their family. Consumers are shown how to express themselves by the good taste of their furnishings. Of equal importance, this writing helps to set in place a schema for evaluating and judging these new products. By making distinctions between different types of imitation (for example, casts of statuettes versus simulated gold or marble), subtle gradations in quality can be used to differentiate among items which are very much alike, creating new ‘‘categories of perception’’ (Bourdieu’s term). The basis for social ‘‘distinction’’ is maintained, for even though luxury is spreading, the democratization of luxury is only allowed to go so far: although the middle classes can buy decorative goods which resemble those of elite collectors, they are at the same time given the means to understand the exact degree of inferiority of what they purchase.       The proliferation of the bibelot raises the problem of accumulation, as signaled by the recurrence of certain expressions cited in this and the previous chapter: encombrer, amasser, inonder, myriades, torrent, proportions inouı¨es, flot montant, de´bordant, a` la grosse, emplir, regorger, s’amonceler, profusion [to encumber, to amass, to inundate, myriads, torrent, unheard-of proportions, rising tide, overflowing, in bulk, to fill, to abound in, to pile up, profusion]. These terms are rarely, if ever, meant to be flattering, for accumulation poses practical problems on at least three levels: physical, aesthetic, and moral. Physically, there is the problem of what to do with

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Literature and material culture

material abundance, where to put it, how to arrange it, how to display it. Aesthetically, accumulation produces the effect of disorder, confusion, and incoherence. On the moral order accumulation is associated with greed, decadence, licentiousness, gratuity, purposelessness, and vulgar materialism. While aesthetes and other fashion-minded Parisians who enthusiastically embraced the bibelot typically rejected or dismissed the moral condemnation of accumulation, even they faced the physical and aesthetic dilemmas associated with it. Collecting and accumulation function as a dichotomous pair. When an accumulation is reframed as a collection, each of the negative moral attributes of accumulation listed above translates into its ‘‘positive’’ counterpart. For example, mere accumulation represents the hoarding of a miscellaneous group of things gathered for no useful purpose other than the satisfaction of lustful greed. In contrast, a collection represents the systematic gathering of a selective group of things for higher purposes such as science, aesthetics, or memory preservation. Collecting mobilizes powerful legitimating discourses such as science, art, sentimentality, and conservation to justify interest in material, earthly things. Accumulation is irrational, sensuous, and libidinal. Collecting is orderly, intellectual, and purposeful. The concept of the collection not only justifies and legitimates the acquisition of otherwise superfluous material things, but also provides them with meaning, value, and organizational principles. From another perspective, collecting is not the opposite of accumulation, but rather a form of it, and a historically specific one at that. The pattern of accumulation specific to a particular time and place could be called a ‘‘mode of accumulation,’’ and would correspond to Marx’s ‘‘mode of production.’’ Collecting bibelots symptomatizes the mode of accumulation which characterizes nineteenth-century Europe and North America, caught up in the grip of emerging mass consumption. What I am calling ‘‘mode of accumulation’’ determines the fate of surplus material goods circulating in the economy, the way they are acquired and by whom, as well as how they are stored, displayed, and disposed of. The bibelot is by definition associated with surplus, and is a visible marker of a shift in the mode of accumulation which corresponds to the rise of industrial capitalism, the mode of production of late nineteenth-century France. I have chosen to speak of a ‘‘mode of accumulation’’ rather than a ‘‘mode of consumption’’ because the category ‘‘bibelot’’ includes so many objects which are not considered to be consumer goods (defined as those recently manufactured objects which pass through the marketplace by means of monetary exchange).

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More comprehensive than the notion of consumption is that of accumulation, which comprises not only the purchase of consumer goods, but also the acquisition of material artifacts through non-market mechanisms like plunder, ‘‘primitive’’ exchange (such as that practiced by ethnologists like Captain Cook), gift exchange, inheritance, secondhand markets, auctions, and the ‘‘recycling’’ of debris. Furthermore, bibelots are generally not ‘‘used up’’ or ‘‘consumed,’’ but rather are stockpiled, which is more in keeping with the notion of accumulation than with that of consumption. For these reasons, the nineteenthcentury bibelot is best thought of as a pre-consumer object. It is an object poised on the brink of full-fledged mass consumption. Collecting serves as a basic mechanism for the ‘‘mode of accumulation’’ of emergent mass consumption. The logic and mechanisms of collecting inform the entire nineteenth-century world of objects, providing models for displaying and classifying goods in such diverse spaces as the living room, the department store, and the museum. Collecting, as notion and practice, provides an already familiar model for addressing the threefold problem of accumulation – physical problems of storage, aesthetic problems of display, and moral problems of justifiable purpose. Collecting must be understood as part of a broader process of assimilating, managing, and promoting the material accumulation which results from the multiplication of objects during the consumer revolution. The accumulations of things typically associated with fin-de-sie`cle bourgeois decor hardly correspond to twentieth-century notions of the collection, which is seen as more selective and orderly than it was a century ago. Because nineteenth-century collections were so eclectic, the terms listed at the beginning of this section were often used to criticize the period’s decor. These very terms in fact come to characterize the ‘‘mode of accumulation’’ of this era, a mode very different than that which currently prevails in the United States and Europe. The density of objects found in even the most elegant interiors of the s and s would strike most people today as cluttered, chaotic, and utterly unlivable. As Peter Thornton explains in discussing traits shared by Victorian and fin-de-sie`cle Parisian interiors, those who lived in them perceived them differently than we do: The characteristic Victorian look, it is commonly believed, was one of clutter, bold patterns, suffocating drapery and a proliferation of ornaments . . . One must . . . remember that most Victorians liked [this look]: it did not seem cluttered to them. Clearly, the Victorian eye – or rather, the Western eye

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between  and  – was exceptionally ready to assimilate complex patterns, whether in the form of ornament or as combinations of objects.

The disposition of the ‘‘Western eye’’ towards these ‘‘complex patterns’’ in ornament or object groupings is the historically necessary condition for the reign of the bibelot in European decor. The practice of collecting cultivates this ocular predisposition. The Occidental eye has changed; we no longer appreciate nor even understand such complex arrangements, which are usually less chaotic than they appear to us. The success of these ‘‘complex patterns’’ in fact depends on their subtly structured organization, as the ‘‘how-to’’ books on home decorating are quick to explain. Blondel offers an axiom to this effect: Les produits de l’Art Intime, quelque magnifiques, quelque luxueux, quelque pre´cieux qu’ils puissent eˆtre, perdent toute leur valeur de´corative s’ils ne sont groupe´s avec gouˆt, ordre et syme´trie. [The products of Intimate Art, as magnificent, luxurious and precious as they may be, lose all of their decorative value if they are not grouped together with taste, order and symmetry.]

Yet in spite of its underlying structure, the salient feature of this decor remains its dense encumberment. To appreciate the specificity of the late nineteenth-century European mode of accumulation as manifested in the bibelot-filled interior, one has but to imagine other manifestations of accumulation, other modes specific to other times and places. Pierre Loti finds an alternative to the fin-de-sie`cle European mode of accumulation in the Far East. Loti was himself a passionate collector, gathering bibelots from ports around the world during his voyages as a French naval officer, while recounting these experiences in a series of largely autobiographical novels. Madame Chrysanthe`me is narrated in the first person by a naval officer at port in Japan. The officer ‘‘goes native’’ by adapting himself to the habits of Japanese daily life, taking up residence in a Japanese house with a Japanese concubine (Puccini’s opera Madam Butterfly was heavily influenced by this novel). Contrasting European collecting and decorating practices with those he finds in his new temporary home, the narrator explains that the Japanese collection is discreetly stored in albums and drawers, shown only to select visitors on special occasions. What he describes here can be seen as an alternative ‘‘mode of accumulation,’’ one very different from that of his Parisian contemporaries. He notes that though Japanese collectibles have become very popular among Parisian collectors, these are displayed in a decidedly un-Japanese manner:

The logic(s) of material culture

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Je souris en moi-meˆme au souvenir de certains salons dits japonais encombre´s de bibelots et tendus de grossie`res broderies d’or sur satin d’exportation, que j’ai vus chez les belles Parisiennes. Je leur conseille, a` ces personnes, de venir regarder comment sont ici les maisons des gens de gouˆt, – de venir visiter les solitudes blanches des palais de Yeddo. (p. ) [I smile to myself at the thought of certain so-called Japanese salons, cluttered with bibelots and hung with cheap gold-embroidered satin, which I have seen in the homes of beautiful Parisians. I advise such persons to come look at the homes of people of taste here, to come visit the white solitude of the palaces of Yeddo.]

The aesthetics of encumberment which reigns in the homes of highsociety women in s Paris is thus contrasted against the aesthetics of sobriety which reigns in the tastefully decorated homes of Japan. The narrator finds sobriety more tasteful than conspicuous accumulation. The narrator so admires the austere dignity of the Japanese interior that he becomes critical of the cluttered interior in vogue in Paris. Describing a visit to a Buddhist monastery, he remarks that ‘‘on se dit qu’il y a beaucoup trop de bibelots chez nous en France; on prend en grippe soudaine la profusion, l’encombrement’’ (p. ) [‘‘one realizes that there are far too many bibelots at home in France. One suddenly becomes nauseated by the profusion, by the encumberment’’]. And yet despite his admiration for Japanese austerity and his nausea (‘‘grippe’’) at the thought of European profusion, he cannot resist accumulating according to the patterns established by the ‘‘mode of accumulation’’ by which he is historically determined. During his stay in Japan, he continues to collect, filling his Japanese residence with a bounty of bibelots. Loti’s awareness of the practical and aesthetic problems inherent in the nineteenth-century European mode of accumulation is evidenced in the following remarks: Et ce que j’ache`te s’amoncelle la`-haut, dans ma maisonnette de bois et de papier; – elle e´tait bien plus japonaise pourtant, dans sa nudite´ premie`re . . . Il y a maintenant plusieurs lampes, de forme religieuse, qui descendent du plafond; beaucoup d’escabeaux et beaucoup de vases; des dieux et des de´esses autant que dans une pagode. (p. ) [And what I buy piles up, up there in my little house of wood and paper. It was, however, much more Japanese in its original bareness . . . Now several lamps, religious in form, hang down from the ceiling; numerous stools and vases; as many gods and goddesses as in a pagoda.]

Almost in spite of himself, the narrator too has amassed ‘‘beaucoup trop de bibelots,’’ he has not followed the example of his hosts. As he packs

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these things in preparing to leave, he becomes acutely aware of their physical mass: ‘‘Mais quel effrayant bagage! Dix-huit caisses ou paquets, de bouddhas, de chime`res, de vases’’ (p. ) [‘‘what frightful luggage! Eighteen cases or packages, Buddhas, chimeras, vases’’]. Loti presents his narrator-protagonist as a person acting compulsively. This is not unusual in the portrayal of the collector, although Loti does not use terms like ‘‘passion’’ and ‘‘desire,’’ as do writers like Balzac and Maupassant in their portrayals. What is singular about Loti’s depiction is the comparatist aspect, the contrast he makes between Parisian and Japanese collectors. Loti implies that the sort of collector’s compulsion which leads to the bibelot-filled living room is a culturally specific feature of European collecting practices. Just as Loti’s novel points to the cultural specificity of collecting bibelots, so Flaubert’s Trois contes provides insight into the phenomenon’s historical specificity. First, there is the matter of periodization, raised by the setting of each tale in a different epoch: ancient, medieval, and modern. This schema of periodization corresponds nicely to Marx’s historical ‘‘modes of production’’ (ancient, feudal, and capitalist), and can be said to correspond in turn to correlative modes of accumulation staged in Flaubert’s tales: ancient in ‘‘He´rodias,’’ feudal in ‘‘La Le´gende de Saint Julien l’hospitalier,’’ and capitalist in ‘‘Un Coeur simple.’’ These patterns of accumulation manifest themselves in the texts in the form of lists. In his essay ‘‘Flaubert’s Libidinal Historicism: Trois contes,’’ Fredric Jameson notes that in each tale the enumeration of a collection ‘‘interrupts the movements of agents and actants with a descriptive cumulation that seems irreducible to narrative meaning.’’ ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’ includes a list of ‘‘the debris, the broken objects and commemorative traces that surround the elderly Fe´licite´’’ (p. ). The narrator of ‘‘Saint Julien’’ lists ‘‘the phalanx of oneiric beasts, the ladder of the animal kingdom, that nags Julien’s steps like a remorse, even as he slaughters them in a frenzy of blood lust’’ (p. ). I would add that ‘‘Saint Julien’’ also includes seemingly insignificant lists depicting the material abundance in the paternal chaˆteau, the notation of barrels of wine, carpets, linens, oak chests, sacks of money, and a collection of weapons. Finally, ‘‘He´rodias’’ includes a rather lengthy passage listing the contents of the Biblical ruler Herod’s concealed vaults of treasures, weapons, and horses. Before further elaborating on the specific historical context of each collection, I would like to follow Jameson in shifting the question of history from the level of periodization to another level, one which one might call historical subjectivity, by which I mean the relationship

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between the author (or author-function) and history itself. What is intriguing about Jameson’s essay, and the reason I discuss it here, is the connection which he does not explicitly make, that between these enumerations and what he calls ‘‘libidinal historicism,’’ the main topic of the essay. This notion is coined for the purposes of rethinking ‘‘the writer’s relationship to history, to dead history, to the past, in some new way, which is no longer dominated by static ideas of representation or of some ‘vision of history’ in which a given artist is supposed to believe.’’ He continues, ‘‘Preferable, it would seem, is the notion of a libidinal investment in the past – indeed, of a libidinal historicism’’ (p. ). Here Jameson’s remarks can be fruitfully combined with Bourdieu’s opposition of practical logic to analytic logic. The ‘‘vision of history’’ which a critic would ascribe to an author corresponds to the rigid theoretical logic of positivist academic discourse. In contrast, Jameson’s ‘‘libidinal historicism’’ belongs to a more intuitive logic of practice. The notion of libidinal historicism allows for a reconceptualization of the complex relationship between the three tales, seemingly so disparate, comprising as they do not only the above-mentioned historical disparities, but also disparities of social position and genre. Fe´licite´ is a servant, while Julien is heir to a feudal fortune then a lord in his own right, and Herod is a Roman ruler. The servant Fe´licite´ treasures debris, while the two noblemen stockpile treasures. Because ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’ is set in late nineteenth-century bourgeois provincial France, it is the only tale which can be considered realist. With its omens, soothsayers, and prophetic dreams evocative of the mystical Christian Middle Ages, ‘‘Saint Julien’’ belongs to the tradition of the conte [folk or fairy tale]. ‘‘He´rodias,’’ set in the Middle Eastern despot’s palace, is more difficult to classify, but most resembles a Bible story. Historical setting is certainly the primary source of disparity among the tales. The question which Jameson formulates, however, is not so much one of period or genre, but rather one of historical subjectivity: why, we might ask ourselves, should this unquestionable nineteenth-century present, the object of a henceforth classical Flaubertian realism, project, not one, but two distinct pasts, two distinct and seemingly irreconcilable historical trajectories? The desacralized world seems indeed to fantasize its own genealogy in two separate semic systems: the medieval world, the world of miracles, faith and legend; and the classical world, which we have heard Flaubert admire for its despotism, the world of aesthetic sadism and ‘‘bloodlust,’’ of Delacroix’s La Mort de Sardanapale, the world of Salammboˆ and of what will shortly be termed, by the fin de sie`cle, de´cadence. (p. )

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Literature and material culture

The idea of fantasizing a ‘‘genealogy in two separate semic systems’’ suggests a fruitful way of thinking about the history of material culture. To rephrase Jameson’s formulation, in Flaubert’s triptych the nineteenth-century mode of accumulation projects its genealogy in two different directions, in ‘‘two distinct and irreconcilable historical trajectories,’’ each with its own distinct semic system. Flaubert inscribes in material culture, in the three collections, the traces of a connection between the seemingly separate modern, medieval, and classical worlds, through the gratuitous accumulation of narratively insignificant signifiers. It is highly significant that these signifiers refer to material things, many of them domestic goods. It is at once their sensual materiality and their insignificance that makes them well suited to serve as vehicles for libidinal impulses. Of the collections enumerated in Trois contes, only Fe´licite´’s could properly be assigned to the modern world of the bibelot, though the old servant’s treasures hardly merit even this often disparaging term. (Flaubert in fact does not use the term ‘‘bibelot’’ in ‘‘Un Coeur simple,’’ though he does use it repeatedly in referring to bourgeois accumulations and collections in L’Education sentimentale and Bouvard et Pe´cuchet). However, borrowing Jameson’s formulation, I would suggest that the accumulations of princely material goods enumerated in ‘‘Saint Julien’’ and ‘‘He´rodias’’ function as a genealogy of the servant Fe´licite´’s pitiful souvenirs – these include cheap religious trinkets, a shell-work box given her by her dead son, some of her bourgeois mistress’s old decorative castoffs, like artificial flowers, an engraving of a count, and of course the stuffed parrot Loulou. The servant’s room within the modern bourgeois interior depicted in ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’ can thus be read as the cultural counterpart to the private interiors of the ruling classes of the past, to the palaces of monarchs and despots as in ‘‘He´rodias,’’ and to the chaˆteaux of feudal lords as in ‘‘La Le´gende de Saint Julien l’hospitalier.’’ Flaubert does not, of course, set out to represent a history of the modes of accumulation, nor are material things in the three tales necessarily meant to function as historical decor. Rather, Flaubert exhibits a libidinal relationship not only to history, but also to material culture. Seen in the light of practical logic as outlined at the beginning of this chapter, ‘‘libidinal historicism’’ can be understood as a practice of experiencing history as the presence of the past, rather than as an analysis of history which produces academic narrative. The practice (as opposed to the study) of historicity produces what Jameson refers to as ‘‘some deeper fantasy about history itself.’’ History is, for Jameson, inseparable from

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political economy, hence the concluding sentence of his essay: ‘‘In Flaubert’s political unconscious then, the mode of representation has become the vehicle for an unresolvable libidinal meditation on the nature of modes of production’’ (p. ). I would add that since modes of production are inseparable from the modes of accumulation and consumption which fuel them, Flaubert’s political unconscious is compelled to libidinally meditate on accumulation and consumption as well. The question remains, why does Fe´licite´ represent bourgeois culture in this historically panoramic triptych, rather than a more classic bourgeois figure like the pharmacist Homais in Madame Bovary? In posing this question Jameson notes Fe´licite´’s tenuous relationship to the production process, to industrial capitalism, and to modernization generally: as a woman and servant, she is not even a working woman or peasant, she ‘‘cannot register the truth of the modern world except by proxy and as absence and marginalization’’ (p. ). It seems to me that Flaubert’s ‘‘political unconscious’’ leads him to libidinally cathect onto Fe´licite´ not for her relationship to the bourgeois (or capitalist) mode of production, but rather for her relationship to the bourgeois mode of accumulation, a mode notable as much for its rubbish, for its production of waste, as for its production of treasure. The production of debris serves as almost as sure an indicator of wealth in today’s capitalist countries as gross national product. Furthermore, unlike princely treasures such as those of Julien and Herod in the other two tales, the treasures of bourgeois material culture become even more garishly kitsch over time. By highlighting the horrifically bad taste of this culture, as compared to the gargantuan wealth of the ancient and medieval ruling classes, made even more splendid by the contrast, Flaubert once again reiterates the appalling mediocrity of the modern bourgeoisie. However, to dwell too long on the differences between the servant’s trash and the two princes’ treasures is to risk overlooking matters of form by getting lost in theme and content. Libidinally, there is perhaps little qualitative difference between piles of trash and piles of treasure. The poetic pleasures of enumeratio likewise remain much the same, whether the writer lists signifiers of beauty or signifiers of banality.      ‘‘Mobility,’’ as opposed to ‘‘immobility,’’ ‘‘fixity,’’ or ‘‘stability,’’ can be understood physically, socially, and economically. Physically, bibelots are not only inert, but are also generally immobile, lying around on

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Literature and material culture

shelves gathering dust. However, the opposite is also true: again in spatial terms, bibelots are mobile, as compared to architectural features or even large pieces of furniture. It might be remembered that the French word for building is immeuble, from the Latin immobilis (immobile), while the word for furniture is meuble, or mobile. Socially, the bibelot comes in all price ranges, and is thus found in the dwelling spaces of persons spanning a wide range of classes, occupations, and lifestyles; the bibelot is thus sociologically mobile as well. Economically, bibelots circulate freely through the marketplace. The spatial mobility of the bibelot corresponds to trends outlined in a best-selling decorating manual of , pedantically subtitled ‘‘Grammaire de l’ameublement.’’ Henry Havard describes two main types of interior decoration, ‘‘fixed’’ and ‘‘mobile.’’ Fixed decor relies on ‘‘l’architecture meˆme de la pie`ce,’’ and thus consists of such elements as wainscoting, wall covering, ornamental door frames, piers painted with scenes, and the room’s general proportions. In contrast, mobile decor relies primarily on ‘‘des meubles et des objets d’art,’’ including seating, display cabinets, paintings, and mirrors, ‘‘dispose´s d’une fac¸on plus ou moins pittoresque.’’ The bibelot-filled interior is of course of the second type, mobile, based as it is on the accumulation of certain types of objects and furnishings. The spatial mobility of the modern interior facilitates the bibelot’s movements across social strata. With its sculpted moldings and painted panels, the fixed decor described here by Havard is limited to the wealthy. A simplified version of architecturally fixed decor does exist among the rural popular classes, whose beds and storage units are often built-in. These rustic homes, however, do not satisfy the taste for luxury, a preference which is by no means restricted to the privileged. In addition, the development of standardized apartment buildings designed in response to urban population growth makes fixed decor even more financially inaccessible even to many among the cultural elite. Though a family of modest income living in Paris during the second half of the nineteenth century cannot afford a custom-designed ‘‘fixed’’ interior decor, it can satisfy its desire for luxury by gradually accumulating the disparate elements necessary for a mobile decor, using antiques, copies, or fakes. The density of objects in this type of interior tends to be high not only because accumulation and profusion are valorized, but also because period furnishings originally designed for large aristocratic dwellings are routinely introduced into the middle classes’ smaller modern Parisian homes and apartments. The bibelot is perfectly

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adapted to add a touch of aristocratic luxury to these scaled-down spaces. As Havard observes, mobile decor is the more appropriate design strategy not only for the middle-class family, but also for the artist, since the ‘‘de´coration fixe’’ tends to be ‘‘moins personnelle, moins intime.’’ Of course, the flattering association with the artist makes the eclectic interior even more appealing to fashion-conscious members of the middle class. Because the middle classes cannot always afford the ‘‘oeuvre d’art de qualite´ supe´rieure’’ recommended by Havard, another decorating manual explains how the housewife of modest means can create her own eclectic interior: Vous avez de vieux meubles, des imitations de l’ancien et des bagatelles modernes, un portrait de Largillie`re et un paysage de Corot; inge´niez-vous par le jeu des tapis et des tentures a` tout harmoniser dans un cadre e´le´gant. Vous trouverez la` l’occasion de donner une note personnelle et, a` ce me´lange composite, un caracte`re particulier. [You have old furnishings, imitations of antiques and modern trifles, a portrait by Largillie`re and a landscape by Corot. Playfully arrange the carpets and wall coverings so as to harmonize everything within an elegant frame. This will allow you to add a personal note and particular character to this composite melange.]

It is noteworthy that both manuals use the word ‘‘personnelle’’ in conjunction with decor. These objects are personalized not by a symbolic relationship to the owner (such as the souvenir), nor even by their integration into a collection, but simply by their tasteful arrangement. The mobile and affordable bibelot, which can be purchased, combined, and recombined more easily than fixed architectural installations, lends itself to self-expression – or at least is promoted that way by these two advocates of the decorative arts industries. The bibelot, marketed by Havard as an objet d’art, is on the verge of becoming an objet de consommation, acquiring an ever greater economic mobility. Though nineteenth-century Paris could anachronistically be called a ‘‘consumer culture,’’ it is important to recognize that the consumption practices of this period differ significantly from those of the much later state of affairs known as ‘‘consumer society.’’ It therefore seems to me useful to periodize the notion of consumption by characterizing the earlier state as an era of ‘‘proto-consumption.’’ The protoconsumer period can be thought of as a phase of apprenticeship to consumption, which entails the establishment and learning of the behaviors and practices upon which present-day consumer culture is built.

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Literature and material culture

Like any consumer culture, the proto-consumer period in France is marked by the proliferation, circulation, and accumulation of material goods. However, the proto-consumer has not yet assimilated one of the most characteristic traits of twentieth-century consumer society: the disposability of goods. Defining the late twentieth-century consumer object in terms of disposability, I identify the late nineteenth-century consumer object with an earlier developmental stage: the mobility of goods. Situating it in terms of an evolution of the consumer object, the nineteenth-century bibelot belongs to the stage of mobility, as opposed to the later stage of disposability. The mobile bibelot is subject to proliferation, circulation, and accumulation. Although it is rarely disposed of, its mobility distinguishes it from most durable goods. Thanks to the physical, social, and economic mobility of nineteenthcentury household goods, the objects of home decor become ever more manipulable. Traces of the modern mobility of furnishings are to be found throughout the narratives of the period. Exemplary in this respect are Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale (first published in ; set in the s) and Zola’s Nana (published in ; set in the s). Nana is written a decade later than L’Education sentimentale, and set two decades later. The two novels’ characters are thus separated by a full generation of life under the consumer society of the Second Empire. As a result, some are more evolved as consumers than are others. I begin with Flaubert, whose Parisian characters and settings thrive on contradictions, ambivalences, and paradoxes brought about by a constant alternation between two opposed attitudes toward modern consumption: unbridled enthusiasm and nostalgic resistance. In addition, buying alternates with selling, giving with taking back, fetishizing with destroying. Above all, the world of objects in L’Education sentimentale is a dynamic one, frenetically so, marked by ceaseless circulation, exchange, and proliferation. Given this context, it should come as no surprise that bibelots abound. Arnoux sells them, Fre´de´ric buys them, both give them to the women they pursue. In a word, the material culture of this novel is highly mobile. In the frequently cited descriptions of Arnoux’s shady artistic milieu, Flaubert signals a mutation in the art market: portable art works are now preferred over large paintings. The pitiful artist Pellerin says of another artist’s work: ‘‘c’est joli, coquet et pas lourd! c¸a peut se mettre dans sa poche, se prendre en voyage!’’ [‘‘it’s pretty, coquettish, and not heavy! You can put it in your pocket, take it along on a journey!’’]. Later in the novel, Arnoux changes businesses. He explains the move from

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dealer of paintings to dealer of porcelain: ‘‘La grande peinture est passe´e de mode! D’ailleurs, on peut mettre de l’art partout. Vous savez, moi, j’aime le Beau!’’ [‘‘Grand painting is no longer fashionable! Besides, you can put art anywhere. You know how I love the Beautiful’’]. Instead of insisting on Flaubert’s already well-documented hatred of bourgeois Philistinism in artistic matters, I would like to underline his latent consciousness that the decorative object is becoming lighter, physically and symbolically, and consequently more mobile, both physically and socially. As these objects manifest heightened mobility, they at the same time become more ‘‘consumable.’’ L’Education sentimentale incorporates this new mobility into the very structure of the narrative: part one of the novel is separated from part two not only by the event of Fre´de´ric’s inheritance, but also by the Arnoux’s change of domicile. Part two opens with Fre´de´ric’s confused wanderings in the streets of Paris after the destabilizing displacement of Arnoux’s bourgeois home. The domestic mobility foreshadows a political mobility: part three of the novel similarly stages Fre´de´ric’s walks amidst the chaotic aftermath following the  barricades. This instability fundamental to the text is accentuated by the surprising number of dwellings described in the novel: more than fifteen. Fre´de´ric moves from the provinces to Paris, from apartment to apartment, reinforcing the sense of movement as he simultaneously moves from career to career, from social circle to social circle, from best friend to best friend, from lover to lover. The movement is not always up the social or financial ladder, but is rather circuitous and haphazard. There is a historical basis for Flaubert’s fictitious portrayal of domestic displacement. The mobility of tenants is among the effects of the massive population movement from the provinces to Paris, and the subsequent need for more housing which in large part fuels Haussmannization. Writing in the s, Georges d’Avenel notes that during the second half of the nineteenth century, Parisians move frequently, in search of ever better housing. D’Avenel expresses the subjective effects of this displacement in rather flowery terms: ‘‘Mobile amas de poussie`re humaine, la foule s’assoit, sans s’y attacher, devant ces foyers sans histoire, te´moins indiffe´rents de sa joie ou de sa douleur’’ [‘‘Mobile mass of human dust, without forming attachments the crowd sits down in front of these hearths without history, indifferent witnesses to its joys or sorrows’’]. For the modern Parisian, ‘‘parvenus que nous sommes,’’ writes d’Avenel, home is no longer a fixed and stable point. What d’Avenel states rather clearly, and what Flaubert stages in Fre´de´ric’s

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Literature and material culture

frantic search for familiar ground, is the intimate nature of the relationship between persons and their built environment. The mobility of modern dwellers who are quick to change dwellings produces changes in the affect which human subjects invest in material objects, like houses. Spatial mobility thus reflects a new psychological mobility, as well as a new mobility in social relations. In L’Education sentimentale, one element consistently present throughout this destabilizing series of crises and transformations is shopping. With every change of fortune, Fre´de´ric buys new clothing and furnishings. Strolling through the streets of Paris with Deslauriers, the latter talks politics while Fre´de´ric almost absentmindedly orders a set of dishes from a shop, then arranges for an entirely new wardrobe. He continues to shop all during the demonstrations and riots in the streets of Paris, for example to furnish the temporary apartment rented for the (missed) rendezvous with Madame Arnoux. The novel’s numerous Paris street scenes almost invariably make mention of the shops and window displays which provide a backdrop for characters constantly on the move. The circulation of characters through the city and among different domiciles is doubled by a circulation of material objects. Numerous items from Arnoux’s shop, such as table services and ornaments, are found in the lodgings of his wife, Fre´de´ric, and Rosanette. Of special significance is a bibelot, Madame Arnoux’s well-known coffret, an exquisite gift from her husband. A characteristically Flaubertian ambivalence toward the material object develops around the coffret, which is simultaneously submitted to two almost contradictory processes: fetishization and circulation. Fre´de´ric becomes emotionally attached to the coffret as he follows its displacements from interior to interior, in the homes of a series of women whom he loves. He sees it for the first time in the home of Madame Arnoux whom he loves chastely, then he discovers the very same coffret in the home of Rosanette, the working-class mistress that he shares with Arnoux. Finally, during the auction of the Arnoux’s household goods following the art dealer’s bankruptcy, the coffret is purchased by Madame Dambreuse, Fre´de´ric’s high-society mistress. It is at the moment of this last displacement that Fre´de´ric feels the most strongly attached to it, as suggested in the text, which presents the reader with a sort of ‘‘cultural biography’’ of the object: On posa devant les brocanteurs un petit coffret avec des me´daillons, des angles et des fermoirs d’argent, le meˆme qu’il avait vu au premier diˆner dans la rue de Choiseul [chez les Arnoux], qui ensuite avait e´te´ chez Rosanette, e´tait revenu

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chez Mme Arnoux; souvent, pendant leurs conversations, ses yeux le rencontraient; il e´tait lie´ a` ses souvenirs les plus chers, et son aˆme se fondait d’attendrissement, quand Mme Dambreuse dit tout a` coup: –Tiens! je vais l’acheter. [Before the dealers was placed a small coffret with silver medallions, silver corner pieces, and silver clasps, the same coffret he had seen at the first dinner on Choiseul Street +at the Arnoux’s,, and that had afterward been at Rosanette’s, then had come back to Madame Arnoux’s. Often, during their conversations, his eyes encountered it. It was bound to his most dear memories, and his soul melted with tenderness, when Mme Dambreuse suddenly said, ‘‘Well then, I’m going to buy it!’’]

For Fre´de´ric the object has become a souvenir, a sentimental relic, but of which woman, Madame Arnoux or Rosanette? The scandal of adultery is displaced from human beings to inanimate objects, transformed into objects of exchange. This antique from the Renaissance was given as a gift, only to be taken back and given again to someone else, then taken back once more in order to put it up for sale. The end result is that the gift, an object sacralized by its symbolic function of linking two persons, becomes a commodity, an object desacralized by the alienating effects of money. The gift, subject by custom to a set of implicit rules which preclude this kind of recycling, is degraded by its metamorphosis into a monetary transaction. By its displacements from dwelling to dwelling, then from domestic spaces (the women’s homes) to a commercial space (the auction house), and also by its transplantation from one exchange system (the gift) to another (the commodity), the coffret escapes the ascendancy of the individual. It is therefore in vain that Fre´de´ric attempts to reattach his sentiments to this object which refuses to remain in place, physically or economically. As Diana Knight clearly demonstrates, in Flaubert’s fiction the fetishization of material objects associated with a beloved person is intimately connected to the commodification and industrialization of art and sentiments. Yet if Fre´de´ric’s reaction to the sale of the coffret is to be understood in terms of a resistance to commodification, then his character is cleaved by a contradiction, since he is one of the most ardent consumers in French literature, buying new goods with every significant turn of events, as noted above. His drive to renew his possessions through purchase sets in motion a cycle which is halted by his momentary attachments to Mme Arnoux’s belongings. I say that the cycle is halted because the full cycle of renewal through consumption involves not only the acquisition of objects, but also their disposal, the attribute of

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Literature and material culture

objects which I associated with the late twentieth-century consumer object. Fre´de´ric resists the disposal of goods through resale: it should be recalled that while he fails to save Madame Arnoux from dispossession, he does manage to forestall the sale of Rosanette’s household effects. Madame Arnoux likewise exhibits a sentimentality toward objects, in committing to memory the contours of the bibelots in Fre´de´ric’s apartment during their last meeting in the penultimate chapter of the novel. Her and Fre´de´ric’s sentimental attachment to each other’s bibelots seems to belong to an age which has already passed. Within the emotional economy of L’Education sentimentale, because of its mobility, the bibelot can no longer be expected to bear the weight of the tender attachments projected onto similar objects by the Romantic heart of yesteryear. Other characters in this novel exhibit no such sentimental scruples. Arnoux, Rosanette, Mademoiselle Vatnaz, and Madame Dambreuse readily traffic in bibelots; the latter’s willingness to purchase the coffret of a rival testifies to a defiance of sentimental fetishization. These characters are therefore much more evolved as consumers. The cycle of acquisition and disposal to which I allude here is best expressed in a sentence describing Rosanette: Incapable de re´sister a` une envie, elle s’engouait d’un bibelot qu’elle avait vu, n’en dormait pas, courait l’acheter, le troquait contre un autre, et gaˆchait les e´toffes, perdait ses bijoux, gaspillait l’argent, aurait vendu sa chemise pour une loge d’avant-sce`ne. [Incapable of resisting a desire, she became infatuated with a bibelot she had seen, was kept awake by it, ran out to buy it, exchanged it for another, and ruined fabrics, lost her jewelry, wasted money, would have sold her blouse for box seats at the theater.]

Rosanette does not hesitate to resell what she buys. This is certainly largely a function of her lower-class standing, intermittent poverty, and above all her novelistic role as courtesan/prostitute: her commodified sexuality is simply transferred to her sentimentality, by the sort of structural analogy typical of classical narrative. Her cycle of buyingselling-squandering-ruining-trading, however, is surely also indicative of a more complete assimilation of the dynamics of consumption. The most famous literary courtesan of the proto-consumer era, the title character of Zola’s Nana, can be compared to Flaubert’s Rosanette on several counts. Both inhabit bibelot-filled interiors which can be described as ‘‘mobile’’ according to Havard’s schema (see above), since their key feature is the eclectic combination of disparate elements like animal skin rugs, European porcelain, and Oriental vases. More

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pertinently, Nana shares Rosanette’s willingness to break the sentimental bonds often associated with bibelots. Nana moves several times during the novel according to the wealth of her latest lover, again like Rosanette. At one point Nana sells her bibelots to live in poverty with an actor. In another famous scene she takes great pleasure in smashing precious bibelots given her for her birthday. The facility with which she parts with her possessions certainly symbolizes the circulation of men in her life, but also reveals a much wider transformation affecting the relationship between individuals and their material goods for society at large. As is the case with Flaubert’s post-sentimental consumers (Rosanette, Arnoux, Mademoiselle Vatnaz, Madame Dambreuse), Nana is on the verge of discovering the most distinctive elements of fully developed consumer society: the commutability of values, alienability, and conspicuous waste. It is conspicuous waste which evolves into ‘‘disposability’’ during the twentieth century. In regard to the evolution of consumer culture, the difference between the two novels is the absence in Nana of sentimental fetishists like Fre´de´ric and Madame Arnoux. This reflects a more complete assimilation of consumption. Yet in another sense Nana is a less evolved consumer than those of Flaubert. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that she is unevenly evolved, for despite her very modern affective relation to objects, she is not yet a true consumer, since unlike Flaubert’s Fre´de´ric and the (female) clientele in Zola’s Au bonheur des dames (), she makes no purchases, but rather receives gifts. Nana is thus caught up in a hybrid economy which combines the features of a gift economy with that of an emerging consumer economy. To sell or destroy a gift is to render it ‘‘alienable,’’ which according to the well-established anthropological tradition characterizes the commodity form endemic to consumer society. It should be noted that the bibelot, whether given or purchased, cannot be considered a consumer object as long as it functions as a relic, or emits a Benjaminian ‘‘aura.’’ Nana’s originality, as compared to Fre´de´ric, is to have given up the symbolic status (in the strong sense of the sacred) of the bibelot as relic or gift, in order to benefit from a convertibility of values (monetary or sentimental) by sale, or by destruction in an act which draws from both the sacrificial nature of potlach (Bataille) and conspicuous waste (Veblen). Nana’s attitude and actions in relation to her possessions reveal that, although she is not yet a consumer in the current sense of the term, she has already begun to assimilate certain behaviors necessary to the full development of

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Literature and material culture

consumption as it is known today in Europe, North America, and the wealthier countries of the Far East. Such is not the case with Fre´de´ric Moreau, who feels lost in the face of the displacement of the decorative objects which he associates with Madame Arnoux. His uneasiness is no doubt as sociological as it is sentimental. Brian Rigby describes a paradox fundamental to the material culture of the nineteenth-century novel: a complex aesthetic and moral resistance to material objects accompanies elaborate descriptions of great quantities of them. A similar ambivalence is apparent in Fre´de´ric: in spite of his own frequent spending sprees, he shows resistance to structures of consumption that the more evolved consumers listed above have already interiorized. Fre´de´ric has not yet begun to assimilate the principles of the modernizing mobility of objects – their convertibility, circulation, and waste – whereas Nana especially seems exhilarated by the new capacity of objects to circulate freely or to be disposed of at will.

 

The fashionable artistic interior Social (re)encoding in the domestic sphere

The myth of the artist and the cult of art so permeate nineteenthcentury French literature and criticism that Claude Duchet suggests revising the familiar schema for periodizing French studies by century: he places the ‘‘paradigme de ‘l’artiste’’’ between ‘‘l’e`re des ‘philosophes’ et l’ave`nement de ‘l’intellectuel’.’’ The private dwelling becomes an important site on which the nineteenth-century ‘‘paradigme de ‘l’artiste’’’ is played out, for during this period, artistic sensibility is commonly manifested by an appreciation of the ‘‘minor’’ arts of interior furnishing and decor, fueling the popularity of collecting and the bibelot. To launch an inquiry into the relationship of the philosophe or the intellectual to interior decor would be ludicrous; however, many of the writers of the era of the artist take decor very seriously and write about it at length, often dramatizing the sociology of aesthetic judgment in fiction and non-fiction. Issues of class and gender complicate matters: the image of the artist appeals to social groups from whom a mostly male cultural elite strives to distance itself, the bourgeoisie and women. The home interior thus becomes a field of struggle for claims to artistic taste. At the heart of this struggle one finds the bibelot in its various guises – objet d’art, objet de luxe, objet de mode, objet superflu, objet de consommation, objet de de´sir. The lengthy descriptions of interior decor characteristic of nineteenth-century novels are best understood within the context of both the sociology and the aesthetics of the decorative arts. For this reason, in what follows I consider literary texts alongside commercial writing on interior decor, such as how-to manuals, trade journals, and newspaper articles. The story of the interior which emerges from these two bodies of writing goes something like this: the collection used as decor (in other words, the cultural phenomenon of the bibelot) purportedly originates among the aristocratic and artistic elite (including collectors, painters, and writers), then is popularized and vulgarized by the middle classes, 

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Literature and material culture

and by women. A common strategy for gendering decor emerges: feminine bibelots are relegated to the sphere of fashion, while masculine bibelots are elevated to the sphere of art.              The dominant decorative styles of the eras of the philosophe, the artist, and the intellectual are, respectively, rococo, eclecticism, and modernist functionalism. By ‘‘eclecticism’’ I refer to the incorporation of collecting into the home interior. This generally European trend, reflected for example in the novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton, is especially important in France, recognized as a leader in the production of highquality luxury goods. Literary and commercial writers alike frequently deploy the words art and artistique to emphasize the aesthetic value of the furnishings and collectibles of the eclectic interior. I use the phrase ‘‘artistic interior’’ to designate this particular conceptualization of eclectic decor. Describing an interior as artistic (or in many cases, as less than artistic) is complicated by changes in the usage of the word art in the wake of what Pierre Bourdieu describes as the autonomization of the field(s) of cultural production. I speak specifically of France and French, though the situation is similar throughout Europe. By the end of the eighteenth century, the field of art has divided into two domains, on the one hand the beaux arts, and on the other hand l’art me´canique, also known as l’art de´coratif or l’art industriel. Semantically, artiste comes to be understood as a derivative of beaux arts, while artisan is understood to derive from l’art me´canique. Art becomes opposed to industrie, which eventually refers to factory rather than artisanal production. As a result, the presence of the word art in the compound terms art de´coratif and art industriel becomes problematic. However, the prestige-value of the term art prompts industrialists to retain claims on it, by redefining the decorative arts in terms of the beaux arts. Meanwhile, the decorative arts become caught up in the trend of collecting household luxury objects produced during the pre-industrial age. Collectors too seek to retain the kinship between the higher-status beaux arts and their decorative/industrial/mechanical counterparts. As early as the s the vocabulary of art begins to appear in literary depictions of eclectic home interiors. Many writers presume a straightforward homology between aesthetic status and social status. The relationship between antique furnishings, the myth of the artist, and social

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hierarchies is made clear in many texts by Balzac, such as La Muse du de´partement, Le Cousin Pons, and La Cousine Bette. However, I will begin with a more unusual source, George Sand’s Le Compagnon du Tour de France (), a socially conscious novel of trade unions. The love between the highly idealized hero and heroine, an artistically gifted carpenter and an aristocratic heiress, is bound up in the beautifully archaic decor of the latter’s family chaˆteau, which the former is renovating. In reference to this setting, the narrator remarks that at the time when the novel is set, around , ‘‘le gouˆt des curiosite´s n’e´tait pas encore descendu dans la vie vulgaire’’ [‘‘the taste for curiosities had not yet trickled down into the common way of life’’]. As compared to the time of the novel’s writing, ‘‘La boutique de bric-a`-brac n’e´tait pas aussi essentielle dans chaque rue de Paris . . . que la boutique du boulanger’’ [‘‘The curiosity shop was not yet as essential to every Paris street . . . as the bakery’’]. In , ‘‘S’entourer de ces objets he´te´roge`nes et vivre dans la poussie`re du passe´ e´tait de´ja` une mode, mais une mode exquise et re´pandue seulement dans les hautes classes ou chez les artistes en vogue’’ [‘‘To surround oneself with these heterogenous objects and to live in the dust of the past was already the fashion, but it was an exquisite fashion which had spread only among the upper classes or among artists in vogue’’] (p. ). Sand thus identifies the eclectic interior with aristocrats and artists, disdaining the spread of this taste outside of these two ‘‘classes.’’ The apparent contradiction between Sand’s artistic elitism and her socialist politics is resolved by her identification of the ideal working-class artisan as an artist; her elitism is directed against the middle classes. Writing nearly twenty years later, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt echo Sand’s elitist attitude toward collecting (if not her socialist politics). In their journal they observe that ‘‘La collection est entre´e comple`tement dans les habitudes et dans les distractions du peuple franc¸ais’’ [‘‘Collecting has been completely integrated into the habits and pastimes of the French people’’]. They too deem that this represents ‘‘une vulgarisation de la proprie´te´ de l’oeuvre d’art ou d’industrie, re´serve´e dans les sie`cles pre´ce´dents aux muse´es, aux grands seigneurs, aux artistes’’ [‘‘a popularization of the proprietorship of the work of art or of industry, which in previous centuries was restricted to museums, great lords and artists’’]. For the Goncourts it is museums as well as artists and aristocrats who, as collectors, are being imitated by ordinary French people. The phrasing of the second sentence presents vulgarization as a post-revolutionary violation of feudal property rights. Sand and the



Literature and material culture

Goncourts socially encode the interior filled with collectibles as elite by assigning it aristocratic and artistic origins, identifying collecting as a Restoration () or ancien re´gime (‘‘sie`cles pre´ce´dents’’) tradition. The notion of vulgarization sets up the artist and the aristocrat as models which other classes merely imitate. The Goncourts soon extend their proprietary attitude toward art to high society (whose members are not limited to what remains of the ancien re´gime aristocracy), whom they accuse of collecting art objects for illegitimate motivations, with an inadequate capacity for artistic appreciation. Edmond de Goncourt is perhaps the most vocal defender of the true collector (apparently epitomized by himself ) against those who are just posing – not only members of the middle classes, but also ‘‘les hommes et les femmes du monde qui ont la pre´tention d’eˆtre des natures artistiques’’ [‘‘those men and women of high society who claim to be artistic by nature’’]. The rights to the terms artiste and artistique are in dispute throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century because they are so often appropriated undeservingly in the eyes of those who claim membership among the cultural elite. The brothers seem to enjoy comparing their taste to that of persons among the highest social ranks. In two very different entries they evaluate the ‘‘artistic interior’’ of the Second Empire’s princess Mathilde. They begin by mocking her amateur painting activities, and at this point clearly number her among ‘‘les hommes et les femmes du monde qui ont la pre´tention d’eˆtre des natures artistiques.’’ They then belittle the decor of this same studio, which they find to be ‘‘encombre´ de ces choses qui ne sont des objets d’art que pour les femmes, un faux pastel de Boucher, de faux pastels de Chardin’’ [‘‘cluttered with those things which only women consider to be objets d’art, a fake Boucher pastel, fake Chardin pastels’’]. This sentence introduces a gender distinction, in the insinuation that men would not consider fake pastels to be art works, whereas women do; mistaking non-art for art becomes a feminine trait. The gendering of art appreciation becomes commonplace, a point to which I will return below. It is with a quite different attitude that, twelve years later, after having developed a friendship with the princess, Edmond writes a favorable description of her studio. The Princess had invited him to lunch to show him her ‘‘bibelots,’’ he explains. ‘‘Me voila` dans son atelier de Paris, au milieu de cet amas de choses, de ce monde d’objets tre`s rares, tre`s pre´cieux, tre`s chers, dans lesquels jurent et de´tonnent des singularite´s he´te´roclites’’ [‘‘Here I am in her Paris studio, in the midst of this mass of

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things, in this world of very rare, very precious, very dear objects, where heterogenous singularities collide and clash’’]. There is no indication here that the term ‘‘atelier’’ is used in an ironic way. On the contrary, the terms ‘‘rares,’’ ‘‘pre´cieux,’’ ‘‘chers,’’ and ‘‘singularite´s’’ indicate a respectful recognition of the value of these tastefully chosen things. The rivalry of taste present in the earlier passage gives way to an alliance of taste. In both cases, taste functions as a mediator in the relationship between the Goncourts and the princess. In contrast, Edmond shows great disdain for the display of collectibles in the famous Rothschild chaˆteau at Ferrie`res in referring to its ‘‘bibeloterie e´crasante’’ [‘‘crushing knick-knack-ware’’]. This dwelling ‘‘n’est pas un chaˆteau meuble´, c’est un magasin de curiosite´s’’ [‘‘is not a furnished chaˆteau, but a curiosity shop’’]. Unlike the princess’s bibelots, the Rothschild collection does not produce artistic effects, but rather recalls the curiosity shop, an inappropriate model for the display of a collection, as compared to the favored model of the atelier. It is not simply the authenticity of the objects themselves that is questioned, but rather the authenticity of the collector’s practice. As one journalist puts it in an  article, ‘‘pour un sensitif’’ the most expensive luxury is intolerable unless tempered by ‘‘les de´licatesses et les discre´tions’’ of taste, which is innate, and cannot be improvised. The vulgar bourgeois buys luxury, while the ‘‘sensitif’’ (a code word for ‘‘aesthete’’?) filters vulgar luxury through his delicate and discreet taste. Thus though the bourgeois and the ‘‘sensitif’’ own the same objects, they are signs of vulgarity in the home of the former, as opposed to signs of artistic taste in the home of the latter. By the s the terms art, artiste, and artistique are commonly found in commercial descriptions of eclectic home interiors. For example, an  article in the professional journal Revue des arts de´coratifs makes reference to the growing passion ‘‘du mobilier de luxe et du mobilier d’art, jointe a` un gouˆt d’arche´ologie qui a passe´ des amateurs au public’’ [‘‘for luxury and artistic furnishings, along with a taste for archaeology which has been passed on from collectors to the public’’]. The phrase ‘‘mobilier d’art,’’ along with its variants ‘‘ameublements d’art’’ and ‘‘meubles d’art,’’ refers to furnishings chosen for their historicism or exoticism, whether the pieces be actual antiques, modern copies, or original modern designs inspired by historic or exotic models. Likewise, decorators’ catalogues and how-to manuals from the s bear names such as Ameublements artistiques, L’Art au foyer domestique, L’Art dans la maison, and L’Art intime.



Literature and material culture

An  article by Victor Champier ties the public interest in the decorative arts to larger factors such as economic growth, social ambition, and democratization. The ‘‘amour du luxe’’ has never before been so widespread, Champier argues. Equality among the classes is manifested by the similarity of their clothing and furnishings, yet there also prevails a desire to be noticed and to dazzle. These factors create the conditions which favor this ‘‘penchant universel’’ for all that is flashy, and which promotes comfort and well-being. The following sentence describes what I am calling the ‘‘artistic interior’’: La mode elle-meˆme s’en est meˆle´e, et la passion de notre temps pour l’arche´ologie mobiliaire, pour les antiquailles et les bibelots, a re´pandu jusque dans les classes bourgeoises le gouˆt de belles choses, a e´veille´ des curiosite´s artistiques, a de´veloppe´ des de´sirs nouveaux pour le superflu e´le´gant et aimable qui est le signe d’un certain raffinement intellectuel. [Fashion itself has intervened, and our era’s passion for the archeology of furnishings, for antiquities and for bibelots, has spread the taste for beautiful things to the bourgeois classes, has awakened artistic curiosities, has developed new desires for elegant and lovely superfluities, which is the sign of a certain intellectual refinement.]

The taste for that which is encoded as artistic has in turn become encoded, since it is the ‘‘passion’’ for antiques, and not the objects themselves, which functions as the ‘‘signe’’ of a refined intellect. Furthermore, such taste, and, I would add, the awareness of the signfunction of such taste, has trickled down into the bourgeoisie. I cite this passage not simply in support of the now all too familiar notion of ‘‘distinction,’’ but rather to demonstrate a longstanding awareness of what could be called a sociology of furnishings. Echoing Champier almost a century later, Pierre Bourdieu describes choices in home furnishings (especially antique collectibles) in a number of the case studies which illustrate Distinction. In analyzing these examples, Bourdieu ‘‘reads’’ codes which are already in place, exposing an established encoding of objects by a class-inflected though ostensibly neutral discourse of art and personal preference. I would add that these codes are often gender-inflected as well. Furthermore, these codes are already present in the nineteenth-century literary, para-literary, and commercial discourse which not only reports, represents, and prescribes such interiors, but also aids in their dissemination, which is in turn reported, represented, and prescribed in print. As a part of the process, these bodies of writing simultaneously develop, implement, and trans-

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form a lexicon of class- and gender-inflected code words for inscribing home furnishings and domestic objects with both personalized and shared meanings, the interpretation or ‘‘reading’’ of which is also classand gender-inflected. From this perspective, ‘‘bibelot’’ is both a code word in itself, as well as a category of things being described by other code words.              :                 The late nineteenth-century cultural phenomenon of the ‘‘artistic interior’’ would not be possible without a transformation in the practice and perception of collecting. This general change can be described as a shift from a traditional mode of antiquarianism (Pons, du Sommerard) to a more modern mode of aestheticism (des Esseintes, Montesquiou). These developments allow the aestheticized homes of collectors to be presented as ideal models for the eclectically decorated artistic interior. In a short-lived art journal of the early s, the second-rate literary writer Octave Uzanne contrasts the homes of two types of collectors, those whom I am calling antiquarians, and aesthetes. He first characterizes the ‘‘grandes maisons des collectionneurs,’’ which are ‘‘bonde´es de belles oeuvres, mais ge´ne´ralement elles sont solitaires et glace´es’’ [‘‘brim full of beautiful works, but they are solitary and glacial’’], as solemn as ‘‘un muse´e.’’ Compare these cold, pedantic interiors to those of the aesthete generation of collectors, ‘‘ces jolies demeures d’artistes personnels qui, avec l’aide de bibelots secondaires, se cre´ent un Eden gai, vivant, impre´vu, au milieu duquel l’aˆme chante des cantates a` l’art dans le prisme des beaute´s de l’ensemble et l’harmonie des murs chaudement tapisse´s d’oeuvres amies!’’ [‘‘these pretty, personal artists’ dwellings which, with the help of secondary bibelots, create a gay, lively, unexpected Eden, in the midst of which the soul sings cantatas to art in the prism of beauties of the ensemble and the harmony of walls warmly covered with works which are friends’’] (p. ). Uzanne’s terminological shift from ‘‘collectionneurs’’ to ‘‘artistes’’ corresponds to the trend that I am discussing. What changes with the shift from antiquarianism to aestheticism is the criterion for appreciating the objects on display. For the aesthete, objects form an ensemble to be apprehended on several levels – visual, affective, and inspirational (in the lyric sense). The warmth attributed to these homes comes from the close personal relationship between the ‘‘artiste’’ and his objects, which are no longer



Literature and material culture

merely beautiful works displayed solemnly but glacially, but rather ‘‘d’oeuvres amies’’ displayed gaily and warmly, inspiring the soul to sing to the glory of art, by providing a visual focal point (‘‘le prisme des beaute´s’’) for the occupant’s fin-de-sie`cle soul. The collection thus becomes encoded in such a way that it can serve as a vehicle for a deeply subjective artistic experience. The fin-de-sie`cle dandy-poet Robert de Montesquiou draws a similar distinction between (old-fashioned) antiquarians and (modern) aesthetes such as himself. Reflecting on his collections in his memoirs, he explains that early nineteenth-century collectors produce ‘‘collections entasse´es’’ [‘‘jumbled collections’’] since, as he puts it, Pons and Sauvageot are no more than ‘‘des fureteurs, incapables de donner, a` leurs trouvailles, une autre interpre´tation que le sens imme´diat de ces dernie`res’’ [‘‘scavengers incapable of giving their finds any interpretation other than a literal one’’]. The key word of this remark is ‘‘interpre´tation’’: the ‘‘trouvailles’’ of this new generation of collectors take on a significance well beyond their archaeological or art historical interest, serving both as an expression of artistic sensibility and as a source of artistic stimulation (for painting or writing, or for more vague intellectual preoccupations). While antiquarians such as du Sommerard, Sauvageot, and the fictitious Pons focused their intellectual attention on the objects themselves as components of art history or archaeology, the fin-de-sie`cle aesthete is represented as focusing not so much on the bibelots themselves, but on their incorporation into an aesthetics of daily life. The aestheticization of collecting calls on all of the arts, including literature and music. In noting that many amateurs find a ‘‘satisfaction litte´raire’’ in choosing historical furnishings at the expense of harmony, an article in a mid-s issue of the Revue des arts de´coratifs criticizes collections found wanting in coherence, taking a dim view of the subordination of harmonious decorative arrangement to thematic effects (‘‘litte´raire,’’ ‘‘e´voquant’’). Montesquiou counters this potential problem by using semantic content to create a harmonious decor out of a seemingly chaotic accumulation of things in his cabinet, the ‘‘sanctuaire’’ of his ‘‘offices esthe´tiques.’’ However, rather than relying on an analogy to literary themes, he turns to music, to opera, in describing the eclectic encumberment of his Quai d’Orsay apartments (a model for the decor of des Esseintes in Huysmans’s A rebours). He explains that ‘‘il n’y avait aucune liberte´ dans ce flux de bibelots, endigue´ dans les lois fort strictes, et re´gi par des correspondances the´matiques, non moins que syste´matiques, aussi ordonnance´es que les leitmotiv wagne´riens’’ [‘‘there

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

was no freedom in this flux of bibelots, dyked within strict laws and regulated by thematic correspondences no less systematic, no less ordered than Wagnerian leitmotiv’’]. The spatial metaphor of the dyked flux indicates an underlying principle of flow and containment. The strict, systematic order imposed on his flux of bibelots is neither museum-like nor taxonomic, but rather conforms to the order of music. Comparing the collection to an opera draws on a sort of Baudelairean synesthesia, recuperating the bibelot from the museum-like curiosity cabinet focalized on the object, into an intimate interior focalized on a highly subjective total artistic experience. Montesquiou goes on to describe the organization of his bibelots as ‘‘ce fouillis si ordonne´, si pe´ne´tre´ de symboles’’ [‘‘this tangle, so ordered, so permeated by symbols’’], at once underlining what he had earlier in the memoirs called ‘‘un faux air de de´sordre,’’ as well as the symbolic function of his objects.                Like the home of the collector, the artist’s studio, or rather an idealized image of it, undergoes the transformation from antiquarianism to aestheticism. The aestheticized collection based on the myth of the artist becomes the style of decor associated with the fin-de-sie`cle art studio. As a recent architectural critic puts it, the ‘‘ ‘style artiste’’’ becomes ‘‘de rigueur’’ in fin-de-sie`cle artists’ studios, suggesting that artists too are compelled to adopt the style of the artist, as if merely producing art works is no longer enough to qualify a person as a true artist, as if being an artist means living the lifestyle of the artist. This transformation of the artist’s studio is explained in an article on the studios of the Romantic generation. The studio of the Romantic painter Decamps is calls a ‘‘boutique de bric-a`-brac.’’ This pile of odds and ends is contrasted against the ‘‘e´le´gants boudoirs ou des nefs gothiques ou` nos peintres a` la mode symbolisent et esthe´tisent, y accumulant toujours des bibelots, mais avec un choix de´licat et une coquetterie’’ [‘‘elegant boudoirs or gothic naves where our fashionable painters symbolize and aesthetize, always accumulating delicately and coquettishly chosen bibelots’’]. It is noteworthy that the term ‘‘bibelot,’’ preferred by aesthetes, appears only in the context of fin-desie`cle decor, whereas the term ‘‘bric-a`-brac,’’ associated with antiquarianism, is used in the earlier context. The two terms are in turn assigned to different types of spaces: the ‘‘boutique de bric-a`-brac’’ characterizes the earlier studio, while the later studios are compared to the boudoir and

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Literature and material culture

the Gothic cathedral. In these feminine (boudoir) and spiritual (Gothic) interiors, artfully chosen bibelots demonstrate their owner’s temperament through his artful arrangement of them. Literary incarnations of the chic atelier filled with bibelots include the studio of Coriolis in the Goncourts’ Manette Salomon, the studio of Pellerin in Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale, the atelier Raoule decorates for her artist lover in Rachilde’s Monsieur Ve´nus, and the home of the high-society painter Fagerolles in Zola’s L’Oeuvre. Of course, not all artists’ studios are decorated in this way, as the article cited here points out. In fiction, the heroic artist Bongrand of L’Oeuvre disdains the studio decorated with ‘‘cette magnificence de tentures et de bibelots dont commenc¸aient a` s’entourer les jeunes peintres’’ (: ). An  how-to manual by a decorator-upholsterer implicitly presents the artist’s studio as a model for his (would-be) clients, noting that studios are decorated like salons, with ‘‘toutes sortes de meubles, de sie`ges, de bibelots, d’e´toffes, de tentures’’ [‘‘all sorts of furniture, chairs, bibelots, cloth, and wall hangings’’]. He goes on to explain that ‘‘la profusion et la diversite´ des objets’’ is justified here because the artist can use these things in his paintings. Qualities such as profusion and diversity could be seen as negative if encoded as signs of sloppy decorative arrangement, or worse, as signs of bourgeois materialism, or as signs of a penchant for ostentation. Instead, the author of the manual legitimates the proliferation of superfluous things by pointing out their contribution to artistic creativity.                  -  -     Literary authors also establish the home of the writer as an authentic version of the artistic interior. ‘‘Quand se rendra-t-on compte que les ameublements artistiques ne peuvent eˆtre inte´ressants que chez les artistes . . . ?’’ [‘‘When will we realize that artistic furnishings can only be interesting in the homes of artists . . . ?], asks the narrator of Proust’s early novel, Jean Santeuil (–). The artists named in the passage thus introduced are all writers: Edmond de Goncourt, Anatole France, and Robert de Montesquiou. Like the atelier of the painter or sculptor, the home of the writer is represented here as an ‘‘authentic’’ artistic interior. A subordinate clause which opens a long Proustian sentence describes a decorative minimalism which one might expect to find in the home of the artist-writer. In the sentence’s main clause, the narrator notes that the houses of collectors such as Edmond de Goncourt,

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Anatole France, or Robert de Montesquiou ‘‘inte´ressent le romancier et redeviennent pour lui matie`re a` description’’ [‘‘capture the interest of the writer and provide descriptive material’’]. The next sentence posits a spiritual, even mystical relationship between writers and their collections: Apre`s de longs pe`lerinages incertains vers un dessin de Watteau, une statuette de Clodion, une estampe d’Houkasaı¨, ils ont enfin trouve´ la vraie pierre de l’autel du dieu et l’ont intronise´e a` la place qui semblait l’attendre entre d’autres idoles qu’une meˆme ferveur, plutoˆt qu’une seule enceinte, y a re´unies. (p. ) [After long, uncertain pilgrimages to a drawing by Watteau, a statuette by Clodion, or a print by Houkasaı¨, they finally found the authentic altar stone of the god and enthroned it in the place which seemed to await it, amidst other idols united more by the same fervor than by the same enclosure.]

Montesquiou’s interior was discussed above. Anatole France’s passion for collecting shows itself in his high-society novel Le Lys rouge (). It should be recalled here that Edmond de Goncourt published a twovolume annotated inventory of his and his late brother’s collections, inscribing the myth of the artist in the title: La Maison d’un artiste (). The fictitious and the biographical overlap here, because it is largely through written discourse that the writer’s artistic interior is invented as a concept, whether or not this writing makes reference to an actually existing space. For the writers that Proust mentions, a poeticization of the dwelling accompanies the aestheticization of the collector’s interior. The connection between the interior and artistic production among post-Romantic writers has been summed up by Guy Sagne`s, who suggests that for many fin-de-sie`cle writers, ‘‘athe´es de la nature, de´vots de meubles et de bibelots,’’ their room provides the poetic inspiration that the Romantic generation found outdoors. A number of post-Romantic poets regularly evoke interiors which are conceivably their own; these include Baudelaire (‘‘La chambre double,’’ ‘‘J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans,’’ ‘‘Dans les fauteuils fane´s des courtisanes vieilles,’’ etc.), Mallarme´ (‘‘Sonnet en -yx,’’ etc.), Cros (Le Coffret de santal), and Rodenbach (‘‘La Vie des chambres’’). To cite another example of a writer-collector, the link between Victor Hugo’s collecting activities, his decor, and his writing is less direct. A collector and bricoleur (handyman, do-it-yourselfer), he often built furnishings by reassembling disparate pieces of antiques. In an  book dedicated to the house in Guernsey where Hugo lived in exile during the

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Second Empire, Gustave Larroumet observes that the eclectic decor of the home resembles the work he wrote there, La Le´gende des sie`cles. Decor and book alike bring together the Old and New Testaments, the Gothic, the sixteenth century, and all succeeding centuries up to the Revolution. Larroumet goes on to state that ‘‘Voir Hauteville-House, c’est mieux comprendre non seulement Victor Hugo, mais le romantisme’’ [‘‘To see Hauteville House is to better understand not only Victor Hugo, but also Romanticism’’]. The author of an  newspaper article on the same subject claims that the great romantic writer was not only ‘‘le re´novateur de la poe´sie franc¸aise,’’ but also ‘‘un pre´curseur en de´coration et en ameublement,’’ since already in , Hauteville House was decorated with ‘‘ce beau de´sordre apparent’’ so fashionable in . Hugo’s collection thus not only embodies the remains of the Romanticism which he outlived, but also reflects his modernism, in that he is a precursor of fin-de-sie`cle taste. That Hugo’s decor is considered worth writing about is testimony to the period’s fascination with the decorative arts. Balzac’s use of his interior in his writing is much more prosaic than that described by Sagne`s and Proust in regard to his successors. He sometimes used his own interiors directly in his writing, reproducing one of his early apartments in the description of Paquita’s boudoir in La fille aux yeux d’or, and including many items from the inventory of his own collection in compiling the inventory reproduced in Le cousin Pons. For Balzac the objects of decor are related to sociology (conspicuous consumption, ‘‘distinction’’), to scenes of seduction (Paquita), or to the collector’s passion (Pons) rather than to the splenetic disposition of the aesthete. Alain Buisine sees a very different rapport between Pierre Loti’s writing and his collecting, seeing Loti’s oeuvre as ‘‘le prolongement, l’amplification litte´rale et litte´raire’’ of the little museum of souvenirs that the writer assembled as a child, as described in Le Roman d’un enfant (). In the previous chapter I discussed the theme of collecting in his largely autobiographical Madame Chrysanthe`me (). As manifested in these and other texts, Loti’s relationship to his collection is more libidinal than that of Balzac, though it is not always melancholic in the sense of Baudelairian spleen. The Goncourts articulate the subjective experience of the artistically encoded interior in creating a fictitious melancholic writer, the eponymous hero of Charles Demailly (), an early incarnation of the acutely impressionable neurotic aesthete common in decadent literature. Not only is the fictitious writer Demailly overly sensitive to people as well as

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to things, his sense of aesthetics is attributed to his nervous nature. It is suggested that his writing talent – ‘‘Ce talent nerveux, rare et exquis dans l’observation, toujours artistique, mais ine´gal’’ [‘‘This high-strung talent, rare and exquisite in observation, always artistic, but uneven’’] – is a product of his temperament and poor health (p. ). This sensitivity is evidenced by Demailly’s refined taste in domestic objects, as explained by the narrator in a well-known passage inspired by The´ophile Gautier: Un mobilier lui e´tait ami ou ennemi. Un vilain verre le de´gouˆtait d’un bon vin. Une nuance, une forme, la couleur d’un papier, l’e´toffe d’un meuble le touchaient agre´ablement ou de´sagre´ablement, et faisaient passer les dispositions de son humeur par les mille modulations de ses impressions. [An item of furnishing was either his friend or his enemy. A hideous glass for him spoiled the taste of a good wine. A nuance, a shape, the color of the wallpaper, the fabric of a piece of furniture, struck him as pleasant or unpleasant, and altered the dispositions of his humor according to the thousand modulations of his impressions.]

Nervous sensitivity thus translates into both artistic production and refined taste in furnishings. Furthermore, in Charles Demailly lack of taste signals lack of artistic talent. The poor taste of Demailly’s wife is first revealed in her admiration for the work of a (male) vaudeville writer, then reflected in her admiration of the tasteless luxury of the latter’s new salon. Her preference for the hack’s bad writing and bad decor is set up to contrast against her growing doubts regarding the true playwriting talent of her husband, whose decorative preferences draw him to ‘‘vieilleries’’ and ‘‘bibelots’’ (p. ) – tasteful and artistic luxury objects which the tasteless wife fails to recognize as true signs of distinction. Though also a self-described neurotic, Flaubert does not share Demailly’s (and the Goncourts’) affectation of a refined sensitivity to objects, nor does he share his contemporaries’ passion for bibelots. Flaubert’s artistic sensibility is confined to his writing, while he remains indifferent to his surroundings, as his niece Caroline de Commanville observes in her introduction to his correspondence. Yet if Flaubert’s home does not reflect the passion for collecting so common among his peers, his writing does reflect this taste, in form as well as in content: Flaubert collects textually, by compiling citations, and by making lists, as in Bouvard et Pe´cuchet and Salammboˆ. To cite another writer whose writing does reflect his own taste for bibelots, Jean Lorrain fictionalizes his own room in the tale of a mad

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Literature and material culture

writer, ‘‘Ophe´lius’’ (). The mentally ill hero suffers in a minutely described ‘‘pauvre chambre de reˆveur et de poe`te avec ses mille et un bibelots me´dite´s’’ [‘‘shabby room of a dreamer and a poet with its thousand and one often-pondered bibelots’’]. The narrator finds his disturbed friend’s room sinister, its very atmosphere suggesting mental illness: ‘‘Je m’e´tais toujours me´fie´ de cette chambre verte et rose, d’un gouˆt barbare et pleine d’une de´votion a` la fois mystique et paı¨enne, puant a` plein nez, sinon le fagot, du moins la franche hyste´rie’’ (p. ). Proust’s above-cited metaphoric religious expressions (‘‘autel de dieu,’’ ‘‘idole’’) are repeated by Lorrain but with a hint of occult magic, in describing the room as full of a ‘‘de´votion . . . mystique et paı¨enne,’’ smelling of ‘‘la franche hyste´rie’’ and ‘‘le fagot,’’ a reference to heretics burned at the stake. The cult practices called forth by this decor are directly linked to a hysteria more sinister than that of Demailly. This room represents an extreme example of what Emily Apter calls the ‘‘pathological interior.’’              Both literary and commercial writing make use of a stereotype of middle-class ‘‘artistic’’ decor as a vulgarized imitation of more elite cultural models – the interiors of aristocrats, artists, and well-known collectors. An  decorating manual describes such interiors in terms of caricature, in noting that among the middle classes, ‘‘nous trouvons la chambre de Monsieur meuble´, ce que l’on appelle artistement’’ [‘‘we find Monsieur’s room decorated artistically, as they say’’]. Unfortunately, the manual continues, the result is but ‘‘la caricature de la chambre d’un amateur ve´ritable, ou d’un artiste.’’ This disparaging remark is all the more curious, since it is found in the manual of a decorator addressing bourgeois customers. However, this sentence is found near the end of the first part of the book, devoted to actually existing apartments, whereas in the second part, devoted to the ideal apartment, the author explains how his (middle-class) customers can avoid such vulgarity through discretion and good taste, implicitly establishing a consumer need not only for quality goods, but also and especially for professional counseling such as his own. By , the fashion-conscious collector has become a recognizable social type in middle-brow literary forms. Le Bibelot, a one-act comedy which opened at the The´aˆtre du Palais-Royal in , parodies the fashionable pastime of antique-collecting: the play’s elegant hero pur-

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sues the lovely owner of the cover of a soup tureen he has just bought from their mutual antique dealer. Maupassant presents a similar plot in ‘‘Une Aventure parisienne,’’ published in the newspaper Gil Blas in : a provincial woman meets a fashionable male writer in an antique shop in Paris by means of a bibelot. An  short story which appeared in the popular magazine L’Illustration mocks a bourgeois woman who encodes her own interior as artistic: ‘‘Nous nous trouvons dans un milieu artiste’’ [‘‘Here we are in an artistic setting’’], proclaims the heroine, as she rehearses some lines in preparation for her upcoming house-warming dinner. Drawings and engravings reproduced in the press further depict (and disseminate) the taste for the collection-filled interior. The image of a theatrical scene set in a cabinet de curiosite´ appears in an  issue of Le Monde illustre´; the collection of a fictitious noble amateur is depicted in an engraving which accompanies an  episode of a feuilleton, also in L’Illustration. It should be noted that the bourgeois bibelot is not always an attempt at being artistic or fashionable. Bibelots can also serve as a sign of respectability, as an enactment of the valorization of domesticity and family life. In Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale, this is how Fre´de´ric reads the bibelots in Madame Arnoux’s living room. Another interesting case is Maupassant’s representations of provincial bourgeois women and their souvenirs, in ‘‘Vieux objets,’’ ‘‘Souvenirs,’’ and Une vie. These objects, referred to as ‘‘bibelots,’’ are precious only to their owners. Their collection has been diagnosed by Apter as female fetishism. While cultural historians have emphasized the use of furnishings and decor to reinforce traditional bourgeois values, in fiction I have found such portrayals of bibelots to be more rare than portrayals of their use as means of demonstrating distinction or aesthetic sensitivity, or in their use for creating seductive salons and boudoirs. The latter uses are certainly more dramatic, and more in keeping with popular novelistic elements such as the portrayal of social climbing, of seduction, and of psychological complexity.            :                      Bibelots are neither masculine nor feminine, though they are often encoded as one or the other. On the one hand, by its association with the domestic, the pretty, the detail, and the ornamental, the bibelot can easily be considered feminine. On the other hand, the bibelot becomes

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Literature and material culture

masculinized by its association with the erudite collector and the scholarly tradition of the curiosity cabinet. It becomes stereotypical for men to create an artistically inspiring atmosphere in their cabinet de travail, while women create a sanctuary for romantic dreams of seduction in their boudoir and dressing room. The bibelot as an element of fashion tends to be relegated to feminized spaces, whereas men are more likely to be portrayed as possessors and displayers of artistic bibelots. Flaubert’s Fre´de´ric Moreau (L’Education sentimentale), like Proust’s Swann (A la recherche), manifests a nostalgia for an erudite aesthetics in filling his apartment with bibelots, whereas Zola’s Nana (Nana), like Proust’s Odette (Swann’s mistress then wife), masters the domain of fashion in acquiring an eclectically decorated hoˆtel. Because gender is conferred upon the bibelot by the context which is created for it, masculinized or feminized bibelots can be used to reinforce and/or destabilize conventional gender identities. This has important implications for the narrative depiction of domestic economies and of the sexual relations which take place therein.           :                 Though the bibelot is strongly associated with the bourgeois foyer, in nineteenth-century literature it is perhaps even more strongly associated with actresses and courtesans. There are more bibelots in Zola’s Nana than in his Au bonheur des dames, for example. ‘‘La rage de bibeloter’’ is common among actresses, remarks Maupassant in a newspaper article entitled ‘‘Bibelots.’’ The Goncourts identify a certain kind of porcelain with the women of the demi-monde, in speaking of a famous actress’s ‘‘masses de Saxes modernes, ces Saxes spe´ciaux aux filles.’’ In written depictions of the bibelot-filled interiors of actresses, courtesans, and prostitutes, over time the vocabulary of collecting gives way to the vocabulary of art, following the same evolutionary patterns as the interiors of male artists and writers. However, in the context of the feminized interior the descriptor ‘‘artistique’’ tends to be accompanied by qualifications, contestation, and irony. At the same time, these sexualized interiors are elevated to the status of storybook fantasy, something like the modern European equivalent of the legendary Middle Eastern harem. A good place to begin this genealogy of the courtesan’s bibelot-filled boudoir is with the novel version of La Dame aux came´lias by Alexandre Dumas fils (). The novel’s opening scene is set just after the hero-

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ine’s death (the body of the novel recounts her life in retrospect). Because she has left many debts, her ‘‘meubles et riches objets de curiosite´’’ are to be auctioned off by her creditors, who have opened her home to the public prior to the sale, hoping to increase business. Upon entering the dead courtesan’s rooms, the narrator, a man of the world and a self-proclaimed ‘‘amateur de curiosite´s,’’ easily recognizes that he is ‘‘dans l’appartement d’une femme entretenue,’’ for her rich decor is obviously made up of gifts from numerous lovers. Along with the narrator, many respectable society women, or ‘‘femmes du monde,’’ have taken this opportunity to visit the interior of the celebrated kept woman, though these women are there motivated by a different kind of ‘‘curiosite´’’ than is the collector-narrator; having little or no contact with the shady world of the kept mistress, these respectable wives and mothers have come in search of ‘‘les traces de cette vie de courtisane dont on leur avait fait, sans doute, de si e´tranges re´cits’’ [‘‘traces of the courtesan’s life, about which they had no doubt heard such strange stories’’] (p. ). It is thus the ‘‘e´tranges re´cits’’ about their less respectable counterparts which bring these righteous women to inspect these luxurious furnishings, hoping that these stories will somehow be inscribed there. The mistress’s interior thus functions as a narrative source within the larger narrative of the novel. By evoking the context of curiosity collecting from the beginning of the novel, the myth of the courtesan’s seductive decor becomes entwined with the myth of the courtesan herself. Non-fiction imitates fiction, at least in written accounts. A few years later in , the magazine L’Illustration publishes engravings and an article depicting the collections belonging to the famous actress Rachel. The use of the term ‘‘bibelot’’ in this article is instructive, since it is identified with collecting and decor, but not art, as we will see in a moment. The pretext for this article devoted to the interior of the famous actress’s recently constructed neo-classical-Louis XV-Gothic home is a rumor that she may sell her belongings. The article’s author enumerates the ‘‘bibelots’’ which decorate her ‘‘salon de conversation’’: ‘‘bronzes, chinoiseries, filigranes, ivoires, Saxe, Se`vres, bonbonnie`res, me´daillons, e´ventails, cassolettes, e´caille, laque, nacre, cristal, jade, lapis, onyx, malachite, marcassite, poignards, kangiars, bijoux, joujoux.’’ The author explicitly states that ‘‘bibelots’’ is used ‘‘en style d’amateur,’’ evoking the trend of collecting. The striking variety of objects included in this list points to the eclecticism common to the collections of the second half of the nineteenth century. In terms of

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Literature and material culture

discursive style, the string of names transforms the description into an enumeration reminiscent of an inventory or catalogue. The author underlines the bibelot’s propensity for accumulation (‘‘inimaginable amas,’’ ‘‘encombrer’’). The passage also indicates that bibelots ‘‘doivent ne´cessairement orner’’ the homes of well-known female beauties and celebrities, not only echoing the same stereotype which underpins the fictitious courtesan of Dumas fils, but also gendering the bibelot as feminine. The author elaborates on this point, dramatically proclaiming that ‘‘Etre sans bibelot, c’est le dernier degre´ du discre´dit et de la honte’’ [‘‘To be without bibelots is the ultimate disgrace and shame’’]. Therefore, all of the women in the Breda red-light district ‘‘ont du bibelot.’’ Dancers own them too, and even the author’s female porter has some. But ‘‘il y a bibelot et bibelot’’ [‘‘there are bibelots and then there are bibelots’’], those one can win at the fair, and those which ship captains bring from all corners of the world, often at great expense. It is significant that exotic objects are so often described in written representations of sexualized women, an association repeated in later literary works such as Proust’s Un amour de Swann (Odette collects Oriental bibelots) and Rachilde’s La Jongleuse. In this article, the category ‘‘bibelot’’ does not include Rachel’s most valuable art works. In the long paragraph discussing the sale of her ‘‘bibelots,’’ the author carefully separates these from ‘‘des ornements d’un ordre plus e´leve´,’’ such as ‘‘les tableaux de choix.’’ The author approves the sale of the former in noting the vulgar register of the term: ‘‘Je conc¸ois, au reste, assez ce renoncement au bibelot, et le mot seul, – si j’e´tais grande trage´dienne, – me refroidirait de la chose’’ [‘‘Besides, I understand well enough her giving up her bibelots, for if I were a great tragic actress, the word itself would put me off the thing’’] (p. ). In other words, the vulgar word ‘‘bibelot’’ was banished from the dictionary of the Acade´mie Franc¸aise, and consequently is not appropriate for use in classical theater. As presented by this article, Rachel actually possesses two collections, one which is of decorative value (the ‘‘bibelots’’) and one which is of aesthetic value (the ‘‘ornements d’un ordre plus e´le´ve´’’). The label artistic has become fully integrated into the discourse of fashion by the time Zola writes Nana in . At the height of Nana’s success, her wealthy aristocratic lover buys a new mansion for her use. The magnificent ‘‘hoˆtel,’’ ‘‘style Renaissance,’’ newly built by an artist forced to sell, features an expensive but vulgar artistic decor:

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Le comte Muffat avait achete´ l’hoˆtel tout meuble´, empli d’un monde de bibelots, de fort belles tentures d’Orient, de vieilles cre´dences, de grands fauteuils Louis XIII; et Nana e´tait ainsi tombe´e sur un fonds de mobilier artistique, d’un choix tre`s fin, dans le tohu-bohu des e´poques. [Count Muffat had bought the mansion completely furnished, filled with bibelots, beautiful Oriental hangings, antique sideboards, and large Louis XIII armchairs; Nana had thus fallen into a mass of exquisitely chosen artistic furnishings, from a confused mix of periods.]

‘‘Mobilier artistique,’’ a phrase which Zola no doubt employs with some irony, refers to furnishings chosen for their historicism or exoticism, whether the pieces be actual antiques, modern copies, or original modern designs inspired by historic or exotic models. These furnishings pass through a series of hands, signaling a process of degradation: built and furnished by a young painter ‘‘drunken’’ by early success, the house is sold to the wealthy aristocrat Muffat, who has been corrupted by his desire for the working-class prostitute Nana. Her new artistic furnishings reflect not her taste for art, but rather her fashionability. According to the narrator, she is now cited by fashionable newspapers, and even imitated by high-society women. In this passage, the word ‘‘artistique’’ has therefore become emptied of its original meaning, no longer signaling refined taste, but rather its perversion.        :            Because the bibelot is so closely associated with feminine and bourgeois spaces such as the courtesan’s boudoir and the family foyer, nineteenth-century male collectors must enlist several strategies for masculinizing their domesticized collections. Encoding them as ‘‘artistic’’ is the primary strategy used. The most clearly masculinized of these collections are those found in the homes of ‘‘real’’ and fictitious bachelors, including Balzac and his character Pons; the Goncourts; Maupassant and the narrator of his short story Qui sait?; Huysmans and des Esseintes of A rebours, along with Durtal of the Catholic novels; Gardilanne and Dale`gre of Champfleury’s Le Violon de faı¨ence; Anatole France and Dechartre of his novel Le Lys rouge; Jean Lorrain along with Fre´neuse and Ethal of his Monsieur de Phocas; and Fre´de´ric Moreau of L’Education sentimentale, as well the eponymous heroes of Bouvard et Pe´cuchet. These bachelors use their aestheticized collections to create a kind of domesticity from which women are excluded, except as temporary

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Literature and material culture

visitors, though even then the presence of woman threatens the order of this bachelor universe. As Vilcot observes in regard to Huysmans’s novels, the typical Huysmansian hero is in search of a protected interior space which is not modeled on the domestic interior comfort associated with the bourgeois or the woman, beings with which he tends to be fundamentally incompatible. Hence this solitary hero seeks refuge in an interior based on other models, such as the hermitage, the museum, the monastery, or the cloister. This observation applies to the interiors of the above-listed bachelor-collectors as well. In these masculine sanctuaries, bibelots – including paintings, drawings, engravings, and fetishized book collections – transform the otherwise dreary apartment of the bachelor into ‘‘un temple de l’Art,’’ where the occupant lives ‘‘en compagnie de ses objets, exclusivement’’ sheltered from the ‘‘fallacieuses sollicitations du commerce.’’ In this way, aided by the appeal to art, the bachelor not only encodes the bibelot as masculine, but also extracts it from the bourgeois order of the marketplace. Because this idealized interior is both elitist and sexist, I call this way of life ‘‘macho domesticity.’’ Writing plays an important role in the process of masculinizing the bibelot through aestheticization. By intellectualizing the interior through publications aimed at fellow connoisseurs, writers like the Goncourt brothers and Montesquiou promote an aesthetics based on a high level of erudition, creating an elite culture of collecting which is inaccessible to many women and members of the middle classes, who usually lack the necessary classical education. At the same time, these publications define and provide models for an interior masculinized through an erudite aesthetics, thus culturally legitimized for a mostly male artistic elite. The interior of des Esseintes in Huysmans’s A rebours is the classic example of such a refined and inaccessible aesthetics. Another strategy commonly used to reinforce the masculinity of the bachelor-collector is, paradoxically, to identify the bibelot as feminine. For example, Edmond de Goncourt characterizes the bibelot as a replacement for woman in the opening remarks of La Maison d’un artiste. The machismo of the male collector is bolstered by his possession of the feminized bibelot – and, conversely, of the bibelotized woman, about which more in a moment. Defining collecting in terms of womanizing thus serves the purpose of masculinizing the bibelot-filled interior. One of Goncourt’s more sexist statements links collecting to writing: ‘‘La litte´rature, c’est ma sainte maiˆtresse, les bibelots, c’est ma putain: pour entretenir cette dernie`re, jamais la sainte maıˆtresse n’en souffrira’’

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[‘‘Literature is my saintly mistress, bibelots are my whore: the former will never suffer in order to keep the latter’’].              ,                  The opposition art/fashion is often mapped onto gender distinctions, art being identified as a masculine realm, fashion being relegated to the feminine. However, though art and fashion tend to form an oppositional pair, it is crucial to recognize to what degree art and fashion become intertwined even as attempts are made to separate them into autonomous spheres. The decadent dandy makes fashion into an art, while high society makes art into fashion. For example, the term ‘‘artiste’’ is associated with fashionable decor, as when in a  newspaper article tastemaker Mme de Girardin recommends ‘‘l’air artiste’’ for the tasteful conversation salon. A curious cultural configuration sustains the art/ fashion conundrum: the nineteenth-century aesthetes’ legitimating code of Art and high society’s legitimating code of Fashion are both founded on the myth of the artist. These matters frequently manifest themselves in the literature of the period, often inscribing interpersonal conflicts into what seems to be mere decor. Maupassant’s Notre coeur () tells the story of Miche`le de Burne, a cold-hearted high-society widow, and her frustrated lover Andre´ Mariolle, a wealthy dilettante and collector. They meet in Miche`le’s ‘‘salon . . . tre`s artiste’’ (p. ), in which she has gathered an impressive collection of art objects as well as a group of loyal male admirers, many of whom are artists. The novel’s descriptions of Miche`le’s collection of valuable art objects become imbricated into the description of her habit of breaking the hearts of artistically gifted intellectual men. In a series of encounters between Miche`le and her admirers staged in the salon of the former, the machismo of artistic erudition is played against the femininity of the merely decorative. Charles Castella insists on the dimension of class in explaining the social use of the myth of the artist in the high-society circles which serve as the novel’s setting: ‘‘Henceforth this elite . . . seeks the supreme ennoblement in art. After aping each other, now the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, together and in unison, ape a common master model: the artist.’’ I would like to extend Castella’s remarks on social stratification to encompass the dimension of gender. Maupassant describes Miche`le as a typical ‘‘modern’’ woman, which is to say one who self-consciously constructs herself as a decorative

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Literature and material culture

object. This point is presented as part of Mariolle’s musings, which are made into generalizations through the use of indirect discourse, doubling his mental voice with that of the narrator. The Mariolle/narrator voice says that the modern woman’s body is now but ‘‘un objet a` orner,’’ and no longer ‘‘un objet a` aimer’’ (p. ). Maupassant thus creates a ‘‘type,’’ the ornamental but unloving modern woman, then inserts his heroine into it. The ‘‘artifice’’ (ibid.) of Miche`le’s beauty is shown to exert an irresistible appeal on male high-society aesthetes like Mariolle, the ‘‘l’artiste infe´cond’’ (p. ) whose talent is wasted on the activities of the idle rich, including the accumulation of a ‘‘jolie collection de tableaux modernes et de bibelots anciens’’ (p. ). In the eyes of this collector, Miche`le is comparable to a rare bibelot. She is ‘‘une cre´ature factice,’’ ‘‘un objet de luxe rare, attrayant, exquis et de´licat.’’ She whets the appetite of those who gaze upon her, as if she were one of those gourmet dishes in a glass display case, ‘‘pre´pare´es et montre´es pour exciter la faim’’ (p. ). Even after becoming his lover, in spite of their physical relationship Miche`le remains as inaccessible to Mariolle as if she were a precious artifact on display in a museum, an object which the collector longs to take home, but cannot (p. ). Artificial in appearance, she loves artificially as well, with an ‘‘ardeur factice’’ (p. ). Miche`le’s physical beauty is framed not only by artful clothing, but also by the exquisite bibelots displayed in a salon ‘‘dont elle e´tait presque aussi fie`re que d’elle-meˆme.’’ She owes the high quality of her decor to the expert guidance of her male artist friends, on whose taste she relies in choosing exceptional art objects (p. ). Each of these artists in turn becomes ‘‘un bibelot rare’’ (p. ) on display in this salon which he helped decorate. Mariolle too becomes trapped in her exhibit: wary from the beginning of becoming merely one of ‘‘sa collection de favoris plus ou moins illustres’’ (p. ), he becomes precisely that, objectified into a belonging comparable to the ‘‘petits bibelots qui traiˆnaient sur sa table’’ (p. ). Thus, women and men are in turn reduced to decorative art objects to be admired or collected. What separates the men from the women in this novel is artistic taste. The male characters know how to appreciate art through a sophisticated aesthetics, while for the women art is simply an element of fashionable decor, an accessory. In one of the key scenes in the novel, during a dinner at the heroine’s home the sculptor Pre´dole´ admires and comments on her rare bibelots. The reader is told that the men ‘‘l’e´coutaient avec un inte´reˆt extreˆme, tandis que les deux femmes . . . paraissaient s’ennuyer un peu . . . , de´concerte´es de ce qu’on puˆt prendre

The fashionable artistic interior

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tant de gouˆt a` de simples contours d’objets’’ [‘‘listened to him with extreme interest, while the two women . . . seemed a bit bored . . . disconcerted that anyone could so admire the simple contours of objects’’] (p. ). Not surprised that Miche`le finds the sculptor dull, one of the secondary characters, the writer Lamarthe, reflects to himself, ‘‘‘Parbleu, il n’a pas admire´ votre toilette; et vous eˆtes le seul de vos bibelots qu’il ait a` peine regarde´’ ’’ [‘‘‘Of course, he didn’t admire your clothing; you are the only one of your bibelots that he hardly looked at’’’] (p. ). Miche`le’s display of decorative art objects is thus portrayed as an act of narcissism. Through slippages and displacements from her bibelot-like person to the bibelots in her living room, she offers the objects in her collection to her admirers to be fetishized as part-object extensions of herself. Unlike the other men, who succumb to this strategy of seduction, Pre´dole´ refuses this fetishism. Lamarthe explains, Pour elle, un buste de Houdon, des statuettes de Tanagra ou un encrier de Benvenuto ne sont que les petites parures ne´cessaires a` l’encadrement naturel et riche d’un chef-d’oeuvre qui est Elle: Elle et sa robe, car sa robe fait partie d’Elle; c’est la note nouvelle qu’elle donne chaque jour a` sa beaute´. Comme c’est futile et personnel, une femme! [For our hostess, a Houdon bust, Tanagra statuettes, or a Benvenuto inkwell are nothing more than little adornments, necessaries to the natural and rich frame of the true masterpiece: Herself. Herself and her dress, which is part of Herself . . . Women! how futile and self-centered they are.]

Lamarthe sums up the significance of Pre´dole´, the idealized artist who idolizes genuine art, refusing to fetishize artificial women. A great artist who lives only for art, he seems unconcerned with feminine artifice, with ‘‘nos femmes a` colifichets, a` dentelles et a` de´guisements,’’ as Lamarthe observes. Rather, Pre´dole´ demands ‘‘de la pure plastique, a` lui, et non de l’artificiel.’’ Lamarthe’s erudite familiarity with decorative artists forms part of the gentleman’s education and serves as a sign of cultural mastery. He understands that Pre´dole´ recuperates Miche`le’s decorative objects by his admiration of them as examples of pure plastic beauty, detaching them from their (feminine) function as seductive ornamentation in order to elevate them into a (masculine) realm of high Art. The implication is that even the most well-bred modern women apprehend art objects according to a code of fashion, whereas their male counterparts apprehend the same objects through a code of aesthetics. Maupassant masterfully draws on the myth of the artist (incarnated by Pre´dole´) in conjunction with the vogue of antique decorative arts (embodied, collected, and

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Literature and material culture

admired by Miche`le and Mariolle), in order to overdetermine the structure of the central plot element, the love relationship between the hero and heroine. A cold but visually and intellectually stimulating ornamental object (Miche`le) ‘‘collects’’ a sensitive but unproductive artist and connoisseur (Mariolle), who fails to live up to the standard of the ideal artist (Pre´dole´). In Proust’s Un amour de Swann the tension between aesthetics and fashion is mapped onto class and gender distinctions following the patterns already established in the Goncourts’ Charles Demailly and in Maupassant’s Notre coeur: all three involve a couple consisting of a man with refined artistic taste and a woman incapable of appreciating this taste because she confuses art with fashion. Proust’s Swann is bourgeois but also well educated, and welcome in the highest social circles. Furthermore, throughout A la recherche Swann is consistently shown to have superior taste to aristocrats in matters of art. In contrast, his mistress Odette de Cre´cy, a demi-mondaine and former prostitute, makes judgments of taste based on her naive notion of ‘‘chic.’’ Swann, on the other hand, not only studies and collects art, but also understands what is truly ‘‘chic’’ through his access to high-society circles. This difference in competency level in both aesthetics and fashion plays itself out in the furnishings of the couple’s respective apartments during their period of courtship. Swann’s rooms are furnished with authentic antiques whose value escapes Odette, who describes them as ‘‘meubles casse´s’’ and ‘‘tapis use´s’’ [‘‘broken-down chairs’’/‘‘threadbare carpets’’]. In contrast, she lives in a heavily draped harem-like apartment obviously designed for scenes of seduction, filled with exotic Oriental bibelots and large plants. Odette’s apartment thus serves as a fitting backdrop for her early encounters with Swann. Both interiors are of course stereotypically nineteenth-century, faithfully corresponding to the social standing and gender of each character. Though she does not realize that Swann’s decor falls into the same category, Odette correctly recognizes the term bibelot as ‘‘chic,’’ as expressed through a litany of fin-de-sie`cle cliche´s. Because it captures so well the socio-historical significance of the bibelot during the nineteenth century, I quote the passage at length: De ceux qui aimaient a` bibeloter, qui aimaient les vers, me´prisaient les bas calculs, reˆvaient d’honneur et d’amour, elle faisait une e´lite supe´rieure au reste de l’humanite´. Il n’y avait pas besoin qu’on euˆt re´ellement ces gouˆts pourvu qu’on les proclamaˆt; d’un homme qui lui avait avoue´ a` diˆner qu’il aimait a` flaˆner, a` se salir les doigts dans les vieilles boutiques, qu’il ne serait jamais

The fashionable artistic interior

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appre´cie´ par ce sie`cle commercial, car il ne se souciait pas de ses inte´reˆts et qu’il e´tait pour cela d’un autres temps, elle revenait en disant: ‘‘Mais c’est une aˆme adorable, un sensible, je ne m’en eˆtais jamais doute´e!’’ et elle se sentait pour lui une immense et soudaine amitie´. Mais, en revanche ceux, qui comme Swann, avaient ces gouˆts, mais n’en parlaient pas, la laissaient froide. Sans doute elle eˆtait oblige´e d’avouer que Swann ne tenait pas a` l’argent, mais elle ajoutait d’un air boudeur: ‘‘Mais lui, c¸a n’est pas la meˆme chose’’; et en effet, ce qui parlait a` son imagination, ce n’e´tait pas la pratique du de´sinte´ressement, c’en e´tait le vocabulaire. [People who enjoyed picking up antiques, who liked poetry, despised sordid calculations of profit and loss, and nourished ideals of honour and love, she placed in a class by themselves, superior to the rest of humanity. There was no need actually to have those tastes, as long as one proclaimed them; when a man had told her at dinner that he loved to wander about and get his hands covered with dust in old furniture shops, that he would never be really appreciated in this commercial age since he was not interested in its concerns, and that he belonged to another generation altogether, she would come home saying: ‘‘Why, he’s an adorable creature, so sensitive, I had no idea,’’ and she would conceive for him an immediate bond of friendship. But on the other hand, men who, like Swann, had these tastes but did not speak them, left her cold. She was obliged, of course, to admit that Swann was not interested in money, but she would add sulkily: ‘‘It’s not the same thing, you see, with him,’’ and, as a matter of fact, what appealed to her imagination was not the practice of disinterestedness, but its vocabulary.]

The sensitive soul of Odette’s superior elite manifests itself through an odd list of preferences: bibelots, poetry, anti-commercialism, love, and honor. The only readily discernible connection between these tastes and the bibelot would seem to be the nostalgic disdain for ‘‘ce sie`cle commercial,’’ commerce being associated with interest, as opposed to disinterestedness. What is most significant about this passage, though, is the opposition drawn between really having these tastes and merely claiming to have them, between the practice of disinterestedness and the vocabulary of disinterestedness. Underpinning these remarks, then, is an eloquent commentary on the sign-function of taste, on the difference between having a certain taste, and deploying this taste socially. In a sphere ruled by fashion, as high society proves increasingly to be as A la recherche progresses, the exercise of good taste is less important than the vocabulary of good taste. Nineteenth-century French writers contribute substantially to the formation of associative chains linking judgments of taste to the myth of the artist. Though this configuration of the cultural codes of art was to last

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Literature and material culture

for many decades, making its way to the Americas, influencing other European countries, it was already disappearing when Bourdieu was carrying out the research for Distinction in France in . Today, in Europe and North America, the term ‘‘art’’ has been radically redefined by cultural events such as pop-art, the valorization of popular culture, and the incredible prices commanded by the art market. ‘‘Art’’ now seems to apply to everything and nothing. Unless one is an extremely wealthy and knowledgeable collector, to repeat the nineteenth-century claim that one’s home interior is ‘‘artistic’’ would be perceived as either naive or pretentious. What does remain of the nineteenth-century encoding of domestic things are a set of familiar novelistic conventions, a practice of enacting identity through personal possessions, an advertising industry aware of this practice, and an academic field, the sociology of the sign.

 

Flaubert’s ‘‘muse´es rec¸us’’ Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s consumerist epistemology

In nineteenth-century France the multiplication of material things coincides with what is perceived to be an explosion of knowledge, two events which come together in the new public museums which also proliferate during this period. Writing within and against this context, Flaubert accords a central place to the museum episode in his novel Bouvard and Pe´cuchet, left unfinished at the time of his death in . To summarize briefly, the novel’s (anti-)heroes, two unmarried Parisian copy clerks, retire to the country on an unexpected inheritance, where they undertake a seemingly endless series of studies and experiments from aboriculture to literature to theology and much more. The two petty-bourgeois hobbyists have no formal training in any of the activities they undertake, and must rely on their own rather confused readings of scholarly treatises and how-to manuals, which often contradict each other. The long series of amateurish study and scientific experimentation, which provides the only real plot structure for this unusual novel, is recounted (in the third person) in great detail, always following the same pattern: each new enterprise is begun with enthusiasm, soon followed by failure, frustration, and dejection, until the haphazard discovery of a new project, which sets the whole cycle going again. The effect is comic, though repetitious. At one point during the course of these successive scholarly activities the hobbyists take up archaeology, an interest inspired by the discovery of an antique chest which, in the serial fashion characteristic of the novel, leads them to ‘‘le gouˆt des bibelots’’ and then ‘‘l’amour du moyen aˆge.’’ They then turn most of the ground floor of their home into a museum. Many literary critics have commented on this episode, but they invariably concentrate on the figure of the museum, abstracting it out of the domestic context of the living room space in which it is set. It is significant that at certain points Flaubert does use the term ‘‘bibelot’’ to describe the artifacts in the museum collection, signaling that they 

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Literature and material culture

belong not only to the sphere of erudition, but also to the sphere of domesticity. In addition, the novel’s critics have relied on a completely dehistoricized notion of the museum, usually to discuss epistemology at an abstract, disembodied level, whereas Flaubert was keenly aware that the museum was very much a product of his time. At the same time, though some criticism does mention class and social position, little attention has been paid to the many consumer purchases Bouvard and Pe´cuchet make in the name of science. Therefore, in addition to resituating Flaubert’s museum episode in the context of the history of the museum, I also propose a rethinking of the epistemology deployed therein. Bouvard and Pe´cuchet is informed not only by the epistemology of the museum, but also by the epistemologies of the domestic, of social position, and of consumption. In short, the novel’s museum episode must be completely rethought in terms of the much broader context of the history of modern material culture. This involves shifting the emphasis from an Enlightenment view of epistemology to an anthropological view of culture. This also involves a rethinking of Enlightenment notions of order.                   I will take as emblematic of a certain critical moment the well-known essay by Eugenio Donato, ‘‘The Museum’s Furnace: Notes Toward a Contextual Reading of Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’’ (), whose assumptions about the nature of the museum are widely shared. Stated briefly, the large body of Bouvard and Pe´cuchet criticism produced during the late s and early s almost invariably associates the museum with a pre-modern, naive faith in order, totality, and transparent meaning; these studies then demonstrate that for Flaubert such naive faith has become impossible, leading him to write a novel which is radically modern in its production of incoherence, fragmentation, and a postSaussurean linguistic uncertainty. I do not dispute the validity of this conclusion, but rather this characterization of the museum. Recent scholarship in the growing interdisciplinary field of museum studies necessitates a reformulation of the notion of the museum, predicated on a shift in emphasis from the epistemological to the cultural. Donato, in one of the best-theorized formulations of the poststructuralist, ahistorical strain of Flaubert criticism, compares the museum to the encyclopedia, understanding it as a totalizing system of knowledge based on the classical episteme of taxonomia, or Order, as defined by

Flaubert’s ‘‘muse´es rec¸us’’

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Foucault in The Order of Things. To characterize the museum in this way is, perhaps paradoxically, to de-historicize it, in two senses. First, the museum is not an abstract universal concept like taxonomia, but rather an evolving institution imbued with local and historical particularity. The earliest public museums in France were not founded until the s. Second, if we lend credence to Foucault’s epistemes, I would argue that the nineteenth-century museum belongs to the modern episteme of History rather than to the classical episteme of Order. To properly grasp the episteme of the museum it is necessary to distinguish between order and Order: the order of the nineteenth-century museum differs from the Order of Linne´ and Buffon, as well as from the order of its twentieth-century counterparts. Donato erroneously oversimplifies the museum and Foucault in reducing both to expressions of taxonomic Order. Claiming that Foucault himself is ‘‘rooted in the episteme of the Enlightenment he describes so well,’’ Donato understands the epistemic shift from Order to History (which roughly corresponds to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, respectively) as ‘‘simply the displacement onto human history of what was until then considered ‘natural history.’’’ In other words, Donato restates the shift from Order to History as a simple disciplinary shift from natural history to human history. Donato in this way retains the Enlightenment notion of taxonomic Order for the nineteenth-century episteme of History. By redefining the nineteenth-century epistemic shift this way, Donato demonstrates his profound misapprehension of Foucault. Donato writes, ‘‘The eighteenth century generated its botanical nomenclatures by a procedure based upon the same epistemology that would later on be applied to archeological artifacts.’’ Donato makes his error in assuming that Foucault is referring to an archaeology based on taxonomy in The Archaeology of Knowledge, disregarding epistemic shifts within archaeology, treating this disciplinary field as an ahistorical abstract concept, just as he does the museum. In fact, Foucault specifically defines the type of archaeology described by Donato as the traditional type which modern archaeology has surpassed. It seems clear to me that the museum belongs to modern archaeology, which corresponds to what The Order of Things defines as the modern episteme of History. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault describes this disciplinary transformation of archaeology in terms of history, and vice versa: To be brief, then, let us say that history, in its traditional form, undertook to ‘‘memorize’’ the monuments of the past, transform them into documents, and lend

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Literature and material culture

speech to those traces which, in themselves, are often not verbal, or which say in silence something other than what they actually say; in our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments. In that area where, in the past, history deciphered the traces left by men, it now deploys a mass of elements that have to be grouped, made relevant, placed in relation to one another to form totalities. There was a time when archaeology . . . attained meaning only through the restitution of a historical discourse; it might be said, to play on words a little, that in our time history aspires to the condition of archaeology, to the intrinsic description of the monument. (p. )

What is transformed is the fundamental relationship between the disciplines of history and archaeology, and their documents or monuments. This analysis can usefully be adapted to the historical and archaeological aims of the public museum. The ‘‘monuments’’ to which Foucault refers correspond to the artifacts in the museum. The old order of history sought meaning by superimposing a layer of discourse on the monuments of the past, or artifacts, making them into documents. The new order of history, a history which aspires to archaeology, makes the document itself into a monument/artifact. Discourse does accompany the deployment of the museum’s monumentalized documents, discourse in the form of labels, catalogues, voices of tour guides, and comments of visitors. However, the primary aim of the modern museum is not to seek the discourse of history behind or beyond the document, but rather to describe the documents themselves in as much detail as possible. The rise of the modern museum signals that the artifact’s materiality has become as significant as its discursivity. For modern archaeology, material culture produces knowledge. In other words, the ‘‘object’’ of knowledge is no longer the discourse which the material object represents, but rather the material object itself; this is what it means for history to aspire to the ‘‘condition of archaeology.’’ Rather than seeking out the discourse which functions as the referent of the object, this new history models itself on archaeology, according intrinsic value to the description of the monument. In this way, the (material) object of history achieves a new autonomy, an adequacy which surpasses its function as mere signifier. We could say that the old history belongs to the order of linguistics, whereas the new history belongs to the order of the artifact. Unlike the textual space of the encyclopedia, then, the museum is primarily artifactual, both literally and conceptually. Though the encyclopedia is of course material and while the museum is certainly subject to linguistic order, the crucial difference between the textual nature of

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the encyclopedia and the artifactual nature of the museum has too long been overlooked as a result of critical theory’s linguistic-oriented phases of poststructuralism, deconstruction, and semiotic postmodernism. Donato writes of ‘‘the failure of the epistemology of the Museum to offer an adequate continuous representation between Words and Things’’ (p. ). Such was never the epistemological aim of the museum. The modern artifact does not represent history, as a word represents a thing. Rather, the artifact embodies history. Such artifacts function analogously to the superfluous narrative objects which produce Barthes’s ‘‘reality effect.’’ In the realist text, superfluous material things do not stand in for some traditional kind of narrative ‘‘meaning,’’ but rather signify realism itself. Likewise, traditional history lent speech to artifacts, whereas modern history lets artifacts stand directly for the ‘‘real’’ of history itself. If in Barthes’s formulation Flaubert’s barometer and Michelet’s little door proclaim ‘‘we are the real,’’ then modern museum objects proclaim ‘‘we are history’’ – or, depending on the type of museum, ‘‘we are science,’’ ‘‘we are culture,’’ or ‘‘we are art.’’ The museum is not a space of pre-modern Order, of transparent meaning, or of totalization. The passage from Foucault cited just above does suggest that the monumentalized documents of modern history (which I am comparing to museum artifacts) must be assembled so as to ‘‘form totalities.’’ ‘‘Totalities’’ is perhaps an unfortunate translation of the French ‘‘ensemble.’’ At any rate, the modern ‘‘totalities’’ created by the grouping of documents do not correspond to the Enlightenment ideal of an encyclopedic totalization of knowledge as described by Donato, since for Foucault the very ‘‘theme’’ and ‘‘possibility’’ of a traditional ‘‘total history’’ ‘‘begin to disappear’’ with the advent of modern history, which becomes what he calls ‘‘general history.’’ The old ‘‘total history’’ sought a ‘‘system of homogenous relations,’’ whereas the new ‘‘general history’’ challenges the old ‘‘principle of cohesion.’’ ‘‘A total description draws all phenomena around a single centre – a principle, a meaning, a spirit, a world-view, an overall shape; a general history, on the contrary, would deploy the space of a dispersion.’’ The monumentalized documents of the new history correspond to this space of dispersion, which is the space of the modern museum, created with the dawn of the nineteenth century. Seen in this way, the museum is not and was never meant to be, as Donato would have it, a space of homogenization. Donato would prefer that Foucault and the museum were simply throwbacks to the Enlightenment ideal of Order, since his own

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Literature and material culture

methodology, deconstruction, is an effective critique of Order, but has little to tell us about History. Laurence Porter accuses Donato of being rooted in the ‘‘rhetoric of deconstruction,’’ observing that Donato’s essay ‘‘suffers from critical oversights resulting from the libido deconstructendi, that is to say, from the need to create structures where there are none, so that they can subsequently be dismantled.’’ Porter further observes that Donato spends two dense opening paragraphs convincing the reader that Bouvard and Pe´cuchet are systematizers and totalizers, whereas the novel provides no indication that they have any over-arching system in mind, but rather indicates that accident determines what they will study next. By insisting on the presence in the text of a will to order, to totalization, and to transparent meaning, which proves to be conceptually untenable, Donato and others create a vicious circle which allows them to remain safely within the realm of the conceptual. If history is discussed, as it is in Donato’s article, it too becomes an untenable abstract concept. In this way, history is deftly reduced to a pre-modern illusion of linguistic unity, a totality ripe for reversal. In a sense, this allows history to be avoided, even as it is being discussed. It is time to re-historicize Bouvard and Pe´cuchet, to think about its relationship to history in a new way. The main problem with Donato and company is a stubborn refusal to consider epistemology outside of the confines of the disciplines which Bouvard and Pe´cuchet explore in series – geology, archaeology, and history are the disciplines which frame the museum episode. Even in their avoidance of history through the proclamation of its epistemological demise, this rather dated poststructuralist criticism is written from within the modern episteme of History, rooted in that set of anthropocentric assumptions whose internalization provides the condition of possibility for the social sciences – the sciences of Man. We are just now entering the as yet unformulated next episteme, which, as Foucault predicts in the famous last lines of The Order of Things, will erase man (‘‘an invention of recent date’’). A sign of this impending shift is the self-examinations to which cultural anthropology is currently subjecting itself, questioning its own foundational assumptions, its enabling myths. Many historians, sociologists, and other scholars – including art historians and museographers – are asking similar questions about their disciplines’ structures of knowledge. What this work shows us, among other things, is that the museum is much more than a classificatory space, that it is also and especially a space of identity-formation and a powerful instrument of cultural politics. Born

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of the episteme of History, the museum is inseparable from history, from the history of its own formation, as well as from the history of consumer capitalism, itself inseparable from the history of empire. However, a certain kind of understanding of the museum can come about only from the position of the new, post-historical episteme. By post-historical, I do not mean ahistoricism, but rather a radical historicism, a critical effort at constant historicizing. I use the prefix ‘‘post-’’ to signal a need for self-reflexive caution, for a self-conscious, auto-critical awareness of the anthropocentric, Eurocentric, positivist tendencies of traditional historiographical practice. What I propose, then, is a ‘‘post-historical’’ re-reading of Bouvard and Pe´cuchet, to replace the ‘‘post-structuralist’’ readings which strike me as inadequate for dealing with current concerns in cultural (including literary) criticism. Whereas post-structuralist readings situated the text in the dehistoricized context of the production of language and discourse, a post-historical reading would situate the text in the radically historicized context of the production of culture. For the post-structuralist critics, history was seen as a linguistic act, as one type of text among others, such as literature. For the post-historical critic, history is seen as one type of cultural production among others, such as daily life, consumer culture, literature, and even economics (from this point of view economics itself must be seen as a cultural production). Such a reading must recontextualize Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s museum in terms of the broader context of material culture, considering privileged epistemological artifacts (such as museum objects) alongside the artifacts of daily life (such as bibelots), as both are transformed by the multiplication of knowledge and the proliferation of consumer goods. This is precisely what Flaubert does in the museum episode, in juxtaposing museum artifacts against the banal artifacts of (petty-)bourgeois ‘‘daily life.’’ The broader perspective of material culture subjects the museum to numerous extra-epistemological logics of ‘‘order,’’ as signaled by Flaubert’s uses of the term ‘‘bibelot’’ throughout the museum episode. Flaubert creates and then observes a pair of comical characters who set out to study only those artifacts which fall within the confines of archaeology, but who find this sphere of material things inseparable not only from related disciplines such as geology and history, but also from daily domestic life, the marketplace, and the larger social sphere around them. The contamination of spheres of objects, whose perception as separate was only ever illusory, underpins the fictitious world of material culture in Bouvard and Pe´cuchet.

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Literature and material culture

For most of the novel’s critics, that the museum is housed in the domestic space of a bourgeois living room serves only to signal that the museum is being ridiculed by Flaubert, and that consequently the copy clerks’ museum project is doomed to failure, like their experiments in botany, medicine, chemistry, etc. But to confine their exercises in erudition to the domain of Knowledge-with-a-capital-K is to evade the issue of the relationship between epistemology and the extra-disciplinary domain of daily life, including the individual experience of the industrial and consumer revolutions. Flaubert’s novelistic vulgarization and domestication of the museum, as distilled in the term ‘‘bibelot,’’ merely mimics a larger system of objects to which the museum artifact and the bibelot both belong, showing that the order of artifacts never really manages to escape the vulgarity and domesticity of the objects of daily life. To relegate the museum to the realm of Knowledge, even while proclaiming its fundamental failure, as do Donato and others, is to fail to recognize that the museum is merely one ‘‘system of objects’’ among others, that objects of Knowledge are as subject to the libidinal logic of desire coopted by consumer capitalism, as they are to the (failed) logic of Reason. Criticism almost unanimously reads Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s museum as lacking any ‘‘fundamental unity,’’ as an ‘‘irreducible heterogeneity,’’ as ‘‘disconnected fragments,’’ as suffering from a ‘‘fundamental incoherence.’’ While I agree that Bouvard and Pe´cuchet exposes the failure of the museological order of things, I disagree with the conclusion that the objects in the novel represent an incoherent lack of order. There are logics which organize the novel’s world of objects, but these belong to the realm of what Bourdieu calls ‘‘practical logic,’’ based on those orders of things which escape the formalist logic of museological order. These alternative types of order include domestic order, mimetic order, social order, and the order of consumption. The novel’s collection is not disordered, but rather multiply ordered.                     The novel’s chapter  opens with a declaration that the two former copy clerks have become archaeologists and that their country house now resembles a museum (p. ). However, the museum contains not only their archaeological finds, but also geological specimens and mementos brought from their Parisian apartments, for which Pe´cuchet had already set aside a room (‘‘pour ses collections,’’ p. ) upon moving into

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the new home two chapters earlier. During the museum episode they will also add their phallus collection made up of anything vaguely oblong, ‘‘des palonniers de voiture, des jambes de fauteuil, des verrous de cave, des pilons de pharmacien’’ [‘‘carriage bars, chair legs, cellar bolts, pharmacy pestles’’] (p. ). In chapter  (three chapters later), after they have moved on to other projects upon becoming disenchanted with the museum, the word ‘‘bibelot’’ appears in a sentence which expresses despair in the face of the failure: ‘‘Bouvard voulut dresser le catalogue du muse´um, et de´clara ces bibelots stupides’’ [‘‘Bouvard wanted to compile a museum catalogue, then declared these bibelots stupid’’] (p. ; my emphasis). The terms ‘‘bibelot’’ and ‘‘muse´um’’ appear in contradicting clauses. The Latinate version of the French ‘‘muse´e’’ underlines the irony behind the juxtaposition of the two terms. By using the word ‘‘bibelot’’ in reference to the objects that make up the ‘‘muse´um’’ of the two ‘‘arche´ologues,’’ Flaubert creates a deliberate ambiguity as to their status, confusing the vocabulary of a fashionable Parisian pastime and style of interior decor (‘‘bibelot’’) with the terminology of serious historical and scientific scholarship (‘‘muse´um’’). The juxtaposition of ‘‘bibelot’’ against ‘‘muse´um’’ is prefigured in the earlier versions of the manuscript, in which Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s collection is first referred to as a ‘‘parloir gothique,’’ becoming ‘‘parloir gothique – muse´e,’’ and finally ‘‘muse´e.’’ It is thus not by accident that a piece of furniture inspires their interest in collecting, as foreshadowed in chapter , in the offhand remark that the two friends would often admire ‘‘un vieux meuble’’ and wish they had lived during the period of its use, even if they knew nothing of the period (p. ). The topic of antique furniture is evoked again in chapter  to explain the genesis of the museum: Pour avoir des morceaux dans le genre du meuble [the dilapidated antique chest which is missing a panel] Bouvard et Pe´cuchet s’e´taient mis en campagne. Ce qu’ils rapportaient ne convenait pas. Mais ils avaient rencontre´ une foule de choses curieuses. Le gouˆt des bibelots leur e´tait venu, puis l’amour du moyen aˆge. (p. ; my emphasis) [Bouvard and Pe´cuchet set off to find pieces to match the old chest. What they brought back was unsuitable, but they had encountered a host of curious things. They had acquired a taste for bibelots, then a love for the Middle Ages.]

Once again, the vocabulary choice ‘‘bibelots’’ seems odd in relation to ‘‘l’amour du moyen aˆge.’’ The interests which make up the curious

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progression ‘‘meuble – bibelots – moyen aˆge’’ recall Bourget’s image of the museum spilling into the salon to create the bibelot (see my chapter ), only in reverse order. In this case, it is a piece of furniture that inspires the taste for bibelots, which only then (‘‘puis’’) leads to a love of the Middle Ages, which in turn will inspire the transformation of Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s salon into a museum. It is the progression of interests that seems odd: looking for pieces to repair an antique chest sets off an interest in the past, rather than the other way around. This passage demonstrates that the order of Flaubert’s museum is subject at once to domestic order, and to the scientific order of the museum.                     Examining the collection’s spatial arrangement in Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s house, as can best be determined by its various presentations in the text, there emerges a logical system of classification in terms of potential value. The inventory of the collection amounts to the naming, usually with a few qualifiers, of nearly fifty items. These easily divide into two groups, based on the spatial presentation. The first group is composed of the items in the entry and first room, all of which closely resemble objects found in museums or historical sites visited by Flaubert; while these items are not necessarily museum-worthy, they are certainly museum-like. In contrast, the second group of objects, located in the second room or library, contains only objects which are best described as petty-bourgeois: the mementos the clerks brought with them from Paris, a few masterpieces of kitsch acquired later (a shellwork cabinet with plush trimmings, a petrified cat), and the ridiculous collection of ‘‘phalluses’’ (mentioned above) in its ‘‘compartiment nouveau’’ (p. ). The items in the second room are neither museumworthy nor even museum-like. The one notable exception to this arrangement is the statue of Saint Peter, which is placed in the second room with the petty-bourgeois kitsch, but in the window, a place of honor. The grouping of objects into two distinct spaces provides order for them. This order can be discerned only by rereading the novel’s descriptions of the collection with the attention to detail particular to the museum catalogue. The post-structuralist critics who have devoted articles to Flaubert’s museum (Donato, Schuerewegen, Lalonde) all privilege generalized concepts, glossing over the almost overwhelming quantity of accurate, carefully accumulated details present in Flaubert’s

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writing. For example, Donato could not have seen the classificatory spatial arrangement separating the museum-like artifacts from the pettybourgeois bibelots, since in his study he uses a short enumeration of the collection found in an earlier draft, rather than the much more elaborate descriptions in the last version of the text. Lalonde likewise fails to notice these organizing principles in providing examples of accumulated objects with ‘‘no connection between them.’’ He is less than accurate in stating that the coconuts are next to the antique medallions and the sombrero next to a funeral urn, since the collectors have in fact placed these objects in two separate rooms, the coconuts and sombrero being found in the library while the antique medallions and funeral urn are displayed in the first room with the other items presumed to be of historical value. There is a coherence underlying the apparent ‘‘fundamental incoherence characteristic of this collection.’’         Flaubert’s mockery is aimed less at an abstract concept of the museum than at the actual museums of his time. The above-cited criticism seems to assume that Flaubert chose the objects of Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s museum at random. On the contrary, it is much more likely that Flaubert culled Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s museum from the collections of what might be called Flaubert’s muse´es rec¸us (to play on the title of Flaubert’s own Dictionnaire des ide´es rec¸ues), museums which Flaubert almost certainly visited. Several such muse´es rec¸us are named in the novel’s account of the couple’s Parisian activities in chapter , but as is often the case with books cited in the novel, Flaubert does not list all of his sources. The Parisian public collection that is the obvious model for the fictitious private museum is one not mentioned by Flaubert, the ‘‘Muse´e des Thermes et de l’Hoˆtel de Cluny.’’ A second model, also unmentioned, is located in Flaubert’s home town, Rouen’s ‘‘Muse´e d’Antiquite´s et le Muse´e Ce´ramique.’’ A third muse´e rec¸u, Caen’s ‘‘Muse´e de la Socie´te´ des Antiquaires de Normandie,’’ is mentioned in Flaubert’s notes and scenarios but not in the novel. For the purposes of this section, the petty-bourgeois bibelots in the second room will be considered separately from the carefully chosen items which Flaubert has consciously grouped together in the entry and first room. I have read the nineteenth-century catalogues of each of these three museums, and have also read Flaubert’s travel notes from French historical sites. In them I have found items which correspond almost

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Literature and material culture

exactly to virtually every artifact Flaubert locates in the entry and first room of Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s house, as well as the statue of Saint Peter in the bow-window of the second room. Having made this careful comparison, I am convinced that Flaubert visited and recalled all three museums in his novel: any author who would read , books and make two visits to an out of town museum (Caen) would not neglect similar museums in cities where he resided (Rouen and Paris). The author draws on his memory (or on lost or unedited notes) to reproduce the objects he saw there. Furthermore, the founding of museums is a topic of current interest at the time of the writing of the novel: all three model museums were founded during Flaubert’s lifetime. Likewise, many of the artifacts described in the catalogues of these actual museums were discovered in France during the mid-nineteenth century. The correspondence between actual museum objects and those displayed in the entry and first room of the fictitious museum challenges Schuerewegen’s reading of the juxtaposition ‘‘locks, bolts, screws’’ as a sign of fundamental incoherence (p. ), since the museum at Caen contains similar items. The reader might also be tempted to interpret the fragments of ‘‘tuiles rouges’’ [‘‘red tiles’’] in the same way, whereas the same item is found in all three model museums. When carefully compared to actual museum catalogues, Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s collection is not simply an ‘‘anti-museum,’’ as the other articles imply, but rather a surprisingly accurate mimicry of Flaubert’s ‘‘muse´es rec¸us.’’ A mimetic order guides the choice of these objects. It could be argued that in spite of their resemblance to actual museum objects, the items of the fictitious museum are obviously inauthentic. But to adopt this conclusion would be to fall into the trap set by the text’s repetition of ide´es rec¸ues [truisms, cliche´s]. The problem of counterfeit antiques had in fact become a commonplace of collecting, thus finding its way into Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des ide´es rec¸ues – twice:       Sont toujours de fabrication moderne.                Sont toujours de fabrication moderne. [     Always of modern manufacture.              Always of modern manufacture.]

Authenticity poses a problem not only for the private collector, but also for the public museum, including such prestigious institutions as Cluny. During the mid-nineteenth century museums varying greatly in quality begin to appear all over the provinces. ‘‘How many galleries and museums would survive a serious and rigorous examination of their

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attributions?,’’ asks an  critique of a provincial museum. Thus by constantly placing in doubt the authenticity of the museum-like artifacts in the entry and first room of the museum, Flaubert is invoking an ide´e rec¸ue. Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s fictitious doubts regarding the authenticity of their artifacts are thus mimetic of the concerns of actual museum directors. The comic presentation of objects might also be taken as confirmation that these objects are inauthentic. However, comic presentation does not necessarily imply inauthenticity. For example, the two collectors discover a ‘‘bahut Renaissance’’ [‘‘Renaissance chest’’] which Gorgu was using to store oats. This comic situation is actually copied from real life: Flaubert’s friend Laporte had reportedly seen and acquired bahuts which had served to store oats. Similarly, the ‘‘vieille poutre de bois’’ [‘‘old wooden beam’’] (p. ) in the entryway, which is reportedly ‘‘l’ancien gibet de Falaise d’apre`s le menuisier qui l’avait vendue – lequel tenait ce renseignement de son grand-pe`re’’ [‘‘the old gibbet from Falaise, according to the carpenter who sold it to them, and who had gotten this information from his grandfather’’] (p. ), corresponds to an item in the museum at Caen described in Flaubert’s notes: ‘‘carcan de la haute justice d’Annebaut qui est une poutre’’ [‘‘pillory of Annebaut’s death sentence decrees, which is a beam’’]; the beam which is a pillory in the ‘‘real’’ museum becomes a gibbet or gallows in the fictional one. As for finding museum-worthy objects in odd places such as barns and lumberyards, such anecdotes are common among collectors. The Renaissance chest and the gibbet cannot be immediately dismissed as pitiful imitations. Of course, it is entirely possible that Flaubert doubts the authenticity of the actual models for the fictitious objects, or that the textual copies are intended as purely visual imitations. Such ambiguity produces a constant shifting of the target of the irony in the text. But even assuming the similarity is intended as purely visual, the question posed by the resemblance of Flaubert’s museum to its models remains puzzling: why does the author go to such lengths to reconstitute the museums of his time, when he could have haphazardly listed a miscellaneous pile of junk, as other critics have assumed he did? This meticulous imitation, like Flaubert’s ambition to write a novel consisting entirely of ide´es re´cues, is integral to the radical irony of this text whose author/narrator hides behind a faithful copy of the beˆtise [stupidity] around him, taking great pains to add no omnipotent judgments of his own. Yet the writer is never absent from the text; there is no such thing as pure copy. Flaubert invents by imagining two copy clerks whose

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collection includes copies of the contents of prestigious museums. The mimesis of well-known museums turns ironic in the attribution of a museum-worthy collection to a pair of seemingly incompetent collectors, and by its juxtaposition against the petty-bourgeois kitsch displayed in the library, which is no doubt also based on specific objects familiar to the author. Whereas I am convinced that the kitsch objects in the library are copied and not imagined, the idea of presenting them as museum objects included in the guided visit is pure invention. Which raises a difficult question posed by Flaubert’s deadpan irony: why are both groups of objects presented as equally worthy of display? Does this equalizing juxtaposition debase the potentially museumworthy objects, or elevate the artifacts of kitsch? Both responses are equally true, based on Flaubert’s self-contradicting fascination with both the banal and the sublime, with the ‘‘clinquant’’ as well as for the ‘‘or.’’ Intrigued by the banal object according to an often-cited letter to Louise Colet (‘‘Il y a dans chaque objet banal de merveilleuses histoires’’), Flaubert is also an ‘‘arche´ologue et antiquaire,’’ equally captivated by barbarian treasures ‘‘e´nume´re´es avec la minutie et l’exactitude d’un inventaire’’ as if by ‘‘un commissaire-priseur qui s’amuse,’’ in the words of Sainte-Beuve in his critique of Salammboˆ, the tale of exotic splendor and barbaric atrocity set in ancient Carthage [‘‘In every banal object there are marvelous stories’’ / ‘‘archaeologist and antiquarian’’ / ‘‘an auctioneer having fun’’]. Emma Bovary’s bourgeois luxury appears all the more ridiculous when contrasted against the sublime decor of the young priestess Salammboˆ’s bedroom, ‘‘avec toutes ses rarete´s et ses bibelots carthaginois; c’est d’une chinoiserie exquise’’ [‘‘with its rarities and knick-knacks from Carthage; it’s exquisitely Oriental’’]. But isn’t the sublimity of the ridiculous one of the fundamental tenets of the realist enterprise? Don’t the endless descriptions of interiors in the realist novel function as a sort of museum of lower-class objects? Given the author’s double predilection for both archaeological and banal objects, the inclusion of both classes of objects in the museum begins to seem logical, in an ironically Flaubertian way.       Plus il ira, plus l’Art sera scientifique, de meˆme que la science deviendra artistique. [Art will become more and more scientific, just as science will become artistic.] Flaubert to Louise Colet, 

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Though Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s curiosities are organized spatially by division into two rooms, there is an apparent disorder even within the presentation of the museum-like objects in the entry and first room. This apparent disorder is in fact typical of nineteenth-century collections, making the clutter of Flaubert’s fictitious collection a mimesis of the arrangement of actual museums. Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s museum copies not only the objects of actual museums, but also their arrangement. Historically, the museum evolves from and with the practices of private collectors. Private collections were often provided with an epistemological order in catalogues, such as the one Bouvard thought of creating (‘‘Bouvard voulut dresser le catalogue du muse´um, et de´clara ces bibelots stupides’’). However, according to a recent history of collecting, the physical arrangement of actual nineteenth-century collections often followed quite a different order: Elaborate printed catalogues designed for visiting tourists or scholars existed for many continental collections. These catalogues were frequently laid out in a logical way, but often enough the objects themselves were simply arranged with an eye to aesthetic impact rather than according to any theoretical or educational principles.

Thus the apparent disorder of Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s museum is not necessarily contrary to the aims of real private collections, whose own displays were guided not only by the spirit of science manifested in the catalogue organized ‘‘in a logical way’’ according to ‘‘theoretical or educational principles,’’ but also by a spirit of art manifested in the physical display of objects ‘‘simply arranged with an eye to aesthetic impact.’’ The ‘‘eye to aesthetic impact’’ becomes a concern of the nineteenth-century museum as well. Moreover, the concern for aesthetic impact influences the displays of the scientific artifacts of archaeology, geology, and natural history, just as the scientific concerns of art history gradually begin to influence the display, and especially the cataloguing, of art objects. It must be remembered that today’s art museums are arranged much more ‘‘scientifically’’ than were their nineteenth-century predecessors. Like the early nineteenth-century public museums, including the Louvre, the disordered presentation of the museum-like objects in Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s collection reflects the simultaneous presence of two traditional modes of collecting, an erudite mode practiced by the ‘‘curieux de science et d’histoire’’ and an aesthetic mode practiced by the ‘‘curieux de l’art.’’ Krzysztof Pomian attributes the emergence of

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Literature and material culture

these two types of collectors in the eighteenth century to social differences, noting that ‘‘The contrast between history and aesthetics therefore grafted itself onto the rivalry between scholars and courtiers.’’ Erudite scholars tended to collect medallions which they appreciated for their historical value, while courtiers preferred shells for aesthetic reasons. However, these are only tendencies; many collections contained both. Pomian, after having extensively studied seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury private collections in France and Italy, observes that ‘‘completely homogenous collections seem, however, to have been exceptions.’’ As Alphonse Maze-Sencier writes in his  Livre des collectionneurs, the vast majority of the collectors of his day are ‘‘e´clectiques,’’ defined by the fact that ‘‘ils admirent ce qui est admirable et recueillent les pie`ces de choix dans tous les genres, sans s’inquie´ter si elles comple`tent une se´rie ou forment un tout parfaitement homoge`ne’’ [‘‘they admire all that is admirable and gather the best pieces of all kinds, without worrying about whether or not they complete a series or form a perfectly homogenous whole’’]. The duality of Flaubert’s fictitious collection is set in place by the novel’s secondary characters: Dumouchel and Larsonneur are the scholars, while the notary Marescot, a bibeloteur, represents the courtly, or mondain, mode of collecting. Dumouchel not only gives Pe´cuchet the coconuts which adorn first his Paris apartment and then the ‘‘library’’ of his country estate, the professor also directly inspires the ‘‘geological specimens’’ in the museum: Dumouchel . . . les pria de recueillir a` son intention des ammonites et des oursins, curiosite´s dont il e´tait toujours amateur, et fre´quentes dans leur pays. Pour les exciter a` la ge´ologie, il leur envoyait les Lettres de Bertrand avec le Discours de Cuvier . . . (p. ) [Dumouchel . . . asked them to gather for him some ammonites and seaurchin’s cases, curiosities which he had always collected, and found frequently in their area. To get them excited about geology, he sent them the Letters of Bertrand and the Discourse of Cuvier . . . ]

The terms ‘‘curiosite´’’ and ‘‘amateur,’’ as opposed to the more contemporary term ‘‘bibelot,’’ are in keeping with this older tradition of collecting. Likewise, Larsonneur encourages their interest in Celtic history: Il e´tait perdu dans le celticisme . . . Il les priait meˆme de recueillir pour lui, quelques-unes de ces haches en silex, appele´es alors des celtae, et que les druides employaient dans ‘‘leurs criminels holocaustes.’’

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Par Gorgu, ils s’en procure`rent une douzaine, lui expe´die`rent la moins grande – les autres enrichirent le muse´um. (pp. –) [He was lost in Celticism . . . He even asked them to gather for him a few of those flint axe-heads, then called celtae, which the Druids used in their ‘‘criminal holocausts.’’ Through Gorgu they acquired a dozen and sent him the smallest, while the others enriched the museum.]

The very act of collecting is thus physically set in motion by these two savants, the professor and the lawyer/archaeologist, in their requests that the two hobbyists procure for them certain curiosities. Again, the vocabulary choice is not accidental: the word ‘‘muse´um’’ in its Latinate form underlines the historical nature of these artifacts. In contrast, Marescot is described in a rough draft as ‘‘leur rival comme collectionneur de bibelots’’ [‘‘their rival in collecting bibelots’’], a vocabulary choice which in this context suggests a bourgeois mode of collecting which serves as a mark of social distinction. It is the soup bowl belonging to the abbot and admired by Marescot which inspires Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s interest in ceramics. More importantly for my present purposes, the text attaches the fashionable cachet artiste to this type of collecting: Marescot, who owned several pieces of old Rouen stoneware, ‘‘tirait de la` comme une re´putation d’artiste’’ [‘‘which gave him a sort of artistic reputation’’] (p. ). Similarly, Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s collection is meant to give its owners a ‘‘re´putation d’artiste’’: when receiving visitors to the museum, Pe´cuchet wears his ‘‘bonnet de zouave qu’il avait autrefois a` Paris, l’estimant plus en rapport avec le milieu artistique’’ [‘‘the Zouave’s cap that he had before in Paris, considering it to be more suitable for the artistic setting’’] (p. ). Flaubert’s earlier outlines describe the museum episode as the ‘‘phase artistique’’ during which the former copy clerks ‘‘prennent le genre artiste,’’ once again mixing the two modes of collecting, this time with a clearly ironic tone. Throughout these passages the term artiste is used ironically, its meaning having been emptied for Flaubert with the inclusion of the famous articles ‘‘Art’’ and ‘‘Artistes’’ in the Dictionnaire des ide´es rec¸ues. Neglecting the dual nature of collecting which gives rise to a spirit of eclecticism, Bouvard and Pe´cuchet criticism tends to examine the museum exclusively in terms of encyclopedic erudition, completely bypassing aesthetic concerns present in the text as well as in the period’s conception of the collection. This aesthetic or artistic aspect of the collection manifests itself not only in the choice of objects collected, but also in

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displays based on an impressionistic eclecticism, as opposed to a more methodical arrangement. Cle´ment de Ris contrasts the two organizing principles in describing the rearrangement of a mid-nineteenth-century private collection often visited by other collectors: Au fouillis plein d’impre´vu . . . avait succe´de´ un classement me´thodique que regrettaient un peu les ve´ritables amateurs, ceux qui recherchaient avant tout le caracte`re. La collection ainsi range´e e´tait plus instructive, on y embrassait plus facilement chacune des se´ries qui la composent; mais elle e´tait moins amusante . . . [A jumble full of the unexpected . . . was succeeded by a methodical classification, which was considered rather unfortunate by the true collectors, those who sought character above all. Arranged in this way, the collection was more educational, for it was easier to grasp each of the series which it included, but it was less entertaining . . . ]

Following the lead of private collectors, the nineteenth-century museum inherits both modes of display, not only ‘‘methodical classification’’ but also the more entertaining ‘‘fouillis plein d’impre´vu’’ so alien to our late twentieth-century museum aesthetic. Donato’s reduction of the museum to encyclopedic taxonomia is completely ahistorical. He supports his version of ‘‘the ideology that governs the Museum in the nineteenth century’’ by citing American and British museum directors writing between  and , that is to say thirty to fifty years after Flaubert’s death, concluding that the dominant feature of the museum is the erasure of heterogeneity. If we compare these twentieth-century citations to the discourse of French museum directors in Flaubert’s time, the ‘‘ideology’’ we find is quite different. From the time of the opening of the Louvre in , the two aspects of the collection – erudite and artistic – formed the basis of a polemic as to the aim of the public museum. Should a museum be ‘‘un livre d’histoire’’ or ‘‘un beau livre d’images’’ [‘‘a history book’’ or ‘‘a beautiful picture book’’]? This debate concerns not only the purpose of the museum, but also its physical arrangement. In his preface to the  catalogue, Rouen’s museum director declares: ‘‘un Muse´e me´thodique pour le savant, passe encore, mais pour le public un Muse´e artistiquement installe´ d’abord’’ [‘‘a methodical museum is fine for the scholar, but for the public an artistically arranged museum is preferable’’]. He explains his preference for a picturesque artistic arrangement over a cold, dry, pedantic chronology: En , la manie du classement a` outrance n’e´tait pas encore de mode. Aussi a-t-on installe´ d’une manie`re tre`s pittoresque le Muse´e d’Antiquite´s de Rouen. On a fait de meˆme d’ailleurs au Muse´e de Cluny, qui date a` peu pre`s du meˆme

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

temps, et il est certainement de nos jours des esprits chagrins qui ne peuvent se consoler de voir un luxueux fanal de gale`re ve´nitienne du e sie`cle dominer des pierres tombales du Moyen aˆge, tandis que des meubles Renaissance supportent des ivoires byzantins ou des miniatures du sie`cle dernier. Les classements me´thodiques ont certes du bon, il serait pue´ril de le me´connaıˆtre; mais la se´cheresse d’une exhibition rigoureusement chronologique et le classement par ordre nous paraıˆtront difficilement pre´fe´rables a` un agencement artistique qui se´duit et attire, meˆme les natures les plus vulgaires. Une installation pittoresque parle bien plus a` l’esprit qu’un ´etalage sec et froid, inspire´ d’un ´etroit pe´dantisme, et c’est par le premier syste`me, plutoˆt que par le second, qu’on obtient une re´elle vulgarisation. [In , the mania for extravagant classification was not yet fashionable. Rouen’s Museum of Antiquities was thus arranged in a very picturesque manner. The same was done at the Cluny museum, which dates from roughly the same period. Certainly today there are sad souls who cannot get over seeing a luxurious sixteenth-century Venetian galley lantern overlooking Medieval tombstones, while Renaissance furniture bears Byzantine ivory figurines and eighteenth-century miniatures. It would be puerile to deny the merits of methodical classification; however, I for one find it hard to prefer the aridity of an exhibit based on rigorous chronology and orderly classification, over an artistic arrangement which seduces and attracts even the most common mind. A picturesque installation speaks more to the soul than does a dry and cold display inspired by narrow pedantry. It is by means of the first system rather than by the second that true popularization is achieved.]

This passage makes clear that ‘‘le classement par ordre’’ is by no means the dominant mode of organizing museums during Flaubert’s lifetime, since ‘‘la manie du classement a` outrance’’ only becomes popular (‘‘de mode’’) during the second half of the century. This is why the juxtaposition enumerated here – ‘‘fanal de gale`re – pierres tombales – meubles Renaissance – ivoires byzantins – miniatures’’ – seems no more heterogenous or disordered than the objects assembled in the first room of Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s museum. In addition to the frequency of the ‘‘installation pittoresque,’’ the museums of Flaubert’s time were in general less specialized than those of today. For example, whereas at present Cluny displays exclusively medieval artifacts, its  catalogue includes not only ‘‘Objets provenant de fouilles et remontant aux e´poques celtique, gauloise, galloromaine et aux premiers temps du moyen aˆge’’ [‘‘objects from digs dating back to the Celtic, Gallic, and Gallo-Roman periods, as well as the early Middle Ages’’], but also a collection of ceramics which extends through the eighteenth century. In addition, it seems that the quantity of artifacts on display was as important as their quality, reflecting the

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prevailing taste for dense accumulations. Cluny’s disparate collection was streamlined after World War II to accommodate the more rigorous museum standards of the twentieth-century public, ‘‘for whom it is no longer possible to display the most remarkable pieces lost amidst those which are secondary, not to mention suspect.’’ Flaubert mimics the nineteenth-century museum’s tolerance for secondary works with Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s statue of Saint Peter. Flaubert had seen such a statue on two visits to the museum at Caen, and describes it in detail in his travel notes. More surprisingly, the Caen museum’s ‘‘real’’ catalogue implies that the statue is not a masterpiece, by describing it as the ‘‘travail grossier d’un statuaire inhabile’’ [‘‘the crude work of an unskilled sculptor’’]. Critics of Bouvard and Pe´cuchet have misinterpreted the spirit of eclecticism which is so much a part of the tradition of collecting in Europe, reading the museum of Bouvard and Pe´cuchet anachronistically, based on a twentieth-century perspective. While it is of course true that assembling a museum implies an attempt at organizing fragments into a representative and coherent whole, this aspect has been overemphasized in Bouvard and Pe´cuchet criticism. As a result, the preference of many nineteenth-century collectors and curators for the happy heterogeneity of eclecticism has been overlooked.           The museum episode mimics not only the physical order of the nineteenth-century museum, but also the social order of the nineteenthcentury culture which embraces the museum. Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel instigated a sociology of the twentieth-century museum. Flaubert’s novel can be read in terms of a sociology of the museum in his time. Sociological hybridization characterizes both the novel’s collection and its collectors. By their attributed social origins alone Bouvard and Pe´cuchet are already comical, since as ‘‘autodidactic cleaks,’’ they begin from a ‘‘position doomed to ridicule.’’ The two copy clerks who through an inheritance become country gentlemen then savants, eventually becoming archaeologists and collectors, have arranged their sociologically hybrid collection accordingly. The items collected as savants greet the visitor in the entry and first room, while the second room or library contains objects of petty-bourgeois decor, including the items brought by the couple from the apartments they occupied as clerks in

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Paris, such as Pe´cuchet’s coconuts and the portrait of Bouvard’s uncle. The presence of the ‘‘arbre ge´ne´alogique de la famille Croixmare’’ [‘‘family tree of the Croixmare family’’] underlines the significance of social origins. The same is true of the secondary characters, whose savant and artistic interests in collecting are contrasted against their strictly bourgeois professions: Larsonneur is a lawyer and archaeologist; Marescot is a notary and ‘‘ami de beaux-arts,’’ even an ‘‘artiste’’ (pp. , ). As is the case for the objects of the collection, there are also ‘‘real’’ models for these collectors: two socially hybrid amateurs, the engraver/archaeologist E.H. Langlois and the clergyman/archaeologist l’abbe´ Cochet, were associated with the museum at Rouen. Other models for these bourgeois collectors were abundant in Flaubert’s hometown, where the collector is a ‘‘character type well represented among the Rouen bourgeoisie of Flaubert’s time . . . Among these collectors, one finds the upper and petty bourgeoisie, and all of the professions.’’ The definition ‘‘antiquaire’’ of the  Dictionnaire de la conversation et de la lecture criticizes the casual collector: tels sont ces individus qui, sans avoir fait les e´tudes pre´paratoires ne´cessaires pour se livrer a` une recherche he´rise´e de difficulte´s, prennent pour l’amour de l’antique la triste manie de recueillir sans ordre et sans choix une foule de de´bris, souvent apocryphes, dont ils forment a` grands frais de pre´tendues collections . . . [Without having done the preparatory studies necessary for undertaking research fraught with difficulties, such individuals mistake the love of antiques for that sad mania which consists in the disordered and indiscriminate gathering together of masses of often apocryphal debris, out of which, at great expense, they form so-called collections . . .]

I include this citation to demonstrate that the incompetent casual collector has become a social type, and that the critique of such hobbyists has become an ide´e rec¸ue. By its comical presentation of the collection, the text suggests that Flaubert’s collectors have simply assembled a disordered and indiscriminate mass of debris. Or is the text simply copying another ide´e re´cue? What if two semi-imbeciles do succeed in creating a museum that rivals famous private collections and public museums of its time? What better way to mock elitist collectors who are already mocking the mock collector, than to attribute an impressive array of authentic antique artifacts to two ‘‘autodidactic clerks’’? The discourse of authenticity becomes inseparable from the discourse of social status.

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The comments of secondary characters as they visit the museum are directly linked to their social positions. The noble comte de Faverges appreciates the collectors’ interest in the Middle Ages, ‘‘e´poque de foi religieuse et de de´vouements chevaleresques’’ [‘‘an era of religious faith and chivalrous devotion’’] (p. ), which he sees as favorable to his moral and political leanings. The unsophisticated provincial bourgeois widow Mme Bordin admires the petty-bourgeois objects (especially the shell-work cabinet and petrified cat from Saint Allyre) while Marescot the notary/collector dismisses them, more interested in the ceramics, a collectors’ item fashionable enough to be included in the Dictionnaire des ide´es rec¸ues (‘‘ Plus chic que la porcelaine’’). Gender is at play here as well: Mme Bordin’s role as an ignorant admirer of a collection is very similar to that of Balzac’s Mme Camusot in Le Cousin Pons. Though both belong to the same social class as other male characters who appreciate collectors’ objects (Marescot and M. Camusot), as women they lack the education essential to the serious collector. Finally, the lowest class of ‘‘bibelots,’’ the religious objects exchanged for museum objects in chapter , are admired by a member of the lowest social class, the servant Marcel, who ‘‘nettoyait ces splendeurs, n’imaginant au paradis rien de plus beau’’ [‘‘cleaned these splendid things, imagining nothing as beautiful even in paradise’’] (p. ). The museum episode traces a descent down the social ladder of collecting. Class also determines the degree of ambiguity in the text’s treatment of the question of museum-worthiness and value. Whereas the text remains stubbornly ambiguous in giving contradictory clues as to the authenticity of the first group of objects, the petty-bourgeois objects in the second room are described in enough detail that we can be sure they had no collector’s value at the time. Likewise, the phalluses, the collection-within-the-collection added later, are clearly a grotesque imitation based on a purely visual similarity, like the ornamental garden of chapter  and the pathetic do-it-yourself gymnasium equipment of chapter . The case of the religious bibelots displayed by the colporteur, as well as those seen during the two clerks’ pilgrimage to la De´livrande (a site comparable to Lourdes; chapter ), is particularly instructive here in terms of ambiguity and clues which indicate a possible authenticity. The museum items which the former collectors exchange with the colporteur are all located in the first room of the museum and correspond to actual museum objects. While this merchant’s interest in the exchange may or may not mean that these objects are authentic antiques, it would seem to indicate that they are clever

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enough facsimiles – and popular enough items – to be sold to other less-than-expert collectors. In contrast, unlike these potentially valuable objects, the religious objects are disparaged by the narrator, the Flaubertian narrator whose voice is rarely so clear. The description of the religious objects in the boutiques at la De´livrande ends, ‘‘ – et le soleil, frappant les verres des cadres, e´blouissait les yeux, faisait ressortir la brutalite´ des peintures, la hideur des dessins’’ [‘‘ – and, striking the framed glass, the sun dazzled the eye, bringing out the crudeness of the paintings and the hideousness of the drawings’’] (p. ). The various series of objects – the potentially museum-worthy objects, the pettybourgeois objects of the library, the phallus collection, the religious bibelots – are presented in the novel in the order of descending value. The lower the class of bibelot the more clearly its worthlessness is inscribed in Flaubert’s text.           In overemphasizing epistemology, Bouvard and Pe´cuchet criticism has not only dehistoricized the museum, but has also neglected another historical aspect of the novel: its internalization of nascent consumer culture. Claude Mouchard and Jacques Neefs have discussed Bouvard and Pe´cuchet in terms of ‘‘the explosion of various fields of knowledge.’’ What has not yet been adequately addressed is the commodification of knowledge exposed by Flaubert’s novel. The nineteenth-century explosion of knowledge, along with the disciplinary domains which organize and generate this knowledge, must also be understood in relation to the explosion of consumer goods in the marketplace. Each of the copy clerks’ new epistemological undertakings begins with a perceived need to make purchases. Verbs like acheter, se procurer, and se faire expe´dier [to buy, to procure, to have sent] appear repeatedly throughout the novel. Bouvard and Pe´cuchet accumulate not only museum artifacts, but also the tools and supplies necessary to carry out their various experiments. Again and again Flaubert mentions the growing piles of debris left behind as projects are abandoned, as if foreshadowing the massive waste produced by consumer societies. Above all, Bouvard and Pe´cuchet accumulate books. Donato compares the museum not only to the encyclopedia, but also to the library to which Foucault devoted an essay. However, following Foucault’s lead, Donato treats the library conceptually, failing to recognize the modern nature of Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s library: its constant expansion

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Literature and material culture

through new acquisitions. Many critics cite the lines in chapter  in which Bouvard declares that they will not need a library in the country, to which Pe´cuchet replies, ‘‘D’ailleurs, j’ai la mienne’’ [‘‘Besides, I have mine’’]. What holds them back at this point is a difficulty in deciding what to buy, how to decide ‘‘si tel livre ‘e´tait vraiment un livre de bibliothe`que’’’ [‘‘if a given book was ‘really a library book’’’] (p. ). During the course of the novel their library does grow, almost exponentially, following the same dynamic by which their museum grew, a few items at a time, discovered one after another as one perceived need leads to the next, following the now-familiar patterns of modern consumption. For Bouvard and Pe´cuchet, science belongs to anyone who can make the necessary purchases of supplies (such as the anatomical dummy purchased for their studies in anatomy) and especially of books. The importance of books is demonstrated during Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s ongoing medical debates with the local doctor: De quel droit les juger incapables? est-ce que la science appartenait a` ce monsieur! . . . Donc acceptant son de´fi, ils alle`rent jusqu’a` Bayeux pour y acheter des livres. Ce qui leur manquait, c’e´tait la physiologie; – et un bouquiniste leur procura les traite´s de Richerand et d’Adelon, ce´le`bres a` l’e´poque. (p. ; my emphasis) [What right did he have to judge them incompetent? Did science belong to him! ... So, accepting his challenge, they went all the way to Bayeux to buy some books. What they lacked was physiology, so a book dealer procured for them the treatises of Richerand and of Adelon, who were famous at the time.]

It is noteworthy that the books purchased here belong not to the domain of the dusty library, but to the domain of nouveaute´s, or new consumer goods: this bookseller gets them the latest books, those which are well known at the time. Knowledge has become a lack to be filled through consumption (‘‘la physiologie’’ . . . ‘‘leur manquait’’). Just as desire is by its very nature destined to remain unfulfilled, so the consumer must constantly experience the deceptions of incomplete satisfaction. The desire for satisfaction leads to new purchases, which provide only partial satisfaction, which leads to another series of purchases, ad infinitum. At the same time, the repetition of this sequence provides a steady source of pleasure. This is the same pattern by which Bouvard and Pe´cuchet consume science, hoping for full satisfaction from each new project, experiencing disappointment when satisfaction proves to be partial,

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then repeating the cycle again with high hopes for their newest epistemological enterprise. As we have learned from Lacan, the aim of this endlessly repeating cycle is not satisfaction, but rather the prolongation of desire. After their disappointment with the results of their venture into aboriculture, undertaken ‘‘comme spe´culation!’’ (p. ), they realize that science is costing them too much money and effort. ‘‘Ensuite, ils s’accuse`rent d’avoir e´te´ trop ambitieux – et ils re´solurent de me´nager de´sormais leur peine et leur argent’’ [‘‘Afterwards, they reproached each other for having been too ambitious, and they resolved to better manage their efforts and their money, from then on’’] (p. ). However, they are immediately lured into the next project, a decorative garden inspired by a book they already own, The Architect of the Garden. Luckily they find an inexpensive means of realizing the project, which implicitly justifies new expenditures: et dans un enthousiasme progressif, apre`s beaucoup de taˆtonnements, avec l’aide d’un seul valet, et pour un somme minime, ils se fabrique`rent une re´sidence qui n’avait pas d’analogue dans tout le de´partement. (p. ; my emphasis) [and with growing enthusiasm, after much feeling their way around, with the aid of a single servant, and with minimal expense, they built themselves a residence unmatched by any in the region.]

For the bricoleur, science takes on the lure of the bargain. The same spirit of consumption fuels their search for bibelots and museum objects. An odd paragraph which appears in the middle of the recounting of their search for medieval artifacts demonstrates the degree to which the spirit of consumption consumes them. ‘‘Quantite´ de choses excitaient leurs convoitises, un pot d’e´tain, une boucle de strass, des indiennes a` grands ramages. Le manque d’argent les retenait’’ [‘‘Lots of things whetted their appetite, a pewter pot, a strass buckle, flowered calico’’] (p. ). This list of coveted objects unrelated to their ‘‘amour du moyen aˆge’’ [‘‘love of the Middle Ages’’] suggests a close relationship between their mania for collecting and what we would now characterize as a more general mania for shopping, where the desire for one object seems inevitably to lead to the desire for another. A passage which I cited above follows a similar logic of consumption: Pour avoir des morceaux dans le genre du meuble Bouvard et Pe´cuchet s’e´taient mis en campagne. Ce qu’ils rapportaient ne convenait pas. Mais ils

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avaient rencontre´ une foule de choses curieuses. Le gouˆt des bibelots leur e´tait venu, puis l’amour du moyen aˆge. (p. ) [Bouvard and Pe´cuchet set off to find pieces to match the old chest. What they brought back was unsuitable, but they had encountered a host of curious things. They had acquired a taste for bibelots, then a love for the Middle Ages.]

One type of object, an antique piece of furniture, leads to an interest in another type of object, bibelots, which leads to an interest in the objects of the Middle Ages. This succession of interests seems haphazard from a purely intellectual point of view. It is the logic of the consumer object, more than the logic of the epistemological object, the museum object, which connects what will become a series of activities for Bouvard and Pe´cuchet. In search for one type of object (replacement pieces for the dilapidated antique chest) which they do not find, many other objects are found. The failed search for one object leads not to utter frustration and despair, but rather to the discovery of other objects – bibelots, etc. ‘‘Le gouˆt des bibelots,’’ though foreshadowed by visits to museums in chapter , ultimately comes (‘‘leur e´tait venu’’) from visits to the marketplace. The contiguity between the museum and the marketplace in Flaubert’s novel can be read as the literary text’s internalization of modern material culture. The bibelot brings the museum into the salon by way of the marketplace. The museum artifact remains haunted by the specter of the bibelot because both belong to the same Western system of objects. The spaces of the bibelot – the curiosity shop, the magasin de nouveaute´s, the department store, the bourgeois living room – remain bound to the space of the artifact – the museum. The curiosity shops in Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin and Gautier’s ‘‘Le Pied de momie’’ resemble museums. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that the museum resembles the curiosity shop, since the latter has been around longer. The critics of Bouvard and Pe´cuchet remind us that the museum is indebted to the culture of the encyclopedia. It is time we recognized that the museum is equally indebted to the culture of the marketplace. The object of knowledge is not so easily disentangled from the object of consumption.

 

Narrate, describe, or catalogue? The novel and the inventory form in Balzac, the Goncourts, and Huysmans

The various middle and upper classes of late nineteenth-century Paris become increasingly accustomed to consulting catalogues, of museums, of art auctions, of estate sales, and of the new department stores. It is no coincidence that this proliferation of catalogues coincides with the proliferation of the bibelot and other material goods in the home and in the marketplace. This culture in the grips of rationalizing bureaucratization perceives a need to inscribe in writing its new material abundance. The catalogue form evolves out of the simple inventory, the written accounting of material accumulation, a representational tool invented by merchants and adopted by collectors of curiosities, antiquarians, and museographers. As the bibelot invades the novel, taking up more and more space in the body of the text, it brings with it the catalogue form, a form of writing born of the profane sphere of material culture, not the sanctified sphere of ‘‘literary’’ writing. However, while mainstream literature assimilates the catalogue form during the nineteenth century, mainstream literary criticism does not embrace the literary catalogue until the advent first of poststructuralist then of postmodernist literary criticism. The divergence of the critics reveals much about the literature itself.                Critical reactions to catalogue-like descriptions, or enumeratio for those who prefer a more elegant latinate term, can be divided into two camps: on the one hand, modernists who, valuing tightly woven narratives, object to descriptive excesses which they see as threatening the unity of the novel as a whole; and on the other hand, poststructuralists and postmodernists who celebrate the fragmentation, openness, and nonhierarchization of lists, inventories, and catalogues. Critics from both camps evoke the bibelot in discussions of the catalogue. This critical 

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‘‘battle’’ over catalogue-like description was never directly fought, but can be pieced together from many books and articles. The two camps rally around two different authors: the modernists denounce the catalogue-like descriptions of the Goncourts, while the poststructuralists and postmodernists celebrate the catalogue-like descriptions of Huysmans. While both camps manage to recuperate Balzac and Flaubert, the modernists are more drawn to the former, while the postmodernists tend to champion the latter. In his essay ‘‘Narrate or Describe?,’’ whose title I borrowed for this chapter, Georg Luka´cs (of the modernist camp) denounces the heavily descriptive novel as a product of industrial capitalism. Though I do not share his modernist aesthetic, I do share his conviction that heavily descriptive novels are produced by the conditions of capitalism, that Zola, the Goncourts, and Flaubert produce ‘‘capitalist prose.’’ The logic of modern material culture under consumer capitalism permeates, indeed generates, the heavily descriptive novel. However, Luka´cs constructs his argument not around politics, but around form, presuming that good form requires the subordination of description to narration. For Luka´cs, the ideal narrative form is the epic, a form which fully integrates description into the only truly poetic project, the recounting of the lives of characters, of their actions and experiences. Epic establishes ‘‘order and hierarchy among objects and events’’ (p. ), thus subordinating description to narration, eliminating all details which do not directly pertain to the dramatic conflict which is being staged. Because Goethe, Tolstoy, Walter Scott, and Balzac use detailed description only in the service of narrating the actions of ‘‘men,’’ they are epic poets. Because Zola, the Goncourts, and Flaubert describe for description’s sake, they are mere observers. The balance between description and narration in a novel is directly linked to the balance established between persons and things. When things ‘‘are described out of any context with the lives of the characters,’’ they attain ‘‘an independent significance that is not their due’’ (p. ). ‘‘The characters have no connection at all with the objects described.’’ Ultimately, ‘‘description debases characters to the level of inanimate objects’’ (p. ). Organizing the novel around inanimate things rather than around the actions of characters results in a loss of internal cohesiveness. The novel degenerates into a grouping of picturesque scenes. ‘‘The characters’ lives, the careers of the protagonists, merely constitute a loose thread for attaching and grouping a series of pictures of objects, pictures which are ends in themselves.’’ He adds that ‘‘From an artistic point of

Narrate, describe, or catalogue?



view, the individual pictures . . . are as isolated and unrelated to each other as pictures in a museum’’ (p. ). This point is worth elaborating. The comparison to the museum is indeed fitting, for the logic of the museum is the logic of juxtaposition, of collocation, contiguity, metonymy. In the museum setting, paintings and artifacts are placed side by side. There is no intrinsic connection among these items, only the external connections of similarity or seriality based on genre, theme, provenance, etc., connections imposed on them by curators, catalogues, or the viewer. Unlike linguistic elements, the material objects possess neither semantic nor syntactic connections, for as one analysis of the museum display puts it, ‘‘The problem with things is that they are dumb. They are not eloquent, as some thinkers in art museums claim.’’ Connections must be added by a narrator figure, either a speaking guide or a text. In highly descriptive novels, Luka´cs’s analogy suggests, things are merely juxtaposed against each other, as well as against human characters, without sufficient connections having been established by a narrating function. Juxtaposition is also the logic of the catalogue, characterized as it is by numbered entries, which may be grouped by criteria such as theme, date, or provenance, but which otherwise are not connected to each other in the way that the sentences and paragraphs of a novel or essay are syntactically connected to each other. Juxtaposition is the chief characteristic of what Roland Barthes calls ‘‘the semantics of the object.’’ Though objects are signs which function within semiotic systems, their syntax is very elementary: In reality the objects – whether these are the objects of the image or the real objects of a room, or of a street – are linked only by a single form of connection, which is parataxis, i.e., the pure and simple juxtaposition of elements. This kind of parataxis of objects is extremely frequent in life: it is the system to which are subject, for example, all the pieces of furniture in a room. The furnishing of a room achieves a final meaning (a ‘‘style’’) solely by the juxtaposition of elements.

According to this formulation,‘‘in reality,’’ ‘‘pure and simple juxtaposition’’ is the form of connection which links things to each other. In narrative, however, it is expected that material objects be connected to persons in more linguistically complex ways. By organizing the novel according to the logic of objects, connections between persons and objects are loosened, producing a sense of alienation as objects and persons seem to become detached. The irony is that by comparing these

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Literature and material culture

descriptions of material settings to paintings in a museum, Luka´cs borrows an object of modern material culture to describe overly objectoriented texts, organizing his own argument around a logic of objects. To catalogue, to inventory, to enumerate, or to list, is certainly to describe with a minimum of narrative elements, leaving little room for plot and character development. Whereas modernists like Luka´cs are troubled by the excesses to which detached, runaway description can lead, postmodernists celebrate excesses of all sorts. Conceding that ‘‘That which one gives to description, one takes away from character,’’ Naomi Schor launches a postmodernist defense of Flaubert’s descriptive excesses in Salammboˆ, a novel dominated by lengthy enumerations of the visual and sensual delights and horrors of exotic ancient Carthage, of its armies, weapons, clothing, food, palace, temple, religious cult objects, etc. As cited in the previous chapter, Saint-Beuve refers to the author of Salammboˆ as an ‘‘arche´ologue et antiquaire,’’ noting among other descriptive excesses that King Hamilcar’s treasures are enumerated ‘‘avec la minutie et l’exactitude d’un inventaire’’ as if by an auctioneer. Such descriptions are a key feature of what Schor calls the ‘‘ornamental text,’’ a term referring to the highly descriptive texts which result from ‘‘the invasion of the body of the novel by details.’’ In her poststructuralist, feminist defense of the detail, Schor notes that critical reactions to what I call catalogue-like description, what she calls the ornamental, depend largely on the aesthetic values of the critic: To say that a text is ornamental necessarily implies a revalorization of the ornamental, an unthinkable operation as long as a modernist aesthetic totally dedicated to a bleached writing hostile to all decorative elements held sway. Salammboˆ, a ‘‘purple’’ text according to Flaubert’s celebrated word, might well be the precursor text of postmodernism and as such requires the elaboration of a hermeneutic specially adapted to its texture.

Schor calls for a postmodernist reevaluation of the ornamental text, which for her amounts to the deconstruction of a series of hierarchically ordered pairs: ornamented over ornament, essential over accessory, whole over detail. In dismantling these pairings on which the modernist aesthetic is built, a postmodernist rereading would revalorize what the modernists reject in the ornamental text: the imbalance between description, plot, and character development. Taking up Schor’s call for a revalorization of the ornamental, in her Ornament, Fantasy and Desire in Nineteenth-Century French Literature, Rae Beth Gordon draws parallels between ornamental texts and ornamental art

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objects. Citing ‘‘the attacks on the excesses in decoration’’ described in Ernst Gombrich’s study of the decorative, she observes that ‘‘all of the antagonism and suspicion directed at ornament in the decorative arts will also be leveled at ornamental texts,’’ then goes on to show the richness and artistry of the ornamental text by identifying rhetorical figures in description with ornamental figures in the decorative arts (arabesque, lace, trills, frills, decorative frames, trompe l’oeil, etc.). She creates a psychoanalytic dimension for such ornamental figures, which often involve depictions of decorative objects, by identifying them with displaced desire. Gordon’s analysis, then, abstracts decorative objects, quickly leaving behind their materiality, their physical production, display, and consumption, in favor of rhetoric and psychoanalysis. Schor and Gordon set out to recuperate the ornamental text from the devalorization it suffered under the sway of modernist criticism, undertaking a task that seems much less urgent now that the postmodern aesthetic ‘‘holds sway.’’ Post-modernist criticism, the term under which I am grouping deconstruction, poststructuralism, post-structuralist feminist criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, and queer theory, has succeeded in revalorizing all of the perverse excesses of those Flaubertian texts which make him the precursor of the decadents, elevating Salammboˆ, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, and ‘‘He´rodias’’ to the critical acclaim once reserved for Madame Bovary. The postmodernist aesthetic has likewise canonized the grand novelistic catalogue, Huysmans’s A rebours, about which more will be said below. My own perspective of the bibelot necessitates an approach more materialist than that of the modernists or the postmodernists. To speak of ornamental art objects is to introduce the domain of material culture into literary analysis. Ornamental texts devote a great deal of attention to material culture. What I would like to add to Gordon’s excellent rhetorical and psychoanalytic treatment is a much more material dimension, one which takes into account the physical and economic circulation of decorative objects in late nineteenth-century culture. ‘‘Bibelot’’ is for me a less abstract term than ‘‘ornament,’’ and it is on the physical and economic ‘‘thingness’’ of the bibelot that I will insist. The ‘‘invasion of the body of the novel’’ by the bibelot, to play on Schor’s phrasing, brings with it the organizational schemas of material culture, first and foremost the catalogue form itself. The bibelot goes hand in hand with the inventory: bibelots are countable, they are physical things which in a monetary economy demand to be accounted for, even in a literary text. Whether they line the shelves of a shop, a

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Literature and material culture

museum, or a curio cabinet in a living room, expressing their presence in writing almost always requires recourse to enumeratio, whether for the purposes of a literary account or of a financial account. Through enumeration, the logic of the marketplace invades the novel by way of form.         :             Paul Bourget’s  essay ‘‘Edmond et Jules de Goncourt’’ associates the brothers’ writing style with their love of bibelots. Likewise, three mid-twentieth-century critics also evoke the brothers’ passion for the bibelot in evaluating their writing. Two of these critics, Jean-Pierre Richard and Joan Dangelzer, staunch upholders of the modernist aesthetic, bring up the bibelot in order to condemn the Goncourts’ inventory-like descriptive style. Their arguments show much in common with that of Luka´cs in ‘‘Narrate or Describe?’’ On the other hand, Robert Ricatte, though he is writing at the same time as Richard and thus can hardly be called a postmodernist, expresses appreciation for the inventory form. How can the bibelot and the inventory be used both to praise and to condemn? I will consider first the condemnation, then the praise. Dangelzer, who shares Luka´cs’s modernist aesthetic stance (though she exhibits none of his historical perspective), associates the writing style of the Goncourt brothers with the detail, the bibelot, and the inventory. D’habitude, ils ne savent pas controˆler leur fre´ne´sie de de´tail. Avec ce regard fureteur du bibelotier, ils ne se contentent pas de raconter les choses en gros, de communiquer une impression ge´ne´rale au lecteur. Ils inspectent et inventorient tous les coins, passent la main sur toutes les e´tage`res, rele`vent chaque excentricite´, chaque hasard curieux. [Usually they were unable to control their frenzy for detail. With the rummaging gaze peculiar to the collector, they are not content to give the reader an overview or a general impression. They inspect and inventory every nook and cranny, touching every shelf, picking out each eccentricity, each curious happenstance.]

It is the Goncourts’ ‘‘regard fureteur du bibelotier’’ which inclines them to list details rather than give a general impression. The bibelot and the inventory are thus identified with the detail in the detail/general dichotomy, here hierarchized in favor of the general, in accordance with the tenets of the modernist aesthetic. The details noted by the brothers are not only too numerous, but also too heterogenous, since in their exhaus-

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tive inspection (‘‘tous . . . toutes’’) they tend to pick out ‘‘chaque excentricite´, chaque hasard curieux.’’ Dangelzer illustrates her points with a detailed discussion of the description of Coriolis’s art studio in Manette Salomon. Her typically modernist reaction to the typically nineteenth-century visual complexity of the brothers’ fictitious studio gives a disparaging though not entirely inaccurate summary of the five-page enumerative description in the original text. Ironically – perhaps intentionally – in her own rendering of ‘‘ces entassements de bibelots’’ [‘‘these piles of knick-knacks’’] the critic reproduces the impression of excess in her long description of the Goncourts’ long description. Dangelzer herself includes lists in her own lengthy summary of the passage in question, in noting the presence of weapons displays, flags, casts of sculptures, animal heads, hats, coats, plaster casts, escutcheons, a statuette, a jug, a bit of amber, a shell, a gobelet, a mask, an animal skin, an oriflamme, a camel harnass, and a water pipe. Judging from Dangelzer’s recourse to the list, enumeration would seem to be inevitable when it comes to writing about bibelots, even in derision. Her summary conveys an impression of physical excess, of a space so overstuffed as to be stifling. Are such descriptive excesses merely the result of incompetent writing, or of an inability to exercise self-control? This is what Dangelzer implies, even though she does acknowledge that the Goncourts’ descriptions are not always excessive. She admires the ‘‘belle sobrie´te´’’ and ‘‘exquise mesure’’ that the brothers use in describing interior decor in their Germinie Lacerteux, in contrast to the descriptive excesses she finds in Manette Salomon. She asks herself the obvious question, but without answering it: if the authors were capable of restraining their descriptive frenzy in Germinie Lacerteux, why do they not do so in Manette Salomon? The Goncourts produce two different kinds of novels, those with an efficient but sparse amount of descriptive detail (such as Germinie Lacerteux, Rene´e Mauperin, and Soeur Philome`ne), and ornamental texts so overwhelmed by descriptive detail that one begins to question whether or not they can be called novels (like Manette Salomon and Madame Gervaisais). In this respect a parallel can be drawn between the Goncourts and Flaubert, who also produces two kinds of novels, realist works like Madame Bovary long admired for their efficient use of description well integrated into the narrative, and, conversely, ornamental works like Salammboˆ which have been harshly criticized for their descriptive excesses. A key element which differentiates the two kinds of novels produced by the Goncourts (and Flaubert), the soberly restrained from the de-

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Literature and material culture

scriptively ornamental, is the aestheticizing gaze of the protagonists. For example, whereas the artist Coriolis of Manette Salomon has the trained eye and mastery of cultural codes necessary to appreciate the aesthetic stimulus provided by his exotic collection, the maid Germinie and her very middle-class female employer of Germinie Lacerteux would be totally out of place in an artistic interior. (Flaubert’s case is similar: Salammboˆ, a high priestess of ancient Carthage, logically belongs in a setting of sumptuous barbaric splendor which would overwhelm Emma Bovary, the provincial bourgeois housewife. A similar contrast can be drawn between the servant Fe´licite´ and Herod’s wife He´rodias, in Trois contes.) In creating characters like Coriolis and Madame Gervaisais, the Goncourts confer upon them their own ‘‘regard fureteur du bibelotier,’’ as Dangelzer so aptly phrases it. In the midst of her passionate attack, then, the modernist critic identifies a key element necessary to the revalorization of the ornamental text: the collector’s rummaging gaze, the eye for detail, the fascination with the visual, with appearances. Borrowing the words of Huysmans, it could be said that the Goncourts and certain of their protagonists number among ‘‘les gens aux pupilles raffine´es, exerce´es par la litte´rature et par l’art’’ [‘‘people with refined pupils, kept in practice by literature and art’’]. Ornamental, bibelot-like texts privilege the visual, indeed ‘‘attempt a vain competition with the visual arts,’’ hence their affinity for surface effects and the resulting valorization of the superficial. The visual is intimately related to the inventory form in the novel. As Dangelzer herself observes, before inventorying, the brothers inspect (‘‘Ils inspectent et inventorient’’). The visual examination precedes the acts of nomination and notation. The inventory which results is written with – and designed to be read with – ‘‘l’e´ducation de l’oeil des gens du e` sie`cle,’’ to borrow a phrase from Edmond’s La Maison d’un artiste (: ). Dangelzer claims that it is difficult to understand how anyone could work in Coriolis’s studio (‘‘On ne comprend pas comment on pourrait travailler dans cet atelier’’). Realistic representation is not the point of this studio, for in Manette Salomon visual stimulation is essential to artistic creation. Jean-Pierre Richard, like Luka´cs and Dangelzer, denounces the Goncourts’ inventory-like descriptions. In the following sentences from a chapter called ‘‘Deux e´crivains e´pidermiques’’ in his Litte´rature et sensation, he evokes the bibelot in support of his main argument, that the brothers are incapable of going beyond the epidermis, a figurative way of saying surface, as opposed to depth:

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Alors les Goncourt se re´fugient dans le bibelot; ils e´lisent comme valeur supreˆme le joli, ce beau sans profondeur, ou pis encore la joliesse, c’est-a`-dire ce qu’il y a de plus superficiel et de plus insignifiant dans le joli. Plus de dangers ici, aucune tentation de fuite: l’objet tient tout entier dans la paume des mains; il peut se manier et se palper, et sa ve´rite´ la plus profonde se limite aux plaisirs que procure son maniement. Bref le bibelot se´duit par son charmant sourire, mais c’est un sourire mort, prive´ de prolongement et d’e´cho. [Thus the Goncourts take refuge in the knick-knack. They choose as the their supreme value the pretty, that beauty without depth, or worse yet prettiness, which is to say the most superficial and least significant in the pretty. No danger here, no temptation to flee: the object can be held in the palm of the hand; it can be handled and felt, its most profound truth limited to the pleasure derived from its handling. In short, the knick-knack seduces by its charming smile, but it is a dead smile, one deprived of duration and echo.]

Richard’s unfavorable evaluation of the Goncourts is based on the modernist critical assumptions that surface is always inferior to depth, that matter is inferior to the idea(l), that the detail is inferior to the whole, that the pretty is inferior to the Beautiful – in short, the hierarchical oppositions brought into question by deconstruction, poststructuralism, and postmodernism. As literary bibelotiers, or collectors of knickknacks, the Goncourts lose themselves in the superficial (‘‘sans profondeur’’) and the sensual (‘‘se manier et se palper’’). Evidently the visual and the tactile do not produce the right sort of ‘‘sensation’’ for Richard, for they are equated with the epidermis, rather than with profundity. The critic concedes ‘‘la finesse de leur observation’’ [‘‘their refined powers of observation’’], but for him, as for Luka´cs, mere observation is not enough. By neglecting depth in favor of surface, the compositional whole suffers. The Goncourts ‘‘se retrouvent dans un univers gravement de´sinte´gre´ ou` tout n’est que de´tail, poussie`re. Aucun sens des masses ou des ensembles ne vient plus encadrer ni soutenir la finesse de leur observation’’ [‘‘find themselves in a seriously disintegrated universe where all is but detail, dust’’] (p. ). The brothers render no sense of the whole, no overview, because they provide no framework (‘‘aucun sens d’ordre,’’ ‘‘encadrer’’), no support (‘‘soutenir’’). The whole is pulverized into the dust of details. Therefore they manage to produce only an eclectic jumble. ‘‘Leurs descriptions deviennent d’interminables peˆle-meˆle ou` leur fe´brilite´ a jete´ en vrac les notations les plus he´te´roclites’’ [‘‘Their descriptions become unending jumbles where in their feverishness they throw together in bulk the most heterogenous notations’’] (p. ). That their textually excessive enumerations are said to

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Literature and material culture

be produced out of feverishness (‘‘fe´brilite´’’) recalls Dangelzer’s phrase ‘‘fre´ne´sie de de´tail.’’ To rephrase and spell out Richard’s and Dangelzer’s comparisons of the Goncourts’ writing to their activities as bibelotiers, it can be said that the brothers’ interminable, disorderly descriptions are shaped by the aesthetic logic of the bibelot in home decor. The Goncourts fail to subordinate descriptive details, analogous to bibelots, to the text as a whole, which for Richard and Dangelzer should be analogous to sound architectural design, based either on the Greek ideals of balance and harmony or on the modernist ideals of geometry and functionalism. Classicism limits ornament; modernist functionalism banishes it. Neither classicism nor modernism allows for the clutter imposed by the predominance of the bibelot in fin-de-sie`cle decor. The Goncourts’ writing is cluttered and disorderly like the bibelot-filled living room. Any recuperation of inventory-like description, then, entails a positive valuation of those elements deemed inessential or insignificant by the modernists: the visual, the detail, and disorder. Long before postmodernism embraces these qualities, aestheticism valorizes them in the name of art. It is on this basis that the Goncourt specialist Robert Ricatte presents the brothers’ inventory-like descriptions in a positive light, even though he is a contemporary of Richard. Ricatte insists that ‘‘la minutie des Goncourt y est toujours volontaire’’ [‘‘the meticulousness of the Goncourts is always deliberate’’], as if in response to Dangelzer’s above-quoted remark that the brothers ‘‘ne savent pas controˆler leur fre´ne´sie de de´tail’’ [‘‘were unable to control their frenzy of detail’’]. If the Goncourts refuse to control their passion for detail in some of their novels but not in others, they must have their reasons. Ricatte asks himself why an inventory-like description might be desirable. He includes among his examples the bibelot-filled art studio in Manette Salomon mocked by Dangelzer. He warns the reader not to fall for the ‘‘ruses d’artiste’’ hidden in apparently simplistic, haphazard ‘‘descriptions en forme d’inventaire’’ [‘‘descriptions in inventory form’’]. He maintains that such descriptions are often ‘‘le re´sultat d’une astucieuse contamination, d’un regroupement savant de toutes les curiosite´s qu’on peut rassembler dans une pie`ce, par exemple dans l’atelier de Coriolis’’ [‘‘the result of an astute contamination, of an erudite arrangement of all of the curiosities that one can gather in a room, for example in the studio of Coriolis’’]. As a result of the Goncourts’ artistic ruses, ‘‘Le de´sordre donne une allure plus raffine´e a` ce proce´de´ e´nume´ratif,’’ and ‘‘La pre´cision, ou` elle paraıˆt exclue,

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engendre l’e´tonnement’’ [‘‘Disorder gives the enumerative process a more refined allure’’; ‘‘Where precision seems excluded, it surprises.’’] The operative word here is ‘‘artistes,’’ for after all, even in classical rhetoric, aesthetic effect is an acceptable motivation for description. Ornamental description in nineteenth-century literature is inseparable from the cult of art and the artist. Recognizing the importance of aesthetics in the Goncourts’ oeuvre, Ricatte sees artful effect in the catalogue-like description, praising the brothers’ detailed inventories of seemingly heterogenous elements for their capacity to render a scene at once strange and familiar. Art justifies the Goncourts’ focus on material things. This aestheticizing, visually oriented focus on material things contributes to the growing autonomy of the object, as it becomes less tied to character development and less clearly integrated into narrative composition.                  :         ,         In the passage cited above, Dangelzer contrasts the excesses of the Goncourts’ description of Coriolis’s art studio with the descriptions of Balzac, claiming that even though the latter ‘‘pourtant meuble ses inte´rieurs a` souhait’’ [‘‘does indeed amply furnish his interiors’’], he never produces the sense of suffocation and fear of being crushed by falling objects that one encounters in Coriolis’s studio. This comparison is curious, since Balzac in fact includes an even longer collection inventory in one of his early novels, La Peau de chagrin. However, Balzac’s inventory of the antique shop in which Raphae¨l purchases the magic skin is much more suited to the modernist aesthetic, whereas something like an aesthetics of excess is needed to appreciate the Goncourts’ presentation of the claustrophobia-inducing collection of an artist’s bibelots. Again, for the modernists it comes down to a question of balance and proportion, of establishing the proper equilibrium between description and narration, between the visual and the semantic, between chaos and order, and, above all, between persons and things. The Goncourts tip the balance so prized by modernism, even though, for example, their description of Coriolis’s art studio is on many counts very similar to Balzac’s description of the antique shop. In the end Balzac’s inventory leaves the reader with an impression of order, whereas many find the Goncourts’ enumerative descriptions disorderly.

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Literature and material culture

While enumeratio in the novel is criticized in terms of excess and disorder, paradoxically, one of the main functions of actual inventories and catalogues is to provide a rational framework for organizing material goods. Interestingly enough, the most striking similarity between the novelistic inventories in La Peau de chagrin and Manette Salomon is that both Balzac and the Goncourts actually thematize disorderly juxtaposition. The narrators of both novels convey to the reader that the objects in question form a chaotic jumble, in the framing sentences which introduce their enumerative descriptions. I cite first Balzac, then the Goncourts, italicizing the rhetoric of uncontrolled pell-mell: Au premier coup d’oeil, les magasins lui offrirent un tableau confus, dans lequel toute les oeuvres humaines et divines se heurtaient . . . Le commencement du monde et les e´ve´nements d’hier se mariaient avec une grotesque bonhomie . . . C’e´tait une espe`ce de fumier philosophique auquel rien ne manquait, ni le calumet du sauvage, ni la pantoufle vert et or du se´rail, ni le yatagan du Maure, ni l’idole des Tartares. (Balzac, La Peau de chagrin, pp. –; my emphasis) [At first glance, the storerooms presented him with a confused picture, in which all works human and divine collided . . . The beginning of the world and recent events joined hands with grotesque camaraderie . . . It was a sort of philosophical dung heap, lacking nothing, neither the savage’s peace pipe nor the harem’s silver and gold slipper, neither the Moor’s yataghan nor the Tartars’ idol.] Ses quatre murs ressemblaient a` un muse´e et a` un pande´monium. L’e´talage et le fouillis d’un luxe baroque, un entassement d’objets bizarres, exotiques, he´te´roclites, des souvenirs, des morceaux d’art, l’amas et le contraste de choses de tous les temps, de tous les styles, de toutes les couleurs, le peˆle-meˆle de ce que ramasse un artiste, un voyageur, un collectionneur, y mettaient le de´sordre et le sabbat du bric-a`-brac. (the Goncourts, Manette Salomon, p. ; my emphasis) [Its four walls resembled a museum and a pandemonium. The display and the jumble of a baroque luxury, a pile of bizarre, exotic and heterogenous objects, of souvenirs and bits of art, the amassing and the contrast of things from all times, of all styles, of all colors, the pell-mell of things gathered by an artist, a traveler, a collector, brought to this place the disorder and the sabbath of bric-a`-brac.]

Because the theme of disorderly juxtaposition runs through both descriptions, this antique shop and this art studio can be seen as counterexamples to many discussions of the collection which focus on seriality, order, and control. One common theory of collecting suggests that collectors satisfy a need for control by manipulating the world of objects, where they can impose an order which is lacking in the ‘‘exterior’’ world of people. The desire for control is not a feature of Balzac’s and the

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Goncourts’ presentations of these particular collections. On the contrary, it is clear from these descriptions that whoever arranged them delighted more in the chaotic excesses produced by radical juxtaposition, than in any possibility for seriality or order. This is not to say that these collections are completely lacking in organization. Both inventories are loosely organized by the very framing rhetoric which characterizes them as tumultuous piles. In the sentences quoted just above, Balzac begins with ‘‘Au premier coup d’oeil, les magasins lui offrirent un tableau confus.’’ The eye, or gaze, of the protagonist, the grammatical antecedent of ‘‘lui,’’ acts here as a framing and focusing device, gathering the confusion of objects into a single ‘‘tableau.’’ The ‘‘magasins’’ at the same time provide a physical boundary for the collection. In the sentences from Manette Salomon, the Goncourts begin by naming the physical bounds of the collection, ‘‘Ses quatre murs.’’ The gaze, however, is not given a focal point, for the Goncourts’ narrator is completely disembodied in this description, a point to which I will return below. Both inventories also include lists of artifacts which are similar in structure and not altogether unlike in content. Here is a sample, first from Balzac, then from the Goncourts: Des crocodiles, des singes, des boas empaille´s souriaient a` des vitraux d’e´glise, semblaient vouloir mordre des bustes, courir apre`s des laques, ou grimper sur des lustres. Un vase de Se`vres, ou` madame Jacotot avait peint Napole´on, se trouvait aupre`s d’un sphinx de´die´ a` Se´sostris . . . Les instruments de mort, poignards, pistolets curieux, armes a` secret, e´taient jete´s peˆle-meˆle avec des instruments de vie: soupie`res en porcelaine, assiettes de Saxe, tasses diaphanes venues de Chine, salie`res antiques, drageoirs fe´odaux. (La Peau de chagrin, p. ) [Stuffed crocodiles, monkeys and boa constrictors smiled at church windows, seemed ready to bite the busts, run after the lacquerware, or climb the chandeliers. Next to a Se`vres vase on which Madame Jacotot had painted Napoleon, there was a sphinx dedicated to Sesostris . . . Instruments of death, daggers, curious pistols, secret weapons, were thrown in pell-mell with instruments of life, porcelain soup tureens, Saxe plates, diaphanous cups from China, antique salt shakers, feudal candy dishes.] Partout d’e´tonnant voisinages : un e´ventail chinois sortait de la terre cuite d’une lampe de Pompe´i; entre une e´pe´e a` trois tre`fles qui portait sur la lame: Penetrabit, et un bouclier d’hippopotame pour la chasse au tigre, on pouvait voir un chapeau de cardinal a` la pourpre historique tout use´; et un personnage d’ombre chinoise de Java de´coupe´ dans du cuir e´tait accroche´ aupre`s d’un vieux gril en fer forge´ pour la cuisson des hosties. (Manette Salomon, p. )

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Literature and material culture

[There were surprising combinations everywhere: a Chinese fan protruded from the earthenware of a lamp from Pompeii; between a sword with three trefoils and Penetrabit inscribed on its blade, and a hippopotamus shield for tiger hunting, was a well-worn figured purple Cardinal’s hat; and a Javanese shadow puppet cut from leather hung next to an old wrought iron grill for making holy wafers.]

While only Balzac’s shop contains a substantial number of natural history specimens and curiosities from the New World, both mix the goods from ‘‘the Orient’’ with goods from Europe, and the historic with the exotic. Also note that each of these sentence groups includes placement information which helps the reader visualize not only the objects, but also their arrangement (‘‘souriaient a`,’’ ‘‘aupre`s de,’’ ‘‘jete´s . . . avec,’’ ‘‘sortait de,’’ ‘‘entre,’’ ‘‘accroche´ aupre`s [de]’’). These spatial indicators organize the fictitious collection physically. The fictive inventory must supply the visual aspects of organization in addition to providing meaning and syntax. In contrast to the catalogue which is designed to aid the viewer of an actual collection, in the case of a fictive inventory the objects in question are not physically present. This is also true of an inventory such as Goncourt’s La Maison d’un artiste which is designed to be read outside of the context of viewing the collection. While the collector’s or buyer’s catalogue usually includes a brief description of each individual item, it does not necessarily need to explain how the items are displayed physically. Differences between Balzac’s and the Goncourts’ descriptions already begin to show when their rhetoric of organization is examined a bit more closely. Balzac’s description of ‘‘ce chaos d’antiquite´s’’ in the shop includes more framing and organizing language than does the description of the Goncourts. For example, in the sentences cited above Balzac sums up the entire multi-story antique shop with a few oppositions, grouping lists of heterogenous elements into large conceptual categories: ‘‘oeuvres humaines’’ and ‘‘divines,’’ ‘‘le commencement du monde’’ and ‘‘les e´ve´nements d’hier,’’ ‘‘les instruments du mort’’ and ‘‘des instruments de vie.’’ These abstractions, organized into pairs, shape the collection into a conceptualizable entity. Another rhetorical strategy allows fragments to be reassembled into wholes. The antique shop is presented as a gathering space to which ‘‘tous les pays de la terre semblaient avoir apporte´ . . . quelque de´bris de leurs sciences, un e´chantillon de leurs arts,’’ a space where ‘‘l’univers lui apparut par bribes’’ [‘‘all nations of the earth seem to have brought . . .

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some scrap of their sciences, a sample of their arts’’ / ‘‘the universe appeared to him in snatches’’] (pp. , ). Because Balzac’s narrator suggests that the fragments (‘‘de´bris,’’ ‘‘e´chantillon,’’ ‘‘bribes’’) could be reconstructed to compose a whole (‘‘l’univers,’’ ‘‘toute la cre´ation connue,’’ pp. , ), a sense of unity is maintained in spite of the eclecticism of the collection. Balzac’s classificatory and organizational rhetoric does not, however, erase the rhetoric of juxtaposition, but rather allows him to play on a tension between order and chaos, alternating between the language of organization and the language of disorder. As David Bell (a poststructuralist/postmodernist reader of Balzac) warns, to read this inventory as ‘‘an exercise in classification waiting to be accomplished’’ would be ‘‘tantamount to a refusal to take seriously the lavish elaboration of the semantics of disorder contained in the language used to describe the shop itself,’’ a semantics built on such terms as ‘‘confusion, chaos, accidents, monstrosity, madness, fog, oceans.’’ As for the thematics of classificatory order, the narrator offers us the geologist Cuvier, whose classificatory work could be used as a model to organize the eclectic juxtaposition found in ‘‘ces trois salles gorge´es de civilisation, de cultes, de divinite´s, de chefs-d’oeuvre, de royaute´s, de de´bauches, de raison et de folie’’ [‘‘these three rooms stuffed with civilization, cults, divinities, masterpieces, kingdoms, debaucheries, reason and folly’’] (p. ). However, Balzac calls Cuvier ‘‘le plus grand poe`te de notre sie`cle’’ [‘‘the greatest poet of our century’’] (p. ), making him into a figure of interpretation rather than a figure of classification. The protagonist Raphae¨l too is described as a poet (p. ). Furthermore, the narrator explains that for Raphae¨l ‘‘cet oce´an de meubles, d’inventions, de modes, d’oeuvres, de ruines, lui composait un poe`me sans fin’’ [‘‘this ocean of furnishings, of inventions, of fashions, of works, of ruins, composed for him a poem without end’’] (p. ). Raphae¨l’s role as interpreter and poet of the collection is the device by which Balzac establishes strong connections between persons and these things, and between these things and plot. It is highly significant that the antique shop is narrated through the eyes of Raphae¨l, for his fictitious subjectivity is the strongest organizational element in the novel, and is ultimately the source of its narrative unity. In addition, the presence of this strong subjectivity animates the description of the collection, creating a sense of movement. The ‘‘tableau confus’’ presented by the shop’s ‘‘magasins’’ [storerooms] is not entirely still, since the reader moves through them with the protagonist. The reader’s eye

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Literature and material culture

follows the protagonist’s eye, led up staircases and through doors as the character enters new storerooms. More importantly, Balzac’s text spells out a close connection between the protagonist, the cultural debris which surrounds him, and the narrative as a whole. The chaos of barely ordered material excess from so many other times and places serves to generate miniature narratives of which Raphae¨l is the hero: upon seeing and handling various curiosities and artifacts, he, for example, breathes the air of ancient Rome (‘‘Les caprices de la Rome impe´riale respiraient la` tout entiers’’ [‘‘The whims of all Imperial Rome breathed there’’]), is transported to Renaissance Italy (‘‘En touchant une mosaı¨que . . . son aˆme s’e´lanc¸ait dans la chaude et fauve Italie’’ [‘‘Touching a mosaic . . . his soul rushed toward hot, wild Italy’’]), becomes a pirate (‘‘il devenait corsaire . . . vivement inspire´ par les couleurs nacre´es de mille coquillages’’ [‘‘he became a pirate . . . keenly inspired by the pearly colors of a thousand shells’’]), etc. (pp. –). This thematics of diversity through the juxtaposition of debris is even more completely recuperated back into the narrative at the conclusion of the long descriptive passage: it is here in the antique shop that Raphae¨l acquires the magical, wish-granting, oriental ‘‘peau de chagrin’’ [wild ass’s skin] which gives the novel its name. The disorderly space of the shop ultimately becomes a model of Raphae¨l’s very subjectivity. The description soon reveals that ‘‘ce chaos des antiquite´s’’ is homologous to the feverish, nervous, confused mental state of Raphae¨l as he wanders through the shop, penniless, brokenhearted, and suicidal. The collection becomes a simile for Raphae¨l himself, who, on the brink of committing suicide, finds himself torn between life and death: Poursuivi par les formes les plus e´tranges, par des cre´ations merveilleuses assises sur les confins de la mort et de la vie, il marchait dans les enchantements d’un songe. Enfin, doutant de son existence, il ´etait comme ces objects curieux, ni tout a` fait mort, ni tout a` fait vivant. (La Peau de chagrin, p. ; my emphasis) [Followed by the strangest of forms, by marvelous creations poised on the brink of life and death, he walked under the spell of a dream. Finally, doubting his existence, he was like one of these curious objects, neither entirely dead nor entirely living.]

Poised on the brink of life and death, the objects take on the human qualities of Raphae¨l, even as he takes on the inhuman qualities of the objects, setting up a homologous relation of mutual reflection and even mutual influence.

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As compared to the antique shop scene in La Peau de chagrin, in their rendering of the art studio in Manette Salomon, the Goncourts make many fewer and much looser connections between material things and the narrative elements of character and plot. As a result of the loosening of these connections, things in this novel acquire the ‘‘independent significance’’ which Luka´cs feels ‘‘is not their due.’’ The major difference between the presentations of the collections in La Peau de chagrin and Manette Salomon lies in the positioning of the protagonist during the course of the description. Whereas the reader of La Peau de chagrin enters the antique shop with Raphae¨l, the reader of Manette Salomon abruptly stumbles upon Coriolis’s studio accompanied only by a very distant narrator. The Goncourts’ ‘‘tableau’’ of the collection is presented directly to the reader, without the mediation of characters. The framing sentence that opens a new chapter of Manette Salomon with the inventory of the art studio makes no reference to a personified point of view, but rather establishes physical dimensions by reference to the metric system: ‘‘C’e´tait un atelier de neuf me`tres de long sur sept de large’’ [‘‘The studio was nine meters long by seven wide’’] (Manette Salomon, p. ). The reader is moved through Coriolis’s collection solely by the use of disembodied locational indicators, with which most of the paragraphs begin (‘‘sur l’un des panneaux de la porte,’’ ‘‘A coˆte´ de la porte,’’ ‘‘De l’autre coˆte´ de la porte,’’ ‘‘Le milieu du panneau gauche,’’ etc. [‘‘on one of the door panels,’’ ‘‘Beside the door,’’ ‘‘On the other side of the door,’’ ‘‘The middle of the left panel’’], pp. –). The Goncourts’ reader is not even told up front that the studio which is being inventoried belongs to Coriolis. The only clue is that this name appears as the last word of the chapter before the inventory (p. ). From this mention, the reader either infers that the studio being described in the next chapter belongs to Coriolis, or is left reading a lengthy description without knowing why. People are strangely absent from the bulk of the description. It is not until the end of the passage that the reader learns that four beings are present throughout the narrative time of the novelistic inventory: Coriolis, two artist friends, and a monkey. These characters are not mentioned until near the end of the description, six pages into the chapter, at which time they are shown to be painting, drawing and sleeping (p. ). They are not made to speak until after a brief but filmic description of their visual aspect, by which they are presented as if they too are visual elements of the colorful scene. The phrase ‘‘la`-dedans, dans cet atelier’’ [‘‘in there, in this studio’’] groups them within the walls of the studio with the same kind of

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Literature and material culture

positional framing rhetoric that introduced the chapter and the description of the material objects in the collection (‘‘C’e´tait un atelier de neuf me`tres de long sur sept de large,’’ p. ). Since the figure of Coriolis does not appear until the end of the textual presentation of his things, his relationship to his collection is not made entirely explicit by the narrator, as was the case with Balzac. The half-finished paintings and art supplies are obviously connected to Coriolis’s activities, but this is something which the reader is left to presume. Here is one such reference: Apre`s la colonnette s’e´talait une grande toile orientale abandonne´e, sur le bas de laquelle e´taient e´crits, a` la craie, des adresses d’amis, des noms de mode`les, des dates de rendez-vous, des mementos de la vie parisienne, qui entraient dans des jupes d’alme´es. (p. ) [Beyond the small column, there lay unfurled a large abandoned oriental canvas, on the bottom of which there were written in chalk the addresses of friends, the names of models, the dates of meetings – mementos of Paris life slipped into the skirts of Egyptian dancers.]

It is easy enough to surmise that Coriolis and his friends have written the addresses, names, and dates on this canvas, evidently painted by Coriolis, whom the reader already knows to be an orientalist painter. There is no narrator’s voice explaining to the reader how this disordered, overcrowded studio provides visual stimulus to the artist, but merely this and other juxtapositions of the fragments of the artist’s work and Bohemian daily life with the fragments which make up his collection. The artist’s canvasses, his ‘‘tableaux,’’ become part of the collection, which is then presented as a textual tableau. The elements enumerated in the Goncourts’ description are, in Luka´cs’s words, ‘‘as isolated and unrelated to each other as pictures in a museum.’’ The connection between Coriolis and his things is established only by juxtaposition, contiguity, and metonymy, in contrast to the relationship of homology and simile which Balzac uses to tie Raphae¨l to the items in the antique shop. It is important, though, not to understand the things in the antique shop as substitutes for the protagonist: as homology and simile, the things remain figures, symbols, and thus subordinate to Raphae¨l, the referent which justifies their place in the narrative. Balzac’s protagonist retains his primacy, as the strong referent to which the symbols (or signifiers) remain properly subordinate. In contrast, the juxtaposition practiced by the Goncourts tends to equalize all elements present. In the description of the art studio, things

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threaten to usurp the place of people (and not just because people run the risk of being smashed by falling bibelots, as Dangelzer suggests). The proportion which the Goncourts upset here is that between persons and things. By relegating the persons to the end of a long enumerative passage, things are at least momentarily accorded precedence over people. I suspect that this is precisely the aspect of this novelistic inventory which Dangelzer and the other modernists find most disturbing. Because things are accorded such prominence within the narrative, and are not explicitly connected to persons, they acquire a strange autonomy. These characteristics of the Goncourts’ writing – suppression of connecting rhetoric and the consequent lack of subordination of things to people – are directly related to their attitude toward material things, for the brothers presume the description of the latter to be important itself, an attitude made evident in a brief preface in which Edmond justifies writing La Maison d’un artiste by evoking ‘‘la me´lancholique vie latente’’ of things (: n.p.). Conversely, Luka´cs, in his insistence that only human relationships matter, denies the importance of describing things for their own sake: ‘‘A ‘poetry of things’ independent of people and of people’s lives does not exist in literature’’ (p. ). The confused jumble of objects in the art studio of Manette Salomon is not, however, without narrative motivation. These motivations are not explicitly stated, as if the Goncourts presume that their readers will make the necessary connections for themselves. Several correlations can easily be deduced by a modern (if not modernist) reader already convinced of the signifying potential of material things. Coriolis, the owner of these objects, is a painter, an orientalist who draws visual inspiration from the juxtaposition of exotica against European artifacts, just as Raphae¨l the poet drew narrative inspiration from the same juxtaposed combinations in Balzac’s antique shop. In one of the citations from Manette above, the phrases ‘‘morceaux d’art,’’ ‘‘de tous les styles,’’ and ‘‘de toutes les couleurs’’ evoke Coriolis’s artistic vocation. In addition, in the story Coriolis has just returned from a trip to ‘‘the Orient,’’ hence the reference to ‘‘ce que ramasse un artiste, un voyageur.’’ A final sentence five pages later sums up the atmosphere of the studio: Une ombre flottante dormait tout le jour dans ce re´duit de myste`re et de paresse, dans ce petit sanctuaire de l’atelier, qui, avec ses odeurs de de´pouilles sauvages et sa couleur de de´sert, semblait abriter le recueillement et la reˆverie de la tente. (pp. –)

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Literature and material culture

[A floating shadow slept all day in this recess of mystery and laziness, in this little studio sanctuary, which, with its smell of savage remains and its desert color, seemed to shelter the contemplation and reverie of the tent.]

Coriolis’s studio, then, a dream-inducing desert tent in miniature, an orientalized space in the middle of Paris, not only houses Coriolis’s paintings, plaster models, and supplies, but also doubles as dwelling space for himself, two male painter friends, and a monkey also brought back from the East. The bachelors of this household live a happy bohemian life, for the heroine of the novel, Manette Salomon, who will eventually marry Coriolis, has not yet appeared. During the second half of the novel Manette slowly dismantles the happy scene depicted in the inventory-like description of the art studio. The oriental beauty of this Jewish woman appeals to Coriolis as a painter, who at first hires her as a model, then falls in love. However, in time she will drive away the artist friends, reduce Coriolis to artistic impotence with her worldly ambitions, instill a strict household budget, and even do away with the ‘‘bibelots’’ (p. ). The Goncourts, always sympathetic to the figure of the artist and usually suspicious of women, turn Manette into a terrible Jewish shrew, and show the effects of her influence through a denuding of Coriolis’s studio space. They sadly report that ‘‘Son atelier, de´pouille´ de ce clinquant d’art sur lequel l’oeil du coloriste aime a` se promener, semblait vide et froid, presque pauvre’’ [‘‘His studio, stripped of the flamboyant art upon which the colorist’s eye loves to wander, seemed empty and cold, almost impoverished’’] (p. ). The artist cannot create in such a cold, colorless, empty atmosphere. The chaos of juxtaposed bibelots, then, is made necessary to the narrative by two motivations: first, it enables artistic creation, and second, it is antithetical to bourgeois married life. It is crucial to recognize that La Peau de chagrin and Manette Salomon are separated by some thirty-six years of literary history. The object, especially the artistic object, gains a strong foothold in the literary text not only because of the influence of Balzac, but also thanks to the work of romantic writers like Gautier and Nerval. If the Goncourts dare to present the decorative object on an equal footing with characters, it is not only that the object has gained a ‘‘fantastic autonomy’’ from people and from plot, but also because readers are entrusted to recognize for themselves the signifying potential of the ‘‘choses, au milieu desquelles s’est e´coule´e une existence d’homme’’ [‘‘things, amidst which the existence of a man has passed’’].

Narrate, describe, or catalogue?



 ,      ,      :                      A sketch of the French literary history of catalogue-like description must necessarily account for Balzac’s Le Cousin Pons, generally considered the definitive novel of collecting, cited in most discussions of collecting from the time it was published to this day. Several noteworthy analyses have been devoted to it over the past twenty years, evidencing the fascination which inventories and collections hold for postmodernist criticism. In this late novel Balzac makes a very different use of the novelistic inventory, a most realistic use. Published over fifteen years after the romantic, fantastic, philosophical novel La Peau de chagrin, Le Cousin Pons is a mature work of realism whose plot is much more complex and more tightly woven than that of the earlier work. Curiously enough, the great novel of collecting includes no description of Pons’s collection which even comes close in length to the catalogue-like enumeration of the objects in the antique shop in La Peau de chagrin, even though the narrator of Le Cousin Pons states that collection is the ‘‘heroine’’ of the rather melodramatic story. However, though catalogue-like description remains restrained, an actual catalogue appears in this novel: in presenting Pons’s collection, Balzac first depicts then later cites the collector’s catalogue, a physical, written inventory meticulously enumerating and describing the items included in the collection. Balzac does not reproduce this fictitious catalogue in the novel, but merely evokes it and cites from it. When Pons’s art collection first appears in the text, the mention of its catalogue allows the author to give a brief, efficient overview of it in one paragraph of average length, which I cite here (for the sake of clarity, I have used ellipses to replace some often-cited remarks on Pons’s antique-hunting techniques and on the collector’s market): . . . Pons cachait a` tous les regards une collection de chefs-d’oeuvre en tout genre dont le catalogue atteignait au fabuleux nume´ro . . . . C’e´tait des tableaux trie´s dans les quarante-cinq mille tableaux qui s’exposent par an dans les ventes parisiennes; des porcelaines de Se`vres, paˆte tendre . . . Enfin, il avait ramasse´ les de´bris du dix-septie`me et du dix-huitie`me sie`cle, en rendant justice aux gens d’esprit et de ge´nie de l’e´cole franc¸aise, ces grands inconnus, les Lepautre, les Lavalle´e-Poussin, etc., qui ont cre´e´ le genre Louis XV, le genre Louis XVI . . . Le premier, Pons avait collectionne´ les tabatie`res et les miniatures (p. ) [. . . Pons kept hidden from view a collection of masterpieces of all genres, whose catalogue had reached the fabulous number of , . . . These were

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Literature and material culture

paintings selected from among the , exhibited annually at the Paris auctions. There was also Se`vres porcelain, paˆte tendre . . . In sum, he had gathered the debris of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, giving just due to those of wit and genius among the French school, those great unknowns, the Lepautres, the Lavalle´e-Poussins, etc., who created the Louis XV and Louis XVI styles . . . Pons had been the first to collect snuff boxes and miniatures]

By letting us know up front that the collection has been catalogued, and that it contains nearly , items, Balzac is able to sketch out a rapid impression of its importance and extent simply by noting the kinds of items it includes. Unlike the contents of the antique shop in La Peau de chagrin, Pons’s collection is highly specialized, consisting in paintings, miniatures, porcelain, and snuff boxes. Though the collection as a whole is often referred to throughout the novel, this is the most extensive enumeration of it until much later. The next description of the collection occurs during a scene which is placed nearly halfway through the novel. In between, there develops an intrigue of money-grubbing greed, whereby Pons’s valuable collection of ‘‘biblots’’ [sic] (pp. , , ; author’s italics) is disputed by two rival groups of avaricious characters, one headed by a distant bourgeois cousin, Madame Camusot, and the other headed by the petty-bourgeois concierge, Madame Cibot. After an illness exacerbated by the coldheartedness of his ‘‘cousins,’’ Pons dies, leaving his valuable collection to his closest friend, a naive musician, but the plotting women wrest it from him in the end, aided by a group of shady art dealers and legal advisors, some of whom work for both sides. The ending is tragic, not only because the hero dies a miserable death, but perhaps more significantly because the bourgeoisie (represented by Mesdames Camusot and Cibot) triumphs over the artists (Pons and Schmucke). Pons’s failure to extract his collection from this network of pettybourgeois and bourgeois socio-economic relations hinges on the way Balzac positions him within a family structure. Pons is a homely bachelor who shares his apartment with another homely bachelor, the naive musician to whom he tries to leave the collection. However, Pons, though a musician and art aficionado, is not content to live for art alone, as is his idealist roommate Schmucke, for in addition to being materialist through his passion for collecting, Pons is also a connoisseur of gourmet food. To satisfy his gourmet appetite, he relies on dinner invitations from various bourgeois cousins (hence the title of the novel), many of whom are only distant cousins by marriage. Pons’s position within traditional kinship structures is thus a very marginal one, first in

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his sharing domestic intimacy with another man, Schmucke, and second in his stretching family ties to include distant cousins, including Madame Camusot. In an attempt to consolidate his place on the most important standing dinner invitation list, that of his ‘‘cousins’’ the Camusot, Pons brings Madame Camusot a gift, a rare collector’s item, a fan painted by Watteau for Madame de Pompadour. When this gift fails to elicit the reciprocal gift of the continued standing dinner invitation, Pons brings a prospective groom for the Camusot’s daughter, whom the couple is having trouble marrying appropriately for want of a better dowry. The bourgeois hostess and her daughter are invited to visit Pons’s collection as a pretext for meeting the prospective groom. This is how Madame Camusot learns the monetary value of her ‘‘cousin’’ Pons’s collection. By bringing his bourgeois cousin a precious bibelot (the fan) then by inviting her into his otherwise closed sanctuary of art (to meet the suitor), Pons sets in motion his own demise. This visit furnishes the occasion for the second and lengthiest description, allowing Balzac to incorporate a four-page enumeration into the plot. Upon seeing the collection, the prospective bridegroom immediately recognizes its artistic and monetary value, which he patiently explains to the Camusot’s daughter, who dutifully listens. As the suitor leaves the apartment building, the owner of the second-hand shop downstairs overhears the evaluation, which he reports to the concierge, Madame Cibot. A third enumerative description of the collection appears in the novel when the contriving concierge introduces art dealers and legal advisors into the dying Pons’s apartment, so that they may evaluate it for the purposes of negotiating the anticipated inheritance. Although this description does include much information on art and artists, it does not seem gratuitous, because it is offered through the eyes of one of the art dealer characters in the act of evaluating the collection for the purposes of the main plot, the disputed inheritance. The fictitious collection’s fictitious catalogue mentioned near the beginning of the novel reappears near the end, after Pons’s death. We are told that the catalogue is entirely handwritten, in two copies, in Pons’s hand. This time it is cited by one of the characters, the lawyer Frasier, who is shown reading it, comparing it to the paintings on display in Pons’s apartment. The document of antiquarianism and art history drawn up by Pons is thus reappropriated by Frasier and transformed into a legal document. During this scene, the conniving lawyer

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Literature and material culture

Frasier reads the following catalogue entry aloud to Madame Cibot, the concierge; his own comments follow: ‘‘No. . Magnifique portrait peint sur marbre, par Se´bastien del Piombo, en , vendu par une famille qui l’a fait enlever de la cathe´drale de Terni. Ce portrait, qui avait pour pendant un e´veˆque, achete´ par un Anglais, repre´sente un chevalier de Malte en prie`res, et se trouvait au-dessus du tombeau de la famille Rossi. Sans la date, on pourrait attribuer cette oeuvre a` Raphae¨l. Ce morceau me semble supe´rieur au portrait de Baccio Bandinelli, du Muse´e, qui est un peu sec, tandis que ce chevalier de Malte est d’un fraıˆcheur due a` la conservation de la peinture sur la    (ardoise).’’ – En regardant, reprit Frasier, a` la place No. , j’ai trouve´ un portrait de dame signe´ Chardin, sans No. !... [ . . .] j’ai ve´rifie´ les tableaux, et il y a huit substitutions de toiles ordinaires et sans nume´ros, a` des oeuvres indique´es comme capitales par feu monsieur Pons et qui ne se trouvent plus... Et enfin, il manque un petit tableau sur bois, de Metzu, de´signe´ comme un chefd’oeuvre... [‘‘No. , Magnificent portrait painted on marble by Sebastian del Piombo in , sold by a family who had it taken from the cathedral at Terni. Paired with a bishop’s portrait bought by an Englishman, this portrait depicts a Maltese knight praying, and was found hanging above the Rossi family tomb. Without the date, this work could be attributed to Raphael. This piece seems to me to be superior to the portrait of Baccio Bandinelli in the Museum, which is a bit dry, while this Maltese knight retains a freshness preserved by its being painted on       (slate).’’ ‘‘Looking at place ,’’ Frasier continued, ‘‘I found a woman’s portrait signed Chardin, with no number ! ... +. . ., I checked the paintings, and there are eight substitutions of ordinary canvases without numbers for works which the late Monsieur Pons has identified as major, and which are no longer here... And finally, also missing, there is a small painting on wood by Metzu, designated as a masterpiece...]

This is the only catalogue entry actually cited. It is presented as if it were from a ‘‘real’’ collection catalogue, numbers and all. Pons’s detailed comments on the painting and its attribution show the catalogue to be a labor of love by a true connoisseur of art. The tone is very similar to that Edmond de Goncourt will use in the catalogue-style entries of La Maison d’un artiste. However, Frasier reads the catalogue not as an art lover, but as a lawyer, treating it like an inventory of Pons’s estate, like a legal document. The lawyer uses the art collection catalogue only to verify the identity and presence of objects which interest him only for their potential monetary value. The catalogue reveals to him not information about art, but clues about a theft. Pons’s catalogue, like his collection, partakes of (at least) three very different socio-cultural domains: art collecting, the marketplace, and the law. Though these domains are not coextensive, they are at the same

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

time inseparable. In the modern (Euro-American) world, no object attains value in one sphere without also attaining value in the two others, and therefore no object enters one without entering the others. This is, in a sense, the ‘‘moral’’ of Le Cousin Pons: it is futile to try to keep a collection gathered from the marketplace from falling back into the marketplace. The law proves to be complicit with the market. The art collection is a socially symbolic system. Hiding it, even if it is never found, does not make it less social. As for the relationship between persons and things in Le Cousin Pons, though the collection is featured prominently, the strong plot structure keeps it well subordinated to the actions of the characters. Pons’s personal relationship to his collection, though, differs significantly from that between protagonist and the collection in Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin and the Goncourts’ Manette Salomon. The lengthy catalogue-like descriptions of the collections in the latter two novels are used, at least in part, to ‘‘map out’’ the complex subjectivities of the poet/philosopher Raphae¨l and the artist Coriolis. Pons, in contrast, exhibits the very simplified subjectivity of the monomaniacal man ruled by passion, in this case a double passion, collecting and gastronomy. Motivated by simple passions, Pons functions as a rational economic agent, negotiating in order to acquire that which he desires most, exchanging minimal amounts of money for undervalued collectibles, exchanging a valuable collectible for dinner invitations. The catalogue of bibelots in Le Cousin Pons serves as an accounting of value, of artistic value for Pons, and of monetary value for Frasier and the other bourgeois characters.             ,         :     In French literary history, two books mark a high point in the evolution of catalogue-like literary description. In  (well after brother Jules’s death) Edmond de Goncourt published La Maison d’un artiste, a twovolume inventory of and commentary on the collections gathered in his home. Three years later his friend Joris-Karl Huysmans published A rebours, the founding novel of decadence, whose main plot consists in the choosing, arrangement, and rearrangement of the decor and collectibles in the hero’s secluded house. Many critics have commented on the catalogue-like nature of this novel, as well as on the similarities between it and Goncourt’s catalogue. Both Huysmans and Goncourt use the term ‘‘bibelot’’ to collectively designate the contents of the homes they

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Literature and material culture

inventory in elaborating a refined aesthetics of daily life. These books break with literary tradition, marking a moment of rupture in the very possibilities for describing interior decor in literature: material objects have begun to rival human characters in importance. What made Huysmans’s strange novel A rebours possible, and why has postmodern literary criticism taken such a keen interest in it? Given the exigencies of plot and character development generic to the novel form, the very existence of a novel like A rebours must be regarded as puzzling. The premiss of the novel can hardly be called a plot: the wealthy duc des Esseintes retires from society and moves to a house which he decorates only with the most exquisite bibelots, with books made bibelot-like by the care with which they are expensively bound, with paintings, engravings, and other well-chosen furnishings. Few other persons are mentioned; of these, none qualify as secondary characters. The bulk of the novel consists in des Esseintes’s choosing, arranging, rearranging, and musing on these objects. To write such a novel is to write as a bibeloteur, savoring the contours of every item, pausing to let each object inspire study, ideas, and fantasies. Because objects are so central to this novel, it seems only logical that its author turns to the catalogue form, to inventory art works, artifacts, books, furnishings, domestic goods, plants, food substances, diseases, and drugs. The writing of A rebours was made possible by the textual space which earlier novelists had carved out for material culture, for descriptions of the man-made material environment. It has been suggested that the ‘‘novelization’’ of A rebours renders it obviously superior to Goncourt’s inventory. I would argue instead that by choosing to write a catalogue instead of a novel, Goncourt makes a significant move, a move which enables the conceptualization of A rebours. By devoting his energies entirely to the sphere of things, Edmond opens the way for a novel like A rebours, where interactions with material culture take the place of interactions among human characters. The organization of A rebours follows the model of La Maison d’un artiste, in which Goncourt enumerates the contents of his house room by room. Just as the space of La Maison d’un artiste is the space of Edmond’s house, the house of des Esseintes is almost the only setting of A rebours. What renders A rebours especially catalogue-like is that many if not most of its chapters revolve around the collections gathered in the various rooms of the house. A rebours is organized not by plot, not by the interactions of human characters, but by material things in physical space, in the space of a house, a private dwelling which is also a

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museum, a library, a decorator’s showroom, and a sanatorium. As one postmodernist critic puts it,‘‘the reader is invited to move from chapter to chapter just as a visitor moves from room to room in a well-organized museum.’’ First Huysmans shows us des Esseintes’s bedroom, study, and dining room, as the decorative choices in each are explained in accord with an elaborate aesthetics. There are chapters almost entirely devoted to paintings and engravings, while another chapter is devoted to the famous jewel-encrusted turtle, and still others to exotic hothouse flowers, liqueurs, and perfumes. Three different chapters scattered throughout the novel are consecrated to the library. Many postmodernist critics speak of the catalogue-like qualities of A rebours, one calling the novel ‘‘a catalogue of rarities,’’ another ‘‘a story that never ceases to march in place and which lives only by recourse to the catalogue.’’ A third critic refers to ‘‘the long catalogue of inventories of A rebours,’’ suggesting that the novel is a catalogue of inventories, ‘‘an overabundance of catalogues and lists, a litany of erudite notations.’’ In complete contrast to the above-cited modernist critics of the Goncourts’ writing, none of these critics finds the inventory-like aspect of A rebours problematic, a reaction which signals a drastic shift in critical tastes. The studies of Huysmans to which I refer were all published since the mid-s, when A rebours was ‘‘canonized’’ by its inclusion on France’s national teaching exams, the  and the Agre´gation, in itself strong evidence that what I have been calling the ‘‘postmodernist aesthetic’’ dominates French studies today. Why have the catalogue, and with it the museum, the collection, and the bibelot, suddenly become privileged objects of critical enquiry? Poststructuralist and postmodernist critics have recuperated these objects, the products of the modern material culture of consumer and industrial capitalism, by abstracting them into figures of the free play of language. This act of critical abstraction relies on the killing off of the concrete referent in favor of pure textuality. Patrick Wald Lasowski provides a particularly lucid articulation of this move to separate language from materiality. He begins by banishing the referent: But from La Maison d’un artiste by Goncourt (whose ‘‘setting of delicious intimacy’’ was appreciated by Huysmans) to A Rebours, the referent – the group of objects which Goncourt inventories – is effaced. The text is affirmed.

This critic identifies the referent with physical objects of Goncourt’s collection, then states that such concrete referents are obliterated by Huysmans in his textualization of them. The text affirms itself at the

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Literature and material culture

expense of the concrete. The implication here is that La Maison d’un artiste is not a text, or at least is somehow less a text that is A rebours. This view refuses to recognize the textuality of the collection catalogue, that the actual catalogue is a narrative form. For that matter, the collection itself must be recognized as a sort of text, following the recent ‘‘society as text’’ turn in cultural criticism, which is to say the trend of reading non-textual objects such as pictures, cityscapes, and shopping malls as systems of signs, following the example set by Barthes in Mythologies and later elaborated by Baudrillard, among others. Though this view is not unproblematic, and is currently being rethought and revised by many in the social sciences, it does bring into question Lasowski’s implicit insinuation that Goncourt’s catalogue does manage to refer directly to the referent, the physical objects of this collection. If these objects are redefined as signs, and if the actual catalogue is recognized to be a ‘‘text,’’ then the relationship between Goncourt’s catalogue and Huysmans’s novel must be rethought. The referentiality of an actual catalogue is no less problematic than that of the fictitious catalogue. The poststructuralist analysis of representation also applies to the non-literary domain, even to the most banal commercial uses of writing. I do understand that words and objects are two separate entities, and I am by no means arguing for a return to a naive notion of referentiality. What I object to in Lasowski’s formulation, and countless others like it from the poststructuralist branch of postmodernist criticism, is the implication that the words in ‘‘actual’’ catalogues, such as the one written by the Goncourts or even the more banal catalogues published by department stores, are more referential that the words in a novel. In writing La Maison d’un artiste, it may seem that Goncourt sets out to directly denote objects by naming, classifying, and describing them. However, he too relies on what Barthes has called the ‘‘reality effect,’’ an effacement of the narrative signified in favor of the concrete referent, the ‘‘real’’ of art, the collector’s object itself. I would suggest that Goncourt too actually seeks to surpass the concrete object-ness of the object, using the semiotic richness of language to turn concrete objects into something else, into signifiers of beauty, of refinement, of artistic genius. This is what is ‘‘signified’’ by the signifiers of the catalogue. The concrete objects designated in Goncourt’s catalogue are not evoked for themselves, for their value as concrete referents, but rather for what they represent, which is not simply art, but also the artistic sensibility which makes a house ‘‘la maison d’un artiste.’’ Goncourt chooses a special

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genre with which to textualize his collection, the genre of the catalogue, a highly specialized form of writing appropriate to collecting and art history. The catalogue thus redefined provides yet another example of the ‘‘realist illusion’’ at work. The objects evoked in the catalogue are just as much linguistic entities as the objects evoked in a novel. The objects named in A rebours function within the textual fabric of the novel form. The objects named in La Maison d’un artiste function within the textual fabric of the catalogue form. Likewise, the voice which ‘‘narrates’’ Goncourt’s catalogue, La Maison d’un artiste, also functions as a literary character, as does the firstperson narrator in any literary work, fictitious or non-fictitious. The first-person narrator must never be confused with the author, even when the work in question has no literary pretensions, whether it be a collector’s catalogue or, for that matter, a department store catalogue. The department store catalogue too seeks to create for its implied readers a ‘‘dream world,’’ to borrow Rosalind Williams’s term. The catalogue text partakes of a poetics all its own. To read a collection catalogue as an exercise in mere referentiality is to read the catalogue naively, especially in the case of a catalogue with as much literary merit as that of Edmond de Goncourt. At the same time, while there are undeniably concrete referents for the objects evoked in Goncourt’s catalogue, there are also concrete referents for des Esseintes’s bibelots. Though des Esseintes is a fictive character, the objects which Huysmans describes in A rebours existed in the material culture around him, in museums, in antique shops, in his own interior (though at best he owned copies, not originals), in the interiors of friends, including Goncourt. Because Huysmans knew Goncourt and his interior well, and knew his catalogue as well, to a large extent, the referents of La Maison d’un artiste are also the referents of A rebours. Having banished referentiality from A rebours with the stroke of the poststructuralist pen, Lasowski goes on to equate the many rare words in the Huysmansian lexicon with the bibelot. ‘‘Word is bibelot,’’ he writes (p. ). Rare words are like rare antiques. Just as des Esseintes seeks out rare bibelots in order to escape the commercialization, utilitarianism, and industrialized mass-production which for him characterize the abysmal times in which he lives, just as he seeks to escape into the past by recourse to the fine craftsmanship of a bygone era, so, according to the word-as-bibelot metaphor, does Huysmans seek refuge in specialized, rarified language. The bibelot is equated with the rare objects

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Literature and material culture

which collectors and art dealers keep separate from the mass market of industrial goods. Just as the elitist collector seeks sublime objects from outside of the spheres of the banal and the commercial, Huysmans prefers the words stored away in the recesses of specialized dictionaries and encyclopedias. In his article, Lasowski relives des Esseintes’s own fantasy of escaping the realms of the banal and the commercial, an escape which is impossible for critic and character alike. Lasowski’s own escape relies on the separation of language from the realm of referentiality, which is in this case the commercial sphere: Thus I have read A Rebours as an economic fable in which the fate of objects selected by Des Esseintes out of hatred for department stores, grocery stores, and variety stores plays less of a role than the fate of words selected by Huysmans as so many linguistic goods from the great number of specialist works, encyclopedias, and other well-stocked curiosities to which he ceaselessly appealed in writing his work . . . If the writerly apparatus finds inspiration in the conditions of the drafting of a department store mail order, the dictionary proves to be the exhaustive catalogue of objects available in our storerooms. (; author’s emphasis)

The dictionary is like a department store catalogue. However, Lasowski is careful again to maintain the strict separation between words and things, by insisting that the A rebours is less about ‘‘the fate of objects selected by des Esseintes’’ than about the ‘‘the fate of words selected by Huysmans.’’ Lasowski does bring up the critiques of consumer society by sociologists like Georges d’Avenel, Abraham Moles, and Baudrillard, but the use he makes of these critiques remains resolutely metaphorical. The author is compared to the consumer, but for Lasowski this is only a comparison. Implicit in this comparison is the writer’s non-identity with the consumer: Lost in his dictionary like the consumer lost in his catalogue, before the continuous unwrapping of products launched on the market, Huysmans unleashes the hunger which torments him: he writes, thereby opposing his own lists to those bourgeois recaps which proliferated at that time . . . (p. ; my emphasis)

Huysmans is like a consumer, but not a consumer. His lists are like bourgeois catalogues (various guidebooks, speciality dictionaries, recipe books, etc.), but at the same time they are opposed to them. Jean Borie expresses the interpretation of escape which Lasowski presumes:

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All traces of commerce have been expurgated, the solitary figure sits enthroned in the contemplation and benevolent sacredness of a museum whose unique objects, disdainful of fashion, bear witness to the exquisite singularity of his personality and his tastes, without time, out of this world.

However, neither des Esseintes nor Huysmans manages to escape bourgeois society, certainly not by recourse to the catalogue. It is by the catalogue form that the logic of bourgeois culture enters into Huysmans’s novel, for, despite his efforts at nostalgic esotericism, he cannot succeed in opposing his lists to those of commerce. The escapist fantasy which des Esseintes lives through his museum-like house filled with ‘‘authentic’’ bibelots is produced by the very consumer culture which it denies. Antiques do belong to the modern system of objects, explains Baudrillard. They are not ‘‘survivals from the traditional, symbolic order,’’ but rather modern signifiers of something else, of historicalness, marginality, or exoticism. As Bourdieu shows again and again in Distinction, antiques function as cultural capital, as markers or signifiers of bourgeois taste. Des Esseintes is in fact a modern consumer, even though he banishes from his home all modern products produced for and sold by the bourgeois consumer market, as Rosalind Williams convincingly argues in her historical study of consumption in nineteenth-century France. It is impossible to retreat from the marketplace, not only because decorating a modern house requires shopping, but also because the principle of elitist exclusivity implies that even when all choices are negatively determined by the market, they remain determined by it nonetheless. As Williams explains: Despite his desperate attempts to exclude the values of the marketplace from Fontenay [the location of the house], they remain potent, acting like invisible magnetic poles casting a field of force over his life, relentlessly pulling and distorting all his feelings and choices. The emotional energy he expends in resisting the market is testimony to its power. Des Esseintes’s very attempts to resist modern consumption, heroic as they may be, are themselves shaped by it.

Though des Esseintes practices what Williams calls ‘‘elitist consumption,’’ by his very resistance to ‘‘democratic’’ or ‘‘mass’’ consumption he participates in it. Nor do his elaborate efforts at creating sensory experience (by transforming his dining room into a ship galley to create the illusion of being at sea, or by inducing dream states with rare perfumes) succeed in lifting him out of the realm of bourgeois consumption, for

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Literature and material culture

escape to a ‘‘dream world’’ is the aim of all consumption, argues Williams. ‘‘When des Esseintes describes his aim as substituting ‘the vision of reality for the reality itself’ or transporting himself ‘far away from everyday life into the region of dreams,’ he could be defining with equal accuracy a significant aspect of mainstream culture, that aspect called here the dream world of the consumer’’ (p. ). While Williams’s reading shows subtlety and insight, and while I wholeheartedly endorse her emphasis on the social, economic, and political aspects of A rebours, what does seem problematic is that at times she speaks of des Esseintes as if he were a consuming subject. It should be noted that many literary critics too read the novel through the lens of its protagonist des Esseintes, adopting the subject position he occupies, clearly identifying with his refined aesthetics. However, it is crucial to recognize that even less than other literary characters, des Esseintes is not a psychological entity. He is, rather, an aesthetic system, a nexus of criteria for discriminating among goods. The subjectivity of des Esseintes is completely enmeshed in the objectivity concretized in the text as products of material culture, the furnishings, books, art works, bibelots, and other collectibles contained within the house. A rebours, then, is not just a fable whose hero is the ultimate consumer, but also the reprogrammation of a subjectivity, a reprogrammation upon which the very functioning of consumer society as we know it depends. Des Esseintes is constructed not as a subject which creates an object world, but rather as a subject created by an object world. Des Esseintes, the most modern of bibeloteurs, impossibly rich, implausibly refined, believing passionately in the power of possessions, is the implied subject of the most wonderful of retail catalogues. The figure of des Esseintes is what in the end holds the novel together, providing order to the collection by functioning as a selection and organizing system. This is why the novel does not seem fragmentary or unstructured, despite its many enumerative passages and its lack of action. The main character’s neuroses, described in between descriptions of books and bibelots, are depicted not in the interests of psychological realism, but in the interests of the coherence of the novel’s aesthetic system. For this reason, I must agree with Jeffrey Loomis that ‘‘A Rebours is surely a coherent naturalistic tale,’’ in its recounting of the psychic decay of the protagonist. The fictitious furnishings of this eccentric house are even more intimately tied up with the literary character des Esseintes than were the antiques with which Raphae¨l interacted in Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin, for des Esseintes’s house is a map

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of his psyche, just as his psyche is a map of the house. The novel lays out the geography of both, like an atlas. If des Esseintes’s house is full of personified things, he must also be understood as an objectified person. Huysmans confuses persons and objects, intermingling the logic of their functioning. Many critics have noted that in his obsession with all that is artificial (mechanical fish in an aquarium with colored water, hothouse flowers which look artificial, the jewel-encrusted tortoise), des Esseintes tries to make himself into an artificial object as well. His very body becomes more and more objectlike as the novel progresses and as his nervous illness worsens: increasingly unable to ingest solid food, he is finally forced to take his nourishment by enema rather than by mouth, finding great satisfaction in this artificial means of sustaining his body. His own body thus becomes an experiment in rendering living things more object-like, as he does with the hothouse flowers and the jewel-encrusted turtle which dies from the weight of the precious stones. Following this line of reasoning, if the house is a museum, then so is its occupant des Esseintes. Franc¸oise Court-Perez writes of des Esseintes that ‘‘the character himself, as if swallowed up by his creation, attempts to convert himself into a museum, with his mind like drawers, his body reified little by little.’’ If des Esseintes is a museum, he is also an antique shop and a department store stockroom. Though description overtakes narration in this odd novel, the balance between persons and objects seem proportionate, since descriptions of the house amount to descriptions of its occupant, and this because the cavernous interiority of both space and psyche is the very space of A rebours.                As material things acquire more and more prominence in the novel, they simultaneously become more and more autonomous from the exigencies of narrative plot and character development. This growing autonomy of the material object results from the incorporation into the novel of the logic of modern material culture, especially consumer culture. This logic is a ‘‘practical logic’’ of excess, of overproduction and overaccumulation, as well as of circulation, exchangeability, reproduceability, seriality, fungibility, and interchangeability. Mainstream literary criticism has resisted the logic of material culture until quite recently. The catalogue itself is a vehicle of this logic of material culture, for the inventory and the catalogue are the written forms of

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Literature and material culture

cumulative stockpiling, in commerce, in collecting, and in the legal profession (estate inventories, etc.). From this perspective, what in the end distinguishes the modernist from the postmodernist critics is that the latter have assimilated the logic(s) of consumer culture. Postmodernism is after all the cultural logic of consumer capitalism, to play on Fredric Jameson’s famous formulation. The mid-s turn to Benjamin and the Frankfurt school serves as testimony to an interest in and incorporation of the logics of consumer culture on the part of postmodernist literary critics, even and perhaps especially those who gloss over Benjamin’s Marxism.

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The parlour of critical theory Reading dwelling space across disciplines

Any writer wishing to describe the densely decorated, bibelot-filled bourgeois interior of the nineteenth century faces a problem: how to go beyond simple inventory to produce substantive commentary. This usually entails finding some sort of meaning behind or beyond what is being depicted literally. Novelists face a special challenge: how to render such a description significant to plot and character development. Nineteenth-century French novelists rise to this challenge by developing what amounts to a social theory of domestic furnishings, a theory which oddly resembles that implicit in discussions of the bourgeois interior by European sociologists and social commentators, the latter echoing the former. The primary concern of this chapter is ordinary household knickknacks, not the artifacts and objets d’art of serious collectors and aesthetes. By what epistemology do social theorists and novelists give meaning to the most ordinary knick-knacks, curiosities, and bibelots in the most banal bourgeois domestic space? A commonly used interpretive strategy relies on figurative homology. Descriptions of the nineteenth-century interior tend to be composed such that the physical structures of the house (layout and furnishings) parallel family structures, social structures, and, especially near the turn of the century, psychological structures.                  Before moving on to specific examples, it will be instructive to consider the epistemology of the bibelot from various disciplinary perspectives. Collectors, archaeologists, and museographers extract meaning from ordinary domestic interiors, and, by extension, from the most trivial decorative objects. Sociologists, social commentators, and novelists also extract meaning from knick-knacks and other domestic furnishings, but 

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Literature and material culture

their epistemology differs significantly. Different disciplines construct different kinds of knowledge from domestic objects, each according to its own conventions regarding what information should be presented, what kind of commentary should be made, and how this information and commentary should be organized. This process of meaning extraction is a form of ‘‘reading,’’ in the semiotic sense. ‘‘Readings’’ in turn generate writing, the various narratives, scholarly studies, and essays published in these various fields. Collectors, archaeologists, and museographers have produced a sizable body of published writing on household objects, whether these be ordinary furnishings and utensils or elaborate works of art. Those working within these disciplines generally begin the meaning-production process by removing domestic objects from dwelling space, placing them in a workshop, curiosity cabinet, or museum in order to study them as disembodied artifacts. The space in which objects are studied affects the way they are read. To place objects into a space designed with study in mind is already to classify and to organize them. An epistemology is already built into spaces like museums and display cases. After removing items to a space of study, certain kinds of information are then gathered: color, form, material, size, geographical origin, maker, date or period, school or style, techniques of manufacture, use, etc. This information is then used to group disparate pieces into a coherent historical (or aesthetic) framework. When written up, a sort of narrative is produced, though the narrative framework may seem lost amidst the copious amounts of descriptive detail endemic to the writing of these disciplines. Because their focus is material things, collectors, archaeologists, and museographers are allowed and indeed encouraged by writerly convention to concentrate on physical form and to dwell on minute detail. Novelists and social theorists proceed quite differently. They do not remove domestic furnishings from dwelling space in order to study them, but rather produce meaning from within a physical context which is organized as living space, not as study space. In order to make objects in such a space ‘‘readable,’’ the ‘‘practical logic’’ by which dwelling space is organized must be transformed into analytical paradigms. In accomplishing this task, novelists and sociologists use similar assumptions to different ends, writing up their readings of interiors for incorporation into novelistic or sociological description. Though both novelists and social theorists are expected to focus primarily on persons, novelists must, by convention, develop a story line and a cast of charac-

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ters. Not only must material things acquire significance by their relationship to people, but information about them must be integrated into a coherent narrative with a plot. Faced with such a task, it is customary to subordinate, if not restrain, descriptions of material things. The case of sociologists and social commentators is somewhat different, even though many nineteenth-century novelists aspire to social analysis. As with the novelist, the focus must be on people, on human actions, beliefs, behavior, psychology, social organization, and the like. However, even though sociologists certainly make use of narrative techniques, there is much more room for descriptive commentary than in the novel, since the sociologist is not constrained by the need to depict actions organized into a plot.     :                              To restate matters a bit differently, novelists, social commentators, and sociologists who take an interest in material culture face the narrative task of connecting two objects of analysis: persons and material things. The primary figures for making connections are analogy, homology, and reciprocal influence. This is how Balzac establishes a relationship between dweller and dwelling in the well-known (and critically wellworn) description of Madame Vauquer’s boarding house in Le Pe`re Goriot. Balzac is of course celebrated for the unity of his compositions, which masterfully blend lengthy descriptions with narrative action, colorful but realistic characters, and complex but orderly plots. His descriptive portraits of important characters combine details of physiognomy, clothing, and housing. Homology is a mechanism which Balzac routinely uses to organize and unify his lengthy descriptions. The portrait of Madame Vauquer is exemplary for the way it explicitly situates her in a mutually determining relationship to her environment, including her interior decor. The opening sentence of Le Pe`re Goriot simultaneously introduces Madame Vauquer and her bourgeois boarding house: ‘‘Madame Vauquer, ne´e de Conflans, est une vieille femme qui, depuis quarante ans, tient a` Paris une pension bourgeoise e´tablie rue Neuve-Sainte-Genvie`ve, entre le quartier latin et le faubourg Saint-Marceau’’ [‘‘Madame Vauquer, ne´e de Conflans, is an old woman who for forty years has kept a bourgeois boarding house on Neuve-Sainte-Genvie`ve street in Paris, between the Latin quarter and the Saint-Marceau area’’]. The sentence grammatically locates the mistress in the subject position, with the

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Literature and material culture

house as the direct object. Through this positioning, the story of a person is accorded prominence over the description of setting, though the house is given an equal amount of attention in the sentence, based on the number of words devoted to it. This sentence, with Madame Vauquer as subject and her house as predicate, prefigures the organization of the heavily descriptive pages which follow. However, the positions of Madame Vauquer and her boarding house are momentarily reversed, since the house is depicted in detail before the owner makes her second appearance. After briefly evoking the downward mobility of the bourgeois boarders (including old Goriot), and the house’s dubious neighborhood (already mentioned in the first sentence), the narrator begins his description of the rundown house from the street (named in the first sentence), first providing the exterior view. He then moves inside to the shabby interior of ‘‘la maison Vauquer.’’ The text gives several samplings of the interior’s tasteless decor, detailing the chairs, wallpaper, greasy tablecloth, and cheap bibelots. Even new, these objects would have reflected the worst of bourgeois and even petty-bourgeois taste. To underline their present state of decline, the narrator provides a list of adjectives which summarize the general condition of the pension’s furnishings: ‘‘vieux, crevasse´, pourri, tremblant, ronge´, manchot, borgne, invalide, expirant’’ [‘‘old, cracked, rotten, trembling, eaten away, one-armed, one-eyed, invalid, expiring’’] (p. ). These adjectives could also be applied to most of the pensioners, especially the aging Madame Vauquer and old Goriot, whose sad situations have already been mentioned in the text. The message is becoming clear: the pensioners and their pension have both deteriorated into a similar state of ruin, the condition of the one mirroring that of the other. By the time the equally dilapidated Madame Vauquer is shown entering this decrepit space, the stage has been set. Her face, nose, hands, and torso are said to be ‘‘en harmonie avec’’ the room, ‘‘dont madame Vauquer respire l’air chaudement fe´tide sans en eˆtre e´coeure´e’’ [‘‘in harmony with’’ / ‘‘whose hotly fetid air Madame Vauquer breathed without feeling nauseous’’]. Only a creature of this noxious milieu is able to breathe here. The relationship between dweller and dwelling is reciprocal: ‘‘toute sa personne explique la pension, comme la pension implique sa personne’’ [‘‘her entire person explained the boarding house, just as the boarding house implied her person’’] (ibid., my emphasis). To understand the one is to explain, even project, the other. Furthermore, the old woman’s pale, plump body ‘‘est le produit de cette vie, comme le typhus est la conse´quence des exhala-

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isons d’un hoˆpital’’ [‘‘is the product of this life, like typhus is the consequence of a hospital’s exhalations’’]. The innovation introduced by this kind of description is that the similarities drawn between Madame Vauquer and the pension are not mere analogies. What is being presented here is not simply a person amidst a group of things, but also and more importantly a theory about the relationship between them. The dwelling is more than a metaphorical or allegorical reflection of its owner, for if the room is ‘‘en harmonie avec’’ the physical traits of Madame Vauquer, if her tattered skirt ‘‘re´sume’’ the public rooms and garden, ‘‘annonce’’ the kitchen and ‘‘fait pressentir’’ the other inhabitants, this is because Madame Vauquer ‘‘est le produit de’’ her life in the pension, just as disease ‘‘est la conse´quence’’ of the bad air in hospitals. This is not so much a poetics as a social theory, or, one could perhaps say, a social poetics: people are products of their milieu, such that descriptors for the one entity apply to the other. To describe a room in this way is not to reproduce ‘‘the real,’’ but rather to advance a hypothesis about the mutual construction of persons and their built environment. The claim that the description of the Vauquer pension is founded on a social theory rather than simply on a poetics is hardly a revelation, given that Balzac considers his novels to be works of social science, and describes himself as docteur `es sciences sociales. It is well known that Balzac models his novelistic portrayals of society on the natural sciences, especially zoology, as he so famously explains in his preface to La Come´die humaine, the vast cycle of novels which (among other things) is meant to be a zoology of French society. It follows from Balzac’s reasoning based on zoological theories that Madame Vauquer is a human type determined by her environment, just as any animal species is determined by its habitat. The scientifically minded individual of the nineteenth century is a keen observer. It is thus fitting that the description of the maison Vauquer is presented by a third-party narrator-observer who appears to be conducting a visual examination of the house as he records its physical characteristics for the reader who cannot see it. At the same time, he interjects interpretations and background information, elaborating and synthesizing as he notes visual data. To borrow a notion from semiotics and visual culture studies, the narrator is ‘‘reading’’ the house. The analogy of reading implies that the house is composed of signs. Physical characteristics become ‘‘signifiers’’ of something else (the aging process, a bourgeoisie in decline, social marginalization, etc.). The

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narrator’s clever ‘‘reading’’ of this interior is made easy, since the connections he appears to be finding between dweller and dwelling are in fact created by the text itself. The reading narrator, the object read (the house), and the interpretation are all fabricated together, based on the interpretive schema of homology, by which dwellers and dwelling space coexist in a mutually influential interrelationship. Material details are made to form a coherent system which not only mirrors the coherent system of characters, but also mirrors and reinforces the coherence of the entire novel. Balzac’s interiors firmly establish a place in the novel for ordinary domestic objects. His successors will make use of what soon becomes a narrative convention, filling their own novels with the details of household decor. Writers like the Goncourts and Huysmans will allow material culture to virtually take over the novel, at the expense of character development and plot.                   Proust announces the end of the Balzacian-style interior. In his early novel Jean Santeuil, written between  and , he insinuates that because the relationship between persons and their furnishings has changed over the past fifty years, Balzacian descriptions of interiors are no longer possible. Proust does not give up describing interiors, however, though he must learn to do so differently. Jean Santeuil is written in the third person from the point of view of the eponymous hero, a young man poised on the threshold of high society, eager to enter, but realizing that in order to do so, he must master the unwritten codes of its mysterious rituals, rites, and hierarchies. The situation is of course similar to that faced by the first-person narrator in A la recherche du temps perdu, but is even more similar to that faced by Balzac’s socially ambitious protagonists. Two of Balzac’s most famous youthful social climbers, Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre´, are indeed invoked by Proust’s narrator and compared to the protagonist of Jean Santeuil, making it clear that this novel is in many ways a rewriting of Balzac’s Le Pe`re Goriot, Illusions perdues, and Splendeurs et mise`res des courtisanes. Proust’s meditation on novelistic descriptions of interior decor forms a part of the character portrait of Jean Santeuil’s ambitious aunt, Madame Desroches, who, beginning from a lowly social position, manages to launch one of the most fashionable salons in Paris. However, at the moment in the recounting of her success story where Balzac would

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place a physical description of the salon, Proust’s already slippery narrator throws out this curious disclaimer: ‘‘La description de l’hoˆtel Desroches serait sans inte´reˆt pour le lecteur’’ [‘‘The description of the Desroches mansion would be without interest for the reader’’]. The next three pages gesture at offering an explanation as to why. What is at issue is the relationship between furnishings, social situation, and taste. What the narrator appears to be describing is a breakdown of the homologies which enabled Balzac to construct a coherent universe through interior description. In setting up his demonstration of the unreadability of the fin-de-sie`cle interior, the narrator of Jean Santeuil first offers an analysis of how furnishings are chosen in Balzac’s day (the s and s). By starting off with the phrase ‘‘en un temps ou`’’ [‘‘at a time when’’], the implication is that the choosing of furnishings in the present time (the s) is somehow different. In Balzac’s time it was the selection process that allowed household goods to take on meaning, the way furnishings ‘‘entraient peu a` peu dans une maison selon que celui qui l’habitait les trouvait utiles, les trouvait beaux ou savait que ses parents, ses colle`gues, les gens de sa classe ou de sa fortune avaient l’habitude de les trouver beaux et de les rechercher’’ [‘‘entered a house little by little, according to whether the inhabitant found them useful or attractive, or knew that his family or colleagues, or those of his class or income level, tended to find them attractive and to seek them out’’]. Because things are selected in this way, details of style mattered: ‘‘la nuance d’un rideau, la forme d’une chaise, les ornements d’une pendule n’e´taient pas choses indiffe´rentes, parce qu’elles semblaient choisies pour ainsi dire par une personne’’ [‘‘the nuance of a drape, the form of a chair, or the ornaments of a clock were not inconsequential, because they seemed to have been chosen, so to speak, by someone’’]. Although an individual selects these pieces, in choosing a chair, for example, ‘‘le faible bras d’un homme’’ is guided by ‘‘toute une e´poque’’ [‘‘a man’s feeble arm’’ / ‘‘an entire epoch’’]. Such furnishings become embedded with a web of social relations: Assemble´s autour de chaque famille, les meubles semblaient l’entourer des instruments de ses plaisirs, des images de ses gouˆts, des symboles de son temps. La maison n’e´tait que comme un autre costume, moins e´troit mais plus durable, que moulait en quelque sorte a` sa ressemblance l’aˆme de l’individu avec les aˆmes plus vastes auxquelles elle participe. (pp. –) [The furnishings assembled around each family seemed to surround them with the instruments of their pleasures, the images of their tastes, and the symbols of

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their times. The house was but another suit of clothing, less tight but more lasting, and which in a way molded to itself the individual’s soul with the vaster souls with which it interacted.]

In this way, a piece of furniture surpasses the individual to participate in the socio-historical. By tying characters and their possessions to social position and historical situation, Proust has elaborated a sort of sociology of furniture in Balzac’s time. It can be surmised from this analysis that Balzac’s selection process leads to a straightforward, harmonious homology between dweller(s) and dwelling. As a result, these interiors are easily interpretable, thus highly ‘‘readable’’: Et un ameublement apparaissait ainsi comme une sorte d’histoire ou` coˆte a` coˆte l’individu, la profession, la classe avaient arreˆte´ leur pre´sence, fixe´ leur vie, exprime´ leur reˆve, de´pose´ leur me´moire. Et c’est comme sur les chartes, sur le grimoire poudreux de l’histoire, qu’un Balzac pouvait se pencher sur un appartement comme pour le de´chiffrer et, d’apre`s la forme des choses, ressusciter les ge´ne´rations des hommes. (ibid.; my emphasis) [A piece of furniture thus appeared as a sort of story where, side by side, individual, profession, and class had halted their presence, fixed their lives, expressed their dreams, deposited their memories. And it is as if over charters, over the dusty magic book of history that a Balzac could bend over an apartment as if to decipher it and, according to the form of things, resuscitate generations of people.]

These apartments function like texts, like a story, a legal document, or a book written in secret code. By carefully scrutinizing the otherwise ordinary things in a dwelling, at the beginning of the nineteenth century it was possible to decipher the dweller’s profession, class, pleasures, and tastes. It is worth pausing over the last phrases of this quotation, ‘‘d’apre`s la forme des choses, ressusciter les ge´ne´rations des hommes.’’ This is the task of the archaeologist, to reconstruct the past from its physical remains, to piece together a narrative from material things. The Proustian narrator’s meditation on Balzac sets up his discussion of the unreadability of bibelot-filled interiors half a century later. He does qualify his remarks by limiting them to the interiors of high society, but by beginning the paragraph with ‘‘il n’en est plus de meˆme aujourd’hui’’ [‘‘it is no longer so today’’], it is historical change that he emphasizes. After all, Balzac does apply his descriptive techniques to high society interiors as well, and shows them to be quite readable.

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Obviously using the Balzacian interior as a point of comparison, Proust points out what the observer will not learn from the fin-de-sie`cle highsociety interior, what these women pretentiously call their ‘‘appartement artistique, qu’il soit Renaissance, Louis XIV, Louis XV, Louis XVI, Empire ou anglais.’’ Such rooms will not tell the visitor whether their occupant is the wife of a great doctor, lawyer, banker, or lord, nor will the visitor learn from them whether the mistress of the house is ‘‘intelligente ou beˆte, ide´aliste ou positive, paresseuse ou active, me´lancolique ou gaie’’ (p. ). Unlike the information-packed Balzacian interior, this ‘‘appartement artistique’’ provides no revealing clues. The interior has nothing to ‘‘say’’ (‘‘dire’’) to the observer, he can ‘‘learn’’ nothing from it (‘‘vous n’apprendrez pas de lui non plus si . . . ’’). Meaning has been drained from the fashionable salon, but how? This has to do with the way in which these women select their furnishings. Without explicitly stating it, the narrator identifies a problem: the artistic apartment does not necessarily signal artistic taste on the part of the owner. The dwelling does not reflect the dweller as it ought to, according to Balzacian convention. Having just enumerated what the high-society ‘‘appartement artistique’’ will not show the observant visitor, the narrator goes on to say that the visitor will see ‘‘de beaux objets d’art Louis XIV, Louis XV, Louis XVI ou Empire, ou des meubles et des tentures de Maple.’’ However, these objects do not reveal the artistic tastes or historical interests of a woman, because ‘‘une femme qui n’a jamais appris l’histoire, ‘travail’ son hoˆtel pendant deux ans au Cabinet des Estampes, en compagnie d’artistes, ou si elle n’en connaıˆt pas en compagnie de connaisseurs’’ [‘‘a woman who never learned history spends two years in the +national library’s, Department of Engravings ‘working on’ her mansion, in the company of connoisseurs’’]. He then gives examples of women whose decor bears no relation to her personality, background, or tastes: Une qui n’a jamais rien lu laisse traıˆner sur la table de sa chambre un seul livre, La Somme royale de Turgot parce que cette chambre est Louis XVI . . . Mme S. n’a jamais e´te´ au Louvre, parce qu’elle n’aime pas la peinture, mais, parce qu’elle est riche, elle recherche les dessins de Watteau et la premie`re manie`re de Gustave Moreau. (p. ) [One woman who has never read a thing leaves lying around on her bedroom table a single book, The Royal Sum by Turgot, because it is a Louis XVI room . . . Madame S. has never been to the Louvre because she does not like painting, but because she is rich, she seeks out Watteau drawings and Gustave Moreau’s early manner.]

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These historic, artistic, and literary interiors are inhabited by nonhistorians, by non-readers, and by non-art lovers. These objects, the period bibelots, book, and drawings which evoke history, literature, and art, do not indicate the tastes and interests of these rooms’ inhabitants. The ‘‘beaux objets d’art’’ and other furnishings do not surround these families with ‘‘des instruments de [leurs] plaisirs, des images de [leurs] gouˆts, des symboles de [leur] temps,’’ as did the furnishings of Balzac’s time, at least according to Proust. The furnishings and bibelots of the s have become what Baudrillard might call empty signifiers, signifying fashion itself. Proust’s narrator gives an example of the kind of art work he would find appropriate in the interiors of these wealthy, socially established, but non-artistic women. The interior of Mme X***, a woman from a family of Jewish or protestant bankers, should be decorated with family portraits of the protestant or Jewish bankers from whom she descended. Instead, Mme X*** lives in ‘‘l’hoˆtel de La Rochefoucauld,’’ which is to say a mansion which once belonged to an aristocratic Catholic writer, and displays in her bedroom the portrait of another aristocratic Catholic writer, Mme de Lafayette (pp. –). Her identity markers (Jewish or Protestant, bourgeoisie, family of bankers) do not match the identity markers deployed in her decor (Catholic, aristocracy, writers). It could be surmised from Proust’s discussion that even though this woman was not born into these circles, her acquisition of La Rochefoucauld’s house and Mme de Lafayette’s portrait might be appropriate if she were a lover and connoisseur of art, whether of painting or of literature. However, she can claim these decorative markers neither by birth, nor by artistic inclination. It can be further surmised that, in Balzac’s time, if Mme X*** had furnished her home with paintings, she would have chosen family portraits, and that these family portraits would have revealed much more about her than does the portrait of Mme de Lafayette. The problem posed in Proust’s text turns what might now be read as a problem of identity into a problem of reading. This problem of readability provides Proust with much narrative fodder for A la recherche du temps perdu. If we accept Deleuze’s thesis that A la recherche recounts the narrator’s apprenticeship in reading and deciphering signs, then domestic objects can be understood as obtuse signs which at first mystify Marcel (the name by which many commentators designate the narrator), but whose mysteries he eventually learns to penetrate. What Marcel expects to ‘‘read’’ in domestic objects is a correlation between taste and social standing. For example, before he

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gains entry into the prestigious salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain (the social sphere of the aristocratic Guermantes family), Marcel exhibits confusion when a person’s artistic taste does not seem to equal their social standing. He discovers through informants and by a glimpse through a window of her hoˆtel that the pinnacle of aristocratic high society, Madame de Guermantes herself, lives amidst rather banal bourgeois furnishings. He had imagined the magic world of the Faubourg to be completely different than the world of his own ordinary bourgeois experiences. The young Marcel had anticipated that bourgeois furnishings were limited to bourgeois homes, and that aristocratic homes would be furnished with marvelously aristocratic things, even though he could not yet have conceptualized what these furnishings might be. During the course of his apprenticeship in the reading of signs, Marcel gradually learns that the bourgeoisie is often much more educated, and usually much more attentive to matters of taste, than the aristocracy. It turns out to be the bourgeois characters Swann and Madame Verdurin who consistently manifest superior taste in A la recherche, and not the prince, princess, duke, and duchess of Guermantes. An exception to the mediocre taste and artistic education of the Guermantes family is Charlus. In La Prisonnie`re, it is suggested that his profound appreciation of art is linked to his homosexuality. Furthermore, it is only the most debased homosexuality ‘‘a` laquelle puisse correspondre chez le meˆme eˆtre un affinement des qualite´s morales’’ [‘‘that corresponds in one and the same person to an intensification of the intellectual qualities’’]. Strangely enough, the ‘‘rapport’’ between the physical and the moral explains why ‘‘l’univers des poe`tes et de musiciens, si ferme´ au duc de Guermantes, s’entr’ouvre pour M. de Charlus’’ [‘‘the world of poets and musicians, so firmly barred against the Duc de Guermantes, opens its portals to M. de Charlus’’]. Proust insists on Charlus’s initiation into the highest artistic realms, not just on the matters of decorative taste stereotypically associated with homosexuals: ‘‘Que ce dernier ait du gouˆt dans son inte´rieur, qui est d’une me´nage`re bibeloteuse, cela ne surprend pas; mais l’e´troite bre`che qui donne jour sur Beethoven et sur Ve´rone`se!’’ [‘‘That the latter should show taste in the furnishing of his home, which is that of a housewife with a taste for curios, need not surprise us; but the narrow loophole that opens upon Beethoven and Veronese!’’]. Refined artistic sensibilities correspond to depraved physical sensibilities. The relation between the physical and the spiritual is inverse, but still proportional. Homologies

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between interior decor, behavior, and taste are convoluted in Proust, but they are not abandoned. What Marcel eventually discovers, then, is that correlations between social standing and taste are tenuous, but that there are connections nonetheless. The homology between dweller and dwelling proves to be less readily apparent in Proust’s novelistic world than in Balzac’s, but the connection between material possessions and social class is not altogether without logic. For example, certain characters, especially Madame Verdurin and Odette, show a high degree of awareness of the sign-function of furnishings, deliberately and strategically choosing and displaying items that they believe to be ‘‘artistique’’ or ‘‘chic’’ (respectively). The commentary of Proust’s narrator reveals that these two characters deploy household things as signs, only to have other characters misunderstand their meanings, or reinterpret them contrary to the owner’s intentions. In the case of Odette, Swann sees through her naive and even false notion of ‘‘chic,’’ because he understands the mondain world of furnishings-as-signs better than she. He thus interprets Odette’s furnishings contrary to her intentions, understanding them as the trappings of a typical, uneducated courtesan. Conversely, Madame Verdurin’s taste is shown to be far superior to that of her social superior, Madame de Cambremer: the former collects antiques and art objects which the latter misunderstands, preferring her own bourgeois decor. Madame Verdurin understands the ‘‘cultural capital’’ of artistic taste, effectively using it to proclaim her ‘‘distinction.’’ These signs are lost on Madame de Cambremer. This is an opportune place to open a parenthesis on Bourdieu, for the applicability of his phrases ‘‘cultural capital’’ and ‘‘distinction’’ to Proust is hardly fortuitous. In Distinction Bourdieu cites Proust several times, turning to literature to corroborate his own sociological theory of the social function of aesthetically informed taste. Proust’s ‘‘aesthetics’’ is given precedence over that of Kant, for reasons which are explained in a ‘‘Postscript’’ which is subtitled ‘‘Towards a ‘Vulgar’ Critique of ‘Pure’ Critiques.’’ Proust is accorded a privileged relation to ‘‘truth’’ because he is associated with ‘‘practice,’’ whereas Kant is associated with ‘‘theory.’’ Bourdieu accords literature more truth-value than Enlightenment reason. His analysis of the workings of the judgments of taste does share some fundamental principles with the analysis of taste which gradually unfolds in the volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu. It could be said that, like Proust’s Marcel, the narrator of Bourdieu’s Distinction has undergone a similar apprenticeship in reading signs, and has also

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worked through the complexities of the relationship between taste and social position. Throughout the case studies and interviews presented in Distinction, Bourdieu describes strategic uses of taste similar to those employed by Odette and Madame Verdurin, as well as similar misunderstandings of the taste of others. It would seem, then, that although Proust’s use of furniture does not directly reflect social structure, as was the case with the interior of Balzac’s Madame Vauquer, A la recherche does follow the logic of homology, insofar as the incongruence between social standing and taste is ‘‘read’’ in furnishings. Clever readers like Proust and Bourdieu can properly interpret even the modern incommensurabilities between dweller and dwelling.    :                  -           There are interesting parallels between the analysis of domestic furnishings in Balzac’s and Proust’s novels, and that found in Max Nordau’s famous work of social commentary, Degeneration, first published in , the same decade as Jean Santeuil. Like Proust, Nordau detects a change in the relationship between dwellers and their dwellings. Nordau was both a literary and social critic, as well as a trained physician. He left Hungary for Germany, then settled in Paris where he lived for most of his life. I cite his widely read and translated Degeneration () because in it he makes use of the dweller/dwelling homology to tie the bibelot-filled interior not only to literary and artistic movements, but also to social and psychological transformations. Nordau ‘‘reads’’ the bourgeois interior as symptomatic of the individuals and the society of his time. The notion of symptom is taken literally here, since Nordau is using medical discourse to diagnose ‘‘degeneration,’’ a mental and moral disease. Degeneration is written from the point of view of a liberal who believes in science, progress, and (middle-class) morality. Though politically liberal, Nordau’s aesthetics are quite conservative. His positivist Darwinian notion of progress grounded in science pitted him against those who proclaimed that art should be free from utilitarian and moralistic concerns. Though Nordau seeks and finds symptoms of ‘‘degeneration’’ throughout Europe, he claims that it is especially prevalent in France. The French words ‘‘decadence’’ and ‘‘fin-de-sie`cle’’ are for him practically synonyms of ‘‘degeneration.’’ He writes: ‘‘Fin-de-sie`cle is French, for it was in France that the mental state so entitled was first consciously

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realized.’’ The term ‘‘mental state’’ already implies the search for a pathology. The common feature of the various manifestations of this mentality is ‘‘a contempt for traditional views of custom and morality’’ (p. ). Nordau senses ‘‘the end of an established order,’’ the immanent decline of the current epoch of history, which is signaled by the attacks on order and rational logic waged in the arts by symbolists and aesthetes. ‘‘All certainty is destroyed’’; ‘‘forms lose their outlines’’; ‘‘moral sea-sickness’’ spreads. Though ‘‘the great majority of the middle and lower classes is naturally not fin-de-sie`cle,’’ the fin-de-sie`cle minority of ‘‘rich educated people or fanatics’’ exerts a disproportionate amount of influence, and thus presents a real danger, warns Nordau. Such views allow for no sympathy toward the bibelot, whose prevalence throughout Europe is indicative of mental and moral degeneration. Of the ‘‘furniture and bric-a`-brac’’ of the ‘‘fin-de-sie`cle’’ dwelling, here is a sample of what Nordau has to say: Here are at once stage properties and lumber-rooms, rag-shops and museums . . . On all the tables and in all the cabinets is a display of antiquities or articles of vertu`, big or small, and for the most part warranted not genuine; a plate beside a long-necked Persian waterpot of brass, a bonbonnie`re between a breviary bound in carved ivory, and snuffers of chiselled copper. (p. )

Nordau describes the same bibelot-filled interiors as the other authors cited throughout this book. However, whereas the Goncourts, Huysmans, and company aestheticize the always passionate, sometimes perverse and neurotic, relationship between the collector and his surroundings, Nordau denounces it as confusion: Everything in these houses aims at exciting the nerves and dazzling the senses. The disconnected and antithetical effects in all arrangements, the constant contradiction between form and purpose, the outlandishness of most objects, is intended to be bewildering. There must be no sentiment of repose, such as is felt at any composition, the plan of which is easily taken in, nor of the comfort attending a prompt comprehension of all the details of one’s environment. He who enters here must not doze, but be thrilled . . . All is discrepant, indiscriminate jumble. The unity of abiding by one definite historic style counts as old-fashioned, provincial, Philistine, and the time has not yet produced a style of its own. (p. )

The qualities presented by the bibelot-filled interior defy classical notions of rational order: ‘‘disconnected,’’ ‘‘antithetical,’’ ‘‘outlandishness,’’ ‘‘bewildering,’’ ‘‘discrepant,’’ ‘‘indiscriminate jumble.’’ ‘‘Unity’’ is perceptively recognized as an outmoded value. Again, the implication

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is that persons and their environment are not only mutually reflective, but also mutually constitutive: the confusion of styles not only mirrors mental confusion, but also amplifies this confusion by ‘‘exciting the nerves and dazzling the senses.’’ A tale of transformation can be detected by ‘‘reading between the lines’’ of this description: if the ‘‘indiscriminate jumble’’ of fin-de-sie`cle decor creates a sentiment of bewilderment, then it follows that traditional (early nineteenth-century) decor creates a ‘‘sentiment of repose’’ through its easily comprehended ‘‘composition.’’ The homology between persons and things is so strongly established that social and psychological changes produce decorative changes, and, though perhaps to a more limited degree, vice versa, decorative changes produce social and psychological changes. Nordau draws on medical discourse to diagnose the collecting of bibelots as symptomatic of a mental disorder: The present rage for collecting, the piling up, in dwellings, of aimless bric-a`brac, which does not becomes any more useful or beautiful by being fondly called bibelots, appear to us in a completely new light when we know that Magnan has established the existence of an irresistible desire among the degenerate to accumulate useless trifles. (p. )

It is not the diagnosis that interests me, but rather the gesture of reading degeneration into the subversion of the rational order associated with traditional home decor. Nordau makes the assumption that the orderly or disorderly arrangement of furnishings reflects and even contributes to mental and moral order or disorder, respectively.    :                         -  -   `      I now turn to a fin-de-sie`cle sociologist’s discussion of bibelot-filled interiors, Georg Simmel’s lengthy commentary on domestic goods in The Philosophy of Money, published in , roughly contemporaneous with the above-cited texts of Proust and Nordau. Like Proust and Nordau, Simmel too tells a tale of historical transformation, in analyzing the changing relationship between people and their household things. Though there are certainly important differences between French and German patterns of domestic consumption, as cultural historians like Whitney Walton amply demonstrate, the taste for eclectic, cluttered interiors is common throughout Europe during the s. That the relevance of Simmel’s cultural analysis exceeds the national boundaries of Germany is evidenced by the many translations of this book. His

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commentary on interior decor is relevant to this chapter because it is sociological in perspective, and much more lucidly articulated than, for example, Walter Benjamin’s impressionistic reflections on the LouisPhilippe interior, which might have been a more obvious choice. Above all, Simmel’s commentary posits structural homologies between dwellers and dwellings in theoretically sophisticated ways. In the final chapter of The Philosophy of Money, Simmel uses the Hegelian subject/object dialectic to analyze profound cultural changes which take place over a one hundred-year period, from the end of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth. This chapter, called ‘‘The Style of Life,’’ includes a discussion of ordinary household furnishings and other products of material culture. Furnishings and consumer goods are used to illustrate the process that Simmel calls the ‘‘objectification of culture,’’ which occurs as money comes to dominate social relations. The result is a ‘‘growing estrangement’’ between (human) subjects and (material) objects. ‘‘The divergence of subjective and objective culture’’ occurs on many levels, and can be seen for example in the results of the division of labor which comes about with industrialization. As material things are produced and consumed in ever greater quantity, producing and consuming subjects alike become distanced from them, rendering relationships between persons and things increasingly impersonal. At first, ‘‘Custom work, which predominated among medieval craftsman and which rapidly declined only during the last century, gave the consumer a personal relationship with the commodity.’’ Later, when consumers no longer buy goods directly from craftsmen, the personal relationship between persons and goods deteriorates, as ‘‘exchange relations become increasingly complicated and mediated.’’ Finally, factory production separates the worker from the end product through specialization. (Human) subjects become separated from (material) objects, though paradoxically while confronting them in abundance. The relationship between people and their home furnishings also grows more distant during this time: ‘‘During the first decades of the nineteenth century, furniture and the objects that surrounded us for use and pleasure were of relative simplicity and durability and were in accord with the needs of the lower as well as of the upper strata’’ (p. ). The phrase ‘‘in accord with’’ echoes Proust’s characterization of the Balzacian interior. Simmel next points out a generational difference in the relationship between persons and their furnishings: ‘‘This resulted in people’s attachment as they grew up to the objects of their surroundings,

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an attachment that already appears to the younger generation today as an eccentricity on the part of their grandparents’’ (pp. –). Detachment is associated with the ‘‘younger generation’’ of the s, while attachment is associated with their early nineteenth-century grandparents. This growing detachment (alienation, in the language of Marx and Luka´cs) is the tale of historical transformation that Simmel tells through his ‘‘readings’’ of domestic interiors. The comfortable attachment of subjects to objects still prevalent in the early nineteenth century erodes as a result of several factors, notably abundance, specialization, differentiation, and commodification. By the s, the ‘‘sheer quantity’’ of specialized objects ‘‘makes a close and, as it were, personal relationship to each of them more difficult.’’ People were closer to objects in earlier times, because ‘‘a few and simple utensils are more easily assimilated by the individual.’’ Later, ‘‘an abundance of different kinds almost form an antagonistic object to the individual self’’ (p. ). Now there are too many different kinds of things to cope with. Further contributing to the sense of detachment are the alienating effects of the money economy. ‘‘What is distressing is that we are basically indifferent to those numerous objects that swarm around us, and this is for reasons specific to a money economy: their impersonal origin and easy replaceability’’ (ibid.). I understand ‘‘impersonal origin’’ to mean that objects are produced by persons unknown to the consuming subject. Their ‘‘easy replaceability’’ would seem to refer to their being made equivalent through the abstract medium of money. Simmel next describes the modern configuration of the world of objects as ‘‘an interconnected enclosed world that has increasingly fewer points at which the subjective soul can interpose its will and feelings’’ (ibid.). In other words, the subject/object relationship begins to give way to object/object relationships which seem to exclude the subject. The subject confronts a world of material objects which he/she experiences as separated from the self. Finally, objects become separated from people by their mobility. Simmel observes that new types of transportation make the commodity more mobile than ever, moving it without its being accompanied by its merchant. ‘‘By their independent, impersonal mobility, objects complete the final stage of their separation from people,’’ he concludes (ibid.). Mobility is what in the end lies behind the eclecticism of fin-desie`cle home furnishings. Also attributed to mobility is the prevailing taste for decorative historicism: ‘‘The historicizing preference of our century . . . is only the internal aspect of the general development of its

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Literature and material culture

adaptability and its wide-ranging mobility. This is the root of the bewildering plurality of styles that are absorbed, presented and appreciated by our culture’’ (p. ; my emphasis). The juxtaposition of historic and exotic furnishings in home decor is but one aspect of ‘‘the bewildering plurality of styles’’ which proliferate in many sectors of culture at this time, ‘‘from the construction of buildings to the format of books, from sculptures to gardens and furniture with their juxtaposition of Renaissance and Japanese styles, Baroque and empire, the style of the PreRaphaelites and realistic functionalism’’ (p. ). This ‘‘multitude of styles’’ results from ‘‘the enlargement of our historical knowledge, which in turn is associated with modern man’s penchant for change mentioned earlier’’ (ibid.). Simmel then ties the plurality of styles to the process of detachment, which he ascribes to the objectification of culture. The very possibilities of choice presented by this barrage of styles leads to the further degradation of the subject/object bond. I have highlighted the terms which refer to the ever widening subject/object separation: Only where a variety of given styles exists will one detach itself from its content so that its independence and specific significance gives us the freedom to choose between the one or the other. Through the differentiation of styles each individual style, and thus style in general, becomes something objective whose validity is independent of human subjects and their interests, activities, approval or disapproval. The fact that the entire visible environment of our cultural life has disintegrated into a plurality of styles dissolves that original relationship to style where subject and object are not yet separated. (p. ; my emphasis)

The multiplication of objects in daily life, then, both reflects and contributes to the alienating separation of subjects from material objects. The eclectic decor of the fin-de-sie`cle living room is the product of fin-de-sie`cle culture. However, the ‘‘plurality of styles’’ is not merely the effect of modern society’s adaptability and mobility, the ‘‘multitude of styles’’ confronting subjects also contributes to objectification by dissolving ‘‘that original relationship to style’’ by which subjects and objects were still attached. To summarize the commonalities among Proust’s, Nordau’s, and Simmel’s accounts of the nineteenth-century interior, it could be said that all three writers tell stories of ‘‘then’’ and ‘‘now,’’ ‘‘then’’ being the early nineteenth century, the time of Balzac, ‘‘now’’ being the last decade of the nineteenth century. ‘‘Then’’ household interiors were intimately and harmoniously interconnected with the lives, mentalities,

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family, and social milieu of their inhabitants, because furnishings were appropriate to the inhabitants’ tastes (Proust), because the orderly arrangement of furnishings reflected mental and moral order (Nordau), because the inhabiting subjects felt an affective attachment to their furnishings (Simmel). Consequently, ‘‘then’’ the arrangement of interiors was homologous to the mental and social structures of inhabitants in a straightforward, direct way, such that clues about the moral character and social situation of the inhabitants could be ‘‘read’’ by carefully examining the interior’s furnishings. By the s, the ‘‘now’’ of the stories of Proust, Nordau, and Simmel, all of this has changed. The bibelot-filled, aestheticized interiors popular in the s ‘‘now’’ are confused and confusing. Many are decorated with art work which the inhabitants neither understand nor appreciate (Proust). They are piled with a jumble of heterogenous eccentricities that only a deranged mind would assemble (Nordau). These interiors represent not only the alienated and alienating, objectified, material world of industrial capitalism, they also represent, through the historicizing styles they bring together, an expansion of knowledge intellectually inassimilable by any one subject (Simmel). Even in the s, after the transformations in question, the relationship between dweller and dwelling is still homologous, since for each of these writers, changes in the household interior coincide with changes in mentalities and social life. What is less clear is how ‘‘readable’’ these new interiors may be, especially for Proust and Simmel, who hypothesize that inhabitants have become disconnected from their furnishings. Balzac, for example, was able to extract information from furnishings because their owners were attached to them in a way which has been lost, at least according to these writers.      :                      What has been the fate of the nineteenth-century interior during the present century? In order to analyze the mid-twentieth-century household interior, Jean Baudrillard found it necessary to define its predecessor. In The System of Objects, he sketches out a prototype ‘‘traditional interior’’ easily recognizable to readers of nineteenth-century novels as the typically realist dwelling. For this reason, Baudrillard’s remarks are pertinent to the topic of the literary interior in general, and the bibelot in particular. Like Proust, Nordau, and Simmel, Baudrillard also tells a ‘‘then’’/‘‘now’’ story involving the household interior, which is shown to

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Literature and material culture

be homologous with the mental, familial, and social structures of its inhabitants, such that changes in any one of these structures are mirrored by similar changes in the other structures. Baudrillard’s periods, though, are located further down the time line, ‘‘then’’ being the nineteenth century, ‘‘now’’ being the mid-twentieth. ‘‘Everything began with objects,’’ declares Jean Baudrillard in a retrospective reflection on his own work. The objects with which ‘‘everything began’’ are located in the nineteenth-century interior: the first chapter of his first book, The System of Objects (Le Syste`me des objets, ), begins with a lengthy description of ‘‘The Traditional Environment.’’ What Baudrillard describes under this rubric is the stereotyped image of the ideal bourgeois family dwelling, the conditions of possibility for which come into being with the economic growth, technological improvements, and ideological constructs coterminous with the industrial and consumer revolutions. For Baudrillard this type of interior, his ‘‘then,’’ no longer exists in its original form in his ‘‘now,’’ the s. Because all of his subsequent theories of consumer society, free-floating signifiers, simulacra, and seduction originate in this first book, which begins with the bourgeois dwelling, it could be said that the nineteenthcentury interior is the parlour of Baudrillard’s critical theory. The ‘‘traditional environment’’ described in The System of Objects strangely resembles Balzac’s maison Vauquer, and Proust’s Balzacian interior. The affinities between Baudrillard’s theories and literature are perhaps explained by his intellectual debt to Roland Barthes. Here are some of the key sentences which introduce Baudrillard’s bourgeois family house. I have italicized the rhetorical indicators of homology: The arrangement of furniture offers a faithful image of the familial and social structures of a period. The typical bourgeois interior is patriarchal . . . The emphasis is on unifunctionality, immovability, imposing presence and hierarchical labelling. Each room has a strictly defined role corresponding to one or another of the various functions of the family unit, and each ultimately refers to a view which conceives of the individual as a balanced assemblage of distinct faculties. The pieces of furniture confront one another, jostle one another, and implicate one another in a unity that is not so much spatial as moral in character. They are ranged about an axis which ensures a regular chronology of actions; thanks to this permanent symbolization, the family is always present to itself.

For Baudrillard, what characterizes the traditional household is that the structure of its furnishings and the layout of its rooms reflect and reinforce the structures of the patriarchal family, as well as the social structures of bourgeois society, also patriarchal of course. The dweller/

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dwelling homologies so starkly presented here are certainly symptomatic of the prevailing winds of structuralism in s France, but the similarity to Balzac is certainly not to be overlooked. The dwelling structure described here corresponds to a nineteenth-century concept of the family house, since before this time, what he calls the ‘‘typical bourgeois interior’’ did not have separate rooms with strictly defined uses; indeed, such arrangements were not common in aristocratic dwellings until the eighteenth century. The language that Baudrillard chooses for characterizing this environment projects what is now commonly recognized as the totalizing, hierarchizing, essentializing theoretical constructs which will be deconstructed by so-called postmodernist criticism: ‘‘unifunctionality,’’ ‘‘immovability,’’ ‘‘hierarchical labelling,’’ ‘‘strictly defined role,’’ ‘‘unit,’’ ‘‘balanced assemblage,’’ ‘‘unity,’’ ‘‘permanent symbolization.’’ By insisting on this group of adjectives, he sets up the reversal that he will identify later in the chapter. As if the point that the ‘‘traditional’’ family space faithfully mimes ‘‘traditional’’ family structures may not be clear, Baudrillard drives home the point in a second paragraph. He chooses the most systematic, unified, totalizing image available to him, the biological organism. The traditional environment ‘‘constitutes an organism whose structure is the patriarchal relationship founded on tradition and authority.’’ The ‘‘heart’’ of this organicized household ‘‘is the complex affective relationship that binds all the family members together.’’ The family home actually functions like an organism: ‘‘the primary function of furniture and objects here is to personify human relationships . . . and to be inhabited by a soul.’’ The model of organic unity is the very model which Balzac and Zola use for their novelistic portrayals of society, in comparing humans to animals, insisting that humans and animals are organized in the same way, both individually and socially. Baudrillard reinforces the notion of the personification of inanimate things by evoking anthropomorphism of the ‘‘primitive’’ sort, writing that ‘‘In their anthropomorphism the objects that furnish [the traditional interior] become household gods, spatial incarnations of the emotional bonds and the permanence of the family group’’ (p. ). The spatial incarnates the emotional. Household objects turn into deities. The family thus inscribes itself into the things around it. It is because furnishings function anthropomorphically that they can be endowed with meaning. They function as symbols because they embody the family. The referent of these symbols is ultimately the dweller and his social relations.

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Literature and material culture

Baudrillard describes, analyzes, and interprets this ‘‘traditional’’ regime of meaningful domestic goods only in order to declare that it no longer exists. This is a typically Baudrillardian move: twenty years later he declares that the ‘‘system of objects’’ no longer exists. The identification of rupture is, after all, the basis of theories of modernity and postmodernity, since to be ‘‘modern’’ something has to be different than it was before. To evoke the notion of the modern is to tell a ‘‘then’’/ ‘‘now’’ story. Localizing a modernizing rupture in the transmutations of the bourgeois interior, Baudrillard posits that by the mid-twentieth century, furnishings are no longer anthropomorphic, nor are they sacred. However, traditional furniture itself does not disappear, but returns in a desacralized form, that of nostalgia. A ‘‘modern generation’’ casts aside the ‘‘household gods’’ of its grandparents. However, ‘‘on occasion,’’ the castoffs are ‘‘reinstated . . . in an up-to-date nostalgia for whatever is old.’’ This furniture then ‘‘passes from a naı¨ve utility into a cultural baroque.’’ Such traditional furniture is popular ‘‘because it embodies the official certainties of the group and enjoys the sanction of the bourgeoisie,’’ and, furthermore, echoes ‘‘the persistence of traditional family structures across broad social strata of modern society’’ (p. ). The important aspects of the transformation here described are systemic, conceptual, and semiotic. It is not simply the emergence of new designs or new decorating schema that changes the interior, but rather the way the mid-twentieth-century inhabitants interact with their interiors. Furthermore, even in the late s, traditional furnishings are still manufactured, are still purchased, and are often still arranged in traditional ways. However, these furnishings are no longer sacralized incarnations of family and social structures. Instead, they take on the function of symbolizing the persistence of traditional structures. Domestic objects are no longer gods, but quaint revivals. They no longer reproduce family structure, but merely mark loss. What is eradicated with furniture’s passing from a (nineteenth-century) ‘‘naı¨ve utility’’ to a (twentieth-century) ‘‘cultural baroque’’ is the principle of organic unity. With the traditional interior arrangement, the ‘‘then’’ of the then/now rupture, the house was the double of the body, ‘‘the symbolic equivalent of the human body.’’ The body’s ‘‘potent organic schema is later generalized into an ideal design for the integration of social structures’’ (p. ). House, body, and society are structured homologously. ‘‘Then,’’ the organizational structure of the home interior was based on the organic principles by which the human

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body generated or engendered the house as body, as well as the social as body. ‘‘Now,’’ after the rupture, organic structure is being replaced by the functionality of technocratic, communicational, systemic principles. The ‘‘basic ordering principle’’ of the nineteenth-century system of objects was ‘‘Nature.’’ Conversely, ‘‘what we glimpse today in modern times is the coming end of this order of Nature; what is appearing on the horizon . . . is a qualitatively new kind of relationship, a new kind of objective responsibility’’ (p. ). ‘‘Our old pieces of furniture remained concrete symbols’’ of ‘‘the very idea of genesis.’’ Today’s world is not reproduced organically, but ‘‘constructed’’ (ibid.). The new world operates not according to organic principles, but rather according to ‘‘practical computation and conceptualization on the basis of total abstraction’’ (ibid.). In these sentences, the ‘‘then’’ and the ‘‘now’’ are organized into a series of opposed images and metaphors. ‘‘Then,’’ the ‘‘order of nature’’ predominated, providing organizational, conceptual, and even experiential schemas based on the organic notions of ‘‘genesis,’’ ‘‘origins,’’ and ‘‘essences,’’ of a world perceived as ‘‘given.’’ In contrast, ‘‘now,’’ ‘‘in modern times,’’ the order of technology dominates, replacing the old nature-based schemas with inorganic schemas. The world is not ‘‘given,’’ but made. It is no longer engendered, but constructed. As nature gives way to technology, genesis gives way to production. For Baudrillard, it is the whole structure of meaning production that is put in jeopardy at this moment of rupture, in the passing from nature to technology, from a regime of anthropomorphic interior decor to a regime of functional interior decor. The house and its furnishings can no longer function as an organic entity because the very regime of meaning which it is meant to symbolize – ‘‘origins, received meanings and ‘essences’’’ – has collapsed. Because the house is no longer grounded in the body, there is no longer a basis for the personification, anthropomorphism, and sacralization of furnishings. The nineteenthcentury structure of meaning, affect, and identity formation has been replaced by a twentieth-century system of functionality, organization, and technical control. The dweller is no longer a creator of relics and idols, of graven images. Rather, in the modern, functional home he is a technocrat, ‘‘an active engineer of atmosphere’’ (p. ). The structure of meaning has been eradicated, not the traditional home furnishings themselves, insists Baudrillard again in the central part of The System of Objects, in two sections entitled ‘‘Marginal Objects:

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Literature and material culture

Antiques’’ and ‘‘A Marginal System: Collecting.’’ Antiques and collectibles incorporate the modern ‘‘system of objects’’ as markers of origins, as reminiscences of the earlier, organic regime of meaning. ‘‘Unique, baroque, folkloric, exotic and antique objects’’ do not ‘‘fall outside’’ the mid-twentieth-century interior decorative principle of ‘‘functional calculation’’ (p. ). These are not to be understood as ‘‘survivals from the traditional, symbolic order,’’ but rather as signifiers of ‘‘historicalness,’’ or ‘‘marginality,’’ or ‘‘exoticism,’’ or ‘‘naturalness’’ (p. ). In the twentieth-century interior, ‘‘the antique object presents itself as a myth of origins’’ (p. ). For Baudrillard, the twentieth-century interior does in a sense remain ‘‘readable,’’ despite the (hypothesized) collapse of the ‘‘traditional’’ organic structure of meaning. It is not symbolism, however, that one ‘‘reads’’ in the new interiors, but rather the communicational strategies of technological society, along with the new mental structures of the technological dweller. This new bourgeois dweller is at once engineer and modern consumer, for modern advertising targets the new strategic approach to interior design (p. ). One must ‘‘read’’ functionality, system, and code in the modern interior, not symbols whose referentiality was established based on a relationship of organic analogy to the body of the individual dweller. Anthropomorphism is eradicated by the abstraction of system. The readings of household interiors presented thus far collectively express an intimate relationship between persons and things as a characteristic of the nineteenth-century interior. Those writing in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Proust, Nordau, and Simmel, along with Baudrillard writing seventy years later, convey a sense of loss in recounting stories of rupture with this time when dwellers experienced an intimate, affective relationship to their furnishings. Given the prevailing stereotype of the perverse overattachment of late nineteenth-century dwellers to their bibelot-filled interiors, the sentiment of loss detectable in these tales of transformation is perhaps surprising. This is the paradox of modern material culture: too much distance between persons and things results in alienation, whereas too much closeness results in fetishism. To clarify at the risk of oversimplification, the collector acts out of passion and is fetishistically overattached, whereas the consumer acts out of compulsion and remains unnaturally detached. However, collectors survive to this day, while consumers already existed during the nineteenth century.

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       Thus far, we have seen interiors which were rendered readable for two purposes, narrative and sociological. Interpretive descriptions of household goods serve as a novelistic device, and as a tool for sociological analysis. There is a third purpose for which domestic goods are commonly rendered readable, and this is marketing. Advertisers warn that since furnishings reveal information about their owners, they must be chosen with extreme care. Baudrillard’s moralistic interpretation of the arrangement of ‘‘traditional’’ domestic space echoes the writings of many late nineteenth-century newspaper and magazine articles extolling the virtues of domesticity, texts which in turn echo and are echoed by the advertisements of the same period. The epistemology that renders the household interior ‘‘readable’’ serves not only to increase knowledge production, but also to increase consumption. A number of cultural histories have reconstructed the inscription of bourgeois values into taste in home furnishings, by close readings of home decorating advice by tastemakers, decorative arts professionals, and advertisers. One such study cites a particularly cogent expression of this discourse on the moral dimensions of dwelling space, a discourse which was developed during the second half of the nineteenth century. In her homemaking manual, published in Paris in , Mme Hennequin writes, ‘‘It is in the home, if one is careful to make it what it ought to be, . . . that family bonds will be tied.’’ In other words, the home supports the tying of family bonds, but only if it is properly organized and managed, only ‘‘if one is careful to make it what it ought to be.’’ She adds that ‘‘The influence of the home is immense, and more farreaching than one can say.’’ In these two sentences, agency subtly shifts back and forth between persons and things: persons (the implied reader, the recipient of this advice) make the home what it is, but the home in turn has far-reaching effects on what people are. The relationship between dweller and dwelling is reciprocal. The architectural critic Viollet-le-Duc, writing in , repeats and anticipates many nineteenth-century writers in positing what amounts to the readability of the interior. The state of an entire civilization can be ‘‘read’’ from dwelling space. ‘‘Les gouˆts, les habitudes, les moeurs de l’homme se trahissent dans la maison qu’il se fait et ou` il demeure avec sa famille’’ [‘‘Man’s tastes, habits, and customs reveal themselves in the house he builds for himself and where he lives with his family’’]. Dwellers leave behind readable traces in their dwellings.

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Literature and material culture

The notion that a house’s furnishings reveal information about those who choose them is exploited for marketing purposes. By convincing consumers that they are represented by their possessions, advertisers hope to convince them to buy more and better possessions. Leora Auslander cites this late nineteenth-century department store advertisement: The wife’s task is to create an agreeable interior. There her personality can express itself in all of the details that make up the home. Her tastes and her character will be so clearly reflected there, that without even knowing her, a visitor with some skills at observation could represent to himself the mistress of the house as she really is, ‘‘careful and flirtatious, attentive and artistic,’’ all of these qualities will emerge in the furniture and the things . . . Of course, all the faults of laziness, of lack of taste, of inattention will also leave their mark.

Auslander and other cultural historians have noted that the task of organizing and properly encoding the interior tends to fall to the wife and mother. The self-image of the entire family depends on the taste and choices of the mother. The home is the site of self-expression, to the extent that the personality is reflected there. Any fault in furnishings risks being ‘‘read’’ unfavorably by observant visitors. Baudrillard’s strategy of reading dwelling space in terms of homologies between decorative arrangements and social structures follows reading practices well established in literature, social commentary, turn-of-the-century sociology, journalism, treatises on taste, and advertising aimed at consumers. Such is the strange genealogy of the theories of a leading, albeit often contested, voice in cultural criticism. This is not to entirely dismiss the theory, but rather to point out postmodernism’s roots in bourgeois daily life. If postmodernism is the ‘‘cultural logic of late capitalism,’’ then it is also the cultural logic of consumption. It is only fitting, then, that Baudrillard, whose name has become virtually synonymous with postmodernist theory, especially for its critics, should ground his thinking in the bourgeois household, the space where the durable goods of early mass consumption gather to create a private dream world, a haven for the industrial capitalist, who seeks escape in a domesticized aesthetic sphere. What remains somewhat troubling is that the starting point of Baudrillard’s ‘‘critique’’ of consumer culture so completely incorporates the discourse of consumer culture. This is not to say that there is any ‘‘outside’’ point from which to critique consumer culture, certainly not now. Rather, in order to move forward in the critique of consumer

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culture, the very hypothesis of the readability of furnishings and other belongings urgently needs questioning. While it seems undeniable that possessions do function as symbols of the self, and that they always have, this symbolic function has been ingrained in and exploited by the machinery of consumer capitalism. Any ‘‘theory’’ of the deep meaning of material things must therefore be greeted with caution. The belief in the readability of man-made things is fundamentally constitutive of the consuming subject. It is time to quit ‘‘reading’’ for a moment, in order to ask what such readings of possessions ultimately do, whose purposes they ultimately serve.

 

Rearranging the Oedipus Fantastic and decadent floor-plans in Gautier, Maupassant, Lorrain, and Rachilde

To rearrange the living room is to rearrange the Oedipal structures of kinship, sexuality, and sociality, and vice versa. While this formulation may or may not hold true for actual physically existing households, it works surprisingly well for nineteenth-century French literature. For example, many fantastic and decadent writers rearrange the traditional bourgeois interior in direct proportion to their rearrangement of bourgeois social order. In order to express this interconnectedness of the material, the textual, and the social, I propose the notion of the bourgeois Oedipus, defined as two related sets of norms historically specific to late nineteenth-century Europe: on the one hand a set of normative plot structures, and on the other a set of socially accepted rules which regulate kinship, sexuality, and economic exchange. These norms are applied to the world of goods by way of the notion of fetishism, the term first coined in the mid-eighteenth century to describe primitive religion, later appropriated by sociology (Comte) and the critique of commodity capitalism (Marx), then finally by fin-de-sie`cle sexologists (including Freud). In all three cases ‘‘fetishism’’ denotes a perceived over-privileging of things, the elevation of things to a status usually reserved for persons or deities. These various notions of fetishism all assume that things can and do mediate relationships between people, but that there is a danger inherent in things being substituted for people. In other words, while it is legitimate for the subject to take on other persons (mortal or divine) as objects of psychic investment or desire (within limits, such as incest or homosexuality), inanimate things are regarded as inappropriate objects for intense subjective investment. Things must remain subordinated to persons, and must never be substituted for them, at the risk of falling into one of the three forms of fetishism: primitive animism (fetishism in its original anthropological sense), reification (Marxist fetishism), or perversion (Freudian fetishism). Bourgeois social prescriptions for dealing with material objects are, 

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however, contradictory, since persons are expected to exhibit some ties to the things around them, lest they fall into alienation. This is the paradox of modern Euro-American material culture: we should be attached to our possessions, for after all, they define us and express us, and yet at the same time we should not be too attached to them, otherwise we are vulgar materialists, or worse, fetishists. The bourgeois Oedipus dictates that a balance be struck between these two extremes, alienation and fetishism. This way of thinking about material things leads to an impasse, however, since by problematizing the attachment to things, attention is deflected from the larger set of relations being enacted. For this reason, I have from the outset of this study rejected the assumption that relationships between persons and persons are somehow preferable to relationships between persons and things, instead assuming that subjects make psychic investments in objects, whether these be persons or things, and that investments in relationships to things are not less ‘‘natural’’ or ‘‘normal’’ than investments in human relationships. From this perspective, literary depictions of characters over-investing in things amount not to the ‘‘representation’’ of psychological perversion but rather to the application of similar organizational frameworks to text, psyche, social relations, and the household floor-plan (by which I mean not just the layout of the rooms within the house, but also the arrangement of furnishings within the house and the position of the house within larger spatial configurations). To state that to rearrange the interior is to rearrange the Oedipus is to rephrase the point made in the previous chapter regarding the homologous relations between persons and things in novelistic and sociological descriptions of household interiors: if the structure of the home reflects familial and social structures, then any breakdown of one of these structures will eventually reverberate in the others. It is my presumption that this correspondence between personal relationships and furniture is more a matter of writerly convention than of psychology.  .        Nineteenth-century authors commonly employ the figure of anthropomorphism, the personification of inanimate things, to establish structural homologies between persons and things, between dwellers and dwellings. In numerous fantastic short stories, when the anthropomorphism of objects is taken too far, inanimate objects come to life, as in six

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Literature and material culture

nineteenth-century tales by Gautier, Maupassant, and Lorrain, all of which are set in bibelot-filled interiors. In his classic study of the fantastic, Todorov demonstrates that the supernatural often results when a figurative expression is taken literally. The figure literally enacted in these six stories is that of personification. Extending Todorov’s remarks beyond poetics to encompass the social realm of bourgeois patriarchy, it could be said that the animated furnishings in these stories violate the stable structure of the patriarchal house, and this in response to the violations of the patriarchal family structure, for the animated objects in question all belong to bachelors, to men who refuse to become patriarchs by their refusal of marriage and children. The unmarried protagonists’ refusal of patriarchal social norms results in the refusal of their furnishings to behave normally. ‘‘The arrangement of furniture offers a faithful image of the familial and social structures of a period,’’ writes Baudrillard, adding that ‘‘The typical bourgeois [read: nineteenth-century] interior is patriarchal.’’ The fantastic interiors under consideration here operate according to a variation of Baudrillard’s theory of the patriarchal floor-plan: if the structure of the traditional dwelling reflects family structure (and, by extension, social structures), then, by an admittedly fallacious logic, it follows that any breakdown in the family structure will eventually reverberate in the structure of the house (including its system of furnishings). Gautier, Maupassant, and Lorrain rearrange realism’s anthropomorphic interior in direct proportion to their rearrangement of the order of the bourgeois Oedipus. In narrative, a male protagonist’s refusal to pursue marriage precludes all Oedipal plots, those classical narrative intrigues of rivalry and seduction. In classic nineteenthcentury narrative, the anthropomorphized interior must be restructured to compensate for any rearrangement of the grand Oedipal narrative cycle. In these tales of fantastic furnishings, the suppressed family structure returns by way of the furniture, magically reanimated. No escaping the marketplace Maupassant’s Qui sait? () clearly inscribes the rearranged Oedipus into its floor-plan. The tale’s aging bachelor hero has withdrawn from the society of other people, whose contact he has grown to abhor. He seeks refuge in his bibelot-filled house, thinking he is safe and isolated. However, his private domestic interior proves to be contiguous with the social space of the marketplace. This story literally enacts the principle

Rearranging the Oedipus

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of commodity fetishism, that relations among material things are truly relations among people. The confusion of persons with things becomes apparent very early in the tale, when the misanthropic protagonist (and narrator) confesses, ‘‘je m’attache . . . beaucoup aux objets inanime´s qui prennent, pour moi, une importance d’eˆtres’’ [‘‘I become . . . very attached to inanimate objects, which become as important to me as beings’’] (: ). This remark sets up the opposition between inanimate objects and human beings. In the sentences which follow, the use of personification further blurs the distinction between persons and things. The narrator explains that ‘‘ma maison est devenue . . . un monde ou` je vivais . . . au milieu de choses, de meubles, de bibelots familiers, sympathiques a` mes yeux comme des visages’’ [‘‘my house became . . . a world where I lived . . . amidst things, furniture, and bibelots which in my eyes seemed as familiar and friendly as faces’’]. In this house, become a world unto itself, he feels ‘‘content, satisfait, bien heureux comme entre les bras d’une femme aimable’’ [‘‘contented, satisfied, and happy, as if in the arms of an loveable woman’’] (ibid.). The narrator’s household objects, metaphorically endowed with friendly faces and caressing arms, replace the society of men (and women). He no longer clearly differentiates between persons and things. The figurative anthropomorphism of this household interior foreshadows an uncanny event: the sudden animation of the narrator’s beloved furnishings. One dark night he returns home from town to find his things leaving through the front door, of their own accord. The formerly inanimate objects move like animals, the piano like a horse, the smaller items like ants, fabrics like octopi. The crawling crystal shines in the moonlight like glow-worms. When the narrator sees his prize possession walking out, an antique desk described ‘‘un rare bibelot du dernier sie`cle,’’ he seizes it ‘‘comme on saisit un voleur, comme on saisit une femme qui fuit’’ [‘‘a rare bibelot of the previous century’’ / ‘‘as one seizes a thief, as one seizes a fleeing woman’’] (:). He reacts to the desk as if it were a person, first a male then a female. The inanimate items which, by way of the simile marker ‘‘comme,’’ have already been compared to friendly faces and caressing arms, have suddenly become living bodies. According to the story, the next day, the servants and the police confirm the loss of the furnishings, offering the logical hypothesis that thieves have stolen them. The servants and the police serve the narrative function of guarantors of the real, confirming an actual occurrence

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Literature and material culture

which they explain rationally. The narrator does not confess what he saw, the animation of the furnishings, fearing he will be believed mad. The reader is thus left with two possible explanations for the strange event, the logical hypothesis of ordinary thieves put forth by the servants and the police, as well as the supernatural explanation given to the reader by the ‘‘eyewitness,’’ the narrator. This hesitation between the real and the unreal defines the nineteenth-century fantastic. Because they are concretely material, household furnishings easily anchor the ‘‘reality effect’’ of the fantastic, but because they are made anthropomorphic through simile, furnishings at the same time provide a point of entry for the supernatural. Paradoxically, in this and other fantastic stories, bourgeois dwelling space anchors both reality effects and supernatural effects. The fantastic itself coincides with the nineteenth century’s preoccupation with the material and with the ‘‘real.’’ Many if not most critics of the fantastic have commented on the role of interior decor in this genre, and on the widespread presence of antiques, bric-a`-brac, and bibelots. Though realistic, the interior decor depicted in Maupassant’s story is by no means solely mimetic. While bibelots are of course typical elements of interior decor during the heyday of the fantastic, the narrative motivation behind the frequent inclusion of historic and exotic artifacts in fantastic interiors is that they lend themselves to supernatural effects. Antique and exotic bibelots evoke distant times and places, mediating between the physical ‘‘reality’’ of the domestic interior, and the imaginary worlds to which such artifacts refer semantically. The de´nouement of Qui sait? takes place in Rouen, where the narrator’s ‘‘tendresse pour les bibelots se re´veillait dans cette cite´ d’antiquaires’’ [‘‘tenderness for bibelots was awakened in this city of antique dealers’’]. Prowling the antique shops, he stumbles upon his own stolen things, but when he returns the next day with the police, the items have disappeared again, only to turn up mysteriously in his own house, exactly where they belonged. The change in setting from the private interior to the public marketplace is significant. To summarize the plot in terms of household objects, the magically endowed furnishings leave the domestic sphere, return to the marketplace from whence they came, then return once again to the home. One ‘‘moral’’ which could be drawn from this story is that the man-made objects of modern bourgeois society are always already social, made by other people, then bought and sold by other people. Surrounded by such objects, one is not alone, not even in the confines of

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one’s own dwelling. Nineteenth-century narrative, both fictitious and non-fictitious, inscribes the normative structures of the Oedipus into the world of goods by means of the figure of anthropomorphism. Writing helps map Oedipal structures onto the new bourgeois forms of material culture, reinforcing them by projecting them back iconographically. The bourgeois Oedipus is made to incorporate not only the material culture of domesticity, but also the material culture of the market, the burgeoning consumer culture created by and for families, but which soon enough seems to consume the family in turn. If the family group is inscribed physically in the dwelling, so are the contours of the social, not only through the social structuring of the family, but also and especially through the marketplace which, in the nineteenth century, was permeating all spheres. By way of the circulation of goods in and out of domestic space, the marketplace connects the family to the larger social world. The bourgeois invention of the private is therefore only partially successful, for, as fiction of the domestic reveals, the private is never private enough. In this context, material things both threaten and fascinate. The bibelot distills this threat and fascination. In Maupassant’s story, the absence of the family in the solitary bachelor’s home cannot eradicate the presence of the social inscribed in modern material goods. In the commodified world of the nineteenthcentury French bourgeoisie, it is only ‘‘natural’’ that what comes from the marketplace returns to the marketplace, just as the fantastic furnishings of Qui sait? make their way back to an antique shop. On some level, the story expresses an unease with retail culture, with the proliferation of goods in the modern marketplace and in the bourgeois home. Many fantastic narratives set in interior space are permeated by a fear that the inanimate world will take over the human world (a fear which in the twentieth century has been displaced onto computers, robots, and cyborgs). Anthropomorphism taken literally is the threat which motivates this fear, though, at the same time, it is also the poetic device which motivates this narrative. Reviving dead women The five remaining examples of animated bibelot stories follow the same plot pattern as Qui sait?, insofar as personification prefigures the sudden animation of the inanimate, but these also share a second salient plot feature: in each, a material object is transformed into a sexually desirable woman, a reanimated dead woman who appears during the night

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Literature and material culture

before the male bachelor protagonist sleeping in a bibelot-filled interior. In each case the actual material object reanimated belongs to the culture of the bibelot: an eighteenth-century porcelain coffeepot (Gautier’s La Cafe´tie`re), a tapestry from the same period (Gautier’s Omphale), a mummy’s foot purchased at an antique shop (Gautier’s Le Pied de momie), a lock of hair found in an antique chest also purchased at an antique shop (Maupassant’s La Chevelure), and a plaster cast of a Renaissance statue in the Louvre (Lorrain’s Re´clamation posthume). The fantastic domestic object is shown to pass through the public spaces of collecting: the antique shop (La Chevelure, Le Pied de momie) and the public museum (Re´clamation posthume). As with Qui sait?, the anthropomorphism of domestic objects is pushed to extremes, effacing the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate. Considering these stories as a group, a trend emerges: domestic furnishings take on supernatural qualities when bachelors take up collecting. In this group of tales, violations of the boundaries between persons and things are shown to violate the boundaries not only of domestic order, but of social order as well. The Oedipus cycle presents narratives of rivalry and of seduction, of familial and social interactions, of desire and the law. In the realm of Western literature, both oral and written, it provides the most basic plots of adventure, quest, and struggle, usually intertwined with tales of courtship. In the nineteenthcentury novel, these simple plots associated with what the French call the romanesque translate into what Peter Brooks calls ‘‘male plots of ambition.’’ It is no accident that the first-person hero of all of these fantastic tales is a bachelor, thus having already violated the Oedipal narrative dictum to go out into the world and seek a mate. A male protagonist’s refusal to pursue marriage precludes all Oedipal plots. The anthropomorphized interior must be restructured to compensate for this rearrangement of the Oedipal master narrative. The living female love object evacuated from the plot returns by way of the furniture, magically reanimated. Maupassant provides an exemplary instance of a dead woman coming to life in a bibelot-filler interior. At several points in La Chevelure (), the first-person hero, a wealthy collector, personifies antique bibelots by comparing them to living women. First, an antique watch palpitates like the heart of the woman who owned it. The watch, ‘‘si mignonne, si jolie,’’ continued to ‘‘palpiter,’’ and unlike its now deceased owner, continued to ‘‘vivre sa vie de me´canique, et elle continuait toujours son tic tac re´gulier, depuis un sie`cle passe´’’ [‘‘so cute, so

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pretty’’ / ‘‘palpitate’’ / ‘‘live its mechanical life, and had continued its regular tic tock for a century now’’] (p. ). Next, antique objects are endowed with the power to seduce and charm, again like a woman: ‘‘On regarde un objet et, peu a` peu, il vous se´duit, vous trouble, vous envahit comme ferait un visage de femme’’ [‘‘You look at an object, and little by little it seduces, disturbs, and invades you, as would the face of a woman’’]. Charmed, ‘‘on l’aime de´ja`, on le de´sire, on le veut’’ [‘‘you already love, desire, and want it’’] (p. ). Finally, buying a new bibelot is like getting married, such that the collector even experiences a ‘‘lune de miel’’ [‘‘honeymoon’’] during which he caresses the new bibelot ‘‘de l’oeil et de la main comme s’il e´tait de chair . . . [O]n va le contempler avec le tendresse d’amant’’ [‘‘with the eye and the hand, as if it were flesh . . . You contemplate it with the tenderness of a lover’’] (pp. –). With the personifying metaphors which portray collectors as lovers and bibelots as female love objects, Maupassant sets up the scene of reanimation. The lovely ‘‘bibelot’’ around which this story ultimately revolves is an antique secretary which the narrator purchases, and in whose drawers he later finds a lock of hair, the ‘‘chevelure’’ which provides the story with its title. This lock of hair becomes a fetish object in the strict sexual sense, constantly stroked and contemplated by the narrator; he even sleeps with it. Eventually he awakes in the middle of the night to find that his love object has come to life, in the form of a beautiful woman whom he possesses night after night. The antique watch, the seventeenth-century chest, and the lock of hair are brought together by the market into the space of the antique shop. What differentiates these antique curiosities is that each represents a different degree of physical intimacy with the human body – more precisely, with the female body. The antique desk is anthropomorphic insofar as any piece of furniture is made by a human body, and designed to the scale and use of the human body. The still-functioning centuryold watch is much more anthropomorphic, living its mechanical life as a continuation of the beating heart and warm touch of its original owner. Like the ticking watch, the lock of hair is almost living yet eternal. However, the lock of hair was a part of the original female owner’s body, ‘‘la seule partie vivante de sa chair qui ne duˆt point pourrir’’ [‘‘the only living part of her flesh which did not have to decay’’] (p. ). A lock of hair is a relic in the strictest sense of the term, like the bone fragments of saints preserved in reliquaries. It is therefore to some extent logical that, of the three objects, it is the lock of hair which finally comes to life. The

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Literature and material culture

watch, a possession, linked to its owner by relations of contiguity and resemblance, can only inspire strong emotion in regard to its dead owner, whereas the lock of hair, linked by synecdoche, narratively motivates its owner’s revivification. The narrative motivation behind the reanimation, the regeneration of a living body from a -year-old lock of hair, is thus multiply determined by previous occurrences of personification. The story is in this way highly structured, since all of the objects mentioned in it contribute to the elaboration of the main plot line. Indeed, since the missing woman is compensated for on the level of the sign, signifier for signifier, the order of the bourgeois Oedipus is likewise maintained, albeit on a strictly symbolic level, even though the substitution of the lock of hair for the female partner violates the ‘‘normal,’’ prescribed order of Oedipal sexuality. As the mate that the bachelor-narrator refuses to take, the reanimated dead woman can be understood as a rhetorical or narrative return of the repressed. At the same time, narrative order is further reinforced, because the organizational framework of structural homologies remains stable: changes in the system of furnishings compensate for changes in traditional familial and social structures. Household, familial, and social structures remain homologous, which makes for an orderly narrative. More female body parts The relationship between fantastic bibelots and body parts comes to the forefront again in Gautier’s Le Pied de momie, first published in . As in Maupassant’s two tales of animation, Gautier takes the reader to an antique shop, but, unlike Maupassant who only names objects directly relevant to his plots, Gautier takes the time to enumerate some of the contents of the antique shop, giving the reader a sense of the colorful heterogeneity which greets the eye of the protagonist, recalling the visit to the antique shop in Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin (published nine years earlier than Gautier’s story). The major difference between Balzac’s and Gautier’s antique shop scenes, other than length, is that Gautier’s protagonist notices that most of this shop’s objects are not authentic, but rather cheap copies which the shady proprietor passes off as genuine. It is significant that the fantastic object selected from the shop, the mummy’s foot of the title, is verified to be ‘‘un pied authentique’’ [‘‘an authentic foot’’] (p. ). Because, as in La Chevelure, a long-dead woman is regenerated from a preserved body part (the mummified foot),

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authenticity is made a condition of possibility for the functioning of this fantastic event. Le pied de momie begins as the narrator browses in search of a unique paperweight. His attention is finally drawn to a small foot, which he first takes to be bronze. Upon picking it up he realizes that the foot is not metal, but rather the embalmed flesh of a mummy, revealed to be that of an Egyptian princess. The old merchant laughs at the idea of using an Egyptian princess’s foot for a paperweight, dismissing it as an ‘‘ide´e d’artiste’’ (p. ). He also warns that the old Pharaoh would not approve of this use, but the protagonist ignores the warning, taking the mummy’s foot back to his apartment. That evening, the proud owner of the mummified paperweight returns home after dinner. At first all seems normal, though this normal state of calm is expressed through personification, with the figure of sleep: ‘‘tout avait l’air endormi et tranquille’’ [‘‘everything seemed to be sleeping and tranquil’’]. A bit later, as in the other tales cited above, the personification of the protagonist’s decor intensifies, foreshadowing strange occurrences: ‘‘cet inte´rieur si calme parut se troubler . . . et les disques des pate`res semblaient des yeux de me´tal attentifs comme moi aux choses qui allaient se passer’’ [‘‘the calm interior appeared to grow disturbed . . . and the disks of the drapery fixtures seemed to be metal eyes, as attentive as I to the things which were about to happen’’] (p. ). The emotions and mental state of the narrator are thus displaced onto the room. Dweller and dwelling alike grow anxious and attentive, setting the stage for a fantastic anthropomorphic transformation. At this point the ,-year-old Egyptian princess herself appears, missing a foot, which she reclaims from the narrator. Gautier emphasizes the restoration of the princess’s fragmented state by having her exclaim how happy her father will be, ‘‘ ‘lui qui e´tait si de´sole´ de ma mutilation’’’ and who in the hopes of avoiding such a mishap had dug her an especially deep tomb so that ‘‘ ‘il puˆt me conserver intacte’’’ [‘‘‘he who was so devasted by my mutilation’’’ / ‘‘‘he could keep me intact’’’] (p. ). This story could easily be read as a classic case of foot fetishism, of the displacement of sexual desire onto a part-object substitute. Ross Chambers reads it as a Romantic poetic project of restoring wholes from fragments. In addition to the logics of sexuality or of modernist poetics, there is also at work a logic of market exchange. In the story, the appearance of the mutilated princess sets off a series of exchanges, following the logic of the marketplace, the logic of the space in which the embalmed foot was acquired at the beginning of the

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Literature and material culture

story. The Egyptian princess explains that she has no money to pay for the return of her foot, because the greedy merchant who robbed it from her in the grave also took all of her coins and jewels, which had been entombed with her. The narrator gallantly returns the foot to her without asking for payment in return. The grateful princess, though, leaves him a small green figurine in exchange, then takes him on a dreamlike voyage to meet her Pharaoh father, who asks him what he would like as a reward. When the young man asks for the princess’s hand in marriage, in exchange for the foot, the Pharaoh refuses on the basis of the ridiculous age difference (the protagonist’s twenty-seven years as opposed to the princess’s thirty centuries). In the middle of this discussion, our hero awakes, thinking he has dreamed the entire episode, only to find the figurine in the place of the mummy’s foot. The physical presence of the bibelot suggests that the impossible event really happened, preserving the fantastic hesitation between the natural and the supernatural. The entire story of the mummy’s foot is set in motion and kept moving by the circulation and exchange of material objects from the domain of antiquarianism, the domain from whence the bibelot is born. Not only is all of this set amidst the culture of the modern Parisian antique market, it is also imbricated in the trade routes of mercantilism and colonialism, of goods moving from the Middle East to Western Europe. The bibelot market is an international market. Following the trajectory of the embalmed foot, the international marketplace is shown to be connected to the private household then to kinship structures, since as a result of buying a woman’s body part, the young bachelor hero nearly succeeds in buying a bride. Monetary exchange and barter lead to marriage exchange, recalling the narratives written by anthropologists studying gift exchange in the South Pacific. In this way, the story accomplishes the restoration of the Oedipal narrative, the marriage plot imposed on a solitary bachelor. Nearly half a century later, Jean Lorrain rewrites Gautier’s tale in the decadent mode. Through exaggeration, his Re´clamation posthume () transforms Gautier’s classic fantastic narrative into a tale of decadent sadism. In Lorrain’s hands, Gautier’s lighthearted but macabre model becomes what we could call the ‘‘hypermorbid’’ (to play on Baudrillard’s ‘‘hyperreal’’). Lorrain’s first-person narrator finds his fantastic object not in an antique shop, but in a museum, the Louvre. He has a plaster cast made of the head of Donatello’s statue La Femme inconnue, asking the cast maker to include blood-like globs to simulate decapita-

Rearranging the Oedipus

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tion, then he paints the cast himself, using garish colors. It decorates the apartment where he, a bachelor of course, lives alone. The story opens with the visit of a male friend who, upon seeing the macabre cast, warns against profanation, as did Gautier’s shop owner. In Lorrain’s version the artist Donatello replaces the princess’s angry Pharaoh father, as the friend warns him that he has quite criminally infringed on the artist’s rights and committed a desecration. Just as the mummy’s-foot paperweight was described as an ‘‘ide´e d’artiste,’’ so the poem which serves as epigraph to Re´clamation posthume describes the hero as an ‘‘Artiste e´pris vivant d’un moulage de plaˆtre’’ [‘‘Artist smitten alive by a plaster cast’’]. Discussions of Pygmalion or Freudian fetishism would certainly be in order here, but what concerns me most is the displacement and fragmentation of bourgeois social structures by way of the manipulation of material culture. As a copy of a museum piece, Lorrain’s statue must be understood in its full materiality, as a product of modern industrialization. When in Lorrain’s tale the woman’s body begins making its nighttime appearances (this time there are several), the narrator first perceives not a full body, but only a statue-like foot, ‘‘un pied nu: et ce pied vivait, . . . un peu rose au talon et d’un grain de peau si uni et si paˆle qu’on euˆt dit un pre´cieux objet d’art, un albaˆtre ou un jade pose´ sur le tapis’’ [‘‘a naked foot: and this foot was living, . . . a bit pink at the ankle, its skin so smooth and pale that it could be taken for a precious art object, like a piece of alabaster or jade lying on the carpet’’] (p. ). It should be recalled that Gautier’s hero first thought that the mummy’s foot was of marble, though after its reanimation there is no more confusion with the inanimate. The situation is slightly different in Lorrain’s tale, since the reanimated feet of Donatello’s statue appear to have come to life, yet are still statue-like. Lorrain leaves the distinction between the animate and the inanimate, between flesh and art, decidedly unclear. However, unlike the apparitions of the other four stories discussed above, in Re´clamation posthume it is not a beautiful young woman that appears, but rather an animated ‘‘cadavre de morte.’’ The head of the body is missing (p. ). The vivified plaster head stares at the narrator, but does not rejoin the body before the narrator faints, ending the story. Lorrain’s woman remains fragmented, her decapitated state subtly repeated in the story’s last sentence by a descriptive separation of her feet: Et la teˆte de plaˆtre pendue a` la muraille regardait le cadavre, et dans le cadre obscur de la porte maudite, le corps de´capite´ tressaillait longuement; et sur le

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Literature and material culture

tapis sombre, les deux pieds se tordaient, convulse´s dans une angoisse atroce; a` ce moment, la teˆte darda sur moi son regard d’outre-tombe et je roulai brise´ sur le tapis. (p. ) [And the plaster head hanging on the wall watched the cadaver, while the decapitated body quivered prolongedly in the shadowy frame of the accursed door; and on the dark carpet, the two feet writhed, convulsed in excrutiating anguish; at this moment, the head cast its other-worldly gaze upon me, and, wrecked, I fell to the carpet.]

The head remains attached to the wall, looking across the room at the body framed by the door, while the feet writhe against the background of the carpet, set off from the rest of the sentence by semi-colons. Though Oedipal order is respected to the extent that a male collector develops a cathexis around a feminized part-object, the part–whole split is left unrestored in the end of this tale, precluding narrative closure, as well as any possibility of so-called normal sexual union. The narrator does not take the reanimated woman to bed, as did the protagonist of Maupassant’s La Chevelure, nor does he court her, pursuing marriage as did the protagonist of Gautier’s Le Pied de momie. Lorrain’s revivified woman is left in pieces, as are the Oedipal plots of sexual union and the pursuit of a young beautiful bride. In terms of the logic of material culture, a significant difference between Lorrain’s tale and those of Maupassant and Gautier lies in the issue of authenticity, of the model versus the copy: the fantastic object in Le Pied de momie is an authentic mummy’s foot, and in Maupassant’s La Chevelure, an authentic lock of hair. In contrast, in Lorrain’s tale, the fantastic object is a plaster cast of a head, hardly a classic fetish object, as are feet and hair. Furthermore, the woman’s foot which does appear in Lorrain’s tale is not generated from an actual woman’s preserved body part, but rather from a statue, and not from the ‘‘authentic’’ original, but rather from a copy of a statue, a simulacrum of a simulacrum, to borrow Baudrillard’s well-worn phrase. Lorrain’s plaster cast is not of the whole statue, but rather of a part, a part whose severance from the whole is emphasized in the story. By building an illusion based on a copy, and one that is not whole at that, narrative order is in the end subverted. Authenticity is replaced by appearance. Antiquarianism gives way to aestheticized illusion. Romanticism’s idealized muse (Gautier) gives way to a particularly monstrous decadent femme fatale (Lorrain). All of this is caught up in the issues of imitation and reproduction which so haunt industrial culture. It could be said that in the

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fantastic, the discourse of authenticity produced out of the material culture of antique furnishings grounds ‘‘the real’’ on which the fantastic relies for its hesitation between the natural and the supernatural. Lorrain’s Re´clamation posthume distances itself from this practice of grounding the real in domesticized antiques by taking us into the logics of the copy, the series, and the simulacrum, whereby the antiquarian’s concern with authenticity gives way to emphasis on appearance.   .             With its recurring themes of masks, casts, and copies, Lorrain’s fantastic and decadent fiction repeatedly raises the question of the simulacrum, an issue crucial to the material culture of European industrialization. In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard schematizes the ‘‘successive phases of the image’’: it [the image] is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

As I said at the beginning of this chapter in regard to another of Baudrillard’s formulations, whether or not this schema is found to have relevance to sociology or history, it does work very well for thinking about the use of material objects in nineteenth-century French literature. In this context, the ‘‘reality’’ in question here would be that conceptual construct which underpins positivism, nineteenth-century science, and the realist novel, all of which make up the reality grounded in the bourgeois values embodied in Balzac’s bourgeois living rooms. Objects in Balzac either reflect a profound reality, or mask and denature a profound reality; in both cases, the profound reality ‘‘exists’’ without question. Objects in Flaubert question the very existence of this profound reality, at times masking and denaturing it, at times masking its absence. Within the classic fantastic of Gautier and Maupassant, the supernatural is but another face of profound reality, a reality more profound than the natural. Lorrain’s simulacra, such as the plaster cast of the Donatello statue, mask ‘‘the absence of a profound reality,’’ the fourth of the ‘‘successive phases of the image.’’ The era of simulation is fostered in by the industrial era of serial production, just as the cult of authentic antique bibelots is in many ways a nostalgic reaction to industrialization. While

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Literature and material culture

Jean Lorrain evokes the cult of the bibelot throughout his fantastic and decadent fiction, his work also manifests an assimilation of the copy, of the series, of the simulacrum, through his frequent evocations of reproductions of art works, by means like photography (Ophe´lius) and plaster casts (Re´clamation posthume). His obsession with masks and portraits contributes to the frequent confusion of persons and things. Anthropomorphism in his work at times leads to an almost complete erasure of the boundaries between humans and their material artifacts. The absence of the ‘‘real’’ in the work of Lorrain is perhaps most evident on the psychological plane. Even in their fantastic tales, writers like Gautier and Maupassant use the anthropomorphism of domestic objects to reinforce the illusion of psychological realism, by reinforcing the mental structures attributed to their characters through the doubling of these structures in the structure of a personified material culture. In contrast, rather than personifying objects, Lorrain objectifies people, insisting on their visual, surface qualities, on the mask-like nature of their personas. Consequently, a logic of objects governs the logic of human relations. Collecting, the bibelot, and the museum take on new dimensions in Lorrain. Serialized sexuality In his most important novel, Monsieur de Phocas, Lorrain serializes sexuality while exalting serialized art, a serialization accomplished by the logics of collecting and of copying. The word bibelot appears frequently throughout this decadent work, eliciting fixations on interior decor, on the antique market, and on the culture of the museum. The hero, the duc de Fre´neuse, alias Phocas, is to a large extent modeled on Huysmans’s reclusive des Esseintes of A rebours. Fre´neuse too is a collector, of gemstones, antique jewelry, precious carpets, rare weapons, and strong poisons, most of which he has gathered on yearly trips to ‘‘l’Orient’’ (p. ). The logic of collecting guides Fre´neuse’s pursuit of his main obsession, eyes the color of emeralds and of the sea. The eyes are perhaps the least gendered part of the body, as compared, for example, to the hair and feet which were the fetish-objects in Maupassant’s La Chevelure and Gautier’s Le Pied de momie. At the same time, eyes are also easily assimilated into the Baudelairean/Huysmansian aesthetics of minerality and artificiality. Fre´neuse finds these emerald, sea-green eyes not only in people, male and female, but also in the statues and paintings of

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major museums. Captivated by the statue of the Greek ephebe Antinou¨s in the Louvre, whose eyes he would like to replace with emeralds, he is equally struck by the eyes of Salome´ and other exotic female beauties in the paintings on view in the museum of Gustave Moreau. He finds the same eyes in female acrobats and in male sailors. Collecting provides a logic for groupings based on physical similarities. The logic of seriality which animates the activities of the collector also animates this search for eyes of a similar type. Seriality is established through a visual resemblance which allows the collecting subject to pass from males to females, from humans to their portraits, from the animate to the inanimate. In this way, seriality serves the purpose of dissimulating homosexual desire, since desire can begin with a legitimate Oedipal object (for a man, a woman) then, through the logic of seriality, move on to an illegitimate object (an inanimate object like a statue; or for a man, another man). The logic of seriality is thus put to the service of the logic of inversion. The novel’s characters are also created out of the logic of seriality, of resemblance, of artistic reproductions, of the simulacrum. Fre´neuse encounters others who share his obsession with eyes, first Claudius Ethal, an older man and mentor figure who later introduces him to a second, younger man, the disturbingly handsome Thomas Welcoˆme. Fre´neuse identifies strongly with Welcoˆme, then learns that he has probably killed another older man, Burdhes. Near the end of the novel, young Fre´neuse copies the alleged crime of young Welcoˆme, by murdering his own older mentor, Ethal. Throughout the recounting of these serialized liaisons, obsessions, and murders, a number of collectors’ objects are displayed and exchanged. Ethal, an artist, ceremoniously shows Fre´neuse several collections, of masks, of wax statues, and of painted portraits, some of which he gathered from the international antique collectors’ market, others made by himself or by artist friends. While traveling, Ethal sends other collectors’ objects to Fre´neuse, as gifts. In Holland he purchases ‘‘le plus merveilleux bibelot,’’ ‘‘une pie`ce de muse´e,’’ a sixteenth-century wax sculpture of an Infanta, which he then shows to Fre´neuse on his return, all with great fanfare. These displays and exchanges depend on a circulation and replaceability of objects which defy the Oedipal order of bourgeois sexuality, for the showing and exchanging takes place between men, recalling then violating the rules of gift exchange governing courtship and marriage negotiations, for such frequent expensive personal gifts are customarily reserved for fiance´s and family members.

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Furthermore, these objects all function as effigies, joined to the various characters of the novel by associative chains based on resemblance and portraiture. Ethal compares his own likeness to that of a dwarf in a painting in a museum, which he urges Fre´neuse to go and see. One of the engravings which Ethal sends as a gift includes a figure which resembles Fre´neuse. Wax figures are preferable to portraits because their resemblance is superior. Claudius’s collection of wax ‘‘portraits,’’ of young adolescent boys and famous aristocratic women, is called ‘‘un boudoir de mortes’’ [‘‘a boudoir of female cadavers’’] (p. ). The cadaver-like quality of art is thus underlined, and reinforced by Ethal’s attraction to sick and dying models, in accordance with the fin-de-sie`cle fashion of pale, wraith-like, drugged, or diseased women, such as those painted by the pre-Raphaelites. From London, Ethal sends Fre´neuse the most obviously symbolic of all of the bibelots mentioned in the novel, a black onyx statue of the Middle Eastern goddess Astarte´. This statue was found in the temple Burdhes, allegedly murdered by Welcoˆme, had erected for a cult he imported from the Far East. The black onyx Astarte´ witnessed the murder of Burdhes, who was found dead in the temple. In the ensuing estate sale Ethal bought the statuette, admiring its slender androgynous body and emerald eyes, with a tiny skull in the place of its genitals. By sending Fre´neuse the green-eyed statue which witnessed the death of Burdhes, amidst ‘‘des de´cors de crime’’ (p. ), Ethal prefigures the scene of his own murder, setting up the decor for a second murder scene. However, present as a witness to Ethal’s murder is not the statuette of the ‘‘de´esse androgyne’’ (p. ), but rather the wax bust of a dying young Italian street urchin, sculpted by Ethal himself. A male statue-witness is thus substituted for a female one. On the night of his murder, as Ethal strokes the head of the male adolescent’s bust, Fre´neuse notices his emerald ring (green of course, the eye color which obsesses him), which he knows contains a strong poison which kills instantly. The younger man breaks open the hollow stone of the ring on Ethal’s teeth, killing him. The replacement of the androgynous female effigy (the onyx Astarte´ present at Burdhes’s murder) by the adolescent male effigy (the wax bust of the dying street urchin present at Ethal’s murder) repeats the logic of seriality. Such substitutions of effigies for people, of male effigies for female ones, mask the replacement of one gender for another in relations of sexual desire. The plot of double murder is inscribed in the novel’s ‘‘floor-plan,’’ in the spatial dimension of its settings. As compared to the solitary lifestyle

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of Huysmans’s des Esseintes living in his suburban retreat, Fre´neuse leads a sordid social life, which alters the floor-plan of Monsieur de Phocas, in comparison to A rebours. Huysmans’s des Esseintes spends almost the entire narrative time of the novel confined to his own collection-filled house, while Lorrain’s Fre´neuse spends most of the time of the narrative outside of the confines of his Parisian family mansion. Whereas very few scenes are set in the space of the protagonist’s home, several important scenes are set in his friend Claudius Ethal’s Parisian art studio, whose decor, based on the aesthetic of fin-de-sie`cle collecting, is transformed like a theater set for each different scene. Fre´neuse does visit his own long-deserted childhood home during the novel, a country estate in Normandy, drawn by the memory of a long-dead farmhand’s beautiful eyes. Other scenes are set at vaudeville-type theaters, and in cheap hotels frequented by the lowest-class prostitutes. Fre´neuse the wealthy collector roams these spaces as if no home can contain his murderous desires and obscure vices, so many figures devised to mask the unspeakable (and unspoken) homosexual attractions which drive him from his home. Fre´neuse, then, is a wandering collector, a thematic which amounts to a rewriting of the customarily fixed floor-plan of the bibelot-filled interior. In this novel, the logics of circulation and exchange become more important than the logics of display and decor. With Lorrain, the bibelot achieves its ultimate degree of mobility. In fin-de-sie`cle narrative, the seriality of the collection lends itself to the seriality of love objects. Given this floor-plan, it is significant that Monsieur de Phocas begins and ends with the theme of travel, the long trip that the protagonist undertakes after the murder of Ethal, a voyage announced in the opening chapter then again at the end. Like Welcoˆme, suspected of Burdhes’s murder, Fre´neuse too will set off for a long voyage to the Far East. ‘‘Les voyages, c’est l’exil volontaire,’’ remarks Ethal. In Monsieur de Phocas, the aesthetics of collecting leads not to the construction of a sanctuary, but rather to the exiled state of the traveling dealer in clandestine artifacts, the lifestyle of the adventurous pillaging antiquarians and archaeologists of high colonialism. One is also reminded of the seafaring figure of collector Pierre Loti, an admirer of exotic women and of young male sailors. The traveling collector makes the world his floor-plan. Rearranging the patriarchal floor-plan The homologies between Oedipal family structures and household layout are readily apparent in Rachilde’s La Jongleuse, first published in

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Literature and material culture

. The novel’s female protagonist, a wealthy widow by the name of Eliante Donalger, rearranges the Oedipus not just through the thematic of decadence embodied in her exotic furnishings, but also in the layout of her strange double house, with its decadent side and a rather conventional bourgeois side. Doubling de-centers Eliante’s house, which proves to be anything but patriarchal. Within this house, persons take on object-like qualities, while material things are personified, though here the confusion between persons and things does not produce the fantastic, but rather the perverse: onanism and a hint of incest. Rachilde’s knife-juggling heroine Eliante Donalger is in many ways a decadent version of Maupassant’s Miche`le de Burne, heroine of Notre coeur. Like Miche`le, Eliante too is a frigid seductress pursued by an ardent admirer, in this case a young medical student named Le´on Reille. Eliante also collects, though not as a fashion-conscious highsociety woman like Miche`le, but rather as a high priestess in the temple of Eros. Eliante’s collections consist not in European art treasures like Miche`le’s, but rather in exotic curiosities amassed by her now-deceased sea-captain husband from ports of call around the world: ‘‘bibelots e´tranges de complication japonaise ou de tourment chinois’’ (p. ), costumes and dresses spanning cultures from Spain to Oceania, and erotic Chinese figurines of wax and ivory, some of them stolen from a pagoda. Eliante shows these exotic objects to Le´on (and to the reader) at various points in the novel, adding to the atmosphere of decadence, making La Jongleuse a period piece which draws on the full range of decadent fin-de-sie`cle anti-bourgeois commonplaces – the frigid femme fatale, Oriental exoticism, stylized eroticism, barbaric excesses, and primitive idolatry. Maupassant compares Miche`le and her suitors to bibelots. In making similar comparisons, Rachilde goes much further, deliberately blurring the distinctions between persons and things by effacing psychological depth in favor of visual effects, privileging aesthetic effect over psychological affect. For example, like Miche`le, Eliante transforms herself into an ornamental bibelot by the artificiality of her dress and make-up. The reader encounters only the decadent version of Eliante in the first chapter, narrated in the third person through the eyes of the smitten Le´on. She strikes him as ‘‘tre`s artificiel,’’ with her ‘‘face de poupe´e peinte’’ [‘‘very artificial’’ / ‘‘painted doll’s face’’]. Her slick hair, ‘‘a` reflets d’acier,’’ imitates her black silk dress, ‘‘cette gaine satine´e presque me´tallique’’ [‘‘with steel highlights’’ / ‘‘this almost metallic satin sheath’’] (p. ). Is she a woman or an automaton? ‘‘Rien ne la re´ve´lait

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femme. Elle demeurait une grande poupe´e peinte’’ [‘‘Nothing showed her to be a woman. She remained a big painted doll’’] (p. ). Attempting to dissimulate his desire, Le´on confides to her, ‘‘Vous me semblez un objet curieux, et cela m’amuse de vous regarder de pre`s . . . derrie`re la vitrine’’ [‘‘You seem like a curiosity, and I find it amusing to look at you up close . . . behind glass’’] (p. ; author’s ellipses). To return to Baudrillard’s ‘‘successive phases of the image,’’ one could ask what is the ‘‘reality’’ being ‘‘masked’’ by Eliante’s artificial appearance, the image of herself that she presents and projects to Le´on and the world? This is what Le´on seeks to find out when she invites him to accompany her home after a party. Captivated by her unreal, mysterious fac¸ade, Le´on is immediately obsessed with seeing underneath Eliante’s sheath-like dress. ‘‘Rien ne la re´ve´lait femme,’’ states the narrator, assuming the point of view of Le´on. By removing the dress, Le´on expects to ‘‘reveal’’ the woman behind the artificial, painted, metallic exterior. He will be disappointed, but not just by the refusal of sex. On this first visit to the house, Le´on enters Eliante’s private rooms through the garden and remains unaware of her bourgeois persona and the bourgeois stage setting on the courtyard side of the house, about which more in a moment. After a spicy meal consumed from impossibly delicate china in contorted shapes, he is invited into the boudoir, where Eliante’s most prized collectible is displayed: a life-sized Tunisian vase. The third-person narrator personifies this inanimate object with physical descriptors such as ‘‘de la hauteur d’un homme,’’ ‘‘hanches d’e´phe`be,’’ ‘‘d’une apparence tellement humaine,’’ ‘‘bras immobilise´s,’’ and ‘‘blessure’’ [‘‘as tall as a man,’’ ‘‘an ephebe’s haunches,’’ ‘‘very human in appearance,’’ ‘‘immobile arms,’’ ‘‘wound’’] (pp. –). The scandalously anthropomorphized vase is also endowed with a perceiving consciousness, this time in the words of Eliante: ‘‘Et qu’a-t-il vu, mon Dieu? . . . Il ne les racontera pas, mais il sait’’ [‘‘And, my God, what has he seen? . . . He won’t tell, but he knows’’] (pp. –). If Eliante is as artificial as a bibelot, this large bibelot is as lifelike as a person. What happens next makes this the best-known episode of Rachilde’s oeuvre: Eliante brings herself to orgasm by rubbing up against the vase, fully clothed, in front of her horrified human suitor. This artificial sexual act, this simulacrum of sexuality, is the first performance of Eliante the juggler. Le´on watches this intimate sexual act, but does not see under the artifice of the dress, because it is not removed. Even in this, the most animal of human acts, she remains coolly unnatural, not a real woman but an artificial one.

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Though Le´on will never possess Eliante physically, near the story’s end he will see underneath her dress, as he watches her perform a Spanish dance bare-breasted. However, there is still no sense that a secret has been exposed. It is as if Eliante, juggler and dancer, is all surface, all performance, as if she constructs herself as purely visual. While Le´on, and with him the reader, expects to learn a dark secret, to see beneath the mask-like make-up and metallic clothing, he (and we) are disappointed, not because we are not told any secrets, but because there seems to be nothing to tell. What we see is what we get, so to speak. Peter Brooks has identified a number of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury plots of veiling and unveiling the female body constructed as an object of knowledge, as ‘‘the real.’’ La Jongleuse can be seen as a counterexample to these masculinist plots of revealing truth by revealing women’s bodies. The body of Eliante reveals no secret knowledge, no profound reality. Yet if Eliante shows no depth, she is shown to be double, like her house: her place in society forces her to live a bourgeois life alongside her life of decadence. This is because upon her return to Paris after her seafaring husband’s death, she finds herself compelled to take in her dead husband’s poor relations, a deaf brother and an orphaned niece named Missie. These family ties burden Eliante with bourgeois responsibilities. She is forced to be a surrogate mother to young Missie, who has reached the age of marriage. It is crucial to understand that Eliante’s bourgeois double is not her ‘‘true self,’’ but rather another role, another mask. Alternating between decadent seductress and bourgeois matron, she has two different wardrobes and even two different faces, the decadent one created through make-up. The decadent face does not ‘‘mask’’ the bourgeois face, for the bourgeois face is also a mask. This family structure which necessitates a double life generates the floor-plan of the double house. Eliante’s decadent private rooms on the garden side of the house are contiguous to but separated from the uncle’s and niece’s bourgeois rooms on the courtyard side of the house, which also features a bourgeois salon where visitors are received by the whole ‘‘family,’’ the brother-in-law, the niece, and Eliante. The reader always enters the house with the arrival of Le´on, sometimes by the garden door, sometimes by the courtyard. This structure sets up the novel’s double plot: while Le´on thinks he is pursuing a decadent femme fatale, he is at the same time being drawn into a bourgeois scheme of marrying off a poor and none too attractive surrogate daughter, for during his first visit to the bourgeois side of the

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house, Eliante will propose to Le´on that he marry her niece Missie. This complicates her position in regard to Le´on. Eliante’s relationship to Le´on is double, since she is both seductress and potential mother-in-law. Her reasons for refusing him sexual pleasure are double as well. As decadent femme fatale she will not sleep with Le´on for aestheticized reasons of narcissistic self-idolatry, preferring the perfect asexual symmetry of the vase. The decadent side of her dwelling is a temple, where she is both idol and high priestess, performing her love ritual as both ‘‘dieu’’ and ‘‘come´dienne’’ [‘‘goddess’’ and ‘‘actress’’] (p. ). As bourgeois surrogate mother, she refuses Le´on because she wishes him to marry Missie, freeing her from her bourgeois familial bonds. Eliante proposes this marriage the first time that Le´on visits her in the ‘‘e´tonnant salon bourgeois’’ on the courtyard side of the house (p. ). He is shocked to see Eliante, his ‘‘idole myste´rieuse,’’ totally transformed, dressed in a matronly way, sallow-skinned without her makeup (p. ). Later in the novel she will pay a surprise visit to Le´on’s apartment (furnished with ‘‘des masses de livres’’ and ‘‘quelques petits bibelots’’; p. ) in order to pursue the topic of Le´on’s marriage to Missie. ‘‘Je suis un peu sa me`re’’ [‘‘I am in a sense her mother’’], Eliante explains (p. ). Le´on is shocked by her unaccustomed bourgeois appearance, the identity which she has donned for the purposes of motherly matchmaking. What has happened to the decadent Eliante, ‘‘l’Eliante d’amour, l’Eliante de reˆve’’? Had she ever existed? he asks himself. ‘‘Encore une horrible jonglerie’’ [‘‘More horrible juggling’’] (ibid.). In the end Eliante tricks Le´on into bed with Missie by seducing him, leading him into her exotic bedroom, then substituting the surrogate daughter for herself at the last minute. In this strange narrative economy, vases are substitutable for male lovers, daughters are substitutable for mothers. With Missie’s displacement into Eliante’s bed, the boundaries dividing the double house are crossed, as are narrative boundaries: the bourgeois marriage plot is grafted onto the decadent seduction plot. The next morning Le´on awakes to find Missie in bed beside him, just as Eliante is committing suicide juggling knives. Less than a year later, Le´on and Missie are proud parents. The bourgeois masterplot is restored. The femme fatale fades into a dream image. The bourgeois family structure is reproduced. Given the novel’s double plot, Le´on’s pursuit of Eliante and his arranged marriage to Missie, to diagnose Eliante’s sexual encounter with the vase as a mere case of psychoanalytic perversion would be to miss its narrative purpose: to provide a counterplot to the bourgeois

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masterplot of marriage. Like the bachelor-collectors in the six fantastic tales discussed above, the widowed Eliante refuses the traditional plot structure of remarrying or taking lovers. Again, as is the case with these male bachelors who see nighttime apparitions of reanimated women amidst their bibelots, the lovers that Eliante refuses are iconographically inscribed in her decor. In addition to the vase with which Eliante ritualistically masturbates, there are other collector’s objects which stand in for people, though in a more banally metaphoric way, through resemblance. Le´on, in black evening attire, is compared to a black statue of Eros whose bow and arrow, hands, and an arm have been broken off (p. ). When shown her collection of erotic Chinese figurines, Le´on notices that the female figures all bear a striking resemblance to Eliante herself (pp. –). Such personifications add to the perverse eroticization of Eliante’s decor. The refused heterosexual liaisons are marked by the vase, the statue of Eros, and the erotic figurines. Oedipal order is thus restored narratively through a game of substitution, the love relations signified by the bibelots standing in for the relations not lived by the human characters. While I would never claim that the collector’s object is in general a part-object substitute, a fetishistic sublimation of desire (as some analysts of collecting have), collecting certainly can be used this way in narrative. Eliante’s collection of exotic and erotic bibelots is not only a substitute for physical union with the male Other, but also and especially a figure of narcissistic onanism, a doubling of her own self. The economy of collecting is thus caught up in a sort of black-market sexual economy constructed in parallel with a bourgeois economy of Oedipal sexuality. Above I suggested that in her visual and performative splendor, Eliante lacks depth. Though we ‘‘see’’ little of Le´on’s body, clothed or unclothed, his character is unusually shallow as well: he is all spectator, all eyes, all questions. As with Lorrain, in Rachilde visual play between the subjects and objects of the gaze takes precedence over psychological realism. As the narrative embodiment of the gaze, Le´on is the double of the reader. He is also the double of fin-de-sie`cle society, for even if he fancies himself to be a bit of an aesthete, he is above all a man of bourgeois means, a double of the ambitious Balzacian hero a` la Rastignac, the bourgeois Oedipal hero in search of a beautiful high-society lover, secretly desiring the mother. The characters of Rachilde’s La Jongleuse and Lorrain’s Monsieur de Phocas are doubles of literary archetypes, and were never intended as doubles of ‘‘real’’ persons; no effort is made to construct them as psychologically realistic. The same is true of

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their houses, which are simulacra of Balzacian archetypes. If Balzac’s heroes, heroines, and houses are meant to be simulacra of ‘‘the real,’’ then Rachilde’s and Lorrain’s are simulacra of Balzac’s simulacra. There is no depth, only surface. Such characters function like objects of decor. The novel itself becomes an elaborate floor-plan. Baudrillard has declared that by the mid-twentieth century, household furnishings are no longer anthropomorphic, as they were during the previous century. Dwelling space in nineteenth-century fantastic and decadent narratives does indeed remain anthropomorphic, hauntingly, morbidly, and perversely so. However, the perverse bibelots of Lorrain’s and Rachilde’s decadent floor-plans should be understood as the last gasp of the anthropomorphized interior. In nineteenth-century narrative, the figure of anthropomorphism allows for the passing between domains, from psychology to decor, from the animate to the inanimate, from the physical or spatial to the economic and the cognitive, from the private to the public, from the domestic sphere to the marketplace, from the familial to the social. Structural homology shows these spheres to be interrelated without being coterminous. Boundaries between them are present, but blurry. The logic of material culture informs nineteenth-century narrative logic, as bibelots and other domestic goods circulate through all of these spheres, crossing boundaries, allowing narrative to pass among them without completely denying their (always only partial) separateness. The anthropomorphism of material culture in literature is more than rhetorical, more than metaphorical, more than psychological, for actual, ‘‘real-life’’ man-made objects are very much anthropomorphic. Elaine Scarry explains that made objects, or artifacts, are produced by the body, for the body, projecting the body, extending it, and in turn transforming it. The room is ‘‘an enlargement of the body,’’ supplementing the protective function of skin and of clothing (pp. –). At the same time, ‘‘while the room is a magnification of the body, it is simultaneously a miniaturization of the world, of civilization’’ (p. ). By the mid-nineteenth century, the time during which Marx is writing, the made world envelops the body to the point that it is difficult to remember that it was made by the body for the body. As Scarry shows in her reading of Marx, with the dawn of industrial capitalism, material objects become increasingly alienated from both their producers and their consumers. As things become separated from people, the marketplace takes on an autonomy haunting in its seeming unnaturalness.

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The bibelot extends the body in a different way than does a chair or a tool, which are the artifacts that Scarry uses as examples. Antique and exotic bibelots were produced for bodies long dead or far away. The industrial reproduction of such bibelots further distances them from the bodies by which and for which they were originally designed and made. In many ways they do not ‘‘fit’’ the modern body comfortably. Faced with the proliferation of these alienated and alienating bibelots in the home and in the marketplace, the place of the body in relation to them becomes unclear, muddling the boundaries between persons and things. It is no longer certain that ‘‘man’’ is in control. Given this situation, nineteenth-century writers respond by dramatizing the anthropomorphism of things, precisely because it is threatened by the growing detachment between them and persons. This is one of the dramas played out around the bibelot in fiction from Balzac to Proust. Fantastic and decadent fiction plays on the threat posed by the separation of persons and things, in genre-specific ways. In the stories and novels discussed in this chapter, characters become overly attached to things and dangerously detached from other persons. The realms of the animate and the inanimate are thus deliberately confused. Inappropriate attachments and detachments restructure domestic, sexual, and social order, the order of the bourgeois Oedipus, in the fantastic through figurative fetishism, and in the decadent through serialized simulation.

Notes

Note on translations: Historical and literary sources are quoted in the original French, with longer citations followed by an English translation in brackets. Twentieth-century theoretical and critical sources have been quoted in English from published translations whenever available. Unless a published translation is cited, all other translations are my own.         Williams, Dream Worlds, pp. –.  Chandra Mukerji contests this periodization, pushing the dawn of consumption back to the early modern period. See her From Graven Images, chapter .  Pearce, On Collecting, pp. –; Barthes, ‘‘Semantics of the Object.’’  Gere, Nineteenth-Century Interiors, p. .  Bosc, Dictionnaire, p. .  Octave Uzanne parodies this trend in a short story, ‘‘Le Crachoir’’ [‘‘The Spittoon’’], in Le Bric-a`-brac de l’amour ().  Wharton and Codman, The Decoration of Houses, p. .  ‘‘La bimbeloterie, ainsi nomme´e du vieux mot bimbelot, jouet d’enfant, de´rive´ lui-meˆme de l’italien bimbolo, poupe´e, comprend non-seulement les divers jouets destine´s a` l’amusement des enfants, mais encore les masques, certains objets d’e´tage`re, et des articles pour les confiseurs, les coiffeurs, les couturie`res et les modistes’’ (Bure´e, Les Eventails. La Bimbeloterie, p. ).  Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Histoire de la socie´te´ franc¸aise pendant le Directoire, p. .  Cle´ment de Ris, La Curiosite´, p. ; author’s emphasis.  Bonnaffe´, Causeries sur l’art et la curiosite´, p. .  Goncourt, La Maison d’un artiste, : ; author’s emphasis.  Cle´ment de Ris, La Curiosite´, . On the parallels between Pons and the other collectors of his time, see Lorant, Les ‘‘Parents pauvres’’, esp. : –, and his introduction and notes to the Ple´iade edition of Le Cousin Pons.  Bonnaffe´, Causeries, p. . 



Notes to pages –

 Vachon, La Belle maison, pp. –.  On the department store, see Miller, The Bon Marche´; Bowlby, Just Looking; Williams, Dream Worlds; and Schor, ‘‘Before the Castle,’’ in Bad Objects. On other retail forms, see Nord, Paris Shopkeepers; and Jones, ‘‘Women Buying and Selling in Ancien Re´gime Paris,’’ in De Grazia, ed., The Sex of Things.  Magraw, ‘‘Producing, Retailing, Consuming: France –,’’ in Rigby, ed., French Literature, Thought and Culture, p. .  Bourget, ‘‘Edmond de Jules de Goncourt,’’ in Essais, p. .  ‘‘[I]ls offrent une re´ponse anticipe´e a` tous [les] de´sirs [d’un peuple],’’ ibid.  Cle´ment de Ris, La Curiosite´, p. .  Flaubert, L’Education sentimentale, p. .  Goncourt, Journal, June , : .  Bonnaffe´, Causeries, p. ; my emphasis. In France, the public auctions are state regulated. These regulations changed just after the revolution. The auctions were moved to the hoˆtel Drouot in , where they are still held today (ibid.).  Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Rene´e Mauperin, p. ; authors’ emphasis.  Cle´ment de Ris, Curiosite´, p. ; author’s emphasis.  Ibid., pp. , ; Goncourt, Maison, : , , ; Journal, : , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and : , , , , , , , , , .  Montesquiou, Les pas efface´s, : .  Zola, L’Oeuvre, in Les Rougon-Macquart, : , , , , .  Benjamin, ‘‘Edward Fuchs, Collector and Historian,’’ p. . On Romanticism and collecting, see Wainwright, The Romantic Interior; and Pearce, On Collecting, pp. –, , and –.  Zola, L’Oeuvre, : ; my emphasis. On Romanticism in L’Oeuvre, see Zamparelli, ‘‘Zola and the Quest for the Absolute in Art’’; and Brady, ‘L’Oeuvre’ d’Emile Zola, pp. –.  Edmond de Goncourt comments on Zola’s ‘‘e´patant faux mobilier moyenaˆgeux, Renaissance,’’ underlining the same paradox: ‘‘Le lit de l’auteur de l’Assomoir serait de´fendu par une grille en fer forge´’’ (Journal,  January , : ). See also Dakyns, The Middle Ages in French Literature, pp. –.  Rey, ‘‘Le nom d’artiste,’’ p. .  Balzac, La Muse du de´partement, : ; my emphasis.  Gautier, ‘‘Pre´face’’ [] to Mademoiselle de Maupin, p. .  Barbey d’Aurevilly, Du dandysme, p. .  Nochlin, Realism, p. .  ‘‘Brummell passait pour avoir une des plus nombreuses collections de tabatie`res qu’il y euˆt en Angleterre’’ (Barbey d’Aurevilly, Du dandysme, p. ).  McGuinness, ‘‘Mallarme´’s Ptyx and the Symbolist ‘Bric-a`-Brac’’’; Helgeson, ‘‘Presque Rien: Mallarme´’s Objects.’’  Chevrie, Pourquoi n’avons-nous pas de style moderne, p. .  Bourget, ‘‘Edmond de Jules de Goncourt,’’ in Essais, p. .

Notes to pages –



 Simmel makes a similar connection in his Philosophy of Money (), pp. –.  See Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin de Sie`cle France.  See Mukerji, ‘‘Territorial Gardens.’’  On the relationship between monarchial power and style, see part  of Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France.      (  )                 Bourdieu, In Other Words, pp. , , –; The Rules of Art, pp. –; Outline of a Theory of Practice, pp. –; and The Logic of Practice, pp. –.  Bourdieu, In Other Words, pp. , .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. ; my emphasis. See also Jenkins, Pierre Bourdieu, p. .  Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty.  Bourdieu, In Other Words, p. .  Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. , cited in Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, pp. –.  Bourdieu, In Other Words, p. .  Zukin, ‘‘Mimesis in the Origins of Bourgeois Culture.’’  On fashion as imitation, see Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, pp. –; and Simmel, ‘‘Fashion,’’ in On Individuality and Social Forms.  See for example Walton, France at the Crystal Palace; and Nord, ‘‘Republican Politics and the Bourgeois Interior.’’  Servant, Les Bronzes d’art (); Bouilhet, ‘‘La Galvanoplastie’’ (–); Nogue`s, ‘‘Les cristaux’’ (n.d.); Vidal, ‘‘La de´coration ce´ramique par impression,’’ (–). On bronze statues, see Walton, France at the Crystal Palace, pp. –; and Wosk, ‘‘The Anxiety of Imitation: Electrometallurgy and the Imitative Arts,’’ in Breaking the Frame, pp. –.  [No author], ‘‘Une Histoire de la reproduction artistique’’ (–).  Walton, France at the Crystal Palace, pp. – and –.  Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Sie`cle France, pp. –; Nord, ‘‘Republican Politics and the Bourgeois Interior,’’ pp. –.  G., ‘‘La Guerre a` la contrefac¸on’’ (–), .  Eudel, Le Truquage: Les contrefac¸ons de´voile´es (), : –.  Bosc, Dictionnaire, p. ; author’s emphasis.  Blondel, L’Art intime et le gouˆt en France (), p. . See also Cardon, L’Art au foyer domestique (), p.  (cited below); Servant, ‘‘Les Bronzes d’art,’’ p. ; and Blanc, Grammaire des arts de´coratifs (), pp. –.  Eudel, Le Truquage, : –; my emphasis.  De Noirmont, ‘‘Imitations artistiques en cuir bouilli,’’ in ‘‘Revue de l’Exposition de ’’ (–).  Blanc, Grammaire des arts de´coratifs, pp. –.  Nord, ‘‘Republican Politics and the Bourgeois Interior,’’ p. .



Notes to pages –

 Baudrillart, Histoire du luxe prive´ et public (), cited by Eleb-Vidal and Debarre-Blanchard, Architectures de la vie prive´e, pp. –.  Cardon, L’Art au foyer domestique, p. . See also Blanc, Grammaire des arts de´coratifs, pp. –.  On kitsch, see Moles, Le Kitsch, Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, and Sternberg, Les chefs-d’oeuvre du kitsch.  De Noussane, Le Gouˆt dans l’ammeublement, p. ; my emphasis.  Huysmans, ‘‘Le Muse´e des arts de´coratifs,’’ p. .  Ibid., p. .  Chevrie, Pourquoi n’avons-nous pas de style moderne, p. . On the relationship between the detail and mechanical reproduction, see Schor, Reading in Detail, pp. –.  On the moral critique of luxury, see for example Campbell, The Romantic Ethic, pp. – and –; Eleb-Vidal and Debarre-Blanchard, Architectures de la vie prive´e, pp. –; and Williams, Dream Worlds, pp.  and –.  Nicholas Thomas makes a similar point in a different context in his ‘‘Licensed Curiosity: Cook’s Pacific Voyages,’’ in Elsner and Cardinal, eds., The Cultures of Collecting.  My use of this term is unrelated to the concept of ‘‘Regime of accumulation,’’ as explained in Boyer, The Regulation School, pp. xii–xiii and –. Historical accounts of forms of accumulation which predate modern collecting can be found in Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities, pp. –; Alsop, The Rare Art Traditions, pp. –; and Pearce, On Collecting, pp. –.  Thornton, Authentic Decor, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Blondel, L’Art intime, p. .  See for example Balzac’s Le Cousin Pons and Maupassant’s ‘‘La Chevelure.’’  Jameson, ‘‘Flaubert’s Libidinal Historicism,’’ p. .  Havard, L’Art dans la maison (), p. .  Cuisenier, L’Art populaire, pp. –.  Eleb-Vidal and Debarre-Blanchard, Vie prive´e, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Havard, L’Art dans la maison, p. .  Noussanne, Gouˆt dans l’ameublement, p. .  Watson, ‘‘Assimilating Mobility.’’  Flaubert, L’Education sentimentale, p. . On art and the artist, see Fairlie, ‘‘Aspects de l’histoire de l’art dans ‘l’Education sentimentale’’’ and ‘‘Pellerin et le the`me de l’art dans ‘l’Education sentimentale’.’’  Andrieu, ‘‘Les Maisons,’’ p. .  D’Avenel, Le Me´canisme de la vie moderne, : . The chapter entitled ‘‘La Maison parisienne’’ appeared in La Revue des deux mondes in .  Ibid., pp. –.  Daunais, Flaubert et la sce´nographie romanesque.  Expression borrowed from Igor Kopytoff, ‘‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,’’ in Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of

Notes to pages –



Things.  Flaubert, L’Education sentimentale, p. . See Haig, ‘‘Madame Arnoux’s Coffret.’’  On the gift/commodity distinction, see Gregory, Gifts and Commodities.  Knight, ‘‘Object Choices: Taste and Fetishism in Flaubert’s L’E´ducation sentimentale,’’ in Rigby, ed., French Literature, Thought and Culture in the Nineteenth Century.  For a psychological reading of this scene, see Apter, Feminizing the Fetish, p. .  See for example Thomas, Entangled Objects.  Rigby, ‘‘Things, Distinction and Decay in Nineteenth-Century French Literature,’’ in Rigby, ed., French Literature, Thought and Culture in the Nineteenth Century.                         Duchet, ‘‘L’artiste en question,’’ p. . Romantisme devoted three issues to the question of the artist: . (st quarter, ); . (st quarter, ); . (st quarter, ).  Saisselin, The Bourgeois and the Bibelot.  Walton, France at the Crystal Palace, p. .  Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, pp. , , –, –.  Rey, ‘‘Le nom d’artiste,’’ p. .  Leduc-Adine, ‘‘Les arts et l’industrie au e sie`cle,’’ p. ; Woodmansee, The Author, Art and the Market, p. .  On Sand’s idealization of the worker, see Schor, George Sand and Idealism.  Goncourts, Journal, ( December ), : .  Ibid. ( March ), : ; author’s emphasis.  Ibid. ( December ), : .  Ibid. ( December ), : .  Ibid. ( September ), : .  Uzanne, ‘‘Note sur le gouˆt intime,’’ p. .  De Noirmont, ‘‘Ameublements d’art,’’ pp. –.  De Noirmont, ‘‘Ameublements d’art’’; ‘‘Meubles d’art,’’ advertisement.  Guinard, Cardon, Havard, Blondel respectively.  Champier, ‘‘A propos de l’enqueˆte sur les industries d’art,’’ p. ; my emphasis.  Uzanne, ‘‘Note sur le gouˆt intime,’’ p. .  Montesqiou, Les Pas efface´s, : , .  Fourdinois, ‘‘De l’e´tat actuel de l’industrie du mobilier,’’ pp. –.  Montesqiou, Les Pas efface´s, p. ; author’s italics.  Feray, Architecture inte´rieure et de´coration, p. ; see also Praz, Histoire de la de´coration d’inte´rieur, p. .  Nogressau, ‘‘Inte´rieurs d’ateliers,’’ p. .  Lenoir, Traite´ the´orique et pratique du tapissier, p. .

        

         



   

Notes to pages –

Proust, Jean Santeuil, p. . Sagne`s, L’Ennui dans la litte´rature franc¸aise, p. . Larroumet, La maison de Victor Hugo, pp. , . Houssaye, ‘‘De Marine-Terrace a` Hauteville-House,’’ p. . See Dangelzer, La Description du milieu, p. , and Lorant’s notes and introduction to the Ple´iade edition of Le Cousin Pons. Buisine, ‘‘Le culte des reliques,’’ in Tombeau de Loti, p. . Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Charles Demailly, p. ; see also Silverman, Art Nouveau, pp. –. Cited by Danger, Sensations et objets, p. ; my emphasis. The Goncourt brothers comment, ‘‘Flaubert n’a aucun sentiment artistique. Il n’a jamais achete´ un objet d’art de vingt-cinq sous. Il n’a pas chez lui une statuette, un tableau, un bibelot quelconque. Il parle pourtant d’art avec fureur; mais ce n’est que parce que, litte´rairement, l’art est une note distingue´e, bon genre, qui couronne un homme qui a un style artiste, et puis c’est anti-bourgeois’’ (Journal,  December , : –). Lalonde, ‘‘La Collection curieuse de Bouvard et Pe´cuchet,’’ pp. –. Lorrain, ‘‘Ophe´lius,’’ in Contes d’un buveur d’e´ther, p. . On Lorrain’s decor, see Jullian, Jean Lorrain ou le satiricon , pp. , –, , –, –, –, as well as d’Anthonay, Jean Lorrain: Barbare et esthe`te, pp. –. Apter, Feminizing the Fetish, p. . On bourgeois imitation during the eighteenth century, see Scott, ‘‘Counterfeit Culture on the Right Bank,’’ in The Rococo Interior, pp. –. Cardon, L’Art au foyer domestique, p. . d’Hervilly, Le Bibelot. Prior to Pons, the fictitious collector is generally portrayed as a maniacal fool blinded by his passion (Lorant, Parents pauvres, : –). Bauquenne, ‘‘Me´nages parisiens,’’ p. . Le Monde Illustre´  ( January ): ; Ohnet, ‘‘La Comtesse de Sarah,’’ L’Illustration  ( November ): . Apter, ‘‘Splitting Hairs: Female Fetishism and Postpartum Sentimentality in Maupassant’s Fiction,’’ in Feminizing the Fetish. See for example Walton, ‘‘Constructing the Bourgeoisie Through Consumption,’’ in France at the Crystal Palace, pp. –; Nord, ‘‘Republican Politics and the Bourgeois Interior’’; and Auslander, ‘‘The Bourgeois Stylistic Re´gime,’’ in Taste and Power, pp. –. Blanche de Ge´ry, ‘‘L’Ameublement moderne,’’ series of articles in La Mode de Paris. On bibelots suitable to the man of the house, see  September and  November , pp.  and . On the woman’s dressing room, see  August , p. . Journal ( December ), : . Dumas fils, La Dame aux came´lias, pp. –. Havard notes that ‘‘les dames du meilleur monde’’ attend the auctions of actresses and visit ‘‘leurs hoˆtels somptueux’’ (L’Art dans la maison, p. ). Mornand, ‘‘L’hoˆtel de Mademoiselle Rachel,’’ p. ; author’s emphasis.

Notes to pages –



 Zola, Nana, : ; my emphasis.  On Maupassant’s strange ‘‘mobilier de putain,’’ see Goncourt, Journal ( December ), : ; Nadine Satiat, Introduction to Notre coeur, ; Dominique Fre´my, Brigitte Monglond, and Bernard Benech, introductory material to Maupassant’s Contes et nouvelles, : –.  Vilcot, Huysmans et l’intimite´ prote´ge´e, pp. –.  Borie, Huysmans: Le Diable, le ce´libataire et Dieu, p. . Eve Sedgwick has suggested that the literary character of the bachelor is sometimes – but certainly not always – homosexual (Epistemology of the Closet, pp. –).  Goncourt, Journal ( February ), : . Sexist genderings of collecting and the bibelot persist. Werner Muensterberger repeatedly compares collecting to Don Juanism in his Collecting: An Unruly Passion, while Re´my G. Saisselin combines sexism with elitism in his The Bourgeois and the Bibelot. On Baudrillard’s sexist theory of collecting, see Schor, ‘‘Cartes postales,’’ –.  ‘‘Chroniques,’’ La Presse,  January and  May , cited in Champier, ‘‘Les artistes de l’industrie,’’ p. .  Castella, Structures romanesques et vision sociale, p. .  Maupassant, Notre coeur, p. . On Pre´dole´, see Vial, Guy de Maupassant et l’art du roman, pp. – and .  Proust, A la recherche, : ; Remembrance of Things Past, : –.       ’ ‘‘ ´ ¸   ’ ’  Flaubert, Bouvard et Pe´cuchet, ed. Gothot-Mersch, p. .  On the museum episode, in addition to Donato see Schuerewegen, ‘‘Muse´um ou croute´um? Pons, Bouvard, Pe´cuchet et la collection’’; Lalonde, ‘‘La Collection curieuse de Bouvard et Pe´cuchet’’; Michel Crouzet, ‘‘Sur le grotesque triste dans Bouvard et Pe´cuchet,’’ in Cogny et al., Flaubert et le comble, pp. –; Leclerc, La Spirale et le monument, p. ; Kempf, ‘‘Pie`ces de muse´e,’’ in Bouvard, Flaubert et Pe´cuchet, pp. –; Wing, ‘‘Detail and Narrative Dalliance in Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pe´cuchet.’’ On the impossibility of unity, see Anne Herschberg-Pierrot, ‘‘La mise en texte des ide´es rec¸ues dans Bouvard et Pe´cuchet,’’ in Toro, Gustave Flaubert: Proce´de´s narratifs et fondements ´episte´mologiques; Grange, ‘‘Les deux colonnes’’; and many of the articles cited in what follows.  Donato, ‘‘The Museum’s Furnace,’’ p. . On epistemology, see Eckhard Ho¨fner, ‘‘Bouvard et Pe´cuchet et la science livresque,’’ in Toro, Gustave Flaubert; and John Greene, ‘‘Structure et e´piste´mologie dans Bouvard et Pe´cuchet,’’ in Cogny et al., Flaubert et le comble.  Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, pp. –.  Ibid., p. ; author’s emphasis.  Ibid., pp. –.  Porter, ‘‘The Rhetoric of Deconstruction: Donato and Flaubert,’’ p. .  See also Franc¸oise Gaillard, ‘‘Un inenerrable histoire,’’ in Cogny et al., Flaubert et le comble, and Seylaz, ‘‘Bouvard et Pe´cuchet ou l’histoire au pre´sent.’’



Notes to pages –

 See Surin, ‘‘Liberation.’’  This work includes that of Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, Michael Taussig, Marilyn Strathern, and Nicholas Thomas.  See especially Clifford, ‘‘On Collecting Art and Culture’’; Karp and Lavine, Exhibiting Cultures; Pearce, ed., Museums and the Appropriation of Culture; and Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics.  Lalonde, ‘‘La Collection curieuse,’’ p. ; Donato, ‘‘The Museum’s Furnace,’’ pp. , ; Schuerewegen, ‘‘Muse´um ou croute´um,’’ p. .  Flaubert, Bouvard et Pe´cuchet, ed. Alberto Cento, pp. , , , , , .  See also Wing, ‘‘Detail and Narrative Dalliance,’’ p. .  Lalonde, ‘‘La Collection curieuse,’’ p. .  Kempf also takes note of the objects in the library in his Bouvard, Flaubert et Pe´cuchet, p. .  Schuerewegen, ‘‘Muse´um ou croute´um,’’ p. .  Many of the Parisian activities described in chapter  are taken up again later in the novel, as Claudine Gothot-Mersch observes in ‘‘Le Roman interminable: un aspect de la structure de Bouvard et Pe´cuchet,’’ in Cogny et al., Flaubert et le comble, pp. –.  An outline of the novel hints at this often discussed tendency: ‘‘Donner comme vraies des indications bibliographiques fausses’’ (‘‘Premier sce´nario,’’ in Bouvard et Pe´cuchet, ed. Cento, p. ).  Gervais, Muse´e de la socie´te´ des antiquaires de Normandie (); du Sommerard, Muse´e des Thermes et de l’Hoˆtel de Cluny (); Adeline, Le Muse´e d’antiquite´s et le muse´e ce´ramique de Rouen (); Flaubert, Carnets de travail.  On Flaubert’s prodigious memory, see Danger, Sensations et objets dans le roman de Flaubert.  France’s first public museum, the Muse´e des Monuments Franc¸ais, was established in  under the direction of Alexandre Lenoir. The Muse´e de Cluny was founded in , Caen’s Muse´e des Antiquite´s in , and Rouen’s Muse´e d’Antiquite´s in , the ceramic collection being added later in .  For example, the fragments of ‘‘tuiles rouges’’ in the Caen museum were discovered at Saint-Aubin-sur-mer in , and those of Cluny at La Souterraine in . The ‘‘lacrymatoires’’ at Cluny were found in the department of Nord in . Cluny’s ‘‘plombs’’ were found in the Seine between  and .  In Flaubert, Bouvard et Pe´cuchet, ed. Gothot-Mersch, pp.  and .  Erlande-Brandenburg, ‘‘L’Evolution du muse´e de Cluny,’’ p. .  Philippe de Chennevie`res, Gazette des Beaux-Arts (), cited by Poulot, ‘‘La visite au muse´e,’’ p. . See also Poulot, ‘‘L’invention de la bonne volonte´ culturelle,’’ and Sherman, Worthy Monuments.  Pierre Lacour and Jules Delpit, Catalogue des tableaux, statues, etc. du Muse´e de Bordeaux (Bordeaux: N. Duviella, ), , cited by Sherman, Worthy Monuments.  Flaubert’s notes from the Caen museum: ‘‘Bahuts Renaissance, style Jean

Notes to pages –

               

   



Goujon’’ (Carnets, p. ). Caen museum catalogue: see items ,  and , ‘‘coffres de mariage.’’ Cluny museum catalogue: ‘‘. – Coffre de mariage, forme de bahut sur pieds et a` couvercle, en bois sculpte´. – Ecole franc¸aise du e sie`cle.’’ See also items –, ‘‘bahuts’’ and ‘‘coffres.’’ Rouen museum catalogue: ‘‘bahuts’’ found in almost every room. ‘‘Il faut aussi ajouter que Laporte, l’ami et le collaborateur de Flaubert, en avait trouve´ qui servaient de coffres a` avoine, et que Flaubert les avait admire´s dans la salle a` manger de Laporte a` Grand-Couronne’’ (Rene´ Dumesnil as cited by Alberto Cento, Commentaire, p. ). Flaubert’s notes from the Caen museum: ‘‘Dans l’escalier, carcans de la haute justice d’Annebaut qui est une poutre, entraves formidables’’ (Flaubert, Carnets de travail, p. ). On Flaubertian irony, see Chambers, ‘‘Re´pe´tition et ironie,’’ in Me´lancolie et opposition, pp. –; Warning, ‘‘Reading Irony in Flaubert’’; Humphries, ‘‘Bouvard et Pe´cuchet and the Fable of Stable Irony.’’ ‘‘Je veux qu’il n’y ait pas dans mon livre un seul mouvement, ni une seule re´flexion de l’auteur’’ (letter to Louise Colet,  February , cited by Bolle`me, La lec¸on de Flaubert, p. ; Flaubert’s emphasis). The Carnets de travail include detailed notes on objects of religious kitsch such as those described in the text. On personal possessions of Flaubert cited in his fiction, see Andrieu, ‘‘Les Maisons.’’ August . Sainte-Beuve,  December , Nouveaux lundis, p. . Ibid., p. . On the relationship of the petit-bourgeois to the museum, including comments on Bouvard et Pe´cuchet, see Buisine, ‘‘Sociomimesis: physiologie du petit-bourgeois.’’ Wainwright, The Romantic Interior, p. . Bonnaffe´, Physiologie du curieux (), pp. –. Pomian, ‘‘Medals/Shells = Erudition/Philosophy,’’ in Collectors and Curiosities, p. . Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities, p. . Maze-Sencier, Livre des collectionneurs, p. . Flaubert, ‘‘Quatrie`me sce´nario,’’ in Bouvard et Pe´cuchet, ed. Cento, p. . Ibid., pp.  and . An exception to this trend is Leo Bersani’s chapter ‘‘Flaubert’s Encyclopedism,’’ in which it is argued that Bouvard and Pe´cuchet appears to be an encyclopedic novel, but its accumulations of facts serve to mask the point that art is useless. This change in organization took place in  (Cle´ment de Ris, Curiosite´, pp. –; my emphasis). Donato, ‘‘The Museum’s Furnace,’’ pp. –; author’s emphasis. J.-M. Roland, ministre de l’Inte´rieur, in a  letter regarding the arrangement of paintings in the Louvre, cited by Pommier, ‘‘Postface,’’ p. . Adeline, Muse´e de Rouen, p. ; my emphasis.



Notes to pages –

 Ibid., p. ; my emphasis.  Du Sommerard, Muse´e des Thermes et de l’Hoˆtel de Cluny, pp. –. Still located in the Thermes and Hoˆtel de Cluny, today the museum is called the ‘‘Muse´e National du Moyen Age.’’  Erlande-Brandenburg, ‘‘Evolution de Cluny,’’ p. .  Flaubert, Carnets, pp.  and .  Catalogue item .  Bourdieu and Darbel, The Love of Art.  Mouchard and Neefs, Flaubert, p. . See also Buisine’s ‘‘Sociomimesis.’’  See Flaubert’s early outlines of the novel in Bouvard et Pe´cuchet, ed. Cento, pp.  and .  Adeline, Le Muse´e d’antiquite´s et le muse´e ce´ramique de Rouen, p. .  Chaline, ‘‘Le milieu culturel rouennais au temps de Flaubert,’’ p. .  Dictionnaire de la conversation et de la lecture: Inventaire raisonne´ des notions ge´ne´rales les plus indispensables a` tous, par une socie´te´ de savants et de gens de lettres, : –.  In Bouvard et Pe´cuchet, p. . On the ‘‘chic’’ of faı¨ence (Italian-style stoneware), see Champfleury’s novel Le violon de faı¨ence, pp. ,  and .  Flaubert, Bouvard et Pe´cuchet, pp. –. Leclerc has pointed out that many of Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s projects are based on purely visual imitations, including the garden and the gym (La Spirale et le monument, p. ; see also his chapter , ‘‘La reproduction,’’ pp. –).  These include the ‘‘vieux fers’’ (no doubt included among the ‘‘quincaillerie’’ mentioned by Flaubert in chapter ), the ‘‘plombs’’ (not mentioned before this point in the novel), and the ‘‘hallebarde’’ mentioned in chapter .  Mouchard and Neefs, Flaubert, p. .  Leclerc, La spirale et le monument, p. .  Foucault, ‘‘Fantasia of the Library,’’ which is on The Temptation of Saint Anthony.  Suzanne Allen describes Bouvard and Pe´cuchet as ‘‘colporteurs’’ of science. It would be more accurate to describe them as customers, rather than peddlers, of science. In fact, at one point they actually purchase a scientific manual from a colporteur (‘‘D’un ‘ cloporte ’ colporteur’’).  See Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumption.  This idea is repeated, becoming part of the cycle. For example: ‘‘Pour entendre tout cela (chemistry), selon Bouvard, il aurait fallu des instruments. La de´pense e´tait conside´rable; ils en avaient trop fait’’ (p. ).  For a fuller discussion of the connections between consuming, collecting, and desire, see, among others, Belk, Collecting in a Consumer Society, pp. –, –, –; and Stewart, ‘‘Objects of Desire,’’ in On Longing, pp. –.

      ,    ,      ?  By ‘‘postmodernist literary criticism’’ I refer especially to the s sort that identifies what is ‘‘postmodern’’ about high-modern writers, generating

Notes to pages –



books like Flaubert and Postmodernism (edited by Schor and Majewski) and Postmodern Proust (Gray).  Luka´cs, ‘‘Narrate or Describe?,’’ p. .  For a detailed discussion, see Bal, Double Exposures, pp. –.  Spencer R. Crew and James E. Sims, ‘‘Locating Authenticity: Fragments of a Dialogue,’’ in Karp and Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures, p. .  Barthes, ‘‘Semantics of the Object,’’ p. .  See Buisine, ‘‘Un cas limite de la description: l’e´nume´ration.’’ See also Brochu, Roman et ´enume´ration.  Schor, Breaking the Chain, p. .  Sainte-Beuve,  December , Nouveaux lundis, : ; my emphasis.  Schor, Breaking the Chain, p. .  Ibid., p. ; my emphasis.  Gordon, Ornament, Fantasy and Desire, p. .  It is telling that of Flaubert’s novels, Foucault chooses to write about The Temptation of Saint Anthony (‘‘Fantasia of the Library’’).  ‘‘Comment ‘e´crire’ la collection? . . . De´crire la collection implique ne´cessairement un inventaire’’ (Ge´rard Gengembre, introduction to Balzac, Le cousin Pons, p. ).  Dangelzer, La Description du milieu, pp. –; my emphasis. I retain the French original for critics Dangelzer, Richard, and Ricatte because they make use of the vocabulary of collecting in the passages cited.  Ibid., p. . For a positive reading of the studio, see Crouzet, ‘‘Rhe´torique du re´el dans Manette Salomon,’’ pp. –.  Dangelzer, La Description du milieu, p. .  On descriptive restraint in Rene´e Mauperin, see Nadine Satiat’s introduction to the edition of the novel cited in the bibliography, pp. –.  Huysmans, A rebours, p. .  Luka´cs, ‘‘Narrate or Describe?,’’ p. .  See Knapp, ‘‘The Goncourt Brothers: Ecriture-Sensation.’’ On ‘‘picturalisme,’’ see Caramaschi, Re´alisme et impressionisme dans l’oeuvre des fre`res Goncourt, esp. pp. , , , .  Dangelzer, La Description du milieu, p. .  Richard, ‘‘Deux e´crivains e´pidermiques: Edmond et Jules de Goncourt,’’ in Litte´rature et sensation, p. ; author’s emphasis.  Ricatte, La Cre´ation romanesque chez les Goncourt, p. .  Ibid., pp. –.  Barthes, ‘‘The Reality Effect,’’ pp. –. As Debray-Genette (of the postmodernist/post-structuralist camp) observes, description in narrative always lacks internal motivation (Me´tamorphoses du re´cit, p. ; see also pp. , , ).  Many theorize seriality as the key feature of the collection. See for example Schor, ‘‘Cartes postales: Representing Paris ,’’ pp. –; Baudrillard, The System of Objects, p. ; and Stewart, On Longing, pp. –.  See for example Muensterberger, Collecting: An Unruly Passion, p. .



Notes to pages –

 Balzac, La Peau de chagrin, p. ; my emphasis.  Cazauran, ‘‘Le ‘Tableau’ du magasin d’antiquite´s dans La Peau de chagrin,’’ p. .  Bell, Circumstances, p. .  The detrimental effect of married life on the artist is a well-worn theme in nineteenth-century French literature, as in Zola’s Oeuvre, to cite the bestknown example. See Michel Crouzet’s preface to Manette Salomon, pp. –.  Baudrillard’s hyperreal comes into being when value acquires a ‘‘fantastic autonomy’’ (Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. ).  Goncourt, Maison d’un artiste, : n.p.  Biasi, ‘‘La collection de Pons comme figure du proble´matique’’; Schuerewegen, ‘‘Muse´um ou croute´um? Pons, Bouvard, Pe´cuchet et la collection’’; Paulson, ‘‘Le Cousin Parasite: Balzac, Serres et le de´mon de Maxwell’’; Bell, ‘‘Statistical Thinking in Balzac.’’  On the melodramatic aspects of Le cousin Pons, see Greene, ‘‘Balzac’s Most Helpless Heroine: The Art Collection in Le Cousin Pons,’’ and Ge´rard Gengembre’s introduction to the edition I cite (p. ).  There is a discrepancy in the text, since later the collection is numbered at , objects (p. ).  See Mustie`re and Ne´e, ‘‘De l’artiste et du pouvoir: l’Allemagne comme horizon mythique du romantisme dans Le Cousin Pons.’’  Balzac, Pons, p. ; author’s italics, guillemets, and ellipses; my ellipses in brackets.  ‘‘A rebours, c’est La Maison d’un artiste, mais avec du ge´nie’’ (Juin, preface, p. ). See also Lethe`ve, ‘‘Gouˆts et de´gouˆts,’’ p. .  Court-Perez, Joris-Karl Huysmans: A Rebours, p. . See also J.P. Vilcot, Huysmans et l’intimite´ prote´ge´e, pp. –.  See Dottin-Orsini, ‘‘Des Esseintes et les femmes peintes.’’  Lethe`ve, ‘‘Gouˆts et de´gouˆts de des Esseintes,’’ p. ; Livi, J.-K. Huysmans: a` rebours de l’esprit de´cadent, p. . See also Phale`se, Comptes A rebours, p. ; and Brunel, ‘‘Du catalogue au roman.’’ On the classical roots of modern description, see Debray-Genette, ‘‘La Pierre descriptive,’’ in Me´tamorphoses du re´cit, pp. –.  Soler, ‘‘Le Bazar de Satan: Inventaires et diabolisme dans A rebours,’’ p. .  Lasowski, ‘‘Le Faux Joris-Karl Huysmans,’’ p. .  See Harris, A Society of Signs?.  Silverman, Art Nouveau, p. ; Fosca, Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, p.  n.; Sagne`s, L’Ennui dans la litte´rature franc¸aise, p. ; Court-Perez, Joris-Karl Huysmans, pp. , –.  Borie, Huysmans: Le Diable, le ce´libataire et Dieu, p. .  Baudrillard, System of Objects, p. .  Williams, Dream Worlds, pp. –.  Ibid., p. ; see also pp. – in Williams, and de la Motte, ‘‘Writing against the Grain,’’ p. .  Humphries, ‘‘Flaubert’s Parrot and Huysmans’s Cricket.’’

Notes to pages –



 Loomis, ‘‘Of Pride and Fall,’’ p. .  Williams, Dream Worlds, p. .  Court-Perez, Joris-Karl Huysmans, p. .                      Balzac, Le Pe`re Goriot, p. ; my emphasis.  Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology, p. .  ‘‘L’animal est un principe qui prend sa forme exte´rieure . . . dans les milieux ou` il est appele´ a` se de´velopper. [. . .] La Socie´te´ ne fait-elle pas de l’homme, suivant les milieux ou` son action se de´ploie, autant d’hommes diffe´rents qu’il y a de varie´te´s en zoologie?’’ (Balzac, preface to La Come´die humaine).  Jameson, ‘‘The Realist Floor-Plan,’’ p. .  On the signification of various Balzacian interiors, see Fro¨lich, ‘‘La description du boudoir de Mme du Tillet’’; and Guichardet, ‘‘‘Espaces inte´rieurs’ et de´cors,’’ in Balzac ‘arche´ologue’ de Paris, pp. –.  Proust, Jean Santeuil, p. .  Deleuze, Proust and Signs, p. .  Proust, A la recherche, : –; Remembrance, : .  Bourdieu, Distinction, pp. , –. See also pp. , , , and Outline of a Theory of Practice, pp. –.  George L. Mosse, introduction to Nordau, Degeneration, pp. xiii–xxxvi.  On these notions in particular and on the Philosophy of Money in general, see Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption, pp. –, and Poggi, Money and the Modern Mind.  Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, p. .  Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, p. .  For Adorno, the nineteenth-century bourgeois interior is the parlour of Kierkegaard’s critical theory: ‘‘It is the bourgeois inte´rieur of the nineteenth century, before which all talk of subject, object, indifferentiation, and situation pales to an abstract metaphor . . . Just as in the metaphorical inte´rieur the intentions of Kierkegaard’s philosophy intertwine, so the inte´rieur is also the real space that sets free the categories of the philosophy’’ (Adorno, Kierkegaard, p. ).  Baudrillard, The System of Objects, p. . The English translation of the italicized rhetoric of homology is accurate.  Bourdieu describes his earliest reading of the Kabyle house as ‘‘perhaps the last work I wrote as a blissful structuralist’’ (The Logic of Practice, p. ).  d’Avenel, Le Me´canisme de la vie moderne, : –.  Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, p. .  See especially Belk, Collecting in a Consumer Society.  Mme Hennequin, L’Art et le gouˆt au foyer (Paris: Armand Colin, ), p. , cited and translated by Leora Auslander, ‘‘The Gendering of Consumption,’’ in de Grazia and Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things. See also Auslander, Taste and Power; Nord, ‘‘Republican Politics and the Bourgeois Interior in



Notes to pages –

Mid-Nineteenth-Century France’’; and Walton, France at the Crystal Palace.  Viollet-le-Duc, Habitations modernes, p. .  Auslander, ‘‘Gendering,’’ p. ; Auslander’s translation.                   Pietz, ‘‘Fetishism and Materialism,’’ in Apter and Pietz, eds. Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, pp. –.  An example of this kind of thinking about object investment can be found in Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus.  Todorov, The Fantastic, pp. –.  Baudrillard, The System of Objects, p. ; see chapter  above.  On the first-person narrator, see Todorov, The Fantastic, pp. –.  Ibid., p.   Harter, Bodies in Pieces, p. .  Vacher-Gravelli, ‘‘Quand l’objet ancien devient fantastique’’; Ponnau, ‘‘La Perte du sens et le blanc du texte: L’envers du de´cor’’; Chambers, ‘‘Gautier et le complexe de Pygmalion,’’ p. ; Castex, Le Conte fantastique en France, pp. –; Bancquart, Maupassant: Conteur fantastique, pp. –, –, –; Schapira, ‘‘Le The`me du mort-vivant’’; Harter, Bodies in Pieces, pp. –. On fictitious haunted houses of the same period, see Vidler, ‘‘Houses,’’ in The Architectural Uncanny.  Pomian, ‘‘The Collection: Between the Visible and the Invisible,’’ in Collectors and Curiosities.  Brooks, Reading for the Plot, pp. –.  La Chevelure is one of the examples that Todorov uses to illustrate his observation that the fantastic often involves taking a rhetorical figure literally (The Fantastic, p. ).  Chambers explains that the reconstitution of the fragmented character – both subject (male narrator) and object (female lover) – is a precondition for the proper functioning of what he calls Gautier’s Pygmalion complex (‘‘Gautier et le complexe de Pygmalion’’). See also Shapira, ‘‘Le the`me du mort-vivant dans l’oeuvre en prose,’’ pp. –; and Steinmetz, ‘‘Ombelles sur tombeaux: Gautier, poe`te fre´ne´tique?,’’ p. .  For recent anthropological studies of gift exchange, see Strathern, The Gender of the Gift, and Thomas, Entangled Objects.  Unlike Gautier, Lorrain leaves his Pygmalion complex unresolved, to borrow the phrasing of Chambers (‘‘Gautier et le complexe de Pygmalion’’).  From ‘‘The Precession of Simulacra,’’ in Simulacra and Simulation, p. . This schema bears a striking resemblance to the stages which Nietzsche outlines in explaining ‘‘How the ‘Real World’ at last Became a Myth,’’ in Twilight of the Gods.  Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, pp. –.  See my discussion of mobility in chapter .  Dauphine´, introduction to Rachilde, La Jongleuse.

Notes to pages –



 Rae-Beth Gordon diagnoses Eliante as a hysteric by her refusal of a male partner, as well as by her attraction to textiles and ornamental objects (Ornament, Fantasy and Desire, pp. –).  Peter Brooks has collected and exposed many such plots in his Body Works, which he has lavishly illustrated with paintings of nude women, in a sense repeating the plot structure he analyzes.  On the relation between family structure and sexuality in Rachilde, see Hawthorne, ‘‘The Social Construction of Sexuality,’’ p. .  On Rachilde and motherhood, see Lukacher, ‘‘‘Mademoiselle Baudelaire’: Rachilde and the Sexual Difference.’’  Baudrillard, The System of Objects; Muensterberger, Collecting: An Unruly Passion; Apter, ‘‘Cabinet Secrets,’’ in Feminizing the Fetish.  ‘‘Les romans de Rachilde de´noncent le leurre de la repre´sentation, du re´el et de la ve´rite´ . . . En ce jeu de miroirs, l’origine se perd, et l’identite´; la ressemblance se fond en semblance, la marque sexuelle se perd sur les corps’’ (Besnard-Coursodon, ‘‘Monsieur Ve´nus, Madame Adonis,’’ p. ).  See especially part , ‘‘Making,’’ in Scarry, The Body in Pain. On the place of the body in architecture, especially its displacement from modern designs, see Vidler, ‘‘Bodies,’’ in The Architectural Uncanny.

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Index

accumulation, , , – aesthetes, ,  aestheticism, , – anthropomorphism, –, –, – antiquite´, meaning and use of,  Apter, Emily, ,  archaeology, , –, ,  art: and the bibelot, , –, –; versus fashion, –; vocabulary of, –,  art for art’s sake,,  artificiality, , – Auslander, Leora,  authenticity, –, , –,  Balzac, , , , , –, , –, , –; La Cousine Bette, ; Le Cousin Pons, , , , , , , , , , , –; La Fille aux yeux d’or, ; Illusions perdues, ; La Muse du de´partement, –, ; La Peau de chagrin, , , –, ; Le Pe`re Goriot, –, ; Splendeurs et mise`res des courtisanes,  Barthes, Roland, , , , Bataille, Georges,  Baudelaire, Charles, , , ,  Baudrillard, Jean, , , , , –, , , ,  Baxandall, Michael,  Bell, David,  Benjamin, Walter, , , , , ,  bibelot: as category, , –, ; meaning and use, , –,  bimbelot, meaning and use, – Blondel, Spire, ,  Borie, Jean, – Bosc, Ernest, , – Bourdieu, Pierre, , –, , ; Distinction, –, , –, –; practical logic, –, ; sociology of the museum,  Bourget, Paul, , –, 

bric-a`-brac, meaning and use, –, –,  Brooks, Peter, ,  Brummell, Beau,  Buisine, Alain,  Castella, Charles,  catalogues: and literary criticism, –, , –; in literary texts, – Chambers, Ross,  Champfleury,  Champier, Victor,  Che´vrie, August, –,  class: and collecting, , –; and luxury goods, , ; and imitation, , –, ; and interior decor, –, , –,  classification, , ,  Cle´ment de Ris, Louis, , , , – Cluny, muse´e de, –, – Colet, Louise,  collecting: aesthetics of, –; as interior decor, –; cultural and historical specificity of, –; space of, , ; vocabulary of, –,  collector’s market, , –, , –, –, – collector’s objects: designations for, –; organization of, , –, –, – Commanville, Caroline,  Comte, Auguste,  consumption: and demand for imitations, , , ; stages of, –, –, –; in Huysmans, –; in Flaubert, , –, –; in Zola, – Court-Perez, Franc¸oise, Cros, Charles,  curiosite´, meaning and use of. , , – Cuvier, Georges,  Dandyism, , – Dangelzer, Joan, –, , 





Index

Darbel, Alain,  D’Avenel, Georges, –,  De Girardin, Madame,  De Noussane, Henri,  Decadence, , , , , , –, – decorative arts, , , , , – Deleuze, Gilles,  description, –, , –, – Donato, Eugenio, –, –, ,  Du Sommerard, ,  Duchet, Claude,  Dumas fils, Alexandre,  eclecticism, , , – encyclopedia, order of the, , –, – enumeratio, , , ,  epistemology, –, , –,– erudition, , – Eudel, Paul, ,  fantastic literature, –,  fashion, , , , – fetishism, , , –, , ,  Flaubert, Gustave, , ,; Bouvard et Pe´cuchet, , , , –; Dictionnaire des ide´es rec¸ues, –, ; l’Education sentimentale, , , –, , , , ; Madame Bovary, , , , –; Salammboˆ, , , , –; La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, ; Trois contes, –, ,  Foucault, Michel, –,  France, Anatole, –,  Freud, Sigmund,  Gautier, The´ophile, , , , , , , , – gender, , , –, – gift exchange, – Gombrich, Ernst,  Goncourt brothers, –, , , –, , , , , –, ; Charles Demailly, –; Germinie Lacerteux, –; Histoire de la socie´te´ franc¸aise pendant le Directoire, ; Madame Gervaisais, ; Manette Salomon, , –, –; Rene´e Mauperin, ,  Goncourt, Edmond de, , , –; La Maison d’un artiste, , –, – Gordon, Rae-Beth, – Havard, Henri, ,  Hennequin, Madame,  heterogeneity, , –, , , , – history, –, – homology, –, –

household goods: designations for, –; as collectors’ objects, , –,  how-to manuals, , ,  Hugo, Victor, – Huysmans, J.-K., , , ,, , ; A rebours, , , , , , , , , , ; Le muse´e de l’art de´coratif,’’ – imitation, – industrial art,  interior decor: first appearance of term, ; in decadent literature, –; in fantastic literature, –; gendering and sexualization of, –; social theories of, – irony, – James, Henry,  Jameson, Fredric, –,  Kant, Immanuel, , ,  Knight, Diana,  knowledge, –, ,  Lacan, Jacques,  Lalonde, Normand, – Landino, Cristoforo,  Larroumet, Gustave,  Lasowski, Patrick Wald, – Le´vi-Strauss, Claude,  literary criticism, , – –, living room, , –, ,  logic of practice, see Practical logic Loomis, Jeffrey,  Lorrain, Jean, –, ; Monsieur de Phocas, , , –, ; Ophe´lius, ; Re´clamation posthume, , –,  Loti, Pierre, –,  Luka´cs, Georg, –, , , , ,  magasin de bric-a`-brac, –, –, ,  Mallarme´, Ste´phane, , ,  market, see Collector’s market Marx, Karl, , , ,  material culture, concept of,  Maupassant, , , , –; La Chevelure, –, , ; Notre coeur, –, ; Qui sait?, , –; Une aventure parisienne,  Maze-Sencieer, Alphonse,  mobility, –, – Moles, Abraham,  Montesquiou, Robert de, , , , –,  Mouchard, Claude, 

Index Museum: in Flaubert, –; aesthetics of, –; and the creation of bibelot, –, organization of, – naturalism, , ,  Neefs, Jacques,  Nerval, Ge´rard de,  Nochlin, Linda,  Nord, Philip, – Nordau, Max, –,  objet d’art, meaning and use of, –,  order, –, –, –, –, –, – personification, – plot, , , ,  Pomian, Krzysztof, – Porter, Laurence,  practical logic, , –, ,  Proust, Marcel, , , –, , ; A la recherche du temps perdu, , , , , , –, , –; Jean Santeuil, , –, – Rachilde, , , , – reading, , – realism, ,  Renan, Ernest,  reproductions of antiques, – revolution, industrial and consumer, ,  Rey, Alain,  Ricatte, Robert, – Richard, Jean-Pierre, , – Rigby, Brian,  Rodenbach, Georges,  Romanticism, –



Rothschild chaˆteau,  Sagne`s, Guy, ,  Sainte-Beuve, ,  Sand, George, – Saussure, Ferdinand de, ,  Sauvageot, Charles, , –,  Scarry, Elaine,  Schor, Naomi, , – Schuerewegen, Franc, ,  Schwartz, Hillel,  Simmel, Georg, ,  superfluousness, , –, ,  symbolist poetry,  Taste, , – Thornton, Peter, – Todorov, Tzvetan,  utilitarianism,,  Uzanne, Octave, – value, , , –, ,  Veblen, Thorstein, ,  Versailles,  Vilcot, J.P.,  Viollet-le-Duc,  Wagner, Richard, – Walton, Whitney,  Wharton, Edith, ,  Wilde, Oscar,  Williams, Rosalind, ,  Zola, Emile, , , ; Au bonheur des dames, , , ; Nana, –, , –; L’Oeuvre, , –, ; Pot-Bouille, –

                           : Michael Sheringham (Royal Holloway, London)       : R. Howard Bloch (Columbia University), Malcolm Bowie (All Souls College, Oxford), Terence Cave (St John’s College, Oxford), Ross Chambers (University of Michigan), Antoine Compagnon (Columbia University), Peter France (University of Edinburgh), Christie McDonald (Harvard University), Toril Moi (Duke University), Naomi Schor (Harvard University)    

J. M. Cocking: Proust: Collected Essays on the Writer and his Art Leo Bersani: The Death of Ste´phane Mallarme´ Marian Hobson: The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France Leo Spitzer, translated and edited by David Bellos: Essays on Seventeenth-Century French Literature  Norman Bryson: Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix  Ann Moss: Poetry and Fable: Studies in Mythological Narrative in Sixteenth-Century France  Rhiannon Goldthorpe: Sartre: Literature and Theory  Diana Knight: Flaubert’s Characters: The Language of Illusion  Andrew Martin: The Knowledge of Ignorance: From Genesis to Jules Verne  Geoffrey Bennington: Sententiousness and the Novel: Laying down the Law in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction  Penny Florence: Mallarme´, Manet and Redon: Visual and Aural Sign and the Generation of Meaning  Christopher Prendergast: The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, and Flaubert  Naomi Segal: The Unintended Reader: Feminism and Manon Lescaut  Clive Scott: A Question of Syllables: Essays in Nineteenth-Century French Verse  Stirling Haig: Flaubert and the Gift of Speech: Dialogue and Discourse in Four ‘‘Modern’’ Novels  Nathaniel Wing: The Limits of Narrative: Essays on Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud and Mallarme´  Mitchell Greenberg: Corneille, Classicism and the Ruses of Symmetry  Howard Davies: Sartre and ‘‘Les Temps Modernes’’  Robert Greer Cohn: Mallarme´’s Prose Poems: A Critical Study  Celia Britton: Claude Simon: Writing the Visible  David Scott: Pictorialist Poetics: Poetry and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France  Ann Jefferson: Reading Realism in Stendhal  Dalia Judovitz: Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origin of Modernity  Richard D. E. Burton: Baudelaire in   Michael Moriarty: Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France

       

John Forrester: The Seduction of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida Jerome Schwartz: Irony and Ideology in Rabelais: Structures of Subversion David Baguley: Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision Leslie Hill: Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Worlds F. W. Leakey: Baudelaire: Collected Essays, – Sarah Kay: Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry Gillian Jondorf: French Renaissance Tragedy: The Dramatic Word Lawrence D. Kritzman: The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance  Jerry C. Nash: The Live Aesthetics of Maurice Sce`ve: Poetry and Struggle  Peter France: Politeness and its Discontents: Problems in French Classical Culture  Mitchell Greenberg: Subjectivity and Subjugation in Seventeenth-Century Drama and Prose: The Family Romance of French Classicism  Tom Conley: The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing  Margery Evan: Baudelaire and Intertextuality: Poetry at the Crossroads  Judith Still: Justice and Difference in the Works of Rousseau: ‘‘bienfaisance’’ and ‘‘pudeur’’  Christopher Johnson: System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida  Carol A. Mossman: Politics and Narratives of Birth: Gynocolonization from Rousseau to Zola  Daniel Brewer: The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France: Diderot and the Art of Philosophizing  Roberta L. Krueger: Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance  James H. Reid: Narration and Description in the French Realist Novel: The Temporality of Lying and Forgetting  Eugene W. Holland: Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: The Sociopoetics of Modernism  Hugh M. Davidson: Pascal and the Arts of the Mind  David J. Denby: Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order in France, –: A Politics of Tears  Clair Addison: Where Flaubert Lies: Chronology, Mythology and History  John Claiborne Isbell: The Birth of European Romanticism: Stae¨l’s ‘‘De l’Allemagne’’  Michael Sprinker: History and Ideology in Proust: ‘‘A la recherche du temps perdu’’ and the Third French Republic  Dee Reynolds: Symbolist Aesthetics and Early Abstract Art: Sites of Imaginary Space  David B. Allison, Mark S. Roberts and Allen S. Weiss: Sade and the Narrative of Transgression  Simon Gaunt: Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature  Jeffrey Mehlman: Genealogies of the Text: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Politics in Modern France

 Lewis C. Seifert: Fairy Tales, Sexuality and Gender in France –: Nostalgic Utopias  Elza Adamowicz: Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse  Nicholas White: The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction  Paul Gifford and Brian Stimpson (eds.): Reading Paul Vale´y: Universe in Mind  Michael R. Finn: Proust, the Body and Literary Form  Julie Candler Hayes: Reading the French Enlightenment: System and Subversion  Ursula Tidd: Simone de Beauvoir, Gender and Testimony  Janell Watson: Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust: The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities