Our Dark Side (11 page)

Although they were a century apart, both Sade and Freud helped to take away the mystical aura surrounding perversion, perverse works and perverse acts, and even to secularize them. But, unlike the mental medicine that tried to circumscribe, control or eradicate perversions by taking away their aura from them, Freud related perversion to an anthropological category specific to humanity itself.

Then what room is there for our dark side in a world where positivity triumphs, in a world in which perversion, having been gradually integrated into the discourse of science, can no longer be used to defy God, to challenge the monarchy, or even to express the metamorphoses of good and evil? A number of the greatest writers (Balzac, Flaubert, Hugo and many others) attempted to answer that question much better than mental medicine. Despite their differences, they all hated a bourgeois society whose normative ideal seemed to them to represent nothing more than the exhumation of a pathology that had been carefully repressed. In their view, nothing could be more perverse that the positivist ethics that sought to domesticate even the most transgressive human passions.

The character of Vautrin (Balzac 1960) is a wonderful embodiment of the many facets of the seamy side of the bourgeois society of the first half of the nineteenth century. The author of
The Human Comedy
tried to expose its hypocrisy by taking his inspiration from the pre-Darwinian classifications of Buffon, Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. With his ravaged face, his terrifying hands, red hair, painted sideburns and grimaces, Vautrin, a convict who has escaped from a penal colony, is a pitiless charmer. A lover of young men, he disdains women and cultivates the love of hatred as the most noble of rebellions. At the age of forty, he is a lodger in the Maison Vauquer disguised as a
rentier
when he decides to corrupt Eugène de Rastignac. He therefore makes him an offer: he will have the brother of one of the young women living in the boarding-house killed so that she can marry Rastignac when she inherits her father's fortune. Rastignac does refuse the offer, but Vautrin triumphs because he can watch the progress of his plan for the young man's education. Not only has he succeeded in perverting his victim's soul; he can vicariously enjoy his moral degradation.

Constantly changing his name to suit his circumstances – Jacques Collin,
²⁵
Trompe-la-Mort [‘Dodgedeath' in the English translation], Abbé Carlos de Herrera – Vautrin's many metamorphoses allow him to go on defying the law. But his passion for Lucien de Rubempré – a ‘male courtesan' who is kept by women and who has become his ‘prostitute' – transforms him into a sort of inverted image of himself (Balzac 1976). At the very moment when he believes he possesses the young man's body and soul, he betrays him and commits suicide, leaving with no hope of vengeance.

Forced to redeem himself, Vautrin becomes Chief of Police, abandons his stance as the archangel of crime and joins the ranks of those who defend the order he once fought. It is at this point that he encounters Corentin, a cold, passionless police officer – pale face and the eyes of a snake – who is willing to serve any government. The battle between the old convict, who now identifies with the ideal Good, and the zealous servant of a legality that has no soul ends with a boundary agreement: ‘Woe to you if you cross my ground! … You call yourself the State, just as lackeys call themselves by the same name as their masters. I wish to be called Justice; we shall often see each other; let us always treat each other with the dignity, the decorum, appropriate to … the frightful riff-raff we shall always be' (Balzac 1971: 538).

Flaubert, who invented the modern novel, was much more resolutely hostile to the ideals of his century than Balzac. A man of the dark Enlightenment, he loathed the democracy of public opinion, colonialism and the moral order. He feared that industrialization, or the entry of the masses into history, would lead people to adhere to futile beliefs such as the worship of scientism and obscurantist cults. On the other hand, he was very keen on pornography, revived its delights during his travels in the East,
²⁶
and wrote corrosive accounts of the history of his century. ‘In Flaubert, and thanks to Flaubert, the basic features of post-revolutionary literature are defined in very assertive terms; negativity, which is not refusal but a participatory hostility, not a rejection, but a polemical internalization, not flight but an offensive insertion, not nihilism but a lucid and creative irony […] Flaubert thinks and writes against his century in the way that one marches by countermarching or sails against the wind' (Duchet 2001: 20).
²⁷

The best way to understand how Flaubert sets about destroying the ideals of the new bourgeois society in an almost Sadean fashion is to read
Avocat impérial
Ernest Pinard's summing up for the prosecution and then
Avocat
Sénard's speech for the defence.
²⁸

Pinard criticized Flaubert for his failure to respect the rules laid down by public morality. He claimed that the author of this sulphurous book was pretending to tell the story of the adulteries of a provincial woman, and was describing vices only in order to condemn them. In fact, he went on, the writer was using the very style of his story to pervert the rules of both the novel and morality, and colluded in his heroine's destructive
jouissance
. Because he had created her, he had to be found guilty, of hating marriage, advocating adultery and lust, encouraging the financial ruin of households, neglecting maternal instincts and, finally, making an apologia for suicide.

In order to illustrate his point, Pinard noted that Flaubert had offended religion and morality by travestying language and inverting the norms of rhetoric. The author spoke, for example, of the ‘stains of marriage' and the ‘disillusionments of adultery', when he should have spoken of the ‘disillusionments of marriage' and ‘the stains of adultery'. And although he claimed to be criticizing the way his heroine was humiliated because she had sinned, he was simply painting a sumptuous portrait of her lascivious, provocative and voluptuous beauty. And when, finally, he described her lingering and agonizing death, he introduced the repellent figure of the Blind Man, whose singing profaned the prayers of the dying. According to the magistrate, Flaubert described the dying Emma as a sniggering devil who defied the laws of God: ‘ “The Blind Man!”, she cried out. And Emma began to laugh, an atrocious, frantic, desperate laugh at the imagined sight of the beggar's hideous face, stationed in the eternal darkness like a monster … A convulsion threw her down on the mattress. They all drew near. Her life had ended' (Flaubert 2003: 305).

In his closing speech for the defence, Senard argued before the magistrate that the novel offended neither religion nor morality, as it painted vice only in order to inspire horror. As we know, Flaubert was acquitted (‘Procès contre Gustave Flaubert: 682):

Pinard was not wrong to analyse Flaubert's text in the way that he did in this exchange. And if he had been better acquainted with the rough drafts, his summing up would have been beyond his wildest dreams.
²⁹

Emma is a rebel without a cause, always in search of some destiny other than her own. She is the sexual slave of her first lover, who whips her, and is incapable of doing her duty as a wife and mother. She is the perfect embodiment of female
jouissance,
of the madness of
amour fou
and of the attractions of suicide, or of all the things whose harmful effects were constantly denounced by a medical science that could not domesticate them. Afflicted with the multiple symptoms of a nervous illness
³⁰
– feverishness, convulsions, vomiting – she is also drowning in the melancholic contemplation of her unsatisfied desire. Half way between Justine and Juliet, and unable to choose between the misfortunes of virtue and the prosperities of vice, Flaubert's heroine can find her way only by destroying herself through a sacrilegious act. She swallows handfuls of powdered arsenic.

The world in which she lived was full of grotesque figures: a corrupt money lender, a lecherous lawyer, a husband who is perverted by his own foolishness, a fearful lover who is enchanted by the spell he casts over her, a mad blind man straight from some beggars' opera, who was born with a club foot that was amputated in terrible conditions and, worst and most perverse of all, Monsieur Homais, a sinister pharmacist who is half way between David Tissot and Ambroise Tardieu.

Because he wants to be rational, generous, positivist, erudite and anti-clerical, Homais emerges from Flaubert's picture as the very opposite of what he claims to be: he is miserly, ignorant, obscurantist, has a fetish about philtres and poisons and is fascinated by the scalpel and pustules. Being the very epicentre of the stupidity
³¹
that is eating away at modern society, Homais turns into a devil
³²
just as Emma, who is supposed to be the embodiment of vice, is converted into a secular saint.

The great figure of the virtue, science and the Sovereign good suddenly appears to challenge this stupidity, like a ghost from another time. The imbeciles regard Dr Larivière as a demon (Flaubert 1973: 299–300):

Having described this scene, which will be remembered by none of those who witnessed it, Flaubert ends his novel with Homais's triumph. After the death of Charles Bovary, the devil in green slippers forces his hygienic policy on the inhabitants of Yonville. He dreamt it up in his gloomy shop as he manipulated his potions, poisons and instruments of torture. In the name of science and progress, he drives all the undesirables – the poor, the sick, the barefoot tramps, the abnormal and the vagabonds – away from the region so that he can enjoy, perfectly legally, his hatred of the human race: ‘He is doing infernally well; the authorities handle him carefully and public opinion is on his side. He has just received the Legion of Honour' (Flaubert 203: 327).

Defining himself as ‘a patriot of humanity' who was convinced that progress was on the march even when it appeared to have fallen asleep, Victor Hugo proceeded to invert the codes of literary narration in a rather different way. In 1856, Flaubert described how Homais was perverting the republican ideal. A few years later, Victor Hugo dragged society's accursed share from the depths: convicts, criminals, beggars, pimps, prostitutes, abandoned children …

He thus brought to light the immense dung heap that existed inside the city – which is symbolized both by the barricades
³³
and by the sewers – and turned it into the deconstructed armature on which the apparently solid edifice of bourgeois normality was built. As he put it in the epigraph to
Les Misérables
(Hugo 1982 [1862]: 15):

And in order to describe the subterranean world in which norms are inverted – men degraded, women subjected and children atrophied – and in which the aspiration towards grace and the attractions of abjection coexist, Hugo comes up with ingenious combinations of contradictory formulae: ‘the acropolis of barefoot tramps', ‘an Olympian sewer', ‘a vile angel', a hideous hero', or ‘it was a dung heap and it was Sinai', ‘our dung is gold' or ‘shadow, that is to say light', and so on.

Born in poverty and consumed by the desire for evil, Jean Valjean is a minuscule and nameless hero. After twenty years in the penal colony, he enters, thanks to Hugo's pen, into the parallel history of the destitute in the autumn of 1815, just as Napoleon is making his exit from history. The disaster of Waterloo is described, half way through the novel, as the apotheosis of an imperial destiny in which three figures symbolizing the destiny of the century become secretly involved: the transgressive, mystical, incestuous and redemptive figure of the magnificent Valjean, the filthy and criminal figure of the repulsive Thénardier, and the sordid, tragic figure of the stupid Javert.

Converted to the love of Good by Monsignor Myriel, bishop of Digne and a holy man who is half secularized and cares nothing for the honours of the Church,
³⁴
the former convict has never experienced any physical relationship. He has never loved a father, a mother, a brother, a sister, a wife, a lover or a friend. But, having been initiated into grace in the course of his metamorphosis, he becomes mayor of Montreuil, and goes by the very feminine name of Monsieur Madeleine. It is at this point that he meets Fantine, a former prostitute who, like him, is being persecuted by Inspector Javel. He promises her that he will rescue her daughter Cosette from the clutches of Thénardier who, together with his wife and his two daughters, has inflicted the worst humiliations on her.
³⁵
Nine months later – the duration of a pregnancy – Valjean rescues the girl, gives her a fabulous doll, takes away her rags and dresses her in black so that she can wear mourning for a mother whose identity is unknown to her.