Semantic Instability in Manon Lescaut

 

Quoted passages are my own translations with the original French provided in endnotes.

 

     The Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut has proven a popular favorite.  Reprinted hundreds of times, Manon is as well the subject of no less than six operas, three of which (Auber, Puccini, Massenet) remain in the repertoire.  Once sufficiently transgressive to be censored, the text is now taught as an exemplar of classic prose style. 

     Surely the principal appeal of the story is the emotional intensity of its characters.  The narrative’s energy derives from the immoderate love of the Chevalier de Grieux, conceived at first seeing his beloved  and never thereafter flagging and the attachment of Manon to a life of luxury which she pursues constantly, only to die when it seems beyond her reach.  Today readers are likely to interpret their behavior as self-destructively addictive.  Yet such a reading is surely at least in part anachronistic.  Though this sort of psychological analysis is not directly derived from the text, several inconsistent interpretations of their affair are suggested, leaving the question of the meaning of the sad story of the Chevalier de Grieux and his beloved Manon at once overdetermined (with multiple explanations) and underdetermined (with none clearly victorious over the others).  At different points in the narration the action is variously described in terms of Christian morality, a question of sensibility, a predetermined fate, and a matter of social class.

     The author as well as his main character being clerics, it is unsurprising that Christian morality plays a role.  To encourage improvements in morals had been a standard justification for literature for centuries.   The frame narrator justifies his story in the “Avis de l’Auteur” as “a terrifying example of the force of the passions” [1].  He hopes his work will serve for the purpose of “moral instruction” [2].  Furthermore, the narration ends with the Chevalier’s apparent reform and return to his family and to a more regular life in less ethically perilous waters.  After that, presumably, nothing happens worthy of note.  One might read all the novel’s suffering as the consequence of moral lapses.  Manon is consistently a loose woman, albeit one with considerable good-natured charm and, apparently, a certain genuine attachment to the Chevalier, while he, by cohabiting with her while unmarried, brings disaster after disaster upon himself and falls into not only defying his father and lying, but theft as well and even murder.

     This didacticism, though, is no stronger than either the Abbé’s or the Chevalier’s consistency to their vows.  In fact, Manon Lescaut is a novel of sensibility, a genre that generally celebrates access to emotions and the development of strong feelings.  Though fainting is more characteristic of women than men in late eighteenth century life and literature, the Chevalier’s swoon when he hears of Manon’s faithlessness from his father is testament to his emotional sensitivity.  He thinks well of himself and even Manon, with her thoroughly predictable disappearances and betrayals, seems more absurd and childish than malicious.  To her sexuality is natural and its use inevitable.  For him reform, dull and eventless in  comparison to the wild swings of fortune during his affair with Manon, is still possible, while she must die.  The author’s protestations of moral purpose resemble those of Defoe and Richardson and even the medieval Pearl-poet who in Cleanness who provides a lurid account of goings-on in Sodom likewise in the service of moral instruction.

     An even broader, though shallower, approach is suggested by the Chevalier himself when he reflects on his problems and decides all is due to fate, to “those specific blows of fate attached to the ruin of a wretch from which virtue cannot defend a person and which wisdom cannot foresee.” [3]  The only response is then passivity.  “Let us leave our fortune in the care of heaven” [4].  This serves primarily as an excuse when the Chevalier feels like dodging a sense of his own responsibility for his difficulties.  It is as well the attitude Manon expresses when she first enters the story and says of her plight, “It seems to have been the will of Heaven, since there was no way to avoid it.” [5] 

     Quite often his decision-making is governed neither by Christian dictates nor some irresistible ἀνάγκη, but rather by the standards of aristocratic behavior, the prizing of honor that results from good breeding.  Class is linked to morality at the outset when the frame narrator notes that he addresses people “of a certain order of spirit and good breeding” [6].  Tiberge appeals to his honor in attempting to reform him [7].  He sees Manon’s brother as “a brutal man with no principles of honor” [7], and the Chevalier regularly evaluates his own behavior by considering what is expected of members of his class. 

     Should one’s acts be governed by Christian (or secular) moral dictates?  Is extravagant love a sign of a noble sensitivity?  Is every event inevitable and predetermined?  Each of these options is raised but not settled in the novel.  This shifting among interpretations of behavior arises not from sloppiness, however, but from precision.   Since the Chevalier himself (and some might suspect also his creator) vacillated among the alternatives of simple resignation, Christian ambitions, and the desire to act honorably, all the while drawn ever further downstream by an overwhelming erotic passion, it is surely right to include all these elements in his representation.  There is no more certainty in the world of the Chevalier de Grieux than in that of his author or one of his readers.  Just like the fictional character, all people respond to a variety of registers of value, acting now for an ethical reason, then in an effort to impress, again with religious principles in mind, and sometimes – not necessarily due to weakness or foolishness -- simply submitting to experience.  The Chevalier is no more inconsistent than we are.

 

 

 

1.  “Un exemple terrible de la force des passions,” page 32, line 17 in the 2016 Flammarion edition edited by Hélêne Bernard.  Other references to destiny are found on pages 18, 45, 82, 100, 221.

2.  “Instruction des mœrs” p. 32, ll. 30-31.

3.  “Je la lui représentai comme un de ces coups particuliers du destin qui s’attache a la ruine d’un misérable, et dont il est aussi impossible a la vertu de se défendre qu’il l’a été a la sagesse de les prévoir.” p. 82, ll.  1306-1309.

4.  “Laissons au ciel le soin de notre fortune.” P. 198, ll. 1912-1913. 

5.  “C’était apparemment la volonté de Ciel, puisqu’il ne lui laissait nul moyen de l’éviter” p. 44, ll. 244-245.

6.  “Personnes d’un certain ordre d’esprit et de politesse,” p. 32, ll. 37-38. 

7.  P. 86, l. 1427.

8.  “C’était un homme brutale et sans principes d’honneur,” p. 74, l. 1077.

Hazard Yet Forward

 

 

Seton arms, originally only the tressured crescents, is here quartered to include alliances through marriage

 

     I have little enthusiasm for tracing genealogy.  Back four or five generations, the research becomes ever more challenging, yet the rewards shrink since the findings have little discernable relation to one’s own life.  Our ancestors multiply by the factor of two (that is, doubling) every generation.  Everyone has heard the story first told in the thirteenth century by Ibn Khallikan of how the inventor of chess asked as his reward to be given one grain of rice for the first square on the game board, two for the second, four for the third, then eight and so on, resulting, to the king’s surprise in a greater quantity than the entire world produces. 

     The same mathematics, of course, apply to everyone’s number of direct ancestors.  This means that, were one to look a thousand years in the past, estimating three generations per century, we each are descended from a number of people that can be calculated by raising two to the thirtieth power, a number over a billion, over a  thousand times the earth’s population at the time.  Now, this number is not in fact accurate due to the fact that people have very often, particularly in the past, married first cousins with shared grandparents, thereby obliging some individuals to fill multiple slots in the family tree, but the general point is clear.   Tracing only direct patrilineal descent simplifies the matter immensely, though, of course, one is equally closely related to the great crowds of their spouses and their spouses’ families. 

     I have several relatives intrigued by family history who have told me that people with my surname have passed in and out of Scots history for centuries some of whom were given a tartan and a coat of arms.  Now I know that a few generations back, my patrilineal ancestors were homesteaders and I rather suspect that the Seatons (or Setons, Seytons, Seetons) who came to America in the seventeenth century left more memories of want than castles behind in the old country.  There can be little doubt that, going back several hundred years, most everyone’s forebears were for the most part peasants or farm laborers. 

     Yet I rather like the doughty fire-spouting wyvern that tops the ducal coronet on the Seton arms and I find the slogan attached to the coat of arms suggestive and appealing.  “Hazard yet forward,” though certainly a war cry in origin, and likely originally meant to indicate enthusiastic support for the king, expresses a sentiment sufficiently general to provide buoyant encouragement in many settings more pleasant than the battlefield.  I like the airy sound of it, the spirit willingly accepting an uncertain outcome, the progress into an uncharted future, the greeny optimism.  It reminds me of the Yiddish paper, the Forward, and of the use of “Adelante!” in Cuba and other Latin countries. 

     In these cases the anticipated future is a positive change, but of course we hazard yet forward every day without the pleasant expectation of likely progress in the long term.  After all, we are all riding time’s conveyor belt, though for us the end is not manufacture but instead deterioration and eventual disassembly.  This fact cannot be changed, only one’s attitude is in part voluntary.  So, if a wistful feeling of regret at the transitory character of things of this world is unavoidable, it is fruitless (and seems in fact ridiculous when not pitiful) to lament the universal limits of human life.  Every morning when a person rises, it is to “hazard yet forward,” and a failure of this spirit is what the medieval church condemned as acedia, condemned by Aquinas as a flight from God.  Today it would be labeled depression, the psychiatric epidemic of our time.   

     The word hazard, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was originally used in Spain and may well have Arabic antecedents.  It was the name of a game played with dice which has survived into modern times but was first recorded in English in 1300.  Within a hundred years the meaning had expanded to apply to any risk or chance, and by the time of the Renaissance the word implied a negative outcome: “risk of loss or harm, peril, jeopardy.”    

     Shakespeare regularly employs the word hazard in the second of these senses, referring not to a danger but to any chance, a meaning that now sounds slightly literary, perhaps its most dramatic use leans toward the third.  Richard III, when he sees he is doomed at the Battle of Bosworth Field, yet remains resolute, declaring to Catesby, “Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,/ And I will stand the hazard of the die.”

     “Hazard yet forward” as the motto of evolution reverts to more positive expectations both within and beyond the human sphere.  While evolution need not move toward greater complexity, it always serves to better equip an organism for survival and reproduction.  Always striving to pursue incremental improvements seems the habit of our DNA.  Random variation through natural selection is responsible for the magnificent perfection of all organisms, including humanity.  One present product of this immense and fabulously complex process is, of course, our present speculations, these words materializing on my screen. 

     Even more fundamentally, there is chance in all things, even, as the quantum physicists tell us, at the very base of material existence.   Without this unpredictability, we would inhabit an entirely mechanistic universe in which all of history was implied by circumstances at the time of the Big Bang.  When Einstein wrote to Max Born that “the Old One” does not play at dice, he did not consider the possibility that God is dice, that his nature is a wide-open roll, realized and refigured as every instant passes.  Indeed, dice have been used by people since prehistoric times and their first use was not gambling and recreation but divination, like other chance operations: the flight of birds, the cracking of a tortoise shell, the reading of entrails, the I Ching and the Ifa oracle. 

     Perhaps we might all become devotees of a neo-pagan cult of Tyche (Τύχη), called Fortuna by the Romans, the goddess of chance.  In his description of Argos Pausanias notes a temple of Fortuna in which he says Palamedes dedicated the dice he had invented.  Originally associated chiefly with good luck, Tyche was depicted with a cornucopia and often a gubernaculum or ship’s rudder, which might suggest either a hope for safety in sea voyages or perhaps simply the steering of events.  By Hellenistic times her governance had spread to all events, both welcome and feared, and Polybius at the outset of his histories concedes control of all men’s affairs to her.  In spite of his sympathy for Christianity, Constantine built a temple to Tyche (which Julian later spurned) in Constantinople.  Have we today any better understanding of our destiny?  Any better way to predict the future?  Her rule, it seems, continues.

     We cannot foresee a single day, but, whatever our experiences, we are each likely to find ourselves eventually in the position of Byrhtwold in “The Battle of Maldon,” aware of a bitter doom that cannot be dodged.  May we at that time be as unbowed as that antique hero who declared, “the mind must be tougher, keener the heart, the spirit stronger, as our strength fades.”  When only self-possession remains, fortitude is the sole dignity left us, a final challenge to hazard yet forward. 

 

 

The family history research has been conducted by my sister Mary Frances Wallner and my cousin Carol  Ann Seaton. 

The passage from Pausanias is found his Description of Greece (or Traveling Around Greece, Ἑλλάδος Περιήγησις) 2.20.3.

Polybius’ comment is found in his Histories (Ἱστορίαι) 1.4.

In the original Old English the quotation from the ”Battle of Maldon” reads "Hiġe sceal þē heardra,     heorte þē cēnre,/  mōd sceal þē māre     þē ūre mæġen lȳtlað.”

 

Theory and Practice in Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money

 

 

     Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money is often regarded as the exemplary proletarian novel due to its author’s lifelong loyalty to the American Communist Party and his theoretical manifesto “Toward Proletarian Art” [1].  He receives thereby a secure place in literary history, but one little valued or dismissed altogether by many critics.  He is often blamed but sometimes praised for non-literary factors, the fellow travelers of the ‘thirties and since admiring him for his politics while anti-Communists are all but certain to denounce him for the same reason.  Discernment of the true merits of his work is ill-served by such a non-aesthetic and  reductive standard [2].   

     Those who think little of Gold’s fiction and regard it as mere agitprop without aesthetic value are influenced, of course, of the practice of what was officially recognized as “socialist realism” by the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 which required that fiction must be proletarian, typical, realistic, and partisan.  The policy was reinforced and tightened in the 1946 Zhdanov Doctrine which dominated Soviet culture until the fall of the USSR, resulting in the government’s acceptance of much art of a pedestrian character and suppression of more nonconformist work.

     This rigid management of the arts was far from inevitable after the Bolshevik victory.  In 1920 Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner published "The Realist Manifesto," arguing for artistic freedom and some prominent Bolsheviks, notably Trotsky, always maintained that writers should have a free hand [3].  The blossoming of certain arts, particularly poetry, film, and graphic design, before Stalin’s assumption of power implies an alternative development that might have been possible under a government calling itself communist. 

     Well before the narrow mandates that dominated Soviet art for decades, Gold published his theoretical essay “Toward Proletarian Art.”  His ideas are best understood in their original context, as a reaction to his mentor Max Eastman whose collection Colors of Life (1918) opened with a prefatory  essay on “American Ideals of Poetry.” 

     Eastman, an editor of The Masses which had declared itself an unreservedly revolutionary journal,  felt he ought to apologize for writing personal rather than political poems, acknowledging with some diffidence the “crimsoned waves” of protest against the capitalist system.  For him “the essence of life” can be found only in the personal, not in “monotonous consecration to a general principle.”  Noting the conflict between a formalist tradition in American literature descending from Poe which aims at crafting beautiful art objects and a more expressive lineage from  Whitman which for him encourages “the free expression of emotion,” he advocates for “a certain adjudication between them which a perfectly impersonal science might propose.” 

     Gold, too, in “Toward Proletarian Art,” in spite of the title, expresses an ambivalence toward explicitly political writing, unwilling to abandon either the goal of a socially revelatory literature or artistic independence.  He is able to articulate the juncture more adeptly than Eastman, however, due to his undeniably working-class origins in the tenements of the Lower East Side, which Jews Without Money describes so unforgettably. 

     Wishing no less than Eastman to strive toward the presentation of a realism of consciousness, he insists that “only through the symbolism of the world around us and manifest in us can we draw near the fierce, deadly flame.  The things of the world are all portals to eternity ”  For each individual “Life’s meaning was to be found only in the great or mean days between each man’s birth and death, and in the mystery and terror hovering over every human head.”  For him that nexus of experience out of which artist creation arises is centered in the circumstances of his childhood.  “All that I know of Life I learned in the tenement.”

     Thus for him there is no contradiction between the personal and the political.  His own solution is authentically individual, true to his own history while at the same time it is collective, reflecting the experience of his whole generation of immigrants.  “I would show only, if I can, what manner of vision Life has vouchsafed me, what word has descended on me in the midst of this dark pit of experience, what forms my says and nights might have taken, as they proceed in strange nebular turning towards new worlds of art.”  For him there is no gap between realism, his autobiography, and propagandizing: each requires the others.  “Only through the symbolism of the world around us and manifest in us can we draw near the fierce, deadly flame. The things of the world are all portals to eternity.”

     The limits of his position are clear in the fact that he is loath to prescribe to others.  After all, he admits that everyone has a story to tell: “Life burns in both camps, in the tenements and in the palaces, but can we understand that which is not our very own?”  To Gold each artist can only offer “the special revelation Life has given them.  I respect the suffering and creations of all artists” which are bound to be “deeper than theories.” 

     There are indications that Gold’s Communist orthodoxy was hardly absolute.  Jews Without Money in fact received a negative review from The Daily Worker which complained about the cover price and called the novel only “semi-proletarian.”  He was according to some sources an “indifferent” party member who rarely appeared at meetings and complained about their “tedium.”  He differed with colleagues who did not wish to include sports coverage in the paper, and, after denouncing swing music in accordance with the approved line, he reversed himself when many jazz fans wrote to object. 

     He is even willing to use the quasi-religious language more characteristic of mystics, Symbolists, and Aesthetes.  “Only an artist understands art,” and for that reason “to censor the poor brute’s murmurings would be sacrilege. Whatever they are, they are significant and precious, and to stifle the meanest of Life’s moods taking form in the artist would be death.”  He speaks of “holy passion” and “artist-saints” and maintains that “the Social Revolution” is “Life at its fullest and noblest,” indeed, it is “the religion of the masses.” 

     Like Eastman he pays homage to Whitman, with the sole reservation that America’s national poet saw no development beyond bourgeois democracy.  This accusation of failure to glimpse the possibility of a socialist future is, of course, accurate, and, while it makes little sense to complain of Whitman for this reason, it does indicate Gold’s values [5]. 

     “Toward Proletarian Art” opens with a description of the contemporary social turmoil as “The Apocalypse” and argues that, since “the old economic order is dying,” surely innovative forms” of art will accompany the new age.  Gold was notoriously critical of other contemporary movements, attacking not only Surrealism and the likes of Gertrude Stein but also the more manifestly humanist writing of Thorton Wilder.  Since the Romantic Era, critics had particularly praised works of introspection and experimentation, but Gold labels all such artists “self-absorbed.”  They are for him The Hollow Men [6].  Such writers, he feels “have all been sick,” as they lack “roots in the people.”  “The art ideals of the capitalistic world,” he goes on, “isolated each artist as in a solitary cell, there to brood and suffer silently and go mad. We artists of the people will not face Life and Eternity alone. We will face it from among the people. We must lose ourselves again in their sanity.” 

     In practice this meant providing a vivid account of life in the tenements, just as Upton Sinclair and Frank Norris had done earlier for other settings.  Some critics have belittled Jews Without Money as a casual unselfconscious memoir, while its admirers have often celebrated it for much the same reason.  The original review in  the New York Times described the novel as having “no story but a stirring panorama of the east side of his childhood.   with a hand as unerring as truth itself . . .  Mr. Gold has captured all of this life with its radii within the net of his words.  It has the deep shadows of a Rembrandt picture, and the high challenge of a Whitman poem.” [6]  The verisimilitude of his depiction of life on the Lower East Side is uncompromising, including its gangs and prostitutes, its anti-Semites and Jewish villains.  Social injustice is countered by the narrator’s mother’s quiet dedication to her family’s survival, while his father never loses his conviction that he can make it in America.  The story is never overdetermined.  There are no heroic radicals, no caricatured bosses, simply a life remembered, and the reader needs no more explicit justification to understand why the working poor might turn from childhood illusions like Buffalo Bill and adult ones like an imminent Messiah toward the redemptive promise of  socialism.

     Yet the books ends with a strident call for revolution in a tone different from anything which has come before. 

     O workers’ Revolution, you brought hope to me, a lonely suicidal boy.  You are the true Messiah.  You will destroy the East Side when you come, and build there a garden for the human spirit.

     O Revolution, that forced me to think, to struggle and to love.

     O great Beginning! 

     A paperback edition of Jews Without Money was published by Avon in 1965 omitted the call for revolution with which Gold concluded his novel.  The fact that this was a blatant example of censorship does not alter the fact that the book loses little without those last five sentences.  If the revolutionary imperative is not implied by the entire narration, it is an aesthetic misstep.

     Just as the conclusion of Jews Without Money seems abrupt, Gold’s theory and practice remain imperfectly harmonized.  He clearly calls for innovative artistic work to match contemporary social changes: “I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past under opposite influences.”  Like Trotsky, though, he shrinks from mandating just what new standards would look like.  Both the commitment to change and the disjunction between ideology and fiction are significant, the first to indicate the author’s passionately held values and the second to remind readers that the political and the aesthetic occupy different realms of culture and neither can dictate to the other. 

 

 

1.  Originally published in The Liberator, vol. 4,no. 2 (February, 1921).

2.  Foe an exception, see Richard Tuerk, "’Jews Without Money’ as a Work of Art,” Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-), Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring 1988).

2.  For Trotsky, see his book Literature and Revolution.  My essay “Marxism’s Limits” discusses Trotsky’s attitude.

3.  J. Hoberman, “Mike Gold, Avant-Garde Bard of Proletarian New York,” The Nation, May 12, 2021.

4.  This sort of criticism is all to common in recent years.  See the devastating critique of the Norton edition of Emma in James Seaton’s From Plato to Post-Modernism.in which Seaton quotes a feminist criticism of Austen for failing to demonstrate that “impoverished middle-class women are victims of a capitalist system.”

5.  This title of one of Gold’s collections of essays turns Eliot’s phrase against itself. 

6.  March 23, 1930, “Boyhood on the Old East Side; Michael Gold Puts Down His Memories of Tenement Life, Pushcart Peddlers and Gang Wars in a Vivid Autobiography.”