LE SIECLE INEPUISABLE: Mélanges offerts à Fernande Bassan || Reading and the Voice of Death:...

Reading and the Voice of Death: Balzac's "Le Message"Author(s): Ross ChambersSource: Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3/4, LE SIECLE INEPUISABLE:Mélanges offerts à Fernande Bassan (Spring-Summer 1990), pp. 408-423Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23533316 .

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Reading and the Voice of Death: Balzac's "Le Message"

Ross Chambers

"All that happens and is the case is accidental." L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus logicophilosophicus (6.14; 145).

"A une lieue de Pouilly, la diligence versa."1 Falls, stumbles and similar accidents—manifestations of loss of control—are a staple of fic tion. At the point in La Princesse de Clèves where the Princess learns that her imprudent confession to her husband has become the object of

public gossip, this always graceful lady stumbles physically: "elle

s'embarrassa dans sa robe et fit un faux pas."2 If Père Rouaut had not broken his leg and called Charles Bovary to set it, the long "fall" that is Emma's life might not have happened, or would have happened otherwise. Such incidents symbolize something negative in their re

spective heroine's careers: Mme de Clèves stumbles but saves herself, Mme Bovary falls irrevocably. But falls also resolve narrative prob lems: it is Louisa Musgrove's headlong fall down the steps that sets

things right in Persuasion, and the narrator's stumble on the uneven

paving-stones, towards the end of La Recherche, manifests, as does the initial incident of the madeleine, the accidental as the mode of occur rence of saving epiphanies.

Working with models of narrative that function epistemologically as controlling models, narratology has shown very little interest in the

category of the accidental in narrative plots, or in the corresponding phenomenon of noise in the channel of narrative communication.'1 One recent sign of critical interest is however David Marshall's The

Strange Effects of Sympathy, which draws attention to the frequency of falls and accidents in (mainly) eighteenth-century fiction in connection with the problematics of mediation, a stumbling-block indeed for an

ideology of unmediated communication, or "sympathy."4 And Michel Pierssens has argued, in an important and suggestive article,^ that "what fiction knows" is that narration is an irreversible event, and that as such it is governed, as are all such events, by the laws of ther

modynamics, that is by conditions of entropy and increasing disorder. More generally, William Paulson makes a persuasive case, in The Noise of Culture,6 for considering literature not as a means of communi cation but as a "noisy channel," out of which we produce meanings

408



Ross Chambers 409

through readings by a process of complexification that is analogous to

the characteristics of self-organizing systems as these are posited in

theoretical biology. Where ideologies of order make implicit reference to Laplace's hy

pothetical demon (the hypothesis being that "chance" events would be

seen as orderly if all the relevant chains of causality could be known), critical interest in accidents is a sign of the emergence of a new episte mology, presided over by another imp, Maxwell's demon. This episte mology, which has been championed most prominently by Michel

Serres, presupposes the primacy of disorder and hence the predomi nance of the accidental. It is in the light of this epistemology that the

theory of narrative might begin to look at falls, stumbles and the like, and to regard them as indices of the uncontrollability of narrative events. For narrative communication occurs in time, it is therefore nec

essarily mediated, and because it is mediated (because it requires a

channel and a code) it is subject to degrees of interference and "noise," that is, of uncontrollability. Working with grossly oversimplified models of communication and largely ignoring the situated quality of narrative discourse, classical narratology has inevitably encountered a

stumbling-block of its own, a skandalon, not so much in the falls and stumbles of narrative plots as in what I take these to figure: the medi ated quality of narrative communication itself. But it turns out, when one begins to look, that this—the scandal of mediation—is also the scandal of which narrative itself obsessively speaks, and it does so, I want to suggest, through its interest in falls and accidents.

Of course, fictional narrative is better known, and much more exten

sively studied, for its interest in the scandals of emotional triangular ity: adultery, jealousy, hesitation between suitors, and so forth.7 It has been less clearly perceived that such emotional triangularity is

frequently, if not regularly, linked with situations of communicational

triangularity in which messages (characteristically love-letters) sup posedly passing between an addresser and an addressee (as a "dual" communication) become triangulated through interference, error or acci dent. This may be the result of interception on the part of a third per son, or of uncertainty as to the originator of the message, or finally of an error of address or of delivery substituting an unintended reader for the addressee. Balzac's little known short story "Le Message" is a case in

point: the accident of the overturned carriage that initiates its action

(the accident without which there would be no narrative message) pro vokes a situation in the plot of mediated communication that blends with the classic triangle of husband, wife and lover (and indeed—as

Dorothy Kelley points out 8—its Oedipal version of father, mother and

son). Indeed, that the stumbling-block of mediation is at the heart of



410 Nineteenth-Century French Studies

this story, as of so many other Balzac narratives, is perhaps suggested (or at least foreshadowed) by its very title, since a "message" implies a

messenger and a mission—all these words deriving from Latin mittere, to send, and all these functions implying an act of delegation, and hence the intervention of a triangulating third party in the supposedly dual act of communication.

I have argued elsewhere^ that the communicational triangles of the traditional fictional corpus are allegories of reading; they figure read

ing as an "accidental" interference in the system, one that is a by-prod uct of the mediated character of communication but is for that very rea son essential: it is both inevitable and indispensable. Reading is fig ured either as a function of a wrong delivery that is nevertheless

legitimated by the text (e.g. Balzac's "Etude de femme"), or of some

duality or duplicity at the point of emission (as in Modeste Mignon), or

finally as an act of interception, alteration or retransmission (of which the classic instance is Valmont's ingérence between Danceny and Cécile in Les Liaisons Dangereuses). I have further argued, however, that fiction depends for its "authority" on just such an understanding of

reading as a triangulation of discourse, that is, as a (necessary) noise in the system, a parasitage of the narrative message. The interference of a "third instance" as an accident of origin, transmission or delivery produces the discourse as functionally double. On one hand it has the status of information passing between an addresser and an addressee (narrator and narratee in narratological parlance) but on the other hand it is produced by reading as meaning, through the intervention of a phenomenon of interpretation, that is, as an interaction of text and reader, neither the "text" nor the "reader" being identifiable

respectively with the narrative subject ("addresser" or "narrator") or the "addressee"/"narratee." "Meaning" is produced because the text is a "means" (a mediation); and the power of fiction is its power to trigger (I argue, through errors, discrepancies and other forms of "noise" in the narrator/narratee relation) a switch such that a "reader" intervenes

and realizes the discourse, not solely as the transmission of informa tion, but also in the mode of interpretability, a mode consisting in the (limitless) production of significance. The scandal of fiction is, then, that its authority consequently depends on a necessary loss of control over its own discourse, this loss of control being figured both by the

physical falls and stumbles, the accidents of plot, and by the communicational noise—the accidents of discourse—that plague the characters.

In "Le Message," a single name is suggested, on the one hand for the scandalous vulnerability of discourse to accident, deviation and trian

gulation, and on the other for the strange power of resonance, the inex



Ross Chambers 411

haustible profundity of fiction: that name is death. That it is fiction that is subject, simultaneously and inextricably, to this scandalous vul

nerability and to this power of mysterious resonance—a power compa rable to that of dreams—is something the text makes clear by making careful distinctions between, on the one hand, the immature and incon

sequential chatter of the young but also the utilitarian discourse of in formation attributed to journalism, and on the other a discourse matured

by the touch of death and the intervention of "noise" or the accidental, a process that culminates in a dialogue of which the narrator specifies: "Le lendemain, cette scène nocturne, confondue dans mes rêves, me parut être une fiction" (328).^ That fiction is thus presented, not as a dis course in which information is transmitted in unilinear direction (as in so many classical models of communication, including those of narratol

ogy),n but as a scene of dialogue and exchange, appears to me to take us to the heart of the matter; and the title of my essay seeks to encapsu late an understanding that, if fiction is the voice in which death

speaks (a prosopopeia, then), the voice of death is itself a discourse

subject to, and indeed produced by, reading. The "scène nocturne" of "Le

Message," like so many of the great scenes (in the narratological sense) to which Balzacian narrative characteristically tends and toward which it inexorably builds, is a scene of reading . That this particular scene of reading (of fiction)—as a scene of dialogue, exchange and trans fer ( if not transference) "confondue dans mes rêves"—should so strik

ingly prefigure that "other scene" of which Freud speaks1^ is ... I he sitate to say "no accident"; but at least it is one of those accidents or co incidences that make one credit a Laplacean demon rather than a mere

imp of perversity.

"A une lieue de Pouilly, "

then, "la diligence versa. " Two young men fall from the impériale and one is crushed to death by the heavy vehi cle. The two have hitherto not so much communicated as communed in an "espèce d'intimité" that the narrator explains as an "attraction

magnétique" (314) between them. If their communication is (fantasized as) unmediated, it is because they are alter egos, doubles or versions of one another; more particularly, the basis of their intimacy is their re

lationship as "confrères en amour" (315)—each has as his mistress a

femme d'un certain âge and each relationship mirrors the other. So

they communicate without noise: "nous nous comprîmes à merveille sur tous les points essentiels de la passion" ( 314). But, as the narrator

points out, the charm of this youthful eloquence is a "charme naïf";

lacking maturity, it lacks depth and gravity . "Oh ! comme le vent em

portait vite nos paroles et nos douces risées ! " (315) . This discourse




without mediation or accident is also without consistency, it is light and slight; it is mere chatter.

All this is radically changed by the accident. In a voice at first in

terrupted by "gémissements" and soon cut off in mid-sentence, so that

the youthful narrator13 must make an interpretive effort ("son dernier

geste me fit comprendre que . . ."), the dying young man charges his friend with a mission, "un de ces soins à remplir auxquels les derniers voeux d'un mourant donnent un caractère sacré" (316). He is to deviate from his itinerary to fetch the vicomte 's mistress 's letters and return them to her in her château (his voyage thus changing both direction and destination), the vicomte's purpose being to obviate, through this use of a mediating messenger, his mistress ' s learning the painful news of his death "brusquement . . . par un journal" (i.e. a directly communicated information). The token of this changed discursive sta tus is a key, an object of complex symbolic connotation .

Keys function conventionally (cf. the "key" to a problem or puzzle) as metaphors of closure and resolution; but for that very reason (why is "closure" needed? ) they imply the loss of the sort of world of sponta neous understanding that the two friends had previously enjoyed. Indeed a key can figure mediation, given that a locked door is that which stands between two spaces and bars immediate access from one to the other. Thus, the young narrator cannot accomplish his "mission" without the key that gives him access, first to the letters, and then (by virtue of the letters) to Juliette's château. But in this particular case, the transfer of the key from the vicomte to his friend simultaneously legitimates the latter's role as delegate of the former, and so actual izes the split in identity whereby the messenger's voice will now speak the discourse of another, that of his dead friend: it is a token of the dual quality of mediated discourse. And this is all the more the case

because, in the story, the key has been driven deep into the vicomte's flesh by the weight of the overturned coach: the wound it makes ("la

plaie,"317) is therefore a signifier of death, but the place of the wound—the vicomte carried the precious key "en sautoir sur sa

poitrine" (316)—signifies both the message of love the narrator is to

carry and the new resonance his discourse will have, speaking one

might say from the cavity in which the emotions reside, but also the

power of death. As "gage de ma mission," the key qualifies him as

"messager de la mort" (318): it signifies both the new gravity of his

responsibilities and the complexity of the relations, communicational and emotional, in which he is henceforth engaged. It is, in short, the

key to his new maturity, the sign that youth is now behind him. It is not simply that, walking with "un mort sur [s]es épaules" and

comparing himself whimsically to Sosie in Molière's Amphytrion



Ross Chambers 413

(318), he is now conscious of a duality of identity and of discourse which will turn all his future encounters into subtly or eerily triangulated ones. It is also—and this is perhaps the deepest level of significance of the key—that death is contagious and can be transmitted, notably through discourse: the message of death is a death-dealing message and, as a result, the young man is about to start something of an epi demic of mortality, beginning with the old servant of the vicomte's mother: "elle tomba demi-morte sur une chaise en voyant cette clef em

preinte de sang" (317). She does not in fact die, but her discourse is in turn invaded by death, since the narrator will leave her, as he says, "poursuivant ses prosopopées" (317). If prosopopeia is the figure of

rhetoric that consists of giving a voice to the dead,14 the young man's own ghost-like role as "messager de la mort" has the effect of transfer

ring the quality of prosopopeia to the voice of those he encounters.

Death, once it has entered discourse, is pandemic; it propagates and contaminates other discourses as well.

So it is not really surprising that when the messenger of death reaches the castle of Montpersan, he discovers in it a place already marked as a space of death: the death he brings with his message is a death that he finds awaiting him. The château is like one of those en chanted castles of fairy-tale or romance: the door stands open, but is

guarded by two mastiffs; to find the countess, the narrator must seek his

way through the maze of the park, guided by a little girl whose white cloak bobs up and down, here and there, "semblable à un feu follet" (319). As a result, whereas his first, or "small" initiation into maturity consists of surviving the fall that kills his double, the vicomte, and be

coming the messenger of the latter's death, his second, or "great" initi ation will consist of the ordeal of learning a new relation to discourse in the château. He brings death and propagates it, but he has yet to attáin the understanding that death brings. And the first sign of this

understanding is a new insight into life, a power of vision that is not

coincidentally reminiscent of the powers attributed in Balzac's oeuvre to the realist author.

A moment ago, then, the narrator was fussing with the vanity of

youth over his shabby clothing, and just now, still discursively inno

cent, stammering out insignificant phrases. But now, suddenly: "Ces ni aiseries me permirent de juger d'un seul coup d'oeil, et d'analyser, avec une perspicacité rare à l'âge que j'avais, les deux époux .... Je pénétrai soudain dans tous les secrets du ménage ..." (320-321). He sees, then, as the dead themselves must see the lives of the living; and this new ma

turity of insight determines, equally suddenly, the second sign of the

young man's accession to a privileged status: he becomes capable of dis cursive tact and indirection, of mediation. "Je pénétrai soudain dans




tous les secrets du ménage, et pris une résolution diplomatique digne d'un vieil ambassadeur" (321). Notice how the concept of diplomacy as wor

thy of an "old ambassador" synthesizes mediation (ambassadorship) and maturity: to be touched by death is to become a messenger—a figure of discursive mediation—but to become a messenger is, in turn, to ap proach, by aging, the point of view, the clear-sightedness of the dead with respect to life. In short, it is time that enters discourse as the indirectness of mediation, and time that qualifies the messenger as an ambassador of the dead.

In case we should miss the importance of this moment, the text in sists on its occasional quality, and indeed its singularity: the narrator's new diplomacy is specifically linked to the adventure of the over turned coach and his visit, as messenger, to the château. "Ce fut peut être la seule fois de ma vie que j'eus du tact et que je compris en quoi con siste l'adresse des courtisans ou des gens du monde" (321). We need not be the dupes of this insistence, however, since it is clear—a point I will return to—that the ordeals of the narrator and the discursive maturity he acquires are those that qualify him for the role in which we, as

readers, know him: that of narrative subject, the teller of his own story. It is simply that his discursive rhetoric, as narrator, has little in com mon with the tricks, reticences and obliquities of the courtier or the po liteness of the fashionable. We will need to try to understand, then, how it is that, as narrator, he speaks as an ambassador and as a mes

senger of death without speaking "diplomatically"; and how, because his message is nevertheless a mediated one and cannot be communicated

directly, its prosopopeia—the authority it derives from its status as the voice of death—is for us, as readers, to grasp and indeed to realize. But how this may be—and how it is that the "voice of death" is a mat ter less of diplomacy than of reading—is precisely the mystery the re mainder of the story, in allegorical fashion, explores.

It is, of course, a mystery of triangulation: it takes a third to realize the unsaid (death) that resonates in the voice of the living messenger. Thus, in the castle, the indirection of the narrator's discourse goes hand in hand with an experience of triangularity that has a discursive and an emotional dimension. In the dynamic of husband, wife and lover, he

figures as the vicomte's substitute: at table, although he is an unex

pected guest, he finds a place already laid: "le mien, qui devait être le sien" (324). Simultaneously, his voice transmits the message of an other—is the "message" of another—so that in each conversation (first with the husband, then with the wife), a third (the vicomte or "death") is also "present." And when at night he receives the visit of the countess in his bedroom, their impassioned conversation is haunted

by, and substitutes for, the (adulterous) love-making one supposes



Ross Chambers 415

Juliette and her lover would have engaged in, but for the intervention of death. In this culminating episode, the two forms of triangularity in

fact blur; and this is the scene the narrator will recall, in the morning, as "une fiction." But by this point it is the countess who will have be come a kind of ghost, so that her visit to the bedroom is symmetrical with the narrator's ambassadorial visit to the château, as if the two visits were in a relation of exchange, the narrative visit to the château

being complemented by the erotic visit to the narrator. But for now it is the process whereby the countess becomes ghost-like that we need to

pursue, in order to grasp how the text understands the nature and

necessity of reading. For it is as a reader of the narrator's (indirect) message, of the un

said in his discourse, that she is in turn touched by death.

Tout à coup, elle eut une sorte de frisson, me jeta un regard fauve et prompt,

rougit et dit: "Il est vivant?

—Grand Dieu! quel mot terrible! j étais trop jeune pour en soutenir l'accent, je ne répondis pas ...

—Monsieur! monsieur, une réponse! s'écria-t-elle.

—Oui, madame .

—Cela est-il vrai? oh, dites-moi la vérité, je puis l'entendre. Dites! ...

Je répondis par deux larmes que m' arrachèrent les étranges accents par

lesquels ces phrases furent accompagnées. (324)

The narrator' s response ( "Oui, madame" ) is at best a prevarication (Oui, madame, je vais répondre"), at worst a lie ("Oui, madame, il est

vivant"). But it is readable; and its true message ("il est mort") is re ceived by the countess, as is shown by her doubting response. ("Cela est il vrai?"), and more significantly by the perturbation that is transmit ted to her own discourse, the "étranges accents" which in their turn so affect the narrator. The message of death has transferred itself from his discourse to hers without conscious intervention, let alone

explicitation, by either; and this is possible, it seems, because—as in the case of the château—the messenger finds the death that he brings. It is already in Juliette' s mind, as her initial question ("Il est vivant?") reveals. And just as the castle is the place where the narrator begins to understand the import of the message he has brought, it is Juliette's

"étranges accents" that now return to him, in the form of tears, the

impact of the message he has transferred to her (so that its signs are now present in his discourse, having been produced as it were, by her

reading of its sense . This passage is crucial, because the structure of exchange it enacts is

the model that foreshadows the narrative scenario, in which Juliette will be led to "return the favor" of the narrator's visit to her. But it is




crucial also because it shows that "death" is not a content separable from the "message": rather it is the mediated nature of discourse, which does not (or cannot) say what it "means"—its quality of

"sentness," if one will—that constitutes the message of death as a mat

ter of readability.15 As a consequence, death can be transmitted, it

seems, only to those who have already received it and who already know it, so that it is the receiver who in the final analysis must mani fest the understanding that gives the message, and the messenger, their

meaning and impact. There are obvious implications here for the textual allegory of reading: it is the realization of the voice of death that is in the message, but only because it realizes the message as the voice of death.

As a confirmation that the messenger brings death only to those al

ready touched by it, the text slips now into a comic mode in order to show the impact of the message on the husband. Afflicted with "une maladie grave" that condemns him to a strict diet, the count gives way to gluttony, a form of symbolic suicide that recalls the old servant's

falling "demi-morte" but simultaneously corresponds in time with

Juliette's more tragic reaction. For she has disappeared; the narrator, the maid and even the "vieux chanoine," leaving the insensitive hus band to polish off the meal, fear the worst and search the pièces d'eau of the property.

They find her in due course figuratively buried, "ensevelie au milieu du foin" (325), a mode of death that most significantly, and again as in the case of the servant, affects the quality of her voice. "Elle avait caché sa tête afin d'assourdir ses horribles cris, obéissant à une invinci ble pudeur: c'était des sanglots, des pleurs d'enfants, mais plus péné trants, plus plaintifs" (325-326). Both muffled and broken by sobs and

cries, the voice is traversed by noise (by the disorderly and the ac

cidental); it has become the discourse of death, a form of prosopopeia. It is this disappearance and the consequent transformation of Juliette's voice that convert her into the ghost-like figure who will visit the nar rator in his room: it is now she, and no longer he, who will be the

"messagjèrej de la mort." But meanwhile the narrator is left to observe:

"J'avais vu la nature dans toute sa vérité, sous deux aspects bien dif férents qui mettaient le comique au sein même de la plus horrible douleur" (326). The philosophical insight (the "truth" of nature is

death, producing life as a grotesque mixture of comedy and pain) is the culmination of the narrator's initiatory passage from youthful "insouciance" (321 ) to mature understanding (and again we can notice that, going from perception of "secrets de ménage" to a metaphysical grasp of the nature of life, he is pursuing the ideal scenario of Balzacian realism).



Ross Chambers 417

But the visit, when it comes, does not have philosophical signifi cance so much as it complements the narrator's philosophical vision by exploring the emotional and aesthetic implications of death's presence, as the "truth" of life. Her voice guttural, her pallid face with its su

pernatural calm picked out by the lamp, Juliette is transformed by death into the ghost of herself. "Elle était étiolée déjà comme une feuille dépouillée des dernières teintes qu'y imprime l'automne . . .: vous eussiez dit d'un nuage gris, là où naguère pétillait le soleil" (327). It is not paradoxical, I think, that communication between the two mes

sengers of death has now become simple and direct: "Je lui dis simple ment . . . l'événement rapide qui l'avait privée de son ami" (327). The return of the letters and the narrator's gift to the countess of a lock of the vicomte's hair; his receipt in return of her gift of tears (tears of

gratitude, "si voisine du bienfait" [328], that correspond to his tears in

response to her "étranges accents"), all signify that the characters are now communicating at an extremely deep and empathetic level

Their intimacy thus echoes the light-hearted intimacy of the two

young men on the impériale; but this is an intimacy that has been achieved, by leaving behind that first youthful level of communication and by passing through the intermediary stage of mediation, where discourse is disturbed by the noise of death and communication is

plagued by indirection, to a level where, it seems, death can speak di

rectly and without mediation. For, although the two are exchanging words, they are reading each other now, and with such an intensity of

passion (of emotion, but also of suffering) that meanings are transmitted from "les plus profondes régions de l'âme" (328). Consequently, it is sig nificant that this level—the level of "fiction"—is achieved as a mo ment of mutual exchange (symbolizing a communication that has gone beyond the obstacles of discourse) and simultaneously as a "frêle bon heur," a happiness the narrator reads in the countess's eyes but which she expresses as insight into his soul. "Ah! vous aimez! dit-elle. Soyez toujours heureux! Ne perdez pas celle qui vous est chère!" (328). A hap piness, then, that is consubstantial with the empathy between them; not youthful "insouciance" but its very opposite since it is a happiness achieved in full knowledge of its frailty, being achieved only through and as the knowledge of death.

Of course, one must return from the nocturnal experience of "fiction" to the daylight world; and the story concludes with the account of a more business-like exchange, also really an act of beneficence, tactfully managed by Juliette to enable the impoverished narrator to get back to Paris. What remains, however, is an understanding of reading not as a

reception of the voice of death but as the mode of mutual exchange in which death speaks. The narrator brings the message of death to the




castle only to find it already an enchanted place touched by death; his

message is transmitted to Juliette only because she is already aware of death and can recognize it as the necessary content of the sign that is the messenger' s presence ( in lieu of the vicomte). So it is her response that manifests the content of his message, drawing from him the con

firming sign of his tears. This exchange foreshadows the even deeper level of exchange that occurs between the two messengers of death in

the nocturnal scene of their intimate encounter. The message of death, in short, cannot be directly said; it can only

be indirectly communicated; but this indirect communication is possi ble—taking the form of a contagion, a pandemic transference from dis course to discourse—because death already resides at the place of re

ception: death is, if one will, the universal signified that discourse cannot name but that reading, therefore, can realize. The double sense of the word "realize" is apt here, since it is in "realizing" (figuring out) the content of the message the narrator brings that Juliette

"realizes" it (makes it real) as a message of death. Such a realization then produces the message itself, finally, as the sign of which death is the referent—that is the implication of the narrator's confirming tears. But what this means is that death does not reside "in" dis

course, as such, but neither does it reside "in" the individual partici pants of acts of communication: it is "realized" only in the communica tive exchange itself, that is, in the strange phenomenon (figured by the symmetrical visits of narrator to countess and countess to narrator,

as well as in their nocturnal conversation itself) whereby a text brings "meaning" to a reader that only the reader can give to the text.

What does this mean for us as readers of the discourse entitled "Le

Message"? Death cannot be said, the text can only mediate it, as its

"messenger"—that is, the text must be understood as mediation for its

message to be realized, its significance depends on an act of interpreta tion. It is clear that, in telling us the story of how he became qualified to tell the story we are reading (as in Nerval's "Sylvie" or La

Recherche), the narrator of "Le Message" is designating himself as a

person of maturity and hence as a "messager de la mort," whose dis course functions as prosopopeia. Giving voice and personality to the

young man he once was but no longer is—since the "death" of that insou ciant young man is as much the subject of the story as the death of the vicomte is the burden of the message he carried to the castle—the now

mature, if not elderly narrator lends his discourse to the voice of death. But it is for us to "realize" this before we can so "realize" the text: it is



Ross Chambers 419

for us to produce the textual "resonance" as Juliette once realized the

youthful narrator's message, and we must do so, therefore, in an act of textual intimacy corresponding to Juliette's nocturnal visit to the narra tor's bedroom.

In rather crude terms, such intimacy is what the narrator expresses as his desire, making it clear with a certain insistence (since the story is framed by two parallel formulations) that his goal in telling the

story is to scare his hearer into a loving response.

J'ai toujours eu le désir de raconter une histoire simple et vraie, au récit de

laquelle un jeune homme et sa maîtresse fussent saisis de frayeur et se réfu

giassent au coeur l'un de l'autre, comme deux enfants qui se serrent en ren

contrant un serpent sur le bord de la route. (313)

That this desired response is the mature narrator's version of the "frêle bonheur" of reading is made clear by the fact that, at the end, he ex

pressly imagines a hearer who will respond to his story with an echo of

Juliette's own words ("ne perdez pas celle qui vous est chère"):

Quelles délices d'avoir pu raconter cette aventure à une femme qui, peureuse, vous a serré, vous a dit: "Oh! cher, ne meurs pas, toi!" (329)

But it is, of course, the surprising directness of these declarations of in tention that gives pause, as does the insistence on directness in the nar rative ("une histoire simple et vraie"), given the story's own obsession with the necessary inexplicitness of the message of death. It is not that such straightforwardness is out of character: we know that this man was diplomatic only once in his life, on the occasion of his visit to the castle. "Depuis ces jours d'insouciance, j'ai eu trop de batailles à livrer

pour distiller les moindres actes de la vie et ne rien faire qu'en accomplissant les cadences de l'étiquette et du bon ton qui sèchent les émotions les plus généreuses" (322). But he knows full well that such

explicitness is likely, as he puts it, to "diminuer l'intérêt de [s]a narration," that is, to deprive it of its power as fiction, a power that

depends on reticence, understatement, selection, and in general on forms of indirection that give the reader an active function, requiring the text to be, not received, but read. "Aussi est-ce la moitié du talent que de choisir dans le vrai ce qui peut devenir poétique" (313). (The emphasis on devenir is mine.) to state one's intentions so nakedly is, in effect, to

prevent the narrative from achieving those intentions. There is a puzzle here that I do not pretend to have solved, but I

think we must recognize in it another, and slightly paradoxical version of the problem of mediation. The narrator's problem is how to make from "un drame presque vulgaire" (313) a poetic narrative—how, to put




the same thing in different terms, to work in an autobiographical mode that owes much to Rousseau ("Il faut tout dire," says the narrator as he embarks on a particularly humiliating reminiscence, 319), in such a way as to produce that sense of omission and of the unsaid that makes a nar rative "poetic" and produces fictive power, making the text a message of death. The implication is that, in saying too much and in speaking too directly, the text is nevertheless hinting—like the youthful narra tor in his "diplomatic" moment—at what it cannot say and what it is therefore for the reader to realize. Diplomacy and etiquette dry up "les émotions les plus généreuses": it is those emotions, therefore, that we must seek in the vulgar and over-explicit drama that is presented to us. This seems to mean that it is for us to be selective where the text cannot be—the exact reverse of the operation that Juliette performs when faced with the young narrator's stammering and diplomatic in

explicitness. For a text that is honest and straightforward can also be

recognized as a mediation, as a "message"; it too needs to be read for it

to deliver up a sense it cannot say.16 I take it that it is to this aesthetic realization of the text on the

reader's part that the phrase "les émotions les plus généreuses" refers: in the rather vulgar erotic sensations the narrator refers to as "le but de [s]on récit" (313), we can look for, and realize something more poetic and more in keeping with the "frêle bonheur" realized by the countess and the young narrator. For it is not implausible to detect in the word

"généreuse" a reference to the countess, whose very tears of gratitude are received by the narrator as a sort of beneficence. "Les moindres

paroles, les gestes, les actions de cette femme me prouvèrent la noblesse

d'âme, la délicatesse de sentiment qui faisaient d'elle une de ces chères créatures d'amour et de dévouement si rares semées sur cette terre" (329).

Behind the Balzacian verbiage and the ideology of angelic femininity we can pick up a hint, perhaps, that these are the qualities that are

expected of the reader of the text, and that the generous emotions a reader may expect from the text are necessarily those that, like Juliette reading the narrator's stumbling message, s/he brings to the text. It is our sense of death that will enable the narrator's maladroit message— maladroit in another way than his youthful stammerings but still mal adroit—to achieve resonance as prosopopeia, the voice of death; it visits us in our château so that we, in turn, can visit it and, in the

intimacy of reading, produce its message as ours and ours as its. The

generous emotions a text procures are those it derives from a generous reading, and a generous reading, in this case, is one that knows how to

poeticize the vulgar, the clumsy and the explicit. The reader is thus cast in the helpful and feminized role of rescuing

the (bluff, masculine) text from its own expressive inadequacy. One can



Ross Chambers 421

imagine the innumerable forms of commentary such an observation

might suggest.^7 I want, in conclusion, only to point out that this fem inization of the reader goes hand in hand with a mode of fictional au

thority that functions in the register of pathos. I mean by this that there is no ironic distancing between the modes of discursive authority represented in the narrative and those on which the text itself relies. The reader is to play Juliette to the text as Juliette plays reader to the narrator. Can one define a mode of fictional authority that functions in the register of irony? And does such a mode imply the masculinization of the reader? And, if so, what are the implications, in terms of a sex ual politics of reading, of the gendered empowerment of the reader on

which, it might seem, fictional authority ultimately rests? These are

questions for another essay, or other essays; but it was necessary to pose them here, if only to relativize the implicit theory of reading that I have read in (out of? into?) Balzac's "Le Message."

Department of Romance Languages & Literatures The University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1275

1 Honoré de Balzac, Les secrets de la Princesse de Cadignan et autres études

de femme (Paris: Folio, 1980) 316. Page numbers in parenthesis refer to this

widely available edition. "Le Message" is in the Etudes de moeurs (Pléiade, 2:

170-182). ^Mme de Lafayette, Romans et Nouvelles, éd. Emile Magne (Paris: Garnier

frères, 1958) 348.

3 See my "Narrative and other Triangles," journal of Narrative Technique, 19, 1

(Winter 1989), 31-48, for a development of this critique of narratology.

^(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) 27: "(...) the experience of

sympathy seems to be uncomfortably like the experience of watching a play." Marshall shows that the victim of an accident tends to be in a dangerous

position, despite the sympathy s/he draws, because the situation is subject to

(mis)interpretation; and he offers (79-83) an instructive and suggestive discussion of "accident" as a term of logic and of grammar.

^"What Does Fiction Know?" Sub-stance, 55,17 , no. 1 (1988), 3-17.

^(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).

^See, famously Denis de Rougemont, L'Amour en Occident (Paris: Plon, 1939)

and René Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Paris: Grasset,

1961). See also Leslie Rabine, The Romantic Heroine (Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press, 1985) and Tony Tanner Adultery in the Novel (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).

^"What Is the Message in Balzac's 'Le Message'?" NCFS, 13, 2 and 3 (Winter

Spring 1985), 48-59. I have profited also from the chapter on "Le Message"

(Chap. II) in John R Barberet, "Narrative Exchange in the Short Stories of




Balzac: the Transaction of the Text and the Gift of the Word," Ph.D. Diss.,

University of Michigan, 1986.

^For expansion of the argument summarized in this paragraph, see especially

my "Narrative and Other Triangles," op. cit., and "Changing Overcoats: Villiers'

'L'lntersigne' and the Authority of Fiction," L'Esprit Créateur. 28, 3 (Fall 1988), 63-77.

l^The distinction is Balzac's, I do not assume it since it is clear that there is no

discourse that is innocent of mediation. To distinguish between direct and

mediated discourse, even while privileging the latter—as this text interestingly does—is obviously an ideological gesture and the fiction/non-fiction distinction

has to be accounted for in social rather than linguistic or discursive terms. In

fact, "Le Message" finally undercuts its own founding distinction, see note 16.

See for example the diagram on p. 151 of Seymour Chatman, Story and

Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). 12 See 0. Mannoni, Clefs pour l'imaginaire ou l'Autre scène (Paris: Ed. du Seuil,

1969), esp. 97 et seq. 12 For reasons that will become clear, I distinguish between the young narrator

as hero of the story and the mature narrator as narrative subject of the textual

discourse: similar distinctions are regularly made with respect to texts such as

Nerval's "Sylvie" or Proust's Recherche.

l^Strictly speaking, it is both more and less than that: Fontanier says that "La

Prosopopée (...) consiste à mettre en quelque sorte en scène les absens, les

morts, les êtres surnaturels, ou même les inanimés; à les faire agir, parler,

répondre ainsi qu'on l'entend (...)." (Pierre Fontanier, Les Figures du Discours

[Paris: Flammarion, 1968] 404.)

l^Thus, it is only because she sees a "messenger" (not the vicomte) that the

countess is led to interpret the messenger's message as signifying death. 1 ^Notice, then, that interestingly and ironically, the text thus undercuts its own

founding binary oppositions, between direct and mediated discourse and

between fiction (confused with dream) and straightforward narrative ("une histoire simple and vraie").

17i cannot resist indicating a few such lines of commentary. In terms of a

historical sociology of reading, novel-readers in Balzac's time were assumed to

be (middle-class, leisured) women: cf. the famous evocation of the reader in

her armchair at the beginning of La Peau de Chagrin, and notice, in Madame

Bovary, the "pathetic" character of Emma' s reading practice as compared with

the text's ironic stance toward her reading matter. In terms of feminist theory, one would want to read the ideological implications of this construction of

feminine subjectivity as "addressee" in the text's Elocutionary apparatus, in

relation to the construction of woman as the object of a desire whose subject is

male in the narrative. Finally, as a matter of the politics of reading, empirical readers will want to define their own relation to the ideological construction of

the reading-position that occurs in the text: from what reading position (how



Ross Chambers 423

empowered? how gendered? ) does one read a text that so constructs its

appropriate reader?



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