The Jew as Model: Anti-Semitism, Aesthetics, and Epistemology in the Goncourt Brothers’ Manette Salomon ❦

Dorian Bell

The awkward task sometimes arises of discussing with students the anti-Semitic depictions that are legion in French fiction from the second half of the nineteenth century. When it does, we often dust off the rote caveat that authors are, after all, products of their time. This sets up an equally reflexive supposition: that negative notions about Jews were too commonplace in French society for literature to be spared. Call it the apologetics of ubiquity. The assumption of ubiquity lets us off the hook as critics, minimizing as it does the literary specificity of an objectionable discourse. But how confident should we be about it? One can legitimately invert the assumption to ask whether French literature, for reasons immanent to its own evolving poetics and fixations, proved at this time especially conducive to anti-Semitic thinking. If we dismiss literary instances of anti-Semitism as merely indexical of a larger, widely prevalent discourse, we discount how much our sense of this prevalence emerges in part from the recurrence of those very instances. There is a risk, in other words, of hypostatizing literary expressions of anti-Semitism—of taking the specific for the general—and therefore of obscuring potentially narrower, more uniquely literary imperatives at work. This is not to suggest, of course, that the latter part of the century did not actually witness a groundswell of French anti-Semitic sentiment, MLN 124 (2009): 825–847 © 2009 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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or that literary anti-Semitism was shaped only by literary preoccupations. France’s late-century anti-Semitic swoon is well-documented,1 and authors obviously drew on various ambient discourses in their literary engagement with questions of Jewishness. I propose only to examine what I would argue is constitutively and peculiarly literary about the anti-Semitism encountered in a certain segment of French letters. In so doing, I will be tracing a literary prehistory of the more dogmatic French anti-Semitism inaugurated by Edouard Drumont’s best-selling 1886 opus La France juive. Despite its many fictions, Drumont’s anti-Semitic polemic itself hardly resembles literature in any conventional sense. But as David Carroll has usefully observed, Drumontian anti-Semitism merits inscription in a “literary” tradition nonetheless, characterized as La France juive was by a poetics that distinguished between Aryans and Jews on aesthetic grounds.2 Incapable of producing beauty, Drumont’s Jew occupied the wrong side of the divide between a crass, Jewish “réalité” and a sublime, Aryan “idéal.”3 As I will demonstrate, however, this neat aesthetic and epistemological demarcation between material particulars and an artistic, absolute truth was not always so self-evident, even for previous French writers disposed to anti-Semitism. If anything, an earlier literary strain of anti-Semitism first developed in concert with an endemic uncertainty over that demarcation. What in La France juive appears, prima facie, a given of modern French anti-Semitism—its bipartite aesthetic and epistemological schema—in fact descends from a prior literature’s hesitations, and of the complex implication in those hesitations of the Jew. A key such moment of hesitation arrives with Manette Salomon, the 1867 novel by the writers and art critics Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. Midway through the novel, the Goncourts stage a scene of grandstanding hermeneutics that, in retrospect, will reveal itself premature. Attending a ball celebrating Purim, the Jewish commemoration of Esther’s deliverance of the Jews of Persia from a plot to destroy them, the painter Naz de Coriolis encounters a mass of assimilated

1  See Léon Poliakov, Histoire de l’antisémitisme. 2. L’Âge de la science (Paris: CalmannLévy, 1981) and Michel Winock, Nationalisme, antisémitisme et fascisme en France (Paris: Seuil, 2004), to cite only two among many available accounts. 2  David Carroll, French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995) 171–80. 3  Edouard Drumont, La France juive: essai d’histoire contemporaine, 2 vols. (Paris: Marpon & Flammarion, 1886) 1: 9.

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Parisian Jewry “pareille de surface et d’ensemble à toutes les foules.”4 Coriolis is not fooled, however, and quickly decodes the palimpsestic signs of Jewishness still legible beneath: ces hommes, ces femmes sans particularité frappante, habillés des costumes, des airs de Paris, et tout Parisiens d’apparence, laissèrent voir bientôt à son œil de peintre et d’ethnographe le type effacé, mais encore visible, les traits d’origine, la fatalité de signes où survit la race. (267)

Coriolis’ painterly eye, attuned to the significant visual detail, operates with the same breezy efficiency on the ethnic as it does on the aesthetic. Regardless of the register, signs offer up their secrets to his perspicacious gaze. Yet Coriolis’ “oeil d’ethnographe” will abandon him in short order, signaling an epistemological disturbance to which the novel’s various elements—typically cited for their disparateness5—constitute on one level a unified, if self-contradictory, reaction. Having obtained the services of Manette Salomon, a Jewish painter’s model he attended the Purim ball in order to meet, Coriolis manages to make her his indifferent concubine.6 Manette becomes his muse and serves as model and inspiration for Le Bain turc, Coriolis’ first Salon success. But even as his artistic career reaches new heights, Coriolis makes a critical mistake that will haunt the rest of his existence: he forgets the fact of Manette’s Jewishness. Surreptiously following Manette on what he suspects might be an amorous rendez-vous, the pathologically jealous Coriolis is surprised to find himself in the synagogue where Manette has come to pray. It seems Manette, in whom “la juive était presque effacée” (296), has managed to hide from him what the Purim crowd could not: il se glissa dans Coriolis le sentiment, d’abord indéterminé et confus, d’une chose sur laquelle sa réflexion ne s’était jamais arrêtée, d’une chose qui

4  Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Manette Salomon (Paris: Gallimard, 1996) 267. Further references to the novel, as well as to the preface by Michel Crouzet and notes by Stéphanie Champeau, are to this edition and will be made parenthetically in the text. 5  See, for example, Crouzet’s insistence on the novel’s fragmentary nature (44). See also Jean-Pierre Leduc-Adine, “Effets de picturalité dans Manette Salomon,” Les Frères Goncourt: art et écriture, ed. Jean-Louis Cabanès (Talence: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 1997) 412 and Robert Ricatte, La Création romanesque chez les Goncourt, 1851–1870 (Paris: Colin, 1953) 309. 6  For a cultural history of the Jewish painter’s model in nineteenth-century France, see Marie Lathers, Bodies of Art: French Literary Realism and the Artist’s Model (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2001).

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avait toujours été jusque-là pour lui comme si elle n’était pas, et comme s’il ignorait qu’elle fût. C’était la première fois que cette perception lui venait de voir une juive dans Manette, qu’il avait sue pourtant être juive dès le premier jour. (292)

Anticipating a rival, Coriolis certainly discovers one, if in an unexpected guise. And a formidable rival it proves to be. In torturously anti-Semitic terms, the rest of the novel will chronicle Coriolis’ progressive artistic dissolution and madness at the hands of a reasserted, rapacious Jewishness in Manette that merits for her a place, with Balzac’s Valérie Marneffe and Zola’s Nana, among the unforgettable literary femmes fatales of nineteenth-century French literature. Perhaps loath to deem Manette Salomon’s ugly racialist message compatible with its finer moments, critics have often bracketed off Manette Salomon’s anti-Semitism as an artifact of the era.7 Yet the novel’s anti-Semitism proves no coarse veneer, easily stripped away to reveal the natural beauty of the grain beneath. More like a painter’s glaze, the Goncourts’ fascination with Jewishness is the binding medium that permanently fixes and refracts the colors of Manette Salomon’s aesthetic and social tableau. In the rest of this essay, I want to argue that Jewishness inflects the novel’s every aspect by figuring a central philosophical anxiety to which the novel’s various aesthetic and metaphysical postures—from its embrace of a sensorial mode of aesthetic appreciation to the final, idyllic communion the character Anatole achieves with nature—represent so many coordinated responses along a same theme. That theme revolves around the reconciliation of material particulars with an aesthetic absolute, a question that heavily preoccupied the avant-garde likes of the Goncourts and Baudelaire. Made thinkable for the Goncourts, I will propose, by certain pre-constructed properties of the Jew, the reconciliation they contemplate proves fraught—so fraught, in fact, as to threaten the status of the absolute itself. The Goncourts’ reaction to this threat likewise organizes itself in terms of the Jew, not only marking the descent of Manette Salomon into unapologetic anti-Semitism, but also suggesting that the French anti-Semitism that would so mar the fin de siècle owed at least something to a mid7  Crouzet, in his otherwise magisterial preface to the novel, lends little import to the fact of Manette’s Jewishness. Robert Ricatte dismisses the later Manette as a “caricature antisémite,” distinguishing between this “mécanique à gros sou” gleaned from “une information mal contrôlée” and what Ricatte considers Manette’s earlier, more redeemably complex turn as a Jewish “Orientale” (318–21).

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century crisis of artistic representation. The stakes of the Goncourts’ aestheticized anti-Semitic turn, I will go on to argue, are useful for understanding—and indeed inseparable from—the tensions and limits of the literary naturalism the brothers helped invent. *  *  * We meet Manette Salomon’s two central characters while they are still students in the Parisian painter’s studio where they have become friends. Talented but a blagueur, Anatole Bazoche is more enamored of the bohemian painter’s life than of hard work. Naz de Coriolis, a créole (European born in the colonies) hailing from what is today Réunion, makes better use of his gifts. While Coriolis goes off to Asia Minor to discover and paint the Orient, Anatole embraces the colorful dissipation of la bohème. Anatole’s ludic adventures unfold one after another in his friend’s absence. Upon Coriolis’ return, the two set up house together in Paris. Coriolis continues to paint, while Anatole excels chiefly at playing with and imitating their pet monkey. Coriolis’ first Salon paintings provoke a less than enthusiastic response. Meanwhile, Garnotelle—an old companion from the studio days—triumphs at the Salon after having won the Prix de Rome, that guarantor of acceptance by the academic painting establishment. Coriolis’ genius will eventually be recognized, but he never achieves the kind of success sustained by Garnotelle, whose mediocre academic style suits the mediocrity of official tastes. As Coriolis’ liaison with Manette develops, his life takes a protracted turn for the worse. Manette overruns his home with Jewish relatives and forces him to paint exclusively for money. Anatole, estranged from Coriolis because of Manette, hits financial and artistic rock bottom. The text proceeds in fits and starts, alternating stories of Anatole’s often cheerful destitution with prolonged asides on aesthetics and updates on Coriolis’ drift towards madness. We last see an almost unrecognizable Coriolis on the day of his wedding to Manette. Anatole, for his part, ends up a fonctionnaire in the Jardin des plantes, providing the novel’s final image as he loses himself one morning in communion with the natural world. French academic painting furnishes Manette Salomon its aesthetic bête noire. In tirade after tirade, both the Goncourts’ irascible mouthpiece Chassagnol and the narrator deride the “école doctrinaire” of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, with its neo-Platonic emphasis on the primacy of intellection in the artistic apprehension of the Idea. Disgusted with this sterile over-reliance on “réflexion,” the Goncourts champion a

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purely sensorial artistic experience, “cette jouissance poignante” of the eye before the visual feast of the painting (250). For all their emphasis on the individual, contingent nature of the artistic experience, however, the Goncourts never turn their back on the absolute. In the “présence réelle et toute vive du Beau” Coriolis discerns in Manette’s body (286), he discovers the holy grail of neoclassical aesthetics: the conduit to a universal absolute. The jouissance of the Goncourts’ sensorial approach to beauty remains bound up in the wonder of transcendent Beauty, and in Manette the novel demonstrates its faith in exemplarity’s power to bridge the fleeting realm of particulars and the timeless realm of the absolute. Yet it is precisely this classical logic of particular and universal that Manette upends, raising an epistemological specter next to which academic painting ultimately proves something of a red herring. The ability of Manette’s Jewishness to hide in plain sight shakes the foundations of the Goncourts’ philosophical assumptions, disrupting the very notion of universality and prompting a textual response that, beneath its superficial repudiation of academicist intellection, conceals a far profounder defense of the truth claims shared by academic painting and the Goncourts alike. Manette’s Jewishness pushes the novel’s aesthetic preoccupations deep into the territory of primary metaphysical principles, and it is on this contested territory that the novel’s true conflict unfolds. In his seminal study of the Goncourts, Robert Ricatte defends the necessity, imposed by the text’s episodic construction, of considering the novel’s “duel du créole et de la juive” apart from its commentaries on art and on bohemian life.8 But to do so is to miss how the stakes of that duel decide the stakes of the novel. That Manette Salomon is named for a character who makes her first real appearance halfway through the story testifies to the magnitude of the rupture she provokes, as well as to the novel’s concerted, comprehensive effort to contain it. How exactly does Coriolis, previously so discerning, manage to overlook Manette’s Jewishness? Quite simply: by painting her. The failure of Coriolis’ “oeil d’ethnographe” coincides with his work on Le Bain turc, the painting whose successful completion Manette’s beauty makes possible. In Manette, Coriolis finds his Turkish baigneuse, and the inspiration to produce his first resounding Salon success. But if Manette’s Jewishness disappears in the process, it is not because she appears in the painting as something other than herself—as Turk, or  Ricatte 309.

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even as Beauty. Rather, Manette’s Jewishness recedes precisely with what, in the final analysis, is her representation in the painting as Jew. The status of the real Manette as an “Orientale” (296) rehearses a metonymy whereby to paint the Oriental (here, a Turk) is also to paint the Jew. That conflation is confirmed by the strong resemblances between the fictional Le Bain turc and Théodore Chassériau’s real-life 1841 painting La Toilette d’Esther.9 Esther, of course, was the biblical Jewish heroine who saved the Jews of Persia by concealing her Jewishness to become the wife of King Xerxes. Manette’s assimilation to Chassériau’s Esther—an association reinforced by Coriolis’ discovery of Manette at a ball celebrating Purim, the Jewish festival commemorating Esther’s deliverance of her people—thematizes the trope of Jewish concealment that fascinates the text. In a significant twist on the theme of concealment, however, Manette’s Jewishness most evades detection by Coriolis in precisely the moment when her painted avatar in Le Bain turc practically flaunts the Jewishness of its flesh-and-blood original. Coriolis’ “oeil de peintre,” so instrumental during the Purim ball in unmasking a Jewry resembling a Parisian crowd, here operates at cross-purposes with the “oeil d’ethnographe” it initially doubled. The reversal stems from the nature of the disguise donned by the Jew. The Jews of the Purim ball scene masquerade as Parisians—that is, as something they are not (at least according to the sensibilities of the Goncourt brothers, who in their Journal repeatedly vent their animus toward Jews).10 Manette’s Jewishness, on the other hand, more successfully hides behind a painting that foregrounds it. Manette’s most salient quality disappears, as it were, behind a mask of itself. To understand the strange efficacy of this self-identical masking, it is first important to observe that, for Coriolis, Le Bain turc indeed serves to conceal. A portrait of Manette painted by a former lover 9  As Stéphanie Champeau points out in her notes to the novel, both paintings depict a female bather in a similar pose, hands tangled in her hair as a black servant looks on (611). Ricatte notes that Chassériau, himself a créole, was a possible model for Coriolis (though in Le Bain turc Ricatte recognizes a different painting by Chassériau, Le Bain, intérieur de serial à Constantine [1849]) (313–14, 364). 10  In an entry of the Journal dated September 2, 1866, the Goncourts recount how they felt importuned to be greeted by Eugène Pereire, an old grade school classmate and scion of the prominent Pereire family of Jewish financiers. They relate their suppressed thoughts: “J’avais envie de lui dire: ‘Mais de quel droit me connaissez-vous, me parlez-vous, me demandez-vous ma poignée de main? [. . .] vous êtes Juif, je n’aime pas les Juifs. C’est un sacrifice pour moi que d’en saluer un’” (Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal: mémoires de la vie littéraire, 4 vols. [Paris: Fasquelle and Flammarion, 1956] 2: 278). Other such examples of anti-Semitic vitriol abound in the Journal.

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unsettles Coriolis because of its “ressemblance mauvaise” to something in Manette that Coriolis “n’aimait pas à voir” (297). More than just a reference to Manette’s promiscuity, the real nature of that troubling “quelque chose”—Manette’s Jewishness—remains clear. Coriolis’ own attempts at portraits of Manette (i.e., of Manette as Manette) never progress beyond the draft stage, presumably because they, too, bring Coriolis into uncomfortable proximity with what he would prefer to forget. Coriolis resolves instead to depict her as someone else: “Coriolis voulait peindre cette tête, cette physionomie, avec ce qu’il y voyait d’un autre pays” (298). Le Bain turc accomplishes this. Paradoxically, however, what lends Manette so well to her transformation into the baigneuse is an “Oriental” ineffability that, according to the text, “le baptême semble tuer” (298). Manette’s Jewishness, in other words, makes possible the painterly transformation intended to elide it. Thus does the painted result of such a maneuver so exude the Jewishness it means to obscure. But that is also, exactly, the point. Insofar as the beauty of the baigneuse requires the Jewishness of its model, the painting reproduces that Jewishness on the canvas. And yet, by virtue of the fact that Coriolis intends the baigneuse as a notManette—that is, as a non-portrait—the evident Jewishness of the baigneuse implies the opposite about Manette. The painting externalizes Manette’s Jewishness in a way that seemingly exorcises it from Manette herself. To put it plainly, Le Bain turc conceals Manette’s Jewishness behind a mask of Jewishness. The painting does so by playing on expectations of the kind surrounding masks. Slavoj Žižek has discussed how the recognition that someone is wearing a mask elicits the expectation that the wearer will be something different than his mask makes him appear. Wear a mask of yourself, however, and you short-circuit this logic by only “appearing to appear.”11 Manette achieves this in a painting that, like a mask recognized as such, broadcasts its concealing function in a way that produces expectations ripe for subversion. Conceiving Le Bain turc as a layer of misrepresentation between him and the real Manette, Coriolis primes himself to interpret signs of Jewishness in the painting as an absence of Jewishness in the model. The possibility of such a manipulation throws the entire notion of presence into disarray.12 That a thing can hide in plain sight by 11  Slavoj Žižek, “A Plea For a Return to Différance (With a Minor Pro Domo Sua),” Critical Inquiry 32.2 (Winter 2006): 234–36. 12  Žižek 234.

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donning a mask of itself erodes the possibility of authenticity. Which is the original, and which is the mask? A gap is opened in which a thing’s non-coincidence with itself becomes apparent. And just as the thing can no longer invoke its own essential plenitude, so is the particular expelled from the plenitude of the universal. Even for Plato, for whom the universal Idea rendered the particular obsolete as object of pure knowledge, the particular participated in the idea of the Idea, as a copy participates in the idea of the original. But if copy and original can no longer be distinguished, what remains of the universal against which the particular, as copy or manifestation, becomes intelligible? This death of the universal constitutes the anxious center of Manette Salomon. If the Goncourts write disparagingly of academic painting’s over-intellectualization of “le Beau” (250), they react with even greater fervor to the possibility, set in motion by Manette, that such an absolute might not exist at all. The depth of this concern is reflected in the breadth of strategies they deploy to claim the absolute. These strategies span the three principle axes of Manette Salomon—the novel of aesthetic reflection, the novel of artistic dissolution, and the novel of bohemia—to produce a triptych whose thematic uniformity belies the text’s jumpy, episodic construction. As removed as the novel’s antiSemitism might seem from its sensuous prescriptions for aesthetic jouissance, or from the beatitude of the bohemian Anatole’s final communion with nature, all three axes align around the philosophical question posed by and through Manette. I turn now to the first two of these axes: the novel of aesthetic reflection and the novel of artistic dissolution. *  *  * In its aesthetic reflections, Manette Salomon stakes an inductive claim to the universal, a claim that Manette both serves and problematizes. Against the deductive, top-down neo-Platonism of academic painting, which subordinated the world of particulars and of the senses to reason’s superior faculty for attaining the higher plane of the Idea, Manette Salomon proposes a bottom-up epistemology that locates the universal at the level of sensible particulars. The centrality of the ­universal does not change; only the methods for apprehending it do. With this move, the Goncourts echo Aristotle’s break with Plato over two millennia before. Aristotle, it will be remembered, rejected the central Platonic contention that universal Ideas (or Forms) possessed a real existence of their own, apart from the sensible world

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of particulars. He held instead that universals existed only to the extent that they were instantiated in particulars themselves. Beauty, for instance, did not somehow hover above and apart from all things beautiful. Rather, it represented a common attribute, emerging from the network of particulars as a shared property or category. As M.H. Abrams has noted, the Platonic/Aristotelian divide over the problem of universals lived on in the bifurcated inheritance of a neoclassical aesthetics consumed with the ideal. On one side, what Abrams dubs an “empirical” theory of the ideal maintained an Aristotelian faith that the ideal (or universal) could be judiciously abstracted or selected by the artist from objects in the sensible world. On the other side, a transcendental or “trans-empirical” theory adopted the Platonic stance that ideals, existing apart in some space of their own, were wholly accessible only to the artist’s mind.13 Manette Salomon aligns itself in the empirical camp. Regarding Manette’s exceptional beauty, the text explains that La Nature est une grande artiste inégale. [. . .] De la pâte humaine, on dirait qu’elle tire, comme un ouvrier écrasé de travail, des peuples de laideur, des multitudes de vivants ébauchés, manqués, des espèces d’images à la grosse de l’homme et de la femme. Puis de temps en temps, au milieu de toute cette pacotille d’humanité, elle choisit un être au hasard, comme pour empêcher de mourir l’exemple du Beau. [. . .] Le corps de Manette était un de ces corps-là. (272)

The Goncourts here locate the universal in the realm of sensible particulars. The artist’s task is to select from this tangible world an object to represent that, among all such possible objects, most instantiates the ideal. The Aristotelianism of the gesture announces a certain realism, though a decidedly selective one: if the real world of things constitutes the proper source for inspiration, most things themselves remain unfit for representation by any artist who aspires to the ideal. “Nous sommes grands partisans du réalisme en peinture, mais non du réalisme cherché exclusivement dans le laid,” wrote the Goncourts in Le Salon de 1852,14 a sentiment echoed by Manette Salomon’s Chassagnol when he maligns the “épatement de bourgeois: le réalisme!” that undiscerningly paints “du laid bête, du vulgaire mal ramassé et sans choix” (419, original emphasis). 13  M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford UP, 1953) 36. 14  Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Le Salon de 1852, Œuvres complètes, vol. 13 (Paris: Slatkine, 1986) 8.

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One must therefore tread carefully when associating Manette Salomon’s aesthetic agenda with a certain “platonisme ‘naïf’ du XIXe siècle,” as Michel Crouzet puts it in his preface to the novel (12), despite the Platonic references to “le Beau” and “le Vrai” that pepper Manette Salomon’s aesthetic ruminations. Certainly, in their fascination with the ideal, the Goncourts manifest a resolute neoclassicism. But theirs is an empirical, Aristotelian neoclassicism, one that trusts the senses to follow an inductive path to the universal. Manette does not simply mediate between Coriolis and an otherworldly Beauty; rather, she is Beauty, just as Beauty only is insofar as there exist Manettes to instantiate it. One must also see past what Ricatte considers the novel’s uninspired choice of foe in French academic painting, whose cozy mainstream entrenchment had long made it an obvious target for critique.15 To be sure, Manette Salomon stakes its inductive claim to the universal in terms of an academic foil. Against academic painting’s fascination with antiquity and emphasis on intellection, the Goncourts elaborate a theory of the universal that locates the absolute in the temporally and sensorially immediate sights of modernity. “Est-ce que tu crois que ça n’est donné qu’à une époque, qu’à un peuple, le Beau?,” asks Chassagnol. “Mais tous les temps portent en eux un Beau, un Beau quelconque, plus au moins à fleur de terre, saisissable et exploitable . . .” (419). The artist need only contemplate “la vie moderne” to discover “ce grand côté dédaigné de l’art: la contemporanéité” (94). Accordingly, Coriolis spends entire days wandering the back alleys of Paris, watching “la Vie” emerge as a capitalized universal from the lower-case particulars of a beggar’s ravaged face or a woman’s guileless gesture (411–13). Yet as easy a target as academic painting presents, offering a viable alternative proves more difficult. Coriolis’ forays into a “réalisme nouveau” inspired by modern life (428), though met with approbation by the narrator, fall flat with the public and help precipitate his dissolution. The famously elitist Goncourts certainly offer the public’s indifference as evidence of Coriolis’ genius. Still, in Coriolis’ unhappy asynchrony with a present whose fleeting beauties he so paradoxically appreciates, there reverberates in the novel a troubling echo of its similarly paradoxical aesthetics. Coriolis’ gradual madness and disappearance from the text suggests that, faced with reconciling the instantaneous, contingent particular and the timeless universal—that  Ricatte 356.

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is, with negotiating the ineffable passage between the temporal and atemporal—the Goncourts simply find themselves inadequate to the task. Baudelaire had already ventured into such fraught territory in his 1863 essay “Le Peintre de la vie moderne.” The mid-century avantgarde shaped by Baudelaire and the Goncourt brothers understood modernity, in Baudelaire’s well-known formulation, as “le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable.”16 Channeling Aristotle via Hegel, who like Aristotle believed that the particular instantiated the universal, the avant-garde likewise shared Hegel’s historicizing conviction that the temporal particulars of an era participated intrinsically in the transcendent, timeless universal. But what ambivalence between the temporal and atemporal Hegel conjured away with the dialectic, his less dialectically inclined avant-garde successors inherited as a lingering aporia. Paul de Man has shown, for instance, how in “Le Peintre de la vie moderne” Baudelaire consistently couches his references to the immediacy of the present in terms like “memory” that undercut this immediacy at every turn by resituating it in a temporal continuum.17 Manette Salomon grapples with this imbrication of the “transitoire” and the “éternel” that, though resembling the blend of contingency and immutability the Goncourt brothers prescribe, preempts itself as a realizable aesthetic strategy because the two categories are so indistinguishable to begin with. Ambiguity inevitably surrounds any ascription of temporality to the instantaneous—or conversely, of atemporality to the eternal. One might reasonably propose, as I have above, that the instantaneous particular partakes of the temporal in a way that a timeless universal does not. But one might equally reasonably assume (as does de Man) that the instantaneous lies outside a temporal continuum in which the eternal universal in fact participates. How to locate the eternal universal in the fleeting particular, then, when the very nature of the gesture so resists elucidation? Enter the Jew. In Manette, the Goncourts possess a figure whose Jewishness uniquely, if vaguely, crystallizes the kind of temporal fusion they envision. Moreover, she does so in a ready-made way that conveniently occults, temporarily at least, the latent instability of the Goncourts’ 16  Charles Baudelaire, “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1961) 1163. 17  Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1983) 156–57.

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aesthetic premise. Not for nothing do we learn that Manette is the daughter of a seller of “vieux neuf,” or that she is the “type nouveau de l’éternel féminin” (265, 286, original emphasis). The Jew had always, from the standpoint of Christianity, accomplished something of a temporal feat. Hegel, for one, struggled with the existence of a Jewish people whom he considered to have abdicated their place in History by denying the divinity of Jesus, but who nevertheless managed to linger into the present.18 Ever-present, the atavistic Jew provided an unremitting reminder of the (Christian) present’s temporal continuity with a ( Jewish) past; and yet, ever in the present—that is to say, ever outside the temporal flux of History—the Jew also represented radical temporal discontinuity. Secularized, this temporal equivocalness took the form of a stereotyped Jew whose great unchanging quality was, paradoxically, his infinite adaptability to the changing circumstances of the present. Hence could the Jew be made into a figure of modernity that, by the same token, confirmed the Jew’s filiation to the ancient. The Goncourts seize on this pre-constructed, time-bending property of the Jew, valorizing it along aestheticized lines—Manette becomes the “type nouveau de l’éternel féminin”—without needing to explain it. Like the painter’s model she is, Manette furnishes the Goncourts a template for what they are otherwise unable to adduce on their own. But imitation, of course, opens onto the question of representation. And it is in the fractured space of representation that Manette’s Jewishness augers the breakdown of the inductive epistemology the Goncourts intially, and so unreflectively, make her serve. We have seen how, by representing another (the baigneuse) in the image of Manette, Coriolis’ Le Bain turc allows Manette’s Jewishness to hide in plain sight in a way that upends the relationship between particular and universal. So, too, become manifest the intractable temporal questions so far held in abeyance by Manette’s stereotyped Jewishness—something confirmed by the fact that this is not the first time Manette’s Jewishness has hidden in plain sight. Much earlier in the novel, Manette

18  See G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977) 206. Shlomo Avineri concludes from the treatment of the Jews in Hegel’s Philosophy of History that they “remain, for Hegel, in some way in history but not of history, a fossil—yet a living organism, a distinct community who in a way should not be there” (Shlomo Avineri, “The Fossil and the Phoenix: Hegel and Krochmal on the Jewish Volkgeist,” History and System: Hegel’s Philosophy of History, ed. Robert L. Perkins [Albany: State U of New York P, 1984] 55).

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makes an anonymous appearance as a small child, blonde and blueeyed, whose mother offers her to a younger Coriolis and his painter friends as a model for “un petit Jésus” (117). In her representation as the most famous Jew of all, Manette’s own Jewishness disappears. The self-identical masking by which this occurs here superimposes itself directly on the temporal question Manette’s later disappearing act only indirectly evokes: namely, that the Jew, in the Jewishness of Jesus she inevitably recalls, demonstrates the extent to which the originative Christian moment represents as much an end or continuation as a beginning. Might the original be a copy? Which is the original, and which is the mask? Difference infiltrates the wholeness of origin as temporality proves refractory to thought; and as origin dies, so does the absolute. Manette Salomon’s narrative itself performs this destabilization. Only belatedly is it revealed that Manette’s apparent first entrance into the text is really her second. The revelation echoes Manette’s challenge to the originative Christian moment by retroactively challenging Coriolis’ and the reader’s perception of chronology, a temporal twist reinforced by the nature of the revelatory device: Coriolis’ decorated watch chain, which Manette had broken as a child and from which she kept a bauble that later reminds them of their first meeting (300). Manette’s initial, putatively Jewish capacity to span old and new here overtakes the text, defaulting on its supposed aesthetic promise by unleashing a Pandora’s box of epistemologically disruptive complexity. Threatened, the Goncourt brothers resort to an economic antiSemitism that, like their anti-academicism, proves another red herring. Coriolis’ artistic and psychological slide accelerates as Manette and her money-grubbing family take over the household, forcing him to paint for money. The absolute, it would appear, comes under siege from a crass Jewish materiality. Yet that siege is little more than an alibi. The Goncourts’ inductive approach to the universal absolute having lapsed into instability, Manette’s material obsession in fact arrives as a desperate, last-ditch bid by the Goncourts to recuperate the universal absolute from the epistemological wreckage. By invoking the Platonic divide between the material and the ideal—or more specifically, between a Jewish world of thingly particulars and a Christian realm of transcendant universals—the Goncourts rush to insulate the universal absolute from the material against which it has so problematically brushed. It is significant, in this respect, that the bauble Manette has saved from Coriolis’ watch chain should be a small gold coin (300); spooked by their own temporal contortions, the

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Goncourts retreat to the relative stability of a Manichean stereotype about Jewish material lust. Such back-tracking, though it rehearses the Platonic idealism with which Manette Salomon has until then been at odds, at least leaves the universal intact. The same cannot be said of the Goncourts’ initially inductive epistemology, whose flirtation with the death of the universal constitutes the real crisis of Manette Salomon, and one next to which academic painting or Jewish money-grubbing represent mere diversions. Such back-tracking also explains why, having staked a decisive claim to inductive aesthetics all along, the Goncourts’ mouthpiece Chassagnol ends the novel in a rather ambivalent mood. In a final, exasperated rant, Chassagnol questions whether “l’Idéal” resides in “l’imitation par élection ou par élévation” (540). Thus does he relaunch the question of Aristotle versus Plato—that is, of induction (facilitated by the careful “élection” of exemplary particulars) versus deduction (the “élévation,” through pure intellection, toward the higher plane of the Idea). It is a late loss of nerve for which the emergence of Manette’s stereotypically “Jewish” avarice has by then already paved the way. The Goncourts’ tergiversation marks a turning point in the history of nineteenth-century French representations of the Jew. Manette’s transformation from site of Beauty to money-hungry femme fatale reprises a long discursive tradition of treating the Jew as both a locus of attraction and repulsion, often simultaneously. Maurice Samuels has recently argued that the seemingly contradictory nineteenth-century topoi of the belle Juive and the villainous Jewish capitalist, when taken together, furnished realism a suitably dichotomous means for acting out its ambivalence about a capitalist modernity it found both seductive and abhorrent.19 But within the trope of Jewish beauty itself, members of the mid-century avant-garde located a model for an aesthetics that ambivalently negotiated modernity by celebrating the power of the changes announced by modernity to evoke a timeless, aesthetic ­absolute. The accompanying depiction of Jewish economic rapaciousness was not just the counterweight, then, to these writers’ guiltily self-conscious seduction by modernity, as Samuels suggests was the case for Balzac. Rather, economically-informed anti-Semitism emerges for members of the avant-garde as a strategy of containment once the

19  Maurice Samuels, “Metaphors of Modernity: Prostitutes, Bankers, and Other Jews in Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes,” Romanic Review 92.2 (March 2006): 178.

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traumatic lesson of their aesthetic experimentation—the death of the universal—becomes apparent.20 A generation of virulent, late-century anti-Semites like Edouard Drumont would heed the example, though minus the aesthetic soul-searching, railing on with reductive certainty about a Platonic “idéal” whose existence now needed no more guarantee than the foil of Jewish materialism.21 *  *  * The Jew aside, why was it so important to the Goncourt brothers in the first place to recuperate an experience of the universal from the experience of the particular? The answer is suggested in the August 27–28, 1855 entry of the brothers’ Journal, in which their friend the caricaturist and illustrator Gavarni bemoans, to the brothers’ obvious approval, the sacrifices the aesthete makes to a universal “idéal”: Nous avons causé de l’idéal, ce ver rongeur du cerveau, —l’idéal, “ce tableau que nous peignons avec notre sang” (Hoffmann). La résignation du C’est ma faute! lui est encore revenue: “Pourquoi nous éprendre de l’inréel, de l’insaisissable? Pourquoi ne pas prendre but à portée de notre main? Quelque désir satisfaisable, un dada qu’on puisse enfourcher. Par exemple, être collectionneur, c’est un charmant dada de bonheur. [. . .] Tenez! Ces bourgeois qui viennent ici le dimanche et qui rient si fort, je les envie. [...] Nous sommes tous des fous. Des fleurs qui sentent, le plaisir qui est, la femme belle, nous ne les savourons pas. Nous avons une maladie dans la tête. Les bourgeois ont raison. . . . Mais être raisonnable, est-ce vivre?”22

20  In a related vein, though on different grounds, Marie Lathers has argued that Manette illustrates a mid-century transition between the earlier topos of the belle Juive and the topos of the affreuse Juive that would so take hold later in the century. Lathers locates an early stirring of this transition in Baudelaire’s 1861 poem “Une nuit que j’étais près d’une affreuse juive,” noting Baudelaire’s gradual evolution—proposed by Brett Bowles—toward racial anti-Semitism of the pernicious, fin-de-siècle variety. Yet while the factors cited by Bowles in explanation of Baudelaire’s anti-Semitism (his financial misery, his fascination with Joseph de Maistre, his frustration with the Jewish publisher Michel Lévy) certainly impacted Baudelaire’s poetics, they nevertheless largely originated beyond those poetics. I am more interested here in demonstrating, at least in the case of Manette Salomon, how tensions intrinsic to the poetics of the era contributed to shifting attitudes about Jews. See Lathers 128–29, 142–43 and Brett Bowles, “Poetic Practice and Historical Paradigm: Charles Baudelaire’s Anti-Semitism,” PMLA 115.2 (March 2000): 195–208. 21  Drumont had read Manette Salomon and cites it enthusiastically in La France juive: “Les Goncourt ont merveilleusement dépeint cet envahissement graduel du Juif dans Manette Salomon, où l’on voit un grand artiste en arriver peu à peu à être annihilé, réduit à rien, foulé aux pieds par une drôlesse israélite qui s’est introduite dans son atelier” (1: 20). 22  Goncourt, Journal 1: 205 (original emphasis).

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The Goncourts’ “idéal” is the consolation prize for an aristocracy rocked by the Revolution, and for avant-garde aesthetes who affect the same exile. Cast off (or put off) by the new economic order, aristocrats and aesthetes declare themselves custodians of the absolute, disdainfully leaving to the bourgeoisie the easy enjoyments of capitalist consumption. Those enjoyments possess a tempting appeal, as Gavarni attests. But how can the aesthete embrace them without abandoning the absolute? How, stooping to earth, can he retain his place in the heavens? Gavarni is clearly pessimistic on this point. Yet merely by posing the question, he lays the philosophical groundwork for much of the Goncourts’ critical and fictional œuvre. In Manette Salomon, the Goncourt brothers answer a resounding yes to the question that so troubled Gavarni: namely, whether the pleasures of the senses were compatible with the pursuit of the ideal. By locating the ideal in the regime of the senses, the Goncourts carve out a place in bourgeois modernity for the aesthete’s aristocratically detached temperament. To a persistent mal du siècle, conditioned by a neo-Platonic inability to reconcile noumenal intangibles with the overwhelming material realities of the nineteenth century, they propose an Aristotelian cure. That cure proves imperfect, though not before announcing the trajectory of literary naturalism. For if the Goncourts’ 1864 novel Germinie Lacerteux had already inaugurated naturalism’s fascination with life’s frequently ugly realities, Manette Salomon dramatizes the lasting epistemological consequences of such a turn to pungent materiality. David Baguley has remarked that despite their common adherence to the dictates of the real, naturalist writers nevertheless submitted the real to their own aestheticizing tendencies. To aesthetically apprehend life’s natural decay was also to arrest that process, abstracting from it a fixed beauty at the expense of referential fidelity.23 Such an ambivalent approach to the real bred temporal equivocation. Naturalists struck an uneasy balance between figuring the inexorable ravages of time in a world of particulars, and extracting from those ravages a timeless, universal beauty. Like the avant-garde aesthetes before them, then, naturalists sought simultaneously to inhabit and transcend the flux of time, an inheritance that in part explains the later admixture of naturalism and Baudelairian symbolism by decadents like J.-K. Huysmans. 23  David Baguley, Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990) 191–97.

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This naturalist iteration on an existing theme reproduced the epistemological tension already latent in Baudelaire’s temporal assignations. To affirm the inexorability of decay was to grant ephemerality a permanence at once indissoluble from and incompatible with the notion of ephemerality itself. Such a contradictory imbrication rendered unsteady any easy separation between temporal ephemerality and timeless permanence. That complicated, in turn, any distinction between the contingent particular and the timeless universal. Little wonder that Zola would embrace a vitalist, cyclical conception of the world, removing as it did the need to think too hard about the vexing distinction between particular and universal: each simply blended into the other, as the decaying particular receded into the universal wellspring of Life only to reemerge, once again, as particular. Manette Salomon finds the Goncourt brothers indulging in a key bit of vitalist prevarication of their own. In the novel’s closing set piece, Anatole, now a fonctionnaire in the Jardin des plantes, experiences a blissful, Edenic communion with “le Tout vivant de la création” (547). Anatole’s epiphany reads as a rejoinder to the havoc wreaked on the Goncourts’ epistemological ambitions by their deployment of Jewishness. Manette’s emergence as an economically rapacious Jew, while safeguarding the absolute, also inhibits its inductive apprehension by returning it to its pedestal above the world of particulars. Anatole’s ecstasy is intended to bring that absolute back within corporeal reach. With its effortless, pantheistic dissolution of a subject into the being of Life—Anatole “glisse dans l’être des êtres” (547)—the final Jardin des plantes scene represents the parting shot, and indeed the degree zero, of the novel’s promotion of a material conduit to the universal. The problem with the Goncourts’ pantheistic deus ex machina is that Anatole is a failed painter, and that his rapture occurs far away from the painterly context that has otherwise dominated the novel’s metaphysical ruminations. This is, of course, intentional: as was their wont, the Goncourts here devalorize painting in favor of an even more immediate experience that they considered writing more suited to evoke. Yet the competition between writing and painting comes at a cost. The Goncourts’ vaunted écriture artiste attempts in this rhapsodic finale not only to describe Anatole’s epiphany, but also to perform it by producing in the reader a similar experience. The hitch is that the immediacy of the experience described implies an ontological leveling of subject and object so profound as to obviate any system of signification—and thus to obviate writing itself. The novel must

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end, in other words, because the Goncourts’ writing has ostensibly just performed its own obsolescence. The great irony of the Goncourts’ anti-Semitic novel is that Manette usefully forestalls this obsolescence, granting the text a reprieve from the suicidal impulse inherent in the ontological leveling it seeks. As a stereotyped avatar for the epistemological and aesthetic mode the Goncourts advocate—that is, as a ready-made paragon of Aristotelian exemplarity and temporal flexibility—Manette first provides her creators a means for advancing their agenda without reflecting too dangerously on its implications. Then, once the devil emerges from the details, Manette’s transformation into an economic parasite recuperates a universal that has come under siege. Consistently, if in different ways, Manette staves off the end of the text augured by any true abutment of subject and object in the sensorial experience of beauty the Goncourts pursue. So, too, does the inability of so many in Manette Salomon to experience or describe that jouissance delay it long enough for the novel to become a novel. Just as Roland Barthes observed about Balzac’s Sarrasine, an earlier nineteenth-century narrative of artistic dissolution, beauty here remains citational: unable to relate its positive content, beauty’s observers tautologically relate the experience of beauty in terms of other discourses about beauty.24 Corolios’ Le Bain turc elicits, along these lines, “des lambeaux de feuilleton” from Coriolis’ impressed but unimaginative admirers (301). The Goncourt brothers affect contempt for the banality of the reception Coriolis’ painting receives. As writers, however, they also require it. The deferral of meaning produced in beauty’s repeated, relational dependence on the next empty signifier ensures that the story goes on. The Goncourts may deride the “lambeaux de feuilleton” produced by Coriolis’ admirers, but it is precisely such textual lambeaux on which, necessarily, the Goncourts’ own novel relies to prolong itself. In this regard, Manette’s beauty maps quite logically onto her Jewishness. Both serve as figures for the fact itself of writing, in which synchronic meaning is inevitably infiltrated by its participation in a diachronic différance or supplementarity. To the extent that the beauty Manette lends to the painting defies description within the narrative, it stands outside of that narrative and of the diachronic temporality

 Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970) 36–37.

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on which narrative depends; and yet, as an engine for the deferral of signification that propels the narrative’s unfolding in time, Manette’s beauty simultaneously inhabits that diachrony. Likewise, Manette’s Jewishness purports to reconcile the eternal with the contingent, the vieux with the neuf. Thus does the beautiful Jewish painter’s model, without whom we are told Coriolis cannot complete his painting, do double duty here as the writer’s model, without whom the novel would grind to a halt. The conflation is typical of the Goncourts, who sought with the pen to do—or do better—what the painter did with the brush. The conflation is also more broadly typical of the naturalism to come, which would continue to strike an uneasy balance between the competing imperatives of mimesis and diegesis. Naturalism attempted with painterly verve to “show” the real in the mimetic, ostensibly unmediated way that, as Plato implied, produces the effect of an ongoing present.25 Yet the presence of a narrator also “told” the real in a way that necessarily inscribed the real in a narrative, temporal sequence from which universal verities might be abstracted. This imposed meaning on what might otherwise remain pure contingency, though in principle without losing the texture of “real” particulars on which naturalism staked its authority. The radical and unsteady juxtaposition of these two representational paradigms owed much, as I have suggested, to the temporal contortions of the mid-century avant-garde. It also partially owed its continued possibility to the constructed figure of the Jew, whose supposedly timebending properties provided both a blueprint and metaphysical cover for any oscillation between the fleeting and the eternal. One thinks of Alphonse Daudet, the disciple of Edmond de Goncourt and naturalist writer, whose 1879 novel Les Rois en exil —a tale of aristocratic dissipation in the French capital—struck Henry James as “intensely modern” because of its “passion for the concrete,” despite the work’s evident (though admittedly disillusioned) nostalgia for a bygone, aristocratic ideal.26 It hardly surprises that Les Rois en exil should feature in the role of femme fatale the Jew Séphora, the daughter of a brocanteur who, like Manette’s father, “rajeunissait les vieux modèles.”27

 See Book III of The Republic.  Henry James, Literary Criticism: French Writers; Other European Writers; The Prefaces to the New York Edition (New York: Library of America, 1984) 222. 27  Alphonse Daudet, Les Rois en exil, Œuvres, vol. 2, ed. Roger Ripoll (Paris: Gallimard, 1990) 1004. 25 26

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Understanding the literary construction of the Jew, in short, opens important perspectives on some of the key aesthetic and epistemological tensions shaping French letters in the second half of the nineteenth century. It also points toward a different way of thinking about French anti-Semitism. In explaining the rise of modern anti-Semitism, Zygmunt Bauman has advanced that the Jew was targeted for incarnating the ambivalence, or “boundary-breaking,” of a new social order in which old distinctions (like class) no longer held.28 But what Bauman does not account for is that ambivalence, while rendering distinctions less clear, simultaneously reaffirms the logic of difference on which such distinctions depend. One cannot be ambivalent without hesitating between different things; absent that difference, ambivalence cannot occur. If the temptation arose, then, to “burn ambivalence down in this effigy” of the Jew,29 the Jew also afforded the opportunity to prolong ambivalence in an effort to maintain what distinctions this ambivalence implicitly preserved. Take Coriolis’ decipherment of Jewishness in the Purim crowd, which seems to allay an ambivalence about racial or national identity produced by the crowd’s outward resemblance to a “Parisian” crowd. It rapidly becomes clear, however, that the other ambivalence preoccupying the Goncourts—concerning the boundary between particular and universal—poses an equal or even greater threat. Insofar as Manette provokes this ambivalence, she actually helps maintain intact the boundary, and by extension the categories it separates. Such affirmation by transgression reprises the founding epistemological balancing act of the realist novel. Premised as it was on the salience of material particulars in apprehending truth, the realist novel rejected the universalizing archetypes of an older literature, even as it reinscribed that universality by deploying particulars to posit an objective reality recognizable to everyone. Manette Salomon tests the limits of this balance, revealing along the way the limits of literary naturalism. Anatole’s final communion with nature stages an imbrication of particular and absolute in the ­ostentatious absence both of a painterly art the Goncourts consider insufficient to the task, and of a Jewishness they have by now deemed anathema to the absolute. Yet if the absence of art is intended to

28  Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (London: Blackwell, 1995) 215. 29  Bauman 215.

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provide a showcase for writing, the absence of Manette moots that enterprise. Free now to reach beyond ambivalence, the novel contemplates an ontological flattening so devoid of distinctions as to become refractory, ultimately, to any narrative at all. In essence, the Goncourts arrive at the terminus of a logic that has encoded its own inversion all along. To seek the universal through the experience of the particular is to risk a leveling of difference between the two—and hence a dissipation of the very universal sought. The Goncourts project this schizophrenic consequence onto Manette, whose strange, dual role as both conduit and threat to the universal crystallizes and perpetuates the central ambivalence of the text. While that ambivalence remains, particular and universal retain their viability as distinct categories. Sideline the Jew, and the jig is up. The Goncourts fail to appreciate this, of course. Offering Anatole’s epiphany as a rejoinder to Manette’s materialist assault on the ideal, the Goncourts loudly claim the last word in the battle for the absolute.30 As we have seen, however, Manette owes her final, materialist incarnation to the Goncourts’ unease with the inductive mode they initially make her serve. Countering their own counter-proposal, the Goncourts find themselves back where they started, either unawares or unrepentant. From this standpoint, it does not surprise that they should close the novel with a scene intended, at the level of both Anatole’s experience and the reader’s, to abrogate the “artificial” mediation of the sign (painted or written) between the perceiving subject and the immediacy of sensation. After all, the nature of the gesture coincides with the ellipsis simultaneously imposed on the entire novel—on writing, as it were—by the authors’ failure to acknowledge their own creation of the monster, Manette, that Anatole’s rapture is intended to mitigate. Implicitly questioning art’s ability to apprehend beauty in its thingly essence, Manette Salomon’s dithyrambic finale proposes a less mediated, more radical participation in the thing by the subject—and concurrently, on the order of the text itself, in the referent by the sign. The latter is, of course, a quixotic proposition. And so the novel ends, silenced before the untellable real. Anatole’s embodiment of “le Tout vivant” thus does not simply mark, as Marie Lathers has maintained, a

30  Carol Armstrong, in contrast, considers the final Jardin des plantes scene a disintegration on a par with Coriolis’ artistic disintegration (Carol Armstrong, Manet Manette [New Haven: Yale UP, 2002] 60–61). The positively marked terms in which the Goncourts render Anatole’s experience, however, would seem to militate against this reading.

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passage from realism into a naturalist representational mode fixated on an embodiment of the real.31 Rather more tellingly, Anatole already marks the breaking point of that mode, exhausting it almost before it had begun and adumbrating the coming importance of naturalism’s Jewish Other—from Walter in Maupassant’s Bel-Ami to Gundermann in Zola’s L’Argent —in distracting naturalism from its greatest Other of all: the real itself. University of California, Irvine

 Lathers 160.

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