Seven

FIRST MANIFESTATIONS OF THE UNCONSCIOUS IN LITERATURE

Arthur Schopenhauer first appeared on the literary scene in France as the philo- sopher of and he was known as such to Hyppolite-Adolphe Taine, Joseph Ernest Renan, Elme Marie Caro, and Ferdinand Brunetière. To some extent, Taine’s pessimism is attributable to Schopenhauer. Charles Renovier adapted several of Schopenhauer’s themes and approved of his philosophical pessimism. Jules Lachelier discussed the German philosopher as a pessimist in his lectures at the École Normale Supérieure. Alfred Jules Émile Fouillée fre- quently quoted the author of Parerga et paralipomena (Schopenhauer, 1880) (Incidentals and Addenda) and borrows his major premise that the word is will and idea. The influence of Schopenhauer’s pessimism on French literature is considered by Alfred Baillot in Influence de la philosophie de Schopenhauer en France (1860–1900) (1927) (The Influence of Schopenhauer’s Philosophy in France). Schopenhauer’s pessimism found a fertile ground in France. Pessimistic trends were observed everywhere in French philosophy and literature during the nineteenth century, becoming more accentuated as the century grew old. Tracing the sources of this prevalent current, Paul Bourget discovered them in Stendhal, Alexandre Dumas (son), Taine, Renan, and Henry Amiel (Bourget, 1920; 1885). The defeat of 1871 and the subsequent period of dissatisfaction and political unrest gave historical justification to a pessimism that had so far been literary and philosophical. In this way, Schopenhauer brought metaphysical arguments to strengthen what is predominantly an attitude and sometimes a fashion. His popu- larity was henceforth assured. Schopenhauer’s pessimism also fit well with the dominant tendency of na- turalism, then the reigning literary school, which proceeded from the theory of an ineluctable necessity in the psychic and materialistic worlds. Perhaps no better exposé exists of the elements that contributed to the development of pessimism in France than the analysis of a character named Chanteau in Émile Zo- la’s La joie de vivre (The Joy of Life) (1925):

Le pessimisme avait passé par là, un pessimisme mal digéré, dont il ne reste plus que des boutades, la grande poésie noire de Schopenhauer. La jeune fille comprenait bien que, sous ce procès fait à l’humanité, il y avait surtout, chez son cousin [Lazare], la rage de la défaite, le désastre de l’usine dont semblait avoir craqué. . . . Puis défilaient en plaisante- rie froide, les ruses de la volonté qui mène le monde, la bêtise aveugle de 158 THE UNCONSCIOUS IN PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE

vouloir vivre. La vie était douleur, et il aboutissait à la morale des fakirs indiens, à la délivrance par l’anéantissement . . . il annonçait le suicide fi- nal des peuples culbutant en masse dans le noir, refusant d’engendrer des générations nouvelles, le jour où leur intelligence dévelopée les convain- crait de la parade imbécile et cruelle qu’une force inconnue leur faisait jouer. (Martino, 1923; quoting Zola, La joie de vivre) [Pessimism had gone that way, a pessimism badly absorbed, from which remains only some whims, Schopenhauer’s great black poetry. The young girl well understood that, under this process made of humanity, there was particularly in the case of her cousin, Lazare, the rage of defeat, the disaster of the factory that the earth seemed to have cracked. . . . Then followed in cold humor, the ruses of will that guide the world, the blind absurdity of the will to live. Life was misery, and they ended up with the morale of Fakir Indians that annihila- tion is deliverance. . . . He announced the final suicide of all people falling in masses in the dark, refusing to engender new generations, the day when their developed intelligence would convince them of the foolish and cruel parade that an unknown force made them perform.]

The example of Chanteau shows how Schopenhauer’s arguments, predicting the universal suicide of an enlightened humanity refusing to be led by a blind and evil will, were used as theoretical justifications for a pessimism that had its foun- dation in national humiliation and personal misfortunes. Yet Schopenhauer’s philosophy, allied for a time with , did not suffer from that school’s downfall brought about by internal causes and the at- tacks of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Brunetière, and Bourget. A new facet of Scho- penhauer’s philosophy was then uncovered that, by a curious antithesis, streng- thened the revolt against naturalism just as his pessimism had lent support to naturalism itself. The German philosopher emerged as an anti-intellectualist and an anti-scientist, an apostle of heterodox mysticism and a theoretician of symbol- ism. Naturalism proceeded in part from a scientific conception and even assumed the scientific method of natural sciences as exemplified in Claude Bernard’s famous Introduction à la médecine expérimentale (1865), which Zola naively took as the credo of the new literature. Naturalism implicitly assumed the infalli- bility of science; but the prestige of science, carefully nurtured since the eigh- teenth century, was beginning to decline. Even Renan, who in 1890 prophesied that science would some day hold the key to every mystery (L’avenir de la science [The Future of Science]), fifty years later tempered his hopes with a considerable skepticism. One of the first authoritative expressions of this newly arisen doubt on the power and extent of scientific investigation appeared in philosopher Émile Bou- troux’s De la contingence des lois de la nature (1874) (On the Contingency of the Laws of Nature). Brunetière, in his struggle against eighteenth-century thought and naturalism, vigorously attacked the pretensions of science in his resounding article “La banqueroute du naturalisme” (“The Bankruptcy of Natu-