“Stay with me,” said Fouqué to him. “I see that you know M. de Rênal, M. Valenod, the sub-prefect Maugron, the curé Chélan. You have understood the subtleties of the character of those people. So there you are then, quite qualified to attend auctions. You know arithmetic better than I do; you will keep my accounts; I make a lot in my business. The impossibility of doing everything myself, and the fear of taking a rascal for my partner prevents me daily from undertaking excellent business. It’s scarcely a month since I put Michaud de Saint-Amand, whom I haven’t seen for six years, and whom I ran across at the sale at Pontarlier in the way of making six thousand francs. Why shouldn’t it have been you who made those six thousand francs, or at any rate three thousand. For if I had had you with me that day, I would have raised the bidding for that lot of timber and everybody else would soon have run away. Be my partner.”
This offer upset Julien. It spoilt the train of his mad dreams. Fouqué showed his accounts to Julien during the whole of the supper—which the two friends prepared themselves like the Homeric heroes (for Fouqué lived alone) and proved to him all the advantages offered by his timber business. Fouqué had the highest opinion of the gifts and character of Julien.
When, finally, the latter was alone in his little room of pinewood, he said to himself: “It is true I can make some thousands of francs here and then take up with advantage the profession of a soldier, or of a priest, according to the fashion then prevalent in France. The little hoard that I shall have amassed will remove all petty difficulties. In the solitude of this mountain I shall have dissipated to some extent my awful ignorance of so many of the things which make up the life of all those men of fashion. But Fouqué has given up all thoughts of marriage, and at the same time keeps telling me that solitude makes him unhappy. It is clear that if he takes a partner who has no capital to put into his business, he does so in the hopes of getting a companion who will never leave him.”
“Shall I deceive my friend,” exclaimed Julien petulantly. This being who found hypocrisy and complete callousness his ordinary means of self-preservation could not, on this occasion, endure the idea of the slightest lack of delicate feeling towards a man whom he loved.
But suddenly Julien was happy. He had a reason for a refusal. What! Shall I be coward enough to waste seven or eight years. I shall get to twenty-eight in that way! But at that age Bonaparte had achieved his greatest feats. When I shall have made in obscurity a little money by frequenting timber sales, and earning the good graces of some rascally under-strappers who will guarantee that I shall still have the sacred fire with which one makes a name for oneself?
The following morning, Julien with considerable sangfroid, said in answer to the good Fouqué, who regarded the matter of the partnership as settled, that his vocation for the holy ministry of the altars would not permit him to accept it. Fouqué did not return to the subject.
“But just think,” he repeated to him, “I’ll make you my partner, or if you prefer it, I’ll give you four thousand francs a year, and you want to return to that M. de Rênal of yours, who despises you like the mud on his shoes. When you have got two hundred louis in front of you, what is to prevent you from entering the seminary? I’ll go further: I will undertake to procure for you the best living in the district, for,” added Fouqué, lowering his voice, I supply firewood to M. le ——, M. le ——, M. ——. I provide them with first quality oak, but they only pay me for plain wood, but never was money better invested.
Nothing could conquer Julien’s vocation. Fouqué finished by thinking him a little mad. The third day, in the early morning, Julien left his friend, and passed the day amongst the rocks of the great mountain. He found his little cave again, but he had no longer peace of mind. His friend’s offers had robbed him of it. He found himself, not between vice and virtue, like Hercules, but between mediocrity coupled with an assured prosperity, and all the heroic dreams of his youth. “So I have not got real determination after all,” he said to himself, and it was his doubt on this score which pained him the most. “I am not of the stuff of which great men are made, because I fear that eight years spent in earning a livelihood will deprive me of that sublime energy which inspires the accomplishment of extraordinary feats.” — Stendhal, The Red and The Black
“Oh, come, don’t we all think ourselves Napoleons now in Russia?” Porfiry Petrovitch said with alarming familiarity. — Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Crime is by so much the biggest thing in literature and fiction that it’s impossible to say anything of interest now: I’ll just state as given that a once maximally politically charged and fecund topos has over the past half-century of reaction mostly decayed into empty sugar- and wormwood- coated replicas; proliferating crime subgenres have narrowed and rigidified in political tendency and withered in symbolic content. (The topic of this withering is the destination of these ruminations. Forgive the interruption to them, it was unavoidable.) Today, fiction, and crime fiction no less than the other sclerotic genres characterized by ersatz innovation (this consists in simply declaring clichès new), is virtually all reaction — rendering the presumed status quo ever more eternal and unassailable and justified even as it lowers the bar for its utility and propriety, the great heap of genre output offers a jaundiced portrait of social relations with fewer and fewer and finally no claims to the qualities that originally were advanced as its benefits to humanity — with little isolated instances of nostalgic protest, increasingly futile as a matter of course. One could say: the ruling class is not bothering to offer alibis anymore. And the clerks are not fantasizing their undoing anymore.
But from ancient texts like the various Holy Scriptures, and works like Antigone, Oedipus, and the Oresteia, all the way up through I’d say the mid-1980s, there was an entirely different character to the exploration of crime in narrative and dramatic art, than the genre product in print and audioviz that is ubiquitous now. Of course this effectively infinite bibliography, ranging over literatures of the earth, is too diverse to address here except in the most ludicrously general way, but happily what is most general is precisely what is at present of interest.
Broadly, the topos of criminality oscillates between developing dominantly as portraiture of social power and dominantly imagining a revolt or rejection of same, with each valence also serving as the subordinate accessory to the other, and by the time we arrive in characteristically bourgeois literature as capitalism encroaches on ancien régime social relations, we find this dominance waning toward an equilibrium never quite reached, but with increasingly fecund permutations radiating irony and real social criticism. That is: we find criminal figures and processes signifying (at once, unevenly and in tension, striking the predatory pawnbroker and her innocent practically enslaved sister Lizaveta, one household) the status quo of authority and its challenger or annihilator, God and Satan, Capital and its gravediggers.
So: legitimacy and how it is made and destroyed. And then some metaphysically- minded drag this off into Truth and its production and destruction.
Here’s an example. Gordon Gekko’s crime de jure is insider trading. Oliver Stone obviously doesn’t think this is really so bad, of course. There is something else that Stone is indicting Gekko for, something the character can’t be prosecuted for in the fictional or real world, and something whose unveiling by Stone is supposed to be something like an indictment of The System, but really isn’t. Stone can’t really pull that trigger. The ‘perception’ speech is more directorial boast, through the glammy villain proxy, than anything.
At the time this film was made, when I first saw it, I thought geez how Hollywood films are diminished. But now, I see it still has its basic symbolic machinery that makes it legible and interpretable, and am aware that I couldn’t even imagine, at the time, what a superficially similar product that didn’t have all that would be like. And the irony is, the great irony, is: these diminished facsimilies of narrative or dramatic art, of literature and cinema, are simplified, are stripped in such a way they become illegible and uninterpretable. Not precisely infinitely ambiguous, because ambiguity is a product they don’t make either. It’s not a paring down to essentials but a starvation — can we say this is really the meaning of deconstruction, (a Nazi praxis), as it always threatened. I used to kvetch a lot about doctrines of modernism that had become unquestionable, like the idea that a state of utter destitution was some kind of truth of humanity, humanity stripped of inessential additions, bared as naked, shelterless, friendless, etc.. (Lear which rejects this cynically enlisted as authority for it). A natural truth, one was invited to think (by right-slant high modernists especially, but also of course some of their faves of the older canon like Sade). Of course this is absurd. That ‘essence’ beneath is an illusion concocted and laid over humanity, it’s not simple and given but actually sophisticated. It is unnatural, and expensive to produce. See it in Gaza of course now.
Anyway as I was saying.
Criminality commonly becomes the node around which social change is imagined either possible or foreclosed. At the dawn of bourgeois society proper this reaches the level of parody, in Sade, whose aristo criminal is a law, and more than merely a law, unto himself, and simultaneously the embodiment of lawless transgression, yet he doesn’t, he can’t, and he doesn’t think to do anything really revolutionary-level scary, as I’ve mentioned before, like eat and shit banknotes.
And here’s something that is formally parodic, and the way it revises the Dostoevsky its adapting ought to be funny, but isn’t:
So we have circled back to the lumpen Napoleons. Just getting started but going to post this.