end, absorbed by the multiplicity of minute events likely to create a void in the most modest lives, swallowing up any intelligible chain of cause and effect, and any organized narrative of individuals and societies. It is born coupled with two daydreaming genres that will eventually devour its forces. First the prose poem nullified action to spread out the suspended sensation, the little scene that suffices to sum up a world: in Baudelaire, for example, a little old woman in a public garden or the gaze of poor children on the lights of a café terrace. Then came the short story, which conserved action to pierce into the immutable aspect of ordinary life, creating a hole that swallows characters, or that heals only to repeat the cycle. Take the spring walk, in Maupassant, at the end of which a lowly employee, who has changed his routine for once, commits suicide, or the pain of a life, deprived of the love to which it was entitled, that opens up for a brief instant before closing up again.13 In Chekhov, we have the tears at the memory of a summer evening when love and happiness were within reach, or the moment of revolt when the little slave-girl–maid smothers the child who keeps her from sleeping.14 The time of the modern novel is cut in half: on the one hand, there is revolutionary upheaval that makes the entire movement of society legible and controllable by thought; on the other, there is the suspension that brings this movement back to the instant and the spot where the equality and inequality of fates hang in the balance. The new novel is born in the gap between these two; it is born as the history of the breach that the great upheaval of social conditions and the minute disorder of plebeian reverie placed at the heart of the logics of action.
1 Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, in Œuvres romanesques complètes, vol. I (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), p. 775; Red and Black, transl. and ed. Robert M. Adams (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1969), pp. 381–2.
2 ‘This eighteen-year-old philosopher, with a fixed plan of action, who establishes himself as a master in the middle of a society he does not know, begins by seducing a woman for personal glory, and finds no happiness other than satisfying his own self-love, becomes sensitive, falls madly in love, and becomes animated by the passions of everyone. Another book now begins, in another style.’ Gazette littéraire, 2 December 1830, in V. del Litto, ed., Stendhal sous l’oeil de la presse contemporaine, 1817–1843 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001) p. 583.
3 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, transl. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991 [1953]), p. 463.
4 ‘Like the Indian cactus, a new civilization has burst open overnight. Now if your artistic imagination lies in a society made of aristocratic pride, financial scheming, injured self-love, either under the feet of the Jesuits, or at the jittery hands of a congregational bureaucracy, what empathy can you expect from an era that no longer knows your models, which has destroyed your painting with a cobblestone, and soiled your colours with July’s mud?’ Le Figaro, 20 December 1830, quoted in del Litto, Stendhal sous l’oeil de la presse contemporaine, p. 585.
5 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Cinquième promenade in Œuvres complètes, vol. I (Paris: Gallimard, 1959) p. 1041; The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, transl. Charles E. Butterworth (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), p. 63.
6 Rousseau, Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, p. 1042 (Butterworth transl., p. 64).
7 Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, p. 599 (Adams transl., p. 222).
8 Honoré de Balzac, La Peau de chagrin, in La Comédie humaine, vol. X (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), p. 65; The Wild Ass’s Skin, transl. H. J. Hunt (New York: Penguin Classics, 1977), p. 29.
9 Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme, in Œuvres romanesques complètes, vol. II, (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), p. 488; The Charterhouse of Parma, transl. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2007), p. 503.
10 Victor Hugo, preface to Marie Tudor, in Théâtre complet, vol. II (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 414.
11 Balzac, Preface to Ferragus, chef des Dévorants, in La Comédie humaine, vol. V (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), p. 792; Preface to Ferragus, Chief of the Devorants. La Duchesse de Langeais, transl. William Walton (Philadelphia: G.B. & Son, 1896), p. 11.
12 Ibid.
13 Cf. Guy de Maupassant, ‘Promenade,’ in Contes et nouvelles, vol. II (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), pp. 127–32; and ‘Mademoiselle Perle,’ in ibid., pp. 669–84; ‘A Little Walk’, in Artine Artinian, ed., The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant (Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1955), pp. 198–202; and ‘Mademoiselle Pearl’ in ibid., pp. 745–55.
14 Anton Chekhov, ‘Sleepy’, in Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, transl. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Bantam Books, 2000), pp. 4–8; ‘A Lady’s Story’, in The Tales of Chekhov, vol. IX: The Schoolmistress and Other Stories, transl. Constance Garnett (New York: Macmillan, 1921), pp. 87–96.
Time and nature yield us many gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await. Dante’s praise is, that he dared to write his autobiography in colossal cipher, or into universality. We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in the middle age; then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, methodism and unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy, and the temple of Delphos, and are as swiftly passing away. Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.1
These lines are taken from a text simply titled The Poet, drawn from one of the lectures Emerson delivered in December 1841 and January 1842 under the generic title The Times. As Emerson thoroughly modified his text for publication in 1844 in the second series of the Essays, it does not seem that the audience assembled under the roof of Boston’s Masonic Temple ever heard this profession of faith. We do not know how it would have received this invitation to abandon English encyclopaedias and the relics of Greek and Roman antiquity to go and find new religion and poetry in the fisheries of the East Coast, the pioneers out West, the prose of daily newspapers, electoral jousting or banking. It is true that the former Unitarian pastor was not new to the art of provocation. He had already urged his audiences more than once to reject the conspiracy of centuries past, and to bid farewell to the policed museums of Europe, to Doric columns and gothic ornaments, in order to fully embrace the present. ‘I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic’, he had already announced, to the shock of the Harvard fellows, ‘what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds.’2 We must thus take note: it was not in London under the glass-and-steel arcs of the Crystal Palace, nor in the fin de siècle Paris of the Eiffel tower, in the New York of skyscrapers or Russia of futurist and constructivist revolutionaries; it was in Boston in 1841, capital of genteel culture, intellectuals and aesthetes enthused by classical philology,
