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announces: now let us leave this theme aside, to be resumed later. It is so clear that a good story has been thrown away and that a kind of totally inexplicable narrative suicide has been committed that the present-day reader is left utterly bewildered. Things must have been different, however, when the book was being published in instalments. Sue must have been suddenly obliged to prolong his narrative; the machine had been geared for a much shorter journey and the tension could not have been maintained to the end; the public was clamoring to be told. So he threw them this revelation as a sop and went on to explore other paths. The public is satisfied, but the plot as an organism has broken down. The kind of commercial distribution which can in some cases provide the serial story with good rules will at other times prevaricate, and the author in his capacity as an artist must submit to this. Les Mystères is no longer a novel but a series of montages designed for the continual and renewable gratification of its readers. From here on Sue is no longer concerned with obeying the laws of good narration and as the story advances introduces into it certain convenient artifices, of which the great nineteenth-century narrative was mercifully ignorant. They are to be found curiously enough in certain comic strip publications such as the stories of Superman.
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For example, Sue starts explaining in footnotes what he can no longer express by means of the plot alone. In part 9, chapter 9, the note tells us that Madame d'Harville asks a particular question because, having only arrived the night before, she could not know that Rodolphe had recognized Fleur-de-Marie, who is here called Amélie, because her father had changed her name a few days earlier. In part 9, chapter 2, the note points out that "the reader will not have forgotten that the instant before he struck Sarah, the Owl believed and had told her that. . . ." In part 2, chapter 17, a note reminds us that the youthful passion of Rodolphe and Sarah is unknown in Paris. And so on. The author records what has already been said, for fear his audience may have forgotten it by then, and establishes late in the day facts he has not been able to tell us because it is impossible to say everything; his book is a macrocosm in which there are too many characters, and Sue can no longer manage to keep track of them all. It may be observed that all these notes occur after the revelation of the identity of Fleur-de-Marie; it is here that the plot breaks down. |
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Thus it happens that Sue behaves sometimes like a mere observer who has no power over a world that escapes him, whereas at other times he lays claims to the divine right of the novelist to be omniscient and to make luscious advance disclosures to the reader. Poe had already noted that Sue did not know the ars celandi artem and that he never missed an opportunity of saying to the reader: "Now, in a moment you will see what you will see. I am going to give you a most extraordinary surprise. Prepare yourselves, for it will work strongly on your imagination and excite |
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