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make of his novel a journey through myth towards knowledge, as we might say Mann did; it is really in order to have 'models' which he knows will produce a desired effect. Kitsch is thus an imaginative device which provides solutions to a real situation according to a predetermined plan. |
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A last device that allows the reiteration of an effect, and guarantees its effectiveness, is the undue drawing out of certain scenes. The death of Jacques Ferrand, victim of satyriasis, is described with the precision of a clinical manual and the exactitude of a tape recording. Instead of giving an imaginative synthesis of the event, he records it 'live': he makes it last as long as it would in reality; he has his character saying lines over and over again as often as a dying man would repeat them in real life. But this repetition does not resolve itself into any pattern. Sue quite simply records everything and does not stop until every reader, even the dullest, is up to his neck in the drama and feels suffocated along with the fictional character. |
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Within narrative structures of this type, the ideological choices which, as we have already shown, Sue makes in Les Mystères can but make themselves felt. If the method of solving the problem of narration by frequent disclosures is suddenly to be lost in a morass of moving and conciliatory redundancy, solutions must likewise be found for the description of events which, without divorcing them from their origins, will channel them in obedience to the reader's wishes. We do not, however, need to ask ourselves whether in the work of Sue the ideological argument preceded the invention of the story or whether the kind of story he invented as he yielded to public demand imposed on him a certain ideological attitude. In reality the different factors in question are often interactive, and the only raison d'être of an investigation is given us by the book itself as it is. It would similarly be quite incorrect to say that the choice of the roman-feuilleton as one's medium necessarily entails the adoption of a conservative and blandly reformist ideology or that a conservative and reformist ideology must of necessity produce a roman-feuilleton. All that we can say is that the various ingredients of the mixture are blended in such and such a way. |
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If we consider the education of Fleur-de-Marie, we find ourselves face to face with a problem that presents itself in the same way on the ideological as on the narrative level: (i) we have a prostitute (a 'type' that bourgeois society has firmly established according to certain canonical rules); (ii) this prostitute has been reduced to this level by the force of circumstances (she is innocent), but she has nevertheless prostituted herself (and bears the mark of this); (iii) Rodolphe convinces her that she can rise above her condition, and the prostitute is redeemed; (iv) Rodolphe discovers that she is his daughter, a princess of the blood. |
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The reader is stunned by a series of coups de théâtre which correspond |
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