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your pity." A criticism that is unkind, but pertinent. Sue behaves like this because one of the principal aims of the 'novel of reassurance' is to produce a dramatic effect. This effect can be obtained in two ways, and onethe easier of the twois "Look out for what is going to happen next." The other involves recourse to Kitsch.
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Les Mystères is clearly dripping with Kitsch. The author asks himself, What will be certain of producing an effect because it has already been tested? The answer is, The literary styleme which has already proved itself in another context. A styleme duly 'quoted' is not only successful, but confers dignity on its context. It habituates the aesthetic thrill, made inseparable from it now by repetition. For the use of this device, too, there are two possible solutions. First, one can directly evoke a sensation that others have tried and described. In part 7, chapter 14, we read as follows: "To complete the effect of this picture, the reader should recall the mysterious, almost fantastic appearance of a room where the flame in the grate strives to conquer the great black shadows that flicker on ceiling and walls. . . ." The writer dispenses with direct evocation by dint of simple representation and enlists the reader's help by referring him to the déjàvu. Second, one can introduce already acknowledged commonplaces. The whole character of Cécily, the beauty and the perfidy of the mulatto girl, is part of an exotic-erotic paraphernalia of romantic origin. Briefly, her portrait is a typological oleograph: "Everyone has heard of those coloured girls, fatal to Europeans, of those enchanting vampires, who by their fearful powers of seduction intoxicate their victim and drain his gold or his blood to the last drop, leaving him, as that telling native phrase has it, nought but his tears to drink or his heart to fret away." Here it is perhaps worse, for it is not a literary locution that is taken at secondhand but quite simply a popular commonplace; and in this Sue shows great ingenuity, inventing, so to speak, a Kitsch for the poor. In other words, he does not make his oleograph by setting on the canvas the constituent elements of Art, but merely by making a mosaic of previous oleographswhat in fact would today be called a work of 'pop' art and would then be intentionally ironic. |
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Even a feature which some critics, Bory among them, consider as the basic and powerful interplay of archetypes is reduced to this kind of stylistic pastiche: the wicked characters are related back to animal prototypes after the manner of Lavater and often even bear their names (the Owl; the cross between Harpagon and Tartuffe to be seen in Jacques Ferrand; the couple formed by the Schoolmaster once he is blinded; the abominable monster Tortillard, a vile reversal of the Oedipus-Antigone motif; and, finally, Fleur-de-Marie, the vierge souillée, a genuine 'type' of romantic derivation). Sue certainly makes use of archetypes and in so doing reveals his culture and inventive genius. But he does not thereby |
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