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tion of its contradictions do not already exist within it, then the resolutive factor must be fictitious. Insofar as it is fictitious, it can be readily presented from the beginning as already in being: so it can go into action straightway, without having to pass through the restrictive intermediary of concrete events. Such an element is Rodolphe of Gerolstein, who is endowed with all the traits required by fable: he is a prince (and a sovereign one, even if Marx and Engels ridicule this little German Serene Highness, treated as a king by Sue; but it is well known that no one is a prophet in his own country); he rules according to the dictates of prudence and virtue;
9 he is very rich. He is stricken with incurable remorse and a fatal nostalgia (his unhappy love for the adventuress Sarah MacGregor; the supposed death of the daughter born of this union; the fact that he raised his arm against his father). Though good-natured, this character has connotations of the romantic hero popularized by Sue himself in earlier books: an adept of vengeance, he does not shrink from violent solutions; he delights, if only in the cause of justice, in the most horrible cruelty (he puts out the Schoolmaster's eyes and causes Jacques Ferrand to die of unassuaged lust). Being put forward as the immediate solution to the evils of society, he cannot simply obey its laws, which in any case are defective enough; so he invents his own. Rodolphe, judge and executioner, benefactor and reformer without the law, is a superman. A direct descendant of the satanic hero of the romantic period, he is perhaps the first superman in the history of the serial story, the prototype for Monte Cristo, a contemporary of Vautrin (who though created earlier came to full development only at that time). |
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Antonio Gramsci had already noted with insight and irony that the superman, having been molded from the clay of the serial novel, proceeded thence to philosophy.10 Some other prototypes also can be discerned in the composition of this particular superman, as Bory observes: Rodolphe is a kind of God the Father (those who benefit from his goodness never tire of repeating this) who takes human form and enters the world disguised as a workman. God becomes the Worker. Marx and Engels had not considered quite thoroughly enough the problem of a superman in action, and thus they complain that Rodolphe, whom they take to be a model of humanity, is guided, not at all by disinterested and charitable motives, but by a predilection for vengeance and prevarication. This is true: Rodolphe is a cruel and vindictive God, a Christ with the spirit of Jehovah. |
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In order to solve by imaginative means the real dramas of the poverty-stricken Parisian underworld, Rodolphe had to (i) convert the Ripper, (ii) punish the Owl and the Schoolmaster, (iii) redeem Fleur-de-Marie, (iv) console Madame d'Harville by giving her life a new purpose, (v) save the Morels from despair, (vi) overthrow the sinister power of |
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