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Translation of “Mimésis littéraire et connaissance morale: la tradition de l’éthopée“, in Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 2/2010, pp. 291-322. Forthcoming on CAIRN International. http://www.cairn-int.info/list_articles_fulltext.php?ID_REVUE=E_ANNA

Literary Mimesis and Moral Knowledge The Tradition of “Ethopoeia”*

Barbara Carnevali

Abstract The aim of the paper is to explore the cognitive value of certain literary works through the notion of

“ethopoeia” (moral mimesis or a portrait based on custom and behavior). Originally a rhetorical notion,

ethopoeia can be expanded to signify an interdisciplinary literary genre, situated at the ideal interface between

literature and knowledge. It can be practiced by any of the “moral sciences” (history, anthropology,

psychology, sociology, etc.) and approaches human reality through the phenomenological representation of

ethos (character/custom/ morality, both individual and collective). Having outlined the theoretical framework of

ethopoiia, we retrace its development though several milestones of the Western “moral” tradition, from

Aristotle and Theophrastus to the realist novels of the 19th and 20th centuries. In doing so, we emphasize the

continuities and discontinuities that characterize the tradition, as well as the relationships between literature

and the human and social sciences.

Mimetic representation often appears more suited to the understanding of the phenomena of

human reality than other more abstract forms of knowledge. It is often the case that a precise

description of a certain human behavior, illustrated both by examples and anecdotes,

constitutes an act of autonomous understanding that is not only an essential addition to any

attempts at conceptual definition, but may also stand in its stead.

* I would like to thank Jacques Bouveresse, Jean-Jacques Rosat, and all those who took part in the seminar “Philosophy and Literature” for having inspired an initial version of this study and discussing it with me. I am also grateful to Philippe Audegean and Antoine Lilti who made important contributions to this article.

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It is an observation that might be made by anyone working in the field of the human

sciences: the historian seeking to depict a vanished way of life, the sociologist trying to

describe the characteristics of a habitus, the psychologist investigating the specificity of a

subjective attitude, or even, an anthropologist faced with explaining a custom that is strange

and incomprehensible to the Western way of thinking. All will often resort spontaneously to

the form of comprehension which in philosophy is referred to as phenomenological, and

which in turn is linked to the type of discourse that, in ordinary language, we associate with

the term “evidence”: the concrete description of the way things appear and their essential

qualities. This same perception of an equivalence between knowledge and mimetic

representations is also the foundation for the opposite experience, whereby we discover a

form of knowledge, for example, in descriptions of social manners or psychological analyses

in a good novel. This form of knowledge is not very far removed from that found in the field

of the human sciences.

The aim of this article is to offer an explanation of the cognitive value of literature in

the light of the concept of representation or mimesis of the moral reality.1 I will try to argue that some literary forms — those, such as realist novels, that are more inclined towards

mimetic reproduction of the life-world — share with the human sciences the same inclination

towards a phenomenological understanding of human reality.

This theoretical insight cannot be separated from a historical genealogy: it is

supported by a collection of intuitions from a significant and longstanding tradition that has

accompanied Western culture like a continuous bass line. One might call this the moralist

tradition, a phrase which generally refers to a specific period in French literary history

extending more or less from Montaigne to Vauvenargues, but which, in this case, would have

to be seen in a wider sense of the term, since it covers a considerably longer period of time

from Antiquity up to the birth of the novel and of the social sciences in the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries. This moralist tradition practiced a form of discourse which I shall term

“ethopoeia”, in reference to rhetorical usage, and which is situated at a sort of ideal

intersection between literature and moral knowledge. Over the course of time it has been a

1 The notion of a moral significance and function in literary works is now at the center of the debate about the cognitive value of literature, in which theorists such as Jacques Bouveresse, Stanley Cavell, Vincent Descombes, Jon Elster, Martha Nussbaum, and Robert Pippin are important participants. The ideas put forward in this article owe much to these authors; in particular, I owe some of the fundamental insights into the phenomenological and descriptive nature of moral knowledge found in the novel to the work of Vincent Descombes, Proust: Philosophy of the Novel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1987] 1992).

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point of convergence for not only writers, but also philosophers, historians, anthropologists,

psychologists and sociologists.

This article will be largely devoted to a reconstruction of a history of the notion of

ethopoeia, in which I will refer to the most significant stages of this tradition. Aristotle

formulated the major lines of the problem by proposing, in his Ethics, a conception of moral

knowledge that was phenomenological and descriptive in nature, and, in his Poetics, a

conception of literature in which the representation of ethos was the aim of mimesis.

Developing, as it does, the outlines of this Aristotelian problem, Theophrastus’ Characters is

a “pure” example of ethopoeia, the renaissance of which in modern times, with its twofold

variation involving on the one hand the psychological (the individual character) and on the

other the social (the character or habitus of a group), has had a determining influence on both

the birth of the modern novel and of the human sciences. At the heart of this tradition are the

classical moralists, who determined the modern anthropological and ethical turn.

It might be useful however to precede my historical reconstruction with a brief review

of the theoretical premises contained within the concept of ethopoeia or ethical mimesis

(representation/description of mores). This concept can be analyzed by distinguishing

between the object and form of moral knowledge, that is, between ethos and mimesis.2

Ethos and Mimesis The tradition of ethopoeia is founded on the assumption that the understanding of human

reality must focus on the ethos, the field of ethical phenomena or mores; and that this field

provides a basis for an encounter between literature and the human sciences. In order to recall

their historical origins as well as their common adherence to the moralist tradition, I will refer

to the human sciences as the moral sciences3, and use the phrase moral knowledge to describe

the aim of the different disciplines that aspire to the knowledge of human reality. Such

knowledge should not be understood merely in its normative sense: it does not refer only to

the morality that is judge of vice and virtue, which rules on correct behavior and condemns

immoral acts. Moral knowledge is also the science of moral behavior, of “ethology,” the

2 See Barbara Carnevali, “L’Observatoire des mœurs. Les coutumes et les caractères entre littérature et morale,” in Pensée morale et genres littéraires, eds. Jean-Charles Darmon and Philippe Desan (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009) 159–178. 3 See John Stuart Mill, The Logic of the Moral Sciences (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, [1843] 1988). See also Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London/New-York: Continuum, [1965] 2004), 3.

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study of human character and social attitudes with a perspective that is not always evaluative,

but also primarily and fundamentally descriptive.4

The notions of ethos and mores are all the more pertinent to these requirements in that

they have always referred — at least since Aristotle — to a specific conception of a moral

knowledge whose nature is primarily phenomenological and descriptive.5 It would be

interesting to retrace its philosophical history, since it coincides with that of certain important

trends in Western moral thinking: Aristotelian ethics, Skeptic and partly Stoic philosophy, the

school of classical moralists, the Hegelian tradition. However, leaving aside for the moment

the history of ideas, I will focus here on the theoretical potentialities of the concept of mores

for the human sciences, in preference to other contenders that have appeared in the course of

the history of philosophy such as Geist, culture, or form of life. For reasons that will be made

clear later on, our conception of mores is inherited from the notion of character, which in

turn is derived from the Greek concept of ethos.6

According to an initial programmatic definition, mores are, therefore, the units of

phenomena that make up the ethical reality which is the common ground of literature and the

moral sciences: individual and collective habits, characters, attitudes, and passions — that is,

all the tangible modalizations of human behavior within incessantly diverse spatial and

temporal contexts.7 Within this definition are associated entities that initially appear to be

extremely diverse: passions, mental and physical dispositions, practices, psychological and

social types, etc. This intermediary status situated, therefore, between the specific fields of

psychology, anthropology, and sociology is precisely one of the principal interests of the

concept of mores, whose interdisciplinary pertinence has been its distinguishing characteristic

from the very beginning. Moral knowledge should in turn be seen as a cross-disciplinary

study of human reality bringing together and joining fields of knowledge hitherto

disconnected by modern specialization.

Furthermore, although quite diverse, the various entities brought together under this

definition of mores present noticeable etymological and semantic similarities. The main 4 Similar to some extent to the ideas put forward by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, La Morale et la science des mœurs (Paris: F. Alcan, 1903). See also Mill’s Logic of Moral Sciences. The fifth chapter entitled “Of Ethology, or the Science of the Formation of Character,” uses the Greek concept of ethos as a basis to define the object and method of moral and social knowledge. 5 See for example Pierre Aubenque, La Prudence chez Aristote (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), 37. 6 Note also moral and mores are derived from the Latin mos (custom, will, habit, rule). 7 See William. G. Sumner, Folkways: A Study of Mores, Customs and Morals (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, [1905] 2002). In this original and fascinating but sadly almost forgotten work, the American sociologist attempts to form the basis of a kind of comparative universal ethnology by drawing on the repertoire of the mores from different civilizations.

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similarity consists in the references to the idea of habit, and therefore to usual practice,

regularity, repetition, constancy, and perseverance in the long or even short term. The same

idea is found as much in the notion of custom, derived from the Latin consuetudo, as in the

notion of character, from the Greek ἦθος, which, as Aristotle emphasized, was closely

related to the concept of habit, ἔθος.8 This last observation is all the more significant in light

of the fact that the concept of ethos-character — and therefore also, by virtue of the above-

mentioned connection, of ethos-habit — constitutes a unifying principle of Aristotle’s work,

since it is the link connecting the different fields of morality, poetics, and rhetoric. In the

Nicomachean Ethics, ethos is the ethical disposition, the subjective condition of virtue; in the

Poetics, it is the second element of tragedy, following, in order of importance, mythos,

history; finally, in Rhetoric, it refers to the different typologies of the soul which the orator

must consider in order to form an appropriate discourse, and adjust it to suit the demands and

the psychological and moral characteristics of its potential audience.

The examples given by Aristotle in these three works are baffling to the modern mind,

which tends to reduce the sense of the word character to the meaning of individual

psychology, so that ethos overlaps with the psychic space of the subject (whereas the idea of

mores has retained its wider social meaning). We tend to think of character as an attribute of

a person’s identity: it refers to the whole range of qualities that make up the irreducible

individuality of that person. Aristotle, instead, considered characters to be pre-individual or

trans-individual attributes: passions (anger, shame, pity, envy etc.), ethical disposition or

virtues and vices (courage, temperance, magnanimity), different ages or stages of life (youth,

maturity, old age), or even social conditions (nobility, wealth, poverty, etc.). Such attributes

do not correspond to the individual subject, but pass through, encompass, or transcend him or

her. They can be represented as conditions, “ethical spaces” occupied by a number of people.

Finally, another reason to consider the notion of mores from a cognitive perspective

lies in its mixed ontological status.9 Ethos contains a mixture of mental elements (ideas,

beliefs, states of mind, sensations) and physical elements (physiological states and processes,

physical appearance, posture and habits). It is a result of such a combination of factors that it

is almost impossible to pin down its essence to either of these domains — as demonstrated by

8 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1103 a 17-18. See Emile Benveniste, Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, vol. 1 (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1987), 329–333. According to Benveniste, the Latin possessive suus has the same root — which relates to the other element common to all three notions: the relationship to the self. 9 Another key feature of the concept of mores is their normative dimension and their mixed nature of facts and values, attitudes and beliefs. This problem would require a lengthy specific analysis, which I intend to carry out in the future.

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the unsolvable argument that for centuries has opposed those who have upheld the cultural

interpretation of character to the partisans of naturalist reduction.

In the tradition of ethopoeia, mores, as the specific object of moral knowledge,

corresponds then to the form known as literary mimesis. This fundamental concept of

Western aesthetics is historically overdetermined: it is loaded with manifold significance and

is the cause of innumerable problems of interpretation, beginning with that of the founding

texts by Plato and Aristotle.10 I will use it in a limited and defined sense in reference to the

type of discourse, the aim of which is to render the objectivity of reality by representation.

Apart from the fact that this conception of mimesis represents one of the main aspects of the

continuing presence of ancient culture in modern literature,11 it can play a decisive role in the

debate on the relationship between literature and the moral sciences: because of its twin

cognitive and aesthetic significance, it effectively provides a way of bypassing the

opposition, mainly Positivist in conception, between art and science.12 In mimesis, the

scientific method is not separated from the literary form by the immense distance

presupposed by the Positivist cliché: both can share the same demand for truth, evidence and

accuracy, as long as they try to find an adequate means of expression, that is, the most

accurate correspondence between the phenomena observed and the words used to name and

describe them. This is generally the case when the very nature of the phenomenon being

studied dictates the method that can lead to its proper understanding. To borrow from Marx’s

own terms, it could be said that literature and science are able to meet when, faced with the

same “specific object,” they both adopt the same “specific logic”, that is the form that

endeavors to remain as close as possible to things and allows them, as it were, to speak for

themselves. In the last century, this method of knowledge was known as the

10 See the recent important work on this by Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis. Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 11 Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis. 12 See Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: the Rise of Sociology (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press [1985] 1988). In retracing the development of the relationship between literature and sociology, Lepenies mentions a historic rivalry between the two disciplines dating from the mid-nineteenth century, when, in his view, the assertion of the social sciences provoked a revolution in the traditional systems of knowledge. For centuries, Western culture had only really produced two legitimate forms of knowledge: that of the natural sciences; and the humanist knowledge of rhetoric and literature. The establishment of sociology as a new and specific discipline would have compromised this historic division of tasks in giving birth to “a third culture” which then constructed its own identity by laboriously forging its way between the two keeping, as it were, a foot in both camps. Even though it is close to science due to its “form” (its aims being universality and objectivity, sociology follows a rigorous methodology and claims exactitude while rejecting the cult of style which in Lepenies’ view is the domain of literature), it shares the object of its study with the humanities. This approach to the problem is nevertheless questionable, in that it reduces the essence of literature to a decorative function (style as the obsession for the “well-written”), dismissing its cognitive value (style as the search for truth, rigor and exactitude).

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phenomenological attitude, and was thought particularly appropriate for the study of the

human condition. Faced with a multi-faceted subject, the essence of which appears to mingle

with its appearance, the phenomenological method sets out to observe closely and to describe

accurately. Its task therefore is the faithful imitation of moral reality, or the “phenomenal

discourse” in the twofold objective and the subjective sense of the expression.

This phenomenological and descriptive method of understanding could be considered

as the soul of the concept of literary mimesis. Since concern for form is the indispensable

condition for the cognitive efficacy of mimetic representation, literature and science are not,

as common sense would have it, mutually exclusive but find conciliation in style. “To write

well” does not mean expressing oneself in an over-ornate manner, with elegance or

refinement (albeit at the price of obscurity — sacrificing precision of meaning for aesthetic

effect); on the contrary, to write well means using language in the most appropriate manner.

The discourse is all the more real, in that it satisfies the requirement for the greatest possible

consistency with the objective reality.

The notion of mores is therefore compatible with a phenomenological and descriptive

conception of language, within a theory of ethical mimesis, which I will refer to as ethopoeia.

Ethopoeia The word “ethopoeia” is composed of two Greek words: ethos (character/custom understood

both in the individual and collective sense) and poiein, to make, create, produce, but also to

reproduce, represent, or imitate, as suggested in the etymology of “poet” and “poetry.”

Ethopoeia is literally the (re)production of ethical characters.

The notion of ethopoeia has its origins in rhetoric and refers to the figure of

hypotyposis or evidentia, that is the ability to produce the living image of the subject of the

discourse in the minds of the audience, to conjure images that are, according to Quintilian,

“…so fully expressed in words that seem to be seen rather than heard.”13 A good orator can

portray his subject so effectively with words that he can make it seem visible in the mind’s

eye, as vividly present to the internal sense of the imagination as if it were actually perceived

by the external senses. The visual metaphor is central to these definitions — indeed it plays a

significant part throughout the entire tradition of ethopoeia. Theorists and writers often

compare the effect of a discourse to the evidence of visual perception — its ability to produce

13 Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, Book 9, Chap. 2, 40. Ed. Lee Honeycutt. Trans. John Selby Watson. 2006. Iowa State. 7 Oct. 2015. <http://rhetoric.eserver.org/quintilian/>

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an illusion, the well-known “reality effect.” In the final analysis, it is hypotyposis that

justifies the principle of ut pictura poësis: through its evocative power, by recreating in

words highly mimetic and illusionistic images of the world, verbal language is an equal rival

to the art of painting.

The basic instrument of all hypotoposis is description: places, landscapes, interior

décor (topography), temporal circumstances (chronology), works of art (ekphrasis), people

(portraits), etc.14 When the personal qualities described by the orator are of a moral nature —

aspects of character, habits, vices or virtues, passions etc.,— hypotoposis becomes

specifically ethopoeia or simply “mimesis,” as proposed by Quintilian, again in Book 9 of

Institutes of Oratory: “The imitation of other persons’ manners (imitatio morum alienorum),

which is called ἠθοποιΐα (ethopoeia), or as others prefer, μίμησις (mimesis), may be

numbered among the lighter artifices for touching the feelings for it consists mostly in

mimicry, but it may be exhibited either in acts or in words.”15

From this definition it is possible then to develop an aesthetic theory. By extending

the rhetorical notion of ethopoeia to poetics, it can be used as a way of understanding this

form of discourse that contain mimetic representations of moral qualities and that is common

to several different disciplines: primarily literature, rhetoric and moral philosophy, but also

history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and in fact all moral sciences that seek to

understand the human condition by relating to it through the mediation of ethos.

Ethical mimesis, indeed, is not just the province of a single literary form. It can be

found in the most diverse literary genres including poetry, theatre, novels, biographies and

books on exemplary lives, on moral thinking and maxims, journalism, travel writing, studies

in sociology, ethnography and cultural anthropology, social history, case studies in

psychopathology as well as guides to self-help and social etiquette. Whenever a writer uses a

process of mimetic description in order to put a moral attitude “in front of [a readers’] eyes,”

it can be called ethopoeia, whether it be the rage of Achilles or Dora’s hysteria, the American

Indian ritual of potlatch or snobbism in the salons of the Belle Époque. However, in spite of

its extreme versatility and its propensity for colonizing different disciplines, ethopoeia is

particularly used in certain specific literary genres, of which clearly the most important and

exemplary is the one initiated by Aristotle’s pupil and successor, Theophrastus. In

14 See Philippe Hamon, Du descriptif (Paris: Hachette, [1981]1993). Also, Pierluigi Pellini, La descrizione (Rome/Bari: Laterza, 1998), Jean-Michel Adam and André Petitjean, Le Texte descriptif. Politique historique et linguistique textuelle: avec des travaux d’application et leurs corrigés (Paris: Nathan 1989), and La Mimèsis, ed. Alexandre Gefen (Paris: Flammarion, 2002). 15 Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, Book 9, Chap. 2, 58. Accessed from <http://rhetoric.eserver.org/quintilian/>.

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Characters, brief moral portraits produce the image of an individual ethos by

“characterizing” it, that is, by depicting its most typical aspects and quality with the greatest

phenomenological accuracy and effectiveness. Here, moral hypotyposis coincides with the

literary genre itself.

It is often the philologists who have emphasized the interdisciplinary nature — at

once esthetic, moral, and cognitive — of the literary genre practiced by Theophrastus.

Giorgio Pasquali, in proposing to interpret Characters as lecture notes, or more precisely as a

summary of the main points of a Lyceum lecture on descriptive ethics inspired by the method

followed by Aristotle in Book IV of Nicomachean Ethics, explicitly refers to “a

phenomenology of mores” elevated to the level of an “art form.”16

Nevertheless, in his Prolegomena to his Latin edition of Theophrastus (1592), a work

that would make a significant contribution to the modern renaissance of the genre, Isaac

Casaubon had already emphasized the particularity of ethopoeia, which in a single gesture

unites the task of the poet and that of the “ethical philosopher” (ethicus philosophus). As a

matter of fact, we are indebted to Casaubon for his profound meditation on the nature and

moral function of mimesis:

…this small work belongs to a genre that is an intermediary between philosophical writing

and that of the poets [medii cuiusdam esse inter philosophorum et poetarum scripta generis].

The subject in this work is mores, which the author sets himself the task of correcting; he

shares this aim with the ethical philosopher and they share the task. Theophrastus does not

however treat the subject in the manner of the philosophers: the subject is written according

to a new method of teaching [novo quodam docendi genere] which consists of a description of

how men with such and such a virtue or vice usually behave, how they really are.17

16 Giorgio Pasquali, “Sui Caratteri di Teofrasto,” [1918] in Letteratura greca, eds. Fritz Bornmann, Giovanni Pascucci, and Sebastiano Timpanaro (Florence: L. Olschki, 1986), 53, 62. See also Augusto Rostagni, “Sui Caratteri di Teofrasto,” Rivista di filologia e di istruzione classica, 48 (1920): 417–443. Compared with Pasquali who associates the genre of Characters with Aristotle’s Ethics and other specialists who associate it with the Rhetoric, Rostagni maintains that the work should be interpreted in the context of the Poetics. The philologists’ uncertainty in classifying the genre is illustrative of the mediating role that the concept of ethopoeia can play between morals, aesthetics and philosophy. See the introduction and editor’s comments in Theophrastus, Characters, ed. James Diggle (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 17 Isaac Casaubon, Theophrasti characteres ethici, sive descriptiones morum graece. Isaacus Casaubonus recensuit, in latinum sermonem vertit, et libro commentario illustravit, (Ludguni: F. LePreux, 1592). This passage is taken from the Prologomena that precedes the Commentarii. The original translation into French was by Marc Escola and taken from the second chapter of his work on Jean de La Bruyère (on the influence of Casaubon on the modern tradition): Marc Escola, La Bruyère I. Brèves questions d’herméneutique (Paris: H. Champion, 2001).

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By referring to the fourth book of Nicomachean Ethics, as Giorgio Pasquali would

also do much later, Casaubon concludes that Theophrastus very often adopts a “mimetic”

(mimetikos) approach to mores, an approach, that is, usually employed by poets. As if to

emphasize the representative nature of the genre, he gives Characters other definitions by

choosing phrases from the classical tradition such as “ethical icons” (eikones ethon,

eikonismoi) and “moral images” (imagines morum).

The point of intersection referred to by Casaubon should be extended further still.

Apart from poetry and moral philosophy, this intersection also includes history, which, by

interpreting events and actions, always refers in the last analysis to human characters. Mores

are therefore a field of interest shared by several experts, a “middle ground” where

philosophers, poets, and historians come together to study human reality. Their methods and

approaches are different, but their aim is always to describe customary behavior in order to

understand and to evaluate it in a satisfactory manner:

This is why, in a sense, they all have the same goal, but take different paths to achieve

it. The philosopher’s approach [ratio] is simple and follows the straight and direct

route: he argues on vice and virtue, tells us that we must follow one and avoid the

other, and to this end issues us with practical instructions [praecepta]. The poet and

the historian do not deal with vices and virtues in abstracto, nor are they concerned

with their nature or their origin. That is the domain of the philosophers. But they

consider the men who are endowed with these virtues or vices: by describing actions

and customary behavior, they provide us with examples of those who we should

imitate, and those who we should avoid, inviting us implicitly [tacite] to look closely

at human life and follow the example of others.18

While the philosopher explains mores in the abstract, questioning their nature and

their origins, the historian and the poet limit themselves to illustrating types of behavior,

developing them in the form of concrete examples which the reader can then reflect upon and

come to his or her own conclusions. There thus begins to emerge a dialectic of the explicit

and the implicit, equivalent to that of the abstract and the concrete, the moment of reflection

(a concept, a definition) and the descriptive act (the exemplum, the anecdote, the illustration).

The relationship of ethopoeia with, and its contamination by, other literary genres, hinges in a

18 Casaubon, Theophrasti characteres ethici.

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number of ways on this dialectic that establishes ethopoeia as a genre in its pure state.

Although definition and description are two essential and complementary aspects, their

mutual equilibrium can in fact tip one way or the other depending on the general aim of the

discourse with which the ethopoeia is associated.

There is an example of this dialectic in Jean de la Bruyère’s Caractères. In his study

on the relationship between this work and the previous tradition, Marc Escola points out that

La Bruyère considerably reduced the philosophical significance of Theophrastus’ work,

whereas in Isaac Casaubon’s version, this aspect had been explicitly highlighted.19 By

avoiding any direct reference to Aristotle, and by leaving out the titles and definitions at the

beginning of each description (replacing them with a name, which although allegorical,

confers a greater level of individuality on the character), La Bruyère seems determined to opt

for an implicit form of ethopoeia. In his reinterpretation of the genre, the character becomes

the object of mere representation and is no longer governed by the concept itself. The reader

can no longer read the phenomenological description of behavior as an abstract and universal

definition, which gradually materializes thanks to the exemplification of characteristic

qualities, such as it is in Theophrastus’ original work.20 Instead, through an act of individual

hermeneutics, the reader must work back from the concrete to the abstract, from the

individual to the universal, by deducing for him- or herself the “ethical concept” behind the

image represented in the text.

As a general rule, it is possible to say that the tendency to make conceptual content

implicit is characteristic of the modern literary variation of ethopoeia (in the novel, the

character is entirely absorbed into a named individual), while in more explicitly reflective

genres, such as essays, the emphasis on the cognitive aspect goes hand in hand with the

tendency to clarify and explain the conceptual content. This rule could also be expressed in

proportional terms: the greater the mimetic and literary content of the ethopoeia, the more the

philosophical and reflective element is reduced. The principle can be illustrated by comparing

two of the most famous methods of analyzing the passions, namely, that of moralist François

de La Rochefoucauld, who intentionally used maxims and thoughts, and that of the novelist

Stendhal and his famous precept in favor of the art of implicit communication: “Never say

19 See in particular Escola, La Bruyère. The work of Escola is a vital resource for the study of modern ethopoeia. See also the work of Louis Van Delft, especially Littérature et anthropologie. Nature humaine et caractère à l’âge classique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993). 20 All of Theophrastus’ thirty characters present the same structure; the title, which names a moral quality, a brief definition, then a more detailed analytical description that illustrates the characteristic behavioral traits in the form of anecdotes and examples.

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‘Olivier’s burning passion for Hélène.’ The poor novelist has to try and convince the reader

of the burning passion without actually naming it […].”21 According to Stendhalian poetics, a

good novel should describe the effects and the signs of a passion without defining it explicitly

— in other words, to paraphrase a major principle of Proustian aesthetics, the novelist must

remove the ethical concept of which his or her characters are the image, as one would remove

the price tag on a purchased object22.

By developing the character in the direction of subjectivity and interiority, the genre

made famous by Theophrastus offers a paradigm that could be termed psychological

ethopoeia.23 This paradigm has an influence on all genres of discourse relative to the life of

the individual: tragedies, novels, biographies, autobiographies and hagiographies, psychiatric

case studies, etc. It has a social equivalent (according to the other possible variation of ethos,

in the sense of the character/custom of a group) in a minor literary genre that had its hour of

glory in the French and English culture of the eighteenth century: the peinture de mœurs

(portrayal of social mores/manners) and the other genre typical of the Enlightenment, the

description of national characters, which we will place together under the title of the study of

manners. Having as its main objective the phenomenology of collective moral attitudes, often

carried out by distanciation (for example, through the narrator being a traveler from a far off

land), the study of manners was linked to travel literature, journalism, and the novel, in as

much as it had an influence on each of these genres and was in turn influenced by them. It is

rightly considered to be one of the sources of modern sociology24: not only because of its

content, its ethnological themes and sensitivity to the so-called question of the “Other,” but

also, on a strictly formal level, because of its refined methods of objectivization— starting

with the art of distanciation itself, the soul of ethopoeia in the Enlightenment, which was at

the root of some of the methodological preoccupations in the social sciences.25 Among the

21 Stendhal, “Lettre à Madame Jules Gaulthier, 4 mai 1834,” Correspondance générale, vol. V, 1834–1836, ed. Victor Del Litto (Paris: H. Champion, 1999), no. 2245, 116. 22 In reality, Proust’s novels are as rich in maxims as the great masterpieces of the moralist tradition, and in fact invite a less rigid application of the rule, since Proust demonstrates that the representation of extremely individualized characters and “living people” is perfectly compatible, even in novelistic ethopoeia, with a considerable level of reflection. 23 See John William Smeed, The Theophrastan “Character”: The History of a Literary Genre (Oxford/New York: Clarendon Press, 1985). The tradition of Characters is mostly widespread in the French and English culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It played a determining role in the birth of the novel. 24 See Johan Heilbron, The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity: Conceptual Change in Context, 1750-1850 (Dordrecht/Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998). 25 See Carlo Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). The technique of distanciation, originally elaborated by the stoics — Ginzburg finds its source in the spiritual exercises of Marcus Aurelius — developed its full potential in the literature of the Enlightenment, where it became one of the most effective instruments of moral and anthropological knowledge. Distanciated description temporarily suspends the centers of meaning and recognition which naturalize an ethos and make it

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numerous examples of such studies are the Lettres persanes (1721) by Montesquieu, an

undisputed masterpiece of the genre, the Lettres sur les Anglois et les François et sur les

voiages (1725) by the Swiss Béat Louis de Muralt, and the Considérations sur les mœurs de

ce siècle (1751) by Charles Duclos — these last two works inspired the descriptions of

Parisian society in La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and influenced the genesis of Jean-Jacques

Rousseau’s social theory.26 As for national characters, Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des lois and Of

National Characters by David Hume (both in 1748) provided famous and influential models

for the genre. Also belonging to this tradition is Giacomo Leopardi’s Discorso sopra lo stato

presente��� dei costumi degl’Italiani (Discourse on the Present State of the Customs of the

Italians, 1824).

If the Theophrastian character is an individual portrait, a study of manners is a

collective one: it focuses on a plurality of people who share the same milieu — nation,

region, community, village, the same role or social condition — class, organization,

professional category, generation. In its social dimension, ethos presents, therefore, a wider

scope than in its psychological dimension, since it transcends the frontiers of the individual

soul and meets with those of a transpersonal spirit: French or Persian, nobles or peasants,

doctors, soldiers, adolescents, old people, etc. In order to consider ethopoeia in this collective

sense and to attempt to convey ethical mimesis from a sociological perspective, the concept

of habitus as taken up by Pierre Bourdieu is an excellent theoretical instrument; but just as

useful is a version of the same concept by Norbert Elias. His Studien über die Deutschen

[Studies on the Germans] clearly relates back to the description of national characters.27

The proximity in methodology between the Theophrastian character and the study of

manners can be better understood by comparing a series of works that, although apparently

very different in their themes and cultural and historical origins, are all descriptions of a type

of collective mores that could be called “ethopoeia of prestige.” Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of self-evident for those who are immersed in it. By allowing things to be seen from another point of view, in a different light, the épochè enables a scientifically objective consideration of mores, which can then be followed by analysis and critique. See also the fine work by Francesco Orlando, Illuminismo, barocco e retorica freudiana (Turin, Italy: Einaudi, [1982] 1997). 26 See Frederick C. Green, La Peinture des mœurs de la bonne société dans le roman français de 1715 à 1761 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1924). For some other later examples of this genre, see: Jacques-Vincent Delacroix, Peinture des mœurs du siècle, ou lettres et discours sur différents sujets, par M. de La Croix (Amsterdam/Paris: Lejay, 1777); Henri Guys, Un Dervich algérien en Syrie. Peinture des mœurs musulmanes, chrétiennes et israélites (Paris: J. Rouvier, 1854); Joseph Tissot, Mémoire sur les habitants des Fourgs, peinture de mœurs (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1863). 27 See Norbert Elias, Studies on the Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2013).

.

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the Leisure Class (1899), The Gift by Marcel Mauss (1923–1924), The Salaried Masses by

Siegfried Kracauer (1929), The Court Society by Norbert Elias (1969), and Pierre Bourdieu’s

Distinction (1979) all center on the symbolic struggle for social recognition. The struggle

takes various forms: the conspicuous consumption of the ruling classes in the United States at

the end of the nineteenth century, exchange rituals in North America and the Trobriand

islands, petit-bourgeois entertainments in Weimar Germany, the contest for royal favor in the

court of the Sun King, and the snobbism of the French upper classes during the 1970s. In

describing these moral attitudes, social scientists use a method which closely resembles the

one used by Theophrastus: they carefully describe manifestations of symbolic practices and

conflicts of honor; they organize corresponding subjective traits into types (the psychology of

the élite who capitalize on prestige, that of the “losers” who covet and lament it); and, finally,

they accompany their efforts with conceptual definitions of examples and anecdotes which

illustrate them with great effectiveness.

Before concluding this overview of the various genres, one final observation must be

made. It has already been established that at the head of this system of ethopoeia are the two

pure genres, the characters and the study of manners. Immediately after this, there are the

mixed genres in which ethopoeia is not the primary or exclusive intention of the discourse,

but it is essential to it and occupies an important part of the text. Among these are studies of

lives (of the Plutarchian variety, hagiographies, or historic biographies), the ancient moralia

(following the tradition of Plutarch), the essay (in the classic form of Montaigne as well as its

twentieth century form), and the modern realist novel. The relationship between these last

two genres has been the subject of numerous important theoretic analyses, which for the most

part focus on the proverbial flexibility of the novel as a form, and on its capacity for

encompassing other literary genres — as a result, in the final analysis the problem refers back

to the question of the novel-essay. The theory of ethopoeia allows for a different perspective

to be taken on this relationship, by inviting a new interpretation of the link between the novel

and the essay in the light of their common adherence to the moralist tradition, and therefore

their interest in the mimetic representation of ethical life (or even their equal tendency to

comprehend reality by hypotyposis, that is, putting it on “display”).28 Their differences could

28 In the essay, the tendency towards hypotyposis is often in proportion to the lack of precision of its objects. The more difficult a human phenomenon is to define, the more often there spontaneously occurs this hybrid genre between philosophy and literature, in which theory seems to overlap with description and the accumulation of examples and of characteristic traits. I began to address this issue, which merits further in-depth analysis in Barbara Carnevali, “Sur Proust et la philosophie du prestige,” Littérature, histoire, théorie 1 (2006). Accessed from http://www.fabula.org/lht/1/Carnevali.html. On the essay, see Marielle Macé, Le Temps de l’essai. Histoire d’un genre en France au XXe siècle (Paris: Belin, 2006).

15

then be understood as the result of the tension between explicitation and implicitation,

between the reflective and the descriptive, in other words, the tension between philosophy

and literature that has been seen to emerge in the modern use of ethopoeia.

Before examining ethopoeia as it is found in the novel, I would like to turn my

attention to some theoretical and historical questions that still remain open.

Depicting Manners

The expression peinture de mœurs (portrayal of social manners), which referred to the

prevalent literary genre of the eighteenth century, also appears in the dictionaries of rhetoric

as a synonym of the figure “ethopoeia.”29 The interesting fact about this expression lies in the

reference to pictorial art, which makes explicit the allusion to visual representation that has

always been written into the rhetorical concept of evidentia. The relationship between literary

mimesis and its figurative counterpart is one of the main topoi of Western poetics and

aesthetics. The way in which Aristotle refers to it in certain passages of his Poetics is

therefore of enormous importance.

According to Aristotle the reason why ethos is open to mimesis, or in other words,

lends itself to artistic representations, lies in its phenomenal nature.30 Characters, both of

individuals and of peoples have the particularity of being perceivable by the senses,

especially the visual: the psychological and moral temperament is expressed in the

physiognomy, in facial expressions, the eyes, in body language, and in the personality. By

manifesting itself in the form of a perceptible image, which becomes its public and

recognizable outward appearance, the character is not only likely to be known via the senses,

but also to be imitated and reproduced by artistic mimesis. If the object of the art is an ethical

image, a moral character existing within the modality of the appearance, then this image can

then be represented by the art of painting, as Aristotle suggests by way of a comparison

between two great Greek painters: “Polygnotus is a good painter of character (ethographos);

the style of Zeuxis is devoid of character (ethos)”31; but the image of the character can also

be imitated by poets, who represent the moral forms with their own specific instruments. So it

29 See for example Henri Morier, Dictionnaire de poétique et de rhétorique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981 [1961]). 30 See for example Frédérique Woerther, L’Ethos aristotélicien. Genèse d’une notion rhétorique (Paris: Vrin, 2007), part 2, 142 sq. 31 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher, 1450 a 26–28 (the translation is slightly modified). Accessed from http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.1.1.html.

16

is within this fundamental distinction between the two forms of literary mimesis described in

Poetics, the imitation of “high” subjects (corresponding with tragedy and the epic) and the

imitation of “low” subjects, mediocre characters (comedy), that the paragone or comparison

between poetry and the art of painting is revealed:

Since the objects of imitation are men in action, and these men must be either of a

higher [spoudaioi] or a lower type [phauloi] (for moral character mainly answers to

these divisions, goodness and badness being the distinguishing marks of moral

differences), it follows that we must represent men either as better than in real life, or

as worse, or as they are. It is the same in painting.32

This paragone has enjoyed a vast fortune among writers. It is found several centuries

later for example, in Tasso: “The poet should express moral habit [costumi] as good painters

do […]”.33 According to Tasso, Homer is the “master of this effectiveness or energy that

presents things as though they were before our very eyes.”34 He is, therefore, the supreme

model in the art and skill of hypotoposis. For a philosopher, these metaphors have particular

resonance since they cannot help but remind the reader of the basic tenets of

phenomenology.35 However, before following these more modern developments, I would like

to pause awhile on another page of the Poetics.

Aristotle, in pursuing the analogy between poet and painter, suggests that the

principle of ethos, in literary mimesis, plays the same role as that of color in pictorial

mimesis, and that the function of mythos, or the story in poetry that is, corresponds to that of

the picture or drawing in the figurative arts. The primacy of the picture itself over color is a

necessary result of the transposition of the hierarchy between the two basic elements of

tragedy36 to the domain of painting. Aristotle defines this well known doctrine by way of

philosophical arguments drawn from his theory of action:

32 Aristotle, Poetics, 1448 a 1–5. 33 Tasso, Discourses on the Heroic Poem, trans. Mariella Cavalchini and Irene Samuel (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 86. The long and laborious rewriting of Jerusalem Delivered from scratch (which gave birth to the new version, Jerusalem Conquered) was carried out by Tasso in the light of this principle. See, Matteo Residori, L’idea del Poema. Studio sulla «Gerusalemme conquistata» di Torquato Tasso (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 2004), in particular the chapter entitled “Ritorno alle origini dell’epica e ‘pittura di costumi’.” 34 Tasso, Giudicio sovra la “Gerusalemme” riformata, ed. Claudio Gigante, (Rome: Salerno, 2000), 163. See Residori, L’idea del Poema, 180. 35 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Le Roman et la métaphysique,” Sens et non-sens (Paris: Gallimard, [1966] 1995), 34–52. 36 As is well known, in Poetics 1450 a 7–22, Aristotle distinguishes between six components of tragedy but specifies that there are only two truly fundamental elements: “Every Tragedy, therefore, must have six parts,

17

The plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy; character

holds the second place. A similar fact is seen in painting. The most beautiful colors,

laid on confusedly, will not give as much pleasure as the chalk outline of a portrait.

Thus Tragedy is the imitation of an action, and of the agents mainly with a view to the

action.37 Since action is at the true center of literary mimesis, representation of the human

character is both secondary and subordinate. This is why Aristotle maintains that there can be

no tragedy without action, while there could be without characters, as demonstrated by

certain examples of the literature of the time.38 Hence his conclusion, which summarizes all

his thinking in relation to the equation between poetry and painting: while the hypothesis of a

tragedy that it is devoid of characters is conceivable and effective as a picture comprising a

sketch in black and white, a tragedy that is devoid of action is the equivalent of a shapeless

collection of colored spots. Poetic mimesis of a purely moral substance cannot exist, any

more than figurative mimesis of a pure pigment.39 The essential basis of any imitative activity

is the intellectual framework that links the actions and arranges the “facts into a system”:

form, figure, and design.

The reason why this line of thought should be of great interest to literary theorists

becomes clearer if it can be reformulated according to the schema applied by Giorgio Vasari

to the history of Italian art. Vasari contrasted the Tuscan school, which had prioritized

drawing, with the Venetian painters, who instead exalted the use of color. So it is possible to

imagine a hypothetical “Vasarian history of Western poetry,” which would distinguish

between a mythical or diegetic style — a more rational and intellectual conception of literary

mimesis with the focus on narrative structure, on the concatenation of events and on the

which parts determine its quality — namely, Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Song. […] But most important of all is the structure of the incidents [pragmaton systasis]. For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality. Now character determines men’s qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse. Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to the representation of character: character comes in as subsidiary to the actions. Hence the incidents and the plot are the end of a tragedy; and the end is the chief thing of all.” Section 1. Part 6. Accessed from http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.1.1.html. 37 Aristotle, Poetics, 1450 a 38–b 3. 38 Aristotle, Poetics, 1450 a 23-28. “Again, without action there cannot be a tragedy; there may be without character. The tragedies of most of our modern poets fail in the rendering of character; and of poets in general this is often true. It is the same in painting; and here lies the difference between Zeuxis and Polygnotus”. 39 The possibility excluded a priori by Aristotle appears to correspond with that of Theophrastus, whose characters are a-mythical, devoid of any history. In pictorial terms, this might be thought of in relation to the non-figurative experiences in the twentieth century, such as the abstract expressionism of American artist Mark Rothko, in whose painting the color translates with great immediacy the essence of a moral content.

18

action —, and an ethical style based contrastingly on an appreciation of mores, and on the

importance granted to the psychologies and the social milieu.

In this imaginary conflict between the two schools of thought, the “ethical colorists”

might well reply to the Aristotelian arguments claimed by the “narrators” on the superiority

of the mythos, by raising the following objections: first of all, the fundamental component of

literature is not made up of plots or stories but of men, because it is the human characters that

are the real source of the actions that determine events. A literature made solely of plots

would be devoid of interest, because it is the moral qualities that bring reality and endless

variety to human life. Furthermore, the hypothesis of a literature without mores is

unacceptable, because any mimesis that is devoid of ethical substance would be as lifeless

and cold as a painting without color. Surely this is what is suggested in common parlance

when a person without character or passion is described as being “dull,” and when the most

vivid observations on social manners are described as “local color”; or more simply when the

word colorful is used as a synonym for exuberance and vitality.

Although this conflict never actually happened in the precise way that it has been

imagined here, this tension between two different conceptions of literature is a constant

thread throughout the Western poetic tradition. The first definite evidence can be found in the

renaissance commentaries on the Poetics, notably Jules César Scaliger, who put forward a

very original interpretation of the Aristotelian doctrine of poetic ethos. In Book Three of his

commentary on the Poetics (1561), Scaliger makes a list of moral attitudes that represent the

object of poetry (avaritia, perfidia, ambitio, superstitio...). Each character is accompanied by

a conceptual definition, some examples of literary persons who are the emblematic

embodiment of that character, and a literary illustration serving as a specific example, such as

a verse from Virgil. Up to this point, Scaliger follows Aristotle’s text to the letter, but when

he comes to interpret the relationship between the two essential components of mimesis, he

takes an unexpectedly heterodox position, stating that the mores are even more important

than the fabula (the Latin equivalent of the Greek mythos), to the extent that they represent

the fundamental object of poetry.40

It is within the framework of this new interpretation of Aristotelian mimesis that

Tasso’s declaration on poetics can be situated: “The poet must depict manners in the same

way as a good painter.” Poetry has a specific purpose in ethical mimesis, that is, in the form

40 Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem (Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, [1561] 1964), Book III, Chap. 12 sq.

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of knowledge that in more modern terms I have defined as the phenomenology of moral

reality.

The Triumph of Customs: The Age of the Moralists Why though should the ethical style in literature have begun to hold sway in the seventeenth

century? Is there a particular connection between modernity and a prevailing interest in

morality? This phenomenon probably has a close connection with the modern revolution in

anthropology. It is at the center of the considerable increase in the importance given by

philosophers and writers of the classical period to the practical analysis of human behavior in

different areas of knowledge, namely the basis of morality and politics.41 It should not be

forgotten that Scaliger and Tasso came after the realist turn in human knowledge associated

with the name of Machiavelli. It should also be remembered that they were contemporaries of

Montaigne, who made the concept of custom or habit the very foundation of anthropology;

“It is for habit to give form to our nature just as it pleases (C’est à la coustume de donner

forme à nostre vie, telle qu’il lui plaist) — it is all powerful in that. It is Circe’s drink which

varies our nature as it sees fit.”42 His famous maxim must not be read merely as a profound

meditation on the power of habit. It testifies instead to a metaphysical and anthropological

turn which recognizes that the essence of modern morality lies in the diversification and the

multiplication of the mores. In turn, the emergence of this “ethicization” of anthropology lies

in a preliminary philosophical transformation, a new speculative orientation that tends to

reduce the metaphysical to the same level as the anthropological. This is the more or less

explicit assumption made by all modern moralists, who were also necessarily humanists, thus

setting themselves apart (even if they appear to have a predilection for the very same themes)

from the philosophers who tend to think about morality as metaphysicians.43 For the

moralists, the mores constituted the quintessential and ultimate object, the supreme

protagonists in their study of human reality.

Another decisive consequence of this transformation was the increasingly obvious

divergence between a) the tendency to steer moral knowledge in the direction of an ultimate

41 See Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, its Basis and its Genesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952); Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Anna Maria Battista, Nascita della psicologia politica (Genoa: ECIG, 1982). 42 Michel de Montaigne, “On Experience,” Essays of Michel de Montaigne, trans. Charles Cotton, Book 3, Chap. 13. Accessed from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3600/3600-h/3600-h.htm. 43 See works cited by Leo Strauss and the interpretation put forward by Daniel Tanguay, Leo Strauss. Une biographie intellectuelle (Paris: Grasset, 2003), in the chapter on the modern anthropological revolution.

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moral threshold, in search of a fixed and precise universal point of view, that would be able

to shield it from the inevitable relativity and instability of ethical modalizations (this line of

thought is perfectly realized in the Kantian plan to found a pure “moral philosophy” free from

any empirical elements; and b) the tendency to try to align morality with positive empirical

knowledge of mores, that is, with ethnographical and historical research, which is best

represented not only by some classical moralists, but also by twentieth-century cultural

anthropology. Impassioned hunter-gatherers of social customs, particularly the strangest and

most bizarre, anthropologists consider mores in their infinite variety and number to be the

very core of their knowledge. 44

The undisputed modern master of this last orientation, that nowadays we would define

as relativist and culturalist, is the skeptic Montaigne, who did not refer immediately to human

nature, but considered it as the protean result of an infinite number of ethical modalizations.

In Montaigne’s concept of morality, human reality is literally made up of customs, shaped by

manners to the point that it coincides with them. This is the reason why, in the Essays,

anthropological knowledge seems to be confused with the observation and description of

mores:

There are peoples, where, his wife and children excepted, no one speaks to the king

but through a tube. [...] There are places where brothels of young men are kept for

the pleasure of women; where the wives go to war as well as the husbands, and not

only share in the dangers of battle, but, moreover, in the honours of command.

Others, where they wear rings not only through their noses, lips, cheeks, and on their

toes, but also weighty gimmals of gold thrust through their paps and buttocks; where,

in eating, they wipe their fingers upon their thighs, genitories, and the soles of their

feet: where children are excluded, and brothers and nephews only inherit; and

elsewhere, nephews only, saving in the succession of the prince: where, for the

regulation of community in goods and estates, observed in the country, certain

sovereign magistrates have committed to them the universal charge and overseeing of

the agriculture, and distribution of the fruits, according to the necessity of every one

where they lament the death of children, and feast at the decease of old men: where

they lie ten or twelve in a bed, men and their wives together: where women, whose

husbands come to violent ends, may marry again, and others not: where the condition 44 See Francesco Remotti, “La Tolleranza verso i costumi,” in Teorie etiche contemporanee, ed. Carlo A. Viano (Turin, Italy: Bollati Boringhieri, 1990), 165–185.

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of women is looked upon with such contempt, that they kill all the native females, and

buy wives of their neighbours to supply their use.45

This extraordinary page is the ideal matrix of all modern ethopoeia, which would be

practiced not only by French classical moralists, but also by novelists, essayists, historians,

sociologists, and anthropologists during the entire period extending from the sixteenth to the

twentieth century. There is a direct connection in particular to the reinterpretation of the

Characters by La Bruyère. One century after Montaigne, there are particularly recognizable

traces of the essay on custom in a passage of the Discours sur Theophraste, in which the

author appears to borrow both the theme and the formal structure of the essay: a long

repetitive and provocative list of customs which might seem totally natural and self evident in

the culture concerned, but which, when described from a distanced point of view, appear to

be strange. This literary technique has the effect of increasing the reader’s dizzying sense of

disorientation and of bestowing on the ethopoeia an aura of skepticism and relativism. The

difference with Montaigne, however, lies in the fact that La Bruyère applies the technique of

distanciation reflexively: he intends it as a means of knowing his own culture. These are not

the customs of others, but our own customs which, from the point of view of a future and

inevitable historical distance, acquire a new and worrying objectivity, a value and a different

meaning:

The present moderns will be ancients a few ages hence. When the history of our times

will reconcile posterity to the selling of offices, that is to say, the power of protecting

innocence, punishing guilt and doing justice to the world bought with money like a

farm, will reconcile them to the splendor of our collectors of revenue, the kind of

people held in the utmost contempt and abhorrence amongst the Hebrews and the

Greeks. They’ll hear of a great city without any public places, baths, fountains,

amphitheatres, galleries, porticos, or public walks, yet this is the capital of a powerful

kingdom. They will tell of person who spent their entire life passing from one house to

another; of honest women who kept neither shops nor inns, yet had their houses open

45 Michel de Montaigne, “Of Custom — That We Should Not Easily Change a Law Received,” Essays of Michel de Montaigne, trans. Charles Cotton, Book 3, Chap. 22. Accessed from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3600/3600-h/3600-h.htm. On the theme of custom in Montaigne, see André Tournon, Montaigne. La glose et l’essai (Paris: H. Champion, [1983] 2000), chap. 4; Ullrich Langer, “Montaigne’s customs,” Montaigne Studies 4 (1992): 81–96; Francis Goyet, “La notion éthique d’habitude dans les Essais: articuler l’art et la nature,” MLN 118, no. 4 (2003): 1070–1091. See also Gérard Ferreyrolles, Les Reines du monde. L’imagination et la coutume chez Pascal (Paris: H. Champion, 1995).

22

to those who would pay for admission. Where you might be furnished with all the

implements of gaming and feasting and where commerce was not forbidden. […] Now

if our posterity astonished at these decent customs so different from theirs should

presume to dislike our memoirs, our comedies, our satires, might not we complain of

them aforehand that they deprived themselves of reading so many excellent works,

sublime poems and elaborate treatises, and of the knowledge of the most glorious

reign which ever yet adorned history?46

La Bruyère’s reflections on the value of observing customs, their nature, and therefore

their close relation with history appear to lead seamlessly towards Balzac’s La Comédie

humaine. However, before considering Balzac, it is important to examine some other

theoretical questions relating to the generic definition of the novel and its connection with

ethopoeia.

The Novel: History and Characters

At the very moment when, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the moralist

tradition appeared to dwindle, a new literary genre established itself, taking over the reins of

ethopoeia. The modern novelist can be considered as the rightful heir of the classical

moralist, and the novel therefore can be seen as an “observatory of customs,” a sort of

experimental laboratory specializing in the study of ethical reality. 47 However, this definition

does not appear to be valid for all the historic incarnations of the novelistic form. From now

on, I will use this term to refer, not so much to nineteenth century realist writers (Naturalism,

Verismo), but rather to the sub-genre that Anglo-American literary theory calls the novel and

which deals with daily existence, everyday life. In philosophical terms, this genre could be

defined according to the Hegelian notion of “prose of the world” or through that of “life-

world”, a term which the phenomenological school uses to refer to the intersubjectively

shared sphere of ordinary reality.48

46 Jean de La Bruyère, “Discourse on Theophrastus,” The Works of Mons. De La Bruyère, trans. Nicholas Rowe (London: J. Whiston & B. White, 1752), 211. 47 See Carnevali, “L’observatoire des mœurs,” particularly 174. See also Paolo Tortonese, “Romanzo, morale e psicologia,” in Teoria del romanzo, ed. Laura Anna Macor and Federico Vercellone (Milan: Mimesis, 2009), 13–23, who emphasizes the moralizing and normative intention of the classical moralists at the expense of their descriptive work which seems to me to be extremely important in determining the continuity of the novel. 48 On “prose of the world,” Merleau-Ponty has written some very profound passages where, in order to define the phenomenological suitability of the novel, and its capacity to bring to life things and tangible experiences, he resorts to the same formula (“point to”) as used in works on figures of rhetoric to illustrate hypotoposis. See

23

Anglo-American literary theory distinguishes between the novel and the romance,

which refers to an adventure story, tales of extraordinary experiences, supernatural events etc.

Such a distinction is ideotypical. These two pure forms of narrative correspond to the two

equally essential and complimentary components of the art of the novel, which, as Henry

James pointed out, cannot be separated without destroying the organic unity and “life” of the

work. In practice, the two can easily cohabit, indeed overlap, and come together in ways that

are sometimes admirable (in La Chartreuse de Parme, for example, Fabrice’s adventures

clearly contain elements of the romance, although strictly speaking Stendhal’s work belonged

officially to the genre known as the novel). I will return to these serious objections further on.

However, in order to determine the role played by the ethical element in modern literature, I

will begin nevertheless with this distinction between two ideal genres — the realist novel and

the adventure novel — of which there is a incisive illustration in a critical essay by Robert

Louis Stevenson, “A Gossip on Romance” (1882), from which the following ironic passage is

taken:

English people of the present day are apt, I know not why, to look���somewhat down on

incident, and reserve their admiration for the clink of teaspoons and the accents of the

curate. It is thought clever to���write a novel with no story at all, or at least with a very

dull one.49

It is not hard to deduce that the author of Treasure Island or The Strange Case of Dr

Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a keen devotee of romance. What he denounces in the novel is its

excessive proximity to everyday existence, its prosaic view of life, illustrated by the typical

traits of English portrayal of manners. A novelist, says Stevenson, betrays his mission if he

merely indulges in details that are as insignificant as they are boring. Instead, the art of the

narrative should provide the reader’s imagination with an escape from daily life with tales of

marvelous and thrilling adventures. The reader of the novel, whatever his or her legal age, Merleau-Ponty, “Le Roman et la métaphysique,” 36. Alfred Schulz, a sociologist with a clear phenomenological orientation, was also interested in the link between the idea of Lebenswelt and the novel’s field of competence. His works contain valuable suggestions for literary theory. See Lester. E. Embree, ed., Alfred Schutz’s “Sociological aspect of literature”: Construction and complementary essays (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998). Also Maurice A. Natanson, The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Claude Romano, Le Chant de la vie. Phénoménologie de Faulkner (Paris: Gallimard, 2005).The link between the novel and phenomenology has also been observed by writers themselves, usually unwilling to claim any affiliation with philosophy. See Milan Kundera, L’Art du roman. Essai (Paris: Gallimard, 1986). 49 Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Gossip on Romance,” Essays on the Art of Fiction. Accessed from http://www.online-literature.com/stevenson/essays-of-stevenson/5/.

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always retains the imagination and the soul of a child: a reader wants to dream, set off with

pirates in search of treasure, live actual adventures, truly extraordinary events that must in no

way resemble a dull replica of the adults’ prosaic existence. No realist novel then can achieve

what Stevenson considers to be the only true vocation of literature. The concept of the

incident, the basis of his definition of romance, is diametrically opposed to the notion of

custom, which presupposes the constant and habitual repetition that forms the basis of

everyday life.

Stevenson’s tone here is ironical, but his thinking is in fact extremely profound and is

made clear through an example: Samuel Richardson’s masterpiece Clarissa should be

considered as the paradigm of the realist novel, in complete contrast with Robinson Crusoe,

the perfect example of the adventure novel, which in turn finds its French equivalent in

Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. Thanks to an observation that acquires an added value in

the context of the distinction between the two ways of understanding poetics, Stevenson

maintains that the “purely romantic atmosphere” that exudes from the work of Alexander

Dumas comes from “his stories which powerfully affect the reader” and the fact that “the

characters are no more than puppets.”50 Stevenson interprets this lack of psychological

characterization as an essentially positive factor, as if, in the art of writing, the attention paid

to the moral aspects is inversely proportional to the ability to tell a good story.

The underlying antagonism throughout the whole of this analysis is not so far

removed from that which divides mythos from ethos in Aristotle’s Poetics. Stevenson puts it

at the center of an aesthetic system that extends the distinction between plot and characters to

the realms of literary production and its reception. The novelist belonging to the school of

Defoe and Dumas places the emphasis on action and incident, he excels at story-telling and

inspires the emotional involvement of the reader by making him identify with the story, thus

taking him out of himself. Conversely, the character studies typical of novelists in the style of

Richardson stem from a fundamentally moral and intellectual interest that produces a form of

critical pleasure in the reader.51 This is an important point: going against the modern cliché,

Stevenson places psychological characterization in opposition to illusionist identification.

The more effective a depiction of character is, the more it is likely to distance the reader and

therefore provoke an objectivizing and critical approach, “[…] but the characters are��� still

themselves, they are not us; the more clearly they are depicted, the more widely do they stand

50 Stevenson, “A Gossip on Romance.” 51 Stevenson, “A Gossip on Romance.”

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away from us […]. It is not character, but��� incident that woos us out of our reserve.”52 This

analysis can be summarized in the following table:

Like Aristotle, but by virtue of an entirely idiosyncratic process, Stevenson perceives

a tension in literature between two essential factors, the mythical principal and the ethical

principal. Within the same literary genre, he then develops this tension that establishes the

specific difference between the two forms of narrative. This distinction finds its perfect

expression in the theoretic duel that, several years after A Gossip on Romance, would pit

Stevenson’s poetics against those of the most “moral” of modern novelists, Henry James.53 In

the reflections on poetics contained within “The Art of Fiction” (1884), it is not surprising to

find a reference to the parallel between the painter and the novelist, which James quotes in

order to justify both the importance of moral purpose in the novel and its capacity for

apprehending the phenomenal surface of life, the color of the human spectacle:

It is here, in very truth, that he competes with life; it is here that he competes with his

brother the painter, in his attempt to render the look of things, the look that conveys

their meaning, to catch the colour, the relief, the expression, the surface, the

substance of the human spectacle.54

52 Stevenson, “A Gossip on Romance.” 53 See Henry James, “The Art of Fiction” (1884), and Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Humble Remonstrance” (1884). 54 Henry James, “The Art of Fiction”. Accessed from http://virgil.org/dswo/courses/novel/james-fiction.pdf. It should be remembered that James refused to distinguish between novel and romance, and therefore between character and plot. He insists rather on their essential complementarity, without which the novel could not be an organic whole.

Romance Novel

Robinson Crusoe, Monte Cristo Clarissa

incident persons/characters

story character studies

romantic interest moral and intellectual interest

26

The defense of romance should have found enthusiastic followers among the writers

and critics who came after Stevenson. However, contrary to all his hopes, it is the ethical

style of the novel that came to dominate as the genre developed over the course of the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thus bringing to a close the moralization of literature that

had begun during the Renaissance.

The Morals of the Novel

As well as being the mimetic genre par excellence, the modern realist novel is also the

ultimate incarnation of the idea of moral literature so dear to Tasso55. This is an apparently

paradoxical assertion because it contradicts the commonplace idea that associates the birth of

the novel with its struggle to emancipate itself from moral constraints and prejudice.

However, the paradox disappears as soon as morals are no longer thought of exclusively in

the normative sense but also in the sense that is closest to the original etymological meaning

— moral being the knowledge or understanding of mores, customs — and the role of the

novelist is seen as that of a moralist, as Friedrich Nietzsche conceived it: not as a preacher

who condemns the decadences of moral life in the name of some superior values, but as an

expert well versed in analytical understanding and axiologically neutral with regard to the

moral phenomena.56

From this point of view, the distance between Tasso and Gustave Flaubert is no

longer as impossible to bridge as may initially have seemed. The distance remains vast if

Tasso’s poetry is only considered in the light of its normative intentions, and its desire to only

represent, among all the possible customs, only decent behavior that complies with the

morals and conventions of the time. However, in accordance with the imperative that Tasso

lays down as the essential principle of his poetics – “the poet should depict customs in the

same way as a good painter” – it becomes obvious that Jerusalem Delivered and Madame

Bovary (subtitled Provincial Manners) are the fruit of a similar notion of literature.

Ultimately, Flaubert had merely carried out a transvaluation of Tasso’s axiology, by

55 I owe many of the fundamental insights on the novel to Guido Mazzoni, Teoria del romanzo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2012), translation forthcoming, Theory of the Novel (Cambridge: Havard University Press, 2016). 56 Among the literary metaphors used by Nietzsche, there is for example that of the moralist as an anatomist working at his dissecting table, as well as the “chemistry of moral sentiment.” See Brendan Donnellan, Nietzsche and the French Moralists (Bonn: Bouvier, 1982); and especially Robert B. Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010). On the evolution of the moral function and significance of the novel, see Mazzoni, Theory of the Novel.

27

depicting the social manners in the provinces as shocking and indecent according to the

official morality, revealing himself all the while to be an equally talented painter.

The tension between idealism and realism in the debate on the representation of

customs has become the fundamental question in the theory of the modern novel, since what

is at stake is its moral significance. Thomas Pavel recently put forward some important and

original arguments on the matter.57 His perspective is however, in some respects, the opposite

of the approach I have adopted in this article. By basing my argument on the importance of

the realist and anti-metaphysical turn in modern anthropology, I have upheld an idea of

literary mimesis, similar to the conception defended by Erich Auerbach and René Girard,

although with different, but convergent arguments. According to this aesthetic conception,

mimesis is understood as reality represented – Auerbach’s dargestellte Wirklichkeit –, and

modernity is seen as a positive evolution towards moral and anthropological realism.58 The

novels at the centre of Pavel’s re-evaluation are the very same that a similar philosophy of

literary history generally considers as “premodern”: the chivalrous or pastoral novel such as

Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée (1607-1627), etc. The representation of moral life in these texts is

considerably idealized, placing them at the opposite end of the spectrum to the realist novel,

where the object is social and psychological positivity. Using arguments curiously

reminiscent of those used by Stevenson, Thomas Pavel accuses the realist novel of being

excessively prosaic, in the name of a novelistic conception summarized by George Sand:

“Art is not the study of a positive reality; it is the seeking for an ideal truth.” In spite of its

different normative perspective, Pavel’s The Lives of the Novel is nevertheless compatible

with the tradition of ethical mimesis. It is not necessary to accept a conception of modernity

as a path towards realism, to recognize that the novel is an observatory of social life and

custom, and therefore an indispensable instrument of all moral knowledge. If the novel’s

telescope is mainly directed towards the earth, the telescope of the chivalrous or pastoral

novel is resolutely focused on the heavens. Remaining faithful to a Platonic and anti-

Nietzschian conception of morals, among all the possible human customs, it favors those that

represent examples of virtue. The conscious choice of this idealized perspective, loaded with

imagination and transcendence, is hard to reconcile with the objectives and methods of

57 Thomas Pavel, The Lives of the Novel: a History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [2003] 2013). 58 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1946] 1953; René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Self and Other in Literary Structure, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, [1961] 1965). On the critical reception of these works see “Aspects nouveaux de l’analyse littéraire,” Annales ESC 20, no. 3 (1965) (special issue on René Girard, with contributions by Michel Crouzet and Jean Cohen), and Erich Auerbach. La Littérature en perspective, ed. Paolo Tortonese (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2009).

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modern moral sciences, which on the contrary have always enthusiastically subscribed to the

Machiavellian precept of considering men not as they ought to be but as they truly are.59 It

nevertheless falls within the tradition of ethopoeia, one of whose original motives it can take

up, precisely because of its refusal to accept the “anti–heroic” turn in modern realism. Pavel’s

idea of the novel is in fact consistent with the Aristotelian defense of the superiority of the

tragic register in the imitation of ethos, that is, the principle according to which the highest

form of literature is that which imitates better characters than ourselves, the behavior of those

noble persons that Aristotle calls spoudaioi. The modern realist novel, on the other hand,

proudly claims its heritage in the lowest register, represented by those mediocre characters

(phauloi) and the vulgar, mundane, and ordinary behavior of everyday human life.60 Having

consciously abandoned the aim of representing an ethical ideal, and as well as the heroic

register sublimely removed from living reality, the novel centers all the phenomenal and

descriptive effectiveness of ethopoeia on knowledge of the “prose of the world.”

Ethopoeia in Novels Let us now turn to look at the manner in which ethopoeia was interpreted in the poetics of

two great nineteenth century French novelists, Stendhal and Balzac. The former turned

mostly to interiority, in line with the psychological tradition of characters, while the latter

leaned in the social direction. The texts I quote here are well known, but I hope to shed new

light on them by placing them in the wider context I have been seeking to describe in this

article.

Stendhal was a moralist, by virtue of his reading and his education,61 and he explicitly

identified literature and moral knowledge, philosophy and ethopoeia: “philosophy or the art

of understanding and depicting human passions.”62 Unknowingly evoking the poetics of

59 The famous appeal in chapter 15 of The Prince to experience things in reality rather than imagining them has been taken up on many occasions and in a variety of ways and has become the byword for modern human and social sciences. 60 For Auerbach, like Girard, modern realism also laid claim to Christian anthropological realism. A chapter on the Christian and Augustinian heritage of modern realist tradition would be appropriate here, but I can only refer the reader to Paul Bénichou, Man and Ethics. Studies in French Classicism, (Garden City, NY, Anchor Books, 1971 [1948]), and Jean Lafond, L’Homme et son image. Morales et littérature de Montaigne à Mandeville (Paris: H. Champion, 1996). 61 Among Stendhal’s favorite authors, Montaigne, Hobbes, Pascal, La Bruyère, Vauvenargues, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Helvetius. 62 Stendhal, Théâtre, vol. 1, ed. Victor Del Litto, (Geneva/Paris: Slatkine Reprints, 1986), 247. This is also the reason, according to Georges Blin (Stendhal et les problèmes du roman (Paris: J. Corti, 1953), 69), why Stendhal was defined as a historian of manners (historien des mœurs). On his relationship with the moralists see Michel Crouzet, Nature et société chez Stendhal. La révolte romantique (Villeneuve d’Ascq, France: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1985). On Stendhal’s portrayal of manners I collected many valuable insights in Giulia

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Tasso, the aspiring author set himself the goal of becoming a talented painter of character,

since “ the great poets have always been distinguished by their depiction of characters.”63 In a

letter to his sister Pauline, Stendhal reverses the Aristotelian order between ethos and mythos

and answers preemptively, as it were, Stevenson’s “humble remonstrance”:

You are well aware that adventure in novels is of little significance: it excites and that

is all; after that it can be all but forgotten. What should be remembered though are

the characters.64

Stendhal believes in the superiority of the ethical style in the writing of the novel. He

believes in it so firmly as to forsake almost – in words at least – his own genius for

storytelling. In fact, his novels abound with romance: one of the secrets of their charm is

precisely their ability to produce an unusual synthesis of ethos and mythos. What makes

Stendhal’s characters so unforgettable is not only the finely honed psychological

characterization, but also the way this psychology is woven into the course of events. The

character needs to lose himself in the intrigue and acquire an event-driven dimension in order

to truly come alive, in the same way that the essentially synthetic and abstract story needs the

colour and the concrete awareness of moral qualities in order to develop any depth: the

adventures of Julien and Fabrice, indeed, would not be as exciting if they were not seen

through the filter of their inner emotions and attitudes. The most appropriate metaphor for

considering the nature of the novel is perhaps that of a planet travelling in an elliptical orbit.

Some writers may lean towards one or the other of its two central points — the mythos or the

ethos — but neither can entirely free itself from them.

The most lucid and explicit definition of the role of manners in the modern novel can

be credited to Balzac. The most interesting, and also the best-known passage can be found in

the preface to La Comédie Humaine (1842):

French society would be the real author; I should only be the secretary. By drawing

up an inventory of vices and virtues, by collecting the chief facts of the passions, by

Oskian, “Lo ‘spirito democratico’ in Tocqueville e Stendhal,” Il destino della democrazia Attualità di Tocqueville, eds. Olivia Catanorchi and David Ragazzoni (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2010), 201-228. 63 Stendhal, Filosofia nova. Pensées, marginalia, ed. H. Martineau, (Coeuvres-et-Valsery, France: Ressouvenances, [1931] 2009), 37). 64 Stendhal, “Lettre à Pauline Beyle, 3 août 1804,” Correspondance générale, vol. 1, no. 94, 189.

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depicting characters, by choosing the principal incidents of social life, by composing

types out of a combination of homogeneous characteristics, I might perhaps succeed

in writing the history which so many historians have neglected: that of Manners.65

The novelist presents himself as an ethnologist of the present day, as a scholar who

uses the critical instrument of mimetic representation in order to study the manners of

contemporary society. The first part of La Comédie humaine, “Études de mœurs”, aims to

bring together both the micro- and macro-ethical dimensions: “The history of the human

heart traced line by line, social history in all its various parts.”66 However, other titles

envisaged by Balzac are also worthy of mention. “Études sociales” emphasizes through the

word “study” the scientific and sociological nature of his novels (we know that Balzac liked

to refer to himself as a “doctor in sociology.”) “Histoire de France pittoresque” is an explicit

allusion to the popular eighteenth-century genres of the peinture de mœurs and caractères

nationaux.67 Balzac returns to the pictorial metaphor in other declarations on poetics, notably

in another passage from the preface to La Comédie humaine where the emphasis on the rigor

of mimetic representation is illustrated by examples. This is a precious testimony of the

spontaneous conversion, typical of ethopoeia, of literary style into scientific method of

understanding. What Balzac is actually saying is that professional use of mimesis requires

various skills, in psychology, linguistics, and the natural sciences as well as in many other

disciplines. In order to depict the greatest variety of human manners, the writer has to

describe not only vices and virtues, habits and passions, but also furniture, clothes, objects,

tools, merchandise, works of art, and circumstances of place and time. In so doing he must

necessarily name and define them with precision, thus transgressing the rules of classical

elegance68:

By adhering to the strict lines of a reproduction a writer might be a more or less

faithful, and more or less successful, painter of types of humanity, a narrator of the

65 Honoré de Balzac, “Author’s Introduction,” in The Human Comedy. Ed. George Saintsbury. Accessed from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1968/1968-h/1968-h.htm. 66 Honoré de Balzac, Lettres à Madame Hanska (Paris: R. Laffont, 1990), vol. 1, no. 72, October 26, 1834, 204. [Translator’s note: Translation of this quotation taken from Albert Keim and Louis Lumet, Honoré de Balzac, trans. Frederic Taber Cooper. Accessed from https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/balzac/b19zk/complete.html.] 67 Balzac, “Author’s Introduction,” notes 1 and 2. 68 Hamon, Du descriptif, 17–18.

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dramas of private life, an archaeologist of social furniture, a cataloguer of

professions […].69

Finally, the intimately historic nature of Balzac’s undertaking should be emphasized,

since he was apparently more aware than Stendhal – who nevertheless significantly chose for

Le Rouge et le Noir the subtitle “Chronicle of the XIXth Century” – that he was aiming to

offer a sociology of that era, which would become a testimony of the manners of the past:

By patience and perseverance I might produce for France in the nineteenth century

the book which we must all regret that Rome, Athens, Tyre, Memphis, Persia, and

India have not bequeathed to us […].70

By repeating La Bruyère’s gesture and anticipating the work of historians of “private

life”, Balzac was aware that he was passing down to future generations a precious document

containing a faithful portrait of the characters and manners of his time.

“A Crowd of Truths”

The history of ethopoeia in the novel did not come to an end in the nineteenth century, but it

was carried on by other means. Although the best modern novelists would refuse the

representative techniques of traditional realism, they opened new paths into ethical mimesis.

In this respect, it is possible to consider representative methods such as the interior

monologue or stream of consciousness writing as so many attempts to describe mores, in a

way that is progressively closer to actual experience, as the site where the processes of

mental and emotional life are expressed.

As an example, among many others, Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropismes (1939) is a

particularly successful case in which an ethopoeia carries its psychological vocation to the

extreme and manages to almost entirely dissolve the psychic substance of the character by

concentrating exclusively on the phenomenology of microscopic pre-individual and trans-

individual manners: veritable ethical particles, the tropisms are fluctuations of the soul which

pass through consciousness and set events in motion, as though they were the true actors in

the plot. In Planétarium (1959), the same technique is cleverly applied to the representation 69 Balzac, “Author’s Introduction.” 70 Balzac, “Author’s Introduction.” For essential reading on this theme, see Auerbach, Mimesis, chap. 18.

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of the snobbism of Parisian intellectuals in the 1950s. The main event of the novel, a drama

involving the gift of some leather armchairs, sets in motion an outbreak of covetousness and

resentment between the characters, and also provokes a struggle for distinction that is as

insubstantial as it is tragic. It quite rightly belongs to that line of “ethopoeias of prestige” that

we mentioned above.71

But it is impossible to speak of the representation of snobbism in twentieth century

literature without thinking immediately of Proust. It is therefore with a quotation from À la

Recherche du temps perdu that I shall conclude this initial and programmatic study of

ethopoeia. Proust’s work is often associated with the anti-scientific and aesthetisizing literary

tradition that envisages truth as an irrational intuition. His theories dealt in epiphanies and

“essences” and were indirectly influenced by the romantic philosophies of art such as those

of Schelling, Schlegel, and Schopenhauer.72 In a certain sense, Proust’s poetics could be said

to represent the perfect union of mysticism with the art of “good writing,” which, according

to the Positivist cliché, is responsible for establishing an unbridgeable gap between literature

and the exact sciences.73 However, at the heart of Le Temps retrouvé, after a long reflection

on metaphysical ecstasies and the inability of rational intelligence to understand the

“essences” which, according to the aesthetic theory Proust defends in the novel, can only be

saved through memory, there is an unexpected homage to ethopoeia:

I felt, however, that these truths which the intelligence derives directly from reality

are not to be despised completely, for they could provide a setting, in a material less

pure but still imbued with mind, for those impressions which are conveyed to us

outside time by the essence common to both past and present sensations, but which,

because they are more precious, are also too rare for a work of art to be composed

from them alone. I felt thronging within me a crowd of truths relating to passions,

characters and conduct (une foule de vérités relatives aux passions, aux caractères,

aux mœurs), all capable of being used in that way. 74

71 See the parallel drawn at the end of the section “Ethopoeia.” 72 See Anne Henry, in particular Marcel Proust. Théories pour une esthétique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1981), also Proust romancier. Le tombeau égyptien (Paris: Flammarion, 1983). 73 See note 11. 74 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. VI, Finding Time Again, trans., intr. and notes by Ian Patterson. General Editor: Christopher Prendergast, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, London 2002, p. 207. On the interpretation of this passage and the relation between the two forms of Proustian knowledge, irrational and epiphanic on the one hand, and the phenomenological and social on the other, I refer the reader to Descombes, Proust: Philosophy of the Novel.

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Proust, who has been considered by some interpreters a “Platonic” novelist, reveals

here an unsuspected Aristotelian vocation. The knowledge of truth can never be exhausted in

a series of otherworldly epiphanies, in a lyrical sequence of “moments of being” in which the

individual soul conjoins with eternity, but must preserve the ethical phenomena of human

reality by learning to study and analyse the colourful and diverse spectacle of the world.

Having abandoned the robes of the mystic philosopher, the novelist Proust now wears those

of the ethnologist and the peintre de mœurs. In doing so he refers back to the great moralist

tradition praising the highly spiritual, and therefore irreplaceable, value of understanding of

human mores.