The word stupidity has slipped free of the dynamic vocabulary and turned into a euphemism, with our contemporaries preferring a more violent term whose etymological ramifications stress its mysterious disfavour. When did that person say "death to fools"? It is a fact that "silliness" [Fr. connerie from con = cunt, whence, perversely, "balls" or "cock". SP] is something other than stupidity [bêtise], because it implies a formidable activity and an invincible hostility that can only be met by insult. Silliness/connerie has ousted "foolishness"/sottise, nowadays a decidedly literary term. "Imbecile" is still a word of crushing abuse, though it presupposes such a superiority on the part of the person hurling it that the poor devil accused of imbecility cannot possibly pose any obvious threat. "Stupidity" and "stupid" are used in a lenient way: "How stupid of me! I forgot to tell you..." roughly means "I'm sorry...", and to grant that so-and-so has done something really stupid is tantamount to pleading his case.

Where do this indulgence and leniency stem from? They date from the glorification of subconscious life by the Symbolists, yet, paradoxically, they follow on from the period when the literary depiction of stupidity and foolishness had reached a kind of acme. The age of Realism and that of the Parnassians were the heyday of stupidity in literature.

Romanticism made much fun of middle-class stupidity, possibly as a result of some sense of aristocracy. Consequently, the populace, the throng, the child and the girl appear naïve, but often in a good sense. Balzac's peasants are not stupid, but extremely clued up, business-wise, even displaying their lack of "education" to bamboozle the city-dweller--except when, as in Les Chouans, a spasmodic fit of bestiality prompts them to commit some act of fearful savagery, which has nothing whatsoever to do with Joseph Prud'homme's variant of stupidity. But let us not go back quite so far. In 1862, in the height of the Realist and Parnassian period, Les Mis‚rables offered an adequate picture of stupidity, as Romanticism had introduced it, but in a way that was already extremely paradoxical. TholomyŠs and Mr. Bamatabois_ are stupid because of their reverse people's simplicity, because they mechanically obey ready-made ideas and fashionable fads. They only exist and feature, in their own eyes, in the thoroughly social dimension. Now, being stupid means, in principle, not being capable of taking part in the social interplay of human exchange, not being able to rise above the satisfaction of vital requirements, staying at the physical level, and never pushing upward to understand something of a general nature.

Quite to the contrary, middle-class stupidity consists in being unable to understand things in the detail. Its pretentious social conventionality and its confident ideological conventionality mean that it tends to limit itself to the general and the abstract, which haver answers to everything and reply to everything by measuring everything. This is called money. The middle-class or bourgeois person lives in a quantified world, where everything can be accumulated. The senator from Digne_ puts nought for God and reduces the things of life to their cumulative quantity, due to power and money. From the way he says as much to Mgr. Myriel, who laughs at him, we understand that he is a perfect dolt, even if he has read "his gilt-bound philosophers"--"like you", replies the bishop. You may also refer to the portrait of Mr. Bamatabois, above-mentioned, a "bourgeois", Javert stresses, a "voter and proprietor". In thoroughly quantitative terms, he is made up of "a high collar, a large tie, a watch-charm, three waistcoats", etc. The whole forms a simple arithmetical and financial sum, in the descriptive sense. Maids, women and populace, on the other hand, only find money by removing from their bodies their hair and their teeth, and "selling the rest" in the end of the day. Break-up of the body, alienated for the sake of money, crucified by the system of quantity.

Conversely, the construction of the bourgeois figure by accumulating attributes, be they, like moustaches, natural or purchased in shops. Their social significance is, moreover, so fluctuating that it becomes absurd: the elegant man wears spurs and moustaches, but "in that age, moustaches meant middle-class and spurs meant pedestrian"_. As in the market system, this system of social equivalences encourages trickery.

Bourgeois stupidity, on the other hand, if we are to believe Romantic jokes, stammers as soon as it is called upon to express quality. At times it remains masterfully stupid: for the lancer Th‚odule, Mr. Gillenormand's legacy did indeed flatly approve the eloquent utterances of the Voltairean and royalist old timer. Saying yes meant so much income. But this is where his unfortunate effort came up against it--crowned by a thunderous "You are an imbecile!"_ on the part of the old man who, for his part, is not stupid. On the contrary, when Joseph Prud'homme fashioned sentences, he maddened the herd of literary figures ("this sabre is the most beautiful day of my life", "the chariot of State floats over a volcano", etc). Confusion in the qualitative realm.

To reduce everything to the quantitative is to cling to common sense, in other words, to what enables everyone to judge everything. The senator from Digne confides to Mgr. Myriel: "Between you and me, I admit I've got common sense". So it was quite natural that Hugo's system should contrast middle-class "common sense" and quantitative common sense with the natural refinement of the humble and of children, the unmotivated generosity of heroes, the charitable flashes of saints and the shrewdness of genius. Otherwise put, the triumph of nature and the divine.

In the literature of the Realist and Parnassian generations, quite to the contrary, the deluge of stupidity is alleged to have smothered everything, stripped nature of her naturalness and rendered the divine caricatural. Flaubert's pessimism versus the at least relative optimism of George Sand, Zola shrugging his shoulders at old Hugo "coming a cropper", the general snickering at Musset, who had turned into a poet for girls. The gardens where the Romantics found respite from foolishness were laid waste. But the worst was that this rude disillusionment was alleged to have been calmly adopted by the public. In the Dictionnaire des id‚es re‡ues/Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, all explanations and worldly instruction entailed an automatic and satisfied "you're doing away with my illusions". So this was the new paradox of stupidity in the Realist age: it claimed to be smart, it thought it was clever, because it saw itself as positive. But people other than me have discussed Homais, and it is enough for me to point out the extent to which stupidity formed the horizon planned for the acceptance of the work, under the Second Empire and up until the 1880s--to a point where it signalled its conception and composition.

The first labour, in the Herculean sense, of Realism was to crush the very chimaera of the triumphant art of mediocrity. Murger's Les ScŠnes de la vie de bohŠme, and Champfleury's tales were described as "realist" precisely because they attacked that great Balzacian myth of the garret, where genius was reflected before bursting on to the world. Poverty, weak character, the power of money, its cruelty and stupidity, all destroy artists, and demean their art. As a reaction to this, the artist gives up any idea he may have had about some dazzling conquest of the public--that middle-class public which was in the end of the day seduced by the Romantic poets--and turns against his condition, rejects the gladrags in which Romanticism had clad him, and, with a hatred for the real, invented Realism and Parnassus:

But alas! Down here is master: its haunting memory

At times sickens me even in this safe haven,

And the impure vomiting of Stupidity

Forces me to hold my nose before the azure sky._

As Mallarm‚ sets this safe haven "In the previous sky where Beauty blooms", this poem teaches us, first and foremost, that the opposite of "Stupidity" is "Beauty", not just wit or intelligence, and then that stupidity takes up all the room down here, on earth. Beauty does not exist, or is not of this world. This Parnassian sentiment prompts both a rediscovery, in this world, of the signs and traces of Beauty, and an experience of the poet's condition as an on-going "run of bad luck", as a curse, and a social blot. This already harbingers the prospect of Verlaine's PoŠtes maudits published 20 years after these lines, written in 1863.

This kind of feeling makes it hard to grasp the specificity of Realism, because it rejects the stupidity of ideality, full as it is of illusion and phoniness, but it rejects just as much a stupid era and a wretched reality. This, in any event, was the more or less general case of Baudelaire, Flaubert and the Goncourt brothers. The paradox of modernity is the same as the paradox of stupidity: both are loathsome, but both are the condition imposed upon the artist, the painter of modern life.

In the last lines of Huysmans' En m‚nage (1881), Cyprien the painter, "all sneering" at the spinelessness of his friend Andr‚, the novelist, thus winds up the novel of their shared failure:

-- It's not a bad thing to be emptied out like we are, for now that all the concessions have been made, maybe the eternal stupidity of mankind will claim us, and maybe, like our fellow citizens, we shall thus have, like them, the right to live respected and stupid!

-- What an ideal! Andr‚ sighed.

-- Ah! come along, that or another..._

This is a surprising piece of writing, which points to the realist paradox of the stupidity we are talking about, presented as a fatality at once exterior and interior. If man is actually stupid, along with nature and society, the ideal, for its part, is a joke. No more garden of innocence and happy simplicity. The child is a wretched gnome for Huysmans, and woman, above all, is stupid. This is revealed in En rade by a dream where the character explores the moon; while the dream ends with the character becoming sorely distressed, and while a volcano erupts and reveals ember teeth in its mouth, his wife, at his side, "ingenuously" appreciates the spectacle:

It is more beautiful, as seen, than the Saint-Germain terrace [...]

--Doubtless, he said, himself taken aback by the foolishness of his wife who, hitherto, had always seemed to him to be less prolific and less rigid._

Although Louise is extremely neurotic, she is not allowed to enter her husband's world of anxiety, with the dream teaching the husband that he no longer has very much in common with his wife, having shown her that the Moon itself was not a roadstead, a somewhere else that was more tolerable than Earth.

So the figures of na‹vety and simplicity have vanished. "Nature has done her time", says Des Esseintes. We should glean from this odd formula that modern, sophisticated and artificial life no longer leaves nature any other place in the literary imagination than that of a force of degradation, a place that ages our faces and reminds us of our bodies by way of sickness and death. And in such a way that the representation of nature is invincibly muddled with that of nothingness. Love itself is readily parodied by aesthetic and perverse practices.

The peasants are sick, or, rather, are not worthy of featuring in literature, except as people stripped of their natural qualities. In 1887, the year of En rade and Zola's La Terre, another peasant novel appeared, called L'Ennemi, by Gustave Guiches. This enemy is phylloxera, and the tale describes its ravages, on flora and society alike, to the great delight of Huysmans who wrote straightaway to the author, thus:

Your peasants are fragrant--and hung, like game, just right[...]--the rotten vines, estates of ulcers, are terrifying to behold [...]. Otherwise, all this phylloxera is grandiloquent. It is a real merry-go-round of desolation and this brings with it oh-so-many sinister and merry stories, throughout this book! Then what surprised me is the general tone--it is the artistic celebration of the average imbecility and the ordinary soul-waste of the characters.

A real sound of wretched money rings out within, like a knell. They are all swine,--really!! The girl is so nasty she bewitches me utterly--stupid and devious--the real type.

In a word, L'Ennemi offers a sampling of "the good cruel liqueur of real life, hopeless, sordid and stupid!"._

So the admixture is clear to see: life is stupid, because nature is stupid and base, because society is stupid and dirty, and because people, and women in particular, are stupid and nasty. We can thus see to what extent stupidity is the last word of the Realist novel, and to what extent, to appear realistic, it needed both "the dismal hospital, and foul incense"_, in other words, the wretched condition of the body and the soul in modern society.

Huysmans and, in many instances, Maupassant are forever on about the impotence of Nature, a corollary, incidentally, of genetic and literary impotence when it comes to creating. Proof of this much is the painter and novelist of En m‚nage._ The fact is that, if we now take a look at Zola, a prodigious writer, this brings a whole new configuration into play. For Zola, who liked his century and believed in progress, even stupidity contributes to the great, vital thrust of people towards more light. Or, more accurately put, stupidity, for Zola, is more and more pessimism itself, the pessimism of Schopenhauer, for example, which acts as an alibi for the weakness of Lazarus, in La Joie de vivre, and as fodder for his melancholy. In Zola's work, imbeciles who are beyond the pale are precisely those who have failed, like brilliant pupils who have turned into dried fruit, like Vallagnosc in Au Bonheur des Dames. He is embittered and incapable, despite all his degrees, in marked contrast with the instinctive Octave Mouret, brutish and boorish, but in fact the real artist, for he invents a new world. And, needless to say, Zola has nothing at all against the nature of Huysmans' prejudices. Yes, people will say, La Terre... But the novel is built on an obvious contrast between the "calm and good" earth, the immortal mother, and "the nests of vermin" in villages, and human instincts. Is man a parasite on nature? Let us say that, in La Terre, Zola's involvement is to study farming like a huge case of parasitism, and the novelist introduces himself once more as a scholarly, great, honest man. In so doing, the overall vision he gives of agricultural society is that of a natural phenomenon, even if it may be pathological. The peasantry in La Terre is governed by aberrant but inevitable laws. The characters who should put evil and stupidity right--priests and teachers--are either powerless or inept, whereas coffee-house political topics (start 1789 all over again!) are inane or base. There is no remedy for brutality and bestiality, and Jean Macquart, who lent his peasant's labour the cool composure of the soldier and the honesty of the craftsman, leaves the land in the end. This naturalist anthropology of the livestock-farmer, incurable sperm of wheat that rises and bread that swells, thus brings society back to nature, the way Th‚rŠse Raquin claimed to show the "human brutes" lurking behind couples, and finally restored stupidity to its etymology. The peasant is ant and cricket, seething, teeming, fornicating and eating the earth, his mother, in a fatal irresponsibility, kills the forebear again and again, but in order to reincorporate the immemorial beast. Yes, eternal animality, but not incompatible with Doctor Pascal's hymn to life in 1893, and the "naturist" reaction of 1897, eternal animality taken in a quite different sense of the stupidity at which Huysmans sneers with despair, and which Villiers on the outer edges of Parnassus turned into a myth in the 1880s.

With Tribulat Bonhomet_ the obverse, contemporary and complementary attitude of idealism pushed the spectacle of natural and social stupidity over the edge. This in turn led to the wholesale reaction of the Symbolist period. Tribulat Bonhomet is the product of a general reversal of values, the monstrous outcome of a reverse of history. For Villiers, the uttermost stupidity is the fact that Tribulat calls on common sense, which is not only, as in the Romantic view, the exclusive consideration of quantity, but a devilish effort to exclude and destroy everything that cannot be quantified--and, to put it in a nutshell, everything that cannot be boiled down to money. The best dinner in the world!_ is the one where every guest first finds a 20-franc piece in his plate. The notary of the new regards this abstract consumption as even more satisfactory and valuable than organic consumption, the "dish" passing directly from plate to pocket, totally edible, without the waste of transit through the intestines, and straightaway forgotten about. And what is strange about Villiers is the frenzied crusade against those positive certainties of the modern middle-class mind, endeavouring to unsettle them and bestir them to the anxieties of unreason, instinct, metaphysics and death. Restoring a body to the spirit of the modern world, and at the same time giving it back its soul, and exposing it to distress, might be fitting punishment--sending it mad by the return of proper intuition and real judgement. Here is what the triumph of art might be, as Villiers dreams of it, in a letter where he tells Mallarm‚ of his intentions as editor in chief of the Revue des Lettres et des Arts:

As soon as we have a few subscriptions, we'll have to startle the reader [...]. What a triumph, if we can dispatch a few subscribers to the bin! In a positive sense, Mallarm‚, it would be the acme of art, it would be sublime!_

Here we are following the birth of the new paradox that would lead logically enough to the attitudes of the Symbolist movement, attitudes which were apparently so different: positive, scientific reason, that of the engineer and the notary, is a monstrous denial of nature and the divine, total unreason. "Startling" this abstract reason by the resurrection of soul and body is to return true reason to it. Now, the huge caricatural element in Villiers fails to disguise the fact that a literature of anxiety and often of anguish, as that of the Symbolist years would also be, sees itself bound to discern the emotion of the infinite, even if in the very densest form of foolishness. There is a very pretty scene in Jules Renard's L'Ecornifleur, typical of the new state of mind that we would now like to analyse. The young parasitic poet, who lets a middle-class couple feed him, reads his poetry to them: a satire on both the poet and his listeners, but one that is then interrupted by the narrator, the scrounger, who resorts back to this sarcastic tone:

But why force me to turn this scene into a ludicrous evocation? I was sincere. I still am when I read poetry. Mr. & Mrs. Vernet were not poking fun.[...] Mr. Vernet felt that he was living it all. Mrs. Vernet did not know what she had... [...] Our free, unfettered souls were hoisted aloft outside and shuddered._

Irony and sympathy make up the distinctive tone of the generation born in about 1860, when it conjures up the traditional forms of stupidity. It is a tone peculiar to Laforgue, BarrŠs and Renard, a mixture of self-mockery and sympathy for others. What has been produced anew since Realism and Parnassus in the history of the novel in particular is the fact that the writer, the artist, has become a character himself. Even Huysmans' tone changes when he resolutely steps down into the arena of the novel under the name of Durtal._ From this point on there was also a shift in the sarcastic viewpoint on all the usual imbeciles and whipping boys, the bourgeois and the woman with the success of the Roman russe, "pity" for the lowly, and fascination with "primitives", be they peoples or painters. This, I believe, is the discriminatory nub of a switch of attitude with regard to stupidity. Unlike the stance of the realist novelist or the Parnassian poet, unlike Zola's stance, clinging as he essentially did to the principle that the author should never appear in the work, the literature of the late 1880s and 1890s, a literature of the "ego", to use general terms, is thus, by definition a literature of sympathy for others. This in turn presupposes the abandonment of that morgue, that outfront superiority of the writer vis-…-vis the social world he was describing. At least this superiority is of a different type, and based on a new duty. The narrator of BarrŠs' Le Culte du moi discovers, in the third and last volume of this trilogy, in Le Jardin de B‚r‚nice, that his task is precisely to lend an ear to the lowly, to young women and the stupid, to listen to the voice of instinct and the subconscious, the "very force that drives the world"._ B‚r‚nice is a young woman who was given as a small girl to some elderly gentlemen. She reveals the vision of the "divine in the world", and the fraternal, mysterious wisdom of the "simple", even of animals, and last of all of the populace. Intelligence is just a "slight flicker" amid the "omniscience and omnipotence that shows the subconscious in its slowness!"_ "It is instinct", writes the narrator of Le Jardin de B‚r‚nice, "that forges the future, far superior to analysis", "it alone will make me able to replace the ego that I used to don with the ego to which I am headed, blindfold".

This is what these coarse people have taught me, these ignoramuses that you are so surprised to see me with. They are wonderful teachers, even though they do not have possession of themselves [...] How could you think that I could prefer the mediocrity of salons and the half-culture of students to these masses with their creative, unmotivated, spontaneous pride? [...] Such people can give me facts, and one or two at times exact notions; the people gives me a soul, its own, mine, the soul of mankind!_

Bodies, in crowds, give voice to the "subconscious monster"_, for which Barrès felt a duty to speak, and that he also felt bound to understand with a vast comprehension. From then on, it is understood that Bérénice, the crowd and the dog are not "stupid"; or at least that their possible stupidity is merely the sign, the slip, the touching clumsiness of the subconscious. Imbeciles would be people of reason and reasons, the "jurists", if they were not so clever. But their very intelligence encloses them within formulae, defines them, and hems them in. The treasure of instinct, on the other hand, is indefatigable, pregnant with the future, and buoyed up on life. In Barr&eagravee;s, and in Marcel Schwob--who, with Monelle, gave his version of the little prostitute giving life lessons--and in André Gide in Les Nourritures Terrestres, there is also, undoubtedly, a kind of condescension. for the voice of instinct needs a higher interpreter to give its life lesson in an intelligible way. It was precisely with this condescension that Saint George de Bouhélier's Revue naturiste took issue in 1897, as did the movement and manifesto of the same name of 10 January 1897 in Le Figaro. Before this manifesto, Gide had already acquainted readers of le Mercure de France with Francis Jammes, the poet of poets when it came to the humble, who readily used as both symbol and spokesman the ass ("I proceed along the road like a laden ass"_):

I like the ass so gentle

Walking beside the holly

[...]

My ladyfriend thinks him stupid

Because he is a poet._

There, there is rhyme, and the thing is brought almost full-circle, and the poet who, under Romanticism and the Second Empire, lambasted stupidity, oddly, dons the gentle wisdom of the stupid and humble. Not at all, it is clear to see, because he presents himself as a fool, that four-letter word:

(I call her Amryllia. How stupid!

No, it isn't stupid. I'm a poet_).

For foolishness is precisely the peculiarity of pretentious intellectuals, among whom we find the Nietzschean company of his friend Gide:

I asked a friend: but who is Nietzsche?

He said: "It's the philosophy of superman".

--And I immediately thought of eldertrees

Whose gentle perfume sweetens the water's edge [...]

They said to me: "Could you be more objective?"

I replied: "Yes... maybe... I don't know if I can.

They kept dreaming in the face of such ignorance,

And I was surprised by their great knowledge._

So a new protagonist emerges on to the literary stage. This is how Claudel introduced Téte d'or, in 1889, a drama "in the budding state", he would say in 1949, which was to be understood by recreating "that prison atmosphere in which we lived in that period of such as Taine and Renan"_, and here is the first liberating word, a Claudelian version of liberation … la Barrés. It is the opening gambit of the play:

Cébés--Here I am,

Imbecilic, ignorant,

A new man before unknown things._

Later, to this disciple, Simon Agnel, later Téte d'or, would merely propose organic things: death and life ("I'll live") and contemplation of the Tree.

We are a long way, here, from Realist stupidity, sarcasm of the man of letters versus the bourgeois, of lucid intelligence versus Romantic illusions, triumph of the erudite over the physiological. Conversely, it is from the viewpoint of the organic and the simple, pushed to the point of the coquettishness of simplicity, that the symbolism of Le Jardin de Bérénice, Les Aveugles and Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande tends to position itself. For many years Gide would still insist on calling many of his writings "soties" (strictly, mediaeval farcical plays).

If we are not mistaken, in about 1890 the literary representation of stupidity altered to the point where, instead of making it the antonym of science and art, imagination admitted that the artist, not without some analogy to the child, the woman and the primitive, is indebted to an instinctive sensibility for the gift of creation, albeit to the detriment of the lucidity of judgement. This idea was very widespread in about 1895, and we shall find it, for example, in the work of the sociologist Gustave Le Bon, when he thus claimed to separate characters from "real artists".

Very impressionable, very unaware, thinking above all by imagery and not reasoning much at all [...] they are enclosed in a network of traditions, ideas and beliefs, the whole set of which forms the soul of a race and a period [...] governing the obscure parts of the subconscious where their works are formulated._

And, indeed, this new pattern was distasteful to many people, including Valéry, for example, who has the narrator of La Soirée avec M. Teste say this: "Stupidity is not my forte". But in a later preface, the author explains that the conception of Mr. Teste dates back to the period when he suspected literature itself, rejected among "Vague Things and Impure Things"._ In some respects, Valéry verifies, by his rejection, the involving strength of the new imagination, for which intelligence is "a very little thing on the surface of ourselves"_, and for which the wit, or at least the "witty word" has the closest relationship with the subconscious.

Centre of Romantic and 19th Century Studies

Paul-Valéry University

Translated from the French by Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods.

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