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Writing, Movement/Space, Democracy:On Jacques Rancires Literary History

David F. Bell

At a certain moment in his argument in Vitesse et politique, Paul Viriliodescribes the French Revolution in a particularly idiosyncratic way as a circulatoryflow of traffic, thus suggesting that one way of representing the events of theRevolution is to see them as a series of traffic jams and roadway accidents. Thegeneral conscription to which the Revolution gave rise in 1793, for example, didnot simply enroll a large number of the new citizens of the republic into itsmilitary activities, it effectively sent those republican soldiers out onto the roadsin defense of the principles of the Revolution:

The new organization of the flow of circulation that has been arbitrarilycalled the French Revolution . . . is but the rational organization of a socialabduction. The general conscription [leve en masse] of 1793 is thekidnapping

of the masses. . . . While [the bourgeoisie] stayed home and acquired newproperties, new buildings and houses, . . . what that same bourgeoisieoffered as land to these soldiers called up by decree of the Convention were the roadsof Europe. Wherever the feet go, there is the fatherland (ubi pedes, ibi patria),as Roman law had already put it. With the French Revolution, all roads

became national.1 (29, Virilios emphasis)

By recalling one of the tenets of citizenship in Roman law, Wherever the feetgo, there is the fatherland, Virilio insists on an important dimension of the RomanEmpire, well known for its logistical expertise at sending large armies to far

flung places with a speed and a road system that were the envy of the ancientworld: Roman citizens carried their rights with them even when they were onthe move.

Virilio is rather cynical about the political tactic he describes in this thumbnailportrait of the politics of the First Republic (which became the first only whendeclaring the Second Republic became a necessity a little more than fifty yearslater...). The conscription to which he refers, while clearly indispensable for afledgling republic threatened on all sides by the monarchies of Europe and from

within by its own unrepentant aristocracy, was simultaneously a political inventionof genius. It was used to short-circuit the demands of a populace whose membersthought they had arrived at their moment of liberation. On the one hand, theconscripted soldiers were indeed freed from their places of origin, and for the

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first time in large numbers, they traveled to parts of their country and Europethey would never have had a chance to visit under the confining socialorganization of the Ancien Rgime. On the other hand, their absence from their

homes, their very mobility, allowed a certain immobile groupthe newbourgeoisie escaping the brunt of the conscriptionto acquire property in theirabsence and to establish a base of power fundamental to the future social andeconomic successes of this newly emerging class.2 Wherever the feet go, there isthe fatherland, but, unfortunately, not for those who are doing the marching, inthis case.

These developments were to have far-reaching implications. NapoleonicFrance and Europe were a direct outgrowth of the military and circulatory

strategies devised and explored in large measure during the Revolution. Noleader had ever thought more about roads and their importance than the firstconsul, soon-to-be emperor. The French peasantry and lower classes weredestined to see the dust and mud of French and European roads with a greatdeal of regularity during the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century, a situationthat was to give new meaning to the expression vieux routier de la Rvolution,an epithet one might well apply to Colonel Hulot in Balzacs Les Chouans. Balzacsearly novel about the anti-revolutionary uprising of the Breton peasantry and

aristocracy takes place almost entirely on the roads of Brittany and the termrouteappears over twice as many times in this novel as it does in any of the othernovels ofLa Comdie humaine. Les Chouans is something like a manual ofrevolutionary tactics and strategy, a story that makes much more sense to areader who grasps the fundamental importance of the notion of circulation andmovement during the dark years of the Revolution and the later expansion ofthe empire.

While it may not be surprising that an urbanist and military strategist like

Paul Virilio would construct a very personal interpretation of the Revolutionusing the notions of movement and dplacement, of the path and the road, ofwalking and traveling, it is perhaps a bit more disconcerting to realize that relatedideas structure Jacques Rancires treatment of the origins of lyric poetry duringthe revolutionary period in his essay La Chair des mots. He uses Wordsworthswork at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries ashis principal illustration of what he describes as a new way of understandingliterary writing:

The republican political is not ordered by the point of view of a privilegedspectator, by the spectacle of royal majesty. Those who walk define therepublican political. The community is made up of people who conjure upthe same images while walking. Nature has dethroned the king byabolishing his place, his perspective. This is a nature . . . that will dominate


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the new age, it is the nexus of the political and the perceptible [le sensible:that which can be perceived and experienced]; it is a single notion, thepower that brings into being and holds together people and the placeswhere they go to stroll and to look (in the absence of any privilege). (27)

Like Virilios conscripted revolutionary soldier, the lyric poet circulates on thepaths and roads of the republic and there discovers a new poetic world. Thisdiscovery should not be understood in a banal sense as the revelation of newsubjects of poetrytrees, plants, lakes, landscapes understood in any simple,straightforward mannerbut in a more fundamental sense as an entirelydifferent vocation for poetry, located outside the strictures of classical mimesis.To understand what this might mean for Rancire requires a careful reading ofthe first chapter ofLa Chair des mots.

Rancire argues that the forms of literature, the ways in which we categorizeand evaluate various kinds of literary production, belonged originally to a culturalcapital inherited from Plato and Aristotle, which effectively structured andconstrained evaluative approaches to literary production up to the historicalmoment of the Revolution. In this classical approach to the literary, the literarywork was analyzed by measuring it according to criteria located along twodifferent axes. The first axis allowed one to judge the work on the basis of whatwas represented in it, the kinds of characters and actions it contained: the high(epic and tragedy), the low (comedy). Only certain actions are acceptable onceone has chosen the type of character one wants to portray, and the value of theliterary work will be judged based on the appropriateness of the representationthrough the actions and discursive interventions of the characters represented.Gods and nobles can act only in certain ways, most definitely not in the sameways as the characters in comic works. The second axis of analysis is at the heartof Platos criticism of tragedy, and it employs the notion oflexis, that is, themanner in which the subject/poet relates to the subjects of the poem, identifies

with them, sets himself off from or hides behind them (19). We recognize herethe origin of the Platonic critique ofmimesis, namely, its propensity to createconfusion at those moments when the audience cannot know whether authorsare speaking for themselves or simply permitting their characters to speak. Suchconfusion ultimately cannot be attributed to the poets occasional error or creativeweakness; rather, it is endemic to the tragic form. Plato argues that it is impossiblelogically to distinguish in the discourse of tragedy between two utterance sources:the poet and his represented character. The disarray inherent in the lexis undoes

hierarchies and stabilities, releasing language from the control of those whoproduce it. Utterances circulate without authority. Because it contributes to thisdangerous state of affairs, tragedy is a threat to the community and the politicalorder, and the ideal republic would exclude it and those who produce it. Rancire


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summarizes this longstanding perspective on analyzing and evaluating theliterary work as follows: The quality of the poem . . . depends on the encounter

between a way of speakinga way of putting forward and then crossing out

the Iof the poetand a way of representing or not people who behave correctly,. . . people whose behavior is acceptable and who are represented in an acceptableway (19).

The conclusion Rancire draws from this presentation of the well-knowntradition based on the work of Plato and Aristotle is that within this critical legacythere is no space for a pure poetics. Literary creation is always tied to the art ofcreating fables representing characters acting upon characters.3 As such, literature

belongs to a political experience of what is perceptible [le sensible] and acceptable.

It is an activity occurring at the intersection between the nomoiof the city statethe laws that regulate it but also the songs sung thereinand the ethos of thecitizenstheir character but also their mood. Poetics is from the very beginningpolitical (19). The long history of the notion of verisimilitude (le vraisemblable),which accompanied the Greek tradition and was vigorously reactivated in Francein the seventeenth century, derives from this relation of literature to thecommunity: it refers to the complex issue of how the community defines what isappropriate in a literary work. The lyricism of Romanticism, on the other hand,

this historically new literary activity formulated in earnest at about the time ofthe French Revolution, is a kind of writing that remaps the Platonic/Aristotelianperspective, Rancire claims. The lyrical should not be defined solely and simplyin psychological terms as something like the expression of a new impetus toexplore the self. It is also a thorough redefinition of the literary field: Thisexperience should be conceived as a reorganization of the relation among thethree terms of the ancient poetico-philosophical system: the status ofrepresentation, the opposition between high and low, and the relation between

the subject-poet and the subject of the poem (20). The literary space of lyricismis an empty category in the Platonic/Aristotelian schema, precisely because it isa kind of writing that collapses the difference between the subject-poet and thesubject of the poem. If the subject-poet and the subject of the poem are from theoutset indistinguishable, then the space of play characteristic in tragedy andepic between the poets voice and the (supposedly independent) voices of hischaracters disappears: [Lyricism] is first and foremost a specific mode ofenunciation, a way of accompanying what is said, of setting it out in a space of

perception, of giving it the rhythm of walking, traveling, passing through (20).The rhythm of the walk through nature is something like an operator ofaccompaniment [oprateur daccompagnement] whereby the ego of the poem isin contact with a world in which perception and apprehension have become


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immediate and in which the presence of the subject-poet, navigating throughthe world, freely establishes relations independently of the strictures exercised

by any community judgment concerning appropriatenessin the absence,

moreover, of any possible confusion about who is speaking. The focus shiftsfrom the question of who is speaking and how, to the act of exploiting proximitiesamong natures elements explored through unhindered movement.

Walking, moving, traveling are more than simply the topoi of a new poetry,they are enactments of the way in which subject-poets accompany the subjectsof their poems, are absorbed in those subjects through the very mode ofenunciation. The notion of accompanying is yet another way of insisting thatlyric poetry has something to do with traveling and moving, and it expresses the

idea that subject-poets establish close, utterly proximate relationships with thesubjects of their enunciation in the enunciative act. Ultimately at stake here isan opposition between mimesis and metaphor. The Platonic and Aristotelianapproaches to literary production insist on the mimetic: they are based on notionsof the appropriateness of subject and style, on the act of fabulation of a storythat corresponds to the ethos and nomoi of the community. Lyric poetry shiftsinto another register entirely, that of metaphor understood in a stronglyetymological sense as transport: Enunciative accompaniment is thus linked to

a problematic of the metaphor as transport. . . . The type of subjectivity that ischaracteristic of lyric poetry encompasses the movement of a body across aterritory, in a coincidence of visions and words that constitutes this territory as aspace of writing (21). Metaphorical comparisons that create relations betweenheretofore disparate elements originate in the movement of the subject-poetthrough a territory in which s/he perceives objects and creates links. The as ifof mimesis is replaced by the like of metaphor. Metaphorical comparisons donot depend on what a society might perceive as appropriate within its laws and

practices, but on the connections made by poets as new literary subjects whenthey move through a newly appropriated space of walking. Lyric poetry becomesan emblematic democratic act.

For Rancire, then, moving, walking, traveling have a more positiveconnotation at the moment of the Revolution than they do for the more cynicalVirilio. Virilio imagines a situation one might describe using the old saying:While the cats away, the mice will play. The cats in question are the citizensof the newly-founded republic, whose demands and political will might have

blocked the bourgeoisies grab for power and possessions in the capital andelsewhere, but whose energy was instead ultimately turned out onto the roads ofFrance and Europe. Indeed, Virilio has always viewed the control of circulationon roads as the major policing activity of European power elites, imagining, for


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example, the fortifications of the medieval city not as a means for sealingbarbarians completely outside the city, but rather for controlling them in thedead ends and chicanes that characterized the narrow, tortured streets within

those fortifications. As long as the bourgeoisie controlled the flow of conscriptson the roads of the republic, it could lay the foundations of its political hegemony.

Virilios viewpoint is that of the analyst of power rendering transparent aseries of strategies applied to befuddle those who are its victims. Ranciresperspective, however, is resolutely that of the victims of such power strategiesand this has regularly been the case since La Nuit des proltaires. In that essay,he described a series of tactics used by workers in the nineteenth century to wincontrol of their time back from their exploiters. Hence the insistence on the

night, a moment when reading, talking, writing could be undertaken away fromthe watchful eyes of owners whose constant purpose was to enforce a timestructure in which workers had not a single instant to spend on anything otherthan creating surplus value through the goods produced with their labor power.Rancires perspective on these issues in La Nuit des proltaires resonates with hisanalyses in La Chair des mots, written nearly twenty years later. In the morerecent essay, space enters more directly into the picture to complicate further thereflections on time that dominated La Nuit des proltaires. The workers initiation

into culture and intellectual engagement can easily take the symbolic form of ajourney and is regularly recounted as such in the journals and essays written byworkers in the first half of the nineteenth century. Or it can take the form of atopographical disorder through which those who belong in one place findthemselves in anotheras interlopers and potential thieves.

Rancires reading of Balzacs Le Cur de village in La Chair des motscharacteristically alludes to a workers diary, of the type that furnished so muchrich material in La Nuit des proltaires: In 1844, theMmoires dun enfant de la

Savoie appeared. They were written by Claude Genoux, former chimney sweepwho had worked at a hundred different jobs and gone around the world beforehe became a printing press paper feeder (123). In the preface to his memoirs,Genoux recounts an incident that occurred during one of his voyages when hewas sixteen years old. While taking the boat from Lyon to Marseilles, he wasforced to spend the night in a peasants cottage, where he happened upon aworm-eaten book containing autobiographical and poetic texts written by anunknown author whose name was given simply as Lonard. Comments Genoux:

Reading this book, full of facts and feeling, gave me a night of pleasure. In themorning, when I was departing and abandoning the book, which did not belongto me and which the owner would not give me (because it composed the entiretyof the library of these fine people), I had the feeling that I was leaving a friend for


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the last time (quoted in Chair 123). Genoux spent many years subsequentlysearching unsuccessfully for a copy of the book that had touched him sofundamentally when he read it during his escapade. For Rancire, all of the

necessary elements are brought together in Genouxs text to make of this incidenta veritable fable of the discovery of the power of language: the impressionableyoung mind, the freedom and adventure of the voyage, the encounter with thesincerity of expression that even an anonymous book can contain.4 BecauseGenoux is in transit, in between places where he should otherwise be in a morepermanent manner, he is uncommonly open to receiving a new and differentintellectual impression. The movement, the change of place at the heart of thisanecdote enables an experience of cultural discovery.

If, then, Romantic poetry was distinguished by the notion of the walk, herethe idea is more broadly applied to the exposure to culture through writing of asocial group whose members had been excluded from such an experience.Movement and walking are incorporated into a broader theory of thedemocratization of literature and culture. But that democratization is also insome sense viewed as a high jacking of culture, that is, as a moment when thosewho had been excluded from its purview insert themselves into its circulationand development: the high jacking of culture appears in the form of a highway

robbery (the book surreptitiously borrowed from the shelf and clandestinelyread in the course of a stopover on a journey). This analysis emphasizes certaincharacteristics of the literary text itself, moreover. The fact that the Lonard textwas available to Genoux, in a fundamental sense unprotected and circulating onits own, has everything to do with the presentation of the powers and pitfalls ofwritten language in Platos Phaedrus. As Rancire reminds us, Platos argumentagainst writing is double and paradoxical:

[On the one hand, writing] is incapable of accompanying the logos that it

sets forth, of responding to those who would question it, incapable ofmaking of this logos a life principle, a principle that grows in the soul.Second, and inversely, writing is too talkative. Because it is not anaccompanied logos , accompanied by its father, it sets out into the worldand circulates haphazardly, without knowing to whom it must or mustnot speak. (125)

We return to the notion of accompaniment encountered earlier in Ranciresremarks on lyric poetry, this time in the context of a perspective on writing thatwas at the heart of Derridas critique of presence in La Pharmacie de Platon:

because the written text is not accompanied, it cannot say what it needs to say,and, simultaneously, it says more than it should sayand to the wrong people.Rancire draws out the political dimensions of Platos argument in a more directway than Derrida did in his earlier essay. But before pursuing these aspects


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more carefully in Rancires reading of Balzac, I want to insist on the parallelbetween the workers experience and the texts existence. If it is characteristic, asRancire has argued and documented repeatedly, for workers to accomplish

their intellectual and cultural emancipation through the act of walking andtraveling, this is also a principal characteristic of the existence of the written text,here the book.5 It, too, moves and travels, unaccompanied by its father, theauthority who might control how it speaks and to whom. Open to chanceencounters, it cannot therefore be hidden from anyone. There are no boundaries

behind which it can be secretly guarded in order to remain available only to aselect few. Its circulation and movement define an emancipation eerily parallelto that of workers on their journeys of discovery. And the free circulation of both

parties gives rise to encounters, to moments when their trajectories intersect,provoking radical transformations.

Rancire argues that this disordering force of writing undoes social hierarchiesand opens up discourse to those whose lives had nothing to do with the politicaldiscourse of the community before their exposure to writing: Writing is adisordering of the legitimate order of discourse (125). He adds:

Democracy, in fact, cannot simply be defined as one political regime amongothers, characterized simply by another distribution of powers. It is more

fundamentally defined as a certain sharing and division of the perceptibleworld [le sensible], a certain redistribution of its places. And what governsthis redistribution is the very fact of literariness: the regime of orphanedwriting, available to all, the system of these spaces of a writing whoseemptiness punches holes in the living tissue of the community ethos . . . [or]the orchestra section of the theater where the first person to come along,Socrates tells us, can buy the books of Anaxagoras for a drachma. . . . (126-27)6

If writing can travel autonomously and anonymously, provoking unexpectedencounters with those who read it, then these same readers, now transformed (in

many different ways), subsequently seek newperhaps previously nonexistententry points into the discourse of the community. They disturb the ways ofacting, of being, and of speaking that characterize the prior harmony of thecommunity, which Plato idealizes, of course, but which functions as a baselineagainst which the aberrations of democracy supposedly develop. From atopographical perspective, one might say that those who were on the marginssuddenly make their appearance within an excluded territory, as interlopers whodisrupt. When workers read texts destined originally for others, the reading of

these texts contains risks and produces social dangers.The emblematic place given to Balzacs Le Cur de village in Rancires

argument in La Chair des mots results from the fact that the novel recounts anexemplary story of cultural discovery that provokes a mortal confusion within


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the social order. Vronique Sauviat is brought up the only child of a couplewhose fortune was made buying and selling scrap metal. Balzac insists on thenarrow fanaticism necessary to survive and thrive at such an activity, the absence,

then, of any time or space for cultural development and complexity, forparticipation in the broader political discourse of the community. The fortuneproduced by her father gives Vronique the possibility to be educated in a wayunthinkable for her parents and ancestors, and, predictably, her education takesa religious and edifying formbut it also exposes her to a radical transformation.One day, she espies an edition ofPaul et Virginie in the display of a bookseller.Balzac describes the incident as follows:

In 1820, an accident occurred in the simple life, devoid of events, that

Vronique was leading, an accident that would have had no importancefor any other young person, but which perhaps exerted a horrible influenceon her future. . . . Vronique passed by the display of a bookseller whereshe saw Paul et Virginie. She bought it on a whim because of the engraving[on the cover]. . . . The child spent the night reading the novel, one of themost moving in the French language. . . . A hand, call it divine or satanic,lifted the veil that until then had hidden Nature from her. (9:653-54)

This scene in the novel is tailor-made to fascinate Rancire, because it containsall the elements of the scenes of cultural recognition and discovery apparent in

many of the workers texts he has analyzed over the years. One might firstremark that the fascination with the book begins at a visual level: the imageattracts Vroniques gaze. Knowing nothing of its contents, even though it iscertainly one of the most well known novels in French during the period inquestion, Vronique relies on the image to suggest what the contents might be.The discovery of the book happens, moreover, during a walk through the streetsof her town. This might not quite be the journey of discovery described byClaude Genoux in his memoirs, but it is nonetheless significant that the book is

not brought to Vronique, handed to her, nor is it part of any collection at herimmediate disposal. Instead it must be discovered by chance encounter whileshe is on the move, in a public space where walking permits certain transgressionsof an otherwise ordered spatial and social grid.7 Once she procures the volume(her father buys it for her), she delays telling her priest about it, implicitly sensingthat this text is unlike her daily religious and edifying fare, but, more importantly,that the unusual encounter with it has something to do with its power. Whenshe finally tells her priest about the book, the emblematic scene of nighttimereading has already taken place, and besides, he can only approve its purchase,so childlike, innocent, and pure was the reputation ofPaul et Virginie (9:614).One might also add that naivet and innocence, here given as the hallmarks ofPaul et Virginie, are also crucial to Lonards text, as read by Claude Genoux.


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The power of these texts has everything to do with the notions of sincerity andpurity, because the discovery of written language by someone who has notexperienced it is always a discovery of its power, of its uncanny ability to move

the reader, to cut through tired daily experience and reveal the new.The discovery ofPaul et Virginie provokes a chain of events that leads to a

double murder and a life of regret for Vronique. Inspired by the naive love andfriendship described in the novel, she befriends a peasant/worker, Jean-FranoisTascheron, who subsequently becomes her lover and who, in the course of atheft conceived to give him the means to rise above his own working class status,is surprised by the miser he is defrauding, Pingret, and by Pingrets servant,

both of whom Tascheron kills, drawing Vronique into his antisocial act in the

course of these events.8 One can quickly understand how this sequence playsinto Rancires perspective: the discovery of a text whose audience was notsupposed to include someone like Vronique is an event that provokes a socialcrisis expressed graphically by two murders. But there is considerably more inthe novel that can be annexed to Rancires argument. For instance, Vroniquescultural formation is a process that extends throughout her early life, rapidlychanging her social status entirely. A comment by Balzacs narrator alludesdirectly to one of the results of this transition: Doubtless used to the idea of

marrying a working class man, she found within herself instincts that refusedany coarseness (9:655).9 The daughter of uneducated parents, burdened withthe kinds of limited expectations such a situation might warrant, she almostmiraculously becomes a powerful cultural magnet and social figure in Limoges,where she lives, by the time the trial and execution of Jean-Franois Tascherontake place. The salon that forms around her after her marriage to the bankerPierre Graslin includes a group of regulars who are among the most visible andintelligent of the towns ruling class. Not only does Vronique cross over into a

different intellectual and moral existence after her reading ofPaul et Virginie,she quite simply accomplishes an astounding move from the communityperiphery into its mainstream cultural territory.

If the idea of movement through space is crucial to Rancires reflections onthe novel, the organization of space and its impact on the characters in the novelare just as important. His reading of Balzacs work begins with a contrast drawn

between two novelistic traditions concerning the treatment of space. The firstwould be the quest novel, which becomes the picaresque novel in the eighteenth

century and ultimately the Bildungsroman. In such novels, the hero undergoesa series of experiences along a trajectory that is something like a road to adestination containing the object of a search (the original model would be TheOdyssey). The second is the novel as it is reformulated by Balzac, in which space


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functions as an enveloping context or setting producing the novels characters:The lens thus moves in, discovers the characters and their stories, the very onesthat the setting called for; they reflect and put into action the properties that the

place, now become milieu, determines (115-16). For Rancire,Le Cur de villageis of particular interest because it represents a third type of novelistic treatmentof space, one in which the first two types are present, but fail to coalesce: Insteadof lending itself to the developmental trajectory of the characters or imparting tothem its properties, space congeals, becomes fixed in one of its points (116).The fixed space in the landscape ofLe Cur de village is very precisely the islandin the Vienne River opposite the part of the town in which Vronique lives. Thisisland becomes a mesmerizing topographical point that blocks narrative

movement. It is, in particular, the place that embodies Vroniques fascinationwith Paul et Virginie, which is, of course, all about islands. Rancire goes furtherand insists on the symbolic power of islands more generallytheir resistance tothe uniform, harmonious flow of water, their unmoving opposition to themainstream. The secret of Tascherons crime is buried on an island in the VienneRiver: not only the stolen money, but also remnants of clothing that can identifyVronique as his accomplice.

Because the island is so closely tied to the revolution produced in Vronique

by the story ofPaul et Virginie, it becomes something like the emblem of thedemocratic impulse contained in the reading act that exposed her to the influenceof a powerful written text in the first place, in the form of a novel she rightfullyshould not have happened upon and subsequently read. Within the harmoniousmainstream of the discourse of a community, the island becomes a site thatprovokes counter currents, resisting absorption into the synthesized community.At stake in Balzacs novel is not a space defined by concentric circles; rather, thisis a spatial organization in which a highly charged island, somehow not quite

contiguous with the social space of Limoges, is the focus of attention not only ofVronique and her lover, but also of the most perspicacious members of thecommunity, for whom a moment of insight brings the realization that the islandholds the secret.10 The space of the quest and the space of the milieu do notcoalesce in Le Cur de village in large part because the speculations aboutTascherons crime and the attempt to identify his accomplice turn the novel intoa proto-detective story in which the search for clues, focused on the island,introduces another dimension into the spatial structure and fetishizes the island

as something radically unassimilated. The perspective on space graduallyintroduced through the vehicle of the detective novel during the nineteenthcenturybeginning with Balzac and becoming much more fundamental withPoe in the 1840sturns the tables on the Balzacian notion of milieu. If one can


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argue, as Balzac does, that the spatial context is a social milieu that forms thecharacters, ultimately imprinting on them their behavior, it turns out to be thecase as well that characters moving through space leave traces of their passage,

imprints that will soon become clues, indices, as the French would call them.11The relation between a given spatial context and a given fictional character is

bidirectional, not unidirectional. Walter Benjamin expressed this in a strikingway when he argued that the bourgeois interior was far more than just the settingthat formed the subject: the subject also created it by depositing traces. Thesetraces became the very stuff of detective novels and gave rise to an investigativeapproach to the scene of the crime once they could be interpreted as clues left

by a subject:

The interior is not only the universe of the individual, but also what wrapsaround him. To live somewhere means to leave traces. In the bourgeoisinterior emphasis is put on them. . . . Traces of the person who lives thereare imprinted on the interior. This is the origin of the detective novel,which pursues such traces. His Philosophy of Furniture as well as his detectivenovels prove that Poe was the first physiognomist of the interior. Thecriminals of the first detective novels are neither gentlemen nor savages,

but individuals who belong to the bourgeoisie. (41-42)

Balzacs clumsiness in weaving together these different perspectives on space

leads to the compositional difficulties that characterize Le Cur de village:Assuredly, comments Rancire, the link between the detective story logic ofthe events recounted [in the novel] and the logic of the fable, which shows us thecause of the crime, is sewn with the coarsest thread (135).

Ultimately, what is at stake here in the clash of spatial models that Balzaccannot seem to synthesize is an encounter with the classical problem of mimesisin a new historical form. If the Revolution created the possibility for lyric poetryand ushered in a shift toward metaphorembodied in the poet-subjects walk

through a non-urban environmentthe founding of a new bourgeois socialstructure brings back the question of the relation between narrative and theworld in yet another form (throw mimesis out the door and it comes back inthrough the window). The Balzacian notion of space as milieu recasts the termsof the relation between the protagonist of the fable and the society that supportsand produces the fable. The fact that people are the products of their milieus isa sort of tragicomic reformulation of the notion of the appropriateness of theaction of a character measured against expectations created by the nomos andtheethos of the society. But this reconstruction of the fable is counterbalanced inBalzacs novel by the drive to create a logic of fiction that is different from that ofthe influence of the milieu, namely, the logic of the trace as clue and the structureof the criminal investigation. This second tendency soon becomes the science


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of a writer like Poe, rendering identical the mastery of the writer arrangingtraces [throughout a text] and the knowledge of the detective who deciphersthem (135). The writer la Henry James or Jorge Luis Borges opts for the

hyper-writing of fictional logic against the connection between character andsociety in the fable. Flaubert, as always, is the transitional figure in this dilemma.The tension between these two poles, however, is already characteristic of Balzacsreinvention of the novel and plays itself out in the debates about and experimentswith realism throughout the nineteenth century. Rancires argument has theadded effect of revalorizing Balzac, whose work has been excluded from themainstream of modernism, where the emphasis has been put on the formalreflections of a Flaubert or a Mallarm and on the contemporary Deleuzian

fascination with short, formulaically programmed fictional texts: The tale [asopposed to the novel] is . . . a privileged structure [in Deleuze]. It is the magicformula that recounts the story of a magic formula, that metamorphoses everystory of metamorphosis into a demonstration of the power of metamorphosis,as Rancire ironically describes Deleuzes Kafka fetishism (188).

I have opted here to follow closely the detail of Rancires arguments onmovement in Romantic lyric poetry and on the imperfect suturing of spaces inthe Balzacian novel as it occurs in Le Cur de village, because although the

programmatic nature of his readings is clear and always strongly present, thebroad driving principles that underlie his work never become so overriding thatthey close him off from the particular history of the text he wishes to analyze.An evident point of departure in reflecting on what I would call his tact is theconnection made between the literary and the democratic, central to La Chairdes mots. On the one hand, Rancire argues that the literary is the fundamentalelement defining democracy from the outset (since the Greeks): this invariantwill reappear in the literary domain whatever the historical moment might be.

The literarythat is, the written wordredistributes social space and roles,because it introduces a very different perspective on authority than that of thespoken word proffered by a speaker holding sway as a result of his or her specialright to a position in the public forum. When Rancire links the literary and thedemocratic, then, there is a broad program at work in his analyses. On theother hand, however, the way this principle plays out is tied each time to a specifichistorical contextin La Chair des mots the Revolution and its immediateaftermath. The specificity of the way the characteristics of writing coalesce in

certain historical moments does not become lost; on the contrary, these historicallygrounded elements create in large part the suggestive power of Ranciresreadings. This fascination with the historical detail of particular moments isclosely linked to yet another dimension of the definition of writing that Rancire


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has developed over the past decade or so. A remark he makes inLa Parole muetteis revealing and represents perhaps the crux of his manner of analyzing literaryworks: In fact, writing is not the simple tracing of signs, opposed to a vocal

emission. It is a particular mise-en-scne of the act of speaking (82). Writingand speaking are perhaps not as radically different as the now familiar Derridianargument would maintain (an argument that Rancire himself takes up in certainof his formulations, one must add). Any act that mobilizes language, be it oralor written, is always a mise-en-scnein a very strong sense, that is, it takes as itspoint of departure the circumstances presented to it and stages its occurrencewithin a particular moment, in a singular context. The circumstances at handwhen language manifests itself are elements that necessarily structure every

enactment of language. They are the constituents that give the enactment itstone and fabric. If movement and space are central to Rancires analysis of lyricpoetry or of Balzacs Le Cur de village, this is because the Revolution precipitateda large-scale reorganization of physical and social spaces in Franceand Rancireis an expert at putting his finger on the way these crucial historical phenomenaare woven into the texture of literary writing in the period. His perspective isalways marked by what one would call in French his disponibilit, his skill atremaining sensitive and open to nuanceswhat I would ultimately call his tact.

The programmatic dimension of Rancires work regularly gives way to thecomplexity of historical circumstance in a manner that refreshes theprogrammatic in surprising and consistently compelling ways.

Duke University

Notes

1. This is a pun in French on the expression route nationale, meaning those crucial roads thathave historically been designated as the backbone of the road system in France since theseventeenth century and whose upkeep was in part the responsibility of the monarchyand then the republic.

2. French aptly calls the real estate to which Virilio is referring biens immobiliers, fixedassets, as one might say in English: the complex relation between stasis and mobilityplayed out in these events is reinforced at the semantic level.

3. The poem cannot be defined as a mode of language. A poem is a story, and its value orlack thereof is linked to the conception of this story (La Parole muette 20).

4. The failure of Genouxs subsequent efforts to identify the text in question and to findanother copy of it contributed to the almost fetishized fascination exercised by the

incident in his imagination and memory.5. It bears mention here that the act of walking at stake is tied to a history of technology.The relationship between walkers and the landscape through which they walk iscategorically different from that of passengers enclosed in some sort of conveyance(stage coach or later train, for example). To walk through a landscape is to feel intimately


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connected to it, whereas to be conveyed through it at speeds that exceed the humandetaches one from the landscape. Historically speaking, the lyrical discovery of thelandscape necessary to produce Romantic poetry has to precede high-speed travel. Seemy Real Time: Accelerating Narrative from Balzac to Zola (Urbana and Chicago: University of

Illinois Press, 2004). Small wonder that Virilio s theoretical perspective insists on speed,the very development, he suggests, that fractures political consciousness to such anextent that modern man loses all traditional bearings when attempting to grasp hisown social life.

6. Or in La Parole muette: Democracy is very precisely the regime of writing, the regimewhere the wandering of the orphaned letter is the law, where it replaces living discourse,the living soul of the community (84).

7. See Michel de Certeau, LInvention du quotidien 171-227.8. Sensing that Tascheron is going to steal the money, Vronique goes out on the fatal night

of the crime in order to stop him, only to arrive as he is committing the crime. She helpshim try to hide certain traces of the crime and he in turn tries to hide the traces of herpresence at the scene.

9. Tascherons intelligence and ambition are precisely the extraordinary qualities thatdraw her to this worker, who is much more than the average laborer.

10. One should add that the anecdote Rancire uses to begin his analysis of Balzacs story,namely, Claude Genouxs discovery of Lonards book, takes place during a journey, butalso on an island, because the layover during his boat trip, the night when he findsshelter with the poor peasant family, is set on an island in the Rhone River, as Rancirecarefully points out.

11. And ultimately fingerprints and DNA codes gleaned from traces of the suspects bodyleft behind. Pre-dating substantially the era of fingerprinting, the mystery in Le Cur devillage nonetheless centers on an imprintof Tascherons shoe.

Works Cited

Balzac, Honor de. Les Chouans ou La Bretagne en 1799. La Comdie humaine. Ed. Pierre GeorgesCastex et al. Bibliothque de la Pliade. Paris: Gallimard, 1976-81. 8:857-1211.

Le Cur de village. La Comdie humaine. Ed. Pierre Georges Castex et al. Bibliothque de laPliade. Paris: Gallimard, 1976- 81. 9:603- 872.

Benjamin, Walter. Paris: Capital du XIXe sicle. Le Livre des passages. Trans. Jean Lacoste. Paris:

Les ditions du cerf, 1989.Certeau, Michel de. LInvention du quotidien 1: Arts de faire. Paris: Union Gnrale dditions,1980.

Derrida, Jacques. La Pharmacie de Platon. La Dissmination. Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1972.69-197.

Rancire, Jacques. La Chair des mots: Politiques de lcriture. Paris: Galile, 1998.. La Nuit des proltaires: Archives du rve ouvrier. Paris: Fayard, 1981.. La Parole muette: Essai sur les contradictions de la littrature. Paris: Hachette, 1998.Virilio, Paul. Vitesse et politique. Paris: Galile, 1977.

bell, writing, mouvement space, democray, on ranciere

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