T HE MOST COMMON CRITICISM of Balzac’s Facino Cane, composed shortly before its publication in March of 1836, is that it consists of two distinct stories which do not cohere: an introduc­ tion which tells of the narrator’s early days in the Faubourg SaintAntoine, and the fantastic tale of Pere Canet, a blind musician from the Hospice des Quinze-Vingts who claims to have once been a Venetian nobleman, Marco Facino Cane. Since Balzac asserted in a letter to Mme Hanska that he had written the work in a single night,1 hasty composi­ tion is usually blamed for its flaws, and the reliance on such stereotypes as the passionate Italian and the fabulously wealthy Venice (which Balzac would visit only after publishing the story) are viewed as evidence that nothing more was intended than a little tribute to italian friends like the Guidoboni-Visconti.2 Since the publication of Gautier’s first articles on Balzac in L ’Artiste (March 1858), which stressed the autobiographical character of the story’s introduction,3 critics and editors of Facino Cane have generally agreed that the detail it presents reflects the reality of the period described, 1820. Most of them have consequently identified the anonymous young narrator with the author himself. Even detractors allow for the value of the personal data offered in the story.4 The story’s partisans point out that, aside from its autobiographical interest, the introduction discusses and illustrates the author’s important concept of seconde vue. They argue also that the lives of the octogenarian and the young man of twenty are in fact well meshed, and that the treatment of the destructive powers of gold is effective and very Balzacian, as is the choice of carefully nurtured creative powers over immediate gratifica­ tion.5 I should like to argue beyond this that the challenge of two narra­ tives, three distinct points of view, and a chance to excel in a genre made popular by recent translation of Hoffmann’s tales inspired Balzac to write a well-knit story in which clearly drawn lines, not only point to the wisdom of walking the straight and narrow, but invite the reader to estimate distance along the way. My examination centers on the manner in which, within the story, awareness of the uses of distance parallels consideration of problems

Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

Distance and Narrative Perspective in Balzac's Facino Cane

Narrative Loss and the Melancholic Reader of Johnny Tremain

"Distance," Desire, and The Ideological Matrix of Winter in the Blood

What Happened? The event is not a given. (Felman 194; emphasis in original) The "act" of the woman remains unclear in the text: she may have jumped, she may have fallen, or something else may have happened. (LaCapra 78) At the end of the last century Raymond Gay-Crosier invoked practical reasons for declining to cite the more than two hundred works devoted specifically to Camus's La Chute (127). It would be a much more realistic undertaking to list critical studies of Camus's third novel in more recent years. Whilst there has been a palpable revival of interest in Camus, much of it has been from a postcolonial perspective, drawing impetus from the posthumous publication of Camus's final, unfinished novel Le Premier Homme in 1994 and focussing on his conflicted attitude to Algerian independence. Set around the foggy streets and canals of Amsterdam, La Chute offers less obvious material to the postcolonial critic than Camus's other major novels and short stories. However, as important texts by Shoshana Felman and Dominick LaCapra have demonstrated, the novel is of substantial interest when read from the standpoint of trauma studies. La Chute refers explicitly to the killing of Jews during the Second World War and it revolves around questions of memory, narratorial reliability, and the entanglement of personal and collective histories. This article examines the issues of trauma and witnessing in La Chute principally by analyzing Felman's essay "Camus' The Fall, or the Betrayal of the Witness," which appears as a chapter in her and Dori Laub's Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Felman's discussion of La Chute is exemplary both as a committed reading and as an instance of how Camus's novel entices its readers into the pitfalls of misreading. What interests me here are the ways in which the novel both encourages and resists Felman's reading, implicating her--as it has perhaps implicated all its best readers--in a complex interplay of blindness and insight through which the text itself remains stubbornly opaque. Felman's interpretation of La Chute tells about the nature of reading in general and about the specific difficulties of producing a persuasive, comprehensive reading of Camus's most difficult novel. Felman makes an irresistible case for relating La Chute to the problems of witnessing and representation raised, in particular but not uniquely, by the Holocaust. The invitation to read the novel in the dark light of the Holocaust is issued in its opening pages when Cla-mence tells his interlocutor that he lives in the former Jewish quarter of Amsterdam. This establishes Amsterdam, and Europe more generally, and the text of La Chute, as spaces which are marked by an indelible crime: Moi, j'habite le quartier juif, ou ce qui s'appelait ainsi jusqu'au moment ou les freres hitleriens y ont fait de la place. Quel lessivage! Soixante-quinze mille juifs deportes ou assassines, c'est le nettoyage par le vide. J'admire cette application, cette methodique patience! Quand on n'a pas de caractere, il faul bien se dornner une methode. lei, elle a fait merveille, sans contredit, et j'habite sur Ies lieux d'un des plus grands crimes de l'histoire. (701) Although there is no reason to believe that Clamence is directly or indirectly a victim of the Holocaust, he can readily be seen as suffering the effects of some kind of trauma, acting out an experience that is not fully recalled and assimilated. This could explain, for example, his sense of doubleness and falseness, his dissociation from his own acts, his sense that he is playing a game or performing a role, and the oscillations between forgetting and partial remembering which recur throughout his narrative. It might also help to explain the self-consciously unreliable nature of his narrative. As Cathy Caruth explains, trauma narratives almost invariably raise the question of their own truth: "The problem [of truth] arises not only in regard to those who listen to the traumatized, not knowing how to establish the reality of their hallucinations and dreams; it occurs rather and most disturbingly often within the very knowledge and experience of the traumatized themselves" ("Introduction," 5). …

Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

Citations

Distance and Narrative Perspective in Balzac's Facino Cane

Narrative Loss and the Melancholic Reader of Johnny Tremain

"Distance," Desire, and The Ideological Matrix of Winter in the Blood

What Happened?: Camus's La Chute, Shoshana Felman and the Witnessing of Trauma

"The Female of the Species" D. W. Griffith: Father of the Woman's Film