The Bourgeois: Between...
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August 8 - September 1, 2022
‘Bourgeois’ first appeared in eleventh-century French, as burgeis, to indicate those residents of medieval towns (bourgs) who enjoyed the legal right of being ‘free and exempt from feudal jurisdiction’ (Robert). The juridical sense of the term—from which arose the typically bourgeois idea of liberty as ‘freedom from’—was then joined, near the end of the seventeenth century, by an economic meaning that referred, with the familiar string of negations, to ‘someone who belonged neither to the clergy nor to the nobility, did not work with his hands, and possessed independent means’ (Robert again).
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once placed ‘in the middle’, the bourgeoisie could appear as a group that was itself partly subaltern, and couldn’t really be held responsible for the way of the world. And then, ‘low’, ‘middle’ and ‘upper’ formed a continuum where mobility was much easier to imagine than among incommensurable categories—‘classes’—like peasantry, proletariat, bourgeoisie, or nobility. And so, in the long run, the symbolic horizon created by ‘middle class’ worked extremely well for the English (and American) bourgeoisie:
Things are different in an earlier period, or at the margins of capitalist Europe, where the weakness of capitalism as a system leaves much greater freedom to imagine powerful individual figures like Robinson Crusoe, Gesualdo Motta, or Stanislaw Wokulski. But where capitalistic structures solidify, narrative and stylistic mechanisms replace individuals as the centre of the text. It’s another way to look at the structure of this book: two chapters on bourgeois characters—and two on bourgeois language.
And so, when a researcher for Cameron’s 1997 Titanic unearthed the anecdote, he immediately brought it to the scriptwriters’ attention: what a scene. But he was flatly turned down: too unrealistic. The rich don’t die for abstract principles like cowardice and the like. And indeed, the film’s vaguely Guggenheim-like figure tries to force his way onto a lifeboat with a gun.
The same bourgeois resistance to narrative emerges from Richard Helgerson’s study of Dutch Golden Age realism: a visual culture where ‘women, children, servants, peasants, craftsmen and interloping male suitors act’, whereas ‘upper class male householders . . . are’, and tend to find their form of choice in the non-narrative genre of the portrait.
Slavery was never ‘ordered around the idea of efficiency’, writes Roberto Schwarz about the Brazilian plantations of Conrad’s time, because it could always rely ‘on violence and military discipline’; therefore, ‘the rational study and continuous modernization of the processes of production’ made literally ‘no sense’.
The bourgeois home—the English bourgeois home—as the embodiment of comfort. In the course of the eighteenth century, writes Charles Morazé in Les bourgeois conquerants, ‘England made fashionable a new type of happiness—that of being at home: the English call it “comfort”, and so will the rest of the world.’61
Already active within court society, and preserving to this day a halo of hauteur, and indeed of luxury, fashion appeals to the bourgeoisie that wants to go beyond itself, and resemble the old ruling class; comfort remains down to earth, prosaic; its aesthetics, if there is such a thing, is understated, functional, adapted to the everyday, and even to work.
Progress: ‘the continuous self-justification of the present, by means of the future that it gives itself, before the past, with which it compares itself’.92
like the modern world of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, which is no longer ‘responsible for man’s salvation’, as Bunyan’s was, but ‘ competing with that salvation with its own offer of stability and reliability’.
This must be what Schumpeter had in mind when he observed that ‘the capitalist style of life could be easily—and perhaps most tellingly—described in terms of the genesis of the modern lounge suit’ (Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 126). Originating in country wear, the lounge suit was used both as a business suit and as a sign of generic everyday elegance; its connection with work, however, made it ‘unsuitable’ for more festive and fashionable occasions.
Serious may not be the same as tragic, true, but it does indicate something dark, cold, impassable, silent, heavy; an irrevocable detachment from the ‘carnivalesque’ of the labouring classes. Serious, is the bourgeoisie on its way to being the ruling class.
Beginning, once more, with the Dutch Golden Age, when the private sphere we still inhabit today first found its form; when houses became more comfortable—that word again—and doors multiplied, as did windows, and rooms differentiated their function, with one specializing precisely in everyday life: the ‘living’, or ‘drawing’ room (which is actually the ‘ with-drawing room’, Peter Burke has explained, where the masters withdraw from their servants to enjoy the novelty of ‘free time’).
‘There has in truth been a great change in the predominant occupations of the ruling part of mankind’, writes Walter Bagehot: ‘formerly, they passed their time either in exciting action or in inanimate repose. A feudal baron had nothing between war and the chase—keenly animating things both—and what was called “inglorious ease”. Modern life is scanty in excitements, but incessant in quiet action.’
‘I never before longed so much to know the names of things’, writes Eliot in her Ilfracombe journal of 1856: ‘the desire is part of the tendency that is now constantly growing in me to escape from all vagueness and inaccuracy into the daylight of distinct, vivid ideas’.24
Objectivity increases, because subjectivity decreases. ‘Objectivity is the suppression of some aspect of the self’, write Daston and Galison in Objectivity;
In political philosophy and literary representation alike, the present becomes a sediment of history; while the past, instead of simply disappearing, turns into something visible, solid, concrete—to quote another keyword of conservative thought, and of the rhetoric of ‘realism’.
But next to Marx’s Balzac there is Auerbach’s, and this strange mix of capitalist turbulence and conservative persistence suggests something important about nineteenth-century novels (and about literature as a whole): their deepest vocation lies in forging compromises between different ideological systems.46 In our case, the compromise consisted in ‘attaching’ the two great ideologies of nineteenth-century Europe to different parts of the literary text: capitalist rationalization reorganized novelistic plot with the regular tempo of fillers—while political conservatism dictated its descriptive
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‘His understanding and temper, though unlike her own, would have answered all her wishes’ . . . who is speaking, here? Elizabeth? Austen?50 Perhaps, neither one nor the other, but a third voice, intermediate and almost neutral among them: the slightly abstract, thoroughly socialized voice of the achieved social contract.51
Madame Bovary is the logical endpoint of that slow process which has detached European literature from its didactic functions, replacing an all-wise narrator with large doses of free indirect style.
For Jauss (and others), free indirect style places the novel in opposition to the dominant culture, because it forces readers ‘into an alienating uncertainty of judgment . . . turning a predecided question of public morals [the evaluation of adultery] back into an open problem’.58 From this viewpoint, Pinard was right about the stakes of the trial: Flaubert was a threat to the established order. Luckily Pinard lost, and Flaubert won.
The voice we so often hear in Pride and Prejudice is perhaps the ‘third voice’ of the achieved social contract, I wrote earlier; with Flaubert, we can drop the ‘perhaps’, because the process has come to its full completion: character and narrator have lost their distinctiveness, subsumed by the composite discourse of bourgeois doxa.
Socialization has been too successful: from the many voices of the social universe, only ‘an average intellectual level’ remains, ‘around which oscillate the individual intelligences of the bourgeois’.60 It’s the nightmare of Bouvard and Pécuchet: no longer knowing how to distinguish a novel about stupidity from a stupid novel.
‘In free indirect style’, writes D. A. Miller, ‘the two antithetical terms (of character and narration) stand, so to speak, as close as possible to the bar (the virgule, the disciplinary rod) that separates them. Narration comes as near to a character’s psychic and linguistic reality as it can get without collapsing into it, and the character does as much of the work of narration as she may without acquiring its authority’
the kitsch fantasyland hovering over St Pancras (‘the west end of a German cathedral combined with several Flemish town halls’—Kenneth Clark
the 50-metre ciborium of the Albert Memorial, where allegorical groups of Manufacture and Engineering share the canopy with the four Cardinal and the three Theological Virtues. Absurd.
‘Imaginary resolution of real contradictions’ is Althusser’s famous formula for ideology;
(an unsurprising mix of Evangelical Christianity, ancien régime imaginary, and the work ethic),
Victorianism had not quite disappeared, but it had clearly lost its conceptual value, surviving only as the chronological label for mid-century capitalism, or power more generally.
If the early bourgeois had been, loosely speaking, a man of knowledge, the Victorian mix of disavowal and sentimentalism transformed him into a being who feared knowledge and hated it. It is this creature, whom we now have to meet.
and from within the opposition of culture and anarchy, a second one materializes, where culture gravitates around the idea of the State, and anarchy around the working class.
‘Culture suggests the idea of the State’, writes Arnold near the end of the second section: ‘we find no basis for a firm State-power in our ordinary selves; culture suggests one to us in our best self’ (Culture and Anarchy, p. 99).
All in all, he may be the most complete bourgeois figure of nineteenth-century fiction: financially sharp, intellectually curious, and politically daring.
hypergamy
refractory
It’s like a twenty-year-long experiment Ibsen is running: changing a variable here and there, to see what happens to the system. But no workers in the experiment—even though these are the years when trade unions, socialist parties, and anarchism are changing the face of European politics.
Honesty, the theory goes, is the bourgeois virtue because it’s so perfectly adapted to capitalism: market transactions require trust, honesty provides it, and the market rewards it. Honesty works. ‘By doing evil we do badly’—we lose money—McCloskey concludes, ‘and we do well by doing good.’
depression of 1873–96,
Past might, becomes present right. But Victorian culture—even at its best: ‘one of the few English books written for grown-up people’, as Woolf said of Middlemarch—cannot accept the idea of a world dominated by perfectly lawful injustice. The contradiction is unbearable: lawfulness must become just, or injustice criminal: one way or the other, form and substance must be realigned. If capitalism cannot always be morally good, it must at least be always morally legible.
Hypocrite lecteur—mon semblable—mon frère!
By now, readers of this book know that prose is its only true hero. It wasn’t meant to be; it just happened, in trying to do justice to the achievements of bourgeois culture. Prose as the bourgeois style, in the broadest sense; a way of being in the world, not just of representing it. Prose as analysis, first of all; Hegel’s ‘unmistakable definiteness and clear intelligibility’, or Weber’s ‘clarity’.
Nora’s dispelling of lies at the end of Dollhouse is one of the great pages of bourgeois culture: on a par with Kant’s words on the Enlightenment, or Mill’s on liberty. How significant, that the moment should be so brief.
His aspiration is ‘comfort’: this almost medicinal notion, halfway between work and rest: pleasure, as mere well-being. Caught in a never-ending struggle against the vagaries of Fortuna, this early bourgeois is orderly, careful, with the ‘almost religious respect for facts’ of the first Buddenbrooks. He is a man of details. He is the prose of capitalist history.
In Faust, in the Ring, in late Ibsen, characters ‘speculate’, looking far into the time to come. Details are dwarfed by the imagination; the real, by the possible. It is the poetry of capitalist development.
You can’t be honest in the future tense—which is the tense of the entrepreneur. What is an ‘honest’ forecast of the price of oil, or of anything else for that matter, five years from now? Even if you want to be honest, you can’t, because honesty needs firm facts, which ‘speculating’—even in its most neutral sense—lacks.
The day the Securities and Exchange Commission authorized this ‘speculation’ on the value of assets, Jeff Skilling brought champagne to the office: accounting as ‘professional scepticism’, as the classical definition had it—and it sounds so much like the poetics of realism—was over. Now, accounting was vision. ‘It wasn’t a job—it was a mission . . . We were doing God’s work.’27 This was Skilling, after the indictment. Borkman: who can no longer tell the difference between conjecture, desire, dream, hallucination, and fraud pure and simple.
Recognizing the impotence of bourgeois realism in the face of capitalist megalomania: here lies Ibsen’s enduring lesson for the world of today.
