As literature sets off on its tortuous route to becoming absolute, it joins up with Satanism in a shared passion, in what only the greatest theologians have come to recognize as one of the gravest sins: curiosity. The image of the writer then becomes Milton’s Satan when, “having reached the earthly paradise, he flew straight down onto the tree of life, the tallest tree in the garden, and rested there, looking like a cormorant, without any attempt to re-conquer life, indeed using the tree only to enable him to see farther, for prospect.”¹⁹⁴ This could be the motto for the experimental frenzy that has been throwing forms into continual disarray since the times of Sainte-Beuve: For prospect. And wasn’t it, after all, in that same empty curiosity that the theologians had found the radical sin of the new science?

“The disease of literature and of art, as they call it, is very common these days … Never perhaps in any age, I would suggest, have phrase and color, the falsehood of the literary word, predominated to such an extent over the foundation and over the truth as in these years.¹⁹⁵ The realm of the pen has replaced, literally, the realm of the sword.” Marx would relentlessly follow the emancipation of the exchange value in its every tiny detail; likewise Sainte-Beuve looked long at the emancipation of the word. It was a process in which he felt himself an accomplice, but at the same time it revolted him. The sinuous verbosity of the new writers, who sailed in the editorial waters of the press and unwittingly discovered the industrial use of the word, their elation at realizing that the word was capable of everything and managed to cover everything, seemed, in his view, to secretly descend from the same origins as Chateaubriand’s majestic prose. And they were also the origins of Hugo, who continued to produce page after page with his “rough soul of the strong and cunning Barbarian.”¹⁹⁶ But the ultimate rancor lay elsewhere: from that same odious proliferation came the newness that Sainte-Beuve, in the fearful corner of his mind, was not inclined to follow, even if his farsightedness prevented him from ignoring it: the newness of Baudelaire, then of Flaubert, both entranced by absolute literature. The basest word and the perfect word were soon to mix together in their waters, like in certain gnostic rituals. Sainte-Beuve, who always refused to stray beyond good and evil, was now distressed to realize that around him there was no “foundation” or “truth” on which to rely. And he spoke to himself in his confidential tone, that of the tender cynic: “I was a petty thief in my youth, I’ll be a pirate in old age.¹⁹⁷ Oh, how I would have preferred to be a good literary gentleman, who lives on his lands in a state of poetry!”

Metamorphoses of Style

Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac once boasted that he had “found something many were looking for, namely a certain little art of arranging words and putting them in the right place.” Apart from that “little art,” there is nothing else than “the secret force by which the words are elicited from Heaven, from which, along with it, comes greatness and majesty.”¹⁹⁸