Le Récit de vengeance au XIXe siècle: Mérimée, Dumas, Balzac, Barbey d'Aurevilly (review)

Before you embark on a journey of revenge, advised Confucius, dig two graves. That point may be first and foremost a moral one, but it also reminds us of the great dramatic potential of revenge, and perhaps goes some way towards explaining the theme's literary longevity. Kris Vassilev's carefully wrought and perceptive study singles out revenge as one of the defining tropes of nineteenth-century narrative, exploring its ramifications in close readings of four texts (though many others are usefully mentioned along the way): Colomba, Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, La Cousine Bette and the final story of Les Diaboliques, 'La Vengeance d'une femme'. While revenge in Classical tragedy was public, sanctioned by leaders and rulers, and swiftly exacted (as in Don Diègue's 'Va, cours, vole et nous venge'), Vassilev points out that revenge in nineteenth-century narrative takes a quite different path. It often confronts the individual with collective institutions of justice (or indeed exposes the failings of the legal system); it is conducted in private, sometimes in secrecy; and above all, it requires time and patience. Classical revenge was necessarily dramatic, visible, confrontational and intense, but nineteenth-century revenge can be slow and discreet, sometimes deliberately laboured, with plots that involve disguise and doubles. Revenge is therefore, Vassilev argues, the perfect mechanism of modern storytelling, requiring the longueurs of narrative elaboration, the sinuosities of fictional form and a self-conscious but continuous re-reading of the past in relation to the unfolding events of the present. The prolixity of Dumas's style in Monte-Cristo can thus be seen as an intrinsic part of the motif of revenge itself, for digression, disguise and the reworking of the past become the guiding principle of the narrative. But revenge is also, Vassilev suggests, an intensely ambivalent theme. In Colomba, it is codified as a set of principles in the tradition of the vendetta, yet it is the locus of Orso's very private and uncertain struggle about who he is. In La Cousine Bette and 'La Vengeance d'une femme', revenge needs initially to be conducted in secrecy; yet revenge fails for Bette because it has no chance of public recognition, while in Barbey's story the secrecy has to be destroyed by the heroine's tactic of public self-humiliation and self-destruction. Beyond the varying treatments of revenge that Vassilev draws attention to in his reading of these four texts, a number of general aspects of the theme emerge (the opposition of justice and anger, past and present, public and private), and the essential modernity of revenge is underlined. Revenge, we are told, shifts the focus to those new areas of society that are captivating the nineteenth-century: the criminal underworld, the world of high finance or the world of prostitution. This study shows that revenge may indeed be a dish best served cold, especially when it comes in narrative recipes that involve patient revisiting, reconfiguring, retelling.