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| Félix Fénéon, in Signac's painting |
Skepticism about morality is what
is decisive. The ending of the
moral interpretation of the world, which no longer has any sanction after it
has tried to escape into some metaphysical beyond, leads to nihilism. 'Everything lacks meaning' (the
untenability of [the Christian] interpretation of the world, upon which a huge
amount of energy has been lavished, awakens a suspicion that all intepretations of the world are
false.
—Nietzsche,
from The Will to Power.
I'd been poking away at Félix Fénéon's Nouvelles en trois lignes on and off for what must have been weeks
when it hit me: modernity is flat!
Let me explain.
Fénéon is a fascinating figure.
An art critic, an anarchist, quite probably a one-time terrorist, and
the man who invented the term "neo-impressionism," he was never
really famous, but he was ubiquitous on the Parisian art and literature scenes
of the 1880s and 90s. He edited
Rimbaud and Lautréamont, championed pointillism, and he's the figure near the center of the spirals in what
is probably Paul Signac's best known painting. An odd man, his Nouvelles
en trois lignes is an odd book: it's a compendium of more than 1,200 little
narratives, most three lines long, originally written for the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906. The narratives tell compressed stories
of miscellaneous news events of no great significance. We don't get history book stuff here,
but what the French call "faits-divers"—mostly
true crime stuff from the provinces, or weird little events that don't fit in
any more formal context. It's a
minor form, to be sure, but Fénéon is a genius with it: his delivery is
deadpan, and even within the restrictions of a few sentences he often manages
to be wry, or to give an ironic twist to the events. The title given to the collection of these faits-divers, Nouvelles en trois lignes,
is sort of perfect: it can mean "the news in three lines," but also
"novels in three lines."
The English translation goes with the latter, and it is a shame there
was no way to keep the double sense of the French original.
Despite the elegant simplicity of the individual items in Nouvelles en trois lignes, I had a hard
time getting through the whole thing, because the pieces, read in mass, become
enervating. Even with the
often-sensational subject matter, they become, en masse, an endurance test: there's no development, virtually no
judgment of events, no direction to them.
There's a clear tone—removed, objective, yet ever so slightly ironic—but
it never changes, so the narrator becomes difficult company to keep. Everything is seen from the same
perspective. Horrors and
trivialities come to us in the same voice, with little or no difference in
judgment.
Maybe a few examples, chosen at random, will make the point (these,
which occur consecutively in the book, are in Luc Sante's excellent
translation):
At Menzeldjémil, Tunisia, Mme Chassoux,
an officer's wife, would have been murdered had her corset not stopped the
blade.
Fearless boys of 13 and 11, Deligne
and Julien were going off "to hunt in the desert." They were brought back to Paris from Le
Havre.
A virgin of Djiqjelli, 13, subject
to lewd advances by a 10-year old, killed him with three thrusts of her knife.
In the heat of argument, Palambo,
an Italian of Bausset, Var, was mortally wounded by his chum Genvolino.
Some people, believed to be the
same ones who attempted a derailment on Tuesday, tried to set fire to the Labat
house in Saint-Mars, Finistère.
Eugène Périchot, of Pailles, near
Saint-Maixent, entertained at his home Mme Lemartier. Eugène Dupuis came to fetch her. They killed him.
Love.
You get the idea. There's
a flatness of delivery here, re-enforced by the accumulation of examples. The narrator is almost transparent in
his objectivity: only in the word "fearless," attached to the two
naïve boys, and "love" attached to the murder of Eugène Dupuis do we
get something like analysis or opinion.
And it is the opinion of someone a little removed, a little world-weary,
a little like our American stereotype of a certain kind of jaded Parisian.
It is in this very flatness, the thing that makes Nouvelles en trois lignes difficult to read through, that its
significance lies. The worldwide
gathering of information, and the availability of specifics about names and
places represents an impressive, and distinctly modern, information
regime. You couldn't assemble a
daily paper featuring these kind of events before the late nineteenth century,
with its telegraph cables and cheap newsprint and centralized police
bureaucracies keeping records.
This kind of communication is native to modernity. As Nietzche knew, modernity gives us an
impressive machinery for information delivery "The entire apparatus
of knowledge," he wrote in The Will
to Power, "is an apparatus for abstraction and
simplification." But
Nietzsche also knew something else: that modernity was largely emptied of systematically
articulated values. After what he
saw as Christianity's self-destruction, we had no established moral
framework. Dante was able to
articulate an intricate, multi-leveled, continuous moral universe—a vertical
universe extending from the deepest circles of the inferno to the highest
celestial haunts of truth and beauty.
But modernity is stripped of that condition. In a way, Fénéon's Nouvelles
en trois lignes can be seen as
our Divine Comedy: it gives us a
universe full of fast communication, and lurid sensations, a world flattened out and shorn of any
vertical scale of vice and virtue. Fénéon's moral universe, like his tone,
is flat. And, for many, it is our
home.
