Balzac’s Colonel Chabert in Javier Marías’ 2011 novel Los enamoramientos [The Infatuations]: a note

Balzac’s Colonel Chabert in Javier Marías’ 2011 novel Los enamoramientos [The Infatuations]: a note

Barnard Turner

Just before the mid-point of Javier Marias’s 2011 novel Los Enamoramientos [The Infatuations] (Spanish p. 173, English p. 141), Javier Díaz-Varela, one of the characters whose motives become shadier and murkier as the novel progresses, turns literary student of sorts, perhaps because he is introduced to us, at the home of Luisa, a literary lecturer, in the company of the renowned real-life literary historian, Francisco Rico Manrique of the Universitat Barcelona. Díaz-Varela, who not coincidentally shares a given name with the novelist himself, tells the narrator María (who shares most of the novelist’s father’s name) that Balzac’s Colonel Chabert had appeared in 1832, but had incorporated a jaded, reflective passage on the world and its times supposedly set in 1840. According to Diaz-Varela, this shows that Balzac “knew, absolutely, that nothing would change,” that crimes would continue to be perpetrated and more alarmingly perhaps remain unsolved and thus unpunished. Yet Díaz-Varela is no Francisco Rico, and one might simply refer to a popular student edition (such as Patrick Berthier’s folio classique) to find that although the first, much shorter version of Balzac’s novella (called “La Transaction”) did indeed appear in serial form in the weekly L’Artiste in 1832, the story in the form it is now most commonly read did not appear until 1844 and it is only from this version that the passage set in 1840 appears. In the 1832 version, the reference is to 1830. Indeed, Díaz-Varela quotes Derville, from Balzac’s novella, as saying that he had seen a father die in a garret (Spanish 12; English 140), a clear intertextual reference (but not for the would-be literary critic Díaz-Varela) to Balzac’s own novel, Le Père Goriot of 1835, another reference of course which doesn’t appear in the 1832 serialisation. Los enamoramientos is a tale told by an editor (María) who blindly—idiosyncratically if not idiotically perhaps—follows her own presumptions and speculations, who obsessively reads Balzac’s story (remarking that yes she does indeed know French, in defiance of Díaz-Varela’s observation that the language is not so studied these days) and finds out that he had mistranslated a word in the passage from Derville’s speech he read to her from a French copy. María discovers that Díaz-Varela had translated Derville’s “goûts” (166) as “gotas” (“[lethal] drops”) rather than, accurately, as “gustos”, “tastes” (Spanish 181; English 148). Yet she later, in an indirect free style incorporation of Díaz-Varela’s translation, includes the passage, as her own, as he had given it to her, without the change (Spanish 315; English 268).

So far, a mild curiosity might have arisen in a patient reader, but many others would already be asking themselves “so what?” Did Marías get it “wrong” or is there some purpose in his having DíazVarela mistake the dating of Balzac’s novella, the facts about which are not really that recherchés given the prominence of Balzac’s story, pace Díaz-Varela, in the French-language curricula of many countries (e.g. at least in the not so distant past, on French ‘A’ levels in England)? It is not enough to say that this is a very literary novel, or that, as in many of Marías’ novels, interpretation runs as a sub-theme in it. Infatuation is desire in circulation, by definition perhaps with the accent on the showing of activity, the process, or “falling in love” rather than the long-term commitment. Yet ideas circulate with comparable fluidity, and a literary tradition is built on changes like these. Francisco Ricos are not that common in society, and he subjected himself to some good-humoured mockery (or self-mockery) in allowing a fastidious attention to literary detail to be presented, even in his criticism of “Madrid university” (not altogether coincidentally, Marías’ alma mater). Had María not been equally fussy, obsessed or infatuated, Marías’ readers might not have known, or cared, about the further details. As with many episodes in Marías’ novel, the mistake about the publication history of Balzac’s novella underscores a difficulty in the common pedagogical division which might be labelled that between the author function and the narrator (or narrative) function. While it is possible (although I think unlikely) that Marías made the “mistake,” the details of which are not that pertinent to the plot (except to show Díaz-Varela as a show-off, a shallow reader), this explanation is not as productive as teasing out the text-internal implications. The return of the repressed, the exiled or the forgotten, is motif, theme and plot device in much of Marias’ fiction. Scraps of dialogue, quotations and phrases are recalled by characters, remarked by the narrator, and strategically, one might guess, repositioned by the author to present a trademark style. It is of course more than this, as by these means an utterance not only takes on an added nuance but has more of its actual locutionary force; when it had been uttered before, it was premature, the discourse partner (another character, the reader) not sufficiently informed to understand its meaning. Recalled, it is therefore neither belated, for it is only at this later moment that its meaning potential has accrued around it, nor repeated, since each expression is a singularity, its uniqueness provided by the context, the event which can only form its particular mosaic or crystallization at this one moment. So, in The Infatuations, a line from Macbeth recurs some half dozen times in its full or slightly revised form and is alluded to another six times or so times: “She should have died hereafter.” Much is made of the unwelcome reappearance of Colonel Chabert (discussed in some eight different passages), and María returns several times (224, 230, 279, 311) to the troublesome reappearance of Anne de

Breuil (as Milady de Winter) in Dumas’ Three Musketeers. Yet these fictional reappearances give the lie to Diaz-Varela’s point that things don’t change: Chabert is of course much changed—“quantum mutatus ab illo”—from his pre-War stature and the point of de Winter is of course that she should not let slip anything about her past. Marías’ writing style, with its reincorporation of material seen from another angle, circulates around the apothegm that once is not enough. In this, reading is seen both as a symptom of melancholy (vicarious involvement in the lives of others revealing a discontent with our own) and its anodyne palliative, a distraction. Yet, unlike melancholy in Freud’s assessment, such melancholy, such belabored fixation on textual detail, can be productive, if ironically so. Perhaps later-day readers may take the authority of Javier Marías as a given, neglecting the textual placement of the point about the dating of Balzac’s novella, and a cosmopolitan literary myth about the French realist be born, which eminent literary professors will be powerless to stop.

References Balzac, Honoré de. Le Colonel Chabert. Ed. Patrick Berthier. Paris: Gallimard, 1974. Paris: folio classique Gallimard, 1999.

Marías, Javier. Los enamoramientos. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2011 [The Infatuations. Trans. Margaret Jull Costa. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2013].