Ponson du Terrail’s recognitions are pointless, apart from being exaggeratedly redundant, because the reader already knows all about his characters. But for the benefit of readers who are easy to please, a touch of sadism is brought into play. The characters in the novel play the part of village idiots—they are the last to understand what the readers and the other characters in the story have understood perfectly well.
Village-idiot anagnorisis is divided into anagnorisis of real idiots and falsely accused idiots. We have a real idiot when the elements of plot, details, facts, confidential information, and unambiguous signs all point toward the anagnorisis, and the character alone remains ignorant; in other words, the plot has provided both him and the reader with the means of resolving the enigma, and the fact that he has failed to do so is inexplicable. The perfect example of the real idiot, used critically by authors, is the detective story in which the policeman offers a sharp contrast to the detective (who gains knowledge at the same rate that the reader does). But there are cases in which the idiot is falsely accused because the events themselves are of no help to him, and what makes the reader aware of what is happening is popular plot tradition. For example, the reader knows, through narrative tradition, that character X must be the child of character Y. But Y cannot know this, since he has not read serial fiction.
A typical case is that of Rodolphe of Gérolstein in Les mystères de Paris. Rodolphe has met La Goualeuse, otherwise known as Fleur-de-Marie, a sweet, defenseless prostitute, and as soon as we are told that his daughter, whom he had had with Sarah McGregor, was taken away from him when she was very young, we immediately guess that Fleur-de-Marie can only be his daughter. But why should Rodolphe imagine he is the father of a young girl he comes across by chance in a sordid tavern? He will find out, quite rightly, only at the end. But Eugène Sue knows we will already suspect something, and reveals the answer at the end of the first installment: this is a typical case of subjection of the plot to the rules of literary tradition and commercial distribution. Literary tradition ensures that the reader already knows what is the most probable solution, whereas the weekly distribution of the feuilleton, with the story that continues for an endless number of installments, requires that the reader not be kept in suspense for too long, for fear of losing track of the story. Sue is therefore obliged to close that question so that he can open others without overburdening the reader’s memory and capacity for suspense.
In narrative terms, he commits one suicide while keeping his best card for the second round. But the suicide occurred as soon as he chose to move according to obvious narrative solutions: the popular novel cannot be complex, not even in the invention of plot.
There is a last device in the category of pointless anagnorisis: the topos of the false stranger. At the beginning of a chapter, the popular novel often introduces a mysterious character who is unfamiliar to the readers. But a little further into the action they are told, “The stranger, whom the reader will have recognized as our X . . .” Here again we have a feeble narrative expedient through which the narrator introduces once again, in a cheap way, the pleasure of revelation. Note here that the anagnorisis is not directed at the character (the stranger knows perfectly well who he is, and generally appears in a dark alleyway, or in a private room, without the others having yet seen him). And if the reader is familiar with feuilletons, he understands straightaway that the stranger is a false stranger and can generally guess immediately who he is. But the author insists, nevertheless, on trying to make him play the role of village idiot—and perhaps with some readers he succeeds.
Although, from the point of view of plot style, these cheap devices constitute narrative padding, from the point of view of psychological enjoyment and success they work wonderfully—the laziness of readers demands that they be blandished with mysteries they have already solved or can solve easily.
Having reached this point, we might indeed ask whether, resorting to such well-worn ploys, the anagnorisis found in the feuilleton still has the narrative power that it once had. Well, yes. A friend of mine used to say, “When I see a flag fluttering in a film, I start to cry, and it doesn’t matter whose country it belongs to.” Someone wrote, in a review of the film Love Story, that you need a heart of stone not to burst out laughing at Oliver and Jenny’s situation. Wrong. Even with a heart of stone, there will still be a tear in our eyes—there is a chemistry of passions, and when narrative ploys are designed to make us cry, then they always do make us cry, and the most cynical snob can at most pretend to scratch his nose to dry away a furtive tear. We can watch Stagecoach (or even one of its more slapdash remakes) countless times and yet, when the Sixth Cavalry arrives with the sound of the bugle, charging with sabers drawn to devastate Geronimo’s mob on the verge of victory, even the most perverse heart pulses away under a fine lawn shirt.
So let us freely abandon ourselves to the pleasure and excitement of anagnorisis, even if we already know who has to recognize whom, and let us marvel aghast at the many techniques with which this narrative archetype continues to reappear throughout the history of the feuilleton:
“Oh!” said Milady, rising to her feet, “I defy you to find the court which pronounced the infamous sentence against me. I defy you to find he who carried it out.” “Silence!” said a voice. “It is for me to reply to that.” And the man in the red cloak came forward in his turn. “What man is that? What man is that?” cried Milady, overcome by terror, her hair falling loose and rising above her livid countenance as if it were alive. “Who are you then?” cried all the witnesses of this scene. “Ask that woman,” said the man in the red cloak, “for you may plainly see she knows me!” “The executioner of Lille, the executioner of Lille!” cried Milady, a prey to insensate terror, and clinging to the wall to avoid falling. And this man who for thirty years had bowed his head before André, stood up to his full height and, indicating the corpse of the father to the degenerate son, then the doorway and the man who had remained on the threshold, he said: “Monsieur Vicomte, your father murdered your mother’s first husband, then cast your elder brother into the sea. But this brother is not dead: here he is.”
And he pointed to Armand, while André stepped back, terrified. “Your father,” Bastien continued, “repented at the last minute and has restored to your brother the inheritance he had stolen from him and had sought to leave to you. This is no longer your house, but that of Comte Armand de Kergaz.” “Begone!” Armand had spoken as master and André, perhaps for the first time in his life, obeyed. He moved slowly like a wounded tiger that retires backward and, as it retires, still menaces. Having reached the doorway, glancing back toward the window from where he had watched Paris illuminated by the first rays of dawn, almost as if to hurl at Armand a terrible and supreme challenge, he exclaimed: “So alas for both of us, virtuous brother! We shall see who will be the winner: you the philanthropist, I the bandit, you the heavens, I the underworld . . .
Paris shall be our battle ground.” He left with his head high and an infernal smile on his face and, without shedding a tear, left the house no longer his, like a godless Don Giovanni. He stopped once again and allowed his gaze to wander over those present. The guests listened in silence and their smiles disappeared from their faces. “Well,” he continued, “this thief, this murderer, this torturer of women . . .
I found him this evening, an hour ago . . . he is here among us: here he is!” And with his hand outstretched, he pointed to the viscount. While the viscount leapt onto his seat, the speaker’s mask fell off. “Armand, the sculptor!” someone said. “André!” exclaimed Armand in a thunderous voice. “André, you recognize me?” But at that moment, while the guests sat motionless listening to the abrupt and terrible conclusion to the story, the door opened and a man appeared, dressed in black. Like the old servant who went to surprise Don Giovanni during an orgy to announce his father’s death, this man, without any concern for the guests, went straight up to André, saying, “The general, Count Felipone, your father, who has been ill for some time, is sick and wishes to see you on his deathbed.” But the man who had brought the news, catching sight of Armand, who had rushed up from behind André to stop him, shouted, “Good heavens, the living image of my colonel!”
