I want to talk to you about emotions. How they're expressed in life,
how they're expressed in literature. Are they. I mean, are they?
If you look at your resume I don't think you're going to see a lot of affect in
it, a lot of emotion underneath it. Perhaps if you keep a journal or a diary,
some of it goes into it. But is it possible that all of what
Faulkner might, or Shakespeare called "the sound and fury" that goes on inside of us,
all the time really, never, ever gets over the threshold into language.
Perhaps in moments of great passion or rage we express these things.
But what, where do they acquire written form at all?
I mean after all, they are the very texture of our feelings.
And, and, some of the major events and matters of our life.
And yet I'm not sure where they get represented, and that's one reason that
literature intrigues me, is that it is that inside story.
It's, it's what, in Hamlet, is called "that which passes show."
It's what, what would otherwise not be articulated or expressed.
And again, one reason this novel is important is that it is obsessed with
affect, with emotion. And they take over, the
emotions. That Prévostis, I think, drawn to this in a way that even he can't see
clearly. And so we are, from the outside made to
understand that the love between this couple is so tumultuous that it becomes
something of a spectacle. And this is true in the- very early on,
when the two first meet. As I say, des Grieux is destined for the
church. Instead he cashiers that game plan.
And, and elopes, more or less, with Manon as they run away towards Paris in a, in
a, in a carriage. Except that Prévost writes it this way:
"Passionately as I loved her, he found ways of showing me that her love for me
was no less passionate. And we cared so little about other people
that we gave ourselves up to our embraces without waiting to be alone."
So they begin embracing madly. With- à la fureur, is what the French says.
"The Postellians," these are the people, you know, driving the carriage,
"and the folk at the end looked on with
amazement. And, I noticed that they were surprised
to see such transports of love in two youngsters of our age."
So it, it is a public spectacle and not, not only then. Throughout the book we're
going to see particularly in the figure of the protagonist, the male, des Grieux,
this almost circus of exploding feelings in a kind of public setting.
And not just erotic feelings, feelings. I could use the word affect, which is
sort of a clinical term. All of the emotions that inhabit us that
really often don't have a, a kind of easy to find format or arena for expression -- we
know that we often repress them, we keep them locked up, they eat us alive
sometimes -- in this book there's not much, sort of, self discipline in this way.
There's, there's not much repression in this novel. They come out.
And I think that, that Prévost loves to write how they come out.
So that, and he understands how democratic this is.
That it's not happiness, particularly. Sadness and misery are even better
catalysts and triggers of emotion. And so when des Grieux is separated from
Manon by his Father's lackeys have come to take him away.
And when he's brought back home. His father tells him, "Did you realize that
she was betraying you with some rich, older lover,
and that's why we came and grabbed you?" He can't believe it.
He collapses. And it's written like this:
"I got up and made for the door. But had only taken a few steps when I
collapsed on the floor in a dead faint. I was quickly revived, but only to fall
into paroxysms of weeping, interspersed with lamentations and heart rending
cries." That's one of the earliest this,
instances of it. Here's what a later one sounds like:
"You cannot imagine how I shouted and wept."
You, by the way, is you. I mean, this is his readers.
This is the person that he's speaking to, which is the conceit of the novel that
all of this is a story that is told orally.
"You can not imagine how I shouted and wept in my anguish.
And my behavior was so frenzied that the others, not knowing the reason,
looked at each other with as much alarm as amazement."
And still another later sequence after Manon has cheated on him, was supposed to
meet him at the theater, doesn't come because there's this beguiling rich lover
who is going to offer her
untold riches, she sends instead a substitute and this also drives him
crazy. And this time it's going to be detailed,
again, almost in a kind of pathological way of the various steps and phases of
this sort of outbreak of emotion. At first we read that he was
suspended, he tells us, "I remained suspended between rage and
grief. Then," it's as if he's sort of checking
out the various moods that he goes through.
"Then the deadly jealousy rending my heart took the form of song and gloomy
calm. He thinks, therefore, maybe he's going to
get over this. But instead all of a sudden there's
another revulsion. A complete, terrible outburst of rage.
And then he drops into a chair, his hat falls on the floor, "tears begin to run
down my cheeks, as my fit of rage turned into abject misery.
I was reduced to weeping, groans, and sighs."
It's as if, it's as if there was something outright clinical here.
It's as ifPrévostknows, he knows deep down in his gut as a writer, he knows that
this is his material. That this kind of tumultuous life of
affect, of the feelings, of sensations, of the kind of fury that young people can
experience -- This is pay dirt.
This is what his novel is meant to be commensurate with, to do justice to.
One of the most astounding notations, and you'll later see why it is, I want to
quote it, comes rather early. As I told you that he's,
kidnapped by his Father's lackeys. He's brought back home.
He spends months at home. He thinks that he's finally gotten over
this young girl Manon. And then he goes to, sort of make his
great presentation in the church, at St. Sulpice in Paris.
This is part, again, of his becoming recognized as a figure that is headed
toward a position. In the church and without his knowing it,
Manon has also learned of the speech that he's going to make and she is in the
audience. And then she comes to see him afterwards,
and of course every reader knows what's going to happen.
He explodes once again with feeling. He's, he explains, that all she wants is
for him to give her back his love. She says, "Without that I cannot live.
He says, "Then why don't you ask for my life.
Ask for my life, which is all I have left to give you, for you have had my love
all along." But he hadn't known that.
That's what seeing her has made him understand.
AndPrévostwrites this in a kind of fascinating way that
this, sort of, encounter which stupefies him,
because all of the intensity of his feelings for her, which he had thought
had become quiescent, had sort of been, gotten through,
and that now he could go on with a priestly career --
all of that comes back to the fore. I mean, there's a kind, I call this a
sentimental education, but I mean it literally.
That you become educated about the nature of the things that are cooking inside of
you. And so he's dazed as she is embracing
him. And I'm going to read you this passage
because it has a pretty astonishing figure of speech and metaphor in it.
I want you to hear it: "I only half responded, for I was horror-
stricken, at the contrast between the serenity of but a few moments ago, and
the wild stirrings of desire I could already feel within me.
I was shuddering, as you do," and here comes the extended metaphor, "as you do
when you find yourself alone at night on some desolate moorland.
When all familiar bearings are lost, and a panicked fear comes over you, that you
can only dispel by calmly studying all the landmarks."
I suggest to you that this is the landscape of human passion.
It's a kind of literal landscape, if you want, it's an abandoned landscape at
night, lost in the country, having no bearings, no orientation.
It's a picture, perhaps, of a new world that is coming into view.
And I make that, I use that term intentionally.
This is a novel that's going to end up taking its two young characters out of
the old world, which is Europe, France, into the new world, which is New Orleans,
it turns out. But I want already to suggest to you
that perhaps affect, passion, the reasons that this book is still read, the very
currency of human relationship, maybe that too, is a planet, is a new
world. And could there be- what sort of stature
is in this, even what sort of politics is in this.
In one later passage, des Grieux goes onto claim that these feelings are not only
what is best in him.
But that these feelings constitute a rival code of behavior and of values.
He says that most people feel only two or three feelings, sensations.
They're driven by this or by that or by that.
But that a man of real feeling, a man of real delicacy, and you begin to hear
that this is almost an aristocratic code, is a person whose heart is subject to an
entire range, a much greater range, of feelings.
It's as if affect itself were being promoted into an ethos.
Your capacity to feel is a sign of your stature.
I want you to realize, really what a character cultural position that is.
That in the traditional view of it, your, your susceptibility to passion
is the weakness that has to be disciplined, regulated, and overcome.
This book, it seems to me, is insurrectionary in just this way.
It's also complex in ways that I've not yet said.
That the appeal to feeling, which I think this book makes, which is why this book
is read, is also a way of gaining power over other people.
That you, in a sense, go directly to their own heart because this is the
surest route. And so, there are sequences where des Grieux,
because don't forget, the guy has no money and he's in love with this girl and
he's got to get money, he has to figure out ways how to get money from other
people. And so he addresses their, not their
interests, not their thoughts, but their feelings.
And there are moments, as well, after this where we watch him intentionally let his
eyes start to tear up. We realize that the display of feeling is
perhaps also the tool of a conman, the strategy of someone who wants to take
advantage or exploit others. And so we begin to see that feeling has
lots of legs to it, lots of edges to it. That its not simply
the direct expression of your heart. But it may also be tactical.