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keen. ‘That’s all you think of. Aren’t you sorry for the people who haven’t anything tonight?”’ (393).
Briefly, then, what made old Goriot suffer? In what Howells claimed to be the worst of novels, Balzac has rewritten the Faust legend, setting it in the Paris of 1819, and has cast Father Goriot as our Father, who is not in heaven. He is not there because he is on earth, trying to reestablish his presence among the living: “I shall go and come like a good fairy who makes himself felt everywhere without being seen, shall I not?” But the Devil (Vautrin) now rules the world — “there was nothing he did not know’’ — and, as Luther claimed, the Devil’s word is money: Vautrin is the banker of the Parisian criminal underground. This Mephistopheles identifies Paris, where money rules society, not only as a cesspool — here he follows Luther’s usage — but as Europe’s version of America, where money determines everything, including personal identity. The question that Vautrin asks, in striking his bargain with Rastignac, the provincial law student, is “how are you to prosper if you do not discount your love,” that is, if you do not cash in on your sentiments before they come due?32 The student has no answer, for everyone, even Father Goriot, agrees that the “heart is a treasury” (69) — love, like paper money and credit, has value and confers success because, but only insofar as, it circulates and thereby organizes social intercourse as such.
So Père Goriot inhabits and articulates a world turned upside down by the power of money. It, too, is a demonic parody of sentimentalism, for it announces that the secret alliance enforcing the rule of money is forged between fathers and (daughters (e.g., 68, 127, 175): they may occupy separate spheres — production/consumption, public/private, and so forth — but their agendas converge on the reproduction of capitalism. And yet it is not a strictly realist parody of sentimentalism. As Dreiser noted in an essay of 1896, “romance and realism blend and become one” under Balzac’s narrative spell.33 In Père Goriot, the peddler of realism, among other things, is the Devil. His proposed alternative to the secret alliance of fathers and daughters is the exclusively masculine preserve that he associates with the wilderness of the New World: only bachelorhood in the frontier forest, Vautrin implies, can disentangle men from the “effeminate age” defined by sentimentalism but enforced by capitalism (92–3, 130–1). In this sense, Natty Bumpo is the Devil’s disciple. Rastignac is not because he does not rise above, or try to escape, the commodified world symbolized in and by the great city.
Neither does Carrie. She becomes a credible character not by ignoring or avoiding the illusions of the market and the theater —
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not by heading for the territory where the self’s integrity is guaranteed by keeping the Other in its proper place — but by identifying with what she is not, indeed by becoming a sign of the signs specific to the symbolic universe of the stage. To put this another way, it is precisely Carrie’s fictionalizing (her dreaming, acting, and identifying with others who are not “real people”) that makes her a character, because it eventually takes her beyond what is given and what she is at the outset. However, the sources and materials of that fictionalizing — her money, her roles, her reading — are themselves fictional, symbolic, or lacking substance in the real world. Like the money she derives from the roles she plays, the consciousness that makes her a character has no objective correlate.
Is it false, then? I have already tried to suggest that our answer will depend as much on our extratextual evidence and assumptions as on our reading of the text. In this case, the evidence and assumptions will be consequences of a theory of knowledge, a notion of the truth, a model of the self. Thus we can and should turn to the language of philosophy for help in deciding the question. But Which language? On what grounds, for example, should we choose Hegel over Kant? My own view is that we do not have much of a choice because our first responsibility as intellectuals is to understand the relation between past and present — to explain, in other words, how past and present may be treated as commensurable, and thereby to explain why we are neither wholly determined nor simply unbound by the past. If these priorities are in order, we need a language that historicizes, that allows us to see extension in space and times as something other than irrational contingency or natural externality, and that accordingly allows us to periodize more philosophies without succumbing to relativism. And so we are driven willy-nilly toward Hegel.34
In any event, he does address the problem of false consciousness in a manner that is immediately relevant to the question at hand. “Truth and falsehood as commonly understood belong to those sharply defined ideas which claim a completely fixed nature of their own,” Hegel notes in his preface to The Phenomenology, “one standing in solid isolation on this side, the other on that, without any community between them. Against that view it must be pointed out, that truth is not like a stamped coin that is issued ready from the mint and so can be taken up and used.” The truth, in other words, works something like paper money, but even more like modern credit in the form of interest-bearing securities, which preserve the original principal when canceled. The
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truth implies the negation — the preservation by cancellation — of original principles.35
‘‘Doubtless we can know in a way that is false,” Hegel acknowledges: “To know something falsely means that knowledge is not adequate to, is not on equal terms with, its substance.” But to identify falsehood in such terms would be to posit a correspondence between, a unity of, subject and object, or knowledge and its substance, which could, in turn, serve as the normative principle for the evaluation of any form of knowledge. “Yet this very dissimilarity is the process of distinction in general, the essential moment in knowing. It is, in fact, out of this active distinction that its harmonious unity arises, and this identity, when arrived at, is truth.” We cannot say that truth is “an original and primal unity as such” unless we are willing to derive it from the supernatural principle called God. It cannot be both an identity that somehow subsists beyond time and the criterion by which the living specify falsehood in human knowledge.
But it [this unity] is not truth in a sense which would involve the rejection of the discordance, the diversity, like dross from pure metal; nor, again, does truth remain detached from diversity, like a finished article from the instrument that shapes it. Difference itself continues to be an immediate element within truth as such, in the form of the principle of negation, in the form of the activity of the Self.
Hegel summarizes, and emphasizes the historicizing movement of his argument, by claiming that “the false is no longer false as a moment of the true.”36
So the divisions and dislocations of the discursive self cannot be construed as deviations from the truth of selfhood, thus as falsehood; for they are the predicates of the attempt to realize the “harmonious unity” this self learns in time, in that attempt, to call the truth. They become not the proximate cause, but the enduring conditions, of identity in every sense. From that standpoint, the falsehoods, the illusions, the waking dreams in which Carrie posits herself are moments in the truth of the character she is becoming. From the same standpoint, Hurstwood’s early admonition to Carrie — “Don’t you moralise until you see what becomes of the money” (80) — is a warning to readers who are looking for the bottom line.
With that warning in mind, let me demonstrate how two radically different political readings of Sister Carrie can be reconciled, or rather contained, by another, and thus how Dreiser forces us to treat this novel as a durable good that cannot be “consumed”
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or discarded, but does not pretend to stand above or outside the commodified world it describes. In 1977, Sandy Petrey tried to explain what bad writing meant in Sister Carrie. He argued that the function of the realist passages Alfred Kazin admired was to subvert the sentimental discursions Leslie Fiedler detested. For Petrey, the “direct language capable of stating what industrialism meant” is the authentic language of the novel, because its blank realism invalidates the media of false consciousness — that is, the sentimental and melodramatic “linguistic forms which perpetuated myths.” Sister Carrie belongs, accordingly, in the “great tradition of social realism” because it undermined the “ideologically significant myths’’ nourished by the sentimental tradition: it “made a certain way of lying so patent that it does not need exposure.” In such perspective, Dreiser’s “refusal to approve the new industrial order” is self-evident.37