8
Confidence and exemplarity
I could never read a philosopher whose life was not exemplary.
– NIETZSCHE
She was twenty-eight years old when her first novel, Indiana, appeared in 1832. Written in a month and a half, it was praised by Balzac and Chateaubriand, who were soon joined by Victor Hugo and Alfred de Musset. Aurore Dupin, writing under the pen name George Sand, made a spectacular entry into the literary world. Even the most merciless critic of the period, Sainte-Beuve, conceded her talent after reading her second novel, Valentine, which appeared a few months after the first. He even compared George Sand to the brilliant early nineteenth-century writer Madame de Staël. From her first novel on, George Sand defended a woman’s right to act according to her passions and urged freedom from domestic oppression. She expressed her boldness not only in her novels, through their style and subject, but also in her private life. To satisfy her desire to write, and her belief in freedom, she courageously asked her husband, a young and unobjectionable baron with whom she had had two children, for a divorce. She had nothing against him except that she found him boring, that there was no complicity between them, and that he was entirely ignorant of literature. To understand just what a decision of this kind must have cost, we need to recreate the context. At the time, divorce was illegal, and George Sand’s property, including the beautiful family estate she had inherited at Nohant, became the property of her husband, Baron Dudevant, starting on the day she married him. But George Sand fought determinedly. After a long lawsuit, she managed to divorce the baron and keep the house at Nohant, where she would entertain many writers, painters, and politicians. In the meantime, she lived in Paris with her lover Jules Sandeau, half of whose name she took to become ‘George Sand’. Travelling between countries and also between men, she counted as her lovers some of the great figures of the century – the poet Alfred de Musset; Chopin, with whom she lived for nine years; the engraver Manceau; the writer Prosper Mérimée; and perhaps a few women as well – always supporting herself by her work and absolutely refusing to be kept. A pioneer of today’s feminist movement, she rejected being called a ‘woman writer’ and asked to be judged solely on the merits of her work.
On the political scene, Sand showed the same force of character. She became a republican after 1830, then a socialist, and championed poetry for the working classes. She started writing more politically engaged novels that dealt with current social issues, and she was as successful with these as she had been with her earlier ‘feminist’ novels, which featured inspiring heroines (Indiana, Fadette, Consuelo …). Just the fact that she was willing to change literary genres, to start on a new tack, is proof of her self-confidence. A prolific author, she also wrote short stories and plays, meeting with critical and popular success throughout her life.
When she learned that the Revue des deux mondes (Review of the Two Worlds), a literary monthly, considered her articles too radical, she straightaway started her own magazine, the aptly named Revue indépendante (Independent Review), with the philosopher Pierre Leroux. A militant journalist, she also started a newspaper, La Cause du peuple (The People’s Cause), which had a second life when it was revived by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1968. And to crown it all, George Sand was fully invested in her role as a mother: her children’s happiness was of great concern to her, and she admitted to a heartfelt ‘passion for her progeny’, which she was able to reconcile with her love of literature and her passion for freedom.
George Sand lived a full life, one that exuded confidence at every level; she had an extraordinary capacity to ‘go for it’, to continually make daring decisions, to keep creating. On what, an observer can’t help asking, did such an abundance of confidence feed?
When we look at her biography, we learn that her early life was chaotic. Her father died in an accident when she was only four years old, and her grandmother took her almost illiterate mother to court for the right to raise her. The grandmother was awarded custody. A product of the Age of Enlightenment and a rich and cultivated woman in her own right, she made a persuasive case that she was better suited to raise a child than her daughter-in-law, a young and penniless widow with little education. At the age of four, consequently, little Aurore lost her father and was taken from her mother, who accepted a monthly stipend in exchange. For all intents and purposes, Aurore’s grandmother bought her from her mother – not an obvious way to develop an unshakable confidence in life. True, the girl would grow up in the care of her progressive grandmother, tutored by a humanist scholar, and in the natural surroundings of the Nohant estate, ensconced in a forest that she learned to explore on horseback. Not a negligible start in life, but it doesn’t explain how she became such a bold, free woman, able to go out into the world with such confidence and courage.
Aurore Dupin became George Sand, by her own account, because she was a great admirer. At every stage of her life, she admired unusual personalities, people who had the courage to become themselves. It was through these inspiring examples that she found the strength to impose herself, as though her fascination with the talents of others allowed her to take hold of her own talent. The whole history of her life confirms it: the admiration of others gave her wings.
As a child, Aurore Dupin had unbounded admiration for her great-grandmother, a woman whom she never met but who had a high profile in the eighteenth century: Louise Dupin. Aurore constantly asked her grandmother for stories about her and devoured any writings in which she appeared. Louise Dupin, who has been called ‘the feminist of Chenonceau’, held one of the most highly regarded literary salons of the Age of Enlightenment. She was a friend of Rousseau, who fell in love with her, and she made her mark on the era by her freedom of thought and her passion for literature and philosophy. Rousseau was convinced that she would have earned a place in the history of ideas had she published the essays on which she was working. ‘The mind deliberates, and the heart decides,’ she wrote, which is a good definition of self-confidence and the art of decision making. So Aurore Dupin grew up admiring this erudite woman who was ahead of her time and who gathered in her salon the greatest minds of the eighteenth century.
Then, as a young woman, George Sand admired Marie Dorval, a popular actress who revolutionised the classical theatre with her Romantic style of acting, which was both passionate and sensitive. George Sand expressed her admiration for Dorval in an open letter, in such strong terms that the two were thought to be lovers, though that was probably not the case. It is easy to see the traits that inspired George Sand in Marie Dorval, just as they had in her great-grandmother: freedom, boldness, the willingness to break with tradition, the commitment to feminism, the marriage of mind and heart …
An accomplished writer, George Sand also admired Gustave Flaubert, with whom she kept up a long correspondence and whom she twice hosted at Nohant. She was dazzled by the genius of Madame Bovary, then by the evocative power of Salammbô, his next novel. And she admired Flaubert’s reinvention of himself in moving from one to the other. When Salammbô, an Orientalist tale, was panned by the public, George Sand went to his defence, writing him in a letter: ‘Nothing is more ill-suited to indulge the mental habits of the social set, the superficial, and the hasty […], which is to say the majority of readers, than the subject of Salammbô. The man who conceived and executed this project has all the aspirations and fervour of a great artist.’
But the person she admired most and who became her true mentor was the socialist philosopher Pierre Leroux. Propounding a ‘religious socialism’ in which Christian charity would prevail in human society, he embodied a form of humanism that was both pragmatic and idealistic. She admired his belief in progress, his reasoned criticism of private property, and his feminism: Pierre Leroux was all in favour of the civil and social equality of the sexes, and a supporter of women’s suffrage. Highly critical of the institution of marriage, he was also an apostle of nonviolence.
We could easily add to the list of those whom George Sand admired, each time gaining a better understanding of the personalities that marked her intellectual progress. In identifying with one after another, she built her own identity and found the strength to invent herself. Among those she admired were free women, writers who moved from one literary genre to another, thinkers committed to social causes … They had all the characteristics that she developed gradually in herself but in her own way, following her own path.
The kind of admiration we are talking about here is not the fascination that fans have for their idols, but a fertile admiration, a deep curiosity about the life of a person who succeeds in becoming his or her true self – an interest in the talent of another that is keen enough to tell us something about the possibilities of our own talent.
To admire is not the same as to venerate; it doesn’t mean losing oneself in the contemplation of another’s talent. It means nourishing oneself, following the example of those who’ve had the courage to follow their star, and undertaking to find one’s own. What does their example tell us? That it’s possible to become oneself.
We always doubt the possibility. And we have every reason to do so. Convention, social norms, established procedures all exert enormous pressure on us to conform. It’s so much easier not to break ranks, not to make waves.
Freud demonstrates this masterfully in Civilisation and Its Discontents: societies rest on the individual’s renunciation of his or her singularity. If there is to be society, then there must also be behavioural norms. The upshot is ‘discontent’, since the individual is well aware that the norm must prevail over individuality. It’s therefore natural for us to experience sudden losses in confidence, to the point where we may sometimes ask ourselves whether it is even thinkable that we might someday become ourselves. When doubts overtake us, what we need is proof – not from rational argument but from example – that it’s always possible to find one’s way. Admirable examples are always more effective, more freeing, than grandiloquent speeches. Admiration can save us from a loss of confidence: if a thing was possible once, then it must be possible now.
Admiring as she did her great-grandmother, ‘the feminist of Chenonceau’, George Sand knew that a woman of letters could make a place for herself in the world of men. She saw it was possible. Admiring Flaubert as she did, she knew that a writer could have the courage to pursue his quest and reinvent himself, even at the risk of losing readers. If she ever started to doubt it, if she was ever tempted to reproduce the same recipe over and over again, she would only need to remember her admiration for Flaubert, and she would find the strength she needed to resist the mounting tide of inner fear.
To admire is always to admire the idiosyncratic. That’s how admiration differs from respect: everyone deserves respect, but we admire those who have had the courage to become themselves. And since what we admire about a person is his or her idiosyncrasy, it would be absurd to copy it. We admire this person for being inimitable. And the inimitability is what inspires us.
George Sand doesn’t imitate Flaubert when she writes. Her style is different, as are her themes and motivating obsessions. But George Sand’s admiration for Flaubert makes her a better writer. She draws inspiration from the way Flaubert became Flaubert, to become George Sand.
When she welcomes Prosper Mérimée, or Delacroix, or Prince Napoleon to her Nohant estate, she doesn’t imitate her great-grandmother hosting a literary salon at Chenonceau: she doesn’t copy her, she draws nourishment from her. She finds inspiration in the way Madame Dupin became Madame Dupin, to become George Sand.
A great role model becomes an example for the very reason that that person can’t be copied, according to Nietzsche. A great man gives those who admire him a dream of greatness: exemplariness is like a bridge that spans the space between one idiosyncratic person and another. Alexander the Great inspired Napoleon because Napoleon, being unable to imitate him, had no choice but to become Napoleon. Similarly, the artist’s desire to create a masterpiece comes from the recognition that the great marvels of past geniuses cannot be imitated. The more clearly George Sand understood that Marie Dorval, Flaubert, and Pierre Leroux were inimitable, the closer she came to her own star.
‘Become what you are,’ says Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. But to do so, admire those who’ve managed it for themselves. Admire and then admire some more. Admire more than one person, and each will sustain you and help you move forward. Every time you admire, you are seeing the radiance of an idiosyncratic star. Each time, you are seeing the possible radiance of the star that is your own.
Nietzsche too was a great admirer. He admired the philosopher Schopenhauer, but also the composers Wagner and Liszt. Picasso didn’t hide his admiration for Velázquez, Goya, and Manet. Madonna admired David Bowie, Tamara de Lempicka, Frida Kahlo. The French writer Philippe Djian has spoken of his debt to Henry Miller, Richard Brautigan, and Raymond Carver. Yannick Noah, the tennis star, admired his own father, and Arthur Ashe, and Mike Tyson. Ralph Ellison would never have written Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953, had he not admired Richard Wright and his major autobiographical work, Black Boy, published in 1945. After reading Wright’s memoir, Ellison wrote that ‘today in America, we see no social or political action that is not based on the realities of Negro life described with such rawness in Black Boy’. This admiration, which also extended to Dostoevsky, Mark Twain, and James Joyce, would not keep Ellison (whose full name, Ralph Waldo Ellison, was given to him by his father, in tribute to none other than Ralph Waldo Emerson!) from launching into his own writing project no more than a few days after reading Black Boy.
These names speak for themselves: to take someone as an example is to make a start. To admire is to come out of oneself, the better to come back to oneself eventually.
Today, we no longer admire enough. We give our attention to messages or people who ‘create a buzz’ on social networks, taking up the space previously held by men and women who had spent years developing their talent, finding their idiosyncratic path, and acquiring fame. Since the arrival of reality television in the late 1990s, we’ve seen the headlines of our media outlets and the guest lists of our talk shows fill with ordinary men and women, people who are demonstrably average, selected not for any particular talent but because they lack any particular talent, so that the greatest number may identify with them. Showcasing so many people without qualities is an unprecedented event in the history of mankind. It could be an occasion for self-confidence: at least these ‘models’ are not too intimidating. But it works in just the opposite way. It’s disastrous to have no one to admire.
When we relax by watching a popular entertainment show, when we surf social networks for such and such a star of reality television, when we allow ourselves to be swept up by the shallow buzz that one of them has created, we often assume an ironic stance. This is a way of reassuring ourselves. By mocking them, we remind ourselves that we are giving our attention to people without merit, but that we are doing so knowingly. We are allowing ourselves to have a moment of rest and relaxation.
But this irony is an illusory protection. We think we’re not being duped, but that’s exactly how we are being duped. Because we think we’re immune, we agree to waste our attention and let ourselves be contaminated by a worthless exhibition. That is precisely the meaning of the title of a workshop given by Jacques Lacan: ‘The non-dupes are duping themselves.’ Thinking we have not been duped is the surest way of entering into complicity with the things that diminish us. We may not have been duped, but while we looked on ironically, all those minutes, those hours, have been stolen from us. While we look on ironically, we are not admiring anything. Admiration is always a direct emotion.
‘Become what you are’ – and you have to do it before you die. Our time is short. And instead of admiring people whose example elevates us and makes us want to believe in ourselves, we walk towards our deaths paying attention to non-events and enriching those who’ve scripted them. The irony that is so pervasive nowadays puts everything on the same level and prevents us from admiring anything. It flattens things out, whereas admiration makes distinctions. There is something morbid in the triumph of irony, in the loss of enthusiasm.
‘Give me work, exhaustion, pain, and enthusiasm!’ says Consuelo in The Countess of Rudolstadt, George Sand’s masterpiece. The little bohemian was to become a great singer simply because of her voice, her courage, and her admiration for Maestro Porpora. There’s no irony on Consuelo’s part – she is too alive for that.