In 1968 Roland Barthes wrote a text that was destined to become canonical: ‘The Reality Effect’. The model that guided him, and that dominated structuralist reflection on fiction at the time, came from the analysis of stories that the Russian formalists had carried out in the 1920s. This analysis reduced the imagination of popular tales to the arrangement of a definite number of fundamental narrative relations. But the beautiful simplicity of the model encountered difficulties when it came to dealing with so-called realist fiction, in which the story is overcharged with descriptive elements irreducible to narrative functions. Barthes illustrated the problem with a detail taken from Flaubert’s Un coeur simple. At the beginning of the story, the novelist describes Madame Aubain’s house, which serves as the setting of the action, and he dwells on a detail: ‘An old piano supported, under a barometer, a pyramidal heap of books and boxes.’1 Plainly, this barometer has no use; it has no function in the story. From the viewpoint of structural analysis, it is a parasitical piece of information that, as Barthes says, using an economic metaphor, ‘increases the cost of narrative information’. This denunciation of the superfluous barometer extends a long critical tradition that laments the vain descriptive proliferation of the realist novel. In the Manifeste surréaliste, André Breton lashes out at Dostoevsky’s minute description of the usurer’s room in Crime and Punishment. For him, this description consisted merely in ‘so many superposed images taken from some stock catalogue’.2 In the prologue to Morel’s Invention, Jorge Luis Borges rounds on the French realist and psychological tradition. There are, as he puts it, pages and chapters of Proust that as inventions are unacceptable and to which ‘we resign ourselves as to the insipidity and the emptiness of each day’.3 And to this he contrasts those well-constructed detective novels, which unfold ‘odysseys of marvels’ that are the logical consequence of a single fictional postulate.
But the structuralist theoretician cannot be satisfied with the modernist humour of making such declarations about realist triviality. If the realist work contravenes the structuralist principle that banishes the superfluous detail, then for its part structural analysis has to account for ‘the entire surface of the narrative fabric’.4 So it has to account for superfluous details, which amounts to showing that they are not superfluous, that they also have a place and a function in the structure. Barthes initially considers descriptive superfluity to be the relic of the ancient tradition of epideictic oratory, in which the object of description supposedly counted for less than the unfolding of brilliant images and metaphors showing the author’s virtuosity in being able to satisfy the merely ‘aesthetic’ pleasure of the listener or reader. He shows its derivation in the famous panoramic description of the town of Rouen that Emma Bovary’s extra-conjugal trips occasion. But a barometer is an object of limited aesthetic seduction. This useless accessory must therefore be found another use: its usefulness lies precisely in its being useless. If an element is found in a tale without there being any reason for its presence, it is because this presence is unconditional; it is there simply because it is there. Such is the at once simple and paradoxical logic of the reality effect. The usefulness of the useless detail is to say: I am the real. The real has no need, in being there, to have a reason for being there. On the contrary, it proves its reality by the very fact that it serves no purpose, and therefore that no one had any reason to invent it.
This outright self-evidence is, for Barthes, the modern substitute of verisimilitude, which has provided the norm of the representational order since Aristotle. But it is precisely only a substitute. The realist novelist cannot make the leap from the ancient mimetic order to authentic modernity, that of the signifying process possessing its autonomous logic. But this substitute for a defunct order is itself impressively fecund. It becomes, Barthes tells us, the kernel of a fetishism assuring us ‘that the “real” is supposed to be self-sufficient, that it is strong enough to belie any idea of “function”, that its “speech-act” has no need to be integrated into a structure and that the having-been-there of things is a sufficient principle of speech’.5 Doubtless today’s reader will be amused to see stigmatized this evidence of the ‘having-been-there’ that the author of Camera Lucida was to celebrate twelve years later. The Barthes of 1968 continued to remain close to those Brechtian times in which he dismantled bourgeois ‘mythologies’ that transformed history into nature. Analysing the reality effect for him was akin to denouncing the way in which a social order is given in the evidence of what is simply there, natural and inviolable. This dismantling concurs with Sartre’s analyses on literature: in Flaubert and the writers of his generation, Sartre denounced an obstinacy to thing-ify everything, to petrify everything, in which he saw the strategy of a bourgeoisie threatened by social praxis and eager to escape its condemnation by transforming works, gestures and actions into stone. More broadly, an entire critical tradition of the twentieth century sought to denounce the minute descriptions of the preceding century’s realist novel as the product of a bourgeoisie at once cluttered with its objects and keen to affirm the eternity of its world imperilled by the revolt of the oppressed.
It may well be, however, that these analyses miss the core of the problem. I will attempt to show herein that the inflation of description over and against action, which comprises the singularity of the realist novel, is not about the bourgeois world’s parading of its wealth in its concern to affirm its perennial existence. No more than it is the triumph of representational logic that so many readily describe. It marks, on the contrary, a rupture with the representational order and with what resides at its core, the hierarchy of action. And this rupture is linked to what stands at the centre of nineteenth-century novelistic plots: the discovery of an unprecedented capacity among common men and women to accede to forms of experience hitherto denied them. Barthes and representatives of the critical tradition ignored this upheaval because their modernist and structuralist presuppositions continued to be too anchored in the representational tradition that they purported to denounce.
We must, to hear this, return to the judgement of disapproval leveled at L’Éducation sentimentale. Barbey d’Aurevilly deemed it lacked the organized development of a book: ‘M. Flaubert does not understand the novel in this way. He proceeds without plan, pushing along, without any higher preconceived notion, not even suspecting that life, under the diversity and the apparent disorder of its coincidences, has its logical and inflexible laws and its necessary engendering […] It is a stroll in the insignificant, the vulgar and the abject for the pleasure of walking about in it.’6 The problem, for Barbey, is not that there are superfluous details, there simply to say ‘we are the real’. The problem is that there is nothing but details. The novel is missing that which is the very condition of fiction. Fiction has to be a body in which the parts are coordinated under the direction of a centre. This judgement’s founding model, one which structures representational poetics more broadly, is clearly identifiable. It is that of the organic totality posited by Plato as posited as the characteristic of living discourse and by Aristotle as the principle of the poetic work. Poetry, said the latter, is not a matter of music, it is not a rhythmic combination of words. It is a matter of fiction. And fiction is a succession of actions linked by necessity or by verisimilitude. This is why fiction is ‘more philosophical’ than history. For history has only to do with the kath’ hekaston, with the succession of facts as they arrive, one after another, whereas poetry has to do with the generality of things grasped in their ensemble (ta katholou), that is to say, with the succession of events as they might occur in accordance with the casual relations of necessity or verisimilitude.7
That is precisely what founds, for Barbey, the inferiority of the realist novelist: the one who ‘pushes along’ by ignoring ‘necessary engendering’. It is crucial to gauge the extent of the privilege given to poetic rationality over historical empiricity. In order to be constituted into forms of scientific knowledge, historical and social science had to borrow from poetry the principle that declares the construction of a verisimilar causal sequence more rational than the description of facts ‘as they occur’. For fiction is not fantasy as opposed to the rigour of science. Instead, it is what supplies the latter with a model of rationality. And precisely this model is the one threatened by the superfluous presence of barometers or other accessories of the same kind. Far from being a triumph of representational poetics, this invasion of prosaic reality could well be its ruin.
It is also because the poetic distinction between two types of linking events rests on a distinction between two types of humanity. The poem, says Aristotle, is an arrangement of actions. But action is not simply the fact of doing something. This category organizes a hierarchical division of the sensible. According to this division, there are active men who live at the level of the totality, able to conceive grand ends and to seek to accomplish them in contention with other wills and the blows of fortune. And there are men who simply have things happen to them one after the other, able only to live day to day in the mere sphere of reproduction of life’s reproduction and whose activities are only ever means to ensuring this reproduction. These latter are called passive or ‘mechanical’ men, not because they do nothing but because they do nothing other than do, as they are excluded from the order of ends, which is that of action. Such is the political core of representational politics. The good Aristotelian organization of the poem’s action rests on this prior division between active men and passive men. The same division applies to the plots of the classical age, when the emotions and passions of souls came, in the France of Louis XIV, to replace the blows of fortune. The verisimilitude lying at the core of representational poetics concerns not only the relation between causes and effects. It also bears on the perceptions and feelings, the thoughts and actions able to be expected from an individual in accordance with his condition.
For those who pass judgement on Flaubert, this articulation of the poetic order with the division of conditions is self-evident. And in all naturalness do they link the disorder of these headless stories to a subversion of social conditions. In reporting on Madame Bovary, the critic Armand de Pontmartin gives this reign of the ‘detail’, which renders all the novel’s episodes equally important or equally insignificant with one another, its name. It is, he said, democracy in literature. This democracy is, first, the privilege given to the material outlook and, by the same token, it is the equality of all beings, all things and all situations open to being seen. But if the details of the description are all equally insignificant, this is because they concern people whose lives themselves are insignificant. Literary democracy means too many people, too many characters alike all the others, unworthy therefore of receiving distinction through fiction. This population clutters the story. It leaves no place for the selection of meaningful characters and the harmonious development of a plot. To the contrary, in the novel of aristocratic times space was opened through the stratification of social positions: ‘In the novel, such as it was formerly understood, in that novel the delightful model of which The Princesse de Clèves has remained, the human character represented by all the superiorities of birth, mind, education and heart, left little place, in the economy of the récit, to secondary characters, still less to material objects. This exquisite world looked at little people only through the doors of its carriages and at the countryside only through the windows of its palaces. Whence a large space was open, and admirably filled, for the analysis of feelings, subtler, more complicated, more difficult to unravel in elite souls than among common people’. On the other hand, in the realist school of which Madame Bovary is the example, ‘all the characters are equal […] The servant boy, the groom, the beggar, the kitchen woman, the apothecary boy, the gravedigger, the vagabond, the dish-washing lady take up an enormous space; naturally the things surrounding them become just as important as they are; they might be distinguished from them by the soul alone, and in this literature, the soul does not exist.’8
This critique states bluntly the social basis of the well-constructed beginning and the organic work. A good structural relation of parts to the whole rests on a division between souls of the elite and commoners. Certainly the little people have always had their place in fiction. But it was exactly the subalternate place or inferior genre in which it was permissible for them to amuse the audience by acting and talking as befits people of their kind. It is this distribution of roles that the new fiction destroys. On this point, the frightened critic of democracy misses the crux of the problem. He sticks to the clichés of counter-revolutionary imagery, which view the space formerly structured by branches of great oaks as henceforth smothered by the copse of democratic shrubs. But the ill runs deeper still. The problem is not that vulgar beings saturate with their prosaic concerns the space formerly devoted to the unfolding of refined feelings. Rather, their new passions happen to blur the division itself between souls of gold destined for exquisite feelings and souls of iron doomed to prosaic activities.
Such is the trouble borne in the story cluttered by the famous barometer. Un coeur simple is the story of a poor illiterate servant whose monotonous existence is marked by a series of unfortunate passions that hone in on, successively, a lover, a nephew, the daughter of her mistress and, at the end of the road, a parrot. This is the context in which the barometer has its sense. It is not there to attest that the real really is real. For the question is not to know if the real is real. It is about the texture of this real, that is to say, the type of life that the characters live. The barometer probably entered the story without any preconceived intention, there quite simply because the novelist ‘saw’ it while thinking up the story’s setting. But if he saw it this clearly, it is because this prosaic instrument encapsulates an entire sensible world. The needle that indicates variations in atmospheric pressure also symbolizes the immobile existence of those whose horizon is limited to knowing each morning the favourable or unfavourable conditions that the weather will lend to the day’s activities. It indicates the separation between those who live the succession of work and days and those who live the temporality of ends. From now on, it happens to mark something else: the relation these obscure existences have with the power of atmospheric elements, the intensities of sun and wind, and the multiplicity of sensible events whose circles expand to infinity. The world of work and days is no longer one of succession and repetition, opposed to the grandeur of action and its ends. It is the great democracy of sensible coexistences that revokes the narrowness of the old order of causal consequences and narrative and social proprieties. Un coeur simple testifies to the revolution that occurs when a life commonly doomed to endure the rhythm of days and variations of climate and temperature, assumes the temporality and intensity of an exceptional chain of sensible events. The needle of the useless barometer marks an upheaval in the distribution of capacities of sensible experience in which life doomed to utility is separated from existences destined for the grandeurs of action and passion. The humblest, most nondescript being is henceforth granted the grand intensities of the world: it has the ability to transform the routine of everyday existence into an abyss of passion, whether this passion is directed at a young man or at a stuffed parrot. The purported ‘reality effect’ is much rather an equality effect. But this equality is not the equivalence of all individuals, objects and sensations under the writer’s pen. It is not true that all sensations are equivalent, but it is true that any one of them can trigger for any woman of the lower classes the vertiginous acceleration that opens her to experiencing the depths of passion.
Such is the meaning of this literary democracy. It strikes at the political heart of the principle of verisimilitude by which the proportions of fiction had been governed. From now on, anyone whomsoever can experience any emotion or passion whatsoever. The object of this passion matters little in itself. Felicity in Un coeur simple is a model servant, inured to every task and fanatically devoted to serving her mistress. But this fanaticism carries disorder within. Felicity does not serve as she should, in line with the logic of social decorum and fictional verisimilitudes. She serves with an intensity of passion far surpassing her mistress’s own capacity for emotion. This intensity is not only useless – it is also dangerous, just as is every sensible capacity that exceeds what is required for daily service. Extreme devotion is close to radical perversion. Some years before Un coeur simple, Flaubert’s colleagues and friends, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt had published a different servant story, Germinie Lacerteux, inspired by their personal experience. Germinie was also a servant fanatically devoted to her mistress. But in the course of the novel it happens that the same passion making of her a model servant could also make her a woman capable of going to the most extreme lengths of physical and moral degradation in order to satisfy her passions and her sexual desires. The angelic Felicity and the monstrous Germinie are two sides of the same coin. Both belong, with Emma Bovary, to the formidable species of those daughters of peasants capable of doing anything to sate their most sensual passions or their most ideal aspirations. This new capacity of anyone at all to live any life at all ruins the model linking the organicity of the story to the separation between active and passive men, elite and vulgar souls. It produces this new real, made of the very destruction of the old ‘possible’, this real which is no longer a field of operation for the aristocratic heroes of grand actions or exquisite feelings but the interlacing of a multiplicity of individual experiences, the lived fabric of a world in which it is no longer possible to distinguish between the great souls who think, feel, dream and act and individuals locked in the repetition of bare life. Flaubert had no sympathy for political democracy. But the story of Emma, eager to verify in her life the meaning of a few stolen words in books destined for souls of the elites – bliss, passion or intoxication – is akin to attempts made by emancipated workers to reconstruct their daily experience out of the words of the romantic heroes who suffer from not having ‘anything to do in society’, or those made by revolutionaries to formulate the new equality in words borrowed from ancient rhetoric or from the evangelical text. It is akin to the audacity of those young dressmakers who the words of Saint-Simonian ‘new Christianity’ were to move so much that they made themselves the educators of a humanity-to-come, all the while sharing, on occasions, the beds of the young preachers from the polytechnic school. Against a fate of immobility, the story of Emma expresses the multiplicity of these ‘silent revolts’ that, as Charlotte Brontë puts it, ‘ferment in the masses of life which people earth’.9
There is no ‘reality effect’ that stands in as a substitute for old verisimilitude. There is a new texture of the real produced by the transgression of boundaries between forms of life. And this transgression changes the texture of fiction under its twofold aspect as arrangement of events and as relation between worlds. The story of Emma Bovary does not attest, as is always said, to the distance between dream and reality. It testifies to a world in which the makings of one are no longer different to the makings of the other. The real is no longer a space of strategic deployment of thoughts and wills. It is the chain of perceptions and affects that weaves these thoughts and wills themselves. This weaving is what defines the new textures of novelistic episodes. Reactionary critics of the time complained, together with Barbey, that action sequences had been replaced with a series of ‘tableaus’, or pictures, simply pinned up next to one another. Progressive critics of the following century would readily come to see this reign of immobile images as the expression of capitalist reification. But these ‘tableaus’ are not images, nor are they immobile. They are differences, displacements and condensations of intensities through which the external world penetrates minds and these minds form their lived world. This blended fabric of perceptions and thoughts, of sensations and acts is what, from now on, will constitute the lives of Zola’s proletarians as much as Virginia Woolf’s bourgeois ladies, Conrad’s adventurers of the Eastern seas or Faulkner’s black and petty white folk of the Deep South. But this fabric was first the new music of indistinction between the ordinary and the extraordinary, which seizes within the same tonality the lives of servants in the countryside and those of great ladies of the capital, the music expressing the capacity of anyone at all to experience any form of sensible experience at all.
Barthes’s analysis misjudges this political stake because the idea of structure that governs it – and that governs the ideology of artistic modernity more broadly – is itself dependent on the organic model that governed the representational order. It contrasts descriptive excess to an idea of structure as the functional arrangement of causes and effects subordinating the parts to the whole. Structural analysis has to assign a place in the structure to each narrative unit. It thus encounters the same scandal that the champions of representational poetics faced with a fictional fabric made up of ‘details’ without narrative function in the narrative totality. But the political stake, which was still clear to the former, gets rubbed out in the context of triumphant ‘modernism’, which imagines it is criticizing the logic of representation where it reprises its most resistant core. Barthes analyses the ‘reality effect’ from a structuralist viewpoint, one that identifies literary modernity and its political impact with a purification of the narrative structure, sweeping away parasitic images of the ‘real’. But literature as a modern form of the art of writing is exactly the contrary. It is the abolition of the border that had delimited the space of fictional purity. What is at stake in this excess is not the opposition between bare singularity and structure. It is the conflict of two divisions of the sensible. This conflict happens to disappear when the functionality of structure is opposed to the superfluous ‘detail’. As it also does when the rupture with the representational logic of action is conceived through the concept of reification. This concept places at modernity’s core the loss of a totality of lived experience. But this ‘totality’ was one of a world strictly divided into two worlds of experience without communication. And the democracy of modern fiction works to revoke this division.
However, this does not therefore entail that fictional democracy goes hand-in-hand with political democracy. The equality specific to the new fiction belongs to this redistribution of forms of sensible experience, in which the forms of worker emancipation also participated, as did the multiplicity of rebellions that assailed the traditional hierarchy of forms of life. But it did not for all that express political aspirations for democracy or social emancipation. Sartre sought to discern in the petrifying power of Flaubert’s style the nihilist strategy of a bourgeoisie threatened by the development of the proletariat and by worker insurrections. But a far larger contradiction sees the novelistic genre, in the nineteenth century, triumph in accompaniment with the ruin of the model of strategic action. From Balzacian conspirers who fail in all their undertakings to Tolstoyan generals who imagine that they lead battles whose success depends upon a thousand interlacing causes that elude their strategies, including Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, who conceives the ends of his action rationally but executes them solely as a hallucination in act – the novel of that century did not cease to proclaim the bankruptcy of strategic action, even as it showed us heroes methodically engaged in the conquest of society. Elsewhere I have evoked the strange duplicity of the apparently simply fable Le rouge et le noir, which in fact contrasts two forms through which the subversion of social positions is presented to the young ambitious plebeian: as conquest of power or as sharing of a sensible equality.10 And I have suggested seeing in this individual story a tension that affects the forms of popular revolution and of demonstrations of worker emancipation on a completely different level: the discovery of the capacity of anyone at all to live any sort of experience seems to coincide with a defection of the schema of strategic action of adapting means to ends. This tension lies at the heart of the most resolute undertakings of social transformation. Prior even to linking means of action to demonstrations of knowledge, the new Marxist science identified the revolutionary realization of human essence with the abolition of the separation between means and ends.
It is thus not really by opposing its sensible equality to the ends of action that literary democracy is separated from the other one. The tension between sensible equality, strategic action and the science of society belongs, far more broadly, to the history of modern movements of emancipation. But the new literature also carries out a scission in this very sensible equality, linking transformations of the novel form to the silent, or noisy, rebellions of ordinary men and women searching for another life. The enterprise of Emma Bovary, eager to experience the meaning of a few words read in books not meant for peasants’ daughters, testifies to a larger movement of affirming the capacity of the anonymous: workers’ sons and peasants’ daughters, identified by the occupation of a defined place in the social totality and with the form of life reserved for them in accordance with that position, broke with this identity assignation. They broke with the universe of repetitive and invisible life in order to engage capacities and live forms of life that did not match their identity. These operations of disidentification, which undo ‘normal’ relations between identities and capacities, were what made possible the literary revolution that destroys the identities and hierarchies of the representational order. But this revolution itself accomplishes a very precise operation with regard to these subversive demonstrations of the power of the anonymous. It separates this power from the agents who put it to work in order to make it its own power, the impersonal power of writing. This appropriation comprises two operations. The first decomposes these manifestations of the capacity of the anonymous into a dust of impersonal sensible micro-events. The second identifies the movement of writing with the respiration of this very sensible fabric.
The first operation may be illustrated by Madame Bovary’s most famous episode, in which we are told of the birth of Emma’s love for Rodolphe amid the bustle of the country fair. In it, Rodolphe deploys the classical arsenal of words and attitudes likely to seduce a provincial petite bourgeois woman. However it is not this logic of means adapted to the end that ensures his success. Emma’s love is born in fact as the modification produced by a chain of sensible events arriving kath’ hekaston, one after the other, without their aggregation being the effect of any reckoning: the heat of a summer’s afternoon, the voices of speakers swirling around in the air, the bellowing of oxen, the bleats of lambs, small rays of gold radiating out all around black pupils, a vanilla and lemon scent, a long plume of dust trailing a stagecoach, the remembrance of a waltz and of longstanding desires swirling like grains of sand in gusts of wind, the final outcome of which is that a hand – hers – surrenders to another hand – the seducer’s. Her love is thus born as the effect of a multiplicity of sensible micro-events, carried away in one and the same flow, also made up of words read in books, of images seen on plates, of coloured vignettes decorating missals or keepsakes, of altar scents and of choruses from sentimental ballads.
Novelistic democracy opposes this order of sensible coexistences to the old order of consequences and proprieties. But this democracy comes at a price: the disquieting ability of the anonymous to live other lives than ‘their own’ is absorbed in the flow of micro-events, which transforms its manifestations into singular crystallizations of the great impersonal Life. If anyone at all can have the refined sentiments previously reserved for ‘souls of the elite’, it’s because these refined feelings are no longer what they were. They are no longer intimate dispositions of individuals but instead chance-ridden condensations of a whirlwind of impersonal sensible events, a ‘life of the soul’ still unknown: a perpetual movement of an infinity of atoms that are assembled, separated and assembled again within a perpetual vibration. This movement is what gives this new fiction its texture. This movement is what provides the response to critics who denounce this fiction for its inability to subordinate its ‘details’ to the unity of the whole. The opposition of the poetic katholou to the empirical kath’ hekaston had its time. The whole is now in the details. It is in the common breath, which sweeps along the succession of these events freed from the chains of causality. It is no longer found in the balance of the plot’s parts. It resides in the work of writing, in that ‘style’ that rightly no longer has anything to do with the charms and ornaments of epideictic speech, since it translates the life of the whole, the impersonal breath holding together the sensible events, and it has them produce these singular condensations called desire or love. So fictional democracy puts to work a very specific form of equality: the equality of phrases of which each bears the power of liaison of the whole, the egalitarian power of the common respiration animating the multitude of sensible events.
Sensible equality thus passes over to the side of writing. And the capacity of the character who had embodied it is split into two parts: on the one hand, the individuality of Emma Bovary is a condensation of impersonal events; on the other, it is an identity defined by narrative functions corresponding to social forms of identification: a peasant’s daughter, a dweller of a small market town, daughter, mother, spouse and mistress. The character is defined at the intersection of two sensible worlds, that of the impersonal dance of atoms and that of social identities and properties. But this conjunction of two worlds is also the principle of a new hierarchy. The character is separated from the writer by the impossibility of seeing that duality. Emma lags behind the recounting of her story. She can perceive only the interlacing of sensible events weaving ‘her’ love. She interprets this interlacing in the classic terms of identity and causality as the story of her love for another person. She thus becomes prey to the old narrative and social logic to which the novelist opposes the power of his sentences. The writer sacrifices the character whose subversive egalitarian power he has appropriated to render it as the impersonal power of writing.
But the operation that abandons the character of new fiction to the old representational logic also turns this fiction into a compromise. Flaubert was the first to raise the problem of modern fiction: what system of relations between characters and situations can constitute the fictional work when the old hierarchy of forms of life that defined the space of fiction and commanded its unity is ruined? How are we to reconcile the new world of perceptions and sensations that this ruin liberates with the necessity to construct a whole comprising a beginning, a middle and an end, that is to say also a history of wills and actions leading to successes or else to failures? And he found an answer that became a model for modern fiction: the solution does not exist at the level of the whole. It must come from the kath’ hekaston: not only at its level but rather through it. Writing that incorporates the new power of sensible equality must exercise a twofold function. By uniting one sentence to another one and one narrative event to another, it must also construct a bridge between the logic of impersonal connections of life and the logic of social identities and causal relations. The new logic of coexisting sensible states and the old logic of linked actions can thus glide imperceptibly over each other. The writer inserts in the interstices of stories about love and money the vibration of the great impersonal equality of sensible events, thus producing the imperceptible deviation, at the level of the sentence, that changes the model of production of narrative action. But the matter can be stated in reverse: the expression of this great equality is only embodied in the vibration of the sentence so as to be better subjugated to the old logic of action: village intrigues, stories of imaginary loves and very real worries about money. The anonymous power of the sentence ends up playing, as regards the old logic of the plot, the same role as Emma’s artistic initiatives, by which Charles Bovary is seduced but without understanding the enticement: ‘They added something to the pleasure of his senses and to the sweetness of his home. They were like gold dust sprinkled all along the little path of his life’.11