Political Fiction, Anonymous and Pseudonymous (A Response to Robert Alter)

In traditional Jewish homiletics, one strategy often adopted by the darshan or expositor was to select two texts as remote from each other as possible and, by a series of deft interpretative moves, to demonstrate their deep affinity. It is in something of this spirit, recalling the rabbinic adage that in scripture there is neither early nor late, that Robert Alter has traced for us the surprising parallels between the David story and The Charterhouse of Parma. In responding to his paper, I shall try to explore a little further his intermillennial pairing, taking as guide the two words of his title, “political” and “fiction,” but turning them around and, since the political has already received generous treatment, concentrating on the complementary term, “fiction.” By “political,” I take it Alter means what Balzac meant when he claimed, in his famous review of the Chartreuse, that Stendhal had “written the modern Prince,” the book Machiavelli would have written had he lived in the nineteenth century. Machiavelli’s political theory rests on the premise that “everyone sees what you seem to be, but few feel what you are” (ch. 18). The wise ruler must therefore know when not to be good. This is what modern philosophers call a consequentialist view of politics: good and evil are only means to an end, which in Machiavelli’s view is power over others. Moreover, for his prince, as for Stendhal’s, the final end of political power is not “the human good,” as it was for Aristotle, but the gratification of personal vanity. “Fiction,” as first introduced into literary discourse by Mme. de Stael (a name consciously echoed by Henri Beyle when he signed his works