Mind as Ruin: Balzac’s “Sarrasine”
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“expires” when he is stabbed by la Zambinella’s Christian friends, but
why would Christians kill Sarrasine, especially when he was already
the victim of their hoax? In our view, Sarrasine’s death is symbolic,
marking a psychological or spiritual catastrophe in which his psyche is
split between life connected to spiritualized, Catholic love and a disenchanted, materialist life without it.
Most readers think that Sarrasine’s disillusionment comes
from the fact that la Zambinella is not, after all, a woman: he thought
he loved a woman, but it was a man. The narrator, however, plays a
double game, revealing that Sarrasine knew his ideal object of love to
be a man. What disillusioned him – on this point the text is clear – was
the absence of ideal love: “[E]n fouillant ton être avec cette lame, y
trouverais-je un sentiment à éteindre, une vengeance à satisfaire? Tu
n’es rien. Homme ou femme, je te tuerai! [...] Plus d’amour! Je suis
mort à tout plaisir, à toutes les émotions humaines” (p. 256).
The absence of love provokes a catastrophic separation, a
death in the soul, a radical disillusion, after which the narrator will no
longer have direct access to the soul or to the transcendent love of la
Zambinella, or to his own former state of mind. While remaining sentimentally attached to his former self (the self that had access to divine
love), his rational consciousness and his language become radically
detached. Sarrasine’s madness and death thus indicate not only an
epistemic separation between Sarrasine and Zambinella, but also between the young Sarrasine and the older Sarrasine-narrator.
Up to this point our allegorical reading remains speculative.
However, we find confirmation at the end of the narrative, when Madame de Rochefide interprets for us what the narrator has been attempting to accomplish, sharing his religious disillusionment with her
in order to shake her from her Christian illusions:
Ah! s’écria-t-elle [...]: Vous m’avez dégoûté de la vie et des passions pour
longtemps. Au monstre près, tous les sentiments humains ne se dénouent-ils pas
ainsi, par d’atroces déceptions?… Si l’avenir du chrétien est encore une illusion, au
moins elle ne se détruit qu’après la mort. (p. 257)
Balzac exposes here the historical and religious content of Sarrasine’s
illusion. According to Rochefide, the narrator/Sarrasine had erred in
yielding to disillusionment whereas she will persist in her belief until
death, even if, from a rationalist point of view, it is madness: “Paris,
dit-elle, est une terre bien hospitalière; il accueillit tout… Le crime et
135
“expires” when he is stabbed by la Zambinella’s Christian friends, but
why would Christians kill Sarrasine, especially when he was already
the victim of their hoax? In our view, Sarrasine’s death is symbolic,
marking a psychological or spiritual catastrophe in which his psyche is
split between life connected to spiritualized, Catholic love and a disenchanted, materialist life without it.
Most readers think that Sarrasine’s disillusionment comes
from the fact that la Zambinella is not, after all, a woman: he thought
he loved a woman, but it was a man. The narrator, however, plays a
double game, revealing that Sarrasine knew his ideal object of love to
be a man. What disillusioned him – on this point the text is clear – was
the absence of ideal love: “[E]n fouillant ton être avec cette lame, y
trouverais-je un sentiment à éteindre, une vengeance à satisfaire? Tu
n’es rien. Homme ou femme, je te tuerai! [...] Plus d’amour! Je suis
mort à tout plaisir, à toutes les émotions humaines” (p. 256).
The absence of love provokes a catastrophic separation, a
death in the soul, a radical disillusion, after which the narrator will no
longer have direct access to the soul or to the transcendent love of la
Zambinella, or to his own former state of mind. While remaining sentimentally attached to his former self (the self that had access to divine
love), his rational consciousness and his language become radically
detached. Sarrasine’s madness and death thus indicate not only an
epistemic separation between Sarrasine and Zambinella, but also between the young Sarrasine and the older Sarrasine-narrator.
Up to this point our allegorical reading remains speculative.
However, we find confirmation at the end of the narrative, when Madame de Rochefide interprets for us what the narrator has been attempting to accomplish, sharing his religious disillusionment with her
in order to shake her from her Christian illusions:
Ah! s’écria-t-elle [...]: Vous m’avez dégoûté de la vie et des passions pour
longtemps. Au monstre près, tous les sentiments humains ne se dénouent-ils pas
ainsi, par d’atroces déceptions?… Si l’avenir du chrétien est encore une illusion, au
moins elle ne se détruit qu’après la mort. (p. 257)
Balzac exposes here the historical and religious content of Sarrasine’s
illusion. According to Rochefide, the narrator/Sarrasine had erred in
yielding to disillusionment whereas she will persist in her belief until
death, even if, from a rationalist point of view, it is madness: “Paris,
dit-elle, est une terre bien hospitalière; il accueillit tout… Le crime et