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l’infamie y ont droit d’asile; la vertu seule y est sans autels. Oui, les
âmes pures ont une patrie dans le ciel! Personne ne m’aura connue!”
(p. 258).
A reading of “Sarrasine” as an archaeology of consciousness
provides a better way of understanding why la Zambinella remains
unnameable and without substance for the narrator. The divine love
and religious belief that la Zambinella symbolizes have no real substance in a modern, post-Catholic world: this is why the old man appears to the narrator as a ghost with a dead and hollow body. Since
Sarrasine’s experience of this transcendent reality is no longer immediately accessible to his disenchanted consciousness, the narrator’s
problem is to make this experience intelligible to a reader whose modern consciousness depends precisely on the repression and perpetual
displacement of the object – religion – that Balzac is attempting to expose. The narrative solution to this experience of catastrophic rupture
is none other than to apply to consciousness an archaeological method
whereby: “La cause fait deviner un effet, comme chaque effet permet
de remonter à une cause” (X, 657).