HEROES AS GUINEA PIGS

  Translated by Stephen E. Lewis

I

The novel has enjoyed good press from the social sciences ever since their establishment. Think of Karl Marx admiring the materialist sociology of Balzac; of Lenin holding up Oblomov as the truest, cruellest analysis of the Russian soul; of Freud finding in Dostoevsky an inaccessible precursor; or, today, of Carlo Ginzburg crediting his vocation as historian to reading War and Peace.  Every great writer has a researcher who swears by him, and almost every great researcher has an author-fetish to whose intuitions he lays claim.

  "Dwarfs on the shoulders of giants": To be with literature is the common ambition of many of us in the human sciences. But it is impossible to be happy with the soft consensus that insists that writers excel in the description, and even in the analysis, of the human. In order to lure the masters into our arena and to force them to speak our language, let us consider what poetic license empowers them to do, in our domain, and that is forbidden us: experimentation:

  "We give the name "experimenter" to one who applies methods of investigation, whether simple or complex, so as to make natural phenomena vary, or so as to alter them with some purpose or other, and to make them present themselves in circumstances or conditions in which nature does not show them... In this power of the investigator to act upon phenomena, precisely here is the distinction separating the so-called experimental sciences from the sciences of observation."[1]

  The fact we must face is that law, ethics, reality rule out violent experimental procedures in the social sciences.  Historians, anthropologists, sociologists, are all incurably reduced to observation---and to speculation.

  Human "laboratories" do exist: these are the so-called limit situations, such as the wreck of the Medusa in 1816. They are born by accident, and fail, themselves, to deliver unequivocal and generalizable results. (I will refrain from mentioning experiments carried out under one regime.)

  In studying the human, literature is in these respects privileged. Like his scientific colleagues, the novelist begins with a thought experiment - by creating a possible world. Experimentation implies a radical impoverishment of reality: like them, he from this world eliminates contingencies. And inside the literary laboratory, anything goes:  "Some time after these events, God put Abraham to the test" (Genesis 22:1), ordering him to sacrifice Isaac; Sophocles submits Oedipus to trials of exceptional cruelty; Defoe spits out Robinson Crusoe on a desert island, thus staging in detail a utopia many philosophers only outlined.

AT THE ORIGINS OF THE LABORATORY

Testing those close to us, preferably those we love, is a common activity, but we lack the omnipotence, the detachment, and above all the thoroughly scientific rigor of a Pasteur or a Molière.  Compare King Lear, testing his daughters' devotion with infantile sentimentality, and Shakespeare, watching steadfastly over Lear's threshold of endurance with an implacability that tests our threshold of tolerance (finding "enough is enough," Dr. Johnson went so far as to propose a happy ending for the play).

          Testing our friends is a less than glorious activity; fiction, by stylizing it, gave it respectability, then science adopted it as a modus operandi.

  "And the Lord said to Satan, "Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?" Then Satan answered the Lord, "Does Job fear God for nought? Hast thou not put a hedge about him and his house and all that he has, on every side? Thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land.  But put forth thy hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse thee to thy face." And the Lord said to Satan, "Behold, all that he has is in your power; only upon himself do not put forth your hand."[2]

  According to God, Job does good for the sake of good, according to Satan, Job does good for his own good.  There is no way to decide between these two hypotheses but to put Job to the test. The guinea pig is designated, the terms and limits of the trials are defined, the experiment can be launched; it will build to a crescendo, striking first Job's sheep, then his house, then his flesh and blood, and finally his skin. God, the devil's advocate and his auxiliary, sends Job two extra scourges: his wife and his three friends. Job perseveres doggedly.

The reading of novels as experimental protocols is a two-way bridge: from novel to theory and back. I have thus read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as the testing of three famous models:  On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche), Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud), and The Civilizing Process (Elias).

  Stevenson's novel begins with the cliché that made him famous: "those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man's dual nature."[3] The idea of split personality is no scoop, the novel is. Close to Satan, stranger to Job, it defines the "good" as the search for esteem among one's peers ("inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect of the wise and good among my fellow-men"); and "evil," as the quest for pleasure ("a certain impatient gaiety of disposition").  Socialization takes place through the internalization of censure - uneasiness is born out of frustration and guilt: 

  "Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations, than any particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was " (ibid.)

  In his laboratory, Dr. Jekyll explores two hypotheses. The first is diagnostic: "It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together---that in the agonised womb of consciousness these polar twins should be continuously struggling" (82). The second hypothesis is therapeutic: "If each could but be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil" (ibid.). Amalgamation being the illness, schizophrenia will be its remedy.

  "Become who you are!"---as a good Nietzschean, Jekyll appeals to chemistry; as a bad Nietzschean, he forgets that one's essence is not immanent, but an artifact or, better yet, a mask. Whence comes the double failure: the expurgated "superego" has the same old, bad conscience, while the pure "it"---"the id on the hide"---reveals itself to be a timorous caricature of Homo Victorianus. The discontents are incurable, not because the libido, ever equal to itself, becomes more and more repressed (Freud), but because the softening of manners is irreversible, the civilizing process (Elias) enriches the gamut but lowers the flame (La civilisation enrichit la gamme mais baisse la flamme[4]).

  In nature everything tends toward entropy, purity is not of this world, it is a chemical artifact. "All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil:  and Edward Hyde, alone, in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil" (J&H 85).  Does Hyde merit the honor?---as the pure embodiment of Evil, he should have freed himself from a heterogeneous Jekyll; yet he shuttles endlessly between his own hidden lair and his creator's house. The demiurge and the creature have an implicit pact: I lend you life on the condition that you come back to me - respect for contracts is a symptom of civilization. Despite the good doctor's efforts to reduce his creature to a brute state of nature, the title "Mr." will always be stuck to his hide.

*

Doing violence to an object is the necessary condition for experimental science, but it is not the sufficient condition.  Violence must be mobilized in the service of an hypothesis; it must be channeled, mastered, and graduated in order to serve heuristics.

  Works that, like the Book of Job or The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, can be read literally as experimental procedures, are rare. In most cases, it is necessary to reconstitute them as such. To do so, let us practice reading as one of the fine and martial arts. Here is the formula: 

  Take a novel, a film, a myth, and torture it; some will spit out a thesis.

  Eliminate from the text all that is not pertinent to its own thesis, it will come out bare, and often bald.

  Confront the thesis with the text, the text against the thesis, and interrogate the social sciences in the light of this game of respect and treason.

CLICHES AND TRUTH

Truth grows on the borders of the  commons and of well troden paths

One could apply this formula to traditional themes.  We do not lack novels that can be read as systematical exploration of the rural exodus or the origins of the French Revolution; others present even more actual, burning issues, such as unemployment among 18 to 25 year olds or the "Islamic threat" ---in short, real problems, those that really interest us.

  I am going to ignore "real" problems, and focus on those that should interest us yet rarely do: the banalities we live by.  Literature is the hearth and home of our accepted ideas, those that govern life and those that dominate research. Not content with simply mass producing platitudes, literature also serves as the workshop where clichés are tested, criticized, and rewritten. By taking up the well-worn paths and stopping at each commonplace, we can proceed upstream against the current of thought. It is in accordance with standards (S) in the stiffest language, and in a kind of Esperanto before the fact, that we can usefully reformulate the postulates (P) that are studied in the novelist's laboratory.

  (P) X cannot be understood outside its context is conveyed better by (S) Everything is connected ("Tout se tient") and, (S) One is the product of one's time.

  Instead of affirming that (P) The visible is a tiny and uninteresting part of reality, why not call to mind (S) I missed the forest for the trees, (S) She saw only the tip of the iceberg, or (S) To read between the lines?

  (S) Tit for tat, or (S) There's no such thing as a free lunch, is so much more poetic than (P) Society is ruled by reciprocity, negotiation, and contracts.

  The history of literature is an inexhaustible experimental resource. For those who need convincing, what follows are samples, mined at currently active sites; priority has been given to topoi, truisms, and metaphors that seem especially hackneyed.

          (S) PANDORA'S BOX

This topos federates numerous truisms, each of which derives from (P) The hidden is always more marked than the visible. "More marked" means more intense, more threatening, more worthwhile studying.

  Let us begin with the original fable, told (invented?) by Hesiod at the beginning of Works and Days. Prometheus steals fire and gives it to men. Vengeful, Zeus offers men Pandora and, by metonymy, the box (textually, a jar). Pandora lifts the cover and all the evils escape---all except hope. . . .

  Hesiod's account appears to be in step with the topos that it came to name, but in fact it undermines that topos from the beginning: "The gods desire to keep the stuff of life [i.e., fire]/ Hidden from us. If they did not, you could/ Work for a day and earn a year's supplies."[5] In the hymn to industry which Works and Days is, sweet idleness is the capital sin: "Both gods and men despise him [a lazy man], for he is/ Much like the stingless drone, who does not work/ But eats, and wastes the effort of the bees" (68). The poem's mantra is: "Foolish Perses [Hesiod's brother], go to work!" (71).  To work so as not to starve, of course, but more important is to work in order to improve oneself, to overcome inertia: one should work in order to be human.

  "Before this time men lived upon the earth/ Apart from sorrow and from painful work,/ Free from disease, which brings the Death-gods in" (61-2). In giving humanity fire, Prometheus in effect condemned men to terminal vegetation. By offering Pandora, Zeus saved us from the supreme evil: self-sufficiency. For women, says Hesiod, cannot accommodate themselves to poverty. In order to satisfy their need for the superfluous we climb down from the trees and go to work; to civilization. In this myth, Zeus is our true benefactor, and Prometheus the perpetrator of boredom.

  Moral: it is the taste from the box that drove humanity from paradise. Had they not lifted the cover, had they contended themselves with the surface, men would have been busy one day per year. (S) And the rest of their time?

The tale of the fisherman and the djinn in The Thousand and One Nights (Nights 3 to 9) is the Arab counterpart to the myth of Pandora. The fisherman fishes a sealed copper flask from the sea. At first he thinks about selling it at the market, but he cannot resist curiosity: "I must open it to see what it contains." He unseals the flask, out comes a genie who has sworn death to whoever delivers him from his tomb. But instead of committing the act right away, the djinn first tells his story. Like Master Renard, like Puss in Boots, the fisherman takes advantage of the boastfulness of the ogre in order to make him return into the bottle. Then, instead of tossing his vanquished enemy into the sea, he takes his turn at telling stories. To make matters worse, he again puts his trust in the djinn, and liberates him. But---surprise!---the "monster" keeps his word and showers the fisherman in riches.

  Moral: A devil set free is not a blind force of nature. One thousand eight hundred years of imprisonment have rendered him curious, a braggart, a dealmaker, a coward; worse, they have made him dependable. Pandora's box has been closed for too long, the djinns that emerge are haggard and feeble, the chained wild animal reveals himself as a poodle. 

  At first, it seems that lifting the lid is the cause of every evil, in fact there lurks our salvation; in A Thousand and One Nights, curiosity gains time or, a second best, kills time with dignity.

(S) NARCISSUS

"Narcissus:  Character of the fable who, having viewed himself in a pool, fell in love with himself and died in self-admiration... Man in love with his own figure" (Littré, 1863).

  Language did not have to wait for Freud to speak, through Narcissus, about mad love for oneself; his "On Narcissism: An Introduction" (1914) only crystallized a topos by granting it a scientific look.

  To the vulgar and Freudian conceptions alike, narcissism represents self-satisfaction, the preferential treatment for one's self, the ultimate phase of nepotism. According to Freud, narcissism belongs to the Do It Yourself department, it responds to our grocer instincts: "The aim and the satisfaction in a narcissistic object-choice is to be loved"[6].

  But this is, from first to last, a slander. The original Narcissus, created by Ovid (Metamorphoses, 3:338-511), did not fall in love with himself but with a stranger, whom he did not know to be his own image.  It is only later that he discovers the truth: "Oh, I am he! Oh, now I know for sure/ The image is my own; it's for myself/ I burn with love; I fan the flames I feel."[7] This realization comes too late, for in the meantime love has transformed itself into an idée fixe, and Narcissus is neither able nor willing to renounce it.

  A slander, too, because Narcissus does not choose facility.  The stranger he falls in love with is inaccessible: "My joy!  I see it; but the joy I see/ I cannot find" (446-447).

  Slander again:  Narcissus is not guilty of subjectivity, for the object of his love "is worthy of the love of nymphs," "many a youth/ And many a girl desired him" (353-356). When has love been so objectively justified?

  Slander, finally, because his choice of a love object does not at all satisfy the alleged need to be loved; on the contrary.  Unanimously loved by mortals and immortals, he ought to have been able to find easy, shameless satifaction elsewhere. Noli me tangere, says Narcissus, your facile love nips me in the bud ("Votre amour facile m'étouffe dans l'oeuf"). Narcissus is greedy for the absolute.

  Freud pretends that a certain amount of narcissism is healthy to our psychic economy. It follows that all humans tend to be narcissistic; all, that is, except Narcissus.

  How is it that the myth has been read so improperly, even betrayed?  The reason lies in the, human, all too human, disposition, to rewrite the objective in subjective terms, the unilateral as relational.  Through the slandered Narcissus we can study relativism, an inverted alchemy, that transmutes "knowledge" into "I believe that", "beautiful" into "I like it very much", "good" into "suits me fine", "truth" into "I think that", "I love" into "do you love me?", "Yes!" into "Why not?"

  A universal disposition, it cannot be attributed to the weakness of some or the laziness of others. It is the fault of the brain, the true protagonist of my research, the brain and its lethal weapon: the synecdoche. 

"THE FIRST SHALL BE LAST AND THE LAST SHALL BE FIRST"

More than a method, less than a paradigm, my formula has three distinct, although overlapping fields of application:

- With Job, with Dr Henry Jekyll, fiction is an orthodox laboratory, the lieu where hypothesis and guinea pigs clash.

- In Narcissus, in Pandora's Box, in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, literature manipulates topoï and stereotypes it first secreted.

- Literature has also a "meta-experimental" function. It often serves as an atelier where methodological premises are essayed and rejected; where new methodological devices are outlined and perfected.

Social sciences have made Christ's adage their research agenda: Get rid of Great Men so that, finally, the small can regain their dignity as three-dimensional beings.

  An ambitious program, politically correct as well, Tom Stoppard executes it in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.  The merest moment in Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are here propelled onto the center sof the tage, while Hamlet, Ophelia, Gertrude, Claudius, and Polonius are relegated to the background.

  But Stoppard knows what his academic colleagues often deny: the promotion of a poor sod to national hero rarely implies that new archives have surfaced. An honest historian, he submits his experiment to a draconian rule:  No new information added! Neither we nor Rosencrantz and Guildenstern themselves will know more about these neo-heroes than what Shakespeare already told us. The wretches run headlong into their own tabula rasa, until their programmed death leads them back to the original nothingness from which they sprang. The spotlights of history cannot save them from their immanent platitude.

Modern historans have declared War and Peace the precursor of the school of the Annales.  Convinced that historical processes are not set in motion by one man, even if he is an emperor, Tolstoy sets to work writing the history of the Russian campaign as seen "from below."  The originality of the novel's flow has been highly praised, but what makes War and Peace especially edifying is the slippage between intention and result. For in Tolstoy's account of the year 1812, it is not the anonymous masses who are protagonists but Marshal Koutouzov, a classic hero, whether fictional or historical. Tolstoy's grandiose failure prefigures others; for instance, Pierre Goubert's Louis XIV et vingt millions de français: despite the title, despite the jacket illustration (Le Nain rather than Le Brun[8]), the Sun King is never overshadowed by his subjects.

  Chase away the Great Men, they come back at a gallop. Many representatives of the history of mentalités and the longue durée have wound up focusing on Saint Louis (J. Le Goff), Pétain and Nicolas II (M. Ferro), Marie Antoinette (J. Revel), as earlier on Lucien Febvre studied Rabelais, Luther, and Marguerite de Navarre; and when it is not heroes, like laymen they are attracted by dates:  1492, 1789.

  "Total history," in defending the cause of the ordinary against the extraordinary, picked a quarrel with the human brain, which is to the Annales historians' credit but condemns their utopia to a short life. Cognitively, the part will always have primacy over the whole, the figure over the ground.

But to be fair, War and Peace is less a critique of the notion of Great Men than a critique of the notion of strategy as theorized by Clausewitz in On War. Far from denying evidence for the existence of Great Men, Tolstoy proposes to think over grandeur. He does so by offering grandeur a negative definition:  A Great Man is one who, once in power, recognizes the futility of strategy; see Koutouzov.

  Bruno Latour takes this insight as the point of departure in his Microbs: War and Peace.  According to Latour, the Great Man is like someone who jumps onto a moving train, proclaims himself the conductor, and obtains the adherence of crew and passengers alike.  Latour analyzes the case of Pasteur, who succeeded in uniting opposing tendencies under his own appellation contrôlée.

  It was not chance that made Napoleon a major figure and his contemporaries historical extras. Each of his grenadiers, considered alone, was perhaps a courageous fellow, but none had the staying power to hold history breathless for twenty years running, or, for that matter, to play the hero in a five-act classical tragedy. The Great Man imposes himself on everyone---on us---because he is a good Gestalt.

Every novel, even one that flaunts its ambition to be exhaustive, is a formidable critique of holism. Some intend explicitly to experiment with alternatives to the rush for totalization. Two examples follow.

  Georges Perec, in W or The Memory of Childhood (1975), alternates between two narratives, one an attempt at autobiography, the other a parable. The first parallel reconstructs the childhood of a Jewish orphan in France during the Nazi occupation. As an historical work, it startles in its refusal, obstinate, tragic, to fill in gaps in the author's meagre memory. Worse, Perec submits the rare episodes that he does remember to a merciless critique of sources, so that his autobiography becomes to all intents and purposes void of content; one can no longer speak of holes in memory but only of memory itself as a black hole. This emptiness is counterbalanced by the book's second parallel, W, an apocalyptic universe that combines Olympic Games and concentration camps. There are times when a fable is the only means to render the past intelligible.

  Virginia Woolf, in The Years (1937), tells the saga of the Pargiter family between 1880 and 1930. A discontinuous narrative, in fact the novel accounts for only eleven years, and even that figure is deceptive because each chapter, though entitled with a year number, in fact treats only one day within that year, hence eleven days out of more than 1800! We expect the blanks to be filled in, but this never happens. We have at our disposal nothing but those parts of the story directly shown to us; rare flashbacks refer us to days that have already been recounted---no make-up sessions.  A novel-puzzle?  Yes, but one in which the missing pieces are definitively lost.

  The unfinished puzzle is not a shattered mirror of reality, it is reality. Among the fragments, the novel gives preference to those that can take the place of a whole by definition absent; see Proust's madeleine: The master of synecdoche will write his own legend ("Le maître de la synecdoque écrira sa légende").

*

We have the hazards of life to thank for in vivo human laboratories, whence comes the ad hoc character of their array of guinea pigs and experimental procedures.  The 149 passengers on the raft of the Medusa were, obviously, not selected according to the usual socio-professional criteria.

  The average literary guinea pig is even further from what could be termed a representative sample of the human species.  Literary violence is administered almost exclusively to exceptional beings: Abraham, Job, Oedipus, Jesus, Lear.  Whence comes the ad hominem character of in vitro literary laboratories.

  Nevertheless, there are writers who possess typically scientific minds. Endowed with one grid, inhabited by one question, they inflict the same treatment on characters coming from various horizons and thus respond to one necessary condition for any experiment: repeatability.

  Take the example of Thomas Bernhard, whose novels hover around the same set of questions: Can one say No! to the social? Can one have an idée fixe? The narrator of Concrete becomes a hermit in order to write the definitive work on Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, the narrator of Yes has "sacrificed all" for his treatise on antibodies, the hero of The Lime Works "is ready to risk everything, to sacrifice all for his treatise on the sense of hearing," the narrator of The Loser is obsessed with the character of Glenn Gould, and the hero of Correction (based on Wittgenstein) is so absorbed by the form of the Cone that he withdraws completely from the world. All are disappointed in their double vocation: their idées fixes remain at the planning stage yet they cannot stop talking about them to anyone who will listen. Monomania and misanthropy are Siamese twins. The monomaniac hates others insofar as they prevent him from pursuing his obsession, yet as a men-hater, he is a bulimic consumer of others. The great misanthropes in literature are no anchorites; think of Alceste (Molière), of Timon of Athens (Plutarch's and Shakespeare's), think of Hamlet. A sociology of misanthropy has yet to be established.

  Other writers follow the same matrix. Thus some of Henry James's best tales: The Beast in the Jungle, Tha Altar of the Dead, In the Cage - ask again and again: Does intensity lie in an active, even hectic, but banal, life, or in the miliant withdrawal from life? All of Ross Macdonnald's novels are variations on one theme, the lost/runaway child. Most of Alfred Hitchcock's films repeat the same exepriment: Let us throw a "simple" individual where he doesn't belong: crime, espionnage - and watch how he manages, and how the milieu reacts to a foreign body.

  The most audacious, most exhaustive enterprise of this kind that I know is that of Georges Simenon, who between 1930-1945 posed obsessively the same question to his antiheroes: What happens when one is deprived, or when one deprives oneself, of routine?

II

ROUTINE AND MONSTROSITY

Arthur T. Winfree, a pioneer in the science of chaos, got into the field indirectly, by way of the study of biological clocks. One of his experiments consisted of keeping mosquitoes under laboratory conditions, that is under constant levels of light and heat. "Free" mosquitoes become active at dusk; protected from the hazards of ambient nature, Winfree's became frenzied. After several days, their rhythm stabilized, but, surprisingly, it turned out that their cycle was not twenty-four but twenty-three hours long. Every twenty-three hours they would set about buzzing with great intensity. Winfree concludes that outside the laboratory, it is the shock of changing light that maintains the mosquitoes on a twenty-four hour cycle, resetting their clocks each day.[9]

  There are two morals to this story: (1) It is not spontaneously, but only under torture, that the mosquito shows its true nature; in order to unveil its clock, we must apply scientific violence. Since mosquitoes first began to fly, only Winfree's have fully enjoyed their original tempo. (2) Though its cadence can depend on context---the rising and setting of the sun, in this case---the biological clock itself is a natural phenomenon, all developed organisms have one.

  But what about social clocks, i.e., routine? The sociologist of time, Eviatar Zerubavel[10] has provided a succinct answer:

  Axiom 1: "As a principle of organizing human life, routine is essentially antithetical to spontaneity" (44).

  Axiom 2: There is an "intimate relationship between  temporal regularity and social control" (45).

  Axiom 3: "Temporal symmetry"---being "in sync"---contributes to the feeling of togetherness and "is one of the fundamental principles of social organization" (65).

  In short, routine is good for "one" and bad for "I". It is an agent of group cohesion on the one hand and alienation of the individual on the other.

  Axiom 4: Routine is a kind of safeguard (garde-fou)[11], an efficient rampart against the chaos that is latent in each of us.

  These axioms sound commonsensical. From them we can deduce that the absence of routine would engender spontaneity (axiom 1), anarchy (axiom 2), the unique and solitary "I" (axiom 3), and madness (axiom 4).

  And yet, man is no mosquito; following WWF et al., Brigitte Bardot leading the ball, even a mosquito hardly is. Since there are limits, legal as well as ethical, to human experimentation, we are reduced to literary laboratories. Enter Georges Simenon.

THE GUINEA PIG IN SPITE OF HIMSELF[12]

In Simenon's work, routine is a given. We meet his characters after they have been settled in their routine for ages; establishing its genealogy makes little sense:

  "He was not unaware of the fact that Cornélius was the first to rise in the house every morning, and that it had been like this since his marriage. Perhaps the first time had only been a fluke and the uncle had continued."[13]

  "Aunt Mathilde's wedding-present had been a canteen of silver plate and, one Wednesday, by way of showing their appreciation, they invited her to dinner. When she was leaving, Marthe said to her, almost without thinking:

                   "Next Wednesday, then. . . ."

  So it had become an institution that Aunt Mathilde should come to dinner every Wednesday."[14]

  For Simenon, routine is a a-historical, is anonymous; to attribute it to society would do it too much honor: Thou shalt not explain what simply goes without saying! Routine is a given, can it be taken?

In his research, Simenon privileges one type of guinea pig over others: the provincial, province being the bastion of monotony. Provincialism gives birth to a pair of attitudes toward routine, adherence and revolt, and as a conscientious researcher Simenon puts them both to the test. These attitudes give rise to two distinct bodies of work within the list of Simenon's publications between 1930 and 1945. The first puts into play the sedentary provincial, who has settled into the monotonous life of his milieu and seems content with it; the experimenter's task is to upset him. The second puts the fugitive provincial in the saddle for a trip far away, as far away as possible from his hometown; he thus assumes the role of guinea pig and experimenter at the same time.[15]

  An immutable experimental protocol emerges from the first set. Take an ordinary man---not a woman, not an intellectual---who leads the life of a civil servant or a town notable: a doctor in Sneek (The Murderer), an insurance clerk in Sables d'Olonne (Young Cardinaud), a high school German teacher in La Rochelle (L'Evadé), a bookkeeper in Rouen (Uncle Charles Has Locked Himself In), a manager with power of attorney in Groningen (The Man Who Watched The Trains Go By). Make him undergo an electro-shock while in the heart of his timetable. Observe how he struggles as his life receives a blow to its raison d'être.

  These novels begin in medias res, with a scene that one assumes to be the exact copy of innumerable previous scenes. This one quickly proves to be the last of the series, for it renders impossible any further repetition. This technique, as old as literature, was codified in the sixteenth century in the Law of the Three Unities. In neoclassical tragedy, a single day is at the same time the rule and the exception, the most typical specimen in a series which, nevertheless, will sound its death knell---a Sunday, if possible, because then routine and ritual, the microcosm of the character and the macrocosm of society are rejoined.

  "Time, space, gestures, everything was linked, everything helped to form the reassuring and limpid block of a beautiful Sunday . . .

                   ---Where to, now?

                   ---To buy a cake . . .

  Like every Sunday morning.  Slowly, solemnly.  Before, he used to take the traditional stroll round the Embankment... He was still walking, as though in a procession, and stopped automatically at a café terrace."[16]

  Back home from Sunday mass, Cardinaud Son discovers that his wife has left him for a petty delinquent. He suffers a short knock-down, recovers, and sets out to search for her.

  "Sometimes an almost invisible fly will ruffle the surface of a pond more than will a large stone.  So it was, that Sunday afternoon at Chestnut Grove.  Sundays for the Donge family had always been, in a way, historic, for example the Sunday of the thunderstorm... But this particular Sunday, which might be called the Sunday of the great drama, glided by with the calm of a level brook. ["He was carried off, like a cork in a flood" is the opening phrase of Young Cardinaud].

  François woke up at about six o'clock, as he always did in the country."[17]

  During Sunday tea in the country, François Donge is poisoned with arsenic by his wife Bébé; he survives, falls in love with his almost murderess, and sets out to discover the "truth" about her.

Repetition of the same procedures permits Simenon to attain a critical mass of results, the condition sine qua non of experimental science. His "variations on a theme" are of classical workmanship, more along the lines of Rachmaninov than of Coltrane: Simenon prefers to deviate slightly from established patterns, rather than improvise. To fully appreciate the incantatory effect of his oeuvre, I'll quote, and quote, ad nauseam I'll quote.

OSTRANENIYE[18]

"After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us, we know about it, but we do not see it. Habituazation devours works, clothes, one's wife and the fear of war. Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life, to make one feels things, to make the stone stony".

Dis-automatization, in Simenon's work, is not only an aesthetic principle, it is the primary narrative process, the means by which scandal enters a plot. Its attack is not on the habits of readers, or only secondarily so, but on the habits of characters, for they are the ones who, by means of defamiliarization, become The Strangers in the House (Simenon, 1940). Everywhere reigns what Freud called the "unhomely" ("Das Unheimlich", 1914):

  "His tone was familiar; his manner that of a visitor who feels at home in his hotel. . . .

  Madame Keller served him with her usual affability; yet there was a perceptible constraint in her gestures."[19]

  "So intimately blended was the sense of danger with the consciousness of everyday reality and all that was conventional and commonplace, that to Kuperus it was all the more exhilarating.  It felt, indeed, very much like the effects of a strong dose of caffeine."[20]

          Great are the benefits of estrangement: 

  "Perhaps they would have remained forever ignorant of the gulf stretching between them if they had never, suddenly, found themselves penniless in a foreign land, far from any possible source of help.  Who knows if, without that, they wouldn't have spent the rest of their lives in the belief that they loved one another?  The catastrophe had burst upon them without provoking any effusion, any feeling of tenderness between them.  On the contrary!" [21]

  Having become a stranger in his own house, the hero has illumination:

  "When he was with his wooden head, with his large, fierce eyes, his waxed mustache, and the gait of an automaton, did anyone ask him why he was so? Well! Now he had lightened up a bit. He had even achieved something. For many years he had lived amongst his family without really knowing them. Since last evening, he at least knew Hellène, and was as moved as a lover."[22]

  Great are the drawbacks of estrangement. After the shock, the hero enters a state of organic crisis, where he no longer manages to be at one with his own life, and feels alienated from it:

  "He had a wife, children. All were properly dressed.  And yet, despite everything, none of that seemed real... When, a few days before, he was sitting at the same table, he knew that the table was of wood, that the people sitting around it constituted his family, that he would spend the rest of his days with them, that the house was his, and that it was a blessing to have a house, because you never know what could happen! Well, things were no longer so. He was seated at the same place, but he was not far from being astonished. He looked at his wife, he heard her voice, and he saw no compelling reason to live with her rather than with another woman."[23]

  "All this was true, and he visualized the scene so clearly that he could have made an accurate sketch of it. And yet somehow he didn't feel it. He could hardly convince himself that he had spent a good part of his life there... That, too, was quite true, yet he had a feeling he was lying. He delved into his memory for something else to tell, something to increase the effect he was already conscious of producing... The grotesque thing was that, though every word of this was true, it sounded to him like a fairy tale."[24]

  If living mechanically or automatically were equivalent to not living at all (Shklovsky), it is highly paradoxical that, through discovering himself to be a robot, the Simenon hero loses his grasp on things. Lucidity and irreality go hand in hand:

  "The house he had lived in for sixteen years seemed suddenly to have changed---or, rather, it seemed to have died. There was no longer any reason, for instance, why an object should be where it was rather than anywhere else... In a strange sort of way, he seemed to have become detached from things. He turned on his own axis in a hollow universe. He touched things without seeming to come really into contact with them; he spoke to people who no longer belonged to the same world as his."[25]

  The shift from Shklovsky's model is sharp. It is surely true that habit prevents us from seeing objects; but estrangement, far from effecting a rapprochement between perceiver and object by forcing us to see objects as they are, renders them unreal, irremediably.

"AFRICA? THERE'S NO SUCH A PLACE! AFRICA..."

We suffer from congenital automatization, and estrangement is the shock treatment whose results against this condition are guaranteed. But after treatment? Is the effect irreversible, and afterwards (S) Nothing will ever be as before?

  Simenon's field is post-operative pathology. The patient awakens lonesome and alienated; how will he manage his life without a routine?

  In fact, what is the antonym of routine? There are three logical postulants. The man deprived of routine might (1) never repeat himself again (novelty, uniqueness), he might (2) fall into some kind of disorder (Brownian movements, chaos), or he might (3) return to routine, his old or a new one.

  (1) According to Zerubavel, a person enfranchized from routine would behave spontaneously, he would become a creative, imaginative, inspired individum---he would become, in short, himself. This perspective is seducing, but Simenon never lets himself to be tempted.

  (2) There is, according to Winfree, a single point in the day during which, if a mosquito is disturbed, its biological clock breaks down completely. By administering a quantity of photons at exactly midnight, one renders it an irremediable insomniac: the mosquito dozes, buzzes a bit, dozes off again, in a state of total disorder. From that moment forward, the mosquito suffers a "perpetual jet lag."[26] It may be that the human biological clock has a point at which, if a person is disturbed, would unleash in him or her an irreversible disorder. If so, Simenon did not find it.

  Which leaves us with the third option. Behold the man without a routine, Simenon seems to say, he will soon have a new one. Very soon.

  To repeat or not to repeat? As with Hamlet's, this dilemma opposes "what goes without saying" to the impossible. And he who, by some miracle, experiences a respite from inertia will hasten to catch up shortly,   You either imitate or imitate yourself ("Qui n'imite s'imite").

  The fugitive provincial, a victim of the false opposition between routine and spontaneity, departs for locations of disorder, fertile ground for the flowering of his true self.  His favorite destinations are as stereotypical as his gesture: Africa, Latin America, Paris, crime (to which we might add the "jungle" of business, as in Strange Inheritance).

  But whether in an exotic land or Paris, whether a swindler or an assassin, our adventurer in search of himself quickly settles down---lets himself go to seed---in a daily round from which he has great difficulty tearing himself away.

  So it is with the dragoman at the French embassy in Istambul: 

  "It was the result of drunkeness and intoxication. In the morning, while rising in a flabby and nauseous state, his legs weary from having hung about much of the night in PÕra and Istambul, Jonsac promised himself: 

                   ---Today, I will go to see neither Mufti bey, nor Ousoun, nor Téfik...  I will not go to Avrenos's and I will not set foot in the PÕra palace bar...

  He had been saying this to himself for years and, like the semi-reformed drunk who already allows himself a little glass of something in the middle of the day, he passed through, as if by chance, the Grand-Rue of Péra where he was sure to be stopped by one or another of his friends.[27]

  Timar, the protagonist of Tropic Moon, escapes from the drab monotony of La Rochelle to the luxuriant monotony of Gabon[28]: 

 "Like Bouilloux or the one-eyed man he would shout: 

                   "Adèle!  A Pernod, please."

  For they had taught him to drink absinthe. Other things, too, which had become a daily ritual. At noon, for instance, before they went to the table there was always a game of poker dice at the bar to decide who was to pay for the round of drinks. At night, no sooner was dinner over than everyone settled down to playing cards, and Timar played with them till the party broke up. Now and then someone, he or another, would shout:

                   "Adèle!  Another round, the same again!"

  He was even picking up "coaster" tricks of speech. Sometimes the others exchanged glances, as if to say, "He's making progress!"

  But there were also moments when Timar was disgusted with himself for sitting on, hour after dreary hour, half fuddled with drink, dealing and drawing cards in this pestilential atmosphere...

  No, he wasn't afraid. Only it meant leaving Libreville, the hotel, the bedroom stippled with light and shade, the red stone wharf, the palm-fringed bay, all in fact that he used to detest---including the rounds of poker dice for drinks, the card games laced with Calvados. But all these things had coalesced into a familiar, companionable setting in which he could move at his ease, trusting to his reflexes.

  And that was a tremendous satisfaction, for he had become lazy, shamelessly inert. He had taken to shaving only twice a week; he sometimes remained seated in the same chair for hours on end, staring in front of him, his mind completely blank...

  But somehow Libreville had got a hold on him; it hurt to wrench himself away. . . .

  He was disgusted with everything, himself included, and yet that feeling of disgust, like his own supineness, had become something he could not forgo."

Routine is not the apanage of the well-ordered, far from it. Egalitarian, it is the lot of both grands-bourgeois and petty delinquents. Dupuche, newly arrived from Amiens, stranded in Panama without money, without relatives, without his wife who has deserted him---even Dupuche could "become settled in his habits, each hour... furnished little by little with doings and gestures that he submissively repeated every day."[29]

  For Simenon, the marginals, the hard-up, the unemployed, have no less an ordered life than civil servants. A failed swindler, de Ritter returns to his home town after twenty-five years away, "a man who liked forming habits and living to a schedule, doing the same thing daily at the same time. He would always, if possible, buy his newspaper at the same bookstall, go to the same restaurant for meals and sit at the same table, and he had now got into the way of rounding off his evenings, as a matter of course, at the Café Vénitien."[30]

  The provincial who explores wilderness returns more resigned than ever. The hero of The Couple From Poitiers[31] goes to Paris, makes some attempts at a mean and petty glory, which come to nothing. Diagnosing himself a "failure", he sees only two career prospects: to be a tramp or a provincial. He opts for the path that is less short---"Now there was nothing before him but a long slope, an infinite and gentle slope downwards"---and ends up at Tulle, in the Corèze, responsible for the local news at the local paper.

  Young Timar is the perfect blasé:

  Let them have their way. They wanted him to marry her; he'd do so. Just to have some peace. He'd accept the job that had been offered to him, at the oil refinery... He, of course, would have a bigger house, with a garden, of the seaside-villa type. And a motorcycle. He'd settle down, make quite a good husband. Have a peaceful life. Never had he wanted that so much. Why, he might even consent to have children![32]

  Simenon's research proves that routine is not necessarily a factor in social solidarity or in social control. The penniless and failures forge their own routines neither in response to pressure nor in order to be socially integrated, they do so spontaneously - Let yourself go, you won't lose yourself, spontaneity is the surest way to sameness.

  It is not so much routine itself that is the target of Simenon's machinery, as our illusion that routine is opposed to spontaneity. Estrangement is a drastic remedy, it is to be taken only once: There is no second chance. Whoever overcomes the trauma is forever immune against surprise, he can return home as if nothing happened. As Timar concludes: L'Afrique, ça n'existe pas! L'Afrique!"

Nevertheless, there are several of Simenon's characters who, having given a good fight, a desperate one, have earned the right to say that (S) Nothing will ever be as before. They have paid for that right with their own persons. Of the chosen, some used routine as "garde-fou": the safeguard against madness; and some used routine as "garde-fou": the safeguard of madness.

ROUTINE AS A SAFETY NET

Zerubavel's Fourth Axiom---that, without routine, a man lets himself go, and the chaos within threatens to suck him under---is illustrated by two specimens, though each fits the mold with some difficulty.

  J.P.G., L'Evadé, begins his career in a criminal disarray---in Paris, of course. A cheat that kills one of his victims more or less by accident, he is sent off to a penal colony. He escapes from Guyana, procures a new identity, and becomes an "automaton":  husband, father, teacher---in a provincial town, of course. "His new life had gone on for eighteen years without there ever being a moment in which he asked himself whether he was happy or not. Then, abruptly, everything was changed."[33] "The very first grinding occurred on Monday, May 2, at eight o'clock in the morning" when, on his way to school, he caught sight of his partner-in-crime in the street. A machinery that had functioned for eighteen years is thrown out of gear, J.P.G. is derailed.

  A man is not a cat: By landing on your feet you'll break your soul. Alas, one suffers only one konck-out per lifetime, J.P.G. hops another train. Without so much as a time-out he returns to his old tics:  He smokes, he takes to Pernod, he spits in the street, he wears loud ties.  After a few more days his life stabilizes: he stakes out a corner in the Café de la Paix, plays pinocle with the regulars, and embarks each night on the same journey:  "These were new habits which were being created, new centers of intimacy" (88). But the Law, his colleagues, his wife, his children won't give him the opportunity to settle himself long-term in this new routine, be it only the routine of a persona non grata.  And so, of course, he returns to Paris.  It is only at this point that J.P.G. loses his mind and ends up in an asylum, the place where time is as highly policed as can be - routine as a strait-jacket.

  Kees Popinga is The Man Who Watched The Trains Go By, than took one - to hell. He alone, of all our heroes, declares a jihad against routine, pursuing it to his final rout. 

  A high-ranking functionary with power of attorney at one of the venerable firms of Groningen, Popinga and his family lead an existence that is ordered once and for all: "For fifteen years it had been this way: they were, as one might say, congealed in their postures and attitudes."[34] Echoing our Fourth Axiom, Popinga used to see routine as a dike against ominous, unnamed forces: "Kees had dreamed of being someone other than Kees Popinga. And it was precisely for this that he was so much, that he was too much, Popinga, that he exaggerated it, because he knew that, if he gave in on a single point, nothing would hold him back any longer" (34-35).

  One evening, he learns that his boss, unable to avoid a fraudulent bankruptcy, plans to flee by simulating suicide. Popinga is suddenly without a job, without faith, and soon to be without a roof over his head. Far from despairing, he uses this trauma as a trampoline. (S) My life has passed me by, drones Popinga, as do so many of us, (S) My real self lies elsewhere: "At base, he had perhaps always been an actor and, for fifteen years, had taken pleasure in a dignified and impassive image, that of a good Dutchman sure of himself, of his honor, of his virtue" (42). The opportunity to put these standards to the test presents itself, and he seizes it. He takes a one-way ride on the night train; destination: freedom. The first stop of the trip is Carlton Hotel, Amsterdam. There, out of resentment and, especially, awkwardness, he strangles his boss's mistress. So he takes a second night train; direction: Paris, of course.

  Is this a remake of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Is Popinga now playing his authentic role, that of ferocious beast? This would be to misread Simenon.

  The police are hot on Popinga's heels and, after a second criminal seizure, so is the underworld. Knowing that a hunted animal's habits are its worst enemy, Popinga settles on a plan:  "I will not only change restaurants and hotels, but my class identity as well" (151).  He also must get rid of his tics:  the cigar, the mocking look, the chess games, the need to have someone beside him in order to sleep.

  Tragic paradox. Popinga, who "had trouble resigning himself to life as a mere nobody in the crowd" (177), who watched "people pass by in the street like a stupid flock, single file" (214), who was convinced that "a man is always stronger than the crowd" (213), winds up entrusted with the most thankless of missions: to become unremarkable. He, who believed himself omnipotent, who "could permit himself anything! He could be whatever he wanted" (88-89), has to become The Man Without Qualities in order to survive. But a tabula rasa is not written in one day.

  Nor is perpetual self-renewal possible. Popinga knows that spontaneity will be his doom. His "scientific struggle" (his terms) implies a rigoros non-repetition - after ten days he has run out of gas: "He no longer had the right to ask for something to write with... Taking a train was forbidden, that was obvious!..  Girls?  He was still not sure of them... What did he still have the right to do?" (196).

  Popinga stands on the threshold of irreversible disorder, but a man is no mosquito, so he cannot cross it. He ends up abandoning the struggle, attempts suicide, then allows himself to be locked away in an asylum.

  Raving madman or alienated individual[35]? The book won't decide, indeed it rejects the distinction. Did routine preserve Popinga from "madness," or is it that, by denying himself routine, he discovered that there really is no alternative? I vote for the second hypothesis: void makes you mad, but, happily, nature abhors vacuum.

  It was not a lack of imagination that got the better of Popinga's reason, but rather the ambition to produce the unique, the unmarked unique, to boot. Now, how much that is new, totally, absolutely new, is imparted us?[36] If to repeat oneself is to die somewhat each time, even the life of the most extravagent being, that of a Philip K. Dick, for exemple, would boil down to a few doubtful spasms. (S) And the rest of the time?

  Popinga's defeat is grandiose because programmed. A tragic hero, his hubris causes his downfall, the hubris of one who defied elementary laws of the brain.

QUI N'IMITE S'IMITE

"I am not mad, but I

do not have your head"

                                          Diogenes the Cynic

The fugitive provincial, who knowingly casts off routine, ends by joining the sedentary provincial, who is deprived of routine almost against his will. With the exception of Popinga, all the "guinea pigs in spite of themselves" land on their feet. Is this the Vanka Stanka syndrome?[37] Yes, by definition, since Simenon recognizes no alternative to routine. No, however, if one understands by Vanka Stanka a return to the point of departure. For if these characters are indeed still subscribers to a routine, in the case of some, it has changed its function. What served as a social cement becomes a carapace of solipsism.

Young Cardinaud leads his wife back home, and picks up where he left off: 

  "He walked along the Embankment, just as on every Sunday...

                   ---As usual, monsieur Cardinaud?

  Nothing would change, nothing had changed. He still walked with the same gait, signalled hello with the same tip of the hat."

  Nothing has but the awareness that things that matter are not to be shared. Such as love:

  "She didn't love him, necer did, never will. Does it matter? He loved her and it was enough, he contented himself with her being his wife, with her living in his house, with her giving him children. It was much simpler than what people thought".

  Routine is a coagulant of solitude, the best in town. Under cover of the most apparently mind-numbing routine, one attains quietude, the key word (the "rosebud") of Simenon's oeuvre: "He said nothing. He never said anything. He was perhaps an idiot, or maybe a philosopher who lived out his personal life quite meekly, sheltered by an invisible shell."[38]

  Noli me tangere: the automaton "was respected. He was the head of the family. But, perhaps by dint of being so respected and feared,  he was kept out of most events. It was striking, all the more so because he had this calmness, this dignity that the deaf have when, in the midst of the agitations of others, they pursue their internal dream" (120).

  Only routine, drugs and alcohol permit one to attain quietude. Of Dupuche, Simenon says:  "He lived within himself.  He was self-sufficient."  Whence comes the happy ending, so uncommon in Simenon:  "Dupuche died, ten years later, of an acute haematuria, after having achieved his ambition."[39]

The biography of Franz Kafka demonstrates that monotony and genius are not incompatible. Still, Even a Kafka wasn't Kafka more than two hours a day - (S) And rest of the time? And what worked in Kafka's case is not recommended for you and me, monotony tends to devour its praticians body and soul. We proclame ourselves Nicodemites[40], monochrome on the surface, technicolor below. The facts of glaciology are there to set us straight: Underwater, all icebergs are wet. 

  For those who have not found nirvana, for those who are neither capable nor in search of it, Simenon designates the most solitary of pathways, the idio-routine. He who adopts it does not make an unsettled, disordered life, but rather a life regulated to the last milimeter---regulated by himself.

  Does routine serve as a safeguard?  Yes, it keeps the hero crazy or, failing that, monstrous. Instead of being "the ensemble of habits and prejudices, considered as an obstacle to novelty, creation, and progress" (Robert), routine gives birth in this case to the unheard of. Three characters are such alchemists: Uncle Charles, Octave Mauvoisin, and Doctor Kuperus.

  The life of Uncle Charles was perfectly drab: "For twenty years, for more than twenty years, nothing had happened... Never had there been an unexpected visitor, never a surprise in the mailbox, never anything that had changed their everyday life one iota"[41]. Then a double cataclysm occurs. He discovers the sordid past of Henri Dionnet, his hated employer and brother-in-law; at the same time, the stock certificate Charles has stolen from Dionnet becomes redeemable, and Charles is suddenly rich: "After twenty years, he could transform the life of the household from top to bottom, as if with a magic wand" (127). Uncle Charles is not Kees Popinga: "He had as much money as he wanted, and he had no idea what to do with it. What could he do with five hundred thousand francs? He had thought about that for days and nights, in the attic. In the end, he had done nothing at all. He had resumed his everyday life" (95).

  But now the same routine that he once simply endured has become a choice; to use gymnastics jargon, it has gone from being a compulsory exercice to a voluntary one. "Voluntary" here does not mean "improvised", on the contrary - To distinguish oneself from the crowd, it is enough to look neither to the right nor to the left, even on a beaten path. In applying routine by the book will Charles appropriate it. In this way, he can divert routine from its logical purpose. It served the interests of his employer, it will serve his own vengeance: "But his real life was in the office, in his cage, where he sat and waited, saying nothing, stubbornly persisting in saying nothing, watching his brother-in-law die slowly, ever so slowly, of fear" (150).

  Uncle Charles at length recovers his autistic disposition:  "He had always been like that, had always seemed like someone separated from the outside world by an invisible membrane.  Weren't deaf people rather the same?" (124)

  Three are but "this", do but "that": God, who does nothing but be, a dead man, who does nothing but not be, and a hero in a novel, who does nothing but pass by[42]. 

  Routine, like all activity, is a part-time occupation, only one of Simenon's characters practices it around the clock:  "Octave Mauvoisin, the man who never visited anyone, the man all alone who didn't speak, who didn't love, who had nothing else in life but rough solitary joys"[43]. Mauvoisin pushes routine to an almost Benedictine extreme, he is an order all in himself, an order with a single monk as member. To each of the divine offices of the Horarium of The Rule of Saint Benedict[44] there is a corresponding stage in his daily trajectory.

  After Mauvoisin's suspicious death, his nephew reconstructs one of his typical days, from Matins to Compline, guided by a Private Eye:

  It is half-past nine, you see... Your uncle would sit at this table, in the winter at the corner table inside the café...

  Here! This is where he would glance over his three newspapers while drinking a glass of white wine... He normally added some eau de Vichy...

  Mauvoisin, all by himself on the sunny terrace, would strike the table with a coin, pay for his drink and be off on his way at the strike of ten.

                   ---Mauvoisin came by here?

                   ---He came by. . . .

  With his same measured tread, he would again reach the quays.

                   ---Eleven o'clock.  We must now go to the Bar Lorrain..

  Mauvoisin, still alone, would walk the length of the sidewalks, following a schedule as minute as that of the green line of buses.

  At eleven, he sidled up to the mahogany counter. He did not need to order, because the rabbit-faced owner would bring him his bottle of port right away...

  Another glance around, a quick stroll through the bus offices. From time to time he gives a signature, standing.  Then lunch, up there, quietly, alone with Colette.

  Now, an hour of siesta. . . .

                   ---Now is the time to sign for the mail. . . .

                   ---My uncle would come to see you at this time, right?

                   ---He would go a second time to the Ouvrard Bank, Rinquet recited. At this time, they receive the last quotes from Paris... That leads us, monsieur Gilles, up to about four o'clock... For one hour, the program would vary... This is the moment in which I had the most difficulty reconstructing his timetable... Sometimes, he would take a walk over by the Basse and Plantel Company... That was on the meeting days of what they call the Union... One detail struck me: for these meetings, your uncle was always the last to arrive and, invariably, the last to leave...

                   ---Around five o'clock, your uncle entered the house of madame Eloi...

  As your uncle was putting his hand on the door knob, your aunt Eloi would press an electric bell communicating with the apartment. This meant that it was time to prepare the tea tray and bring it down...

  Invariably it was the same afternoon tea... Two cups... Weak tea... Toast on which your uncle spread orange marmalade...

  All this lasted year in year out, for almost twenty years, until the day someone in this crowd dared to put an end to it."

  Uncle Charles is a pervert, Octave Mauvoisin, a machine, and Hans Kuperus, MD, the perfect monster. He is The Murderer, to him goes the title of Simenon's ideal type.

  Doctor Kuperus's life is meticulously regulated, in step with the lives of the town notables, all members of the Billiards Academy. His rigid agenda permits his wife to cheat on him with the president of the Academy, and this same agenda gives Kuperus the opportunity to liquidate them both with impunity.

  The town is not fooled. His patients abandon him, his peers snub him. None of this matters. After the fashion of Winfree's mosquitoes, Kuperus becomes frenzied, then quickly finds a new equilibrium: "But nowadays nobody ever came. So to pass the time, he walked the streets with his hands in his pockets. And little by little his itinerary had been narrowed down until it was so invariable that anybody seeing him was apt to say: `It must be ten o'clock.  The doctor's just passed'"[45]. The social automaton has transformed himself into a private automaton.

  Routine does serve as a social cement; the inverse is true as well: to exclude a member of a group from daily rites is the beginning of his sentence of excommunication. "It had been a regular thing for years for the Van Malderens to come to tea on Thursday, and once a month they stayed on for dinner" (67). Now they suggest: "You ought to go away for a while" (71). Kuperus takes no notice. When the examining magistrate commends his "very wise decision" (106) in planning to take a long trip, everyone sighs with relief: "It's all arranged... He's going!" (108). False alarm, Kuperus won't go. His physician counsels him to "Clear out!  And as soon as possible" (117). Kuperus stays. On quitting his service, his maid and mistress joins her wisdom to the mob: "It would be best to leave." Far from obliging, the paria faces his excommunicators in the Academy of Billiards:

  "Another walk in the afternoon, and so the hours slipped by.  On the stroke of five he pushed open the door of the Onder den Linden. Nobody greeted him. He was no longer president of the club, and his name had been removed from the board. The players went on with their games, pretending not to see him...

  That didn't matter, however. As in the old days, the doctor had his seat, always the same one, and there he sat among his former friends, listening to their conversation, till it was time for him to go (131).

  Hans Kuperus explores routine in its full spectrum, from sameness to incommensurability: "According to age and temperament, imagination did its work.  For the children, Kuperus became a sort of supernatural monster, not far removed from Satan himself, and their blood ran cold in their veins if he came upon them unawares" (135).  "They didn't know!  No one knew what he was thinking, because he had escaped from their world and entered another, which existed for him alone" (ibid). Kuperus had become Acher, the Other.[46]

There is no alternative to routine but routine. One is spontaneous, we have it in our blood, through it we are drawn into the impersonal. The other is stylized, it runs counter to nature, through it we try to say an "I" made of quietude or intensity - No mirage without a desert.

  A man is a mosquito, except that he alone, of all the species, has the ability to become his own Winfree.