Narrative Transaction and Transference (Unburying "Le Colonel Chabert")

Abstract

Burial alive offers a version of ultimate horror that has a rich literary career, at least from M. G. Lewis' The Monk through the tales of Edgar Allen Poe. As a nightmare responding to our most primitive fears, beyond its specifically Gothic manifestations burial alive may evoke ancient punishments for the transgression of impurity (as with sinning vestal virgins, sealed alive in the tomb) or indeed the entire mechanism, and burden, of repression, burying and encrypting a past which insists on continuing to live: the archeological image of repression which Freud found so well represented in the Pompeii of Jensen's Gradiva.' The fascination exercised on the literary imagination by burial alive may point to a specifically literary obsession with the buried utterance: the word, the tale, entombed without listener. The work of Balzac, for instance, includes several tales about discourses blocked in the telling or the listening: the visionary masterpiece of Frenhofer in Le Chef d'oeuvre inconnu, which never can be represented in the artist's syntax; the blind Facino Cane's tale of lost riches, described as a buried Odyssey; or, perhaps most radically, Stephanie de Vandieres' love story, in Adieu, condemned to an amnesia and aphasia lifted only by a cure that at once proves mortal. Here and elsewhere in Balzac, we have tales which contain within their frames stories that never manage to be fully told, that are somehow blocked in the process of transmission or realization, that remain inaccessibly buried. The most haunting case of all may be Le Colonel Chabert, which offers a literal instance of burial alive, a fully-detailed enactment of the nightmare. Yet Chabert escapes his bodily entombment, digging his way out of the mass battlefield grave with a dead comrade's detached arm-has escaped it prior to the opening of Balzac's narrative. The true horror of the text lies in a yet more painful analogue and product of his living entombment: the possibility that his story may remain buried; the nightmare of a certain narrative situation and the vicissitudes of the narrative desire. Chabert, we may remind ourselves, was a colonel in Napoleon's armies. Victim of a deep headwound at the battle of Eylau, he is judged dead, and buried in a mass grave on the battlefield. Regaining consciousness in the silence of the tomb, he manages to dig his way out and to emerge, naked, in a second birth, to be cared for by Prussian peasants, until one day he remembers who he is, or was. Returning destitute to Paris, he finds that, since his death was recorded in the official Bulletin of the battle, his wife not only has inherited his property and received his death benefit but also has remarried, to a Faubourg Saint-Germain aristocrat,