It does not matter whether those who have (fortunately) not read Le forgeron de la Cour-Dieu have managed to make head or tail of this torrent of anagnorisis involving characters they know nothing about. It is all the better for them to remain in a state of confusion, since this novel, in comparison to feuilleton classics, is like a film that, to attract a Last Tango in Paris audience, offers its spectators 120 minutes of uninterrupted rear penetration between a hundred patients in a psychiatric hospital. Which is exactly what Sade did in The 120 Days of Sodom, pushing down the accelerator pedal for hundreds of pages, whereas Dante limited himself to writing “he kissed my mouth, trembling all over.”
Ponson du Terrail’s recognitions are pointless, apart from being exaggeratedly redundant, because the reader already knows all about his characters. But for the benefit of readers who are easy to please, a touch of sadism is brought into play. The characters in the novel play the part of village idiots—they are the last to understand what the readers and the other characters in the story have understood perfectly well.
Village-idiot anagnorisis is divided into anagnorisis of real idiots and falsely accused idiots. We have a real idiot when the elements of plot, details, facts, confidential information, and unambiguous signs all point toward the anagnorisis, and the character alone remains ignorant; in other words, the plot has provided both him and the reader with the means of resolving the enigma, and the fact that he has failed to do so is inexplicable. The perfect example of the real idiot, used critically by authors, is the detective story in which the policeman offers a sharp contrast to the detective (who gains knowledge at the same rate that the reader does). But there are cases in which the idiot is falsely accused because the events themselves are of no help to him, and what makes the reader aware of what is happening is popular plot tradition. For example, the reader knows, through narrative tradition, that character X must be the child of character Y. But Y cannot know this, since he has not read serial fiction.
A typical case is that of Rodolphe of Gérolstein in Les mystères de Paris. Rodolphe has met La Goualeuse, otherwise known as Fleur-de-Marie, a sweet, defenseless prostitute, and as soon as we are told that his daughter, whom he had had with Sarah McGregor, was taken away from him when she was very young, we immediately guess that Fleur-de-Marie can only be his daughter. But why should Rodolphe imagine he is the father of a young girl he comes across by chance in a sordid tavern? He will find out, quite rightly, only at the end. But Eugène Sue knows we will already suspect something, and reveals the answer at the end of the first installment: this is a typical case of subjection of the plot to the rules of literary tradition and commercial distribution. Literary tradition ensures that the reader already knows what is the most probable solution, whereas the weekly distribution of the feuilleton, with the story that continues for an endless number of installments, requires that the reader not be kept in suspense for too long, for fear of losing track of the story. Sue is therefore obliged to close that question so that he can open others without overburdening the reader’s memory and capacity for suspense.
In narrative terms, he commits one suicide while keeping his best card for the second round. But the suicide occurred as soon as he chose to move according to obvious narrative solutions: the popular novel cannot be complex, not even in the invention of plot.
There is a last device in the category of pointless anagnorisis: the topos of the false stranger. At the beginning of a chapter, the popular novel often introduces a mysterious character who is unfamiliar to the readers. But a little further into the action they are told, “The stranger, whom the reader will have recognized as our X . . .” Here again we have a feeble narrative expedient through which the narrator introduces once again, in a cheap way, the pleasure of revelation. Note here that the anagnorisis is not directed at the character (the stranger knows perfectly well who he is, and generally appears in a dark alleyway, or in a private room, without the others having yet seen him). And if the reader is familiar with feuilletons, he understands straightaway that the stranger is a false stranger and can generally guess immediately who he is. But the author insists, nevertheless, on trying to make him play the role of village idiot—and perhaps with some readers he succeeds.
Although, from the point of view of plot style, these cheap devices constitute narrative padding, from the point of view of psychological enjoyment and success they work wonderfully—the laziness of readers demands that they be blandished with mysteries they have already solved or can solve easily.