« Tout est bilatéral dans le domaine de la pensée »

Émile Blondet’s maxim Tout est bilatéral dans le domaine de la pensée presents the critic’s task as seeing an idea from both sides rather than fixing a single, final meaning. Spoken to Lucien de Rubempré, it is at once an account of interpretive freedom and a defense of the journalists’ trade: in this world, a writer need not treat every article as a declaration of personal belief.

The maxim and its logic

Blondet rebukes Lucien for taking his own written position seriously. He had expected Lucien to possess the intellectual strength to consider each matter in its “double form.” The maxim names that capacity: every idea has a front and a reverse, and no critic can confidently declare which side is the reverse. Blondet sharpens the thought with the related formulations Les idées sont binaires and Il n’y a que Dieu de triangulaire. Human thought, in this account, works through paired positions; only God stands outside that binary structure.

Criticism as the holding of opposites

Blondet makes the argument concrete through works and characters that resist a single verdict. Molière and Corneille, he says, can give voice both to Alceste and Philinte, or to Octave and Cinna. In La Nouvelle Héloïse, Rousseau wrote one letter for the duel and another against it, leaving readers unable to settle his true opinion by appealing to one side alone. Blondet then asks how criticism might choose between Clarisse and Lovelace, or Hector and Achilles, and which figure is Homer’s hero. These questions do not resolve the opposed readings; they make the critic’s obligation to contemplate a work from all its aspects the point of the examples.

Blondet’s closing description of critics as “great reporters” shifts the emphasis from judgment to range. Their work is to lay out competing positions, not to claim privileged knowledge of an author’s final intention. His question about Richardson’s intention belongs to the same sequence: the critic encounters evidence that can support more than one account, and the maxim cautions against pretending that one interpretation cancels the other.

From intellectual principle to journalistic practice

The exchange gives the maxim a pointed professional context. Félicien Vernou answers that journalists are merchants of phrases: they live by their trade, while articles read today are forgotten tomorrow. In his view, Lucien should save his thoughts and soul for a major book rather than invest them in ephemeral pieces. Blondet’s defense of interpretive doubleness thus meets Vernou’s defense of detachment from journalistic copy. The scene does not simply equate the maxim with cynicism; it shows how an argument for considering both sides can also make it easier to disclaim commitment to either.

The other journalists are astonished to discover Lucien’s scruples. They finish tearing the symbolic novice’s robe from him and give him the robe of a journalist. The maxim’s immediate narrative force lies in that passage: Lucien’s hesitation is met not with a settled answer about what he believes, but with an initiation into a profession where opinions may be treated as phrases in circulation.