La réversibilité de la critique

La réversibilité de la critique, or the reversibility of criticism, is both a theory of how literature may be read and a practical method of newspaper commerce. Émile Blondet presents ideas as having two sides, so a critic should be able to defend and attack the same work; his colleagues then turn that openness into a scheme for reversing Lucien de Rubempré’s negative review of Raoul Nathan. The concept’s force lies in its double edge: interpretive flexibility can recognize complexity, but in the press it can also make conviction disposable and contradiction profitable.

A theory of two-sided interpretation

Blondet explains that Lucien’s mistake is not simply that he criticized Nathan’s book, but that he believed his own criticism had to express a settled judgment. In Blondet’s account, every literary idea has a reverse as well as a face, and no critic can claim the authority to decide which side is final. The critic’s task is instead to consider a work from all its aspects. This is not presented as a small concession to fairness: Blondet treats the capacity to apprehend opposing positions as a measure of intellectual power, and criticism as the art of reporting rather than delivering a final verdict.

To make the argument concrete, Blondet invokes works whose opposed positions resist a simple ruling: Molière lets one character affirm what another denies; Rousseau wrote both for and against dueling in letters in The New Heloise; and the contrast between Clarissa and Lovelace, Hector and Achilles, raises the question of which character or intention should govern a reader’s judgment. The examples widen the principle beyond newspaper reviewing. If major literary works can hold contrary arguments or competing claims to attention, the critic who insists on one definitive position risks mistaking a partial reading for the whole work.

Blondet condenses this position into the maxim that everything in thought has two sides. In the conversation, that proposition works as an intellectual defense of ambiguity, but also as a license: if opposing readings can both be made plausible, the reviewer need not remain bound to the conclusion previously published. The episode leaves open whether such flexibility is a higher form of criticism or a convenient way to avoid responsibility for judgment.

Lucien’s reversal as a test

Lucien initially resists the proposed change of direction. His review of Nathan’s book was negative, and he says that he can see nothing to praise in it. His colleagues’ proposal therefore asks for more than a new interpretation: they want him to write an article that refutes his own earlier one. When Lucien says he meant what he wrote, the others treat that sincerity as inexperience. Félicien Vernou’s paper had left the attack unsigned, while Lucien’s future praise could be signed; the press’s conventions thus make reversal not only possible but legible as a professional maneuver.

The contrast between Lucien’s scruple and Vernou’s account of the trade exposes the cost of the principle. Vernou describes journalists as dealers in phrases and argues that short-lived articles are worth what they pay, unlike a book into which an author may put his thoughts and soul. Under that standard, consistency is not a virtue required of a reviewer: it is an unnecessary attachment to work that will soon be forgotten. The image of the colleagues tearing away Lucien’s student’s robe to put him into the adult robe of a journalist makes his change of profession resemble an initiation. What he must leave behind is not only a particular opinion, but the belief that an article deserves personal commitment.

The manufacture of opposing reviews

The colleagues’ immediate plan has a commercial object. Nathan is their friend, and they fear that Lucien’s unsigned attack could make him an enemy who might harm Lucien’s first publication. They propose that Lucien write three columns for Hector Merlin’s paper praising the very book he has attacked. Lousteau predicts that Nathan will move from regarding Lucien as a spy and a scoundrel to embracing him as a great man and friend. The reversal is designed to repair a relationship, but also to create the appearance of a tightly contested debate that will help sell Nathan’s book.

The plan depends on the different uses of anonymity and signature. An attack can remain unsigned, while praise can bear a name. Lucien may sign with a C in Vernou’s paper, associated with the pure Left, or with an L in Merlin’s Centre-right paper; Vernou has avoided binding Lucien’s future opinions by placing the unsigned attack under a separate mark. Later, Blondet imagines a review signed in full as DE RUBEMPRE, which would present Lucien’s contradictory pieces as part of a larger public discussion rather than a confession of inconsistency. The changing signatures and political settings make opinion look at once personal and adjustable, attached to the outlet and occasion as much as to the writer.

Blondet supplies the language for this manufactured defense. Lucien is to claim that envy has tried to bite into a beautiful work, and that critics invented a division between literature devoted to ideas and literature devoted to images in order to find faults. He should argue that the highest art impresses an idea upon an image, praise Nathan and Canalis for enriching French language, and present the modern novel as a form capable of joining feeling, style, image, character, description, dialogue, and plot. The proposed article would thus overturn Lucien’s previous argument while appearing to offer a broad account of literary progress and form. Its sophistication does not make the transaction less calculated: the prescription is given in advance, down to the praise of Nathan and the denunciation of the earlier critics.

Contradiction as commerce and critical limit

The projected sequence of reviews turns contradiction into a sales strategy. Dauriat has come with three thousand francs for Lucien, and the colleagues estimate further payments for the new pieces: a fee from Merlin, then payments connected with a review in Finot’s Revue. Blondet imagines that Lucien could earn four hundred francs in the week, while producing several mutually incompatible judgments. The public, he suggests, may side with the critic marked C, the one marked L, Rubempré, or perhaps all three. Like buckets lowered into a well, the rival reviews offer different routes to a truth that no single article can claim to possess.

The irony is that the language of interpretive openness serves an operation with a definite intended result: Nathan’s first edition has already sold, and the attack, followed by a strong defense, is expected to help sell two thousand copies that week. The claim that criticism must see every side can therefore describe a real difficulty of judgment while concealing who benefits from prolonging the dispute. The literary work is treated both as an object demanding multiple readings and as merchandise whose reception can be managed through them.

The conversation later generalizes the mechanism. Claude Vignon says that contradiction gives life to literature; Fulgence Ridal compares it to opposing principles in nature, where the triumph of one over the other means death; Michel Chrestien extends the analogy to politics. Lousteau then points back to Nathan’s book as proof that an attacked work, if well defended, can sell. Across these formulations, opposition is not merely an obstacle to success. It becomes the condition that produces movement, debate, and public attention. Yet the book’s commercial triumph depends on a distinction the episode refuses to settle: whether opposed criticism reveals a work’s genuine plurality, or whether the newspaper trade manufactures that plurality because conflict sells.