Touché: The Duel in Literature
By John LeighHarvard University Press, 2015In the winter of 1837, Alexander Pushkin, the gifted leader of Russia’s literary Renaissance, master of nearly every genre, and inveterate duelist, received a bullet in the stomach and subsequently shot and wounded his opponent, Baron D’Anthes. The challenge was issued by Pushkin himself upon receiving anonymous letters that referred to him as a cuckold, insinuating an affair between Pushkin’s beautiful wife and D’Anthes. The wound incurred by Pushkin during that duel would kill him after two days of agony at the age of thirty eight, depriving Russia of a poet who would inspire national authors for two centuries, while D’Anthes, who was sentenced to death for the bout with Pushkin, ran from the country before the terms of his conviction could be carried out.What would prompt Pushkin to risk his life over an unconfirmed rumor written in a letter by society gossips? The answer to that question is simply and undoubtedly honor – a quality that distinguishes a man’s worth and signifies a keen awareness of the judgmental gaze of the other. Honor was virtually the raison d’etre for a 19th century nobleman like Pushkin. Insults from other noblemen – whether physical or verbal – functioned as a stain on his honor, and the only way to remove the stain was to duel, thereby demonstrating that honor was more valuable to the offended party than life itself. Thus, defending honor consisted of meeting the risk of death with equanimity, as though the Goddess Fortuna must smile on the honorable and frown on the dishonorable. The authorities of nearly every country in Europe and The United States, highly displeased by how often their subjects wounded or killed one another, outlawed the violent practice and decreed death to any man convicted of dueling. Yet the fear of capital punishment, which was rarely enforced, did not deter noblemen from taking part in an activity that entailed risking, if not welcoming, a bloody end, and the dueling tradition persisted long after the code of chivalry required noblemen to take up arms in the name of honor.In Touché: The Duel in Literature, John Leigh, a lecturer of French at Cambridge University, explores the opposition to dueling and its representation in texts of mostly French, English, and German literature from the late 17th to the 20th century, and he attempts to account for the duel’s endurance despite or because of its perennial censure. To resolve the contradiction between the duel’s condemnation and its historical popularity, Leigh’s book, which moves along two organizational lines simultaneously – chronological and thematic – investigates a wide range of legislative and authorial ways of contending with the scourge of dueling. Leigh uncovers King Louis XIV’s attempt to abolish dueling by issuing an edict that the duel had already been abolished; the 18th century argument that single combat was a barbaric practice originating in the Dark Ages; the literary representations of female responses to such acts of male aggression; the Romanticist depiction of the duel as an unnatural, calculating practice; the Darwinian view of this confrontation as analogous to conflict in the animal kingdom, which stripped the act of its aristocratic grandeur; and the late 19th and early 20th century literary works in which the search for honor or justice in a duel resulted only in absurdity. Yet not one of these attempts to “outlaw” or “discredit” the duel had deterred men from issuing or accepting challenges and meeting with swords or pistols at dawn. In fact, much of the criticism only gratified duelists, corroborating their view of single combat as a subversive act, an exercise of freedom.However, once the dueling tradition had waned, there was no reviving it.
In the modern age, now that people live longer, collect pensions, and may invoke incitement to hatred in court, the idea of risking one’s life gratuitously can only be a self-conscious anachronism, an irresponsible stunt or a limp joke… By calling another man out, a modern-day gentleman may find a way of laughing off a dispute with him and of thereby ensuring that it is taken no further.
Indeed, since the early 20th century, the practice of dueling had greatly diminished from the pages of history as well as from literary accounts, and the very subject evolved into a source of comedy. Today, the response to the demand for satisfaction would undoubtedly be laughter, instantly dissipating any necessity to duel at twenty paces. For laughter is the solvent of every symbolic conception we have about the self and is our most powerful weapon against challenges of a symbolic nature. As Cervantes had “smiled chivalry away” in Don Quixote, ridicule and caricature are indeed the tools required to reject and oppose dueling. But what exactly is the formula by which the duel could be “laughed into extinction,” to borrow a phrase from the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker? Leigh’s discussion of the duel’s history and of the literary texts that mock the practice provides the answer, illuminating the difficulty for the aristocratic male writer to openly deride the code of honor as well as the historical developments that ultimately cast the duel in a humorous light.While punishing the behavior of duelists and their seconds had proved ineffective, ridicule was meant to disclose the humor of the motivation behind dueling, which, as the anonymous author of The Duellist (1822) stated, “would perhaps be the best weapon to correct this mania, for those who fight through the dread of being laughed at, may be induced to avoid it from fear of the same impending punishment.” Leigh divides the literary works that amusingly expose the duel’s follies into two categories:
Genus A: In which either or each of the combatants… is ridiculous, because they arenot sufficiently valorous or, often by way of explanation, aristocratic.Genus B: In which we see a ridiculous custom, which impairs and wastes the lives of Otherwise decent, serious individuals.
Texts that that fall into the first classification are easy to come by. One such play is Moliere’s brilliantly comedic Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), about a man who, having acquired some money, longs to lead the lifestyle of a gentleman and learns the art of the sword in order to take part in duels without having to risk his life in the process. Works of the Genus A category are comedies that ridicule the duelists, “not the duel” itself, and this insufficiently aristocratic gentilhomme is indeed unable to comprehend the very purpose of dueling. Another variation on this comedic device is a representation of a duelist who treats such a courteous and ritualized practice no differently from a brawl or who utilizes it for his own personal benefit. Although Leigh’s discussion of the various brawls in Tobias Smolett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) takes place in a chapter unrelated to the comical derision of the duel, they can indubitably be categorized as Genus A clashes. Indeed, Random is a dishonorable duelist, picking fights for profit, for self-interest, that is, to “redress… [his] disinherited social position.” This character employs the duel as a means toward ennoblement, negotiating his social status and even the love of a lady he favors. Other texts that utilize this trope, encountered in Leigh’s subsequent chapters, mock the duelist who fights for “ridiculous” reasons. One such example is the lover in Merimee’s “Le vase etrusque” (1830), who chooses to die in a duel merely because he erroneously believes that his beloved has been previously involved with a much too boring, tasteless man. However, ridiculing the irrationality of the cause of dueling proved as ineffective as capital punishment, for the very “recklessness” that appeared so silly to critics also signified that the duelist was “not tainted by self-interest or darkened by the shadows of calculation,” and it “could be misconstrued as proof of valor.”The problem with Leigh’s typology is that only works categorized as Genus A can be properly called comedies, mocking the participants of dueling, albeit not the duel itself. Leigh offers only one example of a text that belongs to Genus B – Sedaine’s Le philosophe sans le savoir (1765) – yet his rationale is not entirely convincing, for Sedaine’s tragicomedy succeeds only in treating the duelists with humor, rather than deriding the tradition or the practice of dueling. The first of the two duels that haunt these pages is undoubtedly tragic, because it results in dire consequences: one of the principals dies. The second duel is portrayed more humorously, for the duelists are said to “fall off their horses.” Yet while Leigh assures us that this “does not detract from the pathos,” the mere fact that the principals are both alive, well, and on friendly terms by the duel’s conclusion renders these men and the cause of their fight ridiculous, while the duel itself, if fought for the right reasons, remains unshakable for the writer of comedy. And although the play indisputably inveighs against dueling through the poignant monologue of the duelist’s melancholy father, it does not do so humorously. Not surprisingly, such literary ridicule did not succeed in deterring would-be duelists from taking part in the by now antiquated tradition. The duel “proves resilient and elastic,” resisting change, for opposition is easily thwarted by the duel’s internal mechanism; it seems impossible to escape the ritual. Leigh suggests that at least some of the difficulty in openly mocking the tradition of dueling lies in the male writer’s own fear of appearing dishonorable or cowardly.Leigh never overstates his case, never reduces the ambiguities and paradoxes of his subject. When he discusses the “extinction of the duel” upon the First World War, he calls it a “half truth,” signifying that the literary representation of the duel had diminished but had not entirely been eliminated. Yet “the duel reaches a new height of absurdity in these pages,” such as the depiction in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain of a “delopement” – discharging one’s weapon in the air – and a suicide, occurring in a single bout. Or, more humorously, Gregor von Rezzori’s En Ermine in Czernopol (1958) depicts the plight of a character who unsuccessfully challenges several individuals to a duel in response to gossip regarding his sister-in-law. By now, the duel is truly a comedic affair, for not one of the offenders is able to comprehend the challenge, let alone engage in a duel, finding not the duelist, but the duel itself too humorous and antiquated.Why does World War I change the duel’s status, which two centuries of literary disapproval was unable to alter? Irina Reyfman has suggested a potential explanation, albeit in a somewhat different context, in her comprehensive book on the practice of dueling in Russia – Ritualized Violence Russian Style: The Duel in Russian Culture and Literature. Reyfman asserts that the practice of dueling waned in Russia when it was no longer opposed by the Czar. For Russian noblemen, she maintains, the dueling tradition functioned as a means of contention with the authoritarian state, a defense of “physical inviolability” and “personal autonomy.” The duel would cease to serve such a function when the practice became not only sanctioned, but indeed enforced by the authorities in the early 20th century. For instance, in Alexander Kuprin’s novel, The Duel (1905), the protagonist dies in a duel that he is reluctant to fight despite a consuming passion for the wife of his opponent. Leigh discusses the grotesqueness of this bout, for the principal does not believe in the honor associated with the act, yet Leigh does not provide the reason for such waning interest. According to Reyfman’s formulation, Kuprin’s character is unwilling to duel, because he is coerced into doing so by the state, which signifies that the act has lost its subversive value. And perhaps the same reasoning could account for the decline of the dueling tradition all over Europe. Men are not willing to fight “on a whim” when obliged to do so in the Great War.Leigh offers his own explanation for the war’s effect on dueling culture, arguing that the duel was “eclipsed in the tumult” of World War I,” forced to recede into the past, which it had resisted for several centuries.
Never such punctilio again… Such attributes as honor and courage, given expressionby the duel, seemed to be located in an irrevocably vanished past…
Juxtaposed with the battle of “global dimensions” and the burdens of modern living, the duel – an artifact of the past – appeared irrelevant, decadent, even puerile. Yet beyond the argument he articulates, Leigh’s book also suggests that World War I had finally achieved what numerous comedies could not. “The inglorious drudgery of trench warfare” had created a backdrop for the duel, and diminishing “any exalted notion of face-to-face combat,” rendered the duel “utterly trivial and laughable” by contrast. Demonstrating this, in Evelyn Waugh’s Officers and Gentlemen (1955), Guy Crouchback facilely dismisses the duel as merely humorous:
‘Guy, what would you do if you were challenged to a duel?’‘Laugh.’‘Yes, of course.’
Indeed, when faced with compulsory violence on a mass scale, laughter at the duel becomes the symptomatic expression of disdain toward subjecting ourselves to the bloody and inescapable ritual voluntarily.Throughout his stylistically masterful and thematically comprehensive book, Leigh compares the duel to a work of literature – it is a “drama… with a beginning, a middle, and an end.” Hence, “a duel, however violent, can be read and appreciated like a text.” And this is particularly the reason that a study of the dueling tradition is so valuable: it not only grants the reader of literature access into the characters’ psychic depths, but it is a prism through which we can read human motivation:
The duel is… a laboratory for an inspection of the human qualities…[it] is a lens trained onto human nature… Or rather it is a magnifying glass in which those inherent drives and emotions are enlarged.
The duel offers insight into the role of honor in individual and collective consciousness, uncovering the significance of upholding a pristine image of the self. Whether we must accept the challenge to duel or humorously waive the need to defend our public persona, we implicitly know what it takes to preserve honor – we read the social cues and, akin to a chameleon-like nobleman of previous centuries, comport ourselves accordingly. And for this reason, whether refusing to duel or ridiculing the dueling tradition and the underlying code of honor in a literary text, moving against the grain has been the real challenge. Until those mores reversed, laughter, rather than fighting, would have been the more courageous act. Humor in the face of this convention, in the face of being called a coward, eliminates any possibility or necessity for dueling, providing the means by which to reject a duel. And in order to terminate the dueling mechanism, a principal like Pushkin only needed gall enough to laugh off the insinuation of his wife’s infidelity, to laugh at D’Anthes, at the gossips who wrote those insulting letters, and most importantly, at himself.____Jane Shmidt is a Ph.D. candidate of Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. She teaches English and Russian literature at Hunter College and City College. She is working on a dissertation that examines the subject of lovesickness in medicine and literature.
