Before Fiction: The Ancien Régime of the Novel 9780812205107

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Before Fiction

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BEFOR E FICTION The Ancien Régime of the Novel

NICHOLAS D. PAIGE

u n i v e r s i t y of pe n ns y lva n i a pr e s s p h i l a de l p h i a

Copyright © 2011 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN 978-0-8122-4355-0

Tout étant égal d’ailleurs, j’aime mieux l’histoire que les fictions. —Denis Diderot

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Contents

Preface

ix

Introduction: The Three Regimes of the Novel

1

Chapter 1. The Impossible Princess (Lafayette)

35

Chapter 2. Quixote Circa 1670 (Subligny)

62

Chapter 3. How to Read a Mind (Crébillon)

90

Chapter 4. The Aesthetics of Sentiment (Rousseau)

115

Chapter 5. The Demon of Reality (Diderot)

139

Chapter 6. Beyond Belief (Cazotte)

171

Conclusion: On Narrators Natural and Unnatural

198

Notes

207

Bibliography

255

Index

277

Acknowledgments

285

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Preface

This book proposes a new history of the novel in France and England in which fiction itself is the primary variable; my account then provides the ground for understanding the fictional status of a series of (mostly) canonical novels from the early French tradition—or, more to the point, for understanding why they may not in fact be fictional. Both the larger narrative and the individual readings are subtended by an approach to the evolution of literary forms that parts company with most work on the novel’s history, and this, as much as fiction, is my subject as well. First, the big picture: I sketch out here a history of fiction. Elaborating and substantially modifying the arguments of a number of specialists of the English novel, I argue that fiction is not at all coterminous with “literature” or what used to be called “poetry,” but is a rather recent phenomenon. Saying this, I am not following common modern usage and taking fiction as a synonym for the novel; though the present study is restricted to novels, it is not about their birth. By fiction, I mean something better though more awkwardly captured by the substantive “fictionality,” which is to say the peculiar yet for us intuitive way that novels refer to the world: via invented characters and plots, they purport to tell us how people and institutions and abstractions like money or power work. This is peculiar logically: how can writers possibly persuade readers of their view of the world if they are just making up their evidence? More important, it is historically peculiar. For one thing, the type of invention commonly practiced by novelists starting in the nineteenth century has few analogues in earlier times, which accorded little respect to writers dabbling in subject matter entirely of their own creation, and which largely understood the term fiction to designate a form of lying as deplorable as any other. Moreover, openly invented characters were a rarity for a good chunk of the novel’s development in France and England: in the late seventeenth century and for almost all the eighteenth, novelists presented themselves as mere editors, and their inventions as real documents or reports. Modern readers

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have often looked back on such pretense of literal truth with a certain degree of bafflement, but our present reflex, according to which the real-world existence of the characters we read about matters not a bit, would have proved just as baffling to readers throughout the two preceding millennia. No doubt there are many valid and useful definitions of fiction and fictionality according to which the above distinctions seem but split hairs: isn’t all literary imagining a part of what philosopher Kendall Walton has called the human propensity to “make believe”? And more seriously, perhaps: doesn’t Aristotle, in the West’s founding document of literary criticism, place the distinction between poetry and history front and center? Such are two main obstacles between us and a history of fiction, but they are far from insurmountable. As we will see, the principal hurdle of the Poetics is simply that we read it through our knowledge of what is to come, which is to say, fiction. And though my definition of fiction is undeniably only one of many possible definitions, it has the advantage of enabling us to distinguish between three historical regimes of literary invention in a way we cannot if we just make some “consciousness of fiction” the bedrock of all literary endeavor. The three regimes, which succeed one another in their dominance, are the following. Most of the Western literary tradition since Homer can be understood through the lens of Aristotle’s Poetics, which described and sanctioned an enduring articulation (not opposition) of poetry and history; according to this model, the poet adds his inventions to the renowned heroes and events of history so as to make a good plot. The second regime starts around 1670 and lasts until roughly the turn of the nineteenth century. During this time, novelists cease posing as Aristotelian poets and instead pretend to offer their readers real documents ripped straight from history—found manuscripts, entrusted correspondence, true stories, and all the rest. Following Barbara Foley, I will be calling this type of novel pseudofactual, in that it masquerades as a serious utterance. That the masquerade is almost always patent should not tempt us to confuse it with what happens under the third, properly fictional regime: the pseudofactual pact demanded that readers pretend to regard novels as true, whereas later novelists asked for something quite different—that they accept the writer’s inventions as a kind of model of reality. This is how the nineteenth century replaces the old distinction between poetry and history with fiction as we have come to know and practice it. This narrative provides the context for the bulk of the book, comprised of six case studies illuminating the strange interregnum between Aristotelian poetics and modern fiction, a period during which the omnipresent formal

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feature of the novel was pseudofactual posturing. The first two chapters probe the leading edge of the regime via one novel long accepted as a canonical milestone and one that has been completely forgotten. Because of its combination of an invented heroine and a carefully drawn historical setting, Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678) can easily be seen as a major step on the road to modern fictionality. In fact, it simply demonstrates that individual works, however successful, need not be signs of wider transformation: the apparently fictional Princess is better understood as a one-time and idiosyncratic twist on the traditional Aristotelian understanding of the poet’s use of history. Subligny’s forgotten La Fausse Clélie (1670), a Frenchified Don Quixote, allows me to tackle what has been for many decades if not centuries a basic way of understanding the novel’s history—to wit, that the “modern novel” replaces archaic “romance.” While similar though not identical divisions were made repeatedly in the period, the novel-romance opposition is not in fact able to account for texts like Subligny’s or even Cervantes’s. Romance was not “dead” for either writer, it was just in need of updating; and La Fausse Clélie constitutes a signal attempt to make romance forms safe for a pseudofactual age. The subsequent four chapters are devoted to works that stretch the conventions of the pseudofactual regime without—and this is crucial—causing those conventions to crumble in favor of modern fiction. Crébillon’s Les Égarements du coeur et de l’esprit (1736–38) is the most sustained example of a new novel of manners that imported a model of invention from comedy—comedy, which since Molière had allowed writers to comment on contemporary social “types” without taking aim at specific individuals. But though Crébillon put no energy into bolstering the pseudofactual pretense of his memoir novel and even narrated thoughts in a manner often associated with modern fiction, his experiment, like Lafayette’s, did not change the way novels were written. Indeed, pseudofactuality had bright days ahead. The sentimental novel’s goal of giving the genre the emotional and moral gravitas of tragedy necessitated a reinvestment in reality: all available theories of aesthetic effect made the audience’s belief in the artwork the foundation of emotional experience and moral improvement. This does not mean that writers such as Rousseau and Diderot were naïve about how novels worked. On the contrary, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1762), commonly advanced as the epitome of quixotic fusion between reader and book, is a laboratory for producing an emotion proper to observers who identify with protagonists even as they maintain distance from them. And Diderot’s sentimental novels and tales, though often seen as signaling through their irony a fictional consciousness to come, remain thoroughly

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and necessarily enmeshed in pseudofactual presuppositions. The final chapter centers on novelistic subgenres that are tailor-made for thinking about aesthetic effects that don’t require literal belief—the fantastic and the gothic. But although a work such as Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux (1772) clearly pushes hard against the governing Horatian dictum of incredulus odi—readers reject what they cannot believe—it is no more predictive of the future than any of the other works examined. The problem of “predictiveness” brings me to the methodological heart of Before Fiction. For it is the relation of the individual novels examined in the six chapters to my larger narrative—a narrative of collective behavior—that separates this book from most histories of the novel. Individual works, especially great ones, are usually the data points that permit the literary historian to plot out an evolution. Thus, given the chronological arc of the novels I’ve chosen, the obvious assumption would be that I am tracing an evolution, and more precisely, that I see these works as bringing fiction into existence. But this is emphatically not the case. Before Fiction could not have been titled The Rise or The Invention of Fiction, since Cazotte, Diderot, Rousseau, Crébillon, Subligny, and Lafayette are not all engaged in the same great project. These writers are not feeling their way through the pseudofactual night toward the bright light of the fictional day. Nor have they intuited some truth about literature—say, Coleridge’s unfortunately proverbial “willing suspension of disbelief ”—that we all now embrace. None anticipate developments that would only become dominant later, or bears witness to a collective cultural realization. And they do not relay one another: Diderot does not “learn” from his one-time friend Rousseau; Rousseau in turn learns nothing from Lafayette (whom he nonetheless admired). No one stands on anyone’s shoulders to get a better look into the future. At the same time, it is not that some other change—the advent of a “concept” of fiction, or of modernity tout court—is readable in the works of authors who were extraordinarily sensitive to their transitional moment. Isolated literary works are not signs of anything else; if they were, they would not be isolated. What, then, can be the broader significance of the novels under study? In a sense, none: they don’t add up to anything; they don’t register momentous change. But this doesn’t mean that they are not instructive. On the contrary, their authors’ complex engagement with the problem of novelistic reference in the wake of Aristotelian poetics brings the larger narrative into focus. Most writers of the period, even good and great ones, give no more thought to the pseudofactual posture than, say, a filmmaker in our day who ends up

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producing a color feature lasting between 100 and 140 minutes. It’s just how things are normally done. The authors under study, meanwhile, scrutinize the problem of how to write literature that doesn’t take as its subject matter the heroes of the past. How can novelists refer to their world without writing about people who are actually part of that world? In asking this question, they push at and play with the conventions of the time; in some cases one might even say that they destroy those conventions. But to the extent that this is the right word, their destructions are local: these individuals do not alter collective practice. I will offer, especially in the Conclusion, some thoughts on how collective practice does change—thoughts, because the type of data needed would dictate a different type of study altogether. For the moment it is enough to insist that though we like to view our favorite authors as heroes or at least as paragons of historical acuity, the truth is much more plain: writers are of their time and place, which is to say, bound by a set of practices and rationales that they do indeed transform, but in limited ways, often without wider effect, and certainly not with our unborn needs in mind. By the pressure they put on Aristotelian and pseudofactual conventions, these six novelists may appear to be gesturing in the direction of fiction, but we mustn’t give in to magical thinking: the mirage is generated simply by our coming after fiction. Lafayette, Diderot, and Rousseau are not so much agents of the transformation of Aristotelian poetics into modern fiction as they are participant-observers of processes whose momentum—and inertia—outbulks the contributions of individuals, no matter how perceptive or talented. The novel, envisioned as a history of shared practices and forms, would look much the same without the great writers customarily regarded as the motors of generic change. “Studies in the morphological history of the novel”: this would have made an apt if offputting subtitle for a book concerned not with what deeper things novels “reflect” but with how forms evolve. My subtitle as it actually reads demands a couple of qualifications. The first relates to the term I’ve chosen to designate the three approaches to literary invention—the Aristotelian, the pseudofactual, and the fictional. I attach no particular importance to the word regime itself; it appears, say, in work by Jacques Rancière and François Hartog, but my use does not follow from theirs. (When speaking of these regimes not as time periods but as ways of writing novels, I often call them “modes”—a term that, likewise, is not intended to recall Northrop Frye.) For me, a regime is merely a fairly stable but not monolithic way of thinking about and writing (narrative) literature; as I will take pains to point out, in no sense should it be taken as implying a perceptual or conceptual matrix on the order of Thomas

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Kuhn’s “paradigms” or Michel Foucault’s “epistemes.” My subtitle, then, contains some wordplay. On a basic level, “The Ancien Régime of the Novel” means nothing more than “The Novel in the Early Modern Period”; in a more important sense, the novel’s Ancien Régime is the pseudofactual regime, the interregnum between Aristotelian poetry and modern fiction. The second remark concerns the fact that my shorthand carries some baggage better left behind at once. Since only France had an Ancien Régime, it is easy to conclude that my overarching theory of regimes applies to France alone, and that the sociopolitical context of the country explains its novel. The pseudofactual, readers might reason, must have something to do with absolutist monarchy; by extension, perhaps Aristotelian poetics suits the politics of the Classical and feudal ages, while fiction is made possible by the French Revolution. This would be nonsense, however. At most, “Ancien Régime” advertises that the individual works analyzed are French, while hopefully not obscuring the fact that the larger narrative covers the English domain as well. Cultural specificity matters to the novel’s history in all sorts of ways too obvious to mention. Nevertheless, and pace the many scholars who have explained the novel as first and foremost and necessarily English, Before Fiction argues that the problem of novelistic reference was shared because it was the result of a broad breakdown in Western poetic practice. Unless otherwise indicated, translations and ellipses are my own; italics in quoted sources are not. Without completely modernizing punctuation, I have occasionally modified it for clarity. For economy I typically use last names alone when referring to authors of the period under study; readers needing greater precision of course will find it in the Index.

Introduction: The Three Regimes of the Novel

One peculiarity of novels when they first arrived in the eighteenth century was that they told new stories rather than recomposing old ones. Their characters were singular; each novel had to introduce its readers to a new world. This has not changed. —John Mullan, How Novels Work

Gottlob Frege’s essay “On Sense and Reference,” published in 1892, stands at the beginning of modern philosophical interest in fictionality—that is, in the truth status of fictional propositions. Poetry—roughly, what we now call literature— had of course long been seen as a special kind of deceit that, at least for poetry’s many defenders, led mysteriously back to the truth. “The truest poetry is the most feigning,” says Shakespeare’s Touchstone; “The novel establishes its birthright as a lie that is the foundation of truth,” writes Carlos Fuentes much more recently; and indeed, the literary ground since the Greeks is strewn with chestnuts such as these.1 “The history of Western literary theory,” as one noted theorist puts it, “can be summed up as a continuous debate on the classical dictum that poets are liars.”2 Frege’s interest was nonetheless distinct, for he was interested in semantic questions regarding language’s capacity to refer to the world; literary language was a curious subspecies that did not, he argued, refer at all. If we read, in Homer, that “Odysseus was set ashore at Ithaca while he was sound asleep,” we understand the proposition as having a sense even though the proper name Odysseus has no reference in the real world, and thus no truth-value. “In hearing an epic poem . . . apart from the euphony of language we are interested only in the sense of sentences and the images and feelings thereby aroused. . . . Hence it is a matter of no concern to us whether the name ‘Odysseus,’ for instance, has a reference, so long as we accept the poem as a work of art.”3

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“A matter of no concern to us,” perhaps, but would the ancient Greeks have felt the same way? To be fair, Frege’s essay is only tangentially concerned with literary reference; it focuses on the way signs in general refer, and Frege, like many early theorists, felt that sharply separating out literature from “natural” forms of discourse clarified the issues.4 It is therefore not surprising that, as a theory of fiction, Frege’s treatment of Homer leaves much to be desired. But one of its shortcomings in particular is shared by more modern and elaborate theories of fiction. That shortcoming is historical. We are welcome to our doubts about Odysseus’s reality, or for that matter about Athena’s—as were, presumably, the Greeks—but Homer certainly didn’t “invent” them in the manner that Balzac invented Old Goriot or Dickens invented Little Dorrit. Epic heroes and the gods were quite simply attested: they were authorized by tradition. They may or may not have had reference in Frege’s empirical sense, but they didn’t need any: they possessed a type of extratextual existence that the protagonists of the typical nineteenth-century novel did not.5 Which is to say that along with asking what fiction “is,” we might also ask if fiction always is, in the same way: mightn’t calling Odysseus fictional be to mischaracterize Greek practices of poetic invention, and to read the Odyssey as if it were a modern novel? We might offer sympathetic support for Frege’s contention that literary protagonists have no reference by limiting it to the nineteenth-century novel—a likely source of the philosopher’s conviction in the first place. The difficulty, however, is that substituting a sentence from Balzac or Dickens for Homer’s verses leads to new complications: Old Goriot or Little Dorrit may have no reference, but their inventors refer rather insistently to the Paris and London of their day—not only to places, but also to the workings of money and class and institutions. Such reference obviously falls outside Frege’s understanding of the term, predicated as it is on the proper name. We could, then, refine Frege’s proposal, perhaps noting with John Searle and others that certain fictional genres contain “nonfictional commitments,” which is to say, references to known people and places.6 This type of accommodation does not, however, solve the problem, which I repeat is at bottom historical: unlike ancient epic, the nineteenth-century novel speaks about specific, local, empirical phenomena, but it does so using completely nonexistent characters engaged in actions that never happened. Homer, meanwhile, spoke of legendary people and events, both (we may speculate) because of their intrinsic interest (heroes, by definition, are worthy of being known) and for the moral or ethical lessons they taught (heroes, by definition, are exemplary). Not without reason are we

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used to thinking of Western literary history along the lines laid out by Erich Auerbach in Mimesis: literature becomes more and more real, more focused on physical reality. But Frege’s remark, by its very inadequacy, reminds us that we must also factor in the converse: modern literature at its most splendidly realist is also removed from reality in a way it had never been before. It can talk a lot about history, implicitly or explicitly, but it does not claim to treat the same people and events that historians do. The difference between Homer and the modern novelist is thus not one of degree: the way the texts work, their modes of reference, are simply incommensurable. And if we agree to call the mode of Balzac and Dickens fiction, then Homer did not write fiction. The Odyssey is not fiction? Not a novel, granted—even the many scholars who remain divided about the novel’s origin can probably agree on that much. But surely fiction and literature as such are coextensive: “All literatures, including the literature of Greece, have always designated themselves as existing in the mode of fiction,” writes Paul de Man.7 Indeed, “fiction” is the innocuous term used when generic objections are feared or when genre is uncertain: The Canterbury Tales and The Faerie Queene may or may not be novels, but they are surely fiction. In fact, “fiction” is the most unobjectionable term of all, better even than “literature,” a word (and therefore, troublingly, maybe even a concept) that has come into use very recently.8 Of course, like “literature,” “fiction” has a lexographic history. It derives from the Latin fingere, to invent; it was long used as a synonym for lies, and sometimes for poetry, especially types of poetry that did not aspire to the dignity of epic or tragedy; around the nineteenth century it became synonymous with the novel and, as I’ve noted, with narrative literature more generally.9 Yet my point is not ultimately lexographic: as a handful of scholars working on the early English novel have suggested, it is the operations we associate with fiction that are historically bounded.10 Broad uses of the word fiction can of course have their own logic and utility. In many ways, humans are uniquely fiction-making animals, as Kendall Walton for one has shown, and it may be that this cognitive ability is an evolutionary adaptation.11 Moreover, there is certainly nothing inherently wrong-headed about using “fiction” as an umbrella designation for discourses about poetry.12 Still, a clue that all literatures have perhaps not always operated in the fictional mode can be found in one of de Man’s favorite authors: Rousseau famously refused to identify himself as the author of Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), a text he presented as authentic correspondence even as he called that authenticity into doubt. Clearly, it would be inaccurate to say, with Frege, that “it is of no concern” to him or his readers whether his heroine

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Julie existed. It must be of concern; otherwise he would not have gone to the trouble of addressing the issue in not one but two prefaces. Few if any were duped by Rousseau’s posture; it was unconvincing by design, as I will show. The point for now is simply that Rousseau—like many other novelists of his age—did not relinquish the Fregian “reference” of the proper name. And so Julie may not really be fiction any more than the Odyssey—at least not in the sense of Balzac or Dickens, who were, true to Frege’s intuition, unconcerned with the literal reference of their protagonists’ proper names. Or rather, less even than unconcerned, if by this we mean, “Maybe Goriot existed, maybe he didn’t.” Goriot did not exist—no hedging necessary. This Introduction begins with some examples of how people have spoken, quite diversely, of the relation between poetry (or literature) and history (which itself is an unstable term). In these sections, Aristotle, Richardson, and a few nineteenth-century writers help flesh out some preliminary characteristics of what I will be calling the three “regimes” of poetic invention—the Aristotelian regime, the pseudofactual regime, and the fictional regime. Of special concern will be explaining what we lose if—following previous critics who have tried to replace the history of the novel with a history of fiction—we consider the pseudofactual novel to be merely an early version of the fictional novel: what came “before fiction,” as my title implies, was not fiction. (It was not inadequate, clunky, or naïve for not being fiction; it simply consisted of practices and rationales that fiction replaces or at least supplements with others.) I will finish up with some methodological remarks designed both to clarify what I mean by the term regime and to underline how the type of literary history it subtends departs from most accounts of the novel’s rise. This all amounts, I hope, to a preliminary case for the pragmatic usefulness of a historically restricted definition of fiction; given space limitations, it cannot be a full presentation and defense of modern fiction’s “legitimacy” (to borrow a term from Hans Blumenberg).13 Readers are asked to keep in mind that my analyses of the six writers treated in the chapters that follow will help fill in many of the blanks in this initial sketch; the Conclusion too chases down some problems it would be premature to tackle at this point. If, as I sometimes fear, Before Fiction opens up more questions than it answers, I can only hope that they are at least not the same questions.

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Aristotle, Poetry, History Homer, Rousseau, Balzac: one might grant differences in the way these authors invent without going so far as to deny some of them fictional credentials entirely. Why arbitrarily brand a given cultural practice as fiction proper, excommunicating writers who don’t measure up to the conventions of the nineteenth-century novel? Why not speak, rather, of different types of fictional modes? This would allow us to say that Homer operates in one mode, Rousseau in another, and Dickens in another still, while all the while not denying that their works have something in common. After all, fiction comes from fingere, as I’ve pointed out myself, and all these writers, readers know, are making or inventing to one degree or another. Surely we can agree that Homer, Rousseau, and Dickens did not write, did not want us to think that they were writing, history. Besides, Aristotle long ago carved out for poetry the domain of the possible, and opposed it to history. Why not call the underlying something that unites their texts—that is, the quality that separates them from historical assertions—“fiction”? Let’s start with Aristotle, then, whose separation of poetry and history has indeed become proverbial, the place we go for an authoritative formulation of what we already know. The famous lines run as follows: “The difference between the historian and the poet is not merely that one writes verse and the other prose—one could turn Herodotus’ work into verse and it would be just as much history as before; the essential difference is that the one tells us what happened and the other the sort of thing that would happen.”14 The philosopher’s words jibe nicely with modern ideas about verisimilitude, realism, and probability on the one hand, and invention on the other: realistic works don’t pretend to be history, they create something of a parallel world that behaves like the world of history. Thus modern commentators often see Aristotle’s “would happen” as endorsing the idea that literature creates alternate, probable, or hypothetical worlds. “It is the artist’s task to convince us that this could have happened,” writes one critic of the modern novel: “Internal consistency and plausibility become more important than referential rectitude.”15 Little Dorrit, we might say, describes what might happen to an imagined debtor imprisoned in Marshalsea, not what the prison’s real inmates did and experienced. A reader could always judge Dickens’s novel unconvincing (too many coincidences, too much melodrama), but that would just make it unsuccessful fiction, not, obviously, history. Clearly, the “would happen”

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of poetry covers Dickens’s practice quite nicely; therefore the house of fiction may have many rooms, but it’s still fiction through and through. And there are more ways still to argue that Aristotle’s theory of poetry makes way for Little Dorrit. Elaborating on the distinction between what happened and what would happen, the philosopher continues: That is why poetry is at once more like philosophy and more worth while than history, since poetry tends to make general statements, while those of history are particular. A “general statement” means one that tells us what sort of man would, probably or necessarily, say or do what sort of thing, and this is what poetry aims at, though it attaches proper names; a particular statement on the other hand tells us what Alcibiades, for instance, did or what happened to him. This passage too can underwrite an extension of the Poetics to the modern novel. First, the novel’s nonhistorical characters can be said to embody social types, human values and experiences, lessons about this or that; it is thus general. Stephen Halliwell has warned, I think rightly, that there is little to no evidence for this understanding of Aristotle’s generality, however, and so he proposes a second, less anachronistic resemblance between poetic generality and modern fiction.16 After all, we routinely speak of successful fiction as creating a thick, internally coherent world, and a small modification of the translation can reinforce this: replacing “would happen” with “might happen” or “could happen” aligns poetry still more closely with “hypothetical” or “imaginable realities.”17 Halliwell’s case for the relevance of ancient theories of mimesis to enduring problems of representation therefore includes the suggestion that the author of the Poetics “is feeling his way . . . toward a notion of the fictional or the fictive.”18 History is what happens, poetry is what might happen, what can be imagined as happening. Historians are given their material, poets invent it. And so do novelists, we now add. For at least two reasons, however, Aristotle is less firm than we are in this happy division of labor. First, as Halliwell himself notes, generality— what “would happen”—is much more plausibly understood as a structural feature of poetry, related to plotting, causality, motives and so on. Aristotle, who disliked nothing so much as episodic plots, defines it himself as “what can happen in a strictly probable or necessary sequence.” Second, generality for Aristotle can hardly mean that the poet “imagines” or “invents” people and events that could “realistically” have existed or happened, for the simple

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reason that Greek poets, while inventing motives and causes, do not usually invent their heroes. Instead, they use proper names referring to the very same people historians do. Poetry is general, writes Aristotle, and he explains that this involves probability and necessity—plotting. But he cannot keep from adding, “though it attaches proper names”—the “though” registering an obstacle to a clean opposition between poetry and history. This does not destroy the criterion of poetic generality, certainly, for we can take our interpretive cue from subsequent commentators and practitioners (say, those of the French neoclassical stage) and understand the philosopher’s words like this: the historian cannot choose among things that happened to Alcibiades, whereas the poet selects certain things and invents other things said or done, in view of constructing a unified plot. But Aristotle’s “though” does complicate our assimilation of that generality to the modern idea of a fictional world: the world of poetry is causally coherent, but it is not invented in quite the same way as is a novel by Dickens, whose protagonists were not Gladstone or Disraeli. The passage moreover does not stop here, as if Aristotle himself were not quite convinced that he had explained why poetry was “general.” That this remains a problem is made clear by Aristotle’s swerve away from tragedy to a species of poetry that is more obviously both supportive of claims to generality and distinct from history. “That poetry does aim at generality has long been obvious in the case of comedy, where the poets make up the plot from a series of probable happenings and then give the persons any names they like, instead of writing about particular people as the lampooners did.” The logic here is not spelled out, but presumably we are to infer that comic playwrights—as distinct from the satiric playwrights (“lampooners,” or more literally, “iambic poets”) of what we now call “Old Comedy”—invent and name protagonists who embody given human character types, who are therefore walking generalities. (Aristotle itemized various character types in his Ethics, and his descriptions would be greatly elaborated by his student Theophrastus.) Comedy, then, makes for a cleaner opposition between poetry and history. Yet for a second time Aristotle is drawn back to the fact that tragedy doesn’t function this way at all: “In tragedy, however, they stick to the actual names.” At this point, Aristotle finally drops the idea of poetry as a general statement and advances an argument that was enthusiastically developed by his Renaissance followers: “conviction” is instilled in viewers by real events, hence the importance of real protagonists. The contortions of this famous passage are good evidence of Aristotle’s efforts to square his initial hypothesis on poetry’s interest in what “would

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happen” with the irrepressible fact that tragedy uses proper names. These proper names, which keep popping back up each time the philosopher seems to have the lid on the box, effectively resist the bringing of all poetry, as distinct from history, under the banner of generality. In other words, comedy and tragedy are not general in quite the same way, just as the distinction between the comic poet and the historian is not exactly the distinction obtaining between the tragic poet and the historian. By Aristotle’s own reckoning, tragedy and comedy function differently. It is not merely that one depicts people better than they are and the other worse (as he writes elsewhere in the Poetics), nor only that one speaks of distinguished families and lofty sentiments, while the other busies itself with the low born and their mundane concerns (as later commentators would repeat). Rather, tragedy deals with real people and comedy with types. This, at any rate, was what later European commentators would take from Aristotle, and it proved surprisingly adequate to poetic practice for about 2000 years: comic characters were invented; serious protagonists were taken from history. Thus Diderot, toeing the Aristotelian line in 1758, could still divide discourse into three types: “History, where facts are given; tragedy, where the poet adds to history what he thinks likely to increase its interest; comedy, where the poet invents everything.”19 Of course, Diderot leaves out other possibilities, notably fable. And one can easily come up with examples that sit uncomfortably or not at all with the preference for attested subject matter. Aristotle himself backs up after declaring that tragic poets “stick to the actual names” and gives a dutiful nod to Agathon’s now lost tragedy Antheus, which did feature invented characters. (Antheus leads the author of the Poetics to shrug off his hypothesis that the reality of characters imparts necessary conviction, since he freely admits that invention doesn’t in the end infringe on the audience’s pleasure.) But Antheus is to all appearances a one-off, for nowhere in the classical corpus do we find references to other such tragedies. To be sure, the Greek novels of Achilles Tatius, Xenophon, Heliodorus, and others, recount the adventures of characters who have no sanction outside the text, as do the works of Petronius and Apuleius that Mikhail Bakhtin pointed to as antecedents of the modern novel. 20 By the same token, however, these works were long denigrated precisely because, like “mere” fables, they lacked the prestige of history. Any number of famed Renaissance works, from More’s Utopia (1516) and Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516–32) to Rabelais’s chronicles (1532–52) and Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590–96), are hardly Aristotelian, and indeed flaunt what we can no doubt broadly call their fictionality. Yet on

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inspection the invention practiced by these writers bears little relation to the fictionality of a character like Balzac’s Goriot: such works are parodically inseparable from either attested heroes of the chivalric past (Ariosto, Spenser), or the truth claims of the New World travel narrative or medieval chronicle (More, Rabelais).21 Rather than being fictional, they parody what someone else is purported to regard as true. It is not to impugn the creativity of pre-nineteenth-century writers that I resist speaking of literature as a house of fiction with many, many rooms. Nor does taking fictionality for something other than a universal property of literature imply that invented heroes were, in Foucauldian parlance, “unthinkable” for the Greeks, Romans, or Europeans of the Renaissance. In different ways, all the writers I have just mentioned invent characters from scratch, and an alternate version of the present study could no doubt inventory at length such practices. But our modern indifference to what Frege called characters’ “reference” keeps us from making the simple empirical observation that underwrites Before Fiction. For much of Western literary history, the principal traffic of literature was in heroes readers had already heard about.

Historical Faith Curiously—at least at first glance—reference was never more doggedly asserted than just before its nineteenth-century eclipse: for about a hundred years now, literary historians have been drawing attention to the fact that early novelists insisted on the literal truth of their works.22 And literary historians have also noted, with understandable puzzlement, that few if any contemporaries, readers or writers, seem to have believed in this truth. The situation made for some oddly contorted speculations, like this one, occurring in a famous letter by Richardson to William Warburton. In the middle of Clarissa’s serial publication, in 1748, Richardson regrets that Warburton’s preface for the third volume explicitly referred to Richardson as the author of the letters, not their editor: Will you, good Sir, allow me to mention, that I could wish that the Air of Genuineness had been kept up, tho’ I want not the letters to be thought genuine; only so far kept up, I mean, as that they should not prefatically be owned not to be genuine: and this for fear of weakening their Influence where any of them are aimed to be

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exemplary; as well as to avoid hurting that kind of Historical Faith which Fiction itself is generally read with, tho’ we know it to be Fiction.23 A rapid interpretation of Richardson’s remark would hold that the novelist is reflecting on the very nature of the reading experience; when we read we enter the fictional world by accepting it provisionally as true even though we know otherwise. The letter would be, then, one more reason to believe that fiction always has been fiction. Yet the passage is historically marked, and its propositions are less compatible than they first appear with modern habits. After all, Richardson’s desired posture is very close to the one Rousseau will devise and execute for Julie: the letters should be presented as genuine, but without intent to deceive (there is properly speaking no hoax). But what might that mean? And why bother, if the nature of the reading experience is (as everyone knows) the provisional or temporary acceptance of what we do not really believe? Richardson gives two reasons for maintaining an “Air of Genuineness,” the first of which the modern reader may skip right over in a rush to get to the seemingly more recognizable contention that we read fiction quite simply as if it were history. For that first reason is a bit unfamiliar: admitting the exemplary characters as mere fabrications, Richardson holds, will undercut the moral aspirations of the book. The remoteness of Richardson’s logic stems from two sources: on the one hand, (“high”) literature since Richardson’s time has largely divested itself of overt moralizing (it may investigate moral dilemmas, but it shouldn’t propose exemplary heroes); on the other, even in the (typically “lower”) forms that do propose models of behavior (most obviously, children’s literature), it may now be hard to see why a character’s nonexistence would disable exemplarity. On the contrary, perhaps it is more common now to assume that invented characters make better role models, since reality, to strike a Lukácsian note, is no place for heroes. Historically, however, this position stands out, because moral exemplarity had always been underwritten by the reality of the exemplars: history itself was our moral compass, and so exemplars were never simply made up, they had to have existed. (Again, we would do better to think of that existence not so much as “empirical” or “documented” as simply attested: exemplary heroes exist in the realm of common knowledge or fame in the Latin sense of “renown,” fama.) Richardson’s worry, then, does make sense within older frameworks for understanding character, recalling for example Aristotle’s argument that real characters make for greater conviction.

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The unfamiliarity of Richardson’s first remark on moral exemplarity is, moreover, a good reason not to regard his second argument for genuineness as self-evident. The trap, I believe, is that we are accustomed to thinking of fiction as an “as if ” proposition. And so the novelist here appears to anticipate nicely the formula of Coleridge’s that so many now reach for when thought turns to the kind of credence literature demands. Fiction—and Richardson himself uses the word—involves a “willing suspension of disbelief.”24 Yet on inspection, we see that the novelist thinks that the conservation of genuineness increases the “as if ” illusion; the more genuineness, then, the more “historical faith.” This leaves us some distance from the idea that fiction can be considered as hypothetical, or that it is a sort of make-believe into which one enters with Coleridgian willingness. Nor is his illusion like one of those drawings that can be either a duck or a rabbit but not both at once. And it resembles still less an alternate or possible world. Instead, illusion for Richardson knows greater or lesser degrees; keeping up the pretense of truth simply increases it. If it goes against a quick intuitive reading of the letter, the above interpretation does at least have the advantage of complete congruence with the assumption of so much seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aesthetic theory: the more you take the spectacle for reality, the greater its effect on you. Burke, in a notorious passage of his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), claims that no matter how good the show, people will always leave a play for a public execution next door.25 Contemporary attitudes toward capital punishment aside, the comment speaks volumes about how thinkers of the time rationalized the effect of the artwork.26 The artwork is not fictional in the sense that it is an alternate or hypothetical reality; it is rather a substitute for reality, a simulation that is, unfortunately but necessarily, always a bit off. This explains, then, why Richardson would say that he wished Warburton’s preface hadn’t given the game away, even though he had no intent to fool people: his readers would have believed him more than they now do. “The nearer [the spectacle] approaches the reality,” writes Burke, “the further it removes us from all idea of fiction, the more perfect its power.”27 Never perfect, but more perfect—this indeed is the gist of Richardson’s apparently paradoxical wish. And Burke’s words also remind us that when Richardson says fiction, his use of the term does not substantially diverge from its common meaning—a lie.28 With the proper presentation, we almost believe lies are true. Now the fact that Clarissa was on its way to being a huge success despite Warburton’s indiscretion might of course have led Richardson to conclude that illusion—or this type of illusion,

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anyway—had nothing to do with the power of his book; but when summoned to express how he thought his novel worked, he took the path traveled by most of the period’s thinkers: he indexed it to a literal reality.

Fiction’s Reality, Realist Fiction Richardson’s comments on Clarissa are representative of a mode of reference I will be calling, with Barbara Foley, the pseudofactual: novelists of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries routinely assert—though ambiguously, half-heartedly, or ironically—the literal reality of their books. Understanding the amplitude of the phenomenon will require more coordinates than just this one letter, and I will give some shortly. Let’s look first, however, at a mode of reference that is startlingly different and much more familiar—the reference that Frege says is not reference at all, and that occurs when it does not matter to readers whether a writer’s characters ever existed. Following the dramatic rout of the French army, Europe’s largest, in the Franco-Prussian war, a British officer named George Tomkyns Chesney feared for his country’s own military preparation. And so he published, in Blackwood’s Magazine of May 1871, a novella entitled “The Battle of Dorking,” in which he recounted an imaginary invasion of Britain, some time in the future, by an unnamed (though German-speaking) aggressor. The story was republished many times, and its hold on the British imagination was considerable. “So powerful is the narrative, so intensely real the impression it produces, that the coolest disbeliever in panics cannot read it without a flush of annoyance, or close it without the thought that after all, as the world now stands, some such day of humiliation for England is at least possible.”29 Thus wrote one critic, and the thought of the possibility of an invasion was enough to accomplish what Chesney wanted, which was to beef up British military peacetime maneuvers. (Inadvertently, Chesney also became the father of a novelistic subgenre, that of invasion fiction.) Chesney’s text, the critic’s words, and even the real-world political effects of the tale are from one point of view perfectly unremarkable: novels (and by extension films) can exercise a hold over readers’ imaginations and be effective propaganda. Yet from another point of view—Richardson’s—this episode would seem remarkable indeed, as we can readily see if we try to apply his standard of “historical faith.” Chesney didn’t pretend that his story was real, obviously; and how could contemporary readers read it “as” true,

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in Richardson’s sense of historical truthfulness, since it was clearly set in the future? Note the vocabulary of the critic quoted above: “The Battle of Dorking” produces an intense impression of reality, and that impression of reality persuades the reader that what is recounted is possible. No faith is necessary, and the effect of the novel does not vary in proportion to the reader’s belief in its literal reality. This type of “as if ” can work its uncanny magic on the “coolest disbeliever.” Chesney’s novella in essence advances a proposition about reality via the construction of a particularly vivid world—a vividness that is generated by internal means (presumably character, plot, and detail) and not through the manipulation of a frame (there are no real letters, no discovered manuscripts). Any reader of Balzac is familiar with his insistence on his novels’ engagement with reality. “All is true,” he writes at the opening of Le Père Goriot (1835), with the bold assertion standing out all the more because Balzac, borrowing from Shakespeare, makes it in English.30 And one can hardly miss his aspiration to be the historian of his time—“to write the history forgotten by so many historians, that of manners.”31 Truth, history: little seems to have changed since Richardson. No wonder the pseudofactual novel can be easily cast, as we will see many doing, as a forerunner of later realist works: it points away from the ideal and to the real, and by the nineteenth century the victory of the real will be complete. If the terms all come from a common pool, however, there has plainly been a revolution in what they designate. For example, Richardson refrained from asserting truth—“I want not the letters to be thought genuine”—whereas Balzac actually goes ahead and asserts it. If truth meant the same thing in both cases, we would have to conclude that Balzac represents something of a regression, and that we have slipped from a time when writers didn’t want to pull a fast one to one when they did. But this is obviously not the correct conclusion. Balzac asserts truthfulness where Richardson cannot because his claim is in fact not hard (i.e., literal) but soft: “I am about to tell you how the world really is, as opposed to something that really happened.” For Richardson, by contrast, reading with “historical faith” means pretending that the novel’s collection of people, actions, and events are in fact a subset of the larger collection of such discrete facts that make up history; to the extent that Clarissa talks about “the way things are,” it does so because we are to pretend that it is one of those things. With Balzac, belonging to the world of Scott and Hegel, history is no longer an aggregate of facts, but something like a system underlying the epiphenomenal particulars of a given age. Because its real subject is less individuals than the society that explains

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individuals, to write history is to seek “the hidden meaning of this huge assembly of figures, passions, and events.”32 And this helps explain, at least in part, why writers of the fictional regime show no compunction about inventing their characters. Old Goriot is just as good as any real human being, for the novel’s human inhabitants, real or invented, are only the observable surface of the novel’s deeper subject. Frege was right to say that it (now) makes no difference whether literary characters exist, but wrong to suggest that this was because (modern) literature did not refer. The novel does, of course, refer—not to real people, but to abstractions we call “the world,” “society,” or “reality.” In the closing decades of the twentieth century, it became axiomatic that realism claimed to be true. For eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers as for their readers, realism in literature (even if the word is not always used) is an ideal: the ideal of the faithful representation of the real, the ideal of truthful discourse . . .; all literary revolutions at the time were fought in the name of representation that would be still more faithful to “life.” These lines come from Tzvetan Todorov’s introduction to Littérature et réalité (1982), a collection of previously published essays bent on showing that realism is in fact deeply mendacious in its claims to transparency and immediacy.33 One of these was Roland Barthes’s 1968 article “L’Effet de réel,” probably the most succinct and resonant articulation of a thesis prominent in much of the critic’s work: realism pretends to be a transparent window onto the world, and this pretension is bad politics and, more fundamentally, bad semiotics. Realism, writes Barthes, is underwritten by a mystified conception of the sign; instead of consisting of an arbitrary relation between a signifier and a signified, the realist sign is yoked directly and “naturally” to a referent. Realist language hides the fact that language is connotation or signification behind a simple denotation or naming—“the pure meeting of an object and its expression.” And the epitome of the realist sign is the insignificant detail; material objects that have no narrative or symbolic function are present in the realist text only to better declare “We are the real.” In other words, the realist sign connotes as much as any other sign, but its connotation is that the text is denotation, that signs have referents, that language is—Barthes puts the suspicious word, the last of his essay, in quotes—a “ ‘representation.’ ”34 Barthes’s argument is susceptible to different interpretations, of which

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some are clearly further from the author’s meaning than others. If the “reality effect” has slipped into common academic parlance, this must be at least partially because the phrase itself doesn’t necessarily upset the commonsensical idea that realism was, well, realistic. According to this view, gratuitous details make texts seem real in the sense that they allow for the reader’s visualization, or make the fictional world thicker, thus facilitating the proverbial suspension of disbelief.35 Barthes’s interest, however, is more semiotic, and his claims lie elsewhere. First, he suggests that the gratuitous detail does indeed still signify—it signifies “realism” as such, and is thus part of the realist code. This is innocuous enough: there cannot be much quibble with the proposition that genres have specific contracts, and that the intrusive presence of description announces realism just as, say, the in medias res expositional conversation announces neoclassical tragedy. Barthes’s main point, however, is something else entirely—that realism was built on an illusion, “the referential illusion.”36 The detail did not content itself with announcing the genre of the text, it furthermore attempted to pass itself off as reality itself; that is, not only did it signify “realism,” it signified that it didn’t signify, that language was pure copying. This enormously influential essay—it can be said to have underwritten a slew of “debunkings” of realist pretense—has also been the object of not a few critiques. One called into doubt Barthes’s reading of Saussurean linguistics by pointing out that Saussure never claimed that the fact that languages were differential systems, or that the link between sounds and concepts was arbitrary, meant that language could not refer to things.37 Besides, if reference were impossible, the whole argument would undermine itself by its very articulation.38 But the oddest thing about Barthes’s viewpoint was that it seemed to imply what for understandable reasons the critic could not state explicitly. Christopher Prendergast has put the difficulty as follows: The implication of “Nous sommes le réel” [We are the real] is that the words of the text try to perform a kind of disappearing act upon themselves; the text plays a trick whereby the reader undergoes the “illusion” of being confronted not with language, but with reality itself; the sign effaces itself before its “referent” in order to create an “effect”: the illusion of the presence of the object itself.39 The slippage, it would seem, occurs in the double sense of “illusion”: when in his (mis)understanding of Saussurean linguistics Barthes speaks of the referential illusion, he means “fallacy”; but he then begins to behave as

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though what was at issue, on the part of bad readers, was a properly visual illusion, a bona fide hallucination.40 Not without reason does Antoine Compagnon assimilate the denotative directness of the reality effect and the leitmotif of Barthes’s later essay on photography, La Chambre claire: “This has been,” says the photograph, echoing the sirenic “We are the real” of realist objects.41 Indeed, Compagnon lines up examples from Barthes’s oeuvre that to all appearances suggest that the theorist modeled his critique of reference on the dispelling of an actual sensory illusion. Barthes was particularly fond of an anecdote from Stendhal’s Racine et Shakespeare, recounting an early nineteenthcentury performance of Othello in Baltimore; a white soldier in the audience, enraged to see a black man lay his hands on a white woman, pulls his gun and shoots the actor. Only a literature that sought, in Barthes’s words, to “empty the sign and to distance infinitely its object,” could save us from this fate.42 Barthes’s attack on realism and its “totalitarian ideology of the referent” was no doubt unusual in its slippage from a figurative illusion to a literal one.43 Todorov’s apparently more moderate contentions were in fact the routine ones: realism pretends to be “truthful discourse,” “a faithful representation of the real.” But even this realism would seem to be made of straw. Here is a realist statement of principles, from the programmatic seventeenth chapter of Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859): “I aspire to give no more than a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind.”44 “Faithful”: Eliot uses Todorov’s word. “Men and things” sounds a lot like “the real.” The novelist even uses the mirror analogy that inevitably arises when conversation turns toward critiquing art’s “copying” function. It’s as if Eliot’s sentence were a concentrate of realism’s bogus promises. Read sympathetically, however, it also restores some balance to the realist claim. It should be obvious, first, that Eliot’s “faithful account” has nothing to do with, say, the “true history” of Oronooko, the royal slave of Surinam, that Behn circulated a century and a half earlier.45 One might point out as well that the mirroring function of fiction suggests neither literal truth nor that the novel is a replica of the material world: “in my mind” clearly entails a transformation, and the mirror metaphor, which was a venerable one, did not typically imply anything like copying.46 A more easily overlooked part of the sentence is simply “men and things,” with its deliberate generality: how can realism be a copy if its object is not actually specific? And Eliot might have written “things and men” without changing too much her meaning: it is well known that like so many realists by this time, she was beating away at divisions between “high” and “low” that had long structured thought about the arts, so that a lowly still life could

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become indistinguishable from elevated history painting. Doing away with that distinction does not mean only that the lives of carpenters are as worthy of attention as the exploits of generals and statesmen. It also means that, as with Balzac, known human beings are no longer the subject of art. Rather, the world—humans and things, humans as things, sometimes just things staring back at the anonymous procession of human life—is represented. “A faithful account of men and things,” writes Eliot; Balzac speaks in his preface to the Comédie humaine of “copying all of society.”47 It’s really the object of the account or of the copying here that hides—but hides in plain sight—the complexity, the counterintuitiveness, of the realist operation, and its difference with respect to earlier novels’ assertions of truth. (Those earlier assertions were complex as well, as we will see; but they were complex in their own manner.) Todorov insinuates the crude literalism of declarations like these, but—and this is particularly obvious after a consideration of Richardson’s posture—there is no literalism: one cannot literally copy abstractions like “men” and “society.” No wonder Balzac, Eliot, and others spent so much time thinking about how their novels, full of people who never existed and whose existence was never even asserted, were faithful copies: they weren’t stating something that everyone knew but rather something that, having no precedent, needed to be argued before readers. That something was fiction. Fiction, then, was real and not real. By this point it should be clear that I do not mean this as a more or less timeless paradox (Fuentes’s “The novel [is] a lie that is the foundation of truth”), nor as a formulation of the mitigated credence (“suspended disbelief ”) that is frequently assumed to underwrite the literary reading experience—all such experience. Rather, fiction—as opposed to both Aristotle’s poetry and the pseudofactual period of the novel’s history—is not literally real, for it didn’t happen, but it is somehow like reality. This is not a matter of content. Though I have used realist authors to illustrate fiction, and though literary realism is certainly fictional, fiction is also more than realism: it need not concern itself with class relations, milieu, money, poverty, the everyday, and other common attributes of the realist novel. Nor does fiction need to be “realistic” in the sense of historically or scientifically possible, which is in part why I mentioned the example of Chesney’s “Battle of Dorking”; ghosts, time travel, and counterfactual history are no more or no less fictional than the sober and documented realist novel. What makes fiction fiction (and what makes the realist novel fiction) is not content but the oblique manner in which it makes propositions about the world.48 Unlike the pseudofactual mode, which asserts literal truth so as to lay

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claim to other sorts of truth (moral, emotional, and so on), it operates analogically or hypothetically. Hypothetically: the vivid world postulated by Chesney’s novella is taken as a comment on the world that we share. “Dear Reader!” writes Dickens at the end of Hard Times (1854), “It rests with you and me, whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not.”49 Analogically: the writer of fiction says, in essence, “This sort of thing is always happening,” “This book is like the world.” Readers are free to remain skeptical, but their skepticism will not be voiced as a denunciation of the literal truth of the story, nor even as a denunciation of the novel’s inability to make claims on reality because it is not factually true. One attacks, rather, the analysis the book makes of the world. So when Lamartine criticized Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862), he wrote, quite simply, “The world is not like that.”50 Fiction whose propositional value you reject becomes a fairy tale—imaginings that may well be internally consistent and vivid, but whose analogical power, whose claim on reality, is nil.

Reality Before Realism, or, the Pseudofactual Fiction, then, was subtly paradoxical, advancing propositions about the world—and about very specific parts of that world—via the destinies of invented characters. “[My book] won’t be imaginary facts, it will be what happens everywhere” (Balzac); “My method is to depict true things with invented characters” (Hugo): it is hard to see in such abundant reformulations the desire to get readers “to believe without reservation in the reality of the fictive worlds [writers] created,” or an attempt to “encourage a benumbed and credulous form of reading that accepts at face value the most banal tricks of the referential illusion.”51 Nineteenth-century writers pushed the paradox to the fore, as if trying to think it through; scholars of realism have largely ignored it. In good part this is due to the “straw man” attacks on realist naïveté I have mentioned: imagining that realism was an attempt at illusion is good for bolstering our sense of our own sophistication. Yet what is notable about realist novels, from another point of view, is precisely their “-ist”: they do not pretend to be literally true. If we are looking for hyperbolically literal claims to truth, the place to go is not the nineteenth century, but the eighteenth or before. It is there we find the model of art-as-illusion; it is there theorists approvingly repeat anecdotes like that of the Baltimore soldier, which far from being representative of realism—pace Barthes—was making a very belated apparition in Stendhal’s Racine et Shakespeare; and it is there writers assert time

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and again the literal truth of their works, works that typically take the form of documents—letters, memoirs, and other purportedly discovered manuscripts. Examples of the pseudofactual posture will occur to anyone familiar with the canonical works of Defoe or Marivaux or Graffigny, Walpole or Mackenzie or Laclos. But beyond such general impressions, what do we really know about this strange phenomenon? In one sense, a good deal—though our knowledge has been shaped and limited by an inability to separate the history of the novel from the history of realism. Assertions of literal truth, many have long argued, are part and parcel of the novel’s turn toward reality, a turn that was accomplished in the nineteenth century. The English and French pseudofactual novel was “a peculiar phase of the theory of realism,” declared the title of the 1913 article by Arthur Jerrold Tieje that may be the first modern scholarly examination of the subject. Knowingly or not, most have followed Tieje’s lead, producing a narrative that (for France at least) goes like this. In the 1660s, readers began to reject the marvelous but improbable deeds associated with the long French romans héroïques; plots and settings that matched everyday experience became the rage. As a result, the deliberately remote historical settings of the romance were replaced by the historical novella, or nouvelle historique, which made use of more recent, documented history (Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves [1678] is the celebrated example). Numerous other novellas were said to be true stories, recently transpired; their geography was that of French cities, and characters started sporting French names. Subsequently, the faux memoir established itself as the form that bridged history and the novel; as it faltered in the mid-eighteenth century, the epistolary novel, better able to “write to the moment” as the ascendant reign of sensibilité demanded, came into its own and dominated production until into the nineteenth century, when interest in the workings of history finally displaced interest in the workings of the heart.52 (The English novel requires some alteration of the specifics of the narrative, but as we’ll see in a moment, the big picture doesn’t change much.) Hence, in his 1969 study Imitation and Illusion in the French Memoir Novel, Philip Stewart sees pseudofactual strategies as part of realism’s rise out of the ashes of improbable romance: “The technique of imitating reality . . . did not await [nineteenth-century realists]: it had been pieced together by a score of novelists good and bad in the first half of the eighteenth century.”53 In a synthesis of Stewart’s findings and those of others, Dorrit Cohn thus concludes, “Historians of the novel have shown that, as the [eighteenth] century advanced and readers learned to accept the norms of literary realism, novelists tended to drop claims to reality or factuality.”54 By the claiming the literal

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truthfulness of their texts, writers helped point literature away from the allegorical or the ideal and toward the real; once the ideal had been vanquished, the posture could be abandoned. The fact that Cohn’s synthesis occurs in a work titled The Distinction of Fiction suggests, however, a slightly different way of understanding this evolution. Realism, after all, is not real but openly fictional. What may be needed, then, is to turn the “more and more real” narrative on its head. This is what Lennard Davis does in his 1983 book Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel, which rewrites the history of the novel not as a tightening of the bond with reality but rather as the discovery of fictionality itself. For Davis, the modern novel does not develop by turning away from romance, as many have argued or assumed; rather, the novel becomes the novel by distancing itself from factual forms of discourse. The seventeenth century, he argues, witnessed the birth and expansion of an “undifferentiated matrix” where news reports and novels were essentially indistinguishable forms of discourse. Then, in the eighteenth century, “as the news/novel discourse began to subdivide, and as the culture began making clearer demands for factual or fictional narrative, the old claim that a work was true become harder to substantiate. As that happened, the possibility arose that a work could be purely fictional.”55 Whereas most critics had seen a formerly fanciful genre being slowly altered through the invention of new techniques of accurate imitation, Davis casts the process as something of the reverse: the novel starts as true, and then slowly evolves indices of its fictionality. As for when this occurs, Davis argues that the “shift toward the fictional” is detectible in Defoe; the shift has not yet fully occurred in Davis’s two other major figures, Richardson and Fielding, but the implication is that once fiction has been explored by writers of this caliber, others will consolidate the gains. Davis’s account was quickly followed by Barbara Foley’s Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction (1986), which provides, at least on the face of things, a different version of the transformation. By allotting separate chapters to the pseudofactual eighteenth century and the realist nineteenth, Foley builds into the structure of her book an opposition. Indeed, Foley repeatedly stresses a qualitative break between pseudofactuality and the nineteenth-century historical novel, which she also calls “fiction” and “realism”: both forms are marked by their own “representational strateg[ies]” and underwritten by distinct “conceptions of history.”56 Yet despite this explicit opposition, Foley too lapses into slow-march-of-realism language that echoes Cohn’s paraphrase. She writes: “as the eighteenth century progressed, readers

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increasingly tired of tongue-in-cheek authorial disavowals of mimetic [i.e., fictional or novelistic] intent”; “The rise of the mode that we term ‘realism’ clearly involved an initial dependence upon, but an ultimate replacement of, the ‘sense of the real’ [i.e., the claim to literal truth].”57 And Foley situates the process where Davis does: “Hesitatingly in the works of Defoe, then more boldly in subsequent novels of the eighteenth century, the pseudofactual imposture signaled the invocation of a mimetic contract.”58 The result is that neither Foley nor Davis has much shifted our understanding of literary history. Before, pseudofactual insistence on the novel’s literal reality was the origin of realism; now, pseudofactual irony is seen as the first sign of a concept of the fictional. Defoe, no longer an incipient realist, has been repurposed as an early theorist of fictionality. We are left with a familiar arc, plotted using the same old coordinates; all that has been done has been to rename the endpoint. The most noted scholar to take up the problem of fiction’s history, Catherine Gallagher, has successfully avoided such gradualism. Unlike Davis or Foley, who both postulate a slow change—“readers increasing tired” and so on—Gallagher works from an implicitly Foucauldian model of rupture: in the middle decades of the eighteenth century there occurred a “massive reorientation of textual referentiality” that replaced the early novel’s direct reference to real people with fiction.59 Gallagher develops this idea in two separate accounts. The first, found in Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (1994), is particularly noteworthy because it uses coordinates that previous scholars hadn’t: the rupture of modern fictionality is readable not in the usual English suspects—Defoe, Richardson, Fielding—but in texts by women authors. Unlike Manley’s “transparently slanderous” New Atalantis (1709), a paradigm for the keyed narratives of the early eighteenth century that refer to real people under the cover of historical or fanciful masks, Lennox’s Life of Harriot Stuart, Written by Herself (1750) was not read as keyed and “made few serious demands on the public’s credit.”60 The invention of fiction, Gallagher suggests, must lie somewhere between the two. Her second account, “The Rise of Fictionality” (2003; English trans. 2006), is chronologically compatible with the narrative of Nobody’s Story, though it reverts to the figures prominent in familiar histories of the English novel. Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), Gallagher observes, contains a famous passage that explicitly denies that the novel portrays real people; Fielding claims instead to describe types drawn from life. The change from the pseudofactual posture of Robinson Crusoe is obvious, and therefore sometime between 1720 and 1742 “new modes of non-reference arose” and the novel became properly fictional.61 For

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Gallagher, fiction does rise, but not quite in the manner of Davis and Foley. Instead, the pretense of truth is simply swept off the stage by fictionality.62 A worry, however, is that in all three accounts the line between fiction and a type of novel that purportedly preceded it grows so maddeningly fuzzy that any real distinction is blotted out. For Foley, not only are the variously ironic pseudofactual stances of the eighteenth-century novel cast as the early stage of fictional realism; in addition, the ironic stance is already detectible in Behn’s novels of the 1680s.63 Mightn’t the pseudofactual always be, from the very beginning, just an early fictionality? Meanwhile, Davis’s wording makes it impossible to determine when the modern opposition between fact and fiction was in place. The culture “began” to make demands of a clear separation, Davis says in the passage I quoted above. Yet how can a culture desire a separation of two things between which it cannot distinguish? How can people want what they can’t yet conceive? And when exactly did they begin to make their demands for something new? At what point did the old truth claims “bec[o]me harder to substantiate”? Does this mean that people once took the claims seriously and then wised up? What exactly is this “possibility . . . that a work could be purely fictional” that “arose”? Did it arise collectively? In the mind of one author, or a group of vanguard readers? In Nobody’s Story, Gallagher achieves a sharper separation, but mostly because by using the keyed scandalous narratives of the early eighteenth century as a foil for the obviously bogus truth pretense of Lennox’s Life of Harriot Stuart, she avoids confronting the saturating presence of the pseudofactual mode. Certainly, Lennox’s truth-posture makes few serious demands on the public’s credit—but how exactly do her demands differ from the demands of Richardson, Defoe, or even Montesquieu, who prefaces Les Lettres persanes (1721) by saying “The Persians of the following letters stayed with me in my home”?64 Moreover, if the pseudofactual form of The Life of Harriot Stuart was just a shell, not to be taken seriously, why wouldn’t any number of earlier faux memoirs—say, Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne (1731–1742), or even Villedieu’s pioneering Mémoires de la vie de Henriette-Sylvie de Molière (1672–1674)—be equally plausible signs that the modern concept of fiction was in the works?65 In Gallagher’s view, the referential “somebodies” of the early novel are replaced by fictional “nobodies”; the worry, however, is that it is difficult to tell a nobody from a somebody as long as the pseudofactual form is present. For Davis and Foley, the pseudofactual prepares the way for the fictional; but since on inspection consciousness of the fictional is already incubating within the pseudofactual, the whole distinction falls apart.

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Furthermore, the longevity of the pseudofactual posture is odd. As Foley and Davis remark with some surprise, the mock affirmation of truth, which is supposed to be “reced[ing] to subordinate status” in Defoe, is still alive and well much later—later even than Richardson, whom Tieje chose as his terminus.66 Foley mentions as late pseudofactual residue titles like Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker (1771) and Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses (1782). As belated as the latter is, it still allows us to preserve at least the idea that the nineteenth century will mark a clean start. But of course it doesn’t: pseudofactual assertions soldier on long into the nineteenth century. Chateaubriand’s Atala (1801) is a true tale, oral at the outset, then relayed back to the author; Constant’s Adolphe (1816) is a memoir replete with bogus provenance; Sand’s Indiana (1832) is a historical anecdote; Hugo, in Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné (1829), makes effective use of a heretofore largely unexploited pseudofactual form, the journal, prefacing it with the familiar editorial equivocations. Meanwhile, Shelley presents her Frankenstein (1818) as fact; in America, Poe does the same with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). And still in mid-century England, heedless of dominant third-person omniscience, the Brontë sisters press all manner of pseudofactual frames into service. If in Richardson the truth pretense is, by the reckoning of another critic, “vestigial,” what are we to make of these much later examples?67 What permits us to say that readers of certain works read them as fictional, whereas the readers of earlier ones were unequipped with that conceptual category? Villedieu, Lennox, Constant, Poe—to which one did readers cease, for the first time, according serious credit? It’s convenient to think of fiction rising, but a slope that goes on for so long may be closer to a stretch of even ground. Or, for that matter, uneven: in the course of this book we will see that writers such as Rousseau and Diderot take the truth of their novels much more seriously than Crébillon, who writes several decades before them, and that well before them all, Lafayette centers a historical novel around a heroine who never existed: “as the [eighteenth] century advanced and readers learned to accept the norms of literary realism, novelists tended to drop claims to reality or factuality”: does the record really confirm the reassuringly steady advance of the fictional that Cohn takes, no doubt accurately, from the scholarship?68 Such difficulties are enough to cast doubt on the effort to isolate fiction historically. The mock-factual statements issued by pseudofactual novels are after all difficult to distinguish from fictional statements, since no one is intended to believe either. Perhaps novels that make ambivalent assertions of literal truth are really not so different from novels that make no literal claims

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whatsoever. Maybe they’re just a little more primitive, or maybe, as so many have said for so long, literature by definition has always been self-consciously duplicitous about its own veracity. (In the Odyssey, characters often make truth claims for their narratives precisely at the moment they are about to lie.) On the other hand, maybe it is the approach that creates the impression that the question of fiction’s history is unanswerable or misguided. That approach obliterates the qualitative distinction between the pseudofactual and the fictional in favor of seeing the history of fiction, like that of realism, as a continuum. Just as the novel becomes realist by increasingly emphasizing the material world, it becomes fictional by demanding less and less real credence, until none at all is required and people acknowledge that novels are neither true nor false. For partisans of the rise of realism, Richardson takes one step toward describing bourgeois life, and Balzac another, much bigger one; while if we want to trace the rise of fiction, Richardson’s letter to Warburton is the sign of a dawning realization, an individual and collective coming-to-grips with something that Balzac will grasp with more clarity, and that can be called “the nature of fiction.” Behind this version of events there are some dubious inferences regarding two kinds of relations—between individual and collective practices on the one hand and between practices and their cognitive or conceptual substrate. These are the problems that my account of literary regimes is designed to correct.

Regimes and the History of Forms Davis, Foley, and Gallagher’s efforts to give fiction a history have a conceptual focus. That is, the way people write novels follows from the way they think; it is because the way they think changes that the novel changes. The schema can be made bi-directional—the novel reflects a change in thought while then furthering and deepening the change—without altering the basic method. Either way, the history of fiction is to be read in a select group of works that document the progress of an underlying conceptual evolution. And this is the way much literary history is done. Individual works are important insofar as they are signs of something else that is otherwise out of sight but nonetheless on the rise—fiction and realism; “the novel,” which is often more of an idea than a thing; a culture of this or that; but really just plain modernity. A drawing of such an approach to fiction’s history might look like this. A, B, and C are the great authors who over time were coming to see that their

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Back to Archaism

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Toward Modernity

works could be fictional; to perceive fiction as legitimate, freed from the alibi of history; to realize at long last that reading and writing involved the coveted “willing suspension of disbelief.” They sighted the conceptual territory of fiction (D) that would soon emerge for all to colonize. D had always been there, pushing up, but aside from these islands, it remained under water. There is, however, a problem. What if nothing below the waterline links these islands to each other or to the mainland in the distance? Sicily lies smack up against the boot of Italy. But despite appearances, it was never part of the boot; geologically speaking, it’s part of North Africa. We see our canonical novels of the past as an archipelago connected to the mainland of now, whereas they may be only a series of data points acting as hosts for our perception of patterns— patterns we perceive based on our knowledge of what is to come. Do things rise? Of course. Oil painting, or the landscape, or abstract art. In literature, the sonnet and the murder mystery and the naturalist novel. But such things are practices, and tracing the rise of identifiable practices makes a kind of sense that the divination of rising ways of thinking does not. If we redefine fiction as a practice, not as a mode of cognition or an underlying concept detectible beneath the surface of individual works, it too becomes traceable, and its difference with respect to earlier practices—Aristotelian invention and the pseudofactual mode—remains clear. Above, I’ve tried to bring those different practices into focus using a few examples that I believe are representative of the dominant practices of their time. They add up, I believe, to the following narrative. As is clear from Aristotle and the classical corpus, for a very long time poets—but of course not all poets—took their characters and their main actions from history and wove their plots around what was commonly said to be true. They went about their work this way not because their thinking was hard-wired, but because they and their audience shared a set of assumptions

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about what literature was good for and how it worked upon us. And so during the first big European heyday of the novel—from the beginning of the seventeenth century until around 1660—writers of French romances who wanted to dignify the genre inspired by the Renaissance rediscovery of Heliodorus’s fourth-century Aethiopica generally hewed close to this sanctioned practice.69 Then, in the latter decades of the seventeenth century, a new formal possibility was devised that ended up mostly displacing the older method of composition. This innovation is the pseudofactual posture: novels were no longer spun around legendary heroes, they took the form of memoirs, letters, or occasionally eyewitness histories by or about contemporaries of whom no one had heard. No conceptual mutation was necessary for this new phase or regime—just a set of forms offering, as we’ll see, concrete advantages over previous forms. Then, around the turn of the nineteenth century, there was a last change—last in the sense that I think we are still in it, not last in the sense of perfect or final. This change is what I’m calling fiction—works that make no bones about their invention despite being set within contemporary reality. (This last trait clearly separates fiction from the “fanciful” genres of the fairy tale or the oriental tale, as well as from allegory.) And as with the pseudofactual novel, represented chiefly by first-person forms, a specific form characterizes the fictional novel—a type of third-person narration that was more or less unexploited before this period. (As my Conclusion will suggest, the fictional novel also makes new use of the first-person forms associated with the pseudofactual regime.) I call each of these periods regimes. The term must not be confused with Kuhnian “paradigms” or Foucault’s “epistemes”—ways of thinking or modes of knowledge production that shift. In fact, even the common vocabulary of “shifting” is out of place, for it yokes us to modeling cultural change along the lines of sudden and unpredictable tectonic movement. Regimes do change, and the change may possibly (but not necessarily) be abrupt. This is not to say, however, that human cognition makes a leap, only that people’s literary behavior changes—generally speaking. “Generally” is a loose word, purposely on the opposite end of the spectrum from “shift.” Its looseness is not designed to protect my theory from the vagaries of history, which is to say, from troublesome counterexamples. In fact, it is inseparable from what I mean by a regime. Let’s take a closer look at the Aristotelian one. Aristotle mentions Agathon’s tragedy Antheus as proof that the genre did not need to concern itself with real people; the Greek novels of Xenophon, Heliodorus, and others set invented characters loose in a recognizable

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Mediterranean landscape. Greeks and Romans, just like early modern readers, were hardly conceptually short-changed or congenitally literal-minded. They could well imagine invented characters. But, they reasoned, why bother with them? Like many other ancient works, Antheus is lost, yet this particular loss is emblematic of a persistent disinterest in characters with no historical sanction. Most commentators were much less forgiving than Aristotle on this point, even when they were Aristotelians: when examples of made-up narratives were there to be denigrated, they were. Macrobius treated Petronius’s and Apuleius’s works as childish fables; the emperor Julian in the fourth century firmly rejected the Greek romances that were nothing but spurious history.70 (Comedy always constituted an exception: it was the one place where pure invention did not bring down upon the poet charges of irrelevance, though it did of course make the genre an also-ran to epic and tragedy in terms of prestige. I will postpone consideration of comic types until Chapter 3.) Of course, some people must have enjoyed these writings, but given the widespread opprobrium—which meant that cultural prestige did not accrue to works not dealing with real heroes—it is no wonder more writers did not push further in this direction. If the Aristotelian critical tradition did not sanction the use of invented heroes, this was not because they didn’t have the right “mental equipment,”71 but—much less dramatically—because they reasoned that heroes should be taken from history. As we’ve seen, Aristotle’s treatise did not set history and literature as two opposite poles—what moderns might want to call the poles of fact and fiction. On the contrary, literature was what poets made of the gaps in history, and conversely, as Lionel Gossman has emphatically put it, “History was a branch of literature.”72 Antheus was only an exception to what would become one of the essential rationales for historical subject matter: poets use historical figures, Aristotle wrote, “because it is what is possible that arouses conviction, and . . . what did happen is clearly possible, since it would not have happened if it were not.”73 Aristotle was not necessarily the root of the belief in the superiority of historical subjects; after all, the author of the Poetics described an existent state of affairs, and one which may well have characterized other pre-modern cultures as well.74 Moreover, even in the Middle Ages when direct Aristotelian influence was sparse, history remained at the core of many prestigious poetic forms.75 This enduring bent, combined with the prestige of Aristotle upon the Renaissance rediscovery of his Poetics, explains why early modern thinkers returned again and again to the historical core of poetry, or at least important poetry: the object of imitation needed to be a real

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one if the audience was to be persuaded and moved. The Spanish humanist Vives put the matter this way in 1522: “Those who are called ‘poets’ in Greek may relate whatever distortions and embellishments of truth that public fame (that monster of many heads) has concocted. But he who makes up the whole of what he tells is to be thought [more] a fool, or rather a liar, than a poet.”76 And well over two hundred years later Fielding was still stressing, however ironically, Tom Jones’s conformity with “that universal Contempt, which the World . . . have cast on all historical Writers, who do not draw their Materials from Records.”77 Dissenters, naturally, dissented. Sidney, with his oft-cited separation of poetry from history (in The Apologie for Poetry, c. 1583), was one. Rabelais, Ariosto, and Spenser are hardly orthodox Aristotelians (even if, as I’ve briefly suggested, they do not give history as short a shrift as might be supposed). Yet the Aristotelian line only hardened in the seventeenth century, as is evidenced by an evolution I’ve alluded to: imitating the Greek novel, which did not use characters of renown, French romance writers gave it a historical inflection.78 Upon its appearance in Amyot’s French translation of 1547, Heliodorus’s Aethiopica was praised by humanists for reasons we will see in Chapter 2. While its nonhistorical subject matter was not an insurmountable barrier to appreciation, it did restrict the work’s claim to our attention by eliminating, Amyot reasoned in his preface, any possible utility: the Aethiopica was nothing more than good leisure reading for the fatigued humanist scholar.79 Unsurprisingly, then, imparting prestige to romance in the Heliodorian model required beefing up its historical credentials. “[When] lies are made openly, such crude falsity makes no impression on the soul, and gives no pleasure,” wrote Georges and Madeleine de Scudéry in the preface to their romance Ibrahim (1641–44); “how can I be touched by the misfortunes of the Queen of Guindaye, or of the King of Astrobatia, since I know that their kingdoms are nowhere on the universal map, or more precisely, in the realm of things?”80 Romance was thus made to conform to general neoclassical arguments about verisimilitude, summed up in the formulation of Boileau, “The spirit is not moved by what it does not believe.”81 And early aesthetic speculation—in contradistinction to Kantian or Hegelian thought—built on the primacy of history by conceiving of art as an ersatz experience of reality, as a simulation or illusion. The theories of Burke, which I’ve mentioned in the context of Richardson’s editorial posture, are merely one late variant on this line of thought, in which illusion, necessarily imperfect, grounds the efficacy of the spectacle.82 The Marquis d’Argens, in his 1739 “Discours sur les nouvelles,” protested that

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he didn’t see why readerly involvement was discouraged by openly invented characters: “The author of a romance or a novel (un roman ou une nouvelle) has had enough genius to imagine a plot (un sujet), to decorate it with the circumstances that captivate and move the soul of the reader. So why can’t he invent names? What prevents him?”83 Nothing except tradition. And in a sense, even tradition doesn’t prevent authors of any period from inventing their protagonists. Tradition, after all, is merely a mass of practices and beliefs that individuals may reject or modify as they see fit. The question is whether such inevitable variation, which may remain strictly individual or possibly resolve into subpractices (like the Greek novel itself ), causes a change in dominant practices. In some cases the answer must be yes, in others no. It probably depends on being in the right place at the right time with the right invention. Here the example of the pseudofactual’s leading edge is relevant. The pretense of truth was not new to the years around 1670: Cervantes claimed to discover and translate a chronicle relating the life of Don Quixote, and any number of writers had offered “true stories”—of capital crimes, say, or of fantastic voyages—for the edification or amazement of their readers. But around 1670 in France the traditional contents of the novel—quite simply, love and adventure—are poured into a number of new forms. The first epistolary novels, for instance: Lettres portugaises (1669), commonly attributed to Guilleragues; or Le Portefeuille (1674), by Villedieu. Early memoir novels: Villedieu’s La Vie de Henriette-Sylvie de Molière, which I’ve mentioned; Bremond’s Mémoires galants (1680); Courtilz de Sandras’s Mémoires de Mr L.C.D.R. (1687). Novels, often cast as long letters to a friend, purporting to recount various adventures recently befallen the writer or people in the writer’s circle: Préchac’s Voyage de Fontainebleau (1678); Murat’s Voyage de campagne (1699). And finally the aforementioned historical novella: Saint-Réal’s Dom Carlos (1672), Boursault’s Le Prince de Condé (1675). As I will show in Chapter 1, this last form, though often taken for a key step toward novelistic modernity, was in fact composed along well-trodden Aristotelian lines (it focused on attested heroes from the European past), and at any rate had no posterity (by 1700 the subgenre is exhausted). But the other forms offered something Aristotelian invention did not. They made a place for writers, from bourgeois hacks to aristocratic women, who were not poets in the old, classically trained sense; and readers who read for leisure and not for learning could read about themselves rather than figures of the remote past. The pseudofactual posture, then, had advantages. By allowing writers to

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set their stories in the present, it permitted a much more direct commentary on contemporary life.84 Novelists were endlessly concerned with how they could use their works to make not only general ethical claims (which of course continued to be explored), but also to raise problems foreign to the figures bequeathed by history. If you wanted to address issues such as the institutions of marriage and slavery, the mores of Paris or London, social prejudice, political chicanery, and the abuses of the Church, then the benefits of the pseudofactual novel were clear. Another advantage to the mode was that at bottom it provided new forms without breaking with the long-established historical bent of Aristotelian poetics. Some violence was done to the common idea that the more illustrious the protagonist, the more forceful and prestigious the artwork: Defoe’s Roxana, certainly, is no Orestes. But what was lost in pedigree was gained in illusory immediacy, since readers were given to read not a poet’s invention, written in the blanks of history, but the hero’s own writing. Total belief was not required: Richardson’s letter to Warburton demonstrates that illusion was not held to be an all-or-nothing proposition. Nonetheless, whatever belief there was (and the more, the better) was envisioned as a species of the belief we have in historical discourse—literal belief with something subtracted, as it were, rather than a special type of belief reserved for literature. Granted, the epistolary novel marks quite a change from the epic; but at the same time, Richardson’s pseudofactual stance toward the reality of Clarissa’s letters does not bring us very far from Aristotle, for whom what has actually happened guarantees conviction. The pseudofactual form, once invented, prospered because it offered something to writers and readers. But invention is necessary, and this was the case with fictional forms as well. The pseudofactual novel features either a real person narrating his or her own deeds, or a real person narrating the deeds of real people. No one believes in all these “real people,” of course, but everyone agrees to pretend. Why can’t the pretense be dropped, given that no one believes it? Partially because of the rationales I’ve outlined, but also, no doubt, because the pretense derives from the forms themselves—from the letters, the memoirs, the biographies, the true histories. The fictional novel requires a new form of third-person narration. Pseudofactual third-person narrators recount a story of which they are not part; but because they pretend write what they have seen or heard, they belong to the same “storyworld” as the characters. The third-person narrators of fiction, by contrast, are not part of the storyworld of their novels; in many cases they are invisible, and the story seems to be somehow telling itself. But even when narrators are intrusive in their use

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of the word “I,” the “I” is no longer that of Behn or Fielding, no more than it recalls the much older poet-bard of, say, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1383) or the romances of Chrétien de Troyes. Rather, it belongs to an authornarrator who invents the persons and actions of which he or she writes. The novel that seems to tell itself and the novel told by an author-narrator who is in no way a “witness”: obviously these techniques open up new vistas for the genre. But they are, precisely, techniques, not a timeless narrative option that Richardson or Rousseau chose not to employ. The eighteenth-century novel’s inertia was not conceptual, but formal. Appropriating real-world discursive forms was the only game in town—at least until writers started to experiment with other possibilities and slowly stretched the bounds of what the novel could do.85 What is a literary regime, then? A dominant practice, modifiable over time, that corresponds to what enough people want their literature to do. Such a qualified proposition may seem toothless. It would be much better for the prestige of literary historians if something more dramatic were afoot—a change in worldview, a cultural mutation, a revolution in what is thinkable by humans, all registered first by the Geiger-like sensitivity of the literary work. And being able to read in the too-well-known pages of the canon the secret correspondences between novels and other apparently separate domains—this cements the critic’s ingenuity. Fiction’s advent has been tied in this way to momentous transformations and hidden causes. For Michael McKeon, nuancing Ian Watt’s argument that novels reflected a new empirical philosophical stance, the genre has to steer a dialectical path between the rock of empiricism and the hard place of skepticism, arriving at fiction as a soft middle ground. For Foley, realist fiction is logically subtended by a new vision of history. Gallagher looks away from philosophy and toward economics, suggesting that fiction follows from developments in capitalism, notably the use of credit.86 John Bender prefers to underline fiction’s congruence with the scientific hypothesis.87 I am certainly not prepared to deny a certain Lockean je ne sais quoi about the pseudofactual novel, especially since it is not hard to find corroboration that in the early modern period a qualitatively new form of discursive referentiality—what Timothy Reiss dubs “analytico-referential discourse”— replaced the textual practices of humanism or scholasticism, rooted in the citation of prior authorities.88 And discourses do interpenetrate. Fielding, trained as a lawyer, integrated legal standards of proof into Tom Jones89; Zola’s interest in the experimental science of Claude Bernard is a still more obvious example. But this is another order of link than the one proposed by the above

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scholars. Rarely content with demonstrable influence or seeking to leverage it into something grander, practitioners of Cultural Studies especially posit something more like a form of “magical ‘sympathy’ ” between otherwise disparate cultural manifestations.90 To be sure, if we get sufficiently abstract about what fiction “is,” then yes, we will start to notice suggestive resemblances with any number of other cultural elements. But this is not evidence of a link; it is evidence of the human propensity to see patterns—to assume the islands of data are subtended by a common conceptual or logical substrate. I am as intrigued by coincidences as anyone—by the fact, say, that Kant defines the judgment of taste as being “indifferent as regards the existence of an object” precisely in 1790, which is to say the moment properly fictional forms started to multiply.91 Nevertheless, the present study simply resists the temptation to link fiction to the domains of philosophy, science, economics, law, and so on. Before Fiction remains focused, rather, on the nuts and bolts of literary form. My intraliterary preoccupations do not mean that I regard literature as autonomous or absolute in the common modern sense. After all, the fact that the writers of the period I deal with attributed to literature effects both moral and emotional implies something far from aesthetic autonomy (art-for-art’s sake), disinterestedness (art is for the mind not the senses), or self-referentiality (the medium is the message). Literary form, therefore, is not an aesthetic but morphological matter. If we stop asking what the novel is a “sign of,” an array of interesting and nearly unasked questions come into view—questions that have little to do with those old studies that simply grouped novels into waxing and waning subgenres or schools. Here are a few. When do individual innovations modify communal practice and when don’t they? Do inherited forms possess a kind of inertia, or, reformulated slightly, might literature show signs of “pathdependence”? If so, what is necessary for a new formal regime to overcome an old one? Is formal evolution continuous, or marked by plateaus and breaks, or a combination of both? Which possibility fits the data better: does an earlier form “turn into” a later form, or is the later form actually a competitor, coming to dominate and displace the other because it is better at doing certain things? Does a given form imply a content, or can new forms simply serve as vehicles for the same old preoccupations? Or do we observe a lag between the new form and the subsequent exploitation of the possibilities it offers—as when Walter Benjamin describes the use of iron in the nineteenth century at first mimicking familiar materials and then, slowly, permitting heretofore impossible constructions?92 Are literary forms, instead of being possibilities that any writer can pull out of the air when needed, something more like

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technologies—devices that need to be invented and then worked on by their inventor and the inventor’s competitors? What would a history of the novel written as a history of forms, as a morphological history, look like? For better or worse, it wouldn’t look entirely like Before Fiction, which at its origin was conceived much along the lines of the histories I have come to critique. This book carries in its structure—chapters on individual novelists strung together like chronological pearls—the trace of a mode of inquiry that the actual works, once contextualized, invalidated. But form, no more than biology, is not destiny, and the six case studies that follow no longer point to something “happening” underneath or around them. On the contrary, they show rather clearly that apart from some local skirmishes, nothing is happening, in the sense that fiction is not coming into being. Maybe elsewhere it is—I doubt it—but not in the texts I have selected. If we want to know how fictional forms came to dominate the novel, then we need to study the spread of their devices—notably, as I’ve hinted and as I will sketch out further in the Conclusion, the use of omniscient narration. That would require, obviously, a quite different type of study, one in which unusual individual works would fade into the background.93 So, because a few isolated cases, contextualized or not, can’t add up to a history of communal practices, Before Fiction is only a prolegomenon to a future history that one day may offer a more adequate understanding of the various succeeding and competing forms the novel has taken.

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Chapter 1

The Impossible Princess (Lafayette)

La Princesse de Clèves’ claims to the title “the first modern novel” are many. The historical romances that had been the glory of the previous French prose tradition were labyrinthine and interminable; Lafayette’s work is compact and linear. It replaces heroic actions and hyperbolic passions with stifled feelings, confused thoughts, wavering intentions; it is thus psychological. Its heroine’s inimitability, famously lauded in the text’s closing sentence, signals the triumph of originality and individuality over conformity and the authority of the past; it is therefore an allegory of modernity itself. We can add to these arguments a trait that has been more or less taken for granted: Lafayette invents her heroine. The novel’s congruence in this regard with what we expect of fiction is remarkable. If we are looking for formal ancestors of the typical nineteenth-century novel—that is, third-person narratives focalized through nonexistent characters placed in a firmly drawn and recognizable milieu— then La Princesse de Clèves is really a much better choice than, say, Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), with its mock-epic themes and a garrulous narrator who repeatedly if facetiously affirms his story as true. One can sympathize with Ian Watt’s need to dismiss this and other French novels, in an infamous phrase, as “too stylish to be authentic”: how can the rise of the novel be British, Lockean, and bourgeois, if that sun had already broken through the Parisian clouds in the early spring of 1678?1 But British chauvinism isn’t the only thing challenged by Lafayette’s novel. Brief reflection is enough to bring into focus the oddity of an ancestor who is separated from her descendants by so many generations. After all, it is not as if the French novel in the century between Lafayette and Balzac looked anything like La Princesse de Clèves, either. On the contrary, with a few exceptions it looked very much like its counterpart across the Channel: it

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was dominated by the pseudofactual forms of the memoir novel and the letter novel. For its brevity, its psychology, its modern values, La Princesse de Clèves no doubt makes a convincing “first novel.” But is it really, in spite of appearances, fiction? A positive answer entails explaining why so much time would go by before novelists imitated Lafayette’s example by inventing protagonists without asserting their existence. A negative answer frees us from that tricky task, but imposes another, that of facing up to the possibility that at least some great books are not harbingers but hapaxes. This is, I will argue, the case with La Princesse de Clèves. It is an occupational hazard of literary historians to regard the history they study as an evolution driven by innovative masterworks or, at the very least, exemplified by those masterworks. Lafayette’s novel was a lasting success at home and abroad; its patently invented heroine spurred readers to envision their relations with characters in a totally new light—to identify with her, as we will see. And yet this novel did not change the shape of the novel: third-person narrations of the doings of openly fictional protagonists set within a firmly drawn historical and geographical frame were not a thing of the immediate future. Lafayette invented her princess, but she did not invent modern fiction, because La Princesse de Clèves becomes “fiction” only in the rearview mirror of literary history. Instead, the novel was an isolated manipulation of longstanding conventions and local practices that changed precisely nothing. Those conventions and practices belonged to the Aristotelian tradition, and they were adhered to by writers of both long historical romances and the short historical novellas proliferating before and after the appearance of La Princesse de Clèves.2 Had Lafayette pushed a plausible figure into the foreground of her tale—a woman who might have existed—she would have certainly been stretching the bounds of normal practice, centered, as we will see, on real heroes of the past. Probably such a stretch would have gone unnoticed as just another example of Classical vraisemblance, of invention that is grafted so seamlessly onto history that we cannot tell where one leaves off and the other begins. But Lafayette was doing something much more radical still, and someone did take note—the otherwise unknown critic Jean-Baptiste de Valincour, who vigorously objected to the fact that Lafayette had created a protagonist who was impossible. This chapter begins, then, with Valincour’s indictment of Lafayette’s princess for being in direct contradiction with the historical record. I go on to point out how startlingly different this practice is with respect to an earlier historical novella of Lafayette’s, La Princesse de Montpensier (1662), whose heroine was, to the contrary, real to the point of

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indiscretion; La Princesse de Clèves’ impossible protagonist, I argue, allows Lafayette to break from a traffic in “true stories” and critique a court culture of gossip. And the invention of the Princess has another effect as well, as an appreciative Valincour points out. Far from being merely a retrograde churl, the critic readily admits the peculiar emotional bond he feels with Lafayette’s characters, a bond he goes on to praise and describe at length, and that is only possible, I suggest, because the character of the Princess disables normal reading protocol. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on the implications of the type of poetic contextualization I offer. For if viewing La Princesse de Clèves through the lens of the Aristotelian tradition robs Lafayette of her stature as the inventor of modern fiction, it has the compensating effect of making the subsequent history of the novel much more comprehensible even as it overturns many common assumptions about the evolution of literary forms. (An appendix to the chapter, intended for specialist readers, describes the types of invention practiced by Lafayette’s competitors in the genre of the historical novella.)

Inventing a Princess Immediately following the anonymous publication of La Princesse de Clèves in 1678 appeared two book-length appraisals of the novel, also anonymous: first, the fairly critical Lettres à Madame la Marquise *** sur le sujet de la Princesse de Clèves, attributed to Jean-Baptiste de Valincour, and then, in the novel’s defense, Jean-Antoine de Charnes’s Conversations sur la critique de la Princesse de Clèves. Valincour is far from uniformly hostile, as we will see, yet a number of things about Lafayette’s heroine bother him—her behavior, as many literary critics have underlined; but also her existence itself, or rather the fact that she never existed. This aspect of Valincour’s criticism has received little attention, and no wonder: as readers whose codes have been formed by, say, Fabrice del Dongo’s experience at Waterloo, we are apt to take the mixture of historical precision and fabricated characters as intuitively novelistic. Indeed, on this point it is difficult not to side with Charnes, who mocks his adversary for staging confrontations between novels and history books. Such has been the position of Charnes’s modern commentators, who credit him with recognizing “the autonomy of novelistic fiction with respect to history”3; the implication, of course, is that Lafayette’s Princess is an ancestor of Stendhal’s Fabrice, and that Valincour may be right to say that Lafayette is breaking with tradition,

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but, turned to the past, he is blind to the novel’s future. In fact, Charnes is not clairvoyant; he mounts a serviceable defense of Lafayette’s practice, but ultimately Valincour’s incomprehension is a better guide to Lafayette’s idiosyncratic use of history and the challenge it posed to longstanding Aristotelian accounts of poetic invention. Steeped in Renaissance interpretations of Aristotle’s Poetics, Valincour cannot abide what he sees as Lafayette’s violation of a rule of literary composition: poets and novelists (faiseurs de romans; V 63), he writes in his Lettres, choose historical episodes of sufficient notoriety to pique the reader’s curiosity but not so familiar in the details as to limit the writer’s room for maneuver.4 The alloy of historical fact (the basic episodes and personages) and poetic invention (the maneuvering) was not of Valincour’s manufacture: it was the one found commonly in Racine and Corneille’s discussions of tragedy; Gomberville and the Scudérys say much the same thing about romance, a genre whose increasing recourse to history helped cement its prestige.5 And such seventeenth-century French use had deeper sanction, as makes clear Valincour’s recourse to the authoritative Aristotelian commentary of Renaissance scholar Castelvetro. For according to the latter’s Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata et sposta (1570), cited toward the close of Valincour’s first letter, inventing new characters was an impermissible infraction of Aristotelian laws. That Aristotle himself had said no such thing is of little concern; Castelvetro’s position, doubtless a bit strict, followed from an interpretive tradition that consistently relegated invented characters to the comic. Serious writers, by contrast, take famous people and events from history—fame being the very basis of readerly interest—and then invent the meetings, dialogues, motivations, and very frequently love stories that had been left unrecorded. The goal, Valincour notes, is to give readers the impression of discovering “what historians forgot to write” (V 70). Authorial latitude is huge, “as long as [invention] [is] not directly opposed to historical truth” (V 71).6 By contrast, Lafayette does not respect this accepted practice. Setting her novel in the well-documented court of Henri II, she makes the false step of contradicting the documentation, marrying a woman who never existed to a man who did, and a man who, moreover, was never married in the first place. Lafayette’s heroine is—Valincour repeats the expression twice— “visibly false” (V 69). Modern critical attention to the subject of verisimilitude in and around Lafayette’s novel has focused almost exclusively on what has been called cultural plausibility: what were the ideological presuppositions that made readers at the time discount episodes or actions as implausible?7 This interest is

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far from anachronistic, since cultural plausibility is thematized in the novel itself, and present both in Valincour’s comments and in the testimony of individuals such as Bussy-Rabutin and Fontenelle.8 Valincour, however, objects to the “visibly false” heroine because the princesse de Clèves, whatever her behavior, is factually impossible. This is not merely a variation on the ageold condemnation of poets as liars, since Valincour does not indict novels in general. Nor does he bemoan some sort of slip in standards among authors of his day. If Lafayette’s book is the only one he incriminates, it is also the only one he can incriminate: Lafayette’s contemporaries all adhere at least in spirit to the Aristotelian rigor set forth by Castelvetro one hundred years earlier, as a quick look at the three works commonly seen as predecessors of La Princesse de Clèves confirms: Lafayette’s very own La Princesse de Montpensier, routinely credited with hastening the demise of the voluminous French heroic romances; Saint-Réal’s Dom Carlos (1672), which coined the term nouvelle historique in its subtitle; and Villedieu’s triptych Les Désordres de l’amour (1675). All these books moved carefully within the blanks of a historical record that was easily available through works of vulgarized history—Davila’s Histoire des guerres civiles (translated from the Italian in 1657), the 1668 abridgement of Mézeray’s massive Histoire de France (orig. 1643–51), the publication of the memoirs of Castelnau (1659) and Brantôme (1665–66), and even something like Le Grand Alcandre (1651), a transparently keyed and much-reprinted account of Henri IV’s dalliances with his mistresses.9 The blanks involved love, whose entanglements—completely invented or merely amplified with respect to what was known—served to explain or motivate noteworthy past events, thus producing the sensation of reading what Valincour called “secret history” (V 70).10 It is true that Lafayette and Villedieu, against the stipulations of Castelvetro, permit themselves an invented character, but two factors absolve them of poetic wrongdoing. First, both characters, the comte de Chabannes of Montpensier and Madame de Maugiron of Les Désordres’ third novella, are spurned lovers whose presence adds tension and pathos to the main love plots, which take place between bona-fide historic personages. In this respect, they are close to Sabine or Dircis, otherwise unknown figures who appear for dramatic reasons in, respectively, Corneille’s 1640 retelling of the Horatii legend and his 1659 version of Oedipus Rex. Second, nothing in the historical record permits one to conclude that the characters could not have existed: their family names were real enough; it was just that available sources could neither affirm nor deny the existence of the individuals themselves. In a famous remark in his 1614 History of the World, Raleigh had asserted that “filling up the blanks

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of old histories” in this manner need not be cause for concern: “For it is not to be feared that time should run backward, and by restoring the things themselves to knowledge, make our conjectures appear ridiculous.”11 Even if we can no longer quite feel the discomfort Valincour felt on seeing an invented woman pushed to the forefront of La Princesse de Clèves, we understand the reasons for his objection. Certainly, invented characters were not unheard-of in novels, but, as in the above examples, the invention almost always remained historically plausible and was typically confined to secondary characters.12 Moreover, how would readers know that the future princesse de Clèves, Mademoiselle de Chartres, and her mother to boot, never existed? What made them “visibly false,” in contrast to characters like Chabannes and Maugiron? We need not suppose perfect mastery of Renaissance genealogy by Lafayette’s contemporaries: all they had to do was to reach for the volumes of the historian Mézeray and the memorialist Brantôme, which were not the dusty tomes they are now but best-sellers devoured by an aristocratic public fascinated by their glorious ancestors. If Valincour’s confrontation of the novel with the historical record strikes us as odd—who could imagine indicting Balzac for having invented Goriot?—in these years such a confrontation made much more sense: in a literary culture in which literary heroes were real almost by definition, the first thing readers of La Princesse de Clèves would do would be to ask for more information on the heroine.13 And it must be said that Lafayette fairly solicits the reader’s curiosity: Valincour’s recourse to histories of the French Renaissance is incited by the book itself. By its detail, of course, familiar to any reader of the novel’s dense opening pages. But also by what, in the midst of such exacting descriptions of the court, of the legendary affairs, of the tournaments, was so suspiciously out of focus—the origins of Mademoiselle de Chartres. Her dead father is evoked but not named; her family name would have been odd, since the house of Chartres did not exist; and, a final goad, this fatherless young woman of whom no one had heard was supposed to be “one of the greatest heiresses of France.”14 Mézeray and Brantôme were silent on the subject, but since silence was the accomplice of possibility, what permitted Valincour to declare with such certainty that the novel featured “a Mademoiselle de Chartres who never was” (qui n’a jamais existé au monde; V 62)? The best proof that Chartres did not exist was her marriage to someone who did figure in the histories—to one of the three sons of Jacques de Clèves, duc de Nevers, none of whom ever married anyone of that (odd) name. What should we possibly think, Valincour says triumphantly, of “a duc de Clèves, who marries [Mademoiselle

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de Chartres] even though he was never married” (V 62–63)? It turns out that Valincour is wrong in the details (he confuses the de Clèves brothers), but the contradiction is indeed there, and it gives the critic all he needs to declare the Princess factually implausible, false.15 Smelling blood, perhaps, Valincour manages to locate one more contradiction. Reading in Lafayette of the tournament in which Nemours competes under the colors yellow and black in homage to the Princess, he turns to the pages where Brantôme describes the same event. The detail, astonishingly, was true: Brantôme notes that the real Nemours, Jacques de Savoie, wore the colors in homage to an unnamed woman. This would seem be the perfect example of a historical blank, since the Princess could plausibly be just that woman about whom the historian is silent. Unfortunately, history isn’t silent enough, for Brantôme adds that Nemours chose the colors of a woman whose sexual favors he was then enjoying.16 Lafayette’s maintaining of the reference to yellow and black, Valincour reasons, is tantamount to identifying her virtuous heroine with a courtesan. The author would have done better to give alternative colors so as not to raise such a specter in the minds of readers—some contradictions, we can assume, are better than others.17 Charnes’s response to this detective work, and to the entire Aristotelian thrust of Valincour’s argument, is that contradictions mean nothing: since the Princess is “an invented person,” Charnes remarks with respect to the colors of Brantôme’s courtesan, “I cannot fathom how one can apply what was said about the historical lady to what the novel’s author tells us about the imaginary lady” (C 84). It is on account of this that François Weil, Charnes’s modern editor, detects in the Conversations the seed of a post-Aristotelian line of thought that will eventually lead to modern fictionality and the novel as we know it. While it is indeed tempting to construe Charnes’s remark in this way, his thought on the issue is a good deal less “coherent” (C xxiii) than Weil alleges, and deserves some pressure. Weil’s main proof rests on a passage in which Charnes says that novels of his day, which he calls “gallant histories,” represent a “third species” of “fiction,” a word he uses in the general sense of poetry. Neither “those pure fictions in which the imagination allows itself complete freedom, without regard for truth,” nor “those in which the author takes a historical subject in order to embellish and improve it with his inventions,” La Princesse de Clèves belongs to a different category entirely: here, “one invents a subject, or takes a subject that is not universally known, and one decorates it [l’orne] with historical details that increase its plausibility [vraisemblance] and heighten the reader’s curiosity and attention” (C 129–30).

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Charnes’s argument, however, is problematic on at least three counts. First, the difference between his third species—the one that holds a tantalizing resemblance to modern fictionality—and fiction’s second species seems close to a quantitative argument: the novel, Charnes suggests, is simply less historical than history.18 Second, and more serious, both species resemble the poetic composition Valincour himself prescribes: contemporary authors, Charnes writes, try to produce such “faithful copies of true history” that readers take them “for history itself ”; they concentrate on the actions of “private persons” recounted in a way in which the reader often understands those actions “as the secret motivation [ressorts] behind the memorable events History has taught us” (C 135–36). The difference between species two and three is that the former treats the great actors of history, whereas the latter treats unknown people whose lives may nonetheless have put into motion public events. It is a perfectly good distinction, but one that in no way parts company with traditional plausibility, as is suggested by Charnes’s assimilation of “invented subjects” and subjects that are “not universally known.” The invented subject here remains plausible through and through: readers cannot distinguish it from a subject that is true but unknown. The final and greatest obstacle to viewing Charnes as the first theorist of a modern articulation of invention and history is simply that his assumption that Lafayette is merely doing what the authors of other “gallant histories” of the 1670s did is dead wrong. As I’ve mentioned, Saint-Réal and Villedieu do not create characters and plots to which they add a little decorative “history,” nor do any other authors of the fifty-odd examples of the genre.19 Charnes may seem open-minded and forward-looking, but his permissiveness results only from his inability to see what is so particular about Lafayette’s practice. Instead of being someone from whom La Princesse de Clèves needed to be saved, Valincour may have been just the kind of reader Lafayette wanted— someone who would tug the obvious historical threads until they pulled out in his hand. If you follow the yellow and black, you will find a courtesan in place of the virtuous Princess; look up the junior de Clèves brother: he is married to someone else. Accidental or inconsequential contradictions these are not: each time we look for the precise point of suture between history and invention, we find that the place the Princess occupies in the novel is already occupied in history by someone else. Which is also to say that Lafayette makes that suture point problematic and brings the contradiction into being by inventing a heroine who cannot exist. Invention alone, I’ve said, can be accommodated to Aristotelian poetics; characters who might have existed may be less interesting

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than real ones, but they still bathe in the soft glow of reality. The Princess is invented in a different manner. She alone can be proved not to exist, since her space, as Valincour helps us see, is already occupied. This is not a mistake, as Valincour seems to think it is; nor is it of no concern, as Charnes suggests with a shrug. Rather, Lafayette has constructed what may be literature’s first deliberately counterfactual heroine. And if the Princess’s counterfactuality is no accident, it is also not a meaningless detail: Lafayette’s twisting of the Aristotelian party line is registered in the innovative strategies contemporaries developed to deal with her most unusual protagonist.20

True Stories We might start to look for the reasons behind Lafayette’s play with the historical record by returning briefly to the work of hers usually regarded as the first historical novella. Despite its cast of largely real characters, including the heroine of the title, La Princesse de Montpensier was advertised as a work of pure imagination: its short “note from the bookseller” prominently proclaims the adventures therein to be “imaginary” and “invented at whim” (L 4). The tone of the note is deferential, as it should be: the novella does, after all, attribute an adulterous if unconsummated affair to Renée d’Anjou, the greatgrandmother of Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier, Louis XIV’s cousin and the richest woman in Europe. No insult intended to persons living or dead, the “bookseller” gingerly states. The modern reader of course barely registers the note, so much does it state the obvious, rehearsing the legal disclaimers of our time.21 Since only a pedant would read with the goal of baring the truth underneath the fiction, why would we expect that this be a story that really happened? But for the public of 1662, adept at using keys to decipher oblique references to real people, these lines would surely have raised suspicions and implied the direct opposite of what they said.22 And anyone who consults the relevant genealogies is rewarded with a delicious “coincidence”: the duchesse de Montpensier’s grandfather, Henri de Bourbon, was born to Renée d’Anjou on May 12, 1573, nine months after an “imaginary” nocturnal episode described in the book in which the princesse de Montpensier lowers the drawbridge of her castle and admits her lover, the duc de Guise, into her chambers. (The adulterous meeting is easily datable since it takes place in the run-up to the Saint Bartholomew Day massacre, August 24 of the previous year.)

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It is impossible to know why Lafayette might have wanted to hint at the bastard birth of the Grande Mademoiselle’s not-so-remote ancestor; the available record permits only speculation.23 Not speculative, however—unless one chooses to accept the bookseller’s note at face value and dismiss the suspicious nine-month interval as true coincidence—is the light this scandalous allusion sheds on the flagrantly unreal princess of Lafayette’s last novel. For the princesse de Clèves emerges as the diametric opposite of the earlier heroine, who was real to the point of indiscretion. In itself, their antithetical relationship might mean only that Lafayette has dropped one mode of writing and adopted another mode, no doubt more cautious or prudent. Yet the entire plot of La Princesse de Clèves seems to revolve around the circulation of true stories—the instructive lessons told to the young heroine, for example, but also a misplaced love letter and, most important of all, the story of the Princess’s own adulterous desire, which in one gripping scene is told back to her, minus the name that would identify her as its protagonist. So it is not only that the two heroines are antithetical in the type of extratextual referentiality they presuppose, but also that the novels that bear their names are antithetical, or more precisely that the later book is somehow about the earlier one, an implicit critique of its mode of being.24 La Princesse de Montpensier was a work of gossip—this is a statement not about its literary quality but about its referential status—while La Princesse de Clèves is a novel about gossip. A novel about gossip, moreover, that has been proofed against turning into gossip itself by dint of Lafayette’s careful husbanding of its heroine’s counterfactuality. Although the prevalence of loose tongues and wayward speech in La Princesse de Clèves has long been recognized by Lafayette scholars, the compulsion to repeat true stories merits revisiting in the context of the “visible falsity” that Lafayette has installed at the heart of her novel.25 The crucial scenes are familiar to students of the book, and they invariably delineate a two-stage process: faced with what are billed as true stories, listeners—figurative readers, I propose—strive to complete the referential circle by supplying the real names of the provisionally anonymous protagonists. Such is the case with the unsigned love letter misplaced by the Vidame de Chartres, which may thereby “apply”—the word was in routine use in both England and France—to multiple parties, including the Princess’s lover Nemours. More relevant still is the complicated trajectory of the Princess’s avowal, made in private but quickly transformed into narrative and put in promiscuous circulation. Here, the problem of names is present on several levels: on the one hand, the Princess decides to admit to her husband her love for a man she refuses to name,

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leaving therefore a blank that ends up exciting the listener’s thirst for more information; on the other, the story of this story is then circulated in such a way that the wife becomes herself a blank that listeners must strive to fill in. The Princess’s extraordinary avowal fails not only because of male indiscretion (that of Nemours and Clèves), but also because she had the mistaken hope that a narrative might be made some sort of sign of good faith—an avowal in the feudal sense of pledge of fidelity—whereas narratives in this world are oppressively and relentlessly tied to real people.26 Indeed, from the outset the novel’s protagonists appear under the sign of the compulsion to name. Madame de Clèves’s first acquaintance with the duc de Nemours illustrates the process by which a known name is hesitantly fitted to a face: the ball commenced, and as she was dancing with Monsieur de Guise, a rather loud noise was heard coming from around the door to the room, the sound of space being made for someone entering. Madame de Clèves finished her dance, and while she was looking around for a new partner, the King cried out for her to take the one who was arriving. She turned and saw a man she at first felt could be no one but Monsieur de Nemours. (L 274) The passage marvelously sets up Nemours first as a blank, an unidentified “someone” emerging from the inchoate background noise or bruit, which in Lafayette’s day possessed the added and perhaps significant meaning of “gossip”; this person, again designated periphrastically as “the one who was arriving,” is then assigned to the Princess, who finally names him for us. The scene culminates with the Princess denying, as the official introductions are made, her prior knowledge of the identity of the “someone” with whom she has just danced. With disturbing symmetry, she now occupies the place that was that of her new husband upon the couple’s first brief meeting: glimpsing Mademoiselle de Chartres at a jeweler’s shop, the prince de Clèves is instantaneously possessed by the urge to learn “who this beautiful woman was of whom he knew nothing” (L 261). While he puzzles over the strange circumstances— why is she so young, and yet unaccompanied by her mother?—the mysterious young woman leaves the shop, and the jeweler is of no help. Then, for the first but not the last time, it becomes apparent that the closed culture of gossip can always be counted on to fill in such blanks: that evening, at the King’s sister’s, Clèves tells the story of the unidentified beauty, and a listener is quick

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to supply a name for the face. Thus later, at the ball, the Princess experiences for herself the involuntary impulse to put names to faces and seems to sense obscurely—she “appear[s] a little embarrassed”—that being able to identify this incomparably handsome stranger is already a kind of guilt, an act of infidelity. For Lafayette, the desire to name names is a step on the road to sexual congress. It is not just that the court loves gossip, it is that, in its way, gossip is a form of love, possesses the structure of desire itself: your own imperious drive to identify is a sure sign you yourself are caught up in the court’s concupiscence. Lafayette’s play with the historical record now starts to assume its full significance: the counterfactuality of her heroine has made it impossible to read her novel as the characters in that novel “read” each other. While those characters give themselves over to gossipy reading that always refers narrative to the real world, Lafayette’s real readers are discouraged from such a mode of consumption. They are not warned off by a disclaimer, since in Lafayette’s day saying that there are no keys is the best way to ensure that readers will look for them. They are discouraged, rather, by the author’s bypassing the normal rules of poetic invention. Had Lafayette supplied a historical cast of characters with plausible or attested adventures, as she did in La Princesse de Montpensier and as the historical novella generally did, she would have been guilty of involvement in the very trafficking her tale denounced.27 Her guilt would clearly be no less great had she set the narrative in the present and hinted at keys, as many other stories of the day did. But La Princesse de Clèves is not a true story, and there is no key. Only an impossible heroine, set safely in the past, could keep Lafayette’s readers from being implicated in the culture of gossip that brings misfortune and death down on her characters.28 Quite simply, the Princess permitted Lafayette to write about intrigue without participating in intrigue.29

Implausible Identifications Such obliquity represented, then, a gain for Lafayette: it enabled a noncomplicit critique of a culture’s narrative promiscuity, that is to say, its unceasing circulation of sexual secrets. Yet an impossible heroine implied disadvantages as well. After all, historical truth underwrote not only Aristotelian poetic production but also theories of consumption; without it, what were readers supposed to do with this novel? Placing a nonexistent heroine at the center of the

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novel’s web disables the pretense of teaching about the illustrious events and figures of the past; and being impossible, the Princess cannot help us entertain hypothetical “secret” causes of those events. Nor can one read for edifying examples of good and bad behavior, since the ethics of exemplarity likewise presupposed the assertion of historical truth.30 And veracity enabled even the dominant explanations of emotional response to the artwork. For theorists of the Italian Renaissance as well as of Classical France, the emotions audiences took away from books and plays were predicated on the historical reality of heroes, whose emotion was in a sense channeled by the poet before flowing outward to the actor or character and finally to the spectators or readers.31 So what was a nonentity good for? Of course, even leaving aside comedy, readers of the period did have experience with characters lacking in real-world attestation. And the most obvious thing to do with them at the time was to look for the hidden historical referents—to look for keys. The success of Le Grand Alcandre, the disguised account of Henri IV’s love life to which I have already alluded, clearly indicated such interest in veiled accounts of scandal; originally destined for private circulation, Bussy-Rabutin’s Histoire amoureuse des Gaules on publication in 1665 cloaked its referents in disguised names (and earned its author a stint in the Bastille); Subligny’s La Fausse Clélie (1670), the subject of the following chapter, was meant to be interpreted as an account of current events. Keys were used moreover in works, like Scudéry’s Clélie, whose characters maintained a nominal historicity. Curiously, however, no one appears to have taken a key to La Princesse de Clèves.32 The fact that keyed readings are not attested in contemporary documents is admittedly surprising, given that part of the novel’s publicity campaign would seem to incite them: in the January 1678 issue of Le Mercure galant, Donneau de Visé published a story, La Vertu malheureuse, having the same basic plot outline as La Princesse de Clèves but recast as the purportedly genuine story of a woman who has just retired from court life. The lack of historical antecedent for the Princess, coupled with the framing of La Vertu malheureuse—the real Princess is out there right now, in a convent somewhere in France—could have made people read Lafayette’s work as a “fake” historical novella that was in fact about a present-day adulterous love. Yet it didn’t. Putting a nonhistorical character into an otherwise historical setting was evidently not interpreted as an invitation to look for a real person.33 There was, however, a second mode of reading that could accommodate Lafayette’s invented princess. This reading was ethical: the Princess, and specifically her avowal, was taken as posing a general problem of conduct to be

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parsed and debated. Antecedents for this are manifold. In Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, the commentary of the tale-tellers on their true stories can be viewed as a colloquial version of humanist exegesis.34 The shepherds of d’Urfé’s L’Astrée, meanwhile, embody certain transparent bents, passions, or ways of loving. Hence, to L’Astrée’s Celadon, a virtual allegory of steadfast faithfulness, was opposed his mirror image Hylas, eloquent spokesman for the virtues of change; numerous other characters illustrated additional approaches to amorous service. Such an ethical concept of character manifestly has nothing in common with the creation of a “deep” individual; but nor do these characters function as types in the comic sense. Rather, they are more like hypothetical instances through which readers can work through problems of conduct. By the time of Scudéry’s great romances of the 1640s and 1650s, the use of characters to illustrate amorous conundrums—what were known as “questions of gallantry” (questions galantes)—was typical. And Lafayette knew the practice well: her own Zayde is effectively built around one such conundrum, borrowed in fact from Scudéry: is knowledge of a possible partner an impediment or a stimulus to love? The cast of Zayde (1670–71) illustrates the possible permutations of the question. Hence, one man will insist on knowing everything about his love object, another will demand that his lover not know anything about him, while the hero, Consalve, who knows absolutely nothing about the eponymous heroine, will alone find his love rewarded. Such a mode of reading was immediately pressed into service by Donneau de Visé, who in a successful bid to solicit the involvement of readers of Le Mercure galant used the Princess’s dilemma to pose a general problem, nowhere articulated in Lafayette’s novel itself: should a virtuous woman who respects her husband tell him of her love for another man so that her husband will allow her to leave court, and thereby to distance herself from the source of her temptation? Or does the calculus of happiness and pain dictate that she suffer in silence? Donneau de Visé was able to construct an elaborate chart in which possible opinions about the Princess’s avowal—its positives and negatives— are organized. And readers wrote to him, explaining why this or that reasoning seemed to them the strongest. Even lacking in historical credentials, the Princess could, then, be treated like any other romance character, that is, as an occasion for posing a general problem. At least one reader, however, found this ethical mode of reading inadequate to a novel in which for the most part characters do not act in accordance with some governing temperament or philosophy. This was Valincour, and once again he is critical of the novel: La Princesse de Clèves has no proper

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heroes, with the Princess herself being, unsurprisingly, the worst offender. In situation after situation, she cannot respond to challenges in a manner the reader expects of a serious protagonist, which, in the court culture of wit and repartee, largely comes down to verbal mastery. Valincour accumulates examples of the Princess’s consistent failure to come up with the right words—or any words—at the right time (V 76–79). Had the Princess replied in one way or another, readers could debate her tactics, as they can debate whether her avowal to her husband was a good idea. But outside the avowal scene, and her final withdrawal, the Princess, confused, blushing, and embarrassed, seems to employ no tactics at all. And Valincour has already noted toward the beginning of his text that the Princess is not alone in being afflicted with a type of social incompetence that normally belongs to the comic genre: the prince de Clèves, after all, is unable to speak to Mademoiselle de Chartres upon their first meeting at the jeweler’s (V 37). Even more worldly men such as Nemours and the Vidame de Chartres are censured for losing the presence of mind the reader normally associates with the “romance hero” (héros de roman; V 51); the Vidame, for instance, talks too much. Valincour is quick to say that he does not demand perfection from the protagonists, only some basic social competence. How indeed can readers sit in judgment over the ethics or decorum of the characters’ actions if those actions are so manifestly botched, if the author has peopled her novel of court intrigue with such a sorry band of intriguers? As with his objections to Lafayette’s use of her sources, Valincour’s nitpicking here seems to me historically significant. When Donneau de Visé asks people to write in with their judgment on the Princess’s avowal, he is effectively using the Mercure galant to do something that the novel itself refuses to do. In Marguerite de Navarre, in d’Urfé, in Scudéry, and still, residually, in Lafayette’s own Zayde, the characters themselves perform acts of judgment: L’Astrée even includes mock trials where characters take turns ruling on the behavioral crimes of others. Another way of putting this would be to say that the editor of the Mercure galant is trying—to all appearances successfully—to fit reception of the novel into older patterns,35 but by the same token, as Valincour observes, the novel appears to resist this ethical use of character. Yet Valincour does not only critique. If he regrets the characters’ lack of poise, he also recognizes that purging the novel of conventional heroics and the grand passions that go with them has allowed the author to instantiate a more intimate relation between reader and character. Indeed, given his frustration with the protagonists, it is striking how much Valincour likes and feels for them, heaping praise on the novel for its

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expression of “what happens in the depths of our hearts” (V 91). The vocabulary he uses to describe his reaction to the book is consistently one of sympathetic identification: readers are able to recognize themselves in the characters rather than feel the more familiar Aristotelian emotions of admiration, pity, and compassion. Lafayette’s achievement is immediately described as the expression of things that everyone has already felt. Hence, accounting for the peculiar “charm” of a passage such as the one in which the princesse de Clèves finally becomes aware of her love for Nemours, Valincour writes, “One cannot imagine anything more agreeable or natural; it expresses admirably well how certain movements arise in our hearts, movements that we hide from our closest friends and that we try to hide from ourselves out of fear of having to fight them” (V 38). “Charming,” “agreeable,” “natural”: these are recurrent terms in Valincour’s text, far removed both from the language of ethical judgment and from forms of aesthetic response that stressed a kind of contagion or fury that overwhelms the reader or spectator with the heroes’ extreme feelings. Lafayette’s art gives voice to things we have already felt, or describes the way we are. So of the Princess’s dumbfounded reaction to seeing Nemours pocket her portrait, Valincour comments, “Admit that Madame de Clèves’s embarrassment is perfectly expressed. As for myself, I’m sure that of all the women who have found themselves in the situation she was in, not one could help but recognize herself here, as if she herself had been depicted” (V 42). Of her husband’s ill-fated urge to have Nemours followed: “This whole passage seemed to me subtle indeed; it expresses perfectly the fact that people given over to love or jealousy don’t see things as others do” (V 80). Of the Princess’s frequent inner monologues in which she debates her course of action: “one must concede that the author excels at showing what happens in our heart. Its many movements have never been perceived so well, nor expressed with such force and subtlety. Madame de Clèves’s reflections on her own situation, her agitations, these different thoughts that destroy one another as they arise are all things that happen every day inside us, things that everyone feels but that few can depict as we see done here” (V 98). Characters do not provide models for our behavior; they act as readers act, enabling us to see ourselves as if in a mirror. The irony, as Charnes himself remarks, is that this expression of common experience is made possible by the very trait that Valincour cannot get his mind around, to wit, the pedestrian quality of the novel’s heroes.36 It is a shame that the Princess cannot respond to Nemours’s outrageous theft of the portrait with more aplomb, and yet it is precisely in her embarrassed reaction that readers will see themselves; she cannot follow through on any of

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her resolutions, but her inability to act in her best interests is what makes her representative of the way we are. That the protagonists’ antiheroic bumbling actually endears them to us is made clearest in a famous passage in which Valincour juxtaposes the scene of avowal in La Princesse de Clèves with a remarkably similar one in the second story of Villedieu’s Les Désordres de l’amour. Critics often assume that Valincour is accusing Lafayette of having plagiarized the key scene of her novel,37 but he clearly brings up the Villedieu passage to demonstrate why Lafayette’s is so much better. And its superiority turns on just this question of heroic behavior. Villedieu’s Madame de Thermes names her lover boldly and unhesitantly, as Valincour notes: she “approaches the conversation with a much more superior tone than that of Madame de Clèves” and “does not show any of the timidity of the Princess.” Moreover, her husband responds with self-sacrifice, ceding to his rival. Villedieu’s characters thus comport themselves with a forthrightness that seems to call out for the reader’s approval or censure; but as Valincour says to the interlocutor who proposes the parallel, “I much prefer the duc de Clèves even with all his chagrins.” The interlocutor agrees, waxing sarcastic on the behavior of Villedieu’s characters: “maybe people lived more heroically back in the time of the Marquis de Thermes.” For heroism is quite literally a turnoff: Madame de Thermes’s “great gift for explaining herself,” Valincour continues, “seems to me as likely to extinguish love in a husband’s heart as Madame de Clèves’s avowal was to foster and maybe even increase it” (V 104). Villedieu’s heroine is admirable; Lafayette’s is something more: “one loves Madame de Clèves” (V 122). Lafayette’s characters, then, are not so much examples of amorous temperaments that one can laud or chastise as they are people defined by a fundamental inadequation between interior and exterior, feelings and actions. And Valincour signals that inadequation as the source of our identificatory pleasure: the author must have avoided giving the princesse de Clèves perfect presence of mind precisely because in the antitragic logic of the novel, weakness is what inspires the reader’s “inclination” for the character: “it is in this manner that the reader is touched by [s’intéresse pour] Madame de Clèves, and that he feels, as it were, compassion and pity with respect to all the embarrassing situations in which he sees her trapped, whereas he would have had only aversion or maybe even contempt for a woman whose quick wit and resoluteness couldn’t keep her from falling into such dire straits” (V 76). I mentioned a moment ago that on the whole Valincour’s lexicon of identification avoids emphasizing the emotions familiar to the Aristotelian tradition, and so this

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passage is an exception: pity and compassion are of course staples of the cathartic vocabulary of the period. But a quick look reveals the anti-Aristotelian thrust of Valincour’s use. Here, pity and compassion (and the critic hints that these terms may be inappropriate) stem not from seeing a strong if imperfect man brought low by circumstances, but from the contemplation of a weak character. Readerly contempt and pity switch sides: whereas according to traditional understanding the former is reserved for the weak and the latter for the strong, now the exact opposite is the case. Whence the indifference Valincour expresses with respect to the grand emotions of Villedieu’s Monsieur and Madame de Thermes. Who can identify with a hero? The silences Valincour initially ascribed to a kind of misplaced comic frustration have become the very focus of the critic’s praise. “Don’t you agree, Madame, that by not saying anything Madame de Clèves nevertheless says everything she should say, and everything she could?” he asks his fictitious correspondent, referring to the scene in which the prince de Clèves exhorts his sorely tempted wife to be strong (V 107). (“They spent some time without saying anything and separated without having the strength to speak,” reads Lafayette’s text [L 359].) The model of affective response can no longer be that of Aristotelian pity and compassion, for these silences remind Valincour of an alternate tradition in which the strongest effects are produced in the spectator by not giving voice to the emotions of the character. This is the tradition of the sublime, evoked by Valincour through the shorthand of the Greek painter Timanthes, who, unable to represent the grief of Agamemnon at the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia, simply veiled the father’s face. The affective charge of scenes like the one between the de Clèves, or the deathbed conversation between Madame de Chartres and her daughter, is achieved by favoring mute tears over an eloquence that would misleadingly imply continuity between feelings and their exteriorization. Valincour is the first in a long line of critics to praise La Princesse de Clèves for its psychological turn, for its inner monologues depicting “these different thoughts that destroy one another as they arise” (V 98), for, in short, putting the magnificence of heroic actions and witty speech into eclipse and thus allowing a vast inner domain to come into view.38 If the factual impossibility of the Princess keeps us from reading for information and gossip, her behavioral shortcomings—her actions do not follow clearly from her will, and her words are rarely the right ones—discourage us from sitting in judgment over her, and instead simply put us in her place. Lafayette’s protagonist is an open fabrication and a strikingly imperfect one to boot, and yet still, in spite of the rules of

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poetics and the norms of romance, the reader “loves” her. In Valincour’s text, identification with the heroine replaces identification of her historical referent. Since the Princess refers to no one but readers themselves, the novel’s grounding in reality undergoes a seismic shift: its truth lies not in its correspondence to real historical actors but in its uncanny resemblance to the reader’s psychic reality. The radical effect of La Princesse de Clèves is to demonstrate that it makes no difference at all that the Princess never existed and never could have, provided that you read with one new thing in mind: its real subject is you.

Exceptionality To all La Princesse de Clèves’ other claims to modernity, we may now add one more: Lafayette invents fiction as we now know it. Or does she? As I’ve already remarked, the fictionality of her protagonist is untimely: it comes too soon. Certainly too soon for the critics of the English novel who have attempted to chart the rise of a properly fictional practice, typically starting from the “hesitant” works of Defoe.39 But too soon as well for the amended timetable proposed in my Introduction. For by my own reckoning, the publication of La Princesse de Clèves comes at a moment in which the novel was ceasing to be composed along Aristotelian lines (as it was during the heyday of the French historical romance) and was taking on instead the pseudofactual mantle; the book can hardly be made out to be part of what I have been calling fiction, a phenomenon of the very late eighteenth century at best. Catherine Gallagher has tentatively proposed that Lafayette’s novel may indicate the early French beginnings of a process that will occur only later in Britain;40 unfortunately, the data do not support the hypothesis, since French novelists after Lafayette adopt roughly the same pseudofactual postures as their British counterparts. What, then, is the place of La Princesse de Clèves in a history of fiction? Franco Moretti has noted the literary historian’s instinctive use of “typological thinking,” a term he borrows from evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr: we readily assume that masterworks stand in for entire genres, that is, that they are examples of a type.41 Or we follow the more diachronic understanding found in a dictum frequently attributed to Walter Benjamin: “all great works of literature found a genre or dissolve one,” which is to say that we like our masterworks to be either revolutionary and foundation-laying, or else able to put a tradition to rest with a culminating flourish.42 Either way, individual works are presumed to be profoundly contiguous with more widespread

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literary practices. Yet in the case of Lafayette, at least, such habits of thought seem to be out of place. Of course, in a cultural sense there are all sorts of ways in which her novel can (and should) be seen as the perfect expression of the stifling court culture of Louis XIV, but morphologically speaking La Princesse de Clèves is every bit as exceptional as its heroine. It does not invent the historical novella, which before and after 1678 is composed according to the Aristotelian stipulations that Valincour accurately holds Lafayette to be breaking. And by the same token it does not do “better” the sort of thing its competitors do: its impossible protagonist, who induces in readers feelings of identification that are not those shared with more conventional heroes, is fundamentally unlike the protagonists of other historical novellas. But Moretti’s own effort to provide a new theory of the relation between innovative works and broader literary practice—of how, in short, literary forms evolve—is similarly unable to account for the data. Moretti has used the detective story as a paradigmatic case for observing the generational aspect of formal evolution. The device of the decodable clue, first used (though only sporadically) by Conan Doyle, eventually came to define the genre itself; but the success of the clue did not happen overnight. In fact, Conan Doyle’s contemporaries—and maybe even Conan Doyle himself—did not appear to realize the device’s usefulness; only a second generation of writers would latch onto the clue and make it a mainstay of the genre. Thus a lag of twenty or more years is necessary between the initial discovery and its generalization. The difficulty, however—beyond worries over the explicitly Darwinian mechanisms of selection that Moretti sees as guiding cultural evolution43—is that a later generation of writers does not pick up on La Princesse de Clèves’ very special, non-Aristotelian sort of invention, even though the book is widely known and admired. Instead, they exploit the possibilities of the pseudofactual. Even the type of identification Valincour describes appears to have no close analogues until eighty years later, with Rousseau’s Julie (1761) and Diderot’s Éloge de Richardson (1762).44 One is reduced to the vague language of “anticipation” to describe the relation between Lafayette and subsequent developments in the history of literature.45 Lafayette’s fictional heroine is probably the single best counterexample to my main historical narrative; she must be explained. Let’s start with the observation that there is little evidence that La Princesse de Clèves was appreciated for its distinctive mode of invention, for its “fictional” form. Valincour of course critiques it; Charnes erroneously claims that all novelists now do the same thing and does not seem to think of it as anything noteworthy.

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And later readers proved equally unable to single out the novel as the shape of things to come. On the contrary: when discussion in the eighteenth century turned to selecting the most excellent French novels of the preceding century, alongside La Princesse de Clèves very often figured Lafayette’s other major novel, Zayde.46 Since Zayde’s morphology is patently that of the heroic romance—interlocking stories are exchanged by characters in a remotely historical third-person frame—the irony is that prior to the advent of the realist novel, readers were incapable of distinguishing which form looked “forward” and which “back”: both felt modern to eighteenth-century readers, but for reasons unrelated to what makes it a comfortable fit for people who think of the novel along the lines of its nineteenth-century forms. (Praise was bestowed on the novels’ downplaying of heroics, their focus on everyday situations, and so on.) We might of course say that these readers were simply not able to process Lafayette’s “innovation.” But an alternate explanation is that there was no innovation, properly speaking, only a one-time twist on age-old habits and local practices. The local practice was of course the genre of the historical novella, which by 1678 was emerging as the replacement for the historical romances that readers appear to have looked on as outdated.47 This practice was not by any means stable (the Appendix to this chapter provides a summary of its major variants), but it did obey the old rule of literary composition, which was that heroes should be real people, or at least plausibly real. Only Lafayette would break that rule with her “visibly false” heroine.48 The reasons for her transgression, I have surmised, lay in the type of critique of court culture she wanted to make; her nonexistent heroine allowed her to denounce the invasive traffic in women’s secrets without using, hypocritically, a real woman’s destiny to do so. What prompted such a critique no doubt lies in Lafayette’s biography. While salon sociability suited the young Lafayette, who was demonstrably proud of her tacitly acknowledged authorship of La Princesse de Montpensier, in later years, for reasons unknown, her attitude toward publicity became much more guarded. But the point is that her critique, and her particularly canny and consistent means of making it, was idiosyncratic: its success did not keep readers from continuing to enjoy the “real” historical novella, a subgenre that existed because it responded to widespread assumptions about what novel reading was for—information and gossip, examples and heroics. Nor did Lafayette’s “fictional” protagonist offer a solution for future generations: subsequent writers, modeling their work no longer on historiography but on pseudofactual forms that would allow a tighter bond with present-day

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reality—say, the memoir or talk-of-the-town news—could hardly reproduce Lafayette’s counterfactual intrusions into history. If Lafayette, therefore, is not a good predictor of the French novel to come, this is mostly because the form she was working with had no future. In studies of the French novel, it has become customary to think of the advent of the historical novella in the 1670s as the key step in the direction of modernity: the extinction of the dinosaur that was historical romance left the terrain open for colonization by the mammalian novel, of which the tiny historical novella was the first example. There is much to be said for this version of events, which is close to the version that Lafayette’s contemporaries told. But in one important matter the hypothesis hides from view the profound commonality between the historical novella and the historical romance: notwithstanding its different structure (it was both short and not built around the exchange of its protagonists’ stories), and notwithstanding its increased emphasis on documentation or its downplaying of physical acts of heroism, the historical novella was perfectly Aristotelian in the type of invention it practiced: it was often (but not always) “more” historical, in that it made greater use of source texts, but at bottom it was historical in the same way. Only pseudofactual forms, which as Lennard Davis has pointed out masqueraded as something like “news,”49 were different: their authors were either the interested parties themselves, or eyewitnesses; they were not poets, picking and choosing between attested versions of illustrious events and then inventing what was needed for the demands of their plot. The pseudofactual was no direct shock to the Aristotelian system, as I’ve noted in the Introduction, since it did not question the preeminence of characters’ reality; but at the same time it represented a distinct mode of composition. From this point of view, then, La Princesse de Clèves tinkers with Aristotelian principles, subverts them even, but in no way opens the door to the regime that will supplant Aristotelian poetics. Subligny’s now-forgotten La Fausse Clélie (1670), the subject of the following chapter, may in fact be much more representative of the novel’s future than Lafayette’s masterpiece. La Princesse de Clèves looks like fiction: it refuses to assert the existence of its protagonist, who is not even a plausible poetic construction. And it behaves like fiction: it causes readers (or at least Valincour) to envision their relation to that protagonist in a way that does indeed recall later sentimental identification, or better still, the type of engagement proper to the realist novel, which makes accessible to readers the “transparent minds” of its characters.50 But what does it mean to call La Princesse de Clèves fiction? Almost inevitably, such a declaration brings with it a host of erroneous historical corollaries, foremost

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among them that this novel must therefore be related to later ones, or that it is a first sign of a conceptual change. To say that despite its invented heroine La Princesse de Clèves is not fiction is not to indulge in academic casuistry. It is to remind us that the resemblances between it and later novels are not signs of a pattern but accidents of history. For fiction is not only a sum of characteristics, it is a practice, and practices are communal. From practices individuals can and do deviate, and sometimes in ways that either contemporaries or later generations may consolidate into new practices. But deviations do not always bear such fruit, even if, as with La Princesse de Clèves, they are appreciated, lauded, kept alive in the literary memory. Lafayette’s example does not mean that France knew fiction before Britain did; she did not divine what the novel would look like 150 years later, or recognize, in the midst of general confusion, what fiction “really was.” Her book is a hapax, a one-off, an isolated shortcircuit in the Aristotelian machine; Lafayette did not have it in her power to rewire literary creation along the lines of what would become, so much later, “fiction.” If La Princesse de Clèves did not exist, no one would have to invent it; we wouldn’t even miss it, because the history of the French novel would look more, not less, comprehensible in its absence.

Appendix: History and the Historical Novella To Valincour’s objection regarding Lafayette’s “visibly false” heroine, Charnes responded with the argument that La Princesse de Clèves belonged to a “third species” of modern novels of whose compositional principles Valincour was ignorant. The move was astute, rhetorically speaking, since it allowed Charnes to cast his adversary as a pedant behind the times. As I’ve remarked, however, Charnes’s taxonomy was pure sophistry: there was no contemporary species of novels that, like La Princesse de Clèves, advertised the nonexistence of protagonists. This appendix provides justification for my claim that in spite of the fact that historical novellas of the period displayed much variation in their use of history, Lafayette’s contribution remained sui generis. Knowing precisely what to count as a nouvelle historique is not necessarily an easy matter, even if the generic tag was applied by contemporaries— appearing almost simultaneously with the genre itself, on the title page of Saint-Réal’s Dom Carlos (1672). Roughly twenty works from the last three decades of the seventeenth century would identify themselves thus. But there are complications. First, works with this subtitle do not always designate the

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same thing. Generally, the historical novella was set in the past; its protagonists were historical in the sense that they were attested in histories, memoirs, genealogies, and so on. On occasion, however, the tag was applied to works set in the present. Second, many works that bear the hallmarks of the genre (including both Lafayette’s efforts) have no such subtitle; in rare cases, an alternate designation such as histoire tragique takes its place. Third, although a title containing a proper name and aristocratic title often announced a historical novella, in some cases, especially in the genre’s infancy, novels bore more general titles—as in Villedieu’s Annales galantes (1670) or Désordres de l’amour (1675); and conversely, the titular proper name could announce “true stories” set in the very recent present—as with Boursault’s Le Marquis de Chavigny (1670), Salvan de Saliès’s La Comtesse d’Isembourg (1678), or Du Plaisir’s La Duchesse d’Estramène (1682). Titles alone, then, are only a rough guide to the actual content of these novels. Searching this content for works set in the past leads to a list of a bit more than fifty historical novellas published in the last three decades of the century, at which time the genre more or less went into eclipse.51 How historical, precisely, was the historical novella? To readers of Lafayette, or those familiar with the extremely careful use of sources evident in the other commonly read examples of the genre, Dom Carlos and Les Désordres de l’amour, the answer would probably be very: nothing could seem farther from the vague historicity of d’Urfé’s Gaul or Scudéry’s Rome than the patient marquetry of Lafayette, Saint-Réal, and Villedieu, in which sources of different types—memoirs, genealogies, official historiography, even manuscript material—are fitted together. Yet the divide between the two may not have seemed quite so unbridgeable to contemporaries. Of about twenty surviving works of the period that incorporate the generic designation into their title, and even if we exclude outlying quirks, we find texts that vary widely in terms of the period treated and the amount of historical detail provided.52 The production of 1678 can serve as representative; this was the year in which the most historical novellas were published, including of course La Princesse de Clèves. Six of nine historical narratives that year were subtitled nouvelle historique. Two took place in the early Middle Ages, and far from France: Le Comte Roger, souverain de la Calabre ultérieure, whose author is known only under the initials “L.L.B.”; and Alfrede, reine d’Angleterre, attributed to Antoine Torche. If the main lines of the biography of Roger Guiscard (c. 1016– 85) were fairly well known, the number of sources was very limited, and their precision nil; the general impression is of a “soft” historicity reminiscent of

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a late romance such as Zayde, that is, of a thoroughly Aristotelian plausibility.53 A third novel, Méroüée, fils de France (by a certain “H.F.M.”), took as its backdrop Merovingian France. Here, because of the illustriousness of the title character, documentation did exist and was cited in detail in the work’s preface; historical pretensions are more evident than in the previous works, but the mode of invention was not qualitatively different. The same “H.F.M.” also brought out Tachmas, prince de Perse; like a good number of other novels of the period, not to mention Racine’s tragedy Bajazet (1672), Tachmas takes place in the Turkish court of the mid-seventeenth century, and moreover is claimed to be derived from an oral source. Rousseau de La Valette’s Le Comte d’Ulfeld, grand maître de Danemarc, is similarly set in the recent past; the author points out that some people still living in France knew the hero, and claims to derive his story from unpublished memoirs from Denmark. The final work, and the one that looks most like what we would tend to expect from the genre, is Dom Juan d’Autriche; this novel, attributed to Courtin and unfolding during the heated rivalry of Charles V and François I, contains a gallery of distinguished protagonists taken from the usual Renaissance memoirs. The nouvelle historique appellation could apply, then, to quite different works—covering periods from the recent to the remote past, incorporating protagonists of varying degrees of familiarity to readers and documentation of disparate sorts and quantity. The sense of the genre as a continuum, one that made room for historically “hard” and “soft” works, is not changed by widening the corpus to include two additional titles of 1678 that were not explicitly labeled nouvelles historiques, Cotolendi’s Mademoiselle de Tournon and Préchac’s Yolande de Sicile, both brought out by Lafayette’s publisher, Claude Barbin: the former advertises its careful work with Renaissance sources, while the latter’s late-medieval plot remains dreamily vague. Given that La Princesse de Clèves was the talk of the town, it is no accident that Valincour chose it and not another of these works to critique. But a look at the competing works from 1678 makes clear that had he wanted to he could not have accused them of the kind of violence to accepted rules of poetic invention he found in Lafayette: all followed Aristotelian precepts. I have alluded to the fact that Villedieu’s Désordres de l’amour gives a prominent place to the invented Maugiron: the invention of “plausible” supporting characters was generally accepted and practiced. Yet nouvelles historiques on the welldocumented Renaissance usually did not stretch history even this far. Boursault’s Le Prince de Condé (1675), whose historical frame overlaps partially with the one subsequently chosen by Lafayette, is more typical of novellas focusing

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on this period: all its characters, primary and secondary, are attested in the historical record; the sexual liaisons that are its main subject mix well-known affairs (say, between the title character and the Maréchale de Saint-André), more covert “dirt” of the sort we have seen in Lafayette’s Montpensier (Boursault furnishes the date Mademoiselle de Limeuil gave birth to Condé’s illegitimate son in the Louvre), and purely hypothetical trysts (between François II and Mademoiselle de Saint-André). Not one of these works on Renaissance France, or the many others like them, invents a heroine, never mind a heroine whose existence is proved impossible by historical sources.54 If other examples from before or after the publication of La Princesse de Clèves would only repeat what we have already seen, one small subcategory of nouvelles historiques merits special consideration. For, like La Princesse de Clèves, a few novels give over their titles and narratives to female characters whose family names ring familiar but whose precise identity no doubt hovered below the threshold of a contemporary reader’s historical awareness. Here too, however, we search in vain for proof of Charnes’s assertion that the historical novella commonly traded in Lafayette’s admixture of fact and visible falsity. The liberties taken in Bremond’s La Princesse de Monferrat (1676) are unsurprising because it takes place in medieval Italy; just as Lafayette herself did in Zayde, Bremond uses familiar family names and the license provided by sketchy sources to create characters whose historical counterparts may or may not have existed. The precise identity of Mademoiselle de Tournon, from Cotolendi’s 1678 eponymous novel, would probably have been a mystery to most readers, even if members of her clan occupied positions of power in the Renaissance. But this particular Mademoiselle de Tournon did exist, and the author tells us in his preface that he retrieved her story from Marguerite de Valois’s memoirs, where, sure enough, she really figures. Boyer’s early La Comtesse de Candale (1672), situated toward the end of the reign of Louis XI (1461–83), is a more promising possible antecedent for Lafayette’s novel: once again, the name of the titular character would have been familiar (the house of Candale still existed), but it is a fair guess that the comtesse de Candale herself was unknown to Boyer’s readership. Any analogy with the princesse de Clèves quickly falls apart, however: Candale had existed, even if little was known about her; and she is used to explain the antipathy—duly noted by professional historians—between Anne de France and the duc d’Orléans. The heroine thus performs the familiar function of plausibly motivating an event in the historical record. Monferrat, Tournon, and Candale are not, after all, the figurative sisters of Clèves.55

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The omission of the generic tag nouvelle historique from the title of La Princesse de Clèves in itself means nothing: more than half of seventeenthcentury historical novellas contain no such designation. Yet in Lafayette’s case, the omission seems almost willful, so much does her variation on the genre’s admittedly elastic characteristics seem a transgression of its very reason for being—telling us about heroes of the past. French literary history has long consecrated La Princesse de Clèves as the best example of the nouvelle historique. The irony is that it may be about the worst.

Chapter 2

Quixote Circa 1670 (Subligny)

Subligny’s La Fausse Clélie, a modest success in the years Lafayette was at work on La Princesse de Clèves and for some years after, is long forgotten.1 On first inspection, it might not seem worth resurrecting. Its protagonist, Juliette d’Arviane, is subject to moments of madness during which she thinks she is the heroine of Scudéry’s famed historical romance Clélie, histoire romaine (1654– 60). What could be clearer? Like Cervantes taking on chivalric romance, like Cervantes’s emulator Sorel attacking pastoral in Le Berger extravagant (1627), Subligny ridicules—now with a gendered twist—the heroic romances that had refused to leave the literary stage. But his confrontation of airy feminine illusion with the manly prose of everyday life seems doubly redundant. First, because the joke was old: numerous novels and plays besides Le Berger extravagant had ridiculed readers whose tastes were behind the times.2 Second, because by 1670, the year La Fausse Clélie was published, even sympathetic observers seemed to know there would be no more Clélies. Hence, the critic Chapelain recognized the symbolism of the death, in 1663, of the author of the 10-volume Cassandre (1642–1650), writing, “romances [romans] . . . have fallen along with La Calprenède”; and Scudéry herself had already abandoned her old habits with Clélie’s last volume and started to experiment with shorter forms.3 So Subligny merely rehearsed a lesson everyone, even Scudéry, had absorbed: romance was dead. Finally. And it would soon have its replacement. “Little histories [petites histoires] have completely destroyed big romances [grands romans],” proclaimed critic and novelist Du Plaisir in 1682; by the following century his observation had hardened into banality.4 Such unanimity makes sense in France, whose literary production was particularly suited to proclamations of a revolutionary upheaval: the episodic, multivolume grands romans that ruled the roost from

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L’Astrée’s first book in 1607 to Clélie’s last in 1660 quite simply ceased to appear, never to return, and the vogue for the historical novella took up the slack. The English data are less dramatic: though England avidly consumed in translation both the French historical romance and the French historical novella, it did not produce enough of either to leave the same telling pattern. Nevertheless, historians of the English novel have located a few Du Plaisirs of their own—in Behn, who distances her “history” Oroonoko of 1688 from “adventures . . . manage[d] at the poet’s pleasure”; in Congreve, whose preface to his 1693 novella Incognita not only theorizes the difference between “romance” and “novel” but even uses those terms; in Manley, who, perhaps cribbing from Du Plaisir, prefaces The Secret History of Queen Zarah (1705) by proclaiming, “Little histories of this kind have taken [the] place of Romances.”5 So in England too, by the turn of the century, the way had been cleared for the novel’s rise. Romance, the novel: as contemporary comments like these show, the opposition is hardly a figment of the modern academic imagination. But there are multiple difficulties, many long recognized by critics. The least serious of these is terminological: in English, the romance-novel opposition took a long time to stabilize (Reeve’s 1785 critical dialogue is still entitled The Progress of Romance), and French never did inscribe the opposition between old and new forms in the language.6 Second, romance seems to persist as a practice as much as a term. In France, many have noted that novels after La Princesse de Clèves often fail to display its sobriety of plot and characterization, and that, though shorn of romance’s Scuderian heft, they quickly put some pounds back on.7 Literary historians on the other side of the Channel have had to contend with a similar sense of déjà vu, since so-called novels—starting perhaps with Oroonoko and Incognita, and extending at least to the works of Fielding—often look uncomfortably like romances, incorporating, as in France, their themes, plot devices, and modes of characterization.8 A third difficulty is obvious enough, yet rarely confronted. Simply put, why was Scudéry still writing romances, anyway? Didn’t she know that Cervantes had already invented the novel? In other words, it is not just that romance is supposed to go away in the latter decades of the seventeenth century but holds on; it is also that romance should have gone away earlier still, in 1605 to be precise, when Cervantes published the first volume of his international best-seller, Don Quixote. As everyone knows, Don Quixote has read too many “books of chivalry” and comes to believe he is living in the world they describe, even though it is comically obvious to everyone else that those

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romances are utterly inadequate to dealing with the realities of taverns and brothels and money.9 Unlike romance writers, Cervantes provides us with a representation of that new world—the world that will henceforth be that of the novel.10 And unlike his protagonist, who believes in the literal truth of what he reads, Cervantes’s reader is at all points made aware of novelistic illusion through the ironic references to the discovered manuscript of a certain Cid Hamet Benengeli; in contradistinction to Don Quixote, that reader has learned both disbelief and the art of its suspension, which we may call fiction.11 Such is, in reduced form, the common wisdom with regard to Don Quixote’s place in literary history, and the specifics of the book appear to fit it quite well. As soon as we lift our eyes from the text, however, the “persistence of romance” problem again presents itself: if Cervantes invented the novel, why does the literary production of his century look the way it does? In 1607, d’Urfé published the first volume of his pastoral phenomenon L’Astrée; perhaps he can be excused for his romancing, since Don Quixote had not yet been translated, but over the next fifty years writers who had surely read it—La Calprenède and Scudéry, but also Gomberville and others still—made historical romance the gold standard of prose. We might, of course, set this at the door of a reactionary French aristocracy, and point out that even in France, a few writers—like Sorel and finally Subligny—absorbed Cervantes’s lesson and fought the good bourgeois fight against romance hegemony.12 But this argument is brought up short by the fact that Cervantes himself left for posthumous publication nothing less than a romance—The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda, which appeared in 1617. Such is, I think, the puzzle that should occur to anyone trying to square the two distinct “death of romance” narratives that characterize discussions of the modern novel—one set in Spain in 1605, another in 1660s France (and holding for England). In fact, the puzzle is an illusion that evaporates once we realize that it is built on a bad premise, which is that the chivalric narratives devoured by Don Quixote on the one hand and works like Persiles, L’Astrée, and Clélie on the other all belong to one and the same “romance”—the romance that is replaced, starting with the Quixote, by “the novel.”13 In other words, it is our two clumsy categories themselves that generate the literary-historical problem in the first place. The answer is not to do away with historical and generic distinctions entirely, as Margaret Doody has provocatively proposed, but instead to develop categories that are more adequate to our object of study.14 This is what Subligny’s apparently redundant and derivative La Fausse Clélie helps us do. The brief synopsis I offered above is in fact misleading: Juliette

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d’Arviane does indeed think she is the heroine of Scudéry’s text, but the latter is not, we learn, excessive or ridiculous. Clélie is merely in need of an updating; Scudéry’s histoire romaine must be refigured as a histoire française. Subligny’s “false” Clélie is thus, counterintuitively, a “true” Clélie, a Clélie made pseudofactual. The reengineering is radical: in many respects La Fausse Clélie is as far removed from Scudéry as Don Quixote is from the chivalric universe of Amadis of Gaul (published in 1508). But only in hindsight do these new works seem to be announcing deaths or births: Cervantes and Subligny are not inventing the novel, they are doing new things with the romance forms they have at their disposal. They cannot suspect that one day, after centuries of human invention and activity, another mode of narrative, will be viewed as fundamentally incompatible with the one they are familiar with; they cannot know that time will make distinctions that they see clearly all but unrecognizable. To be sure, Cervantes and Subligny want to make the forms bequeathed by their predecessors modern—but modern in 1605 and 1670, we must remember, can’t stay modern forever.

Cogitations Like all good romances since the Renaissance rediscovery of Heliodorus’s fourth-century Aethiopica, La Fausse Clélie starts in the middle of things. The device of the in medias res beginning was heralded by Amyot in the preface to his pioneering 1547 French translation of the Aethiopica as an ingenious way of providing narrative suspense: Heliodorus opens with a description of a shipwreck, viewed through the eyes of some pirates who know no more than does the reader; a series of flashbacks then slowly clarify the dramatic events and doubtful identities presented at the outset. Thinking of the detective story, we might surmise that mystery is simply a good way of interesting readers, as if something about it were profoundly suited to the act of reading. For Amyot and other Renaissance commentators, it was this and more: it provided a means of dignifying romance, which is to say, positively, narratives of amorous adventure, or, negatively, narratives that were not epic.15 To the endless forward drive of chivalric narratives—narratives built on a “quest” or “trial” structure in which the hero must triumph over successive obstacles— the Aethiopica opposed something more like plot: here were the beginning, middle, and end that Aristotle had prescribed, though—ingeniously—not in that order. Furthermore, the in medias res beginning permitted the author of

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romance to bring his creation in line with Aristotelian stipulations regarding epic: with flashbacks, plots could cover vast swaths of heroic lives without running afoul of the traditional one-year limit for the main action. Finally, since a similar structure characterized the Odyssey and the Aeneid, which were probably Heliodorus’s models in the first place, the Aethiopica appeared fully sanctioned by tradition. Beginning things in the middle was part, then, of the humanistic assault on popular chivalric romance, and the practitioners of French heroic romance in the seventeenth century, who were descendants of early boosters of Heliodorus like Amyot, retained the in medias res beginning.16 So, at the outset of La Fausse Clélie, the Marquis de Riberville decides to take the air at the chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte one day when the court is away at Fontainebleau. Reading verse in the garden, his attention is caught by a young beauty accompanied by an older woman; he is making small talk with the former when all of a sudden this scene of banal flirtation turns into a veritable adventure. “Monsieur,” the young woman cries out, starting to run, “save me from a kidnapper who’s been looking everywhere for me!”17 And indeed, a man appears out of nowhere, pursues her, and eventually hustles his prey into a waiting carriage, which speeds off just as Riberville catches up. Riberville turns around, but the woman’s guardian has disappeared. “ ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘she must be in on the kidnapping’ ” (3). There is nothing to do but follow on horseback; onlookers he meets along his route tell him that yes, a carriage has just passed, containing only a man and a woman, and that it has taken the road for Combreux. Riberville rides on and comes across what he discovers to be a different carriage stopped in the road, and yet another adventure: four women are trying to stop two horsemen from murdering a gentleman with them. Riberville, acting like a “romance hero” (4), drives the assailants off, after which he realizes that he already knows the people he has just obliged. (The four women and one man will be, along with Riberville, the main figures of the novel. They are Mademoiselle de Barbesieux, Madame de Mulionne, Mademoiselle de Velzers, Mademoiselle de Kermas, and the Chevalier de Montal.)18 Alas, the trail of the mysterious abducted woman is now cold: his friends tell Riberville that no such carriage passed them. And at any rate, they suspect him of “just making things up [qu’il fait une histoire à plaisir]” (5). While he didn’t invent, it will turn out that he misinterpreted what did, it is true, look for all the world like a real adventure. The following day, back at Vaux, the perplexed Marquis goes to read in his “closet,” or cabinet, only to find the mysterious woman hiding there; true to his heroic role, he asks her to name his “enemy,” so that he might avenge her. She introduces

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herself as Clélie, daughter of Clelius, and claims to be pursued by a Roman. The “flabbergasted” Riberville realizes that he was wrong to have taken seriously “such a ridiculous adventure” (10): the woman who calls herself Clélie is clearly deluded. Her so-called abductor, who shows up asking to speak with Riberville, quickly fills in the details: Juliette d’Arviane was so struck by the resemblance between her life and the events of Scudéry’s novel—foremost among which were a shipwreck and an earthquake—that for the last six years she has been afflicted with these sudden episodes of delirium, usually triggered by any mention of things Roman. (The Marquis now recalls having flirtatiously compared her face to that of a Roman just before she ran off.) The “abductor” is in fact a former suitor, enlisted by d’Arviane’s family to try to keep her from doing herself harm. These opening pages—merely the first twenty or so in a novel of about 320—are quite distinctive. One distinction, to which I will return presently, is the protagonist’s self-consciousness: Riberville is not merely confronted with a puzzle, as are romance heroes, he is conscious that he—a French man living in a contemporary Ile-de-France—is having what the text repeatedly qualifies as an “adventure”; it is not the adventure that the deluded d’Arviane thinks she is having, but it is an adventure nonetheless. A second distinction comes from the twist Subligny perpetrates on the standard in medias res opening. From Heliodorus to Scudéry, romance moved forward via the presentation of enigmatic events; typically, those events are followed by an explanation— sometimes nearly immediate, sometimes long deferred—that takes the form of a story recounted by someone who is in the know. That is, romance makes characters (and readers) desire information that is then furnished in the form of an embedded tale. La Fausse Clélie’s opening, by contrast, is an investigation: it too will end with a story (of “Clélie”’s malady), but not before Riberville tries his best to resolve the mystery on his own. Subligny offers us in these pages access to a series of cognitive inferences on the part of a protagonist acting on an initial assumption—the erroneous or, in the vocabulary of the time, extravagant idea that “Clélie” has been abducted. Thus Riberville notes the guardian’s disappearance as a sign of her complicity; and when he asks witnesses whether a carriage has just passed, his judgment that it must be that of the kidnapper is “confirm[ed]” (3) upon his learning that it contains a man and a woman. Little by little, though, Riberville is confronted with facts he is unable to make sense of—the carriage stopped in the road is not, in fact, the one he was following, and the whole “adventure” is found by his friends to be dubious. Riberville is further baffled when the

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supposedly complicit guardian shows up back at Vaux and leaves word with his attendants that “Clélie”’s abductor, if located, must not be harmed, since he was acting on her family’s orders. “This hardly enlightened the poor Marquis . . . whose efforts to make some sense of these mysteries [obscurités] ended in despair” (6). We have, then, a text that initially at least presents a cognitive problem, as much to the reader as to the protagonist, whose efforts to understand double or parallel our own. But we, no more than the protagonist who focalizes (this part of ) the narrative, need not wait patiently for an explanation: we take the information we have and we try to interpret it. For truth, in La Fausse Clélie, must be assembled. The novel’s enigmatic opening, with its series of deductions and corrections, is but part of a novelistic universe that has become cognitively “thick.” The entire structure of the book—its incorporation of the embedded narratives typical of both romance and devisant-type collections like that of Boccaccio or Marguerite de Navarre—is put into service of constituting an active reader who asks where stories come from, and who puts the stories he or she hears into relation with others, all so that their truth may be verified. One of Subligny’s most serious commentators, Jean Serroy, who examines La Fausse Clélie in light of the tradition of the comic tale, is certainly right to maintain the thematic unity of many of La Fausse Clélie’s embedded narratives—say, duping, or the way women love, or the possibility of ghosts—and to point out their many antecedents. La Fausse Clélie also seems familiar on account of the main characters’ discussions about the exemplary moral value of the tales they tell—such commentary is a constant as much in the Heptaméron as in Scudéry’s romances. Yet what distinguishes La Fausse Clélie, what marks it off qualitatively from all the famous works of which it reminds us, is its persistent staging of reading less as a moral action (that is, as a way to police and codify social and amorous behavior) than as a cognitive one. So it is that when Montal, the character attacked at the novel’s beginning and rescued by Riberville’s arrival, tells the gallant story behind the attempted murder, skeptical readers repeatedly intervene: his adventures are “far from plausible [si peu vraisemblables],” mere “delusions” (34). Listeners, however do more than denounce what they hear as lies, and tellers, likewise, do not merely affirm they tell the truth. Instead, stories are evaluated, tested, and read against other things we have heard or that we know to be true. Montal’s protestations of truth are at least partially backed up when Riberville interrupts to say that he has already heard of this “adventure”—“ ‘but I had no idea,’ he said to [Montal], ‘that you were its hero, for no one was named’ ” (37). When the number of coincidences involved increases, Riberville’s skepticism

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reasserts itself: “ ‘And through what sort of adventure,’ said the Marquis to the Chevalier, ‘did [your enemy] come to meet up with you so conveniently on his route?’ ” (41). Riberville’s pejorative use of “adventure” is clearly the same one he used when he dismissed d’Arviane’s madness as “such a ridiculous adventure” (10). But adventures do happen, Subligny tells us, and they can be explained: “ ‘What adventure?’ answered the Chevalier. ‘I have no idea, unless the traitor spied me at Fontainebleau, where I saw him four or five days ago’ ” (41). Montal, twice challenged, has been twice vindicated. The assertion of narrative truth is nothing specific, of course, to 1670 France: it was a staple gambit of the Heptaméron, of Renaissance travel narratives, and before that of Chrétien’s verse romances; the topos was old enough in Classical times for Lucian to mock it in his True Story (second century a.d.), and indeed seems to lead us all the way back to the Odyssey, where numerous characters make claims, often obfuscating, for the truth of their stories. But if La Fausse Clélie gives the impression of cognitive thickness whereas previous works do not, this is because its characters take such pains to verify what they are told, at least to the extent of reducing apparent improbability. In the example just cited, the teller counters his skeptics by adding new information that makes a coincidence seem less coincidental. This is a fairly frequent occurrence in the novel. Barbesieux recounts in book 4 an anecdote about the gallant lover of the wife of a magistrate who, accused of a murder, prefers being beheaded to naming his mistress as his alibi. The tale, similar in tenor to what one finds in Rosset’s Histoires tragiques (1614), is intended as part of an argument about the existence of amorous discretion (i.e., can men kiss and not tell?). Montal immediately proposes a series of objections, however. If, he reasons, the lover really did keep the secret of his whereabouts on the night of the murder, then the story could never be known; true, replies Barbesieux, but it came out later through the maid, who was privy to the liaison and who subsequently leaked the information after being mistreated by her mistress. But if that’s true, continues Montal, her testimony is suspect, since it is motivated by revenge. True again—but the real assassin was arrested and confessed both his guilt and the lover’s innocence (202–3). This short story is followed in book 5 by a number of tales involving supernatural occurrences; these are especially scrutinized, for while other narratives—such as Barbesieux’s anecdote about how men can keep secrets— had moral value, the ghost stories are essentially about their own possibility or believability. The subject of the supernatural is prompted by another enigmatic event in the main narrative, one whose elucidation will propel the

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novel to its conclusion: the group of friends is informed that a man has just fainted in the gardens of Vaux-le-Vicomte after seeing a ghost. This immediately furnishes an occasion to raise the subject of credulity: Montal, the same skeptical questioner who dogged Barbesieux with questions about her histoire tragique, reveals himself to be an esprit fort, that is, someone who thinks the age of supernatural occurrences (and divine intervention in the natural world) to be past.19 Mulionne, less disenchanted, counters with the story of a certain Santois, who is both a “former Paris magistrate” and well known to Mulionne: “that fellow lives in my neighborhood, and he’s a man of honor if ever there was one” (215). The story—which happened, Mulionne maintains, only last Thursday—involves some papers mysteriously torn up, apparently by a sprite (lutin) of some sort. Montal, mirthfully incredulous, refuses Mulionne’s invitations to go see for himself—“for me to go,” he says, “I’d have to think there was at least some possibility of such a thing, but I don’t” (218). The deadlock between believer and nonbeliever is broken by Montal, who brings pressure to bear on Mulionne’s reassertion of the socially unimpeachable origins of witnesses (“one must take respectable people at their word when they say they have seen something”; 218). “Certainly, Madame,” he answered; “but show me one.” “Ha!” she said, “I’m delighted to. The Abbé de Lanciat is all I need—the late Monsieur Fouquet de Croissy appeared to him in Tours, on his property. Or Madame la Marquise de Tessau, whose bed curtains were pulled by the same. Such people are unimpeachable. . . .” “Doubtless, Madame,” said Montal; “but did you get this information from the Abbé and the Marquise themselves, or from someone else?” “I heard it only from one of their friends,” answered Madame de Mulionne. (218–19) Mulionne tries to regain the upper hand by invoking an illustrious family— the house of Brandenburg—haunted by a ghost which appears each time a family member is to die; Montal quickly debunks this final assertion by pointing to a suspiciously similar tale in Lucian’s Dialogues.20 Heliodorian romance carefully controls information, dispensing it so as to produce effects of suspense, surprise, and classically Aristotelian recognition (anagorisis); in Subligny’s variation, information must be carefully amassed

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and verified so as to arrive at a convincing conclusion. Which is also to say that in contradistinction to the world of romance, where the tales that elucidated the main narrative enigmas were invariably reliable, La Fausse Clélie calls into question the position of enunciation.21 This applies as much to the third-person narratives by reliable attendants that proliferate in La Calprenède and Scudéry as to earlier first-person narratives that were modeled on the eyewitness of the travel narrative.22 Similarly, the other model for embedded narrative that La Fausse Clélie draws on, the Boccaccian tradition, is equally the domain of reliable narrators: argue as they may about gender politics, Marguerite de Navarre’s devisants, for example, can only oppose one true story with another one, never claim that the story supporting such-and-such a position is simply invented.23 In both romance and the Heptaméron, truth is a bare affirmation; no information is provided that would help other characters, or the reader, doubt or verify that affirmation. As it turns out, decorum in La Fausse Clélie is still safe, for on interrogation Subligny’s narrators all prove to be in perfectly good faith. Riberville, even if he was wrong about the abduction, was not in fact inventing things or hiding them from his friends. Early modern science, Steven Shapin has suggested, managed to combine a reverence for facts with preexisting codes of elite sociability.24 La Fausse Clélie takes the narrative economy of romance, with its innumerable stories circulated by reliable aristocrats, and makes it safe for an empirical age.

The Real World Romance in the Heliodorian vein uses its many reliably told stories to produce a remarkably tight narrative universe. The fact is easy to forget, since the best representatives of this tradition are seventeenth-century French romances, and if L’Astrée and Artamène (Scudéry, 1649–53) are still known for anything, it is for interminable prolixity. Nonetheless, though the number of subplots in books like these can multiply with seeming abandon, deferring resolution for many volumes and many years, those plots are carefully knit together: clues are strewn like seeds early on, only to bear fruit much later. As I’ve noted, it was architecture like this that helped give romance its Aristotelian sanction: the genre became an art in the old sense—an object worked by the poet, one that strove to create “a strictly probable or necessary sequence,” in the language of the Poetics.25 La Fausse Clélie’s architecture, superficially similar, produces a different

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effect. Subligny has attracted modest critical attention for the particular brand of interpenetration he achieves between frame tale and embedded narrations, for the way the reader discovers slowly the relations between the characters. Serroy, for instance, has singled out as one of Subligny’s innovations the fact that, fairly systematically, his characters are the heroes of the stories they tell, and that “a whole web of relationships is knit between the protagonists.”26 This is true, and it should be pointed out moreover that those relations are often openended. That is, romance characters are generally engaged in a vast enterprise of figuring out who they all are; enigmas turn on issues of personal identity and recognition above all. La Fausse Clélie certainly contains such recognitions, as we will see, but its characters spend most of their time mapping their world, and filling in a map is not like answering a riddle. For along with their empirically evaluative approach to the stories they hear—is this true? does that make sense?—the characters also learn that the tales they hear are extensions of the world they move in. To borrow a phrase from Alexandre Koyré, the romance world is closed, while Subligny’s universe is infinitely open: the articulation of narrative levels produces a spatiotemporal continuum.27 Provided that it be true, any narrative, whether it resolves a puzzle or not, belongs to a world “out there.” What allows this is a dilation of La Fausse Clélie’s frame narrative. In the real Clélie, the frame is made of a type of narrative suspense: we wait for an interrupted action (in Heliodorian fashion, a marriage) to be completed after numerous interposed obstacles have been overcome. To these narrative obstacles Scudéry adds a massive accretion of commentary and judgment, so that the romance structure essentially mirrors the salon its author oversaw.28 La Fausse Clélie’s structure, though, is not so easily split between layers. When Riberville’s friends, at the outset, dismiss his protestations to the effect that the story of the abduction of “Clélie” happened as he maintains, this is not only because the abduction is in itself improbable; it is also because his listeners know Riberville’s past too well not to suspect he is hiding something. “You’re putting us on, Marquis,” Montal [told Riberville.] “You think that someone is going to set up a meeting in a garden like Vaux’s so as to kidnap a woman in broad daylight, and in the manner you’ve described? There’s no way that can even cross the mind of someone reasonable.” “My God, of course!” said Mademoiselle de Barbesieux, who knew that the Marquis was a ladies’ man, “didn’t you know that Mademoiselle de Sencelles lives near here?” (5)

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Sencelles, we will learn much later, once passed letters between Riberville and a certain Comtesse de Tourneüil; Barbesieux’s knowledge of this fact, she will explain, lies behind this initial suspicion of Riberville’s abduction story. But since we already know that Riberville is in fact acting (and recounting) in perfectly good faith, Barbesieux’s knowledge is extraneous. That is, she brings her knowledge of the world to bear on what she hears and makes a well-founded (and clever) hypothesis; but her knowledge proves to be irrelevant, and she is wrong. Riberville’s past will remain murky even as more details start to emerge: when Barbesieux does finally furnish the story of his relation with Tourneüil, Riberville claims that her point of view can only be clouded by her jealousy of Riberville’s love for d’Arviane, and then provides an alternate version of the story, one that purports to explain in a manner favorable to himself the motives behind the publicly acknowledged fact that Barbesieux ends with—Tourneüil’s delayed return from London (107–13). This is all rather complicated, of course, but that seems to be the point: the author weaves a web of events that are ultimately inseparable from one another, yet that do not resolve themselves into a neat climactic resolution or recognition.29 Compared to good romance practice, Riberville and Tourneüil’s relationship is not even an enigma at all. It’s just something that we can learn more about if we pay attention—more, but not everything, and not anything like an answer. Subligny’s characters amass information and put that information to use as they try to make sense of other information. And as in La Fausse Clélie, so in life: occasionally something comes of our efforts but most often our collections of precious facts die with us, underutilized. Romance identity, poetically blurred, was at bottom stable: the past of each protagonist amounted to little more than his or her birth. Henri Coulet, in what is to date the most far-ranging history of the early French novel, detects something special in Subligny’s characters, an unknowable psychological depth that he implies is proto-Romantic: “By confronting these different elements with one another, the reader comes to grasp characters not as finished or fixed portraits, but in their dynamism and relations with others[;] we come to realize that their truth lies somewhere beyond the contradictory indications given about them.”30 Who indeed is the real Charles Foster Kane? It is a tempting conclusion, but one that seems fundamentally at odds with a book that spends so much energy creating a world of facts—facts about actions and events, not about motives or even feelings. Riberville is not unknowable or dynamic in any psychological sense; other characters do not care what makes him tick. They care only about what he has done, in the same

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way, moreover, that they are interested in what anyone does: to be a good cartographer of the human world, one must have stories. This is why the stories recounted are not self-sufficient units; instead, they continually and insistently point to a world beyond, a world against which they pretend to situate themselves. A long story in book 2, which Velzers tells of her courtship by the Chevalier de La Grancour, is a case in point. Naturally, the story is advanced as true, with the intention, moreover, of convincing the audience of Velzers’s virtue. But since, in La Fausse Clélie one must always create a plausible case for truth, Velzers’s gestures to a place outside both her narrative and the frame narrative, to a world of publicly known facts to which both these narratives are connected. “Did you hear the rumor circulating last winter about the night burglary at our home?” [asked Velzers]. “Yes,” responded Madame de Mulionne, “people said that some daggers and nooses were found on your balcony, and that someone was planning to strangle you all. It was the talk of Paris.” (80) Velzers reveals that in fact this publicly attested fact was not as it appeared, for the daggers and ropes were part of a persistent lover’s many stratagems. Later, Mulionne reverses the direction of traffic between the independent world and her autobiographical tale of gallantry gone wrong: she explains that she was afraid for herself because she had previously read of the murder of a young woman by her suitor (see 183). Subligny’s characters constantly build bridges like these between the stories they know and the stories they hear: they live in an information-rich environment in which everything is somehow connected. Not connected “meaningfully,” not connected by ingenious Aristotelian plotting—just connected. The most extraneous tales are carefully knit by the characters into the world they know. And La Fausse Clélie certainly contains extraneous tales: Barbesieux, Montal, Riberville produce their own narratives, but they also pass on and evaluate other narratives. These unconnected tales are generally viewed by Subligny’s few commentators as a manifest weak spot, a reversion to conventional and derivative filler.31 From another point of view, however, their originality is beside the point; what is significant is the way he integrates them, indicates their provenance, makes them coterminous with the world of his main characters. Book 3, for instance, takes place in Mulionne’s home; it contains three stories, all unrelated to the characters, and each a fairly

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predictable tale of roguery with occasional bawdy accents. One is told by Mulionne’s husband, who is of the robe; he carefully indicates that it comes from a recent court case. Another, a tale of a man fleeced of 4,000 francs, is told by none other than the victim, the prosecutor Tigean, visiting Monsieur de Mulionne on business. The third involves a man, Monsieur de Luchères, who arrives to see Monsieur de Mulionne; his story is embedded in the world of our protagonists by means of a sort of triangulation: When [Luchères] had left, the Marquis [de Riberville] spoke up. “If I were as bold as Montal, I’d tell you an amusing story about our Monsieur de Luchères, who if I’m not mistaken is a hefty Norman who’s about as subtle and witty as his wife is innocent.” “He’s from Normandy?” said Montal. “Well if he’s Monsieur de Luchères of Normandy, then I know him as well as you do—and his wife too. If you all allow, I’ll tell their story.” “Go right ahead, then,” said the Marquis, “The honor is all yours.” (123) A short but significant prelude to what is otherwise a very forgettable tale: Subligny introduces a minor character into the frame narrative who is subsequently placed on the map of France, and whose identity (and history) is confirmed by the fact that two other characters have independently heard of him. Renaissance tale-tellers pretended their tales were true; they mentioned vaguely the existence of unimpeachable sources, or alluded to their first-hand knowledge. But by and large there was a gulf between the rarefied aristocratic locus amoenus of tale-telling and the alternately tragic or bawdy tales they told. In Subligny, all narratives, finally, are one. La Fausse Clélie gives us, then, a real world—not simply because characters claim their stories as true, or because Subligny places them in a recognizable geography; not, certainly, because they may “really” have occurred. Rather, his particular integration of narrative levels makes us see the underlying ground that is reality. We do not see it in the sense that everything becomes meaningfully interrelated; there is no pattern in the carpet, revealed as we finish the book. And we do not intimate, via the various clues we pick up about such and such a character, the mysterious and deep psyche of the individual. We merely witness a group of characters amassing and using information.

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Other People’s Adventures In the above I have largely left “Clélie” behind. Subligny does much the same: Juliette d’Arviane is in fact a scant presence in the novel; her delusions kick things off, but once we learn her story, we move on to other stories. Subligny, say commentators, has little control of his material, no sense of structure or plot. And he seems unable to push the comedy very far; we might expect his novel to reprise, in a burlesque mode, scenes from Scudéry’s romance, but it does not. Serroy again expresses surprise, and rightly so: in all other previous instances of the Quixote motif, starting of course with Cervantes, onlookers take advantage of the protagonist’s illness; here, no one does.32 On the contrary, the other characters seem to have a version of that illness themselves. Like Riberville at the novel’s outset, they note that many of the adventures they live or witness or hear about would be perfectly worthy of a good romance. So what, precisely, is wrong with Juliette d’Arviane? And, by extension, with Scudéry? The universe in which d’Arviane moves is not “realistic” by a long shot, not even in a sense that would be comprehensible to a seventeenth-century audience. Subligny’s characters continually marvel at the tales they encounter, which is why they are skeptical. But as I’ve said, only in one or two cases of the supernatural are stories revealed to be downright false. Subligny’s world is, massively, one of truth—a truth repeatedly put to the test, to be sure, but truth nonetheless. Suspected of lies or inventions, his characters inevitably confirm their reliability, no matter how far-fetched their stories may be. That Montal objects to the idea of daylight kidnappings in the gardens at Vaux, or that the group conclude that Velzers’s tale of her affairs with La Grancour must be true because no one could possibly “improvise such a coherent plot” (105)—examples like these confirm that Subligny’s characters are applying criteria of intrinsic plausibility. At the same time, however, the book does not banish implausible stories to a childish never-never land. La Fausse Clélie, in spite of its satiric ancestors, is hardly an anti-Clélie: it does not subvert romance commonplaces in favor of something more earthy and quotidian, it just brings them close to home. For the novel’s ending, which largely revolves around the mystery of the “ghost” seen by the man who has fainted in the garden at Vaux, is essentially plucked from romance. Faced with explaining the apparition, as well as the equally mysterious fact that Kermas has decided to don a mask, the members

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of the group ask the man, the Marquis de Kimperbel, to tell his story. Kimperbel claims to have seen the ghost of his dead and much regretted mistress, whom he had been prevented from marrying years ago on account of a family feud. The mistress, naturally, will be identified as Kermas herself, who, after an intervening story involving a new character, Lusigny, will explain just how it happened that she did not die in childbirth as Kimperbel thought, and ended up alive and well at Vaux. Kermas’s “strange adventure” (276)—she had been erroneously thought dead, buried alive, rescued, only to be shipwrecked and marooned for three years on an island—as well as the coincidence of her turning up masked at Vaux immediately strike all concerned as worthy of romance: “I swear, even in a romance you couldn’t find a better plotted story than that one,” says Lusigny (284). La Fausse Clélie’s interlocking stories, I have maintained, do not usually come together in the manner of Heliodorian romance; their relationship is more diffuse. But the pleasures of good plotting are also celebrated, which is why Subligny does not refuse or ridicule improbable devices—abductions, pirates, shipwrecks, and a final recognition scene. He merely sets them in the present and then validates them through the construction of the fact-checking reading apparatus I have been examining. Which brings us, then, to d’Arviane’s problem—a very slight problem, it turns out. The abductor who fills Riberville in on the events he has incorrectly interpreted is the first to point out that “a strange sympathy” (20) exists between d’Arviane’s life and Clélie’s: the former rightly noticed that things that happened to her also occurred to Scudéry’s heroine.33 Much later in the book, d’Arviane’s story is briefly taken up again; and after a second disappearance, a new carriage, and another pursuit, the group of friends return again to the fundamental resemblance of life and literature: “They talked for a long time about the novelty of these incidents, judged completely worthy of a young lady who imagined that she was Clélie” (308). And d’Arviane, after all, is hardly the only example of this. Riberville, we have seen, behaves bravely like a “romance hero” (4); d’Arviane’s pseudo-abductor prefaces his story by noting that he seems to be playing “the character of a Romance attendant [écuyer]” (16). Subsequent mysterious events in the frame narrative— Velzers’s attempted repossession, for example, of the dropped letter Riberville has impolitely started to read—also furnish “enough to make up the prettiest romance in the world” (43). In La Fausse Clélie, the real world does not take the place of romance; it is rather romance that colonizes the real world. D’Arviane, then, has made a simple error, that of believing not in romance’s incredible plots but in romance’s historical remove. Greece, Rome,

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Turkey, Egypt: these are the places Scudéry and others set their romances. But they might as well set them in France, suggests Subligny, which has no shortage of adventure itself. D’Arviane, then, shares the romance writer’s prejudice for historically removed, exotic locales; her illness, and perhaps theirs, begins at the point she realizes that the genre in fact describes contemporary life. To put the matter differently, one can say that faced with the fact that her life parallels Clélie’s, d’Arviane concludes that she must be Clélie, rather than following the resemblance in the opposite direction. The proper conclusion, according to Subligny’s reading lesson, would be closer to realizing that Clélie is in fact Juliette d’Arviane, or less literally, that the adventures we read about are transpositions of our lives. On hearing the unfathomable coincidences of Kermas and Kimberbel’s relationship, Velzers, whose own life resembles a well-plotted story, comes to a realization: “ ‘Romance stories’ are what we call other people’s adventures [On nomme les aventures des autres des histoires Romanesques]” (311). The comment, I believe, can be taken two ways. Romanesque here has a strong hint of the unbelievable: what happens to us is an adventure, but when the same thing happens to others, we dismiss it as unbelievable. But at the same time, we think that only the adventures of other people—the heroes of the far-off past—are worthy of being put in a romance. In both cases, we unaccountably separate our lives and our books. The lesson, then, is not conventionally Quixotian, for Subligny does not reject Scuderian romance as Cervantes rejects (though seemingly with some reluctance) chivalric romance. The only reform needed is setting. Romance is a form that is completely adequate to our lives—if only authors like Scudéry would stop using those silly Roman names.

The Key to Romance If d’Arviane unnecessarily renames herself Clélie, Subligny, by contrast, constructs his novel on the opposite principle and converts all those romance names back into French. This is, he feels, “a new way of writing,” one that may not be appreciated by “romance-minded readers”: “Few before me,” he writes in his preface, “have taken upon themselves to give French names to their heroes” (n.p.).34 The boast is sometimes cited in histories of literary realism as evidence of a real change, and indeed, from this point on French names, either historically accurate (in the nouvelle historique) or plausible-sounding

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(in the various nouvelles galantes purporting to tell of present-day affairs), do make inroads, even if pseudo-Greek names—Philandre, Clitandre, Philis— continue to be used well into the eighteenth century.35 But “realism”—taking the term in the very general sense of a strategy for easing readers’ suspension of disbelief—has little to do with Subligny’s choice. For one thing, the cast of La Fausse Clélie shows the same obsession with gossip that we have seen in La Princesse de Clèves: characters constantly fit names of people and places they already know to the new narratives they hear. For another, their obsession is a transposition of Subligny’s reader’s own: Subligny has not given realistic names to invented characters, he has hidden real people under invented names. La Fausse Clélie is a roman à clef. Subligny cut his literary teeth on the nascent “society” press: his weekly newsletter in verse, La Muse de la cour, which appeared in the mid-1660s, catered to the news demands of those at court and in the city. And indeed, one fruitful way of approaching the tale-telling of La Fausse Clélie is to dissociate it from the Boccaccian tradition to which it admittedly appears related and fit it into the very specific moment between La Muse de la cour and the foundational periodical Le Mercure galant (which begins publication in 1672).36 From this point of view, his characters do not exchange tales for their distraction and moral profit; they metaphorically gather and distribute news. This is obvious even in the way the protagonists of the novel’s third-person embedded narratives—faits divers, tales of roguery, and so on—are carefully named.37 The man whose papers are torn up by a sprite is “Santois, Paris magistrate”; the bawdy tale of Luchères is told at Mulionne’s chateau precisely when the protagonist’s name comes to light; even Barbesieux’s histoire tragique about the lover who refused to compromise his mistress’s alibi contains his name (the Comte de Bernilly). (On occasion names are missing, but other information is supplied that would seem to encourage readers to find a name to go with the narrative—as in the case of the magistrate from Ardivilliers, who finds his chateau “haunted” by some crooks who want to force him from it.) Thus reading his novel is very much like reading a gazette—only one that does not limit itself to the goings-on of a given group, but like the Mercure galant, canvasses all of France for appropriately diverting tales. As in La Princesse de Clèves, however, the name game usually requires the active participation of the characters: names are not supplied, they must be fit to anonymous adventures. As we have seen, Riberville is able to verify Montal’s story—felt by most listeners to be highly improbable—because it enables him to fill in a blank opened up by a previous narrative: “I heard about that

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story . . . but I had no idea that you were its hero, for no one was named” (37). Anonymity is an invitation to be curious, and to start the process of identification. Speculation regarding Riberville’s past reaches a fever pitch when d’Arviane reveals that she knows “the woman with whom his last adventure happened” (51). Riberville begs her not to name names if she continues with his story, but he only succeeds in piquing everyone’s interest even further— “he’s afraid of having people named . . . [so] this must be an important story” (52). D’Arviane obeys Riberville’s request for anonymity to the letter, but certainly not in spirit, for as he laughingly points out at the end, “Oh yes, the solution is difficult to guess, now that you’ve mentioned Toulouse and said that the lady went to her rendez-vous while her husband was at the courthouse” (59). Such details, Riberville implies, are intended as clues, and the consumption of narrative has become an explicit game of identifications. In this context, Subligny’s “realistic” names are nothing more than a type of temporary anonymity designed to be penetrated. And for the most part they are simply anagrams. Hence Alain Niderst has suggested that the Abbé de Ruper can only hide the Abbé de Pure (a fellow traveler of the précieuses), and that Lusigny must be Subligny himself: “One hardly needs a key, since the real names are respected, or in any case barely modified.”38 A contemporary key, moreover, does exist, and was printed and included in at least one copy of the 1672 Amsterdam edition, published by Jacques Wagenaar.39 It confirms some anagrams Niderst detected, and offers others—“Clélie”’s abductor, the Comte de Sarbedat, is given as a certain Saubedac; Santois, the “Paris magistrate” who was spooked by the sprite, is “Monsieur de Santeüil,” who was, the key confirms, a “Paris magistrate”; another minor character, the Marquis de Luseau, is the Chevalier de Lauzain.40 The key identifies most, if not absolutely all, of the characters in the novel, down to the most minor walk-ons (“the friend wearing the blue doublet” featured in one short anecdote, is, apparently, the Marquis de Carvois). The characters’ constant mapping of narrative onto their “real world” has, it seems, spread outward to Subligny’s own readers, now expected to relate his tales to the real “real world” of 1660s France. Their lives read like a tabloid because La Fausse Clélie is indeed a tabloid.41 For thoroughly historical reasons, modern readers tend to be put off at the idea of keys. Yet the latter were demonstrably, and in remarkably diverse ways, part of an earlier horizon of expectations.42 Unsurprisingly, given the novel’s title, the relevant context for La Fausse Clélie’s particular use of keys is Scuderian romance. The extent, nature, and significance of Scudéry’s use of keys has been hotly debated ever since Victor Cousin proposed in 1858 that the plots

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and characters of Artamène and Clélie offered a veritable window onto the lives of the aristocrats in the circle of Scudéry’s famous Samedis.43 The authenticity of the manuscript key, purportedly dated 1657, that Cousin reported having dug up in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal has been put into doubt, partially on the basis of its disappearance (suspiciously, Cousin was the only one to have seen it); moreover, various internal problems make Cousin’s view of Artamène as a barely disguised relation of Grand Siècle life highly problematic.44 Other doubts riddle attempts to use keys to decipher Scudéry’s works. Not only are the keys proposed usually bewilderingly contradictory, but the author herself apparently refuted their existence: “I have never provided any key for Cyrus or Clélie, and I don’t have one myself,” she wrote in a letter.45 Yet Scudéry’s phrasing of her denial seems cagey, and at any rate the fact that she made it suggests that keys were very much on the minds of readers at the time, as much anecdotal evidence around Clélie confirms.46 The point that keyed reading is most definitely not anachronistic projection on the part of Cousin is brought home by the fact that Scudéry herself incorporates such expectations into the Clélie: her characters wonder about—and then exchange—possible keys before going on to discuss the pros and cons of this type of reading.47 Subligny’s keying, however, bears little relation to Scudéry’s. When the latter’s characters engage the question of keys, they do so in the context of a story concerning a certain Artaxandre, who is nowhere present in the main plot of the novel. The detail is crucial: Scudéry’s characters, citing the need for “diversity” and “entertainment” [divertissement], do on rare occasions claim to recount recent gallant adventures under supposed names, but those adventures and their protagonists are completely separate from the romance’s main plot. Clélie is far, then, from a compendium of contemporary gossip; on the contrary, it is quite decorous. In the main, the type of keyed reading it demands has nothing to do with amorous adventure or scandal; it concerns, rather, the physical and moral portraits that are offered each time a new character makes an appearance. Such portraits, which became a socioliterary fashion in these years, were the element of Clélie that provoked guessing games, not this or that narrative, which instead pose questions of behavior from a much more abstract perspective.48 Clélie’s frame narrative, as has long been recognized, is a transposition of Scudéry’s salon; its coterie of distinguished participants politely and discreetly debate issues of love and taste. When on rare occasions they let themselves go and gossip, they are careful to gab only about people who are not members of their circle. Clélie may be keyed, but it does not, on the whole, purport to traffic in true stories.

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Gossip, by contrast, is what La Fausse Clélie is all about. That Subligny drops Scudéry’s practice of pseudonyms, which came straight from the extraliterary games that characterized gallant society, appears fully logical—not so much a move in the direction of increasing “realism” as a recognition that the ideal of the coterie was inadequate to the type of reading he was attempting to put into place.49 Anagrams and more minor onomastic deformations, by contrast, suited his purpose much better: they were not a code, but clues capable of underwriting investigation. (This is why we have seen Riberville pointing out that once one gives a name of a town and a husband’s profession, listeners can start guessing.) Moreover, there are at least a couple of indications that unlike Scudéry, Subligny is actually keying the action of his novel, or at least its embedded stories. The key identifies Riberville as the Chevalier de Rohan, while the unhappily married Comtesse de Tourneüil, whom Riberville helps escape from her jealous husband, and who takes refuge in England, is keyed to Madame de Mazarin.50 Here, the parallels with what we know—indeed, what everyone at the time knew—are clear, for Hortense Mancini did indeed enlist her presumed lover the Chevalier de Rohan so as to flee to Italy, in June 1668. It is also doubtless significant that the adventure that occurs between Riberville and the unnamed Dame de Toulouse (the one about whom the friends learn enough to identify her, Riberville thinks) is keyed not to Rohan but to “the Marquis de Trerigni and Mademoiselle de Keravioir, sister of the magistrate Laelant’s wife.” Riberville’s character can, it would seem, serve as a “host” for miscellaneous pieces of gossip. Further biographical research—into the identity of this “Keravioir” or anyone else for that matter—is probably unnecessary: whether or not all the adventures recounted here refer to realworld affairs, Subligny wants us—with an insistence that never characterized the age-old topos of the “true story”—to think they do. Hence the inclusion of hints that enable his readers to do more or less what his characters do, which is to undertake the work of fitting narratives to the world they know. D’Arviane does not live in a world of romance that everyone else has left behind. She lacks, rather, the code that would allow her to profit from the intricate web being spun between romances and contemporary society. She notes a conformity between romance and her life, and concludes she must be Clélie. A better inference, Subligny suggests, would be to look at things the other way around: Clélie and all the other characters we read about are actually us. Juliette d’Arviane has her key upside down, or inside out.

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Neo-Romance For some time Don Quixote has given its critics a kind of proleptic madness, not too different from the madness of Cervantes’s hero: the Don projects what he has read about the past onto his windmills, while we perceive those windmills through the filter of our convictions about what is to come.51 This is to say that if he has read too many old romances, maybe we have read too many modern novels to see what is before us. And the texts before us—Don Quixote and La Fausse Clélie, but also Persiles, L’Astrée, and Clélie—are simply manipulations of romance in the wake of Heliodorus. Let us call them neoromances, to mark their self-conscious modernization of a form from which they do not even imagine “breaking.” The authors of these works were not behind the times; on the contrary, they were looking forward and they had a program for the future. But the future, which goes on for so long, soon outdistanced their plans. Subsequent generations of writers experimented with new forms—the pseudofactual forms of the long eighteenth century, but also the nouvelle historique of the tail end of the seventeenth—that looked as different from Heliodorian romance as the Aethiopica was, the neo-romancers felt, from Amadis of Gaul. Search as we may, these later forms are not to be found in any of the earlier works—not in La Fausse Clélie, certainly, and not even in Don Quixote. Only the magical thinking of a certain brand of literary history can make it appear otherwise. Cervantes’s program for the future was, by and large, that of Italian, French, and Spanish humanists. Like the clash between partisans of Tasso’s new epic vision and supporters of Ariosto’s self-conscious and erudite take on the medieval marvelous in Orlando furioso (1516–32), Amyot’s translation of the Aethiopica became one of the flashpoints in the battle to accord modern poetic production with the production, and prescriptions, of the ancients. We now imagine chivalric romance as a crusty remainder of a superstitious age, but this image comes to us precisely from Cervantes and, before him, Amyot, who already had labeled books like Amadis of Gaul “the delirium of some madman’s feverish dream.”52 In fact, it is good to recall that Amadis’s publication in France, directly contemporaneous with Amyot’s Heliodorus, was an undertaking of some prestige. Whether it be true or not that François I discovered Amadis during his imprisonment in Spain following the battle of Pavia (1525) and later pressed Nicolas de Herberay des Essarts to translate it, Herberay’s dedications make it clear that the king took close interest in the eight pricey

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folio volumes that appeared from 1540 to 1548.53 Amadis wasn’t a remaindered leftover, it was a sign of the times: like Orlando furioso, the translation fed what Francis Yates has called the “imaginative re-feudalization of culture” in the sixteenth century.54 This is to say that mid-sixteenth-century audiences did not read Amadis with the quixotic absorption Cervantes suggests; their fad was as self-consciously modern as any revival, in that it acknowledged the pastness of the past.55 But there was a competing route to the future, leading not through a reimagined medieval past but through the Aethiopica, a text that seemed to be the missing classical pendant to the epics of Homer and Virgil. I have already noted how the in medias res beginning helped bolster the Aethiopica’s humanist credentials by giving it a structure that recalled epic, but there were other factors behind Amyot’s attack on chivalric romance. Where Amadis was religious, and heterodoxically so, the Aethiopica was secular; the former relied on the supernatural for its wonders while the latter was filled with only the disenchanted surprises of plot; military heroics and adulterous courtly love were replaced by the chaste love of long-suffering and steadfast youth. And of course one was medieval, the other classical: chivalric romance, deprived of the least “erudition” or “knowledge of antiquity,” was at best a degraded version of ancient epic.56 Amyot’s attack stung. Herberay des Essarts stopped promoting diffusion of Amadis’s remaining parts and provided other chivalric works with prefaces that tried to demonstrate their congruence with Heliodorian practice; in the long verse preface to the eighth volume of Herberay’s translation, Michel Sevin was already taking into account Amyot’s blast, delivered only a few months earlier; prefaces to subsequent volumes became increasingly defensive; the text itself of those volumes often turned antichivalric and satirical, and by the end of the century, even one of the apocryphal additions to the Amadis corpus was tightly modeled on Heliodorus.57 So, as Cervantes scholars sometimes note with perplexity, chivalric romance was something of a dead horse by the time Don Quixote finally ran it through in 1605—not only because of Amyot’s critiques, but also because the affectionately nostalgic Amadis translations were themselves a recognition that the age of chivalry had past. But how to move forward—besides of course furnishing more editions and translations of Heliodorus, which was done? Cervantes took two approaches. The first was Don Quixote. If we may safely dismiss as anachronistic the Romantic embrace of the Don’s madness as a loyalty to the ideal in a debased world, the Quixote nonetheless constitutes a profoundly sympathetic revisiting of chivalric romance, squarely in the line of Orlando furioso, referenced some twenty times by Cervantes.58 One hundred

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years after Ariosto, Cervantes could only bring back chivalric romance as a mad dream. But it was a dream he hung on to—not in the Man of La Mancha sense, of course, but quite literally: the curate and the barber spare Amadis (and a few other items) the bonfire prepared for the rest of Don Quixote’s library. And Amadis’s reprieve is repeated on another level by Don Quixote itself, which allows the memory of chivalry to live on for a bit longer than it otherwise would have. Cervantes was much kinder to chivalric romance than literary history would be, kinder in any case than his own contemporaries. Those contemporaries were voting with their works, and the versatile Montreux furnishes a nicely symbolic figure: this continuator of Amadis (his translation of volume 16 appeared in 1577) jumped ship and published a counterfeit ancient Greek novel, Oeuvre de la chasteté, which appeared in three parts from 1595 to 1601.59 Cervantes could hardly neglect this more obvious approach to the modernization of romance—romance that in the right hands might become roughly what epic was to the ancients, the capstone to a poet’s career. Persiles was to all appearances just that for Cervantes, who unlike Montreux had no interest in making ersatz Greek novels but sought to modernize Heliodorus along the lines of Tasso’s modernization of Virgil. He brought the action into the recent past and spread it out over Europe; he multiplied and interlaced his plotlines with bewildering ingenuity; and he made the book’s many roads lead to Christian Rome. And Persiles’s success, “comparable to that of Don Quixote,” lasted nearly two centuries.60 Amyot won: nearly a century and a half later, Heliodorus was known by heart by Racine, whereas Amadis had become a downmarket offering of peddlers of the Bibliothèque bleue. All seventeenth-century romancers did not take precisely Cervantes’s route in modernization; on the contrary, Persiles, with its modern European setting, is anomalous. The acknowledged masters of the form were French, and though their production certainly varied—d’Urfé’s L’Astrée combines Heliodorus’s structure with the setting of Amyot’s other translation coup, Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe; Gomberville accentuates the adventure aspect, while Scudéry’s frame tale starts to look a lot like a salon gathering—there were clear trends. One was to up the Aristotelian ante on Heliodorus’s tight plotting and love of recognition scenes by weaving their narratives out of classical history, just like tragic or epic poets.61 More important still, the French turned the genre into a school for manners, one that taught its now-domesticated aristocratic readers (and would-be aristocratic readers) how to live and love and above all be sociable: “he was not to be admitted into the academy of Wit,” declared Louis XIII’s minister Richelieu, “who had not

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been before well read in Astrea.”62 Combining ingenious plotting and politesse, writers of the French seventeenth century took up Heliodorus’s mantle and purged romance of its perceived medieval decadence. “Monsieur d’Urfé was the first to deliver [it] from barbarity,” wrote Pierre-Daniel Huet in his widely read 1670 treatise on the origin of romance.63 The year 1670: we are starting to come back around to Subligny, who actually faced a much different situation from the man whose masterpiece he was imitating. A lot had changed in 65 years. For Cervantes, romance’s “other way,” the way of the Aethiopica, hadn’t yet been explored; for Subligny, it had, and was again in need of modernization. We can postulate a number of reasons for the abundantly testified contemporary belief that French heroic romance was exhausted: a shift in the cultural orbit away from autonomous, self-policing aristocratic groups to the “absolutist” court; the growth of the book market and expanded, mobile readerships; sheer “genre fatigue” and the aspirations of a new generation of writers.64 But modernization is not necessarily replacement. It is sometimes said that Huet’s treatise arrived a bit late, that the form whose genealogy he traced was “dying.”65 The metaphor implies far more than we should venture. It is more reasonable to suppose that Huet felt that, after many ups and downs and transformations, new writers would simply transform romance—“fictions of amorous adventure,” according to his definition—once more.66 Why should he feel that romance was dead, when his treatise was the preface to Lafayette’s Zayde, histoire espagnole, a work that represented a self-conscious return to romance’s Heliodorian roots. Similarly, though it is typical to see Lafayette’s return as a nostalgic farewell by a talented writer to the type of book that had formed her, our view is skewed by our knowledge of the novel’s future. In 1670, Zayde probably felt completely up-to-date, for one thing because it cast aside the chastity and generosity of romance heroes and invested Heliodorus with the new, more “Racinian” passions of jealousy and spurned love. There were other ways forward, to be sure. Scudéry, in her production of the 1660s, retained her faithful lovers and gallant rivals, choosing instead to eliminate subplots and intercalated stories and to set her new romances in medieval Spain (Mathilde, 1669) or even in the present (La Promenade de Versailles, 1669). The Lettres portuguaises of 1669 introduced the motif of the discovered bundle of letters. The first nouvelles historiques, or historical novellas, started to appear around 1670 as well; Saint-Réal coined the term for the subgenre in his 1672 Dom Carlos. And the literary career of Villedieu offers a full spectrum of formal possibilities for the novel: Scuderian romance (the

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early and unfinished Alcidamie, 1661), updated romance (Les Exilés de la cour d’Auguste, 1672), the historical novella (Les Amours des grands hommes, 1671), the letter novel (Le Portefeuille, 1675), even a pioneering memoir novel (La Vie de Henriette Sylvie de Molière, 1671–72) whose foundling heroine, unsurprisingly, lives a life that takes many a romance twist and turn. The knowledge that there would be no more Clélies did not mean that the age of “the novel,” conceived as a complete abandonment of all of romance’s devices, had arrived; it just meant that, for reasons I’ve alluded to and probably many more, stories of amorous adventure needed forms in which to recycle (and supplement) those devices. But hindsight is surely a gift as well as a curse: in the end, what is Subligny’s relation to a future he cannot see but that we can? In the terms that define the present study, La Fausse Clélie grafts romance plot devices onto post-Aristotelian pseudofactual stock. No doubt the keyed novel is not pseudofactual in the precise sense I have described in the Introduction: pseudofactual novels pose as found documents while giving reason for disbelief, whereas keyed novels inevitably say they are invented while inviting the reader to look for the real story under the pseudonyms.67 Nonetheless, keyed novels are hardly brute fact. They key some characters and actions while fabricating others; readers are warned that there are indeed real figures hiding under pseudonyms but that the clues have been shuffled so that, as Furetière puts it in his Roman bourgeois (1666), “[the key] will be no good to you”68; when readership becomes national or international, and the personages depicted cease to be drawn from the most visible princely nobility, most readers cannot possibly have enough gossipy knowledge to identify protagonists anyway. In short, the keyed novel was slippery: it hitched the novel to the world, but with enough play to ensure a certain amount of autonomy, so that reading La Fausse Clélie (or Gulliver’s Travels) can be amusing even if you are stuck in a foreign country or for that matter in the twenty-first century. Like letter novels or memoir novels, La Fausse Clélie fudged its factuality; it too was pseudofactual. A romance made pseudofactual through its use of the key. It is sorely tempting to ask of La Fausse Clélie that it be a novel in a sense we can recognize—that it be realist, realistic, connected to the quotidian here and now. That’s what Don Quixote does, after all—gets rid of (chivalric) romance and introduces the modern novel, with its taverns and prostitutes and money. But Subligny doesn’t pursue the implications of his model. He announces a satire on Clélie and then gives us another Clélie, minus the Roman costumes. He regresses (like Cervantes and his maddening Persiles). He doesn’t

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have the force of his convictions. He sees the bankruptcy of romance and reinvests anyway. He is, of course, a third-rate writer, on the wrong side of literary history.69 Third-rate, maybe, but our frustration is uncalled-for. It comes directly from a quixotic reading of Don Quixote, one that seeks in it the novel—themodern-novel-that-is-antithetical-to-romance—just as the Knight of the Sad Countenance searches the Manchegan countryside for giants. I mentioned in the previous chapter that early modern readers did not see one of Lafayette’s novels—Zayde—as pointing back and the other—La Princesse de Clèves—as pointing forward. Since they didn’t know the future, they weren’t tempted to construct the genealogies that we do, and they were right not to: La Princesse de Clèves has no more or less to do with the evolution of the novel than Zayde, and only an accident of history has made it appear otherwise. Similarly, Don Quixote and Persiles were both popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; they were different, certainly, and Don Quixote provided a device—the protagonist whose bad reading has changed the way he views the world—that was found nowhere else. But one was no more or less modern than the other to readers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who still appreciated Heliodorian romance and who did not know that in the nineteenth century the novel would largely become a sort of “Dutch painting” of everyday banality rather than Huet’s “fictions of amorous adventure.”70 It was that transformation that allows modern critics to view Don Quixote as containing both the old and the new within it, the latter driving out the former. But from another perspective—their perspective, this time, and not ours—Don Quixote and La Fausse Clélie are “modern” only in that their authors update forms perceived as outdated. In Cervantes’s case, the outdated form had lost all prestige, and could only be revisited ironically, through the shaky gaze of a madman. In Subligny’s case—and this is why Juliette d’Arviane is not subject to the irony the reader of Don Quixote expects—the basic subject matter of heroic romance, amorous adventure, retained its prestige; the problem was just that certain formal conventions (especially setting and length) had become obstacles. But in neither case was there a “discarding” of the old, only its modification or reuse. This is why Don Quixote can well be considered a “neo”-chivalric romance, just as La Fausse Clélie (and Persiles) is a “neo”-Heliodorian romance. Neither first-rate writer nor third-rate epigone invents a qualitatively new “novel,” which is in the power of no man or woman to invent anyway. Doubtless, Subligny’s willing indulgence in the commonplaces of romance is counterintuitive for the literary historian trained to be on the lookout

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for the novel’s rise; after all, Ian Watt long ago pointed to an explicit mistrust of traditional plots—and they don’t come more traditional than the recognition plot—as a signal characteristic of the realist novel.71 But it is really our expectations that are to blame for our disappointment with the results of La Fausse Clélie. Certainly, in his preface Subligny vaunts his “new way of writing,” which he defends in advance against “romance-minded readers [esprits romanesques]” (n.p.); but only someone with knowledge of the future can see here the announcement of the birth of the novel. La Fausse Clélie’s “new way” simply lies in updating romance by bringing it into the present; “romanceminded readers” are those who are stuck in their ways and still want their characters to be called “Tiridate” or “Cléante,” not Riberville or Velzers. We joust with windmills when we interpret such prefatory declarations anachronistically and then fault the book’s reality for failing to live up to our dreams. As writers, how modern were Cervantes and Subligny? Like most of us, they were being just as modern as they could.

Chapter 3

How to Read a Mind (Crébillon)

Fielding pauses in the course of Joseph Andrews (1742) to correct readers who may think they possess the real-life keys to his characters: “I declare here once and for all, I describe not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species.” The lawyer met in a coach is not a satirical reference to “some little obscure fellow,” but the type of the selfish man, present “these four thousand years” though he may exercise different professions, worship another deity, or live in some far-off country.1 Having little relation to the pseudofactual pretense of the true story or found document, Fielding’s use of character types may well appear properly fictional: his characters tell us about our world while not being literally of that world; they are a kind of abstract transmutation of the author’s observations, “taken from life,” says Fielding, yet certainly not to be read through use of a key. This is why Catherine Gallagher seizes on Fielding’s famous declaration as an indication of a sea-change in literary practice. Sometime between Defoe’s very pseudofactual Robinson Crusoe and Fielding’s proclamation of generality, between 1720 and 1742, “new modes of non-reference” arose: “it is on the basis of [Fielding’s] overt and articulated understanding that the novel may be said to have discovered fiction.”2 It is an intriguing proposition—though as often happens with new worlds and deserted islands, there were already some footprints in the sand when Joseph Andrews came ashore. Fielding himself names a number of French predecessors, including Marivaux, whose Paysan parvenu (1734–35) contains extensive meditations on type; he then proceeds to claim not to have read or to remember them. This is no doubt more an anxious denial of indebtedness than a statement of fact, for when Fielding proposes to use his lawyer “to hold the glass to thousands in their closets, that they may contemplate their deformity, and endeavour to reduce it,” his language is boilerplate.3 At least since

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Molière, the comic type was seen to set off in the viewer a salutary recognition, as we realize that the characters we initially laughed at are really just exteriorized reflections of ourselves; ridendo castigat mores. And complementing this private, moral use of the type was another more “scientific” one. In keeping with the strongly taxonomic thrust of early modern knowledge production, writers making use of character types aimed at producing what they called a tableau or a picture of humanity: Lesage called his Diable boiteux (1707) “a painting of modern mores”; a half-century later Smollett, in Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), defined the novel as “a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life.”4 Fleshing out Gallagher’s remark, perhaps we can hypothesize that the novel “discovers” fiction when it drops its debt to the real heroes of tragedy and epic and aligns itself with comedy—the genre which, after all, was such a good example of poetic generality for Aristotle.5 If so, however, the alignment is surely a process that goes well beyond Fielding, the years just before 1742, or even England.6 One French predecessor whom Fielding does not name is Crébillon, whose preface to Les Égarements du coeur et de l’esprit, ou mémoires de Monsieur de Meilcour (1736–38) easily matches the comments in Joseph Andrews for an articulated understanding of the type.7 And Crébillon’s novel itself points up the extent to which Fielding’s practice of types is really quite minimal, hardly the backbone of his great novels. The lawyer, Lady Booby, Slipslop: Fielding not only flags his types with professions and symbolic names, he relegates them to the margins of his story, which otherwise, in good romance fashion, turns on steadfast love and mistaken identities, and whose literal truth the mock-epic narrator repeatedly asserts. By contrast, Crébillon presents every one of his characters as merely representative, right down to the hapless and unformed protagonist, “a man like all men are in their earliest youth.”8 And while Fielding (somewhat in the manner of Subligny) takes epic and romance peripetia and effectively brings it home to contemporary England, Crébillon deprives his novel of adventure—dismissed in his preface as “those extraordinary and tragic events that give flight to the imagination and tear at the heart” (69)—and sets in its stead a minimal plot that hinges on the very problem of how one should move between generals and particulars. The most noteworthy thing about Les Égarements du coeur et de l’esprit is not that it promises types and discourages “applications” to real people, for in one form or another this characterized many early novels, and before that, Molièresque comedy and Theophrastean character portraits. Rather, the novel’s very subject is how types apply to the infinite variety of the world in which we live.

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This chapter mixes three parts close reading with one part historical speculation. In the first section, I examine the oft-remarked propensity of Crébillon’s characters to classify one another, as well as the urgency they bring to the contrary task of excepting themselves from the categories they apply to others. If in Joseph Andrews Fielding warns that “in our general descriptions [of character types], we mean not universals, but would be understood with many exceptions,”9 Crébillon confronts head-on the fact that such “exceptions” will inevitably proliferate, sapping the very usefulness of generality. Yet, if excepting oneself from the purview of generality is viewed skeptically by Crébillon, so is the classifying mania of the novel’s worldly, experienced libertines. The second part of the chapter, then, examines the point of view of the novel’s memoir-writing narrator, the older and wiser version of the young man who was once “like any other.” What separates the narrator’s take on the characters from the simple “typing” that those characters use to understand one another? Answering this question leads me to an exploration of the strange fact that Crébillon permits his narrator far more psychological perspicacity than anyone could possibly have about other people. Indeed, his narrator is nearly omniscient, a fact that ends up replacing the question of the novel’s relation to a real world “behind” it with the question of what these particular characters, invented though they may be, think and feel. Finally, returning to the proposition of Gallagher’s with which I began, I argue that even Crébillon’s uncommonly self-reflexive use of character types must not be taken as evidence of modern fiction’s birth.

Present Company Excepted Much of the copulation in Les Égarements du coeur et de l’esprit is not of the sort we would immediately expect from a novel usually seen as the flower of the French “libertine” tradition. Certainly, sex seems to be on everyone’s mind—the mind of the inexperienced Meilcour, who later pens the memoirs we are reading; of Madame de Lursay, the older woman he is attracted to, and who would like to seduce him; of the Comte de Versac, the consummate libertine who takes Meilcour under his wing. But the passage to this sort of copulation lies in another—in the copula is and the way it satisfyingly joins substantives and predicates: X is a rake, Y is a parvenu, Z is a coquette. This act of affirmation, which subsumes individuals to general categories, is part and parcel of worldliness: to know the way of the world (to possess what

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Crébillon usually calls l’usage du monde) is to navigate the particulars of experience by mapping them onto the known social system, made up of rakes, parvenus, coquettes, and others still. The libertine’s success derives from his ability to characterize people—to “penetrate” and to “fix” his targets and rivals, in the favored terms of Crébillon, verbs whose overtones of sexual aggression and mastery suggest the power accruing to the person who knows how to wield general knowledge. The libertines have become the heroes of many modern readings of Les Égarements. They know what so many others, befuddled by their allegiance to the purity of the “heart,” refuse to acknowledge10; and their taxonomic promiscuity is the weapon of choice on the battlefield of what Susan Winnett has called “terrible sociability.”11 By extension, the narrator’s education is also the reader’s: in this if-I-only-knew-then-what-I-know-now comedy, an older and wiser Meilcour, recalling the gaffes of his younger self, reinstates the violated social code whose secrets are finally supplied by Versac in a long tutorial near the novel’s end; Les Égarements delivers this teaching by proxy, providing readers the libertine code of mastery.12 Moreover, if we abstract Crébillon’s novel from its overtly libertine subject matter, its obsession with uncovering the character of one’s adversaries fits in perfectly with the Enlightenment ambition to classify—one more reason to consider the Les Égarements as coterminous with the discourse of its characters, a symptom of Enlightenment culture as well as of libertine mores.13 The complication, however, is that Les Égarements itself does not negotiate the relationship between particularity and generality in the manner of its characters, who are split into two equally unsatisfactory camps. On the one hand, there are the people who refuse generalizations, mostly because they find them personally insulting. If the novel makes clear that such a belief in one’s own exceptionality is only a form of vanity, the opposite, more clear-headed camp, whose representatives apply their categories without regard for the egos of their victims, is not treated with any less irony: those who possess the code of mastery prove as inept as the young Meilcour at understanding the world around them. Which leaves it for the novel itself to put into place a means of moving between generals and particulars that none of its characters actually knows how to practice. In the many conversations that fill Les Égarements, generalizations and their relation to individual cases is a subject that returns with regularity. Crébillon’s protagonists are not crudely literal; they understand that generalizations are not simply covert ways of designating specific people, but in fact describe

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groups of people. The rub, however, is that no one wants to be describable. Take, for example, a conversation that occurs near the middle of the book. Here, the naïve seventeen-year-old Meilcour is the passive participant in a conversation with four other idle aristocrats—the libertines Versac and Lursay, one Meilcour’s potential mentor, the other his potential lover; Lursay’s somewhat dissipated forty-something friend, Madame de Senanges; and Madame de Théville, the mother of Hortense, the young lady for whom Meilcour has already experienced love at first sight.14 The conversation comes to the subject of a certain Madame de ***, whose behavior surprises everyone, for after having made a show of a newfound religious devotion and retired from society, she has now, at fifty, taken a new lover, a very young man. The group is able to agree on the ridiculousness of Madame de ***’s choice, but a note of discord creeps into the discussion when Senanges attempts to distance herself from the fallen woman: “It just goes to show that there are some women who have no sense of self-respect.” Versac, sensing Senange’s hypocrisy, looks straight at Senanges: “ ‘Yes,’ answered Versac, with irony. ‘It is true, they exist; and to tell the truth women. . . .’ ” Les femmes: Versac does not get the chance to articulate his generalizing maxim about the behavior of women, for Senanges cuts him off. “Enough general theses, they are always insulting” (157, Crébillon ellipsis). In his prefatory comments, Crébillon warns that his types are not allusions to specific people: “If someone paints fops and prudes, he will not have in mind Sir so-and-so or Madam such-and-such, whom he has never seen; rather, it seems to me perfectly simple that if that Sir is a fop and that Madam is a prude, then there will be, in such portraits, things that resemble them” (71). His characters themselves understand this, but they also reveal that the matter may not be so simple after all: reading with keys at least limited the number of people upset, while general portraits irritate vast swaths of the population. At Versac’s assertion that it is precisely general statements that never insult anyone, Senanges explodes: “What! If you say, for instance, that all women are easily conquered, if you impute to all the disorder that only a few are capable of, you still think that all women should not be upset by it?” “Absolutely, that is what I think; moreover, it is only the very sort of women who give in quickly who don’t like to hear as much, and who complain when they do.” “I agree with you,” said Madame de Théville. “A reasonable woman should not attribute to herself what has been said

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only about another, and as long as I myself do not give in, it is of complete indifference to me whether or not someone says that no woman ever resists.” “But, Madame,” said Madame de Lursay, “doesn’t the view of us produced by such tirades enter into your consideration?” . . . “Oh, what does it matter to you if someone thinks you’ve been won over when you haven’t been?” [answered] Madame de Théville; “What effect does the opinion of some vain man have on your virtue? Believe me, Madame, as long as a man lives a little in society, he learns quickly that all women are not vicious, nor virtuous, and experience effortlessly teaches him what exceptions he must make.” (157–58) On the one hand, and unlike libelous satire, general statements are not insults, Versac says, but something on the order of predictions based on probability: most women, he reasons, behave thus. Théville concurs: generalities cannot possibly apply to each and every member of the class of people designated by the statement. But Théville’s seemingly more supple position is really just a version of Senanges’s, as Geoffrey Bennington has pointed out: here too, general statements are palatable provided that the subject except herself from their claims.15 The drive to except oneself from the expansive referential power of general laws is repeated again and again in Les Égarements. Meilcour likes to think that he and his idol Versac are special exceptions. When Lursay describes Versac, whom Meilcour much admires, by linking his behavior to that of other similar fops—“those of Versac’s character,” she says—he remains convinced of his mentor’s uniqueness: “Whatever vividness Madame de Lursay used to portray Versac to me in such a disadvantageous light, she did not persuade me that this portrait in any way resembled him. Versac for me was first among men” (140–41). Similarly, Meilcour’s interest in Lursay seems to come most from his belief that his own rare charms alone are responsible for Lursay’s interest in him: “I was the only man she had ever loved!” as the narrator rephrases, in indirect discourse, his younger self ’s conclusion (119). Meanwhile, the protagonist and the reader will learn precious little about Hortense, the ideal woman Meilcour first spies one evening at the opera; but the one thing we know for sure is that she too likes to fancy herself exceptional. This much Meilcour overhears in a conversation in the Tuilleries between Hortense and an unnamed friend of hers. Hortense, admitting the pleasure she has recently been

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taking in her appearance, is warned by her friend about the dangers of love; Hortense denies any such interests; her friend counters by recalling Hortense’s behavior on seeing a certain marquis at the opera, behavior interpreted as so much “proof ” of her growing love: “Don’t you remember . . . the pleasure you had when you learned his name and rank? how much you talked about it all evening? Don’t you recall your deep dreaminess during our stay in the country, your distraction, your sighs, which you let out for no apparent cause? . . . If those don’t constitute for you symptoms of love, at least that is the way it starts in other people.” Meilcour is excited, for he thinks he is this marquis; but unfortunately Hortense completely dismisses her friend’s diagnosis, based as it is on general knowledge: “In that case,” she responds, “I am like no one else (je ne ressemble à personne),” and goes on to say that her friend has incorrectly “applied” her knowledge (109–10). Needless to say, Crébillon’s novel encourages us to view such claims to particularity—be they Senanges’s, Hortense’s, or Meilcour’s—with suspicion. In each passage, the bad faith of the characters who assert their particularity is comically obvious; indeed, we could say that they are essentially comic protagonists, if we define the latter in keeping with Molière’s approach, that is, as people who refuse to see themselves as they see others.16 And the novel is of course framed by the preface in which Crébillon has asserted his faith in the explanatory virtues of general statements and types of the kind that Versac has shown himself to be a liberal user. The only character who does not seem to share in the propensity for excepting himself from general statements is Versac. “Me, I never so need to change [lovers] as when I see that someone is taking steps to hold on to me.” “Oh! That I believe!” answered Madame de Lursay. “But what would you do if you saw that someone was going to be unfaithful?” “I’d change all the more quickly.” “That heart you have is certainly worthy of love!” she said. “Ah! Madame,” he replied, “in that respect there is nothing special about me (je n’ai là-dessus rien de singulier); just as I do, all men seek only pleasure; if you can manage to affix it continually to the same object, then we will remain affixed to it as well. You see, Marquise, no one would want to become involved, even with the most charming woman in the world, if it were a question of staying with that person forever.” (138)

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In Versac we see someone effortlessly using his own predilections—“Me, I . . .”—in order to make those blanket statements we have been speaking of—“all men,” “no one.” One might initially regard his assertion that he is just like everyone else with some suspicion: Versac is a master of rhetorical manipulation, after all, and it is he who will later instruct Meilcour to learn to “disguise [his] character so perfectly that people will try in vain to comprehend it” (211). But at bottom Versac’s self is empty: he is not positively different from others, as would be a bourgeois individual like Rousseau.17 Instead, his proto-materialist reduction of human beings to the impulses of the flesh (“all men seek only pleasure”) implies his own fundamental ordinariness or even emptiness; his distinction and power derive from the acknowledgement of a fact that everyone else prefers not to see. Social success, he teaches, is based on cultivating an appearance of singularity—“One can therefore never be too singular” (211)—but the libertine himself seems to have grasped the secret that Pascal had confided decades earlier to a young prince—that there are no real kings, only ordinary men recognized as kings by people who don’t know better.18

What Don Juan Doesn’t Know All men are the same, says Versac; Crébillon’s preface assures us that Meilcour is like all young men. The congruity between the two positions certainly suggests that Les Égarements should be an initiation for its readers, laying bare the sentimental alibis of its characters and replacing them with the general laws that explain human behavior. “It would be possible to complete out of the works of Crébillon a whole collection of . . . character sketches and aphorisms,” once wrote Aldous Huxley, in a remark that has prefigured much work on the worldly code of mastery. “ ‘What Every Young Don Juan Ought to Know’ might serve as a title to this florilegium.”19 At the same time, it has not escaped critics’ attention that Versac’s position in the novel is precarious. The basic fact that Versac is not the narrator is certainly a first clue, since Versac’s discourse is enclosed within that of the experienced narrator Meilcour, and thus distanced.20 A second clue is his fate in the narrative: the worldly Versac comes up emptyhanded, failing to impress almost all the women—especially Hortense, who brushes off his overtures with contempt. Lursay fares little better, for although she does in the end get what she wants by bedding Meilcour, it is far from clear that her victory follows directly from her maneuvering.

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Crébillon’s position would seem doubly critical, then. On the one hand, he gives us characters who take refuge in an illusory particularity; on the other, his worldly masters are so caught up in their own generalizations that they fail to see the particulars under their noses. Les Égarements asks, I would suggest, how we can create better accounts of behavior than those provided by the ineffectual knowledge that Versac at a number of points calls “worldly science” (la science du monde). What kind of generalities might be better adapted to the particulars of experience? In this chronicle of an education, how does one really grow up? If it is true, as many say, that Meilcour’s naïveté has thrown a wrench into the workings of the worldly code, it is also true that the code must be singularly vulnerable given its inability to take account of anything outside its system, even something as predictable as inexperience. Lursay and Versac do recognize that the young Meilcour is not “formed” (241), but they do not know how to avoid the cascade of misunderstandings that serve in lieu of plot. Remarkably, something as obvious as Meilcour’s infatuation with Hortense remains shrouded in hermetic secrecy: all the signs would seem to point in this direction, but they are evidently not the signs the libertine is looking for, and Crébillon provides not the slightest indication that Versac (or even Lursay) has caught wind of the truth. Instead, Versac isolates elements of Meilcour’s behavior that correspond to normal social codes, and concludes that the young man is interested in none other than the somewhat wilted Senanges. Meilcour volunteers to bring Senanges some verses, he writes to her, he appears in public with her; ergo, he must be interested in her. “Normally [Communément] one doesn’t do such things without a motive [sans idée],” Versac notes, so it is perfectly reasonable that both Versac and Senanges herself should think Meilcour interested. And yet Meilcour dares to deny it, thus contradicting the observed data: “After the hopes you’ve given her, and the attention you’ve paid, I find your indifference astonishing” (207). Meilcour gives off all the normal signs of interest and yet protests he is not interested. For Versac there can be only one explanation. He must be lying. Such is, indeed, the limit of Versac’s psychologizing—dissimulation. In society, he opines, people hide who they really are; the key to success is perfecting one’s own disguise while stripping others of theirs—getting down, then, to the bedrock that is their character. Meilcour tries out the libertine’s teaching during a miserable social gathering at Lursay’s. Victim of Lursay’s cold shoulder, and mortified by the fact that she has seated next to her at dinner the Marquis de ***, with whom she has been shamelessly flirting, Meilcour decides

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with affected scorn to leave them to their pleasures. Just as he is getting up to leave, however, the Marquis announces his own departure and is not pressed by Lursay to stay. Like Versac faced with Meilcour’s puzzling mixed messages, Meilcour surmises that something must be afoot: “Such great indifference, after everything that had transpired [i.e., their flirting], did not seem natural to me” (231). Perhaps Lursay and the Marquis have made a secret agreement that the latter would withdraw only to double back when the other guests had left? Goaded on by the ingenuity of his hypothesis, Meilcour decides to stay, indeed to refuse to leave after everyone else is long gone, so that he might be there on the Marquis’s surreptitious return. The reader, however, knows very well that the Marquis will never rematerialize. The scene at Lursay’s is indeed characterized by dissimulation, but not of the willfully strategic sort that Versac makes the cornerstone of his psychology. The solution to the mystery of Lursay’s behavior with the Marquis requires only attention to the power of wounded pride: vexed at the cold behavior of Meilcour himself upon his arrival, Lursay responds with her own coldness and flirts outrageously with the Marquis to make Meilcour jealous. That this is nowhere stated in the novel does not imply unwarranted projection on the reader’s part: the narrator has already shown the way in the production of explanations of behavior. And that way—the real way of the world—lies in a finely tuned dialectic movement between generals and particulars that ends up rewriting our understanding of what a type may be. “What penetration is necessary to discern the character of a woman[!]” Versac declares fatuously, and by character, he means the type to which such and such a woman really belongs, in spite of her attempts to disguise who she is—“the delicate woman,” “the voluptuous woman,” “the coquette” (215). Versac’s social knowledge is, once again, copulation; it applies categories to individuals. The narrator does not shun such categories, but their relation to observed reality is completely different. The long opening portrait of Lursay is a case in point. The narrator starts with broad types (the “coquette,” the “gallant lady”; 77), but these are immediately complicated by the fact that Lursay exists in time; her reputation has suffered, and she has responded by becoming more prudent (and on the surface, at least, prudish). Like the narrator, she too has drawn general conclusions from her experience (e.g., “women are betrayed less by their weaknesses than by the insufficient care they take with themselves”; 77); and out of revulsion for the simple character she has been attributed in the past, she has become a much more complex one. The portrait thus proceeds through shades of increasing nuance, as general types are modified with

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unexpected characteristics: “Moreover, although prudish, she was gentle in company”; “She had a lively wit, but was not at all flighty”; and so on (78). The resulting portraiture combines overlapping categories and isolated observed particulars. It does not “name” reality but helps to explain it.21 A slightly different way of putting the very nonlibertine sort of penetration Crébillon’s novel exercises would be to say that Les Égarements is not so much an assemblage of maxims and character portraits as a generator of maxims and portraits—maxims and portraits that have been tailored to fit the specific contours of lived reality. Huxley was right: Les Égarements does indeed overflow with general propositions about the way certain groups of people “are,” and many of them can be found not in the mouth of the garrulous Versac but in that of the narrator, that is, in the voice that frames, incorporates, or distances Versac’s pretensions to general knowledge. But whereas Versac wants to put people in preexisting boxes, the narrator adapts the general knowledge he possesses to new circumstances, thus generating new knowledge. Why, he asks himself, did Lursay ever take an interest in him in the first place? The early novel would tend to answer such a question by appealing to the specific governing passion of a character (ambition, amour-passion, gloire . . .), which would be revealed through a number of devices—a conversation overheard, a misplaced letter, a talkative confidant, a first-person confession. In Crébillon, however, the answer is derived from a more general question: how does the older woman think? The narrator possesses no maxim to explain this, but he does have at his disposal knowledge of the behavior of the young woman, so he starts there. “A woman, when she is young, is more sensitive to the pleasure of inspiring passion than to that of conceiving her own,” he begins; and somewhat in the manner of La Bruyère, this initial nugget of wisdom is then amplified, restated in different forms that also have the familiar ring of the maxim, with its love of reversals and paradox: “she takes a lover less because she finds him attractive than to prove that she is,” and so on (88–89). From this point, the narrator moves on to a description of how the same woman, now older, thinks and acts: Formerly sure that by trading one lover for another she was trading only pleasures, now she is more than happy to keep the one that she possesses; the cost of the conquest has made it valuable to her. Faithful on account of the loss that would be hers should she not be, little by little her heart becomes accustomed to sentiment. . . . [L]ove, which in her former life had been but a temporary

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occupation among so many others, now becomes her sole resource: she latches onto it with fury. (89) While the knowledge of the young woman was purely sententious, we have now moved into a descriptive mode. As if conducting a sort of experiment, the narrator takes a known quantity (the thought process of the young woman) and introduces new variables. How will the young woman react to the loss of male interest in her? The above passage is thus a description of that reaction, based on a reconstruction of the woman’s psychological motivations. And from here, the narrator feels that he knows enough to wax sententious again: “And so it is that what is taken for a woman’s last fling [fantaisie] is quite often her first real passion.” This maxim, which has been produced before our eyes, is then triumphantly applied to the specific situation in which the young Meilcour found himself: “Such were Madame de Lursay’s dispositions when she decided to become involved with me” (89). Two things follow from a passage such as this. First, the novel does not refuse generalizations, it refuses other people’s generalizations, and—as in the case of the Marquise’s outrageous flirtation with her dinner guest—invites us to construct our own. The narrator’s generalizations are in a sense superior to those of Versac, but not so much on account of their content. Rather, they grow out of a context from which they can be detached only at the peril of becoming dead knowledge. At their origin, Versac’s maxims and characters may well have been alive to experience: during the famous scene at l’Étoile in which he attempts to mentor the young Meilcour, he mentions that his advice is founded “on [his] own experience” (211). At the very least, the libertine’s error lies in thinking he can take the general knowledge that he has fabricated and transmit it as an esoteric gift from master to apprentice. The narrator’s reflections, by contrast, often bear the mark of their own formation in the crucible of experience. “I have since learned that women . . .” (120); “How was I to know that any woman . . . ?” (130); “I did not know then that women . . .” (86). The temporal framing of the maxims immediately stands out: they have the learning process built into them, and it is a process that supposes not the reception of someone else’s knowledge but the time to fabricate one’s own.22 A celebrated anti-maxim, occurring in the novel’s first pages, even moots the worldly education Versac has not yet had the chance to offer: “Lessons and examples mean nothing for a young man; and it is only at his own expense that he learns” (76). Thus, the lesson of Les Égarements is fundamentally dissimilar to Versac’s tutorial; it lies not in any number of

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discrete knowledge-units, but in the fact that any such propositions must be produced by the subject.23 The second reason for the superiority of the narrator’s generalizations comes from the fact that at bottom they rewrite our understanding of what types are. As we have seen in the case of Lursay’s portrait, the narrator’s recourse to categories such as the coquette are immediately inflected with individual characteristics. In such a situation, and in many others where types as such are never mentioned, characters are explained via an underlying psychology. This is not Versac’s psychology of dissimulation; on the contrary, what is curious in Les Égarements is that people’s smoke screens are readily readable as such, as readable as the real motivations of their behavior. The example of Versac’s attempted overtures to Hortense is a case in point. Knowing the libertine’s reputation for success, Meilcour anxiously observes Versac’s efforts to overcome Hortense’s seeming lack of receptivity. [Hortense]’s indifference did not, however, discourage [Versac]; he knew that she was unmarried—a bothersome state, which obliges those who are in it to dissimulate their desires more than married women, who have been rendered less shy by contact with society [l’usage du monde], habit, and example. Moreover she was with her mother, a mother whose severe and reserved manner must have proved imposing and constraining. These reflections, which he likely made, calmed him: he was sure . . . that before leaving that day he would have arranged this affair more or less to his satisfaction, even if he was inwardly blushing over not being able to progress with more speed. In order to learn as soon as possible where he stood, he made a show of his charms: he had nice legs, so he displayed them; he laughed as much as possible, to show his teeth; and he struck his most decisive poses, the ones that showed off to best effect his graceful build. (152–53) This passage contains direct observations, of course: Versac appears initially confused, and then begins to display his physical beauty with confidence. All the rest, however, is inference on the narrator’s part. Knowing Versac’s love of maxims, we may suppose he reaches for an encouraging one regarding the customary discretion of the unmarried woman; he would probably take account of the impact of Madame de Théville’s presence as well. Such thoughts make sense in the context of the observed transition from Versac’s confused disbelief

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at Hortense’s indifference to a more calm and confident attitude. They are, the narrator tells us, “likely.” And given Versac’s vanity, they can only lead to his imagining quick progress, even though we might suppose that her resistance has secretly embarrassed him. The superiority of the novel over Versac is moreover displayed by the following irony: thanks to the narrator, the reader is reasonably sure of Versac’s feelings at the precise moment we observe the libertine making wrong deductions about Hortense’s (neither today nor ever will he arrange things with her to his satisfaction). In some respects this passage is completely unremarkable: one does not need incredible penetration, long study of the way of the world, or knowledge of Ancien Régime aristocratic mores to understand what is happening. But that is precisely the point. All one needs to read minds is cursory knowledge of someone’s character (Versac’s love of maxims, or the self-confidence his past success has bred), concrete observations (of things obvious and subtle, from sparkling teeth to, elsewhere in the novel, suppressed blushes or furtive glances), and perhaps above all attentiveness to one other motive, shared by coquettes, fops, young men, older women, everyone: vanity, or amour-propre. Here is Meilcour, after an argument with Lursay over his presumed interest in Senanges: I gave her my hand; she walked without looking at me, and I noticed that she had on her face the signs of intense spite. And yes, after all, what could be more mortifying for her than what had just transpired between us? Could I have had possibly defended myself more coldly, and in a more insulting way? Is that the way a lover justifies himself? She had too much intelligence, too much experience [trop d’usage], and at the same time too much love for me not to feel deeply the terrible implications my behavior had for her. Never had she more clearly shown her tenderness, and never had I responded so badly. I had recognized that she was angry, we were alone, and yet I hadn’t fallen to my knees in front of her! I hadn’t transformed that instant into the happiest one of my life! I was even letting her leave! Didn’t I know what quarrels can cost? (172) The narrator is able to move in and out of Lursay’s mind through sheer inference, which in spite of the passing reference to worldly knowledge (l’usage) comes principally from a sensitivity to something no more esoteric than bruised vanity. The technique is so effective that it allows us to infer even

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the words a character spoke to herself: in an example of what one might call a framed free indirect discourse, Crébillon’s narrator actually voices another character’s thoughts. (I will return to this subject below.) In a customarily perceptive essay, on La Bruyère’s Caractères (1688), Roland Barthes remarks that we do not share the classical moralist’s idea of character as shorthand for the empirical world: “Nous ne notons plus le monde,” writes Barthes in a sentence we might translate as “Literature for us is no longer a notation of the world.”24 Barthes is careful to emphasize that he implies by this no progress toward more “realistic” characters; rather, we have replaced La Bruyère’s characters with a different sort of type—the woman in love, the mother, the model wife are some of his examples—types which are treated “comme des personnes,” as human beings, “so that the greatest number of [other] human beings can recognize themselves in them.”25 Clearly, the shift implies a change in what reading is seen as doing: in the cases of both classical and modern character, literature is undeniably a means of understanding the real world, but the connections proposed vary. In the one, knowledge is about taxonomy; knowing the world means having the right classificatory boxes into which we can fit the world’s particulars. This, obviously, is the point of view that Crébillon encloses within his novel, a novel that then proceeds to move analysis onto the plain of psychology. Crébillon’s characters are not discrete units. They share, rather, a fairly limited number of psychological motivations, any one of which might be active at any given time—desire and its nearly indiscernible counterpart, love; inexplicable curiosity; amour-propre especially; and last a kind of hypertrophied self-consciousness that, like Poe’s imp of the perverse, often makes people behave in “bizarre” and unpredictable ways. (This last generates a good deal of the novel’s humor.) Versac, Senanges, Lursay, Meilcour—they are, naturally, different from one another, but they are formed out of this common motivational stuff. Shortly after the publication of the first volume of Crébillon’s novel, another novelist, d’Argens, wrote an admiring letter in which he lauded Crébillon’s subtle portraiture and ability to “unravel . . . the inner movements of the different characters.”26 The context of d’Argens’s phrase makes it clear that “characters” is used in the old sense of type, but the praise consists of underlining how “real” and “natural” Crébillon’s description of, say, the “prude in love” is. D’Argens is equipped with the language of type, of which La Bruyère was the acknowledged master; yet it is detectibly inadequate for d’Argens, because Crébillon’s portraits are based not on taxonomy but on a kind of sympathetic identification: “One has to be in love, or to have been in love, in order to paint

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so truly and moreover so delicately all the movements of love.” Genius, wit, and science can only take you so far: for this portraiture, d’Argens writes, you need a heart. And “when I say heart,” he continues, “I mean a tender heart, one which has found itself in these situations.” “The prude in love,” seems to say d’Argens’s Crébillon, “c’est moi.” In his preface to Les Égarements, Crébillon announces a tableau of Parisian specimens, ones so marked by this time and place that he must warn readers against reading them as satire of specific persons. At the same time, he offers us a portrait of “a man like all men are in their earliest youth.” There is here a kind of contradiction, repeated in some early appreciations of Crébillon. His work can on the one hand be seen as a documentary time capsule for those who are “curious to know what French people were like in the eighteenth century” (this was Pallisot’s judgment in 1775), while at the same time it provides (in the opinion of Mercier, writing in these same years) “a fine and subtle anatomy of the human heart.”27 Eighteenth-century French aristocrats, the human heart: Les Égarements is a strange cocktail of specificities and generalities. Its characters are unique, yet understandable; their rituals are arcane, but their motivations banal. As the narrator shows, they are hosts for a supple kind of identification, one based not on a shared hyperbolic passion (say, love, duty, or jealousy), but on the “movements,” as d’Argens put it, of the heart and mind. The worldly science of the libertine is not a necessary prerequisite for entry into Crébillon’s novel, nor is it what the reader emerges with at the end, triumphant. The reader is schooled, rather, in what Don Juan will never know, which is how to read a mind.

Pseudo-Omniscience Les Égarements du coeur et de l’esprit appears to be unfinished: the preface promises us Meilcour’s first loves, his subsequent corruption by the world, and his final turn to virtue at the hands of an unnamed “estimable woman” (72); Crébillon delivers only the first panel of the triptych, however, ending on the conquest of Lursay by Meilcour (or the other way around, it’s hard to tell). Contemporaries report being on tenterhooks, waiting for subsequent installments; yet modern commentators often emphasize that the novel as it exists possesses a kind of completeness, as if Crébillon never intended to go any farther.28 Moreover, by a certain logic, it is not quite clear how Crébillon could have finished it. The gap between the young Meilcour and the older

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narrating Meilcour seems fundamentally unbridgeable, every bit as wide as the one between the narrator and “worldly” characters like Versac and Lursay.29 True, perhaps the “estimable woman” was to have provided the education that the libertine could not. Even then, though, we must admit that there is something well-nigh fantastic about such an education: the narrating Meilcour’s sensitivity to motivation, on display in the borderline case of free indirect discourse I quoted above, very often goes beyond mere perceptiveness. At these times Meilcour knows too much for any man—though just the right amount, perhaps, for an omniscient narrator. For many critics, the narrator’s psychological acumen goes without saying, being a natural consequence of his worldly education at the hands of Versac and others. In response to Vivienne Mylne’s observation that many passages of Les Égarements violate the conventions of the memoir novel by giving the narrator a kind of “omniscient penetration,” Peter Brooks, for example, accused his predecessor of “miss[ing] the point”: “Meilcour has gained a position of worldly knowledge from which he is able totally to reconstruct Mme de Lursay’s past psychology. This is indeed what his education has been about.”30 However, given the gulf I have been stressing between the narrator’s explanations and the psychology exercised by characters like Versac and Lursay, we should take seriously the possibility that the narrator’s penetration may well be of a different order entirely—more other-worldly than worldly. Certainly, as in the case of the ventriloquizing of Lursay’s wounded indignation quoted above, the narrator often underlines for us the tentativeness of his conjectures: “I do not know if she made these reflections,” he notes immediately, effectively naturalizing the passage (172). And in many others, modal adverbs (e.g., “doubtless,” “apparently”), reference to subsequent information (“I since learned”), and maxims (“like all women, who fear . . .”) accomplish the same thing. In such cases, we can sensibly say that the older Meilcour is simply a very perceptive man hazarding informed guesses about the people in his life. Still, William Edmiston has convincingly drawn out Mylne’s initial sense that something is not quite right, confirming that the process of mind-reading is often silently disseminated within the text. This mind-reading extends beyond general ideas, feelings, or decisions to, again, a type of free indirect discourse in which we are given to hear the actual thoughts of characters. Edmiston points out as well that the narrator is occasionally privy to the mindreading that other characters are performing on his younger self, and locates a moment in which we are inexplicably party to a brief and unobservable interaction between two other characters.31 I would add that the convention

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of the memoir novel is twisted in the opposite direction as well, for not only does Meilcour know too much about others, he doesn’t know enough about Meilcour: strangely, he often has to mind-read his younger self, a self which is not, then, substantively different from the selves of other people. If it is difficult to set all this mind-reading at the door of some particularly rigorous education, received at the hands of either the worldly or the virtuous, it is equally hard to suppose that what we have here are merely perspectival errors that Crébillon might have corrected with the addition of a few more modal “probably”s. Rather, the sheer quantity and variety of infractions of memoir conventions suggest that it is the form itself that is under assault from an incompatible approach to character and narration. Les Égarements du coeur et de l’esprit, from this point of view, demands not more naturalizing explanations, but fewer: all that needs to be done is to abandon the pseudofactual pretense inherent to the memoir itself, even a memoir that is prefaced by a declaration stating that the hero is nobody in particular and that it makes no difference whether the reader considers the work to be “real” or “purely imaginary” (69). Whence Mylne’s conclusion, that “Crébillon is moving away from the point of view of the first-person narrator to that of the omniscient third person.”32 What Crébillon seems to want—but what he hasn’t quite come up with—is a narrator who is not a character, or not even human, perhaps. He still writes as if a discourse about contemporary mores had to come from someone, even though everyone knows that that someone, the older Meilcour, is merely simulated, really no one at all. Mylne’s “moving away,” then, deserves emphasis. It is not that Crébillon was mixing two incompatible sets of conventions, one belonging to the firstperson form of the memoir novel, the other to the third-person novel, because the conventions of the latter had not yet been laid down. Or, to be more precise, the existing conventions of third-person narration did not make space for the techniques that Crébillon was somewhat awkwardly putting into service. There were, obviously, third-person novels before Les Égarements—notably, romance novels. An examination of the narrative techniques of romances like d’Urfé’s L’Astrée and Scudéry’s Clélie—and a full explanation of why they don’t amount to mind-reading—is beyond the scope of this chapter, but a couple of things can be noted straight away. For one, the third-person romance narrator describes the passions agitating characters, passions which are the ones that suit a character’s situation. Those feelings are then specified, or really performed, by moving into some sort of first-person narration or description; for example, a character can recount her own “autobiographical” story, or a

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confidant can do it for her, in which case the confidant will rely on the character’s own previous testimony. Which is to say that the third person in such novels serves as an introduction to first-person utterances, which chiefly bear the expressive weight of the character. Another particularity emerges if we compare Crébillon’s mind-reading to the “consciousness scenes” of certain early third-person novels.33 Here is what I regard as a typical example, from Haywood’s Fortunate Foundlings (1744). The heroine Louisa has just accidentally read a gazette article that seems to apply to herself: The very beginning of this paragraph gave her a conjecture it was meant for no other than herself; and the more she read, the more she grew convinced of it.—It must be so, cryed she; every word,— every circumstance confirms it.—How unhappy am I that I cannot return so perfect an affection!—Instead of detesting my ingratitude, he only fears I should receive the punishment of it.—What man but Dorilaus would behave thus to the creature of his benevolence?—If I have any merits, do not I owe them to his goodness?—My brother and myself, two poor exposed and wretched foundlings, what but his bounty rear’d us to what we are?—Hard fate!—unlucky passion that drives me from his presence and protection. . . . This confederation had so much effect on her, that she was half determined to comply with the advertisement; but when she remembered to have read that where love is sincere and violent, it requires a length of time to be erased, and that those possessed of it are incapable of knowing even their own strength, and, as he had said to her himself, that there was no answering for the consequences, she grew instantly of another mind, and thought that putting herself again into the power of such a passion was running too great a hazard.34 Unquestionably, we have access to Louisa’s thoughts, even down to her recollection of the exact words of another character. But at least two characteristics of the passage make it unlike Crébillon’s mind-reading. First, as is fairly common in early third-person narration, particularly acute emotions spur the protagonist to soliloquize: when thoughts are reported, the first person is never far behind. (The technique is clearly adapted from the dramatic monologue.) Second, what is not present is what we might want to call a hermeneutic

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narrator, one who delves into consciousness in search of an explanation of behavior. To recall the passage in which Versac makes his unsuccessful overtures to Hortense, the narrator’s omniscience manifests itself by telling us on the one hand what Versac is doing and on the other what motivates those actions. Where Haywood’s narrator merely recounts a succession of feelings and thoughts, Crébillon’s gives us a fluid back-and-forth between the character’s external appearance and internal thoughts. Crébillon does not give us “more” narration of thought processes than Haywood, or even “better” narration: concluding that the characters of Les Égarements du coeur et de l’esprit are deeper, rounder, more realistic than those of The Fortunate Foundlings misses what is so curious about the novel. For it is as if the (partial) abandonment of pseudofactual pretense were pointing to a completely different sort of relation to characters. A narrator who is supposed (even facetiously) to exist establishes a continuum between the world of the reader and the world of the work, for the narrator touches both worlds; indeed, producing this continuum is the object of the pseudofactual mode. The otherworldly nature of the older Meilcour’s psychological gifts do not merely give us one more reason to doubt his existence, as we should doubt the existence of any pseudofactual narrator. Rather, violating the naturalistic standards of the pseudofactual regime denatures him, makes him impossible. And this impossibility expels the characters he speaks of into a world apart—a world full of people who never lived but who seem to live, not because the “editor” says they do but by virtue of their sheer psychological consistency. It is not their bodies that are supposed to exist, somewhere out in the real world; it is their minds that exist here, in the novel’s world.35 And so reading Crébillon entails transgressing the relatively recent article of critical faith that bars us from asking what characters “really” think or feel—an error akin to that of wondering, in L. C. Knights’s famous phrase, how many children had Lady Macbeth.36 In a novel in which characters are forever dissecting behavior in order to ascertain true motives, wondering whether Lursay loves Meilcour or is merely toying with him is surely no sign of readerly naïveté: Les Égarements may not furnish us with a definitive account of Lursay’s real feelings, but it does very much suggest that she must have real feelings about which we can make educated guesses. For example, the last lengthy conversation between Meilcour and Lursay, which ends in long-postponed sexual congress, is full of each character’s explanations of past behavior—explanations that appear to the reader to be dubious selfjustifications. Our recognition of this may be helped, as Bennington proposes,

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by attentiveness to the presence elsewhere in the text of alternate judgments bearing the approval of the Olympian narrator.37 Yet we hardly need to be so fastidious: by this point any competent reader can hardly miss the fact that characters rarely even know why they do what they do, never mind communicate that information accurately to others. Les Égarements du coeur et de l’esprit has replaced, then, the extraliterary use of novelistic pronouncements with an intraliterary one: the narrator has not been schooling us in the ways of the world, but creating in us the desire to mind-read. Judging Meilcour and Lursay’s self-justifications at the close of the novel more or less convincing is not the sign of a deficient reader, but part of the reader’s work and pleasure. It is because Meilcour and Lursay are not real that they become, for the space of this novel, human beings.

Going Nowhere Granted, an easy way of putting much of the above is simply to say that Crébillon creates a fictional world. By this now-intuitive shorthand, we allow not only for the separateness of fantasy worlds—the “imaginary realms” (71) where, Crébillon tells us, we will not be traveling in Les Égarements—but also, and maybe especially, for worlds that look a lot like our world yet remain insuperably distant. Nothing lies “behind” Les Égarements, I have said: it does not refer to the real denizens of early eighteenth-century Paris. Of course, it may be said to refer to the Parisian fauna in the more general way that types refer; it is then a sort of map, or, as Crébillon and many others put it, a tableau or picture. But in addition it produces a fictional world, thick and consistent enough that the reader can treat it not as the world but simply as a world, investigating, as does the narrator, the hidden motives of characters who have no existence. Is it not time, then, to declare victory and go home? We have indeed found fiction, if not exactly where Gallagher and other students of the English novel have claimed, at least roughly when they specified; there is no reason to wait around for the nineteenth century after all. The declaration may, however, be a little premature. My reading of Les Égarements has touched on three domains in which Crébillon appears to move the novel in a distinctly fictional direction: the abandonment of the pretense to truth, types, and omniscience. Let’s take them in turn. In Crébillon’s preface to Les Égarements du coeur et de l’esprit, pseudofactual pretense lies seemingly in tatters. Notably, he pushes well beyond the

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irony with which novelists often asserted truth—as when, for example, Crébillon’s rival Marivaux prints his name on the title page of La Vie de Marianne (1731–42) and then goes on in his preface to say that he found the memoirs in an old armoire. Since Crébillon raises the issue of his novel’s truth, he is clearly operating from within the pseudofactual tradition. But at the same time, he does Marivaux one better by raising the issue only to declare it irrelevant: the reader is free to regard the memoirs as “a work of pure imagination” or a collection of “true . . . adventures” (69)—it makes, the author says, no difference. Crébillon then goes on forthrightly to proclaim the vice-correcting “goal” (69) and “object” (72) of his writing—something you can only do, after all, if you’re an author. Ironic or hesitant truth claims of Marivaux’s sort need not be interpreted as a move toward fiction, because such equivocations were what made the pseudofactual pseudofactual in the first place. Ignoring the truth claim, by contrast, feels different, as if the mode were simply on the point of being dropped out of sheer lassitude: you, reader, can take this as true or as made up, I’m not going to play that game any more. Fair enough. Yet not only does pseudofactual pretense endure well after 1736, it endures in Crébillon’s own output. Indeed, his penultimate work, Lettres de la duchesse de *** au duc de *** (1769), is preceded by a lengthy preface in which the “editor” declares the letters’ reality to be crucial. Crébillon, here, is no longer operating according to the discourse on types, popular in the 1730s, but instead invoking the rationales of the newer sentimental novel: “truth always has more power over us than what we know to be a mere imitation”; works must therefore resonate with “the sound of truth” (le ton du vrai).38 Admittedly, pseudofactual pretense is on the point of being dropped in Les Égarements, but another way of putting this is to say that Crébillon can only push to that point and no more. In his subsequent work, he experiments with the form of the dialogue, which, since it did not take the form of a found document, completely bypassed truth claims (La Nuit et le moment [1755], among others); and when he turns to the epistolary novel, he does so with the customary aesthetic idea of the superiority of truth over fiction. In other words, and like La Princesse de Clèves, the much-appreciated Égarements du coeur et de l’esprit changes nothing. It does not bring about a “realization” that novels do not have to be true, for the simple reason that everyone knows that. Judging from the evidence—the stubborn refusal of the pseudofactual posture to go away—what is not clear to contemporaries is on what other grounds the novel can make a claim on their attention. So subsequent production—Crébillon’s and everyone else’s—does not take the

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final step of dropping truth affirmations; this fictional pebble makes no waves on the pseudofactual ocean. Gallagher’s proposal that character types signal a properly fictional novel is also doubtful. Not that there isn’t good evidence that writers thought a lot about the odd referentiality of types. Molière devoted a play (La Critique de l’École des femmes, 1662) to the proper understanding of his characters: his types were too local, seemed to have too much barbed specificity to be processed in the way of New Comedy and the masks of the commedia dell’arte, and so the playwright needed to explain that he was not indulging in personal satire.39 And La Bruyère spent a considerable part of his long preface to Les Caractères puzzling over how his observations on the mores of Louis XIV’s France could be historically situated without entailing reference to specific people, and general without diluting their historical claims in the timeless sea of human nature. Crébillon may say in his preface that it is “perfectly simple” (71), that a fop will recognize himself in the portrait of the fop even though the latter does not refer directly to the former. Comments from the period, however, suggest that there is little simple about it—as does, I’ve shown, Crébillon’s very novel, which takes as its subject the successful relation of generality to specificity. And to the inherent slipperiness of the early modern type—drawn from nature without being a portrait of a specific somebody—was added a further complication: writers like Molière, La Bruyère, Lesage, Fielding, and Smollett disowned direct applications of their types, but they also tempted readers to look for their portraits’ originals and often rewarded them, moreover, with some obvious identifications.40 Beyond these difficulties, however, it is far from self-evident that the early novelistic use of type makes a good ancestor at all for the fictional characters of the nineteenth-century novel: types do not refer to real people, fictional characters do not refer to real people, but this does not mean that types and fictional characters are identical. A novelist such as Balzac, who has much to say on the subject of types and species, most often relegates obvious types to the narrative margins, while his protagonists are more strongly individualized.41 Realist protagonists are invariably socially representative, but hardly in the manner of the classificatory “notation” (in Barthes’s formulation) evident in an author like La Bruyère: the two types of representativity—one moral-anthropological, one socioeconomic—are probably separated by a gulf as wide as the one Foucault, in The Order of Things, postulated between the “universal mathesis” of the classical episteme and the life sciences of the nineteenth century. In addition, realist representativity is usually inseparable from psychological individuality;

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the modern novel’s most potent source of fictionality, following Dorrit Cohn, may well be its ability to render minds transparent.42 In narrating what we cannot know about real people, the nineteenth-century novel allows for complex processes of identification; the reader is able to follow characters’ thoughts and feelings while simultaneously viewing them from the outside, as determined by processes and contexts that the characters themselves may well not grasp. In fact, one could say, with Deidre Lynch, that the modern valorization of psychologically “round” characters comes at the expense of an earlier, “notational” understanding of type.43 This brings me to Crébillon’s novel’s last claim to properly fictional status, omniscience: what makes the characters of Les Égarements feel fictional is precisely a type of character that is not that of the character type. I have shown that the minds of Meilcour, Versac, and Lursay are worthy of omniscient exploration insofar as the characters are something more than discrete species of human fauna; and their minds are explorable in the first place because of the presupposition that though we may indeed have different “characters,” our motivations are in fact rather limited and understandable. Does Crébillon therefore join a number of other authors in whom we can see the first move toward that signature narrative feature of the modern fictional novel? Possibly, but as I’ve pointed out in the case of La Princesse de Clèves, genealogies like these extrapolate widespread change from isolated and potentially anomalous data points. Indeed, when we look closely, we see that Crébillon’s practice of omniscience, constrained as it is by the pseudofactual form of the memoir, is quirky: it looks nothing like the type of consciousness scene used in early third-person works like those of Behn and Fielding; Fielding’s practice, meanwhile, doesn’t look much like that of Behn. And if there is no obvious filiation between these three writers, is it likely that there is one between them and the omniscient narration of thoughts one finds in the last decade of the eighteenth century, in authors as different as Austen, Radcliffe, Goethe, and Scott? Given the present state of research into the history of omniscience, mind-reading, or even third-person forms of narration, this must remain for the moment an open question.44 What does seem fairly certain, however, is that mere existence of Crébillon’s strange first-person omniscience hardly proves that this novel, never mind the novel, has discovered the new world of fiction. One reason we will probably find it difficult to trace a line from the novelists of the first part of the eighteenth century who invoked the example of comedy’s character types to the “modern” novel is simple: sentimentality. Comedy’s moral justification had traditionally sidestepped history and its

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lessons; it could therefore do things that tragedy and epic could not, but the converse was true as well. By definition, a novel based on the comedic critique of character types could not aspire to the ethical and passionate gravitas of the “higher” genres: while we might see ourselves in the ridiculous portraits of the novel and emerge from our experience chastised, we would not feel the characters’ passions or share their dilemmas. Another sort of novel, however, was possible—the sentimental novel, which proposed heroic exemplarity in the place of salutary comic distance, and that gave us to feel (not dissect) the passions of heroes (not merely protagonists). So while a writer like Crébillon proposed replacing a novel of adventure—frivolous romance—with a novel having comedic functions, others were busy thinking of the novel as tragedy: the novel must move us, and to move us, we had to believe in it. As we will see in the following two chapters, this is why Rousseau and Diderot “reinvest” in pseudofactual pretense: they see their works as fulfilling or perfecting the aesthetic mission of tragedy. In this, they are not regressing; Crébillon’s indifference to his protagonists’ literal reality, by the same token, is not progress. All we can say is that the novel in the eighteenth century was thought of in a number of ways; unsurprisingly, that thought made analogies with consecrated genres. (The analogies were not necessarily consistent: Fielding, I’ve noted, freely mixes his comic types and the pathos of romance plotting.) No doubt, Les Égarements du coeur et de l’esprit, which stretches the conventions of the memoir novel to the breaking point, lies at the outer edge of the pseudofactual. But in this case at least, the outer edge is not a cutting edge.

Chapter 4

The Aesthetics of Sentiment (Rousseau)

In 1762, preparing for a new edition of his hugely successful Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), Rousseau wrote to warn his publisher, Marc-Michel Rey, not to make any slip-ups on the title page: “if you want to put revised and corrected, don’t add by the author: you must know very well that I’m not admitting to that role, only to that of the editor.”1 Indeed, how could Rey not have known very well, since Rousseau had published not one but two prefaces for the novel, and in each he explicitly refused to relinquish the title of editor. On the other hand, perhaps Rousseau’s anxiety, which always ran high when it came to the printing of his texts, was justified.2 Neither preface, it must be said, was particularly adamant in its affirmation of truth. To the contrary, the effect of the pseudofactual title page was if anything weakened by Rousseau’s prefatory declarations. For example: “Although I assume here the title only of editor, I myself worked on this book, and I make no mystery of it. Did I write the whole thing, and is the entire correspondence a fiction? Society people, what does it matter to you? It’s certainly a fiction for those like you.” And again: “As far as the truth of the events, I declare that having traveled several times around the area where the two lovers lived, I never once heard people speak of the Baron d’Étange or his daughter, or M. d’Orbe, or Milord Édouard Bomston, or M. de Wolmar.”3 These quotes from the so-called first preface—similar ones can be found in the second—do make concern about the title page something like worries over the proverbial barn door, closed too late.4 No wonder Rey might have been expected to let the pretense slip—slip in the manner, say, of the first edition of Marivaux’s Vie de Marianne (1731), where the title page did not even bother to buttress the spurious editorial claims of the preface. But even more surprising than Rousseau’s simultaneous teasing and

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earnest game-playing were its effects on his contemporary readers. In hindsight, we might naturally take the prefaces’ mixed signals for a snapshot of a transition—archaism giving way to modernity, the emergent pushing aside the vestigial. “Rousseau . . . flirts with authorship but finally stays behind a less than convincing mask as editor,” in the words of one critic.5 And yet, if we are to believe the authoritative account of Robert Darnton, La Nouvelle Héloïse “revolutionize[d] the relation between reader and text” precisely by convincing readers that it must be true: “Many readers of La Nouvelle Héloïse believed and wanted to believe in the authenticity of the letters,” Darnton writes, basing his contention on the archive of fan letters written to the author.6 Thus, the reason Rousseau was adamant about the title page was that he “could not acknowledge the careful craftsmanship that went into [the letters] without spoiling their effect.”7 So instead of marking a stage in the collective realization that “a work could be purely fictional,”8 Rousseau’s novel did the exact opposite. It inaugurated, according to Bernadette Fort, a “new mode of literary consumption” that demanded “total immersion into a book and . . . total mimetic identification with the characters, their story, drama, and feelings.”9 That mode was sentimentality, or sensibilité. Does Julie illustrate a culture’s awakening to a modern understanding of fiction, or does it showcase the intense emotional investment of the sentimental reader—an investment that is pointedly not modern at all, but rather every bit as “exotic” as the Balinese death rites with which Darnton begins his essay?10 One solution to the apparent contradiction would be to attribute the modernity of the work to the farsightedness of the author and charge its archaism to the account of simpleminded readers.11 But no solution is necessary at all if both narratives are inherently flawed, and this is the case I will be making. Certainly, and with uncommon persistence, Rousseau builds the problem of the novel’s literal truth into its reception: the prefaces of Julie do not merely provide an example of pseudofactual ambiguity, they are about that ambiguity; the “editor” sends mixed signals and tells his readers he is sending mixed signals. But mixed signals need not be taken as a preliminary stab at fiction or an anticipation of Coleridgian suspended disbelief. Instead, they make sense in the context of the aesthetic ideas of the time, ideas that Rousseau explored in polemical works such as the Lettre à d’Alembert as well as the novel Julie—the novel, and not only its prefaces. The reactions of Rousseau’s fans make sense in this same aesthetic context: the archive of letters reveals that contemporary readers not only knew full well that Julie was a novel, but also reflected on the nature of their transport. How can a novel produce an emotional effect that is

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qualitatively different from the characters’ own amorous passion? What does it mean to identify with a literary character? How can we use characters to understand our own lives and the world in which we live? These questions, neither exotic nor quaint, are asked by readers attuned to the very problems that Rousseau, in reactivating the tired topos of the discovered manuscript, was trying to raise.12

Contagious Passions By many contemporary accounts, even the author’s own, Rousseau should not have written a novel. “My great embarrassment,” he recounts in the Confessions, “was the shame of so clearly and loudly contradicting myself. After . . . so much biting invective aimed at effeminate books that breathed love and softness, what could be more surprising, more shocking, than to see me suddenly and willingly join the ranks of the authors of the very books I had so severely criticized?” (OC 1: 434–35). The allusion here is to the widely read Lettre à M. d’Alembert . . . sur son article “Genève” . . . et particulièrement sur le projet d’établir un théâtre de comédie en cette ville, which Rousseau published two and a half years before Julie, in July 1758. In the Lettre, Rousseau had denounced both the theater’s emotional appeal to its spectators and the bankruptcy of its moral alibi; a few virtuous maxims crowded into a play’s closing lines, he argued, did nothing to calm or purge the amorous passions that the four previous acts had whipped up. Critics of Julie could hardly be expected to miss the contradiction, and their letters to Rousseau hammered it home: “How could your novel have any more effect than plays composed . . . with this [moral] goal in mind and that you publicly inveighed against on account of their ineffectiveness?” wrote one (CC 8: 205), while another alluded to the weepy tragedy of Voltaire’s that the Lettre had torn apart: “You have already taught us that paintings of love inevitably make more of an impression that the maxims of wisdom . . .; what difference do you see between Héloïse and Zaïre?” (CC 8: 139).13 Complex thinkers are under no obligation to be consistent, of course, but in this case we should probably take notice. Rousseau publicly asks his reader to ponder the relationship between Julie and the Lettre à d’Alembert in the novel’s second preface.14 Several paths to reconciliation may be followed. A brief passage of the Lettre hints that novels, because of their private, domestic nature, might be exempt from the social vices of the theater; the idea,

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however, is largely undeveloped, and like most thinkers before him, Rousseau does not systematically distinguish between the effect of the stage and that of a book.15 A more obvious reading of the contradiction would seem to follow from Rousseau’s allusion to his prior justification of Narcisse (1753). In the preface to this comedy, he had written, “The times are no longer suited to encouraging people to do good, all we can do is distract them from doing evil; they must be occupied with nonsense so as to keep them from behaving badly” (OC 2: 972).16 But the argument seems curiously unable to account for Julie, which not unreasonably appeared to Rousseau’s real-life critics as a machine for producing both emotion and moral improvement. The puzzlement of these critics does not stem from their obtuseness: the Rousseau of the Lettre à d’Alembert and the preface to Narcisse had in fact not yet articulated a theory of aesthetic emotions that would allow for Julie. Or, to rephrase, Julie is the unfinished business of the Lettre à d’Alembert, a prolonged exercise in thinking about the inadequacies of previous accounts of aesthetic effect, including Rousseau’s own.17 The Lettre à d’Alembert is one of a cluster of mid-century writings that attempted to rectify difficulties with long-held ideas regarding the effect of theater and the arts more generally on spectators. This tradition was “aesthetic” in the etymological sense of the term—that is, it aimed to be a science of sensation that would account for the subjective emotional experience of art. It might be prudent, however, to call this thought “proto-aesthetic,” so as to distinguish it from the more familiar brand of aesthetics that toward the end of the eighteenth century took pains to distance itself from the earlier science of sensation. Thus Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics open with the warning that he is using an accepted term improperly; he declares his desire to break with a line of thought that had used “aesthetics” to speak of works of art “with regard to the feelings they were supposed to produce, as, for instance, the feeling of pleasure, admiration, fear, pity, and so on.”18 Proto-aesthetics—which, I should emphasize, is not an early “imperfect” version of Hegelian aesthetics, but actually a completely different entity—normally understood the production of feeling as a type of contagion: represented passions create copies of those passions in the theatrical audience. Although contagion’s prestigious pedigree stretched back to Plato, for early modern thinkers the most important ancient touchstones came from Classical rhetoric. Starting in the Italian Renaissance, passages from Cicero and Quintilian were routinely adduced, along with two lines that Horace addressed to the would-be poet: “If you would have me weep, you must first feel grief yourself.”19 In its purest form,

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proto-aesthetic contagion, which was advanced by both theater’s proponents and its critics, described a complete fusion between poet, character, actor, and spectator.20 The implausibility of such tenets, acknowledged since the Renaissance, did little to upset the contagion model, still very much a mainstay of Enlightenment thought about the theater.21 But rival theories were also circulating by this time. The best known are efforts to explain acting as a conscious craft. In part out of the need to account for the excellence of David Garrick, who amazed audiences by the sheer diversity of roles he could take on, Riccoboni’s L’Art du théâtre (1750) and Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien (c. 1770) reasoned that true transport on the part of an actor would make nightly performances impossible. The Lettre à d’Alembert’s concern with the uncontrollable propagation of passions can appear, next to Diderot, retrograde—as if Rousseau were merely “perpetuating an old confusion.”22 Yet Rousseau’s account of the production of artificial passions is as radically different from the old contagion model as is Diderot’s, for it presents a properly psychological theory of artificially produced emotion. Like catharsis, whose functioning Aristotle appeared to understand as primarily medical, contagion had been conceptually underwritten by the somatic explanations of sympathy that extend back to the Greeks, and that are still present for example in Malebranche’s Recherche de la vérité (1674–75), which speculates that we feel the pain of others literally, in our own bodies.23 Rousseau, by contrast, posits no chain of contagion. Instead, emotional stimulation occurs through an act of imagination by which we “put ourselves in the place” of people who are similar to us (OC 5: 18). This means that the emotions stimulated by the spectacle have already been experienced by the spectator; nothing actually passes from poet to actor to viewer. Rousseau further argues that the spectator will make the imaginative leap only when the emotions are pleasurable. Much more than hostile critics before him, therefore, Rousseau focuses his attack on the stage’s stimulation of amorous passion, reasoning that an ending depicting the ultimate dangers of love will do nothing to calm the spectator’s reanimated passions, since the subject has no interest in renouncing pleasure. Aesthetic emotion thus arises from a psychological act of identification occurring when gratification is promised. And “identification” is, of course, the word, even if Rousseau does not utilize it in the Lettre à d’Alembert. Pierre Force has traced the neologism “identification” in the sense of putting oneself in the place of another to Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité, where it figures in Rousseau’s epochal discussion of pity; Force further specifies

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that the different sense of “identification with a fictional character” is unattested before the mid-nineteenth century.24 This latter claim is, however, incorrect, since identification as a readerly act occurs—perhaps for the first time ever—in a fragment very likely contemporaneous with the Lettre: “The soul has trouble identifying with contemptible men . . . but people like to put themselves in the place of an embattled hero who triumphs thanks to his own courage” (OC 2: 1332).25 Rousseau’s thought on identification is both simple and complex. On the simple side, he does not depart from the basic premise of proto-aesthetic theory: he still imagines spectator emotion as qualitatively equivalent to character emotion, even if there is no contagion between the two.26 The Lettre thus presupposes that our likes and dislikes are set from the outset, grounded in our nature, and not modified by the theater. Yet Rousseau’s thought on identification cannot be reduced to the above. First, identification appears elsewhere in Rousseau’s work as an unambiguous good; it underwrites the faculty of pity, and thus provides the means to refute the Hobbsian claim that all action is motivated by self-interest.27 The Lettre’s association of identification with the satisfaction of narcissistic desire would lead us to conclude that theater is civilized man’s pity, a degraded version of the faculty that is more developed in primitive man. Second, the Lettre itself contains a more supple and problematic account of identification that starts from the fact, empirically observed by Rousseau himself, that over the duration of the spectacle, audience attitudes toward characters do not remain the same. For at a number of places in the Lettre, this acutely perceptive theatergoer suggests that putting oneself in the place of another changes the spectator. The first example comes from the crimes of Phaedra and Medea. Rousseau does not say only that the theater can give us no hatred of these characters that we do not already have; rather, he realizes that the dramas actually attenuate our initial aversion: “I will bet that any man who has advance knowledge of Phaedra or Medea’s crimes despises them more at the beginning of the play than at the end” (OC 5: 21). This perception remains undeveloped until later in the essay, when Rousseau indicts Molière and Dancourt because their knaves end up stimulating a sympathy that clearly violates “the most touching sentiments of nature” (42): “Let us dare to say it straight out. Who among us has enough self-mastery to withstand the performance of such a comedy without being half behind the pranks represented? Who wouldn’t be a little mad if the rogue were discovered, or failed in his plans? Who doesn’t become for an instant a rogue himself through sympathy for him? For is sympathizing with someone anything else but putting oneself in his place?” (43). “Interest” in the aesthetic

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nomenclature of the time most frequently implies, as it does here, sympathy and emotional attachment; but the act of putting oneself in another’s place ends up creating feelings in the spectator that were not previously there.28 Rousseau’s celebrated discussion of Bérénice proceeds along the same lines: the perverse achievement of Racine is to change the viewer’s perception of Titus, who goes from being an object of contempt to an object of compassion and fellow-feeling. The spectator who enters the theater scorning the image left by history of an emperor who could not leave his mistress “ends up feeling sorry for the sensitive man whom he first scorned, [and] sympathizing with the very passion that he had initially felt to be unworthy” (49). So it would appear that the statement that introduces, lexically at least, identification with a fictional character is in fact belied by the empirical observations of the Lettre à d’Alembert: it is not difficult to identify with contemptible men at all; the perversity of the poet lies in his ability to make that identification irresistible. Two things are worth underlining before moving on to consider how Rousseau’s readers actually practice identification. First, as we have seen, proto-aesthetic theory commonly held the production of emotion in the audience to be a chief goal of poetics; with the declining prestige of other ends, notably rhetorical or ethical, eighteenth-century theorists concentrated still more attention on the feelings provoked by the work of art. Thus the fact that Rousseau’s readers felt a powerful emotional bond with Julie is in itself unremarkable; what needs attention is the precise nature of that bond. Second, although the bulk of the Lettre à d’Alembert is beholden to a fairly familiar and tautological schema by which spectators and characters feel the same emotions, the psychology of identification also allows for more elastic possibilities that will be substantially developed in the great novel that Rousseau was working on at the time he composed the Lettre.

Sentimental Identification Rousseau’s oeuvre actually contains one more occurrence of the verb s’identifier in the context of literary characters. It can be found in the Confessions, in a passage on the genesis and composition of Julie: “Besotted with my two charming models [Julie and Claire], I identified with the lover and friend [Saint-Preux] as much as I could; but I made him attractive and young, giving him moreover the same virtues and faults I thought I had” (OC 1: 430). This use of the verb would appear compatible with the unproblematic understanding of

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identification that dominates the Lettre à d’Alembert: reading (or here, writing) is an exercise in self-flattery; narcissistic specularity rules the process, as the feelings of the reader-writer are externalized in a character who reflects his image back to him. Or, as he puts it in another passage of the Confessions, describing his youthful reading of Plutarch, “I would become the character whose life I was reading” (9). Such descriptions rehearse neatly the type of relation between book and readers that we are so often told characterizes the sentimental vogue whose ascendancy is marked by the twin appearance of Julie in 1761 and Diderot’s Éloge de Richardson a year later—“total immersion into a book and . . . total mimetic identification with the characters,” in the words of Fort I have already quoted. It is therefore hardly surprising that scholars conclude—and Darnton and Fort are not alone in doing so—that Julie solicits such identification and assume that contemporary readers obliged.29 What could be clearer? Rousseau invents the concept of identification and then puts it to work, changing the reading world forever—or at least for the duration of the sentimental vogue. There are three problems here, however. The first involves the selfcontradiction to which I have already alluded. Rousseau may describe and name identification in the Lettre à d’Alembert, but he doesn’t like it; when some years later he retrospectively describes the writing of Julie as having its origin in an act of identification, he would seem therefore to be falling back into the very contradiction which his critics had pointed out, and which he had claimed in his prefaces did not exist. This leads us to a second problem. When the Rousseau of the Lettre à d’Alembert critiques identification, nowhere does he pretend that the emotional propagation he describes is a new phenomenon. On the contrary, like predecessors such as Du Bos, he attempts to resolve some of the inherent difficulties of the contagion explanation without questioning the overarching commonplace, existing for centuries, that aesthetic reception is a matter of shared or reproduced emotion. Even if we were to maintain that Rousseau changed his mind about identification between the Lettre and Julie (two works that seem, though, to have been composed side by side), we would be left at best with the conclusion that Rousseau’s novel—due to, say, the proverbially private nature of modern novel reading—does particularly effectively what people had always thought good drama did. What Fort calls a “new mode of literary consumption” would then seem to consist of a further helping of what we already had on our plates. The third problem lies in the very text of Julie, which is difficult to

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reconcile with the reading experience described in the Confessions. In Darnton’s examination of the letters sent to Rousseau on the publication of his novel, the cultural historian casts as an instrument of direct communication the very novel whose self-awareness and even near-diabolical cunning has been probed by numerous literary critics: “Instead of hiding behind the narrative and pulling strings to manipulate the characters in the manner of Voltaire, Rousseau threw himself into his works and expected the reader to do the same.”30 Julie’s abundant footnotes alone, laced with their different shades of irony, should give pause to the reader of this sentence. But perhaps Darnton is only speaking of what Rousseau’s own readers felt—readers who, after all, might not be particularly perceptive. The dossier of some sixty mostly appreciative, sometimes critical letters to Rousseau on the publication of La Nouvelle Héloïse is impressive in its size.31 Precedent exists for other troves of nonprofessional readers’ reactions. The debate around Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678), orchestrated in large part in the fledgling monthly gazette Le Mercure galant, was certainly a watershed; but no one wrote letters to Lafayette herself (the novel was published anonymously), and although readers were very interested in characters’ feelings, they spoke much less of their own transport.32 Next to this fairly distanced and subtle parsing of the novel’s plausibility, the Rousseauian archive does indeed stand out, as it stands out against the more commercial frenzy generated by Richardson’s Pamela, which did not take the form of unsolicited letters of appreciation to the author.33 But what exactly does it mean to say, as Darnton does, that Rousseau’s readers “threw themselves” into the book? Perhaps it is best to start with the letters that indeed appear to give freest flow to sentimental credulity and naïveté; it is here that this readership appears most exotic, “as alien to us as the lust for plunder among the Norsemen,” as Darnton colorfully puts it.34 The linchpin of the case for the gullibility of Rousseau’s readers is a letter by the otherwise unknown Madame du Verger. A year after the publication of La Nouvelle Héloïse she puts the following question to Rousseau: Did this woman live? Truth is dear to you. Speak forthrightly. Many people who have read your book, and with whom I have spoken, assure me that it is just a game you are playing, but I cannot believe that. Could a false book [une lecture fausse] ever give rise to a sensation such as I felt while reading it? Again, Sir, did Julie exist? Does Saint-Preux still exist? What country on earth does he inhabit?

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Claire, that tender Claire, did she follow her other half? M. de Wolmar, milord Édouard—are all those characters only imaginary, as people want to make me believe? What world is this in which we live, where virtue is but an idea? Fortunate mortal, perhaps you alone know virtue and practice it. (CC 10: 47) Darnton adduces this letter as proof that readers such as Madame du Verger manifested “an invincible desire to know whether Rousseau’s characters were real.”35 Even assuming what he calls the “ring of authenticity” present in Du Verger’s searching questions, the letter would seem to prove, on the contrary, that the credulous reader was the exception, since none of Du Verger’s interlocutors thinks as she does. But even this is granting too much, since the “ring” is that of the rhetorical question. Du Verger is making an argument here, one that goes something like this: “These characters don’t exist? Well, if that is so, then our world would be bereft of virtue were it not for the fact that the author of genius can imagine it.” The point of her asking if Julie exists is that the answer be negative; virtue then becomes the product of art, not nature. Far from believing in the characters’ reality, Du Verger relies on their nonexistence in order to exalt Rousseau himself.36 The passage from Du Verger’s letter contains one additional remark that may appear credulous—her query as to how she could have possibly felt as she did if the characters were not real. But Du Verger is in good company, for her perplexity is that of the many aestheticians of her century who asked how the spectator or reader can take real emotion from a representation she knows to be false. Du Bos asked this question, as did Burke and Diderot—a question that, as we’ll see in Chapter 6, underwrites the contemporaneous birth of the gothic horror story in Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764). How, indeed, can we feel if we don’t believe? Rather than demonstrate picturesque naïveté, therefore, Du Verger raises an issue of general import for proto-aesthetic theory. For centuries, it had been widely assumed that poetic creations needed some sort of a sanction in history or tradition; “invention” in the meaning of the time was never an ex nihilo creation, but instead referred to the original manner in which an author treated subjects whose prior existence was attested. And such dependence on history or tradition was not simply a matter of slavish adherence to rules. It followed from the contagion model of emotional effect that characters who had no real existence could not move the reader: “Indeed,” write Georges and Madeleine de Scudéry in their preface to the novel Ibrahim (1641–44), “how can I be touched by the misfortunes of the Queen

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of Guindaye, or of the King of Astrobatia, since I know that their kingdoms are nowhere on the universal map, or more precisely, in the realm of things [en l’être des choses]?”37 That is to say, the character whose emotion was the first link in the chain of contagion needed to be historically attested. Unsurprisingly, then, Rousseau’s readers operate more or less according to this assumption—to wit, that their own emotion must be predicated on the historical preexistence of Julie’s. But they modify this in an important way. The inference they draw is not that the letters are real, nor even that Rousseau stumbled upon their story and wrote it up with his inimitable talent. They conclude, rather, that La Nouvelle Héloïse must be inspired by Rousseau’s own experience. Daniel Roguin, a good friend of Rousseau’s, puts it this way: “Even the most sensible women are persuaded that it is [Saint-Preux’s] true story, and not a novel, that you have written, reasoning that one could never speak so well of love without feeling it” (CC 8: 181).38 Strictly speaking, the search for autobiographical keys to novelistic plots was not new; we have much earlier examples.39 Rousseau’s readers nonetheless refine the idea by insisting on the artist’s lived passion as a basis for his art. The difference with respect to contagion theory is evident. The poet does not somehow channel a preexisting character’s emotions, he uses his own life experience to draw an affecting portrait of passion. Aesthetically moving passions—and moral efficaciousness as well—have their origin in the sensitive (and virtuous) writer. So the distinction of La Nouvelle Héloïse was to rewrite completely the source and process of an emotional stimulation that had long been assumed to be one of the chief goals of the poet. The avalanche of letters to a person readers knew very well was the author then makes perfect sense. Rousseau is not merely one link in an emotional chain, but the very fountainhead of everything the reader is given to feel: “You, rare and fortunate man, . . . have all the feelings you have depicted,” sums up another admirer (293).40 The obsession with the person of Rousseau, which Darnton describes wonderfully and accurately, may indeed mark some kind of a revolution. And no doubt such a conception of writing can and should be viewed with skepticism. Nonetheless, it is crucial to see that what sets Rousseau’s readers apart is neither emotional transport itself, nor total readerly absorption in the characters, nor credulous belief in their reality. For what is special about Julie is precisely that the novel enables a sort of identification that banishes the specter of Don Quixote’s folly. Rousseau’s critics argued that the reader of Julie would share the passion uniting the illicit lovers. Thus Pierre de la Roche condemns the novel using the Lettre à d’Alembert’s very vocabulary of place-switching:

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the danger of painting the passion that caused Julie to sleep with her lover lies in the fact that “whatever woman or girl who reads this will be unable to keep her imagination from placing herself in the same situation. . . . So if she falls, she will fall not like Julie, but with Julie” (CC 10: 124). And another would-be censor writes that “most women would love to spend their whole life in Julie’s study [cabinet], but none would want to die as she does” (CC 8: 317). Such conclusions follow easily not only from the mechanism of identification described in the Lettre à d’Alembert, but also from the long history of thought about contagion, to which Cervantes’s novel had been a signal contribution. And yet a typical example of readerly identification is rather the following. The Marquise de Polignac writes to a friend: “I hardly dare tell you what effect [the sixth volume] had on me. No, the time for tears had passed; a sharp pain seized a hold of me, my heart was constricted, the dying Julie was no longer a stranger, I thought myself her sister, her friend, her Claire” (CC 8: 56). Polignac’s powerful identification is with Claire, or even more broadly, with “all those who were gathered round that virtuous woman in her last moments.” The reader’s emotions are routed through those of an observer, not through the amorous passion of the protagonists. Hence the reviewer of Le Journal des savants, who describes Rousseau’s gift for being able to “place the reader in the midst of the scene,” asks, “What reader does not lose [Julie] as he would lose something of his own, and does not share the despair of Claire on the death of her friend with all the mourners of Clarens?” (351). And this projection functions even if there are no characters present with whom to identify. Such is the experience of Roguin, who describes thus his reaction to Saint-Preux’s close brush with suicide: “When I saw you at the edge of that high cliff I almost flew to your rescue to try to hold you back” (CC 8: 181; since Roguin is writing to Rousseau, the assumed identity between author and protagonist is clear). Guillaume Dubois imagines himself consoling characters: “Julie, why let yourself think such bitter thoughts!” (CC 9: 37). Somewhat in the manner of Diderot’s famous 1767 salon entry on Joseph Vernet, which imagines a viewer projected into the painted landscape, Rousseau’s readers have been absorbed into the work. As in the Diderot text, however, they remain in the position of the observer, and so the act of being drawn into La Nouvelle Héloïse resembles only superficially the long-satirized quixotic absorption into romance. Cervantes and his many emulators described readers who thought they were heroes, whose imaginations were infected with heroic passions; this madness was always the limit case under contagion theory. Rousseau, by contrast, causes readers to think they are compassionate observers of

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other people’s passions; they throw themselves into the book, but as an audience, not as actors. La Nouvelle Héloïse has by all accounts a huge emotional effect, but it is seldom that of being in love.41 Even in those cases in which appreciative readers describe identification with the book’s protagonists, it is not exactly the identification described by the Lettre à d’Alembert. Correspondents insist rather on Rousseau’s ability to describe a preexisting reality: “I found in my heart every portrait that you paint” is, in its simplest form, the cry of his readers (CC 8: 293). In modern parlance: You have described my experience, what I have seen, what I have felt. “I’ve only read three volumes, and I find myself in a thousand places in your novel,” writes an anonymous reader; “So many of its episodes could be the history of my own life” (296). A woman writes to her husband that as she was reading, “I always saw your face in place of the hero’s, and finding all Julie’s feelings in my heart, it was as if I were writing you as I read these letters; she says so many things that I had already thought and felt before, but that I didn’t know how to put into words” (72). And a man writes to say that he has his own “Julie,” who is at this very moment causing him the heartache that Rousseau in his novel only recalled retrospectively: “Let me tell you how much the present state of my soul made the sympathy that your beautiful book inspires close and personal. How I love mixing with the tears of your virtuous characters the tears provoked by the worthy object who reigns over my heart. . . . There is not a single portrait, or feeling, or thought, or principle that does not relate to my painful situation” (131). The power of La Nouvelle Héloïse derives from its uncanny likeness to the inner world of its readers. Identification does not lie in becoming what you are not—as in the old model of emotional transport— but in recognizing what you already are. The irony with respect to widespread modern characterizations of the sentimental reader, of which Darnton’s is but one, is that we associate that reader with the very type of identification that Julie was sidestepping. Rousseau’s readers are not overwhelmed by the passion of his young lovers; his novel, unlike previous drama, does not simply make the reader feel a spectrum of human passions by proxy. Instead, the reader is moved to discover that someone else can describe what he or she already feels. Describe, but also analyze, in a manner that erects a firm barrier between illicit passion and the emotions of the reader. Many correspondents echo Rousseau’s sentiment that the novel gets better as it goes on, that Julie married is far more attractive than the young adulteress, that the long commentaries are themselves more delicious than sobering, and that tears flow most freely toward the end. Julie’s “interest”—that is, its contagious identificatory pull—progressively

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decreases, and readers register their admiration for the art with which the author has accomplished his sleight of hand. “I would hope only to demonstrate to you,” writes Guillaume Dubois to an imaginary critic, “that this weakening of interest is somehow part of the work’s perfection. Reading, it seems to me that I passed in stages from the age of 25 to the age of 50. The impetuosity of youth has given way to sweet contemplation and delectation” (CC 9: 42). So this new pleasure, which is not tributary to passion as previously conceived by the contagion paradigm, enables Rousseau to do what he had, in the Lettre à d’Alembert, held to be an impossibility: he has made a virtuous character appealing.42 Or, in the words of Charlotte Bourette, Rousseau has “discovered the art of making the strictest virtue loveable” (CC 8: 148). Deciphering the workings of this new art becomes an obsession for many of Rousseau’s supporters: perhaps counterintuitively, the emotional effect of the book is to make readers think about the writer’s own talent. Indeed, the correspondence contains some powerful articulations of the ways in which tears are a goad to the reader’s own self-reflexivity, to the consciousness of an art of emotion and of the specific emotions of art. The abbé Cahagne, thanking Rousseau for the moral improvement the book wrought in him, cannot separate the moral dimension from the “enchantment” he derived “as a reader”—the conscious pleasure resulting from a book “[that] was the occasion for a thousand new ideas about the art of writing, of exciting [intéresser], of pleasing, of moving—as an author, if ever I wanted to be one” (CC 8: 193– 94). “A thousand new ideas”: indeed, the letters reveal the correspondents to be much more analytical than commonplaces about the sentimental reader would lead us to believe. An unknown woman from Rouen, in praising the novel to her lover, foresees that he will assume that she is only carried away by the first flush of enthusiasm. No, she corrects: I read it with the utmost pleasure and tranquility, and I suppose that the reason I cannot stop going on about the subject is that, having not spoken to anyone about the effect it has had on me nor communicated my ideas, the latter have come bursting out. . . . I never would have thought I could talk so long about this book; the thing is that it has precipitated a fermentation in my thoughts that I had never experienced with such force. (8: 259–60) More than testimony of tearful pleasure, readers write Rousseau and one another with their ideas—ideas on how it has its moral effect, ideas on why

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the author endowed characters with this or that trait, ideas on the ways in which its six parts function together. (The abbé Cahagne even patiently records his changing reactions to each of the six books, from indifference to the first to unspeakable admiration for the last [CC 8: 185–93].) And none of these reactions should surprise us: from beginning to end, Julie parses the many relations possible between spectator and spectacle, and forces readers to think about their emotional involvement in the reading process.

The Aesthetics of Renunciation That La Nouvelle Héloïse is explicitly concerned with identification should be clear enough from its heroine’s fall: Julie d’Étange loses her virginity because she was what proto-aesthetic theory would—normally—consider a good spectator. Watching Saint-Preux’s combat with his own desire is too much for her: “Too long did I dare contemplate this dangerous spectacle. I could feel his transports upsetting me [Je me sentais troubler de ses transports], his sighs weighed on my heart; I shared his torments when I thought I was commiserating with them. I saw him convulsively agitated, ready to faint before me. Love alone might have spared me; oh my cousin, it is pity that was my undoing” (OC 2: 96). Julie might resist love alone—her own feelings—but not the feelings of another, of a Saint-Preux whose transports have just been described in terms strikingly similar to those often used to describe a good actor’s contagious performance. These transports, which Julie feels through the act of identification called pity, overpower her; she thought she was offering distanced commiseration [plaindre ses tourments] while in fact she was party to a contagious propagation [les partager]. As I have mentioned, identificatory pity performs elsewhere in Rousseau’s writings the crucial work of proving that man does not act only out of self-interest; here, in spite of the fact that we are not literally at the theater, we have something that closely resembles the negative identification condemned in the Lettre à d’Alembert. This bad pity collapses the distinction between observer and observed, spectator and spectacle. Small wonder Rousseau’s readers do not describe sharing the feelings of the novel’s young lovers. La Nouvelle Héloïse is not simply one more tale of an illicit passion that must—alas!—be overcome. Rather, it elaborately problematizes the effect of passion on observers. “Spectacles,” alternately dangerous or touching, are mentioned frequently in Rousseau’s novel; tableaux, images, and acts of watching abound, and up

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until the very end of Julie the reader is presented with proliferating models, good and bad, of affective involvement. It is therefore not nearly enough to cleave to the idea that Rousseau sought to transmit a moral message by first enticing the reader with the burning young love of the novel’s first half. This we might call the “gilded pill” reading. The folly of such an enterprise would seem to have been predicted by the Lettre à d’Alembert’s skepticism regarding the efficacy of moral endings; it was, at any rate, denounced by hostile parties who wrote Rousseau to say that people would not bother to read on for the “cure” once they had vicariously tasted the initial passion.43 Most readers moreover dissented vigorously from this view, testifying to their impression that the book actually became more affecting as it went on. Yet the gilded pill assumption survives, as when Anne Vila, using the metaphor, states that “the uncontrolled sensibility of parts 1–3 is more dangerous but also more aesthetically engaging” than the sermon that is Julie’s “off-putting second half.”44 If we hope to understand contemporaneous reactions, however, it must be pointed out that the novel’s more or less bipartite structure does not oppose aesthetically seductive passion and unaesthetic moralism. Instead, it proposes models of aesthetic engagement that will substitute for the type of emotional contagion that both caused Julie’s downfall and underwrote proto-aesthetic theory up until the Lettre à d’Alembert. One particular letter in Julie’s “off-putting second half ” has been a source of fairly constant enthusiasm; it is no coincidence that it thematizes not the sharing of passion, but the aesthetic pleasure derived from the renunciation of that possibility. The last letter of the novel’s fourth part recounts the outing on Lake Geneva during which Saint-Preux and the now-married Julie de Wolmar visit Meillerie, where a lovelorn Saint-Preux had stayed some ten years earlier. Part 4 of La Nouvelle Héloïse begins with Saint-Preux’s return after an absence of six years spent abroad in an attempt to overcome his despair at the loss of Julie to Wolmar. Julie admits to her husband her previous affair with Saint-Preux; Wolmar opens his home to the ex-lover. Saint-Preux, entranced by the spectacle of virtue offered by the Wolmar household, seems to have mastered his feelings for Julie; to test this, the all-seeing Wolmar arranges to leave the former couple alone for a period. It is during this time that Madame de Wolmar and Saint-Preux set out on Lake Geneva hoping to fish and picnic. They do indeed fish (Julie makes him throw their catch back), but a strong wind kicks up; they are able to make it to the village of Meillerie, above which lies the fertile mountainous spot where Saint-Preux had long ago bided his time during one of their imposed separations. Waiting for

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calmer weather, the two make the climb. Once there, he shows Julie the lines of Petrarch and Tasso he had engraved on the rocks, and the stone on which he had written the impassioned letter that paved the way for the consummation of their love. With sadness, Julie asks him to lead her back to the boat; on the trip home, in silence, a despairing Saint-Preux contemplates the huge distance separating the present from the past, and for a split second imagines himself drowning them both. The temptation is dispelled, and a sweet feeling of acceptance comes over him. Like so much of La Nouvelle Héloïse, this letter reads like an inventory of the different sorts of pleasure that grow up around the one pleasure that is foreclosed—amorous transport. Two oblique allusions are made to the Lucretian paradox regarding the pleasure taken in the spectacle of someone else’s danger: first, when Julie orders that the morning’s catch be thrown back (“Let us enjoy the pleasure that [these suffering animals] will take from their escape from peril,” she enjoins [OC 2: 515]); then again when during the storm Saint-Preux imaginatively conjures the touching spectacle of Julie’s drowning (“From time to time I thought I saw the boat sinking to the bottom, this touching beauty struggling in the waves, and the paleness of death tarnishing the roses of her cheeks” [517]).45 And as if illustrating the roughly contemporaneous distinction by Burke and Kant between the beautiful and the sublime, the letter contains brief meditations on the pleasure derived from spectacles both peaceful and terrifying—respectively, the cultivated land of Vaud as viewed from the boat, and the horrible but awesome tableau of the mountains above Meillerie.46 Even in the text’s smallest details, it would seem, Rousseau returns indefatigably to the problem of aesthetic response. But the letter contains one particular form of aesthetic response that goes to the heart of Rousseau’s novel and the reaction of his readers: the pleasure of renunciation. The mountainous retreat, we are told, was one in which Saint-Preux, though separated from Julie, had overcome distance: “Here is the abode where your dear image made for the happiness [of the most faithful lover in the world],” he declares to Julie, who may not—Saint-Preux can hardly believe this—be receptive to the charged atmosphere: “Surely you feel some secret emotion at the sight of a place that is so full of you?” (OC 2: 519). Right away, we have a gulf between two modes of emotional propagation. The first, lived in the past, was metonymically fusional: the image of an absent Julie effectively took her place, writing effaced distance, the poets of the past echoed the feelings of the young lover. The second, experienced in the present, is more like a propagation that fails to occur: here they are, in this same

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place, together, and yet Julie is now farther from Saint-Preux than when she was absent; she is not overcome by the spectacle of passions past, and asks to leave the spot. “Once and for all I left this sad hovel of a place as I would have left Julie herself,” Saint-Preux concludes, playing on the elusive name that seemingly designates two different entities—the “real” Julie d’Étange and this present usurper, Julie de Wolmar (520). On the boat ride home, Saint-Preux meditates on his aborted idyll: “Everything came back to me, so as to increase my present misery” (OC 2: 520). Yet what he calls his “present misery” is not any indifference to him on the part of Julie: the contrast is not between a Julie who loved him and one who no longer does. He has taken note of her suppressed sighs, her tender looks, her “trembling voice” (519), and this is what he cannot bear—the paradox of having past feeling present and yet held at a distance. “Alas! [those happy times] will return no more; and we’re alive, and we’re together, and our hearts are still united!” (521). Saint-Preux’s inner cry performs just this paradox through its reiterated et, which here marks both conjunction and disjunction—that is, the forced rapprochement of two states that do not correspond. The thought crosses his mind that it would be better were she dead, a solution that would suppress the unbearable paradox, and presumably allow him to occupy the comfortable position of the lover faithful beyond the tomb. The temptation of a double suicide offers something similar: taking up this time the role of the star-crossed lovers, they would succumb once more and forever to their mutual passion. Yet little by little Saint-Preux leaves behind these well-worn scenarios, and in a torrent of tears is taken over by a different, tender feeling, l’attendrissement—“and this state, compared to the one I was emerging from, was not without its pleasures” (521). A glance at Julie’s own soggy handkerchief confirms that her emotion has been as intense as his. The letter comes to an end with Saint-Preux hoping that this “crisis . . . will make me completely myself again [me rendra tout à fait à moi]” (521)—that is, put him on the road to self-mastery. Attendrissement, not readily translatable, may well be for aesthetic reasons the privileged emotion of Julie. Anne Vincent-Buffault has observed that this passage does not quite give us the bonding we expect from the sentimental text; Saint-Preux and Julie both cry, but they do so separately.47 This is certainly not always the case in the novel; later, we are told that the “spectacle” offered by the day-to-day life at Clarens “seemed to be laid before us just to prolong our attendrissement” (OC 2: 560), with the “our” underlining communal, shared sentiment. What we can say about the tears of attendrissement

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is that they are not participatory; attendrissement is an emotion proper to the sympathetic observer, the emotion you share when you cannot share your emotions, as it were. Significantly, the word is present in Rousseau’s own account of his composition of the letter on the return to Meillerie: “Reading these two letters, whoever does not feel his heart soften and melt in the attendrissement that dictated them to me must shut the book; such a man is not suited to sit in judgment over matters of feeling” (OC 1: 438; Rousseau is referring to an additional letter as well). In circulating attendrissement between author and character and reader, Rousseau leaves the basic premise of protoaesthetics—shared emotion—in place. Attendrissement’s specificity lies in the fact that it is the emotion of spectatorship. It is like pity, only it does not seem to hold the risks of over-identification we saw in the example of Julie’s fall; it allows for a tempered form of identification, by which one puts oneself in the place of someone who is already an observer. And as is clear in the boat on Lake Geneva, when Saint-Preux and Julie both cry over their own lives, the aesthetics of renunciation manages to transform everyone into a spectator of the self as much as of others: “People don’t know . . . how sweet it is to commiserate with [s’attendrir sur] one’s own misfortunes and those of others,” declares Julie toward the end of her agony (OC 2: 725). The thematizing of renunciation’s pleasures, I would suggest, must count for something in readers’ acceptance of the book’s second half not as bitter medicine but as the source of a heretofore unknown type of pleasure. Even a conventionally “edifying” interpretation of the La Nouvelle Héloïse would have to acknowledge the extent to which the fifth and sixth parts insistently map a vocabulary of pleasure and transport—jouissance, délire, extase—onto selfimposed privation, leading to the celebrated oxymorons “the voluptuousness of the wise man” and “epicurism of reason” (OC 2: 662). This alone implies something other than a gilded pill, since every effort has been made to make virtue itself a pleasurable spectacle.48 Saint-Preux is far from the only character to subscribe to the hope that he is headed for the peaceful contemplation of his own renunciation, the spectacle of his virtue. Claire articulates most clearly what Paul de Man has called “the aesthetic contemplation of [a soul] made ‘beautiful’ by the sacrifice of the passion that created it.”49 “One takes pleasure, as it were, in self-imposed deprivations, on account of our consciousness of how much they cost us and the motives that are behind them,” reads the inspirational letter she had sent Saint-Preux before his six-year absence (320). Saint-Preux’s hope of soon re-becoming “completely himself,” or Julie’s urging that passion be “purified” [épur(ée)] rather than repressed or “stifled”

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[étouff(ée)] (664), would seem to push in this same direction, toward the pleasurable profit to be made from exchanging passion for virtue. Ultimately, however, such potentially edifying sentiments are swept away: as de Man has remarked, the hoped-for contemplation of successful sacrifice never really occurs,50 and the end of the book brings us right back to where Saint-Preux was in the boat on Lake Geneva—to the painful contemplation of feelings that are still alive yet unacted upon. Julie, in her devastating deathbed note, admits that her purification was just a repression after all—“though I tried to stifle the first feeling that made me feel truly alive, it became concentrated in my heart” (OC 2: 741)—and Claire, too, in the novel’s last letter, both concedes to Saint-Preux that she loves him and declares her intention never to act on her desire. There may be pleasure in virtue, but the reader of La Nouvelle Héloïse is left with the more disturbing spectacle of characters who cannot quite renounce the passions they keep in check. The result is a situation in which the protagonists remain until the very end tempted by participatory emotions; theirs is a long struggle, never definitively won, against the “bad” identification that caused Julie’s downfall. Rousseau’s “good” identification, as I have said, is routed through the observer: places and emotions can be exchanged, provided that the boundary separating spectator from actor is respected. The difficulty, of course, is that these two roles exist in the same person—signally, the eponymous heroine is both Julie d’Étange and Julie de Wolmar—and that Rousseau’s characters are constantly solicited by the desire to become actors again. Whence the multiplication, as the book draws to a close, of examples of “bad” spectatorial involvement—of characters like Claire who are pushed to the brink of “derangement” [égarement] and “madness” [folie] by the wrenching spectacle of Julie’s death (739–40).51 Even as La Nouvelle Héloïse makes available to its readers a model of involvement that avoids the trap of quixotism, it stages until the very end the temptation onlookers continually undergo. The transmutation of madness into attendrissement and tears always occurs—but just barely. No question, the readers of La Nouvelle Héloïse cried profusely—Roguin so much that he apparently cured himself of a head cold (CC 8: 181). No question, either, that crying as a reaction to literature and art more generally has become, through a long historical process, unfashionable and antiaesthetic.52 But tears do not make of Rousseau’s readers savages or idolaters, in thrall to a mystified conception of representation. On the contrary, their involvement was quite complex—every bit as complex as the involvement that the novel’s

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characters modeled for them. They speak of the extreme pleasure that Julie has given them; they attest to its strong moral effect on them personally; they describe the way the reader is projected into the narrative and conversely, the way the characters seem to quit the book and become fixtures of the everyday world; they stress and try to understand their impression that the novel’s six parts operate differently; they address the question of whether or not the author is speaking directly in the long chapters devoted to descriptions of Paris or the proper administration of a household; they wonder about how much of what Rousseau describes comes from his own life, and postulate that for him to speak so well about virtue he himself must be virtuous. And, on occasion, they even raise the question of whether or not this correspondence is authentic. How could they not, since Rousseau, neither contenting himself with customary pseudofactual irony nor flatly asserting the letters as true, made the novel’s truth into, precisely, a question? That question, however, had nothing to do with empirical fact and everything to do with aesthetics—with art as poesis, or making. The problem, for the critical “N” featured in the dialogue that constitutes the second preface, is that if the author avows these letters as a poetic invention, then they can only be judged harshly: the plot lacks surprises, the style is repetitive and grandiloquent, and, most important, the characters’ idiosyncratic behavior keeps them from representing Man. “N” reveals that he does indeed want to like the book, but that he can only do so if “R”—presumably Rousseau—assures him the letters are real: this alone will moot the rules of art. “Without a doubt, if all this is just made up [n’est que fiction], then you’ve written a bad book; but tell me that these two women have really existed, and I will reread this collection every year until my dying day” (OC 2: 29). Yes, “N” asks if the letters are real, but he is not driven by referential curiosity. “N” merely wants an excuse to throw out commonplaces about art as the perfection of nature.53 “If I tell you these letters are made up you will reject them because novels are not supposed to be written like this. If I say they are real, I will be lying and I detest lies. So I will just call myself the Editor while volunteering the information that no one around Lake Geneva has ever heard of these people. Figure it out yourselves.” Such is, in a nutshell, the argument of the second preface. And readers did figure it out, responding not to the siren call of literal reality but to a novel that produced a dramatically new reading experience by breaking all the rules of novel-writing. La Nouvelle Héloïse gave them not eloquent heroes to imitate, but the “truly new spectacle” (OC 2: 17) of people whose emotion tumbles forth in language that urban elites are right to find

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ridiculous; of people who are wrong about everything, even the ideal of virtue they ceaselessly invoke; of people who endear themselves to us—se font aimer (16)—on account of the good intentions that we glimpse beneath a decade’s worth of their very imperfect actions. “My young friends are loveable,” says “R,” “but to love them at thirty you have to have known them at twenty”(18). To love them is not to feel their contagious passions, but to come to know them over time. “Their letters do not enthrall us [nous intéressent] all at once, but little by little they draw us close [nous attachent]” (18). It would be trivial to complain that the reactions of Rousseau’s readers were more complicated than Darnton’s influential analysis perceives: analyses are always, by definition, simpler than their object. The serious problem lies in the fact that situating credulity or transparency or immediacy at the heart of Julie’s success turns the novel into its opposite. “It is a fact verified daily in college literature courses that rhetorical modes lose their effectiveness,” writes Arthur Goldhammer, offering Julie as proof that “Words that once stirred the soul or brought tears to the eyes [now] elicit only snickers.”54 Tastes do change, of course, but in this case snickers may be less wide of the mark than the “total mimetic identification” that critics have discerned in Rousseau’s contemporaries. The novel’s very point was to install a sympathetic distance between us and its protagonists’ “delirium” (OC 2: 16), a type of extravagance whose risibility “R” underlined in the second preface. Souls were stirred, and tears fell, but only because Julie provided a template for a type of aesthetic response that was emphatically not a quixotic loss of self. The text engineered instead a more supple identification, one that presupposed various sorts of relations to characters who were not heroes but rather onlookers or spectators of a passion that could not be lived, whose actual experience was foreclosed. And in this, those characters were just like the reader. Rousseau’s brand of aesthetic distance allows readers to get very close to the action without following Don Quixote over the cliff of madness and falling in.55 Rather than give us distance with respect to emotions, Rousseau gives us emotions that have distance built into them. How revolutionary was all this? Julie was not exactly a bolt out of the blue, since it merely extends at least a century’s worth of attention to tears as the paragon of aesthetic response. Over this time, words such as attendrissement and sympathie see an exponential rise, while others, like pathétique, are invented; all mark an evolution of the vocabulary of Aristotelian catharsis, centered on pity and compassion.56 But La Nouvelle Héloïse provided a searching exploration of a spectrum of identificatory possibilities—ranging from the fusional sharing of passion experienced

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by the young couple to the cool love of Wolmar—the combined effect of which was to produce a reading experience that to all accounts was unprecedented. Looking downstream, it is worth underlining that we do not find in Rousseau—though this is perhaps obvious—a primitive version of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt. Nor is his aesthetics of renunciation a good anticipation of dispassionate, disinterested, or critical modes of appreciation, for it remains grounded in, as Hegel put it, “the feelings [art was] supposed to produce.” But there may be an alternate history of aesthetics that is not forced to retell the story of the rise of disinterested, decorporealized, spiritual contemplation. In the end, the kind of feeling-at-a-remove cultivated by La Nouvelle Héloïse may not be so different, for example, from the “emotion recollected in tranquility” that Wordsworth uses to mark his distance from a more participatory “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation.”57 Such a history, to which Rousseau and Wordsworth would both have something to offer, might stress writers’ continual theorization (and practice) of forms of mitigated or mediated emotional investment—forms that overcome some of the absurdities of proto-aesthetic theory and its tautological model of affect without decoupling the experience of literature from the experience of life. Notwithstanding Rousseau’s place within such currents of thought, I do not think Julie makes a convincing ancestor of modern fictionality. At the outset of this chapter I quoted from the novel’s first preface: “this is certainly a fiction for you,” Rousseau writes, slamming his sophisticate readers with the integrity of his provincial characters (OC 2: 5). And, in a very different sense of the word, it is also fiction for us. Since readers in 1761 were perfectly well equipped to process Rousseau’s equivocations and knew that the novel came from his pen, why not take those equivocations and that knowledge as proof that a culture was feeling its way toward the recognition of fiction as a positive entity, something neither true nor false but more powerful on account of that very ambiguity?58 It would be absurd to say that La Nouvelle Héloïse, with some 72 editions in under 40 years, was without influence: we can trace its thematic inheritance, obviously, or maybe the way later sentimental novels such as Cottin’s Claire d’Albe (1799) similarly encourage readers to view the protagonist’s outpourings with as much skepticism as sympathy.59 Yet the question of whether La Nouvelle Héloïse is a step on the road to fiction is of another order entirely. The fact is that neither Rousseau nor his readers were the least bit unusual for knowing that novels weren’t literally true. Still, literal truth grounded their speculation, speculation that, like everyone else’s, was inseparable from commonplaces regarding both poetic composition (the

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verisimilar was superior to the true, but only because it appeared truer than actual truth) and the experience of art (widely if diversely held to be an ersatz form of real experience). Such commonplaces are present in the dossier of La Nouvelle Héloïse not as something vestigial, as if a modern understanding of fiction were wriggling free from a half-sloughed off skin. They are instead the very stuff of a work that devises new models for readers’ emotional investment without ever once trying to theorize a kind of pleasure proper to art or a kind of credence proper to literature. Julie has become fiction for us, undoubtedly. And this simply tells us what we are, not what it was.

Chapter 5

The Demon of Reality (Diderot)

In 1857—the annus mirabilis of realism that saw the appearance of Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du mal—novelist and critic Champfleury pressed Diderot into service as a precursor of Balzac, Sue, and Hugo, one of a handful of writers who, possessed by a benevolent “demon of Reality,” refused tribute to the elevated style that dominated poetic creation at the time.1 Champfleury’s genealogy of realism pointed all the way back to Homer, who “observed and described with precision the mores of his time,” and it is hard not to think of the later syntheses of Erich Auerbach or M. M. Bakhtin as the scholarly culmination of this line of thought. Indeed, Mimesis and the essays in The Dialogic Imagination, more than studies of realism, might well be considered realist studies—of a part, that is, with a movement that had from its very beginnings sought to identify possible forerunners in works composed in vastly different poetic contexts. If the moment of this sweepingly teleological brand of literary history has long since past, Champfleury’s attention to Diderot is hardly baseless nonetheless: even in an age of pseudofactual pretense, the philosophe’s concern with making his narratives seem real stands out. The memoir novel La Religieuse was originally conceived as a part of a hoax on an altruistic but gullible soul, and Diderot prided himself on the utter simplicity of its style. Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne ends with a meditation that on the face of things provides a pretty fair approximation of Roland Barthes’s “reality effect”: the gratuitous yet appropriate detail makes readers cry out, “My word, this is real; such things can’t be invented.”2 Indeed, aside from the early (and reportedly disowned) Les Bijoux indiscrets (1748), all the novels and “tales” Diderot worked and reworked from the 1760s until his death in 1784—La Religieuse, Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne, Ceci n’est pas un conte, Madame de la Carlière, and even

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the notoriously playful Jacques le fataliste—exhibit a concern with their own truth that clashes with the common assumption that pseudofactual assertions underwent a long, slow decline over the course of the century. Precisely at the moment in which one would expect the least interest in the literalness of literature, Diderot intervenes by infusing the old pseudofactual posture with new techniques for convincing readers that they held the truth in their hands. How, then, to explain Diderot’s demon? Subscribing to Champfleury’s lineage does not seem like an option: Diderot’s plots, at bottom sentimental, pay little attention to what we associate with realism proper—history, milieu, social organization and advancement, and so on.3 It is thus not surprising that most modern scholars have taken a different, even opposite tack from Champfleury. What if, instead of being proto-realist, Diderot’s interest in truth were ultimately subversive of the transparency of realist signs? According to this popular interpretation, Diderot, initially a believer in art as illusion, underwent a process of maturation. La Religieuse stands as the pivot between an earlier enthusiasm for sentimental absorption (evident in the 1762 Éloge de Richardson, in which Diderot describes reading as a wholesale passage into the world of the book) and a later desire, fully realized in Jacques le fataliste, to “raise literature itself to a new level of skeptical self-awareness.”4 Diderot’s devilish tales teach us, then, that literature is not real. Yet this common view is beset with as many problems as Champfleury’s— problems more serious than the sheer banality of the putative lesson. The view’s harmony with late twentieth-century received wisdom about critical distance, indeterminacy, and the intransitivity of writing is suspicious, as is its postulation of supposedly more primitive and popular “mimetic” forms of reading deflated by Diderot’s genius. Furthermore, the maturation hypothesis does not fit well with even the brute biographical facts. We know, for instance, that the composition of Jacques le fataliste, dating back at least to 1771, is essentially coterminous with the very tales that make such a concerted use of reality effects; and that Diderot puts his final loving touches on La Religieuse and publishes it in the manuscript newsletter La Correspondance littéraire after and not before the appearance there of Jacques le fataliste, which he called its “counterpart.”5 More basically still, why should we accept as self-evident that Diderot’s interest in hoaxes and mystifications was part of an effort to discredit belief in art? For one could just as well propose—or rather, more reasonably propose— the exact reverse: hoaxes provided Diderot with a means to indulge his preoccupation with how illusion was produced. Indeed, nothing in his novelistic

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works suggests that Diderot aimed at destroying the theory of art as illusion. To the contrary: his textual experiments provided an escape from the customary irony of the pseudofactual posture, making it in a sense more factual and less “pseudo.” This is not to say, as does Champfleury, that Diderot’s demon of reality was that of Balzac, Flaubert, or Courbet. But it is scarcely less absurd to see his work as gesturing toward different futures—say, to Hegelian self-consciousness or poststructuralist textuality. No, like all writers, Diderot was very much of his time. He tinkered with pseudofactual forms in view of enabling the novel to do better what the highest literature at the time was supposed to do, which was to move and to provide moral instruction. It is natural enough to hope that Diderot, like us, believed that ironic distance and self-consciousness were the only proper attitudes with respect to the illusions of art. Unfortunately, our narcissism, as usual, is unjustified.

Demystifying the Hoax The hoax at the origin of La Religieuse has never been a secret for readers of the novel: both in Diderot’s lifetime and since, the “memoir,” purportedly written by an escaped nun to her potential benefactor, was issued with a second text recounting its origins in a communal effort to dupe a kind-hearted friend. (At some point, Diderot had the idea of positioning this latter text after the memoir, giving it the curious title, “Preface to the preceding work”; since the “preface” was really a postface, scholars have taken to calling it the Préface-annexe, and I will follow this usage here.6) Opinions as to the relation of the “behind the scenes” document to the novel, however, have fluctuated greatly over the centuries. Some readers of the first flood of posthumous editions in the 1790s disapproved of the choice to include an account of the hoax, which for them ruined the effect of the memoir by destroying illusion; others scoffed at such reasoning; most failed to mention the document at all. None, however, took it as an integral part of the novel’s meaning. In the years since, opinion has come full around: starting in the early 1960s, critics have concurred with remarkable unanimity that Diderot used the Préface-annexe to subvert, ironize, distance, or demystify the illusion and pathos of the memoir. The joke, it would seem, was not only on one particular reader, but on an entire mode of reading that very nearly sums up what modern literary studies has come to define itself against—mimetic transparency, affective immersion, identification. The preface was Diderot’s way of overcoming the culture that had formed

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him—the culture that regarded illusion as a necessary component of aesthetic experience—and pointing to the future, which is to say, our present. Understanding why this dramatic turnabout in critical opinion is in fact completely unwarranted requires a careful look into the history of the muchdiscussed but frequently misrepresented Préface-annexe. Its existence antedates Diderot’s use of it as a postpositioned preface to his novel. The basic document had appeared in the March 15, 1770 issue of the Correspondance littéraire, on the occasion of a play inspired by the recent suicide of a despairing nun. The account was written by Frederich Melchior Grimm, the newsletter’s editor, and begins: “M. de La Harpe’s [Mélanie, ou la] Religieuse has woken my conscience, slumbering these past ten years, by reminding me of a horrible plot, masterminded by myself in conjunction with M. Diderot and two or three other crooks of the sort who were members of our intimate circle.”7 The 1760 plot reportedly aimed at enticing back to Parisian civilization their friend the Marquis de Croismare, who had left for Caen over a year earlier and, under the spell of newfound faith and idyllic domesticity, did not seem to be coming back. The bait: a plea for help by an escaped nun, Suzanne Delamarre, on whose behalf Croismare had intervened some three years before when she sought, unsuccessfully, to have her vows annulled on the grounds of familial coercion. The letters exchanged by Delamarre, Croismare, and a certain Madame Madin, who had known the fugitive since her childhood, compose the bulk of the document, the rest consisting of Grimm’s presentation. In it, the escaped Delamarre claims to be seeking a job as a household servant; Croismare responds encouragingly; Madame Madin sends him periodic updates on the young woman whose escape left her with serious injuries that prevent her from taking the stagecoach for Caen as Croismare has suggested; eventually the Marquis is informed of the nun’s pious and accepting death. Of course, the mischief in all this is that Delamarre and Madin wrote nothing at all; their letters are fakes, cooked up by the conspirators in view of extracting Croismare’s good-faith sympathy. Croismare did not in the end come running, but he did even better by providing inexhaustible entertainment: “We spent our suppers composing, amid peals of laughter, the letters from the nun that must have made our good Marquis cry, and we read with the same peals of laughter the honorable answers sent to her by this worthy and generous friend” (G 272). If the conspirators laughed, however, they cried as well, for Grimm also mentions the memoir Diderot wrote in the name of the unfortunate nun: “while our joke was heating up the imagination of our friend in Normandy, M. Diderot’s was getting hot as well. He started to write

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the detailed story [histoire] of our nun; if he had finished it, he would have made it the most true, touching, and pathetic novel ever to have existed. Not a page could be read without dissolving in tears” (G 272–73). Unfortunately for readers, however, Diderot’s spotty work habits were such that “the novel was never anything more than bits and pieces [ce roman n’a jamais existé que par lambeaux], and nothing became of it: it is lost” (G 273). Near the close of his account Grimm returns to the subject, regretting that the memoir, which would have made for “very touching [intéressante] reading,” had never been “finalized and recopied [mis au net]” (G 311).8 But the novel was not lost after all. On September 27, 1780—two months after Jacques le fataliste’s concluding installment in the Correspondance littéraire, and more generally near the end of a period in which Diderot was sifting through his writings and preparing them for publication or preservation— Diderot wrote Jakob Heinrich Meister, who had taken over Grimm’s editorial responsibilities, and offered him La Religieuse, which then appeared from October 1780 until March 1782. The last installment was accompanied by Grimm’s text of 1770, this time supplemented, Meister’s newsletter reads, with “several new notes by M. Diderot.”9 Modifications were in fact more extensive and invisible than advertised, even if in many respects it is still Grimm’s text. Beyond the bare fact that Grimm’s document was now entitled a “preface to the preceding work,” Diderot essentially made himself the mastermind of the affair: where Grimm had used a communal “we” to describe decisions taken, Diderot inserted his own name, thus authoring the plot as well as the novel. Other invisible changes include the introduction of an anecdote which in primitive form had been in Diderot’s mind since at least 1761. One day, hard at work on the memoir, Diderot was interrupted by his friend the actor d’Alainville, who asked why he was in tears: “I’m grieving over a tale I’m telling myself ” was the now-celebrated reply (D 385).10 Of the few obvious “notes”—as opposed to surreptitious interpolations—the most important is the text’s final pirouette, a paragraph entitled “A Question for Men of Letters,” in which Diderot transforms the hoax into a meditation on poetics. Here, the author claims that he would spend mornings composing well-written letters, novelistic (romanesques) and full of pathos; his afternoons were spent suppressing, at the behest of his wife and fellow hoaxers, anything in the morning’s production that was exaggerated or contrary to complete simplicity and verisimilitude. “Which ones were the best? Those that might have provoked admiration? Or those that must certainly have produced illusion?” (D 408). Diderot’s refashioning of Grimm’s text as a frame for his own would soon

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be forgotten: for reasons unknown, the first printed editions of La Religieuse, appearing in the late 1790s, appended not the modified version Diderot included as the final installment of March 1782, but Grimm’s original hoax account of September 1770.11 And this was all that was known until the 1880s, when Jules Assézat, in preparation for his new edition of Diderot’s works, dug up in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris a manuscript that had most likely furnished the enlarged text finally reproduced in the 1782 Correspondance littéraire. But Assézat was unaware of this previous diffusion, and moreover did not take note of the document’s full title, which clearly indicated that Diderot himself was the source of the additions.12 Hence, Assézat’s 1885 edition nowhere presents the modifications as Diderot’s own; the editor merely approves of the various stylistic changes and assumes that readers will appreciate the new passages. It was not until the early 1950s that Herbert Dieckmann found two additional manuscripts of the modified Préface-annexe that had escaped Assézat’s attention. One was unambiguous: it offered the text of Grimm’s preface, with all the changes and additions of the final Préface-annexe written in Diderot’s own hand. Thus Dieckmann was able to declare that Diderot had imprinted his stamp on the text, and intended it as an accompaniment for Suzanne Simonin’s memoir: “The Préface-annexe is part of the novel, it is as much invention and fable as the novel itself.”13 Dieckmann refrained from offering an opinion on how the inclusion of the Préface-annexe might alter our interpretation of the now-framed memoir; interestingly, he cautioned against reading the ensemble as a modernist text, something on the order of Gide’s Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs.14 Critics, however, quickly stepped in to fill the void. In 1961, in the first edition of La Religieuse to take into account the results of Dieckmann’s research on the preface, Robert Mauzi proposed that the hoax narrative “throws upon the novel a humorous light that deliberately destroys illusion.”15 Picking up on Mauzi’s cue, Jean Varloot in 1978 added another key term to the interpretive mix— distance. For him, La Religieuse is a “double work” composed of two radically different texts, “one founded on an illusion of identity between author and hero, the other functioning with total distance.”16 In 1991 Rosalina de la Carrera gathered these threads and others and knit them into a web of deceit in which everyone, including the supposedly distanced reader of the preface, risks falling into the position of the foolish Croismare; we may be lured by the idea of distance, she argued, but since the hoax itself may be as much a fabrication as Suzanne’s memoir, mastery is impossible.17 Several years later Vittorio Frigerio again took up the Préface-annexe’s “dismantling” of the novel’s

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illusion, this time stressing its antiideological power to subvert what is for him “an eminently traditional novel.”18 These extended reflections, as well as a few others that have followed, have hardened into a kind of received wisdom. La Religieuse, it now seems obvious, “is divided between the self-absorbed, passionate, and seductive discourse of the heroine and the ironic unveiling of the illusion in the Préface-annexe, which offers us a glimpse of what goes on backstage,” remarks Elena Russo in passing.19 If most scholarship on La Religieuse still focuses on the text of the memoir, the temptation of reading the Préface-annexe as a subversion of that text has proved difficult to resist: I have located no dissenting interpretations of Diderot’s framing gesture.20 One senses behind the critical unanimity a dirty little secret: Suzanne’s memoir, with its high pathos, is quite simply out of fashion. And as I have hinted above, the usefulness of the Préface-annexe goes beyond this particular text: to induct Diderot into the modern pantheon, it is necessary that the creator of the unforgivably soft-hearted drames of the 1750s come around from his own love of tears. Written originally in 1760, in nearconjunction with the Éloge de Richardson, La Religieuse represented Diderot’s bid at sentiment; little by little, the argument goes, he came to mistrust a mode that had become too abused, and the Préface-Annexe was his way of indicating his change of heart and educating his own readers before engaging in the more mature skepticism and self-consciousness of his Shandean Jacques le fataliste. “Diderot will call into question [the Richardsonian power of illusion] ten years later in Jacques le fataliste, when the slide toward the hegemony of effusion, perpetrated by mediocre writers, will have become obvious,” writes a recent editor of the Éloge; for art historian Norman Bryson, “By 1769 Diderot has come to mistrust the whole movement of sensibilité: having been the pioneer reader and supporter of the novel, he now moves toward Sterne and parody of the novel’s realist assumptions.”21 Unsurprisingly, the suggestion that the Préface-annexe turns La Religieuse into Jacques le fataliste goes back to Dieckmann’s discovery of Diderot’s involvement in the frame text, and it pops up routinely in the “ironic” or “distanced” interpretations I have mentioned. Varloot writes, “with respect to the history of the novel, La Religieuse thus turns out to be a ‘modern’ work as well”—as well as Jacques le fataliste, that is.22 The Préface-annexe frees us to read the novel’s sentimental premise as camp.23 Before rushing to interpret what has elsewhere been called the “jarring dissonance”24 between the frame and the text, however, we would do well to make sure that such dissonance exists. Looking at the various strata of the hoax account, a couple of things are evident. First, the only passage of the

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Préface-annexe to suggest something on the order of “ironic distance” from pathos is present already in Grimm’s version: this is the scene of the conspirators laughing while writing teary letters, an anecdote that invariably looms large in the above arguments.25 Grimm does not develop or pursue this ironic line, we must note, but moves quickly on to speak of the great emotional effect of Diderot’s text, nowhere treated as a joke. Indeed, when at the end of the exchange of letters the Marquis asks Madin to see Suzanne’s memoirs and Grimm remarks that it was a shame the memoir had never been finished, he pointedly does so not out of disappointment that the mystification had not been prolonged, but because the memoir would have made for “very touching reading” (G 311). Second, even if we choose to read Grimm’s sentimentality here and elsewhere as ironic (a possibility I do not discount), none of Diderot’s additions to Grimm’s text reinforce the irony. On the contrary, where Grimm speaks already of the memoir as “the truest and most touching novel ever,” Diderot hastens to interject the anecdote about the tears that he himself shed over his own creation, as if to bolster Grimm’s assertion. The concluding “Question for Men of Letters,” meanwhile, allows for admiration of a writer’s rhetorical skill or for the production of illusion, but not for what we are fond of calling “critical distance.” If anything, it is the first option (admiration for the writer) that is associated with distance (perhaps though not necessarily of the sort Michael Fried famously called “theatricality”), and it is clear that the writer casts his lot with the second option, a poetics of simplicity. But what role in this parable does the Marquis de Croismare play? His kinship with Don Quixote has been suggested;26 and indeed the thrust of modern readings of the Préface-annexe is to cast him as a bad reader, the reader Diderot is trying to keep us from becoming. But neither Grimm nor Diderot made an analogy between Croismare and a reader of Suzanne’s memoir who had not had the benefit of Diderot’s demystification. Grimm did, as I’ve acknowledged, include the anecdote about laughing at the nun’s teary letters and Croismare’s generous replies. However, he also suggests that the Marquis is something of a model for our own response—“the role he plays in this correspondence isn’t the least touching in the novel” (G 311)—and Diderot’s additions to Grimm’s text only take matters further in this direction.27 What ambiguity there is in the composite document is reduced still more by considering what good company the Marquis is in, both in Diderot’s work and elsewhere. For the spectator reacting before art as if he were reacting to reality was a dream for eighteenth-century aesthetic thought—not a quixotic figure to be ridiculed, but someone we wished to emulate even if we knew we could

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not. From the early Bijoux indiscrets, where the heroine implies that an African who knows nothing about theater should be completely fooled by a tragedy, to the Discours sur la poésie dramatique, which compares the ideal spectator to the child at the theater for the first time, Diderot continually maintains illusion as the litmus test of proper theatrical practice.28 Jaucourt, in the Encyclopédie, imagines a savage attending the opera; predictably, the savage takes its representations for celestial beings. The enlightened viewer, however, is not the savage’s opposite; rather, her knowledge of the machinery behind the marvels proves no match for the effects of music, and “the soul easily allows itself to be seduced . . . , enchanted by a fiction whose illusion is, as it were, palpable.”29 If music, here, is the instrument of illusion, we find similar arguments in other contexts. Mercier, for example, speaking of the new genre of the drame: “The young man who, at the performance of [Voltaire’s] L’Enfant prodigue, suddenly drew forth his purse on hearing the son deplore his misery, spoke volumes about the worth of his own heart and that of this genre.”30 At other times, these reactions are seen as speaking volumes about an actor’s talent, as when, after a show, the renowned actress Marie Dumesnil thanks a spectator for the audible outrage he has leveled against her evil character.31 Anecdotes such as these have a rich history, going back well into the seventeenth century, and probably to the fabled grapes of the Greek painter Zeuxis.32 Far from breaking with this tradition of thought about the stage, the Préface-annexe merely extended its implications to the novel. That extension had already begun in the Éloge de Richardson, where Diderot compared his reading of the novelist to the reaction of children at the theater for the first time (D 898). It is hard, therefore, not to see Croismare as the childlike Diderot apostrophizing the characters of Clarissa; when the marquis opens his home to Suzanne, he becomes the young man of Mercier’s anecdote, reaching for his purse so as to alleviate the suffering of a character.33 Though childlike, Croismare is hardly childish: he is much closer to an ideal spectator. 34 Moreover, the drame also furnishes the likely source for the explicit meditations on illusion found in the concluding “Question for Men of Letters.” In Beaumarchais’s “Essai sur le genre sérieux” (1767), the playwright represents himself reading Eugénie, his new drame, to a group of “men of letters,” one of whom advises him that his writing will not be convincing on stage: “Trim and prune away anything that betrays the hand of the gardener. Nature’s creations show neither this care [apprêt] nor this profusion. The virtue of being less elegant will make you more true.” “How difficult it is to be simple!” Beaumarchais exclaims, concluding a passage in perfect congruence with Diderot’s advocacy

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of rhetorical simplicity.35 The Préface-annexe as Diderot left it is a parable of the triumph of sympathy and proximity over distance and irony. Ideal readers do not, however, exist: the Préface-annexe contains no analogy between Croismare and an uninformed reader of La Religieuse because logically the analogy would have broken down immediately. There is of course a glaring difference between the type of manuscript letters Croismare received from his friends and a printed memoir consumed by an anonymous public (or even a narrative circulated in an elite manuscript journal). Préfaceannexe or no, such readers would have known that the memoir was written by Diderot, and there was nothing he could do to change that. He could have taken his name off it, of course, perhaps appending a colorful account of the manuscript’s discovery; but this would not have helped very much, since the memoir form itself was an unambiguous sign of novelistic intent, made more unambiguous still by protests of truthfulness. In other words, from the point of view of readers’ belief, knowledge of the hoax anecdote is superfluous. No reader of La Religieuse could ever have been a Croismare. But readers hoped to be—whence Diderot’s fantasy, in the “Question to Men of Letters,” about coming upon Suzanne’s letters in the street, or in the Éloge de Richardson, about finding Clarissa and Pamela’s letters in the armoire of an old château (D 902). The fact that perfect illusion was acknowledged as impossible did not keep Diderot—or anyone else—from positing illusion as the very ground of the experience of art. And the Préface-annexe was simply a way for Diderot to think about that illusion and to spur readers to think about it too. Which many did. As I’ve mentioned, when La Religieuse was finally published in October 1796, the nun’s memoir was followed by an account of the hoax—not Diderot’s version, but Grimm’s original text. Yet even Grimm’s account, by its very inclusion, prompted readers to think about illusion, as we can see in the reviews of the 1796 and subsequent editions. A number of these reviews contained flat objections to the inclusion of the preface on the predictable grounds that it destroyed illusion. Writing in Nouvelles politiques, nationales et étrangères, Jean Devaines holds that the sobriety and the simplicity of the memoir were such that “one would have been convinced that the memoirs had been written by the nun herself, on her own and without modification, if only the publisher hadn’t informed us of the contrary.” The critic holds Grimm’s “joke” to be of no interest to the reader: “it was completely unreasonable [for the publisher] to inform [the reader] that what he had taken for truth was only a fiction,” Devaines writes, concluding with the hope that a future editor will suppress “an explanation that destroys the reader’s pleasure,

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the book’s usefulness, and the precious illusion that the author had created with as much care as success.”36 Devaines’s wish, I’ve said, was not granted: all subsequent editors reproduced Grimm’s text, until in 1875 Assézat and Tourneux substituted Diderot’s so-called Préfece-annexe. Ironically, one of those editors was very much of Devaines’s opinion. Jacques-André Naigeon, a protégé of Diderot’s and the first editor of the writer’s complete works, prefaces the volume containing La Religieuse by stating that had previous editions not already included the letters, he would have suppressed them: “If it is true, as there can be no doubt, that there is always a little illusion in all of our pleasures . . . , if for us they endure and even increase in proportion to the force and extent of this enchanting prestige, then eliminating it destroys in us a fecund source of multiple forms of joy” (BF 273). Naigeon is a bit more subtle than Devaines, in that he thinks of illusion as a variable quality; one is never truly deceived, as Devaines seems to suggest. But both Devaines and Naigeon are reasoning according to one of the basic assumptions of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, including Diderot’s—that the pleasure and profit of art depend on illusion.37 In countering these arguments, other reviewers do not contest such assumptions, they merely draw from them different conclusions. Indeed, there is something nonsensical about the arguments of Devaines and Naigeon: in objecting to the inclusion of the preface, the two men obviously do not advocate printing the novel as if it were a real memoir, say by eliminating Diderot’s name from the title page.38 Why is it that the reader’s illusion is not broken by the author’s name, while an admission of “fiction” destroys the reader’s pleasure? This is precisely the question provoked by the inclusion of Grimm’s account. Amaury Duval, writing in La Clef du cabinet des souverains, reasons thus: “The illusion is destroyed!” What does that mean? Have you ever experienced illusion? What could be more fleeting and perishable by its very nature? Haven’t you ever once put it to the test with a moment of reflection . . . ? Did it really last until the end of your reading? If so, then the work was well done, and the author was successful. [But imagine] going to see [Racine’s] Phèdre or [Voltaire’s] Mérope: you believe, don’t you, that you’re listening to and watching a woman in love, a mother? The curtain falls; you retain a deep impression: but what has become of the illusion? These scenes of pathos, these passionate movements, this language of fire—all that

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came straight from the poet’s brain. And you know it: is the pleasure you experienced yesterday, or that you will experience tomorrow, any less vivid, less pure, less real? What worthless quibbling! La Religieuse gave you all the charm of a true story; what difference does it make that it’s only a fiction? (BF 271)39 For Duval, all illusion is temporary, precarious. You always leave the theater, and—preface or no preface—you always shut the book, neither of which has a negative impact on the experience of the work. A second reviewer offers a slightly different explanation, one that is uncannily congruent with Diderot’s own thought about the art of illusion. In his Journal d’économie publique, Pierre-Louis Roederer writes, “Why this regret [over learning that the memoirs were only a fiction]? The truth conveyed by both the style and the details is so perfect that we don’t believe the publisher; and we’re right not to” (BF 215).40 The style and the details: Diderot’s talent lay in his cultivation of a kind of internal vivacity. His text wasn’t presented as real, it seemed real; the deflating presentation has no impact because the ground of illusion is subtly shifted. Opponents of the preface had the wrong conception of illusion because they held it to be a matter of framing—author and readers had to pretend they thought the text was a real document. But the fact that the preface does not change our experience of the book shows that a good writer does not need this type of crutch: illusion works its magic anyway. Defenders and detractors of the preface do not split on aesthetic principle: all are committed to illusion, and to reality as the gold standard of pleasure and profit; none conceive of fiction as anything but a lie that must be hidden. Even Duval, who thinks of illusion as fleeting, still supposes that under the artwork’s “charm” (which we should understand in the strong sense of “spell”), fiction appears to us a “true story.” And one reader, Roederer, arrives at a conclusion that essentially predicts the Préface-annexe’s “Question for Men of Letters,” where natural style—as opposed to rhetorical ornament—is seen as productive of desired illusion. Picking up in the street a group of rhetorically perfect letters, we exclaim in admiration, “How beautiful, so beautiful!” Stumbling across a group of natural letters, by contrast, we say, “How very true,” and are persuaded of their reality (D 408). So Roederer’s praise of “the style and the detail” of La Religieuse is surprisingly in keeping with the author’s own theory—surprisingly, because having read only Grimm’s account, the reviewer could not have been building on Diderot’s reflections. It would seem that two different men were independently propelled by Grimm’s text to

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the same conclusion: the illusion of art lies not in the presentation (no reader can ever occupy Croismare’s privileged spot), but in the illusory power of the text itself, capable of overcoming the fact that we know we are reading “only” a novel. As Champfleury remarked, Diderot’s tales were positively demonic in the impression of reality they gave. And in this case as in so many others, the devil was in the details.

The Wart Trick Though Roederer could not have been familiar with the modified Préfaceannexe, he may well have known that details had been on Diderot’s mind since his writings on and for the theater in the 1750s, in which pantomime emerged as a central component of the techniques of the drame. A character pacing the stage, pulling out his watch from time to time, gave us the impression of spying on something not intended for public consumption; we weren’t being informed of what the character wanted to tell us of himself, we were observing for ourselves the clues as to his mental state. Detail is central as well to Diderot’s praise of Richardson: if Clarissa is long, this is because the novelist focuses our attention on the forgotten micro-events that make up life’s larger drama. “Know that illusion depends on this multitude of little things,” Diderot writes, adding, in a line that recalls his praise of pantomime, “gesture is often every bit as sublime as speech” (D 902). But it is in the coda to his 1770 tale Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne that Diderot develops an even more explicit theory of the detail’s importance. Any narrative that aims to move us, he reasons, must contain bits of poetic eloquence; but it also must convince us it is true, because we cannot be moved otherwise. These two conditions, unfortunately, are mutually exclusive: eloquence, by calling attention to itself, breaks illusion. The way out of this impasse is the unmotivated, insignificant detail, capable of counterbalancing rhetorical excess. Diderot looks to painting for some examples: the illusion-producing detail would be, say, a cut on the portrait-sitter’s lower lip, or maybe a slight scar, or a wart on his temple. Thus we are pushed to exclaim, “My word, this is real; such things can’t be invented” (D 449). The similarity between this metapoetic reflection and the one that closes the Préface-annexe is obvious enough: both offer means for overcoming the palpable artificiality of poetic eloquence, one through simplicity, the other through detail. La Religieuse and Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne share additional

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similarities as well, for the latter also originated in a hoax that, sure enough, was described by Grimm in the Correspondance littéraire. In the December 15, 1770, issue—a mere nine months after the initial description of the Croismare episode—Grimm recounts his late summer trip with Diderot to Langres in Champagne, the philosophe’s birthplace. Taking the waters in nearby Bourbonne, the friends met up with a mother and daughter, who were there on account of the latter’s ill health. The ladies had been distracting themselves by “telling tales” to their correspondents in Paris, one of whom was “uncommonly gullible”: “he faithfully believed the yarns [les fagots] these ladies sent him, and the simplicity of his responses amused the two friends as much as the absurdity of the tales they told” (D 463). This gave Diderot an idea: he would write tales for the young lady to insert into one of her letters to this man—a Diderot connoisseur, moreover, who prided himself on being able to distinguish the philosophe’s writing from any other. The subterfuge was successful: the correspondent took the tales for fact. Such is Grimm’s presentation, which he followed with Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne and its coda on the importance of detail. As remarkable as these parallels are, even more striking is the divergence in the critical fates of the texts formed in the crucible of Diderot and Grimm’s mischief: whereas the Préface-annexe has often been taken as a subversion of Simonin’s memoir and sentimental illusion, Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne’s “wart trick”—I adapt the expression from Georges May41—has traditionally been accepted as a forthright statement of artistic principle.42 True, there is good reason why this tale, unlike La Religieuse, is not taken as a joke: Diderot did nothing with Grimm’s prefatory text, which subsequently disappeared from the tale’s publication history; the postpositioned reflection on illusion was free of the least hint of comic distance. And of course defenders of the consensual “ironic” reading of the Préface-annexe can always retreat to the argument that in 1770 Diderot had not yet fully moved away from the illusion model, as he would by the time he was rewriting the account of Croismare in 1780. Yet given the various reasons for doubting Diderot’s commitment to critical distance in La Religieuse, Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne is very probably a reliable guide to interpreting the unusual framing device of the Préface-annexe. A guide, moreover, that partisans of an ironic reading of the Préface-annexe must ignore, for it provides a straightforward endorsement of illusion and suggests—by the Grimm preface that Diderot this time does not reuse—that whatever ironic sensibility is at work in the Préface-annexe came from the editor of the Correspondance littéraire. Diderot himself, writing to Grimm after

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the Bourbonne hoax, says as much: the tales he sent the gullible Parisian were “so true [si vrais] that one wouldn’t have to be an idiot to be taken in.”43 Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne is, through and through, a literary polemic: from the title and Grimm’s opening presentation to the excursus on detail at the end, it is an attack on the short story as it exists—more specifically, on the sentimental tale that had been steadily gaining in popularity since the success of Marmontel’s Contes moraux, which initially appeared in the Mercure de France from 1755 to 1759 before being collected in book form in 1761. Marmontel’s popularity—a second expanded edition was published in 1765—was a harbinger of renewed interest in the short story, in eclipse since the early decades of the century but at its numerical peak in the late 1760s and early 1770s.44 If Marmontel was most likely one of Diderot’s targets, the title is a more direct jab at a number of sentimental works of 1770 featuring “two friends,” as Grimm himself hints. Available documents, which permit us to add names and details to Grimm’s account of the Bourbonne hoax, confirm that it was Les Deux Amis, conte iroquois, by Saint-Lambert, that was at the root of Diderot’s own tale. The ladies taking the waters at Bourbonne were Madame de Maux—a recent mistress of Diderot’s—and her daughter, Madame de Prunevaux; both were in correspondence with Jacques-André Naigeon—the same Naigeon who would become Diderot’s executor, and the editor we’ve seen disapproving of the inclusion of the Préface-annexe. From Paris, Naigeon had sent the women the just-published short novel by SaintLambert, and Diderot’s game, as he says himself in a letter, was to offer a subtle “critique” of the “Iroquois tale,” in which friendship and amorous rivalry unfold in an exotic American setting.45 The choice of Saint-Lambert as target—as opposed to the exponentially more popular Marmontel—may have been due less to his incompetence than to his very real if insufficient efforts to bring sentimental seriousness to the genre. Marmontel does nothing to accentuate the pseudofactual bona fides of his tales; on the contrary, in his preface he openly associates them with comedy and never tries to pretend they are true.46 But Saint-Lambert does: “Sara Th . . . ,” first published in the Gazette littéraire in 1765, was presented as a true story translated from English; “Ziméo,” which appeared in a 1769 collection, was attributed to a certain George Filmer, who, the reader learns, was a merchant in the West Indies. Both of these mix different forms of the first person: their framing narrators—dissociated from the writer himself—are heavily involved in the tales told; their title characters cross the main narrator’s path and proceed to recount their lives. Diderot and Grimm had commented,

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unflatteringly, on these works of Saint-Lambert’s in the Correspondance littéraire. “Sara Th . . .” for Diderot “smelled of a romance and its tricks” [on [y] sent le romanesque et l’apprêt], and made Grimm wish for a French Fielding to puncture it; “Ziméo” seemed better to Diderot, but Grimm judged it “insipid and puerile.”47 How might then one write a sentimental tale—sentimental in the good eighteenth-century sense, which is to say filled with emotion and serious thought about duty, virtue, and so on—that does not “smell like a romance”? This is the question that Diderot sets out to answer in his postscript to Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne. He begins by dividing all of narrative into three parts: the “marvelous” tale, which he associates with epic perfection; the “pleasant” or comic tale, something of a grab-bag in which one finds the parodic Ariosto, the ribald La Fontaine, and a few others; and the “historical” tale. Only this last—Diderot gives the examples of novellas of Scarron and Cervantes—demands credence, because only the historical tale aims at moving the reader: the author of the historical tale wants to “win over [intéresser], touch, move, sweep up” readers, “giving [them] goosebumps” and “making [them] weep” (D 449). There is much that is strange, here: the multifarious genre of the tale makes room for Homer and Tasso but not any modern novelists; the philosophical tale is not mentioned, and the fairy tale only obliquely at best, in the category of the “pleasant”; Scarron made, it is true, basic truth claims, but Cervantes did not, and at any rate their devotion to the aesthetics of emotion described by Diderot is doubtful. But Diderot is not doing literary history so much as he is crafting a polemic that will bestow on a certain type of tale—the one he is practicing and the one for which he pretends to find illustrious ancestors—the dignity of tragedy. For Diderot’s tripartite division of the tale is nothing but an application of the old distinction between epic, tragedy, and comedy to narrative prose. Tales can be epic—dignified but no longer practicable or believable. They can be comic, which had been the case at least since Boccaccio. Or they can be tragic. For the emotional reactions that the “historical” tale-teller aims to elicit are precisely those heretofore associated with tragedy. And as with tragedy, those emotions will flow only if we believe in what we are reading. Hence the designation “historical.”48 Diderot’s wart trick is bound up with this communication of emotion. Warts themselves are hardly a good source of sentiment, but detail for Diderot is only a means to an end. Details are designed to counteract the effects of eloquence—the same eloquence that appears, negatively, at the end of the Préface-annexe, where Diderot imagined a rhetoric of simplicity that would

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secure belief in the self-effacing poet’s creation. In the coda to Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne, in all likelihood written before the additions to the Préface-annexe, the reasoning is a bit different. Here, Diderot does not abandon eloquence, because—as he states, and as had traditionally been held by poeticians—it is instrumental in the production of emotion. But its artificiality also works against emotion: readers won’t feel if they don’t believe. Eloquence is thus both the creator and the destroyer of emotion, and the way out of the paradox is the detail. The detail secures credence in such a way that when the poet deploys his eloquence, the reader will be powerless to observe the artifice. The trick is merely a variation on the “multitude of little things” that Richardson knew to insert into Clarissa; those little things prepare the way for what the Éloge calls “the strong impressions of great events,” so that when the crucial human interaction transpires, “you will no longer have the power to hold back the tears that are ready to flow and to say to yourself: but maybe this isn’t true” (D 902). The aesthetic content of the Éloge, the “Question for Men of letters,” and Les Deux Amis is not absolutely identical, but all three texts expound the same principle: the novel (and the tale) share with tragedy a fundamental interest in heightened human emotion; details are there to make that emotion convincing in one way or another. That Diderot’s thought here proceeds from ideas about the “higher” genre of tragedy is no accident: drama was the traditional locus for thinking about poetry’s emotional effect. If the speculations of the Préface-annexe and Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne rightly strike us as quite original in the context of the novel, we need not conclude that Diderot is effecting a paradigm shift, or preparing the way for a realism to come. Rather, he is importing into the domain of the novel tried and true components of drama theory. The essential paradox of rhetoric—good for the production of emotion, but bad for the illusion without which any emotion is impossible—had long been recognized, and solutions proposed. Boileau’s 1674 translation of Longinus’s treatise on the sublime advocated a kind of nonrhetorical rhetoric which made the hand of the poet disappear, leaving us face to face with the thing depicted; and the annexing of On the Sublime was part of a larger effort, evident from around 1650, to theorize a kind of invisible or natural eloquence.49 This reform effort was an extension, moreover, of the observations of classical theorists of drama, who called for the elimination of overly stylized theatrical conventions precisely on the grounds that they attracted attention to the work of the poet and thus broke the illusion presumed to hold sway over the spectator.50 Diderot is unquestionably a thinker of paradox, and his articulations of paradoxes are

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always audacious and vivid. Nonetheless, the Préface-annexe and the coda to Les Deux Amis are made up of dramatic commonplaces, successfully vulgarized and transposed to the domain of the novel. Just as the Diderot of the Discours sur la poésie dramatique dreams of a theater that will have the profound effect normally ascribed to tragedy without tragedy’s archaically distancing conventions, Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne wants to be a tale that doesn’t give off the rhetorical odor of romance. And for this, one needs warts and scars. Commentators have had some trouble reconciling Diderot’s vividly illustrated theory of the detail with Les Deux Amis itself: the comparison with portraiture leads us to expect a gallery of individualized faces, yet with occasional exceptions, Diderot does not spend much time telling us what his characters look like, and when he does, physiognomy provides unambiguous signs of moral worth. (Les Deux Amis provides a rather amusing contrast to the detail its coda theorizes: while the author speaks of the credence produced by a “small scar on the forehead,” his protagonist Félix has been marked by a huge facial gash, incurred when he selflessly helps his friend Olivier on the battlefield.) And Diderot certainly does not describe the material world, for as Vivienne Mylne has noted, his details relate to behavior and character: “It is words, gestures, nuances of emotion, traits of conduct he has in mind, rather than details of clothes, furniture and buildings.”51 Mylne goes on to evoke some of the many such touches in La Religieuse, including dialogue (characters exchange short, clipped phrases, instead of perorating) and tableaux (the placement and activities of characters are often carefully arranged).52 Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne certainly shares such stylistic traits—we will see them in action in a moment—but Diderot’s notion of detail must be expanded to encompass the exceptional care taken to heighten the pseudofactual credentials of his tale. Unlike Marmontel, Saint-Lambert made efforts in this direction, as I’ve mentioned: “Sara Th . . .” and “Ziméo” were found documents, and Grimm and Diderot’s disapproval aside, we should not minimize Saint-Lambert’s novelty. Tales had long pretended to be “true stories”: Boccaccio and Marguerite de Navarre’s storytellers all took oaths of veracity; in the late seventeenth century, the founding of the periodical Le Mercure galant in 1670 provided a suitable vehicle for short stories that were given as culled from real life, often sent to the editor, Donneau de Visé, by correspondents from the provinces. But the authenticating apparatus of such true stories was most often rudimentary—a bare promise of truth, the mention of the town where the events took place, the name and profession of the protagonist, or,

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conversely, a cryptonym that hid actors under asterisks or ellipses. By contrast, Saint-Lambert’s tales were essentially mini-memoir novels: he was making the shorter tale do what normally the novel did; or, put differently, he was aspiring to give the tale the sentimental dignity that the novel, under the impetus of Richardson and Rousseau, was acquiring. But as we know from La Religieuse, the memoir form was no guarantee of truthful style, and Diderot judged Saint-Lambert’s practice wanting. So he did him one better: he designed a form for his tale whose pseudofactual posture did not consist in the importation of the devices of the memoir novel, but that expanded upon the common association between the tale and the news report. Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne was a dispatch. In 1985, Jean Varloot discovered a manuscript of a primitive version confirming that as originally conceived, the story of Félix and Olivier was indeed, as Grimm had suggested, integrated into a much longer and general letter of Prunevaux’s; a continuation of the story was furnished in a separate letter, presumably forwarded to Naigeon at some point, that was “signed” by the vicar of the parish of SainteMarie de Bourbonne, M. Papin.53 In rewriting these original materials for Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire, Diderot excised the unrelated information in Prunevaux’s letter and recast the vicar’s letter, which had been deliberately unsympathetic; significantly, however, he did not simply rewrite the tale in a uniform voice, but produced a strange and complex amalgam. It begins with a statement of fact that pointedly echoes, as many have noted, the traditional opening of French fairy tales: “Il y avait ici deux hommes” [There were two men here], writes Diderot, in place of the habitual distancing “Il était une fois” [Once upon a time]. The deictic “here” gestures to a first-person narrator whose presence is soon detected more directly in the occasional addresses to the recipient—“little brother,” Naigeon’s nickname—that Diderot did not remove; and a bit further on, the reader is told that the information furnished has been learned directly from an encounter with someone involved—the widow of one of the brothers. Diderot then inserts a transition—“You have asked, little brother, what became of Félix”—followed by the vicar’s account, now rewritten and ascribed to a certain sympathetic and trustworthy Aubert, who himself details the provenance of his narrative (he knew the widow of the coal-merchant who had taken in Félix when the latter was on the lam). More elements still are added to the mix. Diderot apparently wanted to conserve the tonal counterpoint of clerical cold-heartedness, for he has Aubert include with his account a short letter by the vicar Papin telling the letter writer that her charity could find a more worthy outlet than these criminal friends. Finally,

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a new and unidentified narrator introduces a short response to Papin by the letter writer herself—indicated only as “Mme de ***” (or “Mme de P***” in one manuscript)—and laconically and succinctly tells the sad end of the protagonists who were still alive. It was once remarked, quite rightly, that scholars of Diderot’s novels tend to explain away the truly uncommon number of logical contradictions they contain as a deliberate effort on the author’s part to create a more superior illusion: an overly neat narrative, the argument goes, does not seem as real as one with gaps and loose ends—warts, in other words.54 While this interpretation seems to me doubtful—evidence suggests that when Diderot noticed factual contradictions, he cleared them up—the formal heterogeneity of Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne can only be deliberate: Diderot’s fragmentary hodgepodge of voices is worlds away from the well-groomed narrative embedding practiced by Saint-Lambert. Again, in the latter’s tales, a first-person narrator meets a second narrator, who will tell, orally and reliably, the main tale. The schema follows an entire tradition of embedded tales in which framed narrators were unimpeachable sources of information and, typically, emotion. By contrast, Diderot’s tale telling is deliberately problematic. The narrative position is uncertain: we seem to be reading a letter, but the normal conventions of the letter, such as salutations at the beginning and end, are not obeyed. Different narrators collaborate: the initial letter-writer gives over her tale to Aubert, before the tail’s conclusion is taken over by an unnamed thirdperson narrator. And narrators (notably the righteous Papin) can have vastly different assessments of a situation that does not speak unambiguously. In sentimental literature especially, as well as in drama generally, the locus of passion is the speaking “I”: first-person discourse offers a conduit between the heart of the suffering subject and that of the listener or reader. Yet in Les Deux Amis, the actors do not tell their stories; they barely even speak. And without this speech, there can be, obviously, no representation of its comprehensive reception—that is, the moment of tearful plenitude when sufferers and sympathetic observers come together to form the community of the just. Diderot’s fragmented narrative voices have deprived the sentimental text of its natural foundation. But not, certainly, of its emotion, which still flows abundantly, even if scarcely a word is uttered. The titular two friends of the tale, Olivier and Félix, are inseparable; Félix realizes they have both fallen in love with the same woman and steps aside; Olivier marries, while Félix loses his zest for life and ends up smuggling contraband; imprisoned, he awaits execution; Olivier frees

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him, but is mortally wounded in the process; the escaped Félix, holed up with a coal-merchant and his wife and ignorant of Olivier’s fate, supposes that his friend is now in prison; he enlists the coal-merchant in a plan to free him, but the two are ambushed by marshals, and the coal-merchant is killed. In this passage, Félix brings the body back to the coal-merchant’s widow: He stops at the door, he lays the cadaver at his feet, and goes to sit down with his back against a tree and his face turned toward the entrance of the cabin. Such was the spectacle that awaited the coalmerchant’s wife when she came out of her hut. She wakes, she does not find her husband next to her; she looks around for Félix, no Félix. She rises, she goes out, she sees, she screams, she falls in a faint. Her children run to her, they see, they scream; they fall on their father, they fall on their mother. The coalmerchant’s wife, brought to her senses by the tumult and the cries of her children, tears at her hair, gouges her cheeks. Félix, immobile at the base of his tree, eyes closed, head thrown back, was repeating to them in an extinguished voice: “Kill me.” There was silence for a moment; then the sorrow and the cries started again, and Félix repeated again: “Kill me; children, have pity, kill me.” They spent three days and three nights like this, disconsolate. (D 443) The first thing to note in this remarkable passage is that it—like the tale as a whole—has nothing of the “everyday” about it. When we moderns speak of an attention to detail—I will return to the point below—we think quite naturally of the overlooked, the stuff of daily existence that is always in the background of the novel’s main action (and that, for certain writers, becomes as or more important than the action itself ). By contrast, Diderot’s detail is concentrated entirely on the human actors themselves: it lies in their physical positioning, which we are asked to visualize (Félix’s back is to the tree, his face turned toward the door of the hut); it is in the care taken to present the mother’s increasingly frantic recognition that something is wrong; it is in the brief silence between Félix’s barely audible but reiterated commands that he be put out of his misery. Furthermore, the action described is nothing if not emotional: as described in the Éloge de Richardson, the details here serve only to heighten the drama of the scene. That emotion, however, is modulated very carefully. The characters seem to derive little solace from one another. Their

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emotions do not spontaneously transform themselves into a discourse that will cement the bonds of sentimental community. Instead, they barely speak, or speak only to numbly mouth their despair. Inarticulate, immured in their pain, Diderot’s characters feel all the more. A case can certainly be made for viewing Les Deux Amis as a chastisement of certain forms of sentimental excess. As in La Religieuse, Diderot avoids the commonplace love plot, since amorous rivalry between Félix and Olivier is expressly banished in one sentence, thus diverting the tale from well-trodden “romance” path taken by Saint-Lambert’s text and depriving it of the customarily pathetic combats of duty and desire. Diderot’s refusal to allow the characters’ self-expression to stabilize the community—indeed, the tale peters out as the characters are geographically dispersed and killed off—also wreaks havoc with the normal sentimental economy. And in place of love and community Diderot gives us a plot that is fully determined by the material precariousness of the protagonists, whose continuing misfortunes are laid at the door of poverty.55 But for all this, Les Deux Amis remains profoundly sentimental, invested in the production of emotion as a route to the exaltation of virtue’s combat against social and institutional injustice. In his work on the theater, Diderot inveighed against dramatic tirades not because theater was to be the site of “distance,” but because the devices undermined the audience’s belief, thus canceling out the desired effect.56 Diderot’s work here on the novel is no different: it is by bypassing the worn-out and therefore all-too-visible rhetorical stimuli that one can better create emotion. “May the tears that you made me shed spread to hearts everywhere” exclaims a narrator to the man who has just shared his tale of woe in an “anecdote” by the notoriously sentimental Baculard d’Arnaud.57 We can follow the trail of tears far upriver of the eighteenth-century man of feeling: La Fontaine, paraphrasing Plato, said the goal of tragedy was to create “a chain of people crying”; Horace, in the Art of Poetry, famously instructed the would-be poet that the reader’s tears were dependent on the poet’s own.58 Diderot, obviously, was no stranger to this (now embarrassing) lachrymose aesthetic, and not just in his early drames: the goal of the “historical tale” was, he insists, to make readers weep. Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne is drier than Le Fils naturel, and laconic where so much sentimental literature of the period is verbose; no magnanimous man of sympathy, certainly, steps in to right wrongs and repair community. Yet such traits do not in any way make it an antisentimental text: they are merely the warts on the portrait that command belief and secure the maximum impact of the tale’s peak moments of passion. Diderot,

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that connoisseur of distress, teaches the sentimental tale new tricks. He gives us plots, predicaments, and forms of enunciation that fans of Saint-Lambert might not even recognize as cues for their tears, so much have they been drained of self-expressive first-person emotion. But the contrivances of rhetorical excess are only avoided so as better to elicit more powerful tears, and Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne no more issues a call for critical distance than it effects a subversion of a naïve realism yet to come.

The Modern Zeuxis? When Ceci n’est pas un conte, written to all appearances in the fall of 1772 and circulated in the April 1773 issue of the Correspondance littéraire, was first printed in the 1798 edition of Diderot’s complete works, the editor Naigeon appended a footnote to one of the tale’s reiterated claims to not being a tale. He wrote: “This remark alone would suffice to destroy the reader’s confidence in the narrative that follows; and yet it is literally true.”59 Naigeon was obviously reacting to standard pseudofactual protocol, where the claim of veracity invited us to pretend that this or that memoir or letter collection were real documents, thereby signaling that they were not. But things are different here, Naigeon warns. Diderot really means it. The matter is a bit more complicated than this, even if we take care to avoid tempting associations with Magritte’s famous painting La Trahison des images, which often though incorrectly goes by its legend, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”60 Naigeon is dead right, however, to remind us that Diderot inevitably twists the pseudofactual practices of his time. Normally, a memoir or letter collection is preceded by a little note in which the author pretends to be an editor, and no one thinks any more about it; La Religieuse is preceded by no truth claim and followed, moreover, by an admission of pure invention. Normally, the “truth” of a “true story” lies in the assertion itself, not in the actual manner of the telling; Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne skips the assertion and then draws attention to its convincing details. And normally, assertions of veracity were made gently, in half-hearted or ironic prefaces, or on title pages promising us letters that have been collected by “editors”; Ceci n’est pas un conte turns its very title—its very “aggressive” title61—into a truth claim that is then repeated within the work itself, a work that moreover backs up that claim with an arsenal of detail. The title and the technique seem calculated to jolt readers out of their habit of viewing the pseudofactual apparatus of the novel

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as very much pseudofactual. Ceci n’est pas un conte, like La Religieuse, would seem to be a perverse example of the pseudofactual mode, but for opposite reasons. Whereas La Religieuse refuses to play the game, Ceci n’est pas un conte takes the game seriously. So seriously that we must take a closer look. The structure of Ceci n’est pas un conte is no less convoluted than that of Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne. After a short preamble in which the author justifies including a listener as well as a narrator in his text, a dialogue between two men commences; one of these men—who will in the course of things be identified as Diderot himself—tells two separate stories, after pausing to introduce the first with a titular declaration, “This is not a tale.”62 The narrator is occasionally interrupted by the remarks or questions of his listener; the dialogue closes with the narrator’s reflections on the moral problem that had been the occasion for the narratives in the first place.63 The narratives themselves are as follows. In the first, the poor but beautiful Mme Reymer, known to both the narrator and the listener, is courted by an equally penniless provincial named Tanié. He supports Reymer with his labor until it becomes clear to him that she has better prospects—she is pursued by all manner of well-off gentlemen—at which point he sets out to make his fortune in the colonies, asking only of Reymer that she not form any permanent attachment in his absence. His commercial success is substantial, and after ten years he returns and presents the fruit of his industry to Reymer; they live together in comfort, though unbeknownst to Tanié, his lover had already enriched herself through her favors. After a while Tanié is chosen for another commercial enterprise, this time in Russia; Reymer, advancing the need for money but also apparently out of indifference, does not let him turn down the offer as he would like to; he dies in the icy north. The second, longer narrative reverses the gender roles. This time, an intellectual collaborator of the narrator, Gardeil, is passionately loved by Mademoiselle de La Chaux. Gardeil works for M. d’Hérouville, whose scholarly projects demand feats of erudition that exhaust his research assistant; La Chaux steps in to help her lover with his work, perfecting her Greek and learning Hebrew, Italian, and English. Her devotion is selfless and happy, but the ungrateful Gardeil leaves her. Without resources, her reputation ruined by her love affair, her health affected by her ceaseless labors, La Chaux appeals to the narrator (who is her neighbor as well) to try to persuade Gardeil, now successful, of her love; Gardeil coldly points out that he is not master of his heart, and cannot choose to love if he does not. At this point, the narrator and a certain Le Camus, a doctor himself desperately in love with the young woman, take

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care of La Chaux, who spends her time translating Hume and writing “a little historical novel” (D 514); the quality of her intellect is such that the narrator appends to his Lettre sur les sourds et muets a letter addressing her objections to his text. (This reference unambiguously identifies the narrator as Diderot, whose Lettre sur les sourds et muets [1751] was indeed followed by a number of additions, including a “Lettre à Mademoiselle ***.”) The Hume translation is published but brings her no money; the historical novel cannot be published because it contains what appear to be clear allusions to the royal mistress, Madame de Pompadour. La Chaux, no more master of her heart than Gardeil is of his, gently but firmly refuses Le Camus’s love; she eventually moves away and soon dies in misery, “on some straw in a garret” (D 515). Gardeil, now a professor of medicine in Montpelier and Toulouse, bathes in the personal and professional esteem of all. From the above summaries I have omitted numerous details. Street names: Diderot and his interlocutor map out where Gardeil and La Chaux were living (and the interlocutor gives Diderot’s own address at the time). More names of people: the Russian offer was made to Tanié by the comte de Maurepas; Diderot speaks with M. Colin, assistant to Madame de Pompadour. Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne, too, was liberally sprinkled with proper names—the vicar Papin or the magistrate Aubert, but also the judge Coleau, of the tribunal in Reims, who condemned Félix to death, and the man in whose service Félix ended up, “a certain M. Le Clerc of Rançonnières, a wealthy man who was also lord of another village in these cantons, called Courcelles” (D 445). But Les Deux Amis—perhaps because its central figures were nobodies—relegated such details to the margins; the people named were only provincials, after all. Ceci n’est pas un conte, by contrast, names known figures. The comte de Maurepas was minister of Maritime Affairs; he did indeed live, as Diderot says, close to the address given for Tanié, and seems to have really planned a commercial venture in Saint Petersburg. By the time Diderot was writing in 1772, D’Hérouville had already published a work of military history; M. de Montucla, given as another member of his team of researchers, was a published author as well, and friend of d’Alembert; the doctor Le Camus too wrote many works. And Gardeil: also known to d’Alembert, with whom he exchanged lessons in Greek for lessons in mathematics, he was a member of various professional academies, published at least one scientific paper, and did indeed end up teaching medicine in Toulouse.64 How surprising is it, then, that with all these warts and scars to authenticate her, the otherwise beautiful La Chaux has found her way into biographical

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dictionaries and library catalogues—on no other evidence than what we find in Diderot’s non-tale? In 1798, when Naigeon declared without hesitation that the story of La Chaux and Gardeil was “literally true,” he also offered additional details on the heroine’s intellectual engagement with Condillac and d’Alembert. From there, her existence was fleshed out in the mid-nineteenthcentury Biographie universelle; a firm date of death was determined; translations of Hume were attributed; the “Lettre à Mademoiselle ***” of the Lettre sur les sourds et muets was published in Diderot’s complete correspondence as an actual letter to the lady philosophe. In a 1977 study, Diderot’s femme savant, Laurence L. Bongie traced the growth of the legend, establishing beyond any doubt that the Hume translations attributed to her cannot be hers, and making a strong case that the “Lettre à Mademoiselle ***” was either addressed to someone else or not a real letter at all but an authorial conceit. Yet the power of the tale is such that even Bongie was drawn back into the archives, only to emerge with a bona fide source for the captivating character—a certain Mademoiselle de Lavau, who did indeed associate with Le Camus and Gardeil (who actually worked for d’Hérouville in some unknown capacity, as reported), and who even lived just about where Diderot said she did.65 The police documents that confirm all this indicate no involvement with Diderot (himself under police surveillance); nor do they hint at any love affair. Bongie’s detective work, however, can hardly fail to confirm that Ceci n’est pas un conte was, as advertised, not a tale. It also turns out that the Hume translation and the attribution of the “Lettre à Mademoiselle” were red herrings; that La Chaux was not the heroine’s real name, as Diderot explicitly declares (D 505); and that assorted other details must be transpositions of quite unrelated events in his life.66 At most, however, these amount to fake warts on a very real portrait. What are we to make of this? The fact that the tale is basically true does not, first, square very well with the customary “lesson” critics profess to find in Diderot’s novelistic works: La Religieuse and its Préface-annexe, Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne, not to mention Jacques le fataliste, with its repeated authorial interventions—all of these are said to show Diderot’s fascination with and mistrust of illusion, his drive to unmask novels as mere novels, and so on. Here, however, the novel is quite visibly not a mere novel. The “maturation” hypothesis cannot be of much help: Ceci n’est pas un conte is composed right after Les Deux Amis and to all appearances during the prolonged (and uncertain) gestation of Jacques. One might argue that the factual basis of the tale is part of a hoax that consists in securing our conviction that La Chaux was the translator of Hume and the “Mademoiselle ***” of the Lettre sur les sourds et

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muets—a hoax that, as Bongie’s work shows, worked like a charm. Perhaps. Though if Diderot took his secret to the grave and did not reveal the hoax, the supposed purpose of hoaxing—the education of naïve sentimental-cumrealist readers—could never be realized. The whole point of La Religieuse, Les Deux Amis, and Jacques le fataliste—the point, according to the interpretation I am contesting—was that they were both the poison and the antidote. By this line of reasoning, Ceci n’est pas un conte would be pure poison. Small wonder that proponents of what passes for Diderot’s anti-illusionism omit it completely from their discussions.67 Such difficulties arise mostly from our presuppositions regarding what Diderot is after; they start to disappear once we accept that illusion is for Diderot a positive thing—not something to be denounced or surmounted, but to be pursued. There is, however, a more intractable problem with Ceci n’est pas un conte, which is that only one of its two tales is “not a tale”: researchers have looked up Reymer and Tanié, and come up with nothing. Of course, Bongie had to dig very deep to find La Chaux in Lavau, and some suppose that under different names the other two are hiding somewhere in the archives.68 This is possible, though from the very beginning of the interpretive tradition the two parts of the diptych were treated differently. Naigeon’s 1798 footnote, we’ve seen, warned us that a title which would normally be taken as an invitation to disbelieve should in fact be understood literally. Yet the note was appended not to Diderot’s first utterance of the formula, which introduced the Reymer-Tanié tale, but to the second, in which Diderot transitions to the Gardeil-La Chaux narrative by assuring us that “what I am about to add is no more a tale than what precedes” (D 504). Without saying so, Naigeon must have been of the opinion that the titular declaration should actually be interpreted both ways—ironically and literally, depending on the tale to which it applies. And if he was right—as it would seem he was—the title is exactly twice as ambiguous as it first seemed to us. But does a reader have to have known Diderot personally—like Naigeon—or spent interminable hours in the archives—like Bongie—to reach this conclusion?69 If so, this would be a private joke of small import. Yet there are, I think, textual elements in Ceci n’est pas un conte designed to suggest that its two parts were not referentially parallel, and that sometimes a tale was a tale and sometimes it wasn’t. First, the amount of detail is much less in the Tanié and Reymer episode: they are given an address (“rue Sainte-Marguerite, at my very door” [D 502]), but Maurepas is the only public figure named, and his relation to the protagonists is slight. By contrast, the second is full

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of known figures, including of course the male protagonist, Gardeil; more specifically, it would seem that Diderot took care to ground all the characters in print: D’Hérouville, Montucla, Le Camus, and Gardeil were all published authors, and La Chaux was supposed to exist in black and white as well, via her involvement with Hume and the “Lettre à Mademoiselle ***.” This last bit, again, was false, but integral to establishing the very special claims of this part of the text. As I’ve said, there are those who await the discovery of the real Tanié and Reymer. But there is good reason to believe that they wait in vain. Only La Chaux is framed by so many real people, and of all Diderot’s characters, she is the only one who is introduced by an attestation of veracity: “I’m calling her by her own name, because the poor thing is no more” (D 505). In pseudofactual novels of the period such attestations were of course very common—and commonly understood to be untrue. Of course, strictly speaking, Diderot’s is untrue too: it turns out that he did not call her by her real name. But he came very close, and the fact remains that this supplemental truth claim, unique in Diderot’s oeuvre, should be a red flag: La Chaux is special. I must stress that the issue in the second half of Ceci n’est pas un conte is not that its characters, like those of so many other novels, have a real-world source. Georges May once claimed that the fact that Diderot based La Religieuse on a real woman (Marguerite Delamarre) made it an ancestor of later realist practice: “Just as Stendhal will one day locate in the Gazette des tribunaux the subject of his novel and out of Antoine Berthot create Julien Sorel, so can we see seventy years earlier Diderot take up his pen to recount the moving story of that young nun of the Longchamp convent.”70 In fact, the practices of Diderot and Stendhal make an instructive comparison precisely because they are so opposed. Everything the former does relates to the problem of illusion. La Religieuse does indeed borrow “details” from the life of Delamarre—notably, the names of the convents through which both Delamarre and Simonin pass— but they are not so much traces of an original source as inclusions calculated to enhance the reader’s belief. In Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne, the magistrate Aubert is not a source but a real person. And Ceci n’est pas un conte’s La Chaux is not “based on” Lavau, she is Lavau. Such details—which are inevitably related to authenticating proper names—are inseparable from Diderot’s concern with illusion. Stendhal, meanwhile, never attempts to make us believe that the story of Julien Sorel occurred; he coyly mentions his source by having his hero discover the Berthot clipping himself, but this hardly seems an invitation to take Le Rouge et le Noir

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as a true story. On the contrary, it asks us to measure the immense transformation performed by the novel on an insignificant event, or, better, the superiority of the novel over the newspaper when it comes to chronicling 1830. This is why readers and later critics have viewed Berthot only as a curiosity, whereas the search for Tanié and La Chaux has been an ongoing critical project ever since Naigeon’s footnote. Diderot scholars are not less mature than Stendhal’s critics: they are simply reacting to the very different referential protocols the two writers employ. Ceci n’est pas un conte is almost the reverse of La Religieuse and Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne, which skip the claim to truth and include instead closing remarks on the production of illusion: it makes the truth claim and has no metapoetic excursus, but for all that looks nothing like the typical pseudofactual text. For the truth claim is made so insistently and repeatedly that it contains within it the impetus for readers to pursue their own metapoetic reflection, perhaps with the one Diderot had furnished in Les Deux Amis as a model. How can we tell a true story from a historical tale? And: does the difference matter? These questions are the only thing that makes sense of the double narrative and its bifurcated referentiality. The Reymer/Tanié narrative seems true, has nice details: it makes the reader say, No, in spite of the author’s declaration, this is most probably a (good, affecting, “historical”) tale. The story of La Chaux and Gardeil seems true as well, but has so many imposing details—all those published authors!—that the reader concludes that it is quite possible that this tale is literally true, just as the author claims. In neither case is there a need to commit irrevocably to invention or to truth, to one or the other interpretation of the title: in this maze of details, how can the prudent reader not suspend judgment, while of course keeping the question front and center? Moreover, that suspended judgment—which is very much distinct from Coleridge’s suspended disbelief—does not affect our moral and emotional reaction to the narratives: Reymer and Gardeil both stir our indignation, as Tanié and La Chaux are appropriate hosts for our pity. So sometimes stories are true, and sometimes they are not. As long as they seem true, it probably doesn’t matter either way.71 “This is not a tale”: behind the categorical statement lies, then, a labyrinth of forking paths and dead ends. But that labyrinth is not fiction, for its walls are built from the belief that the illusion of truth is central to literature’s impact. The texts of Diderot’s I have been dealing with attest to the fact that artistic illusion is hard to produce; and Diderot does not shy away from the fact that

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there are many ways of thinking about illusion, ways that mostly end up contradictory or paradoxical. Hence, if vividly executed, a novel can be openly acknowledged as invented while still creating illusion and laying claim to profound moral and emotional effect: such might be the metapoetic lesson of La Religieuse or Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne. On the other hand, some seemingly true tales may be really true, but if so they probably have about the same effect as those that are not—witness the two halves of Ceci n’est pas un conte. One could pursue this deeper into Diderot’s oeuvre: Jacques le fataliste, so often advanced as fiction at its purest and most ludic, is also and quite deliberately an assembly of anecdotes. This novel’s generic and structural complexity would require a chapter of its own, but its consideration would not, I believe, change much the conclusions I will now offer on Diderot’s possession by the demon of reality. When Laurence Bongie successfully scraped away two centuries of dubious inferences regarding Mademoiselle La Chaux of Ceci n’est pas un conte, he expressed bewilderment at the “distressing literal-mindedness” of so many scholars. Why should it matter, he asks, if there are contradictions between Diderot’s tale and, say, the biography of the real Gardeil? “The normally welldisposed reader is not expected to set about pursuing the pleasures of fiction with critical pen in hand, alertly noting every little inconsistency encountered. Ordinarily the reader asks only to be given a good excuse for believing imaginatively.” Bongie was equally frustrated with critical “orthodoxy” regarding Diderot’s inability to invent stories: all writers bring their creative energies to bear on their own experience and observations, he argued, and there is no such thing as truly ex nihilo invention. The fact moreover that La Chaux did not exist was proof that Diderot did invent, and that his tales should be read like any other imaginative works; “author and reader are being asked to acknowledge the aesthetic distance which has been deliberately introduced.”72 Bongie’s subsequent discovery of Mademoiselle de Lavau did not cause the scholar to revise his opinion: Lavau was so transformed that we should admire all the more “the great writer’s imagination and the manipulatory magic of his words.”73 But of course the idea of Diderot as a writer of fiction—a particularly good one, but otherwise like any other—is hard to maintain. In many places, Bongie refers to the tales as simply “realistic,” but in others he lapses into formulations that indicate how difficult it is to speak of something like Ceci n’est pas un conte as one speaks of properly fictional novels. Hence, he asserts that Diderot “was writing fiction, true fiction,” and in the course of defending

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the writer’s inventive abilities calls him “one of the best literary liars of his century.”74 Locutions like these are, I think, well chosen; but they also undermine Bongie’s enduring contention that the real people behind Diderot’s tale don’t matter. I doubt very much that Bongie would ever call Flaubert a “literary liar,” or Salammbô a “true fiction”—no matter how refined the master’s sense of detail or deep his historical research. Realists like Flaubert did indeed talk about the truth of their novels and the importance of “the real” to art. That truth, however, was not Diderot’s: it was neither illusion nor allusion; it was quite simply a “real world” that was being described through admittedly invented particulars. The realists did not shun emotion, and they, like sentimental writers, had their didactic points to make. But that emotion and those assertions were not dependent on the literal reality of the characters, as they were according to the assumptions of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory. Diderot pushed hard on those assumptions, bringing them into the foreground, testing them. But his tales were defined by this horizon, which is in no way subverted. The reason so many critics thought for so long that La Chaux existed is simply that Diderot incited them to; and when Bongie debunked that existence only to stumble upon a slightly different one, he was doing nothing but following the same cues. “Ordinarily the reader asks only to be given a good excuse for believing imaginatively,” writes the scholar: ordinarily, yes, but Diderot’s order was not ours. This is why his tales are not fiction, and why they do not anticipate fiction. In the polemical year 1857 Champfleury found Diderot’s demon of reality to be sufficiently close to the realist spirit of Courbet, Balzac, and Sue to count as an ancestor. For the critic it did not matter that the writer—unlike Balzac or Sue—pretended that the story of La Chaux was true; much like Auerbach later, Champfleury was simply associating realism with a serious attention to the everyday. Diderot’s genius lay in the perfect execution of the tale, certainly; but still more basically, what set him apart from Rousseau or Voltaire was his gift for recognizing that what was going on in his immediate neighborhood was worthy of artistic treatment. “How many enlightened souls are living in the middle of domestic dramas without suspecting it? In our lives, singular events occur every day that touch us inside, but we give hardly a thought to transforming them into novels or comedies.”75 Champfleury elides a key disjunction between the realist everyday and Diderot’s practice, however. Diderot wants to open our eyes to the high drama unfolding in this or that convent, in forests of Bourbonne, at his doorstep in the Latin Quarter. As with many realists, this desire can have a political dimension—most evident

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in La Religieuse’s protest against forced vocations; still clear in Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne’s focus on the financial precarity at the root of Félix and Olivier’s tragedy; muted or nonexistent in La Chaux’s selfless labors, which illustrate more a moral truth than an economic one. But a key attraction of Diderot’s everyday is that it brings drama and heroics home; up close and personal, it enhances our belief and heightens our emotion. The drama we stumble upon, in other words, is aesthetically superior to the elevated subject matter of tragedy—aesthetic in the eighteenth-century sense of producing feeling. Suzanne Simonin, Olivier and Félix, La Chaux and Tanié: these heroes of great virtue can be found under our noses, not in far-off times or climes; as such, the illusion is more captivating, and the emotional and moral effect of their heroism stronger. Enlisting Diderot as a realist entails forgetting that art for him is essentially predicated on the heightened experience derived from contact with heroes we can believe in. And we believe in them not because they are “believable”—meaning flawed or contradictory or nuanced or deep. Belief is of a more literal order: “My word, this is real; such things can’t be invented.” Diderot does not treat the everyday as art; in the everyday, he finds high drama and real heroes. This is why he is neither a realist nor, even, a writer of fiction.

Chapter 6

Beyond Belief (Cazotte)

In his famous essay on the uncanny, Freud does not attempt to provide a literary history of this effect of “dread and creeping horror,” but he gives enough examples to allow us to sketch one out.1 He finds the uncanny in the stories of Hoffmann and Schnitzler, and even in a Strand magazine piece in which carved crocodiles come to life. He does not find it in “Homer’s jovial world of gods,” nor in Dante and Shakespeare, whose works nonetheless abound in spiritual entities. Fairy tales, meanwhile, are “crammed with instantaneous wish-fulfillments”; “and yet,” writes Freud, “I cannot think of any genuine fairy-story which has anything uncanny about it.” Sheer literary talent cannot be the explanation for the uncanny, since the “thoroughly silly” story in the Strand easily beats Shakespeare and Homer. So even if Freud doesn’t actually draw the conclusion, it would seem from his examples that the uncanny is above all a historical phenomenon: the literature of many periods has supernatural or irrational content, but modern literature is the uncanny’s only home. Such a periodization has been confirmed by subsequent research into the literary genre that best overlaps with the uncanny, the fantastic: both are defined by an intrusion of the irrational into the seemingly rational world, and both appear to come into their own in the nineteenth century.2 One popular explanation for the uncanny’s historical intrusion has been to stress an evolution in mentality—in people’s beliefs about the supernatural, in their faith in reason. Freud’s essay points firmly in this direction. Since the uncanny is generated by the shocking eruption of the irrational into the rational world, it cannot very well exist before the world itself is viewed rationally; indeed, the uncanny is precisely the return of beliefs “surmounted” by the process of rationalization, but which “still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation.”3 Freud himself provides no indication of when that

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surmounting occurred, but others have singled out the Enlightenment as the moment when ghosts exit the material world and enter literature. For E. J. Clery, the early 1760s seem emblematic: in 1762, the so-called Cock Lane ghost attracts much attention, both skeptical and credulous; two years later, one of the skeptics, Walpole, converts the polemic into entertainment by penning the gothic harbinger The Castle of Otranto.4 In her analysis of gothic-era ghost stories, Terry Castle sets the shift a bit later, at the turn of the nineteenth century, “precisely [the] moment when traditional credulity had begun to give way, more or less definitively, to the arguments of scientific rationality.”5 Either way, our uncanny literature allows us to savor at nostalgic remove a realm of experience otherwise lost to Enlightenment rationality. “Aesthetically induced demonic dread of the sort Freud describes,” writes Victoria Nelson, “is finally all that we superstition-free rationalists possess of the numinous.”6 Fantastic literature may well provide life support for beliefs that have otherwise become embarrassing, but throughout this chapter I will sidestep appeals to a sea-change in Western rationality as the genre’s source or explanation. First, it would be a tall order indeed to decide just when we surmounted the “traditional credulity” of our ancestors: when Castle tells us that the literary uncanny arises “precisely” at the point that scientific rationality “more or less” “had begun” to win out, she unwittingly highlights the elasticity of a transition that can be positioned pretty much wherever the argument requires.7 Second, and much more important, the proper place of the supernatural, the irrational, and the unbelievable in literature had long been a subject of debate—in Enlightenment England and France, certainly, but also in the neoclassical French seventeenth century, and before that in the Italian Renaissance; all these writers and thinkers, meanwhile, were turning over some basic if ambiguous precepts found already in Aristotle and Horace. Chief among these was the latter’s dictum incredulus odi, typically taken to mean that unbelievable subject matter could give no pleasure.8 No doubt real beliefs, both popular and elite, did change over such a long period. But the advent of the uncanny or fantastic genre, as well as its break from previous accepted uses of the supernatural, is a problem whose solution lies less in the process of rationalization than in aesthetic and literary history. The reason we can date Freud’s uncanny to the beginning of the nineteenth century has to do, then, with beliefs about literature, beliefs that change at least in part due to the experiments of writers. Only when novels start to prove, through their own aesthetic efficacy, that we can indeed take things we read seriously without crediting them as having really happened—only then

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is the door open to a genre that mingles the supernatural and the realistic. The world of such a type of novel is no longer the ersatz real world of the pseudofactual novel. Instead, it becomes a fictional world soliciting a type of belief that can be quite vivid but that remains qualitatively distinct from the “historical faith” Richardson had supposed necessary to the success of Clarissa. The change was both sudden and a long time coming, and the present chapter approaches it through a short novel that has often been advanced as the original fantastic narrative, Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux (1772). While the fantastic designation seems to me doubtful, Le Diable amoureux is actually more interesting, historically speaking, than it would be if it were a beginning: it is a self-conscious effort to overcome the limits traditionally imposed on the marvelous that does not, however, produce a formula that will be copied. My argument proceeds in three stages. First, I delve into the tradition of thought about the poetic marvelous that Cazotte confronted. Writers—even neoclassical writers like Corneille and Dryden—were not so much hostile to the supernatural as convinced that there should be two classes of literature that did not communicate. I call this doctrine—though it is really more like a set of interlocking assumptions—the Great Divide. On the one hand, there was a literature of illusion and emotion that functioned because its audience believed it literally (if incompletely); on the other, there was a literature that appealed to the sensory imagination alone and produced a distinct sort of pleasure. It was this divide that Cazotte, steeped in earlier uses of the marvelous ranging from Ariosto to fairy tales, sought to overcome, and so my second section examines the work whose very subject is the protagonist’s love for a devilish creature who herself (apparently) longs to become human, that is, subject to the laws and pleasures of the flesh. The chapter’s last part reckons with the demonstrable fact that Le Diable amoureux was part of no movement or school: even if the novel can legitimately be called fictional, it did not initiate any broad change in literary practice; in France, only under the influence of the English gothic in the 1790s did the supernatural start to intrude into the world of the novel. And the same can be said for the apparently pioneering work of the English gothic: Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) sought to bridge the Great Divide, but it was essentially a one-off. Though both novels can arguably considered fictional, they were so in isolation; neither hit upon the formula that powers modern supernatural narrative.

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The Great Divide The story of Cazotte’s supernatural obsessions leads back to what many think of as a most ununcanny place—to the neoclassical seventeenth century, ruled by the sensible, sing-song demands of vraisemblance and bienséance. Critics often point to Corneille’s early tragedy Médée (1635) as a last gasp of the literary irrational. Mythological, supernatural, and violent, it was the Other that Corneille himself had to repress in order to found a political and psychological tragedy, a tragedy that was “civilized” in Norbert Elias’s sense of the word, “disenchanted” in Max Weber’s.9 After the infanticidal sorceress of Médée exits the stage in a flying chariot pulled by dragons, Corneille distances himself from mythological subjects, and as goes Corneille goes neoclassical tragedy more generally: no flying chariots are to be found in Racine’s tragedies, certainly; only Voltaire, under the influence of Shakespeare, will make an anemic attempt to bring a ghost back on stage in Sémiramis (1748). This, however, is only part of the picture—half of it, precisely. Corneille himself was not hostile to myth, and in 1650 offered audiences Andromède—a machine play that challenged recently imported Italian operas through the use of music, elaborate sets, and special effects. And so when Medea pops up again at the end of the century, she does so in an opera, with music by Charpentier and a libretto by Corneille’s younger brother Thomas.10 The gods of old were not put to death by reason, after all. With Medea and her chariot, they simply migrated across the Great Divide that separated a literature of belief from a literature of the imagination. This migration marked a decisive modification of longstanding thought about the poetic marvelous—a thought that was both complicated and downright paradoxical. Complicated, because the marvelous was a grab-bag category comprising anything out of the ordinary that could stimulate the audience’s sense of wonder. The category included the pagan gods of Greece and Rome, and the Christian God as well; but the marvelous was also to be found in other types of content—purely human actions that were extreme enough, for example. (Medea was just as “marvelous” for killing her children as for driving her dragon chariot.) Moreover, the passions elicited by marvels—wonder and admiration—could be provoked not only by what was represented but also by the manner of representation itself. Ingenious plot reversals, unexpected recognitions, episodic digressions that impressed by their variety, even poetic language itself—all of these were evoked in discussions of the marvelous.

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Muddling matters still further were generic divergences: epic narration was widely held to be more tolerant of the marvelous than tragic representation. And beneath all this lay a kind of paradox. Since belief in the poem was essential to the stimulation of the audience’s passions, the very marvelous that grabbed our interest and provoked our admiration worked against our absorption into the artwork. “Whatever I cannot for a moment believe, I cannot for a moment behold with interest or anxiety”: such was Johnson’s paraphrase of Horace’s famous incredulus odi line.11 Like the God of Job, then, the marvelous both giveth and taketh away. Though the fine line between stimulating interest and prompting rejection is arguably still with us, the French seventeenth century witnessed a generic reorganization that mitigated substantially the paradox of the marvelous. This was not primarily a theoretical achievement: disagreement about the marvelous was no less prevalent among seventeenth-century authorities such as Chapelain, Rapin, or Le Bossu than in the writings of Castelvetro and Tasso that inspired them. It is rather in the period’s poetic production that a generic division of labor became obvious. Marvels related to plotting, for example, were reserved for the romance novel and for tragicomedy. Tragedy proper focused on two kinds of marvelous emphasized by Castelvetro: men doing horrible deeds either deliberately or against their will. The marvelous gods, meanwhile, were exiled to opera.12 If the new generic topography was not justified by a full-blown theoretical program, it was not arbitrary either: its logic may be gleaned by crossing isolated or occasional remarks. Audience emotion, people reasoned, was of essentially two different sorts. On the one hand the literary work could stimulate the passions of the heart; according to this model, belief was indeed a prerequisite, for without it, we would not feel—with Johnson’s “interest or anxiety”—the contagious passions of the characters.13 On the other hand, an art form like opera produced a different sort of emotion—a pleasure that was visual and auditory. Corneille, in his remarks on his machine play Andromède, is quite explicit: “My main goal here,” he writes, “has been to satisfy the gaze by the spectacle’s brilliance [éclat] and richness [diversité], and not to touch the mind by the force of argument, or the heart by the delicacy of the passions. . . . I might as well admit that this play is for the eyes alone.”14 Whereas theorists from Chapelain to d’Aubignac routinely predicated the effects of tragedy on the carefully cultivated belief of the audience, both defenders and critics of the new opera referred instead to a different kind of illusion, a sensory enthrallment that was not belief—ravissement, charme, and enchantement

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are some of the terms used by writers such as Saint-Évremond and La Bruyère. “There are therefore poetical reasons why at the opera I can judge excellent things that I would find detestable at the theater,” wrote Perrault in 1674, and he couldn’t have put it better.15 Perrault’s recognition of opera’s specific pleasures is moreover appropriate, for the writer was involved with another fin-de-siècle genre that was likewise supposed to enchant by recycling a bygone mythology that demanded no credence. This was the fairy tale, of which Perrault published one of the first collections, the 1697 Histoires ou contes du temps passé; though the vogue’s first wave subsided by about 1710, its effects reverberated throughout eighteenthcentury literature. It is easy to assume that fairy tales were merely transcriptions, more or less embellished, of oral narratives, and that they were destined for children. In fact, only about half of the eighty tales published between 1696 and 1705 have folkloric antecedents, after which a full ninety percent of the production is invented.16 And they were not invented to be read to children. On the contrary, they were often embedded within longer novels in a manner that figures their own intended mode of consumption: in novels like Histoire d’Hypolite, comte de Duglas (d’Aulnoy, 1690—apparently the first published example), Inès de Cordoue (Bernard, 1696), or Les Petits Soupers de l’été de l’année 1699 (Durand, 1702), the tales are exchanged by aristocrats wanting to divert, impress, or seduce one another. The title of d’Aulnoy’s 1698 collection Les Illustres Fées, contes galants dédiés aux dames [the illustrious fairies, gallant tales dedicated to ladies]—speaks to the role these works played within the context of elite sociability. And they encoded as well a literary program. Because they owed nothing to the erudition of classical learning, they could serve as a kind of “manifesto of modernity,” especially for women writers.17 Unlike laborious poetic imitatio, which arranged traditionally sanctioned subject matter in new way, what Addison (citing Dryden) would call the “fairie way of writing” came straight from the unbounded imagination of its creators.18 One embedded narrator refers to her tale as containing “the marvels born of imaginations unrestrained by the trappings of truth”; another celebrates the possibility of ex nihilo creation: This tale, she says, “is absolutely my own.”19 So fairies were not simply in the tales: through their inventions, women authors actually became “modern fairies,” according to the title of Murat’s Histoires sublimes et allégoriques, dédiées aux fées modernes. Yet, as Perrault’s title—“stories and tales of times past”—attests, fairy tales were as self-consciously old as they were new. A tale like “La Belle au bois dormant,” Jean-Paul Sermain points out, is strewn with references to

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chivalric romance; Sermain goes on to list some of the forgotten titles that demonstrate the extent to which fairies, though on the one hand associated with aristocratic oral exchange, were also emissaries from a dusty (and written) medieval past—as in Lhéritier de Villandon’s La Tour ténébreuse et les jours lumineuses, contes anglais . . . tirés d’une ancienne chronique composée par Richard, surnommé Coeur de lion (1705), Nodot’s Histoire de Geoffroy, surnommé la Grand’Dent, sixième fils de Mélusine (1700), or Gueulette’s Soirées bretonnes (1710), which presents itself as an eighth-century manuscript.20 If opera provided a way of savoring unbelievable classical mythology, texts like these recycled indigenous beliefs, transforming harmless superstitions into poetry. Addison says as much: the fairy way of writing demands on the part of the poet “a particular cast of fancy, and an imagination naturally fruitful and superstitious”: “he ought to be very well versed in legends and fables, antiquated romances, and the traditions of nurses and old women, that he may fall in with our natural prejudices, and humour those notions which we have imbibed in our infancy.”21 Fairy tales are thus what Susan Stewart has called a “distressed” genre, in the sense that they mark a deliberate return to bygone beliefs, beliefs “pried from a context of function and placed within a context of self-referentiality.”22 To fairy tales, old in their inspiration, new in the type of literature and authorship they represented, one could certainly add still other manifestations of the distressed sensibility, most obviously Galland’s Les Mille et Une Nuits (1704–1717), the translation of a series of Arabic manuscripts the Orientalist scholar had come across during his travels in the Islamic world.23 It is difficult to overstate the importance of fairy and oriental tales to the literary landscape of the eighteenth century: along with endless reprints and continuations, there were numerous appropriations of these fanciful forms—by writers like Diderot, Crébillon, and Voltaire—for satiric “philosophical” purposes. By the same token, however, it is difficult now to understand this popularity. I am not making a judgment of quality, here, but merely remarking that whatever the merits or present readability of these works, the genre was useful to writers for reasons relating to the literary field as it was then contested and configured, reasons we can scare now comprehend. As the title of a book like Les Mille et Un Quart-d’heure (Gueulette, 1715) suggests, the valuation of fancy led to the deliberate cultivation of a frivolity that was the measure of the writer’s inventiveness, freedom, and ability to entertain. Small wonder, then, that a book as vital to literary history as Galland’s translation of the Arabian Nights has become, in the words of one critic, an “invisible masterpiece.”24 To be sure, we

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can still appreciate fanciful literature, but our aesthetic landscape is no longer that of the early eighteenth century. For the landscape I have been describing—and it was the landscape of England as much as that of France—was cleaved in two. In a text from 1762 that has become important to the history of the English gothic—another distressed and marvelous genre—Richard Hurd sums up well the opposite but complementary rationales attached to the literatures of illusion on the one hand and fancy on the other. In those species that address themselves to the heart and would obtain their end, not through the imagination, but through the passions, there the liberty of transgressing nature, I mean the real powers and properties of human nature, is infinitely restrained; and poetical truth is, under these circumstances, almost as severe a thing as historical. The reason is, we must first believe, before we can be affected. But the case is different with the more sublime and creative poetry. This species, addressing itself solely or principally to the imagination—a young and credulous faculty, which loves to admire and to be deceived—has no need to observe those cautious rules of credibility so necessary to be followed by him who would touch the affections and interest the heart.25 Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance, which make a case for the interest of a literature that operates by its own special rules, are sometimes said to lay the groundwork for Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, published just two years later.26 This is probably a bit misleading, as we will see, but for the moment it is enough to remark that conceptually speaking, Hurd’s argument is standardissue: he merely reprises a division that had been theorized on and off, and indeed practiced, at least since Corneille made his remarks about Andromède being for the eyes alone. In 1712, Addison was already claiming the territory of the imagination for England, whose people are “naturally fanciful, and very often disposed by that gloominess and melancholy of temper . . . to many wild notions and visions”27; and since then it has been easy to view the country of Shakespeare as constitutionally opposed to the country of Voltaire, and the natural home of the gothic sensibility. In fact, the Great Divide between neoclassical illusion and distressed literatures of the imagination ran right through both countries. English proponents of the gothic merely appropriated for their own purposes the aesthetic rationale worked out by the

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people promoting the possibly more “French” genres of opera, fairy tales, and oriental tales.28 If we want to understand why Freud could think of no uncanny fairy tales, we need look no further than the Great Divide. On one side there was the literature of real human feelings and moral instruction that founded itself on history and illusion and literal truth—tragedy, epic, the historical romance, and the pseudofactual novel. On the other side was a literature that appealed to the senses, to the imagination—opera, fairy tales, and oriental tales, which is to say genres that like the later gothic trafficked in the beliefs of other times or other places and that demanded from the present audience only an imaginative investment, ironic or distanced. In practice these logics were not always mutually exclusive: by the mid-eighteenth century, for instance, there were calls for a type of nonmythological, purely human opera that could serve as a vehicle for sentimental sympathy.29 But allowing for such inevitable complications, the literature of truth and the literature of fancy did not meet; the supernatural could not erupt within everyday reality, producing Freud’s slowly creeping sense of dread, for these were different practices, each with its own conventions and traditions. Until Cazotte, in Le Diable amoureux, tried to mix them together.

Incredible Love The oeuvre of Cazotte, a navy administrator who was not a writer by profession, is mostly forgotten today. This is not surprising: his energies were almost entirely devoted to the literature of fancy whose contours were drawn around the turn of the eighteenth century. He participated in polemics on opera, notably opposing Rousseau’s attempts to abolish its marvelous subject matter; he composed Ollivier (1763), a chivalric prose poem in the vein of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, and the distressed “medieval” ballad “La Veillée de la bonne femme” (1752, pub. 1788); working from an Arabic manuscript we now know was forged, he penned a continuation to Galland’s Les Mille et Une Nuits (1788); and he cut his teeth on a number of fairy tales, or more accurately selfconscious fairy tales that incorporate characters who know they are trapped in the genre, people who pretend to be fairies, and so on. In some respects, he was distinctly of his time: many other writers rode Galland’s coattails by adding to his endlessly popular collection; Crébillon and Voltaire too used oriental tales for satirical or philosophical purposes; Hamilton wrote self-conscious

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fairy tales in the spirit of salon banter, or badinage. But in one respect Cazotte surprises, for a few of his works try hard to give readers a marvelous they can believe in even though it is unbelievable. First among these is Le Diable amoureux, in which fancy, in the form of a horrible camel, sticks its head into the sensible and verisimilar world of the pseudofactual novel. Le Diable amoureux is retrospectively narrated by the Spaniard Alvare, who in his twenties served in the guards of the king of Naples (presumably Charles, also duke of Parma, who would become Charles III of Spain in 1759). When, after a smoky evening of idle chatter about the esoteric or “cabalistic” sciences, Alvare is approached and interrogated by a mysterious participant who claims to be an initiate, he quickly accepts his interlocutor’s proposal to introduce him to the occult. Led down to a secret chamber beneath the recently discovered ruins of Herculaneum, in the town of Portici, Alvare is shown a pentacle scratched onto the floor and given the formula needed to summon Beelzebub. His hair on end, a chill in his veins, he steps into the pentacle and pronounces the magic words. A window high in the underground vault flies open, and in a blaze of light a hideous camel’s head appears. “Che vuoi?” it asks.30 Immediately, Alvare orders the apparition to take the form of a spaniel, and the camel vomits the specified dog at the narrator’s feet. Alvare presses on, demanding that a feast be served up for his cabalist friends, and that the dog appear there as a page dressed in his new master’s livery. All this occurs—to the amazement of Alvare’s group, but also, we may presume, to that of the contemporary reader. Cazotte begins in a manner that recalls a popular book like Villars’s Le Comte de Gabalis (1670), in which the first-person narrator describes with ironic detachment the superstitious doctrine of a renowned German “sage.”31 Yet before we know it, the initiate proves to be just that, the doorkeeper to another reality. And Alvare’s own character blurs our expectations. On the one hand, he seems the very type of the rationalist skeptic, responding to the initiate’s openings by asserting the Cartesian tabula rasa of his mind—“Je ne connais rien des esprits, à commencer par le mien, sinon que je suis sûr de son existence” (8). Alvare’s play on the word “esprit” makes his assertion difficult to translate: he knows nothing, he says, about (supernatural) spirits, no more than he knows about his own spirit, or mind; except that, like Descartes, he is convinced of the latter’s existence. And indeed, there in the ruins below Herculaneum, he displays the intrepid bravery associated with the skeptical esprits forts that we have seen in Subligny, those who have no truck with superstition.32 At the same time,

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however, Alvare is characterized by the insatiable “curiosity” of the gullible soul: the desire for something beyond “ordinary knowledge” possesses him (8). The reader familiar with earlier works with supernatural content must wonder: is this a satire of Alvare? or is Alvare our skeptical surrogate? Neither. Alvare’s credo is something more like: I don’t believe but I want to believe. And so the tone here is not debunking, as if we were but temporarily unsure of the all-too-natural causes we know to be behind the observed phenomena; nor is the initiate’s discourse displayed for us to savor ironically as the ravings of a madman. And it goes without saying that we are far from a fairy world where anything is possible. Rather, a supernatural that no one can believe in is nevertheless treated as a reality. When Alvare demands the presence of an opera star to entertain his feasting friends, she materializes and sings; his guests are “astounded by the truth of the scene, to the point of rubbing their eyes” (17).33 The conceit of Le Diable amoureux is indeed bracing, generically speaking. The work takes precisely the opposite route from Cazotte’s earliest ironic fairy tales, undertaken much in the spirit of Hamilton or Caylus. Les Mille et Une Fadaises (1742), for example, is told to an insomniac Marquise in the hopes that the clichés of the genre will finally enable her to get some rest.34 By contrast, in Le Diable amoureux, Cazotte injects the supernatural into a pseudofactual frame and finds that it is able to produce effects at the other end of the emotional spectrum from boredom-induced sleep. Fright, first: at the apparition of the camel’s head, Alvare describes a complete capsizing of his being, as “a multitude of feelings, ideas, and reflections touch my heart, pass into my mind, and leave their mark on me all at once” (13). And then, soon, passions of a more suave sort, as Alvare is moved “to the bottom of [his] heart” (18) by the singing of the diva, who, he notices, is a further transformation of the graceful pageboy Biondetto. Biondetto, who looks good dressed as a woman, Alvare notes. Biondetto, who reveals that he is in fact a she, Biondetta, a sylph who has betrayed the devil out of admiration for Alvare’s bravery, and who in the process discovers love: “I realized,” she tells Alvare, “that I had a heart” (49). Alvare, of course, feels much the same way. Le Diable amoureux is, precisely, a kind of fairy tale that has lost its distance from our world; beings that normally frolic in their own domain ask us to believe that they have become real. Le Diable amoureux’s plot revolves entirely around the inflamed protagonist’s uncertainty in this respect. What is the exact relationship between Biondetta, the spaniel, and the camel’s head? Can it really be possible that a creature of air has become flesh and blood? Naturally, Alvare is wary; at the same time, Biondetta seems so very alive. After she

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is seriously wounded by a knife-wielding, jealous rival, Alvare at last contemplates her “beautiful bleeding body, cut by two enormous gashes that seemed as if they must both be attacking the wellspring of life” (45); shortly thereafter, during the bandaging of her wounds, her sex is “confirmed” (47). “Man was a mixture of a bit of mud and water,” Alvare muses. “Why wouldn’t a woman be made of dew, terrestrial vapors, and rays of light, the condensed debris of a rainbow? Where is the possible . . . ? Where is the impossible . . . ?” (93–94, ellipses in original). Periodic memories and dreams of his pious mother bolster Alvare’s continued delays and resistance; he tells Biondetta that they will be married once his mother blesses their union. During the trip back to Spain he succumbs to temptation. Carnal satisfaction is quickly followed by Biondetta’s revelation of her true identity. Alvare cowers under the bed until he is pulled from his hiding place some time later and finds his tormentor gone. Soon reunited with his mother, he is told by a theologian that his true remorse and good intentions have preserved him.35 Reading Cazotte nowadays can be a familiar operation, and not only because of his archetypal exaltation of maternal purity at the expense of carnal woman. For Le Diable amoureux is generically familiar: we cannot help but read it through what we know follows, which is the romantic fantastic. Enrolling Cazotte under the banner of the fantastic has a long literary-historical sanction: Pierre-Georges Castex, for example, called Cazotte “the true creator of the French fantastic tale,” and practitioners such as Tieck and Hoffmann, Nodier and Mérimée, had already invoked Le Diable amoureux as an inspiration.36 Unsurprisingly, then, Tzvetan Todorov’s now-classic The Fantastic pointed to Cazotte’s novel as the genre’s true beginning. But Todorov’s structuralism made for an account that was not a typical generic history: the fantastic, he claimed, occupied a specific spot on a generic grid. Todorov divided supernatural narratives into three sorts—the uncanny [l’étrange], in which apparently irrational events are explained rationally; the marvelous, in which the laws of rationality are suspended; and finally the fantastic, in which characters and readers hesitate over “whether or not what they perceive derives from ‘reality’ as it exists in the common opinion.”37 A complication in this generic grid was necessitated by the temporal dimension of the reading process, since the characters and readers can well hesitate for a while, only to resolve their doubts by the book’s end. Hence, Todorov ended up with a total of five categories— the uncanny, the fantastic-uncanny (in which the supernatural was shown to have a rational explanation), the fantastic-marvelous (hesitation was followed by the confirmation of supernatural agency), the marvelous, and finally the

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“pure” fantastic, in which hesitation is maintained until the very end.38 Todorov’s comments on Le Diable amoureux are occasional and ambiguous, but the work does occupy a strategic spot in The Fantastic: Alvare’s hesitations provide Todorov with his opening example of the genre’s sine qua non condition.39 Historically, moreover, the work’s importance is underlined: the fantastic “appeared in a systematic way around the end of the eighteenth century with Cazotte.”40 But there are a number of ways in which Cazotte does not fit very well into Todorov’s structuralist grid. The first thing to notice is that the critic’s characterization of Alvare’s hesitation is inconsistent, shifting. In his initial presentation, Todorov implies that the main hesitation is on the order of a hoax: is Biondetta “simply a woman,” in spite of the fact that “the way this being first appeared clearly suggests that she is a representative of the other world”?41 In virtually the same breath, the critic then shifts the hesitation a bit: Alvare is said to wonder whether sylphs exist, or if he is not dreaming the whole thing. And at another point, later in the study, the critic locates Alvare’s search for a rational explanation in a short episode at the book’s beginning when the initiate, Sobanero, calls out to an invisible servant to take away his pipe and bring it back lighted; when this happens, “we seek, with [the narrator], a rational explanation for those bizarre phenomena.”42 As a result, it is difficult to know just where on his grid Todorov places Cazotte’s novel. As an example of the “pure” fantastic, one would expect, given that he opens his account with Alvare: “The ambiguity is sustained to the very end of the adventure: reality or dream? truth or illusion?”43 Several pages later, however, he leaves Cazotte behind on the grounds that the hesitation of the protagonist is only “momentary.”44 There is good reason for these difficulties. Cazotte does thematize hesitation, but it is not the hesitation that will characterize the later fantastic (or, as we will see, the English gothic). For all Todorov’s textual examples rewrite Cazotte so as to bring him in line with the critic’s definition. Alvare spends no time thinking up rational explanations for the pipe lighting, but immediately becomes Sobanero’s acolyte, pestering him for access to the other world; the question is never whether Biondetta is just a woman after all, but whether the sylph has become human. And in the passage to which Todorov alludes, Alvare does say, “All this seemed to be a dream,” but this is the beginning of a reasoning process designed to convince himself of the dreamlike nature of all reality: “but is human life ever anything else?” he asks (50). In addition, many critics have pointed out that Todorov passes over the most ambiguous part of

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the tale—another moment at the very end when Alvare cries out, “Is everything false in the dreadful dream I’ve been dreaming?” (84). This possibility creates numerous interpretive ambiguities; one critic has gone so far as to call it “one of the most underdetermined texts in narrative literature,” arguing that the dream hypothesis destroys any hope of producing a “literal reading” of Le Diable amoureux.45 These ambiguities are real, and if I do not go into them here, it is simply because our difficulty in determining just what has happened to Alvare has nothing to do with fantastic hesitation regarding the possible reality of apparently supernatural phenomena. It is hard to tell whether Alvare has been dreaming, and if he has, where that dream may have started; some have called into doubt whether, dreaming or not, Alvare has actually slept with Biondetta, or even whether we can consider him “saved” at the novel’s end.46 This may be intentional on Cazotte’s part, or merely the result of sloppiness. But given that all critics agree that there is no textual evidence for the possibility that Alvare is dreaming the entire narrative, none of this changes the fact that the devil actually appears to him, and to us, in the ruins of Herculaneum.47 For strangely—or, strangely for the reader of the later fantastic—Alvare immediately grants the apparitions at Portici a certain type of reality: yes, there is an order of beings with which man can be in contact, and which have power over the natural world, even though they are not of that world. What Alvare himself must be brought to consider is the possibility that the two orders of reality can become confused. The hideous camel’s head, the spaniel, the pageboy, the opera diva—all these exist for Alvare (and for the reader) as “real” apparitions. The illusion does not concern the existence of the supernatural, but lies in Biondetta’s purportedly human nature. Alvare asks: can it be true that this beautiful, embodied creature is not—is no longer—the devil? And Cazotte answers: she was the devil all along. Whatever hesitation it presents to us, it is not that of the fantastic as Todorov defines it, which is said to start “from a perfectly natural situation [only] to reach its climax in the supernatural.”48 On the contrary, Le Diable amoureux is structurally almost the inversion of the fantastic, since it starts with the supernatural and then asks whether the supernatural has become part of the natural world.49 This is not to exalt the novel as genre-bending. It is hardly surprising that Cazotte does not obey conventions that did not exist when he was writing, or that Alvare’s nonfantastic hesitation makes more sense in the context of what comes before it than what comes after. And what comes before is the literature of fancy, whose imaginative pleasures were of a qualitatively different sort

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from those experienced by audiences who were assumed to believe—literally yet not completely—in the reality of spectacle or narrative. Contemporary reactions are not especially plentiful, nor are they unambiguous, but they all situate Cazotte against this literature of the marvelous. The most extensive of these emphasize Cazotte’s break with this tradition. Hence, the anonymous reviewer for Le Mercure de France opens with a meditation on generic resemblance: today’s tragedies, novels, tales, comedies usually have the same “physiognomy” as their predecessors, but every now and then certain writers are able to “cast in a new mold” the works created by their “imagination.” Such is Le Diable amoureux, whose surface of “frivolity” and “banter” hides a moral lesson about resisting our weaknesses.50 Élie-Catherine Fréron, in his Année littéraire, is even more categorical. France, where “shameless plagiarism” is the normal recipe for success, finally has something “original and new” to rival Shakespeare, the operas of Quinault, and the Italian “enchanters,” presumably Ariosto and Tasso. For aside from Quinault, Fréron writes, all the French have had until now are fairies—and “their magic wand is short.” Casual observers may think that the marvelous genres are easy, but this is far from the case: supernatural subject matter makes it hard to produce involvement, or intérêt, on the part of the reader. Le Diable amoureux is a “model” in that respect. It creates “limits” for the marvelous; and the way events are presented “gives an appearance of verisimilitude [un air de vraisemblance] to what is furthest from nature.”51 These two reactions were not the only ones—a couple more short notices simply saw here a badinage indistinguishable from the familiar French marvelous.52 But they do credit Cazotte with an original use of the imagination; Fréron states specifically that originality lay in the way Cazotte treated the supernatural as if it were natural. Le Diable amoureux’s sharp departure from normal practices of the marvelous was not dulled by time: when the French Romantics looked back at Cazotte a half-century later, he was still the only French example of a nonfrivolous use of the supernatural. In Jean-Jacques Ampère’s appreciation of Hoffmann, published the year before the posthumous appearance of the German writer’s Contes fantastiques (1829) in France, Cazotte is adduced as the exception that proves the rule: unlike the Germans, the French have been uninterested in using the marvelous as anything but “a ridiculous phantasmagoria or a purely satirical frame.” Of the abundant French production in the vein of the new marvelous, only Le Diable amoureux, “a masterwork of imagination and grace, . . . gives some idea of the pleasure provoked by the proper use of [the marvelous], and should reconcile to it all those who have been put

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off by the nonsense of certain novels and melodramas.”53 Prosper Duvergier de Hauranne’s review of Les Contes fantastiques reserves the same spot for Le Diable amoureux as the only French text capable of giving any idea of Hoffmann’s genius. Eighteenth-century France, he writes, was a “unpoetical” time “of skepticism and cold reason” that could only admit the marvelous as patent allegory; there were fairy tales, but their invention was too obvious; the tales in Les Mille et Une Nuits provoke “ravishment,” yet remain incapable of “mov[ing] us as profoundly” because they are so “foreign to our own beliefs.”54 In Nerval’s essay on Cazotte, Le Diable amoureux is again placed against the backdrop of the marvelous—fairy tales, operas, allegorical fables—in order to bring out the originality of the novel’s serious marvelous. Even when writers of the caliber of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot dabbled in fables, they were still hampered by the limits assigned to the marvelous: “all this was invention, wit, and nothing more, albeit of the finest and most charming kind.” Only Cazotte broke from this: “But the poet who believes in his fable, the narrator who believes his legend, the inventor who takes seriously the budding dream of his thought, this is what one hardly expected to find in the middle of the eighteenth century.”55 Such critical consensus may help us understand better Cazotte’s somewhat peculiar use of hesitation in his protagonist—peculiar because it does not ask: “might the supernatural exist?” but rather: “has the supernatural (which exists) become human?” In Hoffmann and the later fantastic, but also in much English gothic, readers and protagonists share assumptions about the disenchanted material world that are then troubled by the possibility of immaterial agency. In Cazotte, such assumptions are immediately sloughed off and supernatural agency acknowledged; yet the dividing line between the real and the supernatural, drawn on the very body of Biondetta, remains the focal point of the narrative. And indeed, unlike in fairy tales, where in Duvergier’s words “fiction makes itself felt from the first to the last lines,”56 the question of reality—of the difference between the natural and the supernatural—does not disappear, but is posed in a way specific to the literary world of Cazotte. Diderot, echoing the common relegation of the supernatural marvelous to an inferior form of aesthetic response, wrote that “the enchanted world can amuse children, [but] only the real world is pleasing to reason.”57 Cazotte, meanwhile, features an adult who is very much pleased by supernatural enchantments—pleased, not amused in the normal ironic fashion. What might it mean, Cazotte’s plot asks, for a “fantastic being” to leave its allotted space and “to borrow the form [les traits] of truth and of nature” with such perfection (43)?

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The title of Le Diable amoureux is in itself a program: gone is the conceit of Lesage’s Le Diable boiteux (1707), where the devil was a (remarkably successful) narrative device, what we’ve seen Ampère calling a “purely satirical frame”; in its place Cazotte has installed a real devil and, moreover, a love story, which is to say, the very stuff of the serious novel. Hence, Le Diable amoureux is about the enchanted world’s claim on our reason and heart, its ability to seduce us, to get us to rub our eyes. The novel starts to tell the tale of its own powers of persuasion. “I was moved to the bottom of my heart,” writes Alvare, listening to the aria of the opera diva he had conjured, “and I almost forgot that I myself was the creator of the charm that held me in its spell” (18). It is no doubt significant that in a departure from the Faust myth, Biondetta doesn’t as much promise power, or even pleasure, as represent a longing—Cazotte’s longing—for a literature that incarnates the unreal, that makes the unbelievable possible. In that, the self-reflexivity of the book’s plot is patent. The writer can summon creatures whose incredible nature does not keep them from exercising real seduction over us. Given the bifurcated generic field that had given verisimilar drama and narrative on the one hand and the new marvelous on the other, Cazotte’s experiment has radical implications: supernatural subject matter is not foreign to a poetics of illusion; a different and more potent use of marvels is possible. Le Diable amoureux, then, is new.58 But to what does this newness really amount? The typical way of pursuing the problem is simply to agree to see in this one novel a sign that some deep cultural and conceptual substrate is shifting: fiction is coming into existence, people are realizing that their novels can seem true even when they are literally unbelievable.59 It’s quick and convenient, because the substrate is invisible and can contain whatever we need it to. But if we actually look at the evidence—subsequent novels that make use of the supernatural—can we really say that Cazotte changes something? After all, as we’ve already seen, Alvare’s hesitation is not really very fantastic at all. Cazotte is new, but surely not all inventions change the future by catching on and altering behavior. Maybe his was not exactly forgotten, but not exactly useful, either. Maybe we’ve simply misremembered him as a precursor so that we do not need to confront the vagaries of literary history.

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Weird Devices Todorov asserts that the fantastic “appeared in a systematic way around the end of the eighteenth century with Cazotte.”60 One might wonder what the critic considers a system. A half-century later, French Romantics remember Cazotte as the only one to bridge the Great Divide, and their memories were better than Todorov’s: there are precious few French texts from the period that try to make a serious use of the supernatural, and all are as idiosyncratic as Le Diable amoureux. There is Potocki’s Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse, which Todorov trumpets for its elaborate use of supernatural hesitation. But it is hard to see how it fits into a “system,” either: its partial, sporadic, and largely ignored publication starts thirty-odd years after Cazotte. Two other texts, not mentioned by Todorov, don’t get us much farther. Beckford’s Vathek, published in its original French the year following its 1786 appearance in English translation, suits the chronology better, and it is much more serious in tone than most riffs on Arabian Nights-type oriental fancy. Nevertheless, it does not even try to orchestrate a meeting between real life and the irrational. The closest example of the type of mixing of the fanciful and the real that Cazotte practices is a book that also references Villars’s Comte de Gabalis: Bibiena’s La Poupée presents us with a doll come to life as a sylph. But here too the date—an early 1748—dilutes the notion of a big literary “change” or “realization”; and in spite of some wonderfully uncanny pages where the doll first becomes animated, Bibiena’s sylph is essentially a satirical device enabling the display of the period’s ridiculous characters. (As such, it remains firmly in the tradition of the devil-voyeur of Lesage’s Le Diable boiteux and the metempsychosis of Crébillon’s Le Sopha [1742].) Cazotte’s contemporary admirers explictly noted verisimilar treatment of the marvelous as the noteworthy element of Le Diable amoureux. Its difference, then, was clear, for it showed that a writer could bring the supernatural into the real, sentimental world of the novel—that readers could fall for things they did not believe. Yet it never became a template for later French writers. Gargoyle-like, Cazotte remained perched on a lonely outcropping overlooking the gay and reasonable eighteenth century. But perhaps we need to take into account gargoyles, precisely: if Cazotte’s tale has no French emulators, the place to look may be the English gothic. (Todorov, prizing only “pure” fantastic hesitations, marginalizes a movement known for its “supernatural explained.”) It has been suggested that a few

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features of Biondetta flit across the beautiful face of the temptress Mathilda in Lewis’s The Monk (1796).61 Even if this is right (and it is probably not), borrowings of this sort leave us far from proof that the 1772 work was in any way responsible for the English gothic novel that exploded around 1790. Indeed, it is hard to see what gothic writers might have got from Cazotte that they didn’t already have at their disposal—notably, the precedence provided by Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), Walpole’s Otranto, and some other titles I’ll mention in a moment. The distressed gothic atmosphere, be it supernatural (Walpole) or not (Smollett), owes nothing to Alvare’s satanic dabbling. No gifts of divination are required to indulge in the counterfactual prediction that in the absence of Cazotte the main lines of the gothic vogue would not change a bit.62 Perhaps, then, things operate in the other direction: was Cazotte, in 1772, working in his own way the gothic vein opened by Walpole a few years before? A French translation of The Castle of Otranto appeared in 1767, and was reissued in 1774; conceivably Cazotte, whose extant correspondence gives little sense of his literary interests, might have read either. But beyond the fact that Walpole seems to have had little market penetration in France, Le Diable amoureux, hardly Walpolian in the first place, merely extends the interest for the marvelous that Cazotte had already shown in earlier texts like the ballad “La Veillée de la bonne femme” and Ollivier.63 Cazotte, in other words, had no more need of the early English gothic than the later English gothic needed him. If direct influence appears dubious, and if we persist in our refusal of those ghostly “conceptual” mutations that can always be trusted to resolve difficulties like these, there remains a sense in which Cazotte does indeed deserve to be considered in the context of the English gothic supernatural. For what Cazotte shared with early practitioners of the gothic novel was quite simply an articulated set of aesthetic commonplaces regarding the Great Divide. In the second edition of The Castle of Otranto, in which the author revealed the hoax of the first (there was no discovered manuscript after all), Walpole was explicit in laying claim to a “new route” for poetry that would manage to blend the discourse of “common life” and “probability” with “the great resources of fancy.”64 Reeve found Walpole’s blending ineffective—too much fancy (gigantic swords and helmets, walking pictures), not enough probability—which is why in her Old English Baron (1777) she tried again. The goal was to blend “ancient romance” and the “modern novel” by providing “a sufficient degree of the marvelous to excite the attention; enough of the manners of real life, to

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give an air of probability to the work; and enough of the pathetic, to engage the heart in its behalf.”65 Cazotte himself left us no such explicit statement, but we’ve seen that Fréron’s review of Le Diable amoureux made very similar points, giving the tale the same coordinates mentioned time and again by the English commentators who in the face of the neoclassicism of Dryden and Pope strove to rehabilitate the “gothic” sensibility—Shakespeare and Spenser, but also Ariosto and Tasso.66 And of course the point was made by the tale itself, in which it becomes possible to fall in love with an illusion because the illusion is made so real. This is why the English and French works possess a structural resemblance even as on other levels—setting, plot, character, framing devices—they look nothing like one another. That resemblance is due neither to direct influence nor to a common conceptual substrate on which they all stood. It is because Walpole, Cazotte, and Reeve confronted the same inherited problem that their solutions do much the same thing. The problem was not an eternal one; it was inscribed in the aesthetic history they shared. What might a modern literature of the marvelous look like? Walpole and Reeve shared something else with Cazotte: they too innovated in isolation. Such an assertion will probably be viewed with doubt by scholars of the English gothic, who can point to a rich tradition of mideighteenth-century medievalism that was largely absent in France. Of course, it is true that Walpole and Reeve do not look nearly as lonely as Cazotte, stranded as he is in the country of Voltaire, and any genealogy of the English gothic has an abundance of different texts to rope in. There are, first, the antiquarian—Hurd’s Letters of Chivalry and Romance (1762), Wharton’s Observations on the Faerie Queene (1754, revised 1762), Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). Then there is contemporary production in the medieval vein, most obviously the forgeries of Macpherson (1760) and Chatterton (pub. 1777). Finally, there are the novels that, while not overtly supernatural, contain gothic accents or settings—Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom, perhaps Leland’s Longsword, Earl of Salisbury (1762), certainly Lee’s The Recess (1783– 1785). All of which add up, admittedly, to a serious vogue, while the French side of the scale is relatively weightless—Caylus’s “translation” of a Spanish chivalric romance, Tiran le blanc (1740), Tressan’s many adaptations of chivalric legend, a passing enthusiasm for the Ossian poems.67 Rather than conclude, however, that the reasonable French were simply resistant to the charms of gothic gloom, we might recognize the extent to which English writers did not find it any easier than their French counterparts to marry the novel and the supernatural. Before the explosion of gothic novels

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in the late 1780s and 1790s—at which point one can reasonably speak of a new literary genre for reasons I will explain—England boasts, after all, only two practitioners to France’s one.68 Perhaps on account of the centrality to the national canon of Shakespeare and Spenser, enchanted writers both, English contemporaries do return repeatedly to the Middle Ages in a way the French generally do not. Nevertheless, their novels are hardly more receptive to the supernatural, as the case of Walpole and his avowed imitator Reeve attests. If we simply draw a line between Walpole’s interest in a middle way or “new route” and the explosion of gothic novels in the 1790s, we paper over this difficulty: why is there only one supernatural gothic novel—Reeve’s—in the rough quarter century between Walpole and the earliest uses of the “supernatural explained” in the work of Fuller (Alan Fitz-Osbourne, 1787) and Smith (Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle, 1788)? There was, it turns out, a big difference between appreciating the supernatural in works of the past and making it work in novels. It was one thing to argue, as Hurd did, that medieval romance had historical reasons for existing, possessed its own beauties, and should not be judged by neoclassical standards. But even Hurd did not advocate bringing back this “world of fine fabling”: “I would advise no modern poet to revive these faery tales in an epic poem.”69 Hence the overwhelmingly nostalgic tone of the texts lauding the poetic receptivity of the medieval mind: Shakespeare and Spenser represented that last happy moment before Don Quixote appeared and “chivalry vanished, as snow melts before the sun.”70 This is why immediate critical reaction to The Castle of Otranto shifted significantly once Walpole’s second edition gave up the pseudofactual pretense of the first. Two sets of reviews, from the Critical Review and the Monthly Review, register the problem quite clearly. Reacting to Otranto’s first edition— the one that presented the text as the translation of a thirteenth-century manuscript—the anonymous account in the Critical Review raises the issue of the “translator”’s seriousness, and hints at fraud (“we doubt strongly whether pictures were fixed in panels before the year 1243”). Still, the reviewer, less the dupe of Walpole’s pretense than its relay, plays along, praising the characters and the narrative. But when six months later the same reviewer takes into account Walpole’s new preface, the tone changes. Walpole’s aim of blending “the two kinds of romance” is a bad idea: “we cannot but think that if Shakespeare had possessed the critical knowledge of modern times, he would have kept these two kinds of writing distinct.” If we pretend the text is medieval, all is well. If the text is given as modern, it must respect the Great Divide.71 John Langhorne’s two contributions to the Monthly Review do a similar

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about-face, one that is nearly as perplexing to the modern reader as Richardson’s protests to Warburton over admitting his authorship of Clarissa.72 Here too “the absurdities of Gothic fiction,” its “machinery of ghosts and goblins,” are tolerated because Otranto is presented as the work of a translator, bound to an original which he himself criticizes as unbelievable. In a footnote to the word “translator,” Langhorne expands on his attitude toward Walpole’s pretense: “This is said on the supposition that the work really is a translation, as pretended.” What does the reviewer mean by “supposition”? Langhorne, like the contributor to the Critical Review, changes his tune after Walpole’s secondedition revelations, but I do not think that he does so because he “is indignant about Walpole’s subterfuge,” as one modern scholar has claimed.73 Rather, he is indignant about Walpole’s choosing to do away with a subterfuge that was as necessary as it was transparent. Langhorne’s reasoning, couched again in a language of supposition and not of empirical truth, must be quoted at length. When this book was published as a translation from an old Italian manuscript, we had the pleasure of distinguishing in it the marks of genius . . .; we were dubious, however, concerning the antiquity of the work upon several considerations, but being willing to find some excuse for the absurd and monstrous fictions it contained, we wished to acquiesce in the declaration from the title-page, that it was really a translation from an ancient writer. While we considered it as such, we could readily excuse its preposterous phenomena, and consider them as a sacrifice to a gross and unenlightened age. —But when, as in this edition, the Castle of Otranto is declared to be a modern performance, that indulgence we afforded to the foibles of a supposed antiquity we can by no means extend the singularity of a false taste in a cultivated period of learning. Righteous indignation of the duped? Retroactive revision of his original attitude, now said to be “dubious”? Not at all. Rather, we have here the strange contortions made so often when writers and readers of the period pressed hard on pseudofactual conventions that were meant not to be believed literally so much as treated as if we believed them literally. Walpole’s original presentation was the excuse, in Langhorne’s terms, for not stamping the work with the Horatian condemnation—incredulus odi—he goes on to invoke. Langhorne, in his first review, obligingly followed through on the pseudofactual posture Walpole had initiated; but if Walpole was no longer prepared to play the

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game, then the critic would not play it either. The author wants to call this a modern work? Fine, he must take the consequences, and submit it to modern aesthetic categories—those, again, of the Great Divide. Of course, not everyone agreed with bean-counting reviewers: the philosophe Grimm reports his hair standing on end; Warburton paid the book the high praise of “effect[ing] the full purpose of the ancient tragedy, that is, to purge the passions by pity and terror.”74 Some, then, thought the experiment a success, and ultimately Walpole would indeed “win,” in that a literature in which one could not believe and that affected us nonetheless was possible. But not quite yet, and not with the devices Walpole was using. The repeated association of the essence of poetry with the medieval period and popular superstitions did not translate directly into a new novelistic practice. Walpole remained alone in trying to inject fancy directly into the genre’s truthful illusions. At home and abroad, some liked it, some didn’t, but Walpole had to wait more than a decade for an imitator, Reeve, and he wasn’t satisfied: her modifications involved carefully reducing the amount of supernatural agency in the plot to some mysterious thumps and groans, and a door swinging open of its own accord.75 Only at the end of the 1780s were there a series of novels in which the supernatural appears to intervene—by Fuller and Smith, as I’ve mentioned, and then of course Radcliffe. At that point, writers and readers found themselves able to take the supernatural as seriously as writers of more unenlightened ages did. As one French reviewer remarked of Lewis’s The Monk, many passages cannot be read without an involuntary shudder. . . . The author appears to have the goal of frightening, like Shakespeare, by supernatural means, by dreams, spells, communication between the living and the dead, between man and fantastic beings; it is all quite impossible, quite absurd, and [yet] it all produces an effect, so great is the effect of the imagination’s power on us, no matter what our age. Try as we may to say that it’s only a story, the story makes us quiver and captures our interest. After, one can shrug it off with condescension, but only once the book has been closed.76 In a way, little had changed from thirty years before, when Grimm said that being a philosophe was no guarantee against the fear provoked by Otranto, “so much are the sources of the marvelous the same for all men.”77 What was new was simply that writers had invented a recognizable and reproducible form that could bridge the divide between fancy and belief.

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But why, precisely, around 1790? Since the interest in the supernatural had long been in place, what kept writers from bridging the Great Divide and exploiting that interest in the immediate wake, say, of Addison? Why was Reeve Walpole’s only imitator for a quarter century? One set of explanations— the most common—read through the gothic novel. They take this maligned genre and discover in it the workings of serious spiritual, cultural, or subjective forces, often using what we already know about the historical moment to motivate its appearance in the 1790s. Such are the Weberian hypotheses I alluded to at the outset: the gothic marked the last refuge of the numinous, finally expelled from the disenchanted Enlightenment and exiled to novels. Also reading through the gothic are cultural explanations, for instance, that of Ronald Paulson, who has proposed that the gothic tapped into deep anxieties prompted by the French Revolution.78 Marshall Brown sees the genre as part of the history of modern subjectivity, occurring at the moment when Cartesian self-examination is replaced by Kantian self-consciousness.79 To these possibilities one could add the more materialist explanation of Clery, who appeals to the politics of circulating libraries as the reason Walpole did not have more immediate imitators: “supernatural fictions along the lines of Otranto should have been the ideal commodity for the libraries. . . . Instead, in the period up to the 1790s, pure commercial interest was counterbalanced and constrained by the representation of the library as a civic institution with moral responsibilities.”80 The idea is that the commercial power the gothic novel will demonstrate in the 1790s must have been blunted by something, or else it would have shown itself earlier. Variously illuminating as these explanations may be, they are perhaps needlessly clever. Why weren’t ghosts, demons, and the like “from the first unproblematically available as a resource for writers”?81 Because people had to invent forms. Yes, they needed to be interested enough in the supernatural to bother to try to invent forms, but interest alone only takes writers so far. Consider, for example, the detective novel—another commercial powerhouse, and one that didn’t always exist. Certainly, the detective novel seems unimaginable without at the very least an interest in crime-solving that is scarce before the advent of urban policing in the nineteenth century. It needs something else, however: the decodable clue. In Chapter 1, I alluded to Franco Moretti’s work on the spreading of the device of the clue; what he finds is that clues did not spread in a predictable, linear manner. Conan Doyle may have invented them, but his rivals did not immediately borrow the device; instead, a generation was necessary before clues really caught hold and came to define the genre.82

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However, Lafayette’s seemingly prescient use of a completely invented heroine in La Princesse de Clèves did not, I’ve shown, behave in the same way: some “innovations” go nowhere. At first glance, supernatural narrative appears to show a pattern closer to the one Moretti observes in the detective novel—two isolated early practitioners, Walpole and Reeve, followed by a later generation for whom the supernatural had become a successful formula. But if we look more closely, the “generational” hypothesis, derived from an analogy with natural selection, fails. For Walpole and Reeve do not possess the device that will form the backbone of the gothic novel as it starts to take off in the late 1780s. Walpole, true to his plan, tries to feature characters who react plausibly to the supernatural, where plausibility concerns the construction of a subjective space; we are indeed brought inside the characters’ heads.83 But one thing that we don’t find in their heads is hesitation over the reality of the supernatural. This, I propose, is the device that gives the gothic novel (and many other subgenres since) its form and attraction. Hesitation’s advantages over the brute supernatural are clear: not only does it create suspense, it avoids demanding that we accept the supernatural by persuading us to accept only the latter’s possibility. Once we narrow our sights on this signature device, Walpole’s want of imitators does not seem so strange. Some people liked his brute supernatural, but no one cared to reproduce it (especially because Walpole’s second preface had burned the bridge that was the sanctioning pretense of medieval authorship). Only with the first examples of the “supernatural explained” in the novels of Fuller, Smith, the anonymous author of The Spectre (1789), and of course Radcliffe (1790) do writers find a convincing way to introduce the supernatural. Unlike the clue, hesitation spreads immediately. Like the clue, it is still with us today.84 So my narrative, which I choose to start in the mid-seventeenth century, goes like this. The supernatural had long been a point of interest for writers, who saw very well that literature did not have to be rational to provoke pleasure. Their solution was to carve out genres that appealed to the imagination as opposed to the faculties of reason and the passions—opera, and fairy and oriental tales. A few isolated figures (Walpole, Cazotte) attempt to bridge what becomes an accepted divide between the literature of fancy and the literature of sentiment and psychology; this program is made explicit either by them (in Walpole’s case) or by their contemporary critics (in Cazotte’s). But for whatever reason—general satisfaction with the Great Divide, lack of a good formula for introducing the supernatural into the novel—nothing happens.

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Around 1790 some writers in England start using the device of hesitation: protagonists are confronted by irrational phenomena that they register as such; they continually ask themselves, “Can this be?” Initially, the device is used in the English gothic (and by French “copycats” such as Ducray-Duminil). Another generation, starting with Hoffmann and then Nodier and Mérimée, will fit the device to a new context, bringing it into a more immediate present (no more far-away castles), eliminating romance plotting (no more faithful lovers of mysterious birth), and substituting new explanations—especially madness—for the creaky supernatural explained. (It is probably at this stage that Freud would start to recognize the uncanny, for it is only here that the supernatural can intrude into modern life; Mérimée said that “to do the fantastic right, you have to begin by dressing your hero in a flannel vest.”85) From this point, there has essentially been no end to the device’s re-deployment, occasionally in “high” literature (Nerval’s Aurélia, James’s Turn of the Screw), very often in twentieth-century pulp. Todorov is right to single out the importance of hesitation, but wrong to make the perfectly ambiguous work the cornerstone of the fantastic. Just as tragedy is defined by its subject matter and not its resolution—there need not be blood—the fantastic lies in the hesitation itself. And historically speaking, hesitation was the only bridge over the Great Divide that could support any traffic. Cazotte has become a bit lost in the gothic mists, and it is time to bring the discussion back to him and to the question of fiction. Of all the works I’ve been discussing, which are “fictional”? At what moment does fiction “exist”? Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux has a good claim to being fictional and not pseudofactual for two main reasons. First, it unfolds in a shared contemporary world while recounting events that are impossible. So instead of pretending to believe the story literally, which is what the pseudofactual asks of its readers, we just find the story “believable,” which is to say, internally vivid, psychologically plausible, and so on. Second, though Le Diable amoureux takes the familiar form of the memoir, we are never asked—however ironically—to credit it as a “found manuscript.”86 One clue that the pseudofactual memoir is being used to different effect is the “nouvelle” designation in the work’s subtitle. Nouvelle normally implies a true story, in contradistinction to conte, or tale, the preferred designation for narratives that take place on the other side of the Great Divide.87 In that, the subtitle redoubles the claim to truth put forth by the memoir. But the curious thing is that I know of no other cases where a memoir novel is called a nouvelle: the former is in the first person, the latter in

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the third; they are incompatible forms. The supernatural subject matter of Le Diable amoureux, it would seem, short-circuits accepted classificatory systems. Calling a memoir a nouvelle entails revising what the terms can possibly mean; the subtitle here begins to signify something like “novel,” behaving as a marker of the fictional status of what otherwise looks to be a memoir. Given all this, it would be churlish to deny the label “fiction” to Cazotte’s work, and we can probably extend it, mutatis mutandis, to Walpole and Reeve as well.88 In the end, however, discerning fictional “firsts” keeps us on the level of the individual, whereas fiction must be understood on the level of the group: one fictional work (or three, spread over a dozen years and two countries) does not mean that fiction “exists.” For where could fiction possibly reside, apart from in shared practices and rationales? Unquestionably, Cazotte and Walpole and Reeve share something—a desire to blend fancy and illusion, two categories bequeathed to them by an entire poetic tradition. And each in his or her manner does blend them. But only later, after the invention of hesitation, do writers have a systematic way to forestall the charge of incredulus odi: they incorporate within their works the suspense-laden question of whether the impossible can be real. Belief becomes the novel’s very pivot. Not belief about the real world, of course, but a belief that is cultivated in the space of reading itself. And for that to occur, a subtle shift is necessary, a shift that is more technical than conceptual: belief is not something readers are asked to (pretend to) bring to their reading; rather, belief is introjected into the space of the novel. And so authors can start from a premise shared by readers—the supernatural does not exist—and yet end up persuading those readers of the possibility of something that both parties know is untrue. Reading allows us to entertain possibilities that we need not entertain in real life; emotion and edification, it turns out, do not depend on our literal belief after all. In the end, the assumptions of old aesthetic theory were just wrong. The gothic novel gave the lie to Richardson, who like so many others thought of “historical faith” as a fragile thing, destroyed by the least intimation of impossibility. Radcliffe and Lewis’s works were not “more fictional” than Cazotte and Walpole’s solitary efforts. They were, however, part of a shared practice, and thus a much more credible reason to proclaim, if proclaim we absolutely must, fiction’s birth.

Conclusion: On Narrators Natural and Unnatural

In 1876, Dostoyevsky published “A Gentle Creature,” a short story in which a man keeping watch over the body of his dead wife recounts their life together. The author subtitled the work “A Fantastic Story,” explaining in his preface that the epithet alluded not to narrative content but to narrative mode: since the husband never actually put pen to paper, we must imagine that his monologue has been transcribed by a “supposed stenographer noting everything down.”1 Fantastic, indeed, this invisible writer. Of course, it has now been well over a century that the novel has accustomed us to such “absolutely unreal narrative situations,” as Dorrit Cohn terms them.2 For Cohn, these situations mark literary first-person discourse as fictional, just as third-person texts, she argues, distinguish themselves from historical narrative by informing us in impossible detail of what characters think and feel. Surely the narration of “A Gentle Creature,” which hardly resembles a real-life communicative situation, undermines Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s contention that novels “have typically been representations of chronicles, journals, letters, memoirs, and biographies.”3 So against Smith’s description of fiction as a mimesis of “natural discourse”—and its attendant implication that there are no intralinguistic distinctions between fictional and factual texts—Cohn argues that the mark of fiction is to be discursively unnatural. An issue can scarcely be of more import to literary scholars. How do we know literature when we see it? What keeps readers from mistaking autobiographies and memoirs and reportage for novels? Does anything internal—as opposed to contextual—separate fictional propositions from factual statements? Cohn and Smith are hardly the only ones who have weighed in on the question, and their positions are representative of a fundamental division. On the one hand, fiction can be described as a kind of pretended utterance or nonserious assertion; such is the account that follows from speech-act

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theory, especially that of John Searle.4 Another school of thought—though it is more like a constellation of work generated by the disparate methods of phenomenology, linguistics, and narratology—insists that fictional texts do not follow the logic of natural communication at all, but do all sorts of things unobservable outside literature.5 Teasing out the many strands of this debate would quickly overwhelm the few pages remaining. What I do have the space to suggest, however, is that the debate lacks a historical dimension, or more precisely, that it arises in the first place because of insufficient attention to the historical evolution of literary forms. Is fiction just a special kind of use—a parasitical use—of everyday discourse, or is it a special kind of statement, legitimately distinct and identifiable? Is novelistic narration better thought of as modeled on factual report or as a practice that has no analogues in real-life communication? The answer may depend on where—in what century—one looks for one’s examples. Throughout this book I have held fast to the contention that fictional narratives are not the same as narratives advanced with mock truth claims— pseudofactual narratives. I appreciate that this may appear a distinction without a difference: surely the experience of imaginative investment does not change radically between the pseudofactual and the fictional regimes; surely brain imaging would confirm that Robinson Crusoe and “A Gentle Creature” stimulate the same neuron centers, whatever they may be. On the level of form, however, the distinction does matter, as we can well see in the debate pitting Cohn and her unnatural narrators against Smith and her natural ones. For pseudofactual novels can indeed be accurately described as pretended assertions; they are very much “natural discourse,” in the sense that they mimic the real-world forms of the letter, the report, the memoir. Fictional novels, meanwhile, can do all sorts of things that pseudofactual novels cannot: their omniscient narrators delve into the hearts and psyches of their characters; their first-person narrators often recount without actually writing; they intrude counterfactually into the past or speculatively into the future. Readers of fictional novels “believe” in what they read no more or no less than their pseudofactual counterparts. They just read a different sort of novel—a novel written by people who no longer disguise their inventions as possible truths, and who are thereby free to develop new narrative forms. The omnisciently narrated novel is one of these new forms, and perhaps the most important. It may seem strange to propose omniscience as an invention of the turn of the nineteenth century: Homer, for one, had already paused to peer into Odysseus’s “growling heart.”6 But one hint that

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omniscience is in fact historically circumscribed is Cohn’s own defense of fiction’s distinctiveness—specifically, the examples she uses to argue that fiction cannot be described as a pretended factual statement. When we read War and Peace, Cohn reasons, we know we are not reading history because we have access to the consciousness of the characters, and only the omniscient novel allows that; the narrator, moreover, possesses powers of ubiquity that no real person can have. Fair enough, but why not pull illustrations from somewhere besides nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, if it is true that mimesis as Aristotle uses the word “is very close, if not identical, in meaning to the word Western languages derive from the Latin fictio”?7 Marshall Brown has pointed out that the history of psychonarration before Austen, which Cohn’s work has left unmapped, is “ripe for further investigation.”8 But the problem may lie less in our spotty research than in the spotty record: early examples of psychonarration are neither plentiful nor elaborate. Pressed by the literary archive, even Cohn might have to admit that fiction is quite simply indistinct before the nineteenth century. It may be only our knowledge of the nineteenth-century novel that makes us think a history of psychonarration is missing in the first place: there is no reason to assume that writers have always been interested in narrating thoughts, or even that they have become progressively better at it. For why narrate thoughts if you can report speech? Half of the Iliad and two-thirds of the Odyssey consist of the quoted discourse of characters, and this situation, in which a poet-narrator prepares the way for characters’ speech, is in fact typical of much of Western literature. Thus Thomas Pavel points out, in a rejoinder to Cohn, that such characters do not seem to have “minds” at all: “The heroes of Homer and Virgil’s epic poems only act and speak, and so do the characters of Greek, Roman, and medieval romance.”9 Pavel’s point holds surprisingly well for the early modern narrative forms that are still based on the epic’s focus on human action and speech—from French heroic romance to its comic inversion in Scarron and Fielding. In such forms, the typically rudimentary quality of third-person reports on inner states does not come from a lack of interest in feeling: on the contrary, passion is assumed to be one of the primary reasons people read novels, whose characters have hyperbolic passions indeed. Instead, it is because the eloquent speech of heroes is reckoned the best source of moving poetry—that is, because poetry is inseparable from rhetorical eloquence—that writers have little reason to develop techniques for representing unvoiced thoughts and inchoate feelings. Poets, therefore, limit themselves to a brief sketch of motivations

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before quickly ceding the floor to the characters’ own reports of their joys and sufferings.10 Thus, what Cohn takes as the general index of fictionality is in fact a result of a technical evolution. Exemplars of eloquent passion are displaced by individuals endowed with feelings and thoughts; concomitantly, the presentation of characters’ speech is replaced by psychonarration. So it is not so much that we lack a history of the slow growth of attention to thoughts where once there had been nothing. Rather, we lack a history of how one technique pushed another to extinction. An additional historical point must be made about modern omniscient narrators: they are not the poet-narrators of earlier periods. Narratology does not recognize the distinction. Homer and Zola both employ, in this view, “extradiegetic heterodiegetic” narrators: narrators recount stories of which they are not part (which makes them “heterodiegetic”), and their recounting is not framed by any other narrator (which is why they are “extradiegetic”).11 But their structural similarity belies a fundamental difference. The poet-narrator writes of attested heroes, rehearsing what is known while freely but plausibly inventing what is not. The omniscient narrator is a much stranger entity, not necessarily best explained by analogy with natural narrators reporting matters of fact. Indeed, it has been pointed out that “omniscient” may not be an adequate description of fictional third-person narration, precisely because such narrators do not actually “know” anything. When a narrator tells us that a fictional character does something or other, Jonathan Culler writes, “that is a power of invention, of incontrovertible stipulation, not a matter of knowledge”12; and Culler goes on to point out how poorly the term fits most narrative situations in the modern novel. We thus “naturaliz[e] the strange details and practices of narrative by making the consciousness of an individual their source, and then imagining a quasi divine omniscient consciousness when human consciousnesses cannot fill that role.”13 Culler’s words return us to the unnaturalness of third-person narrators. Again, however, these are modern, fictional third-person narrators, tethered neither to the pretense of the factual report nor to the posture of the poet who sings of heroes and their deeds. First-person narration too has specifically modern fictional forms. The importance of the first-person forms of the letter and memoir novel has been central to my description of the pseudofactual regime, but there is of course an obvious objection: since the first-person novel is still alive and well, how can we say that the pseudofactual novel is replaced by a fictional one? In other words, when is the first person pseudofactual and when is it not? Here again Cohn can serve as a guide. Her example of Dostoyevsky’s “A Gentle Creature”

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provides one criterion for distinguishing a properly fictional first person: manifestly, we now have many examples of first-person narration that do not take the form of letters or retrospective memoirs. These are novels whose narration is every bit as unnatural as the third-person omniscient variety, on account of invisible “stenographers,” the use of the present tense and markers of orality, and numerous other inventions.14 Cohn recognizes that such forms are historically marked—“contemporary fiction has tended to sever first-person narration from autobiographical mimetics in [increasingly] radical ways”15—and thus devises what she deems a more universal account of first-person fictionality. Using Philippe Lejeune’s idea of the autobiographical “pact,” she underlines the importance of the nonidentity between the name of the hero and the name of the author: the title page tells us that what we are reading is fiction.16 But as with her predicating of fictionality on psychonarration, Cohn passes over the historical difficulty: a paratextual fictional pact may well be in place for Gide’s Immoralist and Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, but it is not found in novels that use the figure of an editor to introduce someone else’s “I.”17 So between Roxana and Great Expectations there is, then, a formal difference: the latter replaces the editor’s found document with an author’s imagining of a character’s memoir. And it is only once you admit that you are imagining that you are free to imagine a host of new narrative situations—listening to the person instead of reading his writing; being inside her head with her thoughts as they unravel; even lending your ear to the musings of a dead man. But what makes fictional narrators unnatural? And are pseudofactual narrators really natural? What is so natural about Pamela and Clarissa, “writing to the moment,” frantically scribbling their letters as their tormentors come through the door? The opposition between natural and unnatural is not my own—it comes from the debate on fictional propositions—but it does seem to me a serviceable one. The example of Richardson’s writing to the moment helps bring it into focus. For if Richardson was satirized in his day for his heroines’ amazing ability to make writing and experience almost coincide, this can only be because readers evaluated the book according to Richardson’s own naturalistic narrative posture. In other words, it makes sense to say that this narrative situation pushes the bounds of plausibility, whereas it is difficult if not impossible to imagine even Flaubert’s enemies reproaching him for knowing that at a certain moment during his courtship of Emma, Charles Bovary “could hear only the inner beating of his head, along with the distant squawk of a chicken laying eggs in a courtyard.”18 The reproach would just be silly,

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since as Culler points out, omniscient fictional narrators don’t actually know, they create what they state by fiat. That is how fiction operates. Whereas it is precisely because letter novels are bound to a natural narrative situation that readers can level charges of implausibility.19 Natural, unnatural: the terms are not a pure invention of modern critics like Smith and Cohn. Letters, Richardson wrote, are “the only natural Opportunity of representing with any Grace those lively and delicate Impressions which Things present are known to make upon the Mind of those affected by them.”20 And here is Scott, musing about the problem in The Fortunes of Nigel (1822): I do not mean that Nigel literally said aloud with his bodily organs the words which follow in inverted commas . . . but that I myself chose to present to my dearest reader the picture of my hero’s mind, his reflections and resolutions, in the form of a speech, rather than that of a narrative. In other words, I have put his thoughts into language. [It is] the most natural and perhaps the only way of communicating to the spectator what is supposed to be happening in the bosom of [the character]. There are no such soliloquies in nature, it is true. . . . In narrative, no doubt, the writer has the alternative of telling that his personages thought so and so, inferred thus and thus, and arrived at such and such a conclusion; but the soliloquy is a more concise and spirited mode of communicating the same information.21 Scott’s aside is especially curious: the soliloquy does not exist in nature, and yet it is more natural than a mere report of thought. I doubt many modern readers would agree, but this is less because nature is always in the eye of the beholder than because literary history is, in part, the history of the naturalization of various narrative postures.22 Are any truly found in nature—say, the epic narrator’s presentation of eloquent speech, or the epistolary novel’s account of lively and delicate impressions? Perhaps not. It would be safer to say that writers have dropped the naturalistic alibi—an alibi that could be more or less strained, depending on the case—and have thus freed up the possibility of new imaginings. In a way, setting aside the alibi is a small change, almost infinitesimal. Dostoyevsky, in order to minimize the shock of his fantastic narration in “A Gentle Creature,” pointed out that he had a predecessor in Hugo, whose Dernier Jour d’un condamné (1829) pushed the diary form

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to utter implausibility by having the condemned protagonist write until the very moment of his execution. If Hugo can do that, then why not postulate an invisible stenographer? Why not, indeed: might as well. Still, the literary record—at least the little of it we know—indicates that the step was not easy to take. Hugo’s work, like Richardson’s, may well transgress the naturalistic alibi of its form; only Dostoyevsky, inventing an alternate form, does away with the alibi entirely. If we accept that fiction is distinct—not distinct from factual statements so much as from pre-fictional forms of the novel—it is difficult not to ask why it became so in the nineteenth century, why at this particular moment Aristotelian and pseudofactual invention were no longer enough. One explanation is close at hand. Literature moves from a model of rhetorical self-presentation, in which humans are assumed to know themselves and their motivating passions, to a model of subjective depth, isolation, and self-delusion that weakens the bond between volition and action, thought and speech. In this vein, and still contra Cohn, Pavel writes: It is a fact of cultural history that the modern subject has less access to its own operations than other, better-informed people, and that these operations must be described from outside in a language that cannot be used by the subject qua subject. . . . How archaic a character like Edmund in King Lear sounds, with his unmediated access to his own wickedness. Modern fiction, therefore, writes about inner life the way it does, not so much because it is the essence of fiction to do so, as because our interest in the life of the subject is so differently shaped from that of our premodern ancestors.23 Fictionality suits modern subjectivity. The proposition strikes me as reasonable enough, though we still do not know why modern subjectivity waits for this moment to declare itself: Pavel explains one change with another that in turn demands explanation. Turtles all the way down, no doubt, and biting their tails to boot. Rather than looking for a deep why, we might ask the more answerable question of what and how: we really have very few data on the shifts I have been talking about, certainly not enough to understand the mechanisms of literary change.24 Third-person psychonarration replaces first-person report, but how does that replacement play out, exactly? Are there genres or literary cultures that are more conducive to the replacement, while others resist?

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How does a device central to the modern third person, free indirect discourse, spread? Might it be imported from first-person forms, as I’ve hinted in my discussion of Crébillon’s Les Égarements du coeur et de l’esprit, and if so, is it possible to trace that importation? Godwin’s preface to the 1794 memoir-novel Things as They Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams completely abandons the editorial guise: is his forthrightly authorial presentation of a formerly pseudofactual form part of a trend whose progress can be clearly mapped? Is it true that the invention of unnatural first-person narrators like that of “A Gentle Creature” lags behind that of unnatural third-person narrators, and if so, why might this be? Even without knowing the answers, the questions alone suggest that it will be impossible to determine just when regimes change: there is no “first work” of fiction, no rupture in practice that follows a revolution in the meaning of History or a mutation in human identity. Instead, it seems to me very likely that fiction in my restrained sense is little more than a nebula of writing practices and ideas about writing— techniques invented and modified, sometimes quickly and sometimes not, through a difficult-to-specify dialectical relationship with what people think literature can and should do. In the course of writing this book I have often been asked whether my argument is that fiction did not exist before the nineteenth century. In a sense, yes, that is my argument. But my emphasis on fiction as a practice, made up of a messy and continually evolving ensemble of techniques and ideas, is also strongly at odds with this way of putting the matter. At the outset of this study, I proposed that historians of the novel needed to take into account a very basic but overlooked fact: that modes of literary invention vary immensely over time, and specifically that most literature prior to the nineteenth century focuses on real people—either attested heroes (the Aristotelian regime) or putative contemporaries otherwise unknown (the pseudofactual regime). Given this, it is worth considering the possibility that “fictionality” is not a constant, proper to all literature, but a historically specific phenomenon. I do not deny that prior to the nineteenth century many writers, bypassing both Aristotelian invention and pseudofactual pretense, made no truth affirmations as to the existence of their characters. Some such writers did so in isolation—Lafayette, Crébillon, Cazotte, for example. Others did so because they were working in genres—often perceived as low or comic—that did not make literal truth claims: for example, the seventeenth-century genres of the French comic novel or the Spanish novela. Partially, my response to these counterexamples is simply to say that their existence never threatened or weakened the dominant

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regimes: isolated works were isolated, while clusters of works occupied literary niches in the generic environment of the time. But the argument is not only one of quantity, as if what happened around 1800 was that many more works started to be composed in a manner that had heretofore been practiced only haphazardly. The problem with asking the apparently reasonable question of whether fiction existed before the nineteenth century is that it implies that specific books are signs that some governing thing—fiction—has come into existence. Yet there is no such thing as fiction outside novels that are fictional. To say that fiction exists can only mean that the practice of fiction exists, that people write fiction. So did people write fiction before the nineteenth century? Some people wrote books that feature patently invented characters, but this undeniable fact does not amount to (nor does it lead to) the practice that characterizes the novel from around 1800 on, when the general abandonment of pseudofactual pretense opened the door to the development of new, “unnatural” forms of narration. I do not pretend to have mapped that abandonment and that development here. I do hope that I have shown why such a study needs to be done. For what is fictional about modern fiction may be much less its contents than its modes of narration.

Notes

introduction: the three regimes of the novel Epigraph: Mullan, How Novels Work, 9. 1. As You Like It III, 3; Fuentes, “In Praise of the Novel,” 614. 2. Blumenberg, “Concept of Reality,” 29. 3. Frege, “On Sinn and Bedeutung,” 57; I have replaced Sinn and Bedeutung, left untranslated for editorial reasons, with the customary “sense” and “reference.” (Bedeutung is occasionally rendered by “denotation” or “nominatum.”) 4. Pavel, Fictional Worlds, provides a capacious synthesis of theories of fictionality; he discusses early “segregationist” theories, which maintained a sharp line between fiction and factual discourse, on 11–17. Since the restrained historical definition of fiction offered in the present study has little common ground with the still-growing field of fictionality studies, for the most part I will not even attempt to canvas research on the philosophy of possible worlds, narratological approaches to the fiction-history distinction, and so on. 5. On Greek attitudes regarding the reality of gods and mythological heroes, see Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe; a major strand of thought held historical truth to be a kind of vulgate, consecrated by tradition. 6. Searle, Expression and Meaning, 72. (Searle includes maxims and the like as examples of nonfictional commitments.) Others have pushed in this direction; for a sample and critique, see Pavel, Fictional Worlds, 18–25. 7. De Man continues: “in the Iliad, when we first encounter Helen, it is as the emblem of the narrator weaving the actual war into the tapestry of a fictional object. . . . The selfreflecting mirror-effect by means of which a work of fiction asserts, by its very existence, its separation from empirical reality . . . characterizes the work of literature in its essence” (Blindness and Insight, 170). That Greek readers of Homer—at least by the time of Aristotle, to whom I will return in a moment—felt it to be a work of poetry as opposed to history seems to me indisputable; I doubt very much that such a status was predicated on a concept of the “empirical,” or an experience of the “essence” of literature. 8. “But are we quite sure we know what ‘literature’ means?” asks Roberto Calasso. “When we pronounce the word today, we are immediately aware that it is immeasurably distant from anything an eighteenth-century writer might have meant by it, while at the beginning of the nineteenth century it was already taking on connotations we quickly

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recognize” (Literature and the Gods, 170). Literature’s growth as a category has been analyzed by Caron, “Belles lettres.” 9. To my knowledge the lexical drift from “fiction” as synonymous with (usually devalued) poetic fancy to designating narrative literature as such has not been precisely traced. The titles of works like Staël’s Essai sur les fictions (1795) and Dunlop’s The History of Fiction (1814) at least suggest that by the turn of the nineteenth century “fiction” as an umbrella term for the novel exists in both French and English. For a brief look at the word’s English history, see Williams, Keywords, 134–35. 10. These scholars are Davis, Factual Fictions; Foley, Telling the Truth; and Gallagher, Nobody’s Story and “Rise of Fictionality.” Despite the sometimes stark disagreements that I develop below, my debt to these scholars, especially to Foley and Gallagher, is deep: they are the first to view “fiction” as a more problematic and interesting term than “the novel,” and this book would not exist without their work. 11. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe. For an additional philosophical-anthropological approach, see Schaeffer, Pourquoi la fiction? The argument from evolutionary biology is made in, e.g., Boyd, Origin of Stories. 12. As do Chevrolet, Idée de fable and Duprat, Vraisemblances. Richly detailed though they are, both studies take “fiction” as a historically unproblematic term. 13. See Blumenberg, Legitimacy. Blumenberg was countering the argument that the modern world is simply a secularized iteration of an earlier Christian world; it was, he held, legitimately new. 14. Poetics 9; in Russell and Winterbottom, eds., Ancient Literary Criticism, 102. (Further quotes in the following discussion are found here and on page 103.) 15. Wood, How Fiction Works, 238. Aristotelian poetry is thus understood as a hypothetical but logically coherent reality, as distinct from the purely fabulous and the historical: “Aristotle invoked, or invented, the concept of probability, in order to locate the reality of drama both beyond mere fiction and factual reality” (Pfeiffer, “Fiction,” 94–95). 16. Halliwell, Aesthetics of Mimesis, 195–97. 17. For “might,” see Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Hutton, 54; for “could,” see Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Halliwell, 40. For Aristotle’s poetry as a “hypothetical” or “imaginable” reality, see Halliwell, Aesthetics of Mimesis, 179, 188. 18. Halliwell, Aesthetics of Mimesis, 166. The interpretation of poetic generality as proto-fictional, though repeated, is not fully sustained in Halliwell’s account; my reasons for disagreement will become clear. For an alternate argument that the Greeks’ “poetry” had little to do with “fiction” despite occasional congruence between the two, see Gill, “Plato on Falsehood.” 19. Diderot, Discours sur la poésie dramatique, in Oeuvres esthétiques, 212. “Facts” here refer to people and actions, while Diderot uses “interest” in the sense common to aesthetic theory in eighteenth-century Britain and France—emotional appeal or impact. Poetic “additions” often include invented secondary characters who enrich the plot: as I will explain in Chapter 1, the point is not that Aristotelian poetics tolerates no (or only minimal) invention of characters, but that attested events and heroes are its point of departure.

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20. For a detailed consideration of the Greek novels’ situation with respect to history, see Morgan, “Make-Believe,” and Heiserman, Novel Before the Novel. Bakhtin’s investment in uncovering “realistic” novelistic chronotopes leads him to emphasize the importance of works like the Satyricon at the expense of the “adventure-time” chronotopes of Greek novels (see Dialogic Imagination, 84–258). As I discuss briefly below and again at more length in Chapter 2, however, it is the latter works that had a more demonstrable influence on early European novelists, who nonetheless quickly abandoned the use of invented heroes so as to bring their creations in line with Aristotelian stipulations regarding the preeminence of historical subject matter. 21. In this vein, see Catherine Gallagher’s remarks on Shakespeare: “It is difficult to say how much Shakespeare or his audience were invested in the assumption that Hamlet had been a real person, but it does seem that the playwright had a much harder time than we do imagining that tragic heroes had no prior bodily existence” (“Novel,” 231n6). The gist of Gallagher’s remark seems to me right, even if, as will become clear, the issue is probably not best framed as one of imaginative ability. 22. The pioneering study is Tieje, “Peculiar Phase.” I will be mentioning a number of others. 23. Richardson, Selected Letters, 85. 24. Coleridge, Biographia literaria, 7. It should be noted that Coleridge, who in contradistinction to Richardson glosses this willingness as “poetic” (not historical) faith, is referring here to the reading of specifically supernatural subject matter, and not poetry about the everyday world (whose representation needs no “suspension of disbelief ” at all). In other words, this famous phrase, in context, does not describe a phenomenology of reading (or of film- or theater-going) tout court, as is now routinely assumed. Unfortunately, many critics have rushed to use Coleridge’s formula as a statement of modern fictionality, the “realization” toward which earlier thinkers were tending; among many others, see Gallagher, “Rise of Fictionality,” 347–49, and McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 128, 297. 25. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 47. 26. Burke is of course speaking of theatrical spectacle, and Richardson of the novel, but despite the qualitative difference between reading a book and seeing and hearing bodies on stage, the two types of consumption were continually conflated in the period. 27. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 47. 28. To be precise, two meanings of the term are overlaid in Richardson’s letter. When he writes of “that kind of Historical Faith which Fiction itself is generally read with,” fiction seems to mean approximately “literature”; when he adds “tho’ we know it to be Fiction,” fiction now means something untrue, unhistorical. 29. Quoted in Reiss, “Imagining the Worst,” 106–10. The Dorking episode is analyzed in Clarke, Voices Prophesying War, 27–57. 30. Balzac, Comédie humaine, 3: 50. 31. Balzac, Comédie humaine, 1: 11. As we will see in Chapter 3, manners (as opposed to, say, passions or surprising adventures) had been an object of earlier novelists, though the latter had spoken more of producing a “tableau” or “picture” than a “history.”

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32. Balzac, Comédie humaine, 1: 11. 33. Todorov and Genette, eds., Littérature et réalité, 7. The only essay in the collection not to take such a position is the French translation of the first chapter of Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel. 34. Barthes, “Effet de réel,” 89. 35. “In Barthes’s description, reality effects are designed to create the aura of real life through their sheer meaninglessness: the barometer [Barthes’s example of a superfluous object] doesn’t play a role in the narrative, and it doesn’t symbolize anything. It’s just there for background texture, to create the illusion of a world cluttered with objects that have no narrative or symbolic meaning” (Johnson, Everything Bad, 78). Similarly, according to James Wood’s gloss on Barthes’s concept, “[realist] fiction builds into itself a lot of surplus detail just as life is full of surplus detail”; the physical appearance of a character will be described in superfluous depth because “it is just ‘how he looked’” (How Fiction Works, 81). 36. Barthes, “Effet de réel,” 89. 37. For this critique, see Tallis, Not Saussure, and Compagnon, Démon de la théorie, 141–47. 38. On the pragmatic self-refutation of the argument for reference’s impossibility, see Tallis, Not Saussure, 59. Michel Riffaterre’s essay “L’Illusion référentielle” (also reprinted in the Littérature et réalité collection) avoids this absurdity by restricting nonreferentiality to literary language. But now the argument becomes self-confirming, as Compagnon points out: literary language is defined as nonreferential, and manifestly referential books or parts thereof are simply denied literary standing (Démon de la théorie, 130–31). 39. Prendergast, Order of Mimesis, 70–71. 40. This implied hallucination—Prendergast’s term—represents “a remarkable blind spot in the semiological approach to the question of reference” (Order of Mimesis, 71–72). 41. Compagnon, Démon de la théorie, 134. The relaxation of Barthes’s iconophobia in La Chambre claire—where the “indexical” reality effect of the photograph is positively described—is perhaps the result of contamination with the Lacanian idea of the imaginary. See Jay, Downcast Eyes, 437–56. 42. Barthes, “Effet de réel,” 89. 43. Barthes, “Écrire,” 25. Spectatorial naïveté did routinely pop up, however, in the many full-scale critiques of the realist novel appearing in the 1970s and early 1980s. The mendacity of the realist novel is driven home by Catherine Belsey with an updating of Stendhal’s anecdote: “The success with which the Sherlock Holmes stories achieve an illusion of reality is repeatedly demonstrated. According to The Times in December 1967, letters to Sherlock Homes were still commonly addressed to 221B Baker Street, many of them asking for the Detective’s help” (quoted in Tallis, In Defence of Realism, 153). In such attacks (of which Tallis mentions many), the self-reflexive novel emerges as the antidote, stepping in to warn readers about taking fiction for reality. (On infatuation with Sherlock Holmes as a more ironic phenomenon than Belsey thinks, see Saler, “ ‘Clap.’”) 44. Eliot, Adam Bede, 175.

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45. “A True History” is incorporated into the title page of Behn’s purportedly eyewitness account, Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave (1688). 46. For instance Balzac, who like many realists had an affection for the mirror analogy, explicitly invoked Leibniz’s idea of a “concentrating mirror,” or speculum concentrationis (Balzac, Écrits sur le roman, 59n1). 47. Balzac, Comédie humaine, 1: 14. 48. My remarks on fiction’s ability to make a specific type of proposition—subtle propositions that are worlds away from the naïveté lambasted by Barthes and others—are brief. For a more extensive treatment, see Foley, Telling the Truth, 42–63. 49. Dickens, Hard Times, 314. 50. Cited in Vargas Llosa, Temptation, 168. 51. Balzac, Écrits sur le roman, 83; Hugo, Oeuvres complètes, 14: 1254. The other quotations (made without reference to the formulations of Balzac and Hugo) are from, respectively, Furst, All Is True, 9, and Dubois, Romanciers du réel, 47. (Though both Furst and Dubois want to save realism from such accusations, they do so by balancing its mendacity against more positive characteristics; the accusations themselves are validated.) 52. For some foundational accounts in this vein, in order of initial appearance, see May, “Histoire”; Deloffre, “Problème”; Mylne, Eighteenth-Century French Novel; Coulet, Roman jusqu’à la Révolution; Showalter, Evolution of the French Novel; and Démoris, Roman à la première personne. 53. Stewart, Imitation and Illusion, 303. In “Rise of I,” Stewart has substantially modified his perspective, stressing the formal importance of first-person narration in a way that is largely compatible with my understanding, developed below, of the pseudofactual novel as a technology. 54. Cohn, Distinction of Fiction, 3. 55. Davis, Factual Fictions, 156. 56. Foley, Telling the Truth, 145, 144. 57. Foley, Telling the Truth, 118, 119. 58. Foley, Telling the Truth, 118. 59. Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, xvi. 60. Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, 145. 61. Gallagher, “Rise of Fictionality,” 344. I will return to Gallagher’s account of Fielding’s types in Chapter 3. 62. To be sure, the critic is careful not to suggest an instantaneous development: “there was no sudden novelistic revolution that purged English narrative of somebody [i.e., real “referents”] and replaced him or her with nobody [fictional characters]” (Nobody’s Story, 165). To square this prudence with the idea of a “massive reorientation,” perhaps Gallagher would argue that there is indeed a process, only a quick one, completed in the space of a couple of decades. 63. Foley, Telling the Truth, 117. 64. Montesquieu, Oeuvres complètes, 1: 131. 65. How Gallagher would answer such questions is unclear, partially because of the

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nature of her claims and partially because her work has evolved. I’ve noted that Nobody’s Story does not attempt to take the measure of pseudofactual conventions; moreover, while it suggests systematic upheaval, it consists largely of close literary readings of the themes of property and production, self-invention and naming, debt and credit, all of which are seen as (metaphorically) engaging the issue of fictionality. Gallagher’s chronology also proves quite elastic, since in a third study she has suggested that it is in the nineteenth century that a general valorization of doubt (emblematized by Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism) allows novel readers to entertain propositions they do not literally believe in; at the same time, this culture of doubt (and thus fiction) is said to have its roots in Hamlet (Gallagher and Greenblatt, “Novel”). By this standard, like the bourgeoisie of the old joke, fiction too will always be rising. 66. Foley, Telling the Truth, 124; she calls the longevity of the mode “a wonder” (119). Davis remarks the “striking fact” that Richardson and other novelists “refused to concede that they were writing fictions,” proposing that this may be “because fiction was too limiting a concept for them” (Factual Fictions, 176, 192). 67. “The convention of the claim to historicity is becoming increasingly vestigial,” reads McKeon’s gloss on Richardson’s letter to Warburton (Origins of the English Novel, 414). 68. For simplicity I’ve focused my attention on the three scholars of the English novel who have done the most to foreground fictionality as a historical problem. I should mention a few more here, starting with Day, From Fiction to the Novel, who offers a capacious tour of English pseudofactuality that argues, albeit diffusely, that its strategies are an effort “to create realism” (189). (Day’s vocabulary does not map onto that of most, since “fiction” in his title refers to the outright romance fancifulness that preceded “the novel.”) Without foregrounding the term, Michael McKeon suggests that fiction emerges as a kind of middle way between naïve empiricism and extreme skepticism. Through a slow dialectical process, the novel teaches its readers that literature involves a special sort of credence: in language that recalls that of Davis and Foley, he writes that little by little “modern culture becomes sufficiently tolerant of artful fictions to pass beyond the bare recognition of their incredibility and to conceive the possibility of their validation in other terms” (Origins of the English Novel, 128). The most recent attempt to tackle the problem of the French pseudofactual is Herman, Kozul and Kremer, Roman véritable; the idiom here is different, since what rises is neither realism nor a kind of credence but the “legitimacy” of fiction. Finally, there are a number of studies of the eighteenth-century French and English novel’s relation with history that do not foreground fictionality (or the pseudofactual) per se: Gearhart, Open Boundary, Ray, Story and History, and Zimmerman, Boundaries of Fiction. 69. Though I address the issue in much more depth in Chapter 2, speaking of romance here demands that I clarify my use of the word novel. Like many literary historians, I use “romance” to designate the long narratives of the French seventeenth century—works from d’Urfé’s L’Astrée (1607–27) to Scudéry’s Clélie (1654–60)—that were modeled on Heliodorus’s Aethiopica. Unlike many, however, I treat romance as a form of the novel—a form that is morphologically distinct from the pseudofactual novel and the fictional novel. (The

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distinction involves not only length, but also, say, the number of characters and modes of narration; the distinction is not one of content or intrinsic plausibility.) I avoid, then, the historical and logical difficulties of determining just when romance becomes the novel at the same time I acknowledge the temptation—visible since the 1660s—to make the distinction. That is, there is indeed a (morphological) break between romance and the pseudofactual; but there is no break between romance and the novel. (If I could, I would reword the statement of John Mullan’s I use as my epigraph: “the” novel does not arrive in the eighteenth century, only a certain identifiable form of novel.) 70. See Morgan, “Make-Believe,” 177–78. (These are among the rare—and invariably derogatory—references to the writings that Bakhtin and many others view as ancestors of the modern novel.) 71. Outillage mental was a term coined by the pioneering historian of mentalités Lucien Febvre; see Chartier, “Intellectual History,” 18–22. 72. Gossman, “History and Literature,” 23. Gossman’s contention might be better rephrased by saying that history and poetry were both co-equal branches of rhetoric, though classifications such as these were hotly contested in the Renaissance. 73. Poetics 9, in Russell and Winterbottom, eds., Ancient Literary Criticism, 102–3. 74. For the Chinese situation, for example, see Lu, From Historicity to Fictionality. 75. See Patterson, Negotiating the Past, esp. 197–230. 76. Quoted in Nelson, Fact or Fiction, 46. Nelson bases his efficient synthesis on Weinberg, History, who concludes, “Most critics believe that the object [of imitation] must be a true one if credibility is to result” (1: 633). In McKeon’s account of the novel, such statements are taken for signs of the inroads made by the empirical spirit. Hence, observing that references to historical truth can already be found in Renaissance romance, he declares them to be attempts by a formerly fanciful genre “to adapt to epistemological revolution and to keep itself honest” (Origins of the English Novel, 56). But scorn for poets who speak of people and events that never were does not make the people who deliver the scorn predecessors of Locke; they are merely good followers of Aristotelian thought about poetry. McKeon briefly denies this, arguing that such thinkers “tended to read the Poetics through the spectacles of empirical epistemology” (53). The contention, which is never supported, follows from the preconception that only the invisible hand of empiricism can motivate the appeal to truth. 77. Fielding, Tom Jones, 371. 78. Nelson calls this development a “flight from fiction,” by which he means a retreat into ever more historical poses; see Fact or Fiction, 92–115. 79. See Heliodorus, Histoire aethiopique, 159–64. 80. Quoted in Esmein, ed., Poétiques du roman, 139–40. Their preface is often cited as a manifesto of neoclassical vraisemblance. Again, this was just a rationale, and some did not agree: Huet’s treatise De l’origine des romans (1670), perhaps the best-known early history of the genre, maintains that romance protagonists do not need to be historical in the manner of tragic characters: being of middling stature, the former could not possibly have come to the attention of readers; they are vraisemblable in the sense that they may be assumed

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to be historical (Origine, 445–46). This is not, however, an argument for open fictionality: as we will see in Chapter 1, the logic is still firmly Aristotelian in its postulate of historical possibility. 81. “L’esprit n’est point ému par ce qu’il ne croit pas” (Art poétique III, 50, in Boileau, Oeuvres complètes, 170). Boileau restates Horace’s oft-reprised dictum of incredulus odi: “Whatever you thus show me, I discredit and abhor” (Ars poetica, in Satires, 466–67). “Thus” referred specifically to overly horrible events (Medea’s murder of her children, the dinner Atreus makes of his brother Thyestes), but the line was widely taken as declaring the necessity of audience belief across the board, especially in the matter of supernatural phenomena. 82. On illusionism’s deep roots in Aristotelian thought of the Renaissance, see Hénin, Ut pictura theatrum. Hénin’s work demonstrates that the concern with illusion that many have viewed as typical of the Enlightenment thought about the arts and a properly modern “aesthetics” (e.g., Hobson, Object of Art; Marshall, Frame of Art) is in fact merely a development of much older commonplaces. 83. D’Argens, Lectures amusantes, 1: 52–53. 84. This is not to say that Aristotelian invention could not be made to serve topical ends: French neoclassical tragedy as a whole can and must be viewed in the context of pressing political questions of the day (conflicts between the aristocracy and the monarchy, problems of governance, and so on); and heroic romance allowed a writer such as Madeleine de Scudéry to offer extended instruction in aristocratic sociability at the same time she referred to heroes of the past. But I follow Foley’s claim that the pseudofactual effectively expanded the reach of the novel’s power to figure the contemporary world. 85. The first such narrators seem to appear in England in the late 1780s—in, say, Blower’s Maria, A Novel (1785) and Wollstonecraft’s Mary, A Fiction (1788). By the 1790s, a number of very different subgeneric contexts feature third-person texts having no “real world” narrator, among them Austen’s novel of manners, Scott’s historical novel, and Goethe’s Bildungsroman; the gothic novel alternates between pseudofactual found documents and a fictional third person. Further narratological considerations will be postponed until the Conclusion. 86. Acknowledging Gallagher, Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy, has greatly expanded this line of inquiry. 87. Bender, “Enlightenment Fiction.” 88. Reiss, Discourse of Modernism. 89. Welsh, Strong Representations, 44–76. 90. Liu, “Power of Formalism,” 743. On the affinity in the humanities for arguments that “enchant” their object of study, see Schneider, Culture and Enchantment. 91. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 43. By contrast, Kantian pleasure is predicated on an object that really exists. 92. See Benjamin, Arcades Project, 150–70. Thanks to Andrew Clark for the Benjamin analogy. 93. To an extent, this is the kind of history of the novel attempted by Franco Moretti, especially in Graphs, Maps, Trees. I will have occasion to allude to Moretti’s findings in the

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course of this book, though usually because his hypotheses, couched in the Darwinian language of evolutionary biology, do not match my observations. Between what I’m calling a morphological history and Moretti’s work are two major differences. First, Moretti thinks of formal innovation as a kind of gene passed down from generation to generation, whereas the technology metaphor is, I believe, much less strained. Second, though Moretti crunches an impressive amount of brute data, the way he interprets the data is very much in line with the “sociology of forms” he has advocated in the past: observed evolutions must be the epiphenomenal manifestation of factors such as the rise of the bourgeoisie or capitalist market culture. (This is particularly evident in “Style,” his study of titles.)

chapter 1. the impossible princess (lafayette) Portions of this chapter appeared in “Lafayette’s Impossible Princess: On (Not) Making Literary History,” PMLA 125, 4 (2010), reprinted by permission of the copyright holder, the Modern Language Association of America. 1. Watt, Rise of the Novel, 30. The modernity of La Princesse de Clèves is proverbial. For some accounts, see Stone, “Exemplary Teaching”; Prince, Narrative as Theme (39–50); Lyons, Exemplum (217–36); and Desan, “Economy of Love.” For a review and critique of such arguments, see Campbell, “ ‘Modernité.’” 2. I refer to what were known as nouvelles historiques as historical “novellas” rather than “novels” solely to avoid associations with later historical novels by Scott and others. By “historical romance” I designate what was called the roman héroïque, or, as time went on, the vieux roman. This distinction was generic, and was observed at the time Lafayette was writing. My use of it here does not imply that I believe that the roman héroïque was not a “real” novel, or that the nouvelle historique was. Many things separate the two forms, but from the point of view of this study both are equally far from being fiction. 3. Charnes, Conversations, 84–85 (citations in the text will appear with the abbreviation C). Valincour’s most recent editor follows this argument; see Valincour, Lettres, 25–30 (henceforth abbreviated V). Assertions of Charnes’s superiority on this point have become commonplace; see, e.g., Esmein, ed., Poétiques du roman, 632–42. 4. Valincour’s criticisms are attributed in his text to different interlocutors; since we cannot know what Valincour’s own opinion was, I refer to all the (sometimes contradictory) critical statements as his. 5. Seventeenth-century French romances typically had some sort of historical setting. History both gave the works a claim to moral value (Bannister, Privileged Mortals, 91–99) and underwrote the verisimilitude responsible for readerly pleasure: “[when] lies are made openly, such crude falsity makes no impression on the soul, and gives no pleasure,” wrote Georges and Madeleine de Scudéry in the preface to their romance Ibrahim (1641–44; Esmein, ed., Poétiques du roman, 139–40). As I’ve noted in the Introduction, occasionally writers offered contrary opinions without developing a practice that could displace the Aristotelian model.

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6. Valincour’s position here was representative; another contemporary formulation can be found in Sorel, De la connaissance des bons livres (1671): “When the novel is entirely invented, it can be set up [réglé] according to the author’s fancy. . . . But if an author takes his subject from some ancient or modern history, he is not allowed to change the fundamental actions; one can certainly add to the truth, but not corrupt it, otherwise this would mean contradicting everything that historians had written about it” (Esmein, ed., Poétiques du roman, 319). Tragedy had been envisioned no differently, and it is instructive that Corneille’s pride over his limit case for poetic invention, Rodogune (1644–45), was based on the fact that he had managed to attribute to a cast of real characters a completely fabricated plot. (Invented characters were shunted off to the lower genres of tragicomedy and comedy.) 7. Genette, “Vraisemblance et motivation,” first drew attention to this aspect of Valincour’s critique, and feminist scholars in particular have concentrated on how female characters’ plausibility was seen to vary in proportion to submission to patriarchal convention; see especially Miller, “Emphasis Added,” and Beasley, Revising Memory. On cultural plausibility generally, see Culler, Structuralist Poetics. 8. Bussy’s objections center around the scene in which the Princess admits her temptations to her husband; Fontenelle’s reserves are much more muted, extending only to the conduct of Nemours and Monsieur de Clèves. Both are reproduced in Laugaa, Lectures, 18–19, 22–25. 9. On the importance of vulgarized history in the period, see Ranum, Artisans of Glory. 10. The most influential analyses of the historical novella have centered around this notion of secret history. For a general account, see Harth, Ideology and Culture, 129–79. Since secrets in the historical novella are usually affective in nature and concern women and their power to shape history, the genre has often been read as a subversion of official masculinist historiography; see especially Beasley, Revising Memory (190–243), and Grande, Stratégies de romancières (361–84). See also the remarks of Hipp, Mythes et réalités (132–94), who looks closely at novelists’ engagement with history in this period, though without mention of Lafayette’s exceptionality. 11. Quoted in Nelson, Fact or Fiction, 43. 12. As might be expected, over the course of the half-century separating d’Urfé’s pastoral romance L’Astrée (1607–27) and the advent of the historical novella in the 1660s, what we might want to call the “historicity” of characters varied. Typically—in the romances of the Scudérys, of La Calprenède—protagonists had historical credentials, while minor characters were merely plausible. In Lafayette’s own stab at the romance genre, Zayde (1670–71), the eponymous heroine was “invented,” certainly, but in the accepted manner: extant documentation said nothing about her. Early in the century, one finds more indifference to historical referents. D’Urfé, for instance, placed his shepherds in fifth-century Gaul but did not pretend that they were real figures; in this, he was in line with the reception of Heliodorus’s Aetheopica, which was not assumed to have historical sanction. However, in none of these cases do we find, as in La Princesse de Clèves, a heroine who is “visibly false” in the manner I will be describing.

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13. For evidence that Lafayette’s readers were well versed in Renaissance history and would read with it in mind, see Letts, Legendary Lives. (Strangely, Letts does not comment on the fact that the novel’s heroine punctured a hole in this type of reading.) 14. Lafayette, Romans et nouvelles, 260 (henceforth abbreviated L). The supposed relation between Mademoiselle de Chartres and the historically real Vidame de Chartres (said to be her uncle), rather than authenticating her, would only have confused matters: “Vidame de Chartres” was a hereditary office, not a title of nobility or a family name (see Ritter, “La Philothée,” 88). 15. The matter of the number of de Clèves brothers is a bit intricate. It has long been thought that Lafayette’s mention of three brothers was due to her consultation of Anselme’s Histoire de la maison royale de France (1674), the only source to add a third brother, Henri de Clèves, to the two attested in other histories, François II de Clèves and Jacques de Clèves. (For this hypothesis, see Chamard and Rudler, “Sources historiques,” 125.) Valincour, clearly aware of Anselme, confuses Jacques and Henri, who is the one who never married (cf. Anselme, Histoire, 1:288). Seemingly unaware of Anselme, Charnes maintains that Lafayette simply invents a third brother (of the safe “possible” variety). Weil has proposed that because Lafayette may have finished her novel before the appearance of Anselme’s genealogy, Charnes is perhaps closer to the truth (C 108). It is difficult to imagine Lafayette passing up the opportunity to consult Anselme’s new volume, whatever the date of the work’s composition, but the objection changes little: she pointedly makes her protagonist the second-born son, even though sources all give this role to the married Jacques. 16. Brantôme preserves moreover the sexual associations of the colors, which symbolize “pleasure and steadfastness, or steadfast pleasure” (jouissance et fermeté, ou ferme en jouissance; Oeuvres complètes, 3: 271). 17. Indeed, all contradictions with respect to history were not equal. Dates, for example, which Lafayette used with considerable latitude, did not attract Valincour’s attention, as was to be expected in a literary culture in which dramatists regularly compressed events (see, e.g., Racine’s prefatory comments on Mithridate [1673]). 18. Compare, for instance, to Huet’s separation of history and romance: “[Histories] are true in the main, and false only in a few parts; romances, on the contrary, are true only in parts, and false in the main” (Origine, 445). 19. Harth, Ideology and Culture (194–95), has suggested that the historical novella routinely plays off virtuous fictional heroines against historical male figures, but this is misleading: only in rare cases do invented characters play significant roles, and even then they remain within the bounds of the possible (i.e., they do not contradict the historical record). The Appendix to the present chapter details the practice of Lafayette’s competitors. 20. I have not attempted to coordinate the above account with three other readings that have stressed the novel notion of fictionality at work in Lafayette because the terms of discussion are so different. But I would like to mention these readings here. In a deconstructive analysis by Mireille Calle-Gruber, the text is said to expose the workings of the fictive that it simultaneously puts into place (Effet-fiction, 169–200); Éric Van der Schueren holds the Princess’s fictivity to be a consequence of the Jansenist theory of the sign

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(“Portrait”); closer to my own preoccupations, William Ray has considered the fictional heroine as a “private” challenge to the collective discourse of history (Story and History, 24– 49). None of these readings focus attention on the period’s conventions of poetic invention and novelistic practice, or their implications with respect to a history of fictional modes. 21. The denial is explicitly read as an ancestor of modern legal disclaimers by NoilleClauzade, “Considérations logiques,” 181. 22. Indeed, assertions of pure invention were an unmistakable invitation to look for real-world referents. Keys thus provided an anchor for characters with no obvious historical or mythological precedent. Although such a practice did part ways with Aristotelian verisimilitude (functioning rather more along the lines of satire), it was no more “fictional” than Valincour’s idea of poetic invention. (On the many uses of keys in the period, see Bombart and Escola, eds., Lectures à clés, and Chapters 2 and 3 below.) In the particular case of La Princesse de Montpensier, the notice’s use of the word fabuleux (“imaginary”) would have been especially suspicious: the term, typically an antonym of “history” (see Sermain, Métafictions, 21–84), was out of place in a book whose use of history was on display; the notice thus generated a contradiction that could be resolved only by concluding that irony was intended. Nonetheless, the work is not keyed in any normal sense of the term: the roman à clef flagrantly depicts scandal under assumed names, while Montpensier uses real names to hint at impropriety. 23. Montpensier would on the face of things be a potential mentor of Lafayette, having included pieces by the renowned young wit in the anthology of portraits she had privately printed in 1659, thus giving Lafayette her first publication. On the other hand, allegiances were complicated: Lafayette was fast friends in these years with the scholar Gilles Ménage (who saw to it that La Princesse de Montpensier would be issued by his normal publisher, Thomas Jolly), and Ménage may have encouraged Lafayette to take a swipe at the official protectress of his own enemy, the Abbé Cotin (Duchêne, Madame de Lafayette, 201–3). It is also possible, as Micheline Cuénin has noted, that an affair between Guise and Renée d’Anjou, whose memory seems to have been expunged from the family records, was a matter of oral speculation in the entourage of the Grande Mademoiselle (see Cuénin’s presentation of the text in Picard and Lafond, eds., Nouvelles du XVIIe siècle, 1383). Marc Escola, the most recent editor of La Princesse de Montpensier, has presented the fullest case for Lafayette’s possible indiscretions; see Nouvelles galantes, 37–49. 24. The inverse relationship obtaining between the two characters may be signaled obliquely in a number of the novel’s details. I will limit myself to one example. La Princesse de Clèves’ mention of the husband of Lafayette’s former heroine, the prince de Montpensier, is hardly innocent: in La Princesse de Clèves, Montpensier is none other than the first candidate to marry Mademoiselle de Chartres. (The plans go quickly awry due to the duchesse de Valentinois’s opposition.) Mademoiselle de Chartres, then, is the young woman who barely avoids the fate of Renée d’Anjou. This type of detail is admittedly of little interest to the modern reader, but might not have gone unnoticed by a public fond of genealogical intricacies. 25. Joan DeJean, “Lafayette’s Ellipses,” was the first to see in the novel’s gossip

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something other than a mirror of court life: when read alongside Lafayette’s documented reluctance to identify herself as the work’s author, La Princesse de Clèves starts to look like a comment on the period’s abundant literary commerce in stories of feminine passion. For the proposal that the novel be read as a comment on keyed reading specifically, see Gevrey, “Lectures à clés.” 26. On such naming, see Horowitz, “Primary Sources,” 166; somewhat in the manner of DeJean, Horowitz reads the withdrawal of the Princess at the novel’s end as “resonant testimony to the power of the not named” (175). 27. In two of the novel’s interpolated narrations Lafayette does recount gossip—the loves of Diane de Poitiers and Henry II, and of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII. Such stories had in a sense passed over into the public domain, which is why Fontenelle wonders how it would be even possible for the fifteen-year old protagonist not to have heard them already. “Even I knew them,” he objects (quoted in Laugaa, Lectures, 25). 28. Whence Lafayette’s advantage over even one of her most talented contemporaries, Villedieu, whose moralistic denunciation of the treachery of court and heart in Les Désordres de l’amour was more part of the problem, as the saying goes, than its solution. For Villedieu publishes in her third novella an archival “scoop”—the real parting love-letter actually addressed by the protagonist Givry to his unreceptive mistress shortly before his death. See Villedieu, Désordres, 206. 29. In his account of gossip in Lafayette, Ross Chambers also proposes that the text “transcend[s]” the mundane phenomenon it describes. His argument proceeds differently, however, since he holds gossip and novelistic storytelling to be variations on the same thing: literature maintains “a complicity with the force of desire that is nevertheless the scandal of an orderly bourgeois society,” and La Princesse de Clèves in particular takes as its “enunciatory model” the characters’ own interest in each other’s private affairs (“Gossip and the Novel,” 213, 218, 224). The novel’s superiority to gossip, for Chambers, lies in its ability to provide detached psychological insight in the place of mere facts. However, the most basic reason the novel is superior to the gossip exchanged by its characters is that Lafayette’s subject, the Princess, has no historical referent. 30. See Hampton, Writing from History. 31. On the “contagion” model of aesthetic effect, see Chapter 4 below. 32. Occasional assertions are made to the contrary (e.g., Malandain, “Écriture de l’histoire,” 20), but there is no evidence to back up such assumptions. Alain Niderst, the foremost proponent of biographical keys to French texts of this period, has proposed a number of possible “models,” concluding that “the Princess is not imaginary”; they are entirely of his own devising, however, and not attested in the reception history (L xxxvi–xxxvii). By contrast, contemporary allusions to La Princesse de Montpensier all treated it as either keyed or an example of “brazen calumny” (Villiers, Entretiens, 152–53). Ironically, the sole allusion to the reality of the Princesse de Clèves was made by none other than Lafayette herself, in her oft-cited remark to the effect that she had heard that it was not a novel but in fact memoirs whose title had been changed; for the text of her letter, see Laugaa, Lectures, 16n1. 33. Historical novellas that were taken to allude to present-day affairs set their narratives

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in the present, most famously in Du Plaisir’s La Duchesse d’Estramène (1682); and most are not shy about advertising their topicality by stating at the outset that the story is a true one. 34. See Jeanneret, “Commentary.” 35. Most readings of the Mercure galant campaign stress its novelty; Joan DeJean for example has argued that it was instrumental in the formation of a new, expanded, noncoterie public for literature (Ancients, 51–66), and I have made similar remarks myself (“Storyteller,” 157–61). Yet notwithstanding the new forum the Mercure galant provides, Donneau de Visé’s prescribed reading harks back to a use of character that the novel itself no longer practices. 36. Valincour is incapable of seeing, writes Charnes, “that what he condemns [in one place] derives naturally from what he admired before” (C 172–73). 37. “Insidiously, Valincour throws doubt on the originality of the avowal,” writes Laugaa (Lectures, 91), while Cuénin gives credit to Charnes for rescuing Lafayette from unjust charges of plagiarism when he claims that La Princesse de Clèves had been completed before Les Désordres (Villedieu, Désordres, 231–32). 38. Allusions to the novel’s psychological exploits are too numerous to cite; but on Lafayette’s cultivation of a space of verbal discretion and “recessive action,” see François, Open Secrets, 66–128. 39. “Hesitatingly in the works of Defoe, then more boldly in subsequent novels of the eighteenth century, the pseudofactual imposture signaled the invocation of a mimetic [i.e., fictional] contract,” writes Foley (Telling the Truth, 118). For a more thorough presentation of such histories of fiction, see my Introduction. 40. Gallagher, “Rise of Fictionality,” 344. 41. Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 76. 42. In fact, Benjamin’s text reads: “It has rightly been said that all great works of literature found a genre or dissolve one—that they are, in other words, special cases”; his rephrasing of the sententious statement may well be a subversion of it, since it makes of the masterwork something atypical, as befitting an essay on Proust, in whose work “everything transcends the norm” (Illuminations, 201). 43. For a critique of this assimilation of natural and cultural evolution, see Prendergast, “Evolution and Literary History”; Moretti responds in “End of the Beginning.” 44. “Rousseau stimulated . . . in his anonymous readers a process of identification that was without real precedent,” writes Vincent-Buffault (Histoire des larmes, 14), taking no note of Valincour’s precedence. I will take up the problem of Rousseauian identification in Chapter 4. 45. See, e.g., the remarks of DeJean, Ancients, 181n74, and Fournier, Généalogie du roman, 290. Camille Esmein, “Pensée du roman,” has suggested that Valincour’s appreciation is part of a broader late seventeenth-century reorientation of novelistic reading practices in the direction of identification. Her richly documented study does not, however, do enough to distinguish the rare identificatory language of self-recognition (as seen in Valincour) from a much more widespread vocabulary of shared feeling and illusion. 46. See Laugaa, “Réception,” 121–32.

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47. I explore the contemporary devaluation of the long romances at more length in Chapter 2. 48. It is possible that Lafayette had in fact composed (or at least planned) her work before the historical novella had been named and become popular: in 1671, a royal privilège is taken out for a book entitled Le Prince de Clèves. If this is the case, she could obviously not break rules of a genre that did not exist yet. But since that genre’s rules regarding invention were essentially the same as the rules of historical romance, tragedy, or any serious genre, the possibility would not change my point substantially. 49. Davis, Factual Fictions. 50. See Cohn, Transparent Minds. 51. I have culled my inventory of historical novellas from the all-but-comprehensive list of novelistic works provided by Lever, Fiction narrative. I rely on Lever’s research for attribution of these frequently anonymous tales. 52. Quirks include Préchac’s Le Secret, nouvelle historique (1683), which is really a collection of exempla from past and present on the necessity for secrecy, or Mailly’s late Les Disgrâces des amants, nouvelle historique (1697), in which the term, now a quarter-century old, is applied to a present-day amorous adventure with no historical ramifications whatsoever. 53. If Zayde has never been classified as a historical novella, this is because of its prominent use of interpolated tales, which clearly refers it to Scuderian romance; if one considers only its “historicity,” it is indistinguishable from many historical novellas, and indeed more detailed than a good number of others. 54. Two curiosities, though, actually borrow Lafayette’s invented characters: Bernard’s Le Comte d’Amboise (1688) reprises the dissimulating Madame de Tournon and the longsuffering Sancerre; Mademoiselle de Jarnac (1684), attributed to Boisguilbert, gives a supporting role to none other than the princesse de Clèves. 55. Harth, Ideology and Culture (194–95), adduces two texts as evidence for her contention that historical novellas routinely feature virtuous fictional heroines played off against underhanded historical male characters—Durand’s Histoire des amours de Grégoire VII (first published in 1687) and Courtilz’s Le Grand Alcandre frustré (1696). But the former has an eleventh-century setting that makes the invention both palatable and plausible, while the latter is not a historical novella at all, since it is, with the exception of the heroine, keyed to the contemporary loves of Louis XIV. The closest analogue to La Princesse de Clèves may in fact be a book whose male hero provides the title: in d’Aulnoy’s Histoire d’Hypolite, comte de Duglas (1690), the protagonist is grafted onto a known family, and available sources would have easily enabled readers to detect the grafting. (L’Histoire d’Hypolite’s use of history is analyzed extensively in Duggan, Salonnières, 165–200.) Still, exceptional as it too may be, L’Histoire d’Hypolite upsets neither my specific contention in this chapter (that Lafayette is the only writer to engineer a collision between her novel and history) nor my larger point (inventing protagonists is not a practice that spreads in the wake of La Princesse de Clèves).

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chapter 2. quixote circa 1670 (subligny) An earlier version of portions of this chapter appeared in “Relearning to Read: Truth and Reference in Subligny’s La Fausse Clélie,” in The Art of Instruction: Essays on Pedagogy and Literature in Seventeenth-Century France, ed. Anne Birberick (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), reprinted by permission of the publisher. 1. The original 1670 Paris edition, attested in at least one early source, is lost; three Dutch editions survive (1671, 1672, 1680), though the 1680 edition, and perhaps even that of 1672, may be a repackaging of unsold volumes of the earlier printing. An English translation (1678) and the spate of early eighteenth-century editions (1710, 1712, 1716, 1718) do, however, confirm that the work did not sink into oblivion. 2. For French comic novels reprising Cervantes’s device, see Serroy, Roman et réalité; the stage (and much else) is covered by Bardon, Don Quichotte en France, esp. 1: 167–209. 3. Chapelain’s letter is quoted in Esmein-Sarrazin, Essor du roman, 11. La Calprenède died in the middle of his Faramond, which was finished by Ortigues de Vaumorière in 1670. On Scudéry’s transition, see Grande, “Du long au court.” 4. Du Plaisir, Sentiments sur les lettres, in Esmein, ed., Poétiques du roman, 761. Sixty years later, d’Argens was one who restated the position: “People tired of those long romances [romans]” (D’Argens, Lectures amusantes, 1: 24). (This is only one position, however: Lenglet Du Fresnoy, in his 1734 De l’usage des romans, registers no such lassitude, nor any radical break.) 5. Behn, Oronooko, 9; Manley is quoted in McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 60. 6. The French routinely referred to both old and new novels under the umbrella term of roman; though it may have seemed, in the late seventeenth century, that the term nouvelle could replace it, this did not occur (Sgard, “Mot ‘roman’”). (For some guides to the confusing French terminology of the latter part of the seventeenth century, see Showalter, Evolution of the French Novel, 11–37, and Esmein-Sarrazin, Essor du roman, 36–43.) In England, the cognate terms “romance” and “novel” did eventually stabilize, thus reifying an opposition that is thematic (one is silly, one is realistic), formal (one is long, the other short), and diachronic (one replaces the other). The stabilization was slow, however: “seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century writers often use the terms ‘romance,’ ‘history,’ and ‘novel’ with an evident interchangeability that must bewilder and frustrate all modern expectations,” writes McKeon after reviewing booksellers catalogs (Origins of the English Novel, 25). And of course the fact that stabilization finally occurred in England but not France has not kept researchers from seeking the origins of a qualitatively new (modern) French novel. But is the romance-novel opposition really the best way to understand the period’s admittedly common urge to draw a line between old and new forms? Such is the question that will preoccupy me here. 7. See, e.g., Godenne, “Association,” esp. 73–74. 8. McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, has devised an elaborate “dialectical” model of generic evolution to explain these apparently regressive movements. I hope to show, however, that what seems to be retrograde motion is an effect of viewing literary history from the unmoving earth that is the “modern novel.”

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9. Cervantes, Don Quixote, 28 and elsewhere. I quote from Smollett’s translation, which is exact: Cervantes always writes “books” (libros), and Spanish possessed no word corresponding to “romance” (roman and romanzo in French and Italian). 10. See, e.g., Quint, Cervantes’s Novel. 11. For one formulation of this position, see McKeon, Origins of the English Novel: “the epistemological reversals of Don Quixote, and Part I’s hypostatization under the selfconscious scrutiny of Part II, constitute an elaborate mechanism for inducing that species of belief-without-really-believing which would become, once the mechanism itself proved unnecessary, the realm of the aesthetic” (282). 12. On the French comic novel as an instance of symbolic class warfare, see Harth, Ideology and Culture, 34–67, and DiPiero, Dangerous Truths, 23–61, 163–93. There is much to be said for this version of events, though the professional situation of writers such as Sorel, Scarron, and Furetière (and no doubt Subligny) can be quite complicated. Sorel especially has attracted much interest; see, e.g., Stenzel, “Discours romanesque,” and Giavarini, “ ‘Histoire véritable.’ ” 13. The puzzle, which is not of my own invention, is most often recognized by scholars trying to square Don Quixote and Persiles. “After symbolically burning the chivalric romances he struggled to renounce, Cervantes began again and died writing a last chivalric work” (Robert, Old and the New, 3); “Why would Cervantes—so vocal and assiduous about toppling romance in Don Quixote—become engaged, toward the end of his life, in kidnapping it back again?” (Wilson, Allegories of Love, 4). Wilson recognizes what Robert, accepting the contradiction as such, does not: that Persiles is in no way a “last chivalric work.” 14. Doody, True Story; the premise (not argument) of Doody’s archetypal study is that the novel and romance are one and the same thing. 15. For remarks on the earliest uses of the Old French romanz, especially in its differentiation from the chanson de geste, see Marichal, “Naissance du roman.” 16. Amyot’s “Proesme” can be found in Heliodorus, Histoire aethiopique, 159–64; for his remarks on narrative structure, see 160–61. A wider context for Amyot’s praise of Heliodorus’s ordo artificialis specifically is offered by Cave, Pré-Histoires, 129–41. On the more general congruence between the 1547 preface and humanist poetics, as well as an account of the Aethiopica’s influence on French romance, see Sandy, “Classical Forerunners”; similarly, for Amyot as background for Cervantes’s Persiles, see Forcione, Cervantes’ Christian Romance, 13–29. Also valuable is Plazenet, Ébahissement. 17. Subligny, Fausse Clélie, 2 (henceforth cited parenthetically). 18. For consistency and brevity, and except in cases where confusion might result, I will refer to all characters by their last name. 19. “Esprit fort is a kind of insult directed at libertines and atheists [incrédules] who think that they are above common beliefs and opinions” (Furetière, Dictionnaire universel [1690], art. “esprit”). 20. Montal’s association of superstitious discourse with socially inferior sources is typical of an inversion in the Western history of the marvelous, by which phenomena that had

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been the subject of elite interest become stigmatized as popular error; see Daston and Park, Wonders. 21. Thomas Pavel’s description of L’Astrée holds for romance more generally: “With the exception of a few cases of intentional deception, the stories of L’Astrée . . . are told by truthful and scrupulous narrators with perfect knowledge of events. These stories, moreover, are almost never challenged. They do not present the point of view of one character on the facts—a point of view that could be contradicted or at least modified by different testimony” (Art de l’éloignement, 251). This romance reliability had previously been pointed out by Horowitz, Honoré d’Urfé, 128. 22. That is, before approximately 1630, romances included a high proportion of firstperson narratives; for reasons of aristocratic decorum, later authors would modify this procedure. For more information on romance narrators, with special attention to early modern transformations of the topoi of the Greek novels of Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, see Plazenet, Ébahissement, 597–624. 23. On the truth topos in Marguerite de Navarre, see Mathieu-Castellani, Conversation conteuse, 7–22. 24. Shapin, Social History of Truth. 25. Poetics 9; quoted from Russell and Winterbottom, eds., Ancient Literary Criticism, 102. 26. Serroy, Roman et réalité, 672. Serroy seems to be following Coulet, who states: “Subligny engages in one single plot a group of characters whom we come to know by their behavior over the course of the action, by the stories they tell about themselves or that others tell about them, and by the commentary that these stories provoke” (Roman jusqu’à la Révolution, 254). As I have mentioned, in late French romances decorum prevented aristocratic characters from providing accounts of their own heroic actions; secondary characters—attendants and so on—instead provided the stories of their masters. The elimination of the first person was especially thorough by Scudéry’s time; of the 39 embedded narratives of Artamène, only 3 are in the first person (Godenne, Romans de Scudéry, 97n1). 27. Koyré, Closed World. 28. See Morlet-Chantalat, Clélie. Clélie’s use of commentary stands out quantitatively but not qualitatively from what was already found in L’Astrée or the Heptaméron. 29. As Morlet-Chatalat has remarked, Scudéry never pursues the possibility of interweaving her various narrative threads: between embedded tales and frame tale there is at best “a vague relation of anteriority that . . . never provides any surprise in the later events of the novel” (Clélie, 236). A better model for Subligny’s interweave might be the extremely intricate structure of L’Astrée or the enigmatic story of Destin and L’Étoile in Scarron’s Roman comique (1651–1657), although it, like Clélie, is exempt from worries about narrative truth. Subligny’s interest in the interweaving of narrative threads is shared by some of his contemporaries, notably, Lafayette, in Zayde (1670–1671), and Villedieu, in Les Exilés de la cour d’Auguste (1672). Challe’s Les Illustres françaises (1713) is sometimes seen as the last and best example of this sort of romance structure. None of these works, however, contain as

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much excess information as La Fausse Clélie, whose obsession with plotting connections overwhelms its own plot. 30. Coulet, Roman jusqu’à la Révolution, 254. 31. See, e.g., Serroy, Roman et réalité, 673–74. 32. Serroy, Roman et réalité, 672. 33. Again Serroy is surprised: “Juliette has only one fault, that of having lived a life so romance-like that it was indeed worthy of having figured in a precious novel [i.e., by Scudéry]” (Roman et réalité, 672). 34. A presentation and reproduction of Subligny’s preface can be found in Esmein, ed., Poétiques du roman, 352–55. Subligny might be responding here to a wish expressed by one of the devisantes in Segrais’s Nouvelles françaises (1656–1657), where the question of names is foregrounded: “I have a hard time believing that so many people of sense, the very ones who have imagined on our behalf such noble Scythians and generous Parthians, have not taken equal pleasure in imagining French knights or princes who would be just as accomplished and whose adventures would be no less amusing” (1: 19). 35. See, for example, Showalter, Evolution of the French Novel, who discusses Subligny’s naming practice specifically on 164–65. For some general remarks, see also Watt, Rise of the Novel, 18–21. 36. The Mercure was not the first successful periodical in France, but unlike the Gazette of Renaudot, which starting in 1631 featured matter-of-fact reporting of international and national events, it offered society news in a format that encouraged reader submissions and involvement. As such, it was very much the ancestor of Addison and Steele’s famous Spectator. 37. In contrast with the Heptaméron, in which “true” tales feature at best characters whose names are onomastic plays on character traits; see Winn, “Clin d’oeil.” This is not to say that scholars have not made efforts to identify—with apparent success—many of the real-world referents of Marguerite de Navarre’s work; see Cazauran, Heptaméron, 30–33. 38. Niderst, Essai d’histoire littéraire, 54. That such a decoding was well within contemporary expectations is clear from the fact that anagrammatical reading was practiced both in erudite circles (Hallyn, “Anagramme”) and in salon literature (Denis, Parnasse galant, 225–27). 39. The example consulted is in the collection of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (PT1100.F7 no. 1061 \t\). Niderst to all appearances was unaware of this key when he made his identifications of Subligny’s protagonists. 40. Notwithstanding Niderst’s many correct guesses, most identifications given by the key do not work through onomastic resemblance. Montal is given not, as Niderst hypothesizes, as François de Montsaulvin, “second born son of the famous Comte de Montal, who fought alongside Condé after the Fronde” (Essai d’histoire littéraire, 54), but as the Chevalier de Cavois. 41. The heroine of Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves, made “impossible” in the manner I’ve detailed in Chapter 1, should be considered a reaction to the type of narrative exchange that La Fausse Clélie strives to teach its readers.

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42. The most notable sign of a change in critical winds has been the appearance of a volume of Littératures classiques devoted to the subject (Bombart and Escola, eds., Lectures à clés). For pioneering work on the subject, see Beugnot, “Oedipe et le sphinx,” who argues that the significance of keys far outstrips the “rudimentary sociology” (229) often practiced by their nineteenth-century champions; and Stewart, “Roman à clefs,” who provides a brief overview of the post-romance use of keys in France. 43. Cousin, Société française. 44. For instance, the key covered too few of the book’s many characters to authorize us to view the entire opus as keyed. (For a critique of Cousin’s position, see Godenne, Romans de Scudéry, 83–96.) Since Cousin, other researchers have attempted to devise keys from scratch, based on various biographical clues; see especially Niderst, “Sur les clefs.” 45. Cited in Godenne, Romans de Scudéry, 88. 46. In her correspondence, Lafayette refers on two occasions, in 1657 and 1658, to Clélie’s keys (Lafayette, Oeuvres complètes, 544, 566); the Dutch scientist Christian Huygens refers to keys in his journals (see Mesnard, “Pour une clef,” 371; Mesnard’s article offers a spirited defense of the relevance of keys to Scudéry’s novels). The abundantly testified propensity of contemporaries to view Molière’s protagonists as having specific real-world models or the printed keys to La Bruyère’s later Les Caractères are additional evidence that the practice was widespread. (In the following chapter I will return to the problem of keyed readings in novels inspired by works of social observation such as La Bruyère’s.) 47. Scudéry, Clélie, 1: 496–501. One might also note that Scudéry imports the burgeoning genre of the literary portrait, which patently depends on real-world referents, directly into a novel whose eponymous protagonist’s very name (Clé-lie) subliminally spurs us, perhaps, to look for keys. 48. “It would therefore seem that while the portrait increasingly exhibits its link to the present, intercalated stories, with their narrative content, remain beholden to a tradition of moral reflection” (Morlet-Chantalat, Clélie, 214). Additional information on the portrait craze can be found in Harth, Ideology and Culture, 68–128, and Plantié, Mode du portrait. 49. On the period’s practice of pseudonyms, see Denis, Parnasse galant, 189–235. 50. Rohan was a brilliant member of court society who has the distinction of being the only member of the upper nobility executed during Louis XIV’s long reign (in 1674, after a failed plot against the crown). 51. Cervantes “could not have written Don Quixote at all without a keen sense of the difference, and the relationship, between what we now think of as ‘romance’ and the ‘novel’” (Riley, Don Quixote, 11). The proleptic slip is especially telling when it comes from the pen of a scholar who has done so much, in Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel, to show the congruity between Cervantes’s practice and earlier humanist reflection on romance. And knowledge of the anachronism does not seem to keep critics from indulging in it: “During the four centuries since the publication of Don Quixote there has been no doubt that to write a major work of fiction was to write a novel. And while Cervantes could not possibly have known that in writing Don Quixote he was about to initiate the most important

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literary genre of the modern age, it can retrospectively be said that, among novels, Don Quixote was the first” (Cascardi, “Don Quixote,” 58). 52. Amyot, “Proesme,” in Heliodorus, Histoire aethiopique, 159. Marc Fumaroli, “Jacques Amyot” (30), has pointed to this sentence as the germ of Don Quixote. 53. For a detailed presentation of the French Amadis and des Essart’s involvement, see Simonin, “Disgrâce d’Amadis.’” 54. Yates, Astraea, 108. 55. “For us, romance must always be romance revival,” writes Ian Duncan, associating “us” with writers from Scott forward (Modern Romance, 7). In fact, the statement holds even in the Renaissance. 56. Amyot, “Proesme,” in Heliodorus, Histoire aethiopique, 159. 57. For these contentions, see respectively Plazenet, “Jacques Amyot,” 238; Cappello, “Discours”; Fumaroli, “Jacques Amyot,” 34–39; and O’Connor, Amadis, 22, 242–45. 58. The influence of the Orlando on the Quixote has been well explored; see Brownlee, “Cervantes as Reader of Ariosto,” and Hart, Cervantes and Ariosto. It might also be recalled that subject matter actually migrated from the Orlando to later volumes of Amadis (Cioranescu, L’Arioste en France, 1: 360–62): the frontier between “bad” chivalric romance and “good” Renaissance works by Ariosto and Cervantes is largely artificial; the polemic hostility of a figure like Amyot masks a literary-historical reality that was considerably more fluid. 59. Montreux’s work was routinely taken for an authentic specimen, though Huet, deploying some serious historical and philological work in his De l’origine des romans (1670), detected the ruse. Fabricating Greek novels from scratch became something of a pastime for men of letters; see Sandy, “Classical Forerunners.” 60. Forcione, Cervantes’ Christian Romance, 3. Forcione continues: “The years following its posthumous publication in 1617 witnessed ten editions, translations into French, Italian, and English, and imitations in prose fiction and drama. In the eighteenth century new editions, imitations, and translations appeared, and in the early years of the nineteenth century a scholar of the stature of Sismondi could still affirm that many readers considered it to be Cervantes’ masterpiece.” Most specialists of the Persiles resolve its “contradiction” with Don Quixote in roughly the manner I have done here; in addition to Forcione, see Wilson, Allegories of Love. The problem is that these lessons have not been widely absorbed by historians of the novel. Finally, it should be noted that the idea of a contradiction between Cervantes’s works has an unexamined history, one that may well date from the tail end of Persiles’s popularity: “What shall we say of a man who had produced Don Quixote and could afterwards write a book of the same kind he satirized?” asked a participant in Reeve’s dialogue The Progress of Romance (59). 61. As I’ve mentioned in the Introduction, Amyot’s praise for Heliodorus’s plotting was counterbalanced by the assumption that since it did not feature real epic heroes, it was good only for diversion. In the French seventeenth century, the prestige of romance was assured by attaching it to history; this is why La Calprenède actually resists calling his Faramond a roman, saying that he is really offering “histories embellished with some invention” (“Au lecteur” [1661], reproduced in Esmein, ed., Poétiques du roman, 224).

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62. Richelieu’s remark is reported in the introduction to John Davies’s 1657 translation of L’Astrée, and quoted by Doody, True Story, 269. 63. Huet, Origine, 533. On L’Astrée’s complicated civilizing function, see the foundational work of Elias, Court Society, 279–305, and the synthesis of Wine, Forgotten Virgo, 109–42. One might note that Amadis had already been vaunted for its civilizing effects; Sidney remarks on men who, reading the romance, “have found their hearts moved to the exercise of courtesy, liberality, and especially courage” (Apology, 114). 64. On the havoc absolutism played with the model of sociability espoused by Scudéry’s romances, see Goldsmith, Exclusive Conversations, 59–72; on the creation of something like a “mass market” for books, see DeJean, Reinvention; for a theorization of “leisure” literature, see Cherbuliez, Place of Exile; on the tendency of (sub)genres to change with generational shifts, see Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 3–30. This last issue is perhaps banal only in appearance: literary historians prefer to find epochal motivations for morphological change, but literary fashions may in some cases come and go with no more deep logic than, say, baby names or hula-hoops. 65. I myself have adopted this perspective; see Lafayette, Zayde, 15–16. 66. Huet, Origine, 442. 67. Subligny’s own denial of reference is just such a patent feint: “I would humbly request that those whose names may have some resemblance to the ones I invented refrain from imagining that I have done so on purpose. They will easily see by the lack of conformity between their adventures and the ones in my stories that it is more chance than intent. And at any rate, any gallant ladies and gentlemen there may be are always presented to their advantage” (n.p.). 68. Adam, ed., Romanciers du XVIIe siècle, 901. 69. I am ventriloquizing the frustration of Serroy, Roman et réalité (677), who is continually disappointed by a novel that seems to promise a modernity that it doesn’t deliver. 70. The alliance of realism with Dutch painting is well known; see especially Yeazell, Art of the Everyday. Less frequently noted, but essential to the eclipse of Heliodorian romance, is the slow decline of the recognition plot; see Cave, Recognitions. 71. Watt, Rise of the Novel, 13–15.

chapter 3. how to read a mind (crébillon) 1. Fielding, Joseph Andrews, 193. 2. Gallagher, “Rise of Fictionality,” 344. 3. Fielding, Joseph Andrews, 193. 4. Lesage, Diable boiteux, 28 (this remark occurs in the 1726 edition); Smollett, Ferdinand Count Fathom, 4. (Crébillon, we will see, uses the same terminology.) Foucault, Order of Things, describes the aim of classification and taxonomy as “determin[ing] the ‘character’ that groups individuals and species into more general units, that distinguishes those units from one another, and that enables them to fit together to form a table in which

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all individuals and all groups, known or unknown, will have their place” (226). For more specifically literary accounts, see Brooks, Novel of Worldliness, 44–93, and Lynch, Economy of Character, esp. 23–119. Strangely, Brooks and Lynch both regard this conception of character as endemic to the specific culture they are studying; for Brooks, character writing follows from the closed, theatrical nature of a French court life, whereas for Lynch it reflects a British market culture of collecting. Their accounts should be supplemented by the wider perspective of Van Delft, Littérature et anthropologie. 5. “That poetry does aim at generality has long been obvious in the case of comedy, where the poets make up the plot from a series of probable happenings and then give the persons any names they like, instead of writing about particular people as the lampooners did” (Poetics 9; quoted from Russell and Winterbottom, eds., Ancient Literary Criticism, 102). 6. For some examples of French novelists and commentators of these decades who follow Lesage and Crébillon in associating the novel with comedy, see May, Dilemme du roman, 110–16. Admittedly, Gallagher’s purpose is not to credit Fielding personally with the invention of fiction, which simply “appears” in the novel at some point during the years mentioned (“Rise of Fictionality,” 344). She does, however, make clear that the novel of which she speaks was English: it was in England that the cultural promotion of “disbelief, speculation, and credit” (345) led to the advent of fiction. Earlier “components for an understanding of fictionality”—Don Quixote and La Princesse de Clèves are mentioned—“did not gel into either a common knowledge of the concept or a sustained and durable novelistic practice until they coincided in the eighteenth-century English novel” (345). 7. Crébillon’s novel was not translated into English until 1751, but Fielding read French and it was certainly known in the original: Gray wrote that his idea of paradise was “to read eternal new romances of Marivaux and Crébillon,” and it is most likely he was referring to Les Égarements (quoted in Paulson and Lockwood, eds., Henry Fielding, 119). 8. Crébillon, Oeuvres complètes, 2: 71. Subsequent references to the novel will be given parenthetically. 9. Fielding, Joseph Andrews, 194. 10. On the silent world of desire, obscured by the language of decency, see for example Foucault, “Un si cruel savoir,” and Stewart, Masque et la parole, 160–67. 11. Winnett, Terrible Sociability, discusses briefly the example of Crébillon (15–20). On the worldly search for mastery, see especially Brooks, Novel of Worldliness, and Dornier, Discours de maîtrise. A number of critics, however, note that the libertine is in many respects a problematic model for the good reader. I will take up these readings below. 12. “For us as for Meilcour, the drama is first epistemological and then evaluative,” writes Brooks; “we must find out in order to size up, we must move toward the total clarity, definition, and arrest of the portrait” (Novel of Worldliness, 33). This reading would make of the novel both a reflection and an instrument of Norbert Elias’s “civilizing process,” by which the pressures of social constraints transform emotive chivalric man into a selfregulated creature who observes his peers as he carefully controls his affect: “As the behavior and personality structure of the individual changes, so does his manner of considering

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others. His image of them becomes richer in nuances, freer of spontaneous emotions: it is ‘psychologized’” (Civilizing Process, 399). 13. The affinity between Crébillon’s novel and Enlightenment knowledge production of the kind Foucault describes has been suggested by Dornier, Discours de la maîtrise, 12. Bates, “Cartographic Aberrations,” provides a careful appraisal of the commitment to order on the part of the authors of the Encyclopédie. 14. For consistency, I will refer to the young protagonist as Meilcour, and to the older Meilcour whose memoirs we are reading as the narrator. 15. Bennington, Sententiousness and the Novel, 116. 16. See Force, Molière. 17. For the argument that aristocratic distinction should not be confused with a modern idea of selfhood, see Russo, La Cour et la ville, 139. Bennington, Sententiousness and the Novel, describes Versac’s curiously nonsubversive conception of his own difference or singularity thus: “for Versac, ‘singularité’ does not involve standing outside the closure of worldliness but in becoming such a perfect representative of it in its totality that that perfection itself becomes singular” (118). 18. Pascal’s “Trois discours sur la condition des grands,” written around 1660, was first published in 1670. Versac’s speech contains a number of formulations that recall Pascal’s somewhat functionalist theory of distinction—e.g., “That we must not be inwardly convinced of our merit I will accord—but let it appear that we are” (213). 19. Huxley, Olive Tree, 80. 20. The point is stressed by Bennington, Sententiousness and the Novel, 128. See also Gaubert, “Synchronie et diachronie,” and Garagnon, “Maître à penser.” Contemporaries remarked that Versac’s position was seriously compromised; see the testimony reprinted in Crébillon, Oeuvres complètes, 2: 771, 773. 21. On Crébillon’s portraits, see Jomand-Baudry, “Description.” As Coulet remarks, Marivaux’s portraiture frequently adds singular inflections to basic types (Marivaux romancier, 138). 22. Moreover, both the characters and the narrator use a wide variety of means to undermine or mitigate the apparent absoluteness of their opinions; see Fort, Langage de l’ambiguïté, 135–68. 23. Les Égarements might therefore be viewed not as a novel of worldly discourse, but as a Bakhtinian novelization of worldly discourse. The authoritative text, writes Bakhtin, aims to transmit dead quotations, and as such is profoundly antinovelistic; the novel digests such foreign material, transforming into something new: “One’s own discourse is gradually and slowly wrought out of other words that have been acknowledged and assimilated” (Dialogic Imagination, 345n31). 24. Barthes, “La Bruyère,” 225. 25. Barthes, “La Bruyère,” 230. 26. This and the following quotes from d’Argens can be found in Crébillon, Oeuvres complètes, 2: 769. 27. These judgments, representative of Les Égarements’ reception, are reproduced in

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Crébillon, Oeuvres complètes, 2: 788 and 790. Writing in the early nineteenth century, Dunlop contends that in Les Égarements “the adventures of more than one individual of rank at the French court are said to be depicted” (History of Fiction, 373), but there is in fact no evidence of readers taking it as a roman à clef—in contradistinction to certain other novels of Crébillon. 28. For contemporary impatience, including letters by Graffigny, see Crébillon, Oeuvres complètes, 2: 770. On the problem of the novel’s completeness, see Coulet, “Les Égarements, roman inachevé?” 29. “Finally, we are not to discover on what moral basis [Meilcour] constructs the values and interpretations which colour his outlook as a mature man” (Adams, “Experience,” 612). 30. Mylne, Eighteenth-Century French Novel, 132; Brooks, Novel of Worldliness, 32– 33n6. Brooks’s position, or variants of it, has handily won out over Mylne’s; for a presentation of the critical opinions on the matter, see Edmiston, Hindsight and Insight, 31. 31. See Edmiston, Hindsight and Insight, 33–37. 32. Mylne, Eighteenth-Century French Novel, 132. 33. I take the term “consciousness scene” from Fludernik, Towards a “Natural” Narratology (see esp. 153–59). 34. Haywood, Fortunate Foundlings, 35–36. Haywood’s practice is typical, but I did not choose it completely at random: in 1754, Crébillon published a French adaptation (more than translation) of the work (see Fort, “Heureux Orphelins”). 35. I will take up the subject of unnatural narrators in the Conclusion. 36. Knights’s 1933 essay “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” influential in moving literary criticism from questions of character to themes and structures, derives its persuasiveness largely from its titular question. Yet conflating inquiry into characters’ motives with inquiry into, say, what they had for breakfast is dubious at best. No doubt many literary characters are not designed to elicit psychological scrutiny, but many others manifestly are. 37. Bennington, Sententiousness and the Novel, 122. 38. Crébillon, Oeuvres complètes, 4: 37–38. Crébillon’s theory of illusion in the preface to the Lettres de la duchesse has much in common with Diderot’s work, from the Éloge de Richardson in 1762 to the tales and novels of the 1770s; see Chapter 5. 39. The complexity of Molière’s practice has been explored by Norman, Public Mirror. 40. Contrary to Gallagher’s implication, some of Fielding’s types were (correctly) read as satirical allusions: Peter Pounce, all agreed, was the notorious miser Peter Walter. To discredit his competitor’s inventive gifts, Richardson enumerates with gusto the real-world “originals” of Fielding’s characters (Selected Letters, 197). Of all these authors, no doubt the case of La Bruyère—whose Caractères were routinely printed with marginal “keys”—is the most complex. See Couton, Écritures codées (106–14), and Tourette, “Argument onomastique.” 41. Woloch, One vs. the Many. 42. Cohn, Transparent Minds.

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43. See Lynch, Economy of Character. However, in describing a rupture in characterization caused by the developing market culture of late eighteenth-century Britain, Lynch overlooks the many eighteenth-century instances (in France as in England) in which people speak of characters as round, deep, or living. When contemporary talk turns to the excellence of Joseph Andrews, readers appreciate Fielding’s characters—Parson Adams, of course, but also Lady Booby and Slipslop—for their lifelike richness, not for the representativity of their types. (See the testimony gathered in Paulson and Lockwood, eds., Henry Fielding.) Similarly, Brewer, Afterlife of Character, has shown that the lives of characters were routinely prolonged beyond the bounds of a single novel. And Knights’s famous point about Lady Macbeth’s children was directed at a way of thinking about Shakespeare that he traced back, precisely, to the eighteenth century. In other words, the genealogy of the “round” (or deep) character leads through the pseudofactual novel itself. 44. In both Transparent Minds and Distinction of Fiction, Cohn limits her examples of narration of consciousness to Austen and after, but Behn’s use of “consciousness scenes” is treated at length by Fludernik, Towards a “Natural” Narratology (129–77), who somewhat hyperbolically credits the novelist with having provided “an uncanny anticipation of [the novel’s] later perfections” (130). Brown briefly considers the case of Fielding in the context of Walpole’s more extensive narration of consciousness, which he declares the “true source” of what Radcliffe would later perfect (Gothic Text, 19–33, quoted passage on 32). Perhaps some works are indeed sources for later practices: for example, there is some evidence (Neumann, “Free Indirect Discourse”; Bray, “Source”) that Austen’s third-person free indirect discourse may derive rather directly from first-person forms—not Crébillon’s, but Richardson’s epistolary novel Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54). My point is merely that rather than fit individual cases into a preexisting narrative, literary history needs to assess with care the relations between techniques that have at least the potential to be idiosyncratic. For my part, I suspect that the omniscient narration of thoughts is confined to a relatively few, unrelated texts until the turn-of-the-century expansion of third-person fictional (and not pseudofactual) forms of narration that I describe in the Conclusion.

chapter 4. the aesthetics of sentiment (rousseau) An earlier version of this chapter appeared in “Rousseau’s Readers Revisited: The Aesthetics of La Nouvelle Héloise,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 42, 1 (2008), reprinted by permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. 1. Rousseau, Correspondance complète, 10: 104 (henceforth abbreviated CC). 2. On Rousseau’s conflicted relations with Rey over the latter’s fidelity to the author’s intentions, see Turnovsky, Literary Market, 184–203. 3. Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 2: 5 (henceforth abbreviated OC). 4. The short first preface, published in the novel’s first edition, was in fact written after the much longer “second” preface. The latter was published separately several weeks after the novel, as Rousseau had long planned.

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5. Meltzer, Hot Property, 115. 6. Darnton, “Readers Respond,” 332, 331, 333. Darnton was not the first to propose that Rousseau’s readers believed in his fiction. Bernard Guyon, annotator of Julie for the Gallimard Pléiade edition, assures that “numerous readers believed it to be a true story” (OC 2: 1345n2). But the celebrity of Darnton’s argument has worked the idea into even reference books: “many readers took the letters to be authentic,” reads the Oxford Guide to Literature in French (France, “Julie,” 572). 7. Darnton, “Readers Respond,” 233. 8. Davis, Factual Fictions, 156. 9. Fort, “Accessories of Desire,” 152. Fort references Darnton’s study at this point, as does Vincent-Buffault when she claims that “Rousseau himself prepared the way for this phenomenon of identification since in his preface he presents himself as the mere editor of the letters” (Histoire des larmes, 19). 10. Darnton, “Readers Respond,” 216. In this spirit, Elena Russo divides the eighteenth century into good and bad halves, with an earlier self-aware aesthetic that is in fact more truly modern than a later, naïve one: “disenchanted belief lies at the core of Marivaux’s profound skepticism concerning those virtues that would be extolled by Rousseau and by the Revolution: transparency, sincerity, moral rigorism, and clarity” (Styles of Enlightenment, 261). 11. Thus Séité, Du livre au lire, explicitly opposes the novel to the sentimental readings it was given: “Alongside the legato of effusive and sentimental reading, on which the critical tradition has placed much insistence, Rousseau took care to leave open, indeed to encourage, the possibility of reasoned or reflective reading” (354). In a reply to Darnton, LaCapra has treated the rhetorical complexity of Rousseau’s second preface as a deconstructive rebuttal to the effusive simplicity of his readers’ reactions (“Chartier,” 108–12). In this same vein, and well before Darnton, De Man held that readers mistakenly took the book as “an invitation to a shared erotic or passionate experience” (Allegories, 194). 12. My focus is therefore only on a few key aspects of these letters relating to the nature of the characters and the emotions of reading. For a broader account, see Labrosse, Lire au XVIIIe siècle. Labrosse’s book, which appeared simultaneously with Darnton’s, explores the archive synthetically in view of establishing a typological account of reception, as opposed to the historical one envisioned by both Darnton and myself. 13. The link between the Lettre and Julie was remarked by a number of correspondents, including d’Alembert himself. 14. In this imaginary “conversation about novels,” a reader identified only as “N” asks the author “R” how such an enemy of the theater could possibly stoop to painting La Nouvelle Héloïse’s “vivid situations and passionate feelings”: “Reread the letter on spectacles, reread this collection [of letters]. . . . Be consistent, or change your principles” (OC 2: 25, ellipsis in original). But the novel’s first preface had already, from its first sentence, obliquely alluded to the Lettre à d’Alembert: “There must be spectacles in big cities, and novels where populations have been corrupted” (5). 15. English novel readers of both sexes, “meditative and solitary, are less given to

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frivolous imitations” (OC 5: 75); Roussel, “Phénomène de l’identification,” argues for this resolution of the contradiction. Nonetheless, efforts to theorize the difference between spectators and readers remained haphazard throughout the period, notwithstanding occasional squabbles about the effects of images and the effects of words, as when Rousseau argues in the Essai sur l’origine des langues that Du Bos, following Horace, was wrong to say that painting moves us more effectively than poetry (377). 16. Similarly, in the Lettre à d’Alembert, the theater’s existence in big cities can be considered a positive force, since it keeps people out of worse trouble. Whence the paradox, “When the population is corrupted spectacles are good for it, and bad when the population itself is good” (OC 5: 60). 17. Saint-Preux’s program for a type of novel that, like Julie itself, would make people love virtue, has no counterpart in the Lettre (see OC 2: 277). For a treatment of the contradiction between the Lettre and Julie that differs from the one I am offering, see Kelly, Rousseau as Author, 104–15. 18. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1: 1. Or, Kant: “That taste is always barbaric which needs a mixture of charms and emotions in order that there may be satisfaction” (Critique of Judgment, 58). 19. Horace, Satires, 449. Horace’s lines figure prominently in Hénin’s exhumation of the idea of mimetic emotional contagion in the Italian Renaissance (Ut pictura theatrum, 578–96). 20. For an exemplary formulation, see La Mesnardière’s description of the relay by which the theatrical spectator comes to feel “that his heart is like a battleground where a thousand tumultuous passions fight to the death when the poet’s science wills it” (Poétique, 74). 21. On efforts to deal with the paradoxes attending contagion theory, see Hénin, Ut pictura theatrum (597–605), who points out that although the occasional Renaissance commentator allowed for the production of aesthetic emotions qualitatively different from the emotions of the characters, this line of thinking had no real counterpart in subsequent French poetics. Not that neoclassical theorists always spoke in the same terms on the subject. Some, for example, reached for metaphors not of contagion but of “impression.” Hence, Bouhours praises Racine’s tragedies for “a very touching quality that does not fail to impress [on spectators] the passions they represent” (Remarques nouvelles, 93), while Nicole uses the same logic to condemn the theater: “one must not imagine that one can just erase from one’s mind this impression that has been voluntarily excited, nor doubt that it will make us well disposed to the same passion that we so eagerly sought to feel” (Traité de la Comédie, 36–37). Neither contagion nor impression amounts, however, to a psychological theory of affective transmission—what I will be calling identification. 22. Barish, Antitheatrical Prejudice, 276. 23. The novelty of Enlightenment psychological accounts of sympathy with respect to earlier physiologies is stressed by Force, Self-Interest, 28–34; special mention of Malebranche is made on 29. For additional studies of contagion theory as it relates to novel reading, see Toumarkine, “Châteaux en Espagne,” and Fournier, “Pathology of Reading.”

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24. Force, Self-Interest, 26. 25. The context is plainly literary, since Crébillon père’s tragedy Atrée et Thyeste (1707) is mentioned. This fragment follows the reasoning of the bulk of the Lettre à d’Alembert: identification or place-switching (se mettre à la place and s’identifier appear to be synonymous) does not occur with villains or cowards (at least in France) because the theater pulls us in through its flattery of the gallant passions that define us as a culture. (The contention, in Poetics 13, that one can feel no fear or pity for bad men appears superficially similar, but Aristotle gives no account of what exactly blocks our fellow-feeling.) Finally, Starobinski, “ ‘Se mettre à la place,’” offers a look at the concept of identification and place-switching in the period I am covering. In Starobinski’s view, place-switching moves from being considered negatively (in the texts of Nicole and other critics of the theater) to being seen as highly desirable (in Diderot). His account is flawed, however, since contagion was widely spoken of in positive terms by the theater’s proponents; my purpose here is to show there is indeed a shift, but not the one Starobinski describes. 26. The minor distinctions for which Rousseau’s Lettre allows—e.g., spectators do not actually fall in love with the characters, but are instead prepared to fall in love in real life (OC 5: 47)—palliate the obvious absurdities of a model that is never discarded. 27. See Force, Self-Interest, 7–47. For other examinations of Rousseau’s pity in the context of the theater, see Gearhart, Open Boundary, 259–74; and Marshall, Surprising Effects, 144–51. 28. See Viala, Lettre à Rousseau, who approaches many of the issues I examine here, including the relation of Rousseau’s thought on “interest” to what I am calling the protoaesthetic tradition. 29. Guyon’s comments in his edition of Julie are firmly in this vein (see OC 2: xxii– xxiv); among other examples, see Kavanagh, Writing the Truth, 28. 30. Darnton, “Readers Respond,” 228. For some readings that are particularly attentive to interpretive intricacies of the novel, see Stewart, Half-Told Tales, 115–210; DeJean, Literary Fortifications, 112–90; and Ray, Story and History, 240–69. 31. My estimate of the size of the dossier excludes mere thank-you letters or brief mentions of approval. Remarks on the age, sex, and class of the correspondents can be found in Labrosse, Lire au XVIIIe siècle, 241–44. 32. By far the most emotional response to Lafayette’s work came not from average readers but from the critic Valincour, who devotes roughly a third of his Lettres sur la Princesse de Clèves (1678) to “feelings” stimulated by the novel. In Chapter 1, I have pointed to Valincour’s language of identification, which is notable as much for its difference with respect to dominant metaphors of contagion as for its resemblance to testimony by Rousseau’s readers. 33. Moreover, a good deal of Pamela’s reception was characterized by a somewhat satirical erotic investment: “Rather than being ‘touched’ by Pamela’s narration, actor and audience conspire to do the touching” (Turner, “Novel Panic,” 83). 34. Darnton, “Readers Respond,” 251. 35. Darnton, “Readers Respond,” 245.

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36. The small number of other letters from apparent believers (e.g., CC 8: 158, 257) do not fail to articulate their position as a wish: it would be nice if the protagonists existed, because they are such a credit to humanity. And like Du Verger, these readers tend to transform praise of the heroine into adulation for Rousseau’s perfection as a writer. 37. Quoted in Esmein, ed., Poétiques du roman, 140. As I will show in Chapter 6, plenty of writers noted that belief was superfluous to the creation of pleasure in genres such as fairy tales and opera, but this pleasure was held to be distinct from the passions stirred by the highest genres. 38. One of the first to articulate the hypothesis that Rousseau’s original readers believed in the authenticity of the letters, Rétif de La Bretonne, assumes like Roguin that belief only extended to the autobiographical experience underlying the novel: “No one wanted to believe that Jean-Jacques’s Julie and Claire were imaginary beings: everyone said, ‘Jean-Jacques depicted the women he saw and maybe loved’” (quoted in May, Dilemme, 151). 39. A telling example involves d’Urfé’s L’Astrée, which the jurist Olivier Patru took pains to interpret as a “romanced” version of d’Urfé’s own affair with Diane de Châteaumorand. Patru’s argument, however, did not involve the irreplaceability of originary authorial emotion, but treated d’Urfé’s ingenious use of his own experience as an analog to the dramatist’s use of historical events. Through his art, Patru wrote, d’Urfé adds interest to a story that otherwise would have none (“Éclaircissements,” 559). 40. The author recognized in his Confessions that this assumption lay behind his female readers’ interest in him: “Everyone was persuaded that one could not express so vividly feelings that had not been lived, nor paint love’s transport, if not from one’s own heart” (OC 1: 548). 41. Diderot’s Éloge de Richardson can be seen to operate a similar revision in theories of identification; see Chartier, “Richardson,” esp. 663–64. The idea of quixotic identification was still current in Rousseau’s time, both in philosophy—“There is no man, I would hazard, who in his moments of boredom does not imagine some novel of which he is the hero” (Condillac, Essai, 122–23)—and in poetic treatises: “You [the writer] transform a weak heart into a magnanimous one, and the members of your audience, at least for a time, become so many heroes,” writes Rémond de Sainte-Albine in 1747 (quoted in Hobson, Object of Art, 182). From this point of view, the mid-century interest in absorption exemplified by Diderot may be seen less as a reaction against rococo theatricality, as Fried has famously claimed (Absorption), than as a displacement of older theories of identification. 42. In the Lettre, by contrast, Rousseau had followed Du Bos and Nicole in claiming that “a man without passions, or who could completely control them, could never move [intéresser] anyone” (OC 5: 17). 43. “[Women] everywhere have read your Héloïse, but they haven’t budged from the study and the 55th letter of the first book,” writes one critic, mentioning the letter that marks the apogee of Saint-Preux’s requited passion for Julie (CC 8: 316). The possibility of a reader who fails to complete the entire Rousseauian “cure” becomes a plot device in a number of turn-of-the-century English novels, such as Opie’s Adeline Mowbray (1805), in which the heroines suffer because they are not allowed to finish La Nouvelle Héloïse; these

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female protagonists undergo the contagious emotional influence of adulterous love without ever learning the good news of Julie’s renunciation. See Grogan, “Politics of Seduction.” 44. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, 199–200. To be sure, the reading is sanctioned by Rousseau himself in the second preface, who makes use of the metaphor via a quote from Tasso (OC 2:17). 45. Lucretius’s proposition, much discussed by Du Bos, and echoed by Hume and Burke, reads: “It is comforting, when winds are whipping up the waters of the vast sea, to watch from land the severe trials of another person” (Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, 35; on Du Bos’s discussion, see Marshall, Surprising Effects, 22–25). Lucretius goes on to explain such pleasure in the customary Epicurean manner—that is, as an effect of the observer’s relief at being safe from danger. Rousseau’s rewritings, it should be noted, entirely avoid any recourse to self-interest. 46. Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of the Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful dates from 1757. Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, which cites Rousseau (though not Julie), is from 1764. 47. “This meeting of two hearts that cry in solitude at the same time is a summit, a suspension of subjective transparency” (Vincent-Buffault, Histoire des larmes, 48). 48. Thus, Ray, “Reading Women,” has argued that the second half of the novel deliberately puts into place a “cognitive mode of pleasure quite unlike the erotic suspense and sentimental extravagance of the earlier episodes” (430). Ray’s reading is confirmed by the testimony of Rousseau’s contemporaries that we have already seen. 49. De Man, Allegories, 215. 50. “La Nouvelle Héloïse would be a very different (and a much shorter) text . . . if the narrative had been allowed to stabilize in this way” (De Man, Allegories, 215). 51. Significantly, what Claire cannot yet do, Wolmar points out, is cry (OC 2: 740). Though we might think of this as prefiguring twentieth-century psychologies of grief, it is more in keeping with the thrust of the novel to understand Claire’s inability to cry in protoaesthetic terms. Crying is a critical acknowledgment of distance, and not the mark of total loss of self in the spectacle that we often associate with the sentimental reader. 52. “But who still cries at the theater?” asked Roland Barthes, alluding to the reception of Bérénice (Sur Racine, 142). His call for a history of crying (and the eclipse of aesthetic tears) has been at least partially told by scholars such as Vincent-Buffault, Histoire des larmes, and Elkins, Pictures and Tears. 53. My reading of the second preface therefore conflicts with de Man’s, who sees its concerns with referentiality as a signal displacement of older debates on history and verisimilitude (Allegories, 195–96). But Rousseau does not leave such debates in the dust of what de Man praises as “a new sense of textuality” (204); he merely approaches them from an unusual angle. 54. Goldhammer, “Man in the Mirror,” 42. 55. Sermain, Singe de don Quichotte, extensively examines the importance of the Quixote for the eighteenth-century novel’s self-definition. For a slightly different take on Rousseau’s use of Cervantes, see also Sermain, “La Nouvelle Héloïse,” 234–36.

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56. “People didn’t wait for Rousseau to cry while reading,” notes Vincent-Buffault, Histoire des larmes, 14. On pathétique specifically, see Coudreuse, Goût des larmes. Appropriately, given Rousseau’s attention to the play in the Lettre à d’Alembert, Bérénice stands as the key reflection on how tragedy might be geared to the sole production of emotion. For many reasons, Julie can fruitfully be considered an elaborate amplification of the tragedy that notoriously turned its back on elevated subject matter and the intricacies of plot in favor of the production of tears alone. Various examples of early modern tears in France are explored in Cron and Lignereaux, eds., Langage des larmes, while Ibbett, “Pity,” examines the evolution of cathartic vocabulary. 57. Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, in William Wordsworth, ed. Gill, 611, 599. 58. This is my position in the article on which the present chapter is based, “Rousseau’s Readers Revisited.” 59. Figures on editions come from Rousseau, Nouvelle Héloïse, ed. Mornet, 1: 238. According to Mornet’s figures, even a book as influential as this did not have the sweeping effect on production that one might think: only about a fifteenth of novels published between 1761 and 1789 are obviously Rousseauian (1: 291).

chapter 5. the demon of reality (diderot) 1. Champfleury, Réalisme, 90 (following quote, 273). 2. Diderot, Contes et romans, 449. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from Diderot’s prose narratives will be taken from this edition (henceforth abbreviated D). For Barthes’s description of the reality effect, see “L’Effet de réel.” 3. Champfleury is not without followers, however. For an argument that Diderot’s details signal a proto-realist approach to versimilitude, see Joly, Deux Études. 4. Undank, “Jacques le fataliste,” 752. Diderot is thus assumed to discover a modern truth about literature that is at the furthest possible remove from “naïve” sentimentality: “If, after a tentative effort at a modified version of the Richardsonian mode in La Religieuse Diderot moved to the opposite extreme, flaunting artifice and eschewing the minute circumstantiality he had extolled in Richardson, it was not only because of his progressive disenchantment with ‘sensibility’ during the later 1760s and early 1770s but also, I believe, because he came to see more clearly that no fiction could really escape from its conspicuous condition as an arbitrary ordering” (Alter, Partial Magic, 65). I will return to other such readings presently. 5. The Correspondance littéraire, philospohique et critique was supported by subscriptions from various European courts, including that of Catherine the Great. It appeared from 1753 to 1793, and included, along with accounts of the cultural goings-on in Paris, numerous texts by Diderot. (The diffusion in the Correspondance littéraire can be called publication, since the early modern sense of the word was a rendering public, rather than an actual printing.) The view of the two novels as counterparts is expressed in a letter of September 1780 (Diderot, Correspondance, 15: 190).

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6. The term “Préface-annexe” was first used by Jules Assézat in his 1875–77 edition of Diderot’s Oeuvres complètes. (Diderot’s novels are found in volume 5.) 7. I quote Grimm’s original account from volume 7 of Naigeon’s 1798–1800 edition of Diderot’s Oeuvres (here, 267; henceforth abbreviated G). 8. In a sense, the memoir has never stopped being fragmentary: critics have repeatedly pointed out various oddities and contradictions, of which the most persistent is a shifting temporal point of view. For a quick account of some of these contradictions, see May, Diderot et “La Religieuse”, 206–8; more forensic detail can be found in Parrish, “Conception,” 361–84. Moreover, the story of the hoax itself is riddled with inconsistencies, possibly due to the ten-year gap between the original events and Grimm’s recollection of them; see Mylne, “Truth and Illusion.” 9. Booy, “Inventaire,” 392. 10. In a letter to Sophie Volland dated September 17, 1761, Diderot tells of breaking off his reading of Clarissa in order to address his lamentations to Richardson’s characters; a friend, d’Amilaville (not yet d’Alainville) “couldn’t make head nor tail of my transport or my words” (Correspondance, 3: 306). In the Éloge de Richardson, Diderot claims to have observed this behavior in an unnamed friend (D 908). In both cases, the self-consciousness of the creator who makes himself cry is not yet present. 11. Buisson, the first publisher of La Religieuse, seems to have had access to Grimm’s library, which had been confiscated in 1792 due to its owner’s emigration. But the configuration of his 1796 edition is a mystery. Were there, in Grimm’s papers, copies of the manuscript of the memoir and the original hoax account of 1770 but not the modified version that appeared in the March 1782 issue of the Correspondance littéraire? If so, was it merely coincidence that Buisson decided to position Grimm’s text after and not before the memoir, thus unwittingly fulfilling Diderot’s apparent intention on that score? As of yet, we have no answers to these questions. For information on the provenance of the Buisson manuscript, see Booy and Freer, eds., Jacques le fataliste et La Religieuse devant la critique, 11–36. 12. Dieckmann expresses understandable perplexity at the fact that Assézat did not see this title (“Préface-Annexe,” 38–39n7). 13. Dieckmann, “Préface-Annexe,” 31. Curiously, Dieckmann was as unaware as anyone else that the original appearance of La Religieuse in the Correspondance littéraire had been followed by the expanded preface, and therefore still needed to mount an argument for its inclusion and postpositioning. 14. Dieckmann, “Préface-Annexe,” 22–23. 15. Diderot, La Religieuse, ed. Mauzi, xi. 16. Varloot, “La Religieuse et sa Préface,” 268, 269. 17. Although the argument of Success in Circuit Lies appears to be influenced by a famous series of poststructuralist readings of Poe’s “Purloined Letter” (see Muller and Richardson, eds., Purloined Poe), De la Carrera may also be following a hint by Mylne to the effect that the preface’s meditation on truth and illusion can be extended to the events of the hoax itself (“Truth and Illusion,” 356). (De la Carrera herself mentions neither.) 18. Frigerio, “Nécessité romanesque,” 54. Frigerio references De la Carrera repeatedly.

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19. Russo, Styles of Enlightenment, 23. For more such studies, see Mortimer, “Naïve and Devious,” and Terdiman, Body and Story, 19–38. Hobson, Object of Art, contains a number of references to the Préface-annexe and its “hyperconsciousness” (178). 20. Isolated remarks in longer studies do begin to take the Préface-annexe in less ironic directions. See Kempf, Diderot et le roman, 221; Stewart, Imitation and Illusion, 308; and Mylne, Eighteenth-Century French Novel, 212–13. None of these scholars offer, however, a full-scale reading of the Préface-annexe. 21. Lafon, in D 1264; Bryson, Word and Image, 198–99. 22. Varloot, “La Religieuse et sa Préface,” 270. Mauzi puts it thus: “With the Préfaceannexe, La Religieuse is already, as M. Dieckmann suggests, Jacques le fataliste” (Diderot, La Religieuse, xi). For Dieckmann’s original remark, see Préface-annexe, 29. 23. The modern critical need to save sentimental texts from their sentimentality is not restricted to the work of Diderot: other eighteenth-century novels have gone through a process of revisionism by which former heroes are reinterpreted as hypocrites and fools. See for example Nünning, “Unreliable Narration.” La Religieuse is unusual only to the extent that the Préface-annexe suggests (or so the argument goes) Diderot’s own supposed evolution on the issue. 24. Russo, Styles of Enlightenment, 23. 25. It should be noted that attributions of the original 1770 hoax account to Diderot instead of Grimm are perilously speculative. The elaborate allegory of mastery developed by De la Carrera—according to which the entire hoax may well be a hoax played on the reader—is predicated on just such a “hunch” (Success in Circuit Lies, 217n14). Though De la Carrera admits that her hunch is not supported by extant documentation, she implies that Grimm’s authorship is equally unverifiable. (Terdiman advances a similar argument, apparently without knowledge of De la Carrera, in Body and Story, 30–32.) This is misleading, however: Grimm’s voice is that of the Correspondance littéraire; we have no examples of Diderot’s—or anyone else’s—tacit usurpation of that voice; and at any rate, the various changes Diderot made to the original account— especially his aggressive reaction to Grimm’s assertion that the memoir had never been finished because of Diderot’s work habits—make little sense if we assume that Diderot had authored the first version. 26. Caplan, Framed Narratives, 45, 79. 27. Were it not to his liking, Diderot could have of course suppressed Grimm’s mention of the conspirators’ laughter. Two comments are in order. First, for reasons unknown, Diderot changed without cutting Grimm’s text: he makes himself the hero of the hoax by replacing “we” with his own name; but he leaves in place Grimm’s jab at his work habits, merely defending himself in an aside. Second, Diderot—like many others—clearly loved jokes and put-ons; see for example Kempf, Diderot et le roman, 211–32; Catrysse, Diderot et la mystification, 21–59; and, for the broader context, Bourguinat, Siècle du persiflage, esp. 82–97. Joking, then, was in the air; but if jokes can have a literary lesson, it is not the lesson critics have taken to attributing to the joke played on Croismare. 28. Mirzoza supposes that the African will not actually be taken in, but only because

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current theatrical practice is so artificial; see D 136–37. For the Discours’ comparison of the ideal spectator and the child, see Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, 215. 29. Jaucourt, “Opéra,” 495. 30. Mercier, Du théâtre, 104n. 31. The anecdote is reported in Roubine, “L’Illusion et l’éblouissement,” 410–11. 32. See, for example, d’Aubignac’s admiring reference to a girl who so pities Pyramus deploring the supposed death of Thisbe that she wants her mother to warn him that his lover is in fact still alive (Pratique du théâtre, 427 [IV, 7]). The Zeuxis anecdote is found in Book 35 of Pliny’s Natural History. 33. Though anecdotes attesting to perfect aesthetic immersion are hardly new, as I’ve said, Mercier’s is probably a response to Rousseau’s contention that the (reprehensible) pleasure of theater came from the fact that spectators could enjoy the sufferings of others because they were absolved of the obligation to do anything to help them. (See Rousseau’s Lettre à d’Alembert, in Oeuvres complètes, 5: 23–24.) Diderot’s novel should be seen as part of this polemic as well. 34. As Marshall notes in Surprising Effects of Sympathy, 85. In Marshall’s opinion, the Préface-annexe cannot help tainting the good-faith sympathy of Croismare with “anxious reflections about narrative truth and artifice” (85), and he extends this lesson to Simonin’s entire memoir, which thematizes the dangers associated with “the contagious disease of selfforgetting or self-loss called sympathy” (103). Marshall’s argument is deconstructive, since the good or pure quantity is shown to be constitutionally inseparable from its devalued antithesis: sympathy is always already fraud; sincerity is never anything but theatrical. Without pretending to offer a full reading of La Religieuse, I can at least suggest that Diderot’s attention to sympathy’s potentially dangerous or lubricious variants does not undermine his commitment to it, on the contrary. 35. Beaumarchais, Oeuvres, 139. Though Beaumarchais was indebted to Diderot for the latter’s pioneering theorization of the drame, dates suggest that the “Question for Men of Letters” must be an expansion of Beaumarchais’s remarks. 36. Booy and Freer, eds., Jacques le fataliste et La Religieuse devant la critique, 157 (henceforth abbreviated BF). Here and elsewhere, “fiction” has the customary meaning of a lie or untruth. Devaines’s remark on La Religieuse resembles the argumentation Richardson put forth to object to Warburton’s “outing” of him as Clarissa’s author; see the Introduction. 37. Apart from Devaines and Naigeon, only one other reviewer expresses dismay at the “disenchant[ing]” effect of the Croismare anecdote (BF 294). 38. Assézat, publishing the Préface-annexe, noted as much; see Diderot, Oeuvres complètes, 5:205. See as well the observation of Coulet: “Naigeon’s protests rang hollow: La Religieuse was not presented as a true story, at least not any more than any other memoir novel” (Roman jusqu’à la Révolution, 465). One could argue that its truth pretense was actually weaker than that of typical novels: it had no preface at all attesting to the origins of the found manuscript. 39. In a previous review, Duval praises the quality of the hoaxers’ writing by saying, “I’m shamed to admit that, as aware as I am of the falseness of these letters [between

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Croismare and Delamarre], once I start reading one I can’t get past the middle without my eyes watering and my heart constricting” (BF 124–25). 40. Roederer and Duval are the only reviewers to make the case that the Grimm text does not change the reader’s pleasure, just as Devaines and Naigeon are nearly the only ones to deplore its inclusion. Most take no notice at all of the appended text. 41. “Le procédé de la verrue,” writes May (Quatre Visages, 203). It is frequently pointed out that Diderot seems to be repeating a contention that appears in La Nouvelle Héloïse, where Saint-Preux criticizes a portrait of Julie for leaving out her defects, including “the little scar left under your lip” (Oeuvres complètes, 2: 291). The Rousseau passage, however, speaks about accuracy and not illusion. 42. Although most have taken the theory of the detail in Les Deux Amis at face value, two scholars have arrived at readings that are more or less explicitly influenced by previous treatments of La Religieuse. Jean Ehrard argues that Diderot actually awakens the good reader from illusion by inserting in the text various factual contradictions, thus making “truth . . . problematic” (Invention littéraire, 161). For Pierre Chartier, Diderot’s remarks on illusion at the end of Les Deux Amis warn us that in spite of the uncanny fusion of reality and fiction, the text is a text, and that “all realism is mystifying” (“Le Conte ‘historique,’” 11); Diderot thus manages simultaneously to set the realist nineteenth century on its way and to “initiat[e] the anonymous readership of novels, at least virtually, into the modern era of suspicion.” Both readings are built not on Diderot’s text and context, but on the familiar poststructuralist belief that realism is naïve. 43. Diderot, Correspondance, 10: 124. A cursory reading of Grimm’s literary criticism in the Correspondance littéraire confirms that his tastes were considerably less sentimental than Diderot’s. 44. Statistics can be found in Martin, “Origins of the Contes moraux” and “Marmontel’s Successors.” 45. Diderot, Correspondance, 10: 124. 46. Decades later, when Marmontel was writing the new tales of a more distinctly sentimental nature that appeared from 1789 to 1792 in the Mercure de France, he took care to add a variety of pseudofactual frames. 47. Saint-Lambert, Contes, viii–ix. 48. The names of Scarron and Cervantes—whose tales were rich in murder, vengeance, duels, abductions, and so on—hint that Diderot is thinking back to a time when prose narrative did aspire to high seriousness. (Likewise, Rosset’s roughly contemporaneous Histoires tragiques [1614] was a widely reprinted collection of various tales of criminal passion designed for the edification of its readers.) 49. On the naturalizing of eloquence in the second half of the seventeenth century, see Declercq, “Rhétorique classique.” 50. See, e.g., Reiss, Toward Dramatic Illusion. 51. Mylne, Eighteenth-Century French Novel, 195. 52. Mylne, Eighteenth-Century French Novel, 198. 53. The text—we cannot know how closely it conforms to what was read by

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Naigeon—can be found in D 451–62; for information on the discovery, see Varloot, “Une version originale.” 54. Bongie, Diderot’s femme savante, 93–94. 55. In Saint-Lambert, “material life is weightless,” astutely observes one critic, whereas Diderot’s heroes “are crushed by the burden of their poverty” (Ehrard, Invention littéraire, 155). 56. The peculiar quality of Félix’s stammering—“Kill me, kill me” does not so much “express” the plenitude of the speaker’s pain as it allows us to glimpse that pain under rhetorical poverty—may well come straight from Diderot’s work on the theater, where true emotion was said to break down the character’s ability to express himself. “In the spectacle of a man animated by some great passion, what affects us?” asks Diderot in the Discours sur la poésie dramatique. “Is it his ability to speak well [Sont-ce ses discours]? Sometimes. But what never fails to move is cries, barely articulated words, broken voices, a few monosyllables escaping here and there” (Oeuvres esthétiques, 101). 57. Baculard d’Arnauld, Délassements de l’homme sensible, 1: 30. 58. La Fontaine, Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon, 123 (La Fontaine alludes to Plato’s Ion [356a]); Horace, Satires, 449 (“If you would have me weep, you must first feel grief yourself ”). In such a context, Diderot’s celebrated d’Alainville anecdote is merely a reactivation of the kind of old commonplace one finds in, say, La Mesnardière’s description of the poet weeping over the fate of his characters (La Poétique, 73). 59. Diderot, Oeuvres, ed. Naigeon, 12: 346n. Indeed, phrases like “this tale, which is not one” occurred with regularity in the output of the time (Martin, “Marmontel’s Successors,” 229). 60. Reading Diderot through the lens of the modern artistic practice of putting titles and artworks in dialectic tension or of creating art through the mere act of titling strikes me as too patently anachronistic to require treatment here. Anachronism does not preclude interest, however: see Pucci, “Negative Framing,” and Fleming, “Ceci n’est pas un conte/ Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” (Fleming points out that it is almost certain that Magritte was consciously appropriating Diderot’s title.) 61. Bongie, Diderot’s femme savante, 11. 62. In both the original version appearing in the Correspondance littéraire and Naigeon’s first publication, the title does not in fact precede the text: it is put in the mouth of the narrator-author, but set off from the rest of the text (centered, and preceded and followed by skipped lines). It is therefore possible to argue that the title is not quite a title at all. 63. A further complication should be noted, even if space concerns do not allow me to pursue its implications. Ceci was part of a series of dialogued works appearing in the Correspondance littéraire, including Madame de La Carlière (also a tale of imperfect love purportedly drawn from Diderot’s experience) and the Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (in which the speakers read and comment on speeches by and interviews with Tahitians, which were said to have been censored from Bougainville’s Voyage autour du monde). All three texts worked together, as Grimm hinted when presenting the first, Ceci n’est pas un conte: “We shall see only at the end of the last the moral and the secret goal [Diderot] has set

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himself ” (quoted in D 1079n4). In brief, Diderot’s moral point is that the social channeling of “natural appetites” is responsible for the suffering experienced by the French characters of Ceci and Madame de La Carlière (Supplément, D 580). 64. I take all these details from Bongie, “Retour à Mademoiselle de la Chaux.” 65. See Bongie, “Retour à Mademoiselle de la Chaux.” 66. See Bongie, Diderot’s femme savante, 85. 67. Pucci, in “Negative Framing,” has advanced a reading that does goes in the direction of prevalent treatments of the Préface-annexe. Her argument, situated on an abstract and theoretical level, takes no note of Diderot’s evident concern with the real-world referents of his characters. 68. See, e.g., Diderot, Quatre Contes, ed. Proust, xli. Similarly, some critics await the identification of historical referents of other memorable protagonists of Diderot’s novelistic works, notably those of the celebrated tale of a mistress’s revenge in Jacques le fataliste: “The day will come when we will know [the identities of ] Madame de La Pommeraye, le Marquis des Arcis,” is the optimistic opinion, a half-century old now, of a scholar who assiduously chased down the origins of many of the novel’s numerous anecdotes (Vernière, “Diderot et l’invention,” 164). In Diderotian criticism there is something of a running debate on Diderot’s capacity for invention (perhaps all his novels, some say, are never anything but reworkings of anecdotes); see the remarks of Bongie, Diderot’s femme savante, 30–34. 69. Bongie’s sleuthing is exemplary, but no more than Naigeon does he even begin to explore the interpretive difficulties presented by the fact that Ceci n’est pas un conte is in fact one part tale and one part not-a-tale. To my knowledge, no one has. 70. May, Quatre Visages, 164–65. 71. Diderot builds an additional level into his meditation on truth and reference by having La Chaux author Les Trois Favorites, a “little historical novel” which may—or may not—allude to the Marquise de Pompadour. While space concerns preclude treatment here, I can at least point out that if Ceci n’est pas un conte is unusual in its insistence that a “true story” might actually be true, Les Trois Favorites works the opposite way by insinuating that a text having all the marks of being a gossipy roman à clef may in fact be just what it says it is—a flight of fancy. 72. Bongie, Diderot’s femme savante, 38, 89, 34, 21. 73. Bongie, “Retour,” 103. 74. Bongie, Diderot’s femme savante, 139, 99, 36. 75. Champfleury, Réalisme, 95.

chapter 6. beyond belief (cazotte) An earlier version of portions of this chapter appeared in “Permanent ReEnchantments: On Some Literary Uses of the Supernatural from Early Empiricism to Modern Aesthetics,” in The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age,

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ed. Joshua Landy and Michael Saler (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), © 2009 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University, reprinted by permission. 1. Freud, “Uncanny,” 368; further passages quoted in this paragraph are from 405, 400, 389. 2. Most specialists of the fantastic define the genre along the lines laid down by Freud’s definition of the uncanny, carefully separating it from fairy tales and the like. In the words of the author of the classic work on the French fantastic, it is constituted by “the brutal intrusion of mystery into the domain of real life” (Castex, Conte fantastique, 8). The muchcited analysis of Todorov, Fantastic, which I will take up presently, seconds the nineteenthcentury location of the genre. A comparative overview can be found in Bessière, Récit fantastique. For an exploration of the gulf between fairy tales and properly fantastic narratives, see Caillois, “De la féerie.” 3. Freud, “Uncanny,” 401–2. 4. Clery, Rise of Supernatural Fiction, esp. 13–32. 5. Castle, Female Thermometer, 162. Castle’s many earlier examples of the uncanny are extraliterary. 6. Nelson, Secret Life, 18. This is a commonplace. Caillois: the fantastic “is born at the moment when everyone is more or less persuaded of the impossibility of miracles,” and serves “as compensation for an excess of rationalization” (“De la féerie,” 19, 27). Rosemary Jackson: “It is hardly surprising that the fantastic comes into its own in the nineteenth century, at precisely that juncture when a supernatural ‘economy’ of ideas was slowly giving way to a natural one” (Fantasy, 24). Tobin Siebers: “The Romantics associated superstition and poetry because their distance from magical thought allowed them to transform it into an aesthetic formula” (Romantic Fantastic, 21). The idea may come from the pioneering work of Varma, Gothic Flame, 206–31. 7. Thus one noted critic, analyzing the work of Wilde and James, finds full-blown skepticism in place only at the end of the nineteenth century, just where he needs it; see Ziolkowski, Disenchanted Images, 230. One might remark that Caillois and Jackson, quoted in the previous note, also sprinkle their affirmations with “preciselys”and “more or lesses.” 8. “Quodcumque ostendis mihi sic, incredulus odi”: “Whatever you thus show me, I discredit and abhor,” writes Horace (Ars poetica, in Satires, 466–67). The poet is in fact referring not to anything supernatural, but to actions that revolt reason and morality— Medea’s murder of her children and the dinner Atreus makes of his brother Thyestes. Nonetheless, in the eighteenth century incredulus odi was routinely directed against things mythological or supernatural. 9. The standard account of the period’s refusal of the pagan marvelous can be found in Bray, Formation, 231–39. On Médée as neoclassicism’s other, see, for example, Greenberg, “Mythifying Matrix”; Greenberg’s work, here and elsewhere, gives a Lacanian twist to the well-known arguments of Elias, Civilizing Process, and Weber, “Science as a Vocation.” Accounts like these often take this development as a sign of deep change, reflecting a key stage of rationalism (Bray) or the evolution of modern subjectivity (Greenberg).

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10. On the early modern use of the Medea myth, see Wygant, Medea; Corneille’s contribution is analyzed on 103–25. 11. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets (1779), quoted in Wellek, History, 81–82. 12. Naturally, the history of the literary marvelous is more complicated than this brief treatment can describe. For the Renaissance material, see Hathaway, Marvels and Commonplaces. Bray’s presentation of the seventeenth century in Formation should be supplemented by Forestier, Passions tragiques (161–90), who examines tragedy’s use of purely “poetic” marvels. The long erosion of the prestige of marvelous recognition plots is covered by Cave, Recognitions. On the constitution of tragedy and opera as part of an oppositional generic system, see Kintzler, Poétique. 13. Chapter 4 contains a more detailed account of passionate contagion. 14. The words appear in the “Argument” of Andromède (1651); see Corneille, Oeuvres complètes, 2: 448. Corneille’s “for the eyes alone” implies a hierarchy of worthiness that is evident elsewhere: “In the end,” writes Chappuzeau in 1674 of another Corneille machine play, Le Toison d’or (1661), “these pretty spectacles are only for the eyes and ears, they do not touch the depths of the soul; and when you return home, you can say that you saw and listened, but not that you were instructed” (Théâtre français, 48). 15. Quoted in Kintzler, Poétique, 254; assembling remarks like these, Kintzler offers a thorough reconstruction of the theoretical separation of tragedy and opera in the period. Corneille’s “for the eyes alone” is often taken as evidence of neoclassical tragedy’s essentially verbal prejudice, of its qualitative separation from, say, Diderot’s later theories of the tableau (see, e.g., Frantz, Esthétique, 12–19). In fact, as I point out in “Fourth Wall,” regular tragedy is commonly discussed as a visual illusion. What is important to recognize is that though tragedy and opera both operated through the eyes, the nature of that operation differed. 16. Robert, Conte de fées littéraire, 171. Robert’s thesis provides a thorough overview of French fairy tale production. 17. The link between fairy tales and the Modern camp is well known. For a particularly informative account of the genre as metafictional reflection, see Sermain, Métafictions, where the phrase “manifesto of modernity” occurs on 358. The genre’s implicit self-positioning vis-à-vis classical rhetoric is explored by Fumaroli, “Contes de Perrault.” Work on women’s authorial involvement in the fairy tale is extensive; see, e.g., Seifert, Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender, and Hannon, Fabulous Identities. 18. Addison, “Pleasures of the Imagination” (1712), Spectator, 3: 570. 19. Bernard, Inès de Courdoue, 80; Durand, Petits soupers, 158. 20. Sermain, Métafictions, 393–400. 21. Addison, Spectator, 3: 570. 22. Stewart, “Notes on Distressed Genres,” 74. Stewart’s account is valuable, though it insists too heavily on the “mournful” and ideologically retrograde character of the distressed genre; many of her remarks on the French context are also factually misleading. 23. Presenting his translation, Galland notes that if tales in general divert because of their marvelous content, “these [tales] beat all others that have yet appeared, since they are

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full of details that surprise and grip the mind, and that illustrate the extent to which the Arabs surpass all other nations when it comes to such compositions” (Mille et Une Nuits, 1: 21). In associating the Orient with imaginative prowess, Galland was following earlier scholars such as Huet, who credited the Arabs with mastering “the art of lying pleasurably” (Origine, 453). On Galland’s importance to metafictional reflection at this time, see Sermain, Métafictions, 400–410. 24. May, Mille et Une Nuits d’Antoine Galland. May provides a detailed look at why a work as foundational and successful as Galland’s no longer fulfills our criteria of readability. 25. Hurd, Letters, 94–95. 26. E.g., Clery, Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 17–18. 27. Addison, Spectator, 3: 572. 28. The profound structural similarity between the aesthetic landscape of France and England is overlooked, for example, in Clery and Miles’s valuable compendium, Gothic Documents: the purported Britishness of the antineoclassical sensibility is cemented by excluding the types of earlier reflection I have been canvassing. Patently, a novel such as Lhéritier de Villandon’s La Tour ténébreuse (said to be from an English chronicle!) not only belongs in the gothic lineage, but illustrates the genre’s genealogical proximity to the fairy tale (of which Lhéritier wrote not a few). Doubtless, there are cultural reasons for the fact that a properly gothic literature did not develop in eighteenth-century France, and for the converse fact that fairy and exotic tales were the French’s preferred form of fancy; my point is merely that the absence of a “French gothic” has nothing to do with the country’s purported affinity with reason and vraisemblance. (Brown, Gothic Text, has recently argued for the gothic as a panEuropean phenomenon; but his comparative study, to which I will return below, does not consider Continental interest before the turn of the nineteenth century.) 29. On the French opéra comique, which rejected mythology in favor of spectacles the sentimental viewers could identify with, see Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera, 179–292. 30. Cazotte, Diable amoureux, 13; further references to the novel will be given parenthetically in the text. Incidentally, Cazotte never explains why the devil speaks Italian. 31. For more on Gabalis, still well known in Cazotte’s time and a key text in the history of literary transformations of superstitious utterances into entertainment, see Sellier, “Invention d’un merveilleux,” and especially Sermain, Métafictions, 137–59. 32. Subligny’s ghost stories are but one of a string of texts in which some characters debunk the beliefs of others. These range from the plays La Devineresse (Th. Corneille and Donneau de Visé, 1680) and La Comète (Fontenelle, 1681) to a string of turn-of-the-century novels—d’Aulnoy’s Relation du voyage d’Espagne (1691), Durand’s Comtesse de Mortane (1699), and Murat’s Lutins de château de Kernosy (1710). (Some of these examples, and others, are discussed by Sermain, Métafictions, 341–53.) 33. Cuillé, Narrative Interludes, has isolated the novel’s numerous references to opera, arguing on the basis of these that its marvelous owes much more to the lyric stage than to fairy tales (71–88). 34. The frame narrative of Caylus’s Contes orientaux (1743) claims similar narcotic properties for its contents.

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35. This is the revised ending of the novel, which appeared in the second edition of 1776. In this edition’s epilogue, Cazotte reports the dissatisfaction of his friends on reading the 1772 ending, held to be too “brusque” in its conclusion (88): there, on the ride home, Alvare suddenly realizes the danger and summons the devil to withdraw, at which point Biondetta vanishes and the huge camel’s head appears in clouds that quickly disperse in the wind. He continues on to his mother’s; let this be a lesson to him, she admonishes. 36. Castex, Conte fantastique, 25. Cazotte’s influence on the German fantastic is explored by Von Mücke, Seduction of the Occult, 6–7, 35–57. 37. Todorov, Fantastic, 41. 38. Todorov, Fantastic, 44. One of the problems with Todorov’s grid (I will point out others presently) is that its symmetry is faulty: one can see how a “marvelous” narrative differs from a “fantastic-marvelous” narrative, since the former simply presents marvels as real (no hesitation); but it would seem that there can be no “uncanny” narratives, only “fantastic-uncanny” narratives, since by definition the uncanny is a strangeness that causes us to hesitate. 39. Todorov, Fantastic, 24–25. 40. Todorov, Fantastic, 166. 41. Todorov, Fantastic, 24. 42. Todorov, Fantastic, 85. 43. Todorov, Fantastic, 25. 44. Todorov, Fantastic, 27. 45. Stewart, Rereadings, 210, 206. 46. On these points, see Hoffmann, “Ruse du diable,” and Schuerewegen, “Pragmatique et fantastique.” 47. For this reason, pressed to fit the text into Todorov’s grid, we would have to put it in the “marvelous” category, not in the “fantastic-marvelous” category—in which case, of course, it should not figure in Todorov’s book any more than “Snow White.” At least one critic has tried to argue that the text’s irresolvable contradictions make it an example of the pure fantastic; see Cardinal, “Diable amoureux,” and, much more briefly, Hunting, “Mille et Une Sources,” 270n32. This may, however, be to confuse contradiction and ambiguity: with “pure” fantastic hesitation, we do not have enough information to conclude one way or another as to the reality of the apparently supernatural; in Cazotte’s text, we simply have conflicting information on what has really happened. 48. Todorov, Fantastic, 171. 49. Todorov’s theory is beset with problems besides his waffling over Cazotte. For example, it is not clear what texts, aside from James’s Turn of the Screw and a few others, really fit into the vaunted category of the “pure” fantastic; this concentration on a more or less empty square means that Todorov passes over without comment the huge variety within “fantastic-uncanny” narratives (from the “supernatural explained” to, say, the “diary of a madman”). And the use of the word “pure” lays bare the extent to which Todorov’s ideology of reading is of a piece with New Critical ambiguity, or with Barthes’s writerly text. By refusing the “irreducible opposition between real and unreal,” the pure fantastic

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comes to “represen[t] the quintessence of literature” (Fantastic, 167, 168). But quintessences rarely make for accurate historical observation. (For some other points of difficulty, see Brooke-Rose, Rhetoric of the Unreal, 62–71.) Nevertheless, Todorov’s focus on hesitation is important, and I will return to it below. 50. “Diable amoureux, nouvelle espagnole,” 97. 51. Fréron, Année littéraire, 2: 118–19. 52. For example, La Harpe lumps Le Diable amoureux together with the rest of Cazotte’s works, all considered “amusing” enough for one reading—“and in this genre, that is still saying something” (Correspondance littéraire, 1: 389–90). 53. Ampère, Littérature et voyages, 2: 70. Ampère goes on to indict the use of ghosts and the “supernatural explained” as incapable of generating true involvement; he never mentions names, though he must be referencing the English gothic and its French imitators. I will return to the matter of the gothic below. 54. Duvergier de Hauranne, “Contes fantastiques,” 819. 55. Nerval, Oeuvres, 272–73. Nerval’s text was published in article form and used as a preface for a reedition of Le Diable amoureux in 1845; it was later rewritten for Les Illuminés (1852), from whose version I quote. 56. Duvergier de Hauranne, “Contes fantastiques,” 819. “Fiction” here is synonymous with complete poetic liberty to invent. 57. Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, 112–13. 58. New, though certainly not without a strong anchor in both its marvelous predecessors and Cazotte’s earlier work. Hunting, “Mille et Une Sources,” has convincingly pointed to the Arabian Nights—mostly the story of Aladdin—as the source for apparitions that cause the protagonist to quake in his boots while he nonetheless holds firm; other stories of the Arabian Nights rehearse the “am I awake or dreaming?” motif. The novelty, then, is the novel’s European setting and the insistence with which its author explores the boundary between this world and the other—an insistence, again, which can easily be taken for properly fantastic (as Hunting does) but is not. Meanwhile, Cazotte’s earlier work shows that the writer had long been thinking about new possibilities for exploiting a type of naturalized marvelous. His faux-medieval ballad “La Veillée de la bonne femme,” praised by Nerval as the unique French example of gothic, begins: “Spot in the middle of the Ardennes / is a chateau perched on a rock / where ghosts by the hundreds wander” (quoted in Nerval, Oeuvres, 274). Significantly, Cazotte also left early versions of the device that would become a cornerstone of the gothic novel, the “supernatural explained.” Le Lord impromptu (1767) is an “explained” fairy tale: a foundling discovers that the creature he takes to be his good fairy is actually his real mother, who will make his wishes come true by good old fashioned plotting (and lots of disguises). (The short novel, purported to be a translation from the English, bears the oxymoronic subtitle “nouvelle romanesque”: much like Tom Jones [1749], it refreshes the plot elements of romance [romanesque] by bringing them into the present day [nouvelle].) And in his homage to Orlando furioso, Ollivier, Ariosto’s mythical creatures—hypogriffs and such—are reprised as mere mechanical contraptions. Le Diable amoureux is not, then,

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the only text of Cazotte’s to explore avenues for the marvelous that fairy and oriental tales had not taken. 59. This is in part self-criticism, since an early version of the present chapter, “Permanent Re-Enchantments,” takes just this approach. 60. Todorov, Fantastic, 166. 61. This is the suggestion of Killen, Roman terrifiant, 50; similar parallels are noted by Castex, Conte fantastique, 40–41. A possible link between Cazotte and Lewis has in fact been a subject of debate since the very publication of The Monk; see Peck, “The Monk and Le Diable amoureux,” who demonstrates that influence is unlikely. 62. For the record, Le Diable amoureux was translated into English in 1793 and again in 1798. 63. On the supernatural marvelous of these texts, see note 58 above. As for Otranto in France, the 1767 translation was not reviewed in print, though Grimm reported fairly enthusiastically on it in his manuscript newsletter La Correspondance littéraire. The 1774 reprint was reviewed in L’Année littéraire by Fréron, whom we have seen praising Cazotte; Fréron was negative, and makes fun of the editor’s pronouncement that the first edition had been a success in France. (One additional review in 1774, in the Journal des Beaux-Arts et Sciences, was positive but perfunctory.) The critical fortunes of Otranto, therefore, were not significantly different in France than in England: appreciation was mixed. 64. Walpole, Castle of Otranto, 9–10. 65. The quote is from the second (1778) edition; see Reeve, Old English Baron, 4. 66. Key texts here include Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), Montague’s Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare (1769), and Drake’s “On Gothic Superstition” (1798). “Gothic” in this use is roughly synonymous with “medieval,” and does not designate the modern novelistic use of ghosts and such. 67. Antiquarian interest in the Middle Ages was certainly present in mid-eighteenthcentury France; Sainte-Palaye’s 1759 Mémoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie were “the constant source of information about chivalry, not only for Hurd, Percy, and Thomas Warton, but for Gibbon, Joseph Sterling, and later even Byron” (Johnston, Enchanted Ground, 23–24). In contrast to Hurd, however, Sainte-Palaye did not draw from his studies of chivalry a vision of an indigenous, non-neoclassical literature. On French reception of Macpherson, see Van Tieghem, Ossian en France; for another current of French medievalism, see Jacoubet, Comte de Tressan. The “medievalist” vogue in France crested much earlier, with novels such as Lhéritier’s La Tour ténébreuse, d’Auneuil’s Les Chevaliers errants et le génie familier (1709), and Vignacourt’s La Comtesse de Vergi (1722). 68. “Otranto opened the floodgates for a whole torrent of horror-novels. Since Walpole’s time, for a stretch of about 40 years, readers ‘supped full of horrors’” (Varma, Gothic Flame, 42): Varma does not even attempt to back up his assertion by furnishing titles other than the (hardly horrific) Old English Baron and Lee’s (nonsupernatural) The Recess. 69. Hurd, Letters, 120, 102. 70. Beattie, On Fable and Romance (1783), in Clery and Miles, eds., Gothic Documents, 92. Beattie continues: “Mankind awoke as from a dream.”

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71. The text of the two reviews can be found in Sabor, ed., Horace Walpole, 68–70. 72. Langhorne’s reviews are reprinted in Sabor, ed., Horace Walpole, 71–72. Clery’s analysis of the articles in the Monthly Review and the Critical Review is perceptive, though she too seems to believe that the reviewers were initially taken in (Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 53–55). 73. Sabor, ed., Horace Walpole, 70. 74. Grimm and Diderot, Correspondance littéraire, 5: 478. Warburton’s mention occurs in a footnote to his Works of Pope (1770), and is reproduced in Sabor, ed., Horace Walpole, 75. 75. “A Gothic story, professedly written in imitation of Otranto, but reduced to reason and probability! It is so probable that any trial for murder at the Old Bailey would make a more interesting story” (Walpole, Correspondence, 27: 381–82). 76. The review, in the Décade philosophique in 1797, is quoted in Killen, Roman terrifiant, 89. 77. Grimm and Diderot, Correspondance littéraire, 5: 478. 78. Paulson, Representations of Revolution; this particular interpretation goes back to Sade, who felt that the works of Radcliffe and Lewis were the result of “the revolutionary shocks which all of Europe has suffered” (Idée sur les romans, 32). Other cultural readings, insisting on more locally English factors, include Sage, Horror Fiction, and Watt, Contesting the Gothic. 79. Brown, Gothic Text. In a somewhat similar vein, see also Mishra, Gothic Sublime. 80. Clery, Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 87. 81. Clery, Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1. 82. See Moretti, “Slaughterhouse.” 83. Brown, Gothic Text, has located Walpole’s originality in such psychonarration (19–33). For the exploration of thought in the later gothic, see Castle, Female Thermometer, 120–39. 84. My remarks here on hesitation as a device are intended as a hypothesis; serious study of the data on the subject has not even begun. One further hypothesis also deserves consideration: the difference between a device that “works” (hesitation, as first used in the gothic “supernatural explained”) and one that doesn’t (Walpole’s brute supernatural, viewed through the lens of a discovered manuscript; or Cazotte’s variety) may be partially due to chance. In England, Fuller and Smith make use of the supernatural explained; there happened to be a very talented writer, Radcliffe, who saw and exploited the device’s potential, which then led to followers; another talented writer, Lewis, signed on as well, and the rest was literary history. In retrospect, the appearance of this or that fad often seems to be necessary, to make historical sense: we naturally make the gothic novel the expression of a decade of violent revolution, for example. Yet without Radcliffe and Lewis, would there have been a gothic novel at all? And how many other literary fads have fizzled or never occurred—fads about which, had they actually become fads, we would now not hesitate to say they make perfect and necessary historical sense? In this, and like much human endeavor, literary history is very often a profoundly superstitious enterprise: we see meaning where there is only randomness.

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85. As reported by Stendhal in his diary and quoted in Trahard, Prosper Mérimée, 104. The uncanny, then, does not burst on the scene so much as it is the result of continual literary changes. 86. Le Diable amoureux was preceded in its first edition by an “Avis de l’éditeur.” The title of this document would lead the reader to suspect the standard pseudofactual feint. In fact, the “Avis,” which mostly is given over to discussing the work’s interesting engravings, explicitly refuses to countenance the “found manuscript” pretense: “[The work] was dreamed in a night and written in a day; it was not at all, as is usual, stolen from the author: the author wrote it for his own pleasure, and a bit for the edification of his fellow citizens” (4). Moreover, there is a good possibility that the “Avis” did actually come from an editorpublisher, or at least from a pen other that that of Cazotte: Fréron, in his review, attributes it to “one [of the author’s] friends, very well known in our capital for his wit and his talent for jest” (Année littéraire, 2: 119). 87. See the remarks of Décote, Itinéraire, 184–86. While unquestionably fluid, nomenclature of the period nonetheless follows patterns, and Cazotte’s does not fit. As for the adjective “espagnole,” it probably derives from the protagonist’s nationality alone, since Cazotte does not appear to be referring to any identifiable Peninsular tradition of supernatural temptation. 88. One might, for instance, argue that since Walpole in his second preface and Reeve in her first acknowledge their own authorship, they use the pseudofactual form fictionally, just like Cazotte. Though I do not think much is to be gained by hair-splitting, the English cases do seem to me a bit more timid: they suppose that we can read unbelievable subject matter only via the cover provided by superstitious times; we are being asked to read over medieval shoulders. But behind this there is a more interesting problem. This book insists that pseudofactual forms are not fictional because they pretend to be true, yet Le Diable amoureux is a good (early) example of a pseudofactual form (the memoir) that admits invention. Isn’t the implication that there are “pseudofactual” pseudofactual novels and “fictional” pseudofactual novels? (If so, Cazotte, possibly along with Walpole and Reeve, would fit into this latter category.) I will come back to this important point in the Conclusion.

conclusion: on narrators natural and unnatural 1. Dostoyevsky, Gentle Creature, 60. 2. Cohn, Distinction of Fiction, 37. 3. Smith, On the Margins of Discourse, 30; cited by Cohn, Distinction of Fiction, 20. 4. Searle, Expression and Meaning, 58–75. Genette nuances but more or less follows Searle: “the ‘discourse of fiction’ is in fact a patchwork . . . of heterogeneous elements borrowed for the most part from reality” (Fiction and Diction, 49). 5. See Hamburger, Logic of Literature; Martínez-Bonati, Fictive Discourse; and Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences. 6. “And as a bitch stands over her tender whelps growling, when she sees a man she

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does not know, and is eager to fight, so his heart growled within him in his wrath at their evil deeds” (Homer, Odyssey, 2: 275). 7. Cohn, Distinction of Fiction, 10. Rather summarily, Cohn takes this reading of mimesis to be a matter of consensus, though she duly notes the dissenting reading of Gill, “Plato on Falsehood.” 8. Brown, Gothic Text, 41. “Psychonarration” is Cohn’s term for what others call thought reports, inner monologues, and so on. 9. Pavel, “Between History and Fiction,” 23. 10. Epic, for example, was usually thought of as a mixed mode, combining the dramatic (where characters spoke for themselves) and the narrative (in which the poet spoke of them). Because of this mixture, Halliwell remarks, “modern narratological interest in differences of voice, technique, and point of view within third-person narrative has hardly any antecedents in ancient theory or criticism” (Aesthetics of Mimesis, 168n44). 11. See Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, 84–95. 12. Culler, “Omniscience,” 24. 13. Culler, “Omniscience,” 32. Given the difficulty of attributing narration in many canonical modern novels to actual persons, some have argued for a narratorless understanding of third-person novels. (These include Hamburger, Logic of Literature, and Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences.) Others, especially Genette (Narrative Discourse Revisited, 96–108), vigorously defend narrative personhood. If we were to rephrase the issue historically, both sides might agree on a compromise: modern literature tempts us to see third-person narration as narratorless in a way that earlier texts do not. 14. Indeed, the twentieth-century novel can and maybe should be understood as the history of “the formal work done [by writers] on the first person” (Lucey, Never Say I, 14). 15. Cohn, Distinction of Fiction, 37. 16. Cohn, Distinction of Fiction, 30–34. Cohn argues that this nonidentity enables the narrator’s limited or biased point of view to become the actual subject of the novel. 17. The challenged posed by the pseudofactual editor to narratological definitions of fiction and nonfiction is also obvious in Genette’s work. In Fiction and Diction (68–79), Genette defines five modes of narrative (they include fiction, autobiography, and history) by altering the identity or nonidentity between three voices—of author, narrator, and character. Editorial pretense, however, wreaks havoc with the schema. 18. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 81. 19. Perhaps a more interesting counterexample is to be found in the spate of eighteenth-century short novels sometimes known as “it” narratives, that is, tales told by objects such as a coin or a comb. While such narrators are admittedly as unnatural as any invisible stenographer, they are also obvious examples of the venerable rhetorical device of prosopopoeia. “Aristotle says that the narrative poet sometimes transforms himself into something else, not some one else, because the speakers in narrative poems are not always men and women,” writes Renaissance scholar Castelvetro, who goes on to itemize five categories of speakers, of which the last comprises “plants and inanimate objects, like stones, gold, iron, beds, and the like” (Art of Poetry, 30). Prosopopoeia treats animals, objects, or

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abstractions as natural human speakers, whereas many (though certainly not all) modern narrators are only with difficulty described as speakers at all. 20. Quoted by Palmer, Fictional Minds, 242. 21. Quoted by Palmer, Fictional Minds, 243. 22. Palmer rightly suggests that remarks like Scott’s and Richardson’s prompt the question of how “direct access to fictional minds,” once unnatural, becomes naturalized (Fictional Minds, 243). 23. Pavel, “Between History and Fiction,” 26. 24. “[A]ll literary scholars analyze stylistic structures—free indirect style, the stream of consciousness, melodramatic excess, whatever. But it’s striking how little we actually know about the genesis of these forms. Once they’re there, we know what to do; but how did they get there in the first place? . . . Concretely: what are the steps? No one really knows” (Moretti, “Novel,” 114)

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Index

Achilles Tatius, 8, 224n22 Adams, D. J., 231n29 Addison, Joseph, 176–78, 194, 225n36 Agathon, 8, 26 Alembert, Jean Le Rond, known as d’, 163– 64, 233n13 Alter, Robert, 238n4 Amadis of Gaul, 65, 83–85, 227n58, 228n63 Ampère, Jean-Jacques, 185–86, 187 Amyot, Jacques, 28, 65–66, 83–85 Anselme, Père, 217n15 Apuleius, 8, 27 Argens, Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d’, 28–29, 104–5, 222n4 Ariosto, Lodovico, 8–9, 28, 83–85, 154, 173, 179, 185, 190, 249n58 Aristotle, x, 4, 5–8, 10, 17, 25–28, 30, 38, 65, 91, 119, 172, 200, 207n7, 235n25, 253n19 Assézat, Jules, 144, 149, 239n6, 241n38 Auerbach, Erich, 3, 139, 169 Aulnoy, Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, baronne d’, 176, 221n55, 247n32 Auneuil, Louise de Bossigny, comtesse d’, 250n67 Austen, Jane, 113, 200, 214n85, 232n44 Baculard d’Arnaud, François-Thomas-Marie de, 160 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 8, 139, 213n70, 230n23 Balzac, Honoré de, 2–4, 9, 13–14, 17, 18, 24, 35, 40, 112, 139, 141, 169, 211n46 Banfield, Ann, 252n5, 253n13 Bannister, Mark, 215n5 Bardon, Maurice, 222n2 Barish, Jonas, 234n22 Barthes, Roland, 14–16, 18, 104, 112, 139, 211n48, 248n49 Bates, David, 230n13

Beasley, Faith E., 216n7, 216n10 Beattie, James, 250n70 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de, 147 Beckford, William, 188 Behn, Aphra, 16, 22, 31, 63, 113, 232n44 Belsey, Catherine, 210n43 Bender, John, 31 Benjamin, Walter, 32, 53 Bennington, Geoffrey, 95, 109–10, 230nn17, 20 Bernard, Catherine, 176, 221n54 Bessière, Irène, 245n2 Beugnot, Bernard, 226n42 Bibiena, Jean Galli de, 188 Blower, Elizabeth, 214n85 Blumenberg, Hans, 4, 207n2 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 68, 71, 79, 154 Boileau, Nicolas, 28, 155 Boisguilbert, Pierre Le Pesant de, 221n54 Bombart, Mathilde, 218n22, 226n42 Bongie, Laurence L., 164–65,168–69, 244nn64, n68 Booy, Jean de, 239n11 Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de, 243n63 Bouhours, Dominique, 234n21 Bourguinat, Elizabeth, 240n27 Boursault, Edme, 29, 58 Boyd, Brian, 208n11 Boyer, Claude, 60 Brantôme, Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de, 39–41 Bray, Joe, 232n44 Bray, René, 245n9, 246n12 Brecht, Bertolt, 137 Bremond, Gabriel, 29, 60 Brewer, David A., 232n43 Brontë (sisters), 23 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 249n49 Brooks, Peter, 106, 229n4

278

index

Brown, Marshall, 194, 200, 232n44, 247n28 Brownlee, Marina Scordilis, 227n58 Bryson, Norman, 145 Buisson, François, 239n11 Burke, Edmund, 11, 28, 124, 131, 237n45, Bussy-Rabutin, Roger de, 39, 47 Caillois, Roger, 245n2 Calasso, Roberto, 207–8n8 Calle-Gruber, Mireille, 217n20 Campbell, John, 215n1 Caplan, Jay, 240n26 Cappello, Sergio, 227n57 Cardinal, Roger, 248n47 Caron, Philippe, 208n8 Cascardi, Anthony J., 226–27n51 Castelnau, Michel de, 39 Castelvetro, Lodovico, 38–39, 175, 253n19 Castex, Pierre-Georges, 182, 245n2, 250n61 Castle, Terry, 172, 251n83 Catrysse, Jean, 240n27 Cave, Terence, 223n16, 228n70, 246n12 Caylus, Anne-Claude-Philippe de Pestels de Lévis de Tubières-Grimoard, comte de, 181, 190, 247n34 Cazauran, Nicole, 225n37 Cazotte, Jacques: Le Diable amoureux, xii, 173, 179–90, 195–97, 205; Le Lord impromptu, 249n58; Les Mille et Une Fadaises, 181; Olliver, 179, 189, 249n58; “La Veillée de la bonne femme,” 179, 189, 249n58 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, xi, 29, 62–65, 76, 78, 83–89, 125–26, 136, 146, 154, 191, 229n6, Challe, Robert, 224n29 Chamard, Henri, 217n15 Chambers, Ross, 219n29 Champfleury, Jules Husson, known as, 139– 41, 151, 169 Chapelain, Jean, 62, 175 Chappuzeau, Samuel, 246n14 Charnes, Jean-Antoine de, 37–38, 41–43, 50, 54, 57, 60, 217n15, 220n37 Chartier, Pierre, 242n42 Chartier, Roger, 213n71, 236n41 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 23 Chatterton, Thomas, 190 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 3, 31 Cherbuliez, Juliette, 228n64 Chesney, George Tomkyns, 12–13, 17–18 Chevrolet, Teresa, 208n12

Chrétien de Troyes, 31, 69 Cicero, 118 Cioranescu, Alexandre, 227n58 Clark, Andrew, 214n92 Clarke, I. F., 209n29 Clery, E. J., 172, 194, 247nn26, 28, 251n72 Cohn, Dorrit, 19–20, 23, 113, 198–204, 221n50, 232n44 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, xii, 11, 17, 25, 116, 167 Compagnon, Antoine, 16, 210n37–38 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 54, 194, 210n43 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 164, 236n41 Congreve, William, 63 Constant, Benjamin, 23 Corneille, Pierre, 38, 39, 173–75, 178, 216n6, 246n15 Corneille, Thomas, 174, 247n32 Cotolendi, Charles, 59, 60 Cottin, Sophie, 137 Coudreuse, Anne, 238n56 Coulet, Henri, 73, 211n52, 224n26, 230n21, 231n28, 241n38 Courtilz de Sandras, Gatien de, 29, 221n55 Courtin, Antoine de, 59 Cousin, Victor, 80–81 Couton, Georges, 231n40 Crébillon (fils), Claude-Prosper Jolyot de, 177, 179; Les Égarements du coeur et de l’esprit, xi, 23, 91–114, 205; Les Heureux Orphelins, 231n34; Lettres de la duchesse de *** au duc de ***, 111; La Nuit et le moment, 111; Le Sopha, 188. Crébillon (père), Prosper Jolyot de, 235n25 Cron, Adélaïde, 238n56 Cuénin, Micheline, 218n23, 220n37 Cuillé, Tili Boon, 247n33 Culler, Jonathan, 201, 203, 216n7 Dancourt, Florent Carton, known as, 120 Dante Alighieri, 171 Darnton, Robert, 116, 122–25, 127, 136, 233nn9, 11 Daston, Lorraine, 223–24n20 Davila, Enrico Caterino, 39 Davis, Lennard J., 20–24, 56, 208n10, 212n68 Declercq, Gilles, 242n49 Décote, Georges, 252n87 Defoe, Daniel, 19–23, 30, 53, 90, 199, 202 DeJean, Joan, 218–19n25, 219n26, 220n35, 228n64, 235n30

index De la Carrera, Rosalina, 144, 239n18, 240n25 Deloffre, Frédéric, 211n52 De Man, Paul, 3, 133–34, 237n53 Démoris, René, 211n52 Denis, Delphine, 225n38, 226n49 Desan, Philippe, 215n1 Dickens, Charles, 2–7, 18, 202 Diderot, Denis, xi–xiii, 23, 114, 124, 126, 177, 186, 231n38, 235n25, 246n15; Les Bijoux indiscrets, 139; Ceci n’est pas un conte, 139, 161–70; Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne, 139, 151–70; Discours sur la poésie dramatique, 8, 147, 156, 243n56; Éloge de Richardson, 54, 122, 140, 145, 147–48, 155, 159, 236n41, 239n10; Entretiens sur le Fils naturel, 186; Le Fils naturel, 160; Jacques le fataliste, 140, 145, 164–65, 244n68; Lettre sur les sourds et muets, 163–65; Madame de La Carlière, 139, 243–44n63; Paradoxe sur le comédien, 119; La Religieuse, 139–53, 155–57, 160–62, 164– 70; Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, 243n63 Dieckmann, Herbert, 144–45, 239n12 DiPiero, Thomas, 223n12 Donneau de Visé, Jean, 47–49, 156, 247n32 Doody, Margaret Anne, 64 Dornier, Carole, 229n11, 230n13 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 198–99, 201, 203–4 Drake, Nathan, 250n66 Dryden, John, 173, 176, 190 Dubois, Jacques, 211n51 Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste, 122, 124, 234n15, 236n42, 237n45 Duchêne, Roger, 218n23 Ducray-Duminil, François-Guillaume, 196 Duggan, Anne E., 221n55 Duncan, Ian, 227n55 Dunlop, John, 208n9, 231n27 Du Plaisir, 58, 62–63, 219–20n33 Duprat, Anne, 208n12 Durand, Catherine, 176, 221n55, 246n19, 247n32 Duvergier de Hauranne, Prosper, 186 Edmiston, William, 106, 231n30 Ehrard, Jean, 242n42, 243n55 Elias, Norbert, 174, 228n63, 229n12, 245n9 Eliot, George, 16–17 Elkins, James, 237n52 Escola, Marc, 218n22–23, 226n42

279

Esmein(-Sarrazin), Camille, 215n3, 220n45, 222n6 Febvre, Lucien, 213n71 Fielding, Henry, 20–21, 28, 31, 35, 63, 90–92, 112–14, 154, 200, 232nn43–44, 249n58 Flaubert, Gustave, 141, 169, 202 Fleming, John A., 243n60 Fludernik, Monika, 231n33, 232n44 Foley, Barbara, x, 12, 20–24, 31, 208n10, 211n48, 212n68, 214n84, 220n39 Fontenelle, Bernard de, 39, 219n27, 247n32 Force, Pierre, 119–20, 230n16, 235n27 Forcione, Alban K., 223n16, 227n60 Forestier, Georges, 246n12 Fort, Bernadette, 116, 122, 230n22, 231n34 Foucault, Michel, xiv, 9, 21, 26, 112, 228– 29n4, 229n10, 230n13 Fournier, Michel, 220n45, 234n23 France, Peter, 233n6 François, Anne-Lise, 220n38 Frantz, Pierre, 246n15 Freer, Alan J., 239n11 Frege, Gottlob, 1–4, 9, 12, 14 Fréron, Élie-Catherine, 185, 190, 250n63, 252n86 Freud, Sigmund, 171–72, 179, 196 Fried, Michael, 146, 236n41 Frigerio, Vittorio, 144–45 Frye, Northrop, xiii Fuentes, Carlos, 1, 17 Fuller, Anne, 191, 193, 195 Fumaroli, Marc, 227nn52, 57, 246n17 Furetière, Antoine, 87, 223nn12, 19 Furst, Lilian R., 211n51 Gallagher, Catherine, 21–24, 31, 53, 90–92, 110, 112, 208n10, 209nn21, 24, 211–12n65, 231n40 Galland, Antoine, 177, 179 Garagnon, Jean, 230n20 Gaubert, Serge, 230n20 Gearhart, Suzanne, 212n68, 235n27 Genette, Gérard, 216n7, 252n4, 253nn11, 13, 17 Gevrey, Françoise, 219n25 Giavarini, Laurence, 223n12 Gide, André, 144, 202 Gill, Christopher, 208n18, 253n7 Godwin, William, 205 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 113, 214n85

280

index

Goldhammer, Arthur, 136 Goldsmith, Elizabeth C., 228n64 Gomberville, Marin Le Roy de, 38, 64, 85 Gossman, Lionel, 27 Graffigny, Françoise de, 19, 231n28 Grande, Nathalie, 216n10, 222n3 Gray, Thomas, 229n7 Greenberg, Mitchell, 245n9 Greenblatt, Stephen, 212n65 Grimm, Frederich Melchior, 142–44, 146, 148–50, 152–54, 156, 157, 193, 242n40, 243–44n63 Grogan, Claire, 237n43 Gueulette, Thomas-Simon, 177 Guilleragues, Gabriel-Joseph de Lavergne, comte de, 29, 86 Guyon, Bernard, 233n6 Halliwell, Stephen, 6, 208n17, 253n10 Hallyn, Fernand, 225n38 Hamburger, Käte, 252n5, 253n13 Hamilton, Anthony, 179–80, 181 Hampton, Timothy, 219n30 Hannon, Patricia, 246n17 Hart, Thomas R., 227n58 Harth, Erica, 216n10, 217n19, 221n55, 223n12, 226n48 Hartog, François, xiii Hathaway, Baxter, 246n12 Haywood, Elizabeth Fowler, 108–9 Hegel, G. W. F., 13, 28, 118, 137, 141 Heiserman, Arthur, 209n20 Heliodorus, 8, 26, 28, 65–67, 70–72, 77, 83– 86, 88, 216n12, 224n22 Hénin, Emmanuelle, 214n82, 234n19, 234n21 Herberay des Essarts, Nicolas d’, 83–84 Herman, Jan, 212n68 Hipp, Marie-Thérèse, 216n10 Hobson, Marian, 214n82, 240n19 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 171, 182, 185–86, 196 Hoffmann, Kathryn, 248n46 Homer, x, 1–3, 5, 24, 66, 69, 84, 139, 154, 171, 199, 200, 201 Horace, xii, 118, 160, 172, 175, 192, 214n81, 234n15 Horowitz, Louise, 219n26, 224n21 Huet, Pierre-Daniel, 86, 88, 213–14n80, 217n18, 227n59, 247n23 Hugo, Victor, 18, 23, 139, 203–4 Hume, David, 163–64, 166, 237n45 Hunting, Claudine, 248n47, 249n58

Hurd, Richard, 178, 190–91, 250n66–67 Huxley, Aldous, 97, 100 Ibbett, Katherine, 238n56 Jackson, Rosemary, 245n6–7 Jacoubet, Henri, 250n67 James, Henry, 196, 245n7, 248n49 Jaucourt, Louis, chevalier de, 147, Jay, Martin, 210n41 Jeanneret, Michel, 220n34 Johnson, Samuel, 175 Johnson, Steven, 210n35 Johnston, Arthur, 250n67 Joly, Raymond, 238n3 Jomand-Baudry, Régine, 230n21 Kant, Immanuel, 28, 32, 131, 194, 234n18 Kavanagh, Thomas M., 235n29 Kelly, Christopher, 234n17 Kempf, Roger, 240nn20, 27 Killen, Alice M., 250n61 Kintzler, Catherine, 246nn12, 15 Knights, L. C., 109, 232n43 Koyré, Alexandre, 72 Kozul, Mladen, 212n68 Kremer, Nathalie, 212n68 Kuhn, Thomas, xiii–xiv, 26 Labrosse, Claude, 233n12, 235n31 La Bruyère, Jean de, 100, 104, 112, 175–76, 226n46, 231n40 La Calprenède, Gautier de Coste, sieur de, 62, 64, 71, 216n12, 227n61 Lacan, Jacques, 210n41, 245n9 LaCapra, Dominick, 233n11 Laclos, Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de, 19, 23 Lafayette, Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, comtesse de, 205, 226n46; La Princesse de Clèves, xi–xiii, 19, 23, 35–61, 62, 79, 88, 123, 195, 225n41, 229n6, 235n32; La Princesse de Montpensier, 36–37, 39, 43–44, 46, 55, 60, 219n32; Zayde, 48, 49, 55, 59, 60, 86, 88, 216n12, 224n29 Lafon, Henri, 240n21 La Fontaine, Jean de, 154, 160 La Harpe, Jean-François de, 142, 249n52 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 18 La Mesnardière, Jules Pilet de, 234n20, 243n58

index Laugaa, Maurice, 220n37, 220n47 Le Bossu, René, 175 Lee, Sophia, 190, 250n68 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 211n46 Lejeune, Philippe, 202 Leland, Thomas, 190 Lenglet Du Fresnoy, Nicolas, 222n4 Lennox, Charlotte, 21–23 Lesage, Alain-René, 91, 112, 187, 188, 229n6 Letts, Janet, 217n13 Lever, Maurice, 221n51 Lewis, Matthew, 189, 193, 197, 251nn78, 84 Lhéritier de Villandon, Marie-Jeanne, 177, 247n28, 250n67 Lignereaux, Cécile, 238n56 Liu, Alan, 214n90 Locke, John, 31, 35, 213n76 Longinus, 155 Longus, 85 Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng, 213n74 Lucey, Michael, 253n14 Lucian, 69, 70 Lucretius, 131 Lukács, György, 10 Lynch, Deidre Shauna, 113, 229n4 Lyons, John D., 215n1 Mackenzie, Henry, 19 Macpherson, James, 190, 250n67 Macrobius, 27 Magritte, René, 161 Mailly, Louis de, 221n52 Malandin, Pierre, 219n32 Malebranche, Nicolas de, 119, Manley, Mary de la Riviere, 21, 63 Mann, Thomas, 202 Marguerite de Navarre, 48, 49, 68, 71, 156, 224n28, 225n37 Marguerite de Valois, 60 Marichal, Robert, 223n15 Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de, 19, 22, 90, 115, 229n7, 230n21, 233n10 Marmontel, Jean-François, 153, 156 Marshall, David, 214n82, 235n27, 237n45, 241n34 Martin, Angus, 242n44, 243n59 Martínez-Bonati, Félix, 252n5 Mathieu-Castellani, Gisèle, 224n23 Mauzi, Robert, 144, 240n22

281

May, Georges, 152, 166, 211n52, 229n6, 239n8, 247n24 McKeon, Michael, 31, 209n24, 212n67–68, 213n76, 222nn6, 8, 223n11 Meister, Jakob Heinrich, 143 Meltzer, Françoise, 233n5 Ménage, Gilles, 218n23 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 105, 147 Mérimée, Prosper, 182, 196 Mesnard, Jean, 226n46 Mézeray, François Eudes de, 39–40 Miles, Robert, 247n28 Miller, Nancy K., 216n7 Mishra, Vijay, 251n79 Molière, xi, 91, 96, 112, 120, 226n46 Montague, Mary Wortley, 250n66, Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de, 22, 186 Montpensier, Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de, 43–44 Montreux, Nicolas de, 85 More, Thomas, 8–9 Moretti, Franco, 53–54, 194–95, 214–15n93, 228n64, 254n24 Morgan, J. R., 209n20, 213n70 Morlet-Chantalat, Chantal, 224n28–29, 226n48 Mornet, Daniel, 238n59 Mortimer, Armine Kotin, 240n19 Mullan, John, 1, 213n69 Murat, Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, comtesse de, 29, 176, 247n32 Mylne, Vivienne, 106–7, 156, 211n52, 239n8, 240n20 Naigeon, Jacques-André, 149, 153, 157, 161, 164, 165, 167, 242n40 Nelson, Victoria, 172 Nelson, William, 213nn76, 78 Nerval, Gérard de, 186, 196 Neumann, Anne Waldron, 232n44 Nicole, Pierre, 234n21, 235n25, 236n42 Niderst, Alain, 80, 219n32, 225n39, 226n44 Nodier, Charles, 182, 196 Nodot, François, 177 Noille-Clauzade, Christine, 218n21 Norman, Larry, 231n39 Nünning, Vera, 240n23 O’Connor, John J., 227n57 Opie, Amelia Alderson, 236n43

282

index

Paige, Nicholas D., 220n35, 228n65, 246n15, 250n59 Pallisot de Montenoy, Charles, 105 Palmer, Alan, 254n22 Park, Katherine, 223–24n20 Parrish, Jean, 239n8 Pascal, Blaise, 97 Patru, Olivier, 236n39 Patterson, Lee, 213n75 Paulson, Ronald, 194 Pavel, Thomas, 200, 204, 207nn4, 6, 224n21 Peck, Louis M., 250n61 Percy, Thomas, 190, 250n67 Perrault, Charles, 176 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 131 Petronius Arbiter, 8, 27 Pfeiffer, K. Ludwig, 208n15 Plantié, Jacqueline, 226n48 Plato, 118, 160 Plazenet, Laurence, 223n16, 224n22, 227n57 Pliny the Elder, 241n32 Poe, Edgar Allan, 23, 104 Poovey, Mary, 214n86 Pope, Alexander, 190 Potocki, Jan, 188 Préchac, Jean de, 29, 59, 221n52 Prendergast, Christopher, 15, 210n40, 220n43 Prince, Gerald, 215n1 Pucci, Suzanne Rodin, 243n60, 244n67 Quinault, Philippe, 185 Quint, David, 223n10 Quintilian, 118 Rabelais, François, 8–9, 28 Racine, Jean, 38, 59, 85, 121, 149, 174, 217n17, 234n21 Raleigh, Walter, 39–40 Rancière, Jacques, xiii Ranum, Orest, 216n9 Rapin, René, 175 Ray, William, 212n68, 218n20, 237n48 Reeve, Clara, 63, 189–91, 193–95, 197, 227n60, 250n68, 252n88 Reiss, Timothy J., 31, 242n50 Rémond de Sainte-Albine, Pierre, 236n41 Rétif de La Bretonne, Nicolas-Edme, 236n38 Rey, Marc-Michel, 115

Riccoboni, Luigi, 119 Richardson, Samuel, 4, 9–13, 20–24, 30, 31, 123, 145, 151, 155, 157, 173, 197, 202–4, 209n26, 231n40, 238n4, 239n10, 241n36, 254n22 Riffaterre, Michel, 210n38 Riley, E. C., 226n51 Ritter, Eugène, 217n14 Robert, Marthe, 223n13 Robert, Raymonde, 246n16 Rosset, François de, 69, 242n48 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5, 23, 31, 97, 114, 157, 169, 179; Confessions, 121–23; Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité, 119; Essai sur l’origine des langues, 234n15; Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, xi–xiii, 3–4, 10, 54, 115–38, 242n41; Lettre à d’Alembert, 116–122, 125–27, 129– 30, 234n16, 238n56, 241n33; Narcisse, 118 Rousseau de La Valette, Michel, 59 Roussel, Jean, 234n15 Rudler, Gustave, 217n15 Russo, Elena, 145, 230n17, 233n10 Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-François de, 251n78 Sage, Victor, 251n78 Sainte-Palaye, Jean-Baptiste de La Curne de, 250n67 Saint-Évremond, Charles de Marguetel de Saint-Denis, seigneur de, 175–76 Saint-Lambert, Jean-François de, 153–54, 156– 58, 160, 161, 243n55 Saint-Réal, César de, 29, 39, 57, 58, 86 Saler, Michael, 210n43 Salvan de Saliès, Antoinette de, 58 Sand, George, 23 Sandy, Gerald N., 223n16, 227n59 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 15 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, 208n11 Schneider, Mark A., 214n90 Schnitzler, Arthur, 171 Schuerewegen, Franc, 248n46 Scott, Walter, 13, 113, 203, 214n85, 215n2, 227n55, 254n22 Scudéry, Georges de, 28, 38, 124, 215n5, 216n12 Scudéry, Madeleine de, 28, 38, 47–49, 58, 62–65, 67, 68, 71–72, 76–78, 80–83, 85, 86, 107, 124, 212n69, 214n84, 215n5, 216n12, 221n53, 224nn26, 29, 225n33 Searle, John R., 2, 199 Segrais, Jean Regnault de, 225n34

index Seifert, Lewis Carl, 246n17 Séité, Yannick, 233n11 Sellier, Philippe, 247n31 Sermain, Jean-Paul, 176–77, 218n22, 237n55, 246n17, 247n23 Serroy, Jean, 68, 76, 222n2, 225nn31, 33, 228n69 Sgard, Jean, 222n6 Shakespeare, William, 1, 13, 16, 171, 174, 178, 185, 190, 191, 193, 209n21, 212n65, 232n43 Shapin, Steven, 71 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 23 Showalter, English, 211n52, 222n6, 225n35 Sidney, Philip, 28, 228n63 Siebers, Tobin, 245n6 Simonin, Michel, 227n53 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 198–99, 203 Smith, Charlotte Turner, 191, 193, 195, 251n85 Smollett, Tobias, 23, 91, 112, 189, 190, 223n9 Sorel, Charles, 62, 64, 216n6, 223n12 Spenser, Edmund, 3, 8–9, 28, 190, 191 Staël, Germaine de, 208n9 Starobinski, Jean, 235n25 Steele, Richard, 225n36 Stendhal, 16, 18, 37, 166–67, 210n43, 252n85 Stenzel, Hartmut, 223n12 Sterne, Laurence, 145 Stewart, Philip, 19, 226n42, 229n10, 235n30, 240n20, 248n45 Stewart, Susan, 177 Stone, Harriet, 215n1 Subligny, Adrien-Thomas Perdou de, La Fausse Clélie, xi–xii, 47, 56, 62, 64–82, 83, 86–89, 91, 180 Sue, Eugène, 139, 169 Tallis, Raymond, 210n37–38, 210n43 Tasso, Torquato, 83, 85, 131, 154, 175, 185, 190, 237n44 Terdiman, Richard, 240n19, 240n25 Theophrastus, 7 Thomas, Downing, 247n29 Tieck, Ludwig, 182 Tieje, Arthur Jerrold, 19, 23, 209n22 Todorov, Tzvetan, 14, 16–17, 182–84, 188, 196, 245n2, 248n47, 248–49n49 Tolstoy, Leo, 200 Torche, Antoine, 58 Toumarkine, Barbara Kaech, 234n23 Tourette, Eric, 231n40

283

Tressan, Louis-Élisabeth de La Vergne, 190 Turner, James Grantham, 235n33 Turnovsky, Geoffrey, 232n2 Undank, Jack, 238n4 Urfé, Honoré d’, 48, 49, 58, 63, 64, 71, 83, 85–86, 107, 212n69, 216n12, 224nn21, 28, 236n39 Valincour, Jean-Baptiste de, 36–43, 49–53, 54, 56, 57, 59, 218n22, 220n45, 235n32 Van Delft, Louis, 229n4 Van der Schueren, Éric, 217–18n20 Van Tieghem, Paul, 250n67 Varloot, Jean, 144, 145, 157 Varma, Devendra P., 245n6, 250n68 Vernière, Paul, 244n68 Veyne, Paul, 207n5 Viala, Alain, 235n28 Vignacourt, Adrien de La Vieuville d’Orville, comte de, 250n67 Vila, Anne C., 130 Villars, Nicolas de Montfaucon de, 180, 188 Villedieu, Marie-Catherine-Hortense de, 22, 23, 29, 39, 42, 51, 52, 58, 59, 86–87, 219n28, 224n29 Villiers, Pierre de, 219n32 Vincent-Buffault, Anne, 132, 220n44, 233n9, 237n52, 238n56 Virgil, 66, 84, 85, 200 Vives, Juan Luis, 28 Voltaire, 117, 147, 149, 169, 174, 177, 179, 186, 190 Von Mücke, Dorothea E., 248n36 Walpole, Horace, 19, 124, 172, 173, 178, 189– 95, 197, 232n44 Walton, Kendall L., x, 3 Warburton, William, 9, 11, 24, 30, 192, 193, 212n67, 241n36 Watt, Ian P., 31, 35, 89, 210n33, 225n35 Watt, James, 251n78 Weber, Max, 174, 194 Weil, François, 41, 217n15 Weinberg, Bernard, 213n76 Welsh, Alexander, 214n89 Wharton, Thomas, 190 Williams, Raymond, 208n9 Wilson, Diana de Armas, 223n13, 227n60 Wine, Kathleen, 228n63 Winn, Colette, 225n37

284 Winnett, Susan, 93 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 214n85 Woloch, Alex, 231n41 Wood, James, 208n15, 210n35, Wordsworth, William,137 Wygant, Amy, 246n10 Xenophon, 8, 26

index Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, 228n70 Zimmerman, Everett, 212n68 Ziolkowski, Theodore, 245n7 Zola, Émile, 31, 201

Acknowledgments

Many organizations and individuals have made this book possible. The Hellman Family Fund provided financial support at a time when I had only wrong ideas about where my research was going; I thank them for their confidence and their patience. The University of California provided crucial sabbatical support in the form of a Career Development Grant in 2000, a standard sabbatical in 2004, and a Humanities Research Fellowship in 2007. A Mellon Foundation Project Grant helped bring it all home by covering late-stage research and production costs. So many scholars have given freely of their time when there was so little of it to spare. Many thanks to all those who read portions of the manuscript, with special affection for those who did not do so gently (you know who you are): David Bates, Mathilde Bombart, Marshall Brown, Ross Chambers, Juliette Cherbuliez, Andrew Clark, Joan DeJean, Lynn Festa, Jody Greene, Dori Hale, Tim Hampton, Chloé Hogg, Vicky Kahn, Jeff Knapp, Jonathan Lamb, Josh Landy, Celeste Langan, Françoise Lavocat, Mark Ledbury, Ignacio Navarrete, Nigel Nicholson, Guillaume Peureux, Michael Saler, James Turner, Geoff Turnovsky, Dorothea Von Mücke, and a number of anonymous readers, including those of Penn Press. A number of research assistants provided prompt and invaluable help: Órlaith Creedon, Jonathan Haddad, Miranda Kershaw, Jonathan Repinecz, Anna Skrzypczynska, and Travis Wilds. Collen Hammon-Hogan did great work with his drafting pen. All my love to Becky Curry, who during the decade-long gestation of the project kept me sane, on track, and always looking forward. And Wyatt, whose gestation was so much more efficient and beautiful—well, I dedicate all this ancient history to you.