Dangerous Truths and Criminal Passions: The Evolution of the French Novel, 1569-1791 9780804765800

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Dangerous Truths & Criminal Passions

Thomas DiPiero

Dangerous Truths & Criminal Passions The Evolution of the French Novel, 1569-1791

Stanford University Press Stanford, California I992

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1992 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America CIP data are at the end of the book

Preface

In this study I contest the axiomatic assertion that the novel developed as a bourgeois art form. I argue instead that before it ever reflected, reproduced, or in some other fashion seemed to champion middle-class values the novel articulated the French aristocracy's hegemonic claims to natural ascendancy. French fiction confronted aesthetics with ideology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it codified as resolutely political a literary genre that, because of its ostensible lack of a classical antecedent, remained more or less formally marginal. In contradistinction to a great many studies of the novel, then, I locate the genre's early manifestations-and not its teleological origin, I should add-in the early years of the seventeenth century. During that time, rules dictating the novel's structure and subject matter defined its literary form and attendant political use. Consequently, the aim of my work is not only to sharpen the literary taxonomic systems governing the interpretation of fiction, but to understand the dialectical relationship that the novel as a discursive practice entertains with history and ideology. My most fundamental claim in this study is that the novel developed first and foremost in France as a determinate political practice. Its aesthetic marginality provided it with an ideological malleability enabling it to represent resolutely political positions as natural and organic. In this book, I offer an account of seventeenthand eighteenth-century French fiction as it negotiated the political concerns of dominant social groups, rearticulating the complex of moral, political, and social discourses. I argue that the debates about verisimilitude, referentiality, and literary and moral excellence surrounding early French fiction helped stake out discursive

VI

Preface

fields which in turn contributed to the formation of specific class conscwusnesses. This study is not by any means an exhaustive account either of prose fiction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or of the staggering complexities that obtain in the articulation of literary and political practice. It is, rather, an attempt to understand how specific groups naturalize their social positions by legitimating particular kinds of stories. Consequently, where previous studies of the novel identify precise narrative techniques as constituting a literary mode deemed to be self-evidently mimetic or "realistic," I attempt to identify the political forces that valorized specific narrative forms as best able to express or sustain extant social relations. Many readers may be unfamiliar with some of the novels I cite here, particularly those dating back to the early years of the seventeenth century. Most of them, nevertheless, were popular successes in their time. Because studies of the French novel generally begin with the eighteenth century, I have not assumed that modern readers have any particular familiarity with works that antedate the publication of Madame de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves. Whenever possible, I cite current or readily available editions of the sources I treat, and in general I have provided my own translations, except in the cases of those texts I cite extensively; for these works I have relied on existing English translations. A number of friends and colleagues have provided me with immeasurable support by listening to my ideas, reading drafts of the manuscript, arguing with me, and pretending to agree with me. For their special help I would like to thank Sharon Willis, Pat Gill, Philip Berk, Bonnie Smith, Mieke Bal, Teresa Jillson, Gerald Bond, Claudia Schaefer, Philip Lewis, Craig Owens, Richard Estell, and Jeff Hilyard. I should also thank the University of Rochester for providing support for some of the research done in Paris. An earlier version of Chapter 6 appeared in Postmodernism Across the Ages, ed. Bennett Schaber and William Readings (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991).

T.D.

Contents

Introduction

I

Part One The Construction of a Genre Chapter r

The Rise of Aristocratic Fiction

23

Chapter

The Ideology of Realism in the Early Seventeenth Century

62

Chapter 3

Polexandre and the Politics of Heroic Fiction

90

Chapter 4

The Alienation and Commodification of the Novel

2

Part Two

The Development of the Modern Novel

Chapter 5

Le Roman bourgeois and the Modern Novel

Chapter 6 A Discourse of One's Own: La Princesse de Cleves Chapter 7

Chapter 8

133

163

194

Mastery and Seduction in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

236

"Burn the Letter!": La Religieuse

284

viii

Contents

Chapter 9 Justine and the Discourse of the (Other) Master

333

Afterword

375

Works Cited

379

Index

393

Dangerous Truths & Criminal Passions

Introduction

In 175 5 Bishop Armand-Pierre Jacquin published his Entretiens sur les romans: Ouvrage moral et critique (Dialogues on novels: Moral and critical study), a mildly petulant expose of the political and aesthetic bankruptcy of prose fiction. Like many of his contemporaries, Jacquin believed that novels were not only useless, but detrimental to public decency as well, and he devotes most of his study to demonstrating in point-by-point fashion the snares into which novel readers are likely to fall. Disrespect of the monarch's grandeur, wanton irreligion, and a headlong plunge into moral depravity are but three that Jacquin describes. For over one hundred years, since Jean Chapelain published his "De la lecture des vieux romans" (On reading old novels) in r646, critical treatises devoted exclusively to theoretical discussion of the French novel had raised the question of fiction's power to degrade not only virtue and truth, but the literary forms that had been empowered to serve them as well. Jacquin takes the stock critical assumption that novels would lure readers away from moral truth and appends to it an exhaustive historical account of the actual deleterious social and material effects he believes prose fiction can have. He establishes the intimate connection between the aesthetic and the political natures of the novel when he writes in his preface, "To encourage the respect of virtue, the veneration of truth, and the love of literature are at once the spirit and motive of these debates. To fulfill this obligation worthy of a citizen, nothing seemed to me more fitting than the critical examination of novels." 1 Jacquin's claim that his project is "worthy of a citizen" displays the extent to which he views the proliferation 1

Jacquin, p. vii.

2

Introduction

of novels as a threat not only to the institution of literature, but to the very social fabric of the nation. Jacquin's work is largely derivative, in some spots patterned so closely on previous essays that it almost appears plagiarized. Asking, for example, along with Clapiers de Vauvenargues, whether fictive illusion can hold up to more than one reading, 2 he also copies Pierre-Daniel Huet's historical search for the novel's provenance, which the latter undertook in his Lettre-traite sur l' origine des romans (Treatise on the origin of novels). 3 If Jacquin borrowed material from previous writers, however, the thrust of his essay is both original and pugnacious. Where Huet found the Talmudic and Moslem narrative traditions to be harmless exercises in poetic mystification, for example, Jacquin condemns them as dangerous political propaganda cunningly designed to unravel the moral fiber of Western civilization. Claiming that the Roman Empire's fall was caused by the appropriation of Greek and Syrian fiction (53-55), he goes so far as to suggest that the English and the Dutch were attempting to prevail surreptitiously over France by exporting so many novels there (u8-21). Jacquin's historical and theoretical explanations of the spread of prose fiction may seem exaggerated and even paranoid, but he is among the first to have explicitly addressed the social function of novels. Daring to make the connections earlier writers had only hinted at, Jacquin identifies prose fiction as a new discursive practice that so closely imitates more venerated literary forms that it appropriates their power to reproduce social reality, and so has the power to dismantle the political and moral fiber of an entire nation. This book examines the early French novel and the series of modifications it underwent resulting from the dynamic tension between political and aesthetic domains. Jacquin's complaint that novels sullied legitimate literary forms and menaced the security of the social apparatus, although written in the eighteenth century, is emblematic of the criticisms the novel endured beginning in the middle of the seventeenth century. Such attacks will serve as the springboard for my analysis of fiction's relationship to approved literary 2 Jacquin, p. r69. See also Vauvenargues, who claimed in his Introduction a Ia connaissance de /'esprit humain that "one does not reread a novel" (p. 124). 3 First published in r669. A very good modern edition has been prepared by Fabienne Gegou.

Introduction

3

genres and the legitimizing authority that empowered those genres to represent sanctioned ideological positions. These attacks will also help clarify the political issues at stake in the ostensibly aesthetic critiques of fiction. From the beginning of the seventeenth century, prose fiction was a marginal literary form because, unlike the more venerated forms of tragedy, history, and the epic, it lacked an antecedent in classical antiquity. Yet, because early novels were nearly exclusively written and read by an aristocratic public, they participated in the reproduction and, indeed, in the shaping of the aristocracy's values. At once aesthetically bankrupt and ideologically sound, the early French novel articulated the contradiction between the discourses supporting the structures of power and the codification of power in a budding and still unstable literary genre. As novelists began appropriating formal characteristics of the classical genres in an attempt to legitimize prose fiction, they caused the novel to mediate between aesthetic and political ideals. The manner in which the novel inscribed and transformed ideological and aesthetic concerns will be the focus of this study. The novel's aesthetically marginal status kept it in constant dialogue with the approved literary forms of the day. For example, when novelists began mimicking narrative devices common to the epic4 or wheq critics called fiction a simple imitation of history, they underscored the intertextuality that situated the novel in a dialectical relationship to contemporary literary standards and consequently to the political power that validated and legitimized those standards. From the outset, then, the seventeenth-century novel engaged in a continual polemic with the discursive configurations of power. The clash between discursive authority, which needed to make its presence appear natural and unquestioned, and the early French novel, whose aesthetically peripheral position problematized its ideological stance, caused the novel to internalize the contradiction between the aesthetic and the political. The result is a politics of genre that puts into relief the traditional distinction between form and content: the novel appeared to reproduce social reality in the venerated tradition of historical prose, but it had no license to do so. The novel was, then, as Charles Sorel noted, only 4 In fact, Fran