The Art of the Persian Letters: Unlocking Montesquieu's "Secret Chain" (review)

Montesquieu might not have suspected that, by writing at the end of his life about a "secret chain" in the Persian Letters, he was sending future scholars on a detective hunt to identify this chain. More than twenty articles focus on the nature of the chain, and many other critics discuss the question in their analyses of the novel. However, no one has claimed to furnish any definitive answer: Theodore Braun wrote that "we may not have crossed the finishing line yet, but that without the work of the critics of the 1960s and early 1970s, we would still be at the starting gate" ("'La chaîne secrète': A Decade of Interpretations," French Studies 42 [1988]: 290). Now appears the boldest, fullest discussion to date of the secret chain, in a detailed close reading that claims quite clearly to have "unlocked" the secret. No reader of Montesquieu's novel will be able to ignore this path-breaking and provocative study.

Runyon explains in his introduction that his approach is based not on "thematic connections," but "on nonthematic ones: linguistic echoes and situational parallels and reversals" (16). He defines the "chain" as being each letter, or small groups of letters, as a piece of the chain connected to its neighbours. A brief survey of a few critics is included, along with a discussion of the problem posed by Montesquieu's additions and reordering of some letters, which Runyon scrupulously addresses. The book is divided into eight chapters "simply for ease of reading" (24), and concludes with an afterword and an appendix listing all the quotations and words discussed throughout the book.

Runyon's argument is rich, thorough, both simple and complex, and written with verve and clarity. He shows that words or short phrases connect the letters in pairs or groups of threes according to a simple rule that "each letter should repeat elements of its immediate predecessor" (178). These are what he calls "echo effects," where the words or phrases are repeated, and whenever this is so, and it is often so, he notes that these words linking each pair of letters appear nowhere else in the novel. These repeated words are often short and pertain to different but related topics or themes: for example, letters 46 and 47 are linked by the repetition of "embarras" (or "embarrasser") and "menacer" together in the same paragraph, and, according to Runyon, Montesquieu used both these words to link the discussion of "the difficulty of being a woman in a seraglio and the difficulty of being a seeker after God" (92). Another example is the repetition of "ce titre" in letters 55, 56, and 57, which relate to entitlement, of a husband, of a gambler, and of a priest, respectively. As this example shows, the repeated words are not obvious, but provide hidden connections between the letters that echo each other in different contexts, showing subtle variations on related topics.

This reading of the entire novel's letters linked in pairs leads to a vision of the novel as fluid: "the structure of the Persian Letters [is] a collection of neighboring texts whose dividing walls are so porous that they interflow, the words and motifs of each passing into the next" (103). Variations appear in this type of linking too. Sometimes there are no repeated words, only echoes of situations or concepts. Letters 57 and 58 are linked by a common concern of people getting "into a place (heaven) cheaply" or getting "out of one (a Paris boutique) without spending any more than they have to" (111). Elsewhere in the novel, the connections are diverse yet related to one topic over a larger number of letters: in the discussion of letters 133–37 and 138, Runyon remarks that "[John] Law has been present in every link in the chain since letter 127" (223).

Before I discuss his "Afterword: On the Cause of the Echo," let me say in the interest of...