Les Illusions perdues du roman: l'abbé Prévost à l'épreuve du romanesque (review)

Intriguingly different from his earlier works, frustratingly unfinished and full of good things that fail to gel, Prévost's last novels offer a challenge which Alexandre Duquaire's study is a well-argued attempt to meet. Without hailing them as neglected masterpieces, he situates them in a critique of the romanesque traceable into Prévost's earlier works, revealing Prévost as an isolated figure, distanced from both the sentimental and libertin novel and marked by pessimism that also distances him from the Enlightenment. The Mémoires d'un honnête homme and Le Monde moral are viewed as complementary, each breaking off at the same point, but this should not be regarded as a sign of failure. Each has a hero in conflict with his father, caught in a love triangle with a virtuous and an aggressive woman in which they suffer for their superior qualities, thus demonstrating the irreconcilability of love and virtue; the Mémoires, however, entraps its hero in an Oedipal tragedy that the Monde moral hero escapes. Both works are a network of interlinked episodes; the Mémoires concentrates on social criticism, portraying an honest man in a dishonest society, while the Monde moral traces a programme of moral instruction whose pessimistic conclusions fail to provide the hoped-for mastery of the romanesque mode. Prévost had already attempted demystification of the romanesque in his 1740 novels, parodic re-readings of his earlier works highlighting sordid realities by depriving their heroes of the excuse of parental opposition. The late novels return to father-son conflicts, renewing them by displacing interest to the aggressive female characters and adding a didactic element. Viewed thus, the Voyages de Robert Lade emerges as a transitional work, defusing the father-son conflict and refocusing on an anthropological project, allowing the incompleteness of the last novels to be seen not as a failure, but as a simple recognition that their task is completed. Turning to the content of this project, the Mémoires signals a progression from the public domain to the private, in an emasculated world of mondanité where sexual harmony is achieved only in private, while the Monde moral portrays an archaic male-dominated provincial nobility and a lower class equally open to improvement or corruption by money. Their heroes must choose between accepting or fighting a flawed society; they choose to fight in the context of a worldly Christianity inspired by Le Maître de Claville and Richardson, but are flawed by lack of insight into their motives and emotions, and they serve as a warning against novels in general and those of Prévost in particular. Duquaire's account of these texts carries conviction. It would have been good to see him engage more with the Brenner story in Le Monde moral and develop in more detail his parallels between that novel and Grandisson, and the defence of these novels' unfinished state smacks of special pleading. He does, however, make a powerful case for the coherence of two fascinating texts, and will be read with profit by anyone interested in Prévost.