Circles of Learning: Narratology and the Eighteenth-Century French Novel (review)

REVIEWS 129 sensibilité." Indeed, Staël's (old-fashioned, hence inadmissible) rational humanism strives to correct such irrational excesses. Marso, while plausibly claiming her for an Irigarayan feminist project, has finally done amplejustice to the breadth of her plea for the integration of the discounted female side ofhumanity into every scene of life. Madelyn Gutwirth University of Pennsylvania Jenny Mander. Circles of Learning: Narratology and the EighteenthCentury French Novel. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999. viii + 232pp. ISBN 0-7294-0624-5. Jenny Mander begins her study with a critical review of Genettian narratology, focusing on the categories of voice and focalization established initially by Genette and modified later by BaI and other practitioners. Mander argues that Genette's narratology considers all narrative to have an underlying autobiographical framework, making all narrative fundamentally homodiegetic. This approach, she proposes, is determined by Genette's reading practices, which preclude "any transcendence beyond an essentially autobiographical conception of narrative" (p. 43). Genette's "centripetal mode of reading" (p. 44) causes everything to become essentially internal focalization and prevents him from "realising the full scope of zero-focalisation which ... knows of no centre and no boundaries" (p. 44). For Mander, Genette's trap is historically determined. Her principal authority for such a claim is Maurice Blanchot, who connected the development of the novel with an historical phase dominated by what he called a "bourgeois ideology of individualism " (p. 46). Blanchot proposed that first-person narrative is a rhetorical trope which began with Cervantes when "the act ofnarration is taken charge ofby a character who is in the text either as a first person who appears to speak directly as narrator, or as a third person around whose perspective the tale is organised" (p. 47). Narrative thus became marked by the ideology of the emerging bourgeoisie , an ideology which assumes that, quoting Blanchot, "the individual with all his particular characteristics and his limits is enough to express the world" (p. 47). Genette's first-person narratology is then, for Mander, "limited to a particular historical and ideological conception of narrative" (p. 47), which in turn limits its validity and utility. Mander is especially concerned about the distortions this Genettian approach produces when applied to early eighteenth-century French novels, asserting that "autobiographical contours ... associated with the early eighteenth-century novel are not in fact integral to its eighteenth-century mode of being at all, but ... are imported to these novels by the situated reading strategies of twentieth-century readers" (pp. 52-53). In an effort to resituate our reading of these novels, she proposes to discuss "this literary discourse in terms of its own frame of reference 130 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:1 and attempt to reconstruct how it was made meaningful by readers of its own time" (p. 53). To begin, Mander turns her attention to one of the eighteenthcentury novel's most distinctive features: the preface or editorial introduction. The "recurrent discursive patterns" (p. 66) she elucidates in her analysis of these "paratexts" include the use of authority figures or other third-party mediators, chains of previous narrators who have transmitted—and presumably modified— the tale, textual "recycling," and "the absence of a strong, regulatory sense of textual paternity or authorship" (p. 79), all of which contributes to a blurring of connections between the text and the "je" of the text. A study of Marivaux's Journaux then follows, emphasizing that "homodiegetic narration in the early eighteenth century is not given the subjective contours which are typically associated with the genre of autobiography" (p. 92). Here, Mander stresses the distinction between Aristotelian mimesis and Romantic "expressivism " (a term borrowed from Charles Taylor) because, as she argues, Marivaux's personal writings draw heavily on rationalist conceptions of language, situating him "squarely within a mimetic framework" (p. 102) as the disengaged, reasoning self aiming towards universal enlightenment and not idiosyncratic self-expression. Mander proceeds to demonstrate the way in which these same concepts permeate Marivaux's fictional texts, in particular his two novels, Le Paysan parvenu and La Vie de Marianne. In doing so, she directly attacks the use by modern critics of Wayne Booth's "unreliable narrator" approach, which emphasizes the subjectivity of the first-person...