Mme de Graffigny, Reader of Fiction

Mme de Graffigny, Reader of Fiction English Showalter Once upon a time, the history of the novel was a simple story, a list of titles and dates, with a commentary focusing on how each one both looked like and differed from its predecessor. Change, usually equated with progress, came about as each novelist pondered the tradition of the genre, felt certain influences, and added some original elements. Implicitly, the primary cause of change is the individual creative mind, working more or less consciously to express an original artistic vision. Nowadays, that story, which I have of course oversimplified, will no longer do. The basic list of titles and dates, however, has not been much revised by recent historians, and is not likely ever to be. For the most part, the texts are there and such facts as one needs to know about them are known. What has been revised is our sense of what caused the changes. We have not eliminated the author from the process, but creative genius is now usually consideredjust one factor among many, and perhaps the least interesting because it is so ineffable, and often seems a mere tautology: the novel is great because the author is a genius, and the author is a genius because the novel is great. Q.E.D. Whatever role we may still grant to the author, everyone now concedes that a writer, even a genius, writes in a context and the work is significantly shaped by the context. The "new" causal factors range from very sweeping changes in consciousness, to evolving political and social institutions, to ephemeral aspects of popular culture, to economic development. One element of almost every analysis EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, volume 13, numéros 2-3, janvier-avril 2001 462 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION is the function of the reader, whose demand for a certain kind of reading material presumably prompts writers to produce it, printers to print it, and booksellers to distribute it. Yet the reader's role is almost as hard to pin down as the contribution of genius. The argument is just as circular. We infer the demands of readers from what was popular, and we infer the intention of writers to meet this demand. But there is no way to eliminate the possibility that authors actually created a demand of which readers were unaware until a work appeared, and indeed that seems to be the case with at least a few notable breakthrough novels such as Pamela andJulie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse. And even if one accepts the underlying premises of the argument, the nature of readers' demands is highly problematic. The most common account supposes a mimetic appetite: readers want to see themselves in reality. At the same time, however, the same readers also want to read escapist fiction, presumably as far removed from their humdrum reality as possible. In fact, they also like to read about historical figures, unusual adventures, tragic events, exotic societies, magical worlds, comic buffoons, and indeed the whole panoply of characters, plots, and settings that fiction may employ. Furthermore, the same audience that enjoys novels also enjoys theatre, poetry, opera, music, and a wide range ofother more or less artistic genres. In short, "the reader" is a rather useless abstraction. The pages that follow will not overcome that problem, which is ultimately intractable. Almost every reader likes several different things and any large group of potential readers probably contains enough subgroups to support many different genres and fashions simultaneously. It is nevertheless worthwhile to look at one serious reader reading, to see what she read and what she thought of it. Françoise de Graffigny offers an exceptional opportunity to examine this question, especially for the years of the mid-1740s. Her letters to François-Antoine Devaux, written on an almost daily basis, include among many things a journal of her reading.1 It does not record the name of everything she read; nonetheless, it records an impressive number of titles, often with comments. In addition, from 1742 until 1747, she served as a book-buyer for various wealthy friends: Etienne-Julien Locquet, marquis de Grandville, a retired officer 1 Mme de Graffigny, Correspondance complete...