Cleveland, ou l'impossible proximité (review)

REVIEWS153 l'aventure en mer comme une tentative de transgresser l'ordre «naturel» des choses, et la catastrophe à laquelle il aboutit le plus souvent comme un « châtiment secret de Ia démesure et de l'orgueil»? Real Ouellet CELAT, Université Laval, Québec Paul Pelckmans. Cleveland, ou l'impossible proximité. Amsterdam and NewYork: Rodopi, 2002. 175pp. €30; US$28. ISBN: 90-420-1545-4. Prévost's most ambitious work offiction has attracted far less scholarly attention than its importance to its contemporaries warrants. Paul Pelckmans, in his attempt to persuade a twenty-first century audience ofits merits, wisely decides to keep his study ofthis blockbuster ofa novel to modest dimensions. Though admitting diis is not in any sense a realist work, or even, strictly speaking, a psychological novel, he argues that, if properly understood, it offers valuable insights into the ways offeeling ofits age. On the surface, Cleveland is a voyage of discovery, a "spiritual Odyssey" in the words ofJean Sgard, which leads its outsider protagonist to social integration and a religious conversion. Behind the foregrounded religious theme, however, Pelckmans detects a reflection on the question ofhow human beings relate to each other at the dawn of the age of enlightenment and sensibility. Pelckmans's approach to his central theme is oblique. He begins with a chapter on the vocabulary offortune and Providence in Cleveland, concluding that, behind a highly conventional vocabulary with obvious uses in the field of plot manipulation, the conventional gestures of submission to Providence are no longer convincing. Only the characters' happiness matters, and Providence's role is simply to deliver happiness. This vocabulary has been studied before; so too have the three Utopian societies portrayed in the novel, which form the subject of the next chapter, and his observation that all three fail is not original. The reason he proposes for their failure is much more so, and telling. Instead of resembling modern dystopias, which inspire horror because they are too powerful, these utopias collapse because of a degeneration of social solidarity that suggests they are not powerful enough. This is where modern interpretations of Clevelandrisk going astray; by reading back into it the individualism associated with the Enlightenment, they fail to see that Prévost is not the thoroughgoing advocate ofindividualism that he appears to be. He senses the crumbling ofconventional forms of social solidarity that helped engender the Enlightenment, but he mistrusts 154 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION16:1 individualism; he is reluctant to abandon collective solidarity, and in various passages of the novel it appears that solitude is hell. The thrust of the work is therefore to reintegrate Cleveland into human collectivity, but he never breaks free of the risk ofrelapsing into solitude. In die first half of the novel, the protagonist overcomes a series ofexternal obstacles to this solitude; the second half follows a long break in composition during which Prévost appears to have had trouble finding an appropriate way of continuing the plot in another dimension. Sensibility appears to offer an antidote to individualism in the warmth of human proximity, but it betrays individualist tendencies in the difficulty it finds in actually paying attention to other people. Cleveland is a remarkably imperceptive hero, and much of the novel's action springs from an avoidable misunderstanding between him and his wife Fanny, from which he fails to learn even when it is resolved. Love itself has its risks. Traditionally presented by the novel genre in its nobler garb, its dangerous, passionate intensity is the escape route that Prévost seeks; perhaps passion undermines the old restraints of the ancien régime, but it curtails the drift to individualism because the individual cannot control it. The consequences include an aura of strangeness imposed on sentiments that are in fact quite straightforward, exaggerated claims for love's miracle-working powers and a stress on love's unconscious aspects, which in this instance can barely be called pre-Freudian because they tend to reveal only admirable things, such as the hero's constancy, rather than the darker areas. The daring plot device that finally allows Prévost to complete his novel is the revelation that Cleveland's new love, Cecile, is in fact...