There and Back Again: The Country and the City in the Fiction of Rétif de la Bretonne

There and Back Again: The Country and the City in the Fiction of Rétif de la BretonnePeter Wagstaff Widening horizons exemplify the spirit of the eighteenth century. In France, as elsewhere in Europe, the adventure of travel, both beyond and within borders, is matched by the philosophical and epistemologica ! adventure that accompanies broadening knowledge and an enhanced sense of relativism. The aphoristic irony of Pascal's earlier "vérité au deçà des Pyrénées, erreur au delà"1 is given weight by texts as diverse in form and content as Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, Diderot's Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques, Prévost's Manon Lescaut, and De Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne, which, like countless others, all bear witness both to an awareness of geographical , spatial difference and to the need foran analysis ofthatdifference and its impact on previously unquestioned assumptions and beliefs. The revaluations which are thus brought to bear reflect virtually every aspect of human experience: religious, scientific, moral, political, philosophical, and social. Further, the French espousal of the empirical rationalism of Locke and subsequently Hume, which can be seen as the basis for the Enlightenment assertion that the human mind is formed by the sense impressions it receives from the world around it, lent substantial weight to the importance of experience and environment in the development of personality. Human 1 Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Paris: Garnier, 1964), p. 151 . EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 10, Number 4, July 1998 452 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION beings could be seen as existentially, rather than essentially determined: where and when they lived their lives mattered. The awareness of spatial difference finds its most spectacular expression in the exoticism which, stimulated by the exploits of explorers of the world beyond the continent of Europe, colours much of the imaginative writing of the time. It is an exoticism which, as M.S. Anderson points out, tends to call into question the most deeply rooted values and beliefs: "The discovery by the reading public of noble Iroquois, virtuous Hindus and philosophic Chinese, inevitably shook the Christendom-centred attitudes inherited from the past."2 Thus it became possible to challenge the view that morality was dependent upon revealed religion and to suggest that, on the contrary, it might be adaptable to place and circumstance. This preoccupation with the spatial as well as temporal dimension of human experience has a peculiarly modern resonance: people are always somewhere—an evident fact which modernity's obsession with temporality has tended to overlook. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that there has been a growth of interest in the ways in which individual lives, as well as forms of social organization, are shaped in spatial and temporal terms.3 Jürgen Habermas, in his consideration ofmodern time-consciousness, summarizes Reinhart Koselleck's thesis on the difference between experience and expectation: Modernity's specific orientation towards the future is shaped precisely to the extent that societal modernization tears apart the old European experiential space of the peasant's and craftsman's lifeworlds, mobilizes it, and devalues it into directives guiding expectations. These traditional experiences of previous generations are then replaced by the kind of experience of progress that lends to our horizon of expectation (till then anchored fixedly in the past) a "historically new quality, constantly subject to being overlaid with Utopian conceptions."4 The work ofNicolas Rétif de la Bretonne (1734-1806) is particularly instructive in this respect, as it may be seen to exemplify this concern with the transition from the spatial to the temporal in a number of striking ways, in spite of the apparently limited boundaries of his fictional landscape. In marked contrast to lands newly discovered by exploration and colonization , the fictional world created by Rétif appears confined, circumscribed. 2 M.S. Anderson, Europe in the Eighteenth Century 1713-1783 (London: Longman, 1987), p. 4. 3 See Roger Friedland and Deirdre Bowden, "Introduction," NowHere: Space, Time and Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 6, 21-33. 4 Jürgen Habermas, "Modernity's Consciousness of Time and Its Need for Self-Reassurance," The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick...