The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (review)

Reviews David Marshall. The Surprising Effects ofSympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. ? + 286pp. US$27.50. It is the name of Mary Shelley, at the end of the list of often-linked French writers, that surprises in the title, but it is this fascinating and eminently readable text that surprises continually. Its thesis is simple yet complexly handled: David Marshall has chosen a very slippery term, "sympathy" (or "fellow-feeling"), and uses it to offer a theory of the arts in the Enlightenment that asks us to reexamine the way we generally teach our courses or write our studies on fiction, non-fiction, theatre, and the visual arts. He adroitly combines the theoretical sallies of an eighteenth-century aesthetician, the abbé J.B. Du Bos (Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture, 1719) and a contemporary critic, Michael Fried, whose influential Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1979) remains a touchstone for so many analysts of eighteenth-century aesthetics. Marshall concentrates on the "interplay of theater and sympathy" (p. 2), that is, on the significance in the early novel of scenes, generally of accidents, where the sympathy of the reader is evoked, usually by a recounting of a first-person narrator: I am concerned both with the effects of sympathy and the status of sympathy as a particularly desired effect in eighteenth-century reflections on the experience of the work of art. I suggest that a consideration of the problem of sympathy can help make sense of the deep analogies at work within eighteenth-century fiction and aesthetics between the acts of reading a novel, beholding a painting, and watching a play—as well as parallels between fiction, aesthetics, epistemology, and moral philosophy, (p. 3) EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 2, Number 2, January 1990 154 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION A tall order, but Marshall carries it off in a stimulating series of exegetical exercises. He has carefully assimilated and uses judiciously the work that has been done in this country and abroad on the philosophy of language and aesthetics, and makes pertinent distinctions between, for instance, the theatre and seeing the world in theatrical terms (theatre as metaphor). He shows how such early French novels as La Vie de Marianne were not only stories of success and failure in social relationships, but attempted as well to show the means of understanding the world as it constituted itself in the intelligent consciences of perceptive individuals. Marshall argues that there is a close correlation between what one sees and what one feels; the dilemma lies in being able to transpose that information into writing, to make the reader feel the same way that the viewer felt upon seeing a scene and responding to it. For him, an accident is a trigger to interpretation, and thus it is not coincidental that so much of the fiction of the early eighteenth century had so many "accidents" (or coincidences or events or episodes). They were meant to call forth interpretive responses, rather than (or as much to) delimit character and advance the story. By the end of his first two chapters on Marivaux's fiction, we have come to accept Marshall's view that accident is both a trope as well as an event, strategy as well as scene. In chapter 3 he concentrates on autobiography, which he had already concluded "is also an accident," that is, "an appearance that would pass for an essence, a figure for a self that through the transports of writing has taken a new turn, a series of adjectives that would pass for a proper noun (a first-person singular) ... . Any expression of the self must take the form of an accident" (p. 83). What follows is a subtle analysis of Diderot's La Religieuse (which develops the relationship between sympathy and erotic seduction; does this mean that all accidents are erotically charged?). In one of the best analyses of this novel I have read, the author traces "the distinctions between artifice and natural sensibility, like the distinctions between seduction and sympathy [as they] tend to break down" (p. 99). It is not Suzanne's...