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REVIEWS 271 German, I nonetheless stumbled and bruised myself badly on sentences like this: "His hobby-horse highlights the fact that he is just as much exposed to life as the other characters, and also that writing needs standpoints whose discontinuous multiplicity spotlights the lack of a grand-stand view" (p. 69). It cannot be right to say that "the novel is permeated with the physical gestures of its characters" (my italics [p. 45]; where are the Cambridge editors?). Some generalizations may be merely overstated ("in the Bible noses were an ideal of beauty" [p. 87]). Some assertions may be merely in need of refinement (Locke's "recognition of language as a means of communication represented a breakthrough" [p. 37]). But the ultimate effect is of abstract nouns (who ought to be few in number and firmly under our thumbs) rising up to take over the asylum. Iser's typical sentence finds an abstract noun, personifies it, and drops it in front of a supercharged verb: "Instead, subjectivity grasps itself in the reflection of itself, and the latter need not necessarily be its rationality" (p. 53). Writing this way is thinking this way. By no accident at all does the historical and human Steme disappear behind a grid of abstractions, almost lost to sight in their dense shadows. Max Byrd University of California—Davis Patrick W. Byrne. "Les Liaisons dangereuses" : A Study of Motive and Moral. Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications , 1989. 180pp. £7.95. Although Laclos's only novel has been intensively worked over in the last thirty years, there is still no satisfactory view of what actually happens in Les Liaisons dangereuses. Patrick Byrne's clear-headed study, without claiming to provide a comprehensive coverage of the by-products of the Laclos industry, deals directly with this central question. The reader is not delayed by expositions of critical theory or reploughings of much-tilled ground. Laclos's biography, his literary sources, his handling of the epistolary form, and the reception of his novel have all been subjected to detailed investigation, and are passed over expeditiously with nods in the direction of Jean-Luc Seylaz, for whom Byrne has a high regard, and Georges Poisson, Laclos's most recent biographer. Although he indulges in a spot of minor hoeing in his first chapter (which, notably, highlights a number of troublesome minor inconsistencies in the chronology which he regards as consciously ludic), Byrne opts to concentrate on three crucial areas— psychological motivation, the moral issue, and irony—as a means of reconciling the contradictions of the "Préface" and the "Avertissement." The result is a closely argued and refreshing view of Laclos as a stem censor of manners and a 272 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 2:3 deeply pessimistic satirist who "at every turn sees the folly of human ambition, vulnerable blindness and inconsistency" (p. 59). Byrne discards as unreliable inputs from Laclos's biography and other writings , and bases his arguments solely on the evidence of the text. However, he is particularly struck by a letter to Mme Riccoboni in which Laclos claimed that Merteuil is "un cour incapable d'amour," and uses it to start an interpretation which argues that she does not love Valmont, who, however, does love Tourvel. The conflict does not originate in Merteuil's beady-eyed efforts to dominate her secret passion for Valmont but arises out of her exploitation of his delusion that she loves him. She out-guiles him, yet both fall victim to their self-conceit just as the other characters are destroyed by various forms of self-regard: Cécile by her pride, Tourvel by her idealism, Danceny by his obtuseness , Volanges by her pompous blindness, and Rosemonde (on whom Byrne is self-confessedly "hard") by her hypocrisy. The case is intricately argued and the reading of a number of problematic letters (especially numbers 125-45) is alert and perceptive. It is supported by some excellent analysis of structural "intertwinings" which create "a fatal symmetry" in the climactic reduction of the triangles (Merteuil/Danceny/Valmont versus Valmont/Tourvel/Merteuil). Laclos 's assertive moral stance is detected not only in his handling of hypocrisy but also in the d...

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