Story and History: Narrative Authority and Social Identity in the Eighteenth-Century French and English Novel (review)

Reviews William E. Ray. Story and History: Narrative Authority and Social Identity in the Eighteenth-Century French and English Novel. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990. viii + 362pp. £45.00 (cloth); £13.95 (paper). The changing cultural status of the novel during the eighteenth century, its increasing selfconsciousness , and the patterns of literary and social authority that extend through both the French and English novel, enter into the field of vision of William Ray's ambitious new book. While few recent critics have been as willing as was Ian Watt to dismiss eighteenth-century French fiction as standing "outside the main tradition of the novel," few—if any—have so systematically examined the canonical works from both traditions in an effort to elaborate a theory of narrative representation from Lafayette and Defoe to Sterne and Laclos. Ray is interested, among other things, in the increasing prestige of fiction from mere diversion to cultural authority and "true" representation. His emphasis is not on the social history of the novel, but rather on the social role that fiction inscribes within itself, and on the social practices both described in and enacted by fictional texts. Without pretending to exhaust the critical dimensions of the works studied, Ray takes as his point of departure the notion that "these novels are stories about stories, representations of representation; and they all implicitly argue that reality—the assumptions, rules, and beliefs which are shared by all members of a society—is elaborated through constant narration and sustained as a shared narrative" (p. 10). The individual readings that constitute most of the book explore various configurations of the relationship between individual story and collective history, between the transitory act of narrating and the structured ordering of events as (written or reported) narrative, and between narrating self and (individual or collective) Other. And, as the readings progress, they begin to form a narrative of their own. The earlier novels, in Ray's account, concern protagonists struggling to assert a personal story against a larger, collective system of authority such as the Court in Lafayette's Princesse de Clèves or Providence in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. In Defoe's Moll Flanders and Roxana, this activity takes the form of "negotiation" or "selfhood as bargaining" EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 3, Number 4, July 1991 374 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 3:4 (p. 79), but the different dénouements foreshadow models Ray will pursue in later novels . Moll yields herself up to the system of interactive bargaining, and prospers; Roxana attempts to maintain a rigid control over her story, and is destroyed, prefiguring the defeat of such master plotters as Lovelace, Valmont, and Merteuil. Other chapters deal with Chasle's (more usually Challe or Challes) Illustres Francoises, Prévost's Manon Lescaut, and Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne and Le Paysan parvenu. In these last two the scenario has become more complex, first because of the extreme care with which the protagonists observe and manipulate their self-narration, and second, because of the transformation of the social backdrop into a "community of stridently selfassertive individuals" (p. 105), each of whom has a particular version ofevents to maintain against all others. Marivaux thus shows the way towards a new stage in Ray's account of the novel's development . Turning to Richardson, he analyses the "textualization of the self in Pamela's and Clarissa's written accounts of themselves. Narratives such as Pamela's letters, or Belford's transcription of Clarissa's dying acts, exemplify the power of the text to shape its readers and to become culturally influential. The problematic relationship of authority, mastery, and narration is analysed at length in Clarissa, where the most determined "plotter " of elaborate narratives, Lovelace, is eventually trapped and defeated by well-worn social scripts that he cannot control. The process by which an individual becomes an exemplar or shared text—Clarissa becoming Clarissa or Pamela becoming Pamela—is further explored in an analysis of how Rousseau's Julie becomes La Nouvelle Héloïse. The novel itselftakes on an explicitly formative function in society. Ray examines a group of novels, beginning with those of Rousseau, that put into question their own status within...