Europe Nº 732. Rétif de la Bretonne (review)

REVIEWS 379 on new methods and new techniques. He confines his sense of "the religious question" by equating it with "the quest for paradise on earth" (pp. 6, 37), a particular and also a mistaken religious question. His reproof to the hermit for "misplaced" inconsistency of desire evokes the reply, "But that's the pointl" He makes the pyramids the symbol of idleness, rather than of desperate flight from idleness. He attributes Rasselas's naivety in the marriage debate to his lack of experience of domestic life, missing the likelihood that Johnson is here presenting a gendered viewpoint. He thinks it unconventional, or contrary to eighteenth-century theory and practice, to discuss the Life ofPope as literature. Tomarken's central point is that the literary text Rasselas is related to extraliterary concerns. This, in his terms, is no mere reformulation of eighteenth-century doctrine that art is the handmaid of "what critics of the period called life," but a revolutionary concept which, because "most critics of our time" assume "that all literature is referential to literature," throws them into "grave difficulties" (pp. 104, 105). Rasselas is related to the extraliterary by certain "significant structural elements" acting "in opposition to the mimetic assertions in the text, the truth and instruction that it promises" (p. 104). (This argument assumes assertions and promises made by the text; again, it assumes conclusions.) Structure, in turn, inheres not in the text but in the interpretations of critics. No wonder that Tomarken gives a good deal of space to earlier criticism in his discussion of London, The Vanity ofHuman Wishes, and A Journey to the Western Islands: but the critical opinion presented here, whether past or present, too often appears unequal to the pre-emptive role proposed for it. Formerly, we are told, Rasselas was considered a prose version of The Vanity of Human Wishes; later critics "established" that the two "are related to separate generic traditions and evince different formal characteristics" (p. 128). The insights which Tomarken himself offers into Johnson's writings are not free of this ponderous obviousness. Finally, his "Theoretical Conclusion" demands "How then do we explain the fact that the problems inherent in Rasselas and Johnson's other literary writings have not been resolved by recent innovations in theory?" (p. 179). If we expect all problems to be resolved, we must be prepared for the death of literary criticism. "Enquirer, cease, for Problems yet remain." They are surely the very nitty-gritty of both literature and and literary criticism, that which provokes the author to write and the student to read, that which ensures that we need not deem our practice of these disciplines vain. The unsolved problems, the unconcluded conclusions of Rasselas are its essence and its glory. Let us hope before long for a critical book which will devote its central effort to wrestling with these issues without seeking to foreclose them. Isobel Grundy University of Alberta Europe N° 732. Rétif de la Bretonne. Paris: Messidor, 1990. 219pp. FFr80. Rétif used to be for what the title of the oldjournal called "des chercheurs et des curieux." Among them, in the immediate prehistory of today's Rétif studies, two remarkable men of letters: the retired American diplomat J. Rives Childs assembled, studied, and, in 1949, published the description of his great collection of Rétifs works and writings about them; a French collège professor, Gilbert Rouger, editor also of Perrault's Contes, probably knew more than any other person since the eighteenth century about Rétif and the places where he lived in Burgundy and Paris. Both of these gentlemen were 380 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 3:4 unstinting in their help to would-be Rétivians, and their generosity and knowledge greatly contributed to much of die work that lies behind the current interest in Rétif: Marc Chadourne's biography, in 1958, my Yale dissertation and, later, Restif's Novels in 1967, and then the monumental French thèse, Pierre Testud's Rétifde la Bretonne et la création littéraire, in 1977. Now there is a Rétif society in France and a journal, the Etudes rétiviennes. Inexpensive editions of several of...