Dangerous Truths and Criminal Passions: The Evolution of the French Novel 1569-1791 (review)

Reviews Thomas DiPiero. Dangerous Truths and Criminal Passions: The Evolution ofthe French Novel 1569-1791. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. viii + 401pp. US$35.00. ISBN 0-8047-1999-3. After being judged, even by scholars of early modem literature, as imperfect precursors of a more mature nineteenth-century fiction, early novels have begun to stand on their own. Continuing in this direction, Thomas DiPiero contributes to our understanding of the novelistic production of the early modem period. In this book he analyses specific narrative forms and investigates their relationship to social and political forces of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While respecting the valuable contributions of "the formal realism school" (Ian Watt, Vivienne Mylne, English Showalter, Georges May), DiPiero rejects the idea that the modem novel merely reflects the concerns of the rising middle class, and argues instead that it "articulates the antagonisms and contradictions inherent in the social world" (p. 16). The book is divided into two parts. Part one, "The Construction of a Genre," devoted to the earlier part of the seventeenth century and what DiPiero calls the "early modem novel," examines manifestations of narrative prose as emblematic of aristocratic values. Beginning with the vogue of histoires tragiques and sentimental novels during the first two decades of the seventeenth century, he underlines the respect for aristocratic hegemony such narratives articulated and the fears they addressed in high-bred but impoverished noble readers threatened by the rising sales of offices during the reigns of Henry iv and Louis XHi. Similarly, d'Urfé's L'Astrée (1607-27) proposed an iconography depicting the pre-eminence of aristocratic values and excluding non-aristocratic readers, while SorePs Berger extravagant (1627) satirized this same iconography in order to reveal the unsuitability of aristocratic literary conventions for a wider reading public. By the 1630s, however, three new developments in the social and political realms changed the course of fiction: exacerbated conflicts between the aristocracy and the growing middle class on the one hand, and the aristocracy and the monarchy on the other, changes in the consumption of literature, and the appearance of Académies in EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 6, Number 1, October 1993 84 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:1 Paris. The emphasis shifted from "imagery, language and ideology" (p. 63) to "narrative technique" and "the manner the material was arranged" (p. 64). DiPiero spends a great deal of time analysing prefaces in which novelists discussed the vraisemblance of their work (Gournay, Gerzan, Boisrobert) and articulates an effort to legitimize a genre without tradition through "a cohesive theoretical discourse" (p. 71). The debate on vraisemblance initiated by the Académie française in its Sentimens de l'Académie sur le Cid (1638) provides a case in point of an absolutist government's intervention in aesthetic matters to defend its moral and political ideals. While admitting the difficulty of estimating what effects the Académie's opinions had on fiction writers, DiPiero nonetheless perceives a change in novelists' attitudes towards vraisemblance after 1638. At the end of the 163Os, the heroic novel successfully replaced pastoral fiction. Gomberville's Polexandre (1637) continued to capitalize on aristocratic values while borrowing formal rules from historiography and the epic (held in high esteem by the Académie française), and therefore satisfied the ideological constraints of vraisemblance. Part one is concluded by "The Alienation and Commodification of the Novel," a chapter in which DiPiero investigates the relationship between the novel's form and its early ideological mission. Asking why prose fiction was used as a means to convey aristocratic concerns and how it was later appropriated by a rising middle class, he goes on to review theories of prose fiction such as those of Lukács and Bakhtin. He uses the notions of alienation and fragmentation elaborated by these critics to shed light on the fiction that developed after the heroic novel fell from grace. He locates one facet of the problem in the tension created by the novel's aristocratic stance and its nonnoble status as a genre; he also explains the features of the post-heroic novel through the concept of commodification, as the sharp decline of the system of patronage after the...