Le Langage de l'implicite dans l'œuvre de Crébillon fils (review)

In her book, Émeline Mossé argues that the figure of the implicit can help us delineate a unified "système crébillonien" and thus reconciles two antithetical aspects of Crébillon fils's work: the propensity of his characters to engage in libertine behaviour and the underlying moral tonality of his novels. In Mossé's study, the implicit is a versatile and ever-evolving notion that accounts for a wide range of textual phenomena: silences, detours, ellipses, vague and ethereal characterization, or the narrator's willingness to let the readers fill the margins of the text with their own thoughts and interpretations. The loose conceptualization of the book's major theme is both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, it allows Mossé to insist on the rich juxtaposition of social, stylistic, and generic questions in Crébillon fils's novels. She shows, for instance, that the necessity for noble characters to conceal the true nature of their feelings turns language into a "magical art" (161) that only some can decipher and explains the parodic nature of novels like Le Sopha or Les Égarements du cœur et de l'esprit. On the other hand, the implicit remains under-theorized throughout, in spite of references to Bernadette Fort's Le Langage de l'ambiguité dans l'oeuvre de Crébillon fils (1978) and a reliance on L'Implicite by Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1986) to provide a theoretical framework. With each new chapter, the implicit gains new meanings and variations as it is used to explain different characteristics of Crébillon fils's novels. In the end, it becomes equated with the practice of literary interpretation itself, revealing the internal coherence behind Crébillon fils's body of work and thus defining an elusive "poétique crébillonienne."

This is perhaps most visible when Mossé links the implicit to what she calls Crébillon fils's "laboratory of generic research" (169). The implicit is both a way of analyzing the different novelistic forms employed by the author but also a specific mode—parody—meant to diffuse possible criticism of his generic experimentations. Still, Mossé manages to claim for the oft-forgotten Crébillon fils a central and unique place in the development of eighteenth-century French fiction: the length of his career (from Le Sylphe in 1730 to Lettres Athéniennes in 1771) and the variety of novels he published show the extent to which he tried to tame a still anarchical genre and to propose a comprehensive theory of the novel. Mossé convincingly argues that metatextuality lies at the heart of Crébillon fils's prose fiction by showing how theoretical reflections parallel the main narrative lines and create a dialogue with the text as it unfolds. The Crébillonian narrator is looking for allies, that is, for an informed readership that can decode his implicit references and playful, ironic comments and laugh with him, even when the riddles he poses are hard to decipher. In doing so, the narrator is asking the reader to become aware of the act of reading itself: neither the characters nor the narrator are the sole bearer of truth, and readers should be able to extract their own moral conclusions from the text.

It is not a surprise, then, that Crébillon fils's novels should read as a never-ending language game with wide-ranging implications for characterization, style, and the production of textual meaning. The implicit explains the author's tendency to stage mysterious and secretive characters and to let readers piece together coherent portraits from scattered elements in the narration. In fact, Crébillon fils rarely focuses on the physical quality of his characters, as if they were solely constituted by language and by the verbal exchanges they have with one another. Generic pronouns are often used, indicating that language itself can not solve the communication breakdown that characterizes polite society in the...