L'Abbé Prévost

348 AUBREY ROSENBERG Godwin's Caleb Williams 'radical'? 'Reactionary' and 'radical' in relation to what? As with this arbitrary labelling, several of his points would benefit from more detailed substantiation than they receive. The names ofmany Gothics are dropped into the text, but extended discussion tends to fall back on the same examples, creating a feeling of claustrophobia in the argument. Like some other critics who attempt to systematize the Gothic too strictly, Day lacks a due concern about the genre's development; the works, early and late, are treated as if they all appeared at the same time, and important social and historical distinctions are either glossed over or ignored. The result is that the author winds up making the Gothic more 'modern' than it can possibly be. In his discussion of Dracula, Day writes, 'Had Mina fully integrated the power ofsexuality as pleasure in herself, Dracula could never have corrupted her. Sexual pleasure, except when confined to marriage, remains intrinsicallyunc1ean for Mina and for Stoker.' This view may be valid from a psychoanalytic standpoint but it completely overlooks the fact that Dracula is still a Victorian novel which subscribes to the mores and taboos of its time. A frank acknowledgment of sexuality, while no doubt psychologically therapeutic, is out of the question in the popular fiction of Bram Stoker. To allow his heroine to integrate 'the power of sexuality as pleasure in herself: Stoker and Min. would have to belong to the twentieth century, not the nineteenth. His treatment of the films King Kong, The Cat People, Halloween, Psycho, and Vertigo proves a useful complement to the analysis of the novels, ably demonstrating the 'persistance [sic] of the genre's basic themes and forms in our own era.' However, his claim that King Kong is the 'first of the great twentieth-century horror classics' requires more persuasive support than he musters. A 'short list' of the horror films that this assertion inexplicably excludes from greatness would include The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Mumau's Nosferatu, The Phantom of the Opera with Lon Chaney, the Lugosi Dracula, the first Karloff Frankenstein, and Carl Dreyer's Vampyr. To do it justice, Day's argument gathers force as it proceeds and provides valid and striking analysis of a complex subject, despite its problems in presentation and content. If readers can manage to take these in stride, their efforts will ultimately be rewarded. L'Abbe Prevost AUBREY ROSENBERG lean Sgard. L'Abbe Prevost. Labyrinthes de la memoire Presses Universitaires de France 1986. 239 As I write this review, the Metropolitan Opera is staging yet another revival of Massenet's Manon (1884). For this production, the designer-director, lean-Pierre Ponnelle, has chosen to end the heroine's life, and also the opera, in a dark and UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 57, NUMBER 2, WINTER ]987/8 L'ABBE PREVOST 349 dank cellar. But the abbe Prevost's Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut will survive such indignities, as it has all its other adaptations and interpretations in literature, the theatre, and the cinema, since it was first published in '731. Prevost's novel enjoys the distinction of being the most re-edited in French literature, with 234 different editions identified in 1981 when the survey was done. What is even more remarkable is the increase in the number of editions with the passage of time. There were 32 in the eighteenth century, 72 in the nineteenth, and 130 in this century up to the time ofthe survey. There must be something quite extraordinary about this novel to account for such a steadily increasing celebrity. It is the object of Professor Sgard's new study, following his magisterial Prevost romaneier (1968), to try to define the elements of Prevost's technique that have produced this masterpiece. For despite the fact that Prevost wrote twelve other novels, all of them embodying evidence of his skill, only Manon Lescaut has succeeded in capturing our imagination so thoroughly and for so long. The image that Sgard employs as a way of understanding the art of Prevost is that of the labyrinth of which only the creator knows the detours, the blind alleys...