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C h a p t e r 4 The Aesthetics of Sentiment (Rousseau) In 1762, preparing for a new edition of his hugely successful Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), Rousseau wrote to warn his publisher, Marc-Michel Rey, not to make any slip-ups on the title page: “if you want to put revised and corrected, don’t add by the author: you must know very well that I’m not admitting to that role, only to that of the editor.”1 Indeed, how could Rey not have known very well, since Rousseau had published not one but two prefaces for the novel, and in each he explicitly refused to relinquish the title of editor. On the other hand, perhaps Rousseau’s anxiety, which always ran high when it came to the printing of his texts, was justified.2 Neither preface, it must be said, was particularly adamant in its affirmation of truth. To the contrary, the effect of the pseudofactual title page was if anything weakened by Rousseau’s prefatory declarations. For example: “Although I assume here the title only of editor, I myself worked on this book, and I make no mystery of it. Did I write the whole thing, and is the entire correspondence a fiction? Society people, what does it matter to you? It’s certainly a fiction for those like you.” And again: “As far as the truth of the events, I declare that having traveled several times around the area where the two lovers lived, I never once heard people speak of the Baron d’Étange or his daughter, or M. d’Orbe, or Milord Édouard Bomston, or M. de Wolmar.”3 These quotes from the so-called first preface—similar ones can be found in the second—do make concern about the title page something like worries over the proverbial barn door, closed too late.4 No wonder Rey might have been expected to let the pretense slip—slip in the manner, say, of the first edition of Marivaux’s Vie de Marianne (1731), where the title page did not even bother to buttress the spurious editorial claims of the preface. But even more surprising than Rousseau’s simultaneous teasing and 116 chapter 4 earnest game-playing were its effects on his contemporary readers. In hindsight , we might naturally take the prefaces’ mixed signals for a snapshot of a transition—archaism giving way to modernity, the emergent pushing aside the vestigial. “Rousseau . . . flirts with authorship but finally stays behind a less than convincing mask as editor,” in the words of one critic.5 And yet, if we are to believe the authoritative account of Robert Darnton, La Nouvelle Héloïse “revolutionize[d] the relation between reader and text” precisely by convincing readers that it must be true: “Many readers of La Nouvelle Héloïse believed and wanted to believe in the authenticity of the letters,” Darnton writes, basing his contention on the archive of fan letters written to the author .6 Thus, the reason Rousseau was adamant about the title page was that he “could not acknowledge the careful craftsmanship that went into [the letters] without spoiling their effect.”7 So instead of marking a stage in the collective realization that “a work could be purely fictional,”8 Rousseau’s novel did the exact opposite. It inaugurated, according to Bernadette Fort, a “new mode of literary consumption” that demanded “total immersion into a book and . . . total mimetic identification with the characters, their story, drama, and feelings .”9 That mode was sentimentality, or sensibilité. Does Julie illustrate a culture’s awakening to a modern understanding of fiction, or does it showcase the intense emotional investment of the sentimental reader—an investment that is pointedly not modern at all, but rather every bit as “exotic” as the Balinese death rites with which Darnton begins his essay?10 One solution to the apparent contradiction would be to attribute the modernity of the work to the farsightedness of the author and charge its archaism to the account of simpleminded readers.11 But no solution is necessary at all if both narratives are inherently flawed, and this is the case I will be making. Certainly, and with uncommon persistence, Rousseau builds the problem of the novel’s literal truth into its reception: the prefaces of Julie do not merely provide an example of pseudofactual ambiguity, they are about that ambiguity; the “editor” sends mixed signals and tells...

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