Through Strangers' Eyes: Fictional Foreigners in Old Regime France (review)

The title of this book suggests a literary study, but its underlying concerns are rather more philosophical. Five fictional works, spanning several centuries, are examined in chronological sequence within the broad frame of an opposition between what are called 'naturalists' and 'artificialists'. The first way of thinking, which from Plato onwards has generally prevailed, maintains that there is in the universe an objective order, whereas the latter — increasingly identified here with a stance described as 'postmodern'—does not. This binary underlies a fairly familiar historical metanarrative. Renaissance disorder leads to a 'flight from ambiguity' in the seventeenth century, which is subsequently increasingly broken down, most notably by Nietzsche, leading to the modern 'deconstruction of presence' and so forth. The Enlightenment, divided between 'ambitious questioning' and a belief in 'fundamental norms', is a stage in this process, though an analogous tension is present today.

Montaigne's 'Des cannibales' is presented as the first illustration of 'foreigners' (albeit not fictional, but reflecting the shock of discovering a New World), who function to undermine French certainties. Several chapters are then given to the Lettres persanes. Examined successively are the sojourners Usbek and Rica, the women who expose their ruler's defective Western foundationalism, and the eunuchs as a destabilizing 'third term'. The work is seen as undermining the idea of an essential order which its author wants to affirm. Next comes a chapter on Graffigny's Péruvienne, which is read much less critically. Finally, Voltaire's L'Ingénu and Mme de Duras's remarkable Ourika of 1823 are paired. They serve to illustrate respectively how the foreigner representing nature is successfully integrated into a new French 'meritocracy' (p. 195), or destroyed by a society 'not only racist but sexist' (p. 202). Europe will no longer hear 'the other'. Despite the increasingly righteous tone, and some rather laboured texual analyses, this study is written quite fluently and almost informally. It adduces at various points an impressive range of theoretical paradigms, though their application is not always persuasive. (Can we really read Graffigny's 'Avertissement' in terms of the gift economy, or her work as a chain of seductions?) As a whole the study is stimulating but overambitious. Taking on philosophy, post-Renaissance history, cultural politics and literary criticism, it attempts to hold together too many domains. Thus 'naturalist' mutates in the Conclusion into 'cosmopolitan' and 'liberal'. The Enlightenment is said to espouse 'a flexible society based on market exchanges, individual work and merit' (p. 214), but the Persanes denounce John Law (letter 142), and the Péruvienne's royal heroine affirms that trade is innately corrupting (letter 20). The fictions resist the ideologies that they are required to represent.