The Early Rousseau

dark areas. Personally, I would like to see a literary-critical study of his writings that began from the assumption that all is fiction. It would provide a healthy antidote to what we now possess. And perhaps it will come. As I suggested at the outset, the current interest in 'metafiction' and 'post-modernism' should encourage us to look at this unorthodox Victorian with new awareness and understanding - and above all, perhaps, with more enjoyment. The pleasures of the Borrovian text are considerable. But if any such advance is made, it will be because Collie has taken the first step. By exposing the egregious Knapp, by shocking us into realizing that we know less than we thought, by offering a different but appropriate kind ofbiography, he may well have initiated a new era in the study of a fascinatingly enigmatic writer. The Early Rousseau AUBREY ROSENBERG Maurice Cranston. Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau '7'2- ' 754. New York: W.W. Norton '983. 382. illus. $22.45 The extraordinary resurgence ofinterest in Rousseau in the postwar years has led to the publication of three monumental biographies. The first was a three-volume study in French by Jean Guehenno, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. En marge des Confessions 1712-1750; Roman et verite 175°-1758; Grandeur et mistre d'un esprit 1758-1778 (PariS: Bernard Grasset, Gallimard 1948-52), translated into English in two volumes by John and Doreen Weightman as Jean Jacques Rousseau (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, New York: Columbia University Press 1966). The second was a two-volume work by Lester G. Crocker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Quest '7'2-'758; The Prophetic Voice 1758-1778 (New York and London: Macmillan 1968-73). Now, only a decade later, Maurice Cranston, the distinguished political theorist and chairman of the Department of Political Science at the London School of Economics, has embarked on a new two-volume study ofwhich the first volume is here under review. The questions that spring immediately to mind are: is a new biography really necessary, how much does this work add to what is already known about Rousseau's life, and is there a radical difference in approach? Cranston deals with these issues in his introduction, where he has some harsh words for Guehenno and Crocker, who are never mentioned by name and whose writings find no place in the bibliography. What Rousseau has received at the hands of previous biographers is, according to Cranston, 'for the most part blame, or the kind of patronizing psychological explanation which takes the place of blame in contemporary deterministic culture. Rousseau's biographers, deploring his emotionalism , have been hardly less emotional themselves. Feasting, moreover, on the rich UNlVERSIn' OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 2, WINTER 1983/4 218 AUBREY ROSENBERG narrative material provided in the Confessions, they have generally neglected other sources of information about Rousseau's life.' Now it is quite true that Guehenno's study is a very personal one, based mainly on the Confessions, and that he did not consult a wide variety of other sources, although it should be noted that many of the sources that are now readily available to scholars were hard to find at the time. But the criticism of Crocker must not go unchallenged. While I hold no brief for Crocker's excessively psychoanalytical interpretation of Rousseau, whom he regards as a neurotic, guilt-haunted latent homosexual, a sadomasochist, a hypochondriac, a kleptomaniac, an exhibitionist, a voyeur, and an autoeroticist, not necessarily in that order, it should be stated in all fairness that Crocker's scholarship is and always has been impeccable. He may have overlooked some material uncovered by Cranston, and he was certainly unable to benefit from Michel Launay's magisterial examination of Rousseau's Genevan background, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: ecrivain politique 1712- 1762 (Grenoble : ACER 1971), and the later volumes of the new edition of the correspondence, but in the main the factual elements of the work are well supported by reference to archival and other documents. In addition, Crocker's knowledge of the Rousseau canon is second to none. Cranston's stated aim is 'to provide, if not an impartial, at least...