Licentious Novels of the Enlightenment

Beowulf, approximately one-quarter of the total for verse and prose. The first Arabic translation of Beowulfappeared in Cairo in 1964; the Canadian debut of the poem occurred in 1872 when Eustace H. Jones paraphrased portions in the Canadian Monthly and National Review. Some fourteen past and present professors at the University of Toronto are listed in the bibliography, along with Richard Hakluyt, John Milton, Samuel Johnson, Isaac and Benjamin Disraeli, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Morris, and James Murray. Thomas Jefferson, a fervent advocate of Anglo-Saxon studies, is represented by An Essay towards Facilitating Instruction in the Anglo-Saxon, written in the 17605. In 1832 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was enthusiastic about recent advances in the field; in 1849 the poet William Barnes extolled the copiousness and richness of the Old English language. Twentieth-century appreciators include Ezra Pound, Sean O'Faolain, Kingsley Amis, andJorge Borges. Alas, the William H. Faulkner who wrote on The Subjunctive Mood in the Old English Version of Bede's Ecclesiastical History (item 5564) is not the novelist. The new bibliography is a model of accuracy and completeness. Errors are hard to find: two proper names are misspelled (Finnur J6nsson, Nicolas Jacobs); Cyril Hart and Cyril R. Hart are one person; printers' gremlins have done mischief to item 4'04 (pp 435-4 should be 453- 4) and to item 6471 (volume number and date are repeated); add 'v. 2 (1914), 1-14' to item 4"0; the author of items 4353- 4 is Thomas D. Hill, not Elemire Zolla; Mrs Alison Kingsmill of the Dictionary of Old English project tells me that in item 5512 Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society should be Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society. The compilers present for inspection an entire body of scholarship; their bibliography is a monument to four hundred years of human striving to make sense of the vernacular records that survive from Anglo-Saxon times. It is all catalogued herethe ephemeral, the obsolete, the brilliant, the superficial, the wrongheaded, the learned, and the eccentric: ahistory ofcommentary longer, and therefore richer in surprises, than that yielded by any of the other periods of English literature. Licentious Novels of the Enlightenment JOHN A. FLEMING Jacques Rustin. Le Vice aIa mode: ttude sur Ie roman fran~ais du XVIll~ siecle de 'Manon !..eseau/' tll'apparition de 'La Nouvelle HeloiSe' Paris: Editions Ophrys 1979. 320 Critical opinion through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with few exceptions, has been severe in its judgment of the licentious novels of the Enlightenment, although little serious attention has ever been paid to the 'petits maitres' of the genre who account for the phenomenal number of titles published between 1700 and the Revolution. UNIVERSfIY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 52, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1983 0042-°247/83/°500-°3°3-0306$01.5010 <0 UNlVERSfIY OF TORONTO PRESS 304 JOHN A. FLEMING Jacques Rustin in Le Vieeti Ia mode attempts to reassess this traditional view and to establish some sort ofbalance between the accepted c1assics such as Manon, Les Bijoux indiscrets, Les Liaisons dangereuses, etc, and the hundreds of less wellknown , even obscure novels, which have been condemned out of hand as pornographic or unliterary, the work of hacks and amateurs. Given the size of the corpus (some scholars suggest 3,000 or more original texts through the century), the problems of selection, the methodological difficulties which beset all discussions of the novel, one cannot but admire the tenacity and good sense with which Rustin carries out his task: 'Notre propos est d'abord de decrire ce que nous avons appel~ l'univers degrade du roman ... il est evident que nous ne considerons eet univers qu'en lui-meme, sans ref~rence, sinon incidente, ala realit~ contemporaine ' (p 36). Beginning with a first broad categorization, Rustin proposes to use three different approches: 'dans un premier temps, Ie roman est conc;u comme un "document" sur les mceurs du siec1e, mais par reference a une societe fictive et pr~gnanlequi eslceliedu viceala mode; dans un second temps (qui estIe temps fort), il est consid~r~ comme participant d'une fac;on ou d'une autre, al'elaboration mythique d'un univers (Mceptif) du plaisir et de la volupte; dans un troisieme temps, il revele, par Ie simple deroulement d'aventures signifiantes, une v~rite quicontreditIe tableau de mceurs (donne comme toile de fond) et minesourdement l'univers ludique du libertinage' (p 37). He further suggests that these three approaches will make explicit the stages in an evolution, and he then summarizes his goals within a broader perspective: to inventory the period and to interpret; to prepare the way for further research; to provoke a fruitful contestation and continuing dialogue. The main body of Le Vice aI. mode is divided into three parts which correspond in their treatment of the materials to the three approaches already mentioned, followed by conclusions and a bibliography (somewhat out ofdate) of critical texts and sources both contemporary and modem, as well as a listing of the several hundred novels mentioned explicitly. These three parts are in tum broken into chapters, subsections of chapters, etc, in a rather scholastic fashion which imposes at times an artificial order on a good deal of overlapping material. Part I, chapter 1, for example ('Les lieuxcommuns de la satire'), breaks down into 'Ie jeu,' 'les femmes,' 'Ie mariage,' 'l'amour,' followed by chapter 2, 'I'envers du decor': 'Ie regne de l'argent,' 'Ies rapports sociaux,' 'les rapports familiaux,' 'Ies vceux forces au Ie mariage contraint,' and so on. Since many of the novels are little known, characters must be explained, situations described, plots summarized (particularly in part m), and this leads to a textwhich is at the same timeboth dense and diffuse. As in most theses turned into books, the documentation tends to smotherthe more creative aspects of the commentary. Not only is the text heavy with resume and quotation (e.g., nine quotations in a paragraph of twelve lines, pp 62-3), but footnotes fill from one-quarter to one-third of almost every page. Perhaps the strain of setting so many footnotes accounts for the printer's rather numerous LICENTIOUS NOVELS 305 typographical errors, although not for his uncertainty with English words and capitalization (1750 for 1730, p 20; french Translation ofenglish Works, n 62 on p 21; The Fortunate Foundings for Foundlings, n 62 on p 21; La Dixmetrie for La Dixmerie, n 47 on P 79; Fr~cour for Fecour, p 137; etc). For an academic reader or a specialist in the field all this evidence may be necessary, even interesting, but for a larger audience the visual distraction alone is a powerful deterrent to continuous reading. Rustin recognizes the problem, buthe has not found a way to convert his abundant material into more digestible form. Perhaps some system of indexing appended to the discursive text would have eliminated the need for so many examples to establish themes, motifs, types, and so on. Freed from the dross of documentation, the author could then have been more daring in his use of it. Only in the concluding chapter does Rustin escape from his burden of proofs to interpret more fully, and even here he relies too much, Ithink, on a blend ofwhat others have said (M. Robert, J. Sgard, G. Chaussinand-Nogaret, etall, rather than giving free rein to his own impressive command of the texts, Rustin's interesting and subtle conclusions cannot easily be summarized but they arise from the evolution implicit in his division of the materials into three 'temps' as indicated above. According to Rustin, the novelists of the period from 1731 to 1761 refuse the present, deny their 'origines roturi~res/' reconstitute themselves imaginatively, by means of the 'univers compensatoire du libertinage' (p 235), wherein one fmds the courtly world inverted (Manon is the perfect example). In this way the 'faiseur de romans' becomes a part of the closed and prestigious myth of the aristocracy, while the gradual disintegration of the latter is in turn concealed. In opposition to contemporary philosophical thought, the novel thus continues a picaresque vision of the world closely tied to the ideology of the ancien regime, and the apparent break with this notion, associated with La Nouvelle H~loise, serves only to mask the assimilation of bourgeois and aristocratic values in a single and continuing social order: 'I'omnipotence d'une elite composite' (p 245); 'l'evolution nous aura fait passer d/un libertinage sans perversite ni grandeur aun moralisme inconsistant' (p 245). Had these conclusions (much simplified here) been an integral part of the demonstration as it developed, and had they been linked to the dynamic of the texts in question, their structures and their social/psychological pre-suppositions, the analysis ofand references to 'ideologie dominante' and 'ethiquebourgeoise' (p 244) would have been more convincing. Part of the difficulty lies no doubt in the sudden introduction of an ideological/methodological perspective after an essentially descriptive presentation, and part perhaps in the delay between completion of the study in 1974 and its publication without major revision in 1979. Academic readers at least have come to expect a more sustained theoretical framework. Another weakness of the analysis seems to me to be the neglect of certain fundamental questions Iwould have thoughtintrinsic to the materials studied: the nature and value (aesthetic and other) of the erotic in these novels; the sexual 306 TILOTTAMA RAJAN politics, to use a modern cliche, as well as the psychological sources and implications for social structure contained in the dialectic of dominance which is everywhere present and finds its ultimate expression in Les Liaisons dangereuses. In spite of these reservations Le Vice ala mode brings to the public a mass of information and afar from banal conclusion which should indeed provoke fruitful dialogue and a re-examination of our idees refues concerning the eighteenthcentury French novel. Romantic Fragments TILOTTAMA RAJAN Thomas McFarland. Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation Princeton: Princeton University Press 1981. xxxiv, 432. $30.00 cloth, $9.50 paper It has long been recognized that the Romantic period produced an unusual number of fragments or works which otherwise frustrate the sense of an ending. Not only were The Prelude and Biographia Literaria antechapels to endeavours that remained unattempted in prose or rhyme, but even so apparently systematic a writer as Blake left one of his major prophecies, The Four Zoas, unengraved, and produced in his early period works composed of dialeclical and mobile parts the syntheSiS of which is deliberately left outside the text. The last poems of Keats and Shelley are fragments and seem appropriate as such. An inquiry into the subject is therefore overdue, though recent books by Elinor Shaffer and Edward Kessler involve attempts in that direction. McFarland's book appears to have begun as an investigation of the larger problem of Romantic fragments, and despite its restriction to Wordsworth and Coleridge its wealth of reference to other literary and philosophical sources suggests that it still aims at a phenomenology and psychology of the fragmentary or 'diasparaclive' tendencies of which the two figures studied are exemplary. One regrets the frequent inclusion of material which in his earlier book Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition would have been given the status of excursus notes: a discussion of Wordsworth's politics, for instance, seems out of place in an analysis whose focus is not socia-cultural. To argue that the book embodies its own subject in its 'diasparactive' mode of argument seems more than a little ingenious. Nevertheless the areas considered are fruitful ones, and McFarland's book will initiate, even if it does not conclude, discussion of the subject. A more fundamental criticism has to do with the organization of the book, which syncretizes into a single theory of the fragment derived from a Platonized Christian existentialism the very diverse accounts of the genesis of fragments provided in individual chapters. The chapters are best conceived of as spokes on a wheel rather than as parts of a linear argument. They are approaches to aproblem: approaches whose very lack ofconsistency with each other suggests that the terminus of this inquiry should have been a taxonomy of UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 52, NUMBER ,3, SPRING 1983 0042-0247/83/°500-°306-0310$01.5°/0 \Q UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS ...