Skeptical Selves. Empiricism and Modernity in the French Novel (review)

Three first-person narratives—Histoire d’une Grecque moderne, Adolphe and Le Bavard—written in three different centuries (the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth), each following the linguistic paradigm of its age, carry on a reflexion on representation. All three works denounce the failure of their respective languages, in order to promote the dream of an Edenic language in which everyone and everything would have its proper name. Predictably, all three works fail; at best they demonstrate that “a language true to the self is a text constantly on the verge of solipsism (p.27).” Yet, in dealing with the aforementioned impossible situation, each work’s narrative strategies (interpretive techniques, rhetorical baggage, conception of characters, etc.) provide us with an interpretive model, a paradigm of knowledge, even an epistemology. In so doing these works clearly establish that most of our contemporary debate regarding the problematic of representation and various conceptions of the sign are but elaborations and transpositions of fundamental questions raised by Empiricist theory of language and epistemology.

Russo’s book opens up on Prévost’s Histoire d’une Grecque moderne, a novel that revolves around the (distorted) point of view of an obsessively jealous narrator. Jealousy consists of a relation between subjects whereby an individual interprets another subject’s signals and whether those signs are compatible with the reality (as the jealous perceives it) of the situation. Thus jealousy is Prévost’s way of posing the fundamental semiotic question of the time: can knowledge originating in the sensations (of the narrator) reveal anything about the nature of reality (here Théophé), or is it only a commentary about imprisonment within subjectivity?

In answering the question in the negative (“Observation does not reveal anything beyond the nature of the desire that sets it in motion” p.58) Russo gives the most perceptive—and extensive—reading of the Grecque written to date. First she shows how Théophé embodies the Enlightenment’s ideal of a natural—non rhetorical—universal language that (should) carry with it an immediate translation of experience; and second she follows the narrator’s deciphering process, whereby he reduces Théophé to a complex of signs that he analyzes according to an empiricist itinerary (rooted in sensory data). Russo does an excellent job at diagnosing many of the causes of the narrator’s cross-cultural misreadings, chief among them, the confusion of “languages” and “values” in the narrator’s discourse resulting from his orientalization and Théophé’s westernization (as the novel progresses).

The interpretive riddle gets further complicated by the fact that Théophé’s story is also framed by the narrator’s appeals to the reader’s participation (both as witness and juror)—the narrator’s alternately turning prosecutor, victim, and defendant. Here Russo convincingly illustrates that even the most sophisticated appropriation by the narrator of the rules of deliberative rhetoric fails to “fixate” the meaning of Théophé’s behavior. Shuttling back and forth among a multiplicity of codes, the narrative does not provide any conciliatory reading but keeps wavering between alternative interpretations, as the reader follows the narrator’s deciphering attempts. In this maze of interpretations where is certainty? Thus the narrator’s inquiry is displaced onto the reader’s subjectivity, so that what started as the narrative of Théophé’s seduction becomes, in Russo’s sophisticated reading, a reflexion on hermeneutics—the possibility of knowing and representing the Other.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the relationship between language and the individual changes: language shifts from a universal and ahistorical medium to one determined by historical contingencies. Adolphe’s relationship to language in the novel by the same name parallels the transformations undergone by early nineteenth-century philosophy of language—his is a language burdened by irony, reflecting the absence of all belief. What happens then to meaning when an individual becomes the product of historical (and linguistic) determinacies? Russo argues that the self becomes condemned to perpetual anarchy—behaving like “a theater where different...