Les Mutations de la clarté: Exemple, induction et schématismes dans l’œuvre de Marivaux (review)

This book is about clarté primarily in its epistemological rather than its stylistic sense; it is less about the vexed question of Marivaux’s style (marivaudage) and more about the means by which, in his work, truth may be known and conveyed to the reader. As Meiner points out, a theory of clarity was constructed in the seventeenth century and had a history in the eighteenth century. Marivaux’s work, to be fully understood, should be situated within this context. Meiner begins by showing the signficance of clarté in Marivaux’s work, a significance already apparent in his early essay “Sur la clarté du discours” (1719) where Marivaux writes, “il est un certain point de clarté au-delà duquel toute idée perd nécessairement de sa force ou de sa délicatesse.” Meiner surveys the small amount of scholarly attention that has been given to this aspect of Marivaux’s work, including Henri Coulet’s tentative article “Marivaux et Malebranche,” CAIEF 25 (1973), 140–60, and rightly asserts that no very firm conclusions have yet been reached. In order to move the debate onward the author begins his book with a substantial survey of seventeenth-century notions of clarté, a survey that is valuable in itself for the range of little-known texts it covers and the insight to them which it brings.

In particular, Meiner sketches out a movement from the clairdistinct of Descartes, through the clair-obscur of Malebranche, to Leibniz’s notion of “le clair-confus des idées sensibles, qui échappe à la systématicité déductive géométrique” (172). It is this notion of clarté, elaborated in the Nouveaux Essais sur l’entendement humain (written in 1703 though published only in 1765), to which Meiner points as a key for understanding Marivaux’s work. Leibniz’s clair-confus relates to a sentiment that is clearly experienced, but whose nature, causes, nuances and implications escape the understanding. The attempt to reach such an understanding explains the presence of verbs such as pénétrer and démêler in learned and literary discourse of the early eighteenth century, including the work of Marivaux. Thereafter, in the next part of his book, Meiner applies the notion of the clair-confus to Marivaux’s jounalistic text, Le Spectateur français (1721–24), particularly in relation to the terms exemple, induction, and schématismes, which figure in the subtitle of this volume. Meiner perceptively notes that, as a vehicle for his moral observation, Marivaux lays aside the maxims and characters used by seventeenth-century moralists such as La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère, replacing them with the situations, scenes, and events that draw the attention of the Spectateur. Meiner analyzes issues 1–5 and 15 of Marivaux’s journal, showing how the scenes around which these feuilles are built can be understood as exemples that have, in particular, a spatial dimension and that give rise to idées sensibles. These ideas then pass through a process of induction to produce understandings or interpretations here called schématismes, a term Meiner borrows from Cassirer. When Le Spectateur français is approached in this way, Meiner contends, it is possible to see how Marivaux differs from La Bruyère not just in a stylistic, but also in a thematic sense: he goes beyond the rationalism of the Caractères, describing a world of phenomena that can be conveyed only by new modes of clarification.

These observations have important consequences with regard to the use of space in Marivaux’s novels, and so Meiner turns, in the third and final part of his book, to a consideration of Le Paysan parvenu. Once again, the author begins by situating Marivaux within a wider context, this time the context of the contemporary novel, which Meiner describes as being caught in...