A Taste for the Foreign: Worldly Knowledge and Literary Pleasure in Early Modern French Fiction (review)

This book is a pleasurable and readable contribution to the growing critical literature on orientalism and exoticism in early modern French studies. Its given chronological range is broad, from Jacques Amyot's 1547 translation of The Ethiopian Story to Antoine Galland's early eighteenth-century version of the Thousand and One Nights, but it concentrates on seventeenth-century prose fiction, covering heroic romances, urban novels, fictional memoirs, and extraordinary voyages, as well as those reflecting on the genre such as Georges and Madeleine de Scudéry. Ellen Welch's thesis is not just that a taste for the 'exotic' (which she defines usefully in both early modern and postcolonial terms) animated prose fiction in her period, but that it was a crucial aesthetic category for the development of the genre. The category of the 'exotic' and the 'foreign' offered both a source and a guiding principle for the novelty and variety that constituted the uniqueness and the appeal of prose fiction in the period. What this means for Welch is that prose fiction itself was a place for discussing and testing ideas and assumptions about foreignness and its particular literary pleasures, both guilty and otherwise, even before the term 'exoticism' became common currency and a self-conscious theoretical tool of fiction writers. She examines the documentary sources of the fictional exotic alongside the novels, travel narratives, maps, international newsletters, ambassadorial reports, and argues that fiction writers developed sophisticated techniques to appropriate these factual forms of writing in order to offer a sometimes illusory insight into foreign practices - a kind of effet de réel that both fascinated and tantalized their readers. In her analysis, it is the self-conscious practice of making fiction, and specifically pleasurable fiction, that draws attention to the creation and maintenance of the category of the exotic, which, she contends, is inextricable from a fetishistic pleasure in perceiving an object as precisely 'other'. Taking her cue from Charles Sorel, Welch argues that prose fiction was a pre-eminently market-driven literary form, and finds that the representation of the exotic other in this genre is more unpredictable and diverse than that in other, more centrally-controlled cultural forms such as the theatre. The book analyses works by Marin Le Roy de Gomberville, Madeleine de Scudéry, Antoine Furetière, and Cyrano de Bergerac, among others, and ends with an epilogue arguing that Antoine Galland's early eighteenth-century Mille et une nuits represents a change in the uses of the oriental other in French fiction, with fewer possibilities of self-critique and theoretical exploration-of that representation. It is perhaps a pity that Madame de Lafayette's work is excluded from the discussion as too singular and experimental an approach to the genre, more problematic than representational. But what this book gains in concentrating on the more emblematic and less familiar examples of 'exotic' fiction is a coherence and conviction in its argument for the particular pleasures of the form.