La Mouche, ou les Aventures de M. Bigand (review)

Three centuries after his death, we are rediscovering Charles de Fieux, Chevalier de Mouhy. Born in 1701, sent to jail (for the first time) in 1720, author of a dozen multivolume books between 1735 and 1742— precisely when the novelistic genre is proscribed within the Kingdom of France—this elusive writer spent the rest of his life until his death in 1784 in oscillations between performing spying duties for the police, being sent to jail (again) for communicating the wrong information to the wrong person, chronicling the history of theatre, and composing moralistic novels full of morally surprising twists. His time seems finally to have come: after the Éditions Desjonquères republished several of his books (Le Masque de Fer, La Paysanne parvenue, les Mémoires d'Anne Marie de Moras), a volume of studies was devoted solely to his work last year: Jan Herman et al., Le Chevalier de Mouhy: Bagarre et bigarrure (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010). Now comes a sumptuous scientific re-edition of one of his most intriguing novels, originally published between 1736 and 1742.

The title La Mouche refers to the practice of spying rather than to the insect world. The protagonist, M. Bigand, feels an irrepressible urge to snoop, uncover secrets, enter any dark alleyway where unofficial business is likely to take place. Far from being in a position of surveillance and control, however, Bigand most often falls prey to crooks and powerful figures playing a game well above his own (rather low) league. This 600-page novel in four parts portrays the highly uncomfortable adventures of a fly on the wall trapped in rivalries between greedy wolves. It appears that, in Mouhy's world, the supposedly powerful are as lost and adrift as the beggars. This information society looks more like a mad zoo than a jungle.

The radically uncontrolled and uncontrollable universe in which Mouhy throws his reader makes for a rather maddening experience, largely owing to the fact that one suspects the author to be as lost as his character (and his reader) within the countless meanders, subplots, embedded stories, and metamorphoses that proliferate out of control in his writing. As Mathieu Brunet has demonstrated in the chapters devoted to Mouhy of his L'Appel du Monstrueux (Louvain: Peeters, 2008), the novelist, who publishes four massive novels in parallel instalments during the 1730s, digs secret tunnels from one plot to the other (or simply confuses the volumes), producing a unique literary archipelago, where "flies," cabalists, and scenes of cruel mutilations travel between otherwise unrelated stories. A literary monstrosity it is, but a fascinating one indeed!

The work accomplished by the editors is superb. Two different introductions propose complementary readings of Mouhy's literary enterprise. René Démoris interprets the picaresque vein of the novel, which orchestrates rich psychoanalytical overtones. Florence Magnot-Ogilvy stresses the playful recurrence of certain troubling signifiers, and inscribes Mouhy within the emergence of political economy during the eighteenth century, cleverly characterizing La Mouche as "a moment of equilibrium between the claim to personhood (la revendication d'être une personne), to have a story of one's own, and the temptation to be nobody (la tentation de n'être personne), as a means to gain access to everybody's stories" (77; my translation).

What is there for us to find in this largely forgotten author, who faced more contempt than admiration from his contemporaries, due to the overproduction and "négligence" of his speed-writing habits? Highly disturbing narrative machines, which constantly question the fragility and necessity of our beliefs. Mouhy does not seem to think very seriously about religion or about materialism, yet his fictions engage the social and subjective functions of belief in a refreshing manner. His reader is rarely faced with the simplistic alternative to which countless eighteenth-century studies have reduced "the religious question": to believe (in the Christian God) or not to believe? When immersed in Mouhy's...