Theorizing the French Enlightenment

THE MAKING OF LITERARY FRANCE 413 to wonder when more city streets will be named after authors, when Stephen Leacock or Gabrielle Roy will grace a five-dollar bill, when literary commemorative postage stamps will become the order of the day, when the GovernorGeneral 's literary prizes will have as much impact as the Prix Goncourt, when the minutes of the Royal Society of Canada will be reported in the press with the same interest as the Academie fran~aise's, or when Robert Fulford's literary interviews will control television viewers' social agendas as thoroughly as do Bernard Pivot's Apostrophes on Friday evenings. In one respect, however, the Canadian literary scene duplicates the current French one. Our most famous and esteemed writers, paralleling Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes of post-Sartrian France, have been world-class theoreticians like McLuhan and Frye. Of these, Canadians may well be proud. But it remains that none of our politicians have had the literary credentials ofa Malraux, a Pompidou, or a Mitterrand. And, in the final analysis, Clark's book leaves little doubt that between politics and literature, marriage matters. Theorizing the French Enlightenment LAWRENCE KERSLAKE Josue V. Harari. Scenarios of the Imaginary: Theorizing the French Enlightenment Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 1987.240. us $24.95 This book comes as a refreshing change from the narcissistic tendency of much modern critical theory to examine, in a sort of closed circle, the nature of its own discourse. Through a series of interpretive essays devoted primarily to eighteenth-century French texts, Harari challenges the reader to reflect on the ontological status of theory and its relation to the real. He contends that 'underlying every theory there exists a corresponding scenario - real or imaginary,' and that 'theory is merely the justification, after the fact, of a scenario.' The one problematic element in this initial statement is that it admits the possibility of a 'real' scenario, whereas not only does Harari focus his attention exclusively on 'scenarios of the imaginary,' he claims that all theory necessarily 'pre-empts,' 'occults,' or 'suppresses' the real. His demonstrations of particular cases in which an imaginary scenario subtends and determines theory are, for the most part, very convincing, and we can accept that in these cases 'the theoretical imaginary does not negate the real, but instead rigorously subsumes it on its own terms, ... displac[ing] it ever so slightly'; but we are left wondering about the epistemological problem of whether a 'real' scenario can possibly exist. Harari does provide at least a possible solution (although it does not appear to be intended as such) in his concluding remarks. He sees the current popularity of theory, and particularly of 'theories of desire, of lack, of absence' as corresponding to a profound modern need to suppress the real. However, asserts Harari, 'for all of its efforts to master the real, theory only succeeds in affirming its presence. 414 LAWRENCE KERSLAKE For before the intervention of theory, we could only grasp the real through approximations, whereas by ostensibly subscribing to theory - especially to those modern theories that consider the real insufficient - yet using it as a negative foil, we begin finally to apprehend the real.' While this view challenges the claim of theory to constitute, through the act of interpretation, the only attainable reality, it offers but modest comfort to any adherents (are there any left?) to the idea that the real is in fact apprehensible; and, more seriously, it is not wholly in keeping with the results of Harari's analyses, all of which demonstrate the moulding of reality, through theory, to make it conform to the structuring scenario. The first of these analyses (chapter 3) gives a new twist to the phrase 'the body politic.' Focusing on Montesquieu's Persian Letters, Harari finds in the metaphor of Usbek's body (absent object of the women's imaginary scenarios, present by substitution in the person of the eunuchs, ultimately undergoing a symbolic castration with the loss of authority) the basis of Montesquieu's political analysis of despotism. There are, however, two disquieting elements in the discussion. First, while (as Montesquieu's contemporaries recognized) The Spirit of Laws favours 'principles over...