Dévier et divertir: Littérature et pensée de xviii e siècle ed. by Marius Warholm and Knut Ove Eliassen (review)

As Knut Ove Eliassen and Marius Warholm Haugen point out in their brief introduction, “to deviate” and “to divert” both find their etymologies in the notion of detour, of leaving the straight and normal path. Woven around the pairing of these related terms, this collection of essays (originally presented at a 2008 conference in Trondheim) is the fourth and final publication produced by a dozen scholars working on the larger project “À l’ombre des Lumières” under the direction of Eliassen and Svein-Erik Fauskevåg. Suggesting that the material under study takes a “narrative, philosophical, moral, or geographic” detour (7; all translations are my own) from an implied main road of the Enlightenment, they propose that “the eighteenth century appears as inheritor of both Montaigne and Pascal in joining a ‘deviant’ aesthetic to a philosophic preoccupation with the ways humans go astray” (5). Somewhat paradoxically, the introduction and the collected essays in Dévier et divertir arrive at a loose consensus that deviation from the course is characteristic of Enlightenment writing.

Several of the essays take Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a touchstone of Enlightenment deviation or else focus entirely on one of his works, not surprisingly, since he helped construct the beaten path of the Enlightenment by congratulating himself on departing from it. In her discussion of the physical and conceptual peregrinations taken by the manuscript of Le Neveu de Rameau, Marion Hobson suggests, for example, that it was Rousseau’s ideas on culture that forced Diderot to recalibrate his satire of mœurs to address the specificity of contemporary society (92). Rousseau literalized the philosophic detour when he proposed that walking allows the mind to stray and thus to think: “Il faut que mon corps soit en branle pour y mettre mon esprit” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions, Œuvres complètes I [Paris: Gallimard, 1959], 162; quoted in Fjeldbu, “L’Amusement mental: les rêveries et leurs fonctions dans les œuvres autobiographiqhes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” in Dévier et diverter, 70). Martin Wåhlberg argues that Rousseau substitutes novel and audacious sentences like this last for systematic textual organization; the maxims in Émile prompt and authorize detours of thought while eliciting commentary. Øyvind Gjems Fjeldbu divides Rousseau’s account of the mental states produced by walking into, on the one hand, an essentially passive, yet sensual pleasure—the “recreation of the eyes” (65)—and, on the other hand, an active cognitive engagement dependent on the mental freedom granted by involuntary distraction on the promenade. John O’Neal reminds us of Rousseau’s polemic stance in Émile against reading and abstract reasoning and his emphasis on the child’s exposure to visible scenes that naturally inspire reactions of attraction and repulsion. Marius Warholm Haugen notes the influence of Rousseau’s Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire on Jean Potocki. In Potocki’s writing, the pleasurable yet arbitrary displacement of the traveller, as well as desert-scape and seascape, “inflame the imagination” and spur the desire to roam and think (151).

In contrast, Prévost’s merging of the travel topos with narrative scepticism offers a brief for losing one’s way not only physically but also morally and epistemologically. Fauskevåg suggests that images of sexual disorder in Prévost’s Cleveland correspond to inscrutable psychological depths, the very opposite of the moral clarity generated by images according to Rousseau’s Émile. In his discussion of Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Malte, Colas Duflos similarly emphasizes the relation between an epistemology of uncertainty and illegibility and the formal detours in Prévost’s work (from heroic novel, to novel of passionate love, to sentimental novel, to novel of apology or of conversion). Prévost transforms “déroutement” into a “principle,” refusing to grant the pleasure promised by his “divertissement...