Misrecognizing Fiction

The "fiction" of Nicholas Paige's title is an ensemble of narrative practices that constitute the modern novel: manifestly unreal narrators telling stories about manifestly unreal characters in a realistic but not real world. While today we do not need to believe in the reality of characters or narrators in order to attend to or care about them, traditional poetics assumed that readers, and viewers, responded to characters who are real. As Aristotle says, what is possible arouses conviction, and as Boileau echoes, one is not moved by what one does not believe. So, stories of real, historically renowned, or traditionally attested heroes enable readers to make a powerful emotional connection that depends on belief—not suspending disbelief, but just believing. (Comedy is an exception to this, as it deals with invented characters, but as a low form it does not move one in the way that tragedy or epic does.) Between this long-standing Aristotelian conception of stories and our own, Paige identifies an "ancien régime" of the novel, beginning in the later seventeenth century and lasting through the eighteenth, which makes pseudo-factual claims for the veracity of characters and narrators. Such novels deal with presumptively historical characters, and allow writers to bring their stories closer to home. But the force of such works continues to depend on a pretense that the character actually existed. This may, of course, be a thin, even transparent pretense, but it informs the work's aesthetic effect. In addressing this second, pseudo-factual regime of fiction, Paige is concerned, in particular, to interrupt the seemingly reflexive critical habit of understanding literary history as the prehistory of our fiction. In each of his six chapters—on Madame de La Fayette, Adrien-Thomas Perdou de Subligny, Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Jacques Cazotte—Paige engages with a novelistic innovation that looks deceptively familiar, indeed a harbinger of our sense of "fiction," but that has its own, local rationale.

Scholars of French literature will evaluate elsewhere Paige's specific engagements with the critical debates about these works. Here, I will stress his important methodological polemic, which all students of the history of the novel should read. Before Fiction compellingly challenges two common reflexes of recent literary history: the habit of taking literary history as a register of broader historical change, and the habit of mistaking local adaptations as anticipations of our concerns. These go together because the rationale for taking, say, La Fayette's fictional heroine in La Princesse de Clèves (1678) as a prototype for the heroine of the modern novel depends on assuming her to be revealing an undercurrent of emergent modernity. But in Paige's refreshing readings, writers work on local poetic and aesthetic problems with tools of their own culture, rather than as unacknowledged legislators inventing the modern world.

The Princesse de Clèves is "visibly false," as one of La Fayette's contemporaries noted; she is not just absent from history, but also occupies the place of someone else in the historical record. Paige says she "may be literature's first deliberately counterfactual heroine" (43). Rather than inventing fiction as we know it, however, La Fayette is critiquing the rampant gossip of court culture: "Her nonexistent heroine allowed her to denounce the invasive traffic in women's secrets without using, hypocritically, a real women's destiny to do so" (55). Frustrating the habit of reading by key, La Princesse de Clèves is a novel about gossip "that has been proofed against turning into gossip" (44) and that allows La Fayette to write "about intrigue without participating in intrigue" (46). Paige's readings—and his prose—are sharp and striking throughout, and they offer terrific compensations for, and validations of, his decision to restrict his analysis to studying morphological changes that do not necessarily represent larger cultural changes, or, for that matter, do not go anywhere.

Though La Princesse de Clèves was popular and widely admired, it did not spark a fashion...