Marivaux et la science du caractère by Sarah Benharrech (review)

This is a detailed and carefully argued study of the writings of Marivaux — his journalism, novels, and comedies — which sets out to show how, through formal, thematic, generic, and conceptual innovation, he played a formative role at a decisive stage in the history of personal identity. Sarah Benharrech shows how Marivaux deconstructs the framework espoused by the seventeenth-century classical moralists such as La Bruyère, and how his protagonists anticipate in important ways the plasticity of Diderot’s Neveu or Beaumarchais’s Figaro. She deftly locates Marivaux’s anthropology or ‘science of character’ in the context of the Querelle d’Homère, the final chapter of the Querelle des anciens et des modernes, and — probably the most intriguing dimension of the study — in relation to developments in natural history, showing the pertinence of both the ongoing debates regarding preformation and those regarding botanical taxonomy, led especially by Buffon’s critique of what he regarded as the artificial system of classification of species of his rival Linnaeus. Through careful contextualization, Benharrech shows the valuable insights to be gained by considering imaginative literature from an interdisciplinary perspective and, simultaneously, she makes a compelling case for the importance of belles lettres to the history of intellectual thought. This is a case that she situates, furthermore, in the eighteenth century’s own debates regarding the hierarchy between literature and science, giving prominence to the reception speeches given at the Académie française not only by Marivaux but also by the geometers Dortous de Marian and Maupertuis — all of whom expressed a sense of shared intellectual goals. Benharrech develops an over-arching historical argument, with further chapters or subsections devoted to Crébillon’s libertine writing, Diderot, and Beaumarchais, that makes an original and insightful contribution to the history of anthropological thought. The work does, however, assume a reader already familiar with Marivaux’s œuvre, and his texts are drawn on pertinently to illustrate an argument but rarely become the focus of more sustained exegesis. In pursuit of a broader line of argument, Benharrech might be felt to dodge some of the complexities and ambiguities that she acknowledges without allowing herself sufficient space to probe them. Surprisingly, for example, the crucial question of free will is never tackled head on, although it is implicated in the moral anxieties to which she attaches considerable importance. Nonetheless, while Benharrech’s book might not yield new insights into particular novels or comedies, it constitutes an impressively erudite and stimulating contribution to the literary and cultural history of the Enlightenment more broadly. It is one that should be taken seriously by intellectual historians and literary scholars alike, since it makes a refreshingly candid and persuasive case for the cognitive importance of literature and the porosity between disciplinary boundaries that have tended to obscure the creative interplay between science and fiction. It is a study that might well convince the more traditional intellectual historian to pay more attention to novels and plays, while also encouraging those who enjoy Marivaux’s novels and comedies to explore the scientific debates and botanical writings of the Enlightenment.