Bonheur et fiction chez Rousseau par Guilhem Farrugia (review)

Reviews 267 expressions in argot. She especially loved reading and appreciated literary language. She assumed the role of a writer when her father died in 1967 with the mission of her writing to explore the social issues in how to “écrire littérairement dans la langue de tous” (34). The disparities among the values of different social classes have thus been imbedded in her writings and led her to explore the degree to which she has or has not betrayed her origins. Retour à Yvetot includes the revision of a lecture Ernaux gave at Yvetot in 2012, pictures of Ernaux at various stages in her life, an interview given to the Ernaux scholar Marguerite Cornier, and an essay by Gortier explaining the role of Yvetot throughout Ernaux’s opus. This pamphlet has much to recommend its reading by those familiar with the écrivaine and especially by those not yet acquainted with her work. Trinity University (TX) Roland A. Champagne Farrugia, Guilhem. Bonheur et fiction chez Rousseau. Paris: Garnier, 2012. ISBN 9782 -8124-0500-6. Pp. 361. 39 a. “Peut-on, après Robert Mauzi, écrire sur le bonheur selon Rousseau?,”asks Michel Delon in his preface to a book dealing with a topic that has been discussed at length, not only by Mauzi and the Rousseau scholars with whom the author engages, but also in recent intellectual histories, notably Darrin M. McMahon’s History of Happiness (2006), with which he does not. This is largely an immanent, phenomenological study of happiness in Rousseau’s texts, in the tradition of Poulet and Starobinski. Delon answers his question by pointing to the connections Farrugia draws between happiness and the status of fiction, and there are indeed interesting discussions here of how Rousseau constructs in his reveries as well as in his works imaginary spaces either of happy solitude or affective communication among intimates, spaces that serve as “la matrice de la félicité”(20).While not empirically grounded, these imaginary constructs are“véraces,”in the sense that they foster genuine and positive human experience. The first part of the book explores the key forms of happiness Rousseau likes to imagine, and how Rousseau turns the fictions he elaborates about them into “fictions vécues,” modeled by the characters in his books but designed to be lived by his readers and by himself as reader of his own work. The second part focuses on the “oscillation” between restriction and expansion, between the notion that happiness finds its ideal location within the individual, solitary self and the idea that its proper context is the sociability of little communities of friends or lovers (about citizens the author has little to say). This oscillation gives Rousseau’s thinking its dynamism and his various fictions their contrasting but equally enabling character. Much of this analysis will be familiar to eighteenth-century specialists, but it is designed to support a thesis the author believes to be original: “Assignant à la fiction une réalité existentielle, une solidité affective et infléchissant ce terme du sens de mensonge vers celui de véracité, Rousseau est l’auteur d’une théorie moderne de la fiction” (339). Farrugia is certainly on to something here, but there is a disconnect between his phenomenological approach and his historical thesis. Modern compared to whom or to what? In the absence of any comparison with other writers or thought-systems, it is hard to know what to make of this claim. Did no one before Rousseau ever give fiction existential reality? Another difficulty is that the book never deals with the mistrust of fictions that also pervades Rousseau’s works. How does one distinguish veracious fictions from mendacious ones? And is it really true that only veracious fictions help one be happy? To borrow terms from Starobinski, there is a lot here about la transparence but not enough about l’obstacle. University of California, Los Angeles Patrick Coleman Feilla, Cecilia. The Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013. ISBN 978-0-226-16058-0. Pp. 258. $99.95. This insightful, articulate study illustrates the impact that theatrical esthetics had upon the French Revolution’s overarching goal of transforming society. Drawing upon statistical...