Through Strangers' Eyes: Fictional Foreigners in Old Regime France

Conclusion: Ambiguous Strangers and the Legacy of the Enlightenment

210 Conclusion Ambiguous Strangers and the Legacy of the Enlightenment Ultimate Skepsis.—What are man’s truths ultimately ? Merely his irrefutable errors. Nietzsche The Gay Science The purpose of this study was to survey in detail the bestknown examples of the naive outsider novels that caught the imagination of the period, and along the way to consider how these novels, far from being only works of satire, raised profound questions about subjectivity, gender relations, social prejudice, and the knowability of nature. To conclude this study, I will focus first on the genre as a whole and its place in its historical context, then offer some broader reflections on the legacy of the Enlightenment for our own period. The genre of the naive outsider novel was certainly innovative and imaginative, launched principally by the popularity of Montesquieu’s novel. As some critics have noted, the genre represented a new way of writing, a reversal of perspective that seemed fresh and untried (Georges May, Jean-Paul Forster, Roger Caillois). Much like the Nouveau Roman in the twentieth century that also played with new perspectives and new narrative devices, the outsider novel looked at the world, and especially at the art of narration, differently—as if the Cannibals had been given an articulate voice. Roger Caillois calls it nothing less than a “révolution sociologique [. . .] qui consiste à se feindre étranger à la société où l’on vit, à la regarder du dehors et comme si on la voyait pour la première fois,” an enterprise that calls for “une puissante imagination pour tenter une telle conversion et beaucoup de ténacité pour s’y maintenir ” (xiii). I would like to suggest, however, that perhaps the 211 Conclusion level of imagination and tenacity is not as great as Caillois supposes . In the eighteenth century, the effort to imagine and displace the narrative through interesting filters was in fact rather frequent. Consider the pastoral novel, the historical novel, the fairy tale, fictive memoirs, the use of Greek and Roman mythology and history—all these genres presuppose writing from an imaginary fictional standpoint and staying with it throughout the text. The effort required might seem great to us, accustomed as we are to various forms of realism since Balzac, Flaubert, and others in the nineteenth century redefined the novel in a way that is still alive in our own times, but would seem normal in earlier times for “high” literature. To understand the particular originality of the naive outsider novel, we should situate the eighteenth century in its context of the preceding seventeenth century, whose esthetic system was built on “an aristocratic mold of analogy” as described by Erica Harth: “The various arts were unified by a set of correspondences between the visual and the verbal, the historical and the mythological, the ancient and the modern” (Ideology 17). There had to be a balance between the allegory and its content: “The allegory had to be decipherable to the restricted public [. . .]. If it was too obscure, it became pure diversion, enigma, depriving the representation of recognizable, imitative value. The absence of allegory, on the other hand, would have yielded a transparent, immediately recognizable truth” (Ideology 27). As heirs to this esthetic representational system, the eighteenthcentury writers devised allegories of their own, no longer based in some mythical or historical past, but set in a spatially and culturally distant world. The heroes, gods, and princes of myth and history were replaced by contemporary travelers who were still foreign and mysterious, but less reliant on specific cultural knowledge and more understandable, except by the readers who, as Montesquieu said, want to be fooled. The truth was still veiled artfully, but the veil was more surprising, amusing, and seductive. These texts represent an intermediate stage between the seventeenth-century esthetics and its disintegration at the end of the eighteenth century along with the Old Regime’s political and social structures. The genre passed from the scene along with the Old Regime, and some critics have speculated on the brevity of its life and wondered why the genre lost its appeal and newness. I 212 Conclusion would like to argue that its demise points to a deeper transformation of the relations between Europe and the remainder of the known world, a transformation that Edward Said’s analyses of orientalism can illuminate. Said says that during approximately the last third of the century, there was a change...