Through Strangers' Eyes: Fictional Foreigners in Old Regime France

Introduction: Ambiguous and Useful Strangers

1 Introduction Ambiguous and Useful Strangers The stranger is thus being discussed here, not in the sense often touched upon in the past, as the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather as the person who comes today and stays tomorrow. Georg Simmel “The Stranger” Suddenly a stranger enters. The mother was just about to seize a bronze bust and hurl it at her daughter; the father was in the act of opening the window in order to call a policeman. At that moment the stranger appears in the doorway. This means that the stranger is confronted with the situation as with a startling picture. Walter Benjamin “What Is Epic Theater?” Numerous imaginary strangers come calling from the ends of the earth to eighteenth-century Europe: from Turkey, China, Siam, Persia, Peru, Africa, and America, they come, observe, and criticize. The most famous of them were Usbek and Rica, Montesquieu’s Persian noblemen who flee persecution in their homeland and resolve to instruct themselves in European manners and culture. Since these are not real foreigners writing, but European authors, this is really an exercise of the imagination both about the home culture and about the foreigner’s culture that filters the home culture. Long before these fictive travelers came to European shores, some real newcomers 2 Introduction showed up: the three men brought back to France in 1562, the unnamed Cannibals who appear at the end of Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Des Cannibales.” Their brief appearance and their short but scathing remarks could not be more different from the elegant discursive letters of the eighteenth-century travelers—yet these Cannibals are their ancestors. Eighteenth-century writers were so fascinated by the strangers ’ appearance in Montaigne that they developed a flourishing topos, that of the outsider novel as cultural critique. In order to understand the stranger’s role in the eighteenth century, I will focus first on the outsider as described by Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin in the epigraphs of this Introduction. Then I will outline some tensions within the Enlightenment resulting from its own historical context, tensions that make the outsider a particularly attractive vehicle for cultural analysis. My interest is in exploring how the cultural outsiders were used in the eighteenth century, and how, despite their radical differences from their Cannibal ancestors, they continue to pose the same questions in the texts of Montesquieu, Françoise de Graffigny, Voltaire, and Claire de Duras. First, the stranger as described by Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin. Georg Simmel wrote a fascinating essay called “The Stranger” (“Der Fremde”) published in his Soziologie (1908) as an excursus, well known to sociologists, appended to his chapter 9 on “Space and Spatial Organization of Society.” First Simmel establishes who the stranger is: The stranger is thus being discussed here, not in the sense often touched upon in the past, as the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather as the person who comes today and stays tomorrow. He is [. . .] the potential wanderer : although he has not moved on, he has not quite overcome the freedom of coming and going. His position [. . .] is determined essentially by the fact that he has not belonged to it [the group] from the beginning, that he imports qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group [. . .]. (402) Simmel outlines several qualities of the stranger: first, that of being at once near and distant spatially, which introduces a certain tension: “A special proportion and reciprocal tension produce the particular, formal relation to the ‘stranger.’” Thus the stranger is both “near and far at the same time” (407; Simmel’s 3 Introduction emphasis). What attracts Simmel to the figure of the stranger is the spatial and emotional ambiguity rather than the specific identity of the stranger. And it is this ambiguity that makes the stranger interesting from an epistemological point of view: capable of looking afresh at social mores, and capable of interpreting and understanding them in detail. Neither a blank slate nor a fully acclimated person, neither a passer-by nor a settler, the stranger is for Simmel a “peculiar unity [. . .] composed of certain measures of nearness and distance,” having “a special proportion and reciprocal tension.” Walter Benjamin’s stranger also occupies an ambiguous space, the doorway, but Benjamin, who is discussing the mechanisms of drama, stresses rather the effect of the stranger as he makes his appearance...