The Progressive Poetics of Confusion in the French Enlightenment (review)

In a revision of representations of the Enlightenment as an age of clarity and order, John C. O'Neal examines the period's willingness to accept confusion as a necessary state in coming to know complex realities. O'Neal acknowledges that he is not the first to recognize the Enlightenment's questioning of categories, but, in connecting previously published essays and new material, he demonstrates that this current of confusion runs through plays, novels, essays, philosophical writing, medical treatises, and pornography, and argues that it is the source of the Enlightenment's intellectual and social progress. In Marivaux's plays, O'Neal examines the confusion of social classes as well as the inner confusion of the characters as their emotional states evolve. In Crébillon's Égarements du cœur et de l'esprit, the hero's confusion on entering the complex world of libertine Paris is a necessary phase in his education, but O'Neal also argues that the novel's confusion of narrative voice and time are formal means to create a confusion that encourages the reader's critique of the text. Similarly, his readings of novels by Voltaire and Diderot look at formal confusion introduced through interpolated narratives which teach the reader to critique optimism and fatalism as well as narrative omniscience. The chapter on the Lettre sur les aveugles not only explores Diderot's interest in the confusion of mind and matter but also argues that Diderot's confusing narrative and syntactical structures encourage the reader to query their own understanding of the text. In this section on body and soul, O'Neal confirms the exceptional place of Rousseau as a figure who both rejects and embraces Enlightenment confusion; whereas the vicaire savoyard section of Émile celebrates the soul as distinct from the body, O'Neal shows that the Rêveries connect the variable states to the variety of sensory experiences. Rousseau's ambiguous attitudes are also featured in the chapter on gender; he is an opponent of the mixing of men and women in the Lettre à d'Alembert, and a proponent of a shared sensibility that subsumes gender in the fusional relationship of Saint-Preux and Julie in La Nouvelle Héloïse. Consequently, O'Neal argues for the impact of Rousseauistic sensibility on the progress in attitudes towards gender from the persecution of the transgender man Mlle Rosette to the relative tolerance of the cross-dressing Chevalier d'Eon. In identifying confusion as a problem and solution in the psychiatric texts of Philippe Pinel, O'Neal praises Pinel's humanitarian approach to treating the mentally ill that reintegrates them into the category of the human. Although he allows that Sade's collapse of moral distinctions exemplifies the negative possibilities of confusion, O'Neal concludes with a positive assessment of the Enlightenment's use of confusion as essential to the period's humanitarian, democratic, and socially progressive legacy. While a tighter focus on the notions of physical and mental disability would have made this work more innovative, O'Neal firmly establishes his arguments in the intellectual underpinnings of the Enlightenment and thus invites other scholars to continue examining and interrogating his theses.