A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  So, the manuscript of Le neveu de Rameau may now safely have come to rest in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, but the narrator, “Me,” “Him,” the philosophe, the pauvre diable, and the gueux are still very much on the move. Diderot’s exploration of a power dynamic, his comic demonstration of a dynamics of power, has lost nothing of its ability to unsettle. Indeed, perhaps the most important things unsettled by this work of the major figure of the French Enlightenment are the cherished claims, self-representations, and myths of the Enlightenment itself.

  WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING

  Note: All translations of passages quoted in this chapter are my own.

  d’Alembert, Jean Le Rond. Essai sur la société des gens de lettres avec les grands. In vol. 4 of Œuvres. 5 vols. Paris, 1821–22.

  Chambers, Ephraim. Cyclopædia: An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. 2 vols. London: James and John Knapton et al., 1728.

  Dictionnaire universel françois et latin. Trévoux, 1721.

  Diderot, Denis. Les bijoux indiscrets. Edited by Antoine Adam. Paris: Gallimard, 1993.

  ———. Le fils naturel. Edited by Jean Goldzink. Paris: Flammarion, 2005.

  ———. Jacques le fataliste. Edited by Yves Belaval. Paris: Gallimard, 2006.

  ———. Jacques the Fatalist. Translated with an introduction and notes by David Coward. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

  ———. Lettre sur les aveugles. Edited by Marian Hobson and Simon Harvey. Paris: Flammarion, 2000.

  ———. Letter on the Blind. In Kate E. Tunstall, Blindness and Enlightenment: An Essay, with New Translations of Diderot’s “Letter on the Blind” and La Mothe Le Vayer’s “Of a Blind Man.” New York: Continuum, 2011.

  ———. Le neveu de Rameau. Edited by Marian Hobson. Geneva: Droz, 2013.

  ———. Rameau’s Nephew. Translated by Kate E. Tunstall and Caroline Warman. Cambridge: Open Books, 2014.

  ———. Pensées philosophiques. Edited by Jean-Claude Bourdin. Paris: Flammarion, 2007.

  ———. Pensées sur l’Interprétation de la nature. Edited by Colas Duflo. Paris: Flammarion, 2005.

  ———. La religieuse. Edited by Florence Lotterie. Paris: Flammarion, 2009.

  ———. The Nun. Translated with an introduction and notes by Russell Goulbourne. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

  ———. Le rêve de d’Alembert. Edited by Colas Duflo. Paris: Flammarion, 2003.

  ———. D’Alembert’s Dream. In “Rameau’s Nephew” and “D’Alembert’s Dream.” Translated with introductions by Leonard Tancock. London: Penguin, 1976.

  Diderot, Denis, and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, eds. Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des arts, des sciences et des métiers. 28 vols. Paris: Briasson, David l’aîné, Le Breton, and Durand, 1751–72. Available at ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu.

  Foucault, Michel. History of Madness. Edited by Jean Khalfa. Translated by Jonathan Murphy. New York: Routledge, 2006.

  Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Rameaus Neffe. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1967.

  Grimm, Friedrich Melchior, and Denis Diderot. Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique. Paris: Garnier, 1877–82.

  Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller, with an analysis of the text and foreword by J. N. Findlay. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

  James, Robert, A Medicinal Dictionary. 3 vols. London: Printed for T. Osborne and sold by J. Roberts, 1743–45.

  MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1981.

  Molière. Les femmes savantes. In vol. 2 of Œuvres. Edited by Georges Forestier and Claude Bourqui. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 2010.

  ———. Tartuffe. In vol. 2 of Œuvres. Edited by Georges Forestier and Claude Bourqui. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 2010.

  Moreau, Jacob-Nicolas. Nouveaux mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des Cacouacs. In L’affaire des cacouacs: Trois pamphlets contre les philosophes des lumières, edited by Gerhardt Stenger. Saint Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint Etienne, 2004.

  Palissot, Charles. Petites lettres sur de grands philosophes. N.p., 1757.

  ———. Les philosophes. In “La comédie des philosophes” et autres textes, edited by Olivier Ferret. Saint Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint Etienne, 2002.

  Prévost, Abbé. Manon Lescaut. Edited by Jean Sgard. Paris: Flammarion, 1995.

  ———. Manon Lescaut. Translated with an introduction and notes by Angela Scholar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

  Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Les Confessions. Edited by Bernard Gagnebin, Raymond Marcel, and J.-B. Pontalis. Paris: Folio, 2009.

  ———. Confessions. Translated by Angela Scholar, with an introduction and notes by Patrick Coleman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

  ———. Discours sur les origines et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes. Edited by Blaise Bachofen and Bruno Bernardi. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.

  Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of. An Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit. In Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, edited by Philip Ayres. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

  Voltaire. Le café ou l’Ecossaise. In Zaïre; Le fanatisme ou Mahomet le prophète; Nanine ou l’Homme sans préjugé; Le café ou l’Ecossaise, edited by Jean Goldzink. Paris: Flammarion, 2004.

  Important studies of the sociocultural landscape of eighteenth-century Paris include Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Didier Masseau, Les ennemis des philosophes: L’anti-philosophie au temps des lumières (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000); Antoine Lilti, Le monde des salons: Sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2005); Geoffrey Turnovsky, The Literary Market: Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); and Louise Shea, The Enlightenment Cynic: Diogenes in the Salon (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). For Darnton’s critics, see Haydn T. Mason, ed., The Darnton Debate (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999); and for the view of the salons that Lilti is criticizing, see Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). On the continuing debates over Enlightenment ideas and values, see Kate E. Tunstall, ed., Self-Evident Truths? Human Rights and the Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 2012).

  Stimulating and useful work on Diderot and the Enlightenment, and on Rameau’s Nephew in particular, includes Jean Starobinski, Diderot: Un diable de ramage (Paris: Gallimard, 2012); Marian Hobson, Diderot and Rousseau: Networks of Enlightenment, trans. Kate E. Tunstall and Caroline Warman (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2011); Kate E. Tunstall, Blindness and Enlightenment: An Essay (New York: Continuum, 2011); Colas Duflo, Diderot philosophe (Paris: Champion, 2003); Pierre Hartmann, Diderot: Les figurations du philosophe (Paris: José Corti, 2003); Walter E. Rex, Diderot’s Counterpoints: The Dynamics of Contrariety in His Major Works (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998); and Wilda Anderson, Diderot’s Dream (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). For the Marxist tradition of reading Diderot, see Julia Simon, Mass Enlightenment: Critical Studies in Rousseau and Diderot (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). There are two journals devoted to Diderot scholarship, Diderot Studies (1949–) and Recherches sur Diderot et l’Encyclopédie (1986–). For a recent état présent of Diderot scholarship in both French and English, see French Studies, 67, no. 3 (2013).

  Rousseau’s First Person

  JOANNA STALNAKER

  There is a certain irony in the fact that Jean-Jacques Rousseau is celebrated as the inventor of modern autobiography. Like many Enlightenment thinkers, Rousseau was obsessed with origins, and he offered in his Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men) one of the most influential accounts of natural man ever
written. But he was acutely aware that the search for origins is illusory and that the state of nature as he described it was a fiction, “more suited to illuminating the nature of things than to showing their true origin.” His attitude toward the originary status of his autobiography was equally ambiguous. It is no accident that he borrowed his title, the Confessions, from Saint Augustine’s tale of sin and redemption and that he took his metaphor of self-portraiture from Montaigne’s Essais. Yet even as he evoked these famous models, he proclaimed the uniqueness of his work: “Here is the only portrait of a man, painted exactly after nature and in all its truth, that exists and will probably ever exist.” As he presented it, the Confessions was neither an imitation of prior models nor a point of origin for future works, but a singular creation, an “enterprise that had no example and whose execution will have no imitators.” At the same time, it was a “first article of comparison for the study of men,” a work that laid the groundwork for the study of human nature Rousseau had called for in his Discours sur l’inégalité. As readers, we are thus faced with an enigma: how can a unique portrait of a man unlike any other provide the basis for a comparative science of man in the Enlightenment tradition? This enigma lies at the heart of Rousseau’s literary and philosophical project, whose coherence depends on the articulation of two different figures of the first person: Jean-Jacques and natural man.

  Rousseau’s place in the history of modern literature has always been complicated by his dual association with Enlightenment universalism and the emergence of the modern self. His natural man has been understood in the context of Enlightenment conjectural histories tracing the passage from the state of nature to civil society. The first person of Rousseau’s autobiographical writings, in contrast, has been identified with the earliest stirrings of Romanticism in France, despite the fact that these writings predate the radical break in historical and political consciousness created by the French Revolution. Rousseau’s sensitive descriptions of nature, his portrayal of himself as a solitary figure proscribed by society, and his corresponding insistence on the singularity of his perspective have all been taken as evidence that his autobiographical writings look forward to the Romantics far more than they belong to the philosophy of their day.

  But to understand Rousseau’s contribution to modern literature, we must move beyond this artificial split between Enlightenment philosophy and pre-Romantic literature. The modern self he depicts in the three works of his autobiographical corpus is in fact deeply rooted in the Enlightenment tradition of conjectural histories of natural man. Rousseau insists on this link in his autobiographical dialogues, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques (Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques), when the Frenchman defends the vilified author Jean-Jacques by explaining that the latter took his model for nature from his own heart: “Where can the painter and apologist of nature, today so disfigured and maligned, have drawn his model, if not from his own heart? He described nature as he felt himself to be.” What this means is that Rousseau’s self-depiction is inseparable from his philosophical account of humans in the state of nature. Jean-Jacques and natural man are two figures of Rousseau’s first person, both of whom are called on to illustrate his “great principle that nature made man happy and good but that society depraves him and makes him miserable.” If Rousseau is central to the history of modern literature, it is because he invented a modern self that was fundamentally divided against itself. This self longed for a lost nature that would connect it to other people and to its original goodness, but it nonetheless remained fully aware that its only hope would come not from a return to the state of nature but from the transformation of corrupt social practices, central among which was literature itself.

  Rousseau probably had no inkling of his great autobiographical project when, in 1753, he answered the Dijon Academy’s question about the origins of inequality among men. He had already made a name for himself as the prize-winning author of the Discours sur les sciences et les arts (Discourse on the Sciences and Arts), in which he defied his friends the encyclopedists by asserting that the sciences and arts corrupt morals. But as a Genevan autodidact of obscure social origins, he was in no position to assume he would one day become an international celebrity whose autobiography would capture the public imagination. It is nonetheless striking to see the same themes of self-knowledge that animate his autobiographical corpus appear in the opening pages of the Discours sur l’inégalité. Rousseau opens his preface with the famous inscription at the Temple of Delphi, “know thyself,” insisting that we must look within before we can hope to understand the origin of social ills. In a savvy rhetorical move, he quotes the renowned naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon to lend authority to his claim that self-knowledge is the only true basis for the science of man. Buffon was an empiricist who devoted the many volumes of his best-selling Histoire naturelle (Natural History) to the precise description of everything under the sun, from quadrupeds to human racial varieties to minerals. But he shared Rousseau’s belief that our tendency to view nature as something outside of ourselves poses a serious obstacle to the study of man. In Buffon’s view, if our knowledge about man is lacking, it is because we “rarely make use of that inner sense that reduces us to our true dimensions and separates from us everything that is not ourselves.” By quoting these lines, Rousseau situates his inquiry in the tradition of Enlightenment natural history, while also underlining the special problem posed by the study of man. He did not eschew empiricist description in his effort to uncover our original human nature: the lengthy footnotes of the Discours sur l’inégalité are stuffed with European travelers’ descriptions of “primitive” peoples in support of his claims. But at a time when anthropology did not yet exist as a scientific discipline, he insisted that introspection must serve as the primary basis for the study of man. It was this aspect of his work that would lead the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss to recognize Rousseau as the founder of the human sciences.

  To look within and find the original human nature is no simple task, however. Rousseau captures the challenge with an image borrowed from Plato’s Republic, that of Glaucus, whose original mortal image was disfigured by his years spent under the sea after he was transformed into an immortal sea-god. Socrates uses this image to convey the difficulty of perceiving the beauty of the human soul, “marred by communion with the body and other miseries,” whereas Rousseau uses it to convey the difficulty of perceiving natural man disfigured by society. But Rousseau introduces a crucial change in the image: unlike Plato, he refers not to Glaucus himself but to his statue, as if to suggest that what we are after is an image of natural man rather than the thing itself. This is consistent with Rousseau’s acknowledgment that the state of nature may never have existed at all: “For it is no small undertaking to untangle what is original and what is artificial in the current nature of man, and to know well a state that no longer exists, may never have existed, will probably never exist, and of which it is nonetheless necessary to have accurate notions in order to judge properly our current state.” Paradoxically, Rousseau insists that even if the state of nature never existed, we must still gain an accurate picture of it to judge our current social ills. He criticizes natural law theorists such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke for failing to reach the “true” state of nature and for applying “ideas to the state of nature that they took from society.” Curiously, it is the fictionality of Rousseau’s state of nature that guarantees its distance from society and hence its accuracy. But what is the basis for such a fiction, and how can it be considered accurate if the state of nature never existed in the first place?

  There is no easy answer to this question. One way to understand Rousseau’s state of nature is as a thought experiment, designed not to uncover the past but to illuminate and transform the present. Rousseau himself is entirely explicit about the hypothetical nature of the history he proposes: “Let us begin then by setting aside all the facts, for they have no bearing on the question. We must not take the inquiries in
to which we enter on this subject for historical truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional arguments; more suited to elucidating the nature of things than to showing their true origin, and resembling those that our physicists make every day on the formation of the world.” In telling a conjectural history (or story) of man’s passage from nature to society, Rousseau is less interested in our actual past than in our present state. Above all, he seeks to effect a change in his readers’ feelings about their present condition by instilling in them a nostalgic desire for an irrecoverable past: “There is, I sense, an age at which the individual man would like to stop; you will search for the age at which you would wish that your species had stopped. Discontented with your present state, for reasons that announce even greater discontentments to your unhappy posterity, perhaps you would like to be able to retrograde.” Many of Rousseau’s readers have taken this to mean that he was a primitivist. As Voltaire wrote in a letter to Rousseau following the publication of the Discours sur l’inégalité, “one is overcome by the desire to walk on all fours when reading your work. But since I have been out of the habit for over sixty years, I feel that unfortunately it is impossible for me to pick it up again, and I will leave this natural attitude to those more worthy of it than you or me.” A few years later, a popular antiphilosophical play by Charles Palissot depicted Rousseau walking on all fours and chomping on lettuce as he advocated a return to the state of nature.