A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  Yet there is more at stake in the dialogues than clearing Jean-Jacques’s name. This is because, as the Frenchman reveals in the third dialogue, the author took his model for natural man from his own heart. To vindicate him is thus to confirm the natural goodness of man that serves as the basis for Rousseau’s philosophical system. More broadly, Rousseau makes it clear in his preface that it is not just Jean-Jacques but mankind itself that stands trial in the dialogues. The plot has forced him “to think badly of everyone surrounding [him],” because he views his contemporaries’ mistreatment of him as a repudiation of their humanity. They lack pity, an essential quality of humans in the state of nature, and fail to recognize their own nature in Jean-Jacques. If mankind is to be absolved, Rousseau must thus find at least one reader who is sympathetic to Jean-Jacques’s plight: “In whatever hands [the heavens] make these pages fall, if among those who read them there is still one heart of a man, that suffices for me, and I will never despise the human race enough to not find in this idea any subject of confidence and hope.” Without such a reader, Rousseau will be forced to draw the conclusion he eventually reaches in the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, that he is the sole remaining incarnation of man’s original nature in a world inhabited by automatons.

  Within the space of the dialogues, Rousseau continually tests the possibility for a sympathetic reading that would connect the reader to Jean-Jacques and to man’s original nature. In the first dialogue, the Rousseau figure describes his experience of reading Jean-Jacques’s works as one of self-recognition: “I felt in them such a connection to my own disposition that he alone among all the authors I had read was the painter of nature and the historian of the human heart. I recognized in his writings the man I found in myself.” Of course, this evocation of self-recognition is highly ironic, given how closely the two figures of Rousseau’s split authorial persona resemble each other. This makes it all the more imperative that the Frenchman be convinced to read the works, which he eventually does in the space between the second and third dialogues. When he in turn describes his experience of reading Jean-Jacques’s works, he takes their transformative effect on his soul as a means of gauging the author’s internal disposition when he wrote them: “consulting myself during and after those readings, I examined as you had wanted in what situation of the soul they placed me and left me, believing like you that this was the best way to perceive the Author’s disposition in writing them and the effect he sought to produce.” By looking within, the Frenchman has perceived not just the transformation of his own soul, but the resemblance between his transformed soul and that of the author.

  The dialogues thus end in communion, with the Rousseau figure and the Frenchman agreeing to accept the “precious deposit” of Jean-Jacques’s writings and to form an intimate society with him. The plot has been destroyed, not by a public reparation of Jean-Jacques’s reputation (a possibility explicitly rejected by the Frenchman), but by the recognition of a shared human nature within this small social group. The Rousseau figure concludes the dialogue with a peaceful evocation of Jean-Jacques’s coming death, an image that tempers the terrifying earlier evocations of him being buried alive by his enemies: “let us prepare this consolation for his final hour that his eyes be closed by friendly hands.” And yet the tranquillity of this ending is almost immediately destroyed by an autobiographical postscript in which Rousseau stages his desperate and ultimately failed search for a sympathetic reader for his book. His initial attempt to deposit the manuscript on the altar at Notre Dame is foiled by a locked gate surrounding the altar, an unhappy circumstance he interprets as a sign from God. He then entrusts the manuscript to several acquaintances—including the philosopher Etienne Bonnot de Condillac and the Englishman Brooke Boothby—who quickly prove themselves unworthy of his trust. Finally, he is reduced to handing out pamphlets titled “To Any Frenchman Who Still Loves Justice and Truth” to passersby on public promenades, in the hope that they will be able to reveal the mysteries of the plot to him.

  These increasingly desperate attempts to find a sympathetic reader who can confirm Rousseau’s innocence can be read as symptoms of an acute mental crisis. But they also give concrete literary expression to the central question that haunts his autobiographical project: how can he be sure that the nature he perceives within himself is shared by other people? In the dialogues, Rousseau stages sympathetic readings that bridge the gap between Jean-Jacques and his readers and result in mutual recognition and harmony. But in his postscript, he portrays himself as repeatedly encountering the same wall of hostile silence he faced in the last scene of the Confessions. Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques thus ends not on a note of social harmony but with Rousseau’s “final resolution” to renounce further self-justification and accept his fate at the hands of his enemies: “Let men do whatever they want from now on; after having done myself what I had to do, they can torment my life as much as they want, they won’t prevent me from dying in peace.” Once again, Rousseau evokes a peaceful death for himself, but this time it is a solitary one, with no friendly hands to close his eyes.

  Rousseau spent the last two years of his life writing the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, a work many consider his masterpiece. Unlike his previous autobiographical works, the Rêveries is neither a narrative account of his life nor an attempt at self-justification. It is a fragmentary collection of ten walks, or reveries, in which he poses the problem of self-knowledge from an intimate perspective and in isolation from other human beings: “But me, detached from them and from everything, what am I myself? Here is what remains for me to find out.” For the first time, a writer whose concept of authorship was marked by an ethics of public responsibility claims to write for himself alone: “I am making the same enterprise as Montaigne but with a goal entirely contrary to his: for he wrote his essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.” In fact, the choice to write for the self follows directly from Rousseau’s failed quest to find a sympathetic reader in the postscript to Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques. He underlines this continuity by placing the word donc (thus or so) in the famous opening sentence of the Rêveries: “So here I am, alone on the earth, no longer having any brother, kin, friend, society but myself.” In this way, the solitude of the Rêveries appears as the necessary consequence of the final resolution taken at the end of Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques. And yet even as Rousseau binds the Rêveries to the work preceding it, his renunciation of public authorship creates an unbridgeable gap between his last two works, setting the Rêveries apart from the rest of his corpus.

  The difference is palpable in the luminous, meditative style of the Rêveries and in Rousseau’s newfound modesty concerning self-knowledge. No longer do we find the brash assertions of intrinsic goodness and innocence so characteristic of his earlier autobiographical works. In the fourth walk, Rousseau begins a meditation on his lifelong devotion to truth by acknowledging that “the know thyself of the Temple at Delphi was not such an easy maxim to follow as I had believed in my Confessions.” In the sixth walk, he goes so far as to question his earlier view of himself as a virtuous man: “Here is what altered quite a bit the opinion I long held of my own virtue; for there is no virtue in following one’s penchants and in giving oneself the pleasure of doing good when they lead us in that direction.”

  Each walk brings a new occasion to “presume less of the self.” Self-exploration is a daily activity that must be constantly renewed, a lived practice of philosophy that Rousseau likens to an empirical science: “I will do on myself in a certain respect the operations that physicists do on air to know its daily state. I will apply the barometer to my soul, and these operations if well conducted and long repeated will be able to provide me with results just as certain as theirs. But I don’t extend my endeavor that far. I will content myself with keeping the register of the operations without seeking to reduce them to a system.” In Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, the Frenchman had insisted on the rigorous coherence of Jean-Jacques’s philosophical
system, based on the principle of man’s natural goodness. Here, Rousseau limits himself to a daily register of the states of his soul without seeking to reduce his empirical findings to a system. He is no longer compelled to offer his portrait as the basis for a comparative science of mankind, as he had done in the Confessions, or as an illustration of man’s natural goodness, as he had done in Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques. The work stands on its own as a record of the daily exercises of the body and soul, a “formless journal” of Rousseau’s reveries and botanical expeditions.

  The rejection of systematic philosophy also means that Rousseau’s anguished search for a reader who can confirm his own natural goodness has come to an end. After years of adopting the posture of the Cynic philosopher Diogenes, he has finally extinguished his lantern and given up his search: “When after having searched in vain ten years for a man it was necessary that I at last extinguish my lantern and cry out to myself, there aren’t any more. So I began to see myself alone on the earth and I understood that my contemporaries were nothing in relation to me but mechanical beings that only acted on outside impulses and whose actions I could only calculate according to the laws of movement.” With subtle irony, Rousseau defines his contemporaries according to the popular materialist philosophy of his day, referring implicitly to Julien Offray de la Mettrie’s man-machine and to his former friend Diderot’s materialist determinism. His own intimate science of man no longer needs to concern itself with such mechanistic creatures, but simply accepts the strangeness and solitude of the self and turns its attention within.

  But the Rêveries is not merely a solipsistic record of Rousseau’s inner life. It is also an intimate communion with nature, a register of his daily walks and the plants he studied as a passionate amateur botanist. Rousseau compares the work to his herbarium, a “journal of botanical expeditions that allows me to begin them once again with a new charm and produces the effect of an optical device that paints them again before my eyes.” Botany was the most popular of eighteenth-century sciences, and Carolus Linnaeus’s system of classification had made it more widely accessible than ever before. Rousseau treats this eighteenth-century fad with gentle irony in his fifth promenade, when he depicts himself traversing the island of Saint-Pierre with a volume of Linnaeus tucked under his arm, intent on describing “all the plants on the Island without omitting a single one in sufficient detail to occupy me for the rest of my days.”

  But in other passages he evokes his passion for botany in more serious terms, transforming this Enlightenment science into an intimate means of discovering the self in nature. His botanical expeditions often lead directly into the reveries he experiences in nature, an overlap he signals by referring interchangeably to the ten chapters of the Rêveries as walks and reveries. In the fifth walk, the tongue-in-cheek account of his descriptive ambitions gives way to a lyrical description of the reveries he experienced by the water: “When the evening was approaching I descended the summits of the Island and gladly went to sit down at the shore of the lake in some hidden refuge; there the sound of the waves and the agitation of the water fixing my senses and driving from my soul all other agitation plunged it into a delicious reverie where nighttime often surprised me without my having noticed it. The ebb and flow of the water, its sound continuous but swelling at intervals striking my ear and my eyes ceaselessly took the place of the internal movements the reverie extinguished in me and sufficed to make me feel with pleasure my existence, without taking the trouble to think.” In the experience of reverie, the communion between selves anxiously pursued in Rousseau’s earlier autobiographical works is abandoned in favor of a communion between self and nature. Rousseau may no longer recognize himself in the machinelike beings surrounding him, but he recognizes himself in nature, experiencing the sentiment of his existence as an expression of his natural place in the cosmos. It is this sentiment, paradoxically, that he most effectively communicated to his readers in a work intended for the self alone.

  Modern literature has not been able to dispense with the divided self created by Rousseau. This self was rooted in the Enlightenment attempt to reach the state of nature through conjectural history and has been linked to the foundation of the modern social sciences. But it was also a radically idiosyncratic self, whose shared nature with other humans could never be taken for granted or fully confirmed. The pathos of Rousseau’s autobiographical corpus comes from the deep internal divisions to which this self is subject: it perceives its original nature but knows that social corruption makes any return to the state of nature impossible. It seeks communion with other selves but constantly questions the possibility for sympathetic identification. Literature in Rousseau’s view cannot resolve these divisions, indeed it incarnates them as a practice rooted in humanity’s corrupt social state. But it is also the means of creating fictions of nature, and fictions of the self, which may provide the only possible basis for future social transformations. In this sense, the solitary walker traces a path forward for literature, and it is one we have been following ever since.

  WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING

  Note: All translations of passages quoted in this chapter are my own, from the editions of Rousseau and Voltaire listed below.

  Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc de. Oeuvres. Edited by Stéphane Schmitt. Paris: Gallimard, 2007.

  Epinay, Louise d’. Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant: Les pseudo-mémoires de Madame d’Epinay. Paris: Gallimard, 1951.

  Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.

  Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “Jean-Jacques Rousseau, fondateur des sciences de l’homme.” In Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 239–48. Neuchâtel: Editions de la Baconnière, 1962.

  Palissot, Charles. Les philosophes. Paris: Duchesne, 1760.

  Plato. Republic. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

  Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Oeuvres complètes. Edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. 5 vols. Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1959–95.

  Voltaire. Sentiment des citoyens. Edited by Frédéric Eigeldinger. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997.

  Rousseau’s complete translated works, including the first English translation of Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, are available in an excellent critical series in thirteen volumes, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, edited by Christopher Kelly and Roger Masters (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990–2010). Among several paperback editions of the Confessions, Angela Scholar’s translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) is both readable and scrupulous in its attention to detail. The most accurate and harmonious translation of the Rêveries is by Russell Goulbourne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), but those of Peter France (London: Penguin, 1979) and Charles Butterworth (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1992) are worth consulting as well.

  Although Rousseau’s Confessions is the best introduction to his life, readers seeking more objective accounts will profit from Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005); and the outstanding critical biography by Maurice Cranston, in three volumes: Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1754 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1754–1762 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), and The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

  The most influential interpretation of Rousseau’s writings, with an emphasis on the deep psychic structures of his personality, remains Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Christopher Kelly, Rousseau’s Exemplary Life (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987) interprets Rousseau’s autobiography in terms of his political philosophy, while his Rousseau as Author (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) sheds light on Rousseau’s idiosyncratic conception of authorship.
On the vexed question of Rousseau’s relationship to the Enlightenment, the most nuanced study is Mark Hulliung, The Autocritique of Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Arthur Melzer provides a cogent overview of Rousseau’s philosophical system in The Natural Goodness of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Readers interested in the cultural context surrounding Rousseau’s celebrity will profit from Robert Darnton’s classic article “Readers Respond to Rousseau,” in The Great Cat Massacre (New York: Vintage, 1985). Dena Goodman offers a bracing feminist critique of Darnton and other historians of the Enlightenment who echo Rousseau’s denigration of Enlightenment salon culture in The Republic of Letters (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).

  Realism, the Bildungsroman, and the Art of Self-Invention

  Stendhal and Balzac

  ALEKSANDAR STEYIĆ

  At the end of Honoré de Balzac’s Le père Goriot (Père Goriot, 1835) the novel’s hero, Eugène de Rastignac, stands at the summit of the Père Lachaise cemetery on the outskirts of Paris, gazing at the city that lies below. An ambitious but impoverished nobleman from the provinces, Eugène had arrived in the capital to study law. Instead, over the course of some three hundred pages, he is treated to a very different kind of education, learning about the intricate rules that govern aristocratic salons and witnessing the steady stream of petty intrigues, personal betrayals, and elaborate conspiracies that permeate fashionable society. In a word, he has learned what it takes to succeed in Paris. And just now, Rastignac has witnessed a particularly sordid episode of Parisian life, the funeral of the novel’s eponymous hero, Jean-Joachim Goriot.