by Steven Moore
The most popular and influential novel written during the final decade of the 17th century—and the harshest attack on Louis XIV’s despotic policies—was never intended for publication. The theologian and political theorist François de Fénelon (1651–1715) was the tutor of the king’s grandson and heir presumptive, the Duke of Bourgogne. For the prince’s edification, Fénelon in 1696 presented the 14-year-old with The Adventures of Telemachus (Les Aventures de Télémaque, fils d’Ulysse), a faux-Homeric epic in prose about the tutorship of Ulysses’s son by Mentor, actually the goddess Minerva in drag. As the prince and his tutor search the Mediterranean region for Ulysses, Mentor lectures Telemachus on responsible living and responsible kingship, using as irresponsible examples Pygmalion, king of Tyre, and the reformed king Idomeneus, who was driven from his native Crete and, after a bad start, developed an ideal state in Italy under Mentor’s direction. (The former represents the actual Louis XIV, the latter what Fénelon wanted him to be.) Running parallel to the events in the Odyssey, Telemachus’s adventures come to an end when he arrives in Ithaca just as his wandering father returns.
As a work of political theory, Telemachus is important; as a novel, not so much. To give Fénelon his due, his intention was to create an entertaining textbook for his student, not a novel for the reading public. (The manuscript was leaked in 1699 and caused a sensation, not to mention personal difficulties for Fénelon after the king saw it; an authorized edition did not appear until 1717, two years after the author’s death.) Nevertheless, it’s an interesting combination of several genres of fiction: the recent nouvelle historique, especially in its transhistorical superimposition of ancient history (myth, really) on current events; the roman héroïque with its flat characters and supersized adventures; the fantastic voyage (like those of Cyrano and Foigny); and utopian fiction. Regarding the latter, Mentor/Fénelon describes several ideal communities that reflect his dream for France: a simple agrarian country with a rigidly regulated social structure—each level with a color-coded uniform and no room for social mobility or individualism—free from pomp and nonutilitarian art, ruled over by a benevolent king and a strong parliament: a kind of Spartan Amish state that sounds sensible, efficient, and utterly boring.76
One genre left out of the mix—and perhaps understandably so, given the book’s 14-year-old target audience—is the love story, but Mentor’s repeated maledictions against women and “that shameful tyrant” Cupid sound like a 19th-century health pamphlet warning against masturbation. Telemachus runs a seductive gauntlet of temptresses beginning with Calypso, on whose island he and Mentor shipwreck just after Ulysses leaves, and continuing with some nymphs on her island, shameless hussies on Cyprus, and other young women impressed with Telemachus. Just as Ulysses suffers the wrath of Poseidon, Telemachus is pursued by a vengeful Venus, who is insulted at his rejection of her flirty handmaidens. Instead, Mentor encourages Telemachus to blow off steam in manly boxing and wrestling, despite the homosexual overtones: “Then they close foot against foot, and hand opposed to hand, clinging so close together that the two bodies seemed but one. . . . Telemachus, in order to improve his advantage, plies him hard; sometimes on one side, bending and shaking him incessantly, so that he had not a moment to recover his posture, till at last he threw him down and fell upon him.”77 In a clumsy move near the end, Fénelon has Telemachus admit out of the blue that he’s in love with Idomeneus’s previously unmentioned daughter Antiope, a modest maiden straight out of Scudéry’s central casting. Mentor says Telemachus needs his father’s approval to marry, but hints she would make an acceptable graduation present. Aside from allowing that schoolboy crush, Fénelon—an ordained priest and archbishop—has nothing good to say about love and sex, neither of which has a place in his sedate utopia.
Fénelon leavens his hard lessons with enough nonutilitarian descriptions of landscapes, mythological wonders, and battle scenes to qualify Telemachus as a novel rather than a pedagogical tract, and not surprisingly it appealed to 18th-century novelists as much as to political theorists like Montesquieu and Robespierre. Characters in novels by Marivaux and Prévost read Telemachus and imitate its protagonists. For Fielding, who mentions it in the preface to Joseph Andrews, Telemachus was the link between the ancient epic and his conception of the modern comic novel as an epic poem in prose. The Mentor–Telemachus relationship became a popular pairing in novels, though not always respectfully (see Voltaire’s Pangloss and Candide, Fielding’s Parson Adams and Joseph Andrews and/or Partridge and Tom Jones, and similar pairings in translator Smollett’s own novels). Telemachus showed philosophers that the novel could be an attractive vehicle for popularizing their views, and showed sniffy detractors that the novel need not be a womanish entertainment but could teach youth strong moral values. (Throughout the 18th century, Telemachus was a popular gift for older children.) At times Fénelon expresses himself with Voltairic scorn, as when the narrator gives this gods’-eye view of our planet:
they saw the globe of the earth as no bigger than a little heap of mud; the immense seas seemed to them only some splashes of water with which this piece of mud is slightly soaked: the largest kingdoms are but as grains of sand upon the surface of this mud; and the vastest multitudes, and most numerous armies, appear but as ants contending about a blade of grass on this piece of mud. The immortal gods laugh at the most serious affairs with which weak mortals are agitated, and count them no better than children’s play. What men call grandeur, glory, power, and deep policy, in the eye of these supreme divinities is nothing more than misery and weakness. (116)78
But the novel’s lessons on commendable virtues like honesty, simplicity, moderation, sobriety, courage, patience, and modesty—not to mention its nascent republicanism—gave it wide appeal. Rousseau admired Telemachus immensely; it’s praised in Julie (part 2, letter 18) and is the only novel besides Robinson Crusoe that he allows his Emile to read. Moritz’s miserable young Anton Reiser loves it. Telemachus did not play the role Fénelon intended—the Duke of Bourgogne died before he could inherit the throne and put it to use—but the novel inspired more people than he could imagine.
Fénelon had no intention of joining “the ‘lower depths’ reserved for those who composed novels,” as one of his contemporaries charged.79 Which is just as well, for there was a certain amount of floundering in those lower depths at the beginning of the 18th century. “The situation of the novel, in terms of theory,” writes English Showalter in The Evolution of the French Novel, “can be summed up as chaotic” (65). Historical novels and pseudomemoirs were still popular, but fidelity to the historical record cramped the novelist’s imagination; on the other hand, too much imagination, it could be argued, took wing in the charming but insubstantial fairy tales then in vogue, which (despite the subtle social criticism in some) were too redolent of the nursery to satisfy readers with more mature tastes. The latter trend was reinforced by the dazzling arrival in 1704 of the first volumes of Antoine Galland’s translation of The Arabian Nights, which opened new hatches for escapist fiction and provided a magic carpet for a host of hacks to hop on and imitate. A fastidious bibliophile of the time (with a fondness for alliteration) could be forgiven for feeling that French fiction had fallen into frivolity, first with La Fontaine’s Fables (1668–94), followed by female-formulated fairy tales, Fénelon’s faux-Homeric fiction, and now fanciful fabrications from far Araby. Fatras (balderdash), our next author called them. Fighting fire with fire, a Frenchified fabulist with a very unFrench name decided to reorient this phase of French fiction by refashioning these fantasies for more sophisticated readers.
Anthony Hamilton (1646–1720) was born in Ireland but spent most of his life in France, where his Catholic family moved after the beheading of Charles I in 1649. A witty, well-read member of the aristocracy, he didn’t think much of the flood of fairy tales that had displaced the stately river of 17th-century French novels culminating with Telemachus, and since the reading public’s enthusiastic embrace of The Arabian Nights p
romised more of the same, “he set himself to accomplish for the fairy-tale what Cervantes had accomplished for the tales of chivalry,”80 namely, to mock their weaknesses and to offer a more satisfying alternative.
His first sally was The Ram (La Bélier, 1705), a short novel that metafictionally mocks fairytale conventions while unfolding a shaggy-dog story to account for the name “Pontalie” that Hamilton’s sister, Mme de Gramont, gave to her estate outside Versailles. (Hamilton wrote [in French] for his sister and her friends, not for publication; most of his works circulated in manuscript and were published posthumously.) Inventing a beautiful young woman named Alie, whose castle a giant suitor named Moulineau threatens to storm via a magic bridge (pont in French, voilà Pont-Alie), Hamilton spins a delightfully convoluted tale set in 8th-century France involving Alie’s druid father, his nemesis Merlin, a shapeshifting gnome named Poinçon, talking animals, a magic ring, an unreadable spellbook, flying chariots, unicorns, a knife that writes cryptic warnings, and some surrealistic metamorphoses, among other wonders—a vigorous workout that dances circles around what Clark calls the “overdressed, powdered and beribboned” fairy tales of Mme d’Aulnoy & Cie (233). But it’s the self-conscious telling of the tale, more than the tale itself, that enchants us. Hamilton begins in verse (like some of Perrault’s tales) for the first 15 pages, pretends he is adapting an antiquarian account by Jean Mabillon (a contemporary French Benedictine monk who wrote hagiography, thereby implying his saints’ lives were as fanciful as fairy tales), and informs us that Alie, like Subligny’s mock Clelia, too easily identifies with storybook heroines:
She thought herself—so strange her fate—
A heroine of the Arabian Nights—
A book which she’d devour’d of late;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And her memory being stuft
With this Arabian balderdash,
She thought that she, to save her head,
Must tell her lord some kind of trash;81
—which introduces the first of the novel’s many interpolated tales, a literary convention Hamilton has great fun with when the giant’s factotum, the ram of the title (actually the transformed son of Merlin and Alie’s true love), offers to tell him the extended “Story of Pertharites and Ferandina.” “After musing for some time,” à la a La Calprenède character, “the ram begun thus:
“From the time the white fox had received his wounds, the queen never failed to pay him a visit every day.”
“My woolly friend,” said the giant, interrupting him, “not a word of all this do I comprehend. If you would have the kindness to begin by the beginning I should feel obliged to you,82 for I have always found that stories which begin thus in the middle, have no other effect than that of throwing the mind into a state of hopeless confusion.”
“Well,” said the ram, “I consent, though it be against custom, to put everything in chronological order; . . .” (474).
Thereafter the unliterary giant continues to interrupt him, criticizing the “customs” of storytelling and drawing our attention to contrived conventions and clichéd plots. (“You know how all these stories end,” bleats the ram, skipping the conclusion [508].) One upset character is brought “to his senses by the process usually adopted in romances towards fainting heroes and dumb-foundered [sic] divinities—namely, by plentiful sluicings of cold water” (502). The same character in a calmer mood “could not resist talking to himself, not withstanding his great objection to this mode of proceeding in books” (497), and when the gnome tells a story near the end, he blames his faulty memory for several plot potholes. There are some sylphs whom the narrator suspects are “not true sylphs, but mere village maidens in disguise” (520), pulling aside the curtain to expose the mundane reality behind some fairy tales. (Some of the popular ones in French salons were based on court anecdotes, and Clark informs us that many of the characters and incidents in The Ram were based on Mme de Gramont’s neighbors in Pontalie.)
Exposing the devices of fairy tales, Hamilton uses the same conventions to create a fiction more suitable for adults. There is some nudity in The Ram, male and female, and there are obvious phallic overtones in the subplot about a sorceress named the Mother of Sheaths and her tireless efforts to find the right knife to fit her sheath. Hamilton darkens the fairytale world with several mysterious, occult elements—like the giant statue of Cleopatra in which the gnome is imprisoned and which leads to “the bowels of the earth” (463); in this regard, The Ram anticipates Gothic fiction and, not surprisingly, Hamilton was a great favorite of English writers like Horace Walpole, William Beckford, and Matthew “Monk” Lewis (who translated one of Hamilton’s other novels). There are even some touches that anticipate the decadent French novel of the 19th century: “Grotesque figures, strange musical instruments, Chinese birds, and a thousand different sorts of Indian flowers, formed the chief subjects of the ornaments” (525), which would be at home in the collection of Huysmans’s Des Esseintes. In the poetic prologue, Hamilton had promised the reader, “Before the story finds a close, / I can assure you, you shall see / A touch of actual sorcery” (446), and in fine metafictional form, that promise applies both to the story’s climax and to Hamilton’s own feat of literary sorcery.
Turning from the French fairy tale to The Arabian Nights, Hamilton produced between 1710 and 1715 two short novels that rewrite the conclusion to Galland’s ongoing translation (which wouldn’t conclude until 1717). Hamilton’s biographer Ruth Clark says that after he “twitted the ladies at court . . . on the avidity with which they read each succeeding installment [of Galland’s translation], they retorted by defying him to compose something in a similar strain” (241). In a footnote, she supplies an amusing alternate origin of the the first of these two novels, The History of May-flower (L’Histoire de Fleur d’Épine):
The editor of the first English translation of Fleur d’Épine tells an ingenious but unauthenticated story in connexion with the name of the hero. “The conversation,” he says, “happening to turn in a company in which he [Hamilton] was present, on the Arabian Nights Entertainments which were just published, every one highly commended the book; many seemed to hint at the difficulty of writing that species of composition. ‘Nothing can be more easy,’ replied Count Hamilton, ‘and as proof I will venture to write a Circassian tale, after the manner of the Arabian Nights Entertainment, on any subject you can mention.’ ‘Fiddlestick,’ replied the other. ‘You have hit it,’ said Count Hamilton, ‘and I promise you that I will produce a tale in which Fiddlestick [Tarare] shall be the principal hero.’ In a few days he finished his tale, which he called Fleur d’Épine.” (251n1)
It surely took him longer than a few days, for the novella displays some elaborate plotting and ingenious conceits. It begins the morning after Shahrazad has finished the 999th night of her narrative marathon; her sister Dunyazad warns her that her last story was boring and thus she risks losing her head unless she can come up with something better. For the 1,000th night, Dunyazad suggests she relate “The Story of the Pyramid and the Golden Horse”—a tale in verse by Hamilton, only a portion of which survives—and for the all-important 1,001st night, Dunyazad volunteers to pinch-hit and tell her “dolt” of a husband a story “more extraordinary than all you have related.”83 It is indeed a fabulous performance, in which a clever young man rescues the kingdom of Kashmir from a princess with lethally beautiful eyes by stealing and returning to the sorceress Serena four treasures, including her abducted daughter May-flower, with whom Tarare—unfortunately called “Pooh-pooh” in the English translation—falls in love and to whom he remains devoted even though she wastes away from a rival witch’s spell. It’s all too complicated to summarize, especially the way Dunyazad weaves her tale in and out of the frame narrative, but it’s amazing to watch how Hamilton introduces marvelous but seemingly random incidents that don’t become significant until backstories are filled in near the end of the novella. Tarare is as resourcefu
l as any Arabian adventurer—to avoid the princess’s deadly gaze he invents sunglasses, their first appearance in literature, I believe—though May-flower is more like a languishing Western heroine than a cunning Eastern one. Hamilton downplays the Islamic atmosphere of the original tales, but he certainly fulfills his promise to write something as good as any tale in The Arabian Nights, and obviously had fun doing so. “Of what marvellous assistance is a little magic to unravel the meshes of a plot,” he says of Near Eastern narratology, “and bring about the end of a tale” (420).
But Hamilton topped himself with his ultimate Arabian novel, The Four Facardins (Les Quatre Facardins), which Saintsbury praises for scenes “which reduce the wildest of the Nights to simple village tales” (319). While The History of May-flower is a fairly faithful imitation of an Arabian tale, The Four Facardins adds elements of knight-errantry into the mix by way of a narrator who is a cross between Cervantes’ eccentric knight and Sorel’s extravagant shepherd. May-flower concludes with the fiction-addicted sultan turning on the 1,002nd night to Dunyazad’s lover, the prince of Trebizond, and commanding “him to relate what adventures had befallen him since that of of the Pyramid and the Golden Horse” (444), which Shahrazad had narrated on the 1,000th night. The Four Facardins begins there as Trebizond—whose given name, suggested by a parrot, is Facardin (Hamilton’s spelling of Fakhr al-Din)—promises to tell a “true” account of his most recent adventure. A vain Arabian knight who sallies forth accompanied by a scribe to record his adventures for future publication, Facardin #1 immediately encounters Facardin #2, another adventuring knight, who begins narrating his outlandish exploits (lion-hunting with virgins, surrealistic encounters on Mount Atlas) until an impatient Dunyazad interrupts and tells F1 to get back to his own story. Hearing about but declining an adventure in King Fortinbras’s Denmark—which would place our story shortly after those famously tragic events in Elsinore—F1 is enticed to a crystal city beneath the Red Sea where a jealous genie watches over his promiscuous wife, Cristalline the Curious, who then tells her story. Turns out she’s the unnamed woman who forced Sultan Shahriyar and his brother to have sex with her in the frame tale of Galland’s translation (see pp. 8–9 of Arabian Nights’ Entertainments) and has also had an underwater affair with Facardin #3 (unrelated to the other two). F1 escapes back to land, where he hears the curious story of Princess Mousseline the Serious. (Both Cristalline and Mousseline have nude scenes in this nouvelle galante.) After over a hundred pages of dizzying complications, eye-popping wonders, and tales within tales within tales, Hamilton halts: “But the remainder of the Prince of Trebizond’s adventures may as well be deferred, till you read the second part of the memoirs.”84