by Steven Moore
Montesquieu was as aghast as Usbek at what was happening in France at the time, but rather than write some sort of “Inquiry into the Present State of France” that would be read and nitpicked by a handful of intellectuals, he had the brilliant idea of staging his complaints in “a sort of novel” (as he wrote in his 1754 afterword), which not only reached a much wider audience but allowed him to get away with things inappropriate to a serious political treatise, and I don’t just mean steamy scenes in a seraglio. By filtering his views through foreigners unfamiliar with European customs, he could let them make outrageous remarks on religious practices, political processes, marriage customs, manners, pedantry, the media, and other aspects of Western culture, all while innocently claiming to be merely the translator. And by using two Persians with different temperaments, Montesquieu could vary his cultural critique. Young Rica is merely bemused by the exotic customs of the natives at first; eventually he goes native and dresses in French fashion and accepts their attitude toward women, but as he learns more about French civilization his criticism becomes more pointed. He aims at perennial targets of satire— vanity, greed, religious zealotry, political corruption, pedantry, provincialism—which millennia of mockery have not been able to eradicate and never will. For the more philosophical Usbek, the differences between oriental and occidental customs drive him to investigate their origins, specifically those of law and religion, in order to assess their validity. (His religious correspondents tell him to quit asking questions and just follow orders given in the Quran.) Usbek can’t shake some of his cultural conditioning (the superiority of Islam and the harem system), but his intellectual curiosity and willingness to reconsider the very foundations of civilization convey the attitudes of more and more intellectuals at the dawn of the Enlightenment. Finally, alternating between these two outsiders allowed Montesquieu to make facetious juxtapositions, as in letters 24 (by Rica) and 26 (by Usbek), where Louis XIV’s pursuit of the Jansenist sect is paired with Usbek’s recollection of his pursuit of reluctant Roxane in the harem.105 (The Jansenists got screwed under Louis’ persecution.) Neither Usbek nor Rica question Persian customs, which are implicitly criticized throughout the novel – not from any imperialist orientalism on Montesquieu’s part, but from his evenhanded condemnation of all irrational, unjust systems. He is an equal-opportunity critic.
His decision to let foreign visitors comment on things they don’t understand not only yields comedy gold—Persian Letters is very amusing, despite the tragic plot—but provides a textbook example of what the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky called “enstrangement,” making familiar things strange in order to revivify our habitual (hence deadened) way of seeing things. When Rica attends a play, for example, he notices as much activity in the audience stalls and boxes as on the stage and assumes that’s the reason people go to plays. (Shklovsky cites a similar act of enstrangement in War and Peace, in which Tolstoy describes an opera from the viewpoint of someone unfamiliar with them in order to ridicule the spectacle [Theory of Prose, 8–9].) For the first readers of Persian Letters, it must have been shocking, if not downright insulting, to hear Rica and Usbek refer to Catholic priests as “dervishes,” the Bible as “their Koran,” and their pope as a “magician” who can “make the king believe that three are only one, or else that the bread one eats is not bread, or that the wine one drinks is not wine, and a thousand other things of the same kind” (24).
The equally brilliant decision to use the epistolary form allowed Montesquieu maximum freedom to pursue his dark satire. The epistolary novel was not new to French fiction; Hélisenne de Crenne wrote the first one back in 1539 (Personal and Invective Letters), and in 1669 French readers devoured the anonymous Letters of a Portuguese Nun (Lettres portugaises), a five-letter cri du coeur written not, as it seems, by a nun to her absent French lover, but as a literary exercise by the Comte de Guilleragues (1628–85).106 Among what one critic calls the “experimental novels” of Edme Boursault (1638–1701) are two short epistolary narratives: Lettres de Babet (1669), about “a merchant’s daughter and her literarily inclined lover,”107 and Letters from a Lady of Quality to a Chevalier (Treize lettres amoureuses d’une dame à un cavalier, 1700), dramatic epistles from a married woman to her lover before and after they consummate their affair. The latter is especially remarkable: the unnamed woman feels she can be more sincere in correspondence than in conversation (mere gallantry, she complains) and treats letter-writing as a form of love-making. (We don’t get his half of the correspondence, but she keeps encouraging him to open up more.) The naked honesty of private correspondence also causes her to become rather unhinged when she suspects her lover has fallen for another woman:
Is her beauty, or her wit, suppose them both superior to mine, a sufficient counterbalance for the merit of my love? She is ignorant of half of your excellencies, nor has solidity enough to weigh them as she ought; she does not—can not love like me―What have I said?—how vain is such a thought?—Not love like me!—Why should she not? Has she not eyes?—not ears?—Have you not perfections easily distinguished?―Yes, you both are equally enamour’d! You are divinely charming!—she susceptible!—You have made known your love!―she listens―Your quality may claim!—her fortune may deserve!—All things conspire against me—my ruin is determined! my dream is true. Oh! that I could cease to think―to live―to be.―Distraction!―Death!―Hell yields not half my tortures!――108
(Curiously, the guy isn’t scared off by this crazed outburst; then again, he still hopes to have sex with her; he doesn’t stick around very long afterward.) There’s a great line in the 13th and final letter: “Virtue is not virtue till ’tis tempted,” the mainspring of much fiction of this period. But the epistolary novel closest to Montesquieu’s (and the most obvious model) is The Turkish Spy (L’Espion du Grand Seigneur, 1684–86), written by an Italian journalist based in Paris named Giovanni Paolo Marana (1642–93).109 Over a 45-year-year period a Muslim named Mahmut reports back to his superiors in Turkey on French culture, politics, and religion, much as Usbek does. The letters are somewhat lugubrious and paranoid—befitting literature’s first spy novel—but for its French and English readers it opened their eyes to their insularity, popularized Cartesian rationality, and introduced ideas that lit the way for the Enlightenment.
Aside from The Turkish Spy, earlier epistolary novels confined themselves to one or two correspondents dealing with a private affair; Montesquieu expands the form considerably with a variety of correspondents writing over a long period and addressing both private and public matters, which allows him both to make comic juxtapositions of matters high and low and to insert mini-lectures on a variety of topics, which might seem out of place in a conventional narrative (unless it’s an overtly didactic narrative like Fénelon’s Telemachus, which Montesquieu admired). He takes full advantage of the elasticity of the epistolary form to include short tales, parables, a doctor’s report, a traveler’s critical account of Spain, and other documents, expanding the capacity of novels in general. And the fact a cultural critic would chose the novel as a vehicle for his views—a genre still associated then with womanish romances and escapist literature—testifies to the growing respectability of the genre among intellectuals. Montesquieu would later boast that his Persian Letters taught authors how to write epistolary novels (Mes pensées, no. 1621), which is only partly true, but he taught budding philosophes how to dramatize their ideas in fiction, a lesson not lost on Voltaire, Diderot, and Sade.
Montesquieu was 32 when he published Persian Letters; by that age, his hyperactive contemporary Pierre Marivaux (1688–1763) had already written and abandoned half a dozen novels for a career in journalism and the theater—he’s best known for his dozens of romantic comedies—resuming fiction-writing later, only to leave his two most famous novels, written simultaneously, unfinished. And each of his novels is different! Here’s a log of his experiments in fiction:
Les Effets surprenants de la sympathie (The Surprising Effects
of Sympathy, 1713–14): an old-fashioned roman héroïque, with numerous embedded histoires.
Pharsamon, ou les nouvelles folies romanesque (Pharsamond, or The New Knight-Errant, finished in 1713 but not published until 1737): a satire of chivalric novels along the lines of Don Quixote; in fact, a later edition was retitled Le Don Quichotte moderne.
La Voiture embourbée (The Coach Stuck in the Mud, 1714): a short novel in which four stranded travelers repair to an inn and improvise a novel, each one picking up where the last left off, until “all the characters drink too much and fall asleep on the floor.”110
Le Triomphe du Bilboquet (The Triumph of Diabolo, 1714): a brief allegory in which this faddish cup-and-ball toy (sometimes called the Devil on Two Sticks) is personified as an imp who mocks fashionable French society.
Le Télemaque travesti (The Burlesque Telemachus, written in 1714 but not published until 1736): a comic modernization of Fénelon’s Telemachus, which two of Marivaux’s characters have just read, set in the French countryside. “With its strange mixture of literary allusion, vulgar language and critical observation of human beings, this novel is not easy reading, yet it is entertaining” (Greene, 27). In 1716 Marivaux also published a parody of the Iliad, but in verse.
Lettres contenant une aventure (Letters Containing an Adventure, 1719–20): a five-letter novella in which an eavesdropper at a country house party reports on the conversations of two young ladies, one of whom owns a copy of Guilleragues’s Lettres portugaises. Unfinished.
L’Indigent philosophe (The Philosophical Bum, 1727): an ex-actor and his philosophical drinking buddy swap stories and rail against conventional society.
La Vie de Marianne (The Life of Marianne, 1731–41): a long memoir-novel about a virtuous orphan, published in erratic installments and left unfinished.
Le Cabinet du philosophe (The Philosopher’s Study, 1734): the unorganized papers of a recently deceased scholar, including a Voltairian novella (Le Voyageur dans le Nouveau monde) about a chevalier who travels to a land where everyone speaks the truth.
Le Paysan parvenu (The Upstart Peasant, 1734–35): the memoir-novel of a parvenu. Unfinished.
Nowhere is my ignorance of French a greater handicap than here, not only because English translations of these intriguing fictions are either unavailable or inadequate (with one exception), but also because Marivaux developed a distinctive way of writing, called marivaudage—pretty, witty, and refined—that must be read in the original to be appreciated.111 But here goes:
Pharsamond, the only early novel of Marivaux ever translated into English, is a hoot. Deciding to turn heroic-romantic fiction like La Calprènede’s Pharamond into a farce, Marivaux schizophrenically mocked with his left hand the kind of novel he was writing with his right, for Pharsamond and the earnest Effets surprenants de la sympathie were written almost simultaneously. Set in modern times, Pharsamond concerns an 18-year-old bookworm named Pierre Bagnol, who has filled his head with chivalric novels; convinced that similar romantic adventures await a noble soul like himself, he brushes off the marriageable girls he knows, whose “perpetual gaiety shocked our young man to a prodigious degree. . . . These were in no manner heroines, they having discovered [revealed] a passion for him without allowing him to let their cruelty sink him to despair.”112 Eager to find a heroine who plays by the book, he becomes separated from his uncle while out hunting one day, muses on a scene from a novel in which the hero comes upon a beautiful maiden in the forest, wishes that something like that would happen to him, then looks up, and lo! he comes upon a beautiful maiden in the forest, speaking like “the heroine of a romance” (1:10). After a brief conversation with her—from “whom the pleasure of hearing himself styled ‘knight’ had almost struck dumb” (11)—he loses sight of her. Renaming himself Pharsamond, he sallies forth the next morning with his “squire” Clito—a clownish servant/companion who shares his love for chivalric novels—and manages to track her down at her overbearing mother’s house. Calling herself Cidalise (real name: Babet), she too is a fan of romance novels and flips over the young man who acts and speaks like a storybook hero. This is Marivaux’s first modification of the Quixotic model: instead of a single character crazed by novels—as in Cervantes, Sorel, and Subligny—he pairs two bibliomaniacs, then doubles down with their book-loving servants, Clito and Cidalise’s companion Fatima, who join the game of fiction. (Their romantic relationship parodies that of their employers, just as Pharsamond and Cidalise’s does those in older novels.) Over a week’s time, this quartet of bookworms clashes with members of the “real” world in a series of slapstick adventures until they are cured of their bibliomania by a wandering physician.
But Marivaux complicates his satire by including incidents straight out of heroic romances into the quotidian plane of his narrative: not only do little things happen to Pharsamond “like to those read of in romances” (1:54), but later he comes upon an isolated house inhabited by a young man and his servant who turn out to be two women in disguise; their tale is given in “The Story of the Anchorite,” the first of two old-fashioned novellas embedded in the narrative in traditional roman héroïque form. Even though it is as melodramatic as any similar histoire in La Calprènede or Scudéry—orphaned girl suffers class prejudice until it’s revealed she is of noble birth, only to suffer greater tragedies, sending her into isolation—the anchorite’s story takes place in the “real” world of Marivaux’s novel, not in Pharsamond’s frenzied imagination. Same with the other novella, an even more far-fetched story told to Pharsamond by a disguised woman whom he rescues from a pursuing shepherd. The reader suspects these to be setups at first, like the tricks played on Don Quixote, Lysis, and the mock Clelia, but they’re not: they belong to the everyday reality Pierre Bagnol inhabits and thus seem to validate Pharsamond’s conviction that romantic novels are realistic depictions of a world that hasn’t changed since the days of chivalry for those open to enchantment. (Pharsamond could be the idealistic novel many readers mistake Don Quixote for; imitating the protagonists of chivalric novels brings out the best in our quartet of impossible dreamers.) The romantic adventures of Pierre Bagnol and Babet may be make-believe, but those of the novellas’ heroines, now living in their neighborhood, are “real”—until we are reminded we’re reading a novel, where nothing is really real.
Marivaux keeps reminding us of that inconvenient truth throughout the work; knowing that he is incongruously mixing high romance with low comedy and blurring the distinction between fiction and reality, Marivaux defends his unorthodox choices in a running dialogue between the narrator and his imagined readers and critics, the most outspoken example of the self-conscious narrator before Sterne.113 Anticipating objections to various aspects of his story, the narrator calmly defends them at first, even admitting he doesn’t exactly know what he’s doing at times. As he builds up to the anchorite’s tale, he worries what a captious critic will say and appeals to the more tolerant reader to trust him:
Methinks I now hear some critic object: “This seems to promise an adventure of the heroic kind. You are deviating from the cast of your subject: we expect comic incidents, and this opening does not seem to offer anything of that sort.” The critic is right in the main, for I should not have attempted a description of the adventure in question. The comic part of it may, perhaps, not please; I say “perhaps” for I’ll do all I can to make it agreeable. However, ’twould have argued more prudence in me not to have run any hazard on this occasion. Hence I have half a mind to blot out the strokes I have writ above. What says my reader? “’Tis a good thought.” But hold; this would be an additional trouble, and I dread everything of that kind. I’ll therefore proceed. Must I, good Mr Critic, be obliged to furnish you, always, with subjects for laughter because I have done this several times? I beg you to forgive me in this respect. I myself am delighted with variety.114 Follow me therefore, gentle reader; I will be so ingenuous as to confess that I don’t well know whither I am going, but then the journey will give plea
sure. (1:137–38)
After the anchorite’s tale, the narrator unctuously solicits the reader’s opinion, only to dismiss it with growing confidence in his ability to improvise: