by Steven Moore
On the plus side, The Sofa is Crébillon’s most corrosive critique of his society. As in The Skimmer, the eastern setting is a smoke screen; The Sofa, Conroy points out, is “less an imaginary picture of oriental mores than it is an exact depiction of current events and an exposé of the prevalent mentality in the noble quartiers of Paris” (167n5). And that mentality is cruel, deceitful, hypocritical, cynical, phony. The novel features the largest and most colorful cast of any of Crébillon’s novels, from potentates to prostitutes, almost all of whom are reprehensible in blatantly obvious ways. In his wanderings, Amanzei’s divan soul finds only one decent character, an unnamed girl described at the beginning of chapter 4. The rest of Agra/Paris is a snakepit. The novel also pricks the shiny red balloon of young love, exalted in so many novels then and now. Nasses explains why he prefers experienced women over virgins:
“At that tender age when a woman has not yet loved, if she wishes to be conquered, it is less that she is urged by her feelings than that she wishes to have them: in short, she would rather please than love. She is dazzled rather than moved. How can you believe her when she says she loves? Has she anything with which to compare the nature and strength of her feelings? In a heart where the newness of the most feeble emotions makes them important, the most trivial sentiment appears to be passion, and mere desire, rapture. In short, it is not at a stage at which one is so ignorant of love that one can flatter oneself that one feels it, or ought to be convinced that one does.” (17)
True, but try telling that to a 15-year-old girl “in love for the very first time.”144
The most valuable thing tucked inside The Sofa is its dramatization of the eternal conflict between art and entertainment, and the frustration of a literary writer who has to deal with mainstream readers who would rather be coddled than challenged. Some 40 times during the course of the novel Shah Baham interrupts Amanzei to complain about his narrative or to ask a dumb question; as Amanzei deferentially answers him, we hear Crébillon defending his artistic choices and tutoring the reader to appreciate his innovative approach to fiction.145 On the first page of the preface, he warns that fantasy books like The Arabian Nights can be misunderstood by readers who fail to look beneath their fanciful surface, as the shah will do with The Sofa:
Only those who are really enlightened, above prejudice, knowing the hollowness of science, realize how useful to society such books really are; and how much one ought to esteem, and even revere, those who have genius enough to invent them, and sufficient firmness of mind to devote their lives to making them, in spite of the stigma of frivolity which pride and ignorance have attributed to this sort of writing. The important lessons such fables contain, the fine flights of imagination so often encountered in them, and the ludicrous notions in which they always abound, make no appeal to the vulgar—who commend most what they least understand, while flattering themselves that they do so perfectly.
Shah Baham represents “the vulgar,” an exaggerated version of the type of reader who wants to be dazzled by “wonders, fairies, talismans” without delving into their symbolism or sufficiently appreciating “those who have genius enough to invent them.” He has no patience with literary finesse, repeatedly urging Amanzei to cut to the chase and avoid any sort of subtlety. His frequent interruptions represent the literary writer’s worst nightmare of what the general reader demands of him:
“No more of that!” the Sultan broke in angrily. “A pox on these musty aphorisms you keep on dishing up to us!”
“But, Sire,” Amanzei pleaded, “they are occasionally indispensable.”
“I tell you they are not,” the Sultan retorted. “And even if they were . . . In short, since these stories are being told for my sake, I expect them to be of the kind I like. Amuse me!” (3, author’s ellipsis)
The crafty author sneaks in one more aphorism anyway and continues to stay true to his art, despite the shah’s constant heckling, hoping against hope he will come to appreciate his efforts to provide something more than mindless entertainment. (Arrogant? Yes, but contemptuous of people who pretend to be something they’re not, the committed artist is not about to pretend to be an entertainer, for that would make him no better than the cynical phonies this novel skewers.) Crébillon had been writing innovative fiction for a decade by this time, and these interruptions parody the criticism he had been receiving; Amanzei’s patient responses, along with those of the shah’s more intelligent wife, provide a primer on the new kind of fiction Crébillon proposed in his preface to The Wayward Head and Heart. Even though that and the two dialogue-novels that followed provide more satisfying examples of his innovations, The Sofa can still be read as an interesting experiment in critifiction. I am probably underestimating it, for The Sofa sags only in comparison with Crébillon’s previous fiction; if it’s the first novel you read by him, the difference between it and other fiction of the time jumps out. The metafictional novel ends with Shah Baham’s apostrophe to Shahrazad: “ ‘Ah, Grandmother!’ he concluded with a sigh, ‘this was not the way you told your stories!’ ” (21). Crébillon intends that as a compliment.
The Sofa was certainly influential, especially on Diderot’s Indiscreet Jewels (1748) and Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons (1782). It can even be seen tucked between the cushions of the sofa in plate 4 of Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode (1745), a clever visual pun. But even though Crébillon published it anonymously, The Sofa was quickly identified as his and he was banished from Paris for three months. Evidently its Oriental smoke screen was too thin to conceal the identities of his satirical targets, so they in effect slapped a restraining order on him. This hit him hard, and he didn’t publish any further fiction for a dozen years, and when he did resume writing, the results were inferior.
One later novel of his is worth noting only for its procedural audacity, an unauthorized collaboration that recalls some postmodern exercises in appropriation.146 The Sofa was translated into English in 1742 by Eliza Haywood, who in 1744 published a novel entitled The Fortunate Foundlings. Ten years later, Crébillon brought out The Happy Orphans (Les Heureux orphelins, histoire imitée de l’anglais, 1754), which begins as a loose translation of Haywood’s novel, departing from the original mainly by substituting English names for her more romantic ones (Dorilaus, Horatio, Melanthe). But Crébillon soon abandons Haywood’s sentimental tale of virtue in distress to return to his libertine stomping grounds as an older woman tells Haywood’s heroine how she was once seduced by a rake, whose letters later provide his view of their affair. As Mylne explains, this “curious hotch-potch . . . consists, ostensibly, of a [plagiarized/translated] third-person narrative, a story in memoir-form, and a sequence of letters” (140–41). Though this hybrid form is technically interesting, the actual result isn’t particularly rewarding. Some of the dialogue has a blunt British bluster to it, as when the old rake Lord Chester bellows, “Run, d—n you, every way! Seek all over the house after this little, hypocritical, cunning b—h! G—d d—n you, Mrs. Modesty, if you don’t give me an account of her speedily, I’ll set fire to your house and fling you into the flames! D—n me, don’t you know that I’m a peer of the realm? I’ll be the ruin of you, by G—d” (257–58). But most of it reads like an old-fashioned novel, not the avant-garde fiction he was writing earlier. Antoinette Marie Sol, who read both novels more closely than I did, concludes: “Crébillon turns what starts out as a faithful translation of the English woman’s novel into something else entirely, reverses its ideological orientation, and rewrites it as an indictment of the sentimental as a stance of empowerment for women,” which sounds promising, like Kathy Acker’s textual appropriations of Don Quixote and Great Expectations. “However, Crébillon’s revision fails in part due to his inability to present a believable sentimental position, reducing his sentimental heroines to insincere cardboard stereotypes” (41). She’s probably right (if sentimental heroines were ever more than cardboard stereotypes to begin with), but I recall Crébillon’s Clitandre in The Opportunities of a Night: “I am a
fraid you may think it worse than it was. After all, it was only an experiment, and there is no law against experiments” (179).
Crébillon, Marivaux, and Prévost are the Big Three of French fiction of the 1730s—and I’d rank them in that order for modern appeal—but there are a few other novelists of the decade worth noticing. The Big Three, as it happens, are satirized in a light-hearted critifiction published in 1735 entitled The Wonderful Travels of Prince Fan-Feredin in Novelland (Voyage merveilleux du Prince Fan-Férédin dans la Romancie) by a Jesuit historian named Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant (1690–1743). In what is revealed at the end to be a dream, a well-read man named Monsieur de la Brosse dreams that he is Prince Fan-Feredin, a bookworm who detests his surroundings because they don’t resemble those in novels, so he sets out for the idealized Novelland. He arrives there by way of a subterranean cavern like the one in Prévost’s Cleveland, and it’s everything he expects it to be: everyone is young and beautiful, no one takes time to eat (preferring to tell interminable stories about themselves), flowers spring up beneath the feet of storybook heroines, and the weather is perfect: “Thus we have never heard of a hero being incommoded by rain, wind, or snow; or having caught cold from the vapors arising at night, when by the light of the moon he has expressed his torments of love.”147 As expected, the Novellanders speak novelese, which follows two basic rules according to the prince’s travel guide—another prince named Zazaraph, Paladin of Dondindandinia, whom he came across sleeping beneath a tree—“the first is to express nothing plainly, but always with exaggeration, figure, metaphor, or allegory,” and the second, “never uttering a word without one or more epithets” (5). Gently mocking the manner and tropes of 17th-century heroic romances, Bougeant hits all the easy targets, the same hit a half century earlier by Boileau in Heroes of Romances and by satirical novelists like Scarron, Furetière, and Subligny. Très passé by 1735.
The heroes of romances swan around in rural Upper Novelland; the protagonists of more recent fiction populate urban Lower Novelland. Here Bougeant resorts to allegory to describe the fiction of his time as a book-fair staffed by “threaders, blowers, embroiderers, botchers, colorers, makers of magic lanterns, exhibitors of curiosity, and some others” (12), and like a conservative critic today trashing the current fiction scene, he doesn’t like most of what he sees. He doesn’t name names, but he transparently alludes to all the major and some minor writers of the time, dismissing with haughty condescension memoir-novels, fairy tales, Oriental translations and imitations, picaresques, and anything out of the ordinary.148 Prévost’s Cleveland is clobbered several times, Marivaux mocked, and here is what he thinks of Crébillon, whose faux-Japanese romance of Tanzaï and Néardarné had been published the year before (and which earned him a short prison sentence, the author reminds us):
“O gods!” cried I at this instant, “what a dreadful vapor! Great Paladin, what pestilence is this?” “Ah!” exclaimed he, “let us fly quick to preserve ourselves from the infection.” We ran, in effect, and when we were afar off: “I had forgotten,” said the prince, “that we should have avoided the road we were in unless we were willing to expose ourselves to the danger of being poisoned. It is,” added he, “a young lanterneer who causes this infection. He is called Tancrebsaï. Being the son of a man celebrated for his fine works, he blushed not to embrace the trade of a maker of magic lanterns, and as he is youthful and inexperienced, in attempting to make a new composition wherewith to paint his magic lantern, he composed so offensive a potion that he was obliged to shut up his laboratory, and after performing a quarantine, prohibited working in this manner.” (12)
The sniffy author praises only a few of the artisans’ shops he passes: given his conservative tastes, he predictably approves of The Princess de Clèves and Telemachus, unpredictably likes Scarron’s Comic Novel and prefers Lesage’s Devil upon Crutches over his more popular Gil Blas, and inexplicably praises long-forgotten novels like Jean Terrasson’s Sethos (1731)—a didactic novel about Freemason-types in ancient Egypt—and Marguerite de Lussan’s Anecdotes de la cour de Philippe-Auguste (1733), which apparently wasn’t deemed worthy of translation back when the English were translating almost everything. And he agreed with the French Parlement’s decision to burn Louis-Pierre de Longue’s Les Princesses malabares, ou Le Célibat philosophique (1734), a heavily footnoted novel that he inadvertently makes sound fascinating:
Scarce was this affair ended when there was announced to the court the arrival of the Malabarian princesses. The name excited curiosity. The spectators hasted to give them place, but no sooner did they begin to explain themselves than everyone, looking at them with surprise, seemed to ask what they said. They spoke in an allegorical, metaphorical, enigmatical language which nobody understood. They disguised even their names under childish anagrams, declaiming one after another without method or order, affecting the tone of a philosopher, and placing on their words the emphasis of an enthusiast to give weight to their extravagancies. It was not, however, difficult to perceive that under these foolish obscurities were concealed many scandalous impieties and maxims of irreligion, which determined all the assembly against these ridiculous princesses. There arose a general cry for their absence. They were banished forever, and the vessel which brought them was publicly burnt. (13)
He doesn’t have anything positive to say about foreign fiction: he treats Spanish novels like illegal immigrants, and Zazaraph notes that some Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians recently crashed Upper Novelland, but thankfully those uncouth aliens left “without the least attempt being made to detain them; and all we can say on the subject is that their patron needed not to have taken so long a voyage to learn what he knew before: that there is no real greatness in the world, and that great or little stature is a thing perfectly indifferent to human nature” (7).
Bougeant rightly condemns the lack of originality in most novelists and their tendency to follow in a few well-worn paths; “they very rarely possess that talent which we style invention and which delights in treading original paths, never before explored,” Zazaraph complains to Fan-Feredin (8), contradicting what he says about Swift and Crébillon. Coming from someone who states upfront “I detest romances” (Dedicatory Epistle) and that “we must treat all we read in romances as ridiculous visions and puerile tales” (1), Bougeant’s criticism is both outdated and unduly harsh, but The Wonderful Travels of Prince Fan-Feredin in Novelland shouldn’t be taken too seriously; the author apparently didn’t. It’s a soufflé of critifiction, an after-supper party game of Spot the Allusion for fans of early modern French fiction. It also anticipates those modern novels in which characters from literature exist in an alternative reality, such as Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, Desmond MacNamara’s Book of Intrusions, and Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series.
The same year Prince Fan-Feredin hit the fan, Charles de Fieux de Mouhy (1701–84) published the first volume of his huge, weird novel Lamékis, ou les voyages extraordinaires d’un Egyptien dans la terre intérieure, avec la découverte de l’Isle des Sylphides (1735–38). Only a few selections have been translated into English, which can be unearthed in Peter Fitting’s anthology Subterranean Worlds (32–36), where he offers an eye-boggling summary of the 650-page fantasia in his headnote:
The novel begins with the title character’s father and his adventures as a high priest in Egypt. We are then introduced to the intertwined stories of two exiles from the neighboring North African kingdoms of Abdalles and Amphicléocles—Princess Nasildaé and Prince Motacoa—who have been banished to the underground world and who befriend Lamékis after the death of his parents. The third narrative follows Lamékis to the now joined kingdoms of Abdalles and Amphicléocles149 and tells of his terrible jealousy; while the fourth describes Lamékis’s exile, including his celestial voyage to the Island of the Sylphs. The novel also includes an account of its composition, beginning with a preface in which Mouhy explains that he was told this story by a mys
terious Armenian. (29)
Hou là! But here’s the best part:
Halfway through the novel, there is a lengthy scene in which the author is visited by various characters from the novel, who now complain to him about his inaccuracies. They are followed by the philosopher Dehahal—a character from the Island of the Sylphs who had tried unsuccessfully to convince Lamékis to undergo a ritual of purification, and who again urges Mouhy to undergo the same initiation. After he declines, the author awakes in his bed clutching a mysterious manuscript that defies all attempts at translation until, six months later, his pen—on its own—starts to translate the conclusion to Lamékis. (30)