The Novel

by Steven Moore

  The one aspect of French culture she approves of is “a kind of writing they call books” (20); she is surprised at how shabbily the authors of these noble works are treated, but she devours them, for “I seek enlightenment with an urgency which quite consumes me” (9), which was impossible to fulfill back in Peru. Not only does she become intellectually superior to almost everyone around her, but she becomes an author herself: her letters progress from romantic distress signals to clear-eyed essays on French culture and the subjugation of women, discovering herself in the process and deriving much therapeutic value from writing. Since she’s not aware of Aza’s whereabouts until later in the novel, she retains her letters with the intention of presenting them to him later as a record of her devotion; keeping them after he spurns her, they become an autobiographical novel of female enlightenment, complete with ethnological footnotes about Incan customs.155

  Running through this exotic bildungsroman is a touching story of unrequited love, made heartbreakingly poignant by Zilia’s comically enstranged account. After Déterville rescues her, the smitten man visits her in her cabin; comparing him to an Incan Cacique (“a kind of provincial governor,” a footnote informs us), Zilia is puzzled by French courtship:

  The Cacique seems to want to imitate our Inca ceremonies on the day of Raymi;* he kneels down very close to my bed, he stays for quite some time in this uncomfortable position; sometimes he remains silent, and with downcast eyes he seems lost in deep contemplation. . . .

  Could it be that his nation worships idols? I have so far seen no adoration of the Sun; perhaps women are the object of their devotion. Before the great Manco-Capuc** brought down to earth the will of the Sun, our ancestors made gods of anything which struck fear in them or brought them pleasure: perhaps these savages feel those two emotions just for women. (5)

  * The Raymi, principal festival of the Sun: the Inca and the priests worshipped the Sun on their knees.

  ** First lawgiver of the Indians. See Histoire des Incas [by Garcilaso].

  Before she had learned French, Déterville playfully/pitifully taught her to say “Yes, I love you” and “I promise to be yours” (9), but this little joke comes back to haunt him the first time he sees her all dolled up in French fashion. Still unaware of what she’s actually saying, she repeats “those words he so enjoyed having me repeat. I even endeavored to give them the tone he gives them”:

  I do not know what effect they had on him at that moment, but his eyes lit up, his cheeks reddened, he came towards me with an agitated look, he seemed to want to take me in his arms. Then, stopping suddenly, he took my hand and shook it firmly, saying with emotion in his voice, No . . . respect . . . her virtue . . . and several other words which I understand no better. And then he hastened to the other side of the room and threw himself onto his chair, where he remained, his head buried in his hands, and showing every sign of deep despair. (12)

  Treating her like a goddess, respecting her virtue, arranging her reunion with her fiancé (but leaving for Malta before he arrives), Déterville is a sympathetic character whose descent into the darkness of unrequited love shadows Zilia’s ascent to enlightenment to moving effect.

  Déterville converts the Incan gold the Spaniards had stolen from Zilia into money to buy her a small house, where this unconventional woman can live an independent life outside France’s social structure. Earlier, she had worried “I have neither gold, nor lands, nor occupation, yet I must be one of the citizens of this town. Oh heavens! in what class should I place myself?” (20), but by the end she is content to live apart from people, blind to the “pleasure of being” (41), because she now has a room of her own. As Showalter notes in his superb biography, Graffigny upset the majority of critics and reviewers with that ending, and others rushed in to write sequels with conventional happy endings, but she defiantly retained it when she issued a slightly revised edition five years later, trusting that readers would eventually see its rightness. It only took about 200 years.

  The Marquis d’Argens (1704–71) had written some letter-novels a few years earlier modeled on Marana’s Turkish Spy and Montesquieu’s Persian Letters—Jewish Letters, Chinese Letters, and Cabalist Letters—but hit paydirt with his revolutionary 1748 novel Thérèse the Philosopher. Crébillon’s and Duclos’s soft-core style got harder in the hands of this libertine, who appropriated the language of pornography for his radical project. Like other Enlightenment philosophers, d’Argens regarded the novel as a convenient vehicle for his countercultural views and one that would reach a larger audience than the libertine pamphlets passed around at the time. And he was right: Thérèse the Philosopher was one of the best-selling French novels of the 18th century.

  Asked by her aristocratic lover of 10 years to write the story of her life before she met him, perhaps to reinvigorate their flagging relationship, middle-class Thérèse begins with a bitter account of how, at age 11, she was brainwashed by a priest into thinking sex is dirty, in terms that would be funny if not still used by some benighted people today:

  “Never, never,” he said to me, “place your hand or even your eyes upon that filthy place where you piss, which is nothing more than the apple that seduced Adam, and which has brought about the damnation of mankind through original sin. It is infested by the devil; there is his dwelling place, there his throne! Beware you are not taken by surprise by this enemy of God and man. Nature will soon cover that part with a vile coat, like that which covers ferocious beasts, by this punishment to mark it as the part of shame, of sin, of oblivion. Guard more carefully against the bit of flesh of boys your age who want to amuse you in the barn. That is the serpent, my daughter, which tempted Eve, our first mother. Never let your look or your touch be soiled by that evil creature. It would sting and bite you until sooner or later it would devour you completely!”156

  This scares her into a convent, where she wastes away until age 25, when she emerges “half dead” from a life of austerities, flagellations, and abstinence: “The whole machine was run down. My complexion was yellow, my lips white; I looked like a living skeleton” (14). Guessing at the kind of oil needed to get the machine back into working order, a “clever doctor” advices her to get married, but still frightened of the serpent’s bite, she is tempted to adopt the spiritual exercises of her religiose friend Eradice, on whom (at her invitation) she spies as she is literally whipped into mystical ecstasy by her spiritual advisor, who then fucks her from behind with the “cord of St. Francis,” as he calls his phallus. (Reading like a masochistic sex fantasy, their relationship was based on a scandal of the early 1730s; d’Argens’s father had a role in the priest’s trial.) Roguishly using religious imagery to describe the scene, sex-starved Thérèse is tempted to seek the same kind of spiritual guidance, but fortunately meets two freethinking friends of her mother—an abbé and a widow—who inspire her to reject religion, adopt deterministic materialism, and to masturbate. Regaining her health, her breasts grow “to the point that they’d well fill the hand of an honest ecclesiastic,” the abbé notes with approval (49).

  After she travels to Paris and loses her mother, Thérèse is taken under the wing of a bawd named Manon(!) Bois-Laurier, who encourages her to become a prostitute. She fights off the first customer who tries to occupy Satan’s throne, then is conveniently rescued by a count who honors her childhood fear of intercourse and its threat of pregnancy—which often resulted in death in those days—and settles for mutual masturbation until, inflamed by his collection of erotic fiction and art, she goes all the way, avoiding the possibility of pregnancy by the count’s honorable use of the withdrawal method.

  Except for chapter 4, in which Bois-Laurier tells the story of her life—a bawdy tale in the spirit of Boccaccio and Aretino—the novel is more philosophic than erotic (and even that sequence is more comic than erotic). Thérèse attends or overhears several lectures on libertine philosophy, especially regarding religion. A moderate deist, the abbot believes a benevolent god created the universe and set it in mo
tion, then withdrew and no longer intervenes or responds to his creation. Religious doctrines and practices were invented by men to gain power and to control the populace. Sex is natural, not the satanic crime Thérèse’s first confessor made it out to be, and masturbation is the easiest and least disruptive way to satisfy the itch for sex. (At times the novel reads like a philosophical pamphlet on sexual hygiene.) After listening to one of the abbé’s lectures, Thérèse does something no previous heroine in literary history claimed to do: “It was at that moment that I really began, for the first time in my life, to think” (62).

  Despite its erotic content, Thérèse the Philosopher was intended less to titillate its readers than to make them think, to rinse out of their heads the brainwashing they endured as children. The reader occupies the same voyeuristic, eavesdropping position as Thérèse, and the author hopes we too will learn to think, and to reevaluate what we were taught about sex and religion as kids. And apparently it worked. In Robert Darnton’s lengthy chapter on d’Argens’s novel in The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, he argues that its wholesome encouragement of masturbation and frank talk on contraception may be partly responsible for the fact that, unlike other countries in Europe, “France adopted birth control on a massive scale and at an early date” (408n54). A protofeminist, Thérèse’s declaration of independence from her childhood prejudices and consequent commitment to the pursuit of happiness contributed to the revolutionary fervor stirred up by the Enlightenment; I wouldn’t be surprised to learn d’Argens’s novel was in the library of Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin. The ideas in Thérèse the Philosopher aren’t original—indeed, some of the abbé’s arguments against organized religion were plagiarized from a 1745 pamphlet, as Darnton shows (108)—but d’Argens’s unusual hybrid of bildungsroman-cum-philosophical treatise-cum-sex manual stands out from the typical erotica of the time.157 The Marquis de Sade was indifferent to libertine novels like those of Crébillon and Duclos—“They wrapped cynicism and immorality in an agreeable, playful, and sometimes even philosophical style, and at least pleased their readers if they did not instruct them”158—but he admired d’Argens’s novel, which his adventuress Juliette comes across in a depraved monk’s library: “Thérèse philosophe was there, a charming performance from the pen of the Marquis d’Argens, alone to have discerned the possibilities of the genre, though only partially realizing them; alone to have achieved happy results from the combining of lust and impiety. These, speedily placed before the public, and in the shape the author had initially conceived them, finally gave us an idea of what an immoral book could be” (Juliette, 462). Actually, d’Argens regarded his novel not as immoral but as a charter for a new morality based on reason rather than religious superstition; Barry Ivker puts it better than Juliette: “Thérèse philosophe is the first libertine novel in which the erotic and philosophic elements are totally integrated. The heroine’s philosophic inquiries exactly parallel her discoveries in the sexual realm” (231). Unlike Sade, Dostoevsky disliked d’Argens’s novel: he refers to it in The Gambler (1866) and dramatizes his reservations about its libertine values in his later, greater novels.159

  Though many more French novels were published in the 1740s than during the bountiful ’30s—352 versus 249 according to Jones’s List (xiv)—far fewer hold interest today. On the other hand, the late ’40s saw the debut of the two greatest French novelists of the 18th century.

  Voltaire disdained novels. He thought they were a waste of time, both to read and to write. For the man born François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), novels were for “frivolous youth,” as he harrumphed in his “Essay on Epic Poetry” (1733); “people of real literary taste despise them.” He read them, but rarely referred to them in his letters and notebooks, and when he did it was to disparage them, with a few exceptions. (He admired Lafayette’s Zayde and enjoyed Crébillon’s Skimmer.) “Voltaire seems to have been largely indifferent, if not positively hostile, to the major works of fiction which appeared during the eighteenth century,” writes Steve Larkin, adding that he “appears to have been either uninterested in, or profoundly out of sympathy with, fiction in general” (127–28). For one thing, Voltaire was a classicist, which meant only poetry and drama qualified as literature; he was among those who still regarded fiction as not only an inconsequential form of entertainment but a dangerously misleading one: he felt novels gave a false view of things, the same objection he had against the Bible. For another, he valued brevity and had no patience for the lumbering pace and literary padding of most novels. But after achieving great success in both poetry and drama, he realized in his fifties that the novel would be a suitable vehicle for his views, a “frivolous” medium he could have some serious fun with. Customizing it to his taste, he chopped the vehicle down to its chassis so that it could race while other novels strolled, hit and run while others stayed and talked. He set out to write novels that could “give pleasure even to those who hate romances,” as his first published novel promises in its farcical Seal of Approval.160 Like Charles Sorel a century earlier, “he infiltrates the world of romance the better to destroy it and to replace it with fictions of a more authentic kind.”161 Voltaire had no idea that, after he died, these despairing joyrides would leave his poetry and drama in the dust.

  Brevity is the soul of wit, and his novels are both witty and brief—so brief, in fact, it’s a question how many of his 26 contes qualify as novels. The longest barely reach the 100-page mark, and the rest are much shorter. There’s no universally accepted page minimum (see p. 32 of my previous volume), but since numbered chapters are a traditional formal marker of the novel, they allow us to classify a dozen of his fictions as novels—or novellas, novelettes, mininovels, comme vous voulez. Since they’re largely unknown (apart from the incomparable Candide), and since I don’t plan to discuss them in detail, they’re summarized here in order of publication:

  Zadig (Zadig, ou la destinée, 1748). In ancient Babylon, an intelligent, prosperous man named Zadig is repeatedly thwarted in his search for happiness by ridiculous people. No good deed of his goes unpunished. After a variety of trials and tribulations, assured by an angel that things happen for a reason—“Everything is either a test or a punishment, a reward or a precaution” (COS 191)—Zadig marries his beloved and becomes king of Babylon.

  The World As It Is (Le Monde comme il va, 1748). A genie is tempted to punish the Persian citizens of Persepolis for their folly, so he sends a sharp Scythian named Babouc to visit the city and render an impartial judgment. (For Persepolis read Paris.) Learning of its economic, judicial, and military policies, visiting churches and theaters, conversing with wits and scholars, he is convinced “the bad abounds and the good is rare” (M 46). But gradually Babouc’s black-and-white view of things turns gray with complexity, and he grows “attached to this city whose inhabitants were civilized, gentle and benevolent, even if they were frivolous, scandal-mongering and full of vanity” (M 50–51). Babouc convinces the genie to spare the city and to accept the world as it is.

  Micromegas (Micromégas, 1751). An Earthling tells the story of a brilliant young giant from the star Sirius; traveling to broaden his mind, Micromegas first visits Saturn and converses with an academic about philosophical matters and their cultural differences. Then the two tour the solar system, arriving on Earth on 5 July 1737. After the 23-mile-high giant detects life and devises a way to communicate with the microbic inhabitants, he learns they are mostly “a confederacy of the mad, the bad and the miserable” (M 32). He promises to enlighten them by writing “a fine work of philosophy,” but after he leaves they discover the book contains “nothing but blank pages” (M 35).

  Candide (Candide, ou l’optimisme, 1759). A good-hearted naïf, attracted to both the “plump and appetizing” Cunégonde and the optimistic philosophy of a tutor of “metaphysico-theologico-cosmo-nigology” named Pangloss, wanders through Europe, South America, and back. Beaten by a “chain of calamities” (C 83), he winds up on a small farm outsid
e Constantinople and abandons Pangloss’s thesis that everything always works out for the best in this “best of all possible worlds,” preferring to mind his own business.

  Potpourri (Pot-pourri, 1765). The narrator alternates between reading a puzzling story by Merry Hissing of the development of a puppet troupe (a Tale of a Tubby allegory of the history of Christianity) and discussing current religious abuses with his friends.

  The Ingenu (L’Ingénu, 1767). In 1689, a sensible young Huron (nicknamed “the Ingenu” for his candor) travels from Canada to the boondocks of Brittany, meets his unknown uncle and aunt, and falls in love with a local girl. Their attempts to civilize and convert this noble savage are amusing, but things get ugly when he gets caught up in the religious conflicts of the time; because of some ingenuous remarks, he is arrested for being anti-Jesuit/pro-Protestant and thrown in jail for a year. There he educates himself with the help of his Jansenist cellmate until his fiancée springs him by sacrificing her virginity to an influential Jesuit. She literally dies of shame, and having learned the ways of the world, the Ingenu is “an Ingenu no longer” (COS 262).

  The Man with Forty Crowns (L’Homme aux quarante écus, 1768). The story of a farmer named André who overcomes the challenge of getting by on 40 écus a year to become a well-respected Parisian philosophe. The formally diverse novella includes speculative dialogues on economics, theories of human reproduction, and syphilis; an anonymous letter warning André against financial journals; diatribes and parables; pages “from the manuscript of an old man retired from the world” in which the Christian deity is informed of the latest findings in natural science; an essay on proportion; literary quarrels; extracts from a 1766 pamphlet by Voltaire on a case of injustice, and more—plus footnotes.162

  The Princess of Babylon (La Princesse de Babylone, 1768). In ancient Babylon, a heroic adventurer from India named Amazan wins a competition for the hand of Princess Formosante, but news that his father is dying sends him home before he can marry her. She goes in search of him, but when he hears a false rumor that she’s been unfaithful, he goes off on a world tour to teach her “to conquer her passions by his example” (CT 2:138), rejecting the advances of the women he meets along the way until he sleeps with a Parisian chorus girl. (The temporal setting morphs from ancient times to the 18th century and back.) Formosante catches Amazan in bed, so then he follows after her, rescues her from the Inquisition, and they return in triumph to Babylon. The novella ends with the author invoking the Muses to prevent bad reviews and unauthorized sequels.