The Novel
Page 58
Not surprisingly, Julie was one of the biggest best-sellers of the 18th century, and was especially popular with women. What is surprising is Rousseau’s harsh attitude toward both his novel and his readers, as though he dared them to admire it. One of the few attitudes he shared with Voltaire and Diderot—early friends, later enemies—was their disdain for novels, specifically their corrupting influence: “The refinement of city taste, the maxims of the Court, the paraphernalia of luxury, Epicurean morality: such are the lessons they preach and the precepts they offer,” he writes. “The coloration of their false virtues tarnishes the luster of genuine ones; the comedy of civilities replaces real duties; fine words sow disdain for fine deeds, and the simplicity of good morals is counted as coarseness.”186 The last point was especially egregious, for most novels insulted the lives of provincials who made up the bulk of the reading public at that time. So what does Rousseau offer instead? A novel featuring several aristocrats that he claims is not a novel but a collection of real letters filled with “language mistakes, trite and bombastic style, [and] banal thoughts expressed in turgid terms.” “Whom then will it please?” he asks. “Perhaps no one but me” (3). Not since Furetière’s Bourgeois Romance had an author taken so truculent a tone toward his audience.
Since another critic has already taken a “Close Look at Julie’s Underwear,”187 I’d like to look at Julie’s outerwear, specifically its prefaces and footnotes, in which the author/editor weirdly distances himself from his novel. Rousseau wrote a 15-page “Conversation about Novels” that he intended as a preface, but withheld from the first edition in favor of a two-page one. Added to later editions, it takes the form of an imaginary conversation between Rousseau and an adversarial critic named N., who is either his former friend Diderot or someone with a similar aesthetic.188 Rousseau pretends his book is an actual collection of letters, which N. has trouble believing: “What epistolary style! How stilted it is! What a profession of exclamations! What affectations! What bombast just to convey everyday things! What big words for small ideas! Seldom any sense, any accuracy; never any discrimination, or force, or depth. Diction that is always in the clouds, and thoughts that forever crawl on the ground. If your characters are in nature, admit their style is not very natural” (9). Rousseau admits it, but counters by arguing that a real letter by someone in love, as opposed to one written for a novel, “will be desultory, diffuse, full of verbose, disconnected, repetitious passages. His heart, filled with an overflowing sentiment, ever repeats the same thing, and is never done, like a running spring that flows endlessly and never runs dry. Nothing salient, nothing remarkable; neither the words, nor the turns, nor the sentences are memorable; there is nothing in it to admire or to be struck by” (10). (Rousseau also admitted in his Confessions that the first two parts he showed Diderot “was the chattering of a fever; I have never been able to correct it” [386].) None of this sounds very appealing. Suppose it’s a novel then, Rousseau suggest coyly. “In that case,” N. responds, “I’ve never seen such a bad piece of work. These Letters are no Letters; this Novel is no Novel” (7). Rousseau is taking a huge gamble: by normal standards, his book is “detestable,” but he’s hoping all his offenses against literary decorum are exactly what will create “an authentically new spectacle” (11). It’s not a real collection of letters, it’s not a traditional novel, it’s an antinovel. Since conventional novels corrupt people, only an antinovel will achieve the goal Rousseau set for himself, namely, to “lead its readers to do good,” as Julie later writes (2.18).
Another goal Rousseau set for himself was to write a novel without typical novelistic adventures or a villain; he loved Prévost’s Cleveland and Richardson’s Clarissa, but he avoids the dramatic escapades of the former and the evil presence of a predator in the latter, as N. notes:
As for the focus, it is everywhere at once, it is nil. Not a single evil deed; not a single wicked man to make us fear for the good ones. Events so natural, so simple that they are too much so; nothing unexpected; no dramatic surprises. Everything is foreseen well in advance; everything comes to pass as foreseen. Is it worth recording what anyone can see every day in his own home or in his neighbor’s?
R. In other words, you must have ordinary men and exceptional events? I think I would prefer the opposite. Besides, you are judging what you have read as one would a Novel. It is not a Novel; you said so yourself. It is a Collection of Letters . . . (8–9, author’s ellipses)
So we’re back to that. To maintain this illusion, the “editor” keeps up a running commentary on the “collection” in his footnotes: questioning and even mocking his characters, noting their grammatical errors and rustic terms, correcting historical errors, pretending he doesn’t understand portions, suppressing some letters (thereby creating some confusion) and rearranging others, giving advice, and both taunting and challenging his readers. Regarding the suppressed letters, for example, he asks the reader to step up and do some work: “nothing essential is missing that cannot easily be supplied with the help of what remains” (1.8).189 Often he sounds like a malicious book reviewer:
There, it seems to me, is a twenty-year-old sage [St. Preux] who knows prodigious numbers of things! It is true that Julie congratulates him at thirty for no longer being so learned. (1.22)
I am hard pressed to know how this anonymous lover, of whom it is said later that he is not yet twenty-four, was able to sell a house, not being of age [i.e., 25]. These Letters are so full of similar absurdities that I shall no longer mention them; it is enough to have called attention to them. (1.65)
I believe I hardly need to notify the reader that in this second part and the next [after St. Preux leaves], the two separated Lovers do nothing but rave and wander about; they have lost their poor heads. (2.1)
The fantasy of station! And it is an English peer who says such things! And this is not supposed to be a fiction? Reader, what say you to this? (2.3)
Without anticipating the Reader’s judgment and Julie’s about these narrations, I think I can say that if I had to make them and did not make them better, I would at least make them different. On several occasions I have been on the verge of removing them and substituting some of my own; ultimately I am leaving them in, and pride myself on my courage. . . . Let us leave these Letters as they are. Let the shopworn commonplaces remain; let the trivial observations remain; all that is of little consequence. (2.14)
I’ll stop there, only a third of the way through the novel, to wonder what his provincial readers would have made of such captious remarks, of the author’s “courage” to fill his novel with “absurdities” and “shopworn commonplaces,” of his avoidance of almost everything they would expect in a novel. Rousseau hoped his readers would have the same reaction that the English lord expresses after St. Preux tells him of the story of his love for Julie: “There are, he said, neither accidents nor adventures in what you have told me, and yet the catastrophes in a Novel would absorb me much less; so much do sentiments complement situations, and honest dealings outstanding deeds. Your two souls are so extraordinary that they cannot be judged by common rules” (1.60)—of fiction nor of life. Most fell for it and believed these were real letters, as the editor keeps insisting; others, like Diderot and Voltaire, just shook their head in disbelief.190
In his “Conversation” Rousseau complains that most novels are populated not with regular folk but with the “smart crowd, fashionable ladies, the high and mighty, the military” (13–14), yet most of his characters belong either to the nobility or are highly educated. “Sublime Authors,” he later apostrophizes, “bring your models down a bit, if you want people to try to imitate them” (19), but Julie is so impossibly good, her husband even more impossibly so, St. Preux so impossibly devoted to her (same with Claire, her BFF, the most appealing character in the novel), and their sylvan utopia so impossibly perfect that I doubt very many tried to imitate them. Rousseau’s idea of bringing his models down a bit was to give each what he considered a glaring fault—Julie’
s premarital sex fling, St. Preux’s lubricity, Wolmar’s atheism, Claire’s repressed lesbianism—yet these are characters who could only exist in a novel. St. Preux is an especially odd choice for a romantic role model. He is a rather creepy sensualist in the beginning, the type who thinks it’s “sexy” to warn his virginal girlfriend that someday he might lose control and rape her (1.8), which Julie dismisses as “bantering.” He makes leering suggestions in many of the early letters, and when writing to her about his visit to the countryside, he says of the Swiss misses “I was a little shocked at the enormous size of their bosoms,” which he then compares to Julie’s, and cops to mentally undressing his student in the past with his “slithering” eyes (1.23). He’s hot-tempered, scolding, suspicious, impetuous, and given to violent fantasies; learning of Julie’s decision to marry Wolmar, our hero raves:
I would rather lose you than share you. . . . Would that heaven gave me a courage equal to the transports that toss me! . . . before your hand could defile itself by that fatal bond abhorred by love and reproved by honor, I would come and plunge with mine a dagger in your breast: I would drain your chaste heart of blood as yet unsullied by infidelity: with that pure blood I would mix that which burns in my veins with a flame nothing can put out; I would fall into your arms; I would breathe my last sigh on your lips. . . . I would receive yours. . . . Julie expiring! . . . such sweet eyes extinguished by the horrors of death! . . . that breast, that throne of love, rent by my hand, gushing forth blood and life. . . . (3.16, author’s fevered ellipses)
How romantic. I can see why this “beautiful soul” was especially popular with female readers.
Too many of the letters mouth Rousseau’s own opinions (or perversions, in the case above), especially in the second half when the letters grow longer and more didactic. He surprises us with the brilliant choice of giving the brief account of Julie’s fatal accident to a servant woman, but spoils it with a ridiculously extended death scene with unsubtle parallels to the Passion; had I read this novel earlier I would have added Julie d’Étange to the genealogy of Christ figures in my previous volume (115). Even the subtitle fails: Abélard was 22 years older than his student Héloïse—not merely two years—and secretly married her after seducing her; they were separated and miserable after that, unlike the extended happy family at the foot of the Alps.
Despite breaking all the rules, upsetting reader expectations, and deliberately sabotaging his novel in so many ways, Rousseau was confident that he had written a great book with inspiring characters. As he tells a skeptical N., “Their letters are not immediately engaging; but little by little they win you over: you can neither take them nor leave them. Grace and ease are not to be found in them, nor reason, nor wit, nor eloquence; sentiment there is, it is communicated to the heart by degrees, and it alone ultimately makes up for all the rest” (12). And that’s the key to Julie’s success: N. uses his head to judge the novel, and finds it artistically unsatisfying, but Rousseau knew most readers use their hearts, and that a large enough dose of sentiment would cover aesthetic faults like delicious frosting on a mediocre cake. The sales figures and sacks of fan mail proved he was right.
Rousseau offered a new direction for the novel, one that would be followed by more writers than followed that of Voltaire or Diderot. It is mapped out in one of St. Preux’s letters—another example of Rousseau putting his own opinions into the mouths of his puppets—which is worth quoting because it was incorporated verbatim into the article on novels in the Encyclopedia:
Novels are perhaps the ultimate kind of instruction remaining to be offered to a people so corrupt that any other is useless; then I would wish that the composition of these sorts of books be permitted only to honest but sensible persons whose hearts would depict themselves in their writings, to authors who would not be above human frailties, who would not from the very start display virtue in Heaven beyond the reach of men, but induce us to love it by depicting it at first less austere, and then from the lap of vice know the art of leading men imperceptibly toward it. (2. 21)
After he is appointed tutor to Julie’s kids, St. Preux writes to her husband to say “following our conversations about your children’s education I had jotted down a few thoughts derived from them and which met your approval. Since my departure new reflections have occurred to me on the same subject, and I have reduced the whole into a sort of system which I will send to you once I have worked it out better, so that you may examine it in turn. . . . This system begins where Julie’s leaves off, or rather it is merely its sequel and development; for everything consists in not spoiling the man of nature by appropriating him for society” (5.8). This could almost be Emile, or On Education (Émile ou de l’éducation, 1762), which Rousseau originally wrote as a treatise (which survives as the so-called Favre manuscript) and only later converted to a novel by adding a few fictional touches. Most of these are confined to the end, when a girl named Sophie is introduced as Emile’s future wife. But it’s not really a sequel to Julie—it’s narrated by Rousseau, not by St. Preux—and its fictional elements are so minor that Emile doesn’t merit discussion as a novel, except as another instance of the elasticity of the genre. It’s a textbook example of what German theorists would call the Erziehungsroman (education or pedagogical novel), but there’s too much Erziehung and not enough Roman. (Emile’s value resides in its theory of education, which is not a literary concern.) Nor is its attitude very enlightening: “In Emile,” Cathy Davidson writes, “the great French republican philosopher heaps contempt upon any woman who might believe that the new radicalism and egalitarianism somehow includes her” (204). Rousseau began writing a sequel in epistolary form entitled Emile and Sophie, but what little remains isn’t very promising and confirms our suspicion that Rousseau, like Molière’s médecin malgré lui, was a novelist in spite of himself, not a born novelist. Rousseau’s greatest contribution to the development of the novel in fact might be his posthumously published Confessions (written 1766–70, published 1781), whose unprecedented frankness and willingness to reveal shameful secrets eventually encouraged some novelists to open their raincoats to the reader’s shocked view.
Courage, mes enfants! Only a handful of French novelists to go.
Both Diderot and Rousseau make slighting references to a popular woman novelist of the day, Marie Jeanne Riccoboni (1713–92). A successful actress, she began writing fiction in her forties for the same reason Diderot did: as a dare. Scoffing at a critic’s praise of The Life of Marianne’s “inimitable” style, she wrote a continuation that was published to acclaim and impressed Marivaux himself. Encouraged by this response, she began writing novels that quickly became best-sellers; in fact, her third novel—the one Rousseau slights for “ridicul[ing] one’s hosts, in repayment for their hospitality” (Julia 5.2n)—was second only to Julia “in the number of editions and printings during a three-year-period.”191 That novel, Letters from Juliet Lady Catesby to Her Friend Henrietta Campley (Lettres de Mylady Juliette Catesby à Mylady Henriette Campley, son amie, 1759), is an engaging hybrid of epistolary and memoir novel. Written with verve and wit, this “little masterpiece of elegance and sentiment” (as a later French novelist will call it192) opens with Juliet informing her friend that she’s fleeing London to stay with friends along the way down to Winchester to escape Lord Ossery, a former suitor who dumped her two years earlier without explanation to marry another. In subsequent letters she expresses her mixed feelings about Ossery, her impatience with other guys hitting on her, and her resistance to the reconciliation urged by one of Ossery’s friends. For the latter she encloses in a letter an autobiographical “History of Lady Catesby and Lord Ossery,” which is answered near the end by the 30-page “History of Lord Ossery,” in which he reveals the secret reason for jilting her: drunk one night with his buddies, he raped a friend’s sister and felt honor-bound to marry her once she proved pregnant. She recently died, hence his attempt to patch things up with his first love, and patch they do: Juliet forgives and marries
him in short order (though annoyed he didn’t share his problem earlier), and looks forward to a visit from Henrietta, the recipient of all these letters.
Julietta is a smart, appealing character, and her letters are snappy and believable, unlike Rousseau’s lengthy, overwrought epistles. (They’re so realistic one is dated “Wednesday—no—Thursday, six in the morning,” a natural mistake after being up all night.) In a few instances Juliet encloses copies of others’ letters for Henrietta, which Diderot derides in Jacques the Fatalist.193 These add variety and allow other points of view, though the novel is short enough, and Juliet compelling enough, that such variety isn’t strictly needed. On the other hand, the alternation between letters and confessional narratives is an ingenious solution to providing background, and creates a contrast between the guarded, elevated tone of estranged lovers versus the girl-talk Juliet uses with her pen pal. (And BTW those catty remarks about her hosts are totally justified.) Like Juliet herself, Letters from Juliet Lady Catesby exhibits “strength of mind, and dignity of sentiments” (letter 22), but in a manner closer to Jane Austen than Madame de Lafayette.