by Steven Moore
189 Not always true: Rousseau wrote and then discarded a long autobiographical letter by the English lord—he called it “too novelistic to be combined with Julie’s [adventures] without spoiling their simplicity” (613)—but let stand later references to its details in the surviving letters.
190 In The Man with Forty Crowns, Voltaire mocks Rousseau for criticizing “romances at the same time that he is making romances in which the hero is a stupid preceptor who receives charity from a Swiss girl whom he has got with child, and who goes to spend her money in a brothel in Paris; let us leave him to his opinion that he has surpassed Fénelon and Xenophon, in educating a young man of quality in the trade of a joiner” (CT 1:292).
191 From Ruth Thomas’s essay on Riccoboni in French Women Writers, 357—a reference book I’ve consulted often for this chapter.
192 Restif de la Bretonne, Lucile, chap. 15.
193 The narrator merely paraphrases a letter the master has received, then notices: “Reader, you’ve stopped reading. What’s the matter? Ah! I think I have it! You want to see the letter! Madame Riccoboni would not have failed to show it to you” (205).
194 I was reminded of an episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (c. 2003) in which a hipster was so overwhelmed by the makeover of his bachelor pad that he blurted out, “I want to fuck this room!”
195 Vol. 2, p. 105 in Dr. Hooper’s contemporary translation. Since he saw no reason for the date, he retitled his translation Memoirs of the Year 2500, even though the reason is stated in the first chapter: the dreamer (like Mercier) was born in 1740, so he chose a date 700 years into the future. The only other English translation, done in 1797, gets the year right but entitles the book Astræa’s Return; and though it incorporates Mercier’s later additions, it eliminates all his footnotes! Darnton translates selections from 2440 in his Forbidden Best-Sellers (300–36).
196 A novel with a “moral purpose,” says Saintsbury: “endless talk about virtue and the affections and justice and all the rest of it” (413–14). Pass.
197 “He was a rapid swallow that glanced with grace and ease along the surface of a large river, where he drank and dipped his wings as he skimmed along,” the librarian feels, seconded in a footnote by the author, who prefers a different animal: “Behold Voltaire, who, like a stag, bounds over the plains of literature” (2:26, 27n).
198 Tzvetan Todorov uses The Devil in Love to theorize this genre in The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1970). But in his recent book Before Fiction, Nicholas Paige argues that Cazotte’s novel “is structurally almost the inversion of the fantastic, since it starts with the supernatural and then asks whether the supernatural has become part of the natural world” (184).
199 These adventures occur in what Lesuire calls both Austral France and Antarctic France (a short-lived colony in the Bay of Rio de Janeiro), the latter taken from a passage in Montaigne’s great essay “On Cannibals” that Lesuire cites (3:32).
200 Casanova was of course Italian, but the novel is discussed here because he wrote it in French and published it under the name Jacques Casanova de Seingalt. The original consists of five volumes totaling 1,745 pages, which would occupy around 800 pages in a modern setting. The only English translation available, which I’ll be citing by page number, reduces it to a quarter of its original length.
201 Translator Zurer says she cut Casanova’s “whole commentary on Genesis in which he finds justification for the union of brother and sister” and his “long-winded” lectures on “the nature of light and its relation to color; he expostulates on optics and cataract removal; he discourses on theology and religion. . . . When he describes the theaters he is building or the city he is planning, he details every single measurement,” and she “eliminated sentences, phrases and words that were repetitious or trivial or unnecessarily detailed” (6).
202 From Baldick’s introduction to his abridged translation of Monsieur Nicolas, 4. A complete translation in six volumes was published in 1930–31.
203 Porter, 2. He explains that most of Restif’s books are so autobiographical that it’s often difficult to distinguish his fiction from his memoirs and journalism.
204 He abridges the 1,700-page novel to a mere 218 pages, but assures us he retained “all the erotic episodes” (xxv); hereafter cited by page.
205 Page 7 in Wainhouse’s translation, the unsuitably titled Pleasures and Follies of a Good-Natured Libertine. As an insulting joke, Restif ascribed the novel to Jean-Pierre Linguet, a historian who had been guillotined a few years earlier.
206 Letters from Prison, 333–34. The next quotation is from The Crimes of Love, 13.
207 Quoted by Constantine in the introduction to her translation (xxiii), hereafter cited by letter number.
208 Feher’s introduction to Dangerous Liaisons in The Libertine Reader, 917.
209 There’s even a minor character named Vressac, a fellow libertine with whom Valmont dallies as gaily as Merteuil does with gamesome Cécile.
210 Laclos may have had in mind Marie Riccoboni’s novels, which he knew well: he even wrote a libretto for an opera based on her Ernestine. Immediately after Dangerous Liaisons appeared, Riccoboni wrote him to complain about it, arguing that women like Merteuil don’t exist (!), leading to a heated exchange of letters; see chap. 3 of Sol’s Textual Promiscuities for the full story and plenty of juicy quotations.
211 Roseann Runte pursues the idea of Laclos’s characters as “self-conscious authors” in Free’s collection of essays on Dangerous Liaisons (123–36).
212 Page 21 in The Nobleman and Other Romances, where the novella occupies pp. 1–22.
213 Blurb on back cover of the Stewart-Vaché translation, hereafter cited by page number. The novelette is also included in The Nobleman and Other Romances, 75–101.
214 In an interesting essay, Susan Jackson suggests Charrière avoided closure in most of her novels to dramatize the adage “a woman’s work is never done.” Men’s writing (among other activities) finishes after a climax, but what French theorists call écriture féminine is boundless, cyclical, open-ended.
215 Page 114 in Four Tales by Zélide (an early pseudonym), where the two-part novel occupies pp. 77–263.
216 In The Corrupted Ones, Father Gaudet advices Ursule: “Never wear yourself out with late nights—or by spending too many nocturnal hours in sexual activity. And, most important of all, you must observe frequent ablutions in the torrid zone of your anatomy! A woman, like the rooms of houses in the city of Amsterdam—which are washed three or four times a day—must observe the most careful hygiene in these parts” (135).
217 Perhaps I belong to the wrong gender to appreciate it: Joan Hinde Stewart calls Caliste “an extraordinarily powerful piece” and makes a strong case for its importance, also noting its influence on de Staël’s Corinne (1807) and Constant’s Adolphe (1816) (Hollier’s New History of French Literature, 554–58).
218 The Portrait of Zélide, 96. His wife, Lady Sybil Scott, translated the Four Tales by Zélide.
219 Pages 5–6 in Rooksby’s translation, hereafter cited parenthetically.
220 Rooksby: “Kant held that moral theory consisted solely of duty, in the form of a set of immutable principles that could be ascertained by the exercise of reason alone” (6n2). Charrière dramatizes the drawbacks of that rigid doctrine in the novel.
221 The witty servant was a staple of plays and operas in the 18th century, but not so much in novels, with the exception of Jacques the Fatalist. As the title indicates, Josephine gets equal billing with her social “betters,” an admirably egalitarian move on Charrière’s part.
222 I obviously didn’t find many of interest, but see Stewart’s Gynographs for an incisive overview of other female French novelists active during the second half of the 18th century.
223 Chap. 37 in Sartarelli’s translation, hereafter cited by chapter.
224 “The Aleph,” p. 276 in his Collected Fictions. This allusion eluded the book’s annotator.
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br /> 225 Maistre wrote a sequel in 1798 entitled Nocturnal Expedition around My Room, which wasn’t published until 1825; it’s appealing and idiosyncratic, but inferior to his first novel.
226 Headnote to the Wainhouse–Seaver translation of The 120 Days of Sodom, 183. The novel itself occupies pp. 189–674 of their omnibus.
227 Sade held a low opinion of Gothic novels; they were “the necessary offspring of the revolutionary upheaval which effected the whole of Europe” and projected “into the realm of fantasy . . . the history of man in that cruel time,” but their authors faced an “unavoidable choice”: “either to develop the supernatural and risk forfeiting the reader’s credulity, or to explain nothing and fall into the most ludicrous implausibility” (“An Essay on Novels,” in The Crimes of Love, 13–14). He believed it was better to depict vice realistically, and in brutally blunt language. I beg the reader’s pardon for the salty language sprinkled on the next 20 pages.
228 The scroll-like manuscript, 5 centimeters wide and over 12 meters long, was discovered years later, but not published until 1904.
229 Sade’s radical philosophy is beyond the scope of this literary study, so if interested see Airaksinen’s Philosophy of the Marquis de Sade (originally published in 1991 with the cooler title Of Glamor, Sex and de Sade), as well as chap. 2 of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), which situates Sade’s philosophy between Kant’s Critique and Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals.
230 Nonetheless, the four storytellers are among the survivors who return to Paris. A storyteller himself, Sade honors their trade, for “talent must always be respected” (247).
231 And one has to question Sade’s concept of “simple passions” in part 1: in the very first anecdote a priest masturbates onto the face of a five-year-old girl, and on day 24 Duclos recalls a Frenchman who “used to have brandy rubbed over every part of his body where Nature had placed hair, then I’d put a match to those areas I’d rubbed with alcohol, and all the hair would go up in flames. He would discharge upon finding himself afire” (506)—you know, the simple pleasures of love.
232 Sade revised it for publication in 1791, but various setbacks (including the beheading of his publisher) delayed publication until August 1795.
233 The latter is based on the same source Diderot used—Bougainville’s Voyage around the World—along with the travels of Captain Cook.
234 The last few pages of Dolan’s essay on Aline and Valcour discuss the parallels to Emile; in his autobiographical 5th letter, Valcour describes how he once met Rousseau in Geneva.
235 Letter 23 in the Barque/Simmons translation, the first in English. Sade reiterates this point in the concluding paragraph of “An Essay on Novels.”
236 As quoted/translated in Francine du Plessix Gray’s excellent biography At Home with the Marquis de Sade, 268 (her brackets and ellipsis).
237 David Coward’s translation The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales contains a dozen of these, in addition to the the title story, and some of the other tales can be found in Coward’s translation of The Crimes of Love. Some of them are novellas, but space considerations limit me to Sade’s full-length novels.
238 Pages 455–56 in the Wainhouse–Seaver translation, which occupies pp. 453–743 of their Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings. The publication of this volume in 1965 was a historic occasion in the fight against censorship—and the first time Sade’s writings were made widely available in the U.S.—but unfortunately they gave an 18th-century flavoring to their translation.
239 I’ll be citing the Seaver–Wainhouse translation, where the novel occupies pp. 183–367. A new translation with fresher language and a more accurate title was published by Penguin in 2006, but Neugroschel’s Philosophy in the Boudoir betrays the original in two serious ways: he saddles it with an unauthorized subtitle (“The Immoral Mentors”) from the 1805 edition “for which Sade, then in the Charenton asylum, can scarcely have been responsible,” as Seaver and Wainhouse explain (179), and it runs Sade’s footnotes into the text, obscuring the difference between his commentary and his characters’ dialogue.
240 The “yet another effort” Sade initially calls for is the final extermination of religion. The dechristianization of France that began in 1789 peaked in 1794, and by 1795 religious practices had begun creeping back. The rest of the pamphlet calls for increasingly outrageous public reforms, like state-sponsored brothels for libertines and the decriminalization of rape, which is why some critics suspect it’s a joke, like Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” though with Sade you never know.
241 This version has never been translated into English, though a few passages from it can be found in Walton’s composite translation of Justine (1964). One improvement, however gruesome, is the path of the thunderbolt that kills Justine: in the 1787 version, it enters her chest and exits her mouth, in 1791 exits her stomach, but in 1797 it penetrates her mouth and comes out her vagina—“a parody of the act of giving birth,” Angela Carter suggests (100), or a cosmic rape.
242 Page 241 of her Sexual Personae, which has an interesting chapter on Rousseau versus Sade.
243 The relationship is epitomized in a song in Peter Weiss’s brilliant play Marat/Sade: “They think about nothing but screwing / but we [the people] are the ones who get screwed” (“These Fat Monkeys,” 42).
244 For this important tendency in Sade’s novels, see chap. 2 (“Saying Everything, or the Encyclopedia of Excess”) in Hénaff’s Sade (1978).
245 A thick, infuriating book, best entitled “The Enemies of Literature,” could be written about the exasperating actions of authors’ families, heirs, and estates to destroy, suppress, withhold, or otherwise frustrate the publication and study of the works they inherited. I wish a law could be passed stipulating that, upon an author’s death, all his or her literary remains would become the property of a literary organization, which would thereafter facilitate and oversee future publications and research; a standard royalty would be paid to the heirs for the term of copyright, who would not otherwise be allowed to interfere with matters they ill understand.
246 See chap. 6 of Lynch’s monograph for an account of them; only one, Adelaide of Brunswick (1812), has been translated into English (Washington, DC: Scarecrow Press, 1954).
247 Basil Valentine, on p. 235; two other characters in the novel are reading Justine (183–84, 925).
CHAPTER 3
The Eastern Novel
In my previous volume I needed two chapters to deal with the profusion of novels written in the East and Far East before 1600. By 1600, however, the novel was a stagnant art everywhere east of Egypt except in China, and consequently those written in this wide region in the early-modern period can be contained within a single chapter, especially since so few of them have been translated into English. There are some Chinese novels that rival anything published in Europe during this time, and several others that make for fascinating reading, but it wouldn’t be until the 20th century that the novel in the east regained something of its former vitality.
CHINESE FICTION
Although outwardly China was a rich and powerful country in 1600, it was rotting within. An inefficient government run by eunuchs, lawlessness, oppression, and a series of famines, rebellions, and natural disasters led to a regime change in 1644, when Manchus from the north overthrew the Ming Dynasty and established the Qing, which would last until 1911.1 Nonetheless, the 17th century was a robust time for the Chinese novel, and the 18th produced two novels that would be ranked with the “four extraordinary books” (si da qishu) of the Ming era (Three Kingdoms, The Water Margin, Journey to the West, and The Plum in the Golden Vase). The situation is not as paradoxical as it might seem; as Robert E. Hegel points out, most of the novels produced in the tumultuous 17th century were written by “members of China’s cultural and social elite who in a less chaotic age might have served in positions of authority in the Confucian state. But economic, social, and particularly political change
s ruled out this possibility for them, leaving them to express their concerns, their frustrations, and their insights into the meaning of their existence in a literary form that grew to a new peak of significance through their contributions.”2
The previous peak of Chinese fiction had been reached by the pseudonymous Scoffing Scholar’s Plum in the Golden Vase, written in the 1590s and in circulation at the beginning of the 16th century (though not published until 1617). This huge novel brilliantly combined all of the elements we’ll see in later Chinese fiction: the use of the novel as a vehicle for social criticism; frequent allusions to earlier literature and even wholesale appropriations of older texts; a more realistic vocabulary closer to the vernacular than classical Chinese; and a willingness to write candidly of sexual matters. It would be 150 years before any novelist would combine all these elements as masterfully as Xiaoxiaosheng did, but his totemic masterpiece empowered novelists to continue expanding the form.
The Embroidered Couch (Xiuta yeshi, 1608?) is a bite-sized version of the Plum that appeared under the pseudonym Master Perverse Lover, now agreed to be the playwright and critic Lu Tiancheng (1580–1618). It’s little more than pornography with a warning against sexual profligacy tacked onto the end, but it’s literary porn.3 Lu pays homage to PGV by naming his two principals after characters in Scoffing Scholar’s novel: Yao Tongxin is known as “Easterngate” after the lecherous protagonist of PGV, Hsi-men Ch’ing, whose name can be translated “Western Gate of the Fortunate,” and his oversexed wife Jin is named after PGV’s toxic heroine Jinlian (W–G Chin-lien, meaning “Golden Lotus”), plainly so when Easterngate has her feet on his shoulders during sex and says of them “they are really a pair of three-inch golden lotuses!”4