Читать книгу Before Fiction - Nicholas D. Paige - Страница 7

Preface

This book proposes a new history of the novel in France and England in which fiction itself is the primary variable; my account then provides the ground for understanding the fictional status of a series of (mostly) canonical novels from the early French tradition—or, more to the point, for understanding why they may not in fact be fictional. Both the larger narrative and the individual readings are subtended by an approach to the evolution of literary forms that parts company with most work on the novel’s history, and this, as much as fiction, is my subject as well.

First, the big picture: I sketch out here a history of fiction. Elaborating and substantially modifying the arguments of a number of specialists of the English novel, I argue that fiction is not at all coterminous with “literature” or what used to be called “poetry,” but is a rather recent phenomenon. Saying this, I am not following common modern usage and taking fiction as a synonym for the novel; though the present study is restricted to novels, it is not about their birth. By fiction, I mean something better though more awkwardly captured by the substantive “fictionality,” which is to say the peculiar yet for us intuitive way that novels refer to the world: via invented characters and plots, they purport to tell us how people and institutions and abstractions like money or power work. This is peculiar logically: how can writers possibly persuade readers of their view of the world if they are just making up their evidence? More important, it is historically peculiar. For one thing, the type of invention commonly practiced by novelists starting in the nineteenth century has few analogues in earlier times, which accorded little respect to writers dabbling in subject matter entirely of their own creation, and which largely understood the term fiction to designate a form of lying as deplorable as any other. Moreover, openly invented characters were a rarity for a good chunk of the novel’s development in France and England: in the late seventeenth century and for almost all the eighteenth, novelists presented themselves as mere editors, and their inventions as real documents or reports. Modern readers have often looked back on such pretense of literal truth with a certain degree of bafflement, but our present reflex, according to which the real-world existence of the characters we read about matters not a bit, would have proved just as baffling to readers throughout the two preceding millennia.

No doubt there are many valid and useful definitions of fiction and fictionality according to which the above distinctions seem but split hairs: isn’t all literary imagining a part of what philosopher Kendall Walton has called the human propensity to “make believe”? And more seriously, perhaps: doesn’t Aristotle, in the West’s founding document of literary criticism, place the distinction between poetry and history front and center? Such are two main obstacles between us and a history of fiction, but they are far from insurmountable. As we will see, the principal hurdle of the Poetics is simply that we read it through our knowledge of what is to come, which is to say, fiction. And though my definition of fiction is undeniably only one of many possible definitions, it has the advantage of enabling us to distinguish between three historical regimes of literary invention in a way we cannot if we just make some “consciousness of fiction” the bedrock of all literary endeavor. The three regimes, which succeed one another in their dominance, are the following. Most of the Western literary tradition since Homer can be understood through the lens of Aristotle’s Poetics, which described and sanctioned an enduring articulation (not opposition) of poetry and history; according to this model, the poet adds his inventions to the renowned heroes and events of history so as to make a good plot. The second regime starts around 1670 and lasts until roughly the turn of the nineteenth century. During this time, novelists cease posing as Aristotelian poets and instead pretend to offer their readers real documents ripped straight from history—found manuscripts, entrusted correspondence, true stories, and all the rest. Following Barbara Foley, I will be calling this type of novel pseudofactual, in that it masquerades as a serious utterance. That the masquerade is almost always patent should not tempt us to confuse it with what happens under the third, properly fictional regime: the pseudofactual pact demanded that readers pretend to regard novels as true, whereas later novelists asked for something quite different—that they accept the writer’s inventions as a kind of model of reality. This is how the nineteenth century replaces the old distinction between poetry and history with fiction as we have come to know and practice it.

This narrative provides the context for the bulk of the book, comprised of six case studies illuminating the strange interregnum between Aristotelian poetics and modern fiction, a period during which the omnipresent formal feature of the novel was pseudofactual posturing. The first two chapters probe the leading edge of the regime via one novel long accepted as a canonical milestone and one that has been completely forgotten. Because of its combination of an invented heroine and a carefully drawn historical setting, Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678) can easily be seen as a major step on the road to modern fictionality. In fact, it simply demonstrates that individual works, however successful, need not be signs of wider transformation: the apparently fictional Princess is better understood as a one-time and idiosyncratic twist on the traditional Aristotelian understanding of the poet’s use of history. Subligny’s forgotten La Fausse Clélie (1670), a Frenchified Don Quixote, allows me to tackle what has been for many decades if not centuries a basic way of understanding the novel’s history—to wit, that the “modern novel” replaces archaic “romance.” While similar though not identical divisions were made repeatedly in the period, the novel-romance opposition is not in fact able to account for texts like Subligny’s or even Cervantes’s. Romance was not “dead” for either writer, it was just in need of updating; and La Fausse Clélie constitutes a signal attempt to make romance forms safe for a pseudofactual age.

The subsequent four chapters are devoted to works that stretch the conventions of the pseudofactual regime without—and this is crucial—causing those conventions to crumble in favor of modern fiction. Crébillon’s Les Égarements du coeur et de l’esprit (1736–38) is the most sustained example of a new novel of manners that imported a model of invention from comedy—comedy, which since Molière had allowed writers to comment on contemporary social “types” without taking aim at specific individuals. But though Crébillon put no energy into bolstering the pseudofactual pretense of his memoir novel and even narrated thoughts in a manner often associated with modern fiction, his experiment, like Lafayette’s, did not change the way novels were written. Indeed, pseudofactuality had bright days ahead. The sentimental novel’s goal of giving the genre the emotional and moral gravitas of tragedy necessitated a reinvestment in reality: all available theories of aesthetic effect made the audience’s belief in the artwork the foundation of emotional experience and moral improvement. This does not mean that writers such as Rousseau and Diderot were naïve about how novels worked. On the contrary, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1762), commonly advanced as the epitome of quixotic fusion between reader and book, is a laboratory for producing an emotion proper to observers who identify with protagonists even as they maintain distance from them. And Diderot’s sentimental novels and tales, though often seen as signaling through their irony a fictional consciousness to come, remain thoroughly and necessarily enmeshed in pseudofactual presuppositions. The final chapter centers on novelistic subgenres that are tailor-made for thinking about aesthetic effects that don’t require literal belief—the fantastic and the gothic. But although a work such as Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux (1772) clearly pushes hard against the governing Horatian dictum of incredulus odi—readers reject what they cannot believe—it is no more predictive of the future than any of the other works examined.

The problem of “predictiveness” brings me to the methodological heart of Before Fiction. For it is the relation of the individual novels examined in the six chapters to my larger narrative—a narrative of collective behavior—that separates this book from most histories of the novel. Individual works, especially great ones, are usually the data points that permit the literary historian to plot out an evolution. Thus, given the chronological arc of the novels I’ve chosen, the obvious assumption would be that I am tracing an evolution, and more precisely, that I see these works as bringing fiction into existence. But this is emphatically not the case. Before Fiction could not have been titled The Rise or The Invention of Fiction, since Cazotte, Diderot, Rousseau, Crébillon, Subligny, and Lafayette are not all engaged in the same great project. These writers are not feeling their way through the pseudofactual night toward the bright light of the fictional day. Nor have they intuited some truth about literature—say, Coleridge’s unfortunately proverbial “willing suspension of disbelief”—that we all now embrace. None anticipate developments that would only become dominant later, or bears witness to a collective cultural realization. And they do not relay one another: Diderot does not “learn” from his one-time friend Rousseau; Rousseau in turn learns nothing from Lafayette (whom he nonetheless admired). No one stands on anyone’s shoulders to get a better look into the future. At the same time, it is not that some other change—the advent of a “concept” of fiction, or of modernity tout court—is readable in the works of authors who were extraordinarily sensitive to their transitional moment. Isolated literary works are not signs of anything else; if they were, they would not be isolated.

What, then, can be the broader significance of the novels under study? In a sense, none: they don’t add up to anything; they don’t register momentous change. But this doesn’t mean that they are not instructive. On the contrary, their authors’ complex engagement with the problem of novelistic reference in the wake of Aristotelian poetics brings the larger narrative into focus. Most writers of the period, even good and great ones, give no more thought to the pseudofactual posture than, say, a filmmaker in our day who ends up producing a color feature lasting between 100 and 140 minutes. It’s just how things are normally done. The authors under study, meanwhile, scrutinize the problem of how to write literature that doesn’t take as its subject matter the heroes of the past. How can novelists refer to their world without writing about people who are actually part of that world? In asking this question, they push at and play with the conventions of the time; in some cases one might even say that they destroy those conventions. But to the extent that this is the right word, their destructions are local: these individuals do not alter collective practice. I will offer, especially in the Conclusion, some thoughts on how collective practice does change—thoughts, because the type of data needed would dictate a different type of study altogether. For the moment it is enough to insist that though we like to view our favorite authors as heroes or at least as paragons of historical acuity, the truth is much more plain: writers are of their time and place, which is to say, bound by a set of practices and rationales that they do indeed transform, but in limited ways, often without wider effect, and certainly not with our unborn needs in mind. By the pressure they put on Aristotelian and pseudofactual conventions, these six novelists may appear to be gesturing in the direction of fiction, but we mustn’t give in to magical thinking: the mirage is generated simply by our coming after fiction. Lafayette, Diderot, and Rousseau are not so much agents of the transformation of Aristotelian poetics into modern fiction as they are participant-observers of processes whose momentum—and inertia—outbulks the contributions of individuals, no matter how perceptive or talented. The novel, envisioned as a history of shared practices and forms, would look much the same without the great writers customarily regarded as the motors of generic change.

“Studies in the morphological history of the novel”: this would have made an apt if offputting subtitle for a book concerned not with what deeper things novels “reflect” but with how forms evolve. My subtitle as it actually reads demands a couple of qualifications. The first relates to the term I’ve chosen to designate the three approaches to literary invention—the Aristotelian, the pseudofactual, and the fictional. I attach no particular importance to the word regime itself; it appears, say, in work by Jacques Rancière and François Hartog, but my use does not follow from theirs. (When speaking of these regimes not as time periods but as ways of writing novels, I often call them “modes”—a term that, likewise, is not intended to recall Northrop Frye.) For me, a regime is merely a fairly stable but not monolithic way of thinking about and writing (narrative) literature; as I will take pains to point out, in no sense should it be taken as implying a perceptual or conceptual matrix on the order of Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigms” or Michel Foucault’s “epistemes.” My subtitle, then, contains some wordplay. On a basic level, “The Ancien Régime of the Novel” means nothing more than “The Novel in the Early Modern Period”; in a more important sense, the novel’s Ancien Régime is the pseudofactual regime, the interregnum between Aristotelian poetry and modern fiction.

The second remark concerns the fact that my shorthand carries some baggage better left behind at once. Since only France had an Ancien Régime, it is easy to conclude that my overarching theory of regimes applies to France alone, and that the sociopolitical context of the country explains its novel. The pseudofactual, readers might reason, must have something to do with absolutist monarchy; by extension, perhaps Aristotelian poetics suits the politics of the Classical and feudal ages, while fiction is made possible by the French Revolution. This would be nonsense, however. At most, “Ancien Régime” advertises that the individual works analyzed are French, while hopefully not obscuring the fact that the larger narrative covers the English domain as well. Cultural specificity matters to the novel’s history in all sorts of ways too obvious to mention. Nevertheless, and pace the many scholars who have explained the novel as first and foremost and necessarily English, Before Fiction argues that the problem of novelistic reference was shared because it was the result of a broad breakdown in Western poetic practice.

Unless otherwise indicated, translations and ellipses are my own; italics in quoted sources are not. Without completely modernizing punctuation, I have occasionally modified it for clarity. For economy I typically use last names alone when referring to authors of the period under study; readers needing greater precision of course will find it in the Index.