Extravagant Narratives: Closure and Dynamics in the Epistolary Form [Course Book ed.] 9781400860821

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE. The Genesis of Epistolary Narrative in the Seventeenth Century
CHAPTER TWO. Plotting a Metonymical Life Story: The Correspondence of Madame du Deffand and Horace Walpole
CHAPTER THREE. The Open Dynamic of Narrative: Metaphor and Metonymy in Rousseau's Julie
Closing
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Extravagant Narratives

Extravagant Narratives CLOSURE AND DYNAMICS IN T H E EPISTOLARY F O R M

Elizabeth J. MacArthur

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1990 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, NewJersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Oxford All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data MacArthur, Elizabeth Jane. Extravagant narratives : closure and dynamics in the epistolary form / Elizabeth J. MacArthur. Originally presented as the author's thesis (Ph. D.—Princeton University, 1986) Includes bibliographical references. 1. Epistolary fiction, French—History and criticism. 2. French prose literature—17th century—History and criticism. 3. French prose literature—18th century—History and criticism. 4. Narration (Rhetoric) 5. Closure (Rhetoric) I. Title. PQ637. E6M34 1990 843.009—dc20 89-24253 ISBN 0-691-06793-7 (alk. paper) This book has been composed in Linotron Sabon Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey 1 0

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For my mother and in memory of my father

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix 3

CHAPTER ONE The Genesis of Epistolary Narrative in the Seventeenth Century Women, Salons, and Letter Writing Imperfect Mirrors, Powerful Fictions The Birth of Epistolary Fiction Epistolary Openness in the Lettres portugaises Metaphorizing the Metonymical Text

36 45 61 78 99

CHAPTER TWO Plotting a Metonymical Life Story: The Correspondence of Madame du Deffand and Horace Walpole Reading Letters as Narrative Modeling the Epistolary Relationship Harmony and Conflict in the Epistolary Exchange Limiting the Extravagance of a Female Epistolary Desire

117 124 156 172

CHAPTER THREE The Open Dynamic of Narrative: Metaphor and Metonymy in Rousseau's Julie The Fictional Dynamic The Textual Dynamic Reading the Extravagant Narrative

186 224 259

Closing

271

Bibliography

Tll

Index

291

Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK would not have come into being without the gen­ erous guidance of Joan DeJean, who directed the doctoral dis­ sertation upon which it is based. It would be impossible for me to express adequately here my gratitude for all of her help. Lionel Gossman also offered invaluable suggestions and criti­ cism at various stages. The anonymous readers for Princeton University Press wrote extensive and perceptive reports that have, I hope, enabled me to improve the book considerably. Unless otherwise indicated, translations of the passages quoted are my own. When I have consulted or reproduced a published translation, I indicate as much, and give the refer­ ence to it, in the first note to the work. I am grateful to Erec Koch and Joaniko Kohchi for checking my translations; any remaining inaccuracies or infelicities are of course entirely my own. I would like to thank Richard Jeffers for his computer ex­ pertise and for his extensive help with the index and proof­ reading. I am also grateful to Cynthia Anderson for her atten­ tive proofreading. A Donald and Mary Hyde Fellowship for Research Abroad from the Four Oaks Foundation made it possible for me to spend a year carrying out research at the Bibliotheque Nationale. A small portion of the introduction originally appeared in a slightly different form in Eighteenth-Century Studies 21, no. 1 (Fall 1987): 1-20.1 am grateful for permission to reprint.

Extravagant Narratives

Introduction Death is the sanction of everything that the story­ teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death. —Benjamin

ACCORDING TO many twentieth-century discussions of narra­ tive form, closure is one of the defining elements of a narra­ tive. Critics from James, Sartre, and Benjamin up through the structuralists and Frank Kermode have stressed the impor­ tance of endings in giving shape and meaning to stories. These closure-oriented models of narrative assume that a story is al­ ways told in the past tense, and thus that its ending inhabits all the previous moments of the text and draws them to their inevitable close. Not all narrative forms, however, conform to this assumption. In the epistolary novel, most notably, a series of present moments of letter writing predominates, and the future is yet to be decided. Because of this predominance of the present, epistolary narratives rarely reach the kind of sta­ ble closure valorized by traditional definitions of narrative. Rather than judging epistolary works according to a model derived from the nineteenth-century novel, as are the models cited above, and finding them defective, perhaps we would do better to create a larger definition of narrative, one that can accommodate epistolary as well as first- and third-person nar­ rative. Such a model might focus on narrative dynamics, on the forces that engender and maintain a narrative and that may or may not lead to a stable closure. In this book I will develop one such narrative model through analyses of repre­ sentative real and fictional epistolary works. One of the most lengthy and interesting recent considera­ tions of the functioning of closure in narrative appears in Peter Brooks's Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Nar-

4 · Introduction rative.1 In a series of essays on nineteenth-century novels and Freudian models for narrative, Brooks elaborates a definition of narrative as metonymy leading to metaphor, a chain of mo­ ments driven by desire to the quiescence and coherent signifi­ cance of closure. For Brooks closure does not merely end the story and provide retrospective illumination for the previously obscure moments of the narrative, it is also implicit in these moments all along. The individual instants of the plot contain the plenitude of ending because the narrator speaks in the past tense, telling a story whose outcome he or she knows already. As Brooks writes, "Narrative always makes the implicit claim to be in a state of repetition, as a going over again of a ground already covered" (97), "a repetition of events that have already happened" (99). Although the events of a novel seem to take place as we read, we are always at least subconsciously aware that their outcome has already been determined, that the future is already past: "If the past is to be read as present, it is a curious present that we know to be past in relation to a future we know to be already in place, already in wait for us to reach it" (23). Brooks's model of narrative is only the most recent, and most fully elaborated, in a major twentieth-century tradition of criticism on the novel. This tradition has succeeded so com­ pletely in convincing critics of the defining role of the past tense and of closure in narrative, that it now requires no jus­ tification to write: "Common opinion has it that the plot of a narrative imposes a meaning on the events that comprise its story level by revealing at the end a structure that was imma­ nent in the events all along" (Hayden White),2 or "It is a for­ mal feature of narrative texts—a part of their grammar—that the events are always presented in the past tense, as having 1 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1984). Further references to this work will be given parenthetically in the text, a practice 1 will follow with all works from which I quote more than once. 2 Hayden White, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Real­ ity," in On Narrative, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), 19. This collection of articles originally appeared in Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1980) and 7, no. 4 (Summer 1981).

Introduction

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5

already happened" (Robert Scholes).3 Even Roland Barthes writes: "Raconter (a la ίβςοη classique), c'est poser la question comme un sujet que Ton tarde a prediquer; et lorsque Ie predicat (la verite) arrive, la phrase, Ie recit, sont termines, Ie monde est adjective (apres qu'on a eu grand-peur qu'il ne Ie soit pas) [To tell a story (in the classic way) is to pose a ques­ tion as if it were a subject to which one delayed giving a pred­ icate; and when the predicate (the truth) arrives, the sentence, the narrative, are finished, the world is adjectivized (after one has greatly feared that it would not be)]."4 Walter Benjamin and Jean-Paul Sartre provide two of the most eloquent and celebrated expressions of this description of narrative. In Qu'est-ce que la littiraturef for example, Sar­ tre characterizes Maupassant's novels, which for him repre­ sent the nineteenth-century novel as a whole, as stories of dis­ order recounted from the perspective of order: Il y a eu trouble, c'est vrai, mais ce trouble a pris fin depuis longtemps: Ies acteurs sont morts ou maries ou consoles. Ainsi l'aventure est un bref desordre qui s'est annule. Elle est racontee du point de vue de !'experience et de la sagesse.... L'ordre triomphe, l'ordre est partout, il contemple un tres ancien desordre aboli. [There was difficulty, to be sure, but this difficulty ended long ago: the actors are dead or married or comforted. Thus, the adventure was a brief disturbance that is over with. It is told from the view­ point of experience and wisdom.... Order triumphs; order is ev­ erywhere; it contemplates a very old disorder that is gone.]5

Because of the narrator's retrospective view of the events he or she recounts, even the apparent disorder of the narrative's 3 Robert Scholes, "Afterthoughts on Narrative 2: Language, Narrative, and Anti-Narrative," in On Narrative, 205. 4 SIZ (Paris: Seuil, 1970), 83. See also Henry James, The Art of the Novel (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934), esp. 5-6,171. 5 Qu'est-ce que la littirature? (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 174. As we will see later, Sartre's description is part of an attack on the traditional novel for its role in upholding the bourgeois social order. Translations are those of Ber­ nard Frechtman from What is Literature? (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1978), slightly modified.

6 · Introduction center implies a particular outcome and significance. "II ne s'interdit pas d'eclairer Ie present de ses personnages au moyen de Ieur avenir [He permits himself to shed light on his char­ acters' present by means of their future]," explains Sartre of the nineteenth-century narrator, and "il n'a pas tort, puisque ce present et cet avenir sont tous Ies deux passes [he is not wrong, since this present and future are both past ]" (177). As Frank Kermode summarizes Sartre's discussion of narrative in La Nausie: In a novel the beginning implies the end: if you seem to begin at the beginning ... you are in fact beginning at the end; all that seems fortuitous and contingent in what follows is in fact reserved for a later benefaction of significance in some concordant struc­ ture.6

Benjamin takes the more extreme position that we read nov­ els precisely because they end, because they portray the deaths 6 Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), 148. See also Sartre, La Nausie (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), 57-59; and Les Mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 168-205. In Les Mots, his autobiography, Sartre writes at length of the power of the future to inhabit the present and grant it significance. As a child he found an old book describing L'Enfance des hommes illustres, in which "l'auteur mettait son art a placer partout des allusions a Ieur futur grandeur . .. a machiner si bien ses recits qu'on ne put comprendre l'incident Ie plus banal sans Ie rapporter a des evenements posterieurs.... Ces enfants vivaient dans l'erreur: ils croyaient agir et parler au hasard quand leurs moindres propos avaient pour but reel d'annoncer Ieur Destin.... je lisais la vie de ces faux mediocres comme Dieu l'avait con?ue: en commen^ant par la fin [the author made a point of constantly inserting allusions to their future greatness . .. of contriv­ ing his accounts so artfully that it was impossible to understand the most trivial incident without relating it to subsequent events. . . . These children lived in a state of error. They thought they were acting and talking haphaz­ ardly, whereas the real purpose of their slightest remarks was to announce their Destiny.. .. I read the lives of these falsely mediocre children as God had conceived them: starting at the end]" (168-69). The young Sartre learns to see his own life the same way: "Pour moi, j'etais Ie commencement, Ie milieu et la fin ramasses en un tout petit gar$on deja vieux, deja mort [For me, I was the beginning, the middle and the end condensed into one very small boy already old, already dead]" (203-5). Translation by Bernard Frechtman from The Words (New York: George Braziller, 1964), slightly modified.

Introduction

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7

of others. Since for Benjamin, a person's "real life .. . first as­ sumes transmissible form at the moment of his death," we read about the deaths of fictional characters in an attempt to glimpse the meaning of our own as yet incomprehensible lives.7 As Benjamin writes: But the reader of a novel actually does look for human beings from whom he derives the "meaning of life." Therefore he must, no mat­ ter what, know in advance that he will share their experience of death: if need be their figurative death—the end of the novel—but preferably their actual one.... The novel is significant, therefore, not because it presents someone else's fate to us, perhaps didacti­ cally, but because this stranger's fate by virtue of the flame which consumes it yields us the warmth which we never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warm­ ing his shivering life with a death he reads about. (101)

According to Benjamin we read novels to comfort ourselves with the significance of other people's lives. Novels are re­ counted in the past tense so that the moment of death can in­ fuse the entire fictional life with its meaning, so that even the novel's first words reveal the presence of its destructive but meaning-granting flame. Benjamin explains that what "feeds the reader's consuming interest in the events of the novel" is the way "the characters make him understand that death is already waiting for them—a very definite death and at a very definite place" (101). Of a novelistic character—but only of a novelistic character—one can indeed say that "a man who dies at the age of thirty-five . .. is at every point of his life a man who dies at the age of thirty-five."8 7 Benjamin, "The Storyteller," in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 94. 8 Moritz Heimann, cited by Benjamin, 100. In her recent book La Cloture narrative (Paris: JosS Corti, 1985), Armine Kotin Mortimer begins by making some of the same assumptions about the role of closure in narrative. She ex­ plains, for example, her practice of "la lecture retrograde [retrograde read­ ing]," according to which she started each work with its final paragraph, then backtracked a few pages and read to the end again, and so forth until she reached the beginning and read the whole narrative to its final paragraph. As a result of this method, "les dernieres pages bien en tete, on voit l'ouvrage

8 · Introduction The model formulated by critics such as Sartre, Benjamin, and Brooks cannot fairly describe, however, at least one im­ portant portion of the European novelistic tradition: the eigh­ teenth-century epistolary novel. In the epistolary form, pres­ ent moments are recounted without knowledge of the future, privileging metonymy over metaphor, sequence over closure. Writing from the midst of their experiences ("writing to the moment," as Richardson expressed it), the correspondents who tell a letter-novel's story tend to emphasize present details and are rarely able to order these details and confer on them metaphorical meaning. Rather than recounting a series of past events that can be seen, retrospectively, to lead to a particular outcome, epistolary characters describe present events with no knowledge of the larger story in which these events may ulti­ mately play a role. As Jean Rousset points out, "on ne raconte pas de la meme maniere un present tatonnant et un present qui a d6ja choisi sa voie [one does not recount in the same way a groping present and a present that has already chosen its course]."9 If, as Barbara H. Smith claims, closure is "a confir­ mation of expectations that have been established by the structure of the sequence,"10 if "any terminal element that has been in some way predetermined will strengthen closure by fulfilling the reader's expectation of it.... by conforming to his expectations, such an element becomes both stable and entier dans la perspective de son denouement [the last pages firmly in mind, one sees the whole work from the perspective of its dinouement]" (9). Such a strategy of reading presupposes the defining importance of a narrative's end­ ing. 9 Jean Rousset, Forme et signification: essais sur Ies structures littiraires de Comeille a Claudel (Paris: Josi Corti, 1962), 70. See also Fransois Jost, "Le Roman epistolaire et la technique narrative au XVIIIe siecle," Comparative Literature Studies 3 (1966): 408. 10 Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968), 2. Closure in epistolary novels might in some ways more closely resemble poetic closure than does closure in other narrative forms, since po­ ems are not necessarily in the past tense. On the other hand, poems are vir­ tually always spoken by one voice, whose reliability does not come into ques­ tion. And of course the forward narrative energy of epistolary novels ties them much more closely to other narratives than to poetry.

Introduction · 9 self-validating" (154), then epistolary novels, unable to pre­ pare readers for the future, have a significant handicap in reaching closure. A third- or first-person narrator can create expectations about the ending from the beginning of his or her narration; hints of the future can be scattered throughout the narrative so that when it arrives it will seem to the reader inevitable, predetermined. The letter-writing characters of an epistolary novel, in contrast, cannot make insinuations about the future ("little did I [he/she] know then, that..and they cannot explain the significance of present events in relation to a larger whole. The author of an epistolary novel does of course pre­ pare the reader for the ending indirectly, by inventing partic­ ular characters and having them write about particular events, in a particular tone and style, but since the characters them­ selves cannot write as if they knew the larger shape of the events they are experiencing, their narrations will be unlikely to suggest inexorable progress towards a significant and pre­ determined end. I find unconvincing Scholes's brief reference to the epistolary novel's fundamental conformity with the nineteenth-century model. He writes: "Even if the grammati­ cal tense of the discourse shifts to the present, as in certain epistolary novels, the fact of textualization ensures that inter­ pretation follows the event" (205). Epistolary characters do inevitably interpret experiences as they write their letters, but this interpretation occurs in the midst of the events of the nar­ rative, long before the outcome of the experiences is known. Although individual letters might often resemble miniature first- or third-person narratives, taken together such letters constitute a series of unenlightened present moments. Epistolary novels also lack the central, organizing authority a narrator provides. No one perspective orders the characters' diverse points of view; no external voice evaluates them, sug­ gests whom to believe or to admire. "[L]a methode epistolaire contraint Ie recit a la discontinuite [The epistolary method forces the narrative into discontinuity]," observes Rousset, "elle Ie fragmente et Ie disperse entre divers redacteurs qui n'en connaissent pas la totalite; seul Ie lecteur du livre est en

10

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Introduction

mesure de la reconstituer [it fragments it [the narrative] and disperses it among several writers who don't know its totality; only the book's reader is in a position to reconstitute it [this totality]]."11 The reader can attempt to reconstitute a totality out of the dispersed voices of the epistolary novel, but he or she can never entirely replace the unifying perspective of the absent narrator. Tzvetan Todorov has argued that the selec­ tion and organization of the letters in an epistolary novel re­ veal the presence of a narrator.12 While an external presence is indeed implied by the letters' organization, it is essential to distinguish between such an implicit presence and the "audi­ ble" voice of a narrator. Narrators do not merely decide which events to recount and in what order, they also recount these events themselves. They tell the whole story, and the voices of the other characters are mediated by, or even reported in, the words of the narrator. The mind lurking behind an epistolary novel, who cannot speak directly to the reader, should thus more accurately be termed an "implied author."13 Furthermore, unless the last letter of an epistolary work is supposed to have been written much later than the rest of the correspondence, the events it relates will appear part of a se­ quence and will inevitably suggest the existence of responses. As Janet Altman explains, "the letter writer is always in dia­ logue with a possible respondent," and "any letter appears as part of a potentially ongoing sequence."14 Without the univocal authority of a narrator to guarantee that the final pages 11 Rousset, Narcisse romancier: essai sur la premiere personne dans Ie roman (Paris: Jose Corti, 1973), 21. 12 See Littirature et signification (Paris: Larousse, 1967), 42. 13 Like Scholes, Sartre argues that the epistolary form is merely a variation of his definition of narrative, since the letter writers replace the narrator, and there is necessarily a gap between experience and writing (see Qu'est-ce que la IitUraturef n. 8 to p. 172, on p. 198). The second assertion is not always true, as we know from reading Richardson and Rousseau; the first is belied by Sartre's own description of the eighteenth-century narrator whose subjec­ tivity governs the other subjectivities within the text. Epistolary novels do not contain such governing subjectivities. 14Janet Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1982), 148.

Introduction • 11 do in fact constitute the end of the story, or even to certify that the collection of letters tells a story, with an ending, readers may suspect that the story continued, or feel that it has not been properly closed off. The epistolary form makes it more difficult, then, to provide the kind of closure that fixes the shape and meaning of a text's individual moments. It is not surprising that, when viewed from the perspective of traditional definitions of narrative, with their emphasis on closure, epistolary novels, which resist closure, appear faulty or limited. Until recently critics have considered the eigh­ teenth-century novel, and in particular the epistolary form, primarily as either an obstacle or a development in a mighty progress toward its more perfect descendant of the nineteenth century. Along with the eighteenth century's other most pop­ ular narrative subgenre, the pseudomemoir, the epistolary novel has been criticized for the formal limitations it imposed. Even one of the foremost recent scholars on the period, En­ glish Showalter, writes, for example, "[t]he epistolary novel, despite the prestige of Richardson and Rousseau, was obvi­ ously a technical dead end" and "[t]he novel was in a blind alley in the eighteenth century, as far as technique was con­ cerned. Until the writer was freed from the bondage of the first person, the genre was unable to move forward."15 Similarly, Laurent Versini describes the epistolary novel as appropriate for a century ignorant of the rules of novelistic composition: "[L]e roman par lettres est Ie moins construit des romans . . . et c'est pourquoi il convient si bien a une epoque qui ignore nos exigences de composition quand il s'agit d'oeuvres romanesques [the letter novel is the least constructed of novels ... and that is why it is so well suited to an age that is unaware of our requirements of composition when it is a question of nov­ elistic works]."16 Other scholars view first-person forms not 15 The Evolution of the French Novel: 1641-1782 (Princeton, N.J.: Prince­ ton Univ. Press, 1972), 121, 192, respectively. Showalter writes of Richard­ son's novel: "the worst elements in Clarissa are probably its long-winded preachiness and its epistolary form" (65). 16 Laclos et la tradition: essai sur Ies sources et la technique des "Liaisons dangereuses" (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968), 268.

12 ·

Introduction

as "blind alleys" but as faulty though important precursors to the paradigmatic nineteenth-century novel. Ronald Rosbottom concludes an otherwise excellent article on the epistolary novel by suggesting that we should study the epistolary form because it flourished at the time when the modern novel was being engendered: "Its historical moment was that of the ap­ pearance of what we refer to as the 'modern' novel, and, again, this fact alone makes it an important sub-genre to un­ derstand."17 Rather than criticizing the epistolary form for its failure to correspond to accepted definitions of narrative, perhaps we should put into question these definitions. Since Brooks, Sar­ tre, and Benjamin, among others, derive their models of nar­ rative explicitly from the nineteenth-century novel, it is inevi­ table that when other narrative forms, such as the epistolary novel, are judged in relation to this model they are found to be in some way defective. Brooks, for example, writes in his preface: Most of my examples are taken from nineteenth-century novels and from those twentieth-century narratives that ... maintain a vital relation to [the tradition]. And my very premises for the study of plot largely derive from this tradition: that is, I have looked for the ways in which the narrative texts themselves appear to repre­ sent and reflect on their plots.... The novels of the great tradition all offer models for understanding their use of plots and their re­ lation to plot as a model of understanding, (xii) 17 Ronald C. Rosbottom, "Motifs in Epistolary Fiction: Analysis of a Nar­ rative Sub-genre," L'Esprit Criateur 17, no. 4 (1977): 300. See Vivienne Mylne, The Eighteenth-Century French Novel: Techniques of Illusion (New York: Barnes &c Noble, 1965), for an even more nineteenth-century biased discussion of the epistolary form. Her book's purpose is "to show what in­ trinsically valuable advances in the technique of the novel came about through the efforts of eighteenth-century authors to achieve an increasingly accurate representation of life" (2). She writes, for example, "However vig­ orously novelists of the period might proclaim that their works were true, or true-to-life, it was to be some time before common-sense, attention to detail, consistency and obedience to the conventions of the chosen form were ac­ cepted as part of the basic equipment of any competent novelist" (155).

Introduction

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13

If we examine as well the ways in which epistolary texts "ap­ pear to represent and reflect on their plots," we might arrive at a fairer understanding of the epistolary form and begin to move toward a richer and more complicated definition of nar­ rative. Several recent critics, including Jean Rousset, Frangois Jost, Tzvetan Todorov, and Janet Altman, have begun this study of the epistolary novel on its own terms. In Forme et signification and Narcisse romancier, Rousset describes some of the impli­ cations of the choice of the epistolary form for the plot and themes of a work. He notes, for example, the predominance of the present tense, and suggests that: cette position temporelle, qui rend Ie narrateur contemporain de ce qu'il raconte, tend a faire de la narration l'action elle-meme.... L'instrument epistolaire permet de concevoir un narrateur qui ne raconterait rien, qui n'aurait d'autre objet que sa propre redaction et l'effet de celle-ci sur lui-meme ou sur autrui. [this temporal position, which makes the narrator contemporary with what he is telling, tends to make the narration itself into the action.... The epistolary instrument makes it possible to imagine a narrator who would tell nothing, who would have no other ob­ ject than his own writing and its effect on himself or others.]18

Jost categorizes epistolary novels as active or static, depending on whether the letters are themselves "un mode d'action [a mode of action]" or are merely an account of events to a con­ fidant.19 As he outlines his categories, Jost explains what types of plots correspond best to each use of the epistolary form. Like Rousset and Jost, Altman discusses the way the epistolary form favors the creation of particular themes, actions, and characters. She refers to epistolary works from the seven18 Narcisse romancier, 60. He refers to the Lettres portugaises as just such a novel, in which the letter writer's use of her letters constitutes the plot. See also Forme et signification, 74. 19 "Richardson, Rousseau et Ie roman epistolaire," Cahiers de I'Association intemationale des itudes franqaises 29 (1977): 182-83. This volume contains the papers from a colloquium, "Le Roman par lettres." See also "Le Roman epistolaire et la technique narrative au XVIIIe siecle."

14 · Introduction teenth to the twentieth centuries to illuminate the most char­ acteristic epistolary structures, such as mediation, confidence, and reading, as well as the narrative strategies of the letter form. At the end she argues that the epistolary novel can be seen as a metaphor for all narrative, even all literature, a miseen-abtme of the problems of communication from writer to reader.20 For the first time, critics are also beginning to consider the epistolary form as central to the functioning and significance of particular works. A group of recent studies of Richardson's Clarissa, by Terry Castle, Terry Eagleton, and William Warner, integrate the epistolary form into their interpreta­ tions of the novel.21 Castle, for example, shows how the epis­ tolary form radically undermines the possibility of direct as­ sertions of authority or direct expressions of meaning and forces the reader to interpret self-consciously his or her act of interpretation. Similarly, in his structuralist reading of the Li­ aisons dangereuses, Todorov considers the significance of let­ ters as actions and as material objects and the way the episto­ lary form provides multiple perspectives on the same event. None of these critics, however, considers specifically the rela­ tionship between his or her discussion of an epistolary work or of epistolarity in general, and traditional visions of narra­ tive and closure. I would like to suggest one direction for in­ vestigating this relationship. For the purposes of my argument I have painted the distinc­ tion between epistolary and nonepistolary narrative in black and white. In practice, of course, third-person narratives are not so universally and completely closural, nor epistolary 20 AJtman, Epistolarity. This book includes an excellent bibliography of studies of epistolary works. Ronald Rosbottom, in the article cited above, also investigates the specificity of epistolary structures such as absence and ex­ change. 21 Terry Castle, Clarissa's Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richard­ son's "Clarissa" (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982); Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Rich­ ardson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982); William Warner, Reading "Cla­ rissa": The Struggles of Interpretation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1979). See also John Preston, "Clarissa," in The Created Self: The Reader's Role in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (London: Heinemann, 1970).

Introduction

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15

ones so open, as I have suggested. Nonetheless the distinction remains, and by recognizing it we make possible both a fairer reading of the epistolary form and a broader conception of narrative. Starting from this general sketch of epistolary open­ ness, my readings of individual works will attempt to uncover the more precise dynamics between openness and closure. Ul­ timately I hope not so much to prove that epistolary texts are uniquely open, as to show how they force us to challenge closural theories of narrative. Other narrative forms, and even conceivably the nineteenth-century third-person novel itself, might equally well be used to question such theories.

Different narrative forms correspond to the values and inter­ ests of different societies. As Frank Kermode argues in The Sense of an Ending, "Fictions are for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change" (39). In studying the eighteenth-century novel, or any pre-nineteenthcentury narrative form, we should perhaps emulate Hayden White's attitude toward early forms of history writing. He proposes to treat medieval annals and chronicles: not as the "imperfect" histories they are conventionally conceived to be but rather as particular products of possible conceptions of historical reality, conceptions that are alternatives to, rather than failed anticipations of, the fully realized historical discourse that the modern history form is supposed to embody. (6)

From this perspective, the epistolary form would not reveal the weaknesses in narrative technique of eighteenth-century novelists but rather reflect their lack of concern for questions that were to become central fifty years later. Conversely, nine­ teenth-century novelists would be seen to have rejected the epistolary form not because it was inherently inferior but be­ cause it could not express as effectively as other forms the pre­ occupations of a changed society. Perhaps the fascination with closure, which characterized the nineteenth-century novel to a greater extent than its eighteenth-century predecessor, can be linked to a fear of deviance

16

·

Introduction

and a desire for stability. For as Brooks observes, closure "cures" the text of the deviance of its metonymical center: Deviance is the very condition for life to be "narratable": the state of normality is devoid of interest, energy, and the possibility for narration. In between a beginning prior to plot and an end beyond plot, the middle—the plotted text—has been in a state of error: wandering and misinterpretation. (139)

For Brooks, as for Sartre, narrative is "un bref desordre qui s'est annule [a brief disturbance that is over with]," a tempo­ rary and curable period of deviance. The insistence on closure in both the novelistic and the critical traditions might repre­ sent, then, an attempt to preserve the moral and social order, which would be threatened by endlessly erring narratives. Hayden White has argued that historical events can only be represented in narrative (and thus, for him, given closure) when the outcome of these events can be judged according to a particular system of authority and law: The demand for closure in the historical story is a demand, I sug­ gest, for moral meaning, a demand that sequences of real events be assessed as to their significance as elements of a moral drama. Has any historical narrative ever been written that was not informed not only by moral awareness but specifically by the moral author­ ity of the narrator? (20)

As in historical narrative, closure in fictional narrative might depend upon a narrator's moral judgment and imply a reaffir­ mation of the social and political order of the time. And in fact critics such as Sartre have argued that the nineteenth-century novel, narrated at a safe distance from an earlier disorder, in­ evitably contains a moral: "ce sont des experiences, dont ils [les narrateurs] ont tire Ie sue et ils nous avertissent, des qu'ils prennent la parole, que Ieur recit comporte une moralite [they are experiences from which they [the narrators] have ex­ tracted the quintessence, and they warn us, from the moment they start talking, that their tale has a moral]" (Qu'est-ce que la littirature?, 174). According to Sartre, traditional narrative in fact serves to uphold the bourgeois social order:

Introduction ·

17

Dans une societe en ordre, qui medite son eternite et la celebre par des rites, un homme evoque Ie fantome d'un desordre passe, Ie fait miroiter, Ie pare de graces surannees et, au moment qu'il va inquieter, Ie dissipe d'un coup de baguette magique, Iui substitue la hierarchie eternelle des causes et des lois. [In an ordered society, which meditates upon its eternity and cele­ brates it with rites, a man evokes the phantom of a past disorder, makes it glitter, embellishes it with old-fashioned graces, and at the moment when it is about to cause uneasiness, dispels it with a wave of his magic wand and substitutes for it the eternal hierarchy of causes and laws.] (175)

Real Ouellet too argues that the changes in narrative form at the start of the nineteenth century resulted from the instal­ lation of a more unified, static social system: "Avec la montee de la bourgeoisie, on aura l'impression . .. que l'homme a domestique l'univers... . La vision du romancier se faisant unificatrice, on voit alors fleurir Ie roman a la troisieme personne, Ie roman au passe simple qui decrit un monde petrifie [With the rise of the bourgeoisie, one will have the impression .. . that man has domesticated the universe.. . . With the novelist's vision becoming unifying, the third-person novel flourishes, the novel in the past historic that describes a petrified world]."22 According to this interpretation, the im­ portance of closure in the nineteenth-century novel would re­ sult from the self-confidence and stability of the dominant class, the bourgeoisie, which did not doubt its own authority. Sartre proposes a rather different explanation for the nine­ teenth-century novel's closural moral stance. His discussion of the transformation in literature's relation to social structures between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries attributes the move from open to closed narrative forms to the bourgeoisie's 22 "Deux Theories romanesques au XVIIIe siecle: Ie roman 'bourgeois' et Ie roman epistolaire," Etudes littiraires 1, no. 2 (August 1968): 250. While I do not necessarily agree with Ouellet's implication that the bourgeoisie rose swiftly into an unproblematic dominance, his article provides one example of an historical explanation for the virtual disappearance of the epistolary form in the nineteenth century.

18

·

Introduction

lack of confidence. "[CJomme Ie bourgeois n'est pas tout a fait sur de soi [as the bourgeois is not quite sure of himself]," ar­ gues Sartre, "il faudra que la litterature l'aide a se sentir bour­ geois de droit divin [literature will have to help him feel bour­ geois by divine right]." Ainsi risque-t-elle, apres avoir ete au XVIIIe siecle, la mauvaise conscience des privilegies, de devenir, au XIXe siecle, la bonne con­ science d'une classe d'oppression. [Thus, after having been the bad conscience of the privileged in the eighteenth century it ran the risk in the nineteenth century of be­ coming the good conscience of an oppressing class.] (Qu'est-ce que la littirature?, 141)23

While Ouellet and Sartre disagree as to the bourgeoisie's con­ fidence in its worldview, both agree that narrative closure serves to reinforce a stable social order, and in so doing cor­ responds to the requirements of nineteenth-century society. In contrast to the closed nineteenth-century novel, the open­ ness of the epistolary form might indicate an interest in the actual process of creating meanings and a desire to put into question the moral and political status quo.24 For if the nine­ teenth century seeks to solidify a position gained, the eigh­ teenth century seeks to unsettle an inherited structure. Not only in politics but in every area of science, philosophy, and the arts the eighteenth century questioned received views. This spirit of investigation is reflected perhaps above all in a fasci­ nation with the very process of understanding. As Ernst Cassirer writes in his Philosophy of the Enlightenment: The age senses that a new force is at work within it; but it is even more fascinated by the activity of this force than by the creations 23 See

also 151,167-68. My reference to the eighteenth-century novelists' "desire to put into question the moral and political status quo" should not be taken as a claim that these authors necessarily consciously questioned the existing order (al­ though some did). I would argue that late eighteenth-century novelists repro­ duced the political and philosophical preoccupations of the period and milieu in which they wrote, regardless of whether or not they were "engages." 24

Introduction · 19 brought forth by that activity. It rejoices not only in results, but it inquires into, and attempts to explain, the form of the process lead­ ing to these results.25 At the same time, then, as eighteenth-century thinkers revise particular classical views of nature and the state, their very attitude toward reasoning further undermines these classical views. "The whole eighteenth century understands reason in this sense," explains Cassirer, "not as a sound body of knowl­ edge, principles, and truths, but as a kind of energy, a force which is fully comprehensible only in its agency and effects" (13). It is because of the eighteenth-century's interrogative atti­ tude toward received structures of thought and power that Sartre characterizes it as "la chance, unique dans l'histoire, et Ie paradis bientot perdu des ecrivains fra^ais [the fortunate time, unique in history, and the soon-to-be-lost paradise, of French writers]" (124). According to Sartre, literature ceases to be "une fonction conservatrice et purificatrice d'une societe integree [a conservative and purifying function of an inte­ grated society]" (130), as it had been in the seventeenth cen­ tury, and "se confond avec la Negativite, c'est-a-dire avec Ie doute, Ie refus, la critique, la contestation [merges with Neg­ ativity, that is, with doubt, refusal, criticism, and contesta­ tion]" (131). Because of literature's position "entre des aspi­ rations confuses et une ideologic en ruines, comme l'ecrivain entre la bourgeoisie, l'Eglise et la Cour [between confused as­ pirations and an ideology in ruins, like the writer between the bourgeoisie, the Church, and the Court]" (130), it counters "la spiritualite ossifiee de l'Eglise [the ossified spirituality of the Church]" with "les droits d'une spiritualite nouvelle en mouvement, qui ne se confond plus avec aucune ideologic et se manifeste comme Ie pouvoir de depasser perpetuellement Ie donne, quel qu'il soit [the rights of a new spirituality, in move­ ment, which was no longer identified with any ideology and which manifested itself as the power of continually surpassing 26 The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1951),5.

20 · Introduction the given, whatever it might be]" (131). Although it is clearly an idealization to claim that eighteenth-century "spirituality" is distinct from any ideology, eighteenth-century thought does question the reigning ideology and desire to "depasser Ie donne [surpass the given]."26 This preoccupation with the creation of meaning and with questioning the received order corresponds to the pluralistic, fragmented textual forms, such as encyclopedias, dialogues, and letters, that flourished in the eighteenth century. Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique, begun at the end of the seventeenth century, is often seen as one of the first char­ acteristically Enlightenment projects, a precursor of the Encyclopidte. Although he later revised this plan slightly, Bayle's initial project was to uncover all the false information in the works of other historians, to compose "un Dictionaire de Fautes [a Dictionary of Errors]."27 When the work appears, each entry contains both "un Narre succinct des Faits [a suc­ cinct Narration of the Facts]" and, in the footnotes, "un grand Commentaire . . . ou je fais entrer la Censure de plusieurs Fautes, et quelquefois meme une tirade de Reflexions Philosophiques [a great Commentary . .. in which I include the Censure of various Errors, and sometimes even a tirade of Philosophical Reflections]" (1: 2). Bayle thus chose to divide his authorial voice, to create both a factual historical narrator and a more lively and opinionated commentator. His prefer­ ence for the critical role is borne out by the length of the foot­ notes, which generally occupy more space than the supposed "text" of the entries and sometimes virtually submerge it. The 16

Terry Eagleton argues along similar lines that Richardson uses the epis­ tolary form to challenge the dominance of the English aristocracy. He sees Richardson's novels as "an agent, rather than mere account, of the English bourgeoisie's attempt to wrest a degree of ideological hegemony from the ar­ istocracy in the decades which follow the political settlement of 1688." See The Rape of Clarissa, 4. Eagleton compares Brechtian epic theater to the eighteenth-century epistolary novel in order to explain Richardson's choice of the epistolary form. For him, Richardson's novels are "a mode of cultural pro­ duction more akin to the collective, open-ended, revisionary strategies of modern 'epic' theatre" (10). 27 Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, 5th ed., vol. 1 (1740), 1.

Introduction

· 21

article on Spinoza, for example, consists of a few lines at the top of each page, with the remainder of the page devoted to notes. Bayle himself recognizes the unorthodox, digressive structure of his work: Je Ioue la simplicite d'un plan ... je fais consister en cela l'idee de la perfection; mais si je veux passer de cette theorie a la pratique, j'avoue que j'ai de la peine.... Le melange de plusieurs formes, un peu de bigarrure, pas tant d'uniformite, sont assez mon fait. [I praise the simplicity of a plan ... I make that constitute my idea of perfection; but if I want to move from this theory to practice, I admit 1 have difficulty.... The mixing of several forms, a little variegation, not so much uniformity, this is pretty much my way.] (4: 609)

The form of Bayle's Dictionnaire, divided into entries, orga­ nized alphabetically, and massively footnoted and cross-refer­ enced, undercuts any possibility of stable, univocal discourse. Many of the formal characteristics of Bayle's dictionary reappear in the Encyclopidie. Once again the alphabetical or­ der breaks continuity from one entry to the next and produces odd juxtapositions of unrelated topics. While Bayle divided his own voice into text and footnotes (and arguably from en­ try to entry), the Ertcyclopidie is actually the work of many different individuals. The number of contributors, their op­ posed perspectives, the differing lengths and styles of their ar­ ticles, and the very magnitude of their project combine to pre­ vent either unity or uniformity. As Diderot comments in his article, "Encyclopedic," "nous sommes alternativement nains et geants, colosses et pygmees; droits, bien faits et proportionnes; bossus, boiteux et contrefaits... . vous comparerez l'ouvrage entier au monstre de YArt poitique [we are alter­ nately dwarfs and giants, colossi and pygmies; upright, well made and proportioned; hunchbacked, lame and de­ formed. . .. you will compare the work as a whole to the mon­ ster from L'Art po0tique]."2H This fragmented, plurivocal 28 Diderot, "Encyclopedic," in L'Encyclopidie; (Euvres completes, vol. 7 (Paris: Hermann, 1976), 214.

22

·

Introduaion

structure is given further subversive power by the extensive use of renvois from entry to entry. The entry "Cordelier," for example, which presents a rather favorable view of the clergy, refers the reader to the more critical discussion under the in­ nocuous heading "Capuchon." Diderot discusses the destabi­ lizing function of these renvois quite explicitly: Les renvois de choses eclaircissent l'objet.... Mais quand il Ie faudra, ils produiront aussi un effet tout contraire; ils opposeront Ies notions; ils feront contraster Ies principes; ils attaqueront, ebranleront, renverseront secretement quelques opinions ridicules qu'on n'oserait insulter ouvertement. Si 1'auteur est impartial, ils auront toujours la double fonction de confirmer et de refuter; de troubler et de concilier. [The cross-references to things clarify the topic.... But when nec­ essary, they will also produce a completely opposite effect; they will oppose notions; they will contrast principles; they will attack, weaken, secretly reverse certain ridiculous beliefs that one wouldn't dare challenge overtly. If the author is impartial, they will always have the double function of confirming and refuting; of dis­ rupting and reconciling.] (221)

With the help of the renvois, the encyclopedia may "changer la fagon commune de penser [change the usual way of think­ ing]" (222). The dictionary or encyclopedia form is only one manifesta­ tion (albeit the most celebrated) of an investigative spirit that also manifests itself in other forms, particularly letters. Like the encyclopedia, the epistolary form presents multiple per­ spectives and internal commentary, putting into question the possibility of objective truth or stable authority. Also, as I ar­ gued earlier, epistolary novels privilege metonymy over meta­ phor, process over result, and thus reflect the preoccupations of Enlightenment philosophy. Of course the epistolary form is not the only fragmented narrative form, or the only form that resists closure. Many other eighteenth-century novels, such as Jacques Ie fataliste or Tristram Shandy, create similar effects using different strategies. Armine Kotin Mortimer notes a gen-

Introduction · 23 eralized progression in narrative between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from familiar endings to a refusal of clo­ sure. "Ce changement est radical et comporte plusieurs op­ positions categoriques [This change is radical and involves several categorical oppositions]," she explains, "une fin connue opposee a une histoire sans fin, infinissable, ou toujours retardee ou repousee; un recit fait en vue d'une fin contre un recit ecrit en vue de continuer autant qu'on Ie souhaite . . . [a known ending as opposed to a story without end, unendable or always delayed or deferred; a narrative written in view of an ending versus a narrative written so that it will continue as long as one wishes . . .] (226). Nonetheless, the epistolary novel is one of the most important eighteenth-century narra­ tive forms associated with play on meaning rather than the establishment of a fixed, authoritative significance. Not only novelists, but philosophers, historians, political theorists, and scientists throughout the eighteenth century ex­ pressed their ideas in letters. The explosion of the epistolary form began in the late seventeenth century and continued until the end of the eighteenth century, after which the form largely disappeared. Following the example of such early successes as the Lettres portugaises (1669) and the Lettres persanes (1721), hundreds of epistolary novels appeared, the better known of which were the work of Marivaux, Graffigny, Riccoboni, Rousseau, Diderot, Laclos, Crebillon, Restif de la Bretonne, Sade, Charriere, and Stael.29 Many of the most popular novels at the time, and many of the eighteenth-century novels still read today, are epistolary. Of course these works exploit the form in very different ways. Montesquieu and Rousseau, for example, take advantage of the possibility of introducing an assortment of unrelated topics into one work; as Montes­ quieu writes in his preface to the Lettres persanes, "Mais dans la forme de lettres . . . ou Ies sujets qu'on traite ne sont depen­ dants d'aucun dessein ou d'aucun plan deja forme, l'auteur 29 Versini lists almost three hundred epistolary novels published between 1700 and 1800 in his appendices to Laclos et la tradition, and he notes that his list is not exhaustive. See also his useful graph of the changing popularity of the form, 251.

24 · Introduction s'est donne l'avantage de pouvoir joindre de la philosophic, de la politique et de la morale a un roman, et de Iier Ie tout par une chaine secrete [But in the letter form ... where the sub­ jects treated are not dependent on any design or preconceived plan, the author gains the advantage of being able to join phi­ losophy, politics, and ethics to a novel, and to connect the whole by a secret chain]."30 Almost all epistolary novelists capitalize on the confusion between fiction and reality permit­ ted by the epistolary form, but Diderot took this confusion to an extreme in writing La Religieuse, when his fictional letters succeeded in convincing their real-life recipient of the imagi­ nary nun's existence. Like the Lettres portugaises, the im­ mensely popular Lettres d'utte Pfruvienne present the unan­ swered letters of a woman to her lover and allow for a particularly intimate portrayal of one character's feelings; in La Vie de Marianne and Mistriss Henley, a woman writes to a female friend, thus ensuring a female audience for her efforts to shape the story of her life. In contrast the Liaisons dangereuses creates a truly polyphonic textual world, which demon­ strates the power and means of signification of letters and ends self-referentially with the creation of the novel itself. At the same time that these diverse novels were appearing, many philosophical works took the form of a letter or series of let­ ters (e.g., Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques, Diderot's Lettre sur Ies aveugles, Rousseau's Lettre a d'Alembert sur Ies spec­ tacles), and virtually all of the philosophes and their salon as­ sociates carried on regular correspondences whose immensity testifies to the epistolary form's importance. Eighteenth-century writers chose, more often than writers of any century be­ fore or since, the epistolary form, the form Georges May char­ acterizes as "la plus souple, la plus libre de toutes Ies tutelles traditionnelles, la plus riche de toutes Ies virtualites [the most flexible, the freest from traditional tutelages, the richest in all potentialities]."31 30 (Paris: Flammarion, 1964), 21.1 consulted John Davidson's translation of Persian Letters (London: George Routledge, 1923). 31 Georges May, "La Litterature epistolaire date-t-elle du dix-huitieme siecle?" Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 56 (1967): 840.

Introduction · 25

Since epistolary novels cannot be understood according to tra­ ditional models of narrative, we must revise these models, par­ ticularly the defining role they assign to closure. I will argue that narratives are generated and structured by two tenden­ cies, a tendency toward stability and meaning and a tendency toward mobility and desire. Narratives in which fixed mean­ ing dominates are closural, and narratives in which mobile de­ sire dominates are open; neither type of narrative is inherently superior. Retrospective narratives such as those studied by Brooks do indeed often produce a stabilizing sense of inevita­ bility, while narratives that are generated forward, such as epistolary novels, privilege the energy that propels them. All narratives nonetheless depend on both tendencies. Like Brooks I will borrow Jakobson's terms "metonymy" and "metaphor" to describe the two tendencies, or axes, of narra­ tive, but I will define the relationship between them differently and in so doing transform Brooks's conception of metonymy and put into question his valorization of metaphor. In his celebrated study of two types of aphasia, Jakobson identifies two axes of language, the axis of selection, or meta­ phor, and the axis of combination, or metonymy. As we speak we choose words from the vertical axis of similarity and com­ bine them with others along the horizontal axis of contiguity. Jakobson then extends these axes to larger linguistic entities, such as literary works, and suggests that in different types of literature, and in different literary movements, either meta­ phor or metonymy may predominate; romanticism and sym­ bolism are primarily metaphorical, while realism is metonymical.32 Brooks does not fundamentally alter Jakobson's definitions, but he develops them considerably and demon­ strates persuasively how metaphor and metonymy can be used in interpreting and theorizing about texts. For Brooks, as for Jakobson, metonymy is not only horizontal but "predicative" 32 "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances," in Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), 76-78.

26 · Introduction (Jakobson, 77), seeking to arrive at a completed structure (the sentence or the closed narrative). Brooks describes metonymy as "the figure of linkage in the signifying chain: precedence and consequence, the movement from one detail to another, the movement toward totalization under the mandate of de­ sire" (91). Narrative desire, Brooks states categorically, "is ul­ timately, inexorably, desire for the end" (52). In contrast, I will argue that metonymy seeks to perpetuate itself and to es­ cape final meaning. I agree with Brooks's assertion that metonymical movement is propelled by desire ("[t]he energy gen­ erated by deviance, extravagance, excess—an energy that belongs to the textual hero's career and to the reader's expec­ tation, his desire of and for the text" [108]), but the study of epistolary novels, and even more, of real correspondences, suggests that metonymy desires its own continuation rather than metaphoric closure. This conception of desire as interminable resembles Lacanian desire or metonymy. In his well-known essay, "L'Instance de la lettre dans l'inconscient," Lacan outlines the opposition between metaphor and metonymy in both language and the unconscious. Metonymy, for him, "c'est la connexion du signifiant au signifiant, qui permet l'elision par quoi Ie signifiant installe Ie manque de l'etre dans la relation d'objet [it is the connection between signifier and signifier that permits the eli­ sion by which the signifier installs the lack of being in the ob­ ject relation]," while metaphor is "la substitution du signifiant au signifiant.. . [qui] produit un effet de signification qui est de poesie ou de creation [the substitution of signifier for sig­ nifier .. . [which] produces an effect of signification that is po­ etic or creative]."33 While metaphor produces meaning, the fullness of being, metonymy produces a "slippage of signifiers," the unfillable lack called desire. According to Lacan, de­ sire is precisely that which can never be satisfied, linked to the recognition of the inevitably absent phallus.34 As Lacan char­ acterizes metonymy and desire: 33 Ecrits 1 (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 274. Translation by Alan Sheridan, Ecrits: A Selection (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1977), slightly modi­ fied. 34 Lacan explains the relationship between the phallus and desire in "La

Introduction

· 27

Et Ies enigmes que propose Ie desir a toute "philosophie naturelle," sa fr£n6sie mimant Ie gouffre de l'infini... ne tiennent a nul autre dereglement de l'instinct qu'a sa prise dans Ies rails—eternellement tendus vers Ie disir d'autre chose,—de la metonymie. [And the enigmas that desire poses for a "natural philosophy," its frenzy mimicking the abyss of the infinite ... these amount to no other derangement of instinct than that of being caught in the rails—eternally stretching forth toward the desire for something else,—of metonymy.] (1:277-78) Like Lacanian desire, the metonymical energy that helps mo­ tivate narrative is an eternal desire for "autre chose," for that which by definition it cannot reach: for desire itself.35 And like Signification du phallus," Ecrits 2 (Seuil, 1971), 113: "Cette epreuve du desir de l'Autre, la clinique nous montre qu'elle n'est pas decisive en tant que Ie sujet y apprend si lui-meme a ou non un phallus reel, mais en tant qu'il apprend que la mere ne l'a pas.... Ici se signe la conjonction du desir en tant que Ie signifiant phallique en est la marque, avec la menace ou nostalgie du manque a avoir [Clinical experience has shown us that this test of the desire of the Other is decisive not in the sense that the subject learns by it whether or not he has a real phallus, but in the sense that he learns that the mother does not have it. . . . Here is signed the conjunction of desire, in that the phal­ lic signifier is its mark, with the threat or nostalgia of lacking it]." 351 have an important reservation about comparing Lacan's conception of metonymy with the motivating energy of narrative. His association of meton­ ymy with the phallus implies both that all sexual and textual desire conforms to a masculine model and that desire is always directed at a particular goal, however unattainable. Feminist critics have pointed out the phallocentrism of a system in which the phallus is supposed to represent every person's unfulfillable desire. French feminists such as Luce Irigaray distinguish feminine de­ sire, and thus feminine discourse, from the masculine economy described by Lacan and underlying, for Irigaray, most of Western thought. She character­ izes women's desire and language as metonymical, in contrast to male meta­ phorical and closural desire and language. Following the work of Irigaray, Jane Gallop proposes an alternative to Lacanian metonymy, a female "jouissance" no longer centered on the phallus, and no longer directed toward a nameable closure. In The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanaly­ sis she argues that "[masculine] desire is metonymical impatience, anticipa­ tion pressing ever forward along the line of discourse so as to close significa­ tion, whereas feminine sexuality is a 'jouissance enveloped in its own contiguity' [she is citing Michele Montrelay]. Such jouissance would be sparks of pleasure ignited by contact at any point, any moment along the line, not waiting for a closure, but enjoying the touching. As a result of such sparks,

28 · Introduction feminist critics' revisions of Lacanian desire, the metonymy of epistolary novels and, even more, of real correspondences in­ volves taking pleasure in a process rather than striving for an all-important ending.36 In Narrative and its Discontents, D. A. Miller formulates a revision of Brooks's theory of narrative along lines similar to the one I am proposing. In Miller's theory, too, the desire that motivates narrative seeks not closure but its own perpetua­ tion. Miller proposes the term "narratable" (which Brooks also adopts) to describe the elements in a text that engender or maintain narrative, and "narratability" for the tension, in­ stability, or desire out of which narrative arises. For Miller, narratability is fundamentally at odds with closure and "can never generate the terms for its own arrest."37 It belongs to an entirely different system of values. As he argues, "the suspen­ sive and dispersive logic of narrative is such that an effective closure—no matter how naturally or organically it emerges from the story—always stands in a discontinuous (or nega­ tive) relation to it" (189). the impatient economy aimed at finished meaning-products (theses, conclu­ sions, definitive statements) might just go up in smoke" (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982), 30-31. When I use the term metonymy, then, I will be referring to a desire that Irigaray and Gallop would call "feminine," aimed not at the release of closure but at perpetuating itself indefinitely. 36 Epistolary narrative might thus be considered "feminine" according to Irigaray's terminology. I do not mean to suggest, though, that "feminine" narrative forms result from biological differences between men and women. In the context of my analyses, "feminine" and "masculine" are particularly compelling metaphors for different narrative shapes and motivating desires, compelling partly because openness and subversive desire have frequently been associated with women characters or writers. There would, however, be much to say about the way women's desire, spe­ cifically, is suppressed in epistolary works. For discussions of this topic, see Susan Lee Carrell, Le Soliloque de la passion fiminine ou Ie dialogue illusoire (Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 1982); Peggy Kamuf, Fictions of Feminine Desire: Disclosures of Heloise (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1982); and Linda S. Kauffman, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fiction (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986). 37 Narrative and its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981), 266-67.

Introduction · 29 Within the general category of the narratable, Miller in­ cludes both elements that drive narrative forward and ele­ ments that block the establishment of a stable closure in other ways (such as digressions). I will reserve the term "narratability" to refer to "a tension, a kind of irritation, which demands narration" (103), as Brooks does. The narratable elements of a text are thus often a subset of the metonymical elements, but narratability can also result from the opposition between met­ aphor and metonymy. In my model, metonymy will include not only disturbances that might motivate narrative but also those that do not (thus Miller's narratability resembles my me­ tonymy). I will also maintain that, just as metonymy does not necessarily drive toward metaphor (as Brooks suggests), so closure need not represent a radical rupture with the sequence of narrative (as Miller argues). The closural metaphoric vision will generally be present in a narrative from the start, as an alternative to metonymy. It is important to note that the "deviance"(as Brooks terms it) that generates nineteenth-century novels is more specifi­ cally deviation from a norm than is the "extravagance" (as I will term it) of eighteenth-century novels. Both deviance and extravagance are sources of narratability, but since deviance by definition requires "curing," texts motivated by deviance will tend toward closure. Like deviance, extravagance exceeds conventional limits, but unlike deviance, extravagance is not an abnormality that can be cured. The distinction between de­ viance and extravagance corresponds to the difference be­ tween Brooks's conception of metonymy and mine. In other words, metonymy subordinated to metaphor produces devi­ ance; metonymy not subordinated to metaphor produces ex­ travagance. According to Smith's useful definition, closure is "a confir­ mation of expectations that have been established by the structure of the sequence.. .. The sense of stable conclusive­ ness, finality, or 'clinch' " (2).38 Since this stability and coher38 Similarly, Mortimer writes: "La conception de la cloture narrative de­ pend souvent d'un sentiment satisfaisant que toutes Ies donnees du recit ont

30 · Introduction ence depend not only upon the ending but upon the entire nar­ rative, I will use closure to refer more generally to a work's unity, to the extent to which loose ends can be gathered up to form a coherent whole (in other words, to its metaphoricity). An ending may cut off a text's generative energy (metonymy, or desire) without gathering up its earlier events and ideas into a unified whole. The most metaphoric novelistic endings, such as death and marriage, may give the reader the satisfaction of reaching the termination of plot, without resolving the larger issues raised by the work. Smith distinguishes between "struc­ tural" and "nonstructural" closural devices, depending on whether the devices follow from "the poem's particular for­ mal or thematic structure" (151—52), or are independent of the structure (such as references in the final lines of a poem to death or night). The equivalent of these nonstructural closures in narrative might be inadequately prepared plot twists, such as death or marriage, that provide an easy sense of closure without recuperating all of the text's previous digressions and mysteries. In this case, a metaphoric ending would be subor­ dinated to an overall metonymy.39 abouti a Ieur fin plus ou moins necessaire, que Ies problemes poses par la narration sont resolus, qu'aucun bout de fil narratif ne reste flottant, que Ies signes composant l'univers narratif sont epuises, en somme, que ce qui a ete ouvert est clos [The conception of narrative closure often depends on a satis­ fying feeling that all the givens of the narrative have reached their more or less necessary end, that the problems posed by the narration have been resolved, that no bit of narrative thread remains floating, that the signs making up the narrative universe have been exhausted, in sum, that that which was opened is closed]" (15). I would disagree, however, with Mortimer's assumption that closure necessarily resides in the final words or pages of a text. See her "Ouverture" (15-32) for an interesting discussion of various tech­ niques of closure and useful bibliographic information. 39 David Richter makes a similar distinction in Fable's End: Completeness and Closure in Rhetorical Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974), 170, between "completeness" and "closure": "the devices for closing off an essay ... can be used at any time; the sense of the essay's completeness, on the other hand, depends instead on the use of the many arguments or other means of persuasion which are appropriate to the essay's purpose"; however, he assumes, far too simplistically, that "the possibility of sacrificing complete­ ness to closure (or vice versa) is foreclosed in represented actions because the

Introduction • 31 Taking the theories of Brooks, Miller, and others as a point of departure but above all drawing upon epistolary works themselves, I would like to propose a definition of narrative that can accommodate epistolary novels and even real corre­ spondences. A lengthy exchange between two correspondents involves the use of language to structure a relationship over time and could be described as a narrative. The plot of such a narrative is the process of defining the relationship and the exchange, and its narratability results from the conflicts be­ tween the models the correspondents propose. The continu­ ous mutual effort to establish the nature and limits of an epis­ tolary relationship ensures connections among the letters and movement from letter to letter. In more familiar narrative forms unity and conflict are produced by the narrator rather than by characters whose narrations are also acts in the plot, but a series of tensions and resolutions motivates all narrative. A prolonged, highly self-conscious correspondence might be seen as a particularly explicit representation of the processes that engender all narrative. It depends for its very existence upon the plotting efforts that might be relatively absent from the surface of a fictional narrative. Closure cannot, of course, play the role in such a narrative that Brooks, Benjamin, and Sartre describe it as playing in tra­ ditional narrative forms. The correspondents write of their present feelings and experiences, without knowledge of where these feelings and experiences will lead. Even more than the characters in an epistolary novel, behind whom lurks an ausame event ... must produce both completeness and closure in all fictions whose organizing principle is plot" (n. 1, p. 201). See also Marianna Torgovnick, Closure in the Novel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981). It is not surprising that in his recent review of D. A. Miller's and Torgovnick's books ("Closure and the Critics," Modern Philology 80, no. 3 [Feb. 1983]: 287-92), Richter prefers Torgovnick's work, which more closely approaches his view of closure. Richter and Torgovnick see openness as a sign of the weakness or failure of a text as a work of art and implicitly see the critic's role as defending the work against such hostile charges and ultimately proving its coherence. As I will discuss later, I strongly disagree with this association between closure and literary value.

32 · Introduction thor with plans for the outcome of their lives, real correspon­ dents generate their narrative forward to an unknown future. Often they refer to models that suggest possible views of their relationship's larger shape, but rather than describing an al­ ready fixed structure, these models are part of an unending interactive process of structuring. Given the predominantly metonymical form of real correspondences, it is not surprising that critics have refused to read them as literature, much less narrative. But if one accepts that metonymy and metaphor are equally characteristic of narrative, that all narratives require generative energy as well as structures of meaning, real corre­ spondences may be seen to shed light on the functioning of any narrative. This book will examine the development of epistolary nar­ ratives within late seventeenth-century letter manuals and the generation of narrative in two representative eighteenth-century correspondences, one real and one fictional, to see how a collection of letters becomes a story and gain clues as to the dynamics of all narrative. By juxtaposing real and fictional epistolary works, I hope to bring out the essential similarity of the two forms, in both of which narrative drives forward to an open future instead of looking back over a completed past. Rather than trying to force real correspondences into the mold of the traditional novel, I will reevaluate the novel in the light of the functioning of real correspondences.40 This reevaluation might make it possible to consider open-ended narratives not as an aberration but as one of several variations within the larger realm of narrative works. According to this broader definition, narratives will still be,as Brooks describes them, texts in which "the meanings are developed over temporal succes­ sion" and which require "an interpretive structuring opera40 This strategy should enable my analysis to escape one of the risks of com­ paring letters with novels. I hope to show that it need not be the case that: "In the comparison of letters with novels, their specificity as letters is again com­ promised, their thematic multiplicity reduced to the continuation of a single narrative development," as Anne W. Sienkewicz argues ("Two Women of Let­ ters: Mme de Sevigne and Mme Du Deffand" [Ph.D. Diss., Johns Hopkins Univ., 1978], 19).

Introduction · 33 tion," but they will no longer be seen as depending on one stable "final predication" (19). Throughout this book I will use "metaphor" and "meton­ ymy" to describe what I see as the two fundamental axes of narrative. I have chosen the terms "metaphor" and "meton­ ymy" rather than, for example, "closure" and "openness," be­ cause I want to stress that metaphor functions throughout a narrative, not simply at its ending, and that metonymy in­ volves energy and movement, not simply an open state. Fur­ thermore, I want the terms to represent not just two axes of narrative but two corresponding ideals for spatial and tem­ poral experience. Metaphor will thus refer to a valorization of the collapse of time into a perfect instant, metonymy to a val­ orization of desire and expanse. As in feminist revisions of Lacan's theory, metaphor will imply fullness and significance, metonymy movement and desire. Metaphor will be associated with stability, purposefulness, meaning, and the possibility of synthesis. Metonymy, conversely, will be associated with in­ stability, interminability, ambiguity, and multiplicity.41 All narratives involve a struggle between metaphor and meton­ ymy, but narratives in which metaphor dominates throughout and triumphs at the end can be considered metaphoric (or closural), while narratives in which metonymy prevails are metonymic. Unlike the critical tradition on narrative, which has both privileged the metaphoric axis within narratives, and valo­ rized metaphorical works, I will pay particular attention to the role of metonymy in narrative and will argue that predomi­ nantly metonymical narratives are not necessarily inferior works of art.42 Freeing metonymy from its subordinate role 41 Kermode's terms kairos and chronos are related to my metaphor and metonymy. Chronos is time empty of meaning, "mere chronicity," while kai­ ros describes "times which are concordant and full," "charged with a mean­ ing derived from [their] relation to the end" (The Sense of an Ending, 47-50). The parallel between Kermode's terms and my own may help underline met­ aphor's potential association with time, time that is infused with purpose and meaning. 42 Jakobson remarks the critical preference for the rhetorical figure of met-

34

·

Introduction

within narrative might make it possible to attend to the insta­ bilities and ambiguities of texts, as well as to their coherence.43 Similarly, removing the stigma attached to metonymical texts might make it possible to extend the limits of the "artistic" and discover the literary functioning of nonfictional works such as real correspondences.44

Extravagant, ante (latin extra [en dehors] et vagans, p. pres. du verbe vagari [errer]) ("qui s'ecarte de la voie") 1. Vx. S'est dit de textes non incorpores dans Ies recueiis canoniques. 2. Qui est hors du sens commun. [Extravagant (latin extra [beyond] and vagans, present participle of the verb va­ gari [to wander]) ("that which strays from the path") 1. Archaic. Said of texts not incorporated into the canonic collec­ tions. 2. That which is outside of common sense.] (Robert dictionary)

Each of the works I will study has been judged in some way extravagant, and this extravagance is associated with the epis­ tolary form and with metonymical desire. The authors of the aphor over metonymy, which receives almost no attention. He speculates that this may in part result from the fact that metalanguage, the language of defi­ nitions, is itself metaphoric and thus unsuited to understanding metonymy. See "Two Aspects of Language," 81-82. 43 This attention to the subversion of stability and unity by other elements within a text of course characterizes deconstruction. While I will not "decon­ struct" works in the manner of Derrida or de Man, my theory and my read­ ings both obviously owe much to the poststructuralist interest in subversion and ambiguity. 44 This project, too, has been begun by deconstructionists and by the recent theoreticians of history who study the "literary" strategies of historical writ­ ing. See, for example, Hayden White's Metahistory: The Historical Imagina­ tion in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973).

Introduction · 35 seventeenth-century letter manuals within which epistolary narrative began to develop were afraid to allow letters to tell a story alone, without the controlling presence of a narrator. Critics and editors of the Lettres portugaises have devoted their efforts to pinning down the text's deliberately ambigu­ ous status and reducing the metonymy of Mariane's sentences and letters. Mme du Deffand's correspondent, Horace Walpole, strives to prevent her from following the model of her epistolary forbears Mariane and Heloise in the expression of an inappropriate passion. Rousseau is forced to kill the hero­ ine of La Nouvelle Hiloise in order to remove her threatening desire from the novel. Each of these texts has resisted autho­ rial, editorial, and critical attempts to subordinate metonymy to metaphor, to bring epistolary energy back to the safe path of familiar and univocal meaning. These extravagant narra­ tives, which lack what Benjamin would call the "sanction" of death, are about the dynamic, interminable process of giving shape and meaning to life.

CHAPTER ONE

The Genesis of Epistolary Narrative in the Seventeenth Century Ah! j'en meurs de honte: mon desespoir n'est done que dans mes lettres ? —Lettres portugaises

WOMEN, SALONS, AND LETTER WRITING

In seventeenth-century France letters were part of a codified system of social relations. Seventeenth-century men and women wrote letters not only to maintain contact with distant friends but also to carry out their daily social business. All interactions among members of the upper classes, from the declaration of passionate love, to the expression of condo­ lences on the death of a relative, to the offering of thanks for a political favor, were governed by the conventions of honnetet6 and mondaniti, conventions of polite, well-bred behavior. Letters played a central role in these codified social relations. Sentiments from gratitude to sympathy to advice were ex­ pressed in highly conventionalized letters. Dorothy Backer writes of love, for example: Love was rigorously patterned—disciplined, we might say—to meet standards of civilization, dignity, and honor, even when (es­ pecially when) it was illicit. The love letter was an indispensable element in the pattern.1

As Versini writes, "Pratique epistolaire et honnetete se rejoignent done etroitement [Epistolary practice and courtesy are thus closely linked]."2 1 Dorothy 2 Laurent

Backer, Precious Women (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 205. Versini, Laclos et la tradition (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968), 234.

Genesis of Epistolary Narrative · 37 The conventions of appropriate social behavior were devel­ oped and put into practice in the salons of the prfcieuses, the most important upper-class social setting in seventeenth-cen­ tury France.3 Beginning in 1618 with the Marquise de Rambouillet's famous chambre bleue, and continuing, despite a de­ cline after the court's move to Versailles in 1682, until the Revolution, women presided over regular gatherings of writ­ ers and nobles. The men and women who met in the salons of the pricieuses chatted about literature and love, political and personal gossip, aiming always for light, elegant, and clever conversation and graceful behavior. They played verbal games, critiqued recent literary works, wrote portraits and maxims, and discussed topics ranging from love to politics to morality. Regular participants referred to each other by pseud­ onyms, fictional names to correspond to the fictional world they were creating. Catherine de Vivonne, the Marquise de Rambouillet, for example, was known as Arthenice, an ana­ gram of her name. Salon behavior and conversation were highly codified, gov­ erned by the women in whose alcoves they were held. Those who attended were both creators of and players in a carefully staged performance. As Backer writes of the Marquise de Rambouillet, "She knew she was setting a stage, and the ac tors when they arrived must know too that they were in an exceptional place and on display before an audience consist­ ing of each other" (37). Backer describes the pricieuse con­ struction of a refined and predictable world, in contrast to the grimy and dangerous world outside, as "the imposition of form and ritual on a community that was wallowing in lust, 31 have drawn my information on the salons primarily from the following works: Dorothy Backer, PreciousWomen; Carolyn C. Lougee, Le Paradis des femmes: Women, Salons and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976); Ian Maclean, Woman Triumphant: Feminism in French Literature 1610-1652 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977); and Roger Picard, Les Salons littiraires et la socteti fran 3 5 . 117-85; and Billets galants, 124,129, 144, 152,167, 171; and Heloise-Abelard, 1293 0 > 1 4 1 - 4 2 , 1 4 5 ^ 6 , 1 4 8 ; and Julte' 1 4 8 > 171-72, 261; and Lettres de Babet, 157-58; and Lettres portugaises, 123-24, 129-30,142,145-46,152,1676 8 > 1 7 1 ~ 7 2 , 178-79,183; their relationship in, as natural, 139, 1 7 2 > 1 7 4 - 7 6 Duisit' Lionel>158"59 134

du Bosc

Eagleton, Terry, 20n.26, 232n editor in Julie, 187-88,218n, 220, 225; critical reaction to, 266; exercises control, 235-42; as God of the text, 243-44; judges char-

Index acters, 230, 236-37; replaces narrator, 229-32, 234-42; subverts metaphor, 245; undermines own authority, 237n.43, 254-55 editors, 35, 263n; and closure, 102; of correspondences, 182-83; of du Deffand-Walpole correspondence, 123, 172-83; of Julie, 263; of letter manuals, 69-73; of Lettres portugaises, 9 6 - 9 8 , 1 0 0 116. See also critical reception eighteenth-century France, 19; letters in, 2 3 , 1 1 9 - 2 2 ; literary forms in, 18-24 eighteenth-century novel, 8,11, 12n, 1 8 , 2 2 2 - 2 3 ; and nineteenthcentury novel, 1 5 , 1 8 , 2 9 Ellrich, Robert, 241n.46 encyclopedia form, 22 Encyclopedie, V, 2 0 - 2 2 ending: changes in, from seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, 23; and death, 6n, 7; of du DeffandWalpole correspondence, 161-62, 169—70n.49; in epistolary form, 1 a 11 o • , 1 0 - 1 1 , 2 8 ; as immanent in begina c a a i- n , 1 C ( ning, 4, 6, 9; oi Julie, 221-25; of Lettres portugaises, 9 5 , 1 1 0 - 1 1 ; and meaning, 7; in narrative, 3, 16. See also closure equilibrium in du Deffand-Walpole correspondence, 159-61 extravagance, 34-35; of behavior, 261-63, 266-67; of du DeffandWalpole correspondence, 150, 155, 172-73, 176, 182-83; and feminine desire, 142, 218n.27; of Julie, 1 8 8 , 2 5 9 - 6 0 , 2 6 8 - 7 0 ; of Lettres portugaises, 9 6 , 1 0 3 , 1 0 6 , 116; and metaphor and metonymy, 29; in narrative, 26, 29 Fauchier Delavigne, Marcelle, 111 feminist theory, 27-28n.35, 33, 84n

• 293

fiction-reality border, 24, 74n, 98, 109-16, 251-59 Florenne, Yves, 108nn. 62 and 65, 111 footnotes to Julie, 214-15, 255; attacked by critics, 2 6 0 - 6 1 , 2 6 5 66; as models for reader, 246-48; a n d prefaces, 224-25, 265-66; r o l e °f> 220, 2 2 9 - 3 2 , 2 3 8 - 4 0 , 242-45, 250. See also editor in Fr

E l i e Catherine, 226, 2 4 0 41' 2 6 4 > 2 6 6 - 6 7

Gallop, Jane, 27-28n.35 Garden of Julie, 2 0 2 - 3 , 2 0 8 - 1 1 , 251 Genette, Gerard, 267-68n.66 God: and authorial power, 243-44; footnotes on, 231, 242; in Julie, 197, 2 1 4 , 2 2 0 - 2 1 , 225, 239—40; J u l l e ' s relation to, 213, 216-17, 223n.32; and metaphor, 216-17; and narratlve' 2 1 7 ~ 1 S ' WalP°le „ a s ' 1 3 J > ^5-39 See also atheism Gosse, Edmund, 107 _ . , r Grafngny, Fran^oise de: Lettres ^ ^ 2 4 Grenaille> p de: N o u v e a u recuell de lettres 72-73 G r i m n l ; priedrich Melchior, Freiherr v o n 241 264—66 Guenoun, Solange, 127-28 Gueret, Gabriel, 103-4n.58, 115 Guilleragues, Gabriel de Lavergne, 7 8 - 7 9 , 1 0 1 , 110,112-14. See also Lettres portugaises Guyon, Bernard, 221n, 237n.42, 241, 244, 260-63 Harth, Erica, 100 harvest fete: in Julie, 205-6 Hayward, Abraham, 166-68 Heloise-Abelard correspondence, 35, 44; and du Deffand-Walpole

294

• Index

Heloise-Abelard (cont.) correspondence, 1 2 9 - 3 0 , 1 4 1 - 4 2 , 145-46, 148; in eighteenth century, 1 2 0 - 2 1 , 2 5 8 ; Grenaille's version of, 72-73; as model for Julie, 230, 256 Howard, Catherine, 120 immediacy: in Rousseau, 186-87 Irigaray, Luce, 27-28n.35, 84n Jacob, Paul: Le Forfait Secretaire, 62 7 1 - 7 2 Jakobson, Roman: on metaphor and metonymy, 25-26, 3 3 34n.42 Jost, Francois, 13 Julie: and closure, 219; desire of, 220, 241, 243, 261; and du Deffand, 148; marriage of, 196-98; miscarriage of, 195; and plot, 219; and time, 193-98 Kamuf, Peggy, 109n, 256, 258, 262 Kauffman, Linda, 88n, 93n, 109n Kermode, Frank, 6, 15, 33n.41 Kusch, Manfred, 202, 211, 227, 228n Lacan, Jacques: on metaphor and metonymy, 26-28 Laclos, Choderlos de: Les Liaisons dangereuses, 14, 24, 211n.21, 259 Landy-Houillon, Isabelle, 106 language: creative power of, 55, 9 3 94; duplicity of, 99; and evading responsibility, 53; nontransparent, 46-51, 55; and reality, 46 La Serre, Jean Puget de: Le Secretaire de la cour, 62-63, 65-67 Lescure, Franjois-Adolphe-Mathurin de, 174-78, 180-82 Lespinasse, Julie de, 168, 169n letter manuals, 32, 34-35, 61-78;

in eighteenth-century France, 120; and Lettres portugaises, 7 8 7 9 , 1 0 2 - 6 ; organization of, 6 3 69, 71-72, 74-75; role of editors in, 69, 72-73; and social conventions, 42 letter order: in Lettres portugaises, 107-8 letters: in eighteenth-century France, 119-22; as literature, 32, 34, 5 6 6 0 , 1 1 6 - 1 9 , 124-25,170-71, 182-83; metaphor and metonymy in, 124-25; as narrative, 1 1 9 < P u b l i c f o r > ^ - 4 3 ; relation o f ' t 0 llfe > 4 5 ~ 6 1 < 9 3 > H 0 - 1 1 , 117-18,125, 127n, 128, 130-31, 1 3 4 > 1 5 6 n > 1 6 1 > 166-69, 171, 2 S 7 ' r o l e of > f o r Mariane, 84-92; a n d s a l o n s ' 1 7 1 ' < i n seventeenthcentury France, 36-45; and social relations, 36, 41-42, 62-63, 98; structure experience, 49, 60-61, 8 4 - 9 6 , 1 1 8 - 1 9 , 125-26, 167-68, 1 8 3 ; u s e o f ' i n J u l i e > 2 0 4 ~ 6 ; and women, 43-44, 130. See also correspondences; love letters Lettres portugaises, 13n.l8, 24, 35, 44—45, 46n, 78-116; and Billets galants, 87; and du Deffand-WalP o l e correspondence, 123-24, ~30> 142> 152,1676 8 > 1 7 1 ~ 7 2 > 178-79, 183; edit i o n s of > 121' ^ Julie, 207-8, 251, 258-59; responses and seq u e l to, 97-99, 101-2 Lewis, W. S., and Warren Hunting Smith, 123, 126, 133n, 166, 17376 life as art, 38-41, 5 9 , 2 5 6 - 5 7 . See also salons literary, the: and closure, 31, 1 0 9 11, 115 Lougee, Carolyn, 40-41 Louis XIV, 38 love letters, 36, 44-61, 74; as acts, 129

Index · 295 70; based on fiction, 39; Lettres portugaises as models for, 96; and narrative, 61-62, 66, 69-70; Walpole's fear for receiving, 125, 129-30, 141—42, 153-54; wom­ en's, 67-68,145. See also corre­ spondences; letters Maclean, Ian, 39—40 Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de: La Vie de Marianne, 24 marriage: Heloise refuses, 72-73; Julie's, 196-98; pricieuses avoid, 39-40 Mary Magdalene: du Deffand as, 135 Maupassant, Guy de, 5—6 May, Georges, 24 Mayeul-Chaudon, Louis, 265 Miller, D. A., 28-29 models for du Deffand-Walpole re­ lationship, 125-55, 172-75; daughter-father, 131-34; divine, 131, 135-39; economic, 151—55; mother-son, 139—41,173-75; pu­ pil-tutor, 131-34, 148, 174 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de La Brede et de: Lettres persanes, 23-24 Montor, Artaud de, 179-80 Montpensier, Anne-Marie-LouiseHenriette d'Orleans, duchesse de, 43 moral example: du Deffand's life as, 180-81

Mornet, Daniel, 42 Mortimer, Armine Kotin, 7-8n.8, 22-23, 29-30n.38 Mussett-Pathay, Victor Donatien de, 267 Mylne, Vivienne, 12n narratability, 28-29; of correspon­ dences, 31,163-64; of Julie, 248;

Julie admires, 218-19; and me­ tonymy, 29 narrative: and extravagance, 27576; form and societal values of, 15-24; individual letters as, 229; metaphor and metonymy in, 33; models of, 3-4,12-13, 25,2829, 31—33; reading as, 269-70; retrospective, 4; role of, in life, 275-76, third-person, 3, 9 narrative voice: fragmentation of, in epistolary novel, 232—40 narrator: absence of, in epistolary form, 9-10,13, 228-29, 233-40; and closure, 16; Desjardins as, 49—51; first- and third-person, 9; Julie as, 207-8; in letter manuals, 65, 69; moralizing, 184; and nar­ ratability, 31; and past tense, 45; replaced by reader, 248—49; Wolmar as, 233-34. See also edi­ tor in Julie; editors nature: limits of, 268 nineteenth-century novel, 4; disap­ pearance of epistolary form in, 17; and eighteenth-century novel, 11, 29; and epistolary novel, 9, 18; as model for narrative, 3, 12; Sartre's view of, 5; upholds social order, 16-17 novelistic, the: Walpole's fear of, 146-51 origins: of Julie, 257-60; of Lettres portugaises, 97-100,115-16 Ouellet, Real, 17—18 Ovid, Heroides, 44, 66-67; editions of, 121 Pascal, Jean-Noel, 169n past tense: in narrative, 6-7, 25 Philothee. See Duchatel de Charmoisy, Louise Picard, Raymond, 38, 41 Poulet, Georges, 201-2,205, 208

296 · Index prefaces to Julie, 245,251-53, 25758, 268-69; and "Au lecteur" to Lettres portugaises, 251 present tense: in epistolary narra­ tive, 3, 8-9,13, 31-32 publication: of Billets galants, 5961; of du Deffand-Walpole corre­ spondence, 170-71 Rambouillet, Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de, 37 reader: desire of, 243, 248, 250; in epistolary form, 9-10, 14; of let­ ter manuals, 71; and metonymy, 249-50; of novels, 7; replaces au­ thor, 254; replaces narrator, 24849; role of, in Julie, 245—51 reader-writer barrier: broken down by Rousseau, 256—57 reading letters: as an act, 61 reception. See critical reception Richardson, Samuel, 8, 20n.26; Clarissa, 14, 232, 242 Richelet, Pierre: Les Plus Belles Lettres, 102-6 Richter, David, 30-31n.39 Rosbottom, Ronald, 12 Rougeot, Jacques. See Deloffre, Frederic, and Jacques Rougeot Rousseau: Julie, ou la Nouvelle Ηέloi'se, 23, 35,186-270; differ­ ences between two halves of, 204-8, 226; and du Deffand-Walpole correspondence, 148,17172,261; reception of, 259-67 Rousseau: Lettre a d'Alembert, 237 Rousset, Jean, 8-10,13, 94, 206n.l7, 208n Sabatier de Castres, abbe Antoine, 224n Saint-Aulaire, marquis de, 180 Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin, 173-75 Saint-Preux: desire of, 198; ideal of,

compared to Clarens, 200-206; metaphoric ideal of, 188-93, 200, 202; name and pseudonym of, 191-92,227, 231-32, 249-50; and time, 188-96 salons, 36—44; and closure, 40—41; in eighteenth-century France, 119-20; and letters, 41-44, 11920, 171; literary models for, 3738; and social mobility, 41; and women, 39—41, 43—44 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 5-6,10n.l3,1619 Scholes, Robert, 4-5, 9 Scudery, Madeleine de, 40,146-47 Serres, Michel, 275—76 seventeenth-century France: letters in, 35—45; literature of, 19. See also letters; salons Sevigne, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de, 117,122,127-28; and du Deffand-Walpole corre­ spondence, 141—45; editions of, 120 Showalter, English, 11 Sienkewicz, Anne, 120,156n Smith, Barbara H., 8, 29-30, 95n, 221-22 Smith, Warren Hunting. See Lewis, W. S., and Warren Hunting Smith Spitzer, Leo, 91n, 113,115 Stael-Holstein, Anne Louise Germaine Necker, baronne de, 265n Starobinski, Jean, 186-88, 191n, 194n, 206-7, 212,221-22, 223n.31 Strachey, Lytton, 166,179 third person: in Billets galants, 48; in Lettres portugaises, 81-82 third-person narrative, 3, 9; and epistolary narrative, 14—15; let­ ters in Julie as, 206; and social or­ der, 17 time: at Clarens, 198-204, 206-7;

Index · 297 and closure, 95; and desire, 21516; M. d'Etange's view of, 19293; and epistolary form, 225-26, 229-32; in Julie, 186-211, 250; in Julie's garden, 209; Julie's view of, 193-98, 218; kairos and chronos, 33n.41; in letter manu­ als, 61-62, 64, 66; and metaphor, 33, 204,207-8, 211; and meton­ ymy, 33, 187; Saint-Preux's view of, 188-96; Wolmar's view of, 199-200 title: of Julie, 256, 258 Todorov, Tzvetan, 10,14 Torgovnick, Marianna, 31n uniformity of letters: in Julie, 24041 Urfe, Honore d': L'Astrέε, 38-39

Varloot, Jean, 122n.l2 Versini, Laurent, 11, 36, 39 Villedieu. See Desjardins, MarieCatherine Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet): correspondence of, with du Deffand, 158 Warner, William, 232n White, Hayden, 4, 15-16, 184 Wiart, Jean Francois, 122-23, 14748, 170n women: abandoned, 66, 79-96 (see also Lettres portugaises); extrava­ gance of, 142; and irrationality, 131; and letters, 43-44,130,142, 145; and the novelistic, 149-50; and salons, 39-41, 43-44; sub­ versive power of, 134,161, 185