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Overview
Originally published in 1987.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691609607 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #493 |
| Pages: | 206 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Self-Imitation in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
By Marie-Paule Laden
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1987 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06705-6
CHAPTER 1
Gil Blas and Moll Flanders Imitation, Disguise, and Mask
Ce qui est réel au sens du drame, c'est l'événement qui se produit maintenant devant nous. Ce qui est réel au sens de la narration, ce n'est absolument pas d'abord l'événement raconté, mais bien le fait même de raconter.
Käte Friedemann
In recent years autobiographical writing has received considerable critical attention. At issue in much of this discussion is the relationship between "real" and "fictive" autobiography: not the question of a purported author's civil existence, but a matter of taxonomy, of a distinction or kinship supported by formal or esthetic properties. That veracity and imagination can overlap, or appear each in the guise of the other, is clear in such works as Rousseau's Confessions, Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, Henry Adams's The Education of Henry Adams, or Stendhal's La Vie de Henri Brulard, to mention but a few autobiographical works. Even a casual reader of Rousseau's Confessions is struck by the literariness and structural harmony of the first book; without systematically questioning the author's honesty, one may wonder where the boundaries he between art and the recording of a life, the récit. To what extent does Rousseau's factual truth depend on art to make its impression, and is it in any sense less true for this dependence? Conversely, many critics assume art imitates life, or is even a kind of translation of life. For instance, they seem unable to refrain from drawing a parallel between the narrator of a novel and the "real" author of the work. For many readers of Moll Flanders, Moll's "casuistry" only reflects Defoe's. Roger Laufer's view of Gil Blas — as a disguised autobiography of Lesage himself — also illustrates this tendency to treat the narrator of Active autobiography as the author in costume. As a result, one might be tempted to lump all autodiegetic texts together in the same corpus and to analyze them under such headings as "Autobiography Considered as Fiction," or "Fiction Considered as Autobiography," or "Fiction in the Form of Autobiography," and so on, according to the reader's mood and inclination.
Philippe Lejeune tries to distinguish between "fictive" and "real" autobiography by positing that in any "real" autobiography the "I" of the narrator-protagonist must correspond to the name of the author printed on the title page of the book. Though it carries all the leadenness of a tautology, this idea is certainly not incontrovertible. Its flaws are both philosophical and procedural. For one thing, its "reality" is limited: the name used as the antecedent of the "I" in the book is the same one used where one customarily finds the author's name. The coincidence promises no greater truth; an autobiographer could very well bestow another name on the protagonist-narrator in the most accurate and straightforward chronicle of events, just as we might encounter the same name in a story that diverges wildly in its factual or emotional content from the author's own life. If the occurrence of the same name marks "real" autobiography, we might well ask from the philosophical standpoint whether a reality limited to this vacuous homonymy is at all meaningful. Furthermore, Lejeune's touchstone has the drawback of imposing a factual rather than esthetic test to determine the genre of a literary work, on an only slightly higher plane as it were, than weighing the book or measuring the type font.
More seriously, it fails to address the real question. Does it really matter whether the "I" of the narrator refers to a flesh-and-blood person or not? Even though the names may be the same, and notwithstanding a writer's declared resolution of making a faithful rendering of life, any translation of physical experience into the condensed medium of written narration alters its character irrevocably. Life exists, with its signs and perceptions; and writing exists, with its signs. Between these two systems of signification or experience, there is at most a relationship of suggestion or signification: not an identity. Nor can an author who professes literal translation avoid having the mode of telling the story shape the perception of the teller. Certainly a vow of transparency is not to be trusted; it normally accompanies the most tendentious and self-serving of narratives. In short, there is no real identity between the "author" of a text and the author as perceived by what one might call his narratee. For this reason it might be more fruitful to address the problem of autobiography from a linguistic perspective, and ask what composes the "I."
Any first-person narrative, including the novel, necessarily represents a constellation of selves. The "I" can never be joined seamlessly to a real author or a set of historical circumstances, and this is so whether the "I" refers to a fictive character or not. Not only is there a gap between thought and language — between the depth of lived experience present to a writer's mind and the experience of signs and writing (perhaps almost as rich or ramified, but with a different sort of profundity) within which the reader constructs an antecedent — but there is also the separation between the memory or experience of the event itself and the event of narration. Like Proust, or Augustine and Montaigne before him, Rousseau was aware of this ambiguity: "En me livrant à la fois au souvenir de l'impression reçue et au sentiment présent je peindrai doublement l'état de mon âme, à savoir au moment où l'événement m'est arrivé et au moment où je l'ai décrit" (my emphasis).
Linguistics skirts complexity; from the standpoint of this discipline, what lies behind the "I" is clear-cut, but little enhances our understanding of a literary text. Benveniste's statement that "'je' est 1'individu qui énonce la présente instance de discours contenant le mot 'je'" rightly points out that the pronoun "I" (or "you") refers only to a reality of discourse. The real question, nevertheless, is whether we can ever say anything more than this about the "I," or whether the speaking or writing self is, paradoxically, forever condemned to anonymity even as it tries to introduce itself. From the literary standpoint it is discomfiting to see in the "I" a mere role without an identity. It is, rather, natural to dissect the pronoun "I" (or "you") to try to determine — by implication or logical presupposition, drawing upon the form and content of the discourse that is the narrative — who the "individual" is that Benveniste mentions in his definition.
The present chapter will consider Lesage's Gil Blas and Defoe's Moll Flanders from the perspective of the enunciation. I am therefore concerned with these novels as discourse as well as story. Unlike the many critics who choose to remain at the level of the story (histoire) and see in the use of the first person mainly the author's desire to enhance the illusion of reality, we will concentrate on Moll's and Gil Blas's attitudes toward their stories. We should steer clear of two opposing errors: treating the narrator as an extension or mouthpiece for the actual author, so that the story is overshadowed by life itself; or treating the story as one might any narrative in the third person, and ignoring the quality and function of the narrator's discourse. Between these fallacies is another approach, which is to treat the narrator both as the protagonist within the story, and as a speaking or writing "I" that must be studied and, in effect, reconstructed from the circumstantial evidence of the discourse. (The narrating "I" can obviously lie in speaking of itself, but we learn something if we can trap it in contradictions.) We confer a peculiar autonomy upon the narrator, a status that must be regarded as a heuristic device or critical fiction. If we allow for some inevitable blurring of the distinction between the two roles of the narrator — the same name must serve for both the speaker/writer and the main character — this approach recalls Bakhtin's. As early as 1928 Bakhtin founded his analysis of Dostoevsky's novels (which he termed "dialogical") on the independence of the hero vis-à-vis his author: "The hero's consciousness is given as a separate, a foreign consciousness, it is not made the single object of the author's consciousness." ... "The hero's word is created by the author, but created in such a way that he can freely develop its own inner logic and independence as the word [slova] of another person, as the word of the hero himself." Not much time should be spent debating whether Defoe or Moll is responsible for any irony that may exist in the novel. This does not mean that the novel should be attributed to a fictitious character who is part of it, but rather that one should refuse to ascribe to the author what belongs to the character. Or rather, since the realm of autobiography forces us to be more finicky than Bakhtin, we should avoid confusing the author or the protagonist with the "I" responsible for the discourse.
Examining two novels as different as Gil Blas and Moll Flanders in the same chapter might seem strange at first. They are, of course, linked chronologically (they were both written early in the century, 1715/1735 and 1722) and literary-historically (they are usually considered as influenced by the classical Spanish picaresque). They also have in common their autodiegetic nature. What unites them more profoundly, however, is how the picaresque themes of imitation and disguise create not the usual flat world of the picaresque, but — as we shall see — an inner necessity, a dynamic within both the protagonist's personality and the narrator's discourse. The mask becomes not just the standard instrument of deceit in a round of tromperie, but the philosophical mainspring, the condition of being of both hero and narrator. Since it does so somewhat differently in each novel, a comparison of the two works gives a fuller sense of how the mask bonds the story to the discourse.
On the surface, the narrative voices are quite different. Gil Blas and Moll have divergent attitudes toward their earlier selves. In the case of Moll Flanders, the gap existing between the two voices — the young Moll's voice of innocence and the narrator's voice of experience — is narrower than in Gil Blas. As we shall see, the narrator, despite her moral pose, is hardly any more fixed or settled as a character than was her younger picaresque avatar. It is as if the narrator becomes a double of the young Moll, as if the "I" represents not a mature Moll, as one would expect, but a psychological accomplice of her younger self. Yet her similarity is not identity; in fact, it reminds us that she is neither exactly the same as the heroine nor her true successor. The contradiction between complicity and moral posturing that we find in the narrative voice has its correlative in the story. A similar dichotomy is visible in Moll the protagonist. For instance, the scene in which the elder brother seduces Moll features a division between young Moll's sensual nature and her susceptibility to manipulation by abstractions such as money and status. A further difference between the two narrations is that Moll's "I" is more obtrusive than Gil Blas's. It seems at times that Moll has to convince herself as well as the reader of her honesty, whereas Gil Blas makes it clear that his present prosperity is the result of an innate inclination toward virtuous behavior. Consequently, the two narrators' attitudes toward their narratee are fundamentally distinct; Gil Blas's confident affirmation does not seem to need the reader — to implicate the reader in the narration — as much as Moll's uneasy apologia.
The most obvious consequence of the use of the first person in a narrative is the temporal gap existing between the protagonist's voice of error and the narrator's voice of experience. The gulf is seldom as wide as in Gil Blas. As opposed to Moll, Marianne, Jacob, or Tristram, who constantly intermingle their present "I" with that of their younger selves, Gil Blas the narrator keeps his distance from the protagonist he once was. For this reason it is often assumed that Gil Blas is not a real character, that he is merely a device used to string together all the episodes of this roman à tiroirs: "Ainsi les événements ne s'enchaînent pas: ils se succèdent. ... Les vies humaines, de même, se rencontrent, s'éloignent, sans se pénétrer, ni réagir l'une sur l'autre." A short glance at the table of contents reinforces the impression of detachment; although Gil Blas uses the first person to refer to himself in the text, the third person or the hero's name is used in the titles of the various chapters. The striking contrast between Marianne's "je conte mon histoire" and "De la naissance de Gil Blas et de son éducation," illustrates how all elements of reflexivity tend to disappear in Gil Blas's tale.
Many readers conclude that his novel reads like a book written in the third person, especially since Gil Blas is not always the object of his own story — there are hundreds of interpolated stories in the novel, told by other characters and merely reported by the narrator. Marie-Hélène Huet thus writes that "Gil Blas narrateur donne curieusement l'impression d'écrire à la troisième personne." This statement holds true for the last section of the novel — paradoxically, here, where the temporal or psychological distance between the narrator and the hero vanishes the formal distance becomes greatest — but Gil Blas as a whole could not have been written in the third person without becoming a totally different book. Let us examine an early passage in the book, in which Gil Blas talks not about himself but instead about his uncle and educator Gil Perez:
C'était peut-être (car je n'avance pas cela comme un fait certain) le chanoine du chapitre le plus ignorant: aussi j'ai ouï dire qu'il n'avait pas obtenu son bénéfice par son érudition; il le devait uniquement à la reconnaissance de quelques bonnes religieuses dont il avait été le discret commissionnaire, et qui avaient eu le crédit de lui faire donner l'ordre de prêtrise sans examen. (Book I, p. 4)
Though such a passage written entirely in the third person might still keep its irony, it would lose all its humor. The narrator's fake uncertainty ("c'était peut-être") only emphasizes his detachment and self-assurance; it is very different from Moll's uncertainties. And the narrator's irony is often directed against himself, that is, against his self of many years ago. In the following passage Gil Blas recounts one of his adventures on the road; the innocent Gil Blas easily falls prey to the fraud who is buying his donkey:
Alors, faisant l'homme d'honneur, il me répondit qu'en intéressant sa conscience je le prenais par son faible. Ce n'était pas effectivement par son fort; car, au lieu de faire monter l'estimation à dix ou douze pistoles, comme mon oncle, il n'eut pas honte de la fixer à trois ducats, que je reçus avec autant de joie que si j'eusse gagné à ce marchélà. (Book I, p. 7)
Here the narrator's irony is of course directed against the dealer, but more importantly, emphasizing the naive protagonist's joy at the moment when he is being bamboozled enables him to display his talents as a writer — as in the antithesis faible/fort — at the protagonist's expense. In similar instances throughout the first ten books of the novel, the narrator implicitly passes judgment on the world, while his self-mockery lets him distance himself from the protagonist. But the attitude of the narrator toward Gil Blas the character is not always so oblique. He often frankly condemns his past attitude. "Que j'étais fat, quand j'y pense de raisonner de la sorte" (Book 4, p. 250). No extradiegetic narrator could make such remarks about characters without overinterfering in the story; the deictic "quand j'y pense" would have to be omitted, resulting in: "Qu'il était fat de raisonner de la sorte."
The literariness of Gil Blas as a narrator is striking. His delight in puns, his mastery of dramatic irony, as illustrated in the above quotes, allow him to flaunt his superiority over the protagonist. In the picaresque world of appearances and conventions, factual truth is never an adequate response in a social situation, and in his encounters with others, young Gil Blas always meets trouble when he innocently attempts to tell the naked truth. This predicament is illustrated in his various dealings with innkeepers: "Je demandai une chambre, et pour prévenir la mauvaise opinion que ma souquenille pouvait encore donner de moi, je dis à l'hôte que, tel qu'il me voyait, j'étais en état de bien payer mon gîte" (Book 1, p. 53). To corroborate his words Gil Blas shows his thousand ducats to the innkeeper, who soon finds a way to transfer them from Gil Blas's pocket to his own. The narrator gleefully exposes the simplicity of Gil Blas's language and actions. Naively impulsive, they function entirely at the literal level, taking the world at face value.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Self-Imitation in the Eighteenth-Century Novel by Marie-Paule Laden. Copyright © 1987 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. ix
- NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS, pg. xi
- INTRODUCTION, pg. 1
- CHAPTER ONE. Gil Bias and Moll Flanders Imitation, Disguise, and Mask, pg. 23
- CHAPTER TWO. Pamela, La Vie de Marianne, and Le Paysan parvenu: Self-Imitation–The Appearance of Reality, pg. 69
- CHAPTER THREE. Tristram Shandy Imitation as Paradox and Joke, pg. 128
- CONCLUSION, pg. 156
- APPENDIX, pg. 163
- BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 175
- INDEX, pg. 189