A Poetics of Confusion: Casanova’s Histoire de ma vie as Bildungsroman

Abstract

Casanova warns readers in the preface of the Histoire de ma vie: “I do not write a novel or the story of an illustrious person.” Casanova refuses to character ize the written story of his life as novel or memoir, and he borrows from the poetics of these two genres, which are situated at opposite ends of the social spectrum. Following the ups and downs of its author’s chequered career, the Histoire de ma vie embodies a poetics of confusion and merges competing literary models. One of these models is the Bildungsroman or “roman de formation” illustrated in ancien régime France by such works as Prévost’s Manon Lescaut (1731), Marivaux’s Le Paysan parvenu (1734), and Voltaire’s L’Ingénu (1767). Studying Casanova’s account of his two Parisian sojourns of 1750–52 and 1757–59, which he describes as “mes années d’apprentissage,” this article investigates the author’s borrowing and eventual undermining of Bildungsroman poetics.