Geo-Ethnicity, Epistolary Affect, and Reception in French Prose Fiction of the Enlightenment: An Experiment in Data Analysis

Abstract

Geo-Ethnicity, Epistolary Affect, and Reception in French Prose Fiction of the Enlightenment: An Experiment in Data Analysis Richard L. Frautschi As literary studies move increasingly to the use of machine-readable texts, some precoded with markers of external and internal features , the availability of documents in database formats1 will undoubtedly influence the direction of future criticism. The present article is an exercise in the use of an expanded Bibliographie du genre romanesque français, 1700-1800 (hereafter MMF-2),2 a bibliographic database of Enlightenment French prose fiction. I have extrapolated two types of data— indicators ofgeo-ethnicity and epistolarity—from precoded lists, showing the relative variables of each throughout the eighteenth century. To these arejuxtaposed a taxonomy of interlocutory relationships between senders and receivers observed in four eighteenth-century French epistolary novels , selected as experimental samples. While juxtaposing geo-ethnicity 1 The development of a Treasury of the French Language in Nancy following the Second World War has introduced an era of electronically accessible cultural documents (a North American version—artfl or American Research on the Treasury of the French Language—is partially replicated at the University of Chicago). 2 Forthcoming by Angus Martin, Vivienne Mylne, and Richard L. Frautschi (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 7, Number 3, April 1995 218 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION and epistolary discourse may appear at first glance to introduce an arbitrary relationship, the proximity offers some fresh perspectives on the four texts. More important, the exercise suggests directions which will help us to discriminate authorial and reader preferences in an emerging context of thousands of editions of French prose fiction published and republished during the century. In the first section, I describe an application of precoded data which generate a flowchart illustrating the relative presence of ethnic classes in epistolary fiction and degrees ofcorrelation with the production of epistolary and non-epistolary French novels. In the second section, using communicative conventions in epistolary fiction between senders and empiric receivers,3 1 suggest criteria which can be used to identify discursive preferences in a specific text or texts. In the final section, as an experimental triangulation of the target parameters—content (geo-ethnicity), generic form (epistolarity), and reception (the empiric reader)—I have selected a well-received epistolary novel from each quarter of the eighteenth century in order to compare the forms and functions of the geo-ethnic content, generic, and locutionary measures specific to each text. While the choice of texts—Les Lettres persanes (1721), La Vie de Marianne (1731-39), La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), and Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782)—is arbitrary , the purpose is to illustrate some of the complex perspectives which emerge when components in a single text or micro-universe are compared with the same phenomena gathered from a macro-universe of data drawn from an entire genre over an extended period of time. A Machine-Readable Bibliography of French Prose Fiction Users of MMF-2 will find over 4,600 original titles and four times as many re-editions, plus thousands of external and internal content descriptors and secondary sources. Each entry will encode external identifiers such as author, title, translator/editor/adaptor, place/publisher/date of publication, (some) library locations, pre- and post-1800 references, abridged versions in the Bibliothèque universelle des romans, and the same information about re-editions and collected works appearing before 1821. Internal or content descriptors include narrative voices in epistolary/non-epistolary frames, locales, names of principal characters, types of content, and style or tone. As an example of the pattern-recognition potential within an electronic version of the MMF-2 corpus, a problematic area has been selected which 3 See the narcological theories of the Prague school, Benveniste, Genette, and post-speech-act theorists. AN EXPERIMENT IN DATA ANALYSIS 219 ties epistolary production and communicative affect in eighteenth-century French epistolary fiction to markers ofethnic identity. Do signifiers ofthe latter found in the names of characters and in place names for countries, regions, and cities display frequencies which appear sensitive to the production of fiction in epistolary form? If so, what variation in locutionary preference is evident? To seek a tentative answer to the question, we...