Half-Told Tales: Dilemmas of Meaning in Three French Novels (review)

Abstract

Reviews Philip Stewart. Half-Told Tales: Dilemmas ofMeaning in Three French Novels. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, no. 228), 1987. 216pp. US$15.00 (paper). Half-Told Tales: Dilemmas of Meaning in Three French Novels contains admirable discussions of La Vie de Marianne, La Religieuse, and Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse. The strength of the chapters lies in Stewart's supple and perceptive accounts of these complex novels. As he provides a careful accounting of the major themes and narrative forms of each novel, Stewart displays an impressive mastery of the text. His analyses are built around innumerable textual examples; not only does each moment of the discussion turn upon specific citations ranging from a paragraph to an individual word, each page echoes with three or four footnotes which provide further evidence and examples from the text. The result is a series of precise and subtle observations which reveal both attentiveness to tone, nuance, and diction and an overall command of texts which are notoriously expansive and unwieldy. Stewart is particularly attentive to the language used by the characters in the autobiographical discourse of these novels. The first chapter discusses the currents and counter-currents of the hypotheses about nobility, identity, and sentiment in La Vie de Marianne, often focusing on the complications in narrative time and point of view brought about by the juxtaposition of Marianne the narrator and Marianne the héroïne de roman. Witìiin this context, however, Stewart's real interest is in the vocabulary in which the novel unfolds these themes and structures—what he often usefully identifies as codes, such as the "love code" or the "sacred code." He charts the ambiguities, nuances, and sources of MariEIGHTEENTH -CENTURY FICTION, Volume 1, Number 4, July 1989 336 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION anne's (and odier characters') discourse, tracing her use of metaphor, simile, and epithet. For example, there is a list and analysis of fifteen instances in which Marianne uses the adjective "petit(e)" (with a footnote mentioning three instances in Climal's discourse). Although Stewart's concern is not quantitative, he is particularly fond of lists: there is also a list of maxims, a list of "tableaux," and a related list of narrative "snapshots." It is in his close attention to detail and the resonances of signification that he is often most persuasive and perceptive . For example, he is able to describe the ambiguities of "the sigh" in La Vie de Marianne, along with a variety of other verbal and non-verbal signifiers. The other chapters share this method of processing the text and attending to the interplay between theme and discourse. The chapter on La Religieuse (which is relatively brief) charts the lexicon of the body, the rhetoric of persuasion, and the complicated relation between erotic and religious discourses as it discusses problems of knowledge and doubt in the novel. The third chapter (which takes up almost half the book) traces the problematics of virtue and value in Julie while attending to the terms and vocabulary of these themes and the rhetorical positions of the interlocutors. Once again Stewart organizes the text, providing charts and tables analysing the distribution, length, number, and direction of the letters, and (more important for his purposes) lists of adjectives, epithets, tautologies, and maxims, and careful accounts of the allusions and codes that display the novel's thematic preoccupations and anxieties. Literary sources, die language of romance tradition, discourses of the sacred and the family, codes of love and religion, myth-making language and demystifying rhetorical counter-movements, devices oforatory, formulaic terminology— all are plotted and analysed in Stewart's account of Rousseau's ambivalent representation of Julie and the novel's equivocal presentation of the themes of virtue, purity, sentiment, sexuality, and death. Stewart's command of the text is perhaps most impressive in this monograph-length chapter, since the length and unwieldiness of an epistolary novel such as Julie make it difficult to combine an attentiveness to details of language with a sense of the structure and narrative unfolding of the whole. Having tried to describe Stewart's considerable accomplishments in his subtle...