Hindsight and Insight: Focalization in Four Eighteenth-Century French Novels (review)

Abstract

104 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:1 William F. Edmiston. Hindsight and Insight: Focalization in Four EighteenthCentury French Novels. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. xii + 208pp. US$29.95. ISBN 0-271-00731-1. Some of the most famous (and infamous) critical theories of fiction have emerged from bold new readings of canonical authors by "modem" critics. For example, one immediately associates Balzac with Barthes's SIZ and Proust with Genette's "Discours du récit" in Figures ill. These critical interpretations have predominantly focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, neglecting the wealth of resources offered by eighteenth-century fiction. According to William F. Edmiston, this neglect has had serious effects, particularly in the case ofnarratology: "What I found was that the theories of many narratologists were inadequate to accommodate the kinds of focalization found in first-person fiction. ... There has generally been a failure to recognize that such a narrator has several focal possibilities at his disposal. ... Clearly, a revision is in order" (p. xi). The purpose of his book, therefore, is to expand the concept of focalization, to show that "the eighteenthcentury 's best novelists ... were quite innovative in their integration of focal manipulations with the rigors of memoir-novel logic" (p. xi). To achieve this purpose Edmiston analyses "four major memoir-novels of the French eighteenth century, the period of the rise of this form and of its greatest production" (p. ix). These novels are Les Égarements du cœur et de l'esprit, Le Paysan parvenu, Manon Lescaut, and La Religieuse, and we shall return later to the implications of their selection. The introductory chapter offers a concise theoretical introduction in which Edmiston shows how the concept of focalization most prevalent in today's criticism reveals a "general dismissal of point of view as an area of little interest in texts in which narrator and characters are the same individual" (p. 2). Building on the theories of Genette, Cohn, and BaI, Edmiston concentrates on the focalizer which allows for "a different vantage point for the narrating self and that of the experiencing self (pp. 2-3). Elaborating on all the possible variations of this concept, Edmiston proposes his own notational system which, with a few exceptions, he uses systematically as follows: fnp stands for first-person narrator, NS for narrating self, ES for experiencing self, DD for direct discourse, id for indirect discourse, and fid for free indirect discourse. Similarly, the narrators are distinguished as characters and as narrators. Thus we have MN (Melcourt narrator) as distinguished from MC (Melcourt character), JN (Jacob narrator) from JC (Jacob character, DGC (Des Grieux character) and so forth. Though this notation offers the obvious advantage ofconcision, a list of abbreviations would have helped this reader's reluctant memory. Each subsequent chapter presents an analysis of a different text, testing these new definitions against the actual use of focalization in eighteenth-century fiction. Edmiston painstakingly analyses each author's use of the technique, probing the consistency and rigour of its use, thus demonstrating the narrative possibilities of focalization and the originality of the eighteenth-century texts. Edmiston's exclusive analysis of the uses of focalization brings about interesting insights into the four novels he studies, and unequivocally demonstrates the wealth of narrative strategies employed. He considers Crébillon's achievement to be "a remarkable synthesis between first-person limitations and omniscient incursions" (p. 34). In Le Paysan parvenu, he notes repeatedly the difficulty of separating the register of the hero, young Jacob, from that of the narrator. This is only one instance of the narrative ambiguity which permeates the novel, an ambiguity of many layers that Edmiston situates in Marivaux's use of focalization. Manon Lescaut's narrator differs from the others by his need for self-justification. Thus, Des Grieux's entire narrative is organized around a dichotomy which "is set up in a way that conditions our responses in favor of DGC" (p. 74). This analysis of the use of focalization demonstrates that the narrator uses "the focal possibilities at his disposal to present his characters and to further REVIEWS 105 his theoretical enterprise" (p. 87). Edmiston's critique of focalization in Manon is a useful...