Le Roman véritable: stratégies préfacielles au XVIII e siècle (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Le Roman véritable: stratégies préfacielles au XVIIIe siècle Joanna Stalnaker (bio) Jan Herman, Mladen Kozul, and Nathalie Kremer. Le Roman véritable: stratégies préfacielles au XVIIIe siècle. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2008. ix+335pp. £65;€90;US$135. ISBN 978-0-7294-0947-6. Le Roman véritable offers a new perspective on the relationship between fiction and reality in the eighteenth-century French novel. The authors question the received idea that in presenting their works as authentic documents (memoirs, collections of letters, found manu scripts, historical accounts), eighteenth-century novelists were seeking to trick their readers by creating an illusion of reality. Taking issue with George May's characterization of the credulity of eighteenth-century readers (May, Le Dilemme du roman au XVIIIe siècle [Paris: PUF, 1963]), the authors of Le Roman véritable argue that eighteenth-century prefaces served to establish a new reading pact that, paradoxically, "ne nie pas le caractère fictionnel du discours mais au contraire le met en évidence. Ce pacte est celui du 'roman véritable,' qui semble à première vue reposer sur une impossibilité logique. Il s'agit de montrer ici que cette impossibilité logique est une des 'possibilités' de la littérature" (3). The purpose of the book, then, is to offer a new interpretation of the problematic status of fiction in the eighteenth century. Although the authors build upon May's classic study, they nonetheless question his central thesis. Perhaps, they argue, the dilemma of the novel should be understood not, as May saw it, as a conflict between competing aesthetic and moral demands (realistic representation versus moral edification), but in epistemological and pragmatic terms. Did fiction present itself as such in the eighteenth century, and how did it achieve legitimacy in a cultural landscape that was largely hostile to the novel? The book is organized not chronologically but around the different levels on which the preface operates. The first part serves as an état présent of relevant scholarship and as an extended introduction to the authors' argument and methodology. Mladen Kozul offers a detailed exposition of May's study and a threefold critique of his argu ment: first, the conflicting poetic and moral demands that for May constituted the novel's dilemma were in fact "les composantes essentielles de tout discours critique ou poétique à l'âge classique" (31); second, the neoclassical notion of vraisemblance had an ethical dimension and thus cannot be understood simply in terms of realistic representation; third, poetic mutations during the period were such that moral concerns were gradually subsumed to the relationship between a work and its reader (around notions such as sympathy and interest). This last claim serves as a justification for what the authors refer to as their pragmatic approach to the study of the novel. [End Page 574] The second part of the book focuses on the narrative dimension of the preface, which encompasses fictions pertaining to the origin of the text or the identity of its author. In chapter 4, Jan Herman addresses the problem of authorship facing eighteenth-century novelists, not only because of the fragile status of the novel as a genre, but also because of the taboos surrounding self-expression during the period. In chapter 5, he argues that the reliance on commonplaces (such as the motif of the found manuscript) in the preface was such that the claim "ceci n'est pas un roman" paradoxically became a marker of fiction. In chapters 6 and 7, Kozul shows how the novel established itself in a discursive landscape that was hostile to it, by integrating features of theological discourse and contesting the orthodox critique of the novel from within. The preface maintained a particularly complex relationship to the notion of seduction, Kozul argues, because it had to draw readers in even as it contested the orthodox accusation that the novel was a seductive genre that led readers astray. In the third part of the book, Nathalie Kremer focuses on the self-reflexive dimension of the preface, which encompasses discussions of the verisimilitude, veracity, or moral exemplarity of the text and reflections on its potential...