Literature and Belief: The Example of Prevost's Cleveland

Abstract

HOWEVER DIFFERENT in form and intent the recent writings on Prevost's fiction may be, all of them have in common the fact that they take what is said in these fictions as seriously as they would the of treaties or other discursive writings. Given the various goals of these investigations, such acceptance as truth of literary content may not seem surprising. Jean Sgard, by his own repeated admission, is more interested in Prevost's inner life than in his fictions as works of literary art, so that he regards these fictions primarily as sources of intimate biographical information.' He writes, for example: vaut beaucoup plus que ses romans ... (p. 34), and les romans de Prevost nous passionnent, mais plus encore Prevost romancier (p. 37). Indeed, he comes remarkably close at times to creating a classic example of Harold Cherniss's wellknown formulation of the biographical circle: it is . . . a vicious circle to intuit the nature of the author's personality from his writings, and then to interpret those writings in accordance with the 'inner necessity' of that intuited personality.2 Another recent writer on Prevost, Jeanne Monty, although the fictions interest her as such, is also interested in Prevost's pensee morale, so that she is compelled to regard many passages in his works as having, to use a clumsy, but common and useful phrase, truth-value.3 Somewhat less recently, Robert Mauzi, Jean Ehrard, and Roger Mercier have written studies containing references to Prevost's fiction which combine the approaches of intellectual history, the history of ideas, and Geistesgeschichte. They all follow the