Rousseau's Le Levite d'Ephraim: Dream, Text, and Synthesis

Abstract

DESPITE HIS ENSHRINEMENT BY LITERARY HISTORY as the apostle of self-determination, as the most eloquent spokesman for an ethos of authenticity and independence, the shape of Rousseau's life and writing is very much the result of a constant, relentlesg, and often agonizing dialectic between himself as individual and a social order which, in all its various instances, he sensed as a force impinging upon, disfiguring, and attempting to silence him. From his earliest memories of childhood, Rousseau's consciousness of self is that of a passivity, an innocence (in-nocere: unable to do harm) unjustly victimized by forces for which he bears no responsibility: the death of his mother, the spanking for the broken comb, the apprenticeship to Ducommun, etc., etc. Perhaps for this reason, Rousseau accords, both in his representations of self within the autobiographical writings and in his representations of history and society within the political writings, a particular importance to what I would call the event: the sudden eruption of forces beyond human control, but having an irresistible and devastating effect on all whom they touch. Understanding the event, its occurrence, impact, and implications, provides, I would argue, a useful vehicle for getting at what is an abiding structure of Rousseau's textuality: a singularly complex interplay of proclaimed innocence and passivity which is nonetheless founded upon and orchestrated toward an active, continuing, and highly aggressive inculpation of the other. In attempting to do this, I would like to examine a work which,