Self-Imitation in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (review)

Abstract

168 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION evaluate this ever-expanding field. This admirably compiled primary bibliography documents a selective list of "the First Gothics" and makes accessible to any scholar a comprehensive and representative cross-section of the entire Gothic canon. Devendrá P. Varma Dalhousie University Marie-Paule Laden. Self-Imitation in the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. ? + 192pp. US$37.50. Unquestionably, recent investigations in the field of structural linguistics and semantics, spearheaded by such European theorists as Barthes, Bataille, Cixous, Derrida, Greimas, and Saussure, have introduced dramatic new applications for eighteenth-century novel studies and literary hermeneutics. Literary criticism of the eighteenth-century fictive memoir—Defoe's Moll Flanders, Lesage's Gil Bias, among many others—has especially benefited by recourse to the principles and idiom of linguistics, particularly in the management of narrative and authorial self-imaging. In fact, specialists on the fictive autobiography are now inclined to greet the classics of the eighteenth-century novel with high-tech lenses that would make Elton John envious. Their mission : to scan the novels for "signs"; to determine how the narrator "names" him- or herself; and, above all, to map out the various strategies of personal narrative, whose very telling constitutes an entire theatre of rich linguistic play. Many of these modemist readings are fascinating; and, certainly, such interpretations broaden our appreciation of the more theoretical dimensions of the novel. But, as is the case of any innovative approach to literary analysis which relies fundamentally on systems outside the primary texts and their native historical contexts, one wonders if such specialized (hence limiting) approaches will sustain their initial attractiveness and authority over the long term. Marie-Paule Laden, in her first book, Self-Imitation in the Eighteenth- Century Novel, confidently allies herself with modernist critics in an impressive but regrettably scaled-down monograph, based on her doctoral dissertation, "Faces of the First Person: The Eighteenth-Century Novel in France and England" (Brown University, 1980; 165 pp.). As all sales and marketing executives in the publishing industry hasten to advise new authors, timing is everything in book publishing, and Laden's is a book which, despite its lively moments, arrived too late on the literary market. Even if it had come out at the beginning of this decade, when stocks were high in post-structural linguistics, the abbreviated quality of the book and its frequently derivative analyses would still have precluded an unqualified reception. Pat Rogers certainly agrees, for in his ambitious review-essay of nine recent monographs on the eighteenth-century novel REVIEWS 169 (Times Literary Supplement, 29 January - 4 February 1988), he gives Laden's book a mere five sentences, concluding that its "general level of discussion is by now a little predictable" (p. 117). But in all fairness to Laden's efforts, it must also be said that the achievement of this book is its willingness to embark on comparative analyses of the most engaging of eighteenth-century French and British fictive memoirs, from the vantage point, moreover, of the authorial self. Laden brings together French and British novels that should be paired and contrasted; and, in so doing, she strikes out in some new directions. Laden's Self-Imitation is a provocative discourse of its own, which turns on five eighteenth-century French and British fictive memoirs. Laden argues that each of her selections displays a threefold distinction between author, narrator, and first-person protagonist. Moll Flanders, for example, is the ostensible titular author of the book Moll Flanders, her own life-story, which she also narrates and in which she is also the principal player. Each of Moll's three faces—writer, teller, protagonist—is qualitatively different. Laden's analyses especially seek to identify the many subtle divisions which exist between narrator and protagonist when both are designated by the pronoun "I." She finds that the eighteenthcentury fictive autobiography is essentially a species of self-imitation on several complicated, interlinking planes. As her narrators write, narrate, and act out their respective lives (or versions thereof), Laden observes that they both imitate or "copy" other characters as well as various "faces" of themselves. For Laden, signification displaces action in these memoir novels, and characters are...