The First-Person Narrator in the Abbé Prévost's Mémoires d'un homme de qualité

Abstract

The First-Person Narrator in the Abbe Prevost’s Memoires d’un homme de qualite R. A. FRANCIS One of the achievements of recent scholarship in the eight­ eenth-century novel has been to destroy any temptation to regard Prevost simply as a one-novel man. Several recent studies, of which that of Jean Sgard is the most important,1 have directed attention to the scope and interest of the whole of his fictional output, and thus opened up a wide field for investigation in which much remains to be done. One particularly useful exercise would be a comparative study of Prevost’s first-person narrators. Since Prevost’s main narrative mode is first-person narration, this would be a good way of demonstrating his command of the technical skills of novel-writing, but above all such a study would take us to the heart of the often disturbingly ambiguous world of the Prevost hero. It is, of course, possible to make a general study of Prevost’s heroes, extrapolating tendencies common to them all; Odile Kory has done that in her recent book, and it is a valid exercise. But it would underestimate Prevost’s skill and range if we were to assume that all his heroes were the same, and I should like to make some tentative steps towards a study dwelling on the differences as well 303 304 / R. A. FRANCIS as the similarities. In the brief space available to me, I can attempt nothing more than a few brief illustrations of the kind of question such a study should ask, and therefore I shall discuss one novel only, the Memoires d’un homme de qualite, and within it two narrators only, Renoncour, the homme de qualite himself who tells the central story, and Des Grieux, narrator of Manon Lescaut. This field, though narrow, will be sufficient to illustrate an approach which can be adopted on a broader front, and it may also help to situate Manon Lescaut in the context of the rest of Prevost’s oeuvre, which is itself a useful exercise with a work so often studied in isolation. First-person narration is necessarily a subjective way of telling a story, and the first thing we need to know about a narrator is whether he is the kind of person who is capable of telling his story reliably. The essential question here is whether he can give an adequate account of his own nature; is he capable of looking at himself and giving a lucid and honest representation of what he sees? Certainly one of the main problems with Des Grieux is to know how much credence we should give to his account of himself, and the case against it is too well known to need lengthy rehearsal here. He is a young man, writing shortly after the overwhelming events he describes and still too involved in them to view them with analytic detachment. He has done may wrongful deeds in his past, and though he appears to regret them and to want to lead a better life in future, he is reluctant to accept responsibility for his misdeeds and he still quotes all his old arguments justifying them. Above all, we know from his own admission that he is a skilled liar and hypocrite,2 and we have no guarantee that the story he tells to Renoncour is any more honest than those he has told in the past to people he wants to influence. Scholars disagree in their assessment of his narratorial honesty; Sgard, relatively indulgent, thinks Des Grieux is at his “heure de la verite,” and is sincere at least in that he has convinced himself of the truth of his account, but Jeanne Monty, in her study of Prevost’s novels, takes a harsher view of his rhetoric of deception and self-justification which is still too much in evidence.3 The First-Person Narrator in Memoires d’un homme de qualite / 305 truth seems to lie between the two extremes. We are probably meant to accept his story as sincere, and indeed correct, in its essential facts; a careful study of prior occasions in the novel when he tells...