During the Age of Enlightenment, the novel took hold of philosophy to make multiple uses of it: shaking up philosophical systematicity, resorting to lessons from experience, contesting philosophical illusions… but also disappointing the reader’s novelistic expectations .
If the question of the relationship between literature and philosophy is somewhat topical, the interest of Colas Duflo’s work is to shed light on it in an unusual light by studying a particular era, that of the Enlightenment, “ where philosophy and the novel did not live in separate worlds » (p. 9). Against the evidence with which we approach philosophical discourse and romantic fiction as two entirely distinct types of texts, the XVIIIe century reveals itself as the era when the fashion for philosophy in the novel reigns. Indeed, the novel, then an undefined genre, finds in its union with philosophy a means of raising its dignity and truly inventing itself as an artistic genre in its own right. As for philosophy, tired of the great philosophical systems of the classical age, considered too cut off from real experience, it is looking for a new way of writing itself, which allows greater room for experiences. It is the time of Candide or optimism of Voltaire, James the Fatalist by Diderot or The New Héloïse of Rousseau. The challenge of the work is therefore to highlight the modalities and consequences of this hybridization of the philosophical and the romantic.
The difficult weaving of the essay and the narrative
The first chapters are thus devoted to showing all the difficulty. Indeed, at first glance, philosophy and the novel seem incompatible. It is the entire tradition, from Aristotle to Huet, which opposes the essay and the narrative, the poetic use of language and its philosophical use. The philosophical novel cannot therefore be a subspecies of the novel in general, nor have the stability of a genre in its own right. In fact, it is inherently problematic. The philosophical novel rather designates a collection of different ways of hybridizing philosophy and literature, according to different genres (memoir novel, utopian story, etc.). These ways are never self-evident, because it is always difficult to mix essay and narrative.
A chapter aims to highlight this from a reading of the New Héloïse of Rousseau. Indeed, the work has often been criticized for its long dissertations, which moreover are noted as such most of the time. They have, it is said, the fault of interrupting the progress of the plot. But rather than regretting essay passages which break the homogeneity of the story by suspending the diegesis, Colas Duflo aims to understand the Rousseauist enterprise in the co-presence of these two discursive regimes. It thus shows that the dissertations participate, just as much as the last edifying part, in the ambition of a transmutation of the morally dubious novel into a text of wisdom. By regretting this mixture, it is the Rousseauist ambition that we misunderstand.
This ambition is not unique to Rousseau. It is shared by many other authors. One of its symptoms is the continued presence of the character of the philosopher in the novels of this period. It is indeed, thanks to him, a “ way for novelists to renew themes and novelistic interest by working to give depth to the novel at a time when it suffers from a lack of cultural legitimacy » (p. 88). It is a solution to a literary problem: justifying the co-existence of the two regimes of discourse. Thus, the status of this character authorizes him by definition to hold a philosophical discourse. What’s more, this character carries a story within himself. Philosophy, rigorously understood, always brings into play the question of the good life. Putting a philosopher on stage is always at the same time putting on stage a life project. It’s already a dynamic, almost a scenario.
Colas Duflo then illustrates this using a study of Moral world or Memories to serve the history of the human heart of Abbot Prévost. The book is in the form of a memoir novel written by a philosopher. If the narrator begins his story, it is because he is seeking to establish an encyclopedia of passions. He collects the material by providing his observations. But little by little, the observer becomes the observed, and the philosopher supposed to be a wise man free from passions also succumbs to them. In their own way, the philosophers of the following generation (Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot) will remember the character of Prévost. They in fact belong to an era which renounces dealing with passions a priori, and they also consider it essential to appeal to experience. This is why “ they invent narrative processes which are at the same time philosophical devices making it possible to constitute a passionate anthropology » (p. 152).
The romantic uses of philosophy
Generally speaking, Colas Duflo invites us to compare the way in which novelists use philosophy to renew the genre, and the way in which philosophers use the novel to accomplish their transformation of philosophy. To this end, he is interested in novelists whose status and historical importance are very different. Clairval, philosopher of Durosoy, a novel full of faults and clumsiness, nevertheless testifies in its own way to an appropriation of philosophical ambition. By novelistic means, Durosoy seeks to present events that happen to characters and to draw general consequences on passions and moral life. In doing so, he invalidates and subverts the systems of philosophers (in particular those of moralists) by borrowing from the sensualist materialist vulgate. But he does not do any militant work since he seeks above all to renew the novel through philosophy. The doctrines presented are more open to the reader’s aesthetic appreciation than to his logical judgment.
Cleveland of Abbé Prévost has a much less anecdotal character. It is one of the most important novels of the century, including among the generation of great Enlightenment philosophers, who all read it. Colas Duflo illuminates the pages devoted to the nature of the soul at the end of the novel. If this is indeed a current issue which may interest the reader for extra-diegetic reasons, it shows that these developments are in reality necessary both for narrative and philosophical reasons internal to the novel. This is indeed the only way for the novel to find its end. Prévost wanted to tell the story of the failure of philosophy to guide the life of the main character. Its refutation therefore had to involve a refutation of materialist philosophy.
In several chapters, Colas Duflo’s work offers real reading lessons. Thus, for example, he offers a meticulous and masterful interpretation of a passage from The Nun. As a Diderot specialist, he shows to what extent this novel is linked to this author’s entire system, and why it is nevertheless expressed in such veiled terms. This is because it is a novel of which Suzanne the narrator is supposed to be ignorant. For reasons of plausibility, she cannot therefore speak like a philosopher. The philosophical interpretation of Diderot cannot therefore do without a literary analysis.
It is the same conclusion that we reach when reading the chapter devoted to Paul and Virginie by Bernardin de Saint Pierre. By placing this novel within the larger set of Nature studies, it sheds new light on its belonging to the literature of feeling. Against a well-thought-out vision of the final catastrophe, very widespread in XIXe century, which sees in it a triumph of virtue, we must read something completely different: “ Virginie’s mortal modesty, extreme to the point of preferring to sacrifice her life to him, can only be understood as that of a great lover ; it translates the presence of great feelings as well, as we said in XVIIIe century, of a great temperament » (p. 233).
The chapter devoted to Voltaire’s Candide, under the pretext of a definitional question (is it an anti-novel in the sense that Genette gives to this term ?), scrupulously dismantles its entire dynamic. For Colas Duflo, it is not an anti-novel, since the characters are not victims of romantic but philosophical illusions. It is therefore an anti-philosophical novel. In other words, Voltaire carries out a narrative refutation of a philosophy. On the other hand, if it can pass for an anti-novel, it is because it criticizes the novel in the Cleveland. But the form taken by this criticism is that of the hypertextual genre that is parody. Parody Cleveland allows Voltaire to refute Leibnizian optimism in the mode of narration. The literary fight against Prévost is not distinct from the philosophical fight against Leibniz.
The work ends with a chapter devoted to Jacques the fatalist by Diderot. Colas Duflo shows that Diderot strives to disrupt the conditions of reception of his work through a pronounced use of metalepsis. This is why he invented the category of reader’s anti-novel, and even of reader’s anti-novel in which you are the hero. THE “ YOU » to whom Diderot addresses, the narratee, is in fact the reader of the novel that the author works to transform into a reader of philosophy. The reader’s anti-novel therefore works to transform the reception of the novel by forcing it to come closer to a philosophical reception. Thus, a final way for philosophy to inhabit the novel is to constantly work to deconstruct the reader’s novelistic expectations. This is perhaps one of the most important tasks of philosophy.
If the work does not deviate from one aspect “ potpourri » (to use the title of Voltaire’s tale to which Colas Duflo alludes), to which the absence of conclusion certainly contributes, the analyzes permitted by this double reading – philosophical and literary – which knows how to put itself in tune with its object, are striking. .