Circles of Learning: Narratology and the Eighteenth-Century French Novel

Mander's study is the combination of a good idea and a lot of research. The result is a well written, detailed, and enlightening comparative analysis of twentieth century narratology and the early eighteenth century French novel in which neither one dominates the other. On the contrary, as Mander puts it, "twentieth-century narratology and the early eighteenth-century novel are […] to be brought together as partners in a self-conscious historical dialogue which will make both into objects of scrutiny" (3). What sets Mander's book apart from so many others that treat the same subject matter is the manner in which she reads modern theory. Not only does she refuse to simply impose Genettian narratology on a literary subject, she goes one step further and critiques the theory through the insights gained by her analysis of a selected number of novels, their prefatory texts and a certain practice of reading at the beginning of the eighteenth century. By doing this, Mander follows a practice of reading (and writing) that she found to be in place two hundred years ago where pedagogues, parents, and mentors prescribed "an intensive as opposed to extensive mode of reading" (157) to their pupils, children and students. Recycling the work of others, drawing lessons from them to benefit their own lives and then passing this knowledge on to others formed what Mander calls a "pedagogic circle: as readers we are to draw material from the works of others and make this into our own; as writers we can then enable others to repeat this same process. This circle of learning can thus reproduce itself infinitely" (159-60). This circle of learning is duplicated in the present study.

In the first two chapters, Mander lays the groundwork by discussing some of the major points of Genette's narratology and shows how these widely discussed and widely accepted ideas have heavily influenced (if not biased) our modern reading of the so-called autobiographical novels of Marivaux and Prévost in particular. Mander points out some of the problems with Genette's theory which, as in this case, stem from Genette's own historically influenced reading: "… in the final analysis, it can be argued that the autobiographical framework of Genettian narratology is created by an autobiographical mode of reading which, in the absence of any sings of the narrator, is able to construe a narrative as a first-person narrative and configure the text as autobiography" (43). Over the next five chapters, Manders argues convincingly against such a historically biased reading of the eighteenth-century novel.

She begins with a close look at the commonly used paratexts (Préfaces, Avertissements, Avis, etc.) which accompany the novels of this time period. Several factors in these paratexts seem to suggest dissociation between the first-person discourse of the novel and its status as autobiography. The often dubious genealogy of the text, its uncertain status between fiction and fact, its reworking by editors and publishers, and the recycling of already well-known texts into new and potentially open-ended ones support Mander's claim that the homodiegetic narrative, "despite its first-person form, cannot be read unambiguously as the personal voice of the ostensible narrator" (91).

Moving on to Marivaux's Journaux, a genre that seems to imply a profound connection between the first-person pronoun of the text and its narrator, Mander analyzes the relationship between narrative voice and point of view. Again, Mander goes against most critics' claims that the particular status given to the first person voice of the narrator in the Journaux is necessarily a proof of a psychological viewpoint and an individualistic self-expression. Marivaux's use of the first-person pronoun rather points to a practice of self-reflection in which the "I" looks at himself critically from an "outside" perspective. The consequence of this practice has profound implications as it further supports Mander's argument against an automatic association between homodiegetic narratives and autobiography. In addition, it brings to the fore once again problems inherent in our practice of analyzing past texts from our own historical frame: "Most importantly, in the context of this particular epistemological tradition personal writing assumes focal contours which differ significantly from those associated with the first-person pronoun by twentieth-century readers and critics: the first person subject is often objectified and seen as if from a third-person perspective" (116).

In chapter 5, Mander first establishes the continuity between Marivaux's Journaux and his two novels Le Paysan parvenu and La Vie de Marianne by means of their common emphasis on a simple and truthful style. Simultaneously, she dismisses the claim of the notoriously unreliable first-person narrator. The main protagonist's use of language and the first person pronoun is, once again, rather a sign of his "rational disengagement" (141). The protagonists of both novels, Jacob and Marianne, use the first-person pronoun in their respective narratives to rationalize their personal experiences. Thus, rather than seeing it as a sign of unreliability on behalf of the first-person narrator, Mander argues it to be a demonstration of "greater authenticity and personal insight" (140).

The practice of reading in the early eighteenth century is the focus of chapter 6 and thus brings to a close the circle of Mander's argument. Rather than focusing on empirical data of how novels were received by their readers, Mander suggest a descriptive model of reading "showing how eighteenth-century readers were encouraged to read rather than how they did in fact read" (155). This model of good versus bad reading, quality over mere quantity, is promoted within the novel themselves where mentors and parents alike address the issue. As demonstrated in the previous chapters, the narrator's use of the pronoun "je" is not to provide an insight into their personal experiences and psyche for their own sake, it is to promote general principles (which the twentieth-century reader seems to accept more readily from a third rather than a first-person narrator): "Thus the thrust of this particular approach to reading is to map the personal narrative onto a more general scheme that can be said to have no personal author but which admits of indefinite numbers of illustrators" (181).

Mander concludes her study with the case of Prévost whose status as a transitional figure simultaneously confirms and changes the above-mentioned model of reading. Prévost's Homme de qualité relates universal truths just as the narrators in Marivaux's novels, yet the model of good reading is more and more questioned and undermined by an increasing use of cross-references in the novels. Mander compares the effect of cross-referencing to that produced by the Encycopédie whose readers "must draw out the consequences of the cross-references for him or herself" (208). Although her analysis of Prévost's novels seems to suggest that the latter is more in line with our twentieth-century inclination to associate first-person narratives with autobiography, Mander resists the temptation to use these findings as:

an absolute benchmark to demonstrate how, more than his contemporaries, Prévost realizes the 'true' autobiographical potential of the first person form. To the contrary, the thrust of the argument in this book has been to question the presumptions of modern criticism in order to separate first-person narrative in the early eighteenth century from the structures of autobiography and to show that the latter are not a logical consequence of a personal narrator but are above all a function of a historically situated figure of reading, itself informed by historically contingent notions of subjectivity and textuality (213).

Circles of learning is a well written study that offers an interesting perspective on how to "read" theory with and against the literary texts and vice versa. Mander's book is most insightful in those chapters that deal with Marivaux's novels and journals. The chapter on Prévost, especially because of this author's pivotal status in literary history, seems almost a bit rushed. But this only attests to the fact that one would like to read more.