No Tomorrow: The Ethics of Pleasure in the French Enlightenment

This award-winning study is an expanded version of Catherine Cusset's earlier study in French, Les Romanciers du plaisir (1998). The chapters in this English-language study are lengthier, and an illuminating first chapter on Watteau's two versions of the "Cythère" painting has been added. The other chapters deal with libertine fiction: Prévost's Manon Lescaut, Crébillon's Les Egarements du coeur et de l'esprit, the anonymous Thérèse philosophe, Diderot's La Religieuse, and Vivant Denon's Point de lendemain. Cusset selects these works because they trace an evolution throughout the century, from 1717 to 1777, of an "ethics of pleasure."

After mentioning several French authors of libertine novels and several eighteenth-century French artists whose paintings depict the life of the leisure classes, Cusset poses the question: "In this frivolous world of marquises, vicomtes, roués, and petit-maîtres who seem to be oblivious to any other reality than pleasure, is anything relevant for us today?" (1). The answer lies in what she calls an ethics of pleasure, the moral meaning of the present enjoyment of the senses, of what Crébillon called "le moment." Cusset contends that libertinage is the sole literary and artistic movement that speaks of nothing but pleasure, and pleasure has always had bad press. The movement was ignored by nineteenth-century critics, and Cusset suggests that Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses may have been viewed as the genre's only masterpiece because it appears to prove the failure of a life devoted to pleasure. While libertine fiction may seem to be characterized by an absence of moral judgment, at least in the traditional sense, Cusset asserts that there is an ethical dimension to these novels: the writers are moralists who teach us to fight the resistance to pleasure, to be true to ourselves, and they unmask the hypocrisy of the social and moral codes that deny the importance of pleasure.

In the first chapter the author compares Watteau's Cythère to Rousseau's Elysée garden in Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, in order to highlight the contrast between two conceptions of pleasure that frame the eighteenth century: the immanent and the transcendent. Watteau's painting reveals that pleasure is not a utopian dream that ignores deep meaning and metaphysical thought, but rather a deliberate rejection of metaphysics. Pleasure is an ironic mocking of meaning for the viewer, who longs for a coherent moral interpretation. Rousseau's Elysée, in contrast, totally lacks the irony that characterizes Watteau's Cythère. The aim of Julie's garden is not pleasure but a process of transcendental meaning, a moral lesson. Watteau's painting is often condemned as superficial and frivolous, for we have inherited the dichotomy of frivolity and depth from Rousseau's influence and from the late eighteenth-century moral use of his thought. The painting's irony contains an inversion of traditional metaphysics and an ethical claim: that man must learn to accept the "unbearable lightness of meaning" (35). This is the most theoretical chapter of the book. Clear and convincing, it sets up a framework for the textual analyses that follow.

Cusset shows how Watteau's work sets the stage for the ironic ambiguity that characterizes the ethics of pleasure throughout the period and specifically in the literary texts she examines. Manon Lescaut can be read simply as a love story, but to do so is to ignore the irony of the novel's double discourse. The discourse of order and repression condemns Des Grieux's passionate love for Manon, whereas the discourse of pleasure, embodied by Manon, is more powerful than its repression, even though the latter seems to win out in the end. After exploring the conflict in Prévost's novel between these two radically different sentiments, Cusset contends that this is not a social conflict between two antithetical worlds, as most critics argue, but rather "an ontological conflict between two contradictory feelings that can be found in every human being, man or woman, aristocrat or commoner" (64). Cusset suggests that Crébillon's novel should be read as a finished novel that achieves its aim. Its incomplete ending is its irony, which deprives readers of the moral and sentimental resolutions they have come to expect. While it is true that Crébillon directs irony at his readers, as Cusset states, there is also a tremendous amount of instrumental irony directed by the narrator toward his foolish younger self. Cusset does not emphasize this fact. Indeed, her distinction between narrator and character is not always carefully maintained, as the following passage shows: "Except for one conversation with the narrator and one with a lady in the Tuileries, Hortense is silent. She remains melancholic in society and makes the narrator himself silent" (71, emphasis added). Clearly, the word "protagonist" or "hero" would be more accurate here than "narrator." Both, of course, are named Meilcour, but a confusion of the two focalizations, separated in fact by many years, tends to overlook the narrator's frequent ironic commentary that lays bare the hero's naïveté. It seems to me that drawing more attention to this duality would strengthen Cusset's reading of this novel.

Cusset offers a fascinating analysis of "enlightened" pornography and of one of the century's most famous pornographic novels, Thérèse philosophe. She demonstrates that pornographic novels display irony toward gender relationships and mock the male fantasy of sexual power. Thérèse philosophe reveals that rational philosophy has little power against the mechanical law of desire, thus mocking the rational optimism of the Enlightenment. Diderot's Suzanne Simonin is viewed as "a character who fights for her freedom at the same time that she is used as erotic enticement" (13). La Religieuse is a novel that turns against its own premise of a struggle for liberty: "The novel of persecuted innocence fighting for the triumph of truth becomes a novel of persecuting innocence fighting to deny truth" (141). Suzanne appears in the end less human than the Mother Superior of Sainte-Eutrope, who dies of madness brought on by frustrated desire. Vivant Denon's short story is described by Cusset as a discourse on the method of pleasure, with the narrator's irony attacking the moral and social prejudices that oppose pleasure. The story delivers its lesson with ironic lightness yet seems not to offer any moral at all. Cusset's extended discussion of the notion of decency as a hypocritical social veil masking the truth of physical sensation is, in my view, one of the most interesting of this study.

Cusset concludes that the ironic tone of these works is aimed at the reader's resistance to their anti-idealist message, at the moral and metaphysical impulse that is always privileged over sensual desire, which is often denied and repressed. Pleasure has an ethical value in that its acceptance appeals to a notion of common sense that favors tolerance and rejects fanaticism. These paintings and texts "seek to articulate a reason of the body, of passion, of sensation, and of madness. The ethics of pleasure shows that recognizing ironically the limits of one's own rationality is still the best use of reason" (172).

There are, unfortunately, a few cases of poor or faulty translation. Cusset's "hic and nunc" (11) seems an odd rendering of the Latin "hic et nunc." In reference to the world of Furetière, "courtly people" is surely a more appropriate translation than "courteous people" (17). The sentence "Suzanne is not alone in front of the Mother Superior's desire" (132) makes sense to those who know French, but it might have been more idiomatic to write something such as "Suzanne is not the sole object of the Mother Superior's desire." La Mettrie's Traité de l'âme is called "a materialist treaty" rather than "treatise" (186 n. 18). Perhaps the most egregious mistranslation occurs in a note: Diderot talks about sapphic love with Sophie Volland, "whom he suspected of cheating on him with his sister" (189 n. 16), whereas in fact it was her sister who aroused Diderot's suspicions, not his own. Curiously, the author continually refers to Suzanne Simonin's second convent at Longchamp as "Longchamps" (121 ff.), even though the first spelling is found both in Diderot's French text and in Leonard Tancock's English translation.

These few errors and infelicities do not mar the quality of this study. Cusset's readings are convincing, the arguments are cogent, and the presentation is well-written. With no pun intended, this book is a pleasure to read.