Social Order and ‘le pays des chimères’

Abstract

UNE ESPECE DE ROMAN: the phrase in the Confessions betrays something of Rousseau’s embarrassment at his excursion into a frivolous genre. Indeed he goes on to write: ‘Mon grand embarras étoit la honte de me démentir ainsi moi-même si nettement et si hautement’ (434). However, the phrase also acknowledges a difficulty in classifying Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse. If it is a kind of novel, it is a different kind from most, one that even by the spacious standards of the eighteenth century shows a rare disregard for narrative economy. More fundamentally, this novel is not like others in that it is supposed to escape from the ordinary alternatives of truth and fiction. Something more elaborate than the common eighteenth-century pretence of authenticity is involved here. In the Préface dialoguée or Second Preface a reader who has been given the manuscript insistently challenges ‘Rousseau’ in his capacity as ‘editor’ of the letters— ‘Cette correspondance est-elle réelle, ou si c’est une fiction?’ (Second Preface, Pléiade II, 11)— making it plain that for him the value of the work depends on the answer. No answer is provided, however. The editor dodges and feints, refusing either to lie or to tell the truth (27/28), hinting even that he may not know the answer to his reader’s question. The effect is to heighten the uncertainty created by the book’s title page.