Dialogues and Rêveries: ‘Un monde idéal semblable au nôtre’

Abstract

THE LAST YEARS of Rousseau’s life, the years of the Dialogues and the Rêveries, are marked by delirium and fantasy, the delirium of universal conspiracy and the fantasy of perfect love and friendship. These two opposite but possibly symbiotic creations increasingly invade his writings, largely determining the rhetoric of the two final works as he continues to reformulate his account of the self, now usually seen as wounded and wronged in every outside entanglement and as perfectly fulfilled in the other world elaborated by the imagination. If in other respects there is continuity with the Confessions, particularly with their darker pages, the two last works stand somewhat apart in this regard from Rousseau’s earlier versions of autobiography, which had assumed that there was ultimately some possible relation between external behaviour and the self. At the same time, the two works themselves, however divergent they may appear, share some of the same territory in their systematic movement back and forth between denouncing persecution and celebrating the dream-world. Critics sometimes set the Rêveries apart as a miracle of old age in which Rousseau escapes from his obsessions and finds an entirely new voice.²