by Steven Moore
Over the course of the novel, Prévost examines a variety of philosophical and religious viewpoints—stoicism, deism, primitivism, utopianism, and competing brands of Christianity—usually to expose their insufficiencies. Near the end, as an advisor to England’s Charles II, Cleveland finds it particularly frustrating to apply pure philosophy to dirty politics. Though Cleveland regards his ultimate conversion to Protestantism as a victory (Prévost converted around the time he was writing this), the skeptical author drops enough hints that this is more a concession to the limits of one’s understanding, if not an admission of defeat. Cleveland had earlier complained that institutional religion “requires simplicity and submission” (3:46); the fact he finally finds tranquility near the cave where his mother is buried suggests a return to the womb, that tranquil state where one is untroubled by philosophy. And the fact this is a first-person memoir, not a more objective third-person account, once again puts us on guard against a potentially unreliable narrator, especially one who admits upfront that writing his memoirs is a form of therapy: “nothing can be a greater consolation to a troubled mind than the liberty of venting its sorrows. A miserable person idolizes his grief as much as a happy man does his pleasures” (1:2). Often claiming he is “the most unhappy man that ever lived” (2:140), Cleveland exaggerates what others with a conventional upbringing simply accept as the ways of the world. His isolated upbringing skews his vision, a clever ploy on Prévost’s part because Cleveland’s early encounters with civilized living in France enstranges the reader’s perception (as Shklovsky would say) and helps us see, with him, how it actually works.
But instead of learning from this initial culture-clash, Cleveland unthinkingly imposes the same corrupt European culture on the “savages” he meets on the dark continent of America. Traveling there in pursuit of Fanny and her father, who have abandoned him due to a misunderstanding, Cleveland soon finds himself in a position of power among the Abaquis tribe. First thing he does is try to clothe the naked savages in conformity to uptight European standards of modesty—though he later thinks better of this—then imposes a patriarchal hierarchy on what was a communal society and tricks them into abandoning their visible sun god for the invisible son his tribe believes in by secretly murdering one of the Indians, proclaiming it an act of his god, and threatening more violence if they don’t convert. Prévost’s most ludicrous example of European prejudice has to do with “modesty,” a concept unknown to the Indians, who aren’t ashamed of the body. Always one step behind Fanny as he searches the Americas for her, Cleveland finally bumps into Fanny and her father in the Carolinas, where they have been taken captive; her clothes were stolen, so she’s wearing a grass skirt and some cast-off European pieces, but her father keeps Cleveland waiting until nightfall before he can see her “in order to spare [her] blushes” (2:43), even though the devoted swain has traveled over 5,000 miles to see a girl he has known since she was 10. Although he doesn’t regard the Indians as “noble” savages, it occasionally occurs to him that their lack of some European habits are not necessarily so savage. After returning to Europe and “civilization,” Cleveland concludes, “I perhaps have seen more injustice and dissoluteness among Christians than in the countries inhabited by savages” (3:164).
Cleveland is a studious scholar, but repeated shocks to his system of philosophy frustrate his attempts to apply what he learns in the library to the world outside. Cleveland is a novel about the limits of philosophy, or rather of the difficulty of forging a new philosophical worldview (as many were during the Enlightenment) while still operating under old assumptions and errors like European exceptionalism and the existence of a god. Cleveland’s failed social experiment in America—the Abaquis are ruined under his colonization—is one of several utopian schemes in the novel, all of which fail because their leaders can’t reconcile passionate individualism with rational order, and hence fall back on isolationism, patriarchy, and repression, using many of the same persecuting tactics Catholics were using against Protestants at this period in the 17th century, and which drive many aspects of the novel’s plot.
Prévost adulterates the high-minded novel’s philosophical concerns with some lowbrow sensationalism: there are shipwrecks, pirates, abductions, rapes, incredible coincidences, titillation—Fanny is stripped of her clothes by “naked” savages, Cleveland almost has sex with a girl who turns out to be his long-lost daughter, whom he thought was roasted and eaten alive by Indians—disguises, murders, suicides, wily Jesuits, Indian ambushes, cannibalism, and an endless torrent of tears. Especially shocking is the sequence in which Cleveland debates suicide with himself, Hamlet-wise, and concludes the rational thing to do per his current philosophy would be not only to kill himself but his two sons as well, in order to spare them from living in a fallen world, and he actually draws a sword on them before coming to his senses.129 Prévost wasn’t the first to mix serious philosophy with melodramatic adventure, but Cleveland does reveal his conception of the utility of novels such as his. Near the end, the priggish protagonist reads some novels for the first time in his life (which the villainous Jesuit had recommended to him), and gives them a scathing review:
I dipped a little into them all, but did not find that above two or three at most were any ways rational. A few ingenious thoughts, a happy turn of expression, some soft or smiling images; such were the weapons the Jesuit offered me to drive away the remembrance of my pains. However, after I had looked into these pieces for about a quarter of an hour, I threw them from me with the utmost indignation. Heavens, says I, does he sport with my sorrows! To imagine that it is possible for me to be comforted by such trifling amusements as these is the highest insult. (3:38)
Perhaps recording his own dissatisfaction with mainstream fiction during his melancholy twenties, Prévost wrote a novel that an intellectual could read without feeling insulted, and one that offered a more realistic assessment of life than idealistic books of philosophy and theology. On the other hand, Prévost struggled somewhat with the limitations of the memoir-novel form he chose to adopt. Cleveland contains many self-conscious remarks by the author on why he is writing the way he is; he is trying something different, but (he admits) not different enough:
I consult my own grief much more than I do the laws of history [fiction] and the rules which are prescribed to biographers. How numerous soever and various my misfortunes may be, they now act altogether upon my heart; the sensation which now remains to me of them is not the effect of variety; ’tis now, if I may so express myself, but a uniform mass of sorrow which oppresses me continually with its weight. I therefore should be glad were it in the power of my pen to unite in one stroke of it the several calamities of my life in the same manner as their effect is united in my soul. Then the reader would be much better able to form a judgment of the state of it. Regularity and order are a constraint to me, and as I am not able to represent all my misfortunes at one view, the greatest present themselves with the strongest force to my memory. . . . (2:160–61)
Manon Lescaut had already demonstrated Prévost’s ability to write a powerfully compact work, and had he followed that example, Cleveland might resemble a dense, “uniform mass of sorrow” like Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. But he needed the extra money publishers paid for multivolume works, so he went for “the effect of variety.”
In 1735, Prévost put Cleveland on hold to publish the first volume of yet another huge memoir-novel, The Dean of Coleraine (Le Doyen de Killerine, 1735–40), yet another dramatization of the conflict between theory and practice, the ideal and the real. In this one, a celibate Irish cleric needs to find suitable spouses for his three lively siblings, which involves the same contradiction between duty and desire Renoncour struggled with. Though the dean, like the man of quality and Cleveland, has “a hatred for the world and a taste for solitude” (1:7), he is more practical than they are and contents himself with “all those rules of religion that are reconcilable with the customs and maxims of the world” (preface), rather
than insist on impossibly high ideals, and hence manages to marry his siblings off satisfactorily. The most startling thing about the novel is the physical appearance of the dean; he admits he’s no beauty:
I was born with three defects, from which all the application and remedies of art could not set me free. My legs were bowed and crooked, and bore no bad resemblance in shape to the two crotchets of a parenthesis; yet they were strong and robust enough, and of an equal length not to be any impediment to my walking upright. To add to this infirmity, I had a bunch on my back, and a counterpoise of the same sort and bulk before; and to complete my disgrace, my face was disfigured by two large warts regularly planted above my eyes, which spreading on my forehead appeared like two horns; add to this that my head was exceeding large, my waist full, thick, bundled together, and extremely short: in fine, my whole figure seemed to destine and mark me out for some other state than the world, where raillery much less spares the imperfections of the body than the vices and irregularities of the soul. (1:7–8)
In a genre where the protagonist is always physically attractive and only villains are ugly, this was a bold choice on Prévost’s part. It’s tempting, but too easy, to argue that the dean’s hideousness makes him a suitable spokesman for his defective Catholic creed; Richard Smernoff is probably right to find “that a quiet dignity emerges from this physically deformed clergyman who enjoins men to accept imperfection” (94), as opposed to the handsome protagonists of Prévost’s earlier novels who renounce the world because it’s not perfect. But another 700-page novel on the limits of reason and the violence of passion sounds redundant, and Prévost admits in his preface that it’s merely entertainment, not art. (“As the state of my fortune does not permit me to write on subjects that require time and tranquillity, I confine myself to those that are the most simple, the most virtuous, and the most agreeable.”) So let’s move on, especially since this chapter is growing so lengthy the reader may suspect the French Ministry of Culture is paying me by the word.
Of the half-dozen other novels Prévost cranked out, there is one more worth looking at, the finest thing he wrote after Manon Lescaut. Like it a short novel in two parts, The Story of a Modern Greek Woman (Histoire d’une grecque moderne, 1740) concerns an unnamed French diplomat stationed in Constantinople who falls for a 16-year-old harem girl, a Greek Christian named Théophé. Buying her freedom and taking her under his wing for what he insists are humanitarian reasons, he tries to mold Théophé into his dreamgirl—as virtuous as the Princess de Clèves but as affectionate as a former sex slave—while she attempts to reinvent herself as a modern, independent woman. Naturally, these incompatible goals cause friction, and not the kind of friction he desires. (He claims his initial interest in her was nonsexual, but soon he itches to Turk her Bosporus.) Wanting a mentor, not a lover, she rejects his advances, so they settle into a perverse father–daughter relationship, but his unrequited love for her remains. They return to France, where she suggests solving their emotional conundrum by joining a convent, which he refuses to allow. Then, like Manon Lescaut, she unexpectedly dies young, leaving the diplomat to pen this sad memoir.
Like Des Grieux, the diplomat controls the narrative, but Théophé is given many more lines than Manon and is allowed to explain herself at greater length, which paradoxically makes her even more enigmatic than the French tart. Abducted from her possibly noble Greek family at age two, raised by an amoral scoundrel, Théophé began engaging in sex “at an age when I did not yet know the difference between the sexes,” she tells the diplomat. “You see that a taste for pleasure had no part in my misfortune and that I did not fall into licentiousness but was born into it. Thus, I experienced neither shame nor remorse for it.”130 Years later, at age 15, she deliberately sold herself into a seraglio because it seemed the quickest way to attain a life of luxury. The diplomat is both shocked and titillated by her amoral upbringing; the latter will lead him to expect sexual favors from her, but first he introduces her to European shame and remorse by lecturing her on Christian virtues and reading to her from ascetic Jansenist treatises. In an almost comic way, this backfires on him; performing a kind of cultural clitoridectomy that curtails Théophé’s sexual desire, he realizes he went too far and tries to reverse the procedure by having her read romance novels like Cleopatra and The Princess de Clèves, whose severely virtuous heroines only make Théophé feel even more guilty about her promiscuous past. He realizes too late he has crippled Théophé with guilt, unlike those “who were raised for their condition [as harem girls] and who do not feel the humiliation of their lot” (645). Like Cleveland among the Indians, the diplomat has an inkling that a guilt-free upbringing consistent with nature might be superior to a straitjacketed European one at odds with it, and that cultural relativism trumps what he regards as universal values of virtue, but he’s too committed to his own cultural conditioning to break free from it. He sickens and becomes an invalid during the last part of the novel, and then Théophé mysteriously dies, as if Christian European culture is literally bad for one’s health.
It’s a fascinating portrait of a man broadminded enough to recognize the provincialism of his conventional upbringing, but unable to rise above it. As a diplomat in Turkey, he is used to negotiating with foreign powers, but he is powerless to negotiate a satisfying relationship with this young foreigner. He claims to be a man of the world who practices “enlightened libertinism” (609), but he confesses this 16-year-old girl has become “so formidable to me that I no longer approached her without trembling” (665). The sex slave he freed from the seraglio now holds him in submission, inadvertently sending him into fits of rage and jealousy. (At one point, at the height of sexual frustration, the diplomat fires off canons to celebrate his king’s birthday in defiance of the local authorities; paging Dr. Freud.) The student he taught moral principles becomes more principled than he is. Prévost handles these psychological twists and turns with great aplomb, and effectively dramatizes the power a captivating young girl can have on an older man. This novel is his most writerly text, and the diplomat warns us in the opening paragraph to be prepared to read critically: “Will I not incur suspicion by the confession that forms my exordium? I am the lover of the beautiful Greek woman whose story I am undertaking. Who will think me sincere in the recital of my pleasures or my pains? Who will not mistrust my descriptions and my praise? Will not a violent passion cause everything that passes before my eyes or through my hands to change its nature? In a word, what faithfulness will one expect from a pen guided by love? These are the questions that must keep a reader on his guard” (553–54). Consequently, we never do learn whether Théophé is descended from Greek nobility or is just a resourceful girl of the streets, whether she honestly wishes for for solitary independence (as she claims) or is cheating behind the diplomat’s back (as he suspects). There is no resolution, only the narrator’s admittance at the end that he remains disturbed “with suspicions that I was never able to clear up,” turning them over to us: “It is here that I yield absolutely to the judgment of my difficulties to the reader, and I leave it to him to form whatever opinion he must of all that may have appeared to him obscure or uncertain in Théophé’s character and conduct” (710–11). Unlike Des Grieux, who thought he understood Manon and couched his confession accordingly, the diplomat—an older, wiser man—simply tells us what he knows and lets us decide. (Personally, I trust Théophé more than Manon, and admire the diplomat more for not descending into criminal behavior like Des Grieux.) In fact, we can’t be sure Théophé really died; on the last page of the novel, the diplomat writes: “I did not even learn of her death until several months after the dismal accident, because of the care that my family and all the friends who saw me in my solitude took to keep it from me” (717). This wouldn’t be the first time in a Prévost novel where a character was reported dead, only to survive, and given what the diplomat has told us of Taffy’s moxie and independence, it’s more likely she ran away and the family hushed it up. But no matter; des
pite the title, this is the diplomat’s story, not hers. The Story of a Modern Greek Woman is not as melodramatic as Manon Lescaut, and for that reason will probably never be turned into an opera or a ballet, but it’s just as accomplished, if not more so, and deserves to be as well known.
While Prévost and Marivaux are now considered the most significant French novelists of the 1730s, that decade saw the breaking of a new wave of novelists, many of whom regarded the histrionic prudery in Marivaux’s Marianne and Prévost’s novels as so 17th-century. In real life, not every woman bolts for a convent whenever a man winks at her, or dooms herself to an operatic death if she winks back. At the crest of the wave is a dandy named Claude-Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon (1707–77), called Crébillon fils to distinguish him from his dramatist father. He has been described as a “tall, willowy, serious young man, with a cultivated dry wit” (Levy, 182), worth noting only because even though his novels might seem like the cultivated concoctions of a dry-witted dandy, they are quite serious in their cultural criticism; they have not always been taken seriously by literary critics, but they were by the French authorities who repeatedly jailed Crébillon for his subversive wit.
In his dozen or so novels, Crébillon tweaked the prevailing genres of fiction (and twitted a few of their authors), beginning with the epistolary novel. Letters from the Marchioness de M*** to the Count de R*** (1732) is a one-sided collection of letters that, like Boursault’s Letters from a Lady of Quality to a Chevalier—Crébillon’s likely model—tracks a young married woman’s adultery from flirtation to consummation to abandonment, and like Montesquieu’s Persian Letters ends with what appears to be a suicide note. (Some critics say she dies of a broken heart, but there are hints she plans to stab herself à la Lucretia in Scudéry’s Clelia.) Crébillon expands upon the shorter one-sided epistolary novels of Boursault and his predecessors in two ways: psychologically, by featuring a protagonist who is much more complicated than those earlier epistlers; and formally, by including a cover letter by the discoverer of the letters explaining that she is presenting only 70 of 500 extant letters (along with some shorter notes interspersed throughout), which requires the imaginative participation of the reader. Though the undated letters are presented chronologically and form a coherent narrative, one can’t help but wonder what those other 430 letters contained. At one crucial point, when the couple seems about to consummate their affair, the editorix inserts a tantalizing reminder: “[Some letters are here suppressed.]”131 Along with the count’s missing letters, more is left out of their affair than included, as though Crébillon wanted to challenge himself to say as much as possible with as little material as he could get away with. It is for this reason one critic calls the Letters “a bold experiment,” and “perhaps the most radical and daring” of Crébillon’s novels (Conroy, 73, 16). And he succeeds brilliantly; this one-sided, limited selection of letters has the fullness of a conventional novel, partly because the experienced reader can fill in the blanks from other novels.
