Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Page 4
This view at least has the merit of catering for the ‘chill of horror’ felt by the Monthly Review. Valmont and Merteuil place themselves beyond the pale because neither acknowledges any power, human or divine, greater than themselves. In this sense, Les Liaisons dangereuses may be seen as an illustration of the ‘spiritual poverty’ which, according to Pascal, the seventeenthcentury divine, is the inevitable, unenviable lot of the unbeliever. It is a novel, therefore, about evil. But is the evil really ontological, an inescapable part of the fabric of the universe? The book may seem ‘diabolical’ as the Monthly Review put it, but neither the Devil nor any other supernatural power plays any noticeable role in the demythologized struggle which we observe. On the contrary, evil here seems much more earthbound. It is the result of human failings—pride, selfishness, contempt, and indifference for others—and of social pressures. Human society is so constructed that it requires its members to choose between deceiving or being deceived: it is on this basis that its prizes are awarded. Valmont’s Don Juanism thus leads us up another trail which disappears in the tangle of ambiguity. Perhaps we should see Les Liaisons dangereuses less as a metaphysical tale of evil than as a practical fable about winning and losing.
Many readers have wondered why Valmont and Mme de Merteuil, who have youth, wealth, wit, and social position, all of which might have been put to better uses, settle for so little. Valmont devotes himself to seducing women who, as he observes, are frequently all too ready to be seduced, while Mme de Merteuil fills her time by manipulating people whom she obviously despises. One answer is that they are both drawn to the exercise of power: in this sense, they are ancestors of the Nietzschean ‘superman’. Another is that they hone skills and techniques whose perfect execution is its own reward: they are, in other words, artists of a very perverse kind. A further possibility is that, despising society and having outgrown God, they exist in a world which has no values except those which they give it. They can therefore seem like primitive existentialists who overcome the absurdity of life by asserting their individual identity against a godless universe which is arbitrary and without meaning. Such a view gives Laclos’s ‘libertinage’ a very twentieth-century philosophical slant and, by denying his novel a metaphysical dimension, it allows us to see how the decadent world of the ancien régime is not so very different from our own.
Yet it is clear from his refusal to allow Valmont and Merteuil to succeed that Laclos ultimately disapproves both of them and of whatever philosophy directs their actions. Of course, it would be perverse to deny that he respects and perhaps even admires them. He was a soldier trained in the tactics of defence, not attack. But he was enough of a professional to appreciate the contemptuous ease with which they make their conquests. Valmont and Merteuil exhibit effortless superiority. Audacious, intelligent, and lucid, they reduce human relationships to a set of strategies and their control of the campaigns they initiate is absolute. Their battle plans are implemented with military precision and they have nerves of steel. Moreover, they have style in abundance and wit to squander. Yet they have one weakness. Their self-confidence does not quite disguise their need to be admired. This explains why they throw caution to the winds and, against their policy of not writing down anything that might possibly be used against them, maintain a correspondence with each other which leaves their flanks supremely vulnerable. The war they wage is undeclared, covert, and secret. They cannot have allies nor do they seek disciples. But they do need an audience. As lone operators constantly at battle stations, they are denied true intimacy and all human contact. When each at last discovers a worthy opponent, equal in skill and capable of fighting to a draw, both eagerly grasp the opportunity of having an ear which they can fill with tales of their own cleverness. The need for applause is, of course, vanity, and vanity proves their undoing. When their plans clash, as must happen sooner or later, one must prevail and the other will not yield. Whether or not Valmont loves Mme de Tourvel, whether or not Mme de Merteuil loves Valmont, the Marquise cannot accept losing control of the Vicomte, nor can the Vicomte tolerate being outmanœuvred by the Marquise. When Titans clash, the whole earth shakes. Perhaps, then, they might be seen as tragic heroes, fatally flawed and doomed by the fate that is character.
Now, while Laclos might well have respected their ruthless efficiency and style, he nowhere suggests that they are victims. On the contrary, they are persecutors, the Enemies of innocence, and, unlike many ‘libertine’ writers who connived at the triumph of life’s predators, Laclos does not allow them to succeed. To some extent, his disapproval of them may be accounted for in social terms. Valmont and Merteuil are upper-class bullies who prey on the weak and the gullible, spoilt brats who squander their intellectual gifts on mean acts of petty destruction, beautiful people guilty of the abuse of power and social privilege. They represent the decline of the old aristocratic ideal of honourable conduct and its corruption by the newer, vulgar ethic of success at any price.
And yet their failings are not those of their caste. Their vices are personal, the result of conscious choices for which they alone must be held accountable. In the process of acquiring their iron discipline, they have turned themselves into emotional cripples. Their lucidity and self-control have been achieved at the expense of stifling their inner, affective being which they regard as a source of weakness. When their egos finally collide, they may (according to the interpretation which the reader puts upon events) feel the power of love or the pain of jealousy or they may simply lose their tempers. But however we interpret their reactions, it is clear that their judgement is clouded by their feelings and they make mistakes. If this is indeed the case, then Laclos’s novel seems to be less a criticism of named individuals or even of a social group, and begins to look like a wider comment on the spirit of the age. Valmont and Merteuil are products of the Enlightenment which claimed to show the road to the millennium. The philosophic spirit associated Reason with right and Emotion with error. The first would unravel the mysteries of nature; the second encouraged prejudice, superstition, and fanaticism. However, Rousseau, the antiphilosophe, had already demonstrated the structural weakness of this position: a man is not merely another cog in a clockwork universe, a machine to be programmed, but a wayward bundle of needs and desires. In this context, Les Liaisons dangereuses expresses cogent reservations about the philosophic spirit itself. It shows what the intellect can achieve, but it also reminds us that mere effectiveness detached from feeling is barren. Reason guides the hand; but the hand labours in vain which is not guided by a compassionate heart. The irony of Laclos’s novel is Voltairean, but its sympathies are Rousseauistic.
What we know of Laclos’s private attitudes—he was not averse to ‘Glory’ but set a higher value on ‘the Affections’—lends some support to this view. If he did indeed see the point of Rousseau’s suspicion of the whole ethos of the Enlightenment, it follows that his novel might well express what he took to be proper moral and spiritual priorities. Not that Les Liaisons dangereuses is a moralizing tract. Nor is it even a very moral book by eighteenth-century standards. Vice is not convincingly punished, nor is virtue rewarded. Indeed, if there is a moral lesson at all, it seems to be that clever people should not underestimate their feelings and that the innocent and wellintentioned should tread warily and not assume that everyone is as honest and decent as they are.
If this is what Laclos intended, it is a banal lesson. Yet it fairly echoes the ‘libertine’ debate on the relative merits of Head and Heart in the production of Happiness. But Laclos does add an important rider. In expressing his condolences, Bertrand, Mme de Rosemonde’s steward, humbly points out that feeling hearts exist at all levels of society. It may be therefore that Laclos does not think in class terms at all, but divides men and women into those who judge and do not feel and those who feel and judge not. Mme de Rosemonde clearly belongs to the latter category and, for some readers, she holds the moral centre of the book. She is neither censorious nor sentimental but resigns herself to ac
cepting what cannot be avoided. There is even something in her of the stoicism with which Laclos spoke to his wife of his dashed career hopes. But Bertrand and Mme de Rosemonde are bystanders who observe from afar, unlike the reader who occupies a seat in the stalls and is made privy to every piece of villainy, every drop of suffering. Knowing what we know, we find it difficult to accept the moralizing Preface at its face value. If Laclos indeed intended it to be taken literally, then he is far more effective as a novelist than as a moralist. Valmont and Merteuil soar and cast their cynical glow over the reader who finds it difficult to believe that the clear-eyed, ironic Laclos demanded no more of his reader than a tepid acceptance of the way of the world. Surely, he intended something profounder, something of a stature commensurate with the intricate whorls of his novel, some kind of political or moral or philosophical message … But this is where we came in.
Laclos’s novel is as stoutly defended as the forts he built on France’s western approaches. Every attempt to scale its heights meets with a rebuff. At different moments and to different readers, Les Liaisons dangereuses seems to change shape and direction. It is a novel (if it is a novel) written by a man with a personal grudge against the society which blocked his career prospects. Or it may be just an exercise in realism, a faithful picture of one corner of society painted without prejudice, a kind of documentary exposure of manners presented without bias. Yet it feels more like an indictment of the values of a group of individuals and the general mood of privileged corruption. But if it is not overtly revolutionary, we might believe that it criticizes the fate of women in a male-dominated society, were it not for the fact that Laclos proves, on closer inspection, to have been rather more anti-feminist than he at first seems. If we cannot agree on the precise object of his social strictures, perhaps we can say that he defends a coherent set of values against the cerebral excesses of the Enlightenment. But are these values metaphysical, philosophical, moral, or spiritual? Or is Laclos really no more than an eighteenth-century sceptic, caught in the crossfire between Voltaire and Rousseau? A pre-Romantic, who recommends Sensibility against Reason? A libertine writer raking dutifully through the relative merits of Head and Heart?
It goes without saying that none of the many interpretations which Laclos’s admirers have proposed is either right or wrong. Les Liaisons dangereuses lays many trails which turn out to be false when they are not liberally strewn with red herrings. But the fact that so many possible routes are worth pursuing is a fair measure of its greatness as a work of art. As we read, our sympathies fluctuate between admiration for the style and brilliance of Valmont and Merteuil and dismay at their utter contempt for ordinary decency. They tempt us to despise their victims until we reach the point where the game turns dangerous and deadly. The ironies are rich and we are given marvellously sustained high comedy which runs from glorious farce to the blackest humour. But we always have a disturbing sense that Laclos is being ironic at our expense too, that we are included in his line of fire, that our own values are targeted. The safest starting-point is to assume that the author of this sardonic book was the earnest, upright, and uxorious eighteenth-century man revealed by his letters. But it is not necessarily the most rewarding approach to a book which burns, as Baudelaire said, like ice.
NOTE ON FRENCH TEXTS
The translator’s reference text was the invaluable Pléiade edition (Paris, 1979) of Laclos’s complete works, edited with exhaustive expertise by Professor Laurent Versini to whose outstanding scholarship every student of Les Liaisons dangereuses owes a debt impossible to pay but here gratefully acknowledged. The other main text used was that of the Classiques Garnier edition (Paris, 1961) edited with a long introduction, including detailed examination of the individual voices of the correspondents. Other texts consulted were: the two-volume edition (Paris, 1981) edited for Lettres françaises by René Pomeau, who also introduced the Garnier-Flammarion edition (Paris, 1964); the Livre de Poche edition (Paris, 1987) with a preface, commentary, and notes by Béatrice Didier; and the older but still interesting Textes français edition (Paris, 1943) for the Société des Belles Lettres edited with an introduction by Édouard Maynial. However, in any case of a doubtful reading, Versini prevailed.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
There is a vast amount of Laclos criticism in French. The following list is minimalist.
Pomeau, R., Laclos (Paris, 1975).
Seylaz, J.-L., ‘Les Liaisons dangereuses’ et la création romanesque chez Laclos (Paris and Geneva, 1958).
Todorov, T., Littérature et signification (Paris, 1967).
Versini, L., Laclos et la tradition (Paris, 1968).
——Le Roman épistolaire (Paris, 1979).
There are two excellent French biographies of Laclos:
Dard, E., Le General de Laclos, auteur des ‘Liaisons dangereuses’, 1741–1803 (Paris, 1908, new edns., 1920, 1936).
Poisson, G., Choderlos de Laclos ou l’obstination (Paris, 1985).
The following list is a select bibliography of Laclos criticism in English:
Alstad, D., ‘Les Liaisons dangereuses: Hustlers and Hypocrites’, Yale French Studies, 40 (1968).
Brooks, P., The Novel of Worldliness (Princeton, 1969).
Byrne, P., The Valmont/Merteuil Relationship: Coming to Terms with the Ambiguities of Laclos’s Text, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 266 (Oxford, 1989).
Coward, D. A., ‘Laclos and the “Dénouement” of Les Liaisons dangereuses’, Eighteenth-Century Studies (1972).
Crocker, L., An Age of Crisis (Baltimore, Md., 1959).
Cruickshank, J. (ed.), French Literature and its Background, iii, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1968), esp. chs. 4, 9, 10, 12.
Davies, S., Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (London, 1987).
Free, L. R. (ed.), Laclos, Critical Approaches, Studia Humanitas (Madrid, 1978).
Greshoff, C. J., Seven Studies of the French Novel (Cape Town, 1974).
Grimsley, R., From Montesquieu to Laclos: Studies on the French Enlightenment (Geneva, 1974).
Hill, E. B., ‘Man and Mask: The Art of the Actor in Les Liaisons dangereuses’, Romanic Review, 1972.
Hughes, P., and Williams, D. (eds.), The Varied Pattern: Studies in the Eighteenth Century (Toronto, 1971).
Mason, H., French Writers and their Society (1715–1800) (London, 1982).
Miller, N. K., ‘The Exquisite Cadavers: Women in Eighteenth-Century Fiction’, Diacritics, 5 (1975).
—— ‘Female Sexuality and Narrative Structure in La Nouvelle Héloïse and Les Liaisons dangereuses’, Signs, 1 (1976).
—— The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1727–1782 (New York, 1980).
Minogue, V., ‘Les Liaisons dangereuses: A Practical Lesson in the Art of Seduction’, Modern Language Review, 67 (1972).
Munro, J., Studies in Subconscious Motivation in Laclos and Marivaux, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 89 (Banbury, 1972).
Mylne, V., The Eighteenth-Century French Novel: Techniques of Illusion (rev. edn., Cambridge, 1981).
Perkins, J. A., Irony and Candour in Certain Libertine Novels, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 56 (Banbury, 1968).
Picard, R., Two Centuries of French Literature (1600–1800), trans. J. Cairncross (London, 1969).
Rosbottom, R. C, Choderlos de Laclos, Twayne’s World Author Series (Boston, Mass., 1978).
Showalter, E., jun., The Evolution of the French Novel 1641–1782 (Princeton, NJ, 1972).
Thelander, D. R., Laclos and the Epistolary Novel (Geneva, 1963).
Thody, P. M. W., Les Liaisons dangereuses (2nd edn., London, 1975).
Turnell, M., The Novel in France (New York, 1950).
Wagner, G., ‘Madame de Merteuil: Women as a Sexual Object’, in his Five for Freedom: A Study of Feminism in Fiction (London, 1972).
Wohlfarth, I., The Irony of Criticism and the Criticism of Irony: A Study of Laclos Criticism, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 120 (Ba
nbury, 1974).
For further bibliographical guidance consult:
Coward, D. A., Laclos Studies 1968–1982, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 219 (Oxford, 1983).
Michael, C. V., Choderlos de Laclos: The Man, his Works and his Critics. An Annotated Bibliography (New York and London, 1982).