Eighteenth-Century Fiction

REVIEWS 289 R.A. Francis. 77ie Abbé Prévost's First-Person Narrators. Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1993. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, n0 306. vii + 355pp. ISBN 0-7294-0448-X. The title of this excellent study is to be taken literally; R.A. Francis analyses the characters who serve as primary narrators in Prévost's novels from the Mémoires d'un homme de qualité to Le Monde moral. He does not take a purely structural or narratological approach, although he makes good use of Genette and other critics; rather, he proceeds from the obvious fact that readers come to regard these characters as fellow human beings. They are more than mere technicians of storytelling; they have a fund of experiences, ideas, and feelings which engage the reader's sympathetic interest. Francis works through their narration to grasp the implied ideology or, more accurately, the conflict ofideologies. The book begins with a survey of the narrators, describing their distinctive personal qualities and summarizing the tales they tell. Besides reminding readers of the plots, this section already begins to lay out some original and provocative views of Prévost. The account of the Mémoires d'un homme de qualité, for example, makes a good case for reading Manon Lescaut as part of a coherent structure. The trio of characters—Renoncour, Cleveland, and the Doyen de Killerine—who narrate the long instalment novels are easily presented as a progressive sequence. Francis argues for a more respectful attitude towards the Doyen than many recent scholars have shown: admittedly the Doyen is limited and inept, but he is also humble and willing to learn from his mistakes, and his allegedly comic blunders and blindnesses have counterparts in the actions and comments of Renoncour and Cleveland. Francis also makes an interesting argument for treating the novels of 1740 as serious efforts by Prévost to broaden his range and explore new possibilities, rather than as hastily cranked out inferior repetitions of his earlier works. Histoire d'une Grecque moderne has, of course, long been accorded critical respect, which has placed it second only to Manon in Prévost's œuvre. But La Jeunesse du Commandeur and Les Campagnes philosophiques have had few admirers, and Francis's demonstration of their right to a place alongside the other works is well conceived and welcome. Finally, the late novels—Voyages de Robert Lade, Mémoires d'un honnête homme, and Le Monde moral—are also integrated into a pattern of lifelong inquiry. After presenting a brief anatomy of the narration (in Genette's sense), Francis takes up successively the question of genre, the "real" world, and the interpolated stories. Although he recognizes the multiple generic sources Prévost drew on, Francis does not think that genre alone can explain the forms and the characterizations. Rather, he suggests, the type of story Prévost wanted to tell required a certain type of character; but Prévost found the elements of both characterization and plot in his observations as well as in his reading, and artfully constructed an individual fictional world. The observations, however, bear on the inner life more than on the external and material features that constitute the standard matter of realism. Finally, the interpolated tales serve as thematic parallels from the start, but their use becomes more effective as Prévost matures. Having thus surveyed the narrators as the sources of structure in the novels, Francis turns to their implicit ideologies, and argues that each narrator is pulled in three directions by three competing moral codes: a code of sensibility, a code of honour, and a code of religion. The first, for which Des Grieux is the best known and most eloquent (but not the most reliable) spokesman, makes the capacity for strong feeling a sign of election. Like the other two codes, however, sensibility is fraught with problems and dangers. Prévost doubts the goodness of nature and apparently believes that religious morality should take priority over sensibility. Moreover, the evolution of Prévost's thought reveals a progressive disillusionment with heroic love. The code of honour is the aristocrat's morality; its prime virtues are generosity, loyalty, courage...