31 - Seventeenth-century theories of the novel in France: writing and reading the truth

Summary

The seventeenth century sees widespread consideration of the theory and practice of fiction. During this period, prefaces to novels become the location not just of praise but of more extended analysis, and novels themselves begin to incorporate reflection on their own workings. Similarly, a body of critical writing takes shape, manifested in different forms: reviews of individual texts, satirical commentaries or theoretical essays on the genre as a whole. This critical activity, though, is largely centred on France. In England, writers like Dorothy Osborne may reflect in letters on French heroic romance, but there is very little independent analysis or theorizing. Discussion about the novel is almost invariably second-hand, as is seen in the large number of translations and adaptations of French texts.

A current of hostility to novels and novelists is apparent throughout the century. Some, like Pierre Nicole, condemn fiction out of hand, branding the novelist a brazen murderer [empoisonneur public]. In rather less vituperative manner, Langlois gives expression to many widely voiced criticisms of imaginative literature, and on more than one occasion Jean-Pierre Camus and Charles Sorel attack writers of fiction both past and present. Novels are dismissed on the grounds that they consist largely of time-wasting fantasy [resveries], or, conversely, that they are morally corrupting, appealing through their tales of amorous adventure to man's physical nature. Langlois likens the novel reader to Narcissus, lured by illusion into empty, dangerous imaginings, and Sorel's Berger extravagant (1628) follows the tradition of Cervantes' Don Quixote, mocking a hero whose confusion of fiction and reality is the sign of madness.