Valincour is the first in a long line of critics to praise La Princesse de Clèves for its psychological turn, for its inner monologues depicting “these different thoughts that destroy one another as they arise” (V 98), for, in short, putting the magnificence of heroic actions and witty speech into eclipse and thus allowing a vast inner domain to come into view.38 If the factual impossibility of the Princess keeps us from reading for information and gossip, her behavioral shortcomings—her actions do not follow clearly from her will, and her words are rarely the right ones—discourage us from sitting in judgment over her, and instead simply put us in her place. Lafayette’s protagonist is an open fabrication and a strikingly imperfect one to boot, and yet still, in spite of the rules of poetics and the norms of romance, the reader “loves” her. In Valincour’s text, identification with the heroine replaces identification of her historical referent. Since the Princess refers to no one but readers themselves, the novel’s grounding in reality undergoes a seismic shift: its truth lies not in its correspondence to real historical actors but in its uncanny resemblance to the reader’s psychic reality. The radical effect of La Princesse de Clèves is to demonstrate that it makes no difference at all that the Princess never existed and never could have, provided that you read with one new thing in mind: its real subject is you.
Exceptionality
To all La Princesse de Clèves’ other claims to modernity, we may now add one more: Lafayette invents fiction as we now know it. Or does she? As I’ve already remarked, the fictionality of her protagonist is untimely: it comes too soon. Certainly too soon for the critics of the English novel who have attempted to chart the rise of a properly fictional practice, typically starting from the “hesitant” works of Defoe.39 But too soon as well for the amended timetable proposed in my Introduction. For by my own reckoning, the publication of La Princesse de Clèves comes at a moment in which the novel was ceasing to be composed along Aristotelian lines (as it was during the heyday of the French historical romance) and was taking on instead the pseudofactual mantle; the book can hardly be made out to be part of what I have been calling fiction, a phenomenon of the very late eighteenth century at best. Catherine Gallagher has tentatively proposed that Lafayette’s novel may indicate the early French beginnings of a process that will occur only later in Britain;40 unfortunately, the data do not support the hypothesis, since French novelists after Lafayette adopt roughly the same pseudofactual postures as their British counterparts. What, then, is the place of La Princesse de Clèves in a history of fiction?
Franco Moretti has noted the literary historian’s instinctive use of “typological thinking,” a term he borrows from evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr: we readily assume that masterworks stand in for entire genres, that is, that they are examples of a type.41 Or we follow the more diachronic understanding found in a dictum frequently attributed to Walter Benjamin: “all great works of literature found a genre or dissolve one,” which is to say that we like our masterworks to be either revolutionary and foundation-laying, or else able to put a tradition to rest with a culminating flourish.42 Either way, individual works are presumed to be profoundly contiguous with more widespread literary practices. Yet in the case of Lafayette, at least, such habits of thought seem to be out of place. Of course, in a cultural sense there are all sorts of ways in which her novel can (and should) be seen as the perfect expression of the stifling court culture of Louis XIV, but morphologically speaking La Princesse de Clèves is every bit as exceptional as its heroine. It does not invent the historical novella, which before and after 1678 is composed according to the Aristotelian stipulations that Valincour accurately holds Lafayette to be breaking. And by the same token it does not do “better” the sort of thing its competitors do: its impossible protagonist, who induces in readers feelings of identification that are not those shared with more conventional heroes, is fundamentally unlike the protagonists of other historical novellas.
But Moretti’s own effort to provide a new theory of the relation between innovative works and broader literary practice—of how, in short, literary forms evolve—is similarly unable to account for the data. Moretti has used the detective story as a paradigmatic case for observing the generational aspect of formal evolution. The device of the decodable clue, first used (though only sporadically) by Conan Doyle, eventually came to define the genre itself; but the success of the clue did not happen overnight. In fact, Conan Doyle’s contemporaries—and maybe even Conan Doyle himself—did not appear to realize the device’s usefulness; only a second generation of writers would latch onto the clue and make it a mainstay of the genre. Thus a lag of twenty or more years is necessary between the initial discovery and its generalization. The difficulty, however—beyond worries over the explicitly Darwinian mechanisms of selection that Moretti sees as guiding cultural evolution43—is that a later generation of writers does not pick up on La Princesse de Clèves’ very special, non-Aristotelian sort of invention, even though the book is widely known and admired. Instead, they exploit the possibilities of the pseudofactual. Even the type of identification Valincour describes appears to have no close analogues until eighty years later, with Rousseau’s Julie (1761) and Diderot’s Éloge de Richardson (1762).44 One is reduced to the vague language of “anticipation” to describe the relation between Lafayette and subsequent developments in the history of literature.45
Lafayette’s fictional heroine is probably the single best counterexample to my main historical narrative; she must be explained. Let’s start with the observation that there is little evidence that La Princesse de Clèves was appreciated for its distinctive mode of invention, for its “fictional” form. Valincour of course critiques it; Charnes erroneously claims that all novelists now do the same thing and does not seem to think of it as anything noteworthy. And later readers proved equally unable to single out the novel as the shape of things to come. On the contrary: when discussion in the eighteenth century turned to selecting the most excellent French novels of the preceding century, alongside La Princesse de Clèves very often figured Lafayette’s other major novel, Zayde.46 Since Zayde’s morphology is patently that of the heroic romance—interlocking stories are exchanged by characters in a remotely historical third-person frame—the irony is that prior to the advent of the realist novel, readers were incapable of distinguishing which form looked “forward” and which “back”: both felt modern to eighteenth-century readers, but for reasons unrelated to what makes it a comfortable fit for people who think of the novel along the lines of its nineteenth-century forms. (Praise was bestowed on the novels’ downplaying of heroics, their focus on everyday situations, and so on.)
We might of course say that these readers were simply not able to process Lafayette’s “innovation.” But an alternate explanation is that there was no innovation, properly speaking, only a one-time twist on age-old habits and local practices. The local practice was of course the genre of the historical novella, which by 1678 was emerging as the replacement for the historical romances that readers appear to have looked on as outdated.47 This practice was not by any means stable (the Appendix to this chapter provides a summary of its major variants), but it did obey the old rule of literary composition, which was that heroes should be real people, or at least plausibly real. Only Lafayette would break that rule with her “visibly false” heroine.48 The reasons for her transgression, I have surmised, lay in the type of critique of court culture she wanted to make; her nonexistent heroine allowed her to denounce the invasive traffic in women’s secrets without using, hypocritically,