The subsequent four chapters are devoted to works that stretch the conventions of the pseudofactual regime without—and this is crucial—causing those conventions to crumble in favor of modern fiction. Crébillon’s Les Égarements du coeur et de l’esprit (1736–38) is the most sustained example of a new novel of manners that imported a model of invention from comedy—comedy, which since Molière had allowed writers to comment on contemporary social “types” without taking aim at specific individuals. But though Crébillon put no energy into bolstering the pseudofactual pretense of his memoir novel and even narrated thoughts in a manner often associated with modern fiction, his experiment, like Lafayette’s, did not change the way novels were written. Indeed, pseudofactuality had bright days ahead. The sentimental novel’s goal of giving the genre the emotional and moral gravitas of tragedy necessitated a reinvestment in reality: all available theories of aesthetic effect made the audience’s belief in the artwork the foundation of emotional experience and moral improvement. This does not mean that writers such as Rousseau and Diderot were naïve about how novels worked. On the contrary, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1762), commonly advanced as the epitome of quixotic fusion between reader and book, is a laboratory for producing an emotion proper to observers who identify with protagonists even as they maintain distance from them. And Diderot’s sentimental novels and tales, though often seen as signaling through their irony a fictional consciousness to come, remain thoroughly and necessarily enmeshed in pseudofactual presuppositions. The final chapter centers on novelistic subgenres that are tailor-made for thinking about aesthetic effects that don’t require literal belief—the fantastic and the gothic. But although a work such as Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux (1772) clearly pushes hard against the governing Horatian dictum of incredulus odi—readers reject what they cannot believe—it is no more predictive of the future than any of the other works examined.
The problem of “predictiveness” brings me to the methodological heart of Before Fiction. For it is the relation of the individual novels examined in the six chapters to my larger narrative—a narrative of collective behavior—that separates this book from most histories of the novel. Individual works, especially great ones, are usually the data points that permit the literary historian to plot out an evolution. Thus, given the chronological arc of the novels I’ve chosen, the obvious assumption would be that I am tracing an evolution, and more precisely, that I see these works as bringing fiction into existence. But this is emphatically not the case. Before Fiction could not have been titled The Rise or The Invention of Fiction, since Cazotte, Diderot, Rousseau, Crébillon, Subligny, and Lafayette are not all engaged in the same great project. These writers are not feeling their way through the pseudofactual night toward the bright light of the fictional day. Nor have they intuited some truth about literature—say, Coleridge’s unfortunately proverbial “willing suspension of disbelief”—that we all now embrace. None anticipate developments that would only become dominant later, or bears witness to a collective cultural realization. And they do not relay one another: Diderot does not “learn” from his one-time friend Rousseau; Rousseau in turn learns nothing from Lafayette (whom he nonetheless admired). No one stands on anyone’s shoulders to get a better look into the future. At the same time, it is not that some other change—the advent of a “concept” of fiction, or of modernity tout court—is readable in the works of authors who were extraordinarily sensitive to their transitional moment. Isolated literary works are not signs of anything else; if they were, they would not be isolated.
What, then, can be the broader significance of the novels under study? In a sense, none: they don’t add up to anything; they don’t register momentous change. But this doesn’t mean that they are not instructive. On the contrary, their authors’ complex engagement with the problem of novelistic reference in the wake of Aristotelian poetics brings the larger narrative into focus. Most writers of the period, even good and great ones, give no more thought to the pseudofactual posture than, say, a filmmaker in our day who ends up producing a color feature lasting between 100 and 140 minutes. It’s just how things are normally done. The authors under study, meanwhile, scrutinize the problem of how to write literature that doesn’t take as its subject matter the heroes of the past. How can novelists refer to their world without writing about people who are actually part of that world? In asking this question, they push at and play with the conventions of the time; in some cases one might even say that they destroy those conventions. But to the extent that this is the right word, their destructions are local: these individuals do not alter collective practice. I will offer, especially in the Conclusion, some thoughts on how collective practice does change—thoughts, because the type of data needed would dictate a different type of study altogether. For the moment it is enough to insist that though we like to view our favorite authors as heroes or at least as paragons of historical acuity, the truth is much more plain: writers are of their time and place, which is to say, bound by a set of practices and rationales that they do indeed transform, but in limited ways, often without wider effect, and certainly not with our unborn needs in mind. By the pressure they put on Aristotelian and pseudofactual conventions, these six novelists may appear to be gesturing in the direction of fiction, but we mustn’t give in to magical thinking: the mirage is generated simply by our coming after fiction. Lafayette, Diderot, and Rousseau are not so much agents of the transformation of Aristotelian poetics into modern fiction as they are participant-observers of processes whose momentum—and inertia—outbulks the contributions of individuals, no matter how perceptive or talented. The novel, envisioned as a history of shared practices and forms, would look much the same without the great writers customarily regarded as the motors of generic change.
“Studies in the morphological history of the novel”: this would have made an apt if offputting subtitle for a book concerned not with what deeper things novels “reflect” but with how forms evolve. My subtitle as it actually reads demands a couple of qualifications. The first relates to the term I’ve chosen to designate the three approaches to literary invention—the Aristotelian, the pseudofactual, and the fictional. I attach no particular importance to the word regime itself; it appears, say, in work by Jacques Rancière and François Hartog, but my use does not follow from theirs. (When speaking of these regimes not as time periods but as ways of writing novels, I often call them “modes”—a term that, likewise, is not intended to recall Northrop Frye.) For me, a regime is merely a fairly stable but not monolithic way of thinking about and writing (narrative) literature; as I will take pains to point out, in no sense should it be taken as implying a perceptual or conceptual matrix on the order of Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigms” or Michel Foucault’s “epistemes.” My subtitle, then, contains some wordplay. On a basic level, “The Ancien Régime of the Novel” means nothing more than “The Novel in the Early Modern Period”; in a more important sense, the novel’s Ancien Régime is the pseudofactual regime, the interregnum between Aristotelian poetry and modern fiction.
The second remark concerns the fact that my shorthand carries some baggage better left behind at once. Since only France had an Ancien Régime, it is easy to conclude that my overarching theory of regimes applies to France alone, and that the sociopolitical context of the country explains its novel. The pseudofactual, readers might reason, must have something