Before Fiction. Nicholas D. Paige

place of Romances.”⁵ So in England too, by the turn of the century, the way had been cleared for the novel’s rise.

      Romance, the novel: as contemporary comments like these show, the opposition is hardly a figment of the modern academic imagination. But there are multiple difficulties, many long recognized by critics. The least serious of these is terminological: in English, the romance-novel opposition took a long time to stabilize (Reeve’s 1785 critical dialogue is still entitled The Progress of Romance), and French never did inscribe the opposition between old and new forms in the language.⁶ Second, romance seems to persist as a practice as much as a term. In France, many have noted that novels after La Princesse de Clèves often fail to display its sobriety of plot and characterization, and that, though shorn of romance’s Scuderian heft, they quickly put some pounds back on.⁷ Literary historians on the other side of the Channel have had to contend with a similar sense of déjà vu, since so-called novels—starting perhaps with Oroonoko and Incognita, and extending at least to the works of Fielding—often look uncomfortably like romances, incorporating, as in France, their themes, plot devices, and modes of characterization.⁸

      A third difficulty is obvious enough, yet rarely confronted. Simply put, why was Scudéry still writing romances, anyway? Didn’t she know that Cervantes had already invented the novel? In other words, it is not just that romance is supposed to go away in the latter decades of the seventeenth century but holds on; it is also that romance should have gone away earlier still, in 1605 to be precise, when Cervantes published the first volume of his international best-seller, Don Quixote. As everyone knows, Don Quixote has read too many “books of chivalry” and comes to believe he is living in the world they describe, even though it is comically obvious to everyone else that those romances are utterly inadequate to dealing with the realities of taverns and brothels and money.⁹ Unlike romance writers, Cervantes provides us with a representation of that new world—the world that will henceforth be that of the novel.¹⁰ And unlike his protagonist, who believes in the literal truth of what he reads, Cervantes’s reader is at all points made aware of novelistic illusion through the ironic references to the discovered manuscript of a certain Cid Hamet Benengeli; in contradistinction to Don Quixote, that reader has learned both disbelief and the art of its suspension, which we may call fiction.¹¹ Such is, in reduced form, the common wisdom with regard to Don Quixote’s place in literary history, and the specifics of the book appear to fit it quite well. As soon as we lift our eyes from the text, however, the “persistence of romance” problem again presents itself: if Cervantes invented the novel, why does the literary production of his century look the way it does? In 1607, d’Urfé published the first volume of his pastoral phenomenon L’Astrée; perhaps he can be excused for his romancing, since Don Quixote had not yet been translated, but over the next fifty years writers who had surely read it—La Calprenède and Scudéry, but also Gomberville and others still—made historical romance the gold standard of prose. We might, of course, set this at the door of a reactionary French aristocracy, and point out that even in France, a few writers—like Sorel and finally Subligny—absorbed Cervantes’s lesson and fought the good bourgeois fight against romance hegemony.¹² But this argument is brought up short by the fact that Cervantes himself left for posthumous publication nothing less than a romance—The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda, which appeared in 1617.

      Such is, I think, the puzzle that should occur to anyone trying to square the two distinct “death of romance” narratives that characterize discussions of the modern novel—one set in Spain in 1605, another in 1660s France (and holding for England). In fact, the puzzle is an illusion that evaporates once we realize that it is built on a bad premise, which is that the chivalric narratives devoured by Don Quixote on the one hand and works like Persiles, L’Astrée, and Clélie on the other all belong to one and the same “romance”—the romance that is replaced, starting with the Quixote, by “the novel.”¹³ In other words, it is our two clumsy categories themselves that generate the literary-historical problem in the first place. The answer is not to do away with historical and generic distinctions entirely, as Margaret Doody has provocatively proposed, but instead to develop categories that are more adequate to our object of study.¹⁴ This is what Subligny’s apparently redundant and derivative La Fausse Clélie helps us do. The brief synopsis I offered above is in fact misleading: Juliette d’Arviane does indeed think she is the heroine of Scudéry’s text, but the latter is not, we learn, excessive or ridiculous. Clélie is merely in need of an updating; Scudéry’s histoire romaine must be refigured as a histoire française. Subligny’s “false” Clélie is thus, counterintuitively, a “true” Clélie, a Clélie made pseudofactual. The reengineering is radical: in many respects La Fausse Clélie is as far removed from Scudéry as Don Quixote is from the chivalric universe of Amadis of Gaul (published in 1508). But only in hindsight do these new works seem to be announcing deaths or births: Cervantes and Subligny are not inventing the novel, they are doing new things with the romance forms they have at their disposal. They cannot suspect that one day, after centuries of human invention and activity, another mode of narrative, will be viewed as fundamentally incompatible with the one they are familiar with; they cannot know that time will make distinctions that they see clearly all but unrecognizable. To be sure, Cervantes and Subligny want to make the forms bequeathed by their predecessors modern—but modern in 1605 and 1670, we must remember, can’t stay modern forever.

      Cogitations