Passion, morality and politics: genealogy of the New Heloise discourse
By making La Nouvelle Héloïse a roman of discourse, Rousseau constructs a novel that strikes the event as forbidden: what happens, the fact in general that something happens, is nefas, meaning that the event on the one hand is marked with the corner of misfortune and moral catastrophe, that on the other it proves unspeakable, that discourse elevates it to the sublime through the impossibility of representing it. Discourse, then, does not supplement the event with a narrative or retrospective considerations, as in the nouvelle galante or the analytical novel. Rather, it comes on the edge of the event, building on the event's nefarious character.
Origine and poetic foundation of discourse: Petrarch
Discourse therefore does not represent. It expresses. Expression is an experience of the edge, at the edge of event and feeling. This is what disarms us on reading, and charms us at the same time: Rousseau draws us into the expression of feeling, taking us back to an original sensitive expression, or more exactly Rousseauist fiction is a propaedeutic aimed at this expression. In Rousseau's work, nothing is more elaborate than the original: at the end of the day, at the end of the journey assigned to them, Julie, Saint-Preux, Claire and Milord Edouard should be able to produce this discourse of expression. The novel of discourse does not give itself a priori discourse as an instrument that would be immediately available to the characters, over which they would naturally have control, and which would come there, transparently, to carry what each has to say, what they have experienced and observed. A journey is necessary, a work on oneself must be implemented.
The empty stage of amorous discourse
The first part of the novel opened with the decision to leave, i.e. with the fictional sparing of an empty scene. We saw how this empty scene contradictorily established the prohibition of presence (from which the nefas character of the event derives) and the model of knowledge, pedagogical and amorous. The second part opens with the observation that writing is impossible: holding a discourse is impossible for Saint-Preux.
"I have taken up and left the pen a hundred times; I hesitate from the first word; I don't know what tone I should take; I don't know where to begin; and it's to Julie that I want to write! Ah, you wretch! What have I become? Gone are the days when a thousand delicious sentiments flowed from my pen like an inexhaustible torrent!" (II, 1, 233)
If Saint-Preux takes up the pen, it's not to recount what he did the day before. To take up the pen, to write, is to be able to hold the discourse of passion, it is to signify this mastery. It's about taking a tone, that is, occupying a position: the one who takes a tone, who decides on his tone, is the master. What's at stake here and for the whole of the 2nde part of the novel is the master's position, his mastery of discourse overhanging the empty scene of the event.
It's not a question of technical knowledge, of rhetorical mastery of the arts of discourse: Saint-Preux immediately disposes of all "agreeable talents" (I, 1, 55)! And he recalls with nostalgia the happy times "when a thousand delicious sentiments flowed from my pen like an inexhaustible torrent": the idyll of the first part (which was only episodically one) becomes, in retrospect, the locus of the original discourse with which we should be able to reconnect.Mastering discourse should make it possible to return to this intarrisable torrent, this primal flow, this music of natural feeling that absence, separation, the precipitation of events have damaged and broken.
.
It is from this rupture that discourse becomes aware of itself, from the impossibility of writing itself that it unfolds as a model for the expression of feeling. Its starting point is a cry, "Ah malheureux! que suis-je devenu?", the οἴμοι τάλας of tragedy, which has to do with what Diderot will name, in Le Neveu de Rameau, the animal cry of passion1. But the interrogation "que suis-je devenu" not only refers to the present time of pain and the difficulty of writing: it projects, at the threshold of Part 2e, Saint-Preux into the retrospective examination of what he was and is no longer, that is, of the empty space left by what he will have been.
A discourse must therefore unfold from the aura-été of passion. For Saint-Preux, the apprenticeship of discourse begins with the prohibition of passion, for which epistolary writing will provide the supplement and, through it, a model of knowledge. In the continuation of this same first letter of the second part, we read:
"How I followed my presentiments after those swift moments of delight, when I saw nothing more in life worthy of prolonging it! Undoubtedly, it had to be limited to those three years, or they had to be taken out of its duration; it was better never to taste bliss, than to taste it and lose it. If I had crossed that fatal interval, if I had avoided that first glance which made me another soul, I would enjoy my reason..." (II, 1, 233)
The object of the discourse is "these rapid moments of delight", which no doubt refers to the kiss in the grove, which occurred in the first part between letters XIII and XIV, and to the night of love planned as early as letter XXXVI and achieved not without difficulty between letters LIV and LV. Yet from the very next sentence, "ces rapides instants" becomes "ces trois ans", and finally "ce fatal intervalle", which designates the duration of the whole of Part 1, from Saint-Preux's declaration to his exile from Vevey.
This object is therefore retrospective, and it is crossed out: evoking his life, Saint-Preux writes that "Undoubtedly, it was necessary to limit it to these three years or to remove them from its duration", i.e. to remove these three years of idyll from the duration of his life. For his life to be prolonged, for him to be able to hold a retrospective discourse on his past life from his prolonged life, Saint-Preux must remove the most precious moments of this life from his past, "remove them from its duration". The empty scene of the discourse is the forbidden event it takes as its object.
What, then, will discourse speak of? Of "my presentiments afterwards": the presentiment doesn't precede the event, it follows it; the time of discourse is projected towards a disquieting future, itself based on a subtracted event. My misfortune, I will have predicted it: the future anterior organizes this strange relationship to time, on either side of the "fatal interval" of the event.
How to represent the time of the event, in a novel of discourse whose discourse aims not at representation, but at expression? There is no narrative. Overhanging the narrative and standing in for the event is the burst of "that first glance that made me another soul", which refers not to any materially assignable episode, but to the original scene of Petrarquist innamoramento, in which the poet describes himself wounded in love by the arrow in his Lady's eye. He first evokes Love's arrow, without reference to the Lady:
Era la mia virtute al cor ristretta
per far ivi et negli occhi sue difese,
quando'l colpo mortal là giú discese
ove solea spuntarsi ogni saetta2.
The shot fired signifies the event of the innamoramento but, puremenr stylized by the allegory of Love shooting his arrow, refers to no circumstantial element of a story of Laure and Petrarch. The relationship between the Lady's eyes and the arrow is not immediately apparent. Her gaze first establishes the link, a link that connects and a link that enchains:
ché i be' vostr' occhi, donna, mi legato
[...] Trovommi Amor del tutto disarmato
et aperta la via per gli occhi al core,
che di lagrime son fatti uscio et varco3.
Petrarch slips from your eyes (vostr' occhi) to my eyes (gli occhi) in a passage that allows him to develop the war metaphor, or more exactly to mark his departure from the chivalric world: Amour has struck his blow treacherously, without a fair fight, without regard for the rules of chivalry. The arrow is, moreover, the unglamorous weapon of the foot soldier in modern warfare, in contrast to the spear and sword of the now obsolete heroic and noble face-to-face.
The optical modeling of the scene, which constitutes the decisive invention of the Ficinian neo-platonism in which Petrarch inscribes the Canzoniere, is expressed in all its clarity a few poems later:
cosí costei, ch'è tra le donne un sole,
in me movendo de' begli occhi i rai
crïa d'amor penseri, atti e parole4.
This is exactly where "that first look that made me another soul" comes in, Laure's gaze plunged like an arrow into the poet's heart and producing, creating the thoughts, gestures and speech of amor poetic discourse. Rousseau, who cites the following two sonnets in La Nouvelle Héloïse, sonnet 10 on Colonna on the occasion of the trip to the Valais mountains (I, 23, 108), sonnet 11 on the veil to reproach Julie for her coldness (I, 2, 59), cannot fail to have sonnet 9 in mind when he evokes "this first glance": we thus understand that the empty scene, which constitutes the fundamental matrix from which the discourse of La Nouvelle Héloîse unfolds, does not constitute a Rousseauist singularity, but on the contrary inscribes the novel in the neo-Platonic and Petrarquist cultural heritage, a heritage which it moreover openly invokes through the play of quotations.
The original scene of discourse
There is thus an originary scene, which is a typical scene and has no novelistic existence as an event in the novel, from which an initial discourse on the impossibility of writing unfolds. At the beginning of Essai sur l'origine des langues, which he composed just before, and doubtless still during La Nouvelle Héloïse, Rousseau writes:
"Thus remain only sight and hearing for passive organs of language between dispersed men. Although the language of gesture and that of voice are equally natural, nevertheless the former is easier and depends less on conventions: for more objects strike our eyes than our ears, and figures have more variety than sounds; they are also more expressive and say more in less time. Love, it is said, was the inventor of design. It could also invent speech, but less happily; Little content with it it disdains it, it has more vivid ways of expressing itself." (Œuvres complètes, ed. Gagnebin et alii, V, Gallimard, Pléide, 1995, p. 376)
Love is the inventor of a first language, essentially visual and, if sonorous, inarticulate: sound rather than words, music rather than words, which, in the most original part of our languages, will constitute the accent.A primitive scene is sketched out here, a kind of natural opera taking "sight and hearing for the passive organs of language".
Saint-Preux's apprenticeship, of which La Nouvelle Héloïse constitutes the novel, starts from this scene:
"Come adored image, fill a heart that lives only by you: follow me in my exile, console me in my sorrows, revive and sustain my extinguished hope. Always this unhappy heart will be your inviolable sanctuary." (II, 1, 234)
Saint-Preux is the empty but tabernacular space that Julie's image-idol comes to fill. In the beginning is the pagan adoration of the idol: religious references will multiply, until their pietistic transmutation in the long developments of the 6the part on Julie's faith (letter VIII). Saint-Preux receives the image through the "passive organs" of the original relationship to language, and it is on this experience, on this primitive and sacred scene, that he bases the learning of the discourse that will become the discourse of La Nouvelle Héloïse, and constitute the master's knowledge that it is a matter of acquiring. The process of language development in the Essai sur l'origine des langues provides the novel with the model for this Saint-Preux apprenticeship; the master's discourse is constructed, in the fiction ofLa Nouvelle Héloïse, on the model of language perfecting in the Essai.
There are in fact not several discourses, nor a theme of passion that could be dissociated from a theme of morals and an economic theme. It's a single discourse that develops from the original, Petrarchan scene of the innamoramento :
"This love is invincible like the charm that gave birth to it. It is founded on the unshakeable basis of merit and virtue; it cannot perish in an immortal soul; it no longer needs the support of hope, and the past gives it strength for an eternal future." (II, 1, 234)
In this neo-Platonic creed, the basis of amorous discourse is "the unshakeable foundation of merit and virtue", i.e. love implies from the outset courtly service (merit) and the pursuit of virtue, which must direct, elevate the expression of passion towards the observance of morals. As for the temporal inscription of the discourse, it takes place in the future anterior: from "an eternal future", from the future, the word takes support not from "hope", but from "the past", from the picture of what will have been the past idyll, the enjoyment of the three years that preceded the exile.
In the second letter, Milord Edouard takes over from a Saint-Preux sick of discourse, whose pathology he describes:
"He did not speak to me, nor I to him; indiscreet consolations only embitter violent afflictions. Indifference and coldness easily find words; but sadness and silence are then the true language of friendship. Yesterday I began to glimpse the first sparks of the fury that will infallibly succeed this lethargy." (II, 2, 236)
First of all, it's silence, and this silence is an experience of language. It is from this silence that Milord Edouard observes the rising fury that will soon explode in the cry of passion, and manifest itself in the fragments of letters collated at the end of it. Saint-Preux's fragmentary writing, the fragments of his amorous discourse, will be the prelude to his gradual return to the use of discourse, to his entry into the process of learning, of acquiring the master's knowledge. The accent of amorous pain constitutes the second origin of discourse in La Nouvelle Héloïse.
The moral conversion of amorous discourse: Milord Edouard
Milord Edouard is not here simply Saint-Preux's confidant, symmetrical to Claire, Julie's confidant. He's a military man and an Englishman: a man of the north. And it is as a cold-blooded observer capable of drawing up the clinical picture of a pathology that he addresses Claire in this letter II. There is a third, original moment here, grafted onto the trunk of La Nouvelle Héloïse's discursive development, after the first moment, which was that of the impossibility of writing in the face of the Urszene of the idol's darting gaze, and the second moment, of the amorous cry and the accent of suffering.
The two choices
Milord Edouard then develops, for Claire's benefit, a veritable discourse on the "conjugal bond", grasped as a contradiction between paternal authority and love. It should be noted here that Milord Edouard's discourse is in no way a moral, or even philosophical, digression in a narrative that would be the story of Saint-Preux's exile. On the contrary, Milord Edouard's discourse is what the novel is all about, understood as the development of discourse, that is, not "one" discourse among others, but "the" discourse par excellence, the discourse constitutive of the master's knowledge, the knowledge of the world's worldliness, affective, moral, political.
The key word in Milord Edouard's discourse is choice, the contradiction of conjugal choice, through which the administration of subjective sovereignty within the social community is played out:
"The child whose only rule is love chooses badly, the father whose only rule is opinion chooses even worse. That a daughter lacks reason, experience to judge wisdom and morals, a good father must no doubt make up for. His right, his very duty, is to say: My daughter, he's an honest man, or: He's a rascal; he's a man of sense, or: He's a fool. These are the proprieties of which he must be aware; the judgment of all others belongs to the girl. By shouting that the order of society would be disturbed in this way, these tyrants are disturbing it themselves. That rank should be regulated by merit, and the union of hearts by their choice, this is the true social order; those who regulate it by birth or wealth are the real disrupters of this order; it is these who must be decried or punished." (II, 2, 238)
Discourse is a system for administering choices. Choices pre-exist discourse and manifest the fundamental symbolic splitting on which social order rests. The first rule is that of love: it is the child, the girl, who chooses. Love is neither adult nor masculine. Its rule is that of nature. Further on, Milord Edouard writes that "if love reigns, nature has already chosen". Love makes the rules of the state of nature prevail, and is therefore always morally the best. But this first rule must be mitigated by a second, which is expressed by the figure of the father and represents opinion, morals, propriety - in a word, the order instituted in the state of society. As we can see, it's the symbolic structure posited by Rousseau in his two Discourses of 1751 and 1753 that is transposed here to the question of marriage.
The paternal supplement
The relationship between the first and second rules is neither hierarchical nor negotiable. The law of nature stands alone, and the social rule expresses itself when the first is lacking. The father's law is the supplement that supplements the law of nature, when the daughter lacks reason and experience, i.e. when she herself is not capable of expressing and applying the law of nature, which in this case is by no means that of pure sexual attraction, of the seduction of the senses, but always already that of reason. For all that, the father's law does not repeat the reason that must preside over the union of hearts; it provides an artifact, a supplement, based on social propriety, the order of society. Paradoxically, it is in the union of hearts, in the sensitive experience of love, that reason expresses itself in its immediacy and purity; the father's intervention exerts after the fact a judgment from the outside, which could be described as statistical, whose wisdom is liable to turn very quickly to prejudice.
The father's prerogatives must therefore be severely limited: "Voilà les convenances dont il doit connaître", writes Milord Edouard in legal terms. "Voilà" refers to the only two judgments the father can make: whether the young man is honest or rascal; whether he is reasonable or mad. These are the only criteria he has to judge, for which his judgment is required if need be - that is, only if the daughter has not already exercised this judgment. Moral judgment, then, which excludes any consideration of rank or fortune, i.e. that which in principle founds the social institution, the order of the state of society.
In other words, the daughter's choice and the father's judgment are based on the same moral criterion alone. This is why there can be no negotiation between them: there are no two points of view, two value systems, two different interests to be reconciled. The union of hearts is achieved through the daughter's choice, and if this choice fails, the father's reason makes up for it. It's not a question of surrendering to his reason; there is only one reason.
The opposition of rank and the union of hearts is therefore factitious. In the choice of a husband, the attraction of social rank cannot be set against the attraction of physiognomy, the prerogatives of fortune against those of seduction. For "rank is regulated by merit", i.e. by the rank that one does not yet have and that one will acquire by merit alone. This rank is an anterior future: it is evaluated in the manner of an investment, as the promise of a future success, obtained through the exercise of probity and reason, the two qualities the father needs to know about, if his daughter's heart has not naturally recognized them. This young man will have been full of merit; his promising physiognomy, his way of being, his character will have heralded his future success. The attraction of the man of merit at the moment of innamoramento anticipates merit proper, which is the reward for a lifetime's service. Merit is acquired and at the same time immediately announced.
Milord Edouard's discourse on love is far from being reduced to a plea, albeit a very moderate one, for the freedom of girls to choose their husbands. It takes the form of Rousseau's discourse in general, which is the systemic structure of his entire thought. The discourse establishes the difference between a rule of nature and a rule of society; it makes this difference work, not as an articulation, a negotiation, a dialectic, but according to a logic of supplement: the father's judgment supplements the daughter's choice when the latter is lacking. But he immediately points out the danger of this supplement, the risk of tyrannical overflow. Rousseau's discourse is always organized as a critique of the supplement to Nature constituted by the establishment of a social order. It is a critique of the father who has come to replace Nature, whereas he can never replace Nature.
Rousseau's discourse is always organized as a critique of the supplement to Nature constituted by the establishment of a social order.
Politics of discourse: symbolic splitting
The critique of the supplement, i.e. here concretely the critique of the father's reasons, of the tyrannical outbursts of the father who chooses poorly, politicizes discourse. Or, to put it another way, when discourse unfolds in all its critical dimension of critique of the supplement, it leaves the properly moral register to reach the political register. Discourse's limitation of the father's prerogatives reveals a conflict between two antagonistic principles of social organization. The old principle, asserted by the tyranny of fathers, is that of social propriety based on inherited ranks, a society of orders, places and hierarchies. The new principle, promoted by Milord Edouard's speech, is that of a society of merit based on the union of hearts. Marriage is then the father's investment of risk capital, his daughter, in the husband's merit, i.e. in his work, which must enable it to bear fruit. Here, the capitalist model of bourgeois marriage clearly differs from the aristocratic model based on birth and the preservation of lineages. The (very relative) freedom granted to daughters, the limitation of the power of (certain) fathers can therefore be read as the bait put forward to gain acceptance for a new form of domination through work, of which merit is the euphemistic expression.
.
But we need to pay attention to the way in which this symbolic conflict is presented: the discourse describes existing proprieties - ranks -, and promotes an ideal society based on merit. But "rank rules on merit": in other words, there is no other possible rule, other than the disorder of a disordered society. This is why I spoke of symbolic splitting: strictly speaking, there are not two opposing orders, an old world and a world to come. The cause of the world to come is already heard: the speech is given by an English aristocrat, i.e. both an aristocrat (the old world) and an Englishman (the new); there are not two worlds. The critique of the paternal supplement and its tyrannical drift leads to the reaffirmation of what has always been, should always have been "the true social order": the ideal is the real, the claimed model unfolds from the experience of what is, an experience that has to do with the authority of fathers, with the power of prohibition that characterizes the patria potestas, and which it is a matter of regulating. The model unfolds from the forbidden, and discourse is the support for this unfolding.
The overcoming of moral discourse: Saint-Preux in Paris
Saint Preux's arrival in Paris is an opportunity for Saint-Preux to put his moral discourse as pedagogue and philosopher to the test of reality.
"I enter with a secret horror into this vast desert of the world. This chaos offers me only an awful solitude, where a dreary silence reigns. My soul, in the press, seeks to spread out, and finds itself constricted everywhere. I'm never less alone than when I'm alone," said an old friend; "I'm only alone in a crowd, where I can't be yours or anyone else's. My heart would like to speak, but it feels that I'm not alone. My heart would like to speak, but feels that it is not listened to. It would like to answer; nothing is said to it that could reach it. I don't hear the language of the country, and no one here hears mine". (II, 14, 279)
Paris represents the quintessence of worldliness, the description of which provides the material for moral literature. Saint-Preux systematically overturns its categories and differences.
The legacy of the moralists: criticism of the worldliness of the world
To the "world", which must be understood anthropologically as the space of worldly sociability, is opposed in principle the "desert", which is not a climatic desert, a natural desert, but precisely a place where such sociability does not exist, not even a deserted place5, but a place where the pleasures of worldly conversation and sociability are not practiced6. The desert is the opposite of the world, so the desert of the world suggests that the world is the opposite of the world, that the place of greatest refinement in human relationships and also the place where these relationships do not exist.
This world is chaos, a new reversal: the world is supposed to give itself in representation as world order, with its decorum, its protocols and the regulated ballet of its worldly events. The place of rules, which lays down the rules, is in fact a place without rules.
In the world of Parisian salons where Saint Preux arrives "reigns a dreary silence": yet not only is the world supposed to constitute a veritable theater of conversation, but everything that is said and done there is made a spectacle and therefore makes noise. Silence, like chaos and like the desert, is an antonym of the world.
This inverted presentation of the world in no way constitutes a new moral discourse: on the contrary, the criticism carried by the moral literature of a La Rochefoucauld or a La Bruyère is already fundamentally based on this inversion, which Saint-Preux radicalizes to the limit of parodic stylization.
Before entering this world, Saint-Preux's soul is "à la presse". The expression is found neither in Furetière, nor in successive editions of the Trévoux, but we find "en presse" each time, in the sense of imprisoned. The soul, hitherto compressed into the petty horizon of its desert, its solitude (Saint-Preux's Switzerland), spreads out into the great sociability of the world (Parisian high society), where the Great, the great minds7 evolve. Répandre "also means, to disperse", writes Trévoux's dictionary. And it adds, in relation to Furetière, the following examples:
"Civility must not repandre itself only in words, compliments, & praise. Nicol[e]. Il faut repandre, s'il est possible des agremens dans toutes nos manieres. Bell."
To spread out in the world is to show worldliness, to exercise one's art of speech, of fine wit, of good manners. The moralist warns against this movement: civility cannot and should not be reduced to spreading oneself in the world, that is, to playing this game of fine words, to holding the discourse of the worldly, a surface discourse, which adorns with its amenities the manners of the one who pronounces it.
And Saint-Preux, by spreading himself around (by trying to play the worldly game), finds himself constricted, that is, to the press: it's the same reversal over and over again. In the great world, he experiences the constraint of the desert; to spread out is, for him, to tighten up; his liberation in the world is an imprisonment in silence and solitude.
.
Syllepse de la solitude: l'enjeu humaniste et son infléchissement critique par Saint-Preux
Saint-Preux's discourse will therefore be a discourse on solitude. In solitude, he works a difference expressed by the syllepsis "Je ne suis jamais moins seul que quand je suis seul": where the former seul refers to desert (I am never less deprived of company, of sociability) while the latter refers to solitude (when there is materially no one around me). Rousseau cites the beginning of the third book of Cicero's Traité des devoirs(De Officiis), which deals with the otium. Cicero himself reports a phrase by Scipio the African, which he takes from his contemporary Cato the Censor, who is said to have written: numquam se minus otiosum esse quam cum otiosus, nec minus solum quam cum solus esset, "that he was never less otiosus than when he was otiosus, nor less solus than when he was solus". Seul, in Latin, is already divided into otiosus,which designates a form of sociability, outside political space, apart from urban social life, and solus, which physically designates solitude. From Latin onwards, then, the difference between solitude and desert, between the bond of sociability and the real presence of others, is at work.
This difference, from which Ciceronian humanitas unfolds and, from there, modern humanism and its politics of friendship ("O mes amis, il n'y a nul amy") is thus part of a long and very ancient tradition. Saint-Preux, however, radically inflects it: "I am alone only in the crowd, where I can be neither yours nor anyone else's"; here appears the modern theme of the individual in the crowd, opposed not by the company of good books and the conversation of true friends, but by the immediate, sensitive force of the intersubjective bond: être à toi, Julie, être aux autres, is not of the order of discourse but belongs to presence, for which discourse (or the world as a locus of discourse, as a fact of discourse, as a device for discourse) merely supplements the fullness and binding.
The difference between solitude and the desert, which defines the world as an inverted model of discourse (moral discourse, from La Rochefoucauld to Rousseau, unfolding as a critique of worldly sociability, its language, its discourses), is thus superimposed on a critique of difference, a critical overcoming of humanism, through the demand, beyond sociability, of presence to the other, beyond conversation, of sensitive fusion. Saint-Preux's discourse can then be deployed as a critique of difference at work in the mundanity of the world, and expressed through the play of sylleps. The discourse is not syllepsis, but its overcoming. It does not celebrate the otium but, taking note of the otium as inverted worldliness, it denounces its simulacrum in the name of presence: "I can be neither yours nor others', I cannot be present for others, that is the essential problem.
From this point on, the whole of letter 14 unfolds as a statement of the impossibility of holding a discourse, for want of presence. Yet this impossibility of being with Julie, of being with others, is not due to the protocols of the world's mundanity, for, reytorically, Parisian society is ordered precisely on the basis of the reversal of these protocols: the world is already the negation of the world, and it is this negation that we must critique. Mon cœur voudrait parler" ("My heart would like to speak") takes us back to the essential function of language for Rousseau, which is not representation, but expression, that is, the manifestation of presence. Paris, as an inverted world, offers him only a simulacrum of this. We must therefore flush out, in the accueil, the amitiés, the prévenances, the mille soins officieux with which Saint-Preux is immediately enveloped (and Rousseau, whatever he says in note, describes his own Parisian experience here) not only the difference from worldly protocol, but the simulacrum that difference constitutes, making it a protocol of exclusion and indifference all the more formidable for its elusiveness.
Everything is at stake here, once again, at the level of language: "I don't hear the language of the country, and no one here hears mine." The discourse speaks of the incomprehensibility of language, it is a critique of language insofar as language implements a set of differences, which the discourse denounces as biased.
Politicization of discourse
The stylistic expression of difference is syllepsis; its critique operates through chiasmus:
"I am very much afraid that he who from the first sight (=A) treats me (=X) as a friend of twenty years (=B), would (=B) treat me (=X) as a stranger (=A) if I had some important service to ask of him ; and when I see such dissipated men take (=X) such tender interest (=B) in so many people (=A), I would gladly presume they take (=B) none (=X) in anyone (=A). " (p. 280)
If A designates the other with whom no sociable relationship is established, "from the first sight" refers to A, as do "like a stranger", "so many people" and "nobody". On the other hand, if B designates the other with whom a strong relationship has been established, "a friend of twenty years" refers to B, the "me" in "ne me traitât" still designates the friend of twenty years, and "un intérêt si tendre", taken up in the "en" in "qu'ils n'en prennent", the relationship to this friend. Between these two poles A and B, the paradoxical relationship structuring the syntactic pivot, which I symbolize by X, is first expressed by the verb treat ("me traite comme un ami de vingt ans", and backwards "ne me traitât comme un inconnu"), then by the verb prendre ("prendre un intérêt si tendre", and backwards "qu'ils n'en prennent à personne").
The structure of the chiasmus is then formalized as follows:
A - X - B
B - X - A
X - B - A
B - X - A
In the circle closed by the alternation of opposites, an irregularity, an offset manifests itself, with the precipitation of the verb prendre, redoubled by the assonance with tendre ("prendre un intérêt si tendre"), as if here, at last, we're going to get out of the circle, before the disillusioned fallback, "ils n'en prennent à personne" (also worked by an assonance). The circle works the difference, the offset marks the critical distancing from it.
What exactly is displaced here from the simple game of reversion, which is the classic game of moral satire? Saint-Preux is apparently saying the same thing twice: the Parisians pretend to treat their host as an intimate friend, but in fact they have nothing but indifference towards him. The first time, this host is Saint-Preux ("me traite", "metraitât"); the second time he is any man (to so many, to no one). We change scale, moral satire becomes political discourse.
A political space opens up as soon as the difference (between world and desert, desert and solitude, between solitude in the desert and desert in the world, between worldliness and brutality of the world) is distorted by the change of scale towards which Rousseausite discourse always tends. The language of the heart, of "the simple, touching outpouring of a frank soul", moves from solitude to community: it communicates, spreads, becomes generalized and, from there, politicized. The discourse denounces as an illusion the intersubjective interplay of difference (between friend and stranger, between the interested and the indifferent); there is no relational intermediary between solitudes ("me, I'm only alone in the crowd") and the world's global system, which is a system of exacerbated inequalities:
"Instead, it is perhaps the city in the world where fortunes are most unequal, and where both the most sumptuous opulence and the most deplorable misery reign." (ibid.)
Saint-Preux's speech then becomes a political discourse on inequality in the state of society, of which Parisian society represents the most advanced form, i.e. both the most refined and the most corrupt. At the same time, it is a discourse on discourse, denouncing behind the "open, hospitable, beneficent" approach, "that apparent commiseration which always seems to anticipate the needs of others" and "the flowing, natural tone of conversation [...]", the most unequal distribution of wealth and the most brutal separation between the different classes of society.
The speech denounces a facade all effusive, whose language is that of the most fluid effusion. But Saint-Preux characterized his own language as that of the heart and of "the simple and touching outpouring of a frank soul": that is, the form, the tone, the appearance of his language and that of this Parisian country he says he doesn't understand are in fact the same form. Formally, they are a naïve effusion and a factitious effusion, a natural flow of speech and an artifact of flow that resembles it in every way. The model for Saint-Preux's discourse is found in the practice that his moral discourse prohibits, and it is this prohibition that, by modeling itself, becomes the model for a political discourse.
.
Saint-Preux's discourse simply denounces neither the moral corruption of a Parisian society whose refinement is reversing into decadence, nor even the political injustice of the scandalously unequal distribution of wealth on which it rests. This discourse mimics in its form what it denounces, finding in the completely factitious artifact that it bans the original form of the language of nature that it claims to have always been its own. For this nature is not the same as nature itself.
For this nature is no more natural than that of those he denounces, as Julie points out to him in the following letter:
.
" Dis-me, my dear friend, in what language, or rather in what jargon, is the relation of your last Letter? Is it by any chance a beautiful spirit? If you intend to use it often with me, you should send me the dictionary. What, I beg you, is the feeling of a man's clothes? a soul that is taken like a livery suit? maxims that have to be measured by the yardstick? What do you expect a poor Swiss woman to understand about these sublime figures? Instead of taking, like others, souls in the colors of houses, wouldn't you like to give your mind the hue of the country's? Take care, my good friend, I'm afraid she won't do well on this background. In your opinion, did the traslati of the cavalier Marin, whom you have so often mocked, ever approach these metaphors, and if you can make a man's habit opine in a letter, why shouldn't you make fire sweat in a sonnet?" (II, 15, 286)
This is a far cry from the naïveté and rustic spontaneity Saint-Preux boasted of in the previous letter. What Julie read in the language of his letter was precisely the worldly affectation with which this language pretended not to know, not to be able to communicate, an affectation which Saint-Preux elsewhere indicated to us took on the appearance of its opposite, of the most natural fluidity of a warm, friendly, intelligent conversation. From reversal to reversal, we get lost: Julie the Swiss, as a true Parisian, unravels the Parisianism of her Swiss interlocutor, Saint-Preux, who himself has described Parisians as simulacra of Swiss...
What twists and turns vertiginously here is the circle of the origin of language, whose nature is located and formalized from the most artificial artifacts it bans. It is from this circle that the political discourse of La Nouvelle Héloïse can open up, that is to say, a discourse that in one and the same movement describes what it is that is to be forbidden and what makes a model, as obverse and reverse of the same form of difference, whose critique the discourse would make.
Notes
Diderot, in the mouth of the Nephew, a supporter of the Italians against his uncle, synthesizes Rousseau's theses. He begins by castigating the cold eloquence of French opera: "But to know how empty it is of resources for our art [= for us, musicians], the most violent of all, without excepting that of Demosthenes, have these pieces recited to you: they will seem cold, languid, monotonous. That's because there's nothing there to serve as a model for singing; I'd rather have to musique [= set to music] La Rochfoucauld's Maximes or Pascal's Pensées. It is up to the animal cry of passion to dictate the line [= the melody] that suits us; its expressions must be pressed one on top of the other; the sentence must be short, the meaning cut off, suspended ; the musician must be able to dispose of everything and each of its parts, to omit a word or repeat it, to add one that is missing, to carve and re-cut it like a polyp, without destroying it; this makes French lyric poetry more difficult than in languages with inversion [=where the words do not follow, as in French (!!!!), the logical order of thought].
"My virtue in my heart had sought retreat | to defend there as in my eyes, | when the mortal blow descended into those places | where ordinarily every arrow blunted." (Petrarch, Canzoniere, S2, trans. Pierre Blanc, Bordas, Garnier, 1988, p. 53)
"For your beautiful eyes, Madame, chain me [bind me]. | Totally Love found me disarmed | and opened the way to my heart of eyes | which tears are made the door and the passage." (Ibid., S3, p. 55)
"Likewise, she who of women is the sun, | in me casting the grapes of her beautiful eyes, | creates spurts of love, deeds, words." (Ibid., S9, p. 61)
" Which is neither inhabited nor cultivated. Uncultivated and deserted land is given for rent & lease. Plague & war have made this province deserted. L'Arabie deserte." (Furetière, art. Désert, 1er meaning)
"It is said in contradistinction of a man who loving solitude, had some pretty house built out of the great ways, & removed from the commerce of the world, to retire in. Ainsi on appelle la grande Chartreuse, un beau desert." (Furetière, art. Désert, 2nd meaning, my emphasis)
Rousseau does not here make the distinction, essential for La Bruyère, between the Court and the City, between the world of the Grands, which evolves at Versailles, and the Parisian bourgeois salons, which singularize them.
Référence de l'article
Stéphane Lojkine, « Passion, morale et politique : généalogie du discours de La Nouvelle Héloïse », Julie, le modèle et l'interdit, cours d'agrégation donné à l'université d'Aix-Marseille. Séance du 6 octobre 2021.
Rousseau
Archive mise à jour depuis 2001
Rousseau
Les Confessions
Julie, le modèle et l'interdit (La Nouvelle Héloïse)
Le charme désuet de Julie
Julie, le savoir du maître
Passion, morale et politique : généalogie du discours de La Nouvelle Héloïse
L'économie politique de Clarens
Saint-Preux dans la montagne
La mort de Julie
La confiance des belles âmes, de Paméla à Julie
Politique de Rousseau
La nature comme espace d'invisibilité
Entre prison et retraite : Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques
L'article Economie politique