2013 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

FRENCH LITERATURE I Jesus College Annual Report 2013 33
irresistible woman who whisks him away
to her secluded country home. And yet,
the way in which the narrator veils his
sexual encounters, blurs the boundaries
between imagination and reality, and
denies any satisfaction at the end of his
short tale, demonstrates a seduction that
goes far beyond purely physical pleasure.
Rather, this seduction involves the reader
in an erotic engagement with the narrative
itself, drawing the reader in and promising
intellectual gratification akin to sexual
pleasure.
In Diderot’s Supplément, the reader
becomes part of the text as s/he attempts
to peel back these distinct layers of
meaning, working past the outright
sexuality of the narrative itself. The
narrative engages the reader in a seduction
that forces them to actively question the
distinctions between fact and fiction, and
to reflect on the undeniable mutability of
language, shaking all solid cultural and
linguistic foundations. This work is a
fictional supplement to the 1771 text
documenting Louis-Antoine de
Bougainville’s voyage around the world. In
his account, Bougainville depicted the
island of Tahiti as a New Cythera, a utopian
ideal of love and sexual freedom, and
Diderot’s dialogue professes to be a lost
portion of this factual document, read by
two unnamed French gentlemen. Here,
bliss becomes more than sexual ecstasy,
and is instead aligned with the act of
engaged reading, through which the
reader, positioned in a space that rests
outside of (or between) comfortable
cultural conventions, is seduced into
experience in the liberty inherent in
determining one’s own relation to these
notions.
Manon Lescaut is a sentimental novel,
and the earliest of the texts in question.
The novel sees the young des Grieux
reconstruct through narrative the pursuit
of his true love, Manon. Manon becomes
the elusive, empty space through which
des Grieux can achieve a state of bliss, and
his fractured and flawed narrative creates
Baudouin, Pierre Antoine – La Lecture, circa 1760
this uncertain space in the mind of the
reader. Just as des Grieux is intent on
constantly reliving the fleeting moments of
bliss he experiences with Manon, the
reader engages with the narrative in an
attempt to grasp the ungraspable. In doing
so, the pursuit of intellectual climax is
constant and, although often frustrated, a
positive, productive force.
It is arguable that the subtle erotics of
the text itself, the relationship built
between narrative and reader, is the source
of textual pleasure. A close reading of these
seemingly disassociated texts, through a
framework set out by Barthes’s work, can
help to outline the connections necessary
to understand the act of reading itself in
the eighteenth century as an inherently
erotic process.
In understanding this process, it is
possible to understand not simply what the
public was reading during the eighteenth
century, but how they read these works,
and what possible effect this method of
reading had on the mentalities that
constituted pre-Revolutionary France.