2006 •
Le paradoxe d’Hercule ou comment le roman vient aux antiromanciers
Authors:
Ugo Dionne
Abstract:
The second half of L’Ingénu presents difficulties to specialists of Voltaire. With the adventures of Mlle de Saint-Yves, terminating in her painful, tear-filled death scene, the caustic storyteller of the first chapters seems to transform himself into a sensitive, naïve and altogether conventional novelist. Confronted with this disturbing invasion of the anti-novel by the novel, firm positions have been adopted: condemnation of the work judged to be deficient because of its duality; “ironic” interpretation of the sentimental elements; (...)
The second half of L’Ingénu presents difficulties to specialists of Voltaire. With the adventures of Mlle de Saint-Yves, terminating in her painful, tear-filled death scene, the caustic storyteller of the first chapters seems to transform himself into a sensitive, naïve and altogether conventional novelist. Confronted with this disturbing invasion of the anti-novel by the novel, firm positions have been adopted: condemnation of the work judged to be deficient because of its duality; “ironic” interpretation of the sentimental elements; “sentimental” interpretation of the ironic elements; attempts to synthesize and reconcile the two registers. All these positions react however to a fact whose scandalousness has been exaggerated: the coexistence in the same work of irony and sentimentality, of the novel and the anti-novel. For Voltaire, as for other anti-novelists of the classical age (Sorel, Scarron, Furetière, Lesage, Crébillon, Diderot), the anti-novel is still a novel; it is not formulated outside the procedures, frames, themes and representational possibilities that the novel has bequeathed it. (Read More)
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