special issue: jean-jacques rousseau || introduction: jean-jacques rousseau's "preface to...

Introduction: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Preface to Narcisse"Author(s): Benjamin R. Barber and Janis FormanSource: Political Theory, Vol. 6, No. 4, Special Issue: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Nov., 1978), pp.537-542Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/190996 .

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JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU'S "PREFACE TO NARCISSE" (translated, edited and with an introduction by Benjamin R. Barber and Janis Forman)

I. INTRODUCTION

BENJAMIN R. BARBER Rutgers University

JANIS FORMAN Goucher College

The Play "Narcisse"

Narcisse was the last of seven plays and three operettas Rousseau composed before and during his stay in Paris from 1742 to 1752. Although he claims to have written a first draft at 18, he was in fact 21. Moreover, it is likely that the piece was redrafted a number of times- once by the better-known playwright Marivaux, who "retouched" it in 1742-a decade before its performance. Rousseau is something less than precise in his account of that performance at the Comedie Fran9aise in December 1752, just two months after his charming Le Devin du village was done for the king at Fontainebleau.

In the Preface as well as in the Confessions he gives a convincing description of failure. But in fact, Narcisse was apparently quite successful, and was limited to two performances only because Rousseau withdrew it. On a double bill with Voltaire's Didon (the first night) and Merope (the second), it seems to have outdrawn both of Voltaire's plays when they were shown on a different bill the previous week. Hence, his attempt to belittle his own achievement at the Cafe Procope during the performance (he spoke anonymously and derisively about the play while it was being performed across the street) would seem- as the Preface tends to confirm-to derive from embarrassment at the work's success rather than its failure.

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 6 No. 4, November 1978 ? 1978 Sage Publications, Inc.

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538 POLITICAL THEORY / NOVEMBER 1978

The play itself is a rather tightly constructed one-act farce. Its pro- tagonist is the young fop Valere, who is about to wed Angelique but is first to undergo a cure for his narcissistic self-love at the hands of his sister, Lucinde. Lucinde retouches a portrait of Valere which trans- forms him into a woman; Valere falls unwittingly in love with this portrait of himself, affording both a good deal of mirth and the basic for his own cure. When his love for Angelique overcomes his love for the mysterious woman of the portrait, eros prevails and narcissism is subdued. Rousseau also utilizes a secondary plot device which in- volves Lucinde's scheme to win Leandre, Angelique's brother, in marriage.

Although it is a conventional genre farce, there are hints of Rous- seau's growing distaste for vanity (amour propre) and self-deception in it. Its slight plot is serviceable and some of its dialogue amusing. A recent English translation and staging by Alan H. Orenstein at Trent University (for the Rousseau Bicentennial Congress in June 1978) suggest that Rousseau's dramatic craftsmanship was effective if un- inspiring, and confirm the likelihood that the play was well received by Parisian audiences. Although Grimm later called it a "bad comedy," two different editions were published in 1753. The anonymous English translation of Rousseau's works of 1767 also include it, along with a stilted and grossly inaccurate version of the Preface. Both can be found in the Burt Franklin reprint (New York, 1971).

The Preface to Narcisse

One presumes it was the very considerable success of the play that prompted Rouseau to write an extended preface to it almost immedi- ately following its performance. After a decade of relative neglect, Rouseau suddenly found himself embarrassingly successful in t'wo genres which he himself, in one of them, had declared to be incom- patible. Thus, in the Preface, he is concerned to defend himself against the charges of hypocrisy which readers of his First Discourse might be inclined to level against him: the scourge of belles lettres, writing con- genial little farces?!

It is then no surprise that Rousseau chose himself rather than his play as the subject of the Preface. For the Preface is also an antipreface and opens with a characteristically Rousseauan paradox: Rousseau



Barber, Forman / INTRODUCTION 539

gives us his play by giving it up, and claims its authorship by disowning it. His plays are so many "orphans" he has relinquished to the world; it is the argument of the First Discourse with which he wishes to de- tain us.

The Preface can therefore justifiably be read as the first move in a life-long autobiographical project aimed at self-revelation and self- justification, as well as a reflective appendix to the First Discourse. Whatever Rousseau writes about the arts in that Discourse, or later in the Letter to D'Alembert on Theater, the object of the Preface seems to emphasize theater's palliative role in already corrupt societies.

Autobiography and social argument meet in the Preface as rhetoric, giving the work its characteristic polemical tone. Yet the substantive arguments, even when their purpose is only to disclose Rousseau's candor and underscore his authenticity, are of very real interest.

This brief introduction is not the place to assimilate the arguments and style of the Preface into the Rousseauan corpus, but it may be useful to indicate the problems in his thought the essay illuminates. The brief inventory of topics which follows is intended to serve this modest purpose.

(1) On romantic rebellion and the denaturation of man. The Preface addresses the problem of the First Discourse in terms that confirm the appendix to the Second Discourse where a return to the state of nature is ruled out as a meaningful remedy to society's corruptions. The Preface caricatures and then rejects the view often attributed to Rousseau that civilization and its institutional concomitants can be usefully eradicated in the name of man's untainted nature.

(2) On sociological relativisim. The Preface reenforces the Mon- tesquieuean disposition in Rousseau which leads him to modify uni- versal principles in the name of concrete social circumstances. Thus, as in his later studies of Corsica and Poland, the intent in the Preface is to set the general critique of the arts implicit in the First Discourse in the particular historical context of contemporary Paris.

(3) On theater as corruptor and palliative. In accord with 2 above, the Preface deploys a series of arguments justifying the palliative uses of theater in a corrupt society. These arguments provide a stimulating contrast to the wholly deprecatory case against theater developed in the Letter to D'Alembert, spelling out in detail the remark made in the Letter that while theater may be bad for men who are good, it is good for men who are bad.




(4) On transparency and deception. The Preface is the first work in which Rousseau seems aware of the disjunction between the way he knows himself (the psychological self) and the way others know him (the social self), and assays to overcome the gap through self-disclo- sure-a conscious effort at making himself "transparent" (cf. Staro- binski). The Preface thus becomes the first in a long line of confessional works in which the themes of psychological and social self, self-expres- sion and self-justification, and appearance and reality permeate philosophical and political argument.

(5) On paranoia. ThePreface provides some evidence for the view that, whether real or imagined, Rousseau's sense of being persecuted by "adversaries" was anything but an acquisition of old age. Rousseau is already aware of enemies, many of whom are probably not imaginary. The highly personal and self-revelatory style with which he arms himself against such adversaries is also clearly in evidence.

Despite then the rhetorical mood and the frustrating brevity of the Preface, it appears to occupy a significant place in Rousseau's thought. Written at the crucial juncture in his life when he was undergoing that conversion from urban to rural life, from salon to solitary society, from frivolous to philosophical writing, from celebrity to notoriety, from comfortable domesticity to physical and spiritual exile, which divided his life into two clearly separate parts, the Preface would seem to merit rather more attention than it has been given.

A Note on Translation

There is a contemporary translation of the Preface as well as of the play Narcisse to be found in the anonymous edition of Rousseau's work printed in London in 1767 and reprinted in New York in 19.71. It is of little use and has not been consulted here. We have, however, confronted some of the problems that must have faced the earlier translator, for the Preface is a rather stilted and polemical piece, which-despite its rhetorical flourishes-is not as graceful as Rous- seau's better known works. Like the First Discourse, it is without clear organization. Sentences typically shaped by parallel structure and by phrases of similar length contribute to the rather staid cadence of some sections and guide the reader's attention to individual state-



Barber, Forman / INTRODUCTION 541

ments as self-contained units of thought. It is as if Rousseau intended readers to pause for thought and edification at the end of each phrase.

We have tried to be consistent with crucial abstract terms, using sentiment regularly for sentiment and morals for mouers-a com- pound word denoting mores, customs, and morals: the fabric of social life. Paragraph structure follows Rousseau, to some extent at the cost of organizational clarity. We have also honored Rousseau's repetitions of words and phrases (at the beginning of paragraphs, for example), even at those points where, in English, it may appear a little clumsy. On the whole, we have aimed both for accuracy and a pleasing English style; however, where the two were in conflict, we have opted for accuracy.

We have used the Pleiade edition of Rousseau (Volume II) in making our translation. This edition contains all of Rousseau's work for the theater, as well as useful notes.

SELECTED REFERENCES

Readers interested in Rousseau, theater, and rhetoric may find the following useful.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres completes, B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond [eds.] (Paris: Gallimard, 1959-1969), Volume 2 of the Pleiade edition.

Benjamin R. Barber, "Political Virtue and the Tragic Imagination: The Theater of Jean- Jacques Rousseau," in M. McGrath (ed.) Artistic Vision and Public Action (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1978).

Benjamin R. Barber, "Rousseau and the Paradoxes of the Dramatic Imagination," Daedalus (Summer, 1978).

M. Barras The Stage Controversy in France from Corneille to Rousseau (New York: Institute of French Studies, 1933).

Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity (New York: Atheneum, 1970). Allan Bloom, Politics and the Arts: Rousseau's Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Theater

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968). Robert Ellrich, Rousseau and His Reader: The Rhetorical Situation in the Major Works

(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969). Peter France, Rhetoric and Truth in France: Descartes to Diderot (London: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1972). Margaret M. Moffat, Rousseau et la querelle du Theatre au XVIIIe Siecle (Paris, 1930). Alan H. Orenstein, The Narcissist. English stage version of Rousseau's Narcisse (un-

published). Richard Sennett. The Fall of Public Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977). Jean Starobinski, J.-J. Rousseau: La transparence et l'obstacle(Paris: Gallimard, 1971).




Benjamin R. Barber is the Editor of Political Theory.

Janis Forman is Coordinator of the expository writing program at Goucher College, Editor of a new journal, Composition and Teaching, has published translation in Semiotexte, and is working on a book-length study of autobiography.



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