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- Title
Les égarements de l'imagination, ou le roman raisonné de Philippe-Louis Gérard.
- Authors
BRODEUR, PIERRE-OLIVIER
- Abstract
The article examines the religious discourse on the novel as it manifests itself in an edifying novel of the late eighteenth century, Le Comte de Valmont, ou les égarements de la raison (1774), written by the '‘antiphilosophe'' author Philippe-Louis Gérard (1737-1813). This epistolary novel is one of the few works of the time to criticize with such violence the novelistic genre. Far from being confined to traditional attacks on the morality of the novel, the criticism of Gérard puts particular emphasis on the pernicious effects of imagination as exploited by the novel, which operates a distortion in the mind of the reader who then confuses the real and the imaginary. For Gérard, the imagination is thus not only the source of passions, but also the enemy of reason which alone can attain the truth, that is to say the fundamental dogmas of Christianity. In putting forward a conception of imagination reduced to a power misleading reason, Gérard opposes a long tradition of thinkers, from Aristotle to Pascal, Montaigne, and François de Sales, that reserved to imagination a legitimate place in cognitive processes. His novel Le Comte de Valmont manifests the complete rejection of imagination by the exploitation of a poetic of reason. The work is accordingly structured by the themes and philosophical and theological discussions that are the true narrative motor of the novel. The case of Gérard shows that the debate on the novel must be seen as an integral part of wider debates that involve the cognitive potential of narrative fiction and, more generally, the relationship of man to truth.
- Subjects
LE Comte de Valmont ou les egarements de la raison (Book); GERARD, Philippe-Louis; IMAGINATION in literature; FICTION; LITERARY criticism; REASON in literature; FRENCH literature; LITERARY theory; 18TH century literature
- Publication
Études Françaises, 2013, Vol 49, Issue 1, p43
- ISSN
0014-2085
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.7202/1018793ar