The first time that we see actually see Manon and De Grieux, at the very beginning
of this novel, is when the two of them are in route to being expulsed from France
and sent over to the New World, she as a prisoner, he as her lover who cannot
abandon her and who will go with her. And so, the stakes of this are
unmistakable, that you realize that they cannot survive in the Old World.
They are being sent off to the New World, which of course in 18th Century Europe
would have been America, which is where they're going; they're going to be going to
New Orleans which is the New World and about which I'll speak later.
But instead I want to use that notion because you can see that's it's bristling
with significance Old World versus New World what's possible in one and impossible
in the other. Do you understand the new world?
Do you know something about the old one? And what I'd like to suggest, and the
reason that this book seems to me to be the right book for beginning this course
is that Manon Lescaut is herself the book's New World.
She is the New World that De Grieux has to learn,
to understand. We know that he loves her,
that he desires her, that he erects this huge exalted love
code about her, but does he understand her?
Does he know her? Do you as a reader know much about her?
This is why, the fact that this book is narrated entirely through his perspective
It's like instead of being stereophonic, it's monophonic.
It's his voice, we rarely get her voice. How adequate, how commensurate would that
be for telling the story of the couple. This is how I began this lecture.
Who is the couple? If each of us is an individual, can there
be a story of the couple? Could there be a narrative of mutuality?
I've spent a lot of time talking about the obstacles that beset this couple, and
the project of De Grieux to overcome them. But, what he most collides with is not so
much the old people of society, the kind of Oedipal battle
And it's not so much the even
commoditizing notion of the society--he collides with her. He collides with her
own values and assumptions and it's not always easy to see this.
I know through teaching this book that frequently my students are quite
contemptuous of her, they think of her as a whore
rr as someone who is trifling, someone who doesn't seem to have the
maturity of love, and yet I suggest that the book presents Manon as a person with
her own values, and her own integrity, and her own philosophy.
In one of the early betrayal moments of the text,
she has left De Grieux to be with a wealthy older lover and she sends him a
note that goes like this: I swear that you are the idol of my
heart, my dear chevalier. And there is nobody else in the world I
love as I love you", but don't you see, my poor darling,
that loyalty is a silly virtue in the pass we are in?"
In French it's not loyalty, it's fidelity.
"Que la fidélité c'est une sotte virtue" A silly virtue. "Do you really think we can love each
other, with nothing to eat? One fine day, hunger would lead me into
some fatal mistake. And thinking I was sighing for love, I
should really be drawing my last breath." That turned out to be prophetic.
That's how this book is going to end, almost.
But it raises an awfully fundamental question, which is: Do you think we can
love each other with nothing to eat? And it's an issue about which she knows a
great deal. She knows about what her trumps are,
her resources. They're not the same as De Grieux's; he comes
from a good family, even though he does not have much money.
Because of his social rank he is able to persuade others about the merits of his
case, particularly like-minded young men who are also gentlemen.
They think it's wonderful that this man is in love with this beautiful girl.
They help lend him money; they help him out.
What assets or trumps does she have? She tries to tell him the same thing in a
further sequence after they have been separated.
This one I've already alluded to. This is when she goes off with a younger
lover, and he has been expecting to meet her at the theater where they're going to
head off together with all of the stolen money that they've managed to get.
But instead, the amount of money and riches and jewelry that are made shown to
her that will be hers if she stays with this young man are so impressive and so
irresistible that instead she sends another girl to the theater to meet De
Grieux and she writes a little note, and it's described to us this way, that
"to make up a little for the disappointment she foresaw this news
might give me..." That she's going to stay with this rich
young man. "...she had managed to procure me one of the
prettiest girls in Paris who was the bearer of the letter."
And it's this lovely young girl who hands De Grieux this letter,
who's obviously been hard to replace Manon as an ersatz--substitute.
He of course is stunned; he goes through all of those emotions that I described to
you early on: rage, silence, weeping, tears.
And then, when he finally gets to her because he catches her and he berates her
for the incredible vulgarity of what she's done,
that she could have sent this other girl as a kind of substitute.
She says this to him: "I'm keeping nothing back.
Either of what I did or what I propose to do.
The girl came, she struck me as pretty, and as I felt sure that my absence would
make you unhappy, I was quite sincere in wishing that she might alleviate a little
of your boredom. For the fidelity I expect of you
is that of the heart." I really, believe that we're dead center
in this book with that last piece. "For the fidelity I expect of you is that
of the heart." This is what I think readers of both
genders choke on today: the fidelity I expect of you is that of the heart. We of
course understand what its alternative is because that's part of an economics
that we understand perfectly, the fidelity of the body. That's what fidelity usually
means: the fidelity of the body. I keep my body for you I do not use it with others.
That's not what she says. She says, "the fidelity I expect of you is
that of the heart." Here I think, is what is most
revolutionary in this book. Beyond De Grieux being a love apostle,
perhaps it is Manon articulating a new code altogether.
The fidelity of the heart. Which is a way of saying, "my body is my
currency." She'd never put it in those terms, but
I'm saying it. My body and my beauty are the only things
that I have. And if you put that together with notions
that are quite familiar to us today,
in terms of feminist thinking, who should own a woman's body?
Should it be her male lover? Should he dictate to her how and when she
can use that body with other people? Here is, then, an issue: the fidelity
of the heart versus the fidelity of the body that I think readers
today, in different cultures, of different genders, with different views
of sexual morality, will come to a different understanding of this text.
That is to say it really offers us a challenge to a kind of patriarchal model
of possession. The male possesses the body of the loved
one. There's a kind of gender politics in this
book. What can we make of that kind of
assertion? So, it's fascinating to me that in
this book, the argument that I just presented,
which to me, is what's most sort of, provocative,
is the one that my students rarely see up front.
One reason, I think is, the fidelity of the heart is not an easy code to get your
head around, to get your own
value system around. But another is that Manon herself speaks
so little. And that quotation I gave you is all part
of De Grieux's own response of rage. He certainly can't get his head around
the notion of the fidelity of the heart. But it may be part of the legacy of this
book. Does it actually have its own integrity?
Is it possible that Manon who has none of the privileges that De Grieux does given
his family background, his expectations, because he will in fact at the end of the
book inherit money.
Is it possible that this book is making visible to us if we can attend to it,
making audible to us if we can hear it, tiding of a different ethos a different
ideology all together, much more of a materialist picture of
things. Do you think we could be happy
if we had no money? Is it possible that love depends as much on money as it does
on some exalted view of the emotions? Those are the, I think, modern issues that
this novel of 1731 Puts on our plate.