[In the following introduction to her study of Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons dangereuses, Thelander discusses in general terms why the epistolary form was thought to be more realistic than narrative fiction and how it allowed the author to depict characters from multiple perspectives.]

Today, so few epistolary novels are published that we tend to forget that the genre is more than another eighteenth-century phenomenon like the mania for parfilage which, one year, threatened all the epaulettes of Paris. Long before Richardson, the basic premises of the novel by letters had been established; the techniques employed by eighteenth-century writers cannot be considered as original. Ancient models were known and copied during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance when other forerunners of the epistolary novel were composed. Ovid's Heroides, a series of letters in verse from heroines of literature, history, and mythology to their absent lovers which contain the entire story of the romance in a few lines, went through twenty-five editions or reprints before 1789, according to the Bibliothèque Nationale catalog; the translations of Octavien de Saint Gelais were reprinted seven times by 1546. There were even new “heroides” written by Radulf de la Tourte,¹ Guilbert de Nogent,² and Baudri de Bourgueil. The replies from the lovers to three of the letters composed by the fifteenth-century poet Angelus Sabinus³ were popularly attributed to Ovid himself. It is against this tradition that is much older than the eighteenth century that Laclos wrote Les Liaisons dangereuses and it is against this background of continued use that his novel (or any other epistolary novel) must be assessed.

In order to write an epistolary novel, an author must be able to see that real or fictional letters can be arranged in a series in order to carry the narrative element of a story. By this definition, there were no classical epistolary novels which survived to influence later fiction, although Reinhold Merkelbach believes that one of the sources of the Life of Alexander of Macedon in the Pseudo-Callisthenes version (c. 300 A.D.) was an epistolary novel composed about 100 B.C.⁴ Letters were used for brief narration in the Bible and in early Christian literature, as well as in the Greek letter collections of ælian and Alciphron. The letters of Héloïse and Abelard, which contain narrative portions, were so immensely popular that they were retranslated and rewritten straight through the eighteenth century. One of the weapons in the Reuchlin case was a collection of satiric letters called the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, where there is occasional narration. Writers of seventeenth-century romances even followed the Greek tradition when they used letters within their narrative to emphasize important facts or events or to add to the credibility of their stories.

In the previous paragraph, no distinction was made between fictional letters and real letters because the emphasis has been on the letter as a popular form which could be used for narration. Before discussing the peculiar properties of the epistolary novel, it might be well to define the fictional letter and to consider its stylistic requirements. A real love letter may contain an extravagant account of the beloved's charms, employing all of the stock metaphors; it may even be written in verse. At least in the eyes of the writer and recipient, it is not a fictional letter. The short essay with a salutation and a complimentary close is also not automatically a fictional letter: if the writer and recipient are both real people who use the mail services of their time to communicate, it is a special category of the real letter. Thus Voltaire's letter to Rousseau on “natural man” is a real letter. A fictional letter may be either well or poorly written, just as a real letter may be. The basic characteristic of a fictional letter is that either the writer or the recipient are not historical people, or that the historical personage to whom the letter is attributed did not write it. In short, the only way in which a fictional letter is distinguished from the real one is that it is fiction.

However, the fictional letter loses its effectiveness unless the reader is willing to forget for the moment that what he is reading is not a real letter. The fictional letter must thus meet various criteria of credibility. The most obvious method of judging the letter is its length, as Frank Gees Black has said.⁵ While our practical experience tells us that the amount of time any individual can and will devote to correspondence varies, still, when we are asked to believe that the heroine of Mme Riccoboni's Lettres d'Adélaïde de Dammartin writes a letter equivalent to over twenty printed pages, we may well be incredulous. In contrast to the relatively short letters in early epistolary fiction, those in the eighteenth-century novels tend to excessive length either in their own right or by the inclusion of diaries and journals faithfully copied by the characters to provide their correspondents with background. Though the real letters of the period were often long, the writers at least seemed aware that they might tire or bore the recipients, as shown by Diderot's repeated apologies to Sophie Volland. The eighteenth-century fictional-letter-writer tended to be immune to writer's cramp and insensitive to his reader.

Besides length, there are other criteria which we apply to epistolary fiction, consciously or unconsciously. The author of the letters in III Maccabees, for example, was careful to observe the correct chancellory form in order to give to his epistles the outward trappings of reality. On a more subtle level, while Ovid's claim to have been the originator of a new literary form in the Heroides “Vel tibi composita cantetor epistola uoce / Ignotum hoc aliis ille nouauit opus,” Ars Amandi, iii, 345) may be disputed, these imaginary letters establish the basic criteria of style in epistolary fiction. Ovid took the idea for the Heroides from the grammarians and rhetors under whom he had studied.⁶ With the rhetors, he had composed monologues or speeches for a designated person employing language suitable to their social position, age, and emotion. Substituting letter for speech, the bases for inner reality and for characterization in the epistolary novel are established. These criteria, unconsciously used by the reader, even became critical weapons in the late seventeenth century during the British phase of the Querelle des anciens et des modernes, as when Bentley argued against the authenticity of the epistles of Phalaris because of inconsistencies in the letters themselves.

Thus, the letters in an epistolary novel define the character of the fictional author by their style. If an author is to take full advantage of the documentary aspect of the letter, he must place his characters in such a situation that the letters they write are credible. Although we may wonder at the high degree of literacy among Alciphron's farmers and fishermen, once we grant this premise, there is nothing illogical about their letters. By contrast, as has been pointed out so often, the letter which Saint-Preux writes in Julie's boudoir is not credible.

The correspondence in an epistolary novel must somehow be motivated. This is only one of the technical problems facing the author. Another is the relationship between the letterwriters and the plot—are the characters writing about events which they have witnessed or in which they have taken part? Obviously, the letterwriter can be completely removed from the events which he supposedly narrates, but then the epistolary form loses part of its strength. There is also the “time lapse” problem. Events must be arranged in such a way that the narrator or narrators seem to be kept busy narrating. One solution is simply to indicate the passage of time by a change in the date assigned to the letter. A second is to insert material, not necessarily connected with the main plot, so that time may seem to pass for the reader. The addition of diaries of comparative strangers in some eighteenth-century novels can be directly traced to the need of the author to give his main characters time to travel or for the plot to develop behind the scenes without abruptly shifting dates and thus confusing the reader. And, if more than one person is narrating, the author must somehow arrange his correspondents so that the same event is never seen twice in the same way. One solution here is to have a supposed editor who tells the reader in a footnote that he had deleted useless letters. Another, which presents far more interesting possibilities, is to utilize the double narration, as Alciphron did, either by permitting one character to write two contradictory letters or two characters to write from different points of view, allowing the reader to make up his own mind about the event.

Although the epistolary technique, with its stylistic requirements, is surely not the easiest way to tell a story, it does present subtle possibilities to the skilful writer. A letter is a personal document—it is written by one individual with a definite personality which he reveals consciously or unconsciously. We need not go as far as Giraudoux in saying that a letter is in essence a confession or an improvisation;⁷ yet, at the same time, a letter is written to someone with another personality, with whom the author is attempting to communicate for some purpose. He tries to place his case before the recipient in such a way that the latter will be moved to accept the writer's position or to take the action which the writer desires. In the case of a letter to a distant friend, the writer is usually looking only for a sympathetic audience or for advice which he will find acceptable. When the recipient is in a position to help the writer actively, it is most important for him to realize what the writer is attempting to do.

In this way, the letter presents a dual abstraction from reality. Events are first passed through the prism of the writer's own personality then through a second prism: his knowledge of the recipient's character and his desire to influence him. It is more than a question of varying social distance, as M. Seylaz⁸ claims; the social distance maintained is a result of the wish to exert pressure on the recipient. In this sense, there would be, at least in theory, a difference between an epistolary novel which presents only one side of a single correspondence and a novel in the form of a diary. We do agree with M. Seylaz that the major strength of the epistolary technique lies in its ability to present several views of an evolving situation. They may come from the same person, a device used as early as Alciphron in his three Baccis letters; many individuals may give us a picture of a single person, as in the guilt-by-association technique of the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum; or they may be combined so that we get multiple views of several individuals.

If the author of an epistolary novel has been successful in his creation of illusion, the reader, at least for the moment, accepts the letters as documents. From the multiple views, he must create his own version of the truth and must correct it as he goes along with the new information he receives. While in a sense the reader may be said to recreate any novel for himself, he does so with minimal guidance from the author in this genre, much as he is forced in daily life to probe not only what is said or written or done by several people, but what is omitted. M. Seylaz, has corrected the opinion of Yvon Belaval that the flowering of the epistolary technique in the eighteenth century reflects the social preoccupation with memoirs and letters. M. Seylaz suggests that the authors wanted to make us forget that they were makers of stories in order to give us the illusion of communicating directly with real people and to take no responsibility for the work vis-à-vis the reader (pp. 15-16). Both of these suggestions are attractive, but there is a third reason for the appeal of the epistolary technique which lies in the special relationship between the reader and the novel. Throughout the “Eloge de Richardson,” Diderot elaborates in a more sophisticated fashion his early statement: “Combien de fois ne me suis-je pas surpris, comme il est arrivé à des enfants qu'on avait mené au spectacle pour la première fois, criant: Ne le croyez pas, il vous trompe …”⁹ The illusion of reality is complete for Diderot. The growth of the scientific spirit, the developing interest in man related to his environment throughout the eighteenth century meant an increasing importance for factual evidence. From the Biblical examples onwards, letters are documents, the exhibits which the lawyer produces to prove his case.

Yet neither the strengths of the epistolary technique nor its continuing popularity from Ovid to the writers of historical romances quite prepare us for the “after Pamela, the deluge” effect which sets literary historians to tracing the family trees of the four major works in the genre which appear in the eighteenth century at about twenty-year intervals: Les Lettres persanes (1721), Pamela (1740), La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), and Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782). The familiar story that Richardson sat down to compose a manual on the art of writing letters and ended up with Pamela hides a premise which is perhaps more instructive than the novel: people, not necessarily of the highest classes, were sufficiently interested in writing letters themselves to buy a book that would tell them how.¹⁰ Writers could cater to this interest and turn an ancient form into a stylish genre.

Something is needed to produce an epistolary novel besides the idea that a letter can narrate and that it can be faked. Unless that novel is to be nothing more than a first-person narrative in long installments, the writer must be able to mirror a society in which people can and do communicate with each other by means of letters with some degree of ease. One extreme form of this problem appears in Mme de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne, a very popular eighteenth-century epistolary novel. The thoughts expressed in the letters by the young Peruvian exposed to western civilization for the first time seem perfectly natural. We do not even doubt that messages were common among the Peruvians. However, even in a world where machines can be fed complicated instructions with only two signals, the idea that quipus (cords with knotted strings) could be used to record such nuanced thoughts is slightly ridiculous.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a climate was developing in England and in France in which an epistolary novel would not seem like a science fiction story. The crude postal systems of the Middle Ages and Renaissance were turning into efficient organizations delivering mail on a regular basis. By 1677, the British postal system was well organized, and the London Penny Post was founded in 1680. In France, the postal system was first formed in 1672. However, it was not until 1758 that the Parisian Petite-Poste was established.¹¹

Once a postal system is in common use, it is possible to write an epistolary novel with someone other than Alexander the Great as the hero. The success of such a novel will depend in part on the degree to which letters do imitate real life. It caters to that very human desire to read other people's mail. M. Seylaz has constructed a theory about the appeal of the epistolary novel, especially Les Liaisons dangereuses, based on eroticism in which the reader becomes a sophisticated voyeur.¹² While the Peeping Tom element may be concealed in the pleasure derived from reading another's letters, the late seventeenth-century British “rifled mailbox” collections, the popularity of the travel letter where the sexual element is often minimal, and the severe penalties imposed by law for tampering with the mail all suggest that people will read almost anything provided that they are not the addressees.

Notes

1. On Radulf or Raoul de La Tourte, see F. J.. E. Raby, A History of Secular Latin Poetry from the Beginnings to the Close of the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1934) II, 23.

2. On Guilbert de Nogent, see Phyllis Abrahams, Les Œuvres poétiques de Baudri de Bourgueil (Paris, 1926), p. 37.

3. J. Wright Duff, A Literary History of Rome … (London, 1909), p. 592.

4. Die Quellen des Griechischen Alexanderromans (Munich, 1954), p. 188.

5. The Epistolary Novel in the Late Eighteenth Century, a Descriptive and Bibliographical Study (Eugene, 1940), p. 8.

6. Ovid, Heroides (Paris, 1928), tr. Marcel Prévost, ed. Henri Bonecque, p. xi.

7. Jean Giraudoux, “Choderlos de Laclos,” Littérature (Paris, 1941), p. 67. Mme de Merteuil really answers this definition when she writes to Cécile (Letter CV, Vol. III, p. 119): “Vous écrivez toujours comme un enfant. Je vois bien d'où cela vient; c'est que vous dites tout ce que vous pensez, et rien de ce que vous ne pensez pas.” Miriam Allott, Novelists on the Novel (New York, 1959), p. 189 concludes that the genre is excellent for the “interpretation of private feeling and the power of individual self-expression,” and that “it was handled best by the French novelists—most devastatingly, perhaps, by Choderlos de Laclos … in Les Liaisons Dangereuses …, where it served with splendid success his Gallic gift for the unflinching analysis of devious motive and perverse emotion.”

8. Jean-Luc Seylaz, “Les Liaisons dangereuses” et la création romanesque chez Laclos (Geneva, 1958), p. 61.

9. Denis Diderot, Œuvres, ed. André Billy (Paris, 1946), p. 1090.

10. Rudolph Hercher, ed., Epistolographi Graeci (Paris, 1873), pp. 6-12 gives the classifications (41) and examples of letters of Proclius Platonicus (7th century A.D.?). These examples are, however, quite different from later ones as this sample love letter will show: “Amo, amo per Themidem, pulchram tuam et amabilem formam, nec pudet me amoris: nam pulchras amare non est turpe. Sin autem qui omnio me reprehendat ut amantem, rursus ut pulchram petentem praedicet.” (p. 12).

11. One of the reasons Mme de Merteuil gives for forcing Cécile's mother to take her to the country is that she might think of using the Petite Poste for her letters to Danceny.

12. Seylaz, pp. 22-23, observes that Valmont often refers to the drafts of his letters. How much this reflects Laclos' need to give some logical explanation for their existence in the collection and how much the desire to inform us that these letters are not to be read as spontaneously written documents, as M. Seylaz feels, might be disputed.