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Trois récits utopiques: Gabriel de Foigny, ‘La Terre Australe connue’, Denis Veiras, ‘Histoire des Sévarambes’, Bernard de Fontenelle, ‘Histoire des Ajaoïens’ . Textes édités et présentés par Jean-Michel Racault

2022; Oxford University Press; Volume: 76; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fs/knac178

1468-2931

Richard Scholar,

Literature and Culture Studies

Jean-Michel Racault describes (p. 21) this collection as having been inspired in its conception and title by Susan Bruce’s edition of Three Early Modern Utopias (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Bruce drew into an anglophone threesome the first (1551) English translation (by Ralph Robinson) of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) along with the fictional travel narratives of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) and Henry Neville’s Isle of Pines (1668) in such a way as to suggest that the utopia is in generic terms, as Bruce puts it, a ‘precursor of the novel’ (Three Early Modern Utopias, p. xv). In his development of the same thesis, Racault presents a much more closely related trinity of utopian works in French, all written (though not all published) in the final quarter of the seventeenth century and all variously deploying the formal resources of travel narrative as they challenge the European religious and socio-political orthodoxies of the day, putting alternative possibilities ‘à l’épreuve fictionnelle’ (p. 18). At the heart of Gabriel Foigny’s traveller’s tale is the description of a closed Australasian society whose members hold all things peaceably in common because their form of humanity, as hermaphrodites of pre-Adamitic ancestry, preserves them from the appetites and desires to which Foigny’s postlapsarian European narrator (also a hermaphrodite) is prey. Denis Veiras’s fiction centres around his narrator’s account of an Antipodean society whose population partakes in the same fallen humanity as the European visitors and yet enjoys a religious tolerance and community of goods unknown in Europe, thanks to its governing theocratic elite, which is held firmly in place by a state-sponsored solar cult. The longest of the texts contained in this edition, Veiras’s Histoire des Sévarambes connects French utopian narratives to the anglophone tradition presented by Bruce, since — as Racault observes (pp. 197, 206) — Veiras’s work was partially pre-published in English (1675) and shows the probable influence of Neville’s Isle of Pines. Widely diffused in the long eighteenth century, it counts among its imitations Bernard de Fontenelle’s Histoire des Ajaoïens, which Racault describes as offering ‘une sorte de réécriture distanciée’ of Veiras’s work, as well as of Foigny’s and others, in its fictional depiction of a society that makes religious unbelief ‘l’exact équivalent d’une religion d’État’ (p. 451). For Racault, then, Fontenelle’s text makes the utopian narrative tradition its own object of critique. Running to over 500 large pages, densely printed, Racault’s edition in all senses far outweighs Bruce’s handier Oxford World’s Classics paperback. The author of three major monographs and many other works devoted to utopian literature, particularly of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Racault brings scholarship of the highest order to his edition. He teaches readers everything they need to know about the texts and their complex histories while judiciously advancing — and defending — his critical interpretations of each. For all these reasons, Trois récits utopiques deserves to establish itself as an important point of reference for specialists and students of early modern French prose fiction, religious and political thought, and the European utopian tradition.