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A Contemporary Rousseau
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14993 |
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BOOK WORLD
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9 / 1988 |
3,061 Words |
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Bruce Bawer
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THE NEW CONFESSIONS
William Boyd
New York: Morrow
$19.95, 476 pp.
If it required a man of mature years to write Jean-Jacques Rousseau's famous Confessions, it took the impetuosity of a relatively young man--namely, the 36-year-old British novelist William Boyd--to write The New Confessions. This unusual novel, which takes the form of a 73-year-old Scots filmmaker's memoir, bears a strong, if bemusing, resemblance to the eighteenth-century philosopher's monumental autobiography. Its narrator-protagonist is John James Todd (note the given names), who, at the time he tells his story, has spent the last nine years in quiet seclusion on a remote Mediterranean island. It is 1972, but Todd lives largely in the past, sifting through his old diaries and letters and attempting "to discern some underlying patterns or theme amidst all that insignificance and muddle." He does not use the words insignificance and muddle lightly. As he will spend the rest of the book demonstrating, his long and tempestuous career consisted of more frustrations than triumphs. Yet he had one brief, shining moment: the 1931 release of his movie version of the first part of Rousseau's Confessions, the sequels to which he spent the next several decades trying to finance and film.
The Confessions figures crucially in Boyd's novel--serving at once as a stylistic, a philosophical, and a structural influence. Now one way in which literary allusions can be ranked is according to the audacity of their conception. It was supremely audacious of James Joyce, for instance, to pattern Ulysses after The Odyssey, since by doing so he opened his work up to comparison, at every turn, with an acknowledged classic. Boyd's audacity is on the same scale. For though the Confessions is not on a par with The Odyssey, Rousseau and his book occupy a supremely important position in the history of modern literature and Western thought. Rousseau's ideas about the corruptions of civilization and society and about man's natural goodness were central to the Romantic movement; Rousseau himself has been called the "father of romantic sensibility." Though modeled after St. Augustine's Confessions, Rousseau's autobiography brought something remarkably new into the world: testimony that was far more deeply personal and disarmingly candid than Western readers were accustomed to. Rousseau's Confessions was founded, moreover, on the simple but revolutionary idea that an individual's life can be worth chronicling, at extreme length, for no other reason than that he is a human being and consequently unique, important, and fascinating in his own right.
The New Confessions purports to be founded upon much the same idea. Indeed, Boyd unmistakably echoes Rousseau's exuberant explanatory opening. Rousseau begins as follows:
“ I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my mind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I portray will be myself.
“Simply myself. I know my own heart and understand my fellow man. But I am made unlike any one I have ever met; I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different. Whether Nature did well or ill in breaking the mold in which she
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