Rousseau's Confessions (Part I / III)
I have strayed from the path of virtue and need a vigorous spanking, Mama...
The Solenoid Notebooks is a series of letters reporting on the capacious field of literary and bibliographical references within Cărtărescu’s big book, translated by Sean Cotter.
Solenoid is a massive, ambitious novel that, in addition to spinning a long conspiratorial narrative, kind of summarizes the last century of modernist aesthetics and art in Europe and their relationship with scientific and mathematical knowledge. We’ll try to elucidate the many literary and historical threads woven into this meganovel, one book at a time.
These letters are meant to accompany my review piece that ran in Asymptote.
And boy are we in for a big one, an “ancillary” read that was just as long as the primary text. I hope you enjoy these letters, which will be less analytical and more impressionistic, featuring long, prolix quotations so that you can get a sense of Rousseau’s prolix yet compelling style.
I also hope you enjoy the irregular illustration for this trilogy, some iterations of Rousseau, generated by AI (although they don’t look the least bit like Rousseau).
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The letters summarizing Rousseau’s great book will be divided according to the “books” in which the text is divided. There are twelve in all.
I
I have entered upon a performance which is without example, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I mean to present my fellow-mortals with a man in all the integrity of nature; and this man shall be myself.
So begins Rousseau’s Confessions, with a baldly portentous statement. It’s weird to say there’s no example for this book, considering Augustine published his Confessions around 1400 years prior.
But the uniqueness of this project is that it is centered on a mere “man,” not a king or general or theologian, but an irreplaceable individual, “not made like any one I have been acquainted with.”
These lines indicate the appearance of a new kind of hero in Literature, one befitting the world of commodity production and exchange.
Early childhood in Geneva is explicitly formative for Rousseau. His aunt taught him a love of music. And his parents’ home was full of books.
Every night, after supper, we read some part of a small collection of romances which had been my mother’s. My father’s design was only to improve me in reading, and he thought these entertaining works were calculated to give me a fondness for it; but we soon found ourselves so interested in the adventures they contained, that we alternately read whole nights together, and could not bear to give over until at the conclusion of a volume. Sometimes, in a morning, on hearing the swallows at our window, my father, quite ashamed of this weakness, would cry, “Come, come, let us go to bed; I am more a child than thou art.”
Check out the surprisingly blunt (at least for this blogger) self-exposure in the paragraph immediately following:
I soon acquired, by this dangerous custom, not only an extreme facility in reading and comprehending, but, for my age, a too intimate acquaintance with the passions. An infinity of sensations were familiar to me, without possessing any precise idea of the objects to which they related—I had conceived nothing—I had felt the whole. This confused succession of emotions did not retard the future efforts of my reason, though they added an extravagant, romantic notion of human life, which experience and reflection have never been able to eradicate.
So much for the first ten years. In 1722, an incident occurs that forces Jean Jacque’s father out of Geneva.
My father had a quarrel with M. G——, who had a captain’s commission in France, and was related to several of the Council. This G——, who was an insolent, ungenerous man, happening to bleed at the nose, in order to be revenged, accused my father of having drawn his sword on him in the city, and in consequence of this charge they were about to conduct him to prison. He insisted (according to the law of this republic) that the accuser should be confined at the same time; and not being able to obtain this, preferred a voluntary banishment for the remainder of his life, to giving up a point by which he must sacrifice his honor and liberty.
Under these circumstances, Jean Jacques is brought into the care of the minister Lambercier, who employs JJ’s uncle, and his family in the village of Bossey. “Here we were to learn Latin, with all the insignificant trash that has obtained the name of education.”
And it’s here we witness—so early in the text—the famous spanking sequence.
Miss Lambercier “felt a mother’s affection” and “sometimes exerted a mother’s authority,” he says.
The extent of this authority includes a practice “entirely new” to him.
but I found the reality much less terrible than the idea, and what is still more unaccountable, this punishment increased my affection for the person who had inflicted it. All this affection, aided by my natural mildness, was scarcely sufficient to prevent my seeking, by fresh offences, a return of the same chastisement; for a degree of sensuality had mingled with the smart and shame, which left more desire than fear of a repetition.
But noble young Jean Jacques doesn’t become a naughty boy for the prospect of more spankings; he wouldn’t go so far against Lambercier. “Benevolence, aided by the passions, has ever maintained an empire over me which has given law to my heart.”
Jean Jacques returns to Geneva a couple years later, burning through an apprenticeship with a city clerk and becoming apprenticed to the engraver Abel Du Commun.
This is a much more unsatisfactory environment. Du Commun is “a young man of a very violent and boorish character, who contrived in a short time to tarnish all the amiable qualities of my childhood, to stupefy a disposition naturally sprightly, and reduce my feelings, as well as my condition, to an absolute state of servitude.”
He takes up lying and petty larceny. In this context, Rousseau the narrator takes a long meditation on his “extremely violent” passions. These lines forced yours truly to ponder if Rousseau might have been on the spectrum.
My passions are extremely violent; while under their influence, nothing can equal my impetuosity; I am an absolute stranger to discretion, respect, fear, or decorum; rude, saucy, violent, and intrepid: no shame can stop, no danger intimidate me. My mind is frequently so engrossed by a single object, that beyond it the whole world is not worth a thought; this is the enthusiasm of a moment, the next, perhaps, I am plunged in a state of annihilation. Take me in my moments of tranquility, I am indolence and timidity itself; a word to speak, the least trifle to perform, appear an intolerable labor; everything alarms and terrifies me; the very buzzing of a fly will make me shudder; I am so subdued by fear and shame, that I would gladly shield myself from mortal view.
When obliged to exert myself, I am ignorant what to do! when forced to speak, I am at a loss for words; and if any one looks at me, I am instantly out of countenance. If animated with my subject, I express my thoughts with ease, but, in ordinary conversations, I can say nothing--absolutely nothing; and, being obliged to speak, renders them insupportable.
After a few dark years, Jean Jacques—now in his mid-teens—runs away from Geneva after he finds himself locked out of the city gates.
II
It’s on this exile, in southeastern France, that he meets Mme de Warens in Annecy. The encounter determined his character “in great measure.” They will spend years together; he’ll call her Mama throughout the text (she’s about 12 years older than him).
He represents her with seemingly total frankness, her social pedigree handled just as evenly as certain improprieties:
Louisa-Eleanora de Warens was of the noble and ancient family of La Tour de Pit, of Vevay, a city in the country of the Vaudois. She was married very young to a M. de Warens, of the house of Loys, eldest son of M. de Villardin, of Lausanne; there were no children by this marriage, which was far from being a happy one. Some domestic uneasiness made Madam de Warens take the resolution of crossing the Lake, and throwing herself at the feet of Victor Amadeus, who was then at Evian; thus abandoning her husband, family, and country by a giddiness similar to mine, which precipitation she, too, has found sufficient time and reason to lament.
(De Warens is Protestant by social origin but converted to Catholicism, as Jean Jacques will, and was being paid by the Piedmontese monarchy to bring more Protestants to the faith. The context involves a certain backlash against the misanthropy of Calvinism—even though this Protestant branch reflects a more developed commodity-money economy. Anyway—)
After a couple weeks’ travelling, he arrives in Turin. With no money, he enters a hospice for Christian converts, and is baptized by the end of April 1728.
And here Rousseau pauses for another reflective paragraph. He betrays his encyclopedic drive—one shared by Diderot—as well as fear of concealment, a need to omit nothing.
Before I proceed, I ought to offer an excuse, or justification to the reader for the great number of unentertaining particulars I am necessitated to repeat. In pursuance of the resolution I have formed to enter on this public exhibition of myself, it is necessary that nothing should bear the appearance of obscurity or concealment. I should be continually under the eye of the reader, he should be enabled to follow me In all the wanderings of my heart, through every intricacy of my adventures; he must find no void or chasm in my relation, nor lose sight of me an instant, lest he should find occasion to say, what was he doing at this time; and suspect me of not having dared to reveal the whole. I give sufficient scope to malignity in what I say; it is unnecessary I should furnish still more by my silence.
Could this Enlightenment exhaustion of knowledge, looked at another way, be a kind of baroque horror vacui?
III
As the 1720s come to an end, Jean Jacques goes through a string of domestic employments in Turin, first to de Vercellis, until the matron dies, then to the Gouvon family. His duties involve dictating letters, and “cutting out some ornaments.”
“I was almost the absolute master of my time,” he writes.
But he starts feeling homesick—not for Geneva, but for Madam de Warens and her pastoral setup in Annecy. “The hills, fields, brooks and villages, incessantly succeeded each other with new charms, and this delightful jaunt seemed worthy to absorb my whole existence.”
So he does his job badly till he’s dismissed, and he spends a nice summer idyll with her.
Would it not be madness to sacrifice the prospect of so much felicity to projects of ambition, slow and difficult in their execution, and uncertain in their event? But even supposing them realized, and in their utmost splendor, they were not worth one quarter of an hour of the sweet pleasure and liberty of youth.
De Warens’s place sounds like some very cozy country digs, indeed:
She had very little plate, no china, no game in her kitchen, or foreign wines in her cellar, but both were well furnished, and at every one’s service; and her coffee, though served in earthenware cups, was excellent. Whoever came to her house was invited to dine there, and never did laborer, messenger, or traveller, depart without refreshment.
At this point, Jean Jacques emerges as quite the contrarian in everyday discussions and conversations with the folks de Warens entertains. He comes off as an animated but senseless young lad.
Rousseau explains his conduct with a paragraph reflecting on the divided nature of his own self:
Two things very opposite, unite in me, and in a manner which I cannot myself conceive. My disposition is extremely ardent, my passions lively and impetuous, yet my ideas are produced slowly, with great embarrassment and after much afterthought. It might be said my heart and understanding do not belong to the same individual. A sentiment takes possession of my soul with the rapidity of lightning, but instead of illuminating, it dazzles and confounds me; I feel all, but see nothing; I am warm, but stupid; to think I must be cool. What is astonishing, my conception is clear and penetrating, if not hurried: I can make excellent impromptus at leisure, but on the instant, could never say or do anything worth notice. I could hold a tolerable conversation by the post, as they say the Spaniards play at chess, and when I read that anecdote of a duke of Savoy, who turned himself round, while on a journey, to cry out ‘a votre gorge, marchand de Paris!’ I said, “Here is a trait of my character!”
We’ve all been there….
In the fall, Jean Jacques takes up music studies with a Lazarist priest who was friends with de Warens, and then studies with the Parisian composer M. le Maitre.
They spend a few months travelling together, but some difficulties, including le Maitre’s struggles with epilepsy, overwhelm JJ enough so that he straight up abandons him in Lyon.
Le Maitre “was abandoned by the only friend on whom he could have any reasonable dependence …”
IV
The next year for Jean Jacques is characterized by some odd jobs. In the summer he escorts Merceret, de Warens’s chambermaid, to her home in Fribourg. And though Merceret seems to like Jean Jacques, there is no time for gallantry. (“I could not imagine how two young persons could bring themselves to sleep together, thinking that such familiarity must require an age of preparation.”)
And besides, Rousseau freely tells us, he like ladies. With their gowns, ornamentations, “well-preserved complexion, fine hands, elegance of ornaments, an air of delicacy and neatness throughout the whole person … I even prefer those who have less natural beauty, provided they are elegantly decorated.”
From there, he goes to Lausanne to get a gig as a music teacher. Since he’s back in Switzerland, and he converted from Protestantism, he elects to pose as a Parisian musician by the name of Vaussore de Villeneuve.
From Lausanne to Neuchâtel—which looks like a killer place—the music lessons continue till he runs into a weirdo in a pub “with a long beard, dressed in a violet-colored Grecian habit, with a fur cap, and whose air and manner were rather noble.” He speaks “an unintelligible jargon, which bore more resemblance to Italian than any other language,” which Jean Jacques knows.
So he becomes the interpreter for this gentleman, who claims to be the Archimandrite of Jerusalem. They set off on a pilgrimage to that very place, stopping at hotels to sermonize. At one of these places, an ambassador is so charmed by Jean Jacques (still passing as a Parisian) that he detains him from following the Lord “Achrimandrite” and gives him a chance to perform music in Paris.
It was in June of 1731 that Jean Jacques visited Paris for the first time.
How much did Paris disappoint the idea I had formed of it! The exterior decorations I had seen at Turin, the beauty of the streets, the symmetry and regularity of the houses, contributed to this disappointment, since I concluded that Paris must be infinitely superior. I had figured to myself a splendid city, beautiful as large, of the most commanding aspect, whose streets were ranges of magnificent palaces, composed of marble and gold. On entering the faubourg St. Marceau, I saw nothing but dirty stinking streets, filthy black houses, an air of slovenliness and poverty, beggars, carters, butchers, cries of tisane and old hats. This struck me so forcibly, that all I have since seen of real magnificence in Paris could never erase this first impression, which has ever given me a particular disgust to residing in that capital; and I may say, the whole time I remained there afterwards, was employed in seeking resources which might enable me to live at a distance from it.
In the fall, he travels to Chambery, reuniting again with de Warens, and getting a new gainful job in the tax survey of King Victor Amadeus of Sardinia.
This marks the end of book 4, and Rousseau’s early youth. He leaves us with this reflection on the work thus far:
I did not promise the public a great personage: I promised to describe myself as I am, and to know me in my advanced age it was necessary to have known me in my youth. … I would be able by some means to render my soul transparent to the eyes of the reader, and for this purpose endeavor to show it in every possible point of view, to give him every insight, and act in such a manner, that not a motion should escape him, as by this means he may form a judgment of the principles that produce them.
PART I