Moral Ambiguities in Prévost, pt. 2: Autonomy and Empathy

In my previous post on moral ambiguities in Prévost's Manon Lescaut, I observed how, even when characters and stories are explicitly said to be moral examples, the precise nature of the moral instruction may not be clear.  In particular, I asked of the ethical lesson reflected in the Chevalier des Grieux's interactions with others, "Is one to avoid (being duped into) compromising one’s moral judgment because of compassion, or, positively, to pity a libertine and lighten punishment?  Is one to recognize that pity is a virtue but that manipulating it for self-gain and moral license, as Des Grieux does, is a vice?"  In this post, I simply want to mention a couple of ways in which these questions are as alive for us today as they were for Abbé Prévost in the 1700s:  the relationship between autonomy and empathy in moral evaluation.

Manon Lescaut is a narrative about, among other things, conflict between successive generations and prevailing social moralities.  Prévost captures brilliantly the tremors from individualistic romantic pursuits that can disrupt even quasi-collectivistic cultural mores.  Des Grieux's slavish pursuit of his passions damages his most enduring and genuine relationships (i.e., with his family and his loyal friend Tiberge).  His acting incessantly on his impulses results in fleeting and fatal pleasures.  It also characterizes Des Grieux's life of neurotic urgency, unleashes his utilitarian self-justifications, and propels his spiral of moral descent.  In all of this, however, Des Grieux is sometimes a sympathetic character.  He is human.  We readers recognize some of ourselves in him.  Therein lies the pull and power of this narrative.

When we are sympathetic to Des Grieux it is for a few reasons.  One is that we are drawn into his apologies in which he explains his actions in terms of his personal circumstances, particularly his driving passions.  He is compelled by his natural attraction to Manon.  It is lust at first sight:  "She seemed to me so enchanting that I, who had never thought about the difference between the sexes nor looked at a girl with attention -- I, I repeat, whose wisdom and restraint were admired by all -- found myself inflamed all of a sudden to the point of rapture" (14; alt. transl.: "...felt myself, on the instant, deprived of my reason and self-control").  Eros cannot be denied.  Arrows from the quiver of Aphrodite justify his moral choices and, maybe we are supposed to believe, human behavior.  (This is, in fact, what David Lurie claims in J. M. Coetzee's absolutely superb Disgrace).

Pasquier, "The reunion in La Salpêtrière"

After all, we love a good love story.  And so if we just understood how much Des Grieux (thinks he) loves Manon, how much he burns with passion, how much he merely follows where nature leads, how much circumstances conspired against him, then we would demonstrate the pity and grant the moral absolution that supposedly attends liberal empathy.

In an extreme form, this is like saying that if we fully identified with the Other, who cannot help having these desires, we would see Des Grieux as victim, and we would criticize our own disapproving view of his person and actions as overly strict and prejudicially misplaced.

Another reason that we may (also) be sympathetic to the Chevalier is that we observe a sometimes overly harsh system of “justice” that misfires by corruption or excess.  The narrative pulls our heartstrings when we see how Des Grieux is caught up in this web and how he is occasionally wronged by it.

Once again, whether from innate passions or an imperfect social system of justice, Prévost's narrative may appear to paint a moral vision in which circumstances supposedly beyond one's control exculpate what objectionably flows from one's disposition or behavior.

And yet, sympathy does not entirely suppress recognition of real moral infractions.  The narrator reports that this is how Des Grieux tells his story, quite self-consciously, I might add.  The Chevalier states:  "I feel certain that, while condemning me, you will be unable to keep from pitying me" (11).  The concessive "while" clause grammatically guards against overstatement, but logically privileges pity as the stronger, and preferred, response.  The discounting formulation, in other words, acknowledges that the narrative facts will prompt disapproval, but it primes the reader to pardon more than to condemn.

This is also how Des Grieux himself interprets the stories of others, including his own approach to Manon, for instance.  He superficially recognizes her faults but constantly caves in to pity because he attributes her moral misdemeanors to factors beyond her control.  Des Grieux has a perspectival tendency to lay human actions at the feet of environmental factors.  Of this, some readers rightly become suspicious -- but maybe only some.

In its day, Manon Lescaut was originally controversial and censored for inciting moral corruption.  Specifically, the novel was first banned three months after publication.  According to Angela Scholar, this was “not only [because] it painted vice and dissipation as insufficiently horrifying, but also [because] it portrayed 'people of standing' as acting unworthily” (viii).

What if in our day the scandal is not how the novel paints vice and dissipation but that readers may be insufficiently horrified by vice, dissipation, and Des Grieux's justifications as depicted?  The difference would be between what the narrative depicts and what the readers permit.  To put that differently, what if the moral peril today is not that people might identify favorably with the novel's innovative take on sentimentally individualistic behavior that is inconsistent with one's class, but that such sentimental individualism regardless of class is largely assumed -- and therefore accepted as normative?

France underwent violent social and moral change in the eighteenth century.  Prévost himself, after whom Des Grieux may be modeled, was at the vanguard of both describing this change and in some personal ways hastening it.  Living still in the shadow of the French Revolution, our twenty-first-century Western social fabric is exponentially more individualistic than was Prévost's early eighteenth-century France.  It could seem that the impulse of Western social democracies is, in the name of autonomy and empathy, increasingly to grant moral approbation to individualistic pursuit of passions (whether in consumption or coupling) where Manon Lescaut initially just raised questions.

It is not uncommon now for it to be questionable to question the sort of autonomous expressions of one's chosen life path that, the novel shows, empathy may be employed to allow.

Discerning readers of Prévost's novel perceive how Des Grieux manipulates others and deceives himself to justify his inclinations.  These readers also recognize how he himself is manipulated by Manon and her brother so that they may pursue their lustful preference for wealth.  Des Grieux's blindness is at once literarily amusing and morally dangerous.  Tiberge repeatedly emphasizes the latter point.  Perhaps the way in which other people, social structures, and systems of “justice” are (im)moral examples is ambiguous both in the novel and in reality.

It is only “natural,” then, to wonder whether discerning readers also apprehend the ways in which these things -- manipulation, (self-)deception, and (self-)justification -- occur morally in their lives and society, too.  How aware are we of them?