The Adventures of Telemachus [1699]

Fénelon’s 1699 novel The Adventures of Telemachus—or more precisely, the epic poem in prose—was one of the major bestsellers in many European countries for nearly two centuries. The book inspired paintings, operas, fashions, and even wallpaper motifs. It gave birth to a literary subgenre, the “archeological novel,” such as Terrasson’s Sethos (1731) or Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s L’Arcadie (1788), in which the action is located in an antique setting. Still part of French schools’ syllabi a century ago, this book mainly owes its survival today to highly specialized academic research, stimulated from time to time when an “Agrégation” program generates new publications, papers, and conferences, as happened in 2009–10. The situation is similar in English-speaking countries, if perhaps just a bit worse: new editions are scarce and generally based more or less on revised versions of eighteenth-century translations, such as those editions by John Hawkesworth’s (1768) or Tobias Smollett’s (1776).The publication by A. J. B. Cremer of an entirely new translation, featuring a close rendering of the French text into modern English and preserving the original’s formal dignity without resorting to a pastiche of the classical language, is therefore a landmark in the history of Fénelon’s reception, and in the valuation of Telemachus particularly. This edition, while intended for the general reader, includes most of what is expected of a scholarly edition. In a comparatively short introduction, the editor recalls the essential facts about the author’s background (as a descendent of high nobility) and about his ecclesiastic career, which was compromised by both his involvement in mystical spirituality (the quarrel over Quietism) and his critical attitude toward the absolutism of Louis XIV’s régime.In fact, Fénelon’s appointment as Archbishop of Cambrai (1695) was a kind of exile. In 1689, however, he was appointed tutor to Louis XIV’s seven-year-old grandson, the young Duke of Burgundy, second in the line of succession to the throne after his father (though both died prematurely). Fénelon wrote for this boy The Adventures of Telemachus as an educative fiction in the tradition of the “mirrors of Princes.” Of course, such a book was not intended for publication, and when it appeared in 1699—strangely enough, in a fully legal manner and with a printing privilege—it was against Fénelon’s will and in a very faulty form, which was corrected in later editions. An editor today therefore faces solving some highly complex textual problems, and choosing between the manuscript traditions. Cremer’s translation is based upon Jacques Le Brun’s authoritative text, published in Fénelon’s Œuvres, tome II (Paris: Gallimard, “Pléiade,” 1997).1After surveying the critical reception of Telemachus, particularly in England, starting at the text’s first publication and reaching the present time, the introduction discreetly hints at an apparent trend, among some interpretations, toward Christian allegory. If the figure of Mentor obviously “represents Fénelon” in his tutorial role, Cremer notes, this character, also an incarnation of Minerva, embodies humanity and divinity simultaneously, and thus may be seen as a “Christ-figure,” with Telemachus as his disciple and Ulysses, with his pursuit of a never-ending quest, as the symbolic form of the Divine. These observations are not entirely new; they have been formulated before by various critics. The editor himself concurs with a well-known article by André Blanc that describes Fénelon’s neo-platonician turn of mind: for Fénelon there is no contradiction between Christian revelation and the pagan fables of classical mythology, which he considers prefigurations or allegories of Christianity.This interpretation is abundantly and convincingly confirmed in the editor’s annotations. While as expected the commentaries point frequently to Greco-Latin mythology or classical literary sources, especially Homer and Virgil, the biblical quotations or hidden allusions are far more numerous and fully justify the Christian reading of what could appear as a mere continuation of the Odyssey. However, several other important aspects do remain unexplored or underestimated. For example, Fénelon’s very innovative literary choice of an epic poem in poetical prose rather than in verse likely has something to do with new conceptions of poetry and with contemporary critical opinions concerning the use of rhyme, a debate that revolved around the “Ancients” and the “Moderns.” This important aesthetic context is now obscure, and attention to Fénelon’s own place in that literary development ought to have alerted today’s readers, likely to find the style of Telemachus conventional and rhetorical, to a corrective view that argues against an impression of Telemachus as an outdated work.More importantly, the utopian scope of the narrative, for readers of this journal likely to be its capital aspect, is limited to a few occasional mentions (364 n. 68, 369 n. 118, 385 n. 303, etc.). While not entirely overlooked by the editor, the texts’ utopian resonances receive little in the way of contextualization. Fénelon was not a complete stranger to the classical French utopian literature of the end of the seventeenth century; one editorial note (373 n. 172) refers to a paper by D. R. McKee proving that, surprisingly enough, the reformed social organization of the city of Salentum in Telemachus is borrowed from Denis Vairasse’s Histoire des Sévarambes (1677–79). But while Fénelon and Vairasse use the travel narrative as a basic structural element, their mode of construction of the utopian fiction is very different. In works by Foigny, Vairasse, or Fontenelle, utopian alterity is achieved in its perfection and embodied in a spatial “elsewhere” located very far away, but sharing the same temporality as author and reader. In The Adventures of Telemachus travels take place in a well-known area of the Mediterranean Sea, and within the remote legendary period of the Trojan War. As Telemachus visits different types of societies and political configurations, the young prince seeks, with the analytical assistance of Mentor, to find the one that most inspires him, as he anticipates his future reign in the kingdom of Ithaca. Thus, Fénelon paves the way for a new conception of utopia, no longer seen as a static model of achieved perfection, but as a pluralistic, dynamic, yet unachieved process. This critical turn foreshadows later, more modern conceptions of utopia. Of course the editor had to choose what he deemed most significant about his new edition and was limited by his choice of a brief general introduction, for which he cannot be blamed. However, for those readers interested in the academic study of utopian history, and the history of utopian form, the absence of this consideration is regrettable.In addition to a “Select Bibliography” in English and in French, Cremer’s edition includes several appendices, in particular a chronology and a useful note concerning the many English translations of Telemachus that appeared by the end of the eighteenth century (there were at least eleven, some reissued several times). The editor did not attempt to provide the variants of the different manuscripts and early editions—in the case of Telemachus a particularly pain staking task, the result of which can be found in J. Le Brun’s critical edition. But Cremer does choose to translate two documents extracted from Fénelon’s Correspondence, stating the circumstances of the book’s publication—at least those circumstances Fénelon was willing to reveal. The appendices also include a “Key to Classical References,” a glossary and an index. This edition meets all the requirements generally expected in an academic work, but also meets the needs of the more general reader, with its highly readable translation and neat and appealing production values offering a classic text made accessible to all.