Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse is a novel which has suffered much from those who have attempted to interpret it, as Paul de Man, in one of the most forceful and cogent readings of Rousseau's work, observes: "...We are still coping with a contingent and basically irrelevant misreading ... such a reading considers Julie, if it considers it at all, as if it would have preferred it to be the Confessions or the Rêveries rather than what it is." 1 In attempting to dialecticize what are commonly perceived to be the two halves of the novel, critics have, time and again, come up against a reading that requires a failure, either on their own part (which would be hard to admit) or on Rousseau's part. But in de Man's reading, the novel can no longer be split into the two halves of a dialectic between Rousseau the political and social theorist of Du contrat social and Rousseau the sentimental reader of Richardson. Instead, de Man argues, quoting Wordsworth, "we must discover another and finer connection than that of contrast." 2
Perhaps the text is Rousseau's mimesis of the immanently impossible act of mimesis -- his portrayal of the impossibility of absolute referential knowledge which mankind so desperately seeks yet forever must do without. Rousseau's text is a reminder of the illusory nature of meaning, a fictional parallel to his theories of the inadequacy of language to represent truth. Nothing we say is ever true, because of the fact that we say it, but we cannot deny the reality of the effects of our lies. Communication is always imperfect; in this regard, we can align Rousseau not only with Plato and Horace, but with another master of rhetoric: Nietzsche, for whom all truth is illusion, and language -- specifically the catachrestic, appropriative language of Julie and St. Preux -- is in fact a metaphor, although we have forgotten that it is a metaphor.
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1 Paul De Man. Allegories of Reading. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. 189.
2 ibid., 192.