Coupling the Novel: Reading Bodies in La Morlière’s Angola
Thomas M. Kavanagh, University of California
Volume 13, no. 2-3, Janvier-Avril 2001
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ABSTRACT
Why has as provocative, witty, and innovative a work as Jacques Rochette de La Morlière’s Angola, histoire indienne (1746) received so little critical attention? In his history of the French novel, Henri Coulet dismisses it in little more than a sentence as poorly done Crébillon, a “féerie orientale sans grande originalité.” Robert Mauzi describes it as “un univers de carton,” interesting only for the baroque scene towards the end of its story where tired and undone revellers stumble out of a masked ball into the harsh light of morning. Philippe Laroch rises to a tone of almost ecclesiastical outrage to castigate a work he sees as “peuplé d’aimables parasites occupés à dilapider leur fortune pour séduire des filles qu’ ils n’envisageront pas un instant d’épouser.” Even Angola‘s most astute commentator, Raymond Trousson, defers to the consensus and relegates La Morlière to the status of an “écrivain du second rayon.”
Other ECF articles on the topic of “The Body” include:
Richardson’s Hands
by JAMES ROBERT WOOD (ECF 26.3, Sping 2014)
Interrogating Oroonoko: Torture in a New World and a New Fiction of Power
by CYNTHIA RICHARDS (ECF 25.4, Summer 2013)
Communal Sexuality: Mutual Pleasure in Sade’s La Philosophie dans le boudoir
by KATE PARKER (ECF 25.2, Winter 2012-13)
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