Ch 3: The third chapter concerns pleasure and happiness conveyed by a brief moment in time. Ronsard’s hedonistic poem uses dialectical reasoning and rhetorical deliberation to perfect the pleasure that is ephemeral. It is because the pleasure does not last that it becomes an absolute imperative; the pleasure of the moment is not viewed as lesser than the happiness conferred in duration. In the Princesse de Clèves, a scene of mutual pleasure taken by the protagonist and her beloved is reduced to a series of statements of causation, submitted to intense pressure of time, and turns out to be the only “pure” joy the protagonist feels throughout the novel. Baudelaire’s famous “À une passante,” an example of the new urban lyric, ironizes the lyric tradition while similarly proposing the ephemeral as the source of perfect pleasure.

This chapter backtracks to 1601, revealing that the vogue for novels said to be true (pseudofactual) was in fact the outcome of previous evolutions, rather than simply a traditional practice or a reaction against an earlier fanciful novel (often called romance). Specifically, during the seventeenth century the novel mimed epic and tragedy in borrowing its protagonists from history, becoming measurably more “Aristotelian” starting around the 1630s. It was this Aristotelian novel that subsequently declined in the face of the pseudofactual novel described in Chapter 1. Taken together, these two chapters demonstrate that modern critical investment in a “single birth” narrative — i.e., that the novel rose where once there was nothing like it — is untenable.