Inspiration and its Expression: The Dialectic of Sentiment in the Writings of Benjamin Constant

Abstract

The maxims in Benjamin Constant’s novel, Adolphe, have provoked a certain amount of interest on the part of scholars over the past several years. While some believe that the numerous maxims found in the novel are a vestige of classical form, aphorisms that do little for the literary work, others, more recently, have interpreted the maxims as a form of discourse that plays an important function in the work. On this level, they can be seen as an attempt to win the reader over to the perspective of the main protagonist, Adolphe, or they can be interpreted as an attempt to invoke closure within the work itself, with various characters seeking to impose their point of view on others (cf. Alison Fairlie 1981, and Colette Coman 1982). The maxim can also be interpreted as a search for truth, however, especially when maxims pronounced by the narrator are compared with maxims formulated by characters in the novel who seek to influence others, whereas the narrator’s maxims appear to have a different function (for a discussion of these different positions, see V. Kocay, 1995).