The dangerous book - a review of Dangerous Liasons

(A review by Sidharth Vardhan

of Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos,

A french classic first published in 1782

Review first written on September 2, 2021

My rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟)

It is an age-old idiom but novels should never be used as instruments of instruction. Milton tried to preach virtue by Paradise Lost and ended up making Satan attractive. Laclos tried to write against libertines but see! This is the next-level stuff. Besides admirable prose, and wonderful quotes, and the fact that I would have thought this novel was way ahead of its time if it had been written a century later and the censorship it suffered; there is so much else to admire here. Not only are letters here a narrative device and a means of communication but they also play a role in the plot. What is most impressive is that since these letters are written by the characters to each other and not in some diary or some anonymous reader, you hear characters not as their honest selves or as confessing to some anonymity - but as they wish to appear to the receiver of the letter. The two libertines (Valmount and Merteuil) in particular but also Tourvel (these french names!) are almost always playing a role, constructing themselves for the reader of letters. Tourvel, for example, in her initial letters to Valmont won't acknowledge the temptation she feels and pretends to be unmoved by his pleas. So what we get is not characters as they are but rather what they wish to seem to each other. This kind of deceit is most obviously true in the case of letters of seduction by Volmount to Tourvel. In his letters to her, he plays the role of a person he is not - religious, repenting of his old ways. A commonplace tactic of seduction, but he acquires the language of his victim - Tourvel in his letters to her. Another commonplace tactic he uses is claiming that he is hurting and that she is responsible for it. Both of those too create a character whose role he is playing. This act is so complete that Tourvel would later fail to recognize her lover in him when he shows his libertine ways. It is the case of letters between two libertines though, that this role-playing is more brilliantly done. At first, it seemed that the two were being honest to each other (they are so at least more than they are honest to others) but then you realize they have reasons to wear such masks even with each other. The two have a strange kind of amorous relationship - they are each trying constantly to impress each other by revealing the tricks they played on a third person. I almost feel as if they probably claimed to be far more heartless than they really might have been just to impress each other. A still from 1988 movie adoption Volmont seems to show less understanding of this relationship than Merteuil but then he really seems to show very little understanding of his own emotions and that of others. As Merteuil points out, he only knows what he has learned but lacks invention and has blind spots in observational skills. Even Volmont's libertine ways are just a role he plays probably unknowingly and clings to - probably because that is the only mode of life he understands; it has helped him distinguish himself and has given him a reputation which he values more than anything else. Sexual desire itself seems to far low in his motivations. Merteuil pointed out that he is more interested in the chase rather than conquest and at least twice he decides not to take advantage of women who seemed easily vulnerable. In the end, he is like most men - valuing women according to the amount of effort he needed to seduce them. Merteuil seems to show more awareness of the relationship she has with Valmont, she is one who has constructed this 'friendship' in which  - if my reading is right probably to create a space where, in a weird way, they show fidelity to each other, perhaps because she thought he won't be loyal in a more conventional way. She is often seen as spinning everything to suit the narrative of this amorous friendship - turning Vamont's seduction of Tourvel into a knight's quest for herself. She also takes offence when she discovers that Valmont is in love with Tourvel - almost the only time she lets down the veil of being untouched by anything anyone does in the book by showing anger. Pierre Choderlos de Laclos Although I don't like anyone who would play such games with innocents, there is something respectable about Merteuil. She definitely shows a higher level of observational skills and invention and the letter where she talks of creating herself (as against Valmont who was creating of traditions of society) is probably one of the biggest highlights of the book. She has a way of acquiring expressions of others and then using them her own way (another way in which letters play a role in the book) but her virtuoso is more visible in less verbal forms of communication. While Valmont uses words to seduce Tourveil and blackmail and force, nah, rape to seduce Cecile; Merteuil seduces her prey by listening and by feigning interest through gestures and facial expressions (far harder to control). Unlike Valmont, she chose (though even that may be a lie told to impress) the sphere of sex and betrayal rather than inherit it from some bad company. Unlike him, her object doesn't seem to have a great number of lovers, but rather to be able to be admired by men she herself admired. This art of deceit is how she (consciously) gives meaning to her leisurely life - valuing it enough to want to take Cecil as her student in it (although it may also be her way of easing her conscience for deceiving Cecil into giving up her virtue, for whom she seemed to have some genuine affection). Given her times, there probably weren't too many other ways for a woman to exercise her genius.

Coyright - Sidharth Vardhan