The Literary Market - Geoffrey Turnovsky Material Texts

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of his aspiration for a “modern,” which is to say here an anti-aristocratic, economically articulated independence. Yet it is not in the writings of Corneille that the image of his commercial savvy is to be found, but in those of his detractors who sought to discredit the popular playwright at the apex of his success. The chapter contends that in the course of the 1637 Querelle that exploded after the triumph of his play, Le Cid, Corneille became a screen onto which the anxieties of gens de lettres were projected as they sought to understand and define a specific category of activity—writing and publishing books—that had to be adapted to what Viala calls the first literary field. These anxieties were not so much reactions to Corneille or the doctrinal infidelities of his play. Rather, they were symptoms of a defining quandary that seventeenth-century gens de lettres faced, which lay in the following paradox: the rise in the status of leisure-oriented writing in elite culture allowed individuals with “literary” talent to claim a more enhanced social identity. But they could do so only so long as that identity adhered to the values of aristocratic sociability, which prescribed that, out of modesty and deference to the group, one downplay one’s writing and publishing activities. As such, only by belittling their literary pursuits could gens de lettres benefit from the social transformation that these pursuits, valorized nonetheless by the same society that demanded their belittlement, made possible.

      Chapter 2 follows the evolution of this fraught, ambivalent “anticommercial” ideal into the Enlightenment era, when it continued to impose itself as a prevailing vision while undergoing a substantial transformation at the hands of the philosophes. The chapter focuses on what can be called “philosophical” publishing, that is, the role of publication in the literary lives of those who constructed themselves according to the model of Voltaire. A central paradox has been noted both by eighteenth-century contemporaries and historians and critics of the period: whereas the philosophes are easily considered modern in their relationship to the political and religious authorities of their time, when it came to their intellectual property rights they refused to innovate, hearkening in their activities as writers to established Classical-era tactics of modesty, coy denial, and anonymity. But while these strategies situated the philosophes in a decidedly elite cultural milieu that was far closer to the literary field of Viala than to the commercial field of Bourdieu, they played a different role from similar strategies in the lives of seventeenth-century gens de lettres, by upholding a new formulation of autonomy. Repudiating the “douce liberté” of the leisured aristocrat as well as the uncouth self-sufficiency of a Corneille, the autonomy of the philosophes was defined in a complex negotiation by which writers positioned themselves between a broad public and a network of patrons. In gesturing to an abstract enlightened audience, they projected an autonomy from elites that would ground their authority as critics. These affirmations, however, drew their power as symbolic projections from the philosophes’ proximity to well-recognized and powerful protectors who, through their support of what was becoming known as a “movement,” sanctioned the grandiose selfimages that such writers as Voltaire and d’Alembert presented. “Philosophical” publication was both an effect and the undertaking of this negotiation between an abstract, idealized public and a more concrete readership of elites, in the course of which the philosophes had to adopt contradictory and equivocal postures, or at least postures that necessarily seem as such to us.

      More than a century separates Chapter 2 from Chapter 1. This is not meant at all to downplay the significance of changes that took place over the course of those years but to underscore the importance and durability of the honnête framework, which defined and oriented those changes, including not only the rise of the philosophes in the mid-eighteenth century but earlier developments as well: the novella, moralist writing, and the proto-Enlightenment scientific popularizations of Fontenelle and Bayle. I have focused on an early seventeenth-century debate—the Querelle du Cid—in which the evolving parameters and the polemical nature of this framework become especially clear. And by jumping ahead to the philosophes, I am not suggesting that nothing happens between Corneille and Voltaire, but that the figuration of the “literary market” must be understood as a direct and pointed response to the self-presentational rhetoric of a Voltaire or a d’Alembert; and that the latter cannot be understood without understanding its relation to the seventeenth-century discourse of authorial honnêteté, which stands both as a foil to the philosophes’ image of themselves as socially independent critics, and as the condition out of which their assertions of independence could carry any weight.17

      1

      Literary Commerce in the Age of Honnête Publication

      THE INVESTIGATION INTO WRITERS and the book trade in the early modern period has traditionally presented an exercise in the excavation of origins, driven by the effort to unearth “primitive” instances of what would later develop as standard behavior for writers in the commercial publishing sphere. In his survey of the economic, social, and political realities defined by the printed book in seventeenth-century Paris, Henri-Jean Martin suddenly describes a “prehistory” as soon as he turns to the question of “la condition d’auteur.” The focus on authorship instantly calls up the most underdeveloped aspects of a broad phenomenon that until then had seemed remarkable for its profuseness and penetration, as well as for the complexity of its mechanisms and networks.1 Why the pervading sense of incipience when the writer makes an appearance? One reason for such an impression, it seems to me, not only in Martin’s account but in others as well, is the marked tendency to conflate a general history of writers and publication with what is really a more specific history, that of writers’ moral and legal claims to compensation from libraires to whom they cede the rights to print and sell their works. Indeed, Martin’s incorporation of the Author into his study transforms it not just into a “prehistory” but more exactly into a “prehistory of droit d’auteur.” Referring to the payment that a writer received for the sale of his or her works, the latter term indicates not a generic but a particular contact with the book trade, one that certainly does not exhaust the range of possibilities. Nonetheless, it is characteristic of much historical work on authorship that payments are assumed to be something especially salient and fundamental.

      Martin then tells this aspect of the story largely through an enumeration of the sums obtained by writers in their transactions with libraires2: Benserade’s 150 livres from Sommaville for Cléopâtre; La Calprenède’s 200 livres for Mithridate (also from Sommaville); Tristan’s 600 livres from Courbé and Billaine for three collections of verse (Les amours, Oeuvres chrétiennes, and Vers héroïques); and Scarron’s 1,000 livres from Quinet for the Roman comique, to name a few examples.3 Such figures have the disconcerting effect of seeming at the same time significantly low and significantly high, a fact that further underscores the nascence of the writer’s “condition” vis-à-vis the book trade. They seem low to the degree that they stand out as artifacts of a distant age, elements in a life measured by a distinctly antiquated set of standards. But the payments also appear high inasmuch as we cannot help but read them in contrast to an even more primordial moment when writers received nothing at all from the printers or booksellers who put their works into circulation, other than maybe a few dozen copies of the books in question. Martin will reference this earlier moment explicitly, but it could just as easily remain implicit in its function as a powerful, everpresent myth of authorial origins. When faced with any evidence of writers being monetarily compensated for the “sale” of their writings in the early modern period, whatever the actual sums may be, we instinctively situate those transactions against a putative beginning when writers were not only unpaid but might be expected to contribute themselves to the printing costs.4

      Moreover, the numbers always seem both highly illuminating and utterly impenetrable. They grab our attention as sharply focused glimpses into the daily lives of early modern gens de lettres, all the more tantalizing

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