The Literary Market. Geoffrey Turnovsky
is the vocabulary of a “feudal” nobility. Radically self-legitimizing, nostalgic, conscious of its vanishing preeminence, and intensely hostile to the emerging culture of the court with its communal, self-inhibiting ethos, this language is spoken in Le Cid by the Comte.59 It is, in any case, hardly that of the professional author looking to make a decent living “by the pen.”
Alternative New Realities of Literary Life
All this raises a key question. Given the polemical nature of the connection tying Corneille as an autonomous writer to commercial publishing, what can we say about the underlying reality of the authorial condition? To what extent, in other words, does the association forged by writers such as Mairet and Claveret point to a real “stratégie éditoriale” pursued by Corneille and characterized by an unprecedented focus on property rights and profits? Answers to the question remain speculative in the absence of any direct statement from the playwright himself. It might, though, be fruitful to pose it a little differently; that is, what reality do these images truly reflect? They are normally assumed to indicate the legal and economic reality of the seventeenth-century book trade and commercial theater, in which Corneille’s participation, gauged by the 1643 “Demande de lettres patentes,” was in fact intense compared to that of his contemporaries.60 We have, however, observed that other interpretations of the "Demande" are plausible, according to which it reflects not an effort to improve the legal and economic status of the writer, but contemporary theater and court politics.61 It is worth recalling, moreover, that the lettres patentes for which Corneille applied did not constitute a privilège en librairie, despite being incorporated by Viala and others into the type of historical account of the development of literary property in which the privilège is often highlighted as a key intermediate stage. “Corneille was not simply content to defend his literary property rights to printed editions; in 1643, he tried to advance them durably to the performances of his plays,” contends Viala, seeming to equate the two mechanisms.62
Yet even granting that the lettres patentes might be fully comparable with a privilège, there are still reasons to doubt that the request was so unusual as to be “unheard of at the time.”63 Nicolas Schapira has recently shown that in fact a good portion of seventeenth-century writers, above all, “literary” authors as opposed to those involved in other kinds of writing—scientific, historical, philosophical, theological—asked for and received privilèges for their works in the Classical age, more than is usually assumed.64 Studying the records of the bookseller-printer Toussaint Du Bray, who specialized in printing nouveautés littéraires in the early part of the century, Schapira notes that, while only 6.5 percent of his editions were protected by a privilège granted to a writer in the years from 1604 to 1613, between 1624 and 1633 this percentage rose to 26 percent, and by 1634–36 over half his editions had privilèges directly held by the author. “By the end of the century,” concludes Schapira, “the privilège to the author seems to have become the norm”; indeed, a full ten of the fifteen privilèges the bookseller Claude Barbin held in 1680 had initially been requested by and delivered to gens de lettres.65
But, Schapira argues, if writers became increasingly interested in privilèges, it was not out of a nascent attachment to intellectual property or profits. It was instead out of a wish to enhance their reputations as gens de lettres inasmuch as they become aware of the effectiveness of the privilège in conveying royal favor. Bearing the king’s seal and the approving words of a royal censor or a secrétaire du roi, and printed by law in every copy of the book, the privilège was appropriated as an especially functional medium for advertising the social, political, and cultural legitimacy of writers before a public that always remained sensitive to the decorum of authorial gestures and was predisposed to receiving a book with a high degree of suspicion toward the individual who would be connected to it as its author.66 In his late seventeenth-century biography of Descartes, Adrien Baillet recounts that the philosopher requested a privilège in 1637 for the Discours de la méthode “to mark his love for and perfect submission to the King.” Living in Holland, Descartes was eager to maintain his good standing with the authorities in France. He would in fact be embarrassed by the eulogistic privilège général Marin Mersenne obtained for him from the Conseil du roi.67 Indeed, Descartes’s anxiety shows, as well, that the privilège posed dangers if the effort to acquire it was mismanaged, for it might, in upholding an image of the writer’s favor, also shed light on less admirable efforts of ingratiation and self-promotion. François Charpentier’s satirical account of Martin Pinchesne excitedly reading before a circle of friends the text of a privilège recently granted to him, comically eager to impress them with the official esteem that it conveyed, illustrates the risk.68
In either case, the intersection of authorship with the privilège system did not manifest the professionalization of literary activities, as many literary histories assume. On the contrary, Charpentier tells another story in which Georges de Scudéry turns to the mechanism in an effort to bolster— perhaps to fabricate—an image of himself as a retired soldier devoting his idle hours to poetry rather than as a writer earning a living from his plays: “Scudéry went to Saint Germain in order to have a privilège issued in his name, in which he has the King say that he commanded Royal Troupes, whereas truthfully, he has never commanded any troupes other than those of the Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais, and a few other troupes of provincial actors.”69 The privilège pointed in a wholly different direction, and indeed to quite another cultural reality of which the images of Corneille’s involvement in commercial publication might also be a reflection: not the slow progress of the writer toward professional independence but the evolving stakes of literary legitimacy in the 1630s, in the context of what Alain Viala called “the first literary field.”70
This reality is characterized at least in part by two decisive developments. On one hand, we have what might be called a socialization of intellectual practices epitomized by the emergence of distinctly social qualities like politeness and honnêteté as essential criteria for the evaluation of writers and their works. More exactly, this socialization was an “aristocratization” of letters, with “société” understood in the seventeenth-century meaning recorded by the dictionary of the Académie française, which accentuates the pleasure of leisured interactions and the exclusivity of elite gatherings.71 The process was thus one of the integration of writers into the networks and values of social elites, a process mediated by what Viala calls “institutions of literary life,” such as the Académie, court patronage, and salons. These and other similar bodies offered privileged venues and mechanisms for introducing gens de lettres and their writings into “the Court and high society,” where both authors and their productions would be judged according to emerging worldly criteria.72 Charles Sorel offers an allegorical account of this “New Parnassus,” describing the Muses leaving “their rustic caves for golden palaces where they frequently lived, having been received by the nobility of the age.” Apollo abandoned Pegasus, “an old horse” and “hideous beast,” for a stylish “Carriage.”73
At the same time, the elite assimilation of letters was matched by a reciprocal process, a “literary” transformation and redefinition of noble society and identity. We can understand this in two ways. First is the manner described by Delphine Denis, who, in her excavation of the intellectual production of midcentury salon society—“l’archive galante”—highlights the “aestheticization” of a self-consciously rarefied community, according to which the participation of its members consists in efforts to please the others through impressions made by dress, gestures, and language.74 These individuals become like works of art, to recall the analysis of Domna Stanton, defining themselves as objects of contemplation.75 Yet the pleasure they offer resides in their capacity to focus the attention of others not on their own éclat, but on their beauty as a direct reflection of the excellence of the group and its dynamic. They represent its interactivity and thus its cohesiveness.
This “aestheticization” is as a result fundamentally linguistic, and not only to the degree that the charming exchanges of the group are to be perceived above all in its conversations