The Literary Market. Geoffrey Turnovsky
montrer un sonnet que j’ai fait depuis peu,
Et savoir s’il est bon qu’au public je l’expose.88
[Since you have such fine judgment, I intend
To please you, if I can, with a small sonnet
I wrote not long ago. Please comment on it,
And tell me whether I ought to publish it.]
In other words, the activity in question is not simply the honnête writing of a poem but its honnête publication with the requisite inscription of the act of “faire paraître” in a friendship that would compel and authorize it. And clearly what is being figured by “exposer au public” here is publication in print; Alceste’s questions suggest that there is no ambiguity on this point:
Quel besoin si pressant avez-vous de rimer?
Et qui diantre, vous pousse à vous faire imprimer?89
[What pressing need do you have to compose rhymes?
And what on earth pushes you to have them printed?]
Reimagined in this way, and invested with a newfound significance for the construction of an identity whose status would be a function of its positioning at the intersections of “literary” and aristocratic life, the print publication of writing was, however, defined by two problems that would fundamentally orient its seventeenth-century practice. First, in having their works printed, writers who aspired to elite social standing ran the risk of projecting not their intelligence or their ennobling esprit, but an arrogant belief in the enduring value of their self-expression such that it deserved the permanence of ink. The danger of publication was, in other words, the danger of publishing nothing more than one’s inflated self-esteem. And indeed, central to the figuration of the “Author” in this period, as this denoted the activity of “bringing to light [mettre en lumière]” a book, was a collection of attributes that were all acute symptoms of the ethical flaw of amour-propre.90 In the passage to print, the author was assumed to be driven by vanity, pride, greed, and jealousy. Thus Boileau counseled aspiring poets, “Rid yourself … of authorial arrogance.”91 To publish was to confront moral opprobrium, a fact that Boisrobert makes clear in the avis to the 1659 reedition of his Epîtres en vers: “I know that I have been accused in high society [dans le Monde] of not neglecting myself in the love that one ordinarily has for oneself and for one’s works.”92 Consequently, expressions of modesty downplaying the merit of one’s writing as well as one’s role in its publication were essential. These, of course, abound in the writings of the period, and countless examples could be given. “In all ways, Reader, you are very little obliged to me. I am giving you a rather bad work, and I am only giving it to you with regret,” La Calprenède affirms in the preface to an edition of his 1637 tragedy, La mort de Mithridate, explaining his embarrassment as an “ignorant soldier” to be distributing an unworthy text, and that he did so only once he knew that unauthorized copies, “with two thousand mistakes,” had began to circulate.93
Second, publication might imply that one appealed to a broader public than the audience gathered at court or in the salon, and no doubt more crucially, that one addressed this public as a stranger to it. That is, the move to print introduced an image of the writer elaborated through a sharp differentiation with the reader, one understood spatially, of course, inasmuch as publication bridged but also called attention to the distance separating the two figures. But this distance indicated another separation, which delineated against a collective of readers the solitary, isolated figure of an author who stood apart not simply in space but by talent and genius as well. The cultural logic of honnêteté required, however, that gens de lettres project their integration into groups defined by concentration not expansion, and that they offer their writings neither as vehicles of individual brilliance nor as the effects of their distance from readers but as emblems of their self-effacing participation in the collective venture of polite society.
How, though, might a medium so effective in telescoping a self beyond one’s normal interpersonal networks bring the opposite result of focusing one’s presence within them? Writers had recourse to a number of established strategies: they could inscribe within the work itself the elite group as intended audience and inspiration by the prefatory reference to a circle of friends for whom they had initially produced, and who then convinced them to publish the text or even took it upon themselves to do so; they could restrict the work’s circulation, either by a small print run and stringent control over the distribution of copies—in his 1650 edition of Voiture’s Oeuvres, Martin Pinchesne stresses the “few copies that were printed”94—or symbolically by the incorporation into the work of a system of codes, keys, or references targeted to an exclusive group of readers who, knowing the allusions, drew from the text a meaning and a satisfaction that was specific to them and denied to a wider public for whom the references remained opaque and the text frustrating; and finally, they could root the work’s publication in the oral social practices of the court and the salon—or more exactly in a representation of those oral practices that conceived the printed work as derivative of and a prop to the urbane culture of conversations and group readings “à haute voix,”95 and writing as the image of speech.96
The Perils and Possibilities of Print in the First Literary Field
Providing an alternative backdrop to the conventional image of Corneille as a commercially oriented writer, this other social and cultural reality was constituted by the emergence of print publication as a gesture opening up critical possibilities for aspirants seeking to mobilize their intellectual capital in the quest for enhanced social status. The opportunities had little to do with making money or exercising rights, and even less with the prospect of independence from noble society. At the same time, the alternative reality was characterized by the evolution of publishing as a tremendously fraught act, which extended fatal dangers: “printing is the pitfall [l’écueil],” wrote La Bruyère.97 Indeed, publication appeared to subsume and intensify all the defining paradoxes of life in le monde: how to construct a self that would be admired for its humility; how to stand out through self-effacement before the group; and how to command attention by seeking to deflect it away.
In this respect, the act of “faire imprimer” presented to those who sought to write their way into high society, or consolidate their positions within it, the daunting prospect of a very fine line, with little separating success from failure, grace from inept self-promotion, and thus social integration from exclusion and isolation. In the avis to his Epîtres, Boisrobert affirms his modesty against those who questioned it by pointing out that he suppressed from the second edition “the praise which the most famous wits of the time lavished on the first volume.”98 But, wanting to valorize the quality of his intellect and his favorability in the eyes of eminent judges of talent, he does not suppress the reference to their existence, a fact that then seems to render the “modest” gesture heavy-handed and forced. The effort was too perceptible and as a result open to ridicule for its apparent hypocrisy. In fact, Tallement’s portrait of Boisrobert will not be kind, recounting the reaction of the comte d’Estrée to Boisrobert’s 1657 Nouvelles héroïques et amoureuses. Remembering the backlash against Corneille, and “seeing that Boisrobert spoke about these Nouvelles as of something beautiful, [the comte] took it upon himself to write a long letter in which he warns Boisrobert, without naming himself, of all the things in his book with which one might find fault.”99
But in its postulation of such a fine line, publication also envisioned a vital way to take on the paradoxes of elite intellectual sociability; for it offered the idea of a reconciliation between the seemingly contradictory imperatives of mondanité. Indeed, it was conceived as a medium that was amenable to the projection of a sublimated intelligence, socialized as the ennobling quality of esprit. To be sure, the endeavor was more prone to fail than to succeed. Above all, it was rare that there would be consensus on an individual’s self-presentation through print, and publication revealed itself to be a tremendously heated point of contestation, open to challenge at every turn. Yet if publication became a contentious affair, this speaks not simply to the profound ambivalence