The Literary Market. Geoffrey Turnovsky

      WRITING, PUBLISHING, AND LITERARY IDENTITY IN THE “PREHISTORY OF DROIT D’AUTEUR”

The Story of a Transition: When and How Did Writers Become “Modern”?

      The “literary market” has been a key concept in accounts of cultural and literary practices in Old Regime France, particularly for studies of the author as a “modern” principle of intellectual coherence and legitimacy. In these accounts, the birth of the author is predicated on the writer’s growing independence from early modern political, social, and cultural institutions, which for their part are presumed to inhibit the sincere, personal expression that will be at the core of the claim to distinction and credibility conveyed by the emerging ideal. This independence has been interpreted in no small measure as a function of the new possibilities extended to gens de lettres by a book trade whose expansion becomes, in turn, a measure of the growing ability of writers, by selling their works to publishers, to extricate themselves from the networks of Old Regime literary life in order to address a broader public, and in so doing claim a new kind of authority.

      In the effort to map out this process, scholars have been drawn to identify the first writer “to live by the pen.” Both Alain-René Le Sage and the abbé Prévost have been presented as inaugurators of such an independence for gens de lettres in eighteenth-century France, not for anything that either said on the topic, it should be stressed, but due to the fact that direct earnings from publishing seem to have played a relatively more important role in their overall trajectories than in those of other writers of the time.¹ Still, as Wallace Kirsop points out, “it is not easy—even in the eighteenth century—to discover someone who lives exclusively by the pen.”² Whatever place publishing income occupied in their lives, potential candidates invariably turn out, on closer examination, to have also been deeply implicated in the traditional patronage system, ultimately relying on noncommercial forms of support as much as or more than earnings from manuscript sales. Dubious of the received wisdom about Le Sage and Prévost, John Lough calls attention to their non-market income, including for the former a 600–livre pension from the son of Louis XIV’s foreign minister and for the latter a remunerative priory.³

      More fundamentally, though, the search itself is flawed, since it presupposes that writers had already discerned and internalized an essential, qualitative distinction between commercial and noncommercial pay, and that they therefore considered any move on their part toward market-based compensation as, in and of itself, a gesture of repudiation of noble protection in the name of “autonomy.” In early eighteenth-century France, it is not clear that even money-making authors such as Le Sage or Prévost perceived what they earned in the book trade as representing such a choice. Payment from libraires was scarcely destined to replace traditional revenue sources, but to supplement them when the pensions and sinecures proved inadequate to support the livelihood of the writer. In this sense, Prévost wrote for the commercial press not in order to free himself from the protection of the prince de Conti, whose almoner he became in 1735, but because this position, while offering protection and credibility, did not furnish income. It would therefore be more accurate to say that Prévost wrote for the book trade not to escape Conti’s household but to uphold his place within it, and to continue to reap the benefits that such a position brought him.

      As a result, more persuasive contributions to the debate have instead focused not on the first economically self-sufficient writers, but on those who initially imagined such independence, even if they were not able to live it out. Rather than identify the “first writers to live by the pen,” these studies seek out those who first postulated the idea, highlighting the conditions in which “living by the pen” initially became thinkable: “at least [a] possibility,” writes Lough.⁴ “In the course of the eighteenth century … we see progressively emerge, if not payment to authors as we understand it, at least the principle of a specific monetary remuneration for literary activity,” observes Henri-Jean Martin.⁵ Jules Bertaut’s 1950s study of Enlightenment-era “literary life” similarly emphasizes an emerging psychological landscape—the rising hope of autonomy through publishing—which anticipates but is not identifiable with actual self-sufficiency: “around 1770, the situation slowly modifies: writers have learned to defend themselves…. On the eve of the Revolution, they foresee that one day—perhaps—they will be able to live by their pens.”⁶ Among those considered to have glimpsed this day early on, Diderot tends to count as a prescient advocate of “professionalism” for writers.⁷ So does Rousseau, if in a different kind of mode, given that he mobilized not for writing as a “métier” but for the legal and commercial recognition of the inviolable connection between a writer and a work.⁸

      Yet while they are surely more convincing as descriptions of the hybrid conditions under which writers of the Enlightenment operated, such studies are probably no less idealistic in their characterization of the historical transition that these pioneering writers invoked. The implication is that, even if they themselves did not benefit from its fruits, nonetheless, through their foresight and keen anticipation, these writers represented a transformation in the lives of gens de lettres that was no less real for being deferred into the future. But it is well worth interrogating the nature of the change signaled by this new expectation. Writers envisaged a day when they would be fairly paid for their labors. We presume their visions to be meaningful to the degree that they prefigure an actual evolution. But what if they did not? And what if the development was in fact something quite different?

      Describing the late twentieth-century literary field, Robert Escarpit noted that a young novelist bringing a manuscript to a publisher with the hope of receiving a modest income of 10,000 francs for his work “has a lower chance of reaching his goal than if he had bought a lottery ticket.”⁹ Less provocatively, Michèle Vessillier-Ressi nonetheless confirms the view that only a fraction of writers in the contemporary period derive enough from the sale of their writings to publishers to support themselves. The majority—two-thirds, according to the data she has compiled—rely instead on an “accumulation of jobs.” That is, they must hold down secondary employment that not only “pays the bills,” but also, in the absence of direct earnings from publishers, might bolster the legitimacy of the individual’s self-identification as an author, given that these jobs are often as teachers or critics of literature.¹⁰ But “multiple job holding” undermines the autonomy projected in the utopian image of “living by the pen,” and challenges its central association of the social identity of the writer with the fundamental link tying an individual to his or her works, expressed in the defining labor of “faire des livres.”¹¹ Leaving aside the often very visible but statistically outlying exceptions,¹² it must be acknowledged that no writer today can really be said, without some qualification, to “live by the pen,” not according to the meaning that this phrase has acquired in the historiography of early modern literary practices. And in this respect, “modern authorship” is perhaps not a whole lot different from the eclectic and, in the language of Pierre Bourdieu, “heteronomous” array of cultural, institutional, and social exchanges that defined an individual as an homme or femme de lettres in the Old Regime.¹³ As Vessillier-Ressi writes, “we might ask ourselves if the amateurism which was the rule in the economy of creation of the distant past is not still a prevalent phenomenon today in the majority of cases.”¹⁴

      If not an “objective” socioeconomic regime in which writers could live by the sale of the products of their creative labors, then what do such writers as Diderot and Rousseau prefigure? What transition—if any at all—do they mark in reimagining literary practice in and through the commercial opportunities and legal rights of book publishing? The elusiveness of the shift is manifest, it seems to me, in a tendency to advance the history of authorship by always pushing the pivotal moment of authorial awakening back in time, with studies at least partly driven