The Literary Market. Geoffrey Turnovsky
of the insight the numbers appear to offer. For one thing, viewed from this side of three centuries of currency changes and inflation, they strike us as alien and inconvertible. They force the question: what do they amount to in twenty-first-century dollars or euros? Yet most studies that rehearse these types of payments do not even try to establish modern equivalents for the amounts but seek to let the old numbers simply speak for themselves. What, though, can they tell us on their own? Some studies offer conversion systems, but with confusing, improbable, and arbitrary ratios they only seem to make matters worse, raising more questions than they answer.5
Of course, even if we could get an accurate idea of what, say, 1,000 livres from 1650 is worth in today’s currency, the more basic problem remains of establishing a “real” value in terms of what it could buy at the time, thereby determining what it was worth to the writer who earned it and, with the money, sought to stake out a place in the seventeenth- or eighteenth-century intellectual field. Benchmarks have been proposed. Viala notes that, “to make a good impression socially, one needed about 3,000 livres a year in the middle of the century, and about 4,000 at the end.”6 But this hardly offers a clearer picture than the raw numbers. After all, Viala does not specify what one would need to acquire with those 3,000 to 4,000 livres to present oneself respectably in Old Regime society. More important, such a guideline fails to get at the underlying problem. For if the figures seem opaque it is not simply due to the difficulty of knowing their values in terms of the goods and services they make accessible to aspiring gens de lettres, and which would be crucial for their claims to privileged cultural status. It is because such numbers tell us very little about the effectiveness of these claims in the framework of a society that was considerably less monetized than our own. We can know that with 3,000 or 4,000 livres a writer might obtain some of the basic accouterments required for a literary career in the early modern field. But the figures leave basic questions about access and legitimacy in a culture where these depended relatively more on unquantifiable assets such as personal favor, “qualité,” and “politesse” too unanswered to be illuminating as signifiers of the writer’s “improving” status. A writer might command important payments in the book trade, yet still be shut out of any meaningful place in the dominant social and intellectual networks. Despite the compensation—or more likely because of it—he or she might remain relatively marginalized in Old Regime literary life. The trappings of respectability might be devalorized by the very fact that they were accessed only monetarily and thus stand as the symbols not of the writer’s qualité but of the opposite: ambition, presumption, and thus low stature and rightful exclusion.
The truth, in any case, is that in the context of a history of authorship the growing sums that writers earned from their publishers are really meant not to illuminate the material life to which they explicitly refer, but to propel a narrative of forward movement. That is, the numbers become meaningful less in their concrete relation to the daily lives of writers than in the extent to which they round out the image of an autonomization process marked by writers’ struggles to “live by the pen.” Conspicuously greater than zero, the payments are equally obviously less than what they should be, and in this sense they situate writers on a sliding scale ranging from nonpayment in a primeval past to a “fair price” projected ahead to a time when they might finally earn a “decent” living without recourse to the largesse of patrons.7 The writer’s present is thus recast as an inevitably transitional point, not just from the “objective” perspective of the scholar examining the passage of writers from patronage to market, but also from the “subjective” point of view of writers themselves, whom we assume to be driven in their negotiations with publishers by a vision of an ideal future built on a mounting frustration with their present lot as “underpaid.” Their own experience draws on an ambivalent mix of hope and exasperation, which then defines the forward movement both as a psychological framework for understanding writers’ engagements with the book trade, and as a moral imperative by which writers can be judged.
Yet this raises a methodological problem. For the emphasis on income seems to beg the question of what is being studied. We take for granted that the focus on payments leads to the insight that writers became more independent as they were paid more. But the interest in the amounts earned appears in fact to be an outcome of the very history such an analysis seeks to illuminate. The idea that the history of Old Regime writers is the history of their liberation from aristocracy would seem to dictate—rather than ensue from—the enumeration of their payments in the book trade. Put another way, the analysis of rising income, which, with a focus on the legal rights to that income, has easily been the dominant angle in understanding the role of the book trade in the lives of Old Regime writers, does not precede and summon the conclusion that the history of authorship in pre-Revolutionary France consists above all in the gradual liberation of the writer from noble society. It is, on the contrary, the initial assumption that the history of writing must be the history of the liberation of the intellectual from nobility and monarchy that yields an investigation prioritizing the growth in payments from publishers as the privileged markers of this liberation.
Two important consequences need then to be considered. The first is a mirror effect resulting from this basic homology of a particular approach to an object—the teleological focus on “progress” toward the writer’s social liberation—and the object itself—the author seen as the end result of that progress. The effect is one of tautology, for in accounting for the autonomization of writers one cannot help but encounter the “modern author”, inasmuch as the figure is posited from the start as the personified image of this historical process. By the same token, in describing the “condition of the author,” no matter on which period one focuses, one always ends up narrating the same “progress of the writer toward independence” so long as the author is defined a priori as the pivotal agent of this evolution.8 As such, one might argue that the “history of authorship” is ultimately the history of itself. The investigation of the rise and development of a specific intellectual figure—the author—more than anything else defines and advances a particular conception of how intellectual practices rose and developed. It is hardly a surprise then that this history tends to find its own image reflected back wherever it may be searching. Whether in the eighteenth, seventeenth, or sixteenth century, the history of authorship inevitably finds an author to be its hero.
Moreover, given this incarnation of a teleology of intellectual liberation in a single figure defined by the process, there is a marked tendency for the history of intellectual autonomization that is the history of authorship to double, in turn, as a history of individualization. This is the case not only in the sense referenced by Foucault in his famous essay “What Is an Author?”—which considered individualization in terms of the focalization of the sources of intellectual authority and coherence in one person9—but also insofar as the writing of the history of authorship has so often been drawn to exceptional figures who stand out in their precociousness and unique insight against the mass of their contemporaries, and whose lonely struggles are then considered singlehandedly to drive the narrative. In a characteristic formulation, Raymond Birn observes that Rousseau, “more than any other writer of the eighteenth century, tried to impose his work on a free cultural market…. In his commercial activities as in his creative life, Rousseau was rooted in criteria of understanding that were original and personal.”10
Conversely, the history of authorship offers a paradoxical or incongruous account as soon as such transcendent cultural icons as Diderot or Beaumarchais are not its protagonists. The literary property debates of the early and mid-eighteenth century were, for instance, engaged not by forward-looking “modern” writers loudly asserting their “natural” rights but by wealthy Parisian libraires who sought to consolidate their privileges and extend their control over the industry. “Ironically,” Carla Hesse remarks, “the argument that ideas were the property of the individual author was first advanced in defense of the monopoly of the Paris Publisher’s Guild on texts whose authors were long since dead.”11 But what makes this “ironic”? Not really the specific circumstances of the literary world in the time, which do not in and of themselves imply that there was anything counterintuitive or strange about the leading role played by the Parisian booksellers and printers in the cause of intellectual property rights, or about the noticeable lack of interest of established gens de lettres in that