The Literary Market. Geoffrey Turnovsky
claiming those rights in an effort to maximize his or her social autonomy. Only as they are filtered through those thoughts and that heroic struggle do the rise of intellectual property and the birth of the author acquire meaning.
The Precursor’s Silence
One individual through whose consciousness the “birth of the author” is thought to have been refracted is Pierre Corneille. In his long-term study of authorship as a juridical concept from antiquity into the modern age, Bernard Edelman highlights the playwright’s contribution to the “consecration of the author,” which begins with a moment of illumination: “the sudden insight lies in a simple formula: that the genius is free, … and that he owes this freedom only to himself and his own powers.”12 Bringing this insight to bear into the field of public discourse with his 1637 poem “Excuse à Ariste,” Corneille sparked the polemics of the Querelle du Cid in the course of which “a new sovereignty of the author” was outlined. “In these debates,” Edelman continues, “the eighteenth-century is already anticipated.” Underscoring the playwright’s precociousness, he echoes numerous assessments of Corneille’s foresight. Marc Fumaroli describes Corneille’s “concern for the economic foundation of the activities of the writer” as most unusual for the age. He points to a 1643 request for lettres patentes by which the playwright sought official control over the performance of three of his recent tragedies, Cinna, Polyeucte, and La mort de Pompée, construing the administrative appeal as an endeavor to protect his intellectual property rights in a time when, Fumaroli goes on to argue, “the notion itself was practically unknown.”13 Claire Carlin concurs, deeming the petition “a move unheard of at the time.”14
For Viala, too, Corneille is a “precursor” who mobilized to “benefit from the profits that he could draw from his works.”15 To be sure, the appraisal from a 1984 article must be nuanced against Viala’s much larger investigation into the commercial and legal claims of gens de lettres in his well-known 1985 study of the Naissance de l’écrivain. There Viala argues that a concern for money and property rights, especially among playwrights, was more widespread in the mid-seventeenth century than had been assumed. In this respect, Corneille stands out less as an extraordinary case for his “unheard of” claims than as a remarkably salient and illustrative one who advanced more forcefully what others were thinking: “Thus dramatists, and particularly Corneille, were the most active in asserting their property rights.”16 Still, while the tragedian’s singularity is no longer quite so emphasized, it is nonetheless conveyed by the relative dearth of other examples that might more persuasively round out the impression of a broad commitment to property and payments: “Led by dramatic authors, writers acted energetically and persistently to claim their literary property rights, initiating the movement that Beaumarchais would complete in founding the Société des auteurs dramatiques and in obtaining the laws of 1791 and 1793.”17 Viala goes on to conclude, “the affirmation and practice of literary property certainly already existed, therefore, in the Classical age.”18 But as further evidence only Quinault and Racine are mentioned, although neither make as straightforward and direct a case for owning the “rights” to their texts—whether printed or performed—as that suggested by the legal recourse of Corneille’s lettres patentes.19
In truth, the most deliberate, concrete, and widespread indications of a pervasive rise in the commitment among gens de lettres to a proprietary vision of authorship in Viala’s account lie not in anything that writers such as Quinault or Racine said or did, but in the efforts of others to resist the burgeoning sense of economic and legal entitlement. The most compelling evidence is, in other words, negative not positive. Viala describes, for instance, a monarchical backlash “to the demands of authors” in a series of regulations stipulated by the Conseil du Roi between 1618 and the 1660s. Among other things, these rules forbade writers to sell their own books except through the intermediary of a libraire; formally abolished the older and by that time mostly abandoned custom of granting writers general privileges to their entire oeuvre, including to works still to be written; and supported the increasingly common practice of renewing privilèges upon their expiration, which strengthened the position of established publishers who had an incentive to sit on their old stock.20 In each case, Viala argues, the goal of the Conseil was to undermine the claims of writers to payments from the book trade, channeling them instead into the state patronage system to which they were then forced to turn. In the process, of course, the administration would seem to acknowledge the intensification of those claims.21
Perhaps, though, the richest vein of evidence mined by Viala to show that something like a proprietary form of authorship was gaining currency in seventeenth-century France is in the proliferation of pejorative and satirical images of the literary “professional,” which run through a varied cross-section of writings. Viala cites the classic lines from Boileau’s “Art poétique” to exemplify the anticommercial discourse of the Classical era, which depicts publishing for personal gain and commercial reward as the sullying of a noble art.
Mais je ne puis souffrir ces auteurs renommez,
Qui dégoûtez de gloire, et d’argent affamez,
Mettent leur Apollon aux gages d’un Libraire
Et font d’un Art divin un métier mercenaire.22
[I cannot abide these renowned authors
Who tired of glory and starved for money
Pawn their Muse to a bookseller
And make of a divine art a mercenary trade.]
These lines are more typically invoked to illustrate a general disdain for profit within Old Regime literary culture. Viala, though, reinterprets them as an expression of resistance to profound changes that had previously taken place, according to which the writers of the time were already significantly reoriented toward the “market.” They point, in other words, not to the overall low regard in which commercialized literary activities were held but to their rise as “legitimate” practices: “far from signifying that the majority of authors disdained property rights, the satire indicates on the contrary that most pursued them. His discourse is defensive inasmuch as the opposite attitude had enough power to threaten this image [of the noble writer].”23
Focusing less on the anticommercial gestures per se than on their mounting intensity, Viala presents a strong challenge to the assumptions of an earlier scholarship that bought too easily into the “historical myth” of the Classical-era writer’s indifference to literary commerce.24 The forcefulness and consistency of the denunciations brought by Boileau and others suggest in fact that the reality was otherwise: the book trade occupied a central place in the experiences and aspirations of seventeenth-century writers. At another level, though, Viala’s analysis fails to tackle one of the key premises of the older views. For these strongly associate the commercial engagements of writers with their awakening to legal rights and economic dues, considered as a precondition to the ultimate liberation from the domination of Old Regime elites. Viala has certainly rethought the chronology of this process. While Martin’s “prehistory” suggested that the consciousness of literary property in seventeenth-century literary life was present only in an incipient form, significant only as it anticipates an eighteenth-century authorial revolution,25 Viala essentially argues that the revolution had already arrived.
But precisely in this sense his reconsideration of Classical-era attitudes toward commerce is less probing in its account of how the new entrepreneurial consciousness came to transform intellectual practice in the period. Viala holds to a reading of the book trade’s effect as an institution of modernization, the quintessential function of which was to incite and focalize in gens de lettres a desire for freedom from nobility by offering them opportunities to satisfy this desire. But Boileau’s rhetoric does not support such an interpretation. The lines do suggest that commerce was a draw for writers, which, it should be stressed, was not necessarily a bad thing. In his poem, Boileau also offers a positive image of the writer whose book “is surrounded by buyers in the shop of Barbin.” Commerce did present a clear danger, but not by cultivating in writers a desire for independence from aristocracy.