Pseudohistory and Metafiction in the Eighteenth Century

chapter 1 Pseudohistory and Metafiction in the Eighteenth Century

Anthony Ossa-Richardson

1 Pseudohistory

In his 2011 book, The Shock of the Ancient, Larry Norman paints a nuanced pic- ture of the French Querelle des anciens et des modernes (c.1687–1715), demon- strating the uneasy combination, on both sides of the controversy, of historicism and presentism—of a sense of the past as essentially foreign, resistant to modern values, and a sense of it as contiguous with, and capable of being evaluated by reference to, the present. Thus the leading ancienne Anne Daci- er (1654–1720) admired Homeric Greece for its alterity, but also found many points of comparison between Homer’s religion and her own Christianity. The same individuals could express their support for antiquity one moment, for modernity the next: there were “no pure and simple Ancients and Moderns among actual writers.”1 And the Ancients, whose intellectual richness it is Nor- man’s primary goal to exhibit, argued much among themselves: Jean Boivin, for instance, though he sided with Dacier against the Moderns, disagreed with her about Homer’s religion, which, he thought, was unsalvageable in doctrinal or moral terms, though all the better for its claims to poetic merit. Aesthetics and theology were separate domains.2 One figure in that debate is mentioned by Norman only in an endnote, and aligned closely with Boivin. This is the Breton Jesuit scholar Jean Hard- ouin (1646–1729), whose contribution to the Homer question has been almost entirely ignored by modern critics, perhaps partly because, by the time one

1 Larry Norman, The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 49; on Dacier’s historicism, see 1–3, and on her presentism, 144–46. On the themes of historicism and presentism from a much broader per- spective, see Anthony Grafton, “Renaissance Readers and Ancient Texts: Comments on Some Commentaries,” Renaissance Quarterly 38 (1985): 615–49. 2 Norman, The Shock, 148–49.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004412675_003 20 Ossa-Richardson reaches his 1716 Apologie d’Homère, one is thoroughly sick of the whole affair.3 The Apologie separates Homer’s literary skill from his theology—evaluated on its own lights, without the anachronism of later tastes, the Iliad was a master- piece, but its gods stood allegorically for the worship of fate and nature, tanta- mount to atheism, judged, of course, on the standard of modern Catholicism.4 As Norman acknowledges, this position is similar to that of Boivin, except that Hardouin is less forgiving of Homer’s theology; he concludes with a quotation from Psalms 86:8, “Among the gods there is none like unto thee, O Lord.” Da- cier replied to the Jesuit later that year, praising his morals, his learning, his reputation, and the order to which he belonged. But it was a pernicious error, she said, to equate Homer’s religion with atheism, and misguided to ignore the valuable moral lessons contained in his poetry. As for Hardouin’s interpreta- tions of Homer, his imagination had got the better of him, and, like Pygmalion, he had fallen in love with his own fantasies.5 But Dacier was taken aback by Hardouin’s argumentative strategy:

I am surprised that the reverend Father, instead of contradicting my conjecture, did not have recourse to his old principle and favourite argument, and say that these passages, whose conformity with our holy books seems so obvious, were added to the text of Homer by certain idle monks who, having read the books of Job and Isaiah, and the Epistle of St Peter, amused themselves by fabricating these impostures. Those monks, who around the thirteenth century added so much to Plautus, to Ovid, to Ter- ence, to Vergil and to Horace, could surely have sewn these patches onto Homer after their usual manner.6

3 See, e.g., Joan DeJean, Ancients Against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siè- cle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 100–101, with a slightly pretentious dismissal of the quarrel over Homer. 4 Jean Hardouin, Apologie d’Homère (Paris, 1716). Hardouin thought, 8, that Homer had been on the Trojan side, anticipating the famous view of Samuel Butler, “The Humour of Homer” (1892), in The Humour of Homer and Other Essays (London: Fifield, 1913), 64. 5 See Anne Dacier, Homere défendu contre l’Apologie du R.P. Hardouin (Paris, 1716), 4–5 for the praise of Hardouin, 63–64 and 84–85 on Homer’s religion, and 2–3 on Hardouin’s imagination. 6 Ibid., 17–18: “Je suis surprise que le R.P. au lieu de contredire ma conjecture, n’ait eu recours à son ancien principe et à son argument favori, et qu’il n’ait dit que ces passages, où cette conformité avec nos Livres saints paroît si sensible, ont été ajoûtez au texte d’Homere par quelques Moines oisifs, qui ayant lû le Livre de Job, celui d’Isaïe, et l’Epître de S. Pierre, se sont amusez à fabriquer de ces impostures. Des Moines, qui vers le treiziéme siécle ont tant ajoûté à Plaute, à Ovide, à Terence, à Virgile, et à Horace, pourroient bien avoir cousu à Homere ces lambeaux de leur façon.”