Authors Present and the Experience of the Past Daniel Brewer

AUTHORS PRESENT AND THE EXPERIENCE OF THE PAST

ince the so-called cultural turn in literary studies in the United States, the Sexploration of the “literary feld” in the wake of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s work in France, and the growing impulse to contextualize literature by relating its texts to larger discourse networks, what could previously be treated as “literary” questions seem now to require framing in terms that are insistently and explicitly social, historical, economic, and political in nature. The question of the author is certainly one of these no longer purely literary questions. Treating it must thus involve developing ways to understand the mechanisms and practices that serve to institutionalize the literary through the mediation of other practices, felds, and forces. Becoming an author in the eighteenth century certainly did require negotiating a complex set of factors that together determined the condition of authorship. Thanks to decades of fne-grained analyses, such as those of Robert Darnton, we possess detailed descriptions of the cultural arenas in France and Europe in which aspiring writers—and not a few devious hacks— sought recognition as successful authors. Yet the thicker these descriptions of a particular sphere become, whether they involve the “real” world of the printing industry, for example, or the more imaginary one of the republic of letters, the more the empirical mode seems destined ultimately to bypass, or worse to occult, the very object that provides access to and an understanding of that context, namely, the text. Examining the question of the author in eighteenth- century France is important, for the author’s early modern emergence helps us understand better the development of literature as concept, practice, and institution, as well as its location in and contribution to a broader intellectual feld. But if we return to the question of the author via an interpretive mode, the empirical-historical, that underreads or misreads the text, and thus that skirts the question of interpretation itself, we ultimately may be on unsteady ground when it comes to stating just what “becoming an author” could have meant. To avoid this risk, we can approach authorship as involving a double mediation consisting of both history and discourse, the implication of one within the other, and the one’s determination by the other. Thus phrasing the question of the author and authorship in literary and cultural-historical

The Romanic Review Volume 103 Numbers 3–4 © The Trustees of Columbia University 286 Daniel Brewer terms must also account for the textual practices through which authorship took discursive form. Conversely, a discursive understanding of texts in which the question of authorial subjectivity is posed cannot neglect the relation between subjectivity and history. To focus exclusively on either a historical perspective or a discursive one is surely to misapprehend important features of eighteenth-century authorship. More signifcant perhaps, such an exclusive focus avoids the thornier issue of whether the historical can ever be excluded from the discursive, and the discursive from the historical. To decouple historical understanding from discursive understanding is to risk a double misapprehension both of history and of discourse, a misprision that fails to account for the reciprocal work of these two forms of literary and cultural understanding, each of which aims to explain, respectively, the workings of history and of discourse. The question then becomes one of imagining a way to write a genealogical history of authorship that could account for this double mediation of history and of discourse. Here follows one hypothetical version of such a history. The eighteenth century marks an important moment in the long history of authorship in France, a history determined by the complex interplay of social practices, cultural institutions, historical forces, and discursive forms. This history of authorship extends from the medieval auctor to—and likely beyond—the so-called death of the author popularized a half century ago by Roland Barthes and the “author function” formulated by Michel Foucault (partly in response to Barthes). The appearance of the author can be traced in this genealogical history of authorship by tracking the emergence of discursive forms and practices designed to establish the criteria for authoritative judgments and to found the writer’s legitimacy to make such judgments. Such statements would be ones that could be taken to be “true” above all, not because they are particularly inventive, artful, or beautiful, but because of their performative effect. Such qualities as inventiveness, artfulness, and beauty would be attributed to later forms of writing and thus can be applied only neologistically to earlier, medieval writing. To be an auctor in the medieval sense of the term, for instance, did not involve an individual scribe’s subjective expressiveness, artistic creativity, or aesthetic inventiveness but instead his ability to write in such a way as to display his skilled recognition of cultural authority. That authority resided in the auctoritate, the founding and authoritative texts of medieval culture that were signifed by the proper name and that established the rules and principles for thought, judgment, and behavior in the various branches of knowledge. As Donald E. Pease points out in his article “Author,” the work of the medieval scribe was “to interpret, explain, and in most cases resolve historical problems by restating these problems in terms sanctioned by auctores. These restatements commanded authority because they organized otherwise accidental events into an established context capable of making Authors Present and the Experience of the Past 287

them meaningful” (106). Insofar as we can imagine what the medieval scribe might have aspired to, it was probably not to establishing a new, innovative, or otherwise “modern” interpretation of authoritative texts but to becoming an author, that is, to being recognized as belonging to the body of authoritative references that would be referred to by future scribes. At a certain moment in this genealogical history of authorship, the status of the author no longer resembled that of the medieval auctor. What exactly brought about this historical change would need to be determined. For now though, we can note simply that there came a moment when what commanded authority in writing was not divine revelation, refected in canonical texts, or even the skillful negotiation of these authoritative texts but the expression of human experience, located in various places and times, expressed by writers, and felt at one remove by readers. The author gave voice and form to what was cast as an originary experience, and authority resulted not from conformity with a predetermined and recognized truth but from the discursive self-determination of individual identity as a basis for judgment.1 To explore in greater detail the eighteenth-century moment in this genealogy, we should frst anticipate briefy where the trajectory of this genealogy might point. Is it to an emergent modernity, one where the twin narratives of becoming an author and becoming modern intersect or overlap? The author’s “death,” as Barthes provocatively phrased it, certainly appears to be an end-stage event on the trajectory of authorship. By author, Barthes means what he calls a modern kind of subject, one that frst emerged at the end of the Middle Ages and that was later shaped, he claims, by such historical-discursive factors as English empiricism, French rationalism, and the Protestant faith in the individual. This authorial subject supplanted other forms of authoritative subjectivity to become the source of meaning, the person (in both a psychological and a grammatical sense) who/that registers thoughts, encodes wishes and desires, contends for power, represents the way things are, were, or should be, all through a writing over which the writer has mastery and that subsequent readers approach hermeneutically, as one would a secret to be revealed. That author is eclipsed, however, and made to disappear when

1. René Descartes, for example, in forging a discourse that would break with scholastic authority, performed discursively the experience of thinking. It is in this sense that the “I” of the Discours de la méthode came into being—not only as rational subject but also as author. Similarly, in formulating the experience of his own doubt as a constant negotiation of the claims of past authorities, Montaigne wrote in such a way as to try and to test authors and authorship, including his own. In these two overly familiar cases, as in many more, one senses the emergence of a different confguration, if not a “newer” and more “modern” one, involving author, authorship, and the authority to judge. 288 Daniel Brewer language takes the place of its so-called creator. It is then as if language speaks, or rather acts, and not the author. “Écrire,” writes Barthes, “c’est atteindre ce point où seul le langage agit, ‘performe,’ et non ‘moi’” (Mort 62). Henceforth the author is not that instance presiding over the text’s production; rather, the author is performed by writing and by the work of the text, becoming an aftereffect of the performativity of language. The authorial subject results not from what language states but from what it does. For Barthes, it is once the author has (been) “disappeared” that “l’être total de l’écriture” becomes visible in the text, an entity he defnes as follows:

Un texte est fait d’écritures multiples, issues de plusieurs cultures et qui entrent les unes avec les autres en dialogue, en parodie, en contestation; mais il y a un lieu où cette multiplicité se rassemble, et ce lieu, ce n’est pas l’auteur, comme on l’a dit jusqu’à présent, c’est le lecteur: le lecteur est l’espace même où s’inscrivent, sans qu’aucune ne se perde, toutes les citations dont est faite une écriture; l’unité d’un texte n’est pas dans son origine, mais dans sa destination, mais cette destination ne peut plus être personnelle: le lecteur est un homme sans histoire, sans biographie, sans psychologie; il est seulement ce quelqu’un qui tient rassemblées dans un même champ toutes les traces dont est constitué l’écrit. (67)

What heralds the death of the author is thus the birth of the reader, or rather the birth of a certain manner of reading. Defned by Barthes not in a personal, subjective sense but in terms of an interpretive potentiality, reading designates a way of realizing and actualizing a virtually limitless range of meaning inherent in the written text. The price Barthes asks us to pay, however, if we are to imagine ourselves as possessing this unbounded freedom to read, is that we must consider ourselves—or at least our reading selves—to be “sans histoire, sans biographie, sans psychologie” (67). But how can this autonomy with respect to history, subjectivity, and writing be imagined? (Or can it only be imagined?) Should we take Barthes’s postmortem of the author to be just another post-structuralist boutade, a distant memory from the heady days of literary theory navel-gazing, but a memory best left behind if we are to get on with the business of early modern studies in a fully historical sense and not in the wake of its apparent denial? One response to Barthes’s desire for a liberated reading practice—and the giddy wish it seems to express to have transcended the constraints of history— might be precisely to imagine ways to historicize that desire. How, then, might we understand the situation of eighteenth-century writers and read their texts in a way that takes into account the historicity of writing and of (our) reading? Authors Present and the Experience of the Past 289

For cultural historians, the question of the author in eighteenth-century France is best treated by analyzing various material factors that relate to and possibly determine the author’s historical situation. Chief among these factors is the development of scholarly academies, the notable example being the Académie Française, founded in 1635 as an instrument of kingly cultural politics. The following century saw the development in France of both literary and scientifc academies that were linked, through systems of correspondence and journals, to institutions and readers throughout Europe. In a real sense, these academies were not materially independent from a royal and aristocratic patronage system. However, in the image that academicians gave of their own cultural practice and the texts they produced, “literature” and “science” were represented as concepts and in terms of practices that belonged to distinct, if not totally autonomous, cultural felds. In the case of literature, there emerged in the seventeenth century, through a historical process of differentiation, what Alain Viala terms “the frst literary feld” (124), a sphere of action that was a subset of the broader intellectual feld. Academic institutions regulated the use of language that produced the textual objects located within this feld, their value (aesthetic, cultural, and economic), and the mechanisms of their exchange and consumption. Viala’s reference to feld theory recalls Bourdieu’s development of the notion of feld, in particular, his interest in the literary feld. For Bourdieu, the literary feld constitutes a sphere of action that displays the semi-autonomy of any social feld. Irreducible to an economic law— and herein lies a major component of Bourdieu’s critical engagement with Marxist sociology—the literary never achieves total independence from what lies “outside” the literary feld, however much the literary may be defned— or defnes itself—precisely in terms of such autonomy. “Outside” forces (economic, social, or political) undeniably have an impact on the literary feld, argues Bourdieu, yet these forces cannot be understood as being refected in the literary so much as they are refracted by it. The literary is characterized, then, by its internal mediation of socioeconomic forces external to it. One form this mediation takes in France is the production of mechanisms that frame and phrase writerly identity. In the seventeenth century, an entrenched patronage system functioned to attach prestige to belles lettres, an aesthetic object whose production and consumption were guaranteed by the existence of a certain socio-aesthetic subject, a cultural construct termed the honnête homme in which, as Michael Moriarity and Emmanuel Bury have shown, good taste, erudition, self-sacrifcing politeness, and ideology were entwined. Writers claimed the status of author by appealing to the imaginary construct of the honnête homme, a polite and socially integrated subject that represented a certain elite intellectual identity, an ideal that stood in for the kind of cultural and social integration to which writers aspired. Yet writers 290 Daniel Brewer were not perceived fully as literary professionals, free from determination by social-economic factors. The sense of “commerce” had not yet become differentiated, and it continued to possess an overlapping economic meaning and a social one (as in “le commerce des hommes”). Thus, to the extent that the literary feld could not be formulated in terms of a constitutive autonomy, the symbolic representation of the writer remained subjected to prevailing aristocratic attitudes and values. If cultural prestige previously had been attached to writers insofar as their work refected kingly and courtly glory, in the eighteenth century other mechanisms for framing and phrasing writerly identity began to emerge. Prestige increasingly came to be seen as stemming from individual genius, innovation, and the writer’s personal decision to work for other and nobler ends—the betterment of society instead of its leaders’ praise and its elite members’ entertainment. As Jean-Claude Bonnet has shown, the honnête homme will be supplanted by the grand homme. Testifying to a new logic of prestige, this equally ideal and imaginary fgure derives his greatness from selfess work in the name of civic and patriotic values. Aspiring not only to honnêteté but also to a certain grandeur, writers defned themselves increasingly with reference to an imaginary community of peers, citizens of the republic of letters. Claiming membership in this ideal and imaginary community made it seem possible to conceive of transcending the sociopolitical constraints of an illiberal and aristocratic meritocracy. Thanks to this ideal construct, writers could defne themselves as striving for egalitarian citizenship within a community based on the sympathetic communion of feeling, the global expansion of knowledge, and the progressive betterment of humanity.2 A profoundly ideal construction, this community was perceived as being potentially realizable in knowledge networks such as the Encyclopédie or, as Dena Goodman and Antoine Lilti have shown, in more social ones such as Parisian salons. With the development of new printing techniques, as well as the ever-wider and more effective distribution of printed material, these patterns of social and intellectual exchange intersected with patterns of economic exchange. The result was the emergence of what Geoffrey Turnovsky has termed “the literary market,” in which the intellectual, the social, and the economic were intimately entwined. The writer, this newly formed homme de lettres, had indeed gained increased freedom from the courtly, aristocratic patronage system of earlier times. Yet for the most perceptive of writers, it was clear that this autonomy could not be conceived, much less enjoyed, without confronting limiting factors that circumscribed the writer’s new status. Relatively free from a patronage system, the writer was subjected now all the more to the constraints of the

2. See my “Constructing Philosophers.” Authors Present and the Experience of the Past 291 market and the vagaries of public opinion, a double determination of the value (economic, social, and intellectual) that was attached to what the writer produced. Individual writers, from the denizens of Grub Street to the most recognized of philosophes, negotiated this complex and dynamic situation in various ways, which together make up the condition of the author and the rhetoric of authorship in eighteenth-century France. To consider two examples of this negotiation of authorship, I turn now to and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in particular to their reference to the writers of classical antiquity. Located somewhere between authoritative canonicity and free-foating intertextuality, the reference to classical antiquity is a crucial element in these authors’ staging of the experience of authorship. This process involves differing goals and outcomes in Diderot and Rousseau, but it reveals a similar discursively malleable negotiation of history, a relation that may have been possible (or could be imagined to be possible) only during the eighteenth century. *** It is barely more than a truism to note that eighteenth-century elite culture was permeated by references to classical antiquity. It is less clear, however, how to phrase that relation to the classical past without seeming to replay the way eighteenth-century writers, artists, and critics themselves described that past. Such a replay might do no more than rehearse, yet again, either one set of arguments or the other in the celebrated querelle of the Ancients and Moderns, creating a literary historical feedback loop recently examined by Larry Norman. Rather than repeat these arguments, though, we should attend to how the past was constructed in the eighteenth century, the manner in which the relation to antiquity was constructed, and to what ends. Both Diderot and Rousseau describe their intellectual formation, and thus their insertion into elite culture, precisely through references to classical antiquity. In the plan for a university that Diderot proposed to Catherine the Great, he describes the Jesuit education he received frst in Langres, then later at Louis-le-Grand in Paris: “Plusieurs années de suite, j’ai été aussi religieux à lire un chant d’Homère, avant que de me coucher, que l’est un bon prêtre à réciter son bréviaire. J’ai sucé de bonne heure le lait d’Homère, de Virgile, d’Horace, de Térence, d’Anacréon, de Platon, d’Euripide, coupé avec celui de Moïse et des prophètes” (3:454). Rousseau, too, describing his youth in Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, refers to the formative impact of classical writers: “Les hommes illustres de Plutarque furent sa prémière lecture dans un age où rarement les enfans savent lire. Les traces de ces hommes antiques frent en lui des impressions qui jamais n’ont pu s’effacer” (819). In the writing of Rousseau the voracious autodidact, other indelible classical traces can be found, including those of , Horace, Seneca, and Tacitus, as well 292 Daniel Brewer as Lucretius, Homer, Herodotus, Plato, Diodorus, and Polybius. Similarly, Diderot, besides translating Temple Stanyan’s Grecian History in 1743, well before the Encyclopédie project took shape, was well read in Greek history (Tacitus, Suetonius, Sallust, Pliny), as Raymond Trousson has abundantly shown. Diderot was also deeply familiar with Greek medical thought, as well as with the Greek materialists, Epicurus in particular and his proponent Lucretius, whose De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) is a major intertext of Diderot’s Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature. How are we to explain this deep and intimate relation to the texts of antiquity in these two writers (and the cultivated eighteenth century more broadly)? Can we rely on the notion of “infuence”? Not a totally inadequate explanatory paradigm, infuence nonetheless remains a possibly outdated, uncritical, or even precritical one. The idea of infuence harks back to a distant disciplinary past, a golden age of literary study and intellectual history, when the work of great scholarly fgures implied a seemingly total recall of masterworks of unquestioned value, of literary canons whose individual texts might change but without calling into question the unshakable notion of the canon itself and of national traditions, which themselves freighted numerous ideologies, from “author” and “literature” to “nation” and “modernity.” Under the infuence of “infuence,” thus understood, these models of academic teaching and scholarly writing promoted the goal of recalling infuences, establishing fliations, and selecting the “good” ones from all the others. In taking the history of literature and of thought as their object, the seekers of infuence have produced historical studies that effectively institute recontainment policies—interpretive strategies that engage with literature and philosophy—but only by bracketing these texts off from social and cultural history, if not from history tout court. The study of infuences serves thus not as a royal road to history but as a bulwark against its understanding. The issue, then, is not the infuence that the texts of antiquity might have had in forming Diderot and Rousseau as authors but the precise effect of these texts’ inscription in these two authors’ writing. Thus it is not by chance that I have frst approached Diderot and Rousseau by considering passages written in the autobiographical mode. For in their manner of self-representation, in Diderot’s image of suckling at the breast of antiquity or in Rousseau’s metaphor of texts that create affective imprints and ineffable memory traces, we encounter a relation to the past that cannot be reduced to the reception of an intellectual tradition, at least not without overlooking how that reception took place, its fguration, and its effective—and affective—impact. In large measure, knowledge of antiquity in the eighteenth century is bookish, the world of antiquity being accessible primarily through the mediation of language. To be sure, with the rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 1749, along with the growing popularity of the Grand Tour that expanded Authors Present and the Experience of the Past 293

elite Europeans’ knowledge of the northern and eastern Mediterranean basin, material vestiges of antiquity were encountered in ruins, sculptures, paintings, and medals.3 Yet the knowledge this contact produced was shaped largely by the already known, supposedly “new” knowledge made to ft preexisting narratives and bookish ways of knowing.4 At the same time, the web of existing knowledge on antiquity that eighteenth-century elite culture did possess was becoming frayed. This was the period when classical texts were popularized in collèges through collections of selections, which promoted a more superfcial and fragmented knowledge of the texts of antiquity, and when the practice of translation was expanding, which made translated texts linguistically more accessible but contributed to situating the still-untranslated world of Latin and Greek at an even greater remove. As a result of these and other factors (including the departure of Huguenot historians following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, along with the closing of Jesuit collèges in 1762 and the dissolving of the order the following year), the rich antiquarian erudition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries declined rapidly in the eighteenth century. Familiarity with Greek and the use of Latin diminished, and as a result the knowledge of antiquity became more superfcial, based on commonplaces and received ideas rather than on direct textual engagement. This is not to suggest that Diderot’s and Rousseau’s knowledge of antiquity was in any way superfcial. But I do want to claim that we should judge their engagement with antiquity, like that of their time, in terms of how the texts of antiquity were read, the impact those texts had, and the precise manner in which that impact would be channeled. Eighteenth-century writers and artists were less interested in recapturing antiquity truthfully, an antiquity cast in terms of objective historical accuracy, than in creating an antique truth, a vérité à l’antique, which was not so much historical in nature as moral, philosophical, and aesthetic. Indeed, such a distinction quite probably would have made little sense in the eighteenth century, given the nature of historical understanding at the time, a moment prior to the emergence of a more modern discipline of positive history. In any event, for Diderot, a privileged aesthetic space for creating this antique truth is found in theater, in the hybrid theater of sentiment that he calls the drame bourgeois and that he theorizes in De la poésie dramatique. The model for this new genre is classical Greek and Latin theater. But for Diderot

3. For a discussion of the British version of the Grand Tour, see Jeremy Black. 4. Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffer, French ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and an avid collector of antiquities, notes in the introduction to his Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce (1782), “Je goûtais d’avance le plaisir de parcourir cette illustre et belle région, un Homère et un Hérodote à la main, de sentir plus vivement les beautés différentes des tableaux tracés par le poète” (qtd. in Grell 273). 294 Daniel Brewer what is at stake is not simply an imitative return to classical models and a reviving of ancient forms. In his aesthetic imaginary, classical theater possesses a powerfully evocative capacity to touch and move spectators in ways both aesthetic and moral. In particular, in Diderot’s aesthetic imaginary, the fgure of the victim plays a privileged role, for it is in terms of victim and sacrifce that the most truthful of emotions can be experienced, feelings such as respect, fear, terror, compassion, and sympathy. These for Diderot are the feelings that defne the truly good individual and that bind him or her to others. Moreover, the theatrical event is one in which spectators experience not only the triumph of virtue staged before them but also an inner sense of virtuous selfhood, staged within. Consequently, for Diderot, the truly powerful effect of theater can never be discussed exclusively in terms of what occurs on the stage. Or rather, the stage of theater, that place where the truly theatrical event occurs, not only includes spectators but is centered on them. The performance onstage, if it is to be thought of as truly theatrical, must give rise to a spectatorial response that is theatrical in its own right, a privileged instance of aesthetic (and moral) performative subjectivity in which the spectatorial subject plays out his or her self and is moved and touched by that spectacle of staged selfhood. Here, in Diderot’s texts on the theatrical genre, it is reference to classical theater that provides him with a way to revive the French stage (and French society) by invoking the power of ancient theater to embody both aesthetic and moral values. Reference to classical authors and texts thus does not so much resuscitate the past as it vivifes the present. The kind of theatricality that Diderot theorizes in his writing on theater is not specifc to this one genre, however. Theatricality for Diderot is a concept and a practice that is multigeneric and transmedial. According to the aesthetic theory elaborated in the Salons, for example, the work of art should be judged according to its capacity to produce an impact on spectators, a forceful affective response that, as Michael Fried has shown, is staged and played out in the most theatrical of terms. The theatricality of this brand of spectatorship is abundantly visible in the Salons, where once again reference to classical texts is employed to designate the kind of ideal emotive painting that will produce the intense spectatorial response Diderot seeks, a response in which the aesthetic and moral self can behold itself. More specifcally, Diderot fnds in Homer a model for the way powerfully violent images—linguistic or pictorial—can produce intense feelings on the part of spectators. On numerous occasions in the Salons Diderot urges painters to be more Homeric, to depict savage images, and thus to generate in spectators an encounter with the kind of raw emotivity that wrenches them from an otherwise inauthentic and unfelt experience of art, one as stylized and vapid, as superfcial and artifcial, as much of the mannered painting Diderot rails against. “Il y a des fgures qui ne me quittent point. Je les vois. Elles me suivent. Elles m’obsèdent” (Salons 156). Authors Present and the Experience of the Past 295

Here Diderot calls for painters to abandon tired forms of fgurality in painting and to invent new and powerful ways to “absorb” the viewer’s being. Once again we can read Diderot fguring himself here as privileged spectator, whose own perspective is signaled by the obsessive grammatical repetition of frst- person markers (“me” and “je”). A stylistic microcosm, these four sentences stand for a brand of art criticism in which aesthetic judgment is intimately bound up with the personal, spectatorial, and self-representational response that Diderot’s critical narrative of the self so theatrically stages. Certain writers of classical antiquity function precisely for Diderot as these obsessively haunting fgures whose affective impact is witnessed in instances of self-portrayal. The prime example of such a fgure is Socrates, whom Diderot takes as the paragon of rectitude and self-sacrifce, the philosopher who embodied virtue by choosing martyrdom in the cause of truth over compromise to political power. It is telling that in 1749, during Diderot’s four- month imprisonment in the Château de Vincennes for having published the Lettre sur les aveugles, it is Plato’s Apology, which presents the speech Socrates makes at his trial in defense of his actions, that Diderot translates, supposedly from memory. For the philosophical “party,” the name Socrates was a cover word, a cultural reference and privileged fgure in the cultural imaginary that telegraphically connoted embattled and unyielding opposition. Tellingly, Diderot sees himself in the person of Socrates, using the reference to classical antiquity to represent himself as the embattled victim of entrenched hostile interests, a victim whose sacrifce can be redeemed only by posterity. Melchior Grimm, in his Correspondance littéraire, attributes the following invocation to Diderot: “Socrate, au moment de sa mort, était regardé à Athènes comme on nous regarde à Paris [. . .]. Mes amis, puissions-nous en tout ressembler à Socrate, comme sa réputation ressemblerait à la nôtre au moment de son supplice!” (134). Elsewhere, in the Réfutation d’Helvétius, Diderot writes, alluding to Socrates, “Oserez-vous blamer l’homme courageux et sincère qui aime mieux périr que de se rétracter, que de fétrir par sa rétraction son propre caractère et celui de sa secte” (590). In later life, Diderot turns away from the model of Socrates, as he attempts to formulate a more fexible understanding of the relation the philosophes might adopt with social and political power. Tempering the Socratic model, Diderot turns to Seneca, an important contributor to the development of Stoic philosophy, political adviser to the emperor Nero, and victim of political retribution after the uncovering of a plot against the emperor, who compelled Seneca to commit suicide. In his Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron, as well as in Le Neveu de Rameau in the joust between Moi and Lui that stages the clash between intransigent rectitude and morally suspect compromise, Diderot rethinks the Socratic model. As Louisa Shea has shown, he tries on the fgure of both Seneca and Diogenes, the cynic philosopher who does not 296 Daniel Brewer shy from speaking truth to power even at the risk of personal comfort and security. As Jean Seznec has shown, Diderot’s relation to antiquity was deep and vital. But it was not historical, at least not in any modern sense of the term. Through his reference to antiquity, he did not seek to recover the past in an objective sense, but to replay and restage the past for himself and in himself, as he sought to think critically about the present and the intellectual’s place in the present moment. Diderot’s relation to the past was not restorative but performative, the result of an artistic, discursive, theatrical act designed to create an ongoing experience of self, truth, and values. Had he lived in Athens, Diderot writes in the Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron, “j’aurais pris la robe d’Aristote, celle de Platon, ou endossé le froc de Diogène” (102). By donning the garb of past philosophers, as an actor does his costume, Diderot seeks a creative relation to the past that offers an effective and authoritative way to phrase the experience of authorship and to voice new moral values. More than historical, the relation created via the invocation of antiquity is social as well: “Ô Séneque! tu es et tu seras à jamais, avec Socrate, avec tous les illustres malheureux, avec tous les grands hommes de l’Antiquité, un des plus doux liens entre mes amis et moi, entre les hommes instruits, de tous les ages, et leurs amis” (Essai 39). Diderot was not alone in making use of antiquity to acquire the voice and adopt the stance of philosophical authorship. Rousseau also imagines it possible to transport himself to the past in order to cast a critical eye on the present. Rousseau privileges certain writers—Ovid, Horace, Seneca, and Tacitus, for instance—but he is more interested in using the past to fgure a moment of existential plenitude and of communal integration, a moment characterized by natural purity and simplicity. Throughout Rousseau’s writing, this golden age is placed in stark opposition to the falseness and superfciality of contemporary civilization, which fosters human relations based on alienation, narcissism, and desire. The course of history thus traces a fall from this origin, in a movement of continual decline and degeneration, as humanity descends into violence, inequality, injustice, and despotism. That descent is not absolute, however, or linear, for certain places and spaces preserve for Rousseau the features of this past ideal. In the historical mode, the ideals of Roman republicanism and the austere virtue of Sparta are invoked as correctives to the vices of luxurious civilization. In the fctional mode of the novel, La Nouvelle Héloïse describes the experience of moments of collective transparency and virtuous self-sacrifce, such as the country celebrations at Clarens. Finally, in the autobiographical mode Rousseau parallels Diderot in linking the past with the staging of the present self. The Montagnon community in the Jura mountains that Rousseau observed in 1730 and of which he provides a “slight idea” more than a quarter century later in the Lettre à d’Alembert offers a Authors Present and the Experience of the Past 297 rustic utopian version of this original ideal. No return is possible to this ideal, though: “Malheureusement j’étois jeune; ma curiosité n’étoit que celle d’un enfant, et je songeois plus à m’amuser qu’à m’instruire. Depuis trente ans, le peu d’observations que je fs se sont effacées de ma mémoire. Je me souviens seulement que j’admirois sans cesse, en ces hommes singuliers, un mélange étonnant de fnesse et de simplicité, qu’on croiroit presque incompatibles, et que je n’ai plus observé nulle part” (172). The impossibility of fully retrieving the ideal past is less important, however, than the staging of a psychological, subjective, and imaginary relation to that past. Thus Rousseau can write “Commençons donc par écarter tous les faits” when in the second Discours he sets out to analyze the origin of inequality, for his method is not one that seeks the facticity of the past. His objective, rather, is to reclaim the past— partially, imperfectly, as the product of an unreliable and frail memory—but to regain it nonetheless in order to actualize some effective part of it. Rousseau aims to fgure the past in such a way as to make it contemporaneous with the present, located in the tissue and texture of a subject seeking to be fully self-present by becoming transparently identical to what was. Greeks and Romans teach us, claims Rousseau in the Fragments politiques, “ce que les hommes peuvent être en nous montrant ce qu’ils ont été” (544). Through a commemorative, imperfectly restorative memory of original ideals designated by reference to Greece and Rome, Rousseau fnds a way if not to recapture that ideal, then at least to fgure it. The textually mediated encounter with antiquity is constructed by drawing from a reservoir of metaphors for that ideal, an encounter that produces transports, displacements in space and time, in speech and language, transfers that are as many ways of phrasing the ideal self. In the Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, Rousseau writes, “Quand on lit l’histoire ancienne, on se croit transporté dans un autre univers et parmi d’autres êtres. Qu’ont de commun les François, les Anglois, les Russes avec les Romains et les Grecs? Rien presque que la fgure. [. . .] Comment eux qui se sentent si petits penseroient-ils qu’il y ait eu de si grands hommes? Ils existèrent pourtant, et c’étoient des humains comme nous: qu’est-ce qui nous empêche d’être des hommes comme eux?” (956). As with Diderot, reference to antiquity in Rousseau is not to be read in terms of an objective retrieval of the past or the latter’s infuence such as it might be constructed based on positive historical knowledge. Instead, the relation to the classical past in these two authors is partial, in other words, incomplete yet also motivated, resulting from their partiality toward texts and writers, an affectivity that makes the reference to the past one of historical and discursive plasticity. It is this malleability with respect to the past that determines how these two writers defne themselves as authors in the present. In her study of antiquity in the eighteenth century, Chantal Grell makes the following methodological and theoretical claim: “Toute étude des 298 Daniel Brewer représentations imaginaires doit décrire les représentations en elles-mêmes mais aussi analyser leur lien avec le présent, leur ancrage dans le réel et leur marge d’autonomie par rapport à la réalité qu’elles contribuent à déformer” (2:781). It is precisely as imaginary representation that we should understand the antiquity that Diderot and Rousseau annex and reshape. There is certainly much more to be said about these authors’ place in the broader eighteenth- century retrieval and refashioning of an imaginary antiquity. To conclude though, I would like to refect on the need Grell stresses to analyze the link between imaginary representations and the present moment. With reference to this link between past and present, we can return to Barthes, who, in a short essay that predates “La Mort de l’auteur” by a few years, refects on Voltaire’s becoming an author. Characterizing Voltaire as “le dernier des écrivains heureux,” Barthes claims that Voltaire knew the “good fortune” of not having yet been overtaken by history. Freed from a patronage system of cultural production, Voltaire belonged to a class whose members were confdent that their personal good fortune signaled the nation’s prosperity, the happiness of its citizens, and the fourishing of French culture. Consequently, Voltaire’s self-narrative is one of emancipation, not marginalization. Voltaire can represent himself as both free from history and free to ignore it, imagining a static, Manichaean world in which there plays out the unending confict between good and evil, the struggle between la raison and l’infâme. Such blithe freedom troubles the Barthes of the Voltaire essay, who wonders—and worries about—what “nous [avons] de commun, aujourd’hui, avec Voltaire” (94). It may be that Barthes is trying to free himself from an overdetermining notion of history, as he seeks to slip out of the constraints of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, written a few years prior to “La Mort de l’auteur,” which casts a long shadow in Barthes’s writing of this time. Sartre understands the situation of the eighteenth-century author in terms of a fraught dialectic involving freedom and constraint, autonomy and determination, a dialectic that we unquestionably fnd running throughout the eighteenth century. Signifcantly, Sartre extends this dialectic to his own historical moment, where it plays itself out in the fgure and writings of the postwar intellectual engagé, who views the eighteenth-century writer as precursor, a fgure signaling one stage in the historical arc that leads to the twentieth-century intellectual (and perhaps, Sartre himself notwithstanding, to his—or her—ultimate demise). Sartre’s postwar diagnosis of the morally alienated condition of authorship in France, together with the promise of liberating transcendence through engaged action, is suggestive, appealing, and perhaps outdated. Thus it would not be without interest to update our understanding of authorship, seeking to write its most contemporary version. But the larger question involves how best to recognize and analyze the narrative support on which any such history would rely. If in our literary-historical analysis we approach the question of Authors Present and the Experience of the Past 299 the eighteenth-century author only to fnd the precursory signs of the modern, it is likely that the narrative of emergent modernity has come along as excess interpretive baggage. But at the same time, if we analyze the eighteenth-century author without considering the nature of the relation between the past and our own present that might inform such an analysis, we will have overlooked the regimen of historicity that does and must defne our relation to the past, and thus the meaning that the past can take on in the present. In the present moment, it can be only via the mediation of narrative that we can be connected to the past as an object whose meaning we desire to understand in thoroughly historical fashion. Diderot, Rousseau, and the relation to antiquity that they stage help us understand the nature of that narrative connection. As Diderot so tellingly shows in Jacques le fataliste, one is free to choose the narrative one wants, but one can never be free from narrative determination. Antiquity is a malleable object for Diderot and Rousseau, a cultural reservoir of images in which communal ideals are mirrored and individual desires are expressed. Moreover, both are keenly aware that as authors, they too risk becoming no more than someone’s image of them. For Diderot, the symptom of that awareness was his compulsive fear that posterity would fail to redeem him. For Rousseau, it was the cultural phenomenon of celebrity—or its narcissistic paranoid equivalent, notoriety—that persuaded him he had lost a truly authentic self and that its remnant, a mere image, was controlled by another. Despite these differences though it is somewhat beside the point to ask whether antiquity is treated in their writing in any positive, objective historical sense. Grand historical retrievals of Greece and Rome both precede Diderot and Rousseau in the antiquarianism of the Renaissance and follow them in the Romantic and positivist historiography of the nineteenth century. In between these moments, in a brief eighteenth-century interlude, when the imaginary relation to the past can freely be envisioned otherwise, Diderot and Rousseau reveal the past in its symbolic plasticity. In so doing, they display another historical practice and one that is not entirely different from our own.

University of Minnesota

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