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The Literary Periodization of Eighteenth-Century France
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Abstract
Critical and historical investigations of eighteenth-century French literature have been hampered by inadequate and often irrelevant schemes of periodization. If, as has been claimed, the secular division itself is arbitrary and does not respect the realities of literary production, other principles of division, such as literary generations, have not seemed more realistic. As for the contested attempt to equate the eighteenth century with the Enlightenment, its effect on literary studies has been to stress unduly the literature of ideas, especially as produced by the outstanding philosophes. Attempts to elaborate a rationale for a rococo-style periodization have raised more problems than they have solved, and may lead to unproductive theoretical bickering. Logically, it is only a systematic survey of the literature itself in the light of literary tradition that will yield truly literary periodizations, and it is only when these have been achieved that we can meaningfully investigate literature's relationships with other aspects of what might as well be called, with due reservations, the eighteenth century.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1969
References
1 Style rococo, style des “Lumières” (Paris, 1963), p. 11.
2 Les Générations littéraires (Paris, 1948), pp. 32–33.
3 La Crise de la conscience européenne (Paris, 1935).
4 According to Yvon Belaval, 1715 is a proper initial date if one is interested in generations, but 1685 is a better date if one is concerned with publications. As for the terminal date, one can choose between 1815 if one feels that Napoleon realized some of the basic aspirations of the eighteenth century, or 1785 if one thinks that the deaths of the principal figures of the age represent the death of the age itself. See the Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, ni (Paris, 1958), 571–573.
5 Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, xxvi (1963), 1207–21.
6 L'Idée du bonheur au XVIII'e siècle (Paris, 1960), p. 12.
7 Journal of World History, vin (1964), 426–456.
8 In Search of Humanity (New York, 1960).
9 Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, iii, 593.
10 “In Search of the Age of Reason,” in Aspects of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Earl R. Wasserman (Baltimore, Md., 1965), pp. 1–19.
11 Utopie et institutions au XVIII' siècle, ed. P. Francastel (La Haye and Paris, 1963), pp. 321–357.
12 Scholarship on the bulk of eighteenth-century French poetry and drama illustrates this point abundantly. As for the novel, it is no accident that the literary merits of Les Liaisons dangereuses were first recognized by creative writers (Baudelaire, Stendhal, Gide, Giraudoux, and Malraux). The scholars in the field, who for so long saw in this text little more than the subject of biographical and sociological investigations, have recently seen the esthetic light and have made up for lost time with a vengeance. Again, until very recently, La Nouvelle Héloïse has generally been regarded as a vast, indigestible, pre-romantic pudding, out of which one need only pull some ideological plums of varying degrees of succulence. Patterns of emphasis in research are not completely determined by assumed or accepted schemes of periodization, of course, but it would be difficult to deny their focusing influence.
13 In a helpful survey, Walter Binni points out that, like the term “baroque,” the word “rococo” was first used pejoratively in a general sense, and first applied systematically to literature by German scholars. See his “II Rococo letterario” in Manierismo, Barroco, Rococo, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Quaderno 52 (Rome, 1960), pp. 217–237.
14 Deutsche Barockdichtung (Leipzig, 1924).
15 Welträtsel im Wort (Vienna, 1948).
16 Formgeschichte der Deutschen Dichtung (Hamburg, 1949).
17 Barock uni Rokoko in der Deutschen Dichtung (Berlin, 1926).
18 Grundlangen und Charackterzuge der französischen Rokokolyrik (Breslau, 1930).
19 Der höfische Roman des franzosischen Rokoko (Greifswald, 1936).
20 Woman and Rococo in France, trans. Roger Abingdon (London, 1931).
21 An echo of this opinion that the source of what was new in life and art in the eighteenth century was the emergence of women is heard in the recent book by B rigid Brophy entitled Mozart the Dramatist (New York, 1964). Her Freudian argument is that men of the Enlightenment, having tried to destroy the institutions of church and state, felt like parricides. Having killed their “fathers,” they feared that they would be castrated, and felt that women would be the instruments of this punishment. Thus they embarked upon a sex war which came to an end only when women lost their inferior status and became morally capable of choosing their husbands.
22 “Rokoko als literarischer Epochenstil in Frankreich,” SP, xxxv (1938), 532–565. See also his section on the eighteenth century in his Literature through Art (New York, 1952).
23 Auerbach, Mimesis (Garden City, N. Y., 1957), pp. 356, 364; Spitzer, A Method of Interpreting Literature (Northampton, Mass., 1949), pp. 69–73.
24 The Philosophy of “As If” (London, 1924).
25 From the Renaissance to Romanticism (Chicago, 1962), pp. 159, 168, 177, 200, 218.
26 “A New Periodization of Literary History,” Romance Notes, ii (1960), 73–78.
27 This argument is, of course, reminiscent of Sartre's in Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (Paris, 1948), pp. 124–139.
28 “Le mode de la pensée du siècle rejoint, comme on pouvait s'y attendre, son mode d'expression artistique” (p. 37).
29 See, e.g., the reviews written by Patrick Brady (Studi francesi, Fasc. 21, 1963, 511–514) and Jean Sgard (Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, lxv, 1965, 120–121).
30 I am referring here principally to the fictional illusion achieved by Diderot and his precursors by use of a complex but interrelated multi-tiered structure, such as a story-within-a-story-within-a-story made even more complicated by interruptions which cut down through these narrative layers. Recent publications on Cervantes, Marivaux, and Crébillon fils, and more general studies such as those of Vivienne Mylne (The Eighteenth-Century Novel: Techniques of Illusion, Manchester, 1965) and Frédéric Deloffre (“Le Problème de l'illusion romanesque,” in Littérature narrative d'imagination, Paris, 1961, pp. 115–133) suggest that the rise of the novel was characterized, and not merely punctuated, by astonishing experimentation with forms and techniques.
31 This is very much the point made by Robert J. Nelson (“Modern Criticism of French Classicism: Dimensions of Definition,” Bucknell Review, xiii, 1965, 37–50) in connection with seventeenth-century French studies, when he discusses the difficulty of making responsible statements about the relationship between individual texts and large movements, literary or not, within the century. He concludes: “The revisions of the smaller and more significant units of interaction are still too few and too tentative for the codification of the accumulated revisions. It is still time to return to the Classics—there will be time enough for Classicism” (p. 50).
32 “Critical Judgment and Eighteenth-Century Litera ture,'AUMLA, No. 18 (1962), 153–166.
33 L'Histoire des oracles, ed. Louis Maigron (Paris, 1908), p. 33.