The Literary Market. Geoffrey Turnovsky

in the “socialization” of gens de lettres as adept participants in le monde.

      In such a light, we might reconsider the role played by commercial publication in the lives of seventeenth-century writers in a way that better reconciles the growing centrality of the phenomenon with the apparent deepening of writers’ hostility to it. For it was as it opened up opportunities for intellectuals to establish and project their associations with the privileged and powerful that the vocabulary of literary commerce entered into the discourse of literary selfhood in seventeenth-century France. And accordingly, the book trade burst into the Classical-era field not as the result of a growing desire among writers for liberation from their patrons, nor due to its objective expansion, but as it came to circumscribe a recognizable space in which writers’ ties to elite society would be solidified rather than weakened. In this respect, the book trade became an institution of literary life with implications for the legitimacy of writers. Of course, it did so as a negative field. If a language of commerce was invested with significance for the self-presentation of gens de lettres, it was as this language conveyed the writer’s distance from the “market,” and as it meaningfully expressed, in the terms of reluctance, anonymity, and a refusal to profit, the writer’s lack of contact with its agents and procedures. The language nonetheless became meaningful, and through it, the book trade could be envisioned as an authorial field in which literary identities could be constructed.

      The Case of Corneille

      The case of Corneille illustrates the transformation. The playwright was widely known—and attacked—in his own time for the attention he paid to the commercialization of his plays: “In truth, he is greedier than he is ambitious,” observes Tallement des Réaux, “and so long as he makes money, he does not torment himself about the rest.”³⁵ La Bruyère paints a similar picture: “he only judges the quality of his play by the money that it earns him.”³⁶ Present from the earliest days of his career, such taunts established what would become an enduring image of the playwright’s abiding interest in profit.³⁷ They also provide a backdrop of “traditional” viewpoints against which Corneille’s foresight is contrasted, underscoring his philosophical and material resistance to the entrenched thinking of his age.³⁸ But a closer look at the anti-Corneille invective in its rhetorical context reveals a more complex situation. While the satirical images have been seized by literary history as direct reflections of a reality in which Corneille was more dedicated than others to the commercialization of his works, they can also be read as effects of a willful effort on the part of those generating them to shape—and fit into—a very different cultural reality, one defined not by growing participation in the “literary market” but by the integration of writers into an aristocratic society that for its part was becoming more intellectual and literate. Central to the articulation of this socialization process were images of exclusion from le monde, tendered not as proof of anything that was happening out in the world but as negative paradigms against which writers could affirm their adeptness for elegant society. Active involvement in the commerce of one’s works emerged as an especially clear figuration of social isolation; and by extension, the refusal of commerce became a powerful signal of the writer’s inclusion.

      In fact, the most consistent theme in the attacks against Corneille was a critique of what his detractors perceived to be the playwright’s strong sense of his self-sufficiency, manifest in an arrogant willingness to endow on himself the praise that he should have hoped would come from others. The abbé d’Aubignac, a persistent antagonist, castigates the playwright for his tendency to self-consecration: “this title of Great Man that Monsieur Corneille has given himself,” he writes in the third of four dissertations written against the playwright in the 1660s.³⁹ Literary historians have long pointed out that the quarrel erupting after the performance of Le Cid in early 1637, which is generally viewed as a debate over dramaturgical doctrine, was actually triggered not by Corneille’s failure to respect Aristotelian principles of tragic composition, but by his lack of modesty. Specifically, the Querelle was initiated by a poem Corneille circulated in the months following the success of the play, called “Excuse à Ariste,” in which he celebrates his triumph, depicting it as the sole effect of his own talent. He had, in other words, no support or cabal pushing for him, but only his own merit to thank:

      Mon travail sans appui monte sur le Théâtre,

      Chacun en liberté l’y blâme ou l’idolâtre,

      Là sans que mes amis prêchent leurs sentiments

      J’arrache quelque fois trop d’applaudissements,

      Là content du succès que le mérite donne

      Par d’illustres avis je n’éblouis personne,

      Je satisfais ensemble et peuple et courtisans,

      Et mes vers en tous lieux sont mes seuls partisans.

      [My work without support is staged

      And each in liberty can attack or idolize it,

      There, without my friends preaching their own feelings

      I come away sometimes with much applause,

      There, happy with the success which merit brings

      I do not try to dazzle anyone with the opinions of illustrious individuals,

      I please both people and courtiers,

      And in all places, my verse is my only partisan.]

      Corneille goes on to conclude notoriously (referring back to his verse):

      Par leur seule beauté ma plume est estimée

      Je ne dois qu’à moi seul toute ma Renommée.⁴⁰

      [By its sole beauty, my pen is esteemed

      I owe only to myself all of my renown.]

      Much of the ensuing polemic consisted in denunciations of this self-affirmation and the personal failing that it expressed. The tone was set by Jean Mairet, a rival playwright who quickly published a rhymed response taking Corneille to task for, as the descriptive title puts it, “A letter in verse, which he has published, entitled ‘Excuse à Ariste,’ in which, after a hundred expressions of vanity, he says about himself, I owe only to myself all of my renown.” The poem begins:

      I am speaking to you, Braggart, whose utter audaciousness

      Has in recent days been elevated into the sky.⁴¹

      The venomous exchange that launched the Querelle might be seen as incidental to the deeper issues at stake; in the words of Armand Gasté, it was a “chance cause, but a first cause.”⁴² Hélène Merlin, however, has recently argued that the dispute over proper comportment for writers was at the core of the debate. She inverts Gasté’s reading by suggesting that it was the doctrinal questions that were secondary, and no more than a pretext for an engagement with overriding matters relating to the place of writers in an evolving court society and to a consequent redefinition of literary practice.⁴³ To be sure, while doctrinal matters will dominate the judgment of the Académie française, which pronounced more or less the final word in the Querelle at the end of 1637—and which has, in turn, deeply influenced historical representations of the affair—when another playwright, Georges de Scudéry, first raised the question of Corneille’s dramaturgical transgressions in an Observations sur le Cid in the spring, it was in response not to Corneille’s failures as a craftsman of tragedies, but to his ethical lapses as an homme de lettres: “when I saw that he had deified himself by his own authority; that he talked about himself as one would normally talk about others, … I thought that I could not, without cowardice and injustice, abandon the common cause.” Otherwise, Scudéry goes on, “I am good and generous; … I had been happy to know the error without refuting it.”⁴⁴

      For Scudéry, the questions about doctrine were subordinated to the problem posed by Corneille’s immodesty, and served, above all, as part of a behavioral lesson designed to show how out of line the playwright was. Corneille rooted the celebration of his triumph in the “applause” he references in the “Excuse.”