The Literary Market. Geoffrey Turnovsky

self that are the emanations of his writing and publishing activities; and second, the imposition of this inverted relationship into certain quasi-official discourses such as dedications and privilèges, and consequently onto a small but crucial public willing to buy into it—if not fully, since there were many within that public who sought to unveil the artifice of the reversal, then at least somewhat. But no doubt, this was the best for which one could realistically hope. For in the context of the “first literary field” what was at stake was less the undisputed recognition of a “literary” identity than its recognizability, and the possibility that it could be claimed and defended. Opposition not only went without saying but was in the end essential to this recognizability.

      “Corneille,” the Book Trade, and Honnête Publication

      Commercial print publication became one of the first literary field’s central institutions as it was perceived to open up this honnête autonomy to writers. In this respect, the book trade found its coherence and shape for seventeenth-century cultural life not by offering writers an escape from dependence on aristocratic patrons but in the manner of other formations such as academies and salons, that is, insofar as it offered a medium for the invention and projection of an identity that would be legitimized, valorized, and thus freed to speak by the integration of the intellectual into le monde. It entered into the mental landscape of writers as an “institution of literary life” to the extent that writers appropriated commercial print as a mechanism of their elite acculturation, which in the spaces of self-presentation defined by the printed text—prefaces, dedications, notes to readers, introductory letters, privilèges, and letters patent—facilitated the illustration of their sociability, quality, and esprit.

      Correlatively, while we are inclined to assess writers’ early contacts with the book trade as implicit, primitive, and indirect claims to “literary property” or payments, the reality is that these contacts came to play meaningful roles in the literary lives of Classical-era gens de lettres insofar as they were converted into devices and tropes for fashioning, controlling, and polishing their images as honnêtes gens before the elite public from whom they sought their consecration. Even when they expressed proprietary sentiments. Saint-Amant justified the publication of his Oeuvres in 1629 by indicating in the preface his fear that counterfeit copies would circulate if an authorized version did not. The gesture is open to interpretation as a “modern” claim to the ownership of his writing. It is, though, appropriated by the poet not as an assertion of his individual rights but in an effort to find and maintain that fine line between modesty and distinction that was essential to honnête self-presentation. Hence the deep ambivalence of a gesture offered in the end as an expression of both self-effacement and self-promotion, with Saint-Amant initially submitting his concern about pirated copies as evidence of his humility:

      The just vexation that I have when I see the many small poets impudently claiming items that they have stolen from works appearing in my name, and the fear I have that some provincial bookseller would have the gall to print these items without my consent, as they have threatened to do, are what have led me to try to beat them to it [printing my poems], rather than any desire I have to acquire in this way glory.

      He goes on, though, to suggest that there is in fact nothing wrong with seeking renommée through print. “It is a somewhat too scrupulous philosophy,” he writes of the critical view condemning print publication as vainglorious and uncouth, “that not one of those who preach it would observe it if he had written something worthy of being printed.”¹¹⁶ Saint-Amant’s tack gives his anxiety a distinct resonance, for the stakes are not determined by a writer’s desire to ensure the integrity of his text as an authentic expression of his innermost thoughts. Presumed to be a “natural,” defining authorial desire, the latter motive orients most understandings of the proprietary claims of intellectuals to their writings. But those of Saint-Amant are determined by a wholly different aspiration: the desire for social legitimacy as shaped by the dynamic of a self-consciously “modern,” intellectualized aristocratic culture. It is in this framework that Saint-Amant’s proprietary feelings are conceived and expressed: not as a constrained or embarrassed desire that would be more freely and forcefully articulated if the writer were not so held back by heterogeneous considerations of decorum, but rather as a visible, significant, powerful vehicle of affect and value, which allows the writer, though self-denigration and modesty, to lay strong direct claims to the credibility of the honnête homme.

      The negativity of the commercial rhetoric in the self-presentation of Classical-era writers speaks less to the weakness or awkwardness of these writers’ assertions of preeminence than to the complexity of the book trade as an institution that enabled such claims. In this respect commercial publication must be distinguished from those other institutions of literary life—academies, salons, and so forth—with which it nonetheless shares the twofold agenda of integrating intellectuals into aristocratic society and providing le monde with the venues and media for its linguistic reinvention. For while, say, the “salon” as a cultural institution points above all to a specific type of refined, intellectualized sociability into which writers sought to insinuate themselves as they pursued their renown, it also happens to describe an actual space and a real event in an aristocratic household that they might frequent in the effort. As a result, the “salon” is a relatively intuitive concept, in spite of the fact that the conflation of “worldly sociability [sociabilité mondaine]” as a cultural system with the concrete practices of elite sociability can lead to confusion.¹¹⁷

      But as it is institutionalized, manifesting the rise of writing and print as social practices and vehicles of personal quality and elite status, the book trade refers, by contrast, to a space from which the writer is absent. It could, in fact, be argued that it is in and through the staged withdrawal of the writer from its sphere that la librairie can be said paradoxically to have been transformed as an institution of literary life, one in which writers might acquire recognized identities as gens de lettres and honnêtes gens, along with the autonomy to write in an ennobling leisure signaled—or even constituted— in the evocation of this disappearance: “[I] have no other goal in this work than the sole desire to please myself: for far from being mercenary, the printer and the actors will bear witness to the fact that I did not sell them that for which they could not pay me,” writes Scudéry in the preface to Ligdamon et Lidias.¹¹⁸

      In light of this, Corneille’s pivotal place in the history of writers and publishing becomes more intricate; he was not just a heroic “precursor” who alone among the gens de lettres of the period became aware of his rights and interests as an author, and then took the initiative to act on this awareness. He also came to play an integral role in the staging of this withdrawal as a negative model: “Really, if your writings are remembered by posterity, the fruit that they derive from this will be marvelous,” wrote Claveret, “but it will be in the manner that the Lacedemonians got their slaves drunk, in order to foster a horror of drunkenness among their citizens.”¹¹⁹ Indeed, for those seeking to affirm their absence from the book trade as evidence of their honnêteté, Corneille offered the stark counterexample of presence. His self-promoting rush to publish—“nobody twisted your arm to hasten you into publishing your mistakes with a royal privilège”¹²⁰—and to inhabit the sphere of the book trade in order to try to valorize his identity there was elaborated as a foil against which his detractors could portray their publication activities as symptoms not of their own desire for status and fame, though of course they were this, but of their restraint and selfless dedication to the collective. In his Observations, Scudéry points out that, having had no intention to criticize publicly Le Cid despite his reservations about its doctrinal correctness, he felt obliged to make a statement only out of a sense of duty to the community of honnêtes gens, whose core values were assailed by Corneille’s celebration of self: “I thought that I could not without injustice and cowardice abandon the common cause.”¹²¹ Claveret, too, plays up his gracious reluctance to get involved through a sharp contrast with Corneille’s eagerness to jump into the fray: “I am not happy that a remark so unfavorable to you must come from my pen, and that I am reduced to this shameful necessity of circulating my letter by the same means that you used in order to sell [débiter] your attacks.”¹²²