The Literary Market. Geoffrey Turnovsky

strong personal investment in publishing, and therefore of an authorial arrogance and singularity that the honnête writer had to avoid, is ultimately what, in the context of the premier champ littéraire, “commercialization” denotes. It develops, in other words, as a polemical articulation of the self-interest and vanity of writers, to the degree that these moral attributes are rendered particularly visible and readable in their engagements with the commercial production of their writings. It makes sense that writers who emphasized their reluctance to publish in upholding their honnête integration into le monde would be remembered for their resistance before a mounting outside force. But in positing the commerce of letters as an “objective” phenomenon existing independently of its repudiation by honnête writers, such an appraisal obscures the fact that resistance to the book trade was, paradoxically, the framework in which literary commerce took form in the seventeenth century as a viable, which is to say, a conceivable albeit illegitimate authorial mode.

      These writers would, by the same token, also be remembered for their attachment to “old-fashioned” practices, attitudes, and values; correlatively, their “anticommercialism” would become one of the identifying traits of their archaicness. Yet this brings to light a historical contradiction, in the context of which the following chapters will situate the formation of the “literary market.” For in the 1630s it was Corneille who, as a bad example, pointed not to the future but to the past, and it was his adversaries who fought beneath the banner of modernization. Those who attacked Corneille for his publishing activities did so not out of respect for tradition but in the name of a progress represented in their minds by the reciprocal integration of writers into aristocratic society and intellectualization of court culture.¹²³ The abbé d’Aubignac criticizes the playwright for not being up to date with current tastes. He chose violent and fantastic subjects such as that of Oedipus, which might have pleased an audience from an earlier, more vulgar age, one still plunged “in that old ignorance which [Corneille] had up to this point found indulgent toward his first mistakes,” but which no longer amused the polite society of midcentury: “it is better to adapt oneself to one’s time when one wants to please,” he writes, warning Corneille to conform to the “values of our century.”¹²⁴ In this reversed dialectic, “commerce,” too, rather than “anti-commerce,” is associated with being behind the times. Corneille’s “eagerness to profit” functions in the Querelle much like his “thirty years of schooling” or his crude Norman patois, namely as the sign of his backwardness.¹²⁵ Underscoring editorial activities that manifest this lack of honnêteté inasmuch they give expression to his vanity and unbridled self-importance, “commerce” indicates not Corneille’s prescient transcendence of the domination of lettres by nobility but the fact that he has yet to enter into this transformative relationship with elites. It places him at the beginning of a process not looking ahead to the end. Described by Mairet as a “clerk’s move [pas de clerc],” his involvement in publication points to an older humanistic model, to an older, coarser nobility that would have better appreciated his out-of-date subjects, and indeed to an earlier time whose real coherence consists in the simple fact that it precedes the elegant fusion of social and linguistic practices that lies at the heart of the new social system of mondanité. Far from a future independence, Corneille’s interventions into the book trade, played up in the polemical writings of his enemies, designate a “prehistory” against which the court elites and salon poets of midcentury would articulate a sense of their own progressiveness.

      What is more, this alternative narrative inverts the causal relation between commerce and modernity that is normally posited by the account of the heroic precursor asserting rights. In a standard telling, the expansion of literary commerce induces modernity by offering gens de lettres the material conditions for their social liberation. Commerce in this view operates as an external force that bends and alters the “traditional” practices, attitudes, and institutions of Old Regime literary life according to its own logic. In the confrontation between patronage and the book trade, it is almost always assumed that the latter, in opening up the space of the “literary market,” undermines the former as the opportunities extended by commercial print draw writers away from their rich and powerful sponsors, toward new liberated modes of authorship.

      But the story that seventeenth-century writers tell of their own transformation suggests a different sequence, according to which commercialization is not a cause but an effect. As it erupts into the Querelle, for instance, “commerce” is not an objective driving force of change, but a subjective valuation reflecting the social and intellectual evolution that is the institutionalization of the first literary field. In this respect, “commercialization” is not the result of the mounting interest of writers in commercial payments and property rights, as Viala argued.¹²⁶ Rather, it is the expression of a new kind of social judgment of gens de lettres, articulated in the diffusion of images of writers according a disproportionate place to their concrete, motivated involvement in publication. Tallement rehearses in detail the terms of a contract that Jean Chapelain received from the bookseller Courbé for La Pucelle—3,000 livres plus 150 copies including “several which, because of the paper and the binding, cost 10 écus and more.” Commerce surges into the world of letters in this portrait, but not because Chapelain was in fact more involved than other writers in the sale of his works to publishers, or involved in a way that others had never been. Rather, it bursts in as a transparent and powerful signifier of negativity, invoked to complete what is already a critical portrait of an individual whose stature and reputation Tallement wants to undermine.¹²⁷

      Finally, it is worth spelling out what is implicit in this analysis, since it will be central to what follows in the next chapters. Literary commerce is not only the effect of a social judgment; it is also, by this same token, the invention of that in the name of which the judgment is pronounced: namely, the cultural ethic of mondanité. And in this respect “literary commerce” does not refer to a natural, instinctive, or primal phenomenon. The tendency, though, in studying the historic role of publication in the evolution of literary practices has been to construe “commercialized” gestures—the demand for direct payment in exchange for works or the claim to property rights— as the manifestations of “true” desires expressive of the fundamental nature of the Author. By contrast, “anticommercial” moves—refusing payment or neglecting rights—are considered to be affected and constrained gestures reflecting incidental desires, such as those for recognition from social and political benefactors, desires assumed to be functions more of the contingent circumstances in which the writer operates than of anything essential to the nature of writing and Authorship. As a result, writers “automatically” move into the market of their own free will once they have the chance, but they enter into patronage relations only because they have to, for lack of an alternative. Commerce is then associated with “liberation” inasmuch as it is considered to furnish writers with just such a possibility, thereby allowing them to act on those defining drives, which had been repressed and disfigured by a symbolic order imposing on literary life a decorum seen as “artificial” since it reflects “nonliterary,” heterogeneous ideals and values.

      In the discourses of seventeenth-century literary selfhood, however, the opposition of “true” to accidental desires is exactly inverted. Here, “literary commerce” points to a disfiguration, not of the author, to be sure, but of the social function of the homme de lettres as imagined within the cultural configuration of le monde. And the desire for property rights and droits d’auteur are neither “true” nor “natural” but are the constructs of this symbolic order. Rather than discovered, they are invented as possible modes of writing and literary selfhood, which, driven by authorial self-interest and impoliteness, will offer a counterpoint to legitimacy. This symbolic constitution of “literary commerce” will be critical for gens de lettres of the eighteenth century, for as we will see, they turn to la librairie less for the economic and legal conditions of a social liberation that they will hardly find, but to position themselves vis-à-vis elite society, either within it following patterns inherited from the Classical age or outside of it, according to newer ideals that will root the legitimacy of writers in their sincerity, seriousness, and devotion to truth. It is the argument of this book that the “literary market” as a cultural field grows as much out of the seventeenth-century