A Matter of Competence: The Relationship between Reading and Novel-making in Eighteenth-Century France

Abstract

A Matter of Competence: The Relationship between Reading and Novel-making in Eighteenth-Century France RONALD C. ROSBOTTOM “Ce lecteur, il faut que je le cherche, (que je le ‘drague’), sans savoir ou il est.” Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du Texte The Enlightenment saw the introduction of a new and prob­ lematic concept into the relatively stable context of neoclassical esthetic theory: the function of the reader in the creative act. More generally, the whole process of perception had become integral to a new esthetic based on the theory that art’s effect was not indivisible, and subsequently that taste was a relative and individual matter. Of course, the post-Lockean, post-Quarrel (Rev­ olution in esthetics was extraordinarily complex,1 but for our purposes, let it suffice to say that the subjectivization of the esthetic moment created significant changes in verbal art which would not be fully realized or formalized until the Romantic (r)evolution. Perception, then, and more specifically, the cog­ nitive functions of the reader, became a dominant, persistent topic, not only in esthetic treatises but in the fictional works of the writers themselves.2 In this essay, I will concentrate on the effect this issue had on the appearance and development of the so-called “modern novel.”3 The essay is a prolegomenon toastudy 245 246 / RONALD C. ROSBOTTOM which, when completed, should skirt the boundaries of affective stylistics and literary sociology and lead into the domain of what has been referred to as “literary competence”;4 however, for now, I would like to sketch a few theories and conclusions that a more detailed analysis should substantiate. The thesis of this essay, once the initial premise is accepted, is two-fold: the relatively sudden appearance of the modern novel ruptured the generic expectations of an increasingly sophisticated reading public; as a result, the novelists themselves began to wonder if there were more than a few people who knew how to read their works. This lack of certainty about the constituency of a readership is one of the unique components ofnovel-formation in the Enlightenment. Without considering it, one risks misunder­ standing the appearance, development, and eventual disintegration of pre-Romantic, first-person narrative fiction. Nothing is new in the observation that reading novels written in the eighteenth century necessarily forces one to consider the role of the reader in their creation. The “dear reader,” “cher lecteur” interruptions of most novelists have been analyzed and codified in many studies of the novel, both here and abroad.5 The hypostatization of a “reader” and the attention to the demands of an “audience” form consistent leitmotivs in the history of literary theory. Yet, it is my contention that the novelty of first-person narrative fiction in the Enlightenment, its unexpected success, and more important, on the ethical plane, its seductive aspects imposed very quickly on those who chose it as a felicitous form a need to invent and persuade a readership for it. The development of the form, then, is inextricably linked to this discovered need for a sympathetic, expectant, and competent audience. Though I would agree, in principle, with Lionel Gossman’s observations that “communi­ cation was not yet a severe problem for the [eighteenth-century] writer,” I would not go so far as to agree that “the eighteenth century attained a happy equilibrium between writer and pub­ lic.”6 I hope to show that there was a preoccupation about finding such an equilibrium; whether or not it was found is still a very moot point. Reading and Novel-making in France I 247 The Enlightenment was the first book-centered age of man. It was the first age where literacy was widespread enough to serve as a backdrop to experimentation in the psychology and criticism of written narrative. It was the first age where the printed word became dominant and the oral tradition, and all of its attendant disciplines, lost its hold on man’s conceptual capacities. The Encyclopedie is more than a compendium; it is the coup de grace to mnemonics as a data storage and retrieval system. And, as one critic has recently shown, Candide is as much an encyclopedia of the techniques of the...