Disciplinary Options and the Discussion of Literature in Seventeenth-Century France

Abstract

AS IS KNOWN, the seventeenth century in France is a period rich both in the production and in the discussion of literature. Here I wish to offer some reflections on the latter, as seen from the point of view of the disciplines to which appeal is made, sometimes openly, though not always. If we study seventeenth-century approaches and attitudes in this way, we see-or hear-a complex and lively intellectual counterpoint, made up of lines of thought that are distinct but complementary; and we can discern in this ensemble the essential links that attach it to ancient reference points and to modern analogues. Anyone interested in understanding the continuity of literary opinion in the Western tradition will find in these seventeenth-century discussions a particularly valuable source of materials and insights. At the outset I have three suggestions regarding notions or attitudes of which we need to be aware as we turn our attention to things said three centuries and more ago. (1) Whereas among us a current commonplace in literary criticism holds that language is a kind of autonomous, determinative cause that constitutes the work and the writer, the opposite was just as clear to most seventeenth-century writers: that language is essentially an instrument, and free agents use it-some better than others-for expressing their thoughts or feelings or for making statements about the world. (2) Whereas it is commonly difficult for critics among us to conceive of the mind without distinguishing between conscious and unconscious spheres in mental life and without assigning some degree of priority to the latter in creative activity, the opposite was equally obvious in the seventeenth century: conscious mental activity-conceiving, judging, reasoning, imagining, feeling, remembering-predominate in artistic and intellectual invention; they throw light on the darker, more instinctive side of the soul, and serve to bring it into the sphere of