Persian Letters before Montesquieu

Abstract

A THEORY which assimilates too readily the changes of a literary genre to the evolution of the animal world, would have us believe that every new genre is the result of a slow and patient transformation of a preceding literary form. The 'laws' of this transformation are conceived as inherent in the genre and akin to the innate tendency to development in the cell. However, the genesis of a literary genre is a more complex and a less uniform phenomenon than the production of a new animal species. More or less clearly marked examples are found, no doubt, of a slow mutation of one genre into another-of the epic, for instance, into the novel-but there exist also genres which were generated as spontaneously as any form of human thought and expression can be. Sometilnes they flourish during a few decades and then disappear without betraying any tendency toward transformation. The minor genre of the pseudo-foreign letter, which is so characteristic of the eighteenth century, affords an example of one of these self-limited literary forms which seem to justify their existence solely as vehicles of the intellectual unrest and the aesthetic aspirations. of only one epoch. Not that the foreign pseudo-letter genre sprang into being fullfledged. Some thirty years before it culminated in Montesquieu's Persian Letters, it had its humble beginnings in Marana's Letters of a Turkish Spy. In these early pseudo-letters historical detail smothers almost entirely the few signs of intellectual criticism, but, during the next decades, the frame-the epistles supposedly written by an observant Oriental-was kept, whereas the picture gradually changed to a more detailed image of contemporary life and customs and, sometimes, to caricature rather than to portrayal. This evolution, inside of the genre, was determined, not by a mysterious force of expansion inherent in the early imaginary missives of Marana, but by the denunciatory spirit of the times which seized upon them as upon a new and a safe vehicle for incisive criticism of contemporary society. They presented all the advantages of a transparent disguise, which, on one hand, justified the aloofness of the critic's point of view, and, on the other, softened the bitterness of his utterances by laying them at the door of a man of a different clime and civilization. This mask-at first a mere 'badinage,'