Furetiere's Roman Bourgeois and the Problem of Exchange: Titular Economies

Craig Moyes

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781907747991
• eBook ISBN: 9781351192897
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Literature

"'If Furetiere (1619-1688) hadn't been friends with Racine and Boileau, if he hadn't been famous for his Dictionary and for his battle with the Academie Francaise, it is unlikely that we would still be speaking of the Roman bourgeois (1666). Its qualities are decidedly few. One cannot even say in its favour that it bears witness to a period and a moment in our literary history.' So writes Antoine Adam in his magisterial history of 17th-century French literature. But whatever one might feel about the aesthetic value of the Roman bourgeois - and following Adam it is usually classified as a precocious though failed example of narrative realism, sadly out of step with the classicism of its time - can we really say that it bears no witness to its period? Craig Moyes shows on the contrary how, within the disarticulated narrative of the Roman bourgeois, Furetiere - the titular abbot, the sitting academician, the secret lexicographer, the experimental novelist - was uniquely placed to explore a changing literary economy marked most spectacularly by the trial of Nicolas Fouquet (1661-1664), the decline of aristocratic largesse, and the subsequent centralization of artistic patronage around the personal reign of Louis XIV and the new administration of Colbert."

Preliminaries

Tolle, lege. This book is the result of a number of intellectual coincidences. It began as a chance encounter with an unprepossessing little volume in a poor nineteenth-century binding, found whilst browsing in a bookshop on the avenue Henri-Julien in Montreal. It was the title that first caught my eye: Le Roman bourgeois. As I was at that time thinking about Daniel Defoe, often considered (by English literary historians in the tradition of Ian Watt at least) to be the first genuine novelist thanks in part to his serious and essentially bourgeois concern ‘with the daily lives of ordinary people’,¹ my curiosity was piqued. I pulled the book off the shelf and read the preface.

There, I learned the fascinating history of its author, Antoine Furetière (1619-1688): lawyer, poet, abbot, academician and, during the early years of Louis XIV’s majority, drinking companion of a number of soon to be well-known young writers. Unlike La Fontaine, Racine, Molière, or Boileau, however, Furetière’s most enduring claim to fame would not be due to his literary works, but to his lexico graphic achievement, and to the bitter public dispute that occurred at the end of the century around the publication of his magnificent Dictionnaire universel. The revelation that Furetière, a member of the Académie française since 1662, was about to publish his own dictionary while he was supposed to have been working on the one that the company had been mandated to produce by its founding statutes in 1635, brought forth venomous accusations of intellectual theft from his fellow immortals, followed by an ignominious expulsion from their ranks. The protracted legal battle in defence of his project wore Furetière out and he died two years before his ‘Universal Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences’ would be published in Holland in 1690. When the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française finally appeared four years later — almost sixty years after it had begun — it was generally considered to be the inferior work.

These biographical details take up well over half the preface. But what of the novel? Charles Asselineau, the critic and bibliophile who is here offering the first new edition of the Roman bourgeois in 140 years, claims that the account of the Bataille des dictionnaires is ‘necessary to explain that the unjust oblivion into which Furetière had fallen should not be taken as an argument against his qualities as a writer, or even as a novelist’.² Quite the contrary. For Asselineau, writing only a few years after Balzac’s death, Furetière appears as the neglected precursor of a flourishing school of writing that had yet to receive its name.³ But when I finally read the novel (Reader, I bought that little book!), it turned out to be a rather disjointed affair in two parts: the first a comic tale of several courtships set amongst Parisian bourgeois salon society; the second for the most part a bizarre exchange between three characters discussing the papers of a recently deceased poet. Despite Asselineau’s enthusiastic claims for the Roman bourgeois, what struck me first was less its much-trumpeted depictions of reality than its decidedly odd narrative structure, an unusual focus on literary and social economies, and, most intriguingly, what seemed to be a sustained lexical riff on title, understood in a number of different, sometimes incompatible senses.

Being also immersed in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rhetorical treatises at the time, the term I found to describe this lexical variation around a single word was antanaclasis: ‘When the same word is repeated in a different, if not in a contrary signification; as In thy youth learn some craft, that in thy old age thou mayest get thy living without craft’ (OED). Now this term is rare, even amongst connoisseurs of rhetoric. It comes to us from Quintilian, who gives it in Greek in the Institutio Oratoria.⁴ Fontanier classifies it amongst ‘figures of elocution through consonance’ (along with alliteration, paranomasia, assonance, derivation and polyptoton) which, although common enough in Latin and indeed prized by the Ancients, ‘do not have in French the same importance’ and if they are ‘not entirely unknown [...], they are rarely seen.’⁵ Of course, antanaclasis is normally a figure applied only to single utterances, as in the quotation from Dr Johnson given by the OED above. Given a larger scope, however, I thought it might provide a clue to what Furetière was doing. Just as allegory can be understood as the extension of a single figure — it is traditionally called a métaphore continuée in French⁶ — the repeated emphasis throughout the novel on title, from the words embossed on its spine to its concluding paragraph, seemed to indicate a kind of antanaclase continuée, or extended antanaclasis.

Second coincidence: my time in Montreal overlapped with a short-lived but brilliant research centre, the CIADEST (Centre interuniversitaire de l’analyse du discours et de sociocritique des textes), headed by Marc Angenot, Antonio Gomez-Moriana, and Régine Robin from 1991 to 1997. Regular visits and papers by the likes of Claude Duchet, Charles Grivel, Denise Maldidier, Dominique Maingueneau and others meant that even if I did not quite realize it at the time, a number of fairly precise intellectual currents had already begun to percolate through my approach to literature. As its name implies, sociocriticism is concerned with the ‘social’ in the text, or more specifically the discursive articulation between the text — most fruitfully the literary text, but sociocriticism posits no a priori separation between the literary and the non-literary — and what Claude Duchet has termed the co-text: those traces within the text which open out not onto ‘reality’ as such (by definition inaccessible), but onto a ‘textual without’ [un ailleurs du texte],⁷ onto that inchoate, only partially crystallized body of discourses and social references with which the text must necessarily work. It is in this way that sociocriticism, although potentially able to draw on a number of established disciplines (history, sociology, semiotics, discourse analysis, linguistics, psychoanalysis, to name the most obvious), implies less a set theory, methodology or ideological parti-pris than, more generally, a hermeneutic perspective on texts which (whether accepted as ‘literary’ or not) suggest themselves for analysis because they present the articulation between text and society in a particularly rich and complex form.⁸ When I came to write this book, in which the question of title in both its social (titre de noblesse) and textual (titre de livre) senses appeared as the crux of its understanding, a sociocritical approach therefore seemed natural, insofar as sociocriticism has consistently attempted to find a way out of the dilemma between the theoretical extremes of ‘referentialism’ (the text is valuable for what it can tell us about the world) and ‘textualism’ (the text is an autotelic system that creates its own value and any world described therein is ultimately a pretext for its own ‘grammar’ and systems of codes).

Third coincidence: about fifteen years later, now about halfway through writing this very monograph, I chanced upon a copy of Michael Riffaterre’s Fictional Truth misshelved in the Maughan Library of King’s College London. Remembering my first encounter with Riffaterre’s Semiotics of Poetry in Lorraine Weir’s stimulating course on reader-response theories as an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia (back in the heady days of ‘high theory’; Riffaterre’s book had only then just been published),⁹ I idly picked it up and thumbed through it. I was surprised to find, in its concluding pages, an extended reference to a rhetorical figure I had seen mentioned almost nowhere else and that, consequently, I thought was mine alone. ‘Antanaclasis’, writes Riffaterre, adding his own very particular twist to the standard rhetorical understanding of the term, is ‘a repetition of a word with a different meaning each time. This trope is therefore a corollary of syllepsis. Text production by narrative derivation from a syllepsis may be achieved by transforming the syllepsis into an antanaclasis.’¹⁰ Although mentioned but once in Semiotics of Poetry, ‘syllepsis’ — the rhetorical figure whereby a single word is understood with two meanings at once — will become for Riffaterre over the 1980s almost a sort of ‘master trope’, effectively encapsulating the duality between a text’s (semantic) ‘meaning’ and its (semiotic and intertextual) ‘significance’. It is therefore, as he puts it in a key article written two years after Semiotics of Poetry, ‘the literary sign par excellence’.¹¹ With his turn to narrative fiction at the end of the decade, antanaclasis will appear as the narrative equivalent of the ‘sylleptic truth’ found in poetry: ‘as a special kind of subtext, one born of a syllepsis, [antanaclasis] is the agency through which the narrative accedes to fiction, and fiction, to truth’.¹²

Now Riffaterre is usually placed, armed with his ‘referential fallacy’, in one of the highest citadels of textualism, having argued at many points in his career that the text is ‘self-sufficient’ and that its understanding, its ‘truth’, requires only a knowledge of its structure and the literary intertext to which that structure refers.¹³ Indeed, Riffaterre’s critical hygiene requires him to focus only on the ‘finite, closed entity of the text’.¹⁴ His consistent elevation of the ‘literary’ at the expense of the ‘real’ — or to use his terms, his privileging of semiosis over mimesis — thus would seem, on the face of it, to make him an unlikely candidate to provide the theoretical armature for a sociocritical reading. But we should remember that sociocriticism (in marked contrast to a number of other approaches that find their theoretical matrix in disciplines anchored for the most part outside literary studies proper¹⁵) is principally grounded in poetics. Claude Duchet’s rather prickly interview with Ruth Amossy in a recent issue of Littérature (the journal — and discipline — he inaugurated thirty-four years previously with ‘Pour une socio-critique’¹⁶), returns repeatedly to the specificity of the literary text privileged by sociocriticism against the generality of the ‘discursive’ that underwrites discourse analysis. Whilst acknowledging certain points of convergence, Duchet states his own opposition to the tout est discours school of discourse analysis plainly: ‘I refused to reduce literature to a discourse’; ‘discourse analysis is ineffective [inopérante] in treating literature’; ‘faced with a literary text, the reader is not in a situation which can be compared to social exchange’ [dans une situation assimilable à une situation de parole sociale].¹⁷ Whatever Duchet’s emphasis might be on the ‘social’, and however much sociocritism multiplies its precautions against the ‘sacralization’ of the text, this is nonetheless a robust defence of specificity of literature. Unlike Riffaterre’s rarified notion of the literary, however, ‘sociocriticism has always taken care to avoid the temptation of closure. In exploring sociality, it looked within the text for that which forced it out of the text whilst at the same time remaining within it.’¹⁸ It is this somewhat paradoxical formulation, with its almost (almost!) Riffaterrean injunction to remain within the text (and intertext) of the Roman bourgeois, that I have tried to respect in the pages that follow.

So what then is the ‘social’ aspect of the Roman bourgeois that my reading attempts to uncover? In a nutshell, my aim is to displace Furetière’s novel from the literary frameworks in which it is usually read (e.g. classicism, where it is an anomaly; or the realist novel, where it is seen as a precursor), and to resituate it within the context (or rather the ‘co-text’, to use Duchet’s more pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Preliminaries
• 2 Definitions: From Allegory to Antanaclasis
• 3 Numismatics: Representations of Title
• 4 Mediations: The Title of Mæcenas
• 5 Names, Titles, Keys
• 6 Gifts
• Envoi liminaire
• Bibliography
• Index