not simply in space but by talent and genius as well. The cultural logic of honnêteté required, however, that gens de lettres project their integration into groups defined by concentration not expansion, and that they offer their writings neither as vehicles of individual brilliance nor as the effects of their distance from readers but as emblems of their self-effacing participation in the collective venture of polite society.
How, though, might a medium so effective in telescoping a self beyond one’s normal interpersonal networks bring the opposite result of focusing one’s presence within them? Writers had recourse to a number of established strategies: they could inscribe within the work itself the elite group as intended audience and inspiration by the prefatory reference to a circle of friends for whom they had initially produced, and who then convinced them to publish the text or even took it upon themselves to do so; they could restrict the work’s circulation, either by a small print run and stringent control over the distribution of copies—in his 1650 edition of Voiture’s Oeuvres, Martin Pinchesne stresses the “few copies that were printed”94—or symbolically by the incorporation into the work of a system of codes, keys, or references targeted to an exclusive group of readers who, knowing the allusions, drew from the text a meaning and a satisfaction that was specific to them and denied to a wider public for whom the references remained opaque and the text frustrating; and finally, they could root the work’s publication in the oral social practices of the court and the salon—or more exactly in a representation of those oral practices that conceived the printed work as derivative of and a prop to the urbane culture of conversations and group readings “à haute voix,”95 and writing as the image of speech.96
The Perils and Possibilities of Print in the First Literary Field
Providing an alternative backdrop to the conventional image of Corneille as a commercially oriented writer, this other social and cultural reality was constituted by the emergence of print publication as a gesture opening up critical possibilities for aspirants seeking to mobilize their intellectual capital in the quest for enhanced social status. The opportunities had little to do with making money or exercising rights, and even less with the prospect of independence from noble society. At the same time, the alternative reality was characterized by the evolution of publishing as a tremendously fraught act, which extended fatal dangers: “printing is the pitfall [l’écueil],” wrote La Bruyère.97 Indeed, publication appeared to subsume and intensify all the defining paradoxes of life in le monde: how to construct a self that would be admired for its humility; how to stand out through self-effacement before the group; and how to command attention by seeking to deflect it away.
In this respect, the act of “faire imprimer” presented to those who sought to write their way into high society, or consolidate their positions within it, the daunting prospect of a very fine line, with little separating success from failure, grace from inept self-promotion, and thus social integration from exclusion and isolation. In the avis to his Epîtres, Boisrobert affirms his modesty against those who questioned it by pointing out that he suppressed from the second edition “the praise which the most famous wits of the time lavished on the first volume.”98 But, wanting to valorize the quality of his intellect and his favorability in the eyes of eminent judges of talent, he does not suppress the reference to their existence, a fact that then seems to render the “modest” gesture heavy-handed and forced. The effort was too perceptible and as a result open to ridicule for its apparent hypocrisy. In fact, Tallement’s portrait of Boisrobert will not be kind, recounting the reaction of the comte d’Estrée to Boisrobert’s 1657 Nouvelles héroïques et amoureuses. Remembering the backlash against Corneille, and “seeing that Boisrobert spoke about these Nouvelles as of something beautiful, [the comte] took it upon himself to write a long letter in which he warns Boisrobert, without naming himself, of all the things in his book with which one might find fault.”99
But in its postulation of such a fine line, publication also envisioned a vital way to take on the paradoxes of elite intellectual sociability; for it offered the idea of a reconciliation between the seemingly contradictory imperatives of mondanité. Indeed, it was conceived as a medium that was amenable to the projection of a sublimated intelligence, socialized as the ennobling quality of esprit. To be sure, the endeavor was more prone to fail than to succeed. Above all, it was rare that there would be consensus on an individual’s self-presentation through print, and publication revealed itself to be a tremendously heated point of contestation, open to challenge at every turn. Yet if publication became a contentious affair, this speaks not simply to the profound ambivalence of the gesture in the context of seventeenth-century polite society, but also to the fact that the stakes were high and getting higher, as the act of “faire paraître [a book of poem]” was invested with significance for elite life, becoming perhaps the primary medium for advancing claims to elite social status, particularly for those seeking to base that claim on intelligence rather than blood, strength, or fortune. It is in this ascendancy, one can argue, that literary life takes shape. For the rise of print publication as a remarkably effective conduit for the assertion and reflection of social prestige represents one key index of the formation of the “first literary field,” as Alain Viala defined it.
Viala describes a process by which a subset of intellectual practices— namely belles-lettres, referring to a set of creative activities identified by the fact that they are undertaken in view of offering what might be called “aesthetic” pleasure, though they are also closely tied to the pleasures of “society”100—was distinguished within the broader field of “letters” as they were concentrated in particular spaces—courts, academies, and salons— recognized as privileged sites for their undertaking and appreciation, as well as for the judgment of those engaged in them. According to Viala, the process was one of “autonomization.” However, autonomization is a loaded and multivalent term, as we have seen, which functions at a number of different levels. It can refer to the autonomy of the “aesthetic,” indicating an activity whose end is its own contemplation and enjoyment. It might also point to the autonomy of a discipline whose coherence is recognized and institutionalized, for instance, in a system of prizes or in a pedagogical program.101 Finally, the term can refer to the autonomy of a series of practices viewed together as a sufficient basis for a distinct, coherent, and even valorized social identity, one able as such to support the individual economically and symbolically. It is no doubt this sense that Viala has in mind when he writes, “literary activity has at its disposal a certain autonomy within social structures, and possibilities of work and compensation which are specific to it.”102
It would be a mistake, though, to understand the term here in what is certainly its more modern and intuitive signification. For the autonomy of the first literary field had little to do with freedom from the control of the politically powerful and the socially dominant. On the contrary, it was a function of the ascendancy of cultural institutions that were created at the initiative of elites and operated under their stewardship, bringing writers into their orbit rather than out of it. Christian Jouhaud has recently traced what he subtitles “the history of a paradox,” according to which the “growing autonomy” of writers in the Classical age was possible only as the outcome of their growing dependence on authorities. Drawn into relationships of service with patrons and the state, they were made directly subordinate, to be sure. Yet their expanding role in the exercise of political power as propagandists and normalizers of language, as well as in the elaboration of a self-consciously “modern” elite social culture, was at the same time acknowledged and institutionalized, thereby rendering the social identity of writer not just legitimate but desirable, prestigious, and lucrative, and sufficient.103 For their part, the gens de lettres of the period consistently conveyed a sense of their own “freedom of expression” as a direct function of their subjecthood vis-à-vis a prince, or of their subservience in strongly hierarchical relations of protection. “I am born free, and we live under the domination of a Prince who lets us peacefully enjoy an honorable license to do as we please,” writes d’Aubignac, justifying the printing of his third Dissertation against Corneille.104 Such “liberty” was construed as a benefit of the
