The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa
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into a normative imaginary. One might argue, in fact, that the imaginary marked the need for a respite from the competitive realities of aristocratic life. We cannot assume, though, that the respite actually eliminated the competitive maneuvers for reputation. It was just as likely to veil them. To captivate others on apparent terms of equality might be an act of aggression, an imposition of superiority; one could prevail by not seeming to want to prevail.
The term honnête could still be used to describe an upright man, or a man of integrity, but that meaning was overlaid by the emphasis on “pleasing” to win the approval of others. A galant was not primarily a seducer; he had mastered the art of pleasing women in erotically charged but inconsequential conversational play. In his supreme incarnation the honnête homme was a bel esprit, a brilliant performer entertaining with seemingly effortless wit. Moralists like La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère pointed to the fine line between pleasing others and deceiving them, presenting a false self. Finding self-validation in the gaze of others was a far cry from having the inner core of integrity that the term “virtue” had long evoked. Even as they cast a cynical eye on the ways of mondanité, however, the moralists were immersed in them and contributed to defining their normative ideal. To them, as to so many others, the sine qua non of honnêteté was mastery of the art of conversation, and the raison d’être of conversation was to give and receive “pleasure.” The verbal circulation of pleasure in turn required a collective equanimity and harmony, a commitment by all participants not to introduce a discordant note.17 There could be no winning an argument, no closure in that sense. It was necessary, La Rochefoucauld wrote, to “observe the same precise sense of harmony (justesse) that the different voices and diverse instruments ought to observe in music.”18 Honnêtes gens were always “agreeable” and “obliging” (complaisant); they said nothing “shocking” or “wounding.” They acted with a “sense of the appropriate” (bienséance), always finding the “juste” word or phrase, the one the moment required. They spoke with natural “ease” and “grace.” They all did their part to ensure that social interaction was an “enjoyment,” and indeed a “joy.”
This is the coded lexicon of a social (and socially bounded) aesthetic, an emphatically aestheticized set of norms that made sociability a kind of play and virtue always “agreeable.” To engage in this play was to maintain an illusion of equality within the interlocutors’ self-enclosed space, however unequal they might be outside it. No matter what tensions and rivalries lurked beneath the surface, the sociability of polite conversation could not be sullied by the audible (or visible) exercise of authority, or indeed by the intrusion of power in any form into the free circulation of verbal gifts. The line of demarcation between insiders and outsiders was permeable, but paradoxically the ineffable moments of intersubjective and aesthetic experience conveyed by the “je ne sais quoi” (literally the “I know not what”), that indefinable something that distinguished a pleasing phrase, or a facial expression, or a gesture, kept the line clear. “The je ne sais quoi” is “so delicate and imperceptible,” the Jesuit language critic Dominique Bouhours wrote, “that it escapes the most penetrating and subtle intelligence.”19 With the “je ne sais quoi” honnête society declared its effortless aesthetic to be beyond philosophical analysis and scholarly explanation. At a deeper level, it asserted its exclusiveness in the very act of admitting that even its language, as psychologically and aesthetically fine-tuned as it was, had its limits. The outsider betrayed himself by failing to recognize the limits—by trying to explain what insiders knew defied explanation.20
The novels of Scudéry and Lafayette—the most conspicuous examples of French literary modernity in the seventeenth century—were fashioned in this social and discursive space. We can clarify the social geography of the space by taking a critical look at the work of the literary and feminist scholar Joan DeJean. In her Tender Geographies (1991) DeJean argues that the early French novels were informed by a feminist ideology that was “sexually, socially, and politically subversive.”21 In Ancients Against Moderns (1997) she returns to this theme; “the most successful first novelists” made the early novel “a feminized, and often a feminist, and even a feminizing (in the sense of that which promotes its creators’ feminocentric values), literary genre.” In the controversy that the novels occasioned, DeJean contends, the issue was, contra Jürgen Habermas, more “gender” than “class.”22 Defenders of the novel formed a loose but vocal feminist movement; and this literary feminism aimed to effect a democratization of taste and criticism in an emerging public sphere.
For historians, and for literary scholars with an historical orientation, DeJean’s work is fatally flawed by its presentism. The early novels surely were a feminized literary genre. Much of their material came from conversations among society women; they were written primarily for a female audience; their depictions of gallantry gave women a new respect and agency. Hence we can fairly call their values “feminocentric,” but only so long as we keep in mind that, as will become apparent, the role of intellect in the female-centered world that produced the novels was at least as strictly circumscribed for women as it was for men. But DeJean’s application of the term “feminist” to this context is highly problematic. Her declared aim was to combine literary history and history, with its attention to “a precise historical context,” but that is precisely what she does not do, particularly when situating her subject in a social context. Rather than giving the term “feminist” contextual specificity in an old-regime social milieu that was jealous of its singular honor, and that was open only to the few commoners who could master its performative culture, DeJean wants to find the moment of origin for the modern feminist agenda for women’s rights, which does indeed require a process of democratization. She in effect shunts aside the unmodern in seventeenth-century French literary modernity. Scudéry and Lafayette were society women living in something like a caste, permeable to some degree but, in the self-image that sustained it, contemptuous of other ways of life as vulgar. The notion that they aimed to democratize taste and criticism is simply wrongheaded.
Max Weber’s conceptual precision about social hierarchy is a good place to start in correcting DeJean’s work. To Weber there were two fundamental categories for understanding social hierarchy: classes and status groups (Stände). While one’s class position was a function of the objective power of disposal afforded by command of economic resources, one’s status position, or one’s position in a hierarchy of honor (Ehre), was a subjective phenomenon, a matter of social and cultural perception; it depended on the norms and values that informed “the privileging of social estimation” and especially the value attributed to an entire “way of life” (Lebensführung). Class and status were ideal types, indispensable as analytical distinctions but always bound together to one degree or another in social reality. Elements of class and status mingled in myriad ways in old-regime society, and the elite that gathered in the salons is a striking case in point. The salons mixed people from the upper and lower ends of the steep scale of rank and wealth in the nobility of the sword; families from this ancient nobility with families of the judicial, or “robe,” nobility with virtually hereditary rights to the expensive and lucrative offices of the royal parlements; robe and sword families with families in commerce and finance who had acquired titles as the Crown’s sale of offices and noble titles commodified honor; scholars and men of letters drawn from all these groups.23 The venality of offices introduced anxiety-ridden instability into what was supposed to be a clear hierarchical order of inherited ranks and attached moral qualities. As one historian has aptly put it, it “monetized status,” converting “the attributes that determined one’s identity into qualities that could not only be acquired but also purchased in a marketplace.”24 This confusing conflation of the calibrations of honor with economic (class) positions helps explain why salon society took such pains to demarcate itself as a status group, a circle whose members, however different in origins, wealth, and power, were united, and set apart from everyone else, by a unique social honor that could only be acquired with the personal mastery of worldly self-cultivation and selfpresentation.
It was this honor that was performed in the social aesthetic of play. Its generic characteristics have been described in a remarkable essay published in 1910 by Georg Simmel, another German sociologist and a contemporary of Weber.25