The Bad Taste of Others: Judging Literary Value in Eighteenth-Century France (review)

In The Bad Taste of Others Jennifer Tsien argues that, despite the Enlightenment’s democratization of political ideals, the philosophes strove for absolute authority over the realm of taste. While we now view the eighteenth century as a time of intellectual progress and applaud the spread of literacy and the diffusion of knowledge through the growing availability of books, Tsien shows that many writers of the time feared this unchecked access to culture. Tracing an antagonistic attitude towards the bourgeois pretension to personal advancement through education in works ranging from Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme to Piron’s La Métromanie, Tsien argues that, while the seventeenth century regarded culture as limited to those of noble birth, the eighteenth century saw it as restricted to an elite of professional philosophers. In a chapter that outlines various Enlightenment theories of taste by Crousaz, Batteux, Du Bos, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, among others, Tsien critiques the often repeated eighteenth-century argument that the beautiful is both natural and universal, reminding us that what these writers found aesthetically acceptable was based on a return to principles established by the Ancients, a set of rules that represents an artificial consensus. As Tsien’s title suggests, a better understanding of eighteenth-century French taste is achieved by looking at what tastemakers of the time condemned: the gothic, the oriental, the obscure, and the disorderly. Despite the profusion of medieval characters and settings in works published in the popular eighteenth-century collection La Bibiothèque bleue, Tsien explains that the philosophes reject what they call ‘gothic style’ as if it were a foreign, Germanic invention. And despite the eighteenth-century public’s interest in orientalism, she demonstrates how philosophes from Montesquieu to Voltaire attacked oriental style through parody. In a section on enigma poems, she shows that, regardless of the popularity of enigmas among readers of the Mercure, who not only wrote in with solutions but offered their own amateur poems for publication, philosophes decried the genre, which they considered trivial by comparison with the more useful kinds of questions they favoured in their own writing. Notwithstanding the preponderance of disorganized ana collections and the persistence of the disorderly practice of salon conversation, philosophes worked to impose an aesthetic of order by characterizing good writing as virile and bad style as feminine, even comparing the monthly Mercure to menstrual discharge. Showing that the supposed superiority of French taste was established through the exclusion of those familiar figures of the Other — foreigners and women — Tsien goes even further in arguing that the excluded Other was also the self: the people of eighteenth-century France whose rights in the Republic of Letters were questioned by those same authors we enthrone as the intellectual defenders of the political republic. In this stylish book on style, Jennifer Tsien looks at authors we think we know and presents them in a new light, illuminating Enlightenment aesthetic theories, but also, more importantly, nuancing our understanding of the process by which canons are constructed and demonstrating that they may and must be questioned.