Genese De L’esthétique Française Moderne by Annie Becq (review)

L’E SPRIT C RÉATEUR cient. One would have had to take the trouble to analyze the diabolical, the satanic and the magical in terms that restore them to their putatively archaic status. To the extent that psychoanalysis could have contributed positively to such a project, it could only have been at the cost of a far more careful use of its categories. J a m e s C r e e c h Miami University Annie Becq. G e n è s e d e l ’e s t h é t i q u e f r a n ç a i s e m o d e r n e . Pisa: Pacini Editore, 1984. 2 Vols., pp. 951. In this massive and comprehensive study, subtitled “ De la Raison classique à l’Imagina­ tion créatrice,” Annie Becq, Professor of French Literature at the University of Caen, has made a major contribution to our understanding of French critical thought. In the best tradition of the Paris Doctorat d ’État, her work combines careful and well organized his­ torical research with penetrating interpretation of the central critical ideas at hand. The concern with the formulation and transformation of concepts—génie, beau, raison, goût, sentiment, imagination—draws both major and minor figures into a large historical pat­ tern, in which attention to individual critics and texts moves hand in hand with the history of critical ideas. Perforce, there is some repetition. Key figures such as Dubos, Batteux, Diderot, or Rousseau, are taken up again and again under different headings, but this probably could not have been avoided without impairing the study of the genesis and devel­ opment of critical thought. The course of aesthetic ideas in France moves from a quest for universals in the 17th and 18th centuries to an aesthetic of creative subjectivity, mirrored in the 19th century in Baudelaire’s theory of the imagination as well as in an organic view of art derived in large part from German thought. The account of the beginnings of this process shows con­ vincingly that the new subjectivity was not opposed to the classical concept of reason but came to be integrated with it. While some critics of the 17th century equated reason with a prescriptive rules criticism, others viewed reason as a creative and even instinctive principle wherein genius resides. The usual opposition of reason and imagination is redefined in both French classicism and the 18th century as a more complex and interpenetrative relationship. Some of the author’s most searching and provocative readings (Bossuet, Nicole, Rapin, Perrault, Fenelon) are in the chapters on the late 17th century. Here she gives special atten­ tion to philosophical traditions—Descartes, Malebranche, Gassendi—as well as to under­ currents of esoteric thought (Bruno, Boehme) that were of large subsequent importance. Parallel to the author’s history of critical thought is her attempt to explain changes in aesthetic theory by changes in social and economic history. The correlation is difficult and not convincing. Social developments are somewhat remote from the subject at hand and are at best but one of several causative factors. Perhaps the most controversial statement along these lines is the contention that theories of aesthetic autonomy as developed in the 18th century reflect not so much changes in ideas as changes in the marketplace, in particular the marginalization of the artist in the face of the rise of an impersonal art market and of art as a commodity. The author has great faith in the power of socio-economics to explain changes in aesthetics, but the connections are not clear and the discussion at times seems to split in two. Correlations of aesthetics with history, politics, economics, and sociology, seem at best hypothetical, but it must be said that the analysis of aesthetics that constitutes the substance of the study does not depend on them. Annie Becq has done far more than any previous scholar to provide a history of the concept of the imagination in France. She recognizes the contributions of English thought, notably Hobbes, Addison, and Shaftes­ 94 Fall 1988 B o o k R e v ie w s bury, and the role of faculty psychology, and points...