Rousseau’s Hand: The Crafting of a Writer by Angelica Goodden (review)

Angelica Goodden describes her study as a discussion of how Rousseau ‘came to adopt in middle life a form of handwork he had first engaged in as an adolescent’ (p. 2). During the whole of his life the erstwhile apprentice and later musical copyist was intimately concerned with manual and artisanal craft, a field invested throughout his work with moral value and opposed to such values as the otiose, the luxurious, the artistic, the urban. Contrasted with conceptions of art as inspiration, the trope of craft is used to open up an ambivalence in Rousseau between these two poles in chapters on ‘The Business of Making’ (concerning the early life), ‘Writing (Down) Music’, ‘Art or Craft?’ (on the discourses and debates around his ‘reform’), ‘Drama and Life’; then followed by chapters on Émile and life-writing, and, finally, ‘The Order of Insight’. The expansive writing style and paucity of close reading make the book read like an essai; the language is evocative and the argument functions, in part, through metaphor. Rousseau’s hand evokes a world of craft, a field offering ‘deep connection’ with ‘age-old methods and techniques’ (p. 192) — important to Rousseau’s Genevan background as well as to his mature thought. The work traces many dichotomies, between impulses to create and to copy, distinctions between control and protection, movement and rest. There is a strong awareness of the palpable and the sensory, which links these early impulses with mature texts such as the Rêveries, concerned as they are with the poetic and sensory qualities of language. Certainly, words such as ‘disenchanted’ feel apt when talking of Rousseau’s attitude to many aspects of the society around him; there is, however, something perhaps forced or at least unsustained (as the book stands) about linking all this to later trends such as the arts and crafts movement or modern fair-trade and anti-capitalism. The terminology used is, in keeping with the style of the whole, somewhat fluid, leading to the use of terms such as ‘praxis’, or oppositions between, say, art and craft, that readers might find challenging. It is unfortunate that the recent fascinating discussion by Jacqueline Waeber on Rousseau’s musical copying career is not cited; that Anne Deneys-Tunney, who pioneered a related kind of reflection in her Un autre Jean-Jacques Rousseau: le paradoxe de la technique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2010), is never really discussed (despite appearing in the bibliography); and that what looked like a promising resolution to make full use of the (to date under-exploited) evidence available in Rousseau’s correspondence does not really continue beyond the end of Chapter 1. The book is pleasantly written, however, and clearly shows the importance of reflection on art and craft, manual work, and technology in Rousseau’s works (the thread is followed throughout many of his most important texts as well as several lesser-known works). It thereby throws light on his œuvre from an unusual angle, bringing his works into dialogue around a topic of contemporary interest.