The Literary Market: Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime

5. THE REALITY OF A NEW CULTURAL FIELD: THE CASE OF ROUSSEAU

5 The Reality of a New Cultural Field: The Case of Rousseau This study has underscored the discursivity of writers’ engagements with the book trade, examining their efforts to “live by the pen” and their denunciations of “exploitation” in the commercial sphere as arguments for a new vision of intellectual legitimacy rather than as transparent accounts of their lived experiences dealing with publishers. I am not, however, suggest-­ ing by this emphasis that these experiences were not meaningful or indeed real. If the appropriation of a charged language of stolen rights and abuse was above all a rhetorical move meant to cultivate belief in a new paradigm of authorial credibility, this should not then lead us to conclude that the discourse was nothing more than cynical posturing. The philosophes depicted their critics as hypocrites faking their way up the slopes of Parnassus—­we might recall Morellet’s mock preface to Palissot’s Les philosophes, in which the author of the play hears a voice that, after describing his scurrilous past, urges him to become “the Apostle of morals and the Defender of Reli-­ gion.”1 In the final chapter, we will associate the rhetoricity of the literary market with a far more complex psychological evolution, one that should not be reduced to the scheming ambitiousness of the anti-­philosophe, nor for that matter to the raw anger of the raté, emphasized by Darnton and illustrated in the figure of Rameau’s nephew.2 The framework is instead that of an emerging and ultimately characteristic authorial anxiety, which con-­ centrated on print publication once that process was embraced by writers as the essential and exclusive conduit for the projection, through a work, of a legitimized intellectual identity; and thus once the book trade as whole was approached as the field in which such an identity would be constructed and affirmed. The rhetoric of the market was “strategic,” though, as understood by Pierre Bourdieu, meaning that the turn to a legal and commercial lan-­ guage of authorial selfhood was driven by an intuitive “practical sense” or The Reality of a New Cultural Field 185 “feel for the game,” which was neither purely rational calculation on the part of writers nor an entirely unconscious “natural” urge, but a drive that lay somewhere in between the two.3 It is clear in any case that the develop-­ ment of the market as a cultural field owed not just to writers’ investing their commercial pursuits with a new value against the symbolic dearth that had typified these activities in the framework of honnête publication. It also owed to the anxiety through which writers then experienced the book trade, to the degree that they grew convinced of the importance of the economic/cultural bifurcation as an essential trait of the literary field. If a “modern” intellectual identity builds on an experience of frustration with mediocrity, the market takes form when the dissatisfaction with one’s mid-­ dling place in the cultural field metamorphoses into an anxiety about the publication process, expressive of an increasingly real belief that negotia-­ tions with publishers indeed were critical moments in which success or fail-­ ure was at stake, and as such really were battles in a larger war over cultural value and legitimacy. In a way, the anxiety was the psychological underpin-­ ning of the inexpressible happiness about which Diderot fantasized in his Lettre, when describing the writer’s first payment from a libraire: “his joy cannot be understood.”4 Both responses assume the fundamental signifi-­ cance of the transaction, and assume that everything hung in the balance. Put another way, the rhetoric of the market was, paradoxically, an effect of writers’ sincerity; though not the profuse sincerity advocated by Rousseau and his disciples, but a more basic earnest engagement with re-­ ality that drove the substitution of a representation of an unambiguous outcome—­say, outright abuse of the innocent writer at the hand of an ava-­ ricious libraire—­for the inevitably more equivocal truth. For outsider writ-­ ers desired the representation to be true, and felt that it should be so. Their sense of legitimacy—­and hence their willingness to pursue careers despite the less than impressive nature of the outcomes that they experienced—­ were based on the premise that their perceptions of the cultural field as resting on a set of clear oppositions (commercial versus anti-­commercial; insider versus outsider) were actually more “real” than the murkier facts of the eighteenth-­century literary world. The rhetoric, however...