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

3. The Barbaric, or Of Time and Taste

68 c h a p t e r t h r e e The Barbaric, or Of Time and Taste When it comes to taste, some eras are indisputably better than others —so states the abbé Dubos: “the superior excellency of some ages, in comparison to others, is a thing too well known, to require any arguments to evince it. Our business here is to trace, if possible, those causes which render one particular age so vastly superior to others.”1 In other words, there is no need to ask whether some centuries are superior; instead, we would do better to discover why they are superior . If critics like Dubos looked back in time to judge French literary history according to their eighteenth-century standards, it was surely because they wanted to shape what would be defined for posterity as French culture. Inevitably, this shaping involved chiseling away the elements that they saw as unfit to represent their culture, even if they were influential or popular. In this chapter, I will examine how critics such as Dubos, Voltaire, Marmontel, and La Harpe looked at the history of French literature through the lens of taste. Despite the Enlightenment’s well-known tendency toward cosmopolitanism , especially in matters regarding customs and religion, the philosophes were interested in glorifying French culture. Their claim to greatness concentrated most of all on language and literature, since they conceded that in some cases the Italians may have excelled in painting or the British in philosophy. The critics mentioned above attempted to create an image of French literature that was coherent, unified, and, most important, tasteful by selecting certain works of French literature and either ignoring or ridiculing others. Rhetorically , their strategy involved making what French literature was coincide The Barbaric, or Of Time and Taste 69 with what they thought it should be, meanwhile casting aside rival styles by labeling them “not French” or “not literature.” As Homi K. Bhabha states in his post-structuralist analysis of national discourses, “the origins of national traditions turn out to be as much acts of affiliation and establishment as they are moments of disavowal, displacement, exclusion, and cultural contestation.”2 And Bhabha does not neglect the importance of taste in the creation of a coherent national narrative: among the “narratives and discourses that signify a sense of ‘nationness,’” he lists such things as social hierarchies , attitudes toward outsiders, institutions, political affiliations, and “the customs of taste.”3 In eighteenth-century France, as we will see, the creation of “French taste” by the philosophes depended on the invention of the Grand Siècle as much as on the rejection of certain elements—such as medieval romances, Marot’s neologisms, and Pradon’s Phèdre—from literary history. the imaginary history of taste A considerable number of eighteenth-century writers recount the same imaginary history of Western civilization, from an eighteenthcentury point of view.4 With only a few small variations, the history is as follows: the world began as a morass of darkness and ignorance, from which emerged the shining beacon of ancient Greek civilization. This high point was followed by another, the Roman Age, specifically the Age of Augustus. The world was plunged into obscurity once again with the Fall of Rome at the hands of the uncouth barbarians of the North. So the earth remained shrouded in the errors of early Christianity, until the Italian Renaissance brought civilization into the light once again. A period of religious strife made the darkness return, which lasted until the last age of brilliance and glory: seventeenth -century France. The status of the authors’ era, the eighteenth century, remains in doubt, because the forces of obscurity are struggling against the forces of light, and only the great writers and philosophers can keep society from falling into a state of barbarity once again. This imaginary history of taste appears in a well-known passage by Voltaire from the Siècle de Louis XIV: “whosoever thinks, or, what is still more rare, whosoever has taste, will find but four ages in the history of the world. These four happy ages are those in which the arts were carried to perfection, and which, by serving as the era of the The Barbaric, or Of Time and Taste 70 greatness of the human mind, are examples for posterity.”5 He then specifies what he means by these ages: the Greece of Plato and Aristotle...