Voluptuous Philosophy: Literary Materialism in the French Enlightenment (review)

As the number of books on the Enlightenment grows ever greater, so the permutations and intersections between them become increasingly complex, and assiduous commentators can, with patience and effort, combine them into intricate new patterns of cross-fertilized investigation. This process might be regarded as the critical counterpart of the atomistic mechanism postulated by Lucretius in the De Rerum natura to explain the creation of living organisms which are different from, but linked to, those which preceded them. In Natania Meeker’s study, one can see elements drawn from critics as diverse as Michel Foucault, Margaret Jacob, and Pierre Hartmann, and combined anew into an original and intriguing attempt to explain the taxonomy of reading in pre-Revolutionary France. And appropriately so, for Lucretius’ poem is central to this volume, which treats it as the basis for a dualistic aesthetic of reading in the French Enlightenment. On the one hand, Meeker argues, were novelists and materialists, such as de Sade and La Mettrie who, taking their cue from the Roman poet, wanted to impress their ideas on readers by appealing to their desire for the voluptuous. On the other were those, such as Diderot and the Marquis d’Argens (the probable author of the pornographic Thérèse philosophe published in 1748), who rejected this Lucretian sensualism, preferring to make readers think about what they were being offered: any appeal to the voluptuous was therefore secondary. Meeker’s ingenuity in constructing this analytical framework and applying it to her chosen texts is often admirable, and can suggest some startlingly unfamiliar angles, such as her Lucretian reading of Sade, or the idea that La Mettrie’s ‘homme machine’ is animated by voluptuous literary pleasures. However, her approach raises serious difficulties. In particular, she fails to demonstrate that Lucretius really was as central to eighteenth-century French culture as she claims. It is true that La Mettrie was acquainted with his work, as the Système d’Epicure shows, but Meeker might usefully have heeded de Jaucourt’s observation in his Encyclopédie article ‘Poème’ (1765): ‘tout le monde lit et relit Virgile; et peu de personnes font de Lucrèce leur livre favori’. The one work by Diderot which bears clear traces of Lucretian influence, the Lettre sur les Aveugles, is not discussed, and the long analysis of the Rêve de d’Alembert (pp. 172–187) is largely a laboured paraphrase. Perhaps the major weakness in Meeker’s undertaking is that, in her eagerness to apply her straightforward division between the sensual and the intellectual, she ignores many major works of the time which might escape such trenchant categorization: can Manon Lescaut, or the novels of Restif, for example, be neatly pigeonholed in this way? Meeker undoubtedly tries to appeal to the intellectual reader, but her dense and sometimes opaque style, clotted with nouns and adjectives, often hinders the exposition of her case. Ultimately, this is a bold but flawed attempt to rewrite the cultural history of the French Enlightenment; it does not have the intellectual depth, or the comprehensive knowledge of the period, required to sustain its thesis.