The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia (review)

Description tends to be associated with the nineteenth-century novel rather than with Enlightenment writing. If we do associate the two, one image that tends to come to mind is Bouvard and Pécuchet's farcical project of describing the world in encyclopedic detail: not only was it doomed to failure, but the authors were too myopic to recognize it. Joanna Stalnaker's excellent study succeeds in restoring description to its central place in Enlightenment discourse, and also accords self-awareness as well as literary and scientific ambition to its practitioners and theoreticians. It is in this sense that the term 'unfinished' in her title is to be understood: the book is not a study of what Foucault took to be the Enlightenment ethos of never-ending critique, but rather of the inevitably partial nature of the descriptions of the world that the writers she discusses sought so meticulously and inventively to provide. Her corpus is agreeably surprising, too: the book does not focus on description in the eighteenth-century novel, or on description as a vehicle for colonialist ideology in, say, Raynal's Histoire des Deux Indes, but rather on the theory and practice of description not only in Buffon but also in Daubenton's contributions to the Histoire naturelle, in Mercier's Le Nouveau Paris as well as his Tableau de Paris, in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's little-studied Études de la nature, and in Delille's even less studied poem Les Trois Règnes de la nature, as well as, more expectedly, Diderot's Encyclopédie articles 'Bas' and 'Encyclopédie'. These are rich fields of enquiry, which, Stalnaker shows, correspond for the most part to the branches of knowledge in which description was located in the Encyclopédie article 'Description', with its subheadings 'natural history', 'geometry', 'belles-lettres', and 'poetry'. Stalnaker does not overlook the ideological content of description — her chapter on Le Nouveau Paris is sensitive to description's capacities for political myth-making. But this is not her main focus, which is, refreshingly, the ways in which, during the Enlightenment, description afforded much opportunity for linguistic and literary experimentation as the 'descripteur' — one of Mercier's neologisms — sought to make epistemological claims for his art. The case Stalnaker puts with admirable clarity is that Enlightenment description is not to be understood as a precursor of nineteenth-century description, which has long been consecrated by literary history, but rather as a distinctly foreign discursive space, hitherto unrecognized by literary history, in which science and literature cohabited, albeit not without tensions. Her careful, close readings reveal those tensions, showing how they became the fault lines that created the separate disciplines of literature and science, which would render Delille's encyclopedic poetry unreadable and mean that Saint-Pierre is now better known for Paul et Virginie than for the Études. It is not the least of the merits of Stalnaker's very fine study that it makes some fascinating Enlightenment texts readable once again.