Before Imagination: Embodied Thought from Montaigne to Rousseau (review)

Imagination, John Lyons argues in this engrossing study, was a fixture of seventeenth-century culture, although not in the romantics' familiar sense. By revisiting the once common view of imagination as the faculty that permits thought about the physical world, he demonstrates the prevalence of "embodied thought" in the era of disembodied Cartesian reason.

In antiquity, we learn in the introduction, imagination mediated between the sensory world and intellect. From the later Stoics' prescriptions for managing this faculty, Lyons derives several key themes: death, the inner retreat, and the broad accessibility of will-directed imagination.

The first two chapters of this book strikingly juxtapose the doubter Montaigne and the orthodox François de Sales, whose influential adaptations of stoic practices Lyons relates to ancien régime civilité—the ability to carry on an independent inner life behind a polite veneer. While acknowledging the epistemological challenges the Essais posed to posterity, Lyons emphasizes the practical character of Montaigne's inherited view of imagination as key to knowledge. For example, in the skeptical "Apology for Raymond Sebond," Montaigne debunks mankind's presumption in setting itself apart from animals, only to reestablish the distinction on the uniqueness of human imagination. In the popular Introduction à la vie dévote, de Sales recommended the construction of an inner spiritual retreat not unlike Montaigne's arrière-boutique. He thereby enabled his female readers to devise zones of freedom, whose unforeseen cultural consequences are one of this book's central themes.

Lyons devotes his central chapter to Pascal—all but eclipsed by Descartes, he observes, in synthetic accounts of the seventeenth century. Although the role of imagination in Pascal's account of human fallibility is well known, Lyons views it as an experientially based mode of thinking inherent to the esprit de finesse, through which Pascal fashions a "corrective post-Cartesian statement." The next chapter, an equally remarkable treatment of the Marquise de Sévigné, treats the artist of effusive maternity as a thinker, whose famous style is informed by eclectic philosophical allegiances centering on imagination. If imagination informs Sévigné's treatment of her absent daughter, the chapter's highlight is her narratives of sudden death, which Lyons relates both to her idiosyncratic brand of meditation and to her Jansenist affiliations.

The fifth chapter features a wonderfully original reading of Madeleine de Scu-déry's Clélie, in which Lyons explores the workings of collective imagination and the imaginative strategies of several key characters, memorably treating the carte de tendre as a form of meditative therapy the heroine offers to her lovers. In La Princesse de Clèves, on the other hand, the characters seem unable to direct their overwrought imaginations, while the narrator's refusal to disclose their contents forecasts a change in the status of the imaginative faculty.

The conclusion shows how, during the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, partisans of the ancients discredited imagination as feminine and childish. Nevertheless, Lyons's readings of Boileau, Fénélon, and Rousseau argue that by transforming imagination from an active and inward-directed faculty to a passive, receptive one, these writers laid the basis for its reemergence as the special endowment we revere today.

In his book, Lyons both defines a tradition and demonstrates the extent to which it nurtured habits of mind common to widely divergent cultural and literary practices. Given his excellent invocation of the iconography of the penitent Magdalen in the chapter on the novel, one might have wished for more attention to images per se. Lyons's interest, however, is in mental images, and his engagement with the way each writer thinks and represents thinking produces both compelling readings of familiar texts and a picture of the seventeenth century different from the one we had previously imagined.