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  • Styles of Enlightenment: Taste, Politics, and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France
  • Karlis Racevskis
Russo, Elena. Styles of Enlightenment: Taste, Politics, and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Pp. 346.

It can be both useful and rewarding to study the past in light of certain key themes that allow us to gauge the distance separating us from bygone eras. When it comes to the Enlightenment, as Elena Russo’s book shows, few concepts are as revealing as the notion of taste. While Russo is obviously not the first scholar to survey this theme, what makes her contribution to eighteenth-century scholarship particularly noteworthy, even groundbreaking, is the new light it sheds on the entire movement of ideas known as the Enlightenment. Her approach reveals the importance of an under-appreciated aspect of the age, and thus proposes a reorientation in our customary ways of viewing and interpreting the eighteenth century. To put it succinctly, Russo sees the century in terms of two antithetical halves, each marked by a particular aesthetic philosophy. As a result, Russo’s perspective brings with it a number of consequences for contemporary critical approaches to the Enlightenment.

One of the principal areas of contention marking critiques of the Enlightenment over the last few decades concerned the so-called Enlightenment project and the question of knowing whether it had been betrayed and had deviated, or was still valid and only needed to be completed. Russo’s contribution, in this regard, is to show, first, that the Enlightenment consisted of more than one project and, second, to demonstrate that the philosophes’ concern for aesthetic issues rivaled their passion for political causes. “If the Enlightenment could be said to be a project,” Russo explains, “that project did not consist only in remapping the world of knowledge through an encyclopedic reordering of sciences: it also meant conquering the domain of taste and the arts” (2). While this project never achieved the theoretical and rhetorical consistency of the struggle the philosophes waged against the forces of superstition, fanaticism, and ignorance, it did manifest itself as an ever-present concern in many of their writings, as Russo demonstrates. Paradoxically, however, while the philosophic struggle to emancipate humanity from ignorance could be seen as a progressive development growing in intensity as the century advanced, the campaign to legislate taste in the domain of letters and the arts turns out to have been reactionary and backward looking.

Taste, as it was understood in the first part of the century, was known as le goût moderne and was mainly characterized by “its rejection of the [End Page 141] absolutist and classicist grand narrative in favor of dissonant paratactic storytelling; its ironic use of preexisting forms; its deconstruction of classicism and its fragmentation of narrative … its recurring theatricality and self-referentiality; its blurring between reality and the space of representation … its confusion of hierarchies, be they ethical, representational or gendered” (9). Not surprisingly, these developments in the realm of ideas pertaining to taste took place during the Regency, at a time when traditional structures of authority were increasingly being brought into question and were therefore weakening or even breaking down. It is in the theater of Marivaux especially that we find the most vivid and complete expression of this newly emerging taste for the arbitrary, the intuitive, the ephemeral, the spontaneous, and the unabashedly theatrical. Marivaux’s originality is particularly remarkable when we take note of his purpose, which was “to explore the many ways the subconscious peeks through the carefully wrought structure of verbal and social conventions and the codes of politeness and galanterie” (136–37). It is therefore a theater marked by its esprit, a quality that partakes of both the cognitive and the intuitive propensities of the human mind, that combines the rational and the aesthetic components of taste.

Another author known for this dual manifestation of esprit was Montesquieu, whose Lettres persanes, published “at the height of goût moderne,” as Russo notes, could be considered “one of the greatest works of subversive, burlesque bigarrure, which recklessly juxtaposed theology and sex, philosophy and satire, natural law and fashion, politics and oriental romance” (40). At...

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