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The Critique of Originality in French Letters REGINALD McGINNIS The words original and originalité appear in eighteenth-century French dictionaries with two opposing meanings. The first definition of the noun original given in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie is "the first drawing, or authentic instrument of something, & that is to serve as a model or example to be copied or imitated."1 With respect to painting, the adjective is said to be taken both positively and negatively: "positively, when in a painting everything is grand, singularly new; & negatively, when one finds only a bizarrely grotesque singularity."2 A similar ambivalence is mentioned in the short entry on originalité: "a way of executing a common thing, in a singular & distinguished manner: originality is very rare. Most men are in every genre but copies of other men. The title original is given both negatively & positively."3 The laudatory meaning, expressing authenticity, or referring to a model to be copied or imitated, is well established. The following pages are concerned with the less familiar pejorative sense, relating to a bizarrely grotesque singularity.4 Though mentioned in dictionaries and at times in footnotes to literary works, the negative sense of the word has remained largely unstudied. Roland Mortier broaches the subject in his study of originality as a new aesthetic category in the eighteenth century,5 but his observations on the negative sense are limited to showing the word's ambivalence. While he gives several 127 128 / MCGINNIS examples of its usage, mostly in Marivaux and Diderot, he fails to draw the implicit conclusion for his thesis, the object of which is to show a separation occurring in the minds of Europeans during the period from 1740 to 1770 between originality and mimesis.6 It follows from Mortier's observations on the negative sense of the word "originality" that the rise of its usage coincides with the period he assigns to the questioning of traditional mimesis. The texts we will consider in the following pages show that the negative sense contains a critique of originality conceived as separate from mimesis, so that the questioning of mimesis evolves in conjunction with a questioning of originality. As stated in the Encyclopedia entries on originality, imitation can be considered either with respect to representation, as in painting for instance, or with respect to social relations, in which men are seen as copies of other men. The social aspect of imitation becomes prominent in the play with which we will begin, Les Originaux by Barthélémy Christophe Fagan, first performed in 1737. The object of the play, as stated in the introduction to the 1760 edition of Fagan's works, is "to rid a young man of quality of several flaws, & make them odious or ridiculous in his eyes by presenting them successively in the different people of his society who are affected by them."7 The originaux are the characters affected by the flaws of which the young man, a marquis, is to rid himself. The project of correcting these flaws is not, however, that of the marquis, but rather of his mother, who despairs at his refusal, influenced by the fashion of the originaux, to marry the woman she intends for him. Convinced that "examples will be better than any lesson one could give," a chevalier, assisting the marquise, arranges for several originaux, each of whom has a very pronounced flaw, to visit the marquis. First in line is the ignorant seneschal, followed by a drunken baron, a slanderous chambermaid, a faux brave, and a profligate old man. Through the observation of his own flaws in the bizarre and ridiculous characters that come to visit him, the marquis ends up recognizing his errors and agrees to the wedding. "Originality" in Fagan's play is linked with fashion, which is in turn linked with imitation. Its comic exploitation pertains to a destabilizing of relations between models and copies, whereby originals are shown to be copies, and copies appear as originals. The confusion of copies and originals is observed by the marquise in summarizing her son's imitation of fashion: "A slave to false airs, worshipper of the most outlandish silliness, he adopts so avidly the absurdities...

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