Marginal Writers and the 'Literary Market': Defining a New Field of Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France

Marginal Writers and the 'Literary Market': Defining a New Field of Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France GEOFFREY TURNOVSKY Scholars of literary culture in eighteenth-century France have long identified the expansion of the Book Trade and commercial publishing, on the one hand, and the establishment of a stable regime of intellectual property rights, on the other, as key developments for the "modernization" of authorship, especially after 1750.' These related developments have, in turn, coalesced in many accounts around the concept of the "literary market," invoked as new type of cultural space in which the conditions and possibilities for the most essential transformations in authorial practice were to be found. Roger Charrier situates "les conditions d'une possible indépendance pour les hommes de lettres" within "les contours d'un marché littéraire."2 In line with much eighteenth-century cultural historiography, Chartier here puts a positive spin on the "market," depicting it as a field of liberation for gens de lettres who discover in it the new economic opportunities and legal prerogatives that will enable them to break with their traditional bonds to courts and patrons in order to adopt "modern" authorial comportments as autonomous, unaligned critics of society. Other accounts, though, have proposed starkly different views of the "market" and its repercussions for writers. In her readings of Diderot and Rousseau, Julia Simon underscores "the alienating effects of the literary market," identifying new authorial 101 102 / TURNOVSKY strategies that were rooted, above all, in a resistance to its "commodification."3 Similarly, Robert Darnton's influential research into the "low-life" of the Parisian "literary underground" represents the "literary market" as an arena of cruel exploitation, in which writers were sociologically and psychologically transformed by the "rampant capitalism" of the late eighteenth-century Book Trade.4 My paper discusses this latter, dystopic representation of commercial publishing and the Book Trade, particularly insofar as such a model of the late eighteenth-century cultural field might shed light on how authorial practices evolved in this period and became "modern." The former, positive image has probably been more prevalent in studies of eighteenth-century literary life, where it draws on a long-standing topos in Enlightenment scholarship of a progression among gens de lettres towards greater and greater "independence" and "autonomy." The "market" has thus been viewed as one of the principle institutions through which this liberation took place: the "gradual progress of the writer towards independence," writes John Lough, is a function of the growing feasibility "in the last decades of the Ancien régime [... ] to earn a comfortable living with [the] pen."5 But the negative image of the "literary market" has undoubtedly offered a more enduring model of how authorship was transformed in its contact with the commercial practices and the values of the Book Trade. The liberating "market" ultimately appears as somewhat of an historical oddity, pertinent mainly to a few decades in which gens de lettres might have imagined and desired for themselves greater intellectual freedom, yet continued to have to adapt their literary activities to the exigencies of a patronage system that still determined both realistic possibilities and plausible expectations. By contrast, the image of the "literary market" as a sphere of authorial pain and suffering, in which the personal, aesthetic, and ethical priorities of writers continually and inexorably clashed against the cold, hard calculations of profiteering publishers, suggests a more obvious link with Romanticism and beyond. Darnton implies that the underpaid hacks of the Parisian gutters and garrets were indeed the forebears of the struggling poets later "romanticized" by Balzac.6 Looking back from the other side of the divide, Pierre Bourdieu sees in this same "société des écrivains et des artistes" an early manifestation of the anti-commercial, anti-bourgeois culture of mid-nineteenth-century Bohemianism, albeit "à une échelle sans doute beaucoup plus restreinte."7 A number of questions of precision, though, must be raised regarding such a genealogy, especially insofar as it might appear to be established retrospectively. Indeed, how much does the reference to a cut-throat model of the "literary market," greatly inspired by the nineteenth century, tell us Marginal Writers /103 about how the eighteenth-century cultural field was modified...