Esthetics of the Moment: Literature and Art in the French Enlightenment by Thomas M. Kavanagh (review)

44Rocky Mountain Review THOMAS M. KAVANAGH. Esthetics ofthe Moment: Literature and Art in the French Enlightenment. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. 294p. When applied to eighteenth-century French literature and painting, the world of Enlightenment conjures up many diverse and sometimes paradoxical ideas. The "ancient régime" is often viewed as loaded with the errors ofits past and as announcing the future transformations ofthe French revolution. Putting aside past and future, Thomas Kavanagh chooses the powerful concept ofthe "moment" to approach the study ofFrench literature and art ofthat period. In casting his notion ofthe moment, Kavanagh uses the historical span with the two traditional points of reference: from the death of Louis XTV in 1715 to the overtaking of the Bastille in 1789. He systematically examines the primacy of the moment, its recuperation as a literary, social and artistic phenomenon, redefining its present as a temporality of happiness and freedom. The first chapter serves as a cultural and historical backdrop which finds the sources ofthe desire for immediate experience in the literary and artistic life of the time. The book, divided in two main parts, studies writers, then painters with their creative versions within the esthetics ofthe moment. The first part delves into the works offive writers: Lahontan, Diderot, Graffigny, Rousseau and Casanova. There exists a great coherence in the choice of writers since all elaborate a vision of freedom or independence through a clash ofcultures, a sense ofexoticism in nature, a desire for voyage, or a game of chance. The happiness of the moment, whether it be the "bon sauvage," the Hurons ofNorth America, the Inca princess, or Casanova himself, resides away from arbitrary European constructs and more within the Epicurean doctrine of self and "carpe diem" in love. In the fourth chapter, dealing with Madame de Graffigny, Kavanagh presents an excellent up-to-date summary of the scholarship, mainly American, which contributed to the renaissance ofher epistolary novel. The fifth chapter on Casanova poses the question of chance in a perceptive manner along with the development ofthe science of probability theory. Casanova's life becomes a gambling metaphor by equating seduction to a game of cards, of chance, a masquerade privileging the moment, adventure, and the shuffling of bodies. Kavanagh reminds us that Casanova, the adventurer, seeks esthetically the free-flowing moment of what is "to come," as expressed in its Latin root of "ad-venire," outside any concern for ethics. After examining the configuration ofthe moment in literature, Kavanagh reflects on this problem in its painted representation. Both chapters of the second part are devoted to the theoretical debate around the nature of painting. The author underlines the conflict of French political powers and esthetics between the Crown and the Academy, and within the Academy itself. The artistic practices generated from the royal pre-eminence over artists favor, for example, the style ofhistorical paintings in glorification of the King. Breaking with tradition, two art theorists, Roger de Piles and Jean- Book Reviews45 Baptiste du Bos open up new avenues: Roger de Piles by favoring color; JeanBaptiste du Bos by emphasizing the effect of painting in the single instant. Kavanagh's book includes fifty-one illustrations of paintings by Poussin, Watteau, Chardin, Boucher, Fragonard and Greuze. His critical views of their paintings are worthwhile reading in their meticulous details, as he captures a crescendo of free-flowing instantaneous glances from painted subjects to spectators and vice versa. The critic ends his demonstration with the foreclosed moment of the moralistic Greuze. A great sense of coherence emerges from Kavanagh's analysis on the writers and painters ofthe Enlightenment as he successfully presents their dynamics at work. He clearly articulates the conflict between knowledge of the universal and awareness ofthe individual. The works in literature and art on which he focuses his attention become alive with the temporality of the here and now. In this critical book, the power ofthe word and that ofthe image seem to be freed from the fixity ofthe past and the uncertainty ofthe future, which is a rare feat. This approach of the esthetics of the moment appears refreshing both on the theoretical and exemplary levels. Moreover it sheds a light on our "fin...