Vraisemblance et représentation au XVIIIesiècle (review)

Nathalie Kremer provides a comprehensive and illuminating introduction to the notion of vraisemblance in the eighteenth century through the theories of Rapin, Du Bos, Batteux, Voltaire, Diderot, and Marmontel. Previous studies have concentrated primarily on the meaning and development of this term in the seventeenth century; Kremer’s volume, therefore, fills a gap in current scholarship on this central but elusive concept. According to Kremer, vraisemblance in the seventeenth century designated a set of pre-established rules that works of art had to follow in a bid to imitate nature, to represent the perfect and the timeless. In the transition to the eighteenth century, attention is focused less on the work of art itself and its degree of conformity to rules and more on the impression that the work creates on its audience. As a result, vraisemblance concerns not so much the ideal and the general but more the real and the particular. Kremer locates the beginning of this conceptual shift in the aesthetic theory of the Abbé Du Bos. This theory, she argues, is ahead of its time in insisting on the emotional impact of artistic work as an important criterion for evaluating its worth. Du Bos elaborates a notion of artistic pleasure that is liberated from the need to instruct: art should move its audience, draw them out of a state of indifference. Du Bos’s emphasis on the affective aspect of art has a democratic consequence: the judgement of the public becomes just as valid as that of the literary elite in assessing artistic merit. One of the most interesting arguments of Kremer’s book is that vraisemblance takes on a dynamic dimension in the eighteenth century, becoming more a question of semblance than resemblance. The concept no longer designates a quality inherent in a work of art but the process by which an audience identifies with and, consequently, believes in the work. To be vraisembable, art does not have to be lifelike or rooted in reality but must be considered as such by a community. Even the implausible can appear plausible. In this way vraisemblance, understood as the perspective that gives coherence to a work of art, allows for the acceptance of originality and the new by the wider public. Kremer offers a clearly written and well-argued study that will be of interest to scholars working in the field of aesthetic theory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and more generally in the literature and the intellectual history of these periods.