The Bad Taste of Others: Judging Literary Value in Eighteenth-Century France

6. The Disorderly

163 c h a p t e r si x The Disorderly Like clarity, order seems so self-evident as to be indisputable. Under this assumption, the proponents of clarity and order characterized these principles as the defining features of the French language, ostensibly dismissing any rival aesthetics. The thought that one should prefer the orderly over the disorderly seems so reasonable that we forget that conversation, magazines, travel narratives, and other forms of communication had their particular reasons for not ordering knowledge schematically. The critics themselves, such as Montesquieu and Diderot, sometimes seemed to revel in disordered plots, whether because they imitated the vagaries of human thought or because they deliberately played with readers’ expectations. Yet they saw order as a necessary feature in language and literature, particularly if it was to dominate the world of letters, as they proclaimed. In this chapter, I will demonstrate how critics such as Buffon enforced the principle of order through discussions of good and bad taste in writing style and how they excluded particular genres because of their random patterns. the dangers of random patterns For theorists such as Crousaz, André, and Montesquieu, good taste unequivocally demanded order. To a large extent, theorists simply put emphasis again on the ancient rhetorical skill of dispositio, or the proper arrangement of the various sections of a speech. Some critics made a subtle distinction between ordre and uniformité, and all re- The Disorderly 164 quired that order be counterbalanced by its opposite value, diversity or variety. Crousaz, for example, states that beauty depends principally on a balance between uniformity and variety. He defines uniformity as the ability to relate a number of objects to one single main object. The mind, he states, contemplates a number of things, but it searches for “similar traits, which allows it to connect several things to one main object and to reduce a large number to one single category .”1 According to Crousaz, however, too much uniformity bores us, while too much variety confuses us. From the perfect balance between the two, the other basic qualities of beautiful objects emerge: “regularity, order, proportion: three things that necessarily please the human mind and that, in truth, deserve to be loved.”2 In contrast to uniformity, Crousaz defines order as a methodical way of proceeding from one topic to another related one, particularly in oratory or in works of literature, rather than jumping around indiscriminately. This definition of order coincides with André’s statement that in literature, ideas have to follow each other through a series of relations . He remarks that “order is absolutely necessary in a speech” because “the truths” must be put in order, “so that the first ones clarify the following ones, and that the latter, in turn, give to the former, by a natural progression, a kind of new shine.”3 It is significant that Andr é chooses the term enchaînement to describe the process of moving from one subject to the next, since this image of a chain will figure prominently in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie in which they justify their method of ordering their material, as well as in Montesquieu’s famous, if little-understood, reference to the “chaîne secrète” embedded in his Lettres persanes. In his Essai sur le goût, Montesquieu repeats Crousaz’s ideas about the balance between order and variety, but he especially focuses on the effect of order on the human mind (or soul): “It is not sufficient to exhibit to the mind a multiplicity of objects; it is farther requisite, that they be exhibited with order and arrangement; for then it retains what it has seen, and also forms to itself some notion of what is to follow. One of the highest mental pleasures is what we receive from a consciousness of the extent of our views, and the depth of our penetration .”4 Montesquieu refers to the mind (or the âme) as if it were a particularly susceptible person when he warns us that a lack of order can sadden and demoralize it. Confronted by a disorderly work, he claims, the mind “retains nothing, foresees nothing; it is dejected by the confusion that reigns in its ideas, and by the comfortless void that The Disorderly 165 succeeds the abundance and variety of its vain recourses.”5 To encourage the âme, the work of art or literature has to...