Visible Writings: Cultures, Forms, Readings

Illegibility and Grammaphobia in Paul Et Virginie

Lorraine Piroux ILLEGIBILITY AND GRAMMAPHOBIA IN PAUL ET VIRGINIE In the work of Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, we find a curious fascination with fetishized books—those that are rarely, if ever, read but instead take on a baroque usage centered on aesthetic perception and the symbolism of the object. Bernardin de SaintPierre ’s conception of the book is distinguished by a penchant for printed texts that are resistant to reading, and their material irreducibility forms a curious contrast to the universally legible printed book that was almost unanimously celebrated during the Enlightenment . One is reminded of the bitter observation that the hermit in Bernardin’s Paul et Virginie offers to his student: “How many public and private tyrannies are still perpetrated in [the book’s] name in this world! After all of this, who can imagine themselves being useful to mankind through a book?”1 At first glance, it seems that, contrary to the majority of his contemporaries and more in line with JeanJacques Rousseau, Bernardin considers all reading to be morally, intellectually , and pedagogically suspect. His rejection of books and reading becomes more complex, however, as the hermit of this pastoral tale invites his young pupil to cultivate the society of certain books: “Read, my son. The sages who wrote before us are voyagers who invite us to join in their company when all else abandons us. A good book is a good friend” (191). How, then, are we to understand a pedagogy centered on the company of books that nonetheless seems to lend little credence to learning through reading? We would be faced with a contradiction if Bernardin’s work did not consistently avoid equating the book and reading in order to rede fine reading, not in terms of the hypothetical usefulness of the contents of books but, more radically, in terms of the form of the literary works that inhabit them. As I will show, while Bernardin perceives the book as a medium capable of preserving the formal integrity of his works, he also redefines it as an object that prevents a literal reading of his words. We will see that his romantic imagination and editorial policies move the book out of the cognitive and instrumental tradition , which is generally that of the Enlightenment, toward an aesthetic conception of the literary text. Illegibility and Grammaphobia 99 6.1. Title page of 1806 deluxe edition of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (Paris: Didot l’Aîné, 1806). 100 Lorraine Piroux “What is a book, after all?” Bernardin asks in the long preamble to the magnificent illustrated edition of Paul et Virginie that he had financed himself and that Didot l’Aîné had published for him in 1806 (figure 6.1). His avowed goal was to create a “monument of French publishing.”2 Yet contrary to what such editorial care might predict, Bernardin responds to his “what is a book?” question with a surprisingly virulent attack on the nature of the book as object: [A book] is ordinarily conceived through vanity; then written with a goose feather, by means of a black liquid ex- Illegibility and Grammaphobia 101 tracted from the gall of an insect, on rag paper collected from street corners. One then prints it with black smoke. These are the materials with which man, having acquired civilization, makes his claim for immortality. He composes his archives of them, he consigns there the history of nations , their treaties, their laws, and all that he conceives to be most sacred and most deserving of reverence. (23–24) Since Rousseau, we have learned to be wary of books, but such wariness doesn’t mean that we see them as responsible for the total collapse of civilization.3 Bernardin goes much further than JeanJacques : according to him, the codex (that is, the book with pages) is not only a contemptible object but also frankly repulsive. Witness the dirtiness of the book’s constituent parts, which Bernardin dissects with the dexterity of a forensic pathologist. While it is still only in manuscript form, the book is already stained with “insect gall.” Playing deliberately on the ambiguity of the French word galle (which can also be written as gale), Bernardin evokes scabies, a skin disease caused by parasitic mites, as well as the oak gall used in the production of writing ink. But he does not stop here. To the repulsiveness of...