Matters of Style in the French Eighteenth Century

The interplay of style and matter, form and content, is the subject of two recent studies in French eighteenth-century philosophy and literature. In many ways, Natania Meeker's Voluptuous Philosophy and Elena Russo's Styles of Enlightenment offer similar histories of the competing ideas and logical contradictions that ran through the works of the French philosophes. When read in tandem, moreover, these studies offer interesting histories of the literary field since they examine how style was once thought to matter.

Voluptuous Philosophy is an intriguing and theoretically sophisticated study of materialist thought in the French Enlightenment. Drawing on fiction and essays by La Mettrie, d'Argens, Diderot, and the marquis de Sade, Meeker sets out to demonstrate that when modern science theorized, objectified, and rationalized matter as a distinct, precursive entity, it was far from a straight-forward and inevitable historical development. On the contrary, as they tried to understand their sensations and the natural world around them, eighteenth-century materialist thinkers struggled with frequently opposing theories about the relationship of language and substance.

The baron d'Holbach, for instance, saw matter as a complex signifying system—a discursive text—that needed to be decoded. Since the natural world (re-)presented itself as a set of symptoms of invisible causes, it had to be studied both as a verifiable physical phenomenon and as a rhetorical figure. In other words, Meeker argues, materialists such as d'Holbach were concerned with what we might now consider fundamentally literary problems of interpretation and rhetorical effect. Thus, Voluptuous Philosophy not only shows the interconnectedness of literature, philosophy, and science in the eighteenth century, but also demonstrates that a concern with poetics and appropriate reading strategies was of central importance to the history of French materialist thought. To a large extent, eighteenth-century materialist thinkers were influenced by neo-Epicurean and Lucretian philosophy, most notably by Lucretius's affirmation, in De rerum natura, of the critical role poetry plays in developing the reader's ability to understand the natural world. According to Lucretius, voluptuous forms pleased and affected the reader; they transformed his substance and thereby enhanced his understanding of himself and the world: poetry viscerally converted the reader to materialist philosophy. Voluptuous Philosophy argues that these ideas continued to be popular in the second half of the eighteenth century, for example in the works of La Mettrie and the marquis de Sade. In a surprising tour de force, Meeker thus topples standard readings of La Mettrie's mechanistic Machine-Man, rewriting him as "pure figure," a tropic body supposed to reshape materially its reader (89). Similarly, Sade's materialist project and his critique of sentimentality are said to be a function of Histoire de Juliette's narrative style.

At the same time, however, Meeker shows that contemporary translations of De rerum natura, as well as writings by Diderot and the marquis d'Argens, all worked to disavow the figural dimensions of matter and the suasive powers of figura. Time and again, Diderot raised questions about the link between figure and substance, insisting that sensation was a pre-discursive matter and that language should be considered a discrete object, not a source, of intellection. Similarly, an excellent chapter on Thérèse Philosophe shows how the marquis d'Argens recast voluptuous pleasure as a marginal phenomenon whose effects had to be managed before a more sober (male) reason could become operative. The self-possessed philosophic reader had to use his reasoned judgment to appreciate a text; he was not meant to open himself up to the voluptuous and transformative powers of poetic figure. In the process, Meeker argues, pleasure was redefined and neutralized as the literally insignificant experience of an unreflective body (it lost its ability to effect a material and philosophical conversion), while the literary field was isolated...