PART 1
Genre and Representation
Chapter 1: Sedaine and the Question of Genre
Mark Ledbury
It has long been asserted that the concept of genre was central to the way in which the arts were understood in ancien-rĂ©gime France: one of the fissures that divide early modem artistic practice from modem practice is seen to be the abandonment of those rigid systems of genre which formed the dominant discourse in the production and reception of all art.1 More recent research has stressed that generic structures, like other aesthetic discourses, are connected in complex ways to wider social structures. It is certainly true that the need to classify and construct orders was an essential aspect not just of the rationale of academies, but of the politics of the court society which spawned them, and indeed of everyday life.2 FĂ©libienâs famous pronouncement concerning the hierarchy of genres did more than establish an upward progression of types of painting. It also made clear the philosophical, religious and social bases for this hierarchy, as it classed painters according to the complex and finely gradedsystems by which rank was understood at court.3 In literature and drama too, as Bray and others have shown, the progressive emphasis on generic rules as a structure for the production and reception of creative writing was associated with the hegemony of academic thinking.4
If hierarchical structures of thought and behaviour were central to the mind-set of the court society and left their mark on its artistic products, the same might also be said of what has come to be known as the âEnlightenment projectâ. For many different and often opposite reasons, the encyclopĂ©distes and other philosophes from Buffon to Diderot all argued for the importance of genre and generic categorisation as a key to organising and understanding the complexity of nature and culture.
However, as I have argued in other work, discourse on genre mutated in the course of the eighteenth century from a discourse of hierarchy to a discourse of opposition.5 Theorists such as Roger De Piles, the abbĂ© Du Bos, Claude-Henri Watelet and Voltaire started to recast the taxonomy of hierarchies of genre in terms of an overarching oppositional structure which, of course, associated the notion of genre with that of gender.6 The opposition of genres was the structure around which debate was facilitated, and in aesthetic disputes such as La Fontâs attack on the AcadĂ©mie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in the 1740s, or the long-running Italian/French opera dispute (including the querelle des bouffons), or many other eighteenth-century aesthetic disputes, the language of opposition is clear. La Fontâs critical terminology was specifically derived from gender opposition, as he railed against Boucherâs feminised mythologies and demanded a male and noble style.7
This shift is related to the re-formation of the political sphere in the course of the eighteenth century, one in which finely divided hierarchies and shades of nobility which dominated the systems of patronage and clientage in the court society themselves become increasingly recast as oppositions, whether in models of government, reason, science or art. Such oppositional thinking was integral to the ideologies of the French Revolution when a succession of oppositions became central to Revolutionary rhetoric.8
One brief but central example of this movement from hierarchy to opposition is the treatment of genre in the EncyclopĂ©die. Voltaireâs article on literary genre begins by asserting the multiplicity of different genres, but later states:
Chaque genre a des nuances diffĂ©rentes; on peut au fond les rĂ©duire Ă deux, le simple et le relevĂ©. Ces deux genres qui embrassent tant dâautres ont des beautĂ©s nĂ©cessaires qui leur sont Ă©galement communes.9
This tendency to convert a hierarchised taxonomy into an opposition between two separate, even opposed, genres is also evident in Wateletâs adjacent article on genre in painting, in which he states: âLe mot genre ⊠sert Ă distinguer de la classe des peintres dâhistoire, ceux qui, bornĂ©s Ă certains objets, se font une Ă©tude particuliĂšre de les peindre.â10 Watelet thus explicitly narrows FĂ©libienâs hierarchy into an opposition between history painting and all the rest, now simply defined (by default) as ânon-historyâ.
Diderot is often credited with a revolution in thinking on genre in painting and drama. However, he too succumbs to the same kind of thinking. At points in the Entretiens sur le Fils naturel he, or rather his idealistic partner in dialogue, Dorval, seems to be saying that the opposition that exists between tragedy and comedy might be nuanced by his new genre, the genre sérieux.11 One year later, however, Diderot reverted to an oppositional understanding of genre in De la poésie dramatique, where his new genres are subsumed into subsections of the most opposed categories of drama.
La comĂ©die gaie, qui a pour objet le ridicule et le vice, la comĂ©die sĂ©rieuse, qui a pour objet la vertu et les devoirs de lâ homme. La tragĂ©die, qui aurait pour objet nos malheurs domestiques; la tragĂ©die, qui a pour objet les catastrophes publiques et les malheurs des grands.12
In painting too, his interventions are often seen as nuancing the division established by De Piles, Du Bos and Watelet; however, in the Essais sur la peinture, his most involved intervention on genre, Diderotâs quarrel is not with the fundamental oppositional structure of genre, but with what should be included within this opposition:
Il me semble que la division de la peinture en peinture de genre et peinture dâhistoire est sensĂ©e, mais je voudrais quâon eĂ»t un peu plus consultĂ© la nature dans cette division.13
He goes on to try to recategorise the painters of domestic life as part of the history category. However at no time does he question the need for a fundamental division. If I stress Diderotâs conformism rather than his undoubted originality here, it is to demonstrate how even the most brilliant thinkers involved with the EncyclopĂ©die, as well as more conservative strains of Enlightenment thought represented by Watelet, tend to assume a ânaturalâ oppositional order of genre.
Two important aspects of the theoretical reworking of hierarchy as opposition were the difficulty in reconciling and compromising between the opposing poles, and the horror and fascination provoked by the possible products of such a collapse. In the articles referred to above by Watelet and Voltaire there are stark warnings about the danger of overstepping borders and seeking to escape from oppositional structures. Watelet felt that the attempt to cross boundaries between the high and the low would lead to the production of monsters. Even Diderot, who had theorised an intermediate genre, saw some mixtures and hybrids as dangerous and impossible.
Les peintres et les poĂštes ont le droit de tout oser; mais ce droit ne sâĂ©tend pas jusquâĂ la licence de fondre des espĂšces dans un mĂȘme individu. ⊠Vous voyez que la tragi-comĂ©die ne peut ĂȘtre quâun mauvais genre, parce quâon y confond deux genres Ă©loignĂ©s et sĂ©parĂ©s par une barriĂšre naturelle.14
It is against this background that some of Sedaineâs struggles and innovations in many areas emerge as more widely significant. The history of his practice and much other practice in all the arts in the eighteenth century is in some senses the history of the creative interrogation of systems of genre; although it is possible to see the eighteenth century as a conservative one, resistant to innovation and âplaying by the rulesâ, we must also recognise that, often in marginal or undervalued spaces (such as types of lyric theatre) this same eighteenth century saw the gradual erosion of the strict separation and opposition of genres.15 Such processes and tensions can be seen in perhaps uniquely sharp focus in the work of Sedaine, who was throughout his life actively involved with generic experiment and challenge, from his early poetry right through to the end of his life. This chapter will draw not only on his dramatic ideas and experiments but also his early interventions in poetry and his relatively unknown contribution to debates in architecture and the visual arts, to explore his engagement with the fraught but crucial question of genre.
In broad terms, one might say that Sedaineâs thinking on genre evolved from a dependence on the structures and modes of thinking on genre mapped out by Boileau and seventeenth-century theorists, through subsequent engagement with Enlightenment models of genre to a finally more radical and less comfortable interrogation of genre which was to have a profound impact on his own career, and which I believe constitutes one reason for his enduring importance as a writer and man of the theatre.
The lower, comic and marginal genres of poetry and drama became the focus of Sedaineâs attention from the time of his first poetry, which is, incidentally, critically underexplored.16 It cannot be stressed enough that Sedaine was not a naive or uneducated talent but a fiercely autodidactic one; his poetry, with its mixture of translations and renditions of ancient poetry, its songs and dramatico-musical essais, is clear evidence of a sophisticated, literary intelligence learning from a wide variety of sources. The urbane ironic âfaux-naifâ style which Charlton has analysed as an important part of the rhetoric of his dramatic prefaces is also powerfully present in his early verse collections.17 His early poetic interventions on genre are also laced with this irony, as Sedaine engages with the didactic texts by Boileau and Horace which provide him with points of departure.
One of the longest and most significant of these early poems on genre was the Satyre contre le goĂ»t des ouvrages poissards. This curious poem aimed criticism at the works of the dramatist Jean-Joseph VadĂ© (1720â57), who was Sedaineâs friend and one of the promotors of his early career.18 In this work, Sedaine rather ironically set himself up as a new Boileau (âPrĂȘte-moi sâil se peut, contre un nouvel affront/Les traits dont tu flĂ©tris le burlesque Scarronâ)19 and goes on to denounce the vogue for poissard plays. After describing a time when
Aux plus exactes moeurs ta muse fut fidelle,
Jamais un mot hardi dans tes tableaux divers
Ne souilla tes sujets aussi purs que tes vers
he regrets that
Cet heureux temps nâest plus; les marchĂ©s et les halles
Infectent les esprits des jargons les plus sales:
Câest un marais bourbeux que ce sacrĂ© vallon
La fange y cache aux yeux les trĂ©sors dâApollon.20
This alignment of the city, corruption and bad writing, and the horror of mixture evident here, seemed to imply that Sedaine argued as a purist, an upholder of the traditions of rules and the strict separation of high and low genres, who objected to fair cultures permeating wider artistic realms. However, in the articulation of what seem like fairly orthodox, even clichĂ©d views of the infection of drama by street slang, there is in Sedaineâs own poetic tone some lingering metaphorical enjoyment of the combination of the mud and slime of les halles with the sacred ground of the muses, which is at least a renegotiation of the boundaries of criticism.
Sedaineâs longest and most ambitious single poem, Le Vaudeville, a history and defence of opĂ©ra-comique, also stressed the problematic evolution and categorisation of low or popular genres:
Il est un genre au dessous du Burlesque
Phoebus honteux ne peut le nommer presque
Enfant du peuple...