Questions of Influence in Modern French Literature

T. Baldwin, J. Fowler, A. de Medeiros, T. Baldwin,J. Fowler,A. de Medeiros,Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137309143
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

This collection engages with questions of influence, a vexed and problematic concept whose intellectual history is both ancient and vast. It examines a range of texts written in French, sometimes in dialogue with visual/musical works, drawn mainly from the eighteenth century onwards. Connections are made with related work in a range of disciplines.

1

Voltaire, Dante and the Dynamics of Influence

Russell Goulbourne

Writing in 1927 about the influence of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetry on his own, Paul Valéry remarks: ‘Il n’est pas de mot qui vienne plus aisément ni plus souvent sous la plume de la critique que le mot d’influence, et il n’est point de notion plus vague parmi les vagues notions qui composent l’armement illusoire de l’esthétique’ (‘No word comes more easily nor more often from the pens of critics than the word influence, and there is no vaguer notion among the vague notions that make up the illusory arsenal of aesthetics’).¹ The aim of this chapter is to interrogate and clarify a little that vague notion by considering, as a possibly rather perverse test case, the relationship between Voltaire and a writer who, critics essentially agree, did not influence Voltaire at all: Dante. In exploring at once the limits and the possibilities of what we call influence, this chapter will also cast new light on the specific question of the relationship between Voltaire and Dante.

That relationship does not appear to have been a particularly close, let alone fruitful one. Voltaire seems to have been very much of his time in having all but no time for Dante. For Dante did not enjoy very much popularity in the eighteenth century: in the whole of Voltaire’s lifetime, only 16 editions of the Commedia were published in Europe, compared to 14 in the first decade of the nineteenth century alone. Dante appealed more to the Romantics than to the rationalists of the Enlightenment. Voltaire, for his part, is normally thought to have engaged very little with the Commedia. It is true that he read Dante and that he did so in the original Italian: he owned and annotated a copy of the 1536 Venice edition of the Commedia.² But in his writings Voltaire comments on Dante relatively rarely, and the burden of those occasional remarks seems to be overwhelmingly negative, dismissing the Commedia as a bizarre, badly written and barely intelligible work. And perhaps even more striking than what he says is what he does not say. In his vast Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (Questions on the Encyclopédie) of 1770–74, Voltaire includes articles entitled ‘Enfer’, ‘Paradis’ and ‘Purgatoire’, yet in none of them does he refer to Dante, nor does he in the Dictionnaire philosophique (Philosophical Dictionary) article ‘Enfer’ (‘Hell’) of 1764. Dante is yet more conspicuous by his absence from Voltaire’s 1727 Essai sur la poésie épique (Essay on Epic Poetry), his comparative study of what he considered to be the greatest examples of European epic poetry from Homer to Milton. And, lastly, we look in vain for thematic, stylistic or structural echoes of the Commedia in Voltaire’s epic La Henriade (The Henriade) and his mock-epic La Pucelle d’Orléans (The Maid of Orleans).

If influence is understood in terms of X’s power over Y, where Y comes temporally after X, the great forebear, and if that influence is normally considered to be discernible in identifiable details, images, borrowings or sources, then we might reasonably conclude that Dante had no influence on Voltaire. However, there are two interrelated problems with such an argument: first, it relies on a limited, inherently hierarchical, monodirectional, even negative understanding of influence, where the earlier text wields power over the later author; and secondly, it takes no account of what influence meant to Voltaire and his contemporaries. Addressing what the term meant in the eighteenth century in fact points us towards a more fruitful, and inherently more positive, understanding of influence.³

If we start with the term ‘influence’ itself, it is worth bearing in mind that Voltaire, in common with his fellow eighteenth-century French writers, does not use it in a literary, artistic or cultural sense. Rather, he and they use the term primarily in its physical as well as in its moral sense. For example, the fourth edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1762) gives, firstly and somewhat sceptically, the traditional, astrological definition of influence: ‘Qualité, puissance, vertu qu’on prétend qui découle des astres sur les corps sublunaires’ (‘Quality, force, virtue that is said to be exercised by the stars on the sublunary bodies’). It then gives a figurative definition by means of two examples: ‘Les premières démarches qu’on fait dans le monde ont beaucoup d’influence sur le reste de la vie. Il a eu beaucoup d’influence dans cette affaire’ (‘The first steps one takes in the world have a great deal of influence on the rest of one’s life. He had a great deal of influence in this matter’). In a similar vein, Voltaire’s Questions sur l’Encyclopédie article on influence (1771) begins with a clear and characteristic definition of the term: ‘Tout ce qui vous entoure influe sur vous en physique, en morale; vous le savez assez’ (‘Everything around you has an influence on you physically and intellectually; you already know that’). He goes on to place particular emphasis on direct contact as a defining feature of influence:

Peut-on influer sur un être sans toucher, sans remuer cet être?

On a démontré enfin cette étonnante propriété de la matière, de graviter sans contact, d’agir à des distances immenses. [ . . . ] Il me semble que nous ne devons admettre en physique aucune action sans contact, jusqu’à ce que nous ayons trouvé quelque puissance bien reconnue qui agisse en distance, comme celle de la gravitation, et comme celle de vos pensées sur les miennes quand vous me fournissez des idées. Hors de là, je ne vois jusqu’à present que des influences de la matière qui touche à la matière.

(Is it possible to influence a being without touching or moving that being?

Finally, we have seen demonstrated the surprising property of matter to gravitate without contact, to act over immense distances. [ . . . ] It seems to me that we cannot accept in physics any action without contact until we have discovered some well-recognized force which acts over a distance, like that of gravity and like that of your thoughts over mine when you give me ideas. Beyond that, I have hitherto only seen the influence of matter touching matter.)⁴

Influence, according to Voltaire, is about a direct effect produced by one thing on another by dint of their coming into contact. Apart from that, he is prepared to admit of only two kinds of influence operating at a distance; namely, the gravitational and the intellectual. But while both of these may be intangible, Voltaire seems to imply that the influence of one person’s ideas on another’s is more arbitrary than the influence of gravity, which has been scientifically demonstrated. This very arbitrariness, of course, allows for the creative, dynamic and unexpected interaction and interrelation of ideas and, by extension, works of art.

It is precisely this kind of relationship between works of art that Voltaire analyses elsewhere with great clarity. In 1757, for example, he reflects on the relationship between artists of different generations in his Encyclopédie article ‘Goût’ (‘Taste’):

Le goût peut se gâter chez une nation; ce malheur arrive d’ordinaire après les siècles de perfection. Les artistes craignant d’être imitateurs, cherchent des routes écartées; ils s’éloignent de la belle nature que leurs prédécesseurs ont saisie: il y a du mérite dans leurs efforts; ce mérite couvre leurs défauts, le public amoureux des nouveautés, court après eux; il s’en dégoûte bientôt.

(Taste can be spoiled in a nation; this misfortune normally comes about after those centuries in which the nation’s sense had reached perfection. Artists, fearful of being imitators, seek out excentric paths; they distance themselves from the fine nature which their predecessors captured: there is merit in their efforts; this merit makes up for their failings, and the public, ever desirous of novelty, runs after them; but it soon loses its taste for them.)⁵

Voltaire diagnoses here what he sees as the misguided striving for novelty, or for what we might term originality, an aesthetic category that was taking shape in the middle of the eighteenth century, when Voltaire wrote this article.⁶ Anticipating, in a sense, Harold Bloom, Voltaire sees this striving as a symptom of the desire on the part of some of his contemporaries not to be like their predecessors at all, to be free of their influence: in their struggle for supremacy, their relationship to the past is an antagonistic one, one characterized by fear in Voltaire’s terms, in Bloom’s terms, by anxiety.⁷

In part, Voltaire’s critique of so-called originality informs his broader view of the eighteenth century as a period of artistic decline and decadence following the glories of the seventeenth.⁸ But more than that, it is also part of an aesthetics that privileges cultural continuity and memory. For instance, seven years after his Encyclopédie article ‘Goût’, Voltaire notes in La Défense de mon oncle (The Defence of My Uncle): ‘Les Muses filles de la Mémoire vous enseignent que sans mémoire on n’a point d’esprit et que pour combiner des idées il faut commencer par retenir des idées’ (‘The Muses, daughters of Memory, teach you that without memory one can have no mind and that, in order to arrange ideas, one has to start by remembering ideas’).⁹ And also in 1764, in his Discours aux Welches ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction:Influence: Form, Subjects, Time
• 1 Voltaire, Dante and the Dynamics of Influence
• 2 Post-Revolutionary Uses of Pascal
• 3 The Survival of Sade in French Literature of the 1950s
• 4 Jules Laforgue, Hartmann and Schopenhauer: FromInfluence to Rewriting
• 5 Text, Image and Music: Paul Valéry’s Melodrama Sémiramisand the Influence of the Ballets Russes
• 6 Influence as Appropriation of the Creative Gesture:Henri Matisse’s Poèmes de Charles d’Orléans
• 7 Samuel Beckett’s Funerary Sculpture
• 8 ‘Périmer d’avance’: Blanchot, Derrida and Influence
• 9 Figuring Influence: Some Influential Metaphors inDerrida, Valéry and Freud
• 10 Roland Barthes’s Ghosts: Photobiographical Influenceand Legacies
• 11 ‘Le Cycle de Nestor’: Patrick Pécherot’s Rewriting ofLéo Malet
• 12 Jacques Roubaud’s Rejection of Japoniste Influence:Tokyo infra-ordinaire
• 13 Ghosts of Influence? Spectrality in the Novels of Marie Darrieussecq
• 14 ‘Now I See Me, Now You Don’t’: Working with/againstPaternal Influence in Marie Nimier’s Photo-Photo
• Bibliography
• Index