Hardcover
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Originally published in 1984.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691640174 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #918 |
| Pages: | 370 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Literary Fortifications
Rousseau, Laclos, Sade
By Joan E. DeJean
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1984 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06611-0
CHAPTER 1
Vauban's Fortresses and the Defense of French Classicism
Far rather do I believe that the high command has existed from all eternity, and the decision to build the wall likewise. Unwitting peoples of the north, who imagined they were the cause of it! Honest, unwitting Emperor, who imagined he decreed it! We builders of the wall know that it was not so and hold our tongues.
Franz Kafka, "The Great Wall of China"
* * *
The Genius of Louis's Machine
I read, some days past, that the man who ordered the creation of the almost infinite wall of China was that first Emperor, Shih Huang Ti, who also decreed that all the books prior to him be burned. That these two vast operations — the five to six hundred leagues of stone opposing the barbarians, the rigorous abolition of history, that is, of the past — should originate in one person and be in some way his attributes inexplicably satisfied and, at the same time, disturbed me.
Jorge Luis Borges, "The Wall and the Books"
The Louvre's Grande Galerie may well be the most prestigious exhibition space in France. Some years ago, a decision was made to shift the paintings displayed there, so that a prime section of this most illustrious museum walkway would be given over to the masterpieces of the French Classical age. During the reign of the master of ostentation, Louis XIV, the gallery had already been used to display artistic chefs-d'oeuvre that demonstrated national prestige. The area today devoted to Poussin and Chardin was in the seventeenth century occupied by the scale models of fortified places, plans-reliefs, that Vauban had constructed for his monarch in order to provide him with a permanent, portable, and easily studied record of each defensive complex. The miniature fortresses Louis showed off as representative of his reign were no mere utilitarian constructs. No expense had been spared to make them not only accurate, but beautiful as well. Witness this description by the curator of the museum in which they are now housed:
Le modelage général du relief est en bois. Les maisons et les monuments sont également en bois sculpté peint ou habillé de papier. Les arbres dont chaque essence est caractérisée sont en fil de fer et soie. La poudre de soie recouvre les prairies ... et un mélange approprié de sable et de carton-pierre permet de caractériser les diverses roches.
Upon receiving them the Sun King treated these miniatures as works of art and displayed them to the assembled court to be admired. Once installed in the Grande Galerie, however, the scale models were intended to awe ("éblouir") their few privileged spectators in a different manner. Access to the display was limited to those with the highest level of what we today call security clearance: the king's signature was required on each pass. As records of France's defensive might, the plans-reliefs were shrouded in secrecy. The authority they gained from the Sun King's classic strategy was only augmented on the rare occasions when the veil was lifted. Thus in 1717 the regent had Peter the Great taken to the gallery to prove to him in the most succinct way possible that, even after his death, Vauban continued to protect France (Parent, p. 128). Inside the gallery and defended by military secrecy, the delicate silk-clad miniatures were transformed into the representation of an awesome military machine, the image of a deterrent force then considered as dreadful as today's long-range missile systems. In the process, as will become clear, they became true artistic masterpieces, fulfilling the ultimate condition necessary for elevation to this status during the Sun King's reign.
The history of Vauban's scale models is faithful to the semantic origin of "machine." The Latin "machina" refers both to a military machine and to a device or stratagem. Military machines were devised by a machinarius or a machinator, an engineer, that is, someone known for his ingenium, his natural ability or genius. (In French, ingenium gave rise both to "génie" and to "engin," military machine or ruse.) In seventeenth-century France, all ingenious machinations, from ruses to industrial machines, functioned in some sense as artistic constructs. Machines of all kinds were appreciated as works of genius, as achievements whose very ability to perform tasks on a previously inconceivable scale and with superhuman efficiency lifted them out of the domain of the utilitarian and into the realm of artistic creation. The theatrical machines used in opera from which derives a concept of great importance for Classical literature, the deus ex machina, provide the most obvious examples of artistic devices appreciated aesthetically because of their ingenious construction. The hydraulic machines built by Vauban's engineers in order to operate Louis's lavish aquatic displays at Versailles are less obviously artistic creations, but they, nevertheless, were admired by king and court as though their aesthetic merits were as evident as those of the fountains and ornamental lakes they made possible. The courtiers marveled at the waterworks because of their sheer scale. The machine de Marly — whose functioning attracted spectators as attentive as theatergoers — included an aqueduct 643 meters long and 23 meters high, and 14 hydraulic wheels 12 meters in diameter. The never finished "grand aqueduc de Maintenon" was to have had a total length of 4,600 meters; only the lower arcade, 975 meters long, was completed, with the efforts of 20,000 men and at a cost of nearly 9,000,000 francs. These machines did more than fuel Versailles's spectacles and serve as spectacles in themselves. They functioned above all as signs of Louis's power, and of that of the corps de génie responsible for their invention. At Louis's court, power was beauty, and a machine that functioned on an enormous scale and at great expense was considered a glorious spectacle, even if, as in the case of the machine de Marly, its functioning was hardly a marvel of efficiency. Huet — a noted theoretician of the seventeenth-century novel — provides an apt characterization of this phenomenon of power become beautiful:
Quoique les beautez naturelles soient préférables aux beautez de l'art, ce n'est pas pourtant le goût de ce siécle. Rien ne plaît s'il ne coûte. Une fontaine sortant à gros bouillons du pied d'un rocher, roulant sur un sablé doré, les plus claires et les plus fraîches eaux du monde, ne plaira pas tant aux gens de la Cour, qu'un jet d'eau puante et bourbeuse, tirée à grand frais de quelque grenouillière.
As a result, even a quite humble machine, a machine that had at best an indirect connection to the spectacle of glory orchestrated at Versailles, the machine à faire des has de soie, became a worthy subject for narrative and for aesthetic contemplation. In the Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes, Perrault cites many examples of technical progress as a demonstration of modern intellectual superiority. His description of the silk-stocking machine reveals the structure of power that made such mechanical functioning admirable. The machine is a spectacle because of its superhuman production level: "[elle] fait en un moment tous les divers mouvemens que font les mains [d'un Ouvrier] en un quart d'heure." Furthermore — and for Perrault this is the mark of the "génie" and the "sagesse" of the engineer who, truly the god of this machine, "gave life" to it (p. 120) — this "astonishing" power is perfectly dominated by a system of indirect, impersonal control. The child who serves as the infans in machina by turning the wheel that operates the machine "understands nothing" about its functioning, so that, Perrault reasons, "du vent ou de l'eau tourneroient aussi bien [la roue] et avec moins de peine." Unlike the devices that brought divine spectacle to opera, there is no god in this machine, and that is precisely the origin of its powerful beauty. Like the Sun King, the machine is a hollow construct, capable therefore of an inhuman, a superhuman, level of control and effectiveness.
Hydraulic machines, operatic machines, industrial machines, the royal machine — during France's Golden Age, the machine was an art form, a borderline art form because all these machines had both an aesthetic and a utilitarian function. In the case of the princely machine as much as in that of the operatic machine, the utilitarian function was the source of aesthetic pleasure. For Louis XIV and his moderns, art was an awesome, hollow construct that functioned as a sign of power. In this society that marveled at mechanical glory, it was fitting that the heart of the king's traditional home, the Louvre, should house the representation of the war machine without which all these diverse spectacles of power would have been meaningless. Vauban was the founding genius of the corps de génie, the century's most ingenious maker of engins, the machinator who devised the ruses that were the foundation of his king's war machine. Like his scale models, his military exploits were first an open source of astonishment and admiration. Then, also like his scale models, the strategies on which those exploits were based were shrouded in secrecy, making of Vauban not only a maker of machines that came to constitute a deterrent force, but a deterrent force in and of himself.
Vauban's plans-reliefs were the silk-clad miniaturization of a war machine that functioned on such a superhuman scale that it gave birth to a myth, the myth of a system of defenses so perfect that it could make France, like its king, an impregnable fortress.
* * *
The Builder of the Wall
Les génies lisent peu, pratiquent beaucoup, et se font d'eux-mêmes. Voyez César, Turenne, Vauban. ... C'est la nature qui forme ces hommes rares-là.
Denis Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau
Evocations of the glory that was Versailles assign only a dark place in the Sun King's shadow to one of the individuals most responsible for the continued existence of that glory, Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban, Louis XIV's Commissaire général des fortifications. Vauban's contemporaries were more generous in their estimation of the figure who would ultimately become a legend only for military history. Thus the arbiter of Classicism, Boileau, wrote to Racine: "C'est un des Hommes de notre siècle à mon avis qui a le plus prodigieux mérite." Whereas most legends of the Versailles saga have been painstakingly dissected, one of the great myths of the Classical period in France has never been seriously explored: the creation of the perfect system of defenses. Yet the Sun King's master fortifier may well be the emblematic figure of what Michel Foucault considers the Classical era (the late seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century). Militarily, Vauban's genius was indispensable to the success of his monarch's enterprise. Furthermore, at the end of Louis's reign and in the course of the eighteenth century Vauban's work came to be widely regarded as having almost magical powers that guaranteed France's protection. Finally, the complex of fortifications he developed to defend France against foreign invasion ultimately gave the country its modern shape, just as literary Classicism may have determined the future course of French literature.
The myth with which Vauban's name was synonymous, that of a perfect system of defenses, can be used to explore the intersection of military history and aesthetic history. Proust suggests that "tout ce que vous lisez ... dans le récit d'un narrateur militaire, les plus petits faits, les plus petits événements, ne sont que les signes d'une idée qu'il faut dégager et qui souvent en recouvre d'autres, comme dans un palimpseste." A Proustian reading of the military history of the century of Louis XIV demonstrates that Classicism and defensive military strategies are homologous systems. As much as the triply unified play in five acts and alexandrines, the emblematic art form of the Versailles era is the Vaubanian fortress.
What has come to be known as the Golden Age of French art and literature was also the Golden Age of codification. Even if the dominant figures of the age of Louis XIV were not all makers of codes like Boileau, they both worked within the boundaries established by preexistent codes and worked to generalize the acceptance of these standards. Even within an artistic tradition as strictly governed by rules and hierarchies as the French, no period can equal the Golden Age for the seemingly unerring sense of limits and preference that then prevailed. Tragedy was superior to comedy, theater to the novel, formal "French" gardens were preferred to all other kinds — it seems as if all instinctively knew just what was best in every domain, and, furthermore, that those perceived as great heeded all prescriptions, rather than striving to bend or break them. In this context, Vauban can be considered Boileau's military counterpart. He codified the disparate fragments that had previously passed for a strategy of military defense. Because of his system, Vauban came to be accepted as a judge: it was taken for granted that he knew what should or should not be done. Vauban's peers in the arts set standards that, despite constant efforts to usurp their authority, were dominant throughout the eighteenth century. In like manner, his work ushered in the Classical century of military engineering during which the authority of his codes was contested, but never overthrown.
Like the great artists of Classicism, Vauban has been characterized as typically, essentially French. For example, such a demonstration is the central goal of Rebelliau's authoritative study: "[Les traits] de son caractère ne sont pas difficiles à résumer. Ils ne sont pas autres, en somme, qu'à un degré éminent les éléments essentiels de l'intelligence française. ... Les contemporains le comprirent et reconnurent en sa manière de procéder la marque du meilleur esprit français" (pp. 293, 296). Vauban's fortifications have continued to be judged, as he himself judged them, according to standards that are also applied to the artistic masterpieces of Classicism. Evaluating his work on Maubeuge for Louvois, Vauban reflected that "s'il y a quelque chose dans la fortification qui merite l'admiration des hommes, on peut dire qu'il se trouve dans cette place plus que dans aucune autre du Royaume." He praises it for two reasons: the beauty of its symmetry, and its grandeur ("on n'y trouvera rien que de grand"). Approving Vauban's own criteria, Rebelliau notes: "Maubeuge est done le chef d'oeuvre de la forteresse rationnelle et le reflet de la pensée classique du Grand Siècle" (pp. 81-82).
The language of fortifications is the foundation of a literary topos frequently encountered in the Classical age: for writers as dissimilar as the précieuses, Bussy-Rabutin, and Laclos's libertine correspondents, the woman's body is a fortress to which her lover lays siege. Quite distinct from such imprecise and cliché-ridden usage are the descriptions of fortresses and the art of siegecraft made by some of the greatest writers of the Golden Age — Lafayette, for example, in her Mémoires de la cour de France pour les années 1688 et 1689, or Racine in the fragments he composed for the never completed royal history. Texts such as these demonstrate that literature and fortifications were frequently coupled in seventeenth-century France: the founders of Classicism were well-versed in the strategies of siegecraft and, furthermore, considered Vauban the key figure in the development of that military art.
In his Histoire de la sexualité, Foucault argues that war and military strategy provide the principal model for the functioning of political power in Western society. His analogy may be extended to describe not only the political structure developed by Louis XIV, but also the Classical art nourished by that political structure. In what could be considered a parallel investigation, a recent school of French architects has attempted to show the relationship between defensive military architecture, in particular the bunker, and the definition or repartition of territory. Their comparison suggests an additional relationship, between military architecture and the structure of mental territory. Freud calls fantasies "psychical outworks constructed in order to bar the way to the memories [of primal scenes]." Lacan characterizes the "structure" of "obsessional neurosis" as "si comparable en ses principes à celle qu'illustrent le redan et la chicane, que nous avons entendu plusieurs de nos patients user à leur propre sujet d'une référence métaphorique à des 'fortifications a la Vauban.'" The Vaubanian fortifications Lacan describes are designed to "camouflage" and "displace" patients' aggressiveness. The structure of the actual defensive constructs that are the source of their metaphor may, I contend, have a great deal to teach us about the obsessions and the repressed violence of the Golden Age, may even reveal the shape of its (monarch's) primal fantasies.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Literary Fortifications by Joan E. DeJean. Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- A Note on References, pg. ix
- Acknowledgments, pg. xi
- Introduction, pg. 1
- I. Vauban’s Fortresses and the Defense of French Classicism, pg. 20
- II. La Fontaine’s Crafty Parable: The Pedagogical Trap, pg. 76
- III. The Oblique Way: Defensive Swerves, pg. 96
- IV. Julie and Emile: “Studia la Matematica”, pg. 112
- V. Les Liaisons dangereuses: Writing under the Other’s Name, pg. 191
- VI. Inside the Sadean Fortress: Les no Journées de Sodome, pg. 263
- VII. Under the Walls of the Fortress of Classicism, pg. 327
- Index, pg. 347