eJournals Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature 43/84

Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature
0343-0758
2941-086X
Narr Verlag Tübingen
2016
4384

Christopher Braider: The Matter of Mind: Reason and Experience in the Age of Descartes. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. 340 p.

2016
Hall Bjornstad
PFSCL XLIII, 84 (2016) Christopher Braider: The Matter of Mind: Reason and Experience in the Age of Descartes. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. 340 p. This book sets out to challenge the place of the dualist Cartesian subject as the crucial turning point on the way to modernity, countering not only accounts celebrating the Cartesian threshold moment (from Hans Blumenberg to Jonathan Israel) but also those decrying it (from Adorno to Foucault). To scholars of seventeenth-century France, this may sound like old news: yet another dismantling of a grand récit from yesteryear, catering to the anti-theoretical doxa of our post-theoretical moment. It is not. Rather, the book is a supremely ambitious and utterly successful attempt to tell a revised version of that overarching story, demonstrating the critical and theoretical pertinence of the French seventeenth century for debates well beyond the confines of the period. Significantly, this is done by showing how “the monuments of early modern literary, artistic, and intellectual history” were already working through questions we may tend to consider the mark of a late rather than early modernity, thus “challeng[ing] the very notion of a pervasive rational subject imagined as escaping the multiple determinations of incarnate historical experience.” (4) Hence the structure of the book, where chapters on Descartes, Poussin, Corneille, Molière, Pascal and Boileau present innovative new readings exactly by tracing the very different ways in which the work of each of these authors shows us “that this sense of material entanglement represented not just a fact or even a pervasive motif but the essential matter of the so-called classical culture of seventeenth-century France.” (33) Through these subtle readings we come to a full understanding of the meaning of the title of the book. The matter of mind is nothing else than the body: “the inescapable embodiment of which mind is the expression rather than an impartial witness or judge.” (33) In making the case for this reorientation of our approach to a not-so Cartesian early modernity, the substantial introduction of the book importantly shifts the emphasis from reason to experience as the central concept that best enables us to grasp the major intellectual stakes of the period. The nature of this shift means that it cannot be adequately justified at an abstract level but needs to be worked out through the close interpretational engagement with the corpus at hand as a reflection and locus of the material entanglement in question. This work starts in the second half of the introduction when the focus, somewhat unexpectedly perhaps yet also programmatically, shifts from Descartes to Montaigne with a ten-page close reading of the opening and end of “De l’expérience.” These pages not only anticipate the reading practice that will characterize the chapters to come, PFSCL XLIII, 84 (2016) 110 but also mark a return from epistemology to ethics, from skepticism to experiential and experimental naturalism, which undergirds the rest of the book. In the process, Montaigne’s arrière boutique becomes the powerful emblem for a non-dualist version of the early modern self. While this famous image is normally activated as a figure of the freedom of the private person withdrawn from public roles (Fumaroli on La Fontaine is a case in point (32)), Braider subtly mobilizes the full symbolism of the mercantile setting. As for the intimacy and privacy experienced at the back of the shop, our sense of separateness, the autonomy of our mental interior is only second. The inner privacy and freedom of the arrière boutique is “a function of the deeper sense of connection by which our intimate lives not only communicate with but are permeated by the multifarious social, economic, and cultural relations to which the shopfront links us.” (33) Each of the six chapters constituting the main body of the book is so rich both in the breadth of their contextualizations and in the depth of their critical engagement as to contain the germ of a monograph on its own and certainly too rich to pay justice in a short review. Chapter 1 is a refreshing rereading of Descartes’ Meditations, trying to make sense of the fact that the slender text which today is normally published as the Cartesian foundational text constituted only 17% of the original volume carrying that name and that not even the full Latin title was Descartes own choice. Before solipsistic, disembodied monologue was multidimensional polemic dialogue, as refracted in the original volume in its structure of Objections and Responses and through the text’s complex paratextual apparatus. Indeed, a compelling case is made that a close consideration of the original publication as the thing and event it was at the time serves to highlight the material entanglement and embodiment that Cartesian metaphysics itself set out to refute. Both in approach and conclusions there is a strong continuity between this forceful opening chapter and the following chapters, as summed up in a dense phrase toward the end of the book: “The sovereign sujet-peintre of Poussinian art [chap. 2], the self-made genius of Cornelian tragic poetry [chap. 3], the experimental theory of words, ideas and images enacted on the Moliéresque stage [chap. 4], or the Pascalian portrayal of mind as an impersonal machine whose only hope of salvation is to find a way to switch itself off [chap. 5] - all of these avatars of the so-called modern subject demonstrate just how implausible the Cartesian notion of self turned out to be.” (203) And the same is true for the surprising final chapter on Boileau, a brilliant reading of his late satire “Sur l’Equivoque,” which here comes to enact the catastrophe of the classical culture it defends. All these chapters should be crucial reading for specialists and generalists alike. This reviewer was particularly struck by the revisionary Comptes rendus 111 force and irreverent crispness of the chapter on Pascal, which in 30 dense pages brings more to the field than many recent monographs. Furthermore, throughout the chapters, there are recurrent reflections on authorship, subjectivity, and sovereignty, which taken together constitute a major contribution to the interpretation of seventeenth-century absolutist culture in general. This is a wonderfully rich and ambitious book that brings together three sets of skills that are rarely combined: (a) a formidable general erudition pertaining to a vast set of traditions, including very impressive corpusspecific expertise; (b) a sophisticated fluency in high-level theoretical discussions; (c) the display of supreme close reading and micro analysis, which always serve the purpose of the wider discussion into which they enter. As such, this is an enterprise few others than Christopher Braider could have undertaken. It is a summa, a cornucopia, a career-defining moment, as justly acknowledged by the MLA committee that awarded the book the 2012 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for the best book in French and Francophone Studies. Hall Bjornstad Michael Call: The Would-Be Author: Molière and the Comedy of Print. Purdue Studies in Romance Languages 63. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2015. 292 p. This study aims to “trace Molière’s navigation of the changing nature of authorship and its social, legal, and literary implications” (22), and thus to “examine how Molière and his contemporaries, conscious of authorship’s connotations and utility, constructed, negotiated, and debated the image of Molière the author” (21). One might call this a study implicating the ‘prince of comedy’’s two bodies, or rather three: the physical one, particularly the actor; the writing and publishing one achieving authorial status; and (forgive me) the corpus of writings produced by the first two bodies’ mingled activities, and remaining after they had disappeared. Their interactions were, to be sure, nothing if not complex, beginning, in Professor Call’s telling, with the historic mixing of the notions of actor and auctor, and furthered in the double status of ‘Molière’ during his lifetime, stage name increasingly becoming pen name, “Molière’s authorship essentially becom[ing] one of his many roles” (20-21), its image even constituting Molière’s “greatest creation” (64). It is very much to the author’s credit that his work constitutes a serious, detailed, and substantial contribution to re-