The puritan and the cynic : moralists and theorists in French and American letters

126 Pages·1987·5.75 MB·English

by  Humphries, Jefferson

THE PURITAN AND THE CYNIC
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THE PURITAN
AND THE CYNIC
Moralists and Theorists in
French and American
Letters
Jefferson Humphries
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1987
Oxford University Press
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Copyright ©1987 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Humphries, Jefferson, 1955-
The Puritan and the Cynic.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. French literature—History and criticism.
2. Ethics in literature. 3. Literature and morals.
3. Literature and morals. 4. Didactic literature—
History and criticism. 5. Aphorisms and apothegms—
History and criticism. 6. American literature—
History and criticism. 7. Literature, Comparative—
French and American. 8. Literature, Comparative—
American and French. I. Title.
PQ145.1.E83H86 1987 810'.9'353 86-12570
ISBN 0-19-504180-1
2 4 68 10 97 5 31
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper.
For
Douglas Armato
and
Christopher L. Miller
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Preface
This book primarily addresses one question: Why do Americans—
and American authors in particular—profess such moral sentiments
while engaging so little in the traditionally moralistic literary genres
of maxim and fable? My stance is that of an American who has
spent a good deal of time studying the literature of my own country
as well as that of France, where the properly moralistic genres flour-
ished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as nowhere else—
but where, ironically, there has never been the sort of obsession
with morality (in life and literature) that exists in America, which
has produced such outbursts as the late John Gardner's On Moral
Fiction.
The question is not one which may be answered by means of a
linear, chronological comparison of the two literatures. My ap-
proach, instead, has been the only honest one which the subject will
permit: to consider the various literary environments in both cul-
tures, in which moral issues have arisen, progressing from one to
the next in a sort of spiral development. Each chapter is a circle in
the spiral, not pointing to the next so much as flowing into it. To
begin with, there is the inevitable scrutiny of the history of the
maxim in France and America. This is followed by a consideration
of the fragment as theosophical meditation, and then as literary epis-
temology. The latter chapter is followed by a study of the role of
the aphorism in deconstructionist criticism. The fable in both lit-
Vlll PREFACE
erary cultures comes into focus next. Finally, I am obliged to con-
template the survival of the maxim as a sort of negation of itself in
modern poetry, both in the United States and in France. What emerges
is not one answer to the question raised earlier but many, all of
which I believe to be true and none of which is really as useful by
itself as when considered with the others.
A note regarding references: I have dispensed with footnotes, in-
corporating parenthetical bibliographical references into the body of
the text. Where but one work by a given author is cited throughout,
only the author's name is provided, followed by the page number
in question; if the author's identity is clear from the context, the
page number will suffice. In cases where two or more works by the
same author appear in the bibliography, each work is referred to in
an abbreviated fashion. For instance, Allegories of Reading is ab-
breviated A o R, and "The Resistance to Theory" is abbreviated
"R t T." A complete list of works cited appears at the end of this
book. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
Baton Rouge, La. J. H.
April 1986
Acknowledgments
Several parts of this book have been previously published in some-
what different form in the following journals, to whose editors I am
grateful for permission to reprint: the first part of chapters 1 and 3
in L'Esprit createur 22, no. 3 (Fall 1982) and 24, no. 3 (Fall 1984);
chapter 2, in the Massachusetts Review 26, nos. 2-3 (Summer-
Autumn 1985), and chapter 6 in the South Atlantic Quarterly 86,
no. 1 (January 1987) (copyright © 1987 by Duke University Press).
I would also like to express my appreciation to the Council on
Research of the Louisiana State University for its support of my
work through the granting of two summer stipends, a partial stipend
in 1983 and a full one in 1984. I am heavily indebted as well to
the chairperson of my department, Nathaniel Wing, and to Henry
L. Snyder, former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at LSU,
without whose active interest and support the present book might
never have been finished. A special word of thanks is due to three
friends and colleagues, Ross Chambers, Kate Cooper-Leupin and
Alexandre Leupin, who read the manuscript and offered invaluable
corrections and suggestions. The encouragement, intellectual stim-
ulation, and friendship of my colleagues in the English Department
at LSU—in particular James Olney, Lewis Simpson, and Gale Car-
rithers—have sustained me as well throughout the writing of this
book.
Finally, I must express an immense debt to the staff of the Text
Processing Center of the College of Arts and Sciences at LSU, with-
out whose patient attention to detail the finished manuscript could
not have appeared.