Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
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tury; emerald green for the nineteenth; Venetian red for the seventeenth. The garamond font and layout have remained basically unchanged since volume one was produced in 1931. As of spring 1994,
there were 403 books-some 600,000 pages of text-in the series that
is called the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, the Pleiade library.2 The study
of this vast collection-its evolution, its geography, the appearances
and reappearances of various authors and genres (from novels and poetry to philosophy and religion)-illuminates the very idea of literature in France during the-past sixty years. The Pleiade also illuminates
a specific instance of what critics in the United States have called
"canon formation" or, perhaps more accurately in the French context,
the "consecration" of a set of authors and texts.3
1. Lester G. Crocker reviewing the first volume of the Rousseau P16iade in Modern
Cotin, director of the Pleiade at the tditions Gallimard, delivered at Montpellier, 22 May
1992 (typescript courtesy Jacques Cotin). All translations in this essay are the authors'
unless otherwise noted.
3. For very different approaches to these issues in France and the United States, see
Paul Benichou, Le sacre de 1'6crivain, 1750-1830. Essai sur 1'avenement d'un pouvoir
spirituel laique dans la France modeme (Paris: Jose Corti, 1973), and John Guillory,
YFS 89, Drafts, ed. Contat, Hollier, Neefs, C 1996 by Yale University.
237
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Although "Pleiade" immediately conjures up the French Renaissance school of poets and the defense of the French language, the
name-and the series-actually has more cosmopolitan roots. Jacques
Schiffrin, a Russian Jew who had emigrated to Paris by way of Geneva,
founded an independent publishing house called the Editions de la
Pleiade in the early 1920s.4 Schiffrin's "Pleiade" was from the Russian,
"pleiada," and according to oral tradition at Gallimard, it meant "to
package up" [empaqueter]: the books would be beautifully produced.5
Among the editors in the original publishing house, along with Schiffrin, were Boris de Schloezer, a specialist of Russian literature, and
4. When, exactly, the tditions de la Pleiade began is unclear; one of the earliest texts
published was certainly Schiffrin's 1923 translation of Pushkin's Dame de pique, pref-
aced by Andre Gide (Paris: tditions de la Pliade, J. Schiffrin et Cie., 1923), 95 pages.
5. As told to Cotin and attributed to Brice Parain, Gallimard author and Slavicist. In
fact, Russian dictionaries give the meaning of "pleiada" as "group or movementetymology: French."
6. On du Bos, see Charles D6d&yan, Le cosmospolitisme litteraire de Charles du
Bos, vol. 2 (Paris: Sedes, 1966), 631ff, and Charles du Bos, ed. Dominique Bourel and
Hubert Juin, Entretiens de France Culture (Paris: Fac tditions, 1985).
7. Charles du Bos, Journal, vol. 3, 1926-1927, entry for 5 January 1926 (Paris: Correa, 1949), 14ff.
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Cervantes, Goethe, and Manzoni. His affinity for confessional literature remained a hallmark of the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, which
eventually published Baudelaire ("Mon coeur mis a nu"), Montaigne,
also that of memoirist Andre Gide (Journal 1889-1939, 1939, no. 54).
In 1931, the Editions de la Pleiade launched the leather-bound collection called the "Bibliotheque de la Pleiade": number one, Baudelaire. It was Gide, as the primary shaper and visionary of literary
policy at Gallimard, who negotiated for the transfer of the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade collection to the Editions Gallimard, presumably
had to insist and fight for nearly two years before reaching an agreement. "I don't see what you find so remarkable in it," X insisted
obstinately.8
on his 1936 trip to the Soviet Union). While Schiffrin has gone down in
Gallimard legend as the originator of the series, du Bos's early links to
the Editions de la Pleiade have been forgotten; this is perhaps because
du Bos broke dramatically with Gide and his Gallimard/Nouvelle re-
culosis.) But in concert with Schiffrin, du Bos had set an agenda for the
Pleiade series: the presence of the great Russian novels of the nineteenth century, the importance given to intimate and confessional
8. Andre Gide, Journal 1939-1949, Souvenirs, entry for 16 March 1943 (Paris: Gallimard, Pkiade no. 104, 1954). Edition cited, 1966, 212. Pierre Assouline, Gallimard's
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literature, and the production of beautiful books and editions at reasonable cost.
Legend at the Editions Gallimard tells how, in the late 1920s, Schiffrin had been struck upon his arrival in Paris by the beauty and utility
of the "missal," the liturgical volumes printed on fine "bible paper"
that parishioners carried in their pockets to mass. These small books
book- was based on this affinity to the missal. Not only authors and
titles were being canonized, but so were the objects-the books themselves. Or perhaps the canonical metaphor is inexact, as the spirit of
the early Pleiade was not so much about making literature sacred in an
official sense as it was about making it concrete and available.
Along with the idea of the library shelf contained in the name of the
little Racine that Schiffrin gave me before leaving."'10 The Pleiade was
not "litterature de gare" (junk reading), but train reading. The advantage of the bible paper (actually obtained from cigarette paper manufacturers!) was that you could fit many, many pages of print in a volume
small enough to take in a suitcase. (There are other precedents, such as
the British anthologies of inspirational verse that the World War I
soldiers fit into their knapsacks to take to the front, which embodied
the corresponding notion of essential, life sustaining reading.)" Ini9. Philippe Roussin, interview with Cotin, 2 June 1994.
10. Gide, Journal 1889-1939, Pleiade no. 54, 1939 (edition cited, 1965, 1099-100).
Fittingly, Gide's Journal itself would be the first volume in the Pleiade collection by a
living author. One wonders if Gide weren't writing for the Pliade, given the number of
times he mentions it: 11 February 1934: "I'm soaking up Voltaire's Tales, little and big, in
the charming Schiffrin edition" (1197); 18 July 1934: "Lucien Leuwen in the Schiffrin
edition" (1207); 13 September 1938: Gide goes over the galleys for his Journal with
Schiffrin and spends two weeks on his translation of Shakespeare's Antony and
Cleopatra (1319); 22 September 1938: he rereads the galleys of his Journal for the Edition
de la Pliade; works on the Shakespeare preface, anxiously (1322).
11. Cotin used the expression "une bibliotheque necessaire" in his Montpellier
lecture (typescript, 3), doubtless echoing Malraux's famous phrase, "tout homme a qui
un art est necessaire" [every man for whom an art is necessaryl.
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definition of myth: "the most complete, the most elegant, the least
encumbering and the least costly."'12
These key features of the early Pleiade concept-the liturgical overtones, the idea of the pocket book and the travelling book, plus an
unproblematic view of the text itself (about which more below)-were
all explicit in this 1934 introduction to Montaigne's Essays by Albert
Thibaudet:
This edition is the first pocket edition of the Essays in one volume. The
essays have been called a breviary a hundred times. If they have, in
effect, the soul of a breviary, what remained was to give them the body
of one. And now, along with Cicero, the walker can say about them:
nobiscum rusticantur [go out in the country with us]. The establishment of their text has been uncontested for thirty years. [7]
The work itself was established; notes and commentary were mini-
mal; the book was portable and affordable and durable, like the Good
Book. It had just the right body for its soul.
If you walk into the library of anyone who reads in French, chances
are strong that the Pleiades will not be mixed with the other books but
displayed together on the shortest shelves, their leather bindings
touching one another, perhaps alphabetically by author, or perhaps
chronologically, according to their color. A 1934 poster for the series
insisted on the link between the Pleiade and the bookshelf: ["All the
classics on one shelf."] A 1960 advertisement vaunted the fact that 100
ordinary volumes of 250 pages took up two meters on the bookshelf,
whereas one single Pleiade represented six to ten ordinary volumes,
and the entire Pleiade collection of 178 volumes would take up a mere
5.5 meters.13 There were any number of American equivalents to the
12. Advertisement for the Album Stendhal de la Pliade, La quinzainelitteraire (115 October 1966): 30.
13. From the 1960 advertisement, tditions Gallimard archives: "Its formula, founded essentially on the use of extremely thin bible paper, opaque and inalterable, permit-
ted bringing together in one leather-bound volume, its spine decorated with real gold,
texts that until now were published on ordinary paper in six to ten volumes.... A
double savings: 100 ordinary 250 page volumes would take up 2 meters on the shelves of
your library. The texts they contain, published in the P1kiade, represent no more than 15
volumes and use only 50 centimeters. The complete collection, currently amounting to
178 volumes, occupies exactly 5.5 meters."
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Pleiade concept, also dating from the nineteen teens and twenties.'4
The Everyman Library, the Harvard Five Foot Shelf, Haldeman-Julius's
Little Blue Books, and the Little Leather Library all variously employed
a democratic rhetoric of self improvement. The Pleiade rhetoric did
not focus so much on self-improvement (the target audience was cultured amateurs of literature) as much as it did on an appreciation of a
and Poe make up volumes 1 and 2 in the collection; then the collection
zigzagged from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, followed by a
few seventeenth century titles (the "classic" period for French literature, in literary historical terms). Voltaire, Stendhal, Racine, Laclos,
Moliere, and La Fontaine had their Pleiades by 1933. No Greek or Latin
classic existed for forty-three volumes, when Plutarch's Les vies des
ment for American university curricula, which, in a spirit similar to that of the Pleiade
project, "dismissed historical exegesis and philology as irrelevant ... cut across time
and place, and accommodated translations" (166). For a history of specific publishing
ventures making classics available in pocket format, see John Tebbel, A History of Book
Publishing in the United States, vol.2, The Golden Age Between Two Wars, 1920-1940
showing from the beginning: Descartes (no. 40), Plato (nos. 58 and 64), Machiavelli (no.
92), Spinoza (no. 108), Alain (nos. 116 and 217), Kant (nos. 286,317, and 332), Marx (nos.
164, 204, and 298), the Stoics (no. 156) and the Presocratics (no. 345) figure in the catalog.
As for the term "classics, " it was used in France in the 1 930s much as it was in the United
States-as an umbrella concept for great cultural monuments, with no differentiation
between literature and philosophy.
17. See note 19, below.
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poet."''8 Now, as the incarnation of poetic modernity, Baudelaire corresponded to the taste first imagined for the Pleiade volumes.'9
So although it has come to be identified for its Frenchness-a "lieu
de memoire," to echo the current phrase-the Pleiade was not con-
ceived as a national project. Baudelaire was followed by Poe, the American writer he had translated: the Pleiade began with a marked affinity
for the modern. Commercial considerations and questions of turf may
also have dictated early choices. The works published in the early years
Don Quixote dated 1614 and 1618;20 a short preface vaunted the fact
that only the slightest alterations had been done on the centuries-old
translation. On the other hand, there is a reason that the Pleiade came
ultimately to be identified with a national literature and with a traditional notion of literary canon. Among the first hundred volumes,
there were only seven foreign authors,2' and only five percent of the
first hundred writers were twentieth-century authors. As in any tradi18. See Antoine Compagnon's account of Lanson and Doumic's denigration of Bau-
delaire (as well as Rimbaud, Huysmans, Verlaine, and Mallarm6) in their literary man-
19. Daniel Milo, in his study of the history of literary translations based on the
Index translationum, concludes that the 1930s mark a clear detachment from the classical canon: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Balzac, and Dickens replace the Greeks and Latins in
popularity. See Milo, "La Traduction, un barometre culturel," Annales, ESC (JanuaryFebruary 1984): 92-115. Milo's argument doesn't apply perfectly to the Pliade, since his
notion of the receding "classics" includes not only Latins and Greeks, but also French
authors well-represented in the early Pleiade volumes: Corneille (nos. 19 and 20, 1934);
Moliere (nos. 8 and 9, 1933), Rabelais (no. 15, 1934), and Racine (no. 5, 1931).
On Malraux's recognition of Baudelaire's changing fortune in the 1920s, see his
(nos. 43 and 44, ed. G. Walter, 1937) reproduced Amyot's sixteenth-century translation,
known and beloved by French writers from Montaigne to Stendhal. See Andre Maurois,
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The Pleiade has an eccentric relationship to its own publication chronology and to chronologies in general. When an author is given a new
treatment in the Pleiade collection, the previous edition is rendered
obsolete. There is simply no more mention of it in the catalog. MartinChauffier exists no more, in the Pleiade catalog, as the 1933 editor of
Goethe in 1942. The only mark of that editorial history is in the disjunction between printing dates and the volumes' numbering system.
When an author is reissued under different editorship twenty or thirty
years later, the old editor's name disappears but the new edition retains
its previous number: the 1933 Moliere edited by Maurice Rat was the
eighth volume in the series; reedited in 1971 by Georges Couton, it is
(Plkiade, no. 96, 1953), ed. Albert-Marie Schmidt; and Romanciers du XVIkhme sihle
(Plkiade, no. 131, 1958), ed. Antoine Adam.
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In the late 1920s, Andre Malraux conceived and developed an ambitious literary project to be published under the Nouvelle revue franSaise imprint, entitled Tableau de la litterature fran~aise, and which
might be thought of as the critical corollary to the editorial project of
the Pleiade. It was designed as a series of essays on French literature by
the leading contemporary French writers (not, we notice, by academic
historians of literature), many of whom were publishing their own
work at Gallimard. A decade later, Gide, founding editor of Gallimard's
flagship literary magazine, the Nouvelle revue fran~aise, and the person who had brought the Pleiade series to Gallimard, penned an introduction to the first volume of the Tableau, "From Corneille to Chenier." This brief text described the attitude toward the literary object
that distinguished the neighboring Pleiade enterprise from traditional
literary history:
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with its color reproductions; on the other, the PlMiade Libraries, the
pocket classics, in each great language of culture. This availability
but a poet or a prose writer.... It's not rhetoric professors who have led
us to the beautiful verse of Boileau, it's Victor Hugo.... Rodin is the
true commentator on Greek statuary.26
Sainte-Beuve (Pleiade, no. 129, 1971) ed. Pierre Clarac et Yves Sandre, 190.
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It made sense, then, that writers and nonacademic critics wrote the
introductions to a number of the early Pleiade volumes, inviting the
Andre Billy wrote the introduction to Diderot (no. 25, 1935); Gide to
Shakespeare (no. 50, 1938) and to Goethe (no. 63, 1942); Jean Giono to
Machiavelli (no. 92, 1952); Albert Camus to Martin du Gard (no. 113,
1955); Roger Caillois to Montesquieu (no. 81, 1949) and to SaintExupery (no. 98, 1953).
The early volumes followed a certain model. More often than not,
prefaces indicated that the text was well established and that critical
apparatus was confined to a minimum:
Corneille (Lievre, no. 19, 1934): "The Corneille variants form such a
huge mass that, not wanting to make choices that certainly wouldn't
satisfy anyone, we have decided to renounce publishing them."
Diderot (Billy, no. 25, 1935): "The Diderot variants, or rather those of
his editors, are generally without interest. We haven't attached any
importance to them."
Montaigne, Essais (Thibaudet, no. 14, 1934): "For thirty years, the text
has been established without any contestation."
In addition, the idea of chronological influence so central to Lansonian literary history was not obeyed. Lievre, editor of the 1934 Corneille, would read the seventeenth-century dramaturge by way of Bau-
28. Albert Thibaudet, "La critique des maitres," in Physiologie dela critique (Paris:
Editions de la Nouvelle revue critique, 1930), 104-47.
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With respect to a line in Corneille's Polyeucte, Lievre noted that Voltaire judged it harshly, and reacting in the intimate first person, Lievre
disagreed:
Voltaire judges this line severely. He considers its tone burlesque.... I
must say that not only can I see nothing burlesque in it . .. but that it
seems to me on the contrary to be of a particular and melancholy
eye to rhetoric and "le beau parler, " to the source-hunt ("la chasse aux
so(u)rcieres") of the literary historians. This is a radically different
editorial practice from that of Gustave Lanson, who wrote in his ex-
Malraux later spoke about a "metamorphosis" of works in the library into the present, a space where works would be in a "horizontal"
relationship, a space of equality with one another, unlike the "vertical
is this one that remains the most marvelously living [vivant]. Writers
29. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, ed. Gustave Lanson (Paris: Hachette, 1924), L.
30. Malraux, Le musee imaginaire, (1947, rpt. Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 231; and
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distant in time and language were thus meant to come alive and to
come close to a large public, in concert with other writers.31
Pleiade founder Jacques Schiffrin left Gallimard for exile in the United
States in 1940, where in 1943 he republished the great text of resistance, Le silence de la mer, under a new imprint called "Pantheon
pation of France. Plato, Chateaubriand, and Montesquieu were an31. This spirit of "translation" in the large sense can be understood against a background of interest in foreign literatures on the part of Gallimard authors, beginning in
the 1920s: Gide translated Conrad's Typhoon in 1918, Shakespeare's Antony and
32. Schiffrin left the Editions Gallimard and France in the wake of an "aryanisation" of French publishing undertaken by the Germans as early as August 1940. In
October 1940, the Paris Propaganda Staffel wrote to the German military authorities
la Nouvelle revue critique, and the tditions de la Nouvelle revue franqaise (published
under the Gallimard imprint)-be temporarily shut down, in an effort to "purge" them.
Their letter specifically names Schiffrin as one of two Jewish editors still active at
Gallimard at that time. (Letter of 9 October 1940 from the Paris Propaganda Staffel,
reprinted in Pascal Fouch6, L'6dition fran~aise sous l'Occupation, 1940-1944 [Paris:
33. Gide, Pages de journal 1939-1942, ed. Schiffrin (New York: Books, Inc., 1944), at
head of title: "premiere edition." The Journal would also be published in Algeria, in
September 1944, and in Switzerland, in April 1945, before appearing in France; Thes~e
(New York: Pantheon Books/French Pantheon Book 7, 1946), also marked "premiere
edition"; and William Shakespeare, Hamlet, bilingual edition, trans. Gide, ed. Schiffrin
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1945). Gide's translation of Hamlet was published by Gallimard in 1946.
34. Jean Paulhan, Choix de lettres II, 1937-1945, Trait6 des jours sombres, ed.
Dominique Aury and Jean-Claude Zylberstein, revised and annotated by Bernard Leulliot (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). On the Pliade, see Paulhan's no. 164 (203-04), no. 198
(238-39), no. 217 (260-61), and no. 267 (309).
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nounced for 1940: instead, Peguy appeared in 1941, Plato and Goethe
in 1942, the latter with an introduction by Gide assuring readers that
the best of German culture could be found in this writer.35 In February
1943, no more volumes could be printed due to lack of paper. But all
things considered, it was an excellent year for the Pleiade. Gide noted
in his March 1943 journal that after slow beginnings and considerable
resistance on the part of booksellers, Pleiade editions had become
highly sought after internationally; there was now a veritable black
market for them, with individual volumes being priced at 2,000 francs
in Rome and 4,000 or 5,000 francs in New York.36 In the spring of 1943,
with actual Pleiade production at a halt, Gaston Gallimard used the
"Pleiade" label to launch the "Concerts de la Pleiade," which would
become a house tradition. The year 1943 also saw the founding of the
Prix de la Pleiade, Gallimard's in-house literary prize named for the
prestigious series, whose selection committee included Nouvelle re-
vue franqaise writers Sartre, Queneau, Malraux, Blanchot, and Paulhan. The Pleiade symbol thus stood in for the books that were missing.
35. Gide contrasts the present moment (the Goethe Pleiade appears in May, 1942) to
the horror the French felt for Goethe after the Franco-Prussian war: "Today we think,
following Goethe's example, that it is better to understand than to deny; that it would
have been worth more, that it is still more worthwhile, to seek and find in Goethe what
he brings to the world: the highest teaching that Germany is capable of receiving and
giving, that of a welcoming wisdom, respectful of others, likeable, harmonious, and at
ease" ("Introduction," Pleiade no. 63, xiv).
36. Gide, Journal 1939-1949. Souvenirs (Paris: P16iade no. 104, 1954, [rpt. 1966],
entry of 16 March 1943: "The very likeable young German officer, who was studying art
history, and who was also a friend of Ernst Robert Curtius ... told me that in Rome
where he started his military service and spent over a year, the Pleiade books are so
sought after that the few booksellers who still have any in their possession are asking up
to 2,000 francs (in our currency) for them; (they are valued at up to 4 and 5 thousand
francs in New York, Keeler Faus wrote me at the beginning of the war) .... I remember a
conversation with the principal book dealer (might as well say the only one) in Dakar,
during my first A.O.F. visit, who told me, speaking of the Pleiade books: 'No sir, our
clients don't like those books; there is no chance they'll succeed. No, the French living
here [colons] don't want any part of them.' Then, taking out a hideous huge illustrated
edition of I can't remember which author then in vogue: 'Look, here's what they like.' If I
saw him again today, he'd no doubt insist that he never made such a statement, or even
that he was one of the first booksellers to sell and recommend the Pleiades to his
customers; but I swear that my memory here is accurate" (212-13). See also note 8 above.
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journal that filled the void left by the Nouvelle Revue Franqaise,
which, having been dishonored by the collaborationist stance of war-
stallment plan . .. ).
37. Robert Brasillach, Oeuvres completes, ed. Maurice Bardeche (Paris: Club de
l'Homme, 1963-64), vol. 9, "Textes 6crits en prison," letter 25 to his sister (Fresnes, 22
December 1944), 248-49, for the passage quoted. See also letter 34 to Bardeche (Fresnes,
21 December 1944), 246: "We will have thrown to the gods not a ring, but things more
precious still: it seems that the Pliade, in particular, has disappeared. Too bad! We'll get
it back in gifts, piece by piece. Or we'll buy it back at the Rive Gauche bookstore."
38. See Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Re-Ordering
of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994.)
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being, mysteriously, the ultimate example of "bad readers.") Demographically, France was entering a period of growth; the baby boom
children reached college-age in 1960, and the university was expanding. At Gallimard, Pierre Buge, formerly the director of the Classiques
Garnier, classics for the schools, was brought in by Gaston Gallimard
as director of the Pleiade collection in 1965; his training had prepared
him well to reorient the books toward a university public.39 At the
moment when the Pleiade was turning to this public, other publishers
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means so for the latter.... The process of turning back and forth thousands of times becomes very wearisome in a book whose paper is so
difficult to handle. Why should not the publishers have had at least
enough regard for the needs of the scholar (and their own interests) to
produce a "library edition" on more manageable paper, the text in one
volume, the notes in another? There are other outward and visible
aspects of this edition unlikely to give much satisfaction to the bibliographer and the librarian. However, it is after all the contents that
Indifferent to the charm of the bible paper, and to the bedside inti-
macy of the compact pocket book that was so much part of the 1930s
Pleiade ideal, Besterman was interested in the scholarly content. He
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hidden behind the solidity of the oeuvre and the certainty of its being.
The period of "text"-oriented Pleiades began to open up immediately
after the war, when, faced with such writers as Chateaubriand (Pleiade
no. 67, 1947)42 and Rimbaud (no. 68, 1946) who, for various historical
reasons, did not publish their oeuvre during their lifetime, the Pleiade
editors had to establish a corpus out of unpublished manuscript material; there was no given oeuvre available, in the traditional sense. The
text emerged from the empirical necessity of turning to the manuscript
and constructing the words on the page-the text-from the manuscript or manuscripts. In historical terms, the move from work to text
did not take place in a vacuum. Postwar advances in structural linguistics and esthetics, questioning the unity and integrity of the literary object, meant that the concept of ready-made oeuvre corresponded
less and less to the dominant vision of literature. "Text" was the term
that came to be given to this more problematic linguistic entity. The
1959 Rousseau formalized the sea change within the literary tidal pool
that was the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade.
In the case of Rousseau, recourse to manuscripts was necessary
because Rousseau himself was unable and unwilling to publish his
confessional work during his lifetime, for fear of reprisal by his adversaries. Rousseau's own relationship to his writing was obsessively "autographic." This copiste de musique had a highly artisinal sense of his
(one copy was for himself, one for his publisher, and two were for his
patrons). Moreover, he was constantly worried that corrupt versions of
his texts would be used to discredit him after his death. He hoped to
ested, indeed, obsessed, with the fate of his manuscripts than JeanJacques Rousseau, who in this sense was a most fitting author to usher
manuscript study into the Pleiade editorial apparatus.
42. The Chateaubriand P16iade project had been in the works since 1938 and was
delayed by the war.
43. Quoted in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, vol. 1, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and
Marcel Raymond (Pleiade, no. 11, 1959), 1186-87.
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Germany, the Rousseau team brought to the Pleiade methods of reading indebted to the German philological tradition and to German
The resulting critical volumes, for their fidelity to Rousseau's spelling, their careful variants, their phenomenological reading of the texts
in combination with a philological perspective, brought this writer's
work close to the reader. However, this was not the conversational
intimacy of the imaginary-museum phase of the Pleiade; it was an
intimacy in which the reader came to know the text through the mediation of the editorial expert.
"source studies" and what would come to be known twenty years later
as genetic criticism, using the phrase "genetic study" as well as the
45. The actual practice of genetic criticism in France can be dated back to the
Heinrich Heine manuscript project of the 1960s, conducted by a group of researchers at
the CNRS. The phrase "critique genetique" didn't become common in French literary
studies until the 1980s. The idea of the genesis of a text turns up much earlier, however:
Goethe referred to "the genetic evolution" of the text; Baudelaire to the "genesis of a
poem." On Goethe, see Louis Hay, "La critique genetique, origines et perspectives" in
Essais de critique genetique (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 227-336; on Baudelaire, see
Almuth Gresillon, "Ralentir: Travaux," Genesis (Paris: J. M. Place, 1992), vol. 1, 9-13.
For a discussion of nineteenth-century German precursors, see Gresillon, Elements de
critique genetique. Lire les manuscrits modernes (Paris: Presses Universitaire de
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passed between the initial spark of inspiration and the mailing of the
final batch of corrected proofs.46
What was demarcated so clearly here in May's review was nothing less
than a whole new direction for literary study, distinct from both the
est precisely because, for historic reasons, their work was only pub-
lished posthumously48-to other major writers (Balzac, Proust, Celine, to name the most obvious) whose work had a complicated
publication or manuscript history, or who, as in the case of twentieth46. Georges May, "Rousseau's Literary Writings: An Important New Edition," review of Rousseau's Oeuvres completes, vol. 2: La nouvelle H61oise, Theatre, Poesie,
Essais litteraires, ed. Gagnebin and Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), Modern Language Notes 77 (1962): 519-38. Also: "In fact this genetic study is such a fine model of
what sound methods of literary history can achieve, that one may well regret that it
numbers at the top of each page. "It would be peculiar," according to Kelly, "to cite any
other edition" (phone interview with Alice Kaplan, June 1993).
48. The use of materials not published during a given author's lifetime moved the
postwar Pleiade in the direction of increased editorial involvement, since it necessitated
a vital role for the editor in the establishment of the text. The 1958 Rousseau makes a
funny slip, referring to this material as "posthumous texts": "This volume, containing
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The juxtaposition of introductory material from any one of the reedited volumes gives a fascinating sense of this editorial shift. Here, for
example, we see what occurred with Balzac, edited at the Pleiade in
1935 and in 1976 respectively:
Balzac, no. 26, 1935, ed. Boutem: Our edition has been established
according to the last text revised and corrected by Balzac himself, on his
own copy of the Fume edition, kept today in the Lovenjoul collection.
[xxxiii
In this instance, the editor carried out Balzac's own wishes by reproducing the last published text Balzac had corrected, as was the practice
at that time.49 It was a very different matter in 1976, when seven
Louis Tritter: The team is so large because over the past several de-
Final Authorial Intention" (1976), reprinted in Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 27-71. For debates around these
issues, see Steven Mailloux, "Textual Scholarship and the Author's Final Intention," in
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"preoriginal text. " The work-the work of art, that sure esthetic entity
produced by an author-gives way to a series of texts.50 Even when the
new version of a reedited Pleiade varied rather little from the previously known work, the supporting material put it in an entirely different context.
autre fois, published in 1993 as Pleiade no. 403 and the fourth volume
to appear in the Pleiade was advertised for its "580 never-before-
published pages." Now with the amalgam of previously published material, previously unpublished pages, documentary notes, and schol-
known authors. Manuscript study allowed the Pk6iade series a chance to renew itself on
the oldest territory: even at the current rate of twelve new Pkiade volumes a year, it
could take at least another fifty years to redo "the greats" according to these new manuscript variant standards.
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without the editorial apparatus supplied by Henri Godard in his fourvolume Pleiade (no. 157, 1986; no. 252, 1974; no. 348, 1988; no. 403,
1993)? For each text, there is introductory material on its genesis and
composition, and an analysis of the critical reception and the historical givens. Appendices contain previous versions. There is a lexicon for
vocabulary. Celine is a good argument against the "imaginary museum" phase, since such a complicated corpus as his could hardly be
said to speak for itself. One might even go as far as to say that, for the
reader of such new Pleiade volumes, the editors' historical reconstructions are as vital a part of the reading experience as the literary texts
(1986).
52. Bernard Cerquiglini, Eloge de la variante. Histoire critique de la philologie
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In a theoretical essay, Starobinski describes the intellectual consequences of the labor of editing and thus takes issue with the possibility of ever "finishing" a work. Traditional text editors thought
they were doing the equivalent of restoring an old painting: once the
layers of disfiguring varnish were removed, one would "see" the text
in its true light. Why, he asked, do we assume that text editing "finishes" the work, when what an editor learns in the process of doing
this work is just as likely to point the way toward doubts about the
work's identity?
A laborious form of reading, restoration had no other goal than to free
the work from everything that was preventing it from reaching us in its
integrity. It was assumed that once the various obstacles were eliminated, the true work would emerge, offered up for our pleasure, our
questioning. As soon as the idea of a finished work was posited, gathered in its original bounds, questions and uncertainties rose to the
The vocabulary here is visceral. Starobinski's understanding of editorial work bears little resemblance to positivism. The editor pushes
on, not out of a belief in solutions, but on the contrary, with a sense of
dissatisfaction and the recognition of a ghostly "subwork" disturbing
the smooth contours of the positive "final version." The work of annotation leads to doubt, not certainty. But all is not lost. If what can be
known about a text leads to doubting its integrity as a work of art, what
comes in the stead of the oeuvre is a new equality among text, sub-text,
pre-text, and document-a thickening of the soup of literature. Starobinski speaks here for an entire generation of genetic text editors, for
whom the experience of literature is no longer one of a product, but an
unending process of discovery.
Radically altered, in this vision, is the idea of the author and of the
53. Starobinski, "La litterature, le texte et l'interprete," in Faire de 1'histoire. Ap-
proches, ed. Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard/NRF, 1974), 169-70.
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various stages and phases in writing, and whose hard work is revisited
by the editor. What seemed the last sure element of the Pleiade
formula-the supremely unchangeable proper name that appears in
gold on the spine of every book-is also subject to change.
poetics, raised the question of "l'oeuvre infinie"-the infinite workand described an author's uncanny sense of his or her own absence or
loss from that work, once it was out of his or her hands.54 The writer, he
claimed, is finally removed from the work. Blanchot was not interested
in the making of the book, and even less in the role of editors, and yet
his notions of a literary text infinite in its meaning surfaces in the
enthusiasm for literary genetics-in a literary genetic ideology-that
plays such an important role in today's Pleiade. In another tradition,
that of Anglo-American philosophy, Nelson Goodman had defined the
"allographic" work of art, such as literature, that maintains its identity no matter how often it is reproduced, versus the autograph work of
art, such as the painting, where no copy can be the work itself. A
discourse within the Pleiade on the importance of the manuscript
would seem to return us to an idea of literature more autograph than
allographic: the genetic study of manuscripts in the interest of presenting a given writer's complete works seems to insist that each manuscript is a unique expression, different from each subsequent manu54. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1982).
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script, and that taken together, these various manuscripts tell a story of
the creation of a whole. This is a cultural, rather than metaphysical,
claim about the identity of the work of literature, although its consequences for an understanding of literature must be subject to interpretation and debate.55
published as L'oeuvre de Part, (Paris: tditions du Seuil, 1994) for this study and thanks
Dominique Bourel and Jean-Marie Schaeffer for their comments. We are grateful to Jean-
Pierre Dauphin, archivist at the tditions Gallimard, his assistant Liliane Phan, and
especially to Jacques Cotin, director of the tditions de la P1kiade, for generous assistance
at the Editions Gallimard, Paris. Philippe Roussin thanks Lawrence D. Kritzman
and Richard Stamelman for the opportunity to deliver a working version of this essay in
the form of two seminars at the Edouard Morot-Sir Institute of French Cultural Studies,
Dartmouth College, 25-27 July 1994. Alice Kaplan thanks Christopher Kelly, coeditor of
the University Press of New England translation of the complete Rousseau, for his
perspective on the history of Rousseau editions; Bernard Cerquiglini, Linda Orr, Ann
Smock, Jan Radway, and Philip Stewart were her valued interlocutors; and Alden
Bumstead contributed careful and thorough research assistance. Finally, we thank Cathy
Davidson, Jan Radway, Marianna Torgovnick, and David Auerbach for their readings of
rough drafts of this text.
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