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A Changing Idea of Literature: The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade

Author(s): Alice Kaplan and Philippe RoussinSource: Yale French Studies, No. 89, Drafts (1996), pp. 237-262

Published by: Yale University Press

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ALICE KAPLAN AND PHILIPPE ROUSSIN

A Changing Idea of Literature: the

Bibliotheque de la Pleiade

I. THE BIRTH OF AN OBJECT

A collection of literary texts, packaged in "stout and stubby tome[s],'

the Pleiade books are printed on bible paper, their leather bindings

coded in dramatically named colors- "Havana" for the twentieth cen-

tury; emerald green for the nineteenth; Venetian red for the seven-

teenth. The garamond font and layout have remained basically un-

changed 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 po-

etry to philosophy and religion)-illuminates the very idea of litera-

ture 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

Language Notes 75 (June 1960): 529-33.

2. Approximately one new Pleiade volume appears each month from the tditions

Gallimard; each new year sees ten new works and two reeditions. As of June 1994, four

hundred contracts for additional volumes have been signed and three hundred books are

currently in preparation. These statistics are based on the text of a lecture by Jacques

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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238 Yale French Studies

Although "Pleiade" immediately conjures up the French Renais-

sance 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 Schif-

frin, were Boris de Schloezer, a specialist of Russian literature, and

Charles du Bos, an influential critic of Baudelaire and a comparatist

with links to Curtius and T. S. Eliot and a great affinity for

Hoffmansthal, whose work he introduced in France.6 Schiffrin's Edi-

tions de la Pleiade group was part of the vital cosmopolitanism of the

1920s, through its links to the Franco-Russian intellectuals, to Andre

Gide and his Nouvelle revue fran~aise group at Gallimard, and to the

series of artistic and literary seminars and concerts held at Pontigny,

where du Bos was especially active.

In 1926, when he first stepped in as literary director for the Editions

de la Pleiade, du Bos planned a collection of Russian texts (Mirsky,

Leskov, Aksakov, Pushkin) as well as a series called "Ecrits intimes,"

autobiographical and confessional writing, beginning with Stendhal's

Vie d'Henry Brulard and Nerval's Aurdlia, and designed to include

texts by Rosanoff, Fenelon's Ecrits intimes, and Saint Augustine's So-

liloquia. Each volume was to be introduced by a major French writer-

Maurois, Jaloux, Giraudoux.7 Du Bos also envisaged a series called

"Collection des classiques de la Pleiade," first mentioned in his diary

in 1926, which was to include Shakespeare's sonnets, Dostoevsky,

Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1993).

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 movement-

etymology: 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: Cor-

rea, 1949), 14ff.



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ALICE KAPLAN AND PHLIPPE ROUSSIN 239

Cervantes, Goethe, and Manzoni. His affinity for confessional litera-

ture remained a hallmark of the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, which

eventually published Baudelaire ("Mon coeur mis a nu"), Montaigne,

Rousseau, and Chateaubriand among many other memoirists. The first

Pleiade publication of work by a living author was, not coincidentally,

also that of memoirist Andre Gide (Journal 1889-1939, 1939, no. 54).

In 1931, the Editions de la Pleiade launched the leather-bound col-

lection called the "Bibliotheque de la Pleiade": number one, Bau-

delaire. It was Gide, as the primary shaper and visionary of literary

policy at Gallimard, who negotiated for the transfer of the Biblio-

theque de la Pleiade collection to the Editions Gallimard, presumably

when financial independence for the small Editions de la Pleiade firm

was no longer feasible. Recalling the acquisition of the Pleiade in his

1943 journal entry (which he published in the Bibliotheque de la

Pleiade itself), Gide recalled the trouble that he and Jean Schumberger

had had in proposing the Pleiade to Gallimard:

It's this collection, created and directed so intelligently by Schiffrin,

that Jean Schumberger and I had so much trouble getting adapted. We

had to insist and fight for nearly two years before reaching an agree-

ment. "I don't see what you find so remarkable in it," X insisted

obstinately.8

"X" (Gaston Gallimard) finally acquiesced, and the Pleiade moved

to Gallimard in 1933. Schiffrin followed his creation to the big publish-

ing house, where he remained close to Gide (he accompanied the writer

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-

vue fran~aise cohorts at the moment of his conversion to Catholicism

and didn't follow Schiffrin to Gallimard. (Instead he turned his ener-

gies to Catholic intellectual periodicals. He died in 1939 of tuber-

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 nine-

teenth century, the importance given to intimate and confessional

8. Andre Gide, Journal 1939-1949, Souvenirs, entry for 16 March 1943 (Paris: Galli-

mard, Pkiade no. 104, 1954). Edition cited, 1966, 212. Pierre Assouline, Gallimard's

biographer, identifies X as none other than Gallimard himself (Gaston Gallimard. Un

demi-siecle d'6dition francaise [Paris: Balland, 1984, rpt. Editions du Seuil/ Points,

19851, 189).



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literature, and the production of beautiful books and editions at rea-

sonable cost.

Legend at the Editions Gallimard tells how, in the late 1920s, Schif-

frin 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

were passed down through generations.9 Initially working for an art

editor, and attuned to the visual and tactile quality of books as objects,

Schiffrin took from those sacred volumes his inspiration for a series of

literary works on bible paper in a pocket format-books that would

last, and that, like the "missal," would be passed down. The founding

trope of the Pleiade-"livre de poche de luxe": a luxurious pocket

book- was based on this affinity to the missal. Not only authors and

titles were being canonized, but so were the objects-the books them-

selves. 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

collection-the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade-another thread remained

strong from the beginning. This was the idea of a traveling masterpiece

that Gide evoked in his Journal. On 8 January 1932, he wrote: "Between

Carcassonne and Marseille, I reread Andromaque ... in the charming

little Racine that Schiffrin gave me before leaving."'10 The Pleiade was

not "litterature de gare" (junk reading), but train reading. The advan-

tage of the bible paper (actually obtained from cigarette paper manufac-

turers ) 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.)" Ini-

9. 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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tially the books were considered economical, assembling texts, in one

volume, that would have cost far more if purchased separately. In a

1966 advertisement, the Pleiade insisted on its double claim to luxury

and economy, a reconciliation of opposites worthy of Levi-Strauss's

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 over-

tones, 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 establish-

ment 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 (1-

15 October 1966): 30.

13. From the 1960 advertisement, tditions Gallimard archives: "Its formula, foun-

ded 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 cul-

tured amateurs of literature) as much as it did on an appreciation of a

literature rendered approachable, and available.'5

As for the notion of the "classics" employed in the 1934 advertise-

ment, it corresponded to no standard sense of that word.'6 Baudelaire

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 litera-

ture, 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

hommes illustres appeared (numbers 43 and 44, 1937) on the heels of

Balzac. 17 Homer waited until 1955 for his Pleiade, number 115.

Thus the Pleiade "pantheon" of the thirties never corresponded to a

linear or even canonical history of literature. Homer, who would have

been first and foremost in any American "pleiade" of great books,

belonged to the University and to scholarly editions and therefore had

14. See Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middle Brow Culture (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 165ff, on John Erskine's "great books" move-

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

(New York: R. R. Bowker Company, 1972).

15. The early Pleiade idea of making literature available ("la diffusion") reflected a

preoccupation of both Gide and Malraux, who, as politically committed writers of the

1930s, were starting to think about these issues in connection with the onset of mass

media in Europe. Later, in 1958, when Malraux became French minister of culture,

public access to culture became a theme of his policy-making.

16. The specific question of the place of philosophical works in the Bibliotheque de

la Pleiade is outside the bounds of our study. We note, however, that the Pleiade project

was not identified uniquely with works of literature and that philosophy made a strong

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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to wait his turn, in sharp contrast to the inaugural Pleiade author,

Charles Baudelaire, who belonged to the freer world of art and litera-

ture unbounded by the academy, whose scholarly manuals had con-

demned him for moral reasons and demoted him to the rank of "minor

poet."''8 Now, as the incarnation of poetic modernity, Baudelaire corre-

sponded 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 Ameri-

can 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

were previously edited, no doubt available without copyright fee; the

texts were established and unquestioned; the notes were minimal. The

1934 Cervantes, for example, simply reprinted a French edition of the

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 tradi-

tional 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 tradi-

18. 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-

uals, in La Troisieme Republique des lettres. De Flaubert a Proust (Paris: tditions du

Seuil, 1983), 92.

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 classi-

cal canon: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Balzac, and Dickens replace the Greeks and Latins in

popularity. See Milo, "La Traduction, un barometre culturel," Annales, ESC (January-

February 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

L'homme precaire et la litterature (Paris: Gallimard/NRF 1977), 9-10: "The glory of

Baudelaire marks the fall of the authors of the literary manuals into the abyss," dis-

cussed by Henri Godard in L'autre face de la littgrature. Essai sur Andre Malraux et la

littgrature (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 68.

20. For parts one and two, respectively. Similarly, Les vies des hommes illustres

(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,

"Le 'Plutarque' d'Amyot," in D'Aragon a Montherlant (Paris: Perrin, 1967), 153-67.

21. Poe, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Machiavelli.



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tional canon of great works, women were underrepresented: only Co-

lette, Sand, Sevigne, and Yourcenar had their Pleiade as of 1994.22

II. THE FOUNDATIONAL MODEL

The Pleiade has an eccentric relationship to its own publication chro-

nology 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. Martin-

Chauffier exists no more, in the Pleiade catalog, as the 1933 editor of

Rousseau's Confessions; Gide is gone as the writer who introduced

Goethe in 1942. The only mark of that editorial history is in the dis-

junction 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

still number 8. This number is carefully indicated on a page facing the

title page, part of the standard printer's note one usually finds on the

last page of French books: "This volume, the tenth of the "Pleiade

Library" published by the Editions Gallimard, was printed on bible

paper on the [date] on the presses of the X printing house." Each vol-

ume announces, at its very beginning, the fact that it is printed on bible

paper, a fact central to the founding identity of the object. As for the

careful numbering system, it is a recognition that the Pleiade series

contains a literary history in its own right. It is also, implicitly, a

ranking: Baudelaire will always be the first in this history.

The initial conception of the Pleiade collection, with Baudelaire at

the front, offered an alternative to the then-reigning conception of

literary history identified with the methodologies of the Sorbonne

professor Gustave Lanson, for whom the study of literature was scien-

tific, context-bound, and chronological to the point of meticulous at-

tention to sources: authors were to be read in light of their antecedents.

22. Although no Pleiade volumes bear their name on the cover, Marie de France,

Christine de Pisan, Pernette du Guillet, Louise Lab6, and Madame de Lafayette's La

Princesse de Clkves are included in Plkiade anthologies devoted to medieval poets,

sixteenth-century poets, and seventeenth-century novelists. See Poetes et romanciers

du moyen age (Plkiade, no. 52, 1939), ed. Albert Pauphilet; Poetes du XVIeme sihle

(Plkiade, no. 96, 1953), ed. Albert-Marie Schmidt; and Romanciers du XVIkhme sihle

(Plkiade, no. 131, 1958), ed. Antoine Adam.



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The Pleiade approached literary classics by way of the moderns, and

opposed to Lanson's idea of literary history an appreciation of litera-

ture at once intimate and writerly.

In the late 1920s, Andre Malraux conceived and developed an ambi-

tious literary project to be published under the Nouvelle revue fran-

Saise 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 per-

son who had brought the Pleiade series to Gallimard, penned an intro-

duction to the first volume of the Tableau, "From Corneille to Che-

nier." This brief text described the attitude toward the literary object

that distinguished the neighboring Pleiade enterprise from traditional

literary history:

It is not at all a History of Literature that the Nouvelle revue fran aise

presents today to readers. Rather than reattach works to political, eco-

nomic, or social movements, to spiritual or geographic climate, the

only reattachment we have sought, in the gallery of portraits you see

here, is that of painter to model: the effect of a predilection.23

If Gide played an important material role in the formation of the

Pleiade by his shepherding of Schiffrin's Pleiade series to Gallimard,

Malraux, having conceived of the Tableau de la litterature fran~aise

before the Pleiade existed, also holds the distinction of having concep-

tualized the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade apres coup. Throughout the

1930s and 1940s, Malraux was writing about culture and the mass

diffusion of art and literature. In his 1947 Musee imaginaire, Malraux

made an analogy between the art museum and the library that was

close to Gide's sense of literature in the Tableau: when great works of

art are assembled in a museum space, they reverberate, they speak to

one another. Great books enter into the library as a literary space, the

same way that works of art enter into the museum as an artistic space,

torn from their original context. In the museum, in the library, they

23. Andre Gide, "Avant-Propos," Tableau de la litterature franpaise, vol. 2 (seven-

teenth and eighteenth centuries) (Paris: Gallimard/NRF, 1939), "De Corneille a Ch&-

nier," 7.



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escape the limits of history to speak for themselves, unencumbered by

the weight of context.24

A literature of the past, in this view, was best presented by present-

day writers. Contrary to the standard chronological understanding of

literature, works of the past could just as easily be illuminated by what

came after them as by what came before. Literary history was replaced

in this view by literary affinity, or, as the title, Tableau de la litterature

francaise would indicate, scholarship was replaced by a tableau-a

kind of artful display, akin to a museum display, where works of litera-

ture entered into conversation with one another. Such a relationship

among works might be considered the distant precursor to what would

come, many decades later, to be called "intertexts," rather than

sources or influences.

Malraux insisted, in L'homme precaire et la litterature, his 1977

reflection on literary esthetics, that the Pleiade collection was not

meant to be an accumulation of works, added on to one another over

time, but a space like the museum space, where works would meet

across time:

The analogy of the library revolution with that of the museum begins

with the works' availability. On the one hand, the Imaginary Museum,

with its color reproductions; on the other, the PlMiade Libraries, the

pocket classics, in each great language of culture. This availability

takes place, once again, in a "forward" direction: La Princesse de

Cleves finds echoes in La porte etroite, as Villon does in Verlaine, as the

primitives do in Gauguin.25

Malraux articulated a modern attitude toward a kind of reading

whose earlier spokesperson had been Proust, the Proust of Contre

Sainte-Beuve, for whom the true reader was the writer, not the scholar:

To read a poet or prose writer well, one must be oneself, not a scholar,

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

This was the Proust who had no interest in conventional critical

chronology, who had the narrator of A la recherche talk about "the

24. On the connections between Malraux's Musee imaginaire, the Tableau de la

litterature francaise, and the P16iade concept, see Godard, L'autre face de la litterature.

25. Malraux, L'homme precaire et la litterature, 231-32.

26. Marcel Proust, "Journmes de lecture" in "Pastiches et melanges," in Contre

Sainte-Beuve (Pleiade, no. 129, 1971) ed. Pierre Clarac et Yves Sandre, 190.



12/27


Dostoevsky side of Mme. de Sevigne."27 Albert Thibaudet, an editor of

several early Pleiade volumes, would later coin the phrase "la critique

des maitres," to describe the kind of literary criticism practiced by

working writers, which he distinguished in kind from a "critique des

professeurs. "28

It made sense, then, that writers and nonacademic critics wrote the

introductions to a number of the early Pleiade volumes, inviting the

reader into a literary, rather than a historical space. The introduction to

the Baudelaire volume was written by a scholar, Yves Le Dantec, but

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 Saint-

Exupery (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."

Cervantes (Cassou, no. 18, 1934): Notes have been kept to a

minimum. "

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 Lanso-

nian literary history was not obeyed. Lievre, editor of the 1934 Cor-

neille, would read the seventeenth-century dramaturge by way of Bau-

delaire's modernity. In a note on M6lite, act 4, scene 9 ("J'irai d'entre ses

bras enlever Proserpine"), Lievre's annotation refers the reader to Bau-

delaire's "Dans l'enfer de son lit devenir Proserpine":

27. Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Pierre Clarac and Andre Ferr6

(PMiade, no. 102, 1954), 378. In English: Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott

Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, vol. 3, The Captive (New York: Random House,

Vintage, 1981), 385.

28. Albert Thibaudet, "La critique des maitres," in Physiologie dela critique (Paris:

Editions de la Nouvelle revue critique, 1930), 104-47.



13/27


Perhaps it is a bit artificial to juxtapose this magnificent line with this

line of Baudelaire's verse.... [The former] resembles [the latter] only

by the way in which the name of the goddess is presented in the rhyme.

We do it, however, to call attention to the Baudelairian nature of a great

number of Corneille's verses. [1028, n12]

With respect to a line in Corneille's Polyeucte, Lievre noted that Vol-

taire 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

beauty. [1044, n4]

The 1930s Pleiades preferred a walk amidst the centuries, with an

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-

haustive edition to Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques: "I have wanted

to present a commentary on sources, nothing more. The ideal would

be to have managed to discover for each sentence the fact, the text,

or the idea that stimulated the intelligence or the imagination of

Voltaire. "29

Malraux later spoke about a "metamorphosis" of works in the li-

brary into the present, a space where works would be in a "horizontal"

relationship, a space of equality with one another, unlike the "vertical

exchange" (chronological-past to present) that French culture had

once had with ancient texts.30 Indifferent to historical, linguistic, or

national differences, a living spirit of the work across the ages would

emerge from the Pleiade library. It was the experience of literature in

the present that counted. In that sense one could say that the desire to

"translate" past literature into the present was fundamental to the

spirit of the 1930s Pleiade. Le Dantec compared Baudelaire to James

Joyce, and Cassou put Cervantes in the company of Shakespeare and

Dostoevsky; finally, it was Don Quixote's "living" quality that

counted: "Of all the works that have emerged from the spirit of man, it

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

L'homme precaire, 236.



14/27


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

III. THE PLEIADE'S WAR AND PEACE

Pleiade founder Jacques Schiffrin left Gallimard for exile in the United

States in 1940, where in 1943 he republished the great text of resis-

tance, Le silence de la mer, under a new imprint called "Pantheon

Books."32 Although he maintained a close relationship to Gide (he

published several Gide volumes in the United States between 1944 and

1946), he did not return to Gallimard.33 In Schiffrin's absence, Jean

Paulhan took charge of the Pleiade as of December, 1940; his wartime

correspondence shows an ongoing concern with the preparation of new

volumes.34

Pleiade production slowed dramatically during the German occu-

pation of France. Plato, Chateaubriand, and Montesquieu were an-

31. This spirit of "translation" in the large sense can be understood against a back-

ground 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

Cleopatra in 1920, Hamlet in 1929; he was deeply interested in Russian literature,

especially Dostoevsky. Larbaud worked on the first French translation of Joyce's Ulysses,

published in 1929. Malraux prefaced Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1932 and

Faulkner's Sanctuary in 1933.

32. Schiffrin left the Editions Gallimard and France in the wake of an "aryanisa-

tion" 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

requesting that four publishing houses-Fernand Nathan, Calman-Levy, the tditions de

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:

Bibliotheque de Litterature Franqaise Contemporaine de l'Universit6 Paris VII, 19871,

66-67).

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 Galli-

mard 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 Leul-

liot (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).



15/27


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 Paul-

han. The Pleiade symbol thus stood in for the books that were missing.

After the liberation of Paris, the prestigious collection even played a

role in the events of the purge: collaborationist writer and journalist

Robert Brasillach, awaiting his treason trial in the cold winter of 1944,

was much concerned with the disappearance of his "precious" Pleiade

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.



16/27


collection from his seized apartment. "Alas poor Pleiade," he wrote

to his sister from his prison cell at Fresnes-his second letter mention-

ing the missing volumes. "Let us offer it as a sacrifice to the Gods."37

Free France's first Pleiade was an edition of Mallarme, introduced by

the eminent surgeon and homme de lettres Henri Mondor in 1945.

At the request of Gallimard, Paulhan called upon the good name of

the Pleiade in 1946 to launch the Cahiers de la Pleiade, a literary

journal that filled the void left by the Nouvelle Revue Franqaise,

which, having been dishonored by the collaborationist stance of war-

time editor Drieu la Rochelle, was discontinued under Paulhan's moral

leadership. When the Nouvelle Revue Franqaise finally reemerged as

the Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Franqaise in 1953, one found in its pages

any number of ads offering to let readers exchange the "faux cuir" of

their wartime Pleiades for real leather. The Pleiade, in the 1950s, was

very much an object linked to recovery and affluence. It was marketed

for doctors' and dentists' offices, for a public of cultured, but not profes-

sional, readers. One finds in a 1960 advertisement the emphasis on

American-style consumption that was so much a sign of the times38:

"Your library is as indispensable as a television or a car." The same

advertisement stressed industry and new technique. The object

itself-bible paper bound in pocket-book size-took on a scientistic

aura, due to its amazing properties of strength and economy:

The creation of the Bibliotheque de la PlMiade in 1931 brought to the

publishing world a revolution comparable to that which the invention

of the microgroove represented in the recording industry much later.

It was an age of credit: in 1960, according to Pleiade advertisements,

you could buy the whole collection of French poetry from the middle

ages to the present for 829.65 francs; and, if you purchased a minimum

of twenty volumes or 650 francs worth of Pleiade, you could pay on an

eighteen-month installment plan. The Bibliotheque's desire to reach a

mass audience had reached an all-time high (immortality on the in-

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.)



17/27


IV. FROM OEUVRE TO TEXT

At the apex of this era of conspicuous consumption, a dramatic turn in

the preparation and presentation of the volumes occurred. In spite of

the move away from literary history and toward the literary tableau

represented in the early Pleiade volumes, the series had never entirely

abandoned the world of scholarship. A 1935 advertisement had called

the Pleiade an "ideal working tool": this phrase was used through the

1960s. Scholarship, however, took on a whole new weight during the

1960s. One suspects this was in part because the Pleiade was looking

for new readers in the growing university domain-the subscriptions

by doctors and dentists were not enough to ensure the prestige, nor the

sales, of the collection. (Several eminent scholars remembered the

1950s Pleiades as books for doctors' and dentists' offices, an idea that

made them embarrassing for a scholar to own-medical professionals

being, mysteriously, the ultimate example of "bad readers.") Demo-

graphically, France was entering a period of growth; the baby boom

children reached college-age in 1960, and the university was expand-

ing. 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

were staking out competitive market claims by publishing anthologies

or "morceaux choisis" of classical texts whose ads in Le monde asked,

"Why read all of Madame de Sevigne?"40

As current director of the series Jacques Cotin understands it, the

Pleiade has always faced the problem of two reading publics, two types

of consumers: a cultivated general public who wants to read great

works of literature, who has little interest in notes and variants; and a

university and student public looking for a reference work. This double

readership was nowhere better dramatized than in a review of the 1958

Rousseau Pleiade by the Voltaire scholar Theodor Besterman:

I cannot but dislike many of the external features of this long-awaited

edition. It must be remembered that this is not only a bedside book, but

also the standard edition of a great writer. Over 2,000 pages on very thin

paper constitute a volume ideal for the former purpose, but by no

39. Cotin, interview.

40. Cotin, ibid.



18/27


means so for the latter.... The process of turning back and forth thou-

sands 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 bibli-

ographer and the librarian. However, it is after all the contents that

count, and here a very different account can be given.4'

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

was marking a new demand, identifying a new readership (not lovers of

literature but savants), and expressing a doubt: was the Pleiade the

right venue for serious scholarship?

In terms of scholarship, the new edition of Rousseau's complete

works, whose first volume appeared in the Pleiade in 1959 (replacing

Martin Chauffier's edition of the Confessions and Reveries of 1933,

no. 11), was indeed a departure. As Besterman notes, the edition had

been long awaited by specialists in the field. The support of the Fonds

National Suisse pour la Recherche Scientifique (the Swiss equivalent

of the CNRS) was noted on the back of the title page. Each specific text

was established and annotated by a different scholar. There were notes,

variants, prefaces, a series of introductions covering the history and

interpretation of each text presented, and a special note on the estab-

lishment of the text.

The Rousseau volume marked a shift in the Pleiade readership.

Academics who had once been ashamed of the volumes now used them

as reference works. Equally significant, the Rousseau Pleiade marked a

change in the conception of the literary object, from oeuvre to text. By

oeuvre or "work," we mean that ideal, meaningful entity ("l'homme et

l'oeuvre") incarnated by the text, the words on the page. The early

Pleiade did not question the concept of the work/oeuvre; as the dis-

course in the Tableau de la litterature franqaise indicates, the work's

cultural value was sure, its integrity unquestioned. Without much in

the way of preface, explanation, or notes, the early Pleiade made the

work available; whatever problems the text might have posed were

41. Theodor Besterman, review of Rousseau, Oeuvres completes, vol. 1 (Plkiade,

1959), in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 10 (1959): 519-21.



19/27


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 mate-

rial; 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 manu-

script or manuscripts. In historical terms, the move from work to text

did not take place in a vacuum. Postwar advances in structural lin-

guistics and esthetics, questioning the unity and integrity of the liter-

ary 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 adver-

saries. Rousseau's own relationship to his writing was obsessively "au-

tographic." This copiste de musique had a highly artisinal sense of his

own manuscripts; he hand-copied his final version of Julie four times

(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

guarantee the posthumous fate of his manuscripts by entrusting them

to protectors to prepare for publication at the proper moment, and, in

1774, made a "Declaration regarding different reprints of his work,"

anticipating and disavowing editions that would falsify, alter, disfig-

ure, or mutilate his work.43 No author could have been more inter-

ested, indeed, obsessed, with the fate of his manuscripts than Jean-

Jacques 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.



20/27


The scholars who prepared the first new edition of Switzerland's

greatest writer in over one hundred years were themselves Swiss, af-

filiated with the University of Geneva. The endeavor

was financed by the Swiss government. Bernard Gagnebin was the

librarian of Geneva; Marcel Raymond, the best known interpreter of

Rousseau from a literary point of view; Jean Starobinski, a phenome-

nological critic trained at Johns Hopkins by Leo Spitzer, the impor-

tant German philologist who had sought exile from the Nazis in the

United States. (The Pleiade project coincided with the publication

of Starobinski's ground-breaking Jean-Jacques Rousseau. La transpar-

ence et l'obstacle.)44 As Swiss scholars situated between France and

Germany, the Rousseau team brought to the Pleiade methods of read-

ing indebted to the German philological tradition and to German

hermeneutics-methods that were not a part of traditional French

literary history.

The resulting critical volumes, for their fidelity to Rousseau's spell-

ing, 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 medi-

ation of the editorial expert.

In a review article on the second Rousseau volume (La nouvelle

H61oise), Georges May underlined the significance of this publication

event. May made a distinction between traditional literary historical

"source studies" and what would come to be known twenty years later

as genetic criticism, using the phrase "genetic study" as well as the

word "genesis" in the course of his review45:

44. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. La transparence et 1'obstacle (Paris:

Plon, 1957).

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

France, 1994), 178-81.



21/27


The single problem to which this introduction addresses itself is the

often studied problem of the novel's genesis: not that of Rousseau's

literary sources of inspiration about which disappointingly little is to

be learned here, but that of the various phases through which the novel

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

esthete school of literary appreciation we associate with the

Gide/NRF years, and from the older literary history concerned with

authorial context, influence, and artistic school. The claim was ambi-

tious: only by studying the manuscript did one learn about the critical

process of a given author.47 The new conception of a literary text was

dynamic; the text was in process, the process becoming visible through

the juxtaposition of manuscripts.

The preoccupation with the manuscript soon extended in the Biblio-

theque de la Pleiade from those specific cases such as Rimbaud, Cha-

teaubriand, and Rousseau-authors whose manuscripts were of inter-

est precisely because, for historic reasons, their work was only pub-

lished posthumously48-to other major writers (Balzac, Proust, Cel-

ine, to name the most obvious) whose work had a complicated

publication or manuscript history, or who, as in the case of twentieth-

46. Georges May, "Rousseau's Literary Writings: An Important New Edition," re-

view of Rousseau's Oeuvres completes, vol. 2: La nouvelle H61oise, Theatre, Poesie,

Essais litteraires, ed. Gagnebin and Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), Modern Lan-

guage 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

could not be somewhat longer" (527).

47. The Rousseau P16iade, whose fifth volume has just appeared (1995, no. 416) has

succeeded in surpassing other editions. Indeed, it has set such a gold standard in Rous-

seau scholarship that a new American edition being edited at the University Press of

New England by Christopher Kelly and Roger D. Masters will carry the P16iade page

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

only posthumous texts, was established entirely according to Rousseau's autograph

manuscripts" (Note on the establishment of the text, XVI). Although no one is likely to

misunderstand "posthumous texts" as a form of text production beyond the grave, the

phrase does signal a shift in the balance of authority between editor and author.



22/27


century writers such as Sartre, had as yet no available reference edition

of their work. Along with this new focus on the shaping and presenting

of the text came a dramatic change in the process of editing. Since the

work/oeuvre was no longer a fait accompli, rigorous scholarship was

needed to establish a text; where an individual editor or presenter had

once been sufficient, a team of scholars was now frequently needed.

The juxtaposition of introductory material from any one of the reed-

ited 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 repro-

ducing 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

specialists assembled to work on a vast array of manuscripts, and

where the touchstone was no longer Balzac's final intention ("the last

text revised"), but the entire creative process over time.

Balzac, no. 26, 1976, reed. Castex with Pierre Barb6ris, Madeleine Gar-

geaud, Anne-Marie Meininger, Roger Pierrot, Maurice Regard, Jean-

Louis Tritter: The team is so large because over the past several de-

cades, Balzac studies have benefited from an extraordinary vitality...

Our collaborators have had access, except in very rare instances, to

information from all the manuscripts known to this day. Most of them

are kept at Chantilly, in the de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul collection

administered by the Institute; others belong to French or foreign li-

braries, or to private collections; many were made available for the first

time in support of our enterprise.... We were also able to consult all

the page proofs accessible today and all the editions corrected by Balzac,

which, from the manuscript to the preoriginal text, published in the

periodical or daily press, or to the original text appearing in a volume,

49. As described and theorized by G. Thomas Tanselle, "The Editorial Problem of

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

Interpretive Conventions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 93-125.



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then from one printed state to another, help to reconstitute, all the way

to the definitive text, the successive stages of the creation. [cix]

Once manuscripts are consulted, the conception of the literary object

changes: rather than one intended version-the work-we now have

manuscript, page proofs, corrected editions, printed stages, and even

"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 previ-

ously known work, the supporting material put it in an entirely differ-

ent context.

As the identity of the editor was changing, favoring university

critics over writers and amateurs of literature, and as oeuvre gave way

to texts, the Pleiade fattened. The 1934 Corneille has twenty pages of

notes; the 1980 reedition has 625 pages. Proust's A la recherche du

temps perdu goes from three to four volumes; Celine's Fgerie pour une

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 ma-

terial, previously unpublished pages, documentary notes, and schol-

arly commentary, the oeuvre is no longer sufficient unto itself, no

longer capable, as before, of speaking for itself with the artistic guaran-

tee of a contemporary writer's affinity: the editor must speak along

with it.

Gide's Journal (1939) and Malraux's Romans (1947), published in

the Pleiade while these writers were still living, contained no notes, no

introduction, gave no editor's name on the title page, and consisted

solely in the body of these works. Perhaps the most important change

in this latest Pleiade phase-the "text" phase-is that the editor or

editors take on a new authority and presence, shaping the textual ma-

terial, establishing the text out of manuscript, organizing the presenta-

tion of the work by chronology or genre and, finally, justifying those

choices with copious presentations and notes. One could say that after

the 1960s, Pleiade editors "sign" their texts. This is especially striking

in the case of Proust and even more so in the case of CUline, whose texts

50. One notes, in addition to the labor intensity of the new enterprise, the fact that

the manuscripts offered a chance at newness and originality with respect to the best-

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 manu-

script variant standards.



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(especially the postwar novels) are riddled with microscopic historical

referents and whose very vocabulary calls for the aid of a specialized

dictionary. Would these texts be readable to a contemporary public

without the editorial apparatus supplied by Henri Godard in his four-

volume 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 histori-

cal givens. Appendices contain previous versions. There is a lexicon for

vocabulary. Celine is a good argument against the "imaginary mu-

seum" 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 reconstruc-

tions are as vital a part of the reading experience as the literary texts

themselves; annotation is no longer subordinate to literary material

but, rather, the key to a mystery of literature in the making.51 As the

Wizard of Oz famously quipped, "Pay no attention to the man behind

the curtain " The editor, formerly a ventriloquist in hiding, now per-

ceives the need to make the apparatus visible.

V. THE UNFINISHED

Establishing a text is not merely a technical act: it is an act of reading, a

fundamental gesture of criticism. Every edition, consciously or not, is

founded on an implicit definition of the work of art; the method of

editing is always a praxis of a theory of literature. Bernard Cerquiglini

demonstrated in his Aloge de la variante-an essay that opens a large

window onto all the problems that concern us here-how traditional

philology had hoped, in its approach to the medieval manuscript, to

find a sure text, a fantasized original.52 It was unable to take into

account the fact that the medieval text was not the singular production

of a sole author, but a multiplicity of scribal texts. Modern editing

practice operates with similar assumptions: an author's intention is

51. There is an interesting analogy to be made between the growing authority and

presence of the P16iade editor and the changing role of both the theatrical director and

the museum curator, who, increasingly, are recognized as "authors" of their shows. See

Nathalie Heinich and Michael Pollak, "Du conservateur de mus6e a l'auteur d'exposi-

tions. L'invention d'une position singuliere," Sociologie du travail 1 (1989): 29-49

(especially the contrasting descriptions of the two Bonnard exhibits in 1966 and 1986).

See, also, "L'oeuvre et son accrochage," special issue of the Cahiers du MNAM 17/18

(1986).

52. Bernard Cerquiglini, Eloge de la variante. Histoire critique de la philologie

(Paris: tditions du Seuil, 1989).



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the imagined and implicit "source" toward which the editor works;

the editor's goal is to reconstitute the text in a definitive, finished

version.

In a theoretical essay, Starobinski describes the intellectual conse-

quences of the labor of editing and thus takes issue with the possi-

bility 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 "fin-

ishes" 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 elimi-

nated, the true work would emerge, offered up for our pleasure, our

questioning. As soon as the idea of a finished work was posited, gath-

ered in its original bounds, questions and uncertainties rose to the

surface. With the restorative research, the historian's curiosity would

see the entire discernible past, the previous versions, the drafts, the

avowed or nonavowed models, all transpiring through the finished

work.... One would be faced with that researcher's reflex, with dissat-

isfaction, then refusal, which would come to duplicate the positive

presence of the "final" version in a subwork.53

The vocabulary here is visceral. Starobinski's understanding of edi-

torial 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 anno-

tation 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. Staro-

binski 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.



26/27


very notion of writing. No longer the divine creator, giving birth to a

completed work in all its certain glory the writer of the text (as op-

posed to the author of the oeuvre) is a laborer who struggles with

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.

We have seen, in this introduction to a history of the Bibliotheque de la

Pleiade, that these books have undergone a brain transplant in the

course of their sixty-year existence: a preoccupation with the diffusion

of literary works in an imaginary museum gave way, in midlife, to a

preoccupation with the manuscript and with the establishment of

literary texts, which put the identity of the work of literature in ques-

tion and opened up the work of editing texts to questions of process.

The history of the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, inasmuch as it is a

history of the way a given set of authors' texts are shaped and presented

as works, raises theoretical and pragmatic questions about the identity

and meaning of literature. It was Maurice Blanchot, writing in the

1950s in L'espace litteraire, who, with his acute sense of Mallarmean

poetics, raised the question of "l'oeuvre infinie"-the infinite work-

and 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 iden-

tity 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 present-

ing a given writer's complete works seems to insist that each manu-

script is a unique expression, different from each subsequent manu-

54. 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 conse-

quences for an understanding of literature must be subject to inter-

pretation and debate.55

55. Philippe Roussin acknowledges the importance of Gerard Genette's seminars,

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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