Traitté de l'origine des romans
The Traitté de l'origine des romans , German “Treatise on the origin of the novels”, written by Pierre Daniel Huet , Bishop of Avranches , first appeared in 1670 as a preface by the Zayde Marie-Madeleine de La Fayettes , and became the first larger story of the novel .
Today, Huet's treatise can be regarded as the first literary history in the modern sense of the word - even if the word literature is still missing here, as is the limitation to the tradition of a single nation. The story of a novel becomes a story of fiction. Huet's questions develop large dimensions: How do you define the novel? How did it develop in the worldwide flow of traditions between the ancient Mediterranean and the north, which fell into barbarism after the flood? Why do people invent fictions? What role do they play in culture?
Publication history
The text first appeared in 1670, preceding a novel. Soon after 1670 it was already available in separate editions in French, Latin and English. The first independent English edition appeared in 1672 under the title A Treatise of Romances and their Original. By Monsieur Huet. Translated out of French (Heyrick, London 1672). The tract's career in scholarship began with the Latin editions. A German translation appeared with Eberhard Werner Happels Insularisches Mandorell (Th. Roos, Hamburg 1682). In addition, the text was included in the new editions of the Zayde , which came onto the market primarily in the Netherlands. A detailed excerpt of the English translation by Stephen Lewis from the London edition of 1715 can be found on the English parallel page Traitté de l'origine des romans .
content
Opening: what is a novel?
Huet's treatise clearly bears the signature of the theologian, who develops a very professional interest in the interpretation of fictions. Indeed, the Bishop of Avranches does not shy away from placing the parables of his own religion in the context of his story in a novel. Huet does not even stop at the possibility that priestly castes with fictions that only the initiated could unravel could bring history under their control. The fictional permeates genres and individual texts in its representation and suddenly becomes the actual determining criterion of all poetry . Large lines of influences run through the epochs and cultural areas. In detailed analyzes, Huet talks about individuals and contacts between peoples. In broad terms, his account follows the great currents in which traditions have spread across the globe over the course of time. Transmission lines determine the picture.
A greeting to Monsieur de Segrais opened - Jean Regnault de Segrais officially signs as the author of the Zayde . Huet thanks him for his interest and immediately tackles his topic. The novel has already employed historians, Huet mentions them. However, he wants to work independently and from the present. He starts with a definition:
- Marie-Madeleine de La Fayette : Zayde (1715), p. Vi
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The name "novels" used to refer not only to works that were written in prose, but also more often to those in verse. Giraldi and Pigna, his pupil, hardly knew anyone else where they dealt with romances, and they give Boiardo and Arioste as models. But today the opposite usage has prevailed, and what are actually called novels are fictions of love adventures, written in elaborate prose, for the pleasure and instruction of the reader. |
Fictionality characterizes the novel, love stories, an artistic prose, presented (just as Horace recommended it to poetry) in order to please and benefit. In a second pass, the definition is extended in all directions:
One must distinguish the fictional histories from the true - a problematic statement in view of the fabulous histories that the Middle Ages believed to be true. Love should be the most important matter in the novel - a matter that will not always be compatible with morality, and also a matter to which the novelist is not bound. The prose is the preference of the present age - the history of the genre is thus open to the romanticism . “ Art ” and “certain” rules should be observed in the design, so that no one would sell a “confused collection without order and beauty” - un amas confus, sans ordre & sans beauté - as a novel. About the concept of virtue, Huet comes to the question of the instruction . It remains open what instruction we should expect. Different times and peoples could have made different demands.
In all of these expansions, Huet deliberately gives up clarity. His treatise also raises his most important questions. If we take a closer look at the initial situation that Huet creates, it outlines almost all the discussions within which literary studies still determine what literature it looks at.
The individual threads of the definition can be traced through the entire treatise. The demarcation from the heroic poem is the beginning. Huet does not agree to speak of “ poetry in prose”. Aristotle saw the essence of poetry in fictionality. Wherever it is primarily fictional, the novel suddenly finds itself in the center of poetry. Petron claimed that there was a great machine of gods and tremendous expressions moving in the epic poem. Fureur determine the epic, not une narration exacte & fidele . Novels, on the other hand, kept their simplicity: les Romans sont plus simple. Vrai-semblances , while maintaining probability, they did not tend to be wonderful. Epics were about military actions and politics, but only marginally about love - novels are different. The statement is immediately restricted. The older French, Spanish, and Italian novels full of military campaigns would have adhered to different conventions.
Huet differentiates the novel from fables as well as from histories. There are fictional realms in histories - wherever faulty, erroneous traditions arise. In the novel, however, the fiction is intended - in this the novel is closer to the fable. Fables, however, do not attempt to resemble true histories. The novel shares the intentionality of its fictions with the fables, the objects and the way of writing with the histories. Between epic, history and fable, its story unfolds in the spectrum of genres. Historically, however, there is a division between the traditions of the south and the north.
Lines of tradition: fictions of luxury from the ancient Mediterranean versus fictions of the barbaric north
It is obvious that the peoples of Asia were preoccupied with the fictional. They mystified their own histories into fabulousness. Priestly castes determined who should be initiated into them. The hieroglyphs testified to the art of encryption, which is the essence of all fiction. The journeys that Pythagoras and Plato took to Egypt documented the cultural contact in which Greece got to know veiling and mystification. The tradition touched northern Europe much later through the Arabs, who propagated their beliefs with fictions. But even the Holy Scriptures are filled with fictions, with allegories and parables. Jesus spoke to the Jews in such.
Huet continues from simple evaluations. One could not evaluate the Song of Songs according to the elegant French style. Taste and the way in which one lived should be considered. The first flowering of love stories must be seen against the backdrop of the refinements of the lifestyle that came about in ancient Asia Minor. Precious perfumes, voluptuous dances, luxury in dining and living corresponded here with the production of voluptuous fictions that sweeten life:
- Zayde (1715), p. XXV-XXVI.
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After the Ionians, a people of Asia Minor, became very powerful and very rich, they lived in luxury and pleasure like all who do not suffer from want. [...] They were not satisfied with the pleasures of the table. Flowers and perfumes refined the enjoyment; they created new designs to decorate their buildings; they produced the finest fabrics and the most beautiful tapestries in the world; they invented a lascivious dance, the "Ionian"; and they were characterized by a convenience that became proverbial. Among them, in turn, the people of Miletus excelled in the science of amusement and refinement. They became the first to learn the art of novels from the Persians, and in doing so they developed such a skill that Miletic Fables, their production of novels full of love stories and permissive narratives, achieved great fame. It is very likely that the novels before them were not immoral, and contained only adventures which, for their strangeness, were worth telling; they were the first to make them immoral and fill them with provocative love affairs. |
The historian is concerned with how his subject spread, how fictionality got to Greece and from there to Italy, from where it reached the north - if the north had not developed its own forms of fictionality. It is Huet's language and not the language of Historia Literaria that literary history was able to tie in with: Huet speaks of "sources" and "ways of dissemination". The fictions spread in "rivers". The English translation by Stephen Lewis, 1715 reads, “ we must see by what Streams they have spread and convey'd themselves ”:
- Zayde (1715), pp. XXIV-XXV
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But it is not enough to have revealed the origin of the novels: one has to consider the ways in which they spread through Greece and whether they came to us from there or whether we received them from elsewhere. |
Huet reports on the runic inscriptions that he saw in Denmark - traditions of the darkest history, written by peoples who lost the light of true history after the Flood . From the sagas of the north the development ran into the Arthurian epic and the romanticism of the Middle Ages, which suggests, in addition to the genesis of the fictional from luxury, to consider the opposite to be possible - that fictions come about where there is a lack also a lack of true history conditional:
- Zayde (1715), pp. LXXIII-LXXIV
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Just as we feed our bodies with grass and roots in need, when we have no more bread to sustain our life, just as we feed our spirit when we lose the knowledge of the truth, even though it is the right one would be the natural nourishment of the human spirit with the lie which is the imitation of the truth. And just as we often despise our pleasures satisfyingly in abundance, often despise bread and common foods and strive for refined foods, just as we behave spiritually when we know the truth: we put our studies and speculations aside and steer ourselves with the wrong one Picture the truth, which is the lie, because the picture and the imitation, according to Aristotle, are often more appealing than the truth itself. So that two very different paths, that of ignorance and that of erudition, and so that rudeness like that Courtesy to get people to do the same thing, namely to deal with fiction, fables and novels. |
Epistemology and Cultural Thesis: Why Man Develops Fictions
At this point, Huet did not renounce the meticulousness with which he sketched the lines of influence. France and Germany's universities were the leading universities in Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries. Dante and Boccaccio would have studied in Paris and got to know the fictionality of the north here. However, the tendency towards fictions should be understood as "natural" - here the investigation turns into epistemology . It has to do with the human mind that it produces inventions. The objects present to knowledge could never satisfy the faculty of the understanding. Even if you ask yourself in the face of the present what has just happened or is about to happen, you create fictional worlds:
- Zayde (1715), p. LXXIV-LXXV
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This taste for made-up stories, which is common to all people, does not come to them from deliberation, an imitation, or a habit: it is natural with them, and comes from the formation itself of their mind, and from their soul. In my opinion this is because the possibilities of our reason are too numerous and too great, and reality cannot satisfy us; So our soul seeks in the past and in the future, in the truth and in the lie, in the imaginary places, even in the impossible, something to take in and to distract them. |
The sober, all fictions renouncing knowledge is painful compared to the fictional. The efforts of a targeted search for knowledge often remained unrewarded. The novel, on the other hand, offers the imagination manageable worlds. You and your heroes long for the fulfillment of their wishes - a happy game that you let happen with your own emotions, as the reader of the novel only surrenders to a calculated, manageable production of uncertainty:
- Zayde (1715), p. LXXVII
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They stir our passions, but only to calm them down; they arouse our fear or compassion only to see drawn out of danger or distress for whom we fear or pity; they touch our tender love only to show us the happiness of those we love, they give us hate only to show us the misery of those we hate; after all, all of our passions are comfortably aroused and calm. |
It is thus clarified why it is that the novel delights with all its long, desperate search. To those who are looking for real truth, it may seem like a mirage. But when it is clear why the novel delights, novels can be presented for the benefit of the audience that loves them. Huet comes to the present, and as fluently as he explained the love stories from Asia Minor, from which Petron , Heliodor and Longos still drew, from the conditions of the rich cultural area, the Arthurian epic, on the other hand, as a refuge of the spirit in error, because truth was lost to him, so naturally he now takes another look at living conditions and customs in order to understand the novel in its current form. In a few sentences Huet measures the area of the last century and a half. The most miserable things were produced here, fictions such as Till Eulenspiegel and the famous Amadis de Gaula , whose enormous inventions are marked by a lack of knowledge. But then came the great French novels to which the end belongs. Huet reads them with a view to the customs of France. Again, he does not come to a copy theory, but to a reasoning about the use that the novel fulfills in a culture. The new novels were characterized by their complexity in dealing with the sexes. That has to do with the complexity that is being established in France in order to enable the sexes to coexist more freely. Italians and Spaniards kept their wives locked. Once a man has gained access to a woman in Italy or Spain, he can get down to business without any major formalities. France's women are less protected, but they are responsible for their virtue. Siege, artful attack and constant defense dominated the conversation between the sexes in France. This is the matter on which the new novels thrive. First women would have read these novels about the sieges of their sex to arm themselves from them. Soon they would have lost all understanding of the histories and fables that had taught them so long. The men had followed the new addiction and quickly called the behavior pedantry, which was a custom a short time before. At this point the entire triumph of the gallant conduite is recapitulated:
- Zayde (1715), pp. LXXXIII-LXXXIV
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The people were forced to besiege this protective wall skillfully, and they needed so much care and address to conquer it that they created an art for themselves almost unknown to the other peoples. It is precisely this art that distinguishes the French novels from the other novels, which has made reading so pleasant that it has led to more useful reading to be neglected. The ladies were the first to be seduced: they did nothing more than deal with novels, and so despised the former stories and history that they no longer understood any books other than those inspired by the novels. […] The men imitated them to please them; they condemned what they condemned and called pedantry that which was an essential part of good education at the time of Malherbe. |
The authors would have adjusted to the audience and lost their education. This is the last of the threads that Huet had interpreted in his definition of the novel: the question of the benefits and harms of novels. Huet ticks off all invectives against the sinful species. The novels could hurt as they provide guidance in the game between the sexes. They could also be of use in preparing for the attacks that will be found. The conclusion of the treatise is ambivalent. Huet uses this openness to come up with the novel, which he has the honor of giving the preface. The Zayde is the benefit - unlike other novels - certainly not to be denied.
Huet's treatise ends without a major final thesis. A quiet modesty determines the end from which the reader steps into the following novel.
Aftermath
Scholarship never lost sight of the fact that something sensational had happened to Huet's treatise . Huet had written a story of the novel without getting into a list of titles. At the moment, literary stories were still stories of the sciences, specialist bibliographies. There were poetry stories, stories of production in verse. Both literary and poetry stories had little to do with novels. Literary stories had to deprive the novel of its scientific nature and, even with sympathy for the genre that conveyed modern behavior, hardly got beyond the bibliographical project; they listed titles. Poetry stories, on the other hand, were concerned with the rules of poetry and for that reason alone could hardly go into the content - that applied to the content of both poetry and novels. The novel was prose anyway, hardly poetry.
Huet had opened up an opportunity to present novels and poetry in a progressive narrative that captured content. He interpreted the fictions, and that required him to act as a narrator who reported fictions and then set out frameworks for interpretation. The treatise at this point was wisely published as a preface to a novel - there was no room in scholarship at the moment for books that viewed novels in this way. Indeed, it seemed questionable whether a scandalous production was not given an honor that should only belong to religious parables - that of interpretation .
From today's perspective, Huet's treatise is the first history of literature, the first work to bring poetry and novels under a uniform definition of art and fiction. Yet there is no straight line from Huet into modern literary history. Our literary stories were largely created in the 1830s on German soil in the expansion and restructuring of the previous literary stories: the writings of erudition were increasingly marginalized in these in the course of the 18th century in favor of a look at poetry and novels, which were still at first always recorded bibliographically according to genre and genre. Then at the beginning of the 19th century the bibliographical model was abandoned and switched to a continuous narrative - largely thanks to the history of the poetic national literature of the Germans presented by Georg Gottfried Gervinus (Leipzig, 1835–1842). Gervinus did not follow Huet, but the predecessors of literary historiography, who at the end of the 18th century had taken a decisive step further when they decided to look solely to national traditions. Literature emerged in languages and thus developed in national literature the perspective that Gervinus had firmly established. It is unclear whether Gervinus Huet ever read, but he certainly read the attempts at the history of novels such as Christian Friedrich von Blankenburg, Experiment uber den Roman (1774), which followed Huet and which retained the option of interpretive narration. With the national literary history, a politically explosive project was opened compared to the world history of fictions presented by Huet. Huet hadn't delivered any.
In retrospect, it may remain open whether Huet opened up a very interesting option, especially with his international perspective. It can hardly be proven that the literatures develop in national lines. For the reader, translations from foreign languages are as natural and as freely available as texts from their own literature - and every author, before he takes up the pen in his language, is first of all a reader of an international market. It remains for Huet to have looked at this market; it remains for him to have transferred the interpretation of fictions from theology to the novel and poetry. Looking back, he is fascinated by the astonishing willingness to have seen novels and poetry on the same level as any cultural consumer goods from perfumes and wallpaper to dances and religious traditions - to have risked a breadth of perspective that differs from the poetological debates of his time could hardly develop properly and is hardly unequaled today.
literature
expenditure
- 1670: Pierre Daniel Huet: Traitté de l'origine des romans. Preface to Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne comtesse de La Fayette: Zayde, histoire espagnole. Claude Barbin, Paris 1670 ( pdf-edition Gallica France , ed. 1671 )
Secondary literature
- Olaf Simons: Marteau's Europe or the novel before it became literature. Rodopi, Amsterdam / Atlanta 2001, pp. 165–172, ISBN 90-420-1226-9 (The above text has been taken from there with the permission of the author and may be changed as required.)
- Camille Esmein, "Le Traité de l'origine des romans de Pierre-Daniel Huet, apologie du roman baroque ou poétique du roman classique?", Communication lors de la journée d'étude on 'Le roman baroque' organized by M. le Professeur Jonathan Mallinson, colloque de l'Association internationale des études françaises (AIEF), Paris, 9 juillet 2003, publiée dans les Cahiers de l'Association internationale des études françaises (CAIEF), May 2004, p. 417-436.