SOURCE: Lewis, Philip E. “A Problematic Work.” In La Rochefoucauld and the Art of Abstraction, pp. 15-54. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977.

[In this excerpt, Lewis offers an introduction to the problematical aspects of reading La Rochefoucauld, focusing on the difficult and ambiguous nature of the maxim.]

Just as reading La Rochefoucauld has almost always meant reading the Maximes, reading the Maximes has almost automatically entailed reflecting on the nature of the maxim, on its status as a genre or type of statement. The apparently simple question—what is a maxim?—leads into a tangle of complex problems in La Rochefoucauld's work. To each answer, to each notion or definition of the maxim, corresponds a particular image or interpretation of La Rochefoucauld. Examining divergent perceptions of the Maximes and various accounts of the maxim proposed by La Rochefoucauld's readers will provide a convenient introduction to the problematics of reading his work.

THE MAXIM IN LITERARY HISTORY

While the habitual designation of La Rochefoucauld's acknowledged masterpiece as “le livre des Maximes” might suggest that it is composed of more or less uniform, well-defined statements, the complete title—Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales—properly reflects the impression of variety and discontinuity conveyed by the book. One might submit, however, that the longer title confuses more than it clarifies, for the conjunction ou may either equate or differentiate réflexions and the succeeding terms. Thus two readings are possible: the book is composed of reflections that are, in reality, short statements of moral import; or the book combines two kinds of writing, reflections and short statements of moral import. Neither reading is a felicitous introductory characterization of the text. On the one hand, its dominant mode of statement would better be labeled observation or affirmation than reflection. On the other hand, regardless of their length, most of the statements are surprisingly difficult to reduce to a strictly moral intention. If, then, the title allows the inference of some positive moral value to be gleaned from the work, the text itself seems to disconnect the essentially synonymous terms maxime and sentence from their conventional meaning of precepts, or rules of conduct.¹ Whereas La Bruyère, in the preface to Les Caractères, refuses to apply the term maxime to his work on the grounds that he lacks the requisite legislative genius for writing moral laws, La Rochefoucauld adopts the term while nonetheless desisting from the task of direct moral prescription.

Even a casual look at the text reveals that not all the maximes are maxims. The distinction to be drawn here is an agreeably commonplace one that admits of a variety of terms: short/long, esthetically pleasing (beau)/flat, striking/prosaic, concise/discursive, paradoxical/expository, epigrammatic/reflective. Corresponding to the first term of these pairs and squaring with over three-fourths of the 504 Réflexions ou sentences is the maxim;² to the second term corresponds an awkwardly amorphous category that ranges from the full-fledged essay to the quasi maxim, which is relatively short but lacking in pithiness or finality. The obvious analogy between the language of these nonmaxims and that of the Réflexions diverses seems to justify terming the nonmaxims “reflections” and stressing the characteristic punch, or frappe, of the well-honed maxim.³

The distinction between paradox and exposition, as set forth by Harold E. Pagliaro, calls for special attention because it correlates only in approximate fashion with the others. The terms of the distinction are said to refer to thought patterns instead of stylistic features. Pagliaro notes, however, that “paradoxical aphorisms rely as much upon the force of style as upon intellectual acuity for their effect,”⁴ whereas the so-called expository aphorism depends primarily upon the presentation of argument. Such a categorization thus resurrects, with uncommon subtlety, the irrepressible dichotomy of form (force of style) and content (argument). To Pagliaro's credit, his analysis carefully disallows the implication that the reflection, less explosive and more fully developed, is more truthful or trustworthy than the maxim, which might be considered more apt to gloss over intellectual deficiency with stylistic polish. Yet the issue is raised in clear-cut terms: can the maxim be reduced, in essence, to an identifying form, or is it the articulation of a distinctive message? Is the text of the maxim rooted in the practice of a particular style or in a particular kind of insight?

Although the tenuous opposition of style to substance has long been suspect, most commentators on the Maximes have continued to qualify the maxim in terms of one or the other, and thus to view one as the antecedent, if not the cause, of the other. Especially in “traditional” criticism, the maxim has often been apprehended through loose characterizations of its message, treated as a recording of experience or as a revelation of the truth. Lanson, stressing the distinction of the maxim from the portrait, saw in the latter a reflection on particular experiences and in the former a “synthesis of experiences.”⁵ For P.-H. Simon, the maxim is, rather than a precept, a “sharp and refined statement in which experience and reflection are condensed so as to unveil man in the nudity of his nature,” thus part of a “collection of clinical entries.”⁶ So for Lanson, Simon, and many others, the maxim appears to be an outgrowth of research—a vehicle of broader or deeper truth concerning man and his world, an instrument of social and psychological enlightenment. The significance of the loose analogy with scientific research lies in the presupposition that there is a truth, unique and definitive, to be unearthed and expressed in formulae appropriate to its nature. For many readers, this presupposition is doubtless reinforced by the maxim's inherent tendency toward abstraction and generalization, associated with the conclusions of experiment or argument.

For others, however, acceptance of this notion of experiential truth—La Rochefoucauld's truth—is conditioned by an important reserve. Although the maxim gives expression to a private and personal truth, it remains, nevertheless, a public and general statement, to be reinserted into a personal dimension, tested here and now, and thereby verified by the reader in the light of his experience. Thus the truth for La Rochefoucauld has to be supplemented by La Rochefoucauld's truth for us; the maxim has to be situated in the present, in the tense to which its verb is confined. It is instructive to consider several critical statements that uphold this view:

The maxims fix the final state of an experience. … The experience has taken place; it has become language; life is henceforth this completed comedy whose quintessence is grasped from afar by a definitive insight. The Maximes are written in the present, but in each of them what is involved is an eternal present with no opening onto the future.

[Starobinski]

The “instantaneous” or the “pose,” in effect techniques to which the choice of the maxim's formula limits him (the writer) and which transmit to us, in brief, contrastual images, the static result—immobilized in a fragment of time and space—of his soundings in the hidden depths.

[Mora]

There is a transfer of experience from one level to another, a process of decanting in which the particular gives place to the general which then becomes the possession of all men.

[Sutcliffe]

Whether the maxim represents the sum of a lived experience or the fruit of a polite conversation, its verb is nonetheless located within a present of all times that cannot be fragmented.

[Secretan]⁷

At first glance, repetition of the idea that experience undergoes a transformation or remodulation in language will raise few eyebrows. What does draw attention here, however, is the status of the result: “static, immobilized in a fragment of time and space,” the maxim is apprehended in a “present of all times,” “with no opening onto the future,” as the “possession of all men.” Secretan explains that the maxim can succeed in capturing only certain stable moments of duration, in isolating from time “these privileged instants” when the ever-changing being of man can be grasped in its essence. But if generalized experience is immobilized, “de-temporized” experience, has it not then lost the character of experience? Is not essence the antithesis of experience?

Far from reflecting a supposedly experiential foundation, the generalization, through its imposing timelessness, enacts a radical exclusion of the sense of “lived experience.” It is necessary to distinguish the instantaneous present, apt to allow readers to participate in the perception that it mediates, from the durative present of the maxim. The latter marks, not the immediacy of the particular moment, but the inaccessibility of an undifferentiated eternity; not the discontinuous character of experience, but the continuity of permanence; not the fullness of presence, but the emptiness of absence. It is in this dimension—otherworldly, as it were—that the maxim can acquire a disconcerting impact, that of an arbitrary sentencing of man to his irrevocable fate by a distant, impersonal judge. Moreover, the gap between the maxim and experience (readers' as well as author's) cannot be adequately represented as a spatial distancing, an effect of perspective. In the passage from the personal to the impersonal, from the temporal to the atemporal, from the presence of experience to its absence, what takes place is nothing less than a movement into another order—that of language as something other than and distinct from lived experience. If, as Starobinski writes, experience has become language in the maxim, it is only at the price of being negated as experience. Its relationship to language, echoing that of the concrete to the abstract, is diaphoric rather than metaphoric.

Thus the maxim is born of negation and separation. To the extent that it compels the reader to experience the unnerving separateness of words, it persists in exerting a disruptive force. While involvement of the reader in the truth of the Maximes is an inevitable product of that force, the dynamics of such involvement can hardly be reduced to the act of self-recognition. While a reader may discover in a maxim the truth of his own experience, he will be no less apt to sense that the same maxim overrides conventional orders of truth and, in so doing, challenges his own. Moreover, insofar as the “absolute” truth of the maxim lies within a domain which remains unspecified, the truth of the maxim is itself insecure. In other words, reading the maxim involves a kind of confrontation between the absolute and the relative in which each threatens the other, in which each version of the truth appears in its problematical aspect. However convincing, however telling, the maxim's truth still becomes the reader's problem. The phenomenon in question is designated by Barthes as part of the paradox of the maxim: its generality achieves the most intimate questioning that literature can incite in its reader.⁸

That the reader senses an accusatory interrogation in the authoritative affirmations of the Maximes is poignantly illustrated in La Fontaine's fable “Man and His Image.” Here the mirror image becomes the focal point of the maxim's paradox. To escape from the mirrors that haunt him with his own unbearable image and deflate his self-admiration, a man flees to a remote hideaway in nature. There he encounters, however, an even more disturbing mirror in the clear water of a little stream. His dilemma has an esthetic source: the stream is so beautiful that he has great difficulty in turning away his gaze. The mirror both attracts and rebuffs—like the maxim. The validity of the maxim/mirror analogy extends to Man in general, to our soul and our faults:

Our soul is this man in love with himself;
All these mirrors are the foolish acts of others,
Mirrors, the legitimate painters of our faults;
          And as for the stream, it is the one
Which everyone knows, the book of Maximes.(9)

The Maximes, then, constitute an indictive mirror. Reflecting an ambiguous light on the man who scales their generality down to his particular situation, they call forth both adherence and resistance, identification and self-exclusion. Because of the tension that this process generates, La Rochefoucauld's “sentences” are often perceived as instruments of provocation, quickly become objects of reflection and debate; their appeal includes the intellectual pleasures to be garnered through the criticism a maxim elicits. In “Man and His Image,” the application of the mirror image to the Maximes is exceptionally incisive because the fable does more, as a tale, than play upon man's ambivalent relationship to the unsettling maxim/mirror; it also represents the futility of attempting to escape from the perception of self-revealing truths. Just as the insecure hero of the fable fails to find a self-protecting refuge in the seemingly innocent, impersonal truths of nature, the insecure reader will find no reassurance in the apparently definitive truths of the maxims. In depicting the discovery of still another mirror, one that is painfully attractive, the fable warns of what is to be found in the Maximes: not a resolution of man's problems, but a forceful renewal of the interrogation to which life subjects him.

The mirror image exposes the truth of the maxim as a reflection: it is not the truth, but an image of truth, at once perfect and distorted, that the maxim captures and projects. To escape from that image, as the egotist of the fable sought to do, would be to turn away from reflection—from the trial of self-awareness—and thus to dismiss the problem of truth, which stems precisely from its shaping in thought and language. To face the problem, however, to threaten self-love with self-perception, is to contemplate the image that the stream reflects, to examine the form discernible in the maxim. By its very title, “L'Homme et son image” posits a conjunction of substance and form which is inescapable in the search for truth. Only by observing his image—by engaging in the process of reflection in which he can perceive the formality of his being—can man begin to grasp the truth about himself. No less than the mirrors of society and nature, the maxim confronts us with the necessity of recognizing this critical conjunction, of approaching the truth that it reflects through the perception of its form.

The accumulation of maxims in a collection, like the accumulation of lines and verses in a long poem, gradually evokes the presence of what Lanson called an “artistic mold,” a pre-existing regulatory pattern that is apt to place its distinguishing mark upon a variety of ideas and unite them in tone, if not in substance. Studying the variants which often preceded the finished maxim tends to confirm the priority of form in the gestation of the text, for a very high degree of calculation and rigor seems to be channeled into the achievement of concision. “The Maximes of La Rochefoucauld, at least in their form, are an exercise, the most conscious and the most punctilious, the most accomplished.”¹⁰ The fact remains, of course, that the study of variants does not in itself disclose the form in question, which can be apprehended only in the result of the exercise of compression. The most serious attempts to represent the maxim as a form, those of Barthes and Kuentz, grow out of their attentiveness to the types of relations that prevail among the linguistic elements of the finished sentence.¹¹

Before it is read, the maxim makes its appearance in the two-dimensional space of the printed page. Arising abruptly between two patches of white, two moments of silence, “it is immediately, in its entirety, in its heart, in its very death, since one grasps in a single movement its beginning and its ending.”¹² Conclusion without introduction, “the maxim is a short-circuit,”¹³ the epitome of the pensée détachée, removed not only from any context but, in its inviolable literality, from ordinary language itself: “The maxim, on the contrary, fixes meaning in a terrible immobility; it does violence to language to the extent that it abbreviates. Does the maxim seek to persuade, to convince, or to repeat? No, it speaks, without however displaying the intent of communication.”¹⁴ Here Barthes is dramatizing a kind of formal alienation inherent to the maxim, personified as an autonomous oracle, self-satisfied, holding all of its relationships unto itself. In connecting words that seem strangely abstracted from specifiable referents, the maxim invites concentration upon the arrangement of its terms, diverts attention from the process of representation to the art of verbal combination. Citing Mme de Lafayette's hesitation between two possible combinations—“Unfaithfulness is pardoned, but is not forgotten” and “Unfaithfulness is forgotten, but is not pardoned”—Kuentz ventures this forthright acknowledgment: “The maxim, as one can see, presents itself fundamentally as a form.”¹⁵ Barthes carries the conclusion one step further, arguing that a critical reading of the Maximes should seek to surmount the patternless diversity of subjects and the tendency to read into the maxim one's personal truth by giving up the traditional study of development, composition, evolution, or content. Instead he proposes to adopt “a criticism of the sentencial unit, of its design, in short of its form.”¹⁶

Barthes takes care to distinguish between the external appearance and the internal structure of the maxim, since an important step in his analysis will be the disclosure of a discontinuity within the maxim that in some sense parallels its disconnection from discursive language and/or from the rest of the Maximes. As the variance in description of the external and internal forms indicates, the two discontinuities in question are of divergent orders.¹⁷ To describe the maxim in its external aspect is almost inevitably to resort, after a minimum of analysis, to metaphors of hardness and brilliance, most commonly, that is, to images drawn from jewelry, which depend upon a global perception of the maxim as an object or upon the impression that it makes on the reader.¹⁸ Such a description tends to consecrate, as it were, the fixity of the text in an essentially static context of isolation. In this respect, each maxim is unique, a text in itself, a stylistic gem immediately perceived as literature. The formal independence of each text within the work makes it necessary to seek to relate the maxims on the basis of their internal structure, to look for a pattern or paradigm around which the text of each maxim is constructed.

Inside the typical maxim Barthes identifies a few stable elements (notably substantives, acting as the cornerstones or building blocks of their sentences), autonomous in their own right, coexisting in an essentially passive, fixed relationship, typically mediated by the inert intransitive, to be. From this standpoint, the maxim appears to be the epitome of essentialist discourse. In opposition to Barthes's superstructural representation, we may consider the compositioning of particular elements as it is grasped in the reading of the text. The process of reading allows no less for setting off than for offsetting the discontinuity of textual elements. It constructs an articulation that takes the form of a linear movement and invites recourse to another order of description designed to translate a modulation, frequently to analogies with music. In connecting its elements the maxim defines its own tightly structured internal context in contradistinction to the disjointed literary framework in which it appears. In contrast to the static image of the text as a radiant jewel, an immobile configuration of component parts, the maxim's terminal thrust toward a pointe evokes a dynamic image, the moving form of a crescendo. The incommensurability of the ornamental and musical metaphors draws attention to the relative primacy of the internal structure of the text. Since the dynamics of composition accounts for the maxim's decisive impact—its effect of solidity and inviolability—it is precisely upon the form governing the articulation of the text—its movement toward immobility—that the study of its structure inevitably focuses.

Interpreting the Maximes will ultimately require us to examine in detail the problem of describing the form of the maxim. The key issue to be resolved pertains to the designation of basis units and relationships: does the maxim develop around one or more elemental models or core forms? And if it does, how do we identify and interpret the core form(s)? By virtue of its simplicity and generality, Barthes's “structuralist” description seems to offer a model solution. Barthes unequivocally posits a kernel sentence of the form NOUN-COPULATIVE-NOUN as the fundamental axis or archetype of the maxim, which would then constitute a relationship of equivalence (most characteristically, the restrictive identity of the form “X is only Y”). The maxim can then be defined as a variation upon the semantic relationship of synonomy. The analyses of Serge Meleuc, based upon generative grammar, renew the attempt to treat the maxim as a transformation performed upon a basic proposition.¹⁹ Whatever the core form or kernel sentence that is identified, this approach to the corpus of propositions that we can label bona fide maxims (on the basis of the loose criteria previously noted) opens up the possibility of accounting for a particular maxim in terms of the generative principles underlying its formation. Specifying these principles would allow the critic to go beyond the particular text and grasp the collective or contextual logic of the Maximes.

The decision to approach the maxim through its form rather than through its message does not necessarily predetermine the significance of form itself. Nonetheless, accentuating the function of form tends to subvert our commonsensical ideas about the experience of language. In Voltaire's now canonical view, the language of the Maximes exemplifies the signal virtue of expressing ideas with concision: “This little collection was read avidly; it accustomed one to thinking and to enclosing his thought in a lively, precise, and delicate turn.”²⁰ On the other hand, the search for concision, coupled with a variety of salient stylistic devices that serve to surprise, to stimulate, or to shock, achieves a paradoxical result: the prose of the maxim eventually calls attention, not to the idea expressed, not to the nimble turn of the thought, but to itself, as language on display. For Barthes, the tendency to bring out the spectacle of language through the outburst of a pointe relates the maxim to poetic and archaic language: with them it shares a propensity to manifest through striking antitheses the basic mechanism of meaning, which emerges from an opposition of terms.²¹ The poetic/archaic texture of the maxim reflects an experience of language in its density, in its originary force. Not merely a transparent vehicle of expression, language is opaque, self-assertive, an instrument of action. Speech is an immediate embodiment of thought and feeling, a mythic act; writing, a graphic substance and a mode of impression:

The maxim is a poem before its time (and is its faraway origin not sacred, divinatory?); it presents to us in a single movement the word and the nothingness from which it emerges, into which it returns; it is then, in a sense, wonder at pure language, its substance, its power, its miracle; for the maxim language is not yet the expression, so to speak, of a thought, an argument or an intention, it is not pure transparency, the extended movement of a progressive adaptation to reality; it is an almost sacred object, very close to these magical words that open up the supernatural and subject it to man: speaking within a closed form participates both in the order of the sacred and in the order of the poetic, which were originally the same; it is this archaic function that the maxim recaptures, despite the civilized, rational character of the classical society in which it reappears.²²

In Barthes's analysis, the analogy of maxim and poem mediates the integration of formal and thematic modes: “Like the lyric poem, the maxim is a way of singing certain obsessions, variously termed themes or subjects. …”²³ In the articulation of the poet's chant, the form of the maxim assumes a predominant role in the activity of expression itself. Insofar as the fundamental relation of the restrictive identity corresponds to the mental structure of the poet, it functions as an obstacle, an imposition of form that reduces expression to the monotonous repetition of the same essentialist equation. Their allegiance to form—what Barthes terms a “radical choice of Literature”—confines the maximes to the process of denunciation; it precludes moving beyond a nihilist dilemma into a dialectical solution that certain maxims, by invoking the interaction of opposites, anticipate.²⁴ There is, then, nothing innocent or impartial about the structural notion of the maxim, which influences the reading of the text quite as decisively as a preconception of its message. To single out, in the texture of the maxim, the formal, poetic necessity of certain elements—words, rhythms, sounds, combinations, syntactic patterns—is to underscore what the writer experiences as the necessity or autonomy of language. The object or experience that would have been expressed becomes, in the maxim, a language to be spoken, an experience of the Word. Apprehended as form, the maxim proclaims the pre-emptive power of language.

However imperious, the form of the maxim by no means excludes the dimension of expression. Even if the maximes could be completely reduced to the ritualistic chant of obsessions, they would fulfill an expressive function, would expose and transmute their themes through the process of denomination. Barthes's interpretation clearly allows for the coalescence of form and theme while supposing the primacy of form. But this formalist supposition remains strictly methodological, leaves intact the difficulty of perceiving the relationship of form to theme, of attributing logical or existential priority to one or the other. An attempt to resolve this problem underlies the interpretation of La Rochefoucauld by Starobinski, whose thematic approach implicitly rejects Barthes's equation of themes with the writer's obsessions and instead sifts out of the subject matter of the Maximes the components of an acute analysis depicting the desperately tragic human condition.²⁵ Thus constituted on the level of perception, that is, directed at the consciousness that expresses itself in the text, Starobinski's interpretation develops an account of La Rochefoucauld's commitment to the form of a maxim. By treating the allegiance to form as the achievement of a solution, admittedly precarious, to the moralist's problem, the critic effectively tempers the notion according to which form acts as a determinant obstacle in the Maximes.

Noting early on a significant correspondence between the willful disorder of the Maximes and the internal discontinuity of man, between a punctual, fragmentary, paradoxical writing and the diversity and contradiction of human existence, Starobinski supposes forthwith that the object of the moralist's reflection determines the form that it takes: “The discontinuity and the breaking-up of being impose their law and their rhythm on the moralist who describes them.”²⁶ Subsequently, when he takes up what might be termed the theme of form, he calls attention to the “wordly” role of form as a refuge, a last resort: “For he who has shown the nothingness of man, ‘wordly’ life can continue only in the concern for a form, it being well understood that this form could only be arbitrary and gratuitous, unrelated to a despair for which it offers no remedy.”²⁷ The function of form, then, is to “counterbalance the darkness of the content,” not to suppress it. The form in question, which one constructs with words in accord with an “esthetics of expression,” develops in its own order, one in which man is the maker of his own values. The fundamental value, which constitutes the order of language as a “human milieu,” is the freedom that man discovers only in language, wherein he can create a second self, a “being of language,” coinciding with and depending upon the form in which he communicates. This “substitute being” appears in the relational order linking the abyss of passions in man to his latent humanity, that is, it expresses itself in the audible relation of man's nature to his language.

If an esthetics of expression seems unusually transparent in Starobinski's reading, it is not simply because he represents the maxim as an expression of La Rochefoucauld's thought, and thus envisages the writer's work as the free manipulation of the resources of language in the service of his ideas; it is also because Starobinski finds in those ideas the justification for the writer's commitment to form, so that both theme and structure, thought and language, are eventually treated as expressions. For Barthes, however, the maxim does not simply express La Rochefoucauld's thought, it is his thought, which is realized only as the text takes form. Writing is the medium of thinking, and form is no mere esthetic garment, for it describes the relationships that govern meaning. To the extent that his language and his work escape from his manipulative control and affirm their own “personality,” the writer effaces himself in them and exists only through them, as he is spoken by them.

Insofar as the maxim, in Barthes's terms, “speaks La Rochefoucauld,” it ceases to translate his experience and becomes that experience; it is the achievement of art that takes unto itself the experience of the writer (as a writer) and transposes it directly into the texture of language—as if the author loses himself in his language so that this language can “express” him or, more precisely, state him, in its impression, as directly and completely as possible. Situating the enunciation of maxims in a social context, Starobinski ascribes a comparable experience to the honnête homme who devotes himself to a spirited conversation: “He gains a new existence, a second manner of being, in which his being depends on the form in which he communicates. He coincides with this form at the very instant in which the form is invented.”²⁸ In communication with others, this willful dependency on form offers a refuge from the revelations of descriptive discourse. Protecting the “being of language” from being grasped except as language, it serves to suppress the problem of (self-) expression, or rather overlays the darker elements of expression with the dominant surface of lustrous form.

AMBIGUITIES IN THE MAXIMES

Whether the emphasis falls upon expression or impression, on theme or form, both aspects of language—material and referential, phonological and semantic—are always distinguishable in literature. Whence the inescapable ambiguities of literary language:

Literature is the language that becomes ambiguity. … Ambiguity is there struggling with itself. Not only can each moment of language become ambiguous and say something other than what it says, but the general import of language is uncertain, for one does not know if it expresses or represents, if it is a thing of if it designates the thing; if it is there to be forgotten or if it only makes you forget it in order to be seen; if it is transparent because what it says means so little or if it is clear because of the exactness with which it speaks, obscure because it says too much, opaque because it says nothing.²⁹

With exceptional insistency, the Maximes renew and evince such ambiguity. The text of each maxim breaks out of the continuum of silence only to return rapidly into it; the gathering movement of the text from beginning to end has the effect of reinforcing its global fixity; the statement that shocks and unsettles nonetheless offers the comfort of secured knowledge, yet the definitive affirmation of the particular maxim is but relative to the ongoing process of critical reduction, which can only be halted arbitrarily; the exposure of dark truths sets the stage for the upward valuation of form, so that artistic perfection eventually connotes the sobriety of the underlying message. From every standpoint, the maxim is perceived as an ambiguous, paradoxical discourse, and as the maxims accumulate in a collection, it is a deepening and intensification of this ambiguity that the Maximes invite us to weigh.

In its most comprehensive outlines, the ambiguity of La Rochefoucauld's writings comes to light in the context of a broad, relatively superficial, but clearly indispensable reaction to the view that La Rochefoucauld's art and outlook represent the epitome of simplicity, clarity, and good taste. As represented by W. G. Moore and Jean Starobinski, the opposite view stresses the complexity of La Rochefoucauld, a complexity born of deep penetration into the variety and confusion of human motives and natural causes.³⁰ Advancing similar observations, Mora calls La Rochefoucauld “a master of ambiguity,”³¹ remarking upon the apparent contradiction between the changing, unstable image of man and the relentless attempts at stringent elucidation in the Maximes. But of course there is no simple contradiction between elucidation and the object of elucidation: a lucid exposition of human ambiguity is perfectly conceivable, but problems arise when ambiguity seems to enshroud lucidity itself. Starobinski's study carefully brings out, from La Rochefoucauld's perceptions of man, both an abrupt simplicity and an overwhelming complexity; by virtue of their juxtaposition the work is all the more complex, all the more difficult to analyze in terms of logical priorities. To see the problem in its full extent, it is necessary to distinguish the sources of ambiguity within the work from the various ambiguities attributable to the work as a whole.

As we have noted, the initial and principal source of ambiguity is man—or Man, treated as a species endowed with a human essence. In fact, it is often difficult to imagine that the Man behind the generic on, nous, les hommes even approaches the absolute generality of mankind's archetype. Barthes comes very close to identifying the man of whom La Rochefoucauld writes with the author himself, with a powerless aristocrat and intellectual whose vision is limited to the masculine world of his caste. In many of his pronouncements on man, we sense, with Barthes, an evident lack of concern for the variety of social conditions and for psychological heterogeneity. This narrowing of context and import, which the idiom of impersonality makes quite difficult to gauge, implies a partial, unstable perception of the human condition. At the same time, it remains clear that the frame of reference for La Rochefoucauld's writings extends beyond his class and his epoch. The context of his observations is problematical precisely because its scope is not uniformly general and at times remains indeterminate.

In what appears to constitute a refutation of Barthes's suggestion that La Rochefoucauld's concentration upon the generality of the species entails a summary disregard for individuality and diversity, Starobinski argues that an acute awareness of variety and dissimilarity precedes and sustains the recourse to generalization. He bases this argument on texts in which difference can be regarded as the dominant theme:

There are as many diverse species of men as there are diverse species of animals, and the men, with respect to other men, are what the different species of animals are among themselves and with respect to one another.

[Réfl. (Réflexion diverse) IX, “Du rapport des hommes avec les animaux”]

Perfect valor and absolute cowardice are two extremes men seldom reach. The space in between them is vast, and contains all the other types of courage: among these there is no less difference than among faces and temperaments.

[Max. (Maxim) 215]

Starobinski's commentary: “Real man, if we seek to define him, will be found in ‘the space that is in between,’ this vague space, this doubtful place that is interposed between opposing virtues, between pure values.”³² In this ill-defined territory where no absolutes can properly qualify man's existence, what must be recognized is the unlikelihood that a universal definition of Man will prove to be valid for the individual: “It is easier to know man in general than to know one man in particular” (Max. 431).³³ La Rochefoucauld betrays no confidence that either the general or the particular can actually be apprehended, and his analysis reveals the universality of some human motivations no less than the unique psychological disarray of each individual. Lying somewhere within the ambiguous relationship of the general to the particular, the impersonal subject (“on,” and the like) of La Rochefoucauld's dicta subsumes a tripartite frame of reference: a man in his individuality, men in their diversity, Man in his universality.

Nonetheless, both the Maximes and the Réflexions diverses tempt their readers to overcome their disparate structures by constructing an image of the man whose vicissitudes they depict. As Jean Rousset has demonstrated, it is possible to extract a concept of man—“l'Homme de La Rochefoucauld”—from the Maximes by elaborating point by point La Rochefoucauld's refutation of the classical idea of man.³⁴ One can challenge this rather mechanical analysis by citing maxims that involve the eminently classical theory of honnêteté. Yet elsewhere Rousset is on solid ground when he connects the theme of human inconstancy, prominent throughout La Rochefoucauld's work, with the baroque vision of the preclassical period.³⁵ The recurring expressions of this hackneyed theme seem, however, to reinforce the difficulty of apprehending human nature, of representing Man at all. The same is true, moreover, of another leitmotif of baroque literature, the theme of contradiction: “Imagination could never invent as many and varied contradictions as nature has put into every person's heart” (Max. 478). Paul Bénichou's commentary could hardly be more decisive: “These contradictions are the last word on human nature, its deepest definition; what one finally finds in man is a sort of undifferentiated emotivity, which can have contrary actions as its external manifestations.”³⁶ In effect, the contradictions are nothing more than the external manifestations of this undifferentiated affectivity, which is a kind of internal chaos devoid of any fundamental ground or mainspring. Even self-love, the infamous egocentric impulse and all-purpose explanatory principle, is enshrouded by a realm of dark mystery. At the heart of self-love the unceasing succession of passions and vices (see Max. 10, 11, 191, 195) gives rise to an analogy with the ebb and flow of the centerless sea.³⁷ La Rochefoucauld similarly associates the image of the sea with love, which, like self-love, “is subjected to the reign of words,”³⁸ as if the opaque world of others that one encounters in love were but a mirror of one's own internal opacity. The groping descent of the imagination into affective life seems to parallel the eye's descent into the depths of an ever murkier, fathomless sea. On this point nearly all recent commentators agree: far from reaching the root constituents of a coherent ontology, La Rochefoucauld's seemingly endless analyses open onto the fundamental disorder of human nature, onto an emptiness, a deficiency, “the lack of being,” “a dizzying nothingness,”³⁹ the impossibility of making any definitive, irreducible statement about the essence of Man. Examining the consequences of portraying man at the mercy of his passions, Antoine Adam notes that the search for coherence and spiritual unity becomes unjustifiable and falls by the wayside; thus he affirms that, from an ethical standpoint, “the Maximes eventually lead to a radical ambiguity.”⁴⁰ In metaphysical terms, this “radical ambiguity” can be ascribed to the search for an essence that does not exist, to the attempt to ground explanations upon a shifting, erosive foundation.

Against the background of the theme of contradiction, it is necessary to distinguish a second source of ambiguity within La Rochefoucauld's work—the coexistence of conflicting explanations. To understand that man is a seat of inconstancy and contradiction, we need only to recognize that a host of changing influences forever assails him from within and without, propelling him into the midst of a manifold determinism. Man is driven both by his own indomitable self-love and by the brute forces of nature. The menace to human understanding results from the differing implications of these two influences: “To say that virtue exists is sometimes, for La Rochefoucauld, to say that impressive actions hide the motives of self-interest, sometimes that they are necessitated by external influences and thus devoid of merit.”⁴¹ The explanation based upon self-love allows a moral condemnation that explanation grounded in natural causes excludes. If this contradiction is to be overcome, a problem of perception that preconditions the act of judgment must be resolved: how does one tell whether, in a given instance, self-love or a natural cause determines action, whether man is partially or fully subjected to uncontrollable forces? And a corollary problem concerning self-love: how and when (if ever) does it differ from simple instinct, become something more than a mere agent of physical determinism? It would be imprecise to trace these questions to the ambiguity of a partial determinism. La Rochefoucauld's explanatory formulae are wont to be straightforward and uncompromising—“fortune and disposition [‘humeur’] rule the world” (Max. 435). Yet the concrete operations of these ruling agents seem to remain inaccessible, unpredictable, visible in their broad outlines but, as the terms fortune and humeur (evoking the bodily humors as well as temperament) suggest, resistant to precise, logical comprehension—“the capriciousness of our dispositions is still more bizarre than that of fortune” (Max. 45). While this exceedingly abstract comparison does nothing to clarify the problematic relation between fortune and humeur, it provides more than just a derogatory comment on man's peculiarities or inconsistencies. For the invocation of fortuity, improbability, and chance also entails an acknowledgment of the ambiguous, incomprehensible phenomena in man's world that bring him face to face with his limited, inadequate understanding. Here the distance between the general and the particular is compounded by the gap between observation and explanation.

To the conceptual ambiguities discernible in the representation of man and in the explanation of his conduct, it is appropriate to add a third source of ambiguity within the work: the presence of obscure, anomalous, or polyvalent meanings. Within this category, a composite of particular cases rather than a single, underlying ambivalence, a fairly wide range of semantic dilemmas is encountered. To begin with, it seems undeniable that a part of the maxim's piquancy derives from a deliberately cryptic quality: “The art of the maxim is not just that of abbreviated speech; ainissomai, says the Greek, ‘speaking in enigmas.’”⁴² Beyond a mere enigmatic effect, however, a real conceptual obscurity can be glimpsed in “umbrella words” or in “mots-mana,”⁴³ in abstract notions such as interest or vanity that include or explain so much that they verge on equivocation. Seeking an explanation for this rather surprising obscurity within the framework of La Rochefoucauld's outlook, Moore finds a remarkable number of texts that attest to a veritable sense of mystery and suggest that a certain awareness of ambiguity permeates the articulation of La Rochefoucauld's thought. Upon determining that certain maxims can be read either as denunciations of egotism or as applause for a bold aspiration, Henri Coulet adopts a similar approach.⁴⁴ In La Rochefoucauld's insistence upon the inextricable intermingling of truth and falsehood, virtue and vice, and so forth, he finds a definition and a justification of this ambiguity. On the level of the Maximes as a whole, the extreme case of semantic ambiguity occurs when one maxim appears to contradict another; such an opposition intensifies the crucial problem of their relative priority, which results from the fragmentation of texts within the work.

To glimpse the broad ambiguities enshrouding the attempt to interpret La Rochefoucauld's works as an ensemble, it suffices to consider the formidable variety of moral and ideological positions to which they have been linked: pessimism, Epicureanism, Jansenism, Stoicism, anti-Stoicism, Pyrrhonism, materialism, naturalism, determinism, formalism, nihilism, immoralism, heroism, voluntarism, and still others.⁴⁵ Such an enumeration speaks for itself. In the moral sphere, it seems particularly futile to go on searching for a proper denomination among the various conventional positions that La Rochefoucauld might have picked up from his contemporaries. Not only do the Maximes lie, as Kuentz has noted, at the crossroads of several moral doctrines;⁴⁶ both the Maximes and the Réflexions diverses display a degree of circumspection (perhaps the refusal to take any position on religious matters is the most intriguing case) that suggests that their author sought actively to avoid being identified with a given point of view, possibly with an eye to distinguishing his work from others and marking it as personal. Although the Réflexions diverses do include a fairly direct presentation of the doctrine of honnêteté (in some respects a doctrine of circumspection), the fact that they were not published by La Rochefoucauld might simply reflect a preference not to be associated with a recognizable position that would settle him into a particular niche in literary or intellectual history. At any rate, since the standard procedures of synthetic description cannot do justice to a work that sternly throws them into question, it is understandable that Truchet concludes his introduction to the Maximes by claiming for La Rochefoucauld the right to ambiguity.

If one could nevertheless discern a definite, though eccentric, orientation in these works, the impossibility of categorizing them would represent a relatively superficial ambiguity. Uneasiness in reading them results from the suspicion that beneath their evasive quality is a conscious rejection of the unequivocal, that ambiguity is the necessarily unwritten doctrine of La Rochefoucauld. What Kuentz terms a “work without a message”⁴⁷ may be read as a work on the impossibility of a message; as such it would be entirely consistent in omitting any direct statement that this impossibility is its message and that only messages remain possible. Freed from the requirement of unitary coherence, La Rochefoucauld's position can be represented as a juxtaposition of two or more outlooks, for example, the destruction of all human pretension and the construction of the society of honnêteté; a lucid morality appropriate both to a cynic and to a martyr; an approval of two courses, heroic action and tranquil acceptance of man's fate; the intellectual simultaneously challenging, expressing, and accepting his society; cohabitation in the moralist's conscience of the “qui suis-je?” and the “je suis sordide”;⁴⁸ and so forth. Yet such alternatives continue to pose, for the reader, a critical problem. Given, for example, a juxtaposition of wholesale critical destruction and the theory of honnêteté, does the criticism extend to the concept of honnêteté and prove it unworkable, or does honnêteté constitute a positive response that confronts and actively moves beyond the results of the passive observer's debunking? The prominence assumed by these diverse possibilities may depend largely upon the reader's perspective: “Depending upon the angle from which one looks at them, the Maximes are a manual of honnêteté and a treatise of pessimistic psychology, but also a sort of sober and elevated poem bearing the accent of a nostalgia for glory.”⁴⁹ This remark by a critic studying heroic elements in the Maximes is symptomatic: to recognize the ease with which one can read a given perspective into the Maximes (or the Réflexions diverses) is to edge away from an arbitrary interpretation, to respect the experimental character of the work. In the end, it may be just this experimentality, the ambiguity grounded in the unstated exclusion of definitive interpretation, that becomes the critical object of interpretation.

THE TRIALS OF FRAGMENTED READING

The ambiguities of La Rochefoucauld's writing clearly lay open and amplify the problematics of reading. From the outset, the reader of the Maximes is apt to be acutely aware of his freedom to react to the texts in his own way, in accordance with his own situation and temperament.⁵⁰ Standing alone as a provocative statement, the maxim clearly makes special demands upon the reader, requiring a search for meaning and frequently educing a judgment on its truth-value. The more poignant, paradoxical maxims also tend to elicit, at least from many readers, an intuitive or emotive response, an immediate reaction to which notions of the maxim's impact or effect have commonly been linked. Pagliaro refers forthrightly to “nervous response, and the disturbance that precedes cognition”;⁵¹ other critics prefer metaphorical allusions to the wounds inflicted upon the reader's spirit, or to the feeling of moral paralysis engendered by the Maximes. It is clear, in any case, that the initial bite of the maxim increases both the difficulty of and the necessity for intellectual detachment.

In reviewing the opinions gathered by Mme de Sablé in 1663, Truchet points out that several readers reacted more favorably once the first impression had worn off.⁵² The Maximes were clearly viewed from the outset as an occasion for dialogue (in some cases direct dialogue with the author); they offered their readers a kind of stimulus or reference point for reflection and discussion. In the “Discours sur les Réflexions ou sentences et Maximes morales,” a defense of La Rochefoucauld's work by Henri de La Chapelle-Bessé and placed after the “Avis au Lecteur” of the first edition, we find a remarkable passage on the role of the reader offered in answer to the objection that the Maximes are marred by obscurity:

The obscurity … is not always the writer's fault. Les Réflexions … must be written in a compressed style which does not allow for making things as clear as would be desirable. These are the first strokes of the painting: clever eyes will indeed see here all the subtlety of the painter's art and the beauty of his thought; but this beauty is not made for everyone, and although these strokes are not filled in with colors, they are no less the touches of a master. One must then take the time to penetrate the meaning and the force of the words, the mind must move across the whole spectrum of their meaning before settling down to the formation of a judgment.⁵³

Staking La Rochefoucauld's claim to an initiated audience (an antecedent of the Stendhalian elite) of kindred spirits, Bessé also contends that the intelligent reader should naturally formulate the appropriate restrictions for excessively general statements. The reader must not simply perceive the picture passively in its broad outlines; his task as reader is supplemental to the author's task, involves an active contribution to the completion of the maxim's meaning. Although the degree of La Rochefoucauld's complicity in the development of Bessé's apology cannot be determined, his correspondence and the opinions gathered by Mme de Sablé prove that he fully appreciated the interpretability of his work and was willing to provide his own commentary on particular maxims.⁵⁴ No doubt he also understood the risk of depending so heavily upon the reader, who may give in to the temptation to impose extraneous views upon the Maximes. Indeed, when Helvétius ascribes La Rochefoucauld's notion of interest to a utilitarian outlook, or when a modern commentator extrapolates from the clouding of the vice/virtue distinction to a strained association with surrealism and the exposure of “traditional ethics gaping at the Absurd,” it seems that the interpreter's risk—of becoming the dupe of the very text that accentuates his interpretive license—is just as great.⁵⁵ The reader should not dismiss lightly the “Avis au lecteur” of 1665, which ironically advises him to presume that none of the maxims will concern him personally. This liminary warning establishes the appropriateness of the ironic detachment assumed by the author. Moreover, the reader eventually realizes that his exclusion from the moralist's criticism is at times far from ironic. Some maxims are not merely inapplicable to him but evoke an experience apparently beyond his grasp, meaningful only to superior beings. In other words, if the reader feels personally implicated by some maxims, he is alienated by others, and it is this troubling variation between inclusion and exclusion that makes his relationship with the work unstable and problematical.

In order to get a better hold on the elusive Maximes, one can try to situate them alongside the Réflexions diverses and the Mémoires.⁵⁶ While it is fair to maintain that these works should be read as an ensemble, by no means does it follow that they must be forced into a coherent framework, within which the Maximes should then be read as one part of an integrated whole. The Mémoires and the Réflexions evoke, respectively, a turbulent world of Cornelian heroism and a stable world of polite society;⁵⁷ the Maximes incorporate reflections of both worlds, but nothing hints at a synthesis of the two, or even a transition from one to the other. When maxims appear in the Mémoires (where there are very few) and in the Réflexions, they bear little kinship to those of the Maximes because they are located in an expository context that tempers their sting and controls interpretation. To ascertain the unique independence of the Maximes, it suffices to try reading them as we read La Rochefoucauld's other works, in a continuous movement through the text. It is significant that such a continuous reading cannot work. We can agree with Barthes that there are at least two ways to read the Maximes, “selectively or in order,” haphazardly or consecutively, personally or critically.⁵⁸ While, at a certain level of appreciation, the book should be read “in flashes, as it was composed,”⁵⁹ it is still necessary to undertake the step-by-step critical reading at some point. The alternative would be to renounce completely the effort to exclude emotional reactions and contrived or impressionistic interpretations, to give up the search for synthetic understanding.

Yet even this systematic reading, however painful or monotonous in comparison to a random search for engaging insights, cannot be continuous, for each blank space separating one maxim from the next interrupts the flow of thought before it picks up momentum, laying out an open dimension of time and space for reflection, for weighing the maxim just read, for returning to a table rase before reading the next one. Only at the price of reduced comprehension can any reading gloss over the intrinsic autonomy of each maxim. Within the Maximes, there is no explicit sign of one maxim's relation to others, no trace of the gradually developing comprehension that emerges as we read through a poem or a page of prose. Never acceding to that advancing confluence of statements which creates a unified context of meaning, the Maximes generate a multiplicity—perhaps irreducible—of coordinate relationships. The absence of visible priorities leaves intact the virtual equivalence in import of each maxim. What, then, determines the nature and the coordinates of the relationships among maxims? This is the principal responsibility La Rochefoucauld leaves to the reader. We are free to organize the maxims as we see fit, and tempted to proceed beyond coordination, to suppress the disjunction of the texts and treat them as if they were convertible into a single expository statement, as if each maxim were a part of one long reflection.

Reading consecutively from maxim to maxim is a revealing exercise. The reading process both suggests that the discontinuity of the book is incontrovertible and develops a certain sense of intratextual relationships. In their unwavering isolation, all the maxims have to be isolated from something. As Kuentz observes, since it is a general phenomenon, the solitude of the maxim underlies the solidarity of the maxims, each of which maintains its inviolate fixity over against a shifting ground (fond chatoyant) toward which a search for conceptual unity in the Maximes inevitably leads.⁶⁰ But can one get a hold on this shifting ground? Starobinski has argued forcefully that it will not be apprehended by the traditional, albeit uneasy groping toward “La Rochefoucauld's secret” (presumed to be hidden within but reflected by the Maximes and perhaps more overtly evidenced by the Mémoires).⁶¹ Perhaps, as Kuentz suggests, that “shifting ground” does confer upon the Maximes a dialectical cast, but the fact remains that most readings that aim to discover the ultimate coherence of the whole work hardly proceed in terms of a dialectic. For neither the Maximes nor the Réflexions lend themselves to a dialectical reading. Both tend to elicit a reading according to subjects, that is, a topical, classifying reading that proceeds by identifying themes—as if La Rochefoucauld's recourse to a table of subjects at the end of the Maximes makes up for the lack of ordering noted in the “Avis au lecteur” and provides the key to the book's underlying structure.⁶² The occasional groupings of maxims on the same subject reinforce the tendency to read in terms of fixed notions or essences and to formalize a set of stable relationships among them. To move beyond thematic or structural similarities to a concentration upon conflicting theses is not to move out of a stable frame of reference into a dialectical process. As Bénichou's study shows, the resolution of contradictions does not take place within the movement of the work. It is envisaged by the reader in terms of a logically ordered intellectual itinerary that the Maximes subtend or by reference to a deep-seated experience apt to generate conflicting, but actually complementary, responses.

Nevertheless, Kuentz's strategic association of the Maximes with a dialectical process embodies a valuable corrective insofar as it allows for perception of the particular maxim both in its textual independence and in its intratextual relativity. Many readers have sought to resolve the problem of relating the maxims among themselves by asking whether some text or texts within the book do not dictate a method for understanding other maxims or delimiting their validity. In considering, for example, the implications of this maxim—“Our actions are like set-rhymes, which everyone connects with whatever he pleases” (Max. 382)—can one go so far as to argue that La Rochefoucauld presents a résumé and a refutation of his book?⁶³ Are all the explanations of human conduct in the Maximes to be written off as expressions of the author's personal inclinations? Does a maxim on the difficulty of judgment (for example, Max. 170) or knowledge (Max. 106) undermine La Rochefoucauld's own statements? Over and over, critics have accused La Rochefoucauld of refuting himself, of falling prey to his own system. “It is true that the sword which the moralist brandishes so ardently ended up by striking him too, but he paid no attention to that.”⁶⁴ “The misfortune is that this mistrust does not spare the author either: in fact, it is he who is touched first and most seriously.”⁶⁵ Or, by going one step further and indicting, as does Jeanson, the intellectual's bad faith,⁶⁶ one can argue that La Rochefoucauld deploys his (in) famous lucidity in an abortive attempt to immunize his own reflection, to guarantee its invulnerability by setting it in ironic detachment from the context to which it refers.

At this point, there is no need to reiterate the obvious objections to reducing La Rochefoucauld's work to an expression of his personal disillusionment and resentment. As Bénichou points out, to insist on extending La Rochefoucauld's practice of critical negation to his work is to assume that his negations constitute nothing more than a drawn-out exercise in self-destruction, in nihilism.⁶⁷ In order not to treat prejudicially the positive elements of his thought, such as the approbation of le naturel, it is necessary to posit the initial relativity, the experimental character of his destructive criticism, which may or may not acquire the force of an absolute. Perhaps a more elementary point should be stressed, one that suggests no bias in favor of an ultimate “wisdom” attributable to the moralist. If Maxime 382, or another like it, refutes the Maximes, it also refutes itself unless we can prove that it has a special, irreducible character that the other maxims lack. Just as we admit that the first principle of any system of thought is self-validating and does not turn back upon itself, we have to admit that the maxim does not invalidate itself, that each maxim has absolute value within its sphere. The problem is to determine its relative value with respect to the other maxims. This is the heart of what we shall term the problem of fragmentation.

Throughout this introduction to the problematical aspects of reading La Rochefoucauld, various consequences of formal discontinuity have been in evidence. La Rochefoucauld's apparent disdain for a logical ordering of the maxims, which becomes more pronounced in the later editions, cannot be equated simply with a disdain for pedantry or for bourgeois attitudes. Similarly, treating the fragmentation of the Maximes as a function of the artist's desire to maintain variety and avoid ennui does not materially advance our understanding of its effective properties as a function in the overall meaning of the work. Once it is granted that the maxim naturally resists being drawn into an externally defined context, that some of its aphoristic charge would be drained off if it were readily apprehended as a point in an argument or a component of a system, it remains necessary to consider the context—of which discontinuity is an integral part—which is formed by the work, necessary to ask whether or not an implicit argument or latent system is present in the Maximes. In short, confronting the finished work, the reader still has to interpret its fragmentation.⁶⁸

One glaring consequence of fragmentation in the Maximes is the difficulty of discussing the structure or architecture of the work. From the few critics who have considered the question the essential lesson to be drawn indicates primarily that the first edition (1665) shows some definite signs of an ordering process: “The 1665 volume begins with a definition, or rather with a sketch in bold outline, of self-love and its effects on our passions; then it goes into detail and attacks, one after another, the principal virtues.”⁶⁹ Whence the notion of a battle order, of a gathering assault on the bastions of virtue, that has been considerably muted and distended by 1678: “La Rochefoucauld must have realized at some point that the element of surprise was more suitable to his esthetics of fragmentation than a systematic development.”⁷⁰ An esthetics of fragmentation would presumably dictate a kind of ordered disorder, a subtle, not necessarily rationalistic structuring that subordinates thematic development to a predominantly esthetic logic.

In the lone serious study of the architectural problem published to date, Truchet undertakes to elaborate this kind of argument. In regard to the first edition, La Rochefoucauld did not hesitate to admit that a concerted ordering of the maxims would have been desirable: “I do then agree that it is unfortunate that they have appeared without having been completed and without the order which they should have had.”⁷¹ Truchet contends that La Rochefoucauld nevertheless could not have failed to recognize in advance that the order of the maxims conditions their effect. In support of his affirmation that “the order is subtle, but it exists,”⁷² Truchet develops two main points: (1) the constant variation of sentence structure probably reflects an attempt to delight the attentive reader who reads straight through the book and appreciates new combinations, delicate deviations from an established pattern, and recurrent surprise or shock effects; (2) the “battle order” of the Maximes can be adduced by noting in their order of appearance the groupings of four or more maxims on the same subject: (a) edition of 1665—“amour-propre, passions, modération, constance, orgueil, bonheur et malheur, fortune, amour, amitié, esprit, tromperie, finesse, louange, mérite, vertus, vices, valeur, reconnaissance, bonté”; (b) edition of 1678—“passions, orgueil, amour, amitié, esprit, finesse, louanges, mérite, vertus, vices, valeur, reconnaissance, élévation.”⁷³ The reduced number of groupings underscores the greater dispersion of subject matter and diminished concern with thematic ordering in the final edition. Thus the expansion of the collection confers relative primacy on the motif of variation, with formal variations freely complemented by thematic ones. Yet the central thrust of the attack remains evident: “His great enemy is man's continuing ignorance of his own motives,”⁷⁴ or, as La Rochefoucauld prudently declared in the “Avis au lecteur” of the first edition, “Self-love the corruptor of reason.”⁷⁵

As far as the order of the groupings of maxims is concerned, it is clear that the most significant change after 1665 is the omission of amour-propre at the beginning of the sequence. Otherwise, the order remains substantially the same, especially since most of the groupings omitted from the second list have simply been diminished by suppressions. What is not clear is the thread of logic that might be followed through either series of subjects. If one grants that self-serving ignorance undergoes a constant siege and that this provides an underlying thematic unity, it remains difficult to see a unified progression in these series of themes, within which we can only distinguish groupings of groupings (for example, amour-propre ＋ passions; modération ＋ constance; esprit ＋ tromperie ＋ finesse), just as the groupings of maxims are noticeable in the larger grouping, the Maximes. Sister Mary Zeller adopts the rather incongruous device of graphing the 504 maxims according to their 149 (!) themes, thereby uncovering seven major thematic clusters (in order: passions, orgueil, amour, amitié, esprit, louange, valeur), all of which occur prior to Maxime 230. The zigzags of her chart verify clearly, if anticlimactically, the pronounced dispersion of the second half of the collection, which obviously contains fewer clusters and varies themes more capriciously than the first half, reflecting a decided trend toward diffusion as the work expanded from edition to edition.⁷⁶

Zeller suggests that from her charts, tables, and observations “there arises the suspicion that the work of La Rochefoucauld is a carefully constructed collection of consciously thought-out and worked-over ideas, and not a mere selection of random thoughts propagated by un bel esprit.”⁷⁷ Overlooking the unlikely opposition of La Rochefoucauld to the bel esprit and the axiological implications of Zeller's suspicion, one might draw from her data almost the inverse of her conclusion—that the Maximes are not, as a collection, carefully constructed, and that, if the clusters of maxims are taken as single thematic elements (a dubious procedure), the succession of themes represents little more than a random arrangement. If Truchet's “subtle order” is to be found through a linear reading as he suggests, it will necessarily involve the play of stylistic variations, and here again the concept of a random alignment, or, in a more literary parlance, of a baroque labyrinth, seems much more appropriate. In his response to the factual question concerning order in the Maximes, Barthes is entirely correct in affirming that there is no logic in the succession of the maxims, that the logic and the thematic of the work cannot be found in its extension and must be sought in a dimension of depth.⁷⁸ The work calls for a reading that attempts to respect its linear discontinuity. Our task as readers is to ask what order, if any, underlies the surface disorder, or more generally, of what the fragmentation of the Maximes is a function or a sign.

If no direct answer to the question of fragmentation can be ventured until after studying the Maximes in depth, at least it is possible to formulate some hypotheses to be kept in mind in the course of this study. One hypothesis would place heavy emphasis on the autonomy of each maxim, representing the Maximes as the direct, unmediated practice of a method. Each maxim would be a blow administered by a demolition expert whose basic task is ex-posing or de-structuring; or it would be a vehicle of discovery, apt to translate in its logical estrangement the infinite dissimilarity that analysis uncovers and that the scholarly treatise would distort through systematic presentation. As a rhetorical instrument, the maxim would reflect a conservative attitude toward language use, an unwillingness to accept the logical (or epistemological) restraints and implications of a discursive language or a systematized position. Set in the context of such linguistic reticence, the language of the maxim, as it suddenly erupts from the wisdom of silence, would resound with unprecedented iconoclastic force.

A second hypothesis concentrates on the object of the moralist's perception, assuming a correspondence between the disorder of the Maximes and the disorder of man. The latter would be describable only by a succession of zigzags, of scattered insights whose dissociation would reflect the disintegration of consciousness, the discontinuity of emotive phenomena, or the groundless structure of the personality. As a third and final hypothesis, one might take the discontinuity of the Maximes to be a sign conveying their ultimate message. In this case the truth of the work would not merely be transmitted through its disjointed form; rather, it would reside in the disjuncture, in the process of meaning which is embodied by the juxtaposition of fragments to be grasped in their mutual distinctiveness. Thus the continuing accumulation of fragments would bear witness to the function of dissociation and deferral in the generation of meaning. As with the first hypothesis, the Maximes would pose an implicit challenge to the legitimacy of searching for truth in discursive continuity.

These hypotheses are not mutually exclusive. None of them requires the assumption, frequently accepted without reflection, that La Rochefoucauld's thinking undergoes a deliberate fragmentation only after having been conceived as a unified, systematic position. Each of them assumes, instead, that our task in reading La Rochefoucauld may consist less in reconstituting such a unified position than in grasping the significance of discontinuity within a work in which it is a fundamental and irrepressible phenomenon. For in the last analysis, it is not possible to subsume the problem of fragmentation in the critical context in which it arises, in a study grounded upon the genesis of the Maximes as a literary work and the related development of the author's intention to forgo logical arrangement. The finished work does not acquire its meaning and significance directly and exclusively from the process of production; it assumes the existence of a definitive text, and as such, the work calls for an appreciation which, beyond the purview of causal explanation, situates it in relation to its “effects.” In other words, prior to undertaking an interpretation of the Maximes, it is important to recognize that a critical reading of the work takes its roots in—and therefore will ultimately return to—the conscious effort to read the maxims as fragments.

Notes

1. J. Dubois and R. Lagane, Dictionnaire de la Langue française classique, 2d ed. (Paris, 1960), p. 317. La Rochefoucauld himself generally used the term sentences rather than maximes in referring to his work (they can usually be employed interchangeably). Huet claims (incorrectly) to have obtained a change in title from Maximes to Réflexions morales after having noted that “one called maxims only those truths known through natural reason and accepted universally; whereas the propositions contained in this work were new, little known, and discovered through the meditation and reflection of an insightful and clairvoyant mind” (quoted by Pierre Kuentz, ed., La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, Les Petits Classiques Bordas [Paris, 1966], p. 180). Given that La Rochefoucauld's own use of the term maxime was questionable and unusual, Sister Mary Francine Zeller's laborious attempt to establish historical distinctions among a series of terms (proverb, adage, apophthegm, aphorism, sentence, pensée, reflection, maxim) seems rather pointless (in New Aspects of Style in the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld [Washington, D.C., 1954], pp. 1-14). Throughout this book I have cited La Rochefoucauld's texts in rather literal English translations. Attentive readers will note, however, that I retain the French titles Maximes and Réflexions diverses, and that, in accordance with the usual practice of La Rochefoucauld's readers, I construe these titles as plural nouns (referring implicitly to the plurality of particular texts in the books as well as to the books per se) which, when they occur as grammatical subjects, require a plural verb. Since this is contrary to the usual convention in English of treating titles as singular nouns, my phrasing may sometimes strike a discordant note, but I hope that use of the French titles will alleviate this impression.

2. Some rough statistics will suffice to document this point. As generally throughout this book, I use here Jacques Truchet, ed., Maximes (Paris, 1967). Workable data on length can be obtained simply by counting the number of lines per maxim (given an average 10.3 words per line): 29 maxims occupy one line each; 250, two lines; 118, three lines; 56, four lines; 23, five lines; and 28, six or more lines. Thus 54 per cent occupy two lines or less; 77 per cent, three lines or less; 88 per cent, four lines or less. Nearly all the four-line maxims possess at least one of the conventional criteria for maxims (frappe, pointe, or paradox) to which we can refer, though in the second half of the Maximes an occasional text, usually an explanation (that is, a specification of causes), appears rather dry or flat. This observation is, of course, intuitive or impressionistic, and it seems clear that many texts of medium length (thirty to sixty words) would seem good maxims to some readers and not to others.

3. This distinction is employed by Roland Barthes, ed., Maximes et Réflexions La Rochefoucauld, Le Club français du livre (Paris, 1961), introduction, pp. xlii ff.; and by W. G. Moore, “La Rochefoucauld's Masterpiece,” Linguistic and Literary Studies in Honor of Helmut A. Hatzfeld, ed. Alessandro S. Crisafulli (Washington, D.C., 1964), pp. 264-65.

4. “Paradox in the Aphorisms of La Rochefoucauld and Some Representative English Followers,” PMLA, LXXIX (March 1964), 45.

5. Gustave Lanson, L'Art de la prose (Paris, 1911), p. 127.

6. Pierre-Henri Simon, Le Domaine héroîque des lettres françaises (Paris, 1963), p. 182.

7. Jean Starobinski, ed., Maximes et Mémoires, Coll. “10/18,” (Paris, 1964), introduction, p. 182; Edith Mora, François de La Rochefoucauld, Ecrivains d'hier et d'aujourd'hui (Paris, 1965), p. 56; F. E. Sutcliffe, “The System of La Rochefoucauld,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, XLIX (Autumn 1966), 245; Dominique Secretan, ed., Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales and Réflexions diverses, Textes littéraires français (Geneva, 1967), introduction, p. xxii.

8. Introduction, Maximes et Réflexions, p. xxxv.

9. Fables (Paris: Garnier, 1962), I, 2, pp. 44-45; the rather literal translation of this final stanza is my own.

10. Marcel Arland, La Prose française (Paris, 1951), p. 390.

11. Kuentz's introduction obviously leans heavily on Barthes, just as Secretan repeatedly borrows points from Starobinski. Nevertheless, Kuentz's approach is very much his own, and he differs considerably from Barthes in his use of a relatively traditional, “descriptivist” idiom and in his presentation of the maxim's form within the framework of genre studies.

12. Barthes, p. xxxiii.

13. Kuentz, p. 30.

14. Barthes, p. xxxiv.

15. Kuentz, p. 31.

16. Barthes, p. xli.

17. We can represent schematically the analogy that Barthes seems to be erecting: maxim: Maximes:: basic elements of the maxim: maxim; or, language of the maxim: ordinary language:: key words of the maxim: whole sentence. But in both Barthes and Kuentz this is rather sketchily outlined, and the significance to be attached to the nominal parallelism of these discontinuities is not at all clear, although there is evidently supposed to be a sort of reinforcement of the maxim's exclusivity and immobility within its texture.

18. Secretan, pp. xxix and 264, calls attention to the abundance of images drawn from jewelry, as had Kuentz before him (p. 41). His own use of musical analogies is notable; for example, “An orchestrated meditation, the Maximes hardly illuminate the past any more than does a symphony” (p. xxii). And cf. Kuentz, p. 39: “this artist who orchestrates his ‘variations’ on a few simple themes.”

19. Meleuc, “Structure de la maxime,” Langages, no. 13 (March 1969), 69-99.

20. Le Siècle de Louis XIV, quoted by Kuentz, p. 187.

21. Barthes, p. lxii.

22. Ibid., pp. xxxii-xxxiii.

23. Ibid., p. lxxvi.

24. Ibid., pp. lxxiv-lxxv. Most of the discussion of form and expression into which Barthes's interpretation leads is drawn from my article, contrasting Barthes and Starobinski: “Language and French Critical Debate,” Yale French Studies, no. 45 (Dec. 1970), pp. 154-65.

25. Jean Starobinski, “La Rochefoucauld et les morales substitutives,” NRF, nos. 163-164 (July/Aug. 1966), pp. 17-34, 211-29.

26. Ibid., pp. 22-23.

27. Ibid., p. 212.

28. Ibid., p. 218.

29. Maurice Blanchot, La Part du feu (Paris, 1955), pp. 342-43.

30. Moore, “La Rochefoucauld: Une Nouvelle anthropologie,” Revue des sciences humaines (Oct.-Dec. 1953), pp. 301-10; Starobinski, “Complexité de La Rochefoucauld,” Preuves, 135 (May 1962), pp. 33-40 (this article is integrated into Starobinski's introduction to the “10/18” edition of the Maximes et Mémoires, pp. 12-23.

31. François de La Rochefoucauld, p. 37.

32. Introduction (“10/18” edition), p. 18.

33. Starobinski seems to stretch the point when he suggests that in this maxim La Rochefoucauld finally recognizes “the impossibility of defining man in general terms; more precisely, the impossibility of a universal definition of man which is valid for the particular man” (introduction [“10/18” edition], p. 19). In the text, it is not a question of impossibility, but of relative difficulty, and in one sense the problem is not at all the applicability of general knowledge but the fact that general knowledge alone is applicable, the particular being accessible solely through a necessary conceptual distortion (cf. Max. 106). See also W. G. Moore, “La Rochefoucauld et le mystère de la vie,” Cahiers de l'Association internationale des études françaises, 18 (March 1966), p. 107.

34. “La Rochefoucauld contre le Classicisme,” Archiv fur das Studium der Neueren Sprachen, 180 (1942), pp. 107-12. The gist of the argument is that La Rochefoucauld's analyses nullify: (1) the unity of man, bereft of a central source of stability; (2) man's freedom to control his passions; (3) the power to civilize nature through reason; (4) the ability to maintain the ascendancy of mind over heart; (5) man's sociability, his capacity to live in harmony with others.

35. La Littérature de l'âge baroque en France (Paris, 1965), pp. 43, 226.

36. Morales du grand siècle (Paris, 1948), pp. 99-100.

37. Cf. Moore, “La Rochefoucauld: Une Nouvelle anthropologie,” p. 309, and “La Rochefoucauld's Masterpiece,” pp. 268 ff.; cf. Corrado Rosso, Virtù e critica delle virtù nei moralisti francesi (Turin, 1964), pp. 3-4.

38. Secretan, introduction, p. xxviii.

39. Starobinski, “La Rochefoucauld et les morales substitutives,” p. 34; Barthes, introduction, p. lxxii.

40. Histoire de la littérature française au XVII^e siècle, IV (Paris, 1958), p. 98.

41. Paul Bénichou, “L'Intention des Maximes,” in L'Ecrivain et ses travaux (Paris, 1967), p. 5. Bénichou's article provides an admirably straightforward formulation of this problem (pp. 5-16), which, in diverse readings of La Rochefoucauld, is seen to arise from the opposition of two principles of debunking: “the system of self-love and the idea of an indifferent and capricious causality” (p. 9). Starobinski also offers an explicit treatment of the problem in terms of an “overdetermination of our acts and our qualities” (introduction, p. 17), viewing it as a sort of “radicalization” of the sense of contradiction (p. 21). Francis Jeanson offers an earlier and more uncompromising formulation in Lignes de départ (Paris, 1963), pp. 76-80.

42. Kuentz, introduction, p. 30. See also Rosso, Virtù, p. 5, who suggests that the enigma results involuntarily from the search for concision.

43. Moore, “La Rochefoucauld et le mystère de la vie,” p. 106; Barthes, introduction, p. 66.

44. “La Rochefoucauld et la peur d'être dupe,” in Hommage au doyen Etienne Gros (Gap, 1959), pp. 108-11.

45. It seems pointless to provide a reference for each of these terms. Ample verification of the tendency (reductionism, so to speak) exemplified by the words in -ism may be found in Corrado Rosso, “Processo a La Rochefoucauld,” Critica Storica (Nov.-Dec. 1963), pp. 638-53, (Jan.-Feb. 1964), pp. 27-48.

46. Kuentz, introduction, p. 30.

47. Ibid., p. 40.

48. These examples are drawn, respectively, from Starobinski, “La Rochefoucauld et les morales substitutives,” pp. 211-12; Mora, François de La Rochefoucauld, p. 67; Secretan, introduction, p. xviii; Barthes, introduction, p. lxxviii; Bénichou, L'Ecrivain et ses travaux, pp. 17-18.

49. Simon, Le Domaine héroique, p. 182.

50. Cf. Sainte-Beuve, “M. de La Rochefoucauld,” Portraits de femmes (Paris, 1862), p. 269.

51. “Paradox in the Aphorisms of La Rochefoucauld,” p. 46.

52. Jacques Truchet, “Le Succès des ‘Maximes’ de La Rochefoucauld au XVII^e siècle,” Cahiers de l'Association internationale des études françaises, 18 (March 1966), pp. 125-37.

53. Quoted in the Truchet edition of the Maximes, p. 279. In addition to a magnificent presentation of texts that allows us to study the development of the Maximes from edition to edition over a fifteen-year period, this edition includes an exceedingly valuable collection of documents, much excellent commentary, the best available edition of the Réflexions diverses, and, in the editor's introduction, a remarkably judicious and surprisingly thorough account of La Rochefoucauld's life. In citing maxims, I use Truchet's notations, MP for posthumous maxims and MS for maxims from previous editions omitted in 1678.

54. See, in the Truchet edition, letters 6 (p. 546) and 47 (pp. 589-90).

55. Helvétius, extract from De l'Esprit quoted in the Pléiade edition of La Rochefoucauld (Oeuvres complètes, ed. L. Martin-Chauffier and Jean Marchand [Paris, 1964]), pp. 740-41; and Mora, François de La Rochefoucauld, p. 67.

56. La Rochefoucauld's complete works also include, of course, the extant portion of his correspondence. Apart from the letters concerning the Maximes, it is fair to say that the majority provide a relatively uninteresting documentation of La Rochefoucauld's incomparable politesse and have negligible literary value. Among the exceptions is in particular the remarkable letter to his son, the Prince of Marcillac (Pléiade edition, pp. 658-60).

57. Although there is considerable variation of perspective in the Réflexions, which occasionally revert to a historical viewpoint that could allow for a certain association of the work with the Mémoires, the overall tenor of the two works seems to me to justify this distinction. Cf. W. G. Moore, “The World of La Rochefoucauld's Maximes,” French Studies, VII (Oct. 1953), 334-45.

58. Barthes, introduction, pp. xxi-xxxii.

59. Jean Rostand, “La Rochefoucauld,” Hommes de vérité, 1st series (Paris, 1942), p. 213.

60. Kuentz, introduction, p. 40.

61. Introduction, pp. 24-25.

62. Rosso grounds his study of the Maximes in this topicality, relating the maxims according to their themes and arranging the themes in a more or less logical order. He does not appear to be concerned with the problem that results from the possibility of arranging the themes in various ways so as to produce variant interpretations, but does not try to deny a certain arbitrariness in his own interpretation.

63. As does Emile Deschanel, Le Romantisme des classiques, 3d series (Paris, 1888), p. 60.

64. Rosso, Virtù, p. 28.

65. Coulet, “La peur d'être dupe,” p. 112.

66. Lignes de départ, pp. 71-107.

67. L'Ecrivain et ses travaux, pp. 3-4.

68. It should perhaps be noted that the Réflexions, although endowed with the nominal continuity that stems from discursive language, also manifest a significant degree of discontinuity. As constituted by La Rochefoucauld's editors, the text presents a disparity of subject matter and an absence of transition or logical arrangement that disallow a linear or sequential perception of the work's coherence.

69. Edmond Dreyfus-Brisac, Le Clef des maximes de La Rochefoucauld (Paris, 1904), p. 28.

70. Secretan, introduction, p. xix.

71. Lettre au Père Thomas Esprit, in the Truchet edition, p. 578.

72. Introduction, p. xxii, note 5.

73. Ibid., p. lx.

74. Ibid.

75. Truchet edition, p. 270.

76. Zeller, New Aspects of Style, pp. 148-49.

77. Ibid., p. 147.

78. Introduction, p. xxxviii.