Reading societies
LESEGESELLSCHAFT, n. I have no business talking about German words in this newsletter, as I do not speak German (and some of you do!), but I love a long German word. One of my favorite professors, whenever he veered into a topic he didn’t have a degree in, would say “I’m driving [Kant, etc.] without a license,” so that’s what I’m doing today. Driving German without a license.
Lesegesellschaft means “reading society” in English or “cabinet littéraire / cabinet de lecture” in French, in a specific historical sense of a kind of club that people in 18th- and 19th-century Europe used to form. Books were expensive, so if you liked to read but couldn’t afford to buy your own personal collection, you could pay a small subscription fee to join one of these clubs. They offered books and periodicals. Here is a painting of one:
Johann Peter Hasenclever, Lesecabinett (Reading Society), 1843
Old-timey private-subscription libraries came up because this week in Capital-R Romance, I was reading historian Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, which is a classic nonfiction book on 18th-c France. Darnton is interested in the irreducible strangeness of history—the idea that people in the past were fundamentally different from people in the present—so his work is a fun counterbalance to all the historical romance novels I read, which highlight all the ways people in the past might have been just like us.
I like Darnton’s writing, and he always has the best primary sources (I am a nosy bitch and I love a diary). I find his emphasis on the strange very convincing when it comes to recreational animal cruelty, but less so when he’s like “look at how these 18th-c readers freaked out about novels!”
It is with a heavy heart that I must announce I’m gonna talk about Jean-Jacques Rousseau again.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a frustrated spanking enthusiast, social outcast, deadbeat dad, and Enlightenment philosopher. He maintained that arts and culture were corruptive influences on the public, especially novels, except when he did them. In 1761, he wrote multi-volume epistolary novel called Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse. There are two things you need to know about this book. I will let Robert Darnton say them:
1.
La Nouvelle Héloïse was perhaps the biggest best-seller of the century. The demand for copies outran the supply so badly that booksellers rented it out by the day and even by the hour, charging twelve sous for sixty minutes with one volume, according to L.-S. Mercier.
2.
And La Nouvelle Héloïse is unreadable—if not for everyone, at least for a great many “ordinary” readers of the modern variety, who cannot wade through six volumes of sentiment unrelieved by any episodes of violence, explicit sex, or anything much in the way of plot.
Yeah, that’s right. Me and celebrated historian Robert Darnton both skipped La Nouvelle Héloïse on our exam reading lists. An aside: If you like violence, sex, and plot, and you wanna read an epistolary novel from 18th-c France, there’s one that still bangs. Though I should warn you that there were only two possible novels in 18th-c France:
a good girl thinks about sex and then dies
a bad girl has too good of a time and then dies
La Nouvelle Héloïse is category 1, Les Liaisons dangereuses is category 2, but with a little category 1 on the side.
Fragonard, La Liseuse (The Reader), 1770. She’s only using one hand to read, so you know it’s a category 2 novel.
Anyway, JJ Rousseau writes a bestseller and puts his name on it, which is not customary at the time. It’s a bold move. Also a bold move: writing a second preface in the form of a script that is basically a 2001-era-fanfiction-dot-net author’s note where Rousseau imagines a dialogue between himself “R” and a reader “N” who objects to his book. I am not making this up. (I didn’t read LNH but I made it through the beginning, give me a little credit.)
N. Quoi! Vous y mettrez votre nom? [What! You’re gonna put your name on it?]
R. Oui, Monsieur. [Yes, sir.]
N. Votre vrai nom? Jean-Jaques ROUSSEAU, en toutes lettres? [Your real name? Jean-Jacques ROUSSEAU, in writing?]
R. Jean Jaques Rousseau, en toutes lettres. [Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in writing.]
That shit makes people feel like they know him. People go wild for the book and also for JJ personally, and they start acting like he’s their real-life bestie, and also maybe that his book of letters was real and he’s secretly the male main character. So Rousseau gets a ton of fanmail. (Robert Darnton hates the idea of calling it fanmail.) Knowing an author as a person, writing to that person, these are new concepts.
JJ writes back to his admirers, most of whom want to assure him that they cried an absolute flood of tears over his book, and some of whom have dried their tears and now want to fuck. There is extant correspondence between fans and Rousseau where they roleplay characters he made up.
Is that hilarious? Yes. Is it evidence that people in France in the 1760s were fundamentally different from people now? uhhhhhhhhhhhh
Darnton wrote this book in the 1980s, so it’s not his fault that he didn’t know about twitter (A/N: or early 00s fanfiction author notes!). But when I read about Rousseau’s correspondence with his readers, the only part of it that doesn’t seem entirely relatable is that the book sucks and also Rousseau sucks. I don’t wanna talk to Jean-Jacques “all novels corrupt the public except for mine” Rousseau or about his boring book.
But getting really into a novel and then contacting its author to tell them that they made me cry? I do that like every other day, my guy.
I’m not invalidating Darnton’s argument. It’s still possible view the relationship between Rousseau and his readers, and the way people read La Nouvelle Héloïse, as particularly of its moment. The essay—the whole book—is great. But if this particular behavior is an example of the irreducible strangeness of the past, then I guess romance twitter, AO3 commenters and I constitute the irreducible strangeness of the present.
Speaking of small-r romance, I only finished one book this week—why, did something distracting happen?—but it was totally charming: Aiden Thomas’s Cemetery Boys (trans m/cis m, both gay, young adult, fantasy). I loved the focus on Latinx culture—Yadriel’s immediate family is Mexican-American and Cuban-American, but he has Puerto Rican and Haitian-American cousins and friends, and the way they do magic varies, especially what kind of foods they make as sacred ofrendas to departed family members. I also love to see a fantasy world with gendered magic—women heal, men manage malignant spirits—that recognizes trans characters. Yadriel’s family might not immediately accept him as a man, but Santa Muerte knows. So does Julian, the ghost Yadriel accidentally summons, can’t get rid of, and slowly falls in love with. Content warnings: some unsupportive family members misgender and deadname Yadriel (though his deadname is not in the text, which I thought was skillfully done), some supporting characters have been abused or kicked out of their families, parental death, grief, violence.
Tell your favorite author you love them, but maybe stop short of the roleplaying. (Unless they want to, I guess.) Try not to have so good of a time that you die. See you next Sunday!
