La haine de la littérature selon Bernard Lamy

Abstract

The paper focuses on Lamy’s reflections on literary fiction and theatre as displayed in his Nouvelles réflexions sur l’art poétique (1678). Bernard Lamy (1640–1715) was a prolific writer, a major Augustinian thinker and a member of the French Oratory. Today, he is mostly known for his La rhétorique ou l’Art de parler (1st edition dates back to 1675), and his numerous works continue to elicit contributions from specialists on rhetoric and literary fiction. Lamy’s reflections on literature, theatre and aesthetics are based on rigorous moral and religious grounds, hence his overriding aim to dismantle and deconstruct the core of what some continue to call the “classical doctrine”. Lamy systematically treats topics such as embellishment, respect for the unities (time, place, action), paradoxes of aesthetical pleasure, verisimilitude, morality of literary and theatrical fiction, etc., all to demonstrate their radical incompatibility with the principles and values of an exemplary pious person. Lamy’s rigorist moral and religious views might well seem shocking to a modern reader, but we aim to show that his analysis of various creative strategies (especially intricacies of rhetorical adaptation and procedures of arousing an emotional/intellectual response) has a great potential to enrich our understanding of early modern fiction and theatre.

Keywords

• bernard lamy
• literary fiction
• early modern french literature
• theatre
• embellishment
• verisimilitude
• adaptation
• literary taste
• aesthetical pleasure
• morality