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John D. Lyons The Phantom of Chance: From Fortune to Randomness in Seventeenth-Century French Literature The Phantom of Chance: From Fortune to Randomness in Seventeenth-Century French Literature . John D. Lyons. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Pp. vi+211.

2014; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 111; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/674690

1545-6951

Kathleen Wine,

Renaissance Literature and Culture

Previous articleNext article FreeJohn D. Lyons The Phantom of Chance: From Fortune to Randomness in Seventeenth-Century French Literature The Phantom of Chance: From Fortune to Randomness in Seventeenth-Century French Literature. John D. Lyons. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Pp. vi+211.Kathleen WineKathleen WineDartmouth College Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreChance, observes John Lyons, shapes intellectual discourse as a “force… whose effect we deny to assert our own views” (vii). In this stimulating book, he uncovers in French classical literature the traces of a struggle with this “phantom,” in the words of the neo-Stoic philosopher Guillaume du Vair (1556–1621). Precisely because, Lyons argues, seventeenth-century writers preferred timeless intellect, order, and perfection of form over the everyday and the happenstance, they were acutely aware of chance, which in the guise of a leveling and scattering hasard, took on a new prominence over the course of the century, even as the more portentous fortune declined (xiv).Lyons devotes his book’s introduction to the “tradition of fortune,” the cluster of sometimes contradictory terms and concepts associated with chance from antiquity through the sixteenth century. While he acknowledges the importance of Machiavelli and Montaigne, each of whom was instrumental in the “dissolution of fortune into a multitude of random events and states” (21), Lyons nonetheless sums up the tradition’s central contribution as consisting in the competing Aristotelian and Boethian models it bequeathed to the seventeenth century. The Aristotelian model tended to ignore life’s background of chance events until one of them intersected in unexpectedly apt fashion with human desires or fears, in the fashion of the statue of Mitys, which chanced to fall on Mitys’s killer. The Boethian model, on the other hand, conceived life as a heroic struggle against an external world of pure contingency, associated with Fortuna’s wheel. Lyons detects variations on these two paradigms—which, for all their differences, yoke chance to human subjectivity—throughout the century.In his initial chapter, on Pierre Corneille, Lyons demonstrates that a rejection of chance was implicit in the Academy’s condemnation of Le Cid (1637). By contrast, Corneille’s theoretical writings, with their preference for the extraordinary, have affinities with Aristotle’s discussion of the wonder produced by the episode of Mitys’s statue. Three plays then display the diversity of roles the playwright assigned chance. Corneille’s first tragicomedy, the seldom-read Clitandre (1631), displays a revealing, albeit excessive, preoccupation with chance by design. In Le Cid, the king’s prudent weighing of risk becomes a metaphor for the mature playwright’s “management of chance” (44). Finally, by investigating why the recently converted hero of Polyeucte (1643) is in such a hurry for martyrdom, Lyons suggests the resemblance, in Aristotelian terms at least, between grace and chance.We associate Blaise Pascal with chance due to his celebrated wager and his contribution to the nascent mathematics of probability. In chapter 2, however, Lyons emphasizes the role of chance (including matters of concern to probability such as frequency and predictability) in Pascal’s religious investigations. Moreover, Lyons gives the Lettres provinciales (1656–57) and the Pensées (first published posthumously in 1669) equal consideration, suggesting that Pascal’s tangles with the Jesuits contributed to his reflections on chance. In the process of satirizing his adversaries’ lapses with regard to the likely future conduct of their sinful charges, Pascal arrives at an account of human behavior in which frequency of past actions can be seen as a reliable predictor of future ones. In the Pensées, Pascal appropriates Montaigne’s skeptical account of chance’s influence in worldly affairs as a proof of original sin. Yet he also attempts to convince his unbelieving interlocutor that Christ does not appear in the world by chance. Here, biblical prophecies come into play, since chance events cannot be predicted. Ending with the wager, whose terms come, like Pascal’s probability, from the artificially circumscribed terrain of games of chance, Lyons emphasizes the extent to which the wager fell outside the realm of chance as it had been previously understood.Chapter 3 considers the move from the chance-filled plots of romance to the novel as this trend is recapitulated in Mme de Lafayette’s Zayde (1670–71) and La Princesse de Clèves (1678). Examining the way in which Lafayette employs the terms fortune, caprice, hasard, and destinée in Zayde, Lyons treats the work as a parodic last hurrah for romance chance, which debunks the characters’ specious attempts to order their life narratives in terms of one of these shaping agencies. In La Princesse de Clèves, on the other hand, devoid of such signature manifestations of romance chance as the shipwreck, chance is “released into the world of the everyday” (123). Lyons pays particular attention to the stakes in what he terms the “new implausibility” (129), typified by the convergence of random events that enable the duc de Nemours to be present when the princess avows her love to her husband. The growing preoccupation with the characters’ intentional actions that lead readers to focus on this extraordinary confession, Lyons suggests, coincided with a willingness to overlook implausible manifestations of chance so long as writers did not call too much attention to them.Chapter 4 considers in tandem two works of the late seventeenth century produced at the apogee of French aesthetic and religious uniformity: Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet’s Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1681), intended for the French dauphin, and Jean Racine’s Athalie (1691), composed for the royal school for girls at Saint-Cyr. Lyons shows that Bossuet’s comparison of life to the seemingly random splotches of color in an anamorphic painting reflects the central place he allots chance, even though his providential view of history precludes its actual existence. Emphasizing the peculiar formal layout of the Discours, which initially subjects readers to an indigestible amalgam of historical raw materials, Lyons explores how Bossuet coordinates the unavoidable human experience of chance with a divine order that can be detected only in retrospect and with the aid of biblical prophecy. Due to the incompleteness of the human perspective, Bossuet’s God displays, like the Jehovah of Athalie, some of the duplicity of human schemers. In a fascinating analysis of Racine’s final tragedy, Lyons shows how the dramatist pits the opportunistic courtier Mathan’s belief in chance against providentialist views akin to those of Bossuet, expounded, paradoxically enough, by the play’s antagonists, Joad and the Baal-worshipping queen Athalie. In Lyons’s reading, the tragedy’s depiction of the divine manipulation of suspense appears as a masterly summation of seventeenth-century theological and poetic reflection.The final chapter demonstrates that the superficial character of Paris and the court as depicted in Jean de La Bruyère’s Les caractères ou les mœurs de ce siècle (1688) are bound up with the accidental, unlike the essential and unchanging qualities that the moralist identifies with the human heart. Lyons shows that La Bruyère’s concern not with great events and achievements but with missed chances and unrealized potential recalls Aristotelian tyche in its association of chance with desire, although it emphasizes the almost total incompatibility between desire and what happens. Even more striking is his analysis of La Bruyère’s depictions of clockwork courtiers and mechanized routines as far-flung adaptations of Fortune’s wheel. Wrapping up the chapter with a brief recapitulation of the links he has traced between chance and human imagination, Lyons situates La Bruyère between Bossuet and Rousseau: although, like the former, La Bruyère foregrounds the disorder of a world ruled by chance, his imagined counter to this world is no longer to be found in the world of grace but in the nostalgically drawn image of unspoiled nature.This searching and provocative study offers a compelling account of the cultural and intellectual currents that encouraged the increasing prominence of a “de-dramatized” hasard over the course of the seventeenth century. Whereas in the wake of Ian Hacking’s The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference (Cambridge University Press, 1975) much writing about chance in the early modern period has focused on probability or on games of chance, Lyons’s wider emphasis offers an illuminating perspective on the grand siècle as a whole, demonstrating that the period’s preoccupation with regularity lead to new methods of dealing with the disordered, the random, and the formless. The book’s richest rewards, however, lie in its readings. Lyons states early on that much of the distinctiveness of individual writers lies in the ways they use their perception of chance’s ubiquity (25), a claim that the individual chapters fully bear out. At the same time, the individual analyses bring to light unexpected affinities, as in the cases of Pascal and the Jesuits or Joad and Athalie. Inevitably, scholars will regret omissions in a book limited to six writers. To venture one such suggestion, Lyons’s analysis of how Racine dispels the specter of chance by the interplay of “plotting in …and…of the tragedy” (171) leads one to wonder whether a consideration of comedy, so rich in similar instances of multilayered plotting, might not have rounded out the picture of theatrical chance. Such proposals, though, are a measure of this thought-provoking book’s success in encouraging readers to adopt a new way of thinking about the grand siècle as a whole. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 111, Number 4May 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/674690 Views: 229Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.