Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 17 Number 1, April 2016
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Jefferson, Ann (2015). Genius in France: An Idea and Its Uses. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP. 273pp. ISBN 978-0-691-16065-8
Reviewed by
University of East Anglia
Distinguished critics quoted on the back cover offer positive assessments of this book, which exemplifies scholarly research and historical acumen in showing how 'genius was linked to perfection and fraudulence, national glory and exclusion, and the highest mental powers and degeneracy' (Thomas Pavel). The book focuses on France and Jefferson explains that: i) it's easier to focus on one nation though the topic is pan-European; ii) French models of genius have been to some extent marginalized in other accounts but are in fact varied and formulated across a range of disciplines – philosophy, aesthetics, nationalism/identity, psychology, realism, child development, feminism and critical theory; iii) language shapes sense and thus it's useful to restrict consideration to a single cultural context.
Her concern is with the 'uses [the idea of genius] has been put to' and the contexts which frame it – with how it is perceived and deployed. Her 'aim is to present a number of different accounts of genius ... since the beginning of the eighteenth century' (2). Thus also, because there is 'no established sense of a corpus of French writings on genius', the book aims to outline one, but to signal that it may properly be diverse and discontinuous (7). The remit of the concept can be seen to change during the book's progression across time from claims to national, linguistic or superhero status through to its application to children and women and its assessment in more ambivalent psychological or physiological terms: the trajectory suggests the increasing interrogation or relativisation of a term which appears previously to have taken for granted certain gender and status assumptions. In later periods, it 'is derided, or acquires problematic status' (29); or signals a capacity to engage with enigma or operate transformations of self-construction.
In 18th century Europe the term denotes creativity and originality, framed in the discourses of philosophy of mind and theories of art and aesthetics. It adopts from classical models the tendency to be applied exclusively to male 'poets'. New ideas – a key characteristic of genius - are seen in the 18th century as 'a higher-order form of knowledge' produced through combining ideas derived from sense-experience. This can only happen if the person concerned 'feel[s] and conceive[s] the objects... more keenly than ... other men' (Condillac) (21). The genius 'is endowed with qualities that allow him [sic] either to penetrate the world through his observational powers, or else, on the basis of his sensibility, to take up its imprint and make it legible in turn to his readers and viewers' (23). The genius in this constuction is an exceptionally endowed (male) person who perceives and translates the world more profoundly than lesser beings.
For the 18th century, genius produces or is equated with coherence and wholeness: it results in the creation of new knowledge or new form. It is seen as a self-evident concept or quality, as the supreme capacity of human nature. Associated with or claimed by outstanding individuals (Hugo (80-87) implicitly claims to be the genius of post-Revolutionary France), genius marks an innate, more-than-merely intellectual capacity, a kind of 'spiritual', 'divine', or 'inspired' quality. These things then begin to be transferred to, or seen as characteristic of, (French) civilisation and nation, (French) language or religion - as in Chateaubriand's Le Génie du Christianisme (in the service of which politicised claims, we might ask?).
As if to underline the increasing ambivalence of these applications, the 19th and 20th centuries see genius in more diverse, 'alternative' and indeed problematic senses. The term is central to 'Romantic poetry, psychological medicine, realist fiction, children's literature and experimental psychology' (49) (and even surfaces in more mundane contexts like 'le génie de l'épicerie', 1827!). As its use becomes more widespread, more general, it also loses something of its exclusivity. Child genius, for instance (Chapter 13), is subject to investigation as a suspicious 'production' (Sartre viewed it like this it in himself, noting his own complicity in Les Mots). If genius is understood in the 18th century through the lens of philosophy of mind and aesthetics, in the19th century this shifts towards medicine and indeed pathology. In the former it is venerated; in the latter it is observed. It moves from being the ‘source of knowledge’ to an object of knowledge (94).
In the early part of the 19th century it is treated as a ‘pathography’ (96) or a ‘pathological object’ (93) located in the brain – a site therefore either of optimal function or malfunction. (One might note that the study of consciousness similarly moves towards a cognitive science model in the 20th century.) This view also has origins in the empiricist approaches of Locke, Hobbes and Condillac. It emerges in the 19th century in the work of Lélut and Moreau, who investigate the pathology of genius and invoke ‘heredity’ in a Zolaesque optic: Moreau speaks of ‘intellectual hyperesthesia’, in which what might elsewhere be seen as privileged insight becomes an aberrant condition (cf. Dryden: ‘Great wits are sure to madness near allied...’ cit 95.). (‘Hyperesthesia’ evokes for this reader a contrast with Richard Schechner’s more positive 20th century discussion of hypertrophic and tropotrophic modes of consciousness in relation to Indian and other eastern models of aesthetic experience/sensitivity.)
Artists are seen as prone to the nefarious end of the spectrum, whereas empirical, intellectual temperaments are immune (especially geometricians, it seems). The imagination, in this perspective, shifts from being a luminous source of superior knowledge to being particularly ’liable to... lesions’ (97) because it generates ideas from within itself rather than from sensory information (especially sight).
However, Moreau does concede that literary genius may produce ‘audacious minds ... great truths or startling paradoxes ... [which] change the course of... ideas’ (cit. 108), an observation which might perhaps also apply to many of the major figures in the domain of ‘theory’ in the 20th century, some of whom are discussed later in the book. Genius does undergo one of its several rehabilitations, for instance in the work of Séailles, who sees it as a universal attribute, an ability to ‘organize perceptions into harmonious unity’. Genius is here normalised, but in the process, Jefferson notes, ‘loses a good deal of its distinction’ (116).
The ‘long decline’ it thus entered is not improved by mid-20th century positions (Sartre, Barthes) which debunk or deconstruct genius ‘as a product of bourgeois ideology’ (196) – or in Barthes’ terms, a ‘myth’. Both Sartre and Barthes see creativity as much more ambivalent than the 18th century model; they expressly refute any suggestion that it is ‘natural’ or derives from inspiration. Such constructs reflect specific ideological positions, on which bourgeois culture rests, and which it uses to ‘seek to deny history and [take] refuge in anachronism’ (201); genius is ‘a myth inherited from an outmoded conception of culture’ (Sartre) and anyone who subscribes to it – as he himself confesses to doing in Les Mots - is most likely ‘a prodigious fraud’.
The idea of genius however achieves a further rehabilitation later in the 20th century via psychoanalysis. Jouve and Blanchot, writing about Hölderlin, argue in favour of respecting the enigmatic quality in both madness and genius as opposed to categorising it in physiological terms: its value is to ‘[give] form to the extreme’ (210) and to further relationship with the other, which they see as an ‘affirmation of the essence of poetry’. This also matches the tendency of late 20th century ‘theory’ to privilege questions over conclusions. (226: Genius ‘fares best as the focus of open-ended enquiry’ rather than as an object of knowledge.)
For Derrida, pace Jefferson, genius is indeed exceptional, but as an ‘absolute singularity’ (221), as an ‘event rather than [an] entity’. Here then it is seen as ‘originality’ of occurrence. On one hand this frees it from links with genealogy, genre or gender, as in Derrida’s title Genèses, généalogies, genres et le génie (2003), in other words from being embedded in categories like nationality or language or from being uniquely attributed to exceptional individuals; on the other hand it is a further step in the identification of the psychological and processual quality of the acts and outcomes to which these instances have given rise. So à travers a history of critical redefinition we arrive at a process model for genius (these however are my terms not Jefferson’s). I wonder if a retrospective retracing of the figurations of the social worlds this history has traversed would be appropriate at this point to interrogate why this ‘idea’ has been ‘used’ in these ways at these times.
Julia Kristeva's postulation of female genius (Le génie féminin 1999-2002) with reference to Hannah Arendt, Colette and Melanie Klein fits into this nexus. Her argument, Jefferson explains, is that female genius is ‘necessary’ (213); these women are examples of ‘extreme but vital instances’ which ‘[open] up human existence to the possibility of meaning in ways that are capable of transforming... lives’; as a sort of post-existentialist self-creating, a ‘surpassing of oneself’; also as a ‘cure’ against the deadly disease of uniformity. Its modes of production in the lives of the women Kristeva discusses are pragmatism and narrative: forms of action and process, therefore, I suggest.
An earlier section has discussed Mme de Staël and her protagonist/alter ego Corinne: the latter has genius, principally for improvising in verse, though it isn’t really explained in what if any way this is gendered. I thought some use of Kristeva, or indeed Cixous or Spivak, might have been useful here, but perhaps we have to read across to the key characteristics of the female genius which Jefferson notes in Kristeva’s book: those of Relationality and Maternity. These qualities speak to a somewhat different positioning of genius, one which reflects the psychoanalytical approach: they signal a post-Freudian repositioning of the feminine vis-à-vis mother and father archetypes, a ‘capacity’ (in the case of Colette) ‘to invent her own sexuality in and through language (215), and an enhanced ability to encounter the other – which maternity in particular institutes, but which is in principle available to anyone. We end here then on an implication of a re- or de-gendered universal capacity.
I would have liked the book, which provides a lot of fascinating perspectives, to pick up on some of the larger questions which it implies - and has stimulated me to ask - but doesn't foreground. Perhaps during the discussion, certainly in a summative concluding section. This might have included:
Is there a sense in which we 'all' could now be seen as sharing, at least potentially, the criteria/characteristics (e.g. pathology, creativity, drive, charisma etc.) which have been used at different times to identify genius? What happens to genius in a democracy?
Is it not helpful to ask why certain definitions have been used at different times and in different contexts? What are the political/historical implications of foregrounding the concept? For what reasons has it been promoted? What kinds of social, intellectual, political shifts (e.g. revolution, growth of psychology/neurology, etc.) have driven or underpinned re-evaluations or repositionings of the term? Is there an overlap between ‘genius’ and individualism as a bourgeois and therefore capitalist construct?
If genius is a mode of knowledge (19/20) and knowing is a quest for understanding, expansion, ('appetite for knowledge'), do we need some theory of mind/consciousness, or a historical account of different ways of addressing this? Do we not need a psychodynamics and an interrogation of how genius is performed, as well as a trawl through the major envelopes which have been used to designate its significance and value? We are told that Corinne improvised, but the way she did it and the functioning of the improvisatory as a game-changer is not explored.
Most if not all the examples cited are recognised 'mainstream' figures, even the slightly less conventional later ones (Barthes, Sartre, Colette). I wonder though that if genius in its (latest?) manifestation can be understood as a process which informs the redesignation/reorientation of a culture, it might not be worth a look at some rather more 'off the wall' examples: I think for instance of Jarry, Artaud, Tati, Toulouse-Lautrec, Deleuze/Guattari, Piaf, Cantona... The book by and large sticks to the 'who' and the 'what', rather than examining the 'why' and the 'how'. For that reason, however much I respect its scholarship, it doesn't quite excite me.
What is the supremely human quality that we want or need to validate by identifying it? What is its importance in the context of models of human society, social order, relation to the extra-human, interrogation of internal processes etc.? Why should we care?