Literary Adventures in Télémacomania

J’avouë que le genre [tragique] a ses graces; mais … le genre fleuri n’atteint jamais au sublime. [I confess that the genre of tragedy has its charms; but … a flowery genre never arrives at the sublime.] —François Fénelon, Lettre écrite à l’Académie française The literary “adventure” of this exhibit begins with a bestselling epic book that turned into a cultural fiasco of epic proportions. In 1699 the archbishop and royal tutor François Fénelon found himself dragged into a fraught controversy over his novel, Les Aventures de Télémaque . On the face of it, the book was an unlikely catalyst for scandal. Fénelon himself did not even authorize the novel's publication and certainly did not anticipate the vitriolic paper wars that persisted for several decades following its distribution. Much to his horror, Télémaque quickly became the most notorious novel of the Enlightenment: the book's Homeric setting, far from acting as a neutral generic framework, instead intensified readers’ perception of Fénelon's literary modernity. Accused of political and poetic radicalism, Fénelon found himself embroiled in a dangerous dispute over the limits of literature. To his more conservative readers, the novel made the classical world come alive for the wrong reasons: its exciting plot lines distracted from its instructional mandate and its historical- mythological characters shed a negative light on France's reigning monarch. To more forward-looking readers, Fénelon offered an experience of the ancient world that was thoroughly contemporary: he described Télémaque 's antiquarian world in vivid but plain language, inviting his modern-day readers to immerse themselves in its sensory landscape unconstrained by notions of deference to ancient genres and powerful patrons. By midcentury, Télémaque had evolved into a spectacle that spilled over into all cultural venues; the Encyclopédie 's countless references bear witness to its inescapable influence. In this exhibit, we scrutinize two intersecting stages of reform through the example of Télémaque . Initially, the novel prompted a French literary movement distancing itself from absolutism by renouncing traditional poetic forms: the neoclassical verse of theater was an obvious target for “modernization,” and advocates for literary reform set about rewriting Louis XIV's most cherished plays in prose. This campaign subsequently became an inescapable backdrop against which librettists and composers sought to reform dramma per musica.

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