Race, milieu, and moment
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Race, milieu, and moment were the three aspects of the literary critic and sociologist Hippolyte Taine's attempt at a scientific account of literature. Taine used these words in French (race, milieu et moment); the terms have become widespread in literary criticism in English, but are used in this context in senses closer to the French meanings of the words than the English meanings, which are, roughly, nation, environment, and time.
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[edit] Race, milieu, and moment
Taine argued that literature was largely the product of the author's environment, and that an analysis of that environment could yield a perfect understanding of the work of literature. In this sense he was a positivist (see Auguste Comte), though with important differences. Taine did not mean race in the specific sense now common, but rather the collective cultural dispositions that govern everyone without their knowledge or consent. What differentiates individuals within this collective race, for Taine, was milieu: the particular circumstances that distorted or developed the dispositions of a particular person. The moment is the accumulated experiences of that person, which Taine often expressed as momentum; to later critics, however, Taine's conception of moment seems to have more in common with Zeitgeist.
[edit] Earlier anticipations
Though Taine coined and popularized the phrase "race, milieu, et moment," the theory itself has roots in earlier attempts to understand the aesthetic object as a social product rather than a spontaneous creation of genius. Taine seems to have drawn heavily on the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder's ideas of volk (people) and nation in his own concept of race; the Spanish writer Emilia Pardo Bazán has suggested that a crucial predecessor to Taine's idea was the work of Germaine de Staël on the relationship between art and society.
[edit] Influences
Taine is considered the founder of French naturalism, the literary branch of realism that had Émile Zola as its central figure. Taine also influenced a number of nationalist literary movements throughout the world, who used his ideas to argue that their particular countries had a distinct literature and thus a distinct place in literary history. In addition, post-modern literary critics concerned with the relationship between literature and social history (including the New Historicists) continue to cite Taine's work, and to make use of the idea of race, milieu, and moment. The critic John Chapple, for example, has used the term as an illustration of his own concept of "composite history."
[edit] Criticisms
The chief criticism of race, milieu, and moment at the time the idea was created was that it did not sufficiently take into account the individuality of the artist, central to the creative genius of Romanticism. Even Zola, who owed so much to Taine, made this objection, arguing that an artist's temperament could lead him to make unique artistic choices distinct from the environment that shaped his general viewpoint; Zola's principal example was the painter Édouard Manet. Similarly, Gustave Lanson argued that race, milieu, and moment could not among themselves account for genius; Taine, he felt, explained mediocrity better than he explained greatness.
A distinct criticism concerns the possibile sloppiness of the logic and scientific basis of the three concepts. As Leo Spitzer has written, the actual science of the idea, which is vaguely Darwinian, is rather tenuous, and shortly after Taine's work was published a number of objections were made on scientific grounds. Spitzer also points out, again citing period sources, that the relationship between the three terms themselves was never well understood, and that it is possible to argue that moment is an unnecessary addition implied by the other two.
[edit] References
- John Chapple. Elizabeth Gaskell: The Early Years. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997.
- Leo Spitzer. "Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 3, No. 2. (Dec., 1942), pp. 169-218.
- Mark Wolff. "Individuality and l'Esprit Français: On Gustave Lanson's Pedagogy." MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 62.3 (2001) 239-257.
