Balzac: le roman de l'autorité. Un discours auctorial entre sérieux et ironie by Christèle Couleau-Maixent

Abstract

MLR, 104.3, 2009 871 Schoentjes insists that ironybelongs to three distinct fields: rhetoric, hermeneu tics, and ethics. One of the great virtues of the book is that itdraws our attention to the 'modulations' or 'inflections' of irony, that is to the differentways inwhich ironic potentialities can be perceived/identified and to thevarious factors (historical or other) on which theydepend. The third part concentrates on the politics and ethics of irony (by stressing the common philosophical ground between irony and anarchy), as well as on the massive popularity of irony infin de siede culture and thinking (see the lengthy discussion of thepros and cons ofAlcanter de Brahm's 'point d'ironie'). The analysis iswide-ranging and stimulating. Irony is shown tobe a very fluid and ever-evolving concept. Finally, Silhouettes de Vironie offers a survey of the various ways inwhich irony shapes literature, (popular) culture, art forms, and of how it informs key twentieth-/twenty-first-centuryintellectual debates. A bibliography, updating thevery useful one included inVoetique de Vironie, and an index would have been welcome additions, but overall, Silhouettes de Vironie makes for indispensable reading for all researchers and studentswith an interest in irony,nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, intertextuality,and reader-response criticism. It is a very useful tool indeed as itseeks to shake up some of our preconceptions by tackling known and less-known texts from a decidedly original (and ironic) angle. Durham University Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze Balzac: le roman de Vautorite. Un discours auctorial entre serieux et ironie. By Christele Couleau-Maixent. Paris: Champion. 2007. 855 pp. 135. ISBN 978-2-7453-1359-1. Although itmay no longer be necessary to defend Balzac's style against erstwhile detractors such as Sainte-Beuve, Faguet, and Lanson, and, more recently, against critics of his approach tofiction including Robbe-Grillet and even Barthes, Christele Couleau-Maixent joins Eric Bordas, Fran9oise van Rossum-Guyon, and, more re cently,Nathalie Solomon, Aude Deruelle, Claire Barel-Moisan, and Jacques-David Ebguy in offering a fresh, broadly stylistic reappraisal of Balzac's practice of the novel. Illustrating what she understands by Te discours auctorial', Couleau-Maixent shows Balzac enhancing his authorial status by generating in the reader a need for an auteur induit' (understood as 'tout ce que le texteme donne ? croire ? propos de l'auteur' (p. 95)) which gives greater legitimacy both to thenovel as un genre serieux' (p. 109) and to Balzac as its source and guarantor. This legitimacy is,moreover, reinforcedwhen authorial authority isdelegated toparticular intradiegetic narrators (whose very identity may be defined in terms of theirdiscursive function), to groups of characters in dialogue, or to a narrative teleology permeated with authorial markers such as epigraphs, self-citations, and explanatory incipits or decipits. All of these 'discours d'escorte' are, moreover, self-servingly incorporated into a 'patchwork 872 Reviews textueF (p. 259) of discourses and meta-discourses, producing a new form ofhybrid novel. Thus, contrary to what earlier detractors might have claimed, one of the main conduits for this hybridized but cumulative 'discours auctoriar is not the (ominiscient) narrator but the anonymous, virtual, personnage generique' such as the 'lecteur inscrit, implique, fictionnalise', 'qui [donne] ? La Comedie humaine sa coherence' (pp. 409, 408). This coherence is reinforced by other, related forms of self-authentification such as proverbs, maxims, citations, repetitions, and inserted documents, which subject thework to a constant process of renaming and re-evaluating itsown Veal'. When the vehicle for this 'real' ismetaphorical (as in Le Lys dans la vallee), ironic (even in Seraphita), or simultaneously serious and potentially parodic as when le roman balzacien [. . .]met [. . .] l'ideologie a Vepreuve du pathos (p. 583), authorial discourse becomes evenmore ambivalent, while remaining, as ever,purposeful and self-legitimating: '[l]e discours auctorial prend place ? l'articulation du roman et du monde' (p. 587). Particular examples of this articulation' can, moreover, be found in the Balzacian Bildungsroman which discovers rather than tmcovers the Veal'. The work is, therefore, forever on themove, forever there but also elsewhere, as when it reinscribes the past in the present and inscribes the future in the past in a desperate attempt to archive' the nineteenth century, but whose very failure confirms the authority of itswould-be...