Barbey d’Aurevilly et l’écriture: formes et signes by Pascale Auraix-Jonchière

Abstract

Reviews 211 Literary History and Criticism edited by Marion Geiger Auraix-Jonchière, Pascale. Barbey d’Aurevilly et l’écriture: formes et signes. Caen: Minard, 2011. ISBN 978-2-85210-068-8. Pp. 314. 46 a. This volume explores two tropes in Barbey d’Aurevilly’s œuvre. The first section introduces his concept of symbolic transformation and highlights his subversion of images commonly associated with the French Revolution through a series of comparisons with his contemporaries. The second section explores how a study of ‘transformation’in d’Aurevilly’s œuvre cannot be limited to specific themes or images in his texts, but must include a larger consideration of transformation manifested in the manipulation of genre. In the first section, close textual analyses are both sensitive and strong,teasing out the subversion of historically-charged symbols.Auraix-Jonchière demonstrates how images used to depict the Revolution positively or progressively in other authors’ works (Michelet, Quinet, and Vallès in particular) are transformed by d’Aurevilly to highlight its disruptive and damaging effects on French society. To this end, the first and second parts of chapter two are centered on scenes of decapitation and disfigurement in numerous works by d’Aurevilly. Auraix-Jonchière argues that while for Michelet and Quinet the Revolution and the symbols associated with it, notably the guillotine,“découp[ent] pour mieux construire” (77), these same images are transformed in d’Aurevilly’s writing to reinforce fragmentation and destruction, symbolizing an irreparable loss of order and cohesion of pre-Revolutionary France. Furthermore,Auraix-Jonchière reads this fracturing on thematic and narrative levels. She highlights the polyphony and discord of d’Aurevilly’s use of multiple narrators from different classes (L’ensorcelée) and the stitching together of disparate time periods, leaving irresolvable lacunae in the plot (Le chevalier des Touches) as evidence of the irreparable trauma of the Revolution. The second section pertains to the theme of transformation but no longer takes the chaos of Revolutionary France as the central transforming agent in d’Aurevilly’s work. Rather, it focuses on the hybridization of genre and intertextuality that shapes his œuvre, and claims that both literary forms and movements (particularly the epic and the gothic novel) are revived, reinvested with new meaning, and mobilized to critique nineteenth-century French society. However , the most compelling chapter in this section,“Des Memoranda à la Correspondance (les voix croisées de la mélancholie),” strays from an explicit critique of society to address the question of le mal du siècle. The chapter appeals to intertextuality in its most literal form, demonstrating that an understanding of melancholy in d’Aurevilly’s work may only be achieved through mutual consideration of both his journal (Memoranda) and his correspondence. Auraix-Jonchière aptly reads silences in the correspondence on the subject of melancholy (for instance, lapses in letters sent, or a relegating of the topic of melancholy to paratextual elements) as a performance of Aurevillian spleen, which is more fully elaborated in the Memoranda. Such an original reading strategy of the two texts together is one of the strongest elements of the book. The strength of the textual analyses, however, dovetails with the text’s primary weakness, the lack of a theoretical framework to support and enhance otherwise incisive close-readings, undercutting the authority of certain analyses. Specifically, in“Violence et événement dans Une histoire sans nom,” Auraix-Jonchière posits the paradox inherent in the title of the text with respect to the concept of the‘event,’“qui se définit par sa propre impossibilit é” (121). The brutal event, rape, is narratable only through its symptoms. The analysis rests on knowledge of Derrida’s concept of the event, but it is mentioned only in passing, and its absence weakens the reading. Overall, however, the study is well conceived and will be useful to nineteenth-century specialists interested both in d’Aurevilly and in questions of symbolic transformation and intertextuality. Harvard University (MA) Kathryn Rose Beaulieu, Jean-Philippe, et Andrea Oberhuber, éd. Jeu de masques: les femmes et le travestissement textuel (1500–1940). Saint-Étienne: PU de Saint-Étienne, 2011. ISBN 978-2-86272-578-9. Pp. 284. 27 a...