L’écrivain et son critique: une fratrie problématique éd. par Philippe Chardin et Marjorie Rousseau

Abstract

Reviews 253 “le rapport au réel (référentiel, historique), le rapport au réel (autobiographique, biographique) [...] et enfin le rapport aux récits antérieurs, qui aboutit peut-être à une mise en question encore plus radicale du réel et du genre”(17). Five more sections of essays offer numerous examples of these negotiations with the so-called real.A first section, “Au regard du temps,” acknowledges novels with a relationship to history, especially recent history (World War II and Algeria, for instance). But unlike the novels of the 80s and 90s that accepted these histories as orthodoxy or reference, these newer narratives interrogate history, eschewing certainty in favor of ellipsis and even invention. The section titled “L’appel de la cité” stretches its thematic designation in order to accommodate essays on issues of individual and society, of “engagement”— including a more nuanced approach to the political and social responsibilities of the writer, of national identity (for pieds-noirs, for instance), and of human relationship to an increasingly alienated natural world. “Au miroir de soi” drills down on the question of intimacy revealed in autofictions; a polemic against exhibitionism is countered by other appreciations of the transformations of the“récit de soi”as it writes its own body. “Au miroir des livres” looks at quirky and erudite works in which the mind practices encyclopédisme, criticism or even erasure as it confronts texts ranging from library tome to tweeted ephemera.“À l’encre de la création”reports on renewed challenges to narrative authority, some offering a different approach to the écriture blanche of the last century, others exploiting the a-(chrono)-logical possibilities of electronic technologies. A final section, “Au (bon) vouloir des autres” offers a report on French texts translated and sold in the United States as a measure of literary reputation abroad followed by a second, somewhat playful essay: a “self-portrait” by Les particules élémentaires (Houellebecq’s 1998 novel) that comments self-knowledgeably and unapologetically on its own meanings. As the opening essay suggests, narrative is no simple matter when its relationship to the “real” cannot be pinned down, when authority is indiscernible, when the place of speaking is compromised, when“knowledge”is mediatized and digitized and de-categorized, and when familiar genres are cross-bred beyond recognition. If readers have doubted that the French novel has anything new to bring after the Nouveau and even the Nouveau Nouveau Roman, this collection will easily dissuade with its testimony to the scope, vitality, and intellectual challenges of the novel of the new millennium. Lawrence University (WI) Eilene Hoft-March Chardin, Philippe, et Marjorie Rousseau, éd. L’écrivain et son critique: une fratrie problématique. Paris: Kimé, 2014. ISBN 987-2-84174-650-7. Pp. 567. 35 a. This massive collection of forty-one articles discusses attempts by literary critics to influence creative writers; the actual influence of critical theory on literary production; and creative writers who have also functioned as critics. In principle, this set of subjects certainly merits serious attention; in practice, however, it seems overly ambitious. Unfortunately, the brevity of the chapters (nine to fifteen pages) precludes any substantial development,and most of them create the impression that Comparative Literature is an activity in search of a method. Contributions predominantly treat authors from the eighteenth century to the present. They touch upon novels, theater, poetry, and essays, mainly from Western Europe and Latin America. Quite a few of them are influence studies by comparatists. Among the highlights are Daniel-Henri Pageaux’s contrast of impressionistic and proscriptive criticism, focused on the Geneva School; Jean-Louis Hoquette’s survey of the influence of English authors on eighteenth-century France, emphasizing Voltaire, Milton, Shakespeare, and Dryden; and Catherine Dumas’s contrast between theater in France and Spain from 1620–40, leading, respectively, to the triumph of Neoclassicism or of the Baroque, despite Corneille’s tragicomic masterpiece, Le Cid, misjudged as a failed pure tragedy. Emmanuelle Kaës offers an insightful analysis of how Claudel portrays burlesque critics in Le soulier de satin, as a riposte to the literary establishment’s hostile,uncomprehending judgments of Tête d’Or, while contrasting the sea as a...