La Vraisemblance narrative en question: Walter Scott, Barbey d'Aurevilly

Abstract

By Fiona McIntosh. Paris, Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2002. 364 pp. Pb €23.00. In this immensely solid, if rather densely written, study, Fiona McIntosh invites us to turn our attention away from the nineteenth century's apparent obsession with realism and to examine the seemingly regressive concern with vraisemblance that is shown by her to have formed the central preoccupation of both Walter Scott and his anti-Naturalist disciple, Barbey d'Aurevilly. Her analysis, which derives much of its authority from her familiarity with both the rhetoricians of the Scottish Enlightenment and such hands-on theorists of language and literature as Charles Nodier, is prefaced by a lucid and subtle discussion of post-Enlightenment responses to the poetics of Aristotle. McIntosh argues convincingly that, amid much semantic confusion and the presence of ‘zones de flou’, the fundamental elements of Aristotelian vraisemblance survived the assault on those aspects of the philosopher's poetics that the Romantics associated with the aesthetics of classical drama to form a context in which the central reference point was constituted by the scandalous ‘événement unique’. Not surprisingly, it was with regard to the historical novel that the engagement with the concept of vraisemblance was most acutely experienced, for it was therein that the novelist was obliged to confront most obviously the problematic combination of fiction and the ‘real’, with Scott, moreover, providing a provocative incorporation of the fantastic, arguably the most blatant literary embodiment of a suspect singularité. If McIntosh, who, incidentally, underlines the contribution of contemporary legal thinking to the debate, advances our understanding of the aesthetics of a genre that was perpetually seeking its own justification, it is largely because of her appreciation that the historical event, far from being in simple opposition to popular notions of the fictional, shared with the latter a capacity to produce ‘une rupture dans le cours normal des choses’. Yet individual authors (and critics) inevitably responded differently to the challenge presented by the need for vraisemblance. This diversity is amply demonstrated with the aid of a typology that extrapolates from the authors themselves four different types of ‘rhétorisation’, each of which brings its own contradictions and paradoxes. In revealing the privileged status of ‘la rhétorisation de l'auctor’, McIntosh's rigorous analyses lead to the rehabilitation of a form of fiction that depended for its authority on compromise and a respect for the imaginative input of the reader, and, she argues suggestively, invites respect for its recognition of its own limits.