Le roman de la création: écrire entre mythes et pratiques par Françoise Grauby

Abstract

aux questions qu’elle nous pose sur l’esthétique plutôt que pour les réponses qu’elle apporte. Christopher Newport University (VA) Michael J. Mulryan Grauby,Françoise.Le roman de la création: écrire entre mythes et pratiques.Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2015. ISBN 978-9-0420-3924-7. Pp. 250. 55 a. Grauby opens her study with the story of Flaubert’s coming to writing: his abandonment of law studies, nervous breakdown, life-threatening illness, and transformative emergence into the private realm of writing. Flaubert’s biography thus mobilizes the myths surrounding the forging of a writer: the tortured path to writing, the long hours of solitude, endless even fruitless hours of work, and unbidden inspiration. Grauby argues that this understanding of the writerly vocation remains more or less intact today. Her book focuses on how myths surrounding literary production and the (exalted) status of the writer nevertheless feed into contemporary practice even in its most professionalized form, the writing workshop. To pursue this inquiry, Grauby relies on a sociology of literature combined with the analysis of specific texts. A first chapter bemoans the lost history of the non-written, something this reader finds less edifying than Grauby’s subsequent history of the notion of a unique author, with origins in the establishment of copyright law. She expands on the tensions between secrecy (writing in private) and revelation (publication) as well as the political and economic forces on the writer. Chapter two explores inspiration, more precisely, that part of artistic creation that seems to come from external or uncontrollable sources. The author begins with concepts of magic or divine intervention, most likely the earliest beliefs about inspiration. She notes the struggle of Enlightenment philosophers to attribute inspiration to human reason followed by the Romantic return to an impulse originating outside of oneself. Finally, beginning in the nineteenth century, the psyche is recognized as inspirational source (melancholy, psychosis, the Id, sublimation, etc.). The chapter ends with a reading of Henry Bauchau’s journal documenting his struggles as writer; Grauby points out several contradictory maneuvers undertaken to be able to write, suggesting the impact of external forces that are then re-worked. The chapter that follows examines various ars poetica spanning several centuries and sharing the premise that writing is based on conscious composition, the result of reason and hard effort. In the same vein, Grauby discusses the increased importance of writing workshops and university programs in writing (even in France) that suggest that writing can be learned, thus democratically opening the sacred vocation to all comers. Her last chapter reviews in detail several French manuals for aspiring writers in order to show that, despite the formulae for producing writing, said manuals still integrate ideas about“inspiration”beyond the writer’s conscious control. Grauby also considers writers’ interviews—another source of information on the craft—to find that their 256 FRENCH REVIEW 90.3 Reviews 257 discussion of“construction”is tempered with references to inspiration and rumination. The author concludes with the hope that writing, however complex as creative practice , will continue on a path to more open,engaging dialogue rather than mystification. A bit uneven in its presentation (e.g., the long analyses of writing manuals) and slightly confusing in its framing (the title seems to suggest an examination of the novel of creation) this study is nevertheless a provocative reflection on writing as occupation. Lawrence University (WI) Eilene Hoft-March Grenouillet, Corinne. Usines en textes, écritures au travail: témoigner du travail au tournant du XXIe siècle. Paris: Garnier, 2014. ISBN 978-2-8124-3185-2. Pp. 261. 26 a. Grenouillet offers a literary analysis of recent writing that relates the experiences of workers in France confronted with the decline of traditional manufacturing, the rise of service industries, and the precariousness of low-wage employment. By listening to the voices of workers expressed in literary form, she seeks to determine the extent to which these texts are literary and the effectiveness of literature as a means of communicating workers’ concerns. Grenouillet connects Henry Poulaille’s idea of proletarian literature in the 1930s to current texts resulting from workshops on creative writing and theater, stenographic recording of oral...