L'illusion realiste. De Balzac a Aragon (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: L’Illusion réaliste. De Balzac à Aragon Amy Smiley Henri Mitterand, L’Illusion réaliste. De Balzac à Aragon. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. “Ecriture” series, 1994. Among the many questions that have preoccupied French writers and critics, that of the novel has provoked some of the more heated debates during the past century. Although it has been recognized that the genre ultimately escapes, or at least must leave open, definition (Marthe Robert, Roman des origines et origines du roman), this has hardly prevented criticism from laying claim to it in firm, unambiguous terms. Regarding the realist novel in particular, there has been a variety of continuous and conflicting attempts to situate the genre within the framework of interrelated aesthetic and ideological issues. Numerous, indeed, are the attacks and praises written to its name, that one can trace, for example, through a twentieth-century trajectory from surrealist to feminist readings of the genre. Realist writing for the post-W.W.I surrealist Breton categorically signified the death of the imagination (Surrealist Manifesto [1924]); rescuing the imagination and with it, freedom, implied an arguably excessive rejection not only of the realist novel but of the novel as possible genre of the merveilleux. On the other hand, during the Occupation, the underground journal Confluences devoted a special issue to the novel in 1943: in the context of censorship, realism takes on new political and social significance and finds itself repeatedly valorized. Hence, Gertrude Stein concludes in her translated contribution: “Ce que l’avenir apportera bien entendu personne ne le sait. Personne ne le sait jamais. Tout ce que l’on sait est que ce sera quelque chose de réaliste. Il faut que ce soit ainsi. Il faut que ce soit le réalisme qui a une réalité pour chaque génération” (“Le Réalisme et le roman”). Or, more recently, from a feminist perspective, Naomi Schor (Georges Sand and Idealism), in her revalorization of idealism, rescues it from the margins of canon formation and in so doing fundamentally challenges the triumph of realism. Embedded in the very notion of the realist novel is the paradoxical if not antithetical relationship between the “real” and the “fictional.” In response to the debate over the crise du roman originating in the nineteenth century, Maupassant raised this problem in “Le Roman,” preface to Pierre et Jean, concluding [End Page 803] that the realist is in fact an illusionist. Mitterand’s studies of realist novels take up the challenge of exploring the illusion réaliste through careful textual readings of works by Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, and Aragon. He does so primarily by privileging the “illusion” component, unfolding the artifices which, for him, serve as aesthetic models that contribute to, rather than detract from, the plaisir du texte. The realist novel, then, is first and foremost a novel, since for all of its relation to the real, “le réel, une fois décrit, a bien du mal à échapper à la figure.” Mitterand’s reflection is based more on the relation of this “figure of the real” to the intrinsic narrative structure than its link to the extrinsic problems addressed by the text. His first chapter, for example, devoted to Balzac (Le fantastique des choses), focuses on the ways in which description figurally operates in the text (in La Peau de chagrin), creating a representational topos that enables the fusion of Raphaël’s mental universe with that of the antique store he discovers. Illusions of the real (the enumeration, or vertiginous textual saturation, of objects, which as Georges Benrekassa has argued, creates instead the opposite effect, that of the irréel in Balzac) are inscribed within and primarily related back to the narratological domain of the text and the position of the writer, hence Mitterand’s assertion that “c’est le romancier lui- même qui se fait métaphore du Créateur, et son texte emblème de l’esthétique romantique.” This perfectly legitimate approach often produces probing and interesting analyses throughout Mitterand’s book. However, the emphasis on textual illusion suggests that the realist dimension of the works he considers is secondary instead of what I would argue to be...