Model Behaviour: Cocteau, Radiguet and La Princesse de Clèves

Abstract

This article explores certain implications of the intertextual connections between two canonical French novels, Mme de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Cleves (1678) and Raymond Radiguet’s Le Bal du comte d’Orgel (1924), with particular emphasis on the question of literary individuation as it applies to the later work and its author. The functional importance of exemplary model works in respect of the modern French literary field is examined in the context of challenges to notions of literary tradition and transmission in the inter-war years. Radiguet’s literary individuation is seen as both practically enabled and theoretically problematised by the connection to the earlier text. The individuation process, complicated additionally in this instance by Radiguet’s literary and personal association with Jean Cocteau, is argued to unfold with respect to a classical imaginary that is facilitated by but independent of the actual classical intertext.