Reading Marc Soriano or the Invention of a Scholarly Field

Abstract

Reading Marc Soriano or the Invention of a Scholarly Field Catherine Velay-Vallantin (bio) Marc Soriano died December 18, 1994. I had last met with him at his house on November 24. He was, as always, planning new scholarly projects, and he had shown me an interesting eighteenth-century edition of Perrault’s Contes, which he had bought during a previous visit to Czechoslovakia. We talked about the origins of this little book. It was a strange dialogue between my own lively voice and the equally brisk handwriting of Soriano, whose illness had deprived him of his voice fifteen years before in 1979. 1 It was also a fascinating dialogue; one impregnated with his essential intellectual questioning of the relationship between the written and the oral word. Soriano was one of the first scholars to understand that the connections between intellectual and popular culture were not to be found in the thematic field described by literary historians but in the competing and opposite practices and customs shared by traditional and erudite cultures. This cultural division, whose functions and effects have been analyzed by Michel de Certeau, caused Soriano to make a scholarly choice, the choice of a scientific field: Perrault’s Contes and the classics of children’s literature. In doing so, Soriano was at the origin of what must be called a re-evaluation: the re-evaluation of a corpus of narratives which, since the advent of the Third Republic and Lanson’s triumph over Brunetière (although the reverse would not have changed a thing!), 2 was condemned to the status of so-called marginal texts, mere footnotes in textbooks. He also brought about a re-evaluation of their authors: Perrault, of course, but also Madame d’Aulnoy, Mademoiselle L’Héritier, la Comtesse de Ségur, Jules Verne, and even Léo Lespès. Finally, he initiated a rehabilitation of their audience; these readers, called “popular” because of the difficulty in identifying their status and their competence, were the children, nestled in their nurseries decorated in the latest fashion available at the Galeries [End Page 92] Lafayette, with wallpaper where Little Red Riding Hood is running to her fate; children who were molded by the pious end-of-the-century literature sold by the booksellers Lefèvre and Guérin. 3 The people and the children-could Soriano have grasped Michelet’s generic notions, so cleverly studied by Champfleury in their connection to the foundation of official ideologies, in order to repeat the discrediting approach of former critics? Not at all: undoubtedly Soriano’s interest in this corpus is accounted for by the diversity of literary and artistic creations, as well as by the richness of the reception by audiences of all kinds. Marc Soriano was born into a family of modest means in 1918 in Cairo, Egypt, and lost his father at the age of three. After graduating from elementary school, he decided to become a carpenter, and he passed the admission exam for the Ecole Boulle. 4 However, since he was also granted a national fellowship, he abandoned his original plans and eventually enrolled in the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1939. 5 Drafted by the French army not long after he began his studies, he was wounded in combat and released from military service. During the German occupation, he was a jack-of-all-trades: a factory worker, grocer’s assistant and ghostwriter. He joined the Resistance as early as 1941, and after the Liberation, went back to the Ecole Normale Supérieure, passing his agrégation in philosophy in 1946. It is clearly at this point that Soriano’s future took shape: he worked for one year in Geneva with Jean Piaget at the Laboratory of Child Psychology. Here are his comments on that experience: At that moment it was clear that my vocation would be threefold: 1) research (mostly in epistemology, child psychology, didactics of disciplines); 2) teaching; 3) a taste for and the need to narrate rather than to explain. Hence my first books which were tales or novels and my first scripts for Radio Geneva in 1946. Another factor was essential: my marriage and my three daughters who...