Marcel Schwob: conteur de l'imaginaire (review)

This attractively produced book proposes a study of Schwob's work as a writer of short fictional texts — the core of his literary output — in terms of an observable "évolution de l'imaginaire" (p. 3). The imaginaire is itself taken less as a definable category, more as a locus within which different tensions visible in Schwob's œuvre—that between the mask and what it covers, that between the individual and the collective strands of an imaginary outcome—might be considered together. The dominant imaginary activity analysed, however, does not readily sit with the project thus described—being the imagination of the adequate act of literary creation, and that of the self as the (problematic) source of that act. Governing de Meyer's readings is the figure of a writer driven to an intellectual renunciation of the creative project even before the intervention of ill-health. Cultural as well as personal factors are argued to have contributed to this development. Schwob is characterised as oppressed by the sense of his own lateness, his creativity struggling under the weight of his celebrated erudition. In this he appears to both confront and exacerbate a more general dilemma of the intellectual in an era of the generalisation of education—exceptionality through creativity becoming a governing preoccupation in a period of (emerging) educationally engineered uniformity: 'L'intellectuel, pour prouver sa supériorité, est obligé de se défaire de son éducation, de se séparer du commun des mortels.' (p. 20). But while he might offer a sociological underpinning to the sense of the writer's struggle, de Meyer characterises Schwob's efforts more persistently in terms of a philosophy of literary impossibility—a pre-ordained futility of the creative effort in respect of the writer's demands on it. This problematic fades somewhat from the second part of the book, which considers Mimes and Le Livre de Monelle with particular focus on the rewritings of the figure of the girl/young woman throughout both of those works. Close attention is paid to the genesis and order of composition of these texts, within a more roundly biographical perspective than theretofore. The writing of Monelle in particular is interpreted as a response to actual loss rather than as occurring in the conjunction of an uncertain literary vocation with multiple external imperatives to production. In this context, it would have been interesting to see the organising theme of the imaginaire interrogated a little more than it is. In the third and final part, which pairs a short discussion of La Croisade des enfants with a more developed analysis of the Vies imaginaires (in a chapter titled 'Schwob biographe'), the term makes a return to the forefront of deliberations. By this stage, however, the sense predominates that one is reading a general, chronologically ordered overview of Schwob's fictional production.