Les 'Mémoires' de Saint-Simon: lecteur virtuel et stratégies d'écriture (review)

Saint-Simon has been appreciated both as privileged observer of the last years of Louis XIV's reign and as a great stylist malgré lui. How tantalizing it is then to be offered a study which purports to focus neither on the writer nor on the society he describes, but on that most eighteenth-century of figures (and Saint-Simon is — again, malgré lui — a writer of the eighteenth century), the reader. Who is the reader of the Mémoires? Not in the first instance Stendhal or Proust, nor any of the empirical readers of the first nineteenth-century edition: this is an exercise neither in literary influence nor in the sociology of reading. As her subtitle indicates, Marie-Paule de Weerdt-Pilorge adopts a theoretical stance ostensibly taken from narratology and the Constance School of Rezeptionästhetik in order to investigate how one (or several) 'virtual reader(s)' is (are) invoked through the textual strategies at work in Saint-Simon's magnum opus. This unexpected confrontation between some former heavyweight contenders from the great theory debates of a few years ago and the venerable petit duc is not simply an opportunistic attempt to mine something of value from a seemingly exhausted seam. Indeed, it is surprising that the figure of the reader has not already been more fully analysed, especially given Saint-Simon's own extraordinary preface in which he explicitly evokes a posthumous readership whose contours are defined both with respect to the intrigues and interests of his own time and within the much larger context of what we might term the 'degraded eschatology' of his neo-Augustinian appeal to charity as the guiding hermeneutic principle of the Mémoires. A return then to some of the reader-centred theories of the 1970s and 1980s seems on the face of it like a fruitful approach to a neglected aspect of Saint-Simon studies.

A solid analysis of the preface forms the core of a long theoretical introduction where de Weerdt-Pilorge invokes an impressive array of theorists (Jauss, Iser, Ricoeur, Eco, Genette, Benveniste, Austin, Lejeune, Starobinski et al.) as well as the ususal Saint-Simon specialists (Coirault, Hipp, Himmelfarb, Rooryck). To judge from several dense footnotes congregating near the beginning, however, the introduction seems to have born the brunt of the 'reduction and abridgement' of the thesis to which this book 'remains faithful'. The result, in this section in any case, is a certain amount of theoretical syncretism where the more restricted analysis of literary history (Hipp and Fumaroli) sits somewhat uneasily next to more general theories of genre (Lejeune), narratology (Prince, Eco and Genette) and grander theories of hermeneutics and aesthetic experience (Ricoeur, Jauss and Iser). Although the author furnishes a brief and cogent critique of Iser in a long footnote on page 5, the chapter nevertheless concludes on a robustly Iserian note stating that we must consider the reader as 'un artisan du texte, et cela à part entière, au même titre que l'auteur' (p. 79). Iser's theory has obvious attractions. It explicitly attempts to rob positivist literary theory (that theory which sees texts as having either a reducible meaning, for instance, authorial intention, or an unproblematic documentary reference) of its foundation by placing the burden of literary production on a virtual entity, the (implied) reader. This fundamental shift of critical focus purports to allow us to escape the alternative of reading Saint-Simon either as a simple reporter of events (a writer of mémoires — small 'M' — to use Marc Fumaroli's distinction), or as a genuine author who shapes and controls his material for certain specific ends (a writer of Mémoires, capital 'M'). However, it is not clear if this Iserian scaffolding really does much to support the structure of de Weerdt-Pilorge's readings, which actually stand up quite well by themselves.

Indeed, as the argument...