Une Poétique de l'énigme: Le Récit herméneutique balzacien (review)

In Une Poétique de l'énigme: Le Récit herméneutique balzacien, Chantal Massol probes the historical emergence and use of a poetics of the enigma in Balzac's works. This technique is prevalent in Balzac's stories, in which the suggestion of a secret instigates the hermeneutic impulse to decode. In the first third of the nineteenth century, the use of the undisclosed in prose slowly transforms from a physical quest to an intellectual inquiry, thus binding together the Romantic form and the modern narrative. Massol elaborates on the "poétique historique" and the elements that compose a récit à énigme in her reading of Balzac; she classifies this narrative especially in his novellas of the 1830s, though not limited to that genre or that era, as she traces in her chapter entitled "Questions d'ordre générique."

The récit à énigme surfaces in a variety of genres, including the gothic novel, the popular novel, the detective novel and the realist novel (34 ). Massol declares that the presence of the enigma as hint of a secret (49) in Balzac's work induces a dual process, where the enigma is composed simultaneously with the search for its truth. The récit à énigme tells the story from a retrospective point of view: the reader of Balzac's stories, along with the characters in them, investigates causality, a process that is thus what Jean-Claude Vareille calls "progressive-régressive" (qtd. in Massol 53). In Balzac's stories, characters and readers alike find themselves implicated in a narrative where both are in search of a lost narrative, "le récit d'une absence de récit" (65). The reconstruction of this lost story, fragmented because of the practice of retrospection, creates a dependence on the narrator in this hermeneutic activity. The récit à énigme is a product of the unconscious, and the secret pertains to identity; a power-play is activated by the narrator (perhaps unreliable in his accounts) and the other diegetic and metatextual actors of the story (110 ).

In the second part of her book, entitled "Questions d'ordre générique," Massol engages us in a cultural history, a presentation of epistemic models, a psychoanalytical assessment of the secret, and an in-depth study of the figure of the author and the role of origins. The introduction of an enigma presents us with a search for depth and a search for origins that actively involves all actors: novelist, narrator, character, and reader. There exists an "épistèmè de la profondeur" (127), where the inquiry into the puzzle leads to what Pierre Macherey terms a "littérature des profondeurs" (qtd. in Massol 125). Metaphors of modern science and medicine, of the subterranean décor, of archeology take all actors on a journey to find what is hidden beneath the surface. A game of show and tell contributes to a realistic conception of society and to a new way of writing of what is knowable (132-33 ). By taking part in this hermeneutic activity of reading, we are rewarded with knowledge: archeological, linguistic, detective, and scientific models. Knowledge of the secret, and its subsequent revealing and suppression, translate to a power exercised by the narrator and create an erotic dimension in the reading of the story. In turn, the desire on the part of the reader underscores a modern concept of the function of the "auteur-en-fuite" (176). The enigma laid out in Balzac's stories often is fixed in issues of origins, identity, and memory.

Massol takes up a number of these themes again in the third part of her book, entitled "Fonctions." Here she further analyzes through close readings the playful, socially critical, probing, and æsthetic parameters of the hermeneutics in Balzac's works. Although the exposition of ideas revisits many of the same issues (desire for knowledge, the issue of origins, the simultaneous unveiling and veiling, the emphasis on social codes), the...