Les Illusions de l'écriture ou la crise de la représentation dans l'œuvre romanesque de Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly (review)

In the 1874 preface to Les Diaboliques, Barbey d'Aurevilly claims, "Ces histoires sont malheureusement vraies. Rien n'en a été inventé" (O.C. II 1291). This quotation illustrates the provocative style typical of Barbey's writing as well as his use of paradox, which, according to Alice de Georges-Métral, is the generative trope of Barbey's novelistic production. Georges-Métral shows in this insightful study how Barbey renders "nothing" through the narratological constructions of trickery and illusion.

Her penetrating analysis links these narratological structures to the difficulties of mimesis. Based on the premise that the "crisis of representation" corresponds particularly to the post-Revolutionary era, she examines the mechanisms that reveal the tenuous relationships between meaning and interpretation, between language and the world. After the Revolution, the systems and power structures of the Ancien Régime are diffused, and with them, everything they signified. Subsequently, in the company of Flaubert, Nerval, and Baudelaire, Barbey orients his literary pursuits toward the valorization of style in part to compensate for the loss (Georges-Métral 9). The thematic and stylistic patterns in Barbey's novels that suggest a rift or impasse between the real and its symbolic representation, are detailed in four of the book's five chapters.

Barbey's novels, Une Vieille maîtresse, L'Ensorcelée, Le Chevalier des Touches, Un Prêtre marié, Une Histoire sans nom, Une Page d'histoire, and Ce qui ne meurt pas take place in Normandy in the wake of the Revolution and integrate either the suppression of the Chouan uprising or the remise en cause of the aristocracy. Given Barbey's views of a century riddled with the instabilities and empty promises of short-lived regimes, Georges-Métral illustrates how his stories correspond to a thematics of loss, failure, negativity, vide, and impossibility.

In Chapter 1 she presents an overview of Barbey's conflicted outlook of the nineteenth century and his place in it, in relation to selections from his criticism, his correspondence and journal entries. She highlights the topoi of paradox and aporia in these examples and juxtaposes them with similar passages from Barbey's fiction. Without over-emphasizing the relevance of biographical particulars, the author shows that the paradoxes in Barbey's text function as both "un mode de vie et d'écriture" (46) to defy the difficulties associated with representation.

Georges-Métral focuses our attention in the following chapter on strategies of illusion and subversion particularly in Une Vieille maîtresse and Le Cachet d'onyx. The frequent juxtaposition of opposites for which Les Diaboliques is renowned, appears throughout his novels in metaphors as well as in syntactical idiosyncrasies. The discussion of Une Histoire sans nom is an especially solid analysis of the effects of these constantly shifting opposites in the narrative: "Composé comme une orchestration du silence, Une Histoire sans nom tisse donc sa diégèse du 'leitmotiv' de son propre titre. Reprise en échos tout au long du roman, cette expression superlative désigne l'effacement de la parole pour figurer l'impossible représentation" (116).

Rather than rely on a specific theoretical framework Georges-Métral supports her claims with references to several thinkers such as Hegel and Kant on the impossibility of the novel, as well as Foucault's study of Las Meninas and Genette on genre as a controlling force in the reader's perception of a work. This approach suits an analysis of Barbey's fiction because of the varied and disparate elements of his own narrative.

Chapter 3 shows how loss, lacuna, and impossibility function at the level of genre. The "architextualité" of each work as illustrated by titles, epigraphs, and incipits deceptively orients the reader's interpretation of the genre — novel or short story. Barbey consistently undermines these...