La Poétique d'Alain-René Lesage (review)

For anyone still disposed to think of Lesage as an over-prolific hack producing imitative work in unfashionable genres, this ambitious étude d'ensemble, a rare attempt to embrace his whole output as dramatist, novelist and translator alike, should serve as an eye-opener. Christelle Bahier-Porte presents a Lesage seeking ever to engage with a public of whose changing moods he is highly conscious, and to inspire a critical, reflective approach by means of a juxtaposition of genres. Though no theorist, and difficult to situate within the literary schools of his day, he forges his art by engaging with the works he translates, whether from commission or personal affinity, and subtly transforming them; the Avellaneda Don Quixote is a better subject for translation than the original Cervantes because it is a more appropriate subject for reworking. His theatrical endeavours spring from an attempt to revive French comedy by combining its better features with traits drawn from Spanish models; novels such as Le Diable boiteux and Guzman d'Alfarache, starting from Spanish originals, are transformed into something completely different; and theatrical representation provides a wealth of situations and techniques of plot handling to be redeployed in his novels. Generic heterogeneity is the key to a subtle, elusive art, firmly grounded, no doubt, in the old, but using it in new ways. Lesage's best-known works, Turcaret and Gil Blas, are privileged perhaps because they are his most obviously original creations, but once one understands what he is doing with the wide range of sources he exploits, his whole output can be viewed with a new respect and sense of coherence; that is why this study is so timely. The author adopts three angles of approach to her subject. The first part traces Lesage's career, his interaction with his protectors and the public, which he seeks to engage in a relationship of sociability, and his literary representation of the author figure. The second traces his critical techniques based on re-workings and generic mixtures, in which his work as translator is given its full weight and the evolution of his dramaturgy traced in detail. The third part considers what kind of critical vision these techniques aim to project; though not given to didacticism or preaching, and less of an exponent of what may loosely be called social realism than has often been supposed, he explores the dreams, pretensions and follies of characters constantly seeking to become what they are not, while remaining in an essentially comic mode which inspires the audience to critical effort while encouraging them at the same time to enjoy the story. The argument is clearly laid out, sophisticated without being obscure, with a wealth of specific allusion to Lesage's works, both well known and the less well known; though seeking to go beyond the problem of the identification of sources that has sometimes obsessed Lesage criticism in the past, the sources are necessarily engaged with in subtle analyses of how Lesage's transformative processes work in practice. As often happens with this kind of thesis, one wonders at times whether there is not a shorter, more approachable volume struggling to get out, but an author as prolific and diverse as Lesage deserves and probably needs the leisurely and thorough overview provided here. Nobody interested in Lesage, or the eighteenth-century novel in general, can afford to ignore this study.