Prévost et le récit bref (review)

This remarkable volume not only demonstrates the measure of Prévost's genius as a novelist, and an experimental novelist at that, it also shows why any serious student of the shorter narrative forms should pay the author more attention than has perhaps been the case hitherto. Its fourteen essays focus on the short narratives by Prévost appearing in the course of larger literary enterprises: principally, the journal Le Pour et contre (1733–1740) (eleven studies), but also the late novel Le Monde moral (1760–1764) (three studies). The corpus, admittedly arbitrary, for the former is Pierre Berthiaume's edition of Contes singuliers (volume 7 of Prévost's Œuvres), deriving from the anthology published by Duchesne in 1764, not all of it by Prévost. Six studies in different ways attempt syntheses, or partial syntheses, of this corpus. Jean Sgard, admitting the heterogeneity of narratives which range from the single paragraph to the mini-serial, sees them less as a specific genre and more as a seedbed of Prévost's fictional art. For Shelly Charles, they exemplify the critical problems of re-writing, sometimes raising the issue of Prévost's very authorship. Kris Peeters for his part identifies in them a poetics of the extraordinary aiming at the seduction of the reader. Daniel Acke, stressing Prévost's debts to an 'Augustinian pessimism' in the classical moralist tradition, concludes nevertheless that he is always resolutely focused on the uniquely individual human case. Pierre Berthiaume interprets Prévost's tendency to deify his heroines as an exorcism of his anxious obsession with womankind, and in a related, Lacanian analysis, Sjef Houppermans traces the motif of the unheimlich. Among five essays dealing more with individual short narratives from Le Pour et contre, Paul Pelckmans offers two studies dealing firstly with the lure of the fantastic found in three pieces and secondly with 'Histoire intéressante', in which Prévost explicitly claims an autobiographical dimension. For Richard Francis, if 'Histoire de donna Maria' fails as a miniature serial novel it is principally for lack of the focalizing first-person narrator which the journalistic genre rules out. Frank Salaün gives a close analysis of the re-writing and downright falsification represented by 'Effet héroïque de vertu morale' and Mladen Kozul explores the ethical issues of the actor's feelings and behaviour in 'Trait curieux de morale dans la conduite d'un comédien'. In the first of three essays on Le Monde moral, Jan Herman interprets Prévost's last novel globally as split between the opening three books, a recueil of short narratives by the young traveller-observer, and the roman of the remaining four books (the last two possibly not by Prévost) in which the traveller becomes principally the recipient of narrative by others, and in which the moral turmoil represented in the recueil is finally overcome by reason and calm of mind. Alexandre Duquaire, insisting that Prévost, in the narratives of father Célérier and Mlle de Créon, maintains a tragic vision of humanity, argues that the rhetoric of these pieces is of capital importance. Finally, in the multiple re-writings of the cannibalism motif, Marc Labussière sees a veritable poetics of horror.