Plagiat et créativité (treize enquêtes sur l'auteur et son autre) (review)

Readers familiar with Jean-Louis Cornille's extensive contributions of some 10 monographs to French literary criticism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will immediately find running threads in the essays collected in this volume. Arranged in four movements following classic categories—'Réalismes', 'Surréalismes', 'Populismes', 'Post-modernismes'—the essays return to Cornille's authors of preference such as Rimbaud, Céline and Proust. The '-ismes', however, reopen any neat classification by literary period or aesthetic priority, since the whole series of studies returns in various guises to the question of an author's engagements with his (sic) 'strong precursors', to borrow Harold Bloom's term. Contra Bloom, these precursors include overlapping writer contemporaries (such as Stendhal for Flaubert, Lautréamont for Rimbaud, Zola for Céline), and investigation of how the stylistic tics of the first in each pair find unmistakeable reiteration with variation in the writing of the second. For Cornille, the knowing plagiarisms are not the acknowledged influences and borrowings so much as the likely but chance encounters through text that brought the writers into creative contact. Although Cornille does not use the word, it is the inspiration of the language of the one as manifested intensively in the textual surfaces of the other that marks the creative copy as also an unmistakably new work. This strong intertextual play of mirroring language is the particular subject of the seventh and thirteenth essays which speculate on the (un)likely but very rich textual contact between Rimbaud and Lautréamont and Perec and Sebald. Bloom's author-to-author model of the anxiety of influence is thus enlarged to make room for authorial enjoyment and reading of other authors, the better to forge individualising creations. Renewing notions of intertextual play in this volume, Cornille's emphasis on the intensive tain of plagiarism in the mirror of his chosen authors' works asks important questions about how texts circulate in very complex ways. Specialist critics of any one of the authors treated here may however be less convinced by the surface linguistic evidence Cornille musters to make his case. The third essay, 'L'Hospitalité du texte (Flaubert et Stendhal)', argues that La Légende de saint Julien l'Hospitalier is Flaubert's knowing borrowing and rewriting of Stendhal's Julien Sorel in the opening description and final line. Close reading of more than these sections, as well as of Flaubert's Correspondance and œuvre, readily points up Cornille's comparative criticism as often highly selective, personal, even a misreading. And what of Cornille's borrowings and auto-citation in this volume, which openly collects eleven of his previously published essays? The intriguing title and (new) introductory essay on Proust's literary habits ('pastiches et mélanges') fail to tie them together, let alone address the question why creative plagiarism is manifested so distinctively in these particular French male writers, whose highly literary, self-reflexive, self-validating and allusive forms include recent work by Glissant and Echenoz. In the end, it is perhaps Cornille's challenge to well-read critics to read anew that is most stimulating, the call of one author to his others. In this, Cornille provides the clearest evidence that the author is very far from dead in literary criticism.