Le Roman symboliste: un art de 'l'extrême conscience'. Édouard Dujardin, André Gide, Remy de Gourmont, Marcel Schwob (review)

Jacquod's study focuses on what should be a contradiction in terms — the Symbolist Novel — given that during the period 1887-95 prose fiction was most commonly understood to be driven by mimesis and associated positivist ideas. Not only that, but novelists were thought to be in some sense moralists, with a social or political message to deliver. Jacquod concentrates on the work of four significant, albeit diverse, exponents of the form: Gourmont, Dujardin, Schwob, and Gide. She also comments interestingly on Rodenbach (Bruges la morte, 'roman illustré', pp. 42-45), Jules Renard ('La formule nouvelle du roman, c'est de ne pas faire du roman', p. 49), and Huysmans ('devenir tout autre chose que ce qu'on appelle encore un roman', pp. 49-50). She provides an overview of diverse critical opinion, modern as well as contemporary, noting in passing the debt owed by the Symbolists to Baudelaire and Poe. Taking as her starting point the proposition that the Symbolist aesthetic is idealist, privileging dream, poetry, and the expression of the inner self, but not necessarily as autobiography, her analysis seeks to establish the importance for her selected writers of the self-reflexive text/author, the 'roman autocritique', meaning a work that bears within itself its own implied or overt commentary on itself, as is the case, for example, with several of Gide's texts, notably Paludes. The retroaction of the text on the writer (Gide's definition of 'mise en abyme') is seen as part of the process. This critical observation leads her to the notion of 'extrême conscience' — the phrase is Jacques Rivière's. Against this, however, one notices in Jacquod's analysis a certain tendency to adopt an evolutionary paradigm of transition or progression from one text to another. Jacquod presents music and harmony as determinant influences on style, but she does not fully explain the technical or philosophical implications of the mathematical or musical concepts involved, which are in fact often little more than loose metaphors. The Symbolist text is then set to become something akin to a prose poem, accentuating states of soul through images of grey, mysterious and silent mists, not to mention the judicious use of blank space on the printed page. Jacquod identifies 'correspondances' and metaphors as key narrative devices. So is a 'roman symboliste' an 'anti-roman'? Jacquod cites the examples of Monsieur Feste, À rebours, and Paludes to show permissible degrees of variation, but the ironic discourse of Paludes proves particularly difficult for her to map persuasively, although she uses the work to illustrate a link between a significant aspect of fin-de-siècle aesthetics and modern critical theory. One point she seems to miss is the significance of unfulfilled desire leading to the intimately connected idea of fragmentation, be it of things perceived and the writer's representation of them, or of the dislocation of the structure of the text itself and of the moral codes implied. Additionally, she should have given more attention to the philosophical background that underpins these concepts, notably in the works of Schopenhauer and the German idealists. A lengthy bibliography completes the book, but it is a pity that the updated 1996-97 edition of Gide's Journal was not used, and that no English or German studies are listed.