Proust lecteur de Balzac et Flaubert: L'imitation cryptee (review)

At the heart of Annick Bouillaguet's latest book is an old question: how does Proust's debt to his nineteenth-century predecessors manifest itself in A la recherche du temps perdu? Bouillaguet approaches this question by identifying and analyzing specific passages within Proust's work that can be read, she argues, as stylistic or thematic rewritings of Balzac or Flaubert. Proust lecteur de Balzac et de Flaubert begins with the premise that A la recherche du temps perdu bears "des traces de la littérature du siècle qui vient de s'achever"; its scope is then delimited to the study of Balzac and Flaubert, whose œuvre, Bouillaguet affirms, "a constitué la source la plus féconde à laquelle Proust a puisé directement et indirectement pour construire la sienne." The choice of Balzac and Flaubert is also motivated by a precise historical factor: each of these authors served as fodder for Proust's early pastiches (those concerning "l'Affaire Lemoine," which appeared in Le Figaro in 1908) and later became the subject of a critical essay ("Le Balzac de Monsieur de Guermantes" and "A propos du 'style' de Flaubert," respectively). The fact that Proust devoted both a declared pastiche - a pastiche that presents itself as such - and a critical essay to Balzac and Flaubert constitutes, for Bouillaguet, a continuous "réflexion sur le style de ces deux auteurs." One of the guiding ideas of Proust lecteur de Balzac et de Flaubert is that Proust's reflection on the style of his two privileged predecessors is prolonged within A la recherche du temps perdu through the writing of "pastiches non déclarés" that are folded into the text and encoded in such a way that they often escape the notice of readers. Much of the book is devoted to close stylistic analysis of a number of such passages - that is, to a "décryptage" of the "pastiche cypté" (also referred to as "non avoué" or "intégré").

Proust lecteur de Balzac et de Flaubert is divided into two parts: "Une poétique de l'imitation" and "Le cryptage et ses indices." The first of these provides a thorough history of the critical terms and concepts that will be in use throughout the book (transtextualité, intertextualité, hypertextualité, etc.). Bouillaguet traces the evolution of their various definitions through to their current acceptation, considering their use by critics such as Genette, Kristeva, Bahktine, Jenny, and Compagnon. This intro-ductory section allows Bouillaguet to situate her own intervention with respect to two dominant approaches in intertextology, "l'approche poéticienne" and "l'approche historique," which have typically been opposed to one another. Recognizing the legitimacy of both approaches, she suggests that a new methodology arising from genetic criticism can reconcile them: a poetics of imitation that would take into account "la démarche historique" through a study of the avant-textes. "Une poétique de l'imitation," which comprises the first three chapters of the book (some 69 pages), is perhaps the most technical part of Bouillaguet's study. Some readers may find it tedious, but it provides a useful typology of imitative texts that establishes a framework for the close readings that follow. Two forms of imitative writing in particular, pastiche and parody (but especially pastiche), are retained as the focus of the second part of the book, which becomes more engaging as it draws nearer to Proust's text itself.

Part two, "Le cryptage et ses indices," proceeds from the distinction between the "pastiche avoué" and its encoded counterpart, the "pastiche crypté." The relationship between explicit and implicit imitation is crucial here. Bouillaguet shows how Proust reproduced the style of Balzac or Flaubert in his explicit pastiches by mimicking specific morphological, syntactical, or semantic features of their writing, features that he also identified and analyzed in his critical essays. Proust...