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  • La Révélation inachevée: le personnage à l’épreuve de la vérité romanesque by Yannick Roy
  • Sotirios Paraschas
La Révélation inachevée: le personnage à l’épreuve de la vérité romanesque. Par Yannick Roy. Paris: Éditions L’âge d’Homme, 2012. 282 pp.

Yannick Roy’s ambitious essay is an exploration of the role of fictional characters and of the ways in which authors and readers relate to them. He describes this relation as inherently paradoxical since it requires the reader’s and the author’s identification with, and detachment from, the characters. Following Milan Kundera, Roy views the novel as [End Page 271] a reaction against the reification of man by scientific thought; the novel is an epistemological tool that conveys a distinct kind of savoir. Instead of reifying the object of its knowledge, namely the fictional characters, it consists in an ‘exploration of being’ (p. 13) that approaches the characters from the inside — rendering thus the savoir of the novel perpetually inachevé, as the essay’s title hints. Roy argues that two major theories of the novel — René Girard’s and Mikhail Bakhtin’s — express different aspects of this savoir: he espouses both Girard’s claim that the novel’s true aim is to reveal the inauthenticity and the mediated nature of desire, and Bakhtin’s belief that the highest achievement of the genre, accomplished only by Dostoevsky, is the freedom of the fictional characters from the authorial consciousness and their presentation in such a way as to appear to be subjects with whom the author or the reader can enter into dialogue. Roy engages in a subtle analysis that illuminates several points of contrast between these two theories of the novel, as well as several ways in which they complement each other. However, in order to reconcile them and streamline them to fit his own argument, he criticizes what, in his opinion, constitutes their blind spots. Girard’s thesis is, in this sense, too clear-cut in equating the novel with truth and in precluding any identification with the deluded characters who fall into the romantic trap of believing their desires to be authentic. Roy argues that the revelation of the truth by the novelists Girard privileges cannot but be partial and that there are always residual elements of the ‘romantic lie’ in the truth of the novel that would allow the readers to identify with the fictional characters. Bakhtin, on the other hand, is criticized for overemphasizing Dostoevsky’s virtues. Roy argues that Bakhtin’s concepts are too abstract and can be seen only as ‘relative truths’: in a somewhat unrewarding analysis of Flaubert, Roy concludes that a ‘minimal’ presence of dialogism can be found in any novel, to the extent that a reader can identify with the fictional characters. In his analysis of Bakhtin, Roy admits that, in order to expand the meaning of dialogism to include Flaubert’s novels, he had to ‘dilute’ the concept (p. 165) — a statement that, to a lesser extent, could also be applied to his treatment of Girard. His attempt at synthesizing Girard’s and Bakhtin’s theories of the novel comes at a cost: both approaches lose, in their attenuated version, much of their interpretative thrust as well as most of their charm.

Sotirios Paraschas
University of Reading
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