L’Écrivain et son critique: une fratrie problématique ed. by Philippe Chardin, Marjorie Rousseau (review)

These forty short papers from the 2012 conference of the French Society for Comparative and General Literature, most of them touching on several different authors, grapple with the relationship between writers and critics from many different angles. As Jean-Louis Haquette points out, the ‘problematic brotherhood’ of writing and criticism (p. 57) belongs to the literary ideology of romanticism and its aftermath, and has little direct purchase on pre-Revolutionary intellectual life. No doubt for that reason the bulk of these papers discuss nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature: A. S. Byatt, Paul Claudel, Alexandre Dumas, Gustave Flaubert, André Gide, J.-K. Huysmans, Henry James, James Joyce, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Lu Xun, Stéphane Mallarmé, Vladimir Nabokov, W. G. Sebald, Claude Simon, Italo Svevo, Virginia Woolf, Émile Zola ... et j’en passe. One noteworthy section gathers four papers on the relations between law and literature. Hélène Maurel-Indart points out that literary critics are never called as expert witnesses in court cases involving plagiarism (as doctors are called in cases turning on medical evidence) and suggests intriguing explanations for this strange gap; Jean-Baptiste Amadieu shows that there can be no sharp dividing line between the methods of literary critics and those of political and religious censors; and Cécile Girardin writes on the ‘new era’ of censorship ushered in by the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Although it has little direct relevance to French studies, the paper by Tanel Lepsoo on the extraordinary life and work of Estonian writer Johannes Semper is among the best written and most intriguing contributions to this volume. Indeed, so little is known about the literatures of the Baltic states in the West that some readers might suspect this of being a Nabokovian spoof — but it is anything but that. How can the greatest poet in the language have flourished creatively when he was also a Stalinist apparatchik? How can a writer not merely survive but receive the highest honours under regimes that were by turns liberal, nationalist, internationalist, authoritarian, and sinister, and which each dealt with the cultural leaders of their predecessors in lamentably bloody fashion? This one paper pulls the rug from under many generalizations about the relations between literary creation, social norms, critical reception, and political manipulation. Comparative literature would benefit from contributions of this quality and interest, and perhaps a slower tempo of new essays on Flaubert, Mallarmé, and their conventional British and American partners.