Romans à clés: les ambivalences du réel ed. by Anthony Glinoer, Michel Lacroix (review)

It is difficult not to welcome a reflection on the much-maligned roman à clés, as the preferred spelling has it nowadays, particularly when conducted within a postmodernist perspective committed to demonstrating that conventional definitions of the genre beg important questions. These articles stem from a one-day seminar inspired by a special issue of Lettres classiques (2005), edited by Mathilde Bompart and Marc Escola, and the groundbreaking study by Sean Latham, The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law, and the Roman à Clef (Oxford University Press, 2009). They include a relentless but revealing sociological investigation by Bompart into the negative view of the roman à clés propagated in France during the past decade (in response to a flurry of examples pertaining to the worlds of the media, politics, the intelligentsia, music, and literature) and the reproduction, in translation, of Latham’s introduction. (The translator’s allusion to the ‘novelist’ T. S. Eliot is an obvious misinterpretation of Latham’s reference to the author of Middlemarch.) Yet the volume overall, despite the presence of a model in the form of Michel Lacroix’s central, if arguably slightly arid, contribution, fails to constitute un travail collectif that consistently addresses the same, fundamental, questions. The impression gained of unmediated diversity is less the result of the inclusion of drama (a play by the québecois playwright Normand Chaurette) and film (Woody Allen’s Manhattan, 1979) or the occasional apologetic reference to poetry, and more the result of disruptive shifts between very different fields of cultural production. More seriously, some of the articles only gesture towards the advertised subject and present analyses that, while not necessarily lacking in worth, depend little on critical engagement with the specificity of the roman à clés. Anne Strasser, for example, asks pertinently whether Les Mandarins is a roman à clés (a label contested by Beauvoir but implicitly exploited by Gallimard) or autobiography, only to slide promptly into straightforward consideration of it as an ‘autobiographie déguisée’. Similarly, it is not clear how far re-evaluation of the roman à clés is advanced by Anthony Glinoer and Vincent Laisney’s in itself excellent study of the ‘roman cénaculaire’ (Balzac, Murger, the Goncourts, and Zola); by Denis Saint-Amand’s entertaining piece on ‘les micros-fictions du Petit Bottin des Lettres et des Arts’; or by Michael Finn’s informative discussion of Rachilde. It is the authors of the final two contributions, Mathilde Barraband and Alexandre Gefen, who grasp the nettle most firmly. In her very interesting piece on novels of May 1968 (or, more specifically, ‘romans de la gauche prolétarienne’), Barraband keeps firmly in sight her question ‘est-ce qu’un roman à clés s’écrit ou se lit?’ In his acute analysis of Jean-Benoît Puech’s L’Apprentissage du roman, Gefen challenges head-on the notion of the roman à clés as a conservative genre. Other contributions, too, suggest that contemporary writing provides an especially rich corpus, in Quebec as well as in France. The discussions of earlier authors invariably leave conventional definitions disappointingly intact. The exception is the fine essay on Proust by Elisheva Rosen, who responds imaginatively to her brief throughout.