Alexandre Dumas mythographe et mythologue: l'aventure extérieure by Maxime Prévost (review)

Inspired by an impressively wide set of thinkers in general (Mircea éliade, Roger Caillois, Hans-Robert Jauss, Hans Blumenberg, and Cornelius Castoriades are among the most frequently cited) and relying on two much-admired scholars in particular, Jean-Yves Mollier and Jean Molino, Maxime Prévost writes with a breathless verve that almost rivals his subject's. The first part of this initially very engaging book sets out to answer a question to which an answer would be really appreciated. Ever since Fernand Baldensperger granted that 'un succès prouve toujours quelque chose' and omitted to say what (La Littérature: création, succès, durée (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1913), p. 203), it has remained a puzzle why some of Dumas's works (more exactly, some of his characters and plots) have become universally shared myths, and others not. Prévost has many interesting points to make about the theme of rebirth and the second life in Monte-Cristo, about the explicit and implicit denunciations of the crimes of the July Monarchy in Monte-Cristo and Les Trois Mousquetaires, and about the conflict between Dumas's rational materialism and his wish to believe in ghosts (not unlike that of many of his contemporaries, Victor Hugo included). I was particularly taken with Prévost's initial explanation of the crucial difference between 'romances' (stories of external adventure) and 'novels' (stories of internal analysis), covered up in French by the use of the word roman for both genres, and by his spirited defence of romance as the real wellspring of the myths that mould collective states of mind and become what others have called 'global cultural resources'. However, many of the most interesting points of this book become less so each time they are repeated, and the claim that an answer can be found to tell us why mass awareness of the names and exploits of Dumas's two heroes has continued unbroken for 150 years gets less of a hearing each time it is made. But Prévost is certainly right that these fabricated myths do not simply re-enact older and forgotten ones, but propose new models for understanding events that postdate their invention; that is to say, what Le Comte de Monte-Cristo means to a Chinese teenager of 2018 does not have to have any particular relationship to what it meant to French readers of the 1840s. The second part of Prévost's book consists of shorter essays on less well known texts — Mémoires d'un médecin, La Femme au collier de velours, Isaac Laquedem, and Une odyssée en 1860. Based on a tremendous grasp of an almost impossibly capacious œuvre and on wide reading in literary theory and history, Prévost's book ends up not quite completing the important arguments it launches at its start.