Nouvelles françaises du dix-neuvième siècle: Anthologie (review)

This very substantial anthology covers a range of subjects, approaches and styles, balancing realism (from 'Le Colonel Chabert' to 'Un Coeur simple') and the fantastique, the (bleakly) comic (Maupassant's 'Le Parapluie') and the horrific (Rachilde's 'La Panthère'), the polemical ('Claude Gueux') and the provocative (Villiers). Schwob's mythical 'Le Roi au masque d'or' provides an effectively enigmatic close and underlines the distance travelled by the genre a century on from Madame de Staël's 'Mirza'. Its target postgraduate readership allows such linguistically demanding works as Huysmans's A vau l'eau. Varying narrative techniques and recurrent preoccupations of the nineteenth-century tale (love/sexuality, violence, gender roles, social tensions) provide a possible starting-point for the exploration of form, the role of the reader, or the ideology of the times. Allan Pasco's Introduction cogently argues for the generic recognizability of the short story (attempts to distinguish nouvelle and conte are exposed as unhelpful) across ages and cultures. He examines the four terms of his apparently uncontroversial definition: 'une courte fiction littéraire écrite en prose' to tease out not only the problems raised by each of these, but also show how brevity, in particular, serves as 'un modèle formalisant' (Paul Zumthor) conditioning formal devices used and effects achieved. Because of its general thrust, this Introduction (a translated version of his 1991 article 'On Defining Short Stories' with a few additions and updated references and changes in emphasis) does not address the specificity of the nineteenth-century story either in terms of themes or modes of publication ('journaux' are mentioned to stress the negative consequences of this journalistic context, rather than seeing it as a constraint with the potential for positive exploitation, the reviews of the early century allowing more leisurely tales [some serialized], and the dailies of the end of the century producing the brief tale of Maupassant). This mismatch is to some extent redressed in the introductions to individual authors, which raise notably the issues of gender roles and the fantastique (in the fullest discussion of the fantastique the omission of one alternative in Todorov's definition unfortunately renders it unintelligible [p. 333]; it is quoted correctly elsewhere, pp. 200–201). Pasco provides for each author a concise biographical outline, pointers to style and key issues, with an eye in particular for ambiguities of motivation and alternative readings, and a bibliography angled towards the specific stories included. He situates Vivant Denon's 'Point de lendemain' in terms of circumstances of composition and target audience; elsewhere the context of composition and publication is often missing when it might be helpful: the framing narration in Chateaubriand's 'René' is (as a contemporary critic observed) baffling in its absence. Notes are brief and precise, avoiding unnecessary explanations. Hopefully the few slips (the allusion to 'Gaspard' in Sand's Mouny-Robin [1841] is not to Gaspard de la nuit [1842], but to Kaspar in Weber's Der Freischütz; Alphonse Daudet [not his son Léon] is Zola's starting-point in 'Madame Sourdis') and the scattering of misprints will be corrected in any future edition of this very useful anthology.