Réécrire la Renaissance, de Marcel Proust à Michel Tournier: exercices de lecture rapprochée (review)

This book explores some of the ways in which certain Renaissance authors (most notably Montaigne and Rabelais) inhabit the works of a variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, including Proust, Yourcenar, Albert Cohen, Céline, Ponge, Char, Perec, Bon, and Tournier. The author demonstrates an impressive familiarity with a wide range of texts from the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, and his readings are often illuminating and entertaining. The chapter on Céline's 'pastiche' in Voyage au bout de la nuit of Montaigne's Consolatio (in which Montaigne invites his grieving wife to read Plutarch) provides insights into the paradoxical nature of Céline's relationship with the stylized prose of French classicism. Even if there is a radical 'différence stylistique' separating Céline's writing from Montaigne's, the former attempts to 'parler simple et naïf '. The author understands this as something that is not 'si éloigné de l'idéal stylistique formulé par Montaigne' (p. 87). The chapter on Perec and Rabelais is riveting as it tries to unravel both authors' intertextual and ekphrastic convolutions, delving into, among other things, Perec's description of Bosch's L'Escomateur in which 'toute piste de lecture s'avère être une fausse piste' (p. 141). In spite of such lively and suggestive work, the analysis in a number of chapters is decidedly undercooked, or appears to be at odds with the author's stated purpose in the Introduction. For example, the claim that 'on a utilisé avec profit la notion d'anxiety of influence de Harald [sic] Bloom' in the chapter on Proust and Montaigne is unfounded. The author states bluntly that Proust's motivation for suppressing direct references to Montaigne in the definitive version of the Recherche 'ne découle pas d'une éventuelle anxiety of influence' (p. 25). Very little further analysis is offered in this connection. It seems unlikely that an 'utilisation avec profit' of Bloom's terms has been accomplished. The author refers to the richness of an 'intertexte' (p. 78) between different writers, to the 'labyrinthe intertextuel' (p. 149) created by Perec's 'citations' of Rabelais, and to the dizzying 'intertextualité' (p. 150) in which Perec seems to revel. Again in the chapter on Perec and Rabelais, he identifies a metadiscursivity in the work of both writers that serves to blur origins and sources, resulting in a 'problème de la source' (p. 147). It is unclear how these readings bear upon the author's claim in the Introduction that, after Kristeva, Barthes, and Riffaterre, notions such as 'intertextualité', 'source', and 'influence' are 'éculées' and 'périmées' — of no use to the critic interested in 'réécriture' (p. 9). He simply dismisses these notions — and he does this in the face of the fact that he goes on to depend on them in the rest of the book — within the space of one sentence, arguing that they 'laissent en effet dans l'ombre le travail d'écriture que l'auteur impose à son texte-modèle' (p. 9). The author also discusses Sem Dresden's work on 'influence rétrograde' (p. 12), but he does not explain why this form of 'influence' may be more instructive than 'influence' proper, however this is to be understood. One is left wondering whether he believes in influences or not.