L'Art de la biographie dans les Vies imaginaires de Marcel Schwob (review)

Contemporary interest in Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) has gravitated around the related questions of his appropriations of the textual past and his status as a practitioner of the imaginary within his own literary work. His exemplarity as a creative re-writer, the importance of erudition and bibliophilia as the source of numerous "hypotexts" (Genette) with respect to his authored creations, was the object of extended demonstration and discussion in Agnès Lhermitte's Palimpseste et merveilleux dans l'œuvre de Marcel Schwob (2002). Bernard De Meyer's Marcel Schwob, conteur de l'imaginaire insisted, two years later, on the originality of the works resulting from Schwob's imaginary processes, and hence the originality of their creator. The view of Schwob as a pivotal literary individual, between nineteenth and twentieth centuries, between erudition and creation, and between different understandings of literary selfhood, arguably coheres in the complex interrelationship of these aspects of the author and his œuvre.

In his new study, Bruno Fabre traces this interrelationship in depth through the prism of the Vies imaginaires (1896), a collection he argues to have been relatively neglected in critical debate. That neglect is all the more curious given the work's recognised influence amongst subsequent writers. Indeed, Fabre identifies a range of contemporary French writers, including Gérard Macé and Christian Garcin, along with a number of illustrious foreigners such as Borges, Bolaño and Tabbuchi, for whom the work has been of significance. The sense is of a work anticipating, through its compositional strategies and theoretical horizons, much that would inform modernist and post-modernist preoccupations. Through his scrupulous anatomisation of the work, Fabre also makes the case for the Vies imaginaires, "cette histoire du monde insolite réduite à vingt-deux personnalités célèbres ou inconnues" (133), as an achieved statement of Schwob's own complex creative identity.

The study adopts a four-part structure, modulating between intercultural and trans-historical considerations of literary principle, discussion of Schwob's prior development as a writer, and extended passages of intertextual reconstitution and commentary. The opening part, titled "Le Renouvellement du genre biographique," places the work in relation to previous "biographical" practice, including identified precursors in the category of fictional biography in nineteenth-century France. Schwob is seen, on the basis of the memorable préface to the work, to adopt the biographical mode in defence of the principle of individuality, thus aligning literary art with the illustration of human difference in response to scientific and political developments of the era. The concern with the distinguishing detail does not lead to exemplary fictional lives—Schwob's millennium-hopping cast of (in large part) criminals and ne'er-do-wells suggests instead a strange equality of all subjects before the "biographer's" pen. This pen had been used by the author previously, in a more conventional mode, as Fabre outlines in his relatively brief second part ("Schwob biographe")—the fact that its principal prior subject had been François Villon suggesting strong continuities across the "imaginary" or fictional divide. But it had also undergone the "secret" influences of a number of English-language writers, notably De Quincey, Defoe, Stevenson and Wilde, enthusiastically assumed by Schwob the angliciste and literary translator.

These considerations are all arguably preparatory to what reads as the scholarly core of Fabre's engagement with the Vies imaginaires, an extensive third part titled "Récriture et création" in which he classifies and examines in extensive detail each vie in terms of the kind of "hypotext" to which it is principally related. Such hypo-texts include actual biographies of the subject, the written œuvre of the subject, historical documents, etc.—and in each case Fabre relates Schwob's vie to the identified hypotext(s) with no little sureness of foot. He successfully illustrates the case for seeing the work as one profoundly engaged with the practice and...