Remy de Gourmont: L'ecriture et ses masques (review)

Remy de Gourmont (1858–1915) wore many masks: essayist, editor of the Mercure de France, critic, novelist, playwright, poet, and leader of the Symbolist movement. Consequently, it is not surprising to find that the first impression one forms on contact with his work, writes André Guyaux, is that of its great diversity and multiplicity of subjects. Since he is "l'éclectique par excellence," it is almost useless to attempt to identify the true Gourmont, Guyaux concedes. Nevertheless, he believes that it is as a critic that Gourmont is most identifiable since as a genre criticism so perfectly reflects his diverse and changeable character.

Guyaux's characterization dominates Gourmont studies, and Anne Boyer's recent study is no exception. The problem facing Boyer is precisely the question of Gourmont's identity, a question she hopes to answer through an analysis that privileges the critical texts of a writer whose contribution to French criticism has fallen into relative obscurity. In this study, the author has set herself the task to "saisir l'écrivain qu'est Gourmont" and the texts, or metaliterary discourse, that he has produced through his writing. A difficult task at best, she remarks in her introduction, because Gourmont, a most secretive writer, did not write an autobiography and only rarely did his writings take on the tone of a personal or private nature. In part, it is this challenge that Boyer confronts in her study, a study based on the hypothesis of Gourmont's obsession with the question of identity in so far as it can be affirmed, or simply expressed, in writing (16).

Gourmont's critical writing explicitly takes an object outside itself. "L'écriture est en fait l'espace où se construit une pensée sur autrui," writes Boyer, to call our attention to the fact that the critic's writing is constantly engaged with different forms of "otherness" (16). Because Boyer conceives the question of identity to be linked intimately to the act of writing, she has decided to question in a privileged way a body of Gourmont's texts identified as literary criticism, namely, the two volumes of LeLivre des Masques and the Promenades littéraires. However, she has not limited her analysis to these texts alone and draws on other texts such as his Epilogues and Promenades philosophiques when they treat of literature, or his fiction whenever, she believes they will provide unique insights about problematic aspects of writing or other currents of Gourmont's criticism.

Following her introduction, the author divides her text into four major sections: part one deals with the writer's quest for identity, Gourmont's masters and models, Sainte-Beuve, Taine, Renan, and others; part two examines the subject of irony and his concept of the "dissociation des idées;" part three treats of legends, fairy tales, and the cynical reduction of love to biology in his La Physique de l'amour; the fourth part examines his poetics of critical discourse. A concluding chapter leaves the reader with the image of a critic who finds in the dialectic of boredom the inspiration to look at life and to rediscover the sense of life in writing.

Gourmont once noted of three writers whom he admired, Schopenhauer, Taine, and Nietzsche that their gift for using images would contribute to the lucidity and solidity of their writings. It is not surprising to learn from Boyer, therefore, that the critic's admiration for the style of such sensorial writers is reflected in his aesthetics in which the image is made a fundamental and central point of his writing style. Gourmont's conception of style, moreover, includes two original ideas related to aesthetic problems and the craft of writing: his treatment of the "cliché" and the "dissociation des idées." For Gourmont the cliché represents the density of language associated with tradition or custom that the "dissociation des idées" combats by breaking up such associations to form new ideas or verbal images (337). Boyer observes that the...