Essays in Aesthetics (review)

Essays in Aesthetics is a partial rendering of Figures IV (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1999). Genette's interest in philosophical aesthetics, as illustrated in such books as The Aesthetic Relation and The Work of Art, dates from the 1990s and represents the latest stage in the career of this very prolific French theorist, known to Anglo-American scholars mostly as a founder of "narratology" (through his widely influential Narrative Discourse) and, more generally, as a proponent of structuralist poetics and textual studies (as, for instance, in such books as The Architext, or Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, or Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree). In these areas, Genette has offered us a whole array of fine terminological tools for discourse analysis and a wealth of subtle individual observations on such writers as Proust, Stendhal, Flaubert, Henry James, Borges, and many others.

"From Text to Work," the opening piece of the new volume, is an intellectual autobiography of sorts or, as the author of the older Fiction and Diction prefers to put it, somewhat ponderously, "an exercise in pre-posthumous self-diction." The essay is meant to reconstruct "the true diachronic movement that led me from one object to another." Genette, we learn, started out in the early 1950s as an ordinary "literary critic," passing quickly to "poetics" (under the influence of Roland Barthes) and thus abandoning, in his own words, along with "less than exciting studies . . . , an absolutely disastruous political and ideological engagement" (2). His later structuralist or relativist "disposition" has preserved, however, something from his early Marxism, namely his desire for rationality. One can infer the disillusionment with Marxism of today's French intelligentsia from Genette's exceedingly cautious formulations. He writes: "In fact, if I must go to my prehistory, I think I kept from Marxism as I understood it—or, rather, from what, no doubt wrongly, attracted me to it—at the end of the 1940s a desire for rationality, a wish to see clearly and a refusal of fine words. This desire I found answered again later on, and I hope (which is not difficult) more advisedly, in structuralism and then in analytic philosophy" (27).

Essays in Aesthetics, after the initial account of the author's career, features articles on general aesthetics ("What Aesthetic Values?," "Axiological Relations"), on painting ("The Two Kinds of Abstraction," a discussion of Canaletto's The Stonemason's Yard, an analysis of Zola's portrait by Manet in "The Gaze of Olympia," "Pissaro at L'Hermitage"), on music ("Songs without Words," "The Other of the Same," about musical variations), and on literature. The latter cover approximately the second half of the book and range from more theoretical disquisitions ("A Logic of Literature," about Käte Hamburger's treatise of poetics by the same title, "The Diary, the Anti-Diary," commenting a statement by Roland Barthes) to considerations on specific texts by writers in different genres dealing mostly with visual and musical matters ("Fantasy Landscape," "Egotism and Aesthetic Disposition," focusing on Stendhal's "Italian works," etc.).

Of the last three essays, devoted to Proust by one of the great Proustians, I would single out "One of My Favorite Authors," which concludes the book. Constructed as an erudite and charming guessing game, this meditation on "genetic" criticism starts from a short passage in Combray, in which Proust's narrator says that the Guermantes landscape reminds him of "a description by one of my favorite authors." Who is this unnamed author? Michael Riffaterre, in his book Fictional Truth, identifies him (quite wrongly) with Virgil, on the basis of the Latin-derived adjective fluviatile, which occurs in the passage. A Proustian critic whom Genette admires, Jean Milly, sees the passage in question as suggesting, by certain details, the name of Flaubert. Reading through the variants published in the latest Pléiade edition of A la recherche du temps perdu (1987-89), Genette finds several similar descriptive passages in which Marcel reads a book by Bergotte, the imaginary writer who is a major character in the novel. But...