Raoul Minhar and Alfred Vallette: À l'écart (review)

This volume is the first edition of À l'écart since its initial publication in 1891. Written 'à deux mains' by the Mercure de France's Alfred Vallette and Rachilde's husband, Raoul Minhar, À l'écart is no literary masterpiece; it is, however, an interesting document of fin-de-siècle anxieties. The story opens with a murder — 'il ne remuait plus' (p. 37) — but is an introspective psychological novel rather than a mystery. Suffering from pathological paranoia caused by his crime, 'la chose', the bohemian central character, writer Lucien Mauchat, soon moves to Tunis. There he takes up with the equally pathological and necessarily eccentric Irishman, Malone, who, like Dorian Gray in the same year, 'murders' his family portraits. The men, who are united by their inability to distinguish reality from fantasy, exist in a waking dream. This is only shattered when Malone commits suicide in the penultimate chapter; Mauchat explains that 'en se tuant, il m'avait évidemment tué moi-même' (p. 155). The internal logic of the À l'écart is such that this enables Mauchat to finally find peace as, of all things, a botanist. Ennui, pessimism and Darwinian theories of evolution — murder as an unmotivated act of natural selection — permeate the text and Spandonis's comprehensive notes usefully clarify many of the philosophical niceties that feed the characters' existential Angst, as well as the many intertextual allusions. The notes also examine the documentary sources used by Vallette and Minhar, particularly in relation to Tunis and Orientalism, and, somewhat less helpfully – 'cette construction n'est pas attestée' (p. 50) – the more arcane uses of language. The excellent introduction firmly situates the novel within the context of late-nineteenth-century French literature and Vallette and Minhar's own writings. The appendix is divided into two parts: the first focuses on the reception of À l'écart in 1891 and includes a choice of (sometimes amusing) short articles by contemporary critics; the second contains two articles by Vallette, outlining his aesthetic position. The bibliography, in which secondary sources are organised according to theme – crime writing, Tunisia, Schopenhauer and pessimism, psychology – will prove useful to students of Decadence. Overall, this volume is a welcome addition that will interest students and scholars of the fin de siècle and that will add to our understanding of the transition from Naturalism to Decadence.