L'OEdipe romantique: le jeune homme, le désir et l'histoire en 1830 (review)

Using a sociocritical approach in his study of male youth, Pierre Laforgue demonstrates how the Œdipal myth resumes the problematic relationship existing between the figure of the young man and society. While the Œdipal myth was never employed directly by the Romantic movement, when examined from an anthropological point of view, it is the mythical expression of that which the Romantic movement sought to establish as a philosophy of meaning (in spite of the theoretical ambivalence proposed by the use of psychoanalytical terminology). As set forth in his extensive five-part introduction, and in the chapters following where specific consideration is given to essential works by Balzac, Musset, Hugo, Stendhal and Saint-Beuve, Laforgue shows that Œdipe, the mythical persona, is not only a part of the human psyche but also that l'œdipe serves as a philosophical configuration to address desire conceived in its sociability.

In the first section of his book, Laforgue presents a thorough overview of the social position occupied by the youthful protagonist, as well as the changing landscape of the Romantic imagination in 1830. Drawing from Hugo's 1831 novel Notre Dame de Paris, the author elucidates the crumbling symbolic attached to images of the family, the father, and that of the King as part of a Romantic "enterprise de désymbolisation," to liberate meaning and bring about a new mythology. As we see in his treatment of the works selected for this study, the male youth, as a real or imagined orphan, continually refers to his illegitimate state in an over-determined social or historical context (the beginning of the Empire, or of the Restoration), while seeking to constitute himself as a social subject through his inscription in filial fantasies; this is to say, the invention of self in the historical.

These filial fantasies contest the norms and limits of power obtained legitimately or otherwise. In his introductory sections, Laforgue discusses the blurring of categories as a modality for representing historical and political reality, the subversion of legitimate power through the disappearance of the King and later, the father, as well as the arrival of the turannos or usurper (as seen historically by the example of Napoleon). The young man of 1830 is a turannos who desires to establish a new, self-authorizing intellectual royalty. However, in spite of these various permutations of l'œdipe, the figure of the young man is unable to get a hold on history; reality is insufficient and the only solution is a revolution that never comes.

In the second section of this study, Laforgue demonstrates how l'œdipe as a universal in the human psyche knows variable permutations, both historically and culturally, as seen in the literature after 1830. He dedicates one chapter to Le Rouge et le noir, three chapters to Lorenzaccio, Fantasio and La Confession d'un enfant du siècle, one chapter to Lucrèce Borgia, one to Volupté, and finally two chapters to Le Père Goriot and Le Lys dans la vallée. In his chapter on Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir for instance, he discusses the ways in which Julien Sorel, as an imagined illegitimate offspring of a nobleman, denies the father, but commits a seemingly unexplainable violent act against his "mother," Mme de Rênal. Laforgue regards this action as a fictional means for Stendhal to comment upon his present political state: Julien's attempt on Mme de Rênal's life, taking place in July of that year, symbolically occurs in lieu of the revolution. In the absence of History, Julien expiates his œdipe and dies the death of a revolutionary.

In his two chapters treating Balzac's novels, Laforgue discusses two different varieties of Balzac's œdipe. In Le Père Goriot, he discusses the peculiar function of the sphinx, or enigma, as linked to Romantic symbolization and de-symbolization. The Romantic hero finds himself alone in a world without...