Qu’est-ce qu’un événement littéraire au XIXe siècle? (review)

This collection of essays is in three parts, the first dealing with the theoretical positions and discussions of the concept of ‘événement littéraire’. Alain Vaillant’s essay perhaps best encompasses the perspectives and examples of the concept: theatrical media events, of which the best known are that surrounding ‘Hernani’; the nineteenth-century trials of ‘Madame Bovary’ and ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’; finally, those works which position themselves with respect to ideological debates of the day (Renan’s ‘prière d’insérer’ pour son ‘Vie de Jésus’ in 1863, for example), in which category, of course, one can also include Flaubert’s and Baudelaire’s contested works. Vaillant rightly emphasizes the ‘spectacular’, ‘visible’ characteristic of what the public (originally, spectators at a theatrical performance) thinks of as ‘literary events’, for, as he and many of the other contributors point out, the aesthetic quality of a work does not itself create an ‘event’. The second and third parts of the book deal with case studies of ‘événements littéraires’ in the nineteenth century, either in terms of the way certain ‘events’ create a break in the ‘temps long’ of literary history or as media events. In the second part (‘Faire événement: scénographies de la rupture’), Myriam Roman shows how the nineteenth century romanticized the ‘bataille’ of ‘Hernani’; Olivier Bara demonstrates the way in which Ponsard’s ‘Lucrèce’ (1843) was specifically constructed as the death of romantic drama; Thomas Bouchet (relying rather heavily on the one ‘media’ event of Hugo’s ‘Napoléon le Petit’ declaration in the ‘Assemblée législative’ in July 1851) examines Hugo’s other texts dealing with the ‘Petit’; Jean-Marie Roulin discusses the publication of ‘La Chanson de Roland’; and Jean-Marie Seillan is interested in what he calls the ‘captation’ of Alexandre Dumas’ literary heritage by Verne: much more a case of a change in epistemological model than of any kind of ‘spectacular’ event, albeit a very worthwhile exposition of the shift undergone by the ‘roman d’aventures’ from historical to geographical mode. In the third part, entitled ‘Tintamarres médiatiques’, we have an excellent essay by Marie-Ève Thérenty on the excesses and mystification wrought by ‘le puffisme littéraire’ in the nineteenth century; Vincent Laisney argues that the seeds of the ‘crise cénaculaire’ sparked off in 1829 by Henri de Latouche were in fact sown in the same year by Sainte-Beuve himself in the poem ‘Le Cénacle’ in his ‘Vie, Poésies et Pensées de Joseph Delorme’; Yoan Vérilhac deals with the literary manifesto during the symbolist period; René-Pierre Colin discusses the literary trials of Louis Desprez and Paul Bonnetain; Silvia Disegni analyses the banning of the play ‘La Fille Élisa’ in 1891; finally, Delphine Gleizes reflects on the constant confrontation between the literary text and its cinematographic adaptation. The term ‘événement littéraire’ is sometimes rather elastic, and one might regret the essentially metropolitan Francophone approach. Nevertheless, there is much here to interest the nineteenth-century specialist as well as those whose concerns lie more generally with theories of canon, reception, cultural studies in the broader sense and the thorny question of the independence of the author.