La Mise en œuvre: Itinéraires génétiques (review)

‘Étudier les brouillons et manuscrits d’écrivains, traquer et interpréter les traces écrites, reconstruire la lente et progressive élaboration d’un texte: tel est l’objet de la critique génétique’. Almuth Gresillon is a gifted Reseach Director at the world’s foremost Institute of genetic criticism (‘L’Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes’ of the CNRS in Paris) and also co-Director of the flagship review of this pioneering subdiscipline of literary studies (Genesis). This end-of-career synthesis claims to offer ‘un parcours riche et stimulant au cœur du processus de création’ and does just that. Grésillon brings to bear a robust good sense and native critical acuity, allied to a gift for lucid, no-nonsense exposition. Her first section, reviewing the principles of genetic criticism, clarifies, extends and sometimes qualifies her earlier Éléments de critique génétique (PUF, 1994). It provides a reliable and thoroughly accessible distillation, drawing on a wide-ranging experience of deciphering authors’ manuscripts and giving an excellent overview of genetic practice. Particularly well-treated are: the genesis of the sub-discipline itself; relations between authors, librarians and geneticians; reading manuscripts and reconstructing genetic itineraries; the inter- and hyper-text constitued by authorial reading/rewriting; and, at the heart of the genetic process, the role of ‘la rature’, simultaneously and paradoxically realising an eliminatory impasse and a bifurcation opening up the text to its own creative potential (‘la rature sert à la fois à “annuler” et à “irradier”’). Five collected case-studies then apply the method and explore its critical potential. Flaubert is seen to come to his ambiguous and eroticised vision of Salomé in exploring the source-given relations of Herodias and Antipas; but his writing is also an ‘art des sacrifices’. Zola’s invention of the narrative denouement of La Bête humaine is a creative accident undoing the logic of his ‘écriture à programme’. Proust’s successive reworkings of the motif of ‘la matinée’ constitute, literally, a ‘radiation-irradiation’ that luminously exemplifies the law of loss-and-gain at the heart of a fictional world. Supervielle and Ponge provide variations on the dynamics of elaboration and simplification. A final section tackles the frontiers of genetic criticism. The neglected genre of writing for the theatre (Brecht, Beckett, Claudel) is a prime case of ongoing, translation-like processes at work in artistic creation generally; while the status of the avant-texte before and beyond the brief golden age of autograph manuscripts shrewdly illuminates the problems and possibilities of the sub-discipline.