Gustave Flaubert 5: Dix ans de critique (review)

Fifth in a series of volumes devoted to Flaubert, of which the first four were published at close intervals between 1984 and 1994, this volume appears after a gap of ten years. It is a retrospective on the work of a whole decade (1994–2004), while also raising questions as to future directions in Flaubert studies. Critique génétique has dominated the field for the last forty years. In essence a study of text in the making, it was never as narrow as some critics perceived it to be, and was open from the first to ideas of the voice of the text emerging not only through an avant-texte as conventionally understood (notes, early drafts and so on) but also in response to cultural pressures of various kinds: history, politics, ideology. It was radical and rigorous, as resistant to airy generalizations and abstractions as Flaubert himself. All these qualities remain in evidence in the current volume.

Diversity and flexibility are apparent throughout. The first section, entitled "Dix ans de critique," consists of nine essays. The first two – reports on the progress of, respectively, the major new edition of the Pléiade Œuvres complètes and the (subsequently completed) fifth and final volume of the Correspondance – are a reminder that serious scholarly editing is a major component of the business of critique génétique; while Jacques Neefs' masterly exposition of the art of studying brouillons in the modern way shows how immersion in fine detail can gradually tease out text in the making ("bribes à la recherche de leur densité prosodique") and how critique génétique is not a plod but a pleasure. The remaining essays in this first section take the broader view of what constitutes the avant-texte. Jeanne Bem considers the link between Flaubert's text and nineteenth-century politics, especially early consumerism. For Marshall Olds, the avant-texte is literary – his work continues to explore the theatricality which grounds Flaubertian narrative. At the heart of this section and indeed of the whole volume is Gisèle Séginger's criticism, to which we will return, of Pierre Bourdieu's extremely influential work, Les Règles de l'art (1992), which tackled head-on the issues confronting literary studies in general and, in particular, what he sees as the closed text-based world of critique génétique, unheeding of the domain of ideological realities. The essay which follows, by Pierre Campion, goes some way towards refuting Bourdieu's assumptions by exploring some aspects of, precisely, the relationship between philosophy and Flaubert's writing, with reference to the work of Pierre Macherey and Jacques Rancière respectively. The section ends with two useful reviews of Flaubert criticism in Anglo-phone countries and Japan, the latter emerging as embracing critique génétique in its more text-enclosed form far more enthusiastically than the former ever has.

In the second section, "Études," the same overall pattern is apparent. Eric Le Calvez's thoroughgoing analysis of the gradual creation of the fiacre episode in Madame Bovary demonstrates through very concrete and precise textual examples how this apparently most controlling of writers will still yield to inspiration en route, and shows that the path of writing is not all thorns and briars, as Flaubert himself seems so often to suggest. This illustration of archetypal critique génétique sits comfortably alongside three examples of a more liberal kind of critical practice. Isabelle Daunais's incisive essay on how the concept of a roman differs in the case of Flaubert from the idea of literature or écriture and Hugues Laroche's study of the reading of signs in Salammbô scarcely evoke the idea of critique génétique at all. The excellent study by Philippe Dufour of the relationship between Salammbô and some of its very diverse sources and/or intertexts, Polybius, Michelet, Homer, Ivanhoe, challenges the idée reçue of this novel as pure negativity and unrelieved doom and gloom: he argues...