Splendeurs de la médiocrité, une idée du roman (review)

As Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau clearly states in the preface to Splendeurs de la médiocrité, her aim in this study is to shed new light on the novelistic genre. This she sets out to do by drawing from two of her previous works, La Tentation du livre sur rien (Éditions InterUniversitaires 1993) and La Pertinence réaliste. Zola, (Champion 2000) in which she concludes that the goal of Naturalism is to reveal the beauty in the most common of subjects through the portrayal of relevant yet very mediocre heroes. The work under review here traces the history of the novel from Heliodorus’ Aethiopica to the later writings of Samuel Beckett. Its specific objective is to show that it is, indeed, the profane and mediocre which characterize the novel, setting its prose apart from the sacred and noble poetry of verse.

In her introduction, Thorel-Cailleteau draws inspiration from the Traité de l’origine des romans (1670) in which Pierre-Daniel Huet finds the origins of the novelistic genre in the fourth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses where the sacred is rejected in favour of the ordinary. Of particular interest is also the familiar, conversational tone implied in the recounting of the various tales by the weaving daughters of Minyas, an orality which wanes as the novel evolves. In the telling of a tale, there is the expectation that the story will be retold and live on; it will be woven and forever sung, just as any work written in verse. In the prose of the novel, by contrast, no such divine infinity can be attained; it is the human finite which rules the genre. Neither uttering nor hearing the voice of the gods, the novelist must draw his inspiration from his own imperfection and from that of his surroundings. The resulting work bears a void of sorts which the reader, himself alone and imperfect, must work to fill.

The author opens the first chapter of her book by disputing the notion that the novel cannot be defined. Using illustrations from classical times to the 17th century, she finds support for Huet’s definition of the genre: a novel is a profane narrative written in prose. It is fictional, yet plausible, and has as its subject the interiority of man in his terrestrial existence. The poetry of the novel is that of mediocrity understood according to the Greek notion of the term: the intermediary, both in subject and style, between two extremes, the superior and the inferior. In contrast to the hero of the epic poem, the central character of the novel is less historical and more human. Thus, it is his/her interiority, rather than external factors, which is of prime importance. This Thorel-Cailleteau illustrates through a brief look at La Princesse de Clèves in which history and politics are relegated to the background in favour of intimate relations.

In the first section of chapter 2, Thorel-Cailleteau endeavours to establish that Plato is, as Huet suggested, the philosopher of lovers and of the novel itself. While not ordinary human beings, for example, the main characters of the Aethiopica and of Cupid and Psyche are still very much caught up in the human experience and are, thus, intermediaries between mankind and the gods. Likewise, the novel itself, being fiction written in prose, is an intermediary between truth and falsehood. We also see in the aforementioned works that the love of another human being leads to the love of beauty and of the divine. From there, however, stems the desire to want to conceal what is base in human nature, a desire particularly evident in works of the 17^th century. Thorel-Cailleteau demonstrates through her studies of La Princesse de Clèves and Dom Carlos that the secret (which cannot be kept secret) is at the heart of the 17^th century novel. Here interiority is revealed in silence and through the slightest of gestures, rather than...