Philosophie du roman personnel de Chateaubriand à Fromentin, 1802–1863 (review)

Véronique Dufief-Sanchez’s title is a deliberate variant on Joachim Merlant’s Le Roman personnel de Rousseau à Fromentin (Paris: Hachette, 1905; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1970). Merlant’s study was dedicated to Gustave Lanson and is concerned with literary history, chiefly the grouping under the heading ‘roman personnel’ of a range of fictional works from 1760 until Fromentin a century later. The label ‘roman personnel’, implying self-conscious texts that use apparently autobiographical strategies, was not current throughout the period concerned and is applied by Merlant largely retrospectively — a means of presenting complex patterns of literary production with clarity. By placing ‘philosophie’ at the head of her title, Dufief-Sanchez declares her intention to broaden and modernize this topic. The opening section of her study is entitled ‘Philosophie du roman personnel’ and provides both an analytical survey of her field of enquiry and an investigation of attendant issues of theory and thought. She prefaces this section with a quotation from Flaubert’s Les Mémoires d’un fou: ‘Tout le charme d’un rêve avec toutes les jouissances du vrai.’ Flaubert’s coupling of dream with the true, in Dufief-Sanchez’s view, highlights an essential hybridity within the ‘roman personnel’, both on the level of genre in its mixing of autobiography with ‘le fictif ’ and on the level of thought in its pursuit of truth through the fictional. She discusses the origins of the ‘roman personnel’, its ‘actualité’ as ‘autofiction’, its generic conventions, and the diversity of its characteristics throughout the Romantic period. She reminds us of alternative approaches to hers and their terminology, such as John Cruickshank’s ‘novels of self-disclosure’. Following this general section, there are fifteen chapters of case studies grouped in three parts. The first part takes Chateaubriand, Senancour, Constant, and Sainte-Beuve as ‘initiateurs’. The second turns to unjustly neglected novels by lesser figures, ‘les épigones du second rayon’: Émile de Girardin, Custine, Eugène Sue, Alphonse Karr, and Maxime du Camp. In the third part (‘La Floraison du genre: des romans de l’écrivain’), Dufief-Sanchez brings together Musset’s Confession d’un enfant du siècle, Balzac’s Le Lys dans la vallée, Flaubert’s Mémoires d’un fou and Novembre, Lamartine’s Raphaël, and Fromentin’s Dominique. Like Merlant before her, Dufief-Sanchez chooses to make Fromentin her end point, showing the literary strengths of Dominique independently of the author’s dual vocation as writer and artist. The conclusion to the whole volume is very brief, a mere four pages, and explores two questions: ‘Le moi est-il fictif ?’ and ‘La mélancolie: une maladie de la fiction?’. In asking these questions Dufief-Sanchez returns to the issue of hybridity with which she began and to its implications generically within fiction and philosophically both within and beyond fiction. Dufief-Sanchez’s book will be widely valued for its analysis of individual novels and as a distinctive and original investigation of the theory of fiction of the Romantic period.