Savoirs en récits I. Flaubert: la politique, l'art, l'histoire, and: Savoirs en récits II. Éclats de savoirs: Balzac, Nerval, Flaubert, Verne, les Goncourt (review)

Although these are stand-alone volumes, their common short preface by the former and current directors of the Centre Flaubert in Paris sets out the combined value of their project. If Flaubert is 'l'emblème de l'écrivain-chercheur' (Anne Herschberg Pierrot, in I, 11), and hence the focus of both collections of essays, his many contributions to the writing of knowledge in nineteenth-century French narrative forms also offer a comparative mirror for the similar concerns and different writing practices of his contemporaries. For both editors, then, the knowledge explosion that French nineteenth-century writers (and Flaubert as their representative) confronted provides no positivist certainties or better ordering of things, but rather a more precarious adventure among the heady mass of materials and contradictory authorities, where diverging opinions and disciplines then reveal the grounds for effective creativity as the only response to otherwise overwhelming 'savoirs'. Enter Flaubert (the œuvre not the homme) viewed by longstanding French experts — Gisèle Séginger on 'É crire l'histoire antique: le défi esthétique de Salammbô'; Florence Vatan on 'Lectures du merveilleux médiéval: Gustave Flaubert et Alfred Maury'; Pierre-Marc de Biasi on 'Le Musée imaginaire de Gustave Flaubert' — and by four francophone critics of nineteenth-century French history and literature, art history, and literary history. Séginger's essay proves the exception to what comes as rather a surprise. Flaubert's Correspondance is used extensively and almost uniformly by contributors as face-value proof of his assiduous research and his value judgements on all manner of 'savoirs', yet his published récits are seldom quoted. Nicolas Bourguinat's 'Quelques réflexions d'historien sur Salammbô' manages to discuss this novel at length without quoting from it (apart from the famous incipit, but as if this belongs to no edition of the text). Flaubert's others — Maury (not La Légende de saint Julien); Sainte-Beuve (not Bouvard et Pécuchet) — are quoted at length in essays focusing on Flaubert's 'Lectures du merveilleux médiéval' and 'Flaubert et l'histoire littéraire'. Séginger's essay also stands out for its balanced references to a range of other critical views and its situation of her approach to Salammbô (which also develops her earlier Flaubert, une poétique de l'histoire (Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2000)). By contrast, Pierre-Marc de Biasi's speculative essay on Flaubert's anti-museology, his unusual failure to collect, is almost without any secondary-critical apparatus or referencing. Specialists in Flaubert studies will therefore find in this first volume a rich trove of material ('savoirs'), but an often frustrating lack of wider critical contextualization to aid further reflection, whether in nineteenth-century studies (literary, historical, etc.) or in the extensive history of Flaubert criticism in and outside France. The same pivotal, yet secondary, presence of Flaubert's récits works with greater force in the second volume, in part because its rationale promotes comparative/contrastive investigation. Well-worked passages in Flaubert's texts are reconsidered — the feasts in Salammbô, Flaubert's encounters with Egypt — but Agnès Bouvier and Sarga Moussa, respectively, explore them through the intertexts of Athenaeus and Du Camp to illuminate the overriding concern of the volume: epistemophilia. The case of Flaubert is thus assessed against similar concerns in apparently different works by Balzac, Nerval, Verne, and the Goncourts. Among the most fascinating issues to emerge is that Verne's encyclopedic didacticism is as eclectic as Nerval's illuminist heritages or the Goncourts' accounts and encounters in their Journal. Both volumes, therefore, shed light...