Théorie des textes possibles by Marc Escola (review)

Each one of the pieces that make up this volume bids us enter into the creative process that yielded the literary work, not as its definitive accomplishment but rather as one actualization of many possible outcomes. The critic’s task is extended to a realm of potentiality wherein imagination and reinvention boldly build upon cogent analysis and commentary, drawing out what remains latent or liminal within the work, exploring what Jacques Dubois terms its ‘zones en sommeil propices à l’activation’ (p. 31). The theory in question thus supports a merging of critical enquiry and creative endeavour in an often radical reworking of the text under consideration. Indeed, any literary text is posited less as a finished product than as a contingent object that might well have taken on a different shape altogether — and can by the same token be reconfigured, reoriented, and endlessly rewritten as the odd angles or far recesses of the fictional or poetic world it encapsulates receive fresh attention. Within this framework, the reception of the text simultaneously spurs the further gestation and production of text, as diverse possibilities are unearthed and actualized by the reader. Such is the ‘critique d’intervention’ (p. 18) advocated by Marc Escola at the head of the volume and developed through varied and stimulating discussion in the fourteen studies that follow his introduction and useful bibliography. ‘Critique fiction’, ‘invention critique’, and ‘transfictionnalité’ are but some of the terms spawned by the theory, but overall analysis remains accessible and grounded in canonical examples, from Racine and Stendhal to Proust, Saint-John Perse, and Jacques Roubaud. Laurent Zimmermann argues that it is the flaw or inconsistency almost inevitably embedded within the work that allows it to remain open to alternative versions of itself, that possibility is predicated, as far as the reading experience is concerned, on a principle of inexhaustible perfectibility. Similarly, in the case of Proust, Maya Lavault focuses on the gaps, ambiguities, and equivocations that might only be filled or resolved through the construction of further fictional narratives. More generally, Richard Saint-Gelais highlights the ‘activité conjecturale jubilatoire’ (p. 170) that typifies ‘transfictional’ criticism and, in effect, drives much of the writing in this volume, at times, arguably, to the point of overheating, as in the unlikely association of Proust with Ray Charles originally proposed by Pierre Bayard and revisited in detail by Franc Schuerewegen. May Chehab examines the notion of the ‘poème compossible’ (p. 80) as she deftly surmises what Saint-John Perse’s lost poem Gaia might have contained. Baptiste Franceschini ascribes to Roubaud a reactivation of the medieval practice of translatio that sees fit to transform the materials it translates and transmits. As Yves Citton finally reminds us, all literature entails a responsibility towards the potential and the unfinished, and accordingly he calls for an ‘indiscipline radicale’ (p. 227) that, ever shifting between divergent poles and possibilities, would enable literary studies to enter no less fully into this same commitment.