Faire vrai: Balzac et l’invention du livre-monde by Dominique Massonnaud (review)

pour des idées” (40). Such rapid shifts in tone undercut her efforts to highlight the novel’s “discours extrêmement critique de toute l’idéologie militariste” (43). Her second chapter traces the impact of beloved chauffeur Alfred Agostinelli’s death on Proust, who transposes his loss into the novel in the person of the enigmatic Albertine. Mahuzier ends this chapter with a discussion of the theme of “les intermittences du cœur” (77), describing the Narrator/Marcel’s ambivalence about finally discovering Albertine’s true sexual orientation as Proust’s“traumatophilie”(81). In a strong third chapter exploring the “poétique et morale de l’arrière” expressed by Saint-Loup and his uncle Charlus, Mahuzier returns to the wartime dynamic of the“front”and“rear” to conclude that “[l]’arrière en temps de guerre est donc le lieu privilégié pour voir le monde proustien par le petit bout de la lorgnette, dans son fourmillement d’actes minuscules et dans ses gesticulations grotesques” (99). Her final chapter begins by belaboring a banality:“[L]a stratégie militaire est à la guerre ce que la stratégie littéraire est à la littérature” (136). Analyzing closely Saint-Loup’s three-part discussion of military strategy, which she rightly sums up for Proust as “la question du pasticheur et la question du génie” (146), Mahuzier sees three theories in the text: “celles [sic] de l’enveloppement, celle de la cristallisation, et celle de l’après-coup”(155). This“art of war” approach to Proustian literary theory is a bit forced at times, and yet, in a beautifully-written conclusion, Mahuzier hits her stride, tying the military concepts of diversion and reconnaissance to Proustian leitmotifs. She leaves the reader with the sublime image of the destruction of Combray’s church bell tower, which, thanks to her analysis, we are tempted to now see as a symbol of Proust’s military/literary genius. University of Central Arkansas Phillip Bailey Massonnaud, Dominique. Faire vrai: Balzac et l’invention du livre-monde. Genève: Droz, 2014. ISBN 978-2-600-01719-0. Pp. 535. 60 CHF. The author proposes “une saisie macrogénétique” (20), from which perspective Balzac’s Comédie humaine appears to have evolved into a miniature universe, anticipating later romans-fleuves such as Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu or Romains’s Les hommes de bonne volonté. Massonnaud, who has been publishing feverishly of late, has mined hundreds of references and identified many possible sources for Balzac’s conception. Unfortunately, he does not consider the most obvious source, mentioned in Balzac’s title: Dante’s Divine Comedy. And he does not seem familiar with the most convincing “macrogenetic” concept to date that is pertinent to many cycles of adult novels, namely Northrop Frye’s “anatomy” or Menippean satire. His first chapter reminds us that Balzac has the epic in mind as his underlying model of a deep structure, and that the Restoration period witnessed an explosion of interest in historical subjects for the novel (and theater, and verse). However, he does not see that this backward gaze marks only one of four dimensions of the vast expansion of new or revived 226 FRENCH REVIEW 89.4 Reviews 227 subjects in French Romanticism, also including outward (literary explorations of exotic lands), inward (second states of consciousness), and upward (transcendent spirituality). Therefore Massonnaud passes over the many Balzacian novels that explore these regions. In his strongest area, historical dimensions, Massonnaud offers many plausible speculations for influences on Balzac, and he has thoroughly combed through Balzac’s own writings, but all too often he is content to show that Balzac has mentioned another thinker’s name, and he seldom demonstrates the effects of supposed influences on specific aspects of Balzac’s texts—unlike Éric Le Calvez’s or Mary Orr’s superb genetic criticisms of Flaubert. Chapters 3, 4, and 6 are welcome exceptions, although their analyses would benefit from more precise textual detail. Finally,with the exception of his good chapter 6,“Panorama ou Kaleidoscope?”(respectively , organized and disorganized vues d’ensemble), Massonnaud lacks a sense of true meta-structures—see instead,for example,Dominique Peyrache-Leborgne’s...