La révélation inachevée: le personnage à l’épreuve de la vérité romanesque par Yannick Roy (review)

Naturally, the major issue concerning this concept is whether the book in question possesses real quality or is merely a flash in the pan. Equally naturally, bestselling authors proclaim the value of their product while their less successful brethren beg to differ. Yet what complicates the matter is that the Bible is the alltime best-seller followed by the works of William Shakespeare, and probably few would be prepared to dismiss their authors as lightweights. As Rouvillois demonstrates, the history of the best-seller is the history of modern literary marketing, with significant roles being played by media-savvy publishers (Grasset, Gallimard) capable of expanding the concept to include long-sellers (how many weeks on the best-seller list), and late-sellers (author dead, but book sales thriving), and in France at least, able to work the prize committees . The Book of the Month Club, founded in 1926, started out slowly but rapidly became a breeding ground for best-sellers, as have been its contemporary avatars, Apostrophes and Oprah. These television shows have proven to be such a gold mine for the publishing industry that when the Germans created one, Lesen (Reading), a wag suggested that a more appropriate title would have been Kaufen (Buying). Finally, in terms of marketing tools, the paperback revolution has given a second life to novels that were already successful in their hardbound version. Rouvillois has an interesting section on censorship and its potential for stimulating sales. Certainly Boris Vian owed a debt of gratitude to “le président d’une ligue de vertu, le Cartel d’action morale et sociale” (164) for trying to get J’irai cracher sur vos tombes banned. Government disapproval turned Béranger into a major poet, and Henry Miller had to be grateful for the protests against Tropic of Capricorn. Of all the virtues of Une histoire, its greatest may be that it does not have a thesis. As Rouvillois makes clear, the history of the best-seller is replete with contradictions , endless arguments over what the word means, and bizarre facts. Who would have known, for instance, that Les misérables was extremely popular among the soldiers of the Confederacy? To the extent there can be any central idea about the history of the best-seller, Gaston Gallimard came closest to expressing it, “On ne sait jamais rien du sort d’un livre” (281). Rouvillois’s study attests to the truth of this statement. Florida State University William Cloonan ROY, YANNICK. La révélation inachevée: le personnage à l’épreuve de la vérité romanesque. Montréal: PU de Montréal, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7606-2289-9. Pp. 284. $34,95 Can. This ground-breaking study seeks to redefine the novel flexibly, as occupying varying points along a continuum whose extremes René Girard memorably characterized as ‘Mensonge romantique’ and ‘Vérité romanesque.’ Roy argues that Girard’s rigidly doctrinaire approach condemns the Romantic sentimental lie of readerly identification with fictional protagonists, and claims that a (morally acceptable) novel always exposes the delusions and hypocrisies of both reader and protagonist. Therefore, because for Girard Catholicism is the One True Faith, the authors Roy studies in depth would be Catholics qui s’ignorent, whose novels trick the reader into sympathizing with foolish or reprehensible behavior and beliefs only to undeceive and humble that reader later by ruthlessly exposing the protagonist’s moral defects (the most impressive examination of this tactic by a literary critic is Stanley Fish’s Surprised by Sin on Milton’s Paradise Lost). Reviews 1273 Roy shares Girard’s belief in the explanatory power of the concept of mimetic desire or mediated desire: we learn what to want by observing what others prize, as do the male victims of Freud’s Oedipus complex who desire their mother because they see their father desiring her (today, the increasing numbers of LGBT parents successfully raising ‘normal’ children who experience heterosexual desire suggest that both Freud’s and Girard’s views must be qualified). Of course, Girard’s concept of desire extends far beyond sexuality to other worldly goods such as wealth, power, and social status, as Pierre Bourdieu’s classic Distinction suggests. But Girard believes fictional characters...