Madame de Staël by Michel Winock (review)

Wayne Koestenbaum in Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration. He takes issue with several of Koestenbaum’s central assumptions regarding collaborative texts, questioning in particular Koestenbaum’s emphasis on collaboration between two (rather than several, or even many) authors and his condition that both authors in a collaborative effort admit to the collaboration. Whidden further distinguishes the studies in the present volume from the approach of Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivon in their Significant Others, arguing that sexual partnership need not be considered a necessary component of collaborative authorship. Proposing a broader approach, he maintains that there is much to be gained by examining the nature of collaborative texts, rather than trying to enter the mind of the writer(s). In addition, he attempts to differentiate the focus of the present essays from critical studies of intertextuality. Referring to Julia Kristeva’s definition of the latter phenomenon as a relationship between two or more sign systems, he maintains that collaboration, on the contrary, concerns agents, not texts; process not product. Finally, he situates the essays in the current volume as part of the ongoing discussion about the definition and limits of authorship and authority. The collaborative efforts examined in the volume are presented in chronological order. The essays do not, however, need to be read in that order as there is virtually no cross-referencing among them, and none of the authors emphasizes the notion of an evolution in collaborative contexts over the course of the century that would require the reader of a later essay to be familiar with material from an earlier one. Nonetheless, there are interesting insights to be gleaned and questions to be raised by juxtaposing different analyses. For example, how or why did the author pair Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian, who collaborated in absentia (the former living in Lorraine and the latter in Paris), and produced in L’Ami Fritz what Julia Przybos calls an “overall sense of smoothness” (55), while the Goncourt brothers, who lived and worked side by side, created what Lawrence Schehr describes as long, amorphous works filled with minute descriptions, overflowing with multiple subplots and geographies, and marked by uncertainties of direction [that] seem to illustrate, all too easily the anomalies of this bicephalous production, as if one head did not know what the other head was doing (153)? It is through this kind of juxtaposition that the reader can collaborate (albeit in absentia) with one or more of the essays’ authors and thus participate in the discussion of the nature and limits of authorship. University of Wisconsin, Madison Laurey Martin-Berg WINOCK, MICHEL. Madame de Staël. Paris: Fayard, 2010. ISBN 978-2-213-65451-5. Pp. 576. 25 a. C’est en historien des idées politiques que Michel Winock a abordé l’étude de la vie et de l’œuvre de Madame de Staël (1766–1817). Habitué à l’analyse de la théorie du libéralisme élaborée par Benjamin Constant, il n’a que tardivement découvert “l’importance d’un authentique auteur politique” (11) dans les écrits de Germaine de Staël, l’amante tourmentée et l’inspiratrice généreuse de Constant. Reviews 813 L’ouvrage de Winock est cependant bien une biographie, certes intellectuelle, mais non pas un traité de science politique. En ce qui concerne l’amoncellement de détails biographiques—“une matière toujours en fusion” (14)—relatifs à l’auteure de De la littérature, Delphine, Corinne et De l’Allemagne, Winock a admirablement agencé et éclairci la trame d’une vie amoureuse, intellectuelle et politique dont les rebondissements fourniraient la base de plusieurs romans. La fille de Jacques Necker, ministre de Louis XVI, fut aux premières loges, non seulement pour observer, mais aussi pour participer aux convulsions politiques et sociales de la période révolutionnaire. Dans le dernier chapitre, intitulé “Qui êtes-vous, Madame de Staël?”, Winock tente de réunir les dimensions multiples de la femme la plus célèbre de son époque: celle qui tint un brillant salon littéraire à Paris et, durant son exil, à Coppet, qui innova en développant une théorie de l’évolution des litt...