Splendeurs de la médiocrité: une idée du roman (review)

Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau examines the novel (and its romance predecessors) as a genre constrained to explore human imperfection. She plots a history of narrative fiction whose origins lie in Latin transcriptions of Greek fables and whose trajectory propels it from the margins of the ancient and medieval epic to mainstream modernism. Challenging views of the modern novel that stress its indeterminacy, Thorel-Cailleteau argues that the genre is conspicuously determined by a classical legacy that discriminates between noble epic and lower-order comedy, and subordinates, in the process, love stories and the concept of privacy. This creates an interstitial space for the growth of an aesthetic of the profane, an art of the everyday and the aversive. Working out from a consideration of classical and medieval antecedents in Chapter 1, the author focuses on the challenge to virtue in the early modern period. In Chapter 2 she tracks the evolution of médiocrité from the Horatian-influenced juste milieu to its progressive degrading in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where, for the author, it acquires its proto-modern freight of baseness and vulgarity. Moral imperfection mirrored in physical deformity is reflected in the 'imperfect' language of prose fiction, with its foregrounding of ordinary speech. Huet's Traité de l'origine des romans (1670)is Thorel-Cailleteau's model for understanding the progress of the novel as it moves to occupy new secular ground and to accentuate the divergence of history and literary plot. Thorel-Cailleteau's reading of La Princesse de Clèves (or of Saint-Réal's Dom Carlos) does not always add markedly to the sum of criticism: 'Chacun ne cesse d'épier les autres et de percer les secrets de cette existence intérieure qui forme la seule matière du roman' (p. 47). Prose is the unornamented writing of the void, the discourse of godlessness and death, while the Revolution produces the fracture that leads to a modern novel of Baudelairean paradox and disenchantment where hero surfaces as ironist and where beauty is reborn in dissonance and debris. Chapter 3 follows the displacement of moralité by mœurs in the century of Balzac and Flaubert, when fictional rimeurs are ousted by prose-churning journalists. Thorel-Cailleteau has fresh things to say about the proto-expressionism of the Naturalist novel and its abstractionist inclination, challenging traditional reception. However, in the concluding chapter the modernist novel itself receives more cursory attention than one might expect. Proust is proposed as a continuer of Flaubert and Zola in terms of the porosity of character and the influence of milieu on le moi, but Gide, for example, is conspicuously absent. Thorel-Cailleteau's primary object of research is the French novel, with passing comparisons made with the English-language novel (Richardson, Defoe, Scott) and modern European literature (Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Conrad). She defines her field in terms of the canonical novel, which concludes here with Beckett (though Beckett's novels merit fairly brief consideration). The nouveau roman and recent fiction lie outside the parameters of this study. Offering a teleological view of the novel's journey to modernist dystopia, this book is bold in its diachronic reach and in its tracing of the classical and early modern embryology of the genre. If the conclusions it reaches about individual novels are sometimes uncontroversial, this is an erudite study that places French narrative in an ambitious, enlarged time frame.