Le Récit génétique au XVIIIesiècle (review)

The theoretical framework of this monograph is set out in the three opening chapters. The first of these defines ‘le récit généalogique’, a term designed to convey two meanings. On the one hand, in the eighteenth-century memoir-novel the hero(ine) is often an orphan and/or an ‘enfant trouvé’. On the other hand, Jan Herman uses Derrida’s famous reading of Plato’s Phaedrus to suggest that texts themselves are ‘fatherless’. (This is especially manifest in the case of memoir- or letter-novels prefaced by an ‘editor’ who claims to have acquired rather than written the text(s) to be put before the reader.) Herman’s second and third chapters relate this phenomenon to the ‘récit génétique’, a term coined to refer to (first-person) novels that explain their own origins without recourse to an authorial figure external to the narrative (p. 32). Such novels contain a story of their own evolution from oral to manuscript to printed form. Herman explains this in more detail by using three interrelated metaphors; of these, the ‘filigrane’ is the most important (pp. 33–37). The ‘watermark’ allows us to glimpse the story of the story. Typically, we can detect it by paying attention to the novel’s preface, its incipit, and its ‘relais’. (The last term is used in Genette’s sense, as when Des Grieux’s narrative is repeated/relayed by the homme de qualité to create Manon Lescaut, and a superposition of two ‘voices’ results.) Playing on his guiding metaphor, Herman imagines the filigrane as (representing) a tree, and speaks of an authorial tendency to prune its ‘ramifications’ for the purposes of shape and control, but also of the ‘scars’ that are left when this happens (pp. 47–48). Herman also employs speech-act theory: the texts studied are generally ‘performative’, meaning that they are undertaken as a justification of the (fictional) author’s deeds, and/or as a refutation of rival, proliferating versions of the same story (pp. 65–66). The close readings contained in Part II are generally bold and revealing and cover an impressive range of authors: Mme de Villedieu, Challe, Marivaux, Prévost, Graffigny, Riccoboni, Laclos, and Potocki. With shifting emphasis, each reading illustrates and nuances one or two of the concepts set out earlier. A number of striking formulations and paradoxes emerge along the way. For instance, in the case of Potocki ‘il n’y a aucune réalité qui ne soit pas toujours-déjà livre. Le texte, c’est l’intertexte; la parole c’est l’écriture’ (p. 229). This study does not claim to offer a fully synthesized theory; but it is much more than a series of close readings. Indeed, it effects a bold step towards ‘une nouvelle narratologie [. . .] qui annule l’opposition traditionnelle entre narration et histoire’ (p. 48). This emergent narratology depends on the key insight that the story (of the story) revealed by the filigrane is at once ‘histoire racontante’ and ‘histoire racontée’ (pp. 231–35): a contained container, so to speak. Overall, this is an original and thought-provoking study that effectively balances narratology with meticulous close reading.