Models of Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Several Authors, One Pen (review)

The twelve essays that make up this volume cover a greater range than the title suggests. They begin with two on pre-Revolutionary France, and end with one on Belgian literary journals in the 1920s. The models of collaboration considered fall broadly into four categories. The first corresponds most closely with the volume’s subtitle: writings composed by more than one person. Interestingly, these are all presented as, to some extent, artistic failures. According to Lawrence Schehr, ‘no aesthetic works and no vision of art emerge’ from the Goncourt brothers’ Manette Salomon ‘other than a condescending view of “realism” that leads nowhere’ (p. 166). Erkmann-Chatrian’s ‘smooth collaboration’, as described by Julia Przybos, created a popular writing style with a ‘single and unequivocal message’ (p. 56) that, doubtless for that very reason, was not taken seriously as literature by the literary giants of the time. Joseph Acquisto’s wonderfully evocative and suggestive study of La Muse à Bibi recounts both the history and the aesthetic consequences of presenting a collaborative work as if it were by one person, and shows why, as the twentieth century approached, and with the ‘renegotiation’ of the ‘author function’ (p. 104), the idea of a literal division between two writers gave way to a sense of the author as split personality, an understanding more in tune with the times. The second type of collaboration examined in this volume confirms both the attraction of working together and the difficulty of creating a convincing aesthetic whose contradictions and qualities do not appear to the reader internal to one author: books, albums, and journals bringing together many works from different pens, from the Tombeau de Théophile Gautier to the Album zutique, the Soirées de Médan or the Revue wagnérienne, all presented as fascinating but unequal, containing great works by great writers and lesser works by lesser writers. The third type of collaboration is the ‘cénacle’, or social grouping of writers, vital to the acquisition of sociocultural capital by new literary movements, yet repeatedly foundering as the expressed solidarity between like-minded artists comes into conflict with an aesthetic principle that remains powerful throughout the century: that art is radically heterogeneous to social communication between individuals. Two essays also discuss collaboration between writers and illustrators. Here too the most successful work appears to arise where communication is least evident: in Maurice Denis’s illustrations for Gide’s Voyage d’Urien, where, as Frédéric Canovas shows, Denis refuses to play ‘any useful or helpful role in turning Gide’s narrative into a coherent and unequivocal story for the readers’ (p. 133). Like so many collaborative volumes, this one might leave its own readers with a sense of disappointment that the themes common to the different essays are not more steadily developed as the book progresses. However, this frustration seems strangely in tune with the book’s underlying lesson, and it resonates strikingly with current tensions in academia: for social reasons, collaboration is highly valued (institutionally as well as by the AHRC); yet the works that we admire most unequivocally tend to be read as the products of a single pen.