The Collector in Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Representation, Identity, Knowledge (review)

The collector cuts an ambivalent figure in the social landscape of nineteenth-century France, as Emma Bielecki notes in this new study: 'variously a producer of knowledge and a victim of monomania, a cultural guardian and a despoiler, an easy mark for swindlers but no stranger to sharp practice himself' (p. 44). Indeed, there is no simple way to account for this elusive nineteenth-century type. By tracing the collector's rise from marginal origins during the July Monarchy to mainstream status later in the century, Bielecki's study explores this ambivalence, analysing the tensions that emerge from literary and paraliterary representations, and excavating the cultural uncertainties of which he becomes emblematic. The scope of Bielecki's analysis is impressive, integrating literary portraits of the collector from fiction of the period (not least Balzac, Flaubert, Huysmans, and Proust) into nineteenth-century debates on the subject, and contrasting canonical works with lesser-known paraliterary texts. Despite such a wealth of material, however, Bielecki's readings are sensitive and insightful, frequently teasing out contradictory impulses that characterize representations of the collector. The study is underpinned by a number of interconnected lines of enquiry. Bielecki considers the anxieties provoked by the collector's hoarding of material possessions and the fraught question of the collection's relationship to the market. Her analysis also probes the relationship between such anxieties and questions of textuality and creativity. The reading of Balzac's Le Cousin Pons epitomizes such concerns, conceiving of the novel both as an exploration of the problematic relationship between individuals and objects in post-Revolutionary society and as a means of reflecting on the mimetic aspirations of Balzac's text. The lack of a complete description of Pons's collection in the novel, for example, leads Bielecki to conclude that the very idea of the private collection (in Pons's case, a secretive labour of love safeguarded in the home) is incompatible with mimetic fiction, literature that aims to make public what had previously remained secret and unknown. The study also situates itself carefully in relation to work undertaken by cultural critics and historians, exploring the writings of Walter Benjamin and Pierre Nora, for example. The discussion of the latter in Chapter 4, '(Re)Collecting the Past', is of particular interest; Bielecki adopts Nora's distinction between history and memory in her analysis of historical collecting and Edmond de Goncourt's La Maison d'un artiste, only to read the literary text as a means of provoking, even undermining, Nora's distinction. The study thus raises the connections between collecting, representation, and identity in nineteenth-century France, and successfully negotiates the occasionally complex relationship between cultural history and literary studies to produce an insightful analysis of a critical figure, the collector.