Les prisons du roman XVIIe-XVIIIe siècle: Lectures plurielles et intertextuelles de "Guzman d'Alfarache" à "Jacques le fataliste"

Some books seem designed to defy the task of the reviewer. By the breadth of their scope, the depth of their erudition, the originality of their insights, the multiplicity of the levels on which they can be approached, the wealth and the subtlety of the close textual analyses they provide, the number of doors they open for further research, such books challenge any attempt to synthesize their "main" contribution within the limits of a standard review article.

Les prisons du roman, written by Jacques Berchtold, currently professor in French literature at the Université de Paris III-Sorbonne-Nouvelle, clearly is such a monumental work. Although it comes with a detailed map in the form of a 9-page table of contents, it is impossible to encompass it within a single look, as it calls for multiple trajectories of exploration, rather than for a traditional surveying gaze. The theme seems narrow enough: how did early modern novels represent the experience (or the fear) of being jailed? From the persecuted philosopher looking towards Socrates for inspiration and courage, to the episode where the picaro visits a prison during his errings in the lower strata of society, Jacques Berchtold convincingly shows that the depiction of jails has haunted the novelistic imagination of early modernity.

In reality, the period and the territories covered by his study far exceed the temporal limits of the title. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on which the book eventually focuses are situated within a multi-secular tradition going back to the Greco-Latin world. The first part (no less than 170 pages) is devoted to figures like Socrates, Aesop or Callisthen, as presented and discussed in authors ranging from Plato, Seneca, Epictet or Lucian, to Boccacio and Montaigne. Similarly, while the study eventually closes in on French literature, it encompasses a domain which extends well beyond the French literary tradition: the second part (another good 120 pages) deals exclusively with the Spanish picaresque tradition (Guzmán de Alfarache, Carlo García, Quevedo), and their adaptations by French authors (Lesage, Sorel, Scarron).

It is within the wide frame of this long-term European context that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French novels are situated, in a rich echo chamber which gives them a new depth and a new meaning. Part three (130 pages) studies the presence of jails in six "Histoires comiques," going from the famous (Francion and Cyrano de Bergerac) to the obscure (Claireville, Préfontaine, the anonymous author of La prison sans chagrin, d'Assoucy). The type of reading set in motion by this trans-historical, trans-national, trans-generic approach is by now in full gear: the burlesque novel appears as an endlessly self-reorganizing stage where exempla from the past and contemporary memoirs, canonical works and scandalous news, erudite references and passing literary fads are in constant dialogue.

Jacques Berchtold guides us very authoritatively in this mind-boggling maze of cross-references and hidden clues, revealing layers after layers of meaning under the apparently innocuous surface of the most insignificant episode. At first, everything seems to be a matter of details, subtle traces, discreet clues and fragile hypotheses, but the mere accumulation of such details progressively paints a coherent, though immensely rich and complex, network of intertextuality. Through this patient and fundamentally pointillist work, the notion of a (literary) tradition-an inertia of images, motives, references, topoi, carried from one generation to the next-slowly emerges behind the idiosyncrasy of each work.

At this point, however, the reader is still only half-way through the majestic journey in literary history planned by the author. A fourth part (150 pages) focuses on the role played by the Bastille and the Inquisition in representations of jails at the hinge between the seventeenth and the eighteenth century. Bussy-Rabutin, Courtilz de Sandras, and, mostly, Lesage (whose novels and adaptations, between Spain and France, play a pivotal role in the architecture of the whole book) are the major references here. The reader also discovers, along the way, the imagination of the Bastille and of the embastillement, observed from more than a hundred years before its highly symbolical fall during the Revolution.

A fifth and last part (another 150 pages) looks at the post-Lesage tradition. It is highly symptomatic that the three novels analyzed in these final chapters are the most popular texts studied by the author (and the most canonical works of 18th century French literature): Manon Lescaut, Candide and Jacques le fataliste. Their very position in the overall argument tends to "decentralize" them: from the point of view of the jail-micronarrative, they offer mere echoes of tales, descriptions, and anxieties already seen in countless previous publications. Their interpretation itself is similarly "decentralized." None of them is a "prison-novel," of course: the jail episode is only a very brief moment in the plot, a "detail" that goes unnoticed in many a reader's mind.

Jacques Berchtold's truly unique brand of literary interpretation culminates here in unfolding all the wealth of connotations and references implied in these "insignificant" episodes. The image of the palimpsest often recurs to illustrate the type of work operated on these novels: each narrative writes over previous narratives, each text is haunted by echoes of previous texts, or, to quote the author, "words are already inhabited and remain occupied by the presence of those who, earlier, had already uttered them" (p. 38). Apart from, and well beyond, the breathtaking display of erudition and the virtuoso juggling with an infinite diversity of critical references, the interpreter's most impressive mastery consists in his ability to exploit such echoes in such "insignificant" episodes to shed a whole new light on the whole meaning of the whole novels. It is a challenge to say anything new on Manon Lescaut, Candide, or Jacques le fataliste after countless analyses and interpretations produced by decades of scholarship. Les prisons du roman boldly and successfully meets this challenge. The first 600 pages of the study can be seen as preparing the material needed to help us explore the depth of the multi-layered meanings underscoring each episodes of such masterpieces. Because of all this preparatory work and because of the unique angle from which he reconsiders them, Jacques Berchtold manages to revisit and make us rediscover these monuments from, not one, but many unsuspected perspectives.

With its five parts-each a whole in itself, while in constant dialogue with each other-Les prisons du roman is in fact five books bound into one. Or rather six: a common thread from the first part to the fourth insists on drawing anticipatory bridges towards Diderot's novel, which remains constantly at the horizon of most chapters. "A propaedeutic to the reading of Jacques le fataliste," could be another subtitle to the whole critical endeavor. "Tout est écrit là-haut," warns Jacques-le-serviteur; "everything was already written in the previous literary tradition," confirms Jacques-Berchtold-the-scholar. Only to add right away, of course, that the human agent and the novelist find a new space to express their freedom in playing with the hypercomplexity of the material and literary world. The notions of play / game (les jeux) come increasingly to the forefront of the analysis as the study approaches its end-reminding us that Jacques Berchtold had previously edited two collections of articles on this topic, Echiquiers d'encre and Désordres du jeu, both published by Droz.

In this intertext to Jacques, which is the ultimate "great scroll" referred to by the literary fatalist, we find-among others, and apart from the obvious (Tristram Sandy, Spinoza)-authors and texts like La Fontaine, Candide, Gil Blas, Plutarch, Mandrin, Aesop, Alemán, or Lesage. From the opening words ("Where were they going?" To jail!, answers Aesop's story) until the prison of Fort-l'Evêque, where the master is led in the final pages, from the chains of fate to a palindromic reading of the hero's name (Jacques > cage), the final chapter on Diderot (whose whole career was dramatically deflected by the anxieties raised during his experience in the jail of Vincennes) is a breathtaking firework where everything comes together, in a rich and deep reflection on the meaning and the unpredictability of our destination in life. These pages are an absolute must for any Diderot scholar- just like the previous chapters will soon become a classic in any good bibliography on Candide, Manon Lescaut, Lesage, Sorel, picaro novels, etc.

Five, six or many more books in one: and yet, all that has been mentioned so far gives a (very superficial) account of only three quarters of Les prisons du roman. About a quarter of each page is devoted to a rich maze of endlessly suggestive footnotes. Through precise references to secondary literature or through summary sketches of further readings and interpretive insights, these footnotes provide a mine of suggestions ready to be elaborated into specialized article or full-scale dissertations. In spite of its carceral topic, Les prisons du roman never locks in on any assertive interpretation without simultaneously opening a dozen doors for further exploration. This analysis of jail narratives is an anthem to interpretive freedom and creativity.

Is it a "traditional" type of literary studies, since it does not attempt to theorize gender, the subaltern or globalization? Is it "old-fashioned," because it seems to refer literature only to literature itself? Or is it a brand new type of literary studies, thanks to its extremist assumptions and practices of intertextuality? Such questions are largely irrelevant. As any major work of literary scholarship, Les prisons du roman defines its own original approach to the literary phenomenon, an approach which pushes the notion of tradition to the point where it explodes in a myriad of signifying constellations whose systematicity has very little to do with "traditional" categories of literary history. The unassuming, humble, prudent, and subtle attitude displayed by Jacques Berchtold in his analyses transforms his otherwise intimidating erudition into a purely creative force of cross-pollination. As the reader turns the last page of this book entirely devoted to prisons and jails, s/he can only be grateful for receiving such a liberating lesson in literary criticism.