Translator's introduction to Jean Rousset's "Toward a Reading of Forms."

Jean Rousset (1910- ) is a critic of major importance whose writings have remained largely untranslated and otherwise little known in English, a good example of the uneven reception of European criticism in English-speaking countries. By contrast, the work of his colleague and mentor at the University of Geneva, Georges Poulet, was widely translated and discussed during the 1960s and 70s, until the predominance of poststructuralist criticism consigned it to obsolescence. More recently, the works of another Genevan critic, Jean Starobinski, have been appearing in translation with encouraging regularity (most recently, Blessings in Disguise). Yet meanwhile neither Rousset's work nor that of another Geneva-style critic, Jean-Pierre Richard, has achieved the recognition it deserves outside the Francophone sphere, where the two are rightly considered peers of Poulet and Starobinski.

This translation of an essay that J. Hillis Miller, in his overview of "Geneva School" criticism, called "Rousset's most important theoretical statement" (296, 307) was undertaken partly in response to this problem. "Toward a Reading of Forms" is the introduction to Rousset's most widely cited book, Forme et signification (1963), a collection of readings of such key works of the French literary tradition as Corneille's Polyeucte, Madame de Lafayette's La princesse de Cleves, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and Proust's Recherche, included with studies of Marivaux, the eighteenth-century epistolary novel, and Claudel.(1) In this introduction, Rousset attempts a methodological statement outlining the motives, presuppositions, and criteria of a critical procedure that he had previously developed, evidently, in a highly intuitive manner. To put this in terms that Rousset himself might use, he is struggling here to render a subjective process objective. It would be one justification for this translation, then, that it makes available a basic statement of Genevan criticism, including, in its long penultimate section, concise descriptions of the themes and techniques of both its official practitioners and of such fellow travellers as Gaston Bachelard and Leo Spitzer. But aside from its indisputable value as a historical document, what must be emphasized is the continuing interest of Rousset's essay, not only as the outline of a persistingly viable method, but as a key, gateway, or bridge (borrowing his terms, again) to a highly significant body of criticism.

The approach of the Geneva School has also been called "thematic" criticism insofar as it is typified by a search for suggestive patterns of imagery or for recurrent narrative situations and by an attention to the migration of motifs across discourse and to the ways in which texts can be seen as constructing themselves as so many variations -- if often highly disguised or displaced -- of, precisely, themes. Rousset joined the ranks of this style of criticism with his survey of Baroque thematics, Circe et le paon; and a decade later the essays in Forme et signification present themselves as applications of the same procedure, adapted to writing of later periods and incorporating a shift in procedural horizon from that of an era to that of the work, genre, or oeuvre. Rousset has remained faithful to this line of approach in his subsequent work as well, for example, in his analysis of the history and structure of Le mythe de Don Juan and in his study of "scenes of first encounter" in fiction, Leurs yeux se rencontrerent.(2)

This sort of thematicism will hardly seem unfamiliar, of course: the applied criticism of Northrop Frye constitutes one vivid parallel and another can be found in psychoanalytic criticism. But these types of thematics have standardly come tied to quasi-philosophical "doctrines" -- such as Frye's theoretical system -- about the mind, the imagination, language, or whatever, which over time have come to seem less compelling than they once might have, tending in turn to drain interest from the criticism that had been presented as following from those doctrines. The significant difference in Rousset's form of thematicism is that its theory is cast in much less doctrinal terms: "Toward a Reading of Forms" shows how much he relies on the relatively neutral phenomenological idiom of experience and expression to describe the conceptual background against which his criticism moves. Now certainly there can be no wholly neutral conceptual background, as we are ceaselessly reminded by contemporary theorists, and in this connection it is unsurprising that the first and still the most interesting response to Forme et signification was Jacques Derrida's essay "Force and Signification," which focuses on Rousset's book as exemplary of the way that philosophical assumptions shape even phenomenological and structuralist methodologies despite their being designed expressly to minimize such elements.(3)

Yet a critique of the kind that Derrida offers is not intended as a refutation and does not amount to one despite the misunderstanding on this point by so many enthusiasts of deconstruction. Rather, "Force and Signification" should be understood as encouraging us to reflect on the concepts and issues brought so sharply and richly into relief by meditations like Rousset's, as a continuation, in other words, of the project of Rousset's essay rather than a demolition of it. Certainly, many of the concepts treated as central to literary writing and reading by Rousset deserve to be scrutinized, questioned, and situated: the way in which, for example, the interpretive process is made to hinge on postulating the unity of a work; the acceptance of a principle of expressibility (briefly, that there is a form for each signification); the special value attached to such qualities as subjectivity, authenticity, intimacy, or revery; and so on. Perhaps it is a measure of the progress of critical theory that no one reading Rousset's essay in the wake of later developments could help but find these and other of its conceptual commitments problematic; the point to stress, however, is that nothing about the deconstructive critique or any other possible poststructural response to Rousset entitles us to feel complacent about the concerns he expresses, and his own quite apparent lack of complacency in this essay remains one of its strongest recommendations.

Matters of pure theory aside, the approach to criticism advocated by Rousset in "Toward a Reading of Forms" deserves attention, especially now that a revival of thematic criticism seems to be underway.(4) In particular, the combination of careful attention to formal structure and probing sensitivity to the expressive impulses motivating such forms strikes a methodological balance that has made for excellent criticism, not only Rousset's own, but, for example, the early work of Hillis Miller or Gerard Genette, which arguably flows from his. It is much to be hoped that translations of Rousset's work, as well as new studies of it will begin to appear soon in English;(5) his latest volume, Passages, which resembles Forme et signification in design, certainly shows a critical consciousness of undiminished vitality and attentiveness at work.

Notes

(1) Rousset's chapter on Madame Bovary from this volume has been almost the only piece of his criticism to have been translated into English, twice, as it happens; but see also the recent translation of an excerpt from his chapter on La princesse de Cleves.

(2) Rousset's essays on seventeenth-century poetry and drama, L'interieur et l'exterieur, also form a kind of sequel to his work on the Baroque and an appendix to the studies in Forme et signification. The topics and approaches of his study of first-person narrative, Narcisse romancier, and of his recent volume on Balzac, Le lecteur intime, can also be seen as developments from the critical program laid out in "Toward a Reading of Forms."

(3) On Derrida's essay (though hardly at all on Rousset, significantly), see the first chapter of Christopher Johnson's System and Writing.

(4) Straws in the wind here would include Gerald Prince's Narrative as Theme, the anthologies on The Return of Thematic Criticism and Thematics: New Approaches (edited by Werner Sollors and Claude Bremond et al., respectively), the chapter devoted to thematics in Claudio Guillen's encyclopedic treatise on criticism (191-239), and the translated selections from Starobinski's classic Living Eye studies.

(5) The only extended discussions of Rousset known to me remain the pages devoted to him by Sarah N. Lawall (187-94), Georges Poulet (159-65), and J. Hillis Miller (295-96), all over twenty years old; Guillen's repeated citations of his work remain an isolated, if significant, recent exception.

Works Cited

Bremond, Claude, Joshua Landy, and Thomas Pavel, eds. Thematics: New Approaches. Albany: SUNY P, 1995.

Derrida, Jacques. "Force and Signification." 1963. Writing and difference. By Derrida. 1967. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 3-30, 301-07.

Guillen, Claudio. The Challenge of Comparative Literature. 1985. Trans. Cola Franzen. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.

Johnson, Christopher. "The Passion of Inscription." System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 12-43, 204

Lawall, Sarah N. Critics of Consciousness: The Existential Structures of Literature. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1968.

Miller, J. Hillis. "The Geneva School: The Criticism of Marcel Raymond, Albert Beguin, Georges Poulet, Jean Rousset, Jean-Pierre Richard, and Jean Starobinski." Modern French Criticism. Ed. John K. Simon. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1972. 277-310.

Poulet, Georges. La conscience critique. Paris: Corti, 1971.

Prince, Gerald. Narrative as Theme: Studies in French Fiction. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1992.

Rousset, Jean. Forme et signification: Essais sur les structures litteraires de Corneille a Claudel. Paris: Corti, 1963.

_____. L'interieur et l'exterieur: Essais sur la poesie et sur la theatre au XVIIe siecle. Paris: Corti, 1968.

_____. Le lecteur intime: De Balzac au journal. Paris: Corti, 1986.

_____. La litterature de l'age Baroque en France: Circe et le paon. Paris: Corti, 1953.

_____. "Madame Bovary or the Book about Nothing." Trans. Raymond Guiraud. Flaubert: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Raymond Guiraud. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1964. 112-31. Trans. of Forme et signification, ch. 4.

_____. "Madame Bovary: Flaubert's Anti-Novel." Trans. Paul de Man. Madame Bovary. By Gustave Flaubert Ed. Paul de Man. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1965. 439-57. Trans. of Forme et signification, ch. 4.

_____. Le mythe de Don Juan. Paris: Colin, 1978.

_____. Narcisse romancier: essai sur la premiere personne dans le roman. Paris: Corti, 1972.

_____. Passages: Echanges et transpositions. Paris: Corti, 1990.

_____. "Presence and Absence of the Author." Trans. Pascale Hapgood. The Princess of Cleves. By Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette. Ed. and trans. John D. Lyons. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1994. 159-64. Trans. of Forme et signification 36-44.

_____. Leurs yeux se rencontrerent: La scene de premiere vue dans le roman. Paris: Corti, 1981.

Sollors, Werner, ed. The Return of Thematic Criticism. Harvard English Studies 18. Cambridge: Harvard Up, 1993.

Starobinski, Jean. Blessings in Disguise; Or, the Morality of Evil. 1989. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.

_____. The Living Eye. 1961, 1970. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.

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