To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
The Aquiniad Continues
André Lamontagne
Les Mots des autres: la poétique inter textuelle des
oeuvres romanesques de Hubert Aquin. Les Presses
de l'Université Laval $35.00
Reviewed by Patricia Merivale
André Lamontagne's study of intertextuality
in Aquin's four major novels is among
the richest and most important works of
recent Aquin criticism. While it is not, on
the whole, designed for the general reader,
not even the general reader of Aquin, the
specialist reader, while finding matters of
disagreement, will find even more that is
informative and stimulating.
Lamontagne opens with a brief, clear,
and useful history of intertextuality as a
critical concept. The intertextual methods
discussed, from Bakhtin, Kristeva, Jenny,
Riffaterre, and Genette, offer far more
methodological scope than Lamontagne
chooses to deploy. He makes virtually no
use of major concepts like, for instance,
pastiche and parody, as denned by Jenny
and Genette, his principal intertextual masters,
while a Bakhtinian view of the polyphonic
dialogism of Aquin might be of
great interest in assessing that eponymous
key to both theme and structure, the title
"l'Antiphonaire".
Lamontagne's own intertextuality could
do with more "forest," what Riffaterre calls
"appréhension abstraite des ensembles",
than this introduction supplies. He
excludes such matters as reminiscence and
allusion to such a degree that it seems the
postmodern contexts so valuably suggested
later are not, in Lamontagne's own typology,
"intertextual" at all.
The second chapter analyses by categories
Aquin's own intertextual practices. Here
Aquin's texts are being used to exemplify
the typology; in the later sections, the balance
shifts (though not entirely) to a typology
used to elucidate Aquin's texts.
Lamontagne is actually apologetic about
discussing the key intertext, for Prochain
épisode, of Byron's "Prisoner of Chillon"; he
knows the relationship to be important,
but is methodologically inconvenienced by
the lack of direct citation. Because of the
inapplicability of "la critique génétique"
(source study) in a work of "études intertextuelles"
(that is la critique Genettique),
we are teased with, but deprived of,
Lamontagne's conclusions on the significance
of such major and extended allusions.
This seems Procrustean to me; I will learn
more about Aquin's text from some (necessarily
selective) synthesis of these two modes
of intertextual relationship than from
either one of them alone. The non-narratologist
might wish that Lamontagne's critical
insights into Aquin's texts were not so
firmly cabined within his methodology;
even the narratologist might wish that
methodology more generously interpreted.
Most of the book is eminently readable,
but the reader of the earlier sections needs
to accept at least provisionally such thorny
categories as the four types of "médiation
répertoriés," almost Polonian in their
hyphenated permutations. Or such prickly
sentences as, "L'enchâssement par isotopie
syntaxique constitue donc, au même titre
que celui qui est fait par isotopie narrative,
un modalité 'classique' de la pratique de la
citation, mais seulement lorsqu'il est couplé
à un enchâssement par isotopie métaphorique
ou narrative...", and so on for another
thirty words. It is the price one pays for the
system and rigour of this mode of analysis.
Plagiarism, a major and clearly defined
concept in Lamontagne's typology, is one
he finds all too extensively exemplified in
Aquin's work. Lamontagne finds "des
analogies troublantes" between Trou de
mémoire and Georges Bataille's L'Abbe C.
on the one hand and Vladimir Nabokov's
Pale Fire, on the other. But why should
what turn out to be Aquin's "emprunts thématiques"
in Trou de mémoire be "trou-
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