To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

lantes"? They turn out to be red herrings—"tout
au plus influence," he says,
almost regretfully—in the hunt for "plagiat,"
or even for "faux-plagiat." And when
at last "un plagiat évident" appears, it is the
one (already often noted) from Baltrusaitis'
work on anamorphosis, from which he
culls four pages of illustrative quotes. Edgar
de Bruyne's equally unacknowledged contribution
to the even more impressive erudition
of L'Antiphonaire rates another three
pages. "Ce plagiat massif, parce-qu'il n'est
pas signalé..." is authorial, rather than
imputable to the characters: that is Aquin is
getting no textual mileage out of it at all. Is
Lamontagne's point here that Aquin is just
saving himself trouble? In any case, he is
"left perplexed" by the plagiarism.
In so schematically objective and formalist
a critique, it seems odd that the term
"plagiarism" is used to register shock or
moral disapproval at all, given Lamontagne's
concession that these unacknowledged borrowings
form part of the thematics of
works themselves dedicated to self-reflexive
inquiry into the possibility of their own
originality. A closer look at Aquin's textual
purposes should form part of this quasimoral
assessment.
The central part of this book is made up
of readings of each novel in terms of its
intertextuality. The disproportion in the
pagination of these four chapters is telling:
while Trou de mémoire and Neige noire tip
the scales at thirty and twenty-seven pages
respectively—i.e. about the average of the
four—Prochain épisode rates a measly
eleven pages and L'Antiphonaire an elephantine
forty-eight, a disproportion
attributable to the extreme and atypical
intertextual peculiarities of L'Antiphonaire
and the primitive simplicity, intertextually
speaking, of Prochain épisode. The latter
merely thematises authorial originality and
impotence, in the form of the narrator's
struggle with such figures of textual
authority as Balzac and Simenon.
Trou de mémoire, however, is notable for
its stress upon the "cultural insecurity" of
Aquin's narrators, and indeed of Aquin
himself, whenever the characters' "débauche
d'érudition," lacks integral value to the
text—in short, whenever he, as well as they,
is (just) showing off. This excess is inexorably
connected with the "terreur croissante
associée à l'écriture" which is so
powerful a motive for Aquin's (and his
characters') intertextual excesses. The discussion
of Trou de mémoire is confined
almost entirely to the editorial conflicts of
Magnant and RR; one wishes to hear more
of the intertextuality of Olympe or even of
the intertexts found in the "trou de
mémoire" of the title.
The discussion of FAntiphonaire is the
most fully developed, because of that novel's
sheer volume of intertextuality; yet its
being more relaxed about what constitutes
intertextuality makes it the most useful discussion
of the four. Christine's dissolving
personality is destroyed by her multiple,
fragmented identifications with her invented
characters, and by the insufficiency of her
texts under the invading presence of her
borrowed sources. Intertextuality is thus
seen as both strategic and autoreferential, a
successful way of metaphorising the literary
space.
The emphasis of the Neige noire discussion
is, first, on the interdiscursive elements
of the film scenario, although Aquin (and
Lamontagne) knows perfectly well that
Neige noire is, in the end, "bel et bien un
texte". Then the Hamlet intertext [Hamlet is
Neige noire's Mousetrap), is shown to serve
Nicolas' self-referential purposes as well as
his plot-driven need for the concealment of
Sylvie's murder. Lamontagne overemphasizes
somewhat repetitively, perhaps,
Nicolas' insane overprivileging of his own
creative acts and of himself as demiurgic
creator, culminating in his movement
towards mystical transcendence.
Lamontagne implies that Aquin is skeptical
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