Le chaos ne produit pas de chefs-d’œuvre: Les écrivains, le travail et la légende (Masterpieces Are Not Made from Chaos; Writers, Work, and Legend)

Le chaos ne produit pas de chef d’œuvre. Les écrivains, le travail et la légende (“Masterpieces are not made from chaos”: Writers, Work and Legend), is a thought-provoking volume. Its author, French-born novelist Julia Kerninon, explores the gap between the official image of an author and the legend surrounding the literary creation. The premise of the study, which draws extensively on the “Art of Fiction” interviews published in The Paris Review, is twofold: first to debunk the popular belief that writers do not work very much and, second, to identify the numerous devices through which they build their own personas.Starting from a conversation in a pub in which the poet Ted Hughes was presented by the villagers as “the man who did not work,” Kerninon delineates the nature and content of a writer’s work. In order to find arguments to prove her point that writing is really a trade, she, in her own words, buried herself in the archives of The Paris Review, held in the Sherman Fairchild Reading Room at the New York Morgan Library (28). Setting aside her initial plan to describe the material conditions of a writer’s working conditions, she decides instead to focus on the construction of an author’s self-image “from the professional reality of the authors to the fiction of their testimonies” (29).Kerninon reminds readers that The Paris Review was created in 1953 by American expatriates in Paris. When George Plimpton was editor-in-chief, he changed the rules of the classic journalistic interview by sending questions to the writers and then allowing them to correct the text before publication. By scrutinizing the different versions, Kerninon found that the changes were in fact minor while a common feature emerged: They all tried to take control of their images. Hence, the interview became a means for writers to impose their versions of biographical details and to establish their own visions, thus echoing the etymology of fiction coming from the Latin word fingere meaning both to feign and to fabricate. Their discursive strategies aim to give the last word to the authors as they then become the writers of their own legends. Thus, Kerninon establishes a fine distinction between the writer as a person and the author as persona. She concedes that the corrections brought by the writers to the proofs were less interesting than the correspondences with their publishers.The case of Norman Mailer is held as a template for the new direction her study is taking (24). Mailer does not so much reveal how he composed his work as how he wants the general public to see him. Mailer adds a question that was not asked—the age when he started writing. Thus, he creates the illusion of a real-life situation with questions and answers when, in fact he is the sole creator of himself, as a precocious child who started writing at seven. Spontaneity is replaced by craft.Discourse and French Literature scholar Ruth Amossy maintains that rhetorical devices create a halo of reputation and that biographical details, real or imagined—what Roland Barthes called “biographèmes” (32–33)—evoke a simplified version of a self that is easier to magnify. Through some well-chosen examples Kerninon shows how authors manage to build their own image and have the last word about themselves. Thus, Jack Kerouac, who appears as a character in one of his own Beat Generation stories, builds a romantic image of himself. And William Burroughs, reminiscing in his 1965 Paris Review interview about how he shot his wife, turns the crime into an epiphany. Kerninon quotes Burroughs’s introduction to his book Queer (1985): “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing.” The Paris Review interview of Isaac Bashevis Singer enables him to create a myth around his difficulties to write when he landed as an immigrant in New York. The different versions of the same anecdote reinforce the notion that Singer creates a self-portrait that is highly fictional. What is sought after is not fact but the effect upon the reader (50–51). Kerninon concludes that writers use the literary interview to correct and even improve their public image. However, she aptly remarks that it is difficult to avoid clichés and stereotypes and identifies three clichés common to Kerouac, Faulkner, and Hemingway: alcohol, virility, and reading with an emphasis on being self-taught, apart from academia. In the conclusion of the first part of her study, Kerninon maintains that instead of revealing the true nature of the writer, a Paris Review interview contributes to the making of a legend.The second part of the book contains case studies of three major American writers: William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck (77). But Steinbeck died before he could answer the questions that were sent him for his interview. So why keep him in this sample? Kerninon suggests that Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck together represent a kind of “holy trilogy” of twentieth-century American literature, and in passing she adds that Steinbeck is the most widely read of the three. For each she designs a motto that summarizes his legend: Faulkner the farmer, Hemingway the macho, and Steinbeck the unstable. The choice of “unstable” as Steinbeck’s label reflects Kerninon’s own perplexity when confronted with the complexities of Steinbeck’s character and is reinforced by the lack of interviews. Since Steinbeck was so uneasy with celebrity, he avoided journalists as much as he could.By always referring to himself as a farmer and not a writer, Faulkner surrounds himself with the opacity of a myth, which is a sure means of being left alone with time to write. His role in the war was very much inflated as a necessary sign of virility. Likewise, Hemingway insisted on his being on the World War I war front in Italy. And Steinbeck was actually present in Vietnam during the war.The chapter on Steinbeck points out the writer’s unease with fame. Kerninon remarks that Steinbeck’s reputation as an unsophisticated country boy is misleading since Steinbeck did attend Stanford University, even though he never got a degree after roughly six years of intermittent attendance. He studied a lot—in particular the art of writing—in a composition class, since creative writing seminars were not yet the norm (149). The particular quality of this chapter is that it provides roadmaps to new fields of study. For instance, Kerninon quotes Steinbeck’s biographer Jackson Benson’s praising the early short stories Steinbeck wrote during his years as a student: “Although none of these stories was salable, all of them are of publishable quality. . . . They are unusual, skillfully executed, and do mark the young writer as having talent.” The realization of Steinbeck’s early talent brings to surface the recurrent question of why it took so long for Steinbeck to reach an audience and fame: “They would seem to be far more advanced than anything written by Hemingway, Faulkner or Fitzgerald at the same age. Then why did it take Steinbeck so much longer to publish anything of real consequence and to gain any degree of critical recognition?” (Benson 77).Kerninon provides a partial answer to this question, which recently resurfaced in France with the publication of Steinbeck’s novels in the Pléiade collection. In the eyes of the reading public, he should have been included much earlier in this prestigious collection. Kerninon’s hypothesis is that Steinbeck’s isolation from the literary world of big cities may account for his lack of contact with potential patrons. Steinbeck’s development as a writer is unique, for his case disclaims the assumption that in order to become an artist, a break with one’s family is necessary. Steinbeck was not only encouraged by his parents at an early age in high school but also was supported financially when he actually started to write.Julia Kerninon’s book, initially a PhD dissertation, demonstrates scholarly attention to accuracy and clarity, complete with a solid bibliography, the mark of good academic work. What is also refreshing is her trust in research to bring new light on the writer’s mindset, amply illustrated with examples and founded on a sound theoretical background. She brings to this book as well her own fiction writer’s flair for readable prose.