Reflections in the Mind's Eye: Reference and Its Problematization in Twentieth-Century French Fiction

Cam Tolton is a professor of French and Cinema Studies at the University
of Toronto.

Fitch is one of the best-known scholars in the Department of French at
the University of Toronto. He has earned his reputation through an
impressive number of books and articles on such twentieth-century French
writers as Bataille, Beckett, Bernanos, Blanchot, Camus, Malraux,
Sartre, and Claude Simon. All eight of these authors appear in this
full-length study; a selected “text” or two by each serves in eight
separate chapters to illustrate Fitch’s notions of problematics in
fictional “referentiality.” Fitch devotes his opening chapter to a
discussion of the philosophical dimensions of referentiality, but within
that chapter his most important statement may simply be this: “In
fact, the manner in which the reader is led to conjure up the world of
the novel within his imagination constitutes the central concern of the
analysis of each novel studied in the chapters that follow.”

The presence of this study in the Theory/Culture series should
automatically suggest that it is not going to be an easy read. Steeped
in phenomenology and hermeneutics, Fitch’s book provides the expected
challenge. Readers who are already familiar with the theory of Roman
Ingarden, Wolfgang Iser, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur will be
the most comfortable with its ideas and methodologies.

Fitch has structured his book according to a systematic ordering of the
problems in referentiality that his various authors pose. The result is
a nonchronological presentation of the texts (which were published
between 1926 and 1967). For readers interested in Bataille’s Histoire
de l’oeil, one of the unexpected delights of the study is the
particular pleasure that Fitch clearly takes in his stimulating (and
convincing) original reading of this erotic text. Fitch has left this
chapter till the end, and is forced to conclude in it that his reading
here has been as influenced by formalist/structuralist traditions as by
hermeneutics. He accepts the compromise with good humor, a quality that
graces many other pages—on which he frequently expresses generous
admiration for the novelists and critics of his choice.

Fitch’s study is undoubtedly a useful addition both to theories of
reader reception and to close analysis of certain important
twentieth-century French novels. However, readers looking for an
accessible introduction to these and other French authors of the period
would be well advised to begin with the studies by the likes of Germaine
Brée, Henri Peyre, and W.M. Frohock that were written some 30 years
earlier.