Larson on Craske (2024)

In Complicity in Fin-de-Siècle Literature, Helen Craske examines reading as an act of complicity between writers, readers, and critics. As a critical concept for literary studies, complicity is usefully open ended, lending itself to a wide range of interpretations and applications. Craske analyzes complicity from a literary-historical perspective, examining moral and legal debates on the influence of illicit literature, as well as from a meta-literary perspective, studying the role of rhetorical devices in collusive and collaborative exchanges. In her “four-pronged” methodology, Craske privileges close readings, literary history, the sociology of literature, and cultural studies, drawing extensively from Pierre Bourdieu’s relational model for textual reception. Her monograph is composed of five thoroughly researched chapters that may be read in succession or as independent studies. Complicit in the conventions of an academic review, the paragraphs that follow provide a summary of each chapter, but the intricacies of Craske’s close readings and precise attention to detail surpass what can be fully encapsulated here.

Chapter one, “Legal Complicity,” considers two manifestations of complicity and their intersection with literary production— incitement and collaboration—in the legal and socio-historical context of late nineteenth-century France. The 1881 Loi sur la liberté de la presse, which famously established freedom of the press, also stipulated that any textual or visual incitement of a crime (obscenity, libel, or sedition) was an indicatable offense. The law prioritized prosecuting publishers before writers, establishing a hierarchy of moral responsibility that cast authors as accomplices. Craske closely studies a selection of obscenity and sedition trials to demonstrate how writers skillfully avoided criminal liability and maneuvered the ambiguities of the press law and the lois scélérates.

The second chapter, “Framing Literature,” is a study of Paul Bourget’s corpus and its evolving positions on literary complicity and the reader/author pact. Craske begins with Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1883), which adopts a scientific approach to understanding authors’ social and cultural influences on the individual and the collective. Over the next decade, in response to accusations of critical neutrality, Bourget embraces a more conservative tone to address fin-de-siècle moral decline and artistic responsibility. Craske turns to Bourget’s fiction to trace this ideological shift and provides a masterful reading of Le Disciple (1889) and its complex, multi-layered narrative frame. In a mise-en-abyme of Bourget’s own implication in the Henri Chambige affair, the thesis novel interrogates an assumed causality between literary trends and acts of violence, while also promoting the religious conservativism that characterizes his future works.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, France witnessed a rise in sensationalized crime narratives across media culture. This was partly driven by an increase in literacy rates and printing advancements, but also by the emergent fields of criminology and medical pathology and the quest to explain and classify criminal behavior. In chapter three, “Writing Murder,” Craske examines how murder is depicted and associated with sexual transgression in three novels: Rachilde’s Nono (1885), Émile Zola’s La Bête humaine (1891), and Hector Malot’s Complices (1893). In another sequence of convincing close readings, Craske considers how rhetorical strategies (hyperbole, free indirect discourse, dramatic irony) complicate attributions of guilt and position the reader as witness, confessor, and judge. Confessional dialogues play prominent roles in these novels and contribute to erotically charged complicity between characters. But the reader is also implicated, and Craske highlights the popular idées reçues in courtroom scenes and the reader’s ability to recognize markers of guilt from contemporary criminal typology. A recurring theme in Craske’s study is the meta-literary notion of complicity, and she concludes her chapter with a discussion of “murderer literature” and the art-murder analogy. Through tongue-in-cheek humor, marginalized avant-garde writers satirized the parallels between literary production and violent crime (see, for example, the weekly Journal des assassins), drawing attention to the precariousness of their professional status.

Decadent comrades Rachilde and Jean Lorrain are the subject of chapter four, “Scandal and Collusion in Avant-Garde Media.” Certain literary genres, such as the roman à clef, or journalistic sub-genres, like gossip columns or interviews, depended on “knowing readers,” whose recognition of veiled meanings positioned them as “insiders” within an otherwise exclusive socio-literary community. Accordingly, Craske analyzes a series of debates on the woman writer that appeared in Le Zig-Zag in 1885. Rachilde and Lorrain contributed vitriolic depictions of the bas bleu to the “petite revue” while paradoxically exploiting their own notoriety for mutual self-promotion. Craske structures her discussion around the ostensibly contrasting concepts of réclame (“promotion”) and réclamation (“complaint”) and proposes that we view them in correlation. Through Rachilde and Lorrain’s deeply ironic exchanges, which appropriated the same misogynist and homophobic discourses of which they were often targets, they established an alternative model of solidarity, “repurposing réclame for the purposes of réclamation” (146). The final section of the chapter complicates this model of subversive promotion and considers positions of vulnerability and the intertextual dialogues between Oscar Méténier, Rachilde, and Lorrain.

Craske devotes her last chapter to “Saucy Magazines” and the “erotic networks” that they facilitated for male and female readers. The revue légère was characterized by a combination of titillating illustrations, advice columns, serialized fiction (by avant-garde and popular writers alike), opinion pieces, and risqué humor. Craske centers her analysis around Don Juan, which ran from 1895 until 1900, and examines how the periodical constructed collusive interactions with readers that were erotically charged yet depended on shared knowledge of veiled language and clins d’œil. Craske is intrigued by the “interaction between textual production and reception” (172), and studies how readers actively shaped the revue’s content via surveys, contests, letters, and confessions. Considering this relationship through the metaphor of literature as prostitution, she argues that Don Juan’s role for the reader was analogous to proxénétisme, serving as a sexual intermediary for the “petites annonces” rubric, as well as a space to advertise for sexual products and services. Beyond the light humor and playful eroticism of Don Juan, some columns addressed gendered polemical issues like adultery, divorce, and family planning. If the periodical betrayed a relatively progressive stance on these questions, it maintained a strategic balance between political radicalism and lighter, titillating content. 

Craske has accomplished a good deal in 200 pages, and readers will appreciate her epilogue that succinctly draws compelling threads together. She concludes that studying literature through the lens of complicity broadens our understanding of the moral, thematic, social, and cultural implications of reading. Yet while these four categories reflect the breadth of scholarship that complicity may generate, Craske ends with one final mise-en-abyme and invites reflection on our own positions in networks of scholarly complicity—including, of course, as readers of this review.