What remains of Jacques Riviere’s critical and novelistic work?
Jacques Rivière Alain-Fournier Jean Paulhan
Marianne, Bachir Bourras, 10 mars 2025
To mark 100 years since the death of Jacques Riviere (1886-1925), the Bouquins collection is publishing the essential part of the critical and novelistic work of this famous unknown, condemned to live in the shadow of La Nouvelle Revue francaise, which he directed from 1919 to 1925.
The Bouquins collection continues its commendable work of exhuming the forgotten. Living proof that classics never die: one only needs to breathe a resurrecting breath over their covers. After the complete diary of Julien Green (in publication since 2019), Casanova's essays, or Stefan Zweig's criticism, among recent examples, Bouquins does it again by offering the public the essential works of Jacques Riviere.
In this volume soberly titled Critique et creation, readers will discover the eclecticism and sharp analytical intelligence of the man who was, modestly and passionately, the herald of a young review destined for a great future: La Nouvelle Revue francaise.
Founded in 1909 by a "sextumvirate" of young authors around Andre Gide (1869-1951), what we now know by the acronym NRF sought to defend a literary avant-garde and would become an irreversible link in our literary history. The review would find in its young director an oblate of great fidelity, to the point that their paths and ideas would merge. In fact, to place him in the enlarged space of literature is to place him in the narrower one of the NRF conclave.
Portrait of an unknown
But who was Jacques Riviere? As with all illustrious men, there is first the dry biography, which foretells and announces nothing of the intrinsic strength of the man. Born in 1886, he died abruptly - and we might say tragically - of typhoid fever which, after entering the Riviere household through a servant and affecting first the son then the mother, finally reached him and carried him off at age 38 in 1925. He had married in 1909 (the year of the NRF's creation, incidentally) Isabelle Fournier, sister of a certain Henri Fournier, met at the Ecole normale superieure, who would become author of Le Grand Meaulnes under the pen name Alain-Fournier (1886-1914).
From 1919 onward, he was editorial secretary, then director of the NRF after a memorable encounter with Andre Gide, of whom he kept warm memories. One could push the inquiry further. But no biographical element seems to answer a question that becomes ever more pressing: who was Jacques Riviere, really?
In light of Jean-Yves Tadie's sublime personal preface, the question sounds like an admission of failure. For the relationships we maintain with authors testify against us before our own era. The time when a teenager plunged with delight into the writings of the author of Aimee seems gone. For many of us - and all the more for younger generations - Jacques Riviere is an unknown. Absent from school manuals and from many literary histories, his barely reissued books are reserved to a few happy few.
Yet this pessimistic portrait finds a striking counterpoint in the contextualization work offered by this reissue. Collected formulas reveal a man of extraordinary analytical capacity and intelligence: according to Jean-Yves Tadie, he was "a perfect amateur, without label, without leash, amateur in the sense of one who loves, not one who is merely a dabbler." Paul Claudel (1868-1955) described him to Francis Jammes (1868-1938) as "remarkably penetrating and intelligent."
Riviere was a sensitive being, an intelligence cultivated and nourished by assiduous reading of Maurice Barres (1862-1923), discovered during summer 1905 when he was only 19. Hence an "intellectual sensitivity" feeding a "sensitive intelligence," in Ariane Charton's apt phrase, which he constantly tried out on authors.
The Riviere "method"
"Understanding oneself and understanding others are the only occupations that make sense in life," he declares in his beautiful homage to Marcel Proust (1871-1922). We can understand what charmed the young man in the creation of this Nouvelle Revue francaise, to the point of taking its direction. The "violent literary modesty" exhaled by two of its founders, Andre Gide and Jean Schlumberger (1877-1968), coupled with "a predominance in them, over all aesthetic concerns, of a moral concern," opened pathways toward a new ideal based on "the writer's honesty" and "probity in concerns of composition." ("La Nouvelle Revue francaise. Ses origines, son programme")
Understanding, analysis, and knowledge are the three cardinal virtues of his "method." But above all, Riviere is a sensitive being. Engaged in a personal and intimate relation that fully commits him to authors, he speaks of books "with the enthusiasm of love; and therefore with a certain naivete."
Endowed with flawless lucidity, Riviere advances through the fields of art (music, painting, and literature) and politics with the same inquietude that makes him scrutinize people and things. "Universal insecurity" is a reality for one who knew the trenches of 1914. But beyond morasses and troubles, he also knows how to be prophetic.
Strengthened by that "wonderful art of formulating and foreseeing" for which Alain-Fournier praised him, observation after observation, one truth takes shape: according to him, by dispensing with any serious consideration - especially metaphysical - the literary field, and the novel in particular, records an alteration of its universal scope: "It seems to me I see beginning, simultaneously with Dada, an age in which the question of the meaning of literature will completely cease to preoccupy those who make it, an age in which the writer will no longer believe himself designated for a transcendent function, but will work to fix the aspect of things nearest to him. [...] No longer revelations will be expected from him, but happily formulated information about man, about life, about our journey in this world."
How can one fail to see that we are living in this announced age of superficiality? Perhaps we have even crossed another threshold toward atrophy of the self, which sees in the literary object only a mirror held up to its own vanity.