The Role of Improvisation in Corinne

Corinne begins with an anomaly. In this book to be devoted with exceptional brilliance to the deeds and exploits, to the feelings and thoughts of an extraordinary heroine, it is not the latter who opens the narrative, but one who is in the final analysis a secondary character, Oswald, Lord Nelvil. Corinne herself makes her entry rather late, long after the reader has been accustomed to knowing her solely mediated through the feelings she inspires in others. How is this peculiarity to be explained? Why is an individual who is intended to occupy a supereminent place in the narrative not established in it as of the first moment? The answer to this question is quite clear. Corinne is not a typical novel. Like Jean-Chriqtophe, it is a work of imagination having as its protagonist an individual of genius. But while Tiomain Rolland's work presents this individual to the reader from birth onward in the progression of his genius, Mme. de Stael portrays a person who, like Minerva, is already endowed with a mature genius the moment she appears on the scene. Moreover, she describes this person not only in her intimate life, but also and primarily in the actions and words by which her quality of genius outwardly manifests itself. In a sense nothing could have been more difficult to achieve. For how is the reader to be persuaded that the character being presented to him is a genius, if this character's utterances and behavior do not carry with them something authentically brilliant? Therein reside the difficulty of such an enterprise and the reason for which, nearly every time it has been attempted, it has failed. Only a writer of genius can confer genius on a character of his own invention, and even then he can confer only the particular sort of genius that is his own. It is true that this difficulty would hardly have hampered Mme. de Stael. Brilliant herself, nothing prevented her from infusing her character with the genius she herself enjoyed. Thus Corinne is endowed with the very qualities that

Art · Improvisation · Visual arts · History · Irish and British Studies · Joseph Conrad and Literature