He loved them so much. He thus wanted to rewrite their destinies. With his latest work, Figures du Désir, Jacques Dubois, a ULg Emeritus Professor, takes up critical-fiction and revisits ten major characters in literature. From Proust’s Albertine to Simenon’s Anna, passing by Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Marie. A way of assuaging his reading desires but also to pass on a message: ‘read freely.’

You turn the page. The very last one. Thousands of sentences, millions of words, and yet your literary appetite has not been sated. You close the book with a bitter taste in your mouth. You had dreamed of another outcome. You had wanted to extend the story, to rewrite it, to reinterpret it. You hate the author for having left you wanting more.

What reader has never experienced this terrible feeling of being unsatisfied? Often it eats away at us for a while, and then subsides when a new novel is begun. Or maybe not.

Emeritus Professor at the University of Liège, Jacques Dubois has never really managed to abandon this sentiment. But instead of repressing it, this specialist of 19th and 20th century literature has decided to get to grips with it and declare it without any hang-ups. With his new work, Figures du désir (1), he has signed off on an ‘enamoured critique’ of the characters who have marked his literary experiences the most.

Figures who are in the majority women, who have ‘lived in him’ to the extent that he has felt for each of them a certain affection, even a certain love. ‘I have written much on literature, often in a classical manner,’ he states. ‘I came to realise that I was only to a minor extent giving the reader the best deal. A reader who is not a pure receptacle, but someone who has feelings and someone who personally invests themselves, to such a great extent that they end up sharing the lives of the heroes and that the latter become for him or her psychic realities. On the basis of this observation I told myself that in the end we have the right to reinvent, extend, manipulate and complete the stories we are reading.’

Albertine, Valérie, Marie and the others

Jacques Dubois thus selected ten of ‘his’ characters, protagonists who generally appear in the background, overshadowed by the charisma of the proclaimed ‘stars’ of the story. First of all, his ‘favourite,’ (2) Albertine, the young single bisexual women of the Marcel Proust novel, Albertine Disparue (1927), and who the critic loves to sublimate. But also Valéri Marneffe, the beautiful man-eater narrated by Honoré de Balzac in La Cousine Bette (1846). Or Anna Kupfer, the Czech lover of the hero Marcel Féron whom Georges Simenon made each other fall in love with, with the Second World War as a backdrop, in his novel the Le Train (1961). Or how about Zola’s Séverine Roubaud (La Bête humaine, 1890), Stendhal’s Augustine Grandet (Lucien Leuwen, 1834) and Marie-Noire d’Aragon (Blanche ou l’oubli, 1967).

(1) Jacques Dubois, Figures du désir. Pour une critique amoureuse, Bruxelles, Les Impressions nouvelles, coll. « Réflexions faites », September 2011, 202 pages.
(2) Jacques Dubois had already devoted a book to this Marcel Proust character, Pour Albertine. Proust et le sens du social, Paris, Seuil, coll. « Liber », 1997.