Ce Fatal excès du désir — Poétique du corps romantique (review)

The ways in which writers of the Romantic period represented the body have arguably not received the same critical attention as those more closely associated with realism and naturalism. This lapse is all the more surprising given that the body became a privileged focus of representation well before the Second Empire for not only a veritable 'who's who' of the time, including Hugo, Gautier, Vigny and Sand, but also their lesser-known contemporaries. Kerlouégan suggests at the outset that the Romantic emphasis on the imagination should no longer thwart an appreciation of how these artists responded to corporal reality. The ways in which they figure the body do not work against their idealist leanings, but rather energize them by indicating the characteristic Romantic tension between engaging in the march of history and seeking refuge from its harsh realities in the comforts of the imaginary. The result is the body as both obstacle to and vehicle of the Romantic impulse: at once the material limitation of human desire, and the very opening out of those longings across the realms of both the erotic and the aesthetic. Mapping out these theories in an expansive opening section, Kerlouégan explains that these tensions of representation link tellingly with questions of narrative, in that the novel form which came to prominence in the nineteenth century encapsulated the same friction between reality and fantasy, as observed in the 'Romantic body'. By drawing these parallels between the human and narrative bodies, Kerlouégan ably enhances our critical awareness of the Romantics' desire for a literature that was both alive and dynamic. His choice to concentrate on the years 1820-1840 may exclude potentially exciting contributions to this argument, not least Chateaubriand's Atala, but it does as he suggests allow for a thematic coherence as the age in which Romanticism became increasingly theorized and the novel came into maturity. Kerlouégan draws upon an impressively vast knowledge of these two decades as well as a weighty bibliography of both creative and theoretical writing to put his argument into play. There are however some key omissions as regards relevant critiques of major authors: Victor Brombert's work on Hugo's narratives, for example, or Naomi Schor's study of Sand and idealism. In addition, it seemed rather curious in light of the main argument that Anglophone scholars such as Peter Brooks and Susan Sontag who have worked on representing the body and its physicality are cited, whilst Elaine Scarry's seminal The Body in Pain is overlooked. It would be hard to imagine such omissions, if included, actually working against any of the ideas on display here, but their absence does suggest that Kerlouégan's study is sometimes more expressive than it is exhaustive. This remains nonetheless an enjoyably thought-provoking and meticulously detailed work that is clear in its aims and smart in its assertions, and which should prove useful for researchers interested both in Romanticism and in the literary navigation of the body.