Playtexts: Ludics in Contemporary Literature (review)

L'Esprit Créateur major players such as Benjamin, de Man, Freud, de Certeau, Ricœur, Kristeva, Quilligan, and a host of others makes her book read at times like a compendium of twentieth-century literary thought and threatens on occasion to overshadow her own insights, a number of stimulating connections are established. Murphy finds fertile analytic ground in the coincidence of Walter Benjamin's views on history and allegory with Gracq's own, as presented in his fiction and critical essays. Independent of each other, but witnessing the same historical events of the first half of the century, "each is caught in the dialectic between a future of catastrophe and a future of Utopian possibilities" (56). Likewise, an examination of Gracq's admiration for Jiinger's Sur les falaises de marbre illuminates the allegorical function of the emblematic in his own novels. In the second half of her study, Murphy concentrates on the allegorization of history (Hitler's rise to power and the drôle de guerre) in Le Rivage des Syrtes and Un balcon en forêt. While the latter is solidly argued from a primarily Freudian perspective, it is the analysis of the first text that draws together—brilliantly—the theoretical and the textual, the real and the fictional. "An allegory of time ... Le Rivage des Syrtes dramatizes narrative allegory as construction and deconstruction of historical and readerly time, opening up fixed oppositions to lay emphasis on possibility and desire" (117). 77ie Allegorical Impulse has the potential to attract more North American readers and critics to Gracq, an author who, despite a career begun in the 1930s and continuing into this decade, has remained relatively unknown stateside. Murphy's book is timely in another sense—an apocalyptic author such as Gracq, who presents history as "an impulse toward catastrophe with an emphasis on regeneration and rebirth" (22), seems particularly appropriate for readers and critics poised on the brink of a new millennium. Herta Rodina Ohio University Warren Motte. Playtexts: Ludics in Contemporary Literature. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Pp. 233. $30. This thought-provoking collection of eleven loosely-connected essays, which treat the literary process as a form of dynamic play between writer and reader, has the advantage of a perspective which allows us to see how writer and reader "also play each other," as the author tells us. He adds, "It is this level of interplay that I find most intriguing of all." Beginning with a chapter that orients us to his subject, "Reading Games," and that pays particular homage to Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1938), Motte introduces some of the more relevant literature on the subject, including a discussion of Roger Caillois, Les Jeux et les hommes (1958) and Jacques Ehrmann, Homo Ludens Revisited (1968), as well as references to several other sources. He particularly tends toward a view of play that collapses the categories between frivolity and seriousness and seems closest to the view expressed by Ehrmann, that "reality is played," rather than the definition of play as separate from reality. In his second chapter, "Novel Breton," Motte focuses on André Breton's Nadja (1928) and the paradox of the work's extra-literary claims versus the traditional literary techniques it reflects but refuses to espouse. This chapter is particularly useful in its taking on of Breton's ceci n'est pas un livre approach to the constructing of Nadja, to paraphrase René Magritte, which allows him "to vilify the novel and its norms ... at the same time appropriating and exploiting novelistic norms and conventions." The tension between author and reader, in this case, the constant change of position which Breton attempts—for, as 100 WINTER 1996 Book Reviews reader, Breton prefers the margins, the space where the reader might make his or her annotations —highlights his ambivalence as author or "authority" versus reader. Breton, however , cannot resist "the grip of the octopus," the name of his favorite film, as he tells us in Nadja, of a Chinese man followed by himself and by himself, etc., as he enters President Wilson's office—an apt metaphor for self-aggrandizement that books make possible...