Eau sur eau. Les dictionnaires de Mallarmé, Flaubert, Bataille, Michaux, Leiris et Ponge (review)

L'Esprit Créateur namely, that deconstructionist criticism represents a form of cultural rebellion, against, presumably , literature itself and its apparently conservative positions—a more moderate use of the word would not have diminished its impact. Kevin C. Smith George Washington University Christophe Lamiot. Eau sur eau. Les dictionnaires de Mallarmé, Flaubert, Bataille, Michaux, Leiris et Ponge. Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997. Pp. 172. Eau sur eau is a singular work, whose fundamental importance eludes any hurried reader. At first sight, Lamiot seems to interrogate several literary works, crucial to modernity, from the point of view of their authors' fascination for dictionaries. On a first level, Eau sur eau reads like a study of the various, protean styles taken by key authors' passions for lexicology—be it playful or perverted. This is already a strongly original and powerful way to characterize some of the most famous works crucial to modernity. Yet, Lamiot's work has higher ambitions: to measure literature's response to lexicography's positivistic developments from mid-19th century onward—Littré's, Larousse's, or Hatzfeld's claims of perfect exhaustivity. Eau sur eau's ambition is to bring to light the symptoms of a conflict between the positivists' dream of a systematic appropriation of the world with words, and literature's self-demand for an always new and newly dangerous experience of our being-in-Ianguage. Eau sur eau brings to the fore imagination's rebellion, through which literature took up dictionaries ' challenges. It narrates the fight between literary "disorder"—the self-demand to recreate everything through language—and the reigning passion of an order embodied in encyclopedias and dictionaries. Lamiot shows how the literary strategy consisted in first mimicking, to then better disfigure, the monumental "super-ego" of lexicography. With its ironic or caricatural use of definitional techniques, Flaubert's Dictionnaire des idées reçues (at the end of Bouvard et Pécuchet) denounces the key symptom of modern "bêtise." The same rebellion of the imagination later found a no less exemplary expression in Michaux's Voyage en Grande Garabagne. Cleverly playing with the system of knowledge, Michaux invents in and with his poetry a fictitious genealogy based on the powers of aberration of proper names. Lamiot also shows convincingly how works by Leiris and Ponge (Glossaire j'y serre mes gloses and Le Parti pris des choses) contradict the lexicological imperatives of (1) subjectivity's effacement and (2) the regulated legislation of repertories of meaning. Although their style and approaches differ very much from each other, both works indeed make a purely emotive and playful use of language (Lamiot notably evokes Leiris's calligrams). Lamiot's interpretation of Mallarmé's Les Mots anglais becomes a key in Mallarmé's conception of our world as informed by dream; Bataille's Documents becomes a major opposition by literature to the powers to tell and to name that the dictionary usurped. One can only admire the subtly nuanced, critical method embraced by Lamiot to deal with so vast a topic—that he, however , always presents through specific dilemmas. Called upon to testify faithfully to literature's revolt against lexicography, it appears that he, in his turn, decided to make the limitations of discourses vacillate. Eau sur eau conforms to its object. Writing in symbiosis with the literary passions that he evokes, Lamiot invents some sort of a new genre—in revolt against the sclerosis of fixed orders: water in the form of a metaphor taken up again and again in the entire volume is privileged, as if the limits of Lamiot's own discourse had something of a water quality. Eau sur eau suggests the essential catastrophe of modernity in ambiguities generating order and disorder, on which our present and future times are still eminently dependent. The "miracle" of "water upon water" may only happen in the fragile, metacritical or creative transcendence that 88 Summer 1999 Book Reviews addresses itself to the mind, as in this surprising portrait of several lexicon-eater writers, whom a never relenting passion for life haunted. Gérard Bucher SUNY, Buffalo Elza Adamowicz. Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Pp. xiv...