Reverberations: Staging Relations in French since 1500. A Festschrift in Honour of C. E. J. Caldicott (review)

Thirty-five scholars have contributed to this volume, which covers an enormous range of subjects. If the title appears a little opaque, this is no doubt because of the editors had trouble finding a phrase that would link together this mass of disparate material. Most of the essays are in one way or another concerned with issues of staging or representation, but the volume is far from being limited to theatrical concerns. If it takes in accounts of works by Molière, Racine, Corneille, Cixous, Beckett and Reza, it also contains essays on prose writers, historians, travel writers and the literary salon (the last an excellent piece by the late Barbara Wright). In fact it is a treasure trove of unexpected delights, and the editors were right not to try to force it into a falsely unified mould. After a section on 'the French Stage', including excellent contributions by John Powell on Molière's Psyché and Robert McBride on L'Impromptu de Versailles, comes a second section subtitled 'Theatricality in the Text', with essays on Valéry, Patrick Modiano, Bernard Noël and Sophie Calle. The third section, 'Staging Politics and Ideas in Writing', ranges from Rabelais, via women writers, the dictionary of the Académie Française and the literary salon, to Blanchot, Camus, Houellebecq and Sloterdijk. Section 4, 'Representing "Other" Cultures', has essays on Flacourt's 1658 history of Madagascar, Enlightenment views of the native American, and Jouvin de Rochefort's 'Petits dialogues' (1672–6). The final section, 'Foregrounding Franco-Irish Relations', has four essays on the two-way cultural traffic between France and Ireland. The volume as a whole constitutes a magnificent monument to Rick Caldicott's 26-year tenure of the Chair of French at University College, Dublin; it is a testimony to the breadth of his research and teaching interests, and to the catholicity of his friends.