Shaw from France

ELT 37 : 1 1994 intentional: as this is a. guide to research, one must, in a sense, listen to the lecturer before opening the works about which he has written. Chapters are brief enough (and the section on individual plays is clearly divided by plays within the chapter·—though it might have been useful for the table of contents to list individual plays by page number) so that it is not as if the researcher must wade through too many pages in order to find a reference. Finally, the style of the book's writing merits comment. One would not expect nor feel the right to demand that a book of this nature possess felicity of style: in a sense, the opposite is probably more the expectation —that the sense of voice, if one might even be said to exist, would tend toward the stenographic. Therefore, it is a pleasant surprise to find the book to be immensely readable on its own terms. As mentioned earlier, some of the sections on individual plays are rich enough, both in substance and style, to feel like essays or lectures on the plays. Throughout the guide, Weintraub presents a voice that is vital, opinionated (in the best sense of that term), respectful of the work of others, enthusiastic about his subject, and, in unexpected ways, graceful and eloquent. Though this is a slender volume, it reflects with intelligence, good sense, and wit the five decades of work Weintraub has dedicated to Bernard Shaw. Bruce Henderson ------------------- Ithaca College Shaw from France Jean-Claude Amalric. Studies in Bernard Shaw. Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, Documents 7. Montpellier: Université Paul-Valéry, 1992. 199 pp. 150ff. AS A EUROPEAN Shaw scholar, Jean-Claude Amalric is something of a rara avis, if not unique. He has translated Kipling for the prestigious series of literary classics, known as the Pléiade editions and published by Gallimard. Amalric has already published in French a substantial survey of Shaw's literary career, Bernard Shaw Du Réformateur Victorien au Prophète Edouardien, and is therefore virtuaUy the sole conduit to Shaw's art and thought for non-English-speaking French readers. The present volume collects the articles Amalric has written on Shaw since the publication of his survey. They are necessarily miscellaneous , and range throughout the Shavian territory. Nevertheless, Amalric has arranged the essays into unified groups: Shaw as a critic, 94 BOOK REVIEWS as a dramatist, as a thinker, and the most valuable of the groups, Shaw and France. Each of these groups usually furnishes one superior essay and in the case of Shaw as critic, the essay on Shaw as a drama critic stands out for its economical and clear presentation of Shaw's critical principles and practice. The weakest group, on the other hand, seems to me the essays dealing with Shaw as a dramatist, which chiefly explore plot patterns and ironic effect. In two of the essays, dealing with Arms and the Man and Man and Superman respectively, Amalric examines the plays from a semiotic/structuralist perspective, but to little effect. Both essays are full of diagrams and sometimes descend into accordion-like phrases such as "actantial syncretism" or "syntagmatic operations." Neither essay really Uluminates how Shaw constructed his plays. The final essay of this group, on the ironic uses of the Don Juan myth in Man and Superman, however, does provide a valuable commentary on the subtle and complex uses to which Shaw put Mozart's Don Giovanni, as weU as instances of Shaw's concealed references to the figure of Don Juan, as when Tanner, upon discovering that he has been appointed Ann's guardian by her father's wül, laments that he has been "struck down by a dead hand." In the third group of essays, on Shaw as a thinker, the first essay on The Duty of Immorality" contains nothing really new. The second on The Metamorphoses of the Shavian Hero" is more interesting because it shows how Shaw's conception of the "hero" is fluid, how Shaw constantly varies his versions of the "hero." The final group of essays on Shaw and France has more to offer than any of the...