George Sand: Writing for Her Life by Isabelle Hoog Naginski (review)

100Rocky Mountain Review they might be tempted bypréciosité, and I do not think that Jabès was entirely free from the temptation (like Derrida!). Cabbalists can easily slip into wild numerological and punning concoctions, known in cabbalistic circles as gematria. There is one more topic that Motte sidesteps, no doubt because ofhis concern with the centrality of writing in Jabès. The content ofJabès' entire intellectual enterprise has great significance for the necessary reconsideration of the situation ofJudaism in the post-1945 world, and it is here that Jabès' thought strikes me as important. Beginning from the premise that the Jews are the people ofthe book and therefore inseparable from the dilemma ofwriting and that the Jewish God has disappeared, the quest for the Book, in Jabès, becomes a quest for a kind ofimmanence/transcendence, since God would be in the Book. In view of the problem of a Jewish redefinition of God in the context of the twentieth-century agony of Judaism, as well as in the general context of the death or hiddenness of God, and in the equally important context of Biblical versus classical logocentricity, Jabès should be seen as a major thinker, a poet and visionary whose work needs also to be examined seriously from the angle of Jewish theology. Still, it is with a study such as Motte's, which sends us back to the writings ofJabès, and which illuminates his trajectory, hisparcours, that we must begin. WALTER STRAUSS Case Western Reserve University ISABELLE HOOG NAGINSKI. George Sand: Writing for Her Life. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991. 281 p. At last, George Sand is emerging from the obscurity to which she has been relegated by a host ofcriticed voices who, for more them a century, have ignored, neglected, misinterpreted, or belittled her work. Lately her fortune has changed. A recent sign of growing interest in George Sand was the amount of space devoted to her in the 1988 MLA International Bibliography; entries concerning her oeuvre fill more than one column and a half. The year 1991 was especially important for Sand scholars: the twenty-fifth (and final) volume of her correspondence was published, as was a translation of TAe Story ofMy Life, her autobiography. And now has appeared Isabelle Hoog Naginski's splendid work, the first major in-depth study in English devoted entirely to Sand novels. As Naginski states, her aim was to reestablish George Sand as "one ofthe preeminent novelists in nineteenth-century French literature, whose work remains important in its own right and as a force in the development of the modern novel" (2). Major emphasis is placed on the novels which the author considers to be Sand's greatest achievements: Lélia, Spiridion, and Consuelo, works that embody quintessential features of several important literary periods/moments. (There is a brief, very useful discussion in the book's introductory chapter on various periods such as the période bleue, période noire, Book Reviews101 période blanche, and on other divisions identified as four clearly delineated "moments.") The study of Sand's novels is organized chronologically. Chapter two, "Histoire du rêveur: The Dreamer's Plot," examines the search for an authorial voice as expressed in an eetrly text, Histoire du rêveur; chapter three, "Indiana or the Creation of a Literary Voice," describes the formation and testing of this voice. Chapters three through six are devoted primarily to novels written during the 1830s, Sand's astonishingly prolific period (Indiana, Lélia, Valentine, emd Spiridion); they chronicle her rebellion against societal and artistic constraints, eis well eis her rather nihilistic outlook during that decade. Chapter seven concentrates on a transitional period, Sand's passage from the Romantic emd metaphysical novels to texts which foreground new humanitarian and mythological ideals. The two major works expressing these concerns (Consuelo and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt) are analyzed in chapter eight. The introductory and concluding chapters function as a kind of frame for the analysis of the works of fiction. The first chapter, entitled "Gynography and Androgyny," is an analysis of Sand's androgynous narrative strategies. The final chapter, "Articulating an Ars Poética," sketches a gynographic ars po...