Esthétique du rire ed. by Alain Vaillant (review)

Alain Vaillant prefaces this collective volume with an Introduction noting the vast interest scholars now devote to its subject, while insisting, perhaps temerariously, that 'le rire est un' (p. 11) and should be analysed in itself, not via its purpose. The ensuing thirteen contributions, concentrated almost exclusively on French literature, are arranged chronologically. Jean-René Valette treats a medieval corporeal humour that specifically underlines man's fallen nature, while Daniel Ménager considers a Renaissance grotesque seen as healthy in its main proponents (witness Boccaccio and Rabelais), though disturbing elsewhere (for example, in the Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel). Within the seventeenth century, Dominique Bertrand argues that authors like Paul Scarron and Charles Sorel tend to substitute the all-embracing curative laughter of a Rabelais with an increasingly elitist humour of refinement, and Bruno Roche sees libertines like Cyrano cheerfully and fruitfully rehabilitating sex and the body. Christophe Martin describes how classical aesthetics is similarly undermined by the humour of badinage, traced from Marot through La Fontaine even up to Fontenelle, but which Voltaire and the Enlightenment ostensibly reject. Moving on to the First Republic, Antoine de Bæcque observes how the Revolution's oppressive solemnity was challenged by festivity and satire, as revealed particularly in the anti-Jacobin journalist Alphonse Martainville. The nineteenth century provides Matthieu Liouville with evidence of how 'textes mineurs' like Baudelaire's Petits poèmes en prose and Hugo's Chansons des rues et des bois gain literary significance by subverting established categories in a spirit of playfulness and laughter, a theme that Jean-Louis Cabanès parallels by handling 'La Fantaisie et le grotesque' and seeing how poets like Laforgue and Verlaine break canonical standards, their humour remaining, moreover, tainted with a negativity encapsulated in Paul Margueritte's fin-de-siècle pantomime Pierrot assassin de sa femme. Concentrating on the nineteenth century, Bertrand Tillier addresses the theme of caricature, construing its humour as similarly impure, even hostile and brutal (perhaps an exaggeration). Vaillant devotes his own chapter to irony, rejecting Bergson, theorizing his subject in depth, and exemplifying its literary application within the melancholic humour of, for example, Baudelaire and Flaubert, one that Mallarmé supplanted via a new trend of liberating postmodern irony. Three final chapters come bracketed under the rubric of 'Le Rire démocratique', the first comprising Jean-Marc Moura's attempt to define l'humour as contrast to le comique, which perennial riddle he resolves by seeing the latter as implying mockery, while the former is ambivalent and self-inclusive: more a rire avec than a rire de. Catherine Rouayrenc approaches carnivalesque themes in modern fiction, amply illustrated in such authors as Vian and Queneau, but resurrects the 'rire tremblant' (p. 354) that Vaillant esteems outdated. Hence, while she may describe an 'édifice [. . .] ébranlé' of language, Moncelet in fine traces in modern linguistic games (la création verbaludique) a positive dysfunctionality richly exploited in literature and not inappropriate to pedagogy. Despite rare lapses, the editorial standards remain as high as the apparatus of each contributor is deep, although one regrets that the Baudelairean mantra of rire absolu is not examined more critically. Vaillant also supplies an ample and up-to-date bibliography to what is a thoroughly useful book.