Claudel: Beauty and Grace by Angelo Caranfa (review)

L ’E sprit C réateur Rather than emphasize referentiality alone, Petrey turns to the social function of reified ob­ jects which act as signs of the dominant bourgeois ideology, an ideology in which things signify more meaningfully than people. He goes on to signal points of rupture in bourgeois discourse that occur when the striking miners reinterpret these same material signs other­ wise and thereby undermine the social structure in a revolutionary move that is not unlike that of the Third Estate in 1789, as Germinal’s title suggests. The obvious gap in the book as a whole is the second generation of realists, chief among them Flaubert, whose works further problematize the concept of representation, but to the point where they tend to con­ fuse Petrey’s central argument about conservative and radical constatives. Realism and Revolution is in itself a stunning verbal performance. From the perspective of speech act theory Petrey challenges conventional definitions of realism, reformulates the contributions of a broad array of critical intertexts, and reinscribes literature within the extratextual reality of historically specific communities whose tangible presence emerges from the texts themselves. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the theory and practice of realism. M a r y R ic e -D e F o s se Bates College Angelo Caranfa, C l a u d e l : B e a u t y a n d G r a c e . Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1989. Pp. 178. $26.50. In Claudel: Beauty and Grace Angelo Caranfa demonstrates that objective and spiritual realities intertwine in literary creativity, and that the links between subjective (created) and objective (discovered) evidence of the beautiful and the graceful are never severed in twentieth-century French aesthetics. By juxtaposing Claudel’s interpretation of beauty and grace with that of seven major French literary and artistic figures, the author provides a synthesis of the complex ideas of creativity, literary imagination, poetic inspiration and artistic expression, and leads the reader to experience, through Claudel’s “ theology of vision,” the movement from poetic art to religious faith. To clarify this fundamental relationship between poetic art and religious faith, Caranfa compares Claudel with Proust on beauty (ch. 1), Merleau-Ponty on perception (ch. 2), Weil on grace (ch. 3), Sartre on literary aesthetics (ch. 4), Gide on art criticism of the Baroque period (ch. 5), and Redon and van Gogh on painting and music (chs. 6, 7). The first chapter brings before the reader the tension between the beautiful in natural forms, which Claudel’s poetic art expresses, and the beautiful in created forms, which Proust’s art reveals. Caranfa insists that while Claudel recognizes a primal structure which informs everything, leading the artist, through his creative imagination, from the beauty of the phenomenal world to the world of Beauty proper, Proust, on the other hand, although he admits an inner form, believes that such a form cannot be grasped by the artist. Consequently, Caranfa concludes that whereas Claudel’s poetic art leads to an experience of the beautiful which is encoun­ tered in a world that obeys the “ Creator’s vibrations” (28), Proust’s poetics, by contrast, leads to an experience of the beautiful that is constructed totally from “ immaterial parts or equivalents” (36-37). For Claudel, then, the beautiful is encountered in the world. But unlike Merleau-Ponty, whose perception of the beautiful remains exclusively bound to the perceiving self “ beingin -the-world” (52-55), Claudel’s notion of perception opens the perceiver to God’s divine touches leading him or her to a deeper vision of an inner luminosity shining in all things. While for Merleau-Ponty this inner luminosity manifests and realizes itself through contact with the world and thought, for Claudel, it is God’s light, grasped by the unity of thought and faith, revealed in the phenomenal world. 82 Fall 1990 Book Reviews This inner luminosity in things is what Caranfa calls grace, “ a form of the beautiful to which the self opens in its perceptual encounter with the world and the W ord” (62). This leads him to compare Claudel’s “ theology of vision” with Weil’s philosophy of “ unmediated grace,” which...