Fictions of Sappho 1546–1937 by Joan DeJean (review)

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, in Caranfa’s view, destroys the notions of “ corporeality, sense perception, and understanding” (73) in the structure of theological aesthetics. Here Caranfa makes clear the difference between Weil’s approach to God, which is one of detachment from all willing and knowing, as well as one of contradiction, gravity, void, and suffering, and Claudel’s journey to God, which is sensual, mental, spiritual and mediated by the Church (60). The expression of the beautiful and the graceful in literature, painting, and music is Caranfa’s concern in chapters 4-7. Claudel’s literary aesthetics is read against Sartre’s beauty of nothingness as expressed in his novel, Nausea. Caranfa develops the notion that, while for Claudel nothingness is the very path by which the self encounters the beautiful in the hidden form of God’s grace, Sartre, on the other hand, considers the beautiful as nothingness, and only by the creative act itself can the self “ transcend the world of nausea in order to reach the pure in-itself, art” (96). For Claudel, then, literature is seen as the expression of the self’s “ liturgical dram a,” while for Sartre it is the expression of human­ ity’s absurd and meaningless existence. The theme that the twentieth-century French artist does not create exclusively from thought but from an interplay between thought and the phenomenal world is carried in the next chapter to the level of art criticism. Claudel’s understanding of the Flemish masters is set against Gide’s interpretation of Poussin’s art. The chapter argues that while Claudel sees in Baroque art a harmonious balance of “ people and nature, feeling and perception, perception and thought” (101), as well as a “ profound light of grace itself” (97), rendering it a true representation of Christian revelation, Gide discovers in Poussin’s art a pagan delight, a symbolic mysticism, which is a function of thought alone, of the purely created artistic forms. The ascendancy of thought, of created forms in the art of Redon and van Gogh is inves­ tigated in the last two chapters against its relationship to Claudel’s aesthetics of objective natural forms. Because neither Redon nor van Gogh can penetrate to the source of the inner luminosity shining in things, they substitute in its place dark and amorphous forms (Redon), or beautiful and graceful color forms (van Gogh). The transformed phenomenal forms in Redon’s lithographs and the abstract color forms in van Gogh’s paintings demon­ strate to Claudel the need for the “ sacred measure” in order for the artist to come face to face with the source of light. Claudel believes that, whether in music, painting, poetry or literature, the artist has no other object than to express phenomenal reality in its movement toward the primordial Origin, the divine Ground, Grace itself. Confronting the splendor of medieval stained glass in the cathedrals of France, Claudel says, “ Voici le paradis retrouvé” (159), for here he senses an inner vocabulary, a more perfect light than that revealed to him through the colored windows. M a r ie A . M a l o n e Salem State College Joan DeJean. F ic t io n s o f Sa p p h o 1546-1937. “ Women in Culture and Society.” Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989. Pp. xviii + 383. To the uninitiated reader of Joan DeJean’s masterful study, the extent and consistency of the modern and primarily French fascination with Sappho will doubtless be astonishing. Vol. XXX, No. 3 83 L ’E sprit C réateur From the sixteenth to the twentieth century and in “ fictions” as different as editions, trans­ lations, scholarly commentary, and literary works, writers and commentators have been obsessed with the putative association of the first female poet with female homosexuality. When scholars glossed Sappho’s poetry, it was most often with a view to fantasizing about her life...