Re-reading/La relecture: Essays in Honour of Graham Falconer ed. by Rachel Falconer and Andrew Oliver (review)

‘Books are like ivy in the way they wrap themselves around individual lives and continue to grow in and through them’: this image, drawn from Rachel Falconer’s Introduction (p. 9), offers an apposite account of much of the material in the twenty essays that make up this Festschrift. They attend largely to authors of the nineteenth century (the honor-and’s field of specialism) but also stretch well beyond this in both directions: Paul Perron and Peter Marteinson’s essay revisits the sixteenth-century accounts of Nouvelle-France by Cartier, Champlain, and Brébeuf, while, at the other end of the spectrum, Marion Schmid gives a lucid and rewarding analysis of Nina Companeez’s 2011 téléfilm adaptation for France 2 of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. At the core of the volume are essays that are strongly autobiographical in approach, written by scholars well advanced in their careers, taking the opportunity to reflect on their personal trajectories as readers and rereaders. Ross Chambers identifies Nerval, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire as initiatory forces in his development; Victor Brombert describes the unfolding of his relation with Stendhal; Laurence Porter, his relation with Hugo; Rosemary Lloyd considers the literary afterlives of her childhood favourite, Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda; Henry Schogt gives an account of rereading Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov; Mary Donaldson-Evans traces the evolution of her interactions with Maupassant’s Bel ami; Martine de Rougemont rereads the papers rediscovered in her box of files marked chantiers abandonnés. The volume closes with the honorand’s reflections on revisiting Proust’s ‘Journées de lecture’ sixty years after his first encounter with it. Besides these personal, often anecdotal pieces, critical insights are to be found: Robert Lethbridge reflects engagingly on changing critical approaches to reading and teaching Madame Bovary; and James Knowlson, in a piece that stands out from the crowd alongside Schmid’s essay on Companeez, returns to Beckett’s Happy Days after thirty years: he revisits the play in the light of his own and others’ discoveries during this period, focusing on what we now know about Beckett’s interest in music, song, and poetry, the visual arts, and his readings in literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. While many of the essays are author- or text-focused — Tim Farrant concentrates on Fromentin’s Dominique; Andrew Oliver assesses paternity in Le Père Goriot via computational lexicometry; Clive Thomson rereads Bakhtin’s Toward a Philosophy of the Act; Margot Irvine assesses the gender politics of the award of the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Vie Heureuse in 1904 — Henri Mitterand’s contribution takes a different tack. He explores the risks and possibilities of the act of rereading, ranging across critical approaches, identifying a group of writers (Valéry, Barthes, Richard, Starobinski, Riffaterre, Genette, Steiner, and Gracq) he considers to be ‘théoriciens et artistes de la relecture’, who patiently make of their rereading ‘tout à la fois une rêverie et une mise en scène’ (p. 41). Overall, readers interested in the reception of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary culture will find food for thought here.