Lectures phénoménologiques en littérature française: de Gustave Flaubert à Malika Mokeddem by Franck Dalmas (review)

This book, according to its Introduction, sets out to affirm phenomenology as ‘une méthode de lecture critique au même titre que les approches théoriques qui l’ont précédée’, and identifies a corpus of works that ‘montrent un intérêt critique pour la phénoménologie’ (p. 1). Its approach is inspired by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who had developed a ‘nouvelle critique littéraire’ as early as 1945 in his reading, in ‘Le Roman et la métaphysique’, of Beauvoir’s L’Invitée. Merleau-Ponty’s problematics centre on exchanges between body and soul, text and meaning, dedans and dehors, and the écart between the subject’s and others’ existence. Chapter 1 compares Paul Valéry and Jules Supervielle through a ‘phénoménologie du corps physique et du corps créateur’ (p. 37), applied to their respective works La Jeune Parque and Le Forçat innocent. Chapter 2 contains two studies: of Madame Bovary, in which Emma’s relationships with objects and persons are considered in terms of a phenomenology of existence; and of Proust and Giraudoux, examining a ‘phénoménologie du désir’ in respectively male and female protagonists and thereby engaging both authors in ‘un débat existentiel sur le mensonge et la jalousie’ (p. 110). The third chapter, focused on ‘phénoménologie et langage’, also contains two studies. The first examines the multiple significations of the pronoun ‘on’ in the avantgarde poetry of Pierre Reverdy, arguing that, whereas conventional literary criticism might perceive only an impersonality indicative of a reticent subject, the phenomenological critic, following Heidegger, identifies ‘le Dasein en suspens’; ‘avec le “on” l’être glisse dans l’existant’ (p. 134); the objectivity denoted by ‘on’ becomes ‘le moyen de s’ouvrir au monde et de ressaisir son être propre’ (p. 137). The second part of the chapter offers a reading of Malika Mokeddem’s N’zid, which, in its narrative of a young woman lost at sea who has lost her memory and any sense of her native language, expresses ‘la relation forte et inséparable du corps et de l’esprit — telle la notion merleau-pontienne de la “chair”’ (p. 148). The final, illustrated, chapter addresses the overlap between the visual arts and literature, starting from the premise that ‘ces deux aspects de création sont en participation l’un de l’autre d’une manière invisible et selon une phénoménologie qui est plus à même de nous la révéler’ (p. 167). This chapter first uses insights from Merleau-Ponty’s writings on modern art and sculpture to perform a phenomenological reading of drama and poetry by Jacques Prévert, linked in turn to Marcel Carné’s cinema. It then turns to ‘le processus de révélation photographique’ in Michel Tournier’s works, considered alongside those of photographers Eugène Atget, Édouart Boubat, and Arthur Tress, in a reading owing as much to Barthes as to Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty, as the Conclusion and the bibliography make clear, remains at the conceptual heart of a book that affirms specifically phenomenological connections between philosophy, literature, and other art forms.