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  • Lectures croisées: Essays by Alan Raitted. by Francesco Manzini
  • Peter Cogman
Lectures croisées: Essays by Alan Raitt. Edited by F rancescoM anzini. ( Romanticism and After in France / Le Romantisme et après en France, 24.) Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015. xiv + 252 pp.

From nearly fifty articles published by Alan Raitt between 1954 and 2005, Francesco Manzini has selected thirteen. The title of the volume is taken from that of an essay which traces the responses of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and Huysmans to each other’s works. Other chapters pair two works or writers in various forms of reciprocal illumination, examining Flaubert’s complex relationship with Balzac, discussing Villiers’s relationship with Flaubert, elucidating, in Mallarmé’s lecture on Villiers, their common ‘ambition démesurée et irréalisable’ (p. 199). This ability to weave interconnected strands into a coherent overview is equally in evidence in the other essays. Those on Flaubert (on the present tense in his novels; on the lack of pyramidal structure in L’Éducation sentimentale; on the narrator in Madame Bovaryand the dating of a projected epilogue) move from an initial, seemingly circumscribed topic — the first five words of Bovary, the lack of distinctiveness of names in L’Éducation— to an overall perspective on Flaubert’s achievement, demonstrating why Madame Bovary‘n’a pas fini d’émouvoir le public ni d’étonner les spécialistes’ (p. 90), and how in L’Éducation sentimentaleFlaubert was able to ‘se renouveler si complètement’ (p. 129). What seems at first a minor biographical point — the chronology of Baudelaire’s lists of titles for prose poems — is shown to have consequences for the reading of Le Spleen de Paris: that it is a ‘rounded whole’, and the order of its poems intentional (p. 143). No factor is a prioriexcluded: completed works, plans, drafts, correspondence, biography — all are given balanced consideration. Conclusions are reached by a meticulous unpicking of the evidence, and with caution: Raitt is ever ready to acknowledge the ‘known unknowns’ (why Flaubert changed the declared object of his and Louis Bouilhet’s youthful admiration from Balzac to Hugo), reluctant to explain a feature in terms of a single theoretical position, and generous in acknowledging the work of previous critics. There is a risk in reprinting earlier essays whose conclusions may have been superseded by later evidence (at the time of most of the articles, Raitt had to rely on the ‘nouvelle version’ of Madame Bovaryconstructed by Jean Pommier and Gabrielle Leleu (Paris: Corti, 1949) and Marie-Jeanne Durry’s Flaubert et ses projets inédits(Paris: Nizet, 1950)). Yet time has vindicated Alan Raitt’s perspicacity: the curious parallels noted in 1987 between Sylvieand L’Éducation sentimentale, and between Nerval’s life and Flaubert’s projected La Spirale, prompt the suggestion that Flaubert knew Nerval better than he admitted, although ‘he never mentions him’ (p. 45). Indeed: a letter of Bouilhet’s subsequently figuring in Flaubert’s Correspondance((Paris: Gallimard, 1991), III, 917) recalls ‘notre pauvre Gérard’ and his suicide. These essays not only show their lasting interest both in their rigour (Manzini notes the author’s ‘lifelong commitment to logic’ and to context (p. ix)) and as contributions to knowledge. One misprint (among a dozen minor ones) is misleading: a key quotation from Flaubert’s plans for L’Éducation [End Page 563] sentimentale, ‘montrer que le Sentimentalisme […] suit la Politique’ has become ‘[…] sur la Politique’ (p. 103).

Peter Cogman
University of Southampton

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