My Last Sigh: the Autobiography of Luis Bunuel (review)

REVIEWS 365 Now, considering Madelénat is never so good as when he establishes criteria and proposes a taxonomy, one may express a regret: some of the new terms he proposes for filling the lexical field of biography are scattered throughout his book (e.g. "homéobiographie," "biographomachies," "contre-biographie," on pages 86, 92, 103 respectively), while, as is natural, his biographical typology comes at the beginning (pp. 13-31). The reader legitimately wonders how the late comers fit in the pattern. A glossary would have been a welcome minimum.3 In fact, this book also points towards the making of something more graphic than a glossary and its burden of cross-references : a chart of the notional field of the discipline.4 These are minor observations. Anyway it will be possible to add index and glossary to the next edition—which might be an English edition, a highly desirable thing. As for indulging in excessive (though admittedly economical) sesquipedality, it is the lesser sin. By the scope of his information, the perceptiveness and depth of his analyses , his gift for conceptualisation, Daniel Madelénat has written an important book. In his introduction, he complains there is not, parallel to "psychologie," "théologie," or the more recent "narratologie," something called "biographologie." In fact his book might well be the first treatise in the discipline. Gabriel Merle University of Paris 7 NOTES 1. In "Biography and Criticism," a lecture delivered in Los Angeles in 1982, George Simson, in order to designate his own biographical paradigms or declensions of judgment, proposed the coinage "biodigms." Number 3 of his 18 biodigms reads: "The ontogeny of the individual recapitulates the philogeny of the culture of both subject and biographer." The kinship between the two analyses is obvious. 2. On the same subject, see Gabriel Merle, "La Biographie et ses problèmes: interpellations , frontières, perspectives," Les Langues Modernes, Paris, No. 6, 1982, especially pp. 743-4. 3. Such a glossary would have enlarged D. J. Winslow's, according to his wish. See biography vol. I, No. 1, Winter 1978, p. 61 and vol. II, No. 2, Spring 1978, p. 61. 4. For a good instance of the establishment of an onomasiological field, see G. Mature : La Méthode en Lexicologie: domaine français, Didier, Paris, 1953. Luis Bunuel, My Last Sigh: the Autobiography of Luis Bunuel, translated by Abigail Israel, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1983. 256 pages. Luis Bunuel's autobiography plays like a good Bunuel film. The presentation seems familiar enough and the details are all in the right place—the helpful chapter headings , the chronological arrangement, and the promise of a grand summation by one of the century's great artists—but on second look something is seriously out of whack, not unlike the dinner party scene from The Phantom of Liberty where the guests sit nonchalantly astride toilets and skulk off to the lavatory to eat. Typically, Bunuel has 366 biography Vol. 9, No. 4 posited structure only to undercut it, so what appears to be a formal autobiography is actually a charming picaresque, a presentation of self more concerned with digressions than discourse, with sensibility than sense. "The details are excruciatingly boring," he allows disingenuously, "but if you want to follow the sinuous routes of a life, if you want to see where it came from and where it went, it's impossible to tell what's superfluous and what's indispensable." Born in 1900 in Calanda, Spain, Bunuel grew up in a world that the old man in his eighties can scarcely believe existed, a world genuinely medieval in its pace and outlook . In his provincial hometown "the Middle Ages lasted until World War I," and Bunuel was one of the last inheritors of an insular European folk culture grounded in priestly authority and the doctrinal certainties of the Roman Catholic Church. A brilliant , eccentric youth, he rebelled (naturally) and went to Madrid where he became one of the brightest lights of the famous "Generation of 1927," a talented assortment of Cubists, Ultraists, and Surrealists whose painting, literature, and life-style launched the first sustained artistic assault on bourgeois convention and scientific rationalism. By 1928, Bunuel had...