Aimé Césaire: le terreau primordial (review)

L'Esprit Créateur (43-44), and there is perhaps too much emphasis on the "longue et constante dégradation" as the lot of the Tournierian hero (145), rather than on the transcendence and sublimation that marks the end of each novel's quest. On the other hand, the examination of the masculine /feminine, male/female opposition that runs through Krell's study is genuinely creative and exciting—and here the use made of Bachelardian notions is decidedly liberating. One of Krell's most insightful and telling points is that "la surface est un lieu privilégié" (23; see also 100 and 149). An analogous point is made by Roberts (7), although his project is not so much to engage in an archaeological search for the buried treasures of archetypal symbols as to explore Tournier's manipulation of the surface structures of mythology. Roberts chooses bricolage rather than intertextuality as his theoretical model, because he views Tournier as a palpable presence and agent in the work. This leads him close to adopting an ethical stance, as in his consideration of the vexed problem of the aestheticization of Nazism in Le Roi des Aulnes (58-61), but he exonerates Tournier and his work here on the grounds that the rise (and fall) of Nazism was "an inexorable phenomenon," arguing that the novel seeks neither to mythicize history nor to aestheticize Nazism. Later, in his analysis of the presentation of Herod in Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar, he argues that "history is enlisted not in the service of debunking mythology but of substantiating it" (113). This focus on history's complex relationship with myth leads him to conclude that Tournier's intention is "the resacralization of the novel" and thus "the desacralization of myth" (123). If the mythic can actually be desacralized, the only solution may indeed be that discerned by Roberts in Le Medianoche amoureux, in which the fiction is moving towards a ritualistic repetition of itself—towards a poetics of repetition (166). These two books propose very different methodologies for reading Tournier, yet, in their individual ways, each insists on what is surely a crucial fact about this mythological and/or mythopoeic work: Tournier's stories are "radical" in both senses of the term (see Krell 184). As will be seen when his "Old Testament Western," Eléazar, ou la source et le buisson is published later this year and again when his long-awaited Saint Sebastien is completed, Tournier's writing is now committedly a writing of betweenness—betwen the old and the new, the literary and the journalistic, the mythological and the empirically verifiable—and has become a textual and philosophical dance of sameness and difference. As Krell and Roberts both recognize, new modes of reading are now urgently required—and their studies help to open up new critical possibilities. Michael Worton University College London Jacqueline Leiner. Aimé Césaire: le terreau primordial. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1993. Pp. 175. DM48. This little volume, collecting occasion pieces written by Jacqueline Leiner over the past 20 years—prefaces, postfaces, reviews, introductions to others' books, interviews with Césaire himself, speeches, and so forth—is sure to find its place among those studies that help scholars map the history of Césaire's growing cdebrity. Perhaps the most important archival value of this collection is to remind readers of Césaire to what extent they owe Professor Leiner a debt of gratitude for having worked so tirelessly and generously towards making Césaire's texts better known throughout the world. As a critic, Jacqueline Leiner is less of an innovator than a facilitator. Her writings demonstrate a consistent engagement, a fierce loyalty to both "l'homme et l'oeuvre," more than they articulate a provocative, illuminating hermeneutic. Rather, these pieces accompany the poet throughout his tur122 Summer 1996 Book Reviews bulent career with a rare faith in the integrity of the poetic word and its powers to liberate on the one hand, and a rare faithfulness to Césaire's entire intellectual project on the other. Readers of Césaire criticism will not learn much that is new here, and Leiner's dithyrambic aphorisms can sometimes seem a bit jejune...