In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Parcours lafontainien: d’‘Adonis’ au livre XII des ‘Fables’
  • Andrew Calder
Parcours lafontainien: d’‘Adonis’ au livre XII des ‘Fables’. By Marie-Odile Sweetser . (Biblio, 17). Tübingen, Gunter Narr, 2004. 324 pp.

This book gathers together eighteen articles and papers on La Fontaine written by the distinguished Franco-American critic Marie-Odile Sweetser between 1981 and 2002, a period which, as it included the tercentenary of the poet's death in 1995, saw a rapid growth in La Fontaine studies. The articles are gathered in five sections covering the poet's early days in the Fouquet circle, his poetics ingeneral, his careers as conteur and as fabulist and, finally, an overview of La [End Page 106] Fontaine's opus focusing on his aesthetics and on the extent to which, though a partisan of the ancients against the moderns in his own day, his œuvre can be seen in retrospect as an incarnation of la modernité. The underlying coherence of the book, however, comes not from its inevitably slightly arbitrary division into sections, but from Mme Sweetser's approach to La Fontaine. Her critical method is direct and accessible: she seeks to enter into the poet's world by reading and re-reading his poems as masterpieces of poetic art set in a particular historic and social background; her preferred strategy when addressing topics on the broader themes of genre, aesthetics, poetics and verse-as-music is to look in turn at La Fontaine's radically diverse poems — especially Adonis, Psyché, the Contes and Fables — and tease out common threads. She is sensitive to mood, irony and the frequent shifts of tone within and between poems. While underlining La Fontaine's delicacy and skill in coolly and entertainingly distancing himself from his subject matter, she detects in all his work a delight in escaping the inherited rules of genre, an acute pleasure in the power of word and rhythm, a distaste for the crude hypocrisies and cruelties of public life and, beneath it all, a bedrock of affection for those men and (perhaps even more frequently) women for whom he wrote. She quotes in her epigraph from a fable addressed to Mme de la Sablière (XII, 15), where the fabulist awards a prize for heroism not to any one of the animals which worked together to save one another from the hunter but to friendship itself. For Mme Sweetser, freedom, irony, gallantry and affection are the keys to La Fontaine's poetics. In a way, friendship is a key to her critical method too: it shows in her close attention to the writings of other lafontainiens whom she consults as her friends as well as friends of the poet; the main currents in criticism in the closing decades of the twentieth century are reflected and generously acknowledged in her articles. The format of a book of collected articles inevitably leads to a degree of eclecticism and some repetition, but students of La Fontaine will savour these elegantly written pieces.

Andrew Calder
University College London
...

pdf

Share