L'Image du Nord chez Stendhal et les Romantiques (review)

Handsomely produced and ornamented by photographs of each of the participants, these volumes offer complete proceedings of a conference held at the University of Örebro in 2002. The opening address by Michel Crouzet succeeds in exploding 'le mythe du Nord', hence perhaps Kajsa Andersson's anxiety to contextualize his remarks in her foreword: 'Feignant le scepticisme, avec humour, il posa d'entrée de jeu à son auditoire, la question déroutante que voici: "Sommes-nous très sérieux en nous réunissant pour débattre avec gravité du 'Nord', dont nous sommes bien obligés de reconnaître d'emblée qu'il n'existe que comme mythe?'''. Crouzet is less persuasive when making the case for a Romantic 'philosophie de la chair' that might subtend this myth and so redeem it. The subsequent papers, however, largely ignore his concerns and set about describing aspects of the myth itself. Mme de Staël emerges as the dominant figure in place of Stendhal and her ideas are rehearsed by a number of contributors. Those papers that are devoted to Stendhal's struggle, in the main, to distinguish between his views of Paris and of the North, although Béatrice Didier and Pierrette Pavet-Jörg do much to illuminate his oppositions of Germanic and Italian cultures. Marthe Peyroux's entertaining review of Stendhal's attitude to megaliths notwithstanding, it is perhaps in order to accommodate his relative lack of interest in Scandinavia that the North is defined to include Britain, Holland, Germany, Poland and Russia (the definition of Romanticism is similarly inclusive). Despite this breadth, there is a great deal of repetition (happily the two papers on Balzac's Séraphîta work well together). At the same time, an obvious text such as Hugo's Han d'Islande is paid relatively scant attention. It is left to Alison Finch and Maria Walecka-Garbalinska to provide welcome balance with their respective surveys of women's writing and popular theatre of the period. Many of the contributors do little to connect their research to a broader analysis of what French myths of the North (and the South) might mean, not least in terms of establishing the latitude of France itself in the Romantic imagination. Furthermore, a number of the papers offer only general introductions to their subjects and the original research that does emerge sometimes fails to convince. For example, many of the references to Xavier Marmier, a considerable figure in this field, imply complete unfamiliarity with existing scholarship. Alain Guyot uses the year for Marmier's birth cited in general reference works rather than that given by scholars in the field since Alexandre Estignard in 1893. Françoise Chenet-Faugeras seems unaware of Wendy Mercer's challenge to Eldon Kaye's misinterpretation of Marmier's poetry (see Studi francesi, 37 (1993), 31–46). Dimitri Roboly, writing about the Voyage au centre de la terre, misidentifies Marmier's Lettres sur l'Islande as an original work of 1855 by François (sic) Marmier, even though other contributors correctly date the first edition of this work to 1837, and seems unaware that Daniel-Henri Pageaux has already written about Verne's borrowings from Marmier (see RLC, 54 (1980), 202–12).