Literary Polemics. Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, Breton (review)

L'Esprit Créateur devenir" (518). Given these premises and this method, Montandon's study is most provocative as a symptom of how, from a French point of view, the European past might be imagined in 1999. Thomas M. Kavanagh University of California, Berkeley Suzanne Guerlac. Literary Polemics. Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, Breton. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997. Pp. 294. This is an accomplished and thoroughly innovative study. At one point the author says that the surrealist image is "the bringing together of things that appear to have little in common." This is also exactly what Suzanne Guerlac's book does, and in a most convincing manner. So many interconnecting threads run through her study that in a short review I can deal only with the aspects that I believe to be the most salient. The author's central thesis is that the 1960s, mainly through the Tel Quel group and theory, are credited with having achieved a radical departure from the past and revolutionized the literary field. The proponents of theory, and it is an old story which now has the status of a literary "truth," then kept themselves busy explaining how passé and irrelevant authors such as Breton, Sartre, and Valéry had become. Georges Bataille was the icon of the day but they created a Bataille tailored to their needs, one cleansed of all references to the sacred and ethnography. However, the Tel Quel generation was reenacting (like a hidden inheritance) old literary/political debates and old myths of literature. In other words, the fetishization of literature treated as an absolute never stopped. Reversing chronology for good reasons, the book starts with Bataille and the way his concept of transgression was reinscribed and appropriated during the 1960s so as to be tumed into a convenient philosophical operator in order to attempt to supersede Breton's aporias, among others. Through this masterful rewriting of French literary history, Guerlac ably demonstrates that Sartre's Qu'est-ce-que la littérature? does not promote an instrumental view of literature subservient to social-political goals but instead sees it as an absolute leading to engagement. Furthermore, and this is one of the many strong points of this book, Guerlac takes Bergson seriously. Little known in the United States and somewhat neglected in France nowadays, Bergson seems to be the scapegoat of modern French philosophy perhaps because he was one of the greatest philosophers of the century. There is no way his influence can be over-estimated, and Guerlac does a superb job at showing how in all these debates involving Bataille, Sartre, and Valéry, Bergson and his fundamental philosophical categories are never very far off, even though his name is not always mentioned. It also means that if one deals with French intellectual history since the 1920s, looking for Bergson instead of being blinded by the superficial omnipresence of Hegel (as in most Bataille, Breton or Sartre scholarship), a fresh and major rereading of this very history, like the one offered by this book, becomes possible. Finally, I should add that Guerlac's work most productively combines and balances close readings and a very keen knowledge of French history. Readers will have to be well acquainted with theory and be ready for a lot of erudition and unexpected dialectic reversals, but will be well rewarded. Jean-François Fourny Ohio State University 166 Winter 1999 ...