Philippe Sollers, and: The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel: Literature and the Left in the Wake of Engagement (review)

Book Reviews The remaining articles range from Donald Roy's Arnavonesque treatment of Le Malade imaginaire, based largely on his own Sick in the Head translation, to Noel Peacock's comprehensive study of nearly 50 years ofV École des femmes settings, with most singling out the work of a particularly influential director. Thus, Robert McBride gives us an insightful presentation of Jean-Luc Boutté's bicentennial Tartuffe adaptation, Jean Emelina a well-reasoned and often humorous look at Jacques Weber's Misanthrope niçois, Stephen Bamforth a crafty, well-supported judgment of Jacques Lasalle 's Dom Juans, and Christophe Campos and Michael Sadler combine for a happy romp through Mnouchkineland to visit the Good Witch Ariane and her Tartuffe. Guy Snaith shares the results of an imaginative college production at Liverpool. Translation is the focus of the articles by Elizabeth Woodrough and Eileen Cottis, who illuminate, respectively, the Posner/Crimp "gutter language" Misanthrope of the Young Vic and the HoIloway /Bartlett "Docklands" version by the touring Red Shift company, both of which are heavy with the political overtones of the Thatcherite era. Among the many achievements of these essays is the discussion of a new panorama of young stars, including Emmanuelle Béart and Elizabeth McGovern, whose new Célimènes go from the sensually passionate to a Madonna-inspired "material girl." It is worthwhile to become acquainted with these Molieres of (mainly) the 1990's, even as the productions of the new millennium are on the drawing boards. James F. Gaines Mary Washington College Roland A. Champagne. Philippe Sellers. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996. Pp. 117. $18 (paper). Danielle Marx-Scouras. The Cultural Politics of 'Tel Quel: Literature and the Left in the Wake of Engagement. University Park, PA: Perm State UP, 1997. Pp. χ + 254. $50 (cloth), $19.95 (paper). Roland Champagne acknowledges in the opening pages of his study that, "after writing my doctoral and master's thesis on his work during the early 1970s, I became bored with the apparent monotony of Sollers's work" (7). In this monograph, he plods through the writer's substantial literary œuvre with mixed emotions and uneven results. Susceptible to the seductions of Sollers the cultural player, he sometimes loses the focus on Sollers the writer. He has a feel for his subject , however, and allusions to Molière, Voltaire, Diderot, Montaigne, Casanova, Fragonard, and Poussin (among others) flesh out the portrait of Sollers the "modem day Arlequin, in control of the theatre with his ready wit and sense of humor ... wearing the multi-colored costume (Marxist , Derridean, Lacanian, Maoist, Catholic, etc.) of ideological commitment. In fact, these shifting colors are those of the masks of the commedia dell'arte because Sollers has played at being the stock character associated with these various ideologies" (100). Champagne sometimes seems to be looking over his shoulder as he writes, making sure he has not missed an irony or been duped by yet another mask, but his study succeeds in fixing a lively figure of Sollers the Ironist. The question of relations between writing and commitment is the focus of Danielle MarxScouras ' carefully researched study of Tel Quel, which presents a history of the review—changing editorial composition and ideological postures are rigorously tracked—and analyzes what she takes to be its fundamental "mission": disengaging literature. In the wake of the destalinization, Marx-Scouras argues, disengagement reflected a sense of the illegitimacy of the position of engagement, viewed as having slipped from opposition to fascism into collaboration with the "twin barbarism," Stalinism. Disengagement, therefore, does not signify a retreat from the political back to the esthetic, but rather a (political) invalidation of the political term, subsequently generalized into a broad critique of humanism. This is then reinforced by the linguistic tum in the social sciences, engendering "a theoretical basis for reactualizing the avant-garde dream" (52). If, initially, disengagement was vulnerable to charges of reactionary estheticism, by the eighties it Vol. XXXVIII, No. 4 147 L'Esprit Créateur was "perceived as a manner of affirming individual rights over ideological totalitarianism" (117). In other words, "ethics" intervenes strategically to destabilize the opposition esthetics/politics. As Champagne's monograph reminds us, however, we are dealing with...