Albert Cohen: Dissonant Voices (review)

Book Reviews ing's details to larger cultural discourses: me pink folds of me jeune dame's dress mark the end of fashion's "crinolinomania," her bouquet evokes political Bonapartism, die half-peeled citron calls on sensualist philosophy, and die parrot emerges as an over-determined and unstable sign combining bourgeois conformity with colonial exoticism, religious ecstasy widi erotic audacity, and aesüietic provocation with linguistic mimicry. Even die dangling monocle is given its own clever and Lacan-inflected chapter, which reads me masculine eye-piece as an allegory of beholding. The eclectic cultural studies approach works here because it's anchored in solid art history. Reed gives us a sweeping but lively and well-documented peek at the Paris of die 1868 Salon, combining broad discussion of its political, economic, and aesdietic influence with close analysis of critical responses to Manet's painting, ranging from die well-known (color over line, form over representation) to the less familiar (de Renjarde's take on the "sleazy and garish" pink of the Jeune dame's dress; Castagnary's complaint that fresh oysters abut dirty coffee cups in Luncheon in the Studio). High-quality illustrations, including reproduced caricatures and salon tickets, add to the reader's enjoyment. Key to die book's originality is its juxtaposition of Manet's work not only with Courbet's similarly-themed Woman with a Parrot, but with Flaubert's writing, especially the Trois Contes (1877). The multivalent senses of 'stain' or tache underlie Reed's intelligent close readings of "La Légende de Saint-Julien l'hospitalier" and "Un cœur simple." Blending judicious touches of genetic criticism with aesthetic philosophy and psychoanalytical formalism, Reed argues that Flaubert's use of the word tache performs die same destabilization of representation diat does discourse around Monet's color splotches of paint. A brief epilogue points toward a genealogy from Manet and Flaubert to Pollock and Sartre. Throughout, the aumor's organizational clarity and nervy prose keep die impressively thorough study from bogging down. One of me book's primary aims is to revise me utpictura poesis model—and it does so quite successfully in its detailed central chapters. Here, the word/image relation is shown to be non-symmetrical ("[ZoIa] denie[d] the 'literary' to Manet while appropriateing the painterly to himself), conflictual ("[In Saint Julien, Flaubert's] relationship to his visual 'source' is intentionally malicious ; referring to the window means to transform, subvert, parody, or distort, as well as to limn it"), or even, simply, "perverse and ironic." These nuanced readings contrast widi me introductory chapter's radier too general statements of painting and literature's "intersections" or "interminglings ." In its tendency to generalize, the first chapter is a bit like me rind of die citron fruit Reed analyzes so vividly in Manet's painting: a slighdy dry but promising peel that unfolds to reveal a juicy, zesty center. Widi its wide-ranging scholarship and canny close readings, mis book provides a richly textured birth-story of the literary and aesdietic culture of modernism in France. Andrea Goulet University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Jack I. Abecassis. Albert Cohen: Dissonant Voices. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Pp.272. $45. Dans Albert Cohen: Dissonant Voices, Jack Abecassis annonce d'emblée son intention d'examiner les raisons du fossé qui existe entre la popularité d'Albert Cohen (1895-1981) auprès du public européen et son absence dans les mondes de la critique littéraire et universitaire, en particulier outre-Atlantique. Le "paradoxe cohénien" d'être à la fois beaucoup lu et peu étudié résulte selon lui de voix dissonantes parcourant l'œuvre cohénienne qu'il importe de comprendre afin de faire justice à un auteur qui reçut en 1968 le Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française. Traumatisé à 10 ans par la découverte violente de l'antisémitisme, Cohen rejette le silence de la blessure initiale et recrée sans cesse un espace dialogique de réponse à son agresseur, mais Vol. XLV, No. 4 91 L'Esprit Créateur ne parvient pas à surmonter le traumatisme (chapitre 1). De cet échec provient le fil thématique de la...