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  • Postcolonial Brittany: Literature between Languages
  • Jean-Yves Le Disez
Postcolonial Brittany: Literature between Languages. By Heather Williams. (Cultural Identity Studies, 2). Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. 191 pp. Pb £33.40; $68.93; €44.50.

To read the words 'postcolonial Brittany' on the cover of a book comes as quite a shock to this Breton reviewer. For probably two reasons: i) although they largely took their inspiration from French intellectuals Postcolonial Studies have not enjoyed in France the kind of success they have met with in the English-speaking world; and ii) to refer to Brittany as 'colonial' in la France une et indivisible is still osé. It took perhaps a foreign, albeit knowledgeable critic, to quietly dare frame the question of Brittany's literary identity in those terms. As the subtitle indicates, this is a case-study in in-betweenness, the first fully-fledged analysis in the English language of French-language literature in Brittany qua 'Francophone' literature. To answer the main question she raises, i.e., 'what makes literature Breton today if it is not the language in which it is written [?]' (p. 32), Williams focuses on two arguably crucial periods, namely the 1830s onwards (up to the 1870s) and the 1960s and 70s. The strength of her demonstration lies in the detailed scrutiny of texts, of both lexis and syntax, where she tracks down traces of the tensions between languages, histories and allegiances. Although Chateaubriand, Balzac, La Villemarqué and others are seen are proponents of the emergence of a Francophone Breton literature, the now almost forgotten poet Brizeux emerges as the prototype of the kind of compromise that was available to nineteenth-century writers of Brittany. The study of how he wrote 'to Paris' – i.e. 'packag[ed] Brittany for a French market' (p. 77) – will certainly be food for thought to anyone wishing to study the various literary artefacts that have emerged in Brittany over the last two centuries. The other writer Williams sees as exemplary in the nineteenth century is Tristan Corbière, whose strategy of compromise (or lack of it) she rightly sees as superior in terms of both literary quality and epistemology. In the twentieth century, she sees Hélias, the author of the bestseller Le Cheval d'orgueil, as a late avatar of the Brizeux-type of Breton writer and singles out writers of the 1970s such as Keineg, Piriou and Keginer who tackled the problem of the Breton dual culture head on in their 'revolutionary' poetry and essays inspired by their sympathy for oppressed peoples throughout the then dying French empire. Of all the challenging questions the book raises, one in particular should retain our attention. Translation, which has played a major role in almost all literary enterprises in Brittany in the last 200 years, has not been, Williams insists rightly, sufficiently problematized. Further studies of the Francophone literature of Brittany inspired by this pioneering work – which could also include authors like Souvestre, Le Braz, Henri Queffélec or, typically, Armand Robin – will have to address that key issue. But a sign perhaps that Williams is right to see in Corbière a forerunner in this history of hybridity is the fact that Keineg [End Page 123] recently chose as a title for his collected poems a quotation by the author of Les Amours jaunes which sums it all up: 'les trucs sont démolis'.

Jean-Yves Le Disez
UEB (Université Européenne De Bretagne)
UBO (Université De Bretagne Occidentale)
Brest, France
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