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Reviewed by:
  • Flaubert's Tentation: Remapping Nineteenth-Century French Histories of Religion and Science
  • Laurence M. Porter, independent scholar
Orr, Mary . Flaubert's Tentation: Remapping Nineteenth-Century French Histories of Religion and Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xi + 352. ISBN 978-0-19-925858-1

This is the first book-length monograph on La Tentation de saint Antoine in English. Mary Orr focuses on the 1874 version. She identifies its literary genre as a Mystère or [End Page 302] Mystery Play (10), a dramatized presentation of the revealed truths of the Christian faith. Because a clash of views emanating from several different sides of the discussion occupies much of the text, I think it would be more illuminating to identify it as a Symposium in the tradition of Plato's dialogue or of the long second part, authored by Jean de Meun, of the Medieval Roman de la Rose. Orr herself explains compellingly how the work must be understood in the context of intellectual debates between scientists, philosophers, and theologians, and of further debates among differing factions within each of these groups. That said, her study is a magnificent, ground-breaking achievement offering a fresh, definitive study of the Tentation in the context of intellectual history, and simultaneously, paradoxically opening many possibilities for further research, in which she invites us enthusiastically to partake. Without being brash enough to say so directly, Mary Orr shows how scholars, overwhelmed by Flaubert's erudition, have failed to see the forest for the trees. They have overlooked many basic, obvious questions, and missed many of the sources most influential on Flaubert. He emerges from her investigations as even less original than we had thought, in terms of the massive contributions of other authors to his work – and as far more original in terms of how he "remaps" (a felicitous metaphor for recontextualizing) the intellectual history of his century, including its archeological, geological, and cosmological visions. Sly parallels between the dawning of the established Catholic Church in fourth-century Alexandria, and the twilight of that Establishment in nineteenth-century France, continually peer like mocking goblins through the fabric of Flaubert's and of Orr's texts, like a self-conscious, dematerialized Quasimodo haunting Notre Dame. "With delicious irony, Flaubert's revivified, fictional Antoine 're-embodies' the debate [in the 1850s] concerning the relics of Saint Anthony the Great," and Vatican i, decreeing the infallibility of the Pope when speaking ex cathedra in matters of faith and morals, paralleled the First Council of Nicea, which formulated the official, anti-heretical version of the Apostles' Creed in the fourth century. Orr could have invoked the political parallel of Napoleon i snatching the imperial crown from the pope's hands in order to proclaim himself emperor, or – had the event not occurred a few decades later, the "scientific" parallel of the un-psychoanalyzed Freud decreeing the Œdipus Complex and other such new orthodoxies.

Consistently focusing on the central but often neglected forces at play in intellectual history, Mary Orr provides essential background information. She provides a substantial essay for each of the seven parts or visions of the 1874 Tentation, while convincingly elucidating the coherence of the whole, orchestrated as a total initiatory experience for the reader. Along the way, Claudine Gothot-Mersch and Jean Seznec are repeatedly called to task for their oversights and omissions. Orr schools us not to take Flaubert's own reading lists as definitive, pointing out compelling parallels between other nineteenth-century paratexts (notably, here, high-level but non-technical vehicles for mediating cosmological, paleontological, and archeological discoveries to the educated public) and Flaubert's own work. She makes one feel as if she had been leaning over Flaubert's shoulder as he wrote, detecting materials imported often with little change, but always inserted cunningly into a broader context that transforms their meaning.

To pay proper respect to Orr's rich, varied contributions to Flaubert studies would require a very long article. Instead, I shall simply list a few quibbles, and a small portion [End Page 303] of Orr's valuable discoveries: in Part I, presented as a description of Egypt, it would have been interesting to hear more about...

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