'When familiar meanings dissolve. . .': Essays in French Studies in Memory of Malcolm Bowie (review)

This collection of essays in memory of Malcolm Bowie is poignantly, recurrently, woven with his traces, from Michael Worton's handsome opening tribute to Tim Mathews's closing and moving reflections on the assimilation of his loss. By way of prolegomenon, Marina Warner revisits acoustic eventfulness and the wresting of sense from meaning, of the preverbal from the verbal, in Mallarme´ and Beckett. Michael Sheringham initiates Part II, 'Poetry', with a fascinating account of the infiltration, by cinema and the cinematic, of Pierre Alferi's Sentimentale journe´e (1997), and is followed by Adam Watt's examination of the existential adventure that reading Mallarme´, Vale´ry, and Leiris is: courting insecurity, the better to veer between verbal states or pitch into verbal delirium. Natasha Grigorian explores shifting expressive energies and interpretative implications in the treatment of the Hercules myth by the closely acquainted Gustave Moreau and Heredia, while Katherine Lunn-Rockliffe tellingly reveals the dialectical play of public forthrightness and private turmoil in the syntax of Hugo's astral metaphysics. Patrick O'Donovan provides a carefully nuanced assessment of our relationship with Vigny's verse, particularly as it is embodied in the changing temporalities that the verse inhabits. And Hugues Azérad deftly examines Glissant's renegotiation of the relationship between modernism and postcolonialism through his reading of Reverdy. Part III, 'Proust', opens with two studies as much about Bowie the reader as about Proust: Joseph Acquisto provides a consoling apologia for the critical position that discovers a work's vitality (here Mallarmé and Proust) 'in the networks one can trace among the operating systems' (p. 149), while Carol Murphy looks at the 'heuristic energies, chaotic impulses and healing powers' (p. 158) in Bowie's ravelling and unravelling of Proust's textual weave. Later, Bowie is also intimately present as a reader in Philip Draver's searching commentary on Lacan's 'Lituraterre'. Akane Kawakami takes us on an exhilarating set of sorties in Proustian aeroplanes, while Kathy McIlvenny explores the ubiquity of processes of mediation in À la recherche and what they tell us about desire's ever-expanding and self-jeopardizing field of activity. The sources and implications of Elstir's painterly method fruitfully preoccupy Gabrielle Townsend, while the role of the radiographic image exercises Áine Larkin's investigative acumen. This part closes with another astute and 'interwoven' reader of Proust, Roland Barthes, in Kathrin Yacavone's absorbing study. Equally absorbing is Alison Finch's pursuit of the dissolving meanings of 'influence' over five centuries of French usage, in the first essay in Part IV ('Theory, Visual Arts, Music'). Henriette Korthals Altes considers the sublime in Pascal Quignard's essays as a play between theory and fiction, intellectual creation and bodily affect, while Mary Orr reveals the synergies in the thinking and writing of Louis Bouilhet and Flaubert. Johanna Malt takes us into the Sartrean imaginary the better to assess the oscillations in consciousness generated by modern sculpture. And, in an engaging final essay, Roland-François Lack surveys the ramifying progeny of Vigny's 'Le Cor'. It is no small consolation to think that Malcolm would find in this collection so much to relish.