Narrative Interludes: Musical Tableaux in Eighteenth-Century French Texts by Tili Boon Cuillé (review)

Book Reviews141 and feel of language, about reproducing similar rhymes, alliterations, onomatopoeias, repetitions, and wordplay, produces better translations. Overall, Surprised in Translation by Mary Ann Caws is a useful tool for helping all students of language and literature to understand the difficulties inherent in trying to put a feeling or a mental image into words, transforming those words into written language, and then translating that language into another. In today's world of global misunderstandings, her book might offer insights into managing the surprising slippage that occurs with daily crosscultural communication. Barbara KlawNorthern Kentucky University Cuillé, Tili Boon. Narrative Interludes: Musical Tableaux in EighteenthCentury French Texts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Pp [xi]xxi , 284. ISBN 0-8020-3842-5. $75.00 (Cloth). In this work, Cuillé explores the profoundly interdisciplinary nature of eighteenth-century intellectual culture by demonstrating the ways in which writers and thinkers used musical metaphors to further political debates about aesthetics, nationalism, morality, and gender. Cuillé focuses in particular on the use of musical tableaux, literary devices which suspended fictional narratives and, as she suggests, offered the opportunity for trenchant social and cultural critiques. Operatic quarrels dominated the French intellectual landscape throughout the eighteenth century, from the early deliberations between les Anciens et les Modernes in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, through the Querelle des Bouffons at mid-century and the later Gluck-Piccinni quarrels of the 1770s. In many respects, such debates seem foreign to us today: indeed, why would one get so worked up about the nature and power of opera to move or inspire the soul? But what was at stake, in all of these discussions was not just music, but aesthetics, language, morality—la patrie itself. Cuillé's research focuses on the Querelle des Bouffons, and, in particular on literary responses to the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose arguments, put forward in such works as his Lettre sur la musique française (1753), his Lettre à d'Alembert (1758) and Emile, ou l'éducation (1762), were among the most influential. In the 1753 Lettre, for example, Rousseau argued that Italian was a more musical language than French, a statement which threatened the supremacy of the French language, and with it, the very idea of 'French-ness' itself. Meanwhile, in Emile and the 1758 Lettre, he suggested something altogether more sinister. In a two-pronged argument, he claimed that women were emotionally unruly creatures unable to control their sensibility, and, at the same time, that music itself was equally volatile. Music, he suggested, existed beyond the parameters of mimesis, which meant that the meanings that it conveyed were difficult to discern, and, more significantly, that its effect on the 142Women in French Studies listener could not be controlled (xviii). As such, the relationship between women and music was inevitably fraught with danger. Rousseau's ideas were not well-received by all members of the French intellectual elite, many ofwhom publicly responded to Rousseau's words. Cuillé suggests that their responses can be read along the lines that Rousseau himself put forward. In other words, while one group of writers concerned itself with Rousseau's critique of French nationalism, another contributed to the debate about music as a vehicle for gendered moral disarray. Cuillé herself uses these divisions to structure her work. In the first section, she draws on the writings of Diderot, Cazotte and Beaumarchais to interrogate Rousseau's ideas on national styles, and in the second, she rums to the writings of Charrière, Cottin and Staël to challenge Rousseau's moral understandings about women and music. At the same time, however, she also notes that even though the two 'sides' foregrounded different aspects of the debate, they also worked closely together. As such, the arguments presented can be seen to dovetail into one another. Cuillé explores the ways in which writers and thinkers responded to Rousseau through the medium of literature by using the musical tableau as a method for formulating and propagating their contributions to the debate. Her work relies on a fundamental distinction between musical scenes and musical tableaux. She argues that within the musical scene, a common device in eighteenth-century literature, music is...