The Making of Literary France

PRIVATE LIFE: ROME TO BYZANTIUM 411 (like Brown's) are the well-to-do and cultivated. His account is full of instruction and brilliant aper<;us. Alongside perceptiveness, Veyne also prizes learning; he is most winning as the exuberant caption-writer of his and Brown's sections, who confesses (in the Paris edition) to straining the patience of the assistants who chose the illustrations . Dull moments are few among the pictures: the famous flat-chested young female is really a man; the ox's yoke is inefficiently attached; Roman artists were never so realistic as Greek ones; the double flute is really a double clarinet; the barrel superseded the amphora; not the most beautiful cameo or the least boring, simply the largest; the second earliest trace of the European domesticated cat; a hairdo just like one in Thessalonika Museum; and so forth. An irrepressible teacher has lavished his erudition without stint. The English version needed a good editor. As it is, a misplaced caption invites us to admire on a crucifix the 'carefully curled hair' of Theodoric the Ostrogoth; the legend to figure 28 identifies the rooms of figure 27; a sixth- or seventh-century 'cannon foundry' raises eyebrows; so does the languorous unmarried couple 'accustomed to it.' Educated Frenchmen may know what Veyne means by the 'recently dubbed "evergetism,''' but the term is not English; translating Brown's allusions to il gran rifiuto and the Grande Feur does nothing to convey their sense; and Seneca should avoid quoting StJerome. Blunders like these belong less to the translator than to a publisher who subordinated production to advertising. The book is impoverished by comparison with its prototype. Veyne claims that 'Much additional material that was not in the original French is included,' but failing a guide, additions are less conspicuous than losses. The Paris edition, with running heads and picture captions printed in red, is notably handsomer, and it distributes the colour plates among the pages to which they belong, rather than bunching them up unexplained. Of the bibliographical essays by Brown, Thebert, and Rouche, only Brown's survives in English; captions are abridged; two diagrams - vestigial Annales artifacts - are excised. The rather modest price is less generous than it may seem. Despite the claims of its promoters, this uneven book simply adapts to current tastes the genre of 'daily life' history that it disavows. Yet thanks to Veyne and Brown, many pages are brilliant and original, offering much to anyone interested in Roman society and the early impact of Christianity. The Making of Literary France C.D.E. TOLTON Priscilla Parkhurst Clark. Literary France: The Making of a Culture Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press 1987. xvi, 273. us $28.50 Annually, many North American visitors to Paris, even with only a casual 412 C.D.E. TOLTON knowledge of French literature, delight in their recognition of writers' names on street signs. At the same time, they perhaps ponder why they have not encountered similar manifestations of literary pride back home. Priscilla Parkhurst Oark's Literary France explores the origins and evolution of France's peerless glorification of its literature. The result is a most faScinating book. Clark recognizes the complexity of defining a culture, and in particular, a literary culture. She concludes, however, that a national culture represents more than a simple sum of its constituent parts. 'Some of these parts - in this instance identifiable, more or less autonomous cultures within the larger society contribute more than others to a national identity. In France literary culture is one of these.' With this notion in mind, Clark discusses French literature as both a synchronic reflection of the culture at a fleeting moment and as an inevitable foundation for further diachronic cultural development. Naturally, Clark singles out the Revolution of 1789 as a crucial turning-point in the narrative of French literary culture. But while the aristocratic patronage of writers in pre-revolutionary France was replaced by the bourgeois merchandising of publications for a more broadly educated public in the nineteenth century, the national esteem for the refinements of the French language remained constant. Institutions such as the Academie fran~aise and the Sorbonne have contributed to this relative stability even up to the present day. The French respect for disciplined form (l'esprit de geometrie), best expressed in the ordered taste of the Ancien Regime, is a force to be reckoned with. It is Clark's contention that literature in France has been a profoundly social endeavour. Thus aesthetic and intellectual preoccupations have necessarily become linked to economic and political concerns to provide an impressive array ofpublicwriters. Clarkfocuses on Voltaire, Hugo, and Sartre as the epitome ofthe public writer for each of their respective centuries. She selects for each a single work which best illustrates his aesthetics and ideology: L'[ngenu for Voltaire, Quatre-vingt-treize for Hugo, and Les Mots for Sartre. But the parallels among the three authors become most apparent in her description of the public displays of emotion at their funerals, each one separated by roughly a century. Clark's command offour centuries ofFrench literature in an era when all but the comparativists among French literary scholars are becoming increasingly narrow is impressive indeed. Moreover, she approaches historical, political, sociological, and economic issues with equal ease. The book caters to an audience of non-specialists by quoting all French material in English, reserving the French originals for the satisfying scholarly notes neatly appended at the end. In addition to its attractive presentation, Clark's direct and engaging style makes Literary France an ideal book for travelling francophiles and students in survey courses of French literature or civilization as well as scholars in the field. Without even emphasizing that Ronald Reagan is an actor while Fran<,;ois Mitterrand is the author of twelve books, Clark deals rewardingly with what distinguishes France from the American literary scene. Not surprisingly, she ignores Canada completely. Intrigued Canadian readers, though, may well begin THE MAKING OF LITERARY FRANCE 413 to wonder when more city streets will be named after authors, when Stephen Leacock or Gabrielle Roy will grace a five-dollar bill, when literary commemorative postage stamps will become the order of the day, when the GovernorGeneral 's literary prizes will have as much impact as the Prix Goncourt, when the minutes of the Royal Society of Canada will be reported in the press with the same interest as the Academie fran~aise's, or when Robert Fulford's literary interviews will control television viewers' social agendas as thoroughly as do Bernard Pivot's Apostrophes on Friday evenings. In one respect, however, the Canadian literary scene duplicates the current French one. Our most famous and esteemed writers, paralleling Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes of post-Sartrian France, have been world-class theoreticians like McLuhan and Frye. Of these, Canadians may well be proud. But it remains that none of our politicians have had the literary credentials ofa Malraux, a Pompidou, or a Mitterrand. And, in the final analysis, Clark's book leaves little doubt that between politics and literature, marriage matters. Theorizing the French Enlightenment LAWRENCE KERSLAKE Josue V. Harari. Scenarios of the Imaginary: Theorizing the French Enlightenment Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 1987.240. us $24.95 This book comes as a refreshing change from the narcissistic tendency of much modern critical theory to examine, in a sort of closed circle, the nature of its own discourse. Through a series of interpretive essays devoted primarily to eighteenth-century French texts, Harari challenges the reader to reflect on the ontological status of theory and its relation to the real. He contends that 'underlying every theory there exists a corresponding scenario - real or imaginary,' and that 'theory is merely the justification, after the fact, of a scenario.' The one problematic element in this initial statement is that it admits the possibility of a 'real' scenario, whereas not only does Harari focus his attention exclusively on 'scenarios of the imaginary,' he claims that all theory necessarily 'pre-empts,' 'occults,' or 'suppresses' the real. His demonstrations of particular cases in which an imaginary scenario subtends and determines theory are, for the most part, very convincing, and we can accept that in these cases 'the theoretical imaginary does not negate the real, but instead rigorously subsumes it on its own terms, ... displac[ing] it ever so slightly'; but we are left wondering about the epistemological problem of whether a 'real' scenario can possibly exist. Harari does provide at least a possible solution (although it does not appear to be intended as such) in his concluding remarks. He sees the current popularity of theory, and particularly of 'theories of desire, of lack, of absence' as corresponding to a profound modern need to suppress the real. However, asserts Harari, 'for all of its efforts to master the real, theory only succeeds in affirming its presence. ...