Petite histoire du spectacle industriel by Patrick Bouvet (review)

Reviews 233 displeases this man, and his displeasure reaches its apex on those occasions when the extended family gathers for a holiday meal, providing him with more victims and thus enabling him to unleash his anger on a broader stage. In the second moment of this novel, we find that man much diminished by old age,Alzheimer’s disease, and aphasia. When the narrator goes to visit him in the assisted living facility where he now resides, he takes his own son, a young man in early adulthood, along with him for support. He frets that his father will not recognize him—and indeed it falls to the grandson to introduce the son to the father. Yet recognition comes no more easily now than it has in the past, if for different reasons:“Cet homme n’ayant qu’assez peu reconnu, du plus loin que je me souvienne, mon existence au cours des années, j’étais, pour ainsi dire, paré” (44). During the visit, the narrator finds himself as speechless as his father, and he realizes that they have always lived in that speechless state, insofar as anything significant is concerned. Similarly, the detachment from this man that he now feels is not substantially different from the separation that has always colored their relations— and it is far too late to repair that situation. The third moment focuses not on the father, but rather on another resident of the facility where he lives, a woman who has evaded surveillance and escaped from the grounds. The narrator and his son come upon her as she is making her way on foot toward the home she once occupied, and their encounter with her proves to be far richer than the one they just endured with the narrator’s father. Denis Beneich proposes those three moments to us, wagering upon the subtle reciprocities that circulate among them. For each of them comments, in various ways, on understanding and misunderstanding; on what it means to mourn when mourning has no real object; on a largely misplaced nostalgia for the way things should have been, but never were; on opportunities neglected in the past but put into play in the present; and on the ways one may think about the now, apart from the tyranny of the then. University of Colorado, Boulder Warren Motte Bouvet, Patrick. Petite histoire du spectacle industriel. Paris: L’Olivier, 2017. ISBN 978-2-8236-1021-5. Pp. 176. As it moves beyond binaries, French poetry today embraces many forms and aims, from classicism to visual experimentation, from personal journeys through inner and outer worlds to textual intimations either of stasis or of a collective forward surge. Bouvet tends toward the latter, emphasizing a frank, rhythmic, sardonic portrayal of our media-saturated age, especially its evolution toward appealing surfaces that beckon with false promises. Petite histoire is accessible poetry for those who are pop-culture savvy, made by a musician-artist-writer as part of an ongoing critique of the postmodern condition. The latest installment in a fifteen-year quest for greater truth via books that spotlight a media- and technology-driven hall of mirrors, it centers around the device of inviting the reader into a “machine à remonter le temps” (8). People and events appear before our eyes in an ever-unfolding montage, one that resembles what we might see in a museum installation based on films, photos, video, artworks, and various and sundry artifacts that continually appear. A historically tinged and dangerously lively “Apocalypse [...] en marche” (91) is foregrounded, along with repeated reference to the affective and sensory responses of “le visiteur.”Assuming one makes the leap of faith to become this visitor, fully immersed in the succession of events and cued to their deceptive enticements, the volume’s substance has an intriguing range, complemented by the stylistic choice to vary the pacing through sets of centered, left-aligned, right-aligned, and more free-form brief verse.As famous figures and imaginatively reconstructed scenes interweave, to remind us of Adam and Eve as much as of “George Méliès / P. T. Barnum / Walt Disney / Leni Riefenstahl / Jeff Koons / et tant d’autres” (9), the reader benefits most by...