The Art of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque by Libby Murphy (review)

charme propre” (266). Que diraient ces voyageurs s’ils revenaient aujourd’hui et voyaient les gratte-ciel qui ont remplacé les tentes et les puits de pétrole qui occupent le chimérique désert? Auburn University (AL) Samia I. Spencer Murphy, Libby. The Art of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque. New Haven: Yale UP, 2016. ISBN 978-0-300-21751-3. Pp. 279. Were the countless French infantrymen who after summer 1914 marched off to war along flag-lined thoroughfares so many consenting victims resigned to the patriotic necessity of bloodshed? Seconding historian Leonard Smith who questions the Great War metanarrative as a tragedy of victimization, Libby Murphy restores to consciousness a neglected constant of wartime experience: even as they obeyed orders, ordinary soldiers were overwhelmingly concerned with saving their hide. Rather than epic or elegy, it was the picaresque mode—concretized by the haphazard wanderings of LouisFerdinand Céline’s Bardamu, a morally pliant being if ever there was one—that best exemplified the improvisational, come-what-may attitude of the French foot soldier portrayed in the literary cultures of the day. Unrivaled in his mastery of le système D and always seeking a lucky break, the Gallic picaro-in-arms comes across in Murphy’s generous account as an irreverent trickster whose independence of thought and, on occasion, of action places him at odds with his imagined German counterparts, strictly beholden to military authority, or to the phlegmatic Britons who sheepishly “muddle through” the war. But it is those armchair patriots à la Maurice Barrès who attracted the most biting criticism: as tenacious as a trench rat himself, le poilu saw through hypocrisy and refused to accept shirkers’ incessant propagandizing, or bourrage de crâne. Building on an impressive command of Great War historiography from Jean Norton Cru’s Témoins (1929) to Stéphane Audouin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, Murphy roundly takes issue with literary critic Evelyn Cobley (and presumably Pierre Schoentjes, author of Fictions de la Grande Guerre [2009]) who solemnly cast the foot soldier as brutalized victim. Laughter—given full literary expression through satire— was inseparable from the titular French “art of survival.” Eight chapters place in dialogue literary and journalistic texts from Le Crapouillot to Le Canard enchaîné, dime novels, illustrated caricatures, and film (released in France in 1919 as Charlot soldat, Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms is a lesson in picaresque resourcefulness). This eclecticism has the merit of desacralizing the Great War literary corpus: satirist Georges de La Fouchardière’s serialized Le bouif and Léon Werth’s messily episodic Clavel soldat receive more generous airings than do Henri Barbusse’s canonical Le feu or Céline’s début novel. Murphy draws apposite comparisons with British, German, and Czech sources; thus Bruce Bairnsfather’s Old Bill drawings stand alongside Francisque Poulbot’s depictions of Montmartre street children giddily playing war. At stake is 208 FRENCH REVIEW 91.3 Reviews 209 how in the face of senseless violence the picaresque pragmatics of “getting by” pervaded the Great War literary and pictorial imaginary, and how texts refashioned an erstwhile Spanish narrative mode known for its blend of epic “adventure time” and routine “everyday time” (19) and for its peripatetic working-class or peasant protagonist, who encounters an array of human types while remaining a non-entity or“everyman”(24). Accessible and witty, this exploration of French cultural memory does much to refocus our understanding of la guerre de 14–18 by retrieving the nimble-spirited ingenuity that sustained French society until 1930, when pessimistic narratives of heroic victimization displaced it. Johns Hopkins University (MD) Derek Schilling Pfaff, Françoise. Nouveaux entretiens avec Maryse Condé: écrivain et témoin de son temps. Paris: Karthala, 2016. ISBN 978-2-8111-1707-8. Pp. 200. Françoise Pfaff’s 1993 Entretiens avec Maryse Condé introduced the author to the public at a crucial time in her career and presented an exploration of the relationship between Condé’s life and her work as writer, academic and activist. Nouveaux entretiens updates readers on Condé’s trajectory since then, as she reflects on events that have transformed the world she engages in her work and...