Confronting Evil: The Psychology of Secularization in Modern French Literature by Scott M. Powers (review)

Reviews 211 se détourne de cette subjectivité et fonde une œuvre où le signe, par son rythme et sa “musique”, tente de s’imposer dans le monde réel comme un nouveau point de repère objectif excluant cependant l’individualité et les différences, une voie qui, selon Picherit, le mène à l’antisémitisme. Cette approche des œuvres de Proust et Céline comme réponses à des catastrophes personnelles ou communautaires est originale, complexe et bien écrite, mais elle laisse en suspens la question de la spécificité de l’œuvre littéraire par rapport à la biographie, à l’histoire familiale et sociale dans laquelle cette œuvre s’inscrit. Ripon College (WI) Dominique Poncelet Powers, Scott M. Confronting Evil: The Psychology of Secularization in Modern French Literature.West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2016. ISBN 978-1-61249-453-1. Pp. 274. Confronting Evil offers a compelling and at times provocative take on the literary dimensions of secularization in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France. Focusing on the works of Baudelaire,Zola,Huysmans,and Céline,and drawing broadly from the Freudian tradition and William James, Powers makes a persuasive case for two“psychologies of secularization”that emerge from a comparative reading of these four modern French writers. One sort of psychology, which Powers uncovers in the works of Baudelaire and Zola, is able to “ward off” the conversion experience thanks to psychic (and literary) mechanisms of irony and sublimation, which reveal and enact, in the literary sense, mourning for lost transcendence and a divinely-sanctioned moral order. Nostalgia for an absent sacred paradoxically maintains vestigial openness to transcendence and inoculates a person of the first psychological sort against the possibility of violent conversion. Huysmans and Céline, on the other hand, betray in their earlier writings a more unstable, spiritually fraught psychology. The utter relinquishment of the spiritual in favor of thoroughgoing atheism and materialism in these authors’early works eventually collapses and then explodes, Powers argues, in the form of Huysmans’s deeply Catholic later novels and the potent anti-Semitism of Céline’s Bagatelles pour un massacre. Instead of liberating a person from moral and social constraints, absolute secularism becomes a psychic liability, which in the worst of cases (i.e., the sort of worldview encountered in Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit) makes a person vulnerable to potentially toxic ideologies. Confronting Evil makes two important contributions to the study of secularization’s literary manifestations. The first is to have pointed out that religion matters in how the scholar approaches modern texts—especially in naturalist novels, such as Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, where one might have difficulty detecting religious content. Indeed, Powers is likely at his most impressive in teasing out the repressed theological substrate of Zola’s first novel and then showing how it undermines naturalist pretentions to explain human reality exclusively in terms of biology. Powers’s second, and more significant, contribution is to have made clear, if only in the context of a literary analysis, the psychic limits of the secular worldview. Nowhere advocating a return of the religious, Powers is nonetheless honest with himself and his reader about the psychological (and perhaps social) dangers of unconditional secularism. In particular, his reading of Céline suggests that metaphysical consolation is an ineradicable need of the human psyche, and that improper stewardship of that need can easily bear bitter fruit.At a time when the secular Western order is being challenged by nationalist, Islamist, and perhaps progressive illiberalism, Confronting Evil invites needed reflection on secularism’s claims to found an existentially sustainable worldview. Preserving a moderate secular consensus, which celebrates the religious while inhibiting its political aspirations, will require secularism’s willingness to submit to a critique of its shortcomings. Powers’s book moves in this direction and should be of interest to anyone concerned with saving the secular from itself. University of Wisconsin, Whitewater Louis Betty Ramos, Ángeles Sirvent, et al., éd. Femmes auteurs du dix-huitième siècle: nouvelles approches critiques. Paris: Champion, 2016. ISBN 978-2-7453-3118-2. Pp. 334. This interesting collection of twenty-one articles, originally presented at a conference...