Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor by Christy Wampole (review)

Reviews 273 le deuil, le racisme, et même la pédophilie, afin de “voir le monde à neuf”. À tout prendre, une contribution importante au domaine de la littérature féminine. St. Thomas University (NB, Canada) Jeannette Gaudet Wampole, Christy. Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor. Chicago: UP of Chicago, 2016. ISBN 978-0-226-31765-6. Pp. 287. Following Hans Blumenberg’s notion of “absolute metaphor” or the idea that “metaphors are not simply rhetorical flourishes, replaceable by non-metaphorical language, but that they allow thoughts to be expressed that are impossible to express in nonfigurative terms” (16), this compendious, lively study highlights French and, secondarily, German literary and philosophical writings of the twentieth century in which roots work as an “organizing trope” (2), at once a foundation, source, and seed for poetical thought (17). Eschewing texts where the word root “could simply be replaced by origin” (6), Wampole goes beyond the more obvious iterations of rootbased thinking, such as the Catholic traditionalism of Charles Maurras, who in the wake of Maurice Barrès famously took André Gide to task for his nomadic cosmopolitanism in the “Querelle du Peuplier” (112–16). Instead, combining archetypal (Bachelard, Jung) and historically grounded critiques, she unearths less common tropes likening human and plant realms, for instance the vertical relationship between inversion and religious conversion mediated by the “inverted plant” motif (ch. 3, “Roots and Transcendence,” on Claudel, Valéry, and Tournier’s Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique), and the rhizophilia of materialist-cum-mystic Simone Weil, for whom the rootlessness of the anguished modern spirit finds in property ownership and land cultivation an antidote to abstraction (ch. 4,“Saving Europe from Itself”). French and German writers are regularly placed in dialogue: Sartre’s critique in La nausée of Descartes’s Tree of Life is filtered through Heideggerian Bodenständigkeit (originary groundedness), while fine-grained readings of Breton regionalist poet Eugène Guillevic build on a gloss of Paul Celan’s “Radix, Matrix.” In its plea for a creative, revitalized understanding of roots epitomized by Édouard Glissant’s errance enracinée and Deleuze and Guattari’s postmodern“image concept”(217) of the rhizome, Rootedness downplays the extent to which nativist political rhetoric has dominated the Western imaginary: Hitler’s Mein Kampf, a text rife with botanical language, gets a long footnote (122n29), and the French interwar literary ideologues who would curry favor with the Nazi occupier, scant hearing. No discussion is offered of settlers’ rights discourse in French colonial Algeria (cf. Camus, Jules Roy), much less the forcible uprooting of the countless Arabo-Berber peasants whose plight Bourdieu broached in Le déracinement. Wampole’s compact, scrupulous readings make savvy use of etymology, a tactic deployed not only by philological positivists but also by Derrida in his language-based upturning of Western metaphysics (ch. 6, “Etymology and Essence”). A concluding plea for a post-human, neo-pagan plant democracy (ch. 7, “From Rhizome to Vegetal Democracy”) may resonate with only the most radicallyminded of Wampole’s readers, yet the many conceptually ambitious connections drawn between disparate realms of thought and literary genres make for compelling, thought-provoking reading throughout. Less a genealogical work in the history of ideas than a ramifying essay in metaphorology, Rootedness asks how today we are “to refuse an age-old metaphor” (253) that controls our collective thinking. Clearly, the close reading of texts major and minor with a mind to eclecticism is one good place to start. Johns Hopkins University (MD) Derek Schilling 274 FRENCH REVIEW 91.4 ...