Le sentiment végétal: feuillages d’extrême contemporain par Marinella Termite (review)

an image from Rétif de la Bretonne’s 1782 Le paysan perverti that shows two men (one of them the focus of chapter 7) standing in front of a high table, consulting and apparently discussing pages of illustrations. The image is a mise en abyme of our own situation as readers of a book replete with images. Beautifully produced on highquality paper, the book is enriched by over 100 illustrations. Tane suggests that this plate from Rétif’s novel underlines the human relationships that are linked to images as well as the power of images, which passes from those who produce them to those who look at them (19–21). As they move from creator to spectator, images alter. In this multimedia age, one does well to reflect upon past examples of the complex relationships between images and texts, of the reader as spectator and the spectator as reader. Many of the questions posed in this study bear upon contemporary art and design: for instance, whether book illustrations should be classified as“art”or“trade” (métier) (51–53). Far from being mere decoration, illustrations in eighteenth-century novels shaped readers’ experience of the text. Tane accords such images an active role in the functioning of fiction (461). He concludes by insisting upon a term that recurs throughout, saying that the eighteenth century was the era of the figure (484). Tane’s impressive volume will be of interest to scholars of the eighteenth century as well as to those who study book history and anyone interested in the interplay between text and illustration. University of New Hampshire Heidi Bostic Termite,Marinella. Le sentiment végétal: feuillages d’extrême contemporain.Macerata: Quodlibet, 2014. ISBN 978-88-7462-672-4. Pp. 223. 24 a. Termite identifies a ‘green’ corpus within the literature of the contemporary extreme: a new tradition of French “botanical novels,” in which an abundance of vegetal elements helps readers sensually reconnect with nature’s vitality. Termite argues that these novels tend to be characterized by a deliberately slow-moving pace, which runs counter to both the speed and the spatial organization of contemporary society: their narratives zoom in on vegetal details, indulging in micro-observations of the colors, sounds, odors, tastes, and tactile features of the natural world—all of which ultimately break up diegetic time and space. These narratives highlight and give consistency to the “proteiform” diversity of the living, thereby responding to a sensorially deprived society’s need for “outdoor life” (15, 188). Termite similarly contends that this literature is a form of resistance to our contemporary fascination with virtual realities and totalizing illusions. “Botanical novels” by writers such as Marie Nimier, Richard Millet, Pierre Michon, Tanguy Viel, Pierre Autin-Grenier, Noëlle Châtelet, Sylvie Germain, Marie NDiaye, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Jean Echenoz, Pierre Bergounioux, and Pierre Senges encourage us to experience both the palpable, everchanging , and currently endangered materiality of nature, and the literariness of their 210 FRENCH REVIEW 90.1 Reviews 211 own texts. Reading these novels is therefore said to be a quest for origins both natural and literary. Termite’s excellent close readings show how, through analogies and amplifications, discrete vegetal references seem to animate and to engender these fictions of the extreme contemporary. Syntagmatic narratives are broken up, as the vegetal decomposes both the author’s discourse and the material reality to which the latter supposedly refers. Instead of, or in addition to, functioning through metaphoric signs, which would try to represent stable concepts in their entirety, vegetal writing presents a flow of ever-fleeting sensations. The theoretical dimension of this argument, and arguably the novels’ own resistance to comprehensive interpretations, cause Termite to speak in abstractions, which at times are of difficult interpretation. Her textual analysis, however, fully supports the notion that vegetal imagery can engender and propel the narratives of the French contemporary extreme. With Le sentiment végétal, she suggests, we discover an alternative genre of ‘green’ writing, one that renounces the totalizing illusions of botanical (or more generally scientific) discourse, as well as the similarly recuperative motions of (a vaguely defined) nostalgic environmental criticism. With its focus on the present, the “botanical...