Paris and the Fetish: Primal Crime Scenes par by Alistair Rolls (review)

Reviews 231 Rolls,Alistair. Paris and the Fetish: Primal Crime Scenes.Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014. ISBN 978-90-420-3777-9. Pp. 181. 38 a. Despite the predictable prefatorial praise of its“profoundly built critical analyses” by Michael Bishop, General Editor of the Chiasma series in which this “exceptional study” (5) of the primacy of textual fetishism is showcased, it is unlikely that any but the most ardent Freudian or Derridean fans will have the patience or enthusiasm to read—let alone try to understand—this inaccessible work from cover to cover.A 1927 essay by Sigmund Freud in which the “erection of the fetish hinges not on the traumatic discovery of female genital lack but rather of loss” (15) leads Rolls to consider the extent to which the fetish, or “screen memory,” enables a “re-reading” of reality to accompany a “simple apprehension” of it (16), “a hermeneutics, an erotics even, of absence-presence” (22). As Rolls states in his convoluted and laborious introduction, his objective in the five chapters constituting his book is “to follow the fetishist’s trajectory back to the creation of the fetish” (31). What the Baudelairean poem,“À une passante”(1855), stages, for example, is a reading praxis that is tailored to a new, Parisian critical modernity in which all instances of women passing by can be read in light of the template of Parisian prose poetry and the crime fiction that originated alongside it. Red herrings are, Rolls claims, likewise raised to the status of truth in the various novels teeming with the prose-poetic tropes he chooses to analyze: L’arbalète: la vraie vie commence (2003) by La Rochelle-based novelist Frédéric Cathala; L’homme à l’envers (1999) by crime writer Fred Vargas; as well as Nestor Burma contre C.Q.F.D. (1945) and Les eaux troubles de Javel (1957) by Léo Malet. In all of these works, Rolls contends, the discovery of a primal scene allows doubt to be cast over authorial solutions and new murderers or victims to be found. Similarly, what characterizes the fundamental fetishism of Jean-Paul Sartre’s La nausée (1938) is that it takes the untellable at the same time as suggesting the unseeable: as a result, unwitting readers see and materialize what is not there. Rolls’s study might fit well in a collection seeking, as Bishop claims, to foster “urgent critical assessments” and focusing upon“joinings and criss-crossings, single, triangular, multiple”in the realm of French literature. Furthermore, it might be “sharp” and “incisive.” But its purported “high elegance of articulation”(5) regrettably gets lost in the shuffle: in which new texts depend on the old, the text of desire will only be accessible because of the text of knowledge, and in which hackneyed, indeed gratuitous turns of phrase such as“always already”get repeated ad nauseam,cloud the logic,the balance,the co-presence in which Rolls’s“new readings”(31) ostensibly take place.Confused and exhausted readers could, moreover, greatly have benefited from a concluding chapter that cogently pulled everything together—helping them make better sense of the disparate, over-earnest questions that Rolls’s ruthlessly inhospitable study seems relentlessly to rehearse. California Polytechnic State University Brian G. Kennelly ...