L’éventail et le dandy: essai sur Musset et la fantaisie par Sylvain Ledda (review)

Reviews 277 and the art of painting of interest to many. Lambert describes and analyzes what he calls the pictorial esthetic that organizes Huysmans’s life and oeuvre, beginning with a short chapter on Huysmans’s genetic and esthetic heritage. Born into a family of painters, the young Huysmans visited his father in his studio every evening until he died when Huysmans was only eight. Lambert interprets Huysmans’s life—and work—as a quest for meaning inspired by idealization of the lost father. Substituting the pen for a paintbrush, perhaps, Lambert posits, due to a lack of confidence in his own talent for painting, Huysmans sought Baudelairean correspondences between word and image, literature and painting, this world and another, in all he did. He often portrayed aspects of his life and self-image in his characters, confirmed aesthetes (and bachelors) who sought to become their own creators by making of their lives original and unreproducible works of art. This compelling story gets somewhat lost as Peinture et bibelot progresses. Lambert offers a highly structured, carefully documented, and extremely dense study of various images, influences, and references to painting in Huysmans’s work and life, but the story—or the image—that could unite and bestow meaning upon all this information becomes lost in the details. Lambert analyzes the “doubles”Huysmans created in his characters, the painterly aspects of his language, the pictorial images in his texts, his writing about art and artists, his mastery of color, the extreme attention he paid to the fabrication of his books as works of art in themselves. Although Lambert occasionally mentions the evolution of ideas in Huysmans’s oeuvre, he seems to assume that the writing style—and its relation to painting—remain fairly constant over time, thus referring randomly to writings from different periods and genres throughout the study. It is not clear, then, why he devoted an entire chapter to a close reading of the painterly elements in Huysmans’s first published writing, Le drageoir aux épices. More welcome would have been an analysis of the concept of the “bibelot”announced in the book’s title. Lambert mentions it only as a term to denote books as collectible objects of art. However, current critical interest in the bibelot as a carrier of culture and meaning, as well as the proliferation of bibelots in nineteenthcentury French literature, point to Huysmans’s writing as an attempt to correspond with his absent father and that father’s creations, not the least of which was Huysmans himself. Brandeis University (MA) Jane Hale Ledda, Sylvain. L’éventail et le dandy: essai sur Musset et la fantaisie. Genève: Droz, 2012. ISBN 978-2-600-01609-4. Pp. 287. 51 a. Another in a recent flurry of Musset scholarship that began around the 2010 bicentennial of the author’s birth, Ledda’s book explores the idea of “fantaisie,”weaving together strands of linguistic, generic, and biographic inquiry to illuminate both Musset’s work and the larger cultural context in which it emerged.The titular metaphor of the fan structures the project, which unfolds coyly, beginning with considerations of the various meanings of fantaisie, fantasque, etc. in the early to mid-nineteenth century, followed by an examination of the literary scene in which Musset débuted and quickly became a leading figure, and finally closing again with reflections on Musset’s literary life and legacy. One of the commonplaces of Musset criticism is that the author’s later work represents a poet in decline and is not worthy of notice. Ledda counteracts that view and takes into account all of Musset’s oeuvre, regardless of chronology or genre. As he argues in his introduction,“[i]nterroger la fantaisie, c’est [...] questionner les formes mineures et majeures de la littérature, c’est interroger la ‘situation’ des œuvres dans une aire géographique, intellectuelle [...] l’étude de la fantaisie permet de considérer la place de Musset dans l’histoire littéraire non en fonction de ‘dates-événements’, mais grâce à des notions esthétiques” (25). Ledda is largely successful in this enterprise, but it must be noted that readers not already in possession of an intimate knowledge...