Andreï Makine: l’ekphrasis dans son œuvre par Murielle Lucie Clément (review)

the theory of Michel de Certeau and Gayatri Spivak and with frequent reference to works by Jacques Derrida, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Sigmund Freud, Bruyère uses case studies to explore the limits of theoretical fiction as a source of historical investigation. Recognizing the risks involved in mixing ethnography with history and literature, Bruyère is careful to focus upon self-reflective texts that are conscious of the process of their own production. The result is a thought-provoking (albeit perhaps overly dense and linguistically convoluted) study of historiographical invention and the importance of recognizing the very limits of historiography. Following a general introduction concerned with the place of Francophone studies among university disciplines, Bruyère examines examples from de Certeau, Spivak, Mudimbe, Derrida, and Marin in order to point to césures, or gaps, these works have in common, traces of past paroles, archives that are silent, absent bodies calling to be read—all stories of transfer involving substitutions of theoretical fictions which historians must ultimately recognize as inevitable and yet necessary. In the second chapter, Jean de Léry’s sixteenth-century travel narrative offers a point of departure for consideration of the silences of the colonial text and of the intrinsic fragility of the documentary impulse when faced with unstable manuscripts, gazes, and locations. The third chapter— arguably the strongest—examines visual representations of le sauvage (and ‘savage’ alterity), carefully reading différence in the anachronistic re-presentation that is mediated by the production of image and the retreat of the ethnographer from the scene. A chapter on Patrick Chamoiseau and the mal d’archive highlights the way in which fiction engages with bones, ghosts, and absent bodies and the imprints they leave behind. A final chapter on the film Allah Tantou examines apocryphal inscriptions and absent witnesses in the context of filial memory. This book is concerned with fundamental desires at the core of the study of history: desire for a speaking body, for presence, for contact with an Other, for transmission of knowledge, for an origin. Seduced by what is missing, the historian and the literary figure alike must recognize the fragility of the historical project, constantly re-interrogating the status of their own discursive intervention as being located somewhere between knowledge and invention, and remembering all that such a project has already forgotten. Marred by occasional typographical errors and repetitions, La différence francophone may nonetheless offer future fields of research within the discipline of literary history even as it calls into question the very notion of that discipline. Sonoma State University (CA) Suzanne C. Toczyski Clément, Murielle Lucie. Andreï Makine: l’ekphrasis dans son œuvre. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. ISBN 978-90-420-3403-7. Pp. 158. $41. Makine, born in Siberia in 1957, has been living and publishing in Paris since 1987. He gained international attention with his fourth novel, Le testament français (1995), 218 FRENCH REVIEW 88.1 Reviews 219 which won the Prix Goncourt. Most of Makine’s writing is autobiographical, a creative blend of life in Russia and France. In his efforts to write about and capture Soviet life, Makine weaves in descriptions and commentaries considered“non littéraires”: photographs , films, and music (7). In approaching Makine’s texts, Clément works with the idea of ekphrasis, as theorized by Mitchell and Genette: “une représentation verbale d’une représentation visuelle” for photographs and films and “une représentation verbale d’une représentation auditive” for music (20). Following Bal as well, Clément argues that ekphrasis is “un point de focalisation dans les textes. [...] un point de concentration dans lequel Makine focalise le sens de ses romans” (20). This book is divided into three chapters: les ekphraseis photographiques, les ekphraseis filmiques, and les ekphraseis musicales. Within each chapter, Clément examines several functions of ekphrasis,which at times overlap.The first chapter on photographs and the final chapter on music are arranged similarly by function (psychological, structural, rhetorical, and ontological). Clément’s second chapter is, however, a series of descriptions of films, both real and imagined, as well as her discussion of their various functions. The rhetorical function can be seen in Makine’s...