Colonizer or Colonized: The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture by Sara E. Melzer (review)

Bernardet of the one-act La voix humaine, is followed by Hélène Laplace-Claveries’s more readable and more illuminating examination of how in his Arguments chorégraphiques , Cocteau is less a librettist than a ‘choréconteur’ and how he privileges a choreographic present tense in these texts for dance. For her part, Bénédicte Gorrillot ploddingly and painstakingly traces the myth of Orpheus, specifically the influence in Cocteau’s works of “un fonds orphique de nature religieuse, associé à une parole mythique (d’ordre métaphysique), antérieur aux reformulations de l’Empire romain” (116). Roberto Zemignan points in his reading of Le testament d’Orphée to the inherent tension between the linearity of action and the disruption of deductive logic, as dramatized , indeed “parasitée” (6), by dream. In the last contribution of the first section, “Comment Cocteau raconte quand il parle,” Pierre-Marie Héron examines the interplay between the spirit of conversation and the appeal of narration in the writer-poet’s public talks, radio broadcasts, and newspaper contributions. Hardly revelatory, Héron’s conclusion, like many of the‘findings’by the authors before him, is surprisingly banal: “Cocteau parle et raconte en variant la manière et l’allure de son propos, avec un sens sûr de ‘l’exactitude’ du style selon le public et le genre” (182). The contributions in the second part of the volume do little to increase its usefulness. They include two articles on stage works, a study by Marianne Bouchardon of “les ficelles du théâtre” (187) in Cocteau’s ‘poésie au théâtre’ and his ‘poésie de théâtre’ and one by Ariane Martinez of the creator’s “arguments chorégraphiques” (207); a piece by Évanghélia Stead on the short-lived Schéhérazade, founded by Cocteau with François Bernouard in November 1909, and which was simultaneously a“revue de poésie,”“revue de belle typographie,”and“revue mondaine”(238); and Alex Callebaut’s more inspired reading of the paradoxical preface of the 1954 poetic collection Clair-obscur, in which he shows the genetic tension between the definitional and the metaphorical.All things considered and given the other unremarkable contributions preceding it—which hardly provide the “perspectives larges et variées” (7) that Linares promises in his foreword—it is probably the most interesting and original essay. California Polytechnic State University Brian G. Kennelly Melzer, Sara E. Colonizer or Colonized: The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture. Philadelphia: UP of Pennsylvania, 2012. ISBN 978-0-8122-4363-5. Pp. 320. $75. Boileau and the discourse of colonialism? Early modern French letters and thought as a bridge to understanding France’s mindset and history as a colonial power? Sara Melzer makes that case. She does not treat as merely humorous Boileau’s denunciation of Perrault and the Modernes as a bunch of wild Indians—“Hurons” and “Topinamboux”—or Rouen’s celebration of the 1550 royal entry of Henri II and Catherine de Médicis with the tableau vivant of a Brazilian village that included fifty 230 FRENCH REVIEW 87.1 Reviews 231 natives of the country brought to France for the occasion, but she asks instead what these unconventional episodes and events reveal about how early modern France saw itself. In so doing, she calls into question a standard view of French Classicism as a moment when,by imitating the Ancients,French writers and thinkers sought to elevate their own country’s culture to the same level as that of their models in the pantheon of cultural greatness. René Girard, whose work is cited in the bibliography and seems always to hover at the edges of this study, would not be surprised to learn that imitation , even of so distant a model as the Ancients, brings with it troubling implications. All may well have started with the Gauls, as some late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century writers tried to establish, by way of liberating French culture from the Frankish-Trojan ancestry that so tightly and uncomfortably attached it to Ancient Rome. Although ultimately successful, these writers encountered two irksome facts: the Gauls had been colonized by the Romans, who considered them barbarians...