In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

aussi parfois apporté à l’artiste émigré confirmation de la valeur de son art, ces voyages ne sont plus conçus aujourd’hui comme un déplacement de la périphérie vers le centre mais plutôt d’un centre individuel à la recherche d’un plus grand centre (Belanger, 267). Transatlantic Passages est une lecture indispensable pour qui désire mieux comprendre la richesse de ces échanges créatifs entre les deux continents; échanges parfois douloureux, souvent inégaux, mais toujours fructueux. Représentatifs de nos sociétés contemporaines où les mouvements accrus de population rendent de plus en plus caduques une notion étroite de la nationalité, les artistes et écrivains étudiés sont les symboles adéquats de cette nouvelle identité fluide. Ainsi que l’affirme Régine Robin dans Cybermigrance: “Les écrivains de la migration au Québec ou ailleurs, écrivains dont je suis, seraient alors les nouveaux nomades de notre monde fragmenté et éclaté” (cité dans Green, 188). Hope College (MI) Brigitte Hamon-Porter KAËS, EMMANUELLE. Paul Claudel et la langue. Paris: Garnier, 2011. ISBN 978-2-81240278 -4. Pp. 477. 56 a. Author of a previous book on Claudel and European painting, Kaës focuses here on two unique decades in Claudel’s career when his writing was at its most exuberant—even extravagant—and very different from his previous or later styles. How, she asks, can we understand this unusual period, between the two World Wars, when Surrealists claimed Claudel as one of their own and Aragon considered him a Dadaist? Kaës’s answer is really two-books-in-one. The first is a lively, often amusing account of Claudel’s sparring with critics on both ends of the literary and political spectra. Right-wing, nationalist, xenophobic, and neoclassical reviewers accused him of violating the French language, distorting grammar, disregarding rhyme, succumbing to the “brumes de l’étranger” (11), and creating bizarre, non-French neologisms under the barbaric influence of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, German, English, and Chinese. His sin, in short, was to betray “la clarté française” (8) and thus “l’esprit français” (53). One critic described his prose as “traduit du tartare mandchou” (41). A priest asked Claudel why he did not write like Racine; others reminded him that, as a Catholic, he had an obligation to address a universal audience in language they could understand. Even NRF friends and allies were reticent about a style that seemed so alien to their classical, measured aesthetic. Claudel, who knew his heavenly pantheon, reacted with colorful ire, declaring that he was no Saint Sebastian: “Quand je reçois des flèches, comme tout le monde, j’ai envie de les renvoyer à leurs émetteurs” (376). His sharpest weapon was the Soulier de Satin. As Kaës cleverly shows, the play’s two professorial characters, Don Fernand and Don Léopold Auguste, who decry offenses against “notre clair génie espagnol” (378), are caricatures of Pierre Lasserre, Paul Souday, and all those who lambasted Claudel’s supposed betrayals of “le génie de la langue française” (53). Kaës’s vivid account of attacks-and-revenge constitutes two bookends around a long, central section in which she details Claudel’s theories about words, sentences, rhythm, rhyme, register, and sociolinguistics, as formulated in theoretical texts he composed in response to his critics. Key tenets are: the primacy 1264 FRENCH REVIEW 86.6 of sentences over words; sentences as action; the importance of natural, spoken, musical speech, free of the constraints of traditional rhyme and meter; the superiority of prose over poetry; a canon that includes Rabelais, Pascal, Bossuet, Balzac, Chateaubriand, Michelet, Rimbaud, and Aragon, but vehemently excludes Racine, Voltaire, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry, and other representatives of “l’esprit français,” which Claudel equated with “sec, paillard, méchant, cynique, vaniteux, histrionique” (136). On first reading, the structure of this volume can be disconcerting: the narrative momentum of the first section is interrupted by a 300-page description of Claudel’s linguistic theories before Kaës reunites theory and practice in her analysis of the Soulier de Satin. For Claudel, as for all great writers, practice is more interesting than theory, and...

pdf

Share