Consumer Chronicles: Cultures of Consumption in Modern French Literature by David H. Walker (review)

WALKER, DAVID H. Consumer Chronicles: Cultures of Consumption in Modern French Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2011. ISBN 978-1-84631-487-2. Pp. vii + 328. $95. This sweeping survey of French narratives from the 1830s to the turn of the twenty-first century examines the emerging and subsequently triumphant culture of consumption in France. It offers close readings of an array of fictional texts, which Walker situates in their historical context, by canonical authors such as Balzac, Zola, Gide, Céline, and Beauvoir, as well as by lesser-known and contemporary writers like Rachilde, Jean Valmy-Baysse, Jean Dutourd, Pascal Quignard, and Frédéric Beigbeder. The book’s introduction presents another, related survey, that of critical discourse on the culture of consumption from Marx to de Certeau, by way of Benjamin, Adorno, Lefebvre, Marcuse, and Baudrillard, among others. Culling insights from the literary works he examines, Walker aims to supplement the history of the encroachment into, indeed the colonization of, everyday life in France by capitalism and consumerism. He traces through these works manifestations of resistance to consumer culture by characters who, though cognizant of and even susceptible to the fascination of modern advertising and display , lament the passing of a society that had long placed special value on artisanship and individual entrepreneurship. These fictional manifestations of individual resistance echo and give life, Walker argues, to collective movements documented in history, from the 1843 petition against department stores to the creation over a century later of Poujade’s Union de défense des commerçants et artisans and beyond. A number of Walker’s readings provide interesting insights into the texts treated. In the chapter on Valmy-Baysse’s Les comptoirs de Vénus (1926) and Victor Margueritte’s La garçonne (1922) (critiqued by some feminist readers for the apparent taming of the convention-flouting title character in the end), Walker argues that the female protagonists gain autonomy and a certain fulfillment through their employment as boutique owners or department store managers, out-smarting, out-earning, and/or outliving male companions who do not support their endeavors . In the chapter on Dutourd’s Au bon beurre (1952), the satirical rags-toriches story of a profiteering épicier and his wife during the Occupation, Walker reads the detailed listing of newly-created ersatz food products and the cunning épicier’s sales pitches for them as harbingers of the post-war explosion of processed foods and the elaborate advertising campaigns that made of them consummate symbols of modernity and thus household names. A reading, in the conclusion, of Beigbeder’s 99 francs (2000), which recounts, like Beauvoir’s Belles images (1966), the disillusionment of an advertising executive, demonstrates that Beigbeder’s novel iterates in a fictional narrative many of the critics’ refrains regarding contemporary globalized capitalism, which has overridden national interests and under whose system “the citizen with civic rights and responsibilities has given way to the consumer, restricted to branded choices” (300). A weakness of Walker’s book is that many of the close readings, while of varying interest to different readers, are principally thematic and do not offer compelling, overarching arguments about the texts in question or about consumer culture. At times the book has more the feel of a collection of commentaries on French literary texts treating the selected theme than of a coherent analysis. Because of the breadth of its scope, however, it is a rich resource for students and scholars embarking on the study of consumer society. Its introduction Reviews 1045 is a concise but masterful synthesis of critical and theoretical assessments of consumerism , and its chapters contain lively plot summaries and interesting analyses of a seemingly exhaustive collection of narratives whose protagonists are fascinated with or repulsed by, who profit from or are ruined by (some of them undergoing all of these experiences in turn in the course of a single narrative), consumer culture , whose heretofore rampant expansion, as Walker notes, has been indefinitely arrested by the financial crisis of the dawning twenty-first century. Ohio State University Jennifer Willging Society and Culture edited by Frederick Toner BARBIER, JOSIANE, MONIQUE COTTRET, et LYDWINE SCORDIA, éd. Amour et désamour du prince du haut Moyen Âge...