Visages de La Fontaine by Jean-Pierre Collinet (review)

s’en défaire, l’incliner ou l’accomplir selon son désir, selon le poids d’un héritage qui l’entrave ou l’ancre dans une authentique parole de la liberté” (10). Cardinal’s Lacanian-informed readings of filiation in the Chroniques du Plateau-Mont-Royal are particularly insightful in their analysis of the negative effects of the unavowed incest between the matriarch of the family, Victoire, and her younger brother Josaphat. The original incest not only violates the law of exogamy, it also contributes to a world where mothers are all-powerful, seemingly virginal (in that fathers are neither physically present nor present in the mothers’ discourse) and, according to Cardinal, uncastratable. Throughout part one, Cardinal elegantly demonstrates how the internal logic of Tremblay’s universe points to the fact that the absence of the father figure “est pour le moins signifiante en ce qu’elle implique un vide symbolique, un trou dans la trame d’un roman familial autour duquel, en effet, femmes et enfants tissent un discours où se mêlent le rêve et la fureur. Chez Tremblay, la filiation maternelle est quasi exclusive et révèle avec force cohérence l’horreur d’un monde en proie à ses puissances” (89). Cardinal argues powerfully that while much of Tremblay’s work seemingly celebrates maternal figures, close analysis reveals that the all-powerful mother is profoundly ambivalent in that she blocks access to “la reconnaissance du père comme sujet de la parole” (190), which leads his characters to madness, rage, and violence. While Cardinal sometimes overburdens his sentences with adverbial detours, his analyses, most particularly of the Chroniques, their tributary plays, and Sainte Carmen de la Main, offer new and fascinating contributions to Tremblay scholarship . He is most convincing when he interprets the role of artistic representation in the lives of Tremblay’s marginalized characters, demonstrating how their artistic legacies lend a certain dignity to their own disappointing lives and to their communities . The cases of Édouard and Carmen stand out in this regard, as they are both brutally murdered in the eponymous texts. For Cardinal, Édouard’s failures in life are transformed by the constant mise en scène—the artistic representation— that governs his life as the ‘nobility’ of Montreal’s red-light district (as the drag queen ‘La Duchesse’). Playing this role, “Édouard conjur[e] de ce fait le mutisme honteux, pareil à la mort” (118–19). By writing her own music about the people of her community rather than repeating the warblings of her Nashville idols, Carmen offers her listeners “l’espoir d’une parole en [leur] langue” (157). Cardinal aptly demonstrates how Tremblay’s work has offered that same espoir for nearly fifty years, giving a literary voice to the formerly voiceless. Elon University (NC) Olivia J. Choplin COLLINET, JEAN-PIERRE. Visages de La Fontaine. Paris: Garnier, 2010. ISBN 978-2-81240172 -5. Pp. 481. 69 a. This rich volume brings together more than twenty years of Collinet’s scholarship . The twenty-eight chapters include articles, lectures, and interviews. Topics range widely, representing the considerable conceptual reach of Collinet as one of the world’s leading La Fontaine scholars. While there is no single overarching argument, most of the essays touch on the idea of a Janus-faced La Fontaine, a poet known for a depth and seriousness that somehow coexists with, and is even facilitated by, a fundamentally ludic poetic practice. This and a number of other 820 FRENCH REVIEW 86.4 dualities are explored, both in the historical context of seventeenth-century French society, and through close readings of prose and poetry. A study of flattery in the Fables, for example, carefully reveals how La Fontaine both represented and practiced forms of encomium that take away as much as they appear to give. An examination of La Fontaine’s epistolary writing finds La Fontaine practicing an artisanal ‘journalism’ in letters, with characteristic irony in observations of both court and provincial society. Other sections that deal with La Fontaine’s interests related to but not always associated with poetry include a chapter on La Fontaine and music, a number of reflections on the significance of architecture (or what...