Ondes de choc: nouveaux essais sur l’avant-garde by Henri Béhar (review)

humans have but little purchase on reality, from Robbe-Grillet’s perspective. An author, consequently, can no longer pretend to reproduce some pre-existing reality and, as a result, Robbe-Grillet ended up admitting: “[J]e n’ai jamais parlé d’autre chose que de moi” (4), thus contradicting effectively the earlier talk of objectivity and death of the author that marked the beginnings of the New Novel. In retrospective, as some of the participants observe, the themes for which the New Novel became known help us place it in a broader, postmodern cultural context. Nevertheless, while Robbe-Grillet may well have become a national monument, as he said, his literary and filmic endeavors have not been free from controversy. As the editors note, “comment prétendre ignorer le divorce, chez Robbe-Grillet, entre éthique et sexualité?” (39). Robbe-Grillet’s well known predilection for sadistic fantasies can certainly be found unsettling and was only underlined by his last novel, Le roman sentimental—a gallery of pornographic vignettes detailing the torture and sexual abuse of young girls. It has received a mostly negative press in France: one notable critic bemoaned “les infortunes du pornographe” (483). Arguably, the reception of the novel probably reveals the obsolescence of this sort of provocation. As Shawn Duriez suggests, considering that we live “à une époque marquée par la revalorisation de la lisibilité, qui abandonne les prétentions de rupture et de renouvellement esthétiques de la dernière avant-garde,” a number of Robbe-Grillet’s novels have clearly lost their appeal (480). On the other hand, academics, to whom Robbe-Grillet owed much of his early success—as he himself recognized—still find there is much to be elucidated in an oeuvre that once fascinated many of us in this country and that is still found intriguing by a number of colleagues around the globe. Ohio State University Karlis Racevskis BÉHAR, HENRI. Ondes de choc: nouveaux essais sur l’avant-garde. Paris: L’Âge d’homme, 2010. ISBN 978-2-8251-4100-7. Pp. 343. 28 a. Béhar adds to his already extensive bibliography a new volume with essays on Dadaism, Surrealism, and on several writers within the margins of these movements. In a style that is highly personal, Béhar manages to create a context for the avant-garde in France by discussing, on one side, its relationship with literary traditions and, on the other side, the complex contacts and exchanges amongst various avant-garde groups. The title, a metaphor borrowed from geology, compares the avant-garde to an earthquake that propagated from its epicenter with consecutive shock waves through space—implying its international spread— and through time—assuring its persistent effect on today’s culture. Along with the title, the preface sets the tone for the whole book: Béhar follows Tristan Tzara’s conviction that the avant-garde is a unified phenomenon “d’un seul tenant” (7), while he identifies three features that may define the avant-garde in general: the spirit of ‘breaking’ with traditional norms—which leads him to invent the term ‘littérupture’—the creation of a community, and an aspiration to politics. Béhar emphasizes that his knowledge of the avant-garde stems equally from his life-long scholarly interest in the topic and from his personal acquaintance and experience with writers and artists. The analysis thus follows these two lines, bringing forward archival material and discussing literary works, as well as doubling as a personal itinerary of the author and his career. 562 FRENCH REVIEW 86.3 The essays are divided into three groups. The first group, titled “La bombe Dada,” contains six essays, which consider well-known and some lesser-known aspects of Dadaism. The movement is seen within the avant-garde’s historical continuity—its connection with Futurism is discussed in the first essay, “Tristan Tzara, fourrier du futurisme”—and within the cultural context of its time—by raising the issue of the ambivalent relationship between Dadaism and psychoanalysis in “Dada est un microbe vierge.” The political and the international dimensions of the movement, both modeled on anarchism, have a central position in Béhar’s consideration of Dadaism. In the...