Brantôme mémorialiste et conteur by Étienne Vaucheret (review)

essays, throughout which no aspect of Beckett’s work is left unexamined. Tonning sets the collection’s tone with an elegantly-written introduction in which he ponders the complexities of such a wide-ranging enterprise as pursuing the various influences on Beckett’s writing and his influence on the writing of others. The scholarly game of tracing Beckett’s “debts and legacies” is fraught with a unique set of difficulties and ethical implications, given that the writer himself was notoriously sardonic toward scholarship. How, Tonning asks, “is one to stay, or to become , faithful to that nebulous entity ‘Beckett’” (11), when the task seems only to lead the scholar into dead-ends and unknown quantities? If the articles collected here cannot definitively answer the question of the critic’s responsibility toward such a self-positioned cipher of a writer, they go far toward demonstrating the varieties of positions and pathways that future Beckett scholarship may take. Beckett’s complex relationship with scholarly pursuits is taken up by Steven Connor in “Beckett and the Loutishness of Learning,” which ought to be required reading for any critic attempting to tame the Beckettian canon within the language and conventions of scholarship. Connor deftly traces the way in which the academe persistently haunted Beckett’s creative work after the writer’s early scholarly training in Dublin and Paris. Beckett may have turned his back on academia , Connor argues, but its rules and its formalities provided him “with the model of a violent ventriloquism” (264) that runs throughout his plays and novels. In this astute analysis of the entire project of Beckett scholarship, Connor suggests that Beckett, while certainly not an academic writer, is the “academics’ writer” par excellence: “Beckett and the academy are locked in a lascivious, Laocoon-like clinch, a cycle of dependence and resentment that constitutes a veritable anxiety of confluence” (272). A kind of meta-commentary on the entire volume at whose center it stands, Connor’s essay, then, serves not only as an example of the sophisticated scholarship on display in Debts and Legacies, but also as a warning of the complicated terrain of such a project. For an author who had so famously little to say about his own debts, and whose widespread legacies appear to ceaselessly proliferate, the temptation for the scholar is to find a way to say almost anything. If the task of the critics is to maintain fidelity to Beckett’s spirit, while tracing what Beckett called the “straws [and] flotsam” (10) of his copious debts and innumerable legacies, then most of these essays succeed immensely. Some of the strongest contributions include Feldman’s account of the complex influence of philosophical language on Beckett’s early poetics, Shane Weller’s investigation into the structure of psychoanalysis in Endgame, and Doireann Lalor’s long-overdue analysis of the Italianate dimension in Beckett, beyond the obvious touchstone of Dante. But no matter what one’s critical point of view or area of expertise, this volume will have something to offer all scholars interested in any of the seemingly endless facets of Beckett’s work. Emory University (GA) Jacob Hovind VAUCHERET, ÉTIENNE. Brantôme mémorialiste et conteur. Paris: Champion, 2010. ISBN 978-2-7453-2065-0. Pp. 377. 70 a. This excellent study begins with a brief biography of Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, as well as a genealogy of his copious work. According to Reviews 395 Vaucheret, Brantôme wrote about three dominant themes: the military life of the period, nostalgic memories of the “grandes dames” he had known, and the “multiple facets” of eroticism (271). Vaucheret concentrates on the first two of these themes and barely mentions the third. Nevertheless, this carefully-researched book is a welcome addition to the scholarship on this long-neglected author, the subject of only two monographs since the 1970s. No one knows the memorialist better than Vaucheret, who is also the editor of the Pléiade edition of the Recueil des dames, for which Brantôme drew upon several privileged sources: his mother Anne de Vivonne, identified as the devisante Ennasuite of the Heptaméron, his grandmother Louise de Daillon, who was a dame d’honneur of...