Musset: un romantique né classique éd. par Sylvain Ledda, Frank Lestringant (review)

LEDDA, SYLVAIN, et FRANK LESTRINGANT, éd. Musset: un romantique né classique. Toulouse: PU du Mirail, 2009. ISBN 978-2-8107-0076-9. Pp. 244. 23 a. The purpose of this issue of Littératures devoted to Musset (marking the bicentennial of his birth on 11 December 1810) is to oppose the long-prevailing image of Musset as the archetypal suffering romantic with a more synthetic understanding of his œuvre. In their “Présentation,” Ledda and Lestringant offer an overview of critical perspectives which nuances Musset’s relationship to Romanticism in its various guises, drawing particular attention to the poet’s personal chronology; never quite in step with the major Romantic figures, Musset was always the “enfant terrible du romantisme” (10). By appropriating the epithet of Arvède Barine in their subtitle, they evoke an œuvre which concomitantly expresses and reconciles Romanticism and Classicism through the use of humor and revolt, lyricism and skepticism, interiority and distance. As frequently occurs with similar collections, the volume includes a number of essays of a comparative nature: “Musset et…” (Voltaire, Sand, Gautier, France, Molière). Happily, the focus remains firmly on Musset; contributors exploit the comparison to illuminate his work, either by suggesting the ambiguity of influence , as in the case of Valentina Ponzetto’s “Musset et Voltaire,” or by exploring the insight of posterity, as Patrick Berthier demonstrates in “Musset poète vu par Anatole France,” where he emphasizes the anti-Romantic Frenchness of Musset. “Perdican et ‘la fleur nommée héliotrope,’” by Esther Pinon, proposes a reading of Musset’s play On ne badine pas avec l’amour through the prism of Molière to suggest how Romantic writers shift the foundation of values from institutions to individuals; the consequence for Musset is the cult of love and youth. Françoise Court-Pérez’s comparison of Gautier’s short story “Celle-ci et celle-là” with Musset’s “Les deux maîtresses” emphasizes, although somewhat diffusely, the ways in which each author uses both irony and a nostalgically libertine protagonist to distance himself from the reigning esthetic of Romanticism, portraying the narrator as the true dandy-hero. Olivier Bara’s article on Musset and Sand disrupts the biographical, romantico-dolorist cliché of their infamous love affair to shed light instead on the creative and ludic complicity that characterizes their work during the summer and fall of 1833 and that prepares—for both writers—a more vigorous critique of Romanticism after 1836. In “Musset et la voix du chœur,” Laure Pineau examines Musset’s use of the dramatic chorus, reminiscent of that of classical Antiquity. She convincingly demonstrates that it is neither classical Antiquity nor French Classicism, but rather Romantic opera that provides the decisive influence in the choruses of Musset’s theater. The two strongest essays of the collection, “La confession d’un enfant du siècle: un romantisme de façade” (Gilles Castagnès) and “Le poète déchu: autopsie et testament d’un romantique” (Ledda) offer compelling readings of two defining texts of Musset’s career. By analyzing Octave’s behavior as obsessional jealousy, Castagnès proposes a solution to the apparent contradiction in the narrator’s claim to represent a collective malady while writing a personal narrative : Musset applies a posteriori the breakdown of the paternal Law in his own case to that of a whole generation. For Ledda, the auto-fictional fragment Le poète déchu disavows Romanticism within a paradoxically Romantic frame, employs a prose narrative to discredit prose in favor of verse, and champions not freedom but subservience to form. The only constant for Musset is not an esthetic, but rather the affirmation of the role of the artist. An interview with Lestringant concludes the collection, exploring questions that both underlie and broaden the 560 FRENCH REVIEW 85.3 themes of the essays. Although some traits defined as “Classical” in this volume apply to Romantic authors other than Musset, the collection certainly succeeds in complicating and reconfiguring Musset’s relationship to Romanticism, and individual articles provide fine analyses of his work. This book is recommended for graduate libraries. Kenyon College (OH) Mary Jane Cowles LONGCHAMP, SÉBASTIEN. Anecdotes sur la vie...