Chamoiseau ou les voix de Babel: de l’imaginaire des langues par Noémie Auzas (review)

book are those in which Albanese chronicles the struggle for France’s soul in the lead-up to and the aftermath of the drôle de guerre as a dead serious war of books. Corneille is the standard, even the sword wielded by Brasillach in favor of a fascist France and, at the same time, by de Gaulle in defense of France against Nazism and defeatism. While holding to an academic restraint and respect for the facts, Albanese documents the role Corneille played in de Gaulle’s rhetoric, his sense of devoir, his readiness to answer the call to greatness, and in his vision of France’s emergence from its longest, deepest modern crisis. Perhaps because the other stakes were so high, Albanese seems to have been disinclined in this book to delve too far into the realities of the école républicaine, the place it reserved for literature and its larger aspirations. It is also true that, in this third time around the schoolyard, Albanese has touched on many of these questions before. Perhaps for this reason, the review of Corneille scholarship during the Third Republic is both thorough and lacking in discrimination or authorial engagement: most studies are allowed to speak for themselves in the third-person indirect libre and Albanese does not seem to want to establish a hierarchy among his authors, inexplicably giving Napoléon Bernardin and Gustave Lanson each six pages to reflect on Corneille. In these pages, the book becomes for better or worse something of a compendium of views. The matter of greatness seems also to have extended this book’s ambitions. At twice the length of his Molière, Corneille seems almost to have outgrown the original model. Only about half of the discussion is focused on Corneille in schools. The book’s larger vision is a political and intellectual history of post-revolutionary France through a Cornelian prism. The book’s ample and rich conclusion, for example, includes a brief two-page recapitulation of “Corneille à l’école républicaine” before a more broadly journalistic discussion of France’s dour years of decolonization, Mai 68 and after, and finally the author’s more hopeful view of Sarkozy’s France. In Cornelian fashion, Albanese has written a book in elegant French that seems to respond to his own vision and is by turns detached or impassioned. Corneille à l’école républicaine will be valuable to cultural and intellectual historians and to literary scholars alike as a portrait of modern France’s waxing and waning love affair with Corneille. Boston College (MA) Stephen Bold AUZAS, NOÉMIE. Chamoiseau ou les voix de Babel: de l’imaginaire des langues. Paris: Imago, 2009. ISBN 978-2-84952-073-4. Pp. 301. 23 a. Cet ouvrage entend remédier à la vacance de la critique quant aux apports significatifs des langues naturelles ou contextes plurilingues en littérature. L’œuvre fictionnelle et théorique de l’écrivain martiniquais Patrick Chamoiseau dans laquelle se manifestent français et créole tant au niveau thématique que stylistique est, selon Noémie Auzas, le terrain idéal pour sonder son hypothèse selon laquelle “les langues naturelles sont des espaces de projection pour l’imaginaire” (10–11). Trois sources principales alimentent cette réflexion: les études de l’imaginaire, celles de la sociolinguistique et la production théorique de Glissant en dialogue avec le mouvement de la Créolité. Dans une première partie, Auzas s’attache à la généalogie de l’imaginaire des langues en remontant aux premiers débats de l’Antiquité sur les questions de l’origine des langues et de l’énigme de leur diversité. D’un intérêt particulier sont Reviews 163 sa déconstruction de la notion séculaire du “génie” des langues qui attribue à ces dernières des qualités inhérentes, et sa réflexion sur le concept de “représentation ”, c’est-à-dire la nécessité de considérer l’ancrage subjectif et historique de l’auteur du discours. Dans cette généalogie, une pensée autre vient s’appliquer à la littérature caribéenne, celle de la langue considérée non plus dans ses origines...