Mémoires et identités dans les littératures francophones ed. by Kanaté Dahouda, Sélon K. Gbanou (review)

from those of someone writing in a metropolitan French context. She is also alert to the other differences in their linguistic registers (the role of filth and muck in Ducharme versus scatology in Céline, for example), and she demonstrates how the thrust of Ducharme’s aggressive discourse is centripetal as opposed to the more centrifugal one of Céline. She further establishes how his tone is less broadly harsh than Céline’s (whose extensive denunciations once led Georges Poulet to refer to him as a modern Jeremiah) and how metafictional dimensions play a larger role in Ducharme’s writings. No book of 200 pages on two writers of such importance can be expected to have exhausted the fertile subject Larochelle has chosen to explore. A discussion of the relationship between aggressive language and the carnivalesque in Ducharme or the nightmarish and hallucinatory experience in Céline, for example, might have broadened the perspectives. On Céline, Larochelle made the methodological decision, announced early, to confine her analysis of verbal abuse to his fiction, fully aware that the pragmatics of the pamphlet as a genre in which the writer assumes responsibility for his own discourse differs from fiction where the thoughts and words of characters cannot be attributed prima facie to their creator. Yet, no discussion of invective in Céline can ignore his pamphlets, and Larochelle does make a brief foray into this genre towards the end of the book, acknowledging that “il est indéniable que l’écriture des pamphlets influence le romanesque” (160). She stresses, however, that the pamphlets have a performative function that the fiction does not, requiring a different methodological approach. While the generic differences between the pamphlet and the novel are real, one area that might have been investigated more thoroughly is the link between Céline’s racist pamphlets and the ethnic and racial stereotyping in which his fictional characters engage. The valid distinctions made by Larochelle do not, in my judgment , weaken Julia Kristeva’s argument for a unity of discourse between Céline’s pamphlets and his novelistic writing. Finally, specialized vocabulary is necessary for a study such as this one, but Larochelle tends to retain the idiolect of semiotic analysis in cases where non-specialized language could also convey meaning without ambiguity. Her almost pointillist attention to linguistic detail and classification is frequently illuminating, but there are also times when the exhaustiveness of the procedure obscures the broader appraisal. These are, however, but minor reservations regarding a work that is methodologically rich and probing in its insights. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Emile J. Talbot DAHOUDA, KANATÉ, et SÉLON K. GBANOU, éd. Mémoires et identités dans les littératures francophones. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008. ISBN 978-2-296-06749-3. Pp. 264. 26 a. This collection of eighteen essays, plus introduction, explores a broad range of works dealing with the themes of memory and identity, both individual and collective. The editors point out in their introduction a number of themes that are characteristic of the whole group of essays. For the editors and the other contributors , there is a close link between memory and imagination. Our images of the past are as much a creation of the state of mind of our present selves as a faithful reproduction of events that took place earlier. Most of the Francophone authors discussed are novelists who feel that that fiction is the most accurate way to Reviews 585 recreate the past of the ethnic community from which (s)he comes. This is the case particularly for writers from Africa and the Caribbean. Because of slavery and colonialism, the ethnic heritage of the peoples there was obliterated. It is therefore the writer’s responsibility to reconstruct this destructed heritage. These writers say they prefer fiction as a medium because they are seeking to capture the spiritual mindset of a community rather than compile a list of names and dates. Another common feature of these Francophone works is that their authors and protagonists are constantly trying to balance individual and collective concerns . Individual characters seek to articulate a self-definition as well as elaborate the communal ethos of their culture of...