Selected Poetry and Prose of Évariste Parny ed. by Françoise Lionnet (review)

This new edition and translation of a selection of the works of Évariste Désiré de Forges, vicomte de Parny resurrects an intriguing voice from the past and invites scholars and students to engage with this little-known eighteenth-century French writer. Born in 1753 in Saint-Paul,Île Bourbon (known today as Réunion), Parny first made his mark on the literary world when his Poésies érotiques appeared in Paris in 1778. In her introduction to this MLA edition, Françoise Lionnet highlights his popularity in the nineteenth century, when poetry as a genre gained in importance, writing that Parny’s “unique sensibility, as well as his familiarity with the exotic tropics and its racially diverse populations, inspired a literary career that enchanted his European readers from France to Russia throughout the nineteenth century” (xi). For Lionnet, the inscription of “exotic tropics” and “racially diverse populations” merits the attention of today’s scholars and students to this corpus, given our current interests in writers outside the hexagon, postcolonialism, and race theory (i).

Lionnet’s primary goals in producing this volume of Parny’s works are to introduce this Creole writer to twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars, and to “rediscover[] past voices through the prism of contemporary concerns” (xliv). As she correctly remarks, francophone writers from the Indian Ocean are not very well known; nor is their influence on other writers or literary movements recognized, analyzed, or even taken into account. There is little scholarship on Parny, with the notable exception of Catriona Seth’s monograph published in 2014. Lionnet hopes to expand Parny’s reputation; in her words, “most scholars think of Parny as a minor French poet and do not take the full measure of his geographic and ethnic background” (li). In her introduction, she emphasizes the potential for Parny to illuminate our conception of human rights because “Parny’s oeuvre wrestles with his firsthand experience of violence and the institution of slavery, so his take on human rights is personal, whereas many of his European contemporaries, from Raynal to Rousseau, approach the question with a more abstract knowledge of the inequities they condemn” (li).

Lionnet uses her introduction to distinguish Parny from his eighteenth-century contemporaries and to underscore what makes him unique; she presents him as a precursor to nineteenth- and twentieth-century francophone writers. Of his Chansons madécasses, for example, she remarks that “Parny’s racialized criticism of colonial power, from the imagined collective perspective of those who inhabit the shores of Madagascar . . . is unique in the literature of his time” (xxxiv). Lionnet emphasizes that his island roots and travel to France, “fueled a renewed creativity and provided material for the other major theme for which his work is of contemporary interest: colonialism. His skepticism regarding the colonial enterprise would increasingly lead to critical engagement with the realities of cultural difference, race, and rights” (xvii). This portrait of Parny divorces him from his original eighteenth-century context, a context early modern specialists will recognize as essential when they read the texts themselves.

Parny’s biography and Réunion’s history, which one must tease out from this introduction, are downplayed in this edition in order to transform him into a writer whose primary interest lies in, as Lionnet sees it, “his firsthand experience of violence and the institution of slavery” (li). Lionnet uses her introduction to direct readers to focus on Parny’s “take on human rights” and to view this “take” as “personal” and “unique” (li) primarily because of Parny’s place of birth. But while Parny was born on Ȋle Bourbon, he spent most of his life in Europe. His life resembles more closely that of eighteenth-century French nobility than a colonized “Other” who experienced slavery differently from his contemporaries born in the France. Throughout her introduction, Lionnet glosses over Parny’s complex relationship to France and highlights his réunionese...