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Nineteenth Century French Studies 29.3&4 (2001) 338-339



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Book Review

Resonant Themes:
Literature, History, and the Arts in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe


Haig, Stirling, ed. Resonant Themes: Literature, History, and the Arts in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 1999. Pp. 213. ISBN 0-8078-9267-X

The title of this "Guirlande de Victor," a handsomely-produced collection of essays in honor of Victor Brombert, quite suitably points to the way literature of the two centuries lends itself to thematic as well as structural analysis; it suggests also various pleasing, if loose, thematic echoes within the volume and intertextual resonances with Brombert's own scholarship, which has enriched literary study for one-half century (major books dating from 1949 through 1999) and dealt with a wide range of French authors and others. From the first essay through the last, the homage volume follows the same chronological curve as Brombert's criticism. Lest the title and word "garland" make readers conclude that the collection is chiefly a decorative enterprise, an ornament, it must be stated that these essays, though dealing in some cases with poetic and musical beauty, are thoroughly substantial.

Three contributions treat major poets. Jean Gaudon's essay "La Sérénade d'un grand poète: Le Don Giovanni d'Alfred de Musset" argues persuasively - despite stubborn critical oversight previously - for the presence of Mozart's Don Juan figure in Musset's work, from "Les Marrons du feu" (part of Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie) and Namouna to Les Caprices de Marianne. Well grounded in literary and musical history, the essay is a model for the use of fact to substantiate interpretation. Carol Rigolot's "Saint-John Perse's Oiseaux: From Audubon to Braque and Beyond" reviews the poet's life-long interest in birds and examines the connections between Georges Braque's lithographs and Perse's poetry in Oiseaux - a connection less organic than that with Audubon, it turns out. (It is unfortunate that some of the documentation in Rigolot's otherwise fine study is inadequate, as in notes 1 and 2 and the block quotation on page 204, where reference is made to editions and studies not identified in full, as though they had been previously cited.) Although nearly thirty years old (the only reprint in the volume), Beth Archer Brombert's survey of Francis Ponge's poetic qualities and the approaches she proposes to his work draw deserved attention to another twentieth-century poet of great stature.

This group of essays dealing with poetry is well complemented by "Scènes d'oiseaux," in which Jean-Pierre Richard, furnishing an example of ornithocritique, examines the "Déniquoiseaux" episode in Hugo's Les Travailleurs de la mer, inquiring rhetorically: "Le commentateur hugolien ne pourrait-il pas se muer, lui aussi, en une sorte de déniquoiseau?" The function of the episode and Gilliatt's role in the novel are beautifully worked out through Richard's own inimitable vision and style. Similarly, in Gérard Genette's "Combray-Venise-Combray," matters of no little importance in Proust's aesthetics are illuminated by examination of well-known (and poetic) passages - the description of Saint-Hilaire, the Chardinesque rendering of marble steps in the city of the Doges - as well as pages on Ruskin and other revealing texts. [End Page 338]

Other essays in Resonant Themes deal with fiction, some by authors on whom Brombert also published commentaries. Compositional principles and practices in Stendhal (Lucien Leuwen) and Flaubert ("Un Cœur simple") are analyzed, with manuscript facsimiles as evidence, by Jacques Neefs. Not fearing to venture onto a terrain worked over ad nauseam by others, Gerald Prince, in "Meursault and Narrative," treats L'Étranger, usefully lighting the hero's attitude as narratee (of stories within the text) and thus drawing implications concerning his own story. In "Pushkin, Tolstoy, and the Possibility of an Ethics of History," Caryl Emerson takes on the large question of how history can...

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