La parole d'Adam, le corps d'Éve: Le péché originel au XVIe siècle (review)

Many of us face constant appeals from our administrators to pursue interdisciplinary studies, even as the amount of information in our own disciplines (much of it dutifully culled from others) continues to grow. It is, however, rare to find such a fruitful combination as the comparison of critical theory and art history in La parole d'Adam, le corps d'Éve. Wajeman combines exhaustive erudition with sensitive use of the latest debates among her colleagues at the Centre comparatiste d'études et de recherches pour les Littératures Anciennes et Modernes at the University Denis Diderot (Paris VII).

Wajeman studies plastic and literary representations and accounts of the Fall, the better to see how they represent both the birth of language and the introduction of ambiguity and perversity to our lives: how Adam's voice is disrupted ("troublée") by Eve's body (16). She situates her investigation in a Europe divided not simply by religion and language, but also by differing attitudes toward classical learning and its relationship to learned culture. Some of what Wajeman has discovered will not shock readers of these pages, such as the emergence of the figure of Lucifer in the first century of the common era, but her presentation is as clear as could be wished. Her suggestion that the Fall introduced not merely sex but difference itself to the world, on the other hand, seems to owe more to Saussure than to Derrida, and forms the basis for the detailed analysis of depictions and accounts in the second half of her book.

The Fall thus founds the difference between truth and falsehood, "entre l'être et le paraître" (135). Eve is seductive ("un beau mal") because what we see of her is no longer what she is: she brought us sensory confusion and ambiguity. The erotic is therefore indivisibly linked to polysemy and the birth of rhetoric, a boundary between immanence and struggle but also the source of the richness of earthly life. Wajeman's analysis of the differential development of this dynamic in the art and literature throughout Western Europe is immeasurably aided by the inclusion and her ingenious use of thirty high-quality illustrations. The discussion on page 171 of Titian's Adam and Eve from the Prado is particularly successful at helping us see the ways the artist invited viewers into his painting; La parole d'Adam, le corps d'Éve as a whole is of the quality we have come to expect of Droz. A complaint, however: at a time when word-processing programs can place notes at the foot of the page with half a dozen keystrokes for an entire manuscript, why are Droz and RQ alone in offering this convenience?

Wajeman concludes by pointing to the generic difference between plastic and narrative arts first detailed by Gotthold Lessing: since narrative is deployed over time, it is much easier to cause sin to be followed by repentance, while painting has to make the two coexist in the same frame. Wajeman, however, points to painters' efforts to increase the seductiveness of Eve as a way of encouraging the spectator to identify with Adam. This led painters to situate authority, along with an erotically charged and gendered gaze, in the eyes of their viewers, while poets tended to keep authority for themselves. Even as she formulates this conclusion, though, she points to Rabelais and Marguerite de Navarre as counterexamples; I would have added Montaigne.

Twenty-five years ago, Marcel Tetel set out to bring scholars who depended on erudition into closer contact with devotees of literary theory: it is a pleasure to see the Seuils de la modernité series proceeding so successfully along the same path.