Émigrés: French Words that Turned English by Richard Scholar

Abstract

MLR, .,   poetry. Rather than think about the stanzas of poems as deriving from the Italian for rooms, Steen encourages us to see poems not as highly dysfunctional rooms but as necessary spaces in between rooms. In the end, Steen helps us see the modern and contemporary ‘poem as a container of uncontainable feelings’ (p. ). C P, M H B S Émigrés: French Words that Turned English. By R S. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. . ix+ pp. £. (ebk £.). ISBN –––– (ebk ––––). e ‘émigrés’ of this engaging book, described by its author as an ‘experiment in cosmopolitan cultural criticism’ (p. ), are a very particular set of lexical borrowings which occupy an uneasy centre ground between donor and borrower language, being neither French nor fully integrated into English. is ambiguity, Richard Scholar argues, reflects a long-standing ambivalence in English cultural attitudes to things French, ranging from fascination to disdain, which can be traced back to the Restoration (–), when English aristocrats returned from exile in France and brought French manners and mores back with them. e book takes us on an eclectic journey from Restoration comedy to Winnie-the-Pooh’s companion Eeyore, John Le Carré and the Oscar-winning Little Miss Sunshine, with a passing nod to George W. Bush’s claim that ‘the French don’t have a word for entrepreneur’ (p. ). In Part , ‘Mixings’, Scholar explores à la mode, an expression which has taken on a life of its own notably in North America, where it has come to mean ‘served with ice cream’. Its émigré status in England, however, is underlined in two Restoration comedies, Dryden’s Marriage à-la-Mode () and Etherege’s e Man of Mode (), both of which seek to steer a path between slavish imitation of French manners (satirized by Etherege in the character of Sir Fopling Flutter) and discreet assimilation of French cultural norms. is tension is reflected in a semantic ambiguity through which à la mode denotes on the one hand that which is modern, and on the other that which is merely fashionable. In similar vein, another French import, galanterie, sometimes Anglicized as gallantry, combines both positive rural English notions of chivalry and more dangerous libertine qualities evoked by its French origins. A theoretical underpinning is provided by Raymond Williams’s concept of cultural keywords (Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, )). Where Williams’s own schema allowed only for fully assimilated loanwords , Scholar argues for the inclusion of conspicuously foreign-derived items, on the grounds that they visibly embody the conflict between different conceptions of culture and society. Scholar also draws on the concept of creolization, in the sense of hybridization of identities. is might seem dangerous ground: creolization as defined by French Caribbean intellectuals implies a relationship of deep inequality, rather than rivalry between colonial powers. But creolization à l’anglaise is justified  Reviews in the author’s eyes in that both sides bear the scars of domination at the other’s hands, most painfully, from an English perspective, through the Norman Conquest. Part , ‘Migrations’, focuses specifically on three émigrés: naïveté, ennui, and caprice, which again bear the hallmarks of Anglo-French ambivalence. Naïveté has thus an appreciative meaning (loss of innocence) and a deprecatory one (lapse into idiocy), only the latter surviving in its Anglicized form naivety. An entertaining chapter on ennui, borrowed during the Restoration but not established in English until the late eighteenth century, links its prestigious French origins to its class connotations, as a term denoting a condition beyond mere boredom, afflicting a nobility forced to seek meaning in a life bere of any need for paid employment. ese lexical borrowings reflect the conflicted English mix of admiration and revulsion for our near neighbours, and the book could hardly have closed, in , without reference to England’s vexed relationship with that largely French-designed institution, the European Union. Scholar cites a popular  cabaret video entitled ‘e French Brexit song’, whose singers declare, vengefully, ‘We’re taking all our French words back!’ (p. ), leaving English as the loser. Observing the perennial struggle to make sense of what is alien and strange, Scholar concludes, optimistically...