A Short History of French Literature by Sarah Kay , Terence Cave , Malcolm Bowie (review)

Abstract

MLRj 100.2, 2005 517 L'Imaginaire du corps amoureux. By Marie-Pierre Andron. Paris: L'Harmattan. 2002. 258 pp. ?22. ISBN 2-7475-2901-0. In this study of the French Canadian writer Gabrielle Roy, Marie-Pierre Andron considers successively the body ofthe mother (obese, debilitated, prematurely aged), the body of the young woman (gracile for as long as it is chaste, constantly subject to almost intolerable temptations), the couple (in which the man conserves a youthfulness denied to his spouse, but is in many ways a negligible quantity, detectable mainly through his progeniture), and lastly those things (art and nature) through which carnal lusts may be sublimated, and which are often described by means of erotic imagery. Inevitably, the physical degeneration of (in particular) the female body has psychological consequences which are explored. A wealth of textual evidence is adduced from Roy's canon, unpublished and incomplete works, and Roy's autobio? graphical works. While this does display a consistent pattern of imagery and belief, it raises the question of who or what is being analysed: is it Roy herself? the oeuvre? or the individual works? The approach has something of psycho-criticism, but without much methodological reference to analysis. Andron claims to have recourse to diverse critical approaches and cites Anne Maurel (La Critique (Paris: Hachette Superieur ('Contours litteraires'), 1994), p. 59) to assert that one must have read everything by an author in order to understand the underlying themes of his/herwork (this is pretty much the whole methodology?how often have our students read everything of an author before writing about him/her?). Andron's reading is indeed compendious (as both the quotations and the bibliography attest), although in any given passage, a smaller number of works is foregrounded (Bonheur d'occasion and La Petite Poule d'eau in the discussion of motherhood, for example). However, when Roy's flirtation with a certain Stephen in the autobiographical La Detresse etVenchantementis brought into the argument, as ifit were a work of fiction, I feltthe distinction between psycho? analysis of Roy and the thematic study of the oeuvre was muddied. On the other hand, my own (possibly erroneous) view that Roy's canon contains one or two masterly works and a certain amount of lesser material had not enabled me hitherto to see with such clarity,in an author I had considered an innovative breaker with the rustic tradi? tion, a basically very Catholic world-view, in which intelligence is thin and chaste, and stupidity fat and fertile. It is clear which of these painful options Roy herself chose, but there is no comment on this. Nevertheless, this book offersan overview of Roy's ceuvre and a compelling catalogue of its underlying themes, as well as a tantalizing glimpse of some of Roy's unpublished work that should earn it a place in all libraries where Quebec and its literature are studied. Clearly the obese protective mother is a frequent and familiar figure in the literature of Quebec from both before and after Roy, and it would be interesting to extrapolate from this study to develop these links. Trinity College Dublin David Parris A Short History ofFrench Literature. By Sarah Kay, Terence Cave, and Malcolm Bowie. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2003. xii +344 pp. ?30. ISBN 0i9 -8i593i-5So many dictionaries, surveys, and panoramas of French literature are now available that it might well seem that, taken together, they write not its history but its obituary. Literature is not what it was, though it remains, as Barthes chillingly observed, 'ce qui s'enseigne'. For a generation, French as an academic discipline has been exchanging the study of the private imagination for the sociological analysis of contemporary public culture. History is becoming a thing ofthe past and the term 'literature' is pos? sibly now more widely understood to mean not the works of Racine or Flaubert but 518 Reviews the brochures that come with a new PC. This latest single-volume survey, a confident three-hander, swims bravely against the tide. It stands up for permanence, the craft of writing, and the pleasures of reading. Despite preliminary hesitations, the tradi? tional canon suffersonly minor adjustments and the implications...