Balzac: La Littérature réfléchie. Discours et autoreprésentations by Françoise van Rossum-Guyon (review)

Abstract

202 Reviews later nineteenth-century poets position themselves with respect to the mother text (Chapter i). This is developed in Chapter 2 in Hugo's figure of the echo. Boutin, in a finely tuned argument, here brings together a range of theoretical approaches to suggest that there is, in Hugo's notion of the echo, an implied interlocutor whom Lamartine seeks, only then to retreat into the self, whereas Desbordes-Valmore uses her poetic voice as a friendly echo of another, as a 'sonorous envelope' (p. 80). Boutin concludes that the Valmorean text creates a 'loving community of listeners', whereas 'the poetry of listening in Lamartine reveals a poetic subject listening to himself (p. 92). The heart ofthe book (Chapters 3 and 4) focuses on the maternal imagery of each poet to show, firstly,Lamartine's maternal landscape as a fatal regression, and then Desbordes-Valmore's as a contrastingly life-giving connection with past and fu? ture. In the concluding chapter, 'Towards a Maternal Society', Boutin makes the leap from imagery/the imaginary to a more historicized account of the significance of such maternal nostalgia. In this chapter she examines the nineteenth-century idealization of the mother figure (the emerging cult of motherhood and Marian devotion) and places Desbordes-Valmore's work in the context of Saint-Simonian utopian idealism and social advocacy. In contrast, Lamartine adopts the position ofthe Mater dolorosa 'forhis own purposes' (p. 172), seeking simultaneouslyto return to the maternal land? scape and to appropriate maternal (self-sacrificing and saintly) love. Boutin concludes her study with a positioning of this poetics of the maternal within the nineteenthcentury literary tradition and, perhaps more powerfully, within French and American feminist thought. Boutin's study is complex and persuasive. It opens up new critical perspectives on these two poets (also offering,in an appendix, prose translations of their poems for the anglophone reader), on the nineteenth century more generally, and on the maternal (and its paradoxes) in particular. Royal Holloway, London Sonya Stephens Balzac: La Litterature reflechie.Discours et autorepresentations. By Francoise van Rossum-Guyon. Montreal: Universite de Montreal, Departement d'Etudes francaises. 2002. xix + 2o6pp. $25. ISBN 2-921447-13-4. While the surge of activity around Balzac's birth and death centenaries is now fast receding, work on him continues apace. Alongside a number of noted collections and monographs published by Champion and SEDES (soon to be diverted to Christian Pirot in Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire) comes this welcome firstvolume of articles devoted entirely to Balzac in the Paragraphes series edited by Stephane Vachon. This book has a number of positive features: it gathers together updated and reworked chapters by a leading balzacienne; it includes new, unpublished material, notably on Illusions perdues; van Rossum-Guyon's enviable familiarity with Balzac and Balzac criticism is informed and illuminated by her work on narrative theory and the nouveau roman. The result is a volume which complements and develops recent research on the complexities of the Balzacian enonciation, on Balzac's contribution to the notion and development ofthe novel, and on the relationship between literature, ethics, and 'the real'. Although the volume is conveniently divided into two sections, with one, entitled 'L'Auteur dans le texte', treating works such as Le Cousin Pons, La Cousine Bette, Le Pere Goriot, Le Cure de village, and Beatrix, and the other, entitled ' Illusions perdues ou la representation de la litterature', van Rossum-Guyon's concerns remain constant throughout: what is the Balzacian metatext as opposed to the Balzacian text, and what does the interplay between text and metatext contribute to a Balzacian hermeneu? tics? For van Rossum-Guyon, the firstof these questions can only be answered by MLRy 99. i, 2004 203 comparing the status and the meaning of Balzac's 'hors-textes'?such as the prefaces and the correspondence?with Balzac's intratextual pronouncements as author, with those of his delegated narrators, and with his characters' polylogic discussions about the status of art, literature, and 'reality'. For according to Rossum-Guyon, there is a constant interplay between the textual and the metatextual, which may, depending on the context and situation, be self-reinforcing or self-contradictory: poiesis can, for example, reinforce and...