Bohème sans frontière ed. by Pascal Brissette, Anthony Glinoer

Abstract

how, through the interrelationship between poetry past and present, the former helps the latter “à avoir conscience d’elle-même, comme l’aide à avoir conscience d’elle-même tout ce qui la brise avec dévotion” (169). “Brisons-la,” as Francis Ponge wrote, not without devotion, in his prose poem “Le pain.” As do Bonnefoy’s concluding “Paroles d’Introduction,” La conscience de soi testifies to poetry’s fractious autonomy. Wellesley College (MA) James Petterson BRISSETTE, PASCAL, et ANTHONY GLINOER, éd., Bohème sans frontière. Rennes: PU de Rennes, 2010. ISBN 978-2-7535-1071-5. Pp. 357. 18 a. While Henry Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème (1851) may figure as a relatively minor work of literature, its cultural impact has been enormous. In large measure it is due to this work of fiction that the idea of “the Bohemian” impacted the European and eventually international imagination. This study presents twentyfour essays from a conference held at University of Toronto in 2008 that illustrate the variety, transformation, and migration of the concept of “bohemia” from the nineteenth century to the present. It is a measure of the complexity of the subject that the editors have judiciously divided the contributions into three categories: the first considers the different forms that the notion of the bohemian can take and discusses the social and historical forces that contributed to its emergence; the second concentrates on bohemianism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France; the final section focuses on manifestations of the bohemian outside the Hexagon. In the first section Nathalie Heinich and Jerrold Seigel, a sociologist and a historian respectively, provide excellent historical background for the bohemian phenomenon, namely how legal changes at the dawn of the nineteenth century inadvertently created a large class of disaffected artists, and that bohemianism, essentially a bourgeois phenomenon from its origins, always possessed a symbolic dimension at the same time as a historical reality. Seigel speaks of “competing bohemias” (43), and the second section of this volume provides ample illustrations of this point. Concentrating on French bohemianism, there are excellent essays dealing with literary figures such as Tristan Corbière, Jean Richepin, Francis Carco and, of course, Murger, but space is also accorded to what might be termed “political bohemia,” in the personage of Jules Vallès, as well as the arguably slumming bohemian, but true bourgeois, Guy Debord. As one might expect, there is an essay on surrealism and bohemia. David Vrysdaghs details this conflicted relationship and reinforces the impression that attraction-repulsion was a standard surrealist approach to any movement of even passing interest. International bohemia, bohème sans frontière, is the subject of the third section. The focus is entirely literary with illuminating essays on the bohemian influence in Belgium, Spain, Latin America, Canada, and the United States. In a particularly noteworthy contribution, Clémentine Hougue analyzes the ways three writers of the Beat Generation, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs, quite literally take bohemia on the road in an extreme refusal of social integration “tout en déconstruisant l’idée d’une appartenance à un lieu national, à un espace littéraire, à une topographie préexistante” (344). The Beat Generation offered an uneasy alliance of political and literary bohemia. Hougue never makes clear whether the Beats had any knowledge of Murger’s work, and this remains uncertain in other essays Reviews 349 as well. Naturally, such a question does not really matter. As the collection makes perfectly apparent, whatever its precise origins, the idea of an enchanted locale called Bohemia, a state of mind more than a place, rapidly took command of the middle class’s literary and at times political imagination. Eventually it would become the modern world’s mythical Golden Age, a time of boisterous friendship, sexual license, and financial insouciance. In its Romantic avatars, la vie de bohème is no young person’s fantasy, but the mingling of memory and desire which is the realm of an older generation. In the past hundred fifty years or so, bohemia has developed in myriad directions, yet without ever entirely abandoning Mimi and Rodolphe’s garret. Florida State University William Cloonan CAMUS, ALBERT. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard...