Channel Crossings: French and English Poetry in Dialogue 1550-2000 by Clive Scott (review)

Abstract

MLRy 99.1, 2004 281 of the endeavour to find the self by first losing it. Through a series of detailed, subtle readings, the book traces the invention of the self through its abandonment, diffraction, metamorphosis, sacrifice, and death. The final chapter suggests that the musical model is most appropriate for capturing something of the self without fixing it in a rigid form, allowing for the permanence of a theme which binds together mul? tiple variations. Fiction functions here as a privileged medium for overcoming the Romantic separation of self and non-self, individual and world, inside and outside. The writer traces the outlines of a possible self by projecting it into a fictional world in which it is finally at home. The readings of individual texts are knowledgeable and compelling, and the book persuasively describes the shared concerns and stakes of works written in French, German, and English. However, the breadth of reference to literary texts is offsetby the restricted consideration of non-literary contexts. The problem of selfhood is discussed without substantial engagement with contemporary developments in, for example, philosophy or psychoanalysis. In consequence, conceptual precision suffers.Even the term used in the title, ipseite, receives little by way of clarification or justification, so that the terminological rigour which it seems to promise is not delivered. Beyond some references to Romanticism and the nineteenth century, the perspective is also historically and generically narrow, so that the fictive autobiographers appear to be working in curious isolation from other comparable projects. The book succeeds admirably within the parameters of its self-defined aims, though it would require more conceptual precision to be theoretically innovative, and specialists of the individual authors under discussion might prefer more sustained analysis than the comparative project allows. Univeristy of Warwick Colin Davis Channel Crossings: French and English Poetry in Dialogue 1550-2000. By Clive Scott. Oxford: Legenda. 2002. 276 pp. ISBN 1-900755-54-8. Crossing the boundary between the critical and the creative, Clive Scott continues the debate on the 'undecidable' in the meaning of art text and concomitant problems in the theory of translation. Beginning by looking at the question of gender and the sonnet, Scott finds in Louise Labe (compared here with Elizabeth Barrett Browning) 'peculiarly feminine' (p. 25) features in the verse form, albeit in the absence of any 'masculine' control sample. There is here a circularity in the account of the relation? ship between biography and text. What if the text had been anonymous? Identical features can be found in the 'masculine' sonnet. Scott's use of a Mazaleyrat-style approach to metrical analysis (e.g. 6 + 4 + 2) reveals at every turn its incoherence. It aims in principle at marking accents only at syntactical junctures but in the absence of any explicit general criterion for such junctures. Its application here to identical syntactical units yields differingaccentual readings (see for,example, the adjective + noun phrases in 'Mon triste esprit hors de moi retire' [4 + 3 + 3] * 'Plaisant repos, plein de tranquilite' [2 + 2+1+5]. Analysis based on this ad hoc procedure is damagingly subjective. In 'Translating and Punctuatingiifam/^' Scott is dealing with an English text in which accent and metre coincide reasonably transparently. Here sensitive com? mentary and stimulating discussion of translation by various hands run into trouble with discussion ofthe metre of French verse translations of Shakespeare's text. What French speaker would deliver 'Quoi, ciel et terre!' with a single final accent on 'terre' (p. 71)? At the very least, the punctuation after 'Quoi,' demands a syntactical accent. The analysis here is once again impaired by the standard approach to the scansion of French, an approach which has no consistent theoretical basis. This essay has, never? theless, interesting discussion of the prosodic import of punctuation. Its counterpart, 282 Reviews 'Translating and Dramatizing Phedre', gives Scott's thought-provoking translation of a key passage of text embodying his idea that Racine's characters have a 'met? rical thumbprint': Phedre?2 + 4, Hippolyte?3 + 3, ete. This can be made to work convincingly in English, but once again incoherent metrical analysis of Racine's text (pp. 101-04) decisively damages the case (e.g. 'C'est moi, Prince, c...