Dances with Darwin, 1875–1910: Vernacular Modernity in France by Rae Beth Gordon

Abstract

MLR, 105.3, 2010 877 and 1890s. The role of Le Figaro inRodenbach's career is particularly significant, since itoffered a stage upon which he could initially reveal his journalistic and, later,his literary talent, through the form of thefeuilleton?%. strategy also adopted by Zola and Barbey d'Aurevilly. In 1892, having written a number of articles for the paper, he published Bruges-la-morte as a feuilleton to popular and critical success. From the perspective of nineteenth-century studies, Rodenbach's texts on literature and painting are, as Gorceix states, significant in the first instance because they offerus 'les impressions, les reactions, prises sur le vif, d'un temoin direct de son epoque' (p. 27). Based mainly on artists and writers living in Paris, essays on Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarme, and les Goncourts are accompanied by those on regional writers such asMistral and Brizeux, while the articles on artists are equally wide-ranging, including Rodin, Puvis de Chavannes, Monet, Carriere, and Raffaelli. Rodenbach's admiration for and friendship with many of thewriters and artists he chooses precludes criticism of their shortcomings, yet his perceptive analysis ofMallarme and Rodin, for example, reveals his talent as a critic and in particular for disseminating an understanding of theirwork to a less cultured public. His description of the former's poetic language is telling: cDonc lesmots se taisent; le poete ne les considere plus que comme des signes qui, par la contexture, par la place occupee, par leurmariage avec tel autre precedemment hai, evoquent des sensations vierges, des sens imprevus' (p. 189). Rodenbach's article on Rodin is equally incisive and pedagogical, explaining how he reinvented sculpture through 'la grande loi de la nature [qu'il] a appliquee a toutes ses figures, qui en tirent leur supreme accent de vie' (p. 256). In terms of Rodenbach's own oeuvre, the annex of his writings on Flanders, destined for a Parisian public, is also illuminating. On the one hand, the themes and images ofmisted landscapes, mystical abbeys, and silentmedieval towns recall those of his literary texts; on the other, however, these are self-sufficientand absorbing travel guides which conjure up the exoticism of Rodenbach's native land. Gorceix's edition of Rodenbach's texts thus offers a welcome addition not only to the study of the writer himself, but also to the dissemination and reception of thework of his contemporaries, as well as to the field of nineteenth-century travel literature. Queen's University Belfast Claire Moran Dances with Darwin, 1875-1910: Vernacular Modernity inFrance. By Rae Beth Gordon. Farnham: Ashgate. 2009. 311pp. ?60. ISBN 978-0-7546-5243-4. Dances with Darwin picks up where Rae Beth Gordon's wittily entitled and en grossing Why theFrench Love Jerry Lewis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001) leftoff.An erstwhile performer herself in Paris cafes-concerts, she extends her research here intovarious forms of show-business grotesquerie (inmusic halls, circuses, fairgrounds, and exhibitions), and links these suggestively to the conco mitant phenomenon of (simplistic) exploitation ofDarwin's theories of evolution: in short, the nineteenth-century obsession with the human zoo, typified outside 878 Reviews France by Barnum and the spectacles he made of freaks. Gordon concentrates on three decades and a bit of French popular culture. In her own words: 'The convergence of primitivism with nervous pathology (e.g. epilepsy or hysteria) in the fin-de-siecle music-hall is a vernacular modernity thatprecedes the same shock inHigh Art by three decades' (p. 4). Stereotyped Darwinism was made familiar to the public not only by the popular press but also by popular entertainers. In effect, Gordon's theme is the numerous ways inwhich, like slang, cultural phenomena filtersocially upwards. Despite or because ofwidespread fears of rampant regression and degeneration (a reverse evolution), audiences responded oftenmimetically to the staged displays of chanteuses epileptiques', a kind of St Vitus's dance thatGordon likens to the pelvic gyrations of Elvis Presley a half-century or so later.The famous dancer Jane Avril was a hysteric patient at La Salpetriere mental hospital, where she discovered her vocation; Sarah Bernhardt less riskily studied alleged hysteria in preparation for a stage part. Maurice Chevalier started his career as a comique idiot. There...