Fictions de l’ipséité: essai sur l’invention narrative de soi (Beckett, Hesse, Kafka, Musil, Proust, Woolf) by Laurent Mattiussi (review)

Abstract

280 Reviews Trollope's travel book, South Africa, for Laurent Bury presents Blacks as recyclable : 'A Kafir may be ground and baked into a Christian' (p. 109). When, however, Trollope, more liberal than many of his era, speaks of Kaffirs as being 'as naked as my heart could desire' (pp. 110-11), it is a toss-up whether such occidental wishes are not more naive than the supposedly ingenuous 'savages'. Trollope wants Blacks to replicate Whites (though not, of course, the 'boorish' Boers). Barge-pole kindness denies native peoples any history to call their own. For his part, Rider Haggard, in Yves Clavaron's view, singles out Zulus and places them at the top ofthe African tree, though, superb animals that they are, they are still up a tree. Monique Dubar tackles the dimly remembered Francois de Curel's play La Fille sauvage, where a female savage transported to Europe is remodelled by Christianity and colonialist values. She ends up a queen back in Africa, outdoing the White bosses in her programme for controlling the Blacks. Scandinavian primitivism switches the emphasis, according to Frederique Toudoire -Surlapierre, to environment, and to the far greater role of fauna and flora in human lives in those harsh climes. Dominique Peyrache-Leborgne provides a cinematic dimension to the total question in her study of the interrelated films of Pasolini and fiction of Elsa Morante. The more syncretistic of the two, Pasolini works to create a Third World ofthe mind melded with the Gospels. Both visions, however, grow increasingly pessimistic. Humour gets a brief look-in in Jean-Marc Maura's paper on Andre Breton and Tristan Tzara, and their cults of African and Oceanian art. Maura's effortsto read sense into Hugo Ball's poem in 'pseudo-African' do not convince, for this farrago sounds like a right-winger's attempt to burlesque those to whom it allegedly pays homage. Extremes meet: avant-gardes reach out longingly to the supposed privilege of the primitive. An anthropological slant is furnished by Emmanuel Lezy, who acknowledges that geographers are every bit as nervous about terms like 'primitive' as anyone else, apart from racists. He argues that too many observers do not, cannot, stay long enough with a community to register its long-term, cyclical variations, e.g. as between the proportions of hunting, gathering, and cultivating. He offers a sage analysis of the poser: how can we describe peoples apparently so differentfrom Western societies, without either infantilizingor worshippingthem? At the end, Jean Bessiere's overview sails abstractly above the foregoing discourse. Apart from relishing a stray formula like 'la vulgate de la critique postcoloniale' (p. 236), which Bessiere probably did not intend pejoratively, you end up hankering for some brass tacks to walk or sit on. Nevertheless, despite this incorporeal coda, the collection as a whole is rich, and taxing, just like the West. University of Reading Walter Redfern Fictions de Vipseite: essai sur I'invention narrative de soi (Beckett, Hesse, Kafka, Musil, Proust, Woolf). By LaurentMattiussi. (Histoire des ideeset critiquelitteraire, 399) Geneva: Droz. 2002. 340 pp. ISBN 2-600-00691-5. Opening with the contention that the invention of the self is one of the most fun? damental aims of literature in the modern period, this book sets out to show how fiction was used in the firsthalf of the twentieth century as a space for exploring the volatile boundaries of identity. A nineteenth-century text, Nerval's poem 'El Desdichado ', is used to establish the basic problem of a self which can be grasped only indirectly. Hermann Hesse invents and theorizes a new genre through which Ner? val's self-identification through distortion can be fullyrealized: fictiveautobiography. Beckett, Kafka, Musil, Proust, and Woolf join Hesse as the most daring pioneers 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...