Le lieu et le moment

Abstract

hero he reconstructs the artistic world and images that fixed Paz in the popular imagination, proving that the Nobel laureate was thoroughly “in his century.” This monumental biography has fueled controversy among those who shared or rejected Paz’s convictions. But it is impartial , as befits one of the largest lives ever lived. Paz has not found his Edel, Ellmann, or Stach but rather a combination of them, with some Holroyd-like insights included for good measure. This is not unanticipated , since Domínguez Michael is also an authoritative interpreter of world literature and criticism. Will H. Corral San Francisco Laurent Jenny. Le lieu et le moment. Lagrasse, France. Verdier. 2015. 125 pages. A professor of literary studies at the University of Geneva, Laurent Jenny is best known as a critic and theorist, with an impressive body of scholarly works to his credit, the most recent among them focusing upon the aesthetics of literature. As a much-younger man, he tried his hand at the novel, publishing two of them with Éditions du Seuil in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Here, he turns to yet another form, autobiography. He is not the only critic to do so: one thinks of Roland Barthes, for example, whose late work was often colored by reflection on the self; Gérard Genette ’s latest books, from Bardadrac (2006) through Épilogue (2014) come to mind as well. By comparison, Jenny’s project is briefer and less programmatic. Asked to characterize Le lieu et le moment, he describes it as an exercise in “antisubjective autobiography,” a book that focuses more on the monde than on the moi. Certainly, the world is always present here, whether put on display in miniature (a tool kit in a mail-order catalog, a landscape in an analyst’s office, a comic book in a child’s hand) or in broader shapes (a production of Ubu roi in post-Ceaușescu Romania, a predawn fish market in Tokyo, a Greyhound bus rolling toward Boston). Yet the “I” is always in evidence here, too—as indeed one might expect it to be. Refreshingly enough, Jenny expresses very little nostalgia and almost no regret as he casts a glance over his past. He carefully encloses the word “revolution” in ironic quotation marks when alluding to the events of May 1968, and he meditates on André Malraux’s notion of “lyrical illusion” as if he might have been guilty of that sin. Mostly, however, Jenny gazes at his past in a poised, lucid manner, one fueled by an apparently inexhaustible intellectual curiosity that he brings to bear on a fundamental question: how can an individual traverse such large expanses of space, time, and event, and still be imagined as the same person? Warren Motte University of Colorado Alberto Manguel. Curiosity. New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2015. 377 pages. In the opening pages of this ambitious memoir—in which its author tracks the career of his own curiosity through a lifetime of dedicated reading within a capacious framework of the literary history of human inquisitiveness through the ages— he mentions that he was almost sixty when he first encountered Dante’s Commedia, the work of literature that did more than any other to guide him through the production of his unusually challenging task. Such a gargantuan project seeks proper scaffolding, and Dante’s poem is expected to supply it, along with a conspicuous amount of its content. Curiously including the introduction and even the notes, every chapter in a series of seventeen——appositely titled as questions such as “What Is Curiosity?”, “How Do We Reason?”, “What Are We Doing Here?”, and “What Is True?”—is preceded, with varying degrees of aptness, by an emblematic woodcut reproduced from the 1487 printing of Cristoforo Landino’s commentary on the Commedia. Each of these is followed by a brief prefatory page or two of autobiographical rumination and epigraphs by an array of writers ranging from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Karl Marx to Margaret Atwood to Francis Bacon. Next we plunge into an erudite, often engaging, at times rambling, exposition of Manguel’s ample output of thinking and reading relevant to the chapter’s thematic question...