Le paradigme inquiet: Pirandello et le champ de la modernité (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS leave little room for theoretically sophisticated discussion. If there is anything that disappoints in this project, it is a New Critical emphasis on universal themes and transcendent values combined with an ongoing attempt to justify New World literature by arguing that on those grounds it was just as good as Old World literature during any given period. This defensiveness tends to subvert itself, however, leaving the reader wondering if New World literature does have a problem measuring up. Nonetheless, Fitz achieves whathe undertakes. Spengemann begins his argument against "American literature" by asserting the impossibility of opening up that term to include all the literatures of the Americas, and concludes by arguing that Americanists should limit their studies to a few New World masterpieces in English. In the spirit of comparative literature, Fitz argues that we can legitimately study a body of texts across several languages, in this case texts that share important elements because they share an interAmerican contextual history far different from that of British and continental texts. In the end, I much prefer Fitz's expansive project to Spengemann's reductive one. James Kinney Virginia Commonwealth University WLADIMIR KRYSINSKI. Leparadigme inquiet: Pirandello et le champ de la modernité. Montreal: Le Préambule, 1989. 545 pp. A polyglot familiar with several literary traditions and a Pirandello scholar of note, Wladimir Krysinski seems ideally suited to place the much cited but elusive Sicilian in the comparative context of European and American modernism and postmodernism. His book on the modern novel, Le Carrefour des signes, as well as his essays on literary theory and on writers such as Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Henry James, Francis Ponge, Sartre, Augusto Roa Bastos, and Witkiewicz, as well as Pirandello, betray a wide-ranging interest in the topic of literary modernity. The present multi-faceted volume brings to light a subject that has not yet been sufficiently discussed—Pirandellian semiosis—whUe viewing Pirandello's writing as intertext in the work ofSartre, Gombrowicz, Lenormand, Genet, Julian Rios and others. Reworking a term used by Tynianov and Todorov, Krysinski proposes the term "series" to define "a coexistence and a sequence in a particular discursive time and space of homogeneous and analogous facts according to three affinities : thematic, formal, and evolutionary" (65, my trans.). Thus the placement of Pirandello in a number of such series ranging from Cervantes to Peter Handke serves to illuminate ways in which his theater, prose fiction, and essays (especially "Humorism") serve as reference points or "vanishing points" for various codes of modernity. For example, in a chapter entitled "The Pirandello-Cervantes Une," Krysinski juxtaposes Foucault's observations on Don Quixote as the first modern work because of the way in which its language breaks the classical relation with things, with Pirandello's analysis of the same work as a "humoristic," ironic, and "perspectivist" text. He then goes on to discuss PirandeUo's work in a line ofmodernity emanating from Cervantes: 148 THE COMPARATIST a dialectic unity of tragic and comic, and a system of textual ruptures that subvert mimesis with semiosis. The deconstruction of mimesis through the irony, self-reflectiveness, and fracturing of the stable subject in Pirandellian texts is at the heart of what Krysinski sees as PirandelUan modernity. He proposes the oxymoronic term "le paradigme inquiet" to characterize the "dislocation" of established canons operating in PirandeUo. Thus, ironic humorism subverts naturalistic narration and metatheater systematicallydeconstructs mimetic representation. The pairing of PirandeUo with "deconstruction" whets the appetite for a more precise definition. Did PirandeUo say it all before"} Although Krysinski has some illuminating things to say about PirandeUo's fiction, he constantly returns to the drama as his major focal point. One wishes, in fact, that he had spent more time developing his insights on the novels and short stories. In the first chapter, for example, he briefly discusses the novel One, Nobody, and A Hundred Thousand in the Ught of Bahktin on Dostoevsky and proposes three of the short stories as models for PirandeUo's "perspectivism." Because of the infinite multitude of perspectives brought about by the instability of the character as subject, PirandeUo's novel radicalizes Dostoevskian dialogism, which stiU takes place between two coherent subjects . The clashing of points of...