Le Sphinx et l’abîme: sphinx maritimes et énigmes romanesques dans ‘Moby Dick’ et ‘Les Travailleurs de la mer’ by Lise Revol-Marzouk

Abstract

514 Reviews using the feminine gender to address amale beloved in accordance with the usual conventions ofmost medieval love poetry written in Indian languages. The main part of the book consists of three groups of poems of very different provenance, each contrasting in a differentway with the now classic Urdu model. The first is the Punjabi love lyric composed in the simpler genre called kafi by the great Sufimasters Shah Husain (d. 1593) and Bullhe Shah (d. 1758). Close to the folk tradition and drawing on local romantic legend, thiswonderful poetry continues to enjoy widespread popular appeal in Pakistan, where Punjabi remains the spoken language in diglossia with Urdu as the language of education and high culture. The second and longest part of the book contains poems from the kingdoms of theDeccan where Urdu poetry was firstcultivated. This Dakani Urdu poetry has long been marginalized from the canon by the archaism of its language as well as by the poets' Indian-style preference for speaking through a female persona. Given the general inaccessibility of the Dakani Urdu ghazal today, it is particularly good tohave such a generous selection ofwork from the leading poets, including three reigning sovereigns of the kingdoms ofGolkunda and Bijapur. The third section contains lyricswritten in the peculiar Urdu genre called rekhti which enjoyed a brief vogue in the early nineteenth century, and which has for a while been one of Petievich's research interests. Supposedly invented by the sportive litterateur Saadat Yar Khan 'Rangin', this is a deliberately subversive genre using the invented term rekhti,a feminine formation from rekhta (the then pre ferred name forUrdu as a poetic language), to describe saucy love poems using a pseudo-realistic female persona who quite frequently expresses titillatingly sug gestive lesbian feelings. Since thispoetry of artificialmasquerade isdisapproved for incorporation in the standard canon, it is again good to have a generous selection made available here. While hardly up to the poetic standard of the Punjabi and Dakani poems, the rekhtimaterial will certainly prove a useful source for the exploration of gender issues,which isone of the currently exciting topics in studies of pre-modern Indian literature. The poems are excellently presented, with original texts in Perso-Urdu script faced by readable and accurate English versions. All readers of this linguistically diverse anthology will be grateful for the careful romanized transliterations and helpful annotations. University of London Christopher Shackle Le Sphinx et Vabime: sphinx maritimes et enigmes romanesques dans 'MobyDick' et 'Les Travailleurs de la met. By Lise Revol-Marzouk. Grenoble: ELLUG. 2008. 346 pp. 30. ISBN 978-2-84310-120-5. The connections between the sphinx and the seamay not be immediately apparent, but it isnot the least strengthof Lise Revol-Marzouk's original book that shemakes thisone of several revealing insights. She carefully and enthusiastically explores the interplay between Egyptian and Greek conceptions of the sphinx inwhat might be termed the 'maritime imaginary* of theAmerican writer Herman Melville and the MLR, 105.2, 2010 515 French literary institution that isVictor Hugo. Melville's celebrated classic of the fearfulwhite whale and Hugo's dark novel ofGuernsey mariners come together in a comparative reading which identifies the figureof the sphinx as an effective the oretical strategy forunderstanding the literary imagination of each writer. Readers are taken on something of a voyage themselves which navigates them through each novel's melange ofmyth and history to track a similarly dynamic figuration of the greatmysteries of nature and the cosmos. Although Hugo would not have readMoby Dick and would have had only a passing awareness of its publication in 1851, the similarities between Melville's novel and his own 1866 text go deeper than simply theirmaritime settings. Revol Marzouk probes these likenesses with considerable detail and engaging insight, stressing the sophistication and cultural awareness of each writer's Romantic out looks. In a nineteenth century that was heavily influenced by the Napoleonic discovery of the Rosetta Stone (enabling linguists to begin the process of hiero glyph decipherment), Revol-Marzouk argues that awidespread cultural fascination with ancient history heavily permeates both Moby Dick and Les Travailleurs de la mer. The sphinx is integral to an understanding of that fascination, especially for two Romantic...