Les vers de la mort par Robert Le Clerc d’Arras

Abstract

The fictions of Marie Darrieussecq, especially those after Truismes, focus less on relating events than on presenting a “model of mind” (77). This model and her interest in the biological basis of mental life have also led her to represent prelinguistic thought in stream of consciousness writing, as she does in White. Jean Echenoz, in contrast, plays with popular genre fiction such as polars, adventure stories, and fantasies, as if to see how much he can explode our expectations and still tell a story. He leaves out important scenes, changes plot direction, and shifts genres in mid-narrative; he uses an “intrusive narrator” (118); he does not seem to care about probability or coherence. Above all, he digresses so much that he raises the question of what is and is not digression. Echenoz has also written paired novels, particularly Je m’en vais and Un an, which “recuperate each other’s digressions” by putting information in one which makes events in the other more comprehensible (115). The last author considered is the most traditional, but his works raise the issue of closure. In each of Patrick Modiano’s novels, and in his autobiographical and biographical works, someone is trying to learn about past events, but the searcher is always baffled. Yet at each book’s end there is closure because the initial questions have become less important. On the other hand, the interrelationships among his works, whether thematic or actual, as in Voyage de noces and Dora Bruder, show that the uncertainties persist. Throughout this study Kemp focuses on how these authors from l’Hexagone, all presumably aware that they are writing “in the wake of mid-twentieth-century French experimentalism” (17), conceive of narration in a way that both reflects and rejects the Tel quel and Oulipo sort of serious playfulness. Kemp broadens his subject beyond these five writers by anchoring his discussion in the context of past and present fiction, and he explores ways in which current storytelling techniques challenge contemporary theorizing of narrative. Organized, clear, and specific, this book is a welcome addition to narrative studies. College of San Mateo (CA) Susan Petit LE CLERC D’ARRAS, ROBERT. Les vers de la mort. Éd. Annette Brasseur et Roger Berger. Genève: Droz, 2009. ISBN 978-2-600-01313-0. Pp. 659. 67,80 a. Overlooked by several of the scholarly reference manuals dedicated to the allegorical and didactic literature of the French Middle Ages, this relatively unknown thirteenth-century work has long been eclipsed in the secondary literature by a shorter antecedent of the same name that had been composed by Hélinand de Froidmont at the end of the twelfth century. Adding to its literary misfortune is the fact that Robert’s 3,744 octosyllabic verses, originally written between 1266 and 1271, had not seen a new critical edition for well over a hundred years, until Jean-Charles Payen took up the task in 1979, one year before his own death. The scholarly community owes Annette Brasseur and Roger Berger a debt of gratitude for having expanded and transformed Payen’s unfinished preliminary work into the outstanding critical edition that we have in our possession today. Based on manuscript A (Paris, BNF f. fr. 375, fos 335r–342v), the edition’s critical apparatus includes all the graphical and morphological variants from the two other known manuscripts. The editors claim to have used a light editorial touch and to have registered all of their textual interventions in the notes. The Reviews 753 introduction includes an extensive, but not exhaustive, analysis of the graphical and morphological features of the manuscript’s language with a particular emphasis on its regional characteristics, which are predominantly Picard. To facilitate comparisons between the manuscripts, the editors have reproduced in the introduction a table of corresponding strophes, which had appeared in the original 1887 Windahl edition. The textual apparatus is amply supplemented at the end of the volume with a table of proper names; a rich, eighty-seven-page glossary; an index of all of the work’s rhymes; and an index of proverbial expressions, a number of which, it should be noted, do not appear in either Morawski’s or SchulzeBusacker ’s...