Literature and History: Around by Richard J. Golsan, Philip Watts

Abstract

Reviews 219 invitation au voyage: for Fournier, the inviting smile of Leonardo da Vinci’s “anges charmants”in“Les phares”(68) finds echo in the“invitation”of the exotic destinations proposed in “Anywhere Out of the World” (“Batavia te souriait, peut-être?” the narrator asks his own soul, 73), as well as the stationary voyages offered by hallucinogens in “La chambre double” (“un seul objet connu me sourit: la fiole de laudanum,” 78). There are complicated issues of intersubjectivity and solipsism entailed in Baudelairean smiles; as Fournier observes, the narrator/lyrical subject never smiles at another subject (excepting only the“philosophes à quatre pattes”of “Les bons chiens,”112). Laughter, in contrast, can seem to have a more social dimension (for instance, the savagely mocked Belgians collectively laugh at heaven in “La civilisation belge,” 154, while four blasé “vétérans de joie” share a laugh in “Portraits de maîtresses,” 166), though Fournier ultimately characterizes le rire baudelairien not as an opening toward a group, but rather toward “l’abîme intérieur” (250): a mark of distance between artist and others, as the airborne albatross “qui [...] se rit de l’archer,” the reflexive pronoun emphasizing the self-contained detachment of the poet, as Fournier notes (258). Yet, as in “Le fou et la Vénus,” and “Le vieux saltimbanque” (262–63), silence or absence of laughter evoke an image of an artist in decline, still isolated, but no longer triumphant. In short, this work will inform how I read and teach Baudelaire; I highly recommend it. Widener University (PA) Kate M. Bonin Golsan, Richard J., and Philip Watts. Literature and History: Around Suite française and Les bienveillantes. Yale French Studies 121 (2012). ISBN 978-0-300-18477-8. Pp. 266. $30. Late 2012: two major exhibits, 1917 at Pompidou/Metz and L’art en guerre, 1938– 1947 at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris grapple with the complexities of war’s capacity to generate enduring, if troubling works of art. The second show in particular interrogates the still gaping wound the collaboration blasted into French consciousness. A similar intent animates this provocative issue, in which eleven scholars scrutinize exemplary literary performances originating in the Second World War (Suite française), and emerging out of the darkest period of modern French history (Les bienveillantes). “Literature does not inspire good feelings,” notes Olivier Rubinstein, whose work with Irène Némirovksy’s daughter Denise Epstein resulted in the publication of Suite française (112); it would be an understatement to note that the YFS authors experienced ambivalence around these sweeping, emblematic works. One after another, they acknowledge the difficulties posed by such deeply ambiguous, sensitive material.Was Némirovsky a ventriloquist for the ideology of Vichy (Bracher, 36; Carroll, 74–76)? Was the deportee who perished in Auschwitz a “self-hating” Jew (Suleiman, 12)? Does Jonathan Littell’s seductive brute Max Aue place readers in an impossible position? Just by reading his sophisticated arguments about how circumstance alone separates the reader from the architects of the Holocaust, do we open the door to acquiescence? Or exoneration (Moyn, 128–30; Razinsky, 145)? How does fiction enable a different understanding of the past than history? Antoine Compagnon, ruing le piège littéraire, notes that the dense historical erudition of Les bienveillantes “taught me virtually nothing, yet I did not close the book” (114). More than half of these essays eschew what in war would be called a frontal attack and work instead from the novelists’ prior productions, or from significant affiliations that provide a revealing éclairage for their theaters of cruelty. Thus, parallel production comes to the fore in Marc Dambre’s analysis of Littell’s “ludic intertexuality” (170); or in Lynn Higgins’s use of Julien Duvivier’s film of Némirovsky’s David Golder to better define the melodramatic, noir elements of her representational strategies; or in Steven Ungar’s approach to the perpetrator-as-narrator problem via Littell’s Le sec et l’humide and Belgian fascist Léon Degrelle. Co-editors Watts and Golsan take on the important challenge of epic in Les bienveillantes with their considerations of Littell’s references to...