Mauriac: The Poetry of a Novelist by Paul Cooke Philippe Baudorre (review)

Abstract

828 Reviews the emotional paradigms?or, to use Proust's narrator's terminology, the 'modeles de sentiments' (A la recherchedu tempsperdu, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1987-89), iv (1989), 661)?lying at the heart ofthe Recherche. She probes especially Marcel's separation anxiety,embedded in the drame du coucher and forming the template for heightened moments of self-awareness later in the novel. Moreover, Wimmers works deftlyon the early drafts of the novel, where the powerful assertion of affectiveneed is often unmitigated by irony or humour. Constructing the bridge between the novel's hero and its reader is central to Wimmers 's argument. She demonstrates how the narrator ofthe Recherche regularly seeks to work outwards from the prison of Marcel's emotional crisis. The figures of the sick hotel guest and the lonely traveller who feature in the opening pages of Combray and who become Wagnerian-style leitmotifs fill a crucial role: they widen the focus and draw the reader in. The cognitive reading of Marcel's emotional life thus becomes, additionally, an invitation to the reader to engage in self-recognition. In a pathos-driven analysis of the kind promoted in Barthes's later work, Wimmers constructs elegantly her reflection on the traumas of Albertine disparue and the affecting sense of physical decline conveyed by the Guermantes matinee in Le Temps retrouve. Stressing the transformative power of literature, she quotes from Ricceur: ' "we try to gain by means of imaginative variation of our ego a narrative understanding of ourselves"' (p. 7). The scanning, in tandem, of literature and life also sees Wimmers look passionately at the power of literature for Marcel. His privileging of Racine's Phedre, George Sand's Francois le Champi, and Massenet's Manon illustrates how art provides a voie royale to emotional and psychological self-discovery. The young Proust already demonstrates an awareness of this transposition between hero and mo? tivated reader when summing up the attraction of 'les beaux livres': 'sous chaque mot chacun de nous met son sens ou du moins son image qui est souvent un contre-sens' (Contre Sainte-Beuve, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 305). Wimmers's achievement is to have patiently constructed a finely argued poetics of narrative forthe Recherche that is powerfully grounded in affect. Royal Holloway, University of London Edward J.Hughes Mauriac: The Poetry of a Novelist. By Paul Cooke. (Faux Titre, 240) Amsterdam: Rodopi. 2003. 280 pp. ?57. ISBN 90-420-0848-2. Franpois Mauriac 6: un ecrivain journaliste. Ed. by Philippe Baudorre. (Revue des Lettres Modernes, serie Francois Mauriac, 6) Caen: Minard. 2003. 187pp. ?19. ISBN 2-256-9106i-x. Although Francois Mauriac and his work are still considered rather unfashionable by the wider critical community, these two volumes remind us both of the continuing vitality of Mauriac studies and of the diversity of a writer who, in the UK at least, has long since been pigeon-holed as a 'Catholic Novelist'. Paul Cooke's monograph offersthe firstfull-length study of Mauriac's poetry, which emerged over a forty-year period until it petered out in the 1940s. Mauriac always claimed to see himself as a poet firstand foremost, and it was a favourable review of his firstcollection of poems by Maurice Barres in 1910 that launched his literary career; but both the critics and the wider reading public proved reluctant to recognize him as such during his lifetime, much to his regret. Cooke sets out to reassess his poetry, arguing that it is essential for a proper understanding of his work as a novelist. He adopts a chronological approach to trace the development of Mauriac's verse, making deft use of statistical analysis to map out its thematic and semantic universe, and highlight the ways in which it evolves (a trend towards greater density of expression, forexample). His study is lucid MLRy 100.3, 2005 829 and rigorous, and also honest in its appraisal. While it acknowledges that the early verse has little to retain the interest of the general reader, it makes an eloquent case for the later work, and Le Sang d'Atys (1940) in particular, which Mauriac himself considered his best work in...