Peinture et bibelot: prégnance du pictural dans l’œuvre de Joris-Karl Huysmans par Jérémy Lambert

Abstract

the topics that interest them are treated elsewhere. For example, although there are only two essays in the chapter on the danse macabre, it is discussed in other chapters. The Parisian Cemetery of the Holy Innocents has no single chapter devoted to it, but figures prominently in several essays. A broad spectrum of genres including epic and lyric poetry, Arthurian literature, beast epic, and romance share space with chapters organized around lies and suicide, laughing at death, and image and text. Carlos Clamote Carreto investigates the spilling of the martyr’s blood and the dismemberment of the epic hero. Vicenta Hernandez Alvarez ponders the cortege of words (38) announcing epic deaths. Pierre-Gilles Girault, observing death is everywhere in the Middle Ages (62), focuses on the pilgrim and the warrior, both journeying towards salvation.Agnès Echène considers the fatherless hero. Laurence Cousteix notes Merlin’s dis- and re-appearance in Arthurian literature. Lydie Lansard addresses the Passion of Christ in vernacular versions of the Gospel of Nicodemus. Jean-Louis Benoit expertly considers miracle stories, which are didactic but teach literarily rather than directly, and in which death lies on the path to eternal salvation.Alexandra-Kathrin StanislawKemenah provides close readings of Eustache Deschamps’s poems on senescence, wisdom and the ubi sunt motif. Caroline Denhez investigates the strange links between dance/(life) and death in the danse macabre. Karin Becker reads Martial D’Aubergne’s neglected Danse de femmes, based on an exhaustive tracing of the development of the danse macabre. ZoéVerveropoulou traces death’s cathartic working out in farce, a genre predicated on all death destroys: the body and its functions. Martijn Rus argues that in the Renaissance, death lost its absolute horror. Natalie Vrticka ponders post mortem silences and speech as signifiers of consolation and dis-illusion. Ji-Hyun Philippa Kim also examines stillness whether suicide or swoon. Ian Laurie stretches the death motif to argue compellingly that Eustache Deschamps suffered a double death, corporeal and literary.The Miroir de mariage,possibly three different works,may have been smoothed into cohesion by the poet himself, though interrupted by his death. Julie Singer locates Pierre de Hautville in indestructible loci, the cemetery, the poet’s own work, and the reader. Caroline Denhez returns the reader to the danse macabre and the inescapable connections between death and suffering, depicted satirically as the reader is asked to consider making his own good end. The volume concludes with Jean-François KostaTh éfaine’s own edition of Isabeau de Bavière’s will.This document lets us hear the voice of a medieval queen, who recognizes the diverse and deadly perils of her century. Stevens Institute of Technology (NJ) Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi Lambert, Jérémy. Peinture et bibelot: prégnance du pictural dans l’œuvre de Joris-Karl Huysmans. Paris: Champion, 2012. ISBN 978-2-7453-2495-5. Pp. 227. 25 a. Contemporary interest in exploring ways in which text and image are linked should make this careful study of the close relationship between Huysmans’s writing 276 FRENCH REVIEW 88.4 Reviews 277 and the art of painting of interest to many. Lambert describes and analyzes what he calls the pictorial esthetic that organizes Huysmans’s life and oeuvre, beginning with a short chapter on Huysmans’s genetic and esthetic heritage. Born into a family of painters, the young Huysmans visited his father in his studio every evening until he died when Huysmans was only eight. Lambert interprets Huysmans’s life—and work—as a quest for meaning inspired by idealization of the lost father. Substituting the pen for a paintbrush, perhaps, Lambert posits, due to a lack of confidence in his own talent for painting, Huysmans sought Baudelairean correspondences between word and image, literature and painting, this world and another, in all he did. He often portrayed aspects of his life and self-image in his characters, confirmed aesthetes (and bachelors) who sought to become their own creators by making of their lives original and unreproducible works of art. This compelling story gets somewhat lost as Peinture et bibelot progresses. Lambert offers a highly structured, carefully documented, and extremely dense study of various images, influences...