Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism by Hannah Freed-Thall

Abstract

 Reviews critical incident’ (p. ), on the other. Lloyd prefers ‘Boule de suif’ to ‘La Parure’, praising the former’s complexity of character portraits and downplaying the eponymous prostitute’s victimhood. e latter he calls ‘a rather unedifying lesson about social pretensions and self-deception’ (p. ). Meanwhile, Maupassant’s fantastic fiction is examined in the light of his  essay ‘Le Fantastique’ on the genre; both the fiction and the essay stress the dissolution of the self rather than the supernatural itself. A brief reading of ‘Le Horla’ shows this emphasis in action. Maupassant’s novels are read through the familiar lens of contraction as we move chronologically from Une vie to Notre cœur. Lloyd does not dispute the consensus that the author’s final two novels are inferior to their predecessors, despite glimmers of proto-Proustianism in the latter; yet, unlike most critics, he is also severe in commenting on Pierre et Jean, accusing Maupassant’s narrative voice of losing objectivity and unduly siding with the protagonist. Mont-Oriol, in contrast, has been unfairly overlooked; it has a ‘balanced outcome’ (p. ) that reflects its interweaving of transactional business and romantic dealings. It is hard to imagine a more comprehensive treatment of Maupassant in this format. To the experienced reader, little of this material will be new, yet that is not the function of this book or indeed of the series as a whole. Lloyd expertly condenses a maximum of content, about both Maupassant’s own writing and the responses it has elicited, into around two hundred pages. As a result, Guy de Maupassant will no doubt serve as both a helpful teaching aid and an introduction to Maupassant for interested amateurs for years to come. V U R C Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism. By H-  F-T. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  (pbk ). viii+  pp. £. (pbk £.). ISBN –––– (pbk ––– –). In a rare instance of incoherence, the narrator of Proust’s Recherche expresses his first aesthetic judgement as a spluttered string of outbursts. Encountering an everyday scene of a splotch of light reflected between a pond and a chicken-topped tool-shed roof, he is so delighted that he can only brandish his umbrella and exclaim ‘Zut, zut, zut, zut’. For Hannah Freed-all, this unsophisticated moment of aesthetic experience and disorientation unlocks the apparent contradiction in French modernism between high style and inarticulacy. By examining what she evocatively terms ‘beauty’s aerlives’, Freed-all seeks to prove that ‘the aesthetic is nothing special’ (p. ). Her book comprises two parts, the first of which theorizes an underexplored aesthetics of ordinariness in Proust’s novel via ideas of prestige, babble, and nuance, while the second offers a survey of post-Proust literature, examining mid-century experimental aesthetic encounters in the prose poetry of Francis Ponge, the novels of Nathalie Sarraute, and the contemporary theatre of Yasmina Reza. Concisely erudite and clearly MLR, .,   written, Spoiled Distinctions marshals an impressive range of secondary literature from Immanuel Kant to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in its exploration of the ordinary from the vantage point of aesthetic theory. In the first half of her monograph, Freed-all argues that moments of ineloquent astonishment allow the Proustian beholder to enjoy ‘the world in its common, undignified singularity, rather than as a mineable source of secret treasure’ (p. ). She then turns her attention to authors who have expanded Proust’s minor mode of spoiled distinction such that it becomes the entire substance of aesthetic experience in their work. In elaborating new ways to delineate and parcel up the phenomenal world, Spoiled Distinctions argues that French modernism ‘does not simply reinforce the high–low, distinguished–vulgar codes of taste, but makes us aware of the classification-thwarting margins of both aesthetic experience and literary critique’ (p. ) Ultimately, for Freed-all, the aesthetic in French modernism is bound up with all it purportedly eschews: ‘quotidian commodity consumption; the labour of making and perceiving; and the vulnerable finite body, with its unruly pleasures and displeasures’ (p. ). Each chapter offers perceptive close readings of scenes of beholding. e first focuses on Proust’s early pastiche accounts of a diamond the in the style of...