The Child by Jules Vallès (review)

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MLR, 101.1, 2006 253 given to the flowers, and for increasingly ironic and deflationary as opposed to senti? mental, romantic purposes. While itis a well-known feature of Flaubert's writing style that authorial voice gives way to the language of objects, and that Flaubert uses these objects both mimetically, to produce the effectofthe real, and symbolically, to provide all manner of meaning, what one realizes in reading Tipper's work is that the flower is one of the richest of Flaubertian objects for these kinds of stylistic exploitation. Tipper's chronological approach also reveals that while Flaubert's flower refer? ences and flower types increase over time, allowing the imagery more and more to supplant direct authorial voice, by the time we come to Bouvard et Pecuchet with its maximal number of flower types, most of these references occur only once and seem systematically to have become empty signs, thus devoid of signification. That Flaubert's work hovers between interpretative determinacy and indeterminacy, with the latter textual openness most prominent in his final work, we knew before. But what we did not know before reading Tipper's study is that we can trace all of these developments of Flaubert's stylistic ruses by following the flowers. So while Tipper's investigation of flower imagery produces no new discoveries about Flaubert's art and thematics, it does provide us with a new angle of access to these features. In conclud? ing, Tipper suggests that other organic imagery in Flaubert, such as that of trees and fruit,deserves to be systematically explored. St Mary's College of Maryland Jacqueline Paskow The Child. By Jules Valles. Trans. with an introduction and notes by Douglas Parmee. New York: New York Review Books. 2005. xxvi + 343 pp. ?8.99. ISBN 1-59017-117-9. L'Enfant, the firstvolume of Jules Valles's 'Jacques Vingtras' trilogy, is one of the great novels of childhood in world literature, able to breathe the same air as Gorky or Celine. It has found in Douglas Parmee a sensitive and widely experienced trans? lator. His introduction is pungent, and says a great deal of perceptive sense in small compass. 'II a du temperament', verily. The notes are succinct but informative. In The Child, the alternation of graphic present with various past tenses, managed effortlessly by Parmee, mirrors the autobiographical challenge Valles took up: to recapture the past from an adult perspective that is still essentially childlike. The hero Jacques is mystifiedby,but struggles always to comprehend, grown-up ways. He feels guilty when wrongly blamed forcausing his fatherto lacerate his hand when carving a toy cart. Throughout, Jacques goes willingly through all the motions of accepting the parental programme, but something cussed in him prevents total adhesion to their plans. He cannot, forexample, pray at Mass without dissolving into giggles. This novel is in fact full of defiant laughter from the boy in the face of his joy-killing genitors. There are many vivacious scenes, sound-bites, eye-bites, nose-bites. The child's view is necessarily fragmented, but intense forall that: 'That debauchery of the nose, the bold brassy blare striking the eardrum' (p. 59). In a text where the parental and filial discourses frequently clash, the rendering of that all-purpose pronoun 'on' is crucial; Parmee copes adroitly with this slippery customer. There are oases of plea? sure amid the deserts and other badlands of a largely brutalized childhood; these are provided by various kindly relatives or neighbours, and offset,but never cancel, the parental cruelty. Jacques everywhere seeks to make silk purses out of sows' ears, for example his wonderment at his gesticulatory chatterbox of a deaf-mute aunt. One of the novel's most ebullient features is its embodying of unsneaky juvenile eroticism, as violent and all-encompassingas that of any other age. Sex, sensory rapture , and humour have nevertheless to fighta running battle with forbidding parents 254 Reviews and carceral schools, which are contrasted with the rumbustious local pub, all noise, laughing, and deals, just as the grim household is contrasted with the exuberant lifeof the local jail. Valles's imagery is insistent, often surprising, but generally winning. He shows unrelentingly how envy...