Thomas Cazentre (review)

Abstract

510 Reviews Manifold comparisons might be made between the lives of Flammarion and Zola, and, as Danielle Chaperon notes, between Stella and its antecedent, Le Docteur Pas? cal (similarities might also be observed with Le Reve). Both men were born in the early 1840s in the provinces, but were forced to move to Paris following their fathers' financial embarrassment and then to take up clerical work in fields which they would later master (publishing for Zola, astronomy for Flammarion), both were driven entrepreneurs with colossal appetites for work and publishing, both found success in the Paris of the Third Republic, and five years after meeting 'other women' both would write novels which many interpreted as thinly veiled, fantasticjustifications of their new romances (Stella and Le Docteur Pascal). While Zola's work was primarily fictional, with occasional forays into polemics which valorized the scientific potential of literature, Flammarion's work was mainly scientific, with only rare scientifically inflected fictional outings. Yet where Zola ultimately saw the novel as a means of mak? ing hard choices?as in Le Docteur Pascal's rejection of the militant scientism Zola espoused in Le Roman experimental?there is no equivalent of the Pascalian wager in Flammarion's work. His novel is hampered by a religious conviction of the power of science which extends beyond even the utopianism of Zola's late novels. Neverthe? less, there may be much of interest here to genre specialists, analysts of conceptions of space in literature, and even political scholars interested in Flammarion's 'idees internationales.. . et interplanetaires' (p. 205) which imagine political futures beyond our own earth. School of Oriental and African Studies, London William Gallois Gide lecteur: la litterature au miroir de la lecture. By Thomas Cazentre. Paris: Editions Kime. 2003. 408 pp. ?30. ISBN 2-84174-317-9. Thomas Cazentre shows that the immediacy with which Gide communed with Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Racine has to do with the exceptional importance that read? ing had for him. Unlike Proust, whose obligation to write, as Antoine Compagnon has argued, supplanted the requirement to read, Gide lived out both aspects of litera? ture, 'dans sa perennite comme dans sa precarite' (p. 364). The premiss of Cazentre's excellent book is that Gide's reading has a certain autonomy and can be studied without necessarily being related to his creative work. It bears witness to the extraor? dinary acuity with which Gide pursued the radical questioning of the very notion of literature. Cazentre divides his study into two parts, the firstdevoted to 'pratiques et representations de la lecture'. Three types of reading can be discerned, though the aim is less to specify who the particular authors are in each case than to highlight the characteristics of each type of reading. The 'lecture de reference' concerns rereadings, in fact, since we have no record of when Gide firstencountered the key authors. Meditations outside of time and chronology, these readings are marked by an incommunicable 'ravissement'. The 'lectures de decouverte' we have more anecdotal detail on; they tend to be extensive, driven by a need to find out more, indeed all, about the authors in question and to communicate this?and then to move on to other as yet unknown authors. The 'lectures mondaines' arise by force of circumstance, the requirement to keep up with the latest in literary production, and though frequently resented can occasionally provoke passing infatuations. In a section on problem cases Cazentre highlights possible cross-overs with recourse to the notion of a spectrum. In these pages we are treated to examples of Gide's literary acumen and especially the coruscating style and rhetoric of his critical essays (as well as alert readings of pertinent fictional texts). In Part 11,'Le lecteur face a la litterature', Gide's insights are pursued through the theoretical and generic search for an elusive conceptualization of literature. Cazentre illuminates successively Gide's complex approaches to MLRy ioo.2, 2005 511 poetry; his essentialist striving for a notion of truth that gives way to the hunt for an expression of 'singularite' transfigured as the banal; and his experiments with the novel perceived as the terrain of the 'possible'. Ultimately and fundamentally, Gide wrestles...