Reviews extraordinary theory of ocean currents and tides. ese phenomena he attributes (originally in the Fourth ‘Étude’ of ) to the alternate melting and refreezing of the icecaps at the North and South Poles. Adducing particular maritime and other observations laboriously compiled, he develops a vast imaginative construct—at once ideologically progressive (global currents bring humankind together) and poetically powerful (currents are to the globe ‘comme la sève dans les végétaux, et le sang dans les animaux’: quoted by Joël Castonguay-Bélanger, p. )—which animates Nature and vindicates Providence. No less typically, he inexhaustibly defends it against what he perceives as a conspiracy against him by the academies and the elites. B, U L R H Fictions of the Press in Nineteenth-Century France. By E B. (Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature) London: Palgrave Macmillan. . ix+ pp. £. (ebk £.). ISBN –––- (ebk ––– –). ‘Newspapers are an evil,’ says the world-weary author Claude Vignon in Balzac’s Illusions perdues (–). at comment is typical of pervasive hostility towards journalism in nineteenth-century French fiction. ‘And yet,’ as Edmund Birch notes of Vignon’s remark in Fictions of the Press in Nineteenth-Century France, ‘newspaper and novel become inseparable in this period’ (p. ). Novels, including Illusions perdues, were frequently serialized in newspapers; and most novelists, chief among them Balzac, doubled as newspaper critics and columnists. In the words of Marie- Ève érenty, who has led a recent wave of scholarship in this area, the rapidly expanding press became ‘the laboratory of literature’ (‘Pour une histoire littéraire de la presse au e siècle’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, (), – (p. )). Given the disparity between that creative ferment and the vitriolic portrayals of journalism found in nineteenth-century French fiction, érenty and her collaborators have tended to pay only secondary attention to the latter, which they view as an unreliable guide to literary and journalistic history. By contrast, Birch places the ‘novel of journalism’ at the centre of the frame in Fictions of the Press, which, along with Kate Rees’s e Journalist in the French Fin-de-siècle Novel (; reviewed in MLR, (), –), is the first book in English to take its lead from their research. Beginning with a theoretical overview that situates érenty and her collaborators ’ work within broader debates about realism’s mimetic function and journalism ’s claims to epistemological authority, Birch devotes his subsequent chapters to readings of Illusions perdues, the Goncourts’ Charles Demailly (), and Maupassant’s Bel-Ami (). Echoing Balzac’s Vautrin, Birch argues that these works of fiction offer insights into a volatile secret world of journalistic skulduggery that nineteenth-century journalists generally passed over in silence. In Illusions perdues, Lucien de Rubempré’s entry into the Parisian press becomes MLR, ., ‘a rite of passage’ (p. ) that allows him to see through and manipulate the ever deceptive public record created by the newspaper. But that journalistically mediated education in social realities proves to be inadequate as the novel’s hero is overwhelmed by the nefarious forces he unleashes. As Birch points out, that failure is paralleled in two of Balzac’s less familiar works from the late s, Les Employés and Une fille d’Ève, which similarly dramatize struggles for mastery of the press. In Charles Demailly, the corrosive power of the press seems stronger still as the eponymous hero is driven insane by a scurrilous campaign waged against him by his erstwhile journalistic colleagues. Birch offers a nimble interpretation of the Goncourts’ story as emblematic of pervasive anxieties about the erosion of privacy during the Second Empire, when censorship pushed newspapers to forsake political news in favour of society gossip. Political concerns again come to the fore in his reading of Bel-Ami, which traces dense connections between Maupassant’s journalism of the early s about French colonialism in North Africa and the novel’s critique of the press’s complicity in colonial expansion. Here we see a clear example of érenty’s ‘laboratory of literature’ in action. Birch’s account of Bel-Ami, which was serialized in the newspaper Gil Blas, also shows how the press could accommodate works of literature that went against the grain of...
Read full abstract
Aug 6, 2024
Nora A Draper + 4
Open Access
