European Religious Research Articles

Sad Clowns and Pale Pierrots. Literature and the Popular Comic Arts in 19th-century France by Louisa E. Jones, and: Pierrots on the Stage of Desire. Nineteenth-Century French Literary Artists and the Comic Pantomime by Robert Storey

Reviews175 later milieux such as Franciscan devotions and vernacular developments in liturgy. Finally, the discussion analyzes the formal characteristics that link the Italian pieces to other compositions in Romance languages and suggests lines of origin and development. Sticca addresses a second and still more difficult question when he turns from the liturgical Passion plays of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to the large vernacular cycles of the later Middle Ages. There are, to be sure, some lines of influence, especially regarding narrative techniques within the drama; but it has been plausibly argued that the Passion play is a culmination of liturgical drama rather than a beginning of the vernacular mysteries. As a response to this discontinuity Sticca urges a method of comparative study, and he reviews the vernacular Passion dramas of the Later Middle Ages to map the points of convergence between national traditions. Though the analysis is organized in part as an account of present scholarship, it brings into focus fundamental interpretive questions, such as the nature of dramatic inventio through the rewriting of earlier texts, the relation of genres, literary bilingualism, and the continuing influence of liturgy and devotional literature on the late medieval drama. This is a book of great scope and learning, which supplements and extends Sticca's earlier study, The Latin Passion Play (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1970). The discussion of the planctus as a lyric form is, by comparison, more extensive than the commentary in Patrick S. Diehl's recent study, The Medieval European Religious Lyric (Berkeley. Univ. of California Press, 1985). The analysis of the planctus and the Passion drama builds convincingly on a study of thematic influences . More important, it identifies the ways in which medieval playwrights exploited the abiding differences between their disparate sources and their own form. ROBERT EDWARDS State University of New York at Buffalo National Humanities Center Louisa E. Jones. Sad Clowns and Pale Pierrots. Literature and the Popular Comic Arts in 19th-century France. Lexington: The French Forum, 1984. Pp. 296. $17.50. Robert Storey. Pierrots on the Stage of Desire. Nineteenth-Century French Literary Artists and the Comic Pantomime. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Pp. 351. $37.50. These two critical histories should be studied in tandem, and probably it is preferable to do Storey's before Jones'. Storey's meticulous documentation cum continuity should be consulted; Jones' clarifying narrative should be read. Further, Storey, whose grants-in-aid made possible a copious collection of plates, literally illustrates Jones. His criticism of her use of sources (p. xv, n. 5) is not entirely fair, even if partially founded. Storey relied chiefly on extant manuscript scenarios, while Jones relied more on published accounts. Each tack was appropriate since Jones is showing the development of a modern topos, while Storey 176Comparative Drama is itemizing and annotating documents. Each, not surprisingly, finds a different critical approach appropriate. Jones, who is looking for the larger outlines and inclusive patterns, draws on archetypal and generic syntheses in the Frye manner. Storey, who is concerned with the singular detail (which by accretion could form a pattern), draws on Freudian analysis, especially as propounded by Lacan. Accordingly, in Jones the reader finds the popular Pierrot mime tradition , which both she and Storey begin with Jean Gaspard "Baptiste" Duburau (apotheosized by Jean Louis Barrault in Les Enfants du Paradis ), a growing and changing organism; it changed as it was co-opted by the bourgeois vanguard both without and within the mime troupe. In Storey, the reader can infer an organism from the data, but the reader's attention is focused on the particularity of performer, "text," and Establishment response. Neither historian has much to say about the public that initially acclaimed and supported the Pierrot figure. Yet if these pantomimes had not already acquired an unwashed, unlettered, unmannerly, and foul-smelling following, literati such as George Sand, Théophile Gautier, Théodore de Banville, Gustave Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Paul Verlaine, and the like would never have discovered or exploited them. (Some established writers like J.-K. Huysmans and Champfleury actually wrote "plays" for the pantomime stage.) Although both, of course, note that the government regulation forbidding dialogue in low-level...

The Man to Send Rain Clouds: Contemporary Stories by American Indians ed. by Kenneth Rosen

Reviews 315 efforts to save the species, the legends surrounding the white buffalo, attempts to breed bison with domestic cattle, and the use of the buffalo as a symbol on postage stamps, a ten-dollar bill, and official state seals, as well as in advertising material and a variety of other places. A short final chapter considers the future of the American buffalo. In telling his story, Dary makes extensive use of previously published anecdotes, some occupying as much as three or four pages of text. Enter­ taining though most of them are, the reader may have the sense of wading through a compendium of excerpts from other books. Since many of these are not readily accessible, however, and since Dary’s notes usually identify his sources, his predilection for giving warmed-over information is not a serious defect in the book. There are minor errors of course — the dis­ tinguished frontier historian Wilbur Jacobs turns up in a note as Wilbur “Jones” — but the number is not excessive. Not an encyclopedic work like Frank Gilbert Roe’s The North American Buffalo, nor even quite what the subtitle calls it — “The Full Saga of the American Animal” — Dary’s book is a handy collection of information, eminently readable, well illustrated, and equipped with sufficient documen­ tation to lead the serious reader to the primary sources if his stick floats that way. Not, like Roe, bent on debunking hoary myths about the bison, Dary usually presents both sides of controversial issues and offers a judicious commentary, free of dogmatism. Some readers may find him too non­ committal, insufficiently critical where a considered opinion is called for; but for the audience to which the book is presumably addressed, this posture will probably not be objectionable. Yes, Wayne Gadient would very likely find The Buffalo Book good reading. Whether he would want to pay the $15.00 asked for it is another matter. But with the price of beef where it is these days, he ought to be doing a good business in hump ribs and boudins, and maybe he can afford it. ROY W. MEYER, Mankato State College The Man to Send Rain Clouds: Contemporary Stories by American Indians. Edited by Kenneth Rosen. (New York: The Viking Press, 1974. 178 pages. $6.95.) This anthology of short fiction written by Southwestern Indian authors is worth reading. Some of these stories are technically lacking, but others are impressive. The better stories will undoubtedly appeal to teachers looking for Indian fiction to include on reading lists in literature of the West or literature of American minorities. These stories will also appeal 316 Western American Literature to persons seeking to know contemporary Indians as they see and know themselves. This anthology bears the stamp of a single ethnic identity. The stories show a single large pre-occupation — the transition of a distinct people from an established, inherited culture to an attractive but formidably foreign new culture. The incongruity of the two cultures is evident in many ways. The settings of the stories often depict one reservation or another, but they also at times depict the impinging Anglo world — the off-reservation cop, the modern air terminal, a big city ghetto, or a distant Army base. The characters who are treated with sympathy are Indian; against them are posed antagonists of Anglo or Chicano background. From this incongruity arise the conflicting, ambivalent attitudes and themes discernible in the stories taken as a group. In some stories tradtional Indian culture is affirmed or made triumphant over Anglo culture. In others, the brutality and indif­ ference of Anglo culture are portrayed. In still others, the impotence and dwindling influence of inherited Indian culture are emphasized. In all, the fact is evident that the contemporary Indian lives between two worlds. Two stories will serve as illustration. In a story entitled, “Whispers from a Dead World,” Joseph Little, a Mescalero Apache, brings the fate of a reservation Indian into ironic and tragic contrast with the moral idealism of Euro-American culture. Throughout the story, paraphrases from great European religious and moral philosophers are interspersed among a narra­ tive about an Indian man whose squalid, deprived life terminates in suicide when...

Aborted Modernization in West Africa? the Case of Abeokuta.

Brunschwig and Crowder have argued that many West African states on the eve of European annexation were on their way towards independent modernization and westernization, and that modernization was frustrated rather than accelerated by European rule. The paper examines the applicability of this argument to the particular case of the Egba state of Abeokuta in Western Nigeria.In Abeokuta, European religious and political ideas had gained an early foothold through the return of liberated Egba slaves from Sierra Leone and the arrival of Christian missionaries. The new, westernized élite of converts and repatriates developed ambitions for the transformation of Abeokuta into a ‘Christian, civilized’ state. Scope for the realization of these ambitions was found through co-operation with the traditional élite, particularly in the Egba United Board of Management of 1865–74 and the Egba United Government of 1898–1914. Both these organizations suffered from the incompatibility between the essentially conservative aims of the traditional élite and the modernizing ambitions of the new élite. The Egba United Board of Management was dependent for its success solely upon the support of the traditional élite, and therefore ceased to function when the chiefs lost interest in its cause. The Egba United Government succeeded in laying lasting foundations for a modern administration in Abeokuta, but in order to achieve this had to rely on British military support against internal opposition and on British financial backing for their more ambitious projects. Through its military and financial dependence on the British, Abeokuta gradually became politically dependent, so that its formal political independence was largely illusory for at least five or six years before the final British annexation in 1914.