Nineteenth-century French Studies Research Articles

The fantasy of a Trans-Saharan railway: geographies of violence and the (in)visibility of colonialism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsAlexandre DuboisAlexandre Dubois holds a Ph.D. in French and Francophone Studies from the University of Minnesota. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Regis University. His work is being published in journals such as French Studies, Romance Notes, Parade Sauvage, and Nineteenth-Century French Studies, among others.

Mother’s Milk and Male Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative. Lisa Algazi Marcus

Although the wet-nursing industry may have long faded into the past, the debate around breastfeeding remains a fascinating and salient subject in the twenty-first century. Indeed, while perusing the wealth of striking historical and literary examples offered up in this study, one cannot help but reflect on their connection with divisive issues in our own time. Lisa Algazi Marcus perceptively addresses a powerful political imaginary of the mothering body that continues to intensify bodily autonomy debates today — not only those most obviously implied by the subject of her study, concerning the use of formula milk and public breastfeeding, but also those around abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. This book, then, feels important and timely, and addresses a significant gap within nineteenth-century French studies. It begins with a thorough account of attitudes to breastfeeding in eighteenth-century France, including moving statistics on the prevalence of wet-nursing and the associated infant mortality rates despite the period’s abundance of idealistic discourse on the value of nursing one’s own child. This sets the stage for the second chapter to consider the reasons for a decline in portrayals of breastfeeding in the Romantic era, stressing the impact of Napoleon’s regressive attitudes towards women and his associated public policy. Algazi Marcus examines a very wide range of authors here: Gabriel Legouvé, Chateaubriand, Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine and George Sand, alongside a selection of early nineteenth-century paintings. The final two chapters explore realist and naturalist authors’ renewed interest in both breastfeeding and the allegorical Republican figure of Marianne, moving between Balzac’s Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées (1841), Alexandre Hepp’s Le Lait d’une autre (1891), and Zola’s Fécondité (1899). Algazi Marcus’s primary interest in these chapters is in the curious proximity of the maternal and the sexual. Whereas in the eighteenth century it was acceptable to cite sensual pleasure as an incentive for women to nurse, she argues, after the relegation of the maternal breast to the private sphere under the Empire, discussion of such pleasure could only later return via the (often pathologizing) eroticization of mothers and wet-nurses by anxious male authors. The fourth chapter investigates, in particular, Hepp’s and Zola’s politicized deployment of characters named Marianne during the Third Republic. The fictional passages Algazi Marcus cites are always intriguing, and occasionally astonishing — helping to make this study a genuinely compelling read. They also provide fertile ground for her psychoanalytic readings, which propose that these authors’ own processes of subconscious desire and identification are what motivate their depictions of the mother–infant dyad. However, the discussion of psychoanalytic theory itself (Freud and Kristeva) in Chapter 3 feels too brief, and one might have expected a rationale for why other interpretive paradigms were left aside. In particular, given that this study is centrally concerned with the political uses of biological essentialism, a response to gender theory since Judith Butler would have been welcome, even if only to clarify the author’s chosen approach. Nevertheless, Algazi Marcus’s clear-sighted analysis and impressive range of sources ensure that this is valuable and thought-provoking research.

Nineteenth-Century French Studies: Index to Volume 51

Nineteenth-Century French Studies: Index to Volume 51

Singing the English: Britain in the French Musical Lowbrow, 1870–1904 by Hannah L. Scott

Reviewed by: Singing the English: Britain in the French Musical Lowbrow, 1870–1904 by Hannah L. Scott Claire Moran Singing the English: Britain in the French Musical Lowbrow, 1870–1904. By Hannah L. Scott. London and New York: Routledge. 2022. ix+ 254 pp. £96. ISBN 978-0-367-81543-1. Scholarship in nineteenth-century French Studies has, in recent years, increasingly highlighted the need to address the complexity of everyday lived experience and unravel the myths which have shaped our perceptions of the period. Hannah L. Scott's remarkable study of British popular music in late nineteenth-century France offers a fascinating glimpse into French cultural life in an extraordinary period of the country's history. The focus on British music in a study concerned with France may, as Scott points out wryly in her Introduction, 'strike the reader with some surprise' (p. 2) since, as the influential French musical theorist François-Joseph Fétis put it, 'the English [are] on the lowest rung of the ladder of musical talent' (p. 2). However, through her engaging, well-documented, and well-illustrated study, Scott makes a compelling case for the influence of British lowbrow music in shaping modern France. Singing the English revalorizes the centrality of popular British music for 'exploring, negotiating and mediating national identity and the importance of Britain in Third Republican society, politics and culture' (p. 12). The book comprises an Introduction, four chapters, and an Epilogue, and also includes a comprehensive appendix of café-concert songs about the English. The Introduction offers a much-needed contextual overview, all the while citing the pervasiveness of representations of les Anglais in French culture, most notably in literature, and Scott calls attention to the many minor and central figures such as the chronically melancholic Lord Ewald of Villiers d'Isle-Adam's L'Ève future, the courageous yet angelic Miss Clifton in Hector Malot's Souvenirs d'un blessé, and the sadistic English femme fatale Clara in Mirbeau's Le Jardin des supplices. The first chapter focuses on comic songs from French popular theatres in which French performers pretended to be English and where 'Englishing up' was the trend. The second explores the phenomenon of the Salvation Army band and its noisy presence on the streets of Paris, while the third discusses the French reception of Celtic folk music and includes analyses of translations and arrangements of songs by Robert Burns, Walter Scott, and Thomas Moore. The last chapter discusses the place of music in French travel writing and emphasizes how 'music and sound become fundamental axes in the French mental conception of British character and culture' (p. 185). Singing the English captures the essence of Britishness through nineteenth-century French eyes. It is both entertaining and illuminating, offering glimpses into a French mindset via a host of intriguing texts and archival documents. Paul Bourget's 1889 description of the aural impression of a Salvation Army band is a case in point: 'suddenly, a blast of trumpets bursts out, accompanied by strange singing. […] [A] man begins a sort of yelled prayer; his head is thrown back, his mouth is twisted, his eyes are turned backwards in his head. He calls out "the Lord, the Lord…". An expression of despair or ecstasy can be seen upon every face' (p. 85). Scott navigates texts and documents such as these with ease and [End Page 141] skill, highlighting the linguistic specificities and visual imaginaire that they draw upon. Overall, her analysis of the popular songs, performances, and traditions that represented Britishness in nineteenth-century France offers important insights into the relationship between France and Britain. It is, as she argues in her Epilogue, a relationship which continues to be influenced by popular music, and she cites the dozens of songs by artists from Mick Jagger to Bertrand Cantat which attempted to 'influence, mock, critique and occasionally praise the outcome of the June 2016 referendum' (p. 227). Singing the English is an excellent book which, in its careful and rigorous interdisciplinary scholarship, shows the importance of the nineteenth century in shaping modern life. Claire Moran Queen's University Belfast Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

New Directions in Nineteenth-Century French Studies

ABSTRACT This introduction presents an overview of key critical developments arising in nineteenth-century French and francophone studies over the two decades since the inception of Dix-neuf, and then provides synopses of the articles in the special issue it introduces in terms of their engagement with and advancement of those developments. It identifies further areas of inquiry that fall within the scope of research by dix-neuviémistes: those already existing which are sufficiently broad and significant to warrant special issues of their own, and those newly emerging that offer new opportunities for scholars in this constantly evolving and vibrant disciplinary field.

Use, Value, Justification: On History and Historicism in Nineteenth-Century French Studies

ABSTRACT The ‘historical turn' has been particularly fruitful and enabling in nineteenth-century French studies, and methodological approaches that might broadly be described as ‘historicist’ remain dominant within the subfield. Yet these approaches inevitably privilege certain types of literary critical thinking over others, and may even obscure some of the ways in which literary texts have, or can be given, meaning. They also tend to posit the audience of work in nineteenth-century French studies as being composed primarily of other specialists. I suggest that ‘taking a break’ from historicism might facilitate new conversations about nineteenth-century French literature, with new interlocutors.

Anthropocene Under Paris? Rethinking the Quarries and Catacombs

ABSTRACT This essay takes the Paris underground as a ‘naturalcultural contact zone’ that allows us to consider what current eco-critical discussions of the Anthropocene might contribute to nineteenth-century French studies. Although the origin-point of the anthropocene era continues to be debated, some scholars point to late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century geological theories of deep time as causing a crisis of representation; the Paris basin emerges as a stratigraphic site that makes visible the incommensurability of human and Earth timescales. I put recent critical work on non-human agency of la terre into dialogue with writings by Nadar, Simonin, and Balzac.

Introduction

Introduction Robert St. Clair and Seth Whidden This special issue of Nineteenth-Century French Studies, long in the making, arrives at a moment of contradictions. Commemorating an event seen by many of its contemporaneous actors as the culminating point of a decades-long collective struggle for freedom and democracy in nineteenth-century France1—an event whose name, to this day, still conjures up ideals of freedom and direct democracy, as well as the conscience-shaking act of repression with which it was put down—the present issue seeks to take stock of the past and to bring some clarity to blind spots that may have heretofore remained obscured. Its relevance in the present, however, reveals nothing short of urgency: this issue comes to print amid acute crises and breakdown of political forms while across the globe citizens struggle to find new forms and spaces for collective political actions, contest anti-egalitarian forms of a partage du sensible (Rancière) bolstered by the State's proverbial monopoly on violence, and challenge at its core the notion that the present in which we find ourselves is inescapable—that is to say, futureless. It is therefore in a broader context of leaping into the past in the hopes of better sounding out a way forward—a manoeuvre perhaps best materially emblematized, if not put into practice, by the déboulonnage of public monuments to oppressions not so much past as on-going which spread across transnational contestatory movements and spaces, from Richmond, VA to Nantes, in the summer of 2020—that we have convened the following essays. Each bears witness to the imperative of grappling with the past in the hopes of understanding the present, and of understanding that past in the hopes of finding a way out of a present that seeks to present itself as timeless. In a word, each bears witness to what Paul Verlaine once referred to as "le besoin pressant d'opportuns lendemains."2 It is doubtless more than a little tempting to search for a solitary strand running through each of the essays and interventions assembled in the present volume—however richly multifarious they may be in object or approach, or at [End Page xi] times only uncomfortably compatible in the conclusions they reach where the question of the Commune's significance is concerned—that might allow us to pull them each together in a single dialectical stitch. A red thread connecting each story about the 1871 Paris Commune to, as it were, a larger story, a collective story, that might bring into clearer relief something like the "matter(ing)" of the Commune, the meaning of our "entanglement" with the Commune today.3 Why is it that, in a century which was at no loss for massive revolutionary upheavals, insurrectionary events or world-shaking transformations followed by cruelly dashed hopes (1830, 1831, 1834, 1848, 1851, etc.), nearly alone the Commune retains a particularly intense, perduring grasp on our historical imaginations and perhaps our political aspirations? Revisiting the Paris Commune with 150 years of hindsight is a daunting task, and we could not hope to be exhaustive in our reach. Consistent with the journal's remit of "nineteenth-century French studies and related fields," the Commune's resonance stretches the notion of what is "related" beyond what regular readers of Nineteenth-Century French Studies find in a typical issue. Paul Lidsky's statement that "il n'y a plus deux visions antithétiques de la Commune, mais des lectures plurielles, éclatées, complémentaires de l'événement"4 could well explain the various voices, disciplines, modes, perspectives, and even oppositions that the Commune requires throughout this issue's texts, divided into six groupings, movements, or phases. Despite (or perhaps because of) this fundamental and irresolvable lack of simplicity and the Commune's resistance to facile summary, its potential to endure was always already there, from its earliest moments. On 17 April, when it was just barely one month old, Karl Marx saw the lasting resonance of this event that was still in its infancy: "Whatever the immediate results may be, a new point of departure of world-historic importance has been gained."5 Twenty years later...

Stendhal ‘romantique’? Stendhal et les romantismes européens. Sous la direction de Marie-Rose Corredor.

Conceived in the university that bore Stendhal’s name until 2015, this collection of eighteen essays establishes two principal lines of enquiry: firstly, it aims to pose questions about how Romanticism, which the collection asserts as plural, influenced Stendhal’s literary and journalistic work; secondly, it seeks to understand how the Romantic genre found itself reflected and refracted in that work. The collection defines Romanticism as a pan-European and interdisciplinary movement that, although most prominent in literature and the visual arts, was instrumental in the forging of liberalism and radicalism and thus eventually the formulation of nationalism. The collection proposes that Stendhal’s critical attitudes towards Romanticism, and particularly towards Revolution, allow scholars to understand Romanticism’s trajectory from pan-European ideal to localized nationalism, and it is in this area that the collection is particularly strong. Francesco Spandri and Xavier Bourdenet respectively offer Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Walter Scott as important antecedents for Stendhal’s Romanticism. Using the lens of Romanticism and Bonapartism, François Vanoosthuyse’s essay presents an accomplished discussion on Stendhal’s complicated perception of Italian language, literature, and identity after the Napoleonic Wars. George Rosa’s essay, the only one of the collection to be written in English, is a meticulously researched exploration of Stendhal’s introduction into the Byronic cult and neatly introduces Christopher W. Thompson’s essay on Stendhal and English Romanticism. The highlight of the collection is its analysis of the links between revolution, national identity, and the Romantic genre: Yves Ansel and Michel Crouzet both contribute excellent essays on this nexus of history, myth, and literature. The collection admirably strives to extend its definition of ‘Europe’ to include Hungary, Poland, and Russia, although these attempts are circumscribed by Stendhal’s admittedly limited interest in Central and Eastern Europe. Indeed, faithfulness to the content of Stendhal’s own writings leads the collection to neglect questions that are necessitated by the field of Romantic studies, if not by Stendhal’s œuvre itself. For example, despite the collection’s agreed concern with multiple European Romanticisms, the volume does surprisingly little to probe the different definitions of Romanticism across Europe from the perspectives of different constituent nations. If this oversight had been addressed, Romanticism’s nationalist legacy might have been more satisfyingly squared with the movement’s pan-European beginnings on which the collection focuses. Furthermore, due to the attention paid to Stendhal’s journalistic writing, the collection fails to consider how its conclusions are borne out, or subverted, by Stendhal’s novelistic projects. Notwithstanding these omissions, the volume remains an important contribution to Stendhal studies: the ongoing debate in nineteenth-century French studies about Stendhal’s credentials as a Romantic or a realist writer has surely been advanced by this well-conceived and erudite collection.

Contributors

Marit Grøtta is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo, Norway. Her latest book is Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and 19th-Century Media (Bloomsbury, 2015). Other publications include “Reading/Developing Images: Baudelaire, Benjamin, and the Advent of Photography,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies nr. 1-2 (2012) and “Fotografi og følelser: Om Proust, portrettfotografier og lengselen etter å nå utover seg selv,” Agora: Tidsskrift for filosofisk spekulasjon, nr. 1 (2016), as well as other articles on literature, aesthetics and media culture. Grant Kester is Professor of Art History in the Visual Arts department at the University of California, San Diego and the founding editor of FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism. His publications include Art, Activism and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage (Duke University Press, 1998), Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (University of California Press, 2004, second edition in 2013), The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Duke University Press, 2011) and Collective Situations: Dialogues in Contemporary Latin American Art 1995-2010, an anthology of writings by art collectives working in Latin America produced in collaboration with Bill Kelley Jr. (Duke University Press, 2017). He is currently completing work on a new book that develops a more detailed theoretical account of dialogical aesthetics. Nicholas Mirzoeff is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Among his many publications are How To See The World (London, 2015) and the forthcoming open-source e-book The Appearance of Black Lives Matter. For more information and bibliography please visit: http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/bio/ Kasper Opstrup is a writer and researcher of radical culture, specialising in concatenations of art/literature, radical politics, and occultism as counter- culture and underground phenomena. Currently he is working on a postdoc project at the University of Copenhagen, supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, that examines aesthetic undercurrents of mystical utopianism from surrealism to the

Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic. By Jennifer L. Palmer

One wonders what the late Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who wrote famously of the historical ‘silencing’ of the Haitian Revolution, would make of the great proliferation of works on Haiti and the Revolution that have appeared over the last decade or so — books, articles, and edited volumes by scholars such as Laurent Dubois, Deborah Jenson, Marlene Daut, Jeremy D. Popkin, Nick Nesbitt, Charles Forsdick, Kaiama L. Glover, and many others. Collectively, this body of recent work, building on previous landmark publications by, among others, C. L. R. James, David Geggus, Michael Dash, and Trouillot himself, has had the effect of promoting Haiti to the forefront of debates on race and revolution during and after the Enlightenment era, to the extent that it has become an unavoidable point of reference for any scholar working on those themes and periods. A primary concern has been to investigate what Nesbitt terms ‘The Idea of Haiti’ (see ‘The Idea of 1804’, in The Haiti Issue: 1804 and Nineteenth-Century French Studies (= special issue Yale French Studies, 107 (2005)), 6–38), the philosophical and political underpinnings and ramifications of the Revolution, and to assert the primary importance of Haiti to emerging ideas on race, human rights, slavery, and other contemporary concerns. Arguably, the drive to promote Haiti in this way has rather ignored some of the complexities and contradictions of the Revolution, and paid relatively little attention to the everyday, lived experience of slavery and colonialism in Saint-Domingue. Jennifer L. Palmer’s fine study of that very experience complements some of the other recent work on Haiti, and also subtly critiques its tendency to reach for the overarching political-philosophical meanings of the Revolution while ignoring, and indeed ‘silencing’, accounts of the quotidian reality of slavery. Tellingly — and in this regard she echoes Geggus — she argues that the Revolution, just as it challenged notions of white, European superiority, also had the effect of solidifying race as a political and social category, and of curtailing the fluidity that had previously characterized social relations — the ways in which bonds were formed across racial lines, in the ‘intimate’ settings that she writes about: in workplaces, homes, families, commercial relations, and other situations in which Africans, Europeans, and Creoles inevitably met and formed bonds. As the Revolution progressed, so the personal ties that had bound different groups together began to dissolve and to be replaced by more clearly oppositional, binary understandings of race. Palmer’s meticulous research uncovers a range of intimate connections that go beyond the usual interest in sexual intimacy to include bonds of, for example, common masculinity, shared work, kinship, and neighbourliness, and which, she says, characterized the lived experience of colonial rule. In ranging broadly from Saint-Domingue to La Rochelle, she suggests the ways in which such intimacies were transatlantic in nature and implication, and, again, how such bonds were curtailed as binary notions of race established themselves across the Atlantic world. Palmer’s arguments are persuasive, and should be incorporated into the broader debates on race and revolution, while we remain aware that the historical accounts of such ties remain inevitably one-sided, and that the silencing of the enslaved created one intimate reality that even the most sophisticated study is unable to enter.

From the Editor

From the Editor Seth Whidden We are delighted to announce some new features in Nineteenth-Century French Studies. The current issue includes the first of a series of invited essays. The inaugural piece is Kevin Newmark’s “Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Baudelaire’s Modernité,” a study that explores how readings of the Petits Poèmes en prose have shaped our understanding of key concepts in the field. In the next issue (spring–summer 2016), we will launch Incipit: a dialogic format in which two colleagues debate a matter of primary concern to our field. The first instance will focus on the state of nineteenth-century French studies, the directions in which it is moving, and what is likely to be meaningful to scholars in the coming years. It is our hope that these textual exchanges will spark broader conversations, both within and beyond the pages of the journal. Readers will of course continue to enjoy our regular submissions in each issue, where they can be sure to find important, even foundational work: in the present issue, such work can be seen in Corry Cropper’s udon noodles, Edward Nye’s myth of Deburau, Anthony Glinoer’s réfractaires, Susanna Lee’s jurors, Raisa Rexer’s take on Flaubert’s Orient, Antoine Monnier’s griffes (presented by Judd Hubert), and Erin Edgington’s fêtes galantes. Another project reaches beyond the journal’s traditional front and back covers: starting this fall, we will publish an annual sourcebook for each year’s agrégation title in the form of an e-book compiled from selected ncfs content. Please visit our website for more information about this year’s sourcebook on La Fortune des Rougon: http://www.ncfs-journal.org/?q=Agregation. While these initiatives vary in scope, tone, and format, they share the principles of thoughtful exploration that have guided Nineteenth-Century French Studies since its inception. Thus, the present volume—in formats old and new—reaffirms our sustained focus on rigor, insight, and passion for the finest inquiry into nineteenth-century French studies and related fields. SW [End Page xi] Copyright © 2015 University of Nebraska Press

From the Editor: Updates from Nineteenth-Century French Studies

From the Editor: Updates from Nineteenth-Century French Studies

Stomaching the Salon: The Sense of Taste in Le Tintamarr e’s “Boulangerie du Louvre” and Baudelaire’s Salon de 1846

Baudelaire’s Salon de 1846 appears to be devoted to the textual transposition of visual experience. Yet the text features a coherent body of tropes pertaining to the sense of taste—the physiological sense of flavor perception—and the gastronomic field more generally. These, I argue, are central to Baudelaire’s attempt to engage with a non-elite and non-specialist audience. The gustatory tropes bespeak the influence of journalism on the Salon de 1846 , and in particular a contemporaneous strand of “gastronomic” art criticism: the 1840s “Boulangerie du Louvre” series from the “petit journal” Le Tintamarre , known and contributed to by Baudelaire. Through a comparative textual analysis of the two critical works, I show how Baudelaire adopts and adapts these culinary tropes. While Le Tintamarre uses the sense of taste to satirize the Salon, Baudelaire employs it to conceptualize and heighten the sensorial and corporeal pleasures of art for a bourgeois readership.

Art in an Age of Civil Struggle 1848-1871. A Social History of Modern Art. Volume Four

Published barely four months before the author’s death in November 2008, one of a projected six-volume social history of western art from the Ancien Régime to the First World War stands, at least provisionally, as an epitaph to one of the most influential and productive careers in post-war art history. A seminal figure in opening up the discipline to other areas of historical enquiry, Albert Boime was central to the vigorous debate initiated during the 1970s by scholars such as Robert Herbert, Linda Nochlin, and T. J. Clark out of which art history emerged re-invigorated as a more theoretically aware and politically engaged field of enquiry. The importance of nineteenth-century French studies within this radical re-evaluation is reflected in the overall balance of Boime’s gargantuan survey (currently totalling some 3000 pages). Begun in 1987, and seemingly growing in scope and ambition with each successive volume, this final offering has reached what might be regarded as the symbolic departure point of the intellectual revolution to which it attests: Nochlin’s work on Courbet, Herbert’s research on Millet, and Clark’s publications on Courbet, Manet, and the art of the Second Republic all stand as particularly authoritative antecedents in the study of Realism and Impressionism that dominates Boime’s current instalment. Beyond this, over the course of an unusually prolific career, Boime himself published widely on mid-century culture, not only in France, but also in nations traditionally less often considered in the art-historical literature, notably Italy, Germany and the United States. If whole chapters of Art in an Age of Civil Struggle have a familiar ring, this is because Boime draws upon his prodigious back-catalogue of books and articles covering a myriad of artists and themes from the Second Republic to the Commune.

Canonicity, Creativity, Capacity: French Realism Studies and the Researcher Community (A Case Study)

What is the scope and what are the values of a scholarly society devoted to the study of nineteenth-century French studies? How does a new scholarly society emerge and gain momentum? How does such a scholarly society nurture emerging researchers and build capacity in nineteenth-century French studies and French realism studies in particular? What impact does canonicity have upon the activities of the scholarly society and how does that society influence canonicity in turn? These are some of the questions posed in this case study of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes (founded 2001).

The view from the bridge: Zola's L'Œuvre and its many composites

Emile Zola's 1886 novel of the art world, L'Œuvre, has for some time been understood as a fairly fractured account of one of the most famous historical narratives of Western art: the challenge pose...

Baudelaire and the Translation of Modernity

YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY BAUDELAIRE AND THE TRANSLATION OF MODERNITY ZAHI ZALLOUA INVOLVING questions of fidelity and distance, and the reduction of the foreign to the familiar, translation enacts an ethical relation. Perhaps because of its potential to provoke ethical questioning, translation – as both an instrument of comprehension and a self-reflexive discovery of alterity – preoccupied Charles Baudelaire throughout his career, from his early rendering of Edgar Allen Poe into French to his “retranslation,” in a larger sense, of modern life in his move from poetry to prose. Etymologically derived from trans (across) and latus (the past participle of ferre, to carry), translation evokes the idea of transportation or transfer. In the Middles Ages, for instance, the notions of translatio studii and translatio imperii carry with them this sense of transfer, the transfer of knowledge and political power from one civilization to another, respectively . In its more common usage, translation conveys the transmission of meaning from one language to another. In a wider sense, however, translation is more or less synonymous with the activity of interpretation : to translate is to make something comprehensible, accessible in terms of something else. As such, translation includes the act of rephrasing within a single language, as well as the use of one medium to reinterpret concepts expressed in another. This broader definition opens up a space for a consideration of form: what is communicated becomes inseparable from how it is communicated. This essay explores Baudelaire’s engagement with translation as a means for unsettling understandings about poetry and reality and, more urgently, for thinking differently about the experience and framing of modern life. Beginning with an analysis of Baudelaire’s art criticism and profound attraction to the visual arts, especially painting and caricature, I YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY 67 will examine the insights into modernity that each genre provided him, insights that he sought, in turn, to translate into poetic language.1 I will then turn to the ethical dilemmas of translation that increasingly concerned Baudelaire, especially in his later prose poems, which betray a growing attention to what can be described as the limits of translatability. In painting, no artist, for Baudelaire, surpassed Delacroix’s imaginative and powerful depictions of the human condition. The poet’s unqualified admiration for Delacroix is evidenced by his many laudatory remarks regarding the painter’s works in the Salons. As early as the Salon de 1846, Baudelaire asserts that “Delacroix est universel,”2 placing him alongside two masters of literature, Dante and Shakespeare: “Delacroix affectionne Dante et Shakespeare, deux autres grands peintres de la douleur humaine; il les connaît à fond, et il sait les traduire librement. En contemplant la série de ses tableaux, on dirait qu’on assiste à la célébration de quelque mystère douloureux” (OC 2: 440). The translation metaphor (translation as imaginative interpretation) is telling since it underscores the literariness of Delacroix’s art (establishing a “correspondence” between his images and their texts), as well as his creative (free) approach to the originals, which stand out themselves as excellent translations in their own right. Delacroix’s retranslation of Dante and Shakespeare – his artistic interpretation of their own poeticized perception of the human condition – is not an act of duplication or slavish fidelity, but an imaginative practice in itself. Translation creates as it transfigures the original, and it is this act of poiesis that Baudelaire admires and will seek to imitate. But what is perhaps most significant here is what brings these three figures together: “la douleur humaine,” or more specifically, the painting of “la douleur humaine.” By describing Dante and Shakespeare as “grands peintres de la douleur humaine,” Baudelaire complicates not only the notion of fidelity, but also the prior68 ROMANCE NOTES 1 For prior studies that address the relation between Baudelaire’s art criticism and poetry in terms of translation, see, in particular, Michèle Hannoosh’s “Painting as Translation in Baudelaire’s Art Criticism,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 22 (1986): 2233 ; Sara Pappas’s “Managing Imitation: Translation and Baudelaire’s Art Criticism,” Nineteenth Century French Studies 33, 3-4 (2005): 320-341; Sima Godfrey’s “Baudelaire ’s Windows,” L’Esprit Créateur 22, 4 (1982): 83-100. 2 Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes (OC...

The Haiti Issue: 1804 and Nineteenth Century French Studies

The recent bicentenary of Haitian independence has stimulated scholarly interest not only in contemporary Haiti, but also, as this volume shows, in the largely neglected area of nineteenth century Franco–Haitian relationships. As Nick Nesbitt's engaging opening essay reminds us, the failure to apply the rights of man to the colonial context compromised the French Revolution and the European Enlightenment ideals that underpinned it. According to Nesbitt, the unique contribution of the Haitian Revolution was to redress the imbalance between equality and liberty that had characterized the French, English, and American revolutions. Nesbitt's laudable desire to integrate Haiti into these debates slips at times into a glorification of ‘these African slaves’ that borders on romantic idealization. It is perhaps because of this tendency to idealize ‘the slaves’ and Haitians in general that the essay's most promising and pertinent question — that of the ‘utility of a revolution that paved the way’ for Haiti's two centuries of injustice and dysfunction — remains tantalizingly unanswered. In his lively reading of Baron Roger's novel Kélédor (1828), Christopher L. Miller offers a more Atlanticist interpretation of nineteenth-century French attitudes towards slavery, and argues that, in proposing that France end the slave trade, abolish slavery, and use Africa (not the Caribbean) as the site of a more benign plantation system, Roger offers one means of achieving a common nineteenth century aim: that of erasing the memory of Haiti. Doris Y. Kadish's close readings of the abolitionist novels of Sophie Doin constitute an attempt to rescue Doin from the oblivion to which French literary history has condemned her. As Kadish argues, Doin offered sympathetic representations of Haiti, in a way that ‘gave a voice’ to both women, and ‘persons of color’. In his original piece, Daniel Désormeaux interprets Toussaint Louverture as the ‘first of the black memorialists,’ and reads Toussaint's memoirs with reference to other such writing in France in the nineteenth century. Albert Valdman reflects on the forms and status of Creole language at the time of the revolution, and for all his skill concludes with many unanswered questions on language change and difference in the nineteenth century, his analyses frustrated by a lack of reliable textual sources. Deborah Jenson provides an extremely well-researched essay on the trope of kidnapping in Haitian history, starting with a detailed account of the events leading up to Jean-Bertrand Aristide's departure from Haiti in February 2004, and then flashing back in history to the 1802 exiles of Toussaint Louverture and his family. Of all the essays in this volume, Jenson's makes the connections between the past and present most tellingly, and in her conclusion she admirably resists the temptation to place Aristide unequivocally as one more victim of negative foreign influence in Haiti. The most contentious of all the articles is Chris Bongie's lengthy, skilfully composed critique of Derek Walcott's Haitian Trilogy of plays. Bongie's critique is based on what he sees as the progressive marginalization of the Haitian revolutionary figure Baron de Vastey in Walcott's plays, which according to Bongie is evidence of Walcott's collusion with the ‘mulatto legend’ in Haitian historiography. Because, Bongie says, Walcott focuses his critique on black Haitian despots like Christophe and Dessalines, the playwright subscribes to a view of Haitian history that favours and promotes the more ‘civilized’ values of the lighter-skinned elite. In this essay, Bongie seems to lay bare his own disappointment with Walcott as a ‘black man’ who is not black enough, a postcolonial author who will not play the game of the postcolonial public intellectual. Although he never quite admits it, Bongie's entire argument is founded on his awareness of Walcott's skin tone, and a reductivist idea of its related complexes. The Haitian Revolution was about demolishing myths of race, not perpetuating them.

Fictional Genders: Narrating Difference in Early French Modernism (review)

Reviewed by: Fictional Genders: Narrating Difference in Early French Modernism Margaret Waller (bio) Nathaniel Wing, Fictional Genders: Narrating Difference in Early French Modernism. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2004. 206 pp. $43.50 (cloth). In his new book, Nathaniel Wing, author of The Limits of Narrative: Essays on Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud and Mallarmé (Cambridge University Press, [End Page 146] 1986), again sets the work of Charles Baudelaire in the company of other prominent nineteenth century French authors. This time one of Baudelaire's provocative novellas, La Fanfarlo, joins texts whose non-conforming protagonists face demands that they adopt and embody the normative, gendered practices of modern bourgeois patriarchy. Following Michel Foucault, the readings in Wing's book confirm this period as a time when gender and sexuality were seen as the intimate secret of identity whose revelation and expression were nevertheless continually solicited, produced, and disciplined. From among the countless works from early and mid-nineteenth century France matching this description, Wing has made an excellent, diverse selection. Part 1 of Between Genders features chapters on Theophile Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) and Baudelaire's La Fanfarlo (1847) that focus on "The Play of Gender." The essays on Claire de Duras's Ourika (1823) and on the autobiography of Herculine Barbin, who committed suicide in 1868, which form Part 2, explicitly thematize "Difference and Disbarment." Part 3 takes on Honoré de Balzac's La Fille aux yeux d'or (1834) as "Urban Body, Erotic Body." Feminist and poststructuralist work in nineteenth century French studies have given all five of these texts considerable critical attention, but Wing's study is the first to set them all explicitly in thematic relation to one another. Readers not yet familiar with these works will be intrigued and surprised by their topicality. All five chapters and the introduction explore an essential tension both within the texts and in nineteenth century French society. On the one hand, they show a bourgeois ideology insistent on maintaining that its notions of gender identity and normative sexuality are not only fixed and stable but natural and universal. On the other hand, the plot, characterization, narrator, and/or narrative frame of all five works demonstrate "how sociopolitical structures form particular bodies with specific desires" (14), thus revealing gender as a dynamic, fragile, and contingent social construction and "the site of intense contestations" (13). Scholars interested in seeing how these and other poststructuralist theoretical insights about gender and sexuality can be applied to specific nineteenth century works will find Between Genders useful. For example, Judith Butler's notion of the "materialization of sex" (i.e., how social practices continually "produce the [gendered] bodies that they regulate" [18]) and Michel Foucault's insights about the bourgeoisie's new "technology of sex" as a "distribution of pleasures, discourses, truths, and powers" (23) are not just mentioned, they are explained. Moreover, individual chapters show how these abstract concepts play out in a variety of literary forms, from a novella (La Fanfarlo) to a fictional first-person confession (Ourika), from autobiography (Herculine Barbin) and omniscient literary realism (La Fille aux yeux d'or) to a text that defies generic categorization (Mademoiselle de Maupin). In richly detailed, somewhat dense individual readings, Wing teases out the intricacies of each text's sometimes uneasy and always complex representations of what we might call, [End Page 147] to borrow and expand Luce Irigaray's famous title, "this sex [but also any sex] which is not one" (Editions de Minuit, 1977). In other words, gender is revealed to be never the same, never just one thing, and never just gender. One of the strengths of Between Genders is the author's subtle grasp of the sexual and heterosexual politics at work in these plays of difference. According to the introduction, however, Wing's approach and objective is socio-historical as well. He writes, for example, of his attempt "to strike a balance between literary, aesthetic analysis and considerations of the wider social implications of these narratives. In short, it will be seen that the aesthetic constantly resonates with historical, political issues" (22). The reader comes away with a clear sense that what characterizes nineteenth century French literature is...