Peintre De La Research Articles

The Initial Expression is the Final Impression: The First Sentence of Baudelaire's "Le Peintre de la vie moderne"

Abstract: In his "Études sur Poe," Charles Baudelaire makes the following provocative remark: "Si la première phrase n'est pas écrite en vue de préparer cette impression finale, l'œuvre est manquée dès le début." This essay seeks to disinter the dialectical contradictory logic at the core of this sentence—its identification of first and final in the work of art—by submitting the injunction contained within it to Baudelaire's own work. Attending to three underexplored elements of the first sentence of "Le Peintre de la vie moderne," I claim that the 1863 text provides us with the paradigmatic example of Baudelaire's response to the injunction. The first sentence is replete with an entanglement of unresolvable contradictions that are constitutive of the forms of perception, experience, and subjectivation immanent to modern life. The "impression finale" of the work is that it extends this entanglement of contradictions to the level of a general systemic operation of irony. What the exaggerated, anatomical analysis to the opening sentence will show is that at the center of the text is the attempt to give sense to the possibility of holding fast to the experience of modern life as an experience in a constant state of disappearance that plays out at the level of form.

Baudelaire, Manet and the Visual Object

ABSTRACT This article begins by providing a contextual account of the different ways in which contemporaries of Baudelaire and Manet subscribed to a widespread, though not universal, assumption that the two shared common artistic aims. The article then seeks to establish aesthetic parallels between Manet’s La Musique aux Tuileries (1862) and Baudelaire’s ‘Le Thyrse’ (1863). Sidestepping the vexed question of the extent to which Manet may be seen as an embodiment of Baudelaire’s peintre de la vie moderne, the analysis focuses on the heterodox function of the visual object in triggering a self-reflexive representation of an act of seeing.

La Peinture selon Proust: les détournements du visuel by Sophie Bertho

Reviewed by: La Peinture selon Proust: les détournements du visuel by Sophie Bertho Thomas Baldwin La Peinture selon Proust: les détournements du visuel. By Sophie Bertho. Paris: Classiques Garnier. 2021. viii+170 pp. €26. ISBN 978–2–406–10757–6. This book brings together work published by Sophie Bertho over the last twenty years on the subject of Proust's aesthetics and on the 'fonctionnement interne de la peinture' (p. 15) in A la recherche du temps perdu. The first part focuses on the ways in which the pictorialist poetics of A la recherche represent both an assimilation and a transformation of 'les idées ou la "manière" de ses maîtres' (p. 29). The works of Montesquiou, the Goncourts, and Ruskin, Bertho argues, are 'retenus et retravaillés' (p. 29) by Proust, suggesting a form of influence and rewriting, a 'critique en action' (an expression that Proust himself uses to describe pastiche) that cannot be reduced either to repudiation or to a more transactional, unambiguous intertextual process involving debt and uncreative borrowing (p. 29). The second and third parts of the book focus on the ways in which the treatment of painting in A la recherche represents a shift away from a more 'traditional' mode of ekphrasis (involving set-piece, relatively autonomous descriptions of visual art that invite us to 'quitter un instant le roman pour nous tourner vers un tableau, l'admirer' (p. 104)) towards a 'détournement du pictural', a 'dissolution' (p. 17) of well-known paintings in writing. It is here that the argument of the book is at its most interesting and also its most problematic. Bertho demonstrates quite convincingly—and with ample reference to manuscript material—that Proust stands at a distance from a straightforwardly mimetic, referential ekphrastic mode or 'transposition d'art' in A la recherche (one that he had dabbled with on several occasions before 1899), and that he experiments in that work, through processes of metaphorization (for example), with a reappropriation and reworking of the visual by the textual—an internalization of painting in or by narrative (Bertho calls this approach radically 'modern', but readers of Diderot's Salons, for example, would probably disagree). However, her suggestion that the less conventional form of ekphrasis developed by Proust in A la recherche involves the 'effacement' (p. 17) of painting is underpinned by a superannuated take on the ekphrastic relation as a paragonal battle for dominance between word and image, the limitations of which have been clear for some time. There is a critical cack-handedness here that is compounded by the absence of any meaningful reference in Bertho's work to recent critical writing on Proust and/or ekphrasis in English. The idea of an 'effacement' of the visual in or by the textual does not, furthermore, do justice to the title of Bertho's book. A 'détournement' might be a diversion, a misappropriation, a hijack, or a rerouting (it is also, famously, the name of a technique developed in the 1950s by the Internationale lettriste and later adapted by the Internationale situationiste), but to say it is an erasure leaves the impression of an overexcited drama that does not reflect the subtle intricacies of the rest of Bertho's argument, in which terms such as 'traces', 'contamination', 'profanation', and 'allusion' feature prominently. [End Page 245] Thomas Baldwin University of Sheffield Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

La modernité baudelairienne et ses parages

The Baudelairean modernity and its environs The following text takes up the problem of modernity in its canonical formulation proposed in 1863 by Charles Baudelaire in his important essay entitled Le peintre de la vie moderne. The author of the article tries to show the basic framework of this concept with the definition of modernity itself and the category of beauty, remaining at Baudelaire’s conception in natural connection with it. The author highlights the importance of Baudelaire’s earlier views and the influence that the Paris World Exhibition of 1855 had on him.

Edgar Allan Poe: Efemérides em trama

Edgar Allan Poe: Efemérides em trama

Baudelaire's Two Cosmopolitanisms

In his text on the ‘Exposition Universelle 1855’, Baudelaire upholds what he calls ‘cosmopolitisme’ as the antidote to the constraining influence of universalizing principles of taste that are meant to define beauty for all times and places. Baudelaire’s view is that such aesthetic systems close off the possibility of beauty, which, he maintains must contain an element of novelty. Accordingly, the proper attitude for the viewer (or reader or spectator) to take before a work of art is one that remains always open to novelty and to the ‘universal vitality’ out of which it springs. This attitude is the cosmopolitan one. Yet Baudelaire characterizes this attitude in ways that seem fundamentally incompatible if not diametrically opposed. On the one hand, cosmopolitanism as described in this text seems to involve the slow, lived apprenticeship in the values, ways of life, and criteria of judgement of those in other places, the better to be able to appreciate the beauty of the objects produced in them. On the other, he speaks of the appropriate attitude toward an aesthetic object — indeed toward any object that presents itself to our senses — as one resulting solely from the spectator’s exertions on his or her own mind and will, exertions by which the spectator refrains from imposing criteria of judgement upon the putative aesthetic object in order, instead, to derive one’s criteria from it. While the text on the ‘Exposition’ provides the reader with no way of resolving this contradiction, Baudelaire’s remarks on fashion in ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’ (1863) provide a dialectical resolution.

Early modern clouds II: Revisiting the poetics of meteorology

“Early Modern Clouds II” briefly introduces the four essays contained in this volume and refers readers to the more sustained, introductory essay of the first special issue of “Early Modern Clouds” in Romance Quarterly 68: 2, 2021. Here, the focus shifts from Hubert Damisch’s classic study of clouds in Théorie du nuage: Pour une histoire de la peinture (Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting; 1972; 2002) to the question of the cloud’s numerous mediating functions—including philosophy, poetics, art history—with an eye to later centuries, as explored by John Durham Peters in The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (2016).

Peindre les nuages, de l’aube des Lumières au crépuscule du Romantisme

This article serves as an introduction to the dossier, Painting Clouds from the Dawn of the Enlightenment to the Twilight of the Romanticism, bringing together the contributions concerning the painting of clouds, from European researches in different disciplines: philosophy, art history, geography-climatology, history of science, and literature. With the aid of these contrinutions, and of the fundamental work by Hubert Damish, Theorie du Nuage. Pour une Histoire de la Peinture, 1972 (Theory of the Cloud: for a History of Painting, 1972), this introduction proposes a chronological exploration of the painting of clouds and its evolution, from the cloud as manifestation of the holy (up to the Renaissance) to post-Impressionism. The dialogue between science and art provides the occasion to raise certain questions: did the invention of the classification of clouds (1803) have an incidence on their pictorial representation? In what measure did the discovery of the vibratory nature of light (Augustin Fresnel beginning in 1819) influence the practice of painters like Turner, and then the Impressionists? A view of ensemble of the set of connections of our deliberations does not lead to the conclusion of an evolution towards the realism in the painting of clouds, or even to a progressive equivalence between the perceptive experience and the representation of the cloud.

The Medieval and the Modern in Baudelaire’s “À une passante”

This article highlights a medieval dimension to Charles Baudelaire’s “À une passante,” a poem that has been considered emblematic of poetic modernity. A comparative reading with two medieval Italian sonnets, Dante’s “Tanto gentile e onesta pare” and Guido Cavalcanti’s “Chi è questa che vèn, ch’ogn’om la mira,” brings to light Baudelaire’s continuity with, and divergence from, the medieval lyric. “À une passante” ultimately emerges as traditional in its subject matter and form, and modern in its portrayal of a highly individualized self and this self’s relationship to the other. This double dimension, encompassing both an immutable poetic form and the fleeting present of nineteenth-century Paris, is finally linked to Baudelaire’s account of the composite nature of art in “Le Peintre de la vie moderne.”

Double Perspective: The Art Market—Between the Sociology of Art and Cultural History

In this interview, Julie Verlaine, an expert on cultural history, discusses her specific experience as a historian exploring a world that was also studied by a sociologist. Indeed, Verlaine focused on the post-war art market in Paris, wich was studied in depth by the sociologist Raymonde Moulin in the 1950s and 60s. Moulin’s research was published as a book, Le Marché de la peinture in 1967, which has since become a key reference in the sociology of art and was translated in English in 1987 [The French Art Market. A Sociological View]. Fifty years later, Verlaine focused on this same world, but from a different disciplinary perspective. The resulting book, Les Galeries d’art contemporain à Paris de la Libération à la fin des années 1960, was published in 2013. What was the role of the sociologist’s work in the historian’s work? What does this dual disciplinary perspective contribute to our knowledge of the art market? What are the scientific and theoretical issues involved in the transformation of a sociological study into a historical source?

Baudelaire and the Literary Fabrication of the Poor

Baudelaire and the Literary Fabrication of the Poor Maud Meyzaud (bio) By the time Baudelaire starts his work-in-progress prose-poems project, the Petits Poëmes en prose (1857–1865), also known as Le spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen),1 the poor, a recurrent protagonist of these short narratives, have already achieved a successful literary career of three decades. This evolution has mainly taken place in the rising genre of the novel, which, from the 1830s onward, interacts with an emerging mass public, whether one thinks of Dickens' Oliver Twist; or, the Parish Boy's Progress (1837–39), the Newgate novels, Eugène Sue's likewise widely popular Les mystères de Paris (1842–1843), George Sand's La mare au Diable (1846) or Francois le Champi (1847–48). At that time, Hugo's masterpiece, Les misérables (1862), which would have a tremendous impact on Baudelaire's prose poem project, is still to come. Because of its media-related feature, the serial novel both addresses the poor as its protagonist and enables literary works to reach social classes that cannot afford to buy a book. In this sense, it is not surprising that the very first work to be published in Paris in 1836 as a serial novel, Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), is credited to have founded the genre of the picaresque novel, also called romance of roguery. During the same period, especially before the Revolution of 1848, the poor have been addressed by early socialist literature and even self-help books. By letting them enter several pieces of his prose poems, as is the case in "The Widows," "The Old Acrobat," "The Bad Glazier," "The Cake," "The Pauper's Toy," "The Eyes of the Poor," "The Counterfeit Coin," "Let's Beat Up the Poor!" and "The Good Dogs," Baudelaire is not only drawing on a former urban experience, but also on motifs, semantics and a rhetorical figure developed by his predecessors. One of the last drafted prose poems, "Assommons les pauvres" ("Let's Beat Up the Poor!"), does not stage an opening reading scene by chance.2 The scene connects the concerns of the prose poem explicitly with that time and implicitly warns the reader not to read what follows too literally, i.e., the narrator's testing of a reversed 'philanthropy' on a beggar. My concern is to ask to what extent the prose poems react to a general culture of philanthropy and a language of compassion to which not only theoretical positions contribute, but also novels such as Dickens' Oliver [End Page 156] Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress, Eugène Sue's Les mystères de Paris or Victor Hugo's Les misérables, i.e., literature in the narrow sense of the word and Baudelaire's own field. Walter Benjamin's notion that Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal might have profited from the mere fact that its author did not write any novel (The Writer 167), applies even more accurately to his prose-poems project. In this sense, one can grasp this project per Jonathan Monroe as the "novelization of lyrics" (25). The European novel at that time embodies an understanding of prose that Baudelaire will be writing against, especially while drafting most of his pieces from 1860 to 1865. Given the direction taken by the European novel—say, 'realism' – on the one hand, and Baudelaire's search for what he coined himself in his essay "Le peintre de la vie moderne," 'modernity,' on the other,3 one can suspect the figures of the poor to be closely linked to the act of rewriting that characterizes his prose poems in general. The political relevance of this aesthetic operation becomes clear when, instead of linking it to the versified poems of Les fleurs du mal (as Barbara Johnson did in Défigurations du language poétique, her classic study on Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil and his Paris Spleen), one chooses to focus on the political framing of the rhetorical operation by which the poor have been addressed by literature since then. I will show how Baudelaire's prose writing is directed against the rhetorical figure of 'giving a voice' to...

ル・コルビュジエの言説における彫刻と建築の音響的綜合

In the middle of 1930s, the architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965) began to study the “synthèse des arts” and developed the theory of it in his texts, e.g., “Sainte alliance des arts majeurs ou Le grand art en gésine” (1935), “Les Tendances de l'architecture rationaliste en rapport avec la collaboration de la peinture et de la sculpture” (1937), “L'Espace indicible” (1946), “Unité” (1948), etc. In order to accomplish the “synthèse des arts”, he introduced the acoustic metaphor into his discourses. The properties of sound, which Gustave Lyon (1857-1936) taught him, served as an opportunity for conceiving an idea for the synthesis. The acoustic metaphor played two opposite roles. On the one hand, this metaphor performed the function of separating sculpture and architecture. This function enabled him to clarify the difference between these two arts. In his discourses, the sculpture and architecture functioned as speaker (emitter) and listener (receiver) respectively. On the other hand, this metaphor performed the function of connecting these arts. For example, though a mouth and an ear belong to different systems, the voice is conveyed from one organ to another and connects these two organs. Le Corbusier focused on the properties of voice and utilized them metaphorically in his theory of the synthesis. Le Corbusier's way of thinking—derived from the acoustic—simultaneously separates and connects two things. This way of thinking formed the basis for the acoustic synthesis of sculpture and architecture. In the late 1940s, he reedited the plan for Algiers (Plan-Obus) (1932) in his article “Unité”, the title of which was originally “synthèse des arts”. His task was to accomplish the synthesis of two different arts in his architectural project. For that purpose, he limited the scope of application of each art. That is to say, he regarded a building's outside as sculpture and contrastively, its inside as architecture. At that time, his way of thinking played an important role in the reinterpretation the Project A. Separate from his theoretical work, Le Corbusier had begun to study the properties of each art practically. On the one hand, he designed the Monument in Memory of Vaillant-Couturier as speaking object. This monument is almost massive sculpture without an internal space. He attempted to exploit the only ability of sculpture in this project. On the other hand, he began to study the properties of architecture and designed the project of La Sainte-Baume (the “Trouinade”). There was no external appearance in this architectural project. In other words, its figure was invisible from the outside. This project contrasted with the Monument in Memory of Vaillant-Couturier. Eventually, except for the Project A which was rediscovered and reinterpreted in the 1940s, Le Corbusier was not able to connect sculpture as “mouth” with architecture as “ear” in architectural practice from the late 1930s to the end of the 1940s. However, he began to make a series of sculptures, which were called the “plastique acoustique”. These monstrous sculptures with strange “mouth” and “ear” were the very compilation of his study in the 1930s and the 1940s.

Is Odette an Artist? Approaching Female Creativity in Proust’sÀ la recherche du temps perdu

This article proposes to broaden our understanding of artistic activity in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu through the example of Odette Swann’s act of self-fashioning in the conclusion of ‘Autour de Mme Swann’. The article opens with an overview of the relationship between women and the arts in A la recherche: Proust’s female characters, apart from actresses, do not express themselves through the canonical arts. But Proust also depicts creative activities of a more domestic nature, not usually considered art forms. This article posits that A la recherche destabilizes hierarchical categorizations of what should be considered superior or inferior forms of creative expression. As a result, the passages concerned with Odette’s toilettes should be considered as integral parts of the novel’s exploration of the nature of art. Odette’s transformation from the Botticellian ‘piece de musee’ desired by her husband into a new artefact of her own design is considered in dialogue with Charles Baudelaire’s essay ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’. Proust’s Odette can be viewed as a response both to Baudelaire’s suggestion that female adornment is an aesthetic endeavour and to the complex twofold temporality that Baudelaire finds behind both beauty and great art.

Baudelaire and Feminine Singularity

This article revisits the representation of gender and femininity in Baudelaire’s poems about the city, arguing that these works reveal a vision of femininity that cannot be reduced to the particularity through which the nineteenth-century individual is codified. While feminine figures abound in Baudelaire’s œuvre, most critical readings of the poet have concentrated on the tendency towards objectification, and even denigration, in his portrayal of women. By contrast, in its early stages this article reads ‘A une passante’ in conjunction with Baudelaire’s observations from Mon Cœur mis a nu, Fusees , and Le Peintre de la vie moderne , suggesting that a form of femininity that I shall call ‘feminine singularity’ crystallizes in his work, and that it resists collectivization under the broader tenets of urban capital and political liberalism. The subsequent stages of the article discuss ‘Les Sept Vieillards’ and ‘Les Petites Vieilles’, arguing that there is a redrawing of gendered individuation in the Tableaux parisiens . Both of these poems approach gender ironically, using a grotesque mode of serialization to dissolve a conventional understanding of sexual difference predicated on binaries, reproduction, and heterosexual desire.

Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Baudelaire’s Modernité

The concept of modernity remains a crux for literary studies because it attempts to combine historical categories with principles of form. Modernity refers to a moment of change: change in history and change in aesthetic forms indissociable from it. This essay examines the privileged case of Baudelaire, where a reflection on modernity—“Le Peintre de la vie moderne”—is doubled by writings regularly taken as examples of modernity—especially Les Fleurs du Mal and Le Spleen de Paris . Is it possible to identify the formal element in Baudelaire’s writing that distinguishes it as “modern”? After juxtaposing the incompatible responses offered by Paul Valéry and Walter Benjamin, the essay considers “Le Thyrse” as a particular case in point. The reading discloses how only a radically “prosaic” element—though one equally at work in the verse and prose poetry—could prove adequate to a “modernity” at one and the same time poetic and historical.

“Half Art”: Baudelaire's Le Peintre de la vie moderne

This article considers Baudelaire's essay Le Peintre de la vie moderne as a possible response to the question of why art matters. Baudelaire's exhilarating innovation is to downgrade the significance of eternal value in art, in favour of what he designates its other half, the fleeting presentness that is modernity. Baudelaire explores this idea through a mock-anonymous celebration of the artist Constantin Guys, referred to as M. G., whose prolific sketches, done at speed, for rapid journal publication, chart the day-by-day miniscule changes in the appearances of the city. Guys's pictures — the art of modernity — give to the fleeting moment a second life, and ‘translate’ into a different medium — from sight to (mental) impression to its ‘rebirth’ as a sketch — what would otherwise be lost in its passing.

Le cadre et la peinture. Symboles de l’esthétique baudelairienne

The starting point of this article is a study of the sonnet characterized by a correlative and irregular structure in the poetry of Du Bellay et Ronsard. In Les Fleurs du Mal, Baudelaire gets back only once to this particular structure. He introduces, in this old mold, what he names, in Le Peintre de la vie moderne, his theory of Beauty which appears constantly in his aesthetic writings from 1857 until 1863. The same composition date of the sonnet characterized by a correlative and irregular structure and Le Peintre de la vie moderne establishes a relation between the aesthetic theory and poetic creativity. It leads also to the conclusion that Baudelaire has always been interested in the poetry of the sixteenth century.

Formal Revolution in the Work of Baudelaire and Flaubert by Kathryn Oliver Mills (review)

Kathryn Oliver Mills, Formal Revolution in the Work of Baudelaire and Flaubert. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012. 200 pp. Scholarly and other professional achievements strengthen a faculty member's teaching and make The University of the South a vital intellectual community. Kathryn Mills has the skills to make significant contributions to her academic discipline as a scholar and critic. She has enjoyed several accomplishments in the area of scholarship during the past years. She made available her research by publishing articles and by attending conferences to gain favorable peer recognition within her discipline of nineteenth-century French literary studies. Most important, she completed a book entitled Formal Revolution in the Work of Baudelaire and Flaubert, from the University of Delaware Press. The book deals with these two authors' novelty and modernity, defined as a reconfiguration of the generic boundaries between poetry and prose, by bringing formal, thematic, and historical considerations to bear on Charles Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris and Gustave Flaubert's Trois contes, as well as by setting those works in the context of the authors' other works of literature and literary criticism. Kathryn Mills argues that the critical studies, which recognize that Baudelaire and Flaubert were at the crossroads of a traditional era and a modern one, emphasized endings in Les Fleurs du mal, Madame Bovary, L'Education sentimentale, and Bouvard et Pecuchet by defining these works with respect to the past. Such literary masterpieces have helped define modern poetry and the modern novel, but the technical innovations of these novels were deployed within the traditional genres of the novel and of poetry in verse. In other words, critics focus on the literary structures Baudelaire and Flaubert were looking back at, and moving away from, rather than on the new forms toward which they were moving. Kathryn Mills positions herself against a certain trend of critics who have defined Baudelaire and Flaubert's contributions to modernity as an innovative ability to modulate traditional forms in order to express the inadequacy of those forms in the face of modern times. She claims that both writers' interest in finding a new literary form ultimately went further than variations on standard literary structures. Changing times and thoughts both elicit and require new literary forms. Le Spleen de Paris and Trois contes, for a variety of reasons, have been less represented in general discussions of Baudelaire and Flaubert, and Kathryn Mills demonstrates that the extent to which Baudelaire's prose poems and Flaubert's poetic tales diverge from the rest of their works is also the extent to which these works are particularly striking embodiments of their authors' artistic ideals. For these two seminal authors, the language of modernity involves an exploration of the boundaries between poetry and prose. Kathryn Mills's compelling argument even goes further, daring to venture that Baudelaire and Flaubert launched what amounted to a formal revolution--hence her title. Each writer advocated a revolution in form. For both writers, formal revolution turned around the heightened importance of prose. Baudelaire and Flaubert were both born in 1821, and Kathryn Mills argues that Flaubert is Baudelaire's counterpoint in the medium of prose. They had echoing sentiments about the need for a new, modern form in a changing day and age. The book is divided into six chapters. The first four are on Baudelaire, and the last two, on Flaubert. In the first chapter, Kathryn Mills launches her thesis and explains that Baudelaire's last Voyage in verse at the end of Les Fleurs du trial fails to discover something new on practical, existential, and literary levels. In her second chapter, she establishes new and definitive links between Constantin Guys and Joseph de Maistre's works and Baudelaire's Le Peintre de la vie mode me, whose composition and publication not only coincided chronologically with Baudelaire's interest in these works, but occurred in parallel with the poet's transition to prose poetry. …

The Flâneur, the Tourist, the Global Flâneur, and Magazine Reading as Flânerie

The flâneur and the tourist were both characterized foremost by movement and curiosity. A range of meanings and resonances were associated with both figures, underlining the tensions between the ideas of the insider and the outsider, the Parisian and the foreigner, travel within Paris and without, mechanical versus purposeful seeing, and compulsive versus meaningful mobility. While the sense of vision was emphasized, literary representations often evoked the idea that vacuous and passive seeing, stimulated by trivial goings-on and merchandise, lets the flâneur neglect the other senses, whereas an inner preparation and discernment lead to a more balanced way of flânerie. The projection of flânerie onto world travel paralleled the mode of reading illustrated magazines, which elicited imaginary flânerie. The re-reading of Baudelaire’s ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’ in this light provides some new insights regarding the concept of the artist as the ‘man of the world’.

Passer la nuit by Marina de Van

avec son père, tous les destins s’y dessinent, chaque spectateur peut s’y inscrire et y découvrir des lignes d’avenir, des potentialités, un idéal. Seront exclus de l’image ceux qui en détournent le sens en s’accaparant à leur profit les forces de la représentation pour imposer leurs règles et leur pouvoir. Elle ne fera pas de place, ne laissera pas de voix aux deux méchants. On comprend aussi que Thomas, guide du regard, peintre de la toile imaginaire, narrateur du récit, garant des lois de la représentation, est aussi celui qui a brûlé les deux villas, et que ce livre sur la part du feu n’est pas un livre sur le passé pour redonner voix aux anciens chefs, aux identités figées, mais un livre sur l’éthique de l’effacement pour construire un lendemain meilleur qui n’entend pas retourner aux origines. Ainsi parle Thomas s’adressant à Anaïs: “Mais mon oncle pense que tu es spéciale, que ce que tu cherches au fond, plus qu’une origine, ce pourrait être un idéal. Que la vraie question que tu te poses, en passant par de longs chemins, c’est [...]: quel usage faut-il faire de sa présence au monde?” (39). La fin du roman est narrée par la jeune femme qui fait le bilan de sa visite et prend le relais de Thomas lui-même emporté dans l’effacement. California State University, San Marcos Marion Geiger VAN, MARINA DE. Passer la nuit. Paris: Allia, 2011. ISBN 978-2-84485-400-1. Pp. 142. 9 a. After graduating in 1996 from FEMIS, the French school for cinematic studies , Marina de Van began her career as an actress in, and scriptwriter for, films by François Ozon. She wrote and directed Dans ma peau (2002), in which she also starred, and Ne te retourne pas (2009), starring Monica Bellucci and Sophie Marceau. Passer la nuit, Van’s first novel, continues to investigate the difficult themes she so ingeniously explored in her films, such as the location of identity, the experiences of depression, mourning, and loss of memory, and in general, women’s place in the world. Van decidedly eschews the psychoanalytical approach in her films and continues to do so in her novel. Rather, she concentrates on what it actually means, feels, and looks like to experience an identity lost, or perhaps more likely, never achieved. One has the sense of following a person who is suffering from acute amnesia (or worse, the inability to formulate memories at all), but who nonetheless manages to function in a way that suggests she has no problem with recalling and performing the mechanics of her daily routine. She even establishes relationships and careers, but what she cannot do is ascribe meaning to them or, in fact, to any aspect of her life. Still she is not sociopathic— she is poignantly aware of her condition and knows there is something wrong with her. What Van’s films and now her novel explore is this condition of being outof -sync with one’s body and the world; not its potential causes or treatment, just what it means to live the condition, which has apparently always been with her. Passer la nuit is written almost as a journal recounting the life of the narrator over the course of a few days, which, we learn, could well describe her entire life: “La seule chose passée que je ressente avec certitude est celle que j’expérimente aujourd’hui, des années plus tard, à travers l’enfermement solitaire et la paralysie” (141). When she awakens in the morning, she immediately starts to wonder how she will pass the time of her day until it is time to go to bed again. Even a steady regimen of coffee, alcohol, cigarettes, anxiety medication, and sleeping pills does not alter her mechanical functioning: she wakes up in the morning, time passes, Reviews 431 she goes to sleep at night. During her waking moments, she keeps appointments, she imagines beautiful yet haunting fictions, but unopened mail overwhelms her to the point...