Proust et les “Moyen Âge” éd.

par Sophie Duval, Miren

Lacassagne (review)

François Proulx

The French Review, Volume 90, Number 4, May 2017, pp. 231-232 (Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tfr.2017.0230

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/768341/summary

[ Access provided at 21 May 2021 21:39 GMT from the University of Connecticut ]
Reviews 231

in terms of alienation and mediation; both embodied an underlying risk of inter-

pretive failure or “willful perversion” of meaning (39). This theoretical reflection
comes to full fruition in a “coda” on Joan of Arc as a discursive construct. Employed
by Christine and Chartier as an efficacious mediating figure, Joan was seen by her
detractors as a threat to newly constructed notions of national (masculine) identity.
Delogu’s book is essential reading for anyone interested in late medieval allegory,
political thought, and questions of gender.

University of Georgia Catherine M. Jones

Duval, Sophie, et Miren Lacassagne, éd. Proust et les “Moyen Âge”. Paris: Hermann,
2015. ISBN 978-2-7056-9037-3. Pp. 423. 38 a.

The twenty-two essays by Proustians and medievalists gathered here revisit a rich
field of research, long defined by studies from Richard Bales (Proust and the Middle
Ages, 1975; FR 50.2) and Luc Fraisse (L’œuvre cathédrale, 1990). As its inventively
formulated title signals, the volume emphasizes both the mediation of Proust’s
knowledge about the Middle Ages (largely through the work of art historians, first
among them John Ruskin and Émile Mâle), and his creative, polysemic redeployment
of the medieval in his works and correspondence. Opening and closing essays by
Sophie Duval and Stéphane Chaudier underline how Proust systematically uses “the
distancing-effects of metaphor and allegory, irony and pastiche” (31) to negotiate
between the Middle Ages as “resource” and “trap” (340): a repository of artworks,
names, and tales that incite imagination and inquiry, yet can lead to no definite
knowledge, and offer little “grip” on modern or personal realities (356). Highlights of
the collection include essays examining Proust’s subtle critique of medieval
antisemitism (Nathalie Mauriac Dyer) and of the politicized uses of the Middle Ages
in nineteenth-century schoolbooks (Françoise Leriche); his reworking of allegories
by Giotto and, more unexpectedly, Baudelaire (Guillaume Perrier, Matthieu Vernet);
and his sources for the famous scene of the magic lantern in “Combray” (Kazuyoshi
Yoshikawa). Equally fine chapters retrace the nineteenth-century lineage of the book/
cathedral analogy through Hugo, Gautier, and Huysmans (Stephanie A. Glaser); inter-
rogate the link between “reclusion” and “spiritual discipline” in Proust and how it
shaped twentieth-century receptions of the medieval (Virginie Greene, 239, 241); and
situate the Recherche with regard to nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century discourses
about medieval monuments as national “patrimony” (Laurent Baridon, 57). A remark-
able essay by Simone Delesalle-Rowlson reconsiders Proust’s intimate letters to Reynaldo
Hahn, traversed with pseudo-medieval “lansgage” (315) and often accompanied by
drawings that whimsically rework religious images (a parallel essay by Elizabeth
Emery provides an overview of these drawings and their publication history). This
232 FRENCH REVIEW 90.4

corpus, subject to censorship in some editions (328–32) or dismissed as childish and

gratuitously campy in others (for instance by Philippe Sollers in L’œil de Proust, 1999),
is here given thoughtful critical consideration, revealing its richness as “secret” but
also “inventive, full of humor, and never ironic” (328). The volume’s handsome
material presentation (60 illustrations, many in color) partakes in the same attention:
whenever possible, Proust’s drawings are here reproduced as actual objects (existing
on a material support, usually semi-translucent paper with a thick border), rather than
as the decontextualized black-and-white images first published in Lettres à Reynaldo
Hahn (1956) and often reprinted since. While the density of scrutiny throughout the
collection could be thought to occasion repetitions (multiple contributors sometimes
cite the same passages from Proust’s novel), editors choose to emphasize this through
cross-references, creating instead a network of perspectives and recalls not wholly
dissimilar from the structure of the Recherche. This exemplary book makes a
significant contribution to Proust studies and sets a high scholarly, editorial, and
aesthetic standard for edited collections.

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign François Proulx

Githire, Njeri. Cannibal Writes: Eating Others in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Women’s
Writing. Champaign: UP of Illinois, 2014. ISBN 978-0-252-03878-5. Pp. 256. $55.

Close textual analyses in this study of works by female writers of Caribbean and
Indian Ocean regions serve to reverse western mythical views of non-western and
colonized peoples as cannibals. An abundance of metaphorical images of cannibalism,
consumption or refusal of food, and excretion in the works of Monique Agénor
(Reunion Island), Lindsey Collen and Marie-Thérèse Humbert (Mauritius), Maryse
Condé and Gisèle Pineau (Guadeloupe), Andrea Levy (Jamaica), and Edwidge Danticat
(Haiti) underscore sexual, political, and social hierarchies and prove that the real
“cannibals” are those who wield power in these realms. In her introduction, Githire
explains her focus on postcolonial island regions, with their clear geographical bound-
aries, because they were/are the locus of trade and consumption of comestible goods,
like sugar, coffee, and spices, and “comestible” peoples whose labor was/is consumed
in global trade. Githire uses word play throughout to force a renewed examination of
two sides of the same coin in expressions like “(non)eating,” the “(m)other figure,”
“(neo)colonial,” “(neo)imperial,” “(un)consciously,” and the clever title of her third
chapter, “Dis(h)coursing Hunger.” The first chapter compares Condé’s The Story of
the Cannibal Woman and Levy’s Small Island, both of whom establish a link between
sexual and gustatory appetites, and develop interpretations of family dynamics as
metaphors for imperial/colonial “cannibalism.” Both the colonized and immigrants
from the colonies are often portrayed as voracious in eating resources of the imperial
nation. Yet, Githire argues that both Condé and Levy reverse this cannibal image