Review

Author(s): Andrew Rothwell

Review by: Andrew Rothwell
Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 88, No. 4 (Oct., 1993), pp. 999-1001
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3734492
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 MLR, 88.4, 1993 999
The reprinting, in facsimile edition, of the Hommagea MarcelProustis, in contrast,
an act of total repetition. Gallimard have reissued the copy of La NouvelleRevue
Franfaiseof I January 1923 which, only six weeks after Proust's death, comprised an
impressive list of essays and hommages to the dead author. The facsimile makes an
attractive volume, complete with various photographs of Proust himself and of the
rewritten pages and labelled notebooks which form his manuscript. The increased
availability of the Hommagewill be of great use to Proust scholars; as Tadie remarks
in the NRF: 'Le numero du Ier janvier I923 est toujours utile.' The Hommageis
arranged in six parts. The first three, and the bulk of the volume, include 'Souvenirs'
from Proust's friends and acquaintances, essays on his writing, and tributes from
foreign authors. There follow two fragments from La Prisonniere (as yet unpublished
in I923), a brief bibliography, and a few comments on the manuscript of A la
Recherche dutempsperdu.
The primary interest of the volume for modern readers is, evidently, in its
collection of tributes from other authors. Stunning amongst these is Valery's offering
of what he describes as 'un hommage, une fleur perissable sur une tombe qui
restera'. Also particularly striking are the contributions from Valery Larbaud and
Cocteau. Larbaud describes Proust arriving at a social gathering 'un peu comme un
revenant', and indeed the reader of this volume has much the impression of a
phantom Proust being conjured by his admirers and readers. Cocteau writes on and
recalls 'La Voix de Marcel Proust', both the voice in his work and 'cette voix
profondement rieuse, chancelante, etalee' of Proust himself; others focus on Proust's
heavy, dark eyes or more lavishly on his 'charmant et poetique visage creuse de
souffrance'! Yet as Philippe Soupault writes: 'Vivant, Marcel Proust etait indefin-
issable.' The Hommageas a whole moves between attempts to recall and define a
known Proust, to outline his reading habits and the details of his cork-lined room,
and a prospective attempt to mark out the boundaries of Proust criticism. To this
latter end we find already essays on Proust and the psychology of love, Proust and
tradition, Proust and memory, Proust as naturalist, Proust and the visual arts....
M. C. Marx, indeed, in his essay, 'Du Plaisir de lire Marcel Proust', hazards the
anxiety that 'unjour- comme pour Racine ou pour Baudelaire- nous ne pourrons
plus que relireProust'.
Yet the Hommageitself offers many pleasures of rereading. Not least is the
rereading of the very familiar passages from La Prisonniere.'Une Matinee au
Trocad6ro' leads uninitiated readers into musing on Albertine's possible infidelities
with Lea. And in the final place stands 'La Mort de Bergotte', which, with its final
image of resurrection, seems to serve so perfectly the purposes of the writers of the
Hommagea MarcelProust,reminding us, as does ReadingProustNow, that through his
texts Proust too is for ever recalled and indeed, as Peter Collier puts it, that 'reading
Proust is a process of re-creation'.
NEW HALL, CAMBRIDGE EMMAWILSON

PierreReverdy1889-1989 (NottinghamFrenchStudies,28.2 (Autumn 1985)). Ed. by

BERNARDMcGUIRK. Nottingham: University of Nottingham. I989.I28pp.
?8.
Le Centenairede Pierre Reverdy (i889-960o). Ed. by YVAN LECLERCand GEORGES
CESBRON.Angers: Presses de l'Universite d'Angers. I990. 522 pp. 220 F.
Reverdyaujourd'hui. Ed. by MICHELCOLLOTand JEAN-CLAUDEMATTHIEU. Paris:
Presses de l'Ecole Normale Superieure.I992. I85 pp. I20 F.
The 1989 Reverdy centenary was marked by international colloquia in Nottingham,
Angers-Sable-Solesmes, and Paris, the proceedings of which (referencedbelow as N,

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1000 Reviews

A, and P respectively) contain important contributions in a number of areas.

Perhaps most fundamental is the new work on the techniques and mechanisms of
Reverdy's reticent earlier texts, examined from different angles in papers which
together provide an impressive overview. Roger Cardinal (N, pp. 75-83) uses the
Augustinian distinction between natural and cultural signs as the basis for a
probing account of both the poet's confrontation with reality and the reader's
problematic encounter with his texts, which sets the scene for several other
contributions. Asking whether signs in Reverdy are ever 'natural', he sees the
apparent impersonality of the poetry as the product of a deliberate coding process,
to which the reader can respond only by formulating an implied speaker and so
becoming aware of how the poet "'comes across" as a person'. This approach,
which flies in the face of recent poetic and critical orthodoxy, is implicitly
supported by some of the more 'technical' pieces. Evelyne Lloze's study of
Reverdy's 'humilite' (A, pp. 425-35) examines the attenuation of the subject, use of
doubt-inducing questions, and modalizing expressions, and so on, which contrib-
ute to an '6criture de la litote' in Plupart du temps. Christian Herve's study of 'la
serie negative' in La Lucarne ovale (P, pp. II5-31) analyses negated terms of
perception and knowing, and the widespread semantic and phonetic dissemination
of the verb 'passer'. Jacques Diirrenmatt (A, pp. 213-20) shows how the use of
punctuation in the prose-poems to create pauses for the eye rather than as
syntactic markers organizes a collision between 'le lecteur et un texte qui lui
echappe parce qu'il lui propose de faux reperes ou lui retire certaines assurances de
sens'. That this is a systematic intention of Reverdy's is confirmed by Michele
Montballin's survey of titles (A, pp. 121-39): she concludes that their relationship
to the poems is often misleading, establishing expectations which are then
contradicted or left in suspension as puns, disorientating the reader and forcing the
revision of his or her whole reading strategy. Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck, in a
paper on the 'swerving syntax' of the Flaques de verreprose-poems (N, pp. 84-92; for
the original French text, see Lire Reverdy, ed. by Yvan Leclerc (Lyon: Presses
Universitaires de Lyon, I990), pp. 119-30), argues persuasively that Reverdy's
prose syntax, with the often perplexing prominence it gives to 'grammar words',
has an identical function to the blanks of the early verse poems, simultaneously
structuring and destructuring the world of the text. A comparable point is made by
Isabelle Chol (A, pp. 205-09), who analyses the rhythmic consequences of the
rewriting of early verse poems into prose for La Liberte des mers: rhythms based on
anaphora, sentence and syllable length, and grammatical parallels replace the
original unconventional metrics.
Since Jean Rousselot's assertion, in his pioneering I973 study 'Pierre Reverdy
romancier' (reprinted in A, pp. 235-47), that Reverdy was 'le poete cubiste par
excellence', the question of the links between cubist painting and the early poetry
has been hotly debated. Etienne-Alain Hubert has always rejected out of hand any
technical comparison, and does so again in a meticulously documented paper on the
history of the definition of cubism as a 'nouveau realisme de conception' (P, pp. 53-
65). Michel Collot treats the possibility more seriously (P, pp. 67-76), but sees too
much evidence of movement and pictorial perspective in the poetic landscapes for
the aesthetic and technical 'parentes' to be anything but 'assez superficielles'. This
view ignores the possibility of the poems defining their own figurality through
parodic adoption of conventional visual models, an idea supported by John E.
Jackson's survey of pictorial meta-images and their 'auto-designation du proces [sic]
d'engendrement par lequel le poeme se constitue en tableau' (P, pp. I05-13). Both
Enrico Guaraldo (P, pp. 4-52) on perspective (P, pp. 45-47) and Yvan Leclerc
(P, pp. 141-49) on movement (P, p. 146) seem to undermine Collot's argument; the
debate is clearly still open.

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 MLR, 88.4, 1993 iooi

Another group of papers sheds welcome light on the later collections. Serge
Meitinger (A, pp. I51-58) reads Plein verreby reference to the Drole de Guerre
('temps suspendu propre aux faux semblants'), and Bois vertas a frustratedaccount
of the betrayal of the Liberation's promises of social and moral renewal. In similarly
referential vein, Lucienne Cantaloube-Ferrieu (A, pp. 193-202) examines the war
imagery in Le Chantdesmorts,showing the correctness of Aragon's I946 judgement
that Reverdy's poetry would soon be seen as 'l'expression d'une epoque'. The fact
that these poems have until now been read solely as personal meditations on the
great abstract themes is strikingevidence for the densely polysemic nature of the late
writing. A further layer is added by Bernard McGuirk's original interpretation of
the same works in terms of a 'negative theology' (Derrida, Levinas), with the Bible
and St John of the Cross as intertexts (N, pp. 93-107); though controversial, this
approach builds convincingly on the embarrassing fact, which critics usually
relegate to a tidy 'parcours spirituel' narrative based on a few quotations from Le
Gant de crin, that Reverdy spent many of the later years of his life engaged in
quasi-theological speculation.
In that other great 'prohibited' area of Reverdy studies, biography, Robert Kenny
relates his discoveries about the poet's early years (notably concerning his illegiti-
macy and his mother's eventual insanity) to the idealized poetic themes of childhood
happiness, the 'domaine perdu' and the admirable father. His paper (N, pp. 4-25; in
French translation with an additional 'chronologiefamiliale', A, pp. 371-4 I) is the
first to do more than repeat the 'country boy lost in the big city' story accredited by
Reverdy himself. A full biography would probably cast light on a number of other
myths of this type, but with so much of the evidence under embargo by the 'Comite
Reverdy' (possibly encouraged by Flammarion, who apparently hold the rights), we
may have a long time to wait. This is unfortunate, as it is now clear that Reverdy's
work, for all its apparent universality, is actually structured on every level by the
complex encoding of personal experience, reactions to contemporaryevents, aesthe-
tic polemics, and the like. Some ineditsare being allowed to filter out: the Paris
volume contains the transcription of a fascinating war-time carnetfrom which
material was later selected for En Vrac(P,pp. 151-84), and comparison with the
published text shows how many of his contemporary concerns (with the Occupa-
tion, or the extra-territorialactivities of Gide) Reverdy later excluded. This is just
one of many such carnets(another, dated 'I945-1946', appears in Pour Reverdy
(Cognac: Le Temps qu'il fait, 1990), pp. 14-46); it is to be hoped that the rest will
soon be published.
UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS ANDREW ROTHWELL

The Irigaray Reader. By MARGARET WHITFORD. Oxford: Blackwell. I991.

vi + 234 pp. ?40 (paperbound ?12.95).
TheIrigarayReaderfocuses primarily on Irigaray the feminist, although, as Margaret
Whitford observes in her introduction, we get a glimpse (indeed, more than a
glimpse) of Irigaray the philosopher too - notably in 'Volume Without Contours'
(Part I: Chapter 4), 'Sexual Difference' (3:o1) and 'Questions to Emmanuel
Levinas' (3:I I). Whitford's selection of texts is exemplary. A wide variety of essays is
included, ranging from the relatively straightforward'Equal or Different?' (I: ) to
more hermetic pieces such as 'The Poverty of Psychoanalysis' (2:5) and 'The Limits
of the Transference' (2:6). A glossary at the start of the volume acquaints us with
those terms which are used by Irigaray in a specific and often idiosyncratic way.
Apart from her introductory essay, in which she delineates Irigaray's ideas and their
development, Whitford provides prefaces to each of the reader's three sections,

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