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Rétif de la Bretonne spectateur nocturne: une esthétique de la pauvreté by Philippe Barr

2014; American Association of Teachers of French; Volume: 87; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tfr.2014.0380

2329-7131

Ivy Dyckman,

Historical and Literary Analyses

revealing how its fragile, fragmentary nature obliges each author and artist to continually reinvent his or her own biography. This volume participates in very clear and helpful ways in an ongoing critical discussion of texts that are composed of words and photographs (whether real or imagined), and provides a valuable addition to a growing bibliography on the role of visual contributions to autobiographical works. University of Notre Dame (IN) Alison Rice Barr, Philippe. Rétif de la Bretonne spectateur nocturne: une esthétique de la pauvreté. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. ISBN 978-90-420-3539-3. Pp. 192. 40 a. Pornographic and prolific often come to mind when recalling printer and writer Nicolas-Edme Rétif/Restif de la Bretonne. Nicknamed le Voltaire des femmes de chambre and le Rousseau du ruisseau, Rétif laced his Balzacian-like output with familial and voyeuristic details excerpted from his experience as a member of the Third Estate. Barr, however, takes a different view of him in this treatise. He contributes to the rehabilitation of Rétif by portraying him not as a peasant philosophe of the lower classes but as an artiste, or more closely, a poète who depicted the poor with esthetic sensibility. In Les nuits de Paris, published in 16 parties between 1788 and 1793, Rétif uses Paris after dark as the setting to explore his preferred haunt, the streets of the Île Saint-Louis. He does this through a series of vignettes that resemble contes, a popular genre of the eighteenth century, often used as an amusing and instructive literary tactic to disseminate socio-political criticism. Relying on his own observations of nightlife, Rétif created a first-person narrator personified as le Hibou or le Spectateur nocturne who had the rare talent to see in the dark, la nyctalopie, physically and metaphorically. He conceived the Marquise de M***,likely modeled after the Marquise de Montalembert, as a device to serve as the listener and reader of his observations as well as the foci of the nobility and impoverished. Rétif created his Shéhérazade-like character as a way of advancing his social ideal of class assimilation without bowing to the Revolutionary aim of aristocratic obliteration and of continuing his tales over many, many nights. With regard to the genre of Les nuits de Paris, Rétif had early eighteenth-century predecessors in Addison’s Spectator (1711) and Marivaux’s Spectateur français (1721– 24). Each writer used a first-person narrator to deliver subjective observations and opinions of urban inhabitants in a newspaper format. The influence of Marivaux’s journaux, in particular, as well as the conte moral, and the Bibliothèque bleue are evident in Les nuits de Paris and attest to Rétif’s preference for marginal narrative forms over the conventional esthetic criteria of the Lumières. English literary trends made their way to the continent and eventually into Rétif’s work.Addison represented the prototype of the “homme de lettres discret et misanthrope” (172). The writings of the Graveyard poet Edward Young and the complete works of Shakespeare in translation inspired the introduction of the night as a representation of melancholy and the 254 FRENCH REVIEW 87.3 Reviews 255 “horreur agréable” (123) of the sublime. Les nuits de Paris reflects elements of preromantic authors and appears to pave the way for the likes of Baudelaire and, much later, the surrealists. The esthetics of marginality and of the night in this work herald the conception of Rétif as a modern author of his time. Barr’s analysis would be appreciated and digested better with some prior familiarity with Rétif’s Nuits. If Barr is read first, he manages to arouse sufficient curiosity to seek out a copy. Independent Scholar Ivy Dyckman Berthier, Philippe. Stendhal: littérature, politique et religion mêlées. Paris: Garnier, 2011. ISBN 978-2-8124-0265-4. Pp. 240. 39 a. Berthier’s book will please the ‘happy few’ devoted to Henri Beyle and his works. A somewhat unusual collection, its fifteen essays (all but one of which have been published previously) do not generally deal directly with Stendhal’s literary texts but...