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Le (dé)montage de la fiction: la révélation moderne de Mallarmé by Patrick Thériault

2012; American Association of Teachers of French; Volume: 85; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tfr.2012.0174

2329-7131

Pamela A. Genova,

Renaissance Literature and Culture

their children rather than the other way around. In a related essay, Pommier takes on Georges Couthon’s writings on the comic playwright. He pokes fun at Couthon’s claim that certain lines are difficult to interpret when Pommier finds the same passages as clear as day. In a third essay, Pommier confronts both Pierre Barbéris and Rousseau. He responds to Barbéris’s criticism of him for being too singleminded in his interpretations and not sufficiently open to multiple viewpoints. Barbéris suggested that even Pommier would not dare refute Rousseau’s ideas on Molière although they differ from his. Pommier sets out to refute Barbéris by refuting Rousseau. He answers the charges made against Molière by the author of the Lettre à d’Alembert by showing that the seventeenth-century playwright never makes fun of anyone who is truly virtuous. He ridicules only the hypocritical, selfish , and tyrannical who seek to exploit others. In two other essays, Pommier addresses studies of Apollinaire by Georges Zayed and Anne Clancier. Adopting his commonsense approach, he takes Zayed to task for his over-interpretation of a one-line poem by Apollinaire. He goes on to criticize Clancier for what he considers her pseudo-psychoanalytical reading of another poem. He condemns bringing into the analysis of a work concepts and preoccupations that are external to the work itself. Although he tries to be judicious in his reading of Apollinaire’s poetry, it is clear that Pommier does not have a high opinion of this writer. He has an even lower opinion of Bossuet. Here he challenges the author directly instead of his interpreters. In two works of the theologian/homilist, Pommier finds blatant self-contradictions between his expressed ideals and his actual practice. Unfortunately, Pommier’s personal scorn for Bossuet’s writings becomes a diatribe against religion in general. Bossuet comes in for additional mockery in an essay about Chateaubriand’s reference to him in a passage of Mémoires d’outre-tombe. Although he cannot curb his hostility toward Bossuet, his reading of Chateaubriand is a good example of his commonsense method. In the final essay Pommier’s target is Roland Barthes’s Sur Racine. He accuses Barthes of deliberately misinterpreting lines in Racine’s plays by taking at face value comments intended by the characters to be ironic or deceitful. Pommier’s own view of Racinian tragedy is that the characters are primarily victims of the dramatist, who places them in impossible situations from which there is no escape. University of Denver (CO) James P. Gilroy THÉRIAULT, PATRICK. Le (dé)montage de la fiction: la révélation moderne de Mallarmé. Paris: Champion, 2010. ISBN 978-2-7453-1987-6. Pp. 354. 65 a. In his study of one of the most celebrated and complex poets in the history of French letters, Thériault focuses on a notably mysterious facet of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetics: the notion of mystery itself. Of course, many critics have addressed the often enigmatic nature of Mallarmé’s work, discernable both in his theoretical writings and in his creative work. It is not unusual to encounter the view that for the Symbolist poet, the very act of reading poetry—and of writing it—is obscured by veils of mystery, conceived as an aesthetically-sacred gesture aiming to communicate the existence of a universal realm of absolute Ideas, a realm protected from the commonplace by a deeply ritualistic aura, by a secret system of initiation for those hoping to gain access to Mallarmé’s art. Reviews 1175 Thériault brings to this understanding of Mallarmé as obscure a new dimension , by proposing an innovative reading of his work (through an examination, not only of certain major poetic works, but also of lesser-analyzed writings, such as Les dieux antiques and Crayonné au théâtre), by suggesting that Mallarmé was situated between the act of the mystification and that of the demystification of his subject. Revealing through his art both the primacy of language and the order of desire, Mallarmé is reconsidered in this study as a doubly complex thinker, as Thériault underscores the inherent jouissance of both writer and reader...