Les Essais critiques d'un journaliste by Georges Rodenbach, Paul Gorceix, Jacques de Decker
2010; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 105; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/mlr.2010.0086
ISSN2222-4319
Autores Tópico(s)French Literature and Criticism
Resumo876 Reviews through a close, cumulative reading of the seven tableaux of the 1874 Tentation, Orr is able to show how throughout the textFlaubert ishimself remapping the debates and contexts of nineteenth-century religious and scientific thought. She proposes especially convincing parallels with post-Napoleonic France's view of Egypt, and with the debates about monsters that are pursued in thework ofCuvier and Geof froy Saint-Hilaire. At the same time, her knowledge of the doctrinal debates of the early Christian Church is impressively detailed, and there are some persuasive pages about the importance ofRenan's Vie de Jesus as one of themajor intertexts in the 1874 Tentation. Elsewhere, the looming presence ofAlfred Maury's La Magie et Vastrologie dans Vantiquite et au Moyen Age (i860), which is seen to operate as a code-breaker for tableau five, is established for the first time. But these are only a few snapshots from a rich and wide-ranging study inwhich Orr reveals how the dissenting, heretical voices that challenge orthodoxy in fourth-century Egypt and Alexandria are also thevoices of thenineteenth century itself.Flaubert's 'bibliotheque fantastique', which Foucault's famous phrase might have made to seem nightmarishly chaotic, becomes readable at last. This is a challenging study, both in terms of the sophistication and subtlety of its arguments and in terms of the sweep of itserudition. With all studies of the Tentation, there isdanger that the vertiginous complexities of Flaubert's own textwill contaminate discourse about it. Orr has risen impressively to this challenge, and has provided the closest and most sustained reading of the Tentation ofmodern times.Whether readers of Flaubert will, as a result, overcome their own 'block' about the Tentation, returning to it like the saint at the dawn of a new day, is of course another matter. University of Bristol Timothy Unwin Les Essais critiques d'un journaliste. By Georges Rodenbach. Ed. by Paul Gor ceix. Preface by Jacques de Decker. (Textes de Litterature Moderne et Contemporaine) Paris: Champion. 2007. 360 pp. 65. ISBN 978-2-7453 1466-6. Georges Rodenbach isone ofnineteenth-century Belgium's most important literary figures: the author ofBruges-la-morte and Les Vies encloses, friend ofDaudet, Ban ville, and Mallarme, and contributor to La JeuneBelgique, Le Journal de Bruxelles, and Le Figaro. This publication concerns the latter, critically neglected aspect of Rodenbach's oeuvre: his journalistic writings. Paul Gorceix's scholarly edition is thorough and meticulously presented. The lengthy introduction provides a succinct history of Rodenbach's journalistic career followed by a detailed analysis of the journalistic sections which form the body of the book: 'La Poesie nouvelle', 'Les Ecrivains', 'LesArtistes', and 'Villes et paysages de Flandre'. Like his better-known literarycompatriots, Maurice Maeterlinck and Emile Verhaeren, Rodenbach turned from law to literature and fromBrussels toParis in thepursuit of his art. The writer's journalistic textsdate from his first stay in the French capital in 1878 and cover his period as correspondent forLe Journal de Bruxelles and Le Figaro in the later 1880s MLR, 105.3, 2010 877 and 1890s. The role of Le Figaro inRodenbach's career is particularly significant, since itoffered a stage upon which he could initially reveal his journalistic and, later,his literary talent, through the form of thefeuilleton?%. strategy also adopted by Zola and Barbey d'Aurevilly. In 1892, having written a number of articles for the paper, he published Bruges-la-morte as a feuilleton to popular and critical success. From the perspective of nineteenth-century studies, Rodenbach's texts on literature and painting are, as Gorceix states, significant in the first instance because they offerus 'les impressions, les reactions, prises sur le vif, d'un temoin direct de son epoque' (p. 27). Based mainly on artists and writers living in Paris, essays on Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarme, and les Goncourts are accompanied by those on regional writers such asMistral and Brizeux, while the articles on artists are equally wide-ranging, including Rodin, Puvis de Chavannes, Monet, Carriere, and Raffaelli. Rodenbach's admiration for and friendship with many of thewriters and artists he chooses precludes criticism of their shortcomings, yet his perceptive analysis ofMallarme and Rodin, for example, reveals his talent as a critic and in...
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