Bloy et la communication dans ‘l’enfer des médias’ ed. by Pascal Durand (review)
2003; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 98; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/mlr.2003.a827479
ISSN2222-4319
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Literary Analyses
Resumo998 Reviews the firstof the work's three main sections begins with a 'detour biographique' ex? amining Zola's attitudes to humour, irony,and the seriousness of mimetic discourse; of interest here from a textual perspective is the idea of Zola's fiction as parody of the excessively serious naturalist author. Indeed, the ironizingand ironized naturalist author and narrator are characters, just as characters subsequently examined in this section are themselves ironists, inscribed in an intertextual metalanguage subverting precisely ie serieux', which is 'la valeur-cle de l'ideologie bourgeoise' (p. 86). The texte-cle used as illustration in the next section (and throughout) is, appropriately, Pot-Bouille, where the outward gravity of the 'maison' is subverted by the behaviour of the inhabitants for whom it functions metonymically. Voisin-Fougere systematically examines this novel in terms of its manifestation of each element of an extensive taxonomy of irony, consisting of antiphrasis, emphasis, comparison, metaphor, oxymoron , mise en abyme, paralipsis, euphemism, asyndeton, and parataxis, among other 'indices figuratifs' and strategies of ironic silence and dissimulated authorial pres? ence. This analysis is followed by two case studies examining, respectively, external focalization in La Conquete de Plassans and contradictoryjuxtaposition in La Debdcle. The finalsection deals with theatrical metaphor in Les Rougon-Macquart, identifying the bourgeois as archetypal hypocrites in the comedie sociale, and naturalist fiction as the ideal dramaturgical means of exposing the farcical and immoral reality lurking behind his 'serieux'. One criticism to be made is that the work comes across itself as rather earnest and over-systematic: but therein lies, perhaps, in the manner of the theme in hand, subtle ironization of the 'serieux' of academic criticism. University of Ulster, Coleraine Larry Duffy Bloy et la communication dans Tenfer des medias'. Ed. by Pascal Durand. (Revue des Lettres Modernes, Leon Bloy 5) Paris: Lettres Modernes Minard. 2001. 282 pp. ?22.11. ISBN 2-256-91030-x. Bloy's relationship with the media was predictably ambivalent: the self-appointed 'exegete des lieux communs' and satirist of 'Cochons-sur-Marne' simultaneously needed the press and despised its core business, its readers' appetite for 'news'. 'Trop furieusement catholique' forhis co-religionists, he needed a forum forhis antiEstablishment and anti-Republican views. The vagaries of that relationship, judiciously encapsulated in an etude liminaireby Pascal Durand ('Babel Enfer'), are revisited here in a clutch ofsuggestive studies which, with a rediscovered review ofSueur de Sang by Jaures, and the series-standard 'carnet critique', should appeal both to a spe? cialist and to a wider scholarly readership. Thomas Loue analyses the iogique contreinstitutionnelle ' (p. 52) of the periodicals with which Bloy was successively aligned, from his own short-lived creation Le Pal (1885) to the Mercure de France, L'Univers, and La Revue blanche. Gilles Negrello, Olivier Macaux, and Pierre Glaudes examine parallels between 'ecriturejournalistiqueet ecriture romanesque', 'communication et communion' in LeDesespere, and 'le journal' and 'lesjournaux' respectively. Alongside the strikingthematic consanguinity of the provincial illumine and major figuresoffinde -siecle Decadence, some familiar suspects emerge: the 'Republique des vaincus'; the 'putanat' of officialclerisy from Hugo to Zola (the Dreyfus affairis both subtext and overt preoccupation); colonialism rationalized as civilizing mission; and fashionable new technologies including the bicycle, the telephone, the Eiffeltower ('Babel de fer'), and aviation. Photography was a site of particular negativity (pun intended), partly frompersonal mortification?Bloy's likeness to the naturalist 'cretin' de Goncourt and the anticlerical Rochefort foreshadows his disciple Bernanos's 'Helas! je ressemble a Claudel!' (1926)?but more profoundly because reproduction-as-creation usurped MLRy 98.4, 2003 999 divine privilege, substituting a false image of the world for the 'face cachee-face visible' of Christian tradition. Allegorizing the writing process (Charles Grivel), the photographic metaphor also informs Le Revelateur du globe, a work on Columbus overdue for scholarly attention, while Livio Belloi's observation that the 'grand ab? sent' from the technophobic charge sheet was cinematography (p. 81) emerges from Bloy's unpublished account of the catastrophic fireat the Bazar de la Charite in May 1897: by amalgamating the Papal Nuncio's opening benedictionand the fatal carelessness of the Russian projectionist, Bloy gave uniquely 'incendiary' expression to his pathological anti-modernism and the eschatological exasperation ('charite de bazar') which found 'la...
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