‘Hidden Assassin: Subverting the Bourgeois in Villiers de L’Isle–Adam’s Contes Cruels’, 2001 Group: Essays in French Studies, 1, (September 2005), ISSN 1749–3307. (original) (raw)

Damian Catani, 'Evil: A History in Modern French Literature and Thought

AmeriQuests, 2014

Evil: A History in Modern French Literature and Thought is an in-depth, politically salient reaction to the need for "greater interdisciplinarity with respect to evil" in literary studies (2). Designed to move beyond a tendency to aestheticize or compartmentalize historical traumas, Catani's model successfully establishes a more inclusive approach. Overall, he applies the concept of evil as a critical prism, through which he elucidates the evolution of sociopolitical anxieties in the history of modern France, with a special emphasis on the 19 th and 20 th centuries. The study is organized chronologically and thematically. The first chapter, which functions as an introductory anthology, provides a succinct yet constructive synthesis of major philosophical and critical approaches to evil. It illustrates Catani's excellent grasp of the western intellectual tradition, while introducing the conceptual tools that ease the readers into his argument. Catani examines evil through the proposed themes of philosophy, politics, science, and gender in the subsequent chapters; however, the latter remains less explored, with only a brief mention of the "evil feminine" in Baudelaire's reading of Miss Scalpel. Gender discourse could have received more attention to parallel the meticulousness of his other arguments. As a study promoting self-critical awareness and moral agency, Catani is particularly interested in the interaction between free will and social factors, as well as their effect on individual subjectivity. Chapters 2-6 utilize a dual-prism technique, contrasting the positions of two different thinkers from a similar time period: Balzac and Baudelaire, Lautréamont and Zola, Gide and Proust, Bernanos and Céline, Sartre and Foucault. Each pair of authors provide snapshots of a constantly evolving society, whose internal dynamism is highlighted through the authors' opposing views. In chapter 2, Catani persuasively links Baudelaire's and Balzac's representation of evil to the gritty urbanism of Paris, condemning its Romantic metaphysical equivalent as an "anachronistic danger" (40). The rapport between urban modernity and down-to-earth vice ('la conscience dans le mal') is symbiotic in its mutual definition. Through a close reading of "Au lecteur" and "Le jeu" from The Flowers of Evil, Catani elegantly derives the new evil "from untapped experiences that lie dormant within the rich storehouse of the modern city itself, awaiting to unleash their potential to neutralize the ennui and moral passivity in which society would otherwise continue to languish" (40). Though both Balzac and Baudelaire favored identifiable evil over abstraction, Catani is mindful of the subtleties in his comparative analysis. His attentive reading of Balzac's A Harlot High and Low demonstrates the conservative nature of Balzac's modernism. His nostalgic reaffirmation of the pre-Revolutionary noble lineage and a tendency to depict the criminal underworld from a safe distance constitutes a "controlled engagement with the vice of modernity" (49). In contrast, Baudelaire directly implicates himself in the world of vice as one of its marginalized members, seeking selfdestructive pleasure. In chapter 3, Catani's comparative examination of Zola and Lautréamont is read against the biological paradigms of Darwin and Lombroso. To emphasize the significance of moral agency, he problematizes Zola's adaptation of atavism to explain societal corruption. Catani argues that Zola fails to escape theological determinism because of his predisposition to justify unsanctioned behavior through external forces. In the end, whether it is the original sin or an animal instinct, the driving motive remains beyond the characters' control. Catani argues that Lantier's lack of moral free will is what makes Zola's scientific interpretation of evil unsettling, inconsistent, and "far less conductive to moral reflection" (73). Alternatively, Lautréamont's hybrid combination of science and theology results in a character that is able to fulfill his moral agenda while remaining aware of the committed evil, albeit in unusually cruel ways. Catani interprets Maldoror's seemingly gratuitous acts of violence as a self-aware struggle against human and divine violence.

Oedipal Mayhem: Rituals of Masculinity and Filiation in Jacques Audiard's Regarde les hommes tomber

Australian Journal of French Studies, 2006

Reading Sophocles' Oedipus Rex as the prototype of all detection narratives is no longer a novelty, and inscriptions or displacements of such key Freudian concepts as the primal scene, repetition-compulsion and repression in crime and suspense films, from Alfred Hitchcock to Henri-Georges Clouzot and Dario Argento, have long been documented, if at times in a rather heavy-handed manner. 1 Today, the ever-increasing popularity in France of the serial killer format, 2 for instance, paradoxically tends to obfuscate rather than illuminate complementary notions that are equally central to the genre and to psychoanalysis: linkage and slippage, meaning and nonsense, a-causality and over-determination, singularity and multiplicity. Concurrently, however, there has emerged, in the last decade or so, a nexus of related, yet deeply idiosyncratic Gallic neo-noirs that strive to articulate original, complex reconfigurations of the Oedipal thrust in family or family-type constructs and radically revisit the constitutive, mysterious opacity of filiation or genealogy. One such example is Claude Chabrol's Merci pour le chocolat (Nightcap, 2000), which uses the thriller format (complete with in-joke references to Renoir's La Nuit du Carrefour and Lang's psychoanalytically-inflected The Secret Beyond the Door) as a flimsy excuse not so much for yet another satirical look at bourgeois family ties and values as for a perverse exposure of a web 3 of Oedipal tensions, rife with Freudian slips. The manifestation of these slips and shifts can be idiomatic in nature ("recevoir quelqu'un comme s'il était de la famille", "reconnaître un enfant", "s'aimer comme des soeurs", or-a key plot point-"endormir son monde") and 1 The least I can do here is be the first to plead guilty and refer the reader to a forthcoming personal contribution: "'Knowing Too Much' about Hitchcock: The Genesis of the Italian Giallo",

Diderot's rocaille jewel: an example of rococo humour

Romanica Olomucensia, 2019

Was Denis Diderot, the philosopher of Langres, a humorist? The idea may seem surprising, considering the popular assumption that the philosophers of the European Enlightenment, in which Diderot played a primary role, had a very serious plan. Diderot occupies a unique position within the history of literature, and is often cited as both a genius and the first truly modern writer: outstandingly, humour plays a fundamental role in this consideration. The object of this study is the libertine novel Les Bijoux Indiscrets (The Indiscreet Jewels in English), the most mysterious of his creations. This paper analyses the artist's experience of humour, his originality, and his comic opinions about the social and political events of his day portrayed in this story. The subject matter of his rococo fiction veers from dreamlike to grotesque, documentary to imaginary, humorous to harshly satirical: the different features that differentiate his work will be explored. This research proves that women occupy a central place within Diderot's oeuvre and in this text particularly, especially through portraying women in possession of their own powers, whether political or sexual. Diderot notes that in almost every nation Nature and the laws have combined in a way that is cruel to women. That is why he decides to write about their most unknown feelings and thoughts using a truly comic situation. It might be concluded that he typifies women as being relentless in love and ruthless in hate, but with a superlative might, and throughout all of it playing with a sensitive rococo style.

THE CULT OF EVIL AND HIDDEN OPTIMISM IN BAUDELAIRE’S POETRY

Baudelaire’s ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’ is possibly one of the most debated collection of poems in the poetic world. The French poet who heralded modernism in poetry could successfully open a new vista in poetic criticism through his relentless description of dark, shabby and negative aspects of human life. Imagination in Baudelaire’s writing attains a separate height which makes his poems venomous and at once symbolically critical. A unique blend of rejection of earthly life and optimism for a ‘new’ future lies hidden in Baudelaire’s poetry. Keywords: Dark, Les Fleurs du Mal, nothingness, negation, optimism.

Villainy and the figure of the vilain in French Renaissance Satire

This seminar will explore the social and moral conditions of villainy (vilenie) and of villains (vilains) in sixteenth-century French literature. The villain is traditionally stereotyped in fiction as being lowborn with low morals, working against ‘the good characters’. Scholars such as Eugene Waith have nonetheless demonstrated how these traditional villain-noble and villain-hero oppositions are subtly undermined in English Renaissance tragedy. What happens, then, when we turn to French comic fiction? My paper takes as its principal object chapters 45-7 of François Rabelais’s Quart Livre (1552). These three chapters of Rabelais’s Odyssean fourth book humorously dismantle any straightforward correlation of low moral conduct with low social status. Rabelais recounts how two vilains, a humble farm labourer and his wife, cheat a demonic tempter ‘of noble and ancient stock’ in a crop-growing contest. Within this apparently simple, formulaic fable we find humorous, satirical digressions, in which an array of Lucifer’s choicest villains – theologians, lawyers, and usurers – start to repent of their usual sins. Is villainy thus tantamount to base behaviour which may be remedied by religious reform? To what extent are socially lowly vilains capable of moral excellence? Is coarse behaviour still viewed as an indelible mark the lower social orders? Rabelais’s Quart Livre provides no stable answer; but, like John Marston’s later Scourge of Villainy (1599), it animates satire with gleeful references to indecency across an array of social types. This paper will, I hope, stimulate lively discussion on how villainy of the French Renaissance compares with that seen across various other disciplines. Jonathan Patterson works on early modern French literature, thought and history. From 2008 to 2011 he was Gledhill Scholar at Sidney Sussex College. His PhD research, supervised by Neil Kenny, examines representations of avarice in early modern France (c.1540-1615). His published research considers Marie de Gournay, gender and poetry (2010); and avarice in the agronomical writings of Olivier de Serres (October 2012). His postdoctoral project will be an interdisciplinary study of villainy in the Renaissance.