Guillevic maintenant: colloque de Cerisy 11–18 juillet 2009 ed. by Michael Brophy, Bernard Fournier

Reviews 221 modern, from France to Quebec to Czechoslovakia. Given this wide scope, Le rire runs the risk of critical balkanization. Yet a number of threads add coherence to the collection . Almost all of the authors cite the same names: Cervantes and Rabelais form common points of origin; Bakhtin, Kundera, and Pavel create a shared critical framework . Pavel in particular is cited by nearly every one of his fellow contributors. Yet Pavel’s own essay, which closes the volume, refers the reader elsewhere, offering a summary of the ideas in Kundera’s L’art du roman (1986). Pavel emphasizes Kundera’s characterization of the novel as a unique way of envisioning the human condition. This entails two kinds of irony, both of the reversal-of-expectations sort. In the first, characters fail to realize their ideals through uncontrollable fortune; the second emphasizes the characters’ role in their own disasters. Even if the reader is not wholly convinced of the universality or uniqueness of le rire romanesque (whose relation to theatrical comedy seems in dispute among some of the authors), this way of conceiving the novel has clear value. Finally, the authors of this volume not only write about wit; they often write wittily. For instance, Isabelle Arseneau writes a prolepsis of her own, barely one paragraph after analyzing uses of prolepsis by the thirteenth-century narrator of Meraugis de Portlesguez; Bélisle whimsically compares the role of laughter in the novel to a Sancho Panza trailing eternally behind romanesque Don Quixote. These moments make this volume a rather fun, as well as thought-provoking, read. Widener University (PA) Kate M. Bonin Brophy, Michael, et Bernard Fournier, éd. Guillevic maintenant: colloque de Cerisy 11–18 juillet 2009. Paris: Champion, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7453-2306-4. Pp. 423. 90 a. This collection of twenty-six essays is the outcome of the most recent of five major international colloquia on Guillevic since 2001. Not only does the title declare the volume to be the state of Guillevic studies—with many of the most familiar, authoritative , and accomplished voices on twentieth-century poetry contributing to it—it also seizes on the recurrence of the word maintenant in the work of Guillevic, as well as the importance of the now in Guillevic’s philosophical and aesthetic preoccupations. In this way, the studies all approach, often from admirably different perspectives, the insistence, persistence, invocation, consecration, duration, and iteration of the present moment in a vast array of works by Guillevic. The title of a 1993 collection of poems, maintenant also has a role to play throughout the corpus of Guillevic’s poetry, and, in an important gesture that reveals the rhetorical richness of the word for the present study, Brophy’s preface reminds the reader of these studies that the word appears in Guillevic’s work as a verb, an adverb, and a noun. This plural function of maintenant can be seen, in some ways, as the organizing principle of the collection of essays. As a noun, the word thematizes time in Guillevic’s work and encourages dialogue with various theories of temporality and the segmentation of time (Heraclitus, Bergson, Deleuze). In this way, many of the essays in this collection explore the nature of time and the way in which Guillevic asks and answers questions of continuity and individuation of moments. For example, Steven Winspur shows how Guillevic’s work opposes time as a succession of units to other cadences that we might conceive and impose. Along these lines, with temporality taken as a dominant trope of Guillevic’s work, there are essays that address primordial time, antiquity, and modernity in Guillevic’s work, with studies of classical materialism and the hic et nunc, as well as modern scientific theory and Guillevic’s use of the term ‘quanta’ for the fragments of such texts as Du domaine. Understood as an adverb, ‘maintenant’ amplifies the thematics of time, of course, but also inspires readings, such as Glenn Fetzer’s study that focus on the nowness of the poetic text, both with respect to its indexical function (as an embrayeur: by saying ‘now,’ the text orients the reader in time) and with respect to its performative...

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