Filiations: folie, masque et rédemption dans l’œuvre de Michel Tremblay by Jacques Cardinal

find Bret-Vitoz’s taxonomy of plays with Egyptian themes, Marchal-Ninosque’s reading of Lemierre’s La veuve du Malabar and its parody La veuve de Cancale, and Bénac-Giroux’s treatment of identity and exoticism in Lefèvre’s 1776 Zuma. The third group of essays is the strongest: Hillerin’s article on the image of the king in tragedy between 1760 and 1789 is erudite and convincing, and Ambrus’s treatment of M.-J. Chénier’s tragedies is well written and original. A fitting final article for this section and for the volume is Jacob’s analysis of Luce de Lancival’s 1809 Hector. Here, Jacob examines the tension between a longstanding tradition of critical contempt for the play (reflecting the notion evoked in Bénac-Giroux and Pacal’s introduction of eighteenth-century tragedy as a waning genre) and its enthusiastic reception by some part of its contemporary audience, most notably by Napoleon. Jacob goes on to situate the early performances of the play within the context of Napoleon’s campaigns and to highlight the parallels between Napoleon and Lancival’s hero that must have been so clear and compelling to the emperor himself. Another strength of the collection is the multiplicity of approaches employed in the various articles. Pascal, Maligne, Bénac-Giroux, and Ambrus depend essentially on traditional textual readings. Ligier-Degauque, Marchal-Ninosque, and Jacob pay particular attention to the reception of the principal plays they study. Hillerin’s, Bec’s and Bret-Vitoz’s articles present literary taxonomies, which demonstrate both the scope and evolution of the form in its relation to the political (Hillerin and Bec) and the exotic (Bret-Vitoz). All of the authors consider historical context and the evolution of stagecraft in their articles to create a complete vision of the evolution of the form in both literary and theatrical terms. Regards sur la tragédie assembles an outstanding group of articles that—read individually or together— will be of interest to scholars of eighteenth-century literature and culture, and scholars of French theater of all periods. University of South Alabama Susan McCready CARDINAL, JACQUES. Filiations: folie, masque et rédemption dans l’œuvre de Michel Tremblay. Montréal: Lévesque, 2010. ISBN 978-2-923844-07-7. Pp. 212. $25 Can. Filiations analyzes the impact of familial relationships, in particular the relationship to an all-powerful mother, on the characters inhabiting the world of Michel Tremblay. A prolific, critically and publically acclaimed figure in Québécois literature for over forty years, Tremblay has created a fictional universe that traces the destinies of his characters over generations through approximately sixty plays and novels. Cardinal’s book is divided into two parts. Part one, “Folie,” contains five chapters and part two, “Masque et rédemption” contains six. Each chapter either addresses a specific text or a specific relationship that develops through several of Tremblay’s works. As such, the chapters contain coherent arguments that can be read separately (although the longer chapters lend themselves much more readily to extraction from the entire text than the shorter ones). The link between all of the chapters is the relationship to the concept of filiation, which Cardinal describes in his introduction as: “un processus par lequel un sujet reçoit et transmet une parole, s’insérant ainsi dans la trame d’un récit qui le précède et le détermine, dont il cherche bien souvent à prendre la mesure pour Reviews 819 s’en défaire, l’incliner ou l’accomplir selon son désir, selon le poids d’un héritage qui l’entrave ou l’ancre dans une authentique parole de la liberté” (10). Cardinal’s Lacanian-informed readings of filiation in the Chroniques du Plateau-Mont-Royal are particularly insightful in their analysis of the negative effects of the unavowed incest between the matriarch of the family, Victoire, and her younger brother Josaphat. The original incest not only violates the law of exogamy, it also contributes to a world where mothers are all-powerful, seemingly virginal (in that fathers are neither physically present nor present in the mothers’ discourse) and, according to Cardinal, uncastratable...

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