Diplomacy and the Modern Novel: France, Britain, and the Mission of Literature ed. by Isabelle Daunais and Allan Hepburn (review)

Reviewed by: Diplomacy and the Modern Novel: France, Britain, and the Mission of Literature ed. by Isabelle Daunais and Allan Hepburn Debra Rae Cohen Diplomacy and the Modern Novel: France, Britain, and the Mission of Literature. Ed. Isabelle Daunais and Allan Hepburn. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. 252 Pp. $71.00 (cloth); $71.00 (eBook). What is diplomatic literature? According to the French essayist Albert Thibaudet, whose essay "Paysages" is one of the touchstones of Diplomacy and Modern Literature, it is the new fiction of movement, "la littérature de la valise," "a cosmopolitan literature that … awaited the formation of a universal language of sleeper cars and cinema, … a cosmopolitan literature of trips, capital cities, beings that join in solidarity with the diplomatic vocation" (quoted in Daunais and Hepburn, Diplomacy, 86–87). According to the volume itself, it is also something, or several somethings, else: novels written by diplomats, diplomatic memoirs-a-clèf, literature whose heroes, or fall guys, are diplomatic personnel. As evident from their own essays, the first version, perhaps more expansively geared to dovetail with the impulses of modernism as a whole, and with contemporary modernist studies projects on hotels, ocean liners, and other sites of cosmopolitan interchange in particular, seems to be the vision of the volume's editors; but the capacious introduction by Allen Hepburn does its best to justify the variegated versions offered up by their contributors. Perhaps because of its genesis—it is the product of a bilingual symposium hosted at McGill University in 2017—the volume focuses on representations of French and British diplomacy. But though Hepburn points out in his acknowledgments that "French has been the lingua franca of diplomacy since the Renaissance," a limitation of this volume is precisely that it confines itself to France and Britain; a concentration on either of those countries might have more fully limned the special circumstances and claims for its authors' cultural diplomacy, while an extension of the volume's mandate to other nations would have more completely located the diplomat/author within a global historical framework (viii). Hepburn points to the "intertwined" nature of French and British nineteenth- and twentieth-century diplomatic networks, but few of the essays here (aside from Hepburn's own intriguing portrayal of Nancy Mitford as a expatriate saloniste and [End Page 215] "onlooker of international relations" [162]) in fact evoke this; rather, the volume performs its own diplomatic negotiation, largely shuttling between French and British case studies (4). Like Timothy Hampton's Fictions of Embassy (2009), which examined the early modern period, Diplomacy and the Modern Novel makes claims for the mutual imbrication of diplomatic and literary forms. As Claire Davison puts it, "Both diplomacy and novels of diplomacy are founded on a well-preserved set of internal structures, language forms, private codes, and time-honoured rituals. Just as the public, referential world of embassies and diplomats is popularly perceived as complex, enigmatic, convention-bound, and disconnected from contingency, so the diplomatic novel, in a pact with allegory, gives the impression of being desynchronized with mainstream literary modes" (36). The formal analogies are here complicated, however, by the transition from the "chummy affair" of nineteenth-century aristocratic "boudoir diplomacy" to the more public-facing bureaucratic professionalism of twentieth-century modernity (7). Thus the Paris Peace Conference, and the shift it marked in diplomatic practice, is understandably a key marker for this volume: Caroline Krzakowski's chapter on Harold Nicolson's writings about the conference argues that "the representation of the new diplomacy had aesthetic repercussions; it required a modern genre that could capture the incremental fluctuations and changes in the process of negotiation" (67). If Krzakowski's claims for Nicolson's own generic innovation occasionally feel somewhat overblown, she is astute in linking new modes of anecdotal observation to the depiction of the temporalities of the new diplomacy. Indeed, one could argue further that diplomacy helps structure modernist narration. As Hepburn explains, "Novels create effects of acceleration, deceleration, deferral, and digression as manipulations of temporality. Such effects are diplomatic as well. The diplomat procrastinates; he appears to disclose information when, in fact, he does not. If he does not always lie, he may commit acts of...

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