Le sentiment du temps dans la litterature francaise (XIIe s.--fin du XVIe s.).

Miha Pintaric. Le sentiment du temps dans la litterature francaise (XIIe s.--fin du XVIe s.).

Presses universitaires de la faculte des lettres de Toulon Babeliana 4. Paris: Honore Champion Editeur, 2002. 342 pp. index. bibl. [euro] 53. ISBN: 2-7453-0673-1.

Many theoretical studies have been devoted to the relation between the concept of time and the intellectual or cultural productions of a period. Books by Eliade, Fraser, Meyerhoff, Poulet, Ricoeur, and many others have laid the groundwork for specialized analyses of the "time element" in Western culture. French literature is no exception, and about in the 1930s Richard Glasser already ventured to write an immensely ambitious synthesis, translated as Time in French Literature and Thought (1972). The study under review is just as Gargantuan in its scope as it claims to survey five centuries of French literature and examine how various writers, from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, conceived temporality and produced works of art which somehow translate both their own vision and the dominant mental structures of their Zeitgeist.

In a long introduction, subtitled "Philosophers' Time," Professor Pintaric invites us to a vast survey of various concepts of time in Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, and others. Not unexpectedly, we are reminded of the Greek cyclical conception (with its metaphysics of space) which is traditionally opposed to the Judeo-Christian linear belief (based on the history of salvation). Other analytic notions, like Fraser's "time felt" versus "time understood" are brought to bear on the evolution of self-consciousness. The general theory is that, in the Middle Ages, people feel that they live sub specie temporis; although they are submitted to change, they believe in an unchanging essence of the self. The idea that the self may case to be what it is and become something "other" belongs to a new historical paradigm, which is usually associated with the Renaissance Zeitgeist. Yet, early modernity is characterized by a dialectic movement between "old" and "new" concepts of temporality and selfhood.

The first seven chapters are devoted to some medieval texts, each being cursorily treated in a few pages. Thus we move from "heroic time" in the Chanson de Roland to "erotic time" in troubadour poetry to "Arthurian time" in Chretien de Troyes's first romances (Erec et Enide, Chevalier au Lion, and Perceval) to more problematic time in Queste del Saint Graal and La Mort le roi Artu. The Romance of the Rose is interpreted as the confluence of two major trends: Christianized Platonism (which is supposed to come to an end) and the beginning of "contingent subjectivism" which is even more noticeable in the works of "realist" poets such as Rutebeuf and Francois Villon. For the Renaissance reader, the last four chapters may present a somewhat greater appeal as they deal with well-known sixteenth-century French writers such as Rabelais, Du Bellay, Ronsard, and Montaigne. Unfortunately, there are no close readings of texts. We learn, for instance, that in Gargantua's education, the humanist preceptor will not waste "a single hour" of the day; that Du Bellay and Ronsard are keen on exploiting the myth of poetic glory after death; that Montaigne is fascinated by the "instant" and jokes about envying the fate of Pyrrho's pig.

Up until the fifteenth century, we read, the concept of time was relatively coherent--with a few exceptions, including Jean de Meung's part of the Roman de la Rose. The increasing fragmentation of time, which occurs in the sixteenth century, is thought to be the result of secularizing tendencies brought about by new factors, including new techniques of measurement (clocks). The concept of "spiritual progress" yields to early modern concerns for the concrete realities of the external world. It may be so, but this teaches us little about the specificity of the great literary texts under study. In particular, this reader would have liked to know more about the use or misuse of grammatical tenses in the way those great writers expressed their concept of temporality. Harald Weinrich's Tempus. Besprochene und erzahlte Welt (Stuttgart, 1971), which was translated into French as Le Temps: le recit et le commentaire (Paris, 1973), could have been an effective theoretical point of departure to foster the close readings this book seldom offers.

FRANCOIS RIGOLOT

Princeton University