REVIEWS — FS, LIV-3, 2OOO 407 feminist debate. A persistent impression (as Rodgers acknowledges on page 276) is diat the encyclopaedic quality of Beauvoir's text has led to it being constandy cited but not necessarily thoroughly read and understood. This is demonstrated in the interview with Chawaf who, despite admitting to not having read Le Deuxieme Sexe, pronounces vehemently on Beauvoir's text and life. Aldiough by 1970, Beauvoir was already 'un monument' (in Delphy's words) for feminists wanting to forge their own creative and theoretical paths, die success of Le Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fs/article/LIV/3/407/512493 by guest on 29 September 2021 Deuxieme Sexe has resided both in its popular impact and in the way in which it was already part of die established theoretical landscape for the women interviewed here. For even if few interviewees acknowledge Beauvoir as a direct influence on their own work, they all recognize the historical importance of Le Deuxieme Sexe. One is thus inclined to agree with Le Doeuff diat 'travailler avec la deception' has been more intellectually productive for French feminism than approaching Le Deuxieme Sexe as 'la Bible du feminisme moderne'. UNIVERSITY OF SALFORD URSULA TIDD La Femme cent sexes ou Us genres communicants: Deharme, Mansour, Prassinos. By MARIE-CLAIRE BARNET. Bern, Peter Lang, 1998. 323 pp. Luce Irigaray meets Max Ernst and Andre Breton in the tide pun of Marie-Claire Barnet's examination of the work of three Surrealist ecrivmnes (sic), indicating not only die theme of plurality in sexual identity but also that the texts are read through a prism of psychoanalytically based feminism. Barnet's aim is to rescue women Surrealist writers from the reduction and marginalization to which contemporary criticism has helped to consign them. She dius takes a somewhat different approach to Xaviere Gauthier's ground-breaking but, in her view, reductive Surrealisme et sexualiti (1971). Barnet's study of the writing of Lise Deharme, Joyce Mansour and Gisele Prassinos is a feminist project through and through, re-placing die writers' work at die very heart of Surrealism and revealing them to be much more than muses, sexual objects and marginal authors. The three women writers of her study were active, critical readers of male Surrealists, commenting on dieir work prior to publication, to die extent that Barnet is led to wonder exacdy who influenced whom. Interesting echoes are identified between the work of die three women writers and that of artists Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning and Remedios Varo. Following an introductory section which contextualizes die corpus, chapters are structured around some of the most well-known themes of Surrealism (hysteria, beauty, animal imagery, /'amourfou), in order to demonstrate the originality of their treatment in the work of Deharme, Mansour and Prassinos. Multiplicity, ambiguity and fluidity in matters of gender and sexuality are identified to be common characteristics of diis diverse body of writing. Particularly interesting for gender studies are Mansour's bisexual/*, Deharme's ironic displacements and Prassinos's fantastic fauna, as well as Barnet's own analyses of die ecrivaines' various reworkings of the Freudian Oedipus complex. Packed full of fascinating examples and insightful analyses, Barnet's well-referenced approach draws out the richness and complexity of the writing. A welcome feature is her insistence on the plurality and nuances of bodi Surrealism and feminism. The volume is 408 REVIEWS — FS, Lrv-3, 2000 well presented and pleasandy free of typographical errors. A valuable contribu- tion to feminist literary criticism as well as scholarship in Surrealism, this is an extremely useful and accessible resource for bodi specialists and students of French literature, feminism, gender and sexuality. _ _ & ' GILL RYE UNIVERSITY OF SURREY, ROEHAMPTON Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fs/article/LIV/3/407/512493 by guest on 29 September 2021 Reading Between the Lines: Claude Simon and the Visual Arts. By JEAN DUFFY. Liverpool University Press, 1998. 400 pp. The heteroclite nature of the materials used by Simon in 'constructing' and 'assembling' his texts as formal 'ensembles' has long been acknowledged, but no comprehensive survey of the role of visual art in his writing had been attempted before Jean Duffy published this thorough and thought-provoking study. Around 350 individual works by fifty artists are cited, from Alechinsky to Zurburan, and over 200 of the works referred to are by just half-a-dozen key painters: Mir6, Cezanne, Poussin, Francis Bacon, Dubuffet and Paul Klee. Individual paintings by artists as varied as Aldorfer and Piero della Francesca, Paul Delvaux, Georges de la Tour and Picasso are, however, also an integral part of the rich pictural intertext brought into play. Returning to the lively debates at Cerisy-la-Salle in the 1970s, Duffy 'salvages' the notion of the 'textual generator', in 'an attempt to rehabilitate the concept by extending its range to include non- linguistic phenomena which, at the moment of writing, interact with then phonetic, morphological and connotative dimensions of language' (p.66). Femmes (1966) is a key work in this connection and Duffy's account of the interplay between Mir6's paintings and Simon's texts goes far beyond die ostensible 'stimuli' for the writing (the reproductions themselves) to include all manner of associations with both other works by the Catalan painter and Spanish motifs in Simon's ceuvrt in general. Duffy also establishes a series of correspondences between specific passages in Triptyque and paintings by Francis Bacon, whose Paris retrospective in 1971 deeply affected the writer. Further chapters deal with the influence of Cubism, the concept of 'bricolage', and the role of the 'objet trouve' in Simon's compositional technique. Fascinating parallels are established between the texts and the collages and wooden constructions of two moderns much admired by Simon, Rauchenberg and Nevelson, and in 'an overdue comparative study of shared aesthetic principles' (p.246), Duffy shows how their compositional methods coincide with the novelist's in a love of formal symmetry, as well as in the treatment of gesture, facial expression and the recurring theme of man's place in nature and history. In a chapter on Baroque art that includes an analysis of the special importance, for Simon, of Poussin's Landscape with Orion, Duffy makes the interesting suggestion that the figure of the blind Orion allegorizes the writer's situation as he envisages the (virtual) world of visual memories produced by writing: 'the writer advancing blindly [. ..] engaged in a kind of "voyage immobile"'. In the end, references to painting enrich the texts by linguistic implication only: nothing is really 'seen' at all, except in the rare cases, such as Femmes, where text and images are juxtaposed. The dominant feature of Simon's aesthetics, for Duffy, is a love of 'internal correspondences' and 'reflexivity'. And if there is an unresolved tension in his.