Reviewed by:

• La Galanterie, une mythologie francaise by Alain Viala
• Andrew J. Counter (bio)

In this extraordinary, ambitious book, Alain Viala traces the history— though that word suggests something rather more conventional than what he offers—of the slippery concept that is la galanterie, from the end of the Ancien Régime to (more or less) the present day. Whether conceived as a literary or artistic mode, a set of specific social practices, or a vaguer sensibility, galanterie is, as Viala’s subtitle indicates, distinctively French. At least, the French have for centuries been so persuaded that it is distinctively French that one has to take their word for it: certainly, no culture has been more insistent that it has a unique way of “doing” heterosexuality than that of France. Clearly, a good deal of the impetus behind Viala’s decision to treat the topic up to the contemporary moment (following on from the early-modern focus of La France galante, 2008) comes from the observable way the “mythology” of la galanterie has shaped the French reaction to certain key positions of Anglo-American feminism (and, more recently, the great reckoning of #MeToo), a collision of worldviews that Viala analyses with style and insight in the final chapters. At stake in the early twenty-first-century promotion of galanterie as (in Mona Ozouf’s phrase) “une particularité française” is, Viala suggests, a sort of cultural protectionism or exception culturelle that says much about French anxieties in the face of American cultural dominance. If the French resistance to “Americanization” in general has typically taken the form of denunciations of “liberalism” and the all-conquering law of the market, a specific and important strand of post-1990 French cultural production has specifically lamented, as Victoria Best and Martin Crowley observed more than a decade ago (in The New Pornographies, 2007), the extension of those “liberal” principles to the domain of sexual intimacy. For better or for worse, la galanterie has tended to offer itself, like the original exception culturelle, as the most viable model of resisting that perceived liberal encroachment in the sexual-cultural field. Yet among [End Page 486] the more problematic effects of galanterie’s hegemony in this respect are its idealization of the existing relationship between the sexes and thus pre-empting of any serious renegotiation of that relationship; and its tendency not simply to close the mainstream French mind to sexual-ethical thinking from the US, but to collapse even the most obviously countercultural and anticapitalistic strands of (say) queer or trans theory into just so many avatars of the same old American liberal capitalist individualist hostile cultural takeover bid. In a very real sense, then, and despite Viala’s humble acknowledgement, by way of captatio, that his is a “petit sujet” (9), galanterie matters. Viala’s book, which eschews an indulgent as assiduously as a judgemental attitude to its subject, offers instead a vital, sense-making, archaeological account of this powerful mythologie française.

Viala’s deft approach to this archaeology proceeds by close, evocative readings of specific works and objects whose sympathetic resonances reveal them to be exemplary of any number of contexts, traditions and genres—which is to say that Viala pulls off the feat of telling a broad, longue durée story, and telling it plausibly, through a sort of pointillist method. Some of the “dots” he joins up might be named Watteau, Nerval, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Alain-Fournier, Aragon, Sollers, Kristeva; the combined image is more than all of these. Beneath each reading, and woven into the book’s synthetic narrative, one senses a truly vast erudition and an extensive primary corpus comprising more than a thousand sources. (To appreciate just how extensive, however, and a fortiori to follow up any of Viala’s richly promising leads, one must consult the substantial part of the scholarly apparatus that is presented in the form of online-only dossiers, a cost-cutting wheeze that one hopes will not catch on any more than it already has.) In an illuminating discussion of his principles of selection and interpretative methodology, Viala...

审核人：

• La Galanterie， Alain Viala的《法国神话》
• 安德鲁·J·柜台（生物）

在这本非凡的，雄心勃勃的书中，阿兰·维亚拉（Alain Viala）追溯了从AncienRégime末期（或多或少）到现在（或多或少）的溜溜概念，即la galanterie的历史，尽管这个词比他提供的东西更传统。日。无论看作是一种文学或艺术模式，一组特定的社会实践，或更模糊的感觉，galanterie正如Viala的副标题所指示的，它具有鲜明的法文含义。至少，几个世纪以来，法国人一直被这样说服，以至于它是独特的法国人，必须信守诺言：当然，没有哪个文化比法国更坚信它拥有一种独特的“做爱”异性恋方式。显然，Viala决定一直处理这一话题直至现代时刻的大量推动力（紧接着，La France galante的早期现代关注，2008年）来自la galanterie的“神话”的可观察方式。法国人对英美女权主义的某些关键立场（以及最近对#MeToo的重新审视）的反应受到法国的影响，这是世界观的碰撞，Viala在最后几章中用风格和洞察力对其进行了分析。维亚拉（Viala）建议，在二十世纪初的百货商店促销中（按蒙娜·奥祖夫的话），“特殊的法国菜”是一种文化保护主义或例外文化。面对美国文化的主导地位，这足以说明法国人的焦虑情绪。如果法国人通常对“美国化”的抵制通常采取谴责“自由主义”和征服市场的法律的形式，那么1990年代后法国文化生产中的一条特定而重要的环节就特别感叹，如维多利亚·贝斯特（Victoria Best）。马丁·克劳利（Martin Crowley）十多年前观察到（在《新色情文学》（The New Pornographies），2007年）中，这些“自由”原则扩展到了性亲密领域。不管是好是坏，la galanterie倾向于提供自己，就像最初的例外culturelle一样，是抵抗性文化领域那种被认为是自由主义侵害的最可行的模式。然而之中[完486页]在这个方面，“霸权”霸权带来的更多问题是它理想化了两性之间的现有关系，从而避免了对该关系的任何严重的重新谈判；其趋势不仅是使主流法国思想家不接受美国的性道德思想，而且甚至使（例如）酷儿或跨性别理论中最明显的反文化和反资本主义阶层陷入同样的​​美国旧自由主义者的众多化身中。资本主义个人主义敌对文化收购要约。因此，从真实的意义上讲，尽管维亚拉谦虚地承认，他是个“小苏捷”（9），但还是被俘虏了很重要。Viala的书刻苦地回避对其主题的判断态度，而对这种强大的神话般的法国小说提供了至关重要的，有意义的，考古学的解释。

Viala对这种考古学的敏锐态度是通过对特定作品和对象的近距离，令人回味的阅读来进行的，这些作品和对象的同声共鸣表明它们是各种背景，传统和流派的典范-也就是说，Viala发挥了讲述广泛，通过一种点画法来讲故事的长篇故事，并合理地讲出来。他加入的一些“点”可能是瓦托，内瓦尔，波德莱尔，韦尔莱恩，阿兰·富尼耶，阿拉贡，索勒斯，克里斯蒂娃。合并后的图像远不止这些。在每次阅读之下，并融入到本书的综合叙述中，人们感觉到了一种真正的博学和一个包括上千种来源的广泛的初级语料库。（为了理解是多么广泛，然而，更不用说 要跟上Viala的任何有前途的潜在客户，必须咨询仅以在线档案形式呈现的学术工具的实质内容，这是一种削减成本的狂热，人们希望不再像以前那样流行。）在对他的选择原则和解释方法学进行的富有启发性的讨论中，Viala ...