Poétique de la nature: romantisme et négativité, de Jean-Jacques Rousseau à Marcel Proust. Par Jeffrey Burkholder

This is an ambitious study of thinking and writing about Nature (the capitalization is authorial) in French literature from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Marcel Proust, via Étienne Pivert de Senancour, Honoré de Balzac, Jules Michelet, Charles Baudelaire, and others. Jeffrey Burkholder defines his corpus as belonging to the long nineteenth century and as being emblematic of what he calls ‘un romantisme large’ (p. 12), inspired in part by Roland Barthes. He begins with the famous comment by Raymond Williams that Nature is the most complex of concepts (p. 7, with reference to Williams, Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays (London: Verso, 2005), pp. 67–68). Amidst such complexity, Burkholder’s particular approach is to present Nature for these writers as characterized by both a ‘négativité conceptuelle’ and ‘une positivité descriptive’ (p. 39). On the one hand, Nature is a ‘terme négatif’ (p. 12) which is always presented and defined as part of an oppositional pair and as the negative of that to which it is opposed — its opposite being society, most often. From this perspective, Nature is a negative idea that points to something missing, lost, absent, ruined, impossible, or even non-existent and purely speculative. On the other hand, Nature is positive for these writers in that it inspires description and literary style — what Burkholder heralds as nothing less than ‘un nouvel art descriptif’ (p. 11). In this respect, the focus on ‘négativité’ in the subtitle is somewhat misleading, and indeed the author clarifies that ‘la négativité de la Nature ne saurait être totale’ (p. 60). Investigating this bipolarity, the volume is divided into three parts. The first is devoted to Rousseau, drawing on a range of his works (essays, novels, autobiographical writings) and involving an examination of related concepts, in particular art, freedom, and education. The second considers Romantic writers including Senancour, Balzac, and Michelet as heirs of Rousseau in their approach to writing about Nature, though often in strikingly ambivalent and even anti-Rousseauean ways. The third part rather loses sight of Rousseau as the baseline comparator, turning instead to a contrast between the attitudes of John Ruskin and Proust towards writing about Nature. In a dizzying shift of scope, Burkholder suggests that ‘Proust représente une continuation esthétique de Rousseau, où “l’Art” et la “Littérature” prennent la place de la “Nature”’ (p. 495; original emphasis). A short conclusion suggests the possibility of extending ‘le “romantisme large” […] de Rousseau à Barthes’ (p. 505) and considers the book’s topic in light of the Anthropocene. One might wish for the corpus to be more diverse, especially given early comments about Nature as being often gendered as female (see p. 10), though also to be more restricted, given the vastness of the works, authors, and time period involved. Above all, the argument could have made space for more examples from the primary texts to support its claims and observations, given the book’s avowed focus on the description of Nature. Notwithstanding these caveats, Burkholder has written a wide-ranging and thought-provoking book on a topic of perennial importance and complexity.