298 Book Reviews

is as he thinks that logical rules can he false to reality not simply true by definition. And it is
the metaphysical assumptions which make the system realist or non-realist, not the technical
details of the logic.
However Dummet's enterprise, though perhaps it does not fulfill its main aim of giving an
indirect way of deciding between realism and anti-realism provides an interesting new ap-
proach to a number of logical questions. Unfortunately it is not likely to he accessible except to
the comparatively few experts whose interest in the field of logic is as wide-ranging as
Dummets.

Richard L. Purtill
Western Washington University

French Lessons,A Memoir, Alice Kaplan (Chicago and London, Chicago UniversityPress,
1993),221 pp.,$19.95 cloth,£15.95.

During the Romantic Period, Italy appeared to other Europeans to be the source of all civili-
safion. Germaine de Stall's Corinne owed all her culture to her adopted country; for Stendhal
('Atrigo Beyle, milanese'), a search for true values in an alienated world could only be pursued
south of the Alps.
In the XXth century, France has played a similar rtle. Since the days of Oscar Wilde, innu-
merable young men---and women---have fled there, some to escape what they perceive as the
unutterable boredom or repressive nature of their native land; others to acquire the veneer they
feel is lacking at home; still others, particularly in the case of the British workin~class, to use
their newly acquired French culture as a mode of bypassing the class structure, as did David
Lodge to a certain extent and Emlyn Williams before him.
For many young women, whose identity, traditionally derived from their fathers or their
husbands, has always been fragile, 'becoming' French has also been a way of acquiring an
identity of one's own. French filling a need. Alice Kaplan's memoir fits, albeit a little uneasily,
into that pattern.
The first half of this memoir would appear in many ways to be a rather traditional and
charming account of her love affair with language itself and her search to acquire Frenehness.
Boarding school in Switzerland, Junior Year Abroad, French lover, French family that adopts
her as their American friend. Even the ersatz father she chooses in Minneapolis, her own father
having died before her eighth birthday, serves, with his wealth and superior knowledge of
painting, as a gateway to French culture. Focussed on her goal from an early age, it is small
wonder she now teaches French at a prominent American university.
This is not, however, just another tale of the formative years of a young and wealthy Ameri-
can heroine and the release she found in French. Kaplan here writes as a Jew, as the daughter
of first generation immigrants, as the daughter also of a prosecuting lawyer at the Nuremberg
trials, in whose desk, at the age of eight, she found the photographs of indescribable horror
taken by the soldiers who liberated the Nazi death camps.
It is with this background, although, obviously, one does or should not need to be Jewish to
share her reactions, that she discovers the writings--and racism----of Louis-Ferdinand C~line,
who symbolizes both everything one must love about language and everything one must hate
in ideology. It is with this background that she finds herself caught up, rather like Milton Hin-
dus before her, another American Jew whose correspondence with C~line she studies, in the---
malevolent--spell cast by French fascism and collaborationlsm. The language of civilisation,
of the life of the intellect and the politics of progress is also the language of hatred, reaction
and anti-Semitism, both in France and outside it.

History of European Ideas

Kaplan struggles within this ambiguous web, almost reproducing in her relationship to the
famous revisionist---and literary critic--, Maurice Bard6che, that which earlier linked Hindus
to C~line. She became possibly the first American professor of French to write a doctoral dis-
sertation on fascist writing in French, a specialization that stood her in good stead profession-
ally when the rest of the intellectual world belatedly discovered Paul de Man's collaborationist
writings.
We owe this memoir in part to that discovery, as students demanded an accounting from
those among their professors who had studied with or worked for this Nazi sympathiser.
Kaplan had marched to a different drummer at Yale, but she could or would not escape the re-
quired reflexion. What she then does is to weave together the various threads that compose her
life: the immigrant grandmother and her problems with language, the early death of her father,
her 'French lessons.' From there she moves to an analysis of the role France and the French
language played in her life and the reasons she had to proclaim her 'otherness'. She also re-
fleets on the role of language itself, its successes and failures, and on the stratagems we all per-
haps employ to express as adults what we had to suppress as children.
This is an interesting book, well written, except for an amazing typo (one hopes) on page
119. A certain self-deprecating quality permeates it, and a great deal of hurnour. It's also very
American, as, of course, it should be. If she were really French, there would probably be more
analysis and less narration, and that would possibly have been even more fascinating, but then,
if she were really French, the book wouldn't exist at all, would it?.

MaYrVerthuy
Concordia University, Canada

Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790-182~5, Intercepted Letters, Interrupted
Seductions, Nicola J. Watson, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 220 pp., n.p.g.H.B.
ISBN 0-19-811297-I.

Nicola J. Watson's book is an account of how the epistolary novel, common in the last
decades of the eighteenth century, gave way to novels written with an omniscient narrator
in the nineteenth, and the political significance of this fact. Watson argues that the
epistolary encodes revolutionary and subversive intentions. Associated with female
sexuality, the letter becomes a metonymy for 'the plot of the daughter's sexual rebellion
against the father and the ancien r~gime for which he stands.' (p. 26) Hence conservative
and post-revolutionary novelists, Austen and Scott amongst them, in their preoccupation
with the conversion and purgation of the great cataclysm, include letters in their works,
but put them through a process of what Watson calls 'disciplining', subjecting the private
letter (with its presumed access to the writer's heart) to a range of critical strategies that
empty it of authority.
An account of the politics of genre, then, this is also a study in intertextuality as it
follows the traces ofLa Nouvell¢ Hdloise through the sentimental novels of the 1790s to
Byron's Don Juan (1814-24). The second chapter, 'Julie among the Jacobins' contains an
intricate account of the plots of several minor radical novels and their relation to
Rousseau's master-plot. Novelists such as Eliza Fenwick and Mary Hays are displayed
reassembling pieces of Rousseau's plot, like the cards in a game of scrabble, seeking to
make them spell out a convincing revolutionary message. But, as Watson argues, these
novels are caught in an impossible bind: 'how to claim public authority for a female
narrative premised upon sensibility' (56) which ultimately leads to the 'hopelessly
beleaguered state of sentimental discourse at the end of the decade.' (58)

Volume 21, No. 2, March, 1995