Reverie and reverence.

READING BOYISHLY: ROLAND BARTHES, J.M. BARRIE, JACQUES HENRI LARTIGUE, MARCEL PROUST, AND D.W. WINNICOTT

BY CAROL MAVOR

DURHAM, NC: DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2008

536 PP./$27.95 (SB)

Both critical novel and novelesque criticism, Carol Mavor creates a self-described monster of fiction, memoir, and criticism in Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J.M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D.W. Winnicott. Nostalgia is intertwined with scholarship in this text as Mavor's work is a (re)search for this emotion in literature, art, and especially photography. With hedonistic pleasure, she offers exegetical indulgences and connections she has made in a lifetime poring over texts, films, photographs, and other aspects of literary and visual culture.

The titular "boyish" is narrowly conceptualized and is limited to male identifications with and attachments to mothers. Masculine identities and fathers are excluded from this book's discussion. She acknowledges through her comparative readings of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and D.W. Winnicott that the normative primary relationship is between child and mother and that children must negotiate this relationship in order to attain their own sense of self. Mavor wants to "repair" theorizations that boys must utterly separate from their mothers in order to be healthy. Her "feminized" male subjects maintain and return to this connection throughout their lives. Mavor's project is to celebrate connections between mothers and sons, especially given societal pressures for young males not to become "mamma's boys." She offers examples of renowned artists and intellectuals whose ideas were shaped by these maternal bonds. For instance, alongside analyses of Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse (1979) and Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1927), Mavor writes much about the adult Barthes practically living with his mother and the grown Proust craving for maternal goodnight kisses. Mavor searches for literary moments she claims are longings for mother and desires to return home. Key examples of such boyish yearnings include Barthes's search for his dead mother's essence in the photographs described in 1980's Camera Lucida; the conflicted relationship Barrie writes between Peter Pan and Wendy, in which the latter is both mother and love interest; Proust's memories of home and mother in Swann's Way, triggered by madeline cake soaked in tea.

Mavor, a professor of art history and visual studies at the University of Manchester, lends a few chapters to the United States culture wars (though she doesn't state this as an agenda point) by offering a contrast to texts, such as the well-known War Against Boys (2000) by Christina Hoff Summers, that pathologize effeminizing tendencies in Western societies. Mavor uses Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's "effeminophobia" concept of "our culture's pervasive fear of effeminate boys" as a point that positions her readings of Reading Boyishly's artists and authors (72). "Boyish," however, seems to imply something broader--a condition belonging to all boys--but normative male development is not her subject. Mavor states that her aim is also to "repair" critical effeminophobia, lamenting, "While we often encourage our girls to be tough, to play the man's game, we rarely encourage our boys, especially older adolescent boys, to be feminine, maternal, soft, caring" (72). Unfortunately, she offers no lines to boys or men already cut, as she writes, from "mother's apron strings."

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Mavor effortlessly and purposefully crosses disciplines in Reading Boyishly, writing about photography, literature, early aviation, theater, psychoanalysis, cinema, art tourism, sculpture, and many other topics in one book. She embraces the notion from visual culture studies that everything is in play and engages in a leveling enterprise in which undisputedly serious texts by Proust and Barthes are matched with popular stories for children, photographs made by a child, and discussions of fairies. She uses these high/low interdisciplinary transgressions to address conflict-ridden themes that include effeminate boys; erotic longings for children; adult gazes toward naked children; grown men who dote on their mothers; and feelings of nostalgia, melancholy, and sentimentality.

Her methodologies break academic rules by dint of their sheer subjectivity. Mavor displays scholarly pleasures demonstrating that she has fully absorbed concepts and attitudes given by Barrie, Barthes, Proust, etc., not just as intellectual notions but also as experienced perceptions. She makes personal her soaking up of texts by scholars such as Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan. In sum, Mavor exposes lines of inquiry to demonstrate an emotively resonant reasoning. There is a sense that this is an honest account of the mechanisms driving her tastes; if she introduces an argument, she is sure to explain its appeal to her Informed by feminism and queer theories, the author takes this subjective position in order to split from "objective" (arguably masculine) scholarship so she can legitimize a personal engagement with the texts and artworks. She unabashedly adds to the mix tales from her own experiences as mother, professor, and tourist. Mavor's informed subjective tack addresses the affective content of her subjects--she offers a strategy for focusing on art and literature that have intense resonance. In some ways, she deals with much older and deeper questions regarding why certain cultural works have such a profound effect, and engages the otherwise ineffable through a preponderance of personal evidentiary text. Mavor finds in her partialities for Proust, Barthes, Barrie, and Winnicott the precedents and permission to include her biases and poetic free associations. Some of her connections can be quite poignant--smoking-guns-of-the-soul that all scholars discover in the research process. Fellow devotees of these authors will undoubtedly share certain responses and resonances offered by Mavor, who (as she says of Proust) can "turn a crumb into a universe."

In some moments her fractured and poetic strategy is difficult to swallow. In a particular few pages for instance, she makes lyrical connections and writes intertwining interpretations among disparate subjects spanning several centuries and cultures including Barrie's The Little White Bird (1902), portraits of children with birds by both Francisco Goya and John Brewster, Julia Kristeva's ideas about infantile pre-linguistic communication, Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince (1943), and a contemporary photographic image by Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison. These interpretations can be utterly fascinating, and they are presented with great skill and thorough documentation, though it is not always possible to penetrate the author's psyche and share the delight of her subjective responses. In or out of context, lines such as "If Proust, as Kristeva has claimed, loves 'people and places with his mouth,' by extension Lartigue's camera loves people and places as a mouth. Lartigue's shutter kisses are a manifestation of butterfly kisses," require much suspension, recall, and poetic association in order to make sense of them (373). Reading Boyishly is filled with such demanding passages.

Though Mavor acknowledges that she can be indulgent, indirect, and repetitive (like the work of some of her subjects), this preemption does not mean that her reveries do not become boring. "I strive to be a boyish reader and writer," writes Mavor (436), but left unchecked her hedonism leads to free-associative binging--the dozens of references (an attempt at Proustian repetition) to madelines and memory become exasperating. She waxes on the metaphorical powers of birds and nests such that these symbols become absurd through overdetermination (in two middle chapters nearly everything becomes ornithological). She drops in a long, confusing, fictive narrative in which she imagines herself as the ten-year-old Lartigue prognosticating his adult activities and folds in more references to swallows, madelines, and string. Perhaps the tactic most beaten to death is the Camera Lucida-style use of images and pull quote captions. Though this strategy worked well given Barthes's restraint and use for emphasis, the effect that weds image to text is severely diminished in Reading Boyishly's 215 occurrences.

Mavor exercised moderation in her earlier scholarly successes, Pleasures Taken (1995) and Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (1999); while these books are also sensual and hedonistic, they remain relatively disciplined, better edited, and on target. There are sections in Reading Boyishly that are self-contained and recall the successful formulas of these previous efforts. Her introductions to Winnicott's insights about transitional objects and to Lartigue's photographic work, which captures a privileged child's view, are utterly fascinating and do not become entangled in the associative strands that fold upon themselves to make up (muck up) the latter half of the book. Like an all-night conversation that should have ended when the participants were lucid, Reading Boyishly suffers from too many disparate connections. An obvious example (although it would stand on its own as a separate essay) is the book's long coda concerning the Proustian tempo and blue coloration of Chantal Akerman's film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce. 1080 Bruxelles (1975), that seems piled on after so many intertextual chapters.