Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J.M Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D.W Winnicott

by Carol Mavor
Duke University Press, UK, 2007
536 pp., illus. 32 col./183 bw. Trade, $99.95; Paper, $27.95
ISBN: 0-8223-3886-6; ISBN: 0-8223-3962-5.


Reviewed by Kathryn Adams
Australia

kathy@pacific.net.au



“To read boyishly is to covet the mother’s body as a home both lost and never lost…to desire her as only a son can – as only a body that longs for her, but will never become Mother, can.” (p.14)

In the Acknowledgments of Reading Boyishly, author Carol Mavor lovingly refers to her book as…‘this plump book’… and so it is. A plump book filled to the brim and overflowing with all the deliciousness of childhood flights and fancies, photography, art, boys, mothers, birds, nests, fairies, aviation, theatre, cinema, literature, travails, loss, breath, string, soufflé and cake among other things, all cleverly and evocatively connected to five well known ‘adolescent gentlemen’; Roland Barthes, J.M Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D.W Winnicott, whose lives, work, and artistic ideas were influenced by the maternal bonds they developed with their mothers during childhood.

All at once philosophical, historical, biographical, psychoanalytical, scholarly and ‘novelesque’, this is an absolute monster romp through the incredibly intricate tapestry of Oedipal desire, maternal attachment, and nostalgia. Mavor, a professor of art history and visual studies at the University of Manchester and mother of three boys, throws societal caution to the wind and dares to celebrate, not fear, the ties that bind mothers and sons. By exploring the work of her ‘five boys’, including Barthes’ short book and eulogy to his late mother, Camera Lucida, Barrie’s children’s novel Peter Pan and Wendy, the photography of Lartigue, “Swann’s Way” by Proust and Winnicott’s article on the mother/child relationship, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” Mavor finds that nostalgic sentiment is the common thread linking these works and illustrates the many and varied ways it has been captured and repeated in the works of a great many more artists and writers.

Mavor’s findings are supported by 215 images (32 in colour) that are as rich and eclectic as the text they accompany. Works by Joseph Cornell, Giovanni Bellini, J.M Barrie’s personal photographs of the Llewelyn Davies family, illustrations from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, pages from Marcel Prousts’ note books and a film still from Chantal Ackerman’s 1975 movie Jeanne Dielman are examples of the smorgasbord of images to be pored over. Of special interest are the black and white photographs taken by the young Jacques Henri Lartigue from the age of seven. Not only did he document snippets of early aviation feats such as Gabriel Voisin’s first public flight in France in 1904, but his photographs included here of family, racing cars, rabbits and boys in motion, are testament to the first rumblings of what it is to be ‘boyish’.

From art and literature to Freud’s Oedipal theories, Eve Kososky Sedgwick’s ‘effeminophobia’ concept and her own musings on motherhood, Mavor effortlessly shifts from one discipline to the next, linking a myriad of disparate ideas and images on the way. Some, however, may find the connections hard to swallow at times and the sheer multitude of tangents baffling to follow. Mavor confesses to writing in a similar meandering and repetitive vein to that of her much loved subject, Proust, which certainly gives this informative book its unique voice but also causes it to teeter dangerously close to tedium at times. Reader enthusiasm may not match up to that of this passionate author for the entire journey.

As Hayden White notes on the back cover of Reading Boyishly…‘This book is performed rather than merely written’…and so it is, giving this educative book its distinctive flavour. Printed on acid free paper and creatively designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan, this book is a pleasure to hold and savour. Headings and quotes float vertically down the page at the beginning of each chapter making for both tasteful design and intrigue. An asset to any library - though to what section it belongs could prove to be quite a conundrum - this informative, poignant, hedonistic and reflective book is one to devour.