The Sunday of Fiction

Peter Schulman is an assistant professor of French at Old Dominion University. He is the co-author of Le Dernier livre du siecle with Mischa Zabotin, a series of interviews on the notion of fin de siecle with over seventy prominent French personalities. He has written seventeen articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature and is currently co-editing a book of essays titled Rhine Crossings: France and Germany in Love and War as well as The Marketing of Eros: Performance, Sexuality, and Consumer Culture.

Schulman s subtly humorous book on the modern French eccentric is primarily concerned with twentieth-century representations of such fi gures in novels and fi lms and their relationships to others, space, and time. While previous eccentrics were often well-to-do and outlandish in their rebellion against the status quo, Schulman notes that a seemingly paradoxical ordinariness defi nes eccentric characters in major works of the twentieth century. Beginning with a table naming French fi ctional eccentrics through the ages, the work then indicates the diffi culty of both defi ning the term and fi nding eccentrics through modern databases, provides an overview of some early eccentrics and an explanation of the key prototypes of eccentrics during the nineteenth century, and engages in close readings of some contemporary works in order to tease out the modern typology of eccentricity.Schulman s comparison of nineteenth-century eccentric literary characters with their modern counterparts is especially insightful, revealing social and literary trends that extend beyond the subject of this work. In his opening chapter, he notes that nineteenth-century eccentric characters typically were excessive in their behaviors and interests as they sought to express their free will. These included the Dumasian romantic adventure hero, Huysmans s decadent idler, Verne s technological traveler, and fi n de siecle farcical performers. These types were immediately recognizable as ex-centric through their dress, obsessions, and actions.Schulman proposes that in contrast, twentieth-century eccentrics at fi rst may appear ordinary, much like Magritte s bowler-hatted fi gure. Rather than overtly rebelling against social conventions, modern eccentrics instead actively create a new reality slightly different from the norm through subtle expressions of free will.The types that he discusses (the bureaucrat, the executive, the trickster, the lover, and the adventurer) have produced a slight swerve