Aloysius Bertrand’s ‘Gaspard de la nuit’: Beyond the Prose Poem. By Valentina Gosetti.

Abstract

This elegant and beautifully written monograph seeks to offer new insights into Gaspard de la nuit, by returning to the literary and cultural context in which it was written, and approaching it on its own terms. Valentina Gosetti states in her Introduction that ‘the task of literary scholarship can sometimes be that of freeing an author from his/her canonical critical consideration by recovering the original context of the author’s creation. In doing so we may open up new interpretative possibilities’ (p. 1). The canonical critical consideration to which Aloysius Bertrand has been subjected has not served him or his works well, and Gosetti’s painstaking research enables us to glimpse quite how much we have been missing. Rather than seeing Gaspard de la nuit in terms of its importance to the birth and development of the prose poem — which has meant, of course, that Bertrand has been doomed to be considered almost exclusively in terms of his significance to Baudelaire — Gosetti demands that we think about Bertrand’s importance to regional French literature, that we explore the importance of the fantastic to his work, and that we re-evaluate the intertextual context in which Bertrand himself was operating. Gosetti turns first of all to considerations of Bertrand as a regional poet in her efforts to gain a clearer understanding of the aesthetics underpinning his work. Chapter 1, ‘Louis Bertrand between Dijon and Paris’, probes the different versions of Romanticism circulating in Paris and in the provinces, warns against the too easy dismissal of writers who were not established in the capital, and reminds us of the pivotal role that Dijon plays in the different sections of Gaspard de la nuit, where it functions almost as a character in its own right. Gosetti probes the importance of Dijon still further in Chapter 2, ‘Mysterious Geographies’, where she argues that the first preface of the poem indicates a ‘mysterious récit de voyage’ (p. 34). This imaginative approach to interpreting the poem yields a wealth of original and persuasive insights about the ways in which his love for Dijon permeates Bertrand’s verse. A further fascinating and well-explored dimension is a study of Bertrand’s understanding of Flemishness. This is a chapter that highlights in particular the rewards of Gosetti’s sensitive and meticulous close reading. A chapter on the importance of the fantastic to Bertrand follows: a lucid exposition of the importance of the terms ‘fantastique’, ‘fantasque’, and ‘fantaisie’ in nineteenth-century France enables Gosetti to follow a number of intertextual paths that have been insufficiently explored to date, and this leads neatly into a rich and persuasive analysis of ‘Intertextuality and Cultural Exchange’ in the following chapter. The last chapter, on the hermeneutics of form, offers further insights into the lack of critical attention that has dogged Bertrand from the start, since he was the victim of early reviewers who failed to recognize his innovative approach. A succinct Conclusion closes with the observation that ‘Gaspard de la Nuit is a deeply fascinating work that is surely deserving of a much wider readership’ (p.147). Gosetti’s book richly deserves to achieve its aim of encouraging readers to pick up Bertrand, but it also offers an enormously rewarding read for anyone interested more generally in prose poetry, provincial literature, and the role of the fantastic in nineteenth-century France.