Introduction: New Anglo-American Approaches to French Prose Poetry

Abstract

Introduction: New Anglo-American Approaches to French Prose Poetry Stamos Metzidakis AS YVES VADÉ'S RECENT BOOK DEMONSTRATES,1 the prose poem does indeed exist, even if within its purview the literary world has placed a myriad of superficially dissimilar texts, which Vadé calls its various "territories." The main problem, however, is that researchers most concerned with this hybrid genre are all too often unaware of the large amount of work already done throughout the world on this peculiar scriptural form, and do not always take advantage of some of the critical territory already covered . The extensive bibliography by Anne Craver included herein tries to remedy this situation by providing both enthusiasts and specialists of the prose poem with a long overdue tool with which to achieve a fuller and richer appreciation of its specificity. It essentially takes up the relevant bibliography where Suzanne Bernard's earlier, indispensable one leaves off.2 One of the aims of this special issue, men, is to present new approaches to French prose poetry by certain Anglo-American critics who have assimilated much of the important earlier scholarship, all the while exploring essentially new territory. David Scott, for example, probes not only the fascinating ways French prose poems deconstruct conventional poetic practice, but also examines how their heterogeneous nature is at one and the same time a symptom , as well as historical cause, of a whole series of literary crises, from the eighteenth century on. Like Scott here (and Barbara Johnson elsewhere, in a whole series of influential essays quoted amply by many of the contributors to this issue), I, too, agree that prose poems deconstruct the supposed stability of poetry in particular, and literature in general. Yet, I believe that they also actually deconstruct the meta-linguistic notion of "literariness" itself. For, upon closer inspection, readers of this genre should note that when their attention is drawn to the language of prose poetry, thanks to Jakobson's infamous "poetic function," there is nothing really "there" except more of a "same" language that still has not been properly defined.3 In any case, Rosemary Lloyd extends this line of thinking about crises by showing that Mallarmé 's practice of this writing mode creates a crisis for the reader, especially for those Homais-like readers who seek in texts mere literary mirrors of the social hierarchies, codes and limits constitutive of their own confined existences. Edward Kaplan explores the manner by which BaudeVol . XXXIX, No. 1 3 L'Esprit Créateur laire's prose poetry functions as an appropriate, ethically ironie vehicle for our post-Holocaust condition, a condition in which and for which all future critical discourse must reach beyond Absurdity, binary oppositions or simplistic dichotomies between the Ideal and the Real. Charles Minahen, on the other hand, compares the way certain topoi are treated in Mallarmé 's verse and prose poetry in order to prove that the representational crisis so frequently initiated by the latter can also lead to a kind of discreet, and ultimately subversive , resolution of certain inarticulated, unsatisfied erotic desires on the part of a writer who evidently felt more restricted in/by verse. Dianne Sears follows with a comparative reading of her own, this time juxtaposing two stylistically different pieces in Francis Ponge 's collection, Proêmes. Sears suggests that by the twentieth century the prose poet seems more concerned with "rhematics" than "thematics," with rhetorical objects more than with abstract ideas. For his part, Clive Scott undertakes the first serious examination of the rhythmicity of prose poems by Char, Fargue and others, something that has barely received the kind of sustained attention he gives it here, but that it nonetheless deserves. Proving how variable and, therefore, semantically fecund such readings can be, he points unmistakenly towards a whole new territory for analysis by future students of this complex genre. Finally, in my essay, I suggest yet another path to follow in our future use and understanding of this type of text. I show how painterly techniques, general aesthetic preoccupations and visual-poetic aims in Magritte's work are often semiotically analogous to those found in prose poetry, specifically, in Baudelaire's Spleen de Paris. Washington University, St. Louis...