La conscience de soi de la poésie: colloques de la Fondation Hugot du Collège de France (1993–2004) ed. by Yves Bonnefoy

Abstract

BONNEFOY, YVES, éd. La conscience de soi de la poésie: colloques de la Fondation Hugot du Collège de France (1993–2004). Paris: Seuil, 2008. ISBN 978-2-02-097138-6. Pp. 416. 15 a. Spanning two decades (1987–2006) of annual meetings of the Fondation Hugot and including essays by over twenty participants, this volume offers a perspective on poetry that is as eclectic as it is fascinating and wide-ranging. As does the anthology’s title, many of the essays point to a question dear to Bonnefoy: poetry’s self-consciousness, self-reflexivity, or what he called, in 2001, “l’autonomie du poétique” (372), to which “la critique qui se veut ou se prétend scientifique” can only substitute “des spectres plus ou moins pâles” (11). The reader should not expect a clear presentation and sustained examination of some “concept” of poetry’s self-consciousness. Rather, to take in the entirety of this volume is like stumbling onto the vestiges of a learned society seemingly from an era much further removed than its actual dates of existence. Vestiges since as of 2002 the participants seemed to have reached the end inevitably contained within Bonnefoy’s proposed and refined conditions for the yearly meetings, namely, that the way or “form of knowing” specific to poetry “only can be found upstream from any conceptual reading and even further from any ideological commitment ” (373). Confronted with this demanding hypothesis, the twenty or so essays that make up the anthology circle around the “autonomy of the poetic”— with some coming closer than others—from every which angle, multiple historical periods, and from a mix of long established critics (Jean Starobinski, Karlheinz Stierle, Maurice Olender, Bertrand Marchal, and Jacqueline Risset, to name but a few), and a younger generation (such as Jérôme Thélot, Patrick Née, and François Trémolières). In their approach to the question of poetry’s self-consciousness, many of the essays range from readings of the reception of Homer during Roman Antiquity (U. Todini) to the interrelationship of writing and painting in the works of Petrarch (P. Oster) and Montaigne (K. Stierle). As is befitting of Bonnefoy’s general hypothesis , many other essays offer readings of non-Francophone poets such as Leopardi (C. Ossola), Keats (J.E. Jackson and M. Edwards), Yeats (J. Thélot), and Rilke (M. Finck). A number of other essays focus on the poetry of Baudelaire (J. Starobinski), Nerval (P. Labarthe), Mallarmé and Valéry (B. Marchal), while still others read the prose of Balzac (P. Née) or Proust (J. Risset). A few essays, the best to my mind, directly address Bonnefoy’s anxious question as to the “autonomy of the poetic.” Among others, by way of a careful reading of Giambattista Vico, Maurice Olender turns Bonnefoy’s view around to analyze poetry’s previous entwinement with religion, politics, and law: “au point souvent de ne plus former qu’une entité aux aspects indistincts” (135). In an essay ranging from the Chanson de Roland to Flaubert, Rimbaud, and Proust, Michel Zink offers a dazzling demonstration as to THE FRENCH REVIEW, Vol. 85, No. 2, December 2011 Printed in U.S.A. REVIEWS Literary History and Criticism edited by Marion Geiger 348 how, through the interrelationship between poetry past and present, the former helps the latter “à avoir conscience d’elle-même, comme l’aide à avoir conscience d’elle-même tout ce qui la brise avec dévotion” (169). “Brisons-la,” as Francis Ponge wrote, not without devotion, in his prose poem “Le pain.” As do Bonnefoy’s concluding “Paroles d’Introduction,” La conscience de soi testifies to poetry’s fractious autonomy. Wellesley College (MA) James Petterson BRISSETTE, PASCAL, et ANTHONY GLINOER, éd., Bohème sans frontière. Rennes: PU de Rennes, 2010. ISBN 978-2-7535-1071-5. Pp. 357. 18 a. While Henry Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème (1851) may figure as a relatively minor work of literature, its cultural impact has been enormous. In large measure it is due to this work of fiction that the idea of “the Bohemian” impacted the European and eventually international imagination. This...