Le poète innombrable: Cendrars, Apollinaire, Jacob par Alexander Dickow

Abstract

Reviews 217 the century. In a more anecdotal manner that makes for interesting reading, MarieFran çoise Melmoux-Montaubin retraces the animated, at times heated exchanges between Jules Verne and his editor, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, over the extent and tenor of descriptive passages to be included in Voyages extraordinaires. Readers who make their way systematically through this volume—which can be challenging at times, given the subject matter and the profusion of critical terminology—will find the last two contributions especially rewarding. In a study of Un cœur simple that is both perceptive and gracefully written, Nadia Fartas shows how “une poétique de la simplicité se confond avec la simplicité du personnage” (256) to set the stage for the famously ambiguous ending. Jacques Neefs brings the collection to a satisfying close with his engaging reading of passages from Madame Bovary, L’éducation sentimentale, and À la recherche du temps perdu; alluding to the secondary emphasis of the volume, he observes:“On mesure combien le‘descriptif’transformé en prose-vision, s’ouvre ainsi à un autre type d’expérience, que l’on pourrait dire‘cézanienne’” (286). As editor, De Georges-Métral deserves credit for providing an extensive range of end material—a comprehensive bibliography; indices of character names, authors, and works; and summaries of contributions in both French and English—that readers should find very helpful. University of Kansas John T. Booker Dickow, Alexander. Le poète innombrable: Cendrars, Apollinaire, Jacob. Paris: Hermann, 2015. ISBN 978-2-7056-8995-7. Pp. 396. The question of how legitimacy is conferred upon the lyric subject has been reformulated according to the prevailing dictates of different literary periods. Dickow traces how the lyric self emerged from near-extinction (as ordained by Mallarmé) to reassert itself grandly at the beginning of the twentieth century. The three major poets selected for this study—Blaise Cendrars, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Max Jacob— exemplify what Dickow calls la mise en scène de soi: how poetic personas enact dramatic interpretations of their relationship to the world through continually evolving roles. Dickow illustrates this through a handful of diverse approaches, although he contends that this soi is best glimpsed not in a vacuum, but in its interactions with others. In this sense, Dickow’s work is informed by the sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu, Gisèle Sapiro and others. Beginning with a look at the rhetorical fashioning of self, Dickow bolsters his claims with astute readings of Jacob’s poem“En famille,”Apollinaire’s“Le larron”and“Zone,”and Cendrars’s Le Panama ou les aventures de mes sept oncles. These poems reveal a prismatic vision of the lyric self—an“I”whose credibility is constantly questioned and in flux (66). Dickow then delves into each poet’s idiosyncratic process of composition, pointing to Modernist modes of assemblage—the mosaic, the patchwork , the collage. Moving forward, Dickow proclaims the literary review to be an exemplary space to identify this mise en scène de soi for here, one may observe the representation of a réseau, an imaginative space of textual sociability (195)—though he correctly admits that much more work is required to detail the subtle tensions of “une poétique de la revue”(260). Nonetheless, Dickow capably situates these authors’ attempts to craft a new lyric subject within the larger framework of French literary history, particularly in relation to Romanticism. He also makes valid connections to cultural events (for instance, the 1905 laïcité law and its impact on Cendrars’s Pâques; World War I’s looming shadow over all literary output during the war years). His ability to free-associate poets into surprising groups shows the depth of his critical acumen, such as when he compares Cendrars’s characteristically minimalist poetic line to those of Guillevic, Ungaretti, Creeley, and Beckett (173). To be in such wideranging company is a pleasure, though at times the essential pursuit becomes obscured through discussions that, while lengthy, do not add much (for instance, a long section on Fantômas could have certainly been condensed). Ultimately, Le poète innombrable succeeds in offering new perspectives on these iconic figures even if its ambitions sometimes mirror the Modernist techniques of...