Le Vers libre (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Le Vers libre Andrew Pigott (bio) Michel Murat. Le Vers libre. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008. Much like Michel Murat’s earlier work, Le Coup de dés de Mallarmé: un recommencement de la poésie, Le Vers libre responds to a perceived gap in the scholarship. While library stacks burgeon with histories of and technical treatises on traditional French verse, critics (however intrepid) and historians (however longsuffering) have fairly neglected this literary form—which, for all its variability, characterizes “la poésie française dans sa dernière grande période” (1). With the erudition and sensitivity that we have come to expect, Murat sets out to redress the imbalance. Murat so obviously masters his subject that our admiration may goad us into hyperbole; enthused by his combination of acumen, originality and good sense, we may be tempted to proclaim Le Vers libre the first study of its kind. Yet seminal though it doubtless will prove to be, Le Vers libre did not gestate in a void: Murat has his predecessors. In his introduction, he opens (and closes . . .) a critical dialogue with three of them, contrasting his methodology to their own. The first, Jacques Roubaud’s classic La Vieillesse d’Alexandre, condemns free verse as a mere ideological posture—one which negates the alexandrin but fails to offer a cogent alternative, and so reaffirms the very tradition it would transgress. In Murat’s view, Roubaud (an Oulipo contributor and virtuoso of mathematical versification) comes down a bit hard on the last great period of French verse. But how could Roubaud judge the demoded avant-garde with impartiality, mired as he is in an intergenerational polemic? “Une telle attitude,” concludes Murat, “me semble surdéterminée par les querelles des avant-gardes. Dans ce cas au moins, c’est un oulipien qui règle ses comptes avec le surréalisme” (17). Murat’s second interlocutor betrays no such bias. Laurent Jenny’s brilliant study, La Fin de l’intériorité, traces through the rise and fall of modernism the unfolding of a single idea: that of the inner psyche, struggling ever outward to expression. Jenny demonstrates how during this period, the idea of interiority spurred—and simultaneously thwarted—formal innovation, therein resembling the fecund and ravenous wolf who devours her own pups. (Thus did symbolism bequeath to the likes of Apollinaire and Joyce a bevy of unexploited techniques, which they at last could put to genial use.) Though Jenny stipulates between the concept and its implementation a crucial discrepancy, he nonetheless subsumes the history of free verse into a philosophical metanarrative; in so doing, he reduces aesthetic form to an epiphenomenon. Such, in any case, is Murat’s (rather [End Page 1004] unfair) allegation: “[Jenny] conçoit ainsi l’histoire des formes non pas en elles-mêmes,” he complains, “c’est-à-dire comme une construction de leurs propriétés constitutives indépendamment de leur usage, mais en fonction de leur relation à une ‘idée de la littérature’ qui leur donne sens” (18). Anna Boschetti, on the other hand, fully assumes the reductionism imputed to La Fin de l’intériorité. Her important study, La Poésie partout, applies Bourdieu’s sociological hermeneutics to Apollinaire; that is to say, she situates free verse within its concomitant champ littéraire, allowing for nary a transcendent deviation. While Murat acknowledges the pertinence of “la perspective sociologique,” he rejects its totalizing rigidity: “Même lorsqu’on envisage l’art à partir de son champ sociologique, il est nécessaire à un certain seuil de laisser ce point de vue en suspens pour penser l’art à partir de ses ‘moyens’” (27). This methodological “debate” may strike the reader as bizarre. Murat’s interlocutors, after all, have in common only their originality and intelligence; yet he transitions blithely between them, implicitly conflating all three. Despite their obvious differences, in fact, he attributes to Roubaud, Jenny and Boschetti the same flaw: none of them reads free verse for itself alone; each in his or her own way degrades it to a symptom, a secondary manifestation of some more basic structure. Murat, by contrast, will analyze free verse as a self-contained literary form, replete with...