On Poetry and Collaboration in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

On Poetry and Collaboration in the Nineteenth Century1 Seth Whidden Villanova University Armand haussa les épaules, et sur un ton tout différent: "Pour te consoler, veux-tu savoir la composition de notre premier numéro? Il y aura donc mon nocturne; quatre chansons de Cob-Lafleur; un dialogue de Jarry; des poèmes en prose du petit Ghéridanisol, notre pensionnaire; et puis le Fer à repasser, un vaste essai de critique générale, où se préciseront les tendances de la revue. Nous nous sommes mis à plusieurs pour pondre ce chef-d'œuvre." Olivier, qui ne savait que dire, argue gauchement: "Aucun chef-d'œuvre n'est le résultat d'une collaboration."2 So says Olivier in Les faux-monnayeurs, and he is not alone in his distaste for multiple authorship. The "myth of solitary genius,"3 as Jack Stillinger and others have discussed, has long held sway in much of literary studies, going back to "the concept of the poet as prophet and possessor of transcendent knowledge [. . . giving] the writer and the artistic intention an especially exalted status."4 Recently, however, considerations of the instability of this traditional "solitary genius" have shown how, "[b]ecause a collaborative text depicts the author in nervous crisis (breaking down, splitting in two), double writing is a symptom of the monolithic author's decline."5 In this respect, literary collaboration is an example of Bakhtinian "heteroglossia," with multiple languages existing in every word.6 "Collaborative texts, like quilted novels, make the reader vulnerable to heterogeneity and indeterminacy, and, by obscuring who wrote what, they prevent the reader from limiting the text's sense."7 In particular, gender studies have questioned the notion of the monolithic author, with good reason, and have focused on the multiplicity offered by collaborative texts.8 For many such studies, literary collaboration extends beyond the page and enters into the more social aspects of textual creation; in this model, multiple authorship reflects "the partners' search for [End Page 73] fulfillment and self-expression."9 In a description that bears similar tones, the Goncourt brothers called their own collaboration: [. . .] la confession de deux vies inséparées dans le plaisir, le labeur, la peine; de deux pensées jumelles, de deux esprits recevant du contact des hommes et des choses, des impressions si semblables, si identiques, si homogènes, que cette confession peut être considérée comme l'expansion d'un seul moi et d'un seul je.10 Early studies of multiple authorship focused less on who contributed what and more on the silent partners: those whose contributions went unnoticed. As Bette London discussed in her book Writing Double: [. . .] in the case of women, literary collaborators suffered from a double invisibility—the invisibility of collaboration and the invisibility of women's writing. Even where such collaborations were openly recognized, they tended to be represented in ways guaranteed to ensure their marginalization. To study collaboration, then, was to study the conditions of its erasure.11 While Wayne Koestenbaum's Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration is arguably the most important recent study of collaborative literature,12 it is incomplete in its consideration of multiple-author works. Texts from the Album zutique reside outside Koestenbaum's useful but somewhat limited definition, and I would like to propose a new model for considering literary collaboration, in nineteenth-century French poetry and beyond. Before I do, however, I should disclose my own biases concerning authorship. First, to avoid excessive repetition of the word "writer," I sometimes use the terms "author" and "writer" interchangeably, even though they obviously do not designate the same person, as illustrated by the example of Colette and Willy, among many others.13 As we shall see, collaboration focuses on the process of literary creation; as such, the writer should be taken to be the privileged member of any writer/author divide in this study. In addition, while there is much to be said about the numerous kinds of...