Rhythm across Borders: Free Verse between Cosmopolitanism and Statelessness in Valery Larbaud’s Les Poésies de A.O. Barnabooth

David Elwyn Evans

doi:10.3828/mlo.v0i0.218

Abstract

This article reads the dynamic vers libre of Valery Larbaud’s Poesies d’A. O. Barnabooth (1913) as a rejection of literary and cultural nationalism, and an enthusiastic embrace of internationalism made possible by early twentieth-century developments in global transport networks, the tourism industry and the broadening of experiential horizons. In the character of Barnabooth, a sentimental young billionaire inclined to poetry, Larbaud indulges his fantasy of the rootless vagabond, stateless by birth, who roams unhindered. A voracious polyglot with no native language, Barnabooth is a translingual writer who in his poems in French expresses a commitment to transnationalism as multi-directional belonging, declaring himself ‘un grand patriote cosmopolite’. While Larbaud’s passionate cosmopolitanism has been dismissed as the dilettantish privilege of the wealthy elite, Barnabooth recounts his travels in striking polyphonic poems which allow diverse voices from around the world, as well as the noisy, dissonant soundscapes of global travel such as trains, boats, stormy seas, city streets and fragments of popular song to permeate the text. Poetic form emerges as a central feature of this opening up to the world, with vers libre providing a mobile, transnational verse capable of transcending tired national paradigms. Yet Larbaud’s free verse includes numerous echoes of former national glories: fragments of the alexandrine appear fleetingly amid the poems’ infinite rhythmic diversity, as the vestiges of late nineteenth-century nation-statehood resurface within this new, transnational mode of being. Larbaud’s innovative textual forms capture something of the interplay between fragile national identities and the transient, unsettling experience of the endless voyage. The rhythmic fabric of his vers libre juxtaposes regular and irregular, national and international, enacting the central tension of his statelessness, between belonging and rupture, in which Barnabooth, ‘ce coeur de vagabond’, pursues his dream: ‘Etre un perpetuel evade de tous les milieux’.

Highlights

At the heart of this relationship lurks a central anxiety of late nineteenth-century French nationalism, with carefully orchestrated myths of monolithic nationhood, race, cultural history and identity proving uncomfortably flimsy in the face of the dynamic international pathways of nascent twentieth-century modernity
Carter and Susan Waller have shown in Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870–1914: Strangers in Paradise, many French artists were receptive to foreign influences – ‘the more alien, the better’ (Sonn 132) – so that, by the early twentieth century, any desire for the certainties of nationalism in the aesthetic realm had to contend with an equal fervour for an intoxicating internationalism, made possible thanks to new technologies of travel, as celebrated in volumes of poetry such as Cendrars’ Du monde entier (1912–13) and Apollinaire’s Alcools (1913)
In 1918, with the First World War having provided a horrific demonstration of the dangers of extreme nationalist sentiment, the committed cosmopolitan Valery Larbaud scorns the very idea of a national literature: La France n’a que faire d’un poète national, de même qu’il serait ridicule de dire que Paris possède un poète local

Summary

Introduction

Elsewhere the sounds produced by the boats and trains mingle with those of natural phenomena, as in ‘Yaravi’ where the poet once again abandons control of his own discourse, unable to explain what he means to say as his incoherent cries are lost amid myriad other noises which become the aural fabric of the text itself: Je ne saurais dire si c’est de désespoir ou bien de joie Que je pleure ainsi, mêlant Mes sanglots étouffés aux cris de panique de l’aquilon, Au rythme de la machinerie, au tonnerre et au sifflement Des vagues tordues en masses de verre sur les flancs Du navire, et tout à coup étalées comme un manteau de pierreries (Œuvres 56)

Results

Conclusion