Une intention de salut. Essais sur la poésie française moderne by John Naughton (review)

Abstract

John Naughton, intention de salut. Essais sur la poesie francaise moderne. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012. 235 pp. This is a work of genuine academic piety. John Naughton, who launched his career as interpreter of modern French poetry with a book on Yves Bonnefoy (1984), develops in his title and final chapter a moving and substantial analysis of Bonnefoy as the exemplar of a new (atheistic or agnostic) modern faith in five major poets--and he accomplishes this essentially ethical intent with meticulous textual analyses. Naughton is a sensitive, trustworthy guide. After an avant-propos explaining his own flexible relationship with traditional faith-based motivation, he provides a wide-ranging Introduction: La poesie moderne et la tradition chretienne (13-43), which anticipates his approaches to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Claudel, des Forets, and Yves Bonnefoy. Each chapter is self-contained and some repetition of crucial quotations strengthens the book's pedagogical unity. Following Yves Bonnefoy's assertion that Nous autres venons apres les dieux (41), Naughton explores how each poet adapts the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. He begins by tracing the French sanctification of the poet from Hugo through Bonnefoy and insists that est le seul a avoir vecu la foi sans equivoque (41). The following five chapters plunge into those ambiguities. Naughton makes a convincing case for Baudelaire's essentially religious, though anti-bourgeois, orientation. Le probleme (43-87)--with its trendy medieval genitive following Sainte-Beuve (see La Folie Baudelaire by Roberto Calasso; John E. Jackson, La Mort Baudelaire)--warns against identifying author and poetic persona. Referring to approaches of Bonnefoy, Pierre Emmanuel, Pierre Jean Jouve, Leo Bersani, Charles Mauron, Steve Murphy, and others, Naughton stresses the dialectic of reality and escapism, Une extase faite de volupte et de connaissance (72, Baudelaire's italics). Baudelaire's own analysis of ecstasy (70-74) was provoked in part by Wagner's overture to Lohengrin as well as the drug experience. The poet's compassion provides a transition to L'experience de la charite chez (83-105), itself a transition chapter that provides analyses of saison en enfer and Rimbaud's relationship with his mother, with Verlaine, and the influence of his absent father. The chapter concludes by citing Rimbaud's appeal to American readers such as Henry Miller and Jim Morrison of The Doors. Rimbaud in Africa also receives insightful treatment. The next two chapters--La Foi selon Paul (107-146) and Louis-Rene des Forets, Agonistes, (147-183)--illuminates the contrast between Claudel's militant Catholicism and the profound secularism of Des Forets, whom Naughton knew personally, and to whom he devoted an important monograph (1993). Naughtons analysis of Claudel's theatre is sympathetic and attempts to rescue that powerful personality from disdain by literary historians--but not without a bold moral judgment: certes, il semble que Paul Claudel ait eu besoin de la forteresse que l'Eglise lui a fournie. La rigidite de ses doctrines, la coherence de son enseignement, la beaute de ses rites, la regularite de ses pratiques, repondaient a une necessite chez lui et le defendait de forces obscures mais reelles: le doute, la passion, le chaos, la folie. Son orgueil, ses impatiences, sa soif de certitudes sont autant de fortifications contre l'ennemi, contre la peur. …