Du Soir Research Articles

Discovery of a painting inspired by Ancient Egypt on the reverse of Train du Soir (1957) by Paul Delvaux

Discovery of a painting inspired by Ancient Egypt on the reverse of Train du Soir (1957) by Paul Delvaux

Preface: Francis Jammes’s “Fourteen Prayers,” Part 1

PrefaceFrancis Jammes’s “Fourteen Prayers,” Part 1 Raymond N. MacKenzie, Editor Key Words Reverend Dr. Ian Ker, St. John Henry Newman Francis Jammes (1868–1938), French Catholic poet and novelist, is not as widely read in the English-speaking world as he deserves to be, though some new translations have been published lately, as has a volume collecting some modern appreciations of Jammes.1 I’m going to add to the list with translations of a set of poems he titled “Fourteen Prayers.” In this issue, I’ll present the first seven, and the remainder in our next issue. I’ll include the French originals on facing pages. Jammes (pronounced zhahm) was born in the very small town of Tournay, located in the Haut-Pyrenées region of southwestern France; it is about a half hour’s drive from Lourdes. He spent most of his life in the region, moving west to the town of Orthez when he was twenty; and he is buried not far from there, in Hasparren. But though he loved this corner of the world, he did get out and experience life more broadly. The family moved to Bordeaux for a time when he was a teenager, and from there he went on to Paris and a series of literary friendships, notably with Paul Claudel; on a trip to North Africa, he met André Gide, who became a close friend and confidant for a while. In Paris he lived with his mother—and as we’ll see, the bond with his [End Page 5] mother was of great importance to him. He worked as a clerk during the day, read every night with his mother, and began to write and publish poetry. His early poems struck his readers as offering something fresh, a healthy antidote to the prevailing modes of poetry toward the end of the century, the kind of style literary historians today call Symbolism. In Symbolism, the emphasis is on evocation rather than description, on impression and nuance rather than direct statement; Symbolism’s most famous poets for readers today are Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, both of whom can seem decidedly obscure. The young man from Basque country, however, was writing decidedly clear, direct, accessible yet rich and powerful poems that struck a chord with many readers, especially Gide. Born and raised a Catholic, Jammes’s faith shifted in his twenties to a more generalized spirituality, but the poems, especially from 1897 on, were more often than not concerned with God, looking forward to what would soon (in 1904, with the help of Paul Claudel) be a return to the Church. But to return: 1897 saw the publication of his first great collection, De l’Angélus de l’aube à l’angélus du soir (from the morning to the evening Angelus). It opens with a prose epigraph announcing his view of the poet as a servant of God. The epigraph begins, “My God, you have called me from among men. Here I am.” The collection had a powerful impact on young poets both in France and in Italy who were seeking an alternative to the increasingly obscure and difficult style that the Symbolist poets were adopting.2 There was even talk of a new school of “naturisme,” a renewal of a poetry in closer contact with real life than the rarefied work of the Symbolists. Jammes wrote a serio-comic manifesto for his own personal, one-man school of poetics, which he called Jammisme. The manifesto mixes his actual beliefs with self-deprecating humor. Article I is an excellent example of both: I think that Truth is the praise of God; that we must celebrate it in our poems for them to be pure; that there exists but one school. . . .3 [End Page 6] That school consists of imitating nature, whether “nature” means a bird, a flower, or a pretty girl “with charming legs and graceful breasts.” The last phrase, which may seem a little offensive to some today, is intended as mildly comical, as if warding off the accusation of pomposity. The whole manifesto ends on a similar comic note: But since all is vanity, and even...

La traducción del pantún al francés o el vuelo impreso de la mariposa

El pantún es una forma fija poética proveniente de Malasia que se incorpora a la poesía francesa de una manera peculiar en el siglo XIX. La estructura comienza a difundirse en Francia mediante una traducción en una nota al final de Les Orientales de Victor Hugo, en la que aparece acompañada de otras traducciones árabes y persas proporcionadas por un reconocido orientalista de la época, Ernest Fouinet. En conjunto, esta serie de traducciones participan en la justificación de la estética romántica. Tras esta primera aparición, el pantún será objeto de exploración de sensibilidades poéticas diversas a lo largo del siglo XIX: algunas de sus imágenes son evocadas con insistencia en diversos textos de algunos poetas, y su forma incita a explorar en los efectos de la repetición alternada y organizada de los versos. Con el paso del tiempo, “Harmonie du soir” de Baudelaire se convertirá en el modelo de referencia más inmediato de esta estructura poética. El pantún que se desarrolla en Francia plantea un mecanismo singular de repetición de versos (el segundo y cuarto verso de cada estrofa son retomados en el primero y tercer verso de la siguiente) y crea una analogía que distingue de forma precisa naturaleza y experiencia. Además de observar las características y condiciones de esta primera inserción en la nota al final de la obra mencionada de Victor Hugo, el propósito de este artículo es reflexionar sobre las funciones que cumple una forma fija importada de otra cultura, y las circunstancias que permiten su asimilación en la historia literaria francesa.

Mode de procès et dimensions aspectuelles dans De l’Angelus de l’aube à l’Angelus du soir

This reflection on the collection De l’Angelus de l’Aube à l’Angelus du soir, by Francis Jammes, is situated in the framework of verbal aspectual values and of modes of process. A review of morphological features of verbal aspect, followed by attention to selected passages from the collection demonstrates that the freshness and the simplicity of the poetry is illuminated by aspectual dimensions and by the modes of process. When all is said and done, the book exudes a limpidity and a frankness that emerges, in part, from verbal elements, especially aspectual phenomena, grammatical features that indicate the way the state of things envisioned develops in space and in time.

Baudelaire and the Poetics of Pollution

Examining how key aspects of Baudelaire’s aesthetic theory address the negative ramifications of industrial growth, this article traces the black smoke that drifts through his urban poems in the context of the increasing visibility and public concern over air pollution in the second half of the nineteenth century. Reading his ‘recycled’ 1862 version of the prose poem ‘Le Crépuscule du soir’ (Le Spleen de Paris), a sombre poem in its first version from 1855 that stands apart from the rhapsodic rhetoric in contemporary literature lauding the capabilities of steam and machines, it situates Baudelaire as deploying a remedying aesthetics of conservation that aims to depollute. The noticeable clearing away of contamination in the revised poem, with its suggestion of light and airiness as well as its fluid sketch quality, lets breathe the dispersed fragments of nature engulfed by, but still palpitating beneath, the unrelenting and interlocked forces of urbanization and industrialization.

Marcel Carne

This monograph could hardly be more timely, its publication coinciding with a lavish exhibition devoted to Les Enfants du paradis at the Paris Cinémathèque (October 2012–January 2013) and the issue of a new, restored French DVD edition of the film (Second Sight Films, 2012). After a long period of underestimation, connected undoubtedly with the Cahiers du cinéma critics' effective dismissal of Marcel Carné as Exhibit A in the rogues' gallery of cinéma de qualité, the director's pre-war œuvre is at least now more judiciously evaluated, with gendered and star-studies approaches (as in the work of Edward Baron Turk and Ginette Vincendeau respectively) playing a significant role in this shift. The problem with discussing Carné as an auteur is the perceived tailing-off of his work after the end of the Second World War and of his partnership with Jacques Prévert, as a result of which many of the later films are difficult or impossible to view. Jonathan Driskell, in only the second English-language monograph on the director and the first for upwards of twenty years, contributes appreciably to a fleshing-out of Carné's later career, by way of succinct but well-contextualized analyses of his less familiar films. He grasps the bull of Carné's fluctuating critical reputation firmly by the horns, attributing it at least in part to ‘his decision to continue making films under the Nazi Occupation’ (p. 1), and offers an erudite and well-documented overview of his work. He is particularly persuasive in attributing Les Enfants' iconic place in French cultural history to ‘the significant popular appeal it had in 1945’ (p. 69). The book is, alas, marred by a periodic tendency towards what I would describe as ‘messageitis’, as with the assertion apropos Les Visiteurs du soir that, ‘[b]ecause the characters ultimately accept their fate and do not fight back against the Devil, they can be seen as complicit with the Occupation’ (p. 64) — a singularly inappropriate hypostatization of the cinematic text, though qualified immediately afterwards by the recognition that such allegorical readings leave much to be desired. There is a scattering of omissions: Jean-Pierre Léaud's derision of Les Visiteurs in Jean Eustache's La Maman et la putain (1973) surely called for mention; and errors: Malou in Les Portes de la nuit appears to change gender when referred to as ‘Milou’, while Jacques Becker's Rendez-vous de juillet turns into Rendez-vous de Paris. Driskell's comprehensiveness is not always matched by his incisiveness, as the overuse of epithets such as ‘metaphysical’ and ‘transcendent’ attest, but this monograph will be of value to all scholars, and indeed students, of French cinema.

'Romances sans paroles' suivi de 'Cellulairement' by Paul Verlaine, and: Jadis et nagure by Paul Verlaine

MLR, .,   and opposing desires, finds expression in his dilemma between two rooms, which though they intersect and provide memories of each other, refuse any exchange. Time and, more specifically, the problem of ‘in-between-ness’ in Baudelaire are the focus of the fourth chapter, which provides a close reading of ‘Harmonie du soir’. Here, Meltzer argues, contrary to scholars like Poulet, there are two times in Baudelaire: ‘the past, which can serve as an antidote to the present, and the future, which poisons the present’ (p. ). e role of poetry is then to transform the present into the space from which the future is averted and the past reanimated ; for Baudelaire, therefore, the present necessitates a double vision. Meltzer’s intriguing and beautifully presented book, in its emphasis on the lack of unity of vision in Baudelaire, reveals a new understanding of his reaction to modernity as a splintered gaze on an incomprehensible world. Contrary to many scholars, she does not assume that Baudelaire knew what he was seeing and recording; instead she highlights the ‘overlaying of disparate realities that remain, opposingly, in the poet’s gaze’ (p. ). e volume is thus not only essential reading for scholars of Baudelaire but also an important contribution to the history of modernism. Q’ U B C M ‘Romances sans paroles’ suivi de ‘Cellulairement’. By P V. Ed. by O B. (Le Livre de Poche Classique) Paris: Librairie Générale Française. .  pp. €.. ISBN ––––. Jadis et naguère. By P V. Ed. by O B. (Le Livre de Poche Classique) Paris: Librairie Générale Française. .  pp. €.. ISBN ––––. As the poems in these collections span most of Verlaine’s oen tumultuous adult life, we should not be surprised by the ‘kaleidoscopic’ range of genre, register, prosodic practice, inspiration, and even quality encountered here. Romances sans paroles is home to many of Verlaine’s most successful poems and is the most unified of the collections under review. Written during the years immediately preceding his incarceration in  (which are also those of his Rimbaldian adventures ), these poems are grouped under headings which clearly indicate the centrality of sensorial experience (e.g. ‘Ariettes oubliées’, ‘Aquarelles’). Verlaine proposes a poetics based on prioritizing sound and musicality, and on promoting nuance, approximation, and suggestion in the visual, semantic, and prosodic domains. is is an anti-rhetorical, anti-intellectual, and visceral poetry—Verlaine called it ‘objective’—characterized by experimentation and innovation. Not least because of his instinctive attraction to the unconventional, Verlaine seeks out the slightly incorrect word, deliberately chooses rare and uncodified metres, and elaborates a subtle, yet powerful, Impressionist syntax and grammar. is is a fresh, innovative, and exciting collection of poems, published shortly aer the poet’s imprisonment. Cellulairement is Verlaine’s true incarceration collection, the first of a number of hybrids, and indeed a turning-point in his œuvre as a whole. Clearly  Reviews there are here some echoes of Romances (e.g. ‘Berceuse’), but the inclusion in this collection of ‘Art poétique’, which details some of Romances’s techniques and precepts, essentially marks the high water mark for this vein of the poet’s work. In prison, he experiences a religious conversion which inspires nearly two-thirds of the verse-lines of the collection: the ‘récits diaboliques’ and the final sequence of eight sonnets. Also to be found in Cellulairement is evidence of the poet’s interest in experimenting with variation in register and tone, as the parodies of ‘Vieux Coppées’ and the narrative verse of ‘L’Impénitence finale’ demonstrate. Verlaine never published Cellulairement as a collection: difficulties with publishers, his own evolving thoughts and practices, and the attraction of leaving behind his ‘cellular’ days meant that his energies were soon thrust into Sagesse () and Jadis et naguère (), both of these absorbing much of Cellulairement’s content. Even more than Cellulairement, Jadis et naguère contains an impressive, though somewhat bewildering, variety of poems: those of ‘A la manière de plusieurs’ display the poet’s penchant for parody and pastiche; there are too the texts of ‘Art poétique’ and ‘Langueur’, controversially adopted by others as Symbolist and Decadent...

Seeing Double: Baudelaire's Modernity (review)

Reviewed by: Seeing Double: Baudelaire's Modernity Rebecca Pekron Françoise Meltzer. Seeing Double: Baudelaire's Modernity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011. 280 pages. Print. Françoise Meltzer's Seeing Double: Baudelaire's Modernity envisions a new perspective from which to understand the poet Charles Baudelaire's relationship to modern life. Challenging the interpretations and accepted wisdom of some of Baudelaire's most distinguished readers, Meltzer's arguments focus on Baudelaire's engagement with the radical transformations in society, philosophy, and aesthetics in mid-nineteenth century Paris. Meltzer characterizes Baudelaire's response to nascent modernity as a kind of double vision. Seeing Double asserts that the irreconcilable tensions that critics have so often observed in Baudelaire's work are the result of the poet's [End Page 1154] inability to integrate his vision of the old world of the ancien régime with the new Paris (still under construction) and France's budding democracy. Baudelaire's dilemma, as it emerges in Meltzer's book, crystallizes around issues of time and mortality. For the poet, language still has the power to convey, though his work gestures toward, and indeed lays the groundwork for, the crisis of language that will consume later writers, such as Stéphane Mallarmé. Similarly, though Baudelaire's work may describe “the erosion of the subject” (227), he does not yet have the distance to understand this phenomenon historically, as attached to modernity. Meltzer contends that Baudelaire “does not actually understand what he is seeing, even as he records it” (5). Baudelaire's genius is rather that “he puts the reader into the same maelstrom as himself” (248). Meltzer organizes Seeing Double's four chapters according to “four major aspects of Baudelaire's thinking . . . beliefs, seeing, money, and time” (9). Each chapter includes a reading of a poem that serves to illustrate the pervasive double vision Meltzer perceives as crucial to an understanding of Baudelaire's modernity. Meltzer couples her close readings of “Assommons les pauvres!,” “À une passante,” “La chambre double,” and “Harmonie du soir” with discussions of Baudelaire's journals, art criticism, essays, and correspondence. Meltzer's interpretations, which place Baudelaire's oeuvre in dialogue with a wide array of texts and thinkers (including biographical, historical, philosophical, socio-political, literary and literary critical perspectives), make Seeing Double a comparative and broadly relevant text. The contradictory influences of two such thinkers, Joseph de Maistre and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, form the basis for Meltzer's reading of “Assommons les pauvres!” in the first chapter. “In ‘Assommons,'” Meltzer writes, “we are witness to a theological and political strabismus as if the poet were remembering Proudhon's social theories with one eye and reading Maistre on original sin with the other” (17). This strange (and often overlooked) alliance marks the first instance of Baudelaire's double vision. Meltzer analyzes the ramifications of these two irreconcilable postulations, demonstrating how Baudelaire's commitment to the doctrine of original sin interferes with his socialist tendencies. Meltzer contends that the strabismic perspective in “Assommons les pauvres!” typifies the contradictions and ambivalences that a reader encounters in Baudelaire's writing. Her argument casts these ambivalences as “symptoms of the larger issue, which has to do with the birth of modernity” (70). Meltzer's second chapter, heavily informed by Baudelaire's art criticism, focuses on a different type of modern clash: the meeting of gazes captured in “À une passante.” Meltzer's reading of this poem elucidates the logic of the image as it works in Baudelaire's poetry more generally. The double vision Meltzer outlines in this section underscores the role of memory in the creation of the work of art. Baudelaire, according to Meltzer, imagines the work of art (or poetry) as “twice removed” from the event or experience it portrays. “Twice removed” because a painting or a poem is a representation of a memory, which is always already the representation of an original fleeting perception or experience. [End Page 1155] Meltzer's observations regarding Baudelaire's fascination with certain optical devices, including the phenakistiscope, the kaleidoscope, and the stereoscope, provide a novel approach to vision in Baudelaire's poetics. These devices created an awareness of a subjectivity of vision for Baudelaire, making visual play...

Everyday Ghosts: La Curée in the Shadow of the Commune

[L]e desastre revient, il serait toujours le desastre d'apres le desastre, retour silencieux, non ravageur, par oU il se dissimule. --Maurice Blanchot (1) At the conclusion of Zola's La Curee, through the eyes of its female protagonist, the reader sees ghosts. Most of them are actually alive, shimmering figures from Renee's past life parading through the present in the Bois de Boulogne. As the finale to this defile triomphal, (1) the aging emperor is especially spectral, looming up dans ce vide (335) like a vanishing act in a magic show, then floating among passersby before disappearing into the light. In contrast to this spirit-like figure--described through the narrative voice of free indirect discourse as cette apparition, qui lui rappelait autre heure de sa vie (336)--the coincidental appearance of Renee's husband and stepson seems less ghostly than murderous: [E]n tournant tete, apercut, a cote d'elle [...] un spectacle qui dechira d'un coup supreme. Like the society men and women glimmering in the park, Saccard and Maxime join a ghoulish menagerie summed up as mangeurs de curee who bring their outlandish appetites to bear upon the spoils of the hunt (334). This evocation of the hounds rushing for the entrails of a captured animal evokes further specters--of the dead creature into whose role the young woman has been metaphorically cast and, more explicitly, of the lost pleasures confronted by Renee in her final spin through the gardens. Like Poe's Raven, her heart even intones, Jamais jamais plus! (332). The past itself has become ghostly in this sequence, as the novel gives Renee a flashback in which toutes ses promenades au Bois lui revinrent. What she sees again here (elle revoyait les pelouses trempees par l'air du soir [332]) makes a ghost of ber own figure gliding through the landscape. One specific twilight of burgeoning passion returns to haunt ber. Through her recollection of that previous dusk in the Bois, the reader is in turn forcibly called back to the novel's opening, in which the narrator first gave us access to Renee's viewpoint. Strangely, that inaugural sequence already evoked something otherworldly. The uncanniness of l'etrange tableau qui s'effacait derriere elle was there exacerbated by the novel's insistence on the funereal aspects of that Second Empire world: the Bois wrapped dans un linceul d'ombre where tout allait en se mourant (46-47). In the final chapter's flashback, the young woman's early visions of this nuit [...] si navree (47) appear even more ghostly, not only recalling what has been lost but also suggesting that all this life we have read about between the novel's covers was illusory, transitory to be sure, but perhaps more: bereft, deathly, even cadaverous. Significantly, the experience Renee remembers, la cendre fine du crepuscule qu'elle avait vue tomber un soir (332), entailed sensing spirits, perceiving the wood as une de ces clairieres ideales au fond desquelles les anciens dieux cachient leurs amours geantes (47). There in the past, she was already trafficking with phantoms. This double ghostliness exposes something crucial about the workings of this novel's relationship to the past, not just the past of its characters but that of the Second Empire, which, by the time of the novel's publication in autumn 1871, has receded into history. Through flashbacks to the 1860s, the novel lures readers into the perspectives of those who vibrate for luxury and pleasure. In particular, as we have just seen, La Curee transforms the vision of its female protagonist into a perspective on the ghosts of Napoleon III's failed regime and deploys that vision historically (remembering its own past perceptions) to invite readers to judge those who lusted after the pleasures of its carnage. From the time of La Curee's first appearance, Zola insisted on the historical dimensions of his work. …

Grotesque Figures: Baudelaire, Rousseau and the Aesthetics of Modernity

As Virginia E. Swain observes in her introduction, the question of Baudelaire's relationship to Rousseau has gone largely unexamined beyond the general assumption that the poet had nothing but scorn for the believer in the innate goodness of man. Inspired by the explicit reference to the Rêveries in one of the titles Baudelaire considered for his prose poems — ‘Le Promeneur solitaire’ — Swain sets out to trace Rousseau's presence in Le Spleen de Paris, suggesting that many of its characters are drawn from ideological debates about France's post-revolutionary identity. Although Baudelaire seldom discusses Rousseau, Swain posits the double, hybrid figures of allegory and the grotesque, such as rococo art, as common ground between the two authors. Rousseau himself is then read allegorically, as both the literary-historical figure and the nineteenth-century poncif alternately praised and vilified in political disputes. In this context, Baudelaire's discarded title would have been highly charged, drawing attention to ‘the subversive political implications of his poetic activity’ (p. 73), the substance of which is analysed in detail in Chapters Four to Seven. Highlighting the structural affinity between allegory and caricature, notably the socio-political cartoon which flourished in France during this period, Swain suggests that the allegorical figure of ‘Rousseau’ lies behind the assorted social types which populate Baudelaire's Paris; as the prototype, then, of alienated modern man, whose discomfort stems in part from the repercussions of the Revolution, Rousseau is said to appear variously as the étranger, solitaire, saltimbanque, mendiant or fou. While it might be overstating the case to argue that Baudelaire consistently neglects to name the author of the Rêveries ‘precisely to keep under wraps the primary object of his fascination — Rousseau’ (p. 82), the close readings which follow draw convincingly on many useful, fresh intertexts for the prose poems. Detailed analysis shows ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’, ‘Le Crépuscule du soir’, ‘Une mort héroïque’ and ‘La Corde’ to be dense allegorical networks constructed upon echoes of Proudhon, Sainte-Beuve and Rousseau himself in texts such as Julie; ou, la Nouvelle Héloïse or his Confessions. The allegorical continues to inform the political dimension in Swain's reading of ‘Les Yeux des pauvres’ as a rejection of the imperial politics of exclusion and discursive repression, in a text which imports the rhetorical structure of Rousseau's entry on opera in Dictionnaire de musique. Similarly, ‘Le Vieux Saltimbanque’ is said to deal with Rousseau's problematic reception in the nineteenth century by drawing on elements from his textual self-portraits. On occasion the sheer density and uncertainty of these allegorical networks can lead to a confusing conclusion such as ‘The poem is and is not an attack on Rousseau’ (p. 105). On the whole, though, this is a thorough and engaging exploration of a neglected area which successfully convinces the reader that rather than simply scorning him, Baudelaire makes of Rousseau a productively unstable motif for nineteenth-century France's obsession with its painful past and its need to work through the traumas of the Revolution which he had come to embody.

L'imaginaire médiéval dans le cinéma occidental by François Amy de la Bretèque (review)

REVIEWS83 The New Historians ofthe Twelfth-Century Renaissance (Woodbridge, 1999). In the light of this recent research, it is clear that Bakhtin's generic distinctions are not especially helpful for our understanding of the Brut, though his views on language prove to be more fruitful. The moral dimension to language and its importance in shaping our response to the theme of betrayal in La^amon's poem is perceptively analysed in chaptct 1, whilst the exploration of the possible interaction between preaching andwriting (chapter 3) makes a number ofcogent points that will certainly be revisited by other scholars. Also notewotthy is the discussion ofthe function of Merlin and his prophecies in the Brut. This is a well-researched, carefully produced and clearly written piece of scholarship, that all students ofLa^amon and ofArthurian literature will read with profit. And while it will not prove to be as controversial as Daniel Donoghue's 1990 article, it is to be hoped that it will spark new research into hithetto unexplored aspects of the Brut. FRANÇOISE LE SAUX University of Reading BRIEF NOTICE: François amy de la BRETÈQUE, L'imaginaire médiéval dans le cinéma occidental. Paris: Honoré Champion Editeur, 2004. Pp.1277. isbn: 2-7453-12064-x. $170 euros. The study of cinema arthuriana begins in France in the 1940s as patt of the more general study ofcinema medievalia. More recently, no one has been a more frequent commentator on cinema arthuriana and medievalia than Professor Amy de la Bretèque. In what will doubtless for some time remain the definitive study ofWestern 'medieval cinema,' he discusses in varying detail more than 500 films. Of special interest to Atthurian scholars will be chapters 10-14 and 16 in which Amy de la Bretèque turns his attention to films about the Round Table, Gawain, Lancelot and Guinevere, Parsifal/Perceval, Merlin, and Tristan and Isolde. Those interested in broadet range of cinema medievalia will also want to read what the author has to say about the cinematic traditions of Robin Hood, Joan ofArc, and the Crusades, as well as about individual films such as Alexander Nevsky, Le Miracle des loups, Le Moine et la sorcière, The Name ofthe Rose, The Nibelungenlied, La Passion Béatrice, The Seventh Seal, and Les Visiteurs du soir. KEVIN J. HARTY \? Salle University ...

"Tarrying with the Negative": Baudelaire, Mallarme, and the Rhythm of Modernity

Drawing on commentary by De Man, Benjamin, Poulet and Bersani, I argue that Baudelaire's Harmonie du Soir and Mallarm�'s H�rodiade set out not only to testify to modernity's constitutively fragmentary, and implicitly violent, experience of time, but also to create new norms of conceptual and formal coherence for experiencing such fragmentation positively. As Benjamin puts it, they offer not the experience of shock itself, but "the experience for which the experience of shock has become the norm." Specifically, I suggest that they elevate the experience of the Kantian sublime to a definitively modern experience, an exemplary norm of our era.

From Theory to Practice: A Musical Reading of Valéry’s “Profusion du soir”

Research Article| November 01 2000 From Theory to Practice: A Musical Reading of Valéry’s “Profusion du soir” Lisa Goldfarb Lisa Goldfarb Gallatin School of New York University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Romanic Review (2000) 91 (4): 459–479. https://doi.org/10.1215/26885220-91.4.459 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Lisa Goldfarb; From Theory to Practice: A Musical Reading of Valéry’s “Profusion du soir”. Romanic Review 1 November 2000; 91 (4): 459–479. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/26885220-91.4.459 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsRomanic Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2000 The Trustees of Columbia University2000 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

L'Eternel retour: Reflection of the Occupation's Crisis in French Masculinity?

RELEASED IN OCTOBER 1943, L'ETERNEL RETOUR's re-working of the legend of Tristan and Iseult in a stylized but contemporary setting was the film event of that year. With a screenplay by Jean Cocteau, the film was the most popular film of the entire Occupation period (Crisp). Along with La Nuitfantastique (L'Herbier, 1942) and Les Visiteurs du soir, the most successful film of 1942, it was seen as part of a new trend in French cinema. Like Les Visiteurs du soir (directed by Marcel Carnm and scripted by Jacques Pr6vert), L'Eternel retour was praised for its aesthetic qualities. Most critics saw in it an escape from the daily life under the Occupation into a fantastic, poeticized world of heightened aspirations and emotions. If some were critical of the incorporation of elements reflecting Cocteau's poetic universe,1 they nevertheless applauded the film's imaginative combination of modern setting and universal theme, its stylized settings, lighting, costuming and acting style. Credit for the film's success was accorded not just to Cocteau, but to director Jean Delannoy, cinematographer Roger Hubert and music coordinator Georges Auric. Whatever the contributions of Cocteau's collaborators, it is evident that the film not only derives its inspiration from Cocteau, for whom its realization was a long-cherished dream, but that he also played a major role in the designing, casting and editing. According to actor Jean Marais, Cocteau's presence at the shooting was enough to affect the mood of the film, giving a more poetic edge to Delannoy's otherwise rather leaden direction (Marais 147).2 L'Eternel retour was Cocteau's first major step into film-making since the experimental Le Sang d'un porte (1930). He prepared himself for the task by working on Serge de Polignac's Le Baron fantdme (1943), writing the dialogues and taking on the small role of the eponymous baron. In L'Eternel retour, Cocteau aimed to elevate a modern story to the status of myth (Art of Cinema 189) by proving that Nietzsche's notion of eternal return could be applied to the fate of the doomed lovers whose story is relived by others, without their even realizing it. The Tristan and Iseult of legend become blonde-haired Patrice and Nathalie (Jean

Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy

Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy. By Paul Roberts. Portland, Ore.: Amadeus Press, 1996. [xxi, 372 p. ISBN 0-931340-97-7. $39.95.] It has long been known that Claude Debussy generally preferred the company of painters and poets to that of musicians, and that the initial stimulus for much of his music came from a picture or a line of poetry. Paul Roberts, the British pianist and teacher, who also has strong lies to France, focuses largely on specific paintings, prints, posters, and book illustrations that are known to have set Debussy's creative impulses in motion. Visual imagery seems to behind even those pieces that are clearly the result of his fascination with the Javanese gamelan. When [he title of a piece was taken from a poem or fairy tale, a picture apparently formed itself in his mind, 'finis, the title of Roberts's book is particularly apt. The six chapters of Background make up part I, which begins with an informative discussion of the artistic scene in fin de Steele Paris. In painting, the catchwords were impressionism, postimpressionism, symbolism, and realism. The first chapter discusses these terms and Debussy's relationship to them, Debussy, like most of the later nineteenth-century artistic community, was fascinated by the Orient, particularly the Japanese prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige. Roberts details how influential these prints were on painters (e.g., Edgar Degas) and how certain aspects of them can found in Debussy's piano music. Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe, Jean Antoine Watteau, Paul Verlaine and the old commedia dell'arte form the substance of the next two chapters. Chapter 5 deals with Debussy's disdain for the term constantly associated with him: I'm trying to do 'something else'--in a way realities--what imbeciles call 'impressionism,' a term as misused as it could possibly be (Debussy in a 1908 letter to his publisher, Jacques Durand). The sixth chapter is a masterful discussion of the relationship between music and painting and poetry in Paris during the last part of the century. Roberts's extensive knowledge' of the world of painting and poetry in Paris of the late nineteenth century stands him in good stead throughout pan 1, and these first six chapters should he invaluable to all who have an interest in the cultural atmosphere in which Debussy lived, composed, and performed. The second pan of the book is addressed more specifically to musicians, especially pianists. Foreground, part 2 of the book, consists of five chapters. They provide more information on the creative stimulus for Debussy's most important piano works and also offer Roberts's thoughts on how those works should interpreted. He continues with a good deal of technical instruction on the best means for a pianist to achieve the desired interpretation, stressing varieties of tone color. An exact understanding of what Roberts intends for the Preludes Book I, the Images Book II, and the Estampes can ascertained from the compact disc that is offered as a companion to the book (The Classical Recording Company, CRC 501-2, $15.98). Roberts is indeed a marvelous interpreter of Debussy, carefully adhering to the authentic text as given in the new CEnvres completes, but always making the most of his sense of line and color, from the most delicate nuance of Les Sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir to the violent assault of Ce qu'a vu le vent d'Ouest. …

Baudelaire's Frisson Fraternal Horror and Enchantment in "Les Tableaux Parisiens"

"Baudelaire's Frisson Fraternel: Horror and Enchantment in 'Les Tableaux Parisiens'" considers the significance of encounters between Baudelaire's narrator, the urban flâneur, in "Les Sept vieillards," "Les Petites vieilles," and "Les Aveugles," and grotesque, sinister, yet fascinating figures met in the street. The article demonstrates that these encounters are different in kind from other allegorical figures in the many other urban poems of Les Fleurs du Mal and Le Spleen de Paris, such as the verse poems "Le Cygne," "Le Soleil," and "Le Crepuscule du soir," and the prose texts "Les Yeux des pauvres" and "La Fausse monnaie;" this difference is attributed to a nexus of associations whose common term is an uncannily indeterminate humanity, in which life and death are increasingly indistinguishable. The fascination and anxiety evoked by these figures in the narrator and the reader alike provoke a terrible immediacy with the unconscious, an irresistible return of repressed, primitive fears, drawing us into a disturbing proximity with death.

Debussy and baudelaire'sHarmonie du soir

Abstract Baudelaire's poem Harmonie du soir received two important readings from Debussy — the song which is the second of Cinq poèmes de Ch. Baudelaire, and the fourth Prélude for piano. Both form and content of the poem are reflected in both pieces. This is evident in the song, but hidden in the prelude. The unravelling of these reflections is the focus of this paper, and leads to a possible re-evaluation of the ways in which Debussy's aesthetic was imbricated with that of Wagner.

“Profusion Du Soir” and “Le Cimetière Marin”

In “Au Sujet du ‘Cimetière marin’,” Valéry tells us that this poem originated from a decasyllabic rhythm, at first empty of content, which began running through his mind: “Une figure rythmique vide, ou remplie de syllabes vaines, qui me vint obséder quelque temps.” He speculated on what a modern poet might do with this rhythm, the type of stanza he might use, the composition he might create, and concluded that his poem would be a personal monologue: “Un monologue de ‘moi,’ dans lequel les thèmes les plus simples et les plus constants de ma vie affective et intellectuelle, tels qu'ils s'étaient imposés à mon adolescence et associés à la mer et à la lumière d'un certain lieu des bords de la Méditerranée, fussent appelés, tramés, opposés . . . ”Since Valéry speaks of intellectual and affective themes of his adolescence, it is not surprising if we find similarities between “Le Cimetière marin,” written between 1917 and 1920, and a long poem of Valéry's youth, “Profusion du soir,” “abandoned” in 1899 and published for the first time in 1926 in Quelques vers anciens and in the augmented second edition of L'Album de vers anciens. The parallel, however, extends beyond the themes. The two poems have a similar structure, and frequently, at corresponding points in the structure, we find similar images, ideas, and even similar vocabulary. While “Profusion du soir” can hardly be considered an early version of “Le Cimetière marin,” a number of its aspects reappear in the later poem. This fact may well explain the note “poème abandonné” which follows the title of “Profusion du soir.” If Valéry left “Profusion du soir” in an abandoned state, it is possibly because he was no longer interested in working on the early poem after creating “Le Cimetière marin.”