Les Amours Research Articles

Disaster, Transgenerational Endurance and Duration in Béké Writing

This article interrogates the preoccupation with transgenerational endurance and duration apparent in béké representations of “natural” disaster. It begins with a brief overview of the earliest literary texts to emerge from the French Caribbean islands: Auguste Prévost de Sansac de Traversay’s Les Amours de Zémédare et Carina, et description de l’île de la Martinique (1806), and Jules Levilloux’s Les Créoles ou la vie aux Antilles (1835)—both of which feature catastrophes that claim the lives of plantation owners and pose a threat to their daughters, the bearers of béké culture. I then consider texts by béké women who lived in Martinique at the time of Mount Pelée’s eruption in 1902, an unprecedented disaster which eradicated almost half of the island’s white population: Clémence Cassius de Linval’s Cœurs Martiniquais (1919) and Élodie Dujon-Jourdain’s Le Sablier renversé (1912). In doing so, I trace a lineage of male and female béké authors who lament white losses in the aftermath of “natural” disaster and remain anxiously preoccupied with the caste’s longevity. Such an approach reveals how white Creoles have, across generations, taken to writing to promote, protect and preserve their culture. Anxieties around the need to preserve patriarchal order, family bloodlines, names and language consistently resurface in this intergenerational literary output which spans more than a century. As we shall see, some of these temporal concerns converge with Édouard Glissant’s observations on time and memory in the French Antilles, specifically his sedimentary poetics of duration.

Tristan Corbière and T. S. Eliot’s Salt-Encrusted Poetry

Abstract The name of Tristan Corbière (1847–1875) appears repeatedly in T. S. Eliot’s criticism, notably in his Clark and Turnbull lectures where Eliot characterized Corbière as a metaphysical poet and observed that he is a ‘finer poet, though a lesser intellect, than Laforgue’. Corbière’s influence on Eliot has long been recognized, but few critics acknowledge the particular resonance of his maritime poems. It is time to revisit Corbière’s crucial influence on Eliot, who drew on his writing for Poems (1920), and most significantly in the draft sea passages of The Waste Land. Identifying Corbière’s presence in the draft allows us to hear the French poet in the final version of ‘Death by Water’, and reveals that Eliot owes more to Corbière than has previously been acknowledged. I argue that Eliot was captivated by Corbière’s resolutely unsentimental depiction of maritime elements in Les Amours jaunes, and that this Breton poet offered Eliot a new voice.

Witness to the Revolution: Jean-Baptiste Louvet, 1760–1797

Jean-Baptiste Louvet, an unexpected hero of the French Revolution. Romantically disposed and an accomplished author, most known for Les Amours du Chevalier de Faublas (1787–90), this unlikely candidate became one of the bravest political characters of the 1790s. In this concise account, Bette W. Oliver, an independent scholar whose other works, such as Girondin Fugitives from the Terror, 1793–1794, demonstrate extensive research of the Girondin faction, presents a glimpse into the life of Louvet. The most recent work detailing his personal experiences since John Rivers’ Louvet: Revolutionist & Romance-Writer, Oliver restores this neglected revolutionary to the narrative of the French Revolution in a very readable account. Most striking about Oliver’s study of Louvet is the exquisite portrayal of his time as a fugitive, and the emphasis placed upon the unique relationship between revolutionary networking and survival. At the heart of Louvet’s story is his ability to draw strength from others, particularly his friends and beloved Lodoiska, in spite of his physical weaknesses. His loyalty, charm and unwavering principles, combined with his personal relationships, secured his survival during the Terror, permitting him to officially return to the National Convention in March 1795. Oliver’s careful placement of Louvet’s individual experiences within the broader frameworks of the Girondin network, his marriage and his ability to convince strangers to help him during his time as a fugitive, successfully capture the essence of the intimacy between personal and collective revolutionary identities and experiences. Without friendship and Lodoiska, it is highly doubtful that Louvet would have survived until 1797, when he succumbed to illness.

The "Impassable Morass" in Translation: Louisiana's Wetlands, Chateaubriand's Atala, and the Aesthetics of Colonial Ambivalence

In 1682, La Salle claimed for France all the countries watered by the Mississippi and named them Louisiana. Over the next century, as published accounts of this territory proliferated in the Atlantic world, it was described simultaneously as a "New Eden" and an "impassable morass," while colonial observers also speculated about its potential as a pastoral middle ground. Freely adapting such accounts into his own prose, Chateaubriand composed in Atala, ou les amours de deux savages dans le désert (1801) a likewise ambivalent picture of the region. This essay locates the novella at a narrative intersection of several of these descriptive accounts and argues that it provides a literary node for examining the hemispheric text-network that documented and translated Louisiana's settlement within an uneasy, yet increasingly coherent wetlands discourse. This process of translation is linguistic, as English and Spanish editions of Atala began circulating soon after its publication, but it is also the founding matter of the novella. While a landmark of French fiction, Atala's aesthetic appeal cannot be uncoupled from the environmental and topographical specificity of its source material, and in this light the novella is also an early American text in translation, one that is itself a melancholy document of the colonial project.

Environment and Identity in the Nineteenth-Century French Caribbean Novel: Traversay’s Les amours de Zémédare et Carina and Bergeaud’s Stella

ABSTRACTThis article compares Traversay’s Les amours de Zémédare et Carina (1806) and Bergeaud’s Stella (1859), which portray Caribbean landscapes altered by plantation economy. Examining these understudied novels through the lens of ecofeminism and eco-postcolonialism allows us to understand how Francophone colonial authors perceived the history of the land to be inseparable from socio-political history on both a regional and an international level, and also how the authors portray new Caribbean identities as dependent on landscape and the role of women.

De ciel en ciel: lecture de deux romans de Béroalde de Verville

In this paper I will deal with the sky, seen as a place of divinity and as a celestial space in two novels by the baroque writer Béroalde de Verville: Les Amours d’Æsionne (1597) and La Pucelle d’Orléans (1599). These novels have in common the themes of war and love. But they are different as regards the evocation of the celestial space, linked above all to the action of Fortune and Destiny in the first work, while, in the second, it is closely connected to the religious theme, perhaps because of its protagonist, which is a heroine in the Christian tradition. She is, however, transformed by Béroalde into a character in communication with “intelligences supérieures” or “puissances séparées” (that are not better identified), becoming a sort of syncretic figure. These entities are also present in Æsionne. One of the main characters in this novel is in fact the Flambor hermit who brings together in himself the power of a magician, of a quasi-deity in possession of a superior knowledge obtained through contact with the “puissances célestes”.

Mythological Indifference in Schelling and Nerval

Mythological Indifference in Schelling and Nerval

‘We Were All Strangers Here’: Time, Space, and Postcolonial Anxiety in Traversay’s Les Amours de Zémédare et Carina, et description de l’île de la Martinique

A sense of dislocation, unsettlement, and exile — what V. S. Naipaul calls the ‘enigma of arrival’ — was the destiny of all who migrated to the Antilles under the plantation regime, although this enigma was experienced in radically different ways by masters and slaves. While much scholarship exists on how ‘black’ writers engaged with space and time in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, earlier Antillean writers have generally not been interrogated in terms of their exploration of the chronotopes of island and plantation. For these writers, fiction was a medium through which to explore and accentuate the exotic: nineteenth-century novels routinely present idealized, mysterious, magical, or forbidding landscapes. Fiction also provided a powerful vehicle for domesticating the alien, through a pronounced recourse to (apparently) objective detail and quantifiable data. This article examines the first known, and almost entirely neglected, Martiniquan novel, Traversay’s Les Amours de Zémédare et Carina, a novel that exemplifies this tension between the urge to make strange and the urge to chart, define, and explain. In its treatment of time — in particular its use of prolepsis — and in the presentation of space — gardens, trees, geological formations — the novel exemplifies the ambivalence and anxiety so commonly identified with more recent postcolonial writing.

Le « silence bruyant » de Corbière

In "Les Amours jaunes", Corbière carries out a paradoxical promotion of silence. In fact, the writing features cacophonous poetics. However, the promotion of noise makes it possible to denounce the dysfunction of language. The deceptive experience of communication reveals a wish to implement another mode of emotional transmission. The poet distorts and mocks the romantic tradition to denounce the tricks of a language which is musical and full of imagery. On a quest to find authenticity, he deploys competing and conflicting semiotic layouts which break the textual unity. Renewing the lyrical pact, that fragmentation opens a vacant space that the reader can take over. A reception which is strengthened by the empathic relation between the subject and its recipient is replaced by a formulation based on the evocative power found outside the text. That is definitely a speech ‘addressed’ to the reader but the emotions go through the perception of silence. The formulation of these emotions is suspended, thus letting us read implicitly the mark of its absence. Often considered “unlyrical”, Corbière finds, in the fragile balance between hubbub and silence, an interval filled with the transmission of personal affects.

Comment l’esprit vient aux filles… et comment les garçons le perdent : Maladie d’amour, médecine et fiction romanesque au XVIIIe siècle

This article proposes a commentary on a little known novel, Les Amours du chevalier de Faublas, written between 1787 and 1790 by Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray. The objective is to show a rivalry that existed in the second half of the eighteenth century between the novel and medical treatises as ways to document knowledge of the human mind. Taking as a point of departure the problematic polysemy of the term “esprit” in the eighteenth century, this article reveals how Couvray’s novel engages in therapeutic writing. Its main hypothesis is that as a fictional narrative, the novel discusses the madness of love and the disturbances of the mind.

The Fight for the Nation in Arnold Antonin's Zombi Candidat à la Présidence … ou Les Amours d'un Zombi

Using feminist and Third Cinema theory as a lens, this article argues that, coming as it does from a postcolonial/neocolonial nation, though the film ostensibly focuses on the trials of the male protagonist, Zéphirin, Zombi Candidat à la Présidence … ou Les Amours d'un Zombi by Haitian filmmaker, Arnold Antonin, draws attention to the struggles of the female characters as representatives of the nation. The Haitian woman's struggle to resist objectifying onslaughts from both the natural and the supernatural world represents the struggle of the nation to survive similar onslaughts both from within the country and outside of it.

Eric Rohmer: Interviews

Arguably the leading French proponent of the ‘talking picture’, Éric Rohmer (1920–2010) was among those directors who most frequently rewarded journalists and critics with formal interviews — invariably with the proviso that all personal questions be left aside, to the sole end of illuminating the filmmaker's craft. This well-conceived collection spanning some four decades fills a significant gap in English-language documentation of Rohmer's storied career. Despite his staunch pro-Americanism at the head of Cahiers du cinéma from 1957 to 1963, Rohmer claimed to have ‘no knowledge of English at all’ (p. 49): whence Fiona Handyside's turn to French sources, translated here for the first time for ten of eighteen selections. Striking in these periodic snapshots is the interviewee's thematic range and rather stubborn constancy. Rohmer proves equally comfortable, and variously opinionated, discussing the drawbacks of neon versus incandescent lighting; the photogenic potential of the new urbanism or of riverbanks; the circular nature of art's progress through history; or the relation of aspect ratio to the expressive qualities of human gesture (1.33:1 is always best). Discontented by the professionalization of the French cinema industry after 1980 and seduced by emergent televisual practices, the self-described auteur emphasizes with increasing vigour the virtues of economy (reduced crews, limited takes) as a condition for artistic freedom. Although his tone is not overtly self-congratulatory, Rohmer cultivates the image of an outsider vindicated in his wish to attract a small but committed public of literate viewers by performing variations on a theme. If several interviews turn on individual releases (Conte de printemps, L'Anglaise et le duc), Handyside rightly favours those in which a broad exchange of ideas ensues. Historically symptomatic are a wonderfully dogged attempt by Beverly Walker, writing for Women in Film in 1973, to make Rohmer side ethically with the ‘temptresses’ of the Contes moraux (Maud, Chloé), and the non-committal discussion of ‘politics’ in L'Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque twenty years later. A good balance obtains between literary and creative concerns — for example, the status of screenplays and the exigencies of adapting such neglected classics as Perceval and Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon — and the nuts and bolts of cinematography, lovingly detailed in Priska Morrissey's long interview of 2004. The one surprise is the minor billing given to Cahiers du cinéma, from which Handyside culls but one of the nearly twenty interviews Rohmer granted that journal, and the corresponding overemphasis on the later years (three interviews co-conducted by Noël Herpe in 2004, 2007, and 2010 are featured). Handyside includes exhaustive credits for each film, down to the names of the carpenters, hair stylists, and car hire firms; trimming the twenty-two pages of filmography might have enabled one or two additions, perhaps from the 1960s, absent here. Fronted by a fleet thematic introduction, this judicious overview in its depiction of a creative modus operandi as punctilious as it is unique will prove essential for Rohmer enthusiasts and for students of French film after the New Wave.

Word into image: Maurice Denis, ‘Les Amours de Marthe’, and Amour

Maurice Denis is unusual as an artist known and respected as much for his writings as for his art. However, the scholarly attention paid to his work as a theoretician has overshadowed another facet of his writing: a section of his journal penned during his courtship of his first wife, which amounts to a symbolist prose poem and later served as the basis of his celebrated suite of lithographs, Amour. Although Amour is considered the acme of Denis's achievements as a printmaker, it remains understudied, with most examinations focusing on formal issues. Little attention has been paid to its negotiation of issues of word and image; still less to the original text. This essay examines Amour in the light of Denis's reading and writing of symbolist poetry, as well as his writings on the subject of illustration. Amour, the only illustrative work in his oeuvre for which he supplied both text and images, is perhaps the richest application of his theories. By considering Amour from several angles — its place in Denis's illustrative oeuvre; its relation to the narrative strategies and use of text employed by Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard and Félix Vallotton in their contemporaneous print albums; the symbolist interest in secret languages and the suppression of meaning; the concept of writing as art and Denis's response to the work and ideas of Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; and, finally, its status as a transitional work — the author hopes to demonstrate that Denis was a writer (and artist) of considerably more complexity than has been previously thought.

Les Romans de la Salpêtrière: réception d’une scénographie clinique: Jean-Martin Charcot dans l’imaginaire fin-de-siècle by Bertrand Marquer

others argue for a particular interpretation), there are sure to be interesting intersections with other topics (authors, movements, historical moments). Fans of decadence will rejoice. Texas A & M University Melanie Hawthorne MARQUER, BERTRAND. Les Romans de la Salpêtrière: réception d’une scénographie clinique: Jean-Martin Charcot dans l’imaginaire fin-de-siècle. Genève: Droz, 2008. ISBN 978-2600 -001153-2. Pp. 424. 49,65 a. Examining novels that run the gamut from the well known to the relatively obscure, from Realism to the Fantastic, Marquer traces Jean-Martin Charcot’s journey from eminent neurologist to cultural icon. Assuming that “la littérature, reflet de son époque, intègre les espoirs et les angoisses que la figure saillante du médecin peut engendrer” (12), he gauges Charcot’s influence on the popular imagination through the optic of the romans de la Salpêtrière, texts that integrate various facets of his work with hysterics. In the nineteenth century, hysteria was often linked to extremes of female sexuality—those suffering from the disorder were either over- or under-sexed (i.e., prostitutes or repressed virgins). Not surprisingly , then, novelists found “dans la vie mouvementée des hystériques une trame incitant à la fiction en transposant le savoir faire que la Salpêtrière entend rendre accessible” (160). At the same time, Marquer brings to light the way in which literature shaped Charcot’s clinical methods. As much a man of letters as a neurologist, Charcot understood the possibilities that literary devices offered the emerging discipline of psychiatry; his clinical writings on hysteria and other neurological disorders benefited from his creative use of narrative perspective. Endowed with a “parole pittoresque,” Charcot was “plus peintre qu’orateur,” (116) his often poetic descriptions more vivid and full of life than the photographic portraits of his patients that made him famous. Many of the novels in Marquer’s study target the unenlightened beliefs about hysteria that the anticlerical, republican Charcot sought to dispel, such as the association between hysteria and diabolical possession. He argues that Marie de Guersainte in Zola’s Lourdes exemplifies the Catholic Church’s view that hysterics were “des possédées corps et âme” (203) while the character of Geneviève in Jules Lermina’s Les Hystériques de Paris confirms that “la ruse principale de l’hystérie est, comme pour le Malin, de faire croire à sa non-existence, en substituant constamment à sa réalité la comédie d’un rôle qui pourtant le signale” (199). Nonetheless, both works implicitly credit Charcot with convincing clinicians and laypersons alike that hysteria was a medical, not a spiritual, concern, its treatment best undertaken by physicians instead of priests. What makes hysteria unique among psychological disorders is that the majority of its symptoms are external, manifesting in behaviors that are discernable even to the untrained eye. In part 3, “L’Esprit de Charcot: autopsie du regard clinique,” Marquer explains that Charcot’s “theater” was frequently filled not only with medical practitioners but with members of the general public. What is more, actors such as Sarah Bernhardt and novelists such as Léon Daudet visited La Salpêtrière seeking artistic inspiration in the “performances” provided by Charcot’s hysterics. In giving his patients a voice and medical practitioners a methodology, he presented artists and writers with “la structure d’un drame 596 FRENCH REVIEW 84.3 intérieur, et [a] offert un cadre dramatique à de nombreux récits exploitant la dimension proprement subjective d’une contemplation pathologique” (366). Marquer’s nearly encyclopedic knowledge of the romans de la Salpêtrière affords him a deep understanding of the place Charcot and his patients occupy in fin-de-siècle literature and culture. The more familiar novels Marquer examines —Zola’s Lourdes, Huysmans’s Là-bas—benefit from a fresh reading while the more esoteric ones—Léo Tréznik’s La Confession d’un fou, Jules Claretie’s Les Amours d’un interne—prove that the romans de la Salpêtrière were something of a literary phenomenon. Thanks to Marquer’s top-notch analysis and documentation , the reader comes away with insight into the myriad social changes...

Rohmer's Les amours d'Astre et de Celadon as a systematical synthesis for Bazin's space-based adaptation theory

This article expounds ric Rohmer's adaptation theory, both through his early writings on the subject (heavily influenced by Andr Bazin's filmic ontology) and some of the films he made after he became a director, that is, his cinematographic adaptations from other art forms. After this overview, a close analysis of his very last film (Les amours d'Astre et de Cladon) follows, because this film can easily be considered the ultimate manifesto for Rohmer's adaptation theory. According to it, cinema is more than a simple art: it is the art that bears the strongest connection with reality not because it can reproduce reality, but because it can grasp reality's spatial coordinates. This is why cinema should merge itself with the other arts: because it can transfigure an artistic language (simply put: an art form) into a purely spatial asset. Dealing with a different kind of art, cinema turns the sign into space.

Charles Burney and The Cunning-Man

Charles Burney and The Cunning-Man Elisabeth Le Guin It all starts in Naples before Charles Burney is even born. Opera is booming, and with it a host of auxiliary theatrical and musical practices. Comic theater is thriving; the composers of the day—Alessandro Scarlatti, Leonardo Leo, Leonardo Vinci, and a young fellow named Giovanni Pergolesi—produce full-length operas in Neapolitan dialect as well as droves of shorter comic works, intermezzi to be played between the acts of serious operas. It's as if the public cannot stand to be away too long from the mother wit, sarcasm, raunchiness, and latent social criticism of the comic mode that make it an uncomfortable business for official censors. Outside of the officially supported theaters, troupes of traveling players adopt and adapt these shorter works and take them on tour throughout Europe. One such group, under the guidance of Eustachio Bambini, comes to Paris in 1752 with an intermezzo by Pergolesi called La serva padrona (The Maid Made Mistress), which visits once again the old commedia trope of the sassy servant who tricks her master—in this case, into marrying her, thereby legitimizing her socially. The music, like that for all Neapolitan intermezzi, is deftly minimal: only a soprano and a bass singer, a mute actor, a couple of violins, and some supporting instruments are necessary to sketch the story in lively tones and acts. The Italian players and their music are appreciated in Paris, where the official opera tends toward ponderously magnificent tragedy, but they have been there for six months before their reception unleashes a controversy. All of a sudden, there are fights in opera houses; friendships are made and broken over the issue of the relative effectiveness of Italian and French musical styles. Everyone who can read and write—which in Paris at this time is a large number of people—gets in on the act, it seems; the storm of over sixty pamphlets that results is known as the Querelle des Bouffons, and it turns out to be one of the defining events in European musical history. Among the pamphleteers are most of the philosophes, and prominent among them is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who is a composer as well (something he [End Page 113] would not like to be so generally forgotten as it is nowadays). He steps outside the fusillade of rhetoric long enough to write Le Devin du village (The Village Soothsayer), which resembles Serva in being deftly minimal: an intermezzo-length piece for three singers and a very small orchestra, and a plot that draws from ancient archetype, this time pastoral—a shepherd and shepherdess of low social station. They are lovers but each vaguely longs for something better, and they are persuaded by a "sorcerer" (whose main magic appears to be common sense) to accept their lot, and in so doing find happiness, which they celebrate by dancing. Le Devin is significantly different from Serva in its musical style, which is a conscious attempt to fuse the best of the French and Italian idioms, and thus a direct contribution to the ongoing Querelle. The little piece is a success. In fact, it is one of the roaring successes of the entire history of opera. It is mounted and remounted, adapted and readapted, hundreds of times between its 1753 premiere at the Opéra and its last performances there in 1829. News of such success tends to travel rapidly. Within a year of its premiere, Le Devin has been reworked as an opéra-comique, Les amours de Bastien et Bastienne, by Charles-Simon Favart, with a mixture of pirated popular and operatic airs as musical material. In 1770 a translation of Favart's libretto into German comes to the attention of the violinist and composer Leopold Mozart, who, ever mindful of keeping the career of his prodigy son Wolfgang up to the minute, arranges for the twelve-year-old to compose new music for it. Meanwhile in 1765 the English actor David Garrick, visiting Paris, has seen Le Devin and been much impressed; upon returning to London, he prevails upon his friend Charles Burney, then a composer for the theater and an aspiring man...

The earliest literary descriptions of the gardens of Versailles

The first literary descriptions of the gardens of Versailles both appeared in 1669: Les Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon by Jean de La Fontaine and La Promenade de Versailles by Madeleine de Scudéry. These were followed by the ‘Explication’ of Claude Denis, written about 1675. But before entering into a detailed discussion of these works, a word must be said about the tradition of literary descriptions of actual gardens in France prior to Versailles.1

De Corbiere a Tristan. 'Les Amours jaunes': une quete de l'identite

Tristan Corbière is an important and original poet, author of the eclectic and ironic 1873 volume Les Amours jaunes. Troubled identity is a central theme and too often considered as a universal rather than rooted in the particular region which dominated Corbière's life. He was born in Brittany, where he lived for most of his short life, and many of his poems are set there or allude to Breton myths and culture. Interpretations of his Breton credentials vary wildly. For T.S. Eliot, Corbière's greatest poem is ‘La Rapsode foraine’, a spiritual evocation of a traditional Breton scene. Recent literary critics have tended to prefer the poems set in Paris for their self-referential parodic humour, which is partly a response to the alienating environment of the modern city. Many critics present the contrast between the so-called Breton poems and the Parisian ones as a metaphor in itself, seeing Brittany as redeeming the spiritual void of Paris. Pascal Rannou's book undertakes the important task of providing an informed Breton perspective on Corbière's verse and assessing the extent to which he is a Breton poet. It sets the verse in context by explaining that although Corbière was born in Brittany, his family were bourgeois and hostile to Breton culture. When Corbière became disenchanted with the dominant class, he expressed his disenchantment by embracing the marginalized culture of the region. Rannou's title encapsulates this trajectory; it is an allusion to Corbière's decision to adopt the mythical Celtic name of Tristan and reject the Christian name Édouard which he had inherited from his father, a ship captain and author of successful maritime novels. The strength of Rannou's work lies in his ability to distinguish between those aspects of Corbière's verse which are truly Breton and to pinpoint errors made by readers less familiar with the language. He exposes mistakes made by critics who have seen Breton allusions where there are none, whilst missing the true references. Most of this valuable material comes in the fifth section, which, as the author acknowledges, is the most original part of the book. However, in the other sections the argument is buried in lengthy sections of derivative and repetitive textual analysis of poems only loosely related to the theme of identity. The book was originally a thesis and remains a methodical and detailed survey in which the valuable insights sometimes get lost. The exhaustive approach yields stimulating passages, such as the discussion of how Brittany haunts the ostensibly Parisian poems, but much of the revolt discussed is not clearly linked to the central Breton question. Nevertheless, there is plenty here to convince us that Corbière is more of a Breton poet than is generally thought. Rannou's overall verdict is persuasive: Corbière was not saturated with Breton culture but he wrote Breton literature in French which dramatized the situation of the alienated writer.

De Corbière à Tristan: "Les amours jaunes," une quête de l'identité (review)

Reviewed by: De Corbière à Tristan: “Les Amours jaunes,” une quête de l’identité Heather Williams Rannou, Pascal . De Corbière à Tristan: “Les Amours jaunes,” une quête de l’identité. Paris: Champion, 2006. Pp. 560. ISBN 2745314823. Pascal Rannou's contention that Corbière's work must be understood as the result of cultural hybridity was already familiar to specialists from shorter pieces such as his contribution to Visages de Tristan Corbière, ed. Pascal Rannou (Morlaix: Skol Vreizh, 1995), but it seemed more a hypothesis than a definitive argument. Here, in contrast, we have the detailed, tightly structured and full argument in the form of an updated and revised version of his doctoral thesis of 1998 (initially published by Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, at Lille, 1999), and it has earned him the Prix Henri Régnier for 2007. "Cerner la 'bretonnité' éventuelle de notre auteur" (14) may seem a somewhat modest aim. Indeed to many it will seem a marginal, or even irrelevant one, as Corbière criticism tends to see the investigation of Breton culture as unnecessary for appreciating Corbière's originality, and views discussion of his Bretonness as sufficiently unimportant to be left in the ghetto of "Corbière criticism from and for Brittany." However, Rannou shows this attitude to be caught in the trap set by Verlaine over a century ago in Les Poètes maudits, when he claimed to prefer the Breton Corbière to the Parisian. Rannou exposes critics from Brittany, France and beyond as anti-Breton, or shows how they have misunderstood the (Francophone bourgeois) cultural milieu into which Corbière was born, overstated his knowledge of the Breton language and culture, or even been too pro-Breton. Having set the record straight, with a thorough état present, Rannou's contribution in this study is to demonstrate that [End Page 173] Corbière's encounter with Breton culture plays a key part in the multifaceted search for identity and voice that can be traced in Les Amours jaunes. Taking "la problématique identitaire" as its main issue and organizing principle, this book is highly ambitious both in the boldness of its vision and the thoroughness of its investigation. Rannou posits a tripartite movement, from what he calls "Corbière" (the author), to "Tristan," the "voix singulière et multiple" (134), that is the creation and projection of the author. The first stage in the progression from one to the other is a fragmentation of voice that is discernable in the interplay of various "responsables de la parole" (74), which he analyses in a selection of poems. The second is the rejection and denial of the culture of origin, that is the Francophone bourgeoisie of Morlaix (for this Rannou's analysis inventories clothes, food, education, the canon, Romantic poetry, religion, the conception of woman, versification, language in the sense of "bon usage"). This rejection leads to a "désarroi identitaire profond," and a sense of "aliénation" or exile, which Rannou then explores with the help of theorists Kristeva and Sélim Abou. The third stage is a desire for certainty, and the affirmation of an identity, which is where Bretonness comes in, as it offers an alternative culture, just as Bohemian Parisian culture posed an alternative. Breton culture is only one way in which "Tristan" the projection searches for an identity, in a culture "dont son origine familiale aurait dû lui interdire l'accès" (391), but discussion of this particular way is also the crux of the book: "la partie où nous pensons avoir le plus d'informations originales à donner" (391) states Rannou. His assessment of Corbière's likely exposure to Breton culture proves enlightening. An authoritative review of the Bretonisms in his language was long overdue, and sets us straight on calques, syntax, lexical exoticism, supposed "mistakes" and so forth. This provides a definitive correction of Verlaine's 'Breton bretonnant' to "bretonnant approximatif" (405), with Rannou concluding that Corbière had a "connaissance profonde," but not a "connaissance érudite" of Breton culture. More importantly Rannou has finally demolished the dichotomy between Paris and Brittany that was taken for granted by generations of critics, and was also attributable...

Les Poses de l'Incompris reprises: Corbière, Caricature, and Critical Illness

Though included in Paul Verlaine's Poètes maudits ("accursed poets"), Tristan Corbière is remembered as accursed not for his brassy innovations in style or for his audacity in challenging poetic convention, but for his poor health. He is said to have suffered from chronic swelling in the extremities, rheumatic fever, pneumonia, tuberculosis, deafness, blindness, sexual impotence, and neurosis, as well as being unattractive. Despite a startling paucity of proof to substantiate these conditions, the pathologized composite continues to haunt critical inquiry. The essay examines the historical construction of illness— how it became the bedrock of critical studies of Corbière, and why recent trends in scholarship have failed to shake that construction at its foundation. These findings make way for a reevaluation of Les Amours jaunes that reveals a brilliant parody of the very preconceived notions that, over time, have entwined to stereotype both Corbière and Les Amours jaunes.