Word and Figure

WORD AND FIGURE WORD The Language of AND Nineteenth-Century French Poetry FIGURE Carol de Dobay Rifelj Ohio State University Press Columbus Copyright © 1987 by the Ohio State University Press. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rifelj, Carol de Dobay, 1946 Word and figure. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. French poetry—19th century—History and criticism. 2. French language—Figures of speech. 3. French language—Versification. I. Title. PQ433.R5 1987 841'.009 87-1504 ISBN 0-8142-0422-8 For Tony and Claire Contents Acknowledgments ix Preface xi 1 Poetic Language and the Language of Poetry 1 2 Hugo: Responding to "Réponse" 22 3 Banville the Funambulist 54 4 Baudelaire: De quelle boue? 68 5 Verlaine: Wringing the Neck of Eloquence 100 6 Rimbaud: Poetics and Politics 132 7 Conclusion 165 Notes 181 Bibliography 193 Index 201 Acknowledgments Preliminary work for this project was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and its writing was made possible by a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and leave from Middlebury College. I am very grateful to all these institutions for their support. An earlier version of parts I and II of Chapter 2 appeared in Romanic Review 70 (1979):346-56; a shorter version of Chapter 5 was published in Kentucky Romance Quarterly 19 (1982): 365-77; a small portion of Chapter 6, part II, appeared in Ro mance Notes 21 (1980): 1-4. I am grateful for permission to re print them here. I would like to express my gratitude to the late Paul de Man for his inspiration and counsel. Special thanks go to Christine Froula for sympathetic readings, helpful discussions, and un failing encouragement. I would also like to thank Nancy O'Connor and Ed Knox for their readings and advice, Tom Copeland for his technical assistance, and the readers and edi tors at Ohio State University Press for their helpful sugges tions. Preface Carl Sandburg once defined poetry as "the synthesis of hya cinths and biscuits"(x). But this is a post-nineteenth-century view of poetry. As an old word for flower, as a precious stone, or as the standard literary metonym for reddish-gold, hya cinthe is eminently "poetic." But biscuits? The fact that bis cuits have in fact become a part of poetry reflects the change in poetic diction that occurred during the nineteenth century, when the introduction of formerly banned terms into French poetry overthrew the conventional, restricted lexicon and created new possibilities for poetic expression. Asselineau wrote that "La fonction du romantisme fut la reconstitution, la création de la langue poétique et du style littéraire au XIXe siècle" (quoted in Brunot, "Les Romantiques," 309). French poetry was long overdue for such a reform: from the seven teenth to the early nineteenth centuries it had distinguished in a very rigid way between elevated and low diction, the noble and the roturier ("common"). Poetic conventions covered all the dimensions of what has been defined as linguistic register and prescribed both acceptable subjects of verse and the lan guage proper to express them. Those poets who breached this code, using colloquial or fa miliar words and even vulgar and slang expressions, were clearly writing in opposition to the accepted canon. Hugo claimed a revolutionary role for himself in the line beloved of literary critics and survey textbooks, "Je mis un bonnet rouge au vieux dictionnaire." But many of the other major poets of xii Preface the century had a part in the elaboration of this new poetic language. Gautier praised the richness and range of Baude- laire's language; Verlaine was described as a "grand marieur de mots, Tun de l'autre étonnés" (Dictionnaire néologigue); the task Rimbaud set himself was to "trouver une langue" ("La Lettre du voyant"). Of course, each poet developed this poetic program in a different mode, raising different questions about the use of unconventional language in a highly conven tional context. I will not attempt to provide a history of French poetic lan guage, a task already masterfully accomplished by the great historians of the French language. Nor will I try to determine influences among these poets. The object of my analysis is, rather, language in context. I will study the functioning of fa miliar discourse in individual poems, examine in what ways each poet exploited its stylistic potential, and show how the use of colloquial language can take on a figurative dimension. Intruding into the texture of poetry, familiar discourse be comes a kind of trope: it calls attention to the surface of the work, complicating and interfering with the poem's referen tial dimension. This renewal of poetic language and the figu rative uses it made possible are of primary importance both to these poets and to those who came after them, for whom hya cinths and biscuits, as well as the colloquial, slang, or technical terms referring to them, have become the stuff of poetry. WORD AND FIGURE ONE Poetic Language and the Language of Poetry All languages are rich in semantic and connotative possibili ties, and poetry makes the most of them. The major innovators of French poetic language in the nineteenth century had access to many different levels and varieties of discourse. The con cept of linguistic register, or language varieties, can help to define more precisely what kinds of language were available to them, to outline the poetic norms according to and against which they were writing, and to determine the rhetorical dimensions involved when they transgressed against those norms. /. Levels of Language When we read a passage like the second stanza of Baudelaire's "L'Imprévu" we are struck by the way it juxtaposes different styles: Célimène roucoule et dit: "Mon coeur est bon, Et naturellement, Dieu m'a faite très-belle." —Son coeur! coeur racorni, fumé comme un jambon, Recuit à la flamme éternelle! But to determine just what brings this incongruity about and what its effects are requires a closer examination. We recog nize elements from different categories and different levels of 2 WORD AND FIGURE what linguists have termed "language varieties" or "contextual language."1 Flamme éternelle belongs to the language of ser mons and the Bible; whereas flamme in the sense of "love" or "passion" belongs to the vocabulary of classical French poetry, a sublanguage I will be describing later on. On the other hand, recuit and jambon fumé belong to the language of cooking, a subject area (despite Sandburg's definition) eliminated from such poetry. These culinary terms lead us to read flamme as a cooking fire as well. The phrase Flamme éternelle, belonging to the langue soutenue of sermons and dramatic and lyric po etry, is associated with written language and formal address. Très-belle is also a marker of formality, since the hyphenated form, though correct, was falling into disuse at the time (ac cording to Iittré and Larousse). On the other hand, "Et natu rellement" is the kind of colloquial expression we associate with spoken discourse. It appears in what is indeed an example of reported speech; but roucouler in the sense of "sweet talk" was classified as a familiar term by contemporary dictionaries, and it is the speaker of the poem who uses it. Baudelaire makes much of these various levels and semantic fields. For instance, he plays on the root come in racorni to recall the devil, in opposition to "Dieu m'a faite ... " in the preceding line. Beyond these multiple resonances is the allusion to Célimène from "Le Misanthrope," motivating both the direct quotation and, to a certain extent, the use of familiar language, since comedy was traditionally a less formal genre. I have already called on several different categories in dis cussing these lines: semantic fields, levels of formality, differ ences between spoken and written discourse, genre considera tions, and the question of intertextuality. It would be well to sort some of them out, determine their interrelations, and give an idea of the connotations they can carry. Linguists, especially in Britain, have recently given atten tion to the different ways the speakers of a language can ex press themselves. People observe not only syntactical and se mantic rules, but also rules relating to the context or situation of their utterances. Unlike geographical dialects or temporal dialects (e.g., Old French, modern French), the relevant di mensions here are those Gregory has termed "diatypes," the Poetic Language and the Language of Poetry 3 possibilities within a particular individual's speech.2 We would expect great variation, for example, in the utterances of a physician if she were writing an article for a medical journal, comforting a child patient, or making a grocery list. Linguists have established different systems of classifications to describe these variations, sometimes using different terms to refer to the same categories. I will follow the summarizing work of Gregory and Carroll's Language and Situation, which de scribes contextual language in three general, overlapping ways.3 First, the dimension of field comprises the linguistic fea tures usually correlated with an extralinguistic situation, baseball, say, or the weather. Although subject matter is the most important element here, what we call "subject matter" can be described more precisely. The general field of baseball is treated very differently when one is discussing a game in a bar, making a bet, announcing the batting order to the team, or swearing at the umpire. The second dimension, mode, refers to the medium of utterance: a radio sportscast, a newspaper column, a conversation between friends, and the printed pro gram are all modes in which aspects of baseball can be dis cussed or presented.

Load more