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PRE-TEXT TEXT CONTEXT Essays on Nineteenth-Century French Literature Edited by Robert L. Mitchell OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS : COLUMBUS Copyright © 1980 by the Ohio State University Press All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: Pre-text, text, context. Includes index. 1. French literature—19th century—History and criticism—Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Mitchell, Robert L., 1944- PQ282.P87 840'.9 80-11801 ISBN 0-8142-0305-1 CONTENTS Preface ix Editor's Note xi PART ONE : PRE-TEXT SUZANNE NASH Transfiguring Disfiguration in L'Homme qui rit: A Study of Hugo's Use of the Grotesque 3 BETTINA L. KNAPP La Fee aux miettes: An Alchemical Hieros Gamos 15 WILL L. McLENDON The Grotesque in Jean Lorrain's New Byzantium: Le Vice errant 25 CATHERINE LOWE The Roman tragique and the Discourse of Nervalian Mad ness 37 ANDREW J. McKENNA Baudelaire and Nietzsche: Squaring the Circle of Madness 53 NANCY K. MILLER "Tristes Triangles": Le Lys dans la vallee and Its Intertext 67 GODELIEVE MERCKEN-SPAAS Death and the Romantic Heroine: Chateaubriand and de Stael 79 vi Contents MARTHA N. MOSS Don Juan and His Fallen Angel: Images of Women in the Literature of the 1830s 89 PART TWO : TEXT ALBERT SONNENFELD Ruminations on Stendhal's Epigraphs 99 PAULINE WAHL Stendhal's Lamiel: Observations on Pygmalionism 113 ENID RHODES PESCHEL Love, the Intoxicating Mirage: Baudelaire's Quest for Com munion in "Le Vin des amants," "La Chevelure," and "Har monie du soir" 121 NATHANIEL WING The Danaides' Vessel: On Reading Baudelaire's Allegories 135 ROSS CHAMBERS Seeing and Saying in Baudelaire's "Les Aveugles" 147 LAURENCE M. PORTER Artistic Self-Consciousness in Rimbaud's Poetry 159 VIRGINIA A. LA CHARITE Mallarme and the Plastic Circumstances of the Text 173 PETER W. NESSELROTH Lautreamont's Plagiarisms; or, The Poetization of Prose Texts 185 PART THREE : CONTEXT DIANA FESTA-McCORMICK The Myth of the Poites Maudits 199 Contents vii URSULA FRANKLIN Mallarml's Living Metaphor: Valery's Athikte and Rilke's "Spanish Dancer" 217 PAULA GILBERT LEWIS Emile Nelligan, Poete Maudit of Quebec: The Pervasion of Black and White Coldness 229 RALPH ALBANESE, JR. The Moliere Myth in Nineteenth-Century France 239 CHRISTIE v. MCDONALD Dialogue and Intertextuality: The Posterity of Diderot's Neveu de Rameau 257 GERALD J. PRINCE On Attributive Discourse in Madame Bovary 269 MICHAEL ISSACHAROFF Ubu and the Signs of the Theater 277 Notes on the Contributors 285 Index 289 Preface The nineteenth century in France is a nightmare for literary historians. Their thirst for categorization is more easily quenched by prior centuries, which seem to be unified by cohesive preoccupations and goals: Renaissance, Classical Age or le grand siecle, and Enlightenment or Age of Ideas, for example, become appropriate appellations. But the protean nineteenth century—to which no such handy tag has been, or can be, appended—is beyond all else distinguished by extreme heterogeneity and eclecticism. It is a period of chaotic social and political instability, of scientific and industrial revolution. In literature it is, fundamentally, a time not of solidarity but of unprecedented individualism, when sparks of genius fly at the periphery of this social flux. Collective social consciousness yields to isolated probings into the uncharted recesses of the human mind and soul, and revolt against standardized (even valorized) literary practice—e.g., the slow undermining of the "accepted" literary lexicon and of the qualities of unity, clarity, and reason; the overhauling of the traditional system of prosody—proliferates. If such divergence obfuscates potential coherence in nineteenth-century French literature, it can itself be recognized as the "organizing" element of this literary epoch. It is precisely this paradox that the present volume of essays intends to reflect. The studies to follow are not unified, as orthodoxy might dictate, by a common approach or theme or author, nor are they presented as festschrift or anniversary celebration. Rather, they are marked, as was the century that is their context, by divergence and variety, not harmony and consistency. Thematically, they examine such varied topics as pygmalion ism, allegory, mirage, self-consciousness, plagiarism, madness, feminism, the grotesque, and dance. Critical approach further reflects a collective heter ogeneity, as the volume includes discussions that are, in turn, thematic, intertextual, historical, stylistic, psychocritical, sociological, and semiotic. Furthermore, these essays consider virtually all the important writers of a prolific nineteenth-century France, with the exception of some of the romantic poets, Corbiere, Laforgue, and Zola. Eclecticism is also reflected in the basic conception of the volume, which x Preface approaches the process of writing from three discrete directions: before (pre text), during (text), and around (context). The essays in part 1 are essentially thematic studies that illuminate three provocative and vital areas of nineteenth- century thought—the fantastic and the grotesque (Nash, Knapp, McLendon), madness (Lowe, McKenna), and feminism (Miller, Mercken-Spaas, Moss). These themes are presented as "pre-text" in the sense that they inform either authorial motivation or the orientation of a given text prior to the actual scriptural activity. Part 2 includes essays that approach the process of writing from the perspective of the text itself. These studies—basically stylistic in nature—examine texts by Stendhal (Sonnenfeld, Wahl) and Baudelaire (Pe schel, Wing, Chambers), a novelist and a poet who were perhaps the two staunchest defenders and living embodiments of individual genius, which so characterized the century. Also included in this part of the volume are studies of three poetes maudits who were models of aesthetic individualism: Rimbaud (Porter), Mallarme (La Charite), and Lautreamont (Nesselroth). Part 3 ("Con text") is concerned with elements—spatial, temporal, and linguistic—that sur round the literary text. The first three essays (Festa-McCormick, Franklin, Lewis) consider the relationship between texts written outside of France (spe cifically, in England, Italy, Germany, and Canada) and the French literary tradition. Next, the problem of "anteriority" is confronted: focus on nineteenth- century texts or reactions as they relate to texts of the seventeenth (Alba nese) and eighteenth (McDonald) centuries helps to elucidate the temporal (historical) contexts of the former. Finally, the literary text in relation to the more general problem of language as a system of verbal signs forms the context for discussions of Flaubert (Prince) and Jarry (Issacharoff) that conclude the volume. In his "Epigraphe pour un livre condamne," Baudelaire admonished the reader to discard his copy of Les Fleurs du mal, which would be meaningless reading unless he has "learned his rhetoric from Satan." Unlike that reader, the reader of the present volume—dix-neuviemiste or not—needs no such special ized training or inflexible orientation to appreciate, or find meaning in, its contents. And, whereas Baudelaire's ultimatum reflects a narrow field of vision, this book offers a global view of therichness and diversity that pervaded the literature of the past century in France. Editor's Note Scholarly interest in nineteenth-century French literature on this side of the Atlantic has grown tremendously during the past decade. Evidence of this are the journal Nineteenth-Century French Studies—founded and edited by Profes sor T. H. Goetz (State University College, Fredonia, N.Y.)—which first appeared in 1972; and an annual colloquium on nineteenth-century French studies, which has been held since 1975 on various American college and university campuses and which has attracted a broad range, and a growing number, of scholars of all ages and critical persuasions specializing in French literature (and related areas) of the nineteenth century. It was my pleasure to organize and host the third of these annual colloquia at the Ohio State Univer sity in October of 1977: the great majority of the essays in the present volume are expanded or revised versions of papers presented at that conference. It is my hope that all of the essays to follow reflect the quality and diversity of re search that is being done today in this field and are a collective reminder that nineteenth-century French studies are alive and well and living in prosperity. PART ONE : PRE-TEXT Transfiguring Disfiguration in L'Homme qui rit: A Study of Hugo's Use of the Grotesque SUZANNE NASH The most coherently developed study of the function of the grotesque in Hugo's work has been presented by Anne Ubersfeld in Le Roi et le bouffon.l She relies for her analysis of dialogue in Hugo's theater on Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism as he elaborates it in his books on Dostoevsky and Rabelais.2 The brilliance and ingenuity of Ubersfeld's textual analysis are undeniable, and her application of Bakhtin's theories to Hugo's work is, in my view, entirely justified; but it seems to me that her conclusions regarding Hugolian discourse generally invite close scrutiny. Ubersfeld seems to read both Bakhtin and Hugo through the decentering prism of Derrida and Lacan, causing her to depart dramatically from Bakhtin's vision of the grotesque as a fundamentally vivify ing and revolutionary form to reach the conclusion that Hugo's theater enacts the absolute breakdown of communication. For her it is a stage of empty words ("la vaine parole"), where history is affirmed as a locus of derision. Ubersfeld's conclusions clearly place her on the side of the moderns as opposed to the ancients in the current critical controversy that has begun to affect Hugo studies in a very fundamental way. Hers is a powerful deconstruc tive reading of Hugo's work that seeks to demonstrate how the formal organiza tion of dramatic tirades subverts Hugo's professed humanitarian and liberal ideology, which, on the level of theme, places God, history, and progress at the center of its discourse.