Leaving Parnassus
296
Etudes de langue et littérature françaises
publiées sous la direction de
Seth Whidden
AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2007
Leaving Parnassus
© Philadelphia Museum of Art: The George W. Elkins Collection, 1936. Cover design: Pier Post.
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence’.
Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents - Prescriptions pour la permanence’.
ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2210-2
Contents
Acknowledgments 7
Introduction 9
Chapter One: The Dominance of Parnassian Poetry 17
Chapter Two: Verlaine’s Identities 45
Melancholia 52
The Love-Struck Subject 69
Verlaine’s Poetics of Indecision 75
After the Fall; or, The Subject, the Sacred, and the Profane 92
Favorite Positions 107
Toward an Aesthetic of Decay 115
Chapter Three: Rimbaud, Beyond Time and Space 119
“la poésie objective” 122
“le dérèglement de tous les sens” 125
Time and Space in Rimbaud’s Verse Poetry 131 Derniers vers: Pushing Limits, Stretching Out 138
On “Mémoire” 168
Time and Space, Illuminated 179
Hortense Found, in Time 183
Mouvement 194
Conclusion 207
Bibliography 211
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without exceptional gen-erosity from many; in the process of researching and writing it I have amassed a debt I will likely never fully repay. Parts of chapter two appeared in earlier versions in Revue Verlaine; similarly, earlier versions of portions of chapter three were published in Lire Rimbaud: Approches critiques; Parade sauvage; and Actes du colloque de Charleville de 2004. All are published here with permission and with the grateful thanks of the author.
Some friends and colleagues will find their names below; I hope that those whose names do not appear will understand that listing everyone on whom I have relied would create a book at least as long as the one you are currently reading (to say nothing of what that book’s index might look like).
Thanks to Jan Rigaud, whose friendship has helped to make going to the office a pleasure. Similar gratitude goes to Lee Abraham, Jean Lutes, Charles Muskiet, Silvia Nagy-Zekmi, Carlos Trujillo, and Béatrice Waggaman. It’s hard to imagine how one person could excel at simultaneously being a student, colleague, editor, mentor, and friend, but Jody Ross does it all, and with grace. The Dean’s office of Villanova’s College of Arts and Sciences granted me sabbatical leave to finish my manuscript; I shudder to think of what state it would still be in without that precious time away from the office. Christa Stevens and her colleagues at Rodopi have made working on this book so easy and enjoyable that I never grew sick of it. The cover artwork, Paul Cézanne’s stunning Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902-4), appears courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and was made available by generous funding from Villanova’s Vice President for Academic Affairs and the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
beginning, Marie-Chantal Killeen continues to be an infinite source of warmth, friendship, and inspiration. Steve Murphy always replies, often within seconds, with an endless supply of kindness and encouragement, and usually with more information than I can process; many thanks to him for his generosity of time, thoughts, and office space. Yann Frémy helped with part of the Rimbaud chapter; ours has become a great working partnership. Sharon Johnson and Richard Shryock offered wonderful home cooking and friendly advice at a crucial juncture in the Verlaine chapter. David Powell pored over an early version of this manuscript; thanks to his scrupulous attention to detail, this is a much better book. Each of them in their own way, Dennis Minahen, Adrianna Paliyenko, and Gretchen Schultz are models of the kind of scholar I constantly strive to be. On separate occasions, Cathy Nesci and Roger Little brightened entire months on end with extremely encouraging unsolicited comments following conference presentations; their kindness will never be forgotten. Finally, I would not be able to answer Bill Thomas’s patented exis-tential question without him bringing me here in the first place.
My parents and my sister have made it their business to follow a field of study about which they had previously known nothing; my success would be hollow if I couldn’t share it with them. Home away from home was provided, sometimes with no advance notice but always with a smile, by Chris and Cynthia Gorton; Hervé Hilaire; and Keith Martin and Eric de Gaudemont. College and grad school buddies, friends, and colleagues have all helped me enjoy my work in its proper context. Lastly, thanks to my good friends and neighbors on Cliff Island, Maine, the best place in the world to walk, think, read, write, swim, and fight fires.
My children Carter and Posey have done precious little to help this book along; to the contrary, they gave me every possible reason to put it aside and spend more time with them. I can only hope that they appreciate how hard it was to say no – those times that I was able to do so – and that they see this book as proof that I was making good use of my time away from them.
More than anyone else, this book is for R. Reed Whidden.
Introduction
At the heart of this study of nineteenth-century French poetry lie questions fundamental to the entire genre of poetry. Despite varying degrees of success for the epic and the dramatic, French poetry of the nineteenth century was largely dominated by the lyric. Originally the medium through which a poet expressed innermost emotions, the lyric became synonymous with its subjective point of view. As Hegel explained:
The content of a lyric work of art […] must be the individual person and therefore with all the details of his situation and concerns, as well as the way in which his mind with its subjective judgment, its joy, admiration, grief, and, in short, its feeling comes to consciousness of itself in and through such experiences.1
But an art form from a subject who sings (hence the “lyre” in “lyric”), and who sings a very personal song, has clear limits: namely, the emotional limits of its poet/source. Those who look for poetry to transcend individual experience and to speak to larger universals of the human condition voice disappointment similar to the one expressed by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy:
[...] we know the subjective artist only as a bad artist, and throughout the whole of art we demand above all else the conquest of the subjective, release from the “self,” and the silencing of all individual will and craving; indeed we cannot imagine a truly artistic creation, however unimportant, without objectivity, with-out a pure and disinterested contemplation. For this reason our aesthetic must first resolve the problem of how it is possible to consider the “lyric poet” as an artist: he who, in the experience of all ages, always says “I” and sings to us through the full chromatic scale of his passions and desires.2
1 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Volume II. Trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 1113.
In addition to the negative reaction that the effusiveness of tradi-tional subjective poetry generated, the inherent limitations of language to express accurately one’s emotions created a palpable, unavoidable tension. All writers felt this struggle, but few expressed it as elo-quently as nineteenth-century philosopher Henri Bergson: “[…] nous échouons à traduire entièrement ce que notre âme ressent: la pensée demeure incommensurable avec le langage” [we fail to translate entirely that which our soul feels: thought remains incommensurable with language].3 The questions that poets attempt to answer are the
same: How can one express oneself and express true feelings in and through a language that only limits expression according to subjective interpretations of each word? How can a person be truly understood, given these linguistic limitations? For Bergson, language is an endless series of compromises between language and the feelings and thoughts that it approximates:
[…] nos perceptions, sensations, émotions et idées se présentent sous un double aspect: l’un net, précis, mais impersonnel; l’autre confus, infiniment mobile, et inexprimable, parce que le langage ne saurait le saisir sans en fixer la mobilité, ni l’adapter à sa forme banale sans le faire tomber dans le domaine commun.4
[our perceptions, sensations, emotions, and ideas are presented in two ways: one clear, precise, but impersonal; the other confused, infinitely mobile, and inexpli-cable, because language can not seize it without fixing its mobility, nor adapt it to its banal form without watching it fall into the common domain.]
Bergson was hardly alone in his observations, and this line of investi-gation is by no means limited to speakers of French; as Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1926) wrote in his Letter of Lord Chandos:
[…] the language in which I might be able not only to write but also to think is […] a language none of whose words is known to me, a language in which inani-mate things speak to me and wherein I may one day justify myself before an unknown judge.5
3 Henri Bergson, Œuvres, ed. André Robinet (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1959), 109. Translations are mine unless indication to the contrary.
4 Bergson 85-86.
The poets who followed Romanticism thus inherited a poetic tradi-tion in which the role of the lyric subject and its language were questioned. This avenue of inquiry into what is commonly called the crisis of the lyric subject has been the focus of important critical studies in recent years.6 As Dominique Rabaté has explained, the lyric
subject is a constant source of tension, stuck in a state of flux and slipping back and forth between the “je” in the poet’s mind – repre-sented on the page – and the “je” as it is received by the reader:
Cette tension, qui ne se résout pas en une dialectique, fait ainsi porter l’accent sur l’instabilité de ce sujet: le sujet lyrique en question, c’est-à-dire ce sujet comme question, comme inquiétude, comme force de déplacement. Le sujet lyrique n’est donc pas à entendre comme un donné qui s’exprime selon un certain langage, la langue changée en chant, mais comme un procès, une quête d’identité.7
[This tension, which is not resolved in a dialectic, thus puts the emphasis on the instability of this subject, the lyric subject in question, that is to say this subject as question, as worry, as force of displacement. The lyric subject should thus not be understood as a given expressed according to a certain language, a language changed into chant, but as a process, a search for identity.]
Rather than trace the path of this tension throughout nineteenth-century French poetry, studies of the crisis of the lyric consider not only language’s inherent shortcomings but also the impact of those limitations on the stability of the lyric subject. It is useful to discuss just a few of these semiotic approaches for, while they are not the central focus of this study, they do inform our understanding of the complexity of the poetic subject’s expression in and through language. For Julia Kristeva, the lyric subject becomes “un individu éclaté, passage à la limite du moi: à la limite de la synthèse logico-syntaxique” [an exploded individual, a passage to the limits of self: to the limits of logic-syntactic synthesis].8
6 See Dominique Rabaté, ed. Figures du sujet lyrique; Dominique Rabaté, Joëlle de Sermet, and Yves Vadé, eds. Modernités 8: Le sujet lyrique en question; and Nathalie Watteyne, ed., Lyrisme et énonciation lyrique (see bibliography for complete information).
7 Dominique Rabaté, “Énonciation poétique, énonciation lyrique,” Figures du sujet lyrique, ed. Rabaté (Paris: Presses universitaires de France / “Perspectives littéraires,” 1996), 66; original emphasis.
This tug of war between the poetic subject and its language is particularly prominent in French poetry of the second half of the nineteenth century, as Julia Kristeva explains: “[…] la transformation du langage poétique à la fin du XIXe siècle consiste précisément en ce qu’il devient une pratique [d’une] dialectique du sujet dans le lan-gage” [the transformation of poetic language at the end of the nineteenthcentury consists precisely in that it becomes a practice of a dialectic of the subject in language].9 Kristeva’s reflections on poetic
language, while directed more at symbolist poetry, interest the present study because they are just as applicable to certain aspects of Verlaine’s and Rimbaud’s poetic projects. In the opposition between what she refers to as the symbolic and the semiotic, Kristeva defines two fields of expression: the first, representing everyday transparent linguistic expression which is of the order of the sign; the second is a poetic expression that surpasses the limits of the former and destabilizes language’s referential function. It is precisely language’s destabilizing potential that will interest us in this study; the poet troubles the existing order in exploiting in a new way the discursive figures that go beyond everyday language.10
Another useful approach to language comes from Henri Meschonnic, for whom the practices of signifying are as important as the signification itself (if not more so). Like Kristeva, he privileges aspects of language that are beyond the realm of the sign, and he gives particular emphasis to rhythm: “le primat du rythme, dans la signi-fiance, avec tout ce qu’elle comporte d’infralinguistic, de transsémiotique (débordant le signe), il me semble que ce sont ces éléments qui font la relation spécifique du rythme au poème” [the
9 Julia Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974), 81.
primacy of rhythm, in significance, with everything infralinguistic and transsemiotic (going beyond the sign) that it brings with it, it seems to me that these are the elements that make the specific relationship from rhythm to the poem].11 It is precisely in the rhythm of a poem, what
Meschonnic defines as “mouvement de la parole, mouvement du sujet dan son langage” [movement of speech, movement of the subject in its language]12, that we can find poetry’s specificity. However, instead of limiting rhythm to versification, Meschonnic goes further, consid-ering rhythm as an integral part of all literature, linking meaning and form in all kinds of linguistic expression. Of course, rhythm remains a key element of poetry because it is “ce qu’il y a du plus inaudible dans le règne du sens” [that which is the most inaudible in the reign of meaning]13 and because it retains the link between the lyric and its
oral tradition, central to Meschonnic’s writings.
Informed by these approaches to the crisis of the lyric subject in nineteenth-century French poetry, this study focuses on that crisis as it is played out, and as can be organized along thematic lines, in the works of two poets of the second half of the century: Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. Both poets react to Parnassian poetry, “ce culte de la rime riche” [this cult of rich rhyme]14, a consensus of poetic
approaches that grew out of the publication of the three volumes of Le parnasse contemporain. While Parnassian poetry was “un groupement jeune, l’expression d’une génération nouvelle” [a young grouping, the expression of a new generation]15, it was marked by a return to classical prosodic forms and in general a heightened respect for the rules that govern them:
Ce souci esthétique qui caractérise le Parnasse, se manifeste chez les nouveaux venus par un respect accru des ‘règles’ prosodiques et par un retour à des formes fixes qu’avaient abandonnées ou méprisées les romantiques, exceptés quelques ‘marginaux’ comme Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, Nerval.16
11 Meschonnic, “Qu’entendez-vous par oralité?” Langue française 56 (Dec. 1982), 10. 12 Meschonnic, “Qu’entendez-vous par oralité?” 20.
13 Meschonnic, La rime et la vie (Paris: Verdier, 1989), 20-21.
14 Pierre Martino, Parnasse et symbolisme (1850-1900), 3rd ed. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1930), 27.
15 Luc Decaunes, ed. La poésie parnassienne: De Gautier à Rimbaud (Paris: Seghers, 1977), 7.
[The aesthetic concern that characterized le Parnasse manifested itself in the works of the new arrivals in a heightened respect for prosodic “rules” and by a return to the fixed forms that the Romantics – with the exception of a few “marginals” like Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, and Nerval – had abandoned or despised.]
For both Verlaine and Rimbaud, the destabilized situation of the lyric subject is a direct response to and reaction against the traditional modes of subject/object relations that characterized Parnassian poetry.
This study’s three parts pursue the lines of questioning opened here. The first chapter, “The Dominance of Parnassian Poetry,” examines how Parnassian poetry was a direct refutation of the Romantic notion of the social utility of poetry as seen in Alphonse de Lamartine’s poems. In stating that “tout ce qui est utile est laid” [“all that is useful is ugly”]17, Théophile Gautier helped develop the Parnassian credo of l’art pour l’art [“art for art’s sake”] which considered the depiction of beauty in its many forms as the only valid aesthetic. Most studies of literary history give Parnassian poetry short shrift, especially once the advent of Symbolism arrived in 1886. However, this first chapter shows that, while Parnassian poetry has perhaps lost favor among twentieth-century scholars, it was a much more dominant presence than most scholars have traditionally accepted, and poets throughout the late 1880s and mid 1890s were still trying to shake the confines of le Parnasse. Even after Symbol-ism’s official manifesto, poets continued to respond to Parnassian poetry of earlier decades, suggesting that its dominant lyric subject enjoyed a long and enduring presence during much of the last forty years of the century. As a result, many poets of the 1860s and 1870s wrote in the shadow of this Mount Parnassus. For some, like the two studied here, their departure from Parnassian poetry marked the first step in a direction that would prove to be a fundamental aspect of their poetics, spanning their entire work. In this regard, the influence of
Parnassian poetry on Verlaine’s and Rimbaud’s poems can hardly be overstated.
“Verlaine’s Identities” shows the extent to which Verlaine’s poetry is based on a constantly evolving search for poetic subjectivity. In each collection, the search is redefined, and the lyric subject adopts a new role to play, each time framed within the context of a couple. After his Parnassian phase of the 1860s, he turns to writing the love struck subject addressing his beloved in Fêtes galantes and in La Bonne Chanson. No longer under the influence of Saturn as he was in his collection Poèmes saturniens, Verlaine’s poems in Romances sans paroles are greatly influenced by the Rimbaud’s poetry, and his poetic subject is on the brink of collapse. The devout and reborn poet of
Sagesse is in constant conversation with God, only to lead to the debauched subject of Verlaine’s final erotic collections, which explore the imaginable relationships of power and positions through the blurring of roles in sexual and poetic role-playing. Here, Verlaine’s subject’s search for self – what Arnaud Bernadet has termed Verlaine’s “theater of individuality”18 – is not biographical but rather
an aesthetic stance that is repeated, with slight variations, during each phase of Verlaine’s literary production. The tensions surrounding the lyric subject do not reflect Verlaine’s biography but are a poetic construct. A clear break from the tradition of Verlaine studies that has far too often muddied the boundaries between life and work not only permits his poems to be studied more seriously, without the hindrance of irrelevant biography, but also forges a clear and promising path for future studies into the role of the lyric subject in Verlaine’s poetry.
The third part, entitled “Rimbaud, Beyond Time and Space,” takes as its point of departure a famous passage from Rimbaud’s correspon-dence, in which he states that the poet arrives at the unknown by “le dérèglement de tous les sens” [the derangement of all the senses]. Here the French word “sens” is interpreted in all its myriad possibili-ties: senses, meanings, and directions, all definitions proposed by dictionaries of the period. In order to question lyric poetry as repre-sented by the Parnassian model, Rimbaud explodes not only the lyric subject’s categories of sensory perception but also the very markers that define the subject’s existence: namely, time and space.
ity is inextricably linked to the its temporal and spatial situation, and Emile Benveniste saw this link as manifesting itself in language as well:
Il est aisé de voir que le domaine de la subjectivité s’agrandit encore et doit s’annexer l’expression de la temporalité. Quel que soit le type de langue, on constate partout une certaine organisation linguistique de la notion de temps.19
[It is easy to see that the domain of subjectivity grows greater still and must in-clude the expression of temporality. In whatever kind of language it might be, we see that everywhere there is a certain linguistic organization of the notion of time.]
By troubling conventional notions of time, Rimbaud destabilizes human existence, always situated somewhere along the axis of time from the very onset of the cogito. When neat categories of past, present, and future become blurred, and history is no longer linear, how do we situate our stories? How do we situate ourselves? Such are the questions raised by Rimbaud’s refusal of a traditional and linear chronology. Readings of poems throughout his brief career situate several existing critical studies of Rimbaud’s bending of time in
Illuminations20 within a larger context and show how the crisis of the lyric subject that dominates French poetry of the second half of the century can be traced along the axes of time and space.
This study concludes by considering how the lyric subject in crisis in the poetry of Rimbaud and Verlaine is different from that of their Symbolist contemporaries, and how these issues of subjectivity influence the reception of their work by future generations of critics and scholars. While many other poets were able to break free from the Parnassian mold, it continued to define the developing Symbolist movement throughout the 1880s and 1890s, and as such it deserves more attention from critics for the major role it played in French poetry of the second half of the nineteenth century.
19 Emile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale. Vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard / Tel, 1966), 262.
Chapter One
The Dominance of Parnassian Poetry
Before considering the situation of Parnassian poetry – and perhaps its underestimated dominance – it is useful to recall the basic origins and themes for which le Parnasse came to be known. As the words
Parnasse and Parnassus suggest, the poetry grouped into the three volumes of Le Parnasse contemporain: recueil de vers nouveaux
inhabited Mount Parnassus, mythological home of the Muses and, more generally, of poetry. With this return to mythology came a neoclassical turn away from their own era: roughly 1860 to 1880. They similarly rejected the social utility of poetry that had come to characterize the 1830s and that had perhaps seen its symbolic apotheosis in 1848, when Romantic sensation Alphonse de Lamartine ascended to the head of the provisional government:
The overwhelming majority of writers in the 1830s and 1840s either endorsed and campaigned tirelessly in behalf of the various ideological aspirations of what became known as social Romanticism or quietly consented to the practice of popular literature for the sake of swift personal recognition and financial gain.21
In the preface to his 1835 Mademoiselle de Maupin, Théophile Gautier refuted poetry’s potential for social utility. Five years earlier, on 25 February 1830, Gautier had famously worn a red vest in support of his fellow Romantics and their ideals at the première of Victor Hugo’s play Hernani, thus casting himself as a major player in the “bataille d’Hernani” [battle of Hernani]. Hugo’s preface to Hernani
broke French theater’s reliance on tenets from the classical age; Gautier’s preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin marked a similar
departure from an earlier model, and his anti-utility stance has been paraphrased as l’art pour l’art ever since.
Of course, the relative proximity (just five years) of these two im-portant events, and Gautier’s involvement in each, shows the extent to which Romanticism and le Parnasse are closely aligned on some levels and yet significantly opposed on others. Indeed, “[…] opinions to this day are divided between a view of le Parnasse as a continua-tion of Romanticism and as a reaccontinua-tion against it.”22 This complexity
comes precisely from le Parnasse’s rich diversity and its lack of cohesion.23 Never a clearly-defined literary movement or school as
were Romanticism and, later, Symbolism (with its official manifesto), the Parnassian phenomenon was more a assemblage of poets whose work shared, to varying degrees, some common approaches to poetic content or form.24 In his landmark 1903 history of French poetry of
the last third of the nineteenth century, former Parnassian Catulle Mendès reflected on the lack of cohesion in this way:
Il n’y eut jamais, je le répète, ni dans l’intention, ni dans le fait, d’école parnas-sienne; nous n’avions rien de commun, sinon la jeunesse de l’espoir, la haine du débraillé poétique et la chimère de la beauté parfaite. Et cette beauté, chacun de nous la conçut selon son personnel idéal. Je ne pense pas qu’à aucune époque d’aucune littérature, des poètes du même moment aient été à la fois plus unis de cœur et plus différents par l’idée et par l’expression […] Au contraire, il se pro-duisit entre ceux qu’on appelle encore parnassiens […] une extraordinaire
22 Gretchen Schultz, The Gendered Lyric: Subjectivity and Difference in Nineteenth-Century French Poetry. Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures 17 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999), 84. For more on the numerous critical points of view, see Schultz, Gendered Lyric 287n2. Critics such as Schultz and Metzidakis have revisited this question, with the former concluding that le Parnasse is “[. . .] a rejection of Romanticism's perceived femininity and an attempt to reclaim poetry as a masculine domain” (Gendered Lyric 84). See Schultz’s “Part 2: Parnassian Impassiv-ity and Frozen FemininImpassiv-ity,” 81-167 in Gendered Lyric.
23 In his exhaustive study of this generation of poets, Luc Badesco details the origins of this nebulous assemblage, tracing the “quatre groupes distincts” [four distinct groups] that, together, made up much of the Parnassian group. See Luc Badesco, La génération poétique de 1860. La jeunesse des deux rives, 2 vols (Paris: Éditions A.-G. Nizet, 1971), 1:320. Other useful studies on the composition of the Parnassian group are Catulle Mendès, La légende du Parnasse contemporain (Brussels: August E. Brancart, 1884) and Robert F. Denommé, The French Parnassian Poets.
divergence d’inspiration, et leur œuvre qu’on incline à présenter comme collective est, au contraire, infiniment éparse et diverse.25
[There was never, I repeat, neither in intention nor in fact, a Parnassian school; we had nothing in common, except for a youthful hope, a hatred for poetic untidiness and the chimera of perfect beauty. And this beauty, each of us conceived of it according to his personal ideal. I do not think that at any epoch in any literature, poets of the same moment had been at once more united in spirit and more differ-ent in idea and expression […] On the contrary, there was among those that are still called Parnassian […] an extraordinary divergence of inspiration, and their work that we tend to present as collective is, on the contrary, infinitely dispersed and diverse.]
The collection’s very subtitle – “Recueil de vers nouveaux” [Collection of new verses] – bespeaks a loose assemblage more than a collection of poems built around a specific poetic or philosophical approach, as Luc Badesco has argued.26 And yet, despite what Mendès
calls their “extraordinaire divergence,” Parnassian poets did share certain undeniable traits; with their return to Parnassus in name came a turn to the past – le Parnasse is certainly a neoclassical movement – but once again in a slight deviation from the Romantics’ take on that same past: “Romantisme français et Parnasse se tournent également vers le passé, mais avec cela de différent, que le premier y voit des exemples à suivre dans l’avenir et pour l’avenir, et le second trouve là les temps d’harmonie qui sont définitivement passés” [French Romanticism and le Parnasse turned toward the past, but with this difference: that the former saw examples to follow in the future and
for the future, and the latter found moments of harmony, gone forever].27 In the preface to his Poëmes et Poésies (1855), Leconte de Lisle defended his neoclassical stance as an anti-modernity, stating “Je hais mon temps” [I hate my time period].28 He argued against
steam and electric telegraph, the most visible of the modern scenes
25 Catulle Mendès, Le mouvement poétique français de 1867 à 1900 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale / E. Fasquelle, 1903), 114.
26 Luc Badesco, La Génération poétique de 1860. La jeunesse des deux rives. 2 vols (Paris: Éditions A.-G. Nizet, 1971), 2:1305.
that inspired so much of impressionist painting, that movement that captured so well its present day:
J’ai beau tourner les yeux vers le passé, je ne l’aperçois qu’à travers la fumée de la houille, condensée en nuées épaisses dans le ciel; j’ai beau tendre l’oreille aux premiers chants de la poésie humaine, les seuls qui méritent d’être écoutés, je les entends à peine, grâce aux clameurs barbares du Pandémonium industriel. […] Les hymnes et les odes inspirées par la vapeur et la télégraphie électrique m’émeuvent médiocrement, et toutes ces périphrases didactiques, n’ayant rien de commun avec l’art, me démontreraient plutôt que les poètes deviennent d’heure en heure plus inutiles aux sociétés modernes.29
[Now matter how much I turn my eyes to the past, I can see it only through the coal smoke, condensed in thick clouds in the sky. No matter how much I open my ear to the first chants of human poetry, the only ones that deserve to be heard; I can hardly hear them, thanks to the barbaric clamor of industrial Pandemonium. […] the hymns and odes inspired by steam and the electric telegraph move me only slightly, and all these didactic periphrases, having nothing in common with art, show me instead that poets are becoming, with each passing hour, more and more useless in modern society.]
Leconte de Lisle’s hatred of the modernity that surrounded him – “Haine inoffensive, malheureusement, et qui n’attriste que moi” [Inoffensive hatred, unfortunately, that saddens only myself]30 – was
expressed partly in response to the reviews of his 1852 collection
Poëmes antiques, in the preface to which he had written: “Les émo-tions personnelles n’y ont laissé que peu de traces; les passions et les faits contemporains n’y apparaissent point” [Personal emotions left but few traces; passions and contemporary events do not appear at all]. As is equally evident in the title of 1862 collection Poésies barbares (expanded for an 1872 edition with a similar title, Poëmes barbares), Leconte de Lisle’s work led the Parnassian call for a return away from the modern civilizations towards antiquity, away from the trappings of nineteenth-century French society towards an earlier, mythological, barbaric past. Parnassian preference for a pre-modern moment is a refusal of rapidity of its changes, its ephemeral nature; as Gautier explained in “L’Art”:
29 Leconte de Lisle 126-27.
Tout passe. — L’art robuste Seul à l’éternité.
Le buste Survit à la cité.31
[Everything passes. — Robust art Alone is eternal.
The bust Outlives the city.]
Only beauty and art can stand the test of time, as classical master-pieces show; it is from this point that the Parnassian preference for statues developed: works of art that are nearly impervious to age:
Oui, l’œuvre sort plus belle D’une forme au travail
Rebelle,
Vers, marbre, onyx, émail.32
[Indeed, the results of art are more beautiful When they emerge from a substance
Rebellious to modeling, Verse, marble, onyx, enamel.]
French verse is hardly as resilient as marble, onyx, and enamel, but Gautier’s Émaux et camées (1852) made a strong case – strong enough to warrant the author’s poems appearing first in the first volume of Le Parnasse contemporain.
The Parnassians’ repudiations of certain Romantic tenets did not translate into a similar refutation of all Romantic poets; Victor Hugo remained a dominant and largely revered presence until his death in 1885 (despite – or, rather, in part because of – his exile during the Second Empire). In fact, Hugo’s Les Orientales (1829) paved the way for Parnassian poets’ formal experimentation.33 Their neoclassicism
also permitted the Parnassians to draw often from mythology and
31 Gautier, Émaux et camées, ed. Claudine Gothot-Mersch (Paris: Gallimard/Poésie, 1981), 149. For a more detailed analysis of this poem, see Peter Whyte, “‘L’art’ de Gautier: Genèse et sens,” 119-39 in Relire Théophile Gautier: Le plaisir du texte, ed. Freeman G. Henry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998); thanks to Stamos Metzidakis for bringing this article to my attention.
32 Gautier, Émaux et camées 148.
other legends, many of which were foreign; and the numerous archaic and foreign words and spellings throughout the poems of Le Parnasse contemporain are indicative of this predilection. In this way they were well in keeping with the popularity of the mid-century récits de voyage from Chateaubriand, Loti, Fromentin, Nerval, and even Gautier. Finally, countering the stereotypical sentimentalism of Romantic poetry, many poets of the Parnassian era emphasized a more objective poetic brand of description. Rather than the stoicism of some of the Romantics, the impassible Parnassians approached their lack of emotion from a scientific vantage point:
Doubtless impressed by some of the positivist currents dominating the 1850s and 1860s, the most prominent Parnassian poets supported an alliance with scientific methodology in order that the observation of external reality might be achieved with the calm deliberation of the scholar rather than with the enervating passion of the unpredictable lyricist.34
The notion of impassibility merits our attention and should be nu-anced, particularly to avoid the facile and oversimplified equating of the terms “Parnassian,” stoic,” and “impassible” that has become far too common. Although it is true that before they were called Parnas-sians, the poets in question here were called “Impassibles,” the label “impassible” was applied more by others – most often critics – than by the poets themselves. In addition, the very nature of the poets’ impassibility is itself more complicated than often believed. Once again, they mark an important distinction with the extreme impassi-bility of stoicism:
Cette impassibilité, chez ses meilleurs théoriciens et écrivains, n’était assimilable ni à l’impassibilité effective de l’auteur, ni surtout à l’impassibilité du lecteur, mais à un refus d’exprimer directement des émotions fortes en tant qu’auteurs, ce qui conduisait souvent, et notamment chez Baudelaire et Flaubert, au démantèle-ment de l’équivalence entre auteur et narrateur ou locuteur.35
[This impassibility, in the hands of the best theoreticians and writers, was compa-rable neither to the author’s actual impassibility nor certainly to the reader’s impassibility, but to a refusal to express directly strong emotions as authors, which often led, especially for Baudelaire and Flaubert, to the dismantling of the equivalence between author and narrator or interlocutor.]
34 Denommé 2.
The last years of le Parnasse – as well as the extent of their im-portance – similarly elude critics searching for quick and easy answers. A one-time participant in Le Parnasse contemporain (he contributed seven poems to the first volume and another five to the second one), Verlaine traced the end of Parnassian poetry to the Paris Commune, which at the very least delayed the publication of the second volume of Le Parnasse contemporain, dated 1869 but appear-ing in print after the Commune, in 1871. As he later wrote in “Du
Parnasse contemporain”:
Cette belle union dura jusqu’à la guerre de 70. Une catastrophe pouvait seule briser un faisceau si robuste ; engagements aux armées, gardes au rempart, divi-sions politiques nécessaires, – car le mot “fatal” n’est pas courageux, – un tas de choses sérieuses pour la patrie, puis pour la conscience, mit à néant, réveil brutal, le tout si bon, le rêve si beau, et parcella le cénacle en groupes, les groupes en couples, les couples en individualités, amies mais irrémédiablement antipathiques. Et ce fut bien la fin finale de ce Parnasse déjà célèbre et qui restera illustre.36
[This fine union lasted until the war of ‘70. Only a catastrophe could break this robust group; enlistments in the army, standing on ramparts, necessary political divisions – for the word “fatal” lacks courage – many serious things for the na-tion, and for our conscience, turned into nothingness, a brutal wake-up, everything so good, the dream so beautiful, and cut up the cenacle into groups, the groups into couples, the couples into individuals, friends but irremediably antipathetic.
And such was the final end of le Parnasse, which was already famous and which would stay illustrious.]
In his remarkable biography of Rimbaud, Jean-Jacques Lefrère points to a similar time period, but more specifically to the legendary meeting between the young poète maudit and Parnassian maître
Théodore de Banville in late 1871:
Dans les jours qui suivirent le dîner des Vilains-Bonshommes du 30 septembre, Verlaine continua à présenter à ses relations le “jeune prodige” qu’il se flattait d’avoir découvert. Il l’aurait ainsi conduit chez Banville, qui habitait à cette épo-que un appartement au premier étage de la maison du 10, rue de Buci, près de l’Odéon. De ce que l’affable et souriant maître a pu dire à Alcide Bava, on ne connaît que son jugement sur le Bateau ivre: il avait fait remarquer à l’auteur qu’il
eût été préférable de commencer son poème par “Je suis un bateau qui…” […] Conscient d’avoir donné àson Bateau ivre une vigueur qui le dispensait de tout préambule, Rimbaud ne répondit pas à la suggestion de Banville, mais, une fois dans la rue, il aurait déclaré à Verlaine dans un haussement d’épaules: “C’est un vieux con.” On peut dater de ce jour les débuts du Symbolisme et la décadence du Parnasse.37
[In the days following the dinner of the Vilains-Bonhommes on 30 September, Verlaine continued to introduce to his friends the “young prodigy” that he flat-tered himself with having discovered. He took him to see Banville, who lived in a first-floor apartment at 10, rue de Buci, near Odéon. Of whatever the affable and smiling master might have said to Alcide Bava [Rimbaud], we only know his opinion of “Le Bateau ivre”: he mentioned to the author that it would have been preferable to begin the poem with “I am a boat who…” […] Conscious of having given to his “Bateau ivre” a vigor that relived him from needing any preamble, Rimbaud didn’t respond to Banville’s suggestion, but, once in the street, he shrugged his shoulders and said to Verlaine: “He’s an asshole.” We can date the beginnings of Symbolism and the decadence of le Parnasse from that date.]
Not only was Parnassian poetry never a clearly defined movement or school, but it is passed over as inconsequential, even by some of the best critics of nineteenth-century French poetry. In his excellent study of the second half of the century, Laurence M. Porter intentionally skips over the period of Parnassian output, pushing it into what he calls “the chronological cracks between Romanticism and Symbol-ism.” For Porter, the “special labels” attributed to them “reduce them to oddities and remove them from serious consideration.”38 The present study seeks precisely to return Parnassians to serious consid-eration; as believable as Verlaine’s first-person accounts may be,39 it
would seem that the amorphous grouping that came together in the 1860s held sway over French poetry long after 1871. In addition to the publication of a third and final volume of Le Parnasse contemporain
in 1876, no major response to Parnassian poetry was made explicit throughout the 1870s, the first major challenge coming with the
37 Jean-Jacques Lefrère, Arthur Rimbaud (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 346-47.
38 Laurence M. Porter, The Crisis of French Symbolism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 4.
publication of the Symbolist manifesto in 1886.40 While this
publica-tion, like the first volume of Parnassian poetry, marked the first official manifestation of an approach to poetry that had already existed in an undefined form several years earlier, it was also charac-terized by a diversity that somewhat recalled that of le Parnasse: “Si l’on interrogeait séparément les poètes dits symbolistes, il est à croire qu’on obtiendrait autant de définitions qu’il y aurait d’individus interrogés” [If one asked separately each of the so-called Symbolist poets, there would probably be as many definitions as there would be individuals asked].41
Despite most critics’ insistence that Symbolism removed le Par-nasse from the French poetic landscape of the late 1880s and 1890s, there is evidence, from Symbolism itself, that suggests that Parnassian poetry continued to occupy a significant place. First, as Anatole France famously showed in his response to Jean Moréas’s manifesto defining Symbolism, the new official movement’s arrivalwas marked by a backlash at the obscurity that it championed. Symbolism’s detractors focused on the fact that, by virtue of its professed lack of clarity, it was difficult to determine precisely what the movement stood for: “Tout ce que je devine, c’est qu’on interdit au poète symboliste de rien décrire et de rien nommer. […] Il en résulte une obscurité profonde” [All I can figure out is that the Symbolist poet is forbidden from describing and naming anything. […] What results is profound obscurity].42 This obscurity was famously formulated by Stéphane Mallarmé in his response to Jules Huret’s interviews with contemporary poets in 1891:
40 This third volume is widely thought to be the least Parnassian of the three, as it lost some of its openness, tried to enforce certain ideological stances, and even rejected Mallarmé and others; see Jean-Paul Goujon, “Le quatrième Parnasse contemporain,”
Histoires littéraires 1.2 (April-June 2000), 25-34.
41 Adolphe Retté, La Plume 15 February 1892, qtd. in Bernard Delvaille, ed., La poésie symboliste (Paris: Seghers, 1971), 11-12. For Bernard Delvaille, Symbolism was easier to describe in terms of families and inherited traits, and he nevertheless concluded, “Bref, à chaque fois, toute tentative de définition semble se briser devant une inaliénable diversité” [In short, each time, every attempt at a definition seems to shatter in the face of an unalienable diversity] (Delvaille 13).
[…] les Parnassiens, eux, prennent la chose entièrement et la montrent; par là ils manquent de mystère; ils retirent aux esprits cette joie délicieuse de croire qu’ils créent. Nommer un objet, c’est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème qui est faite du bonheur de deviner peu à peu; le suggérer, voilà le rêve.43
[As for the Parnassians, they take the thing entirely and show it; in so doing they lack mystery; they take away readers’ delicious joy of imagining that they create.
Naming an object is removing three-quarters of the satisfaction of the poem, which comes from the pleasure of guessing little by little; suggesting it, that’s the dream.]
While Mallarmé’s words are often cited to show the extent of Sym-bolism’s aesthetic opposition to le Parnasse, elsewhere in the same interview with Huret he explains that, rather than being competitors, Symbolism and le Parnasse complement each other:
Les Parnassiens, amoureux du vers très strict, beau par lui-même, n’ont pas vu qu’il n’y avait là qu’un effort complétant le leur; effort qui avait en même temps cet avantage de créer une sorte d’interrègne du grand vers harassé et qui deman-dait grâce.44
[The Parnassians, lovers of very strict verse, beautiful in itself, didn’t see that there was [on the part of the Symbolists] an effort complementing their own: an effort that had at the same time the advantage of creating a sort of interregnum of the great verse, which was beleaguered and crying for mercy.]
In addition, there is the question of the length of the movement’s reign; just five short years after announcing the birth of Symbolism, Jean Moréas declares it to be dead, replacing it with “L’École ro-mane” and relegating it to nothing more than a “transitional phenomenon”: “Le Symbolisme, qui n’a eu que l’intérêt d’un phéno-mène de transition, est mort. Il nous faut une poésie française, vigoureuse et neuve, en un mot, ramenée à la pureté et à la dignité de son ascendance” [Symbolism, which had no more interest than that of a transitional phenomenon, is dead. We need a French poetry that is vigorous and new, in a word, brought back to the purity and the
43 Jules Huret, Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire, 1891, ed. Daniel Grojnowski (Paris: Thot, 1984), 77.
dignity of its ascendance].45 In addition, one of Symbolism’s great
strengths – a “movement based in idealism,” it offered an intellectual and lofty goal of “pure art”46 that appealed to the most highly edu-cated literati of the day – led to another opening for le Parnasse to remain in the public eye. Symbolism’s political connections made its manifesto a definite response to l’art pour l’art, reconsidering po-etry’s potential social impact: “Supporting pure art was not a way to retreat to the ivory tower and remove oneself from socio-political concerns. It became a way to voice one’s position about how society should be: a higher level of understanding and living needed to be cultivated that could be provided by Republican ideology.”47 And yet,
through its messages of obscurity and the idealized form of poetry it hoped to attain, Symbolism left unanswered the crisis of the lyric subject that had begun to take shape, in the works of Rimbaud, Verlaine, and others, during the 1870s, as the coming chapters will show. Mallarmé’s famous formulation in his essay entitled Crise de vers shifts the emphasis in his poetry from the lyric to the power of the words that make up the poem: “L’œuvre pure implique la dispari-tion élocutoire du poète, qui cède l’initiative aux mots” [The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who yields the initiative to words].48 Instead of a reflection on the crisis of the lyric subject that would then dominate his poetic project, the crisis in Mallarmé’s work lies on the surface of poetic language, complicating the physical and semantic values of words, syllables, and phonemes, so that “the poem is a form totally empty of ‘message’ in the usual sense, that is, without content – emotional, moral, or philosophical. At this point the poem is a construct that does nothing more than experi-ment, as it were, with the grammar of the text, or […] a construct that is nothing more than a calisthenics of words, a verbal setting-up
45 Jean Moréas, Le Figaro 14 September 1891, qtd. in Delvaille 35. “From this perspective, French Symbolism considered as a self-conscious literary movement would span only the period 1885-91” (Porter 14).
46 Richard Shryock, “Becoming Political: Symbolist Literature and the Third Republic.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 33.3-4 (Spring-Summer 2005), 388 and 390.
47 Shryock, “Becoming Political” 390.
exercise.”49 In this way, Mallarmé and many of his Symbolist
col-leagues sidestep the lyric; rather than explaining how the tension between lyric subject and object could or should be resolved, Sym-bolism proposes removing the former from the equation altogether, thus leaving open (until such time as they can show how it is done) the question of the situation of the lyric in the poetic text. In its attempts to solidify the subject/object dynamic, the general traits of Parnassian poetry created a rigid mold in which to work; this mold had to be followed or broken. The confines of this approach to poetry were great enough that the Symbolist manifesto is a direct response to
le Parnasse, but it didn’t eliminate overnight le Parnasse’s hold on poetics. In addition, Parnassian poetry remained popular, even sought-after; in his 1884 history of Le Parnasse contemporain, Catulle Mendès points out that it was “introuvable”; certainly its being out of print points to its drawing continued interest among readers.50
Further evidence supporting le Parnasse’s continued presence after the official declaration and organization of Symbolism comes from the consecration of leaders of le Parnasse during the 1880s and 1890s: they were elected to the Académie Française (Sully-Prudhomme in 1881, François Coppée in 1884, Leconte de Lisle in 1886) and ascended to dominant positions in well established and “official” literary journals of the day. This situation is summarized by Gustave Kahn, whose interview with Jules Huret provides yet another telling account of le Parnasse’s staying power:
Pour conclure, Monsieur, je crois que le symbolisme, non de par l’accord de ses représentants divers, mais de par leur lutte, remplacera le Parnasse, parce qu’il est l’Action: les meilleurs Parnassiens (ils sont rares) révisent leurs œuvres complètes et entrent très honorablement dans le passé.51
[To conclude, Sir, I believe that Symbolism, not by the agreement among its diverse representatives, but by its battle, will replace le Parnasse, because it is Action: the best Parnassians (rare in number) are revising their complete works and enter quite honorably into the past.]
49 Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1978), 13.
50La légende du Parnasse contemporain 233.
Kahn’s use of the future tense in the verb “remplacera” [will replace] is quite telling, especially in an interview given in 1891; it certainly suggests that le Parnasse is still around, although in Kahn’s opinion it is becoming somewhat staid and dated, and Symbolism will soon replace it. Unlike le Parnasse’s old-fashioned appearance, Symbolism represented a youth movement, relatively speaking, and Symbolist poets thus benefited from the social capital that an up-and-coming movement typically enjoys, particularly in contrast with an officially consecrated and sanctioned group such as the one the Parnassians had become. Despite the this opinion of le Parnasse as outdated, Huret’s series of interviews came out, as Rosemary Lloyd astutely points out, “en pleine bataille” [in the middle of the battle] between the Parnas-sians and Symbolists, “chaque parti étant avide de saisir l’occasion que l’enquête lui offrait de promouvoir ses propres croyances tout en dénigrant celles de l’autre” [each side avid to seize the occasion that the survey offered it to promote its own beliefs, all the while deni-grating the other’s].52 An example of such partisan vitriol comes from
art critic Gustave Geffroy (1855-1926), one of the first supporters of Cézanne, who told Huret the following: “Les symbolistes ne me paraissent pas dans le mouvement déterminant de notre siècle; ils représentent une réaction mort-née, ils s’occupent surtout de procédés, et ils affectent vraiment un trop extraordinaire dédain pour les conquêtes de l’esprit moderne” [The Symbolists don’t seem to me to be the determining movement of our century; they represent a still-born reaction, they are occupied primarily with procedures, and they bear an extraordinary disdain for the conquests of the modern mind].53
Such a fiercely fought battle can only take place, of course, if both approaches to poetry are still not only extant, but relevant and worth fighting about, and for.
As Jean-Paul Goujon has shown, the project for a fourth volume of
Le Parnasse contemporain pushed forward all the way to late 1892 or early 1893, and it was well underway in 1893.54 In that same year, François Coppée published his “La ballade pour défendre la doctrine des poètes Parnassiens” [Ballad to defend the Parnassian poets’
52 Rosemary Lloyd, “Théodore de Banville: La corde raide entre forme fixe et vers libre,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 104.3 (July-Sept. 2004), 655.
doctrine], with the poem bearing the following concluding quatrain:
Le symbolisme nous dévore! France, n’en ayez pas souci, Il est des fidèles encore; Les vieux Parnassiens sont ainsi55
[Symbolism devours us! France, don’t worry,
There are still faithful ones among us; The old Parnassians are that way]
As late as 1895, in the collage production Le Mur that developed out of the Cabaret des Quat’z’arts, Numa Blès published his “Poème en toc: Pour railler les poèmes en tic de Leconte de Lisle” [Poem in “toc”: To rail against the poems in “tic” by Leconte de Lisle], the subtitle an obvious play on words with Leconte de Lisle’s 1864 volume of Poèmes antiques.56 If le Parnasse was still a target of
derision well into the 1890s, it clearly remained in the forefront of people’s discussions of poetry, and thus it retained its influence.
These points all support this study’s claim: that the enduring pres-ence of Parnassian poetry lasted well into the 1880s and 1890s. While mere dates of publication (1866, 1869/71, 1876) would be enough to warrant a consideration of the extent of their influence in Rimbaud’s and Verlaine’s poetry, the fact that Parnassian poets continued to hold sway well after those dates suggests that their influence was greater than is typically attributed to them. As this study will continue to show, Rimbaud and Verlaine each fostered a great enough interest in Parnassian poetry to participate in it (or, in Rimbaud’s case, to wish to participate in it); each poet subsequently distanced himself from the
55Annales politiques et littéraires (5 March 1893), 152; as Goujon notes, the poem’s original title was “Ballade pour défendre la doctrine des poètes Parnassiens contre le Symbolisme qui nous dévore” (Ballad to defend the Parnassian poets’ doctrine against the Symbolism that devours us) (26n1).
group, at different times and in ways that were unique to each and at the same time central to each poet’s complete poetic output. For both poets, the departure from Parnassus begins with the treatment of the lyric subject which, as we have already discussed, was characterized in the Parnassian mold for its immobility, represented most often by a statue of a woman.
It should be noted that the Parnassian obsession with statues was not limited to poetry; the 1858 play Les filles de marbre presents Phidias, a Parnassian incarnation of Pygmalion, a sculptor who refuses to part with the statues he was commissioned to create:
Femmes ou statues, je vous aime; mon ciseau vous a donné une seconde vie; il vous a immortalisées. Tiens!… nous sommes bien seuls, Diogène, tu vas les voir. […] Qu’elles sont belles!… vois, Diogène, elles semblent vivre, oui, elles vivent, et mon génie qui les a crées n’a rien omis en elles…57
[Women or statues, I love you; my chisel has given you a second life; it has im-mortalized you. Here!… we are alone, Diogenes, you will see them. […] They are so beautiful!… You see, Diogenes, they seem to live, yes, they live, and my gen-ius, which created them, left nothing out…]
And when Diogenes agrees, that the statues are “de belles filles de marbre” [beautiful marble women] Phidias responds:
Non!… elles sont femmes et je les aime!… Oui, oui, travail de mes jours, rêves sans sommeil de mes nuits; je ne travaillerai plus, je briserai l’outil qui vous a fait naître; car vous êtes mes chefs-d’œuvre et j’ai laissé mon génie endormi à jamais dans chaque pli de vos robes blanches, dans chaque ligne de vos pales visages… Vivez!… aimez!… appartenez-moi comme je vous appartiens; on ne vous aura pas, on ne peut vous acheter, créations de l’artiste; non, non, on n’achète pas le génie, on n’achète pas l’amour.58
[No!… they are women and I love them!… Yes, yes, labor of my days, sleepless dreams of my nights; I will not work, I will break the tool that gave birth to you; for you are my masterworks and I have abandoned my genius sleeping forever in each fold of your white robes, in each line of your pale faces… Live!… Love!… Belong to me as I belong to you; no one will have you, no one may buy you, creations of the artist; no, no, one does not buy genius, one does not buy love.]
57 Théodore Barrière and Lambert Thiboust, Les filles de marbre (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1858), 4.
To be sure, French literature had long considered different themes of women; the specific contributions of Parnassian poetry reside in the stasis of statues of women, the result of the eternal nature of beauty and a desire on behalf of the lyric subject to immobilize the object so as to appreciate its form more deeply. A brief discussion of the female statues that were so central to Parnassian poetry will in turn shed light on the poetry that played such a major role in the poetic works of Rimbaud and Verlaine.
At first glance, it would seem that the Parnassian obsession with statues gives them the tools with which to attempt to come to grips with the immortality of woman’s beauty, a central element of all French lyric poetry. Continuing where Baudelaire leaves off in “La beauté” with the line, “Je suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre” [I am beautiful, oh mortals! Like a dream of stone]59 are
Parnassian notions of idealized beauty in poems such as Banville’s “Une femme de Rubens” from his collection Les exilés:
De tes formes parfaites, On verra les poëtes, Tourmentés par le mal
De l’idéal,
Attester par leurs charmes Le pouvoir de tes charmes Et l’immortalité
De ta beauté60
[From your perfect shapes, We will see the poets, Tormented by the evil Of the Ideal,
59 Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois, 2 vols, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1975-76), 1:21. This poem, with its other oft-cited (for its Parnassianism, among other reasons) line “Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes” [I hate any movement that moves lines] is the starting point for Natalie David-Weill’s excellent study of Gautier, Rêve de pierre: La Quête de la femme chez Théophile Gautier (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1989).
Attest by their charms To the power of your charms And the immortality
Of your beauty]
The Parnassian desire to preserve female beauty leads to a heightened appreciation for feminine forms as they are depicted in statues from antiquity; chiseled out of marble, their beauty is eternal. In addition, Parnassians’ preference for the permanence of classical forms extends beyond women’s immobility to the poet’s respect of classical prosodic forms: “the representation of the modern female body invades poetic inspiration without damaging the classical poetic frame, the fixed forms of French prosody.”61
Inspired by feminist criticism, studies have brought the Parnas-sians’ immobilization of the female form to task, detailing its inherent misogyny and showing the extent to which this misogyny comes from the classical tradition that the Parnassians inherit and attempt to emulate, going all the way back to Petrarch. Nancy J. Vickers goes even further, showing the extent to which literary criticism has perpetuated the topoi of, on the one hand, mobility, stability, and unity (masculine), and on the other, immobility, instability, and dismem-berment (feminine), referring to what she calls
[…] the centrality of a dialectic between the scattered and the gathered, the inte-grated and the disinteinte-grated. In defining Petrarch’s “poetics of fragmentation,” these same critics have consistently identified as its primary figure the particular-izing descriptive strategy adopted to evoke Laura. If the speaker’s “self” (his text, his “corpus”) is to be unified, it would seem to require the repetition of her dis-membered image.62
To be sure, Petrarch was hardly the first writer to display this treat-ment of women in his work; not a phenomenon unique to any one writer, epoch, or literary or critical tradition, it is a universal that stems from the male-dominated classical mold, perpetuated in each
61 Eliane F. Dalmolin, “Modernity Revisited: Past and Present Female Figures in the Poetry of Banville and Baudelaire,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 25.1-2 (Fall-Winter 1996-97), 83.
generation.63 As Vickers argues, the consequences of this model are
wide reaching:
The import of Petrarch’s description of Laura extends well beyond the confines of his own poetic age; in subsequent times, his portrayal of feminine beauty became authoritative. . . . In this sense his role in the history of the interpretation and the internalization of woman’s “image” by both men and women can scarcely be overemphasized […] Silencing Diana is an emblematic gesture; it suppresses a voice, and it casts generations of would-be Lauras in a role predicated upon the muteness of its player.64
The theme of female immobility was perpetuated elsewhere in nineteenth-century French literature: even by female authors, as George Sand’s realist novel Lélia (1833 and 1839) shows.
[Sand] links the “solidarités” which ground realist aesthetics to the notion of “solidité” through the association of petrification and the female body. The central conflict of [Lélia] is acted out between the petrifying male gaze of realism and the heroine’s resistance to the fixity and corporeal imprisonment which this entails.
Lélia can consequently be interpreted as constituting a self-conscious dismantling and refusal of the structures which underpin the realist text.65
Certainly, though, no one made the immobility of the female form a central theme of its aesthetics like the Parnassians did, and Gretchen Schultz convincingly demonstrates a “direct link between, on the one hand, Parnassian poetics of immobility and permanence and, on the other, a conservative ideology striving to contain femininity.”66
Just one of the numerous examples, the poem “La dame en pierre” by Charles Cros, demonstrates many of the aspects central to the Parnassian aesthetic. This poem was originally published in the
63 For another example, see Josette Féral’s study of Antigone, in which “Woman remains the instrument by which man attains unity, and she pays for it at the price of her own dispersion” (Josette Féral, “Antigone or The Irony of the Tribe,” Trans Alice Jardine and Tom Gora, Diacritics 8.3 [Fall 1978], 7).
64 Vickers 265, 278-79.
second volume of le Parnasse contemporain and then reprinted in Cros’s 1873 collection Le coffret de santal.67 Formally, “La dame en pierre” displays a rigidity and a respect for order, especially with the almost exaggerated nature of the rimes riches that link every other verse (“paupières” / “prières”; “sculptures” / “tentures” etc.). The opening movement sets the stage, complete with a female object characterized by her beauty, immobility, and lack of emotion, coupled of course with suggestions of death:
À Catulle Mendès.
Sur ce couvercle de tombeau Elle dort. L’obscur artiste Qui l’a sculptée a vu le beau
Sans rien de triste.
Joignant les mains, les yeux heureux Sous le voile des paupières, Elle a des rêves amoureux
Dans ses prières.
Sous les plis lourds du vêtement, La chair apparaît rebelle, N’oubliant pas complètement
Qu’elle était belle.
Ramenés sur le sein glacé
Les bras, en d’étroites manches, Rêvent l’amant qu’ont enlacé
Leurs chaînes blanches.
Le lévrier, comme autrefois Attendant une caresse, Dort blotti contre les pieds froids
De sa maîtresse.
[Upon the coffin cover
She sleeps. The obscure artist Who sculpted her saw beauty
Without anything sad.
