The Rhythmicity of the French Prose Poem

The Rhythmicity of the French Prose Poem Clive Scott THE TASK OF DEFINING THE PROSE POEM has generated much critical anxiety. The transformation of the medium (poetic prose) into the genre (prose poem) seems to require sharp differentiations, and the clearing of a space around the form. But it is doubtful whether the terms of differentiation most often resorted to—brevity, intensity, autonomy (e.g., Chapelan, Bernard, Decaunes)1—can be applied with sufficient persuasiveness , or whether such a differentiation is historically justified.2 Brevity, for example, has perhaps turned out to be a token criterion, a conventional sign whose validity has never been really tested. At what point exactly does a prose poem become too long? Did Maurice de Guérin manage to restrain himself sufficiently to be saved, or does his work drift into some generical no man's land? What disqualifying sea-change, at what limit, does the structure suddenly undergo? Is there then no such thing as the epic prose poem (Chateaubriand's translation of Paradise Lost, Lautréamont 's Les Chants de Maldoror)! Even Yves Vadé ends by paying only lip-service to brevity as a formal criterion, and turns to an alternative, semantics-based principe de tension , as guarantor of the coherence of the genre; but this is no more compelling: Un poème en prose court toujours le risque de se diluer dans une page de prose quelconque. Il semble qu'il ne puisse être considéré comme poème en l'absence d'un principe qui en assure la cohérence. Certes le poème en prose doit être bref, on l'a dit. Mais cette condition nécessaire n'est pas suffisante pour assurer ce que les commentateurs nomment d'un commun accord la tension poétique.' The "commun accord" makes the argument a little too easy; the fact is that tension, significant for the prose poem if only on account of its unresolved formal status, has enjoyed a privileged critical standing as an organisational principle, in verse as much as in prose, ever since New Criticism. For a literary critical Darwinist of my persuasion, the very survival of the prose poem lies in its refusal to locate itself on a generical map, which would absorb it into some food chain of formal characteristics and expressivity. For the purposes of defining the prose poem in general, and the rhythmicity of the prose poem in particular, we may be better advised to worry less about what it is than about the frame of mind in which it is most profitably read. In describing what takes place when a verse-poem becomes a prose poem, it is usual to propose that (a) rhyme and (b) "mesure" are removed (where 26 Spring 1999 Scott "mesure" refers to those rhythmic measures whose constitution and combinations are more or less predicted by a presiding isosyllabic principle). For Roger Little,4 the disappearance of rhyme has to do with the shift from oral/aural to visual transmission, while rhythm is already less central to French verse than to English. With both these views we shall have cause to disagree. (a) The removal of rhyme reminds us that the prose poem has little interest in mnemonicity: it remembers but does not ask to be remembered. Those gestures of effacement that we encounter in the Rimbaldian prose poem, Fargue's suspension points, or other kinds of dispersive closure (dissonance, irony, metalinguistic turns) are all perhaps expressions of this characteristic. Mnemonicity is ultimately about textual survival, that is, the survival of a text in its non-interpreted, or pre-interpreted, integrity. This is perhaps to argue that the prose poem is under greater readerly pressure than the verse-poem, the pressure of comprehension, of consumption, the pressure to be entirely coincident with itself in the moment of reading. What this last might mean is the reader's attempting to confine, to close down, the prose poem's ontological flexibility, which its rhythmicity is there to protect. Rhythm's presence as metre in the verse-poem is pre-interpretative; it preserves the existence of the verse-poem and at the same time maps out/stakes out/measures out its textuality ; the...