Culture et sexualité dans la poésie d’Apollinaire (review)

In the second issue of Studi Francesi (May–August 1957), a young Antoine Fongaro, assessing the current state of Apollinaire studies, regretted that some of the poet’s sexier writings had been excluded from the editions of his work: ‘Il y a pourtant dans ce côté tranquillement obscène de l’oeuvre d’Apollinaire un aspect fondamental du génie du poète’. He furthermore suggested, quite rightly, that it was the time for ‘sentimental’ or biographical readings to be superceded by ‘une véritable étude esthétique de la poésie d’Apollinaire’. A lifetime later, Fongaro has brought together over 30 of his own articles on Apollinaire, not including the one cited above, published between 1957 and 2005 in France and Italy. They primarily address issues of sexuality and intertextuality (a term he avoids) in Apollinaire’s poetry, confirming the twin-track approach already apparent in an earlier version of this anthology (Apollinaire poète: Exégèses et discussions 1957 –1987), published by the Presses Universitaires du Mirail-Toulouse in 1988. Most of the articles are devoted to Alcools, reflecting that volume’s perceived primacy over Calligrammes until a decade or so ago. One of Fongaro’s major contributions has been his ability to identify in Apollinaire’s poems multifarious patterns and echoes from traditional and popular songs. As Fongaro points out, the young soldiers and medics who invented many of those bawdy lyrics plied their trade in the company of death: their loud obscenity was a defence against the power of Thanatos. In Apollinaire’s poetry, that same obscenity, often coded in slang or puns, implied in the hint of a song or in the shapes of a calligramme, often serves a similar purpose, complementing and countering his sensitivity to transience and loss. Fongaro also demonstrates how solidly Apollinaire’s writing was grounded in his close acquaintance with nineteenth-century poets, from Hugo to Maeterlinck, but also with Virgil and Shakespeare, the Bible, popular superstitions and cosmopolitan folklore. Apollinaire’s innovative originality is here never in question, but Fongaro’s articles cumulatively confirm that the poet had a boulimic cultural appetite and a prodigious memory, prompted by the notebooks that swelled his pockets. Fongaro recognizes that Apollinaire’s imagination was always nourished by personal experience, but he projects his own avidly bookish perspective onto the poet’s creative processes, stating that reading other writers was ‘de loin’ his major source of inspiration. He thus underestimates the extent to which Apollinaire’s poetry is energised by direct engagement with the experience of landscape, streetlife, love and war. Fongaro also acerbically dismisses most other critics working on Apollinaire, seeing them as intellectual fashion victims and slaves to theory. Their writing, no longer reductively biographical, is nevertheless diagnosed as ‘élucubrations’, ‘grave distorsion’, ‘inacceptable’, ‘insoutenable’ and so on. In one 1968 article, Fongaro claimed that ‘Tout texte publié devient la proie du lecteur’, and he does indeed consistently swoop down on his prey, eviscerating the work of fellow-academics. This gathering together of Fongaro’s significant contributions to the last 50 years of work on Apollinaire nevertheless deserves a place on library shelves.