Hellénismes de Banville: mythe et modernité (review)

Profoundly marked by an education grounded in Greek and Latin literature — even if he received his baccalaureate only on the second try — Théodore de Banville would follow throughout his life the rhetorical techniques imbibed at the lycée and never lost his interest in a symbolic interpretative system suggested by Greco-Roman myth. Myriam Robic sets out first to place Banville's fascination with this set of myths within the literary, artistic, and scientific context of his age, and then to show how the poet uses this framework not merely to recreate a lost Eden but more importantly to propose a highly individual response to his own age. In so doing, she reveals an extensive knowledge not just of Banville's work, even unearthing a manuscript sonnet not found by the editors of the recently published Œuvres poétiques complètes, but also of that of his contemporaries, from Gautier and Hugo to Baudelaire and Mallarmé, as well as Daumier, Champfleury, and Courbet. Moreover, her study provides numerous insights into the aesthetic and political climate of the time, including a particularly useful study of the different waves of Hellenism that shaped mid-nineteenth-century thought, and some fine comments on the ekphrastic dimension of Banville's writing. And if she is forced to conclude that much of his later work was marked by his complicity with the Second Empire, she also underlines how, through parody and subtle humour, he not only retained some of his independence but was one of the first to fuse images of antiquity with those of the modern city. Robic is even able to argue quite convincingly that fantasy itself, in Banville's deft hands, becomes an arm against the Empire's social decadence. Nevertheless, the study bears the scars of its birth as a doctoral thesis, a work conceived to impress a jury of specialists rather than convince and guide a more general readership. Long lists (for example, of Banville's schoolboy reading), numerous tables (of archaic spellings or of uses of the word lyre, for instance), a plethora of examples for every contention put forward, as well as lavish use of quotation all make this a work in which the argument too often struggles to make itself heard. Sentences are sometimes so clotted with excess fat that they impede rather than illumine the underlying proposition. One example among many: 'Quoi qu'il en soit, rares ont été les critiques à souligner, en 1925, avec autant de justesse que John Charpentier, le contexte de naissance et le fonctionnement de la fantaisie banvillienne quant à cette fusion du mythologique et du trivial, de l'antique et du moderne à l'exception de Philippe Andrès' (p. 390) (who would find himself surprised to be described as doing anything in 1925, a good two decades before his birth). While the book would have greatly benefited from much tighter editorial control, it offers a rich study of nineteenth-century poetry seen through the lens of Greco-Roman culture, raising numerous questions about how nineteenth-century writers managed to make the mythology of antiquity connect with the modern world.