Lost Beyond Telling. Representations of Death and Absence in Modern French Poetry by Richard Stamelman (review)

B o o k R ev iew s été hypostasiés en genres ‘purs’ ” (p. 136) and . . toute tentative de réconciliation, de synthèse . . . conduit paradoxalement à un isolement accru des genres, qui deviennent irréductibles” (p. 149). In a brief conclusion, Combe suggests that there are reasons to believe that the aesthetic associated with the glorification of a “ poésie pure” has run its course. The return to narra­ tion in recent poems such as Bonnefoy’s Ce qui fu t sans lumière, the interest in poetic periods and forms once considered too “ prosaic,” are signs of a self-conscious desire for greater freedom in writing. Here, it is no longer a question of “ synthesis,” since the old dualities are no longer postulated. The rhetoric of exclusion, says Combe, “ est typique­ ment française” ; this is not the case with English poetry in which “ le récit a toujours occupé une place importante. . (p. 193). For Combe and others, “ revenir au récit, c’est accorder confiance à la valeur fondatrice de la conscience, à la présence à soi, perçue non plus comme une illusion mais comme une certitude ontologique” (p. 192). J o h n T. N a u g h t o n Colgate University Richard Stamelman. L o s t B e y o n d T e l l in g . R e p r e s e n t a t io n s o f D e a t h a n d A b s e n c e in M o d e r n F r e n c h P o e t r y . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Pp. 291. $35.95. To speak of the poetry of France from Baudelaire on is to delve into a modern world of division, fêlure, abyss, a world of difficult synthesis, healing, reconciliation. Of course, such psychological as well as more strictly intellectual energy has, in our own century, been arguably invested in the ironic or tragic minimalisms emerging from such cracked or split conditions, but, although this may imply bold and even proud stoicisms, it should not be lost upon us that poets, thinkers and artists as divergent as Rimbaud and Mallarmé, Jouve and Breton, Dubuffet and Giacometti, Barthes and Blanchot, have been locked in the most urgent, the most authentic of struggles, and struggles that continue today in modes and forms at once pertinent to and critically mutated from those that stem from the acerbically passionate, the painfully fertile pages of Les Fleurs du Mal. Richard Stamelman’s Lost Beyond Telling elegantly and concisely details some of these tensions in the slowly evolving and complex poetics of modern France, beginning with Baudelaire, passing to Apollinaire and Jouve, then offering the bulk o f his analysis to the more recent work of Bonnefoy, Dupin, Du Bouchet, Jaccottet, and Jabès. A final chapter is reserved, perhaps surprisingly, for Barthes, but the linkages are significant and soundly established. In broad terms Stamelman’s thesis centers around a poetics of loss, absence, exile and death, which not only dwells within what might be termed the raw emotional thematics of much of the work evoked, but penetrates and infects the very aesthetics that, in principle, rises up—“ cette émotion appelée poésie,” Reverdy aptly named it—to counter the leaks, the drift, the mortality of nature, by injecting into its poeticized blasons the transcendent anti­ dote of the “ antinatural” (Reverdy again). From a dream of representation of both pres­ ence and the sublimely intuitable, there are variously perceived, variously enacted slippages toward a poetics at once persisting in such aspiration and conscious of the unrepresentability of the absent and the present, a poetics riveted to the dilemma of (our) otherness, (our) becoming, and writing’s inability and finally assumed lack of desire to escape into the sealed space of pure redemption, of chanceless symphonicalness. Poetic and artistic repre­ sentation neither accedes to presence nor refutes absence; rather does it speak, in melan­ choly, in nostalgia—though at times in other registers—of such difficulties as it traverses, intransitively, caught between desire and impotence, glittering image and ever-shimmering inachevable. Poetry...