Théophile Gautier entre enthousiasme et mélancolie by Alain Montandon (review)

This study of Gautier’s fictional prose takes as its central pillar the familiar tension between the notion of enthousiasme, ‘la marque de l’artiste authentique’, offered by Romantic writers as proof of a quintessentially artistic sensibility in literature, painting, and music, and its inevitable corollary, ‘la plus intense mélancolie, suivant une logique du trop-plein, d’un trop-plein indigeste’ (p. 217). At the same time, the book focuses on Gautier’s love of E. T. A. Hoffmann and presents many of its themes as stemming from the German writer’s influence. None of these themes is analysed in any great depth — the longest chapter weighs in at about twenty pages — but taken together they provide an effective introduction to many of the key themes of nineteenth-century French literature as they appear in Gautier’s stories, with reference also to his feuilletons and Salons and less frequently to his verse. While the short chapter on music, for instance, cannot probe the mechanisms of inter-art metaphoricity as thoroughly as recent monographs by François Brunet or Peter Dayan, it offers an interesting reading of the Romantic topos of the nightingale but leaves the well-known nineteenth-century cliché of ‘la supériorité de la musique sur le langage’ (p. 33) undeveloped. Elsewhere, the book gives an overview of Gautier’s treatment of key Romantic themes such as the outsider artist, the transgression of social norms, le voyage, historical ruins, and the visionary nature of the writer of fantastic tales. The artist appears as Prometheus or Icarus, both allegories of the aesthetic paradox in the book’s title, as the enthusiasm of creation and the movement towards the ideal lead to the melancholy provoked by the ensuing fall. A longer section examines the motifs of hieroglyphics and arabesques as metaphors for writing, especially in the fantastic genre, while the themes of magic, masks, and carnivals are all related to the practice of writing and a sense of a ‘secret indéchiffrable’ (p. 154) at the heart of Romantic aesthetics. Gautier’s immense body of art criticism perhaps deserves more than a short chapter on the different manifestations of the adjective admirable, but a chapter on Poe demonstrates effectively how Baudelaire introduced the American author to a French readership through comparison with Gautier, despite the different nature of each writer’s particular ivresse — alcoholic and artistic respectively. The book closes with a satisfying close reading of Gautier’s final novel, Spirite, as a return to the influence of Hoffmann, a ‘roman de la neige’ (p. 201) that provides a fitting ‘allégorie de la sublimation’ (p. 214). Since both Hoffmann and the international nature of Romanticism are so important to this study, it is odd that a chapter entitled ‘Lectures d’Hoffmann’, which begins ‘On ne saurait aucunement sous-estimer l’importance jouée par les lectures d’Hoffmann dans l’inspiration créatrice et l’imaginaire de Théophile Gautier’ (p. 69), is barely three pages long. Yet, despite the fact that some rather short chapters do not allow much extended development of key ideas, this monograph offers both a useful introduction to Gautier’s aesthetics and an effective overview of the main themes of French Romanticism.