Une figure de l’expansion: la périphrase chez Charles Baudelaire by Federica Locatelli (review)

Poetic language expands its powers in the nineteenth century in France as it undergoes a sea change. Federica Locatelli argues that Baudelaire’s role in this development is characterized by his use of the rhetorical figure periphrasis, suggesting that Baudelaire rediscovers periphrasis as a means of promoting the mobility of poetic language over ordinary language, and defining the figure as ‘un processus d’amplification d’un terme monoverbal’ (p. 43). Through frequent recourse to technical terms derived from ancient and classical rhetoric, combined with a linguistic approach derived from Saussure and Benveniste, Locatelli examines the expansion of the linguistic sign in a way that recognizes the underlying arbitrary distance between a term used and the thing it represents or signifies. She argues, however, that Baudelaire’s verse poetry deploys particular periphrastic expansion techniques that enable poetic language to go beyond its normal boundaries. For example, the monosemic term ‘mort’ is expanded periphrastically by Baudelaire in the closing line of ‘La Mort des pauvres’: ‘c’est le portique ouvert sur les Cieux inconnus’ (p. 50). One of the strongest sections of the analysis is the central chapter on names and naming, with extended interrogation of biblical and religious proper nouns deployed throughout Baudelaire’s verse, including Satan and ‘la Madone’. In some respects, this study rehearses a similar approach to Baudelaire’s poetry as Michael Temple’s approach to Mallarmé’s ‘onomastics’ in The Name of the Poet: Onomastics and Anonymity in the Works of Stéphane Mallarmé (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1995), although Temple’s study is not referenced, in part because the book relies primarily on French-language scholarship. There are moments when Locatelli seems to read Baudelaire through the lens of the later generations, for example when she justifies Baudelaire’s status as a Symbolist poet through quotations from Mallarmé, Ghil, and Moréas, whereas in fact her overall argument focuses primarily on Baudelaire’s pivotal role in shaping the poetic language that was to come. In the closing chapters, Locatelli flags up how the distance between signifier and signified can be both temporal and spatial, demonstrating both the linguistic and metaphysical dimensions inherent in Baudelaire’s use of periphrasis. Offering detailed appendices of linguistic and comparative corpus analysis, Locatelli’s work is well resourced with salient examples, and the Preface by Michel Deguy sets up the analysis compellingly. While this study does not, for me, present any significant new findings regarding Baudelaire, it does bring to the fore the core arguments underpinning his poetic techniques, and Locatelli argues convincingly in favour of placing the analysis of rhetorical figures back at the heart of poetry criticism.