Gendered Lyric: Subjectivity and Difference in Nineteenth-Century French Poetry

Chapter Four Parnassian Obsessions

Chapter Four Parnassian Obsessions Obsession (obsidere: to sit down before, besiege): "Compulsive preoccllpation with a fixed idea or unwanted feeling or emotion, often with symptoms ofanxiety."1 "Obsessional ideas are invariably transformed self-reproaches which have re-emerged from repression and which always relate to some sexual act that was performed with pleasure in childhood."2 Leconte de Lisle's work exhibits numerous obsessive elements . His criticism, a conscious discourse governed by the language of reason, returns incessantly to the ideas of hardness , embattled isolation, and the reassuring repetition ofconfronting obstacles. Such obstacles are both external, as the stubborn incomprehension ofan unenlightened readership, and self-imposed, as the demands of a rigorous poetics. Leconte de Lisle's representation of his lyric subject, a creative undertaking open to the multiform language of poetry and the unconscious , reveals more clearly the significant role played by repression in his writing. What would this hardness be whose challenge assures the writing subject's virility? Poetry, perfection fashioned from impossibility, represents the mastery of language . Successful domination assures wholeness and the mark ofaccomplishment. Leconte deLisle's poetic obsessions were, however, not unique to him, but instead governed the poetic production of an entire generation that wrote as a group besieged . Like Leconte de Lisle, other Pamassian poets fashioned images of hardness with which to master poetic language and capture femininity. Poetic language, at once an interior voice and an ungraspable alterity, has always been represented as a woman. Until the Parnassian poets, it had not so relentlessly been characterized as impenetrable and petrified. Moreover many Parnassian poets followed Leconte de Lisle in looking 111 Chapter Four to flawless sculpture as a metaphor for the all-consuming poetic, feminine object. Like his, their chiseled, unyielding verse and perfected, static forms stood as monuments of security and longevity. And like his work, theirs exhibits a denial of repression through the insistence on neutrality, a sublime indifference that pretends not to care. My intent here is therefore to show how Leconte de Lisle's poetry translates into the thought and practice of a movement. His true that many deny the coherence of a Parnassian school: "Le groupement parnassien ne s'est fait sur aucune theorie, sur aucune esthetique particuliere;jamais l'un de nous n'a entendu imposer aun autre son optique d'art" (Mendes, interviewed by Huret 289). I would, however, take issue with this appraisal. Leconte de Lisle's hard-line poetic stance in fact lends unity to the group's production, and the containment of femininity plays an integral role in Parnassian theory. Theophile Gautier Leconte de Lisle began his poetic career as a Parnassian, but Theophile Gautier's Parnassianism represented the final phase of his poetic production. Although of the same generation as Leconte de Lisle, Gautier (1811-72) began his literary activities at an early age and wrote his first poetry under the prevailing Romantic style. So while they both came to occupy the position of Parnassian elder, each cut his teeth on projects and associations far removed from its aesthetic and ideological programs (Leconte de Lisle, let us recall, began as a Fourierist journalist). Their literary and ideological evolutions illustrate the instability and malleability of historical subjects and in so doing counter the rigid dogmatism of the movement. Gautier's poetic career began with his long Byronic poem, Albertus (1832). While Romantic in tone and inspiration, it nonetheless conserves traces in its preface of the artistic (artiste ) stance with which Gautier was associated throughout the various periods and styles of his lengthy career as a writer of poetry, prose, and criticism. In his preface to Albertus we read that "L'auteur du present livre [...] n'a vu du monde que ce que l'on en voit par la fenetre, et il n'a pas envie d~en voir davantage. II n'a aucune couleur politique; il n'est ni rouge, 112 Parnassian Obsessions ni blanc, ni meme tricolore; il n'est rien, il ne s'aper~oit des revolutions que lorsque les balles cassent les vitres" (Albertus 81). Among the first to take up the battle cry of l'art pour I'art, Gautier elaborated upon this notion in the oft-cited preface to his novel Mile de Maupin (1835), where he writes that "il n'y a de vraiment beau que ce qui ne peut servir arien; tout ce qui est utile est laid, car c'est I'expression...