L’Année Baudelaire, 11–12 (2007–2008): Réflexions sur le dernier Baudelaire (review)

The first three contributors here, on ‘le dernier Baudelaire’, discuss texts from Le Spleen de Paris. Jacques Noiray’s ‘“Le Joujou du pauvre”: une pédagogie de la cruauté’ traces this theme back to Rousseau’s Rêveries. Since his subtitle pre-empts the outcome of his analysis, the reader will be wary of an excursion into intertext resulting in an off-the-peg reading of what is after all a ‘poème en prose’. Since this ‘poem’ has no metrical/ formal structure, what exactly is its differentia specifica? This question is not addressed. Peter Fröhlicher on ‘Le Désir de peindre’ explores a rich intertext and metaphor, but, like Noiray, proposes a univocal summary of the text’s meaning: the text ‘peut être lu comme un manifeste poétique’ (p. 31). Again, what makes this a ‘poem’? On the other hand, in ‘Une lecture des Bons chiens’, Violaine Boneu discounts the possibility of a propositional equivalent of this text. She finds that juxtaposition of thematic elements replaces logical connectives and discusses the text’s plentiful ‘rythmes énumératifs’ (p. 50) and ‘trame musicale’ (p. 51), but gives no analysis of its ‘rythmes’; the sense of ‘musicale’ also remains unclear, since music’s differentia specifica is its semantic vacuity. These three essays would have profited from relevant work done in the field of discourse semantics. In response to François Rastier’s question ‘que fait-on quand on lit un texte, et d’où procède le sentiment de son unité’? (Sémantique interprétative (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1986), p. 9), componential analysis of minimal units of meaning, for example, makes possible a rewarding approach to the role of associative networks in prose marked by increasingly weak propositional and logical structure. (For a test case see Roger Pensom, ‘Le Poème en prose: de Baudelaire à Rimbaud’, French Studies, 56 (2002), 15–28.) Linguisticians are reading poetry: it is time for littérateurs to return the compliment. Gérard Gasarian traces the theme of ‘nuages’ through the Petits poèmes en prose, too often on the strength of intuition (‘“les nuages d’or” semblent être étrangers aux lois’ (p. 76); ‘cet enfant semble parler au nom des nuages mêmes’ (p. 77)). J. A. Hiddleston’s learned ‘Meryon, Boudin, Guys et Le Spleen de Paris’ explores the ekphrastic dimension of Baudelaire’s prose, including the Salons. Didier Philippot considers Baudelaire’s relationship with Delacroix with respect to ‘les femmes d’intimité’, these latter exemplifying ‘la Beauté moderne’ with its fusion of opposites. Francesco Orlando situates ‘Harmonie du soir’ ‘dans des structures sousjacentes à l’ensemble du recueil’ (p. 148) in view of obtaining ‘une meilleure lecture du poème’. To imply the text’s critical dependence on intertext for its meaning is problematic, and Orlando’s approach excludes any detailed consideration of the text’s defining metrical/formal properties. Concluding essays on Baudelaire’s later writing discuss, respectively, ‘hyperbole’, ‘dégoût’, and his passion for conspiracies.