Dream Cities: Utopia and Prose by Poets in Nineteenth-Century France by Greg Kerr (review)

With the rapid changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution and the explosive population growth in the larger cities, France saw an equally speedy rise in the number of writers depicting utopias, either social, as in the case of Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon, or physical, as novelists and poets dreamt of what a great city could be. In this study Greg Kerr intriguingly argues that the contemporaneous development of the prose poem is closely associated with utopian dreaming, as if Baudelaire’s dream of a prose poétique, sufficiently supple and abrupt to adapt itself to the ‘mouvements lyriques de l’âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience’ (dedicatory letter ‘À Arsène Houssaye’ in Le Spleen de Paris (1869)), could alone do justice to these new social and physical structures. Focusing on the writings of Saint-Simon, which are juxtaposed with the poetic prose of some of Théophile Gautier’s journalistic articles, especially his gently parodic Paris futur, as well as, more expectedly, on the prose poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Kerr’s analysis shows how the sense of speed and fragmentation that can be created by prose poetry closely corresponds to the new forms of urban experience, both real and imagined. Baudelaire’s longing to seize the countless, often arbitrary and destabilizing, patterns that typify urban existence, together with Rimbaud’s more frenetic desire to make turbulence depict a fragmentary and fleeting futurity are explored here, as are texts by the lesser-known authors Charles Duveyrier and Michel Chevalier. Given the intrinsic interest of such a thesis, numerous questions arise. Is the dream of a utopian city limited to the male imagination? Were no women drawn to evoke fantasy cities? Did children’s literature offer no dream cities? Did the increasing amount of travel writing play a role, with its description of exotic cities? And while the connections among poetic prose, prose poetry, and utopian thought are well traced here, the claim that utopian writing and the evolving nature of poetry enjoy a unique symbiosis seems difficult to sustain unless there is some comparison with other forms. Both Émile Zola and Jules Verne, to mention just those two, could usefully have been brought into this discussion, if only to offer a counterweight. In a Utopian world, Legenda, which produces such physically attractive books, would also provide greater editorial support to help overcome stylistic problems. As it is, the somewhat rebarbative style risks preventing the work from reaching the wider audience that the inherent interest of its topic and its arguments deserve.