Musset: Poésie et Vérité ed. by Gisèle Séginger (review)

The proceedings of a colloquium held at Paris-Est in 2010, this volume contains nineteen essays divided into four topics: 1) Images of the lyric self (see Patrick Née, 117–38), dedicated to the motif of “anywhere out of this world” in Musset’s work; 2) The opposition of despairing blasphemy and mocking parody (see Frank Lestringant, 87–101, who understands Musset’s blasphemy as a challenge to God to appear); 3) The relationship between ethics and esthetics (see Samy Coppola, 175–91, helpful for understanding the evolution of Musset’s thought toward an ideal of classical simplicity; and Alain Vaillant, 209–20, on how Musset’s sprezzatura masks his nihilism whereas his sentimentality masks allusions to orgasm); 4) Musset’s experiments with hybrid forms combining lyric poetry with dramatic monologue, the chanson, theatrical dialogue in prose and verse and literary criticism (see Valentina Ponzetto, 275–92). This last section cries out for a comparison with Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues.

Aside from these four main topics, several other essays explore Musset’s reputation among contemporaries and his legacy to the Belle Époque. The revival of his popularity with youth and women in the 1840s, and the consecration of his admission to the Académie Française in 1852, ironically coincided with the loss of his lyric inspiration, his protracted physical and mental decline and the resulting torments of his self-contempt (see José-Luis Diaz, 19–33). Musset always remains at risk of being dismissed as a self-pitying propagator of emotional effusions. However, like Lamartine, Vigny and Hugo before him, the versatile Musset wrote successful lyric poetry, verse narrative, plays, prose fiction and essays, as if to demonstrate the superiority of the individual talent to the traditional forms that would constrain it.

Séginger’s collection makes several suggestive contributions that examine Musset’s noteworthy experiments with hybrid literary genres, and how he problematizes the notion of Truth. In what could serve as an informal overview, Aurélie Loiseleur (47–61) contributes a beautifully-written critical prose poem, sparkling with glancing insights. Regarding Musset’s legacy, Stéphane Chaudier (63–84) carefully looks through the prism of the “anxiety of influence” to see how Proust inflected Musset’s topic of a life consecrated to love. Henri Mitterand (305–15) speculates on Musset’s surprising influence on Émile Zola, who arrived in Paris in 1858, just after Musset’s collected works had appeared. They were for a time his livres de chevet.

Gisèle Séginger’s collection successfully reminds us that Musset, as a creative mind, remains an Unikum, who cannot be dismissed with a pat phrase. Nonetheless, more detailed work could still be done on situating his presentation of the authorial self in relation to the self-conscious tradition of Cervantes, Diderot, Sterne, Byron, Goethe, Heine and others, where at least five forms of mockery—directed at that self, at the hero, at the readers, at society and at the work itself—walk hand in hand (compare Michel Brix, 35–46). It is at if, while building a monument, the author had repeatedly paused to dip his verbal brush into pails of intertextuality, triviality and topicality, in order to tag his own structure with some self-mocking graffiti.