Poe’s “Body Poetics”: Between “Theory” and Russian Formalism

R E V I E W Poe’s “Body Poetics”: Between “Theory” and Russian Formalism Alexandra Urakova. Поэтика тела в рассказах Эдгара Аллана По [The Poetics of the Body in Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Fiction]. Moscow: A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature, 2009. 252 pp. T his book has two “protagonists”: Edgar Allan Poe and “theory.” Literary theory arrived late to Russia and became widespread only ten years ago or so, by which time Terry Eagleton had proclaimed Western literary criticism to be “after theory.” Still, Russian studies undertaken with real knowledge of “theory” are very few; some supposedly theoretical works referred to as “phenomenological” are actually quite traditional in thought and method. But such is not the case with this contribution by Alexandra Urakova. She is deeply in love with the sophisticated ideas of Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Genette, and others. And love brings knowledge. Urakova’s starting point is a phenomenological preoccupation with le corps propre, the bodysubject that “can make itself known contrary to the notions produced by the culture” [11; all translations are mine]. Hence her semiotic approach differs in general from Judith Butler’s, which emphasizes the hidden significance of politics, as well as from Peter Brooks’s, which investigates mostly the sexual body. She chooses to follow Jean Starobinski and focus on the body in its relation to writing. Also following Roland Barthes, Urakova aims to show the function of the body in the construction of narrative. Not narratological in the proper sense (though developed with the diegetic nature of the texts in mind), her study deals with “narrative bodies” displaying the power and limits of representation. [See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993); Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993); Jean Starobinski, “L’Echelle des températures: Lecture du corps dans Madame Bovary,” in Le Temps de la réflexion (Paris: Gallimard, 1980); and Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974)]. From the traditional point of view, Poe is an unsuitable subject for this kind of critical inquiry. His reputation as a “spiritual writer” (Daniel Hoffman), as “the patron saint of French symbolists” (Scott Peeples), deters a consideration of his prose in corporeal terms. [See Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1998), 256; and Scott Peeples, The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), 436).] C  2012 Washington State University P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 44, 2011 97 R E V I E W Arguing the opposite, Urakova starts with the assumption made by Dostoevsky about corporeality as a characteristic feature of the fantastic in Poe’s prose. Her idea is this. The bodily experience deforming the poetical structure of the text explains the suggestive quality: “By furnishing the blocks of symbolization” the body produces the effect of “disturbing materiality” in the tales [18]. Urakova describes the experience as “displaced” or “suppressed,” since Poe’s writing takes the reader away from the body. The suppressed bodily experience striving toward self-expression is believed “to charge” the narrative with energy, to provoke a special kind of interaction between the author and the narrator, the author and the reader [12]. Thus through the representation of bodily experience the structural features of Poe’s prose are displayed. In her introduction, Urakova declares that she studies not “body politics ” but “body poetics” [29]. In contrast with many poststructuralist approaches that give equal treatment to fictional and nonfictional texts, she aims to understand the “aesthetic laws of Poe’s prose.” This attention to the literary text as it is sounds similar to Russian formalism, but the replacement of “textual poetics” by “body poetics” signals a shift in method, in which the aesthetic laws are considered to be the laws of representation. The main concept Urakova relies upon is the gap between “what is narrated and what is suppressed, told and silenced” [239]. Here Urakova builds on the work of the notable Russian cultural studies specialist Sergey Zenkin, who, taking into account Juri Lotman’s differentiation between the “continuous” and the “discreet,” describes the gap between the...