Andre Chenier : Oeuvres poétiques. Tome I. Imitations et Préludes, Art d'Aimer, Elégies (review)

The first volume of André Chénier's Oeuvres Poétiques edited by Édouard Guitton and Georges Buisson aims to recapture Chénier's life and times, to render through their edition 'la complèe intelligence du passé' (p. 18). The task is not simple. The poet died young and obscure, having published almost no poems, leaving unfinished manuscripts that were quickly scattered or lost and jumbled by intervening hands, hands that moreover sought to capture his work as a symbol in the pitched ideological battles of the nineteenth century. The editors of the current edition come equipped with knowledge of the contexts, political and literary, within which Chénier wrote. They have zealously researched his family and connections, and the fortunes of the manuscripts and editions. Earlier scholarship lets them recall his Greek and Latin sources, and recent science dates the paper and ink of the surviving manuscripts. The resulting edition is built as rigorously as possible along chronological principles and becomes a transparent lens to discover the personal trajectory and historical moment of 'le Chénier réel' (p. 14). The poet's beginnings are represented by a group of exercises in imitation. Then, as befits a young man captivated by the idea of love, follows an ars amatoria in the Ovidian vein. The volume ends with the elegies, which the editors have also grouped according to chronology, starting with poems supposed to depict successive love relationships, moving to pieces related to voyages, and ending with works that attest to a wiser poet contemplating settling down, and that also reflect a change in the public taste of the late 1780s when love poetry fell out of favor. The resulting edition is a kind of poetic autobiography, not unlike Hugo's Contemplations. It almost does not matter that the portrait that takes shape from the fragmentary nachlasse is the only plausible one the complicated circumstances of Chénier's posthumous legacy allow. For the editors have provided a unifying structure that makes the poems accessible, while giving us the benefit of their immense erudition. However, when the editors state that Chénier's course was finally a straight one, that he moved by 'des relais gradués vers (un) objectif' (p. 15), we may protest that the work itself often states his path to be exorbitantly wandering. This is a sign of a larger issue. Poems are an unreliable way to deliver information. With the poetic function of language, as Jakobson reminded us, language refers to language. Even where Chénier's poems appear to address literal events and people, they quickly turn allegorical, becoming poetry insofar as they cease to function as documents. Here the edition presents lacunae, for its notes help little in elucidating Chénier's properly poetic vocabulary. There is no doubt that this is the edition that will serve our early twenty-first century. It is for that reason one must regret that it does not help us more to understand what the poems do with the language, which is why a poet like Hugo found them so interesting, and ultimately what makes them alive for us.