Poésies du non-sens. XIIIe-XIVe-XVe sie`cles. Tome 1. Fatrasies. Fatrasies de Beaumanoir. Fatrasies d'Arras (review)

This attractively presented edition brings together the two main collections of the earliest known nonsense poetry written in French, the ‘fatrasies’ of late thirteenth-century northern France. A short poem, typically of eleven lines, the ‘fatrasie’ is remarkable because it regularly employs what Paul Zumthor terms ‘non-sens absolu’, that is to say each line of the poem invariably contravenes sense. It was not for nothing that this poetry appealed to surrealists: ‘fatrasies’ feature in É luard’s Première anthologie vivante de la poésie du passé(1951) and some were translated into modern French by Georges Bataille. Although Martijn Rus recognizes the potential risk of anachronism (p. 6), his preface nevertheless argues for the modernity of the ‘fatrasie’. This argument can be turned on its head: far from showing that nonsense writing is invariably modern, the ‘fatrasie’ demonstrates that it flourished long before the advent of modernity. Moreover, even if the surrealists saw something of themselves in their peculiar medieval predecessors, this demonstrates neither an unbroken tradition of nonsense writing nor that the ‘fatras-siers’ were concerned with the expression of subconscious thought. The main body of the edition is well presented, with the medieval French and its modern translation side-by-side. Copious notes provide commentary on linguistic difficulties and context, as well as helpfully pointing out links between the different ‘fatrasies’. The edition proper is followed by an essay on the ‘fatrasie’. The difficulty, if not impossibility, of interpreting nonsense is obvious. Rus’s specific contribution is to argue for a resemblance between the nonsense of the ‘fatrasie’ and ‘le fantastique’, especially since both consist in a defamilarization or ‘déterritorialisation’ of reality (p. 125). However, such a broad comparison does not advance understanding of the sources and strategies of the ‘fatrasie’ a great deal. The gap between the fantastic that makes sense and nonsense that does not seems greater than the supposed similarity between the two. Rus is dismissive of a more obviously rhetorical approach to the ‘fatrasie’, especially that which places it in the long tradition of the adynata, or impossibility (p. 114). This is strange, because he is highly sensitive to the tendency of the ‘fatrasie’ to combine two or more contradictory ‘effets du réel’, and the ways in which adjectives and nouns are put together in ‘impossible’ ways (e.g. ‘un sage sot’, ‘Dui lait hom bel’ and ‘Blanche robe noire’, p. 122). Indeed, the ‘fatrasies’ can convincingly be seen as strings of adynata(as Noel Malcolm argues in The Origins of English Nonsense[1997], pp. 63–4). It is certainly true that the ‘fatrasie’ tends to lead to defamiliarization and to suggest that the sense we project onto the world is fragmentary. Nevertheless, more argument is needed to show how this is consistent with the poetic and grammatical regularity of the ‘fatrasie’, as well as its frequent use of recognizable pieces of social reality, including especially foodstuffs associated with Carnival and Lent, respectively. These quibbles should not, however, detract from the primary contribution of this edition, which is to make this fascinating poetry available to a wider audience that will include inquisitive undergraduates as well as more established scholars.