Prose Poems of the French Enlightenment: Delimiting Genre (review)

Fabienne Moore proposes her Prose Poems of the French Enlightenment as a prehistory to Suzanne Bernard’s Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours (1959), tracing the origins of the genre back to the quarrel touched off by the publication of Fénélon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque in 1699. Moore’s book thus serves as a companion piece to Jean-Marie Roulin’s L’Épopée de Voltaire à Chateaubriand: poésie, histoire et politique (2005), which uncovers a previously unrecognized French eighteenth-century epic tradition. Moore bases her study on the identification of approximately sixty lost, miscategorized, under estimated, or forgotten prose poems that can be distinguished by the presence of a “legitimizing preface in defense of elevated prose” and by their “conspicuous” use of traditional poetic figures (5). Rather than providing a comprehensive overview of the genre, like Vista Clayton in The Prose Poem in French Literature of the Eighteenth Century (1936), or a cross-century survey, like Christian Leroy in La Poésie en prose française du xvii^e siècle à nos jours (2001), Moore initiates us into the intricacies of the eighteenth-century debate about its legitimacy, providing in-depth analyses of the works that, by questioning or defying prior generic restrictions, created the need for a new generic category defined in part by its resistance to categorization. The term “petit poëme en prose” was coined, we learn, not by Charles Baudelaire but by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (160). Dubbing the genre “one of the least known ‘inventions’ of the French Enlightenment” (2), which has previously fallen outside studies of both poetry and prose, Moore undertakes what proves to be an invaluable project of recovery.

Fénélon’s Télémaque provides the perfect starting point for Moore’s study: an unprecedented publishing sensation situated midway between the epic and the Bildungsroman, it became the preferred reading material not only of the Duc de Bourgogne, for whom it was intended, but also of Rousseau’s Émile and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul. Moore interprets Fénélon’s choice of prose as both aesthetic and political, indelibly linking the new genre to the critique of unenlightened despotism and the aristocracy. Rather than grounding her study in a brief yet probing analysis of Fénélon’s spiritual convictions (which she reserves for chapter 6) and the generic and political stakes of his work, Moore proceeds to peel the proverbial onion. Juxtaposing Fénélon’s work to Louis Aragon’s 1922 prose poem of the same name, she reveals the genre’s fundamental status as palimpsest, or hypertext: just as Fénélon rewrites the Odyssey (and Baudelaire rewrote his own verse poems), Aragon rewrites Télémaque. This approach admirably sets up Moore’s subsequent focus on prose poems as translations (or pseudo-translations, in the case of Montesquieu) of verse originals, a practice largely responsible for the eighteenth-century development of the genre. Though readers who find themselves backtracking from Aragon’s, to Rimbaud’s, to Marivaux’s response to Fénélon’s work in reverse chronological order might prefer a somewhat more top-down approach, the Rousseau-like journey from present time to the posited point of origin alerts us to Moore’s primary interest in the reception of Fénélon’s work, which served as a model for sub sequent forays into the genre. Moore’s analysis of the work’s reception effectively highlights the shift from an emphasis on form to an emphasis on affect that plays into the changing definition of the genre in the course of the century (2).

After exploring the cultural phenomenon known as “Telemacomania,” Moore enters into the complexities of the cultural debate about prose poetry, marshaling ample evidence of the nascence of the genre in the form of neologisms (Rousseau’s “prosaïser,” Staël’s “dépoétiser”), parodies (particularly Chaussepierre...