Textual Matters of Life and Death or Gautier’s “As You Like It”

Textual Matters of Life and Death or Gautier’s “As You Like It” Constance Gosselin Schick I T IS WELL KNOWN that the published conclusion of Le Capitaine Fracasse is not the one Théophile Gautier had intended.1 “ Dans la pensée première de l’écrivain, Vallombreuse ne guérissait pas, Sigognac ne pouvait épouser la sœur de celui qu’il avait tué, et le triste capitaine . . . se mourait d’inanition dans le Château de la misère, devenu le Château de la famine.” 2 In 1884, Théophile’s daughter, Judith, con­ firmed in an article published in the newspaper Gil Bias and then in a preface written for the Jouaust illustrated edition of Le Capitaine Fracasse that her father had planned a fatal dénouement for his novel. She again returns to the subject of this changed conclusion in 1903 in her autobiographical Le Second rang du collier, explaining that it was Char­ pentier, the novel’s editor, who had insisted upon a happy ending for marketable reasons: il [Charpentier] pousse les hauts cris et prétend que l’avenir du livre est perdu, que la vente et le succès sont compromis, car le public sera déçu, trompé dans ses justes prévisions. Ce qu’il faut c’est la récompense de la vertu, le bonheur des amants et l’apothéose finale dans le temple de l’hyménée. . . .3 The irony is that, despite Gautier’s life-affirming textual choice, his writ­ ing has been judged to be deadly. The happy ending of Le Capitaine Fracasse has often been delegated, on the one hand, to the lifeless realm of the deus ex machina and of textual artifice and, on the other hand, to the fatal selling out of his poetic life and soul to deadly commercialism and bourgeois conformity. In Mélancolie et opposition: les débuts du modernisme en France, Ross Chambers establishes a kind of inverse relationship between Gautier’s adherence to the life of his time and the subsequent deadliness of his writerly fortune or afterlife. Admitting that Gautier’s success with his public was tout relatif, Chambers nevertheless classifies Gautier as a writer whose attempts to placate his contemporary readership with his facile, accessible and pandering textuality explain his failure with later readers.4 By means of a wonderful reading of the Gautier poem, “ Tristesse en mer,” Chambers argues that Gautier is a writer who VOL. XXXV, No. 4 49 L ’E sprit C réateur chooses to adhere to the “ salut de la communicabilité sociale” (49), and that, in so doing, he has no authorial life today. The poem narrates the temptation of the seasick, melancholic /to drown himself and his deus ex machina salvation and salutation when he sees and is seen by a charming young woman: “ Salut, yeux bleus! bonsoir, flots verts!” 5 Thus, Chambers concludes, poetic death and the life of a meaningful text are killed by a “ guilleret saut d’humeur” and by the cliché “l’amour plus fort que la mort” (54). This argument echoes, of course, the canonic opinion of Gautier’s œuvre, and reflects the place usually delegated to him in the canon: the largely buried space of a “ minor” or “ secondary” writer who may now and then be exhumed, but who is generally kept in the crypt of unread and therefore dead texts. Ironically, therefore, it is to the extent that Gautier is said to have sought an escape from death and nothingness by embracing sensual and pleasurable appearances that he has been ex­ cluded from the realm of the living or the immortal authors.6To borrow from Gautier’s own terminology, he is a writer who supposedly chose “ la mort dans la vie” rather than “ la vie dans la mort.” 7 The vivifying function of death for the writer and for the literary text has often been demonstrated, and, in fact, as my last allusion implied, has often been dealt with by Gautier himself. Léon Cellier presented his Mallarmé ou la morte qui parie as “une contribution à la poétique de la Mort” (12), and maintained that, for Gautier as for Mallarm...