Baudelaire et Nerval: poétiques comparées éd. par Patrick Labarthe et Dagmar Wieser (review)

Reviews 225 Labarthe, Patrick, et Dagmar Wieser, éd. Baudelaire et Nerval: poétiques comparées. Paris: Champion, 2015. ISBN 978-2-7453-2993-6. Pp. 259. If Gérard de Nerval left behind no written reference to Charles Baudelaire, the reverse is not true. Among a small handful of mentions, the most poignant is Baudelaire’s commemoration of Nerval’s suicide exactly a year after its occurrence on 26 Jan. 1855, which Baudelaire inserted in the middle of his Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe. This may appear a slender connection on which to scaffold an entire book.Yet in the absence of a more prolonged or overt dialogue between Baudelaire and Nerval, the thirteen essays of this multi-author volume, part of the series Romantisme et Modernité, seek to identify major points of comparison between the two writers’bodies of work, which (argues Patrick Labarthe) both participated in a renewal of lyricism while jointly bearing witness to a“fracture interne au Romantisme”(9). The challenge for these proceedings of a 2007 conference is to offer readers a compelling and comprehensive insight into these authors, their genres, or their moment in literary history. And in fact—whether due to the narrowly-framed subject of the conference or the active engagement of the editors—the volume’s diverse essays do indeed hang together with unusual coherence. For instance, the very different “Voyages à Cythère” undertaken by Nerval and Baudelaire—together with their implications for the topos of the idyll in nineteenth-century poetics, especially the mid-century neo-paganist vogue—are a focus of study for Violaine Boneu, Corinne Bayle, Michel Brix, Hisashi Mizuno, Luca Pietromarchi, and Odile Bombarde. The image of a gibbet, which figures in Nerval’s representation of a diminished, modern Cythère, is violently reprised by Baudelaire with the figure of a hanged man, whose chilling resonances are interestingly explored by both Mizuno and Bombarde. Nerval’s and Baudelaire’s experimental fusions of poetry and prose are analyzed by Olivier Pot and Gabrielle ChamaratMalandain (and both of these critics agree on a line of demarcation denoting “modernity” between Nerval and Baudelaire, with Nerval falling—or failing?—just short of a bar that feels somewhat over-determined). Of particular interest are essays which focus on representations of the two writers by their peers. For instance, JeanNicolas Illouz compares portraits of Nerval and Baudelaire, in daguerreotype and in photographs by Nadar. Both authors, Illouz argues, appear to have been equally unsettled by the end result. Finally, Aurélie Loiseleur details Proust’s warm defense of Nerval and Baudelaire in response to their contemporaries’ (notably the excoriated Sainte-Beuve) incomprehension, pity, or dismissal.What appeared as madness to their peers was, for Proust, nothing less than a fully modern prise de conscience of their own mortality. In sum, these diverse essays jointly make an effective argument that Nerval’s and Baudelaire’s works benefit from comparative analysis. The volume is worthwhile reading for dix-neuviémistes and perhaps early modernists interested in tracing the evolutions of lyric poetry in the century of revolutions. Arcadia University (PA) Kate M. Bonin ...