De Corbière à Tristan. 'Les Amours jaunes': une quête de l'identité (review)

Tristan Corbière is an important and original poet, author of the eclectic and ironic 1873 volume Les Amours jaunes. Troubled identity is a central theme and too often considered as a universal rather than rooted in the particular region which dominated Corbière's life. He was born in Brittany, where he lived for most of his short life, and many of his poems are set there or allude to Breton myths and culture. Interpretations of his Breton credentials vary wildly. For T.S. Eliot, Corbière's greatest poem is 'La Rapsode foraine', a spiritual evocation of a traditional Breton scene. Recent literary critics have tended to prefer the poems set in Paris for their self-referential parodic humour, which is partly a response to the alienating environment of the modern city.

Many critics present the contrast between the so-called Breton poems and the Parisian ones as a metaphor in itself, seeing Brittany as redeeming the spiritual void of Paris. Pascal Rannou's book undertakes the important task of providing an informed Breton perspective on Corbière's verse and assessing the extent to which he is a Breton poet. It sets the verse in context by explaining that although Corbière was born in Brittany, his family were bourgeois and hostile to Breton culture. When Corbière became disenchanted with the dominant class, he expressed his disenchantment by embracing the marginalized culture of the region. Rannou's title encapsulates this trajectory; it is an allusion to Corbière's decision to adopt the mythical Celtic name of Tristan and reject the Christian name Édouard which he had inherited from his father, a ship captain and author of successful maritime novels. The strength of Rannou's work lies in his ability to distinguish between those aspects of Corbière's verse which are truly Breton and to pinpoint errors made by readers less familiar with the language. He exposes mistakes made by critics who have seen Breton allusions where there are none, whilst missing the true references. Most of this valuable material comes in the fifth section, which, as the author acknowledges, is the most original part of the book. However, in the other sections the argument is buried in lengthy sections of derivative and repetitive textual analysis of poems only loosely related to the theme of identity. The book was originally a thesis and remains a methodical and detailed survey in which the valuable insights sometimes get lost. The exhaustive approach yields stimulating passages, such as the discussion of how Brittany haunts the ostensibly Parisian poems, but much of the revolt discussed is not clearly linked to the central Breton question. Nevertheless, there is plenty here to convince us that Corbière is more of a Breton poet than is generally thought. Rannou's overall verdict is persuasive: Corbière was not saturated with Breton culture but he wrote Breton literature in French which dramatized the situation of the alienated writer.