Poetry Proscribed: Twentieth-century (Re)visions of the Trials of Poetry in France (review)

Poetry Proscribed scrutinizes the twentieth-century fascination with the trials of poetry, examining divergent interpretations of the legal trials of four poets: the charge of heresy brought against the libertine poet Théophile de Viau in 1623; the execution by guillotine of the romantic poet André Chénier in 1794; Charles Baudelaire's trial for outrage to public morality in 1857; Surrealist André Breton's defence of Louis Aragon against the charge of incitement to violence in the 1930s. James Petterson examines the many divergent discourses that have flourished around these trials – they have been interpreted by lawyers, historians, politicians and philosophers from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries – and he proposes that the relationship between poetry and law, history, politics and philosophy is defined by 'mishearing'. The book contains four sections, one for each trial. The first two focus upon the writing of history and how the poetic subject is determined by tradition. Petterson contrasts the teleological nature of historical interpretations, focused on innocence or guilt, with the irreducible ambiguity of de Viau's poetic language. Drawing on Derrida's concept of citationality, the second section explores the proliferation of the image of André Chénier in the political and literary rhetoric of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The third and fourth sections focus on the question of commitment and poetic introspection, using Sartre's post-war writings as a framework through which to challenge Baudelaire's inability to defend his poetry in 1857 and Breton's difficulty in reconciling the revolutionary spirit of Surrealism and the interiority of automatic writing during L'Affaire Barrès and L'Affaire Aragon. Critiquing Sartre's distinction between poetry and prose and notions of literature's success and failure, Petterson analyzes how poetry can at once fail to give an account of itself in the public sphere and yet generate countless discourses on the subject of this failure. The final section suggests that, neither wholly committed to nor excluded from the public domain, Breton's Surrealism successfully voices the problematic relationship between morality and literature. Overall, Petterson forges useful connections between the 'mishearing' of poetry in public and the twentieth-century conception of an element of non-savoir within poetry as analyzed by Bataille, Blanchot and Nancy. Given the emphasis on mishearing and poetry's resistance to meaning, it is surprising that Petterson does not draw on Paul de Man's concepts of misreading and unreadability. Focusing on four distinct legal trials, the book's notable weakness is that it attempts to cut through four centuries of poetry, law, history, politics and philosophy. This slim volume is thus a somewhat dizzying read and the chapters on Baudelaire and Breton would merit further exploration. Petterson is certainly at his most impressive when theorizing. Tackling the difficult, essential and often neglected question of poetry's relationship with the public domain, he combines a common sense attitude with theoretical subtlety and rigour. Weighing, for example, writings on committed literature by Sartre against writings on poetic negativity and alterity by Blanchot and Nancy, Poetry Proscribed makes a valuable contribution to this critical field.