La Littérature symboliste et la langue: actes du colloque organisé à Aoste les 8 et 9 mai 2009 par Olivier Bivort (review)

A handful of the essays in this collection deliver intriguingly on the title’s promise to consider language and literature together in late nineteenth-century France, which was, as Olivier Bivort points out in his brief introduction, the age of both the birth of modern linguistics and the crise de vers inspired by symbolist poetry. Jacques-Philippe Saint-Gérand’s contribution on the period’s distinction between la langue française (the object of study by linguists) and le français (a shared cultural patrimony), for instance, goes on to examine the early reception history of the symbolists that would relegate their use of language to the status of ‘petit-nègre’ by virtue of their deformation of what was considered typical coherent structure. Bivort’s essay on clarity (with reference to the Proust/Mallarmé debate) also spans both linguistics and literature in its analysis of the myth of clarté as ‘le drapeau du conservatisme et le repoussoir de la liberté dans l’art’, the debate over which is shown to reveal ‘une certaine idée de la littérature et une certaine idée de la langue, — voire une idée tout court de la société’ in the politically inflected linguistic analysis of the period (p. 88). Also of note is Jean-Pierre Bertrand and Henri Scepi’s study of Laforgue’s use of popular language and neologism that results in a perversion of words and their erotic contamination, both of which ‘indiquent le rêve d’une langue, première, primitive, qui, au delà des genres et des normes, instaurerait l’échange harmonieux des voix et des corps en une utopie de la communication’ (p. 138). Gilles Philippe’s essay on symbolist use of neologism and metaphor, as well as Ida Merello’s on Charles Guérin’s use of assonance, also provide insightful links between literature and language. Other contributions are less directly related to this theme: these include André Guyaux’s otherwise interesting essay on Baudelaire’s early reception history, and Marisa Verna’s analysis of the Port de Carquethuit scene in Proust in light of the novelist’s published reactions to Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Some of the essays offer much less of an original or insightful analysis, at times falling into summaries of familiar symbolist texts or leaning heavily on, without necessarily building upon, older, established work by other critics. Regrettably, this is most noticeably the case in the essays devoted to Mallarmé’s engagement with linguistics in texts such as Notes sur le langage and Les Mots anglais, which might have held great promise for the announced subject of the volume. The summaries, rather than analysis, of the symbolist poets’ well-known ideas in several of the articles suggest an ambiguity about the intended audience for these essays. Too specialized for the general reader, they are often too introductory to be of value to specialists, with the possible exception of those essays dedicated to minor figures such as Jean Lahor, Max Elskamp, Charles Guérin, and Camille Mauclair.