In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Baudelaire devant l’innombrable
  • Timothy Raser
Compagnon, Antoine. Baudelaire devant l’innombrable. Paris: Presses Universitaires de la Sorbonne, 2003. Pp. 210. ISBN2-84050-263-1

Because Baudelaire defiantly exercised the right to contradict himself, the bulk of publications devoted to him that have tried through the years to find a single interpretation, which would account for his entire work, have failed. Antoine Compagnon is acutely aware of this problem as he reviews and classifies these efforts in the first chapter of Baudelaire devant l'innombrable. Beyond indicating the perils of totalizing readings of Baudelaire, this chapter usefully recalls the sheer variety of methods applied to the poet who dominates modern French literature. Among these Compagnon includes Bonnefoy's essentialist approach as well as the "historical materialist" approach currently in favor, the chief exponent of which is Walter Benjamin. All, however, fall short in their ambition to account for the supremely difficult poet that Baudelaire was.

Having said this, Compagnon undertakes modestly to let Baudelaire speak for himself, which means not to impose a reading of one preferred text on all the others, but to read those texts that have resisted interpretation with all the resources and sensitivity one can muster. In Antoine Compangon's case, those resources and that sensitivity are considerable indeed. Compagnon refines a statistical analysis of the frequency of certain words by paying attention to attestations of first uses in given meanings, to variants of the same published poems, to lexical differences between manuscripts and published versions, and teases meanings out of a key constellation of words that revolve around notions of time and number. These words are the seemingly heteroclite foursome "éternel," "infini," "mer," and "rue," a choice that might leave some readers puzzled: what concept could possibly synthesize the four? As Compagnon progresses through them, however, the power of his method becomes increasingly apparent: comparisons of adjectival and nominal usage, of use with capitals and lower-case letters, and correlations of these uses to dated attestations [End Page 194] led to irrefutable determinations of meaning, meanings on occasion at odds with those employed by critics in widely admired readings. Despite this evident hermeneutic power, however, it is difficult to anticipate where this reading is leading, so closely does it resemble thematic reading. But this is emphatically not thematic reading: Compagnon reads words, not themes, and the subjectivity of thematic reading lacks here. Nor does his reading open onto what Jean-Pierre Richard used to call the necessary complement of thematic reading: the author's unconscious. What Compagnon delimits with such clarity and precision is a property of Baudelaire's texts, published and unpublished, poetic and prose: the necessary association of some words with other words. In the case of the four chosen, that other word is "l'innombrable," an uneasy concept of indefinite repetition of the same, entirely lacking in any consoling transcendence.

If Compagnon had concluded his book at this point, it would have been a remarkable study, if only for having localized a concept - l'innombrable - of such enormous gravitational pull. But his reflections on number have a prosodic dimension, and he also returns to the readings of Baudelaire - particularly Walter Benjamin's - rehearsed in the first chapter. With regard to the first, following Michel Deguy, Compagnon explores the concept of number in French prosody and alerts us to Baudelaire's innovations in this field. Baudelaire recast the duodecasyllabic verse to produce breaks in unexpected places, anticipating the vers impair of the decades following him.

It is, however, in the following chapter, "Allégorie ou non sequitur," that the polemic thrust of the book becomes apparent. One of the more productive threads of Benjamin's discussion of Baudelaire has been his designation of allegory as the key to the poet's modernity. This contention has led to many excellent readings of the "Tableaux parisiens," and of "Le Cygne" in particular. Availing himself of his enormous lexical erudition, Compagnon asks whether, in fact, Baudelaire practiced allegory, either as a rhetorical figure or as a hermeneutic mode. In both cases, the answer is "no," and more significantly for readings such as Paul de Man's of "Correspondances," it is well-nigh impossible...

pdf

Share