“A Fine Tangled Web-Work”: Revisiting Poe’s Prose

R E V I E W “A Fine Tangled Web-Work”: Revisiting Poe’s Prose Henri Justin. Avec Poe jusqu’au bout de la prose. Paris: Gallimard, 2009. 416 pp. 29,50 € paper. O ne century after “the invention of Poe” by the prestigious readings of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry, in the 1970s and 1980s—the golden age of structuralism—Poe studies in France enjoyed a revival. What brought about this revival was the critical and editorial work of Claude Richard, which led in 1989 to the publication of a new collection of Poe’s complete works in French, Edgar Allan Poe. Contes—Essais—Poèmes [Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989], including all of Baudelaire’s and Mallarmé’s extant translations and a few of Valéry’s translations of “Marginalia”). Following in Richard’s wake while developing his own approach, Henry Justin published Poe dans le champ du vertige [Paris: Klincksieck, 1991], an innovative study that covered a large selection of the tales, combining systematic narratological analysis with a description of Poe’s imaginary space up to its final formalization in Eureka. Justin’s new book, Avec Poe jusqu’au bout de la prose (which quotes Poe in most cases from Richard’s French edition) is a more ambitious work. It encompasses the whole range of Poe’s production, that is, not only the tales and Eureka but also the poems and the critical and theoretical writings, all viewed as phases and aspects of one complex artistic growth. And it situates those productions in the wider context of the literature and culture of the Western world, thus reassessing them from our twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury point of view. Poe’s life, as Justin sees it, was essentially the struggle of a self-creating artist: the problematic transformation of the poet he aspired (and failed) to be into the writer he became by creating and ceaselessly perfecting a kind of prose that had never existed before. Discussing the first mode of Poe’s creation—the poems published in the 1827, 1829, and 1831 volumes—Justin analyzes its relative failure, describing a verse that “flows like a thin rivulet overgrown by assonance and internal rhyme” [47; all translations of Justin’s book are mine]. It is mainly grounded in autobiography, he argues. It is the self-expression of a soul lost in the paralyzing dream of an irretrievable past—carried along the drift of a death desire and thus in need of a “resistance” [47] that could only come from the intellect, which brings into play the rigor of prose and the demanding construction of operative plots. C  2010 Washington State University P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 43, 2010 93 R E V I E W This textual mode was the prose tale as Poe elaborated it, purged of all self-expression, in 1831 and the following years. He ritualizes, so to speak, the decisive transmutation in one of those early tales, “Siope,” by dismissing the man who sits at center stage, absorbed in the sonorous discourse of his own “Desolation” and unable to hear “Silence”: the silence of the genuine soul conjured up by the Demon, which the recreated artist confronts and will explore in the new medium that the very text (“Siope,” later re-titled “Silence”) already exemplifies. To Poe, therefore, the tale’s creation was a secret triumph, but one that was to be ever anxious, never thoroughly free from haunting regret for the poetry that could not be. Such is the feeling one has when reading Justin’s account. His analysis of some of the major texts (those written from 1838, when Poe was in full possession of his art) shows that the tale form, while unfolding its extraordinary story, as Baudelaire will say, is representing its own genesis as a prose text. And in so doing, it plays over once again the birth of the genre, staging it as a form that must grow out of the poem’s death, as if it still needed to establish its artistic legitimacy. “The Fall of the House of Usher,” for example, becomes, in the light of Justin’s subtle analysis [71– 73...