Tristan Corbiere and the Poetics of Irony

Modern Language Review, The, Oct, 2007 by Anna Davies

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Tristan Corbiere and the Poetics of Irony. By KATHERINE LUNN-ROCKLIFFE. (Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs) Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2006. viii + 256 pp. 50 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 978-0-19-929588-3. In this illuminating study Katherine Lunn-Rockliffe offers a stimulating new perspective on the poetry of Tristan Corbiere as she examines Les Amours jaunes, his single published volume (1873), in the light of poetic irony. Little has been written on Les Amours jaunes, the one collection left by Corbiere on his death aged 29, though his influence on Laforgue and later poets is widely recognized. Reassessing the myth of Corbiere as poete maudit, this study demonstrates how his uniqueness lies in his subversion of that cliche, a stance that is etched into his very language. Indeed, his linguistic originality marks him out as a major contributor to the general revolution in poetic language of the 1870s, and in particular the 'conversational-ironic' branch of Symbolism (often eclipsed by the 'serious-aesthetic' branch exemplified by Mallarme), which influenced Laforgue in the 1880s and, later, poets such as Pound and Eliot. The study shows how Corbiere's irony, ranging 'from verbal wit to cosmic pessimism' (p. 1), forms the crux of his 'aesthetic of defamiliarization' (ibid.),and reflects the sense of spiritual alienation of modern life. The 'unstable' irony embodied by the 'ironic jester' (p. 31) Corbiere shows him as exemplifying notions of writerliness as expounded by Roland Barthes. Corbiere employs those 'voice-defying' techniques of indirect discourse, dialogue, polyphony, and fragmentation ('conversational') discussed by theorists such as Bhaktin, Volosinov, and Barthes in relation to novelists such as Flaubert and Dostoyevsky (Chapter 1), such techniques being more disturbing in a lyric poem than in a Flaubert novel. Corbiere challenges the assumption, taken to excess by Romanticism, that the lyric poem can fully reflect the self, as he shakes up the traditional roles assumed by poet and reader. The author argues against the view that Corbiere propagated the ultimate impossibility of linguistic communication, however; on the contrary, the lyric poem's concern with subjectivity is reinvigorated. The study emphasizes the colour, vivacity, and materiality of Corbiere's verse, and alludes to Eliot's likening of Corbiere's style to the conceits of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets. Chapter 4 deals with the 'thought-feeling' aspect of his love poems, where ideas are fused into emotion. The author also questions the often held view that the realism of the early Brittany poems (Chapter 2) implies that they are purely biographical in genesis, for a keen ironic distancing is observable at every step: 'Rather than speculating how far Corbiere might have taken a boat out to sea, it is more fruitful to focus on the stylistic combination of concrete realism and ironic distancing' (p. 54). Questioning the dichotomy set up between the Brittany and Paris poems, this study considers the interconnections as well as the differences between each. Irony is directed at the self in his Paris poems (Chapter 3), as the familiar nineteenth-century theme of art providing spiritual sanctuary in a materialistic age is

turned on its head. Chapter 5 is devoted to the most neglected part of Corbiere's poetic production, the enigmatic Rondels pour apres. Described by Laforgue as 'la plus fine, la plus tenue, la plus pure partie comme art' ('Une etude sur Corbiere', quotedp. 171), the six rondels are (rightly, considering the dearth of criticism on them) approached through a series of close readings, which elucidate their circular suggestivity. The author detects numerous, until now uncharted, allusions in the rondels, and discusses the Promethean yoking of poet and child therein. The songlike, sonorous rondel form, conveying simplicity and sophistication, matches the theme well. This lucidly and intricately argued book is essential reading for a deeper understanding of Symbolism, for the 'poet's poet' Corbiere was a significant precursor of the 'conversational-ironic' branch of the movement. His poetics of irony need to be grasped in order to gauge the pivotal role he played in liberating poetry from the constraints of verse.