attempt has been made to focus extensively on French poets from Charles Baudelaire
and Stdphane Mallarmd through Guillaume Apollinaire and Andrd Breton, the women
surrealists Valentine Penrose and Alice Rahon Paalen, Andrd du Bouchet, Francis
Ponge, Rend Char, Philippe Jaccottet, Andrd Frdnaud, Denise Le Dantec and Heather
Dohollau to Andrde Chedid and Marie-Claire Bancquart.
Unsurprisingly, the critical approaches or methodologies are as plural as the
theoretical era in which they are written. In all cases, however, it will be obvious to the
reader that the contributors both reflect current critical developments and, at the same
time, re-assess traditional readings. In no sense is the collection representative let alone
comprehensive. Contributors, drawn from France, the UK and the US and Canada in
roughly equal measure, and reflecting no doubt the institutional practices of their
different national traditions, were approached for the OriginaHty of their insights, never
for the sake of inclusiveness. Even in the trajectories of redirections, even in the
process of reconstructions, the keynote of the collection - as of the critical age - is one
of dis∞ntinuity.
In the opening essay, Russell King draws on recent theories of gendering as
construct in order to reappraise the tensions operating in Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de
Paris. Clear-cut binary oppositions, particularly that of male∕female, are revealed as
but surface narratives. The process whereby poet constructs poetic persona is shown
to derive from appropriations which transcend sexual difference (mis-)read as but the
misogyny of Baudelaire’s more notorious Joumaux intimes formulations. King strikes
a Barthesian note from the outset, showing how 'the pleasure of the Baudelarian text
confounds and exceeds its transparent meanings, however much these are blatantly and
exphcity stated in moral terms at the end of many of the prose poems'. Whereas this
essay ∞ncentrates on jouissance and prostitution, Phflippe Bonnefis, still on
Baudelaire, fixes attention on an altogether more primal though no less Iudic phase of
his poetic development. He meditates on the setting, the resonance and the implications
of both Baudelaire’s joujou and the morality attached to or deriving from his plaything.
Child psychology, voyeurism, sublimated and distorted sexualities, memory and the
construction of an aesthetics inseparable from occultism and concupiscence, all these
are the ingredients of Bonnefis’s suggestive exploration of the difficulties of child’s
Language games and Iibidinal CompHcations of text (to rephrase Tzvetan
Todorov’s approximation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations) are the twin invitations to
voyage deep into Mallarme’s Idumaean night taken up by Bernard McGuirk. Heeding
Paul de Man’s warning of the dangers of UnivocaHty - another lurking form of
∞ntinuity - in literary criticism, he responds not to the song of the siren but to the
chants of sailors, of Baudelaire’s mariniers, of Mallanne’s matelots. A trajectory of