Theodore De Banville

Constructing Poetic Value in Nineteenth-century France

David Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351539289
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Theodore de Banville (1823-1891) was a prolific poet, dramatist, critic and prose fiction writer whose significant contribution to poetic and aesthetic debates in nineteenth-century France has long been overlooked. Despite his profound influence on major writers such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Mallarme, Banville polarised critical opinion throughout his fifty-year career. While supporters championed him as a virtuoso of French verse, many critics dismissed his formal pyrotechnics, effervescent rhythms and extravagant rhymes as mere clowning. This book explores how Banville's remarkably coherent body of verse theory and practice, full of provocative energy and mischievous humour, shaped debates about poetic value and how to identify it during a period of aesthetic uncertainty caused by diverse social, economic, political and artistic factors. It features a detailed new reading of Banville's most infamous and misunderstood text, the Petit Traitede poesie francaise, as well as extended analyses of verse collections such as Les Stalactites, Odes funambulesques, Les Exiles, Trente-six Ballades and Rondels, illuminated by wide reference to Banville's plays, fiction and journalism. Evans elucidates not only aesthetic tensions at the heart of nineteenth-century French verse, but also a centuries-old tension between verse mechanisms and an unquantifiable, mysterious and elusive poeticity which emerges as one of the defining narratives of poetic value from the Middle Ages, via the Grands Rhetoriqueurs and Dada, to the experiments of the OuLiPo and beyond.

CHAPTER 1

The Music and the Mechanism:
Theorizing the Unanalysable

First published in instalments with the Écho de la Sorbonne, moniteur de l’enseignement secondaire des jeunes filles, in 1870–1871, then as a single volume both in 1872 and with Charpentier in 1881, Banville’s Petit Traité de poésie française frequently appears in studies of nineteenth-century French poetry as a sort of reference work whenever questions of versification arise.¹ It seems to have been taken primarily as a didactic text, since its original readership was the schoolchildren for whose edification the Écho de la Sorbonne was intended, and Banville himself claims in chapter 9, ‘je dois me souvenir que j’écris un manuel d’écolier et non un livre de critique’.² Max Fuchs confirms that ‘ce livre est en réalité presque exclusivement scolaire’, and Léon Valade, reviewing it for La Renaissance in 1873, writes appreciatively of a guide ‘où les plus novices ouvriers du vers peuvent s’initier rapidement à toutes les habiletés de la forme. Une prosodie écrite par un poète, cela est précieux autant que nouveau! — Parfait artiste et théoricien consommé’.³ Sandra W. Dolbau, in her Dictionary of Modern French Literature, suggests that the Petit Traité has been considered ‘a valuable handbook on Parnassian poetry, mainly for its praise of Hugo, though it was poorly received by Leconte de Lisle and others’, while Levi’s Guide to French Literature claims that ‘The treatise on versification is primarily of interest for the stress it lays on rich rhymes and its view of poetry as syntactically correct organization of sound patterns’.⁴ Brian Rigby, however, in the New Oxford Companion to French Literature, calls the Petit Traité, with a generosity rare among readers of Banville, ‘perhaps the single most impressive exposition of the forms and techniques of French poetry’.⁵

None of these readings, however, does justice to the tone of provocative hyperbole which Banville adopts throughout his Petit Traité in an attempt to save poetry from the forces of science and commerce which we observed in the previous chapter. Albert Giraud argues perceptively, as early as 1891, in La Société nouvelle:

Les théories de Théodore de Banville sur la prosodie et sur la rime ont été travesties par des gens qui n’avaient pas lu ou qui n’avaient pas bien lu le Petit Traité. Elles procèdent, au contraire, d’une merveilleuse divination du génie de la langue, et rien n’est plus faux que de les représenter comme un Art poétique exclusif, formulé par un Boileau du romantisme.⁶

An historical exposition of poetic forms hardly seems an attractive proposition for the general reader. In chapter 2, where Banville offers a brief overview of the ‘Règles mécaniques des vers’, he does so ‘en demandant au lecteur toute sa patience pour cette partie aride de mon travail’, and Fuchs finds the chapters where Banville laboriously dissects the rules governing a broad selection of fixed form poems ‘secs et monotones’.⁷ Even the back cover of the 1998 Ressouvenances reprint struggles to inspire the reader’s enthusiasm, announcing in rather half-hearted terms an outdated, descriptive overview of verse techniques of only limited interest and application:

L’histoire a dépassé ensuite les règles qu’il semble définir dans la Poésie où rien n’est arrêté. Pour cela même, il aide à la lecture actuelle des œuvres du passé poétique en ce qu’il nous transmet les préoccupations de méthode qui les ont animées.

The few scholars to have written on Banville have done little to challenge this rather pedestrian reading, either deaf to the mischievous humour which runs throughout the volume, or reading Banville’s provocative overstatement as a source of frustration. Indeed, this little treatise has attracted considerable critical opprobrium for what are perceived as significant flaws, if not gaping holes, in its argument. These flaws are not, as Dominique Rincé suggests in the Dictionnaire des littératures de langue française, a defect on the author’s part: ‘On ne lui pardonne pas aujourd’hui la maladresse de certains propos de son Petit Traité de poésie française’.⁸ Rather, they represent a strategy essential to Banville’s poetics, allowing him to locate poeticity beyond the reductive, mechanistic logic of science and industry, in an altogether more mysterious and elusive music.

Among the least forgiving of the Petit Traité’s critics is Pierre Martino, who grumbles:

Ce court volume, sans théories d’art, sans vues ambitieuses d’esthétique, fait uniquement de conseils et de recettes, est vraiment le manuel du Parnasse, après 1870. Cette esthétique est bien pauvre […]: elle ramène tout à des tintements de rimes, à des rencontres de voyelles, à des questions de coupe […]. Elle n’a plus de philosophie.⁹

Similarly, Maurice Souriau complains:

Ce Traité surfait […] n’est qu’un tissu de contradictions entre les théories de Banville et sa pratique. […] Ce n’est guère sérieux. A quoi bon formuler des règles si absolues que leur inventeur lui-même ne peut pas les appliquer? […] Ce serait peine perdue que de chercher à établir l’esthétique du poète: elle se compose de quelques contradictions.¹⁰

Such is the confusion surrounding the Petit Traité — proof, indeed, that Banville succeeds in writing a theory of poetry whose ultimate message proves frustratingly elusive, and whose recommendations are inapplicable in practice — that critics are unable to agree whether it corresponds more closely to Parnassian or Symbolist poetics. Martino writes of Banville that ‘son influence a été énorme sur les poètes de la génération parnassienne; il est certainement un de ceux qui ont le plus contribué à fonder ce culte de la rime riche’, and Laurence Campa claims that ‘L’ouvrage est bien accueilli par les poètes de l’époque, mais il sera violemment attaqué par les Symbolistes, puis par Apollinaire, qui accuseront Banville de réduire l’art du poète à la technique du rimeur’.¹¹ Souriau, on the other hand, argues that the Petit Traité is ‘si peu parnassien que les Symbolistes vont y découvrir une des sources de leur poésie […]. Comment le Petit Traité, plaisant aux romantiques, puis agréant aux symbolistes, pourrait-il contenir la doctrine parnassienne?’, and Francis Vincent concurs, suggesting that the author of the Petit Traité displays ‘le plus souvent un moi fort peu parnassien, un moi plein de fantaisie et de gaîté’.¹² Banville succeeds in obscuring his own theoretical enterprise thanks to a potent blend of effervescent hyperbole and impractical, categorical pronouncements which encourage his readers not to take the book seriously; Souriau concludes dismissively that the Petit Traité is a joke — ‘Théodore de Banville y a développé ses idées personnelles, qui semblent souvent de pures plaisanteries’ — and André Theuriet warns in 1903, ‘il s’est laissé aller à sa belle humeur naturelle; […] il faut lire [son Traité], parce qu’il est d’une fantaisie très spirituelle, mais il faut n’en adopter les doctrines qu’avec une sage circonspection’.¹³

So omnipresent is the humour in the Petit Traité that it almost invites us to read it as a parody of what was a well-established genre. The poetic treatise in French dates back to Eustache Deschamps’s L’Art de dictier of 1392, and beyond that to Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s Ars poetica, and includes a few tr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Verse in an Age of Science and Industry
• 1 The Music and the Mechanism: Theorizing the Unanalysable
• 2 The Silent Music of the Stars
• 3 The Poetics of (Self-)Parody: Odes funambulesques
• 4 Bringing the Past to Life: Resuscitating Fixed Forms and the National Canon, or la cheville glorifiée
• Epilogue: The Poetry Factory: On the Meaning of Form, from the Grands Rhétoriqueurs to the OuLiPo, via Dada
• Bibliography
• Index