SOURCE: "Introduction: Facing Textuality," in Seductive Resistance: The Poetry of Théophile Gautier, Rodopi, 1994, pp. 1-7.

[In the excerpt below, Schick examines the aesthetics of Gautier's poems, noting that "Gautier's concept of poetry stresses the preeminence of words, of craft and of beauty."]

Poetry afforded Théophile Gautier his greatest pleasure as a writer. He repeatedly expressed his delight in what he referred to as a sculpturing in verse:

Les esprits qu'on est convenu d'appeler pratiques . . . n'auront pas connu leur [the poets'] pur enchantement: contempler la nature, aspirer à l'idéal, en sculpter la beauté dans cette forme dure et difficile à travailler du vers, qui est, comme le marbre de la pensée, n'est-ce pas là un noble et digne emploi de ce temps qu'on regarde aujourd'hui comme de la monnaie?¹

Expressing the opinion that writers of poetry were superior to writers of prose, he explains: "Un chanteur sait parler, mais un orateur ne sait pas chanter. Les oiseaux volent et marchent; les chevaux, si fringante et si fière que soit leur allure, ne peuvent que courir .. . la double nature du poète tient de celle de l'hippogriphe."² He claimed that poetry was his destiny "J' tais né pour faire des voyages et écrire des vers,"³ and often spoke of it as the salvation of his life. In the preface to Albertus ou l'Ame et le Péché, he says that even if his poetry were to remain completely unnoticed, he would not regret "la peine qu'il a prise .. . ces vers lui auront usé innocemment quelques heures, et l'art est ce qui console le mieux de vivre."⁴ He was to repeat this sentiment in a letter to Maxime du Camp, written in December of 1850: "Je me sens mourir d'une nostalgie d'Asie Mineure et si je ne faisais quelques vers, je m'abandonnerais aux asticots, quoique je trouve la mort plus hideuse encore que la vie."⁵

His literary fortune, however, has not supported this predilection. Most readers of Gautier do not turn to his poetry for their textual pleasure. The admiration professed by Baudelaire and by Mallarmé, by Ezra Pound and by T.S. Eliot, by the Russian formalists and the Latin American modernistas remain exceptions.⁶ In fact, they are exceptions that many literary critics and historians explain and discard as either polite flattery or the flattering projection of greater genius onto lesser talent. The dominant canonic opinion regarding Gautier's poetry is that voiced by Jules Supervielle for whom Gautier provides an example of minor poetry, one lacking in mystery; and that of André Gide for whom Gautier is a writer plagued by "cécité" for all that is not exterior and visible.⁷ Admitting that Gautier occupies "une place considérable" in French literature, Gide adds: "c'est seulement fâcheux qu'il la remplisse si mal" (162).

In fact, the role and place attributed to the poetry of Gautier is considerable. It is pivotal to Art-for-Art's Sake poetry, a gratuitous, aesthetic poetry whose finality is beauty rather than any moral or social purpose. Furthermore, this aesthetics is wide-reaching. In Gautier's poetry we find the Romantic aesthetic for dark, mysterious gothic beauty, for the affective beauty of nature, and for the evocative and mimetic beauty of local color. We also find the Parnassian aesthetic which seeks impersonal, exotic, and monumental beauty; the ephemeral, sentient, and modern beauty of the Impressionists; the elitist, refined and amoral beauty of Dandyism; the artificial, immoral and exacerbated beauty of Decadence; and the spiritual, evocative, and suggestive beauty of Symbolism. . . . Baudelaire found yet another form of beauty in Gautier's writing: "la beauté du diable, c'est à dire la grace charmante et l'audace de la jeunesse, il contient le rire, et le meilleur rire" (683). In the article on Gautier which he wrote in 1859, Baudelaire summarizes: "Or, par son amour du Beau, amour immense, fécond, sans cesse rajeuni . . . Théophile Gautier est un écrivain d'un mérite à la fois nouveau et unique" (689).

The writer for whom "le monde visible existed" is also an important key in the development of realist poetry, a poetry which is said and says itself to be more concrete, objective and prosaic; one which focuses on visuals and objects, on deictic matter-of-factness rather than on sentiment, philosophy and rhetoric. Finally, Gautier's poetry is seminal to "la poésie pure," or to autonomous poetry, a poetry whose poeticity is said to be constituted by and according to linguistic and formal elements rather than by referential or signifying ones.

To a certain extent, it may be because of the importance of its place and role that Gautier's poetry is so rarely read with pleasure. It is read as a case of literary history, as an illustrative space of that canonic break between Romanticism and post-Romanticism. Gautier's literary output is usually summarized in terms of being Romantic-turned-something else (usually sour or Parnassian, the two being almost synonymous for many readers). His poetry is thus made to be the locus of a fault, both in the sense of a break and in the sense of a defect. It is looked at as marginal, an outer border to the predecessors, contemporaries and successors who represent a particular spirit or movement more centrally, and therefore, by implication, more successfully. The admission of Gautier's influence and importance is usually accompanied with a pejorative acknowledgement that he is not a Hugo, not a Baudelaire, not a Mallarmé.

A review of the reception which his poetry has occasioned reveals this marginality in interestingly contradictory ways. It is a poetry which is said to be too Romantic to be objective, yet too impersonal and disengaged to be Romantic; too fanciful to be Parnassian yet too concrete to be Symbolist. It is judged, often simultaneously, as too discursive and too formalist, too escapist and too conformist, too self-conscious and too mimetic, too overstated and too understated. Its innovations are recognized, yet it is still dismissed as conventional and commonplace.

It seems to me that such contradictions suggest that there may be more mystery in Gautier's poetry than Supervielle accords it. The "poëte impeccable," the "très-vénéré maître"⁸ deserves better consideration. Gautier's poetry merits attentive close readings which, while not necessarily being "pour un Gautier" (as Ponge did Pour un Malherbe), at least respect the criteria that are in keeping with its textuality.⁹ Gautier's concept of poetry stresses the preeminence of words, of craft and of beauty, yet it is most often evaluated according to referentiality and/or signification: its (and the its is really a euphemism for his) honesty, its sincerity, its truth, be this personal, philosophical, phenomenal, social, moral, or symbolic truth. A corollary to these referential and signifying criteria is the criterion of originality, both of style or form and of content. Questions regarding poetry's ability to distance itself from, or better yet to discard commonplaces and convention are really questions regarding its sincerity and its commitment to a personal and/or a contemporary reality. Yet Gautier asserted repeatedly that message or content and originality were secondary in poetry, as they were in art in general. "L'art, c'est la beauté, l'invention perpétuelle du détail, le choix de mots, le soin exquis de l'exécution,"¹⁰ and by invention, Gautier meant making: "Le mot poète veut dire littéralement faiseur: tout ce qui n'est pas bien fait n'existe pas."¹¹ As for originality, that is only "la note personnelle ajoutée au fonds commun préparé par les contemporains ou les prédécesseurs immédiats."¹² Molière, Shakespeare, and all the greats, he insists, never worried about originality any more than Michelangelo worried about the illusion of reality.¹³

When Taine once expressed a preference for Musset over Hugo, Gautier responded:

Demander à la poésie du sentimentalisme . . . ce n'est pas ça. Des mots rayonnants, des mots de lumière . . . avec un rythme et une musique, voilà ce que c'est que la poésie. .. . Ça ne prouve rien, ça ne raconte rien. . . . Ainsi, le commencement de Ratbert... il n'y a pas de poésie au monde comme cela. C'est le plateau de l'Hymalaya. Toute l'Italie blasonnée est là .. . et rien que des mots.¹⁴

Poetry is not what is said, that is an énoncé, but rather it is a saying, an énonciation which allows words to radiate, which makes them disseminate their light/their meanings in all directions according to and by means of a rhythm, a music.¹⁵ The referent of Ratbert may well be Italy, but it is an Italy so blazoned, so heralded that it is first and foremost an other-wordly poetry, evoking, for Gautier, Himalayan heights as well as its Italian referent. It is poetry because it is a radiation onto multiple signifieds constituted solely and purely by and of words. Regarding Les Fleurs du Mal, Gautier wrote:

Les mots ont en eux-mêmes et en dehors des sens qu'ils expriment une beauté; une valeur propre, comme les pierres précieuses qui ne sont pas encore taillées. Il y a des mots diamant, saphir, rubis, émeraude, d'autres qui luisent comme du phosphore quand on les frotte, et ce n'est pas un mince travail que de les choisir.¹⁶

It is necessary to recognize, therefore, that for Gautier, poetry is writing which "ne prouve rien, ne raconte rien." Whatever rhetoric, narration or reference it may possess or produce, these are not what define or constitute its poeticity. In Spirite, Gautier describes a reader/reading which would be in touch with his writing:

Il ne faut pas toujours prendre au pied de la lettre ce que dit un auteur: on doit faire la part des systèmes philosophiques ou littéraires, des affectations à la mode en ce moment-là, des réticences exigées, du style voulu ou commandé, des imitations admiratives et de tout ce qui peut modifier les formes extérieures d'un écrivain. Mais, sous tous ces déguisements, la vraie attitude de l'âme finit par se révéler pour qui sait lire; la sincère pensée est souvent entre les lignes, et le secret du poète .. . se devine à la longue; l'un après l'autre les voiles tombent et les mots des énigmes se découvrent. (94)

While I don't propose to be the realization of the ideal Lavinia/Spirite reading and understanding her beloved poet, I do propose that a deviant reading, that is, one which accepts the disguise of Gautier's writing, its displacement and its artifice, in short, its textuality, is in order. What is perhaps most striking about Gautier's poetry (and in fact all his writing) is its textuality, which, of course, is also an intertextuality. It exhibits its borrowings, its literary and cultural repetitions, its codes and conventions. It puts on display its literariness, that is, its existence as cultural artifact. It does so at times serenely, at times theatrically, at times playfully and humorously, at times ironically, at times obsessively.

Many have previously noted this artificiality. Michel Crouzet discussed it as Gautier's reproduction of the false and as his "creative problem." In "Théophile Gautier, poète," Gabriel Brunet saw "le type d'esprit qui ne perçoit le monde que sous l'aspect d'un ensemble de formes artistiques et ne cherche à le juger que par rapport à l'art créé par les hommes" (331). More recently, M. C. Schapira wrote: "Ce qui intrigue dans ses récits, c'est moins le non-dit que ce qui le masque en tout lieu: c'est l'artifice séduisant et trompeur de son écriture qui me parut très vite s'imposer comme le centre de toute réflexion sur son oeuvre" (8). What needs to be done for Gautier is to acknowledge this artifice and/or this artificiality not as something negative, something that goes against or prevents "good," "authentic" poetry, but as an essential constituent of poeticity. Rather than seeing artificiality and artifice as false and deceptive, I propose to accept them for what Gautier himself saw them to be: elements which are inherent and true to poetry, to writing and to art.

There are perhaps no verses of Gautier which are more widely known and quoted than those which conclude his poem "L'art": "Sculpte, lime, ciselle; / Que ton rêve flottant / Se scelle / Dans le bloc résistant!" (Poésies complètes III: 130). It may be that what readers have often resisted in Gautier's poetry is its manifestation of the resistance of the block, that is, the resistance of poetic language to what it would keep outside of it, namely time and therefore reality, as well as its resistance to that which it would have be within it, namely the rêve flottant. Résistant, the final word of Gautier's art poétique, is usually interpreted as signifying his commitment to a firmly defined formal poetry which would thereby possess the "hardness" to endure. One should note, however, that such an interpretation ignores, or is resistant to, that concomitant aspect of resistance by which the block is also impervious to the dream. It ignores, or is resistant to, the fact that Gautier himself modified the monosemic resistance which was expressed in the original variant of the poem: "Scelle ton rêve, afin / Qu'il dure / Tant que le monde ait fin!"¹⁷

The artificiality, the perceived and perceptible near-sightedness or lack in Gautier's poetry may be the honest, sincere, and lucid manifestation of poetry's inherent otherness to what is otherwise and elsewhere floating dream, as well as to its other "otherwise and elsewhere," reality. In fact, dream and block are mutually exclusive, as are dream and reality; they can coexist only rhetorically. The sealing of a floating dream is an oxymoron, a resistant, linguistic block or artifact defying realization and thus, paradoxically, assuring the continued existence of the rêve flottant in that realm outside or without textuality. Gautier's art poétique concludes with the purely figurai and rhetorical exhortation ("Sculpte, lime, ciselle") that poetry be the simulation of a seal, the simulation of a tomb and/or of an imprint, both only traces of or monuments to the thereby absent and still floating dream. These verses which are usually cited in order to typify all that is solid in the textual artifact that Gautier would have be poetry, actually manifest a poetics that is a complex play of deviance and simulation.

Gautier's poetry is not deceptive, however, precisely because it acknowledges and exhibits its duplicity. It does not delude. It makes visible its artifice both as prosodic legerdemain and as monumentality or blazonry. In a sense, the canonic opinion of this poetry as excessive surface and as lacking in mystery is justified. Gautier's poetry does reveal itself to be a textual surface which is only a supplement to what is absent. It is made up of an excess of what is not essential and exhibits a lack of what is essential. This, however, does not necessarily negate or impede poetry; rather it informs it and constitutes it. In his study of Genet, Sartre proposes that beauty is the triumph of the nothingness of appearance over the nothingness of the real, whereas "le non-être poétique se révèle dans l'échec . . . il est moins donné que pressenti, qu'espéré" (351). Poetry is Mallarmé's admission that "rien n'a eu lieu que le lieu." Gautier's poetry makes its readers aware of this gratuitousness, makes them aware of poetry's failure by making manifest the void of its exteriority. In Gautier's poems, beauty's triumphs are shown to be hollow because they are made superficial, that is, they are made manifestly textual. His poetry is a chiseled, polished surface which reveals its hollowness and inadequacy. It effects perceptible borders, gaps, and instabilities which reveal the limits of the poetic, textual surface. Its very superficiality allows, invites and seduces the reader to go "entre les lignes" and perceive the mystery, not of what is present and revealed, and therefore not mysterious, but of the absent.

Notes

¹ "Les progrès de la poésie française depuis1830," Histoire du romantisme in the Oeuvres complètes XI: 359. Future references to the Oeuvres complètes will be abbreviated to OC.

²Fusains et eaux-fortes, OC III: 49. . . .

³ Quoted by Ernest Feydeau in his Théophile Gautier, souvenirs intimes 47.

⁴Poésies complètes, ed. R. JasinskiI: 84. Unless otherwise noted, all my citations of Gautier's poetry will be taken from this edition which I will refer to as PC.

⁵Correspondance générale1849-1851 IV: 273. Gautier here reaffirms the same dual need for travel and for writing poetry which he expressed in the above statement cited by Feydeau. This need can be seen to reflect a desire for evaporation: a dispersal of the moi; and for condensation: a realization of the moi in the non-moi.

⁶ Serge Fauchereau lists these admiring readers of Gautier at the conclusion of his study, Théophile Gautier, 114-121. P.E. Tennant also concludes his book, Theophile Gautier, with an interesting sampling of views on Gautier (116-122).

⁷ Supervielle, in Robert Mallet's Les incertitudes du langage—entretiens à la radio avec Robert Mallet 264; Gide, Incidences 161.

⁸ These are the well-knownattributions given to Gautier in Baudelaire's dedication of Les Fleurs du Mal.

⁹ Christopher Prendergast's "Questions of Metaphor:Gautier's 'La Nue'" in Nineteenth-Century French Poetry is one such reconsideration. Jacques Lardoux has also suggested that rereadings in a more contemporary mode yield appreciative insights into Gautier's poetry ("Quelques hypothèses sur la modernité poétique de Théophile Gautier").

¹⁰Revue des Deux-Mondes,April 1, 1841.

¹¹Revue des Deux-Mondes,April 1, 1841.

¹²Histoire du romantisme, OCXI: 299.

¹³Histoire de l'art dramatique en France depuis vint-cing ans, 169; Fusains et eaux-fortes, OC III: 138-140.

¹⁴ Preface to Emile Bergerat's Théophile Gautier: entretiens, souvenirs et correspondance vii-viii.

¹⁵ The plasticity ofGautier's poetry is often unjustly used to negate its musicality. . . .

¹⁶ Gautier's introduction to Les Fleurs du Mal (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1925) xlvi.

¹⁷ This version appeared in L'Artiste, September 13, 1857 and is cited in Claudine Gothot-Mersch's edition of Emaux et Camées 275. Gautier's poem, as has often been noted, was a response to Théodore de Banville's "Odelette" which itself manifests a particularly strong sense of poetic resistance: "Car il faut qu'il [the poet] meurtrisse, / . . . Un métal au coeur dur," "Les strophes, nos esclaves / Ont encore besoin / D'entraves," and "Les pieds blancs de ces reines / Portent le poids réel / Des chaînes . . ." (Gothot-Mersch 275-276).

Works Cited

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