Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

LITERARY LANDFALLS by Dominique Aury. Translated by Denise Folliot. (Chatto & Windus.)

THE WRITER’S WAY IN FRANCE by Robert Greer Cohn. (University of Pennsylvania Press.)

Two books about French literature which could scarcely be more different. Mme Aury practises a traditional genre — the highly personal, impressionistic sketch, attempting to interpret and communicate the essential atmosphere of a writer’s mind and work, his ‘personal vision and message’. There is neither analysis nor theory, and little ethical or aesthetic judgement; this is scarcely literary criticism as the pundits would have it, but rather the reveries about men and books of an âme sensible. The reviewer reaches instinctively for clichés about insight, perceptiveness, sensitivity. There is nothing strikingly new in Mine Aury’s study of these fourteen writers, who range from Chrétien de Troyes to Colette; Fénelon’s quietism, Scève’s symbolism have been studied exhaustively elsewhere; Balzac’s subconscious radicalism was pointed out by Marx. But one is impressed by the delicate surety of her touch, the truthfulness of her judgement and the breadth of her sympathies, even while a certain poeticism irritates. The value of this sort of criticism depends largely on the particular quality of the critic’s sensibility (and Mme Aury’s, though subtle, is surely less rich than that of Virginia Woolf, with whom she has been compared) and also on the charm of the style, which is inevitably dissipated in translation, although Denise Folliot’s is admirably smooth and lucid. The book is destined to the common reader — Lectures pour Tous is the original title — and the common reader will get from it a certain rarefied pleasure and a flattering sense of being himself among the âmes sensibles.

     He will get no such solace from The Writer’s Way in France. Professor Cohn is a learned American with a mind original to the point of crankiness, who writes uncompromisingly for eggheads, for readers versed not merely in Hegel and Heidegger but in Auerbach and Kretschmer, and inured to the strenuous discipline of the New Criticism. His book teems with provocative ideas dogmatically stated. Its scope is ambitious; it studies, in turn, the nature of the creative temperament, the origins of language, the various themes of the Collective Unconscious treated by man’s imagination from primitive to modern times, and the various periods of French literature from the Middle Ages to the Symbolists; there are, further, detailed analyses of certain texts — Rimbaud and Proust — and of various types of French poetry, and a handful of learned appendices. Professor Cohn is an exponent of the very newest criticism, which has evolved ‘behind the backs of insular figures like Leavis and Eliot’; he ‘borrows insights from various systematic disciplines (psychology, philosophy, anthropology, semantics) but substitutes fluid critical language for scientific jargon, inventing new terms and formulations when necessary’. (His own words.) But such critical language becomes itself a jargon more repellent, because less precise, than technical scientific speech. This common reader floundered blindly on, coming up for air when some shrewd and illuminating comment revealed the Professor’s genuine critical qualities, and then again submerged in verbiage — painfully aware of ignorance yet with a vaguely resentful sense that ‘ce qui se conçoit bien s’énonce clairement’.

     Indeed, one feels inclined to ask the Professor: ‘is your epistemology really necessary?’ One of its basic elements, for instance, is the concept of polarity, which seems to cover every sort of conflict, stress or contrast in human experience; there’s something rigid and artificial about this systematizing, and the common reader is scarcely illuminated if he turns to the Appendix and reads: ‘The epistemology which I have tentatively called “multipolarity” or “polyparity” is in the lineage of the Hegelian dialectic, with a kinship to the post-Hegelian modification of it into a tetrapolar and polypolar form by Kierkegaard.’ Etc. Again, the terms vertical and horizontal are used constantly to distinguish between man’s inner and his outer life, his relations with himself and those with society and the outside world: a convenient formula, which however leads the author into such extravagant writing as this: ‘The momentary addition of horizontality to verticality produces the architectural quality of squareness, carrure, in classical art beginning with Malherbe . . . the dynamism or thrust of the baroque spirit underlying the Classical draws much of its power from this new dimension, for breadth has its own infinite, its own poetry, from the vast sweep of Versailles to the incredible width of Louis XIV’s hats.’

     Moreover, one cannot help feeling suspicious of this mishmash of ‘systematic disciplines’ adapted and distorted by a layman; one senses confusion of ideas behind the battery of words. The thought as well as the language is ‘fluid’ and is always spilling over, psychology into anthropology into literary history. For example: Professor Cohn traces the development of culture in terms of human growth (the highly disputable theory of ‘progress’ in art being further justified in an appendix), and thus the Renaissance is equated with puberty and explained in Freudian terms. ‘We have noted that this new vision, the idea of a vocation, is characterized by the reality principle of adolescence, based on the concrete possibility of sexual expression and competition with the father. . .’ Etc, etc.

     Professor Cohn’s extreme sensitivity to symbol and metaphor and all the correspondances and associations underlying them (he is an authority on Mallarmé) bears fruit in the searching and illuminating chapters on Rimbaud and Proust, but it also leads him to excessive and unremitting ingenuity in identifying ideas and images. One example must serve: a footnote on Rimbaud’s lines

‘Ils tressaillent souvent à la claire voix d’or
Du timbre matinal, qui frappe et frappe encor . . .’

runs: ‘Whether through the golden sun which measures time, the village bell, or the “golden voice” of the livingroom — possibly “grandfather” — clock, there is some link between “Father Time” and the poetic expression of nostalgia for the father.’ Far-fetched enough; if such ingenuity were confined to footnotes one would hardly object, but it pervades the book, blurring issues and ideas in a haze of ambiguity.

     It seems a pity that so much learning and imagination, combined with such zest and real feeling for literature — all this and a Guggenheim Fellowship too — should have resulted in so pretentious and irritating a book.