Rob Halpern wrote
concerning my reference of Aloysius Bertrand in my blog the other day about Merrill
Gilfillan, who long ago translated some 30 poems from Gaspard de la Nuit, a work Baudelaire cites as the inspiration for
his own poems in prose. –
Dear RS,
I wasn't too surprised to find the parenthetical
"(unlike Bertrand)" in yr recent blog comment of 5/7: "I recall
how, reading Baudelaire’s prose poems which (unlike Bertrand) Baudelaire knew
in advance to be both prose & poetry & realizing that Baudelaire was
clearly counting sentences so that more than a few turned out to be 14 sentence
poems, I got so excited I could barely stand it."
Bertrand may not have understood the historical
contradictions his curious technique of hybridizing poem and prose was
registering. To be sure, the "meaning" of his form, and the social
allegory it was performing, eluded him; but the historical meaning of
Baudelaire's own form arguably eluded him too – despite his strong sense of it
– just as our own are bound to elude us. What we "know" ourselves to
be doing "in advance" must always be something else or other, no?
There is no question, however, that Bertrand knew himself to be writing both
poetry and prose while he was working on his book; hence, the rich tensions
that obtain between, on the one hand, the comment "I tried to create a new
genre of prose," which appears in a letter to the sculptor David
d'Angers* when Gaspard was collecting dust in the drawer of his would be
publisher, Eugene Renduel (who bought the work for a
small price only to allow it to languish unpublished for fear of bad sales),
while Bertrand, indigent and tubercular, was really struggling to survive; and,
on the other hand, the note "to Monsieur Typesetter" appended to his
manuscript in which Bertrand emphatically specifies the amount of white space
designed to appear between his prose "stanzas," and along the margins
of his page: "as if it were poetry," he writes. Anyway, your comment
isn't unlike many other similar misreadings of Bertrand – from Saint-Beuve and Baudelaire, to Mallarmé and Breton – which,
despite their enthusiastic appreciation for the work, fail to grasp Gaspard as the product of a historically
specific labor. In fact, I would argue that calling Bertrand's compositions
"prose poems" amounts to a misrecognition – something along the lines
of a genre fallacy – one that assimilates a particular innovation to a later
formation with which it shares no "generic" features. Baudelaire
himself recognized this when he referred in the letter to Houssaye
to having fallen short of his model and to having produced something
"singularly different". I think it's important to our understanding
of the "pre-history" of the 19th c. avant-garde – and of the
development of poem/prose hybrid forms in general – to comprehend and respect
that difference, and to do so equally from the side of Bertrand's own
singularity.
Sincerely, Rob Halpern
* A sketch
of Bertrand’s corpse made by d’Angers can be found here.
