Roger Pearson

Flaubert's Style and the Idea of Literary Justice

Abstract Whereas it has often been argued that Flaubert’s preoccupation with style constitutes the rejection of an ethical function for literature and art, or at best bespeaks a purely private ethic of effort and artistic self-consciousness, this article proposes that, in his famous pursuit of the ‘mot juste’, Flaubert is seeking to institute a public form of ‘literary justice’ (a concept he introduces explicitly in his correspondence with George Sand). It is argued that, in contributing to the creation of an autonomous literary domain governed by its own criteria of rightfulness, Flaubert was not simply withdrawing into style as a self-sufficient realm of aesthetic perfection (as Pierre Bourdieu and many others have maintained), but rather was knowingly employing style as an inherently political instrument in order to create a bewilderingly inscrutable — and therefore more just — moral universe at variance with that unthinkingly inhabited by the state and the majority of its citizens.

The Voice of the Unconscious: Laforgue and the Poet as Lawgiver

This article discusses Laforgues thinking about the nature and purpose of poetry against the backdrop of the age-old figure of the poet as lawgiver. Although Laforgue rejected the ‘vers philo.’ of Le Sanglot de la Terre, and with it apparently the Hugolian model of the poet as vates, this model continued to inform his poetic theory and practice as he developed a new aesthetic in the light of Hartmanns Philosophy of the Unconscious. The first part of the article briefly traces the emergence and development of the poets new role as the ‘voice of the Unconscious’ from Le Sanglot de la Terre through to Derniers vers, while the second part examines the ways in which four of the protagonists in the Moralités légendaires — Hamlet, Salomé, the Monstre-Dragon, and Pan — constitute different manifestations of the poetlawgiver and represent successive stages in Laforgues conception of the poets function.

Strategic Gaps: Poetry and the Sixth Sense from Chateaubriand to Mallarmé

Abstract This article examines a view of poetry that developed in France during the course of the nineteenth century: namely, of poetry as a mode of perception and knowledge that creates and maps a ‘strategic gap’ between the sensual and the conceptual. Following brief discussion of the explicit analogy between poetry and the sixth sense as it appears in twentieth-century poetry (Bonnefoy, Guillevic), the article traces a history of this ‘strategic gap’ through a series of writers: Chateaubriand, Ballanche, Staël, Lamartine, Baudelaire, Hugo, and Mallarmé. The term ‘sixth sense’ — proposed by the abbé Du Bos in 1719 as a synonym for aesthetic response and briefly adopted by Chateaubriand to designate the capacity of art to offer intimations of the divine — was appropriated by Mesmerism in the late eighteenth century and remained associated with the paranormal and the occult. Nineteenth-century poets were therefore obliged to coin alternatives — enthusiasm, prayer, conjecture, mystery — in order to articulate an increasingly secular apprehension of the ‘divine’, of that which lies just outside our sensual or conceptual grasp. Implicit in these coinages is nevertheless the conviction that poetry allows us to perceive and express what Chateaubriand calls the ‘je ne sais quoi’ and Mallarmé quite simply ‘autre chose’.

'Les Chiffres et les Lettres': Mallarmé's 'Or' and the Gold Standard of Poetry

‘Tu m’as donné ta boue et j’en ai fait de l’or’: Baudelaire’s famous line from his projected ‘Epilogue’ to the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal traditionally stands as emblematic of his poetic enterprise: that is, the transformation – by the alchemy of imagination and prosodic technique – of the base metal of reality into the more valuable commodity of art. The poetic thyrsus, twining fantasy around the stiff rod of fact, will restore freshness and wonder to our perception of the everyday and intimate a realm of connections, or ‘correspondances’, suggestive of ‘une ténébreuse et profonde unité’. One of the several interesting ways in which Mallarmé presents himself as heir to the author of Les Fleurs du Mal but then gives his legacy an entirely new application may be seen in his use of this term ‘or’: and, as my ambiguous title is intended to convey, I propose to discuss not only the short poème critique so entitled in Divagations but also, summarily, Mallarmé’s use of the word ‘or’ throughout his work. This discussion will be concerned with the central aspect of a larger and ongoing project, namely a study of the articles which Mallarmé wrote during the1890s for the Revue blanche, edited by the alleged anarchist bomber Félix Fénéon, and for the National Observer, a British weekly journal of politics and literature. In these articles Mallarmé examines a range of contemporary political, social and literary issues anarchism and the class struggle, the role of the aristocracy and the Catholic Church, the workings of capitalism, the advent of vers libre and seeks to refocus these issues within the context of his own carefully elaborated account of the public role of the writer. Thus self-evident analogies are skewed: writers constitute an élite but one that is working on behalf of the people; the writer is a priest but his religion is secular; the writer is a worker, but his work is spiritual and his labour unpaid; vers libre is anarchic,