Underdetermination in Two French Poems

 

Baudelaire’s “L’Étranger” and Verlaine’s “Art Poetique” are appended following the endnotes in new translations of my own as well as in the French originals. 

 

    Teachers of expository writing, technical writing, and journalism generally stress clarity and economy.   For such forms of discourse the language should most often be transparent with the meaning evident and the style unobtrusive.  In aesthetic genres, though, to exploit literature’s capacity for an extraordinary density of meaning, phrasing, figures of speech, tone, and sound enrich and deepen signification.  Ambiguity can convey a richer truth that reflects the contradictions, even the mystery of things, rather than a reductive simplicity. 

     Literary usage, however, differs widely in deployment of this strategy.  Some texts have what seems a unitary (or at least a rapidly decodable) signification while others are more ambiguous or unclear in meaning [1].  The distinction was recognized in medieval France in the contrast between trobar leu and trobar clus.  Either may be appropriate depending on the aims of the text.  Realistic fiction, for instance, is generally highly determined as are popular dramas like television situation comedies and folktales, while experimental and avant-garde works are more likely to be underdetermined.  Poetry that succeeds in oral performance is likely to be more immediately intelligible than written texts which the reader may ponder and review.

     Though works of both kinds may be found throughout literary history, during the last century and half underdetermined poetry has been particularly prestigious.  Since Romanticism the elevation of the individual genius and the rise of an art indifferent or even hostile to popularity has in part displaced the old emphases on art’s transmitting cultural norms while seeking to please.  Intellectuals relish complexity while the great majority of the population consumes poetry only through the medium of popular music.

    These attitudes are often quite self-conscious.  Flaubert and Baudelaire sought to distance themselves from social norms [2].  Verlaine considered the modern writers he admired to be Les Poètes Maudits and Mallarmé cultivated an obscure style. French Symbolism and Italian Hermeticism gloried in vaguer signification, while Realism, Naturalism, and Tendenzromane of both right and left strove in general for unitary, clearly prescribed meanings.   

     “L’Étranger,” one of the prose poems in Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose or Spleen de Paris (1869) and Verlaine’s “Art Poétique” from Jadis et Naguère (Formerly and Recently) (1884) both promote underdetermination in service of rather different styles.  While both poets share with Gautier the view that beauty is the primary desideratum of art, Gautier’s “L’Art” promotes a Parnassian style with attention focused on form and precise concrete description.  For Gautier a poem is a cunningly crafted object like Cellini’s gold, enamel, and ebony salt cellar, its shapes well-defined, with solid heft.  Though Gary Snyder would scarcely be classed with Gautier, he expresses a similar notion in “Riprap”: Lay down these words/ Before your mind like rocks.”  Both Baudelaire and Verlaine depend on a different aesthetic, with beauty based on more elusive meaning.

     Baudelaire’s stranger prefers clouds the very excellence of which arises from their imprecise suggestiveness.  After denying that he loves what others do – family, friends, country, and wealth – the speaker hedges on beauty, saying that what is called art he finds not always beautiful or divine.  He chooses instead to celebrate the clouds.  Surely this is a manner of saying that he revels in his own imagination.  The clouds themselves bear no meaning, it is only his reception of their appearance that lends them appeal.  In other words, he is affirming his own sensibility as the source of aesthetic delight.  He follows here the Romantic celebration of genius and anticipates not only the obscurity associated with Symbolist imagery, but also the notion of idiosyncratic taste inherent in hip, camp, and kitsch appreciation.  Classical standards of beauty and monosemous theme are dismissed or ignored.

     Verlaine’s “Art Poetique” advocates a similar aesthetic, though with considerably more elaboration.  In fact his “nuance” (also nuance in English) shares an etymology with Baudelaire’s ”nuage” (cloud).  Like Baudelaire he condemns traditional eloquence using vivid terms, even saying it should be throttled).  Like Pater in The Renaissance saying that all art aspires to the condition of music, he declares that music, the most abstract of the arts, must rule [3].  His enemy is the obvious: a cheap laugh, too much garlic, showy costume jewelry.  For him beauty lies in the subtlety of a scent in the breeze, a musical phrase, the flight of a bird.  Equivocation becomes a part of charm.

   Baudelaire’s “L’Étranger” used the open form of the prose poem, employed by Aloysius Bertrand in Gaspard de la nuit (1842) and later to shattering effect by Rimbaud in in Illuminations (1886).  Though Verlaine inveighs against rhyme, he rhymes nonetheless (sometimes in slant rhymes such as midi/attiédi, énergie/assagie, and matin/thym).  The eight syllable lines are not entirely predictable, as they are varied without pattern with seven and nine syllable lines, and one of ten [4]. 

     This freedom is consistent with the expression of novel content and the elevation of art to a quasi-religion.  The appeal of the poets’ underdetermination arises in part from its suggestion that the artist is a kind of shamanic conjurer dealing in spells, but the reader, too, shares in the creation of meaning not through mechanical decoding but in a kind of collaborative construction of signification.  By violating conventions and establishing new ones, the poets help bring to birth new forms of literature.

      

 

 

1.  Roland Barthes’ S/Z distinguished between readerly (lisible) texts and writerly (scriptable) ones   Since for him certain further assumptions and value judgements are associated with these terms, underdetermined and highly determined are preferred here.  (Overdetermined should be reserved for cases in which too much information is given resulting in potentially tiresome replication.)

2.  Flaubert ridiculed the bourgeois, for instance, in Bouvard and Pecuchet and the Dictionary of Received Ideas, and Baudelaire praised the “dandy” whose style indicates his aesthetic concerns.  In another clear sign of transgressive intent, both were prosecuted for obscenity.

3.  Pater in 1873 was far from alone in his sentiment.  In Poe’s “The Poetic Principle” (1850) he said "It is in Music perhaps that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles -- the creation of supernal Beauty.”  Verlaine had described Poe as malin though naïf and even puéril in a letter of May 16, 1873 to Edmond Lepelletier.  Many others have voiced similar ideas.  For instance, Susan Sontag in Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 says “Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts— it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure— and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.”

4.  I find two lines of seven syllables, ten of eight, twenty-three of nine, and one I count as ten: 8899 8899 8998 9979 10998 9999 9898 9997 9989.

 

 

 

 

The Stranger

 

 

     “Whom do you love better, mystery man, tell me: your father, or mother, your sister or brother?”

    “I have no father, mother, sister, or brother.”

     “Your friends?”

     “You are using a word the meaning of which has always been unknown to me.”

     “Your country?”

     “I don’t even know its latitude.”

     “Beauty?”

     “I would gladly love her as an immortal goddess.”

     “Gold?”

     “I hate it just as you hate god.”

     “So, what then do you love, you extraordinary stranger?”

    “I love the clouds – the clouds which drift by – like there – and there! The marvelous clouds!”

 

 

L’Étranger

 

— Qui aimes-tu le mieux, homme énigmatique, dis ? ton père, ta mère, ta sœur ou ton frère ?

— Je n’ai ni père, ni mère, ni sœur, ni frère.

— Tes amis ?

— Vous vous servez là d’une parole dont le sens m’est resté jusqu’à ce jour inconnu.

— Ta patrie ?

— J’ignore sous quelle latitude elle est située.

— La beauté ?

— Je l’aimerais volontiers, déesse et immortelle.

— L’or ?

— Je le hais comme vous haïssez Dieu.

— Eh ! qu’aimes-tu donc, extraordinaire étranger ?

— J’aime les nuages… les nuages qui passent… là-bas… là-bas… les merveilleux nuages !

 

 

 

The Art of Poetry (Paul Verlaine)

 

Before all else the verse must swing,

so build a rhythm just off-beat,

dissolved in air and not too neat,

no weighty or prescriptive thing.

 

You must not choose your words without

allowing polysemy in. 

Grey songs have aways finest been

where certainty contends with doubt.

 

Behind a veil a lovely eye,

or noonday trembling in the sun.

Blue stars arrayed when day is done

across the mild autumn sky.

 

Nuance alone is what will suit

No color, just nuance alone!

For only by nuance is shown

The links of dreams or horn to flute!

 

Fly far then from the deathly spot,

the cruel shade, the laugh so cheap

which makes the very sky to weep

like too much garlic in the pot.

 

Take eloquence and twist its neck! 

A little work and you’ll do well

To calm the rhymes for a short spell

If we don’t curb them, there’s no check!

 

Why, who rhyme’s wrongs can ever know?

And what deaf child or crazy slave

to us this shoddy jewel gave

which proves so false when studied close.

 

It’s music always wins the prize!

Your verse must be a thing in  flight,

an active soul alone can write

which takes to other loves and skies.

 

So may your verse fly with the birds,

and swim in morning’s breeze so chilled,

with mint and thyme aromas filled

and all the rest is only words.

 

 

Art Poetique

 

Paul Verlaine

De la musique avant toute chose,

Et pour cela préfère l’Impair

Plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air,

Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.

 

Il faut aussi que tu n’ailles point

Choisir tes mots sans quelque méprise :

Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise

Où l’Indécis au Précis se joint.

 

C’est des beaux yeux derrière des voiles,

C’est le grand jour tremblant de midi,

C’est, par un ciel d’automne attiédi,

Le bleu fouillis des claires étoiles !

 

Car nous voulons la Nuance encor,

Pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance !

Oh ! la nuance seule fiance

Le rêve au rêve et la flûte au cor !

 

Fuis du plus loin la Pointe assassine,

L’Esprit cruel et le Rire impur,

Qui font pleurer les yeux de l’Azur,

Et tout cet ail de basse cuisine !

 

Prends l’éloquence et tords-lui son cou !

Tu feras bien, en train d’énergie,

De rendre un peu la Rime assagie.

Si l’on n’y veille, elle ira jusqu’où ?

 

Ô qui dira les torts de la Rime ?

Quel enfant sourd ou quel nègre fou

Nous a forgé ce bijou d’un sou

Qui sonne creux et faux sous la lime ?

 

De la musique encore et toujours !

Que ton vers soit la chose envolée

Qu’on sent qui fuit d’une âme en allée

Vers d’autres cieux à d’autres amours.

 

Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure

Éparse au vent crispé du matin

Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym…

Et tout le reste est littérature.