Les nouveaux tsars, Tome 2 : L'Effet blast by Jean-Yves Delitte

Show description

The speaker of ‘Paria’ actively rejects a whole clutch of nineteenth-century clichés: ‘Qu’ils se payent des républiques, | Hommes libres! — carcan au cou —’ (1–2) attacks discourses of progress, ‘— L’idéal à moi: c’est un songe | Creux; mon horizon — l’imprévu —’ (21–2) attacks the ideal. The poem sets the speaker up as an anti-hero who condemns society and invites us to take his side. …— Par hasard j’ai pu naître; | Peut-être en est-il — par hasard…’ (53–4). He also shows the pain of this isolation by evoking the absence of contact in concrete physical terms: ⁵³ ‘Une étude sur Corbière’, 8.

42 Voice-Defying Lyricism as a communicative strategy or dialogue. Edmund Wilson describes this kind of poetry as ‘conversational-ironic’,⁶⁹ and it is worth unpacking his term to consider how the evasiveness of irony is inextricably linked to the immediacy of living speech. We have already seen instances of this: the use of contrasting voices in successive poems, and the plurality of voices which coexist within the individual ‘À Marcelle’ poems. Corbière’s poems present themselves as living utterances.

The self-conscious wit of poems like ‘À la mémoire de Zulma’ constantly rebounds on the poet himself, making it difficult to identify a conventional lyric subject. ‘Épitaphe’ describes the elusive subject in the third person with paradoxical statements such as: Ne fut quelqu’un, ni quelque chose Son naturel était la pose. (42–3) Poems like ‘À la mémoire de Zulma’ turn this into a first person performance by systematically destabilizing the je lyrique. Speakers sometimes actively use puns as self-punishment, but wordplay also exposes things which are beyond the speaker’s control.