Theory and Me II

Marvin Richards’ Without Rhyme or Reason (Bucknell, 1998) gives me another chance to vent about Theory in literary scholarship. I’ll try not to repeat the general points I already made in my earlier piece on Connery’s The Empire of the Text. (Richards’ book, like Connery’s, has the look of a revised PhD thesis, so I suspect that in he, too, should be excused for some of the flaws of a book which was written under duress.)

Again we see a revisionist version being presented while the received version is still unknown. But Richards’ book at least cites and discusses some of Bertrand’s actual poems -- by my estimate, about a third of this short book discusses the  poems. Far too much attention, however, is given to the preface -- the weakest part of the book, and one which Bertrand had decided to replace.

The bulk of Richards' book is devoted to appropriating and validating Bertrand’s work for the world of theory. There are mentions of  Hegel, Derrida, Bohr, Gödel, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger, an extended comparison to the nouveau roman (which I think is far off the mark), and a discussion of the carnivalesque.  The “self-contradictory nature of the genre” of the prose-poem (well, duh) is touched on, and perhaps the biggest single theme is the  reception of Bertrand’s work by others as a “precursor”. (Richards regrets that Bertrand seems to have been relegated to the precursor role, but by foregrounding this issue in his book, even critically, he takes that ascription more seriously than he needed to. Some of us don’t care about Breton’s endorsement, one way or another).

A number of interesting perceptions in Richards’ book would fit quite well in a  book which was actually about Bertrand’s poems. Richards’ comments on Bertrand’s   “creative parody”, “jerkiness”, use of “mosaic”, and “break from monologic romanticism”, are all interesting. But there just isn’t enough of the good stuff.

I doubt that Richards’ book would convince anyone who isn’t already familiar with Bertrand’s work that Gaspard de la Nuit is worth reading. In saying this I err in the direction of saying that Richards should have written an “appreciation” of Bertrand, but that is exactly what I think he should have done. Writing is normative and intentional by nature, and (except in very rare cases) we only write about books which think are worthy of attention. When writing about an author who is mostly unknown to Anglophones (though translations have been published), it seems to me that you should start at the beginning and (especially) show what’s good about his writing. A strictly detached analysis seems quite inappropriate.

Compared to Connery's book, Richards's isn't all that bad. The sad thing is that both authors  clearly would have been capable of writing much better books, if they had been allowed to do so.

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SOURCES

Bertrand, Louis (Aloysius), Gaspard de la Nuit, Nouvel Office d’Édition, Poche Club Fantastique, 1965.

Rude, Fernand. Aloysius Bertrand, Éd. Seghers, Paris, 1971

Sidney-Fryer, Donald,  Gaspard de la Nuit, Black Coat Press, 2004 (translation).

Sprietsma, Cargill, Louis Bertrand, Oeuvres poétiques, Slatkine Reprints, Geneva, 1977/1926.

Wright, John T. Louis "Aloysius" Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit: Fantasies in the Manner of Rembrandt and Callot, Translation, Introduction, and Notes. Maryland: University Press of America, 1994.

Some translations of Bertrand by Michael Benedikt

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Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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