THE GALLIC COCK
FROM BAUDELAIRE TO SURREALISM. By Marcel Raymond. Wittenborn,
Schultz. Paper $3 .75. Cloth $5.00.
" 'Tis
true: There's magick in the web of it."
Othello
Marcel Raymond's
,vade mecum
to modern French poetry,
sensitively translated and presented, can serve to raise certain critical
issues here as effectively as it has for native readers since 1933. With
commendable briskness, the author sets forth his program: "Our task is
to discern the essential features of an adventure or drama
in
which a
number of privileged beings have taken part, to record the premises of
a dialectic that has developed and
fulfilled
itself in the course of human
history, tracing on the spiritual plane an ideal cycle of acts and as–
pirations that reveal a mysterious coherence." This statement of aims
provides a useful measure for the evaluation of the work: since it is
made clear that the author's purpose is primarily not a historical one,
his success or failure depends upon the adequacy with which he has
defined the
literary
"adventure" of our
times,
in short, upon his
poetics.
It is evident that the scope of his study will lie in the extension From
this position toward the historical richness and variety of poets, poems,
words, and spaces considered, but it is his poetics, available to reason and
discourse, that gives us at very least the symptoms of critical progress
and, at most, its dimensions.
It ma.y be objected that if Raymond had been more conscious of
the issues he could not have written his book. I do not deny this:
Raymond is a professor, an uncommonly sensitive one, whose purpose
is to communicate to an audience rather broader than the avant-garde.
To this extent he has succeeded. But inasmuch as he has not grasped
the full implications of his program he has failed, and
his
book ac–
cordingly
contains
several serious misjudgments, particularly on the
key relationship between Mallarme and Valery and upon each of these
figures separately: "It pleases him [Valery] to challenge nature, to
try to escape from himself through paradoxes. This is lost labor."
Need one point out that the strenuous attempt at transcendence over
nature, leading to paradox and gratuitous wrestling with mind, is the
indispensable condition for original creation? On the contrary, compared
with Mallarme, whom he called "the most conscious man who ever
held a pen," Valery did not think strenuously enough. Just recently the
best French critics have begun to realize how right Valery was when
