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LEO BERSANI
readings of poetry don't encourage us to expect better literary ana·
lyses from less dogmatic versions of structuralism. I'm thinking
of
his studies of Baudelaire's "La Geante" for the Johns Hopkins sym·
posium, and of Baudelaire's "Je te donne ces vers ..." for the recent
issue of
Poetique
devoted to Jakobson. The apparatus of syntactic,
prosodic and semantic analysis which he uses for his reading of
"La
Geante" (replete with the familiar charts and algebraic formulas of
contemporary French criticism) hardly seems vindicated by his tenta·
tive, impressionistic conclusions. The charts and formulas have gotten
him to what might have been the starting point for a discussion of
the poem: the "ambiguous" position of "Ia jeune geante" as both
dominated and dominating, and the ambiguity of her identification
with nature. But that's as far as we are taken, and the exact nature
and function of these ambiguities are not gone into. This is especially
disappointing since Ruwet had begun his analysis with the most
striking particularity of the poem: the string of infinitives that depend
on " j'eusse aime." But, peculiarly enough, that observation leads him
I
nowhere. The giantess's passive-active nature - which is what Ruwet
works up to - is a dull piece of information which becomes poetically
satisfying only in relation to the more original and precise ambiguity
created by the poet's playing his syntactical eloquence, even grand·
ness, against the humble, self-effacing poses he imagines for himself:
as a voluptuous domestic cat and as a peaceful hamlet subordinated
to the giantess's royal and monumental being.
A mystery of the criticism I'm speaking of is what might be
called its inadequate thoroughness. It's as if a certain analytical pos·
ture automatically destroyed the experience of the poem. A rigorous
structuralist would, of course, not be likely to consider this a valid
objection to his method. This destruction, he might say, is called for
in Levi-Strauss's definition of the philosopher's mission (substitute
"poem" for "Being" and you will have the critic's mission ):
"To
understand Being in relation to itself, and not in relation to oneself."
But to understand the poem "in relation to itself," in Levi-Strauss's
sense, is to miss something vital in poetry. As Richard Poirier has
eloquently argued, the meanings of literature are inseparable from its '
performing aspects - and performance includes the writer's attempts
to imagine an audience and to incorporate it into the form of his
work. The poem's relation to
llS
-
its struggle or complicity with an
