Les Poses de l‘Incompris reprises: Corbière, Caricature, and Critical Illness

Journal of Literary Disability, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2007

Les Poses de l‘Incompris reprises: Corbière, Caricature, and Critical Illness Tammy Berberi1

Though included in Paul Verlaine’s Poètes maudits (“accursed poets”), Tristan Corbière is remembered as accursed not for his brassy innovations in style or for his audacity in challenging poetic convention, but for his poor health. He is said to have suffered from chronic swelling in the extremities, rheumatic fever, pneumonia, tuberculosis, deafness, blindness, sexual impotence, and neurosis, as well as being unattractive. Despite a startling paucity of proof to substantiate these conditions, the pathologized composite continues to haunt critical inquiry. The essay examines the historical construction of illness— how it became the bedrock of critical studies of Corbière, and why recent trends in scholarship have failed to shake that construction at its foundation. These findings make way for a reevaluation of Les Amours jaunes that reveals a brilliant parody of the very preconceived notions that, over time, have entwined to stereotype both Corbière and Les Amours jaunes.

Introduction Tristan Corbière is best known for having authored a single, slim volume of poetry, Les Amours jaunes (Yellow Loves), which he published at his own—or more exactly, his father’s—expense in 1873, yet extant documents suggest that he possessed extraordinary talent for self-expression in the visual arts as well as language. Corbière’s childhood letters are richly illustrated, here with an unfavorable rendering of a schoolmaster he did not like, there with a tiny family portrait of his cousins, the Chenantais, with whom he lived for a time as a teenager. As an adult, he delighted in presenting himself in caricature, and left nearly a dozen known caricatured self-portraits scattered about—charcoal sketches and two extraordinary oil paintings. In all of these, he appears in profile, as scrawny, knobbykneed, and a bit hunched, with a large nose, craggy features, and a tattered, crumpled hat. One sketch, distinct from the others, is covered with dark, criss-crossed hatch marks; a shadowy figure leaning against the wall is discernible only by the darker scratches that outline it. The first oil painting reproduces this craggy figure who sits alone, leaning back on his palms, smoking a pipe as he retrieves verses from his cobwebbed ‘attic.’ A spider sits atop his tattered hat, spinning a web behind his head, and paraphrased verses from “Le Poète contumace” (“Poet in Absentia”) are inscribed in the upper right-hand corner. The other painting depicts a plump, leathery old sailor on a stool, holding a drink in one hand and smoking a pipe with the other. The puff of smoke emanating from the pipe swirls E. Corbière. In contrast, extant photos of Corbière are quite banal. In one, he is a boy of perhaps sixteen. He sits with affected ease, his cheek propped stiffly on his left hand, his cap crumpled in his right. Critics strive to rationalize its utter unremarkability, its bourgeois—and physical— normalcy: faced with irrefutable “proof” that Corbière bore no visible stigma as a young man, Henri Thomas wonders if “the ugliness he made such a big deal about in a poem wasn’t the 2 result of an illness that struck him rather late in life.” Likewise, André Le Milinaire insists, “As we compile this terrible list, we must not forget Tristan’s ugliness, which some biographers 3 dispute, but which Tristan lived and suffered as such.” Readers who are by now curious about the appearance of this Corbière fellow might like to know that both of the extant photographs and most of the caricatures are readily available ISSN 1753-741X

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online. Referring to one caricature, René Martineau, Corbière’s first biographer, writes, 4 “Nothing in the child suggests the bizarre being that he would be at age 25.” Albert 5 Sonnenfeld describes “the ravages that rhumatism caused to his face,” as he contemplates a Jean Benner sketch of Corbière: “[Corbière] has almost no chin, enormous lips, and his long 6 nose resembles a bird with a long beak.” Others use the sketches as a kind of pathometer, a measure of how Corbière “must have felt” about his various conditions. Jean Rousselot cites the drawings as proof of “this will to self-destruct, this self-hatred, this delight in the ridiculous and 7 the abject.” Sonnenfeld in turn contemplates the oil painting of the plump old sailor to conclude that the swirling smoke suggests Corbière’s “desire to become one with the sailor and 8 to rid himself of his infirm body and the face that he so cruelly caricatured.” Thus, despite being included in his contemporary Paul Verlaine’s Poètes maudits (1888), Corbière is best remembered as maudit for his poor health. He is said to have suffered from chronic swelling in the extremities, rheumatic fever, pneumonia, tuberculosis, deafness, blindness, sexual impotence, and neurosis, and—horreur!—to have been unattractive. Despite a startling paucity of proof to substantiate any of these conditions save rheumatism and the tuberculosis that killed him, the pathologized composite continues to haunt critical inquiry. This essay will explore why the specter of a sick and ugly body remains central to the study of Corbière and Les Amours jaunes. It is an unwieldy body that, to borrow the characterization of James L. Porter, “stands in its own way,” shunting inquiry into the same impasse of unanswerable questions, inviting biographical speculation, and spawning endless assumptions that continue to stifle more analytical readings of Les Amours jaunes (iii). To study the reception of Les Amours jaunes over the past 130 years is to explore the historical construction of illness— how it became the bedrock of critical studies of Corbière, and why recent trends in scholarship have failed to shake that construction at its foundation. A wholesale reevaluation of Corbière’s verse foregrounds sound and dissonance rather than vision and incongruity, and reveals a brilliant parody. The work is an extraordinarily prescient parodic staging of the very preconceived notions that have entwined to stereotype both Corbière and Les Amours jaunes.

Corbière, Caricature, and Critical Illness A review of Les Amours jaunes—the only one that appeared at the time of its publication in 1873—offers the beginning of an answer: “Although this may be a rather naïve approach, we took the book for what it is and judged it according to this principle: the work is [a reflection of] 9 the man.” Critics have thus read statements like, “That toad there is me” (“Le Crapaud”) or “I am so ugly” (“Guitare”) in the same spirit as they have considered his caricatures, despite ample evidence that something else is at play. Corbière was crafting the poems of Les Amours jaunes as Rimbaud was formulating an aesthetic that would challenge these assumptions, writing 10 in a letter to Paul Demeny in the spring of 1871: “Je est un autre” (“I is another”). This suggests that one is justified in approaching Les Amours jaunes more critically, yet critics have remained steadfast in their fascination. In 1925, Martineau insisted: “One could retrace, verse 11 by verse, the short journey of his life,” and Le Milinaire confirmed in 1989: “There really are 12 no poems in Les Amours jaunes that are not autobiographical.” While the present study refutes this rather grandiose and outmoded claim, reviewing what little is known about Corbière’s life is worthwhile—if a bit humdrum by contrast. Edouard-Joachim Corbière was born to Antoine-Edouard Corbière and his young wife, Marie-Angélique Apasie Puyo, on July 18, 1845 at Coat-Congar Ploujean, Brittany. Corbière père was a sailor and a writer of maritime novels; his most successful, Le Négrier, was published in 1832. Edouard-Joachim shed his father’s name to adopt the name Tristan in 1861. Limited medical records and extant letters suggest that Corbière had a happy childhood and endured occasional bouts of illness and longish periods of convalescence by resting in the sitting room in a miniature cutter he dubbed Le Négrier after his father’s novel. At the age of fourteen, the onset ISSN 1753-741X

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of chronic swelling associated with rheumatic fever prompted his family to send him to live in Nantes with an uncle, Dr. Chenantais, where he benefited from in-house medical expertise and a milder climate. In 1861, he suffered an apparently difficult crisis (due to either rheumatic fever or tuberculosis) and moved to Provence to convalesce. In 1863, the family moved again to Roscoff, Brittany, to hasten his recovery. Although he suffered other minor bouts of illness, Tristan was able to sail and travel a great deal when in his twenties: while living in Italy from 1869 to 1871, he developed his skills as a sketch artist and caricaturist. Upon returning to Paris in 1871, he began publishing poems and short stories in various reviews, and lived among friends until his collapse in November of 1874. He was found unconscious on the floor of his apartment on December 20 and rushed to the Hôpital Dubois, where he wrote sardonically to his mother, “Je suis à Dubois, dont on fait des cercueils,” a cutting pun that translates loosely as, “I’m at Wood Hospital, whence they make caskets.” She arrives promptly to take him back to Morlaix, his birthplace, where on February 28, 1874, Tristan is said to have predicted his own death, stating simply, “Tomorrow, 13 I will no longer be.” Corbière died the following day, March 1, 1874, at the age of twenty-eight. Extant medical records do not confirm a cause of death, but Vacher-Corbière confirms that his death was far less exotic than imagined: like so many fellow Bretons of the 14 period, Corbière succumbed to the tuberculosis epidemic that plagued Bretagne until 1930. Critics depict Corbière as a difficult eccentric; friends and family remember him as a charming prankster: in Martineau’s biography, Le Gad (a long time friend of Corbière) recounts how, after having been cited for not obeying the leash ordinance, Corbière walked his dog on a ninety-foot lead, tangling passers-by in his defiance. He is said to have dressed in a robe and miter, posing as the Pope to make obscene gestures at others, and finally, to have fired all his father’s guns simultaneously outside a church window, faking a cataclysm during a particularly apocalyptic sermon. Alongside this playful eccentricity, the many unanswered questions, missing or unavailable documents, and unknown details of Corbière’s life have prompted critics to speculate, to confabulate, and to draw inferences from every insinuation without acknowledging the biases inherent in their choices. Often, their conjectures are simply wrong and their sources misstated. Vacher-Corbière published Portrait de famille: Tristan Corbière (Family Portrait: Tristan Corbière) in 1955 to confront the myths in circulation. He refutes the insinuation, present in so many accounts, that letters written after 1862 disappeared due to a family conspiracy to hide the details of Corbière’s life from the public. Letters do not exist because when he was not in Italy, Corbière lived alternately in Paris and Bretagne: few letters were necessary, and those that were written may have been discarded without a second thought as to the future of either Corbière or Les Amours jaunes (Vacher-Corbière 45). Vacher-Corbière also counters conjecture about Corbière’s alleged hatred for his father, highlighting the frequency of their letters as well as their mutually warm tone, and deducing from his mother’s anecdotes that any alienation that may have existed between them would be typical of a father and son with more than half a century separating them. He likewise strives to dismiss the Oedipal counterpart to Corbière’s alleged hatred for his father: an unusually intense fascination for his mother, put forth by Alexandre Arnoux, Tristan Tzara, and Rousselot. Finally, Vacher-Corbière condemns those critics who confuse Corbière with Gérard de Nerval, claiming that he died in an asylum, as well as those who mistakenly confuse Corbière with his younger brother, who died of alcoholism at age thirty. Vacher-Corbière’s account is neither rosy nor jaune: the portrait of Corbière that emerges from his mother’s recollections is of a kind and lively person. His unassuming and straightforward account reveals the extent to which misprisions and willful distortions have shaped contemporary reception. Corbière’s legacy takes a turn for the worse very early on, with (published) indignation at the manner in which Corbière’s appearance posed an intentional affront to coded norms of the bourgeoisie. Vincent Huet makes the following remarks in an article published in La Plume in 1889:

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Because Corbière was of sickly constitution, school was soon abandoned and he had tutors at home. Did he finish his studies? I doubt it. In terms of intelligence, nature had really been generous to him, but physically, it had denied his satisfaction and vanity of any kind. Deep down, he must have felt bitterly disappointed about it, but he pretended to laugh and enjoyed disfiguring himself 15 to an even greater degree. In his article “Constructing Normalcy” (1997), Lennard Davis examines how notions of physical normalcy were conditioned by social norms of a bourgeoisie whose social status at the end of the nineteenth century was still tentative. He demonstrates that the premises for the experiments of French statistician Quetelet were firmly rooted in bourgeois ideology: l’homme moyen (“the average man”) was the incarnation of middle-class ideology, and the scientifically average (and perfectly healthy and able-bodied) man exemplified a moderate way of life. 16 Paradoxically, bourgeois hegemony promulgated this average man as a new, modern ideal. Huet’s article is one example among many that highlight Corbière’s failure to live up to the expectations of his family’s social milieu by comparing him to his father, establishing a parallel that is justified by a few biographical details, but to a far greater extent by the patrilinearity and implicit masculine privilege of the bourgeoisie. Rousselot writes : A robust and balanced Corbière with a pleasant and companionable personality would undoubtedly not have spent his short life flouting suffering and spouting hatred and contempt. He would have been a clerk in his father’s offices or a 17 lieutenant on a merchant ship; he would have married an Angelique. Corbière’s physical difference is the cornerstone for a characterization that at once associates illness with a host of undesirable traits, including mental instability, unattractiveness, and an unpleasant demeanor, and contrasts it with the tranquil stability of bourgeois ideals. Like his precursor Huet, Rousselot posits a conception of destiny that is predetermined by physical normalcy abetted by turns of phrase and verb tenses that suggest its infallibility. In this conception, both son and mother are easily reproduced and desirable commodities that perpetuate patriarchy. The disadvantages of physical illness would make Corbière a ‘bad’ copy of his father: “His unsatisfactory marks at school and diminishing physical strength prevent him 18 from undertaking anything but a parody.” Even a glimpse at a few comments suggests that three related phenomena are at work in the construction of the mythology of Corbière’s illness. The first is a pervasive tendency to construct a narrative around physical difference. Davis points out, “When one speaks of disability, one always associates it with a story, places it within a narrative. A person becomes deaf, became blind, was born blind, became quadriplegic” (1995, 3). In Corbière’s case, the strategy of constructing a narrative is particularly seductive given the lack of substantiated biographical information. The second phenomenon shapes the kinds of depictions that emerge from the first. Rosemarie Garland Thomson describes them in this way: Characters are necessarily rendered by a few determining strokes that create an illusion of reality far less intricate, undifferentiated, and uninterpreted than the context in which real people and real poets exist. Like freakshows, textual descriptions are over-determined: they invest traits, qualities, and behaviors of their characters with much rhetorical interest, simply by omitting and therefore erasing other factors or traits that might mitigate or complicate the delineations. (10) The rhetorical interest that Thomson refers to invokes a tautological loop that justifies the association of a character or personality trait with a physical impairment based on a kaleidoscope of ableist value judgments—standards of appearance and personality, and measures of social, economic, and personal failure—that critics associate with disability and ISSN 1753-741X

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infirmity. These traits invoke associations, which in turn highlight the importance of physical difference in shaping aspects of one’s personality and character. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder concur with Thomson and add to her analysis the notion that pathos is the driving force behind the construction of narratives of disability, asserting, “Disability acts as a shorthand method of securing emotional responses from audiences because pathos, pity, and abhorrence have proved to be an integral part of our historical cultural baggage,” and suggesting that the repetitious associations result in depictions that are “exotic specimens of our most pervasive cultural narratives” (17). This dynamic suffices to explain the motivation behind dozens of gratuitous statements characterizing Corbière. Martineau supposes that Corbière may have been suicidal: “His passion for the sea becomes more violent. He seems to dream of being 19 engulfed by his incurable illness, by his ghost-like ugliness, and his artistic dreams.” Rousselot explains the inspiration for the poem “Libertà”: “Freedom is only a word when one has limp 20 muscles, a weak chest, twisted bones, when one can’t manage to move Sysiphus’ rock.” Likewise, Le Milinaire, commenting upon the many infirm and disabled figures that populate Les Amours jaunes, insists, “They are brothers to Tristan the Quartered. Like him, they live in a state of regression towards animality. These pathetic fragments of humanity [. . .] such is the 21 corbierien being: born to die, born to suffer.” Rhetorically, all of these comments are written in a thinly veiled confessional mode in which the critic purports to illuminate the concealed lives of disabled people and to bear witness to the trials of living with impairment. Another of Le Millinaire’s comments reveals this confessional mode to be a narrative ventriloquism to which the French pronoun on lends itself particularly well. Of Corbière’s adolescent decision to change his name from his father’s—Edouard—to Tristan, Le Milinaire writes, “Why choose Tristan? Because he’s sixteen, he’s a romantic, he’s a 22 sailor, and he’s Breton.” Le Milinaire then proceeds to act out Corbière’s presumed self-deprecation in his stead: “The verdict is rendered: Tristan will be neither notary, nor writer. Life condemned him. Roscoff is the record of this condemnation. Condemned by life, I 23 distance myself, I exile myself, I leave life, poet in absentia.” Critics have strengthened this contrived intimacy by linking any and every aspect of Les Amours jaunes to some sort of physical illness and myriad emotional hardships associated with it, tossing about facile metaphors. Robert Mitchell contends, “Inhibition in life becomes exhibition in poetry” (21), while Rousselot characterizes Corbière’s genius thus: “He suddenly 24 projects—I was going to say, coughs himself up.” Michel Dansel, who otherwise offers an interesting analysis of Les Amours jaunes, insists that Corbière’s predilection for ellipses lends an “asthmatic” quality to his writing (76). Verses apparently cobbled together with telegraphic dashes or missing a foot are frequently described as estropiés (“crippled”), while according to Francis Burch, as readers progress through Les Amours jaunes, “His enfeebled steps are getting 25 stronger and stronger.” Rousselot declares triumphantly, “With this infirm man and his infirm 26 work, a new poetry is born.” Finally, few have resisted the homonymic implications of Corbière’s name, finding in his decision to change it to Tristan a profession of his sadness, and offering fatalistic interpretations of Corbière, or corps (en) bière [sad (in) casket]. The most elaborate interpretation of his name appears when Marthe Le Clech and François Yvan suggest the elaborate version that draws upon homonymy with the first name, as well: Triste en (son) corps(=)bière [sad in his body (=) casket] (48). Such facile equations clarify the impact of a particular strain of criticism that is based on a handful of notions loosely centered around nineteenth-century ideas of difference, carefully distilled and carelessly replicated. The literary disability critics whose ideas figure in this critique of the construction of illness—Davis, Mitchell and Snyder, and Thomson—have reflected upon what happens in an encounter with physical difference. Drawing upon Jacques Lacan’s notion of the corps morcelé, Davis identifies in the disabled body a repressed imago of the fragmented body. A confrontation with disability is a “specular moment between the armored, unified self and its repressed double, characterized by a kind of death work in which the unified self continuously sees itself undone, castrated, mutilated, perforated, made partial” (Davis 1995, 3-4). Discussing the effects of this encounter, Mitchell and Snyder suggest that, however unsettling the mixture of fascination and repulsion evoked by the confrontation may be it ultimately ISSN 1753-741X

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confirms one’s normalcy among the able-bodied (15). In fact, this surprisingly pervasive bias in criticism devoted to Corbière is the response to a “specular moment” that he captures perfectly in “Le Crapaud”: A song in a night without air —The moon, plates like silverware The cut-outs of dull jade. …A song; like an echo, quite lively Buried there, under the greenery… —It’s silent: Come, it’s there, in the shade… —A toad!—Why this fearfulness, Near me, your faithful warrior! Look at him, a clipped poet, wingless Nightingale of the mud…—Horror!— —He sings.—Horror!! Why horror? Don’t you see his eye’s lambency… No: he goes off cold, under his boulder. ……………………………………….. Good evening—that toad there is me. th 27 (This evening, July 20 ) On a still night, a couple, presumably a man and a woman, happens upon the toad in the shadows —Horreur!—the woman cries as her companion reassures her that she is safe with him, highlighting the fact that he is a soldier as if to confirm his physical prowess and consolidate the distance that separates them from the unsightly reptile. As the toad begins to sing, she gasps again, repulsed by its song as well. Its “eye of light,” a steadfast gaze that confronts their exclamations, suggests that the toad is undaunted by their reactions. In the fourteenth line of the sonnet, a lengthy pause at what marks, for the couple, the end of the encounter, the toad takes leave prematurely, suspending their reaction mid-gasp with its departure only to reappear in the final verse and reconfirm its presence as well as its song. The toad’s resurgence in a fifteenth line, outside the frame of traditional (albeit inverted) poetic form, overturns the objectification at work within that frame: in this narrow margin, the toad at once asserts its subjectivity. This declarative statement at the end of the poem suggests an infinite potential for the encounter to repeat itself—and it has, among many critics, for well over a century. The key to this encounter is that the self-referentiality of this declarative moment refers not to the poet, but to the poem itself, which, were it not for the overhang, “is me,” would begin and end with a toad: THE TOAD...that toad there…THE TOAD...that toad there,.. such that the declaration points back up to the title. The toady moi of the poem works on another level, since its “song, like an echo” both recalls and subverts Victor Hugo’s epic, sadistic poem of the same name, from La Légende des siècles. In Hugo’s version, a band of young thugs mercilessly abuses a toad that narrowly escapes death at their hands because they would prefer to see it crushed under the wheel of an 28 oncoming carriage! The donkey pulling the carriage spies the torn and battered toad just in time, and overcome with pity for another unfortunate creature, exercises uncanny strength to turn the wheel away from the toad, sparing its life. As the children watch this spectacle in wonder, one of them hears a voice that dictates: “Be good!” (171). Corbière’s version unfolds as the antithesis of this romantic moment; his use of the inverted sonnet emphasizes the intentional affront of poetic convention that is also present in other aspects of the poem. The tumultuous natural setting and pathetic fallacy of Hugo’s poem is stilled, flattened, and stereotyped: a metallic moon is stuck in the sky of an airless night. The deadpan “That toad there is me” stifles abruptly the transports of Hugo’s lyric verse and ISSN 1753-741X

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counters the mythical omniscience of the narrator. Thus, the statement that has long been understood as the most transparent, declarative moment of Les Amours jaunes, the moment at which the reader is said to glimpse the “real” Corbière, is in fact a double subterfuge. First, at the precise moment Corbière appears to be pointing to himself, he is deflecting attention to another moment in literary history, and mocking it. Second, by staging a brilliant mise en abîme—an encounter with the toady poet—that the reader is in the process of experiencing with the text, Corbière dupes that reader into the same reaction patterns: he invites the very bias that he scorns throughout Les Amours jaunes. “Guitare” (“Sentimental Story”) is the other poem that is most often cited as proof of Corbière’s homely appearance. In it, the interlocutor announces, “I am so ugly!” but Corbière deploys a similar strategy. It appears in a section of Les Amours jaunes entitled “Sérénades des sérénades,” and is in fact another pastiche of a Hugo poem from Les Rayons et les ombres. In Hugo’s version, a wayward royal guard sings of the powers of seduction of doña Sabine, a gypsy woman whose beauty puts even the queen to shame. While everyone in the village seems smitten with her, no one has ever seen her. “The wind that comes over the mountain / will drive me mad,” the guard laments as he longs for her (984-86). One night, he catches a glimpse of her as she steals away with a wealthy Sardinian count, but she never returns. Eventually, the search and the compulsion to sing about it drive the guard to madness: the wind sweeping over the mountain strikes an Aeolian harp, and the guard is only a vessel for the song that swells within him. The present perfect tense of the final refrain— “The wind that comes over the mountain / drove me mad”—points to the folkloric quality of the rest of the song; though the soldier sings in the present tense, in the final stanza both the song and the madness of the soldier have become part of romantic legend. In “Guitare,” Corbière’s brazen minstrel makes a mockery of Hugo’s guitare as he gleefully champions the one-night stand and disappears before the light of day: I know how to roll a light affair, Like a cigarette, I know how to roll greenhorns to stuff my wallet! And girls into a predicament not rare! Don’t fear long faithful loving: For slippers, my feet have wings; Owl of love, thief in the night, I flit at first light. You know Psyche?—No?—Mercury?... Cinderella and her story? —No?--…Well, all those are me: Seen by nobody. And I would leave you fresher Than a little Jesus in the manger, Before dawn comes revealingly… —I’m so ugly!— I know how to light a cigarette, A light affair How to tangle and light the blankets, 29 And how to get into trouble, there!

In Corbière’s figure of the boastful minstrel, the subject and object of desire have collapsed: he desires nothing and laments no one. The minstrel aligns himself with a narrative tradition ISSN 1753-741X

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driven by a desire for elusive beauty: Cinderella disappears at the stroke of midnight and only the fitted slipper identifies her as the prince’s companion; in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, Psyché is punished for her extraordinary beauty and betrothed to a monster whom she is never to see and who, like the minstrel, comes to her after dark and leaves before the break of day. One night, Psyché’s curiosity gets the better of her, and she shines a light upon him as he sleeps, only to find that he is the beautiful Cupid. However, transgressing the taboo means that their relationship must end, and Cupid flees. The reference to Mercury both suggests that the minstrel is fleet-footed, and alludes to an episode in which Mercury, unable to win the affections of the beautiful Aphrodite, steals her sandal in the hopes that he can barter for them. The minstrel raises this tradition as a matter of interest, addressing the reader directly but at the same time presuming to know the reply, answering himself with a series of inquisitive remarks. “Well,” he confirms, “all those are me / Seen by nobody,” essentially promising the reader that he is as elusive as the tradition that he is singing his way into. In a perfect reversal of the myth of Psyché and Cupid, he then transgresses his own implied promise and delights in an exhibitionist moment, announcing, “I am so ugly!” The textual strategies deployed in both “Le Crapaud” and “Guitare” are similar and achieve the same end: Corbière stages a moment that is both an encounter with an earlier text and an encounter with the reader. However, the absence of other plausible interlocutors within the poem makes the minstrel’s appeal to the reader more direct, and suggests that the real object of the poem is not Hugo’s guitare, but the one constructed of (critical) assumptions about the effects of being unattractive and the pathos associated with it. The machinations of Corbière’s exhibitionist minstrel prove that ugliness can be pretty seductive; jumping to judgment about glass slippers and stolen sandals, it is critics— and not girls—who “get into trouble.” The last thread of this tapestry of critical misapprehension that will be examined here is Corbière’s apparent obsession with death, presumed to be the natural consequence of his selfcontempt, which is in turn the result of his disabilities. Yet many of the poems that seem to corroborate this fascination offer the same kind of sardonic commentary found in other poems. For example, in “Un jeune qui s’en va” (“A Young Man Leaving”), Corbière depicts a young poet who awakens from a long convalescence to ask for a pencil: Quick, I saw in my delirium Come eat right out of my hand Glory, who wanted to read me. 30 —Glory won’t wait until tomorrow.— (9-12) The poet beckons to his companion and muse to prop him up as he reminisces about his life and, oddly, about his own death: On your arm, prop up your poet You, his muse when he used to sing His smile when he was dying And his Party, when it was a party. (13-16) From the first stanza to the next, the poet distances both himself and his muse to imagine his literary death—the kind of dying one does from time to time in verse. Asking for his sapphire encrusted pipe—“the one that goes so well with my type”—he commands, “Laugh! We’ve finished dying” (line 20), but in the same moment calls his companion to his side. Asking her to keep death from stealing away with him, he capitalizes on the pathos of one’s final moments, comparing himself to a stubborn child who does not want to go to bed, only to back away from this scene in the same instant to admit that it, too, is pure fabrication: Look: my cover is not a shroud / I was singing for myself alone (lines 26-27). He continues to conflate reality and fiction, adding himself to a long list of literary figures—artists or their protagonists—who die in the service of art:

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Death: Rolla—the Academy Murger, Baudelaire—hospital— Lamartine: in losing the life Of his daughter, in verse that’s not half bad (57-60) He throws Lacenaire, a murderer who published his prison memoirs, in with the likes of Byron and Hugo, parodying the latter in a crescendo: I have read them dying !...And this swan Under the chef’s knife - Chénier-…I feel—this is a bad sign!— Green with envy—O what a trade! (88-91) As the poem concludes, the poet seems ready to barter with immortality, especially since illness and death are but cheap reproductions. Corbière fakes his own death in the opening pages of Les Amours jaunes, with “Epitaphe,” placing his bets on a pose that, by contemporary standards, was sure to gain literary attention—and certainly has. Another poem, “Une Mort trop travaillée” (“A Death Too Contrived”), stages a death inspired by Musset’s Romantic figure Rolla (1833), a dark and disenchanted young man who suffers an acute case of ennui and, after spending his father’s inheritance in a few short years, 31 decides to end his life and sets about planning his own suicide. He begins planning three months ahead of time, carefully choosing the date, sending a last will and testament to his witness...and waiting: “I killed myself to kill time,” reads his suicide note. He plans to kill himself by means of twin pistols ordered from England, each with his name inscribed on the barrel, along with the aphorism “Here, what mortals lack / To know how to die is custom” (lines 58-59). The aphorism suggests the absurdity of this extremely orchestrated death, driven by pure vanity: These pistols are a pose So pose like he is posing Go ahead, you bourgeois, that’s something To pose when faced with that. (60-63) Like “Le Crapaud” and “Guitare,” the poem stages a specular moment in which the poet, who clearly characterizes both himself and his worth as utterly indescribable—even unnamable—in a poem entitled “Ça” (“That”), daringly confronts the bourgeois reader, to the death. Corbière delights in a careful staging, describing blowing one’s brain’s out with a pun that suggests primping or powdering one’s nose: He planted himself in front of the mirror He would not have done better at the photographer’s To see himself fall gracefully As he powdered his nose. (99-102) So consumed is he with the prospect of watching his own death that he botches the job: He falls, the shot fires, followed by a darting flash And the shot… Excellent, he just barely missed. (105-07) The narrator notes in conclusion that the figure still bears the scar from this misfire “Il en porte toujours les marques” (line 108). The sardonic announcement that the shot failed is an echo of an earlier description of the poet in “Epitaphe”: Too successful—a failure. The last line of the poem (cited above) is actually a brilliant double entendre, since une charge may refer to either ISSN 1753-741X

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shot of gunpowder or a caricature. A caricature that is too successful is one that adequately captures the failure that Corbière strives to cultivate. He addresses readers directly, as both narrator (describing the scene) and director, challenging them to take up a similar pose. Corbière is banking on the notion that readers will be smitten with the spectacle of suicide and its accoutrements. In staging this encounter, he presumes that once again, the vanity of readers’ assumptions will cause them to tumble into the usual trap, pose, and pull the trigger before realizing that they have contributed to a self-destruction of sorts, denying themselves the necessary critical distance to create a complex depiction and settling for clichés, cheap reproductions, and facile caricatures. Guess who ends up just a little disfigured and— Horreur!—ugly? We readers are duped again, despite the fact that Corbière spells out the rules of engagement in a pair of complementary poems, “ÇA” (“THAT”) and “Epitaphe.” While “ÇA” endeavors to classify a work that defies even the broadest definition, “Epitaphe” strains to characterize an utterly paradoxical life of the poet: THAT ? What ?... (Shakespeare) Essays ?—Nonsense, I have not essayed ! A study? I’m lazy, I’ve never pilfered around. A volume?—too like a brochure to be bound… Copy?—Alas, non, for that you don’t get paid! A poem?—Thanks, but I have hocked my lyre. A book?—A book, that’s something else to be read!... Loose sheets?—Thank god no, it’s sewn and dolled up. Album? It’s not blank, and it’s too scattered. (1-8) Verses?—A flux of verse?...No, it’s jerky, see? —Ah, you’ve been chasing Originality?... —No, she’s an odd one,—from the streets— Who takes off running, just as she’s caught. (13-16) … —A thing to put out?—Or for a house of ill fame. Reform school, even?—Not at all! (19-20) … It’s…just there, I’ve signed my humble name as author, And my child has no lie for a title. It’s a hit-or-miss, right or wrong, by pure chance… 32 Art doesn’t know me. I don’t know Art. (29-32) The poem progresses chaotically, inquisitively, from attempts to classify the poet to attempts to classify the work. Many verses seem to describe both poet and work: for example, the reform school, or maison de correction, suggests both that the poet may need to be institutionalized, and that the poem, with its poor rhyme, shoddy punctuation, frequent misspellings, and hiccupy meter may well be in need of such a place. The parallel is further strengthened by verses in “ÇA” that are echoed in “Epitaphe” to describe the poet (the two poems are separated by only one poem). These continual parallels are tied together in a quiet final stanza in which the author admits that precisely where one might find the words to characterize the work, he has signed his own name. The fact that the author’s name and the title match suggests that the work, “his child,” has indeed been forged in the image of the poet, a conclusion that at first seems to encourage a biographical reading of the text. Yet the poem itself confirms that both are ÇA, as in the following declaration, which places Big ÇA and little ça side by side: ISSN 1753-741X

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THAT is naively an impudent pose It is, or it isn’t that—something or nothing at all. (25-26) The poem hinges on a series of vertically aligned telegraphic dashes that suggests sparring between a poet who must justify his endeavor and an interlocutor who would be anonymous were it not for the cheeky epigraph. Attributed to Shakespeare, the epigraph sets up a dialogue between the literary establishment and the poet that is played out through the stanzas. The poet echoes, then strenuously objects to all attempts to classify his work, as the reader tumbles through a series of interrogatives that fall short of identifying either poet or work, until only ça remains—and an interrogative one, at that. The poet offers ÇA? as both the answer to Shakespeare’s question and an interrogation in and of itself, leaving the poet and the literary market at an impasse of mutual unfamiliarity. A reader looking for clues as to where to find Corbière is forced to engage in a tireless game of hide-and-seek with a poet “who takes off running, just as [he’s] caught.” The many mirrors in the work certainly do not make the quest to find Corbière any easier: Les Amours jaunes is bound by a pair of pastiches of La Fontaine’s “La Cigale et la fourmi” (The Grasshopper and the Ant”). In the dedicatory pastiche, “A Marcelle: Le poète et la cigale” (“To Marcelle: The Poet and the Cicada,”) the nightingale / poet finds his muse’s (lexical) cupboard bare and, having neither worms nor verse, visits his neighbor, Marcelle, to borrow her name: A poet having rhymed a bit PUBLISHED IT And saw his muse bereft Of sponsor, almost naked: left With neither worm nor verse He went and cried famine To the blond who lived next door And begged that she should lend Her little name for rhyming (It was a rhyme in –elle). —Oh! I will pay you back, Marcelle, Before August, on my word! Interest and principal.— My neighbor is most generous It was her nicest fault, indeed: —What? That is all you need? Your muse is most felicitous… By night and day, for one and all Rhyme on my name, if that’s your pleasure, I’ll be pleased, by all measure. 33 Come on: now it’s your turn to sing. He promises to repay principal and interest before August. She graciously lends it to him, and at the end of Les Amours jaunes, in a second pastiche of the same La Fontaine fable, “Epilogue: La Cigale et le poète,” (“Epilogue: The Cicada and the Poet”), Corbière returns: To paint his regrets For having made—but not on purpose! 34 His shameful monster of a book!... Marcelle berates him: —Mediocre public writer! precisely because what he has written is popular, too easy to swallow. The titles too, reflect each other, the second reversed as if read in a mirror, ISSN 1753-741X

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and within each title, we find the poet contemplating himself in a tiny mirror: the poet is the grasshopper who must sing for his supper. This pair of pastiches encloses Les Amours jaunes between mirrors, each of which reflects in several directions, offering Corbière’s own reflections son—and of—his relationship to today’s critics. Corbière’s incorporation of a self viewed through the eyes of others is most effectively demonstrated by the series of caricatured selfportraits, the best-known of which is signed NATSIЯT—Tristan backwards—the Я confirming that Corbière depicts himself as if in a mirror, staging the image that critics project, and rehearsing his own objectification.

Conclusion Through his deft manipulation of language, sound, and images, Corbière is able in the same moment to glance back at his predecessors and forward, anticipating the trajectory criticism would take. Equally significant, the mirrors placed on either side of the text make it utterly selfreferential. The infinite circularity imposed by their juxtaposition collapses the linearity of the work, undermining the kind of biographical reading that critics have found so inviting. History has proven the enduring marketability of the many poses Corbière adopts—albeit with a good deal of disdain and regret—to sell his verse. Who can say what kind of man lived behind them, what he looked like, or how he felt, whether a particular sketch or poem represents the measure of a particular personal or professional victory or failure, a bad case of the flu or a slow return to health? While these questions have particular resonance in an encounter with the figure of the poet and the text of Les Amours jaunes, and also play an important role in literary history, there are no definitive answers. One must continue to read Corbière with a double strategy, looking for answers while conceding that every question will necessarily yield another: Corbière will always be a poet in absentia—one step ahead.

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Notes 1

Dr. Tammy Berberi, French, University of Minnesota, Morris. si la laideur dont il fait trois fois état dans un poème [des Amours jaunes] n’était pas apparue assez tardivement comme le résultat d’une déformation maladive (108). 3 On ne peut pas oublier, dans l’établissement de ce terrible catalogue, la laideur de Tristan que certains de ses biographes contestent d’ailleurs, mais que Tristan a vécue comme telle et dont il a si profondément souffert (67). 4 Enfant, Tristan Corbière n’annonçait en rien l’être bizarre qu’il fut à vingt-cinq ans (28). 5 les ravages que le rhumatisme a causés à sa physionomie. 6 [Corbière] n’a pratiquement pas de menton; ses lèvres avançent énormément; son long nez fait ressembler à un oiseau au long bec .... (35). 7 cette volonté d’auto-déstruction, cette haine de soi, cette complaisance dans le ridicule, l’abject (45). 8 un désir de faire partie de la personne du marin, et de se défaire de son corps infirme et de ce visage dont il a fait la cruelle caricature (36). 9 Jouant un rôle peut-être naïf, nous avons pris le livre tel qu’il est, et nous l’avons jugé ce livre d’après ce principe: l’oeuvre, c’est l’homme. The review appeared in “Mouvement Littéraire,” Renaissance artistique et littéraire II, Saturday 26 October 1873, 304. Qtd. by Burch in Sur Tristan Corbière, 99. 10 Letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871. Poésies, 142. 11 On pourrait refaire, vers par vers, le bref trajet qu’il a couru (Tristan Corbière, 83). 12 Il n’y a pas, pour ainsi dire, de poèmes dans Les Amours jaunes qui ne soient pas autobiographiques” (157). 13 Demain, je ne serai plus. 14 Jean-Vacher Corbière, Corbière’s nephew born to Corbière’s younger sister Lucie eleven years after Corbière’s death, bases his commentary on Corbière’s mother’s recollections, which he published in Portrait de famille: Tristan Corbière (1955). 15 Comme [Corbière] était de tempérament très maladif, on ne tarda pas à changer le système d’éducation, et on lui donna des maîtres chez lui. Termina-t-il ses classes? J’en doute ...moralement, la nature l’avait admirablement doue, physiquement, elle l’avait refusé toute espèce de satisfaction et de vanité. Au fond de lui-même, il dut éprouver un amer déplaisir. Mais il affectait d’en rire, il se plaisait même à se défigurer encore. In “Notes sur Tristan Corbière,” La Plume 9, 15 August 1889, 85, 87. Qtd. in Burch, 126. 16 See the original study, Adolphe Quetelet, Sur l’homme et le développement de ses facultés ou Essai de physique sociale. Paris : Bachelier Imprimeur-Libraire, 1835. 17 Un Corbière robuste et équilibré, de figure plaisante et de commerce agréable n’eût sans doute pas passé sa courte existence à narguer la douleur et à se jeter sur la vie des expressions de haine et de mépris. Il eût été commis aux écritures dans les bureaux de son père ou lieutenant sur un bateau de commerce, se fût marié avec une Angélique... (47-48). 18 Ses études insuffisantes, ses forces de plus en plus faibles ne lui permettent pas d’essayer autre chose qu’une parodie (43). 19 Sa passion de mer devient plus violente ....On dirait qu’il rêve de s’y engloutir en sombrant sa maladie incurable, sa laideur de spectre, et ses rêves d’artiste (55). 20 La liberté n’est qu’un mot quand on a les muscles mous, les bronches fragiles, les os tordus, quand on ne parvient pas à ébranler le rocher de Sysiphe (24). 21 Ils sont les frères de Tristan l’Ecartelé. Comme lui, ils vivent dans la terreur dune régression vers l’animalité. Ces pauvres débris d’humanité...tel est l’être corbièrien: né pour mourir, né pour souffrir (76). 22 Pourquoi Tristan? Parce que l’on a seize ans, que l’on est romantique, que l’on est marin, et que l’on est Breton. 23 Le véto est tombé. Tristan ne sera ni notaire, ni écrivain. La vie l’a condamné. Roscoff, c’est l’enregistrement de cette condamnation. Condamné par la vie, je m’éloigne, je m’exile, je sors de la vie, contumace (38). 24 L’abrupte projection—j’allais dire expectoration—qu’il fait de soi-même (48). 25 Ses faibles pas s’affirment de plus en plus (25). 26 Avec cet infirme et son oeuvre infirme, une poésie nouvelle est née (48). 27 Warner, 19. 28 Rousselot infers from this intertextuality that Corbière’s version is inspired by the abuse Corbière must have endured at the hands of others, imagining his encounter with “thugs who spare him neither 2

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jibes nor punches,” (“des mauvais types qui ne lui épargnent ni les quolibets, ni les bourrades” (27). 29 Warner, 41. 30 Adapted from Peter Dale, “A Youngster on the Way Out,” 96-103. 31 Adapted from Peter Dale, “A Death Too Worked At,” 420-27. 32 Adapted from C.F. MacIntire, 20-23. 33 Adapted from Peter Dale, 28-9. 34 Adapted from Peter Dale, 414-15.

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Works Cited Arnoux, Alexandre. Une Ame et pas de violon. Paris: Grasset, 1929. Burch, Francis F. Sur Tristan Corbière: lettres inédites et premiers critiques le concernant. Paris: Librairie AG Nizet, 1975. Corbière, Tristan. The Centenary Corbière: Poems and Prose of Tristan Corbière. Trans. Val Warner. Chester Springs Pennsylvania: Dufour, 1975. ---. Selections from Les Amours jaunes. Trans. C. F. MacIntyre. Berkeley : U of California P, 1954. ---. Wry-Blue Loves : Les Amours jaunes and Other Poems. Trans. Peter Dale. London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2005. Dansel, Michel. Langage et modernité chez Tristan Corbière. Paris: A.-G. Nizet, 1974. Davis, Lennard J. “Constructing Normalcy.” The Disability Reader. Ed. Lennard J. Davis. New York, London: Routledge, 1997. 1-28. ---. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London, New York: Verso, 1995. Hugo, Victor. “Le Crapaud.” Oeuvres Complètes de Victor Hugo X. Poésies X. La Légende des siècles 4. Paris: J. Hetzel, A. Quantin 1883. Gallica. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 2001. 22 Mar. 2007 . ---. “Guitare.”Les Rayons et les ombres, Oeuvres complètes de Victor Hugo I. Paris: J. Hetzel, A. Quantin, 1882. Gallica. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 2001. 22 Mar. 2007 . Le Clech, Marthe, and François Yvan. La Métamorphose du crapaud. Plourin-les-Morlaix : Editions Bretagne d'hier, 1995. Le Milinaire, André. Tristan Corbière. La paresse et le génie. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1989. Martineau, René. Tristan Corbière. Paris: Le Divan, 1925. Mitchell, David and Sharon Snyder, eds. The Body and Physical Difference. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997. Mitchell, Robert. Tristan Corbière. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979. Porter, James L. Foreword. The Body and Physical Difference. Ed. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997. xiii-xiv. Quetelet, Adolphe. Sur l'homme et le développement de ses facultés ou Essai de physique sociale. Paris: Bachelier Imprimeur-Libraire, 1835. Rimbaud, Arthur. Poésies. Paris: Flammarion, 1989. Rousselot, Jean. Tristan Corbière. Editions Pierre Seghers, 1951. Sonnenfeld, Albert. L’Œuvre poétique de Tristan Corbière. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1960. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997 Thomas, Henri. Tristan le dépossédé. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. Tzara, Tristan. “Tristan Corbière ou les limites du cri.” Œuvres complètes 5, éd. Henri Béhar. Flammarion, 1982, 125-35. Vacher Corbière, Jean. Portrait de famille. Monte Carlo: Regain, 1955. Verlaine, Paul. Les Poètes maudits. Paris: Léon Vanier, 1888. Gallica. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 2001. 22 Mar. 2007 .

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