Abstract
Banville has long deserved a fair hearing. The relatively recent publication of his complete poetry, criticism and theatre by Champion – principally edited by Peter Edwards and Peter Hambly (1994–2013) – has only made that hearing more urgent. This study by David Evans puts Banville at the centre of poetic developments in the latter half of the nineteenth century, as a tireless practitioner, yes, but more perhaps as poetry’s conscience or quality controller in an age in which poetry was in danger of being engulfed by consumer economics and production-line aesthetics. As Evans points out, the anxieties we may have about Banville’s own literary standing are very much the same anxieties by which he himself was beset as he contemplated artistic output driven by the new culture industry, elements of which he puts to the pen in his Odes funambulesques (1857). Evans’s first chapter (‘The Music and the Mechanism’) is devoted to a re-reading of the Petit Traité de poésie française (1872), and engrossing it is too, since it re-situates Banville’s treatise as a subversive maverick among other such treatises (particularly Quicherat (1850) and Tisseur (1893), but looking back at the whole tradition from Deschamps (1392), up through Ronsard (1565), and on), and carefully tracks its strategic complexities, as Banville teaches those rules that are only rules when applied by those not fit to be poets. It takes a subtle reading like this to catch Banville’s knowing hypocrisies and wry hyperboles, however much one may still feel cheated by his convenient mystifications (genuine poets have gifts beyond any analytical capacity). In Chapter 2 (‘The Silent Music of the Stars’), Evans takes us through Les Stalactites (1846), Odelettes (1856), Les Exilés (1866/75) and ‘Variations’ (Dans la fournaise, 1892) to trace the development of Banville’s notion of the music intrinsic to poetry, not its material acousticity, but what rhythm reaches for, that ‘substance’ of the inaudible: breaths, tremblings, subsonic noise, silence. It is particularly in the destabilization of verse limits (caesura, line-ending) that Banville looks to set loose what we cannot properly hear, contours we cannot quite hold on to, outlines that will not keep still, such that verse has access to its own perceptual beyond. Rhythm, in this view, is the privileged corridor to the music of the spheres, thanks to the unresolved tensions it is able to generate. But if this is so, how do we account for the garrulous and diversionary virtuosities of the Odes funambulesques, the subject of Chapter 3 (‘The Poetics of (Self-)Parody’)? Evans has reminded us that dance is a favoured metaphor of poetic rhythm for Banville, and the acrobat of the Odes is a peculiar hybrid of gymnast and dancer, of physical contortionist and spiritual sylph. Evans deftly helps us to understand how Banville manages to keep us on his tightrope, how he manages both to weld together contradictions and to keep us on havering tenterhooks. But his most challenging task is perhaps that of Chapter 4 (‘Bringing the Past to Life: Resuscitating Fixed Forms and the National Canon, or la cheville glorifiée’): to persuade us that Banville’s revival of medieval fixed forms in the 1870s – with Trente-six ballades joyeuses (1873), Rondels (1875), Les Princesses (1874) and ‘Les Caprices’ (1879) – aside from any wish to re-consolidate national poetic identity after the Franco-Prussian War, advances his vision of the mercurial mystery at the heart of genuine lyricism. Evans’s intricate argument manages to suggest ways in which the absurd and the arbitrary foster that fine excess which not only opens on to a peculiarly arcadian, naïve, lyric exuberance, but also promotes an imagery of reflection, flight, dazzling light, turbulent movement, which points us towards the uncontainable and the ungraspable, towards the paradox of fixed forms without closure: hair, for example, is both a metaphor of the tightly interwoven lines of fixed forms and an image of what is éparpillé, or dénoué, or flottant. How does Banville emerge from all this? Not as a great poet, to be sure, but as one who knows how to celebrate, to show the way to, the heart of lyricism, and as one whose thinking and practice were remarkably fruitful, when viewed, as the Epilogue invites us to view them, within a verse-current running from the grands rhétoriqueurs through Tzara to the OuLiPo poets. This is most appositely and convincingly done, and gives the book an affirmative, highly pleasurable finale which, however, makes no attempt to sweep any of the difficulties encountered under the carpet. Looking back over the whole enterprise, one might argue that Evans occasionally overindulges his reading, that quotation becomes excessive, or that argument becomes over-comprehensive. But against that charge we might put an important countervailing argument: we have let our knowledge of Banville become partial, fragmented, limited to loci classici, which makes him too representative a figure (the Parnassian, or the poet in whose work musical considerations strangle sense, or the poet hog-tied to formal and generic display). It is part of Evans’s purpose to reintroduce us to the sheer range of Banville’s output and to its abiding preoccupations as well as to its periodic inconsistencies; his ‘Introduction’, for example, takes us more deeply into the textual detail of Banville’s Le Feuilleton d’Aristophane than the accompanying argument might justify, but it provides a valuable opportunity to acquaint readers with a dimension of Banville’s work too easy to overlook; and he is not afraid to give this study, periodically, the feel of an anthology. But make no mistake; this is an extremely important critical venture. It is scholarly, it has a sure-footed control of its materials, it is analytically judicious and insightful, and it draws the reader deep into its own critical zestfulness.