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The Structure of Chenier's L'Invention

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Clifton Cherpack*
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore 18, Md.

Extract

It is not surprising that André Chénier's poem L'Invention has been much discussed, and that the discussion has been conducted almost exclusively along the lines of literary history. To begin with, this poem excited the greatest attention on the part of critics and scholars in the heyday of the historical method. Secondly, it is, or seems to be, a poetic manifesto, containing doctrines and ideas which lend themselves to consideration in abslraclo. Thirdly, this manifesto is uniquely provocative of historical and comparative analyses since it appears to mark a turning away of the poet from the aesthetic which characterizes the bulk of his extant work, and to herald the composition of important new works which exist only in disappointing fragments. Thus, the reader who follows the tortuous course of Chénier criticism plotted by Paul Glachant and who has read Paul Dimoff's more recent study, finds raised over and over again, in connection with L'Invention, questions which have little to do with the poem considered as a poem. Was Chénier the last of the classicists, the critics and scholars ask, or was he the first of the romanticists? Did he have two manières, or three, or one which could be pulled inside out and only appear different, like a reversible garment? If Hermès and L'Amérique, the poems which L'Invention seems to foreshadow, had been completed, would they have been masterful epics, or epic failures? These questions, and others like them, are discussed at length, but only rarely and negligently do the students of L'Invention hint that it is itself a poem and not merely a discursive recipe for the writing of poetry. Yet, L'Invention obviously is a poem in spite of its doctrinal “message,” and as such must be read with an eye for those poetic principles which should inform it, which should guarantee its organic unity, its formal autonomy. Such a literary reading must be the basis for any discussion of the ideas contained in the poem.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1957

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References

Note 1 in page 74 André Chénier critique et critique (Paris, 1902); La Vie et l‘œuvre d'André Chénier, 2 vols. (Paris, 1936). After this article was written, an interesting discussion of L'Invention appeared in Jean Fabre's Chénier, l'homme et l‘œuvre (Paris, 1955), pp. 128-137. Analogies with the present study may be noted therein.

Note 2 in page 74 Paul Glachant, for example, explains the vague confusion which he finds in the poem as follows: “Chénier n'était pas encore parfaitement sûr de la voie dans laquelle il devait engager la littérature. C'est pourquoi ses théories … manquent de précision et de fermeté. … II définit, puis doute de sa définition. Il tâtonne …” (pp. 79–80).

Note 3 in page 76 “vos doctes mépris,” v. 146; “vos regards,” v. 147; “votre inflexible humeur,” v. 149; “vos yeux,” v. 152; “direz-vous,” v. 185; “dites-moi,” v. 195.

Note 4 in page 76 V. 299, quoted above, and v. 363: “Des Toscans, je le sais, la langue est séduisante …”

Note 5 in page 76 Ed. Abel Lefranc (Paris, 1914). Chénier often indicates his fear that his literary opinions will gain him enemies (pp. 8, 78, 91, 104).

Note 6 in page 78 See Chénier's own Epitre to Lebrun; Lefranc, p. xxv; and Dimoff, I, 218.

Note 7 in page 78 Documents inédits sur André Chénier (Paris, 1875), p. 152.

Note 8 in page 78 For these fragments see Paul DimofE's edition of Chénier's œuvres complètes (Paris, n.d.), ii, 5–11.

Note 9 in page 79 Dimoff says, in his edition (ii, 8) : “ces six vers, d'une écriture différente, ont été rajoutés après coup …”

Note 10 in page 80 La Vie et l'œuvre, i, 407–408, 410.

Note 11 in page 83 La Fin du classicisme (Paris, 1897), p. 223.