Leaving Parnassus: The Lyric Subject in Verlaine and Rimbaud

Adrianna M. Paliyenko

Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Volume 36, Number 3 & 4,

Spring-Summer 2008, pp. 341-342 (Review)

Published by University of Nebraska Press

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Whidden, Seth. Leaving Parnassus: The Lyric Subject in Verlaine and Rimbaud. Am-
sterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Pp. 230. isbn 978-90-420-2210-2.
Adrianna M. Paliyenko, Colby College

Seth Whidden, who has recently produced excellent modern editions of Marie Krysin-
ska’s Rythmes pittoresques (Exeter up, 2003) and Wallace Fowlie’s translation of Rim-
baud’s complete works (u of Chicago p, 2005), makes a valuable contribution to mod-
ern nineteenth-century poetry studies with his new book on the crisis of the lyric
subject in Verlaine and Rimbaud. The Parnassian movement, taken as the historical
point of departure for the study and as the core point of æsthetic reference for Verlaine
and Rimbaud’s respective poetic projects, provides a fresh critical framework for an
illuminating analysis of each poet’s subversion of a unified creative voice. This study,
which eschews biographically inflected interpretation to focus on discursive practice,
charts pivotal departures from Parnassian poetry in Verlaine and Rimbaud as crystal-
lizing, æsthetic turns in their modern conceptions of poetic subjectivity.
Introductory comments sketch out salient features of semiotic approaches to poetic
language à la Kristeva et Meschonnic that, together with recent “genetic criticism”
focused on textual stages of a creative work, inform the emphasis in this study on the
organic construction of poetic subjectivity as an æsthetic, rather than a biographical,
stance. “For both Verlaine and Rimbaud,” Whidden argues, “the destabilized situa-
tion of the lyric subject is a direct response to and reaction against the traditional
modes of subject/object relations that characterized Parnassian poetry” (14). Chap-
ter 1, “The Dominance of Parnassian Poetry,” cogently presents not only the origins
and tenets of le Parnasse, but also offers historical and textual evidence that extends
this “neo-classical movement” beyond the advent of French Symbolism into the lat-
ter decades of the century (19, 23–43). This incisive broadening of the traditional
chronology of the dominant poetic movements in the nineteenth century squarely
places aspiring poets Verlaine and Rimbaud in the Parnassian shadow and offers an
intriguing vantage point from which to view, at the level of poetic discourse, their
respective sujets-en-procès.
In Chapter 2, “Verlaine’s Identities,” Whidden reconsiders Verlaine’s Parnassian
phase, as encapsulated by several poems from “Melancholia” (from the 1866 collec-
tion Poèmes saturniens), to reveal “there lies a poet searching for his voice underneath
the Parnassian exterior, unsure of his recently adopted poetic identity” (46–47). With
discerning textual readings of subversive prosodic practice in Verlaine’s Parnassian-
era poems that blurs the crisp distinction between the Parnassian subject and object,
Whidden shows that “Verlaine’s poetry involves the poetic subject’s search for identity
through interaction with its object” (68). For Whidden, “this project extends through-
out Verlaine’s entire poetic work and is but one phase within the larger context of a
constantly evolving search for poetic subjectivity” (68), from La Bonne Chanson to
Romance sans paroles to Femmes/Hombres. In his sustained analysis of “an æsthetics
composed of an unstable subject who defines his self [. . .] in terms of his object” (69),
from the sublime to the profane, Whidden exposes multiple paths of poetic expression
departing from le Parnasse while leading to the “degeneracy of the lyric subject in Ver-
laine’s poetry” (117).
The third and final chapter, “Rimbaud, Beyond Time and Space,” demonstrates

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 36, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring–Summer 2008 

against the Parnassian grain a novel way of thinking through the construction of the
lyric subject in Rimbaud, from his early verse to the Illuminations. Whidden frames
the displacement of traditional categories of time and space in Rimbaud with an astute
reading of the voyant’s celebrated dictum, “Je est un autre” and, through ensuing close
textual analysis of Rimbaud’s æsthetic stance, productively illustrates that “Rimbaud
situates the lyric subject not only as an other, but also in another place, in a place
that is other, particularly in terms of time and space” (125). Drawing on painstaking
research in dictionaries and his thorough knowledge of Rimbaud criticism, Whidden
aptly opens up along temporal and spatial lines Rimbaud’s “dérèglement de tous les
sens” (125–31). Initial ruptures with standard categories of time and space and, by ex-
tension, from the strictures of Parnassian æsthetics, are teased from Rimbaud’s early
verse poems (1870–71) and his Derniers vers (1872) with careful attention to prosodic
experimentation and thematic resonance. Whidden deftly inflects with phenomenol-
ogy the deep spatio-temporal problematic elaborated in emblematic texts from Une
Saison en enfer and Illuminations and neatly sums up Rimbaud’s radical departure
from le Parnasse in this way: “As ‘Mouvement’ shows us, all is in flux, [. . .] and the stuff
of poetry will forever be more interested in the objects and context surrounding the
lyric subject than the subject itself ” (205).
Verlaine and Rimbaud experts will follow with admiration Seth Whidden’s well-argued
thesis, while amateur readers will appreciate how precisely the author situates his argu-
ments in Verlaine and Rimbaud criticism. Replete with English translations that may de-
tract from some readers’ pleasure of the text, Leaving Parnassus: The Lyric Subject in Ver-
laine and Rimbaud nevertheless will allow a broader readership to think more creatively
about French poetic history that departs in provocative directions from le Parnasse.

Barel-Moisan, Claire, and José-Luis Diaz, eds. Balzac avant Balzac. Paris: Christian
Pirot, 2006. Pp. 197. isbn 9788-2-86808-244
Masha Belenky, The George Washington University

In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in Bazac’s early literary production.
The 1990 publication of Balzac’s early works in Œuvres diverses of the Bibliothèque de
la Pléiade, André Lorent’s 1999 edition of Premiers Romans, published by Bouquins, as
well as Eric H. du Plessis’s recent English translation of Wann-Chlore (reviewed in this
journal) testify to this growing interest. Dismissed until recently as juvenilia, Balzac’s
early novels and plays had been viewed as failed attempts at literature before, at long
last, the great writer finally emerges in the late 1820s, with the publication of Physiologie
du marriage and Le Dernier Chouan. Recent scholarship, however, has shown that, in
fact, there was a lot of Balzac as we know him in that early Balzac. Balzac avant Balzac,
a collection of essays edited by Claire Barel-Moisan and José-Luis Diaz, contributes to
scholarship that seeks to present the writer’s early works not merely as a preparation
for the Comédie Humaine but as valuable in their own right.
Drawing on research conducted during a year-long seminar at Paris vii on early
Balzac production, the volume begins with an excellent essay by José-Luis Diaz, who
formulates the central premises of the articles that follow. First, Diaz suggests that,
paradoxically, it was Balzac himself who contributed to the neglect of his early works

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