Counter-Modernities in Nineteenth-Century French Literature

Counter-Modernities in Nineteenth-Century French Literature explores a counterview of modernity in late nineteenth-century French literature (1848-1891). The principal claim of this book is that what we find in the works of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Flaubert is a form of 'writing against the grain' of history: not the elegant lyricism of history's victors, but a use of literature against the erasures of past injustices and for those 'lost futurities' upon which the order of the present is founded. What we find, in other words, is a critical literary archive of the powerless that persists in contesting the legitimacy of the powerful, which persists in haunting the nineteenth century every bit as much as it does our own achingly out-of-joint present. The story Counter-Modernities seeks to tell is, in other words, about the meaning of loss, and the significance of losers as possible figures of opposition to the dominant order, in nineteenth-century French literature that is also a story about modernity as an aesthetic politics. What brings together the authors in this study, however, cannot be reduced be the biographical: that is, to the uneven successes, financial hardships, and, in one case, outright failure (i.e., Rimbaud) shared by the authors in the literary market of their lifetime. At stake in this study is not an account of the ironies of literary history, wherein, to gloss Walter Benjamin's take on Baudelaire, a prior and benighted era sees little of interest in an artist in which a later epoch recognizes the “genius” of modernity. Rather, Constellations of Loss in Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Flaubert demonstrates how each author in this critical corpus insists on tarrying with history as an experience of irrevocable loss: each lingers with history as a force of negations, and thereby insists on the significance of historical setbacks and political defeats that seem to affect-if not more dramatically wipe out-the collective hopes of entire generations. Each one gives us losers as subjects who matter in the nineteenth century (Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud), narratives of historical defeat that are as negative as they are meaningful (Baudelaire, Flaubert), or the contours of events whose meanings and narratives are themselves lost (Baudelaire, Rimbaud), whose meanings remain, in other words, perhaps less absent than open-ended: a possible grammar for what may come next, when hope seems lost and dreams dashed. Indeed, as this books shows, it is precisely in its representation of history as a dilemma or undoing of meaningfulness, a problem of legibility and not-knowingness, that we can most fully recognize the formal calling-cards of literary “modernity”: ironic undecidabilities and difficulties, infinite interpretability and the death of the author, the dissolution of previously stable cultural and historical narratives or forms of subjectivity, formal breaks with semantically oriented modes of representation, and so on.

Robert St. Clair is Associate Professor of French at Dartmouth College. He is the co-editor-in-chief of Parade Sauvage, the international revue of Rimbaud studies published with Classiques Garnier as well as the author of Poetry, Politics, and the Body in Rimbaud (OUP, 2018).