Carol Rigolot, Forged Genealogies: Saint-John Perse's Conversations with Culture . North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. 264 pp. $34.95 (paper).
At a time when students are reading literatures or appreciating artworks from cultures that imitate different models than the Greco-Roman one, Saint-John Perse might appear to be an anachronism. For, as Carol Rigolot demonstrates in her richly-documented study, the French poet and 1960 Nobel prize winner went to great lengths in his writings to assume the mantle of Homer, Virgil, and Dante and thus embody the onward march of Western civilization. From his 1911 collection Eloges, through Anabase (1924), Amers (1957), and up to Chronique (1959), the protagonists in his poems are defined by lineage, individual prowess, and universal glory—three imperial traits to which Perse himself aspired. Yet how these traits are forged (i.e., both crafted and counterfeited) reveals as much about the legacy of classical culture as it does about Perse's transformations of non-Western cultures in his poetry. One of the virtues of Dr. Rigolot's book is to unearth the residues of these other voices and also the aspects of Perse's writings that are not simply rewritings of a past tradition but that speak of something else.
The book is divided into thirteen chapters, devoted to each of Perse's volumes of poetry plus his carefully composed autobiography for the French Pléiade edition of his complete works, that appeared under the poet's supervision in 1972. Dr. Rigolot spent many months over the past decade researching the personal library and manuscript holdings at the Fondation Saint-John Perse in Aix-en-Provence, and several of her chapters contain new insights into how the poet crafted his works. Beginning with the supposition that reading Perse "is not unlike eavesdropping on a telephone conversation where only one side is audible" (13), she manages to flesh out the poet's dialogues through his work with other writers, and also with his imagined audience. The chapter on Eloges, for instance, has a fascinating discussion of the ways in which Perse's homage to a Paul Gauguin painting underpins the aloofness of the addressee in Récitation à l'éloge d'une reine; the influence of Edgar Allan Poe on Images à Crusoé is carefully pieced together, as are Jules Verne's on passages from Anabase, or John James Audubon's on pages from Oiseaux; one of Perse's letters from 1908 suggests how Perse used Beethoven's Eroïca symphony to build a homage to his lost father in Eloges; numerous lines from François Villon, Victor Hugo, Alexis de Tocqueville, Paul Claudel, or Paul Valéry are also shown to have their counterpart in Perse's writings. Dr. Rigolot comments astutely on the ways in which Perse tried to conceal many of his dialogues with earlier artists. For instance, the debt to Audubon in lines from Oiseaux that stress the unbroken bond between birds and their habitats is partially obscured by Perse's foregrounding of Georges Braque's birds, which are much more abstract than the species named in the poem. Perse would often mislead his interviewers by saying that he knew little (or disapproved) of a certain writer's works—for example, Charles Baudelaire's prose poems, Arthur [End Page 146] Rimbaud's Illuminations, or Victor Segalen's Stèles—whereas in fact he incorporated and modified key traits from these very books.
One of Dr. Rigolot's central claims is that Saint-John Perse used such smokescreens to distance himself from an immediate past. It also helped him fashion his own lineage and posterity, in a way that echoes the genealogist in the tenth canto of Anabase who is asked to legitimize the newly-founded city. The latter is a city-state unlike Plato's Republic, as Dr. Rigolot points out, since instead of exiling the poet it puts him on an equal footing with the military leader who led his army to the site of the new community. One might, however, wonder if this version of the poet is truly a descendent of Dante and Virgil. Is he not instead a hybrid figure in Anabase, closely allied to "le Conteur [. . .] au pied du térébinthe"—the story-teller who, in the creole cultures of Perse's native Caribbean, embodied the African wisdom of slaves and their ancestors? Other references to non-Western rituals throughout Perse's writing (for instance the poet's mentioning that Anabase was composed in a disused Taoist temple, or his allusions to Amerindian dances in Chronique) suggest that a small corrective is needed to re-align Dr. Rigolot's author-based intertextual study with the two afore-mentioned poems as well as with Amers and several pages from Eloges. For Saint-John Perse's works not only construct a persona for their creator, or a place he can occupy within the French Pantheon of writers; they also evoke forces that run counter to this personal project. Whether these be elemental ones (in such poems as Vents or Pluies) or cultural ones (non-Western practices that infuse Perse's celebrations of unique places) they often offset the poet's championing of the Western epic tradition.
Dr. Rigolot is always respectful of the critical work done by others
on Perse, and her copious references to secondary studies give readers
many avenues to follow if they wish to deepen their understanding
of a given poem. Forged Genealogies is therefore ideal for
advanced undergraduate students. When read in tandem with Arthur
Knodel's Saint-John Perse: A Study of His Poetry, the book is
an excellent introduction not only to the poet's work, but also to the
varied interpretations that it has provoked.
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Steven Winspur is Professor of French at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. His publications include Saint-John Perse and the
Imaginary Reader (Gèneve: Droz, 1988), Bernard Noël
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991), and a volume co-authored with Jean-Jacques
Thomas, Poeticized Language: The Foundations of Contemporary French
Poetry (Penn State University Press, 1999).
