Aloysius Bertrand's 'Gaspard de la Nuit': Beyond the Prose Poem

Abstract

"The author is a captive of his epoch, of his own present. Subsequent times liberate him from this captivity, and literary scholarship is called upon to assist in this liberation". What was perhaps missing from this declaration by Mikhail Bakhtin in his 'Response to a Question from Novy Mir' is that an author can also be a captive of subsequent times - of his critical reception - and become a victim of the opinion of his/her posthumous readership. For a long time Aloysius Bertrand (1807-1841) has been treated as a minor poet and classed under the controversial label of petit romantique; his name has been deemed worth mentioning mainly because of his role as the author of the first collection of prose poetry in France. Bertrand himself seemed to have glimpsed this possible destiny of his work. ... This study of Bertrand's 'Gaspard de la Nuit' will attempt to show that the task of literary scholarship can sometimes be that of freeing an author from his/her canonical critical consideration by recovering the original context of the author's creation. In so doing, we may open up new interpretative possibilities.