•
Rating:
“…and in the middle of the river, the scorpion stung the frog. The frog, astonished by this act that would condemn them both to certain death, asked the scorpion why he committed such madness. The scorpion replied: <It’s my nature!>”.
The parable of the frog and the scorpion has always piqued my imagination: that terse answer, allowing no reply, is forever etched in my mind; an existential answer, clear, precise, complete, absolute. I’ve always thought that animals, compared to humans, lead a much richer and more vivid existence, if only because they manage to live in the only thing that truly exists: the present. We are different, we are more complex, we have expectations and awareness that lead us to believe, among other things, that we are privileged tenants of that great condominium we call Earth. Nonetheless, we often complicate our lives, building castles in the air thinking about the future or wallowing in idle anguish over the past. Does it make sense to speak of a “human nature”? Are there really innate characteristics that fuel all of us? The scorpion stung the frog, but what about us? What would we have done? We would probably have had the most diverse reactions; not only considering the number of people we might account for, but also considering the specific moment (of life, mood, energy) in which a single person might find themselves in a situation comparable to that of the scorpion.
So, if we consider the “race” of poets, we might be led to believe they are people endowed with a diamond-like and inexorable nature, that their existence is almost an inevitable expression of an innate feeling. But is it really so? Baudelaire with "Les Fleurs du Mal" wrote THE cornerstone of modern poetry, yet he also had the ability to shed the celestial cloak of the Poet to produce an almost "scientific" treatise on the effects of drugs ("Les Paradis Artificiels"), he had a Machiavellian skill in building relationships that favored his literary rise, and he had the finesse and precision of a seasoned critic when considering the works of others. Certainly, all these qualities do not rule out being a great poet, but, for some reason, the Poet par excellence is considered, by the collective consciousness, as the one who made, first of all, his existence a living work of art, a poem without compromise, a perpetual revolt against pre-established values.
And then I think of Apollinaire. His novel-like life, his formal research always in continuous evolution, his hatred for anything stagnant, his eternal good humor that barely concealed an overwhelming restlessness, even his eccentric clothing; everything about him has always made me think of a "purist". His two official books of poetry, "“Alcools”" (forgive me if I refer here to a previous review of mine) and "Calligrammes" are among the most important of the first half of the twentieth century and displayed an artist who, in fact, had amply outgrown the symbolist mists that had shrouded French poetry for sixty years and who had ventured into a no man's land that would later, thanks in part to his fundamental contribution, be colonized by the Surrealists.
Even when he dedicated himself to prose, Apollinaire had the flair of a poet. This is exemplified by this collection of short stories, "Le Poète Assassiné" (composed in the time interval between the publication of his two collections of poetry), where, after careful meditation on the work of Rabelais (famous anti-Renaissance humanist of the sixteenth century who inserted "low" themes into his writings, in total countertrend to the dominant classical lineage of the time), he prided himself on having forged a new literary genre, the "lyric-satirical."
The long story that opens the collection and gives it its title, is somewhat his declaration of intent. It narrates the life, from inception to death, of Croniamantal, Apollinaire’s alter-ego. And what a life! An uninterrupted hurly-burly of implausible, fairy-tale, and hilarious situations, rendered with a changing and multicolored stylistic chromaticity (it almost feels like listening to Gong’s "The Flying Teapot"); references to the contemporary are systematically deformed, clad, and transcended by a massive dose of connections to myths, legends, and symbols that are emptied of their usual references and continuously submit to Apollinaire's overwhelming hilarity. The subsequent stories all follow the basic scheme, albeit without the irresistible acrobatics of the opening tale.
While reading the book, it is impossible not to notice the influence of Corbière, a great late nineteenth-century poet who received proper recognition only after his death. With “Les Amours Jaunes,” he was one of the first to have delivered important blows to the sacred symbolist edifice and he too tended to transfigure myths and symbols, eroding them with sarcasm and an iconoclastic fury in which, however, there occasionally gleamed a bile almost entirely absent in Apollinaire.
Finally, in the distance, I seem to glimpse the crooked physiognomies, the bizarre types engaged in absurd occupations, the paradoxical situations, rural and urban legends, that populate Gogol’s "Petersburg Tales", but also those of "Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka", where the Ukrainian legends were overturned and updated by the great Russian writer (who, in hindsight, was also a Surrealist ante-litteram).
Apollinaire died in 1918, shortly after the end of the Great War. This too seems like a sign of destiny: one world was ending and another was about to begin, and Apollinaire himself became one of the most unmistakable and inimitable symbols of his time. I like to think that, right at the threshold of death, as an era of which he was one of the brightest voices was definitively collapsing, Apollinaire thought: "It’s my nature!".
Loading comments slowly
