Les Complaintes by Jules Laforgue: “L’idéal et Cie”: proceedings from the Agrégation Colloquium, 7 October 2000 / texts compiled by José-Luis Diaz and Daniel Grojnowski; with contributions from Henri Béhar, Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Dominique Combe... [et al.], Paris, 2000, SEDES, 1 vol. (188 p.); 24 cm, "Société des études romantiques".

Abstract

If “L’idéal et Cie” was selected here as a banner in the true Laforguian style—expressing through a jaunty, off-kilter phrase the bitter renunciation of the Ideal characterizing post-Romantic disillusioned poets (P. Bénichou)—then here are some alternate titles you narrowly avoided: “The Similar Is the Opposite.” “Well now, the universe/is upside-down!” “The God Beneath Our Skin.” “Unconscious, descend into us through reflexes.” “Shake the poor being before using.” All are slogans flung out “without any guarantee of humanity,” by someone who knew early and acutely that “a poem is not a feeling transmitted in the state it was in before the pen touched the page”... Of these *Complaintes*, which are a “counter-blow or a thumbed nose at all lyre-wielders” (B. Vibert), this volume seeks to map out their unstable landscape—fitting for a poet unexpectedly canonized by the agrégation: origins of the text, knowledge systems, themes, forms, musicality, *dispositio*, etc. But all of this without embalming too soon the mischievous runaway, with his unmistakably earnest look as a “Spoilsport who stops us dancing in circles on this/scandalous planet.” Because even if “mourning” there is (mourning of Faith, of the Self, or of the “Poet”), it is expressed here—not in the tearful eloquence of “philosophical verse”—but in streetwise Complainte slang: “I is-so mis’rable!”

Romanticism – colloquia
Les Complaintes by Jules Laforgue: “L’idéal et Cie”
Texts compiled by J.-L. Diaz and D. Grojnowski

Table of Contents

• Portico
  Jude Stefan – To You, Who Embraced Leah Lee
• From History to Text
  Jean-Pierre Bertrand – The Birth of the Complaintes: From History to Text
• Mourning
  Bertrand Marchal – *Les Complaintes* and "the universal lammasabaktani"
  Dominique Combe – “In Mourning for a Me-the-Magnificent…”
  Yvan Leclerc – Portraits of the Poet in *Les Complaintes*
• Knowledge, Subjects
  Henri Béhar – “The Vain Processions of Humor”
  Bertrand Vibert – “I howl at the moon, folly-lit”: On an apocryphal verse, or the subjects of the Complaintes
  Claude Leroy – “She, loyal stillborn dream”: Laforgue and the myth of the passerby
• The “Complainte” Form
  Françoise Sylvos – Laforgue and the Poetics of the Popular Complainte
  Mireille Dottin-Orsini – One Poem May Conceal Another
  Henri Scepi – The Poetic Antinomies of the “Complainte” Form
• Dispositio
  Daniel Grojnowski – The Logic of the Collection

Download my article in PDF: The Vain Processions of Humor
(For easier online reading, I provide a transcript of the SEDES edition pages.)

Read Les Complaintes on Wikisource.