Feneon's Faits Divers and Poe's Principles of Poetry

iIt is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.



It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.



Part One . . . to be continued--


The "Faits Divers" of 1906, written anonymously, undercover, saved faithfully as cut-outs, clippings preserved in albums by both a loyal wife and mistress, are the now increasingly well-known "detonatoing words" of the Anarchist art critic, translator, and editor and suspected "Propagandist of the Deed" bomber Felix Feneon, published psthumously as "Nouvelles en trois lignes"
and in French totaling over 1200 entries.

In English they are available in a translation by Luc Santé entitled "Novels in Three Lines," and are edited down by roughly 150 entries, these latter being considered "too obscure" and "time-bound" to convey anything meaningful from the world of 1906 to the world of today.

The English language title is not quite accurate, in French, besides being a pun, "Nouvelles--News--means short stories--not "novels."

This misses the point of Feneon's eliding the anonymous “documentary" "Faits Divers” -- (literally "Diverse Facts"--"News Briefs" also used as "filler"--) with "Nouvelles" as "short stories," fictions which are immediately suggested by the "facts.

The punning on "nouvelles" is thus simultaneity of the "news" and "short stories," fictions.

Since the facts/news stories that Feneon works with are those "hot off the wire," and come in over the "telegraph lines," they are already of necessity in a brief and dryly "factual" "telegrammatic" style, one which influenced a great many early Modernist poets, fictioneers and artists.

Indeed, one of the results of the telegrammatic style of composition was that via sports writers like Ring Lardner and the young Ernest Hemingway, a new kind of short story writing began to emerge, swift, spare, nervous, violent, and with disjunctures, gaps, to be filled in by the reader like proto-McLuhanesque television screen mosaics. The speed of both telegraph and sports action, cutting down the "time it takes to traverse a distance," also cut down the texts' word counts and placed far more emphasis then on the arrangements of the words within sentences to convey an "unwritten yet present" "meaning" with "maximum effect."

In Feneon's Faits Divers, the elision of the documentary and fictional and its very artfully arranged elements within three lines creates a "detonating device" in which the "maximum effect" of the "nouvelles" is calculated ahead of time. That way, the fuse is already burning as the unsuspecting reader picks up this anonymous daily "letter bomb"/"explosive breaking news story!!!" in three lines.

A suspect in an 1894 Anarchist bombing, Feneon was among the accused in the mass roundup of the Trial of Thirty, a Spectacular Media Event in a which Feneon gained a popular following as he regaled the packed courtroom with sharp epigrammatic statements that put the lawyers and Judge on trial. His loyal friend Stephane Mallarme told the press that Feneon’s real detonators were his words.

Since Feneon has to include in each of these "plastiques" the journalist's list of names, times, places, and "actions with consequences," the one way he can navigate this crowded "information highway in miniature" is to continually play with the arrangements syntactically of the elements, and in his way create "a short story" out of an otherwise "prosaic event."

(Pascal: It is not the elements which are new, but the order of their arrangement.)

One of the reasons that the title Three Line Novels is so misleading is evidenced in the number of reviews which remark on the "poetic" or "haiku" quality of the pieces, rather than anything "novelistic."

That feat had already been accomplished some decades earlier by Gustave Flaubert, who created out of a provincial journal’s Faits Divers the novel Madame Bovary: “Delphine Delamare, 27, wife of a medical officer in Ry, displayed insufficient austerity. Worse, she ran up debts. To avoid paying them, she took poison.”


The "poetic" effects of Feneon’s Faits Divers actually do have a poetic lineage, as they follow Poe's expositions of writing "with the effect always in view" in calculating deliberately how to write poems in his "Philosophy of Composition.” Poe writes:

It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.
There is a radical error, I think, in the usual mode of constructing a story. Either history affords a thesis--or one is suggested by an incident of the day--or, at best, the author sets himself to work in the combination of striking events to form merely the basis of his narrative--designing, generally, to fill in with description, dialogue, or autorial comment, whatever crevices of fact, or action, may, from page to page, render themselves apparent.


I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping originality always in view--for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest--I say to myself, in the first place, "Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?" Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly a vivid effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or tone--whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone--afterward looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.

His 1842 Graham’s Magazine review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, Poe emphasizes that it is in the short poem and the short story that the effect is best realized.
(that composition) next to such a poem as we have suggested, should best fulfill the demands of high genius—should offer it the most advantageous field of exertion—we should unhesitatingly speak of the prose tale, as Mr. Hawthorne has here exemplified it. We allude to the short prose narrative, requiring from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal. . . .

having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, (the writer) then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the out-bringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design.

Feneon was a regular at the Tuesdays held at the Poe-translator and admirer Stephane Mallarme's residence, where the doctrines of Symbolism were worked out with a precision and calculation modeled on the American's.


It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.

Feneon, writing in 1886:

His(Seurat’s) immense canvas, La Grande Jatte, whatever part of it you examine, unrolls, a monotonous and patient tapestry: here in truth the accidents of the brush are futile, trickery is impossible; there is no place for bravura—let the hand be numb, but let the eye be agile, perspicacious, cunning…


Poe had been the great discovery for Baudelaire of his literary and spiritual double, setting the poet to work in translating Poe as well as write the hagiographies which in France created quite a different Poe than the one that Rufus Griswold had in America, via his famous and still damming obituary.

Baudelaire saw himself as the Savior of Poe from the mob that had literally killed him, and Mallarme wrote a poem for his tomb as a sign of the French "mournful and never ending Remembrance" for the overlooked American genius. Writing an autobiographical piece requested by Paul Verlaine, Mallarme says avers:

Having learned English solely in order to improve my reading of Poe, I left to England at the age of twenty, wanting mainly to flee, but also to speak the language, and to teach it in some nook, peaceful and needing no other livelihood: I had married and that caused some urgency.



October 30, 1864, Mallarmé writes to his friend Cazalis


. . . j’invente une langue qui doit nécessairement jaillir d’une poétique très nouvelle, que je pourrais définir en ces deux mots : Peindre, non la chose, mais l’effet qu’elle produit.
Le vers ne doit donc pas, là, se composer de mots ; mais d’intentions, et toutes les paroles s’effacer devant la sensation. I invent a language that must necessarily spring forth from a very new poetics, which I could define in these two words: To paint, not the thing, but the effect that it produces.
The verses should not therefore, therein, be composed of words; but of intentions, and all words to give way before the feeling.



In a strange way, this "Americanism" that existed among the Symbolists via Poe, manifested itself "literaly/literarily/figuratively" so to speak, in Felix Feneon's actual appearance, as an embodiment of the "Yankee" figure who in some photos resembles oddly the caricatural figure of Uncle Sam. This frequently remarked on "Yankee Dandy" so to speak which Feneon so impressed people as being carries with it an odd "after effect" of Baudelaire's Poe-Identification.

Though he demanded of Signac, in painting in his portrait, to present him full face, like a frontal mug shot, neither Signac nor the many other painters who depicted Feneon would do so, preferring instead the “profile” mug shot “point of view.” As Julian Barnes remarks in a long essay, “the profile shot offered artists much more promising material: a big boney nose, prominent chin and, beneath it, the flowing tuft of a goatee. Highly individual and yet also, somehow, generic. This angle made people think of Uncle Sam or Abraham Lincoln (Apollinaire called him ‘a faux Yankee’).”
Barnes also cites a “portrait” found in the Goncourt Journal, which “reports the verdict of the poet Henri de Régnier: ‘A real original, born in Italy and looking like an American. An intelligent man who is trying to turn himself into a character and impress people with his epigrams . . . But a man of heart, goodness and sensitivity, belonging wholly to the world of the eccentric, the disfavoured, the down-and-out.”
(Poe often claimed in his youth that he had shipped aboard a Russian vessel, a fiction which is "mirrored" in "John" Rimbaud's attempt to join the American Navy in Bremen, unaware that only US citizens were eligible.)
On


While the constraint of the 20th Century newspapers' Faits Divers’ three lines, coupled with their informations received via telegraph, give Feneon’s pieces a Modernist "effect" of brevity, speed and "maximum effect," I think that Poe’s ideas of the short poem and short story had beaten them to the punch-line. Via his effects “continually in view,” Poe’s “after effects" anticipated and provided much that is found in French Symbolist poetic theory and methods of composition. In many ways, Poe as a “double” posthumously ghost writing –what I call ghosthumously—the anonymous Faits Divers of Feneon, is not all that surprising when one learns that Feneon had been a ghost writer for Willy, Colette’s companion and collaborator.



It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.