Poe’s “Body Poetics”: Between “Theory” and Russian Formalism

Abstract

This book has two “protagonists”: Edgar Allan Poe and “theory.” Literary theory arrived late to Russia and became widespread only ten years ago or so, by which time Terry Eagleton had proclaimed Western literary criticism to be “after theory.” Still, Russian studies undertaken with real knowledge of “theory” are very few; some supposedly theoretical works referred to as “phenomenological” are actually quite traditional in thought and method. But such is not the case with this contribution by Alexandra Urakova. She is deeply in love with the sophisticated ideas of Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Genette, and others. And love brings knowledge. Urakova’s starting point is a phenomenological preoccupation with le corps propre, the bodysubject that “can make itself known contrary to the notions produced by the culture” [11; all translations are mine]. Hence her semiotic approach differs in general from Judith Butler’s, which emphasizes the hidden significance of politics, as well as from Peter Brooks’s, which investigates mostly the sexual body. She chooses to follow Jean Starobinski and focus on the body in its relation to writing. Also following Roland Barthes, Urakova aims to show the function of the body in the construction of narrative. Not narratological in the proper sense (though developed with the diegetic nature of the texts in mind), her study deals with “narrative bodies” displaying the power and limits of representation. [See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993); Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993); Jean Starobinski, “L’Echelle des températures: Lecture du corps dans Madame Bovary,” in Le Temps de la réflexion (Paris: Gallimard, 1980); and Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974)]. From the traditional point of view, Poe is an unsuitable subject for this kind of critical inquiry. His reputation as a “spiritual writer” (Daniel Hoffman), as “the patron saint of French symbolists” (Scott Peeples), deters a consideration of his prose in corporeal terms. [See Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1998), 256; and Scott Peeples, The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), 436).]