Toast ! Poétique du toast démocratique et lyrique au XIX e siècle [I]

Abstract

The lyrical power of the toast lies in the collective ghost it calls for. Always, this phantom appears at the edge of the word "raised", "carried", "addressed"—a harangue, a poem, a song, a simple cry. This collective ghost, often invoked as a promise, a future, a fraternity, occurs at the same time as a glass is raised, first a glass to drink, then, or at the same time, a glass to drink and verses to sing, and then, finally, in books, only a few verses turned into toast when, in the last third of the century, the toasts branch out into poems that have a posterity outside the straitjacket of this sub-genre that is so media-savvy that is the toast, because of their publication in collections: Mallarmé's Salut, Verlaine's Toast à distance, etc. Haunted by this collective ghost, the toast form is a composition that brings together a word, a ritual, festive or funereal, and a social landscape that owes much to the occasion. Thus the toast is simultaneously a literary form and a form that escapes literary communication to the point of experiencing "vogue", to the point of drifting into a joke or a pastiche: then, its sister forms are the "prospectus", the "page", the "discourse". Before being enshrined in poetry collections, the toast inhabited the press, many of them, and also anthologies alongside political speeches, to the point of becoming an object of literary criticism, under the sharp eye of Sainte-Beuve and Baudelaire 3. Hybrid by nature, oral, it forms less a genre in its own right than it is cousins with a number of genres, registers and forms, from which it shamelessly draws according to the circumstance and the coterie, or the community, of the sociability that takes hold of it. However, there are some constants: the rhyming bits, the harangue, the song, the acclamations often return. It is born with a single voice and ends in chorus. Finally, strangely, the toast is anchored in a territory of written traces that compose, in the second degree, a retrospective harmonic score, conceived with a vocation, either propaganda, memorial, militant or lyrical. At what price can a circumstance make poetry? How does a drinking song become a barricade toast? A good toast always "performs" a metamorphosis of voices, which Baudelaire defended as a critic had carried the hopes and disappointments of the February Revolution: then, the cup, the wine, the glass, are transformed into a magical medium capable of transforming the lead of misery into gold, an authoritarian despotism into spontaneous and popular adhesion (Bonapartism), a poem of a social assembly in exercise of fraternity (Mallarmé). The interest of the toast is the tipping point, the reversal of voice that it operates, or that it pretends to operate.