From the Los Angeles Review of Books, May 26:
MINOU DROUET WAS a child-poet. Born in 1947, she captivated postwar France with poems that the newspaper Le Figaro, as quoted by Time in 1955, called “sparkling with spontaneous sensations, new tingling images.” At the time, much of the French public was skeptical that Drouet’s poems could have been crafted by a child. Even experts in cultural production were drawn in. André Breton speculated that “[b]etween the physico-mental structure of Minou and what is published under her name there is an incompatibility of structure.” And a simple examination of the texts concluded that they exhibited a maturity of expression and experience of life unavailable to a child. The girl was forced to prove—through a series of tests by journalists, police, and the French Society of Authors, Composers, and Publishers of Music—that it was she, and not her overbearing mother, who was the “true” author of the poems. Those who admired or speculated about the authenticity of Drouet’s poetry did so under the presumption that it was of some quality—but by any critical standard, it wasn’t.
Today, Minou Drouet is perhaps best known thanks to an essay in Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1957), which explores the consumerist mania that surrounded the child-poet as a desirable object of attention. Barthes classifies Drouet’s work as “a docile, sugary poetry, entirely based on the belief that poetry is a matter of metaphor, its content nothing more than a kind of elegiac, bourgeois sentiment.” Her poetry is, in his analysis, predictable fluff and formula. Barthes concludes that Drouet was successful at replicating the signs of poetry, not poetry itself: she gave French culture what it believed poetry to be. By focusing on whether or not Drouet was “genuine,” and thus a “genius,” Barthes said her readers took part in “valorizing simple […] production” and thus obscured the fact that she was essentially regurgitating the clichés of the culture around her—like the postwar fetishization of childhood itself. In the publicity photographs taken of her as a child, Drouet looks like a model for a Normal Rockwell painting: playing the piano, writing poetry, petting a cat........In late November, Google released a video demonstrating its new conversation-bot software, Gemini, fluidly interacting with a user.....
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